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Kanye skips Tidal exclusivity, drops new album on Spotify and Apple Music | Brian Heater | 2,018 | 6 | 1 | null |
Revolut announces a Robinhood-like trading product | Romain Dillet | 2,018 | 6 | 6 | Fintech startup likes to announce new things . Even though nothing is going live today, it’s interesting to see where the startup is heading. The company is working on a trading platform for traditional shares without any commission. You’ll find stock from public companies from the U.K. and the U.S., as well as various ETFs and options. In other words, Revolut is going to become the of Europe. While American customers have been using Robinhood for years, the rest of the world has been lagging behind when it comes to stock trading. You still have to open an account on a painfully slow website and pay a few euros for every transaction. Some companies even ask you to send a letter to create an account. And if you want to buy stock through your existing bank account, it usually costs even more. Revolut promises that you won’t pay any commission when you buy or sell shares. The company plans to make money on margin trading, securities lending and interest on cash. Unfortunately, Revolut didn’t say when the feature would launch. Premium subscribers will be able to test the feature first. Eventually, you’ll also get additional perks if you’re a premium subscriber. Trading will be available to all Revolut users in Europe and future markets. The company plans to launch in the U.S., Canada, Singapore, Hong Kong, Australia and New Zealand in the coming months. Revolut’s premium subscription is becoming a sort of Amazon Prime for financial products. You pay £6.99/€7.99 per month and you get unlimited foreign exchange transactions, travel insurance, access to new features and more. It’s clear that Revolut plans on making predictable revenue on this premium subscription. And maybe the trading platform will make more people subscribe to Revolut Premium. Additionally, Revolut now officially has 2 million users. It’s funny to see that Revolut is announcing this new milestone just days after N26 announced . Interestingly, Revolut has 900,000 users in the U.K., where N26 has yet to launch. |
Fortnite is headed to the Nintendo Switch, according to new leaks | Brian Heater | 2,018 | 6 | 1 | null |
“Social selling” startup Meesho lands $11.5M Series B led by Sequoia India | Catherine Shu | 2,018 | 6 | 6 | , one of several “social selling” startups gaining speed in India, will add more features to its e-commerce platform after closing a $11.5 million Series B led by Sequoia India. Existing investors SAIF Partners, Y Combinator and Venture Highway also returned for the round, which brings the Bangalore-based startup’s total funding so far to $15 million. Its last round of funding, a $3.4 million Series A, was . Like social selling competitors including GlowRoad and Zepo, Meesho’s model combines dropshipping from its wholesale partners with a comprehensive suite of e-commerce tools and services. This reduces overhead while making it easy for sellers, who Meesho says includes many housewives, students and retirees, to set up an online business through WhatsApp, Facebook and other social media. Meesho’s tools include an online platform that allows sellers to manage purchases and process payments, as well as a network of wholesale suppliers (its main categories are currently fashion and lifestyle items) and logistics providers. In other words, it offers almost everything its vendors need to start selling online. This leaves vendors responsible for customer acquisition, picking what items they want to include in their online shops and marketing them. This reselling model appeals to small stores, as well as individuals, who want to make more money but don’t want the expense of setting up an e-commerce business from scratch and carrying inventory. Meesho’s rivals include e-commerce startups like GlowRoad, Shopmatic and Zepo, which have also recently raised large funding rounds. All of these companies attract sellers by offering a significant amount of help with order management, payment processing, fulfillment and logistics. In order to differentiate, chief executive officer Vidit Aatrey, who co-founded Meesho in 2015 with Sanjeev Barnwal, its chief technology officer, tells TechCrunch it focuses on product quality, pricing and personalization to help resellers improve their sales and customer service. Meesho claims that more than 800,000 resellers have used its platform and that a “typical” reseller earns between 20,000 to 25,000 rupees per month (about $298 to $373). In a press statement about the funding, Sequoia India managing director Mohit Bhatnagar said “Social commerce is the future of e-commerce in India. People buy from people they trust, and that’s what Meesho enables. Entrepreneurs, many of them women, use the Meesho platform to recommend, customize and sell to their family and friends. Social selling is a huge trend and Sequoia India is excited to partner with Meesho, which is the early leader in this space.” Aatrey says Meesho’s Series B capital will be used to hire more people for its tech and product teams in order to build a suite of new customer acquisition and selling tools. The startup also plans to add more personalization options for its resellers and product categories. |
Photos on social media can predict the health of neighborhoods | John Biggs | 2,018 | 6 | 6 | The images that appear on social media – happy people eating, cultural happenings, and smiling dogs – can actually predict the likelihood that a neighborhood is “healthy” as well as its level of gentrification. From the : So says a groundbreaking study published in Frontiers in Physics, in which researchers used social media images of cultural events in London and New York City to create a model that can predict neighborhoods where residents enjoy a high level of wellbeing — and even anticipate gentrification by 5 years. With more than half of the world’s population living in cities, the model could help policymakers ensure human wellbeing in dense urban settings. The idea is based on the concept of “cultural capital” – the more there is, the better the neighborhood becomes. For example, if there are many pictures of fun events in a certain spot you can expect a higher level of well-being in that area’s denizens. The research also suggests that investing in arts and culture will actively improve a neighborhood. “Culture has many benefits to an individual: it opens our minds to new emotional experiences and enriches our lives,” said Dr. Daniele Quercia. “We’ve known for decades that this ‘cultural capital’ plays a huge role in a person’s success. Our new model shows the same correlation for neighborhoods and cities, with those neighborhoods experiencing the greatest growth having high cultural capital. So, for every city or school district debating whether to invest in arts programs or technology centers, the answer should be a resounding ‘Yes!'” The Cambridge-based team looked at “millions of Flickr images” taken at cultural events in New York and London and overlaid them on maps of these cities. The findings, as we can imagine, were obvious. “We were able to see that the presence of culture is directly tied to the growth of certain neighborhoods, rising home values and median income. Our model can even predict gentrification within five years,” said Quercia. “This could help city planners and councils think through interventions to prevent people from being displaced as a result of gentrification.” The team expects to be able to assess the health of citizens using the same method, overlaying pictures of food on maps in order to find food deserts and spots where cafes and croissants are on the rise. Just imagine: all those Instagrammed photos of your favorite sandwiches will some day help researchers build happier cities. |
Limited Siri support for music apps like Spotify is possible in iOS 12 | Lucas Matney | 2,018 | 6 | 6 | Apple is finally getting a bit more friendly with third party music-streaming apps when it comes to Siri. Music-streaming companies like Spotify will soon be able to let users utilize Siri controls to play music through their apps thanks to Apple’s newly-announced Siri Shortcuts feature in iOS 12. At a WWDC developer session, the company detailed a new “Play Media” intent it was introducing to developers with Siri Shortcuts that will let users summon audio and video media from third-party apps. The integrations would operate much less seamlessly than controls for Apple Music through Siri, but you would theoretically be able to direct Siri on the iPhone or HomePod to a designated playlist or artist on a service like Spotify, functionality that was previously not possible. The big caveat here is that this is a developer tool and support relies on apps like Spotify and others integrating these new changes into their apps with iOS 12. In other words, don’t go bothering Siri quite yet. What you probably won’t be able to do is ask Siri to play a specific artist or song that you haven’t already built a shortcut for. So, yeah, it’s not perfect, but it’s a start. Developers are already playing around with how the functionality could work in the iOS 12 beta release, though without official Spotify app support things are still a bit rough. Well that's awesome — Finn Gaida (@fga) With proper integrations the feature would launch the app in the background so you could keep your phone in your pocket while the tunes automatically started playing. At that point, Siri would also be able to handle playback controls for the app. The “Play Media” intent boasts full HomePod support as well but you still have to set up the shortcut on your iPhone before querying Siri on HomePod directly. Last week, I about how Apple needed to open up its compatibility with Spotify at WWDC and while this certainly isn’t full support from the company, it is a peace offering to Spotify and other music-streaming apps which could now build functionality for users to do things like summon their playlists from Siri on the iPhone and HomePod through Siri Shortcuts. |
The startup community must defend merit-based immigration | Bobby Franklin | 2,018 | 6 | 1 | The Trump administration just moved to kill a key tool to support immigrant entrepreneurs, and the startup community must make our voice heard to save it. Supported by Republicans and Democrats, the International Entrepreneur Rule (IER) operates like a startup visa and allows foreign-born founders to launch new businesses in the U.S., rather than overseas. IER is in place after the National Venture Capital Association (which I lead) successfully sued the Department of Homeland Security when it unlawfully delayed the program last year. But now, the administration is taking new steps to end the rule before it has a chance to bring new companies and innovation to our country. Why would the administration do something so obviously counter-productive? That’s the question those of us who understand the importance of immigrant entrepreneurship keep asking. The track-record of foreign-born founders is staggering. Studies show that immigrants have started of America’s privately-held startups valued at $1 billion or more, and 43 percent of Fortune 500 companies were founded or co-founded by an immigrant or the child of an immigrant. A found that one-third of all venture-backed companies that went public from 2006 to 2012 had at least one immigrant founder. Specific to IER, that the rule will create more than 300,000 jobs over 10 years, although I believe this is on the low end because a single entrepreneur could create a startup with tremendous growth or even an entirely new industry. IER is tailored to attract founders who are positioned to launch the next generation of great American companies and would unleash fresh entrepreneurial energy and dynamism that we desperately need in the economy. The Trump administration’s hostility toward IER is also puzzling considering President Trump’s previous statements on immigration. During the State of the Union address, the president emphasized the need for a “merit-based immigration system — one that admits people who are skilled, who want to work, who will contribute to our society, and who will love and respect our country.” Photo courtesy of Flickr/ It’s almost like he was describing IER without naming it. After all, we are talking about a program where a successful applicant must create a new high-growth enterprise that will in turn employ Americans and contribute to our nation’s technological and scientific advancement. Furthermore, the applicant’s status in the United States is completely tied to the startup company and would be unable to remain in our country if the enterprise fails. There is nothing more merit-based than that, and yet the administration is saying no to the new jobs that come when young companies scale and grow. The administration’s rejection of IER comes at a particularly troubling time for American entrepreneurial standing. Twenty years ago, U.S. startups received 90 percent of global venture capital, but that number has precipitously dropped to 54 percent last year. Policymakers must understand that U.S. startup dominance is being challenged every day, and the top entrepreneurs now have a world of choices when it comes to where to launch their high-growth company. Other countries are copying the American blueprint for startup activity and making their countries more attractive for new company creation. One way they’re doing this is by taking advantage of our intransigence on immigration policy and then welcoming foreign-born founders to their shores. The idea of a startup visa was first proposed in the U.S., and while we still don’t have one, countries like Canada, France and Singapore have copied the idea and are reaping the benefits. Rejection of IER is also incongruent with the Trump administration’s goal of American leadership on critical technologies like artificial intelligence, robotics, machine-learning and new drug discovery. If we are to lead in these areas, the world’s top entrepreneurs must be in the U.S., rather than overseas where they will compete with us. Rather than pushing entrepreneurs away, the administration should be fighting to attract top talent. That’s the only way the U.S. will be the innovation leader going forward. Despite the overwhelming arguments in favor of IER, the Department of Homeland Security is moving forward to rescind the program before it truly gets off the ground. This is a setback to be sure, but so was the first DHS delay, and we beat the administration that go around. We’re going to keep fighting, but we can’t do it alone. How can you help? The best way to do your part is by engaging in the public comment period that is open now and closes on . Visit and share your perspective on why the International Entrepreneur Rule is needed. Everyone’s voice is valued in the process. Tell your personal stories of immigrant entrepreneurs who have impacted our country, how IER will help maintain U.S. competitiveness or how IER will create American jobs. Together, we can win, and by doing so help our country remain the best place on the planet to launch a new company that provides a better way of life. |
The damage from Atlanta’s huge cyberattack is even worse than the city first thought | Taylor Hatmaker | 2,018 | 6 | 6 | More than two months after a cyberattack hobbled many of its critical municipal systems, the city of Atlanta is still sorting through the wreckage of what is likely the worst cyberattack targeting a U.S. city to date. On , Atlanta’s connected systems city-wide were hit with a ransomware message locking their respective files and demanding an approximately $50,000 payment in bitcoin (the price has fluctuated since). The ransomware is believed to be from the group known as , which has been operating and executing similar attacks since at least 2015. In the days following the March 22 incident, Atlanta residents were unable to do simple city system-dependent tasks like paying parking tickets or utility bills. City employees didn’t get the all-clear to turn on their computers until and many city systems still have not recovered. On Wednesday , Daphne Rackley, Atlanta’s Interim Chief Information Officer and head of Atlanta Information Management, disclosed new details about the extent of the damage. As , at least one third of the 424 software programs that the city runs remain offline or partially inoperable. Almost 30 percent of those programs are deemed “mission critical” by the city meaning that they control crucial city services like the court system and law enforcement. In the meeting, Rackley explained that the city initially believed only 20 percent of the city’s software programs to be affected by the attack, none of which affected critical systems. While reporting the updated numbers, Rackley estimated that $9.5 million would need to be added to the department’s $35 million budget to address the remaining damage. That amount is on top of the more than sought by Atlanta Information Management following the attack. TechCrunch has reached out to Atlanta Information Management about how that additional $9.5 million for recovery from the attack would be allocated and will update if we learn further details. Earlier this week, Atlanta’s Police Chief that the cyberattack destroyed “years” worth of police dash cam video footage. Atlanta has been regarded as a frontrunner for Amazon’s second headquarters in though it’s not immediately clear how the cyberattack will affect the city’s odds. |
Coinbase is acquiring a securities dealer in order to trade your startup tokens | Connie Loizos | 2,018 | 6 | 6 | Every day, tech investors and reporters are pitched on new services that intend to generate digital tokens that its creators expect will trade . . . somewhere. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Coinbase, known currently for trading a handful of the largest cryptocurrencies, wants to be that somewhere. To that end, it’s acquiring securities dealer Keystone Capital, a California-based FINRA-registered broker-dealer that, , can operate as a registered investment and run an alternative trading system. Coinbase said the move sets it on a path to “offer future services that include crypto securities trading, margin and over-the-counter trading.” Terms of the deal weren’t disclosed. Coinbase will need regulatory approval to operate under the Keystone licenses, and its COO Asiff Hirji told the WSJ that it expects to take several months after those approvals are obtained to integrate Keystone’s operations. More than $13 billion has been raised by startups via so-called initial coin offerings since the beginning of last year — a whopping of that raised in just the first three months of 2018. That represents a huge opportunity for a company like Coinbase, particularly as more startups submit to regulatory oversight and, as a result, produce what are called “security” tokens. (Startups also sometimes sell “utility” tokens, which are designed to represent future access to a company’s product or service rather than as an investment, though the SEC has repeatedly signaled it’s belief that these tokens are similarly expected by purchasers to rise in value.) Coinbase, which has so far raised $225 million from investors, isn’t alone in its interest and along with sizable abroad, it’s facing growing competition in the U.S. Robinhood, for example, the free stock trading app, is also a FINRA-approved broker-dealer that recently began offering cryptocurrency trading; one can imagine it getting into the business of token trading in the not-too-distant future, fueled in part by the $363 million in new funding it disclosed last month that it had raised (at a reported $5.6 billion valuation). Circle, a trading desk for cryptocurrencies, also has strong financial backing, including $110 million Series E funding that the company announced last month. Like Coinbase, it also has very big ambitions, as evidenced in part when, in February, it , one of the world’s most active cryptocurrency exchanges. According to the WSJ, Circle is also currently seeking a banking license. |
Instagram plans to launch Snapchat Discover-style video hub | Josh Constine | 2,018 | 6 | 6 | Instagram is preparing to unveil a home for longer-form video — a YouTube competitor and its take on Snapchat Discover. According to multiple sources, Instagram will offer a dedicated space featuring scripted shows, music videos and more in vertically oriented, full-screen, high-def 4K resolution. Instagram has been meeting with popular social media stars and content publishers to find out how their video channels elsewhere would work within its app. It’s also lining up launch partners for an announcement of the long-form video effort tentatively scheduled for June 20th. The public shouldn’t expect Netflix Originals or HBO-level quality. This is not “InstaGame of Thrones.” Instead, the feature is more focused on the kind of videos you see from YouTube creators. These often range from five to 15 minutes in length, shot with nice cameras and lighting but not some massive Hollywood movie production crew. Average users will be able to upload longer videos too, beyond the current 60-second limit. Instagram intends to eventually let creators and publishers earn money off the longer videos, though it hasn’t finalized how accompanying ads like pre-rolls and mid-breaks or revenue splits would work. It is not paying creators up-front for shows like Facebook Watch, either. But the videos will each feature a swipe-up option to open a link, which creators can use to drive traffic to their websites, e-commerce stores or event ticketing. Thanks to Instagram’s 800 million-plus users, the video section could be a powerful marketing tool beyond generating cash for creators directly. The long-form video section will spotlight a collection of popular videos, and provide a “continue watching” option since users might view long clips over the course of several sessions. Users will also see the long-form clips featured on authors’ profiles near the Stories Highlights bubbles. Creators won’t be able to shoot and post long-form videos, as the section will only allow pre-made video uploads. Instagram has previously offered Spotlight Collections that assemble multiple videos into a non-stop viewing experience This new information from TechCrunch’s sources comes after a brief initial report by yesterday that Instagram was talking to content publishers about a vertical video feature. The WSJ’s article focused on the ability for average users to post up to hour-long clips, but the real story here is Instagram launching a professionally produced video entertainment hub. Instagram declined our request for comment. It’s unclear what the new video feature will be named, or where it will appear. It could possibly live in the Explore tab, get its own tab or even be spun out into a separate app. Our sources didn’t know how the videos would work with the main Instagram feed, where they could appear full-length or show up as previews to alert a publisher’s fans to their newest long-form clip. The announcement date or feature details could still potentially change. Facebook’s Watch section of long-form video hasn’t proven popular Facebook hasn’t had much luck with its own original long-form video section it launched in August 2017, . Mediocre, unscripted reality shows and documentary clips haven’t proven a draw for the social network, which is now expanding into and . Instagram may prove a more natural home for lean-back entertainment content. The Instagram long-form video section will be Facebook’s answer to two competing social video destinations it’s yet to successfully clone. Snapchat’s Discover section offers exclusive, professionally produced vertical video shows from an array of publishers as an alternative to shaky user-generated Stories. But with sagging endangering viewership, that buries Discover and a to stop paying Discover publishers up front, Instagram and its massive user count may be able to seduce publishers to bring longer videos to its app instead. YouTube is the stronger foe. Its ad revenue sharing agreements and massive engagement have made it the go-to platform for video makers. Still, creators are always looking to build their fan bases, earn more money and promote their other online presences. Instagram’s wildfire growth and the familiarity of following people there could make the long-form video section worth embracing. The feature has big potential as long as it’s not too interruptive of people’s entrenched feed-scrolling and Story-tapping behavior patterns. Instagram will also have to convince creators to shoot their content vertically or find ways to gracefully crop it, and some may be apprehensive if they typically shoot in landscape for traditional video players. The Facebook family of apps might never be able to match the breadth and depth of YouTube’s video catalog. But Instagram has an opportunity here to skim the best content off the top of the sprawling creator/publisher ecosystem and curate it coherently for casual audiences. That could get us spending more time with Instagram, even if our friends are boring. |
null | Sarah Perez | 2,018 | 6 | 1 | null |
Cambridge Analytica’s Nix said it licensed ‘millions of data points’ from Acxiom, Experian, Infogroup to target US voters | Natasha Lomas | 2,018 | 6 | 6 | The repeat grilling by the U.K. parliament’s today of Alexander Nix, the of the now — aka the controversial political and commercial ad agency at the center of a Facebook data misuse scandal — was not able to shed much new light on what may or may not have been going on inside the company. But one nugget of information Nix let slip were the names of specific data aggregators he said Cambridge Analytica had bought “consumer and lifestyle” information on U.S. voters from, to link to voter registration data it also paid to acquire — apparently using that combined database to build models to target American voters in the 2016 presidential election, rather than using data improperly obtained from Facebook. This is more information than Cambridge Analytica has thus far disclosed to one U.S. voter, professor David Carroll, who in January last year lodged a subject access request with the U.K.-based company after learning it had processed his personal information — only to be fobbed off with a partial disclosure. Carroll persisted, and made a complaint to the U.K.’s data protection watchdog, and the ICO ordered Cambridge Analytica to provide him with all the data it held on him. The deadline for that . 14/ Section 7 DPA required disclosure of Axciom, Experian as data sources. SCL Election failed to disclose it. More evidence that my Subject Access Request was not adequate. This is the basis of my ICO complaint and high court claim. [break] — David Carroll 🦅 (@profcarroll) The committee questioned Nix closely over responses he had given it at his earlier appearance in February, when he denied that Cambridge Analytica used Facebook data as the foundational data set for its political ad targeting business. He had instead said that the work Dr. Aleksandr Kogan did for the company was “fruitless” and thus that the Facebook data Kogan had harvested and supplied to it had not been used. “It wasn’t the foundational data set on which we built our company,” said Nix today. “Because we went out and we licensed millions of data points on American individuals from very large reputable data aggregators and data vendors such as Acxiom, Experian, Infogroup. That was the cornerstone of our data base together with political data — voter file data, I beg your pardon — which again is commercially available in the United States. That was the cornerstone of our company and on which we continued to build the company after we realized that the GSR data was fruitless.” “The data that Dr. Kogan gave to us was modeled data and building a model on top of a model proved to be less statistically accurate… than actually just using Facebook’s own algorithms for placing advertising communications. And that was what we found out,” he added. “So I stand by that statement that I made to you before — and that was echoed and amplified in much more technical detail by Dr. Kogan.” And Kogan did indeed play down the utility of the work he did for Cambridge Analytica — when he appeared before the committee back in April. Asked about the exact type of data Cambridge Analytica/SCL acquired and processed from data brokers, Nix told the committee: “This is largely — largely — consumer and lifestyle data. So this is data on, for instance, loyalty card data, transaction data, this is data that pertains to lifestyle choices, such as what car you drive or what magazines you read. It could be data on consumer habits. And together with some demographic and geographic data — and obviously the voter data, which is very important for U.S. politics.” We’ve asked the three data brokers named by Nix to confirm Cambridge Analytica was a client of theirs, and the types of data it licensed from them, and will update this report with any response. What was most notable on this, Nix’s second appearance in front of the DCMS committee — which is investigating the role and impact of fake news/online disinformation on the political process — were his attempts to shift the spotlight via a string of defiant denials that there was much of a scandal to see here. He followed a Trumpian strategy of trying to cast himself (and his former company) as victims — framing the story as a liberal media conspiracy and claiming no evidence of wrongdoing or unethical behavior had been produced. Cambridge Analytica whistleblower Chris Wylie, who Nix had almost certainly caught sight of , was described as a “bitter and jealous” individual who had acted out of resentment and spite on account of the company’s success. Though the committee pushed back against that characterization, pointing out that Wylie has provided ample documents backing up , and that it has also taken evidence from multiple sources — from one former employee. Nix did not dispute that the Facebook data-harvesting element of the scandal had been a “debacle,” as he put it. Though he reiterated that it was ever the recipient of the full data set Kogan acquired from Facebook — which Facebook confirmed in April consisted of information on — saying it “only received data on about 26 million-27 million individuals in the USA.” He also admitted to personally being “foolish” in what he had been — when he had appeared to suggest Cambridge Analytica used tactics such as honeytraps and infiltration to gain leverage against clients’ political opponents (comments that got him suspended as CEO), saying he had only been talking in hypotheticals in his “overzealousness to secure a contract” — and once again painting himself as the victim of the “skillful manipulation of a journalist.” He also claimed the broadcaster had taken his remarks out of context, claiming too that they had heavily edited the footage to make it look worse (a claim Channel 4 phoned in to the committee to “heavily” refute during the session). But those sole apologetic notes did not raise the tone of profound indignation Nix struck throughout almost the entire session. He came across as poised and well-versed in his channeled outrage. Though he has of course had plenty of time since his earlier appearance — when the story had not yet become a major scandal — to construct a version of events that could best serve to set the dial to maximum outrage. Nix also shut down several lines of the committee’s questions, refusing to answer whether Cambridge Analytica/SCL had gone on to repeat the Facebook data-harvesting method at the heart of the scandal themselves, for example. Nor would he disclose who the owners and shareholders of Cambridge Analytica and SCL Group are — claiming in both cases that ongoing investigations prevented him from doing so. Though, in the case of the Information Commission’s Office’s ongoing investigation into social media analytics and political campaigning — which resulted in the watchdog raiding the offices of Cambridge Analytica in — committee chair Damian Collins made a point of stating the ICO had assured it it has no objection to Nix answering its questions. Nonetheless Nix declined. He also refused to comment on fresh allegations printed in the suggesting he had personally withdrawn $8 million from Cambridge Analytica before the company collapsed into administration. Some answers were forthcoming when the committee pressed him on whether Aggregate IQ, a Canadian data company that has been linked to Cambridge Analytica, and which Nix described today as a “subcontractor” for certain pieces of work, had ever had access to raw data or modeled data that Cambridge Analytica held. The committee’s likely interest in pursing that line of questioning was to try to determine whether AIQ could have gained access to the cache of Facebook user data that found its way (via Kogan) to Cambridge Analytica — and thus whether it could have used it for its own political ad targeting purposes. AIQ received in the run up to the U.K.’s 2016 EU referendum campaign, and has been described by leave campaigners as instrumental in securing their win, though exactly where it obtained data for targeting referendum ads has been a key question for the enquiry. On this Nix said: “It wouldn’t be unusual for AIQ or Cambridge Analytica to work on a client’s data sets… And to have access to the data whilst we were working on them. But that didn’t entitle us to have any privileges over that data or any wherewithal to make a copy or retain any of that data ourselves. “The relationship with AIQ would not have been dissimilar to that — as a subcontractor who was brought in to assist us on projects, they would have had, possibly, access to some of the data… whether that was modeled data or otherwise. But again that would be covered by the contract relationship that we have with them.” Though he also said he couldn’t give a concrete answer on whether or not AIQ had had access to any raw data, adding: “I did speak to my data team prior to this hearing and they assured me there was no raw data that went into the Rippon platform [voter engagement platform AIQ built for Cambridge Analytica]. I can only defer to their expertise.” Alexander Nix just stated in live testimony that what I found was not raw voter data. Here's the truth: I purposely refrained from accessing the raw databases. I found the usernames, passwords, and network locations. All out in the open. — Chris Vickery (@VickerySec) Also on this, in to the committee Facebook said it did not believe AIQ had used the Facebook user data obtained via Kogan’s apps for targeting referendum ads because the company had used email address uploads to Facebook’s ad platform for targeting “many” of its ads during the referendum — and it said Kogan’s app had not gathered the email addresses of app installers or their friends. (And in its to the committee, AIQ’s COO Jeff Silvester also claimed: “The only personal information we use in our work is that which is provided to us by our clients for specific purposes. In doing so, we believe we comply with all applicable privacy laws in each jurisdiction where we work.”) Today Nix flat denied that Cambridge Analytica had played any role in the U.K.’s referendum campaign, despite the fact it was already known to have done some “scoping work” for UKIP, and which it did invoice the company for (but claims not to have been paid). Work which Nix did not deny had taken place but which he downplayed. “We undertook some scoping work to look at these data. Unfortunately, whilst this work was being undertaken, we did not agree on the terms of a contract, as a consequence the deliverables from this work were not handed over, and the invoice was not paid. And therefore the Electoral Commission was absolutely satisfied that we did not do any work for Leave.EU and that includes for UKIP,” he said. “At times we undertake eight, nine, 10 national elections a year somewhere around the world. We’ve never undertaken an election in the U.K. so I stand by my statement that the U.K. was not a target country of interest to us. Obviously the referendum was a unique moment in international campaigning and for that reason it was more significant than perhaps other opportunities to work on political campaigns might have been which was why we explored it. But we didn’t work on that campaign either.” In a less comfortable moment for Nix, committee member Christian Matheson referred to a Cambridge Analytica document that the committee had obtained — described as a “digital overview” — and which listed “denial of service attacks” among the “digital interventions” apparently being offered by it as services. Did you ever undertake any denial of service attacks, Nix was asked? “So this was a company that we looked at forming, and we never formed. And that company never undertook any work whatsoever,” he responded. “In answer to your question, no we didn’t.” Why did you consider it, wondered Matheson? “Uh, at the time we were looking at, uh, different technologies, expanding into different technological areas and, uh, this seemed like, uh, an interesting, uh, uh, business, but we didn’t have the capability was probably the truth to be able to deliver meaningfully in this business,” said Nix. “So.” Matheson: “Was it illegal at that time?” Nix: “I really don’t know. I can’t speak to technology like that.” Matheson: “Right. Because it’s illegal now.” Nix: “Right. I don’t know. It’s not something that we ever built. It’s not something that we ever undertook. Uh, it’s a company that was never realized.” Matheson: “The only reason I ask is because it would give me concern that you have the to undertake activities which are, perhaps, outside the law. But if you never went ahead and did it, fair enough.” Another moment of discomfort for Nix was when the committee pressed him about money transfers between Cambridge Analytica/SCL’s various entities in the U.S. and U.K. — pointing out that if funds were being shifted across the Atlantic for political work and not being declared that could be legally problematic. Though he fended this off by declining to answer — again citing ongoing investigations. He was also asked where the various people had been based when Cambridge Analytica had been doing work for U.S. campaigns and processing U.S. voters’ data — with Collins pointing out that if that had been taking place outside the U.S. it could be illegal under U.S. law. But again he declined to answer. “I’d love to explain this to you. But this again touches on some of these investigations — I simply can’t do that,” he said. |
Synack is the latest cybersecurity company to offer state elections its services for free | Taylor Hatmaker | 2,018 | 6 | 6 | The cybersecurity firm Synack will offer its penetration testing services to states for free in an effort to for the 2018 midterms. , founded by two former NSA analysts, is best known for its bug bounty program that allows its carefully curated stable of researchers to probe a client’s systems for vulnerabilities. The researchers then disclose those soft spots through Synack’s platform. The company’s offerings are already tuned to the needs of sensitive government clients, and Synack has worked with IRS and the Department of Defense through its “Hack the Pentagon” bug bounty program. States wary of bug bounties should have some peace of mind knowing that Synack emphasizes the intense vetting and low acceptance rate of its research team. From now until November 6, Synack will offer free penetration testing for voter registration sites and voter databases through its . The offer’s fine print: Each eligible recipient will be limited to one (1) free 14-day Synack Crowdsourced Vulnerability Discovery Test of an online voter registration website or remotely-accessible database that is expected to be used in the November 2018 mid-term election. It’s possible that states wary of the federal government’s involvement in state and local elections will be less skittish of help coming from the private sector. The Department of Homeland security , but federal resources, including cybersecurity audits, remain opt-in. Synack isn’t the only security company talking to states about securing elections. In late 2017, Cloudflare announced that it would extend it DDoS protection for free to states for their voter databases, voter registration sites and election result sites through what it calls “ .” In April, enterprise security firm Centrify offered states its services at a discount in a similar “ ” program. “Synack’s pro bono service looks for vulnerabilities in remotely-accessible voter registration databases and online voter registration websites from a hacker’s perspective,” the company said in a press release. “Synack’s crowd of researchers discovers vulnerabilities left undetected by other solutions and then helps to remediate them before an adversary can exploit them on election day.” |
Apple Design Award winner Florence breaks new ground in mobile gaming | Sarah Perez | 2,018 | 6 | 6 | Designer Ken Wong’s app isn’t exactly a game. Or a comic. It’s a little bit of both — a new experience in storytelling using a mobile device. The app — or game, if you prefer — comes from the mind of Ken Wong, best known before Florence’s release as Monument Valley’s designer — another app which broke new ground in mobile gaming by creating a visually stunning world that ended up winning the title of Apple’s Game of the Year in 2014, as well an Apple Design Award. Now Wong has won for his work again on his first venture post-Monument Valley with an Apple Design Award for Florence. We sat down with the designer on the sidelines of Apple’s Worldwide Developer Conference in San Jose this week to talk about how Florence came to be, and what Wong has planned next. Wong had left (Monument Valley’s publisher) before its sequel, Monument Valley II, because he wanted to try something new. “I kind of said what I wanted to. The best thing for Monument Valley would be to have other people take over and expression their vision for it,” he says. Wong moved back to his home country, Australia, from London, to Melbourne, where there’s a thriving indie gaming scene, to launch his new company Mountains. The team at Mountains is small — just a programmer, producer and artist in addition to Wong. The company partnered with Annapurna, a film studio behind hits like “Her” and “Zero Dark Thirty,” that now . The studio backed Mountains on the Florence project, but also gave the team advice and input along the way. As part of this arrangement, Annapurna shares in Florence’s revenue. (Florence sells for $2.99.) Unlike traditional games, you don’t play the “game” Florence with a goal of getting a high score or achieving goals of some kind. Instead, you where a young woman, Florence, meets someone, falls in love and has a relationship. You live through it with her, dealing with everything from parental pressure over her single status, to then first dates and moving in together. Music is a key part of the experience, and helps the game invoke an emotional response. When the relationship ends, you’ve been invested in this story and characters, and probably will feel sad. That’s the point, says Wong. “A lot of people think of games as things you can win — things that involve luck or skill. in video games — or, largely, the digital interactive space — there’s so much that you can do,” he says. “It seems like we’re surrounded by stories of love and romance and relationships…but it felt like that was a blind spot for mobile games. We wanted to tap into that and see how far we could take a romance game on mobile,” Wong explains. Wong says he was inspired by stories from friends, as well as his own personal experience, when building Florence, as well as movies about relationships like “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind,” and “500 Days of Summer.” Like those, Florence is also a portrait of a relationship that’s both light and dark, both joyful and painful. “It’s my job to provide stimulating material. I just want to move people. And I think moving people in itself can be a goal. What they take out of it is really up to the individual,” he says. Now that Florence is out there, on both iOS and Android, Wong says he hopes it will inspire other developers to take what the team introduced in terms of the app’s interface design, and use that to tell their own stories. As for Mountains, however, the team is now considering what stories they want to tell next. They’re not announcing the details of those discussions, but they have some ideas around telling other types of stories that aren’t represented today through mobile gaming. We might not see those come to life for some time — it took Florence 15 months to go from idea to launch, and the next title will likely take just as long. But Wong knows what kind of stories they probably won’t do, he says. “There are so many other studios out there exploring your traditional power fantasies, like combat and fighting and such,” he says. “I think where we can really contribute is telling stories that are less explored — human experiences that have to do with family or identity. I think that’s who we are.” |
Valve says removing controversial games from Steam is hard so it’s not going to | Lucas Matney | 2,018 | 6 | 6 | Internet platforms removing objectionable content from their sites has been one of the more difficult challenges for tech companies in recent years. Valve has also determined that it’s a pretty difficult challenge in their Steam gaming store, but unlike some of the other major platforms on the web, they’ve decided they’re not going to do anything unless the content is actually illegal or, as they put it, “straight up trolling.” The company has also asserted that “the games we allow onto the Store will not be a reflection of Valve’s values…” Here’s exactly what else Valve employee Erik Johnson said in a company blog post, which you should read in full : Valve shouldn’t be the ones deciding this. If you’re a player, we shouldn’t be choosing for you what content you can or can’t buy. If you’re a developer, we shouldn’t be choosing what content you’re allowed to create. Those choices should be yours to make. Our role should be to provide systems and tools to support your efforts to make these choices for yourself, and to help you do it in a way that makes you feel comfortable. This post is largely in response to the company’s actions regarding a school shooting simulator (pictured above) that caused the ire of many. Valve removed the title from the store, but it did so because the creator was previously banned and was a “troll.” There are certainly plenty of those in the gaming community who would hold tightly to the idea that people will buy what they want to and Valve shouldn’t decide which content makes it onto their PC. Honestly, that could be a pretty ideologically defensible position if you didn’t think about the money changing hands here. The problem is Valve takes a pretty big cut of the revenue from titles sold through the store, so when it says that it doesn’t agree with content, that doesn’t mean that it doesn’t want the money it makes from it. If Valve wants to find objectionable content and then forego their cut while keeping the games available for download that’s one thing, and they can probably stick by the words in their blog post a bit more as a result. Finding the line in terms of what is okay and what isn’t in gaming is admittedly painfully difficult. You can kill cops and mow down pedestrians in Grand Theft Auto V, which has brought in billions of dollars in revenue single-handedly, but ultimately I think its maker, Rockstar Games, would at least say that they can stand by their game. If Valve isn’t willing to stand by the games they sell as part of their “values,” do they even have values as a company that… sells games? YouTube is having what seems to border on an existential crisis right now as they have to decide how to monetize videos on their site that contain “objectionable content.” Valve can hide from this kind of a crisis, but they can’t avoid it. Ad-supported models tend to obscure the money exchanging hands, but when someone buys a game on Steam, money goes directly to Valve as an effect. Valve can ultimately do what it wants here; they can decide that they want to allow ugly content on their store or not, but they can’t act like Steam is just some giant bucket inside of which games just sit. Valve is a multi-billion-dollar business that inhales revenues from every paid title it sells. Free expression on the web is an awesome thing, even if it seems to suck sometimes, but stores should be responsible for the items they stock on their shelves. |
Parrot responds to the Mavic Air with its own folding drone | Brian Heater | 2,018 | 6 | 6 | null |
CTRL+T podcast: That time we talked about Apple, Kanye West and slavery | Henry Pickavet | 2,018 | 6 | 6 | Welcome back to CTRL+T, the TechCrunch podcast where Megan Rose Dickey and I talk about the stories we want to talk about and figure out what they mean in relation to life. This week is Apple’s big developer conference, creatively called Worldwide Developers Conference (or WWDC), and . Each year the company showcases the things developers will be able to do in upcoming versions of Apple’s various operating systems (iOS, macOS, tvOS and watchOS). While there were a bunch of features that didn’t really elicit much excitement from either of us, there was one in particular that we are quite looking forward to: Memoji. We talk about it all and what messaging in general means out there in that big bad world of ours. Also this week, Kanye West made his latest , , available on platforms other than Tidal, which is a departure from what he did for the release of his 2016 release, . We talked about that for a second. Because these days you can’t have a conversation about the rapper without getting into his recent comments about American slavery having been a choice. So we did that. Click play on the little player below or, better yet, subscribe on , , , or whatever other podcast platform you can find. |
Facebook finally monetizes Marketplace with ads from users and brands | Josh Constine | 2,018 | 6 | 6 | launching its , and relentlessly promoting it with placement in the main navigation bar, Facebook will start earning money off its classifieds section. Facebook today begins testing Marketplace ads in the U.S. that let average users pay to “Boost” their listing to more people through the News Feed. While they’re easy for novices, requiring buyers to only set a budget and how long the ads will run, there are no additional targeting options beyond being shown to age 18+ users in nearby ZIP codes. Meanwhile, yesterday that it’s launching product ads from businesses that appear within Marketplace. After quietly opening in the U.S. in January and testing in Canada in May, Marketplace ads are now official, and can be bought in those two countries plus New Zealand and Australia. Businesses can extend their existing News Feed, video, Instagram, Messenger and other ad campaigns to Marketplace, and more types of objective-based campaigns will open to the classifieds section soon. Facebook lets brands show ads within Marketplace The Boost ads could be a big help if you need to rapidly liquidate your furniture before moving out, or if you’re trying to sell something big at a high price, like Marketplace’s new , , and . Yet they seem inefficient, since the lack of targeting means your listing for men’s jewelry might show up to women, or your rock climbing gear ads could show up to senior citizens. Facebook’s new Boost ads let average users pay to show their Marketplace listings to more people But Facebook does tell me that ads will be auto-optimized for clicks, so when people start to click your ads, Facebook will show them to people of similar demographics. It will also immediately pause your ad campaign if you mark your item as sold. Boost ads get entered in alongside traditional bids in Facebook’s auction system, which then display what it predicts will be the most appealing ads. “Many Marketplace sellers have told us that they want the ability to show a listing to more people in their local area, especially if they’re trying to sell it quickly,” Facebook product manager Harshit Agarwal tells TechCrunch. “We’re starting to test a simple way for sellers to boost their listings and help them find a buyer.” For comparison, Craigslist doesn’t run any ads, but charges sellers $5 to $10 for certain product listings for cars and brokered apartments. One interesting quirk is that Facebook says it won’t allow boosting of listings of political products such as a Bernie Sanders for President t-shirt, as its political advertiser verification and labeling system only works with Pages and not individuals right now. The Boost ads will only appear to a small percentage of U.S. users and Facebook says it’s too early to know if it will roll them out further. But as the company seems bent on swallowing up every other essential part of the internet, anything that makes Marketplace more useful to sellers and lucrative for the tech giant seems like a good bet for an official launch. Together, the two formats could unlock new revenue streams for Facebook at a time when it’s starting to run out of ad inventory in the News Feed. The company either needs to open new surfaces like Marketplace to ads, or get people and businesses to pay more to fill its dwindling feed space if it wants to keep Wall Street happy. |
Hackers, sign up for Disrupt SF Virtual Hackathon today | Emma Comeau | 2,018 | 6 | 6 | Calling all creative hackers, coders and programmers around the world. We’ve cooked up a special Virtual Hackathon to celebrate — our biggest Disrupt event ever. Think of it as a Hackathon without borders. Teams from across the globe can submit their most impressive hacks. , and start creating today. In previous Disrupt Hackathons, teams had only 24 hours to work their magic. But when you call for thousands of worldwide competitors to join the fun, well, you gotta give them a bit more time. That’s why we’re launching today — plenty of time to form your team, come up with an idea and get your hack on in the run-up to , which takes place on September 5-7. Here’s how the works. Our expert judges will review, evaluate and score every eligible submitted hack. The 70 highest-scoring teams will receive 5 to TechCrunch Disrupt SF 2018. From that group, the top 30 teams will exhibit their hacks in our Hackathon Demo area at Disrupt SF to over 10,000 attendees and a separate panel of judges who will determine the 10 teams that get to demo their creation on The Next Stage. Out of those 10, the judges will choose one winner to be our very first Virtual Hackathon Champion. Oh, yeah — the winner gets the $10,000 cash prize. Now a , virtual or otherwise, wouldn’t be a Hackathon without lots of very real sponsored prizes, cash and swag. You won’t be disappointed on that front, trust us. We have some great prizes from TomTom, BYTON and Viond on tap so far, and many more to be announced in the coming weeks. Need more inspiration? Disrupt Hackathons have resulted in some pretty sweet hacks. Just take a look at the range of products the grand-prize winners of Hackathons-past created: They created these awesome hacks in a mere 24 hours. Now just imagine what thousands of tech coders, creators, hackers and programmers from around the world can create between now and when Disrupt SF ’18 kicks off on September 5. The mind boggles. takes place September 5-7. The Virtual Hackathon starts now. Do you have the raw tech talent and creativity to win it all? There’s only one way to find out. |
Bumble CEO Whitney Wolfe Herd is coming to Disrupt SF | Jordan Crook | 2,018 | 6 | 6 | Bumble founder and CEO Whitney Wolfe Herd has always done things her own way. Whether it’s standing up for her political beliefs, building a company with fully outsourced engineers or avoiding the usual startup fundraising runaround, Wolfe Herd . Which is why we’re super excited to announce that Whitney Wolfe Herd will join us at TC Disrupt SF 2018. Wolfe Herd first came on the scene as a co-founder and VP of Marketing at Tinder, where she helped grow the dating app into one of the world’s biggest dating platforms. But after , which was settled out of court, Wolfe Herd left the company to build an app focused on compliments and positive affirmations. Originally, she wanted nothing to do with the dating space. But after meeting Andrey Adreev, Badoo founder and Bumble’s majority stakeholder, she realized that giving women a voice in digital dating could be revolutionary. And so, . The app has grown to 30 million users, and continues to grow in popularity based on a simple premise: women make the first move. But Wolfe Herd’s ambitions don’t stop at dating. The 28-year-old founder has , letting users find friends and make professional connections via Bumble. And all the while, Bumble’s cap table has never changed, with Wolfe Herd’s 20 percent stake as yet undiluted. Wolfe Herd was named one of , and has herself become a brand that represents authenticity and self-empowerment. We can’t wait to talk to Wolfe Herd at Disrupt SF 2018. You can buy tickets to the show . |
Android P Beta 2 brings updated system images and 157 new emojis | Brian Heater | 2,018 | 6 | 6 | null |
Sonos announces the $399 Beam, a cheaper home theater smart speaker | Lucas Matney | 2,018 | 6 | 6 | Today, at a special event in San Francisco, Sonos announced a compact home theater smart speaker, the Sonos Beam. The cheaper $399 device boasts a much smaller footprint than its previous home theater products; the company says Beam is 60 percent smaller and 28 percent shorter than the Playbase. The speaker is available for pre-order starting today. The company’s new home theater product will support Amazon Alexa controls at launch, alongside Airplay 2 connectivity, which will arrive in July. The product will be set up to gain support from other voice assistants in the future, the company says. You’ll be able to perform tasks like turning on the TV and changing the device’s volume; with FireTV support you’ll be able to query Alexa to direct you to specific movies and shows. “We believe that people want a better way to listen,” said CEO Patrick Spence onstage at the event. The product launch is an important one for Sonos, which is still seeking to expand its footprint in home audio products. In April, The reported that Sonos had filed confidentially for an IPO that could take place as early as this summer. While the Santa Barbara company was the incumbent disruptor of the stodgy whole-room audio systems of the past, deep-pocketed tech giants like Google and Apple have invested heavily in audio streaming hardware and APIs. Sonos has found itself having to compete in a home audio market that is increasingly becoming more about the embedded AI tech of virtual assistants. Apple’s $349 HomePod is just the latest competitor to prioritize more intelligent music playback; meanwhile there are dozens of speakers with Amazon’s Alexa and the Google Assistant. Last year, Sonos to its new product, its Sonos One speaker, which is also set to pick up support in July for Apple’s new Airplay 2 alongside the Playbase, Play:5 and the new Beam. |
Facebook is funding news programs from CNN, Fox News, Univision and others | Anthony Ha | 2,018 | 6 | 6 | Facebook has unveiled its initial lineup of news programming that will be airing in , the original video content initiative . While these shows are being produced by outside media organizations, it’s actually Facebook that’s funding them. In , Head of News Partnerships Campbell Brown described this as an extension of the company’s announcement in January that it would . While that decision , Brown echoes CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s rationale for the move, saying that while there will be less news in users’ feeds, what remains should be “trustworthy, informative, and local.” Here’s how Brown describes the news initiative: The shows include: |
Four years after its release, Kubernetes has come a long way | Ron Miller | 2,018 | 6 | 6 | On June 6th, 2014 Kubernetes was released for the first time. At the time, nobody could have predicted that 4 years later that the project would become a de facto standard for container orchestration or that the biggest tech companies in the world would be backing it. That would come later. If you think back to June 2014, containerization was just beginning to take off thanks to Docker, which was popularizing the concept with developers, but being so early there was no standard way to manage those containers. Google had been using containers as a way to deliver applications for years and ran a tool called Borg to handle orchestration. It’s called an orchestrator because much like a conductor of an orchestra, it decides when a container is launched and when it shuts down once it’s completed its job. At the time, two Google engineers, Craig McLuckie and Joe Beda, who would later go on to start , were looking at developing an orchestration tool like Borg for companies that might not have the depth of engineering talent of Google to make it work. They wanted to spread this idea of how they develop distributed applications to other developers. Before that first version hit the streets, what would become Kubernetes developed out of a need for an orchestration layer that Beda and McLuckie had been considering for a long time. They were both involved in bringing Google Compute Engine, Google’s Infrastructure as a Service offering, to market, but they felt like there was something missing in the tooling that would fill in the gaps between infrastructure and platform service offerings. “We had long thought about trying to find a way to bring a sort of a more progressive orchestrated way of running applications in production. Just based on our own experiences with Google Compute Engine, we got to see firsthand some of the challenges that the enterprise faced in moving workloads to the cloud,” McLuckie explained. He said that they also understood some of the limitations associated with virtual machine-based workloads and they were thinking about tooling to help with all of that. “And so we came up the idea to start a new project, which ultimately became Kubernetes.” When Google began developing Kubernetes in March 2014, it wanted nothing less than to bring container orchestration to the masses. It was a big goal and McLuckie, Beda and teammate Brendan Burns believed the only way to get there was to open source the technology and build a community around it. As it turns out, they were spot on with that assessment, but couldn’t have been 100 percent certain at the time. Nobody could have. Photo: Cloud Native Computing Foudation “If you look at the history, we made the decision to open source Kubernetes and make it a community-oriented project much sooner than conventional wisdom would dictate and focus on really building a community in an open and engaged fashion. And that really paid dividends as Kubernetes has accelerated and effectively become the standard for container orchestration,” McLuckie said. The next thing they did was to create the as an umbrella organization for the project. If you think about it, this project could have gone in several directions, as current CNCF director Dan Kohn described in a recent interview. Kohn said Kubernetes was unique in a couple of ways. First of all, it was based on existing technology developed over many years at Google. “Even though Kubernetes code was new, the concepts and engineering and know-how behind it was based on 15 years at Google building Borg (And a Borg replacement called Omega that failed),” Kohn said. The other thing was that Kubernetes was designed from the beginning to be open sourced. Photo: Swapnil Bhartiya on Flickr. Used under CC by SA 2.0 license He pointed out that Google could have gone in a few directions with Kubernetes. It could have created a commercial product and sold it through Google Cloud. It could have open sourced it, but had a strong central lead as they did with Go. They could have gone to the Linux Foundation and said they wanted to create a stand-alone Kubernetes Foundation. But they didn’t do any of these things. McLuckie says they decided to do something entirely different and place it under the auspices of the Linux Foundation, but not as Kubernetes project. Instead they wanted to create a new framework for cloud native computing itself and the CNCF was born. “The CNCF is a really important staging ground, not just for Kubernetes, but for the technologies that needed to come together to really complete the narrative, to make Kubernetes a much more comprehensive framework,” McLuckie explained. Over the last few years, we have watched as Kubernetes has grown into a container orchestration standard. Last summer in quick succession as , , , all joined. They came together with Red Hat, Intel, IBM Cisco and others who were already members. Cloud Native Computing Foundation Platinum members Each these players no doubt wanted to control the orchestration layer, but they saw Kubernetes gaining momentum so rapidly, they had little choice but to go along. Kohn jokes that having all these big name players on board is like herding cats, but bringing in them in has been the goal all along. He said it just happened much faster than he thought it would. In , David Aronchick, who runs the open source Kubeflow Kubernetes machine learning project at Google, was running Kubernetes in the early days. He is shocked by how quickly it has grown. “I couldn’t have predicted it would be like this. I joined in January, 2015 and took on project management for Google Kubernetes. I was stunned at the pent up demand for this kind of thing,” he told TechCrunch. As it has grown, it has become readily apparent that McLuckie was right about building that cloud native framework instead of a stand-alone Kubernetes foundation. Today there are and the organization is thriving. Nobody is more blown away by this than McLuckie himself who says seeing Kubernetes hit these various milestones since its initial release has been amazing for him and his team to watch. “It’s just been a series of these wonderful kind of moments as Kubernetes has gained a head of steam, and it’s been so much fun to see the community really rally around it.” |
Tencent becomes a Linux Foundation platinum member to increase its focus on open source | Jon Russell | 2,018 | 6 | 24 | Tencent, , is increasing its focus on open source after it . The company has long been associated with the foundation and Linux generally, it is a founding member of , and now as a platinum member (the highest tier) it will take a board of directors seat and work more closely with the organization. That works two ways, with Tencent pledging to offer “further support and resources” to foundation projects and communities, while the Chinese firm itself will also tap into the foundation’s expertise and experience. Along those lines, the company said it will contribute its open source microservices project called TARS and an open source name service project (Tseer) to The Linux Foundation. It added that an open source AI project — Angel — will be contributed to the deep learning foundation. “We are honored to be a Platinum member of The Linux Foundation. Open source is core Tencent’s technical strategy,” Liu Xin, general manager of Tencent’s Mobile Internet Group said in a statement. Other platinum members include Cisco, Huawei, Microsoft, AT&T, Samsung and IBM. Earlier this year, Tencent joined another open source industry body — — as part of a push for open source in the hardware space. Tencent’s chief rival Alibaba also maintains a large presence in the open source community. , but more than that it has invested resources into projects directly as part of a push for its cloud computing service Alicloud. , which became its first cloud investment outside of China. At home, its Alicloud-focused deals have |
Meituan, the Tencent-backed ‘one-stop super app,’ files for IPO in Hong Kong | Catherine Shu | 2,018 | 6 | 24 | After , , the largest service booking app in China, confirmed that it has filed for a public offering. The company’s IPO application was earlier today and is being sponsored by Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley and Bank of America Merrill Lynch. A spokesperson for Meituan said the company is currently not disclosing information about fundraising amount or valuation. Reuters reports that Meituan . Meituan was created after Meituan and Dianping, two competitors in the group deals space, (it is still formally known was Meituan Dianping). Since then, the company has added more services to become China’s leader in O2O (online-to-offline), a catchphrase for goods and services that are purchased online, but bring people into brick and mortar businesses, like movie ticket bookings. One interesting aspect of the merger is that it brought together two archrivals, Alibaba and Tencent. Alibaba was one of Meituan’s investors, while Tencent backed Dianping. Since then, Alibaba to focus on Koubei, its own O2O app, while Tencent has maintained an investment relationship with the company. For example, it last October. Meituan initially focused on restaurant reservations and food delivery, before expanding into more local services to create what it describes as a “one-stop super app” that allows users to buy movie tickets, make spa and salon appointments, book transportation and hotel rooms, and even pay for bike-sharing program MoBike, which Meituan . The company says one advantage of its business model is customer conversion between verticals. For example, it claims over 80% of its new hotel booking consumers first began using the app for food delivery or restaurant reservations. In its announcement today, Meituan said it currently has 310 million transacting users and 4.4 million active merchants. Over the past three years, its revenue grew from 4 billion RMB in 2015, to 13 billion RMB in 2016, before hitting 33.9 billion RMB (about $5.2 billion) in 2017. Meanwhile, its gross transaction value went from 161 billion RMB in 2015 to 237 billion RMB in 2016, then 357 billion RMB (about $54.8 billion) in 2017. Meituan also said that it’s adjusted net loss dropped from 5.9 billion RMB in 2015 to 2.9 billion RMB (about $430 million) in 2017. |
oBike is closing its dock-less bike-sharing service in Singapore | Jon Russell | 2,018 | 6 | 24 | Singapore’s upcoming licensing for dock-less bike-sharing services has claimed its first scalp after — a Singapore-based company run by Chinese founders — announced that it would cease its service in the country ahead of the implementation of regulations. The Land Transport Authority (LTA) is introducing measures to protect Singapore’s streets from a glut of bicycles left all over the place, as photo essays from China and beyond have cautioned can happen. oBike launched its service at the beginning of 2017, and it claims over one million registered users but still it will end its service today, June 25. oBike said it will continue to run operations in other markets, although it hasn’t said if/when it will refund Singapore-based users with the deposits that they paid upon registration. “oBike strongly believes and is committed to provide [sic] dock-less bicycle sharing service that would benefit users’ commuting and Singapore’s transportation system, however it is with regret that the new regulation measures do not favour this belief of ours,” the company said in that posted to Facebook. This move comes weeks after following issues with regulation. oBike has directed its customers to the newly launched bike platform from ride-hailing giant Grab, . Other alternatives in Singapore also include services from Chinese duo Ofo and Mobike. Grab said today it has removed oBike from its list of service providers — its platform aggregates other services into a single place — and added new options. “As of today, oBikes will no longer be available on our platform. We understand this may impact your GrabCycle experience. Therefore, we will be waiving your active subscription fee, and refunding your deposit,
if any by 26th June. We will also add a complimentary 4-week GrabCycle subscription to your account to try our newest partner, Anywheel,” . Grab is actually an investor in oBike, , after taking part in its $45 million Series B round that was announced in August 2017. |
Fintech friends: Monzo partners with TransferWise for international payments | Steve O'Hear | 2,018 | 6 | 24 | “So what’s going on here then?” I ask. “Two good friends just got even better [friends],” replies co-founder Kristo Käärmann laughing, while co-founder Tom Blomfield, who is also on the video call, smiles approvingly. “Sorry for spoiling your news,” I tell the pair, who I’m interviewing ahead of an announcement today that the two companies are working together. The partnership, which , will see TransferWise power international payments for the U.K. challenger bank’s 750,000 customers. It is the second new bank partnership that TransferWise has unveiled this month, after the fintech unicorn announced that BPCE Groupe. TransferWise also powers international money transfer for Germany’s N26, and Estonia’s LHV. However, a previously announced partnership with the U.K.’s Starling Bank never materialised . Asked why Monzo has chosen to work with TransferWise, Blomfield reiterates the challenger bank’s goal of becoming a “hub or control centre” for your money. This won’t necessarily all be done by Monzo, he says, “but with partner organisations who plug into this hub”. TransferWise is the first of these. International payments has also been one of the most requested features by Monzo users since the challenger bank posted a roadmap of things it intends to “ ” over the next three months now that the switch from a pre-paid card to a full current account has been completed. “I’ve personally been a TransferWise customer for five or six years and the service is amazing,” says Blomfield. “Compared to my old bank, it’s really, really transparent, the fees are really fair, and they’re continually working on bringing fees down and to make transfers more instantaneous. So I can’t think of a better partner to do foreign transfers with than TransferWise”. I ask Käärmann how different the conversation is with a challenger bank like Monzo — which arguably has nothing to lose by partnering with TransferWise and will generate affiliate revenue on each transfer — compared with larger incumbent banks who have historically generated fat margins on foreign exchange fees. He says it is similar, and usually centres on the fact that customers are already using TransferWise and that if a bank wants to put those customers first it makes sense to offer TransferWise functionality within its own app. “When we announced the large French bank, which is clearly an incumbent — a massive incumbent — they were thinking about their customer,” he says. “That maybe does feel a little bit rare for banks to think this way, but they figured that ‘if we are going to do this, then why don’t we do it properly’. They were actually fully driven by their users and thinking about how to get the best user experience”. The TransferWise functionality will start rolling out to Monzo users as of today and will let them send money from their current account to 16 of the most popular currencies, with “more being added in the near future”. The user experience will be near-identical to TransferWise’s own app, and will see transfers happen at claimed ‘mid-market’ rates in addition to TransferWise’s low and transparent fee. This means you’re told upfront exactly how much you’ll pay in fees and the amount you’ll receive in the exchanged currency. The integration is pretty deep, too. Monzo customers who don’t have an existing TransferWise account will have an account automatically created for them when they first initiate an international money transfer. If they already have a TransferWise account, they can use their existing details to authenticate with and link their account to Monzo. This means that any international money transfers made from within Monzo will also show up in your TransferWise account and the TransferWise app. “One of the coolest things for us, other than just working with cool people, is there’s another bank in the U.K. who is transparent with their international fees,” says Käärmann. “We’re kind of getting to the place where once there is enough banks who are as transparent in their foreign fees as Monzo is then it becomes quite untenable for everyone else to keep hiding their fees and that’s very interesting. Not just for us as companies, but more generally in terms of how banking works”. One notable dynamic to TransferWise adding another bank partner is that the fintech giant recently launched a banking product of its own. Positioned as a companion to your existing bank account, lets you deposit, send and spend money in multiple currencies. Acting like a local country bank account, it is primarily designed to solve the specific problem of earning, receiving and spending money abroad and TransferWise says it is not intended to be a fully fledged bank replacement — at least not yet. “We’re pretty chilled about it,” says Blomfield when I ask him if TransferWise’s tentative entry into the bank account space was in any way a concern. “Honestly, we are not competing with TransferWise. Both of us are looking at the big high street banks, as either partners or competitors. Our customers come from Barclays, Lloyds, HSBC and RBS. I think anything that increases both of our brand awareness is a really positive thing. We have 750,000 customers, which is something like 2 percent of the adult population, we’re targeting the other 98 percent who are still using the big banks. I just think there is so much headroom in this space that it would be crazy to think that we are competing with each other”. “If we take a step back, what is the problem we are solving?” says Käärmann rhetorically. “The problem we are solving is that moving money across borders is expensive”. He then reiterates a point that TransferWise co-founder and Chairman Taavet Hinrikus has made often, which is that the company is entirely agnostic on how customers access the service. The more money moving via its infrastructure, the better, with economies of scale also meaning it has been able to lower fees on an increasing number of routes. “For us, it doesn’t really matter if the money is in a bank account that is connected directly to TransferWise or if it is in the Borderless account,” he says. “There’s really no difference, and I know the user experience is better today if you’re banking in the U.K. with Monzo, so that’s what users should do”. At this point I can’t resist mentioning Revolut, the digital bank startup that, on paper at least, competes with both TransferWise and Monzo. Revolut’s original “attack vector” (to borrow Blomfield’s phrase) was cheap foreign currency exchange coupled with a debit card for traveling. And although not yet a licensed bank, it has rolled out bank account features at a shockingly fast pace, putting it on feature parity with Monzo in a number of instances. Rightly or wrongly, I put it to Käärmann that there is a market perception that Revolut is often the cheapest option when spending or sending money abroad, even if questions remain about how it determines prices, especially at weekends, or if the startup actually makes money on foreign exchange at all. “When you talk about other people getting into that space, we should be happy if someone figures out how to do parts of it, some routes, better than us or faster than us or cheaper than us,” he says, somewhat diplomatically. “I wish these things were sustainable as well. We’re super anti-subsidising, just because we think that over the long-term it doesn’t make sense to get some users paying for other users’ transfers or for some routes to pay for other routes. Progress is going to be faster if it’s clean. But, at the end of the day, if there’s a better solution, we actually endeavour to recommend that better solution. It would be nice if that better solution was also transparent and we can confidently say that they’re not just better in the next 5 minutes but that they are going to be better for the next 5 hours when you can put in your transfer. It’s only fair to the consumers — they’re not stupid — that they should go wherever is cheapest, if they need that, or somewhere that is more convenient”. Cue Monzo’s Blomfield to caution me not to get too caught up in the London fintech echo chamber. “Most people in the U.K. have never heard of Monzo or Revolut or TransferWise,” he says, “and so our mission over the next five years is to take market share off all of the big banks, who I think are gouging their customers on things like foreign exchange. There’s so much open space in front of us because big banks just aren’t able to keep up”. |
Zcash: life on the crypto roller coaster | Jon Evans | 2,018 | 6 | 24 | Suppressed in Japan. Championed in New York. Accused of betraying the billion-dollar community he created with an arcane and byzantine ritual, while accidentally solving — maybe — a transnational clandestine mining mystery. All this while leading the rollout of some of the world’s most cutting-edge cryptographic technology into production. It’s been an interesting six months for , cryptographer, engineer, and CEO / driving force behind Zcash, one of the world’s most valuable, technically interesting, and politically fraught cryptocurrencies. Thoughtful, soft-spoken, quick to laugh, and eager to see all sides of every issue, he doesn’t seem like a man to inspire bans and rancor. But that’s the crypto world for you, these days. When it comes to Zcash, “crypto” means both “cryptocurrency” and “cryptography,” for once. It is essentially a fork of Bitcoin which uses a mindbending branch of mathematics known as “zero-knowledge proofs” (which I’ve been writing about …) implemented in a form known as “zk-SNARKs,” to allow users to preserve their privacy by concealing both the participants and the amount of any given transaction, even though it is recorded on and guaranteed by Zcash’s public blockchain. This privacy makes it a knee-jerk target of thoughtless governments and regulators, in the same way that cryptographic protection of your phone’s messages and data has become a knee-jerk target of law enforcement agencies who protest that they are “going dark.” Recently, in the wake of a of Japanese exchange Coincheck, which , Japan’s financial regulator on privacy-preserving cryptocurrencies … even though they were not what had been stolen. Zcash is not the only privacy-preserving cryptocurrency, of course; others include Monero and Dash. But it is the most cutting-edge. To an extent this has hampered it, as the first version of its zk-SNARK transactions were quite costly to process. Zcash has recently rolled out a new alpha version with , though — you don’t often see a 98% improvement in anything in engineering — and we can expect a steady rise in zk-SNARK transactions once this hits its mainnet. This vanguard position has not gone unnoticed. Ethereum made zk-SNARK primitives available to developers as last year, though they have not yet been widely used. to implement privacy technology in its own corporate blockchain research. Perhaps as a result of this, and/or a deeper understanding that privacy is in fact important to the financial industry, New York State’s Department of Financial Services recently named Zcash as on the heavily regulated Gemini exchange. Yes, even as it was being suppressed in Japan. We live in interesting times. Meanwhile, Zooko is being accused by his own community of turning turncoat. The reason? ASICs. To oversimpify: (Almost) every cryptocurrency is secured by “miners” who prove they have solved computationally intensive problems, in order to show it would be impossible for anyone to have overwritten the consensus record of transactions unless they control more than half of the network’s computing power. In exchange for this service they get shiny new cryptocoins. Bitcoin mining has long been taken over by mining companies / consortiums who use custom-built “application-specific integrated circuit,” chips to mine with hardware specifically dedicated to solving these problems, known as “hash functions,” with speed and energy efficiency that general-purpose processors cannot match. In an attempt to democratize mining, many third-wave cryptocurrencies chose hash functions which were thought to be ASIC-resistant. Zcash was among them. However, ASIC designers are smart people too, and have announced ASICs for essentially all cryptocurrencies. Interestingly, when an ASIC was announced for Monero, its developers promptly changed their hash function to foil the would-be miners … and their “hash rate” dropped by nearly 50%, indicating that someone had likely secretly been mining Monero with ASICs for some time. This is big business. Across all cryptocurrencies tens of millions of dollars a day are at stake, not even counting the costs of a so-called “51% attack” which have of late. So when ASICs for Zcash were announced, and Zooko did not immediately move to change the hash algorithm as Monero did, he was accused of betrayal, and of being in the pocket of Jihan Wu, CEO of the miner manufacturer and, if you believe the frothier corners of some cryptocurrency subreddits, all-around evil crypto boogeyman. Every tradeoff in a billion-dollar market is going to hurt someone. In this case, on the one hand, you’d want the stereotypical “Venezuelan with a GPU miner,” who’s providing for their family with Zcash, the opportunity to keep doing so; on the other, ASIC mining means more dedicated hardware keeping the entire Zcash network more secure. Onn the gripping hand, drastic changes in mining capacity raise the spectre of a 51% attack. Zooko’s current notion is to try to support both GPU and ASIC miners, by dividing the mining rewards between them. In passing he may have accidentally solved the secret Monero mining mystery. A fascinating thing about the cryptocurrency world, a way in which it’s increasingly a synecdoche for global geopolitics, is that it’s divided between a Chinese sphere and a Western sphere, and the two seem to be mostly tethered by bonds of mistrust, miscommunication, and misinterpretation. Zooko was less inclined to believe that Jihan Wu was a Bond villain, because, as he puts it, “I’ve met him, at a conference in Buenos Aires, and he just seemed like a nerd like the rest of us. And I like nerds!” So he decided to communicate; he called up Wu and asked him if he was responsible for the stealth mining, and found Wu’s denials convincing. Then he called up , the other main mining company, asked if they had a Monero mining farm going back to last year, and received the hilariously casual answer “Yeah, I think so?” None of this is at all dispositive, of course — but it speaks to how the crypto world often seems to run on rumor and rancor more than open communication. While we’re on the subject of conspiracy theories: perhaps the single most colorful thing about Zcash is that in order for its zk-SNARKs to work, they have to be by a group of participants who must construct and then discard secret information. If they don’t, and if they subsequently collaborated, they’d then have the ability to create free Zcash out of thin air. Zcash was initiated with a complex six-person ritual, and if any one of those people was honest then the Zcash network is free of this so-called “ ” taint … but obviously this still isn’t optimal, and is a breeding ground for beliefs of betrayal. However, this underpinning can be replaced. Zooko is looking into new cryptographic developments such as “STARKs” and “bulletproofs” which provide even stronger guarantees. He envisions a world of “non-custodial exchanges,” where people can trade cryptocurrencies without ever giving up control of them. He’s plotting to implement Ittay Eyal and Emin Gun Sirer’s “ ” protocol to scale Zcash up by an order or two of magnitude. Meanwhile, the Secret Service has called for like Monero and Zcash — after citing numerous cryptocurrency thefts which, er, were not of those currencies — and they’ve felt compelled to . All this a week before the developer conference he’s organized this week in Montreal … which will doubtless be attended by some people who consider him a sellout in the pocket of the evil Jihan Wu. I’ll say this for the cryptocurrency world: it’s rarely boring, and for better or worse, Zcash may well be its least boring front. |
Snag your super early-bird passes for Disrupt Berlin 2018 | Leslie Hitchcock | 2,018 | 6 | 24 | Der frühe vogel fängt den wurm! Yikes, if we’re trotting out our tortured German to say “the early bird catches the worm,” it can mean only one thing, folks. It’s time for all you European startup fans to go catch super early-bird tickets to TechCrunch on November 29-30. Our pricing tiers start at €595 + VAT. The value is real, and your time is limited, so go . Berlin’s the perfect city for a Disrupt event. It’s both affordable and an international hub — factors that have contributed to a vibrant and growing tech startup scene. Our Berlin Disrupt events have drawn participants from more than 50 countries across Europe, Asia and beyond. There’s no better place to introduce your pre-Series A startup to the international startup community. But not everyone who goes to Disrupt events goes to launch a business. Whether you’re a marketer, job seeker, founder or investor, you’ll find opportunity waiting for you in these two program-packed days. Take in , our premier startup pitch competition, to see which early-stage startup will reign supreme and take home the $50,000 grand prize. Spend time exploring and networking your way through Startup Alley. You’ll find hundreds of early-stage startups showcasing their best tech, products and platforms. It’s prime hunting ground for potential connections, clients and customers. If you’re a founder or an investor, be sure to take advantage of CrunchMatch. That’s our free, business match-making service that simplifies networking. It efficiently connects founders and investors with similar business interests and profiles. At Disrupt Berlin 2017, CrunchMatch generated a total of 888 meetings — and 97 percent of participants said they’d use the service again. That’s just a small sampling of what you can expect at Disrupt Berlin, and this is your opportunity to experience it at a great price. takes place on November 29-30, 2018 at the Arena Berlin. Check out our super early-bird pricing tiers, and buy your passes today. We can’t wait to see you in Berlin, ja voll! |
In Army of None, a field guide to the coming world of autonomous warfare | Danny Crichton | 2,018 | 6 | 23 | The Silicon Valley-military industrial complex is increasingly in the crosshairs of artificial intelligence engineers. A few weeks ago, Google was around Project Maven, which would use image recognition to automatically evaluate photos. Earlier this year, AI researchers around the world of any research that could be used in autonomous warfare. For Paul Scharre, though, such petitions barely touch the deep complexity, nuance, and ambiguity that will make evaluating autonomous weapons a major concern for defense planners this century. In , Scharre argues that the challenges around just the definitions of these machines will take enormous effort to work out between nations, let alone handling their effects. It’s a sobering, thoughtful, if at times protracted look at this critical topic. Scharre should know. A former Army Ranger, he joined the Pentagon working in the Office of Secretary of Defense, where he developed some of the Defense Department’s first policies around autonomy. Leaving in 2013, he joined the DC-based think tank Center for a New American Security, where he directs a center on technology and national security. In short, he has spent about a decade on this emerging tech, and his expertise clearly shows throughout the book. The first challenge that belies these petitions on autonomous weapons is that these systems already exist, and are already deployed in the field. Technologies like the Aegis Combat System, High-speed Anti-Radiation Missile (HARM), and the Harpy already include sophisticated autonomous features. As Scharre writes, “The human launching the Harpy decides to destroy enemy radars within a general area in space and time, but the Harpy itself chooses the specific radar it destroys.” The weapon can loiter for 2.5 hours while it determines a target with its sensors — is it autonomous? Scharre repeatedly uses the military’s OODA loop (for observe, orient, decide, and act) as a framework to determine the level of autonomy for a given machine. Humans can be “in the loop,” where they determine the actions of the machine, “on the loop” where they have control but the machine is mostly working independently, and “out of the loop” when machines are entirely independent of human decision-making. The framework helps clear some of the confusion between different systems, but it is not sufficient. When machines fight machines, for instance, the speed of the battle can become so great that humans may well do more harm then good intervening. Millions of cycles of the OODA loop could be processed by a drone before a human even registers what is happening on the battlefield. A human out of the loop, therefore, could well lead to safer outcomes. It’s exactly these kinds of paradoxes that make the subject so difficult to analyze. In addition to paradoxes, constraints are a huge theme in the book as well. Speed is one — and the price of military equipment is another. Dumb missiles are cheap, and adding automation has consistently added to the price of hardware. As Scharre notes, “Modern missiles can cost upwards of a million dollars apiece. As a practical matter, militaries will want to know that there is, in fact, a valid enemy target in the area before using an expensive weapon.” Another constraint is simply culture. The author writes, “There is intense cultural resistance within the U.S. military to handing over jobs to uninhabited systems.” Not unlike automation in the civilian workforce, people in power want to place flesh-and-blood humans in the most complex assignments. These constraints matter, because Scharre foresees a classic arms race around these weapons as dozens of countries pursue these machines. Humans “in the loop” may be the default today, but for how long? At a higher level, about a third of the book is devoted to the history of automation, (generalized) AI, and the potential for autonomy, topics which should be familiar to any regular reader of TechCrunch. Another third of the book or so is a meditation on the challenges of the technology from a dual use and strategic perspective, as well as the dubious path toward an international ban. Yet, what I found most valuable in the book was the chapter on ethics, lodged fairly late in the book’s narrative. Scharre does a superb job covering the ground of the various schools of thought around the ethics of autonomous warfare, and how they intersect and compete. He extensively analyzes and quotes Ron Arkin, a roboticist who has spent significant time thinking about autonomy in warfare. Arkin tells Scharre that “We put way too much faith in human warfighters,” and argues that autonomous weapons could theoretically be programmed never to commit a war crime unlike humans. Other activists, like Jody Williams, believe that only a comprehensive ban can ensure that such weapons are never developed in the first place. Scharre regrets that more of these conversations don’t take into account the strategic positions of the military. He notes that international discussions on bans are led by NGOs and not by nation states, whereas all examples of successful bans have been the other way around. Another challenge is simply that antiwar activism and anti-autonomous weapons activism are increasingly being conflated. Scharre writes, “One of the challenges in weighing the ethics of autonomous weapons is untangling which criticisms are about autonomous weapons and which are really about war.” Citing Sherman, who marched through the U.S. South in the Civil War in an aggressive pillage, the author reminds the reader that “war is hell,” and that militaries don’t choose weapons in a vacuum, but relatively against other tools in their and their competitors’ arsenals. The book is a compendium of the various issues around autonomous weapons, although it suffers a bit from the classic problem of being too lengthy on some subjects (drone swarms) while offering limited information on others (arms control negotiations). The book also is marred at times by errors, such as “news rules of engagement” that otherwise detract from a direct and active text. Tighter editing would have helped in both cases. Given the inchoate nature of the subject, the book works as an overview, although it fails to present an opinionated narrative on where autonomy and the military should go in the future, an unsatisfying gap given the author’s extensive and unique background on the subject. All that said, Army of None is a one-stop guide book to the debates, the challenges, and yes, the opportunities that can come from autonomous warfare. Scharre ends on exactly the right note, reminding us that ultimately, all of these machines are owned by us, and what we choose to build is within our control. “The world we are creating is one that will have intelligent machines in it, but it is not for them. It is a world for us.” We should continue to engage, and petition, and debate, but always with a vision for the future we want to realize. |
Open source sustainability | Danny Crichton | 2,018 | 6 | 23 | has been nothing short of an oxymoron. Engineers around the world pour their sweat and frankly, their hearts into these passion projects that undergird all software in the modern internet economy. In exchange, they ask for nothing in return except for recognition and help in keeping their projects alive and improving them. It’s an incredible movement of decentralized voluntarism and represents humanity at its best. The internet and computing giants — the heaviest users of open source in the world — are collectively worth trillions of dollars, but you would be remiss in thinking that their wealth has somehow trickled down to the maintainers of the open source projects that power them. Working day jobs, maintainers today can struggle to find the time to fix critical bugs, all the while facing incessant demands from users requesting free support on GitHub. Maintainer burnout is a monstrous challenge. That distressing situation was chronicled almost exactly two years ago by Nadia Eghbal, . Comparing open source infrastructure to “roads and bridges,” Eghbal provided not just a comprehensive overview of the challenges facing open source, but also a call-to-arms for more users of open source to care about its economics, and ultimately, how these critical projects can sustain themselves indefinitely. Two years later, a new crop of entrepreneurs, open source maintainers, and organizations have taken Eghbal up on that challenge, developing solutions that maintain the volunteer spirit at the heart of open source while inventing new economic models to make the work sustainable. All are early, and their long-term effects on the output and quality of open source are unknown. But each solution offers an avenue that could radically change the way we think of a career in open source in the future. Eghbal’s report two years ago summarized the vast issues facing open source maintainers, challenges that have remained essentially unchanged in the interim. It’s a quintessential example of the “tragedy of the commons.” As Eghbal wrote at the time, “Fundamentally, digital infrastructure has a free rider problem. Resources are offered for free, and everybody (whether individual developer or large software company) uses them, so nobody is incentivized to contribute back, figuring that somebody else will step in.” That has led to a brittle ecosystem, just as open source software reached the zenith of its influence. The challenges, though, go deeper. It’s not just that people are free riding, it’s often that they don’t even realize it. Software engineers can easily forget just how much craftsmanship has gone into the open source code that powers the most basic of applications. npm, the company that powers the module repository for the Node ecosystem, has nearly 700,000 projects listed on its registry. Starting a new React app recently, NPM installed 1105 libraries with my initial project in just a handful of seconds. What are all of these projects? And more importantly, are all the people behind them? That dependency tree of libraries abstracts all the people whose work has made those libraries available and functional in the first place. That black box can make it difficult to see that there are far fewer maintainers working behind the scenes at each of these open source projects than what one might expect, and that those maintainers may be struggling to work on those libraries due to lack of funding. Eghbal pointed to OpenSSL as an example, a library that powers a majority of encrypted communications on the web. , people were surprised to learn that the OpenSSL project was the work of a very small team of individuals, with only one of them working on it full-time (and at a very limited salary compared to industry norms). Such a situation isn’t unusual. Open source projects often have many contributors, but only a handful of individuals are truly driving a particular project forward. Lose that singular force either to burnout or distraction, and a project can be adrift quickly. No one wants open source to disappear, or for maintainers to burnout. Yet, there is a strong cultural force against commercial interests in the community. Money is corrupting, and dampens the voluntary spirit of open source efforts. More pragmatically, there are vast logistical challenges with managing money on globally distributed volunteer teams that can make paying for work logistically challenging. Unsurprisingly, the vanguard of open source sustainability sees things very differently. Kyle Mitchell, a lawyer by trade and founder of License Zero, says that there is an assumption that “Open source will continue to fall from the sky like manna from heaven and that the people behind it can be abstracted away.” He concludes: “It is just really wrong.” That view was echoed by , who is the maintainer of the popular JavaScript compiler . “We trust startups with millions of VC money and encourage a culture of ‘failing fast,’ yet somehow the idea of giving to volunteers who may have showed years of dedication is undesirable?” he said. Xavier Damman, the founder president of Open Collective, says that “In every community, there are always going to be extremists. I hear them and understand them, and in an ideal world, we all have universal basic income, and I would agree with them.” Yet, the world hasn’t moved to such an income model, and so supporting the work of open source has to be an option. “Not everyone has to raise money for the open source community, but the people who want to, should be able to and we want to work with them,” he said. Mitchell believes that one of the most important challenges is just getting comfortable talking about money. “Money feels dirty until it doesn’t,” he said. “I would like to see more money responsibility in the community.” One challenge he notes is that “learning to be a great maintainer doesn’t teach you how to be a great open source contractor or consultant.” GitHub works great as a code repository service, but ultimately doesn’t teach maintainers the economics of their work. Perhaps the greatest debate in sustaining open source is deciding who or what to target: the individual contributors — who often move between multiple projects — or a particular library itself. Take for example. Aboukhadijeh (who, full disclosure, was once my college roommate at Stanford almost a decade ago) has become a major force in the open source world, particularly in the Node ecosystem. He served , and has , including popular projects like (with 17,000 stars) and (18,300 stars). Aboukhadijeh was looking for a way to spend more time on open source, but didn’t want to be beholden to working on a single project or writing code at a private company that would never see the light of day. So he turned to Patreon as a means of support. (Disclosure: CRV, my most immediate former employer, is the series A investor in Patreon. I have no active or passive financial interest in this specific company. As per my , I do not write about CRV’s portfolio companies, but given that this essay focuses on open source, I made an exception). is a crowdsourced subscription platform, perhaps best known for the creatives it hosts. These days though, it is also increasingly being used by notable open source contributors as a way to connect with fans and sustain their work. Aboukhadijeh launched his page after seeing others doing it. “A bunch of people were starting up Patreons, which was kind of a meme in my JavaScript circles,” he said. His today has 72 contributors providing him with $2,874 in funding per month ($34,488 annually). That may seem a bit paltry, but he explained to me that he also supplements his Patreon with funding from organizations as diverse as Brave (an adblocking browser with a utility token model) to PopChest (a decentralized video sharing platform). That nets him a couple of more thousands of dollars per month. Aboukhadijeh said that Twitter played an outsized role in building out his revenue stream. “Twitter is the most important on where the developers talk about stuff and where conversations happen…,” he said. “The people who have been successful on Patreon in the same cohort [as me] who tweet a lot did really well.” For those who hit it big, the revenues can be outsized. Evan You, who created the popular JavaScript frontend library , ($182,472 a year) from 231 patrons. The number of patrons has grown consistently since starting his Patreon in March 2016 , although earnings have gone up and down over time. Aboukhadijeh noted that one major benefit was that he had ownership over his own funds. “I am glad I did a Patreon because the money is mine,” he said. While Patreon is one direct approach for generating revenues from users, another one is to offer dual licenses, one free and one commercial. That’s the model of , which Kyle Mitchell propsosed last year. He explained to me that “License Zero is the answer to a really simple question with no simple answers: how do we make open source business models open to individuals?” Mitchell is a rare breed: a lifelong coder who decided to go to law school. Growing up, he wanted to use software he found on the web, but “if it wasn’t free, I couldn’t download it as a kid,” he said. “That led me into some of the intellectual property issues that paved a dark road to the law.” based on the two-clause BSD license, but adds terms requiring commercial users to pay for a commercial license after 90 days, allowing companies to try a project before purchasing it. If other licenses aren’t available for purchase (say, because a maintainer is no longer involved), then the language is no longer enforceable and the software is offered as fully open source. The idea is that other open source users can always use the software for free, but for-profit uses would require a payment. Mitchell believes that this is the right approach for individuals looking to sustain their efforts in open source. “The most important thing is the time budget – a lot of open source companies or people who have an open source project get their money from services,” he said. The problem is that services are exclusive to a company, and take time away from making a project as good as it can be. “When moneymaking time is not time spent on open source, then it competes with open source,” he said. License Zero is certainly a cultural leap away from the notion that open source should be free in cost to all users. Mitchell notes though that “companies pay for software all the time, and they sometimes pay even when they could get it for free.” Companies care about proper licensing, and that becomes the leverage to gain revenue while still maintaining the openness and spirit of open source software. It also doesn’t force open source maintainers to take away critical functionality — say a management dashboard or scaling features — to force a sale. Changing the license of existing projects can be challenging, so the model would probably best be used by new projects. Nonetheless, it offers a potential complement or substitute to Patreon and other subscription platforms for individual open source contributors to find sustainable ways to engage in the community full-time while still putting a roof over their heads. Supporting individuals makes a lot of sense, but often companies want to support the specific projects and ecosystems that underpin their software. Doing so can be next to impossible. There are complicated logistics required in order for companies to fund open source, such as actually having an organization to send money to (and for many, to convince the IRS that the organization is actually a non-profit). Tidelift and Open Collective are two different ways to open up those channels. is the brainchild of four open-source fanatics led by Donald Fischer. Fischer, who is CEO, is a former venture investor at General Catalyst and Greylock as well as a long-time executive at Red Hat. In his most recent work, Fischer invested in companies at the heart of open source ecosystems, such as Anaconda (which focuses on scientific and statistical computing within Python), Julia Computing (focused on the Julia programming language), Ionic (a cross-platform mobile development framework), and TypeSafe now Lightbend (which is behind the Scala programming language). Fischer and his team wanted to create a platform that would allow open source ecosystems to sustain themselves. “We felt frustrated at some level that while open source has taken over a huge portion of software, a lot of the creators of open source have not been able to capture a lot of the value they are creating,” he explained. Tidelift is designed to offer assurances “around areas like security, licensing, and maintenance of software,” Fischer explained. The idea has its genesis in Red Hat, which commercialized Linux. The idea is that companies are willing to pay for open source when they can receive guarantees around issues like critical vulnerabilities and long-term support. In addition, Tidelift handles the mundane tasks of setting up open source for commercialization such as handling licensing issues. Fischer sees a mutualism between companies buying Tidelift and the projects the startup works with. “We are trying to make open source better for everyone involved, and that includes both the creators and users of open source,” he said. “What we focus on is getting these issues resolved in the upstream open source project.” Companies are buying assurances, but not exclusivity, so if a vulnerability is detected for instance, it will be fixed for everyone. Tidelift initially launched in the JavaScript ecosystem around React, Angular, and Vue.js, but will expand to more communities over time. The company has raised $15 million in venture capital from General Catalyst and Foundry Group, plus former Red Hat chairman and CEO Matthew Szulik. Fischer hopes that the company can change the economics for open source contributors. He wants the community to move from a model of “get by and survive” with a “subsistence level of earnings” and instead, help maintainers of great software “win big and be financially rewarded for that in a significant way.” Where Tidelift is focused on commercialization and software guarantees, Open Collective wants to open source the monetization of open source itself. is a platform that provides tools to “collectives” to receive money while also offering mechanisms to allow the members of those collectives to spend their money in a democratic and transparent way. Take, for instance, . Babel today receives an annual budget of $113,061 from contributors. Even more interesting though is that anyone can view how the collective spends its money. Babel currently has $28,976.82 in its account, and every expense is listed. For instance, core maintainer Henry Zhu, who we met earlier in this essay, expensed $427.18 on June 2nd for two weeks worth of Lyft rides in SF and Seattle. Xavier Damman, founder president of Open Collective, believes that this radical transparency could reshape how the economics of open source are considered by its participants. Damman likens Open Collective to the “View Source” feature of a web browser that allows users to read a website’s code. “Our goal as a platform is to be as transparent as possible,” he said. Damman was formerly the founder of Storify. Back then, he built an open source project designed to help journalists accept anonymous tips, which received a grant. The problem was that “I got a grant, and I didn’t know what to do with the money.” He thought of giving it to some other open source projects, but “technically, it was just impossible.” Without legal entities or paperwork, the money just wasn’t fungible. Open Collective is designed to solve those problems. Open Collective itself is both a Delaware C-corp and a 501(c)6 non-profit, and it technically receives all money destined for any of the collectives hosted on its platform as their fiscal sponsor. That allows the organization to send out invoices to companies, providing them with the documentation they need in order to write a check. “As long as they have an invoice, they are covered,” Damman explained. Once a project has money, it is up to the maintainers of that community to decide how to spend it. “It is up to each community to define their own rules,” Damman said. He notes that open source contributors can often spend the money on the kind of uninteresting work that doesn’t normally get done, which Damman analogized as “pay people to keep the place clean.” No one wants to clean a public park, but if no one does it, then no one will ever use the park. He also noted that in-person meetings are a popular usage of revenues. Open Collective was launched in late 2015, and since then has become home to 647 open source projects. So far, Webpack, the popular JavaScript build tool, has generated the most revenue, . One major objective of the organization is to encourage more for-profit companies to commit dollars to open source. Open Collective places the logos of major donors on each collective page, giving them visible credit for their commitment to open source. Damman’s ultimate dream is to change the notion of ownership itself. We can move from “Competition to collaboration, but also ownership to commons,” he envisioned. It’s unfortunately very early days for open source sustainability. While Patreon, License Zero, Tidelift, and Open Collective are different approaches to providing the infrastructure for sustainability, ultimately someone has to pay to make all that infrastructure useful. There are only a handful of Patreons that could substitute for an engineer’s day job, and only two collectives by my count on Open Collective that could support even a single maintainer full time. License Zero and Tidelift are too new to know how they will perform yet. Ultimately though, we need to change the culture toward sustainability. Henry Zhu of Babel commented, “The culture of our community should be one that gives back and supports community projects with all that they can: whether with employee time or funding. Instead of just embracing the consumption of open source and ignoring the cost, we should take responsibility for it’s sustainability.” In some ways, we are merely back to the original free rider problem in the tragedy of the commons — someone, somewhere has to pay, but all get to share in the benefits. The change though can happen through all of us who work on code — every software engineer and product manager. If you work at a for-profit company, take the lead in finding a way to support the code that allows you to do your job so efficiently. The decentralization and volunteer spirit of the open source community needs exactly the same kind of decentralized spirit in every financial contributor. Sustainability is each of our jobs, every day. If we all do our part, we can help to sustain one of the great intellectual movements humanity has ever created, and end the oxymoron of open source sustainability forever. |
UK report warns DeepMind Health could gain ‘excessive monopoly power’ | Natasha Lomas | 2,018 | 6 | 15 | DeepMind’s foray into digital health services continues to . The latest worries are voiced by a panel of external reviewers appointed by the Google-owned AI company to report on its operations after its initial data-sharing arrangements with the U.K.’s National Health Service (NHS) ran into a major public controversy in 2016. the contract between the company and the Royal Free Trust funnels connections via DeepMind’s own servers, and prohibits connections to other FHIR servers. A commercial structure that seemingly works against the openness and interoperability DeepMind’s co-founder Mustafa Suleyman has . “ Though they point to However, stated intentions and future potentials are clearly not the same as on-the-ground reality. And, as it stands, a technically interoperable app-delivery infrastructure is being encumbered by prohibitive clauses in a commercial contract — and by a lack of regulatory pushback against such behavior. The reviewers also raise concerns about an ongoing lack of clarity around DeepMind Health’s business model — writing: “ “ DeepMind has suggested it wants to build . But Streams does not involve any AI. The service is also being , at least for the first five years — raising the question of how exactly the Google-owned company intends to recoup its investment. Google of course monetizes a large suite of free-at-the-point-of-use consumer products — such as the Android mobile operating system; its cloud email service Gmail; and the YouTube video sharing platform, to name three — by harvesting people’s personal data and using that information to inform its ad targeting platforms. (And while Google stopped data-mining Gmail for ad targeting purposes it does still extract keyword data to customize individuals’ search results, for example, and for other purposes such as feeding its machine learning algorithms, according to .) Hence the reviewers’ recommendation for DeepMind to set out its thinking on its business model to avoid its intentions vis-a-vis people’s medical data being viewed with suspicion. The company’s historical modus operandi also underlines the potential monopoly risks if DeepMind is allowed to carve out a dominant platform position in digital healthcare provision — given how effectively its parent has been able to turn a free-for-OEMs mobile OS (Android) into global smartphone market OS dominance, for example. So, while DeepMind only has a handful of contracts with NHS Trusts for the Streams app and delivery infrastructure at this stage, the reviewers’ concerns over the risk of do not seem overblown. They are also worried about DeepMind’s ongoing vagueness about how exactly it works with its parent Alphabet, and what data could ever be transferred to the ad giant — an inevitably queasy combination when stacked against DeepMind’s handling of people’s medical records. “To what extent can DeepMind Health insulate itself against Alphabet instructing them in the future to do something which it has promised not to do today? Or, if DeepMind Health’s current management were to leave DeepMind Health, how much could a new CEO alter what has been agreed today?” they write. “We appreciate that DeepMind Health would continue to be bound by the legal and regulatory framework, but much of our attention is on the steps that DeepMind Health have taken to take a more ethical stance than the law requires; could this all be ended? We encourage DeepMind Health to look at ways of entrenching its separation from Alphabet and DeepMind more robustly, so that it can have enduring force to the commitments it makes.” Responding to the report’s publication on its , DeepMind writes that it’s “developing our longer-term business model and roadmap.” “Rather than charging for the early stages of our work, our first priority has been to prove that our technologies can help improve patient care and reduce costs. We believe that our business model should flow from the positive impact we create, and will continue to explore outcomes-based elements so that costs are at least in part related to the benefits we deliver,” it continues. So it has nothing to say to defuse the reviewers’ concerns about making its intentions for monetizing health data plain — beyond deploying a few choice PR soundbites. On its links with Alphabet, DeepMind also has little to say, writing only that: “We will explore further ways to ensure there is clarity about the binding legal frameworks that govern all our NHS partnerships.” “Trusts remain in full control of the data at all times,” it adds. “We are legally and contractually bound to only using patient data under the instructions of our partners. We will continue to make our legal agreements with Trusts publicly available to allow scrutiny of this important point.” “T here is nothing in our legal agreements with our partners that prevents them from working with any other data processor, should they wish to seek the services of another provider,” it also claims in response to additional questions we put to it. “ We hope that Streams can help unlock the next wave of innovation in the NHS. The infrastructure that powers Streams is built on state-of-the-art open and interoperable standards, known as FHIR. The FHIR standard is supported in the UK by NHS Digital, NHS England and the INTEROPen group. This should allow our partner trusts to work more easily with other developers, helping them bring many more new innovations to the clinical frontlines,” it adds in additional comments to us. “Under our contractual agreements with relevant partner trusts, we have committed to building FHIR API infrastructure within the five year terms of the agreements.” Asked about the progress it’s made on a technical audit infrastructure for verifying access to health data, which it , it reiterated the wording on its blog, saying: “We will remain vigilant about setting the highest possible standards of information governance. At the beginning of this year, we appointed a full time Information Governance Manager to oversee our use of data in all areas of our work. We are also continuing to build our and other tools to clearly show how we’re using data.” So developments on that front look . The Google-owned U.K. AI company began its push into digital healthcare services in 2015, quietly signing an information-sharing arrangement with a London-based NHS Trust that gave it access to around 1.6 million people’s medical records for developing an alerts app for a condition called Acute Kidney Injury. It also inked an MoU with the Trust where the pair set out their . (They even went so far as to get ethical signs-off for an AI project — but have consistently claimed the Royal Free data was not fed to any AIs.) However, the data-sharing collaboration ran into trouble in when the scope of patient data being shared by the Royal Free with DeepMind was revealed (via investigative journalism, rather than by disclosures from the Trust or DeepMind). None of the ~1.6 million people whose non-anonymized medical records had been passed to the Google-owned company had been informed or asked for their consent. And questions were raised about the legal basis for the data-sharing arrangement. the U.K.’s privacy regulator concluded an investigation of the project — finding that the Royal Free NHS Trust had broken data protection rules during the app’s development. Yet despite ethical questions and regulatory disquiet about the legality of the data sharing, the Streams project steamrollered on. And the Royal Free Trust went on to implement the app for use by clinicians in its hospitals, while DeepMind has also signed several additional contracts to deploy Streams to other NHS Trusts. More recently, the law firm , after being commissioned by the Trust as part of its settlement with the ICO. Though this audit only examined the current functioning of Streams. (There has been no historical audit of the lawfulness of people’s medical records being shared during the build and test phase of the project.) Linklaters did recommend the Royal Free terminates its wider MoU with DeepMind — and the Trust has confirmed to us that it will be following the firm’s advice. “The audit recommends we terminate the historic memorandum of understanding with DeepMind which was signed in January 2016. The MOU is no longer relevant to the partnership and we are in the process of terminating it,” a Royal Free spokesperson told us. So DeepMind, probably the world’s most famous AI company, is in the curious position of being involved in providing digital healthcare services to U.K. hospitals that don’t actually involve any AI at all. (Though it does have some ongoing .) In mid 2016, at the height of the Royal Free DeepMind data scandal, the panel of external reviewers met for the first time. DeepMind says it established the panel in February 2016, though there was no formal announcement then and the first meeting was not held until . The group’s was published in July 2017. The panel has now produced a second report looking at how the division is operating. And it’s fair to say that — including the ICO’s finding that the initial data-sharing arrangement between the Royal Free and DeepMind broke U.K. privacy laws. In their latest report the external reviewers warn that the public’s view of tech giants has “shifted substantially” versus where it was even a year ago — asserting that “ At the same time on the works and social impacts of tech giants. Although the U.K. government has also been keen to position itself as a supporter of AI, for the sector and, in its , identifying AI and data as one of four so-called “Grand Challenges” where it believes the U.K. can “lead the world for years to come” — including specifically as one of a handful of leading-edge homegrown AI businesses for the country to be proud of. Still, questions over how to and AI deployments — especially in highly sensitive areas such as healthcare — remain to be clearly addressed by the government. Meanwhile, the encroaching ingress of digital technologies into the healthcare space — even when the techs don’t even involve any AI — are already presenting major challenges by putting pressure on existing information governance rules and structures, and raising the specter of monopolistic risk. Asked whether it offers any guidance to NHS Trusts around digital assistance for clinicians, including specifically whether it requires multiple options be offered by different providers, the NHS’ digital services provider, NHS Digital, referred our question on to the Department of Health (DoH), saying it’s a matter of health policy. The DoH in turn referred the question to NHS England, the executive non-departmental body which commissions contracts and sets priorities and directions for the health service in England. And at the time of writing, we’re still waiting for a response from the steering body. Ultimately it looks like it will be up to the health service to put in place a clear and robust structure for AI and digital decision services that fosters competition by design by baking in a requirement for Trusts to support multiple independent options when procuring apps and services. Without that important check and balance, the risk is that platform dynamics will quickly dominate and control the emergent digital health assistance space — just as big tech has dominated consumer tech. But publicly funded healthcare decisions should not simply be handed to the single market-dominating entity that’s willing and able to burn the most resource to own the space. |
How backups, backups, backups protect NYC’s cellular infrastructure | Danny Crichton | 2,018 | 6 | 23 | The infrastructure that underpins our lives is not something we ever want to think about. Nothing good has come from suddenly needing to wonder “where does my water come from?” or “how does electricity connect into my home?” That pondering gets even more intense when we talk about cellular infrastructure, where a single dropped call or a choppy YouTube video can cause an expletive-laden tirade. Recently, I visited Verizon’s cellular switch for the New York City metro area (disclosure: TechCrunch is owned by Oath, and Oath is part of Verizon). It’s a completely nondescript building in a nondescript suburb north of the city, so nondescript that it took Verizon’s representative about 15 minutes of circling around just to find it (frankly, the best security through obscurity I have seen in some time). This switch, along with its sister, powers all cellular service in New York City, including three million voice or voice over LTE (VoLTE) calls and 708 million data connections a day. High-reliability and redundancy is a must for the facility, where dropping even one in 100,000 connections would create more than 7,000 angry customers a day. As Christine Williams, the senior operations manager who oversees the facility, explained, “It doesn’t matter what percentage of dropped calls you have if you are that person.” As we walked through the server rows that processed those hundreds of millions of connections, I was surprised by just how little digital equipment was actually in the switch itself. “Software-defined networking” has taken full hold here, according to Michele White, who is Verizon’s Executive Director for Network Assurance in the U.S. northeast. As the team has replaced older equipment, the actual physical footprint has continued to downsize, even today. All of New York City’s traffic is run from a handful of feet of server racks. The key to network assurance is two-fold. First is multiple levels of redundancy at every level of the infrastructure. Inside the switch, independent server racks can take over from other servers that fail, providing redundancy at the machine level. If the air conditioning — which is critical for machine performance — were to fail, mobile AC units can be deployed to pick up the burden. All equipment in the building is serviced by DC power, and in the event of an external power loss, two diesel generators connected to a large fuel storage tank will take over. The facility is also equipped with battery backups that can sustain the facility for eight hours if the generators themselves don’t function appropriately. Diesel generators can sustain power to the switch in the event of an external power outage At a higher level, the switch and its sister share all New York City cellular traffic, but either one could handle the full load if necessary. In short, the goal of the switch’s design is to ensure that that no matter how small or large a problem it might experience, there is an instant backup ready to go to keep those cellular connections alive. The other half of network assurance is centralization, something that I was surprised to hear in this supposed era of decentralization. Cellular sites in an urban area like New York are often placed on buildings, as anyone looking at roof lines can see from the street. Given those locations, it can be hard to provide backup generators and other failover infrastructure, and servicing them can also be challenging. With centralization, increasingly only the antenna is located at the site, with almost all other operations handled in central control offices and switches where Verizon has greater control of the environment. Even with intense focus on redundancy, natural disasters can overwhelm even the best laid plans. The telecom company has an additional layer of redundancy with its mobile units, which are placed in a “barnyard” owing to the names of the equipment stored there. There are GOATs (generator on a truck), and COWs (cell on wheels), and BATs (bi-directional amplifier on a truck). These units get deployed to areas of the network that either are experiencing unusually strong demand (think the U.S. Open or a presidential inauguration) or where a natural disaster has stuck (like Hurricane Harvey). A barnyard filled with animal-named mobile cell infrastructure, including COWs, COLTs, HORSEs, and others That said, both White and Williams noted that mobile cell deployment is much rarer than people would guess. One reason is that cell sites are increasingly being installed with Remote Electrical Tilt, which allows nearby cell sites to adjust their antennas so as to provide some signal to an area formerly covered by an out-of-commission cell. That process I was told is increasingly automated, allowing the network to essentially self-heal itself in emergencies. The other reason their deployment is rare is that network assurance already has to handle a remarkable amount of surging traffic throughout the normal ebb and flow of a dense urban city. “Rush hour in Times Square is pretty heavy,” noted Williams. Even something as heavy as a parade through Midtown Manhattan won’t typically exceed the network’s surge capacity. One other redundancy that Verizon has been exploring is using drones to provide more adaptive coverage. The company has been testing “femto-cell” drone aircraft designed by American Aerospace Technologies that can provide one square mile of coverage for about sixteen hours. A drone capability could be particularly useful in cases like hurricanes, where roads are often littered with debris, making it hard for network engineers to deploy ground-based mobile cells. I asked about 5G, which I have been covering more heavily this year as telecom deployments pick up. Given the current design of 5G, White and Williams didn’t expect too much change to happen at the switch level, where most of the core technology was likely to remain unchanged. The trend that is changing things though is edge computing, which is in vogue due to the need for computing to be located closer to users to power applications like virtual reality and autonomous cars. That’s critical, because 50 milliseconds of extra latency could be the difference between an autonomous car hitting another vehicle or a new support pylon and swerving out of the way just in time. Edge computing in many ways is decentralizing, and therefore there is a tension with the increasingly centralized nature of mobile communications infrastructure. Switches like this one are getting outfitted with edge technology, and more installations are expected in the coming years. 5G and edge are also deeply connected at the antenna level, and that will likely affect cell deployments far more than the switch infrastructure itself. Edge, internet of things, 5G — all will increase the quantity and scale of the connections flowing through these networks. In the future, a cellular outage may not just inconvenience that YouTube user, but could also prevent an automobile from successfully navigating to a hospital during a natural disaster. It takes backups, backups, and backups to prevent us from ever having to ask, “where does that signal come from?” |
Teaching computers to plan for the future | Sarah Wells | 2,018 | 6 | 15 | As humans, we’ve gotten pretty good at shaping the world around us. We can choose the , and stave off life-threatening diseases with . However, what continues to elude our molding grasp is the airy notion of “time” — how to see further than our present moment, and ultimately how to make the most of it. As it turns out, robots might be the ones that can answer this question. Computer scientists from the University of Bonn in Germany that they were able to design a software that could predict a sequence of events up to five minutes in the future with accuracy between 15 and 40 percent. These values might not seem like much on paper, but researcher Dr. Juergen Gall says it represents a step toward a new area of machine learning that goes beyond single-step prediction. Although Gall’s goal of teaching a system how to understand a sequence of events is not new (after all, this is a primary focus of the fields of machine learning and computer vision), it is unique in its approach. Thus far, research in these fields has focused on the interpretation of a current action or the prediction of an anticipated next action. This was seen recently in the news when a reported designing an algorithm that could achieve up to 90 percent accuracy in its predictions regarding end-of-life care. When researchers provided the algorithm with data from more than two million palliative-care patient records, it was able to analyze patterns in the data and predict when the patient would pass with high levels of accuracy. However, unlike Gall’s research, this algorithm focused on a retrospective, single prediction. in the field of machine learning. While it appears impressive on paper to report accuracies ranging upwards of 90 percent, there is debate about the over-inflation of these values through cherry-picking “successful” data in a process called . In their experiment, Gall and his team used hours of video data demonstrating different cooking actions (e.g. frying an egg or tossing a salad) and presented the software with only portions of the action and tasked it with predicting the remaining sequence based on what it had “learned.” Through their approach, Gall hopes the field can take a step closer to true human-machine symbiosis. “[In the industry] people talk about human robot collaboration but in the end there’s still a separation; they’re not really working close together,” says Gall. Instead of only reacting or anticipating, Gall proposes that, with a proper hardware body, this software could help human workers in industrial settings by intuitively knowing the task and helping them complete it. Even more, Gall sees a purpose for this technology in a domestic setting, as well. “There are many older people and there’s efforts to have this kind of robot for care at home,” says Gall. “In ten years I’m very convinced that service robots [will] support care at home for the elderly.” The number of Americans over the age of 65 today is approximately 46 million, according to a , and is predicted to double by the year 2060. Of that population, roughly 1.4 million live in nursing homes according to a . The impact that an intuitive software like Gall’s could have has been explored in Japan, where just over one-fourth of the country’s population is elderly. From , a soft, robotic therapy seal, to the sleek companion robot from SoftBank Robotics, Japan is beginning to embrace the calm, nurturing assistance of these machines. With this advance in technology for the elderly also comes the bitter taste that perhaps these technologies will only create further divide between the generations — outsourcing love and care to a machine. For a yet mature industry it’s hard to say where this path with conclude, but ultimately that is in the hands of developers to decide, not the software or robots they develop. These machines may be getting better at predicting the future, but even to them their fates are still being coded. |
Crown, a new app from Tinder’s parent company, turns dating into a game | Sarah Perez | 2,018 | 6 | 15 | If you’re already resentful of online dating culture and how it turned finding companionship into a game, you may not be quite ready for this: , a new dating app that turns getting matches into a game. Crown is the latest project to launch from Match Group, the including Match, Tinder, Plenty of Fish, OK Cupid, and others. The app was thought up by Match Product Manager Patricia Parker, who understands first-hand both the challenges and the benefits of online dating – Parker met her husband online, so has direct experience in the world of online dating. Crown won Match Group’s internal “ideathon,” and was then developed in-house by a team of millennial women, with a goal of serving women’s needs in particular. The main problem Crown is trying to solve is the cognitive overload of using dating apps. As Match Group scientific advisor Dr. Helen Fisher explained a few years ago to , dating apps can become addictive because there’s so much choice. “The more you look and look for a partner the more likely it is that you’ll end up with nobody…It’s called cognitive overload,” she had said. “There is a natural human predisposition to keep looking—to find something better. And with so many alternatives and opportunities for better mates in the online world, it’s easy to get into an addictive mode.” Millennials are also prone to swipe fatigue, as they spend an in dating apps, and are being warned to cut down or face burnout. Crown’s approach to these issues is to turn getting matches into a game of sorts. While other dating apps present you with an endless stream of people to pick from, Crown offers a more limited selection. Every day at noon, you’re presented with 16 curated matches, picked by some mysterious algorithm. You move through the matches by choosing who you like more between two people at a time. That is, the screen displays two photos instead of one, and you “crown” your winner. (Get it?) This process then repeats with two people shown at a time, until you reach your “Final Four.” Those winners are then given the opportunity to chat with you, or they can choose to pass. In addition to your own winners, you may also “win” the crown among other brackets, which gives you more matches to contend with. Of course, getting dubbed a winner is a stronger signal on Crown than on an app like Tinder, where it’s more common for matches to not start conversations. This could encourage Crown users to chat, given they know there’s more of a genuine interest since they “beat out” several others. But on the flip side, getting passed on Crown is going to be a lot more of an obvious “no,” which could be discouraging. “It’s like a ‘Bachelorette’-style process of elimination that helps users choose between quality over quantity,” explains Andy Chen, Vice President, Match Group. “Research shows that the human brain can only track a set number of relationships…and technology has not helped us increase this limit.” Chen is referring to the which says that people can only really maintain a max of some 150 social relationships. Giving users a never-ending list of possible matches on Tinder, then, isn’t helping people feel like they have options – it’s overloading the brain. While turning matchmaking into a game feels a bit dehumanizing – maybe even more so than on Tinder, with its Hot-or-Not-inspired vibe – the team says Crown actually increases the odds, on average, of someone being selected, compared with traditional dating apps. “When choosing one person over another, there is always a winner. The experience actually encourages a user playing the game to find reasons to say yes,” says Chen. Crown has been live in a limited beta for a few months, but is now officially launched in L.A. (how appropriate) with more cities to come. For now, users outside L.A. will be matched with those closet to them. There are today several thousand users on the app, and it’s organically growing, Chen says. Plus, Crown is seeing day-over-day retention rates which are “already as strong” as Match Group’s other apps, we’re told. The app is a free download on only for now. An Android version is coming, the website . |
Are scooter startups really worth billions? | Natasha Lomas | 2,018 | 6 | 23 | It’s been hard to miss the scooter startup wars opening fresh, techno-fueled rifts in Valley society in recent months. which sprouted seemingly overnight to clutter up sidewalks — drawing apparently far more forgiving of traffic congestion if it’s delivered in the traditional, car-shaped capsule. Even in their best, most-groomed PR shots, the dockless carelessness of these slimline electrified scooters hums with an air of insouciance and privilege. As if to say: Why yes, we turned a kids’ toy into a battery-powered kidult transporter — what u gonna do about it? An earlier batch of — offering full-fat, on-road mopeds that most definitely do need a license to ride (and, unless you’re crazy, a helmet for your head) — just can’t compete with that. Last mile does not haul. But a short-walk replacement tool that’s so seamlessly manhandled is also of course . Or misappropriated. Or both. And there have been a plethora of scooter / horror stories coming out of California, judging by reports from the scooter wars front line. Hanging scooters in trees is presumably a protest thing. Scooter brand Lime struck an especially tone-deaf tech note trying to fix this problem after an update added a security alarm that on anyone who fumbled to unlock them. Safe to say, littering abusive scooters in public spaces isn’t a way to win friends and influence people. Even when functioning ‘correctly’, i.e. as intended, scooter rides can ooze a kind of brash entitlement. The sweatless convenience looks like it might be mostly enabling another advance in tech-fueled douche behavior as a t-shirt wearing alpha nerd zips past barking into AirPods and inhaling a takeaway latte while cutting up the patience of pedestrians. None of this fast-seeded societal friction has put the brakes on e-scooter startup momentum, though. Au contraire. They’ve been raising massive amounts of investment on rapidly inflating valuations ( ). But buying lots of e-scooters and leaving them at the mercy of human whim is an expensive business to try scaling. Hence big funding rounds are necessary if you’re going to replace all the canal-dunked duds and keep scooting fast enough for the competition. At the same time, there isn’t a great deal to differentiate one e-scooter experience over another — beyond price and proximity. Branding do it but then you have to scramble even harder and faster to create a slick experience and inflate a brand that sticks. (And it goes without saying that a scooter sticky with fecal-matter is absolutely not that.) The still fledgling startups are certainly scrambling to scale, with some also already pushing into international markets. Lime just scattered ~200 e-scooters , for example. It’s also been testing the waters more quietly in Zurich. While Bird has its beady too. The idea underpinning some very obese valuations for these fledgling startups is that scooters will be a key piece of a reworked, multi-modal transport mix for urban mobility, fueled by app-based convenience and city buy-in to greener transport options with emissions-free benefits. (Albeit scooters’ greenness depends on what they’re displacing; Great if it’s gas-guzzling cars, less compelling if it’s people walking or peddling.) And while investors are buying in to the vision that lots of city dwellers are going to be scooting the last mile in future, and betting big on sizable value being captured by a few plucky scooter startups — more than half a billion dollars has been funneled into just two of these slimline scooter brands, and , since February — there are skeptical notes being sounded too. Asking whether the scooter model really justifies such huge raises and heady valuations. Shared bike and scooter fleets are paving the way to a revolution in urban mobility but will only capture little value in the long term. Investors are highly overestimating the virtue of these businesses. — Thibaud Elziere (@tiboel) The bear case for these slimline e-scooters says they’re really only fixing a pretty limited urban mobility problem. Too spindly and unsafe to go the distance, too sedate of pace (and challenged for sidewalk space) to feel worthwhile if you don’t have far to go anyway. And of course you’re not going to be able to cart your kids and/or much baggage on a stand-up two wheeler. So they’re useless for families. Meanwhile scooter invasions are illegal in some places and, where they are possible, are fast inviting public and regulatory frisson and friction — by contributing to congestion and peril on already crowded pavements. After taking one of Lime’s just-landed e-scooters for a spin in Paris this week, Willy Braun, VC at early stage European fund Daphni, came away unimpressed. “I didn’t feel I was really saving time in a short distance, since there is always many people in our narrow sidewalks,” he tells us. “And it isn’t comfortable enough for me to imagine a longer distance. Also it’s quite expensive ($1 per use and $.15/min). “Lastly: Before renting it I read two news media that told me I had to use it only on the sidewalks and they tell us that we should only use it on the road during the onboarding — and that wearing an helmet is mandatory without providing it). As a comparison, I’d rather use e-bikes (or emoto-bikes) for longer journey without hesitation.” “Give us Jump instead of Lime!” he adds, namechecking the electric bike startup that’s been lodged under Uber’s umbrella since , adding a greener string to its urban mobility bow — and which is as part of the ride-hailing giant’s ongoing efforts to revitalize its regionally battered brand. “Uber stands ready to help address some of the biggest challenges facing German cities: tackling air pollution, reducing congestion and increasing access to cleaner transportation solutions,” said CEO Dara Khosrowshahi wheeling a bright red Jump bike on stage at the Noah conference in Berlin earlier this month. Uber’s Jump e-bikes will launch in Germany this summer. E-bikes do seem to offer more urban mobility versatility than e-scooters. Though a scooter is arguably a more accessible type of wheeled steed vs a bike, given you can just stand on it and be moved. But in Europe’s dense and dynamic urban environments — which, unlike the US, tend to be replete with public transit options (typically at a spectrum of price-points) — individual transport choices tend to be based firstly on economics. After which it’s essentially a matter of personal taste and/or the weather. Urban transport horses for courses — depending on your risk, convenience and comfort thresholds, thanks to a publicly funded luxury of choice. So scooters have loads of already embedded competition. TechCrunch’s resident Parisien, Romain Dillet — a regular user of on-demand bike services in the city (of which there are many), and prior to that the city’s own dock-based bike rental scheme — also went for a test spin on a Lime scooter this week. And also came away feeling underwhelmed. “This is bad,” he said after his ride. “It’s slow and you need to brake constantly. BUT the worst part is that it feels waaaaaay more dangerous than a bike. Basically you can’t brake abruptly because you’re just standing there.” Index Venture’s Martin Mignot was also in Paris this week and he took the chance to take a Lime scooter for a spin too — checking out the competition in his case, given the European VC firm is a Bird backer. So what did he think? “The experience is pretty cool. It’s slightly faster than a bike, there’s no sweating. The weather was just amazing and very hot in Paris so it was pretty amazing in terms of speed and lack of effort,” he says, rolling out the positively spun, vested view on scooter sharing. “Especially going up hill to go to Gare du Nord. “And the lack of friction — just to get on board and get started. So in general I think it’s a great experience and I think it feels a really interesting niche between walking and on-demand bikes… In Paris you’ve also got the mopeds. So that kind of ‘in between offering’. I think there’s a big market there. I think it’s going to work pretty well in Paris.” Mignot is a tad disparaging about the quality of Lime’s scooters vs the model being deployed by Bird — a scooter model he also personally owns. But again, as you’d expect given his vested interests. “Obviously I’m biased but I would say that the Xiaomi scooter/Ninebot scooter is higher quality than the one that Lime are using,” he tells us. “I thought that the Lime one, the handlebar is a little bit too high. The braking is a little bit too soft. Maybe it was the one I used, I don’t know.” Talking generally about scooter startups, he says investors’ excitement boils down to trip frequency — thanks exactly to journeys being these itty-bitty last mile links. But it’s also then about the potential for all that last mile hopping to be a shortcut for winning a prized slot on smartphone users’ homescreens — and thus the underlying game being played looks like a jockeying for prime position in the urban mobility race. Lime, for example, started out with bike rentals before jumping into scooters and going multi-modal. So scooter sharing starts to look like a strategy for mobility startups to scoot to the top of the attention foodchain — where they’re then positioned to offer a full mix and capture more value. So really scooters might mostly be a tool for catching people’s app attention. Think of that next time you see one lying on a sidewalk. “What’s very interesting if you look at the trip distribution, most of the trips are short. So the vast majority of trips if you’re walking, obviously, are less than three miles. So that’s actually where the bulk of the mobility happens. And scooters play really well in that field. So in terms of sheer number of trips I think it’s going to dwarf any other type of transportation. And especially ride-hailing,” says Mignot. “If you look at how often do people use Uber or Lyft or Taxify… it’s going to be much less frequent than the scooter users. And I think that’s what makes it such an interesting asset… The frequency will be much higher — and so the apps that power the scooters will tend to be on the homescreen. And kind of on top of the foodchain, so to speak. So I think that’s what makes it super interesting.” Scooters also get a big investor tick on merit of the lack of friction standing in the way of riding vs other available urban options such as bikes (or, well, non-electric scooters, skateboards, roller blades, public transport, and so on and on) — in both onboarding (getting going) and propulsion (i.e. the lack of sweat required to ride) terms. “That’s what’s so brilliant with these devices, you just snap the QR code and off you go,” he says. “The difference with bikes is that you don’t have to produce any effort. I think there are cases where obviously bikes are better. But I think there are a lot of cases where people will want something where you don’t sweat. “Where you don’t wrinkle your clothes. Which goes a little bit faster. Without going all the way to the moped experience where you need to put the helmet, which is a bit more dangerous, which a lot of people, especially women, are not super familiar with. So I think what’s exciting with scooters as a form factor is it’s actually very mainstream. “Anyone can ride them. It’s very simple to manoeuvre. It’s not super fast, it’s not too dangerous. It doesn’t require any muscular effort — so for older people or for people who just don’t want to sweat because they’re going to a meeting or something. It’s just a fantastic option.” Index has also invested in an e-bike startup ( ) and the firm is fully signed up to the notion that urban mobility will be multimodal. So if e-scooters valuations are a bit overcooked Index is not going to be too concerned. People in cities are clearly going to be riding something. And backing a mix is a smart way to hedge the risk of any one option ending up more passing fad than staple urban steed. Mostly Index is betting that people will keep on riding robotic horses for urban courses. And whatever they ride it’s a fairly safe bet that an app is going to be involved in the process of finding (docklessness is therefore another attention play) or unlocking (scan that QR code!) the mobility device — opening up the possibility that a single app could house multiple mobility options and thus capture more overall value. “It’s not a one-size fits all. They’re all complementing each other,” says Mignot of the urban mobility options in play. “I would say e-bikes are probably a little bit more great for little bit longer trips because you’re sitting down. But again it takes a little bit longer, because you have to adjust the saddle, you need to start peddling. There’s a bit more friction both on the onboading and on the riding. But they’re a bit better for slightly longer distances. I would say for shorter distances there’s nothing better than the scooter.” He also points out that scooters are both cheaper and less bulky than e-bikes. And because they take up less street space they can — at least in theory — be more densely stacked, thereby generating the claimed convenience by having them sitting near enough to convince someone not to bother walking 10 minutes to the café or gym — and just scoot instead. So scooters’ slimline physique is also especially exciting to investors. (Even if, ironically, it’s being deployed to urge people to walk less.) “I think we will end up with more density of scooters. Which is super important,” he continues. “People will, in the end, tend to take the vehicle that they can find where they are. And I think it’s more likely, eventually, that they will get a scooter than an e-bike. Just simply because they take less space and they are less expensive.” But why wouldn’t people who do get won over to the sweatless perks of last mile scooting just buy and own their own ride — rather than shelling out on an ongoing basis to share? Unlike bikes, scooters are mobile enough to be picked up and moved around fairly easily. Which means they can go with you into your home, office, even a restaurant — disruptively reducing theft risk. Whereas talk to any bike owner and they’ll almost invariably have at least one tale of theft woe, which is a key part of what makes bike sharing so attractive: It erases theft worry. Add to that, you can find e-scooters on sale in European electronics shops for as little as €140. So if you’re going to be a regular scooterer, the purely economic argument to just own your own looks pretty compelling. And people zipping around on e-scooters is a pretty common sight in another dense European city, Barcelona, which has very scooter-friendly weather but no scooter startups (yet). But unless it’s a tourist weaving along the seafront most of these riders are not shared: People just popped into their local electronics shop and walked out with a scooter in a box. So the rides aren’t generating repeat revenue for anyone except the electricity companies. Asked why people who do want to scoot won’t just buy, rather than rent Mignot talks up the hassle of ownership — undermined slightly by the fact he is also a scooter owner (despite the claimed faff from problems such as frequent flat tires and the chore of the nightly charge). “The thing you notice very rapidly: There are two things, one is the maintenance,” he says. “The models that exist today are not super robust. Maybe in a very flat, very smooth roads, maybe Santa Monica, maybe it’s a little bit less true but I would say in Europe the maintenance that is required is fairly high… I have to do something on mine every week. “The other thing is it takes a little bit of space. If you have to bring it to a restaurant or whatever type of crowded place, a movie theatre or wherever you’re going, to an office, to a meeting room, it’s a little bit on the heavy side, and it’s a little bit inconvenient. So certainly some people will buy them… But I also think that there are a lot of cases where you’d rather have it just on-demand.” Unlike Mignot and Index, Tom Bradley, of UK focused VC firm Oxford Capital, is not so convinced by the on-demand scooter craze. The firm has not made any e-scooter investments itself, though mobility is a “core theme”, with the portfolio including an on-demand coach travel startup ( ), and technology plays such as (machine learning for driverless cars) and (complex circuits for automotive parts, which sells to the likes of Tesla). But it’s just not been sold on scooter startups. Bradley describes it as an “open question” whether scooters end up being “an important part of how people move around the cities of the future”. He also points to theft problems with dockless bike share schemes that have not played out well in the UK. “We’re not convinced that this is a fundamental part of the picture,” he says of scooter sharing. “It may be a part of the picture but I personally am not yet convinced that it’s as big a part of the picture that people seem to be prepared to pay for.” “I keep thinking of the Segway example,” he adds. “It’s an absolutely delightful product. It’s brilliant. It’s absolutely brilliant. In a way that these electric scooters are not. But obviously it was much more expensive. And it made people feel a bit weird. But it was supposed to be the answer — and it’s not the answer. Before its time, perhaps.” Of course he also accepts that capital is “being used as a weapon”, as he puts it, to scoot full-pelt towards a future where shared electric scooters are the norm on city streets by waging a “marketing war” to get there. “Venture capital valuations are what someone is prepared to pay. And in this case people are valuing potential rather than valuing the business… so the valuations [of Bird and Lime] are being driven more than anything by the amount of money being raised,” he says. “So you decide a rule of thumb about what is acceptable dilution, and if you’re going to raise $400M or whatever then the valuation’s got to be somewhere between $1.6BN and $2BN to make that sort of raise make sense — and leave enough equity for the previous investors and founders. So there’s an element of this where the valuations are being driven by the amount of capital being raised.” Oxford Capital’s bearish view on scooter sharing is also bounded by the fund only investing in UK-based startups. And while Bradley says it sees lots of local mobility strengths — especially in the automotive market — he admits it’s more of a mental leap to imagine a world leading scooter startup sprouting from the country’s green and pleasant lands. Not least because it’s not legal to use them on UK public roads or pavements. “If you look at places like Amsterdam, Berlin, they’re sort of built for bikes. London’s getting towards being built for bikes… Cycling’s been one of the big success stories in London. Is [scooter sharing] going to replace cycling? I don’t know. Not so convinced… It’s obviously easy for anyone to get on and off these things, young and old. So that’s good, it’s inclusive. But it feels a little bit like a solution looking for a problem, the sorts of journeys people talk about for these things — on campus, short urban journeys. A lot of these are walkable or cycle journeys in a lot of cities. So is there a mass need? “Is this Segway 2 or is this bike hire 2… it’s hard to tell. And we’re coming down on the former. We’re not convinced this is going to be a fundamental part of the transport space. It will be a feature but not a huge part.” But for Mignot the early days of the urban mobility attention wars mean there’s much to play for — and much that can be favorably reshaped to fit scooters into the mix. “The whole thing, even on-demand bikes, it’s a two year old phenomenon really,” he says. “So I think everyone is just trying to learn and figure out and adapt to this new reality, whether it’s users or companies or cities. I think it’s very similar to when cars were first introduced. There were no parking spaces at the time and there were no rules on the road. And fast forward 100 years and it looks very different. “If you look at the amount of infrastructure and effort and spend that has been put into making — and I would argue way more than should have — into making a city car-friendly, if you only do a 100th of the same amount of effort and spend into making some space for bicycles and light two-wheel vehicles I think we’ll be fine. “That’s the beauty of this model. If you compare the space of the tech and if you look at the efficiency of moving people around vs the space, the scooters are simply the most efficient because their footprint on the ground is just so small.” He even makes the case for scooters working well in London — arguing the sprawl of the city amps up the utility because there are so many tedious last mile trips that people have to make. Even more so than in denser European cities like Paris, where he admits that hopping on a scooter might just be more of a “nice to have”, given shorter distances and all the other available options. So, really, where urban mobility is concerned, it can actually be courses for horses. Yet, the reality is London is off-limits to the likes of Bird and Lime for now — thanks to UK laws barring this type of unlicensed personal electric vehicle from public roads and spaces. You can buy e-scooters for use on private land in the UK but any scooter startups that tried their usual playbook in London would be scooting straight for legal hot water. It’s not just the British weather that’s inclement. “I’m really hoping that TfL [Transport for London] and the Department for Transport are going to make it possible,” says Mignot on that. “I think any city should welcome this with open arms. Some cities are, by the way. And I think over time once they see the success stories in other parts of the world I think they all will. But I wish London was one of those cutting edge cities that would welcome new innovation with open arms. I think right now, unfortunately, it’s not there. “There’s a lot of talk about air quality, and so on, but actually, when push comes to shove… you have a lot of resistance and a lot of pushback… So it’s a little bit disappointing. But, you know, we’ll get there eventually.” |
Elizabeth Holmes reportedly steps down at Theranos after criminal indictment | Devin Coldewey | 2,018 | 6 | 15 | Elizabeth Holmes has left her role as CEO of Theranos and has been charged with wire fraud, and others report. The company’s former president, Ramesh “Sunny” Balwani, was also indicted today by a grand jury. These criminal charges are separate from the civil ones and already settled. There are 11 charges; two are conspiracy to commit wire fraud (against investors, and against doctors and patients) and the remaining nine are actual wire fraud, with amounts ranging from the cost of a lab test to $100 million. Theranos’s general counsel, David Taylor, has been appointed CEO. What duty the position actually entails in the crumbling enterprise is unclear. Holmes, meanwhile, remains chairman of the board. The FBI Special Agent in Charge of the case against Theranos, John Bennett, said the company engaged in “a corporate conspiracy to defraud financial investors,” and “misled doctors and patients about the reliability of medical tests that endangered health and lives.” This story is developing. I’ve asked Theranos for comment and will update if I hear back; indeed I’m not even sure anyone is there to respond. |
Judge says ‘literal but nonsensical’ Google translation isn’t consent for police search | Devin Coldewey | 2,018 | 6 | 15 | Machine translation of foreign languages is undoubtedly a very useful thing, but if you’re going for anything more than directions or recommendations for lunch, its is a real barrier. And when it comes to the law and constitutional rights, a “good enough” translation doesn’t cut it, a judge has ruled. is not hugely consequential, but it is indicative of the evolving place in which translation apps find themselves in our lives and legal system. We are fortunate to live in a multilingual society, but for the present and foreseeable future it seems humans are still needed to bridge language gaps. involved a Mexican man named Omar Cruz-Zamora, who was pulled over by cops in Kansas. When they searched his car, with his consent, they found quite a stash of meth and cocaine, which naturally led to his arrest. But there’s a catch: Cruz-Zamora doesn’t speak English well, so the consent to search the car was obtained via an exchange facilitated by Google Translate — an exchange that the court found was insufficiently accurate to constitute consent given “freely and intelligently.” The fourth amendment prohibits unreasonable search and seizure, and lacking a warrant or probable cause, the officers required Cruz-Zamora to understand that he could refuse to let them search the car. That understanding is not evident from the exchange, during which both sides repeatedly fail to comprehend what the other is saying. Not only that, but the actual translations provided by the app weren’t good enough to accurately communicate the question. For example, the officer asked “¿Puedo buscar el auto?” — the literal meaning of which is closer to “can I the car,” not “can I the car.” (Note: these translations were what were put forth in the case, not my own — I don’t speak Spanish. As commenters below note, it’s more like “can I the car,” which is very different.) There’s no evidence that Cruz-Zamora made the connection between this “literal but nonsensical” translation and the real question of whether he consented to a search, let alone whether he understood that he had a choice at all. With consent invalidated, the search of the car is rendered unconstitutional, and the charges against Cruz-Zamora are suppressed. It doesn’t mean that consent is impossible via Google Translate or any other app — for example, if Cruz-Zamora had himself opened his trunk or doors to allow the search, that likely would have constituted consent. But it’s clear that app-based interactions are not a sure thing. This will be a case to consider not just for cops on the beat looking to help or investigate people who don’t speak English, but in courts as well. Providers of machine translation services would have us all believe that those translations are accurate enough to use in most cases, and that in a few years they will replace human translators in all but the most demanding situations. This case suggests that machine translation can fail even the most basic tests, and as long as that possibility remains, we have to maintain a healthy skepticism. |
Apple and Oprah sign a multi-year partnership on original content | Sarah Perez | 2,018 | 6 | 15 | Apple today a multi-year content partnership with Oprah Winfrey to produce programs for the tech company’s upcoming video-streaming service. Apple didn’t provide any specific details as to what sort of projects Winfrey would be involved in, but there will be more than one it seems. Apple shared the news of its deal with Winfrey in a brief on its website, which read: Apple today announced a unique, multi-year content partnership with Oprah Winfrey, the esteemed producer, actress, talk show host, philanthropist and CEO of OWN. Together, Winfrey and Apple will create original programs that embrace her incomparable ability to connect with audiences around the world. Winfrey’s projects will be released as part of a lineup of original content from Apple. The deal is a significant high-profile win for Apple, which has been busy filing out its lineup with an array of talent in recent months. The streaming service also will include , , , a Kristen Wiig-led , a Kevin Durant-inspired , a from “La La Land’s” director and several other shows. Winfrey, however, is not just another showrunner or producer. She’s a media giant who has worked across film, network and cable TV, print and more as an actress, talk show host, creator and producer. She’s also a notable philanthropist, having contributed more than $100 million to provide education to academically gifted girls from disadvantaged backgrounds, and is continually discussed as a potential presidential candidate, though that’s not for her. On television, Winfrey’s Harpo Productions developed daytime TV shows like “Dr. Phil,” “The Dr. Oz Show” and “Rachael Ray.” Harpo Films produced several Academy Award-winning movies, including “Selma,” which featured Winfrey in a starring role. She’s also acted in a variety of productions over the years, like “The Color Purple,” which scored her an Oscar nom, “Lee Daniels’ The Butler,” “The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks” and Disney’s “A Wrinkle in Time.” Winfrey also founded the cable network OWN in 2011 in partnership with Discovery Communications, and has exec produced series including “Queen Sugar,” “Oprah’s Master Class” and the Emmy-winning “Super Soul Sunday.” The latter has a connection with Apple as it debuted as a podcast called “Oprah’s SuperSoul Conversations” and became a No. 1 program on Apple Podcasts. Winfrey recently extended her contract with OWN through 2025, so it’s unclear how much time she’ll devote specifically toward her Apple projects. Apple also didn’t say if Winfrey will star or guest in any of the programs themselves, but that’s always an option on the table with a deal like this. , however, is reporting that Winfrey “is expected to have an on-screen role as a host and interviewer.” |
Machines learn language better by using a deep understanding of words | Devin Coldewey | 2,018 | 6 | 15 | Computer systems are getting quite good at understanding what people say, but they also have some major weak spots. Among them is the fact that they have trouble with words that have multiple or complex meanings. adds this critical context to words, producing better understanding across the board. To illustrate the problem, think of the word “queen.” When you and I are talking and I say that word, you know from context whether I’m talking about Queen Elizabeth, or the chess piece, or the matriarch of a hive, or RuPaul’s Drag Race. This ability of words to have multiple meanings is called . And really, it’s the rule rather than the exception. Which meaning it is can usually be reliably determined by the phrasing — “God save the queen!” versus “I saved my queen!” — and of course all this informs the topic, the structure of the sentence, whether you’re expected to respond, and so on. Machine learning systems, however, don’t really have that level of flexibility. The way they tend to represent words is much simpler: it looks at all those different definitions of the word and comes up with a sort of average — a complex representation, to be sure, but not reflective of its true complexity. When it’s critical that the correct meaning of a word gets through, they can’t be relied on. (“Embeddings from Language Models”), however, lets the system handle polysemy with ease; as evidence of its utility, it was awarded best paper honors at NAACL last week. At its heart it uses its training data (a huge collection of text) to determine whether a word has multiple meanings and how those different meanings are signaled in language. For instance, you could probably tell in my example “queen” sentences above, despite their being very similar, that one was about royalty and the other about a game. That’s because the way they are written contain clues to your own context-detection engine to tell you which queen is which. Informing a system of these differences can be done by manually annotating the text corpus from which it learns — but who wants to go through millions of words making a note on which queen is which? “We were looking for a method that would significantly reduce the need for human annotation,” explained Mathew Peters, lead author of the paper. “The goal was to learn as much as we can from unlabeled data.” In addition, he said, traditional language learning systems “compress all that meaning for a single word into a single vector. So we started by questioning the basic assumption: let’s not learn a single vector, let’s have an infinite number of vectors. Because the meaning is highly dependent on the context.” ELMo learns this information by ingesting the full sentence in which the word appears; it would learn that when a king is mentioned alongside a queen, it’s likely royalty or a game, but never a beehive. When it sees pawn, it knows that it’s chess; jack implies cards; and so on. An ELMo-equipped language engine won’t be nearly as good as a human with years of experience parsing language, but even working knowledge of polysemy is hugely helpful in understanding a language. Not only that, but taking the whole sentence into account in the meaning of a word also allows the structure of that sentence to be mapped more easily, automatically labeling clauses and parts of speech. Systems using the ELMo method had immediate benefits, improving on even the latest natural language algorithms by as much as 25 percent — a huge gain for this field. And because it is a better, more context-aware style of learning, but not a fundamentally one, it can be integrated easily even into existing commercial systems. In fact, Microsoft is reportedly already using it with Bing. After all, it’s crucial in search to determine intention, which of course requires an accurate reading of the query. ELMo is open source, too, like all the work from the Allen Institute for AI, so any company with natural language processing needs should probably check this out. The paper lays down the groundwork of using ELMo for English language systems, but because its power is derived by essentially a close reading of the data that it’s fed, there’s no theoretical reason why it shouldn’t be applicable not just for other languages, but in other domains. In other words, if you feed it a bunch of neuroscience texts, it should be able to tell the difference between as it relates to time and as it relates to that region of the brain. This is just one example of how machine learning and language are rapidly developing around each other; although it’s already quite good enough for basic translation, speech to text and so on, there’s quite a lot more that computers could do via natural language interfaces — if they only know how. |
null | Sarah Perez | 2,018 | 6 | 6 | null |
Showcase your country or state’s startups at Startup Alley | Emma Comeau | 2,018 | 6 | 15 | null |
With its new in-car operating system, BMW slowly breaks with tradition | Frederic Lardinois | 2,018 | 6 | 15 | When you spend time with a lot of BMW folks, as I did during a trip to Germany earlier this month, you’ll regularly hear the word “ .” Maybe that’s no surprise, given that the company is now well over 100 years old. But in a time of rapid transformation that’s hitting every car manufacturer, engineers and designers have to strike a balance between honoring that history and looking forward. With the latest version of its BMW OS in-car operating system and its accompanying design language, BMW is breaking with some traditions to allow it to look into the future while also sticking to its core principles. If you’ve driven a recent luxury car, then the instrument cluster in front of you was likely one large screen. But at least in even the most recent BMWs, you’ll still see the standard round gauges that have adorned cars since their invention. That’s what drivers expect and that’s what the company gave them, down to the point where it essentially glued a few plastic strips on the large screen that now makes up the dashboard to give drivers an even more traditional view of their Autobahn speeds. With BMW OS 7.0, which I got some hands-on time with in the latest BMW 8-series model that’s making its today (and where the OS update will also make its first appearance), the company stops pretending that the screen is a standard set of gauges. Sure, some of the colors remain the same, but users looking for the classic look of a BMW cockpit are in for a surprise. “We first broke up the classic round instruments back in 2015 so we could add more digital content to the middle, including advanced driving assistance systems,” one of BMW’s designers told me. “And that was the first break [with tradition]. Now in 2018, we looked at the interior and exterior design of our cars — and took all of those forms — and integrated them into the digital user interface of our cars.” The overall idea behind the design is to highlight relevant information when it’s needed but to let it fade back when it’s not, allowing the driver to focus on the task at hand (which, at least for the next few years, is mostly driving). So when you enter the car, you’ll get the standard BMW welcome screen, which is now integrated with your digital BMW Connected profile in the cloud. When you start driving, the new design comes to life, with all of the critical information you need for driving on the left side of the dashboard, as well as data about the state of your driving assistance systems. That’s a set of digital gauges that remains on the screen at all times. On the right side of the screen, though, you’ll see all of the widgets that can be personalized. There are six of those, and they range from G meters for when you’re at a track day to a music player that uses the space to show album art. The middle of the screen focuses on navigation. But as the BMW team told me, the idea here isn’t to just copy the map that’s traditionally on the tablet-like screen in the middle of the dashboard. What you’ll see here is a stripped-down map view that only shows you the navigational data you need at any given time. And because the digital user interface isn’t meant to be a copy of its analog counterpart from yesteryear, the team also decided that it could play with more colors. That means that as you move from sport to eco mode, for example, the UI’s primary color changes from red to blue. The instrument cluster is only part of the company’s redesign. It also took a look at what it calls the “Control Display” in the center console. That’s traditionally where the company has displayed everything from your music player to its built-in GPS maps (and Apple CarPlay, if that’s your thing). Here, BMW has simplified the menu structure by making it much flatter and also made some tweaks to the overall design. What you’ll see is that it also went for a design language here that’s still occasionally playful but that does away with many of the 3D effects, and instead opted for something that’s more akin to Google’s Material Design or Microsoft’s Fluent Design System. This is a subtle change, but the team told me that it very deliberately tried to go with a more modern and flatter look. This display now also offers more tools for personalization, with the ability to change the layout to show more widgets, if the driver doesn’t mind a more cluttered display, for example. Thanks to its integration with BMW Connect, the company’s and services for saving and syncing data, managing in-car apps and more, the updated operating system also lays the foundation for the company’s upcoming e-commerce play. Dieter May, BMW’s VP for digital products and services, has and the updated software and fully digital cockpit is what will enable the company’s next moves in this direction. Because the new operating system puts a new emphasis on the user’s digital account, which is encoded in your key fob, the car becomes part of the overall BMW ecosystem, which includes other mobility services like ReachNow, for example (though you obviously don’t need to have a BMW Connect account just to drive the car). Unsurprisingly, the new operating system will launch with a couple of the company’s more high-end vehicles like the 8-series car that is launching today, but it will slowly trickle down to other models, as well. |
Lemonade files lawsuit against wefox for IP infringement | Jordan Crook | 2,018 | 6 | 15 | , the insurance platform based out of NYC, has against German company ONE Insurance, its parent company wefox, and founder Julian Teicke. The complaint, filed in the U.S. District Court Southern District of NY, alleges that wefox reverse engineered Lemonade to create ONE, infringing Lemonade’s intellectual property, violating the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, and breaching its contractual obligations to Lemonade not to “copy content… to provide any service that is competitive…or to…create derivative works.” In the filing (which you can see on or ), Lemonade alleges that Teicke repeatedly registered for insurance on Lemonade under various names and for various addresses, some of which do not exist. Teicke also allegedly filed claims in what appeared to be an attempt to assess and copy the arrangement of those flows. Lemonade’s counsel says Teicke started seven claims over the course of 20 days, prompting Lemonade to cancel his policy. Alongside Teicke, a number of other executives and members of leadership at wefox also filed fake claims, says the complaint, despite having opted in to Lemonade’s user agreement and taking an honesty pledge, which is required of all Lemonade users. This, according to Lemonade, violates the Computer Fraud and Abuse act. Lemonade also alleges that the ONE app infringes Lemonade’s IP, and that in assessing the Lemonade app and building a competitor, Teicke also violated Lemonade’s TOS. Lemonade has changed the insurance business in two key ways: First, it made the process of actually buying insurance as easy as a few clicks on your smartphone. Digitizing the process makes the issue of getting home or renters insurance far less daunting and more approachable to consumers. Secondly, Lemonade rethought the business model of insurance. Normally, insurance providers charge you a certain monthly rate based on the value of the property/items looking to be insured. But at the end of the year, the money remaining in that policy becomes profit, putting the insurance company in direct opposition to the consumer any time a claim is filed. Lemonade takes its profit directly out of each payment, and if a file isn’t claimed, it sends the rest of the leftover money to the charity of your choice, ensuring that Lemonade and the consumer are on the same page when a claim is filed. In keeping with that thesis, any proceeds generated from this lawsuit will go directly to Code.org. “We’re not trying to enrich ourselves by poking another startup,” said Lemonade CEO Daniel Schreiber. “We’re not anti-competition. We’re just saying ‘Play by the rules, play fair and square.'” A wefox spokesperson offered up the following statement: At wefox Group, we have 160 talented people whose hard work has created a unique business that is challenging the status quo every day. These allegations have no merit and ultimately appear to be an attempt to disrupt our business rather than a serious dispute. Lemonade actually raised these questions with us nine months ago, and – as we explained at the time – the concerns are meritless and we further received no answer. We have not been served any paper from Lemonade: if we are, we intend to defend ourselves vigorously. This lawsuit appears to be an attempt to bait the media into covering a non-issue. |
Kustomer gets $26M to take on Zendesk with an omnichannel approach to customer support | Ingrid Lunden | 2,018 | 6 | 15 | The CRM industry is now estimated to be worth some $4 billion annually, and today a startup has announced a round of funding that it hopes will help it take on one aspect of that lucrative pie, customer support. Kustomer, a startup out of New York that integrates a number of sources to give support staff a complete picture of a customer when he or she contacts the company, has raised $26 million. The funding, a series B, was led by Redpoint Ventures (notably, an early investor in Zendesk, which Kustomer cites as a key competitor), with existing investors Canaan Partners, Boldstart Ventures, and Social Leverage also participating. Cisco Investments was also a part of this round as a strategic investor: Cisco (along with Avaya) is one of the PBX equipment vendors, and customer support is one of the biggest users of this equipment, but the segment is also under pressure as more companies move these services to the cloud (and consider alternative options). Potentially, you could see how Cisco might want to partner with Kustomer to provide more services on top of its existing equipment, and potentially as a standalone service — although for now the two have yet to announce any actual partnerships. Given that Kustomer has been approached already for potential acquisitions, you could see how the Ciscos of the world might be one possible category of buyers. Kustomer is not discussing valuation but it has raised a total of $38.5 million. Kustomer’s customers include brands in fashion, e-commerce and other sectors that provide customer support on products on a regular basis, such as Ring, Modsy, Glossier, Smug Mug and more. When we last wrote about Kustomer, when it in 2016, the company’s mission was to effectively turn anyone at a company into a customer service rep — the idea being that some issues are better answered by specific people, and a CRM platform for all employees to engage could help them fill that need. Today, Brad Birnbaum, the co-founder and CEO, says that this concept has evolved. He said that “half of its business model still involves the idea of everyone being on the platform.” For example, an internal sales rep can collaborate with someone in a company’s shipping department — “but the only person who can communicate with the customer is the full-fledged agent,” he said. “That is what the customers wanted so that they could better control the messaging.” The collaboration, meanwhile, has taken an interesting turn: it’s not just related to employees communicating better to develop a more complete picture of a customer and his/her history with the company; but it’s about a company’s systems integrating better to give a more complete view to the reps. include data from e-commerce platforms like Shopify and Magento; voice and messaging platforms like Twilio, TalkDesk, Twitter and Facebook Messenger; feedback tools like Nicereply; analytics services like Looker, Snowflake, Jira and Redshift; and Slack. Birnbaum previously , which turned it into — (his co-founder in Kustomer, Jeremy Suriel, was Assistly’s chief architect), and between that and Kustomer he also had a go at building out , Sean Parker’s social startup. Kustomer, he says, is not only competing against Salesforce but perhaps even more specifically Zendesk, in offering a new take on customer support. Zendesk, he said, had really figured out how to make customer support ticketing work efficiently, “but they don’t understand the customer at all.” “We are a much more modern solution in how we see the world,” he continued. “No one does omni-channel customer service properly, where you can see a single threaded conversation speaking to all of a customer’s points.” (In actual fact, Zendesk has now started to respond: in May the company launched a new omnichannel product called , which bundles Zendesk Support, Guide, Chat, and Talk to give a unified view of a customer to the support agent. One more reason Kustomer needs to keep expanding what it does.) Going forward, Kustomer will be using the funding to expand its platform with more capabilities, and some of its own automations and insights (rather than those provided by way of integrations). This will also see the company expand into other kinds of services adjacent to taking inbound customer requests, such as reaching out to the customers, potentially to seel to them. “We plan to go broadly with engagement as an example,” Birnbaum said. “We already know everything about you so if we see you on a website, we can proactively reach out to you and engage you.” “It is time for disruption in customer support industry, and Kustomer is leading the way,” said Tomasz Tunguz, partner at Redpoint Ventures, in a statement. “Kustomer has had impressive traction to date, and we are confident the world’s best B2C and B2B companies will be able to utilize the platform in order to develop meaningful relationships, experiences, and lifetime value for their customers. This is an exciting and forward-thinking platform for companies as well as their customers.” |
Uber’s unrelenting desire to be everything | Henry Pickavet | 2,018 | 6 | 15 | Welcome back to CTRL+T, the TechCrunch podcast where Megan Rose Dickey and I talk about stories from the week that we either found interesting or hated and had more to say about. This week we talked about Uber. Uber, Uber, Uber. This company wants everything. The rideshare market! Autonomous vehicles! Flying vehicles! And now? Scooters. And to be able to detect inebriation in passengers! This week, we found out that Uber for tech to be able to tell whether a potential passenger is drunk. And regular listeners know how we at CTRL+T feel about scooters, but we have to keep talking about them because the companies that facilitate that mode of transportation keep getting funded. Thanks, funders. And Uber . I mean, market. Click play on the little player below or, better yet, subscribe on , , , or whatever other podcast platform you can find. |
Fitbit employees charged with stealing Jawbone trade secrets | Brian Heater | 2,018 | 6 | 15 | Rahman has provided TechCrunch the following statement, We believe the Justice Department’s indictment of six current and former Fitbit Inc. employees for stealing trade secrets from their former employer, Jawbone, validates the claims we made in our 2015 lawsuit against Fitbit. On behalf of former employees, investors, suppliers and others associated with Jawbone, we look forward to seeing justice take its course in this case. |
European and Indian regulators team up to defend net neutrality | Romain Dillet | 2,018 | 6 | 15 | Representatives of Europe’s BEREC (Body of European Regulators for Electronic Communications) and India’s TRAI (Telecom Regulatory Authority of India) met up yesterday to a joint statement to promote an open internet. This describes a set of rules to guarantee net neutrality. Those are some basic rules, such as equal treatment of internet traffic, a case-by-case assessment of zero-rating practices and more. Both the European Union and India have implemented regulation to ensure net neutrality already. But they now want to go further and work together on the same set of rules. Net neutrality is always evolving and rules need to be updated regularly. This collaboration should contribute to a unification of net neutrality. Even more important than the statement itself, the timing of this announcement is interesting. The FCC officially repealed net neutrality in the U.S. . While other regulators can’t do anything about what’s happening in the U.S., they can make sure net neutrality remains intact in their own country. There’s a risk that the FCC decision triggers a domino effect. Telecom companies in other countries could lobby regulators to end net neutrality (the U.S. has done it, so why not us?). As ARCEP president Sébastien Soriano told me a few months ago, it’s time to show that there’s another way. And the best way to do it is by forming a group of countries and regulators who share the same principles. With India and the European Union, a good chunk of the world population is now clearly defending net neutrality. Other countries could now join this alliance and prove that net neutrality is important for innovation, competition and end customers. |
Venmo is discontinuing web support for payments and more | Sarah Perez | 2,018 | 6 | 15 | PayPal-owned, peer-to-peer payments app is ending web support for its service, the company announced in an email to users. The changes, which are beginning to roll out now, will see the Venmo.com website phasing out support for making payments and charging users. In time, users will see even less functionality on the website, the company says. The message to users was quietly shared in the body of Venmo’s monthly transaction history email. It reads as follows: NOTICE: Venmo has decided to phase out some of the functionality on the Venmo.com website over the coming months. We are beginning to discontinue the ability to pay and charge someone on the Venmo.com website, and over time, you may see less functionality on the website – this is just the start. We therefore have updated our to reflect that the use of Venmo on the Venmo.com website may be limited. The decision represents a notable shift in product direction for Venmo. Though best known as a mobile payments app, the service has also been available online, similar to PayPal, for many years. The Venmo website today allows users to sign in and view their various transaction feeds, including public transactions, those from friends, and personal transactions. You can also charge friends and submit payments from the website, send payment reminders, like and comment on transactions, add friends, edit your profile, and more. Some users may already be impacted by the changes, and will now see a message alerting them to the fact that charging friends and making payments can only be done in the Venmo app from the App Store or Google Play. It’s not entirely surprising to see Venmo drop web support. As a PayPal-owned property after its by Braintree which later , there’s always been a lot of overlap between Venmo and its parent company, in terms of peer-to-peer payments. Venmo had grown in popularity for its simple, social network-inspired design and its less burdensome fee structure among a younger crowd. This made it an appealing way for PayPal to gain market share with a different demographic. It’s also cheaper, which people like. PayPal doesn’t charge for money transfers from a bank account or PayPal balance, but does 2.9 percent plus a $0.30 fixed fee on payments from a credit or debit card in the U.S. Venmo, meanwhile, a fee of 3 percent for credit card payments, but makes debit card payments free. That’s appealing to millennials in particular, many of whom have , and are careful about their spending. Plus, as a mobile-first application, Venmo was offering a more modern solution for mobile payments, at a time when PayPal’s app was looking a bit long in the tooth. (PayPal its mobile app experience to catch up.) Another factor in Venmo’s decision could be that, more recently, it from newcomer Zelle, the bank-backed mobile payments here in the U.S. which is forecast to outpace Venmo on users sometime this year, with 27.4 million users to Venmo’s 22.9 million. In light of that threat, Venmo may have wanted to consolidate its resources on its primary product – the mobile app. Not everyone is happy about Venmo’s changes, of course. After all, even if the Venmo website wasn’t heavily used, it was used by some who will certainly miss it. i only use the website to send/receive payments so in guess you're cancelled! — respectfully yours (@biking_away_) This makes me really …."Venmo has decided to phase out some of the functionality on the website over the coming months." — V Lav (@Druzy920) Why are you breaking your website? — Lozaning (@lozaning) Just got an email saying you're phasing out website functions. What's the justification? Pay and charge by web is incredibly useful. — Woode (@Woode2380) Venmo email: “We are beginning to discontinue the ability to pay and charge someone on the website, and over time, you may see less functionality on the website – this is just the start.” Is this a threat? — Noah Mittman (@noahmittman) Reached for comment, Venmo explained the decision to phase out the website functionality stems from how it sees its product being used. A Venmo spokesperson told TechCrunch: Venmo continuously evaluates our products and services to ensure we are delivering our users the best experience. We have decided to begin to discontinue the ability to pay and charge someone on the Venmo.com website. Most of our users pay and request money using the Venmo app, so we’re focusing our efforts there. Users can continue to use the mobile app for their pay and charge transactions and can still use the website for cashing out Venmo balances, settings and statements. The company declined to clarify what other functionality may be removed from the website over time, but noted that using Venmo to pay authorized merchants is unaffected. |
Apple Maps outage disrupts search and navigation for all users [Update: resolved] | Sarah Perez | 2,018 | 6 | 15 | Apple Maps is experiencing a widespread outage, according to the company’s System Status page. Maps routing, navigation and search are impacted by the outage, which is affecting all users, the page informs. [Update: the problems were resolved at 1:05 PM ET.] The issues were first noticed by the Apple news site , before Apple’s own confirmed the outage starting at 8:48 AM ET. The disruption is impacting Apple Maps across platforms, including iPhone, iPad, Mac, Apple Watch and CarPlay. Unfortunately, Apple has only just its CarPlay platform would open up to third-party navigation and mapping apps with the release of iOS 12 – but that hasn’t yet come to pass. That means CarPlay users will have to launch a different navigation app on their phone in order to get directions during this outage. While the Apple Maps user interface will load, when you try to search for a given destination or try to navigate, it gives an error message like “No Results Found” or “Directions Not Available.” Or sometimes, the screen will just continue to read “Loading..” without ever displaying the results, or say “The network connection was lost.” Apple has not said what’s causing the outage or when it expects a fix to be in place. Often, these sort of things are related to data center issues or unstable software updates. Currently, Apple’s System Status page states that Apple is “investigating the issue.” Reached for comment, an Apple spokesperson pointed TechCrunch to the but had no other information at this time. : The problems were resolved at 1:05 PM ET according to the status page, but no other information was provided. |
Adobe could be the next $10 billion software company | Ron Miller | 2,018 | 6 | 15 | Adobe reported its yesterday and the news was quite good. The company announced $2.2 billion in revenue for the quarter up 24 percent year over year. That puts them on an impressive $8.8 billion run rate, within reach of becoming the next $10 billion software company (or at least on a run rate). Revenue was up across all major business lines, but as has been the norm, the vast majority comes from the company’s bread and butter, , which houses the likes of Photoshop, InDesign and Dreamweaver, among others. In fact digital media, which includes Creative Cloud and Document Cloud accounted for $1.55 billion of the $2.2 billion in total revenue. The vast majority of that, $1.30 billion was from the creative side of the house with Document Cloud pulling in $243 million. Adobe has been mostly known as a creative tools company until recent years when it also moved into marketing, analytics and advertising. Recently for $1.6 billion, giving it a commerce component to go with those other pieces. Clearly Adobe has set its sights on Salesforce, which also has a strong marketing component and is not coincidentally perhaps, the most recently crowned . Adobe CEO Shantanu Narayen speaking to analysts sees Magento as filling in a key piece across understanding the customer from shopping to purchase. “The acquisition of Magento will make Adobe the only company with leadership in content creation, marketing, advertising, analytics and now commerce, enabling real-time personalized experiences across the entire customer journey, whether on the web, mobile, social, in-product or in-store. We believe the addition of Magento expands our available market opportunity, builds out our product portfolio, and addresses a key underserved customer need,” Narayen told analysts. If Adobe could find a way to expand that marketing and commerce revenue, it could easily surpass that $10 billion revenue run rate threshold, but so far while it has been growing, it remains less than half of the Creative revenue at $586 million. Yes, it grew at an 18 percent year over year clip, but it seems as though there is potential for so much more there and clearly Narayen hopes that the money spent on Magento will help drive that growth. Even while it was announcing its revenue, rival Salesforce was meeting with Marketing Cloud customers in Chicago at , a move that presented an interesting juxtaposition between the two competitors. Both have a similar approach to the marketing side, while Salesforce concentrates on the customer including CRM and service components. Adobe differentiates itself with content, which shows up on the balance sheet as the majority of its revenue . Both companies have growth in common too. Salesforce has been on quite a run over the last five years reaching $3 billion in revenue for the first time last quarter. Adobe hit $2 billion for the first time in November. Consider that prior to in 2013, Adobe had revenue of $995 million in Aug 2013. Since it moved to that subscription model, of recurring revenue and grown steadily ever since. Each has used strategic acquisitions to help fuel that growth with Salesforce acquiring 27 companies since 2013 and Adobe 13, according to Crunchbase data. Each has bought a commerce company with Adobe buying Magento this year and two years ago. Adobe has the toolset to keep the marketing side of its business growing. It might never reach the revenue of the creative side, but it could help push the company further than it’s ever been. Ten billion dollars seems well within reach if things continue along the current trajectory. |
Gmail proves that some people hate smart suggestions | Romain Dillet | 2,018 | 6 | 15 | Gmail has recently introduced a brand new . While you can disable or ignore most of the new features, Gmail has started resurfacing old unanswered emails with a suggestion that you should reply. And this is what it looks like: The orange text immediately grabs your attention. By bumping the email thread to the top of your inbox, Gmails also breaks the chronological order of your inbox. Gmail is also making a judgement by telling you that maybe you should have replied and you’ve been procrastinating. Social networks already bombard us constantly with awful content that makes us sad or angry. Your email inbox shouldn’t make you feel guilty or stressed. Even if the suggestions can be accurate, it’s a bit creepy, it’s poorly implemented and it makes you feel like you’re no longer in control of your inbox. There’s a reason why Gmail lets you disable all the smart features. Some users don’t want smart categories, important emails first and smart reply suggestions. Arguably, the only smart feature everyone needs is the spam filter. A pure chronological feed of your email messages is incredibly valuable as well. That’s why many Instagram users are still . Sure, algorithmic feeds can lead to more engagement and improved productivity. Maybe Google conducted some tests and concluded that you end up answering more emails if you let Gmail do its thing. But you may want to judge the value of each email without an algorithmic ranking. VCs could spot the next big thing without any bias. Journalists could pay attention to young and scrappy startups as much as the new electric scooter startup in San Francisco. Universities could give a grant to students with unconventional applications. The HR department of your company could look at all applications without following Google’s order. When the Gmail redesign , a colleague of mine said “I look forward to digging through settings to figure out how to turn this off.” And the good news is that you can turn it off. There are now two options to disable nudges in the settings on the web version of Gmail. You can tick off the boxes “Suggest emails to reply to” and “Suggest emails to follow up on” if you don’t want to see this orange text ever again. But those features should have never been enabled by default in the first place. The new look of gmail has this new little reminder and I keep reading it as "Received 4 days ago. Really?" And this is stress I just don't need. — Mary Kate McDevitt (@MaryKateMcD) Ooh, new Gmail has an incredibly annoying feature where it bumps a message ending in a question to the top of your inbox with a banner saying "Received 2 days ago. Reply?" — Seb Patrick (@sebpatrick) Switching back to classic . I REALLY don't need these "Received 6 days ago. Reply?" notes. I have four jobs connected to six email accounts. I'll manage my own productivity, thanks. — mitchell bloom (@bloomin_onions) Wtf Gmail on mobile now resurfacing emails I haven't replied to with a "received two days ago. Reply?" Label. Insane. Can't seem to turn it off. Breaks my entire inbox. — Tom Critchlow (@tomcritchlow) I’m not really a fan of gmail’s new feature that hounds you if you don’t reply to emails. ‘Received 2 days ago. Reply?’ I don’t need to technologically enhance anxiety. — Thomas Lynch (@thomasjlynch) Hey , One message in my inbox suddenly has a garish red message. "Received 2 days ago. Reply?" Never seen this happen and never want this suggestion. — Brendan Falkowski (@Falkowski) |
Apple’s new Mac ads show that even Grimes uses dongles | Romain Dillet | 2,018 | 6 | 15 | Apple has launched a new advertising campaign for the Mac called “behind the Mac”. In this campaign, the company is sharing user stories of people using Mac for work, creative projects and accessibility reasons. The Mac is a versatile platform. People use it for boring tasks, such as checking emails and browsing the web. But you can also use it for countless of other things. Apple wants to show you what you can do with a Mac beyond Word and Excel. Apple has shared 4 videos today. The first is a 60-second recap of the three other videos. Each standalone video is a portrait of someone who is using a Mac every day. There will be 12 portraits in total on . Peter Kariuki is a developer who created an iPhone app to improve road safety in Rwanda. Bruce Hall is a photographer who is legally blind and uses photography to see more details of the outside world. And Grimes is one of the most interesting music artists out there. There are a few interesting things to note. All three are using laptops. It’s clear that MacBooks have become the most popular computers from Apple. It doesn’t mean that Apple should abandon the iMac, iMac Pro, Mac Mini and Mac Pro. But only a fraction of Apple’s customers will buy them. It’s also interesting to see that none of the Macs have been updated in the last twelve months. Apple has nothing new to sell on the Mac front. And it’s a bit worrying that the company is starting a new advertising campaign right now. Maybe there won’t be any Mac update for at least a few months. And if you’re currently using a recent MacBook or MacBook Pro, you might be using stupid dongles right now to plug accessories to USB-C and Thunderbolt 3 ports. The good news is that, yes, even Grimes has to use dongles. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dar_brj8zdw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eRl5wi8JCnA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QAM2lqbPElU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IPv9jFWhzGE |
YC alum Modern Health, a startup focused on emotional wellbeing, gets $2.26M seed funding | Catherine Shu | 2,018 | 6 | 15 | Modern Health founders Alyson Friedensohn and Erica Johnson About one year ago, a thanking his employee for using sick days to take care of her mental health went viral. It was a reminder to Alyson Friedensohn of what she wants to accomplish with , the emotional health benefits startup she founded last year with neuroscientist Erica Johnson. “We want that to be normal. We want the email she sent to be normal, to be able to be that open,” Friedensohn tells TechCrunch. Modern Health, a Y Combinator alum, announced today that it has raised $2.26 million in seed funding for hiring, accelerating the development of its healthcare platform and growing its network of therapists, coaches and other providers. Offered as a benefit by companies, Modern Health’s services are meant to improve employee well-being and retention rates. The round was led by Afore, with participation from Social Capital, Precursor Ventures, Merus Capital, Maschmeyer Group Ventures, Y Combinator and angel investors. Friedensohn, Modern Health’s chief executive officer, says several employers have already signed up for its platform, which includes services like counseling and career and financial coaching. One of its newest customers, human resources startup Gusto, hit a 43% The startup is especially proud of the fact that Modern Health’s team is currently all female and Friedensohn wants to parlay their points of view into services that address issues affecting women. For example, the platform already works with providers who specialize in postpartum depression and infertility. “People don’t talk about what working moms are dealing with and countless things like that,” says Friedensohn, who previously worked at health tech companies Keas and Collective Health. “People don’t want to talk about it because they are worried it will jeopardize their careers, but it makes a difference.” Several other tech startups are working on mental health care platforms for employers to offer as a benefit, including Ginger.io, Lyra Health and Quartet, which have all have received significant amounts of funding from prominent investors. The space is especially important, given the and the fact that . One of Modern Health’s priorities is to reach employees before they hit a crisis point. Since many people are daunted by the idea of therapy, the platform connects them to coaches instead to focus on specific issues, like their careers, or overall emotional wellbeing. This helps referrals, Friedensohn notes, because it makes the service feel more approachable. “They can say to friends, I have this awesome Modern Health coach, versus saying I have a therapist, so it’s way easier for people to engage,” she says. Modern Health also makes its services more accessible by offering several ways to use the platform: texting, video calls or, for people who don’t want to talk to a therapist or coach yet, meditation apps and other digital tools created by the company. Friedensohn adds that it’s not uncommon for people to write essays on their sign-up forms when registering because it’s the first time they’ve been able to unload their problems. “People like that it’s coaching,” she says. “What we found is that by focusing on that point, the biggest thing is lowering the barrier to entry, so that people who are depressed are also comfortable reaching out.” |
Sea seeks $500M raise to develop its e-commerce and payment businesses | Jon Russell | 2,018 | 6 | 12 | Southeast Asia-based internet firm Sea is raising $400 million through the sale of notes in what would be its first fundraising activity since it went public via in . The Singapore-based company, formerly known as Garena, said that the senior note offering will put toward general costs and business expansion. Long-time investor Tencent is expected to buy up $50 million of the notes on offer, and the offering itself could be extended by a further $60 million. Sea’s IPO was a landmark for Southeast Asia, where startup exits are few and far between, but the company hasn’t exactly set Wall Street on fire since making its public bow. Its share price is $16.40 at the time of writing, having debuted at $15. It has risen thanks to gains over the past month following its most recent earnings but initially the company spent a lot of time priced under $15. So what got investors excited? In short, signs of growth. jumped 81 percent year-on-year as its Shopee e-commerce service doubled its GMV and the firm’s AirPay payment unit quadrupled its transaction volume, but ultimately the business remains unprofitable. Losses jumped from $73 million to $216 million and Sea’s cost of revenue more than doubled, indicating that it is still chasing growth for its businesses. While AirPay and Shopee, which competes with the likes of Alibaba-owned Lazada for the attention of Southeast Asia’s 600 million consumers, are growing, the same can’t be said of Sea’s main business. It rose to prominence selling games via its Garena service, with Tencent a particular ally here, but that business is seeing new user growth flatten and revenue gains slow. It makes sense that Sea is playing up its digital business since the big opportunity in Southeast Asia is e-commerce, as evidenced by Alibaba’s recent double-down on Lazada — which . and then to increase its ownership. It also installed a number of its own executives in a bid to help Lazada grow its business and the overall e-commerce industry in Southeast Asia, too. that e-commerce in Southeast Asia will surpass $88 billion by 2025. That’s up from an estimated $10.9 billion in 2017. Sea said previously that it expects Shopee to reach $8.2-$8.7 billion in GMV in 2018, an increase that’s potentially as high as 112 percent year-on-year. That’s up on its previous guidance of $7.5-$8 billion but, since it is GMV, it doesn’t translate to direct revenue for the company itself. Sea had previously boosted Shopee by allowing a high burn rate to fund merchant and buyer promotions. It only began to monetize the service last year. |
Coinbase opens its crypto index fund to accredited U.S. investors | Jon Russell | 2,018 | 6 | 12 | , crypto giant Coinbase today announced that its The company said in a blog post that it has see “overwhelming” interest from investors, and now it is reaching out to those who want to invest between $250,000 and $20 million. For now, the company said, participation is limited to the U.S. and those who are accredited investors. That’s a pretty big caveat since crypto, by default, is open to anyone — but Coinbase is very specifically target institutional capital, having . The pitch is that it knows the market, its service covers the most stable assets and it won’t charge the kind of rates that existing funds do, as Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong explained on Twitter. Investing in Coinbase Index Fund is the easiest way to get exposure to a broad range get of crypto assets. Much cheaper than 2 and 20% charged by most crypto hedge funds, and you get new assets automatically added to the fund as they become available on Coinbase. No rebalancing. — Brian Armstrong (@brian_armstrong) Here’s more: Coinbase Index Fund gives investors exposure to all assets listed on our exchange, weighted by market capitalization. As we announced yesterday, the fund will be rebalanced to include Ethereum Classic, and more assets when they are listed by Coinbase in the future. Coinbase did say that it is working to launch other funds that are “accessible to all investors and cover a broader range of digital assets” so, if you’re not an accredited U.S. investor, there might yet be opportunities for you depending on what comes next. However, — and the SEC is in the middle of a major crypto investigation — it might take some time to reach the longer tail of retail investors. Stay tuned, though, we’ll be asking questions to two key people at Coinbase over the coming months and this topic is sure to be on the menu. , while . |
Check out this adorable Bluetooth controller for the Nintendo Switch | Brian Heater | 2,018 | 6 | 12 | null |
Southeast Asia’s Grab lands $1B from Toyota at a $10B valuation | Jon Russell | 2,018 | 6 | 12 | Grab, the ride-hailing firm that acquired Uber’s Southeast Asia business earlier this year, is raising a new round of funding and it just announced that it will be led by Toyota, which is committing $1 billion in capital. The deal values Grab at over $10 billion, a source close to the company told TechCrunch. In return for its capital, Toyota will also get a board seat and the opportunity to place an executive within Grab’s team. Grab said it plans to work with its new investor “to create a more efficient transport network that will ease traffic congestion in Southeast Asia’s megacities” and help its drivers increase their income. In particular, that will involve close collaboration with the Toyota Mobility Service Platform (MSPF), which is working on areas such as user-based insurance, new types of financial packages and predictive car maintenance. “Going forward, together with Grab, we will develop services that are more attractive, safe and secure for our customers in Southeast Asia,” said Toyota executive vice president Shigeki Tomoyama in a statement. , but this time around the capital comes directly from the parent company. . The new round follows a $2.5 billion investment that was jointly led by SoftBank and China’s Didi, two long-time investors put last year. That round quietly closed at the start of 2018, Grab has confirmed but so far it hasn’t said who put up the additional money. The company’s valuation had been $6 billion but, unsurprisingly since the Uber deal, it has jumped by a further $4 billion based on Toyota’s investment. Grab now claims over 100 million downloads of its app across eight countries in Asia, including Singapore, Indonesia, Vietnam, Thailand and more. The firm said its annual revenue run rate has now surpassed $1 billion, although it declined to provide profit or loss numbers. While it did remove Uber from the region by acquiring its business — — that exit to with Indonesia’s Go-Jek, in particular, looking like the key foe. Go-Jek, which is valued at some $4.5 billion, having itself . Aside from competition, Singapore-based Grab has kept its busy in recent years expanding its services from point-to-point taxis and private car hailing to include mobile payments, food delivery and dock-less bicycles. Earlier this month it officially unveiled Grab Ventures, a unit focused on helping building out an ecosystem through investment and mentoring. Grab Ventures is not a VC arm, but it does plan to make 8-10 investments over the next two years while it will also open an accelerator program for “growth-stage” startups — although that doesn’t include equity investments for cash. The division will also focus on incubating new business ideas, which include which aggregates on-demand bikes from a range of companies. |
Valve sets sights on Discord with updates to Steam Chat | Devin Coldewey | 2,018 | 6 | 12 | has risen among the ranks of gamers as the most common choice for game-related communications. And it’s easy to see why: it works well and the competition is pretty dismal. But Valve is looking to keep users in-house with an on its game platform Steam. It’s a welcome change, one of many that Steam’s users have surely been asking for — the platform, while convenient in many ways, is also incredibly outdated in others. The friend and communications options may as well be ICQ, and let’s not get started on the browser. Today’s news suggests that Valve has not failed to hear gamers’ cries. The revamped chat is very Discord-like, with text and voice channels listed separately, in-game details like map and game type listed next to friends and a useful quick list for your go-to gaming partners. There’s also a robust web client. Voice and text chat is all encrypted and passed through Steam’s servers, which prevents the NSA competition from monitoring your squad’s tactics during PUBG games and griefers from tracing your IP and ordering a hundred pizzas to your door (or worse). It’s long past due for a platform like Steam, but more importantly it lets them keep Discord in check. The latter, after all, could conceivably grow itself a game store or promotions page in order to subsidize its free services — and that would be stepping on Valve’s turf. Unforgivable. That said, it’s far too late for Steam to steal away Discord’s users — it’s been adopted by far too many communities and the benefits of switching aren’t really substantial. But for people who have not yet installed Discord, the presence of a robust chat and voice client within Steam is a powerful deterrent. It’s currently in beta, but you can request access and . No word on whether they are developing a whole system of chat icons based on those wiggly little egg-people in the top image. (Please.) |
How Nintendo regained its footing with the Switch and smartphones | Brian Heater | 2,018 | 6 | 12 | of years ago, Nintendo very much felt like a company at a crossroads. The Wii U presented a rare major misfire for the gaming giant, while its executives stubbornly clung to a strategy that actively excluded smartphones. |
Jane.ai raises $8.4M to bring a digital assistant into your office software | Lucas Matney | 2,018 | 6 | 12 | Even as AI assistants delve deeper into consumer hardware, companies still seem a bit reticent to bring them deep into their office software workflows. is aiming to bring natural language processing and intelligence into an employee-facing solution that lets people query a digital assistant to give them information about documents, meetings and general company knowledge. The St. Louis startup announced today that it is raising an $8.4 million Series A from private investors to power this vision. Jane lives inside apps like Slack and Skype for Business (in addition to its own web app) where users are already chatting with co-workers and may need to surface information quickly that they don’t have ready access to. With Jane, employees can just message the assistant directly and the system will comb through information and apps that were uploaded and connected to the system in order to find answers. You can ask for a file by name and quickly get a link. You can ask for a specific department’s phone number and Jane will slack it to you. The startup currently supports integrations with Office 365, Slack, Salesforce and Zenefits, and has more partnerships “on the horizon.” The big focus will be outsourcing some of the more basic questions that you would ordinarily ask HR or IT so you don’t have to bombard the same person’s email to get the latest phone number for the workaround for a particular problem. The Jane.ai team The basic goal of the system is to learn over time and give appointed admins the ability to be called on to answer certain questions when Jane doesn’t have an answer so that Jane will learn from the company experts and get more informed over time. “Pitting humans against machines is one of the big design flaws of a lot of AI systems,” Jane.ai CEO David Karandish told TechCrunch. The startup will also have a general knowledge base where users can call on some quickly available info that will also grow over time. It takes time for these solutions to gather the information to be accessible enough to turn to, but Jane.ai is hoping that by ensuring that data is cleaned up for every customer, a lot of employees’ frequent questions are answered on day 1. |
Gaming leans into diversity at E3, but not hard | Devin Coldewey | 2,018 | 6 | 12 | To say the gaming community is not known for its friendliness to women and minority groups is something of an understatement. But we’re starting to see developers abandon the usual excuses of tradition, demographics and, the most absurd of all, “realism,” in favor of making gaming more inclusive. Kind of. This has been an ongoing theme for years, of course. But it feels like this year it was a little less self-congratulatory and a little more self-motivated. The fun started early, well ahead of E3, with the apparently devastatingly diverse front lines in Battlefield V, which takes place during World War II. The predictable objections as to “historical accuracy” appeared — unironic, despite the utter lack of historical accuracy in pretty much any of these games. The way the war was fought, the locations and situations, the weapons and vehicles have all been liberally massaged to turn the worst thing in history into a fun multiplayer game. But it was EA’s chief creative officer, Patrick Soderlund, who made the headlines with a searing riposte . Citing the historical record of women and people of color in the war, he called out the peanut gallery as both incorrect and irrelevant. What’s the most unrealistic part about Battlefield V? It ain’t her. “These are people who are uneducated,” he said. “They don’t understand that this is a plausible scenario, and listen: this is a game.” A game, he added, intended to surface stories that have been hitherto relatively seldom told, including the roles of those groups. “This is something that the development team pushed. And we don’t take any flak. We stand up for the cause, because I think those people who don’t understand it, well, you have two choices: either accept it or don’t buy the game. I’m fine with either or. It’s just not OK.” Then E3 got started. As a pleasant early surprise, Gears of War 5 has you in what has long been a mainstay of grizzled space-marine mandom, and your companion is a black guy. Of course you have the new Tomb Raider, a solid franchise with an increasingly strong, well-written female lead. In Assassin’s Creed Odyssey, Ubisoft went so far as to twist the lore of the series to accommodate the player’s choice of character: , between whom there are no real differences — including romance options, a quietly provocative decision. The Last of Us Part Two has a badass young woman as its protagonist, in a post-apocalyptic hellscape. (Yet you can be sure it’s the kiss shared with a girl on the dance floor that will generate more controversy.) Nintendo offered a variety of customization in the new Smash Bros. for Switch, with male and female options for , including Pikachu. Even Cuphead has a playable lady in it now. Elsewhere we saw diversity on display in something as simple as having men and women of all races represented as pirate captains, commanders of futuristic forces, medieval knights (a nice Joan of Arc feel from For Honor’s trailer) and futuristic jet pilots. (My favorite outfit was in , by the way.) What it felt like to me, though, was not that these companies were fulfilling some kind of diversity quota — that bogeyman so often invoked by critics — but rather the simple acknowledgement that the world of games should resemble the world of gamers. Of course, when you pull back a little bit, it becomes extremely clear that the majority of games are still very much dominated by the garden variety grizzled white male protagonist. But that’s fine. We have a similar problem in film, TV and other fiction as well, right? Moving on from outdated ideas of race and gender in the world of media is an ongoing concern and it won’t happen all at once. But at least at this E3 we’re seeing indications that developers and publishers are moving in the right direction. As for the people — well, that’s a different story. Whatever the flexibility of your choices in the latest crop of AAA games, female gamers and people of color will still be ruthlessly harassed, abused and otherwise targeted. Developers can’t change the bigoted minds of toxic players — but they ban them. Here’s hoping that side of things is getting equal attention. |
Hands-on with Nintendo’s Poké Ball Plus | Lucas Matney | 2,018 | 6 | 12 | Nintendo doesn’t come out with a ton of hardware in-between system launches, but the peripherals it does come out with have a history of being pretty quality. That being said, the Poké Ball Plus may be the nicest little game-specific system accessory Nintendo has sold yet. At Nintendo’s big, honking E3 booth I had a chance to go hands-on with the little golf-ball sized device. Nintendo was not allowing us to take video or pictures of it during use, but rest assured, this is exactly what it looks like in real life. For what should by all means be a gimmicky little device, Nintendo put a thoughtful amount of engineering into the little ball, which was surprisingly fun to play the new titles with and seemed to offer a lot more than nostalgia for prospective owners. Build-wise this thing feels nice and hefty with an experience that feels a bit more than using a Joy-Con because you are holding a little ball rather than flicking a controller. Additionally, there are some lights on the joystick/trigger that light up to showcase when you’ve caught a Pokémon or are housing one. You can charge the Poké Ball Plus via USB-C and you’ll get about six hours charge on it, the company tells us. You can navigate your character through the game with the joy-stick and push it in to make selections. When it comes to actually capturing Pokémon that you encounter, you can sort of flick the little ball — there’s a strap and a little ring to ensure the ball doesn’t go flying. Will this be something that drastically improves your experience playing the varieties of Pokemon: Let’s Go? No, but you probably won’t feel like an idiot for spending extra money on something your system’s Joy-Cons can already do if more fun is an acceptable system spec. It’s cool, it’s cute and tiny and, similar to the Pokémon GO Plus wristband, you’ll be able to connect this to your phone and catch the little creatures on-the-go, so you are getting some added functionality if you’ve bought into Niantic’s Pokémon world on mobile, as well. Other features beyond being able to house a Pokémon that you have captured on the move is that you can actually shake the device and hear the sound of the particular Pokémon you currently have captured. As far as fun little features go, this has a lot to offer fans. We don’t have an official price for the accessory itself, but Nintendo did reveal today that it will be included with a $100 bundle with a copy of Pokemon: Let’s Go Pikachu or Eevee. You’ll also get the mythical Pokémon Mew with your Poké Ball Plus. |
Netflix and Alphabet will need to become ISPs, fast | Danny Crichton | 2,018 | 6 | 12 | This week completely scrambled the video landscape, and its implications are going to take months to fully understand. First is the district court’s decision to approve the merger of AT&T and Time Warner . That will create one of the largest content creation and distribution companies in the world when it closes. It is also expected to encourage Comcast to make a similar bid for 21st Century Fox, further consolidating the market. As Chip Pickering, CEO of pro-competition advocacy org INCOMPAS put it, “AT&T is getting the merger no one wants, but everyone will pay for.” But the second major story was the final (final final) yesterday that will allow telecom companies like AT&T to prioritize their own content over that of competitors. In the past, AT&T didn’t have all that much content, but the addition of Time Warner now gives them a library encompassing Warner Bros. to TBS, TNT, HBO and CNN. Suddenly, that control over prioritization just got a lot more powerful and profitable. The combination of these two stories is spooking every video on demand service, from YouTube to Netflix. If Comcast bids and is successful in buying 21st Century Fox, then connectivity in the United States will be made up of a handful of gigantic content library ISPs, and a few software players that will have to pay a premium to deliver their content to their own subscribers. While companies like Netflix and Alphabet have negotiated with the ISPs for years, the combination of these two news stories puts them in a significantly weaker negotiating position going forward. While consumers still have some level of power — ultimately, ISPs want to deliver the content that their consumers want — a slow degrading of the experience for YouTube or Netflix could be enough to move consumers to “preferred” content. Some have even called this the start of the “ ” of the internet. AT&T, for instance, has . That world is not automatic though, because Alphabet, Netflix and other video streaming services have options on how to respond. For Alphabet, that will likely mean a redoubling of its commitment to Google Fiber. That service has been trumpeted since its debut, but has in order to scale back its original ambitions. That has meant that cities like Atlanta, which have held out for the promise of cheap and reliable gigabit bandwidth, . Ultimately, Alphabet’s strategic advantage against Comcast, AT&T and other massive ISPs is going to rest on a sort of mutually assured destruction. If Comcast throttles YouTube, then Alphabet can propose launching in a critical (read: lucrative) Comcast market. Further investment in Fiber, Project Fi or perhaps a 5G-centered wireless strategy will be required to give it to the leverage to bring those negotiations to a better outcome. For Netflix, it is going to have to get into the connectivity game one way or the other. Contracts with carriers like Comcast and AT&T are going to be more challenging to negotiate in light of today’s ruling and the additional power they have over throttling. Netflix does have some must-see shows, which gives it a bit of leverage, but so do the ISPs. They are going to have to do an end-run around the distributors to give them similar leverage to what Alphabet has up its sleeve. One interesting dynamic I could see forthcoming would be Alphabet creating strategic partnerships with companies like Netflix, Twitch and others to negotiate as a collective against ISPs. While all these services are at some level competitors, they also face an existential threat from these new, vertically merged ISPs. That might be the best of all worlds given the shit sandwich we have all been handed this week. One sad note though is how much the world of video is increasingly closed to startups. When companies like Netflix, which today closed with a market cap of almost $158 billion, can’t necessarily get enough negotiating power to ensure that consumers have direct access to them, no startup can ever hope to compete. America may believe in its entrepreneurs, but its competition laws have done nothing to keep the terrain open for them. Those implications are just beginning. |
null | Sarah Perez | 2,018 | 6 | 15 | null |
Macy’s acquires minority stake in tech retailer b8ta | Megan Rose Dickey | 2,018 | 6 | 12 | Macy’s has partnered with b8ta, the retail-as-a-service startup that originally started as a way to let people try out new tech products. Macy’s has acquired a minority stake in b8ta and will use the startup to enhance The Market, an experiential-based retail concept at Macy’s. By partnering with b8ta, Macy’s envisions being able to scale its Market concept faster, Macy’s president Hal Lawton said in a statement. For b8ta, this is an additional source of revenue. “At b8ta, we believe physical retail will thrive as a platform for discovering new products and brands,” b8ta CEO Vibhu Norby said in a statement. “Macy’s was the best partner for b8ta to scale our pioneering retail-as-a-service model to a breadth of categories like apparel, beauty, home, and more. With b8ta’s software platform and business model, product makers can go from solely selling online to launching their products with Macy’s in a few clicks. Our platform makes it easy for makers to deploy, manage, analyze, and scale amazing offline retail experiences.” Earlier this year, . Called “ ,” the solution functions as a retail-as-a-service platform for brands that want a physical presence. b8ta’s software solution includes checkout, inventory, point of sale, inventory management, staff scheduling services and more. was the first customer to launch a Built by b8ta store this June in Silicon Valley’s Santana Row, and b8ta has plans to deploy additional stores for other brands in that area. In April, Norby told me there were a handful of other brands that b8ta would announce soon. This year, b8ta expects anywhere from 10 to 15 companies to launch stores built by b8ta across cosmetics, apparel and furniture. It seems that Macy’s was one of those companies. b8ta as a store that showcased products like the , a folding electric bicycle, and , a wearable for achieving mindfulness and boosting energy, into physical stores to enable customers to have real, tactile experiences with them. |
Court approves merger of AT&T and Time Warner | Jordan Crook | 2,018 | 6 | 12 | United States District Court Judge Richard J. Leon has ruled in favor of AT&T in the government’s antitrust suit to block AT&T’s proposed merger with Time Warner. That decision matches word on the street over the past few weeks, and delivers a stern rebuke to the Trump administration, which had opposed the deal from its earliest days. The decision was made following the close of markets in New York, and after-hours trading was muted to the decision. In light of today’s decision, Comcast, which has been eyeing its own content creator takeover of 21st Century Fox, will In October 2016, AT&T its plan to acquire Time Warner for $85.4 billion, and a total of $108 billion with debt. The DOJ moved to block the merger in March, arguing that the merger would reduce competition and hurt consumer choice. The , as the implications of this decision reach far beyond the individual businesses of AT&T and Time Warner to the vast media landscape as a whole. First off, it’s worth noting that the overall goal of antitrust regulations is to protect the consumer from unfair business practices that may arise from a consolidation of power within a single company. But size isn’t necessarily what’s most important in these types of cases. In fact, sometimes a merger can help competition and consumer choice, as is more often the case with vertical mergers. A vertical merger is when two companies who provide different or complementary offerings join forces, giving consumers access to a more comprehensive set of services, at a lower price, while still generating profits. That’s not to say that vertical mergers get through regulatory approval free and clear — the FTC has fought 22 vertical mergers since 2000 — but they receive less scrutiny than horizontal mergers. AT&T-Time Warner is considered a vertical merger, as AT&T is a content distributor and Time Warner is a content creator. But the overall landscape complicates the decision a great deal. There are only a handful of companies in this space, and they are some of the most powerful companies in the world. AT&T itself is the largest telecom provider in the world, and via DirecTV, it is also the largest multichannel video programming distributor in the U.S. Time Warner, meanwhile, owns channels like TBS and TNT, HBO and Warner Bros., not to mention the assets to live sports and news orgs such as the NBA, MLB, NCAA March Madness and PGA. The DOJ has argued that this type of consolidation would give the merged AT&T-Time Warner the ability to raise prices, thwarting the competition’s ability to compete by forcing them to raise prices to maintain carriage rights. The government has also argued that the newly rolled back net neutrality rules would no longer protect AT&T from, say, throttling Netflix if it didn’t purchase and distribute Time Warner content. On the other side, AT&T and Time Warner (big as they may be) face steep competition from the FAANG companies (Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Netflix and Google), all of whom have made video a top priority. In fact, CNNMoney reported that AT&T-Time Warner’s counsel Daniel Petrocelli made the argument that traditional media orgs have already been left behind in the digital revolution. From the report: Petrocelli told Judge Leon that their estimates show FAANG is worth $3 trillion collectively, while an AT&T-Time Warner entity post-merger would be worth $300 billion. ‘We’re chasing their tail lights,’ Petrocelli said. It’s also worth noting that President Trump has been publicly opposed to the deal since he was on the campaign trail. Remember, Time Warner owns CNN, which is the object of some of Trump’s most focused hatred. At a campaign rally in 2016, Trump said his administration , raising concerns over political interference. The government has argued that Trump did not communicate with antitrust officials over the deal and that their choice to fight the merger was not influenced by the White House. |
LOLA just raised $24M for a subscription service that ships tampons, pads and now condoms | Sarah Perez | 2,018 | 6 | 12 | , a subscription service delivering tampons and pads, and now other products, including condoms, lubricant, and feminine cleansing wipes, has closed on $24 million in Series B funding. While the startup touts its products’ “100% organic” nature, it’s also well-received because of the customization offered and its direct-to-consumer nature. The new round of financing was led by private equity firm Alliance Consumer Growth (ACG), with support from existing investors Spark Capital, Lerer Hippeau and Brand Foundry Ventures. To date, has raised $11.2 million, from investors including also BBG Ventures, 14W, the founders of Warby Parker and Harry’s, Sweetgreen, Bonobos, and Insomnia Cookies. Celebs like Serena Williams, Karlie Kloss, Lena Dunham, and Allison Williams have also invested. in 2015, LOLA’s founders Alex Friedman and Jordana Kier had the idea to challenge industry giants, like Tampax and Playtex, with a 100% organic product. “We founded LOLA with a simple and seemingly obvious idea – as women, we shouldn’t have to compromise when it comes to our reproductive health,” explains Kier. “Like most women, we’d been using the same feminine care products since we were teenagers. But when we found out that brands – including the same ones we were loyal to all those years – aren’t required to disclose exactly what’s in their products, it made us wonder: what’s in our tampon?” “If we care about everything else we put in our bodies, products for our reproductive health shouldn’t be any different,” she states. LOLA’s tampons, pads and liners are made only with organic cotton, not synthetic fibers, like those used mainstream brands. Nor do they contain fragrances or dyes. The nature of its products appeal to consumers – especially, young millennial women – who are more conscious of the chemicals in their products, as well as those who want to buy organic for the environmental benefits. That said, there’s over how dangerous (or not) it is to use traditional feminine care products. , including some , insist there’s no threat from conventional products. But even women not concerned with buying organic may find LOLA appealing because of its model. Its subscription service lets you create a box with your own mix of tampon sizes (with or without applicators, which can be either cardboard or plastic). That’s something you can’t do when buying off the shelf. Plus, LOLA’s boxes aren’t any more expensive than those bought in the store. Its 18-count box of applicator tampons is ; or it’s $9 each, if ordering two or three boxes per month. Non-applicator tampons are a dollar less. In addition, LOLA sells other period-related products, including an essential oil blend for cramps, a multi-vitamin that protects against PMS, and a first period starter kit. In May, the startup broadened its mission to become more of a female health company with the launch of . This product line includes condoms, personal lubricant, and all-natural feminine cleansing wipes for women. It’s the startup’s first product line outside of feminine care. “Until now, there wasn’t really a place for women to turn to for honesty, reliability and information when it comes to their sex products,” says Kier of the new product lineup. “Historically, sexual wellness companies have been primarily marketed towards men and promote products that contain obscure ingredients and unnatural additives.” SEX by LOLA products, on the other hand, don’t have “irritating” additives, the founder explains, but still deliver the sensation and reliability you’d expect, she says. These new products are also offered on , starting at $10 per month for a 12-count box of condoms or 12-count box of cleansing wipes. https://youtu.be/hc8SgHiDuEU The company plans to use the Series B funds to finance product development, expand customer outreach – including through events, partnerships and offline – and expand its 19-person, currently New York-based team. More importantly, perhaps, is throwing more fuel on the fire, as LOLA is no longer without competition. There are a number of subscription startups for feminine products on the market today, including (which also ships chocolate); organic rival , which focuses on discrete, portable tampons and carrying cases; Jessica Alba’s (which ) and sustainable competitors like , as well as other reusable menstrual cups, like Diva Cup. And, of course, you can subscribe and save on Amazon to almost anything, including tampons. LOLA declines to share details related to the size and growth of its customer base or its revenue, so it’s difficult to rank LOLA in terms of its competition. Where LOLA may have some leverage, however, is encouraging more open discussions about female reproductive health, and engaging its customers through social media. The startup touts 6 times the number of Instagram followers compared with mainstream brands, for example, and says 1 in 4 customers have directly engaged with its brand over a variety of communication channels, including calls, emails, DMs, texts, and letters. ACG’s investment could help LOLA become more of a household name. The firm has previously brands like Harry’s, Pacifica, Shake Shack, Plum Organics, PDQ, barkTHINS, EVOL Foods, Suja Juice, Nudestix, and others. “LOLA is at the epicenter of the shift towards transparency in the women’s health category, and we couldn’t be more impressed with the brand Alex and Jordana have built and the impactful conversation they’ve driven,” said Alliance Consumer Growth Managing Partner, Trevor Nelson, in a statement about its funding. “We’re thrilled to welcome LOLA into the ACG family and support their continued evolution and product innovation, enabling them to meet their consumers’ needs,” he added. |
Fortnite won’t support cross-play between Nintendo Switch and PS4 | Brian Heater | 2,018 | 6 | 12 | null |
Tesla lays off roughly nine percent of workforce | Megan Rose Dickey | 2,018 | 6 | 12 | Tesla has laid off about nine percent of its employees, . This is part of the reorganization Musk talked about in May on the company’s quarterly earnings call. The layoffs reportedly started on Monday and will be made official at some point today. Tesla, which also operates SolarCity, is only laying off salaried employees. Tesla isn’t letting go any production associates, as the company is trying to ramp up Model 3 production. “We made these decisions by evaluating the criticality of each position, whether certain jobs could be done more efficiently and productively, and by assessing the specific skills and abilities of each individual in the company,” Tesla CEO Elon Musk wrote to employees in an email obtained by TechCrunch. “As you know, we are also continuing to flatten our management structure to help us communicate better, eliminate bureaucracy and move faster.” When Tesla acquired SolarCity in 2016, its headcount increased to more than 30,000 employees. Toward the end of 2017, Tesla had around 37,000 employees. In February, with Home Depot to sell the PowerWall and solar panels at 800 of Home Depot’s locations. But Tesla has reportedly not renewed its contract, which means the Tesla employees working at Home Depot won’t be needed anymore. Instead, Musk said in his email that they “will be offered the opportunity to move over to Tesla retail locations.” The hope with the restructure is to get to profitability. Last quarter, Tesla reported record revenues along with record losses. In Q1 2018, were a record $784.6 million ($4.19 per share). Here’s the full email Musk wrote to staffers: As described previously, we are conducting a comprehensive organizational restructuring across our whole company. Tesla has grown and evolved rapidly over the past several years, which has resulted in some duplication of roles and some job functions that, while they made sense in the past, are difficult to justify today. As part of this effort, and the need to reduce costs and become profitable, we have made the difficult decision to let go of approximately 9% of our colleagues across the company. These cuts were almost entirely made from our salaried population and no production associates were included, so this will not affect our ability to reach Model 3 production targets in the coming months. Given that Tesla has never made an annual profit in the almost 15 years since we have existed, profit is obviously not what motivates us. What drives us is our mission to accelerate the world’s transition to sustainable, clean energy, but we will never achieve that mission unless we eventually demonstrate that we can be sustainably profitable. That is a valid and fair criticism of Tesla’s history to date. This week, we are informing those whose roles are impacted by this action. We made these decisions by evaluating the criticality of each position, whether certain jobs could be done more efficiently and productively, and by assessing the specific skills and abilities of each individual in the company. As you know, we are also continuing to flatten our management structure to help us communicate better, eliminate bureaucracy and move faster. In addition to this company-wide restructuring, we’ve decided not to renew our residential sales agreement with Home Depot in order to focus our efforts on selling solar power in Tesla stores and online. The majority of Tesla employees working at Home Depot will be offered the opportunity to move over to Tesla retail locations. I would like to thank everyone who is departing Tesla for their hard work over the years. I’m deeply grateful for your many contributions to our mission. It is very difficult to say goodbye. In order to minimize the impact, Tesla is providing significant salary and stock vesting (proportionate to length of service) to those we are letting go. To be clear, Tesla will still continue to hire outstanding talent in critical roles as we move forward and there is still a significant need for additional production personnel. I also want to emphasize that we are making this hard decision now so that we never have to do this again. To those who are departing, thank you for everything you’ve done for Tesla and we wish you well in your future opportunities. To those remaining, I would like to thank you in advance for the difficult job that remains ahead. We are a small company in one of the toughest and most competitive industries on Earth, where just staying alive, let alone growing, is a form of victory (Tesla and Ford remain the only American car companies who haven’t gone bankrupt). Yet, despite our tiny size, Tesla has already played a major role in moving the auto industry towards sustainable electric transport and moving the energy industry towards sustainable power generation and storage. We must continue to drive that forward for the good of the world. Thanks,
Elon |
Beware ‘founder-friendly’ VCs — 3 steps founders should take to protect their companies | Mona Bijoor | 2,018 | 6 | 12 |
In 2014, it seemed like pretty much with a pulse and pitch deck was capable of raising huge amounts of capital from prestigious venture capital firms at sky-high valuations. Here we are and times have changed. VCs inked a little more than 3,100 deals in the last quarter of 2017, according to — about 500 fewer than the previous quarter. For aspiring startup founders, it’s a “confusing time in the so-called Unicorn story,” as Erin Griffith put it in a last May — an asset bubble that never really popped, but which at the very least is deflating. In the confirmation hearing for new SEC Chairman Jay Clayton, lawmakers lamented the dearth of as companies that thrived in private markets — from Snap to Blue Apron — have struggled to deliver meaningful returns to investors. This all creates a number of dilemmas for founders looking to raise capital and scale businesses in 2018. VCs remain an integral part of the innovation ecosystem. But what happens when the changing dynamics of financial markets collide with VCs’ expectations regarding growth? VCs may not always be aligned with founders and companies in this new environment. A recent commissioned by Eric Paley at Founder Collective found that by pressuring companies to scale prematurely, venture capitalists are indirectly responsible for more startup deaths than founder infighting, technical debt and slow customer adoption — combined. The new landscape requires that founders in particular be judicious in the way they seek out new sources of capital, structure cap tables and ownership and the types of concessions made to their new backers in exchange for that much-needed cash. Here are three ways founders can ensure they’re looking out for what’s best for their companies — and themselves — in the long run. Venture capitalists are arguably in the business of due diligence. Before they sign the dotted line, they can be expected to call your competitors, your customers, your former employers, your business school classmates — they will ask everyone and their mother about you. A first-time founder is also new to the pressures of entrepreneurship, of having employees rely on you for their livelihoods. Whether you are desperate for cash because you need to make payroll, or you’re anxious for the validation of a headline-worthy investment, few founders take the time to properly backchannel their investors. Until you can say you’ve done due diligence of your own, your opinion of your VCs is going to be based on the size of their fund, the deals they’ve done or the press they’ve gotten. In short, it will likely be based on what they’ve done right. On the other hand, you likely don’t know anything about the actual partner that will join your board. Are they intelligent in your space? Do they have a meaningful network? Or do they just know a few headhunters? Are they value creators? What is their political standing in their firm? Before you sign a term sheet, you need to take the time to contextualize the profile of the person who is taking a board seat. It gives you foresight on the actions your investment partner will likely take down the road. If you do decide to raise capital, make sure you are in alignment with your board regarding your business plan, the pursuit of profit at the expense of revenue growth, or vice versa, and how it will steer your decision making as the market changes. It goes without saying that differences of opinion regarding your business strategy can lead to big conflict down the road. As you think about these trade-offs, remember that as an entrepreneur, your obligation is to the existing shareholders: the employees and you. As the pack of potential unicorns has thinned, VCs in particular have turned to deal structures, like the use of common and preferred shares. For the founder who needs to raise cash, a dual ownership structure seems like a fair compromise to make, but remember that it may be at the expense of your employees’ option pool. The interests of preferred and common shareholders are not , particularly when it comes time to make difficult decisions in the future. VCs frequently share information, board decks and investor presentations with members of the press and the tech community, sometimes in support of their own personal agendas or to get perspective on whether to invest or not. That’s why it’s particularly important to backchannel, and more importantly, that you have allies that you can call on and people who can ensure some measure of goodwill. A good company board cannot be made up of just the investors and you: You need advocates that are balanced and on your side. These prescriptions can sound paranoid, particularly to the founder whose business is growing nicely. But anything can cause a sea change and put you at odds with the people funding your company — who now own a piece of the company that you’re trying to build. When disagreements arise, it can get tense. They might say that you are a first-time founder, and therefore a novice. They will make your weaknesses known and say you’ll never be able to raise again if you ignore their invaluable advice. It’s important that you don’t fall into the fear trap. If you create a product or service that solves an undeniable problem, the money will come — and you will get funded again. The term founder-friendly VC was always perhaps a bit of a misnomer. The people building the business and the people planning on cashing in on your efforts are imperfect allies. As a founder and business owner, your primary responsibilities are to your clients, to the company you’re building and, most importantly, to the employees who are helping you do it. As founders we like to think that we have all the answers, especially in bad times. Making sure you have alignment with your investors in challenging and unpredictable situations is critical. It’s important to anticipate how your investors will problem-solve before you give up control. Venture capital is far from the only way to finance an early-stage business. Founders looking to jump-start their business have a number of alternatives, from debt financing and bootstrapping to crowdfunding, angel investors and ICOs. There are indeed still many advantages to having experienced investors on your side, not simply the cash but also the access to hiring and industry knowledge. But the relationship can only benefit both parties when founders go in eyes wide open. |
Is Super Smash Bros. Ultimate the most ambitious crossover event in history? | Brian Heater | 2,018 | 6 | 12 | null |
Everything Nintendo announced at E3 2018 | Lucas Matney | 2,018 | 6 | 12 | Nintendo came out with the big guns for its pre-recorded E3 conference this morning, delivering updates on a couple of veteran franchises while also bringing some new titles to its Switch console. We didn’t get a ton of big surprises, but what Nintendo showed off was certainly exciting to a lot of fans. The bulk of the presentation was (as expected) devoted to the intimate minutiae of Super Smash Bros. Ultimate, which is arriving at the end of the year and will bring the biggest cast to the game ever, with some new characters arriving alongside the entire cast of the series’ previous iterations. Super Smash Bros. Ultimate, Super Mario Party and Fortnite were probably the biggest highlights, but let’s take a look at everything they talked about. One of the crazier parts of this announcement included the fact that Nintendo has made a redesigned GameCube controller, which will be compatible with the game and will be supporting your old GameCube controller somehow as well, presumably with a dongle. Available December 7, 2018. Alongside the new gameplay content, Super Mario Party is going to integrate some weird multi-Switch gameplay that will allow users to play together across multiple Switch consoles and merge their screens together. Available October 5, 2018. Available now for free download. In addition to the big-gun trifecta of game announcements, Nintendo also shed some light on other titles coming to the system, which has realistically had a pretty tiny game library since launch. Coming spring 2019. Coming 2019. New update available September 14 for Expansion Pass members. Other titles announced during the Nintendo Direct included Daemon X Machina, Overcooked! 2, Killer Queen Black, Hollow Knight and Octopath Traveler. In terms of the new Pokémon titles, Let’s Go, Pikachu! and Let’s Go, Eevee!, they will be available November 16 and people will be able to buy a $99.99 combo that includes the Poké Ball Plus controller, as well. So that’s it; no Metroid Prime news, no Animal Crossing for Switch, no other big teases — but there’s certainly a good chunk of titles to keep Switch owners excited for a while. We’ll be at E3 checking out some of these new titles this week, so stay tuned for more from us on the ground in Los Angeles. |
Google’s Family Link software now recommends ‘teacher-approved’ apps | Sarah Perez | 2,018 | 6 | 12 | Google today is expanding the capabilities of its Android parental control software, , to go beyond helping parents better manage their child’s device and app usage. Now, the Family Link app will also help parents learn about what apps they may want to install for their kids, as well. In a new discovery section, Family Link will feature a list of educational apps for children ages six through nine that parents can install with a tap. The apps are “recommended by teachers,” the section proclaims. Google explains that it worked with teachers from across the U.S. to come up with this curated list of apps with educational value. The teachers were recruited to rate content based on their expertise in learning and child development, and had a diverse background in terms of things like years of experience, demographics, and locations in the U.S. The apps must also meet Google’s Designed for Families (DFF) At launch, the recommended apps come from publishers like MarcoPolo Learning Inc., BrainPOP, Edoki Academy and others, and include those that teach kids about facts and figures, interesting places around the world, and, of course – it’s Google! – the basics of coding, among other things. There are currently a few dozen recommended apps, but they won’t appear all at once. Instead, Google tells us, the list will refresh on a weekly basis so as not to overwhelm either the parent or child. Over time, Google plans to add more apps to the feature, including those for other age ranges. Currently, all the apps are free, but Google may choose to highlight paid apps in the future, a spokesperson says. Parents can tap on the apps to visit their page on Google Play, and add them directly to their child’s device with a tap on the “Install” button. The feature is available in the Family Link mobile app for parents in the U.S. for the time being. Google says it will be available in other markets over time. The recommendations of “nutritious” apps, as Google refers to them in an announcement, comes at a time when major tech companies are paying increased attention to the time spent on devices, and a growing concern among consumers – parents and otherwise – that it’s not time well spent. At Google’s developer conference in May, the company for managing and monitoring screen time to promote healthier app and device usage. This includes ways to prevent the phone from distracting or stimulating users, as well as time limits for apps. These sorts of controls are things parents want for their children, too, which is what Family Link, publicly in fall 2017, has provided. But when even “screen time” itself is being seen as a concern, it makes sense that Google would want to showcase some of the apps that provide something of value. The feature is launching today on Family Link for Android with iOS support to follow. |
Google wants to make the college search easier | Frederic Lardinois | 2,018 | 6 | 12 | Google Search is getting that will put data about colleges front and center when you search for a school’s name. The idea here is somewhat similar to what Google did with its . In this case, the company aggregates data about a school that’s typically hard to find and then presents it in a single widget. One caveat here, though, is that this only works for four-year schools. So if you’re looking for data about community colleges, for example, this new tool won’t help you. Finding all of this information about cost, acceptance and graduation rates, available majors, stats about the student body and other details like the typical annual income of graduates after 10 years can be very time-consuming. This new widget puts all of this data right into the sidebar (on desktop) or at the top of the page (on mobile). Google is mostly getting this data from the U.S. Department of Education’s and . The company notes that it worked with research and nonprofit organizations, as well as high school counselors and admissions professional to design the new experience. This new feature is now live and should automatically pop up when you search for any in the U.S. |
Samsung launches new fund for early-stage AI investments | Jon Russell | 2,018 | 6 | 13 | Samsung is diving deeper into artificial intelligence after it a new fund focused on AI technologies and startups. The Korean firm’s ‘ is targeted at seed and Series A deals for startups that are “solving AI problems, as well as those using AI to solve computer science problems.” In particular, the announcement revealing the new fund mentioned areas that include learning in simulation, scene understanding, problem learning programs and human computer interaction. The fund itself doesn’t have a dedicated kitty, , which was announced last year and is focused on early-stage companies in emerging tech verticals. The Q fund has already cut checks, though. To date it has backed a number of companies, one of which is Covariant.AI — a startup that teaches skills to robots. “For the past ten years, we’ve watched software eat the world. Now, it’s AI’s turn to eat software. We’re launching Q Fund to support the next generation of AI startups who look to scratch beyond the surface of what we know today,” said Samsung NEXT Ventures’ Vincent Tang in a statement. |
Apple confirms that it will seal up law enforcement’s favorite iPhone cracking method | Taylor Hatmaker | 2,018 | 6 | 13 | A new version of iOS will block a that law enforcement agencies have leveraged in order to crack into locked iPhones. In an upcoming version of iOS (likely iOS 12), Apple will include a feature known as USB Restricted Mode, which limits access to a locked iPhone through its USB port. The feature previously appeared in the iOS 11.3 beta, making its way into the iOS 12 beta; now the company has confirmed the security patch will make it into a final iOS release. With USB Restricted Mode, an iPhone’s Lightning port will lock one hour after the phone is locked. In that mode, which will be the default, only charging will be possible through the port after the initial one hour period has expired. “We’re constantly strengthening the security protections in every Apple product to help customers defend against hackers, identity thieves and intrusions into their personal data,” Apple told TechCrunch in an emailed statement. “We have the greatest respect for law enforcement, and we don’t design our security improvements to frustrate their efforts to do their jobs.” That solution should thwart iPhone-cracking devices like those made by GrayShift and Cellebrite. Such devices, particularly GrayShift’s , which promises to unlock even new iPhone models, use the USB port to access a locked iPhone in order to crack its password using more attempts than would normally be allowed. That process can take anywhere from , depending on the length of the iPhone’s password. Federal agencies — including the FBI, DEA, State Department, Secret Service and at least five states — already or are in the process of obtaining it. The FBI’s third-party solution to iPhone cracking became a lightning rod in the clash between the agency and Apple in the aftermath of 2016’s San Bernardino mass shooting, with Apple pressing the FBI for details on the security vulnerability and the close to its chest. As Apple moves to neutralize GrayKey and similar devices, anyone looking to crack into the company’s famously secure iPhone is going to need to try a new tack — and maybe figure out what to do with their now defunct $15,000 or $30,000 hacker toy in the process. |
This AR guppy feeds on the spectrum of human emotion | Brian Heater | 2,018 | 6 | 13 | null |
Comcast bids $65B for Fox assets, setting the stage for a fight with Disney | Anthony Ha | 2,018 | 6 | 13 | Comcast made good on to make an offer for 21st Century Fox’s film and TV assets today, with a cash bid of $65 billion, or $35 per share. That’s 19 percent more than . This follows yesterday’s U.S. court approval of , which was widely expected to lead Comcast to make a new bid for Fox and, in the long-term, set the stage for . (This is where I remind you that TechCrunch is owned by Oath, a digital media subsidiary of Verizon.) In (namely Rupert, James and Lachlan Murdoch), Comcast CEO Brian Roberts wrote that after meetings last year, his team was convinced that Comcast would be “the right strategic home” for the Fox assets, and that “we were disappointed when 21CF decided to enter into a transaction with The Walt Disney Company, even though we had offered a meaningfully higher price.” “In light of yesterday’s decision in the AT&T/Time Warner case, the limited time prior to your shareholders’ meeting, and our strong continued interest, we are pleased to present a new, all-cash proposal that fully addresses the Board’s stated concerns with our prior proposal,” Roberts said. This could set off a battle between Comcast and Disney. The assets at stake include the Fox film studio (which owns the Avatar franchise, the film rights to the X-Men and Fantastic Four and the original Star Wars), its TV studio, its cable networks and its stake in Hulu. In the letter, Roberts also said a Comcast-Fox acquisition is “as or more likely to receive regulatory approval than the Disney transaction” and that Comcast would reimburse Fox for the $1.5 billion breakup fee with Disney. Fox released a statement confirming that it has received the bid. It also said, “21st Century Fox has not yet made a determination, in light of Comcast’s proposal, as to whether it will postpone or adjourn” its July 10 stockholder meeting to discuss the Disney acquisition. |
Sphero raises $12M as it focuses on education | Brian Heater | 2,018 | 6 | 13 | null |
Amazon starts shipping its $249 DeepLens AI camera for developers | Frederic Lardinois | 2,018 | 6 | 13 | Back at its re:Invent conference in November, AWS its $249 DeepLens, a camera that’s specifically geared who want to build and prototype vision-centric machine learning models. The company started taking DeepLens a few months ago, but now the camera is actually shipping to developers. Ahead of today’s launch, I had a chance to attend a workshop in Seattle with DeepLens senior product manager Jyothi Nookula and Amazon’s VP for AI Swami Sivasubramanian to get some hands-on time with the hardware and the software services that make it tick. DeepLens is essentially a small Ubuntu- and Intel Atom-based computer with a built-in camera that’s powerful enough to easily run and evaluate visual machine learning models. In total, DeepLens offers about 106 GFLOPS of performance. The hardware has all of the usual I/O ports (think Micro HDMI, USB 2.0, Audio out, etc.) to let you create prototype applications, no matter whether those are simple toy apps that send you an alert when the camera detects a bear in your backyard or an industrial application that keeps an eye on a conveyor belt in your factory. The 4 megapixel camera isn’t going to win any prizes, but it’s perfectly adequate for most use cases. Unsurprisingly, DeepLens is deeply integrated with the rest of AWS’s services. Those include the AWS IoT service Greengrass, which you use to deploy models to DeepLens, for example, but also SageMaker, Amazon’s newest tool for building machine learning models. These integrations are also what makes getting started with the camera pretty easy. Indeed, if all you want to do is run one of the pre-built samples that AWS provides, it shouldn’t take you more than 10 minutes to set up your DeepLens and deploy one of these models to the camera. Those project templates include an object detection model that can distinguish between 20 objects (though it had some issues with toy dogs, as you can see in the image above), a style transfer example to render the camera image in the style of van Gogh, a face detection model and a model that can distinguish between cats and dogs and one that can recognize about 30 different actions (like playing guitar, for example). The DeepLens team is also adding a model for tracking head poses. Oh, and there’s also a . But that’s obviously just the beginning. As the DeepLens team stressed during our workshop, even developers who have never worked with machine learning can take the existing templates and easily extend them. In part, that’s due to the fact that a DeepLens project consists of two parts: the model and a Lambda function that runs instances of the model and lets you perform actions based on the model’s output. And with SageMaker, AWS now offers a tool that also makes it easy to build models without having to manage the underlying infrastructure. You could do a lot of the development on the DeepLens hardware itself, given that it is essentially a small computer, though you’re probably better off using a more powerful machine and then deploying to DeepLens using the AWS Console. If you really wanted to, you could use DeepLens as a low-powered desktop machine as it comes with Ubuntu 16.04 pre-installed. For developers who know their way around machine learning frameworks, DeepLens makes it easy to import models from virtually all the popular tools, including Caffe, TensorFlow, MXNet and others. It’s worth noting that the AWS team also built a model optimizer for MXNet models that allows them to run more efficiently on the DeepLens device. So why did AWS build DeepLens? “The whole rationale behind DeepLens came from a simple question that we asked ourselves: How do we put machine learning in the hands of every developer,” Sivasubramanian said. “To that end, we brainstormed a number of ideas and the most promising idea was actually that developers love to build solutions as hands-on fashion on devices.” And why did AWS decide to build its own hardware instead of simply working with a partner? “We had a specific customer experience in mind and wanted to make sure that the end-to-end experience is really easy,” he said. “So instead of telling somebody to go download this toolkit and then go buy this toolkit from Amazon and then wire all of these together. […] So you have to do like 20 different things, which typically takes two or three days and then you have to put the entire infrastructure together. It takes too long for somebody who’s excited about learning deep learning and building something fun.” So if you want to get started with deep learning and build some hands-on projects, DeepLens is now available on Amazon. At $249, it’s not cheap, but if you are already using AWS — and maybe even use Lambda already — it’s probably the easiest way to get started with building these kind of machine learning-powered applications. |
Democrats introduce an election security bill that proposes paper trails and mandatory audits | Taylor Hatmaker | 2,018 | 6 | 13 | As in states across the U.S., concerns about election cybersecurity are mounting too. This week, a group of Democratic senators introduced a bill to mitigate some of the well-established risks that the nation’s uneven mix of voting machines and election systems poses. The new bill, known as the , proposes two significant measures. First, because not all digital voting systems produce a paper trail, it would require all state and local elections to ensure that their equipment produces voter-verified paper ballots that can be cross-referenced. Second, for all federal elections regardless of outcome, state and local governments would be required to conduct audits comparing digital ballots to a random selection of paper ballots. The latter policy would cover the 22 states that currently don’t require audits following elections. “Leaving the fate of America’s democracy up to hackable election machines is like leaving your front door open, unlocked and putting up a sign that says ‘out of town.’ It’s not a question of if bad guys get in, it’s just a question of when,” Oregon Senator Ron Wyden said in a statement accompanying the bill. Voting integrity is one of and the senator has pressed for his home state of to be adopted nationally. Wyden is joined by Democratic Senators Kirsten Gillibrand, Ed Markey, Jeff Merkley, Patty Murray and Elizabeth Warren on the legislation. Congressman Earl Blumenauer plans to introduce a corresponding bill in the house. “We know that Russia hacked into American voter systems to influence our election – and we know they’ll try to do it again,” Sen. Warren said. “Our national security experts have warned us that the country’s election infrastructure is vulnerable – this bill will take important steps to help secure it.” While the bill isn’t a bipartisan proposal — yet, anyway — these same measures are widely supported by election security experts as well as the and a offering recommendations for securing the vote from earlier this year. The full text of the bill is embedded below. [scribd id=381730370 key=key-PgmRtP7NtebNWwZEa085 mode=scroll] |
Chowbotics raises $11 million to move its robot beyond salads | Brian Heater | 2,018 | 6 | 13 | null |
Netflix is adding an interactive ‘Minecraft’ story to its lineup, denies entry into gaming | Sarah Perez | 2,018 | 6 | 13 | Netflix denies a report that it’s entering the gaming market, but says it is expanding its lineup to include a new game-related, “interactive” narrative series called “Minecraft: Story Mode.” The new series will be the latest addition to its growing collection of interactive stories, which includes kid-friendly titles like “Stretch Armstrong: The Breakout,” “Puss in Book: Trapped in an Epic Tale,” and “Buddy Thunderstruck: The Maybe Pile.” According to a recent report from , Netflix is partnering with Telltale Games to bring game experiences to its TV service, starting with a Minecraft game. Netflix is now clarifying that it’s not a “game,” exactly, it’s an interactive story. The company a year ago it would begin experimenting with a new way to stream video, through “choose your own adventure”-style stories that allow viewers to pick what happens next. This allows for the same story to have multiple variations. It’s the sort of thing that would have never been possible through traditional linear TV, but is enabled through an online platform like Netflix. The stories could also make for a selling point for families with younger children, in terms of being a differentiating feature for its service. The company confirms that “Minecraft: Story Mode” is a licensed 5-episode interactive narrative series that will be coming to its service this fall, in partnership with Telltale. The gaming publisher Telltale Games already “Minecraft: Story Mode” across other platforms, including Steam, game consoles, Google Play and the App Store. While Telltale and others consider “Minecraft: Story Mode” to be a type of game, Netflix does not. It’s a narrative you work your way through, similar to the others, it believes. (The story does take place in the Minecraft universe, however.) “We don’t have any plans to get into gaming,” a Netflix spokesperson said, in response to TechRadar’s report. “There’s a broad spectrum of entertainment available today. Games have become increasingly cinematic, but we view this as interactive narrative storytelling on our service,” they explained. Meanwhile, the other gaming project TechRadar had uncovered – a game related to the Netflix hit “Stranger Things” – is something that will launch in Telltale’s platform at a later date, Netflix says. It’s not a game coming to Netflix’s service, and is instead part of Netflix’s ongoing marketing and title promotion efforts. The company has today, and often promotes its shows in other ways on mobile. For example, it a standalone “Orange is the New Black” app back in 2014, and when it was promoting the new season of “Arrested Development,” . “Stranger Things” lends itself more to a mobile gaming format, though. And Netflix does use video games to drive awareness of its brand and content. As the company stated in a recent for a Manager of Interactive Licensing: We are pursuing video games because we believe it will drive meaningful show awareness/buzz and allow fans to “play” our most popular content. We want the interactive category to help promote our titles so they become part of the zeitgeist for longer periods of time and we want to use games as a marketing tactic to capture demand and delight our member community. Of course, interactive stories do blur the line between games and narrative storytelling – something that’s a newer trend across online platforms these days. For example, was a part-story, part-game called “Florence,” which involved both narrative elements and interactive features. To what extent these work as well on Netflix’s platform as they do on smartphones still remains to be seen, given that the format is still new to streaming services. Time will tell if it’s worth the continued investment, or if Netflix’s experimentation will one day conclude. |
Ashton Kutcher and Effie Epstein to talk Sound Ventures at Disrupt SF | Jordan Crook | 2,018 | 6 | 13 | While many celebrities try to invest in the world of tech, very few do so successfully. And no one has proved their worth as celebrity-turned-VC more than Ashton Kutcher. That’s why we’re absolutely thrilled to host Ashton Kutcher and Sound Ventures partner Effie Epstein at TC Disrupt SF in September. Kutcher first got into investing in 2011 with the launch of . The firm invested in big-name companies like DuoLingo, FlexPort, ProductHunt, Airbnb, and Uber. In 2014, Kutcher, alongside his longtime friend and partner Guy Oseary, started a new VC firm called . Since launch, Sound Ventures has made 53 investments and led six rounds of financing, with portfolio companies including Gusto, Vicarious, Robinhood, Lemonade, and Acorns. And in 2017, Sound made another investment in the form of . The firm brought on Epstein as managing partner, with Kutcher telling TechCrunch: “Effie has a deep understanding of business and fiduciary responsibilities. She also has a multidisciplinary background which makes her a home run for venture. The bottom line is she is someone I want to work for.” Before joining Sound, Epstein led global strategy at Marsh & McLennan subsidiary Marsh. Prior to Marsh, she served as SVP of planning and head of Investor Relations at iHeartMedia, and before that she worked in business development at Clear. Epstein also worked in investment banking in the energy sector and has an MBA from Harvard Business School. In other words, Epstein brings a multi-disciplinary approach to Sound, which is venturing beyond consumer tech into financial services, insurance tech, enterprise, govtech and medtech sectors. This won’t be Kutcher’s first go-around at Disrupt. He spoke at , right as the world was . We’re excited to revisit the topic of cryptocurrencies and so much more with Kutcher and Epstein, and discuss their investment thesis moving forward. Tickets to Disrupt SF are available . |
Uber brings on Facebook product director to lead driver product | Megan Rose Dickey | 2,018 | 6 | 13 | Uber has brought on Daniel Danker to serve as a senior director and head of driver product. Prior to joining Uber, he was a product director at Facebook responsible for video and Facebook Live. “Drivers are the heart of the Uber experience, and Daniel’s passion for our mission and deep product knowledge will ensure we continue to improve and innovate on their behalf,” Uber Head of Product Manik Gupta said in a statement to TechCrunch. Uber has been without a head of driver product since December, when shortly after Uber wrapped up its 180 days of change driver campaign. As head of driver product, Danker will be responsible for planning, strategy and execution. Danker has had a long history in Silicon Valley. Between 2000 and 2010, Danker worked in a couple of roles at Microsoft, where he ended his stint as director of development and operations. He eventually left Microsoft for BBC in 2010 and then made his way to Shazam, where he served as chief product officer for nearly three years. Danker’s addition to the team comes in lockstep with . This hire also comes a its revamped driver app. The new app was designed to make it easier for drivers to access pertinent information, while ensuring they wouldn’t be distracted behind the wheel. One key added feature was the ability for drivers to recognize where surge, boost and incentivized areas are located. “Say you’re in a slow area,” Uber Driver Experience Group Manager Yuhki Yamashita told me in April. “We might actually suggest a place to go to instead because it’s much busier. And in this way you get a little bit more information about what’s happening around you. We get to answer questions like ‘well what should you be doing next.’ And you know it feels like the app understands your current situation.” Under the leadership of CEO Dara Khosrowshahi, Uber has placed a greater emphasis on its drivers. Its commitment to drivers kicked off in June with Uber’s 180 days of change. In that time, . At the Code Conference last month, despite what former CEO Travis Kalanick said, Uber will never get rid of the driver. “The face of Uber is the person sitting in the front seat,” Khosrowshahi said. He also spoke about how Uber is looking for ways to offer benefits and insurance to its drivers. |
Musical.ly kills its standalone live-streaming app Live.ly | Sarah Perez | 2,018 | 6 | 13 | Musical.ly is merging the functionality from its two-year old live-streaming platform Live.ly into its main app, and has disabled Live.ly’s standalone app as part of the transition process. The Live.ly app will eventually be pulled from the App Store and Google Play, the company confirmed to TechCrunch. Instead of being able to go live, Live.ly users are presented with a message about the changes, informing them that live streaming has now moved over to Musical.ly. This change is also confirmed via Live.ly’s App Store update text, which says: Live.ly is becoming part of musical.ly!
– You can go live on musical.ly right now! Plenty of live content there! Live.ly offering Musical.ly users a live-streaming platform, where the streams were directly viewable on Musical.ly, as well as within the Live.ly mobile app. As the video creator streamed, they’d see a count of how many people were watching, and would see hearts float up across the screen when viewers “liked” their content — an experience that’s very similar to Twitter/Periscope and Facebook Live. Viewers could also chat with the streamer, and engage in real-time conversations. Unfortunately for Live.ly users, there was little warning about the shut down, and it seems that, for some, live streaming on Musical.ly is not working as expected. One regular Live.ly user , complaining that after she made the switch to Musical.ly for her live stream as instructed, but no people were online watching and no likes and comments were showing up, either. This appears to be some sort of glitch, as viewers, likes, comments and other Live.ly core features are displaying for others who have been transitioned to the Musical.ly-based live-streaming experience. Not everyone will be able to go live directly on Musical.ly today, as the addition of live-streaming support is a phased rollout. However, the company says it remains committed to investing in live-streaming functionality, despite the Live.ly shutdown. We’re told that the majority of live-stream viewership was already taking place on Musical.ly’s main app, so it made sense for the company to consolidate the live video alongside the other short, lip sync videos Musical.ly is known for. The closure of Live.ly is one of the first major changes to the Musical.ly product following its by Chinese media company Bytedance for up to $1 billion in November 2017. Under its new ownership, Musical.ly to help build out its creator community, but has also faced for having capabilities — something that’s especially concerning given that a large part of its viewership audience is children. It is also now facing a new threat: this month, called Lip Sync Live. The increased competition may have played a role in having Musical.ly consolidate its resources in order to focus on its flagship app, not its spinoff. The main Musical.ly app has a reported 200 million registered users, 60 million of whom are active on a monthly basis. Live.ly has been downloaded 26 million times to date, 87 percent on iOS. The U.S. accounts for about 70 percent of installs, according to data from Sensor Tower. |
Here’s what having the biggest game of the year looks like at E3 | Lucas Matney | 2,018 | 6 | 13 | For all of the beautiful photo-realistic titles shown off at E3 this year, for all the mind-bending storylines and beautiful art styles, it seems that nobody can stop thinking about Fortnite. The battle royale title has picked up users at break-neck speeds, announcing yesterday that it now has 125 million active users logging in and dropping into battle. The Epic Games title is available across a wide variety of platforms — it just launched a version for the Nintendo Switch yesterday, successfully rounding out the most viable gaming platforms. In short, this is Fortnite’s year, and on the E3 show floor, Epic Games made quite the splash with one of the more elaborate booths, complete with mechanical llama piñatas, photo ops, merch, snacks and plenty of opportunities for fans to stop and play a little Fortnite. Check out some more of the ridiculous opulence below. [gallery ids="1656223,1656222,1656224,1656221,1656226,1656225,1656228,1656230,1656231,1656243,1656227,1656233"] |
N26 launches a revised metal card | Romain Dillet | 2,018 | 6 | 13 | Fintech startup is updating its N26 Metal product and launching it tomorrow. You might remember that the company its premium card at TechCrunch Disrupt Berlin in December 2017. Shortly after the conference, the card was available in early access for existing N26 Black customers. But the company had to go back to the drawing board and update the card design. N26 Metal customers had some complaints about the design of the card in particular. While the original metal card was primarily made of a sheet of tungsten, the metallic part was still surrounded by plastic. Customers complained about scratches and the overall feel of the card. It didn’t really feel like a metal card. It was more or less a heavy plastic card with a metal core. You could easily get scratches and the MasterCard logo was just a sticker. such a shame my Metal card has a big scratch… it doesn’t even look like a scratch but something deeper under the plastic :( — W Bonnaud-Dowell (@bonnaud_dowell) Even more surprising, some customers had some issues going through airport security because tungsten was an uncommon material. Travelled 2 times since I have the metal card and get an extra security check each time because of this. 😒 — Alex. Delivet (@alexd) At an event in Berlin, the company announced a revised version of N26 Metal. The front of the card is going to be made out of actual metal. The MasterCard logo will be engraved. And the name of the customer is moving to the back of the card. You can now and customers will start getting the new metal card tomorrow. Everybody will be able to sign up next Tuesday. But N26 Metal isn’t just a fancy card. For around €15 per month, you get all the advantages of as well as partner offerings. These offerings include the basic $45 per month WeWork subscription so that you can access a WeWork office for free for one day per month and pay for extra days. You also get 10 percent off hotel bookings on Hotels.com, promo codes for Drivy, Babbel and other services. The company says that there will be new offerings in the coming months. |
This new startup wants to be the ‘Netscape for crypto,’ and some investors think it has a shot | Connie Loizos | 2,018 | 6 | 13 | Three-month-old wants to make it easier for you to find and use blockchain-based apps. How? Through a portal that’s promising to enable users to click through to see how their crypto holdings are faring, to buy and sell CryptoKitties or to find and use other decentralized apps. Its co-founder and CEO, Ritik Malhotra, says it will eventually be the “Netscape for crypto.” If it sounds outlandish, that’s partly because there are still so few blockchain apps from which to choose. Malhotra and team insist that this will change over time, however, and investors seem to trust them, including Coinbase, The House Fund and numerous individual investors who just provided the company with a little less than a million dollars in pre-seed funding. The founders’ pedigree appears to be part of Elph’s appeal. Malhotra was a Thiel fellow, for example, stepping away from UC Berkeley in order to make the requisite two-year commitment demanded of the prestigious program. Malhotra and Tanooj Luthra, Elph’s co-founder and CTO, had also previously co-founded and led a YC-backed startup, Streem, that to Box in 2014. Afterward, Luthra joined Coinbase as a senior engineer on Coinbase’s crypto team, learning the ins and outs of the nascent but fast-growing industry. But the company’s premise is compelling, too. Most crypto outfits today require users to walk through numerous manual steps to create and store their wallet, and authenticate that they are who they say before they can start actively engaging with the service. With Elph, users simply sign up with an email and password, says Malhotra; Elph then handles account management across apps based on the unique ID that it assigns them. “It’s an app store,” explains Luthra. “You log in, you see a bunch of decentralized apps, you click them and they open up. We’ve handled all the interfacing with the blockchain and done the heavy lifting in the background for you.” These decentralized app developers don’t need to buy into Elph’s vision; they all respond to open web3 protocols that allow them to interact with the Ethereum blockchain and Ethereum smart contracts. Elph has been able to implement the web3 APIs in its app, meaning everyone is talking the same language. Elph is also working on a developer SDK to make it even easier for developers to build blockchain-based apps. Malhotra and Luthra seem to be carving their careers out of abstracting away the complexity of highly technical things. Streem built desktop software for cloud storage services, for example, enabling customers to stream files to their desktop environments. (Notably, it also raised just $875,000 from investors to build out its product.) More recently, while working at Coinbase, Luthra realized he was witnessing “this huge boom of new, decentralized apps coming out that are hard for anyone to access or use who isn’t fairly technical.” It’s “kind of like the internet in 1994 right now,” he says. “So we decided to simplify it.” The company is opening up its public beta launch today, which you can check out . Because most users need to be educated about which apps are being built, the portal today allows them to browse apps by category — much like sites like Netscape and Yahoo once did when the internet was still young and its content a confusing morass for web surfers. The team has plainly paid attention to creating an engaging experience that aims to make finding and using these apps fun. As for how Elph accrues value for itself and its investors, the idea is to employ token mechanics, meaning that new features will be added over time by “maintainers” or people who work on the app store to either jazz it up or else rank apps for Elph and receive tokens as rewards in exchange for their efforts. (These tokens, presumably, will be available to trade over time on cryptocurrency exchanges that are easily accessed through . . . Elph.) Elph isn’t the only outfit to identify this same opportunity. Coinbase, for example, last year rolled out Toshi, a browser for the Ethereum network that aims to provide universal access to financial services. Still, it’s early days, obviously, and momentum appears to be building slowly. Today, there are roughly 3,000 decentralized apps up and running, roughly four times more than there were a year ago. Some day, believes Malhotra, there will be millions. If Malhotra and Luthra play their cards right, Elph may help you find them. |
null | Frederic Lardinois | 2,018 | 6 | 12 | null |
Apple orders a 10-episode mystery series inspired by kid reporter Hilde Lysiak | Sarah Perez | 2,018 | 6 | 13 | Apple is continuing to flesh out its lineup of TV series for its upcoming streaming service and Netflix competitor, to be offered sometime next year as part of a subscription bundle with Apple Music. The company’s latest addition is a dramatic mystery series, currently known as the untitled Hilde Lysiak project. The show is inspired by the real-life story of the 11-year-old investigative reporter who scooped local news outlets by being the first to expose a murder in her hometown of Selinsgrove, PA. Lysiak may not be a household name, but her story is impressive. The Columbia Journalism Review profiled her online news operation, , in a story titled, “ ” The young reporter is not a hobbyist at her chosen profession — she attends town meetings, she covers neighborhood crime without police cooperation, and she shows up on the scene of breaking news, the article explains. She also beat the local daily paper in being the in the area when she was only 9 years old. When criticized by Facebook commenters (aren’t they lovely) for being a kid covering graphic news like this before all the facts were in, . “I just like letting people know all the information,” the . “Because of my work, I was able to inform the people that there’s a terrible murder hours before my competition even got to the scene. In fact, some of these adult-read newspapers were reporting the wrong news or no news at all,” she in a YouTube video. As to how she got the scoop, Lysiak said, “I got a good tip from a source and I was able to confirm it.” Her today continues to feature a number of crime reports, included break-ins, , abuse, assaults and more, alongside stories of local interest, like the that shut down Orange Street, for example. Clearly, Lysiak’s work is great fodder for a feel-good show about smart and ambitious kids, but it’s also one of increased importance in an era where journalism itself is under attack. Apple has given a straight-to-series order to the untitled Hilde Lysiak project, which will have 10 episodes in its debut season. The series is produced by Anonymous Content and Paramount Television, is created and executive produced by Dana Fox (How To Be Single and Ben and Kate) and Dara Resnik (Daredevil), along with executive producers Joy Gorman Wettels (13 Reasons Why) and Sharlene Martin (Smallville). Jon M. Chu (Crazy Rich Asians, Now You See Me 2) will direct and executive produce. The show will begin by following a young girl who moves from Brooklyn to the small lakeside down her father had left behind. The protagonist will then work to unveil the truth regarding a cold case that everyone in town, father included, has tried to bury. Hence the “inspired by” label — in real life, Lysiak’s father didn’t try to bury the truth. In fact, he her pursuit of chasing stories by taking her with him to the newsroom of the New York Daily News, where he had as a journalist himself. The show will join a varied lineup at Apple, which now includes , , , a Kristen Wiig-led , a Kevin Durant-inspired , a about extraordinary homes, a from “La La Land’s” director and a , among others. We asked Lysiak what she thought of the Apple TV project, and she told us she’s “very excited.” “I hope this show inspires an army of kids to grab their phones, notepads, and pens and go out into the world to find the truth and hold adults accountable,” she replied via email. “It’s also going to be super weird to see a different me playing me.” |
A conversation with Sarah Cannon and Mark Goldberg, Index Ventures’ new partners | Matthew Lynley | 2,018 | 6 | 13 | Index Ventures — a firm with investments in companies like recent IPO Dropbox, a series of successful gaming companies like King, and others including Slack and coming IPO Zuora — has seen a lot of moves in the past few months. There was the earlier this year, but the firm also brought on Sarah Cannon from CapitalG as one of their recent big hires. Index has also promoted former Dropboxer Mark Goldberg to partner. Prior to joining Index, Cannon led investments in companies like Looker, MultiPlan, Oscar and Care.com. Cannon will primarily be focusing on growth stage, and is also now a board observer for Slack. Goldberg has been at the firm for around three years and worked on deals like Nova Credit and CoverWallet. We sat down with the two new partners to discuss some of their plans, as well as some broader parts of the venture ecosystem. Here’s the interview, which has been lightly edited for clarity. : In the last stage, we have a partner presentation, where the entrepreneur presents and we debrief. Then it’s a vote at the partner level. Everyone votes 1-10, and if it’s over 7 it’s approved. If it’s between 5 and 7, it’s the sponsor discretion. On average it’s around in the seven range. Some partners always rank lower, their most enthusiastic is at 8. It ends up being a pretty intellectually honest discussion, every vote is the same. I’ve worked at other funds before, and it seems like it becomes more of horse trading. This feels like a constructive debate, we operate as one team. It’s also 6:30 a.m. pacific on Mondays, so there’s that. : I speak more to my background to being an early business hire at Dropbox, but it’s staying focused don the end user and building something people actually want to use. Regardless the paradigm, [we ask], are you building a product where at the end of the day is the end customer happy user. : In the board room so much of where we can help is focus. My role is not making decisions but helping the management team align on priorities and sharing an example from a company they respect. It is often most helpful to connect them to another portfolio company. At CapitalG, we were investors in Lyft and Stripe, and a lot of learning would be between those companies. We would say, let me connect you to the head of product at Lyft. After that coffee, the priorities have been reduced to just a few. : First off, the [series] A is where we’re really focused. I think historically Index had really built a brand in Europe. King, SuperCell, Skype, and others. When we set up the team in the U.S., we ended up getting pushed into more series B. We would have loved to see the Series A on many of these companies, but we were new it was harder to proactively get to these great deals at the earlier stage. So we’re pushing earlier into that Series A. Maybe 7 of the last 10 deals have been [series] A for us. The challenge is, how do we find these great founding teams and category winners at that stage. Despite the valuations, we want you to hit those check boxes. : As you move later stage, it’s much more on the unit economics. That’s part one — really understanding the unit economics, how big of a business can this actually be. The market could be really large, but what’s the size of the prize. Those are the two things I focus on. It’s easy to look at the unit economics. There are exceptions to the rule, like Amazon, where the margins didn’t look good along the way… Traditionally these companies haven’t made money, and that’s how you miss really exceptional businesses. They are transformative businesses. That’s really how I’ve shifted my way of thinking. For consumer companies, I think of that has to be massive user traction and if you’re seeing wild adoption or a differentiated technology. : I think being a founder is an extremely lonely job. I think one of the things that a strong venture partner can do is be a really good sounding board. The emotional fluctuations in these businesses are extreme. A founder has to be, even if they’re resilient and have a lot of grit, they’re absolutely going to feel the highs and lows. If you talk about what makes a venture fund and partner valuable, it’s the ability to damper some of that volatility by being available. If someone calls me on a Saturday night, i’m picking up the phone and being present and having that perspective. If you’re doing this job well, you can help the entrepreneur feel less lonely. : [Part of it is] regulating on both the highs and the lows. You’ve had the benefit of working with a lot of companies. You can say, this is a great moment, celebrate, but it’s not like we’re going public tomorrow. In the lows, you remind them of the good times, you’re modulating to the middle and giving some perspective.. It’s important to step in as an investor, and to say, ‘ok, this was a scary moment but this is why I have conviction in your business.’ It’s a topic that’s a lot of shame. It’s very much like an artist, there’s an individual genius creator but there’s a dark side. There’s a very known perspective in the founder world. I hope we have a few brave founders who come out and say, look, I really struggled, here’s how I managed to deal with it. : We see it as a good thing, for us it’s additional optionality for a lot of our portfolio companies. Before SoftBank a lot of times your option is [just going public]. Softbank is not the only one, there’s Sequoia growth, there’s a lot of money sloshing around the late stage. It’s been a boon for our companies — we’re generally playing at a stage before we’d be competitive [with that]. : For the later stage, it’s absolutely changing the return profile. To Softbank’s credit, it’s a brilliant strategy, it’s like an index on the private markets. For me, the adjustment [to earlier stage] has been a couple things, like adjusting your risk reward. You’re taking a lot greater risk. It’s easier to rely on cohort data, thinking that I’ve seen this for three years. [At earlier stages] it’s less data, and you’re taking more risk, you need to spend more time about thinking about the team. You need to believe that founder is capable of bringing on that high quality team. To move earlier stage, you have to have a lot more conviction. In later stages you have a bunch of investors already at the cap table. : I think it’s absolutely critical that the market is multistage. We’re stage agnostic and expertise driven. We’ll see a company at the series A or series B, and we get to know the founding team. We don’t wait for the round to form, we preempt it, and if we don’t do the deal we have a relationship going forward. : [I also think it’s] very specific to the business. If it’s an IT infrastructure startup, the person needs to be highly technical people. It maps to the business. Do they know their own strengths and weaknesses, do they know the strengths and weaknesses of their existing members. : The major focus is how do I address this challenge. The numbers speak for themselves in terms of diversity of all types. A lot of founders aren’t happy with where they are, we think about what specifically can we do about it. That’s where we’ve been having a lot of discussions — how are you giving fair reviews, how do you make sure your compensation is the same. There’s always the question about funnel and how do I see different candidates. My view on that is we should do a much better job in venture and companies in screening for the specific attributes you need in the job. We want to push people, rather than going to pools that are easy, such as just to banking, and say the attributes important to an investor is high emotional intelligence, analytical thinking, and such. They don’t necessarily come from the same people. : What’s changed is it is now a board-level conversation. At the last 4-5 meetings, this is now a topic on par with the KPIs of the business. That didn’t used to exist. I agree with the tactical points, we can do a better job with diversity, we’re having those conversations.. : I think that’s exactly the tactical thing. People are just begging for an idea, something I can commit to changing my funnel. Changing my process to be more fair, founders I think are very more open to it. : I think we’re fortunate that as a fund culture and with the LP base, we’re afforded the ability to make a long term view. While the timeline is stretching, we don’t feel pressure. To the extent the companies continue to build value, the returns are gonna look good enough. We have not felt the urgency to try and realize gains faster, and part of that is our broader philosophy and ethos around investing. We’re here to support the entrepreneurs, and I don’t want to be prescriptive in an exit. I think we need to be thoughtful when we take a secondary investment. Doing large secondaries in early companies can be detrimental. When we’re looking at rounds where secondaries are available we ask about proceeds being distributed, we want to know [if it’s just certain executives or for the whole team]. : You do want to think about the employees who have made significant contributions. In a market where companies are staying private much longer, for the employees, I do want us to find a way to have some liquidity. The key is how you structure it. You could buy a house, but you don’t need a mansion. : What I don’t like is when founders or a select set of executives are able to take money. As long as it’s equitably done in a way, like 10% to 15% liquidity being offered for employees. : We are not currently investing in China, but I want to learn form China and see what insights we can get from businesses there and how they will be different in the US. If you look at live video, a lot fo companies have taken off there. The social e-commerce business, mid-messaging, how does that change with transactions. : On the fintech side, it’s almost like the world has inverted, I used to do a lot of cleantech where we were worried China would copy the IP. In fintech, the most innovative companies are coming out of China. If you look at digital payments in China versus the west, they were already way ahead of the curve, and now it’s even more so. It really is, for us, about learning what’s around the future. We’re pushing ourselves. Some of these platforms are becoming monolithic conglomerates at this point. My broader thesis in this point is, we’re gonna see a new set of companies and winners from the last few years that are gonna re-bundle the rest of the feature rich companies into larger platforms. They’re building massive user bases with extreme engagements. You imagine what else can you cross-sell once you have that engagement and brand affinity. We’re gonna see massive category winners of the next digital bank in the US. : We’re watching them opportunistically. I think crypto and blockchain have gotten a huge amount of airtime in the press, to me it’s distracting for financial services. The incumbents are absolutely vulnerable in a way they’ve never been before. We’re seeing huge success.. : We’re very expertise driven. The two areas are really around blockchain and AI. We just had a presentation we call Monday musings — we’ve had them on gaming, bitcoin, and crypto in general — that’s an area where we’re actively trying to build our knowledge set. I think there’s a lot of interest and the timing is of vigorous debate. One of the challenges is to be an effective unit of economic transaction without the regulatory infrastructure like know your customer. As long as we have nation states we certainly will not see all transactions on blockchain. Regulators will have a way to regulate these transactions since at some point you are going to have to transfer your bitcoin into dollars or some other currency at some point. : I have had a challenge to find a [high-potential] Dapp. (Dapp is short for decentralized app) : I haven’t found a magic bullet. It’s an aggressive push to reach a diverse set of channels of sourcing. : [Companies have big pools of strong candidates], the challenge early stage is it’s harder to find out about those companies. At the beginning it’s hard for people that aren’t as well networked. What’s a role that a large company has a big pool, how can they help them connect. I think about how to do that in a scalable way. The innovation that Google really did have is doing interviews. Rather than saying we’re gonna get people from top schools, we’re gonna have a test that tests for the engineering skills for this job. If you can prove you have these specific skills, I think that’s a great way. You get people who have the skillsets. Sarah: The way I thought about investing in AI is three buckets. One was on the generalized AI, and what would replace a human. That’s a lot of science and a lot of risk in the very early stage.The second bucket is vertical AI where I think health care and financial services are most interesting. The third bucket is what I call machine learning for everybody else or democratizing access to ML. Google and Facebook can afford to hire data scientists of incredible caliber, but most companies can’t. There’s an interesting company to be built sharing standard ‘algorithms as a service’ with those companies. On the vertical side, a lot of is is tech constraints. I’d love to get into contracts, but [you have to] think about what’s possible — what you can do with a camera, where we are with machine vision and the applications of that with an immediate business context. [We look at] how many engineers and data scientists you have, what are the top 5 applications of your technology. You’ll very quickly find they’re doing something that could be automated quickly. : 99% of the pitches that I hear across industries talk about machine lerning. It’s become so ubiquitous as it’s almost meaningless, or it’s as horizontal as big data. What I look for is proprietary data. What is really critical is it’s not just algorithms but your ability to train a model faster than anyone else and in a way that’s more unique. You have access to some data pool, and the data is ultimately what sets it apart. For the vast majority, it’s a buzzword that they think will increase the valuation. A way to test that is to look at the technical DNA in the team. To me that’s a lot of suss out is this really machine learning, or is this empty words on a page. : There are massive segments of the economy coming online right now. Agriculture, construction, logistics, we look at where the data has been locked up in offline form like on paper or excel. As software brings it online, a lot of those industries are ripe for machine learning. : I am focused on consumer and the consumerization of the enterprise. On the consumer side I cover marketplaces, millennial purchasing behaviors and what we can learn from China. On the consumerization of enterprise side I’m focused on productivity, particularly tools used across business units. : I always think chance favors the prepared mind. I do want to do thesis work in consumer, and think about areas where I see patterns. When I see the monthly active users data, [I ask], does it conform to the world. Millenials have contrarian thinking, one thing that stood out when the Robinhood founders talk, was that millenials didn’t want to pay an upfront fee. I wonder if there are other models they’re resistant to. Maybe they don’t want to be monetized by ads, and are there businesses that could evolve based on that view. Cannon reached out to clarify a few things from the interview, which we’ve sprinkled some updates throughout. |
Docker aims to federate container management across clouds | Ron Miller | 2,018 | 6 | 13 | When Docker burst on the scene in 2013, it brought the idea of to a broad audience. Since then the delivery of those containerized apps, but Docker saw a gap that wasn’t being addressed beyond pure container deployment that they are trying to address with the next release of Docker Enterprise Edition. Docker made the announcement today at in San Francisco. Scott Johnston, chief product officer at Docker says that Docker Enterprise Edition’s new federated application management feature helps operations manage multiple clusters, whether those clusters are on premise, in the cloud or across different public cloud providers. This allows federated management of application wherever they live and supports managed Kubernetes tools from the big three public cloud providers including Azure AKS, AWS EKS and Google GKE. Johnston says that deploying the containers is just the first part of the problem. There is a whole set of issues to deal with outside of Kubernetes (and other orchestration tools) once your application begins being deployed. “So, you know, you get portability of containers with the Docker format and the Kubernetes or Compose description files, but once you land on an environment, that environment has deployment scripts, security models, user management and [so forth]. So while the app is portable, the management of these applications is not,” he explained. He says that can lead to a set of separate deployment tools creating a new level of complexity that using containers was supposed to eliminate. This is especially true when deploying across multiple clouds (and on prem sometimes too). If you need load balancing, security, testing and so forth — the kinds of tasks the operations team has to undertake — and you want to apply these in a consistent way regardless of the environment, Johnston says that Docker EE should help by creating a single place to manage across environments and achieve that cloud native goal of managing all your applications and data and infrastructure in a unified way. In addition to the federated management component, Docker also announced Windows Server containers on Kubernetes for Docker Enterprise Edition. support for Linux containers last year. Finally, the company is introducing a template-based approach to Docker deployment to enable people in the organization with a bit less technical sophistication to deploy from a guided graphical process instead of a command line interface. The federated application management is available in Beta starting the second half of this year, support for Windows Server Containers will be included in the next release of Docker Enterprise Edition later this year and Templates will be available in Docker Desktop in Beta later this year. |
Audit of NHS Trust’s app project with DeepMind raises more questions than it answers | Natasha Lomas | 2,018 | 6 | 13 | A third party audit of a controversial patient data-sharing arrangement between a London NHS Trust and Google DeepMind appears to have skirted over the core issues that generated the controversy in the first place. The audit ( ) — conducted by law firm Linklaters — of the Royal Free NHS Foundation Trust’s acute kidney injury detection app system, Streams, which was co-developed with Google-DeepMind (using an existing NHS algorithm for early detection of the condition), does not examine the problematic 2015 information-sharing agreement inked between the pair which allowed data to start flowing. “This Report contains an assessment of the data protection and confidentiality issues associated with the data protection arrangements between the Royal Free and DeepMind. It is limited to the current use of Streams, and any further development, functional testing or clinical testing, that is either planned or in progress. It is not a historical review,” writes Linklaters, adding that: “It includes consideration as to whether the transparency, fair processing, proportionality and information sharing concerns outlined in the Undertakings are being met.” Yet it was the original 2015 contract that triggered the controversy, after it was obtained and published by New Scientist, with the wide-ranging document In the pair scrapped and replaced the initial five-year contract with a different one — which put in place additional information governance steps. They also went on to roll out the Streams app for use on patients in — despite the UK’s data protection regulator, the ICO, having instigated an investigation into the original data-sharing arrangement. And just the ICO concluded that the Royal Free NHS Foundation Trust had failed to comply with Data Protection Law in its dealings with Google’s DeepMind. The audit of the Streams project was a requirement of the ICO. Though, notably, the regulator has not endorsed Linklaters report. On the contrary, it warns that it’s seeking legal advice and could take further action. In a on its website, the ICO’s deputy commissioner for policy, Steve Wood, writes: “We cannot endorse a report from a third party audit but we have provided feedback to the Royal Free. We also reserve our position in relation to their position on medical confidentiality and the equitable duty of confidence. We are seeking legal advice on this issue and may require further action.” In a section of the report listing exclusions, Linklaters confirms the audit does not consider: “The data protection and confidentiality issues associated with the processing of personal data about the clinicians at the Royal Free using the Streams App.” So essentially the core controversy, related to the legal basis for the Royal Free to pass personally identifiable information on 1.6M patients to DeepMind when the app was being developed, and without people’s knowledge or consent, is going unaddressed here. And Wood’s statement pointedly reiterates that the ICO’s investigation “found a number of shortcomings in the way patient records were shared for this trial”. “[P]art of the undertaking committed Royal Free to commission a third party audit. They have now done this and shared the results with the ICO. What’s important now is that they use the findings to address the compliance issues addressed in the audit swiftly and robustly. We’ll be continuing to liaise with them in the coming months to ensure this is happening,” he adds. “It’s important that other NHS Trusts considering using similar new technologies pay regard to the , and ensure data protection risks are fully addressed using a Data Protection Impact Assessment before deployment.” While the report is something of a frustration, given the glaring historical omissions, it does raise some points of interest — including suggesting that the Royal Free should probably scrap a , in which the pair set out their ambition to apply AI to NHS data. This is recommended because the pair have apparently abandoned their . On this Linklaters writes: “DeepMind has informed us that they have abandoned their potential research project into the use of AI to develop better algorithms, and their processing is limited to execution of the NHS AKI algorithm… In addition, the majority of the provisions in the Memorandum of Understanding are non-binding. The limited provisions that are binding are superseded by the Services Agreement and the Information Processing Agreement discussed above, hence we think the Memorandum of Understanding has very limited relevance to Streams. We recommend that the Royal Free considers if the Memorandum of Understanding continues to be relevant to its relationship with DeepMind and, if it is not relevant, terminates that agreement.” In another section, discussing the NHS algorithm that underpins the Streams app, the law firm also points out that DeepMind’s role in the project is little more than helping provide a glorified app wrapper (on the app design front the project also utilized UK app studio, ustwo, so DeepMind can’t claim app design credit either). “Without intending any disrespect to DeepMind, we do not think the concepts underpinning Streams are particularly ground-breaking. It does not, by any measure, involve artificial intelligence or machine learning or other advanced technology. The benefits of the Streams App instead come from a very well-designed and user-friendly interface, backed up by solid infrastructure and data management that provides AKI alerts and contextual clinical information in a reliable, timely and secure manner,” Linklaters writes. What DeepMind did bring to the project, and to its , is money and resources — providing its development resources free for the NHS at the point of use, and stating (when asked about its business model) that it would determine how much to charge the NHS for these app ‘innovations’ later. Yet the commercial services the tech giant is providing to what are public sector organizations do not appear to have been put out to open tender. Also notably excluded in the Linklaters’ audit: Any scrutiny of the project vis-a-vis competition law, public procurement law compliance with procurement rules, and any concerns relating to possible anticompetitive behavior. The report does highlight one potentially problematic data retention issue for the current deployment of Streams, saying there is “currently no retention period for patient information on Streams” — meaning there is no process for deleting a patient’s medical history once it reaches a certain age. “This means the information on Streams currently dates back eight years,” it notes, suggesting the Royal Free should probably set an upper age limit on the age of information contained in the system. While Linklaters largely glosses over the chequered origins of the Streams project, the law firm does make a point of agreeing with the ICO that the original privacy impact assessment for the project “should have been completed in a more timely manner”. It also describes it as “relatively thin given the scale of the project”. Giving to the audit, health data privacy advocacy group MedConfidential — an early critic of the DeepMind data-sharing arrangement — is roundly unimpressed, writing: “The biggest question raised by the Information Commissioner and the National Data Guardian appears to be missing — instead, the report excludes a “historical review of issues arising prior to the date of our appointment”. “The report claims the ‘ ’ (i.e. remaining alive) of patients is justification to protect against an “event [that] might only occur in the future or not occur at all”… The only ‘vital interest’ protected here is Google’s, and its desire to hoard medical records it was told were unlawfully collected. The vital interests of a patient are not vital interests of an actual data subject (and the GDPR tests are demonstrably unmet). “The ICO and NDG asked the Royal Free to justify the collection of 1.6 million patient records, and this legal opinion explicitly provides no answer to that question.” |
China’s Didi Chuxing continues its international expansion with Australia launch | Jon Russell | 2,018 | 6 | 14 | Didi Chuxing, China’s dominant ride-hailing company, is continuing its international expansion after it announced plans to launch in Australia this month. The company — — said it will begin serving customers in Melbourne from June 25 following a month-long trial period in Geelong, a neighboring city that’s 75km away. The business will be run by a Didi subsidiary in Australia and it plans to offer “a series of welcome packages to both drivers and riders” — aka discounts and promotions, no doubt. It began signing up drivers on June 1, the company added. The Australia launch will again put Didi in direct competition with Uber, but that is becoming increasingly common, and also Ola and Didi which both count Didi as an investor — more on that below. This move follows forays into Taiwan, Mexico and Brazil this year as Didi has finally expanded beyond its China-based empire. and it has taken a variety of routes to doing the latter. This Australia launch is organic, with Didi developing its own team, while in Taiwan it has used a franchise model and it went into Brazil via acquisition, . It is also set to enter Japan where . “In 2018, Didi will continue to cultivate markets in Latin America, Australia and Japan. We are confident a combination of world-class transportation AI technology and deep local expertise will bring a better experience to overseas markets,” the company added in a statement. This international expansion has also brought a new level of confusion since Didi has cultivated relationships with other ride-hailing companies across the world while also expanding its own presence internationally. The Uber deal brought with it a stock swap — turning Didi and Uber from competitors into stakeholders — and the Chinese company has also backed Grab in Southeast Asia, Lyft in the U.S., Ola in India, Careem in the Middle East and — — Taxify, which is primarily focused on Europe and Africa. In the case of Australia, Didi will come up against Uber, Ola — present in Melbourne, Perth and Sydney via — and Taxify, too. Uber vs Didi is to be expected — — but in taking on Ola (so soon after it came to Australia), Didi is competing directly with a company that it funded via an investment deal for the first time. That might be a small insight into Didi’s relationship with Ola. Unlike Grab, which has seen Didi follow-on its investments, despite making . “The ride-hailing industry is still a young business, and the potential for growth is substantial. Competition exists in ride-hailing, like in any flourishing industry. But it leads to better products and services, which ultimately benefits users,” Didi told TechCrunch in a statement when asked about its new rivalry with Ola and Taxify. That’s a similar sentiment to Taxify: “With a market the size of Australia, we think there is room for multiple players to operate and grow,” a spokesperson told TechCrunch. Ola declined to comment. The move into Australia comes at a time when Didi is under intense pressure following . The company suspended the Hitch service — which allows groups people who are headed in the same direction together — and . This week, but only for drivers picking up passengers of the same sex. |
Back Market raises $48 million for its refurbished device marketplace | Romain Dillet | 2,018 | 6 | 13 | If you’ve tried selling your old smartphone on a refurbishment website, chances are you ended up with a dozen browser tabs comparing prices. French startup is taking advantage of this fragmented industry to create a marketplace and aggregate all refurbishers on a single online platform. The startup just $48 million (€41 million). Groupe Arnault, Eurazeo, Aglaé Ventures and Daphni participated in today’s funding round. Back in May, the company told me that it was working with over 270 factories. Back Market has generated over $110 million in gross merchandise volume over the past three years. The service is now live in France, Germany, Spain, Belgium and Italy. The company just expanded to the U.S. “Before, refurbishment was just a thing for tech savvy people and tech bloggers,” co-founder and chief creative officer Vianney Vaute told me. “With Back Market, it becomes a mainstream alternative.” Working with multiple factories is also a competitive advantage when it comes to pricing, fail rate and quality assurance. Back Market has an overview on the industry and can choose to work with some partners and leave underperforming ones behind. The startup needs to build a brand that consumers can trust. While smartphones and laptops are the most prominent products on the homepage, Back Market also accepts game consoles, TVs, headphones, coffee machines and more. Back Market also sells Apple products refurbished by Apple itself. Now that smartphones have become a mature market, many customers aren’t looking for new and shiny devices. Some customers can be perfectly happy with a phone that was released last year or two years ago. It represents an opportunity for Back Market and the refurbishment industry as a whole. |
NXP-Qualcomm $44B deal to clear China as Trump authorizes $50B tariffs | Danny Crichton | 2,018 | 6 | 14 | The U.S.-China trade battle enters an important new phase. that China’s Ministry of Commerce will clear Qualcomm’s pending $44 billion acquisition of NXP Semiconductors. One independent source also conveyed the same news to TechCrunch, although there has been no official word from Qualcomm, NXP or China at time of publication. That acquisition was expected to close months ago, but the Chinese government over the future of bilateral trade. China’s ministry remained the last competition authority worldwide pending to approve the deal, and presumably it will close rapidly now that antitrust review has been completed. The news of the approval broke on Chinese goods. The final list of goods that will be subject to the tariffs has not been released, although TechCrunch has , which focused on aluminum and steel imports. Direct news from the White House is expected Friday. There has been a studied response and counter-response between the two countries over trade the past year, as both Presidents Trump and Xi Jinping sought high ground over the spat. The most recent set of issues has concerned ZTE, which was offered a reprieve by President Trump only to have . In my analysis on ZTE’s potential death sentence, I wrote this afternoon that: Ironically — and to be clear on this view, I am not getting this from sources, but rather pointing out a unique strategy vector here — it might well be Qualcomm that uses its DC policy shop to try to save ZTE. Those lobbyists protected Qualcomm from a takeover by Broadcom earlier this year, and it could try to make the case to Congress that it will be irreparably damaged if legislators don’t back off their threats. The timing of the approval for Qualcomm could come with an understanding that it help ZTE with its congressional woes. Qualcomm has , which one source said to me was part of a package of concessions offered to placate Beijing. Without a doubt, the news will prove a rare bit of relief for Qualcomm, which has been buffeted by challenges over the past year, including its hostile takeover battle with Broadcom and ongoing patent lawsuits with some of its biggest customers like Apple. Shareholders are likely to be enthusiastic with the outcome, and the stock was up 3 percent in after-hours trading following the news. The acquisition of NXP is expected to provide a new set of technologies and patents for Qualcomm, particularly in strategic growth spaces like automotive, where Qualcomm has been weak on its product side. |
Purdue’s PHADE technology lets cameras ‘talk’ to you | Sarah Wells | 2,018 | 6 | 14 | It’s become almost second nature to accept that cameras everywhere — from streets, to museums and shops — are watching you, but now they may be able to communicate with you, as well. New technology from Purdue University computer science researchers has made this dystopian prospect a reality in . But, they argue, it’s safer than you might think. The system is called PHADE, which allows for something called “private human addressing,” where camera systems and individual cell phones can communicate without transmitting any personal data, like an IP or Mac address. Instead of using an IP or Mac address, the technology relies on motion patterns for the address code. That way, even if a hacker intercepts it, they won’t be able to access the person’s physical location. Imagine you’re strolling through a museum and an unfamiliar painting catches your eye. The docents are busy with a tour group far across the gallery and you didn’t pay extra for the clunky recorder and headphones for an audio tour. While pondering the brushwork you feel your phone buzz, and suddenly a detailed description of the artwork and its painter is in the palm of your hand. To achieve this effect, researchers use an approach similar to the kind of directional audio experience you might find at theme parks. Through processing the live video data, the technology is able to identify the individual motion patterns of pedestrians and when they are within a pertinent range — say, in front of a painting. From there they can broadcast a packet of information linked to the motion address of the pedestrian. When the user’s phone identifies that the motion address matches their own, the message is received. While this tech can be used to better inform the casual museum-goer, the researchers also believe it has a role in protecting pedestrians from crime in their area. “Our system serves as a bridge to connect surveillance cameras and people,” He Wang, a co-creator of the technology and assistant professor of computer science, said in a statement. “[It can] be used by government agencies to enhance public safety [by deploying] cameras in high-crime or high-accident areas and warn[ing] specific users about potential threats, such as suspicious followers.” While the benefits of an are still being debated and critiqued daily, there might just be an upside to knowing a camera’s got its eye on you. |
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