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Apple opens India-based development center to work on its maps services | Jon Russell | 2,016 | 5 | 18 | Apple CEO Tim Cook is in the middle a busy trip to Asia’s two biggest countries. Last week, he was in China where , this week it is India where the announcements are continuing to flow. Yesterday, in Bangalore, and today it , the same city where . This is Apple’s first such facility in India. Plans for the center in January, and Apple today confirmed that it will be focused on developing its maps services for iOS. The U.S. firm plans to create up to 4,000 jobs to staff the center, although it isn’t clearly exactly how it will contribute to Apple’s maps services. Apple is increasing its efforts in India, where it has less than one percent of the fast-growing smartphone market. I wrote more about the company’s challenges in India yesterday, so head over to that post ( ) if you want more context behind today’s announcement. |
Microsoft brings Skype to businesses’ iOS and Android apps | Sarah Perez | 2,016 | 5 | 20 | Microsoft is further opening up Skype to businesses. On Thursday, the company its – tools which allow iOS and Android developers to integrate Skype’s messaging, audio and voice capabilities into their own mobile applications. The idea is to allow Skype to power the communications experience inside applications, so developers can focus on building their product’s unique features. This is an area other messaging-focused startups also tackle to some extent, including former and, more recently, , for example. Microsoft’s solution, however, is aimed at larger enterprises. Skype for Business SDK customers can continue to use their existing infrastructure, like Skype for Business Server or Skype for Business Online – depending on if the company has deployed Unified Communications on their own servers, or if they’re relying on Microsoft’s cloud. In addition, companies adopting the Skype for Business SDK can continue to use their existing native clients to reach their customers, However, during this SDK preview period, the focus for the integrations is on “remote advisor” functionality. That is, businesses who want to interact with remote customers over their mobile phones and tablets in order to chat, call or video chat. You may remember an example of this functionality was when the company showed off a telehealth app created by . In the app, doctors offered patients virtual care via video calling sessions. They can also share and review medical records, lab results, send messages, and more. Patients, meanwhile, can book, schedule then connect with doctors for real-time chats right in the application at their appointment time. Healthcare isn’t the only scenario where a “remote advisor” makes sense, of course. The platform could also be used by financial advisors, customer service, and a variety of other enterprise applications. Microsoft says that if the company is licensed for Skype for Business Server or Skype for Business Online, then there are no additional costs for the use of the SDKs. The SDK is available for download . |
Razer is opening its first U.S. concept store in San Francisco this weekend | Jon Russell | 2,016 | 5 | 18 | Razer, , is finally opening its first concept store in the U.S. this weekend. The company already has three locations in Asia — Taipei, Manila and Bangkok — and its first store in the U.S. will be located at the Westfield San Francisco Centre. Razer is throwing a party to mark the opening, which will see CEO Min-Liang Tan and special guests like Xbox’s Major Nelson stop by to meet and chat with fans. If you’ve never been to a Razer concept store, then you’re in for a treat — even if you’re not the kind of hardcore gamer who is . and were suitably impressed. They are designed to be spaces where gamers can meet friends, hang out and, of course, play games. Visitors can buy Razer merchandise and products, but there are no sales staff pushing products down your throat — the onus really is on experiences and there’s no time limit so you can stay and geek out on games for as long as you want. The opening party in San Francisco starts at 10:00 on Saturday morning — you can find more details on Razer’s Facebook page or via .
When we met Tan in Bangkok last year, he told us that Razer was working to open concept stores in the U.S. and across Europe, so, if you’re not in San Franisco, the experience may yet come to a city near you soon. |
Gogoprint wants to modernize online printing in Southeast Asia | Jon Russell | 2,016 | 5 | 18 | is a new company based in Thailand that wants to bring the benefits of the Internet to the printing industry in Southeast Asia. Traditional print houses have no doubt suffered at the hands of the growth of the internet and the rise of home printers, but a number of companies are using digital to breathe new life into the business. Nasdaq-listed , Germany’s and London-based are three examples that take orders online and fulfill them using traditional print shops. The idea is that, once you reach scale, it is possible to find a level of efficiency that was impossible offline. That’s because print companies collect a large volume of orders which allows them to combine different customers request to fill each print sheet to capacity. ‘Batching’ prints together, as the process is called, means that less space is wasted on a print sheet, which would traditionally run some way below capacity. That level of efficiency enables online printing companies to process more orders with fewer print runs — that translates to much lower prices for customers and higher profit margins for the business. It also gives printers guaranteed volume, too. So far, most of the focus has been on large markets like Europe and North America — although Vistaprint did enter Latin America in 2014 with . Why the long backstory? Gogoprint believes it can bring learnings and business models from the West to Asia, and the company has already gained the backing of a key Printi investor. Since launching in November 2015, Gogoprint has raised a mid-six-figure U.S. dollar investment from OPG (Online Printing Group), an investment firm from Kai Hagenbuch, an early backer of Printi. OPG is dedicated to finding and funding online printing companies in emerging markets, which Gogoprint founders and — both originally from Germany — told TechCrunch is very key. “They are more experienced than us and understand that building companies in emerging markets is fundamentally different,” Berghaeuser, who was formerly with Rocket Internet’s Zalora business, said. Gogoprint currently has a team of less than 20 which serve the domestic market in Bangkok. The target customer is business users, rather than consumers, and for now it offers printing for paper-based products such as business cards, flyers and brochures which are delivered 48 hours after order. Gogoprint is starting out in Thailand, where both Suss and Berghaeuser have resided for the past few years, but it has plans to be regional. They estimate the printing industry in Southeast Asia to be worth $25 billion annually, with smaller customers like SMEs “heavily underserved” by existing solutions. For that expansion to happen, the company is looking to raise a Series A funding round in the second half of this year. “We’re not talking about one or two countries, we’re talking about the whole region. So [if] you want to go into five countries, you need some capital for that,” Suss, a former Ernst & Young auditor who has run multiple online commerce businesses, said. When it comes to going regional, the German founders plan to replicate their local printing model in each country. That means going out to meet printers and explaining that they can bring them new business, not to mention hiring locals to found the business in each country. Local printing makes more sense than running everything through Bangkok, Suss said, because of faster fulfillment speed and no need for overseas shipping which raises costs. As of now, the Gogoprint founders are weighing up which countries to enter next based on factors such as competition, market pricing and cost of production. But they could move into new countries as soon as July this year. Beyond geographical expansion, they are also looking to move into other kinds of printing, including banners, stickers and more. Since many businesses come to them with intent to run marketing or promotional campaigns, Suss and Berghaeuser said they might consider offering related services such as flyer campaigns or design consultancy via partnerships with local players. They are also working to open a dispatch office in Bangkok to manage the movement of their print runs more efficiently. |
Theranos reportedly voids two years of results from its Edison blood-testing devices | Catherine Shu | 2,016 | 5 | 18 | Troubled bio-tech startup has told the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) it voided two years of results from the blood tests that it once staked its future on, . All results taken from its Edison blood-testing devices in 2014 and 2015 were thrown out and updated reports sent to doctors. The Edison blood test was considered disruptive because it , and was one of the main reasons the startup . According to the WSJ, Theranos also told the CMS—which is currently investigating the startup for compliance issues—that it has issued tens of thousands of corrected blood test reports to doctors and patients, with some results voided and others revised. These reports include data from both Edison devices and traditional lab machines. In an emailed statement, Theranos spokesperson Brooke Buchanan said, “Excellence in quality and patient safety is our top priority and we’ve taken comprehensive corrective measures to address the issues CMS raised in their observations. As these matters are currently under review, we have no further comment at this time.” TechCrunch has also contacted the CMS for comment. Tossing out reports and issuing thousands of new ones is one of the biggest steps Theranos has taken as it tries to avoid sanctions from the CMS. Unfortunately, it also means that health providers and patients relying on the voided tests may have made faulty medical decisions. The WSJ spoke to several doctors near Phoenix, Arizona who said they had received corrected reports, including one physician who sent a patient to the emergency room based on erroneous results from Theranos. The CMS is just one of currently investigating Theranos for issues connected to its diagnostic tests and business operations. The CMS investigation at Theranos’ main lab in Newark, California and for Elizabeth Holmes, the company’s founder, and Sunny Balwani, its former president. Balwani . |
For Tattoo obsessives, Tattoodo adds an app to its arsenal | Mike Butcher | 2,016 | 5 | 18 | Tattoo culture has pretty much gone mainstream. Tattooing is the sixth fastest growing market in the retail industry with about 30% of Americans getting them now. Thus started out as a “digital lifestyle hub for all things tattoo-related,” with content, community and a marketplace. Think Pinterest for Tattoos, almost. Back in February we reported that the Copenhagen-based startup had raised $2.5 million from a number of high-profile investors including AOL’s Jimmy Maymann (President of AOL Content and Consumer Brands), Tom Ryan (CEO, Pluto TV), Jake Nickell (CEO, Threadless), Rene Rechtman (International President, Maker Studios) and some other executives. I wonder what Jimmy has… It’s now , on iOS and Android, which carries thousands of galleries, user profiles and other things to attract tattoo collectors and artists. It features Tattoo celebrities like Mike Rubendall, Megan Massacre and Henning Jørgensen; new designs, fashion styles, and artists. Basically if you are in to tattoos, this app has you covered… badum-tish. Entrepreneurs Johan Plenge and Mik Thobo-Carlsen launched Tattoodo in Copenhagen in 2013 and were later joined by world-famous tattoo artist Ami James. |
Moving from population-based health to precision medicine with Orion Health | Ben Kepes | 2,016 | 5 | 18 |
is a New Zealand-founded (now global) provider of technology products developed for the health sector. founder and CEO, , is a passionate advocate for a new way of doing business. He argues that current approaches to patient information are akin to the Victorian era, when a surgeon’s blood-stained uniform was a source of great pride because it showed medical expertise. In McCrae’s view, today’s approach to prescribing drugs, the so-called population-based approach, is harmful. As McCrae sees it, clinicians don’t have access to the totality of information available about a patient and, hence, have to use very course treatment protocols. He quotes research published in Nature Journal that found that of the 10 most popular drugs prescribed in the U.S., only a limited number actually help patients — as low as one in 25 patients in some cases. McCrae believes that a unique set of circumstances is creating an opportunity to move to precision medicine. Firstly, medical and testing technology is moving in leaps and bounds — the availability of not only traditional testing, such as blood and imaging, but also newer approaches such as genetic sequencing. The development of even deeper testing and information gathering will, in his view, create the lion’s share of total information that is held about an individual health consumer in the future. Cloud computing, and the ability it gives to process and store bulk information quickly, easily and cheaply, is another factor. An aging population, and the need to provide better outcomes for an increasingly at-risk population, is another. And, finally, policy changes will have an impact, such as President Obama’s push toward more results-based health funding. With all of these trends occurring around the same time, there is perhaps a unique opportunity to create a new way of providing health that is as transformation as the post-Victorian discovery of sepsis and the need for a clean environment to avoid cross infection and contamination. This is the opportunity that Orion Health was set up to leverage. The company, which is publicly listed on the New Zealand Stock Exchange, employs more than 1,250 people globally and has, to date, ingested close to 120 million medical records of individual patients. Commercial partnerships see it poised to ingest close to another 200 million records. That is a staggering amount of data, even based on the more traditional, and hence incomplete, approaches to health data. Four-hundred million individuals’ prescription and assessment records, medical imaging and blood records makes up for a vast and useful aggregation of data. And the vastness of this data will only grow. McCrae believes the “digital body” — that is, the totality of data around an individual when genetic and exogenous (environmental, nutritional, social) factors relating to health data become available — will be in excess of 1 TB per person. And this is where the cloud comes in — 1 TB is simply too much data to be stored by an individual clinician, regardless of the other pitfalls of doing so (like being unable to collaborate with other health professionals). Rather, this data will be set on massive health IT platforms like that which Orion has built. And by sitting on these platforms, a treasure trove of insight is able to be generated from aggregated (and, yes, anonymized and suitably secured in terms of privacy) data. As President Obama stated a few months ago during a White House forum on precision medicine: “…the key to all of this is for us to be able to build up databases. And because all of us potentially could have electronic medical records that voluntarily — with strong privacy protections — we pool together so that researchers, practitioners, scientists can share, we may be able to accelerate the process of discovering cures in ways that we’ve never seen before.” McCrae is bullish that his company will be a leader in this new field of precision medicine. Around 30 percent of the $100 million-plus revenue that Orion generates per annum is poured back into research and development, and the company is expanding its international footprint, and partnerships with other vendors, rapidly. It has large health-provider customers in the U.K., the U.S. and its home market of Australasia, and it is actively working on solutions that can move beyond the digitization of medical records, to the pooling of those records for deeper analysis and insight. One thing is sure: Health IT in the future will be very different from what it is today, and unimaginably so from those Victorian times that seem so archaic now. Orion Health has an interesting part to play in that journey. |
Meet the 8th class of hardware startups from HAX | Lora Kolodny | 2,016 | 5 | 18 | An accelerator called held its 8th Demo Day for hardware startups in San Francisco yesterday. Best known for bringing companies in its portfolio to Shenzhen, China for about 15 weeks to get to know everything they can about manufacturing there, Hax is funded by SOS Ventures. The firm spins out accelerators to focus on different problems or technologies about every two years and is also the force behind synthetic biology accelerator . HAX invests $25,000 to $100,000 for a 6-9 percent stake in companies that it admits to its program. SOSV will invest even more in select follow-on rounds led by other investors. HAX founder and SOSV Partner said that in this last cycle, applications from sophisticated robotics and healthtech companies soared, but the accelerator saw fewer applications from companies making 3D printers. It still fielded plenty of applications from the makers of fitness trackers and drones, but accepted fewer of these hardware companies into the program. A challenge that all early-stage hardware startups are facing, he said, is the rising cost of manufacturing services in China. He elaborated: “Startups may go to Shenzhen for manufacturing, but what they end up with is low cost and high-speed product development. Because of all that engineering, prototyping and design expertise, Shenzhen is still the best place for manufacturing in the world. But over time, we see automation making manufacturing and assembly affordable and fast in other places. And at the same time, the cost of living is on the rise in Shenzhen, which brings up the cost of services there.” Here are the 15 companies in HAX VIII.
Trash sorting robot for offices.
The 3D printer for clothes.
Low cost Water-jet cutter.
Agile rovers for heavy-duty in rough terrain and harsh environments.
DC-based power and IoT infrastructure for new buildings.
Habit awareness bracelet.
IBS diagnostics.
Tracking injuries for runners.
Connected tampon.
Sleep science mask.
Precision growing device for accelerated botany.
AR glasses.
Routine-creating wearable for kids with ADHD.
Sonically molded headphones.
A robot for Ping Pong training. |
Three startups to watch from HAX hardware accelerator, batch VIII | Lora Kolodny | 2,016 | 5 | 18 | The hardware accelerator held its 8th Demo Day in San Francisco yesterday. While all 15 companies in the latest batch hold promise, and encompass some very wild ambitions, these three stood out thanks to creative applications of advanced tech to sometimes overlooked, but truly massive potential markets. Based in Lausanne, Switzerland, Rovenso is adapting technology created for planetary exploration to use in the industrial world here on Earth. The company’s ROVéo 250 is a remotely operated vehicle that can navigate rugged terrain, endure harsh environments and do the very heavy lifting that humans would find challenging even with the right tools in tow. The rover is battery-powered, and human-operated remotely using a controller that gives tactile feedback to a driver. Doing this instead of just providing a mobile app to run their rovers should help drivers understand instantly when the ROVéo 250 is stuck in a ditch, or in the midst of a steep climb, then make adjustments if needed. Co-founders Lucian Cucu and Thomas Estier said they were inspired by generations of Mars rovers, but also the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster, to build their machine. The company will develop and rig its rovers with custom, robotic arms to do different tasks for customers. Rovenso already has signed one customer, and wants to raise venture capital to bring robotics automation beyond nuclear, to mining and civil engineering, oil and gas and construction businesses. Cucu said, “If it’s a harsh environment, that’s dangerous humans, or you need to automate the process and flow of heavy materials, that’s where our technology makes sense.” HabitAware is a health tech startup that sprang, as so many do, from the founder’s personal challenges dealing with a “body-focused, repetitive behavior;” in her case, obsessive hair pulling. “I hadn’t had eyebrows since I was a teen,” said HabitAware’s co-founder Aneela Idnani Kumar, head of product, design and marketing. “Several years into my marriage, I showed my husband what I looked like without my eyebrow makeup on, and we decided to build something to help me and others who have this problem.” Kumar and her husband, CEO and co-founder Sameer Kumar, built smart bracelets that wearers use to gently conquer their repetitive behaviors. The wearables, called the LIV, contain sophisticated motion sensors and connect to a user’s smartphone via Bluetooth. A LIV mobile app initially calibrates the bracelets so they can silently monitor a wearer’s activity and vibrate to alert them when they’ve begun to engage in an unwanted behavior. After they’re set, the bracelets work without being connected to a smartphone. Wearers get a two-bracelet set for a suggested retail price of $279. Those who do not use both hands when they engage in an unwanted behavior can opt for a single LIV bracelet for $149 at retail. Beyond hair pulling, kids and adults alike struggle with nail biting, skin picking and thumb sucking. They usually engage in this behavior around certain triggers or stresses that can be pegged to a certain time of day. When users choose to connect their bracelets to their smartphones via Bluetooth, the LIV app shows them a chart tracking the times of day when they are most likely to fall into their repetitive behaviors. That way, users, or their parents, can take special measures to help them get through that troubling time of day without triggering their habits. The company estimates that 30 million people in the U.S. suffer from some form of repetitive, body-focused behavior. HabitAware is currently taking pre-orders. With a company name that’s a portmanteau of lasers and water, this New York-based startup is working on building a relatively low-cost water-jet cutter that can slice through steel, glass or, for that matter, fabrics and pastry, without burning any materials or giving off toxic fumes. Co-founders Nisan Lerea (CEO) and Matthew Nowicki (CTO) say they want to sell their cutter to “makers,” especially contractors who may want to use it to create custom tiles and steel brackets or other parts to make home repairs, as well as jewelers and interior designers who want to cut beautiful shapes without creating toxic fumes in a home studio or small shop. The machine’s footprint size is about 2 feet by 3 feet today. So it’s not quite a desktop model, but it is a scaled-down version of water-jet cutters only available for tens of thousands of dollars and for factory use. The company is still refining its prototype. It plans to offer custom-design software, but the co-founders said, more importantly, they will integrate with and make it easy for designers to use the tools they have already mastered, like AutoCAD, SolidWorks or Adobe Illustrator. |
null | Natasha Lomas | 2,016 | 5 | 20 | null |
Shift Technology grabs $10 million to prevent fraudulent insurance claims | Romain Dillet | 2,016 | 5 | 18 | French startup just raised a $10 million Series A round from , with existing investors and also participating. Shift Technology uses big data and machine learning to detect patterns of fraudulent insurance claims. This way, insurance companies can save money. Shift Technology uses a Software-as-a-Service approach so that its tools get better over time. All the data the company collects from all its clients can educate its algorithms. Insurance fraud is a big market as insurance companies have a lot of money and are always looking for way to optimize claims. Anything that lets these companies save money is worth doing. So Shift Technology’s platform looks like an easy sell. Right now, fraud detection is manual and many frauds slip through the system. Shift Technology puts a red light on suspicious claims and tells you why. The startup also suggests actions to investigate on a specific claim. So far, the company has processed around 50 million claims. And when it comes to suspicious claims, Shift Technology has been right 75 percent of the time. It’s not perfect, but it’s pretty good. Today’s round will be used to expand the technical team, improve the product and build out a sales team. Accel’s Sonali de Rycker is joining the board. |
E.ventures closes new $150M early-stage fund to invest in European startups | Steve O'Hear | 2,016 | 5 | 18 | There’s more evidence of European VC stocking up before a potential LP winter. This time it’s , which has closed a new $150 million early-stage fund to invest in European startups. The VC, which has offices in Berlin, San Francisco, Beijing, Tokyo, Moscow and São Paulo, is also announcing that Bernardo Hernández is joining e.ventures as a general partner. Hernández has founded multiple companies, including real estate listing site , and has been a senior director of product at Google and the general manager at . He also has 10 years of experience investing, including founding his own VC firm in 2008, in San Francisco, in a bid to help European companies access the U.S. market. Mobile marketplace , social network , and retail CRM are some of Hernández’s more notable investments. Meanwhile, e.ventures’ new fund will be focused on seed and Series A rounds, and, says the VC, will be deployed alongside its existing $290 million growth fund, which invests at later stages and is used for subsequent funding rounds. In this regard, e.ventures is talking up its ability to support its portfolio startups with capital and operational expertise through the “full investment lifecycle,” although that isn’t entirely unique in European VC or elsewhere. Most Series A funds put capital aside for follow-on rounds so as not to get too diluted, and a number of VCs operate both an early-stage and so-called growth-stage fund. Interestingly, in a statement, Hernández makes reference to the when assessing potential investments, something that Google’s venture arm is notoriously known for but e.ventures has been doing for a good few years now. “Joining e.ventures appealed greatly to me as our investment philosophies are the same. Its’ use of technology to identify investment opportunities and the always available operational support to entrepreneurs are features I believe will come to define venture capital in the future,” he says. |
Google’s Allo won’t include end-to-end encryption by default | Kate Conger | 2,016 | 5 | 18 | Google announced its new messaging app at its I/O developers conference today, and it looks pretty cool. It’s a feature-rich interface with graphics and doodles, and it works with Google Assistant to make suggestions and schedule plans. Allo even has an option for users to send their messages using end-to-end encryption, a security feature that has become increasingly popular and is the default in other chat apps like WhatsApp and Viber. But the full-service experience Allo offers is at odds with the encryption it’s offering. In order for Google to add dinners with friends to your calendar or suggest replies, it needs to be able to read your messages — which it can’t do if your chats are end-to-end encrypted. Allo, then, offers users a choice: privacy and security or entertainment and interactivity. Most consumers will likely choose the latter, leaving security by the wayside, and civil liberties advocates are already voicing displeasure about it. Making encryption opt-in was a decision made by the business and legal teams. It enables Google to mine chats and not piss off governments. — Christopher Soghoian (@csoghoian) As the ACLU’s Christopher Soghoian points out in the tweet above, government agencies are probably a bit happier with messages being encrypted by choice rather than by default. The FBI and other law enforcement agencies have complained that default encryption causes them to lose access to important communications they need in order to secure criminal convictions. If encryption isn’t a default, suspects may forget to turn it on and accidentally leave their messages exposed to law enforcement. But those who choose to turn on Allo’s encryption, dubbed “incognito mode,” will be getting a highly regarded security protocol: Google partnered with Open Whisper Systems to use the company’s . Signal Protocol also forms the backbone of WhatsApp’s and Signal’s encrypted messaging. |
Google built its own chips to expedite its machine learning algorithms | Frederic Lardinois | 2,016 | 5 | 18 | As Google at its I/O developer conference today, the company recently started building its own specialized chips to expedite the machine learning algorithms. These so-called Tensor Processing Units (TPU) are custom-built chips that Google has now been using in its own data centers for almost a year, as Google’s senior VP for its technical infrastructure Urs Holzle noted in a press conference at I/O. Google says it’s getting “an order of magnitude better-optimized performance per watt for machine learning” and argues that this is “roughly equivalent to fast-forwarding technology about seven years into the future.” Google also manages to speed up the machine learning algorithms with the TPUs because it doesn’t need the high-precision of standard CPUs and GPUs. Instead of 32-bit precision, the algorithms happily run with a reduced precision of 8 bits, so every transaction needs fewer transistors. If you are using Google’s voice recognition services, your queries are already running on these TPUs today — and if you’re a developer, Google’s Cloud Machine Learning services also run on these chips. AlphaGo, which recently beat the Go world champion, . Holzle said that Google decided to build these application-specific chips instead of using more flexible FPGAs because it was looking for efficiency. Holzle sadly didn’t want to disclose which foundry is actually making Google’s chips, though he was willing to say that the company is currently using two different revisions in production and that they are manufactured by two different foundries. With TensorFlow, Google offers its own open source machine learning library and unsurprisingly, the company adopted it to run its algorithms on TPUs. |
Equal Employment Opportunity Commission says tech industry is underutilizing diverse talent pool | Megan Rose Dickey | 2,016 | 5 | 18 | Many tech companies in Silicon Valley like to blame the lack of diversity on what they call the pipeline. Their argument is that there are simply not enough qualified female and/or underrepresented minorities qualified to fill these high-tech roles. The U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission has effectively called bullshit on that. Of the people graduating from top engineering programs, 9 percent are black and Latino, but representation at tech firms typically falls around 5 percent, according to the the agency collected. That means the current talent pool is being underutilized, EEOC Chair Jenny Yang said today at a public meeting between EEOC commissioners and a panel of experts including Kapor Capital Partner Benjamin Jealous, McKinsey & Company Partner Kweilin Ellingrud, AARP Foundation Senior Attorney Laurie McCann and others. Orrick Partner Erin M. Connell at the EEOC teleconference in San Francisco. On screen is Benjamin Jealous, partner at Kapor Capital. “While there is some truth to the ‘pipeline’ theory and anxiety over the ability of the US educational system to provide a sufficiently large, well trained, and diverse labor pool, there are additional factors at play,” the EEOC’s latest report, Diversity In High Tech, states. “For example, about nine percent of graduates from the nation’s top computer science programs are from under-represented minority groups. However, only five percent of the large tech firm employees are from one of these groups. This presents the unlikely scenarios that either major employers in the field are unable to attract four out of nine under-represented minority graduates from top schools or almost half of the minority graduates of top schools do not qualify for the positions for which they were educated.” The report also outlines a few “concerning trends,” like how the tech industry nationwide employed a larger share of white people, Asian Americans and men than the overall private industry, according to 2014 EEO-1 data. Among leading tech firms in Silicon Valley, 57 percent of executive employees were white, 36 percent were Asian American, 1.6 percent were Hispanic and less than 1 percent were black, according to the EEOC’s 2014 data analysis. Among the total employed at top Silicon Valley tech companies, 47 percent were white, 30 percent were women, 41 percent were Asian American, 3 percent were black and 6 percent were Hispanic. Diversity and inclusion in tech, as it turns out, is a top priority for the EEOC. That sentiment was made clear today in Yang’s opening remarks and in the EEOC’s latest report. Although the meeting took place in Washington, D.C., I was able to sit in at the teleconference at the EEOC’s San Francisco district office, where Connell participated via the livestream. Ultimately, today’s meeting was a big brain-picking session around issues relating to diversity and inclusion, with the intention of bringing the topic to the mainstream and getting commissioners focused on it. The next step for the EEOC is having conversations with tech companies, though, the solution Jealous put forward to create a national mandate is one that could be really effective. “At the end of the day, it comes down to companies being reluctant to change,” Jealous said during the Q&A portion. There was also a lot of conversation and discussion around age and disability status. Although there is no data about the number of disabled people working in tech, we “can probably assume that there is underrepresentation,” EEOC Commissioner Chai Feldblum said. She went on to say that getting that data is something the federal government can work toward. Around age, AARP’s McCann noted that age discrimination is real in Silicon Valley and that, often times, job descriptions show a preference for new or recent graduates, or “digital natives.” “Just because someone is a digital native,” McCann said, “doesn’t mean they’re an expert in technology.” Be sure to check out the EEOC’s . |
Right-sizing the development process for startups | Dave Gullo | 2,016 | 5 | 18 |
As the co-founder of a “142-proof” software development agency in the Silicon Valley catering to pre- and post-money companies, I’ve observed quite a bit of variance when it comes to the development process. The capabilities range wildly, from hack-and-slash all the way to buttoned-down tests and infrastructure that makes us all giddy when we see it. It’s pretty much The Good, The Bad and The Fugly. It boils down to the core competencies of the team and the experience of the technical leadership. What amazes me is how many of these companies start up doing it wrong. Granted, startup companies are under the gun to hurry up and build a great product and find relevance in the market. Never mind about the shiny bells and whistles involved with how it got produced. In the first few chapters of , explains how they honed their process such that any developer could commit code to production on their first day at work. This does not mean they gave the new geek the keys to the kingdom and the power to destroy the service. It means the tech team has enough process in place, as well as checks-and-balances, that nobody can break things — not even a newbie. The challenge that many enterprises face is a lack of innovation and a slow response to change. Some large companies are trying to adopt “agility at scale” in the enterprise, or set up “intrapreneuer” programs to innovate. However, these enterprises tend to be the exception. The upper hand startup companies have is that they have a chance to do it right the first time… but the reality is that many do not. The economics of time/talent/capital for startups means that most are running 5,000 MPH toward a goal — and leaving a wake of technical debt behind them. “But what is this ‘doing it right’?” you ask. Simply put, it means code that is continuously tested and integrated whenever an engineer commits code to the source repository. The most popular alternative is some mix of: The adopted solution to house parties is automated user interface testing, aka: end-to-end, or functional testing. This is best achieved by building these tests from Day 1 of a project instead of waiting and back-filling them at a later point in time. Requirements or user stories are translated into tests that exercise each feature, under each possible user persona. Needless to say, I’m bullishly anti-house-party when it comes to testing for quality. You can have all of these awesome tests, and developers can certainly run them in their working environment, but the key is to continuously run them in a test server environment or a continuous integration (CI) server. Each time an engineer checks code into the repository, the CI server wakes up and gets to work. Ideally, unit tests are run first, because they run much faster, and then the functional tests are run. For large applications, the CI server can break up and ideally parallelize the functional tests to save time. An automated test cycle that takes too long is not of use; I’ve put the upper bound at 15-20 minutes for a max test cycle. Obviously, shorter is always more productive for the team. By building these tests, an automated web browser can drive the user interface and make sure it works as intended. This keeps the codebase from moving backwards in production, and stops the presses until it’s resolved, or until they “fix the build.” Many dev shops I’ve visited have a special monitor in the room that turns red, and I’ve seen a USB traffic light that is evidence of the build’s health. Besides environmental indicators of the build, I’ve seen other variations on maintaining quality — such as passing around a My Little Pony and placing it shamefully on the desk of the engineer who broke the build, such as the geeks do at Say Media. I prefer positive reinforcement — after the sprint demo, a medium-sized trophy adorned with Mardi Gras beads is awarded to the geek with the best feature of the week, such as the geeks do at Lyft. The benefit of emphatic testing at the user-interface level is an increase in product quality. This is because each UI test is akin to . If the tests are evolving with the requirements, they serve as a watchdog to make sure we’re not rolling backwards. In chatting with geeks about where to spend the most time testing early on in a company or project, I always tilt toward the user interface because it inevitably exercises all the other layers. If the UI works, the underlying layers are probably doing it right. The exception is where the product is an API, where unit tests are going to be the way to go. Really, in a perfect world, functional and unit tests should be in place from the get-go. A challenge with startups is that the product continually changes; that is often the byproduct of the Build/Measure/Learn cycle. Therefore, at what stage is it right to overlay end-to-end tests? This is an open-ended question that I still ponder. When a company has no idea of what it should build, it seems of limiting value because there probably are not enough users on the system where quality is of concern. When the company knows what it needs to build, but the roadmap seems so daunting and talent so limited, it seems only natural to skip functional tests “for now.” But quality should ALWAYS be of concern, right? In the end, the trade-off is going to be a longer build cycle, but not 2x. I’d guesstimate it adds ~33 percent more to a project to have good functional and unit tests; therefore, on a two-week sprint this is at most days, not weeks. So rather than “hurry up and get a product out there,” I favor “slow down and do it right, because we are probably living with the new features of this release for a long time.” The payout is clearly down the road on the efforts of good testing. It creates a codebase that is delightful to work with for future engineers. It creates a codebase which lives longer, is easier to refactor and can stand the test of time. The idea that I’d like to leave behind for startup founders and lead techies is to “Please! Please! Test Your User Interface.” Do this early in your progression and the payouts will be plentiful down the road. |
Tesla is selling $2 billion in stock to fuel Model 3 production | Matthew Lynley | 2,016 | 5 | 18 | Tesla — with a significant chunk contributed by Elon Musk — is selling around $2 billion worth of stock in an equity offering in order to accelerate production of the Model 3, according to . The company is selling 6.8 million shares in the stock offering, which at its current price of around $205 amounts to roughly $1.4 billion. Musk is selling around 2.8 million shares — or close to $600 million — as part of the offering to satisfy taxes on options he is exercising. Even after the sale, the number of shares of common stock held by Musk will increase, the company said. The net proceeds of the sale are going toward Tesla’s ambitious goal of producing 500,000 cars annually by 2018. The company originally expected to hit that number by 2020, but bumped up that goal in conjunction with its new earnings report based on the high volume of pre-orders for the new Model 3. With so many pre-orders coming in — the company said it has 325,000 reservations for the Model 3 — it’s not a surprise that the company wants to ensure that it’s able to fulfill that production. Ironically, Goldman Sachs is underwriting the offering, , signaling that Goldman Sachs felt the stock was undervalued and worth purchasing. Stocks tend to move on these new ratings issued by banks, and Tesla shares were up 3 percent on the day. As part of its earnings report, Tesla also said it still plans to deliver 80,000 to 90,000 new vehicles this year. The earnings followed a bit of a mixed few months for Tesla, which unveiled the Model 3 — a $35,000 electric car — earlier this year. It’s one of Tesla’s most important launches, and critical for the company’s success, so it seems like the company wants to ensure it has the capital to meet the demand it’s seeing for the car. Shares of Tesla dipped slightly on the news, though the stock has certainly had a rocky year. Bloomberg recently ahead of mass production of the Model 3, which sent the stock down around 4 percent. Net net, however, shares of Tesla are pretty flat. [graphiq id=”bwpcJZ2OyH3″ title=”Tesla Motors Inc. (TSLA) Stock Price – 1 Year” width=”600″ height=”462″ url=”https://w.graphiq.com/w/bwpcJZ2OyH3″ link=”http://listings.findthecompany.com/l/12234646/Tesla-Motors-Inc-in-Palo-Alto-CA” link_text=”Tesla Motors Inc. (TSLA) Stock Price – 1 Year | FindTheCompany”] There’s a small footnote in the filing that also indicates the company may “use a portion of the net proceeds from this offering for working capital or other general corporate purposes.” |
PornHub launches BangFit so you can bang to get fit | Jordan Crook | 2,016 | 5 | 18 | In seemingly bizarre news out of the porn industry, PornHub is launching a new fitness system (wearable + workout videos) called . As its name suggests, it helps you bang to get fit. Here’s how it works: Users can join the game at , which will allow users to then sync the game to their phones. BangFit offers options for one player, two players, and three players. From there, you can choose your ‘sexercise’, with information about how each position burns calories (man vs. woman) over a thirty-minute period. That’s where the BangFit Band comes into play. Users can pop their phone into the BangFit Band (a belt worn by one player) to measure their success in getting fit while getting busy. For now, PornHub says the BangFit Band is going to be available soon, and that the software product is in beta. I tried to pair two phones with the web app and check it out, but the webapp failed to recognize one of the two phones as paired. I also can’t seem to figure out if this thing supports gay and lesbian couples. That said, this is a fun marketing stunt for PornHub. The company has an early foothold in VR, and is wont to pull fun tech-related marketing stunts like . Check out the video below: [youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DUFjNiusLEw&w=560&h=315] |
Google asks the Internet for N-words — what could possibly go wrong? | Devin Coldewey | 2,016 | 5 | 18 | What’s worse than asking the Internet at large to ? Telling them it has to start with N. Let’s just take a moment to appreciate the stupefying magnitude of Google’s naiveté here. I mean, right off the bat, asking the Internet for help with naming something is a losing proposal. Just ask . Accountability is in short supply online, so as we’ve seen again and again, any poll or user-reliant measure without strict controls is almost guaranteed to be gamed or spoiled if it attracts any attention whatsoever. Asking the Internet to name the thing would have been worthy of derision as folly, but the alphabetical restriction elevates this folly to the sublime — the quixotic. It’s heartwarming, really, to think that somewhere in this decadent and dissipated age, there is an entire room of people who thought asking the Internet for words that start with N was a good idea. God bless all ye pure-hearted fools! But seriously, this really does argue that at some high level, Google’s team is totally oblivious to certain things. For all the talk about diversity, it says a lot that in none of the meetings in which crowdsourcing an N-word was discussed did someone say “You’ve got to be kidding me. We’ll have to hire full-time moderators to keep one word out of the running.” That, or they were not listened to, or did not feel comfortable objecting. None of these situations speaks well of the process that resulted in this absurd campaign. I mean, it’s not really big a deal, but come on. At least it’s not broadcasting name suggestions live. In fact, if you look at the , the whole thing is “for entertainment purposes only.” So Google has just commissioned the largest list of variations on racial slurs ever compiled for, really, no reason at all. My humble request: Someone at Google, please secretly record the post-mortem meeting on this boondoggle. Send to tips@beta.techcrunch.com. |
Google brings Android Pay to ATMs, Chrome and more apps | Frederic Lardinois | 2,016 | 5 | 18 | After announcing the expansion of Android Pay in the U.K. earlier today, Google also made a few additional announcements around its mobile payments service at its I/O developer conference today. Pali Bhat, Google’s senior director of product management for Android Pay, told me that one and a half million users in the U.S. now set up Android Pay on their phones every month. “We’re very excited with all the momentum we’ve seen since we launched,” he said. To push this momentum forward, though, the company knows it has to figure out how to make using mobile payments as easy and convenient as using a credit card or cash. Bhat argues that to do this, the company wants to offer “amazing value” to both users and the rest of the ecosystem, including merchants, banks and developers (for in-app purchases). For users, maybe the most interesting update today is that Android Pay will now work at some ATMs. For now, the company is only working with Bank of America on this project, but others will likely follow in the future. Thanks to this, you will soon be able to roll up to a Bank of America ATM, tap your phone and make a withdrawal (which is good news in case you forgot your wallet at home but not your phone, I guess). For developers, Google worked with partners like Stripe, Braintree and others to integrate Android Pay into their payment services. According to Bhat, it only takes a few lines of code to enable Android Pay support with these partners. For developers who are working with a payments processing service that doesn’t support Android Pay yet, the company is also launching a self-service API today. The company previously only worked with a select group of developers to test its Android Pay integrations (think Uber, Yelp, Eat24 and Ticketmaster), but the service is now live for any developer who wants to it into apps that sell physical goods and services (only in markets where Android Pay is available, of course). Even though in-app shopping is probably more convenient than using a mobile web site for buying stuff online (which is often a painful experience), plenty of people do use the mobile web for online shopping. Here, the Android Pay team is betting on the cross-browser , which is still making its way through the W3C process. The team worked with the Chrome team to integrate this API with Android Pay already and services like Booking.com and Shopify are already testing it with their users. Banks, too, can now more easily integrate their mobile apps with Android Pay, but what’s maybe more interesting is that merchants, too, can now build more interesting integrations into the service. As Bhat told me, the team worked with Walgreens, for example, to bring that company’s Balance Rewards loyalty program to Android Pay users. To use their virtual loyalty cards, shoppers simply tap their phone to the payment terminal and users who haven’t signed up can do so with just a few taps (though their personal info will go right from Android Pay to Walgreens, which may not be something everybody will be comfortable with, including those of us who use fake names and throwaway email addresses to sign up to these kind of programs…). All of these updates represent relatively small steps in making mobile payments more ubiquitous and convenient, but it’s really the sum of all these small parts that will decide whether services like these will succeed in the end. If I don’t have to hunt for my loyalty card in the deep recesses of my car’s glove box to get a discount at Walgreens, for example, and can just pay with a tap of my phone, then that’s already a win in my book. |
Android developers get new beta testing, analytics and pre-launch tools in Google Play | Frederic Lardinois | 2,016 | 5 | 18 | Google is launching a major update to its today that should make life a little bit easier for Android developers. With 65 billion app installs in 2015, Google obviously knows a little bit about what its developers want; with this update, the company is focusing on giving developers more tools to test their apps before a new (or first) release. While Google Play already offered developers the ability to run an open beta test for their apps before launch or to test updates (and recently made it a bit easier to enroll users into these tests), the team went a step further and now allows developers to enroll users right from their Play Store landing pages. The button won’t sit right next to the usual “install” button, though. Instead, it’ll be a bit farther down the page. For developers who don’t have a very active user community yet, the Google Play team will also now highlight some of the best new applications that are still in beta in a new “early access” section on the Play Store. As , who leads Google’s developer efforts around Google Play, told me, the team will be on the lookout for apps it can feature and then handpick some of the most promising ones. Once users are enrolled in a beta test, their ratings in the store won’t count toward the overall rating for an app. Instead, these users can now give private feedback to developers through the store without the need for developers to set up forms or email addresses the way they often do today. Another new area in the store will highlight collections of apps that users may need to perform more complex tasks (think buying a house). These collections will appear on the landing pages of other apps that are included in these lists. With this update, the Google will now also feature an updated integration with the Firebase Test Lab (previously known as the ), Google’s service for testing apps on real devices that sit in its data centers. Firebase now offers developers a pre-launch report that summarizes all the issues these automated tests find. The report will show diagnostics and screenshots, as well as tips for fixing crashes. One other area the team improved is the ability to analyze and respond to user reviews. Now, instead of just giving you a list of reviews from the store, Google will automatically summarize reviews for you and highlight the most important things from them. By default, the console will show you what users are saying about some key areas that influence an app’s success, including stability and design, and how they influence the app’s overall star rating. In addition to these generic topics, the service will also show a list of unique topics that are mentioned in your reviews. The same list will also then compare your metrics to those of similar apps. These benchmarks, Powers tells me, are a feature developers have been requesting. To make responding to review easier, Google is launching a new API that allows developers to respond to them from both their custom tools and through partners like Zendesk, which is launching its integration today. Other new features in the Play developer console includes more in-depth acquisition funnel analytics that can now break down numbers by country and benchmarks, as well as a new service that automatically rounds prices to numbers that make sense in a given country (think $1.99 in the U.S. and 200 yen in Japan). For the first time, too, the team is launching . Powers tells me this app will allow developers to quickly check stats on the fly, but not every report is available in the app yet. The app will also be able to send notifications to developers. To ensure developers also tune their apps for users in emerging markets, Google is launching a with checklists for optimizing their apps, as well as a more with tips and best practices for expanding into these markets. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PErnqJT3xjA |
Xiaomi shows off a 4K Android TV set-top box at I/O | Brian Heater | 2,016 | 5 | 18 | Like a number of other bits and bobs announced at Google I/O thus far, there are still some important questions left unanswered about the Mi Box — but here’s what we do know about forthcoming set-top box. It’s sleek, it’s small and it’s apparently won the Chinese phone maker a couple of design awards already. The Mi Box is powered by Android TV 6.0, is capable of beaming 4K video at 60 FPS and supports Dolby Digital Plus audio playback. It does HDMI 2.0a and features a quad-core ARM processor, Mali 450 GPU and has 2GB of RAM and 8GB of storage, which is expandable via USB. Oh, and there’s a Bluetooth remote, as well. That peripheral supports voice control, so users can search for content, ask contextual questions (actors’ names, etc.) and launch apps using their voice. The controller also doubles as a gaming controller for Android TV-compatible games. The company will also be offering a separate Mi Game Controller, which is compatible with the set-top box and other Android devices. Availability details for both products are still forthcoming, though the company noted that the product is “coming soon” in a press release issued today. A Xiaomi spokesperson added that the company is “working closely with Google” on the U.S. launch. More details are also likely to be made available this week during I/O. [gallery ids="1324454,1324455,1324458,1324461"] |
Crunch Report | Try Amazon Alexa In A Web Browser | Khaled "Tito" Hamze | 2,016 | 5 | 27 | Tito Hamze
Tito Hamze
Yashad Kulkarni
Joe Zolnoski |
The sweep of the Internet of Things, garbage cans and all | Jake Rozmaryn | 2,016 | 5 | 27 |
Who could imagine being wowed by a garbage can? In our age of technological whiz-bang, not much floors us anymore. But I confess, I couldn’t stop thinking about the lowly garbage can. Embedded with smart sensors, it alerts city workers when it’s ready to be emptied, which slashes fuel costs and avoids unnecessary garbage pickups. That may not sound so impressive — at least compared to driverless cars or sending regular folk into space — but when the dumbest of items gains intelligence, we need to pay attention. We are entering a phase in the cleantech revolution where we are reaping efficiency value from even the most mundane items. “The garbage app reduces energy costs by 50% to 60%. That’s not pie-in-the-sky — those are real savings for real cities that can make them even more livable and enjoyable for residents,” says Tim Wolf, Global Director of Marketing for Smart Grid Solutions at . Call it Cleantech 3.0 or Energy Democracy, this new iteration takes us beyond solar energy and the early technologies that kicked off the clean energy revolution. Now bits and bytes are infiltrating everyday objects, allowing them to “talk” to each other and make smart energy decisions. Dorothy, we’re not in Kansas anymore — or at least its wind farms. Why is renewable energy now old school? Credit the Internet of Things, or IoT. Green is still good, but digitally connected green is even better. IoT is a network of physical objects — devices, machinery, vehicles, buildings and other items — embedded with electronics, software and sensors that enable these objects to collect and exchange data. Connecting our disparate “things” — and giving them intelligence — creates autonomous systems that are convenient and user-friendly in ways that can drastically improve home and work environments — as in the garbage can that can signal to city trash collectors. In the energy arena, IoT brings together all kinds of things to create smart networks, such as hot water heaters, home thermostats, solar panels and microgrids. These networks can automate anything that generates, consumes, measures, switches or stores energy. IoT also helps consumers collect granular data so they can track their energy consumption in real time. What you can see, you can save. So now consumers are better able to lower their energy bills. All of these changes upend the old way of doing business in the energy industry. The power of controlling energy distribution no longer resides with just utilities; it’s become decentralized. You and I gain more control over energy generation and usage. Putting energy management into the hands of individual consumers and businesses is forcing utilities to rethink their business models. Rather than fighting decentralized energy, forward-thinking utilities are embracing it. “As the grid moves toward a more distributed model, the command-and-control infrastructure is moving to a more distributed model as well,” Wolf says. IoT has made its way into the public consciousness through devices like the thermostat, and it will soon be universal. Businesses of all sizes are starting to realize its power to transform how they handle their energy needs — to save money, improve resiliency and reduce carbon footprint. According to Tom Willie, CEO of , IoT is at the foundation of Cleantech 3.0. “Without IoT, you can’t effectively deploy onsite energy solutions,” Willie says. “People are realizing that if you’re going to build a behind-the-meter grid, you need on-site command-and-control.” “The growth of on-site generation has started expanding exponentially in the past 10 years, but most on-site energy systems are still disconnected and working in silos,” he adds. “You need the ability to centrally connect, control and optimize everything from renewables and back-up generators to microgrids, energy storage and traditional building automation systems. That’s why the new energy IoT solutions are so critical — we need a ubiquitous, connected energy ecosystem.” What’s truly amazing, Willie says, is that new energy IoT solutions will even allow connection and control of older equipment that was installed before the Internet was around, positively impacting energy usage and costs. “It’s an exciting time to be at the intersection of IoT and energy management,” he says. “The future is limited only by our imaginations.” Here’s what Cleantech 3.0 means for those it will affect most: “Cleantech 3.0 will democratize the way people consume energy, and that’s a good thing,” says Robert Cooper, CEO of . “The awareness of what your energy costs are and how you consume it will empower people to use energy more efficiently and cost-effectively. The revolution is coming, and those who are on the cutting edge will be the biggest winners.” Cleantech 3.0 is causing a reshuffling of responsibility across the energy landscape — and has the potential to affect entire city infrastructures, leading to the development of so-called “smart cities” that rely on IoT. “The killer IoT apps that will revolutionize cities will be for smart energy and water systems,” Itron’s Wolf says. “Right now, we lose 25% of water we pump through the streets — unacceptable in a world that will soon run short on water resources. And you can reduce street light energy costs by up to 80% if you combine LED replacement bulbs with network-controlled monitoring applications.” The roles and relationships between energy production, distribution and consumption are changing, and the end-user will ultimately win. How quickly this shakes out will depend on the speed with which utilities and their customers embrace the transition. Meanwhile, keep an eye on your household devices — even boring ones like garbage cans — they soon may surprise you. |
Review: VAIO’s Z Flip ultrabook shows little learned | Stefan Etienne | 2,016 | 5 | 27 | journey for the brand: Sold off from Sony in 2014 to investment firm Japan Industrial Partners, the deal saw all of its then-new products disappear. The computer brand was on standby for a while, and only within the last year has been launching new laptops — the Z Flip is one such laptop. But to be fair, despite new management, it doesn’t seem like much of the formula has changed for the better, if at all.
Here’s what you have to know about the VAIO Z Flip that makes it “special” — the screen can be flipped off a hinge mounted to the middle of the screen, then laid flat, on top of the keyboard. A simple release switch disengages the lock to make this happen. The point of it all is to have a laptop that doubles as a convertible tablet. There aren’t any keys exposed, which is a good thing, but the nature of this design means the top-end of the laptop is heavy, and that the hinge offers so much resistance, that to cope with it you can’t open it with just one finger. Instead, use one hand to hold the base, and the other to open the lid — it’s silly. To close the tablet mode, you need to exert a force against the hinge, using the body of the laptop, or awkwardly pulling it up, then pushing back. It’s not intuitive and has to be learned. Ultimately, there’s a lack of finesse here despite the creative engineering. Oh, and the VAIO Z Flip comes with a stylus pen, which is useful for OneNote and the like, but with no place to store it on the laptop itself, it becomes a fad rather quickly and I had to leave it out of my commutes. In this case, VAIO could have learned something from the Surface, where the pen magnetically latches to the body. Also, the volume rocker is on the back end of the laptop — this makes no sense, and is another consequence of the flip mechanism. What’s there to love about the VAIO Z Flip? Evidently, nothing about the flip mechanism for the screen, but the specs are actually great for the form factor. The Core i7 processor is blazing, as is to be expected for a base clock speed of 3.3GHz, with a decent amount of RAM and SSD storage to keep things running. Another good thing: There was very little bloatware on the Z Flip the first time I booted up. [gallery ids="1327211,1327210,1327209,1327208,1327207,1327206,1327205,1327212,1327255"] The screen is another solid point on the Z Flip’s resume: It’s sharp, with popping color reproduction and accurate tracking with your finger or the pen. Other things to note: The keyboard feels and looks solid, but there is some flex on the surface area; battery life is middling at five hours or so; the speakers are actually pretty loud; it runs hot at the bottom and the fan blasts when it’s handling workload. The VAIO Z Flip’s main feature doesn’t justify its cost, especially not in build quality or intuitiveness. It has one of the highest starting prices for a Windows ultrabook, and what you get doesn’t fit the bill. A better alternative would be the VAIO Z, which is everything the Flip is, sans the flipping screen with a lower starting price of $1,499. In short, this is VAIO’s problem: With offerings that are not competitive in price or looks, it becomes hard to justify buying into what was once good, when so many better alternatives are available. Still, nice try by VAIO on this — I almost flipped out. |
13 TechCrunch stories you don’t want to miss this week | Anna Escher | 2,016 | 5 | 27 | This week, Google successfully defended itself against the $9 billion fair use court case against Oracle, Snapchat’s financials were leaked, Twilio revealed its IPO filing and more. These are the top stories of the week to catch you up on all things tech. Closing out a $9 billion case that has stretched across many years, a jury found that . However, Oracle attorneys have already indicated they will appeal the decision. Earlier this week we that Snapchat was raising more money. An was made with information about Snapchat’s latest Series F round, . We also obtained a leaked pitch deck revealing Snapchat’s revenue and forecasts. Twilio had a big week as it , signifying that it could enter the public markets as early as next month. The cloud communications platform also announced a new product called — programmable SIMs for IoT and handsets with T-Mobile — as well as that lets developers orchestrate push notifications, text messages and chats. Twitter announced it is . The company said it will no longer count media attachments and @names in select replies toward your 140 allowed characters. However, links will still count, and these rules are still confusing. Facebook revealed two new features for Live. Live reactions power a visualized timeline of when a Live video receives the most engagement. So now you’ll be able to . Facebook also enabled like nature feeds and puppy cams. One more thing on the Facebook front: We learned that , and users are now seeing Facebook’s own AI text translations. Billionaire investor Peter Thiel made headlines this week. Thiel was outed as gay by Gawker-owned Valleywag in 2007, and has said that in retribution. Thiel has recently been Hulk Hogan has brought against Gawker. Now Gawker founder Nick Denton has published an open letter outside the courtroom. Story developing. It was a good week for SpaceX. The company has . This week’s landing also makes it the third time the company has landed a rocket on a moving robotic “drone ship” at sea. Natasha Lomas wrote that . Let’s file it under “it seemed great on paper.” across the Atlantic that will connect Virginia Beach, Virginia, with Bilbao, Spain. MAREA will be the highest-capacity subsea cable to cross the Atlantic (at least for the time being) and will feature eight fiber pairs. Crunch Network columnist Jon Evans explained Ethereum, a combination of a cryptocurrency, like Bitcoin, and a vast decentralized computer, in Brian Heater , writing that they bring Bluetooth earbuds a step closer to mainstream. Reddit launched image uploads, MIT spinoff in funding to go after its ambitious goal of offering self-driving taxis within two years. |
Musical.ly launches live.ly for live streaming | Katie Roof | 2,016 | 5 | 27 | Launched last year, musical.ly is growing fast, with about 80 million young teens using it around the globe. The app makes it easy to create music videos by allowing users to dub over their voices with songs from popular artists like Rihanna and Meghan Trainor. Now the app is moving beyond recorded videos with the integration of live.ly. Live streaming has become increasingly popular, with the launch of and the continued evolution of Twitter’s . Musical.ly is hoping it can capitalize on this trend and be a force in the live video business. It began as lip syncing, yet “people started using musical.ly in different ways which we didn’t anticipate,” Alex Zhu, co-CEO of musical.ly tells TechCrunch. From comedy to animal videos, Zhu says they saw that musical.ly was being used for more than music, and he hopes live.ly will help “users to interact with others in real-time.” The video social network has already begun rolling out live.ly to select users and will be expanding access to its whole user base in the coming weeks. Musical.ly is one of the first social networks to gain significant traction since rose in popularity a few years back. |
Comixology CEO shows off new Unlimited subscription service | Anthony Ha | 2,016 | 5 | 27 | Comixology recently launched , a subscription plan that offers unlimited access to thousands of digital comics for just $5.99 per month. Given the “all you can read” model, it’s natural to compare the new service to Netflix, but CEO told me that Amazon Prime’s video offerings are a closer match — and no, not because of the corporate synergy ( ), but because Comixology now combines subscription and individual purchase options. Put another way, if you want to try out a comic like or , you can read the older collections through Unlimited. Then, if you’re really hooked, you can get fully up-to-date by buying the newest issues individually. I also asked Steinberger about the absence of the two biggest comics publishers — DC and Marvel. He said he’s certainly open to adding them in the future, and he also touted the fact that Comixology Unlimited is the only digital comics subscription that includes titles from publishers Dark Horse and Image. |
Maison de Mode takes its online ethical luxury fashion brand to an offline pop-up in San Francisco | Sarah Buhr | 2,016 | 5 | 27 | San Francisco’s fashion staple seems to be ripped jeans and a hoodie. But just between the edgy All Saints and Paris designer St. Laurent on San Francisco’s Maiden Lane is a rare, high-end fashion pop-up called . The shop boasts ethical fashion for the luxury buyer with hard to find artisanal items from globally sourced brands you’d normally only find at its online site. But Maison de Mode founders Amanda Hearst and Hassan Pierre are conducting something of an experiment in San Francisco — taking their online store offline for a limited time. The site launched in October of 2015, but its roots are in the physical realm. Hearst and Pierre originally kicked off the idea to provide high-end, ethical fashion as a traveling concept boutique in 2012. Hearst is deeply embedded in the fashion world — she’s to the Hearst Corporation fortune and started out working as an editor for Marie Claire (which is owned by Hearst Corp.) when the idea struck her to not only write about the fashion industry but provide high-end items that give back. Hearst’s startup partner, Pierre, studied at the acclaimed fashion design school Parsons before launching his own sustainable clothing line, which is also sold on the site. The two run a couple of pop-ups a year to introduce folks to their online concept store and decided to try San Francisco this time. The store was pretty quiet when I walked in mid-morning this week, but other than the loud, clanging construction a block away on Union Square, so was every other shop along the street. “Most brick mortar stores don’t get the traffic but online you are 24-hours and global, which is why we just do pop-ups. It’s like brick-and-mortar in reverse,” Hearst told me. Indeed, as more physical stores go online, that may be a trend we start to see more of. But Maison is a unique concept shop, closer to Gwyneth Paltrow’s Goop, which recently showed up in downtown San Francisco with its own pop-up, not Gap or Amazon. Hearst and Pierre told me it’s been a mix of the tech crowd and an older crowd to the store so far. And, interestingly, San Franciscans seem to have their own kind of style unique to this city. “Each place we visit is a sociological study,” says Hearst. “We’ve seen a lot of customers go for more of the colorful Latin brands [in San Francisco].” The pop-up shop displays bright blue and green Mola Salsa handbags, which are handmade from vintage textiles by a tribe in Colombia, and fabric tassel Shashi earrings put together piece by piece in New York’s garment district. The Shashi bracelets (at ) have also been popular, according to Hearst. All items sold in the store and online are supposed to support “social and environmental transformation” and come with special marks indicating how the products support Maison de Mode’s mission. It’s not clear if visitors are just drop-ins or come for the concept, but a few notable Silicon Valley visitors to the store so far include CEO of the RealReal Julie Wainright and founder of Sutro Energy Group Nicole Systrom. “All are smart, educated women. Very impressive,” Hearst said. “They’re not your typical New York City fashionista but they have their own unique style.” Maison is self-funded and didn’t want to release sales figures, but says it’s “healthy” and “growing” as a business. Maison’s pop-up shop will be on Maiden Lane until this Sunday, then heads to Dallas. You can visit the store to check out more items and the stories behind them by clicking or by checking out the gallery below. [gallery ids="1329227,1329228,1329229,1329230,1329231,1329233,1329234,1329235,1329236,1329237"] “ |
HP sheds some more light on the Omen X VR PC backpack | Brian Heater | 2,016 | 5 | 27 | The Omen X by HP VR PC is nothing if not compelling. The company earlier today and let slip a smattering of details around the backpack PC, but not much else. No press release, no product page. It was a fairly usual announcement for HP. The hardware company’s VP of Consumer PC & Solutions Mike Nash agreed to shed a bit more light on the upcoming product, which is HP’s attempt to adapt the expanding world of virtual reality through the creation of a rig that cuts the tethers, in hopes of providing a more immersive virtual experience. “We’re learning a lot about how customers use and perceive VR,” says Nash. “There are two consistent pieces of feedback we’ve gotten. The first is that the demo is incredibly cool, and the second is that the cord is incredibly annoying. But despite all of the demos, nobody has tripped over the cord. We wondered why this was and basically people are aware of the cord the whole time so they don’t trip over it. In some sense it’s kind of limiting the overall VR experience. It feels a little less real.” The company worked on a few different solutions. Wireless transfer standards couldn’t accommodate the throughput without a notable latency and simply shoving a compatible laptop into a backpack wasn’t an ideal solution. HP eventually hit upon the Omen X concept, a wearable PC. It’s a similar solution to the one recently shown off by MSI, though HP insists that the timing had less to do with that announcement than its own desire to offer up a working prototype before the unveil. But rather than waiting until the company has a shippable product before announcing, HP opted to show off a prototype in hopes of enlisting developers to help shape the creation of the device. “At this time we’re showing an initial concept prototype of the product. We’re using these examples to begin engaging with ISVs (independent software vendors), who are going to help us refine the final product,” explains the exec. “So what we bring to market probably will be quite different from what we’re showing today. We’re not announcing a product for sale, but we are looking for a select group of developers to help vet the backpack, provide feedback to us, and see what kind of new experiences they supply to us with this backpack.” The current prototype weighs in at less than 10 pounds and features a battery that offers an hour of life per charge. And while HP believes this will be enough to offer a reasonable immersive VR experience, the company has also added a belt with hot swappable batteries, letting users switch them in without losing their place in the game and other important data. The system also features two high-output batteries, assuring that the CPU and GPU aren’t throttled — despite the fact that the backpack is intended to operate on battery power alone. Cooling is accomplished with two large vents, those red wings on the exterior of the machine. HP will also be bundling a wireless display, keyboard and mouse, so users can interact with the system as a standard Windows PC and spectators can watch what’s going on in the VR environment through the monitor. Beyond that, the company isn’t offering a ton in the way of specifics, because much of the final version is dependent on how the prototype fares — though HP insists it does plan to bring the backpack to market at some point. It will also be showing off the prototype likely in the next month or so and throwing a developer page live in hopes of recruiting interested third parties to help bring the product to fruition. |
Gillmor Gang LIVE 05.27.16 | Steve Gillmor | 2,016 | 5 | 27 | – Dan Farber, Keith Teare, Frank Radice, Kevin Marks, and Steve Gillmor. Gillmor Gang’s Facebook page G3’s Facebook page |
SpaceX launches a communications satellite and sticks another landing | Nitish Kulkarni | 2,016 | 5 | 27 | It’s been a good week for SpaceX. Earlier this week we learned that the company won a lucrative contract with the , the tight-lipped government organization that runs America’s reconnaissance satellites. Today, with the launch of Orbital ATK-built communications satellite THAICOM 8 from Kennedy Space Center’s Space Launch Complex 40, SpaceX has for the fourth time landed the Falcon 9’s first stage after a challenging orbital launch. Today’s landing also makes it the third time that the company has landed a rocket on a moving robotic barge “drone ship” at sea. The orbit that THAICOM 8 was is what made the landing especially challenging. The satellite was put into a Geosynchronous Transfer Orbit (GTO), an elliptical orbit that places satellites in a position to get into Geosynchronous Earth Orbit using another smaller rocket motor once the main launcher (in this case, Falcon 9) is expended. GEO is a circular orbit 22,000 miles above the equator. At GEO, satellites are “fixed” in a point in the sky above a certain part of the world. GEO is commonly used by weather and communications satellites. THAICOM 8 is a commercial communications satellite intended to serve parts of India, Africa and South-East Asia. Falcon 9 second stage and THAICOM 8 spacecraft in nominal orbit and coast. First stage has landed on the droneship — SpaceX (@SpaceX) As with the previous Falcon 9 launch, today’s launch into GTO required sending the payload into an orbit significantly higher than the more commonly seen ones to Low Earth Orbit. This higher orbit made the arc the rocket needed to take far steeper and more elliptical, making the angle of the descent much deeper and at a much higher velocity. All of this meant that the margins for error that Falcon’s control system for return had to operate in were that much narrower. More importantly, the higher return velocity really reduced opportunities for the rocket to correct itself in the event of unexpected factors like wind shear and atmospheric fluctuations — small perturbations that at this scale can have significant effects. Moreover, the first stage had to do all of this with less fuel than usual — a consequence of the high orbit. Today’s vertical landing helps vindicate the . The company aims to rely on this reusability to bring down launch costs and increase space access. There’s also the company’s larger pipe dream of a return trip to Mars, for which landing rockets vertically (so they can be launched back to Earth) is vital. Still, this dream is only half-fulfilled right now, with today’s first stage joining the other three in their crowded hangar at Cape Canaveral. The dream of reusability can only come true if the stages can be reused again and again. Otherwise, all the effort and design compromises SpaceX put in Falcon 9 for vertical landing will not yield any fruit. SpaceX CEO Elon Musk on Twitter earlier this month that one of these recovered rockets will be reused in a launch over the next few months. The company did re-fire the Falcon 9 first stage from their first successful recovery on land at Cape Canaveral, but decided not to attempt a reflight, instead planning on placing it in front of the company’s headquarters. Whether or not this is indicative of the fireability of the returned stage is unclear. The tight margins and high arc of today’s launch mean that the first stage’s landing was close to the maximum landing velocity. This meant that an aluminum honeycomb ‘crush core’ was crumpled and absorbed some of the impact of landing, leading to a slight oscillation in the rocket, Musk on Twitter. The ‘crush core’ is part of the retractable landing leg actuator, and was described by Musk as being easily replaceable, though he did add that there was a slight risk of the stage tipping over before the autonomous barge it landed on returns to port. |
EU mandates open access for all publicly funded research by 2020 | Devin Coldewey | 2,016 | 5 | 27 | European Union officials that, starting in 2020, any research that owes its existence in some way to public funding must be freely accessible and reusable. Recommendations were also made to encourage investment and ease the passage of startup founders between various European states. The decision arose from a meeting of EU ministers at the in Brussels; in a press release, Sander Dekker, State Secretary for Education, Culture and Science in the Netherlands, made a number of remarks on the necessity of open access: Research and innovation generate economic growth and more jobs and provide solutions to societal challenges, and that means a stronger Europe. To achieve that, Europe must be as attractive as possible for researchers and start-ups to locate here and for companies to invest. That calls for knowledge to be freely shared. The time for talking about open access is now past. With these agreements, we are going to achieve it in practice. Exactly what the method will be for enforcing this decree will depend on a number of things, and other details remain to be defined — for example, what publications exactly will qualify as being “the results of publicly funded research.” Loopholes allowing exceptions to the rule based on intellectual property, security or privacy concerns will also need to be formalized. That aside, this could still be a powerful precedent, and a timely one too: access to scientific journals is such a problem even for qualified academics that millions are turning to . Much EU-funded work under major research frameworks is already required to be open access. However, it can be costly for a researcher to make a paper free to access that would otherwise be paywalled at a major journal like Science or Nature; the cost of doing so could potentially be included in the grant, but how this will be handled at scale remains to be seen. TechCrunch has contacted the Netherlands Ministry of Education, Culture and Science for details on this and other questions. In addition to the open access requirement, the Competitiveness Council also made suggestions less binding regarding best practices for accommodating foreign businesses and investments. Member states are evaluating a “European start-up visa” that would simplify the application process when establishing a business that spans multiple countries. Still less concrete is the idea that legislators should take heed of the “Innovation Principle,” which according to an official summary issued yesterday “entails taking into account the impact on research and innovation in the process of developing and reviewing regulation in all policy domains.” “With these agreements, my colleagues are showing that we all agree that sharing knowledge and data, making legislation future-proof and investing in excellent research are indispensable to ensuring a strong Europe in the future,” concluded Dekker. |
Pierre Omidyar involved in effort to help Gawker in its appeal | Connie Loizos | 2,016 | 5 | 27 | Well, this story keeps getting more and more interesting. According to a in the New York Post, Pierre Omidyar, the billionaire founder of eBay, is involved in an effort to help Gawker Media in its appeal of a $140 million judgement that was awarded to Hulk Hogan following Gawker’s release of a sex tape involving the former wrestler. Specifically, First Look Media, an online news venture that includes the The Intercept and which is financially backed by Omidyar, is reaching out to other media organizations to file friend-of-the-court briefs to influence an appeals court’s decision in support of Gawker. According to the The Post, by “filing the amicus briefs in support of Gawker, First Look could effectively elevate the trial into a First Amendment rights case,” one that would “pit” the media organizations supporting Gawker against a powerful foe of the organization: billionaire Peter Thiel. As is widely known by now, Thiel revealed that he’s been financially aiding Hogan’s case, to the tune of $10 million. The reason, Thiel said: he deems a Gawker bully whose work often has no connection with the public’s interest. Thiel did not respond to requests for comment this week. But Omidyar said this afternoon that any perceived animus between himself and Thiel is non-existent. following the Post’s publication of its story, Omidyar writes that he has “never met Peter,” that he respects Thiel’s work as a venture capitalist, and that there is no “bad blood.” Also, I’ve never met Peter, respect his work as vc, and obv disagree on Trump and press. There is no “bad blood.” — Pierre Omidyar (@pierre) Omidyar was featured periodically in Valleywag, though its was relatively tame compared to some of its posts about other Silicon Valley executives. Gawker’s treatment of Thiel, who was featured regularly in a now-shuttered Gawker property called Valleywag, was particularly aggressive. Indeed, in an interview with this reporter in 2009, Thiel likened Gawker to the “ .” Other Silicon Valley entrepreneurs, many of whom were also written about by the outlet in less-than-glowing terms, have largely rallied around Thiel since his disclosure. click bait journalists need to be taught lessons. Far less ethics and more click chasing in press today. I’m for — Vinod Khosla (@vkhosla) First Amendment specialists and reporters, however, have voiced concern that Thiel’s involvement could further fuel a practice that’s already on the rise, which is that of third-parties funding legal cases in order to serve their own means. You think Peter Thiel is dangerous? He’s so much more dangerous than you think. — Felix Salmon (@felixsalmon) Omidyar has been characterized as a “crusading but conflict-averse billionaire.” In late 2013, he began funding First Look Media, an investigative news organization, with an eye toward ensuring that such outlets can function in an era when page views drive revenue and cat videos often trump public-service journalism. First Look has famously had problems of its own since, as detailed in this Vanity Fair piece . Even still, has published a long-line of hard-hitting stories over its short history to date. |
The UE Roll 2 speakers bring rugged Bluetooth audio poolside | Brian Heater | 2,016 | 5 | 27 | The is fun. How do I know it’s fun? Look at all the press images on the side of the box. It’s gone skiing, bike riding, mountain climbing and rolling around in the mud with a bunch of attractive product models. Even more telling, the product ships with its very own miniature inner tube, which is a pretty fun thing to do. Also inside the box is a bright yellow USB cable and a pamphlet of legalese called “Bonus Material for Lawyers and Insomniacs.” Fun. The UE Roll 2 is also extremely brightly colored — and in the case of the orange and maroon and teal model sent us (Habanero, apparently), somewhat clashing so. But it’s certainly the kind of product that’s designed to get noticed. Though actually, design-wise, the product is pretty much identical to gen-one. It sort of looks like a big, bright Advil tablet with a cloth face sporting two big volume buttons — a plus and minus that look a bit like a crucifix when you squint. The bottom is a rubberized and ruggedized affair, featuring two buttons and a flap that houses the microUSB port and auxiliary jack. Next to that is a big bungee loop for hanging on a backpack loop, in the shower or, in the case of the press material, a carabiner hanging off the side of a cliff. The Roll 2 isn’t the most aesthetically pleasing Bluetooth speaker around (Exhibit A: ), but that’s not really the point. The speaker wasn’t designed to look nice sitting around on a desk or shelf (I mentioned the speaker ships with its own inner tube, right?). It’s designed to get out into the real world and get dirty in the process. That ruggedness is the speaker’s real strength. The Roll 2 is waterproof, dust proof and designed to take a bit of a beating. Naturally, I tossed the thing around the office a bit, just to make sure. It came out unfazed. The sound quality on the Roll 2 is fine. I’m probably a little biased having tested out that new B&O speaker yesterday. This isn’t that. But again, UE’s device serves a somewhat different purpose — and at $100, it retails for $150 less than the A1. The sound isn’t bad, it’s just not as rich and full as you’ll find on other pricier units. It does get loud, however — 15 percent louder than the previous generation, according to the company. At those volumes, things can get a bit distorted. I wouldn’t recommend it, but there’s certainly something to be said for top volume when using the product outdoors. The other big improvement this time out is range. The product now operates at an impressive 100 feet away from its source, so you’ll be able to use it without risking accidentally dunking your iPhone in the pool. All in all, none of the improvements over the first unit are major, but they do help the device maintain its standing as one of the Bluetooth speakers best equipped to handed whatever the great outdoors throws at it. And the inner tube certainly doesn’t hurt. |
null | Lucas Matney | 2,016 | 5 | 18 | null |
Trump’s wall misses the mark: We need a cyber wall, not a physical one | Jay Edelson | 2,016 | 5 | 27 |
The issues for the general election campaign have, to a great extent, already been framed. And Donald Trump, being the world-class marketer he is, has successfully forced a debate about whether the U.S. needs to build a wall across the 1,954 miles of our southern border to secure our great nation. The project would cost the government — unless Mexico pays for it, a deal Mr. Trump would have us believe he can strike as our president. But Trump, whose platform is based on the premise that his business acumen is a fine — indeed, preferable — substitute for political experience, is making a big mistake. He’s focused on the wrong border. It’s 2016. There isn’t a wall high enough to keep out the fastest-growing threat to our national security: Cyberterrorism. It follows that our vulnerable corporate networks constitute the border we most urgently need to secure, the one the man who has earned billions through corporate endeavors should care the most about. Acts of cyberterrorism are occurring more and more frequently, and pose an increasing threat. We learned recently, for example, that Islamic Jihad, a Palestinian terrorist group, has been for the past two years. Even more disturbing was a that caused power outages for hundreds of thousands of people. Closer to home, a cyberattack of a Newark, New Jersey Police Department. It took three days for the city to restore the network. But attacks on governmental systems are only part of the issue — a part that private citizens can only hope is being addressed by our military and intelligence agencies. The government does not operate most of the critical infrastructure that American citizens interact with every day. Much of this infrastructure is in the hands of private entities. And protecting the companies that operate it, perhaps by forcing them to protect themselves, is the way to build the wall that America actually needs. We’ve just begun to see what cyberterrorists are capable of. A nation-state used a (in retaliation for a Seth Rogen movie, of all things). A — at that point the largest bitcoin exchange in the world — resulted in losses that approached half a billion dollars. Some of the county’s richest and most powerful law firms were hacked, leading to speculation that the cyber thieves were looking for information to . Private companies operate our financial system, including our bank accounts and the markets themselves, so what’s to stop cyberterrorists from targeting the New York Stock Exchange and throwing the global economy into a tailspin? A five-year-long orchestrated from Ukraine, carried out for profit rather than disruption, easily obtained a vast amount of confidential data whose release could have had far worse consequences than the loss of $100 million. And recently, the Department of Justice , allegedly working on behalf of the Iranian government, who targeted 46 major financial institutions as well as the computer systems controlling a dam in New York. We already know that planes can be turned into weapons when hijackers are on board, but what happens when terrorists can remotely hijack planes through ? The same holds for , or for that matter. What if a cyberterrorist hits our water supply or our power grids? The threat to national security would be on par with a weapon of mass destruction. Part of the growing threat is a form of modern piracy called , software with which hackers can hold computer networks hostage and, as pirates have always done, demand their ransom. These pirates forced a hospital in Kentucky to declare a in March, an attack that came on the heels of a to regain control of its computer system in February. The threat has grown so much that the FBI recently pleading with companies to assist the government in stopping its spread. Our government knows of these threats and has some of the top minds in the world working on protecting government targets. Businesses, however, are lagging behind. Part of the problem is that the United States workforce is suffering from a at the worst possible time. But the more significant problem is that there are few — if any — laws that require businesses to take the necessary steps to defend themselves. And while the government should be lending free support, its interests are not perfectly aligned with those of corporate America. As the FBI has demonstrated in its public fight with Apple, in making sure that some private systems are actually not quite secure. Trump’s Wall is a relic of an era in which invading armies moved across continents and walls kept them at bay. Today a wall is not an impediment for terrorists, and certainly does nothing against the pressing threat of cyberterrorism. Rather, it serves as a reminder that the U.S. is reacting to the threats of the past instead of the threats of the present. |
Applications are open for Startup Battlefield at Disrupt SF 2016! | Samantha O'Keefe | 2,016 | 5 | 27 | Applications for the Startup Battlefield at Disrupt SF are . We’re looking for new, yet-to-launch startups to debut on the Disrupt Stage. For those of you who don’t yet know, the Startup Battlefield is a . It’s like the gymnastics portion of the Summer Olympics. It’s like March Madness for tech geeks. It’s quite literally for HBO’s Silicon Valley. The event will take place September 12-14 at the lovely Pier 48. Each day of Disrupt, young startups take the stage and pitch for six minutes. With the world watching, founders then face a live Q&A session with our judges — investors, founders and CEOs. Former judges include ( ), ( ), ( ), ( ) and ( ). Teams are competing for $50,000 and the illustrious Disrupt Cup. So who have we had on our Battlefield stage and what do they do after launching with us? Agrilyst, the , led by Brooklyn Bridge Ventures. Fleet, of Disrupt SF 2014, to build out the Yelp of international cargo shipping. And 6SensorLabs, recent winner of our Hardware Battlefield, to develop a line of food allergy testers. As a whole, companies that participated in Startup Battlefield have and had over 76 exits. There are no fees to participate in the Startup Battlefield. Selected companies also receive free demo space in Startup Alley, tickets to VIP events, a Battlefield-only reception and, of course, TechCrunch swag. Prior to the event, startups work with TechCrunch editors to hone and polish their pitches. All verticals are welcome including biotech, security, supercomputing, e-commerce, on-demand services, battery technology, mobile consumer, healthcare, bitcoin, hardware and the next big thing in dev tools. Though our event is in San Francisco, we encourage startups from around the U.S. to apply. TechCrunch is not looking for the best startups in our backyard. We’re looking for the best startups period. Full details on eligibility can be found . Building a great company encompasses much more than strong launch but, in our humble opinion, it doesn’t hurt. Applications are now open through June 23rd at 9pm PT. To apply, head on over to our . |
Amazon puts Alexa in the browser with Echosim.io | Jordan Crook | 2,016 | 5 | 27 | Amazon has put Alexa, the voice-powered AI software found in the , right with the launch of . After logging in with an Amazon account, anyone can start asking Alexa questions by clicking and holding on the mic button. Amazon’s Alexa is able to answer basic questions around information, weather, news and music and control other gadgets in the home. But since launch, one of the real differentiators for the Echo has been integration with third-party developers. With an Amazon Echo, you can use your voice to order anything from a pizza to an Uber or even tune your guitar. The issue, however, is that most people who don’t own an Echo have no opportunity to play around with the device and see how it works. With Echosim.io, built by at a hackathon in 2015, anyone with access to the web can check out how Alexa works. Amazon has been toward turning Alexa into a platform that stretches past Amazon’s own hardware. Recently, the company launched SDKs and APIs so that both hardware and software developers could integrate Alexa into their wares. This latest move just puts Alexa in an even more accessible place. If you want to try out Alexa in the browser, head over to . |
Two-year, $25M study finds positive effect of cell phone radiation on some cancers in male rats | Devin Coldewey | 2,016 | 5 | 27 | A major study conducted by the National Toxicology Program has found a slight, but significant, positive correlation between radio-frequency radiation exposure (like that given off by phones) and certain cancers in rats — though only male ones. The two-year, peer-reviewed study involved thousands of rats, each of which received one of several carefully controlled doses of radiation daily for two years (including a control group that received no radiation at all). Two to three percent of rats exposed developed glioma in the brain, and one to six percent developed schwannoma of the heart. Strangely enough, only male rats showed these increases — and even more puzzling, the control group rats (which received no radiation) tended to live shorter lives. The effect is weak and it would be a mistake to prematurely extrapolate results to humans, but it also won’t do to pretend the effect doesn’t exist. Experts are still weighing in, but the trend seems to be that the results, while far from conclusive, are definitely significant. The National Cancer Institute told TechCrunch that it was updating its to reflect the news, but did not offer further comment. (It added only that the study existed and was under review.) The National Institute of Health issued a statement reminding people that the research does not replace or invalidate earlier studies that didn’t find cancer links; they all add to the same corpus of knowledge on this topic: This study in mice and rats is under review by additional experts. It is important to note that previous human, observational data collected in earlier, large-scale population-based studies have found limited evidence of an increased risk for developing cancer from cell phone use. Christopher Portier, former head of the NTP, This is by far — far and away — the most carefully done cell phone bioassay, a biological assessment. There will have to be a lot of work after this to assess if it causes problems in humans, but the fact that you can do it in rats will be a big issue. A representative for a petitioning for stricter rules regarding radiation exposure said the study supports their mission: This $25 million study, executed by the U.S. government, provides support for what we are stating in the ‘International EMF Scientist Appeal’ that precautionary approach should be exercised and lower electromagnetic field exposure guidelines should be set. Kenneth Foster, bioengineering professor at the University of Pennsylvania, concurred, but also raised questions to : Here you have the first borderline positive result in animals. So now you have a stronger case. The results are only in male rats, the incidence numbers were very small, and there’s no clear dose response. Did the control rats not live long enough to naturally develop these tumors? John Bucher, associate director of the NTP, described the results in a briefing as highly important, but cautioned against making more of them than the data allow: Overall, we feel that the tumors are likely to be related to the exposures. We felt it was important to get that word out. It is very reassuring in fact that there has been no dramatic increase. It may well be that current cellphone use is safe. The report is only a partial one, put out because the researchers felt it worthwhile to do so after some of the data was reported on by the website . The full paper will be published next year. |
Copyright questions remain after Google’s fair use victory | Kate Conger | 2,016 | 5 | 27 | If you didn’t already know the jury’s decision in Oracle’s long-running lawsuit against Google, you wouldn’t have been able to guess it from looking at either company’s legal team yesterday. Moments after the verdict was read, both sets of high-powered intellectual property lawyers huddled up and spoke softly, without any outward signs that Oracle had just lost a crucial round in its battle to extract up to $9 billion from Google’s pockets. The jury found that , a decision that will not only save Google from writing a huge check but will also give developers a little breathing room as they build their own Java products. But it’s a complicated victory because a prior court already found that the APIs in question are copyrightable, and even the fair use win might not last forever. Oracle has already said it will appeal. “It’s interesting because APIs are still copyrighted,” Duke computer science professor Owen Astrachan says. Astrachan testified in the copyright and fair use cases as an expert witness for Google, and said he jumped up and down in his hotel room when he saw news of the verdict on Twitter. “Does every use have to be tried as a fair use case? It’s interesting. Oracle has deep enough pockets where they can go after anybody.” The question of whether they’ll have to defend their work in court still lingers for developers. Although a developer’s reimplementation of Java may qualify as fair use, no one wants to end up fighting about it in court against a deep-pocketed corporation like Oracle. Advocacy organizations like the EFF have that it would be simpler and safer for the developer community to not restrict API labels under copyright at all. Google’s lawyers structured their arguments to the four core tenets of fair use, a strategy Astrachan says seems to have played well with the jury. Attorneys and witnesses proposed analogies for implementing code that seems bizarre — the APIs in question were compared to over the course of the two-week trial — but the strange comparisons ultimately had the desired effect. “Maybe the hamburger and the outlet and the steering wheel — I think they must’ve worked,” Astrachan said, adding that after the jury’s decision was announced, “We were joking about going to get hamburgers.” Instead, Google’s legal team ended up celebrating with champagne. The celebratory mood didn’t extend to Oracle’s offices. Intellectual property attorney Annette Hurst, who represented Oracle in the case, published a on LinkedIn today denouncing the verdict. She suggested the Oracle team was blindsided by the decision, writing, “No copyright expert would have ever predicted such a use would be considered fair.” “Not only will creators everywhere suffer from this decision if it remains intact, but the free software movement itself now faces substantial jeopardy,” Hurst added. “It is hard to see how ownership of a copy of any software protected by copyright can survive this result. Software businesses now must accelerate their move to the cloud where everything can be controlled as a service rather than software.” Hurst’s argument that Google harmed open source software with the creation of Android echoed the comments made by during her testimony. Catz said that the introduction of Android forked the Java open source community, splitting developers between the two platforms. Hurst closed her post by chastising the development community and invoking Richard Stallman, an activist and programmer who helped pioneer the free and open software movement. “You should have been on Oracle’s side in this fight. Free stuff from Google does not mean free in the sense Richard Stallman ever intended it,” she wrote. After five years of legal wrangling, it’s not likely that many of Oracle’s outspoken critics will change their minds. But there’s always the appeal. |
Skillz snags Chief Product Officer Bill Mooney from EA Mobile | Lora Kolodny | 2,016 | 5 | 27 | A San Francisco startup whose technology can turn any video game into a tournament played for cash prizes, , has a new Chief Product Officer, ex-Electronic Arts’ mobile vice president Bill Mooney. Skillz quietly brought Mooney on in February this year. Earlier, at , he managed teams that were responsible for games in the Simpsons and Star Wars franchise. And before that, he worked at Zynga and Lucas Arts’ games divisions. Mooney spoke with TechCrunch about his vision for Skillz, and why e-sports is changing everything about video games. If you stay in this industry a while, you see that gamers are always kind of evolving their behavior. When I was at Zynga we were able to win casual game players over, turn them into hardcore players, tapping into a massive audience on social. Would you believe that people got married after they met through a clan playing Mafia Wars? More recently, streaming started to turn hardcore gaming into more of a community thing than it had ever been before. I think competition is going to make it even more so, and wanted to be part of this new evolution. At least a fifth of people who play video games want to do so with other people, and making a game tournament-playable for points or cash lets them do that. Probably the most important effect of e-sports becoming more mainstream — it will get people to play a game not just until they finish it, but to get better at it, and keep playing with a community of friends they know from life on or offline. Right now, when you think of e-sports you think of classic games like League of Legends, Call of Duty or Starcraft. And you think about elite gamers who play against each other, and form tournaments for prestige, rankings and prizes. But we talk about this all the time at Skillz. There are only 450 NBA players, but tens of millions of people who play basketball in the US. So many people watch football, soccer and basketball, and love it, probably have leagues, but obviously not as many are professionals like elite gamers in e-sports. E-sports is starting to bring new people into the fray, while turning people who might play occasionally into hardcore gamers. Skillz is making e-sports happen for the other 99 percent. We give companies infrastructure so that any one of their games can be put into a tournament, and streamed. And we provide high quality competition around games. For the gamers, we’re there to enforce fair game play, a kind of digital referee. If you used Skillz for a multi-player tournament for Tetris, we’d make sure competitors get the same pieces falling in the same places. They’d be playing the exact same game. We also match people with someone at their level. We don’t want gamers getting crushed or being bored because they’re so much better than their competitors. We think of ourselves as the “fair tournament tech” platform. Nearer term, we expect to see major e-sports tournaments coming up around titles that haven’t been played this way before whether that’s Word With Friends or something else. |
Fovo wants to help women shop by shape, not size | Sarah Perez | 2,016 | 5 | 27 | One of the challenges with clothes shopping online is that it doesn’t mirror the real-world experience where you can try on items for fit. And even though a number of today’s retailers offer free returns, there’s nothing quite as disheartening as ordering a piece online, only to find it won’t work for your body type, size or shape after it arrives. A new startup called from shapewear line founder wants to change that. Its recently launched e-commerce website lets customers shop by body shape instead of just size. Anvaripour has extensive experience in the fashion industry, having worked with designers, including Roland Mouret and PREEN, before moving into senior positions with luxury lingerie brands like Madame V and Letters of Marque. She then launched her own shapewear lingerie, dMondaine, in 2011, which is sold at places like Neiman Marcus, Barneys, Selfridges, Harvey Nichols, and NET-A-PORTER. This background has given her a wealth of understanding about women’s bodies and how they prefer to shop. The new startup is also advised by , who, along with Anvaripour, invested a small amount of seed funding into the company to get it off the ground. Explains Anvaripour, a big problem with shopping online is that it’s hard to really know what will work on your own body without trying things on. “Brands cut differently — you can be a four in one brand, and an eight in another. Sizing is not uniform. And what’s missing at the top of the purchase funnel is shape. And it really dictates these other things. It’s this macro category that’s very much underserved,” she says. When Anvaripour began to research the issue further, she discovered that 7 out of 10 women today still prefer to shop in store — and that’s often precisely because of this desire to try on items before buying. On Fovo.com, the goal is to offer a personalized shopping experience for each customer. That begins with having women answer five short questions about their body shape and style. However, instead of focusing on the negative — what body parts do you want to hide?, for example, Fovo asks you which parts you want to accentuate. Combined with an understanding about your taste in clothing, the site then offers you a feed of unique suggestions. Fovo today features clothing from more than 300 major retailers — both pricier and less so — including Nordstrom, NET-A-PORTER, H&M, Neiman Marcus, Dillard’s, Saks Fifth Avenue, Forever 21, Nasty Gal and others. Notably, it also offers a wide variety of sizes — all the way up to size 32. “It was our mission to have all women feel comfortable on Fovo,” says Anvaripour. The brands’ inventory is manually annotated before being added to the site, so that women understand why garments are being selected for them. For example, a long v-neck top could elongate the body or a boat neck could balance out larger hips. It’s as if Anvaripour’s understanding of fabric and fit has been downloaded from her mind, then used by Fovo’s algorithm to automate a series of fashion recommendations. As women shop the site, they can add items from different stores to a universal cart, then checkout directly on Fovo.com, which simplifies the experience. A majority of the brands Fovo works with also offer free shipping and free returns, the founder notes. Fovo currently generates revenue through an affiliate model, but the eventual goal is to introduce other means of monetization, like advertising. In the nearer future, the company is working to expand its community and social features, which today includes a forum for chatting with other shoppers, and will soon include other user-generated content — like photos of customers wearing the items in question, for instance. Fovo launched into beta in April and then made its official public debut earlier this month. While it’s too soon to talk about users and sales, Anvaripour says they’re already seeing more customers than expected, and users are spending over an hour and 10 minutes on the site. “It’s really resonating with users,” she says. “Women just want to feel safe and comfortable and we want to serve them.” |
Beyond Siri: The AI revolution coming from the web | Eric Poindessault | 2,016 | 5 | 11 |
From HAL in 2001: A Space Odyssey to Samantha in Spike Jonze’s Her, for decades we have been obsessed with the idea that artificial intelligence powered-computers will one day be able to interact with people, follow spoken instructions and make decisions independently, like a human would. Since hit our screens on the iPhone 4, have entered the playing field, too. But while each new generation brings its lot of interesting new features or use cases, they are still far off from the representations in movies. It’s hard to imagine anyone engaging in a romantic relationship with , or NASA putting Alexa in control of a spacecraft just yet. Movies have set the bar pretty high, and we are still waiting for such ubiquitous voice-controlled assistants to enter the real world. However, the era of an intelligent assistant that can really help us in our day-to-day lives is certainly closer than we may think. When talking about intelligent personal assistants, people tend to think about , or . More tech-savvy users might also have heard of from the founders of , Facebook’s recent contribution and other messaging-based tools like or . However, while these new tools have been getting a lot of hype lately, when it comes to their use cases, most of them are still stuck in the realm of glorified Q&As. Over the last couple of years there have been a number of signals that tech forerunners are serious about taking to the next level. for half a billion dollars in 2014, last year and These acquisitions came after recent breakthroughs in GPU-accelerated deep-learning techniques have made it possible to reach exceptional improvements in pattern recognition, with great applications for speech recognition and computer vision. According to within the next two years machines should be able to follow spoken instructions even better than humans do. While arguably the ability to communicate through our senses is at the essence of human intelligence, it is only one ingredient of the essential recipe. Professor from U.C. Berkeley identifies : natural language processing, knowledge representation, automated reasoning, machine learning, computer vision and robotics. In simpler terms, these are the building blocks of , and speech recognition is just one aspect. Speaking can be a convenient alternative to tapping on a keyboard when your hands are busy, but then your voice is just a medium, and it doesn’t always shine as the best input method. How many times have you started asking Siri something and ended up typing your own query on Google? The team behind , using advanced deep-learning techniques to make machines teach themselves how to solve problems. While they’re understandably keeping their secret sauce close to their chest, the information disclosed so far implies that it requires some human guidance in order to build use cases. In the same way a human can learn to solve a problem using clues given by someone who knows how to solve it, they guide the to find its own methods to solve problems. However, the comparison with humans stops here, because, unlike machines, we have the ability to autonomously build on top of our knowledge by contextualizing problems and finding original solutions to solve them. We naturally “connect the dots” to find answers and make decisions, while current implementations often fail to associate problems with something essential and very hard to formalize: the context that surrounds them. Context is what gives the ability to form more intelligent decisions rather than solely relying on well-defined input instructions. As such, it links the , present and future to solve sophisticated problems. Professor from the University of Paris argues: “In Artificial Intelligence, the lack of explicit representation of context is one of the reasons of the failures of many Knowledge-Based Systems.” There is indeed a lot to grasp. Teaching computers about context in human behavior is a colossal task; people are not always predictable and the variety of situations is basically endless. At a personal level, using machine-learning techniques to understand someone’s way of dealing with social interactions and decision making would involve countless hours of user input. That could probably be performed by observing you 24 hours a day but, since mind reading doesn’t exist yet, you would also need to be expressing your reasoning out loud so the machine could learn to think like you. Machine learning requires a lot of data. For natural language processing, the data is generally collected in a , which is a large structured set of texts that can be used to train the . To give you an idea of just how large data sets can be, when , it had previously ingested the entire Wikipedia database. What is interesting about the IBM Watson story is that the corpus it was fed required no prior structuring, which means Watson was able to use the data without human supervision. Now what if M had a similar training, with the further goals of being able to converse and perform elaborate tasks? What would the model be and where could we find the appropriate data? The Internet contains millions of hours of talks, videos, books, data and everything that would allow for neural networks to build intelligence. You want to teach a machine about love? Feed it Romeo and Juliet and other romance novels. About business? Plug it into The Wall Street Journal’s news feed. , teaching language to their with a database of more than 300,000 articles from CNN and the Daily Mail. The data is right there, and for now we only seem to be scratching the surface. But another wave of progress in machine learning will soon allow us to make even more sense of the exabytes of information the contains, and such advancement will mark a huge step in the evolution toward an . Aside from scraping the oceans of unstructured data available online, a much closer future that could make our lives easier is already at hand. Every day humans make hundreds of decisions online, and every time we click on a link, those clicks are recorded by advertising and analytics companies across multiple websites. Imagine if that information was instead used by an dedicated to understanding your browsing preferences as you navigate and collect the relevant information in your browsing, along with that of millions of other users, to determine patterns out of the data. It would not only be able to offer you a more personalized and contextualized experience of the , it would also understand your intent better and be able to anticipate your needs before you even express them! And voilà, an personal assistant that could really lighten the load using technology that already exists. Researchers predict we’ll have to wait at least another decade before we can truly experience the greatness of ubiquitous human-like intelligence. Meanwhile, the Internet is arriving at a stage where it is gathering all the necessary ingredients for a huge leap in terms of , and already has a lot of bots, scrapers, analytics and other APIs harvesting our online data of which we could take advantage. So let’s disconnect images in the movies from the real progress that’s happening before our eyes, and realize that the greatest chance we have of creating an that can really make our lives easier is by harnessing something we use every day. |
The race to the moon is underway as Astrobotic raises $2.5 million | Emily Calandrelli | 2,016 | 5 | 11 | , the company that plans to deliver payloads to the moon, has completed a $2.5 million seed round led by . The company was originally spun out of Carnegie Mellon University in 2007 to compete for the (GLXP). As of today, they’ve secured from governments, companies, universities, nonprofits and individuals for their first mission to the moon. Like many of the other 16 companies left in the GLXP, Astrobotic is hoping to win the $20 million Grand Prize by becoming the first privately funded rover to land on the moon, travel 500 meters, and transmit high-definition video and images back to Earth. Illustration of Astrobotic’s Griffin Lander / Image courtesy of Astrobotic But unlike the other GLXP competitors, Astrobotic is unique in that they’ve created a rideshare platform for other space agencies or companies to send their payloads to the moon. Interestingly enough, two other GLXP competitors have partnered with Astrobotic to land their rovers on the lunar surface. “We offer space agencies all over the world unprecedented, affordable access to the Moon to achieve their science, exploration and resource goals.” John Thornton, CEO of Astrobotic Technology Chile’s and Japan’s are two GLXP companies that have partnered with Astrobotic to land on the lunar surface. HAKUTO, Japan’s sole entrant into the competition, will attach two rovers, known as Moonraker and Tetris, to Astrobotic’s lander. Similarly, Astrobotic will carry AngelicvM’s Uni (for “unity”) rover. Partnering with Astrobotic allows these companies to focus on roving, imaging and communication technology and leave the difficult entry, descent and landing up to Astrobotic. “We envision a ‘NASCAR on the Moon’ scenario, where competing teams land together, and countries can cheer on their team to the finish line.” John Thornton, CEO of Astrobotic Technology In terms of technology development, Astrobotic has proven themselves as a worthy GLXP competitor. In fact, Astrobotic is the GLXP team that has won three out of three GLXP milestone prizes, totaling $1.75 million. Because of this, a NASCAR-esque race on the moon between companies from the U.S., Japan and Chile to win the $20 million Grand Prize certainly isn’t out of the question. Florida-based (which has raised more than $30 million) and Germany’s Part-Time Scientists each won two GLXP milestone awards. Cremated human remains, personal mementos, messages from children around the world and a time capsule are some of the other contracted Astrobotic payloads. When asked if these more sentimental payloads were part of the core business, John Thornton, CEO of Astrobotic told TechCrunch that “while this is a smaller part of our long-term business, it remains important for us to enable that human connection.” Ultimately, Astrobotic seems happy to work with any space agency or commercial company who is willing to pay the $1.2 million per kilogram price tag. Any payload that’s brought to the moon by Astrobotic will have to stay there for now. Thornton said that they don’t intend to bring anything back to Earth on their first two lunar missions, but eventually they could do a scientific sample return once they increase their payload capacity. “Our first missions to the Moon will become historic landing sites that will remain untouched for future settlers to visit. The hardware from later missions will likely be re-purposed or recycled for future lunar settlements. For example, fuel tanks can be used to store fluids, solar panels can be reused, and metals can be ground up into powder for 3D printing new parts.” John Thornton, CEO of Astrobotic Technology With the additional funding, Astrobotic plans to accelerate the development of their Griffin lander, which they are co-developing with NASA. Since 2007, Astrobotic has received from NASA, totaling several million dollars. Astrobotic’s Griffin Lander / Image courtesy of Astrobotic Astrobotic is one of the three companies NASA has with through the Lunar Cargo Transportation and Landing by Soft Touchdown (CATALYST) program to advance robotic lunar landing capabilities. One of the next big steps for Astrobotic will be to secure a verified launch contract. Two GLXP teams — Moon Express and Israeli company SpaceIL — have already secured verified launch contracts with RocketLab and SpaceX, respectively. Both companies plan to launch in 2017. Thornton stated that they will reserve a launch contract of their own once their manifest is full enough to fly. He expects that they will launch in the next couple of years. Regardless of who wins the GLXP Grand Prize, however, the lunar show will go on. Like other GLXP frontrunners, Astrobotic plans to continue business as usual after GLXP is said and done. “The GLXP has been a great catalyst to get started and now we have a series of 5 lunar missions planned. Regardless of the outcome of the prize, Astrobotic will be flying missions for decades to come” John Thornton, CEO of Astrobotic Technology |
A look at the machine that turns dough pods into tortillas | Brian Heater | 2,016 | 5 | 11 | It’s actually very tasty. Really. I certainly had my doubts, eating a tortilla that came out of a pod, but 90 or so seconds after Flatev co-founder and CEO Carlos Ruiz put the little Keurig-esque plastic saucer in the machine, a piping hot and legitimately delicious corn tortilla popped down into the warming shelf. I can’t say there’s really a place in my life (or my tiny New York City kitchen) for a $437 standalone tortilla maker. But I can say that the results are delicious. And there apparently are a lot of people who aren’t on the same page as me with regards to home appliances. As of this writing, the company has already . Ruiz came up with the idea for the Flatev back in 2010, and since then the company has scored two rounds of funding and teamed up with Fred Bould, a design firm that’s previously been employed by Nest and GoPro, to design the casing. Now the company’s a few days into a highly successful Kickstarter campaign and showing a working prototype today at Disrupt. The functionality is pretty straightforward. You pick a flavored dough pod (priced at around $0.70), put it in the drawer and the system goes to work. The dough is pressed and cooked in the middle of the machine and then dropped into a warming drawer where it sits until it’s ready to be consumed. The pods come in a variety of flavors — variations on corn and flour. Ruiz was quick to point out, unprompted, that the pods are fully recyclable, as the company got backlash against the potential for wastefulness almost immediately. The system has two buttons up top for toggling between corn and flour and a knob that lets the user determine how cooked they want their tortilla. The company expects to deliver its first units in August of next year. Beyond that, it’s hoping to branch out into even more flat-bread varieties, which is, incidentally, how Flatev (Flatbread Evolution) got its pithy name. |
The Blockchain is the new Google | Contributor | 2,016 | 5 | 11 | At its core, the blockchain is a technology that permanently records transactions in a way that cannot be later erased but can only be sequentially updated, in essence keeping a never-ending historical trail. This seemingly simple functional description has gargantuan implications. It is making us rethink the old ways of creating transactions, storing data, and moving assets, and that’s only the beginning. The blockchain cannot be described just as a revolution. It is a tsunami-like phenomenon, slowly advancing and gradually enveloping everything along its way by the force of its progression. Plainly, it is the second significant overlay on top of the Internet, just as the Web was that first layer back in 1990. That new layer is mostly about trust, so we could call it the trust layer. Blockchains are enormous catalysts for change that affect governance, ways of life, traditional corporate models, society and global institutions. Blockchain infiltration will be met with resistance, because it is an extreme change. Blockchains defy old ideas that have been locked in our minds for decades, if not centuries. Blockchains will challenge governance and centrally controlled ways of enforcing transactions. For example, why pay an escrow to clear a title insurance if the blockchain can automatically check it in an irrefutable way? Blockchains loosen up trust, which has been in the hands of central institutions (e.g., banks, policy makers, clearinghouses, governments, large corporations), and allows it to evade these old control points. For example, what if counterparty validation can be done on the blockchain, instead of by a clearinghouse? An analogy would be when, in the 16th century, medieval guilds helped to maintain monopolies on certain crafts against outsiders, by controlling the printing of knowledge that would explain how to copy their work. They accomplished that type of censorship by being in cahoots with the Catholic Church and governments in most European countries that regulated and controlled printing by requiring licenses. That type of central control and monopoly didn’t last too long, and soon enough, knowledge was free to travel after an explosion in printing. To think of printing knowledge as an illegal activity would be unfathomable today. We could think of the traditional holders of central trust as today’s guilds, and we could question why they should continue holding that trust, if technology (the blockchain) performed that function as well or even better. Blockchains liberate the trust function from outside existing boundaries in the same way as medieval institutions were forced to cede control of printing. It is deceptive to view the blockchain primarily as a distributed ledger, because it represents only one of its many dimensions. It’s like describing the Internet as a network only, or as just a publishing platform. These are necessary but not sufficient conditions or properties; blockchains are also greater than the sum of their parts. Blockchain proponents believe that trust should be free, and not in the hands of central forces that tax it, or control it in one form or another (e.g., fees, access rights, or permissions). They believe that trust can be and should be part of peer-to-peer relationships, facilitated by technology that can enforce it. Trust can be coded up, and it can be computed to be true or false by way of mathematically-backed certainty, that is enforced by powerful encryption to cement it. In essence, trust is replaced by cryptographic proofs, and trust is maintained by a network of trusted computers (honest nodes) that ensure its security, as contrasted with single entities who create overhead or unnecessary bureaucracy around it. If blockchains are a new way to implement trusted transactions without trusted intermediaries, soon we’ll end up with intermediary-less trust. Policy makers who regulated “trusted” institutions like banks will face a dilemma. How can you regulate something that is evaporating? They will need to update their old regulations. Intermediary-controlled trust came with some friction, but now, with the blockchain, we can have frictionless trust. So, when trust is “free” (even if it still needs to be earned), what happens next? Naturally, trust will follow the path of least resistance, and will become gradually decentralized towards the edges of the network. Blockchains also enable assets and value to be exchanged, providing a new, speedy rail for moving value of all kinds without unnecessary intermediaries. As back-end infrastructure, blockchains are metaphorically the ultimate, non-stop computers. Once launched, they never go down, because of the incredible amount of resiliency they offer. There is no single point of failure unlike how bank systems have gone down, cloud-based services have gone down, but bona fide blockchains keep computing. The Internet was about replacing some intermediaries. Now the blockchain is about replacing other intermediaries once again. But it’s also about creating new ones. And so was the Web. Current intermediaries will need to figure out how their roles will be affected, while others are angling to take a piece of the new pie in the race to “decentralize everything.” The world is preoccupied with dissecting, analyzing and prognosticating on the blockchain’s future; technologists, entrepreneurs, and enterprises are wondering if it is to be considered vitamin or poison. Today, we’re saying blockchain does this or that, but tomorrow blockchains will be rather invisible; we will talk more about what they enable. Just like the Internet or the Web, and just like data-bases, the blockchain brings with it a new language. From the mid-1950s forward, as IT evolved, we became accustomed to a new language: mainframes, databases, networks, servers, software, operating systems, and programming languages. Since the early 1990s, the Internet ushered in another lexicon: browsing, website, Java, blogging, TCP/IP, SMTP, HTTP, URLs, and HTML. Today, the blockchain brings with it yet another new repertoire: consensus algorithms, smart contracts, distributed ledgers, oracles, digital wallets, and transaction blocks. Block by block, we will accumulate our own chains of knowledge, and we will learn and understand the blockchain, what it changes, and the implications of such change. Today, we Google for everything, mostly information or products. Tomorrow, we will perform the equivalent of “googling” to verify records, identities, authenticity, rights, work done, titles, contracts, and other valuable asset-related processes. There will be digital ownership certificates for everything. Just like we cannot double spend digital money anymore (thanks to Satoshi Nakamoto’s invention), we will not be able to double copy or forge official certificates once they are certified on a blockchain. That was a missing piece of the information revolution, which the blockchain fixes. I still remember the initial excitement around being able to track a shipped package on the Web when FedEx introduced this capability for the first time in 1994. Today, we take that type of service for granted, but this particular feature was a watershed use case that demonstrated what we could do on the early Web. The underlying message was that a previously enclosed private service could become openly accessible by anyone with Internet access. A whole host of services followed: online banking, filing taxes, buying products, trading stocks, checking on orders, and many others. Just as we access services that search public databases, we will search a new class of services that will check blockchains to confirm the veracity of information. Information access will not be enough. We will also want to ask for truth access, and we will ask if modifications were made to particular records, expecting the utmost transparency from those who hold them. The blockchain promises to serve up and expose transparency in its rawest forms. The old question “Is it in the database?” will be replaced by “Is it on the blockchain?” Is the blockchain more complicated than the Web? Most definitely. The blockchain is part of the history of the Internet. It is at the same level as the World Wide Web in terms of importance, and arguably might give us back the Internet, in the way it was supposed to be: more decentralized, more open, more secure, more private, more equitable, and more accessible. Ironically, many blockchain applications also have a shot at replacing legacy Web applications, at the same time as they will replace legacy businesses that cannot loosen their grips on heavy-handed centrally enforced trust functions. No matter how it unfolds, the blockchain’s history will continue to be written for a very long time, just as the history of the Web continued to be written well after its initial invention. But here’s what will make the blockchain’s future even more interesting: you are part of it. |
Google is reportedly announcing a standalone Android VR headset next week | Lucas Matney | 2,016 | 5 | 11 | Google is moving beyond Cardboard. The company will reportedly be announcing a standalone Android VR headset at next week’s Google I/O event. Entrepreneur and former tech journalist has tweeted that Google will launch an untethered Android VR headset next week according to his multiple sources. Android VR will definitely be announced next week, and from what I’ve heard will be less powerful than the Vive or Rift. — Peter Rojas (@peterrojas) Rojas noted his sources had confirmed that the headset will be “less powerful than the Vive or Rift,” which given its standalone mobile nature is no surprise. The high-powered PC graphics cards needed to run the Oculus Rift or HTC Vive setups cost at least $300-ish by comparison, and are quite bulky. The price point is the critical note for Google to hit here. Cardboard has worked so well because all consumers have needed to do is slot their smartphone into a $15 cardboard headset and immediately dive into the experience. With a standalone product, Google will have to build something that moves past the power of high-end smartphones and delivers superior optics but is priced aggressively. https://twitter.com/peterrojas/status/730413344050532352 Samsung has gotten an early advantage in the mobile VR space with the Gear VR, but it has done so by selling the headset (which requires a compatible Galaxy or Note device) at only $99. Samsung had more than one million people on the Gear VR platform last month, undoubtedly the fruits of Samsung and select carriers giving the headset away for free with S7 pre-orders. Google has spent much of its VR efforts over the past two years enticing developers to produce simple VR content. Cardboard as a gateway drug to VR has proven quite successful for Google, though there’s still a long way to go in garnering the interests of content creators. More than 5 million Cardboard-compatible VR headsets have already shipped. TechCrunch will be reporting from Google I/O next week in Mountain View to see what’s next for Google in the virtual reality space. With of tighter VR integration within Android N, it’s likely that I/O will see a host of VR-related announcements. |
And the winner of TechCrunch Disrupt NY 2016 is… Beam | Romain Dillet | 2,016 | 5 | 11 | been incredibly fierce, but we now have a winner. At the very beginning, there were 22 startups. We hand-picked all these great companies from the wild world of startup land so they could compete in our highly competitive startup competition — the . They all presented in front of multiple groups of tech leaders serving as judges. The startups were competing for $50,000 and the highly coveted Disrupt Cup. After hours of deliberations, TechCrunch editors pored over the judges’ notes and narrowed the list down to : online kid safety service , interactive Twitch alternative , Blockchain credit startup for emerging countries , daily vitamin maker , ultra-affordable underwater drone and ultra-affordable water filtration system . These startups made their way to the finale to demo in front of , which included: (betaworks), (Precursor Ventures), (Sequoia Capital), (BBG Ventures), (Greycroft Partners) and (TechCrunch). Applications for the Startup Battlefield at Disrupt San Francisco will open soon. Please check out our Startup Battlefield Hub, apply and email Battlefield Editor Sam O’Keefe with any questions (sam@beta.techcrunch.com). And now, meet the TechCrunch Disrupt New York 2016 Battlefield winner. is a platform that ties in with the growing world of e-sports to offer a low-latency chat platform for live streamed games. But beyond that, Beam lets viewers actually interact with the games by measuring the general intent of all of the comments to play along with the live streaming gamer. You can think of it as a Twitch WePlay that actually works. Read more about Beam in our . Startup Battlefield: Countertop Purity with Water-O — TechCrunch (@TechCrunch) uses reverse osmosis, the gold standard in water filtration, to bring clean water to families. This normally costs an exorbitant amount, forces users to tear out their plumbing and wastes around 80 percent of water. Plus, renters can’t use it. But with WaterO, only around 20 percent of water is wasted, with no re-tooling of the plumbing at a $399 price point for the hardware. Read more about WaterO in our . [gallery ids="1321567,1321568,1321569,1321464,1321465,1321466,1321467,1321468,1321469,1321471,1321488,1321489,1321490"] |
Review: The North Face’s Access Pack is a backpack design that fizzles | Stefan Etienne | 2,016 | 5 | 11 | I [gallery ids="1320289,1320288,1320290,1320296,1320291,1320292,1320297"] The most unusual feature of The North Face’s design on the Access Pack is the pulley system. The first is within the main zipper compartment, where you’d house a tablet or a very small ultrabook. A small handle extends to the bottom of the pack, so that when you pull it back, your device of interest is pulled towards you. The second is a more durable version meant for a laptop up to 15″, with two supplementary “ejector tabs” for things like phones or portable battery packs. Of course, this makes me ask: why not just take the device out of the bag, like a person normally would? Or better yet, the way humans have been taking things out of satchels and bags for probably . Why would I ever waste (more) time to do this? It takes both hands to provide a net force strong enough to remove hardware from the bag, whereas I could just unzip the pouch with one hand and remove the laptop/tablet/etc. with the same hand, or the other. The Access Pack isn’t a complete waste of money, however — gadgets are truly safe and sound in it. It might make you look like a turtle when it’s on your back, can’t stand upright for its life, and will create a sweat patch on your back that is very uncomfortable. But, it does succeed at one thing: opening the door for more drastic backpack designs, especially within the mass market. It’s a space that has been relatively untouched and boring for quite some time, with only a few cool entries by high fashion brands, like the Paris-based Cote et Ciel or Adidas’ Y-3 division. If a clothing and accessories company like The North Face is willing to make an oddly-shaped backpack for the everyday individual and sell it for a sticker price where you’d expect higher-end materials, then surely someone else is gutsy enough to try something fresh and new — and that doesn’t make me look like a turtle. You might not catch me walking around in Manhattan or Brooklyn with the Access Pack on my back, but you might see it somewhere. There’s definitely a market that exists for large backpacks designed for carrying expensive technology. However, style points are not easy to come across with the Access Pack, and its dry weight is quite frankly too heavy. But if you don’t care about any of that, and just want a backpack that can carry all your technology from point A to B in a way that’s safe, while also throwing in a pulley and a few ejector tabs, then be my guest — the Access Pack wouldn’t mind. |
null | Frederic Lardinois | 2,016 | 5 | 27 | null |
Jeremy Hitchcock steps down as CEO of Dyn | Anthony Ha | 2,016 | 5 | 11 | Just a day after announcing , Internet performance management company is revealing there’s been a change in leadership — co-founder is stepping down as CEO. “I’ve done a nice and effective job of getting the company from A to B, but now I’m thinking about helping the company get from B to C,” Hitchcock told me. “In terms of day-to-day leadership, I’ve made the decision that I’m not the best person for this specific role.” , who was previously chief executive at Netezza and Endeca, is taking over those day-to-day operations — but he’s not taking the title of CEO. Instead, he’ll continue to serve as executive chairman and work with Dyn’s board of directors to develop a “long-term leadership strategy.” Presumably, that means finding a new CEO, but Baum said there’s no big rush on that front, and that they won’t make an “abrupt, rash decision.” Baum and Hitchcock both emphasized that this was very much Hitchcock’s decision, not something that was forced on him. After all, he started the initial DynDNS service in his dorm room at Worcester Polytechnic Institute back in 2001, and he’s helped the company launch a broader suite of products for managing website availability, security and speed. The company projects that it will reach annualized recurring revenue of $100 million later this year. “We’ve all seen these things unfold over time,” Baum said. “I think there’s nothing unusual here about Jeremy’s decision. What’s unusual is, I’ll say the grace with which we’re able to execute this. … When it’s not a founder’s decision, you tend not to have this continuity of leadership. You tend to have a big disruption that causes the company to miss several beats. That’s not what’s happening here at all.” As for why the change is happening at the same time as the funding announcement (as well as the launch of Dyn’s broader platform for Internet performance management), Baum said, “It’s an obvious point in the development of the company. We’re saying, ‘Okay here’s the strategy for company going forward in IPM, we’ve raised a bunch of capital and it’s time for a leadership change.'” At the same time, Hitchcock said he will remain on Dyn’s board and also will remain a full-time employee with the simple title of founder. Moving forward, he’ll be focused on possible expansion areas, whether that’s new geographies or new ways to use Dyn’s data. “I’m excited about how I’ll play this very interdisciplinary role in uncovering some of the value there and mainstreaming some of those opportunities into what Dyn can become,” he said. |
Activists at Disrupt protest Airbnb over listings in Israeli settlements | Ingrid Lunden | 2,016 | 5 | 11 | is under fire for allowing hosts on its platform to list homes in Israel’s occupied territories. And today the issue became the subject of a protest at the TechCrunch Disrupt conference in New York, after one of its board members took the stage . Sequoia’s Alfred Lin was interrupted by a protester brandishing a banner with the words “Airbnb hosts apartheid.” The issue of occupied territory and Israeli settlements is a messy one, and Airbnb’s place in it is also complicated. Critics have been hitting out at the disputed listings for two main reasons. First, Airbnb and homeowners are profiting by renting out homes in a politically disputed region. And second, there are claims that the hosts are regularly refusing to rent properties to guests with Arabic-sounding names. (One investigation published claimed several violations of this kind.) The individual who stormed the stage, Ariel Gold from the group CodePink (a of the company), was removed by security and arrested for trespassing, after it emerged that she gained access to the stage by going through Port Authority territory at the Brooklyn Cruise Terminal, where Disrupt is taking place. She was released shortly after the arrest, she told me in an interview later. There was also a small group of protesters outside the event who were also from CodePink along with another group, the Stolen Homes coalition. “Our goal was to ensure that conference goers were aware that Airbnb lists homes in illegal settlements built on Palestinian land, and that there is a constituency of human rights activists, including Jewish Americans, that are asking Airbnb to withdraw from the settlements,” Naomi Dann, another protester, told me. “According to a recent , Airbnb, along with other companies that operate in the illegal settlements, has a responsibility to end its complicity in the settlement economy. Failure to do so indicates a tacit endorsement of policies and practices that displace Palestinians, and enables Israel’s of the West Bank,” she added. Airbnb has been on the regulatory front around the issue of “ ” hosts — that is, those that do not meet local regulations for running accommodation businesses. It’s also not a stranger to staying out of certain markets when barred by U.S. sanctions. For example, it was only recently that Airbnb , part of a wider thaw of the U.S. trade embargo with the country. But more generally, the company — which has and is valued at over $25 billion — is also trying to find ways to continue to grow globally, not shrink. The occupied territories in Palestine/Israel are an interesting point of reference in that context. The settlements in Palestine/Israel are considered by some to be in contravention of the ; but even that is in dispute, since Israel (unsurprisingly) does not agree. Airbnb has somewhat adopted the position of an innocent bystander in the debate. “We care deeply about the feedback we receive from our community and we take these issues incredibly seriously,” it told the in March. “This particular issue is complex: people have been debating this matter for 5,000 years, so a hospitality company from San Francisco isn’t going to have all the answers but at the end of the day, we want to help open the world, not close it off.” But could that change? We’ve heard from sources that the company is considering how it might pull certain listings from the region. But the statement that the company has provided to us does not address that specifically: it focuses instead on how it follows laws on where it can do business, it said, adding: “We investigate specific concerns raised about listings and/or discrimination.” Airbnb’s business in occupied territories came to light , when it was revealed that there were dozens of listings in these areas, which Israel claims as part of their country but other countries dispute. Here is an of one. Overall, there are hundreds of properties listed in Israel on the platform. Airbnb’s full statement: We believe in the transformative power of allowing people to share experiences that can come from sharing a home. That’s why is an open platform with hosts and guests in 191 countries around the world. We follow laws on where we can do business and we investigate specific concerns raised about listings and/or discrimination. is based on trust and we depend on hosts and guests to be transparent with one another. Hosts determine how their listing is described and we urge all hosts to provide accurate information about where their listing is located so guests know what to expect. We also encourage guests to communicate with their host about their listing long before a trip begins. |
General Michael Hayden on the state of surveillance in America, presidential candidates and more | Kate Conger | 2,016 | 5 | 11 | General Michael Hayden is no stranger to government — or to your data. As the former director of the NSA and the CIA, he oversaw controversial surveillance programs and had authority over some of the government’s most closely kept secrets. Since he retired from his post at the CIA in 2009, Hayden has worked with a security consulting firm run by former secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, Michael Chertoff. At today, Hayden sat down with our own Matt Burns to discuss the recent debate in Congress over reforming a portion of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), Section 702, which authorizes the collection of Internet traffic by the NSA. He also shared his thoughts on both parties’ presumptive presidential nominees, Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton, and discussed the Edward Snowden disclosures that forced his former agency into the public eye. Section 702 is set to expire at the end of next year, and Congress has begun the process of deciding whether to renew it as written or to make changes to it. During a Senate Judiciary Committee yesterday, senators questioned national security officials and civil liberties advocates about whether Section 702 should be modified to require NSA and FBI analysts to obtain a warrant before querying their massive databases for information about Americans. Hayden called the warrant question “a no-fooling legitimate issue.” “That’s a legitimate discussion we should have,” Hayden said. But he also defended the surveillance conducted under the authority of Section 702, pointing out that the NSA’s collection of Internet traffic is permitted under generalized warrants given through the FISA court. He reiterated the NSA’s usual defense of 702 surveillance — that Americans’ data is only incidentally collected when analysts are seeking information of overseas targets. Surveillance under 702 is supposed to be focused primarily on suspects in terrorist organizations, but privacy and civil liberties watchdogs have cautioned that the 702 requirements are so broad that many Americans’ communications are also collected by the NSA. How many Americans are vulnerable isn’t easily apparent — Congress has been asking intelligence agencies to disclose how many times they query Americans’ information for years with no success. Hayden defended the NSA’s reluctance to detail how often it queries the database for information about Americans, claiming that releasing these statistics would result in greater harm to Americans’ privacy. “For Jim [James Clapper, the Director of National Intelligence] to answer the question would require him to go through the collection and tally up all of the incidental collection, even if the collection has never been touched before,” Hayden said. He added that tallying the number of Americans whose data has been accessed would require putting those Americans’ emails and data under the scrutiny of analysts for a second time. He said that such a tally would “squeeze privacy” but added that it might be worthwhile in order to satisfy critics of the collection program. Soon, the presidential candidates will begin receiving classified briefings from the CIA, one of Hayden’s former agencies. Hayden expressed skepticism over Trump’s and Clinton’s ability to handle the classified information safely. “When candidate Trump gets that first briefing, he will be introduced to problems infinitely more complex than any real estate deal he has ever encountered,” Hayden said. Staying true to his background as an analyst, he wondered if the new requirements on Trump to deal with complex issues would inspire new behavior. But Hayden didn’t sound very optimistic about Trump’s ability to handle the nation’s security. He said Trump’s national security understanding is at “a level of sophistication that’s a half-a-level below bumper stickers,” and reiterated that Trump’s discussion of keeping Muslims out of the country provided fodder to jihadist narratives. Hayden didn’t mince words when it came to Clinton, either, referring to her decision to operate her own email server out of her home as the “original sin.” “Guccifer says he’s been inside of it,” Hayden remarked, name-dropping the who originally exposed Clinton’s use of a private server. “I would lose respect for scores of foreign intelligence agencies around the world if they were not already thumbing through all the emails stored on that server,” Hayden said. (We assume he meant that intelligence agencies had hacked Clinton’s server — at this point, the majority of and anyone can thumb through them.) Former NSA and CIA Director Michael Hayden on Cyber Security & Privacy (full) — TechCrunch (@TechCrunch) Although it may surprise those who have followed the FBI’s battle with Apple over encryption, Hayden has broken ranks with his colleagues in government and consistently backed Apple in the debate. “It doesn’t matter what [FBI Director James] Comey says, it doesn’t matter what Congress says,” Hayden said, explaining that the progression of strong encryption is inevitable. “The arc of technology is in the direction of unbreakable encryption and no laws are going to get in the way of that reality,” he added. For law enforcement agencies like the FBI, which have lobbied Congress and fought pitched court battles over access to encrypted data, Hayden had a piece of advice: forget about decrypting content. “My advice is, get over it. There’s still a lot of things you can legitimately do to make America safe through electronic surveillance,” Hayden said. Instead of pursuing content, Hayden suggested that law enforcement agencies turn to metadata. Hayden, who has previously said that the American military kills people based on metadata, said that such information is a ripe area of investigation for law enforcement. [gallery columns="5" ids="1321419,1321418,1321417,1321416,1321415,1321414,1321407,1321406,1321405,1321404"] |
Treating the healthcare issue with tech | Florence Comite, M.D. | 2,016 | 5 | 11 |
The healthcare industry, with its maddening inefficiencies and an economic model that incentivizes disease care over health care, desperately needs a Silicon Valley-style overhaul. But even as waves of technological and economic disruption have washed over almost every industry in the United States over the last decade or two — commerce, finance, media, telecommunications — the everyday experience of healthcare stands unperturbed, stuck somewhere in the mid- to late-1990s. Why is the nation’s creaky, monstrous and convoluted healthcare sector seemingly impervious to technological change? As a precision-medicine physician who is working in the trenches to help people lead healthier lives, I’m eager for a digital health future. I imagine a new model, where we prevent disease over a lifetime. We could monitor individuals, more closely tracking key biomarkers via wearables, and — in light of their family history and lifestyle — manage risks over time. We could spot and reverse problematic trends in each individual long before disease ever expresses itself. Yet most communications between doctors’ offices come by fax! (Yes, fax machines still exist!) The full integration of technology and healthcare always seems just out of reach. This is the model today: Doctors treat patients when they are sick. Patients switch doctors as often as they switch jobs, and their insurance changes. The history and data rarely follows the patient along this journey. You go into your doctor’s office and fill out a pile of papers. The doctor will only have so much time to glance over them before treating the illness at hand. You come back again the next time you are sick. This is no way to run a railroad, never mind keeping people healthy for a lifetime. And we are paying for it. For instance, a recent UCLA study found more than half the population of California is either diabetic or pre-diabetic. This is madness. Diabetes is the kind of disease you can see coming from miles away. There is one obvious reason for this lack of creative renewal in healthcare: size. Healthcare spending represented of the U.S. gross national product in 2014, more than twice the size of the financial services sector. But, really, that’s not the answer. A big market would only be more attractive to entrepreneurs and venture capital. The real reasons are more complex. Among them: Most of the recent attempts to disrupt healthcare have been aimed at cost containment and reducing healthcare usage. That is certainly less transformative — and much less sexy — than providing a more thoughtful or futuristic healthcare model. Add subsidies, high regulation and other distortions of market forces and you have a recipe for warped valuation assumptions of healthcare startups. Just ask healthcare startups or , who have found themselves tangled in regulatory issues. One VC that has had tremendous success in bringing healthcare businesses, such as , and to market despite these dynamics is , a partner at the Silicon Valley venture capital firm . He is known for investing for the long term, avoiding fads and investing broadly across healthcare, from biotech to health IT. Roberts says that one impediment to digitizing the sector is the enormous amounts of capital required. “You’re dealing with an industry that is very labor-intensive and very low-margin,” he said in a recent phone interview. “And when that’s true those businesses are focused on viability with 90 percent of their brain.” He also pointed to the separation of power in healthcare. “There are patients and providers and payers — everything is separate,” he said. “There is a fragmentation that makes it much harder to align interests and have someone step up and do something new.” For instance, when asked about the diabetes crisis, Roberts points out that the current model for healthcare reimbursement ultimately disincentivizes keeping an individual healthy through the decades. The payer — your insurer or even your employer if they are subsidizing your insurance — is likely to change every few years. Any benefits created through a deep preventative focus would accrue to someone else. “No person who pays for healthcare for someone in their 20s is also paying for that same person when they are in their 50s,” he said. “How you deal with that incentive dislocation — that’s a tough nut.” Perhaps the next wave of VCs may be looking to solve this problem; I asked , president and CEO of the , a venture capital training program in Palo Alto. He has a firsthand view of the problems that young and talented VCs want to tackle. He noted that some of the unpredictability of process in healthcare is a deterrent to both VCs and entrepreneurs who might want to sell into the space. “The delivery of healthcare, from soup to nuts, is one of the most unpredictable things I’ve ever seen,” he said, adding treatment can vary widely by geography, influenced by arbitrary factors — anything from the way a city was developed to mergers and private equity rollups in the sector. “To me there isn’t a logical methodology or predictability,” he added. “Take 50 people across the country getting a triple bypass, and it seems to me that all 50 of those people go on a bespoke journey.” And remember: Many healthcare providers are still living a paper-and-pen existence. Roberts points out that many physician practices have only recently become technologically wired, or — even worse — they were wired a long time ago and need expensive upgrades. “Their focus on technology is really small — they are busy taking care of people,” he said. “For our investments at Venrock, what we have tried to do is focus on those things that make it hard (to provide healthcare the old way), and seek out products and businesses that we believe have a very tangible short-term payback at a minimum or even better.” And if the economics of healthcare are complicated, the human body itself is even more complicated than that. Disrupting healthcare is not something akin to reinventing how you hail a cab. “I’m pretty sure we know single-digit percentages of biology today,” said Roberts. “I think in a couple of years it will become very evident how much of the genome we didn’t know about, even though it was 15 years ago that the genome got sequenced, and we were all like, we’re all good to go.” He pointed to the human genome’s complexity, with the DNA in a single cell containing some 3 billion base pairs, and said that systems biology companies are potentially moving too far out in front of the science. “They say biology is going to be like semiconductor manufacturing. But not anytime soon, because it’s really complicated.” Wickham also noted that the emotional aspect of healthcare also comes into play, which also makes healthcare harder to disrupt than, say, manufacturing. “There is a heightened threat response behaviorally to decision makers and users of the healthcare system because it is such an emotional experience,” he said. Despite the daunting obstacles and the stubborn complexities, there is reason for optimism: Venture investors often like the challenge of solving the really tough problems. Further, many more investors have been drawn to healthcare in recent years, and as they work with leading researchers and physicians, swarming the problem, there are going to be breakthroughs that will extend not just our lifespan, but the years of healthy enjoyment of our lives. |
Sunrise will sunset on August 31st 🌅 | Romain Dillet | 2,016 | 5 | 11 | We all saw it coming, but it’s still hard to swallow. Well-designed calendar app and service will be in the next few days. The servers will be shutting down on August 31st. Today’s news shouldn’t come as a surprise as Microsoft the New York-based startup in early 2015. The iOS app hasn’t been updated since July. And Microsoft already announced that . We just didn’t know when. The plan is to put all of Sunrise’s great calendar features into Microsoft’s mobile email client, Outlook, which is what the Sunrise team has been working on. For now, the calendar part of Outlook is nowhere near as good as Sunrise. That’s why I’ve been trying alternatives and . Sadly, I still miss Sunrise. Is it too late now to say I’m sorry? Thanks for the heads up Microsoft. If you’re still using Sunrise, it’s time to move on. As for me, I’m going to pour myself a drink. |
Justin Kan accepts Y Combinator Fellowship pitches over Snapchat | Fitz Tepper | 2,016 | 5 | 11 | One of the latest Snapchat trends (at least in our little tech bubble) is venture capitalists using the social media platform as a way to dish out advice to aspiring entrepreneurs. People like , and preach on topics ranging from how to ask for an email intro to the importance of physical activity for startup founders. But here’s the thing — no matter how good the advice is, it eventually gets boring to watch the same person talk into the camera each day for a seemingly endless amount of 10 second snaps. Plus, even if you’re taking notes, it’s not exactly an interactive experience. So Justin Kan, partner (and ) at YC, has up by using his Snapchat to hold a pitch competition, with the winner getting to interview for the . As a refresher, YC Fellowship is an attempt by the startup accelerator to return to its roots by funding at the idea stage with a small investment of $20,000. Entrepreneurs can for the chance to pitch; if selected, they will be able to log in and “takeover” Kan’s Snapchat for an hour between May 23rd and 26th. The startups can do anything they want in that hour to sell viewers (and YC) on their idea, so expect some pretty creative stuff. At the end, Kan will let viewers vote by screenshot which ideas they liked best. The winner will then get the chance to interview directly with the YC team. Why go through the process of a final interview and not just fund the winner, especially since participating startups will be vetted before being chosen to pitch on Snapchat? Kan said that they wanted to give winners the chance to meet the fellowship team in an interview first, since they will be working closely with the team if they are given funding. While we won’t know if the experiment will be successful for YC until after the pitches are over, the week-long event will definitely give the startup community an interesting glimpse at how early-stage startups pitch accelerators like YC. The pitches will start on May 23rd and can be viewed on . |
Kik already has over 6,000 bots reaching 300 million registered users | Lucas Matney | 2,016 | 5 | 11 | Messenger and WhatsApp may be the 800-pound gorillas in the chat space thanks to Facebook’s significant reach, but Waterloo-based is rapidly building a young, dedicated audience of users that are already showing interest in bots. Today, onstage at TechCrunch Disrupt NY, Kik CEO Ted Livingston divulged some insights on how Kik has been growing over the past year. Namely the platform, which was recently , now boasts more than 300 million registered users, growing from 200 million in January of last year. He also revealed that Kik, which reaches 40 percent of U.S. teens, now boasts more than six thousand bots. Inside the Chat Wars with Kik’s Ted Livingston (full panel) — TechCrunch (@TechCrunch) Bots have gathered a good deal of attention since Facebook Messenger started pushing them heavily, but Kik has actually been experimenting with bots for the past two years. There may be of developers already building bots for Messenger, but Livingston believes that Kik is better situated to host bots that people will actually use. Livingston sees the current, more text-based, approach to chatbots as something similar to the way companies were approaching websites in 1996. He believes that soon platforms will see the full bot potential and put more effort into giving devs tools to create more streamlined experiences for users. Summing up the advantages of bots as a platform, Livingston cited “no downloads, no new account, no new interface” as the major differentiating features. Livingston did caution against the strictly conversational, text-based approach being pursued on other platforms, but said that overall it was still “the early days,” and there was still lots of experimentation in the space. What he envisions is a more interface-centric approach that leads to less taps and more seamless usage. “A lot of people are taking that and saying, oh, to order a pizza you should just write that out, like, ‘Hey there, I’m Ted, and I’d like one large pizza with pepperoni, please,'” Livingston said. “That’s like 100 taps. I just want to click ‘one large pepperoni pizza.'” Overall, Livingston believes that the era of native apps may be nearing an end and that bots have huge potential, though the tools for devs to build them are going to need a little TLC for chatbots to reach ubiquity. [gallery ids="1321211,1321210,1321209,1321208,1321205,1321206,1321207,1321204,1321203,1321201"] |
GeoOrbital’s wheel turns almost any bike into an electric bike | Sarah Perez | 2,016 | 5 | 11 | TechCrunch Disrupt NY 2016’s “wildcard” participant has a different take on the electric bike. Instead of putting a motor on the bike, they put it in the wheel. This crazy idea was actually prompted by something founder Michael Burtov saw in the movie Tron. He thought there was a lot of wasted space inside the motorcycles because of their hollow wheels. But this triggered him to dream up what he now calls the GeoOrbital wheel. The wheel, which comes in two sizes, is designed to be attached to any bike in less than a minute — taking the place of your bike’s front wheel. It uses a Panasonic 36V removable Lithium-Ion battery with a pedal-assisted range of up to 50 miles per battery, or up to a 30-mile range for the 26-inch wheel. It also has a 500W Brushless DC motor that the company claims will get you to 20 miles per hour in just 6 seconds. And just like any other electric bike, you can continue to pedal to go even faster. The wheel comes in two sizes to cover more than 95 percent of all adult-sized bicycles, the company says. If your bike has a 26-inch wheel, or 700c front wheel, and uses rim brakes, the GeoOrbital wheel fits, the company’s explains. It’s also compatible with 28-inch and 29-inch wheels, they say. The wheel charges by way of USB through a built-in outlet, which can also power a speaker on the go or charge your phone. You can also remove the battery if you need portable power — like for a day at the beach. GeoOrbital blew past their $75,000 fundraising goal in just 78 minutes. Backers have now funded the company to the tune of $633,788 as of the time of writing. The wheel itself is an all-season “flatless” tire filled with solid foam. That may not make it ideal for serious bikers, but they’re not really GeoOrbital’s market, either. “We look at it as more of an urban product, or suburban product,” says Burtov. He explains that his wheel will appeal to anyone who wants to bike, but needs a little boost. That could include people who simply want to arrive at work without getting sweaty, or anyone who would otherwise go biking but for some reason couldn’t. This is not Burtov’s first startup. He founded a SaaS-based HR software company prior to GeoOrbital. But he’s now been working on the wheel for a couple of years. After making a prototype and filing patents, he ended up meeting SpaceX engineer Dakota Deckerd at a local event. A year and a half ago, Deckerd left SpaceX and became GeoOrbital’s CTO. Now the two-person team has more than 20 testers driving on their wheel around the startup’s hometown of Cambridge. Following a week ago, GeoOrbital is ready to go into production. They’re working with a manufacturer in New England who makes both the parts and accessories. The company is also no longer entirely bootstrapped. A month ago, they took in their first outside money by raising $150,000 from a group of independent angel investors. GeoOrbital aims to start shipping its wheels to customers this fall for |
Agrilyst raises $1M seed round for its indoor agriculture analytics service | Frederic Lardinois | 2,016 | 5 | 11 | , the of our Disrupt SF 2015 Battlefield competition, today announced it has raised a $1 million seed round for its indoor agriculture analytics service. The round was led by with participation from and a number of angel investors and seed funds, including the co-founders of QuickFire, another that was later . As Agrilyst co-founder Allison Kopf told me, the funding round was oversubscribed. She attributed the interest from investors to the fact that the company combines agriculture — something investors are interested in but typically know little about — with the more traditional concept of a Software-as-a-Service business and data analytics. The company, which is now about a year old, currently has six employees. When it launched at Disrupt SF, the company had only finished building a basic beta version of its product. Now, six months later, the company is launching a new version of its service that is specifically optimized for vegetable producers. The service now also includes workflow management tools, as well as support for tracking inventory and managing nutrients and pests. The new version also features an easier onboarding process. Just like in the beta, Agrilyst uses all this data to then provide recommendations to indoor farmers for how they should manage their crops. The company also wants to add another dimension to this over time: flavor. To do this, it’ll have to start capturing data about taste first, though. Kopf noted that most indoor farmers still don’t use sensors — and when they do, the data often goes to a local desktop and isn’t stored online (so Agrilyst allows growers to import spreadsheets, too). That’s slowly changing, though, and Agrilyst can import data from the most popular sensor system in indoor agriculture (think CO2 and humidity levels). A lot of the data, however, still has to be entered by hand. Agrilyst isn’t interested in becoming a hardware company itself, though, but instead plans to support as many third-party sensors as possible. When Agrilyst first launched, Kopf told me the company didn’t want to be perceived as a cannabis company. That crop, after all, is typically grown indoors and represents a fast-growing market. Come July, though, Agrilyst will offer support for cannabis growers, too. |
Facebook will turn panoramas into “360 Photos” for feed and Gear VR’s 1M users | Josh Constine | 2,016 | 5 | 11 | Those panoramas trapped on your phone will finally get a better viewing experience, both on News Feed and the Oculus-powered Samsung Gear VR. Facebook is also for the first time, saying Gear VR has 1 million monthly users, and those who use it spend 25 minutes per day on the device. That could encourage developers to build for the platform. Facebook’s upcoming “360 Photos” feature will let people upload flat panoramas like those taken on iPhones, Google Photo Spheres or photos from 360 cameras. Facebook will then morph them into 360 Photos for News Feed where users will be able to hold and drag to pan around the photos, or move their heads to look around them on the Gear VR. 360 Photos made from panoramas could democratize VR content creation by allowing people to make it with no special equipment. They’ll just need an iPhone running iOS 6 or later, an Android running v4.2 or later or one of many 360 photo apps available for download. In fact, many people will have already created this content, which before was tough to view. Google, for reference, built its Photo Sphere system into Android, allowing users to take full 360 panoramas and then watch them on VR headsets like Google Cardboard. Facebook has had support for , but good 360 videos are tough to shoot and often require designated hardware. Now a large percentage of smartphones can shoot for VR. The Samsung Gear VR launched worldwide 6 months ago a $99 mobile virtual reality headset powered by Oculus’ technology. Users slide a recent Samsung Galaxy phone in, which acts as the screen. Now Oculus owner Facebook is providing some stats on its progress. The company says that more than one million people used the Gear VR last month, and developers have built more than 250 apps for it, including games like Minecraft and a variety of video experiences. In an effort to dispel the idea that VR is just for gamers, Facebook touts that nearly 80 percent of Gear VR users each day watch video content, and 7 of the top 10 Gear VR apps are for video. Facebook is also touting new video series coming to the Gear VR, including Felix & Paul Studios’ Nomads series following the lives of Nomadic people from Mongolia and Kenya. Discovery will meanwhile release a new VR experience based on its hit TV show Deadliest Catch about fishing for Alaskan crabs in the Bering Sea. Oculus is also updating its Oculus Home on Gear VR to make it easier to navigate, especially for finding recently downloaded content. Meanwhile, the Oculus Mobile app will get a “What’s New” section highlighting recently launched content, which should help users from getting bored until more VR experiences are released. The new Oculus Home design While the Oculus Rift might command more attention, it’s mobile VR headsets like the Gear VR that will bring virtual reality to a mainstream audience. But to be appealing, there needs to be tons of great content created for them, like these on Facebook. Some VR users are already telling me they’ve burned through most of the high-quality video and games, and are using their headsets less until fresh content is produced. Through pro-focused initiatives like the open sourcing of Facebook’s 360 Surround VR camera, and the new 360 photo features, people from across the spectrum will be able contribute to the library of experiences we strap to our faces. |
Google Photos takes on Facebook Moments with improvements to shared albums | Sarah Perez | 2,016 | 5 | 11 | Following to the EU and Canada earlier this week, Google is launching new features on its own photo-sharing service, , aimed at making its app both more competitive with Moments and more social. The company is adding support for both commenting and “suggested additions.” This latter feature makes it easier for users to add their photos to a shared album they’ve received from a friend, explains Google. The way this works is that Google Photos will now make “smart suggestions” where it prompts the user to add the right photos to the album. It determines what those photos should be based on factors like time and place. (Unlike Moments, it doesn’t use facial recognition.) This makes it simpler to add photos — especially if you’re viewing the album long after the event has wrapped. You’ll no longer need to scroll back through your uploads or search for the photos you want to share with friends. Instead, you’ll just be able to quickly add the suggested photos. This feature will bring Google’s Shared Albums a bit more on par with Facebook Moments, the social network’s private photo-sharing app. The goal with both products is to allow different users who took photos at the same time and location to combine their photos into a single album. On Moments, Facebook looks at photos’ date, time, location and, in most markets, uses facial recognition to figure out who’s in the photos. It automatically suggests which photos you share with friends when you launch its app. Meanwhile, users create shared albums on Google Photos instead of waiting to be told who to send a group of photos to. Once this album has been created, you can share the link to the album with anyone whose photos you want to be included in it. Users with access to shared albums can also save photos to their own libraries with a tap. The second new feature is comments in shared albums. Now users can comment on both the photos themselves and on the album, which makes these albums feel more social. Commenting is rolling out after 10 AM PT today on Android, iOS and web. Suggested additions actually rolled out yesterday, but is only now being publicly announced. |
Carmelo Anthony looks to be a VC MVP with Melo7 Tech Partners | Jonathan Shieber | 2,016 | 5 | 11 | , already a superstar forward for the New York Knicks, is looking ahead to his next act as a venture capital mogul. Coupling his longtime interest in technology with a desire to promote entrepreneurship, Anthony and his partner Stuart Goldfarb ( ) formed to build a lasting legacy beyond the basketball court. “The money is enticing but it’s also the thrill of being involved with businesses and companies that’s changing the world today. Tech is changing the world in everything we do, whether it’s sports, fashion, music…. regardless of what it is tech is changing the world,” Anthony said. After linking up socially, Goldfarb and Anthony began discussing business ideas and technology, in part because of Anthony’s recent exposure to wearable devices. The Knicks were using the to provide data and analytics on the team’s performance and Anthony was intrigued. “In the NBA everything is data. Everything is data driven,” he said. But Melo’s interest in the industry extends beyond sports. “Everybody wants to be heard and technology gives people the opportunity to be heard,” the Knicks star said. [gallery ids="1321172,1321175,1321168,1321171,1321178,1321166"] More than just giving people a voice, these new technology innovations give people a new way of seeing, and that’s exciting for both Anthony and Goldfarb. Goldfarb actually mentioned virtual reality and augmented reality devices as technologies that were interesting investment opportunities for the fund. “For me the most interesting thing is fan engagement,” Anthony said. Virtual reality could give fans at home an opportunity to experience a game as if they were courtside,” he said. And who wouldn’t want that? Sometimes, though, Anthony’s status and position in the NBA means there are actually interesting investment opportunities that the two can’t finance. “I’d love to invest in a weed business,” Goldfarb admitted. “We can’t.” |
Bolt Threads raises $50 million to brew spider silk, inks deal with Patagonia | Lora Kolodny | 2,016 | 5 | 11 | If the idea of wearing spider silk intrigues, the idea of managing a farm full of spiders isn’t all that appealing. A startup called has developed a means of brewing spider silk and other insect fibers and spinning then into yarn, making them accessible to makers of apparel, upholstery and more. Co-founded in 2009 by CEO Dan Widmaier, Chief Scientific Officer David Breslauer and Vice President of Operations Ethan Mirsky, Bolt Threads has raised $50 million in a Series C round of venture funding, the company announced today onstage at . “Two new big pieces of information today. One, we’ve closed a $50 million Series C round,” Widmaier said. “We’re in the process of scaling up. We’ve built a lot of the supply chain to bring the products to the market,” he said later in the interview. The second announcement is that the company has also inked a deal with to begin developing and designing products with these science fiction-esque new threads. “We’re not disclosing what we’re doing yet, we’re disclosing that we’re working with them,” Widmaier said. Bolt already manufactures its Engineered Silk protein at scale, with outsourced manufacturing partners, says CEO Dan Widmaier, and will be moving into yarn manufacturing this summer. led the investment joined by Hong Kong-based Nan Fung and Innovation Endeavors. Earlier backers of Bolt, including Alafi Capital, East West Capital, Foundation Capital and Founders Fund also participated. A founder and General Partner with Formation 8, Jim Kim, said his firm invested in Bolt because its silks have amazing properties. Spider silks could be used to make materials that are stronger than Kevlar, and more durable but at least as flexible as Lycra, he said. But the processes that Bolt Threads has come up with are far easier than natural silk manufacturing, which traditionally requires silkworms and plenty of mulberry leaves, which are plants threatened by climate change and the silk industry. Kim said, “Lots of people are investing in the next Uber for something, but not a lot of people understand the technology around textiles. What Bolt is doing impacts a trillion-dollar market.” Given the funding, Kim said he expects Bolt Threads to make its bio-fabricated silks available in mainstream products by 2018. Also onstage today, CEO Andras Forgacs talked about his company. Modern Meadow has been and it’s working well. “In our case, we grow leather and we’re able to grow real leather — same biology, same structure — but we don’t have to kill animals to do that,” Forgacs said. Obviously, it takes a lot of time to build a company that makes a new kind of fabric. But Modern Meadow plans to double in size over the next year. In particular, Forgacs really believes in his company’s mission. “Leather is $100 billion industry,” he said. “Along every step, there’s a lot of chemistry involved, a lot of waste involved.” Commenting on Bolt Threads’ news, Forgacs said that Modern Meadow and Bolt Threads have a lot of things in common. “There are not a lot of companies doing what we do, so we stand out,” he said. Modern Meadow has raised in total. Startups are always working on new things, but Forgacs joked about the fact that he didn’t come with any news. “I don’t have an announcement to make just yet,” he said. [gallery ids="1321321,1321326,1321337,1321338,1321339,1321340,1321342,1321343,1321345"] |
Robots add real value when working with humans, not replacing them | Matt Beane | 2,016 | 5 | 29 |
In the popular media, we talk a lot about stealing jobs. But when we stop speculating and actually look at the world of work, the impact of advanced robotics is far more nuanced and complicated. Issues of jobs and income inequality fade away, for example — there aren’t remotely enough to affect more than a handful of us in the practical sense. Yet usually spell massive changes in the way that skilled work gets done: The work required to fly an F-16 in a combat zone is radically different from the work required to fly a Reaper, a semi-autonomous unmanned aerial vehicle, in that same zone. Because they change the work so radically, robot-linked upheavals like this create a challenge: How do you train the next generation of professionals who will be with ? My research into the increasing use of robotics in surgery offers a partial answer. But it has also uncovered trends that — if they continue — could have a major impact on surgical training and, as a result, the quality of future surgeries. As I have previously , robotic surgical systems allow for one (liable) senior surgeon to take near-complete control of the surgical act. This means trainees are involved less — far less — in performing surgical work, which spells trouble for the profession’s competence and legitimacy. Who wants to be operated on by a surgeon who has watched a lot of surgery, but done very little? If we are at the cusp of a robotic era, I think there are some crucial lessons to be learned here for the world of skilled work in general. A few points set the stage for these lessons. Many fiercely debate whether are the . Partially this is because we don’t agree on how to count are only mechanical devices guided by AI and fed data by sensors, or are they also things like software and process automation? The second of those groups is far, far bigger and has had far, far greater impact on jobs and the economy than the other. Even if we count conservatively, there is reason to think that are about to have their “PC” moment. Robot development and investment are , and every year get dramatically more capable and less expensive — the Internet means that what one robot learns, , for example. If we’re about to see explosive growth in robotics, it is important to keep in mind that, in principle and in practice, when they human capability . But what counts as enhancement or replacement changes when you look up close. Paradoxically, for example, it looks like the is surgical capacity in practice. Traditionally, surgical residents learned the craft by assisting senior surgeons. This is partly due to a happy accident — surgeons needed more skilled arms and thus relied on residents for assistance. Residents could observe and, under the watchful eye and hands of senior surgeons, perform procedures or even take over. Senior surgeons typically retract tissue so the resident can cut or suture, for example. Traditional surgical practice basically demanded that residents play every minute of the game, literally shoulder to shoulder with their mentor. That’s how surgical training has been done since the early 20th century. Robotics upsets this dynamic. In many Da Vinci procedures, residents find themselves on the edges of the playing field. When once they might get four hours of practice during a traditional operation, now they get 10-15 minutes during a Da Vinci procedure — if they get a chance to participate at all. It’s that the robotics technology prevents residents from learning; the technology just makes it iPhone-easy for liability-saddled attending surgeons to assume complete control. The expert does the work, which is good for patients in the short run, but the profession itself is in a new kind of trouble. So what’s the broader lesson here for the future of skilled work? Surgeons are one of the first professional groups to deeply integrate sophisticated robotics systems into their methods, and the result is that surgery itself is radically reconfigured. But as with others that have already crossed this threshold — like pilots — the rush to integrate the latest robotic system may obscure the need for wholesale revisions to training methods so that can learn to perform even better in collaboration with robotic systems. |
What Facebook Live and Periscope need is a waiting room | Josh Constine | 2,016 | 5 | 29 | Livestreams start boring because broadcasters don’t want to begin the real action until more people have tuned in. That can take a few minutes, even with streams being rapidly distributed via push notifications, tweets and the News Feed. But by that time, the initial audience may have bounced, and the recorded replay won’t entice viewers later. Facebook Live videos auto-play their first seconds in the News Feed, but no one wants to watch creators twiddle their thumbs saying “Hey, we’re just waiting for more people to join the broadcast.” That’s why Facebook and Twitter should take cues from other forms of mass media and build a way to stoke interest and assemble viewers before a livestream starts. Pre-broadcast screens from Facebook Live and Periscope (from left) Movies begin marketing many months or even years in advance. The promotional blitzes climax in the weeks before the film is even released. They want a big pop on opening day that convinces others it’s a zeitgeist moment. Even movie showings themselves start with previews of trailers when the film is scheduled to start. The studios want everyone ready in their seats, rapt with anticipation. Concerts have openers. Sports matches have pre-game shows. And in tech, the big launch events from Apple and Google post their streams well before the CEO takes the stage. Mobile livestreaming apps need a waiting room. Imagine an alternative to immediately starting your Facebook Live or Periscope broadcast. You’d get a link that you could freely distribute, when typically it’s awkward or impossible to post your stream to other social networks when you’re on camera already. You could potentially set an estimated start time, or wait to begin the broadcast whenever you’re ready. There could even be an option to schedule a stream further in advance, though the platforms and people lining up to watch might worry the broadcaster would flake out. People who click the link before the stream starts would be dropped into a waiting room. There they’d see a countdown to the estimated start time or a message telling them to hang tight. They could opt to receive a notification when the stream actually begins so they can do something else until then. They’d have the ability to share the stream elsewhere to help it go viral. To keep people entertained while they wait, Facebook or Periscope could show previous videos or posts from the creator, or other content they think would be relevant. The viewers could also be allowed to chat with each other, or add comments and questions ahead of time so broadcasters have feedback or queries waiting for them when they start the stream. This is similar to how Reddit Ask Me Anything viewers can write their questions before the AMA starts. When the stream begins, broadcasters will be able to immediately jump into the subject matter because they’d already have an audience. That will make the first few seconds seem more dynamic when people stumble across the livestream or replay in their feeds. Facebook is already trying to tackle the issue of long livestream replays seeming boring by showing an so viewers can skip to the most popular parts of the video. But by letting creators assemble their fans or friends ahead of time, the video themselves will rev up faster and receive more real-time feedback that makes them feel urgent and lively. The waiting room could convince celebrities that streaming is worth their time, and make amateurs more confident that someone actually wants to see what they transmit. To maximize the potential of the unpredictable mobile livestreaming format, Facebook and Twitter might need to let broadcasters plan a little. |
Technological innovation is often simply an innovation in how we think about technology | Simon Chandler | 2,016 | 5 | 29 |
It may slip our notice, but is reducible to an in the marketing and conceptualization of . Take Viv, the new from the makers of Siri. It promises to simplify the process of ordering pizza or buying cinema tickets, allowing its users to perform such actions via a single voice-operated interface. Like the earlier Siri, it’s being described as a “ ,” not least because it’s speech-operated and assists you in your daily, web-based business. Yet it could also be described as an “Internet intermediary,” or an “advanced search engine,” or an “online purchaser” since it will essentially serve as its users’ single point of contact for a host of websites and services, if not for most of the Internet itself. That it’s classified as a “virtual assistant” rather than something like a “super search engine” is an important distinction, because the difference between the two terms encapsulates how advance is an advance in what say and about . That’s not to say that there isn’t new code involved in Viv, but it is to say that the sense it or any similar app offers something radically new is partly engendered by the application of a new vocabulary to pre-existing kinds of . This vocabulary involves such terms as “personal assistant,” “conversational and “ ,” and it’s the introduction of this vocabulary into the world of search engines that’s largely responsible for making it seem as though Viv, or Siri, is doing something fundamentally different from what Google, Yahoo! or Bing is doing. The thing is, and , or and for that matter, are no more “personal assistants” than other technologies that apparently don’t warrant the name. Like Viv, your laptop is your “single point of contact” to the Internet, insofar as every website you ever access is accessed through your laptop. Like Viv, your web browser “assists” you in the purchasing of products, in that it executes the code that actually places your order after you’ve left-clicked your mouse or pushed Return. Of course, neither laptops nor web browsers are quite the same as meta-search engines (or whatever you want to call them), but they still bear enough similarities to demonstrate that, more than realize, the difference between underlying technologies is exaggerated by differences of language and conceptualization. While there are undoubtedly many breakthroughs that can’t be reduced in this way to linguistic and conceptual changes, it’s surprising how often apparent innovations depend on shifts in terminology and discourse. To take another example besides “virtual assistants,” the financial world is currently with its own line in blockchains, aka distributed ledgers, which banks are rushing to design and test. However, as Chris DeRose noted in an published last year by American Banker, “the powering distributed ledgers predates blockchains by well over 20 years.” Here, DeRose is referring to the consensus algorithm and its more recent successor, , which enables the nodes of a decentralized network to agree with each other on questions of value, and which will most likely be in one form or another by financial institutions in building their distributed ledgers. While such databases will incorporate consensus algorithms into their architecture and will therefore be largely based on technologies with a long pedigree, they’re nonetheless being referred to as these whole new entities: blockchains. This is somewhat misleading, because, aside from implying an affinity to the Bitcoin blockchain (which uses a different, proof-of-work consensus algorithm), it also implies a considerable break with the past that hasn’t really occurred, at least not on the level. However, what has occurred is a considerable shift in the culture and context surrounding these consensus algorithms, a shift brought about by the ascent of Bitcoin. Together with its blockchain and its surrounding libertarian subculture, the cryptocurrency has altered how conceptualize distributed ledgers and databases, thereby predisposing us to see an innovative product — a blockchain — where in fact there’s much that’s been around for years, if not decades. This cultural influence isn’t uncommon, either, and with closer inspection it becomes clear that most has a conventional, socially constructed element that serves to reframe its function and meaning. If nothing else, this is what social media teaches us; in many cases, the difference between a Facebook and a LinkedIn is the difference between socially conveyed norms on how to use the same basic software. That is, could very easily use LinkedIn in much the same way that use Facebook, yet the socially disseminated that it’s “business-oriented” and used for “professional networking” leads us toward using it mainly to help our careers, transforming it into a business tool in the process. Even beyond the conventions surrounding the use of social networking sites, it’s interesting how supposedly objective, scientifically engineered is dependent for its uses and purposes on subjective interpretations. For instance, Romex recently an app that will stop people from texting or calling when they’re driving their cars. It works by using our smartphones’ GPS systems to detect our speed and lock our phones if ‘re moving at more than four miles per hour. The London-based firm intends it as a safety device, which is what it will henceforth be categorized as, but there’s nothing to stop us from using it on the train as an anti-procrastination gadget that makes sure finally read A Brief History of Time rather than idly check our Twitter feed, or from using it to check whether our jogging pace remains above a minimum level. This is because the actual uses to which the app is put resides outside of the app itself, meaning that very depends on innovations in how conceive of and exploit a particular (in this case GPS). Still, this dependence testifies to the intimate relationship between and culture, to how has the power to reshape in turn the society that shapes it. This is evident in the example of the Bitcoin blockchain changing how the financial industry thinks about distributed ledgers and encryption, and it’s evident in how social media has our face-to-face relationships and political lives. Yet the social construction of , its uses and its innovations, nonetheless warns us that can’t expect new alone to be a panacea for the issues all face in the 21st century. It reminds us that purely is insignificant on its own, and that to generate the novel technologies that will truly change how live and work, also need to change how and act. |
360-degree camera maker Jeffrey Martin talks about what it takes to film for VR | John Biggs | 2,016 | 5 | 29 | This week on the Technotopia podcast I interviewed Jeffrey Martin, the creator of and the maker of the . Martin is a skilled 360-degree camera operator and has created amazing panoramas of cities around the world. “I’ve been working with VR since the days of CRT monitors,” he said as he explained the challenges and changes coming to us thanks to new improvements to VR systems. I’m not a huge VR proponent but Martin’s excitement is great and I could be swayed… if I saw the right content on the right device. Jeffrey has ideas about both. You can and .
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Human obsolescence: Are we ready for an artificially intelligent future? | Ryan Brady | 2,016 | 5 | 29 |
“Enjoy your com-FORT-able stay,” says a robot front-desk clerk at Japan’s . Do you thank the robot for its awkward salutation? Or maybe you hesitate for a moment before shuffling off in silence. If our digital screens are separating us from human interaction, you better believe AI will further tear that tenuous social fabric. On the other hand, AI could also help free us up for more time spent with loved ones — kind of like how social media has helped us keep in touch with friends we wouldn’t normally keep in touch with. But what does that mean for our jobs? Let’s face it, humans aren’t the most efficient workers. We’re moody, unpredictable and we have to make time for silly things like eating and sleeping. But robots don’t. Besides the occasional software patch or hardware update, machines and programs can pretty much work at maximum capacity, 24/7. Because of this, 57 percent of workers are currently at risk of automation, according to a recent study by . Another found that roughly half of all U.S. jobs are at risk of being automated within the next 20 years. It shouldn’t surprise you that customer service and manufacturing jobs are among the most at risk. If the Internet was the first wave of disruption for customer service, AI and robotics will be the second (and likely final) wave. Just as the Internet rendered the role of the travel agent nearly obsolete, so too will AI wipe out jobs for telemarketers, receptionists and even retail salespersons. counterbalances this argument by suggesting that AI is not replacing jobs, but simply augmenting and shifting them. The example he gives is when blacksmiths lost their horseshoe-making jobs because of the proliferation of the automobile in 1908. He writes: And then, of course, as automobiles became more sophisticated (again, because of advancements in technology), it further required the maintenance of a professional auto mechanic rather than your weekend do-it-yourselfer. So perhaps the proliferation of artificially intelligent applications and robotics will foster a . After all, someone’s got to take care of all these robots, right? Recently, a Chinese inventor built a $50,000 to fulfill a childhood dream. This raises more than a few ethical . If one cannot garner the attention and company of another human being, is it OK to simply a second version of that person to appease latent desires? Think for a moment how you would feel if a stranger built and interacted with a robotic replica of yourself. Creepy, right? Perhaps because lifelike robotics is still coming into fruition, the ethical guidelines are “lost in translation” (I had to throw my in here somewhere…). Nonetheless, we’re still nowhere near the point where a Scarlett Johansson robot can play her part in the upcoming Ghost in the Shell movie adaptation — or a Kusanagi robot, for that matter — but perhaps we’re not far off. A drummer in my brother’s reggae band had this sticker on the outside of his bass drum: “Drum Machines Have No Soul.” Drummers are supposed to have near perfect rhythm; perfect being key. A perfect drum beat, like the kind you get when you program a drum machine, coupled with identical dynamic drum hits make it sound mechanical. It makes it sound, well, robotic. In some genres of music this is a desired effect (high-five if you listen to ). But most genres — reggae especially — do not benefit from that mechanical, robotic sound. Extrapolated further, we can say it is the minor imperfections and subtle flaws of the human operator that imbue us with something special, something warm and alive — something analogue. I supposed this imperfection can be summed up as our own psyche, or, our own soul, of which no amount of code can completely replicate. Can there really be a program for something so nuanced and fragile as the human self? Can we ever experience an “I-Thou” relationship with an artificially intelligent design, or will it forever be an “It.” I suppose that would depend on the person (and the robot). No matter how lifelike a robot’s appearance may be, I remain convinced a robot’s programmed personality will leave us wandering through the uncanny valley — at least for the time being. |
Why do chatbots suck? | Faisal Khalid | 2,016 | 5 | 29 |
Chatbots have been in the news a lot this year. First there was , Microsoft’s racist love child, who just couldn’t keep herself under control. Then came with its Messenger bots, which, by most accounts, didn’t start well. And now there’s news coming from , which at first glance seems like Siri 2.0. Not surprisingly, it was built by the founder of . What’s really surprising is that, despite all this hoopla, it’s hard to find a single chatbot that’s actually a really good product. Of course, we can wrangle over the definition of what makes a good product, but in its simplest terms, a great product would have three traits: (1) It’s simple and easy to use; (2) It works well 99 percent of the time; and (3) It removes or reduces friction in whatever it was you want it to do. So back to the question — why do chatbots suck? I mean, there’s not a single chatbot I can think of that has won wide praise, or, more importantly, that has proven that chatbots are actually easier to use than an app. So why is this? Let’s take a closer look. Viv and Siri both suffer from this; they aim to cover everything, and in the process compromise on quality. To understand why a broad scope is problematic, we need to first understand how chatbots work. Chatbots basically have two parts to them: the “brain” and the “body.” The first part is the “brain.” To understand what this brain is, think of a car. Inside a car you have an engine that makes the car move. And attached to that engine you have a body that you can customise to your needs — you could have a four-wheeler, a sporty roadster or just a normal sedan. The same engine could be used in many different ways depending on the body you attach to it. That’s kind of how chatbots work, too. The “brain” is like this giant nervous system that takes words that humans say and converts them into actionable code. In a very narrow-scope chatbot, there’s only so much that a human can say. For example, if someone built a chatbot to help you book flights, you can imagine about 100-200 things a human could possibly say to the chatbot. So, it’s quite easy to build a brain for this need. I can do it in a few weeks and be pretty sure that I’ll get 99 percent accuracy in responding to the human. But now imagine a chatbot whose scope is much wider — like Siri. You could say literally anything to it. For Siri to correctly understand everything is incredibly difficult. It requires an immense engineering effort, and takes time. If it takes a human baby years to learn a language, it will surely take humans years to artificially build one. And then too, they will fail, because they can never quite replicate the irrational aspects of human behavior. Just like you can never predict what a six-year-old will say. But you predict what a 40-year-old will say. The second part of chatbots is the “body.” As I said, this is the “easy” part of it. It needs to be built and customized, but it’s literally just a vast body of knowledge. Compiling it can take time, depending on the industry. For something like travel bookings via a chatbot, the body of knowledge you need is not immense. I imagine you could literally plug your chatbot into a TripAdvisor API and deliver a pretty robust product. But for anything in financial services, which is the world in which I operate, the barriers and the time it takes to compile this body of knowledge is immense. Most financial services websites aren’t accustomed to talking like a real human. Chatbots, by nature, need to talk like humans. They need to be simple and easy to understand. Translating from banking lingo/websites to chatbot-friendly lingo is time-consuming and hard. Hard because financial products are by default complex, and describing them in simple, layman’s terms is therefore quite hard. As strange as it may sound, most chatbots aren’t actually intelligent. Well, at least not the ones that are used. How do you know if a chatbot is intelligent? Here are two defining traits: (1) It is able to “take care of itself” and get better with time; and (2) It lets you say or ask literally anything you want to. Let’s take Tay — the Microsoft chatbot — as an example. Yes, it was intelligent. It tried to learn as people spoke to it. And, in theory, it should have gotten better with time — better in that it starts seeing patterns without having to be “told” about them. What about an unintelligent app? Most Facebook Messenger bots, for example the CNN chatbot, are not intelligent. Why? Because you can only go down one of the many pre-set paths on them. The apps that are most likely to get it right — to actually do what they’re supposed to do without screwing up — are the unintelligent ones, because the number of “paths” you can go down is finite. This is an interesting one. Most chatbots you see being demo-ed, for example Viv, completely gloss over this minute but important detail. The thing is, with most good apps, you actually type very little. It’s swipe swipe, touch touch, and you’re done. With most chatbots, this is not the case. Most chatbots don’t support voice yet, which means you literally have to type everything. Not surprisingly, this means more time to complete the task — so it’s actually less efficient to use a chatbot than to use an app! Which is totally counterintuitive. And when you factor in the delays caused by the chatbot not understanding what you are communicating, the efficiency becomes ever worse — because now you have to re-type your question and hope the chatbot gets it. Not at all. But it does suggest that it’s still very early days for chatbots. Ten to 15 years back, when apps started taking over the world, the benefits were crystal clear. It was just quicker and easier to use an app on your phone to do stuff than to try to use the mobile web. Today, the same benefits — speed and efficiency — aren’t apparent when I use chatbots versus the mobile web. And even when they are, the lack of accuracy means I’m never quite sure if I can really trust the chatbot to get the job done. Personally, I believe that un-intelligent chatbots will be the first excellent use of chatbots. Using them for customer service — playing back answers to FAQs to customers. And using them to actually explain how complex things work. Like bank products, for example. Imagine a chatbot that could help you — a first-time buyer — understand anything and everything you need to know about buying your first house. How valuable would that be? It would be amazing and immense. Chatbots are great for explaining stuff because they can keep asking you if you get it, and if you don’t they can keep going deeper and deeper into explanations. Chatbots are also, I think, a great substitute for long forms. They’re much more human and palatable than forms. So there are great places to stratify if you’re an entrepreneur looking to build a chatbot. Some people are a bit confused about what is. To be clear, it’s not a Siri. It’s not a complete chatbot. It’s just a brain. Viv is a brain. It relies on input from third-party APIs to actually deliver content for you. What Viv is trying to do is become the default operating system or the network on which all other chatbots or chatbot APIs ride. , if it works, could become like the App Store. So in that sense, they will compete with Facebook Messenger or Slack or social networks that are also trying to become the default platform for chatbots. Is this what the future looks like? Personally, I’m not sure. I’m not sure there is value in actually having a centralized chatbot operating system like Viv. If chatbots are the new apps, then wouldn’t we expect to find them in the app store, like we find our apps today? Maybe, maybe not. Only time will tell. |
Twitter is introducing a Periscope live-streaming button in its mobile apps | Jon Russell | 2,016 | 5 | 16 | Facebook is heaping focus on live video with , which , so it’s no surprise to see that Twitter is fighting back in the streaming war with an integration between Periscope, its live-streaming platform, and the Twitter mobile apps. is a gradual rollout, a small number of Twitter for Android users have a ‘Go Live’ button alongside existing media options, such as record video or attach image, when they create a tweet. Those with the app already installed on their phone are directed to Periscope when they click the button, all others are sent to the app store where they can download the live-streaming app. “Over time, all users will have the ability to start a Periscope broadcast from Twitter,” the company told us in a statement. The move makes a lot of sense, and frankly it is somewhat surprising that it has taken so long to come about. and, like Vine — the other standalone app it runs — it has given the team a degree of independence away from the mothership. But, with Facebook doubling down on live streaming with , Twitter needs to explore synergies. Facebook may have a larger userbase, but it still remains to be seen whether the social network can adapt to live videos, which are a hugely different proposition to perusing a timeline full of updates accumulated over days. Twitter, however, is more adept to real-time, but is far smaller. Beyond redirecting users to another app with this integration, it’ll be interesting to see if Twitter explores a more seamless, straight-to-broadcast, option inside the Twitter app in the future — because Facebook is already doing that. |
YouTube for iOS gets full Google Cardboard support | Lucas Matney | 2,016 | 5 | 16 | As the tech world waits to see what at its I/O conference later this week, today, the company snuck in an update to YouTube for iOS that allows you to view any video in VR mode on Cardboard. YouTube’s Android app has had full Cardboard support since November, but iPhone users have been sorely out of luck. With today’s release, iOS users can now tap the icon in the top-right of any video to get the option to view it in VR mode. This is huge news for mobile VR as YouTube essentially just opened up what is likely the largest iOS virtual reality content library. Now, something to keep in mind is that this new functionality doesn’t magically turn regular YouTube videos into 360-degree content or anything, in Cardboard mode you’re basically watching the video in theater mode. 360 content looks awesome in Cardboard mode though and gives you the immersive 360 experience that you can’t get in “magic window” mode. As rumors continue to flurry around the Android VR headset that Google is reportedly launching this week, this release proves that whatever comes, the Cardboard platform is likely going to continue to be a major part of the company’s future mobile VR strategy. |
VR gaming startup Lucid Sight nabs $3.5M in Series A funding | Lucas Matney | 2,016 | 5 | 16 | , an LA-based VR game studio, announced today that they have closed a $3.5 million Series A round of funding led by Rana Capital Partners, B.V. and Salem Partners. This raise brings the company’s total funding to $4 million. Previous investors included AdColony founder Jonathan Zweig. Coinciding with the funding announcement is Lucid Sight’s release of a VR Ad SDK. Lucid Sight is hoping that game developers can use this platform to monetize their content for users with immersive in-app ads. The company is using this latest raise to build out their own library of content so they can both increase their presence on various headsets and show off their ad platform. The game studio currently has three titles (Poly Runner VR, Gumi No Yume and Space Bit Attack) available across the major headsets and they’re looking to expand the number of free, ad-supported titles they’ve put out to 20 by the year’s end. Poly Runner VR Advertising in virtual reality is in a pretty weird place right now where game developers don’t want to implement it haphazardly and piss off users, but Lucid Sight is hoping it can get in on the ground floor of this opportunity before VR ads start getting big. This is familiar footing for the Lucid Sight founders, Randy Saaf and Octavio Herrera, who have pursued this path to success before on a different paradigm-shifting platform, mobile. The pair co-founded Jirbo in 2008, an iPhone gaming company that dominated the Apple App Store in its early days. The team would soon evolve Jirbo’s gaming efforts into building out its video ad network for in-app advertisements. The team later sold a majority stake of the company to Insight Venture Partners. Jirbo soon rebranded as AdColony and would go on to be . For advertisers, VR represents a really enticing platform to show off engaging sponsored content, but the fact is there just aren’t that many places to view that content at the moment. “It’s very hard to express a VR experience on a 2D platform like the web or a mobile screen,” Saaf told me. “So, the only place you can really show a VR experience is within another VR experience.” Lucid Sight has seen early successes with the 360-degree content they’ve been pushing in-app through their own games. Even with an opt-out after 10 seconds, the company told me that over 20% of users chose to watch the entirety of a 4-minute sponsored ad based around the Lions Gate film within their game PolyRunner VR. Relevant metrics are occasionally hard to come by in the VR space. Oculus revealed last week that the Samsung Gear VR had surpassed 1 million users last month so we’re starting to get more useful benchmarks for device and content popularity. Lucid Sight still isn’t quite ready to give exact download numbers, but did specify that their games were impressively on a “high double-digit percentage” of current Gear VR devices. Ads may not be something users are clamoring for in virtual reality, but it’s likely going to take significantly more free, ad-supported content in the various headset app stores for people to actually try out some of the awesome stuff VR game studios are creating. |
Twitter may remove photos and links from its 140-character limit | Catherine Shu | 2,016 | 5 | 16 | For , Twitter users have complained about the fact that link and photo URLs count against each tweet’s 140-character limit. Now that may finally change. According to a , Twitter will stop including photos and links in character counts soon, possibly within the next two weeks. URLs are automatically shortened by Twitter, but still eat up 23 characters. The platform has explored ways to make it easier to include links in tweets since 2010, when , but many users don’t think they should be counted at all. Twitter declined to comment on the report. If the new character count policy is implemented, it will allow people to compose wordier tweets—but still be far less drastic than another change that , which would have raised its limit to thousands of characters. CEO Jack Dorsey said that the time that Twitter is “not going to be shy about building more utility and power into Twitter for people. As long as it’s consistent with what people want to do, we’re going to explore it.” Twitter has been encouraging users to include more media in their tweets with features like support for videos, gifs, and polls. What they really want, however, is space to write more. Users have (which won’t work as well and may become downright incomprehensible now that ) and . The ability to jam more text, media, links, and other content into individual tweets , which launched four years ago—in a bid to attract more brands, media companies, advertisers, and other power users to the platform. By giving users—even those that don’t use Twitter cards—more control over how they compose their tweets, Twitter may be able to lure more people onto the site—which is , while other social networks and messengers like Snapchat and WhatsApp continue to gain traction. User engagement—especially during live events—may also increase because people no longer have to perform mental gymnastics in order to compose the shortest tweets possible and can instead use more conversational language. |
Snapchat goes to space with NASA Live Story | Emily Calandrelli | 2,016 | 5 | 16 | Today, the International Space Station its 100,000 orbit around the Earth since its first module was launched on November 20 , 1998. To celebrate that milestone, NASA teamed up with Snapchat for a space-themed Live Story called Day in Space. Up on Snapchat now, the feed features NASA astronaut , Commander of Expedition 47, living and working on the International Space Station (ISS). [gallery size="tc-article-featured-image-wide" ids="1322985,1322986,1322987,1322988,1322989,1322990,1322991,1322992,1322993,1322994,1322996,1322998"] “One thing that never gets old here is looking down on our beautiful planet.” Astronaut Tim Kopra Kopra uses the video to show off the view of the Earth from the ISS, a Low Earth Orbit laboratory that’s traveling at 17,500 miles per hour, completing a full orbit around our planet every 90 minutes. Kopra notes that because of this the crew is able to witness 16 sunrises and sunsets every single day. The Live Story features videos of Kopra doing everyday tasks in a weightless environment like flying from one module to another, conducting science experiments with globules of water, eating a tortilla, and doing a mid-air flip. : Mexican scrambled eggs, creamed spinach, pepperjack, onions, and salsa. Best one yet. — Tim Kopra (@astro_tim) As an international science laboratory, the ISS has been used as a test bed for microgravity experiments and a launching platform for cubesats for 18 years. Kopra notes that there are over 250 microgravity experiments on board the ISS right now. Because crew often live and work on the ISS for extended periods of time, it’s an ideal environment to analyze the long-term effects of weightlessness on the human body. Over time, an astronaut living in a weightless environment will experience muscle degradation and bone density loss, among other issues. Exercise helps mitigate the harmful effects of microgravity – British Astronaut Tim Peake runs the London Marathon while on board the ISS/ Image courtesy of ESA Space agencies are concerned with this issue because in order to send humans farther out into the solar system, like to Mars for example, astronauts will be required to survive long journeys floating inside their spacecraft. The most notable experiment on this topic to date is Astronaut Scott Kelly’s . Kelly completed a 340-day mission that ended in March of this year, while his identical twin brother, Mark Kelly (also an astronaut), stayed down on the ground. The brothers are part of NASA’s ongoing which involves 10 investigations designed to understand the long-term effects of living in a weightless environment. Good morning, ! You were impressive from 250 mi up on my . Great to be visiting you today! — Scott Kelly (@StationCDRKelly) At the end of the Day in Space Story, Kopra shows off the Russian Soyuz vehicle docked to station saying that they are “currently packing it up, getting it ready to go home.” This time next month, Kopra will be preparing to board that vehicle on a trip back to Earth. His ride, the Soyuz TMA-19M, is to depart from the ISS and land on June 18th. |
null | Sarah Perez | 2,016 | 5 | 11 | null |
The Garmin vivofit 3 makes me want to move again | John Biggs | 2,016 | 5 | 16 | I’ve long been an activity tracker kind of guy. I strapped them all onto my fleshy wrist: the Fitbits, the Nikes, the Polars. I’ve watched circles fill up on my Apple Watch and I’ve watched ghost competitors race me on early GPS watches. But for the past few months I abandoned any wrist-based tracker because the battery in the one I was using kept dying. And so I went pedometer-less for a long while. Now, thankfully, I can walk again thanks to the vivofit 3. Garmin’s super-simple band has a 1-year battery life, is eminently usable and is as unobtrusive as any other fitness tracker — without the requirement to carry a charger around on long trips. In short, it’s fitness tracking epitomized. The device is exactly what you’d expect from a fitness tracker. It has a single button that scrolls between time, date, steps taken, your daily goal, calorie burn, distance moved and “active time.” It also senses when you’re asleep, automatically, and charts your deep sleep with acceptable accuracy. It connects to Garmin’s own Connect app to show you your stats and you can sync with a heart-rate monitor and phone wirelessly. Finally, you can hold down the button to time activities as needed. The device tracks your motion and reminds you to stand up every hour or so. You can see all of your activity on the Garmin Connect app, which also connects to other Garmin devices, like bike computers and higher-end sports watches. You can swap out the bands for fancy designer models, but I liked the black band just fine. [gallery ids="1322955,1322956,1322957"] What this means is that this little $99 band does everything you need it to do for the average life of futzing around at work and home. This is definitely not for the triathlon-runner or the endurance athlete — the lack of a built-in heart-rate sensor means you won’t be truly satisfied — but as a daily driver, a sort of fun thing to track your steps and tell you that you’re too slovenly, then this is just right. It’s obvious that Garmin is going straight for the jugular. Late for the activity tracker party, the company originally tried to sell all sorts of high-end sports devices to compete with Android and Apple when the only folks it needed to compete with are the ones selling sub-$100 activity trackers. It’s not clear how many of the vivofits Garmin has sold, but given that this is the third iteration on the theme — the first two devices sporting a simpler LCD screen and fewer features — they clearly think this product has legs. And it does. Again, this is not Garmin’s “premium” product. It is a great entry-level fitness tracker with enough features to keep you happy until you run a 10K and need something a little more in-depth. When that becomes the case, a heart-rate measuring device like the or the vivoactive HR will do quite nicely. The vivofit 3, then, is Garmin’s gateway drug. There are a few concerns I had with this product. First, there is no backlight, so you can’t consult it in the dark. Second, the clasp and rubber are precariously connected. I’ve seen the device fall off a few times during normal use, even when the buckle is properly locked. It’s not a terrible flaw, but it could be slightly disconcerting if you’re running around and suddenly find your band gone. Neither of these are showstoppers yet. The vivofit 3 works well. It measures your walks and runs and it can measure your sleep. It reminds you to move and it rewards you when you do. In a society predicated toward sloth and sitting, it’s a boon friend and wrist companion, and at $99 it’s a great way to suggest someone should get out more without untoward chiding. Heck, buy it for yourself and let it help you get off the couch. It’s a win for all, especially fleshy meat bags like myself. |
5 days after Disrupt NY, the beard is still gone and the Red Hook Initiative is $4,500 richer | Jonathan Shieber | 2,016 | 5 | 16 | So I know some of y’all were worried about me after I agreed to have my face shaved at Disrupt NY to raise money for the . I just wanted to check in and let you know what life post-beard is like. (Actually I’m pretty sure none of y’all gave a good goddamn, but I’ll let you know anyway.) Initially, I went through the five stages of grief. I didn’t believe that my fat face could be that jowly. That my follicles didn’t put up more of a fight. I asked if they could paste the beard hair back. They said no. Goddamn, that really what my face looks like. That and (our corporate overlord) combined to put up $3,000 for the Red Hook Initiative … to match the $1,500 that came from so many of the TechCrunch friends and family (and my own friends and family… all five of them). Have I changed? I’m a little wiser (in that I will never do that again), and I have a newfound motivation to go back to the gym. Ultimately, though, this little experiment with my face managed to drive home a point that I know, but sometimes overlook. That our not-so-little community of makers, entrepreneurs and investors is pretty terrific. The money you raised is going to help an organization provide programs and long-term services that each year reach more than 350 young people who live in a historically disenfranchised neighborhood. Another 2,000 Red Hook residents reap the benefits of the charity’s work, as well. My face may be shorn, but your generosity never fails to leave me beaming. |
This machine 3D prints metal structures in midair by lasering nanoparticles | Devin Coldewey | 2,016 | 5 | 16 | One limitation of run-of-the-mill 3D printers is that the structure must essentially be built as a series of layers, each one supporting the next. A new device from Harvard’s Wyss Institute allows metal filaments to essentially be drawn in midair with no support whatsoever. And it uses lasers! There’s no fancy name for the technology yet (unless laser-assisted direct ink writing counts), but the gist of it is this: A nozzle moves along a preset path sending out a thin stream of silver nanoparticles, while at the same time a laser follows its progress, heating the particles and solidifying them into a freestanding filament thinner than a human hair. Inside the nozzle, the flow of nanoparticles has to be precisely controlled to keep the metal thread’s width uniform, and the laser must adjust as well so as not to leave any particles un-annealed, or apply too much heat and solidify the ink inside the extruder. The results are beautiful and flexible single-piece structures that can take almost any form — useful for creating structural elements like tiny springs and buttresses, as well as circuits. “I am truly excited by this latest advance from our lab, which allows one to 3D print and anneal flexible metal electrodes and complex architectures ‘on-the-fly,'” said lead researcher Jennifer Lewis . “This sophisticated use of laser technology to enhance 3D printing capabilities not only inspires new kinds of products, it moves the frontier of solid free-form fabrication into an exciting new realm.” The technique is demonstrated in the form of some pretty 3D wire butterflies, but you can imagine it being used to build custom structures for a variety of purposes — wiring on custom medical devices or rapid prototypes, for instance. Lewis’s research was published today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. |
Starting the food crisis conversation | Benzi Ronen | 2,016 | 5 | 16 |
What does the future of food look like? Former Vice President Al Gore and 40 entrepreneurs and CEOs in the food industry recently convened in London to try to answer just that. The topics of conversation ran the gamut, from and , to using , to the decentralization of food. These topics are set against the backdrop of the stunning magnitude of the many problems we face: the economies of scale that emphasize quantity over quality, a single-minded focus on the bottom line, the use of technology to obscure and de-humanize (rather than to connect and share) and an ignorance-is-bliss approach to our environmental impact. Nevertheless, five key realizations indicate how far we have come and how much further we can go: After years of experiencing first-hand the ills of an industrial food system — environmental degradation and the obesity epidemic, to name a few — entrepreneurs in the U.S. will essentially be forced to be the first responders to a seemingly insurmountable challenge. And it won’t just be the traditional food guys; people with backgrounds in software, hardware or environmental sciences will be the ones to step up and hack brand new solutions to our problems. Bonus: Those who founded mission-driven startups will find they have an easier job of attracting the best and brightest as employees look for more meaningful work. Big companies and small farms both face a key issue that comes with a global food industry: maintaining food safety standards. Enter some seriously high-tech solutions, including a scenario where small samples are extracted from food items in order to examine their genome, thereby ensuring 100 percent safety. In a world where and , it could be an invaluable safety net. Businesses of all sorts are beginning to use , tailoring content and experiences to the individual. As personal preferences become paramount, companies will become obsessed with giving us exactly what we want, when we want it. Manufacturers — including food retail — will transition away from a distribution system toward the pull model that the service industry has long taken advantage of. Food will be pulled just-in-time to meet demand (fresher food), less inventory will be needed (cheaper food) and will decrease the time it takes perishable food to get to market (less food waste). Online retailers are already beginning to provide consumers with , and the food industry is next. Pulling back the curtain on ingredients, provenance and practices will encourage more responsibility and accountability along the entire supply chain. In the pursuit of growth and economies of scale, we often see a loss of quality and transparency. However, by tapping into decentralized, local communities, businesses can scale with more efficiency (smaller, more nimble, more personalized locations versus one large behemoth) and provide the customer with a better experience — like, say, Airbnb. Plus, as hard as it may be to believe, when consumer preferences finally tilt the scales toward quality, it’s not unrealistic to expect slow, but gradual changes in government policy to follow. Relatively minor amendments to the outdated regulations, illogical farm bills and subsidies that dictate our current policy (in favor of the major food lobbies) could have a huge impact on the future of food. More and more of us are becoming conscious of , on both the and our . The geographic line-in-the-sand between areas of food production and food consumption will shrink, and the focus will switch from animals to plants as technological advances give us the ability to create healthy, nutritious and . Once futuristic greenhouse technologies — hydroponics, aeroponics, and aquaponics — are already commonplace and being used the world over to create efficient, clean and healthy sources of food in our cities. At the end of the day, there is no question that the innovation we’ll see in the coming years will dramatically outpace anything we’ve seen to date, just as the last few years have seen rapid advances over the past decade. Our food industry is in crisis; the problems we’re facing need to be resolved, and fast. Is everything being worked on right now going to fix them all, or even work? Definitely not. Was the conversation an important, inspiring and huge first step toward getting there? Absolutely. |
Apple’s GarageBand picks up traditional Chinese sounds and instruments in new update | Lucas Matney | 2,016 | 5 | 16 | Apple’s interests in China, its second-largest regional market, expand far beyond their recent . As the company eyes a larger presence in China, they’re also looking to capture the country’s creativity and imagination with their content creation tools. Today, Apple’s music creation software is gaining an update on iOS and Mac that will more tightly integrating traditional Chinese instruments and sounds into the program. The updates (2.1.1 for iOS and 10.1.2 for Mac), which are available now for free to existing users, adds more than 300 loops built with several different Chinese instruments and styles in mind, adding guzheng, dizi, yangqin and Peking Opera to GarageBand’s library of Chinese musical content. Past playing around with traditional-sounding loops, users can now create their own customized sounds on new Chinese instruments, including the , and Chinese percussion. Users can capture the intricacies of these instruments by dynamically controlling vibrato and intensity with 3D Touch or can just tap a few chords and let Autoplay take over on the pipa and erhu. In addition to the new musical instruments and loops, Apple is making it easer for users in China to share their GarageBand tunes to the region’s most popular social networks, including QQ and Youku. This certainly isn’t the craziest GarageBand update, but it does signal that Apple is aiming to keep a closer eye on how they can more closely integrate their Mac and iOS creative software to attract Chinese users and serve their needs. |
MCX postpones rollout of Apple Pay rival CurrentC, lays off 30, will focus on bank deals | Ingrid Lunden | 2,016 | 5 | 16 | As merchants like Walmart on their own mobile payment strategies, a consortium that once counted Walmart — along with a number of other big retailers and brands — behind it, has taken a step back. (MCX) today announced it would postpone a nationwide rollout of , a smartphone payment initiative originally conceived as a mobile wallet rival to smartphone-led services like Apple Pay and Android Pay. As a result, MCX said it would lay off 30 people as it shifted its focus to working with financial institutions. A statement from MCX CEO Brian Mooney noted that the company would forge ahead instead on partnerships with banks like Chase: “Utilizing unique feedback from the marketplace and our Columbus pilot, MCX has made a decision to concentrate more heavily in the immediate term on other aspects of our business including working with financial institutions, like our partnership with Chase, to enable and scale mobile payment solutions. As part of this transition, MCX will postpone a nationwide rollout of its CurrentC application. As MCX has said many times, the mobile payments space is just beginning to take shape – it is early in a long game. MCX’s owner-members remain committed to our future. As a result, MCX will need fewer resources. This change has resulted in staff reduction of approximately 30 employees. These are very tough decisions, but necessary steps. For those employees leaving us, we want to thank our colleagues for their hard work and dedication to MCX over the last several years.” The Columbus pilot Mooney refers to was in place with nine retailers — including Walmart, CVS, Target and more — with dozens of others preparing to add their names to the mix. A spokesperson for MCX would not provide any further detail on the timeline, if any, except to stress the “long game” in payments. There was a lot of noise about CurrentC when it as a joint effort from dozens of large and small retailers after what looked like . The thinking was that these retailers could develop their own payment services to avoid credit card transaction fees and to keep the likes of Apple and Google out of the equation when it came to payment relationships with their customers. But the writing on the wall may have been there for CurrentC and MCX for a while now: The company was supposed to roll out service in 2015, but then there were last August that it would be pushed back to this year. There was also a cloud over the technology that underpinned CurrentC. Originally its payment service was based on QR Codes at a time when others were swapping to faster, secure NFC-based “contactless” solutions; later MCX said it would . While the consortium has been plagued with delays in its development, retailers effectively defected from the effort by working on their own solutions and with other third-party services like Apple Pay. CurrentC also faced a number of controversies — perhaps most notably after the service was . At the same time, the rest of the payments industry has continued to evolve: The largest businesses, like Walmart, have been developing their own services. Existing mobile wallets like Apple Pay have continued their expansion globally, while other large payment businesses have consolidated their position. Notably, Paydiant, the company that powered the CurrentC application for MCX, got — and that too may have left a question mark over how it would be developed going forward. On top of all this, there is a general commoditization afoot in payments, and white label solutions — such as announced today — are becoming more widespread. In that context, it’s very unsurprising that efforts that are costly or clunky (or both) are getting abandoned. |
How can we control intelligent systems no one fully understands? | Vasant Dhar, Ph.D. | 2,016 | 5 | 16 |
The widespread conversations about AI took a new turn in March 2016 when Microsoft launched, then quickly unplugged, , its artificial intelligence chat robot. Within 24 hours, interactions on Twitter had turned the bot, modeled after a teenage girl, into a “ .” This controversy, on the heels of the Feb. 14, 2016, of Google’s self-driving robot car, has ignited a new debate over artificial intelligence. How should we design intelligent learning machines that minimize undesirable behavior? While both of the aforementioned incidents were relatively minor, they highlight a broader concern, namely, that it is very difficult to control adaptive learning machines in complex environments. The famous cybernetician Norbert Wiener warned us about this dilemma more than 50 years ago: “If we use, to achieve our purposes, a mechanical agency with whose operation we cannot interfere effectively … we had better be quite sure that the purpose put into the machine is the purpose we really desire and not merely a colorful imitation of it.” The difficulty with learning machines arises because they train themselves on what they see, the “training data,” that cannot completely represent situations the machine will see in the future. These are sometimes called “edge cases” or “Rumsfeldian unknowns,” in that they are unknowable in advance. Humans typically deal with such edge cases remarkably well with no prior “training” by applying common sense or finding analogies and learning from these samples of one. There is no clear answer to this vexing issue at the moment. However, it is essential for designers of such systems to assess worst-case implications in terms of the risks associated with future edge cases. For starters, the analysis of errors on the training set is essential in helping us understand what a system has learned in the first place. Understanding what the machine has learned is a nontrivial activity. For example, in a recent project involving estimating the audience on TV stations at different times of day, we found that a system’s predictions were badly off at certain times in some regions of the country. A detailed analysis of the errors revealed that the system wasn’t aware of special sports schedules in the relevant regions at those times. By adding this data to the training set and retraining the system, its performance improved dramatically in the problematic cases, while it stayed the same for the others, which suggested that the machine had learned to use the new knowledge in dealing with previously problematic cases. While this doesn’t address the problem in general, it is the first line of attack in making systems robust. Another strategy is to leverage the globally available human intelligence on the Internet to create the edge cases where the machine is likely to fail. Crowdsourcing is a commonly used method to obtain or process such cases. Some of my colleagues have set up a system called “beat the machine,” where humans are asked to identify cases where the machine’s predictions will be wrong. Each time they are successful in identifying such cases, the machine is better able to learn about them and deal with similar cases in the future. There are other ways, some more automated, to add an adversary into the learning process, where the role of the adversary is to trip up the learning system. For example, adversarial examples can be constructed synthetically by slightly modifying real training examples with the goal of inducing errors. These are especially useful in cases where a system is most confident about its predictions, which happens because it is unable to distinguish between the real example and the slightly modified one, suggesting that it has not learned a sufficiently robust model we should trust just yet for automated use. The goal of such strategies is to train the system to be more robust by essentially throwing in new and possible possibly bizarre cases in training the system that are not available in the existing data. It is also worthwhile to estimate the costs of errors in worst-case scenarios. There is a large work of literature on risk in the finance industry that uses concepts of severity and frequency to quantify risk into monetary or other similar units. To use such frameworks, we need to construct distributions of losses associated with various outcomes including edge events, even though we may not be able to anticipate what these events will be in advance. If the tails of such distributions cannot be estimated reliably, chances are that the system is not yet ready for autonomous function. |
Debra Lee, Chairman and CEO of BET, joins Twitter’s board | Connie Loizos | 2,016 | 5 | 16 | , who has been CEO of Viacom’s Black Entertainment Television (BET) since 2005 and its chairman since 2006, has joined the board of . She tweeted out the news earlier today. Thrilled to be joining the board. It’s transformed the media and the world like few other things in history (and continues to)!! — Debra Lee (@IamDebraLee) Twitter’s executive chairman, , quickly congratulated her publicly, via tweet (natch). Welcome , chair and CEO, to the board! — Omid Kordestani (@omidkordestani) Lee has been with BET for most of her career, joining in 1986 as a VP and the company’s general counsel. She has also been the company’s chief operating officer and served as its president in the ensuing years. According to a newly issued statement from Twitter, Lee will also chair the company’s Nominating and Corporate Governance Committee. Lee joins two other women on the board of Twitter. British businesswoman Martha Lane Fox was appointed to the board , along with Hugh Johnston, vice chairman and CFO of PepsiCo. In late 2013, the company also appointed former publishing executive Marjorie Scardino to its board. Indeed, following the company’s annual shareholder meeting on May 25, Scardino will preside over meetings of Twitter’s independent directors, approve proposed meeting agendas and schedules and call meetings of the board or independent directors. In her new role, Scardino succeeds investor Peter Currie, whose term is ending, along with that of Hollywood exec Peter Chernin. Currie joined Twitter’s board in 2010; Chernin joined in 2012. Twitter was widely expected to following the return of Jack Dorsey to the role of CEO last fall. Indeed, Kordestani is himself relatively new to the company, having become its executive chairman in October of last year. Kordestani famously led Google’s business operations from its earliest days, transitioning out of his operational role after a decade and more recently becoming an advisor to the company’s founders as they created a new operating structure and formed the public holding company now known as Alphabet. Kordestani left as he was joining Twitter. Twitter has been criticized repeatedly over its lack of diversity, both within its workforce and, earlier, on its board. When the company went public in 2013, each of its directors was white and male, including then-CEO Dick Costolo. In more recent years, it has repeatedly to making the company a better reflection of its users. According to , 28 percent of black Internet users are on Twitter. Similarly, 28 percent of Hispanic internet users are on Twitter. Meanwhile, just 20 percent of white Internet users are on the platform. In terms of gender, 25 of male Internet users are on the platform, compared with 21 percent of female Internet users. |
Starbreeze teams with Acer in its quest to build a better VR headset | Brian Heater | 2,016 | 5 | 16 | was undoubtedly overshadowed by larger names during its debut at E3 last year, but those who did manage to demo the high-end headset seemed to walk away impressed. Among other things, hardware device offers a wider field of view than either Oculus or HTC, at 210 degrees to those devices’ 110. That’s courtesy of two Quad HD panels, bringing an extremely impressive combined resolution 5,120 x 1,440 (here the Rift and Vive each clock in at 2,160 x 1,200). The game studio that it’s enlisting as a hardware partner for the headset. The companies will collaborate on designing, manufacturing and promoting the tech, according to the deal, bringing StarVR to “the professional- and location-based entertainment market,” language that sounds as if the headset will be focused on markets outside the Rift and Vive’s livingroom demographic. Not a huge surprise, really, given the high-end specs and, likely, a price to match. Acer’s CEO Jason Chen added that the company has already been priming its line of PCs for the StarVR experience, explaining in a statement, “We are devoting R&D resources across multiple aspects of the VR ecosystem for a coherent and high-quality experience, while just last month Acer announced powerful desktops and notebooks fully-ready for StarVR.” |
AI learns and recreates Nobel-winning physics experiment | Devin Coldewey | 2,016 | 5 | 16 | Australian physicists, perhaps searching for a way to shorten the work week, have created an AI that can run and even improve a complex physics experiment with little oversight. The research could eventually allow human scientists to focus on high-level problems and research design, leaving the nuts and bolts to a robotic lab assistant. The experiment the AI performed was the creation of a Bose-Einstein condensate, a hyper-cold gas, the process for which . It involves using directed radiation to slow a group of atoms nearly to a standstill, producing all manner of interesting effects. The Australian National University team cooled a bit of gas down to 1 microkelvin — that’s a millionth of a degree above absolute zero — then handed over control to the AI. It then had to figure out how to apply its lasers and control other parameters to best cool the atoms down to a few hundred kelvin (i.e. a billionth of a second), and over dozens of repetitions, it found more and more efficient ways to do so. “It did things a person wouldn’t guess, such as changing one laser’s power up and down, and compensating with another,” said ANU’s Paul Wigley, co-lead researcher, . “I didn’t expect the machine could learn to do the experiment itself, from scratch, in under an hour. It may be able to come up with complicated ways humans haven’t thought of to get experiments colder and make measurements more precise.” Co-lead researchers Paul Wigley (left) and Michael Hush. Bose-Einstein condensates have strange and wonderful properties, and their extreme sensitivity to fluctuations in energy make them useful for other experiments and measurements. But that same sensitivity makes the process of creating and maintaining them difficult. The AI monitors many parameters at once and can adjust the process quickly and in ways that humans might not understand, but which are nevertheless effective. The result: condensates can be created faster, under more conditions, and in greater quantities. Not to mention the AI doesn’t eat, sleep, or take vacations. “It’s cheaper than taking a physicist everywhere with you,” said the other co-lead researcher, Michael Hush, of the University of New South Wales. “You could make a working device to measure gravity that you could take in the back of a car, and the artificial intelligence would recalibrate and fix itself no matter what.” This AI is extremely specific in its design, of course, and can’t be applied as-is to other problems; for more flexible automation, physicists will still have to rely on the general-purpose research units called “graduate students.” The team’s research appeared today in the journal |
Roadie is like Uber for shipping | Kristen Hall-Geisler | 2,016 | 5 | 16 | “Someone is always leaving everywhere”: that’s the idea behind , a peer-to-peer package delivery service launched last year by Marc Gorlin. There are something like 250 million vehicles on the road every day, Gorlin said, so he decided to take advantage of this resource by allowing people to help their neighbors out by driving things to places they’re already going. Gorlin said in a phone interview that Roadie has already had 250,000 downloads and 20,000 drivers , and thousands of items are ferried to their destinations in private vehicles each month. The cost of shipping the item depends on its size and how far it’s going; an across-town delivery costs about $8, while a piece of furniture being moved a couple of states away will be a few hundred dollars. When you post a gig on Roadie, drivers headed in the right direction will make an offer, which you can accept or ignore. Drivers are rated and reviewed, and Roadie relies on that pretty heavily. Drivers who’ve logged lots of miles get a Road Warrior badge to distinguish their record. You get to pick your driver, unlike , where you get whichever driver answers your request and shows up at the curb. Roadie also has an agreement with Waffle House to take the creep factor out of the transaction. Whether you’re picking up or dropping off, you can meet at a 24-hour and get a free cup of coffee, thanks to your Roadhouse benefits. There’s a photographic chain of command, Gorlin says, to make sure your item arrives in the same shape it was shipped. Every gig is covered by $500 in insurance, but you can buy up to $10,000 extra. All drivers get free roadside assistance when they’re on a gig, and they get a summary of miles driven on gigs at the end of the year so they can write those miles off on their taxes. And you get what Gorlin calls “the most deterministic tracking,” since you can follow the gig on your phone, and even call or text the driver. That community is the key for Gorlin. “We had a couple of guys road tripping from Texas to Oregon,” he said, “and they picked up gigs to pay for gas. They went to a pick-up at a house and found a dying grandmother and grieving family, and they asked to pray with the family. Then they delivered the grandmother’s stuff to her granddaughter in Oregon. You don’t pray with your postman.” Gorlin loves to tell stories about gigs, like the guy in Brooklyn who found the perfect stained glass window for him mom’s antique shop—in Atlanta. He trusted Roadie more than a traditional carrier with the fragile piece. Or the woman who needed to send a 9-foot surfboard 400 miles as a birthday present for her boyfriend. “It’s like creating magic,” Gorlin said. “People can send things where they couldn’t before.” Of course, you can ship anything anywhere if you’ve got the cash and the packing materials, but that’s another difference for Roadie gigs—no boxes or Styrofoam peanuts required. You can help the driver lash that highboy into a truck bed, or you can just throw your stuff in the backseat of the driver’s SUV. Roadie has even added pet gigs to get your animals where they need to go, though drivers seem to need to only answer a few questions to get the Pet Lover Badge initially. What makes this different from on-demand ride sharing services like , or even food delivery services like or , is using the app to mesh the driver’s goals with the shipper’s goals. “On demand means someone’s coming where they weren’t already going and taking you somewhere they weren’t already going,” Gorlin said. “With Roadie, this is where you’re already going. It’s more efficient.” No packing peanuts necessary. |
Ex-Twitter and Medium exec Jason Stirman launches Lucid, a mental training app for athletes | Sarah Buhr | 2,016 | 5 | 16 | Jason Stirman is part of a select group of early Web 2.0 builders in Silicon Valley. He was there at the beginning of Twitter, jumped with Ev Williams to Obvious Corp and then Medium and is now working on a passion of his – mindfulness for athletes. His new app, , launches in the today and lends advice and mindfulness meditations from expert sports coaches who train stars like Kobe Bryant and Michael Jordan. There are quite a few mental training apps out there already so the app is not without competition. Headspace provides mindfulness and meditation techniques, Lumosity trains your brain, and Omvana is a platform for meditation teachers to hawk their programs. But Stirman didn’t see anything out there for helping athletes to get their head in the game. “Kobe says he owes 80 percent of his performance to mental training,” Stirman told TechCrunch. The training can focus on confidence, being present, visualizing the goal, speed and various other behaviors an athlete needs to succeed for five minutes a day. “Your brain doesn’t know the difference between what you visualize and what you experience so athletes for decades have been visualizing before they go out on that court or the field or the pool,” Stirman says. Will it work? Meditation has become popular in the last few years and is said to offer benefits at work, school and in the home. Google offers meditation workshops to employees and various Silicon Valley startups have started providing mindfulness timeouts to workers. There are also quite a few scholarly articles to back up the claims of enhanced athletic performance through mindfulness training. The cites several instances of athletes attaining higher scores or winning competitions through mindfulness training and another showed a strong correlation between mindfulness and a better score. Lucid wants to offer the same type of training available to famous athletes to those who aren’t Michael Jordan or Kobe Bryant. The app works by logging on, determining your goals and picking a coach like Aaron Gordon, forward for the Orlando Magic, to guide users through daily meditations. Stirman and his team have so far pulled in $1.5 million in seed for the app from True Ventures, Obvious Ventures, Loic Le Meur and various other angels. The founder says he plans to target the nearly half a million college athletes and close to 35 million youth sports players in the U.S. who could benefit from his app, but that it is useful for athletes at any level. Lucid is free and available to download on the starting today. You can try the meditation training for free for up to five days and the pay either a yearly subscription for $100 or $10 per month. |
GoButler launches Angel.ai to offer natural language tech to commerce companies | Steve O'Hear | 2,016 | 5 | 16 | GoButler, the startup that originally offered a virtual assistant that let you request anything on-demand, appears to be pivoting for a second (and maybe final) time. The New York-headquartered company is shuttering the GoButler consumer-facing service altogether in favour of offering natural language processing technology to third-parties. is based on the same NLP technology that powered GoButler’s “fully-automated” flight search and discovery, and will enable commerce companies to build ‘conversational’ user interfaces, such as Facebook Messenger chat bots, or other kinds of natural language search. However, instead of targeting a single vertical, Angel.ai claims to be able to process conversational requests across 40-plus commercial domains out of the box, providing businesses with an off-the-shelf solution to facilitate natural language-powered transactions. The idea is to let consumers express intent in a more natural way, and by translating natural language expressions into structured, actionable requests, commerce companies can capture that intent and make their products easier to find and purchase. “The objective with GoButler as a product was to figure out how people interact through conversational commerce, gathering millions of examples of how people express intent in a natural language message. From there, we used our human-assisted concierge to develop our AI and help train our models, aggregating the data from conversations to build out our data set,” Navid Hadzaad, CEO and co-founder of Angel.ai, tells TechCrunch. “Ultimately, this has led us to our current B2B technology product, Angel.ai, that will focus on developing natural language search for commerce. On day one, it would have been impossible to claim what the solution of the problem we are working on would look like.” The point that Hadzaad repeatedly makes is that without the conversation data the original messaging-based but human-powered GoButler captured, it would have been impossible to develop the Angel.ai tech. Natural language processing is entirely reliant on the data set it’s trained on and it’s this data set, specifically related to commerce intent, where he believes the startup has an advantage. That said, I can’t help tease that this is the second pivot sanctioned by Hadzaad and that perhaps are getting tired of the change in strategy; a B2B company can look a lot less sexy from the outside than one that consumers directly interact with. “I know you could call it a pivot if you want to, although we’re really still working on the same problem — offering consumers the most efficient way to express an intent and ultimately make a transaction,” he says, kicking back a little. “The number-one thing shareholders are concerned with is that a company takes the best available path to success. When you’re a startup shaping a new space, it would be foolish to assume that your day one hypothesis will never change. I truly believe that as a startup you need to leverage the flexibility you have, learn quickly and move on”. And move on the once Berlin-based company has. Separately, I’m hearing that Angel.ai has already struck deals with several companies in the travel and delivery space who will be launching new products over the next few months, although Hadzaad declined to comment on who or what they are. My understanding is that these won’t necessarily be messenger app integrations per se, but that Angel.ai’s tech could also surface in the form of a search box on a commerce company’s website or a chat box within their existing app. “Our unique combination of AI scientists and product/business experts allows us to not act as a research lab, but as an AI company developing real products,” adds Hadzaad. “The fact that we have domain-specific models that are trained on millions of examples of consumers expressing specific domain intent in a message, differentiates us from other businesses in the space”. |
Oculus announces VR for Good initiative to help students and non-profits capture community life | Lucas Matney | 2,016 | 5 | 16 | For all of the talk there is in how virtual reality is going to usher in some dark, utopian age where people are huddled in corners with VR headsets strapped to their faces… That’s just not where things are headed right now. VR has a lot of impact for social change. We’ve talked about VR as an engine for empathy. Now, Oculus is specifically looking to turn VR into a medium for social change through their new initiative meant to inspire “the next generation of VR creators.” The company, that is of course owned by Facebook, is looking to begin their push by targeting Bay Area high schools through a six-week program called the , which is partnering the students with professional filmmakers to put together short, 360-degree films focused on what life in their communities looks like. The students in the program will get access to all of the tools they need to make great content, including a Samsung Gear VR, a Galaxy S6, Ricoh Theta S 360 cameras and all of the software they need to stitch, edit and export their footage. The company is also focusing efforts on a second initiative called , a program aimed at connecting aspiring filmmakers and powerful non-profits to build content that communicates their missions and the obstacles they’re up against. The program is initially targeting up to ten different non-profits who will start this VR filmmaking journey with a two-day bootcamp at Facebook HQ where they’ll learn from some of the best on what it takes to build beautiful VR content. The teams will gain access to some of the most professional rigs available, making use of the industry-standard Nokia OZO cameras and all of the professional-grade editing software available. Those taking part in the program are going to gain some pretty amazing exposure as their films will debut at Sundance 2017. for the program open on May 30. Oculus is hardly the first VR company or the craziest one, but its high visibility is giving the company an impressive amount of sway in deciding where the entire industry focuses its efforts. By shifting the focus toward inspiring social good, Oculus is allowing the conversation to drift more towards overcoming some of VR’s most pertinent accessibility and impact problems. These programs put VR content creation power in the hands of people aiming to show what their communities are like and can use VR as a powerful medium to convey the issues that are facing them. |
One chip to rule them all? The Internet of Things and the next great era of hardware | Narbeh Derhacobian | 2,016 | 5 | 28 |
It’s been almost 10 years since Apple unveiled the iPhone. Since that day, the smartphone has been the overwhelming driver of innovation in the technology industry. Cameras, Wi-Fi, batteries, touch sensors, baseband processors and memory chips — in less than a decade, these components have made stunning advances to keep up with consumer demand to have sleeker, more powerful devices every year. For chip makers, the pressure has been to produce smaller, more powerful components for each generation of phones. Denser, faster, cheaper — these mantras have driven our industry for as long as most people can remember. But there’s a new game in town. The smartphone is not over, but the growth rate is slowing. The key growth driver in could soon be the of . Over the decade, this industry will churn out tens of billions of connected sensor devices. These will be used in every corner of the world — from highways to arteries — to gather new insights to help us live and work better. This chapter will reshape the technology industry in profound ways, and even reverse many of the changes brought about by the smartphone . To understand how profound this shift could be, it’s important to know how past markets have shaped the way computers are built. Just a few short decades ago, computers filled entire rooms. In these early days, manufacturers produced each component separately and wired together on a circuit board. You’d have memory in part of the board, logic processing on another side, maybe a radio in the corner. Wires or copper traces connected each piece, and components could be easily added or removed from the system. The “System on a Board” configuration worked for a while. But then computers began to shrink as scientists engineered smaller and smaller transistors. Transistors are like electric switches — the fundamental building blocks of modern computing. In 1965, Gordon Moore, the founder of , made a (misleadingly labeled a “law”): Every 18-24 months, engineers would fit about twice as many transistors on a particular piece of silicon. Computer components started shrinking fast, and suddenly a lot of free space opened up on circuit boards. Engineers soon began to experiment with putting multiple functions on a single piece of silicon. Before long, they could get a whole computer onto that piece of silicon, wrap it up nicely and market it as a single, -inclusive package. We call this “ ” (SoC). You probably have in your smartphone. This tight integration of components carries some big advantages. With components packed closer together, signals can travel between more quickly, which can increase processing speed. SoCs are frequently cheaper too; instead of testing many components independently, you could run set of tests on a single . And, of course, size matters. The consolidated package helped manufacturers like and produce new generations of lighter, sleeker devices. But there’s a big drawback. SoCs are manufactured on common process platforms in large manufacturing facilities called “fabs.” These mega-factories are able to produce hundreds of millions of chips per month. The challenge in the SoC paradigm is that the components in a single (processor, radio, memory, etc.) are locked into a single manufacturing process, which does not always provide the “best in class” for each component. For example, process platform may be excellent for processors, but just mediocre for embedded flash memory. And it’s difficult to upgrade or switch out components individually without upgrading the entire fab. For smartphones, and many other applications, the benefits of an integrated SoC generally outweigh this drawback. However, the emergence of a new introduces a new set of challenges for chip makers. Let’s look at the of . This is the industry of the future, and it will run on billions of sensor devices. But the problem is, these devices will exist in sorts of environments. Some will live in factories; some will be outside; some will collect data underwater. The basic functionality of these smart nodes is very similar (sense data, collect data, store data, communicate data); however, the deployment requirements vary greatly. A sensor node in a car engine, for example, will need to withstand high temperatures. Sensor nodes spread across farmland might require powerful radio components to send data over long distances. Most sensors will need to operate at very low power consumption (because they won’t be plugged in), but for some, this will be even more important than others. Even more confusing, at this point we simply don’t know the exact requirements for most IoT applications. It’s just too early in the process. But we have to start building for it anyway! This presents . The PC and smartphone industries were able to deploy the same designs for hundreds of millions of units. The giant integrated SoC fabs were well-suited to this. But IoT is different; it will likely consist of thousands of million-unit applications. This would suggest the need for a much greater diversity of configurations than we’ve seen to date. As a result, other models for constructing chips are emerging. Some are calling the developments , or 2.5D, or . involve packing components closely together, without the complete, end-to-end integration of SoC. The equations governing cost, performance and power consumption of these approaches are beginning to tilt the balance away from SoC as the favored choice for IoT smart nodes. In some ways, the trends of the PC and smartphone eras were toward standardization of devices. Apple’s vision was understanding that people prefer a beautiful, integrated package, and don’t need many choices in . But in software it’s generally the opposite. People have different needs, and want to select the apps and programs that work best for . In a smart, connected world, sensor requirements could vary greatly from factory to factory, not to mention between industries as varied as agriculture, urban planning and automotive. Just like smartphone owners like to pick and choose which apps they want, IoT manufacturers may want to shop for components individually without being locked into a single fab. It’s hard to overstate how fundamental this shift could be. The $300+ billion semiconductor industry has grown up around the standardized of PCs and smartphones — basically, boxes that live indoors and plug into walls. IoT, on the other hand, will require a huge diversity of offerings. Get ready for some big changes in the “silicon” of Silicon Valley. |
Momofuku’s David Chang launches Ando, a delivery-only restaurant | Jordan Crook | 2,016 | 5 | 16 | And now, the moment all foodies in New York have been waiting for… David Chang, owner of the wildly popular line of Momofuku restaurants, is today launching , the latest to join the franchise. But Ando isn’t quite like the Ssäm Bar or the Noodle Bar or even the Milk Bar. To the contrary, Ando is an entirely on-demand delivery restaurant, with no front of the house or dine-in experience. Users can order food, which includes a Philly Cheesesteak and three exclusive Christina Tosi cookies, on the Ando app. For now, Ando only delivers lunch and only delivers in Midtown East, which makes sense considering there is literally no good food in that neighborhood despite the thousands of corporate employees forced to hang around there all day. The first 200 people to sign up on the app today will be let on the platform to order food, but Chang is insistent on only serving a small number of people each day to ensure quality and scale accordingly. All the food at Ando has been engineered specifically for delivery, taking into account the various ingredients and PH levels of the food, as well as the packaging for specific items. [gallery ids="1322589,1322588,1322587"] Deliveries will be handled by UberRush, but Expa investor Hooman Radfar says that Ando isn’t closed off to other delivery channels, like UberEats or Seamless. It’s also worth noting that Chang is an investor and chief culinary officer at Maple, which may appear as a direct competitor with its fully-cooked meal delivery service. However, Radfar explained that the food industry is too diverse to consider each deliverable meal as a competitor to the next. For example, Chang owns and operates a handful of very different Momofuku-branded restaurants, which aren’t necessarily direct competitors to each other. While both Maple and Ando will deliver food on-demand, that food will be very different. [gallery ids="1322598,1322595,1322594,1322593,1322591"] If you want to check out Ando for yourself, hit up the . |
Apartments are the hot new tech sector | Caren Maio | 2,016 | 5 | 28 |
Welcome to the land technology forgot. High-end leases negotiated and signed via fax. Millions of dollars in apartment inventory — in some of the hottest real estate markets in the country — tracked on whiteboards with dry-erase markers. Client histories recorded in longhand in legal notebooks and stashed in manila folders. Multi-family real estate (i.e. apartment buildings) is one the in the country right now. In fact, investment hit in the fourth quarter of 2015, and multi-family units now account for of all housing. But the multi-family has long proved one of the most resistant to technological change. Owing partly to an old guard of landlords and owners, and partly to the relationship-driven nature of the business, the kinds of cloud-based apps and innovations that have transformed other sectors have failed to make inroads into one of the biggest. But a flurry of developments in the past few years means change may finally be on the horizon. For starters, shifting lifestyles in the U.S. have sent demand for rentals through the roof. America’s rental population is expected to grow by 4.2 million people between 2015 and 2025, according to . Post-traumatic stress from the recent mortgage crisis and a younger generation less attached to home ownership is fast making renting the American choice. The push to rent is reflected in plummeting vacancy rates in major cities, which hover at around and 2.7 percent in L.A., for instance. Meanwhile, consumer-based real estate apps like , and have shown how easy listing and viewing properties can be. Not many renters, after all, are still leafing through newspaper classifieds in 2016. This has created the expectation for easier online interfaces on the professional side, as well — and made calling or faxing rental contracts and leasing information seem increasingly dated. As in other sectors, innovations that started in the consumer space are creeping into the business-to-business marketplace. At the same time, the habits and preferences of landlords are evolving. A generation of digitally savvy professionals has never used a fax, and isn’t about to start now. Meanwhile, old-school landlords, now competing with high- management firms at buildings, are being forced to market and lease units more efficiently or risk getting left behind. When dealing with dozens of that may rent for thousands of dollars a month, the ability to share listings in real time can have a sizable bottom-line impact. Enter SaaS-based solutions. Not surprisingly, given the sheer size of the total market, a wave of cloud-based platforms has emerged to provide marketing and leasing tools. Innovative services now offer landlords and brokers online hubs for tracking inventory, syndicating verified listings with consumer sites and running analytics on property performance (a big step up versus old-fashioned spreadsheets or even file folders). And investors are taking notice. Real estate technology investments are soaring, reaching a record $1.7-billion in 2015, up 50 percent year-over-year, according to from CB Insights. With some of the biggest names in venture capital, including our own lead investor, , doubling down, growth in 2016 is expected to be even steeper. A big part of the reason: In an era when consumer is saturated and unicorns are dying off by the day, real estate remains ripe for innovation. Ultimately, the driver and beneficiary of all this change is the consumer. As a serial renter, I can attest personally that there’s nothing more frustrating than racing to your dream rental listing in York (or Boston, San Francisco, Austin or any other market) only to find the unit already leased hours (or days) ago. Solutions that make the nerve-wracking task of apartment hunting a little easier are long overdue — and bound to find a receptive audience. |
Unicorns along the Wasatch: Utah’s flourishing startup and enterprise scene | Ken Davis | 2,016 | 5 | 28 |
Silicon Valley has traditionally been the Garden of Eden, but it’s no longer the only game in town. Utah — specifically Salt Lake City and its ecosystem — has become a formidable breeding ground for startups, even developing its own unicorn herd. As in nature, a ’s habitat can shape a creative and fiercely competitive ecosystem. Such is the case in Salt Lake City, where investors have significantly less money as a whole, yet outpace Silicon Valley, New York, Los Angeles and almost every other hub in the country. No one knows the potential impact of the Silicon Valley bubble bursting, but one thing’s for sure — it’s no longer enough to set up shop in Silicon Valley and have a good idea and some cash. success is greatly affected by what your ecosystem exposes in the way of available resources (both human and financial capital), partnership and market opportunities and, of course, local market conditions. Relative to Silicon Valley, Utah sees far less investment from VCs. In Q1 of 2015, Utah companies compared to . While more money is rarely a bad thing, in this case it’s already having a negative effect on the Silicon Valley ecosystem. More money in a fund generally means more LPs that VC and private equity investors have to please. Silicon Valley LPs demand a higher investment clip and returns at a faster rate, which forces venture capital to be more aggressive in their placements. As a result, Silicon Valley companies may be more likely to get funded, but they risk quickly becoming early-stage companies with underdeveloped financial controls and mechanics. In Utah there is less aggregate investment (though last year ). Less available financial capital creates an environment in which local VC and seed funds are more selective. They are able to exercise patience and fund more fully developed companies, focus less on burn rate and growth trajectory and instead home in on companies with a proven market, earlier recurring revenue and a clear path to profitability. Utah is peculiar for many reasons: its location (a lush valley in the middle of a desert), its people (plenty of young, ambitious talent from BYU and University of Utah) and its workforce ( ). From the outside it can be tough to spot the draw — restaurants close early, it’s wicked hot in the summer and in the winter — but people who are from here call it home, and . Indeed, Utah is growing at of the rest of the U.S. population. Housing is super cheap compared to most major cities. A mortgage payment on a nice, four-bedroom will cost you less each month than your rent for that in the Bay Area. The same goes for business expenses — office leasing, employee costs, commuting, etc. These are crucial things to consider, but a firm shouldn’t spend all its cash on setting up shop. , and this makes sense. The Valley is like the cradle of civilization for startups and technology companies. As the took off in the 1990s and 2000s, a critical mass of workers with the appropriate skill sets found themselves in close proximity to each other, helping companies quickly and easily grow and scale, fill sales pipelines and bring more general network effects. Provo/Orem, home to stone-cold-sober BYU, now features three multi-billion-dollar companies essentially . in the top 20 cities for funding (the Salt Lake City/Ogden area was ranked No. 12), and BYU was on the list of schools that have spawned the most unicorn startups. Utah is proof that a desert wasteland can harvest startups and grow them into multi-billion-dollar companies. Whether or not a tech bubble exists, the companies that make it through will likely have been brutally vetted by VCs, will have founders who believe in constrained creativity and run lean and that quickly found product/market fit and a successful model. Seeing this happen in markets outside the Bay Area is fairly new — at least within the technology . The Bay Area used to be the de facto answer for “Where should I launch my tech ?” — but it’s becoming less and less important to set up shop in the Valley. From everything we’re seeing, it may be a better strategy to go find gold in them thar hills. |
Gillmor Gang: Conventional Wisdom | Steve Gillmor | 2,016 | 5 | 28 | The Gillmor Gang — Dan Farber, Frank Radice, Kevin Marks, Keith Teare, and Steve Gillmor. Recorded live Friday, May 27, 2016. Too much Trump, TV, Twitter, and Gang thinks apps have jumped the shark. Gillmor says no way. Plus, the latest G3 (below) with Mary Hodder, Elisa Camahort Page, Francine Hardaway, and Tina Chase Gillmor. @stevegillmor, @dbfarber, @kevinmarks, @fradice, @kteare Produced and directed by Tina Chase Gillmor @tinagillmor [ustream id=87475773 hwaccel=1 version=3 width=480 height=302] |
‘Gremlins’ and ‘Innerspace’ director Joe Dante sees the good and the bad in CGI | Anthony Ha | 2,016 | 5 | 28 | Director made some of the best-loved films of the 1980s, including and , so I was eager to ask him about how movies have evolved. Shira Dubrovner, the festival’s executive director, said Dante was chosen for his persistently independent attitude — he started his career in the indie world, and even when he made bigger Hollywood movies, they still had “his own voice and his own sensibility and his own style.” Dubrovner also praised the way that the effects in Dante’s (which will be screened as part of the award presentation) have held up over the past 30 years. So when I got a chance to interview Dante in conjunction with the festival, that’s the subject I started with. “Well, I’m proud that [the effects] hold up,” he said. While “today, we’d film the same thing with entirely computer-generated material,” at the time, effects house Industrial Light and Magic built miniatures to represent the inside of the human body — Dante recalled that they “ran for almost a mile of plexiglass.” The days of those kinds of effects might seem to be mostly behind us, as they’ve been replaced by CGI. Dante said he sees CGI as “a great thing,” but with drawbacks: “We now assume everything is fake.” For example, if a real person performs an amazing stunt, the audience might still say, “Oh, that’s not a real.” At the same time, he pointed to and as movies that effectively combine CGI with practical and animatronic effects. Dante offered a similarly measured view on the industry’s move away from physical film. “I love film, I grew up on film,” he said. That doesn’t mean he’s opposed to shooting digitally, but in his view, “Film is still the best archival medium. … What I don’t like is the concept that, ‘Well, we’ll just put it up in the cloud and it will always be there.'” Current movies seem to be particularly obsessed with pop culture properties from the 1980s — there’s even been talk of . Dante sees this as “a nostalgia for a simpler view of the world.” The thing is, the 1980s probably didn’t seem so simple when they were happening. After all, Dante recalled that at the time, there was a similar look back at the 1950s. Now, “the ’80s are the new ’50s.” While Dante is probably best known for his older films, he’s continued to direct for movies and television (including two segments for the Showtime anthology series ). When I asked how a director’s job has changed over the course of his career, Dante said, “People do more directing for television than they do for features because there’s less features … The jobs that are available are more likely to be on television.” Still, he said, “I don’t think it’s really changed that much.” |
What UX designers can learn from 1990s Japanese video games | Benjamin Brandall | 2,016 | 5 | 28 |
I’m writing this from a slightly saddened perspective, revisiting my favorite SNES RPGs and realizing something: . The sentiment is pretty universal. Hugon on the Quarter to Three forum : “When I think ‘console RPG’ I think pages of fairly inscrutable character info and bad navigation. You cry tears of joy if you can just get a basic item comparison.” Thanks, “good UX.” In the past, I expected everything to be a bit rubbish. Sitting in the back of my dad’s car, smashing the Nokia keypad trying not to let the snake eat its own tail — I wasn’t thinking about it any deeper than “hehe,” “wow” or “ahhh…” Replaying the old classics wasn’t all bad, though. As well as the experiences that no one would be caught dead designing, there were a few things I noticed that have carried over into highly praised apps. This post is about the evolution of UX — although we know it now as a way to — this is from a time period when it wasn’t so much of a big deal. I got to play a lot of games, record the screen and see UX and video games in a new light. It’s about the good and bad parts of 1990s Japanese video games, and what we should (and shouldn’t) learn from them today. In the first 10 minutes of Final Fantasy III, you come across a small, glowing light — something that’ll entice any gamer in search of loot. What you get instead is a lesson — not in the instruction booklet that nobody would bother to read, but baked into the gameplay: I’ve looked before at how Microsoft inside Minesweeper and tricked users into adapting to a GUI, and it seems this is an equally ancient example. In Final Fantasy III, however, it’s exciting because it’s exactly like a tactic used recently by (and plenty of other SaaS apps): And, because Slack’s user onboarding process has since changed, here’s a .gif of the same idea in action in : It’s the same idea. A transitory, floating point of interest — sparkles on a cave floor. A tiny piece of information hidden in the UI to help users learn as they go, instead of having to break out the biblically oversized user manual. The death of the instruction manual and move toward learning by doing is common in all kinds of , much as relying on someone to get from 0-60 on their own isn’t necessary or expected when there are other ways of teaching. In Nick Babich’s , he says: ”The best products do two things well: features and details. Features are what draw people to your product. Details are what keep them there. And details are what actually make our app stand out from our competition.” One example of a “delightful” microinteraction is the heart. It used to be a case of clicking the star and it turning from gray to yellow; now, as we all know, this happens: There are some pretty good spending design time on microinteractions, but in video games, it’s part of the immersive experience. Chrono Trigger is one of the few SNES RPGs I’ve played where poking around mundane rooms pays off. In the very first room, when your mum wakes you up, it’s possible to open and close the curtains. In a genre where the game is mostly story-driven and the actual mechanics seem to be an afterthought, this is pretty awesome. As you can see, I had to do a quintuple take: You can’t appreciate the wonders of modern menu navigation if you’ve not been through some of the more poorly designed UIs from the 1990s. Now, I know it’s not the primary concern of RPGs (and, in fact, something they’re most often criticized for anyway), but the first menu system from Breath of Fire just doesn’t make sense. Bearing in mind this menu is presented before the game has ever started, check this out: The key issues: It’d be far more helpful not to force this before gameplay, and to leave it as a preferences menu somewhere in-game. It’s unfair to compare menus from 1990s games to modern SaaS products, but thankfully, I didn’t have to. Here’s a much better menu from Super Mario RPG: Legend of the Seven Stars, a game known for its elegant design: It even comes with a little onboarding primer, unlike the menu in Breath of Fire, which surfaced before I even saw what the game looked like. Thanks to social media, smarter design and the realization that no one wants a blank profile picture or the need to spend time filling in their details, information like thumbnail and full name is often pulled in automatically by apps when you sign up. Take , for example: Like points out in his teardown of , that’s much better than the default silhouette and [username not entered]. Here’s a pre-cursor to that approach from Chrono Trigger, kindly filling in your default name, with the cursor ready to overwrite left-to-right if you want to choose another name: This reduces friction at the most vital moment — . At a high level, a user interface consists of two groups of things: things with which you can interact and things with which you can’t. Badly designed interfaces make it difficult to decide straight away whether an element is interactive, whether it’s for displaying data or just for decoration. With SNES games, it’s sometimes a matter of trial and error to find which parts of the screen you can interact with, but unlike apps with freeform (mouse/touchscreen) controls, the number of options is limited to wherever you can move the cursor with the arrow keys. If you can’t move your cursor there, you can’t interact with it. That leads to confusing interfaces like the one I looked at earlier from Breath of Fire — how was I supposed to know there’s an input field there? In the same way Final Fantasy III shows you a part of the environment is interactive, there are parallels in modern apps. Check out (left) and (right) for a contrast of how interactive UI elements are displayed: With touch/mouse-controlled UIs, the user could theoretically click anywhere. The awkward Breath of Fire menu shows that interactions can be misleading, even when there are limited places to “click.” Peach’s enticing button looks tappable, but it gives you an error message; Buffer has the balance right by showing buttons you can’t interact with by keeping them gray. Every classic Final Fantasy game follows the same structure. Like a Shakespeare play, you’re thrown right into the middle of a story, with only the tone of the start screen for context — like, “What’s all this lightning?” The story unfolds over the course of a painfully slow 5-10 minute cut scene of sprites shuffling around, and references to an array of names and places you have no idea about. But that’s what fantasy stories are, right? They don’t start at the beginning of time, and even if they follow the dumbed-down “This is me, I’m from a town called X” format, you’re going to be thrown into a universe you never previously knew existed. (In an earlier article I addressed how isn’t the best idea.) It’s the same deal when you start with a new app. Part of the is reducing that initial overwhelm factor. does a good job at this by situating the app in a familiar environment — texting — with a talkative AI. Setting aside some obvious clunkers like Dragon Age 6 and Breath of Fire, it seems like the have been informed by the past. Some, like and , take direct inspiration from old-school RPGs. It’d be unfair to say 1990s video games didn’t care about UX, but unlike today — 14 years after the first major came out — it wasn’t a high priority. While SNES technology limited the complexity and elegance of the games it ran, it’s only clumsy in retrospect because we’ve been spoiled by silk-smooth interfaces and “delight.” After all, until now I never complained about Final Fantasy’s UI — I sat down, shut up and played it until . |
Who’s afraid of the IoT? | Jon Evans | 2,016 | 5 | 28 | It’s heeeere! The Internet of Things, I mean. I just spent several days at the in Paris, which focused on IoT hardware. They built a whole home full of connected devices, showcased the War for the WAN and underscored that the IoT is — as always — not quite what we imagined, and not quite what we hoped. The home was interesting: it boasted “smart” shutters, speakers, heater, boiler, umbrella, mirror, toothbrush, shower, bed and a scent-driven alarm clock, along with the obvious smart lock, Nest, Dropcam and Echo. Did all of these things actually seem useful? Well, no. But it did reinforce that the Echo is a big deal. As more things in your home (which, let’s remember, are still not “your” things, , which you won’t) accumulate membership in your Wi-Fi network, the more cluttered any kind of computer or phone dashboard gets and the more important a single simple interface becomes. The Echo has every chance of becoming the de facto control center for hundreds of millions of homes. No wonder Google (and maybe Apple) are racing to introduce competitors. But while homes get all the press, the IoT will largely consist of industrial surveillance. I don’t necessarily mean that in the scary political way, although there’s plenty of that: , for instance, has built neural networks that live on the edges of the network rather than in data centers, which can handle facial and posture recognition at a rate of 480 parsed images/second on a Raspberry Pi. Their admirable intent is to, for instance, identify people stricken by illness, or would-be suicide jumpers, in Paris Metro stations; but they still sound eerily like they could easily become the tools of a police states. Relatedly, of course, the IoT has every chance of becoming a security nightmare — though everyone at the conference was at least about security, which offers some hope of salvation. Mostly, though, the IoT is about collecting industrial data on an industrial scale. Tracking vibrations in buildings to measure their stability. Tracking smells via adsorption, courtesy of the very cool ‘ tech. Tracking noises, lights, moisture, toxins. And then making this data available despite the physical restrictions of battery power and radio networks. Speaking of networks: Did you know there is a three-way war on to be the Wide Area Network of the IoT? Choose your allegiance: ! I was especially impressed by SigFox. is a standard that existing wireless carriers claim they’ll implement any year now. is a loose “open” alliance, in the sense that (Semtech.) , , is a really company. Their ambitious objective — a level of ambition which is all too rare in France — is to become a bona fide global utility. They want to create a vast radio network that anyone anywhere can use for IoT data, for the low price of one euro per device per year. Sigfox’s bandwidth is extremely limited — 12 bytes per message; an example of 140 messages/day was cited — but that suffices for most sensors, and it’s extremely low power. We were shown a small GPS tracker that can last for an entire month, and a moisture sensor with an expected battery lifetime of two years. Like LoRa, they use unlicensed ISM bandwidth, which makes rollouts much easier. They’re only now expanding into the U.S., but they expect to by the end of this year. The best thing about Sigfox is its simplicity. Take a device, pay the euro, plant the device anywhere within range and Sigfox will handle capturing its sensor data and forwarding it to your cloud servers. (And/or sending messages back; it’s a two-way service.) Like Amazon, it doesn’t just want to be a company, it wants to become a utility. And, of course, with the advent of wide-area low-power networks like this, the new limiting factor for the Internet of Things becomes the , not the networks. Interesting times indeed. Full disclosure: This trip to France to visit the French tech scene was paid for by Business France, a tentacle of the French government. Studies show that this inevitably subconsciously biases me in their favor. (Although, interestingly, the bias effect than large ones.) |
Privacy shield rejection highlights need for proactive corporate privacy approach | Joanna Belbey | 2,016 | 5 | 17 |
To anyone familiar with doing business in Europe, it really is no surprise that representatives from supervisory authorities of each European Union (EU) country, the European Data Protection Supervisor (EDPS) and the European Commission — Referred to as the Article 29 Working Party (WP29) — rejected the EU/US data transfer agreement. Europeans believe personal is a fundamental right of all people, similar to the way people in the United States believe in freedom of speech. Though no revisions are imminent for the EU/US , the should signal to companies they must re-think . Across industries ranging from banking and financial services to retail and e-commerce, competitive advantage and market share will be won and lost depending on an organization’s ability to exhibit how they protect customer data, as well as partner, employee and information. The is a framework designed to “protect the fundamental rights of Europeans where their data is transferred to the United States and ensure legal certainty for businesses.” Though WP29’s word is not law, its views often set precedents upon which data regulators in each European country base their laws. cites “an overall lack of clarity regarding the new framework as well as making accessibility for data subjects, organizations, and data protection authorities more difficult” as the overarching reasons for its of the agreement in its current form. Given “has the right to respect for his private and family life, his home and his correspondence,” without interference from a public authority, it is no wonder WP29 requests more clarity before sending its citizens’ data freely across the Atlantic. Not after the National Security Agency (NSA) and Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) were found to be with Germany’s spy networks. Not after document leaks revealed PRISM, the surveillance program under which the NSA collected customer information from nine different U.S. telecoms companies. Not after the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s (FBI) kerfuffle with Apple over an unlocked iPhone. The WP29 stated that its major concern with the is that the U.S. would not hold European citizens’ data to the same standards as it is held to with current European laws. Specifically, WP29’s assessment calls for increased clarity about “massive and indiscriminate collection of personal data originating from the EU,” even in light of counterterrorism efforts. To consider accepting a revised agreement, WP29 asks that the commission add a glossary of terms to the agreement’s appendix to define and bring more clarity to the use of important notions, such as commercial data retention and citizens’ rights to reject automated data processing. In order to develop and pass a data transfer agreement, the U.S. will have to take Europe’s concerns much more seriously than they have up to this point. The recent spate of issues, headlined most recently by the , is likely to awaken in U.S. consumers and organizations a deeper reverence for data . Already over requests for customer information; a collects and shares its customers’ TV-viewing information; even don’t-be-evil has been sued over its reading of students’ emails. While companies may not have to comply just yet to additional regulatory stringency, they must begin to weigh how to protect data across their infrastructures. Those that adopt more robust practices will have an advantage over competitors who fail to see the for the harbinger of changes it is. As companies consider a path forward, it becomes increasingly important they perform their due diligence with regard to data-management tools and policies. Box, for instance, recently introduced , a cloud-based storage solution that honors country sovereignty. All firms will eventually to demonstrate that they are proactively addressing data . The companies that lead the way in data standards will also develop a competitive advantage and win market share. To pave the data road, companies to include features and benefits built into their products and infrastructure. They must demonstrate that they protect , partner, employee and customer data and clearly and publicly define the specifics of their initiatives. We are in the age of information, the age of transparency. Companies must heed concerns, or risk falling out of step with regulatory compliance guidelines and falling out of favor with customers. |
Down to Lunch has met with investors about raising funding | Matthew Lynley | 2,016 | 5 | 17 | We’re hearing from multiple sources that Down to Lunch has met with investors about a potential financing round. Down to Lunch became a bit of a darling during its rise thanks to its dead-simple approach: signal to your friends that you’re interested in getting lunch, drinks, or whatever else and figure out who’s up for it. This is a simple concept, but in reality fills a niche that larger companies like Facebook still haven’t quite figured out how to nail down quite yet. The value of that niche is unclear, but then again, other kinds of successful low-touch applications have started off with what seemed like early niche applications. Details are scarce, and there’s also always a chance that while the company is meeting with investors, it may not elect to raise money. We’re hearing this all as the app has faced scrutiny for the perception that some people are getting annoyed by text message invites. Since growing like crazy and rocketing to the top of the app store, it’s fallen in both the top free app and top social networking app categories in the past 30 days. The use of aggressive opt-in text message invites isn’t uncommon among social apps, but often doesn’t yield strong retention. It can work better in cases where there is a manifest transactional return — see Uber. There was also what Down to Lunch described as a “smear campaign” happening on Twitter and the App Store that the app was allegedly being used for human trafficking, . The company said this massively, and negatively, affected its user base and app store rankings. Down to Lunch has raised previously and the app does not appear to take a lot to run — which is something that could give them more runway. But raising money can help a company scale the service more quickly, which is important to head off potential competition from other startups and larger companies that will target the space if it looks like Down to Lunch will be successful. “There’s a lot of talk about Down to Lunch right now — unfortunately, most of it is not true,” co-founder Nikil Viswanathan said. “Here’s what is true — we’re super focused on creating the best product to help people hang out with their friends daily. Regarding invites, college students love the app and asked for an easy way to invite friends. We’re constantly striving to make this the best experience possible. Regarding the human trafficking smear campaign — yes, those rumors massively affected us but we’ll bounce back. It’s been an intense journey, and we’re committed to creating a world where your friends are in your daily life because it’s the world we want to live in!” Still, it’s not like consumer applications are not attracting attention amid a softening in the venture capital investing ecosystem. Musical.ly is raising . While that company demonstrated it was able to show a strong amount of engagement, it’s not clear if Down to Lunch can match that kind of swagger. It’s also not clear if this is just a novel use case that quickly captured a lot of attention before fading away. Yo, another fad, showed a similar fast rise to fame and drop off — and Yo . But Down to Lunch may prove to fill a big enough use case that it could attract financing and take off like a rocket once again. |
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