title stringlengths 2 283 ⌀ | author stringlengths 4 41 ⌀ | year int64 2.01k 2.02k | month int64 1 12 | day int64 1 31 | content stringlengths 1 111k ⌀ |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Facebook Alive | Josh Constine | 2,016 | 4 | 12 | down, you never grow old.” Tom Petty isn’t playing the F8 after-party, but his song encapsulates the point of Facebook’s conference — a social network won’t go extinct if it’s reactive, personalized, and urgent. Everything launched today is designed to eschew the generic. To wrap around the user and bend to their whims to create a unique experience. After a decade as the top social network, Facebook’s biggest risk isn’t some upstart competitor. There are plenty nipping at the heels of its various products, but none challenging Facebook’s core value: it is your identity, your life on the Internet. The danger is getting stale. A sneaking suspicion that there’s nothing new and it all feels static. That’s not to say it’s always a pioneer. Facebook frequently sprints down paths others laboriously cleared. But when it brings in all the friends, businesses, and developers, good ideas turn into ubiquitous utilities. makes this obvious. The mobile streaming format Meerkat introduced and Periscope sharpened, Facebook is actually popularizing. It doesn’t require a separate app or social graph, and is instead built into an app a billion people use each day. That reach draws the best content from celebrities, journalists, and average Joes. And in turn, broadcasters and viewers enjoy a vibrant experience flooded with comments. Each Live video is one-of-a-kind. Not just because it’s shot in real-time, but because you never know what the audience or fellow commenter might say that could influence the broadcast itself. With the new launched today, serious content producers can marry its immediacy and intimacy with the polish, angles, and effects that make live television so compelling. And instead of locking consumers to their phones, they’ll be able to pick whatever camera fits their lifestyle, from the table top Livestream Mevo to DJI’s drones. Live won’t stay stuck as sunsets and selfies. The format will progress with our imaginations. Choose-your-own adventure novels stay interesting longer than a typical paperback. And that concept is why its new could keep Facebook relevant. By open sourcing both the 17-lens UFO-looking hardware and the seamless image stitching software, it will allow more creatives to dive into the next frontier of art however they please. Facebook purposefully pushed the limits on quality so producers can opt for the most pristine vision or smaller file sizes. The 360 and VR content the camera produces will give Facebook News Feed users and Oculus Rift wearers autonomy within video. They’ll able to choose where to look so each viewer and viewing’s experience is different. What makes you feel teleported isn’t just the sense of being far away from where you were, but calling the shots once you’re there. The web was built for everyone, but also means it’s not quite built right for anyone. Each site and app is the same when you first log in. You must wander, unguided, to discover the parts that are meaningful to you. They’re distinctly robotic, even alienating, which is why many apps are hardly used after they downloaded, and people bounce from websites if not instantly entertained. 1-800 numbers with their mechanized phone trees are just as bad. Despite the name, chatbots are designed to feel human. They’re instantly responsive, adapting to your queries and commands. They personalize themselves without forcing you through screens full of setting options. They learn from you, and from everyone else using them to become more helpful. At their best, they can feel like the music genius record store clerks of yesteryear. You told them what you like or how you’re feeling, and they tapped their vast knowledge to recommend you the perfect album. That’s what Facebook is aiming for with . “We think you should message a business just the way you would message a friend,” Mark Zuckerberg explained on stage. Instead of sifting through a cold yet crowded app store, you simply type the name of the business you want to chat with, and they appear right beside the people you love. When the AI powered by Facebook’s new performs right, you might not even be able to tell the bots from the humans…except that the software can conjure answers and pull information faster than any person. They’ll make mistakes, frustrate us, and seem awkward at times, but that’s natural. Facebook has been accused of dividing people by jacking them into a social network instead of a social life. But compared to the politics of fear currently festering, even digital connection can be refreshing. “Instead of building walls, we can help people build bridges” Zuckerberg stressed in his wide-eyed yet inspiring keynote. A product of Facebook himself at this point, he pushed to fortify our sense of humanity. The success of F8 is how it proved Facebook’s community size and engineering strength lets it build products that evolve to meet our needs. Even if they are just ones, zeroes, and inanimate atoms, their willingness to unlock our free will remind us we (too) are alive. |
Salesforce and Zendesk want to help brands manage Facebook Messenger traffic | Ron Miller | 2,016 | 4 | 12 | No sooner had Facebook announced when two players with an eye on sales and service in the enterprise — and — announced new products to manage Messenger traffic on their respective platforms. Salesforce , a way for customers to communicate directly with brands through the Salesforce platform. As an example, a person who knows they are going to miss their flight, could message the airline and get a new booking in a familiar way, just by chatting in Messenger. The company sees this as a way to enhance communication across all its areas of business — sales, marketing and service. The fact is the lines between these three areas which used to be crystal clear are blurring for both brands and customers alike, Rob Begg, VP of product marketing for social products at Salesforce explained. He doesn’t see rolling out another communication platform as a problem for companies already used to dealing with customers through multiple channels, whether that’s through an app, social, email, phone or web chat client. As Salesforce sees it, this is just another channel to manage and they will incorporate it into the full view of the customer that could include a record when you called, emailed or messaged the company. Zendesk also announced a new Messenger product today called that will fit in with its customer service focus. When customers interact with a brand via Messenger, they may get an automated response if that’s appropriate or they may hear from a human. From a CSR perspective, they can see the Messenger interactions on a timeline and recognize the nature of the interaction, while moving between message threads quickly. “Today’s businesses must meet customers wherever they are and combine the personal touch of human interactions with the convenience of automated activities through bots,” Royston Tay, general manager of messaging at Zendesk said in a statement. While chat bots may seem exotic now, in short order it’s very likely they will become as common as using social channels like Twitter and Facebook to engage with brands. Like those social channels, there will be rules of engagement that define the proper way to approach customers without spamming them and companies will need to learn what types of interactions are appropriate. Just as you recognize when someone is spamming you by email or on Twitter, it will become readily apparent what the best practices are in chat soon enough. As with any new channel, brands must feel their way and learn how to use this channel as another way to communicate and interact with customers. |
null | Sarah Perez | 2,016 | 4 | 15 | null |
Testlio raises $6.25M to expand its testing-as-a-service empire | Haje Jan Kamps | 2,016 | 4 | 12 | Mobile testing startup today announced it raised a $6.25 million round of funding led by and . The company is aiming to make it easy to do QA for mobile app developers on a variety of devices in a variety of circumstances. The company also plans to move beyond purely mobile testing. Testlio can be best seen as a managed testing-as-a-service platform; the company takes ownership of the test plan management, sources staff from their global network of quality assurance testers and delivers validated, high-quality bug reports for issues found. They make it sound easy. The benefit of the company is obvious. In addition to having an elastic crew of testers at your disposal, the geographical distribution of the company’s testers is a boon: true real-world testing performed across the matrix of vast geographies, languages, device types and telecom providers is crucial to getting resilient applications. Testlio is profitable, and is growing rapidly: In 2015, the company grew by more than 500 percent. The new funds will be invested in building out infrastructure across its two locations in San Francisco, California and Tallinn, Estonia. Today’s announcement comes after the company raised their $1 million seed round . “We partner closely with some of the most demanding companies in the world,” said Kristel Viidik, CEO of Testlio, who revealed that as the funding hits the bank account, the company is starting to look beyond the world of mobile apps. “We are expanding our service beyond mobile app testing so that we can continue to meet the changing needs of our customers now and in the future.” |
Facebook launches video Rights Manager to combat freebooting | Josh Constine | 2,016 | 4 | 12 | There’s an epidemic of stolen videos on Facebook. Business Pages rip videos from YouTube, TV or other Pages, and then post them on Facebook as their own to gain more engagement and fans. This is known as “freebooting.” Video makers were pissed off about it because they were losing video views to others who didn’t have permission to use their clips. sounded the alarm about the problem in July, and in August, Facebook it would soon start testing a tool to help stop freebooting. Today Facebook officially launched , its version of YouTube’s Content ID. It’s an admin tool for Pages that lets them upload video clips they don’t want others using. Facebook then monitors for copies of these videos to be posted to Facebook, and can then either automatically report them as violations to be deleted or notify the original publisher. Rights Manager isn’t openly available yet, but . Rights Manager offers a ton of for content owners. They can choose different actions based on how much of a video was copied, what Page posted it or how many views it has gotten, and sort alerts about freebooting by these parameters, too. Publishers can set up whitelists of Pages that are allowed to distribute their videos, and upload unpublished videos they don’t want anyone else using even if they haven’t posted them themselves. Live Videos can even be monitored, which could help prevent people from rebroadcasting pay-per-view TV content like boxing matches — an issue that turned some of the video industry against Twitter’s Periscope. All of these options can be controlled through the Rights Manager dashboard, or through a new for big media companies with tons of content to protect. One major feature that’s missing is the ability for content owners to leave freebooted videos up but earn the money off of them, which YouTube’s Content ID permits. That’s because Facebook officially offers a revenue-sharing option for most video makers. However, Facebook is testing a monetization model with some original content creators where if someone watches their videos and then video ads that are suggested afterwards, Facebook splits the ad revenue with them. Content owners might want to be able to hijack that revenue share if someone freeboots their video, rather than getting it removed. Facebook’s long been seen as soft on content rights. In fact, CNBC says that’s why the NFL chose to sell rights to stream football games to Twitter instead of Facebook. |
Uber shared 14 million users’ info with the government, transparency report says | Kate Conger | 2,016 | 4 | 12 | Uber released its first-ever today, following in the footsteps of other major technology companies and detailing the kinds of information it shares about riders and drivers with the U.S. government. Between July and December 2015, Uber disclosed information about 14 million users to law enforcement and regulatory agencies, according to its report. Most of the data — ride info for more than 12 million users — went to regulatory agencies. Uber used the disclosure to push back against regulatory oversight, claiming in a that regulators like the California Public Utilities Commission often require far more data than is necessary and can sometimes compromise riders’ privacy. “In many cases they send blanket requests without explaining why the information is needed, or how it will be used. And while this kind of trip data doesn’t include personal information, it can reveal patterns of behavior — and is more than regulators need to do their jobs,” Uber wrote in its post. “We hope our Transparency Report will lead to a public debate about the types and amounts of information regulated services should be required to provide to their regulators, and under what circumstances.” Uber determines a rider or driver to be personally affected if the company is required to disclose specific GPS coordinates of a pick-up or drop-off location. In cities like Austin, where Uber lists zero drivers or riders affected, it is because the regulatory agency did not require specific coordinates but accepted aggregate rider data. This isn’t Uber’s first sparring match with the California Public Utilities Commission over rider and driver data. The in January for failing to comply with its reporting requirements about accessible cars, the number of rides requested and accepted per ZIP code, and driver safety information. Uber paid the fine but plans to appeal the decision. Law enforcement requests make up only a small portion of the total number revealed by Uber — 469 in total from state and federal agencies. Uber says most of the data sent to law enforcement is for investigations into credit card theft and fraud. The company also introduced a “ ” into its transparency report, stating that, as of today, it has not received a National Security Letter or FISA court order. Uber plans to continue to release transparency reports on regulatory and law enforcement requests every six months, and hopes to expand the reports to include information from outside the U.S., a spokesperson confirmed. |
Habito is another London startup aiming for a slice of U.K.’s lucrative mortgage market | Steve O'Hear | 2,016 | 4 | 12 | A little over two months since Trussle for picking up £1.1 million in funding from , the new VC fund from father and son duo Robin and Saul Klein, and another London startup has launched to take aim at the U.K.’s multi-billion pound mortgage market. , founded by Daniel Hegarty, pitches itself as the U.K.’s “first digital mortgage broker” — though Trussle may disagree — and offers a “fully automated” brokering service to help you find the most suitable mortgage and make an application. To do this, it has built tech that claims to analyze every mortgage on the market across 100 lenders to identify the best deal based on your individual circumstances. You’re then able to apply via Habito in (they claimed) under 30 minutes. “We think the whole mortgage application process, from start to finish, should be automated,” Habito’s Hegarty tells me. “We’ve built proprietary tech that analyses over 15,000 mortgage products across 100 lenders in seconds, but more importantly, it identifies the best mortgage for each unique applicant and allows them to apply online from their phone, tablet or desktop in less than 30 minutes.” Furthermore, Hegarty says Habito is designed from the ground up to make “intelligent decisions based on data.” Its tech tracks changes in the mortgage market, such as eligibility criteria, interest rates, affordability and product features, to be able to identify emerging patterns and how they can help or hinder potential applicants. “It’s machine learning for the mortgage broking market,” he adds. “Ultimately, no one need worry about finding the right mortgage, or remortgaging, ever again.” To that end, to help Habito out the gate, the startup has raised just over £1.5 million in seed funding led by Mosaic Ventures. A number of noteworthy angels also participated, including Taavet Hinrikus, Samir Desai, Yuri Milner, Tom Stafford and Paul Forster. Meanwhile, just like Trussle, the company offers its brokerage service free to the end customer but takes commission from the eventual lender. “Unlike the majority of mortgage brokers, we don’t charge consumers anything for using our service,” says Hegarty. “We get paid by the lenders for processing mortgage applications. The fee is a fraction of a percent of the mortgage. For Habito to work we have to be perfectly impartial, so if we ever gain any financial benefit from choosing one lender over another, we pass it directly back to the consumer.” |
Facebook starts allowing “Sponsored Messages” ads | Josh Constine | 2,016 | 4 | 12 | Facebook launched its today, but how will it make money on it? By charging businesses to send re-engagement messages to people who’ve already voluntarily started a conversation with them. These are currently in testing, with a small test of advertisers, and are being heavily monitored by Facebook to prevent them getting spammy. The news confirms , after we attained a presentation sent by a Facebook representative to one of its top advertisers outlining the forthcoming marketing product. Facebook confirmed it will also be able to earn revenue with that TechCrunch previously pegged as a way to monetize chatbots. An early test of Sponsored Messages spotted by Both Sponsored Messages and Click To Message ads could pull users into a conversation with a bot that can then try to sell them things. Imagine if instead of clicking an ad and then having to guide yourself around an unfamiliar e-commerce website, you could just tell the bot your preferences and it could show you relevant products you might want to buy. The sponsored messages blocking option, spotted by While chatbots are built to respond to users or take other actions they ask for, one concern is that Messenger ads could dilute the experience. Until now, when someone’s Messenger app buzzed, they could be confident it was someone they cared about contacting them. That changes with Sponsored Messages. But Facebook’s VP of product for Messenger David Marcus assured me Facebook would be vigilant about how Messenger ads are used to avoid pissing off users: “These will definitely be limited…we’re very paranoid about that and we don’t want bad things to happen to anyone.” When asked about the exact timing or frequency with which businesses could send Sponsored Messages, Marcus told me “the rules aren’t fully defined yet.” However, he stressed that Facebook could much more tightly police their usage compared to marketing messages sent on other mediums. “We have the ability to control the number and quality of messages that are sent to you, which is not the case with email. And you have those prominent user controls,” he said, noting that there’s a block button at the top of every conversation with a business that can silence all messages, or just sponsored ones. Not every chatbot or Sponsored Message will necessarily trigger alerts, either, Marcus told me. Facebook could instead simply surface the thread with a business to the top of your list of conversations but not send you a push notification. “We’re very cautions” he tells me. The goal is to create a “high quality, high signal, low noise experience for everyone.” If Facebook can convince these Sponsored Messages to endear users to businesses rather than annoy them, it may have finally found a way to monetize Messenger’s 900 million users. |
The era of AI-human hybrid intelligence | Robert Dale | 2,016 | 4 | 12 | |
NASA selects 13 early-stage, high-concept moonshots for $100K funding each | Devin Coldewey | 2,016 | 4 | 12 | Ah, spring — when a young engineer’s fancy lightly turns to harvesting icy moons for rover fuel. NASA has announced the recipients of its yearly National Innovative Advanced Concepts awards, and they’re just as out there as the planets and other stellar objects they propose to mine, analyze and explore. There are 13 projects that have been given Phase I consideration: about $100,000, with which the team can investigate their concept’s feasibility. These are all idea- or concept-level projects, of course, if you couldn’t tell from the image above, which looks like a sci-fi paperback. It’s rather difficult to practice “reconstituting asteroids into mechanical automata” in your garage. Phase II selections, which you can generally assume will be fewer in number, will receive $500,000 to continue development. Here are a few of the ideas NASA will be feeding money. Plenty more interesting programs to check out at . Start a pool with your friends over which will graduate to the next phase. |
New study shows women in tech ask for less — and receive it | Connie Loizos | 2,016 | 4 | 12 | According to a published by the data science team at , a jobs marketplace for tech workers, the average female candidate sets her expected salary at $14,000 less than men. Related or not, 69 percent of the time, men receive higher salary offers than women for the same job title at the same company. (On average, employers pay women 3 percent less for the same roles, though some companies offer as much as 30 percent less.) Hired’s insights derive from how its platform operates. Tech candidates set a preferred salary, and all interview requests made by companies include compensation details. Its report includes a healthy size sampling, too; it looked at more than 100,000 job offers across 15,000 candidates and 3,000 companies. It’s worth noting that most job seekers on Hired are between two and eight years out of college. Explains company’s lead data scientist, Jessica Kirkpatrick, “Very junior people tend to get recruited out of school, and more senior people get recruited by executive recruiting firms by companies willing to pay a premium for a C-level manager.” Put another way, we don’t know where these trends lead for those with 10 to 20 years of experience, though Census Bureau data suggests things don’t right now balance out over time. (As you’ve likely heard, as of last year, U.S. women were still earning for every dollar men earn.) With that in mind, some more of Hired’s other findings include that bootstrapped and seed-stage companies have a gender wage gap that’s half that of larger corporations and companies that have taken advanced funding. Presumably, there’s more parity owing to the greater transparency into operations that employees enjoy at smaller startups. Kirkpatrick further suggests that there may simply be less money to play with when it comes to paying some employees more than others. A third possibility, she says, is that pay inequality manifests itself in equity allotments to employees at the earliest-stage startups. According to Hired, the pay gap is also bigger in roles that feature a higher percentage of men, like heavily male-dominated software engineering roles. This is where the so-called expectation gap is likely playing a role, says Kirkpatrick. Women are asking for less because they don’t know what their peers are making or, in some cases, they question whether they deserve the same amount. (Pinterest engineer Tracy Chou shared her own in a piece on Quartz published earlier today.) Kirkpatrick also notes that a women’s comparative lack of success when it comes to negotiating for better pay (as documented by , among others) can also take on a kind of snowball effect over time. If you get paid $15,000 less than your male counterpart in one job, it’s hard to make up the difference when your next employer asks you about your last salary. There is, thank goodness, a silver lining. According to Hired, once employees know the salary expectations for a certain job, whether male or female, they tend to ask for the same amount, and they get it. “When people know their worth and set it appropriately,” says Kirkpatrick, “they get what they are asking for.” Indeed, the biggest takeaway for readers, Kirkpatrick adds, is that women do their research at the outset of their job hunting process. You can check out Hired’s round-up . |
Facebook lets users record Facebook profile videos in third-party apps | Matthew Lynley | 2,016 | 4 | 12 | Facebook today launched the , which gives third-party developers a way to publish videos recorded on their apps as profile pictures on Facebook. The service was announced at the company’s annual developer conference, f8, in San Francisco today. Videos that are recorded on third-party services can now be used as profile videos with the new tools. Details are a little sparse, but the company has a few partners already that are working with the service, including Instagram, Cinemagraph Pro and MSQRD. Boomerang by Instagram, Vine, lollicam and BeautyPlus are also included in the list. Developers also get attribution within News Feed whenever a video from their service is posted as a profile picture, . Mobile video is becoming massive and is quickly taking over much of the internet. Facebook’s Chris Cox at f8 said around 70% of mobile internet is expected to be video in a few years. So it’s not surprising that Facebook would want to jump on the trend in any way it can — including giving users new ways to express themselves on Facebook through video. Facebook allowed users to change their profile pictures to . In theory, as mobile video continues to expand thanks to its engaging nature, it would make profile pictures even more engaging — encouraging users to interact with both profile pages and News Feed posts. That, in turn, increases overall engagement on Facebook, making it more sticky and getting people coming back to the service over and over. That’ll be important to Facebook, which has to tackle increasing competition from other platforms that are more video-centric. Snapchat, with its focus on self-expression, is huge when it comes to video. Facebook needs tools like the Facebook Profile Expression Kit to convince users to continue to express themselves on Facebook instead of on other platforms. |
Bigelow Aerospace partners with ULA to launch private space habitats | Emily Calandrelli | 2,016 | 4 | 13 | Through a new partnership this week, United Launch Alliance (ULA) will work with Bigelow Aerospace to launch a large inflatable habitat on an Atlas V rocket in 2020. The size of the habitat will be based off of Bigelow’s B330 module, which is named for its total expanded volume of 330 cubic meters. Illustration of B330 habitat / Image courtesy of Bigelow Aerospace The announcement comes shortly after Bigelow Aerospace had their smaller habitat sent to the International Space Station (ISS) on a SpaceX launch. At 16 cubic meters, BEAM is just a fraction of the size of a B330 module, but will be used to validate and test the expandable technology in the harsh environment of space. “This innovative and game-changing advance will dramatically increase opportunities for space research in fields like materials, medicine and biology. And it enables destinations in space for countries, corporations and even individuals far beyond what is available today, effectively democratizing space.” – Tory Bruno, ULA President and CEO Whether the habitat, tentatively named the XBASE or Expandable Bigelow Advanced Station Enhancement, would orbit as a stand-alone module or be attached to the ISS is yet to be determined. Robert Bigelow, founder and president of Bigelow Aerospace, said that they are speaking with NASA to discuss the possibility of attaching it the ISS. If that were to happen, a B330-sized module would increase the total internal volume of the ISS by 30 percent. B330 model at Press Conference for partnership — Robert Clark (@rg_clark) Although this may be a relatively short-term option for Bigelow Aerospace as the ISS is currently only supported through . Once Congress and NASA decide to decommission the station, it will be forced to de-orbit into Earth’s atmosphere and crash into the ocean. At an estimated total cost of $100 billion, NASA wants to squeeze as much useful research out of the ISS before it’s gone forever. Bigelow Aerospace’s expandable module would help accomplish that goal. In a press release, ULA that the “the craft will support zero-gravity research including scientific missions and manufacturing processes.” Visualization of BEAM expansion/inflation on the ISS / Image courtesy of NASA However, it costs the U.S. an additional $3 billion each year to maintain the space station. With their sights set on farther destinations like asteroids and Mars, NASA will eventually shift focus – and budget – to other deep space projects. Without the ISS, Bigelow Aerospace has other viable options. In order to send humans into deep space, NASA will need suitable habitats for the crew. Expandable modules are especially attractive for these inherently costly missions because they’re relatively lightweight and compact compared to rigid alternatives, making them potentially cheaper and easier to launch. The company’s expandable modules could also orbit as a standalone station around the Earth similar to the company’s first uncrewed modules, Genesis 1 and Genesis2, launched in 2006 and 2007 and still in orbit today. In addition to acting a lab for microgravity research, expandable modules could function as space hotels for tourists. Transportation to Bigelow Aerospace habitats would be provided by NASA’s current commercial crew providers, Boeing and SpaceX, whose crew capsules are just a year or two away from their first crewed flights. Specifics of the ULA – Bigelow Aerospace contract have yet to be released, but the companies noted that the development of the B330 is well underway as well as its integration to the Atlas V rocket. |
Gestigon and Renault know if you’re ready to take the wheel | Kristen Hall-Geisler | 2,016 | 4 | 13 | Between the current advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS) and the future, the completely autonomous car rests in some potentially treacherous semi-autonomous territory. has enlisted the help of gesture-control experts at to help ease the transition from vehicles taking care of driving tasks to humans taking over driving duties. This transition is more difficult than you might imagine. When vehicles reach SAE Level 4, they can do most of the driving themselves, but will still require human drivers to take over in tricky or unpredictable situations. But if the vehicle has been cruising along without any input from the driver, the driver may not be fully ready to drive. “Just think about all the things you might be doing in a self-driving car and then the situation that the external sensors recognize that the driver needs to take over control in a 3-4 seconds, e.g. due to a crash on the highway or cattle crossing the countryside road,” said gestigon co-founder and CEO Moritz v. Grotthuss in an email interview. “If you have a coffee mug in your hands, that might be possible. A laptop might be more fragile. Newspapers? You might have put the back of the seat in a lying position and you can’t even reach the steering wheel. You might not be in the driver seat at all, or breast-feeding, or sleeping, or wearing VR glasses. The car needs to know if you are able to take over control or not!” There are vehicles on the road today that monitor driver awareness, usually via cameras that provide a 2D image. Gestigon uses depth sensors that tell the system the distance from the lens to each pixel. Grotthuss said it works like the Xbox Kinect in that way. “Skin color, noisy background, light conditions, etc. don’t matter,” with this technology, he said. “You get the same results in bright sunlight as well as the darkest night.” While gestigon’s technology can track just about anything a person does, in this particular application with Renault, the focus is on the seating position of the driver. “What are they doing? Where is their head and where are they looking? Where are their arms and hands? Do they have an object in their hands?,” he explains. All of these factors will tell the vehicle if the driver is prepared to actually drive. Renault and gestigon aren’t yet saying when this 3D mapping of drivers will be available in vehicles, but the transition of power from vehicle to human is going to be an important safety hurdle to clear as cars become more — but not entirely — autonomous in the near future. |
Interim guidelines to the Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act | Jason R. Edgecombe | 2,016 | 4 | 13 |
Despite the objections of , the (CISA) is now the law of the land. Slipped into the 2016 federal omnibus spending bill, CISA permits private entities to share about cyberthreat indicators (CTIs) and defensive measures against cyber attacks, both with each other and with the federal government. The purported goal of CISA is . If a business believes that it is experiencing a cyber attack, it can provide the threat signatures to the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), which can then blast out that throughout the country in hopes of keeping the threat from spreading. The problem is that there are scant privacy safeguards to prevent private from being shared through CISA. A private entity that shares with the government is only required to remove “ that identifies a specific individual” of which it “ to be personal .” This is a low bar: If the entity doing the isn’t aware “at the time of ” that a CTI identifies a specific person, it is required to de-identify that before sending it to DHS. This is where the “ ,” recently released by DHS and the Department of Justice (DOJ), come into play. The require that DHS or any other governmental entity receiving through CISA “shall review” CTIs for personally identifiable prior to any further within the government, and “destroy … in a timely manner” any remaining personal . In other words, the don’t let DHS simply assume that whoever shared the CTI did its job and removed personally identifiable , but requires DHS — and any other federal entity that subsequently receives that — to re-review and remove any extant personal before it further. beyond CISA’s baseline, the aren’t perfect. Personal only has to be removed if it is “not directly related to a threat.” Perhaps more troubling, the don’t require the destruction of personal unless it is “known not to be directly related to uses authorized under CISA.” This creates a for the feds, as “uses authorized under CISA” include a number of law enforcement activities unrelated to , such as “investigating [and] prosecuting … sexual exploitation and threats to physical safety.” As their title suggests, however, the are just that: . DHS and DOJ will be releasing the final sometime around mid-May 2016 and periodically revising them thereafter. One can hope that the final would look at privacy holes and either patch them completely or at least give more specific guidance as to situations that warrant the of personal . That being said, the best way to prevent personal from falling into the hands of the feds is for non-governmental entities to decline to share it in the first place. CISA doesn’t require that private entities do much to protect their users’ , but it doesn’t prevent them from doing so either. They can take extra steps to ensure that any shared through CISA has been scrubbed for personally identifiable , or they can simply decline to share through CISA entirely. Private companies that value their users’ trust would be wise to take one of these steps, irrespective of what the final or provide. |
Obama appoints tech veterans from Microsoft and Uber to cybersecurity commission | Devin Coldewey | 2,016 | 4 | 13 | President Obama has just to the Commission on Enhancing National Cybersecurity — and it’s more or less what you’d expect: higher-ups from the big players in tech, plus some academics and the former director of the NSA. Wait, what? Yes, General Keith Alexander (Retired), who headed the NSA during the enormous expansion of its surveillance apparatus — pointed, of course, at you — is the first listed member of the commission. On the one hand, better the devil you know, and a resumé. On the other, wow. The rest of the members are as follows, with their primary or most recent affiliation listed: So what does this commission do, exactly? It’s part of Obama’s larger overhaul of government tech policy, the Cybersecurity National Action Plan, . In fact, it’s the first highlight on the administration’s . The commission is advisory only, making both short- and long-term recommendations on cybersecurity, public safety, privacy and partnerships between the various appendages of the government. Ironically, the members were announced on the same day that, if this commission is worth its salt, will be the subject of their very first recommendation. That is to say, to bury that bill so deep that they’ll need ultrasonic locators like they used at the beginning of to find it again. Actually, that probably won’t be necessary (the bill is a dud), but it sure would be nice to watch. The specific details on exactly what the commission will be doing are . If all goes according to plan, a final report will be due to the president by December 1 of this year, leaving him just enough time to not implement it. I kid, but really, no sweeping reforms were likely at any time during this acrimonious election season, so this gives them time to do real research and, probably, establish their own sub-commissions. Periodic public meetings are also part of the plan, so keep an eye out for those — you wouldn’t want to miss a chance to make your voice heard, would you? |
PayPal Credit expands to the UK with an interest-free option for purchases over £150 | Ingrid Lunden | 2,016 | 4 | 13 | After separating from eBay, PayPal has been on a march to grow both its international business and transactions beyond basic e-commerce. Today it is taking a step to do both, with the U.K. launch of — a service that lets consumers use their PayPal accounts to spread out online payments for goods as a replacement for traditional credit cards. It will give consumers online the option of buying with PayPal Credit across all PayPal-enabled sites, with purchases over £150 ($212) offered at 0 percent interest to sweeten the deal, and agreements with select retailers for special interest rates on their sites. Interestingly, as a point of comparison, PayPal offers an interest-free option in the U.S. at less than half that price, $99. This is the first market for PayPal Credit outside of the U.S., where it (as a rebranded and expanded Bill Me Later) along with a PayPal Extras MasterCard physical credit card, issued by Synchrony, and a money transfer service. The U.K. service for now has no plans for a physical card or money transfer service, the company tells me. If you’re wondering why it’s taken so long to expand outside the U.S., PayPal Credit has actually been lingering around in a limited U.K. pilot since 2014, when PayPal announced its intention to take the Credit service international. Customers apply for PayPal Credit after they are approved, their digital wallets essentially have an added credit option on them. The basic service comes in two tiers: those who spend more than £150 on any purchase via PayPal Credit are charged 0 percent interest for four months. (After this, those balances accrue interest at the standard variable rate, which is currently 17.9 percent interest p.a., PayPal says.) On top of this, PayPal Credit is working with select retailers — , , , , , and — to set up promotional interest rates around payment installment plans over periods longer than four months. These might also include 0 percent interest rates, although the terms vary by store. The move to expand into credit services is an obvious move for PayPal as it looks to expand its brand as a go-to place for all things to do with financial services, and to make its platform more appealing to retailers, who now have a range of competing options when it comes to giving their customers ways to pay for goods. “Today’s announcement is another example of how PayPal is so much more than a button on a website,” said Cameron McLean, Managing Director of PayPal U.K., in a statement. “We are using technology to reimagine money. For consumers, it’s about giving them more choice and convenience when shopping online. For businesses, we are enabling them to grow and offer their customers greater payment flexibility. It’s a sign of things to come. As a newly independent company, we will continue to partner with retailers to find new, improved ways for people to pay.” The U.K. — a big market for PayPal and its former owner eBay — is a regular first-stop for PayPal when it expands new services outside of the U.S. Other products it has launched here to expand its payments business include cash advances and — in a bid to grow its point-of-sale physical transaction business — (the first market where it introduced an EMV card reader that is now replacing the mag-stripe in the U.S.). |
Burr-Feinstein encryption bill is officially here in all its scary glory | Kate Conger | 2,016 | 4 | 13 | Senators Richard Burr and Dianne Feinstein released the official version of their anti-encryption bill today after a appeared online last week. The bill, titled the , would require tech firms to decrypt customers’ data at a court’s request. The Burr-Feinstein proposal has already faced heavy criticism from the tech and legislative communities and is not expected to get anywhere in the Senate. President Obama has also indicated that he will not support the bill, . “I have long believed that data is too insecure, and feel strongly that consumers have a right to seek solutions that protect their information — which involves strong encryption,” Sen. Burr said in a statement announcing the bill. But in spite of his stated support of strong encryption, Burr’s bill calls for the exact opposite. It requires legislation that requires communications services to backdoor their encryption in order to provide “intelligible information or data, or appropriate technical assistance to obtain such information or data.” Sen. Feinstein weighed in too, stating, “The bill we have drafted would simply provide that, if a court of law issues an order to render technical assistance or provide decrypted data, the company or individual would be required to do so. Today, terrorists and criminals are increasingly using encryption to foil law enforcement efforts, even in the face of a court order. We need strong encryption to protect personal data, but we also need to know when terrorists are plotting to kill Americans.” Predictably, the bill has been panned by tech and . But Burr’s fellow senators are coming out against it, too — Sen. Ron Wyden tweeted that he would do “everything in [his] power” to block the bill, including filibustering it. I will do everything in my power to block Burr-Feinstein anti-encryption bill. It makes Americans less safe. — Ron Wyden (@RonWyden) If this dangerous anti-encryption legislation reaches the Senate floor, I will filibuster it. Period. — Ron Wyden (@RonWyden) A similar died in California’s General Assembly yesterday. The Assembly Committee on Privacy and Consumer Protection determined that the proposed legislation, which would have mandated $2,500-per-day penalties for companies that refused to decrypt data, would place too much burden on the state’s technology companies and declined to vote on it. |
Facebook’s new chatbots still need work | Sarah Perez | 2,016 | 4 | 13 | Facebook debuted this week to much fanfare, over the company’s popular messaging service. The idea is that Messenger users could simply “chat” with these automated software programs to do things like read the latest news from CNN, get a weather report or even go shopping. In practice, however, the bots — at least at launch — failed to live up to the hype. Trying to use the bots for simple tasks — like finding out if it would rain or buying a black shirt — was frustrating, disappointing and ultimately far less efficient than simply visiting the company’s website itself. That’s not to downplay the potential for bots in the long term, or the possibilities provided by bringing Facebook’s large base of businesses to Messenger where they could better serve customers who increasingly use mobile messaging apps while on their smartphones. However, as the chatbots for Messenger platform launches, the bot experience leaves much to be desired. To get a good feel for Facebook’s chatbots, we demoed the three “Featured” bots that Facebook is promoting via : CNN, shopping app Spring and weather app Poncho. Each bot had a “Try it” link provided, which opens directly on Messenger a chat interface with the business. For starters, clicking this link — (in the m.me format) — merely launched the chat window; there was no greeting text from the business in question. In other words, though you know that there’s a bot to interact with, you don’t know how to begin. Does it require a trigger word or phrase? Can you just say “hi?” Facebook will reportedly soon address this problem when it which will allow businesses to pass along a note to customers when they kick off a chat session. These greetings could instruct users how to get started using the bot. It’s unclear why Facebook wouldn’t have this enabled for the chatbots at launch, though. After all, this whole concept is new to so many of today’s mobile messaging users who are not old enough to remember chatting with IM bots from back in their PC days. As it turns out, not all the bots operate the same way. For example, simply saying “hi” to CNN and Poncho generated an automated response, but Spring’s bot ignored me. (I had to Google to find out that the way to talk to Spring was to say “go shopping” to it.) Unfortunately, that was the least of my problems with using the bots. Here’s a simple problem a chatbot could help me solve, I thought: I’m in the market for a new shirt. I like the color black and I don’t want to spend a lot. Couldn’t Spring’s new shopping bot help point me to some nice items? I didn’t expect it to succeed in helping me narrow top shirts by details like sleeve length or fabric type at this early point, but I at least believed it could pull up a few possibilities. I was wrong. After getting the shopping session started by the keyword trigger, Spring’s bot interface is easy enough to use. It asks you a series of questions to narrow down what you’re looking for — Men’s or Women’s items?, “Clothing, Shoes, or Accessories?”, etc. — and you click on your response. After I narrowed it down to tops under $75, Spring returned five items it thought I would like. Why would I like these particular items? I don’t know. Spring knows nothing about my shopping history, what style of shirt I’m looking for, the color, the occasion (work or casual) or anything else. It returned three white shirts, one t-shirt, and a sweater. Uh, OK. [gallery ids="1307410,1307409"] At this point, I’d like to ask the bot for more options. But how do you do that? I tried “chatting” with the bot, assuming at this point, anything I said would at least trigger a new “help” message that explains how to continue using the service. “I don’t like these” I told it, and was met with silence. “hi?” I spoke into the void. Nothing happened. “can you show me more?” Finally, the bot answered, informing me that I could return to the options above and click them again to start the process over. Hopeful that the five items it returned were a randomized group and I’d see five new shirts if I repeated things, I did just that. The bot returned the same five shirts. Well, maybe I need to be more specific, I thought. “Please show some black shirts,” I said. The bot gave me a link to its website. I know what you’re thinking. Well maybe Spring didn’t have any black shirts under $75? But it did! The link pointed to Women’s black shirts on the Spring site, and there are more than a few from which to choose. The thing is, it just would have been easier to visit Spring’s website directly, rather than dancing through this chatty interface. Poncho’s snarky weather bot was even worse. Though I got it talking with a simple “hi,” its weather reports failed to deliver even the most basic information, like when it would rain. After getting my location and asking if it could message me daily weather reports (NOPE!, I said), it told me I could still chat with it for other information, specifically: “Feel free to ask me if it’s going to rain, if you need sunglasses or a jacket, or just say hello from time to time!” So I asked: “is it going to rain?” Poncho answered: “Wet. Warm. Yuck.” [gallery ids="1307397,1307396"] I’m sorry, but what….? Is that supposed to be a real answer? I tried to get Poncho to clarify — did “wet” mean rain was coming, then? “Sorry, you’re going to have to say that again in Cat. Meow?,” it said. You’ve got to be kidding me. “When will it rain?,” I asked. It didn’t understand. “What time will it rain?,” I tried again. No go. “What’s the percentage chance of rain?,” I attempted awkwardly. “Wet. Warm. Yuck,” the bot repeated. I threw my phone across the room. No thanks. Of the three Featured bots, CNN’s did better, but still had some issues. It responded to “hi” as well, thankfully, as I still have no clue what you’re supposed to say to these things. It then directs you to pick the news you want to hear: Top Stories, Stories for you or Ask CNN. Top Stories is a curated selection of the top news, and can offer you a summary or a link to the CNN site to read further. The summary feature is a bit reminiscent of , and is a good way to get briefed on the most important aspects to the day’s news. Ask CNN lets you specify a topic you’d like to read about, while Stories for you returns suggestions based on what you’ve been reading. (Presumably, this will improve over time.) While CNN’s bot performed these tasks fairly well, it still failed in other areas. For example, because it’s been programmed to look for topics by keyword, apparently, it didn’t seem to grasp the nuance of a query asking for “U.S. news.” It’s plausible that someone might think to ask for U.S. news via this bot, in order to get a filtered selection of the day’s top news. However, CNN’s bot only seemed to look for the word “U.S.” in the headline when returning its suggestions. Instead of “top” stories, the bot returned exactly two articles: CNN’s “ ” and a CNN Money video entitled “ ” Not only are these not what one would consider the top U.S. stories, the second was returned because it had the word “ ” in the headline. Maybe I didn’t word it correctly? Oddly enough, asking just for “us news?” returned a different set of (now three) stories with the word “us” in the headline, including an op-ed called “ .” Similarly, requests for the “latest news” stumbled — again, only looking for the keyword in the headline. This was not helpful at all. While these tests were brief, it goes to show that Messenger’s chatbots are still a long way from fulfilling their potential to be a useful way to interact with businesses and brands through chat. These bots clearly need to be able to interact with their human customers more conversationally, and have a better understanding of what people are actually saying to them. They need to have more functionality — like the ability to pull up specific items when shopping — and they need to be better programmed from the start. Some bots are better than others, of course. gave different chatbots a dry run and had similarly mixed results. Simple bots like The WSJ and CNN’s news bots did better, while Operator’s shopping bot — which claims to respond to emoji queries — didn’t really work. Meanwhile, Sequel Stories’ “choose your own adventure”-style story bot was more fun, their report found. The question for Facebook’s business users is whether or not it’s worth the time and effort to build one of these bots, or if the chatbot phase will end up being a fad. For now, it’s still entirely unproven that customers will to chat with bots — especially when they work so poorly. The experience, if not improved in short order, could become the mobile equivalent of punching your way through a business’s automated customer service hotline. At the end of the day, people may want to chat with a person, not a machine, when trying to get customer service. They may think that using the company’s website or native app is easier and faster than trying to get the bot to respond properly, so they simply ignore the bots. And if people try bots and fail to find them useful right out of the gate, there’s a good chance businesses won’t get a second chance to win back those same customers in the future. “SIGH” I wrote to Spring’s chatbot, ending my experience today. The bot said it got my note and would be back with me shortly. (Spring says its bots are partly human-powered. Maybe my message was being sent to staff?, I wondered.) Over an hour later, Spring asked me if I wanted to keep shopping. Not via bot, I don’t think. |
Ohio State’s woven-in antennas take us one step closer to smart jeans | Devin Coldewey | 2,016 | 4 | 13 | Wearables may be the next big thing, but what about the wearables we already wear? Integrating electronics into everyday clothes is still some distance off, but have taken an important step: weaving circuits into clothes with enough precision to integrate them with ordinary PCBs. “For the first time, we’ve achieved the accuracy of printed metal circuit boards, so our new goal is to take advantage of the precision to incorporate receivers and other electronic components,” said Ohio State ElectroScience Laboratory director John Volakis in a news release. “We believe that functional textiles are an enabling technology for communications and sensing — and one day even medical applications like imaging and health monitoring.” Volakis and his lab have been working on this tech for a long time. Two years ago, they were weaving with 600-filament count conductive polymer thread half a millimeter in diameter. Now they’re down to 7-filament copper-silver threads that are 0.1 mm wide — which not only enables patterns to be laid with greater precision, but the improved conductance makes less thread needed. That saves cost and weight. Researcher Asimina Kiourti works on hand-stitching a design. Built-in antennas and leads for power are an option: one prototype created by researcher Asimina Kiourti has RFID integrated, and another is ready to receive other bands. A six-inch-wide fabric antenna flawlessly collected transmissions from 1 to 5 GHz in tests. The threads themselves are merely a conductive medium, and can’t do any electronic stuff by themselves, of course — they need to be connected to a microcontroller somewhere. But conductive thread is versatile and can be integrated with other flexible electronics. Think of it this way: you won’t be getting live contour information on your six-pack, but you won’t need a dozen keyfob-sized lumps all over your workout clothes to know how many sit-ups you’ve done. Perhaps most importantly, the resulting fabric feels like fabric, not a suit of armor. That said, it remains to be seen whether the garments or patches would stand up to everyday exposure to moisture, friction and so on. The research was funded by the National Science Foundation, and the university plans to license it through its . We’ve asked for more details and will update the post if we hear back. |
Airbnb’s VP of engineering on the sharing economy | Megan Rose Dickey | 2,016 | 4 | 13 | The sharing economy, which is sometimes referred to as collaborative consumption, has become a household term — at least in the tech industry — that signifies peer-to-peer exchanges through technology. “The fact that there are so many terms going around these things is almost a function of the fact the industry is so new,” Airbnb VP of Engineering Mike Curtis told me on this week’s episode of Bullish. We also discussed where this industry is going and what’s driving it. “It’s accessible to more people and they’re able to participate in it,” Curtis said. “The more people who get involved in these marketplaces means you’re able to give more choice to the consumer, so the quality levels are generally going up.” Check out the video above to hear more from Curtis on the sharing economy. |
Journalist Matthew Keys sentenced to 2 years in hacking case | Kate Conger | 2,016 | 4 | 13 | Former Reuters journalist Matthew Keys was today to two years in prison on hacking charges. He faced a maximum sentence of 25 years. During his sentencing hearing, Keys , “This whole process has been exhausting.” Keys was last October of violating the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA), in a bizarre case that led to the temporary defacement of a story about a tax bill on the website. (The headline was altered to read “Pressure builds in House to elect CHIPPY 1337” by an unidentified individual and was live on the ‘ website for only about 40 minutes before it was corrected.) Although Keys did not alter the headline himself, he was accused of sharing login credentials for Tribune Media, which owns the , in an Anonymous chatroom. Tribune Media claimed that the defacement resulted in the loss of $929,977. Keys’ case drew widespread interest from technologists and activists because he faced charges under the controversial CFAA, legislation passed in 1986 that describes hacking in vague terms and can carry hefty prison sentences. The CFAA broadly defines computer crimes under terms like “unauthorized access” and “damage without authorization,” which give prosecutors discretion to interpret what “authorization” means in a given case. Efforts to reform the CFAA have been underway since noted activist and programmer was charged under the CFAA for downloading academic articles from JSTOR and committed suicide during his prosecution. However, these reform efforts have stalled in Congress. Despite his conviction last October and the evidence against him, which includes , Keys has maintained his innocence. “I am innocent, and I did not ask for this fight,” Keys wrote in a published prior to his sentencing. “Nonetheless, I hope that our combined efforts help bring about positive change to rules and regulations that govern our online conduct.” Keys’ attorney indicated that he would appeal the decision. Matthew Keys was found guilty. We'll proceed forward to sentencing and look forward to appealing this verdict. — Jay Leiderman (@JayLeidermanLaw) Shortly after sentencing, Keys tweeted that he and his attorneys plan to file a motion to stay the sentence, pending appeal. 2 years. We plan on filing a motion to stay the sentence. — Matthew Keys (@MatthewKeysLive) When we do appea, we're not only going to work to reverse the conviction but try to change this absurd computer law, as best we can. — Matthew Keys (@MatthewKeysLive) |
House committee votes unanimously for Email Privacy Act | Kate Conger | 2,016 | 4 | 13 | Maybe you’ve delighted in reading some of Hillary Clinton’s more humorous emails, released in several stages over the past year — there’s the one where she calls Harriet Tubman her “home girl,” or the time she jokes about Chinese hackers messing with her contacts. But imagine someone digging into your old emails and reading through all your bad jokes, family feuds and business arrangements. It’s not so funny anymore, right? Here’s the thing — law enforcement officials can read through your old emails anytime without a warrant. The House Judiciary Committee made its first move to fix this legal loophole today, voting 28-0 to approve the . The bill would require officials to obtain a warrant before reading Americans’ old emails (and texts, instant messages and other cloud-stored communications). If the Email Privacy Act continues to progress through Congress, it will amend the , which allows law enforcement (with a simple subpoena) to read emails that are more than 180 days old. The vote is the first major move toward reforming ECPA, a 30-year-old law that governs digital communications and differentiates between data stored on a computer or other device and data stored in the cloud. Now that cloud storage is more common, it no longer makes sense to allow unfettered access to emails and messages stored in the cloud. “This legislation is a long overdue remedy to the loopholes in ECPA that treat data stored in the cloud differently than data stored on a local computer,” said Information Technology and Innovation Foundation vice president Daniel Castro, whose organization has supported the bill. “Americans expect that their data will receive Fourth Amendment protections regardless of the means used to store it, and this legislation will help bridge that divide.” Several states, , Colorado, Maine, Texas and Utah, already have similar privacy laws in place. After today’s vote, there’s still a long path to victory for the bill, which will need to pass several more votes and receive the president’s approval before becoming law. However, with 314 representatives already signed on as co-sponsors, the bill’s chances look pretty good. “Today is a great day for not only the Fourth Amendment advocates who have fought long and hard to move the Email Privacy Act, but also for all Americans, who are one step closer to having private and secure digital communications,” Rep. Kevin Yoder, the bill’s sponsor, told . |
Threaded messaging is coming to Slack | Matthew Lynley | 2,016 | 4 | 13 | Slack CEO Stewart Butterfield said threaded messaging — perhaps one of the service’s most important missing components — is finally coming. Butterfield told Mossberg that Slack had been using threading internally for months while testing what the best version of the tool would be for the service, which will hopefully come out in the next quarter. Details are, of course, still sparse about how threaded messaging will look like. But it’s in Slack’s DNA to build simple collaboration services that look more like consumer tools than the standard-issue enterprise ones. Adding threaded messaging, an important component in other services like Yammer, Citrix’s Podio and Convo, would level the playing field between collaboration services — and give Slack an opportunity to gobble up a much wider part of the field. Slack, as-is, is more like a tool for quickly building work-centric chat rooms with direct messaging integrated into it. Threaded comments would bring the service to another level, helping it become a more important part of the workflow and upending existing services. Slack has attracted a lot of attention in Silicon Valley because of its dead-simple interface and tools. Adding additional tools, of course, carries the risk of feature-creep. But threaded messages are a critical component to other enterprise collaboration tools, and the service is going to need to find ways to usurp those services in order to attract new clients. And that includes attracting clients outside of Silicon Valley — where the company will have to find growth if it wants to become the truly massive business investors are betting on. Slack is already one of the hottest enterprise startups in Silicon Valley, . In April last year, Slack was valued at $2.8 billion as part of its financing round, and the service has 2.7 million users. The promise of Slack is partly to reduce the clutter of email by making it easier to not only message other Slack users directly, but provide an extensive history of conversation that’s easily searchable. There’s also a whole new ecosystem of third-party applications that are coming to the service in the form of bots and other third-party apps, , that will populate Slack’s own third-party app directory. All these additions, taken together, help the service become more powerful in the context of enterprise — which explains why Slack has attracted so much investor interest. And this would help the service look less like a chat room and more like a true enterprise collaboration service — which could help attract even larger enterprise clients that rely on tools like threaded messages to get work done. As Slack picks up those larger enterprise clients, it can continue to scale its business, and thus invest in new tools and hire additional talent. |
Vine releases a Watch button because scrolling is too much work | Jordan Crook | 2,016 | 4 | 13 | , Twitter’s social network turned entertainment platform, is today a new way to consume content on the app. The company is introducing a “Watch” button, which will let users watch a particular channel or account without needing to scroll. When a user presses the watch button on a certain account or channel, videos in that feed will play back-to-back, continuously. Users can hold down on a video if they want to see it loop a few times. Otherwise, the app will play the next video in the feed. [gallery ids="1307261,1307262"] Vine has really transformed over the past few years to be more than just a social network. It follows the Twitter doctrine of one-to-many broadcasting, with a smaller amount of producers providing content for a larger group of consumers. For example, my girlfriend posts nothing to Vine but loves watching funny videos and uses the app regularly. The app has really become more of an entertainment platform, like YouTube, than a true social network. As such, it makes sense for Vine to move to a more comfortable consumption experience than to have the user work to see videos. It’s also worth nothing that this is slightly reminiscent of the , which autoplays your inbox from one sender to the next without a break. Obviously, the loop is part of the format of a Vine, and adds to the story or plot in some way. Folks who are obsessed with loops may be a touch perturbed to remember to hold down to get a loop, but like any other user behavior, they’ll likely soon forget it was ever any other way. |
Veteran Apple designer leaves for GoPro to be VP of Design | Matt Burns | 2,016 | 4 | 13 | Longtime Apple industrial designer Danny Coster is joining GoPro. Coster had worked at Apple since the early 1990s, and helped Apple re-establish itself after Steve Jobs returned. Now he has to do that to GoPro. GoPro’s stock popped on the news and is trading up on the day. The news comes from and an internal email sent from GoPro’s founder and CEO, Nick Woodman. “Ironically, Danny and I first met in December, 2001, on the beach in Sayulita, Mexico at the very start of the five month surfing trip where I developed and tested the first GoPro prototype,” said Woodman in a released statement. “His design pedigree speaks for itself, but I will say that we feel energized to have him join GoPro.” GoPro has had rocky year and news of Danny Coster joining the company caused its stock to jump to its highest level since the middle of January. As of this post’s writing, the stock price is up 16% on the day. Coster will report to Nick Woodman and official join the team at the end of April. |
Facebook will soon be able to automatically tag your friends in videos | Frederic Lardinois | 2,016 | 4 | 13 | Facebook is making big strides in using its artificial intelligence systems for image recognition, but it’s also working on bringing this technology to video. As the company demoed at its F8 developer conference in San Francisco today, it has a team working on automatically tagging people in videos. As Facebook’s director of machine learning said during his keynote today, the idea here is to allow you to search for people in any of the videos they have shared with you. Say you are on a live video feed with a friend and another friend walks into the video and has a brief conversation with you. Typically, that would be a very ephemeral experience because it would be hard to find this moment again. Soon, Facebook may be indexing this moment automatically for you and will let you find it again simply by searching for your friend’s name. You could then jump right into the video at exactly the moment your friend walks in. Facebook is also working on automatically captioning videos, and it is conceivable that it could use the same image-recognition techniques for video that it uses for detecting objects in still images. |
Regina Dugan exits Google to lead Facebook’s Building 8, a new R&D lab | Lora Kolodny | 2,016 | 4 | 13 | Talent wars may never cease in Silicon Valley. Facebook today announced it has hired former Google vice president of advanced technology and projects, Regina Dugan, to head up a new group dubbed Building 8. According to a company statement, Dr. Dugan’s department will combine R&D with product development, and focus on technologies that “fluidly blend physical and digital worlds.” Prior to leading the ATAP group at Google, Dugan was the Director of DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. Her about everything from tiny drones to mind-controlled prosthetics went viral in 2012. Luckily for the social networking juggernaut, Facebook wasn’t part of the no-hiring pact between Adobe, Apple, Intel and Google. And the company has a long history of poaching great talents from Google, including COO Sheryl Sandberg. |
Legal health isn’t easy for digital health companies | Samuel Waxman | 2,016 | 4 | 13 |
With the recent announcement of the , an open-source platform to simplify the development of healthcare apps for iOS devices, it appears that the digital health industry is primed to become even more robust in 2016. Over the past year, digital health companies raised about $4.5 billion in funding. There were 302 financing deals, with an average size of$14.8 million — up slightly from 2014, when there was a substantial surge in these deals. As the convergence of healthcare and technology continues, technology companies (and investors) are increasingly finding themselves lost in a thicket of unique legal issues, enforced by unfamiliar regulators, including privacy of patient information, consumer protection and fraud and patient safety. Investors in and buyers of digital health companies should be aware of these concerns, as they can be addressed at the outset of investment and acquisition agreements. The consumer electronics market is lightly regulated in comparison to government efforts to protect users of digital health products. In the United States, companies moving into the digital health sector are faced with an interlocking and sometimes overlapping regime of federal, state and sometimes local regulatory bodies, and should expect to expend significant resources on regulatory compliance. At the federal level, the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act ( ) has both a “Privacy Rule” that governs permissible uses and disclosures of protected health information (PHI), and a “Security Rule” that governs electronic storage and transfer of PHI by certain covered entities, including health plans, healthcare providers and any business associates of these entities. Under the Security Rule, covered entities and their business associates must evaluate potential risks and implement security measures to deal with these risks. Ensuring compliance with HIPAA can present both technical and administrative issues, especially for startups. Notably, some digital health companies — including some mobile apps — are not required to comply with HIPAA. Its regulations only apply to those apps that transmit PHI (like medical records or appointment dates) to or on behalf of covered entities or their business associates, and generally would not include “health” apps designed for use solely by individuals. While most technology companies would have no reason to be concerned about the regulatory authority of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), which regulates food, drugs and medical devices, the FDA plays a in the healthcare sector. However, the FDA has shown reticence to go beyond suggestions for what they call “low-risk” products that are intended “for only general wellness use,” which includes certain software programs. As such, the FDA only strictly regulates and requires agency approval for apps that specifically conform to a definition of medical devices that capture “mobile medical apps” that control or transform a medical device and deal with topics such as diagnosis and treatment recommendations. In particular, the agency is concerned with apps that could pose a risk to patient safety if they did not function as intended. For those mobile apps not regulated by the FDA, like those used by consumers to manage their own health, the agency maintains “enforcement discretion.” Recent publicity surrounding a study that found a blood pressure measuring app to be inaccurate and unsafe has prompted calls for the FDA to more closely regulate such apps. In the event a product or application is not subject to HIPAA rules or regulated by the FDA, it may still face promulgated by the Federal Trade Commission (FTC). The FTC deals with deceptive or unfair business practices, and has recently enforced actions against a medical billing company that collected personal medical information without consent and a medical transcription company that used a third party for services without making sure that third party could implement reasonable security measures. Moreover, the FTC’s Health Breach Notification Rule — which requires notice to affected individuals, the FTC and, in some cases, the media of unauthorized access, use or disclosure of personal health information — applies to any vendor of “personal health records” or service provider to such a vendor, even if not covered by HIPAA. In addition to federal regulation and oversight, digital health companies also must worry about state laws governing privacy, consumer protection and the healthcare industry generally. So-called “telehealth” or “teledoc” companies should be aware of state licensure rules. Most states deem physicians to be practicing in the place where the patient resides and accordingly require licensure in that locale. Companies offering patients online or mobile access to licensed healthcare professionals nationwide may implicate licensure requirements in all 50 states. A related issue is the corporate practice of medicine doctrine that prohibits non-physician-controlled business entities from practicing medicine or employing physicians to do so. Many states have broad regulations that extend this doctrine to different types of healthcare professionals, such as dentists and physical therapists, and digital health companies that seek to provide access to medical or other healthcare services must structure their businesses accordingly. Many states also prohibit licensed professionals or licensed facilities from sharing their professional fees with unlicensed entities and individuals, also known as “fee-splitting.” Payments must be appropriately structured to comply with state fee-splitting prohibitions. Finally, 47 states and the District of Columbia maintain , which require companies to provide notice to individuals and, in many cases, state authorities, credit reporting agencies or the media of instances of unauthorized access, use or disclosure of certain types of personal information. Depending on what a particular health record contains, a breach involving such a record may trigger one of those statutes. Investors and buyers in the “healthtech” sector should be conscious of these regulatory pitfalls in connection with financings and acquisitions. Due diligence should identify whether the target company has obtained all necessary authorizations and approvals to operate its technology. This may require a more detailed and deeper review than is typical for technology investors. It is also important to review the company’s policies and procedures on effectiveness to ensure that they comply with norms within the healthcare industry, as well as with government regulations and legal requirements. Additionally, it would be prudent to review any potential or current litigation and investigations to be aware of red flags, like product-liability concerns or fraudulent business practices. These diligence practices should, in certain circumstances, be extended to third parties with whom the seller or target has contractual relationships. With respect to contractual protections, recent acquisition agreements between technology companies and healthtech startups have included detailed sections attesting to the legality of the target company’s medical devices and their compliance with laws — specifically FDA regulations, the Federal Food, Drug and Cosmetic Act, HIPAA and any other laws relating to fraud, abuse or kickbacks. This includes stating that there are no current or threatened enforcement actions by the FDA or any other agency, that no licenses issued by the FDA have been suspended and that any clinical trials are being conducted in accordance with the law. These provisions indicate the importance of assuring that any acquisition of healthcare technology should take into consideration the target’s commitment to user privacy, consumer protection and patient safety. As development in the healthtech sector expands, there will be more legal issues presented for tech companies. In early February, the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions approved a bill titled the “ ” for a future vote in the Senate. If passed, this bill would encourage certification of health IT products, establish a transparent product rating system and seek to develop technology that would make it easier for patients to securely access their own health information. At the same time, a recent controversy over the accuracy of the technology used by blood-testing startup has caused some unease over regulation and funding in the digital health industry. In the future, healthtech companies could face increased scrutiny from the government, potential investors and consumers. |
Android N Developer Preview 2 hits with Vulkan, shortcuts, less-generic emoji | Devin Coldewey | 2,016 | 4 | 13 | Developers, start your fastboots! for OTA updates or manual flashing. This update brings a mixed bag of features and fixes. Vulkan, from Khronos Group, makers of OpenGL and that family of standards, is now part of the package. Expect boosts in benchmarks as CPU-bound processes shift over to the GPU. Instructions on implementation can be found . Launcher shortcuts can now be created by apps; these can make actions with multiple steps or hooks easy for users to fire up with a single tap. Things like “send a text to this contact,” or “watch next episode of Veep,” or “open navigation with home as my destination.” Less welcome for some will be the “new emoji design for people emoji that moves away from our generic look in favor of a more human-looking design.” While pretty much anything is better than the living chicken nuggets that are the default in Android (right), this may just create even more confusion as to what image exactly you are sending to the recipient. That information really ought to be standard in every messaging app. Seriously At least the new realistic style makes for better skin tone changes, and the update also brings the objects added to the Unicode standard — bacon, facepalm, etc. Watch out for and changes to the too. Now, go forth and develop! |
null | Anthony Ha | 2,016 | 4 | 12 | null |
Facebook’s Terragraph and ARIES antennas bring Internet to underserved areas | Frederic Lardinois | 2,016 | 4 | 13 | Probably the most impressive of Facebook’s is its solar-powered for enabling Internet access in remote areas. But while the technology behind Aquila is impressive, more traditional terrestrial connectivity systems are often still more practical. Today, two new connectivity projects at its , Terragraph and Project ARIES, both of which focus on using terrestrial antennas — but in very different ways — to exploit different wireless techniques to cover both urban and rural areas. Terragraph equips lightpoles and other “street furniture” with antennas to blanket cities in WiFi, and ARIES packs tons of antennas into a big array to beam connectivity into the distance. Terragraph combines Facebook’s knowledge of software-defined networks (which essentially moves many of the networking techniques that previously required highly specialized hardware into off-the-shelf software tools) and the , which can handle transmission rates of up to 7 Gbits. WiGig uses the 60 GHz frequency band, which is unlicensed in most countries (just like the 2.5 GHz and 5 GHz bands Wi-Fi uses). The problem with 60 GHz, though, is that it can’t really penetrate walls, but the signal can travel about 200 to 250 meters and Facebook wants to use these Terragraph systems to offer street-level connectivity in urban areas. In the end, of course, this WiGig connectivity has to be translated to Wi-Fi, which will be the job of WiGig client nodes. As Facebook announced today, it plans to run a pilot project for Terragraph in San Jose later this year. At least some of the work the company is doing on Terragraph will flow into Facebook’s Telecom Infra project. “Terragraph implements a phase array antenna to retain the highly directional signal required for 60GHz, but makes it steerable to communicate over a wide area,” Facebook’s Neeraj Choubey and Ali Panah write today. “Given the architecture of the network, Terragraph is able to route and steer around interference typically found in dense urban environments, such as tall buildings or internet congestion due to high user traffic.” Facebook also notes that a system like Terragraph could be installed outside a high-rise to offer connectivity to a whole building. ARIES, which as you probably already guessed stands for ntenna adio ntegration for fficiency in pectrum, focuses on covering larger areas. It’s essentially a technology that pushes the 4G cellular standards forward by moving from multiple input, multiple output (MIMO) — that is, using multiple transmitters and receivers to transmit more data — to what Facebook calls “Massive MIMO.” The ARIES test platform currently uses 96 antennas and can support up to 24 devices simultaneously. The company says its ARIES prototype shows 10x spectral and energy efficiency gains over traditional 4G systems. While these systems also work well in urban areas, Facebook says its focus is on making these massive MIMO systems work well for rural areas. The idea here is to use ARIES base stations in urban areas to broadcast out to the rural areas around these population centers and provide a backhaul infrastructure to provide access to areas farther away. |
Regulators plan to revoke Theranos’ federal license and ban founder Elizabeth Holmes | Sarah Buhr | 2,016 | 4 | 13 | Theranos might find itself homeless soon. A federal agency plans to force founder Elizabeth Holmes out of her blood analysis startup for two years and take away the California lab’s federal license. First reported in the , the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services sent a proposing sanctions barring Holmes and company president Sunny Balwani from owning or running operations in labs for at least two years – including in both California and Arizona – and taking away federal licensing for Theranos’ California facilities in Newark and Palo Alto after Theranos’ continued failure to correct major problems with accuracy and competence. These actions would be a major financial blow to the startup valued at $9 billion. Theranos has the runway to keep working with approximately $700 million in the bank but the two labs make a good portion of the money for Theranos’ operations and a loss of the founder and president would strangle any hope of recovery. The letter has not been released to the public, but you can view a copy given to the WSJ . CMS gave Theranos 10 days to comply from the time the letter was issued (several weeks ago). Between June 1st and September 21st, Theranos failed to properly hire and train qualified people to run the machines, allowed unlicensed workers to review patient test results, failed to follow manufacturer’s instructions on equipment and did not have a proper, written protocol in place to calibrate the machines to maintain accuracy. Theranos submitted a plan of correction in February but the March 18 letter from CMS indicates it was not satisfied with the actions Theranos has taken so far. Last week Theranos told TechCrunch it had submitted a plan to CMS to correct the problems, including hiring a new lab director in its Newark facility. Theranos now must convince federal regulators it has taken the necessary steps needed and to not impose the penalties associated (a fine of up to $10,000 per day) for non-compliance. According to Theranos spokesperson Brooke Buchanan, CMS has not imposed sanctions at this time and has already responded to the March 18th letter within the ten-day timeframe required. “This is normal practice, normal process,” Buchanan told TechCrunch. “But this is all hypothetical until if and when Theranos receives sanctions.” |
What bubble? VCs spent $12 billion on startups in first quarter | Katie Roof | 2,016 | 4 | 14 | Investment dollars were flat compared to the $12 billion invested in the fourth quarter of last year. It was also the ninth consecutive quarter that saw deal volume reach $10 billion. Yet the money was flowing to more experienced startups, with early stage investment declining 18% in volume compared to the previous quarter. Seed stage deals also fell 10%, but expansion stage investment saw a 25% rise. Late stage deals were up 10%. Some investors are surprised by the data and think that many investors need a reality check. “There’s still a tremendous oversupply of venture dollars in Silicon Valley,” warned Asheem Chandna, partner at Greylock. “While VCs are more cautious overall, the dollars are still flowing way too fast. The reality is the very best companies don’t need a lot of venture capital money.” |
Jeremy Guillory, who says he was ousted as Cruise co-founder, files counter-complaint | Connie Loizos | 2,016 | 4 | 14 | A strange new battle over valuable startup equity took another step forward late this afternoon. Jeremy Guillory, a Bay Area mechanical engineer, has against 2.5-year-old Cruise Automation and its longtime CEO, Kyle Vogt. At issue: Guillory says that the self-driving car company — which developed an autopilot system for existing cars and is being acquired by General Motors for reportedly north of — is cheating him out of his rightful 50 percent ownership stake in the business, which he says he helped form. (In legalese, Guillory is accusing Vogt and Cruise of promissory estoppel, conversion, unjust enrichment and accounting.) You knew this counter-claim was coming yesterday, when the president of Y Combinator, Sam Altman, tried to get ahead of things publicly in a . As you may have read then, Altman, who has known Vogt for years and whose accelerator program provided Cruise its first check, acknowledged that Gillory “collaborated with Kyle for a very short period early on in the life of Cruise.” Some time in the weeks since GM announced it was buying the company in mid March, Guillory requested a percentage of Vogt’s equity in the company, even though, according to Altman, “Kyle and Jeremy parted ways” after roughly one month of working together. “This event happened more than two years ago, and well before the company had achieved much of anything.” The matter was private at first, with Vogt making what Altman described as an “extremely generous offer to settle this claim,” presumably to keep it from derailing Cruise’s acquisition. When Guillory didn’t accepted Vogt’s offer by a deadline last Friday, Vogt hired the law firm Orrick, Herrington & Sutcliffe Guillory for so-called declaratory relief. Guillory’s new cross-complaint seems to confirm Altman’s account from yesterday (which itself echoes Vogt’s suit). The filing acknowledges that Guillory and Vogt first met in mid October 2013 and began working on Cruise. By October 21, 2013, they had submitted an application to Y Combinator, whose deadline that year was October 31. By November 7, 2013, after the duo had been accepted into the accelerator, Vogt told Guillory that he no longer wanted to work together. Guillory’s attorneys note that on that print application to YC, Guillory and Vogt list themselves as co-founders and 50 percent shareholders of Cruise. That seems to be the only documentation Guillory has to support his claim, along with , which Guillory and Vogt also submitted as part of their application. Whether it’s enough could determine whether or not Guillory is entitled to up to hundreds of millions of dollars. In Vogt’s earlier suit against Guillory, it states that “after Mr. Vogt had already founded Cruise,” he and Guillory “exchanged various emails and correspondences where they discussed a potential collaboration in working to develop Cruise.” Vogt’s complaint says that, “Despite these early conversations, by mid-November 2013, it became clear that Mr. Vogt and Mr. Guillory had personalities and visions that were not compatible and the two decided not to pursue any collaboration on Cruise. After this decision, Jeremy never participated in or contributed to any Cruise business.” Indeed, it says, on November 19, Vogt interviewed alone with Y Combinator’s partners. It says Guillory did not pay for any equity interest in Cruise; receive any stock options in Cruise; write code for any technology being developed by Cruise; or draft, file, or create any patents for the tech that was being developed by Cruise. Guillory lists himself on his as having spent the last four years consulting on various projects, including designing the first open source hexacopter frame. In previous years, according to his profile, he has assisted numerous accelerator programs with fundraising and deal evaluation. He has not responded to requests for comment. In the meantime, investors are rushing to Vogt’s defense. In addition to Altman, early Cruise investor Eric Paley of Founder Collective told us yesterday via email that: “While I’m not at liberty to speak for the company on the details of the lawsuit, Mr. Guillory’s claim is completely frivolous. Kyle Vogt is a person of exceptional integrity. I’ve known Kyle since he was a college student, when he was an MIT undergrad interning at my startup. In the eight years since, he’s been a model citizen of the startup world and truly one of the best entrepreneurs of the last decade — founding two billion-dollar companies.” Vogt had previously co-founded the social video platform Twitch, which sold to Amazon for $1.1 billion in August 2014. Continued Paley, “We were proud to be one of the first investors in Cruise and to back Kyle’s vision. I first discussed Cruise with Kyle when he was on the starting line and never met Jeremy Guillory or even heard his name. Our investment decision was made entirely on the basis of Kyle’s personal credibility, his track record as a technologist, and his vision for the future. I can’t comment on the specifics of the case, but I’d proudly back Kyle again.” |
Shuddle, the Uber-like service for getting your kids around, is shutting down tomorrow | Greg Kumparak | 2,016 | 4 | 14 | If you’re a fan of Shuddle’s Uber-style driving service for getting your kids to school/playdates/etc., bad news: they’re shutting (shudding?) the doors tomorrow. Shuddle’s main pitch point was their focus on safety: They did intense background checks on drivers, monitored drivers to ensure they stayed on route and didn’t speed or text while driving and offered real-time ride tracking to parents. Drivers could also be authorized to do things most other service’s drivers would be weirded out by, like checking your kids out of afterschool activities. News of the shutdown comes by way of an email sent to customers this afternoon, and it all certainly seems pretty sudden — they’ll cease operating at the end of tomorrow’s business day. Shuddle is promising to pay out drivers with remaining balances within the next few days. The company had raised around $12.2 million dollars to date, — most recently having raised $9.6 million in March of last year. Here’s the full text of the shutdown notice: Hi [name removed], On behalf of the entire team here at Shuddle, we are saddened to inform you that Shuddle will be ceasing operations and closing business as of end-of-the-day Friday, April 15th. We worked hard to find the financial resources that would allow us to continue to grow, but ultimately could not raise the funding required to continue operations. We will be supporting rides for families and drivers through Friday, April 15th with the same commitment to safety, trust and reliability for which Shuddle is known. We would sincerely appreciate your help in supporting families through our last day of business. Drivers will be issued final payment invoices on Monday, April 18th for all rides given through Friday. Standard payment procedures apply whereby payments may take 1-2 business days to appear in your account. Phone support will be available through Friday. Email support will be available through Monday, April 18th. For any general questions you may email support@shuddle.us, for payment questions you may email payments@shuddle.us. 1099-MISCs will be issued to any driver who has received more than $600 in 2016 payments from use of the Shuddle Services. This may include, but is not limited to: payments for Shuddle Rides, bonuses, reimbursements, and promotional events. 1099-Ks will be issued to any driver who has made more than $20,000 and has more than 200 transactions in 2016. To make sure that you are following tax laws or if you have any questions about how to file your tax return, including any potential deductions based upon your use of the Shuddle Services, we encourage you to consult a tax professional. We hope our drivers find new flexible work opportunities that you enjoy, and we take our hats off to our parent customers who work so hard everyday to help their kids get safely to school, home and fun. Thank you for making Shuddle a part of your lives. Safe journeys,
Team Shuddle |
Beacon, the all-you-can-fly travel startup, closes shop | Lora Kolodny | 2,016 | 4 | 14 | Another tech startup seeking to transform aviation has closed its doors. sought to bring an all-you-can-fly option to business and leisure travelers starting on the East coast. The company’s approach was to charge membership fees, handle customers at the gate with a white-glove service and partner with regional aviation businesses to get passengers to their destinations. The company was co-founded by Wade Eyerly, Cory Cozzens and Reed Farnsworth, who previously started the California-based all-you-can-fly airline . Ryan Morley was their other co-founder. Customers paid Beacon a $1,000 deposit and $2,000 per month for unlimited travel between Boston’s Logan Airport and the Westchester County Airport outside of New York City. Pre-sales were key in the company’s plan, and revenue from these would enable Beacon to get started. The startup had to cover payroll while also renting planes from partners, planes that use a lot of fuel and required skilled pilots. Eyerly said, “We built the business on the premise that once we launched we would never have to lose money on operations. We thought pre-selling would let us do that.” He believes the business model behind Beacon would still work, but here’s where the former CEO says he made critical mistakes. “Beacon launched in September and I believed we had sold enough to cover our expenses but learned that we had not because three-fourths of our sales were to people who didn’t want to start flying until a future date. Most of them wanted to wait until the summer to start flying.” The company had raised a tranched Series A of $6.5 million led by and joined by and others. It also raised $1 million in venture debt funding. About $4 million of its Series A money was earmarked to support Beacon’s growth, once it became operational and profitable, not to get Beacon flying in the first place. Founders were subsidizing operations from day one, but could no longer do so by the turn of 2015, Eyerly says. Beacon employed 20 in March when it closed shop. Its website is still up. Most, if not all, employees have since found other work, according to Eyerly. Beacon co-founders have gone to lengths to help them find that work, he said. The startup realized half a million in revenue. It could not return capital to investors — all of its funds and assets were assumed by senior creditors. The company planned, but was not able, to launch a service between its hubs in Boston and Westchester, and summer vacation destinations in Nantucket and the Hamptons. Customers who made a deposit and intended to fly that circuit will get, or already have gotten, their money back. Others flew and got what they paid for. The highly regulated industry of aviation proves a consistent challenge for upstarts. Regulation and high overhead costs are reasons why we don’t see new airlines launching very often, or terrestrial trends like on-demand rides, subscription commerce and the collaborative economy transforming the industry as quickly as they have ground-based travel. Beacon joins the ranks of , and others who have folded or pivoted under such pressures. Eyerly himself has joined Wheels Up as the Managing Director of New Ventures. is a private aviation startup that sells memberships and on-demand flights. It charges customers $17,500 to become members, and $3,950 an hour to fly anywhere within the U.S. on short notice. |
Women in tech: What’s the real problem? | June Sugiyama | 2,016 | 4 | 14 |
In my 20-plus years in tech, and now in Silicon Valley as part of a tech foundation that supports innovations, I’ve had the opportunity to partner with many entrepreneurs and help foster the growth of dozens of startups for social good. As a woman, the fact that I’m still working in tech, and in a leadership position, is not lost on me. By now, I’ve grown used to being one of the only women in the room. I’m used to walking into both young startups and tech giants, seeing the woman behind the receptionist desk and realizing that she is the lone female. I’ve gone to meetups and networking events that at times felt more like a frat party than a gathering of like-minded techies. Don’t get me wrong, things still get done; startups excel and the product reaches market and makes the world a better place — but could it get better? What’s keeping women out of Silicon Valley — and away from the tech industry in general? Is the male-dominated environment intimidating talented women? While women represent more than half of the college graduates in the United States, they make up only 30 percent of workers at large technology companies. This should be alarming to an industry so desperate for talent that its hiring practices have led to much-publicized “talent wars“ and legal action. At the same time, women are taking legal action for being pushed out or passed over at major tech companies. Quite a dichotomy. There’s no doubt this is a complicated problem, and there is no one solution. To increase the amount of women in tech, we need to think both short term and long term, and break down the walls that institutionally keep women out. The first step is admitting there’s a problem. While some Silicon Valley giants have had to answer for their lack of diversity, many companies still think their hiring policies are fair and work environments are just fine for women. Yet, the numbers show we’re losing women at an alarming rate. In fact, 50 percent of women with careers in STEM fields will eventually leave because of hostile work environments, according the . Most women don’t experience obvious forms of discrimination or sexism. Instead, they face an undercurrent of condescension that leads to a feeling of isolation. It’s time for all tech companies to admit there’s a problem and tackle it head-on. That means implementing policies that create cultures that are open to women and support their career advancement — and getting men to buy in, too. Providing innovative policies with a flexible return to work can ensure that talented women stay in the workforce, and can mitigate burnout after returning from leave, as well as having to choose between a career or having children. There also needs to be a conscious effort to get women into leadership positions, which can help lead to more female-friendly environments. Not to mention that technology is better for everyone when it is designed by everyone (tech companies — half of your market is female!). It is for women entrepreneurs to get venture funding. That means the next generation of tech companies probably won’t be led by women. With just 9.7 percent of all partners at venture capital firms being women, it’s no wonder just 8.3 percent of venture capital-funded U.S. tech startups founded in 2014 were led by women CEOs, according to . The heavy male presence in the private VC process is one not talked about much in the diversity conversation within the tech community. Male VCs invest in male-led startups, then end up on the boards of those startups, which then grow into major male-led tech companies. To break the cycle of male-dominated tech companies, we need to also look at this male-dominated VC cycle. By bringing women into the fold, VCs can diversify investments that serve the other half of the population. We need to fill the pipeline with more talented young women. This is where we have the opportunity to make the greatest long-term impact. In middle school, 74 percent of girls express interest in STEM subjects, but when choosing a college major, just 0.4 percent of high school girls select computer science, according to . So, why does this gender parity start between middle and high school? Part of it is the lack of technology education options at the middle-school level, and part of it is STEM’s image problem with girls. We need to change the perception of science and math as masculine fields by providing girls with female role models, and giving them hands-on experience with all different kinds of technology. Great organizations like Girls Who Code and are already making a dent in these problems, and future tech companies will be able to reap the benefits. STEM education is about more than just leveling the playing field for women — there simply aren’t enough men to fill the growing workforce. The projects that by 2020 there will be 1.4 million computer specialist job openings. If we keep heading down the same road, U.S. universities are expected to produce only enough qualified graduates to fill 29 percent of these jobs. My simple recommendation to everyone is this: Start noticing who is in the room and how many women are there. We can start looking in our own backyard — technology can play an important role to diversify our workplace. Look at what is doing, for example. I recently went to an event where they showcased a group of early-stage ventures leveraging technology to mitigate bias at scale by reinventing part of the HR/People Ops/People Analytics process. Everything from recruiting, hiring, interviewing, assignment, performance evaluation, promotion, compensation, complaint-handling, training and other processes were discussed. With this thinking, companies are starting to make actual numbers commitments to get women involved — with that, we will be able to measure and see if it’s really happening. So, the tech industry actually women, but the question is will they do what’s necessary to win them over? Change is coming — however slow it might be. |
Teslaphoresis-activated self-assembling carbon nanotubes look even cooler than they sound | Devin Coldewey | 2,016 | 4 | 14 | Not all important scientific research is cool looking, or has a cool name. But now and then you get something with both. These are created with a process called Teslaphoresis. If you’ve read a more impressive-sounding sentence today, I’d like to hear it. Even the lab of Rice University chemist Paul Cherukuri looks like a proper mad scientist’s lair. But don’t let the flashy trappings fool you: this is a very significant development. Nanotubes are one of these carbon supermaterials that, like graphene, are full of interesting properties and theoretical applications but — again like graphene — are difficult to manufacture cheaply and reliably. This new method could be a breakthrough in the creation of the ultra-thin, ultra-strong, and ultra-conductive carbon nanowires. Cherukuri has a lifelong love of Tesla coils, which produce powerful AC electrical fields. “What we discovered is that nanotubes can actually string together and form wires by themselves under this electric field,” he said . “Teslaphoresis is — the simplest way to understand it is self-assembly at a distance.” The alternating current of the coil apparently polarizes the nanotube pieces, which immediately align themselves with their neighbors and form long chains. Watch for yourself: In that second gif, the wires are actually connecting those two LEDs and transmitting power to them. The longest chain so far has been 15 cm. And if the “wires” look a little furry, that’s because plenty of nanotubes will adhere in the attempt to get in line with the others. Patterned surfaces (to scrape the extra off, or guide it into other channels to self-assemble there) and multiple coils could fix that. “These nanotube wires grow and act like nerves,” said lead study author Lindsey Bornhoeft, a grad student at Texas A&M. “Vontrolled assembly of nanomaterials from the bottom up may be used as a template for applications in regenerative medicine.” It’s advances like this that make things like permanent electronic implants and flexible circuits possible. Before long you’ll be taking these things for granted. The researchers published their work . |
Magic Pony’s neural network dreams up new imagery to expand an existing picture | Devin Coldewey | 2,016 | 4 | 14 | The source image on the left was used to generate the one on the right. A British startup is using the unique abilities of convolutional neural networks to do a sort of scaled-up version of Adobe’s content-aware fill — but instead of filling in the gaps in a picture, it’s imagining a whole new picture, larger and more detailed than the original. Kind of hard to believe without seeing it, right? That’s why they call their company . Just emerging from semi-stealth mode (and even then, only barely), Magic Pony Technology’s researchers have trained their system by exposing it to high- and low-resolution versions of images and video, letting it learn the differences between the two. was first with the story. Just as you could supply the probable details of a pixelated face because you are familiar with how faces look, the AI can extrapolate as well, having examined on a pixel by pixel basis what certain features look like at various levels of detail. It can, for instance, upscale blurry images or video intelligently, because it “knows” that certain patterns indicate letters, and can be hammered into shape no matter how artifacted; other patterns indicate the hard edges of a face, and can be contoured and sharpened as the system sees fit in order to bring the image up to snuff. Click to see the full-size version, which will let you compare details better. One highly valuable application is in enhancing poor-quality streaming video on the client side — in real time and with a standard GPU. There are sophisticated filtering systems out there, of course, but this one may outstrip them with superior intelligence. In addition to enhancing images, the Magic Pony system can improvise new ones. By recognizing not just low-level features like edges and features but also high-level ones like structure and overall shape, the AI can invent statistically similar images or expand beyond the edges of the original. Take that brick and mortar wall at top, for instance: It’s clear there are different regions and hard borders between them, with reliable variations in color and texture. The system discovers rules that govern everything from the finest details to larger patterns, and simply makes new imagery that fits within those rules. Imagine a game or CG movie where textures like that can be generated dynamically, different for every playthrough or character, beyond what is currently possible — a unique patina on every sword, each building with its own wear pattern, ivy creeping procedurally along buildings. Chances are that humans would still have to ground-truth these images to fine-tune the algorithms, but it’s a powerful way to implement a feature artists and engineers have been pursuing with varying success for years. (Paging John Carmack and .) Magic Pony has raised an undisclosed sum in seed funding from a number of angel investors: Chris Mairs, Tom Wright, Xen Lategan and others. It was also part of the program in 2015. Co-founder Rob Bishop confirmed that it has a number of early access partners, though he declined to name them. We’ll likely be hearing more from Magic Pony when the details of the neural network — and how it was put together — are presented at CVPR in June. |
Gary Vaynerchuk on why he’s betting on Facebook Live, Snapchat and Musical.ly | Katie Roof | 2,016 | 4 | 14 | Seasoned entrepreneur and digital strategist Gary Vaynerchuk sat down with TechCrunch to talk about his new book, . An in Facebook, Twitter, Uber and Tumblr, Vaynerchuk also advises Fortune 500 companies on their social media ad spend with his company, Vaynerchuk tells us that just because an entrepreneur raises money doesn’t mean they’re going to have a successful business. He also told us which platforms he’s optimistic about. His firm has clients spending “hundreds of thousands of dollars” to make videos for Facebook only. In particular, he’s “very bullish” on Facebook Live, the live streaming platform. And while he’s enthusiastic about Snapchat and for younger demographics, he says that “Twitter ads are overpriced.” Vaynerchuk has more than a million followers, but gets better engagement on Instagram, which he refers to as “the main social network of this second.” Watch the video above to learn more about why Vaynerchuk thinks “all television commercials are grossly overpriced” and how he got to where he is today. |
Sorted offers a new take on the standard To Do list app | Sarah Perez | 2,016 | 4 | 14 | A new application called launches today to offer a better, faster and more efficient way to manage your tasks via your mobile phone. Yes, it’s To Do list application. Do we really need such a thing? The answer to that question may be subjective, but a small team of developers in Hong Kong believes there’s room for another app in this space to carve out its own following. They’ve even patented some multi-touch gestures aimed at making working with tasks quicker than before, they said. For starters, the Sorted application may only have niche appeal. It’s not really designed for the occasional list maker, but rather for someone who regularly has to juggle a number of tasks throughout the day. The app began as a personal project by Mind Fund Studio’s CTO Leo Tumwattana,, who says he struggled with keeping up with tasks and requests that continually change. A follower of the “GTD” (get things done) model, he couldn’t find the right app for his own needs, despite the many options in the App Store. Mind Fund Studio, for those unfamiliar, is a studio backed by Hong Kong VC fund Mind Fund, early investors in Flipagram. The studio has five developers, and had put out a few applications to date, but Sorted is the most polished and high-profile of the lot. The goal with Sorted is to address problems where other calendaring and to-do list apps fall short. These applications on the desktop and on mobile both have their advantages for booking chunks of time, but don’t work well at rescheduling a group of tasks. When that happens, you must go through each task one-by-one and assign it a new date and/or time. The idea with Sorted is to allow you to quickly select a group of tasks using a swipe, then move them ahead to a different day or time. The concept here is actually based on the tickler filing system, the company explains — meaning you can move your to-do items to the day you should be reminded about them. And if you can’t get to a series of these tasks at a given time, you can quickly drag your finger across a group of them and move them around. To do so, tap on the bell icon to the left of the task itself, then drag your finger on the screen to change the time. You can also tap the bottom of the screen to access the calendar to move it to a different date. (It’s easier to try this yourself rather than have it explained to you.) The app also does away with date pickers and forms. When you create a task, you can simply enter the description. To some extent, the process of task creation reminds me of , which was once buzzed about for its then-unusual and innovative use of gestures. (Sorted’s team, meanwhile, has patented a way to multi-select tasks with one swipe gesture). “We think Clear is great,” admits Mind Fund Studio’s CMO Charlie Morris. “But the big thing about Clear is that it doesn’t have scheduling.” Tumwattana had wanted something like Clear, says Morris, but something that not only offered scheduling but also made it easier to schedule things using gestures. The problem with Clear, however, is the same one that Sorted will face. Because it introduces so many unique gestures, it simply can’t aim for a mainstream, more casual audience. There’s definitely a learning curve to using Sorted (as there was with Clear). If you’re a power user who’s in the app several times per day, then Sorted could improve the speed with which you manage your tasks. However, if you only use to-do lists, then you might forget in between sessions how Sorted’s interface works, and all its many hidden tricks — like how you can label selected reminders by using a particular swipe motion, how you swipe to complete a list or delete a list, how to swipe to create checklists and so much more. Sorted can help you jog your memory by offering a detailed help section with these answers — and it even includes handy videos of how to perform each action. Still, there’s something to be said for an app that’s more intuitive than it is clever. [youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jEPS_w16UTc] That being said, for power users who invest the time in learning Sorted, it could become one of those must-haves for your iPhone. During early beta test, it seems that’s the audience who will become addicted to this. Of some 200 beta testers ahead of today’s launch, many dropped out. But some 30 remained and became hardcore users. The app is , but it will increase to $3.99 next week. A Mac version will launch into beta in a week, and longer term the company is considering moving into the team collaboration space. |
From recording to reacting: Neural networks are changing notions of surveillance | Jack Dashwood | 2,016 | 4 | 14 |
There are an estimated 30 million surveillance cameras in the U.S. today. Out of these 30 million cameras, only 5 percent are monitored by a human at any given time. Instead, the majority of them are simply recording footage, providing little value other than evidence long after any kind of crime or accident has occurred. What this means is that today’s “security” systems are mostly just a vast network of evidence collection devices, constantly recording and dumping data into hard drives, only to be retrieved after something regrettable has happened. Ninety-five percent of all security cameras offer no real-time benefits — there simply aren’t enough eyeballs to go around. Imagine if we could hire one person to monitor every camera in the United States. Rather than having a video recording network, we would have a vast real-time response system, able to alert emergency services to potential accidents before they happen, or stop a crime in progress. A real-time network could cross-reference multiple feeds at the same time, potentially exposing highly sophisticated planned crimes and terrorist attacks similar to those that various countries have suffered in recent years. Making use of these 30 million installed cameras in a real-time system would make them far more useful than the current mass-recording approach that is their current primary function. If we wanted to monitor this network in real time, it would require employing more than 90 million Americans for the task — roughly half the country’s entire workforce. Clearly this is not a viable solution, but a new generation of smart cameras with embedded neural networks will soon be able to act on this real-time video data as if we really did have a 90 million-strong staff of security personnel operating around the clock. Neural networks are the result of research in the field of machine intelligence (a field of computing that seeks to bring about more natural types of intelligence in our devices). Rather than simply the “number smarts” that the traditional computer is known for, neural network approaches appear to be very good at enabling computers to understand natural, unprepared and often non-uniform information of the world around them, such as the contents of a video, or the topics and themes of a conversation — things we take for granted, but are tremendously challenging for a computer to understand. Rather than video being locked away and retrieved after a crime has happened, an intelligent system monitoring feeds in real time could detect accidents and crimes as they are about to occur (or at least while in progress). Airports, bank and schools could significantly reduce response times for emergency services, possibly even prevent accidents and crime before they happen. How would a machine intelligence system do such a thing? Thanks to new approaches such as deep neural networks, we’re able to create extremely sophisticated detection systems that not only detect humans in a video feed (very useful for pedestrian avoidance), but also understand complex layers of information, such as behavior and body language. Detection of behaviors is extremely valuable and can dramatically improve security systems. For example, . Imagine a situation in a bank where silent alarms can be triggered not with the press of a button but automatically when the smart camera system detects aggressive body postures, or running motions. The ability for these new systems to understand, flag or even respond to events makes security response more timely, and less labor intensive at the same time. Google’s “ ” Pose estimation using deep learning. Furthermore, facial recognition can rapidly separate authorized personnel from intruders, or match faces from multiple camera sources in order to track from location to location. Researchers are even exploring systems that can detect the presence of concealed firearms or explosives based on the gait of an individual, or Privacy is a major concern that comes up in these discussions. Of course, surveillance is a controversial topic that should not be swept under the rug. That being said, society appears to have come to the consensus that security cameras do belong in places such as airports, hospitals, banks and schools. These public spaces are already being constantly recorded, yet with little actual real-time responsiveness available. Technology has the opportunity to improve these systems not by adding more cameras or recording more footage, but by making better use of the information in real time. Companies are already leveraging massive amounts of cloud computing for the newest generation of smart cameras, but we are also beginning to see new levels of intelligence in the cameras themselves. Computation at the sensor, rather than in the cloud, massively reduces movement of data, and eases the complexity and cost of deploying connected devices in bandwidth-constrained areas. What were a handful of research papers a decade ago are now active product development initiatives for security camera companies. What does that mean for the future of security? It means a world where cameras contribute to real-time safety, and it’s not imprudent to imagine these systems will eventually be preventing crimes before they actually begin. |
Angel investors hope to find the best and brightest in Cuba’s emerging tech scene | Sarah Buhr | 2,016 | 4 | 14 | President Obama’s bold new course on Cuban policy is paving the way for emerging tech to blossom in the country. A new entrepreneurial competition, , hopes to uncover Cuba’s best and brightest tech minds with an offer of mentorship and potential financing. The idea is to prevent brain drain and help boost Cuba’s economy, says 10x10KCuba’s Ricardo Herrero. Herrero is also the executive director of , a political organization advocating for growth and economic expansion in Cuba and forging relationships for the country in the United States. The new initiative teams #CubaNow with the 10x10KCuba is a bridge for struggling Cuban founders, but also helps angel investors and accelerator programs scout out hidden talent in a country that has been largely isolated from modern technology and has had to take a different approach to technological problems. The country is struggling to communicate with the rest of the world and with each other. Broadband Internet doesn’t exist there and cell phones are rare (about of the country has a mobile phone). The competition is a chance to help develop the tech ecosystem and bring Cuba into the 21st century. While funding isn’t guaranteed — under current Cuban and U.S. law funding in Cuba is not yet legal — it will give Cubans who may not otherwise have those opportunities the means to pitch and get needed mentorship. In addition to the competition, Those interested in more information on the contest can visit . |
Google now lets you design custom cases for your Nexus phones | Frederic Lardinois | 2,016 | 4 | 14 | Google is a new service today that allows you to create $35 custom cases for its Nexus 5X, 6 and 6P phones. You can choose between two variations of the One allows you to pick any photo and . The lets you design and print a stylized map with the help of Google Maps. Both variations allow you to select a couple of filters and other styling options to personalize your case even more. There is a bit of tech built into these cases, as well. Google says there is a programmable shortcut button on the back of the case that will allow you to launch your favorite app with a single click. As far as I can see, Google is using NFC to power this feature. https://youtu.be/ZrinxYzhq-E Once you’ve created and ordered your case, Google will also let you download a wallpaper with the same design. I haven’t used a phone case for a very long time now — and I can’t quite see myself using a photo case — but those map cases do look nice, especially after you apply a filter. If you really can’t live without brandishing a photo of your cat every time you pull out your phone, though, a photo case is probably the way to go. At $35, Google’s case costs just about as much — and often a little bit less — than services. Many of these, however, don’t support the Nexus line and they don’t give you an extra shortcut button for your phone, either. |
GoPro’s developer program aims to connect its cameras to cars, toys and apps | Devin Coldewey | 2,016 | 4 | 14 | GoPro on Thursday very quietly , by which it hopes to get its action cameras hooked into as many third-party devices, vehicles and services as possible. The program was announced at a private event in San Francisco, where it showed off the fruits of various partnerships. The announced earlier this year is an example of what the company is hoping to achieve. There was also a snap-on time-code system that you can use to sync your footage (announced , but still new), a mount for kids’ toys from Fisher-Price and add-ons for tracking your route and vital statistics when parasailing, skiing and other extreme activities — you get the general idea. Partnerships with BMW and Toyota also suggest more automotive applications in the future. Perhaps the coolest item, shown off at the end of this highlight video, was a gesture-based camera control system for when your motorcycle gloves or [insert extreme garment here] prevent you from operating the app. The hope, presumably, is that this will extend GoPro’s reach and restore the company’s luster (and sales) after a . Turns out people don’t buy a new action camera every year or so, unlike iPhones. But dozens of cool new applications and accessories could bring in new users, put more miles on existing cameras — or leverage features only available in the latest model. There’s also a “Works with GoPro” badge now — it’s sort of a rite of passage in consumer electronics to get big enough to require curation of accessories, and then name that curation process the exact same thing as everyone else’s. |
Amazon eyed up Everlane, Le Tote and more for acquisition in a wider fashion push | Ingrid Lunden | 2,016 | 4 | 14 | has been focusing attention on areas like media streaming, its faster delivery and pickup services, hardware and enterprise via AWS. But it’s also making an effort to reboot one of the more legacy parts of its business: fashion. TechCrunch has learned from multiple sources that the e-commerce giant has considered buying several startups in the fashion sphere as potential acquisitions to update and expand its presence in the category. , , , and are among the names we’ve heard in connection with the effort. “They are losing big time in apparel and are anxious to acquire brands,” one founder approached by the company told TechCrunch. Amazon did not respond to requests for comment, and all the companies mentioned here declined to comment about any talks. (Update: in the comments below, Everlane’s founder and CEO Michael Preysman, says Amazon has “never talked to us.”) The range of these companies speaks to how Amazon is looking to address several parts of the equation when it comes to selling fashion online. Apparel and accessory site Everlane and lingerie startup ThirdLove are both vertically integrated businesses, selling items that they have designed and manufactured themselves. Le Tote and Rent the Runway are in the business of Netflix-style clothing rentals, sometimes called recommerce, where you wear and then send back items. And Preeline is a social platform where people can connect with like-minded consumers to share opinions and discover new items. Amazon has been looking to build up its own in-house muscle in at least one of these areas already. Following in the footsteps of major physical retailers like Nordstrom, Macy’s and Target, Amazon has been working on a , with smart/quirky names like Franklin & Freeman, Lark & Ro, and North Eleven, designed and manufactured under Amazon’s direction and (of course) sold and distributed by Amazon. Of the in fashion that Amazon is currently advertising (399!), 25 specifically mention Amazon’s private label business. Part of the reason that Amazon is interested in acquiring third-party brands and building its own private-label business is because the company has typically had a hard time shaking its no-nonsense and decidedly unsexy image as a purveyor of cut-price books, electronics and just about anything under the sun — an image that has kept some fashion brands away from selling through the site, and keen fashionably-minded shoppers from visiting and buying there. “Right now, there is no way that some of the top brands would want to be seen for sale on Amazon,” one source said. But in a kind of e-commerce, corporate version of Pygmalion, Amazon has been trying to change this. The company has built photo studios in hipster neighborhoods in and to put together shoots and editorial to better sell items online. It has sponsored Fashion Weeks both in New York and India (also helping to raise its game in the latter country). And in addition to the company’s own private label advances, it’s finally been wooing some bigger brands, too. “Dozens of brands now sell directly to Amazon,” the WSJ earlier this month, “including department store stalwarts such as Nicole Miller, Calvin Klein, Kate Spade, Lacoste and Levi Strauss.” It’s also apparently taking a very un-Amazon approach with this new stock: it’s selling full price. And on top of all this, the company has been looking at ways of leveraging some of its other assets to differentiate what it presents in terms of fashion commerce. One of the more recent and notable developments there has been the debut of , a daily video program that lets viewers shop for highlighted items on Amazon (and chat about them) while the show is streaming. The other thing that is notable about these startups that Amazon has looked at for acquisition is that they are the essence of customer loyalty and recurring sales, with sites like Le Tote directly built around subscriptions, but the others donning strong brands that encourage repeat visits and purchases, too. Loyalty is something that Amazon has been very bullish about as a way of growing its business, specifically around its Prime service, which gives shoppers free, fast shipping and exclusive access to certain digital content and other goods in exchange for a monthly fee. It’s a guessing game how many Prime members Amazon has. One estimate from this past January put the number at in the U.S. alone. On the other side of the equation, building e-commerce businesses of any size is notoriously hard, with even often failing to make decent (or any) returns, never mind the challenges for smaller outfits that lack scale. (Indeed, consignment marketplace Threadflip in January and sent its business over to Le Tote, which appears to still be going strong.) That pressure (or more positively, the scaling opportunity) could lead some smaller businesses to consider offers from Amazon. Amazon itself is no stranger to considering startups for acquisition when it starts to eye up a new business area, be it , , or . But while Amazon’s push into fashion is on the one hand somewhat recent, it also goes back years, as a reference point in a more general mantra about how the company needs to focus on the essential, recurring items of modern consumerist life. “In order to be a $200 billion company, we’ve got to learn how to sell clothes and food,” CEO and founder Jeff Bezos has , according to Brad Stone’s 2013 book about the company, . |
Dinner Lab shuts down after failing to find a sustainable business model | Matthew Lynley | 2,016 | 4 | 14 | After laying off staff in December as it shifted business models to find a sustainable operation, Dinner Lab has officially shut down, . Dinner Lab, like many startups, is facing a challenging environment for startups that lately have to find their way to profitability instead of simply fund operations with venture capital. Gumroad, for example, had to lay off most of as it reassessed its direction. Dinner Lab’s business model was challenging enough that it shifted its events staff to a contract-based model instead of full-time employment. “We put every ounce of our energy into developing a product that you wanted to engage with regularly, but we weren’t able to turn the corner on creating a profitable enough enterprise to support our ambitions,” the company said. “We are proud of the work that we have done, and am saddened by the fact that we no longer get to make our living on providing you all the experiences that we love so dearly.” Dinner Lab is a pop-up food event service, which throws parties that include up-and-coming chefs. It threw parties every week or so to once a month in its 31 cities prior to shutting down. The company also had a B2B model for hosting company events. That model sounds like a good consumer experience in theory, but in reality it’s a logistical challenge that requires carefully managing an events staff — who were employed full-time before shifting to contractors — that can quickly scale up and down as more or less events are hosted. That requires not only staff management, but also figuring out supply for each event and finding the right sourcing that can operate in step with Dinner Lab’s operations. Dinner Lab raised around $9.1 million in venture financing, . We reached out to CEO Brian Bordainick for additional context and will update the story when we hear back |
Microsoft sues Justice Department for transparency in government data searches | Kate Conger | 2,016 | 4 | 14 | Microsoft sued the Justice Department today, challenging the constitutionality of the gag orders issued by the government that prevent tech companies from informing their customers when their data is accessed as part of an investigation. challenges a provision in the Electronic Communications Privacy Act (ECPA) that allows courts to force Microsoft and other companies that offer cloud storage to stay silent when they turn over customer data to the government. Microsoft claims that these gag orders violate customers’ right to know when the government searches their property, and the company’s right to communicate freely with its customers. Written 30 years ago, before cloud storage was as common as it is today, ECPA gives the government legal cover to access data stored in the cloud without notifying its owner. “The government,” Microsoft argues in its lawsuit, “has exploited the transition to cloud computing as a means of expanding its power to conduct secret investigations.” Microsoft claims that, between September 2014 and March 2016, it has received 5,624 federal requests for customer data. Of those requests, 2,576 were accompanied by a gag order, prohibiting Microsoft from informing its customers that their information was being accessed by the government. Although some of the secrecy orders came with a time limit, after which Microsoft could tell its customers about the intrusion, the majority did not — meaning that Microsoft could never divulge that the search had taken place. In its suit, Microsoft singles out its Outlook.com and and Office365 as products that are frequently targeted by the government. “These twin developments—the increase in government demands for online data and the simultaneous increase in secrecy—have combined to undermine confidence in the privacy of the cloud and have impaired Microsoft’s right to be transparent with its customers, a right guaranteed by the First Amendment,” Microsoft states in its suit. The lawsuit comes one day after the House Judiciary Committee on the Email Privacy Act, a bill that aims to reform ECPA. The ACLU praised Microsoft’s lawsuit and called on Congress to take up ECPA reform, specifically focusing on the gag order issues raised by Microsoft. “If Congress fails to include those changes as it considers ECPA reform, then the courts should step in, including in Microsoft’s case, to end the government’s constitutional failure to provide notice,” said ACLU staff attorney Alex Abdo. |
Instagram launches personalized video feed and themed channels in Explore | Josh Constine | 2,016 | 4 | 14 | Instagram wants to show you the best videos without completely destroying the sanctity of your main feed, so today it with a slew of new video channels. Most importantly, there’s a personalized “Videos You Might Like” feed that draws from across the network. There’s also themed, hand-curated channels, like one for Coachella, and on , like the ones Instagram started showing in January. The update is coming to and today, but will only be available in the U.S. for now (with other countries coming soon). When Instagram announced it would switch to an last month, many users freaked out, and some pushed followers to turn on . But by putting more of the focus on the Explore page, Instagram could gain the benefits of algorithmic curation without disturbing what’s familiar as drastically. Instagram has been gradually beefing up the Explore tab over the years, growing to be in 2012, in 2014 and adding a year ago. Still, it’s missing what seems like an obviously huge opportunity: “Nearby.” The ability to discover local ‘Grammers showing the beauty around you is something I’ve been requesting for . The new channels are inserted amongst the thumbnails of photos to check out on the Explore page. When opened, they cleverly auto-play one video after another without looping to create a lean-back viewing experience. That’s quite similar to the recent and the that launched yesterday. Social networks are clearly seeing the massive rise of mobile video viewing, and are trying to capitalize on it with dedicated ways to watch. Instagram’s parent company with channels of its own, though these are more like tags than purposefully curated channels. If Instagram can ingratiate users to watching organic videos, it could make video ads easier to swallow. And by giving top creators higher , which it recently started showing, it can recruit more of them to its platform, drawing in their fan bases who will inevitably see ads. When asked whether it plans to put video ads in the new channels or let brands pay to create their own sponsored channels, Instagram’s spokesperson said “we have nothing to share at this time.” So basically, maybe. Mobile video consumption is no longer something that just serendipitously happens as we go through our day. Faster connections and bigger screens have made watching much more delightful. Thanks to new interfaces like Instagram’s channels, it will be easy to curl up on the couch or in bed and watch clip after clip. |
Microsoft’s Visual Studio Code for Windows, OS X and Linux hits 1.0 | Frederic Lardinois | 2,016 | 4 | 14 | (VS Code), Microsoft’s text editor for developers, hit version 1.0 after about a year in beta. The company says more than 500,000 developers now actively use the application each month. The launch of VS Code came as quite a surprise when the company it at its Build developer conference last year. Microsoft, after all, had never offered a code editor for OS X and Linux before — and definitely not under the Visual Studio brand. When Microsoft launched the application, it was still missing extensibility and the code for VS Code wasn’t open source yet, either. Since then, the company fixed both of these issues. Microsoft opened up the necessary APIs to allow developers to and by now, the community has built over already (though obviously there is a bit of a long tail here). This also means the VS Code now supports for more languages than before (the original focus was mostly on JavaScript and TypeScript). Thanks to these extensions, VS Code can now also be used to write applications in Node.js, Go, C++, Python, PHP and more. A few months after the initial launch, Microsoft also open sourced the application and made the code . Looking ahead, the VS Code team promises to continue to focus on the fundamentals. “Performance, stability, accessibility, and compatibility are of utmost importance to our users, and they are to us as well,” the company writes. |
null | Josh Constine | 2,016 | 4 | 13 | null |
Review: HTC 10 is solid, but consumers need to be convinced | Stefan Etienne | 2,016 | 4 | 14 | T But, it has been a while since I was excited to review an HTC device. This wasn’t a purely subjective feeling. A year ago, HTC launched the One M9, and it was reported to be a decidedly mediocre device across the board; it almost felt like an afterthought. Now, with the HTC 10, the problem is no longer, “can HTC make a great phone again?”, but “can HTC sell great phones?”. After all, there should be a full comeback this time. I lived with the HTC 10 for nearly a week — not a long time, but chalk that up to industry deadlines. So, I made the HTC 10 my daily driver; my “one and only phone” — if only that last part were true. Whether I like it or not, the subjectivity of using the device is a given. But things like reliability, performance and holding a charge for a full day are more, if not strictly, objective. So, what is it like to live with an HTC 10? [gallery ids="1307569,1307574,1307572,1307573,1307634"] Turns out: it’s neat. Notice how I didn’t say great, but also am refraining from calling it shoddy. Unibody aluminum makes another appearance with HTC, this time with a 45-degree chamfered edge on the back that increases ergonomics and grip — a welcome addition. The HTC 10 is what everyone wants from a smartphone — all generalizations are dangerous, even this one — but for me it lacks excitement. It’s a top-tier smartphone, and makes great calls through the earpiece (there’s a dedicated amp for the tweeter) but also doubles as a rich speakerphone, since the bottom speaker is a woofer, also with dedicated amp. A similar story can be applied everywhere else: the HTC 10 has what it needs to be . A laser-based autofocus assists in quickly shooting decent photos in brighter light, but with some grain and ISO compensation in low-light situations. Usually there is little overcompensation with renders having accurate detail and color. Capturing staggeringly saturated or otherwise vibrant shots can be tricky, but the “Pro mode” of the app allows for custom camera control, plus shooting in RAW, so there is some flexibility. [gallery ids="1307591,1307593,1307594,1307592,1307596,1307590,1307589,1307588"] There’s a lot of RAM to keep Android M running smoothly. Whilst using and opening apps, it’s fast as hell, and that’s because it’s powered by Qualcomm’s best processor: the Snapdragon 820. Again, the HTC 10 is well-endowed and executes admirably. HTC Sense has never been so stripped-down, but also complimentary of the default Android user interface. So, it really shows in terms of speed but also ease-of-use. Still, HTC has thrown its own personal spin on Android, with things like Blinkfeed (a news screen that can be accessed left of the homescreen), HTC Zoe (a video story editor of sorts), or gestures like swiping up on the screen to unlock or double-tapping to wake (both very useful). Want stickers to be free of the grid layout on the homescreen, but linked to any app you want? Sense has that too. [gallery ids="1307609,1307616,1307610,1307612,1307613,1307608,1307611"] But best of all, none of these software additions intrude too heavily upon using Android, placing widgets, using Google Now, or otherwise setting a new record playing . On top of that, the battery life is strong, lasting me nearly a “full day of usage” — starting at 6AM and ending at 12AM. If a quick-charge is needed, then a USB-C cable and compatible fast charger (like the one included) takes it to 85% in little less than a half hour. But it’s not an exciting device to use. Instead, it feels like just that: a device. A piece of technology so well-connected, engineered and capable that it allows you to do everything you wanted (subjective, of course) but there’s no allure. I’m not saying you need to love your phone — although some people do — I’m saying it has to feel like more than just a collection of metal, glass, silicone and maybe some germanium. The remedy to making a device more exciting when nearly everything about it is good? Marketing that generates consumer interest. Consumer appeal (or at least that’s what it seems) is HTC’s biggest problem. They’ve been out of the cross hairs of the general public for so long that even with a top-notch offering, it’s going to take more than just the appeasement of diehards, tech reviewers and people who have been waiting for the “perfect HTC phone” — if there is such a group of people — to push sales forward, ultimately saving the brand. If HTC can convince the world — even just a few of its major markets — that the HTC 10 is a phone worth having, then they have a shot at being in the picture of a top Android phone manufacturer. The HTC 10 itself is a great smartphone, and brings good looks, robust specifications, support for modern standards and a battery that you needn’t fret over. But none of that matters if no one buys into the experience. On the flipside, however, there’s never been a better time to buy an Android phone, since the big three — Samsung, LG and HTC — have offerings with specs so similar that the only real difference are proprietary features and the software design layered on top of Android. Lucky for HTC, the 10 strikes a solid balance between competitiveness and a unique aesthetic. Great work on the phone, HTC. Now convince us all that we need it. |
Tech’s new diversity leaders explain how they plan to fix sexism and racism in the industry | Kate Conger | 2,016 | 4 | 22 | Tech’s freshman class of diversity and inclusion leaders gathered at Rev. Jesse Jackson’s Within the last six months, Dropbox, Pinterest, Airbnb, Twitter and Intuit have all hired employees charged with correcting their diversity problems. At Jackson’s conference, intended to increase diversity in tech, those newly minted leaders are determining their path forward. The first step, as addiction counselors say, is admitting you have a problem. Most industry-leading companies have already made that first uncomfortable admission in the past year, on the lack of women and people of color in their workforces. Now, instead of transparency reports, the trend has shifted to hiring diversity chiefs to fix the problem — preferably from within the communities these leaders will be tasked to represent. as its global head of diversity since October; as head of diversity three months ago; as director of diversity less than two months ago, as vice president of inclusion and diversity four months ago, and Michelle Angier has been chief diversity officer at Intuit since December. Seeing a new class of diversity leaders hired across the industry feels good, but the big question is what comes next. Unfortunately for data-driven executives, the answer is more nebulous than just getting better percentages out of recruiting and hiring programs. The big change tech needs is a cultural one — and it seems that diversity chiefs are still figuring out how to make it happen. The most urgent task, of course, is boosting their companies’ embarrassingly low percentages of minority employees. But a hiring surge alone isn’t enough to trigger a culture shift — and fixing the culture that allows women engineers to be harassed out of their jobs or will take more than just a fresh group of new hires. To get employees to stick around, diversity leaders are focusing on inclusion. “I like to think of it as, inclusion is diversity sustained,” says Candice Morgan. It means nothing for companies to bring in a group of diverse new hires if those people turn around and leave when confronted with an unwelcoming culture, Morgan explains. Morgan and her peers say they’re using a mix of employee resource groups, unconscious bias training, and ally outreach to keep diverse employees from leaving. But there’s still so much more to be done, says Airbnb’s David King. “One of the first conversations [at Airbnb] was about women in tech,” King explained. “But people weren’t talking about race. Disability wasn’t mentioned at all.” There’s resistance among legacy employees who worry they’ll be excluded or that they don’t have the knowledge base to comfortably join a conversation about diversity. Some employees feel like they don’t fit in with the left-leaning politics in their workspaces — King cited the example of a Trump-supporting Airbnb employee who felt excluded from workplace chatter about politics. Even after all the culture work is done, diversity leaders still don’t think they’ll have convinced everyone in their organizations to be more inclusive. Judith Williams says she believes 10-15 percent of Dropbox’s employees will never be supportive of her diversity mission. But, she adds, if she can get support from employees who are invested in diversity or neutral on the subject, “You can create a culture where those who will never support you have to be quiet about it.” Diversity heads are beginning to look beyond their employees as well. Although users might not be concerned about the diversity of the engineers who build their favorite products, those engineers are encouraged to consider the diversity of their users. Airbnb wants its customers to see it as a company that provides an , not as a company that enables with African-American names. Twitter wants to be viewed as the company that helped , not as the place where female video game developers face a . Even as change comes at these companies, the shift for users still seems aspirational. The plans proposed today represent a strong industry-wide start at adjusting workplace culture. But, with all these diversity leaders still brand-new in their roles, it’s not clear how hard they can push for change. At the end of today’s panel on diversity, an audience member stood up and asked the group if executive compensation was tied to corporate diversity goals. One by one, the panelists answered no. |
CERN releases 300TB of Large Hadron Collider data into open access | Devin Coldewey | 2,016 | 4 | 22 | Cancel your plans for this weekend! CERN just dropped 300 terabytes of hot collider data on the world and you know you want to take a look. Kati Lassila-Perini, a physicist who works on the (!) detector, gave a refreshingly straightforward explanation for this huge release. “Once we’ve exhausted our exploration of the data, we see no reason not to make them available publicly,” she said in . “The benefits are numerous, from inspiring high school students to the training of the particle physicists of tomorrow. And personally, as CMS’s data preservation coordinator, this is a crucial part of ensuring the long-term availability of our research data.” Amazing that this perspective is not more widely held — though I suspect it is, by the scientists at least, if not the publishers and department heads who must think of the bottom line. The data itself is from 2011, much of it from protons colliding at 7 TeV (teraelectronvolts, you know) and producing those wonderful fountains of rare particles we all love to fail to understand. All told, it’s about half the total data collected by the CMS detector, and makes up about 2.5 inverse femtobarns. But who’s counting? There’s both the raw data from the detectors (so you can verify the results) and also “derived” datasets that are more easy to work with — and don’t worry, CERN is providing , as well. There’s a whole CERN Linux environment ready for booting up in a virtual machine, and a bunch of scripts and apps (some are on , too). Just messing around in the same computing environment used by researchers plumbing the depths of the universe would be an interesting way to spend a few labs in a college physics course. There are even “masterclasses,” data sets and tools specially curated for high school kids. This is only the latest of several data dumps, but it’s also by far the largest. A more detailed explanation of the types of data and how they can be accessed is . |
Tip your Uber driver | Devin Coldewey | 2,016 | 4 | 22 | Don’t argue, just do it. Uber doesn’t include any kind of gratuity in the cost of your ride. And it doesn’t just pay drivers more to make up for that. The company implied that it did by saying there was no to tip, and by simply not including the option to tip. The narrative is predicated on a deliberate omission. No one questioned it, partly because it tallied with the white-knight persona, the slaying of the evil cab companies and the victory of clever technology over a dinosaur of the 20th century. Tipping was an anachronism, only necessary because of how poorly cabbies were paid. So in the new Uber era: no tipping necessary. Uber drivers make about on average, then have to pay for their own maintenance and gas after Uber takes its 20% cut. That’s not a bad wage, plus the flexible hours are nice, but it’s not great either, and it’s not like they’re going to get regular merit raises. But that’s all kind of beside the point. Tips are an unfortunate relic of (among other things) the longstanding and ongoing underpayment of people in the service industry, but for now they’re also the reality. People working at jobs where their employers don’t provide adequate support — good wages, benefits, equity, expenses — often must rely on the unofficial and unreliable tip system to make ends meet. Uber drivers fall under that category, since the service is no different from other car services where tipping is standard, but the company’s narrative and the app itself are designed to exclude them from the tip process in order to give the service the illusion of economy. It’s shameful, really. How much to tip, how it would work with ratings, the etiquette involved, these are secondary issues — and ones already being worked out by services that allow tips, like Lyft. First you have to acknowledge that if you can afford to take an Uber, you can afford to tip your driver, and that you really should. Just like you can afford to tip if you can buy a $5 coffee, or a $20 lunch. (Personally, I believe it’s part of the social contract in which we all take part, but that’s a broader discussion for another time.) I know it’s not easy, because part of the reason you use the app is so you don’t have to carry cash, and because tipping is old hat. Blame Uber for not including the option and for telling you there’s “no need to tip.” Well, of course there’s no . There’s no to tip anyone. You’re just a dick if you don’t, since, until employers stop and obfuscating the actual cost of a product or service, you’re on the hook to make up the difference. Don’t like it? Me neither. But don’t take it out on the driver, or the barista, or the waiter, or the cook, or the cleaner, or the mover, by not tipping. If you really want to broadcast your disappointment with the situation, support businesses that are doing right by their employees, and decline to support businesses that aren’t. (I don’t use Uber, myself, and maybe you shouldn’t either. There are plenty of options to choose from.) One of the unfortunate dark sides of the gig/1099 economy is this: if the price seems too good to be true, the company isn’t paying for it — the worker is. Who better to subsidize the price than the people who have no choice in the matter, since the alternative is often no job at all? It’s exploitative, and you should be suspicious of every business model that drags its workers with it on a race to the bottom. Exceptions are conspicuous (and meritorious): companies like Honor and Rinse just with the uncontroversial action of making their employees W-2s. It behooves companies claiming to be progressive to enact progressive policies. Cutting out middlemen, fighting entrenched legislation and established players, leveraging instant connectivity, these are all great things. I congratulate Uber on its conquest. I don’t think it’s evil, but it sure isn’t on the side of the angels, either. Tech is supposed to be a rising tide that lifts boats. Until that happens, tip your Uber driver. |
NASA invests $67 million into solar electric propulsion for deep space exploration | Emily Calandrelli | 2,016 | 4 | 22 | NASA has selected for a $67 million contract to develop an advanced Solar Electric Propulsion (SEP) system for future deep-space missions. In a press release, NASA that the propulsion system could be used on robotic missions to an asteroid and in other missions related to their program. Compared to chemical propulsion (the type of propulsion that rockets use to escape Earth’s gravity well and reach orbit), SEP has lower thrust but is more fuel-efficient and can provide thrust for longer periods of time. For these reasons, SEP works well in the vacuum of space, particularly on spacecraft with long mission lifetimes. A Hall thruster tested at NASA Glenn Research Center/ Image courtesy of NASA SEP engines provide thrust by converting solar energy into electricity and using that electricity to accelerate ionized propellant at extremely high speeds. The iconic blue glow from a SEP thruster is created from NASA has been working on SEP technology since the 1950s and they’ve used SEP on prior missions like the , which is currently in orbit around the dwarf planet Ceres and is the first spacecraft to orbit around two extraterrestrial bodies. Illustration of the Dawn spacecraft with its SEP system / Image courtesy of NASA Under the new contract, NASA hopes to double the thrust capability compared to current electric propulsion systems and increase the fuel efficiency by 10 times the current chemical propulsion. One challenge with deep-space missions that use SEP is that as you travel deeper into the solar system (farther away from the sun), it becomes more difficult to effectively capture light from the sun to power the spacecraft. Because of this, NASA stated its current SEP research is funded in parallel with work to advance solar array technology. During the 36-month contract, Aerojet Rocketdyne is responsible for constructing, testing and delivering an SEP product for testing and evaluation. Eventually, the goal is to have Aerojet Rocketdyne deliver four electric propulsion units that will fly in space. “Through this contract, NASA will be developing advanced electric propulsion elements for initial spaceflight applications, which will pave the way for an advanced solar electric propulsion demonstration mission by the end of the decade.” Steve Jurczyk, associate administrator of NASA’s Space Technology Mission Directorate In addition to this particular electric propulsion contract, Aerojet Rocketdyne is responsible for the chemical propulsion — the — for NASA’s Space Launch System, the rocket designed to be used on missions related to NASA’s Journey to Mars initiative. Illustration of NASA’s Asteroid Redirect Mission using SEP / Image courtesy of NASA Aerojet Rocketdyne’s current contract is part of NASA’s overall push to advance SEP systems. NASA plans to test the largest and most advanced SEP system ever used in space on their Asteroid Redirect Mission, which is designed to capture an asteroid and place it in orbit around the moon. That mission is currently slated for the mid-2020s. |
How IoT security can benefit from machine learning | Ben Dickson | 2,016 | 4 | 22 |
Computers and mobile devices running rich operating systems have a plethora of security solutions and encryption protocols that can protect them against the multitude of threats they face as soon as they become connected to the Internet. Such . Of the presently in use, a considerable percentage are sporting low-end processing power and storage capacity and don’t have the capability to become extended with security solutions. Yet they are connected to the Internet, nonetheless, which is an extremely hostile environment. Basically, it’s like going to the battlefield without armor. That’s why are constantly surfacing, and countless IoT devices are falling victim to hacks, and other evil deeds every day. It takes mere minutes for a malicious hacker to find thousands of vulnerable devices , and compromised IoT devices frequently become beachheads for more serious hacks in networks. The bottom line is that too many of our smart devices are to protect themselves (and us) against cyberattacks. But this is a gap that can be bridged with machine learning and analytics, especially as to developers and manufacturers. IoT devices are generating tons of data, and to analyze and peruse that data to help improve efficiency and customer service, and reduce costs and energy consumption. The same mechanics can be employed in security-related use cases, such as determining safe device behavior and general usage patterns, which can subsequently help to spot and block abnormal activity and potentially harmful behavior. Already, several tech firms are drawing on this to offer solutions that enhance IoT security, , where there are no defined security standards and practices. “Machine learning and behavioral analysis is one of the biggest trends in detecting anything and everything these days,” says Alexandru Balan, Chief Security Researcher at cybersecurity tech firm . However, he elaborates that machine learning still has a long way to go and there needs to be “a lot of research and innovation into developing, implementing and testing the algorithms.” Bitdefender’s approach is to aggregate into a cloud server data from all endpoints that rely on its products; the input is analyzed to determine patterns and spot malicious behavior. “You gather all the traffic,” says Balan, “sanitize and normalize it, learn from it, see what servers the devices talk to, what other devices they talk to, how they normally interact with the Internet and with each other, and you pick up on the abnormal traffic.” Bitdefender uses cloud-based intelligence and pattern recognition, along with local network analysis through its suite of endpoint security software and hardware, to control Internet traffic in home networks and block connections to malicious URLs, malware downloads and suspicious packets. Leveraging cloud services has enabled the company to bring enterprise-level intelligence and protection to the consumer space. “Machine learning is a critical component to developing Artificial Intelligence for IoT security,” says Uday Veeramachaneni, co-founder and CEO at . “The problem is that the IoT’s will be distributed massively and if there is an attack you have to react in real-time.” Most systems relying on machine learning and behavior analysis will gather information about the network and connected devices and subsequently seek everything that is out of normal. The problem with this primitive method is that it produces too many false alarms and false positives. The approach suggested by PatternEx is to develop a solution that incorporates machine learning and augments it with human analyst insight for greater attack detection. “The way to address this in real time is to create a learning system that takes those outliers and solicits human feedback on them,” Veeramachaneni explains. “The human alone can distinguish between malicious and benign, and that feedback returns to the system to create predictive models that can mimic human judgment — but at huge scale and in real time.” This is especially pertinent in IoT ecosystems, where large numbers of devices are involved, and the real-time analysis of the overwhelming amount of data generated are beyond human abilities. PatternEx uses machine learning algorithms to do outlier detection, and trains the model to be more accurate in real time. The training is done by a human, the analyst who can spot a new attack happening. The system generates events that indicate potential attacks. The human investigates the events and determines whether the system was correct in its assessment or not. The system learns from the experience and makes more accurate decisions next time. “This model helps improve threat detection accuracy and decrease the number of false positives dramatically over time,” Veeramachaneni says. IoT devices are designed to carry out a limited set of functions. Therefore, with a bit of machine learning and enough data, it becomes pretty easy to identify anomalous behavior. This idea was leveraged by startup tech company to create a smart-home IoT security solution. “When it comes to IoT devices they were designed to do a very, very specific function,” Yossi Atias, co-founder and CEO of the company. “So assuming we have a lot of users using the same camera or the same smart TV or the same smart alarm or smart lock, there is no real reason that one device will behave different from the other, because they’re all running the same software, which is not something the user can change.” Dojo-Labs’ method involves collecting metadata from different endpoints and defining the behavior range of each device type in order to be able to spot and block malicious behavior. As with all solutions involving machine learning, Dojo-Labs’ model improves as it collects more and more data from customers. The solution includes a pebble-like device that gets installed in the home network, a mobile app that allows the user to control the device and monitor the network status and a cloud service where the data is consolidated and analyzed using proprietary statistical tech and mathematical models coupled with machine learning algorithms. Machine learning is very promising, but it is still in its infancy and has a long way to go. And by no means can it be considered a complete solution by itself. “[Machine learning] is going to be virtually everywhere,” says Veeramachaneni. “To get security in the enterprise or in the IoT realm, you have to have powerful machines organizing data, crunching data, and seeking patterns in data. But you also need the human’s intuition to spot new attacks and to train the system to stop these new (and old) attacks.” Veeramachaneni calls this combination “augmented intelligence,” an alternative for the acronym AI, which is where the strengths of both man and machine converge to defeat cyber threats. “Neither machine learning nor humans can do it alone,” he says. |
TechCrunch’s Disrupt app is now available for all Disrupt NY (May 9-11) attendees | Ned Desmond | 2,016 | 4 | 14 | We to make networking at Disrupt a lot better, and today we’re making a big part of that promise a reality with the launch of the Disrupt app in Apple’s and Google . The app is custom-designed for attendees at TechCrunch’s (May 9-11). Point of pride: We built the app in-house with help from our friends at , the . Every feature is about finding people, communicating with them and getting the most out of Disrupt. Once you have a ticket to Disrupt NY, you can download the app and register. See you at Disrupt NY! |
MIT creates a control algorithm for drone swarms | Natasha Lomas | 2,016 | 4 | 22 | Swarms of drones flying in terrifyingly perfect formation could be one step closer, thanks to a control algorithm being developed at MIT. The complexities involved in controlling teams of moving robots so they don’t crash into each other, or indeed wipe out other objects/entities that cross their path, is a hard problem that continues to keep roboticists busy. But the team of researchers at MIT reckon they have made a breakthrough that could make perfect complex drone formations easier to pull off. They say their decentralized planning algorithm can handle both stationary and moving obstacles, and do so with reduced computational overheads. Why are decentralized control algorithms better than centralized control algorithms? The basic answer is they are more resilient, given a centralized algorithm has a single point of failure if its central controller goes offline. The researchers also assert that decentralized algorithms have the advantage of handling erratic communication better than centralized algorithms. And what’s more potentially erratic than a swarm of flying robots? But, on the flip side, they are also harder to design, given that all the moving pieces have to be involved in doing a bit of the thinking. “In a centralized algorithm a single entity has all the information and finds a solution. In a decentralized algorithm each entity (robot) has only partial information of the environment and the other robots (for example, it can only see a few neighbors). The robots need to communicate to pass information and coordinate,” explains, Javier Alonso-Mora, one of the researchers involved in developing the algorithm. Up til now, most research on decentralized control algorithms has focused on making collective decision-making more reliable, according to the group — deferring the (hard) problem of avoiding obstacles which they have rather chosen to drive straight at. “The closest applications [for the algorithm] would be drone swarms navigating in formation, for example for surveillance of an area, mapping of an environment,” adds Alonso-Mora, discussing potential future applications for robot teams. “And mobile manipulators collaboratively carrying objects on the factory floor.” Last year the team demoed a centralized version of the algorithm using a pair of wheeled robots tasked with carrying an object together. You can see a . Their decentralized algorithm requires what they say is significantly lower communications bandwidth, as well as lower computation cost, thanks to the distributed way it makes robots share intel on obstacle-free regions in their immediate vicinity. How does this work? Instead of each robot broadcasting to every other robot a complete map of safe space around it, the decentralized algorithm has robots only share maps with their immediate neighbors and also has each calculate where neighbors’ maps intersect with their own — sharing only relevant intersected data on to the next neighbor. So the idea is that, collectively, the team of robots maintains a comprehensive map of safe terrain while reducing the comms data needed to keep the swarm moving. “The robots do not communicate the position of all the obstacles they see. Instead, they communicate the region (set of linear constraints/convex region). So, they all get an overview of the ‘free space’ without a need to know where all the obstacles are.” “This scales well in scenarios with many obstacles,” adds Alonso-Mora. As well as mapping 3D space, the algorithm also includes a fourth dimension — time — to allow swarming bots to predict the trajectory of moving obstacles and re-route their own formation accordingly. This process does involve some guestimation, with the researchers noting that it works in a “mathematically compact manner” by assuming that moving obstacles have a constant velocity. Obviously that assumption is not always true, but given that each robot updates its map several times per second they reckon it’s a short enough time span/margin of error to handle most accelerating objects, given that most moving obstacles will not dramatically change velocity at very high speeds. So far the researchers have tested their algorithm with simulated drones and say it came up with the same flight plans they’d expect a centralized control algorithm to. This resulted in squadrons of virtual mini helicopters “generally” maintaining an approximation of their preferred formation (a square at a fixed altitude), but with the square sometimes rotating to accommodate obstacles and/or the distances between drones contracting. “Occasionally” the drones would also fly single file or assume a formation in which pairs flew at different altitudes, they add. They have also tested the decentralized algorithm on physical (wheeled) robots, and suggest such a scenario could be useful to further use-cases where teams of robots are expected to work in environments also containing humans. “We are working on a demonstrator with real vehicles as well as similar applications,” says Alonso-Mora. He adds that they “may” also experiment with actual drones at a later stage, too. (Presumably there’s rather higher costs involved with testing the robustness of control algorithms if your control robots are flying around mid-air… ) The researchers will be presenting their paper at the International Conference on Robotics and Automation next month. Expect to wait rather longer to see a perfect formation of drones buzzing over your city. “At this stage it is research,” stresses Alonso-Mora, going on to note that many big challenges remain when it comes to creating robust algorithms for controlling robot teams. “Accounting for the robot dynamics. Long term guarantees in dynamic environments with many moving obstacles. Communication/networking issues in real systems. Perception of the environment. Just to name a few.” |
The next new thing: Women VCs | Connie Loizos | 2,016 | 4 | 22 | The venture landscape changes fast. Ten years ago, few would have predicted the ubiquity of micro funds or the rise of Andreessen Horowitz or the very existence of a platform like AngelList that enables people with enough connections to become pop-up VCs. Few — though not most — see what’s coming next, too, and that’s women VCs, taking their place alongside men, in equal, or nearly equal, numbers. In fact, we’d argue that the shift will represent the biggest opportunity over the next decade. It may be hard to believe, given the paid to the low numbers of women in the industry and the obstacles they’re having to overcome. But the signs of change are everywhere if you’re paying close enough attention. Women now make up 60 percent of college graduates, and many more of them are graduating with tech-friendly degrees. (Women are exceeding at elite institutions particularly, and now account for of Stanford’s undergraduate engineering students, as well as one-third of Stanford’s graduate engineering students.) Though women are making slow inroads at venture firms — according to published earlier this week, just 7 percent of the partners are women at the top 100 venture firms — women are increasingly finding paths around today’s guard. They represent 12 percent of investing partners at corporate venture firms — a percentage likely to grow because of heightened interest in how tech companies fare when it comes to diversity. “We believe it’s a missed opportunity if we aren’t an active participant” in funding women- and minority-led companies and funds, says Janey Hoe, VP of Cisco’s 40-person investments unit. More, over the last three years, 16 percent of newly launched venture and micro-venture firms had at least one female founder, shows . So what’s happening? As VC Jon Callaghan of True Ventures noted during a in San Francisco earlier this week, has played a starring role. As costs have fallen and made entrepreneurship accessible globally, more people are coming into venture capital. Monique Woodard, a longtime entrepreneur and a venture partner at 500 Startups, credits her own path to the democratization of information brought about by social media platforms, as well as the many public insights into the industry that VCs like Fred Wilson and Brad Feld have contributed over time. “You suddenly have this library around venture capital and thought leadership that didn’t exist before,” said Woodard, speaking on the same panel. It’s also the case that women — an expanding number of whom are founding startups, as well as rising through the ranks of other companies — have more role models in VC than they did a decade ago. Of course, none of these trends is brand-spanking new. So why, you may be wondering, is now suddenly the tipping point? Because the ethical, business and financial reasons for change are finally poised to overtake the industry’s inertia. For starters, as the venture industry evolves from a boutique business to one that’s more mainstream, people are taking an interest in how it operates. Expect this attention to impact universities, in particular, which are among the world’s most powerful institutional investors. Big schools like Harvard, Yale and the University of California typically invest a percentage of their endowments in venture capital. And they’re feeling more outside pressure than ever before in terms of what they are funding. Last fall, for example, after being pressed by environmentalists, the UC system pulled out of coal and oil sands investments. (Many institutions have divested from tobacco interests, too.) Neither endowments nor pension funds seem overly focused on gender and ethnic diversity just yet, but with a , they will. In fact, some of these so-called limited partners receive active counsel, including by Callaghan, who says he’s advising them to “be aggressive” and “act now,” while there are still irrational biases against women and ethnicities to exploit. Venture firms are facing a more immediate business risk: the very real possibility that without women investors on staff, they will losing out on promising investment opportunities. According to a new survey of 265 male and female founders who have taken money from True Ventures, a high percentage said they would not seek funding from a firm without any females in investing roles. An even higher percentage responded that they’d be even more inclined to seek funding from firms that employ more than one female investing partner, says Callaghan. That message is reaching venture teams. Last month, Founders Fund brought aboard renowned angel investor Cyan Banister as its ; First Round Capital in February brought aboard Birchbox co-founder Hayley Barna as . True Ventures has, meanwhile, authorized Amy Errett, the CEO of True-backed hair care company , to write checks on its behalf. True is also bringing on another woman who will be writing checks on behalf of the firm, says Callaghan. (More on this appointment soon.) Which brings us to our third point: If LPs and VCs want to see robust financial returns over the next decade, more capital will need to be entrusted to women and other currently underrepresented groups who have different networks and a bring a different point of view into the mix. Woodard noted on the panel that black and Latino consumer alone account for $2.5 trillion in annual spending. And after (after ) has shown that diverse groups financially outperform more homogeneous ones. This is why you saw Intel Capital last June create a to back women and other underrepresented entrepreneurs. It’s why Kapor Capital has a to invest in women and minorities. It’s why Andreessen Horowitz, which has exclusively male investment partners, is trying to get the word out to entrepreneurs that it’s interested in underrepresented groups, including by organizing networking events for tech’s black community. (The Information wrote about earlier this week.) Said Callaghan on Tuesday night, “This little press leak of [Andreessen Horowitz] whispering [to the media about its efforts to court diverse talent], we’re all thinking like that. The leaders in our industry see this as a huge opportunity, and we’re all moving quickly to address it. “This” — bias– “will turn,” he told the crowd of largely founders and VCs, explaining to those gathered the ways he has seen and capitalized on similar biases in the past. The biggest beneficiaries will be those who exploit it and soon. Said Callaghan, seemingly to those who might be thinking of raising a fund: “Don’t wait. Do it now. Move fast.” |
Drastic disruptions are underway in the energy market | Scott Elrod | 2,016 | 4 | 22 |
It’s 6AM and I’m rolling out of bed. But before my feet hit the floor, my “home energy management agent” is negotiating with the California Independent System Operator (ISO), the nerve center controlling the flow of electricity on the grid. Normally, I’d get my coffee first and then jump in the shower. But my personal agent has alerted me to the fact that a hair-trigger condition has developed! There is a hydro plant in the Sierras getting ready to ramp up production to meet the morning demand. I’ve already told my agent that it’s OK to request that I rearrange my schedule in modest ways, so it’s concluded that if I (and enough other homeowners!) can hold back on energy consumption for 10 more minutes, the hydro turbines won’t need to open, and the reservoir won’t need to be drained further. [One of my passions is kayaking in the lakes and reservoirs of the Sierras, and I hate to see the water level drop.] As I jump out of bed, a text suggests that I “shower first, then coffee!” With an aggregate impact of small decisions made by homeowners like me all over the state, we succeeded in averting the need for that reservoir to drain further…at least for today. This vision will become reality. But for now, we lack the ability to directly influence our energy sources, and we certainly have no way to express environmental priorities in such transactions. When you flipped on your light switch this morning, where did that energy come from? What were the environmental impacts of its generation, transmission and use? All energy sources have externalities that many of us are passionate about: emissions from burning fossil fuels, groundwater contamination related to oil and natural gas extraction, impacts on fish migration for hydropower and desert habitat disruption for solar, just to name a few. Unfortunately, there is no way, today, for the full set of impacts of our energy use to be collected, and no way for people to express their values and communicate them to system operators, so that they can be incorporated into decision-making. How would balance the benefits you derive from your energy use with the true economic and environmental costs, if you had that information and could choose exactly where your energy comes from? There are, though, emerging technologies that will alter these legacy dynamics. Instead of captive consumers with few energy choices, we are fast becoming active participants in the energy markets as generators, demand-response agents and ancillary service providers. Our energy resource mix is increasingly coming under our control as we put solar on our rooftops and proactively shift our demand from gas-powered to electric vehicles or our home energy mix between electricity and natural gas. The cost of energy storage continues to decline, promising increased flexibility in the way we use power from renewable sources. New sensing and analytics technologies allow us to monitor and measure environmental impacts and energy use benefits to a degree never before achievable. These trends are evident as utilities such as Con Edison allow customers to choose electricity only generated by renewables. Companies like Whirlpool and others are making smart appliances that interact with Nest thermostats to reduce energy by helping consumers find the best time of day to run. And, commercial-building owners can make money providing demand-side control and ancillary services through network aggregators like EnerNoc. As these capabilities proliferate, they have the potential to coalesce into an integrated system with great flexibility and potential for savings, and even the possibility to make money. While these changes promise opportunity for better energy choices, they may also bring some risk. is needed to provide new frameworks and advanced information systems that can help us manage this complexity and guide us toward diverse energy and environmental policy goals. There are strong similarities between today’s energy systems and the information technology of the 1960s. The mainframe computer of that era was a valuable shared resource, but due to the non-intuitive interface, control of the computing resource was isolated from the workers who used it to support their tasks. There was a group of intermediaries, experts in machine language, and end users had to coordinate with them to access the computer. Decisions about utilization priorities, methods and investments were generally far removed from the end users, just as is the case with today’s power grid. In the 1970s, PARC and other Silicon Valley innovators shattered this model and launched the information revolution with the invention of the personal computer, graphical user interface and Ethernet connectivity. Together, we developed the technologies and practices that put computing into the hands of business users and consumers, providing unprecedented direct access to information and the ability to optimize computers for specific needs. This transition from mainframe to personal computing is often referred to as the . Today, anyone can access knowledge on any subject, irrespective of economic or social status. The economic benefit of this transformation is measured in trillions of dollars, with impacts that have touched every aspect of our society. Today we see signs that the energy market is set for this type of dramatic disruption. New technologies and markets are allowing energy consumers to gain direct control over energy resources. It is impossible to predict all of the implications and value that will ultimately be created when control of energy is placed directly in the hands of users, but it is nearly certain that it will lead to a period of tremendous innovation, economic growth and job creation. This type of disruption is a once-in-a-generation opportunity, and the timing couldn’t be better in the context of accelerating our efforts to address impending climate change. I am a technology innovator, and I’m also a lover of nature. It matters to me where my power comes from and I want to better understand how the little choices I make can improve (or at the very least, not harm) the world I live in and enjoy. What energy choices would you make if you were able? |
Google showcases the best Android apps for its first-ever Google Play Awards | Sarah Perez | 2,016 | 4 | 22 | Apple has historically doled out to those third-party app developers that it believes have created the best apps and games over the past 12 months. Now, its own take on app awards with the debut of what it’s calling the “Google Play Awards.” But while familiar in concept, Google’s version will tweak the formula somewhat from Apple’s version. While Apple’s annual awards are announced at year-end just ahead of the holidays, in order to present a group that made waves during the past calendar year, Google’s award winners will be announced at the company’s I/O conference in May. According to Google’s announcement, the program will feature five nominees across 10 categories, and these are now showcased in The apps will be chosen by a “panel of experts” at Google, and will be rated on a number of factors, including app quality and innovation. In addition, the apps will need to have either launched or had a major update over the last 12 months, in order to qualify. The company also announced the first group of nominees for these new awards. What’s interesting about Google’s round-up versus Apple’s list is that, instead of focusing on best apps and games per platform (e.g. mobile, tablet, watch, etc.) along with the “most innovative,” Google features apps across a wider variety of categories. For example, Google’s list highlights those developers who are taking best advantage of Google’s own services, like the apps for “Best Use of Google Play Game Services,” as well as those whose apps have done the best job of implementing Google’s newer design language, “Material Design.” Plus, Google is using the awards to promote the fact that its platform is also home to innovative technology and startups. A number of new companies continue to launch on iOS first so, to some extent, categories like “Standout Startup,” “Early Adopter” and “Most Innovative” speak to the fact that there are modern, technically advanced apps on Google Play, too. Other categories include “Standout Indie,” “Best Families App” and “Go Global” — the latter which focuses on apps that are localized, or appeal across cultures and regions. Of course, there are still two main categories that all developers will vie for: “Best App” and “Best Game.” The full list of this year’s nominees are below. Some of the apps in Google’s list made an appearance in as well, including Robinhood and Hopper. Robinhood additionally became the first finance company to ever win the Apple Design Award last year, and was a runner-up for best iPhone app of 2015. Google also notes that its Google Play storefront reached more than 1 billion Android users across 190 countries over the past year. The final winners will be live on May 19th at 7 PM PT at Google I/O and will be . |
Dell’s SecureWorks stumbles in first tech IPO of the year | Katie Roof | 2,016 | 4 | 22 | It has been a . Up until today’s SecureWorks offering, there had been zero in the U.S. in 2016. Zero. This compares to seven in the same period last year and 24 in that timeframe the year before. So tech investors and late-stage private companies were watching SecureWorks closely, to see if the tech IPO window would reopen. It is one of the few indications we have right now to assess public investor appetite for tech IPOs. Unfortunately, SecureWorks faltered. The unicorn-sized security company split from Dell, although the computer manufacturer remains its majority owner. SecureWorks raised $112 million in the offering, after pricing its IPO at $14 per share. But the company was expecting the initial price to be between $15.50-$17.50. TechCrunch spoke to CEO Mike Cote about why they went public right now and why he is optimistic that SecureWorks will do well as a public company. Cote told TechCrunch that the IPO has nothing to do with . He said that the process had begun before that and that the move will allow SecureWorks to “g Cote says the company, which has big corporate clients including Bank of America, is in a position to succeed in what is a very competitive landscape, with countless security businesses. Cote says they are focused on emerging categories such as the Internet of Things and that SecureWorks will evaluate threats and “ Atlanta-based SecureWorks was acquired by Dell for more than $600 million in 2011, but its current market cap is twice that. Yet while the company has seen an acceleration in revenue growth, its costs have grown, leading to widening losses. Cote maintains that recurring subscriber revenue will help them excel as a public company. “ Yet SecureWorks closed the day at $13.88, beneath the $14 IPO price. The offering certainly did not assuage concerns about the current environment for tech IPOs. |
Intel CEO says leadership team has received threats for company’s stance on diversity | Megan Rose Dickey | 2,016 | 4 | 22 | Intel is widely seen as a leader around corporate diversity in tech. But, it turns out, some Intel employees are not happy with the company’s stance on it. In fact, there’s “been a bit of a backlash within the company” and even threats made toward the company’s senior leadership team, Intel CEO Brian Krzanich told Rev. Jesse Jackson on stage at the PUSHTech 2020 conference today in San Francisco. “People worry that as a white man, you’re kind of under siege to a certain extent,” Krzanich said. “There’s been a bit of resistance. We’ve even had a few threats and things like that on some of our leadership team around our position on diversity and inclusion. We stand up there and just remind everybody it’s not an exclusive process. We’re not bringing in women or African-Americans or Hispanics in exclusion to other people. We’re actually just trying to bring them in and be a part of the whole environment.” Regarding what kind of threats the leadership team received, an Intel spokesperson said, “T , Intel has had a 30 percent increase in its underrepresented minority population, bringing the total up to 12 percent company-wide, Krzanich said. He also noted that Intel surpassed its hiring goals with 43.3 percent of its new hires in the past year or so being female or coming from an underrepresented minority group. Included in Intel’s next diversity report will be employee pay data broken down by gender and race. This all comes a little more than a year after , which has included partnerships with historically black colleges and universities, . Regarding the “pipeline problem” in tech, Krzanich said that it’s “bunk.” |
Two years after launching, Casper prepares for European expansion | Anthony Ha | 2,016 | 4 | 22 | It’s been since started selling mattresses, and CEO Philip Krim said it’s already turned into a big business, with $100 million in revenue (not to mention ) in 2015. Next up is international expansion, with the New York City-headquartered startup opening an office in Berlin. That office currently has four employees, but Krim said the number should be up to “one or two dozen” by the time Casper launches in Germany this summer. Why start Casper’s European push in Berlin? Krim praised the “great startup ecosystem” and “the cost of doing business.” Plus: “Germany is the biggest mattress market in Europe.” Now that Casper is available across the United States and Canada, Krim said there’s a “playbook” for moving into new markets, but, at the same time, “We do have to localize every part of the business,” including finding new manufacturing partners so that the startup isn’t shipping U.S.-made mattresses overseas. The past two years have also seen . Krim characterized many of them as “knockoffs” and “copycats.” I doubt those companies would agree, but Casper does seem to have started a trend. “I don’t think it’s a winner-take-all category,” Krim said. “We don’t mind competitors” — but he said the team does laugh at the ones that seem particularly blatant in copying aspects of Casper’s design or . But what exactly is new here? Is it just the act of buying mattresses online? Krim said Casper is differentiated “on both the product and the experience” — in other words, it’s a high-quality, affordable mattress, but it also offers a better ordering, delivery and return experience. (By the way, I gave in and bought a Casper mattress earlier this year, and I think I really am sleeping better.) Casper has also expanded beyond its product line, offering things like pillows and bed sheets. Krim said that in some ways, the pillow has worked as a “gateway to the Casper brand” for customers who aren’t ready to buy the mattress. The company will continue to add more products, though he’s staying mum for now on what they’ll be. |
mNectar introduces force touch to its playable ads | Anthony Ha | 2,016 | 4 | 22 | allows mobile game developers to promote their games with ads that people can actually play before downloading. That means its technology needs to evolve with the games, so now it’s announcing support for force touch interactions. , the term refers to touch interfaces that are affected by the amount of pressure applied by the user. mNectar CEO Wally Nguyen said that while most games aren’t taking advantage of these capabilities, “We believe this is the future of gaming.” That’s because force touch unlocks a whole new set of possible interactions and gives the touchscreen something like the versatility of a console game controller. You can see mNectar’s playable version of a Kabam game with force touch in the video below (though sadly, you don’t get to see the player frantically hitting their screen). [vimeo 161851216 w=640 h=360] from on . Plus, Nguyen suggested that by embracing force touch early, developers will be able to able to stand out from the competition. He also discussed the broader world of playable ads, where are getting involved. Nguyen argued that mNectar still has a big advantage over the competition because it doesn’t require any custom work for developers, and because it has invested in the infrastructure to deliver a high-quality playing experience, even over slower cell networks. |
Windows Ink, Cortana improvements and more arrive in the latest Windows 10 build out now | Sarah Perez | 2,016 | 4 | 22 | It’s going to be a good Friday for those testing the latest releases of the Windows 10 operating system, as of its PC and mobile OS, which will allow users to try the newly announced Windows Ink experience for the first time. Windows Ink, , offers improved pen support for Windows 10 PCs, including the ability to create sticky notes, draw on whiteboards and in a sketchbook, annotate and draw on web pages in Microsoft Edge, Maps and more. It’s also integrated with Office. With the update, those using a device with an active pen like the Surface Pro 4 or Surface Book will be able to use which will now be enabled by default. This is accessible in the notification area of the taskbar, Microsoft explains, but only if and when you have an active pen paired with your device. (You can also manually enable it if you’re curious by right-clicking on the taskbar.) From the Workspace, you’ll be able to sketch out drawings and ideas on a blank canvas, pull up a digital ruler for drawing straight lines, then save and share your work. A new Screen Sketch feature lets you draw on screen captures of your desktop, which is great for collaborating on documents or photos. With this feature, you can draw, crop and mark up images, then share them with others. Also arriving today is a new Sticky Notes experience, which you can customize the size and color of, then save. But Microsoft says these notes will soon get a lot smarter, thanks to integrations with Cortana and Bing. In the near future, you’ll be able to write phone numbers down that will then be ready for calling, turn items into checklists, write down flight numbers which then get updated with flight info from Bing and more. Finally, the Workspace will display a “Get Pen Apps” link, so you can more easily locate which apps are pen-enabled. (As you may remember, is that Microsoft is allowing any developer to pen-enable their app by adding just two lines of code.) Windows Ink will be the highlight of the suite of new features being introduced today, but it’s far from being the only one. The new build also introduces an updated Start experience, Cortana and search improvements, changes to the Action Center and Notifications, updates to the Taskbar and Settings app, Lock screen improvements and more. Under the hood, the build will also offer battery improvements for computers that can run in “Connected Standby” mode. Of these changes, the more notable will be a new, visual layout for the Start experience, which now sees the “Most Used” apps list and the All apps list merged into a single view and moved to the top of the user interface. Microsoft says this will reduce scrolling and clicking. It also moved around other key functions, including the Power, Settings and File Explorer, so it’s also visible in the Start menu. A couple of other tweaks here include a change to the Recently Added section to show three entries instead of one, and a way to expand it; meanwhile, additional folders you’ve configured to show up here will now be immediately available on Start instead of requiring you to open the hamburger menu to access them. Tablet users will also be glad to know that the full-screen All Apps list is back in this build, a popular request, the company noted. There are a number of other adjustments specific to tablets, too. You can find the details . In addition, this build now puts Microsoft’s virtual assistant Cortana on the Lock Screen, which means you can talk to her and ask questions (e.g. how’s traffic, what’s my schedule like, remind me…, etc.) without having to unlock your device. The Lock Screen will also offer access to your Media Controls, and it will no longer display your email address, for privacy reasons. Plus, Cortana will now be easier for new users to try out, says Microsoft. Instead of having to run through set up or signing in, you can start to use Cortana right away to ask her questions, perform web searches, have her tell you jokes or look for documents on your device. This onboarding improvement will let users get a taste of Cortana, which they can then choose to improve and personalize at a later point by signing in. Cortana Reminders have been made easier, too, and cross-device features (like ringing your phone, sharing maps across devices) should now work correctly in this release. And you can search across your OneDrive for files in the cloud, instead of just those on the device. Many of the remaining changes are visual tweaks or adjustments to the user interface — like the introduction of Cortana notifications to the Action Center, or added, relocated or changed icons and menu items. A few actions have been updated, too — like the Wi-Fi Quick Action no longer turns off Wi-Fi, but takes you to view the available networks instead. A full list is available on the Windows blog. As with other releases, this Insider Preview Build (14328) is available to the millions of users of its broader release. However, Microsoft reminds users that early access also means these builds have bugs — and this one has a lot of “rough edges,” it says. That’s why this one is being rolled out to those in the “Fast” ring. If you want to avoid the bugs, switch to the “slow” ring, the company says. |
Streaming service Sling TV will add MTV, Comedy Central, Nick Jr & more, following Viacom deal | Sarah Perez | 2,016 | 4 | 22 | Following that would have otherwise caused a blackout of Viacom’s TV channels on Dish Network, the two companies have worked out a deal that will not only keep those channels live, but will also bring select channels to Dish’s Internet streaming service, According to Viacom, the company will make Comedy Central, BET, Spike, MTV, Nick Jr. and others available on Sling TV in the “coming months.” While no exact launch date was given, it’s worth noting that the channels will arrive on both of Sling’s products — its original single-stream service and the . The latter, in case you missed it, addresses one of Sling TV’s largest problems (besides its still-clunky interface and glitchy streaming issues). Before, you could only stream Sling TV’s service to one device at a time. lets you stream a limited number of Sling TV’s channels to up to three devices at once. The company is negotiating to expand the channel lineup for this product, so the Viacom win is a worthy addition. In total, Viacom’s 18 channels will be carried by Dish Network, while a smaller group is coming to Sling TV. Unfortunately, it appears that the Sling deal misses out on one of Viacom’s top kid properties: Its flagship kids channel Nickelodeon was not mentioned as being one of those arriving on Sling. VH1, CMT, TV Land and Nicktoons were also not listed, though they will remain on Dish Network. It’s also unclear for now how the new additions will be packaged on Sling TV. The streaming service offers its users a core bundle of TV channels for $20 per month, then lets users customize that base product by adding on $5/month packages centered around a theme — like kids channels or more sports, etc. It’s likely that some of these new additions will be used to improve the channel lineups found in these extra packages. Still, this was a hard-earned deal that came right down to the deadline. The previous contract had been set to expire at midnight Eastern on Wednesday. Dish, whose pay TV service has around 13.8 million subscribers, is not a customer Viacom could afford to lose — especially as more of today’s consumers are cutting the cord with traditional television in favor of over-the-top streaming services. And for that very reason — cord cutting — Dish had been pushing for Viacom to agree to let it stream its channels over Sling TV. Financial terms of the deal were not revealed, but that Viacom will receive a mid-single-digit percentage increase in its affiliate fees from Dish for each year of the five-year contract, citing sources. Viacom investors reacted favorably to the news — sending shares soaring over 12 percent on Thursday after the agreement was announced. A also noted Dish is known to be a tough negotiator, and tends to allow for blackouts in 75 percent of its negotiations. Execs touted the deal in a positive light, in Viacom’s announcement. “Dish has historically been and remains an important partner for Viacom, and as part of our commitment to entertain audiences wherever they are, we are pleased to offer select Viacom networks as part of DISH’s Sling TV product,” said Viacom Executive Chairman, President and CEO Philippe Dauman in a statement. “We appreciate Viacom’s willingness to continue with us on our journey as we work to deliver the best, most innovative television services available,” added Charlie Ergen, Dish’s Chairman and CEO. |
11 TechCrunch stories you don’t want to miss this week | Anna Escher | 2,016 | 4 | 22 | This week, Apple’s MacBook got some sweet new upgrades, major tech companies reported earnings, Snapchat’s crazy new 3D stickers hit iOS and more. These are the stories everyone in tech is talking about. Apple’s that included faster processors, better graphics, faster internal memory and an hour more of battery life. And if pink laptops are your thing, you can now get Apple’s Rose Gold finish on a Mac for the first time ever. Floating MacBooks. See how they float. We ran the and their impact on female founders. Some findings from the report: Only 7 percent of partners at top 100 venture firms are women, and women hold just under 12 percent of partner roles at both accelerators and corporate venture firms. This is a must-read for anyone in venture capital. Tesla is facing some unhappy customers. found their car doors won’t shut and the windows won’t close. And earlier this month, the company recalled 2,700 Model X cars to fix a seat latch issue. Earnings season has begun. after missing expectations on revenue of $20.3 billion, , much to the disappointment of Wall Street and amid acquisition talks. Intel reported lower-than-expected first-quarter earnings and announced it is , or 11 percent of its workforce. and kept quiet about its Yahoo bid. What you need to know about Alphabet's first quarter earnings http://tcrn.ch/1SndjTH Posted by on Thursday, April 21, 2016 because it wants to be your phone. Now, Messenger could serve as a better replacement for Skype. it thinks you’ll spend more time looking at. Facebook co-founder Sean Parker , a video chat room for groups. YouTube rolled out — and is the first to do so at scale. LinkedIn of its Recruiter platform, the interface and paid product used by those who mine the company’s database to fill jobs. The new version includes a smart search and suggestions of similar candidates. Snapchat’s crazy 3D stickers that allow users to “pin” emojis to objects in videos hit iOS. In honor of 4/20, Snapchat released a Bob Marley filter that . Tech fatigue: when everything new feels old, and everything different feels dumb. Curb is a comprehensive home energy monitoring system. Matt Burns went , concluding that it shows a lot of promise in surprising ways. |
Hear Dave Cole, co-founder of NextVR, discuss the future of VR live entertainment at Disrupt NY | Lucas Matney | 2,016 | 4 | 22 | When you can’t make it to the game in real life, the experience offered by virtual reality live streaming can get you closer to the action and more connected to the players and fans than anything else out there. Dave Cole, , will be joining us in Brooklyn at Disrupt NY to chat about immersive stereoscopic live streaming and whether anyone is really going to give a shit about VR a decade from now. NextVR has been leading the charge to beam some of the most anticipated sporting events in virtual reality to users sporting headsets. They’ve brought their 3D VR cameras to the sidelines at NFL games, courtside at NBA games, ringside at boxing matches and to a great deal of other sports, and they’re only getting started. VR certainly seems to have a lot of potential at the moment. Virtual reality live event streaming could grow to become a $4.1 billion market and reach 95 million users by 2025, according to a January report from Goldman Sachs. NextVR has raised more than $35 million from major investors like Formation 8 and Comcast Ventures, with major sports broadcasters and has already begun eyeing live entertainment options that fall outside sporting events. We’re pumped to chat with Cole about his thoughts on early consumer adoption of virtual reality and everything that’s next for NextVR. Dave is joining our stellar list of Disrupt NY speakers that includes Uber’s David Plouffe, Foursquare’s Dennis Crowley and Honest Company’s Jessica Alba and Chris Thorne. , and you definitely shouldn’t miss us in Brooklyn. Or, bring your startup and exhibit in Startup Alley. |
Buy a Disrupt NY ticket, get a free Amazon Echo | Travis Bernard | 2,016 | 4 | 22 | Disrupt NY is right around the corner, and to build excitement for the event we’re giving away some swag. For the rest of the day, the next 30 people who buy general admission tickets for Disrupt NY will receive a free Amazon Echo. , and we think you’ll love this as a gift with your Disrupt NY general admission ticket purchase. . If you aren’t familiar with Disrupt, here’s a quick rundown. Disrupt gathers the brightest entrepreneurs, investors, hackers and tech fans for on-stage interviews, the Startup Battlefield competition, Startup Alley and after parties. The event takes place May 9-11 at the Brooklyn Cruise Terminal in Red Hook. This year’s Disrupt NY is set to be the best event yet, with on-stage interviews from , former Director of the NSA and the CIA , , , YouTube star and many more. For a full list of speakers, . Startup Alley features hundreds of early-stage companies showcasing their tech to investors and members of the press. This is a great way for your startup to be seen. Disrupt NY also includes the Startup Battlefield competition. More than 20 companies will present their pitch to an all-star panel of judges. Five make it to the finals, and one takes home the grand prize of $50,000. If you are interested in going and want to take advantage of our giveaway, . We hope to see you at Disrupt NY! |
Digital data and the fine line between you and your government | Shawn DuBravac | 2,016 | 4 | 22 |
What if the decided they wanted to see what device could see and hear? Or gain real-time access to the easily digitized information that surrounds a growing crop of connected devices? Thus far, interest in our has focused on residing on smartphones or sitting in centers — take the recent Apple and the FBI for example. And the same has been true in the that have made it through to the Supreme Court. We pay close attention to these cases because we spend on the Internet, and many of us are “ .” Our phones have become an extension of ourselves. But all of this is about to change. The Internet of Things (IoT) is producing reams of about our daily lives — that could prove incredibly valuable to law enforcement once they figure out a way to harness it. From thermostats to dishwashers to TVs, we are connecting once-analog devices, appliances and, well, “things” at an astonishing clip. We are on a road toward of connected and sensorized objects. Microsoft Kinect, Amazon Echo and an increasing number of other connected devices are “listening” and “watching” so they can more effectively and efficiently provide and predict services and offerings and do things on our behalf. We’re entering a new paradigm wherein we interact with technology through voice, gesture, proximity and a growing amount of digitized information. And in this always-on environment, we are surrounding ourselves with devices that are tracking our everyday moves — waiting for us to beckon them into service. My August smart door lock, for example, is watching me, waiting to unlock itself when it sees me getting close to home. Many of us experience a level of discomfort in giving our devices so much access to our private spaces and the ebbing and flowing of everything we say and do. But have to give a little to get a little. Consumer adoption of IoT technologies is extremely delicate; it hinges on trust. Trust in device makers and trust in . Devices that don’t meet consumer expectations for privacy and control will fail. The question before consumers and the courts today is three-fold: What kinds of valuable is the IoT generating; who should have access to and control over that ; and who can be legally compelled to share that information with law enforcement. In the recent Apple encryption case, the FBI went directly to the manufacturer of a product to gain access to digitized information residing on that device. In our digitally connected future before us, will law enforcement simply end users like and me and compel companies to turn on our Nest cameras, unlock our August Smart Locks or tune in to our Echos? The Apple encryption case and its predecessors have broad implications for the entire tech community — not just those building smartphones and running centers. The way in which we’ll interact with technology in the future has been turned on its head. The precedence set today by our courts ultimately will apply to the diverse amount of information that exists around us and can be digitized by an army of sensors that are being deployed to perform diverse services. All around us we have cameras that can be turned on in real time; microphones that are constantly listening and could share what they are hearing in real time; information that was already there, but wasn’t being captured in a systematic, way. Details about when I lock or unlock my front door. When I turn my lights on or off. When motion sensors detect movement in my home. When I open my fridge or perform any number of diverse tasks. All of this information is available today because of the connected, sensorized devices we are deploying around us. Who should control this information and who should have access to it is the conversation we need to have today. It’s time for an honest and open discussion about the future of . Consumers, manufacturers, law enforcement and policy makers need to collaborate to establish the social contracts that will guide and direct our future. Without broad trust across all players, the IoT ecosystem will not work. |
null | Matt Burns | 2,016 | 4 | 14 | null |
Facebook usage over Tor passes 1M per month | Natasha Lomas | 2,016 | 4 | 22 | The number of people using the Tor anonymizing browser to access Facebook has passed the one million mark this month for the first time, Facebook has . (aka The Onion Router) is a network technology designed to increase the privacy of web users by encrypting and randomly routing Internet connections via a worldwide network of volunteer relays — thereby making it harder for individual web connections to be traced back to a particular user. Facebook created a dedicated for Tor access back in , aimed at making it easier for users to connect via Tor, given that the way the network routes traffic can be flagged by site security infrastructure. Facebook also expanded its Tor support at the start of this year by , giving Android Facebook users an easier way to use Tor. The company said today that growth of Tor over the past few years has been “roughly” linear, noting that some 525,000 people access the service via Tor in June 2015 — rising to move than one million this month. (Albeit it’s very much a drop in the ocean of Facebook usage generally, with the company reporting more than as of January this year.) “This [Tor] growth is a reflection of the choices that people make to use Facebook over Tor, and the value that it provides them. We hope they will continue to provide feedback and help us keep improving,” Facebook added. Discussing why users of the social media service, whose business model relies on tracking and profiling users by encouraging them not to be private about their data, might see any point in using Tor’s network to access said service (given that their data is going to be anything but private once they get there), Tor flags up some specific use-cases why the feature might still be useful to people, including location obfuscation. Its routing system via a network of relays means it disguises the user’s physical location — presumably also cloaking that location data from Facebook. (Albeit, if you fb Messenger your friend about the ‘great holiday you’re having in Chicago’ Facebook is going to be able to figure out where you are anyway…) Tor has confirmed this supposition, with a spokeswoman for the organization telling TechCrunch: “When using Facebook website over Tor, Tor Browser is in charge of that data, so it is anonymous. Of course, someone may post a status update saying that they are at some restaurant, for instance, and that would de-anonymize them.” Another reason Tor points to is to ensure a user’s identity doesn’t leak to intermediaries — such as ISPs or “an agency that surveils the Internet”. “Political activists organize on Facebook: Their public identity is important in their work. So is their safety,” it notes in a statement. It adds that countries where Internet access (or use of Facebook specifically) is blocked or censored can also be a motivation for people to use Tor as a workaround for that block (i.e. rather than as a specifically pro-privacy service). “Many people use Tor in countries where the Internet is censored, not in order to be anonymous. Tor allows them to access the uncensored Internet, including reaching Facebook. In Iran, for instance, Facebook is blocked. So people use Tor to get onto the Internet and browse, and from there they can reach Facebook.” Plus it argues there are security advantages “inherent” in the structure of its network, such as making man-in-the-middle attacks more difficult to carry out. For its part Facebook does not delve too explicitly into the psychology of its Tor users but just notes that people use Tor for “a variety of reasons related to privacy, security and safety”. Why does Facebook care about Tor? Providing another route for users who might not otherwise want to or be able to access its service means it potentially gets to keep/gain that small group of people as Facebook users. But, if you want to be more cynical about it, you could say Facebook is engaging in a little brandwashing of its data-powered business model by cosying up to a well known entity in the privacy/security space — which might result in the perception that it cares about user privacy. Sure Facebook is happy to protect your data from falling into the hands of companies unattached to its business. But, remember, once you pass through those blue gates it’s a data free-for-all. |
Fore: Rakuten’s delivery drones take to the golf course | Jon Russell | 2,016 | 4 | 25 | Last month we reported that , and now and video footage of how the system will work. To refresh your memory, drones can provide food, snacks and golf accessories like new balls to players while they are out on the course. The drones are developed by Autonomous Control Systems Laboratory (ACSL), a Japan-based firm in which Rakuten invested. Golfers simply use the accompanying app — which is only available for Android — to summon a drone. There are some caveats: the total purchase amount must be at least 100 yen ($0.90), the maximum weight of a delivery is 2kg, and the service is operational between 8:30am and 3pm due to safety. The month-long trial starts May 9. It’s a unique way to test drones, and Rakuten said it plans to expand to more golf courses across Japan based on how things go. It is also looking to take things further in the longer term: Rakuten is looking into the utilization of drones for deliveries in sparsely populated areas and mountainous regions, in transporting supplies during disasters and in its e-commerce businesses, including Rakuten Ichiba, and aims to accumulate technical and operational expertise through running the service and put it to use in developing further innovative drone delivery services. |
Lendix grabs $13.5 million to become a leading European P2P lending platform | Romain Dillet | 2,016 | 4 | 25 | Shortly after its competitor Finsquare, is back with more news. The French startup has just raised $13.5 million (€12 million) and now wants to become one of the leading European peer-to-peer lending platforms. Lendix launched just like year. But the startup has taken over the French market by storm. During its first year, the platform has managed $22.5 million (€20 million) in medium-term business loans. Typically, Lendix manages loans for small and medium companies for 3 to 6 years with annual returns between 4 and 9 percent for the lenders. But now that Lendix has acquired its smaller competitor, the company will be able to manage short term loans as well as this is where Finsquare shined before the acquisition. So let’s come back to today’s news. Lendix raised $13.5 million from CNP Assurances, Matmut, Zencap AM and existing investors, such as Partech Ventures, Decaux Frères Investissements, Sycomore Factory and Weber Investissement. But this is just one part of the equation as some of these investors have also committed to investing $22.5 (€20 million) on the platform. It’s a good vote of confidence and lets Lendix finance more deals. Having CNP Assurances as a backer is also interesting as CNP Assurances is just starting investing into fintech startups — Lendix is the major French insurance company’s first investment. Next, Lendix is going to expand to other European countries, starting with Spain and Italy in the coming months. For each geographical expansion, Lendix has to work on getting a license to operate on these new markets. Rules can be slightly different as well. It’s a long process, but also a good barrier to entry for foreign competitors. As you can see, Lendix is avoiding the U.K. for now as and other platforms are already pretty big there. But what if Lendix could become the dominant peer-to-peer lending platform for the rest of Europe? It looks like that’s exactly what the company plans to do. I’ve tried opening an account on the platform, and I’ve been impressed with the process so far in France. Opening an account is seamless. You can then lend a bit of money in a company in just a few clicks — on average, people lend €220 per loan. When you lend, the platform automatically generates a contract you can keep in your records. And, of course, you’ll get money back every month. But Lendix doesn’t want to stop there as the current marketplace could be much simpler. As a small company, it’s already much faster to talk to Lendix than a traditional bank to see if you could get a loan. As a lender, I wonder whether lenders could get tired of having to manually reinvest their loans. And in its current form, there’s one thing that is probably stopping many people from investing on the platform. If you want to allocate a significant portion of your savings to a platform like Lendix, chances are you’re slowly going to get back your money over multiple years. In the future, you can imagine a hands-off option that will turn Lendix into a fully automated savings product with no strings attached. Lendix could repackage loans into a three-tier system with three different loan portfolios for instance. You’d choose the riskiness and average interest rate of the portfolio and automatically invest in all the loans in one tier for instance. And if you want to get your money back, Lendix could match people willing to sell their positions with people willing to invest. If the market is liquid enough, you could sell your position without having to wait for the end of the loans as somebody else would take over your loans. There will be some legal and trust issues as you don’t want Lendix to invest in failing companies without your knowledge. So this is a long and winding road, but also the most interesting one. |
Ant Financial, the Alibaba affiliate that operates Alipay, raises $4.5B at a $60B valuation | Jon Russell | 2,016 | 4 | 25 | Ant Financial, the Alibaba affiliate that runs Alipay and other financial services in China, has announced a truly huge round of funding today. The company said it has completed its Series B, which weighs in at a staggering $4.5 billion. that the company was raising new funding at a valuation of up to $60 billion, and we understand this is the valuation for the deal. valued the firm at $45-50 billion. This round is the largest investment in a tech company to date, surpassing the , China’s homegrown rival to Uber, brought in from investors last summer by some margin. No ordinary round of financing, for sure, but then again Ant Financial is hardly a normal company by any stretch of the definition. Ant Financial was created in December 2014 when it was spun out of Alibaba before with a record IPO in September 2014. The company has very much piggy-backed on Alibaba’s vast e-commerce empire — which in revenue during the last quarter of business — since then. It offers a range of financial services, most prominent of which is Alipay — China’s most popular online payment service, used to process payments on Alibaba’s sites — but its portfolio also includes a micro-loans program and , MyBank. All told, it claims to reach 450 million users, most of whom likely interact with Alipay, but Ant Financial puts focus on enabling people in remote areas who have limited access to traditional financial services. It says its “payment, insurance and wealth management services” reach 140 million people in rural China, while MyBank has dished out 20 million loans to SMEs and entrepreneurs. Beyond China, Ant Financial has moved into India via , an e-commerce and payments player that . Ant Financial said that at the turn of 2016, Paytm had 122 million users and was processing 52 million transactions a month, a number that has grown 230 percent year-on-year. Ant Financial is tipped to go public in the not-too-distant future. A company representative declined our questions on when and where an IPO might take place, but that he hopes to list “in both domestic and offshore stock exchanges” in the future. This could be the last chance for investors to get in on the action privately, so it’s notable that Ant Financial summoned some big names with plenty of strategic value for this record round. Sovereign wealth fund China Investment Corp (CIC) and CCB Trust, a subsidiary of China Construction Bank, joined as new investors, while insurance firms, including China Life, China Post Group, China Development Bank Capital and Primavera Capital Group returned as existing backers. Ant Financial said that it will work with CIC to expand its footprint overseas “to provide equal access to financial services globally.” You can bet that this growth will be in tandem with Alibaba, which is . |
Indian digital payments company TranServ gets $15M to launch new financial products | Catherine Shu | 2,016 | 4 | 25 | , one of several companies digitizing payments in India, said today that it has secured a Series C of $15 million to develop new financial products. The round was led by IDFC Spice Fund and Micromax Informatics. Returning investors Nirvana and Faering Capital India also participated. Micromax, one of India’s largest smartphone makers by market share, is also one of the startup’s strategic partners. The two companies with Visa to offer mobile payment services, including NFC-based contactless payments on Micromax devices. TranServ claims a total of 10 million users. It processes about $15 million per month through its APIs, which let merchants integrate payment tools into their own software, with clients including , , , and . The company plans to launch new products, including micro-loan services, new non-payment features for its API stack, and online meal vouchers for companies that still issue paper coupons to their employees. It will also continue developing its mobile wallet app . TranServ co-founder and CEO Anish Williams says that Udio, which lets users split bills and send money to one another, was one of the first peer-to-peer transaction apps in India. It can also be linked to a prepaid debit card that is accepted by about one million offline merchants. Several factors are fueling demand for digital payments in India, including the and the . The country’s , however, which means companies need to help consumers find alternative ways of making online payments. Startups that have stepped into the breach by providing tools like mobile wallets that can be linked to bank accounts or topped up at brick-and-mortar stores include and . TranServ co-founder and CEO Anish Williams hopes his company’s competitive strategy of rolling out new features and products to attract customers, and charging for premium services, will let the startup “maintain financial discipline” by avoiding expensive promotional tools like discounts and cashback deals. |
Adobe’s Document Cloud adds support for Box and Microsoft | Frederic Lardinois | 2,016 | 4 | 25 | Adobe is launching an update to its Document Cloud service today that will bring support for both Box and Microsoft OneDrive to the company’s PDF-centric digital document solution. Adobe previously announced a similar partnership . Thanks to this partnership, Document Cloud users will now be able to use tools like Adobe Sign, the company’s e-sign solution, with documents stored on these third-party services. Box users will also be able to access their files from Acrobat Reader. As part of this update, Adobe is also adding a number of new data centers in Europe so that the service now meets new EU guidelines for electronic signatures that will go into effect in the EU in July 2016. The company also updated its Adobe Sign mobile apps for iOS and Android, and its integration of Adobe Sign with its Experience Manager Forms and Adobe Marketing cloud tools will make it easier for users to fill out forms on mobile (and for businesses to offer more personalized experiences around forms). |
Leaked Postmates financials suggest company might be doing better than everyone thought | Katie Roof | 2,016 | 4 | 25 | The costs of paying the couriers is greater than the money generated from delivery fees, according to the narrative. And naysayers say that the financial struggles mean that Postmates will have trouble raising additional funding. Yet the venture capitalists who backed the company defended it, promising that the business looked healthier than what the Silicon Valley echo chamber hypothesized. But without actual numbers, it was hard to say who was right. So when we got our hands on documents that detailed Postmates’ financials, we were curious to take a look. It turns out that the truth is probably somewhere in the middle. The files, dated last fall, show a glimpse at Postmates’ rapid growth in the delivery business, despite a competitive landscape which includes DoorDash, Grubhub and now Uber Eats. We’ve also obtained more recent numbers that suggest that the growth has continued. The files reveal that in the first quarter of last year, Postmates processed $28 million in transactions (GMV), resulting in $6.5 million in net revenue and $1.1 million in gross profit, up 67% from the prior quarter. Postmates projected $55 million in net revenue and $11.3 million in gross profit for last year, a substantial increase from the $8.6 million in net revenue and $1.03 million in gross profit from 2014. We’re also hearing that the actual numbers turned out to be better than what was forecasted in documents and that Postmates facilitated $56 million in gross merchandise volume in just the third quarter of last year. About $14 million of this was net revenue and gross margins were about 22%. And as of the first quarter of 2016, the gross margins held above 20%. We’re told that both the transaction volumes and revenues doubled in a six month timeframe — from the third quarter of last year to the first quarter of this year. While the documents from last year listed the 2016 revenue forecast to be $250 million, we hear that the revenue this year is expected to be between $200-$250 million. From Uber to Lyft, there are a handful of on-demand “unicorns,” with sky high valuations. But until one goes public, only the occasional glimpse at leaked financials gives us an accurate sense at how the businesses are doing. |
Naya Health raises $3.9 million to build a better breast pump | Lora Kolodny | 2,016 | 4 | 25 | Redwood City-based has raised $3.9 million in seed funding to make a breast pump that is sleeker, quieter and more comfortable for moms than the devices already on the market. Investors co-leading the round were and , who were joined by , , Stanford’s and individual angels. According to married co-founders Janica and Jeff Alvarez, parents of three kids together, the startup wants to help women give their babies a breast milk diet for as long as they wish, with the least possible hassle. According to several , babies fed with breast milk exclusively or primarily for the first six months of their lives experience lower rates of asthma, pneumonia, leukemia and other childhood illnesses compared to those who take formula exclusively. And the recommends moms who can do so feed their babies breast milk exclusively for six months, then continue to give them breast milk for the first two years of their lives. These are among the reasons why so many mothers opt to pump when work and other obligations interrupt time spent with their babies. Workplace and public accommodations for moms who breastfeed have, in recent years, helped fuel the growth of companies like Philips Avent, Lansinoh Laboratories and others in the burgeoning breast pump market. The industry is projected to generate $1.2 billion in annual global sales by 2020, according to forecasts from Naya Health’s new breast pump works using a water-based hydraulic system rather than a pneumatic, or air-based, one. Its suction is more efficient than that of today’s popular models, Alvarez said. The piece of the Naya Health Smart Pump that attaches to a mother’s breasts also deviates from the old, hard plastic funnels that go with mass-marketed pumps. Its cups are softer, hospital-grade silicone, and structured to feel like a baby’s latching mouth would. The pump also has smart features for the “quantified parenting” set. It senses how much milk a mom is producing, and gives her data about her milk production via a smartphone app. This should ostensibly help moms optimize their pumping schedules and avoid problems like over- or under-supply on a given day. The Naya Health pump is still not available in stores. That’s in part because the company can’t sell and ship it to customers until it attains regulatory approvals from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. But a review process is in the works, the CEO said, and the item should be certified as a class II medical device within a few months. Today, Naya Health opened up the possibility for customers to register to buy one at least — no deposit required. Long-term, the company is planning a “pump it forward” initiative, whereby families who have wrapped up their breastfeeding and pumping can return their hardware to Naya Health or retail partners to have it cleaned and donated with new sterile attachments to women in need. |
Uber aims to retain its 1099 workforce with a few new in-app perks | Sarah Buhr | 2,016 | 4 | 25 | Good independent workers are hard to find and even harder to keep if the doesn’t make sense. So Uber is adding a new goody bag of rewards in hopes of retaining its workforce. One of those perks is , a new feature inside the driver-side app allowing drivers to search for the cheapest and closest gas stations. Drivers simply zoom in a tap on the provided map and little gas pumps at nearby gas stations will pop up with a price per gallon of gas. Gas prices don’t fluctuate that much in a day but the app will pull in aggregate data from various sources and refresh about once an hour to reflect any possible changes. The app will also provide turn-by-turn directions to get the driver to the gas station they wish to fill up at. Of course, if you are out of gas and out of money you can’t start picking people up so along with finding the best price, Uber intends to offer drivers a fuel rewards card. The new card is based on a driver’s record instead of credit history and is intended to reward those who drive a lot on the platform. Those completing at least 100 trips a month can get up to 15 cents a gallon off at participating gas stations throughout the U.S. and the rewards card can be used to purchase other items at the station as well like Gatorade and snacks. The app also offers drivers discounts from certain places. Jiffy Lube will offer those on the platform a 15 percent discount on oil changes, for instance. Uber will also offer an Instant Payment feature through GoBank. Lyft came out with an instant payment feature for drivers . Uber says it is slowly rolling out a similar feature to its drivers and that the ability to instantly transfer earnings from rides to your GoBank card (and eventually your own bank account) will roll out to all eligible drivers by the end of this month. Uber updated the driver-side app last October with the intent to integrate several features drivers had wanted more transparency on such as ratings and payments. Clearly Uber wants to keep its most loyal workers happy and that includes a useful and informative app for drivers. Other ideas the product team is working on to accommodate Uber’s 1099 workforce include a public restroom locator (currently code-named “poober”) and the best places for grub or rest stops. |
The driverless truck is coming, and it’s going to automate millions of jobs | Ryan Petersen | 2,016 | 4 | 25 |
A convoy of self-driving trucks recently drove across Europe and arrived at the Port of Rotterdam. No technology will away more — or drive more economic efficiency — than the . Shipping a full truckload from L.A. to New York costs around $4,500 today, with labor representing 75 percent of that cost. But those labor savings aren’t the only gains to be had from the adoption of trucks. Where drivers are restricted by law from driving more than 11 hours per day without taking an 8-hour break, a can drive nearly 24 hours per day. That means the technology would effectively double the output of the U.S. transportation network at 25 percent of the cost. And the savings become even more significant when you account for fuel efficiency gains. The optimal cruising speed from a fuel efficiency standpoint is around 45 miles per hour, whereas truckers who are paid by the mile drive much faster. Further fuel efficiencies will be had as the self-driving fleets adopt platooning technologies, like those from , allowing trucks to draft behind one another in highway trains. Trucking represents a considerable portion of the cost of all the goods we buy, so consumers everywhere will experience this change as lower prices and higher standards of living. In addition, once the technology is mature enough to be rolled out commercially, we will also enjoy considerable safety benefits. This year alone more people will be killed in traffic accidents involving trucks than in all domestic airline crashes in the last 45 years combined. At the same time, more drivers were killed on the job, 835, than workers in any other occupation in the U.S. Even putting aside the direct safety risks, driving is a grueling job that young people don’t really want to do. The average age of a commercial driver is 55 (and rising every year), with projected driver shortages that will create yet more incentive to adopt technology in the years to come. While the efficiency gains are real — too real to pass up — the technology will have tremendous adverse effects as well. There are currently more than 1.6 million Americans working as drivers, making it the most common job in 29 states. The loss of representing 1 percent of the U.S. workforce will be a devastating blow to the economy. And the adverse consequences won’t end there. Gas stations, highway diners, rest stops, motels and other businesses catering to drivers will struggle to survive without them. The demonstration in Europe shows that trucking is right around the corner. The primary remaining barriers are regulatory. We still need to create on- and off-ramps so human drivers can bring trucks to the freeways where highway autopilot can take over. We may also need dedicated lanes as slow-moving trucks could be a hazard for drivers. These are big projects that can only be done with the active support of government. However, regulators will be understandably reluctant to allow technology with the potential to eliminate so many . Yet the benefits from adopting it will be so huge that we can’t simply outlaw it. A 400 percent price-performance improvement in ground transportation networks will represent an incredible boost to human well-being. Where would we be if we had banned mechanized agriculture on the grounds that most Americans worked in farming when tractors and harvesters were introduced in the early 20th century? We often discuss the displacement of by artificial intelligence and robots in the abstract, as something that we’ll have to eventually tackle in the far distant future. But the recent successful demonstration of the self-driving shows that we can’t afford to put off the conversation on how we’re to adapt to this new reality. |
Theranos continuously failed to comply with CMS on several counts, documents show | Sarah Buhr | 2,016 | 4 | 25 | We now know the full extent of the concern over compliance issues at Theranos’ Newark, California lab thanks to new documents TechCrunch has obtained under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) began a federal investigation into the practices at Theranos’ main facility in Newark last fall involving erratic test results and unqualified personnel. The newly released letter and documentation dated March 18, 2016, highlight what CMS labeled “serious deficiencies” in the testing at Theranos’ main lab, putting patient health and safety in “immediate jeopardy.” CMS found the blood analysis startup continued to fail compliance requirements since an initial visit in November 2015, and again accused Theranos of being out of alignment with at least five CLIA condition-level requirements in January 2016, including hematology testing, analytic systems, a sufficient lab director for complex-level testing for proper technical workers and proper technical supervision. CMS gave Theranos 10 days to get with the program before leveling fines of up to $10,000 per day for every day the lab continued to be out of accord. However, Theranos asked for an extension from CMS in February of this year, which CMS granted. By March 2016, CMS found Theranos’ main lab continued to side-step compliance issues and decided the startup’s reasoning for compliance was unsatisfactory. CMS granted the startup time to address the deficiencies and submit a corrective course of action since then. Theranos has also been busy , a new lab director and more qualified personnel to appease the federal agency. However, the recent U-turn may not be enough to reverse the damage done. Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes is now under criminal investigation from the U.S. Attorney’s Office, as well as an investigation from the Securities and Exchange Commission for possibly defrauding investors. She may even be barred from operating her own company for up to two years. Theranos spokesperson Brooke Buchanan shared with TechCrunch a portion of the ongoing communication with CMS , adding, “The company continues to work closely with regulators and is cooperating fully with all investigations.” And Holmes told Maria Shriver during a recent interview on the Today Show she felt “devastated [we] did not catch and fix these issues faster.” However, Theranos failed to adequately adjust practices and comply with CMS time and time again. Though it seems and the company is working on getting into alignment with federal agencies, it may be too little, too late to patch up relations in the public eye. A CMS spokesperson declined to elaborate on the documents out today, but you can view for yourself the correspondence between the two organizations.
|
Have we seen the last of the All Writs Act in the encryption fight? | Kate Conger | 2,016 | 4 | 25 | A judge today officially put an end to the fight between the Justice Department and Apple over unlocking the iPhone of a New York man convicted of selling drugs. This is the second time in recent weeks that the government has back-pedaled on a case after initially trying to force Apple to help investigators gain access to iPhone data. The Justice Department abandoned its effort to compel Apple to create a custom operating system to help unlock the San Bernardino shooter’s phone nearly a month ago, saying that a third party had provided a way into the phone. Although these two cases are over, the FBI’s fight with Apple over encryption will continue. There will always be more iPhones and more investigators who want to unlock them. But the New York case may influence the government to change its strategy when pursuing data stored on an iPhone. The San Bernardino and New York cases sought to secure Apple’s cooperation under the All Writs Act, a 1789 law that allows judges to order compliance with search warrants and other court orders. Because the government received search warrants for the iPhones at the center of the two cases, it argued that the court could force Apple to facilitate access to the devices. Apple, of course, opposed this, arguing that the company should not be ordered to compromise its security. Apple has provided data from its devices in roughly 70 cases; however, as Apple has improved device security in newer versions of iOS, it has lost the ability to extract data for the government. Going forward, the government can continue relying on the All Writs Act in the hopes that, eventually, one of its cases will stick, or it can wait for a legislative solution from Congress. Neither option is particularly appealing. Repeated use of the All Writs Act opens the Justice Department to additional embarrassment, as it insists Apple is the only entity that can help it get the information it needs — only to follow up with a court filing weeks later. But a Congressional solution will come slowly, and, with the Justice Department seeking access to , it may not be willing to wait. Although the All Writs Act initially seemed like a useful tool in the Justice Department’s fight for access to encrypted data, the two high-profile losses might keep the government from relying so heavily on the 227-year-old law in the future. “I think the All Writs Act litigation is most likely over,” says Electronic Frontier Foundation staff attorney Nate Cardozo. “Nothing’s saying they can’t try it again, but they’ve been burned twice.” Instead, Cardozo and other civil liberties advocates think the fight will shift to Congress, where the government can argue that it needs a new law to govern encryption since the old laws aren’t proving effective. When Senators Richard Burr and Dianne Feinstein introduced their two weeks ago, their efforts were panned by technologists as “ ,” The bill, titled the Compliance with Court Orders Act of 2016, is not expected to receive widespread support among lawmakers. However, Cardozo says that the demands of the bill — which would require companies to decrypt “unintelligible” data by making it “intelligible” — are merely a point from which the government can negotiate. “This is just the opening bid,” Cardozo says of the bill. Any successful encryption legislation is likely to scale back the drastic measures proposed in the Burr-Feinstein bill, while still providing some support for the Justice Department’s interests. For its part, the Justice Department has maintained it has no interest in setting legal precedent in favor of decryption and is merely focused on getting into phones on a case-by-case basis. “As we have said previously, these cases have never been about setting a court precedent; they are about law enforcement’s ability and need to access evidence on devices pursuant to lawful court orders and search warrants,” DOJ spokesperson Emily Pierce said in a statement about the New York case. “In this case, an individual provided the department with the passcode to the locked phone at issue in the Eastern District of New York. Because we now have access to the data we sought, we notified the court of this recent development and have withdrawn our request for assistance.” |
Clarkson, Hammond and May to launch DriveTribe motoring content platform | Mike Butcher | 2,016 | 4 | 25 | In an age when completely driverless cars (probably electric) seem to be just around the corner, the idea of starting a brand new online community aimed at petrolheads seems like an ill-timed one. But that’s not about to stop Jeremy Clarkson, Richard Hammond and James May, best known as the former presenters of the globally famous Top Gear TV show. After leaving the BBC last year, these three musketeers signed up to create a new streaming TV show for Amazon Prime. But but they also plan what they say will be a totally separate venture to create an online community for motoring enthusiasts. Slated to launch in the Fall, (which has a holding site and , and presence) will be a brand new digital media platform consisting of a combination of content produced by celebrities of the motoring scene, professionally created content and that generated by users themselves. The company is co-founded by the three mentioned above together with Andy Wilman, their long-time TV collaborator, and serial tech entrepreneur Ernesto Schmitt, who recently . But before you throw your hands up to declare this a content strategy from 2004, wait. The startup plans to build an engine to send content that will specifically target the disparate communities that make up car fans — from petrolheads to classic car aficionados. A versioning engine and multi-variate testing system will trial “hundreds of different versions” of content on different segments of users, defined by age, gender, location and interests, with “optimal matches” pushed directly to peoples’ social timelines through Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Snapchat, etc. There will, of course, be iOS and Android apps, as well. The idea is that punters will sign up to the “tribe” that best reflects their motoring interests, in addition to being able to create their own. The Clarkson/Hammond/May trio will of course be hosting their own “tribes” with original content. Now, DriveTribe will have its work cut-out. Competitors include online publishing ventures, like the original online community, , , numerous Subreddits and the estimated 400 million fans of motoring already on Facebook. Ah, but DriveTribe argues, those people are not well-served right now, and they plan to reach them with this new kind of content-targeting engine. Richard Hammond said: “Gamers have got Twitch, travellers have got TripAdvisor and fashion fans have got, oh, something or other too. But people who are into cars have got nowhere. There’s no grand-scale online motoring community where people can meet and share video, comments, information and opinion. DriveTribe will change that. And then some.” Schmitt, CEO of DriveTribe, said: “Automotive and adventure-lifestyle are huge growth areas for content, and are presently woefully underserved digitally. Automotive is also the biggest advertising category in the world — with $45 billion media spend projected for 2016 — and we expect our content will monetize well through native advertising and social commerce.” DriveTribe thinks there is a big gap in the market, with (they say) 428 million people on Facebook with a self-declared like of motoring — slightly smaller than Movies and Entertainment, which are the number 1 category. Additionally, cars are a bigger interest category than News & Current Affairs (410 million), Football (380 million) or Pets, Dating and Toys combined. At the same time, not one of the top 500 websites globally is dedicated to cars. Schmitt was previously founder and CEO of Beamly (sold 2015), peoplesound.com (sold 2001) and executive chair of Invision, sold to Intel in 2012. He has brought on board Jonathan Morris as CTO, who was previously CTO of The Financial Times online and Thompson Reuters, as well as co-founder of two fintech ventures. DriveTribe will be based in London’s Kings Cross. So is this like “Tidal for Petrolheads” where car stars will be bringing their loyal fan base to the party? Not really, says Schmitt. He says Tidal was trying to solve a perceived problem with royalty collection where none existed, but DriveTribe is solving a supply-side problem. The team is starting with 20 product and engineer people, but plans to scale up to 60 by the launch. Hammond told me that talk about a coming future of driverless cars deadening our desire for motoring is wrong-headed. And that, in fact, the innovation happening around cars will actually “drive” DriveTribe. “The historical urge for speed still is primal. That will never go away. If anything it’s heightening. There will be entirely new forms of motoring. And there’s the tribal nature of motoring… We will still use cars to demonstrate our power and potency. It’s a hugely exciting times for motoring. The need for people to have their own platform is greater than ever before. Manufactures are, thank goodness, once again making mistakes because they are pushing the boundaries. Twenty years ago manufacturers were not making mistakes, just changing bits of fascia. Now it’s all about innovation,” he said. Schmitt said the model for their content distribution will be “50% technology and 50% content. But the tech stack is world-class. We will invest same proportion into R&D as we do into content.” He also said the company will look at extending the model into other verticals, which could include fashion, music or food. However, he may come up against the issue of aggregation as a business model. All online media and content is fragmented, a problem which was solved by search engines and social media. Thus, customers may not see it as a problem in the first place, and nor, perhaps, will media buyers. Although Schmitt and Hammond insisted to me that DriveTribe will be separate from the Amazon Prime show, there remains the possibility that it may have a similar name — over which the trio have been apparently. Meanwhile, James May added: “This is pure digital inclusivity. Some of the world’s most endangered tribes — Volvo enthusiasts, for example — will now have a voice as loud as everyone else’s.” It now transpires that DriveTribe will be based on the created by former Beamly co-founder Anthony Rose, who obviously worked closely with Schmitt. DriveTribe says that it acquired 6tribes earlier this year, and now owns the IP. “Drivetribe will develop the proposition, and add more to it ahead of launch later this year,” said a spokesperson. |
null | Jon Russell | 2,016 | 4 | 22 | null |
You can now watch a ton of Lionsgate movies on Steam if you so choose | Devin Coldewey | 2,016 | 4 | 25 | has just added more than 100 movies, including the Hunger Games films and Kill Bill (both volumes) to, of all things, . That’s Valve’s digital content delivery platform, of course, used by millions of PC gamers. Why did Lionsgate add more than 100 movies to a gaming platform? Hard to say. It’s part of “our commitment to remain at the cutting edge of innovation,” Lionsgate exec Jim Packer says in the . Strange that they waited so many years to do it! Steam was cutting edge in the early 2000s, maybe, but now it’s just a standard and reliable way to get your game fix. It may be a little late to start trying to compete with iTunes. Video delivery has always been part of Steam, but it’s usually previews for games you’re checking out. A handful of big movies have been added over the years, but unless I’m greatly mistaken, there aren’t many people who think of Steam as a movie-watching platform. If you have it already set up on your TV in Big Picture mode, this could be an easy way to watch your favorite Lionsgate films. So, $4 gets you one of the “commercially exciting, star-driven” movies, which is in line with other options (HD, at least) on Google, Amazon and iTunes. The player is no-nonsense, and the movie I rented looked and sounded good to me. I didn’t actually watch an hour and 10 minutes of Kill Bill Vol. 2 before writing this post. I just love Daryl Hannah. It’s “800p” because it’s letterboxed, anamorphic 1080p. Hardcore cinephiles will probably sniff. |
Goldman Sachs launches GS Bank, an Internet bank with a $1 minimum deposit | Fitz Tepper | 2,016 | 4 | 25 | Goldman Sachs has traditionally functioned like a run-of-the-mill investment bank. Minimums to open an account were in the range of $10 million, and returns were not guaranteed. While that will still remain true for the firm’s wealth management arm, Goldman is opening its doors to the masses with the launch of , an FDIC-insured, Internet-based savings bank. And just what do we mean by the masses? Well, anyone with an Internet connection and a dollar — because that is what each account’s minimum balance will be. GS Bank’s interest rates will be high, giving customers an . This rate trumps the average U.S. saving’s bank yield of , but is relatively in line with other online rival banks like Ally, which offers 1 percent APY. Deposit yields from online banks are traditionally much higher than traditional banks, mainly because of the cost savings that come from not having to support brick-and-mortar branches. The bank was born out of Goldman’s acquisition of GE Capital Bank, the online retail bank previously run by General Electric’s capital arm. The launch of GS Bank and acquisition of GE Capital Bank is a move by Goldman to diversify revenue streams and strengthen liquidity in a market where traditional investment banking isn’t doing as well as it has in the past. Currently, GS Bank has total , which pales in comparison to the total deposits of large consumer banks like Wells Fargo and Bank of America. |
Honda and Volvo add more electrification | Kristen Hall-Geisler | 2,016 | 4 | 25 | Honda announced it’s going to expand its Clarity line to include an all-electric version and a plug-in hybrid next year. The latest version of the will be available later this year any way you want it, as along as you want a fuel-cell vehicle. The other two variants will be ready in 2017. Honda’s goal is to have electrified vehicles, including plug-in hybrids and fuel cells, account for two-thirds of its total sales by 2030. Right now, you can buy a Honda Fit EV or an Accord Hybrid, so adding two more models nearly doubles Honda’s electrified offerings, to be Pollyanna-ish about it. Keep in mind that all three Clarity versions are still niche vehicles. Fuel-cell vehicles are pretty much restricted to southern California, where there’s infrastructure to support the new technology. All-electric vehicles have a bit more reach, as many metro areas in the United States are expanding charging infrastructure, but that change is slow in coming. Plug-in hybrids have the most potential for reaching the heartland, as there’s a regular gasoline engine to fall back on after a few miles of all-electric travel. Errands and short commutes can be completed almost entirely on electric power in most plug-in hybrids, but if you live in Montana or Kansas, you’re going to be glad you have a gasoline engine on board. On the same day, announced it will have two hybrid versions of every vehicle in its fleet, and it will release its first fully electric vehicle in 2019. In the press release, company president Hakan Samuelsson said, “Volvo wants to be at the forefront of this shift to electrification.” Given that so many other manufacturers already have at least one hybrid model, if not several, on the road, and there are a dozen or more electric vehicles a person could choose from right now in 2016, that “forefront” ship has already sailed. Volvo is not known for moving quickly and providing a lot of flash, though, so it’s not out of corporate character to spend years preparing for a change this huge. They’ve created two vehicle architectures — one large, one small — that can be fitted with either a hybrid, plug-in hybrid or electric powertrain. The first vehicle to get the electrification treatment is the SUV, which will be available soon, with the S90 full-size sedan to follow. Volvo’s goal is to have 1 million electrified vehicles on the road by 2025 — the same year the company hopes to be climate neutral. |
Hands on with SanDisk’s iPhone storage-expanding flash drive | Brian Heater | 2,016 | 4 | 25 | The is an odd thing to behold, a strange Frankensteinian amalgam of adapters fused together and folded over for good measure. It’s another interesting concept out of SanDisk as the company attempts to stay nimble in a world of rapidly dropping storage costs and increasing reliance on cloud backups. The iXpand is a new, slimmer take on a product released in 2014, trading in a boxy design for a more portable footprint that is half USB dongle, one-quarter Lightning connector and one quarter curved rubbery bit. As is pretty clear from the design, the peripheral serves as a link between an iOS device and a computer, both for backing up files on an iPhone/iPad and working as expandable storage, so you can watch movies on your mobile device without having to wipe the rest of its precious 16GB of built-in storage. The former is more of a backup of a backup. You should be backing up your stuff in the cloud and on your computer already, but the iXpand offers a little added insurance, along with the ability to quickly transfer large files that would otherwise require additional fees for cloud storage. The latter is the more compelling case use, as anyone with a 16GB iPhone will gladly bend your ear about at length. Of course, whether or not the ability to add on expandable memory is worth $50 (16GB) to $130 (128GB) a pop is another question entirely. Either way, it’s an important lesson in thinking long and hard about whether or not to pay for an internal storage bump for your device during checkout, or else be doomed to rely on dongles for the foreseeable future. SanDisk has revamped the app for the , and the whole process is pretty much plug and play (well, plug, download the app and then play). It’ll back up photos, videos, music and other files, organizing then into neat little folders that can be accessed when plugged into an iOS device or computer. The app can also be set to perform automatic backups every time it’s plugged in and can back up photos from Facebook, Instagram and Picasa, should you see fit to give it access. The drive features its own video player, so videos can be played directly from the peripheral. You can record directly to it, as well, if you’d like to bypass the mobile device’s storage altogether. One important caveat to all of this: The slimmer body is thanks, in part, to the dropping of the internal battery found on the previous generation, so the iPad/iPhone’s own built-in battery will drain that much faster if you spend a lot of time watching videos. |
How social entrepreneurship is making a difference in the world | Bérénice Magistretti | 2,016 | 4 | 25 | accustomed to the Silicon Valley zeal driving startups to develop new technologies that will disrupt the market in yet another way. In other parts of the world, people are faced with different kinds of “problems.” They aren’t so much worried about finding an app that will water their plants — their actual concern is finding water. An example, among many others, is India.
Nearly three-fourths of all diseases in India are caused by water contaminants, yet many Indians still lack access to clean drinking water. This health issue has been addressed by several organizations, one of which is . Founded in 2008 by Anand Shah and seeded by the , Sarvajal means “water for all” in Sanskrit. This social enterprise designs and deploys innovative solutions to create affordable access to safe drinking water in underserved areas of India. They are currently reaching out to about 300,000 consumers daily, through 570+ installations across 12 states. What stands out from their business is their market-based approach. While other organizations rely solely on donations or government subsidies, Sarvajal has added another vertical to its model that operates on a transaction basis. In each community where they operate, Sarvajal sets up a purification plant, as well as a unique Water ATM model that uses smart cards to create price transparency, which ensures the effective post-purification water distribution. Twenty liters of Sarvajal drinking water costs the same as a cup of tea (about 12 cents). One of their main challenges was raising awareness around this health-related issue. Locals needed to understand that spending money on clean water can save much more in healthcare costs. “This was handled on a face-to-face basis by talking to consumers directly,” explains Vasu Padmanabhan, CEO of Sarvajal. “We also used other, more innovative communication methods, like wall paintings and local vehicles equipped with a large speaker to diffuse the message in the streets, often with the support of doctors.” Finding water is one thing, but sometimes, there isn’t any water to find. Isabel Medem, who was born of a Peruvian mother, decided to address one of the underlying issues that people living in the slums of Lima are facing: sanitation. “Lima is the second driest capital in the world, therefore water toilets are not a sustainable solution,” Medem says. And so, in 2012, Isabel and co-founder Jessica Altenburger, both in their 30s, decided to launch , a lasting sanitation solution for low-income, urban households in Lima. The concept is simple: Interested customers sign up to a subscription service amounting to a total of $13 a month, which they pay in “bodegas,” or bank agents. The dry toilet, imported from a , is then delivered to their home and installed for their use. Because there is no flushing involved, the feces are collected from the buckets on a weekly basis and converted into compost. “It’s a simple solution, but a real one,” explains Medem. Since its inception, the startup has raised more than $1 million in funding. This includes seed capital from angel investors, grants from foundations and governments and, more recently, a cash prize from , a local startup competition they won. Because their business is a customer-oriented one, x-runner has decided to partner with this year — a smart move that will help them manage their expanding client base. Waste, be it feces or trash, is a common problem in developing countries. People don’t always know what to do with it, or aren’t aware of the fact that it can be converted, either by recycling or upcycling. project in Nepal is striving to do just that: raise awareness around waste. This social initiative for waste paper management was launched by the in 2002, and was recently taken over by a Nepalese-based startup called . The idea is simple: Corporations and organizations subscribe to a type of membership based on the number of employees they have. A general membership, for example, offered to a company that has up to 50 employees, amounts to an annual fee of $50. Companies with more than 300 employees will receive a Gold membership, totaling $200 yearly. Current members include the World Bank, the UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR) and Etihad Airways. The Green Circle team picks up the paper waste from its member organizations on a weekly or monthly basis, depending on what the members prefer. “Our project helped collect more than 8 tons of paper since 2014. We were able to reuse 4 tons out of it and recycle 3.2 tons of paper that went back into the market,” said Nabin Bikash Maharjan, CEO of Blue Waste to Value. “Member organizations and their staff are now familiar with the value of waste paper and have adapted their businesses to adopt a greener approach.” Once the paper is collected, it is then segregated, sent for processing, recycled and manufactured into sellable products like paper bags, stationary, photo albums and more. In the production process, household women from the community are trained and employed, thereby providing them with an income-generating activity. Products will soon be available for purchase online on The Green Circle’s upcoming new website. Empowering women is one of the best ways to stimulate an economy — and empowerment often starts with education. Democratizing education to give access to all, regardless of age, race or sex, is one of the pivotal pillars that social entrepreneurs around the world are working on. This is what Toni Maraviglia, a former teacher, and Kago Kagichiri, a tech guru, have been striving to achieve in Africa. In 2012, the two launched , an edtech platform that started in Kenya and has now spread to Ghana and Tanzania. The idea? Delivering tailored and relevant educational content to students via three different platforms: regular web, smartphone (via Android) or SMS via a (basic mobile phone). Giving them the option is a smart move. “It’s easier to reach people on SMS because the subscription is deducted from their phone credit. Many of our users don’t have credit cards to buy apps from app stores. We’re exploring billing through mobile money to tackle this problem for smartphones,” explains Kago Kagichiri, Eneza’s CTO. The company has partnered with some of the major mobile network operators in the region, making the whole process easier for students who can subscribe by using their phone credit. With more than 800,000 active users in March, the venture is continuously growing, aiming to expand to Nigeria and South Africa by the end of 2017. They have already received seed funding in the amount of $890,000 from angel and impact investors, and are about to close a Series A round of funding. But social entrepreneurs aren’t only active in developing countries like the ones cited above. Even countries like oil-rich Saudi Arabia have social issues that need to be addressed. The Saudi government discloses little official data about its population, but a report released by the World Bank in 2013 estimated a poverty rate of 12.7 percent. The healthcare system is well-established in the Kingdom; all Saudi nationals receive free health insurance. The problem is that some poorer communities do not have the health awareness that others may have, and may not know where to seek medical services. This is where Dr. Shaista Hussain and Princess Sama Faissal Al Saud step in. Through the , launched last year, the two women hope to raise awareness around health issues. They have already held three workshops since the beginning of the year to train eager volunteers in basic medical and clinical practices. The co-founders also created a data collection app as a support system for the volunteers, who can then use it to gather the patient’s medical information. The app was launched in January and is available on the and . Based on an SQL database format, it allows volunteers to determine how urgent the patient’s condition is via a color-coded system. Depending on the information entered, the algorithm will display either a yellow flag, which means the patient likely needs urgent care, or a red flag, indicating immediate emergency care. The volunteers will then refer the patient to the closest hospital. Centralizing medical data through technical innovation could play a big part in modernizing Saudi Arabia’s medical system. “The neural network of technological advances has made it possible for a multitude of creative solutions and innovations to improve our world,” says Dr. Hussein. “Social entrepreneurship is a product of this new digital age, empowering males and females alike to transcend traditional physical boundaries and express themselves on a global stage.” |
Cyan Banister has a new startup, and it’s looking for seed funding | Connie Loizos | 2,016 | 4 | 25 | Cyan Banister realized long ago that , a subscription-based online community of artistic nude, glamour and pin-up photography that she founded in 2007, was never going to be a highly profitable endeavor. That’s okay with her, too. In an interview last week, Banister — known for the many angel investments she and husband Scott Banister have made over the years and more newly for her role as a at Founders Fund — told us Zivity was “always growing, but never at a crazy rate.” Indeed, nine years after it was created, it has amassed 3,000 subscribers who pay the site on average $250 a year to access its various photo sets. Now, Banister and Zivity’s longtime general manager-turned-CEO, Nadya Lev, think they’ve struck on a more lucrative opportunity that can not only shine a light on the creative class but help artists get paid, too. Their new company is called and it’s looking for $1.5 million in seed funding to see how far it can get over the next 18 months. It could make for an interesting bet. ThankRoll is essentially a service that offers a convenient way for fans of artists, blogs and others to support those products and services through a white-label widget that appears on the artists’ or blogs’ site. Fans just enter their credit card information; they can cancel their pledge any time they like. Laughing Squid is the company’s first customer, and you can see what its particular pledge button looks like here. “We were inspired by what Kickstarter has done,” explained Banister, who acknowledges that plenty of tipping mechanisms have been tried in the past but says one of ThankRoll’s secret ingredients is to throw in special sweeteners. Someone who pledges a monthly donation to a certain site might receive an invitation to the content creator’s invite-only yearly barbecue, for example. Or a musician might call a fan on the phone or let fans collaborate with him or her in some way. Further, unlike, say, , a three-year-old platform that enables fans and sponsors to give ongoing support to artists and creators (and which has raised $47 million in funding so far), ThankRoll is enabling and encouraging artists to receive recurring support on their site, rather than hosting their campaign with ThankRoll. Whether these incentives are enough to prompt more pledges on a meaningful scale remains to be seen, but Banister says that she and Lev decided to spin the business out of Zivity after launching it on the platform and watching hundreds of its artists begin using it within weeks. They collectively drummed up an extra $55,000 within the first 60 days, in fact. If you’re interested in giving it a try, ThankRoll is now embeddable for creators using WordPress, Tumblr, Squarespace and other platforms. Note: There is no minimum pledge. Also, ThankRoll, which already employs five people and is using Stripe for its payment processing, takes a five percent cut from every transaction. The artists cover credit card fees. |
Obama spends a little time in the ‘brave new world’ of virtual reality | Lucas Matney | 2,016 | 4 | 25 | When you’re the leader of the free world who has been keeping an eagle eye on liberty and domestic surveillance for the past 7-8 years, sometimes you just want to take a look at a new version of reality. Obama tried virtual reality this weekend with his occasional frenemy Angela Merkel at an industrial technology trade fair in Hanover, Germany. He reacted to the technology by saying that it was a “brave new world.” Virtual reality: President Barack Obama and Chancellor Angela Merkel sample the latest tech in Hanover — AFP news agency (@AFP) What exactly does he have on his face here? He’s rocking a bit more of a sophisticated setup than your typical Google Cardboard headset. Check out the camera on the top of the viewer that’s connected to the smartphone. The manufacturer of the camera, , boasts that the device is the pico flexx and is the “world’s smallest 3D camera system.” The depth-sending camera creates a 3D point cloud of the environment in front of the headset allowing average consumers like Barack Obama to add hand-tracking to their mobile virtual reality experiences. The company is interestingly the depth-sensing partner of Google for the Project Tango augmented reality partner, but this product is its first foray into building a platform on Cardboard. Cardboard may not be the most powerful VR platform, but it’s very cool to see the Prez take it for a whirl. Obama has previously to having a virtual golfing range in the White House. Perhaps in his retired years he can get old Oculus or HTC to get him all set up with a VR golfing experience. |
Rackspace brings AppFormix’s cloud optimization platform to its private cloud | Frederic Lardinois | 2,016 | 4 | 25 | today announced that it is partnering with to bring that company’s cloud monitoring and performance optimization tools to its private OpenStack cloud customers. Thanks to this partnership, Rackspace will now license AppFormix’s and bring it to all of its private cloud customers who use Rackspace to manage their clouds. This will give them access to AppFormix’s real-time monitoring, analytics and optimization tools (and Rackspace’s engineers will also use these to manage cloud for their customers). For RackSpace, this is a somewhat unusual move. The company typically builds its own tools for managing the technical side of its cloud businesses (and it was the founding member of the OpenStack project, together with NASA). When I asked Bryan Thompson, RackSpace’s senior director of product management, for its OpenStack Private Cloud business, what made him choose AppFormix instead of building the product itself, he told me the company definitely looked at building its own tools. “With AppFormix, we had a team that was solely focused on this,” he told me. “We met with the team and realized the caliber of the folks working on this. It was a great alignment with the things that we were trying to achieve and it accelerated anything we were trying to build ourselves.” That’s pretty much exactly the same kind of reasoning I hear when I ask large companies why they acquired a startup and Thompson acknowledge that the thought of an acquisition had definitely “cross some people’s mind.” As AppFormix CEO and founder Sumeet Singh added, his company isn’t solely betting on OpenStack either, of course, and also supports the Google-incubated Kubernetes container management service (though it’s worth noting that Kubernetes and OpenStack play together rather nicely these days). AppFormix raised a $7 million Series A round led by August Capital and has since landed key partnerships with Intel and others to bring its service to more customers. |
Astronomers discover three exoplanets similar to Earth and Venus | Emily Calandrelli | 2,016 | 5 | 3 | Astronomers are getting closer to finding Earth’s twin in the universe. NASA that three planets with sizes and temperatures similar to Earth and Venus have been discovered orbiting around an ultra-cool dwarf star 40 light-years from Earth. While astronomers believe there are many billions of planets in the universe, only 1,966 (planets outside our solar system) have been . And only a small number of those are thought to be Earth-like enough to potentially harbor life. Astronomers are on a constant quest to find Earth’s twin and while the three exoplanets in question aren’t quiet there, they’re close. The two inner planets are too close to their host star to be in the “habitable-zone,” which is the zone around a star where a planet could sustain liquid water on its surface – a key ingredient for life as we know it. But NASA says it is “still possible that they possess potentially habitable regions on their surfaces.” Illustration of “Habitable Zone” concept courtesy of NASA The third planet however, holds more promise. Astronomers believe that despite the fact that it probably receives less radiation than Earth, it could be within the habitable zone. More work will need to be done to gain a better understanding of that planet and its orbital characteristics. The three exoplanets were discovered using the transit method, which involves analyzing the brightness of a star’s light over time. If an orbiting planet passes between its star and the Earth, that star’s light will appear to dim a small, but measurable amount from our perspective. This passage is called a transit and the transit method is a common strategy employed by astronomers to discover new exoplanets. Image courtesy of NASA Michaël Gillon from the led a team of astronomers who found that the exoplanet’s host star, now known as TRAPPIST-1, faded slightly at regular intervals. TRAPPIST-1, named for the that was used to discover the three exoplanets, is a star that is much cooler, redder, and smaller than the Sun. In fact, it’s just larger than the planet Jupiter. The Hawai’i-based UKIRT Telescope was used to confirm the existence of the three exoplanets / Image courtesy of NASA Interestingly, the planets are between 20 and 100 times closer their host star than Earth is to the Sun. However, because TRAPPIST-1 is so much smaller than the Sun, the inner planets only receive four and twice the amount of radiation as Earth does while the outer planet likely receives a little less radiation than Earth. Now that the three exoplanets have been identified, follow-up observations will be made to determine if life exists on any of their surfaces. Or to be more specific, if life existed 40 years ago, since the images and light from that star’s planetary system has taken 40 years to reach Earth. K2, the Kepler ’s (launched in 2009) second mission, and NASA’s (launched in 1990) are the two space-based telescopes that will be used to further observe the TRAPPIST-1 system. By measuring the starlight filtered through each planet’s atmosphere, the Hubble Space Telescope can characterize their atmospheric composition. Based on the chemical signature, scientists can make a better prediction as to whether life exists on those planets. K2 will be used to better understand the orbital characteristics of each exoplanet and ultimately their masses. While the jury is still out on whether these planets harbor life, they’ve joined the short-list of promising exoplanet candidates that astronomers will continue to observe and search for signs of life as we know it. James Webb Space Telescope primary mirror fully assembled / Image courtesy of NASA In a few years, astronomers will have an even better tool to study these promising exoplanets. The James Webb Space Telescope will launch in 2018 and has an infrared sensitivity capable of searching for traces of biological activity. |
Asia’s mobile-first economy and how the West is feeling the effects | Matthew Dibb | 2,016 | 5 | 3 |
Asia Pacific leads the global digital infrastructure as home to half of the world’s mobile phone subscribers and the largest number of wireless Internet connections. However, the region also has historically attracted less than one-third of global mobile marketing spend — making its role in the digital economy largely underrepresented amongst its Western counterparts. The potential for that role to change was galvanized by a late-2014 Google survey, which highlighted that mobile penetration in Asia was far greater than any other region in the world, even surpassing computer use, thus ushering in Asia’s “mobile-first” consumer. As we approach the 10-year anniversary of the smartphone era, are there further lessons to be gleaned from Asia’s mobile-first economy? The mobile-first consumer has fueled double-digit annual sales growth over the past five years for Asia Pacific tech companies — twice the pace of traditional retailers in the region. Although the growth trajectory is similar to the North American experience, differences in underlying drivers have the potential to elevate Asia Pacific’s sphere of influence in the digital economy. While North American technology players have traditionally relied heavily on advertising, the Asian tech scene is more diverse. The West’s largest online companies — and — generate more than 90 percent of their revenue via advertising. By comparison, Asia’s largest player, , doesn’t even operate on an advertising model, and the region’s next largest incumbent, , relies on advertising for less than 20 percent of its income. As a result, popular consumer mobile apps in the region, such as , and , are synonymous with multipurpose functionality, incorporating e-commerce, payments processing, games and other digital goods and services. Their success has been a recent source of inspiration among Western counterparts, with , , and Facebook all launching actionable “buy it” buttons in their platforms during 2015. Are these initiatives set to open new rivers of gold for the West’s social media incumbents? To date, the West’s foray into social commerce remains in the experimental phases. To soften investor curiosity, industry leader Facebook has promoted its new functionality as a mechanism to enhance the value of existing advertising services rather than as an independent monetization strategy. While Facebook and Alphabet command half of all mobile advertising dollars, the pursuit of alternative revenue strategies may remain a covert affair. The region’s two most active private equity houses — Sequoia and Tiger Global — have together during the last six months helped anchor for local tech startups funding rounds nearing $2 billion. If their portfolio allocations are a proxy for near-term trends in the region, enterprise software, agency and financial services are set to become a greater part of the East’s mobile commerce mix. Accounting for 40 percent of recent deals in the region, on-demand services are driving a boom in agency funding. Also referred to as online to offline (O2O) businesses, the likes of and have pioneered this model in the West. However, in a hallmark characteristic of the East, local incarnations are not just relying on the pure agency model to drive revenue. Indian car hire provider marked the region’s most significant agency deal over the past six months with a $500 million funding round in September from a consortium that included Tiger Global. Proceeds are helping the company broaden its horizons with the launch in November of a new payments service, Ola Money. A reverse situation appears to be transpiring at . After operating an enterprise management platform for doctors and medical clinics since 2008, the business now has an ancillary opportunity on the consumer side to facilitate on-demand medical bookings and advice. Practo attracted $90 million in August from a consortium that included , Tencent Holdings and, interestingly, . Practo Technologies represents the largest Asia Pacific tech deal in which Google has participated (to date). It also is the largest deal involving Google outside the U.S. and U.K. As smartphones approach their 10-year anniversary, could this be a sign of even larger deals ahead? Horizontal integration is poised to become a critical theme in the West as the value of North American tech IPOs reached a three-year low during Q1 2016. As competition for funding and users ultimately tighten, one-dimensional consumer applications that are characteristic of the West may pave the way to multiple functionalities in the pursuit of additional revenue. The “buy it” buttons experiments embarked on by Pinterest, Twitter, Instagram and Facebook during 2015 have yet to reach a verdict. The risk facing multi-revenue pursuits is a complication of the user experience. However, could hesitations from consumers to utilize the multiple functionalities, e.g. “buy it” buttons, create opportunity for more nimble, focused players? Such players to enter the space, specifically in the Asia Pacific region, include on-demand services and e-commerce startups, including , , and in Singapore. These startups are shaping revenue pursuits based on a deep understanding of the audience, catering to localized consumer services. While we are seeing startups engineer products around defined markets, it’s still a nascent trend in the West for consumers to engage in multi-dimensional platforms. However, as opportunity beckons for masters of their audience, this new wave of engineering could provide a natural stepping stone for consumer apps in North America. |
IBM launches quantum computing as a cloud service | Ron Miller | 2,016 | 5 | 3 | Quantum computing is still very much in the early research stage, but IBM is hoping to accelerate the progress around it by making a quantum computer available to researchers as a cloud service. It is a bold and ambitious idea, although still very much a small step in trying to understand quantum computing processing. IBM is allowing interested parties to access a 5 qubit quantum computer it’s calling . The actual hardware is sitting in the IBM Research Lab in New York State. IBM is providing a programming interface and the ability to run experimental programs on an actual quantum computer. Among the challenges here are that quantum computers take enormous cooling systems that in some cases are colder than outer space (we’re talking seriously cold). What’s more, they maintain so much information, none of which is necessarily static, keeping all of that information available long enough for meaningful analysis is an enormous task. These challenges are akin to balancing an egg on the tip of a pencil, then figuring out why it fell, Jerry Chow, Manager of the Experimental Quantum Computing Group at IBM Research explained. The programming language IBM created for this project operates almost like writing music. The programmer can simply drag quantum objects to the “staff” to write a program. Photo Credit: Courtesy of Charles King, principal analyst at Pund-IT, Inc. says quantum computers are different from conventional computers in a couple of essential ways. “For one, while conventional systems are designed on binary principles (where opening/closing semiconductor gates represents on/off, or 0/1) quantum systems utilize “qubits’ which can be on, off or both on and off. In theory, that will allow resulting systems to perform functions on data utilizing phenomena from quantum mechanics, such as superposition and entanglement,” King explained to TechCrunch in an email. IBM has created its own quantum chip running at 5 qubits. Chow estimates that it could take a machine running between 50 and 100 qubits to surpass the capabilities of today’s fastest super computers. We have a ways to go here, but this is a good starting point. But getting there is harder than simply following Moore’s Law with digital computers on silicon chips. While IBM is still using silicon, there are a couple of huge hurdles involved in getting more consistent usage. First of all there is building the computer and second figuring out how to program it, Earl Joseph, who covers high performance computing for IDC explained in an email. “This experiment provides the opportunity for a large group of people to start to learn how to program quantum computers, which will help to develop ways to use this new type of technology,” Joseph wrote. He points out there are other such experiments in progress. “NASA Ames and Google are doing some very interesting work. The large home run will be from a more general purpose and large size quantum computer. I think it will be an evolutionary process, with more applications coming on line every few years.” The hope is that by offering this tool, it will help propel interest and understanding of quantum computing and create a community of interested individuals, institutions and researchers who can work together to advance knowledge about these computers in the coming years. |
Well, it’s practical: Google’s next self-driving car is a Chrysler minivan | Devin Coldewey | 2,016 | 5 | 3 | There’s a lot to like about Google’s own self-driving cars, but if you’ve got kids, you’d need a fleet just to get them to the soccer game and back. That, presumably, is why the Google initiative’s first direct collaboration with an automaker will automate a nice, roomy new Pacifica minivan. Not only is the mileage great (it’s a hybrid) but there’s ! But more importantly for Google, it’s a very different type of vehicle from what the project has tested thus far, although the Lexus SUVs used early on were fairly traditional. “The minivan design also gives us an opportunity to test a larger vehicle that could be easier for passengers to enter and exit, particularly with features like hands-free sliding door,” . So while point-to-point travel for individuals is certainly on the table for future Google autonomous vehicles, the company is clearly looking into broader applications that require a different approach. Self-driving cars could be incredibly useful for disabled or aged people, for instance, but the question of accessibility — wheelchair accommodation, an interface for the seeing-impaired, etc. — immediately appears. A big platform like the Pacifica is a more realistic test bed for exploring such considerations. Around 100 vehicles will be specially prepared by Fiat Chrysler Automobiles to work with Google’s sensor suite. For the present, they’ll be limited to testing on the company’s California test track. |
Subsets and Splits
No community queries yet
The top public SQL queries from the community will appear here once available.