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Poptheatr is a bucket you put on your head so you can watch movies | John Biggs | 2,018 | 1 | 26 | Are you afraid of human contact? Do you like movies? Do you like buckets? Sister, have I got a product for you. is a bucket that you put over your head. You put your telecommunications device on top of the bucket and then look up at movies, television, and pornography while you lie comfortably on your back. This keeps your hands free to manage your video playback using an included Bluetooth device. “Poptheatr is your own private theater that provides you with a comfortable, personal viewing experience when watching on your mobile device. No longer will you face distractions and constant discomfort when you could be enjoying your movie or show to the fullest extent,” write the creators. It should be clear to all of us by now that the best way to enjoy video is flat on your back with a bucket over your head. Early bird units cost $54 and will ship in July, just in time for your outdoor bucket head video watching sessions in a park or the courtyard of an abandoned school building. It will retail for $119. Can’t wait that long? May I recommend cutting a smallish hole in the bottom of a Home Depot work bucket and putting it over your face? Or, if your head is smaller, buying a bucket of Quaker Oats and poking holes in the bottom for a pixelated version of the Poptheatr? Any way you wish to recreate the exciting experience of putting a bucket on your head to watch movies is fine by us and I welcome images of you recreating the Poptheatr experience at home sent to on Twitter. Thank you.
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Selfie app Snow, once a Snapchat clone, raises $50M from SoftBank and Sequoia China | Jon Russell | 2,018 | 1 | 21 | It’s been a while since we heard from Snow, the Snapchat clone app in Asia that , but today the company behind it has scooped up a $50 million investment from SoftBank and Sequoia China. Snow was started by Naver, the Korean firm behind popular messaging app Line, and it had proven popular in Japan, Korea, China and other markets in Asia thanks to a focus on localized filters, stickers and features. Not to mention Snapchat’s famous lack of effort in Asian markets. The Snow app has changed significantly since we last wrote about it, however. It’s no longer a Snap clone. A major updated that dropped last week removed Snow’s user-to-user communication features and turned it into a dedicated selfie camera app. Without chat, the app doubles down on filters, stickers, augmented reality (AR), and other selfie-related features to make photos and other media that can be exported to social networks or chat groups. Snow users can now, for example, record a video set to music from artists that include Charlie Puth. There’s the usual array of photo filters, alongside a GIF maker and Instagram-like Boomerang feature. Snow plans to use this new investment to develop its augmented reality and facial recognition technologies. Its App Store listing shows it is working with Chinese unicorn SenseTime on facial recognition. It is also aiming to build partnerships and localize its service in China. Outside of Snow, Snow Corp also owns camera apps Foodie and B612, which it acquired from Line, so they may also be pushed in China as standalone apps, although the tech behind them is also shared with the core Snow app. A Snow representative told TechCrunch that the app now has over 200 million downloads on iOS and Android. The company doesn’t break out specific data for each market, but it said that China is its largest market. In January 2017, but there’s no further update on the MAU front for now. SoftBank — and this is SoftBank Group not the Vision Fund — and Sequoia have bought up 20 percent of the shares of Snow’s China business unit via this deal. , . |
Apple partners with Malala Fund to help girls receive quality education | Megan Rose Dickey | 2,018 | 1 | 21 | Apple has teamed up with Malala Fund to support girls’ education, becoming Malala Fund’s first Laureate partner. Founded by Yousafzai and her father, Ziauddin, aims to empower young girls and help them access the quality education they deserve. With the support of Apple, Malala Fund expects to double the number of grants awarded through its and launch its funding programs in India and Latin America, with the goal of extending secondary education to more than 100,000 girls. Apple will also help Malala Fund with technology, curriculum and education policy research. “We believe that education is a great equalizing force, and we share Malala Fund’s commitment to give every girl an opportunity to go to school,” Apple CEO Tim Cook, who will join Malala Fund leadership council, said in a press release. “Malala is a courageous advocate for equality. She’s one of the most inspiring figures of our time, and we are honored to help her extend the important work she is doing to empower girls around the world.” Worldwide, there are several threats to girls’ education, like poverty, war and gender discrimination. Malala Fund currently operates in Pakistan, Afghanistan, India, Nigeria and countries where there are Syrian refugees, like Lebanon and Jordan. “My dream is for every girl to choose her own future,” Yousafzai said in a press release. “Through both their innovations and philanthropy, Apple has helped educate and empower people around the world. I am grateful that Apple knows the value of investing in girls and is joining Malala Fund in the fight to ensure all girls can learn and lead without fear.” In 2012, the Taliban attempted to assassinate Yousafzai when she was just 15 years old. They targeted her because she repeatedly spoke about the challenges of trying to attain a good education. Miraculously, Yousafzai survived a gunshot to the head while she was on a school bus headed home. Since then, Yousafzai has continued to advocate for girls’ access to education. In 2014, Malala Yousafzai became the youngest Nobel Peace Prize winner in history. |
Sphero lays off dozens as it shifts focus to education | Brian Heater | 2,018 | 1 | 21 | This restructuring finds Sphero investing much more of its existing resources into the education side of its business. Sphero co-founder and CTO Ian Bernstein also recently left the company to spin out a new startup, . It isn’t designed to be a direct competitor, focusing instead on home assistant robotics, but former staffers did join Bernstein at the new company. Misty will also have its own programmable robot, though its offering, , is focused primarily on adult developers. |
null | Matt Burns | 2,018 | 1 | 26 | null |
Startups, high-speed rail and California’s infrastructure future | Danny Crichton | 2,018 | 1 | 21 | California is home to two very different innovation worlds. For the readers of TechCrunch, there is the familiar excitement of the startup world, with startups working on , , and . Hundreds of thousands of entrepreneurs, engineers, and product managers are building these futures every day, often on shoestring budgets all in the hope of seeing their solution come to fruition. Then, there is the “innovation” world of California’s infrastructure. Let’s take the most prominent example, which is . The train, , is expected to — three years after the original target of 2022. That’s roughly 17 years start to finish, or older than the ages of Facebook (14 years) and the iPhone (10 years) are right now. Given that , it seems hard to believe that the route will maintain its current schedule. The delays are only one part of the problem — the finances are another. This week, the reported that for the Central Valley portion of the route. The revised total budget for this segment is now $10.6 billion, up from $6 billion when the plan was originally conceived. , a number that the government authorities last came up with almost two years ago. That budget is more than 20% greater than , which was $52.4 billion. It’s not just high-speed rail though that is expensive. The cost of infrastructure is outlandish across the state. The new , due in large part to . A large water infrastructure project called California WaterFix to build . Nor are the challenges that California faces unique. The New York Times has gone in-depth in a series of articles (at $3.5 billion per mile, the most expensive in the world), as well as . We need better infrastructure, and we needed it yesterday. America’s infrastructure grades continue to be abysmal. The American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) . Even more harrowing, America is projected to according to the Census Bureau, an increase of 75 million in just another three decades. With decrepit infrastructure, how will the country accommodate its growth going forward? The issue here is cost disease, the dramatically increasing costs of areas of the economy like construction, education, health care, housing, and infrastructure. , looking at how a startup named is attempting to bring better cost controls to hospitals. If you thought improving the efficiency of health care was hard, then infrastructure is a whole other level of challenge. It’s physical, run by government, owned by unions, and requires in some cases thousands of sign-offs for eminent domain. Then there is the complexity of issues like tunneling, where further exploration might instantly double costs for a project. The ASCE puts , a number that only increases as time goes by. In short, bridging California’s two systems of innovation isn’t an easy task. That said, there are few places where trillions of dollars will be spent — or can be saved — with better technology. We have all heard at this point about , which is attempting to massively improve the efficiency of existing boring technology to make digging tunnels exponentially cheaper. But other startups are starting to get in the game as well. Take for example. It’s software is designed to help cities predict and respond to disasters with the help of machine learning. In its ideal form, the platform could allow city planners to prevent disasters through scenario planning, and the startup is initially focused on earthquake simulation. . Or take , which is developing a robot that can accurately scan sewer lines for leaks, without having to shut down water service for customers. The startup, founded by a trio of MIT students, won Boston’s HubWeek demo day pitch contest late last year. There is an enormous opportunity for robots and drones to do everything from sewer inspection to tree censuses to bridge maintenance. Finally, consider , which produces a handheld device called . Such tech could be used by city and state officials for everything from scanning the interiors of buildings to mapping the streetscape in a complex urban environment. Most of these companies are relatively young, and for good reason: few founders have really dived into the infrastructure space over the past decade. Certainly, the kinds of backgrounds required are often quite technical: simulation, robotics, and 3D mapping just to name a few. But the possibilities to improve our lives every day and also make profit to boot should be deeply enticing. One way or another, California’s startup innovation culture needs to blend over to its infrastructure culture. We don’t have trillions to spend to get America’s infrastructure up-to-speed for the 21st century. Without significant tech innovation, the cost disease around infrastructure will forever consign us to 1970s BART trains and declining water security. It’s time for California’s entrepreneurs to change the future here, just as they have done in so many other industries. |
Diversifying the blockchain | Megan Rose Dickey | 2,018 | 1 | 21 | that the tech and financial industries are not diverse and inclusive places. So when you combine the two and out comes blockchain, what you get from a diversity viewpoint isn’t pretty. In purposefully simplistic terms, blockchain is a technology that allows two untrustworthy peers to make a verifiable transaction without intermediaries. The technology wipes out the need for an intermediary, such as a government, a bank or a company. Using cryptography, people can make these peer-to-peer transactions with less risk of their data being compromised. And in a “well-designed peer to peer system,” Revere said, there are reduced costs for the end user as a result of not paying intermediaries to keep your data safe and coordinate all of the transactions. What’s cool about the blockchain is that it’s very infrastructural. That means the products that run on blockchain still look like web apps or mobile apps. “It’s not going to change the way the web feels,” Revere said. “It’s an underlying change. Not everybody gets that.” Revere co-founded in part because of the lack of diversity in blockchain. The company’s mission is to diversify the blockchain industry, be that through teaching basic investing to smart contract development. She wants to ensure this potentially revolutionary technology is understandable and accessible to those who have historically been on the margins of society — people of color and LGBTQIA people. Maiden is in its early days, but Revere says the company plans to help people understand what the blockchain is and how it operates, while steering them away from more complex topics that the average user doesn’t really need to know, like how mining works. In fact, Revere says that’s a mistake a lot of people make when trying to explain the technology. They’ll “say something about decentralization and then go into describing how mining works,” Revere said. “ Through Maiden, Revere hopes to create products that are going to be more understandable for the everyday person, while also having a social mission of developing “educational tools that are accessible to people of diverse identities.” The blockchain, and its potential in decentralizing industries and our society at large “is worthwhile and it is worth pursuing,” Revere said. The issue, however, is that there is “not quite enough awareness on the social aspect, and if we’re not careful, we will create a really liberating technology that doesn’t actually do much other than create a Wall Street version two.” Revere added, “So if we want this Although cryptocurrencies these days are quite volatile, Revere doesn’t see the blockchain industry going anywhere anytime soon. She notes that cryptocurrencies are global and digital, and there’s no way government-controlled fiat currencies can compete in the long-term. Over the next five years, Revere predicts there will continue to be a lot of volatility but suggests people try to think about the long-term. While a lot of revolutionary technologies have hype, not everything with hype is revolutionary, she said. You can hear my full conversation with Revere on CTRL+T.
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2018 might be Amazon’s year to take a leading role in online advertising | Andrew Keen | 2,018 | 1 | 21 |
Few people have a better overview of the tech economy than , the co-founder and longtime CEO of the world’s largest advertising company, . With WPP’s over 200,000 employees and a $75 billion media book, Sir Martin has a uniquely privileged insight into the future of the online advertising industry. And he believes that 2018 might be the year that a third company joins what he calls the Facebook/Google “duopoly” in online advertising and search. That company is, of course, Amazon which he describes, cutely, as an “up and comer” in online advertising. Along with being an commerce and web services leviathan, Sir Martin predicts, Bezos’ beast is about to become an advertising and search company. Not that Sir Martin is writing off either Facebook or, particularly, Google. Indeed, he boldly suggests that Google might have a clear lead in autonomous cars. And he is optimistic about all the world’s seven dominant tech company (the plus Alibaba and Tencent) — who he collectively calls the “seven sisters”- in terms of their development of AI. But even here he’s particularly bullish on Amazon’s Alexa which, he believes, is winning in the voice-activation device war by “carpet-bombing” its rivals. Over the years, Sir Martin has argued that the big tech companies should have the same responsibilities and accountability as traditional media companies. So will 2018 be the year that the worm finally turns and the Frightful Five finally admit they really media companies? Sir Martin thinks that this might have actually happened in 2017 — citing Facebook’s decision last year to employ 20,000 editors to monitor its videos. And in 2018, he suggests, they will come to behave more and more like traditional media companies. With great power, he reminds us, comes great responsibility. And perhaps nobody should listen more carefully to this advice that Jeff Bezos, who Sir Martin describes as the “John D. Rockefeller” of the 21st century. |
Inside Amazon’s surveillance-powered, no-checkout convenience store | Devin Coldewey | 2,018 | 1 | 21 | have heard of Amazon’s most audacious attempt to shake up the retail world, the cashless, cashierless Go store. Walk in, grab what you want, and walk out. I got a chance to do just that recently, as well as pick the brain of one of its chief architects. (The store, in downtown Seattle, is now open to the public.) My intention going in was to try to shoplift something and catch these complacent Amazon types napping. But it became clear when I went in that this wasn’t going to be an option. I was never more than a foot or two from an Amazon PR rep, and as Dilip Kumar, the projects VP of Technology, convinced me, they’d already provided against such crude attacks on their system. As you might have seen in the promo video, you enter the store (heretofore accessible to Amazon employees only) through a gate that opens when you scan a QR code generated by the Amazon Go app on your phone. At this moment (well, actually the moment you entered or perhaps even before) your account is associated with your physical presence and cameras begin tracking your every move. The many, cameras. [gallery ids="1589027,1589028,1589038"] I wondered when the idea of Amazon’s cashierless store was first proposed how it would be accomplished. Cameras on the ceiling, behind the display cases, on pedestals? What kind? Proximity and weight sensors, face recognition? Where would this all be collated and processed? Amazon’s approach wasn’t as complex as I expected, or rather not in the way I expected. Mainly the system is made up of dozens and dozens of camera units mounted to the ceiling, covering and recovering every square inch of the store from multiple angles. I’d guess there are maybe a hundred or so in the store I visited, which was about the size of an ordinary bodega or gas station mart. These are ordinary RGB cameras, custom made with boards in the enclosure to do some basic grunt computer vision work, presumably things like motion detection, basic object identification, and so on. They’re augmented by separate depth-sensing cameras (using a time-of-flight technique, or so I understood from Kumar) that blend into the background like the rest, all matte black. The images captured from these cameras are sent to a central processing unit (for lack of a better term, not knowing exactly what it is), which does the real work of quickly and accurately identifying different people in the store and objects being picked up or held. Picking something up adds it to your “virtual shopping cart,” and you can pop it in a tote or shopping bag as fast as you like. No need to hold it up for the system to see. [gallery ids="1589031,1589029,1589033,1589035,1589030"] This is where the secret sauce is, Kumar told me, and I believe him. As banal a problem as it may seem to determine which similarly dressed person picked up which nearly identical yogurt cup, it’s very difficult to get right at the speed and accuracy level needed in order to base an entire business on it. A student, after all, with the resources available these days, could probably design a version of this store in a few weeks that would work 80 percent of the time. But to get it right 99.9 percent of the time, frictionlessly and instantly, is a challenge that requires a great deal of work. Notably, there is no facial recognition used (I asked). Amazon perhaps sensed early on that this would earn them rebuke from privacy-conscious shoppers, though the idea of those people coming to this store strikes me as unlikely. Instead, the system uses other visual cues and watches for continuity between cameras — you’re never not in sight of a lens, so it’s easy for the system to see a shopper move from one camera to another and make the connection. Should there be a technical problem with a camera or it gets sauce on its lens somehow, the system doesn’t break down entirely. It’s been tested with cameras missing, though naturally it wouldn’t be long before a replacement is put in place and the system re-re-calibrates. In addition to the cameras, there are weight sensors in the shelves, and the system is aware of every item’s exact weight — so no trying to grab two yogurts at once and palm the second, as I considered trying. You might be able to do it Indiana Jones style, with a suitable amount of sand in a sack, but that’s more effort than most shoplifters are willing to put out. And, as Kumar noted to me, most people shoplifters, and the system is designed around most people. Building a system that assumes ill intent rather than merely detecting discrepancies is not always a good design choice. The error rate may be low enough that Amazon doesn’t care, but that didn’t stop it from happening to someone on the first day of operation: I think I just shoplifted?? didn’t charge me for my Siggi’s yogurt 😬 — Deirdre Bosa (@dee_bosa) This type of thing happens constantly in regular stores, things being mis-scanned or skipped, or outright stolen — a certain amount of “lossage” is anticipated. So the occasional fancy yogurt plus or minus won’t break the business model, but it’s not a good look for Amazon Go’s first day. (As if to self-flagellate for such mistakes, Amazon doesn’t really even have a way of rectifying these mistakes, and if you manage to get out without paying for something, the company officially doesn’t care. You can return stuff if you change your mind or buy too much, though.) There is in fact a human in the loop should the system find itself in a bind, but Kumar said this was rare enough that it hardly needed to be considered. He also said that the difficulty of monitoring the store doesn’t increase with square footage, though of course you’ll need more cameras and more processing power. It’s also been tested with serious crowds; we were there during a slow time in the mid-afternoon, but shortly before that was the lunch rush, they told me, when dozens rather than a handful of people could be found walking in and out without doing anything more than showing their phone to a sensor at the entrance. There may not be cashiers, but there are staff: stockers who replenish inventory; an ID checker (and erstwhile sommelier I’m sure) in the wine and beer section, and chefs in the back throwing together fresh sandwiches and meal kits. Someone also hovers in the entrance area to help people with the app, answer questions, and take returns. The selection was mainly grab-and-go lunches and snacks, with the usual handful of household items you grab at the bodega on the way home. Prices were what you’d expect at a supermarket rather than a convenience store, though. As for the expected Amazon gambits that leverage its existing properties and hooks, few are to be found. The app is self-contained, and your purchases are tracked there rather than on your “main” Amazon account. Prime members don’t get lower prices. Whole Foods has a little section of its own but there’s no broader partnership (and no plans to convert any of those stores to Go, though I can’t imagine why not). Overall I’m impressed with the seamlessness of the system, and I can see these things successfully operating here and there. On the philosophical side, I’m troubled, of course — a convenience store you just walk out of is a friendly mask on the face of a highly controversial application of technology: ubiquitous personal surveillance. It’s a bit overkill, I think, to replace a checker or self-checkout stand with a hundred cameras that unblinkingly record every tiny movement. What’s to gain? 20 or 30 seconds of your time back? Lack of convenience has hardly been a complaint for this market — it’s right there in the name: “convenience store.” Like so many ways companies are applying tech today, this seems to me an immense amount of ingenuity and resources being used to “solve” something that few people care about and fewer still consider a problem. As a technical achievement it’s remarkable, but then again, so is a robotic dog. The store works — that much I can say for it. Where Amazon will take it from here I couldn’t say, nor would anyone respond meaningfully to my questions along these lines. Amazon Go will be open to the public starting this week, but whether anyone will find it to be anything more than a novelty is yet to be seen. |
Why inclusion in the Google Arts & Culture selfie feature matters | Catherine Shu | 2,018 | 1 | 21 | & Culture’s new went viral earlier this week, many people of color found that their results were limited or skewed toward subservient and exoticized figures. In other words, it pretty much captured the experience of exploring most American or European art museums as a minority. The app was by Google’s Cultural Institute, but the art selfies made it go viral for the first time. The feature is (a spokesperson said Google has “no further plans to announce at this time” for other locations), but it still managed to take Google Arts & Culture to the top of this week. The selfie feature shows how technology can make art more engaging, but it is also a reminder of art’s historic biases. It underscores the fact that the art world, like the tech industry, still suffers from a critical lack of diversity, which it must fix in order to ensure its future. Matches uploaded by Instagram users Many people of color discovered that their results seemed to draw from relatively limited pool of artwork, as . Others got matches filled with the stereotypical tropes that white artists often resorted to when depicting people of color: slaves, servants or, in the case of many women, sexualized novelties. A Google spokesperson told TechCrunch that the company is “limited by the images we have on our platform. Historical artworks often don’t reflect the diversity of the world. We are working hard to bring more diverse artworks online.” Matches for me and fellow TechCrunch writer Megan Rose Dickey The selfie feature’s race problem did not go unnoticed, prompting social media discussions and gaining coverage in Digg, , , , , , and , among others. (Not surprisingly, the feature also raised many privacy concerns. In an interstitial message displayed before the selfie feature, Google tells users that it won’t use data from selfies for any other purpose than finding an artwork match and won’t store photos). Some might dismiss the discussion because Google’s art selfies will soon be replaced by the next viral meme. But memes are the —and when many people feel marginalized by a meme, then it demands closer examination. *usng the Culture and Arts app*
white people: “Wow what beautiful renaissance/impressionist/european painting do I look like?
me: “Wow what racist stereotype of black people do I look like?” — jimmyNUDEtron (@liluzi_girth) Called the Google Art Project when it launched in 2011, Google Arts & Culture was almost immediately hit by charges of Eurocentrism. Most of its original 17 partner museums were located in Washington D.C., New York City or Western Europe, prompting criticism that its scope was too narrow. Google quickly moved to diversify the project by . Now the program has expanded to a total of 1,500 cultural institutions in 70 countries. Google Arts & Culture’s , however, shows that American and European collections still dominate. It’s clear from its posts that the project is making a concerted effort to showcase diverse artists, art traditions and styles (recent topics included the in Bangalore and ), but unraveling Eurocentrism means unraveling centuries of bias. Even now, the management at many American museums doesn’t reflect the country’s demographics. In 2015, the Mellon Foundation released what it said was , which was performed with the help of the Association of Art Museum Directors and the American Alliance of Museums. It found that 84% of management positions at museums were filled by white people. Minorities were also underrepresented in the junior ranks of museum staff, which means institutions need to actively nurture young talent if they want their future leaders, including directors and curators, to be diverse, said the Mellon Foundation. The art world’s diversity problem is pushed to the forefront when controversies erupt like the one generated by , which was exhibited at last year’s Whitney Biennal. Many black artists were disturbed by how Schutz, who is white, presented Till’s body, saying that it both trivalized and exploited racist violence against black people. In , artist and educator Lisa Whittington blamed the Whitney Biennial leadership’s homogeneity. “Their lack of understanding seep onto the walls of the museum, into the minds of viewers and into the society,” said Whittington. “There should have been more guidance and more thought in the direction of the selections chosen for the Whitney Biennial and there would have been African American curators and advisors included instead of an all white and all Asian curatorial staff to ‘speak’ for African Americans.” Progress has been frustratingly slow. There are now more female than male students in art schools, but exhibitions of contemporary art are . The decline in arts education since No Child Left Behind was signed into law in 2002 has and it was only within the past few years that the College Board reworked the Advanced Placement art history course to address the lack of diversity in its syllabus, though about 65% of the artwork used in its course is “still within the Western tradition,” . Meanwhile, a found that not only are museum boards “tipped to white, older males—more so than at other nonprofit organizations,” they have also not taken enough action to become more inclusive. The lack of diversity reflected in art museums creeps into our definitions of art, culture and ultimately whose experiences matter enough to be preserved. They are reinforced every time a person of color walks into a museum and realizes that the few paintings that look like them depict tired stereotypes. While well-intentioned, Google’s art selfie feature had the same impact on many people of color. Algorithms don’t protect us from our biases. Instead, they absorb, amplify and propagate them, while creating the illusion that technology is sheltered from human prejudices. Facial recognition algorithms have already demonstrated their ability to cause harm, such as when two black users of Google Photos discovered that it (Google apologized for the error and “gorilla,” “chimp,” “chimpanzee” and “monkey” from the app). Algorithms are only as good as their benchmark datasets, and those datasets reflect their creators’ biases (conscious or not). This issue is being studied and documented by researchers including MIT graduate student Joy Buolamwini, who founded the to prevent bias from being coded into software, which has unsettling implications . In a last year, Buolamwini, who is black, recounted how some robots with computer vision did a better job of detecting her when she wore a white mask. “There is an assumption that if you do well on the benchmarks then you’re doing well overall,” Buolamwini . “But we haven’t questioned the representativeness of the benchmarks, so if we do well on that benchmark we give ourselves a false notion of progress.” The biases making their way into facial recognition algorithms echo the development of color film. In the 1950s, Kodak began sending cards depicting female models to photo labs to help them calibrate skin tones during processing. All of the models , after the first studio model used, and for decades, all of them were white. This meant that images of black people often came out over- or under-developed. In , writer and photographer Syreeta McFadden described how those photos fed into racist perceptions of black people: “Our teeth and our eyes shimmer through the image, which in its turn become appropriated to imply this is how black people are, mimicked to fit some racialized nightmare that erases our humanity.” Companies like Google now have an unprecedented opportunity to challenge racism and myopic thinking because their technology and the products built on them can transcend the limitations of geography, language and culture in a way that no other medium has been able to. Google Arts & Culture selfies have the potential to be more than a silly meme, but only if the feature openly acknowledges its limitations–which means confronting biases in art history, collection and curation more directly and perhaps educating its users about them. For many people of color, the feature served as yet another reminder of how they have been marginalized and excluded. More than a meme or an app engagement tool, Google’s art selfies are an opportunity to look at who gets to define what is culture. Art is one of the ways by which cultures create their collective narratives, and everyone loses out when only a narrow slice of experiences are valued. |
Sex, the final frontier: Cindy Gallop raises $2M from mysterious investor for social sex tech | Jon Evans | 2,018 | 1 | 21 | “Everything’s a battle,” sighs, although it’s clear she relishes those battles. What she means is that the entire Internet has long been divided into two separate, walled fiefdoms: one labelled “pornography,” the other marked with those three dread words “no adult content.” The territory between those two worlds, which she is trying to claim, remains a strange no-man’s-land. We take this partitioning for granted, but it’s pretty weird if you think about it. Whether we like to talk about it or not, sex is a significant and meaningful part of adult lives; the territory defined by “adult content” is far larger than its peninsula “pornography.” Think sexual education, sexual communication, sex toys, etcetera. Think of “Grace” and Aziz Ansari, and the that we need a new sexual revolution, one of better sexual behavior, communication, and enthusiastic consent. This is a very big ask. Sex is still at best an awkward subject for most people. Everyone pretends to be casually cool and sexually sophisticated, but at the same time, for many people sex is still dangerously intimate and revealing, sometimes even a minefield of shame, and always fraught with the rawest of emotions and desires, difficult to talk about and to negotiate. Anything technology can do to make sexual communication easier ought to be welcomed. But to most Internet providers — payment processors, email providers, hosting companies — anything remotely sexual is automatically relegated to the category of porn, and promptly rejected. Venture capitalists react in the same way. Gallop, a former advertising executive turned force of nature, has been running her social-sex site on a shoestring for , with no budget for marketing, and only one paid full-time employee (“MadamCurator” Sarah Beall), they’ve attracted nearly half a million and pulled in close to $1 million of revenue. And yet, even though it’s widely accepted that there’s a glut of VC money out there, “fear of what other people would think” has caused VC after VC to reject her. Late last year, matters came to a head. An anonymous seed investor, who works (obviously very successfully) in high finance, provided Gallop with a seed investment five years ago; he and she have kept the site running with smaller top-ups since then. Apparently he too has grown frustrated with VCs’ nos, because this anonymous investor — call him the Satoshi Nakamoto of sextech — has just funded her with two million dollars. This is a big deal for Make Love Not Porn, obviously, but it’s significant for the field as a whole. There is a growing of companies out there. If someone as prominent as Cindy Gallop has had to fight so hard for funding, imagine how much harder it is for the rest of them. Consider Leah Callon-Butler of , who are hoping to end-run around the payment processing problem by building their own blockchain solution for sex tech. A perfectly reasonable business model, you’d think: but once again, anything sex-related triggers shame and embarrassment in others. “I’ve had people refuse to have their picture taken with me at conferences for fear it might get out,” Callon-Butler observed wryly at the World Crypto Economic Forum’s “Vice Panel” earlier this week You might wonder why Gallop herself didn’t go the ICO route. “We are a mass-market play,” is her answer. “Our customers use credit cards, not cryptocurrencies.” And, indeed, has broad, ambitious mass-market plans. To become “the Khan Academy of sex,” with a freemium subscription model, e.g. by delivering curated age-appropriate content from sex educators to help parents talk to / educate their children about sex, with a 50-50 revenue split. “I want sex educators to make a shit-ton of money,” Gallop stresses. Today, any from of sexual self-expression, and any nudity (even breastfeeding), are effectively banned on Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, etc; Gallop wants MLNP to be the “Wattpad for sex,” home to all kinds of sexual expression, from art to essays to erotica, again on a subscription model. She wants to build a messaging app explicitly constructed for sexting, as opposed to Snapchat’s disingenuous pretense that its growth was not fuelled by that — an app with custom filters, emoji, etc., wherein messages are persistent by default but any participant can delete the conversation. First, though, MLNP will be quintupling their full-time staff — including a CTO, Aaron Sikes — and rebuilding their existing shoestring social-sex site to scale, and as a platform for all of the above. They’ve already partnered with ‘s . Down the road Gallop wants to raise her own $200 million for her own sex-tech fund — because, as she says, it has been amply proven that there is a ton of money to be made from approaching one of the most powerful forces in human lives in an ethical, transparent, empathic and open way. And it’s all too apparent that we’re a long way from that today. Gallop cites Hollywood sex scenes as an example. According to Hollywood, sex is wordless; nobody ever talks, asks questions, laughs, etc., during sex; and, all too often, those are the kinds of sexual values that filter out into the mainstream. “Fuck that shit,” Gallop says hotly, and, later, “I don’t wait for things to change. I make them change.” That’s good. Somebody needs to. |
VW taps Nvidia to build AI into its new electric microbus and beyond | Darrell Etherington | 2,018 | 1 | 7 | Nvidia will power artificial intelligence technology built into its future vehicles, including the new I.D. Buzz, its all-electric retro-inspired camper van concept. The partnership between the two companies also extends to the future vehicles, and will initially focus on so-called “Intelligent Co-Pilot” features, including using sensor data to make driving easier, safer and more convenient for drivers. The AI features will be based on Nvidia Drive IX platform, and can enable features like face recognition-based door unlocking, gesture input for cockpit controls, natural language speech recognition and even monitoring a driver’s attentive and distracted state for providing safety alerts to bring them back to focus. Nvidia has been working with automakers on putting artificial intelligence features into vehicles for some time now, and revealed a number of partners on this front last year at CES, including Audi and Mercedes-Benz, so Volkswagen adds yet another automaker to its growing number of partners. AI in vehicles is often thought of as a means to achieving full self-driving capabilities, but this is an example of what it might be able to do in production cars in the nearer term, long before fully Level 4 and 5 autonomy is available in the average consumer vehicle sold directly to individuals. The I.D. Buzz that Volkswagen is developing is aiming to go into production in 2022, and should come with AI onboard, thanks to this partnership today. It’s not quite the iconic camper van it replaces, but it could be something better. |
Nvidia reveals new AI platforms for smart assistants and AR in the car | Darrell Etherington | 2,018 | 1 | 7 | Nvidia revealed a lot of news about its Xavier autonomous machine intelligence processors at this year’s CES show in Las Vegas. The first production samples of the Xavier are now shipping out to customers, after being unveiled last year, and Nvidia also announced three new variants of its DRIVE AI platform, which are based around Xavier SoCs. The new DRIVE AI offerings include one focused on putting augmented reality into vehicles, in ways that Nvidia says could enhance and transform the driving experience. The company’s automotive lead, Danny Shapiro, believes that just as AR has become an increasingly fundamental part of the smartphone experience, so too will it become natural and even essential in cars. DRIVE AR offers developers an SDK that will allow developers to build experiences that tap into computer vision, graphics and artificial intelligence capabilities to do things like overlay information about road conditions, points of interest and other real-world locations using interactive in-car displays. DRIVE IX, another of the three new platforms it’s unveiling based on Xavier, will make in-car AI assistants easier to build and deploy, with capabilities that incorporate both interior and exterior sensor data to interact not only with drivers, but also with passengers on the road. All automakers will likely eventually have their own proprietary Alexa built into vehicles, and Nvidia could be a big driving force behind making that happen with DRIVE IX. Nvidia’s last new DRIVE AI-based platform is actually a revision of its existing autonomous taxi brain, Pegasus. The new version of Pegasus improves on the previously revealed preproduction edition by comping two Xavier SoCs with two Nvidia GPUs into a package that’s roughly the size of a license plate – down from the trunk-filling physical footprint of the original. Nvidia is working with at least 25 customers on using Pegasus to power their self-driving robotaxi fleet, and it’s going to ship the first samples of Pegasus to a select group of those clients starting in the middle of this year. In total, over 320 partners are working with Nvidia on autonomous driving. |
Self-driving startup Aurora will work with Nvidia on autonomous driving | Darrell Etherington | 2,018 | 1 | 7 | Relative autonomous driving industry newcomer Aurora has been revealing a lot of early traction lately, and now we know that it’s also working with GPU-maker Nvidia. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang revealed that his company will be supplying Aurora with the tech underlying their compute platform. Aurora is building self-driving systems for both . Volkswagen is looking to build test vehicles that it can put on the roads relatively soon, and ultimately both carmakers aim to put driverless ride-hailing fleets on roads as soon as 2021. The fact that Aurora is using Nvidia’s self-driving computer hardware as the foundation of its system isn’t surprising – Nvidia revealed today that it’s working with over 320 companies on self-driving, through products like its Drive PX and now Drive Xavier GPU-powered autonomous driving computers. Aurora also isn’t without experience in the field, despite its relative youth: Its founders include Google self-driving project early team member Chris Urmson, Tesla Autopilot architect Sterling Anderson and Uber ATG alum Drew Bagnell – all people who’ve likely worked with Nvidia AV technology in the past, too. |
Baidu and ZF tap Nvidia Drive for self-driving compute tech | Darrell Etherington | 2,018 | 1 | 7 | Nvidia announced at its CES 2018 keynote that it’s now partnering with two Chinese companies on bringing autonomous driving to roads, including Baidu and automaker ZF. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang announced that Nvidia’s Drive Xavier autonomous compute platform would be used for Baidu’s Apollo project, which aims to offer an open platform for self-driving cars in partnership with a wide variety of automakers, suppliers and tech companies. The partnership will give Nvidia key access to supplying the Chinese market with AV tech, letting it build a platform that can truly span the world, and operate in what’s become the most important, largest and fastest-growing auto market in the world. ZF is a huge, crucial supplier in safety and ADAS tech, too and it’s likely to help Nvidia grow aspects of its business that focus on steps between safety features now, and eventual full self-driving later. Baidu has a large presence at CES this year, a first for the Chinese internet tech giant. It’s going to be showing off its latest AV prototypes at the show, which will include tech from Nvidia on board. |
Nvidia teams up with Acer, Asus and HP to launch 65-inch gaming displays | Frederic Lardinois | 2,018 | 1 | 7 | If you are tired of that puny 27-inch gaming screen on your desk and you want a more immersive gaming experience on a really big screen — say 65-inches — then Nvidia has something new for you. The company today announced a new hardware initiative with partners Acer, Asus and HP: (BFGD). The idea here is to take a 65-inch 4K screen with 120Hz HDR support and to pair it with Nvidia’s for tear-free graphics and as a built-in streaming service. Because the streaming platform is based on Android TV, it also includes support for the Google Assistant. The combination of all of these technologies, Nvidia says, will provide you with a “buttery-smooth gaming experience.” Exactly how buttery that experience will be probably depends on the machine that’s driving that display, too. To push a 4K display, you’ll probably want an GeForce GTX 1080-based card and those (especially when every crypto-bro is trying to buy one, too). As for these display’s other specs, Nvidia only sayd that the display will feature a full direct-array backlight, 1,000-nit peak luminance and DCI-P3 color gamut (the same kind you would expect for digital movie projections). “PC gamers expect high performance and instant response times, but, until now, they’ve been largely limited to traditional desktop displays,” said Matt Wuebbling, head of GeForce marketing at NVIDIA. “BFGDs change that. With NVIDIA’s latest technology built into these new displays, PC gamers can now experience their favorite titles in all the low-latency glory they deserve.” Nvidia says that the first displays will go on sale in the summer. That’s when the partners will announce pricing, too, though I don’t expect you’ll see these displays in the bargain bin anytime soon. |
Uber taps Nvidia for its self-driving vehicle fleet | Darrell Etherington | 2,018 | 1 | 7 | Uber has picked Nvidia as one of its key technology partners in its fleet of self-driving, specifically to provide the AI computing aspects of its autonomous software. The partnership is one that has been in development for a while now, including in its very first test Volvo XC90 SUVs, which followed the introduction of its program using modified Ford sedans. Uber has used Nvidia’s GPUs in both its self-driving ride hailing test fleet, and in its self-driving transport trucks, which are also developed by its Advanced Technologies Group. To date, Uber has accumulated two million autonomous miles in its self-driving passenger vehicles, and it has run over 50,000 passenger trips in total. Of the two million miles they’ve driven, the most recent million were also driven in just the last 100 days alone, representing a significant ramp up in the pace of their program. Uber hasn’t been super specific about its tech stack in its self-driving vehicles, but lately more companies have been more forward about what kind of technologies they’re employing, and this partnership, while not exclusive, seems like a solid bet on both sides on working together going forward, too. While Uber hasn’t been speaking much about its autonomous program lately, given everything else that’s going on at the company lately, it seems to have quietly been accelerating its efforts. That’s probably smart given how many other carmakers and tech companies are building autonomous fleets for ride hailing. |
Two large Apple shareholders say it needs to research the impact of smartphones on kids | Catherine Shu | 2,018 | 1 | 7 | Two of Apple’s institutional shareholders, hedge fund Jana Partners and California State Teachers’ Retirement System (CalSTRS), are calling on the company to study the impact of smartphone use on child development. In an , the two investors said that after reviewing research, they believe that Apple needs to give parents more resources and software tools to make sure their kids are using their devices “in an optimal manner.” Together, Jana and CalSTRS hold a total of about $2 billion in Apple shares, which represents a tiny fraction of its current $898 billion market cap. The letter is noteworthy, however, because both investors are influential activist shareholders. Jana Partners managing director Barry Rosenstein before the grocery chain’s acquisition by Amazon last year, while CalSTRS, which manages retirement benefits for public educators in California, is the second-largest public pension fund in the United States. In a letter signed by Rosenstein and CalSTRS director of corporate governance Anne Sheehan, the two shareholders said they worked with child development experts to review studies that found links between the use of electronic devices and negative effects on concentration, emotional health, sleep and empathy. These include research by psychologist and San Diego State University professor Jean Twenge, the author of “iGen: Why Today’s Super-Connected Kids Are Growing Up Less Rebellious, More Tolerant, Less Happy-and Completely Unprepared for Adulthood-and What That Means for the Rest of Us,” that found American teens who spend three or more hours a day on electronic devices are more likely to have a risk factor for suicide than their peers who use them for less than an hour a day. The letter also says arguing that parents bear ultimate responsibility for their kids’ device and social media use ultimately “misses the point,” because parents still need the support of tech companies. “It is also no secret that social media sites and applications for which the iPhone and iPad are a primary gateway are usually designed to be as addictive and time-consuming as possible, as many of their original creators have publicly acknowledged,” Rosenstein and Sheehan wrote, adding even though an American Psychological Association study found 94% of parents try to manage their kids’ technology use, “it is both unrealistic and a poor long-term business strategy to ask parents to fight this battle alone.” The two believe that current parental control features in software are ineffective because they force parents to take an “all or nothing approach” by only allowing them to prevent access to certain functions or features. Furthermore, they claim many apps designed to help parents monitor their kids’ tech consumption aren’t backed by strong research and don’t have the same impact as they would with Apple’s support. Jana and CalSTRS proposed several steps Apple can take, including tasking one of their executives (or hiring a new one) to focus on the issue and deliver annual reports, similar to its Environmental Responsibility Reports, for more transparency; creating a committee of child development experts; supporting researchers by giving them access to Apple’s information resources; and adding new setup menus and other options to software so parents can tailor functionality to specific age groups. “As one of the most innovative companies in the history of technology, Apple can play a defining role in signaling to the industry that paying special attention to the health and development of the next generation is both good business and the right thing to do,” wrote Rosenstein and Sheehan. TechCrunch has contacted Apple for comment. |
Hands on with Samsung’s refreshed Notebook 9 and Notebook 7 Spin | Brian Heater | 2,018 | 1 | 7 | , |
Netatmo launches a chatbot to manage all your connected devices | Romain Dillet | 2,018 | 1 | 7 | French company is adding one more way to control your smart objects around your house. You can now talk and control with all your connected devices using a chatbot in Messenger. The feature is now live in English, with more languages coming later this year. Search for the Netatmo Smart Home Bot in Messenger to start using it. Netatmo has always tried to embrace as many ways as possible to control your devices. You can control your Netatmo devices using Siri and Apple’s HomeKit, an Amazon Echo device and anything that comes with Alexa, Google Home and now Messenger. You’ll be able to type straightforward queries, such as “turn on the lights in the living room” and “adjust the temperature in the bedroom to 72°.” But the chatbot will also handle more complex queries, such as “who’s at home right now” and “what’s the weather like right now.” Netatmo says that the chatbot is going to get better over time once you start using it. I’m still not sure the connected home is going to happen. But I believe people will need many different ways to control their devices. There won’t be an Amazon Echo in every single room, and it’s also quite convenient to control your home while you’re already texting a friend. I hope Netatmo is going to release its chatbot in more messaging apps though. The company first started with a sophisticated connected weather station but has since expanded to more product lines. Netatmo now sells indoor and outdoor , connected and radiator valves, an monitoring device. Last year, the company announced with existing home appliance brands to connect everything in your home. For instance, home makers can now buy connected switches from Legrand and connected windows from Velux. This program is called “with Netatmo”. Chances are you won’t change your window just so that it closes automatically when it rains. That’s why Netatmo targets construction companies that want to build and sell connected homes from day one. So far BNP Paribas Real Estate and Vinci Immobilier have built around 140 apartments with Netatmo solutions. So it’s not a huge market for now, but the company is going to roll out connected radiators with called Intuiv with Netatmo. It’s a smart heating device that automatically adjust the temperature based on user habits. Netatmo has developed a connected module that is compatible with many different Groupe Muller radiators that have been sold since 2000. Slowly but surely, Netatmo is expanding its product range to all sorts of appliances and use cases. [gallery ids="1583675,1583676,1583678,1583679"] |
Watch Nvidia’s CES press conference right here | Frederic Lardinois | 2,018 | 1 | 7 | CES is here — and while most of the official press conferences and keynotes don’t start until tomorrow, Nvidia has scheduled its press event for tonight to give us an early start on the week. The event starts at 8pm PT and you can watch it . Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang will keynote the event.
This being CES, Nvidia’s focus is typically on cars. We’ll likely here a lot more about the company’s initiatives around self-driving cars and its platform for allowing car manufacturers to build their own. However, this also means that we won’t hear much about Nvidia’s gaming cards but instead about its chips for machine learning workloads. Last year, Nvidia announced its work with Audi and Bosch, for example, as well as its Xavier AI car supercomputer. In previous years, though, Nvidia also often used CES to talk about its Shield platform. I wouldn’t be surprised if we heard a bit about that tonight, too, as well as more integrations with the likes of Amazon’s Alex and Google’s Assistant. |
The PDA returns to CES, because everything old is new again | Brian Heater | 2,018 | 1 | 7 | null |
The NeoMano robotic glove brings control back to paralyzed hands | Brian Heater | 2,018 | 1 | 7 | No word yet on how much the device will ultimately run. |
SpaceX successfully launches top-secret Zuma spacecraft | Darrell Etherington | 2,018 | 1 | 7 | SpaceX has successfully launched its first mission of 2018, after capping a record year last year in 2017 with 18 total launches. The first launch this year carried a special payload – Zuma, a secretive spacecraft commissioned by the U.S. government for an undisclosed mission. SpaceX launched Zuma from its SLC-40 launch facility at Cape Canaveral in Florida, which was used instead of its other launch facility at Cape Canaveral because that was being employed for preparations for the launch of SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy rocket. The payload will be delivered to low Earth orbit, per the mission parameters, but we don’t know anything else about its purpose, design, or intended mission, because it’s all classified. SpaceX has also flown other sensitive cargo for the U.S., including the Air Force’s X-37B spaceplane. This launch also included a recovery of the first stage booster used with the Falcon 9, which returned to Cape Canaveral and landed at its LZ-1 landing pad after deploying and separating from the second stage. SpaceX now can look forward to its next major test for the year – launching its huge heavy-duty rocket for the first time ever. |
Liveblog: Nvidia is at CES 2018 with autonomous cars and gaming | Matt Burns | 2,018 | 1 | 7 | Nvidia is quickly becoming a giant in the world of consumer electronics so it’s only fitting that the company holds one of the first press conferences of CES 2018. The event starts at 8:00pm PST from the massive MGM Casino in Los Vegas. We’re on site and ready to liveblog the entire event. It’s widely expected that Nvidia will reveal details about its autonomous vehicles programs. And since its CES, gaming is likely to be on tap, too. The Nvidia liveblog starts at 8:00pm PST Sunday, January 7 2018. |
Nuheara announces $200 wireless earbuds with active noise-canceling | Lucas Matney | 2,018 | 1 | 7 | is at CES showing off the smart earbud company’s newest hearables. The battle to take-on Apple’s wildly-popular wireless earbuds is a tough one for emerging companies, but Nuheara is hoping that it can leverage active noise canceling to attract consumers away from AirPods. With Doppler Labs shutting down last year, the company is now one of the more vocal companies left in the smart wireless earbud space. Nuheara has a particular focus on the way its software can help users boost their hearing. The small public company’s IQBuds offer a similar feature set to other products on the market that look to leverage recent legislation giving headphone-makers more freedom to market hearing-aid/headphone hybrids as over-the-counter solutions for consumers with hearing loss. At CES, Nuheara is filling out their line of products with an entry-level sub-$200 product called LiveIQ which should allow them to better approach the market that Apple has opened up with AirPods while offering the promise of active noise canceling as an added evolution. The company is also teasing IQBuds Boost, a new high-end model that brings souped-up audio with more present bass to the company’s signature line. No details on pricing for the high-end model yet, but the regular IQBuds retail for $299. IQBuds Boost As the company builds out a more extensive product line to approach consumers at different price points, they’re also looking to software upgrades to give consumers an easy way to get started utilizing the smart features on the IQBuds Boost earbuds. The new Ear ID technology that the company is introducing will automatically calibrate the earbuds to the unique sound profile of the user’s hearing. We haven’t had a chance to try out Nuheara’s latest products, but as with other smart hearing products, these headphones are generally for a very specific type of consumer with Nuheara looking very strongly at consumers looking to correct their hearing as well. IQBuds Boost are launching in April of this year while Nuheara is aiming to ship the LiveIQ buds before summer. |
Hey Glooglel | Matt Burns | 2,018 | 1 | 7 | CES 2018 is here and it feels different to the TechCrunch team. Maybe we’re jaded. We’ve been doing this for years, fighting the scrum and braving this unholy city of filth. CES 2018 feels more corporate than in the past few years. Google is here in a major way. The company has a with a slide. Google wasn’t here in the same capacity in the same way and the company clearly wants to make up for it. Google is impossible to miss at CES 2018. CES goes through changes as the consumer market changes. Apple and Amazon are winning and startups are losing. Hardware startups are struggling to gain a footing but they’re still trying so that’s why we’re here. It almost feels like companies are at CES 2018 because they’re afraid not to be here. It’s important to remember that CES is a trade show at its core and primarily designed for companies to meet buyers and partners. The press is secondary and the show is not open to the general public. Products announced here generally do not hit the consumer market for months; some never launch. For CES 2018 TechCrunch decided to bring fewer people and not to do a stage show or live stream from the show floor. We were one of the first outlets to do both and we decided to do something more intimate than in the past. We still have a location at the show but it’s a large meeting space were we can have longer conversations with more companies. Stop by and see if any appointments are left. The show officially starts on Tuesday, which is when we’ll be at our booth, but press events start tonight. As John Biggs , let the boredom begin. |
Google cancels UK ads from shady rehab clinic referrers already banned in US | Devin Coldewey | 2,018 | 1 | 7 | Another day, another way tech giants are found to be . Today brings the news, , that Google has reaped “millions” from shady companies that advertise online as help lines for people suffering from addiction, but in reality funnel those people to expensive private clinics, earning huge commissions. The basic idea is simple, and sound: someone searching for “help quitting pain pills” or something like that should be connected with the appropriate resources, and ostensibly that’s what help lines like those investigated by the Sunday Times’ undercover crew do. But profit-oriented private clinics, which charge tens of thousands of dollars for their services, have begun offering huge referral rewards for sending patients their direction. And the referrers, in order to snag these people in need before the competition, have begun paying more and more for prime Google placement. The report shows that referrers were paying as much as £200, around $270, for a single . But that’s just a drop in the bucket if they successfully refer someone to a clinic, earning ten or twenty grand. Plus it bought them consultation with Google representatives who reportedly helped keep them at the top of the results. It may be that the people looking for help did eventually find it. But naturally, they were not informed of any of these financial arrangements. Might be nice to know that the ostensibly objective help line you’re calling is earning huge commissions from the places it refers you to, right? That’s why “patient brokering,” as it’s sometimes called, is banned in much of the US. And why Google doesn’t allow these kinds of ads here; it banned the whole category in September. In a statement, Google said that it had today decided to make that ban apply to the UK as well. Substance abuse is a growing crisis and has led to deceptive practices by intermediaries that we need to better understand. In the US, we restricted ads entirely in this category and we have decided to extend this to the UK as we consult with local experts to update our policy and find a better way to connect those that need help with the treatment they need. One needn’t be too much of a cynic to find a few things worth asking. If it’s a question of medical ethics, why were the ads allowed in the UK at all? Why not extend the ban globally? Why did it take an investigative report to cause Google to “decide” to change its policy when presumably it had the tools to identify these problems itself? There are, of course, major differences in how these clinics are regulated and allowed to operate between the US and UK, with (as you might expect) less regulation in the former. So a one-size-fits-all ban would be premature and possibly even harmful to those looking for help. Consulting with experts is a good start. Yet one would hope that, having found pervasive slimy tactics in a business in one major market, Google would have been more proactive about looking into the presence of those tactics elsewhere. After all, it may be a niche but this wasn’t chump change: we’re talking about millions of dollars here. This appears to be just another entry in the log of internet companies making money from both good actors and bad, only cutting off the bad when someone else points it out. They’re happy to apologize and change the policy afterwards, but seem to have remarkably little foresight when it comes to finding such things on their own. |
KweliTV is Netflix for black people, by black people, starring black people | Megan Rose Dickey | 2,018 | 1 | 7 | aims to be the go-to streaming media platform for black filmmakers all over the world to share their content and make money from its distribution. KweliTV handpicks all of its content, with 98 percent of the content having been official selections at film festivals worldwide. “There are a lot of really great filmmakers out there globally,” KweliTV founder DeShuna Spencer told me. “For us, we’re offering an avenue for filmmakers of color to make money off of their work and be celebrated for the work they do.” Perhaps, more importantly, KweliTV wants to be a source of authentic storytelling of the black community from the black perspective. A recent study showed the mainstream media (news and opinion media) offers a consistently warped view of black people and black families. For example, black families represent 59 percent of the poor in mainstream media even though they make up just 27 percent of low-income people, . Meanwhile, white families make up just 17 percent of low-income people while they officially represent 66 percent of the country’s low-income population. Kweli, which means “truth” in Swahili, aims to tell all sides of the black experience. In order for content to be featured on KweliTV, the the main character needs to be of African descent and “not the sidekick, the friend of the fairy godmother,” KweliTV founder DeShuna Spencer told me. “The black person has to be the main character.” An example of some KweliTV content is a film called . Created by Kenyan filmmaker Judy Kibinge, explores life after the civil unrest in Kenya following the 2007 elections through the eyes of a woman named Anne. In 2013, the film was nominated for audience choice award at the Chicago International Film Festival and screened at the Toronto International Film Festival. There are currently 200 titles on the platform, with KweliTV adding about three titles a week in the categories of documentary, shorts and full-length features. Subscribers can watch KweliTV on the web or via Roku, Apple TV or Google Play. Unlike Netflix, the goal is not to have an endless library of content. Instead. KweliTV wants to keep it intimate with no more than 500 titles at a time. KweliTV, which launched out of beta just a few months ago, currently has 2,000 paying subscribers. By the end of the year, the goal is to hit 30,000 paid subscribers. An annual membership costs $49.99/year and a monthly one costs $5.99. As a value-add to the streaming content, KweliTV partners with other black-owned businesses to offer discounts and other perks to its subscribers. Subscribers can access discounts at companies like Heritage Box, Black Card Revoked, African Ancestry and others. On the creator side, filmmakers get paid based on how many minutes people spend viewing their content. More specifically, 60 percent of Kweli.TV’s revenue goes to filmmakers, who get paid quarterly. In alignment with Spencer’s desire to keep it intimate, KweliTV is going to start hosting in-person events for its members to connect with each other. The first event will be next month. “We really see Kweli as being a community more than a streaming service,” Spencer said. “Our customers are asking us to be more community-oriented.” KweliTV is a bootstrapped company in the traditional sense, meaning it hasn’t raised funding from any angel investors or VCs. The company has, however, won $65,000 from a couple of startup competitions. “It’s a full-time job to raise money,” Spencer said. “That’s not to say we’ll never raise but today, my focus is on revenue.” One of KweliTV’s competitors, last August, despite raising $4 million in capital. Spencer pointed to Afrostream as a bit of a cautionary tale of trying to grow too quickly. Instead of becoming a unicorn, Spencer sees her company as a zebra. Unlike unicorns, zebras a profitable and work to improve society, and KweliTV is achieving both of those requirements. |
Here’s how to stream the Golden Globes tonight | Fitz Tepper | 2,018 | 1 | 7 | Tonight for the first time the are being live-streamed, meaning you can watch it even if you aren’t in front of a TV. The show is being hosted by Seth Meyers and coverage starts at 5pm PT / pm ET. Here’s how to watch: You can check out the . |
Watch SpaceX launch the mysterious Zuma spacecraft live here | Darrell Etherington | 2,018 | 1 | 7 | [youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0PWu3BRxn60&w=680&h=383] SpaceX will attempt its first launch of 2018 later today, with a two-hour launch window opening at 8 PM EST (5 PM PST), with a backup launch window set for tomorrow at the same time. The launch was originally planned for late last year, but was pushed due to SpaceX wanted to review data related to fairing used in the launch. The payload for the launch is the ‘Zuma’ spacecraft, a top-secret spacecraft for an undisclosed U.S. government customer, commissioned by Northrop Grumman on their behalf. That’s about all we know about Zuma, besides that it’s targeting an insertion position somewhere in low Earth orbit. SpaceX will use the Falcon 9 to launch Zuma (not the Falcon Heavy it’s also prepping for a launch, likely sometime this month, also at Cape Canaveral in Florida where the Zuma mission will depart from). The launch today will also include a recovery attempt, with SpaceX attempting to land the Falcon 9 first stage booster back at SpaceX’s LZ-1 landing pad at Cape Canaveral. SpaceX’s live webcast of the Zuma launch will likely begin around 15 minutes prior to the opening of the launch window, or at around 7:45 PM EST (4:45 PST). |
China’s Kunlun completes full buyout of Grindr | Jon Russell | 2,018 | 1 | 9 | , China-based tech firm Kunlun Group has fully acquired the gay dating app. Grindr is among the, if not the, world’s most popular LBQT dating app with a claimed 3.3 million daily users. Kunlun, which is best known for games but is , bought 60 percent of the service in January 2016 for $93 million. for the remaining stake, that’s according to stock filings. The deal will also see a change in the structure of Grindr’s business with CEO and founder Joel Simkhai exiting the company. The startup’s current board chairman, Yahui Zhou, is stepping in as interim CEO until a full-time replacement is hired. In other exec shuffles, current vice-chairman Wei Zhou becomes CFO with , formerly with Facebook and Instagram, moving in as CTO. “I’m beyond proud of what we’ve built as a team and how Grindr has been able to make a meaningful and lasting contribution to the global community. We have achieved our success because of the strength and global reach of our community. I look forward to Grindr and Kunlun’s continued commitment to building tolerance, equality, and respect around the world,” Simkhai said in a statement. Grindr was founded over seven years ago and it never raised outside money. That’s pretty rare in this day and age. |
What is Snapchat, now that Story sharing has stopped growing? | Josh Constine | 2,018 | 1 | 9 | of loyalty signaling poor morale, a massive of Snapchat’s usage stats has leaked. The most worrisome is that the number of users posting Stories has shown zero growth, an even worse performance than this year. It appears Instagram’s Stories clone has stopped Snapchat’s most monetizable feature dead in its tracks. This explains why moves friends’ Stories into the chat inbox, since visual messaging on the app is growing slightly faster than total users. Messaging is tough to interrupt with ads without being annoying, so combining messages and Stories might be Snap’s best shot at reinvigorating revenue. Yet the leak as a whole paints a picture of an app that’s falling short of living up to its reputation as a communication sensation. And with weak morale, a sagging share price, and losses mounting, Snap might not have the momentum it needs to recruit top talent or lure more big acquisitions. It’s evolved social media, but is in the angsty throes of maturing as a public company. The leak was scored by , who is quickly making a name for herself as a top reporter on social networks and teen tech culture. She managed to obtain usage for a wide range of Snapchat’s feature from the end of April to mid-September 2017. You can see the at the bottom of this story. As Lorenz reports, the Snap Map live location sharing and geo-tagged content search feature has sunk from a high of 35 million daily unique viewers after its June launch to just 19 million and falling — just 11 percent of Snapchat’s users. The Discover section where professional publishers post magazine-esque daily editions spiked to 38 million in July, and then has languished at around 34 million daily users — about 19 percent of all users. And usage could fall further as Discover is less prominent in the redesign that’s yet to roll out to most users. Snapchat’s new redesign Snap should get credit for soaking up a ton of time from those who do use it, with the app growing average minutes of usage from around 32.7 to 34.8 during the April to September time period. And the brightest point in the data was that the number of daily Snaps viewed rose from around 3.9 billion to 4.6 billion, or 17.9 percent, which vastly outstrips the roughly 7 percent total user growth in the same time period. Daily Snaps sent grew from around 2.08 billion to 2.21 billion, in line with total user growth. In August, Lorenz reports that users were 64 percent more likely to send a private snap to a friend than to broadcast to Stories. Here’s where the Facebook competition is really hurting Snapchat. Back in Q2 2016 before Instagram Stories came out, Snapchat grew its user base 17.2 percent. Last quarter, it grew just 2.9 percent, as many users find they can just stick with Instagram and share Stories to their existing social graph where they already post permanent imagery rather than building a new graph on Snapchat. The number of daily users posting to Snapchat Stories held flat at around 51 million users from April to September despite total user growth. That signals that while people may be sticking with or coming to Snapchat to send disappearing messages to friends, they don’t necessarily need to post to Snapchat Stories. Daily Snapchat Story unique viewers grew 4.37 percent from 137 million to 143 million during the time period — significantly slower than total user growth. Users who do broadcast to Snapchat Stories are posting more often, at least, and are using more Geofilters. But advertisers want scale, and the lack of total Stories sharers is troubling. With messaging remaining by far its most popular feature, Snapchat may have to massively increase its augmented reality Sponsored Lens and static Sponsored Geofilter sales to make up for the lack of ads in the feature. Otherwise, it will have to risk pissing off teens by jamming more scalable display ads into the messaging experience. Overall, Snap has a rocky road ahead. New features like Snap Map and professional content in Discover don’t appear able to change its fate. The company’s best hope for now is that users grow addicted to algorithmic sorting of Stories to show best friends first, . That’s now finally coming in the redesign, and could make it easier to open Snapchat and quickly see the most relevant stuff from the people you care about. Beyond that, Snapchat might need another blockbuster acquisition to restore growth. Bitmoji’s personalized avatars and Looksery’s AR lenses gave Snapchat mainstream appeal outside of its ephemerality. But with tales of a share price down 50 percent from its post-IPO high, and Facebook’s copying machine running at full-tilt, Snap isn’t as attractive of a place to work as it was when it made those acquisitions. Snapchat has been incredibly impactful on culture. From impermanent content to vertical video, popularizing augmented reality and bringing on the age of visual communication, Speigel’s ideas have redefined the way we share. Unfortunately, Snapchat hasn’t been able to capture much of the monetary benefits of those inventions as they get cloned elsewhere. The popularity of Snapchat messaging amongst western teenagers means it won’t disappear overnight. But it may be time for it and the world to face the fact that Snapchat could be world-changing product without ever becoming a world-dominating business. [scribd id=368759484 key=key-RCiLsYV9PuqV46UPkgrL mode=scroll] |
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Chat app Line is reportedly considering its own cryptocurrency | Jon Russell | 2,018 | 1 | 9 | Tickets please, the next crypto train is about to depart. Japan-based messaging app Line is said to be the latest public company to consider a move into the blockchain and cryptocurrencies, . Unlike some of the more obscure and head-scratching moves, which include and , there would be some merit to Line adopting a token. The company already offers a mobile payment service — Line Pay — and one of its staple features is a virtual currency that is used in its social games and to buy content on its platform, including its vast array of ( ) stickers. Bloomberg reported that Line is in discussions with a number of potential partners, including bitcoin exchange Upbit, over possible tie-ins around Line Pay and other products. The goal, the report claimed, is to make its products stickier with users. Line did not respond to a request for comment. Lack of engagement is certainly an issue Line has encountered since it went public via . — just before the listing — but that had by October 2017. The company also lost users from its three core overseas markets — Indonesia, Thailand and Taiwan — for the first time last year. Those countries account for two-thirds of its users, making it a very big problem. Line’s share price got a 10 percent bump in Japan yesterday, but ultimately it remains to be seen whether, and indeed how, it will utilize the blockchain. There are already some examples. Kin, a Canada-based messenger that claims 15 million monthly users, aimed at developing an ecosystem that rewards users, content makers and advertisers based on ‘attention.’ Telegram, which has emerged as a key platform for the crypto industry, is also planning an ICO which . Line wouldn’t necessarily have to conduct an ICO — the regulations are still hazy for public entities — but it could implement attention-based tokens or the blockchain to reward users for using the messenger, making payments via Line Pay or playing its games. |
Crunch Report | ElliQ Robot Raises $22 Million | Khaled "Tito" Hamze | 2,018 | 1 | 9 | Tito Hamze
Tito Hamze
Bay McLaughlin
Tito hamze TechCrunch C/O Tito Hamze
410 Townsend street
Suite 100
San Francisco Ca. 94107 |
Alibaba will consider listing its affiliate companies in Hong Kong | Jon Russell | 2,018 | 1 | 9 | , and the country just got a major boost after Alibaba chairman Jack Ma said the company is exploring the possibility of listing one or more of its affiliate businesses on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange. The Chinese e-commerce giant famously snubbed Hong Kong in favor of . Now that the HKEX is adjusting its rules to allow for dual-class shares — an omission that prompted Alibaba to go to New York — Ma admitted it has become a viable destination. “We will consider listings in Hong Kong for Alibaba subsidiaries but we have not decided yet which one,” . The most obvious candidate for HKEX would be Ant Financial, . Ant has long been linked with a Hong Kong IPO, but equally others including and could be outside bets. and were two successful tech listings in Hong Kong last year. Alibaba is familiar with Hong Kong having when it raised some $1.5 billion. More than a decade later, the firm is valued at a colossal $488 billion with ventures across commerce, payments, logistics, the cloud and more. It’s also expanded its reach outside of China and into India, Southeast Asia and other parts of Asia. |
Igloo, a Jive-style enterprise collaboration platform, raises $47M | Ingrid Lunden | 2,018 | 1 | 9 | The market for social media and collaboration services for enterprises — made popular by the recent, rapid growth and emergence of platforms like Slack, Facebook’s Workplace and Microsoft Teams — continues its hot streak. Today, , a Canada-based startup that has built a Jive-like platform that integrates for employees to communicate with each other, access common documents and more, announced that it has raised $47 million, on the back of significant growth of its business, and a few acquisition offers to boot. The company is active in 80 countries, has around 1,000 paying customers and some 10,000 organizations using a free version of its platform. It works out to “well over” 1 million users on Igloo, said The new funding — which comes from Frontier Capital — brings the total raised by Igloo to $56 million after the startup had only raised a modest $9 million in the nine years previously, from investors that included the former CEO of BlackBerry, Jim Balsillie. Igloo is not disclosing its valuation with this round, but I understand it to be well north of $100 million, and that the company’s goal is to reach a $500 million valuation in the next year or two now that it’s putting its foot on the gas pedal. While Igloo is very much a part of the SaaS wave — it exists in the cloud, and is built around the idea of storing and serving other documents from the cloud — Latendre said that he has steered the company to think of SaaS not as software but solutions — that is, “Solutions as a Service.” The reason for this, he said, is because Igloo positions itself as a platform that incorporates lots of other software, including the likes of Slack, as well as Salesforce, Microsoft and Google’s productivity suites, Dropbox and Box and more. The idea here is that incorporating tools that people are already using is the best way of getting them to engage in using them more, and giving end users a choice and flexibility is better than locking them into something. Interestingly, working with a large range of software providers also means that Igloo sometimes also gets approached by these larger companies, as they themselves look for better ways of interfacing with enterprises to grow their revenues per user. The company is a strong collaborator with Microsoft and Salesforce, so my bet is to keep an eye on these.
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Under Armour launches two new pairs of connected running shoes | Brian Heater | 2,018 | 1 | 9 | null |
WayRay’s AR in-car HUD convinced me HUDs can be better | Darrell Etherington | 2,018 | 1 | 9 | , a Swiss augmented reality technology provider, brought its in-car heads-up display solutions to CES 2018 to show what its unique approach can do. The company was showing off its NAVION aftermarket solution to the public for the first time, and also had its holographic AR in-windshield product, designed for OEMs, available for anyone to try. I tried it myself and was impressed by the results. The display is clear and easy to read, both in the solution that’s designed to be built directly into windshields by automaker OEMs and in the aftermarket device. The aftermarket version was using a simple two-color overlay, in both red and green, but the company’s CEO Vitaly Ponomarev told me that it’ll soon be introducing blue, too. Even with just two colors, it was very easy to identify all the crucial information shown by the system. Part of the reason why WayRay’s tech is so good compared to the average in-car HUD is that it has a wider field of view than most. A driver can see it from 11 degrees of range in the built-in solution, which is much better than the 8 degrees that you typically get from automotive HUDs. The aftermarket version, which uses its own display, has less simulated depth and also offers only 8 degrees of field of view, but it’s still far better at making its seem like the information it projects is actually “stuck” to the road. This is something that’s unique to the way WayRay manages its simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) technology. The product can combine data, including location and mapping information, along with vision data gathered by the front-facing camera, to more effectively place its visualizations on the real world in front of the car. Compared to other automaker OEM products I’ve used, and to other aftermarket devices like the Navdy, WayRay’s system felt a lot better, and a lot more authentically tied to what you’re actually seeing as a driver. Ponomarev told me that’s why they term their product “True AR,” in order to differentiate it from the less effective methods that fudge the effect from insufficient information. WayRay is already in talks with OEMs to incorporate its technology into windscreens for future vehicles, including China’s SAIC, Honda and other manufacturers it wasn’t yet at liberty to discuss. The company also plans to ship its aftermarket solution sometime later this year. Also at CES, WayRay demonstrated its , which is a development platform it created to allow others to build AR apps for automobiles. These could include software that shows points of interest, enhances navigation, offers deals on purchases and more. Ponomarev told me they then plan to launch an app store for their product. It also says it intends to own the branding for this store, even if OEMs choose to incorporate it in their own vehicles along with the AR HUD hardware. WayRay has already raised $30 million, and it’s opening a new office in Silicon Valley, with the HQ still based in Lausanne, Switzerland. Ponomarev told me they’re also currently raising a $50 million round, though he couldn’t disclose any of the investors participating as it’s not yet closed. |
Renault-Nissan-Mitsubishi launches $1 billion corporate venture capital fund | Jonathan Shieber | 2,018 | 1 | 9 | The , – – , has launched a $1 billion corporate venture capital fund to focus on investments in “new mobility” including electrification, autonomous systems, network connectivity and artificial intelligence. Called , the fund has already made its first investment, taking an equity stake for an undisclosed amount in Ionic Materials — a Bill Joy-backed . The fund said that it will invest up to $200 million in start-ups and “open innovation partnerships” in its first year and expects to invest roughly the same amount over the next five years. As a strategic investor, the new fund will look to bring technologies developed by its portfolio companies in-house for use across the three-brand alliance that comprises the group. It also intends to incubate entrepreneurs and will make investments across a startup company’s life-cycle. That its first deal is in a battery technology developer shows exactly how much emphasis automakers are placing on electrification in the coming years. When it was first going public with its technology Ionic Materials was hailed in some quarters as a “Jesus battery” for its solid-state, cobalt-free battery materials. With the investment the Alliance has agreed to help out with research and development as the Massachusetts-based company looks to bring its solid polymer electrolyte to market. The roughly $1 billion commitment puts Renault-Nissan-Mitsubishi in the pole position when it comes to automakers committing to corporate venturing. Both and have longer histories with venture capital (and ), but their funds are smaller. While Toyota to back robotics and artificial intelligence companies earlier this year and Ford on a mobility accelerator program in Detroit. The only company that seems willing to throw as much capital around the technology industry at a similar scale is Volkswagen, the world’s number two automaker. Volkswagen doesn’t appear to have a dedicated venture investment group, instead making direct investments in companies or setting up joint ventures with other automakers. Renault-Nissan-Mitsubishi does also invest roughly 8.5 billion euros in its own research and development, but that differs from capital commitments in new companies. The new venture firm will be led by , who previously served as the chief executive officer of Nissan Brazil (and has a background in investment banking). Nissan has been down the road of working and partnering with startups before. The company was an early proponent and partner of the , which raised $850 million at the height of the cleantech bubble, but collapsed by 2014. That experience may have left Renault feeling a bit shocked, but the company has since recovered. It’s planning to launch 12 pure electric vehicles by 2022 and will bring 40 autonomous vehicles to market and additional robotically-enhanced ride-hailing services. The first offices for the new fund will be in Silicon Valley, Paris, Yokohama and Beijing — which align with the member companies that are committing capital to the alliance. Renault and Nissan will both put up 40% of the capital for the new fund, with Mitsubishi Motors financing the remainder. |
Huawei’s Richard Yu is really pissed at US carriers | Brian Heater | 2,018 | 1 | 9 | null |
GoPro CEO explains shutdown of company’s Karma drone unit | Lucas Matney | 2,018 | 1 | 9 | Yesterday, GoPro confirmed TechCrunch’s that the company was shuttering its Karma drone division and laying off hundreds of employees. Today, CEO Nick Woodman is at CES on damage control. In an interview with TechCrunch, Woodman said that the company is shifting focus entirely back to action cams, a market he insists is “absolutely” robust enough to sustain the company. Woodman didn’t comment on rumors of a potential sale beyond noting that the company was not “actively engaged” in the process of selling itself, and said that the leadership would “continue to strategize and run GoPro as though we’re going to be running this independent company ongoing, because we have to be masters of our own destiny.” While the founder asserted that he believes things would have fared differently for the company’s Karma drone program had it not dealt with its initial “horrible launch,” he said that the decision to shut it down was ultimately due to a “domino effect” that resulted from poor sales of the company’s last-gen Hero5 action camera. These poor sales led the company to drop the Hero5 Black action camera’s price from $399 to $299 and eventually led to further price restructuring, including a $100 price cut yesterday to the brand new Hero6 Black. “If Hero5 Black had sold to expectations at its original $399 pricing, we would not have had to change prices across all of our cameras, and we would not have had to do a restructuring and we would have been able to continue investing in programs like our next generation Karma,” Woodman said. “But reality is reality.” The company seems to have been forced into a situation where it has to fight for stability rather than seek out new opportunities for future growth. Woodman heralds this as a return to “paying much more attention to what our customers really want from us and less about what we want from us,” as GoPro confining its ambitions to a niche market where it’s already king sounds far less positive. The company’s last gamble sitting in its product line, the newly-released $699 Fusion, is aimed at “prosumers” but resides in a saturated 360 camera market that likely won’t bring too many new customers to GoPro. Woodman concedes the mass-market promises of 360 cameras rely heavily on the software side and that the company’s ability to invest in machine learning technologies that help consumers edit down footage will be key. “I don’t think consumers want a 360 camera, I think consumers want a camera that makes it so simple and essentially automatic to capture and share themselves in exciting ways, and I think in the future that will be a 360 camera,” he said. GoPro stock is down nearly 20 percent since yesterday’s restructuring announcement. |
Euveka’s shape-shifting robotic mannequin could streamline the fashion and wearable industries | Devin Coldewey | 2,018 | 1 | 9 | Some ideas you hear and they immediately make sense. Some take a minute, but the more you think about them, the better they seem. , a mannequin for clothing designers that can change shape and size in seconds, is the latter — and I think it may eventually be a standard item in any fashion studio and a fair few other industries. It’s not something I ever really thought about, but designers don’t just create one version of a shirt or jacket and then scale it up and down (well, good ones don’t). They need to design and refit it for different body types, allowing for the many shapes humans take and the ways that shape changes with time or activity. That means lots and lots of mannequins. Big, small, short, tall, pregnant, broad-shouldered, narrow-hipped and everything else. It would be nice to just be able to dial in the exact size and shape you’re designing for, right? That’s Euveka. Under the standard soft, pin-friendly cover (stretchable, naturally) is a set of mechanisms that can change all kinds of measurements, quickly and (ahem) seamlessly. Pretty much any combination of measurements can be put in, mirroring the diversity of human morphology. Shoulders, bust, chest, waist, hips, thighs and height can be independently adjusted, as well as general, shall we say, robustity — allowing for the realistic replication of body types from a 5′ pregnant woman to a 6’3″ basketball player. The changes happen over a few tens of seconds, and yet so slowly that you may not even be able to tell when it’s growing, shrinking or otherwise reconfiguring. It’s all done with an attached application that also warns of unsafe pressures or chemicals if they’re detected. I spoke with Audrey-Laure Bergenthal, president and CEO of Euveka, . She and the others on the team helped expand my mind a bit as to what something like this enables. “There’s fashion, of course,” she said. “But also medical, sports, security — any time there’s a question of morphology. A post shared by (@euveka_smartmorphosizing) on She gestured to some gentlemen who had just left the booth. They, she said, were from the French Ministry of the Army. “Soldiers have a certain type of morphology,” she said. Testing with those actual types could make better uniforms, sure. But she also pointed out that women’s upper bodies differ more broadly than men’s in the military, making bulletproof vests significantly less effective. Tailoring those vests to more body types could literally save lives. In sports, of course different body types are to be found in different sports, but the bodies also change over time and different bodies change in different ways. Why not have uniforms ready for players before and after spring training? This transition took about 30 seconds. Again, people in different phases and conditions of life deserve to have well-fitted clothes: older people who have bent forward over time, or people in wheelchairs who have adopted new postures or whose bodies have adapted to a recumbent position. You could get a different mannequin for each of those bodies and the dozens more you might want over time, or you could get a Euveka. The most obvious downside is that while a Euveka mannequin can replace dozens, it can only be used for one garment at a time — five traditional mannequins, of course, could wear five, and be worked on by five designers. Bergenthal said that a Euveka is, realistically, as effective as having 10 mannequins in use by five people. That will differ designer by designer, of course. And there’s no reason you can’t have both. Well, except the price. This thing ain’t cheap. You can lease one for €3,000 per month, or buy one outright for €96,000. That may explain why their early partners are major fashion houses like Chanel and Louis Vuitton. The army, too, may get in on the fun, assuming the French military is anywhere near as deep-pocketed as our own. Work is just beginning on the Euveka line, however: R&D is ongoing, Bergenthal told me, both to improve the existing model and to add new parts and shapes. A male mannequin with similar capabilities is underway, as well as arms, lower legs, feet and different postures and spine curves. Designing for more bodies seems like it should result in better clothes and a healthier industry, not to mention happier consumers. The first Euveka mannequins should be shipping in March. |
Baidu sets its sights on Japan with a voice-enabled projector in a dome light | Frederic Lardinois | 2,018 | 1 | 9 | Baidu’s is essentially China’s Alexa. Over the course of the last few years, the company has built a voice assistant and an ecosystem of hardware partners that, for the most part, cater to the Chinese market. At CES this week, the company talked a bit more about its own first-party smart speaker: the oddly compelling Raven H, which looks nothing like what you imagine a smart speaker would look like. In addition, though, it also showed off the popIn Aladdin, a dome light with a built-in projector that the company specifically designed for the small apartment you find in countries like Japan. Baidu developed the light/projector together with smart projector maker XGIMI and Baidu Japan’s popIn brand. It’s kind of ingenious when you think about. In a small room, you may not have the necessary space for a projector and speaker, but with the Aladdin, you get both, plus a voice-enabled smart speaker that hangs from your ceiling. [gallery ids="1585193,1585192"] The Raven H, too, is similarly unusual in that it looks like a stack of LEGO bricks, but with a thin, removable top that functions as a standalone voice assistant with a touch-enabled, highly low-res screen on top. That removable display also fits on the even odder Raven R, which is a robot with an articulated arm that can dance to your music and, the company told me, locate you in space and always aim its microphone in your direction as you move around the room. There seems to be more to this, but the Raven R isn’t quite ready for prime time yet and won’t go on sale until later this year. Together with its partner Little Fish, Baidu also brought an Echo Show-like smart display to CES, as well as a smart lamp from Sengled. As Kun Jing, the general manager of Baidu’s Duer business unit told me, the company is looking to Japan for its first major international expansion of DuerOS because it already optimized its assistant for the acoustics of small rooms. It doesn’t look like Baidu is planning to bring its software and hardware to the U.S. anytime soon, though. Jing argued that this isn’t so much a question of language support as that Baidu doesn’t think its products will work well in large American homes. |
Huawei’s Mate 10 Pro is coming to the US unlocked next month | Brian Heater | 2,018 | 1 | 9 | Yu mentioned the word “trust” repeatedly during today’s keynote when describing global reaction to the company’s hardware offerings — seemingly an unstated reference to some of the aforementioned security concerns in recent years. He then loudly exclaimed that the company offered the “highest standard in privacy and security” to a smattering of applause. |
Huawei’s also selling a $1,225 Porsche-branded Mate 10 | Brian Heater | 2,018 | 1 | 9 | null |
Jump will be the first stationless, e-bike-sharing service to launch in SF | Megan Rose Dickey | 2,018 | 1 | 9 | Social Bicycles, maker of the pedal-assist e-bikes that don’t require docking stations, has received a permit from the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency to launch 250 dockless electric bikes in San Francisco sometime between now and the end of March. This is the first permit the city has issued to an electric, stationless bike-share provider. “Jump Bikes has demonstrated a commitment to San Francisco’s priorities of providing a safe, equitable and accountable bike share system and is the only company to have fulfilled the requirements of the SFMTA’s stationless bike share permit application,” . Jump’s bikes can be legally locked to bike parking racks or the “furniture zone of the sidewalk,” which is where you see things like light poles, benches and utility poles. The bikes also come with integrated locks to secure the bikes. But since stationless bike-sharing is pretty new, the SFMTA will use this 18-month period to evaluate, collect data and assess if a program like this will work in the longer-term. Similar to what the , the aim is to better understand the needs and impacts of this type of mobility service. More specifically, the SFMTA will be evaluating the use of existing bike-share systems to identify places where the city should promote stationless bike-share, SFMTA spokesperson Paul Rose told TechCrunch. The SFMTA will also access the impact of stationless bike-share “on the public right-of-way, including maintaining accessible pedestrian paths of travel, as well as the enforcement/maintenance burden on city staff,” Rose said. The conditions of Jump’s permits require that it provide the SFMTA with enough data to make an evaluation. The evaluation will result in policy recommendations for stationless bike-share services moving forward, including any necessary amendments to the SF Transportation Code. After the first nine months of the program, the SFMTA may allow Jump to add an additional 250 bikes to its fleet. “Over the past few months, we’ve been working closely with the SFMTA and local community groups to design a solution that not only brings e-bikes to the challenging streets of San Francisco but does so in a responsible and accessible way for its many neighborhoods,” Social Bicycles CEO Ryan Rzepecki said in an emailed statement to TechCrunch. “JUMP Bikes is extremely proud to have been selected to receive the first electric bike share permit from the city and we’re even more excited to announce the upcoming launch of this system in the near future.” This permit comes after Jump conducted a test pilot last year with 100 bikes in the Bayview neighborhood in San Francisco. What Social Bicycles is doing, , is “going in and trying to put equity first.” Regarding the tech audience and other potential early adopters, “they will come naturally.” This week has been a busy one for bike-sharing startups. Just yesterday, , and announced pedal-assist e-bikes. Motivate plans to roll out a pilot program of 250 e-bikes in San Francisco in April, while LimeBike will start launching e-bikes this month in Miami, Seattle and the greater San Francisco area. Spin, on the other hand, will launch its e-bikes in Miami and on the campuses of University of California San Diego and Rochester Institute of Technology. While the SFMTA has this pilot program in place with Social Bicycles, the agency will not issue any other stationless bike-share permits. That means if a startup like Spin or LimeBike wants to launch their stationless bikes in San Francisco during the 18-month period the SFMTA is piloting the program with Jump, they’ll be out of luck. Still, it seems that the SFMTA envisions a city where Motivate’s Ford GoBikes and Jump bikes are friends. The SFMTA sees Jump bikes as complementing the Ford GoBike system, which recently announced it will add electric bikes to its San Francisco fleet in April. “Combined with the Ford GoBike expansion, the JUMP pilot allows for an unprecedented growth in shared bikes in San Francisco, with the SFMTA taking measures to study and manage the impact of bike share on San Francisco’s streets,” the agency wrote. If you want to hear more about bike-sharing and the competition, be sure to check out the latest episode of CTRL+T with Rzepecki. You also can hear me talk about what it was like when I rode around the hilly streets of San Francisco on a Jump bike.
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Gal Gadot is Huawei’s secret weapon, as US distribution plans fall through | Brian Heater | 2,018 | 1 | 9 | null |
Huawei’s new whole-home Wi-Fi system combines Powerline and mesh networking | Frederic Lardinois | 2,018 | 1 | 9 | today announced a new whole-home Wi-Fi system, the WiFi Q2. Wi-Fi mesh network systems are quickly becoming the standard, with companies like Qualcomm estimating that they now account for 40 percent of new Wi-Fi router sales. Huawei is going a different route, though. In addition to a Wi-Fi mesh, it also uses a network that routes your traffic over the existing electrical system in your house instead of dedicated Ethernet cables. The result of this (ideally), is that your various satellite access points all get full-speed internet access without the potential of network degradation as you get further away from the main hub. And when both the mesh and the Powerline network work together at full speed, you could get connections with up to 1867Mbps (if your home internet can handle that, of course). The company also promises that you’ll be able to connect up to 192 devices and that the switching time for the network is about 100ms. “We are streaming more content than ever before, more music, more movies, and more social media on more connected devices, which makes fast and reliable Wi-Fi an essential need,” said Richard Yu, CEO, Huawei Consumer Business Group in today’s announcement.” ͞The Huawei WiFi Q2 offers today’s families a hybrid whole home Wi-Fi system with a reliable, flexible solution that expands Wi-Fi throughout our homes.” The company also notes that, in addition to all of the usual Wi-Fi encryption and password protection, it’s also using an “anti-brute force algorithm” to keep hackers from getting into your network. It’s worth noting that Huawei isn’t the first company to combine Powerline and Wi-Fi mesh networking. TP-Link announced a similar system , but it doesn’t look like it ever went on sale. The Q2 will sell in the U.S., with three-packs selling for $349. What we do know, though, is that the company plans to sell it in two versions: the hybrid solution we described above, as well as one that only relies on Powerline networking with up to 1 Gbps speeds. These will sell in three-packs, though the company will also sell individual base and satellite routers. [gallery ids="1585138,1585139,1585140,1585142"] |
FTC and state of Nevada crack down on revenge porn site | Megan Rose Dickey | 2,018 | 1 | 9 | In a complaint filed against MyEx.com, allege the website violates both federal and state law by featuring intimate images of people, along with their personal information, without their consent. MyEx, which the FTC describes as being “dedicated solely to revenge porn,” is a website that lets people upload photos and information about their ex partners. The complaint alleges MyEx “extorted victims by requiring them to pay fees of hundreds of dollars to have their intimate pictures, videos, and information removed from the site.” In some cases, the defendants allegedly made people pay anywhere from $499 to $2,800 to remove the photos and other personal information. A recently approved settlement with one of the defendants, Aniello “Neil” Infante, bans Infante from posting intimate photos and other personal information on a website without notice and content, requires him to destroy all the intimate images in his possession and bans him from charging people to remove the content. As part of the settlement, Infante also agreed to a $205,000 judgment, which the FTC will suspend as long as he pays $15,000 “in light of his inability to pay more.” The money he pays will go toward reimbursing the people he allegedly charged to have their images removed from the site. “MyEx.com uses reprehensible tactics to profit off of the intimate details of individuals’ private lives,” Acting FTC Chairman Maureen K. Ohlhausen said in a press release. “People who were featured on this site suffered real harm, including the loss of money they paid to remove intimate images and personal information, loss of jobs, and being subject to threats and harassment.” The FTC’s complaint also alleges MyEx was aware that a lot of the people featured on the site did not consent to having their personal photos and details shared. As of December 2017, according to the complaint, there were 12,620 entries on the site. Revenge porn has been illegal in . There also is a federal statute that criminalizes the use of computer services to intentionally harass or intimidate someone by engaging in conduct that “causes, attempts to cause, or would be reasonably expected to cause substantial emotional distress to a person.” There’s a reason why legislators are tackling revenge porn. One in 25 people in the U.S. are victims of non-consensual image sharing, . Of those affected by the sharing of consensual intimate images, 93 percent of people report “significant emotional distress” and 82 percent report significant difficulties in other aspects of their lives, according to the US Victims of Non-Consensual Intimate Images. , Senators Kamala D. Harris (D-CA), Richard Burr (R-NC) and Amy Klobuchar (D-MN), as well as Rep. Jackie Speier, introduced a bill to address revenge porn. The bill, Ending Nonconsenual Online User Graphic Harassment (ENOUGH) Act of 2017, is designed to address the unwanted sharing of private, explicit images. , which has bi-partisan support, also has support from tech companies like Twitter and Facebook. In the 12 months or so, Facebook and Twitter have made some efforts to crack down on revenge porn. In April, a photo-matching technology to ensure people can re-share images previously reported and tagged as revenge porn. Then, in October, its policy to state that no one can post or share “intimate photos or videos” of someone without their consent. |
H-1B visa extensions for workers waiting on green cards are safe for now | Taylor Hatmaker | 2,018 | 1 | 9 | The Trump administration appears to be creating distance between itself and that it might end the practice of extending H-1B visas during the green card application process. The rumored change would have a large impact on foreign tech workers in the U.S., but the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) is offering assurances that no such policy change is underway. In a statement to TechCrunch, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services Chief of Media Relations Jonathan Withington noted that the agency is examining other potential policy changes in light of the “Buy American, Hire American” executive order, which the president signed last April. That includes “a thorough review of employment based visa programs,” though USCIS explained that the H1-B extension policy was not on the chopping block. USCIS clarified its stance in a statement to TechCrunch: “We are not at liberty to discuss any part of the pre-decisional processes; however, all proposed rules publish in the federal register and USCIS posts all policy memoranda on our website… “What we can say, however, is that USCIS is not considering a regulatory change that would force H-1B visa holders to leave the United States by changing our interpretation of section 104(c) of AC-21, which provides for H-1B extensions beyond the 6 year limit. Even if it were, such a change would not likely result in these H-1B visa holders having to leave the United States because employers could request extensions in one-year increments under section 106(a)-(b) of AC21 instead.” McClatchy that this reassurance comes after the business community sharply rebuked the potential policy change, though USCIS denies that claim. |
Nintendo is bringing Mario Kart to mobile | Jon Russell | 2,018 | 1 | 31 | In news that will excite every Nintendo fan on the planet, the Japanese gaming giant just announced that it will bring its hugely popular Mario Kart series to mobile. Nintendo teased the upcoming development of ‘Mario Kart Tour’ which it said will be released sometime before March 2019. A long wait, indeed, and for now we have no additional details. But, for most enthusiasts, this confirmation alone is hugely exciting news. The checkered flag has been raised and the finish line is near. A new mobile application is now in development: Mario Kart Tour! Releasing in the fiscal year ending in March 2019. — Nintendo of America (@NintendoAmerica) Mario Kart has been one of the most recognizable IPs in Nintendo’s history, and it continues to sell well today. Yesterday, Nintendo revealed that Mario Kart 8 Deluxe has sold more than 7.3 million copies for Switch since its release last April. That means it is on around half of . . To date, it has released , and . , the social app that was its first release on mobile, didn’t hold its popularity and will . Mario Kart is the only much-loved franchise that’ll be hitting smartphones, last year that a Legend Of Zelda release is in development, but Nintendo hasn’t confirmed that. |
Elon Musk sold all 20K Boring flamethrowers, bringing in $10M | Darrell Etherington | 2,018 | 1 | 31 | Elon Musk’s flamethrower, branded and sold via The Boring Company, his new tunnel digging venture, is now all sold out. That means 20,000 buyers have secured pre-orders, and at $500 per, that adds up to $10 million in committed funds heading to The Boring Co’s coffers. Musk started selling these via The Boring Company’s website just a few short days ago, on Saturday, January 27. He noted that 15,000 were sold just yesterday, and now the remaining 5,000 are all claimed, per a tweet from the serial founder. Flamethrowers sold out — Elon Musk (@elonmusk) The sell-out of flamethrower stock follows The Boring Company’s first successful merch venture, which involved selling 50,000 branded hats to fans. Musk must be feeling magnanimous after doing so well with these tangential revenue-generation tactics, because he’s also giving away a “complimentary” Boring Co fire extinguisher with each flamethrower sold. The Boring Co. had been retailing these separately as $30 add-ons, but maybe some of the criticism levied against Musk and his company for selling something that potentially dangerous got through, or maybe no one bought any of the fire extinguishers and so they had a bunch of stock they needed to be rid of. This doesn’t mean Musk has raised $10 million free and clear via the sale of the flamethrowers for his young company, but the markup is probably huge so the total sum of funds generated this way isn’t anything to sneeze at, either. |
Nextdoor is expanding to France to connect neighbors | Romain Dillet | 2,018 | 1 | 31 | After a slow and steady expansion across the U.S., social platform is now launching its fourth country outside of its home country. Nextdoor is a sort of tiny Facebook for neighborhoods. It’s a good way to connect with your neighbors, exchange tips, buy and sell things and more. “The launch of Nextdoor in France represents a critical step in our continued European expansion. The value in connecting people to what matters most to them locally transcends national boundaries, and we are thrilled that our initial tests were received with great enthusiasm,” Nextdoor co-founder and CEO Nirav Tolia said. “We look forward to playing a role in helping neighbors across France utilize Nextdoor to make local connections every day that strengthen communities.” On paper, Nextdoor sounds like the perfect platform for sprawling suburbs in the U.S. But the company thinks big European cities are also going to use it. That’s why the company is now live in the Netherlands, the U.K., Germany and now France. Nextdoor users buy and sell desks and bikes, find babysitters and veterinarians, get together for block parties or to run together. If you’re looking for a drill or you’ve lost your dog, maybe other Nextdoor users can help you. You need to reach a certain scale to turn Nextdoor into a useful platform. The company knows how to launch new neighborhoods with enough users to make them come back and find the service useful. So you can expect to see ads and flyers in the coming weeks. The startup is still much bigger in the U.S. than in Europe. There are over 165,000 active neighborhoods in the U.S., which represents 80 percent of U.S. neighborhoods. Each neighborhood has 1,200 households on average. So that means Nextdoor has millions and millions of users. And the company has raised of dollars in total. With that much funding, it’s going to make it easier to compete with in France. People are getting tired of general purpose social networks, such as Facebook. The backlash is real, and it’s a good opportunity for smaller, more focused social networks. There’s also a feel-good effect with local connections. It’s nice to see your neighbors helping each other instead of your angry uncle sharing Donald Trump speeches. [gallery ids="1593015,1593014,1593013"] |
The Last Episode of Crunch Report | Khaled "Tito" Hamze | 2,018 | 1 | 31 | This is the last episode of Crunch Report. It’s been an awesome journey but now to try other things. I’m not leaving TechCrunch, just to clarify. Watch the video and thank you. Tito Hamze
Tito Hamze
Joe Zolnoski
Tito Hamze TechCrunch C/O Tito Hamze
410 Townsend street
Suite 100
San Francisco Ca. 94107 |
A new study of Airbnb paints an ugly picture of the company’s impact on New York City housing | Taylor Hatmaker | 2,018 | 1 | 31 | For anyone who knows their city well, it’s easy to see that the short-term rental boom spurred by Airbnb’s massive popularity is changing things. Figuring out what exactly is changing and how quickly is trickier. In New York, those changes have kept Airbnb and city regulators engaged in over what’s really good for the city. A new deep dive into the rental market is just more fuel for that fire. The conducted by offers some pretty striking data points. While its analyses were conducted independently, the study itself was commissioned by the Hotel Trades Council and the AFL-CIO, two entities with a vested interest in keeping hotel business booming, so bear that in mind. For starters, the study estimates that Airbnb has driven up long-term rental prices by 1.4 percent, or $384 per year, for the median New York City renter. The research suggests that both restricted availability in the long-term rental market and increased financial incentives in the short-term rental market account for this increase. To reach those conclusions, the study drew from a comparative model developed by UCLA to rule out confounding variables that, specific to New York, might be driving those increases: After controlling for a comprehensive set of factors, they find that a “exogenous” 10% increase in number of Airbnb listings in an area (which is to say, an increase that is not driven by other factors which would have increased rents anyway) predicts a 0.42% increase in long-term rents. Applying this relationship to our data, we find strong evidence that Airbnb has increased long-term rents in New York City. The study also lays plain Airbnb’s potential impact on long-term housing availability in New York, estimating that it has removed between 7,000 and 13,500 long-term rental units from the market. Unfortunately, it looks like that problem is poised to worsen: Additionally, spatial cluster analysis reveals that 4,700 private-room listings are in fact “ghost hotels” comprising many rooms in a single apartment or building. This is perhaps the fastest growing category of listing in all of New York, and may represent a tactic for commercial Airbnb operators to avoid regulatory scrutiny. While Airbnb goes to great lengths to promote an image of its average renter — a homeowner renting an extra room to make a little passive income — it’s no secret that a massive swath of Airbnb listings come from professional operators who control many listings across a city. The McGill study examined this, determining that as much as two-thirds of New York City area Airbnb revenues came from listings that likely violate city rules against short-term rentals for fewer than 30 days in buildings with more than three units with the owner not present. To examine this, the research combined its own data with census information that specified building types. The results: … we estimate that between 85 percent and 89 percent of entire home rentals to have been illegal each month. This means, even assuming that all private-room listings are legal, that between 43 percent and 47 percent of reservations in New York City have been illegal. In any given month, between 7,600 and 12,700 listings have had illegal reservations—accounting for between 42 percent and 46 percent of all active listings. In total over the last year, 45% of reservations were likely illegal, and these illegal reservations generated 66% ($435 million) of all host revenue. Given the predominance of likely illegal listings and “ghost hotels,” it might be less surprising, then, that the top 10 percent of Airbnb hosts generated 48 percent of all revenue in 2017. Not quite the image that Airbnb is projecting about how it plays nice with city regulators in order to help out the little guy. If these highlights were interesting, you can dig into the full report . While the hotel industry funding backing the study does raise an eyebrow, the research methods seemed largely sound and it’s hard to argue with quantitative findings that back up the kind of qualitative shifts you’ve seen in your own backyard. |
Watch what it actually looks like when CRISPR snips a strand of DNA | Devin Coldewey | 2,018 | 1 | 31 | The is an important concept to know about in these days of biotech advances, but it can be pretty difficult to visualize properly. Is it really like molecular scissors? Where does the DNA go? Is it a big molecule or a small one? Fortunately a group has created a 3D animation of the process that shows it at the molecular level. You can watch the animation, created by biologists at Russia’s Skoltech Institute and the Visual Science organization, below or : Wonder how accurate it really is? It got the thumbs-up from none other than Jennifer Doudna, one of the people who helped discover and refine CRISPR techniques: Molecular animations are an essential way to demystify and explain complex biological systems. Through the use of stunning imagery and attention to detail, Visual Science and Skoltech have captured the dynamic mechanisms of CRISPR-Cas proteins and their use as research tools. These animations were created as part of a “nonprofit education project,” so if you’d like to license, modify, or otherwise use them for educational purposes, go for it. |
SpaceX’s rocket booster survived descent despite no landing attempt | Darrell Etherington | 2,018 | 1 | 31 | SpaceX flew a mission today that didn’t include a controlled recovery attempt of the Falcon 9 booster involved in the launch. Even still, the first stage survived the return to Earth pretty much intact, and the company will now try to recover it from the Atlantic Ocean to see what kind of shape it’s in. This rocket was meant to test very high retrothrust landing in water so it didn’t hurt the droneship, but amazingly it has survived. We will try to tow it back to shore. — Elon Musk (@elonmusk) SpaceX did fire the rocket’s retro thrusters, as it does during a controlled landing when it tries to sit the booster upright either on land or on one of its ocean-borne ships, but it did so very high in the air, with the sole intent of making sure the rocket would avoid colliding at high impact with its mobile landing pads. The unintended consequence of that action is that the rocket appears to be intact, floating on the ocean surface — and potentially even ready for refurbishment and reuse. If recoverable, this could set the stage for a third flight for this particular booster. SpaceX might also want to look into replicating these results in the future. It could be less costly and challenging to recover boosters this way than via controlled descent, after all — provided they can consistently come back in decent shape. |
Equifax launches its credit locking app and extends free credit freezes through June | Taylor Hatmaker | 2,018 | 1 | 31 | Today was supposed to be the deadline for Equifax’s free credit freeze offering, but the company has decided to extend the service to consumers for another five months. Now, customers can request a credit freeze through June 30. Still, January 31 the last day to cash in on free credit monitoring through TrustedID Premier program, assuming you still trust the company that failed to protect the personal data of 143 million users enough to rely on it. Equifax decided to offer these user services after a massive outcry from consumers and last September. Users who freeze their credit report through Equifax also should look into doing so at Experian and TransUnion, the other two major credit bureaus. Choosing to freeze your credit reports is a useful if imperfect tool for anyone concerned that their accounts or identifying information (social security numbers, birth dates, etc.) might be compromised, but it can prevent would-be identity thieves from opening a line of credit or a loan in your name. Equifax also is introducing a new credit locking service called Lock & Alert, made available today (and free for life) in app form. It may sound redundant, but a lock and a freeze are two different services. As the company explained to CNN Money, a credit freeze can only be lifted with a PIN, while a credit lock uses “modern authentication techniques, such as username and passwords and one time passcodes for better user experience.” The Lock & Alert app is available now through the and through . |
Mobile delivers high exit multiples despite broader market slowdown | Jason Rowley | 2,018 | 1 | 31 |
In the world of mobile apps, numbers come in two sizes: big and bigger. More than one billion people use Facebook’s mobile app every day. Instagram — another Facebook property — has well over 100 million photos and videos uploaded to the platform every 24 hours. And untold millions of emails, instant messages, small financial transactions and other interactions are facilitated by mobile devices every day. But what about the financial side of the mobile business; specifically, venture investment and returns? All of that activity should bring in some considerable revenue, and a lot of startups are seeking a niche in this expansive ecosystem. By taking a look at the numbers behind two different ends of the startup life cycle — seed and early-stage funding on one side and exits on the other — a reasonable understanding of the mobile market today can be had. In doing so, we’ll see just how much money has gone to startups in the mobile sector, and the (often good) returns they generate for investors. , explored the performance of , and, at least as far as seed and early-stage investment goes, 2017 was not a great year. At the early stage, which consists of Series A and Series B rounds, deal and dollar volume is down from highs set around 2015. And while we’ve asserted that this trend is widespread, there are bright spots in the early-stage market. Mobile may be one of them. In the chart below, we display seed and early-stage funding round data for startups in group from 2007 through the end of 2017. This broad group includes companies in a number of categories, encompassing everything from mobile payments and mobile health apps to iOS, Android and, yes, even Windows Phone and Palm OS. And despite declines in overall deal volume (mostly attributable to reporting delays), the pullback from 2015 highs haven’t been as precipitous as other categories or the market as a whole. Since 2012, the average seed or early-stage round in Crunchbase’s mobile category group has been on the upswing, according to reported data. Part of the increase may be driven by the types of companies that are being funded. One of the main trends over the past several years is the emergence and growth of mobile-facilitated “sharing economy” services. Sure, most of us are familiar with ridesharing services like Uber and Lyft, but the market has grown to include a much wider array of services. A vibrant and highly competitive market for dockless bikes emerged seemingly out of thin air, as has . Just in the last quarter of 2017, at a pre-money valuation of $175 million, and China-based raised from , the Japanese mobile messaging company. Other mobile-focused apps in the sharing economy are gaining traction too. , a “marketplace that connects traditional businesses with workers to fill hourly paid shifts, on demand,” recently closed . And at the intersection of “the real world” and mobile, San Francisco-based , which helps its users store and rent out their extra stuff, in January 2018. And apart from the sharing economy companies, there’s also been a fair bit of investor interest in enterprise applications designed around mobile. For example, , a Tampa-based company that aims to “redefine corporate wellness programs,” . On the cybersecurity front, closed to fuel the growth of its mobile-based biometric authentication business. Sharing economy and enterprise startups also share a common thread: they’re expensive to get started. On the sharing economy side, it takes a lot of capital to build the supply and demand sides of a marketplace. Meanwhile, enterprise startups have to contend with long sales cycles and stricter requirements from their prospective customers. With a greater prevalence of capital-intensive sharing economy and enterprise startups in the mobile funding mix, it shouldn’t be surprising that the mobile category continues to fare better than others. Venture investors often talk about investing in companies that will deliver a 10x return on invested capital. It goes without saying that doing so, and doing so consistently, is a challenge. Recently, and found that the life sciences offer a fairly deep pool of opportunities for large exit multiples. But the ratio of valuation to invested capital (VIC) for many of the deals highlighted in that article pale in comparison to some of the multiples to be found in mobile. Below, we’ve highlighted just a few of the biggest M&A deals, in terms of exit multiples, to come out of the mobile sector. These companies were founded between 2003 and the present, known as the . Just like earlier survey of exit multiples found that the mix of tech companies was surprisingly diverse, so too are the businesses in the table above. However, one company connects two of these deals. Through a series of acquisitions, Facebook repositioned itself from a primarily desktop-based social network to being mobile-first. In the process, Facebook has become one side of a duopoly in mobile advertising. According to financial data , Facebook’s mobile ad revenue went from basically $0 in 2012 to $8.92 billion by the end of 2017. Desktop ad revenue — some $1.2 billion — remained largely flat over the same period. Although many believed that the $1 billion acquisition price for Instagram was far too high, Facebook raked in $4.1 billion in revenue from Instagram ads in 2017. Now that’s a multiple! As shown, the mobile sector produced some exits with very good multiples on invested capital, which is good for investors and entrepreneurs alike. The category also outperforms the general market. So what makes the mobile category special? A few factors may be at play here. Shifts to more capital-intensive startups are being made. As far as exits go, some of the biggest came from companies with a more traditional software business model, one involving a large up-front investment of time and financial resources to build, but close to zero marginal costs to maintain and near-infinite potential to scale up. But there is another factor to keep in mind. A few years ago, investors and the tech press were abuzz with excitement about mobile. Now that the fervor over the mobile sector has dimmed in terms of press, more exciting sectors like seem to be the center of attention lately. And while that may sound like a bad thing, it isn’t. It’s not that mobile got any less exciting; it’s just become as common as the air. |
Engine Biosciences raises $10 million in Southeast Asia’s largest institutional seed round | Jonathan Shieber | 2,018 | 1 | 31 | Life sciences startups in Asia are getting another boost with the $10 million investment in — a biotech company that’s applying machine learning to genomics for drug discovery. With its headquarters in both Singapore and San Francisco, the company has managed to attract some impressive investors from both the U.S. and Asia. The round was co-led by Danhua Venture Capital and 6 Dimensions Capital, with additional participation from WuXi AppTec, EDBI, Pavilion Capital, Baidu Ventures, WI Harper and Nest.Bio Ventures. Founded by a who’s who of researchers, including Massachusetts Institute of Technology professors and Jim Collins; Mayo Clinic Assistant professor and University of California San Diego assistant professor, , Engine is leveraging experts in synthetic biology and drug discovery to create a new way to build and test novel medicines. According to a statement, the company will use the money to continue developing its drug discovery platform, expand the executive and scientific team in Singapore and the U.S. and begin pre-clinical studies internally and with partners — which already include undisclosed research institutions and an unnamed Fortune 500 company here in the U.S. Combining parallel biological experimentation with machine learning to develop therapies, Engine is building a system for new drug discovery that is faster and cheaper to test than existing methodologies, the company claims. “The biopharmaceutical industry needs better approaches for R&D to deliver therapies to patients in need faster. Legacy approaches mean that in many cases, we still have a weak understanding of what drives disease and correspondingly, how to treat or prevent it,” said Engine Biosciences co-founder and CEO Jeffrey Lu, in a statement. “Engine’s data-driven platform allows researchers to not only uncover the critical gene interactions underlying diseases, but also test therapies that specifically target these interactions in a faster, cheaper and more precise fashion than currently possible.” So far, the technology is being used for drug repositioning, which creates new applications for existing drugs; target discovery, which looks at potential biological factors for disease; precision medicine through targeting specific genes; and pathway analysis. Already the company has seen proof-of-concept successes around treatments for cancer, neurodegenerative, autoimmune disorders and skin disorders. “The lack of insight into complex and multi-factorial biological processes within cells contributes to the high failure rate across the drug development cycle. Engine Biosciences has pioneered a new approach to address this by generating novel data and insights that are highly relevant to the biological process,” said Dr. Leon Chen, founding CEO of 6 Dimensions Capital and a member of Engine’s board of directors. “We expect the company’s AI platform will lead to insightful information in complex diseases’ pathways that was not previously possible using traditional wet lab-centric biology research and we are excited to support the team with our investment.” |
Pandora is laying off about 5 percent of its workforce as it shifts to more automated ads | Megan Rose Dickey | 2,018 | 1 | 31 | In the same month that streaming music company , its US rival is feeling the pinch of how challenging the digital music business continues to be. The company today that it is laying off about five percent of its employee base as it switches to new services automating some of its advertising and marketing, investing in more non-music content, and with “other cost-saving measures”, with a goal of saving $45 million annually. , employees were notified today of the plan and the company expects the staff reduction of about five percent to be complete by the end of Q1 2018. “As I shared last quarter, we know where and how to invest in order to grow,” Pandora CEO Roger Lynch said in a press release. “We have an aggressive plan in place that includes strategic investments in our priorities: ad-tech, product, content, partnerships and marketing. I am confident these changes will enable us to drive revenue and listener growth.” We’d heard murmurs of the layoffs coming in the last several days, with sources pointing to reductions in two specific areas, advertising sales and client services, “due to weakened advertising sales,” according to one person. The company earlier today announced that it would be reporting its earnings on , so we’ll see a more complete picture then, but the fact that the company emphasized adtech and audience development in its announcement today is one sign of how it’s hoping to improve things with a shift to automated services and fewer people to run them. Pandora also announced plans to expand its presence and workforce to Atlanta, although it did not specify how many employees would be added there and in what areas of its business. Notably, the company . Pandora’s restructuring comes at a critical juncture in the music streaming business. With Spotify preparing to go public, many are wondering if it will be able to use its larger and more global scale to produce a more viable business model for the industry. In any case, its growth could increasingly start to impact Pandora’s fate: just today it emerged that Spotify is now testing a based around playlists, giving Pandora users another reason to jump to Spotify without losing one of the core features of the Pandora experience. At the same time, there continue to be developments that will whittle away at Spotify’s, Pandora’s and other streaming companies already thin margins. Just this past weekend, it emerged that the Copyright Board that songwriters will be due from streaming to 15.1 percent, up 40 percent from their previous cut. |
Soraa’s new light bulbs skip the smart home and focus on the science of the color spectrum | Brian Heater | 2,018 | 1 | 31 | null |
WhatsApp hits 1.5 billion monthly users. $19B? Not so bad. | Josh Constine | 2,018 | 1 | 31 | Facebook’s $19 billion acquisition of WhatsApp sounds smarter and smarter. CEO Mark Zuckerberg on the Q4 2017 earnings call today that WhatsApp now has 1.5 billion users and sees 60 billion messages sent per day. That’s 1.3 billion monthly users and 1 billion daily active users in July. The massive growth makes Facebook’s choice to pay more than $19 billion to acquire WhatsApp look prescient. At the time in 2014, WhatsApp had just 450 million monthly active users and 315 million daily active users. In a slight to Snapchat, Zuckerberg also noted that Instagram and WhatsApp are the No. 1 and No. 2 most popular Story-sharing products, referring to those apps’ clones of Snapchat Stories. Each now each has , compared to . He also mentions that Facebook’s research suggests that across apps, total social media posting to Stories will soon exceed that of feed posting. People thought Facebook was crazy to pay such a high price. But messaging is the most critical and time-consuming activity on mobile. And if Facebook didn’t buy WhatsApp, Google probably would have, and messaging would be a two-horse race. Instead, Facebook is massively dominant everywhere but China, between the 1.3 billion-user Messenger and 1.5 billion-user WhatsApp. Now Facebook is finally getting serious about monetizing WhatsApp with the . Facebook plans to charge business owners for additional commerce, customer service or broadcasting tools. And with such a massive audience, merchants will be clamoring for them. |
EBay Q4 falls slightly short on sales of $2.6B, EPS in line at $0.59, full-year revenues of $9.6B | Ingrid Lunden | 2,018 | 1 | 31 | reported its after market close today, where it reported sales of $2.6 billion and adjusted earnings per share of $0.59 for the quarter (versus $0.54 a year ago), and $9.6 billion in revenues for the year. While the holiday season, which fell into the quarter that ended December 31, is traditionally a huge time for e-commerce companies, in the case of this e-commerce giant, it fell just short of meeting estimates: analysts were sales of $2.61 billion and earnings per share of 59 cents. Notably, eBay posted a GAAP net loss of $2.6 billion from continuing operations, “primarily driven by a $3.1 billion tax charge attributable to the enactment of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act.” Still, the company tried to sound an upbeat tone, pointing to active buyer growth of five percent to 170 million. Gross Merchandise Volume, or the total amount spent on its platform, was $24.425 billion versus $22.275 billion for the same quarter a year ago. “Q4 was a record quarter for eBay, representing the fifth quarter in a row of volume acceleration in our US Marketplace,” said Devin Wenig, president and CEO of eBay, in a statement. “We have made great progress transforming eBay while delivering meaningful growth and we expect further acceleration in 2018 as we continue to execute our strategy.” Still, the earnings guidance that eBay is providing for the next quarter, Q1 of 2018, and the full year are not particularly aggressive. The company expects net revenue between $2.57 billion and $2.61 billion in Q1 but with lowered EPS versus this quarter of between $0.52 and $0.54. It expects full-year sales of between $10.9 billion and $11.1 billion. The company repurchased $922 million of stock in the last quarter, and has now set out a plan to repurchase $6 billion more. As you might expect, eBay’s Marketplace business accounted for the vast majority of its GMV and overall revenues in Q1, respectively $23 billion and $2.1 billion. The GMV was up 9 percent over a year ago in terms of reported numbers, but with currency exchange adjustments it was up only 6 percent. StubHub, the company’s ticketing business that many keep expecting to see play a bigger role in the business, remains a marginal but growing part of it. Its GMV was $1.4 billion, up 16 percent on reported numbers and 15 percent with currency adjustments. Classifieds were an even smaller part of the eBay’s earnings, with revenues of $244 million, with Germany (eBay’s second largest market after the U.S.) the strongest market for classifieds. The earnings come on the heels of a for eBay, where sales of $2.4 billion and EPS $0.48 fell well within analyst estimates but didn’t underscore any dramatic growth for the company, which added 2 million customers in that quarter. It’s interesting to compare eBay to the likes of Amazon and Alibaba. Once a stablemate and potential rival of eBay’s in the first wave of large e-commerce hits, Amazon has gone on to diversify massively into a multi-service loyalty program, artificial intelligence and gadgets to make AI a part of everyone’s home life, original content, cloud services targeting enterprises and other businesses, and more. Alibaba has followed a similar trajectory, piggybacking on the massive growth of its home market of China, to boot. eBay’s biggest and most successful expansion beyond its core auction business and marketplace was probably acquiring PayPal, which it later divested and, as you can see from its earnings earlier today, is than the company that once owned it. Even in its core business of selling goods online, some have described it as eBay as consumer and sellers in categories like fashion have moved beyond its own efforts. More to come. |
Shutterfly stock hits all-time high after snapping up the leader in kids’ class photos | Jonathan Shieber | 2,018 | 1 | 31 | One day after announcing strong earnings and the massive strategic acquisition of the leader in yearbook and school photos, is watching its shares soar. It’s quite a turn for a company that just over a year ago , whose entry into the personalized photo-sharing market caused Shutterfly’s stock to tumble. By buying for $825 million, Shutterfly not only gets the leading photo service for those adorably cute (or horrifyingly cute) school pictures that only a parent can love, it gets an opportunity to sell more crap that can now be customized with the faces of a parent’s darling little angel (or angels). Lifetouch is responsible for taking the pictures of more than 25 million children a year during school picture time at the beginning of the year. “It brings together two uniquely complementary assets, gives Shutterfly access to more than 10 million highly desirable households and, as a result, we expect to almost double our adjusted EBITDA by 2020,” said Shutterfly chief executive Christopher North, on yesterday’s earnings call. On the strength of that deal, Shutterfly’s stock is buzzing. Its shares are on a victory lap run, rising $14.83 per share (or over 28 percent) in today’s trading to close at an all-time high. The acquisition wasn’t the only bit of good news for Shutterfly or its shareholders. The company also blew past the earnings targets analysts had set for the company. Analysts had estimated earnings per share of roughly $2.88, and Shutterfly clocked in with $3.11 earnings per share. “We had a very successful fourth quarter with net revenues of $593.8 million, with strong performance in both consumer and SBS,” North said yesterday. “We also performed well on adjusted EBITDA, with the fourth quarter coming in at $215.6 million.” The Lifetouch acquisition also should help smooth lumpy revenues for the company extending its highest trafficked months to another season with the addition of a massive business in fall portraiture. Just look at Lifetouch’s numbers. The company posted nearly $1 billion in sales for the year ended June 30, according to Lifetouch. Shutterfly said that it expects the new business to generate $450 million of adjusted earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization by 2020. “In 2018, we will accelerate the pace at which we expand the range of products we offer. I’m excited to share that we will be launching two new categories this year, kids and pets, clearly a natural fit for our customer base,” North said on the earnings call. “Both new categories will launch in the third quarter and we will provide more details closer to the launch date. We’ll also continue to add to the personalized gifts and home décor range. Overall we will be doubling the number of new products launched in 2018 versus 2017.” |
Twitter now says 1.4 million people interacted with Russian trolls during 2016 presidential campaign | Sarah Buhr | 2,018 | 1 | 31 | Twitter has now the number of people engaging with Russian trolls during the 2016 presidential campaign to 1.4 million. That’s more than double the initial 677,775 Twitter had seen, followed or retweeted one of these accounts earlier this month. The new number reflects those who may have also replied to or @ mentioned these accounts. “We have expanded the number of people notified about interactions with Twitter accounts potentially connected to a propaganda effort by a Russian government-linked organization known as the Internet Research Agency,” Twitter said in the update. “Our goal in providing these notifications is to advance public awareness of and engagement with the important issues raised in our blog post, and provide greater transparency to our account holders and the public.” Twitter also said it would only notify these people of certain interactions but that it would not be notifying everyone who ever saw one of these accounts on its platform. However, Twitter also noted it may notify more people in the future. “As our review continues, we may also email additional users,” Twitter said. “If and when we do so, we will do our best to keep the public updated.” The total number of Russian-linked troll accounts, as we reported earlier in January, is over , of which 3,800 were thought to be from the Internet Research Agency (IRA). The IRA is a Russian company with Kremlin ties that has been exposed as organizing purposeful disinformation campaigns in the U.S. and elsewhere — including the 2016 presidential election. The news furthers the perception that social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook, which has its own Russian troll army problems during the election, are not making enough of an effort to shutter disinformation campaigns that have contributed to swaying the voting public. Further — and despite a promise of more transparency — the notification seems to have added to the confusion. Ars Technica’s Cyrus Farivar, who was sent one of the notification emails, lamented that Twitter didn’t name names. “What exactly am I supposed to do with this email?,” Farivar asked. . just told me that I followed/replied/mentioned/retweeted a Russian bot account. But which one was it? It’s not saying. What exactly am I supposed to do with this email? — Cyrus Farivar (@cfarivar) Here’s the from Twitter’s blog: We have expanded the number of people notified about interactions with Twitter accounts potentially connected to a propaganda effort by a Russian government-linked organization known as the Internet Research Agency. Our notice efforts are focused on certain types of interactions, and they will not encompass every person that ever saw this content. Our goal in providing these notifications is to advance public awareness of and engagement with the important issues raised in our blog post, and provide greater transparency to our account holders and the public. We have now sent notices to Twitter users with an active email address who our records indicate are based in the US and fall into at least one of the following categories: Approximately 1.4 million people have now received a notification from Twitter. We will be sending a short survey to a small group of people who received our notification to gain feedback on this process. As our review continues, we may also email additional users. If and when we do so, we will do our best to keep the public updated. |
SpaceX successfully launches GovSat-1 on a flight proven Falcon 9 | Darrell Etherington | 2,018 | 1 | 31 | SpaceX has launched a Falcon 9 rocket loaded with a geocommunications satellite commissioned by the Government of Luxembourg. The satellite, created by Orbital STK and to be operated by SES, will support humanitarian and military operations for Luxembourg, among other communications functions. The rocket took off from Cape Canaveral on Wednesday, a day after its initial planned launch. The original window wasn’t viable due to weather, but the rocket launched as planned at the opening of its backup date with favorable weather conditions today. SpaceX is also readying its Falcon Heavy for launch from Cape Canaveral, with a planned launch date of February 6. That’ll be a huge milestone for the company, regardless of whether the Heavy makes it all the way to orbit on its first try. This launch today didn’t include a recovery attempt of the Falcon 9 first stage booster used during the launch. The booster used was a reflown rocket, however, having been used May last year during a mission for a different client. |
PayPal beats Wall Street quarterly expectations; shares fall on eBay partnership change | Katie Roof | 2,018 | 1 | 31 | PayPal beat The Street when it reported fourth-quarter earnings after the bell on Wednesday. The global payments giant surpassed analyst expectations for both sales and profit. The company reported $3.71 billion in revenue on a foreign-exchange neutral basis, or 24% growth from the same period last year. Analysts were expecting $3.63 billion in revenue for the quarter. Adjusted earnings per share were 55 cents, compared to the 52 cents that Wall Street forecast. But shares later ticked down as much as 14% in after-hours trading, after eBay announced that it is making competitor Adyen its primary checkout partner. PayPal will remain a checkout option, however, with the two companies agreeing to extend their partnership through July 2023. “eBay has signed an agreement with Adyen, a leading global payments processor, to become its primary payments processing partner. PayPal, a long-time eBay partner, will be a payments option at checkout for eBay buyers,” read the The stock also slipped due to a guidance forecast that just missed the mark. PayPal is expecting its overall revenue for the year to be between $15 billion and $15.25 billion. The midpoint was beneath what analysts surveyed by Yahoo Finance had been forecasting, with $15.16 billion. Other estimates had been as high as $15.26 billion. PayPal said its adjusted earnings per share was expected to fall between $2.24 and $2.30. Yahoo Finance analysts had been expecting $2.25. In a conversation with TechCrunch, CEO Dan Schulman voiced optimism about the upcoming year. The “world is moving towards digital payments,” he said. “Cash is being digitized” and “mobile phones are exploding.” There’s “a lot of very healthy signs in the business that bode well for a strong 2018.” It may not have been enough to send the stock soaring, but the company is seeing record total payments volume, because “customers are using it more than ever before,” said Schulman, averaging over 33 transactions per year. Paypal processed $131 billion in TPV for the fourth quarter, showcasing 32% growth. PayPal has grown to 227 million active customer accounts, after adding 8.7 million for the quarter. The company also announced an agreement with Synchrony Financial. Synchrony is acquiring PayPal’s consumer credit receivable portfolio, worth $6.4 billion. The transaction is expected to close in the third quarter of the year. PayPal separated from eBay in 2015 and is currently the larger of the two companies, with a market cap of $103 billion. eBay is valued at $42 billion. PayPal is also the owner of Venmo, the popular peer-to-peer payments platform. The app processed $10.4 billion in payments in just the fourth quarter alone. Venmo’s overall growth for the year was 97%, processing $35 billion in payments in 2017. It’s a “beloved application for the millennial generation,” said Schulman. He said that users are opening the app 4-5 times per week and that Venmo will “continue to add more and more services and functionality” to the platform. |
null | Matt Burns | 2,018 | 1 | 9 | null |
Facebook’s U.S. user count declines as it prioritizes well-being | Josh Constine | 2,018 | 1 | 31 | Facebook is putting its short-term money where its mouth is, reducing the presence of viral videos in an effort to boost well-being of users of its site. In Facebook’s Q4 2017 today CEO announced that “Already last quarter, we made changes to show fewer viral videos to make sure people’s time is well spent. In total, we made changes that reduced time spent on Facebook by roughly 50 million hours every day.” That’s a reduction of roughly 2.14 minutes per day per user, given that Facebook has 1.4 billion users now. Zuckerberg later said that’s a reduction of total time spent on Facebook by 5 percent. This showed up as a reduction from 185 million to 184 million daily active users in the US & Canada region. That’s the first time Facebook’s ever reported a user count decline in any market, and it’s in the one where it earns the most from ads. Facebook earned an average revenue per user of $26.76 in the region compared to a global average of $6.18. What happened? The viral video changes and other prioritization of well-being over time spent contributed to a reduction of 700,000 daily active users in the U.S. and Canada region. Facebook’s CFO David Wehner says he believes this is a one-time decline and not a trend. That could depend on how many time-reducing changes Facebook is willing to make, however. Here’s the key quote from Wehner: As Mark mentioned, certain product quality changes impacted our DAU growth. In the US & Canada, these changes contributed to a DAU decline of 700,000 compared to Q3. We don’t see this as an ongoing trend, but we do anticipate that DAU in this region may fluctuate given the relatively high penetration level. Even if Facebook hadn’t lost the 700,000 daily users in the U.S. and Canada, the company would still have had the slowest quarter-over-quarter percentage daily user growth ever, at 2.24 percent. The 2.18 percent growth it did experience is much lower than its previous worst quarters, Q4 2015 and Q4 2016, when it had 3 percent growth. It’s the slower global DAU growth, not the changes-related decline in the US & Canada that should give investors and social marketers pause. Still, once Facebook explained that U.S. and Canada DAU decline wasn’t a trend but a result of the viral video and well-being changes, Facebook’s share price rocketed up from being down as much as -4 percent in after-hours trading to around +4 percent. Eventually Facebook shares settled at +1.4 percent. Investors may believe this means Facebook won’t be taking massive user count hits from the changes, and that the overall growth trend persists. Facebook is making good on the promises Zuckerberg made on last quarter’s earnings call when he said “Protecting our community is more important than maximizing our profits.” It shows Facebook is executing on the it announced earlier this month that were designed to reduce passive browsing, video consumption and news in favor of active interactions with close friends. Today Zuckerberg explained that he’s changed the directive to his employees from showing the most meaningful content to people to showing content that drives the most meaningful interactions. That’s a subtle but important change that could decrease the prevalence of content people find informative or entertaining, but not special enough to share and talk about. Zuckerberg says the company will begin to judge itself by “The number of interactions that people have on the platform and off the platform that people report to us as meaningful.” Facebook’s willingness to promote user well-being over its bottom line is unusual amongst big corporations. Some see it as an act of compassion. Others believe it’s just a long-term strategy designed to prevent a bigger “ditch Facebook” movement from emerging that could cost it a lot more than the time-spent reduction announced today. But for now, investors trust the company will be able to make a more meaningful, less passive News Feed work. Less time spent could mean fewer ad impressions but deeper engagement which everything people see which might increase auction competition and lead to higher ad prices. Zuckerberg explained this saying that if you’re used to meaningless content, you grow accustomed to skipping stuff in your News Feed, and that can translate over to ads. So, Facebook might actually earn just as much money or more by ditching its reliance on the blank-eyed scrolling addiction of its users. |
Microsoft’s Azure revenue nearly doubled year-over-year in its second quarter | Matthew Lynley | 2,018 | 1 | 31 | Microsoft posted a relatively good second quarter this year that continued the ongoing process of its growth into a major cloud entity, in addition to saying it would be taking a significant charge as part of changes to U.S. tax law. In particular, Microsoft said that its Azure revenue grew 98 percent year-over-year — a long-running theme alongside many other lines that equate to Microsoft’s efforts in the cloud offsetting many of the major shifts in computing that first led Microsoft to be a behemoth. The company said it would be taking a $13.8 billion charge related to the changes in tax laws. All this, together with earnings that just about beat what Wall Street was looking for, led to a collective shrug for investors as the stock basically went nowhere. Since Satya Nadella has taken over, much of the narrative has shifted to the transition of Microsoft to a true player in cloud computing. As Amazon Web Services continues to become a behemoth and Google makes its own play, Microsoft too has found itself diving deep into the cloud and going head-to-head with Google and Amazon to try to woo as many developers as possible. So far, that’s more or less paid off. As more and more companies start to find value in using up computing resources on demand rather than investing heavily in their own hardware, Microsoft has ridden that wave along with others to build out a massive business. In October, the company said it for its commercial cloud target it set about two years ago. Under Nadella, Microsoft’s stock has more than doubled: In addition, Microsoft saw some continuing growth from some of its other services, including LinkedIn. That alone contributed about $1.3 billion in revenue to Microsoft, while its overall division (called Productivity and Business Processes), including LinkedIn and Office commercial products, grew around 25 percent year-over-year this quarter, to $9 billion in revenue. Here’s the final scorecard for the company: |
Samsung topples Intel to become the world’s largest chipmaker | Jon Russell | 2,018 | 1 | 30 | Samsung has ended Intel’s 25-year run as the world’s biggest seller of chipsets after it its 2017 end of year financials. The Korean tech giant’s chipset division — which has long been its biggest hitter — grossed total revenue of $69 billion in 2017, eclipsing . That was a record year for Intel — and an annual increase of six percent — but it wasn’t enough to stop Samsung from knocking it from the top spot, which it had occupied since 1992. The writing was on the wall last year when , but now it has held out for an annual win. The change of position highlights Samsung’s focus on mobile, and in particular memory chips which are an essential part of smartphones. Intel’s chips may be in 90 percent of the world’s computers, but it missed the mobile boom and is playing catch-up. Overall, Samsung’s entire business reported full-year profit of KRW 53.65 trillion ($50.7 billion) on revenue of KRW 239.58 trillion, $225 billion. For the final quarter of 2017, revenue was KRW 65.98 trillion ($62 billion) with KRW 15.15 trillion ($14 billion) in operating profit. That’s a higher profit but slightly lower revenue . The company’s mobile business actually saw its take-home drop by 3.2 percent year-on-year during Q4. Looking ahead to 2018, Samsung said it intends to increase its chipset focus on cloud services, AI and automotive. On the smartphone front, where its name is best known among consumers, the company said it plans to adopt “cutting-edge technologies” like foldable displays. Samsung said also that it would continue to develop its smart services with a focus on its Bixby assistant and upcoming 5G technologies. |
Spotify is testing a new playlist-based music app that’s a lot like Pandora | Jon Russell | 2,018 | 1 | 30 | Spotify is testing an app that sees it move firmly into Pandora’s territory. that is being piloted by the company in Australia — it was by app analytics firm Sensor Tower on Tuesday. This app offers a ‘lean-back’ option to listen to music based on genres and managed playlists. In the description, Spotify explains that it plays music instantly when opened with stations easily changed by scrolling inside the app. Like Spotify’s core service, there’s a personalization element with user-based playlists created once enough music has been played for it to gather data. The app has picked up less than 100 downloads to date, while it is limited in its support for Android devices, all of which suggests it has only been used by Spotify’s own staff to date. “We are always testing new products and experiences, but have no further news to share at this time,” was all that Spotify would tell us when we asked. The core Spotify product is a subscription-based music, but there is a free version that lets users shuffle through playlists on mobile and is supported by advertising. The theory is that offering a limited version of the product encourages users to sign up for the full product. You’d imagine it could easily do that with this new app, which has a Spotify log-in button but doesn’t require users to be paying members. With Stations, the company looks like it has taken an alternative approach by creating a standalone app that offers more direct competition to Pandora. Pandora claims over five million users. It offers premium membership but the bulk of its revenue comes from advertising — $275.7 million of the $378.6 million that . Late last year, Pandora boosted its money-making potential by to its mix. Spotify’s exact financial situation is unclear since the company is private, but . The company has been tipped to opt for a ‘direct listing,’ which would mean going public without doing an IPO. In other words, it is just insiders, not the company, that sell shares to the stock market. The Swedish company seemed to take a step towards going public when which . |
At the State of the Union, Trump touts tax cuts and immigration deal | Taylor Hatmaker | 2,018 | 1 | 30 | With a president as mercurial as Trump, it was anyone’s guess what would happen during his first State of the Union address. The appearance is the president’s most high profile public speaking moment of the year and Trump was expected to touch on some of the issues of the moment, including funding for a border wall, infrastructure and an immigration deal. While less likely if things went according to plan though totally possible if he veered off script, it wasn’t clear if Trump would dig into the white-hot topic of the ongoing Russia investigation being conducted by Special Counsel Robert Mueller. That scenario would have proved a nightmare for his legal team and the White House, though with the speech done, they should be able to rest easy (for now). As the address began, Trump hit a series of surprisingly hopeful notes, with declarations of “a new tide of optimism” and praise for the nation including an unusually ego-less assertion that “our state of the union is strong because our people are strong.” As he moved deeper into the speech, Trump waded into some familiar ideological territory, chiding those who kneel during the national anthem as an act of protest. In a portion of his speech touching on the tax cuts, Trump touched on Apple’s recent announcement that it would bring much of its tax-sheltered wealth abroad back to American shores thanks to a friendlier tax rate: “Since we passed tax cuts, roughly three million workers have already gotten tax cut bonuses. Many of them, thousands and thousands of dollars per worker and it’s getting more every month, every week. Apple has just announced it plans to invest a total of $350 billion in America, and hire another 20,000 workers.” Trump was widely expected to tout the Republican tax cut plan, his only significant legislative win from a year spent navigating the process of lawmaking with a fully Republican-controlled Congress. A bit later, Trump detoured into an portion of the speech on the pharmaceutical industry, declaring the “injustice” of high U.S. drug prices as one of his “top priorities for the year.” “In many other countries, these drugs cost far less than what we pay in the United States and it is very, very unfair,” Trump said. As expected, Trump announced plans for a $1.5 trillion bipartisan infrastructure bill “tapping into private sector investment.” Toward the end of the speech, Trump launched into the four pillars of a plan that would resolve the congressional gridlock around creating a path to citizenship for DACA-recipients. Expectedly, the path of the Dreamers is tied directly to “building a great wall on the southern border,” which in all likelihood will look more like a patchwork of physical barriers and surveillance technology. Trump also announced an end to the Visa lottery system in favor of a “merit-based” system of immigration, “a program that randomly plans out green cards without regard for skill, merit, for the safety of American people,” in the president’s words. “Time to begin moving toward a merit based immigration system, one that admits people who are skilled, who want to work, who will contribute to our society,” Trump said. He also announced plans to limit immigration sponsorships to “spouses and minor children.” To see how the American public responded to the big speech, Google pulled together some to depict what people were searching for as the address went on. during the speech included “steve scalise,” “who is sitting behind trump,” “trump party planner, “live fact check trump” and, oddly, “trump clapping,” possibly a reference to what appear to have been his own very amplified claps into the microphone following major talking points. All told, the speech was a mix of style — rousing the base, hitting the right anecdotes — and a bit of substance around actual policy proposals like the immigration deal. Given the potential nightmare scenarios here, Republicans and White House officials are likely to be pleased with the president’s performance. By any other presidency’s standards, the speech had some wildly controversial moments — particularly an alarming call to remove federal workers who “undermine the public trust or fail the American people” while rewarding the loyal — but by 2018 standards, and Trump standards, it was fairly safe. |
Chat app Line announces plan for cryptocurrency services, loans and insurance | Jon Russell | 2,018 | 1 | 30 | Line, the messaging app with around 200 million monthly users, is embracing bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies to fend off increased competition from Facebook and others. The Japanese company today the creation of a new financial services division which will spearhead a move into cryptocurrencies and other services including loans and insurance. Line already operates a payment service — which claims 40 million users $4 billion in annual GMV — but now it plans to do much more. Line said it has applied for a cryptocurrency license in Japan — where more than a dozen exchange and other businesses have been approved — which is currently under review. earlier this month that , but at this point it isn’t clear exactly what that will entail. From the announcement, Line said it will operate a marketplace inside its app where people can trade crypto and get loans or insurance. It said, too, that it will look into how it can use blockchain technology within its services. Loans and insurance, while not as attention-grabbing as crypto, may prove to be lucrative ventures in markets where Line has strong recognition among consumers. The company is need of something fresh to revitalize its business in the wake of increasing competition from Facebook, which operates WhatsApp and Messenger, the world’s most popular messaging apps with over one billion monthly users each. , Line had targeted a global audience via its messaging service — — and a connected games business. Its international expansion didn’t go according to plan, however, and the company refocused efforts on its four core markets of Japan, Thailand, Taiwan and Indonesia, which account for 168 million of its active users. In those markets, it offers a range of localized services that include , , , and . Last year, it began to sell to offer its own cartoony alternative to Amazon’s Echo range and Google Home devices. In some markets, it also offers a Line-branded mobile phone/data service. There’s plenty of pressure, however. Facebook’s global popularity makes Messenger an option for most internet users on the planet while the company is busy in other areas. that allow companies to correspond with users via its service, and soon. to look into whether Facebook can make use of blockchain technology. Line will hope these new services can boost its business in its strongest markets and pick up new users in other countries. Line might well be the largest consumer-focused business to adopt crypto to date. It is far from the only chat app, though. Kik raised $100 million in an ICO earlier this year, while there are also newer blockchain-based solutions such as . Then there’s Telegram, a chat app that has over 150 million users and is popular among the crypto community, which is . Line’s announcement comes as the price of bitcoin dropped below $10,000 for the first time since the end of November, . |
Crunch Report | Amazon, JPMorgan and Berkshire Hathaway are building a healthcare company | Khaled "Tito" Hamze | 2,018 | 1 | 30 | Tito Hamze
Tito Hamze
Tito Hamze
Tito Hamze TechCrunch C/O Tito Hamze
410 Townsend street
Suite 100
San Francisco Ca. 94107 |
DroneGun Tactical is a portable (but still illegal) drone scrambler | Devin Coldewey | 2,018 | 1 | 30 | The only thing growing faster than the global drone population is the population of people thinking “how can I knock these annoying things out of the sky?” DroneShield offers a way to do just that, and now in a much more portable package, with the — that is, if you’re an authorized government agent, which I doubt. Over the last few years, the Australian company DroneShield has been showing off its DroneGun, essentially a high-powered antenna that blasts drones’ own antennas with a signal powerful enough that it drowns out the controller’s instructions. Many drones in such a situation treat this like a loss of signal, and attempt to make a safe landing or, if GPS isn’t also scrambled, return to a known location. The problem with the DroneGun is that it’s really big, requiring a backpack with the batteries and other components in addition to the rifle-like gun itself. The DroneGun , on the other hand, is merely large. It’s 56 inches long, 18 inches tall and 8 inches wide, weighing more about 14 pounds. But no pack! I’m aware the pictures shown here are renders, but upon asking I was assured the device is in production. They already made the original, so I don’t doubt it. DroneShield claims that the Tactical will drop drones more than a kilometer away (about half the distance of the original), though you’ll need to maintain line of sight; if the drone reestablishes signal with its controller, it might just take off again. You should get an hour or two of straight jamming, more than enough to take down a dozen UAVs. A GPS blocker add-on is also available, which makes it all the more sure that the rogue craft will simply descend instead of flying home. I can certainly think of a few recent situations where I would have liked to bring an irresponsibly piloted drone down safely to give it a good stomp. But unfortunately ordinary folks like myself are strictly prohibited from getting their hands on one of these things. The FCC hasn’t approved the device for use in the U.S., meaning it’s illegal to operate one unless you’re an authorized agent of the government; for example, someone testing it for the military. (The Tactical, in fact, was developed “following comprehensive international military end-user trials.”) When I asked DroneShield’s CEO if these devices were likely to ever get FCC approval, he simply responded “no.” Well, at least he’s honest. |
Appeals court rules that Tinder’s pricing violates age discrimination laws | Anthony Ha | 2,018 | 1 | 30 | A California appeals court has sided with Allan Candelore, a man suing Tinder over the pricing for its premium service, Tinder Plus. Specifically, Candelore and his lawyers argued that by , Tinder is discriminating based on age, in violation of the Unruh Civil Rights Act and the Unfair Competition Law (those are both California laws). Tinder co-founder Sean Rad back in 2015 by saying, “Our intent is to provide a discount for our younger users.” Apparently a lower court agreed with Tinder’s reasoning, particularly the argument that younger users have less money to spend. However, the appeals court came to a different conclusion: No matter what Tinder’s market research may have shown about the younger users’ relative income and willingness to pay for the service, as a group, as compared to the older cohort, some individuals will not fit the mold. Some older consumers will be “more budget constrained” and less willing to pay than some in the younger group. We conclude the discriminatory pricing model, as alleged, violates the Unruh Act and the UCL to the extent it employs an arbitrary, class-based, generalization about older users’ incomes as a basis for charging them more than younger users. Because nothing in the complaint suggests there is a strong public policy that justifies the alleged discriminatory pricing, the trial court erred in sustaining the demurrer. Accordingly, we swipe left, and reverse. (Yes, that’s a real quote from .) We’ve reached out to Tinder for comment and will update if we hear back. |
Fools and their crypto | John Biggs | 2,018 | 1 | 30 | token sales? Two days ago a Lithuanian “company” called Prodeum looked like a promising if silly blockchain startup. Their stated goal? To track every piece of food on the internet. While I doubt many of us will care about the exact provenance of the orange we just ate, we could see, in some distant future, a need for this sort of tracking. After all, the blockchain is the future. Fund it well and let it lead the way. Prodeum checked all the boxes. They had a sharp team, a and some excited fans: lololololol it looks like Prodeum was paying people from Fiverr to write its name on their bodies — Ryan Mac (@RMac18) In other words, Prodeum followed the token sale playbook from beginning to end. They created two tokens, one for funding the company and one for paying within the “network.” They created a credible whitepaper that, at the very least, tickled some of the neophilic nerves, and they had an active, if scammy, social media presence. That is literally all you need to run an ICO these days, and they did exactly as expected. Then the whole thing imploded. On the 28th the scam shut down, leaving a website containing a single word: penis. It is a tale for the ages, similar in scope to that one song about the . In this case what did they find on the bloody morning after? Penis. That, friends, is the long and the short of the modern token ecosystem. a shitcoin startup called Prodeum just exitscammed with millions of investor dollars and left them the following message on their site — Republican Guard, Tawakalna Divison, Fida'i Thotty (@thelateempire) This , purportedly by the scammer, explains things a bit more clearly: I hope you guys understand and I hope you’ll accept my apology. They were babyscams and I only made like $50,000 off of you guys in the last month. That’s a forgivable amount, right? I mean, there are millions on here. I just want to announce my resignation and that I won’t be making any more shitty scam sites anymore. It all started with tony dumper and satoshibox and I jumped for joy at my first $100 made from scamming. I sang to myself when I made my first $10,000 with bitflur..and Magnalis made me a lot. I put zero effort into prodeum though and that’s where I know to stop. I only made $3k on prodeum and I consider that a failure. Plus I shit the bed with the scam team too early. “Remember that all ICOs are scams,” he writes in closing. The scam . Not many were hurt in this particular scam but, as these things become more popular and things like this happen over and over again, I worry about the token sale space. We are killing the very thing that will save startups in the next decade. And we’re sitting blithely by while idiots ruin it for the rest of us. I believe that the token sale economy will drive the next startup revolution. Just as sites like TechCrunch, organizations like Y Combinator and the men in Dockers and fleece sweaters who populate Sand Hill Road defined (and still define) the last startup revolution, crypto will define the next one. But, as it stands, we cannot trust the participants, nor can we trust the products. The token sale economy is half-baked. It needs another few wins under its belt to make it the investment vehicle of choice for the next generation of angels, and it needs fewer scams to prove to those angels that their money won’t go up in dick. It’s frustrating now, but I honestly think things are getting better. So how do you, the startup fan, invest in these? Which ones work? Assume, for the sake of argument, that the token economy is a real thing and will lead, eventually, to a true utopia of token-based equity and utility coins. Because of the lack of oversight, no one in the space can be trusted — not even . Assume, for the time being, that all of these are scams and act accordingly. Do the due diligence. Ask questions. Imagine you’re investing in Apple in 1980. There is plenty of risk involved and you’re still not sure this Jobs kid has what it takes, but do you like the idea? The mission? The product? Apply the tried and true attitudes of the cautious investor and then add another soupçon of caution. I’ve seen this sort of market before. It happened first in the dot-com boom when any IS or CS major could get a really nice job right out of college and in the run-up — and run-down — of the 2008 crash when startups were interesting simply because there was no other work. Startup investment was hot and scammers ran rampant. The same thing is happening now. The current problem is simple: The ICO market exists within a social, legal and societal loophole that allows for bad actors to act badly. The opportunity is simple: It is the future of funding, whether Sequoia likes it or not. And the solution is simple: Create institutions that help the average founder crowdfund equity or create utility tokens while explaining, clearly and sanely, why the average investor should jump in. As it stands, that clarity and sanity do not exist. Enthusiast media has taken the field and that media is not allowed inside the big trading houses. Therefore, the entire ICO fad is happening in the shadows. Drag it into the light. Support projects with product. Stop getting your crypto news from Facebook and Reddit. Start holding founders accountable for their claims. If you don’t, we’ll all be left holding little more than an empty webpage emblazoned with a single word: penis. And we’ll deserve what we get. |
Red Hat acquires CoreOS for $250 million in Kubernetes expansion | Ron Miller | 2,018 | 1 | 30 | , a company best known for its enterprise Linux products, has been making a big play for Kubernetes and containerization in recent years with its OpenShift Kubernetes product. Today the company decided to expand on that by acquiring , a container management startup, for $250 million. The company’s core products include CoreOS, a Linux distribution and Tectonic, a container management solution based on the open source , originally developed by Google. (For more information on containers, .) CoreOs and Red Hat have been among the top contributors to Kubernetes, along with Google, FathomDB, ZTE Corporation, Huawei, IBM, Microsoft, Fujitsu and Mirantis. Perhaps by working so closely on Kubernetes, CoreOS and Red Hat formed a bond, and it eventually made sense for them to come together and share customers and brain power. The companies also , and perhaps the two can find some common developer ground by combining the two. If the next generation of software is going to be in a hybrid cloud world where part lives on prem in the data center and part in the public cloud, having a cloud-native fabric to deliver applications in a single way is going to be critical. Red Hat’s president of products and technologies, Paul Cormier said that the combined companies are providing a powerful way to span environments. “The next era of technology is being driven by container-based applications that span multi- and hybrid cloud environments, including physical, virtual, private cloud and public cloud platforms. Kubernetes, containers and Linux are at the heart of this transformation, and like Red Hat, CoreOS has been a leader in both the upstream open source communities that are fueling these innovations and its work to bring enterprise-grade Kubernetes to customers,” Cormier said in a statement. As CoreOS CEO Alex Polvi told me in an interview last year, “As a company we helped create the whole container category alongside Google, Docker and Red Hat. We helped create a whole new category of infrastructure,” he said. His company was early to the game by developing an enterprise Kubernetes product, and he was able to capitalize on that. “We called Kubernetes super-duper early and helped enterprises like Ticketmaster and Starbucks adopt Kubernetes,” he said. He explained that Tectonic included four main categories, including governance, monitoring tools, chargeback accounting and one-click upgrades. Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst told us in an interview last year that his company also came early to containers and Kubernetes. He said the company recognized containers included an operating system kernel, which was usually Linux. One thing they understood was Linux, so they started delving into Kubernetes and containerization and built OpenShift. CoreOS has raised $50 million since its inception in 2013. Investors include GV (formerly Google Ventures) and Kleiner Perkins, which appear to have gotten nice returns. The most recent round led by GV. One interesting aside is that Google, which has been a big contributor to Kubernetes itself and whose venture arm helped finance CoreOS, was scooped by Red Hat in this deal. The deal is expected to close this month, and given we only have one day left, chances are it’s done. |
TimeFlip is a time-tracking gadget simple enough that I might actually use it | Devin Coldewey | 2,018 | 1 | 30 | If you’re like me, and I’m going to assume you are for the purposes of this post, you like the idea of time tracking, but generally it’s a bit too fiddly or complicated. is a super-simple gadget that lets you easily track how much time you spend on different activities just by flipping it around. It’s a dodecahedron with a tiny accelerometer inside that can tell which way it’s sitting. All you do to operate it is flip it around so the side corresponding to what you’re doing is up; the chip inside sends a signal over Bluetooth to an app on your phone. Answering some emails? Flip it to the email side. Take a break to watch a few videos on YouTube? Flip! Off to the gym? Flip! It comes with a bunch of stickers with icons representing common activities and websites: shopping, eating, reading… there’s even one for procrastinating. And there are plenty of blank ones you can print or write on if you spend a lot of time doing something not represented there, like knife fighting or knitting. Be warned, you’ll need to sign up for an account so it can back up your activity online — you can then log in to peruse it from the comfort of your laptop. I would just as soon have done without this feature, myself, but unfortunately it’s required. The device came out a while back but has only been available in limited quantities in the U.S. via the TimeFlip website. Fortunately, the creator, Ilya Tarassov, told me at CES that it should be available on Amazon starting in February. I’ve been playing with one just for the last week and it seems like a great way to easily do basic tracking. You can buy a kit with a ready-to-go TimeFlip for $50 or print your own enclosure and just order the sensor. |
Imverse’s groundbreaking mixed reality renders you inside VR | Josh Constine | 2,018 | 1 | 30 | What if you could look down and see your actual arms and legs inside VR, or look at other real-world people or objects as if you weren’t wearing a headset? The team at Imverse spent five years building this incredible technology at EPFL, the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology of Lausanne. “We were working on this before Oculus was even created,” says co-founder Javier Bello Ruiz. Now its real-time mixed reality engine is ready for public demos, debuting this month at Sundance Film Festival. ‘s tech has the power to make VR seem much more believable and easy to adjust to — which is critical as the industry tries to grow headset ownership amongst mainstream buyers. The startup wants to become a foundational software platform for the development experiences, like Unity or Unreal. But even if their commercialization stumbles, one of the VR giants would probably love to buy Imverse’s tech. While there’s certainly some pixelation, rough edges and moments when the rendered image is inaccurate, Imverse is still able to deliver the sensation of your real body existing in VR. It also offers the bonus ability to render other objects, including people, allowing Bello Ruiz to shake my hand while he’s in a VR headset and I’m not. That could be helpful for bringing VR into homes where family members might need to share the living room without knocking into people or things, especially if someone’s trying to get your attention when you have a headset and headphones on. The first experience built with the real-time rendering is , which lets you play with a tiny black hole. Pull it in close to your body, and you’ll see your limbs bent and sucked into the abyss. Throw it over to a pre-recorded professor talking about space/time phenomena, and his image and voice get warped. And as a trippy finale, you’re removed from your body so you can watch the scene unfold from the third-person as the rendering of your real body is engulfed and spat out of the black hole. “This collaboration came out of an artist residency I did at the lab of cognitive neuroscience in Switzerland,” says Mark Boulos, the artist behind the project. “They had developed their tech to use in their experiments and neuroprosthesis.” Imverse’s volumetric rendering engine both detects your position while also capturing what you look like so that can be displayed in VR Between microfluidic haptic gloves that let you feel virtual objects and sense heat, and the psychedelic experiences like Requiem for a Dream director Darren Aronofsky’s galaxy tour Spheres, there was plenty to wow VR fans at Sundance. Yet Imverse is what stuck with me. It unlocks a new level of presence, which every VR experience and gadget aspires to. Actually seeing your own skin and clothes within VR is a huge step up from floating representations of hand controllers or trackers that merely show where you are. You feel like a full human being rather than a disembodied head. That’s why it’s so impressive that the Imverse team has just four core members and has only raised $400,000. It got a huge head start because CTO Robin Mange has been specializing in volumetric rendering for 12 years. Bello Ruiz explains that Imverse’s tech is “probably his fifth or sixth graphics engine he’s created,” and that Mange had been trying to build a photorealistic environment for neurological experiments with Bruno Herbelin at EPFL’s Laboratory Of Cognitive Neuroscience, but wanted to add perception of one’s own body. Imverse is now working on raising a few million dollars in a Series A to fund a presence in Los Angeles where it’s working with content studios like Emblematic Group. Bello Ruiz says that would solve one of the startup’s main challenges, which is that in Switzerland, “you have to first convince people that VR is important, and then that our technology is better.” In the meantime, Imverse is developing LiveMaker, which Bello Ruiz calls a “Photoshop for VR” that offers a floating toolbox you can use to edit and create virtual experiences from inside the headset. He says film studios could use it to make VR cinema, but it could also help out marketers, real estate companies or even do mathematical simulations. Imverse’s previous work allowed a single 360 photo to be turned into a VR model of a space that could be explored or altered. Imverse’s “LiveMaker” is like a Photoshop for VR There’s plenty of room for Imverse to make its mixed reality engine clearer and less choppy. The drifting pixels can make it feel like you’ve been haphazardly cut out and stuck into VR. Yet it still gave me a sense of place, like I was just in a different real world with my body intact rather than in an entirely make-believe existence. That could be key to , allowing us to absorb someone else’s perspective by acting out their life in our own skin. |
Amazon is experimenting with its own QR code style ‘SmileCodes’ | Greg Kumparak | 2,018 | 1 | 30 | QR code style markers — those lil’ barcode-looking boxes you’ll see on ads from time to time, meant to be scanned with your phone to launch some website or app — have yet to really find their footing in the U.S. But that’s not going to keep Amazon from taking a stab at it. Amazon is rolling out its own take on the concept and calling them “SmileCodes.” If you’ve scanned a QR code before, the idea will seem similar: see a code in, say, a magazine, open a scanner (built into the Amazon app), line up your camera with the code, and… something happens. What that something will be will vary from code to code, but they can open product pages, play videos (movie trailers, product reviews, etc.), etc. For the sake of differentiating it from other such barcodes, each of these ones has a big ol’ Amazon smile right in its center — hence the “SmileCode” name. [gallery ids="1593022,1593023,1593024,1593025,1593026,1593027,1593028"] Amazon has apparently been testing these codes in pop-up shops and Amazon Lockers (pictured above) in Europe for a few weeks now, but the company says these codes will make their U.S. debut in a few different magazines ( and ) come February. Beyond getting you from a magazine ad to an Amazon product page, it’s probably safe to assume we’ll eventually see Amazon tinker with putting these codes on another massively common canvas: its own boxes. Amazon has turned its boxes into ads more than once before (with bright , or the red boxes from a few months back); these codes could give them a consistent, repeatable way to turn those boxes into a clickable link of sorts. And if you don’t care to scan it? Then it’s just another Amazon logo on the box. |
Getting to the root of the revenue multiple | Steve Sloane | 2,018 | 1 | 30 | With a regular drumbeat of news covering the cyclically high prices in the stock market, valuation concerns are top of mind for many investors. For those in tech investing, this concern is perhaps most acute, given the generally high multiples assigned to the sector. It was across this backdrop that I decided to examine something that has been bothering me for quite some time; specifically, why on earth have we become accustomed to valuing SaaS companies (both public and private ones) in terms of revenue multiples rather than more traditional measures of value such as earnings or free cash flow? After all, most people will recall from a basic accounting or finance course that cash is king, and stock prices fundamentally reflect the discounted value of future expectations of cash flow. Is a revenue valuation multiple merely a short-cut to describing cash flow expectations for SaaS companies, or is it a different, premium way to value businesses that have higher levels of revenue predictability based on customer renewals and the potential for net-negative churn rates? While there are a number of good articles addressing time or , I still find myself curious as to how exactly a revenue multiples ties to some fundamental unit of company value. As a result, I’ve decided to cover this topic in a high-level (and no doubt relatively unscientific!) way to see what I could discover. The valuation of a stock is most commonly quoted in terms of an earnings multiple, i.e. today the S&P trades at approximately 25 times earnings. However, an apples-to-apples comparison of earnings for SaaS companies becomes difficult given that earnings remain negative for many years given the GAAP treatment of subscription contracts. As a result, it makes most sense to go right to a free cash flow comparison — as you can see from the graphic below, the median public SaaS company produced a 7.6 percent free cash flow margin in the most recent quarter: So, at face value, how does the free cash flow multiple for SaaS companies compare to the broader market? According to Goldman Sachs, the free cash flow yield (ratio of free cash flow to market cap) for the median S&P 500 company was 4.3 percent as of August 1. So if we use today’s average SaaS revenue multiple (there it is again!) of 6.6x* we can calculate the free cash flow yield for the median SaaS business at 1.2 percent: So, no surprise, SaaS companies look quite expensive as compared to the S&P (1.2 percent versus 4.3 percent) as investors get much lower cash flow for a given stock price. However, SaaS companies are given credit for their high growth rates, so what might this ratio look like if they were growing at a more moderate pace? As shown below, the average SaaS company spends about 37 percent of revenue on sales and marketing: Considering an average payback period (the time it takes to recover revenue equal to the cost of customer acquisition) of around , 37 percent investment in S&M implies a growth rate of 27 percent (basically right on with public SaaS companies’ average growth rate of 27.8 percent*). So what level of sales and marketing investment would be required when the growth rate of the business moderates to 10 percent? Adjusting the sales and marketing investment down from 37.1 percent to 13.6 percent simplistically adds 23.5 percent to the bottom line. Now, our FCF Yield calculation looks quite different: Ah-ha! While you can certainly pick on any of these (admittedly very basic) assumptions, we are now at least in the same ballpark as the valuation multiple of a traditional S&P stock: So, at the highest level, it’s clear that public market investors are giving credit to SaaS businesses for future profitability when growth moderates. Whether this is a sensible valuation methodology is outside the scope of this discussion (certainly current cash flows are superior to non-guaranteed future cash flows!). It also starts to shed some light on my own personal question, where the basic 7x revenue multiple looks like a shortcut from the approximately 30 percent free cash flow margins at maturity divided by a more traditional free cash flow yield of 4.3 percent. |
You can now use Alexa to send SMS messages | Sarah Perez | 2,018 | 1 | 30 | Amazon announced today it’s launching a new messaging feature for Alexa devices in the U.S. that will allow you to send texts – yes, SMS messages – to your friends and other contacts using your voice. Customers can now ask Alexa to send a message to a specific contact, and Alexa will figure out how to route it appropriately – using either the , or by sending it out as an SMS instead, if the recipient doesn’t have an Alexa device of their own. There is one big caveat, however – the feature currently works only for sending SMS messages to Android phones. To get started, you’ll need to follow the instructions that appear via a pop-up in the Alexa app on Android, Amazon tells us. In the Conversations tab of that app, you’ll need to select “Contacts,” then “My Profile,” then enabled the “Send SMS” feature to on. (To be clear, you will not send SMS messages from the app itself, only from Alexa devices via voice.) You can then specify if you want to send a “text message,” or you can ask Alexa to send a “message,” which will be routed to Alexa devices first, then SMS if Alexa devices are not available. As you may recall, Amazon free calls and messaging last year, but the feature only then worked in between Echo devices, limiting its adoption. However, there that the company was developing some sort of SMS capability. The Alexa app itself was also very aggressive about importing users’ entire address books – which led to some last year before Amazon contact blocking. Now we know why Amazon wanted your whole address book: Alexa was getting ready to be a phone. (Oh, you can also use Alexa with your home phone service, including for , if you buy $35 add-on.) Amazon tells us it can’t offer a similar feature for iPhone users because Apple currently does not offer their messaging API to third-parties. It didn’t say when it would roll out SMS support to Alexa’s international markets. The feature is live today on all Alexa devices that support Alexa calling and messaging, and does not work on third-party devices at this point. |
CVS, other health stocks down upon Amazon, JPMorgan, Berkshire healthcare co news | Sarah Buhr | 2,018 | 1 | 30 | Investors panicked this morning upon the news Amazon, JPMorgan Chase and Berkshire Hathaway were teaming up to launch a health insurance company for their U.S. employees. Healthcare is one of the biggest operating costs for Fortune 500 companies, and the three iconic companies have joined forces to build a new health insurance company for all U.S. employees in an effort to improve satisfaction and reduce those costs. The new, yet-to-be-named company will “pursue this objective through an independent company that is free from profit-making incentives and constraints. The initial focus of the new company will be on technology solutions that will provide U.S. employees and their families with simplified, high-quality and transparent healthcare at a reasonable cost,” according to a issued this morning. However, CVS, UnitedHealth and others were down after the news came out, indicating investors’ displeasure at the announcement. CVS dropped by just over 4 percent by midday, UnitedHealth a whopping 11.5 percent, Express Scripts by 3.6 percent, Cigna was by just under 7 percent and Walgreens by 2.6 percent. The plunge isn’t a surprise considering the deal may affect these companies in various ways. Amazon has made indications it would be moving into drug delivery, affecting CVS, Walgreens and Express Scripts’ models. The announcement also possibly affects health insurance providers like UnitedHealth and Cigna, as well. The three companies collectively employ 880,000 people and the plan is to cover all U.S. employees, though it’s not clear how many of the 880,000 are working internationally versus in the States. While stock prices dropped immediately, details are still sparse and it still remains to be seen how these three iconic companies plan to shake things up in the industry. However, it is still a significant announcement for the healthcare industry and will surely have ramifications beyond the activity we see today. “It puts in sharp relief the fact that large employers will continue to move aggressively forward with or without traditional healthcare players, and the value chain in the near future will likely contain new players and new influencers who will wield significant leverage to force change from status quo,” said digital health market expert and in an email. |
Google is launching a new digital store to sell cloud-based software | Connie Loizos | 2,018 | 1 | 30 | Google is launching a digital store that will offer cloud-based software to companies and other organizations. Bloomberg, which a bit earlier, notes the move is just the juggernaut’s latest effort to ensure that cloud leaders, and specifically Amazon Web Services, don’t leave the company in the dust. Google isn’t launching the store alone but rather partnering with MobileIron, a once venture-backed company that went public in 2014 and is focused around mobile device management. Indeed, in a new about the new store, Google says the collaboration is designed to bring together Google Cloud’s Orbitera commerce platform with MobileIron’s app distribution, security and analytics capabilities. The white-label offering will come with a handful of features, says Google, including customized bundles to enable operators to create groups of services by customer segments; customized branding for both operators and customers of the marketplace; one bill for everything across all of a customer’s devices, data, voice and third-party cloud services; secure cloud access to ensure that only trusted users who are using trusted apps on trusted devices get access to the cloud services; and usage analytics. Google had acquired the startup Orbitera in 2016 for what TC was told at the time was . The company developed a platform for buying and selling cloud-based software and was gobbled up to help Google improve how it competes against Amazon’s AWS, Salesforce and Microsoft, all of which sell their enterprise services in the cloud. Google’s new initiative has competition. For starters, as Bloomberg notes, AT&T offers a virtual private network to allow users to securely connect to cloud services. Still, the marketplace should make it easier and simpler for users to pay for a host of services at once, rather than having to source them from multiple places. It also should provide Google stronger footing in this particular slice of the business world if all goes as planned. |
Amazon’s new healthcare company could give smaller healthtech players a boost | Sarah Buhr | 2,018 | 1 | 30 | JPMorgan Chase and Berkshire Hathaway have joined forces with Amazon to form a for all U.S. employees. Right now details are so sparse there’s not even a name associated with the new company. However, this is big news for the industry, and it could possibly have ramifications not only for health insurance giants, but also smaller tech companies that are open to either partnering with the company — or even being acquired by it. The decision didn’t come overnight. According to the heads of each company — Jamie Dimon, Warren Buffet and Jeff Bezos — have chatted for years about how to fix the problem of high costs and a broken healthcare system. “The ballooning costs of healthcare act as a hungry tapeworm on the American economy,” Buffet said in a out this morning. “We share the belief that putting our collective resources behind the country’s best talent can, in time, check the rise in health costs while concurrently enhancing patient satisfaction and outcomes.” But others in tech have tried to jump into healthcare only to get bogged down with regulatory hurdles. Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes, who did not have a medical background, ran into regulatory issues and was ultimately banned from operating in her own labs due to health and safety concerns. Google parent company Alphabet is known for dipping its toe in the healthcare waters, with Calico and Verily Life Sciences. However, Google its health management platform Google Health after it failed to gain traction. “When [tech companies] start to understand the complexity, even just the idea of an electronic health record, they pull out,” says health consultant and CEO of Avalere Health Dan Mendelson. Bezos has acknowledged the difficulties for tech companies in the space, saying the healthcare system is “complex” and that the three “. . . enter into this challenge open-eyed about the degree of difficulty.” Companies that have succeeded in healthcare have largely been those with a background in the industry, Mendelson points out. However, the allure to get into the space has fueled plenty of tech company attempts, especially in the last year. Apple a feature with its iOS update to allow users to upload medical records and Amazon has already been to be in talks with drug makers. And stronger technological chops is something the industry needs going forward. Amazon is in a position to provide these measures with machine learning, AI, online communications and other tools needed to make a more efficient and effective system. But it will likely need outside help from health experts, and it remains to be seen how these three iconic companies plan to move the ball forward without industry understanding. Collective Health founder Ali Diab has one, perhaps unsurprising suggestion: that the new company that’s being formed work with Collective Health. Collective Health offers companies healthcare coverage through a cloud-based, integrated health benefits platform for self-insured employers and, as Diab points out, has been providing that solution for the last five years to large companies like eBay and Restoration Hardware. “I would suggest they focus exactly on what we are already doing, which is build infrastructure that knits everything together,” Diab says. “It’s not stuff that people see. It’s all the infrastructure to ingest data from various sources, process claims, to make that data analyzable, to build machine learning and AI-based systems on top of it that help identify people that need care way before they might even know.” JPMorgan Chase, Berkshire Hathaway and Amazon could potentially snap up smaller tech companies like Collective Health that are working on these types of solutions, as well. “It would not surprise me to see them start to acquire some of the technology that makes their goals possible,” says Mendelson. “This team is very capable from a mergers and acquisitions standpoint. That’s not an accident.” |
Details and solutions emerge for missile threat false alarm in Hawaii | Devin Coldewey | 2,018 | 1 | 30 | A preliminary report from the FCC has revealed additional details about the situation that caused a earlier this month. It really was human error, as initial reports indicated, but now the nature of that error (errors, really) is a bit clearer. It was known that Hawaii’s Emergency Management Agency had planned to send a test alert to internal systems on the morning of the 13th, but that somehow this alert leaked out into the public communications systems. explains that the issue was not just a missed click, but several things: So basically, we had a sort of comedy of errors that could very easily have been a tragedy. Obviously a major alert like this should have more than a dialog box as a safety mechanism to make sure it isn’t in error, or even set off by a rogue officer. The officer who sent out the alert, by the way, was first reassigned and then fired; apparently his job performance was never great, and his refusal to cooperate with the investigation was the last straw. Here is the meat of the report’s findings, which echoes the concerns many raised immediately after the alert: With respect to inadequate safeguards, most importantly, there were no procedures in place to prevent a single person from mistakenly sending a missile alert to the State of Hawaii. While such an alert addressed a matter of the utmost gravity, there was no requirement in place for a warning officer to double check with a colleague or get signoff from a supervisor before sending such an alert. It is also troubling that Hawaii’s alert origination software did not differentiate between the testing environment and the live alert production environment. Hawaii’s alert origination software allowed users to send both live alerts and test alerts using the same interface, and the same log-in credentials, after clicking a button that simply confirmed “Are you sure you want to send this alert?” In other words, the confirmation prompt contained the same language, irrespective of whether the message was a test or an actual alert. …Common industry practice is to host the live alert production environment on a separate, user-selectable domain at the log-in screen, or through a separate application. Other alert origination software also appears to provide clear visual cues that distinguish the test environment from the live production environment, including the use of watermarks, color coding, and unique numbering. The Hawaii Emergency Management Agency had not anticipated the possibility of issuing a false alert and, as such, had failed to develop standard procedures for its response. It first sent out a correction using social media, rather than the same alerting systems that it used to transmit the false alert. Indeed, the agency was not immediately prepared to issue a correction using these systems. The agency also did not maintain redundant and effective means to communicate with key stakeholders during emergencies. Fortunately both the FCC and Hawaiian authorities are looking into it, and have already taken the following steps: It has created a new policy that supervisors must receive advance notice of all future drills. It will require two credentialed warning officers to sign in and validate the transmission of every alert and test. It has created a false alert correction template for Emergency Alert System and Wireless Emergency Alert system messages so that warning officers are more readily prepared to correct a false alert, should one ever occur again. It has requested that its alert origination software vendor integrate improvements into the next iteration of its software to more clearly delineate the test environment from the live production environment, helping to safeguard against false alerts. Hawaiians can probably feel a bit safer, but of course the big problem is that any of this was possible in the first place with a system of such importance. |
Apple reportedly under investigation by SEC and DOJ for phone slowdown | Jonathan Shieber | 2,018 | 1 | 30 | The U.S. Department of Justice and the Securities and Exchange Commission are jointly investigating Apple’s communications about the software update that slowed down older models of the iPhone, . Citing sources familiar with the matter, the government has reportedly requested details on the company’s communications about the software update. The Bloomberg report indicates the two agencies are in very early stages of their investigation. We’ve reached out to Apple, the SEC and the DOJ for comment and will update when we hear back. For background, Apple got into a lot of trouble with customers who noticed that the performance of their older model phones was degrading over time. Apple was pushed to disclose that it had issued a software update that privileged power management over performance in older devices that had degraded batteries. There was, unsurprisingly, , and . The U.S. isn’t the only country where people are pressing Apple for more information. Consumer advocacy groups around the world — — are pressing for an investigation into the slowdown. |
Contraception app still being probed by medical agency over unwanted pregnancies | Natasha Lomas | 2,018 | 1 | 30 | Is there such a thing as bad publicity? It’s an interesting and contested question. To wit: Self styled ‘digital contraception’ app, — which relies on a set of proprietary algorithms and women inputting their morning body temperature to predict fertility levels each day — has claimed that negative headlines generated after a clinic reported a number of unwanted pregnancies among users of its app has actually led it to gain users. Which might suggest that negative publicity (reported product failure) can actually be net positive for a business (claimed user gain). Or else it’s 100% pure surfactant spin. “What’s positive is that our users don’t seem scared by these sorts of articles,” co-founder Elina Berglund told last week, discussing the news that had been reported by a concerned Swedish clinic to the country’s Medial Products Agency this month. “We’ve actually gained many new users. Instead, many are annoyed by the fact that their ability to use our app is underestimated, and they often respond to articles in the comment sections,” she added. Trolls and other agents of misinformation also often contribute to articles in the comment sections. But I digress. Sadly Berglund did not quantify exactly how many new users Natural Cycles has onboarded as a consequence of “these sorts of articles”. So we can’t attempt to measure how helpful this particular exposure episode might have been for Natural Cycles’ business, even if some of the headlines didn’t sound, well, great for a business in the contraception business. But here’s the thing: If reportage of 37 unwanted pregnancies is actually net positive for Natural Cycles, the company, why was its UK PR agency so quick and alacritous to push claims the probe had already run its course (and the app been given the “all clear”)? It really makes you pause and wonder. Maybe bad publicity is a thing after all? Or — at least — where failure of the product in question can have such grave and unwelcome consequences as an unwanted pregnancy. Gerald Ratner trinketry this really is not. “ ” read the subject of an email sent to my inbox today, by Hot Cherry — the aforementioned UK PR company for Natural Cycles. A press release attached to the email, and headlined with the same phrase, contained the following opening para: Earlier this month, , the first app to be certified as a contraception in Europe, was reported to the Swedish Medical Product Agency (MPA) after a hospital found 37 cases of unintended pregnancies among women relying on the app for contraception. Now the MPA has closed all individual reports related to unplanned pregnancies concluding that there are no implications on behalf of Natural Cycles or the way the product is being marketed. If you read carefully you’ll see the body text wording actually specifies that the MPA has “closed all related to unplanned pregnancies” (emphasis mine). Not that it’s closed its investigation. Although the PR does go on to make the grand and linked claim that the MPA has “there are no implications on behalf of Natural Cycles or the way the product is being marketed”. “Following about we thought you’d be interested in running this as follow-up. Let me know,” added Harry Cymbler, who lists himself as “founder” of Hot Cherry, dashing off a pithy email to which he’d attached the full PR. “Details and imagery attached. Pls let me know if you can run this,” he added. I certainly ran the claim past the Swedish MPA. I also contacted the referring clinic in Stockholm which had originally raised the concerns about the app’s efficacy — to ask whether they were aware of there being such a swift resolution to the investigation? Reader, they were not. In fact they immediately pointed me to this (in Swedish) posted by the Lakemedelsverket (aka: the MPA) which seeks to quash media rumors that their investigation has been closed. Spoiler: It really is ongoing. A spokeswoman for the MPA also confirmed to me, via email, in English, that there is no ‘all clear’ for Natural Cycles as yet. “That is not correct,” she told TechCrunch. “The investigation is still ongoing.” “We are now asking the company behind the product for more information,” she added. She also pointed to the notice the MPA had felt moved to post on its website as a result of incorrect media rumors the company was in the all clear. The agency does not speculate on what could have triggered these false media rumors. In the notice, the MPA specifies that while they have completed the “first phase” of their probe, they have now moved on to next steps — such as asking Natural Cycles to see clinical data, risk analysis and aftermarket control — i.e. before they will be in a position to be able to decide whether or not any further action is needed. Here’s a Google Translate version of the anti-rumor notice in English: There are reports in the media that the Swedish Medicines Agency would have closed the investigation on the Natural Cycles contraceptives app. That’s not right. The investigation proceeds in the form of a supervisory case, where the Swedish Medicines Agency now requests additional information to find out if there are shortcomings in the product, product information or how the manufacturer follows up the product’s performance and use. “The investigation of the Natural Cycles contraceptive is most ongoing. We have completed the first phase where we have requested the manufacturer’s response to the accident reports. Now the investigation goes on to the next step, which means that we collect information to be able to decide if any action is needed. Among other things, we want to see clinical data, risk analysis and aftermarket control,” says Ewa-Lena Hartman, Group Chief, the Medical Products Agency. The background to the supervision is an increased number of healthcare reports of unwanted pregnancy when using Natural Cycles. The preventive drug certification has been performed by a third party and has not previously been reviewed by the Swedish Medicines Agency. If you as an individual are worried about or have questions about which contraceptives you should use, turn to your care for help and advice. Curious to sort out these crossed wires, I went back to Harry at Hot Cherry — to ask why his PR appeared to imply the MPA’s investigation was over, when in fact the process remains “most ongoing”. In an era replete with hair-trigger claims of ‘fake news’, any professional messaging that seeks, even inadvertently, to blur the lines of truth and fiction by encouraging time-strapped journalists to “run” unchecked claims seems, well, ill advised to say the least. And maybe especially so for Natural Cycles — whose product relies so acutely on users trusting the efficacy claims its business makes because it hasn’t yet conducted a randomized control trial to be able to robustly prove out those claims via the standard science. Harry’s first response came quickly: “We’ll discuss this with and get back to you.” A couple of hours later, thanking me for my patience, he emailed the following statement (emphasis theirs): Läkemedelsverket (the MPA) are commenting on what the is writing. We agree with what MPA states. The individual reports have been dealt with and are now closed, but we continue to work with the MPA in what is called trend reporting to make sure our data is in line with what is being reported from the public. We appreciate the fact that we now going forward will get data from both the public and our own sources, which will only strengthen our clinical claims further. So, after all that, I’m very happy to confirm there is in fact no new news here: Natural Cycles remains under investigation over a number of unwanted pregnancies among users of its app. And on the other matter of interest — the question of whether all publicity is good news in business growth terms, i.e. even when it’s attached to ongoing concerns about your product’s efficacy — well, I’ll leave you to be the judge of that. Feel free to leave your thoughts in the comments. |
null | Darrell Etherington | 2,018 | 1 | 31 | null |
Wonderschool gets $2.1M to bring its early childhood programs to New York City | Catherine Shu | 2,018 | 1 | 8 | , a network of in-home daycare and preschools, plans to open 150 programs in New York City after raising $2.1 million in new funding. The capital comes from non-profit investment firm Omidyar Network, Be Curious Partners, Rethink Education, Edelweiss Partners and Learn Capital and brings the startup’s total raised so far to more than $4 million, including . Headquartered in San Francisco, most of Wonderschool’s programs, or about 140, are in the Bay Area and Los Angeles. The startup already has 16 programs in New York City, which suffers from a huge childcare shortage exacerbated by . Wonderschool’s general manager there is Ben Newton, who was on the founding team of Avenues: The World School, an international system of private schools. One of the reasons Wonderschool was created is because compensation rates in early childcare education are so low that many caregivers are not only priced out of the neighborhoods they serve, but eventually quit the field (sometimes because they, ironically, cannot afford childcare costs for their own kids on their salaries). Part of Wonderschool’s value proposition for providers, which it screens based on credentials, experience and education, is efficiency. It not only provides its programs with support, but also helps them with licensing, creating a daily routine for kids, maintaining liability insurance, meeting health and safety standards and other time-consuming administrative tasks. The company’s tech platform lets carers manage their programs, communicate with parents and take payments online, while giving parents program, enrollment and tuition information. Wonderschool emphasizes in-home programs because it helps providers save further on costs (and lets them look after their own children, too) and monetizes by taking a percentage of monthly tuition fees. In a statement, Isabelle Hau, the U.S. education lead at Omidyar Network, said “Wonderschool is responding with better quality and more flexible solutions to meet the needs of early learners, their parents and child care providers. By using Wonderschool’s technology platform, early learning educators get to focus on what they are best at, which is caring for and teaching young children.” Wonderschool founder and chief executive officer Chris Bennett says city leaders have contacted the startup about launching in their communities, but it will focus first on growing its network in California and New York City. “Since we do build up waiting lists for programs that we support, it has been more of a focus to build density in areas where we already support programs, rather than starting in new areas, so that we can support the families that have already come to Wonderschool to find a program for their child,” he told TechCrunch. |
ElliQ has raised $22 million for its social robot aimed at older adults | Brian Heater | 2,018 | 1 | 8 | null |
Samsung forecasts record fourth-quarter profit, but still misses analysts’ expectations | Catherine Shu | 2,018 | 1 | 8 | Samsung Electronics expects to post another record profit for the final quarter of 2017, but it results may still fall a bit short of analysts’ expectations. In , Samsung said it estimates operating profit of about 15.1 trillion won (or $14.13 billion) on sales of about 66 trillion won. This represents an increase of 64% from , when Samsung posted operating profit of 9.22 trillion won on revenue of 53.33 trillion won, but it still misses from 17 analysts surveyed by Thomson Reuters. Samsung , when it posted a 14.53 trillion won profit thanks in large part to sales of chips, OLED screens and other components to tech manufacturers, including Apple. For all of 2017, Samsung says it expects profit of about 53.6 trillion won on sales of about 239.6 trillion won. |
Crunch Report | A Telegram ICO Would Be Huge | Khaled "Tito" Hamze | 2,018 | 1 | 8 | Tito Hamze
Tito Hamze
Joe Zolnoski
Tito hamze TechCrunch C/O Tito Hamze
410 Townsend street
Suite 100
San Francisco Ca. 94107 |
Watch Intel’s drones play the piano and dance in the air | Matt Burns | 2,018 | 1 | 8 | Forget drone delivery. Intel made drones play the piano. Using a system very similar to the one , drones took center stage at Intel’s CES keynote and played a piano like Tom Hanks did in Big. It was fantastic. The show starts out with band called Algorithm and Blues. Fast forward if you must, but their performance was fun too. You want to see the drones after their bit. Intel didn’t detail how the drones work inside but instead this version of the Shooting Star program. before it’s first show in Disney World in 2016 and the platform pre-programs the path of the drones to create a light show. In that version, the drones lacked collision detection and used GPS to plot their location. But this show happened inside a Las Vegas theater where GPS is not available. Like any good technology, it’s as good as magic. |
Sony’s new Aibo robot just melted the hearts of a room full of jaded tech bloggers | Brian Heater | 2,018 | 1 | 8 | [gallery ids="1584590,1584589,1584588,1584587,1584586,1584592,1584591,1584593,1584595"] |
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