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‘Captain America: Civil War’ mostly ignores the real world, and it’s all the better for it | Anthony Ha | 2,016 | 5 | 7 | I’ll be honest: I was kind of nervous about this one. In the run-up to this weekend’s release of , I’d seen some fond recollections of that the movie is based on, but here’s the objective truth: , with strained references to post-9/11 politics shoehorned into a dopey superhero story. The previous movie, , actually did a decent job of tapping into the broader zeitgeist of surveillance and suspicion without having those themes completely overwhelm the action-packed story. Nonetheless, adapting seemed to me like a recipe for a self-serious slog with lots of long speeches about Important Themes — basically, . Boy, was I wrong. It turns out that is a fun, funny movie that wears its politics lightly. It might even be the best movie in the Marvel Cinematic Universe (the only real competition comes from 1 and 2). You probably know the broad strokes of the story already, but just in case: The film opens with the Avengers on a mission that ends badly, leading to a push for more government oversight of our superheroes. This causes a split in the team, with an Iron Man-led faction willing to answer to governmental authorities, while Captain America and his allies are opposed. Tensions escalate, leading to the superpowered civil war of the title. From a dramatic perspective, it’s a promising premise, but it also runs into some of the problems that inevitably spring up when you try to examine political questions through the lens of superheroes. Let me take a slight digression with another superhero team, the X-Men, to explain my broader concern here. On an emotional level, the X-Men make a powerful stand-in for outsider groups like racial minorities or the LGBT community. But as soon as you start discussing the thornier political questions, the whole thing gets pretty silly. When the X-Men’s enemies say that they’re a danger to public safety, they totally have a point — we’re talking about people who can literally control others’ minds and shoot laser beams out of their eyes. Similarly, the Avengers aren’t really a great vehicle for a discussion about government oversight or about security versus freedom. Instead, , the real debate laid out in the movie is “whether people who are rich and famous (and, for the most part, white and American) should be allowed to form their own private armies, and carry out military missions in population centers all over the world.” Put that way, I think most of us would agree that Iron Man has a pretty compelling argument. None of this is to say that you can’t tell a serious or even political superhero story, just that it works best when you deal with big emotions and broad strokes. Once you start getting into policy arguments, things can get really dumb, really quickly. Luckily, the best parts of are only tangentially related to any of that. It seems that Anthony and Joe Russo, who directed both and , weren’t interested in making another political thriller — in fact, while they pointed to ’70s movies like as the inspiration for the earlier film, they’ve described as more of “ ” in the vein of , which sounds insane but actually kind of makes sense once you’ve seen the movie. Sure, both Robert Downey Jr. and Chris Evans get to deliver passionate speeches about power and responsibility. What makes the conflict work, however, is the fact that it’s as driven by personality as ideology. After all, Captain America spent most of his last movie uncovering a sinister conspiracy, so he’s understandably wary of being manipulated again by government officials. Iron Man, meanwhile, seems chastened by some of his past mistakes. Plus, both of the last two movies did a good job of establishing why their friendship might already be on shaky ground. So unlike this year’s fight between Batman and Superman, Marvel’s superhero-on-superhero showdown isn’t just based on a dumb misunderstanding, and it’s not resolved by an even dumber coincidence. When our heroes start punching each other, the conflict feels real. Of course, saying that is better than is setting an awfully low bar. But seeing the two movies close together makes it clear that the Marvel film is better in almost every way — and I say that as someone who has more sentimental attachment to the DC characters. While is somber and pretentious, doesn’t let its ostensibly serious subject matter drag it down. It’s witty and light on its feet, almost all the way to the end. (Tom Holland as the new Spider-Man is the MVP here.) And man, the action scenes are . While ‘s fights are basically a series of weightless, incoherent CGI explosions, the Russo brothers stick to a visceral, relatively grounded style, even when some crazy superpowers come into play in the climactic battle. If has a flaw, it’s the same flaw as virtually every blockbuster released these days — it doesn’t even try to work as a standalone film. It’s very much a middle chapter in an ongoing story. It assumes you’ve seen the previous and movies, and its downbeat ending is clearly setting the stage for the upcoming . But if this is our shared-universe, mega-franchise future, if every movie has to function as the next chapter in an ongoing story, then getting individual chapters that are as good as is probably the best we can hope for. |
User’s Guide to Disrupt NY 2016 | Leslie Hitchcock | 2,016 | 5 | 7 | Hard to believe that Disrupt NY is just around the corner! TechCrunch has partnered with an amazing array of sponsors who promise to make your experience at the conference better and better. : Download the newest version of the official Disrupt app to connect and message with other attendees at Disrupt. (Note: you can only message attendees who have also downloaded the app. So get in there and don’t miss out on people who may be trying to message you right now!) Download the app and . is reprising its role at the Disrupt Hackathon, providing the platform for our . Thanks, y’all! with attorneys from Perkins Coie to get courtesy legal advice. is meeting with exhibiting startups that are working around AI, Machine Learning, Big Data, Bots and the sharing economy. Universe is the official ticketing platform of Disrupt. If you purchased a ticket, you used . We love them and we think you will, too. If you haven’t purchased a ticket, please go do that Welcome Mercer to Disrupt NY. Mercer Match and Mercer PeoplePro are the latest launches out of the brand new innovation hub. is the official venture arm of the original Silicon Valley startup, focusing on global early stage investments. Our partners love to celebrate innovation. will be awarding the inaugural “Breakthrough Innovation Award” to one lucky company. The award will go to the startup with the most potential to be a global player – from the sand & surf of sunny Queensland, Australia – with $50,000 (AUD) to relocate and grow your next venture. If you’re an arm-chair Disruptor, you can watch the conference action from the . See you on Monday! |
null | Sarah Perez | 2,016 | 5 | 26 | null |
VR is terrible for traditional storytelling | Jon Evans | 2,016 | 5 | 7 | “But among them was this poor Earthling, and his head was encased in a steel sphere which he could never take off. There was only one eyehole through which he could look, and welded to that eyehole were six feet of pipe. He was also strapped to a steel lattice which was bolted to a flatcar on rails, and there was no way he could turn his head.” — Kurt Vonnegut, Last weekend I visited the San Francisco Film Festival’s “ ,” and spent some time binging on short pieces made for the Samsung Gear, Google Cardboard, and Oculus Rift; and amid all this virtual diversity, lo, the proverbial scales did fall from my eyes. Yes, VR is amazing — I caught myself uttering “oh, wow” under my breath multiple times — but at the same time, don’t kid yourself, we are still in the “ ” / hand-cranked-cameras stage of the art. The technology is terrific but still profoundly restrictive, and , it raises a of unanswered questions. How will we tell stories in VR? What will be the relationship between those stories and their observers? The more one “moves” in VR, the more compelling it is … but the greater the risk of motion sickness. (I felt faint stirrings from a mere drone’s-eye view, and my gut survived the .) More importantly, though, stationary-observer VR — call it “DomeVR,” since your point-of-view is essentially frozen in place within a dome — may be a richer, more immersive experience than a 2D screen, but when it comes to traditional narratives, it is vastly to, say, movies. Narrative storytelling is something I’ve thought, and know, a lot about; I’ve had a clutch of novels (traditionally) published, scripted a graphic novel for Vertigo Comics, had various screenplays bounce around Hollywood, have helped to shoot and edit TV episodes, etc. All those kinds of stories follow similar rules — rules which are blithely, rudely shattered by VR. A movie viewer, or a book reader, is in the same position as the unfortunate Billy Pilgrim in the Vonnegut quote with which I opened this piece: trapped in a linear narrative, with every sensation restricted and controlled by someone else. That quote goes on: The flatcar sometimes crept, sometimes went extremely fast, often stopped–went uphill, downhill, around curves, along straightaways. Whatever poor Billy saw through the pipe, he had no choice but to say to himself, “That’s life.” That’s a movie for you, or a book; time and space appear to you only as and when the storyteller allows. Not so VR. Even in stationary DomeVR, you can twist and turn and spin and look at a full 360 degrees of immersive environment. The narrative effect of this is that you are never quite as in sync with the story that being told; there is no clear demarcation between “story space” and elsewhere, as there is with a TV or movie or game screen. Your mind keeps telling you that is story space. But you can only focus on so much of it at a time; and it is all too easy, and tempting, to look away from what matters to the story, in favor of some curious detail, at exactly the wrong moment. Put another way, in VR, the story does not come to you; you go to it. "In cinema, the camera is the author … in VR, you cede that power to the viewer … imply how to look through space before things happen." — Jon Evans (@rezendi) There are various tricks one can use to get the VR viewer to go to it in the right way: "Lighting guides the entire narrative" – most interesting thing anyone's said yet. Practiced more in breach than observance to date imho. — Jon Evans (@rezendi) and I expect those will soon become a new kind of visual grammar, in the same way that we’re all accustomed to cinematic visual transitions that would have seemed shocking in the age of the Lumière brothers. But even so — if you reduce a VR experience to stationary viewers restricting their vision to a controlled frame, all you’re doing is recreating the 2D screen experience in an especially clumsy, annoying, restrictive way. What’s the point of that? VR is not for traditional narratives. VR is for of narratives. Just realized that the ‘blink’ navigation mechanic of many VR games lends itself perfectly to an adaptation of Tarkovsky’s “Stalker”. — P.G. Witchhouse (Aaron Muszalski) (@sfslim) VR is the medium we have long waited for so we could properly adapt my favorite book, Lewis Carroll's 'Alice' — Jonathan Korman (@miniver) It’s easy to say “Games! Games games games!” And VR games will be great, sure. But pure narrative, the raw human urge and need for stories, is what interests me more. If you stripped out the contests, puzzles, scoring, and first-person-centricity from games, if you de-gamified them, how often would their stories and characters still be interesting enough to be captivating all on their own? Not often, he understated. But I put it to you such VR stories will exist, and what’s more, they will become wildly popular. Consider , the immersive (loose) adaptation of , which occupies an entire large building in New York City, and whose action roves among many chambers in that building over the course of several hours. I know people who have attended it more than a dozen times, each time taking a new path, following a new storyline or a single character through the events. Now imagine that but with something even more sprawling as its basis. , say, or the Marvel Cinematic Universe. That, I think, is an indicator of what the great VR narrative art will become; not a story that you watch once, strapped to the storytelling equivalent of Vonnegut’s Tralfamadorian prison, but an experience you immerse yourself in multiple times, grasping new facets, finding and sharing Easter eggs, and seeing new angles every time. We’re some distance away from that yet, and it’s pretty clear that video games will be the thin edge of the VR wedge. But I predict they will soon be followed by a whole new kind of immersive fiction — one that will make IMAX 3D movies look like black-and-white silent films. I, for one, can’t wait. |
The Information Age is over; welcome to the Experience Age | Mike Wadhera | 2,016 | 5 | 9 |
Twenty-five years after the introduction of the World Wide Web, the Information Age is coming to an end. Thanks to mobile screens and Internet everywhere, we’re now entering what I call the “Experience Age.” When was the last time you updated your Facebook status? Maybe you no longer do? It’s been that original status updates by Facebook’s 1.6 billion users are down 21 percent. The status box is an icon of the Information Age, a period dominated by desktop computers and a company’s mission to organize all the world’s information. The icons of the Experience Age look much different, and are born from micro-computers, mobile sensors and high-speed connectivity. The death of the status box is a small part of a larger shift away from information moving toward experience. What’s driving this shift? In short, the changing context of our online interactions, shaped by our connected devices. To illustrate how this is playing out, think of and . Facebook is an Information Age native. Along with other social networks of its generation, Facebook was built on a principle of the desktop era — accumulation. Accumulation manifests in a digital profile where my identity is the sum of all the information I’ve saved — text, photos, videos, web pages. (Evan Spiegel explored this first in a 2015 YouTube video titled ). In the Information Age we represented ourselves with this digital profile. But mobile has changed how we view digital identity. With a connected camera televising our life in-the-moment, accumulated information takes a back seat to continual self-expression. The “virtual self” is becoming less evident. I may be the result of everything I’ve done, but I’m not the accumulation of it. Snapchat is native to this new reality. Many people think Snapchat is all about secrecy, but the real innovation of Snapchat’s ephemeral messages isn’t that they self-destruct. It’s that they force us to break the accumulation habit we brought over from desktop computing. The result is that the profile is no longer the center of the social universe. In the Experience Age you are not a profile. You are simply you. The central idea of the Experience Age is this — I’ll show you my point of view, you give me your attention. I hear you yelling, “That’s always been the story of social!” And it has. But what’s changed is that the stories we tell each other now begin and end visually, making the narrative more literal than ever. In the Information Age, the start of communication was information. On Facebook you type into a status box, add metadata such as your location and select from a hierarchy of emotions for how you feel. This information-first approach is also visible in Facebook’s feedback mechanisms — six pre-selected reactions with threaded commenting. By contrast, Snapchat always starts with the camera. Feedback is sent passively — swiping up on your story reveals which friends watched your snaps. In the Experience Age, the primary input is visual and the dominant feedback is attention. Today the feedback loop connecting sharing and attention starts and ends on mobile; in the future, it could start with contact lenses and end in VR, for example. This reality frames Facebook’s recent investments, which bring live video, 360-degree cameras and VR as products all into a single portfolio. But Facebook isn’t the only tech giant looking ahead and seeing how all these technologies might line up. By now you’ve likely heard of , the super stealth AR startup with a $4.5 billion valuation funded by the likes of and . A global arms race is underway, and is beginning to create a layering of technologies I like to call the experience stack. The experience stack. At the bottom is Layer 0, the real world. The full stack is in service of capturing and communicating real-world moments. Reality is its foundation. As you move up, the layers transition from physical to logical. At the top is the application layer made up of products like Snapchat Live and . Tomorrow’s products will be even more immersive. Take for example the relaunch of Sean Parker’s and Magic Leap’s . The experience stack will drive new products to market faster as each layer can grow independently, while at the same time benefiting from advancements in the layers below. An example of this phenomenon is high-speed 3G enabling Apple’s App Store, which together advanced mobile as a whole. The best products of the Experience Age will be timely new applications that leverage step-change advancements in bottom layers. Given that some layers are still nascent, tremendous opportunity is ahead. Our online and offline identities are converging, the stories we tell each other now start and end visually and investments at every layer of a new stack are accelerating the development of experience-driven products. Taken together, these trends have cracked open the door for a new golden age of technology. It’s an exciting time to be building. |
Embedded fuel cells power smartphones for a week… and could run the world | Garry Golden | 2,016 | 5 | 9 |
People love their smartphones but hate poor battery life. We love having access to the world’s information at our fingertips but tire of the need to constantly plug in to the world’s electricity grid. The recharging model of batteries fails us — the marketplace is ready for a new approach to portable power. We may be entering the early days of refueling products to gain longer performance and freedom from cords and electric sockets. Beyond powering our devices 10 times longer than batteries, this refueling model of personal power systems might also set the stage for a “leapfrog” energy scenario that brings billions of people into the age of electricity by delivering clean fuels to retail shelves. In January of this year, social media spread about a CES demonstration of an iPhone that could hold its power for a week, and shared of a hydrogen-fueled drone that could fly six times longer than a battery-operated version. Both stories hinted that there might be a fuel-based revolution ahead in portable energy for our smartphones and laptops. At the center of the excitement is a magical energy technology: the micro fuel cell. In basic terms, a fuel cell converts chemical energy into electricity. When devices need more power, we simply add more fuel. No wait time for recharging. No cords. Just add clean fuel that you can find on any retail shelf across the world. The company behind both breakthrough stories is U.K.-based . While the British company is far from a household name, industry insiders recognize that Intelligent Energy is within striking distance of a potential game-changer for how we power our portable devices. Carry their vision out far enough and micro fuel cells might also transform how we solve issues of global-energy access to clean fuels and electricity. While the CES iPhone and drone stories made headlines, an earlier (and more important) announcement was widely ignored. In late 2015, Intelligent Energy to develop embedded fuel cells for an emerging smartphone developer. What does this signal mean? Cutting the cord to electrical outlets or charging pads is actually possible with current technology. Intelligent Energy isn’t alone in its quest to bring micro fuel cells to the world. First-generation micro fuel cell products — sold as battery rechargers to campers, business travelers and the military — are coming to market from , , and . The challenge for these companies is to avoid being branded as a “battery recharging system,” and presenting the technology as a new way of thinking about portable personal power and the role of clean hydrogen-rich fuels. To jumpstart the transition, all eyes will be on decisions made by manufacturers like Foxconn, Apple, Samsung and Sony, which will deliver the fuel-cell proposition to consumers. These manufacturers want to deliver consumer products that have unprecedented power, performance and convenience. Embedding power plants inside devices would be a small leap for manufacturers, and a potentially giant leap for consumers seeking to escape the cycle of daily recharging. The future of refueling portable devices is an ideal business model: more convenient for consumers and also more expensive. Skeptics may question consumer willingness to shift from very cheap electricity (annual recharging costs under $10) to buying premium fuels (likely $30-100/year). Opportunists will point to bottled water as an example of where a portable, premium version of a cheaper product has succeeded. Premium cartridges of hydrogen-rich fuels would be available on retail shelves and everywhere across the public landscape (think malls and airports that currently offer charging stations). Because fuel devices run 6-10 times longer than batteries, the need to refuel will be infrequent. As fuel-cell technology matures in the years ahead, we can imagine refueling our phones once or twice a month. The tremendous benefit lies in the constant uptime and, by extension, a lack of stress that our batteries will die while we’re on the go. Will our default fuel be hydrogen or a liquid fuel like butane currently used for lighters? The standards for refueling micro fuel cells remain unresolved. The sector is ripe for a battle of Beta versus VHS (or, more recently, Apple charger plug versus newer Apple charger plug). The most likely candidates are portable fueling packets of hydrogen-rich gas, liquid fuels or solid-state hydrogen. Portable fuels and micro fuel cells offer something the cleantech world has yet to see: incentive-free, market-driven growth. While solar, wind and behind-the-meter battery storage have relied heavily on government incentives to jumpstart and sustain growth, micro fuel cells don’t require a government subsidy for growth. Selling fuels on retail shelves opens a pathway that is entirely driven by consumer demand as people will pay more for hydrogen-rich fuel because it powers their devices for significantly longer than electricity-dependent batteries. Hydrogen’s role as a universal energy carrier is an upside for this scenario of portable personal power. Suppliers of hydrogen-rich fuels can emerge in any region around the world using feedstocks from traditional natural gas or from new cleantech brands that sell solar-hydrogen or bio-derived hydrogen at a premium. Concerns over energy losses from producing and storing hydrogen are muted these days as researchers improve nano-materials that drive chemical reactions. The next decade will be critical for micro fuel-cell innovations. Think of the technology as somewhere between a late 1980s Motorola carry-pack cellular phone and the late 1990s flip phone. The vision of fuel-based power systems is compelling, and the technology’s maturity hints at an S-curve tipping point ahead. Yet this energy platform will still need old-fashioned time and experience. Believing in this scenario rests on two assumptions that must remain true. The first is that refueling beats recharging. The electrochemical conversion of fuels into electricity will always outperform the storage approach of batteries. Second, the profits of selling fuels will sustain this higher-cost path of embedded fuel cells while dropping costs for global scaling. No roadmap for rethinking portable energy has been made public yet, but by taking a deep look at positioning by industry players and consumer frustration with batteries, we might expect first-generation fuel cells embedded in smartphones and laptops within the next five years. From there, the cost curve matures and the scaling phase begins. Headlines from the not-too-distant future might resemble the following timeline: News stories emerge from Burning Man communities embracing small stationary and micro fuel cells to power camps and art pieces. Many in the community applaud the small footprint and efficiency of these solid-state devices and claim that the hydrogen fuel is produced from green sources. Skeptical Burners complain that empty hydrogen fuel packets litter the Playa and express concerns of waste byproducts. The audience commends the elegant design of Apple iFuel dispensers and H2 cartridges — ignoring the fact that Apple will now make an estimated $85 a year per consumer to refuel their devices. Apple fans rejoice and say the premium is worth the convenience to only refuel devices twice a month. The Communist Party announces revision to its latest Five-Year Plan and will focus on higher-value product integration and scaling challenges of embedded fuel cells inside consumer devices and industrial equipment. In its push for embedded energy systems, Intel acquires the talent and assets of U.K.’s fast-growing fuel-cell designer. The US$6 billion acquisition represents a new direction for Intel into clean energy space. If we thought unplugging from the landline phone was big, retailers are now touting cordless fuel-cell-based products. IKEA has announced plans to eliminate cords by 2035. GE sells an LED lightbulb with all the fuel it will ever need for its lifetime. Texas has become first state to grant permits for residential and commercial housing to be built without internal electrical wires and wall sockets. Micro and stationary fuel cells are expected to eliminate the high costs of wiring buildings, possibly rendering electricians the buggy-whip makers of our era. Large retailers see opportunities in delivering a range of fueling solutions, from liquid hydrogen-rich fuels to solid-state hydrogen packets. CEOs from Amazon and Walmart have announced their vision to become the world’s largest fuel distributors. Utility stocks continue to decline. Looking beyond 2030, it’s possible to imagine manufacturers integrating fuel cells inside our coffee makers, lamps, irons, vacuum cleaners, washer-dryers or any other object that benefits from long energy life and cordless convenience. Product designers will be thrilled to say goodbye to cords and dependency on electrical outlets. Simply add a cartridge of new fuel or refuel via a dispenser and you’re up and running. Beyond predictions of early adopters paying a premium for device fuels is a much more impactful goal: a distribution model for radically expanding global access to electricity. Clean fuels could be brought to market anywhere in the world at a variety of price points. Local markets could generate their own hydrogen-rich fuels from regionally available resources. It’s also not difficult to imagine a low-cost supply chain that enables the manufacturing of solid-state fuel cells in regions across the world. The expanse is wide between embedding fuel cells in a smartphone and a scalable retail-based global energy marketplace. To fill in the gaps, companies like Intelligent Energy will need to solve deep technical challenges and follow sustainable business models that focus on early-adopter markets. For now, micro fuel cells give us a compelling vision for moving beyond batteries and possibly transforming how billions of people might leapfrog into the age of electricity. |
Rancher Labs raises $20M Series B round for its container management platform | Frederic Lardinois | 2,016 | 5 | 9 | , a container management platform that supports both Kubernetes and Docker Swarm, today announced that it has raised a $20 million Series B round. This new funding round was led by new investor , a Chinese private equity and venture capital fund, with participation from existing investors Mayfield and Nexus Venture Partners. This round brings the company’s total funding to . The company says it plans to use the new funding to increase its sales and marketing capabilities and “to keep pace with demand for the product.” “Containerization has enabled organizations to do amazing things to improve application performance, availability and cost,”said Rancher Labs CEO Sheng Liang in today’s announcement. “The next piece of this puzzle, which will really help to perfect container technologies, are the tools around the management of containers. We are excited to continue efforts in furthering our goal of providing users with the right tools to take advantage of container technologies, and the financial and organizational benefits they promise.” https://vimeo.com/160679346#at=0 The market for container platforms is starting to get a bit crowded, but Rancher Labs argues that the fact that it supports both Kubernetes and Docker Swarm makes it the right platform for enterprise container deployments. What’s maybe more important, though, is that it’s also cloud agnostic and allows enterprises to run containers in public and private clouds as well as in traditional data centers. It’s also worth noting that Rancher is a multi-tenant platform, so teams can manage their own clusters according to their needs. The company argues that it only takes five minutes to set up a Kubernetes cluster this way, for example (though I would take this number with a grain of salt — especially if you’re deploying your first cluster). To make deploying containers easy, the company also offers an application catalog that makes it almost trivial to configure and deploy relatively complex applications with just a few clicks. “Containers are rapidly disrupting software development and IT operations” said Dr. James Zhang, partner at GRC SinoGreen, in today’s announcement. “ Labs has shown through its amazing open-source adoption, that organizations see container management as critical to accelerating software development, and running applications reliably and efficiently in production.” |
Virtual reality will revolutionize media content but VR headsets need to evolve | Jon Russell | 2,016 | 5 | 9 | Virtual reality can deliver on its promise to bring new and immersive experiences to the masses, but the current iteration of hardware will need to evolve first. That’s the view shared by co-founder Dave Cole and Shanna Tellerman, co-founder and CEO of , two VR industry veterans who took to the stage at to dig into the development of this much-hyped but potentially transformative medium. Tellerman’s company, which , enables users to create a fully virtual version of their home for the purpose of testing out interior design styles or decor. That’s quite unlike the typical content associated with VR — such as games, sports or even pornography — and Tellerman believes it will take some time for VR to permeate beyond the typically white male users who own early versions of the hardware right now. “The reality is that most consumers who [could benefit the most] don’t have VR in their living room yet. We have incredible technology in the background, and we’re designing every home so that, when VR hits, we can take advantage of it,” she said. NextVR, which , and already covers a range of sports, including the Kentucky Derby and select NBA matches. Plenty of new features are in the pipeline, including positional tracking and movement, but Cole admitted he wants to expand his company’s range of programming. “Content for a broader audience is a tricky issue, [we’re focused on] very pronounced silos right now. It takes critical mass, you have to hang that [content push] on [VR reaching a] critical mass,” he explained. But, for those that experience it, there will be no turning back. “Once you’ve had that experience, anything else will feel like watching video in a fish bowl,” Cole added. So what will it take for virtual reality to reach critical mass? Aside from time, Tellerman and Cole both believe a new kind of hardware experience is needed. Fixed-home VR is showing the potential for the virtual reality and augmented reality content experience, but it is costly, unwieldy and uncomfortable. That’s kept it to a limited early demographic. “We’re all very hesitant to put things on our face. The trend needs to start with trendy people… starting it in Silicon Valley… maybe sometimes works,” Tellerman joked. “Form factor needs to be something that hits the mark.” “Form factors will need to change before it becomes mainstream,” Cole said in agreement. The NextVR founder shared his belief that LG’s lightweight VR headset, LG 360 VR ( ), is the type of device that can move virtual reality into new kinds of audiences beyond early adopters. He also mentioned Microsoft’s , which has shown early promise and has more than 1,000 engineers working on its development. [gallery ids="1319679,1319678,1319676,1319664,1319667,1319669,1319668,1319665,1319666"] “I think there’s a step beyond [headsets], whether it’s in our phone or our eyes, it won’t be a set of goggles sitting in our home,” Tellerman mused. Both executives believe that VR is poised to be a genuine breakthrough, and not fall dead on its hype like 3D TV did. “3D TV was a very small value add to the television experience,” said Cole, whose company was involved in TV, he explained. “VR engages your entire visual system in a way that 3D never did, [it is] immersive beyond anything that was possible… even an iMax theater.” “3D goggles might [fail], but VR content creates a different level of immersion, it feels like we’re creating amazing businesses,” Tellerman said in agreement. |
WaterO brings reverse osmosis drinking water to the kitchen table | Brian Heater | 2,016 | 5 | 9 | A month before Disrupt, Yu Zhou sent us an email titled, “We want to help solve the Flint water problem.” WaterO’s CEO wasn’t claiming to have the catchall solution to the lead problem plaguing the Michigan city, but his company was in a unique position to lend a hand. Since then, the Los Angeles-based startup announced it has teamed up with the charity to send 5,000 of the company’s water filtration systems to help give Flint residents access to clean drinking water. The WaterO is a tabletop device roughly the size of a bread maker that utilizes reverse osmosis, a higher and more exacting technology than the carbon filters found on your everyday, run-of-the-mill pitchers from the likes of Brita or PUR. The system uses pressure to push water through a membrane, leaving particles larger than H2O behind in the process. It’s effective in removing heavy metals like lead and mercury, along with chlorine and bacteria. It’s a process that has existed for some time, but WaterO has applied it to a self-contained system with a small footprint, while managing to increase its efficiency. Before the water reaches the fourth filter, it enters a recycling mode, helping reduce the water waste. In the company’s process, 80 percent of the water is made drinkable. The rest stays behind in a pitcher that can be used to, say, water the plants. The system was five years in the making. Zhou says it came about, in part, due to his own hydration habits. “I drink a lot of water,” he explained in an interview ahead of Disrupt. “I don’t drink it from the tap, because I don’t like the smell. I bought a lot of bottled water from the grocery store. It’s annoying because I need to go every three days to get more water. I did some research into installing a reverse osmosis system, but I couldn’t do it in my rented apartment.” [gallery ids="1319624,1319622,1319621,1319620,1319649,1319648,1319647,1319646,1319631"] The company took to Indiegogo to help fund the project and gauge consumer interest, ultimately selling between 300 to 400 units in the process. Those are set to start shipping next month, at which point the WaterO system will also open up for online retail at $300 apiece. The user fills up a pitcher from the tap and places it in the machine. The system goes to work running it through four separate filters, a process that takes around 10 or so minutes. Once finished, a screen displays the starting TDS (Total Dissolved Solids), a measurement of non-H2O particles dissolved in the water, followed by the post-filtration numbers. [gallery ids="1318930,1318929,1318928,1318927"] The New York City tap water we used registered around 180 — drinkable, but not great. By the time the machine was done with it, we were at a far more acceptable 5. The company also brought a jug of lead-contaminated water from Flint (along with another filled full of salt water) to today’s Disrupt presentation. The machine was able to reduce the contaminated water from 147 TDS down to 5, which our judges then proceeded to taste. And like me, they agreed the water tasted pretty good. The TDS, it should be pointed out, is simply the number of non-water particles. It could be dust or it could be something far more harmful like lead. Zhou says the company is hoping to develop a more precise measurement. The system is, naturally, connected to an app that also displays this information, along with the health of the four filters in the rear and keeps track of the amount of water the user has consumed in a day. More compelling to Zhou however, is a feature that measures water quality across different machines in the same area, monitoring overall quality for neighborhoods. “We want to build a healthy drinking community with the app,” he explains. “Imagine if you have this machine in 10 different homes in the same area. You can know the TDS in the area. If it goes up too high, you can sound the emergency alarm.” |
Laugh.ly aims to be the Pandora for stand-up comedy | Sarah Perez | 2,016 | 5 | 9 | A company called wants to make streaming sets from the best comedians as easy as streaming music on Pandora. Though not yet available to the public, Laugh.ly’s iOS application will allow users to follow both big-name comedians like Louis C.K., Kevin Hart, Aziz Ansari and Amy Schumer, among others, as well as emerging stand-up comics looking for a way to grow and monetize their fan base. The company has lined up more than 400 comedians whose content will stream on its app, and a total of 20,000 individual tracks. These content deals were often made with comedians directly, explains Laugh.ly’s founder Dave Scott. “It’s different from musicians,” he says. “[Comedians often] own their own rights, or they’re owned by mom-and-pop shops.” However, several of the bigger names on the platform came in via the larger record label deals, he notes. In addition, the company is working with brands like Uproar, Shout, Laughing Stock and other big names in comedy (think TV), to license content. Scott is a third-time founder, having previously started an e-commerce site for entertainment merchandise, , as well as a marketing automation company, , that worked with Disney, Direct TV, Norwegian Cruise Lines and others. While both of these allowed for some cross-over with the entertainment industry, that wasn’t what prompted the idea for Laugh.ly. Instead, Scott was inspired to work in this space because he became a stand-up comedian himself. After the sale of his last company, he began taking classes at the Upright Citizens Brigade and doing open mic nights. He later moved to San Francisco and attended San Francisco Comedy College. (He even once had Tracy Morgan chase him outside after a bad set to remind him that “hey man, everybody bombs.”) [gallery ids="1319562,1319563,1319564,1319565,1319566"] The business model for Laugh.ly is similar to Pandora’s, as comedians will participate in a revenue share with the company, while the service itself is ad-supported to remain free for consumers. Also like Pandora, users can choose to upgrade to an ad-free experience. For $7.99 per month, Laugh.ly’s premium customers can ditch the commercials, save content for offline access and stream exclusive content the company is developing in partnership with the comedians participating on the platform. However, Scott points out that Laugh.ly isn’t just another content play — the company has developed legitimate tech IP, too. For the past several years, Laugh.ly’s developers have been working on technology that’s a lot like Pandora’s , but for the spoken word. That is, the company’s platform transcribes every joke it processes, so it knows what the jokes are about as well as their larger context. This allows consumers to create smart playlists using the app. For example, they could create a playlist (aka a “station”) that just contained Trump jokes. Another nice feature that having transcriptions allows for is the ability to quickly toggle on or off the profanity in a stand up’s routine — helpful for when you’re listening around kids, perhaps. Laugh.ly will launch into public beta this summer, but interested users can sign up now on to be first in line. Startup Battlefield Wild Card: Laugh.ly Brings Customized Comedy to Devices at — TechCrunch (@TechCrunch) |
Botify is an SEO crawler that helps your website optimize for Googlebot | Fitz Tepper | 2,016 | 5 | 9 | Most businesses live or die on Google search rankings. If you can’t crack the top few results, it’s almost impossible to consistently drive organic traffic to your site. But how does Google decide which sites appear at the top of the results list? It uses , a proprietary automated software script to “crawl” every website on the Internet and create an index that becomes the basis for search results. The problem is that this script is vague and mysterious, making it impossible for website creators to truly optimize for Googlebot and other search engines’ crawlers. Enter , a cloud-based crawler that will examine your website and create a detailed SEO analysis with actionable feedback. The French-based company, which launched today onstage at Disrupt NY, has and on-boarded big-name customers like eBay, BlaBlaCar and Expedia. [gallery columns="4" ids="1319603,1319601,1319600,1319599"] But a few things make Botify stand out from the hundreds of other SEO companies out there. First, the crawler is strong. The startup jokes that it holds the “world record” for most URLs crawled from a single website — 150,000,000. Botify also will let site administrators specify the crawl speed — anywhere from 10 to over 200 pages per second. Why would a site want its content crawled slower? Because Botify can crawl so fast that it sometimes stresses a site’s servers. Besides a strong crawler overall, Botify can also detect which pages on a site have been crawled by Google. When Google crawls a site, it leaves traces in a site’s server logs. Once the site provides these logs to Botify, they can compare it with their own crawl to see if Google had visited a certain page. [gallery columns="2" size="full" ids="1318833,1318834,1318835,1318836,1318837,1318838" orderby="rand"] Adrien Menard, co-founder and CEO of the company, explained that when “a page is not crawled by Google, it can’t drive any traffic and therefore any revenue. Pages ignored by Google represent a huge potential of traffic and revenue.” So, Botify takes its crawl data and creates a unique recommendation report for websites. But unlike most SEO consultants, Botify won’t tell sites to add more content. Instead, the startup tells sites how to “organize site content to make it more efficient.” Specifically, this includes how to organize internal links, how to direct Google to crawl specific pages over others and how to optimize pages to decrease load times. This level of intense SEO work is probably better suited for larger websites, which Botify’s pricing structure alludes to. The least expensive plan is over $500 a month for a bot to crawl 5,000,000 URLs, and enterprise plans can run over $10,000 per year. |
OverNest launches GitZero with encrypted code searching at TechCrunch Disrupt Battlefield | Ron Miller | 2,016 | 5 | 9 | , a startup that was launched just over a year ago by several technology industry veterans, announced its first product, called , today at the TechCrunch Disrupt Startup Battlefield competition in Brooklyn, NY — and it’s a pretty exciting product that makes encrypted code searchable. It’s widely known that you should be encrypting your data. It prevents prying eyes from seeing your valuable intellectual property as it moves on the Internet, but it comes with its own set of problems, especially for developers who can’t really work on their code once it’s been encrypted. That’s where GitZero comes in: It lets developers encrypt their code and still be able to search across it, solving a huge technical problem. When you look at the largest data breaches over the last couple of years — Sony, Target, JP Morgan or any high profile hack — the data would have been entirely useless to the hackers if it had been encrypted, OverNest founder and CEO Ed Yu told TechCrunch. “Encryption solves most of the problems associated with hacking, but then you lose the ability to work with data,” he said. Essentially, encryption works to stop the hackers, but also makes it impossible for the people who want legitimate access to work with the content because, up until now, you couldn’t work on or search across it in an encrypted state. [gallery ids="1319577,1319576,1319575,1319573,1319557,1319558"] OverNest has solved this conundrum by making encrypted data searchable. The trick here is you need a search key in the same manner you need an encryption key to encrypt and unencrypt the data. That keeps the data safe and secure in its encrypted state, but gives authorized users a way in to search across the data set. While OverNest should get big points for solving an enormous technological problem that has persisted for years, they needed to wrap that solution around a product; hence, GitZero was born. It works in the same fashion that developers expect when adding code to a Git repository, but it enables them to create an encrypted, searchable repository, thereby keeping it secure, but accessible. The GitZero repository acts like a layer on top of Git, giving users that searchable encryption, while still using a standard Git command line interface to move the content into the newly created repository. When a user uploads source to GitZero, it encrypts the files and builds a searchable index. You enter your search key and you can see the encrypted files and search them. What’s more, you can share search keys, using familiar encryption key managers, or for those organizations that don’t want to take the responsibility of managing their own keys, GitZero will manage the encryption and search keys for you. It’s not easy for a technical solution like this to get the attention of venture capitalists (or contests like Battlefield) because the people in charge don’t always understand the nuances of this type of solution. In fact, Yu joked, if someone didn’t question the viability of his solution, he would wonder if they truly understood the magnitude of what they are doing here. https://youtu.be/s6S0sDo3Iao “One thing that’s pretty interesting is that as we move to the age of AI, the source code is going to contain even more intellectual property as the code now will be the ‘brain’ of that AI. It’s amazing people think a private [repository] from all existing source code cloud hosting will protect their code,” Yu said. In fact, if it’s not encrypted, it’s not protected, but now with GitZero, developers can have the best of all worlds. The company launched in March, 2015 with Yu and co-founders Paul Lung and Michael Lai. It has received a million dollars in seed funding. |
Artveoli combines algae and microfluidics to generate fresh air indoors | Natasha Lomas | 2,016 | 5 | 9 | Live in any major city, be it London, Paris, Los Angeles or Shanghai, and you’ll be all too aware that air pollution is a huge and growing problem. At the same time, indoor air quality can suffer because of attempts to reduce buildings’ energy consumption to make them less pollutive to the outdoor environment — by, for example, applying high-grade insulation and recirculating indoor air to reduce heat loss/lower air conditioning systems’ energy needs. Very well sealed buildings can lead to elevated CO2 levels as more people gather indoors. So how to square this circle? Step forward , a biotech startup that’s building an air purifying device that aims to convert carbon dioxide into oxygen in indoor environments, such as offices and homes, by harnessing the photosynthetic properties of algae. “It’s like having trees inside buildings,” is Artveoli’s elevator pitch. The startup is officially launching onstage at TechCrunch Disrupt New York, opening registrations for people to sign up for updates. The aim is to start manufacturing its first air purifying product this year, says co-founder Alina Adams — with a view to shipping the device sometime in 2017. Adams has a background in microfluidics, the core technology which it’s applying to increase the efficiency of the algae to enable a single unit to have an impact on the room where it is placed — having worked at the , along with her co-founder. Microfluidics refers to a field of research that looks at how fluids behave differently at the microscale and how those differences can be exploited for particular use-cases. “It’s a new type of technology that makes biochemical processes much easier, faster, it’s easier to control and work with the different, complex biological systems,” explains Adams. “I was thinking, we have plants that make fresh air so how can we put lots and lots of plants inside buildings?” she adds, discussing how the idea for the business was born. “This was an ah-ha moment — ok nobody is actually using microfluidics devices to grow photosynthetic type of cells to make fresh air.” Startup Battlefield: Making Fresh Air with ArtVeoli at — TechCrunch (@TechCrunch) An existing technology — photobioreactors — uses a light source to cultivate phototropic microorganisms, such as algae, generating biomass from light and carbon dioxide. But these units tend to need to be very large in order to generate a large amount of biomass. Artveoli’s founders’ mental leap was to wonder whether they could grow the same type of phototropic cells on the micro-scale — so very, very densely packed, and thus able to pump out more oxygen. “We’re working with small channels and small volumes, so we’re working with chips that are easier to manipulate small volume type of liquids. High density means we’re using cell concentrations inside our system that are much, much more significant than those that you’d find even in traditional bioreactors. “So we have these nature-type of systems inside that metabolically produces oxygen and removes carbon dioxide… Light powers the system. And because we have this large surface area and high density that’s how we’re able to achieve significantly higher outputs for carbon dioxide absorption and oxygen production than traditional trees.” [gallery ids="1319582,1319583,1319584,1319591,1319592,1319593,1319594"] Adams says NASA has already looked at using the same type of algae it is putting inside its microfluidic high-density photobioreactors to power closed, self-sustaining systems to produce oxygen for astronauts on long space missions. However, the problem they ran into was making those systems efficient enough. “They’re not able to get this efficiency because they’re using larger volumes. That’s where microfluidic technology eliminates that problem. With microfluidic technology we have more control and we have the higher efficiency, so they can work with higher densities,” she adds. “We’re actually talking to — they are interested in potential future applications for this technology — because we are able to produce oxygen and remove carbon dioxide in closed spaces. Which is essential if you’re limited on the air supply from outside.” Artveoli’s device is also a closed system (which lowers the risk of contamination), with the algae contained inside transparent, microfluidic plastic chips and the necessary nutrients (plus light, via an LED backlit panel) fed to them via a built-in control system. This allows for control of cell density (and therefore unit efficiency), including by controlling the rate of introduction of new algae, based on the growth rates of the existing population. The particular microalgae being used by Artveoli has been selected because it has a high photosynthetic efficiency, says Adams. “We introduce the right proportions of media — that’s part of the control that we have, so we can have a very stable system.” The algae won’t live forever, of course, even given ideal conditions provided for them in a closed system, so there is a need to remove waste (i.e. dead) algae from the units by replacing filters in the units and also replenishing with fresh microalgae over time. But the aim is to make this process very simple — similar to putting a new ink cartridge in a printer, says Adams. “We remove the excess biomass, or bioproduct waste, which is basically dead algae,” she says. “And introducing — similar to printer cartridge models — you put in new media. “There’s no periods whenever there’s no algae in the system so it’s continuously recirculating and introducing new media and removing the excess and dead cells/debris out with the cartridges.” These (biodegradable) cartridges will need to be replaced three to four times per year, providing for a recurring revenue stream for the business. The cost of the cartridges will be similar to the price of new filters for existing air purifying machines, according to Adams. The units themselves will be custom-built and installed for commercial customers, so will vary in size and price — although Adams says, again, pricing will be in the ballpark of existing air purifier devices, so “from a few hundred dollars to a few thousand.” Selling to the commercial market is the startup’s first push, with the clearest use-case being offices where lots of people gather for long periods of time, reckons Adams. But the team also intends to build a product for the consumer market down the line, although decisions about form factor and how to design these units are yet to be made. The number of units that a buyer might need will depend on building occupancy, but Adams says the goal is to build systems that can create enough oxygen for one person, so in a house with four occupants you’d need four systems. (Albeit, the more custom configurations it’s envisaging creating for commercial buyers might change those ratios, depending on the size of individual units.) On the design front, Artveoli is partnering with designers to be able to offer buyers a printed cover for the units, in addition to potentially offering other cover options — even such as a touchscreen or a whiteboard, which would obviously be useful in an office environment. The units will also contain embedded Wi-Fi sensors so gas exchange levels can be monitored. The units themselves resemble flat-screen TV panels in terms of form factor at this point, according to Adams, but she says the team is also researching alternative multi-layered configurations to be able to build devices with other form factors in the future — such as the box-shaped units typical of existing air purifier products, so it could potentially be portable. Why the name Artveoli? Alveoli is the name of the tiny air sacs clustered in bunches inside the lungs where the gas exchange of oxygen and carbon dioxide takes place. The density of alveoli in the lungs provides a very large surface area, allowing for the body to get enough oxygen into the blood to sustain life. It’s a similar density principle behind Artveoli’s microfluidics technology, which maximizes the surface to volume ratio. Artveoli is also, of course, a play on words — with the ‘Art’ in the title referring to the idea of incorporating designers’ works onto the front of the panel so the unit can be a feature in and of itself, if buyers so wish. Artveoli incorporated last September, after starting out doing tests and building prototypes in a garage. They have been bootstrapping the first stage of development — including building their first system — but are now looking to raise funding to pay for manufacturing units to take to market. Adams says the amount they’re aiming to raise will depend on how much interest they see via sign-ups, but their initial aim is to raise between $3 million and $5 million at this stage of the business. The long-term vision is not carbon dioxide consuming devices that are hung on walls or even moved around different rooms, but rather walls that are themselves breathing out oxygen — with the technology embedded directly into buildings. However, that’s going to require a lot more work to bring to market, looping in architects and mechanical engineers, and needing to comply with standards/buildings regulations. Hence, Artveoli is taking a device-based (and modular/custom) approach with their first line of hardware. “On the functionality level it will be more efficient to have it embedded, because that way we can have it more controlled and for the replacement of cartridges and filters there’s more opportunities to make it a bit more efficient, as part of the building. But to be honest, it’s at least five years til we get to something because it’ll have a bunch of product iterations. It also depends on working with architects and designers.” Another future hope is to integrate the technology with smart home devices so they could be used to control the units. “Our system is smart in itself but it would be good to integrate it with an existing network of appliances and devices so they could control that as well,” adds Adams. If you’re wondering if microalgae-based oxygen production air purifiers have an off switch, the answer is yes — kind of. Switching the LED lights off will “power” the unit down, however, you can’t keep the lights off indefinitely or the algae will die. Adams says the microorganisms would probably manage for a few weeks without light — so just enough time for a family vacation. This machine behind you, you put art on top of it but behind it there’s an air filter?
It’s not actually a filter — it’s a biological entity. So how many square feet does one of those do? And what are you selling that for and who are you selling it to?
The typical example of a conference room, 12 x 12, we need about one system. If occupancy is higher — let’s say 4-6 people — you need two units. What does it sell for?
Initially a couple of thousands but with large-scale manufacturing we’ll bring the cost down. Initially you are selling to who?
To commercial segments. We’re selling it directly as well as partnering with HVACs because they already have sales channels. This takes in CO2 and emits oxygen but it doesn’t do particle removing of contaminants?
At this point it doesn’t, but we can probably do that later. But nothing in the market does this. Can you tell us a bit about what the demand is for this?
There’s a huge new trend of making buildings healthier, not just green. Green means saving energy, healthy means providing a healthy environment… The new trend is not only making buildings efficient but making them healthy. By reducing the air that you bring in from outside you are keeping air in — and all this ties in with the demand-control ventilation. Because installing our systems locally you don’t have to bring the air so much over all the building, you can take care of where the CO2 levels get elevated. But these buildings are already being built… they are doing it without these machines, it has to do with the way the building is built. They’re bringing in fresh air. It’s completely internal. They’re doing it just in terms of the actual building of the building…
In addition to providing fresh air we’re actually saving energy because our system doesn’t use so much energy to bring air from outside. Neither do these buildings. Is it just all about the balance of oxygen to CO2?… I’ve heard in different environments of people pushing oxygen into different environments and I don’t know if that produces a comparable effect?
There are two things. CO2 concentrations high is worse than lack of oxygen because we don’t need as much oxygen as is in the room. So oxygenators — that’s the machines that inject the oxygen… they might inject some oxygen to keep people awake and alert but the core problem is actually CO2. That’s what makes us sick, that’s what makes us feel tired. As you think about trying to create demand, educating the public and these commercial folks… how are you going to overcome that challenge? Because it sounds like an awesome technology, I’m sure it’s highly defensible… but you’ve got to convince people that the CO2 is the problem. How do you execute that campaign?
It’s a great point. Awareness is number one thing. Not everyone’s aware, oh I feel sick and the air’s feeling stuffy — but that means CO2 is elevated. So dealing with buildings the great point is that we have a support from a lot of research that other companies do so we don’t have to educate so much to say ok CO2 is bad for you. We can refer to the studies. For example, a Harvard study that recently just published this paper on CO2 and cognitive performance — so relying on the knowledge and the foundation that industry has, working with them, partnering, we can show the benefits and the value of providing our product to the customer. |
Dataminr was in an unpaid pilot with intel agencies when Twitter ended the deal | Kate Conger | 2,016 | 5 | 9 | We’re heading into summer, but the chilly relationship between government bodies and private tech businesses is growing frostier by the day. In the latest development, it has emerged that Twitter requested one of its key B2B partners, — a service that offers advanced social media analytics and early detection of major events like terrorist attacks or natural disasters — stop providing U.S. intelligence agencies with their tools and content. But Dataminr isn’t ending its relationship with the government altogether: Dataminir still counts In-Q-Tel, the non-profit investment arm of the CIA, as an investor. Dataminr has taken investment from Twitter, too, highlighting some of the conflicts that remain as tech companies fight for more transparency and autonomy from government control. Interestingly, the agencies who are at the center of today’s news were using Dataminr in an unpaid pilot, TechCrunch understands. That pilot, which was coming to an end, could not be continued as a paid deal because of pre-existing Twitter policies that forbid selling data for use in government surveillance. The news of Dataminr cutting off intelligence groups was first reported by the , and we have confirmed the details directly with sources. What exactly is Dataminr? The company uses Twitter firehose data — the unfiltered, full stream of Tweets from Twitter’s 300m+ users — along with other primary sources, to surface signals for big events as they are happening. “We have never authorized Dataminr or any third party to sell data to a government or intelligence agency for surveillance purposes,” a Twitter spokesperson told TechCrunch. “This is a longstanding Twitter policy, not a new development.” Dataminr is not without a wider financial relationship with the intelligence agency: In-Q-Tel, the CIA’s investment arm, has a strategic stake in Dataminr, as highlighted in April in an article published in the . Twitter is also an investor in Dataminr — with a 5% stake in the big data startup. Dataminr has raised , with its most recent round at a . Other investors include Credit Suisse, Fidelity, IVP, Venrock, among others. Government agencies have been gathering intelligence about individuals and large-scale events from social networks more frequently as part of their efforts to keep surveillance up to speed with technology. But in the wake of Edward Snowden’s revelations about NSA surveillance, tech companies are not always comfortable playing a role in government intelligence-gathering, and are becoming more proactive about defining their boundaries. Twitter is in the midst of a against the U.S. Government in which it is fighting to disclose information about the requests it receives for user data from the government. (The suit has been but is still in progress.) Twitter has been celebrated in part for its role as a platform for free speech — a key virtual “town square” where people can speak their mind and organize with others in a spirit of activism. But there is also a pragmatic reason for companies like Twitter to push back against intelligence authorities using tools to monitor Twitter activity. Twitter relies heavily on consumer trust to operate: if users think that it’s a hotbed for CIA snooping, this could turn them off from tweeting. Ironically, Dataminr may be one of the more innocuous of the social media big-data analytics firms: it uses public information from Twitter to track big events, rather than collecting and organizing personal information about people. Twitter itself pointed this out. “Dataminr uses public Tweets to sell breaking news alerts to media organizations such as Dow Jones and government agencies such as the World Health Organization, for non-surveillance purposes,” Twitter said in a statement to TechCrunch. Still, as the WSJ noted, it’s the optics of having any kind of relationship with intelligence agencies that motivated Twitter to end the pilot program. “American technology companies can continue to thrive only if people around the world trust them,” ACLU deputy legal director Jameel Jaffer told TechCrunch. “It’s completely understandable that a social media company like Twitter doesn’t want to be seen as an arm of American intelligence agencies.” And in the end, it seems like cutting off Dataminr activity is not necessarily the final word. Twitter told the Wall Street Journal that the data in question is “largely public and the U.S. government may review public accounts on its own, like any user could.” Jaffer agreed that the government could still easily observe action on Twitter. “It’s doubtful that this move by Twitter will have any significant effect on the U.S. government’s ability to access or analyze information,” he added. |
Chinese tech giant Kuang-Chi harnesses Israeli tech to build smart cities in China | Dennis Mitzner | 2,016 | 5 | 9 |
, a Shenzhen-based technology conglomerate, recently launched a $300 million Israel fund in Tel Aviv “Kuang-Chi is the first Chinese corporate VC and incubator that leverages the capabilities of the Israeli market together with the distribution, sales and marketing and technology development in China,” said Dorian Barak, managing partner of , Kuang-Chi’s partner in Israel. With a valuation of over $10 billion Kuang-Chi is no stranger to early-stage investments, with a portfolio that already includes ., Martin Aircraft Company (ASX:MJP), biometrics pioneer and communications group HyalRoute In Israel, the company’s Kuang-Chi GCI Fund & Incubator has already made its first investment: A $20 million commitment to , a machine vision company. “Israeli entrepreneurs tend to have very big ideas, but there are limitations in the local market; we can help these companies to take big leaps,” said Liu. Like many of his peers in China, Liu is looking to take Israeli tech to a global audience. And the first stop will be China. The country’s smog-choked, populous metropolises are a perfect testing ground for Israeli technologies aimed at “smart cities,” which is a main area of focus for Liu’s fund. With the rapid expansion of its urban population, Chinese cities suffer from environmental pollution and a shortage of resources, like potable water. Considering the difficulty of sustaining the country’s megacities, it makes sense for China to cozy up to Israel to adapt to the changing landscape. For example, should be a shoo-in for China’s growing needs. “With the future city, we emphasize two points: environment and safety. We know the severity of the problem in China and desperately need technology to monitor and track the real data of environmental change,” Liu says. “And the other part is safety, for example against natural disaster and disaster relief… 3.5% of Chinese GDP is lost because of disasters. Chinese cities are crowded and if something happens, many people will die.” The launch of the fund is the fruit of nearly a year of negotiations with local Israeli players, and is potentially the first step of a multi-pronged approach to Kuang-Chi’s involvement in the technology scene. The company’s new fund also is indicative of the flood of technology investments coming from China into Israel. Chinese investment into the country is growing by 50 percent annually and is expected to increase. Despite China’s reputation as a copycat nation, the country’s economy is evolving as it gains more exposure to technology startups internationally while investing heavily in research and development efforts at home. According to Liu, Kuang-Chi works with municipalities who have a keen interest to see their cities avoid natural disasters and overcrowding, operating with the support of the Chinese government. And in terms of investment, the firm intends to be stage-agnostic. “We are not financial investors. We don’t care about the stage, we only care about what they are doing. It could be a one person company or a 100 person company,” said Liu. Based on Liu’s vision, there are a number of Israeli companies that might fit the bill. “We are looking at robotics, aviation and at anything that makes machines behave and understand human behavior, “ Liu says. Kuang-Chi is also on the lookout for virtual reality investment opportunities. |
Uber and Lyft ‘pause’ Austin operations today in standoff over regulation | Lora Kolodny | 2,016 | 5 | 9 | Today, Uber and Lyft took their ride-hailing services offline in Austin, Texas, leaving drivers scrambling for other means of making income, and riders stranded or seeking another mode of transportation. Here’s why: , Austin voters upheld a rule that would require Uber, Lyft and other transportation network companies there to do fingerprint-based background checks of their drivers, among other things. The General Manager for Uber Austin, Chris Nakutis, issued a statement after the vote: “Disappointment does not begin to describe how we feel about shutting down operations in Austin…We hope the City Council will reconsider their ordinance so we can work together to make the streets of Austin a safer place for everyone.” The ordinance he’s talking about also requires drivers for Uber, Lyft and others to clearly label their cars with a company logo, and refrain from picking up and dropping off passengers in certain city lanes. And a spokesperson from Lyft issued a similar statement: “…The rules passed by City Council don’t allow true ridesharing to operate. Instead, they make it harder for part-time drivers, the heart of Lyft’s peer-to-peer model, to get on the road and harder for passengers to get a ride. Because of this, we have to take a stand…and will pause operations in Austin on Monday, May 9th.” Both Uber and Lyft lobbied hard in Austin, spending more than $8 million on their efforts. But that didn’t manage to sway voters. Entrepreneurs who live and work in Austin, Dane Jensen and Noah Lee, the co-founders of subscription commerce startup , are concerned that without Uber and Lyft, drunk driving rates will increase in their city. They are also worried that residents and visitors won’t have an easy way to get around, especially on rainy days when people are reluctant to ride a bike. Sock Club CTO Jensen said, “I’m not really certain what fingerprinting brings to the table in terms of improving safety for consumers, but I’m happy our community gets a say in how these companies are allowed to operate.” Lee added, “There was no lack of knowledge about what was happening, but Austin still voted this way. I don’t know where Uber or Lyft should draw the line with local government. But there are definitely not enough cabs or public transit options to handle all of the demand without them.” Perhaps another ride-hailing company will implement fingerprint-based background checks, and move in on Uber and Lyft’s territory. Traditional taxi companies already conduct fingerprint-based background checks on their drivers. For its part, Lyft has about 10,000 Austin-based drivers who will be looking for new ways to generate income during this so-called “pause” in operations. Uber also reports that prior to the shutdown, they had approximately 10,000 drivers using their app in Austin, too. Throughout the U.S. many freelance drivers use Lyft and Uber simultaneously to source fares. |
Facebook now directly denies report of biased trends, says there’s no evidence | Josh Constine | 2,016 | 5 | 9 | Facebook is now strongly refuting claims that it suppressed conservative Trends after issuing a more vague and indirect PR statement earlier today about having neutrality guidelines. Facebook VP of search Tom Stocky Facebook has “found no evidence that the anonymous allegations are true” at 9:30pm pacific May 9th, regarding a from sources who said they were formerly on the team that chose what Trends appeared on Facebook’s site. “Facebook does not allow or advise our reviewers to systematically discriminate against sources of any ideological origin and we’ve designed our tools to make that technically not feasible. At the same time, our reviewers’ actions are logged and reviewed, and violating our guidelines is a fireable offense.” [Update 10pm pacific, May 10th: This article has been significantly updated to reflect the new statement released by Facebook VP Tom Stocky directly refuting the claims of biased trends.] Facebook’s earlier statement about having neutrality guidelines left it unclear whether any contractors hired to curate the trend had potentially violated those rules. But now Stocky’s statement bluntly calls into question the allegations by Gizmodo’s sources. Here’s Stocky’s full statement: “My team is responsible for Trending Topics, and I want to address today’s reports alleging that Facebook contractors manipulated Trending Topics to suppress stories of interest to conservatives. We take these reports extremely seriously, and have found no evidence that the anonymous allegations are true. Facebook is a platform for people and perspectives from across the political spectrum. There are rigorous guidelines in place for the review team to ensure consistency and neutrality. These guidelines do not permit the suppression of political perspectives. Nor do they permit the prioritization of one viewpoint over another or one news outlet over another. These guidelines do not prohibit any news outlet from appearing in Trending Topics. Trending Topics is designed to showcase the current conversation happening on Facebook. Popular topics are first surfaced by an algorithm, then audited by review team members to confirm that the topics are in fact trending news in the real world and not, for example, similar-sounding topics or misnomers. We are proud that, in 2015, the US election was the most talked-about subject on Facebook, and we want to encourage that robust political discussion from all sides. We have in place strict guidelines for our trending topic reviewers as they audit topics surfaced algorithmically: reviewers are required to accept topics that reflect real world events, and are instructed to disregard junk or duplicate topics, hoaxes, or subjects with insufficient sources. Facebook does not allow or advise our reviewers to systematically discriminate against sources of any ideological origin and we’ve designed our tools to make that technically not feasible. At the same time, our reviewers’ actions are logged and reviewed, and violating our guidelines is a fireable offense. There have been other anonymous allegations — for instance that we artificially forced to trend. We looked into that charge and found that it is untrue. We do not insert stories artificially into trending topics, and do not instruct our reviewers to do so. Our guidelines do permit reviewers to take steps to make topics more coherent, such as combining related topics into a single event (such as and ), to deliver a more integrated experience. Our review guidelines for Trending Topics are under constant review, and we will continue to look for improvements. We will also keep looking into any questions about Trending Topics to ensure that people are matched with the stories that are predicted to be the most interesting to them, and to be sure that our methods are as neutral and effective as possible.” Stocky’s explanation suggests that Gizmodo’s sources may have exaggerated the claims. Facebook’s assertions here mesh with a report from the this evening that says a former employees of Facebook’s trend curation team told it that “Any ‘suppression,’…was based on perceived credibility — any articles judged by curators to be unreliable or poorly sourced, whether left-leaning or right-leaning, were avoided, though this was a personal judgment call.” It’s possible that what was perceived as suppression may have been shortcomings of the algorithm or hesitation to display Trends based on news outlets not deemed to be credible. At 1pm pacific May 9th, Facebook said in a statement to TechCrunch that it was against the company’s curation policy to suppress or prioritize specific political views in its Trending topics, and that it has guidelines in place to preserve consistency and neutrality there. This would imply that any issue arose from deviation from these guidelines on the part of contractors paid to curate the trends it shows. In the statement responding to that conservative trends were suppressed in Facebook’s Trending section, Facebook wrote: “We take allegations of bias very seriously. Facebook is a platform for people and perspectives from across the political spectrum. Trending Topics shows you the popular topics and hashtags that are being talked about on Facebook. There are rigorous guidelines in place for the review team to ensure consistency and neutrality. These guidelines do not permit the suppression of political perspectives. Nor do they permit the prioritization of one viewpoint over another or one news outlet over another. These guidelines do not prohibit any news outlet from appearing in Trending Topics.” Former Facebook “news curators” told Gizmodo they were instructed to “inject” certain stories to make them appear to be Trending news topics on the platform’s homepage and search results, even if they weren’t that popular. That’s a somewhat understandable practice as Facebook sought to improve its trends algorithm. If something was important but not yet generating loads of discussion on Facebook, or wasn’t getting picked up by the algorithm, Facebook’s editors may have added the trend artificially. Facebook was also said to have discouraged inclusion of trends about Facebook itself. That could have been done to avoid self-promotion or to offset the propensity for Facebook users to talk about Facebook. But it also could have suppressed negative stories about Facebook. Most damning were the accusations by former workers that some trending stories were suppressed if they didn’t agree with the political views of the contracted curators controlling the trending topics feed — especially if the stories were conservative. Though Gizmodo didn’t claim that this bias was mandated from higher-ups, Facebook’s neutrality guidelines should have prevented this from happening. “I’d come on shift and I’d discover that CPAC or Mitt Romney or Glenn Beck or popular conservative topics wouldn’t be trending because either the curator didn’t recognize the news topic or it was like they had a bias against Ted Cruz,” one former employee who wished to remain anonymous . The news outlet published an about these same “curators” and their harsh working conditions, calling the company out on degrading conditions — stuck in a conference room for months, forced to speed write quick hits to fill out the trending portion found on the upper right side of Facebook’s site. What we have from the report is anecdotal and it’s tough to know what’s going on. Facebook’s biggest problem may have been not realizing humans have biases — including political ones. Though it may have had neutrality guidelines in place about how to curate the trends, it’s possible that contractors with inherent biases were placed on the team, then went on to bend or break the rules. A more rigorous oversight system may be necessary to ensure that the neutrality guidelines are strictly followed. But as Stocky writes, training and technical systems were both in place to prevent bias leaking into the Trends, and all actions by curators were logged. The whole issue is alarming because Facebook has grown to become a core way people discover news. It drives so much traffic that news outlets are pressured into publishing on the platform. Bias on the part of the platform itself could impact the minds of its 1.65 billion users. The fact is that the employees of Facebook itself do lean liberal. At a 2011 town hall talk where Mark Zuckerberg interviewed Barack Obama at Facebook headquarters, employees could be heard loudly cheering for pro-Democrat statements and anti-Republican jabs from the president. With the 2016 presidential election coming up, Facebook has enormous power to sway the populace. It will need to convince the public it can remain neutral, or it opens itself up to stern criticism, lost political ad dollars and increasing skepticism about its stronghold on the distribution of information. At this point, the report has already done significant damage to Facebook’s reputation with conservatives, and increased fears that it manipulates the world. Even if its records show no evidence of tampering with Trends, the perception of bias could haunt the company through the election season. |
With Lumenus smart cycling apparel, you can leave your boring cycling jacket at home | Romain Dillet | 2,016 | 5 | 9 | As self-driving cars are not quite ready yet, bike accidents unfortunately are still a thing. Sometimes, stupid monkey brains can’t see someone riding a bike. wants to fix that with smart clothes and accessories for runners, cyclists and motorcyclists. The company is taking part in our Startup Battlefield competition at . Lumenus integrates LEDs into clothes. For now, the company is working on two jackets, a vest and a backpack. During daytime, they look like regular clothes and accessories. At night, you can turn on the LEDs for safety and take advantage of the smart features. “All the system is completely embedded — you’re not going to see wires and LED bulbs,” Lumenus co-founder and CEO Jeremy Wall told me before Disrupt. “You’re easily able to switch out your bike jacket for this upgraded version because you’re not losing, comfort, fit and size.” [gallery ids="1319535,1319536,1319537,1319538"] The battery is a small circular cell with a male USB on it so you can plug it to any USB charger. On average, you can expect 7.5 hours of continuous light usage, or 24 hours of flashing mode. And the best part is that these lights are waterproof. When Wall was in college, he started riding his bike a lot to commute. He was a little bit scared when the sun went down. “I almost got hit by a car at one point,” Wall told me. That’s how he came up with the idea behind Lumenus. If you’ve been following Kickstarter campaigns, you already know about Lumenus, as the company already did late last year. Lumenus plans to ship the backpacks in July with other items following shortly after. Items range from $150 to $450. [gallery ids="1318010,1318012,1318015,1318016"] And yet, these clothes and accessories are just the first step. The startup has bigger plans, with a software element, a licensing business and potential new markets. Let’s start with the software part. Lumenus isn’t just about safety. For instance, you could connect your jacket to your phone using Bluetooth and input turn by turn directions. Putting aside the question whether it makes sense to connect your jacket to your phone, the handcuff LEDs will tell you when you should turn left or right so you don’t have to look at your phone. Your jacket also could alert you when someone is calling you, or if you’re not running fast enough compared to your target pace. Wall calls this a Zero UI design. The LEDs can give you bits of information without requiring you to tap on your phone’s screen. And your phone acts like the brain for your jacket. [gallery ids="1318003,1318006,1318002,1318007,1318005,1318004"] Then there’s the licensing business. Lumenus wants to partner with other clothing brands to add LEDs and smart features. The startup is announcing onstage that is the first partner and is working on a Lumenus-enabled bike helmet. The startup doesn’t act as a white label company, as you still need to install the Lumenus app to take advantage of all the features. In other words, Lumenus wants to become the standard of smart clothing for cyclists and runners. Finally, Lumenus sees a future for smart clothes beyond cyclists and runners. “We see a huge opportunity in the industrial safety space,” Wall said. If Lumenus technology doesn’t get commoditized, the startup could make clothes for highway construction workers, miners or delivery people. Obviously this is a longshot, but it could also turn this nifty product into a successful business. Ajay Agarwal, Charlie O’Donnell, David Pakman, Ellie Wheeler, Joanne Wilson Do you have any data yet that shows that these devices improve safety?
In general, 21 percent of deaths happen during just three hours of the day — night time. And the primary reason is lack of visibility. Are you going through offline retail?
For the offline channels, we really want to do an engaging experience in store. When it comes to licensing, we want to follow the Gortex model. What about wearing it at a rave?
We’re looking at ways to make it react to music. How many people on your team right now?
Right now, we’re four. So you want to license your technology with four people?
We want to expand the team. We already have the relationships with retailers, etc. |
Scoutible says its video games will find you a job | Katie Roof | 2,016 | 5 | 9 | The company launched at TechCrunch Disrupt in New York on Monday. With work experience at the White House, Goldman Sachs and a JD/MBA from Harvard under her belt, Scoutible CEO thinks she has what it takes to change the way businesses do hiring. [gallery ids="1319441,1319443,1319442"] Armed with $1.5 million in seed funding from Mark Cuban, the startup has begun building “science-based mobile games to identify talent and match perfect fit candidates to jobs,” says Antony. She started Scoutible because she sees “a wide range of companies that recognize that they don’t have the information prior to hiring that they know is important.” Based in San Francisco, Scoutible works with psychologists to develop algorithms that identify strengths. These programs test for qualities like risk tolerance, emotional intelligence, response to feedback and mental processing speed. She encourages companies to try the games on their top employees to see which personalities perform best. The games have a variety of themes, including surviving on an island and jumping across floating lava rocks. Antony thinks people might play Scoutible games for fun, even when they are not looking for a job. “We hope this will open up opportunities for people, even if they aren’t necessarily looking for them.” Antony has already been in talks with large companies about her concept and says the response is encouraging. |
Spinn’s unique coffee brewer brings ‘third wave’ roasters to your countertop | Devin Coldewey | 2,016 | 5 | 9 | There’s no shortage of ways to get a satisfactory caffeine fix these days, and some of them are mighty high-tech. , demonstrated onstage at Disrupt NY today, claims one of the most high-tech of all — but this elaborate centrifugal brewing method may be the most versatile, as well. “It’s a very low innovation industry,” Spinn co-founder Roderick de Rode told TechCrunch. He pointed out that the biggest change recently has been Keurig’s infamous K-cups, which are convenient but highly wasteful and, really, don’t make very good coffee. Spinn has not only a powerful new machine, but a sales platform to go with it. The Spinn system grinds the coffee to spec, then drops it into a cylinder, in which it can sit, be agitated, or spin at great speed to force the water through the grounds at varying pressure. The technique was attempted by Bosch in the 1940s, but never caught on. Jan van Hattem is the veteran coffee systems engineer who created the patented self-cleaning centrifugal mechanism — and he’s on the founding team at Spinn. A precision burr grinder, plus computer-controlled pressure and temperature, brings the original idea to the next level. “It uses eight parameters in the brewer,” de Rode said. “If you use a really thin grind, a smaller amount of water, and higher pressure, you get espresso-style coffee. For French press, we rock it first, then we spin it out.” And so on. It can produce anywhere from one to six cups at a time. One other bonus: no mess. The grounds are drained of water and shot out dry as a bone into a waste container, at which point they can be collected. “You can use the grounds for fertilizer, body scrub, whatever. We talked to some people in the beauty industry and using coffee on your skin is supposed to be really cool these days,” de Rode said. “That’s what they told me, anyways!” But the innovative machine is only part of the deal. Spinn is building relationships with the so-called “third wave” coffee roasters — these are the ones in your neighborhood with bespectacled baristas arguing about acidity and notes of goji berry. “We want to provide an infrastructure for the third-wave roasters, these real artisanal coffee guys, to be available in your home,” said de Rode. To that end, the same app that lets you choose your coffee style or schedule a cup or carafe also lets you choose from local or far-flung roasters and have the whole beans shipped to you. It can even be done automatically; a sensor in the hopper will detect a low bean count and order a new batch if you so choose. It’s a step beyond existing subscription services, though a lot depends on the execution and selection. Spinn is working on a revenue share model with the roasters, and for now is taking aim at the home market, not the commercial one — although a larger machine is certainly a possibility. De Rode mentioned interest from a major retailer popular with spendy kitchen outfitters, but a crowdfunding campaign is probably also in the cards. Serious coffee is big business right now, and while “smart” brewers are thick on the ground(s), Spinn brings more than a little new to the (coffee) table. Grabbing the long tail of local roasters who want to expand their reach could be the difference between a merely popular machine and a new, lucrative and delicious platform. [gallery ids="1319485,1319486,1319487,1319496,1319499,1319500,1319498,1319501"] |
Halo is building a wearable to make athletes better, stronger, faster | Natasha Lomas | 2,016 | 5 | 9 | wants to build a new category of wearable. Not for passively tracking human activity, as so many existing wearables do, but for actively and positively influencing physical abilities — or that’s the claim — using an existing neurostimulation technique called transcranial direct current stimulation. The team demoed their wearable onstage today at TechCrunch Disrupt NY. So what exactly is transcranial direct current stimulation? It refers to a long-standing brain stimulation technique that involves applying a very small level of electric current to the wearer’s brain via electrodes placed in contact with their scalp — with a wide range of experimented applications over the years, such as treating depression, chronic pain or brain injury. Typically, it’s fair to say that the technique has mostly been focused on specific medical use-cases up to now, rather than being applied as a wider consumer proposition. But it’s that broader potential market Halo Neuroscience is hoping to open up — if their tech can live up to their claims. Their first wearable, the Halo Sport, is designed to influence a region of the brain they say is involved in sports and fitness learning — thanks to the specific positioning of the electrodes over the motor cortex. The device is being targeted at elite athletes to use as a training aid to improve their performance. At first glance it looks rather like a pair of Beats headphones, but you also must attach two neuroprimers (as they’re calling their electrodes) to the inside of the headband, then spray your head with water to allow for good conductivity before the battery-operated device is good to go. A companion app allows for control and tracking of usage. The headset does not need to be worn during every training session, but rather should be used when athletes are doing a training session involving “a high volume of quality repetitions,” according to the co-founders — albeit predicting your training performance ahead of time isn’t exactly an exact science. [gallery ids="1319482,1319462,1319481,1319483,1319109"] Their core claim is that neurostimulation of the brain via their device will accelerate an athlete’s learning process when applied during an intense training session — including, they say, positively influencing the rate at which particular sports skills are honed, as well as helping athletes make general strength gains and improve performance explosiveness. They claim they can “reproduceably” show they can generate gains above a control group, noting specifically when it comes to skill acquisition that the learning rate is “about 2x” better with their device (they say they have tested it in controlled lab conditions with around 1,000 subjects). “When athletes train, much of the benefit in strength as well as skill comes from the brain learning to use the body better… That’s neuroplasticity. And what Halo Sport is doing is it’s increasing neuroplasticity during that training period so that the brain, which is already getting better during that, gets better a little bit faster during that period of training,” explains co-founder Dan Chao. “There’s a very extensive body of research worldwide… showing that this technology, transcranial direct current stimulation, can increase the rate of motor learning when it’s applied to these points over motor cortex. It’s been shown by multiple groups in peer-reviewed studies in healthy people, in stroke patients, and we’ve confirmed that with our own [sham-controlled, randomized controlled trials] data. Now what we’re doing is we’re applying this specifically to athletic training.” “When paired with athletic training our claim is that you can stand to benefit from accelerated neurologic gains in your athletic training,” he adds. “Almost 100 percent of athletic training is just based on repetition. It’s repeating a skill over and over and over again, or even in the gym for strength — strength training is based almost entirely on repetition, just do it over and over and over again. “Certainly part of that is for the sake of our muscles, to make them stronger. But a big part of that — and I think this is under-appreciated in the field — is to literally make your brain stronger and more skilled. That’s where we want to come in.” The co-founders reckon a wide range of athletic disciplines potentially stand to benefit from their wearable, but say they are seeing early interest from baseball, having ceded some beta units to athletes to test the tech ahead of a commercial launch later this year. “Baseball has been an interesting place for us,” says Chao. “A very systematic and science-based approach has crept its way into player development. Especially smaller market teams — they don’t have the luxury of just buying players, they need to build players. It’s cheaper for them to do this. “We’re seeing in the sport a lot of these smaller market teams have developed a competitive advantage in player development — to use sports science to accelerate the development of young players so that they can have them on their team before they hit free agency. So that’s been a great place for us so far. There’s been a lot of interest from Major League Baseball.” Prior to founding , back in 2013, the two co-founders had worked for most of their careers at another neurostimulation company, , which makes an implanted medical device for epilepsy sufferers that uses neurostimulation to try to stop seizures at the point they are about to start. “As we worked on this [NeuroPace device] for more than a decade, one thing that really became apparent was that there’s this enormous potential in technologies that interact with the brain. It’s this really powerful way to help people reach their potential, to improve the lot of humans, basically,” says Chao. “The problem is so many of the technologies that are so powerful on the medical side of things — it’s very invasive. It’s expensive, it’s invasive… That’s appropriate for some patients, but in and of itself it’s not a technology that’s really changing the world.” At the same time he says the pair had been tracking research developments in non-invasive neurostimulation — and became convinced there was enough of a body of evidence that the technique could be used to influence the rate of learning “non-invasively, safely and effectively with an external device” to launch their own startup. “Now we’re at the point where there’s hundreds of articles every year about this in peer-reviewed journals. And this whole world of science working on this technology,” he adds. They’ve been working on the startup for almost three years at this point, and have raised some $9 million in funding, coming out of stealth to launch pre-orders for the Halo Sport this February. Investors in the business include some very well known names — , , , — along with a newer, neuroscience-specific firm, . The lengthy (and stealthy) development process was down to the team needing to build up their own body of data. The entire first year was spent looking purely at data generated by their core tech, with no thought of finished products or target markets, says Chao. “Our goal for the first year was to build our own device and to test the heck out of it,” he says. “We tested a thousand people before we made any decisions on product. It was really the data, specifically the data that came out of our motor cortex stimulation program that led us to sports. “Brett and I didn’t found a sports science company. We founded a neurostimulation company.” They’re aiming to ship the Halo Sport in the fall of this year, with the discounted pre-order pricing set at $550 and RRP of $750. (It’s worth noting the primers are also “semi-disposable” so will need to be replaced around every three months (based on “average use,” they say). How much demand is there for this sport-focused wearable? They won’t specify how many units have been pre-ordered at this point, but couch the early demand as “good.” They’re not currently taking any more pre-orders, but say they plan to open up a second wave in “about two months.” In terms of additional revenue streams, beyond the cost of the hardware, the basic companion app will be freemium, should individuals want to buy the product, but certain more pro features will be unlockable via in-app purchases. There’s also a SaaS component to their business model at the elite athlete level — with different levels of service bringing in different rates of subscription revenue. Are there any downsides to using the device? Does it perhaps cause headaches with prolonged use? The founders concede it’s unlikely to feel exactly pleasant to use. They describe the sensation as “very tolerable,” rather than pleasing, with Chao adding that: “Most people don’t like it but almost everybody — they don’t mind it.” He says they have also monitored usage for specific “obvious problems” — such as headaches and scalp pains, as well as testing for impairments to cognitive and motor skills — and say they haven’t found “any real changes.” So the claim is no major negatives, beyond perhaps feeling a little buzzy. The ultimate goal of Halo Neuroscience is to end up with “a fleet of these products,” says Chao, addressing all sorts of consumer market use-cases — if they can convince people to don a headset to speed up their learning. “We’re starting with the motor cortex but why couldn’t we develop a neurostimulator to hit that part of the brain that’s responsible for memory? And instead of doing memory games on its own if you paired it with neurostimulation that could be a much more powerful combination,” he says. Another interesting potential use-case is back in the medical space, with Chao flagging up what he says is promising data on rehabilitation of motor skills for stroke victims using the neurostimulation technique. The startup is sponsoring a clinical trial to investigate this use-case. “The scientific data looking at neuro-rehabilitation for motor stroke victims is really good with this technology. You can really raise the ceiling of recovery of what is possible. And also accelerate the rate at which you obtain this new ceiling,” he says. “About a million people in the U.S. suffer from a stroke every year, and about half of them suffer from some sort of motor symptoms — they can’t move a leg or an arm or something like that. And their opportunity for improvement is very poor. Physical therapy doesn’t work very well, especially in the chronic phase.” What was he demonstrating there?
That was just an example of pairing neurostimulation with athletics training — and in this case a strength-based training session. But you can imagine doing more skill-based work or endurance work. Do you wear it before you exercise, during, after?
Ideally during and after. If it’s not conducive to during then if you do it just before that’s fine – for example working with Olympics swimmers and you obviously can’t wear this in the pool. So in that case you would wear it before, when you’re warming up. Take it off. There’s an afterglow of an hour. So you would still have that hour of benefit from the neuropriming. The results that you showed, were people actually wearing it? And will those last over time if they stop using the device?
Yes the results are durable. They are maintained at the same extent. The difference between the control group is maintained over time. It’s a beautiful piece of hardware, a very consumer-facing name. Is that a part of the strategy here. Because you not only have to get these distributed, you have to educate the market as to what this is, what shocking… the brain will do to you, things like that. So you’re an education company as well as a hardware sales company?
That’s exactly right. Our goal for this year is really to educate and inspire the market. How do you do that?… Having Olympic teams is a big marketing push, but what’s going to be able to educate the mass market that this is a viable thing to do?
Our strategy is top down. We want to use our elite customers as our mouthpiece, generate PR with these individual athletes and teams… Top down is a very viable way to do it. This is something that you think over time as a performance enhancer gets regulated, or this is what every single athlete in the world has to do to keep up?
Regulation really starts around safety and we’ve gone to great lengths to demonstrate safety, and so has the scientific community. There’s scientific published literature published on over 60,000 sessions. Everything that we’ve seen so far suggests that it’s safe, so… There’s plenty of techniques and products that are performance enhancing that are legal — in fact most are. Where the clear line is is around safety. What could go wrong? I’m putting electric spikes on my head. What could go wrong?
Very little could go wrong. We stack those odds in our favor. There’s hardware and software safety features that we don’t really talk about we just want our users to take for granted. So, for example, overuse could be a concern. We would lock people out after 30 mins per day. There are current limiters so that the device checks itself 1,000 times per second so that if it were over-delivering stimulation it would gracefully shut itself off. So there’s features and functions built in. How does it work with wet hair?
It works great with wet hair. In fact it works better. Aren’t there lots of physical activities that take longer than 30 mins?
You still benefit from the afterglow of an hour, so that would buy you about 90 minutes of neuropriming. What is the consumer price point? And what margins do you expect?
$750 is the price point. And I shouldn’t disclose the margins but they will be good. Are you ready to produce at scale? Does your team have experience doing that?
Yeah we do. We built the implantable neurostimulator which was a very complicated piece of hardware to build. This device we’ve already cut steel in China. We’ve already picked our vendors, our final assembler, our injection molder, so we’re well on our way. We should be able to deliver it in the fall. Do you have data for the rehabilitation portion of the application?
Yes, that takes time. We should have data at the end of the year. We’ll expect 24 subjects completed by the end of the year. But there’s been multiple trials looking at a stroke model. And perhaps the best data in all the scientific literature comes from the stroke model. Do you reshape the electrodes or the electrical patterns for different use cases?
You do slightly, and you’re able to do that through the app. So you could target the hands and arms. You could target legs… We would allow you to do that through the app. |
Ephemeral is developing tattoo ink designed to disappear after a year | Brian Heater | 2,016 | 5 | 9 | Practically everyone who has ever considered a tattoo knows the old parental refrain of “you’ll have it forever.” It’s a fairly stark warning tinged with the regret of a generation covered in inked relics of disco and popular culture past. Some temporary solutions do exist, including the relatively recent phenomenon of the two-week tattoo (along with some ). A two-year-old Harlem-based startup spun out of NYU is presently in the process of bringing a year-long solution to market. is a two-part system, involving an ink designed to break down after a year, along with a separate removal solution. “Tattoo inks today are permanent because of the fact that the dye molecules are too big for your body’s immune system to take away,” explains co-founder Anthony Lam. “By using smaller molecules, we’ve encapsulated them inside this spherical structure that’s big enough that your immune system doesn’t take it away. But when you remove it, it essentially eats away one of the components and the dye molecules are flushed out.” The product is still being tested, first on cells and now on pigs, given the close genetic similarities between ourselves and our porcine cousins. Ephemeral CEO Seung Shin says the company hopes to have something out around Fall of next year. In the meantime, the company is set to open its seed round on June 1st. “We haven’t really sealed down the pricing yet, but we’re looking at anywhere from $50 to $100 for an average sized tattoo,” says Shin. “Right now we’re planning for our [initial] financing round and we hope to have it up in the next ten months or so. “ |
Behold.ai launches artificially intelligent medical software to find abnormalities faster | Sarah Buhr | 2,016 | 5 | 9 | Jeet Raut’s mom was told she no longer had breast cancer. But it turned out to be a false diagnosis and she had to undergo further treatment. She’s okay now, but that medical mistake could have cost her life — and it gave Raut the idea to build a better way to catch medical abnormalities in the body. He and his co-founder Peter Wakahiu Njenga created to expedite the process of finding cancers and minimize human error. “The idea behind Behold.ai is to increase efficiency,” Raut said onstage at TechCrunch’s Disrupt NY 2016 Startup Battlefield. A new report from puts medical error as the third leading cause of death in the United States. And radiologists must comb through an increasing number of body scans every year — the number has since 2012. “Doctors now have more data than ever, but if radiologists had to read every single image they’d never get through them,” Raut said of the problem. Thanks to advances in machine learning, Raut and Njenga figured they could teach a program to do the same thing, only better and faster. They’re an impressive duo — both studied at Columbia and then Njenga went on to UC Berkeley and later worked as a software engineer at Facebook on machine learning. Raut continued at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and later Stanford for life extension research at the Computers and Cognition Lab. Behold.ai is an outgrowth of both Njenga and Raut’s training. It works by feeding the software algorithm hundreds of scans of healthy versus unhealthy lungs, for example, to teach the program how to identify a problem, and then improves on its own over time. How much better is it than a human? Raut admits the accuracy of the algorithm isn’t 100 percent. He wasn’t sure the number but guessed it was closer to 85 percent. “We’re initially focused on increasing the efficiency of the doctor while helping them maintain accuracy, but down the line we’d like to help them become more accurate,” he said. There’s also the trust factor. Hospitals are notorious for bureaucracy and are slow to adopt new technologies. Raut brushes off the suggestion hospitals may not want what he’s got and tells me Behold.ai is in talks with several large hospitals for possible partnerships in the near future. Behold.ai will still face stiff competition from IBM Watson and others in the AI space getting in on the medical market and it will need to pass FDA regulations (which no one has been able to do so far, but on). [gallery ids="1319436,1319435,1319434,1319418,1319416,1319417"] |
B.J. Novak’s “The List App” rebrands to li.st, arrives on Android | Sarah Perez | 2,016 | 5 | 9 | When , best known for exec producing, writing and starring as Ryan on “The Office,” teamed up with Dev Flaherty to create a mobile application that allowed people to create lists and share them with others, they gave it a playfully anti-tech name: “ .” But following , more than 150,000 users have signed up to create some 250,000 lists on the app, using only their iPhone keyboards. Today at TechCrunch Disrupt NY 2016, the founders announced they’re rebranding the app with a friendlier name by simply calling it . The app is also arriving , with a web launch soon to follow. In case you missed it the first time around, the idea with li.st was to offer a simple platform for sharing lists, which could be of anything you wanted — a list of the best restaurants or bars, top travel tips, entertainment suggestions or recollections (like “albums that changed my life”) or even just funny time-wasters. Lists are not only a popular medium for written content on the web because they’re easy to peruse without feeling like you’re committing to reading a long essay, they’re also ideal for mobile because they can be digested in a brief period of time. [gallery ids="1319385,1319384,1319383,1319373,1319372,1319371,1319361,1319359,1319358,1319357,1319356,1319355,1319354"] The app’s debut was aided in part by getting a number of notable names on board, including Lena Dunham, Mindy Kaling and , along with publishers like The NYT, Washington Post, Slate, The New Yorker, TED, The Onion, PBS, Vox and others. Having so many well-known accounts to follow initially made people believe the app was an attempt at aggregating high-quality content from around the web for the rest of us to follow — or worse, some thought it could be another example of a Hollywood actor’s attempt to capitalize on fame to establish a presence in the App Store, à la the Kardashians’ mobile empire. However, li.st isn’t about either of those things. What ended up happening is that the app attracted a community who took to the list-making format as a form of self-expression — something that fit in between the brevity of using Twitter and the sometimes longer blog posts found on sites like Medium. Lists, after all, seem approachable. Ask someone to write an essay about a topic and they balk. But ask them to make a list of superlatives or tips or anything else, and all of a sudden, the ideas flow. It’s almost as if lists can trick people into becoming writers. The app, explains Flaherty, lets you write and get your thoughts out without having to worry about the structure of those thoughts. And by making writing more accessible, the type of content that people share becomes more personal, too. Today, users are sharing things like favorite jazz albums, tips for new grandparents, “being a fat girl in a skinny world” or “names men call me that make me uncomfortable,” for example. “Self-expression is the core use of this product,” Flaherty says.
“We’ve really tried to embrace the strength of the community. We’re always trying to come up with new ways to get people exposed to new people they might like,” he adds, hinting at the personalization features the team plans to ship in a future release. That being said, having celebrity accounts on the app is not a bad thing. It gives people interesting content to follow right away. Celebrity has opened doors for the company, too, Novak admits. “But at the end of the day, it will not take you the distance,” he says. Celebrity didn’t score him his co-founder either, as it turned out. In fact, Flaherty had never watched “The Office” and had to ask his wife who Novak was. But Novak says he appreciated that Flaherty didn’t treat him like a celeb, but rather a guy with a good idea that wasn’t great yet. “Ideas are front and center,” Novak says of the industry. “Being star struck by someone who is actually inventing the future…that, to me, is so much more interesting than someone who has a slightly different take on a horror movie.” The founders also disclosed they had raised $2 million in seed funding for the app last year. Li.st’s web version is due in around four to six weeks. This will allow users to type out their thoughts using a computer keyboard, instead of tapping on a mobile phone’s small screen. However, the , to complement the previously launched iOS app. |
Asian indie film platform Viddsee signs content deal with Discovery | Catherine Shu | 2,016 | 5 | 31 | Viddsee founders Ho Jia Jian and Derek Tan , a streaming platform for independent short films in Asia, and Discovery Networks announced a content partnership today. The agreement is noteworthy because this is not only the biggest deal of its kind that Singapore-based Viddsee has inked so far, but also marks the first time Discovery’s content, including documentaries, will be available online in Asia. Co-founder Derek Tan says the platform will start streaming two Discovery series today and add a new one every month. Viddsee was , who usually only got to screen their work at film festivals, an online distribution channel. The startup has . In keeping with Viddsee’s mission, the first Discovery documentaries available on the platform will be from independent filmmakers. Part of Discovery First Time Filmmakers series, the two films that launched today are “Singapore Stories” and “Super Japan.” Since both stream films, Netflix might seem like an obvious Viddsee competitor, especially after its . Viddsee sets itself apart, however, by showcasing short films and focusing on content discovery and social media marketing in order to make sure they actually get an audience. For example, the company runs a site called that uses Buzzfeed-style clickbait headlines to promote films. “Although our content are not household brand names, our content has reached millions worldwide because of the positioning for a social, mobile audience and also the conversations that surround the content,” Tan tells TechCrunch. Its content distribution and marketing model allows Viddsee to stand out from Southeast Asian companies that compete more directly with Netflix, like and , as well as platforms like YouTube and Vimeo, where independent filmmakers often post their work. One film, by Melanie Light, got 90,000 views on Vimeo—but wracked up over one million views in less than a month after debuting on Viddsee. Tan says Viddsee is now working on more content discovery deals and may also team up with Discovery to produce original content for the platform. |
Whirlpool crowdfunds a beer maker | John Biggs | 2,016 | 5 | 31 | Like the movie in which Robert DeNiro plays an intern, venerated appliance brand Whirlpool is spreading its wings, dusting off the cobwebs, and . The product, called Vessi, ferments and dispenses suds and even has a system for reducing and managing sediment. The system comes from W Labs, Whirlpool’s product design skunkworks, and is part of which brings big companies to the crowdfunding table. The Vessi costs $1,200 for early birds but will sell for $1,800. It makes beer in seven days and requires no “expertise.” The Vessi only handles the cold side of beer fermentation which means you need to cook the grains and infuse the hops yourself on the stove. “This product is the result of an employee business case contest,” said Noel Dolan, Senior Marketing and Open Innovation Manager at Whirlpool. “A group of passionate home brewers who work in various roles at Whirlpool got together and discussed what it was like for them to brew at home, and discovered they all had similar issues with the cold side of home brewing.” “We’ve had the pleasure of working with some Michigan breweries that have provided substantial feedback as well as home brewers. Our Brewmaster works on our Global Consumer Design team, and he has over 29 years of brewing experience. We’ve also identified about 40 home brewers who work at Whirlpool, that have been nicknamed our ‘beer group.’ We have involved them every step of the way, from naming the product to using it to ferment their beer.” This is Whirlpool’s first foray into crowdfunding and, as far as anyone can tell, their first attempt at making a beer appliance. Dolan wasn’t sure if the company will release the product in stores after crowdfunding but, if the movie in which Robert DeNiro is an intern is any indication, this move by an “old” brand into a new space will be full of love, laughter, and a little learning. And beer. |
Jeff Bezos on space, free speech and creating shows to sell more shoes | Matthew Lynley | 2,016 | 5 | 31 | When it came to discussing Peter Thiel’s involvement in the , Jeff Bezos quoted Confucius: “Seek revenge and you should dig two graves, one for yourself.” Bezos, naturally, should have strong opinions when it comes to free speech: he’s the owner of The Washington Post. With Gawker locked in a legal battle that’s a sort of proxy duel between the company and Peter Thiel, Bezos effectively has a duty to come out in favor of protecting free speech in order to, at the very least, protect his investment. Of course, that doesn’t mean he’s saying these things entirely to protect The Washington Post — the whole case has become a centerpiece for a discussion around a potential test of free speech rights. So he came out swinging on stage at Vox Media’s Code Conference on Tuesday. In fact, there were so many quotes that we’re just going to go ahead and list them below: Bezos also has a pet project in Blue Origin, his foray into space travel. It’s seen by most as a competitor to Elon Musk’s SpaceX — and Bezos wasn’t really denying that on stage. The two have been kind of passively sparring over . Bezos says he is taking a wider view of the potential of a vibrant space exploration industry — rather than just going to Mars. Here are a few choice quotes from the discussion surrounding space travel: The interview was a doozy. But of course that wasn’t all he talked about. Bezos dropped gem after gem throughout the hour-plus he was peppered with questions. Again, there are almost too many to choose from — but here are a few favorites from the interview: |
Crunch Report | Marketo Bought For $1.8 Billion | Khaled "Tito" Hamze | 2,016 | 5 | 31 | Tito Hamze, Jason Kopek
Tito Hamze
Yashad Kulkarni
Joe Zolnoski |
This Facebook bot will pick your next movie for you | Fitz Tepper | 2,016 | 5 | 31 | As Facebook’s bot platform is still in its early stages, and most apps aren’t ready yet to become part of your everyday life. This is mainly due to shortfalls in natural language processing and the trial-and-error process of developers actually figuring out how users are going to use bots. But one company, the named , has figured out how to build a bot that is actually well suited for Facebook’s chat-based interface. And Chill is a movie recommendation engine that is eschewing the traditional “like/dislike” model of recommendation, instead pledging to dig deeper into the reasons a viewer would want to watch a certain movie. Here’s how it works: The bot can be accessed via Facebook Messenger or SMS. After the superfluous pleasantries standard with all bots these days, And Chill asks you to tell it a movie you liked and why. For example, I’d say “I liked because it was a true story about sports that also seemed like a medical mystery film”. And Chill then analyzes these components and uses them to recommend similar films. The startup isn’t ready to give specific examples on how exactly its algorithm works, besides that it “uses a few different frameworks to detect patterns, attributes, and other factors” to pull movie options for viewers. While I was at first skeptical of the startup’s lack of transparency around the recommendation process (mainly just because I like knowing how things work) most of that disappeared once I actually received some valuable suggestions. [gallery ids="1330086,1330087,1330088"] All three (decently complicated) questions I posed were answered with movies that I either had already seen and loved, or more frequently hadn’t heard of but looked great. Since I usually tend to watch most movies that are similar to ones I like (i.e all Wes Anderson films) I suspect the algorithm specifically tries to recommend films you are likely to not have seen yet. Currently, requests take a few minutes to process (so don’t give up if you haven’t heard back yet), which may be because the startup noted that that some requests involve human input “to confirm what their data crunching gives them”. Overall, the service is a huge leap forward from the traditional way of scrolling through a list of hundreds of movies at a time. That being said, there could still be some improvements that would enhance the experience even more. For example, each response currently includes a link to a YouTube trailer so you can quickly check out the preview. But it would also be nice to see a rotten tomato score and brief synopsis, so you don’t gave to go searching for any additional information online. You can try And Chill by , or texting them at this number: 213-297-3673 |
Get fit for summer with these workout apps | Katie Roof | 2,016 | 5 | 31 | Sworkit Sworkit also lets you select the duration of your fitness routine, beginning at just five minutes. The app is free and available on both the iPhone and Android. Couch to 5K They also have a half-marathon version for those of you who really want a workout. There are both free and paid versions of the app. ClassPass From barre to yoga to pilates to spinning, use the ClassPass app to find out which classes near you have openings. High-end studios like Flywheel Sports and Exhale allow you to book classes through ClassPass. The app is powered by and is available on the iPhone and Android. So check out these abs… I mean, apps! |
SeedPlus is an early-stage fund focused on finding global startups in Southeast Asia | Jon Russell | 2,016 | 5 | 31 | There’s a new early-stage fund in town — town being Southeast Asia. Singapore-based Jungle Ventures, last year, has a new initiative focused on seed stage investments in the region, which is . Jungle Ventures started out as in 2012, but it moved into Series A and Series B financing with its new fund last year. SeedPlus, as the newest fund is called, takes it back to its early-stage roots with a hands-on approach to working with its portfolio. SeedPlus will be run by : Michael Smith, who was CTO at streaming service HOOQ, ex-Spotify product manager Gabriel Lundberg, and Tiang Lim Foo, formerly of Evernote. Together the trio — who are listed as ‘operating partners’ at Jungle — will invest in companies in Southeast Asia and work closely with them to scale their business. How closely? SeedPlus is providing office space in Singapore to house its portfolio to enable its partners to work face-to-face with them. In the case of companies based outside of Singapore — which principally means elsewhere in Southeast Asia — it will move them to the city-state and incorporate their businesses there to make Singapore their headquarters. In an interview with TechCrunch on the sidelines of , Foo said the fund size is not disclosed — nor has it closed yet — but that it is above $20 million right now. The team is looking to make around half of dozen investments per year, he said, with a check size of SG$500,00 to SG$1 million (US$360,000-$725,000) per deal. Roughly, that means the fund is likely to last for three to four years. “We’ll be slightly larger than your typical seed round but I think that speaks to how involved we want to get. We want to go hands on, work with founders to get products and businesses launched,” Foo said. “In all cases we’ll be the lead investor or first institutional rounds.” Southeast Asia is awash with early-stage capital, but SeedPlus is specifically looking for companies with the ambition and capabilities to be global. “The sweet spot will be if you have a product market fit and traction but are just shy of raising a proper Series A,” Foo, who managed Evernote’s presence in Asia prior to the U.S. company downsizing its international footprint, explained. “We’ve spent a lot of time looking at deep product and technology, so it could blockchain, AI or machine learning, or Saas or security — that speaks to our background and things we understand. We want global stuff, strong technology teams and disruptive technology.” There’s no guarantee that a SeedPlus backed company would then raise from Jungle Ventures, but Foo suggested that the parent fund would have “first dibs” on promising startups thanks to the close relationship. SeedPlus is backed by a range of partners. The LPs include Jungle Ventures itself, Singapore’s Infocomm Investments, Accel Partners and RNT Associates, a fund from Indian business magnate Ratan Tata, who is also an LP in Jungle Ventures’ fund. Beyond that collection of LPs, SeedPlus also “strategic” relationships with Google Southeast Asia and PwC Singapore who have pledged to help with resources and assistance for portfolio companies. To date, SeedPlus has made three undisclosed investments, Foo said, details of which will be revealed soon. Jungle Ventures is arguably one of the stand-out investors in Southeast Asia, but SeedPlus is an interesting challenge since — to date, at least — there are few examples of companies with global reach emerging from Southeast Asia. The startups that have scaled the most in the region have provided services very specific to Southeast Asia — Grab is an Uber rival, Lazada is an Amazon equivalent, to name but two — but Jungle is investing significant funds, resources and attention to SeedPlus, which suggests that the team sees the potential for Southeast Asian startups to break that mold and be relevant globally. That makes this is a project worth watching. |
Depth-sensing walker monitors and connects the elderly and mobility impaired | Devin Coldewey | 2,016 | 5 | 31 | The so-called Internet of Things is often underwhelming — who really needs a tweeting oven? — but inspiring applications of embedded sensors and ubiquitous connectivity still appear, and sometimes from the most unexpected places. Take this smart walker, for instance: The same tech that goes into tacky toys and frivolous appliances could help an aging generation regain its mobility and independence. We’ve all seen walkers, of course — terribly low-tech aluminum affairs with tennis balls skewered onto the front struts to act as brakes. And if you’ve been to the physical therapy and rehabilitation areas of hospitals, you’ll have seen the walkways on which patients with impaired mobility truck up and down as pressure sensors record and analyze their gait. The Friendly Robot Walker, or FriWalk, is a high-tech mobility aid that not only props someone up while they walk, but uses depth-sensing cameras (an original Kinect, among other cameras) and hidden sensors to monitor their gait and mood — even watching in front for dicey terrain, obstacles and other FriWalk users. That may sound to some like overkill for a simple walker, but it addresses several failings in the medical and support systems on which these people rely. Perhaps most importantly, it vastly improves the data on a person’s mobility and recovery. Observations of a person’s movements in everyday life are potentially far more valuable than lab data, and what comes out of the FriWalk is also richer and more voluminous: The depth cameras capture a great deal of detail about how the legs and feet are getting along. “We process 15 to 20 frames per second, which produces a virtual walkway on which we can see the footprints on the floor together with the corresponding pressure distribution as well as the path of motion of the feet in the air,” said Siemens technologist Josef Birchbauer, who works on the project, . Facial expression analysis, heart rate and more are added to the pile, as well. That kind of soft data may not mean much over a single session, but aggregated can provide unique insights into recovery progress. The outward-facing sensors help address problems that arise when a person also has impaired sight or awareness — a break in the sidewalk might not be obvious, but a big yellow caution sign on the screen in front of your face sure is. FriWalks will also be personalized with the user’s interests and networked with those being employed by others. A nearby art exhibition could then be recommended to a senior who otherwise might never have heard of it, encouraging both exercise and social contact, things people who are hospitalized or at a nursing home tend to lack. On the other hand, if a space is found to be too crowded or unpleasant by another FriWalk, a user could be warned away before entering an unpleasant situation. The project is being pursued by an international consortium of researchers under a €4.3 million grant from the European Commission; plans are in place to test it with 100 seniors in Spain, Italy and England over the next year or so. |
Not all startups need the bright lights of the big city | Ben Fischberg | 2,016 | 5 | 31 |
In an office park overlooking a lake in Southern New Hampshire, Rajesh Mishra is working to change how cell networks are created. Rajesh and his company, , along with a dozen or so other nearby startups in Southern New Hampshire, are taking on a variety of challenges that face tech infrastructure that most people are not aware of, but impact our daily lives. These startups are working on problems like how to load websites faster, how to improve security in storage systems and how to enable people to get more information across cell networks. In addition, these startups are also disproving one of the strongest-held beliefs in tech that emerged over the past decade: that startups need to be located in cities and must rely on millennials. Over the past two decades, the center of gravity for tech has from the suburbs to the city as millennials flock to cities, and startups and tech firms follow. San Francisco, New York City and Boston have experienced a tremendous upswing in tech as the firms that had been located in nearby suburbs have moved into the city. Despite this trend, or more likely because of it, Southern New Hampshire has benefited, as the remaining suburban startups have a clearer pitch to job seekers and certain heightened advantages over urban tech firms. While the suburbs are not the right place for all startups, it is the perfect place for some. , an Internet performance management company that handles all of the infrastructure-related decisions websites have to make, was started in Manchester, NH because the founders liked the freedom that came from the suburb’s low costs. Instead of being dependent on outside funding to pay expensive rent, companies like Dyn have been able to develop on their own schedule as they don’t need to meet the metrics set by VCs in order to raise successive rounds of funding needed to remain open. Being located in Manchester, which can be 75 percent less expensive than Boston, the nearest city, enabled the Dyn team to decide when they want to roll out new products, when they want to and how they want to run their company — a level of control that a company cannot have if it must appeal to investors in order to survive, a necessity for many urban startups. While the suburbs of Southern New Hampshire are an hour away from the nearest major city, tech firms and startups there have not struggled to attract the talent they need to innovate and grow. In fact, the suburban location is a boon to recruiting; even though millennials may prefer to live in cities, older workers prefer the suburbs, and suburban startups offer an easier, rush-hour-free commute compared to heading into the city. , a Nashua-based startup that introduced data-aware storage with the goal of turning storage from being thought of as a dumb container into a trusted advisor, has needed to attract a variety of people because of the range of challenges the company is working on. As DataGravity looks for engineers to work on storage and security issues and designers and data scientists to develop analytics and visualization tools, DataGravity, along with other nearby companies like , have an easy time attracting suburban talent. While these companies may need to make an extra effort to convince people in Boston to join, these startups have been able to attract the needed people as they grow into companies worth hundreds of millions. The suburban startups of Southern New Hampshire have capitalized on their location and wisely use it as a test ground for their products before trying to sell to large companies or attract large user bases. Being located outside of a buzzy tech scene not only enables these companies to focus on their products, it lets startups stand out in their communities, making it much easier to interact with users and run pilot programs. , a Manchester-based app that lets users know about daily specials, worked with a group of local merchants to test different approaches before deciding on the app’s current structure, which emphasizes daily photos of chalkboards. Adored was only able to iterate and receive significant feedback from its users since merchants in towns like Manchester and Nashua were excited to try a new marketing solution and were willing to stick with Adored as it developed. Adored has now launched in large cities, but the company’s success will be in large part due to all the feedback received in New Hampshire suburbs. The recent revitalization of Southern New Hampshire towns like Nashua and Manchester shows that even though it is popular for startups to be located in a city, being based in the suburbs may be the best decision a tech firm can make. The chance to build and grow at your pace, without being beholden to VCs, can be incredibly freeing. Similarly, being outside the tech echo chamber that ensnares many startups and causes them to lose touch with their customers can be highly beneficial. At a time when startups are desperately searching for space in cities, Nashua and Manchester, New Hampshire reveal an alternative. Rather than just deciding to be located in a city because it is the hot thing to do, startups should think through that decision. For a certain group of startups, being in the suburbs is the best option. |
Is civic technology the killer app for democracy? | Lorelei Kelly | 2,016 | 5 | 31 |
Smartphone apps have improved convenience for public transportation in many urban centers. In Washington, DC, riders can to help them figure out where to go, when to show up and how long to wait for a bus or train. However, the problem with public transport in DC is not the lack of modern, helpful and timely information. The problem is that the refers to the vital systems that connect us. Like the water catastrophe in Flint, Michigan and our , bridges and airports, the Metro system in DC is experiencing a systems failure. The Metro’s problems arise from typical public challenges like . Upgrades of physical infrastructure are not easy and nimble like a software patch or an agile design process. They are slow, expensive and subject to deliberation and scrutiny. In other words, they are the fundamental substance of democratic decision-making: big decisions with long-term implications that require thoughtful strategy, significant investment, political leadership and public buy-in. A killer app is an application you love so much you buy into a whole new way of doing things. Email and social media are good examples of killer apps. The killer app for Metro would have to get political leaders to look beyond their narrow, short-term interests and be willing to invest in modern public transportation for our national capital region. The same is true for fixing our critical infrastructure throughout the nation. The killer apps for the systems on which we rely daily won’t be technical, they will be human. It will be Americans working together to a build a technology-enabled resilient democracy — one that is inclusive, responsive and successful in the Information Age. In 2007, the I-35 bridge in Minneapolis collapsed into the Mississippi river. During his presidential bid, Senator John McCain used this event as an example of the failure of our leaders to make trade-offs for common national purpose. Case in point, an extravagantly expensive congressionally funded Alaskan that served just a handful of people on an island. But how many apps to nowhere are we building? Identifying and scrutinizing apps to nowhere is an awkward challenge because it requires that we, as a democratic society, interrupt the cork-popping IPO parties and continually ask the bigger questions about long-term consequences, trade-offs and who exactly information technology is helping. There are many apps to nowhere, like that platform to match donors with needy classrooms that fails to address the underlying issue of why taxes aren’t paying for science books. Or that fitness app on your wrist that tells you how many calories you just consumed, but not whether the food is safe or if the locations in its supply chain respect human rights. In DC, commuters who can afford alternatives will leave Metro. They’ll walk, drive, order a car service or locate a bikeshare. The people who suffer from the public service risk and imbalance of the current Metro system are those who have no choice. So here’s the challenge: DC public transportation is an emblem of today’s American town square, where rights and responsibilities are out of balance. We all want safe and clean communities with well-functioning critical infrastructure, but we don’t feel obligated to pay for them, especially when they benefit people who live elsewhere. Data and technology can help close this perception gap. If far-flung citizens understood their mutual interests and the cost and efficiency advantages of coordinated efforts in the formative stages of policy decision-making, they would likely be more supportive of critical infrastructure projects. data will give us a chance to figure out a modern version of federalism — shared responsibilities among states and DC. Fortunately, a Nobel-prize-winning already exists. In the near future, data science and new visualization techniques will make it easy for elected leaders to view and analyze both the parts and the whole of a complex system (of the Metro, of , , of ). Dynamic modeling will show context and trends and help forecast possible consequences — all within the — so policy makers and interested citizens can better understand the impact of making, or failing to make, important policy decisions. Such course-correction tools for interrogating data or for assuring ethical statistical methods are already on display in journalism and . Because our systems generally run well, Americans have the luxury of taking them for granted. As a result, we woefully underestimate how connected we are. From fire hydrants to school teachers, our way of life is built on intricate dependence on one another. American success has always required long-term investment in public goods like health and parks, roads and electrical grids, science and education. We expect this mutual support so much that it is invisible to most of us. To civic technology, however, it must be visible and clearly understood, because the technology itself is built upon our civic interconnectedness. Civic technology is the use of — reporting a , for example, or allocating a — and it might give Americans the chance to renew public life by making democracy more visible and intentional. Hybrid platforms blend the convenience of open data with a strong commitment to the larger society. Civic technology inherently asks the tough questions about who is helped, who is harmed, how inclusive a system is and whether the app is ultimately good for democracy. The civic disconnect between information convenience and failing public systems is a considerable challenge. Big data might be a huge boost to our economy, but will it help us build a better nation? Hackathons are terrific community-building events, but we can’t code ourselves out of our failing infrastructure. To build the killer civic app, we need to find an ethical framework that connects technology to political leadership, to power. This is not about Left versus Right or public versus private. To address our critical needs as a nation we must transcend those tired divisions and move quickly. In the words of civic tech entrepreneur , “Let’s look at government as a subscription service for the provision and preservation of common goods.” We are taxpayers, after all. It follows, then, that our collective goal should be a technology-enabled system that provides and preserves the common good. For democracy to succeed in the Information Age, we’ll need some new rules of engagement with technology. The White House recently released its third report on data and its implications for society. pays special attention to the ethics of machine automation and algorithms. The authors stress the importance of ethical analytics and propose the principle of “equal opportunity by design.” It’s an excellent point of departure as we recalibrate old systems and build new bridges to a more resilient, inclusive and prosperous nation. |
Xiaomi inks Microsoft patent deal and agrees to pre-install Office apps on its phones | Jon Russell | 2,016 | 5 | 31 | Xiaomi is moving closer to launching its smartphones in the U.S. market. Today the Chinese company announced a partnership with Microsoft that includes a cross-license and patent transfer agreement and the pre-installation of Skype and Microsoft Office products on Xiaomi devices. The companies said that, starting this September, Xiaomi’s Mi 5, Mi Max and Mi 4s, as well as cheaper Redmi Note 3 and Redmi 3 smartphones will be sold with Microsoft Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook and Skype applications pre-loaded. The partnership builds on the two companies’ previous collaborations: which have included , and the use of Microsoft Azure to power Xiaomi’s Mi Cloud service. , the bulk of which were in China, Xiaomi is potentially a significant distribution partner for Microsoft. But, more interesting that the pre-install deal, is the fact that Xiaomi has added more patents. “Microsoft has sold Xiaomi nearly 1,500 high quality patents that read on a variety of technologies including wireless communications, video, cloud and multimedia,” a Xiaomi spokesperson clarified to TechCrunch, adding that Xiaomi has “been applying for, acquiring and licensing patents” in recent years. Combine that with , which the company developed closely with Google, and last year, and it is clear that China’s largest smartphone maker is building key allies in preparation to expand its affordably priced devices into new markets: most notably North America. Right now, Xiaomi’s devices are sold in six countries in Asia and Brazil, but the company has never shied away from the fact that it wants to be more global. That expansion plan is critical since Xiaomi has struggled to reach its own sales targets and , largely off the back of slowing mobile growth in China, so new market expansions means more potential to grow. |
After years of bootstrapping Vendini raises $20 million for its ticketing platform | Jonathan Shieber | 2,016 | 5 | 31 | Nearly fifteen years after chief executive Mark Tacchi launched his ticketing services to compete with the likes of TicketMaster, the company has raised its first $20 million in outside capital. The new round came from New York-based private equity firm . “I started from scratch and basically grew it organically,” Tacchi says. “When I started it I was adamant that I wouldn’t take any outside money.” What changed his mind was the opportunity that he sees to push more aggressively into the middle market for ticketing. While LiveNation’s TicketMaster controls large stadiums, Vendini is reaching out to the smaller venue with an all-in-one solution, Tacchi says. “If I would have taken venture money or angel money I could have pointed the company in one of 64 different directions and pulling the trigger betting that it was going to be the right bet,” he says. “It was a luxury to sort of incubate and grow. I knew at some point we’d take financing, the question was the timing.” While TicketMaster plays to large stadium owners and Eventbrite caters to small events, Vendini is doing everything in between, according to Tacchi. From small black-box general admission venues and comedy clubs to performing arts centers, and larger music halls, Vendini is the ticketing technology of choice, he said. Roughly 330 colleges and universities use the service along with organizations like the United Nations, according to Tacchi. Moving beyond simple ticketing, the company also provides a customer relationship management toolkit and monitoring technologies for venues, in addition to getting people through the door. Clearly, there’s interest in the industry. Eventbrite has raised roughly $198 million in outside investment and TicketFly was sold to Pandora for $450 million for its take on the ticketing industry. “We are thrilled to be joining the family,” said Level Equity partner George McCulloch, in a statement. “We’ve been impressed with the strong growth Mark and his team have achieved to date while successfully executing three acquisitions over the last four years without external capital. We’re excited to work together to continue expanding ’s industry footprint and offerings.” |
Periscope introduces real-time comment moderation | Sarah Perez | 2,016 | 5 | 31 | Livestreaming app Periscope is a new experiment with real-time comment moderation, the company announced today. While its parent company has struggled over the years with spam and abuse — without much success, let’s be honest — is aiming to go a different route with the introduction of a community-policed system where users can report and moderate comments as soon as they appear on the screen. Until today, viewers have been able to type in a text entry box in the Periscope app, then see their comments overlaid on the live video stream during the broadcast. As others added their comments, the older ones would float off the screen. However, in terms of managing harassment and abuse, Periscope only offered a set of tools similar to Twitter — that is, users could via in-app mechanisms or You could also but this is less desirable for those interested in engaging with a wider, more public community on the app. With the new system, Periscope viewers can report comments as spam or abuse which will cause the individual comment to disappear from their screen immediately, and will prevent them from seeing other messages from that same person during the broadcast. As a result of being flagged, Periscope will then randomly select a few other viewers to vote on whether or not they also agree the comment is spam or abuse or if it looks okay. If the majority of viewers indicate the comment is spam or abuse, the commenter is notified their ability to chat is being disabled temporarily. If they again have a comment flagged during the broadcast, they lose the ability to chat for the duration of the livestream. By asking a random group of online users to confirm if the comment is spam or abusive, Periscope could potentially cut down on community-based attempts at censoring unwelcome viewpoints. That is, if the broadcast is on a divisive topic, and community voting was not involved, someone could target those users with differing ideas by flagging their comments. But instead, if the online community doesn’t agree that a comment is spam or abuse, the comment’s poster should remain unaffected. Whether or not comments are moderated is up to the broadcaster, and viewers can also choose to opt out of voting via their Settings, the company notes. What’s interesting about this launch is that it introduces a fairly simple system for managing bad actors on the service — something that Twitter itself could learn a thing or two from, in fact. Twitter is also a real-time platform, and has often been the first source for a number of breaking news stories over the years. But when events are shared instantaneously, that leaves little time for the company itself to react to reports of abuse or obscene or graphic content. Automated tools like this new voting system in Periscope could help. The launch also comes at a time when the app has been under fire for serving up livestreams of extremely disturbing content, including the and the , for example. Meanwhile, a video posted on Twitter showed a gang rape victim in Brazil laying naked and unconscious — , as citizens marched on the Supreme Court. While seeing a graphic incident like this is not common, they do pose a much greater challenge for platforms like Persicope, where users don’t have to sign up using real names. Instead, Persicope users can choose to sign up with a phone number or a Twitter account — the latter of which is already fairly anonymous as it only requires an email or phone number, too. By obfuscating a user’s true identity, these public platforms invite bad behavior. That being said, we understand that Twitter is not considering implementing this same system on its site, as tweets are not the same as Periscope comments — that is, they’re not real-time and ephemeral. Twitter doesn’t believe that tweets require immediate and actionable moderation. We’re not so sure about that. The new comment moderation system is rolling out now, via an app update. |
Robots date, mate, and procreate 3D printed offspring in ‘Robot Baby’ project | Devin Coldewey | 2,016 | 5 | 31 | Researchers in the Netherlands claim to have created the world’s first “robots that procreate.” What does that mean exactly? Well, child, when two robots’ fitness evaluation algorithms come to a successful conclusion, something beautiful happens. You’ll know when you’re older — or if you scroll down. “This breakthrough is a significant first step in the Industrial Evolution and can play an important role in, for instance, the colonization of Mars,” reads the for the “Robot Baby” project. Well, from the humble acorn grows the mighty oak and all that, but these claims should be taken with a fistful of salt. “Mating” and “evolving” robots appear now and then in research, from to a selecting the best of its brood, to robo-fish (Sorry, I have a quotation marks “quota” I’m trying to fill in this “article.”) So far, no gray goo or robot armies. But the new project still offers something new, if only as a proof of concept. Two robots (or conceivably more in the future) made of semi-random configurations of motorized blocks and capable of lurching movement, are given the impetus to make their way towards a bright light (in life this behavior is called phototaxis). Those that arrive quickly, proving their locomotive merit, can contact one another and evaluate whether they’re suitable mates. What that process consists of there is precious little detail on, but one can imagine: similar block count and leg length, comparable time on the half-meter dash to the light. At any rate, having met, they go on a few dates (to the router) and, having fallen in love at first byte, they submit their genetic material — that is, the code and hardware they are running — to be mixed and synthesized into a new robot. That’s the sex part, in case you were wondering. The resulting robaby, in this case a hideous chimera consisting of dad’s right leg, mom’s left leg and tail/stabilizer, and god knows what babbling, buzzing confusion in its newborn silicon brain, is printed piece by piece and assembled by the lab techs. While the claims of the researchers are something of a reach, they aren’t absurd. Self-modifying robots can adapt to situations and environments on their own rather than waiting on instructions from human monitors. And natural selection algorithms can produce unique solutions that people, with their puny, fleshy brains, might never hit on. If someone just straight up proposed a giraffe, for instance, would you approve? Yet they seem to be doing just fine. ( investigating their ludicrous anatomy was very interesting.) If you doubt the evolutionary ingenuity of computer-controlled natural selection, look up or find a way to run the supremely entertaining . The Robot Baby project is the robot baby of , professor of AI at Vrije Universiteit in Amsterdam. It was presented as part of the . |
Facebook spares humans by fighting offensive photos with AI | Josh Constine | 2,016 | 5 | 31 | systems now report more offensive photos than humans do, marking a major milestone in the social network’s battle against abuse, the company tells me. AI could quarantine obscene content before it ever hurts the psyches of real people. Facebook’s success in ads has fueled investments into the science of AI and machine vision that could give it an advantage in stopping offensive content. Creating a civil place to share without the fear of bullying is critical to getting users to post their personal content that draws in friends’ attention. Twitter has been for failing to adequately prevent or respond to claims of harassment on its platform, and last year former CEO “We suck at dealing with abuse.” Twitter has yet to turn a profit, and doesn’t have the resources to match Facebook’s investments in AI, but has still been making a valiant effort. To fuel the fight, Twitter acquired a visual intelligence startup called , and , an AI neural networks startup. Together, their AI can identify offensive images, and only incorrectly flagged harmless images just 7 percent of the time as of a year ago, . This reduces the number of humans needed to do the tough job, though Twitter still requires a human to give the go-ahead before it suspends an account for offensive images.
When malicious users upload something offensive to torment or disturb people, it traditionally has to be seen and flagged by at least one human, either a user or paid worker. These offensive posts that violate Facebook’s or Twitter’s can include content that is hate speech, threatening or pornographic; incites violence; or contains nudity or graphic or gratuitous violence. For example, a bully, jilted ex-lover, stalker, terrorist or troll could post offensive photos to someone’s wall, a Group, Event or the feed. They might upload revenge porn, disgusting gory images or sexist or racist memes. By the time someone flags the content as offensive so Facebook reviews it and might take it down, the damage is partially done. Previously, Twitter and Facebook had relied extensively on outside human contractors from startups like , or companies in the Philippines. As of 2014, that estimates pegged the number of human content moderators at around 100,000, with many making paltry salaries around $500 a month. The occupation is notoriously terrible, psychologically injuring workers who have to comb through the depths of depravity, from child porn to beheadings. Burnout happens quickly, workers cite symptoms similar to post-traumatic stress disorder and whole health consultancies like have sprung up to assist scarred moderators. Facebook’s Joaquin Candela presents on AI at the MIT Technology Review’s EmTech Digital conference But AI is helping Facebook avoid having to subject humans to such a terrible job. Instead of making contractors the first line of defense, or resorting to reactive moderation where unsuspecting users must first flag an offensive image, AI could unlock active moderation at scale by having computers scan every image uploaded before anyone sees it. Following his recent talk at the MIT Technology Review’s in San Francisco, I sat down with Facebook’s Director of Engineering for Applied Machine Learning Joaquin Candela. He spoke about the practical uses of AI for Facebook, where 25 percent of engineers now regularly use its internal AI platform to build features and do business. With 40 petaflops of compute power, Facebook analyzes trillions of data samples along billions of parameters. This AI helps rank News Feed stories, to the vision impaired and for video ads that increase view time by 12 percent. Facebook’s Joaquin Candela shows off a research prototype of AI tagging of friends in videos Candela revealed that Facebook is in the research stages of using AI to build out automatic tagging of faces in videos, and an option to instantly fast-forward to when a tagged person appears in the video. Facebook has also built a system for categorizing videos by topic. Candela demoed a tool on stage that could show video collections by category, such as cats, food or fireworks. But a promising application of AI is rescuing humans from horrific content moderation jobs. Candela told me that “One thing that is interesting is that today we have more offensive photos being reported by AI algorithms than by people. The higher we push that to 100 percent, the fewer offensive photos have actually been seen by a human.” Facebook, Twitter and others must simultaneously make sure their automated systems don’t slip into becoming draconian thought police. Built wrong, or taught with overly conservative rules, AI could censor art and free expression that might be productive or beautiful even if it’s controversial. And as with most forms of AI, it could take jobs from people in need. Defending Facebook is an enormous job. After his own speaking gig at the recent in San Francisco, I spoke with Facebook’s director of core machine learning Hussein Mehanna about Facebook’s artificial intelligence platform Facebook Learner. Mehanna tells me 400,000 new posts are published on Facebook every minute, and 180 million comments are left on public posts by celebrities and brands. That’s why beyond images, Mehanna tells me Facebook is trying to understand the meaning of text shared on the platform. AI could eventually help Facebook combat hate speech. Today Facebook, along with Twitter, YouTube and Microsoft agreed to . They’ll work to remove hate speech within 24 hours if it violates a . That time limit seems a lot more feasible with computers shouldering the effort. Facebook’s Hussein Mehanna speaks at the Applied AI conference That same AI platform could protect more than just Facebook, and thwart more than just problematic images. “Instagram is completely on top of the platform. I’ve heard they like it very much,” Mehanna tells me. “WhatsApp uses parts of the platform… Oculus use some aspects of the platform.” The application for content moderation on Instagram is obvious, though WhatsApp sees a tremendous amount of images shared, too. One day, our experiences in Oculus virtual reality could be safeguarded against the nightmare of not just being shown offensive content, but being forced to live through the scenes depicted. But to wage war on the human suffering caused by offensive content on social networks, and the moderators who sell their own sanity to block it, Facebook is building bridges beyond its own family of companies. “We share our research openly,” Mehanna explains, regarding how Facebook is sharing its findings and . “We don’t see AI as our secret weapon just to compete with other companies.” In fact, a year ago Facebook began inviting teams from Netflix, Google, Uber, Twitter and other significant tech companies to discuss the applications of AI. Mehanna says Facebook’s now doing its fourth or fifth round of periodic meetups where “we literally share with them the design details” of its AI systems, teach the teams of its neighboring tech companies and receive feedback. Mark Zuckerberg cites AI vision and languages as part of Facebook’s 10-year roadmap at F8 2016 “Advancing AI is something you want to do for the rest of the community and the world because it’s going to touch the lives of many more people,” Mehanna reinforces. At first glance, it might seem a strategic misstep to aid companies that Facebook competes with for time spent and ad dollars. But Mehanna echoes the sentiment of Candela and others at Facebook when he talks about open sourcing. “I personally believe it’s not a win-lose situation, it’s a win-win situation. If we improve the state of AI in the world, we will definitely eventually benefit. But I don’t see people nickel and diming it.” Sure, if Facebook doesn’t share, it could save a few bucks others have to spend on human content moderation or other toiling avoided with AI. But by building and offering up its underlying technologies, Facebook could make sure it’s computers, not people, doing the dirty work. |
Y Combinator announces basic income pilot experiment in Oakland | Kate Conger | 2,016 | 5 | 31 | Y Combinator announced today that it would launch its first basic income experiment in Oakland, CA. The startup accelerator began researching the concept of basic income last fall and will soon start paying salaries. Y Combinator initially said that it wanted to pay basic income to a group of people over a and study the effects, but now the company has changed course. It will begin the research with a short-term study in Oakland, Y Combinator announced in a : “Our goal will be to prepare for the longer-term study by working on our methods — how to pay people, how to collect data, how to randomly choose a sample, etc.” Depending on how the pilot goes, Y Combinator may continue with the longterm study. The idea of basic income, which would guarantee a base level of financial support for every person, has gained steam recently. In just a few days, the for basic income. Basic income also has its champions in tech. Y Combinator president Sam Altman has argued that, as technology usurps jobs, the need for a universal basic income will become more pressing. “In a world where technology eliminates jobs, it will mean that the cost of having a great life goes down a lot,” Altman today. “And I think we need something like basic income to have a cushion and a smooth transition to the jobs of the future.” But the concept also has its detractors. One of the biggest questions about basic income is where the money will come from. Y Combinator, with its roster of wealthy investors, may not have to worry about funding its basic income project, but funding is a more pressing concern for governments. The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities (CBPP) has argued that a government-funded basic income would increase poverty by stripping funding from federal programs supporting the poor and instead inject that money into the middle and upper classes. “Suppose UBI [universal basic income] provided everyone with $10,000 a year,” CBPP’s Robert Greenstein today. “That would cost more than $3 trillion a year — and $30 trillion to $40 trillion over ten years.” The Swiss government has urged voters to reject the basic income referendum, citing its cost. But Y Combinator sees the pilot program as a way to model basic income for the future, saying government funding may not be the right approach. Its Oakland research will be led by Elizabeth Rhodes, a recent PhD graduate from the University of Michigan. “In our pilot, the income will be unconditional; we’re going to give it to participants for the duration of the study, no matter what. People will be able to volunteer, work, not work, move to another country—anything. We hope basic income promotes freedom, and we want to see how people experience that freedom,” Altman said. The accelerator says it is already working with Oakland city officials and community groups to plan the pilot, which does not yet have an official launch date. |
Energysquare is a wireless phone charging pad that doesn’t use induction | Romain Dillet | 2,016 | 5 | 31 | Meet , a thin charging pad made so that you don’t have to plug in your phone charger ever again. Energysquare doesn’t rely on induction like most wireless chargers out there. Instead, Energysquare uses a conductive surface as well as a sticker on the back of your phone. The company is currently doing a . I met the team at in Paris and saw a working prototype of Energysquare. The main device is a mousepad-size device with a grid of 25 metal squares. Metal squares are nice, but putting your phone on this pad doesn’t do much. You’ll also have to put a sticker at the back of your phone. This sticker has two tiny metal dots at each end as well as a USB or Lightning connector so that you can plug the sticker to your phone. After that, you’re set. While I’m not a fan of putting stickers on the back of your phone, I’m just tired of plugging and unplugging my phone multiple times a day. The idea behind Energysquare is that you have a charging pad at work and one at home so that you can just put your phone on the table to charge it. Compared to inductive chargers, Energysquare can charge at full speed and you can put multiple devices on one pad. As long as the two ends of the stickers are on two different squares, your phone will start charging. And the good thing is that stickers are quite inexpensive. You can get a bunch of them for $10. So you can replace your phone without having to think about this. An Energysquare charging pad costs $65 on Kickstarter (€59). Eventually, the startup wants to be able to sell charging pads to train stations, airports and bars. This seems like a long shot, but it would certainly quite useful to have charging tables everywhere you go.
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Inventory shortages may herald rebirth of Apple’s aging Thunderbolt Display | Devin Coldewey | 2,016 | 5 | 31 | Apple’s Thunderbolt Display, , may be getting a refresh at , if inventory shortages at retail stores are any indication. Just try — dozens of locations near me are “ship to store” only, suggesting (as is often the case before a refresh) that stock has not been replenished or even, , sent back to the warehouse. The 2560×1536 display was a nice, if expensive, option when it made its debut, and five years later… well, now it’s just expensive. Needless to say it is no longer a recommended product — but the good news is that a replacement may be on the way. It would, of course, be the panel from the (again) nice, if expensive, Apple put out in late 2014. Thinner, higher resolution, better color, modern ports — all valuable things in a monitor. The problem is that few devices can process the 5K resolution — that’s four times the pixels found in a MacBook Pro — and push it over the Thunderbolt interface. The ones that can require two cables to do so, and it’s hard to imagine Apple allowing that to be the standard connection. Updates to the DisplayPort protocol might allow it, but it probably won’t happen in time for WWDC and any hardware that could reasonably be expected to be announced there. It’s hard to think of a workable alternative — a combination of wireless and wired display driving is conceivable, but only just. Apple has never shied away from leaving standards behind, however, so something new and strange may in fact be on the horizon. My guess is we’ll find out more at WWDC, since a big new display and potentially a new method of driving it would be something on which developers will want a heads up. But it also depends on the company’s ability to get the necessary hardware lined up by then. . Watch for our live coverage two weeks from now. |
Xbox One price drops to $299 just in time before unveiling slim Xbox One at E3 | Romain Dillet | 2,016 | 5 | 31 | Microsoft the price of its gaming console. The Xbox One now costs $299 in the U.S. with a 500GB hard drive, or €299 in Europe. For $319, you get a 1TB hard drive. And bundles also get a $50 price cut. Interestingly, this news comes right before E3. Microsoft is set to announce a . Rumor has it that it should be 40 percent smaller and come with a 2TB hard drive. (Maybe Microsoft is going to drop the Blu-ray player?) Next year, Microsoft could also announce a more powerful Xbox One. So the slim model is just an intermediary step to keep things fresh ahead of the holiday season later this year. Sony is also set to release a more powerful PlayStation 4 ‘Neo’ later this year. Today’s price drop could be a way to clear up the inventory before making room for the slim Xbox One. Or maybe Microsoft wants to be more aggressive when it comes to pricing as the company is lagging behind Sony when it comes to consoles. Sony recently announced for the PlayStation 4. Microsoft has stopped reporting unit sales, but estimates that Microsoft has sold around 21 million Xbox One units so far. Either way, Microsoft is going to tell us more about the new Xbox One at its E3 conference on June 13th. |
null | Lucas Matney | 2,016 | 5 | 9 | null |
Katy Perry’s Twitter account, the platform’s most followed, got hacked | Catherine Shu | 2,016 | 5 | 30 | Many of Katy Perry’s 89 million Twitter followers—the —were probably intrigued and confused when the pop star tweeted supposed archnemesis Taylor Swift this morning. As it turns out, that tweet—along with several others that were filled with profanity and slurs—was the work of a hacker and quickly deleted. It appears Katy Perry’s Twitter — with her more than 89 million followers — has been hacked… — Ryan Parker (@TheRyanParker) Those tweets followed one that said “haha follow @sw4ylol #hackersgonnahack.” That account, which is still active, claims to be based in Romania and sent its first tweet on May 29. It also tweeted a link to a SoundCloud song supposedly by Katy Perry, which was taken down after a copyright claim by Universal Music Group. Lol. — sway (@sw4ylol) This incident is yet another reminder that despite the platform’s security measures, no one’s Twitter account is safe—especially if they are a celebrity. Other high-profile Twitters that have been hacked include Justin Bieber, Lea Michele, and Britney Spears—and . Earlier this month, Tumblr and required users to reset their passwords. One security researcher (there’s no indication that data breach and the Katy Perry account hack are related). TechCrunch has contacted Katy Perry’s reps and Twitter for comment. |
Recently confirmed Myspace hack could be the largest yet | Sarah Perez | 2,016 | 5 | 31 | You might not have thought of – much less visited – Myspace in years. (Yes, it’s still around. and other properties when it bought Viant earlier this year.) But user data never really dies, unfortunately. For Myspace’s new owner, that’s bad news, as the company just ahead of the Memorial Day holiday weekend in the U.S., that it has been alerted to a large set of stolen Myspace username and password combinations being made available for sale in an online hacker forum. The data is several years old, however. It appears to be limited to a portion of the overall user base from the old Myspace platform prior to June 11, 2013, at which point the site was relaunched with added security. Time, Inc. didn’t confirm how many user accounts were included in this data set, but a report from says that there are over 360 million accounts involved. Each record contains an email address, a password, and in some cases, a second password. As some accounts have multiple passwords, that means there are over 427 million total passwords available for sale. Despite the fact that this data breach dates back several years, the size of the data set in question makes it notable. Security researchers at Sophos that this could be the largest data breach of all time, easily topping that recently surfaced online from a 2012 hack. That estimation seems to hold up – The U.S. voter database breach included 191 million records, Anthem’s was 80 million, eBay was 145 million, Target was 70 million, Experian 200 million, Heartland 130 million, and so on. The issue with these older data breaches is that they’re from an era where security measures were not as strong as today. That means these passwords are easily cracked. LeakedSource notes that the top 50 passwords from those cracked account for over 6 million passwords – or 1.5 percent of the total, to give you a sense of scale. The passwords were stored as unsalted SHA-1 hashes, as LinkedIn’s were, too. That allowed Time, Inc. to date the data breach to some extent, as the site was relaunched in June 2013 with strengthened account security, including double-salted hashes to store passwords. It also confirmed that the breach has no effect on any of its other systems, subscriber information, or other media properties, nor did the leaked data include any financial information. Myspace is notifying users and has already invalidated the passwords of known affected accounts. The company is also using automated tools to attempt to identify and block any suspicious activity that might occur on Myspace accounts, it says. “We take the security and privacy of customer data and information extremely seriously—especially in an age when malicious hackers are increasingly sophisticated and breaches across all industries have become all too common,” said Myspace’s CFO Jeff Bairstow, in a statement. “Our information security and privacy teams are doing everything we can to support the Myspace team.” However, while the hack itself and the resulting data set may be old, there could still be repercussions. Because so many online users simply reuse their same passwords on multiple sites, a hacker who is able to associate a given username or email with a password could crack users’ current accounts on other sites. Of course, it’s not likely users even remember what password they used on Myspace years ago, which makes protecting your current accounts more difficult. A better option is to always use more complicated passwords, reset them periodically, and take advantage of password management tools like Dashlane or LastPass to help you keep track of your logins. that the hack is being attributed to the Russian cyberhacker who goes by the name “Peace.” This is the same person responsible for the and attacks, too. In Tumblr’s case, some 65 million plus accounts were affected. But these passwords were “salted,” meaning they are harder to crack. Myspace is working with law enforcement as this case is still under investigation, the company says. |
On-demand logistics startup Lalamove raises $10M more in push for profitability | Jon Russell | 2,016 | 5 | 30 | , one of a number of companies offering logistics on-demand in China and across Asia, has closed $10 million in funding as it targets profitability this year. The round was led by existing investor MindWorks with other existing investors, including China’s Crystal Stream (China), AppWorks (Taiwan), Aria Group (Hong Kong), taking part. In addition, Asia Plus from Thailand, where , joined as a new investor This fundraising takes Lalamove, which is also known as EasyVan in some markets, to raised . Interestingly, founder and CEO Shing Chow said this money will help the two-year-old company reach profitability by the end of this year thanks to a planned series of city expansions. Started in Hong Kong in December 2013, Lalamove is currently present in 20 cities in China, alongside Hong Kong, Bangkok and Taipei. The startup said it is on track to expand its presence to 49 cities this year, with a particularly aggressive slate of launches planned inside China, where Lalamove has focused much of its expansion efforts to date. Lalamove operates a consumer-facing app, but much of its customer base is business — and particularly those in the e-commerce or delivery spaces. Some, for example, may need to expand their delivery or logistics capacity at peaks times or during busy order period, and that where Lalamove’s “Uber For Logistics” model — to use the hackneyed term — comes into play. Beyond that on-demand need, the company claims its fleet of vans and motorbikes is more efficient than traditional logistics partners. “We began as a small start-up in Hong Kong working out of my apartment and have grown to 19 cities across Asia in the last two years. When we began, we targeted lots of small businesses, but since then we have developed enterprise solutions to allow companies like Google, IKEA, and now LINE to make their delivery much faster and simpler,” Chow said in a statement. As a logistics player, Lalamove is technically rivaled by existing, legacy players. Other on-demand startups in their space do include fellow Hong Kong-based GoGoVan, which last year. Also in Hong Kong, where logistics is hugely challenging but lucrative, is Uber Van — . Initially named Uber Cargo, it is focused more on consumers than GoGoVan or Lalamove. Further afield there is NinjaVan in Southeast Asia, although that startup covers the full logistics space including warehousing and storage as well delivery. Ninjavan, which , actually works with Lalamove in some cities. |
Watch Pitch@Palace Estonia Demo Day Right Here | Samantha O'Keefe | 2,016 | 5 | 30 | TechCrunch is pleased to bring you Pitch@Palace’s Demo Day this Wednesday, June 1st from Latitude59 in Tallinn, Estonia. Investors, press and Latitude59 conference attendees will hear pitches from nine companies solving problems ranging from making university fundraising a default behavior to improving efficiency in the timber market. Mark your calendars, the demos run from 4-6pm UTC+02:00 and you can watch it live right here. [youtube=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G63uaYDAQNk&w=560&h=315] — 3D Creationist is the simplest 3D modeling app that lets even children make their own 3D models. — Bike-ID provides quick and easy insurance cover via a mobile app. Bike-ID provides easy access to bicycle insurance for bike owners to protect them from bike theft and damages. — COMODULE is the OEM provider of a connected vehicle platform and IoT technology for light electric vehicle manufacturers (e-bikes, e-scooters, e-motorcycles). — Funderful is a fundraising toolset for universities designed to turn donating into a habit. — Nordigen helps credit institutions categorise their client banking transactions to improve credit assessment process speed and reliability. — RangeForce is a Cyber defence simulation company that discovers, develops and recruits cyber talent. — Reverse Resources turns pre-consumer textile waste into a resource for the fashion industry. — SprayPrinter is a completely new technology that enables wireless freehand printing from a smartphone to any surface. — Timbeter’s smart device based solution enables measuring raw timber material quicker, cheaper and more accurately; plus processes & stores data in digital form. |
How I moved my startup from San Francisco to San Diego | Andrew Gazdecki | 2,016 | 5 | 30 |
Tech giant of the West, soil of the , epicenter of the cutting-edge. Companies have long come to the Bay Area to plant their seeds, and . The stretch of land from Jose to encompasses some of the most revolutionary technology in the world, and the best of the best call it home. But that’s beginning to change. that more than one-third of Bay Area residents hope to pack up and leave in the next few years, and newcomers (those who’ve lived here five years or less) are most eager to abandon the region. Residents cite cost of living and traffic as the primary motivations to move and, increasingly, believe the Bay Area is “headed in the wrong direction.” That’s a vague statement at best, but there’s no question the region’s social and economic disparity have left a bad taste in people’s mouths for quite some time now. As a mass exodus becomes more and more realistic, companies need to evaluate how the Bay Area stacks up next to rising tech hubs that offer lower business costs, greater recruiting power and minimal saturation. Those very reasons are why I decided to move six-year-old , Bizness Apps, out of . We broke ties with our Bay Area zip code last month and opened up shop in . Comments on my March TechCrunch article, “ ,” asked for a follow-up to that decision, so here it is: A breakdown of the benefits and consequences, how we made it happen and how your can do it, too. The makes sound sense. I crunched the numbers, I weighed the scales and I decided it was a risk worth taking. And I’m glad we did. I could quantify solid reasons, largely centering on cost and talent. I could argue case like the best attorney. But we were still facing the question of how to do it. We had to learn on the job; hopefully others can benefit from our hindsight. Let’s just get this part out of the way. We can quantify it by reeling off the stats: two new world-class VP hires we’d struggled to attract in ; operational costs plummeted by 14 percent; our employees’ rent reduced by 37 percent on average, and their commutes are down to less than 30 minutes; our overall profitability has rocketed by 21 percent; and we’ve gained a lot of local media attention, including having the mayor open our offices. Our SF office pales in comparison to our new space. We can afford wall-to-wall ocean views (fun fact: ) in a class-A office for almost half the price. It’s allowed us to expand into a larger, modern and more comfortable space, and our employees love showing up to work. Down here, you have more options that can suit your culture and your budget. It’s looking good, but moving was not easy by any means. As any entrepreneur knows, you’re going to have serious pushback the moment you suggest a new idea that could be this risky. You need to know, without a shadow of doubt, that you’re looking to move your business for sound economic reasons that stand up to scrutiny. That way, when the tough spots come (and they will), you won’t be left questioning the decision in the first place. You won’t question the basis of your decision — you’ll just fight the small fires that arise along the way. Did I have to stay put in for investors? Did they want us to stay or chase the future elsewhere? Did location matter more to them than profits and success? Does have access to venture capital? Was moving to a lower cost area a sound long-term decision? Luckily for us I was able to quickly check these questions off the list. We have a team of exceptional investors that want us to do what is best for the business, regardless of our location. When we ran the idea by them with some of our initial analysis, they were completely behind us. Also, if we decided to take on more venture funding, ranks No. 4 in the nation in VC dollars per capita, and has more VC funding than Seattle and Austin — combined.
Source: Then I looked at the talent I had now, and the talent I needed to continue to grow the company. Did I, in Silicon Valley as a small fish, have the power to recruit the best future talent? I found myself realizing I would be a far more attractive employer in a less competitive environment. The reality was that I was competing with the salaries and benefits of the largest companies in the world. I wanted employees to feel valued, to feel they are compensated fairly, to have the standard of living they deserve. I couldn’t make that match up in . But more questions were needed to solidify how we would pull off a move successfully. Once I was sure moving made sound business sense, I needed to extend questioning. How did key team members and employees feel about a potential move? Would they be open to the possibility of a move? Would I lose very best employees, or would they see sense in decision and get on board with moving with me? By now I was heading into December and the questioning gained momentum. And so I began to extend questioning beyond myself and closest team members. This was essential to the of the move, simply because I needed to understand viewpoints other than own. How could I mitigate the losses if I wasn’t sure what those losses would be? First of all, we had to examine a few things. Our chief order of business was to nail down office space — which was far from an easy task. While the cost was less expensive than our office, negotiating a lease takes time, energy and commitment. We also had to do the research and figure out the logistics of relocating without allowing a bunch of rumors going around the workplace. Without a definitive plan in place, we had to keep everything quiet until we were absolutely sure we would be moving. After we found an office space and had a lease in hand, we worked for a month to figure out a way to get our employees to follow us. Ultimately, we knew our employees would have a tough time with change, but we didn’t think we should hold back pursuing relocation for fear of upsetting the apple cart. We knew we had intelligent talent on our hands, so we instilled trust by asking for their opinion. I had to accept the scary reality that I would definitely lose some of our employees. And that is a scary thought for any tech . However, knowing what talent I was liable to lose was a vital step in mitigating the impact of our move. Before we officially announced a move, we sent out multiple surveys to all employees and asked if they would be willing to move to a number of locations outside of — including . And to our surprise, the majority of our respondents said that they would be willing to pack up and join us in . Considering we had already found a potential office and that the cost of operating there was far less expensive, we were thrilled. We knew we needed to make sure that people were not just blowing smoke in the first survey, so we sent out a new survey about once a week to see if anything had changed. A lot of our team seemed really excited about a Southern California lifestyle. We subtly started to share the benefits that had to offer the company: less expensive, nicer office space and being a bigger fish in a smaller pond. But the key to making this work was retaining best employees. So in January a survey a week started hitting the inboxes of our employees. I moved forward with logistics, thinking all was going great. Come February I called an all-hands meeting for the company to announce “We are officially relocating to ,” and I walked out of that meeting having shell-shocked entire staff. The surveys weren’t as reliable as I had hoped — by a pretty large margin. Mistake number one: I should have spent more time speaking one-on-one with everyone and finding out their thoughts. I took the reliability of surveys for granted without a second thought. They were wrong — the “moving” majority dropped to a minority. I shared our official plans to relocate. I prepared what I thought was a great presentation highlighting why was not the best place for our business. I started by showing pictures of our nice, new office followed by pictures of the beaches. You know, to get people excited. Then I gave a video walk-through of our new place. Then I started to explain how the rent in was absurd — which actually backfired a bit with die-hard employees. After that, I shared some information about how there’s so much untapped talent in . Unfortunately, it did not go as planned. Even with the relocation packages, salary and stock bonuses we offered, along with a clear timeline of our plan, people were not sold — morale collapsed in that instant. After the announcement, communication was poor and morale decreased significantly. We should have clued in team leaders sooner to help mitigate the damage and gauge their own willingness to move before the rest of the staff. For anyone thinking about relocating your , make the relocation decision a company-wide discussion from Day One. Despite its poor initial reception, we had signed a lease, the plan had begun and there was no turning back. So after the official announcement, we made sure to speak to every single employee in the company and gauge their interest every single week. Some gave us an immediate, “Yes I’ll move.” Some gave us, “I need more time to think about it.” Others were interested in working remotely. And, some were very upfront and said they were likely to leave the company in the upcoming months. So, we needed to get creative here. I needed every employee during the transition, as we couldn’t risk gaps in service, so I incentivized team to stay together as long as possible with a $5,000 bonus for staying with the company until . This all paid off. That scary moment of thinking I was losing most of talent in reality changed to losing only about 7 percent. And even for those 7 percent, we’ve given LinkedIn recommendations, handled reference calls and even offered introductions at top SF companies. It was important to us not to forget the very people who facilitated our growth, even at a parting of ways. With a vague idea of who was following us down to , we still had to set our sights on setting up shop in . Our VP of Finance created a huge to-do list of what tasks needed to be done, when they needed to be done and who needed to do them. We all got to work on our laundry list of things to do. From getting bids on furniture, to hiring movers, to opening up a new office, we were busy with the logistics of the relocation itself. Installing furniture, activating services, relocating your team… a lot goes into opening an office. This is also a decisive period for employees riding the fence on moving, so it’s critical to keep them comfortable. We opened our new office in on , two full months before we closed our SF doors. Those two months between March and May when we had two offices open were tough. It was change: We were in limbo. I was surrounded by an amazing team who still hit their goals and kept on task, but I also had to see some of them walk away, even if I desperately wanted them to stay. I watched people go, for good, for remote-working, or in the process of moving to . I was, literally, the last man standing. We closed our office on April 21, yet I didn’t head down to the new office myself until May 1 when our lease ended. It felt important for me to stay behind; a captain never leaves his ship. And it was personal. So much had been accomplished in that space. We were on the list for two years in a row, there had been so many great times and our processes had improved immensely. We had fun, we learned and we grew as a team. Closing our office was an emotional time for everyone, but the show must go on. We began our talent search months before leaving , flying candidates up to interview in our SF office and hiring them before we opened our SD doors. The media buzz surrounding our move leveraged our recruiting more than anything — we received hundreds of applications. Our announcement to move attracted top media attention, and the mayor of offered to join us for a ribbon-cutting ceremony. In regards to becoming a bigger fish in a smaller pond, the move itself went extremely well. There’s no doubt the decision to move had its ups and downs, but the benefits far outweighed the mistakes I made as we transitioned. The one that hurts the most was that we lost about 7 percent of our valuable employees, and I attest that to the way the move was presented to our team. Another struggle we are still working around is half of our team is now working remotely, which strains communication and productivity. If given the opportunity to do the moving process over, I would have planned more carefully. Our move plan covered everything from prepping our remote team to cleaning the carpets and disabling the alarm system. However, with all this planning, I should have clued in more employees individually sooner rather than relying almost solely on company surveys. When selling employees on the move, I also focused too much on ’s drawbacks and not enough on ’s advantages. I failed as a leader here, and view this as biggest mistake with the move. As CEO, I lost the trust of many employees who felt undervalued by decision. If you’re committed to moving, you have to take the heat that comes with that. I know the decision was right. The benefits we are seeing are just the beginning. We anticipate all of the above metrics to only improve as time goes on. I know I’ve harped on this enough, but the benefits are real: lower operational costs, shorter commutes, less competition for talent. These factors position you in a way the Bay Area’s saturated atmosphere can’t. As the great Jack Welsh said, “If you don’t have a competitive advantage, don’t compete.” After reading the above, you might think a move is crazy — it’s expensive, risky, uncomfortable and borderline insane. But so is losing out on prime talent, pouring money into rent and operational costs that dwarf the rest of the country’s. If you ever plan to get out, the time is now. Tech hubs are emerging all over the country; from to Detroit to Atlanta, cities are eyeing the opportunity to pick up where the Bay Area has left off, evolving into more profitable locales for businesses that are just as ready as residents to head for shore. Yes, Silicon Valley will probably always be the best place to start the next Facebook. For the other 99 percent of us — those with practical, executable ideas — there are better places out there. If you want to build a profitable, mid-sized company, explore elsewhere. Don’t get caught up in the notion that tech lives and dies in the Bay Area, or that sharing an area code with the giants will spur your momentum. Growth is about competitive advantage, not proximity to the scene. Home is where you make it, even for startups. |
VetTechTrek is creating an e-learning platform to help veterans build careers in the tech industry | Fitz Tepper | 2,016 | 5 | 30 | is a nonprofit founded last year with the goal of helping military veterans network with the technology industry. Over the last 12 months they have worked toward this goal by hosting multiple “treks” that brought more than 180 veterans and spouses to meet with veterans who work at more than 60 technology startups in New York, Silicon Valley and Washington, DC. Some companies have included Dropbox, Twitter, Facebook and . While feedback was great, the nonprofit became overwhelmed with requests from both veterans and companies wanting to participate. So today VetTechTrek is launching , an e-learning platform that will house a library of resources to help veterans build great post-military careers. Essentially, the nonprofit plans to help veterans with anything “that can help translate their military experiences to stories and skills that make sense for hiring managers and founding teams.” These lessons will be broken down into content based on Companies, Topics and Roles. The Companies portion will function like video-based “treks” to replicate the experience of their in-person events. The other two sections will focus on helping veterans with things like resume development, networking and other topics relevant to transitioning service members. https://www.facebook.com/vettechtrek/videos/278817642453129/ To build the platform, VetTechTrek just launched a Kickstarter to raise $50,000, which will be used to pay pre- and post-production crews to film about 100 “Netflix-quality” instructional videos. But why use Kickstarter to raise funding when the nonprofit could presumably easily fundraise from the over 60 companies that have already supported the initiative? VetTechTrek explains that they wanted to validate “without a shadow of a doubt” that they’re building something that veterans actually want. The nonprofit was started by Steve Weiner and Mike Slagh, two navy veterans who now work in the tech industry in San Francisco. While the group will continue running a few in-person treks each year, the majority of the nonprofit’s resources will be dedicated to the new e-learning platform. You can check out their , which will be live for three more weeks, and has already raised $12,000 out of their $50,000 goal. |
Hate the games, not the players | Daniel Ruch | 2,016 | 5 | 30 |
Imagine that you are lead strategist for the Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump campaign (take your pick). Your job is to maximize voter turnout in November. You hypothesize that more people would vote if doing so were fun. If your campaign could turn rallies and voting into a game, you’d drive more people to the polls, right? No, not exactly. You’re about to fall into the same trap as dozens of consumer apps, B2B services and companies that have misapplied gamification. Unaware of your mistake, you build a social photo app that encourages rally participants, and eventually voters, to post photos. You reward them with digital tchotchkes for participating (“Hil Points” or gold “Trump Cards”). Six months and seven figures later, no one uses the app. This hypothetical scenario illustrates why gamification has floundered. In the example, we attempted to create a game — a solution — . If voter turnout is lower than it could be, ? Our reward, digital junk, was probably incongruent with the problem. Who cares about points and badges if the distance to the polls, long work hours and carpooling kids keeps you from voting? We can’t make successful games without understanding the problems we aim to solve. Moreover, we can’t apply gamification successfully without understanding the behavioral science principles on which it stands. To revive gamification, we need to reconsider why it failed and how it actually works. Let’s define our term: “Gamification” is the application to other activities of game-playing elements (such as point scoring, competition and rules of play) in an attempt to achieve a measurable goal. In business, that goal could be greater productivity, user engagement or employee satisfaction. In our personal lives, goals might include losing weight, exercising regularly or unplugging from mobile devices. A few years back, the business world was bullish on gamification. In customer service, sales, loyalty programs and corporate health, everyone thought games were the answer. And then the bubble deflated. Gamification darlings like and cratered. By 2014, commentators were writing for gamification. So what went wrong? In the B2B space, the game objectives were unclear and complicated. Players weren’t sure how to win points and badges, and, frankly, they didn’t care. Gold stars didn’t motivate behavioral change; there was no compelling value exchange for players. Combined, those two failures created a bad user experience. If you don’t understand a game, and don’t care to win, what’s the point of playing? The first wave of gamification ignored the behavioral science principles that underlie every effective game. To revive gamification, we must understand and apply these four principles: With intrinsic motivation, playing the game is an end in itself. We do it for fun, pleasure or some other personal reason. Extrinsic motivation is the desire to do something for a tangible benefit, whether that be cash, a reward or recognition. When the desired behavioral shift is small, intrinsic motivation works. A great comes from Volkswagen, which wanted to motivate subway commuters in Stockholm, Sweden to take the stairs instead of the escalator. Overnight, they transformed into a massive piano keyboard the stairs leading out of the Odenplan subway. As commuters stepped on the keys, they played musical notes; 66 percent more people than normal used the musical stairs over the escalator. When the desired behavioral shift is significant, intrinsic motivation doesn’t cut it. Musical keyboards will not make your developers write more code than normal. Cash or experiential rewards might. In the same way that your muscles tire from repetitive use, your brain tires from making decisions. We work that decision “muscle” every waking hour of the day: What should I wear? What do I eat for breakfast? Should I answer this text now or later? Decisions can become overwhelming; as we use up neural fuel, we deplete our willpower. That’s why President Obama and Mark Zuckerberg (one less decision). That’s also . After you’ve spent your decision fuel shopping, it’s harder to resist the sugar. The point is that in gamification, rules must be simple. If you fatigue players, they’ll make the easiest decision, not the decision you want. When making decisions, we rely too heavily on the first piece of information presented to us. That’s why car dealerships make the MSRP so high. That elevates your sense of what is a reasonable price to pay. It also makes discounts seem bigger than they really are. Anchoring is a powerful tool in gamification. For instance, Fitbit makes 10,000 steps per day the default goal for users. They have for using that number, but it’s still a brilliant anchor. It predisposes Fitbit users to think that walking 10,000 steps daily is a reasonable, attainable goal. As psychologists Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky discovered in the 1980s, people are more strongly swayed by a desire to avoid losses than to secure gains. We ascribe greater value to things we already own. That’s why free trial periods are effective, and that’s why a $5 surcharge is more influential than a $5 discount. In gamification, the extrinsic motivation — the reward — must be immediately tangible so players feel like they stand to if they fail to change their behavior. Gamification begins with a question. Why aren’t employees productive? Why can’t I lose weight? Why don’t voters turn up at elections? Once you have the answer, deploy the behavioral science toolset in your solution, and keep the following points in mind. If you’re trying to motivate change, points, gold stars and badges matter on their own. Quantitative measurements of change matter because they enable you to use extrinsic motivation, anchoring and loss aversion. For example, betting on diets is effective because it invokes those three factors (credit to Tim Ferris for this idea). You have two quantitative measurements: pounds and dollars. Diet betting websites like anchor by setting a target weight goal, such as lose 10 percent in six months. Both loss aversion and extrinsic motivation come into play because you don’t want to lose the $150 you incrementally bet over six months. Dollars trump digital badges. In business gamification, competition isn’t an end in itself. It’s more important to show how individuals compare to their peer group. For instance, in sales, most people don’t care whether or not co-workers hit their quotas. Those are pass-fail goals. But, if you notice that co-workers dial twice as many prospects as you do, that anchor will influence your perception of a reasonable workload. And finally, keep the rules simple and clear. Straightforward rules save people from decision fatigue, whereas complicated rules intensify it. In a business setting, “rules” are a synonym for expectations. Unlike ambiguous mantras (e.g. “ ”), rules don’t hide their intention. I wrote this piece because gamification can do immense good in our personal lives, businesses and presidential elections — if we apply it wisely. Understand the principles of gamification, then deliberately choose or create the games that will enhance your world. |
International startups: Sign up for a country pavilion at Disrupt SF | Matt Burns | 2,016 | 5 | 30 | We’re just a few short months away from . Soon thousands of entrepreneurs, innovators and investors will flock to the beautiful Pier 48 for the best startup show in the Bay Area. Will you and your budding international startup be joining them? One of our favorite Startup Alley staples in recent years has been the country pavilions, sections of the Alley where promising startups from all corners of the world pitch their ideas and products to the tech community. In previous years, we’ve had companies from Ireland, Hong Kong, the Nordics, Japan, Korea, the Middle East and more. We’re thrilled to announce that we are now accepting applications from companies that would like to display in a country pavilion at Disrupt SF, so be sure to get in touch with us today to express your interest. To sign up for a spot in the Alley, companies must be less than two years old and have secured less than US$2 million in funding. As long as your company meets those two criteria, you can sign up for a country pavilion by telling us a bit about your startup and where your company is from. After reviewing your submission, we’ll reach out with additional information about how to secure your spot in the Alley. So why should you display in the Alley, you ask? Simply put, the Startup Alley at Disrupt is one of the best ways to get your company noticed by tech enthusiasts who could turn into top employees, members of the press who can get your company the coverage it needs to get noticed and investors who could bring the funding to take your startup to the next level. If nothing else, the Alley is a heck of a lot of fun, and you’ll get to check out all the other companies, hear from some of the best and brightest folks in the tech community with our series of interviews and fireside chats and network at all the parties and after parties that take place during the show. What are you waiting for? Send us an email to express your interest in the country pavilions at Startup Alley today. And if you aren’t an international company but still want to get in on the Startup Alley action, tickets are now available to purchase, starting at $1,995. You can buy your tickets . |
Buy tickets to the Austin and Seattle pitch-offs now | Jordan Crook | 2,016 | 5 | 30 | It’s time for a little friendly competition among startups. TechCrunch is coming to Austin and Seattle in two weeks, and we’re bringing the TC pitch-off with us. Ten companies will have exactly 60 seconds each to pitch their wares to a panel of expert judges, including TC editors and local VCs. After all the presentations, the judges will determine our winners. First place will receive a table in Startup Alley at TechCrunch Disrupt SF in September. Second place gets two tickets to the show and the Audience Choice winner will get one ticket to the conference. . Applications close June 3. If you’re not interested in pitching, there will be plenty of time for networking and throwing back a few beers. (21+ only, please.) |
Iran forces messaging apps to move data to Iranian servers | Romain Dillet | 2,016 | 5 | 30 | Companies behind popular messaging apps have a year to move all the data they have on Iranian users onto servers in Iran, . This raises concerns about privacy. The Iranian government wants to be able to track private and semi-private conversations on messaging apps. Many social networks are already blocked in Iran, but it looks like the government wants even more control. In particular, apps like WhatsApp and Telegram have become incredibly popular in Iran, and the government has no control over what is said on these platforms. Users can create groups on Telegram and reach hundreds of people. As always, the devil is in the details. Moving servers to Iran might not be enough, as WhatsApp recently completed its rollout of . With end-to-end encryption, WhatsApp can’t even read the content of communications, as they are encrypted, and only WhatsApp users involved in these conversations can decrypt them. Apple’s iMessage is another example of an encrypted messaging protocol. Apple isn’t able to hand out messages to a government. Similarly, Telegram lets you start “secret conversations” with end-to-end encryption. As long as Telegram users in Iran are aware of this feature, the Iranian government wouldn’t be able to read those conversations. By default, Telegram conversations aren’t encrypted on Telegram’s servers. Like in other countries with Internet restrictions, there are ways to create an account on Facebook and tweet stuff. You can install a VPN tool so that Iranian ISPs can’t see you’re browsing these websites. And now, the Iranian government wants to play a new cat-and-mouse game with messaging apps. Today’s news proves once again that encryption is a cornerstone of the freedom of speech. Every time the FBI , the FBI also endangers countless numbers of people around the world who just want to be able to criticize their government freely. |
Bitcoin price jumps 21 percent over 4 days, reaching a 21-month high | Romain Dillet | 2,016 | 5 | 30 | Bitcoin is back! Or at least, there are indicating that bitcoin might not be as dead as . Bitcoins are now trading at $547.40 on (the largest USD/bitcoin exchange according to ). And it represents a big 21.4 percent price jump over just four days. Today’s price represents a 21-month high. Surprisingly, bitcoin prices had been relatively stable for the last two months before this weekend’s jump. What’s the reason behind this jump? It’s hard to say. and , the two dominant Chinese exchanges, have seen many new sign-ups, as well as many buy orders. Increasingly, bitcoin’s price variations are correlated with macroeconomic trends in China. These trends tell us that China still fears a deflation. And bitcoin is perceived as an alternative asset class for many people in China. Similarly, the Chinese government cloud on peer-to-peer lending, forcing lenders to invest in bitcoins. Other than China, there are reasons to be optimistic about bitcoin right now. In late 2015, many bitcoin companies started arguing in favor of a to increase the transaction processing capacity. It led to a very ambitious roadmap for the original Bitcoin Core project. In the coming months, many Bitcoin Core updates are going to make bitcoin and the bitcoin blockchain more robust and more future proof. I’m particularly excited about — these networks would make it possible to send bitcoins in seconds. It would turn bitcoin into a viable alternative to existing payment networks. |
Watch Microsoft Accelerator’s Machine Learning Demo Day here | Samantha O'Keefe | 2,016 | 5 | 30 | TechCrunch is pleased to bring you Microsoft Accelerator’s Machine Learning Demo Day this Thursday, June 2 from the Showbox SoDo in Seattle. The Microsoft Accelerator is an immersive three- to six-month program aimed at helping entrepreneurs get through the challenges of building a company, finding customers and scaling to global markets. There are seven accelerators located around the world, from Bangalore to Beijing, from Berlin to Tel-Aviv. While most of their programs have a focus on enterprise startups, this demo day in Seattle is for companies specifically leveraging machine learning. Investors and press will hear pitches from nine companies solving problems ranging from natural gas pipelines to on-demand medicine. Mark your calendars, the demos run from 5:40-6:40pm PT and you can watch it live right here. (In order of appearance) — Predictive analytics for natural gas and hazardous liquid pipelines. — Connecting news, documents and your enterprise data to create summaries in real time. — Predictions with the WHY that include an intuitive and actionable visualization of the analysis. — Helping data scientists get better data, faster, by solving the pain point of data gathering and enrichment for AI researchers and developers. — Enhanced legal knowledge management. — Retail selling team optimization. — Your virtual medical assistant. — A machine learning platform that radically changes the way universities discover and recruit students. — Marketing intelligence platform that leverages the interest-graph to understand the culture of today’s consumers. |
French financial prosecutor went dark for a year to investigate Google France | Romain Dillet | 2,016 | 5 | 30 | Google was caught by surprise. Last week, nearly 100 employees of France’s equivalent of the IRS (Direction générale des Finances) for a tax non-compliance investigation. French financial prosecutor Éliane Houlette that her team had been secretly working on this raid for nearly a year. Google may be facing a $1.8 billion fine (€1.6 billion). Houlette and her team have been a bit paranoid with this investigation. Given Google’s size and reach, the team has been extra cautious, as Google couldn’t know about an upcoming raid in its office in Paris. You don’t want the company to start obfuscating files before you even have a chance to look at them. That’s why most people at the DGF didn’t even know Houlette was getting serious about this investigation. Her team used the codename “Tulip” when talking about Google, referring to the flowers in the Netherlands. “We’ve dealt [with this investigation] in complete secret given this company’s business,” Houlette told . “In order to protect this secret, we decided that we would give another name to Google and never pronounce Google’s name — Tulip. And we’ve worked offline on this investigation for nearly a year. We used one computer, but only as a word processor.” The end result is terabytes of data. It’s going to take months, or even years to process all this data, according to Houlette. Many have asked whether France is willing to do a tax deal French finance minister Michel Sapin that there won’t be any deal. Houlette went even further and said that France’s legislation doesn’t work this way and there’s no way the French government could make a deal with Google. So it leaves one possibility — a trial. Things could get ugly as this trial could go on and on for years. It would hurt France’s image when it comes to doing business in France. Houlette is also aware of that, so let’s see if the financial prosecutor can find an alternative that won’t be a deal nor a trial. France’s investigation against Google’s tax schemes started . According to Google, the company doesn’t do much business in France. It has an office and a marketing team, but no sales team. That’s why most of Google France’s revenue goes to Google’s European HQ in Ireland and the company doesn’t pay much tax in France. Google then sends most of Google Ireland Limited’s money to Google Netherlands Holdings BV, so that this other subsidiary can send the money to Google Ireland Holdings. Despite the name, Google Ireland Holdings’ cost center is in Bermuda and is called Google Bermuda Unlimited. And that’s how you end up making money in France while keeping your bank account in Bermuda, where corporate tax doesn’t even exist. Many European companies use more or less the same process to lower tax rates — and it’s legal. But the main issue with Google in France is that the DGF thinks Google is doing more than just marketing in France. Some Irish contracts could be French and could be subject to French taxes. Hence the investigation. |
Facebook set to foster popularity of branded content | Jared Feldman | 2,016 | 5 | 30 |
was already becoming more attractive to many marketers and publishers trying to navigate the shoals of the online media ecosystem. Now, thanks to , it’s set to really take off. I think this sector grow quickly, and in some interesting new directions. At its annual conference, said it would allow publishers to include in their Instant Articles posts, using a new tag and ad unit as part of broader efforts to encourage more high-quality of all kinds, especially live video. The changes provide a path for publishers to both tap the huge audience and, for the first time, make money doing it. Done right, can be hugely popular, especially when it leverages big brands alongside big TV personalities in smart and customized ways. Late-night shows have done a good job repurposing bits of their programs for sharing on YouTube and beyond, and that continue. But I think the next step for brands and smart humor shops such as the late-night shows be to create more . Soon enough, at least some of these creative TV talents begin working with brands to create entertaining programming that doesn’t have to run on their traditional TV show to have an impact. Spanish-language Azteca is one example of a network building creative teams for and exploring with brands the potential for . They’re not the only ones, either. Conan O’Brien had a huge online hit with his “Clueless Gamer” video segment in February. It posted on YouTube four days before this year’s NFL Super Bowl, and featured two of the game’s biggest stars, Denver’s Von Miller and Carolina’s Josh Norman. Part-way through, the trio added Seattle running back Marshawn Lynch, a star of the previous two Super Bowls who lives nearby. Together, the four played a new release of Doom — a massively updated version of the pioneering 1990s game that debuted in mid-May. They also joked around, drank wine and wore silly fur hats. Gory game play and Conan’s comically incredulous responses were shown. Production values were modest: a hotel conference room, an Xbox One and big-screen TV, a bottle of wine and a wacky “Clueless Gamer” trophy. The result: nearly 3.7 million views of the 7-minute video, with nearly 44,000 likes and 4,000 comments. For current Doom publisher , it was a very good play three months ahead of the game’s release. And the exposure was further magnified when game vloggers weighed in with their own approving takes on the segment. The segment came across as authentic, relaxed and hugely entertaining. It can stand on its own as a piece of , pushing Doom for months to fans of first-person-shooter games, the NFL stars and Conan’s show. Doom is woven throughout the piece. The only sales push comes at the end of the video, when O’Brien holds up the game’s box and says when it’s coming out. The end of the video also has a simple chyron acknowledging Bethesda paid “promotional considerations.” That approach should work with too, which has signaled that it does not support “interruptive” advertising — pre-roll and mid-roll ads — in the . Smart, funny can keep fans watching for extended periods, as well as sharing it and talking about it. Now imagine what happens when shareable video like this is also posted on a newly hospitable , where the Doom page already has 589,000 Likes. The results could be huge for brands, and for their creator/publisher partners. As an industry, we’re just beginning to put all these pieces together. But as we do, become a powerful combination of creative messaging, smart partners and deep knowledge of our audiences. And that holds great promise for us all. |
FirstMark Capital’s Matt Turck on the big data landscape | Harry Stebbings | 2,016 | 5 | 30 |
“We are entering the most exciting time for big data,” according to , in our latest interview. In 2010 only 2.5 percent of the Series A market was committed to big data. Today, the sector amounts to more than 7.5 percent of total venture investments. So where are we in the world of big data, and is the recent obsession with AI still fundamentally related to big data? The evolution of big data can be viewed in three distinct timeframes. The formative years of the big data landscape were dominated by a small set of large Internet companies (LinkedIn, Facebook, Google). As a result of their traction, these companies attained mass datasets, had no legacy infrastructure and had the ability to hire the best engineers. So they set out to build the technology the world needed. The second phase saw the fragmentation of top technical talent away from large Internet companies to form their big data own startups. The rise of many “budding unicorns” provided these startups with a client base that similarly had no legacy infrastructure. As Turck stated in our interview, “their lack of legacy infrastructure was key to their innovation.” So they became early clients of these big data startups. The final phase takes us to the present and the most challenging. Many big data technologies have been embraced by a broader range of companies; however, we still have a long way to go. Unlike the “budding unicorns,” most companies do have a legacy infrastructure and a lot more to lose. To a large extent, their existing infrastructure is sufficient, presenting the most challenging hurdle. How can the big data community convince companies to leave legacy infrastructure that has been core to their business, in favor of big data technologies? Turck stated, “it is the job of startups to show that data allows you to be inherently smarter about your business.” Whilst suggesting that there must also be willingness from larger companies “to begin playing with big data.” The recent obsession and progression of AI would not have been possible without big data. Turck even suggests that “AI is the child of big data.” Despite the fact that the algorithms behind deep learning were created decades ago, it was not until they could be applied to mass datasets quickly and cheaply enough that their potential was reached. This led Turck to state, “AI allows big data to deliver on its promise.” Ultimately, the continuing maturation of the ecosystem will see AI act as the catalyst toward the rise of the application layer of big data. However, we are still in the very early days of the big data landscape. With that in mind, and the continuing discovery of dataset applications, the big data opportunity is bigger than anticipated.
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Diane Greene wants to put the enterprise front and center of Google Cloud strategy | Ron Miller | 2,016 | 5 | 30 | When , it got more than a stealthy startup. It also landed as executive vice president of Google Cloud Enterprise — and that perhaps was the bigger prize. Greene brought with her years of industry experience, having co-founded and been CEO at VMware for a decade, building it into a virtualization powerhouse. In fact, under Greene’s watch, . She stuck around for five years, , before a wealthy woman. She spent the next several years helping other companies as a board member. One of those companies was Alphabet. It was through this relationship that she was lured back to the big corporation, where she was charged with taking Google’s struggling cloud business and turning it into the enterprise powerhouse many suspected it always could be. In a world with three or four big players, by just about any measure AWS is light years ahead of everyone with a market share lead that, as of last year, combined. Google is fourth in that mix, behind Microsoft in second and IBM in third, according to numbers from . The bad news for Google is that it has less than five percent market share as of Q4 2015. The good news is that it grew at a brisk 108 percent for the quarter, second only behind Microsoft’s 124 percent growth rate. That means Greene has her work cut out for her, but she doesn’t seem all that worried. She says AWS has a big lead simply because it got a head start on everyone else, including Google. “They were there in the public cloud long before Google. We didn’t decide to do public cloud for about four years after AWS,” Greene told TechCrunch. She says that AWS has a big chunk of what essentially is a very small piece of the potential market, and she believes her company has plenty of time to catch up and grab a substantial share of the remainder. While that’s all true, it’s worth pointing out that Google has had six years to work at this and, in spite of all its resources, has managed to garner less than five percent of market share. After having so much success, why did Greene want to go back to a high-level executive job at a big company and take on this challenge to improve Google’s cloud position? She says she just sort of fell into it, but given her background and experience in the enterprise, she certainly appears to be the right person for the job. As she tells it, she had a lot of conversations with the folks at Google as part of her job as an Alphabet board member, and she began to see a role for herself there. It all started when she became friendly with Urs Hölzle, senior VP of technical infrastructure at Google Cloud, while walking their dogs together. She knew they were ramping Google Cloud pretty aggressively. As their friendship grew, they were discussing possible candidates for the role to run the overall cloud business. “He is a totally brilliant and wonderful person. We started taking our dog for walks and became pretty good friends,” she explained. Eventually they focused on her. “One thing led to another and we were having trouble finding someone, and I eventually said OK I would do it — and here I am,” she said. With Greene, Google scored someone with a tremendous enterprise pedigree. At the time of her hiring in November, Steve Herrod, who was CTO at VMware under Greene, and who is currently managing partner at venture capital firm General Catalyst, . “She is awesome and immediately changes the game for Google’s cloud efforts. The engineering team at bebop was outstanding as well and they’ll bring a ton of enterprise DNA to Google,” he told TechCrunch at the time. When Greene came on board, the cloud business was fragmented. One of the first things she did was unify all the pieces under a single umbrella, with her at the top of the unit. Sundar Pichai outlined the new organization when he announced Greene’s hiring. As , Greene would be in charge of a newly integrated enterprise cloud business that brought together Google for Work, Google Cloud Platform and Google Apps under a consolidated product, engineering, marketing and sales team. She said one of the reasons for this single Google Cloud view was her experience at VMware, where they valued integrated execution across the company. She felt that in order for this to work well, all these cloud pieces had to be working in sync with a consistent message up and down the entire cloud stack. The other thing she emphasized at VMware that she brought to Google was the importance of building a broad partnership network. “We were super friendly to partners at VMware and I brought that in here. There are huge opportunities to partner with companies and we’ve been accelerating that very quickly. Google is committed to open source and open APIs and part of that is creating a partner-friendly place,” she explained. While she wasn’t ready to name names yet because the ink was still drying on some of the agreements, Google did let me know they have 13,000 partners in the network, so it’s not something they just started after Greene came to the company, but she is attempting to build on that existing effort. As Greene applies her enterprise chops to the Google Cloud platform, she rightly sees a market that’s heating up — and one that Google should by all rights be well-positioned to grab a big piece of. Photo Credit: “The enterprise has become a super interesting and exciting place,” she said. “Everybody is realizing .” She sees that cloud having a big role in that as it allows companies to communicate better, flatten hierarchies and move much more quickly than they could running equipment inside a data center. One of the big difference makers Greene is seeing is the power of data and the role the cloud plays in that. “It’s all about data and getting insights out of data. This is all fairly recent, that everybody is like ‘whoa, if I don’t do this and my competitor does, I’m going to be left behind,'” she said. As you might expect, she sees Google as a strong contender for these transforming businesses because it has had to do this itself as a company, building data centers, processing huge amounts of data and applying analytics to it to understand what it has. She sees that experience as a big differentiator for her company. “It is Google’s time for enterprise. Google has a lot to offer the world and it all came together in a nice way. There was just a lot of effort going on around the enterprise that has set things up really well,” she explained. That could be true, but Google needs to win the hearts and minds of enterprise IT staff, who might mistakenly see Google as merely Google Apps and not the entire cloud stack it has become. Having a spokesperson like Greene should help in that regard, and she says a big part of her job is talking to customers and finding out what they need and how Google can help. AWS is clearly the big dawg at the moment, but Greene doesn’t seem all that worried. In spite of AWS existing for a decade, she sees Google as a worthy competitor in . “I don’t feel like we both started off building cloud at the same time. We came from different places. The place where we are behind and that’s changing quickly is in workloads. Every customer wants to run on all the clouds. Pilots have been deployed and are up and running and growing incredibly fast right now,” she said. She gets the current landscape, but with her in charge, she sees a market that’s wide open for competition and a company that’s ready to seize that opportunity. “They have more workloads and features and more partners, but those are very straightforward things to change.” she said. |
Nestor focuses on delivering lunch for office workers in Paris | Romain Dillet | 2,016 | 5 | 30 | French startup just raised $1 million (€900,000) from business angels through , and . The startup competes in the incredibly fierce market of food delivery startups in Paris. Compared to its competitors, Nestor has a full stack approach and focuses on weekday lunches for office workers. Nestor’s product offering is quite simple. Every day, the startup puts up a different meal with a starter, an entrée and a dessert for €15 (roughly $16.5). Like , Nestor cooks everything in-house and delivers hot meals. And that’s it, you can’t choose your entrée, you can’t say no to the dessert. Keeping things simple has a clear advantage. I’ve ordered from Nestor a few times already, and it’s clear that it solves many logistical issues. On average, Nestor delivers meals in 13 minutes. Every day, Nestor delivers 1,000 meals and is growing by 15 percent per week. I’ve heard about companies that rely mostly on Nestor for lunch every day. There’s one big caveat, if you’re vegetarian, you’re out of luck. And yet, Nestor is still quite restrictive when it comes to its delivery area. If you don’t work in the west part of Paris, you can’t order from Nestor just yet. The good news is that Nestor is opening up deliveries in La Défense, the large business district with hundreds of thousands of workers. Now let’s see if the startup can scale its offering if Nestor becomes popular over there. There are a few advantages when a startup chooses to cook everything itself. While Nestor doesn’t really compete with Frichti directly, everything I about Frichti’s full-stack approach still holds true for Nestor. Food delivery startups operating in Paris, like , and , need to make sure that restaurants can generate margins using their services. Like in other industries, managing every level of the stack lets you bring the prices down or generate significant margins. Nestor, , , and each operate one big cooking and delivery service. A full-stack approach is also better when it comes to branding. Nestor isn’t a delivery startup. You’re eating something from Nestor. Whether you like or hate what you’re eating, it’s going to be Nestor’s responsibility. The startup owns the experience. |
null | Ingrid Lunden | 2,016 | 5 | 31 | null |
Vote now in The Europas Conference & Awards for European startups | Mike Butcher | 2,016 | 5 | 30 | In partnership with TechCrunch, , which I founded, has . Think of it as a relaxed, summer prelude to the heat of a Disrupt, followed by an all-out celebration of startups. Admittedly, it’s how we like to do things in Europe… The Europas includes a public vote to determine the industry’s favorites. Thus, voting . This is the final short list from which the winners will be chosen by a combination of industry votes and and announced at an evening awards ceremony. The awards are supported by TechCrunch, the official and exclusive media partner. Attendees, nominees and winners will get deep discounts to , later this year. Held annually, The Europas are the main European Awards for technology startups. The whole thing comes together on a special awards night in London, on June 14, which is preceded by a smaller scale, but intimate, conference where there is no VIP list and plenty of amazing discussions between founders and investors. Of course, out of the sheer need to filter the thousands of people in tech startups across Europe, the Awards can’t cover every single startup, investor and entrepreneur. But it’s a selection of amongst the best Europe has to offer. The awards are editorially led, with many and others suggested by judges. There is no charge to enter or be selected or to win. (There is only a charge to attend the awards ceremony, but it’s a super fun event for the whole industry).
-“Choose a a sound, record yourself, send to your friends.”
– “Jukedeck is developing an artificially intelligent music composer.”
– “Car Throttle is the internet’s fastest growing car community.”
– “The fastest way to find and book great musicians.”
– “Touchvie brings context to content.”
– “Real-time TV and video clip sharing.”
– “The best of UK television all in one place.”
(Cyber London)
(The Dash)
, Accel Partners
, Seedcamp
, LocalGlobe
, Passion Capital
, Spark Labs
, Atomico
, Whitestar Capital
, Qualcomm Ventures
, Connect Ventures
, Balderton Capital
, GV
, Index Ventures
, PROFounders
, Northzone
, Octopus Investments
, Earlybird
, Balderton
, Partech
, Mangrove
, Meltwater, MEST, Shack15
, Skyscanner
, Shazam
, Baby2Body
, BorrowMyDoggy
, Watchfit
Awarded to a key, long-term player in European tech startups. Suggested by the community in online voting.
(Decided from winners in other categories by Judges) (P.S. You can follow The Europas on and or the ). |
Afraid of the future? Try Technotopia | John Biggs | 2,016 | 5 | 8 | Over the past few months I’ve been on a mission: I want to prove that the future is not going to suck. While this project was originally going to end up in a book – and it still will – I’ve started recording a weekly podcast called Technotopia in which I speak to amazing thinkers about the future. We’ve covered , , and why the . The latest episode is right here and you can . If you want to be on the show tweet me and I’ll get you into the schedule. Enjoy and here’s to a better future.
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PayPal nixes Purchase Protection for payments made through crowdfunding platforms | Catherine Shu | 2,016 | 5 | 8 | If you use your PayPal account to support a crowdfunding campaign, you can’t rely on its Purchase Protection plan anymore. The payment platform has , payments made on crowdfunding platforms will no longer be eligible for the , which allows users to open disputes for items that don’t arrive or are different than described. Supporting any crowdfunding campaign comes with a degree of risk because you have to trust that your money will actually be used for the stated purpose, whether it’s helping someone reach a goal or supporting the development of a new product. In an emailed statement, PayPal said: In Australia, Brazil, Canada, Japan, United States and other countries, we have excluded payments made to crowdfunding campaigns from our buyer protection programs. This is consistent with the risks and uncertainties involved in contributing to crowdfunding campaigns, which do not guarantee a return for the investment made in these types of campaigns. We work with our crowdfunding platform partners to encourage fundraisers to communicate the risks involved in investing in their campaign to donors. According to a , one of the biggest crowdfunding platforms, nine percent of successfully funded projects fail to deliver rewards, but 65 percent of backers surveyed said their rewards were delivered on time. Those stats only apply to Kickstarter, however, and not the many other crowdfunding platforms out there, which each have their own policies. Back in March 2014, PayPal after some campaigns ran into problems . Its new policies separated campaigns into two categories: fundraising or preselling advance orders on merchandise. According to , preselling campaigns may still get their funds held to ensure that customers can get a refund if a pre-ordered product is not delivered as promised. TechCrunch has asked PayPal for clarification on how it will handle these types of problems in the future. PayPal also added two other kinds of transaction to its updated list of items ineligible for Purchase Protection. They are “anything purchased from or an amount paid to a government agency” and “gambling, gaming and/or any other activity with an entry fee and a prize.” The U.S. Department of Treasury began , which accepts payments to government agencies in February 2015, while the payment platform started . Both developments gave PayPal , and removing them from Purchase Protection mitigates the company’s exposure to risks. |
The digital age of data art | Maxence Grugier | 2,016 | 5 | 8 |
Many artists use as material for art the raw data produced by our societies, seeking innovative means of display or transforming it into a work of art. By blurring boundaries between art and information, dispels the myth of the romantic artist while offering a fundamental artistic act in a critical commentary of the digital age in which we live. An age that is supposedly open and yet increasingly obscure or incomprehensible to non-specialists. By re-appropriating these reams of information, or big data, data artists reintroduce fantasy to an age of increasingly abstract data and concepts. The objective of data art is to create aesthetic forms and artistic works from the digital nature of the data generated from big data (graphics, simulations, worksheets, statistics, etc.). Any virtual data produced by our environment can be transformed into images, objects or sounds. Data art also presents the underlying links that exist between the ubiquitous algorithms in our lives — figures from databases, raw data, data collected by search engines, calculations and statistics (geographical, political, climatic, financial) and artistic creation. Natural disasters around the world. Image from the exhibition EXIT. At the Palais de Tokyo (November 2015 / January 2016). Art and information technology are still unfortunately widely perceived as evolving in two conflicting worlds, but a new generation of artists working in the field of electronic media cannot afford to consider the world — and art — in these terms. Using media and IT tools is a creative process that is natural for them (this usually involves information technology: software development; programming; data analysis; algorithms; documentation and meta-data retrieval on the Internet, etc.). This still-emerging aesthetic trend offers a new interpretation of the increasingly “mathematical” and rationalist world in which we live, re-enchanting the everyday life of homo technologicus. For these artists, this techno-scientific vision only touches the surface of another, much more complex, secret and marvelous world — a world that also speaks volumes, a world of data and information. The world in which we live is almost entirely governed by algorithms. An algorithm is a sequence of computer instructions, applied systematically by a machine, or by software. In the past, an operator instructed a computer and commands were performed. With algorithms, the computer carries out automatic tasks alone, unassisted. Some algorithms are the syndication’s key participants (subscription to a data flow; for example, RSS flow). They search for information and send it to the user registered on a “syndication feed.” Of course, other algorithms pick up the same data. These programs capture — and therefore propose — content, according to prior choices made by the user (on Google, Amazon, Facebook, Yahoo, etc.); these are flow aggregators and big data collectors. The current quantitative explosion of digital data streams requires new ways for this information to be visualized. The processing of the research, retrieval, storage and analysis of this data is still an emerging sector, but it provides work for evaluation and analysis specialists, as well as for artists. Processing this extremely complex and diversified data is responsible for a brand new economic sector emerging in the field of information technology, along with new forms of artistic creation. The treemap represents hierarchical data in a limited space, invented by Ben Shneiderman. Data visualization has become a fundamental discipline as more and more businesses, local councils and public services are forced to invent visually amusing and striking ways to classify dig data generated by the movements in populations, their patterns of consumption, communication and travel, etc. The first step in the world of data art consists of addressing how to view this data. Amongst the pioneers of this discipline, previously solely scientific and devoted to graphical representations of statistical data, are theorist Edward Tufte, responsible for the creation of sparklines (a concise graphic format developed for insertion in text), and Ben Shneiderman, who invented treemap in 1990. Amongst the other graphical representation techniques and terminology, there are bar charts, pie charts (better known as Camembert or Donut Chart), scatter graphs, lines, bubbles, heat maps, (mapping of “hotspots”), etc. They all refer to the different ways of making visually attractive and, above all, understandable the reams of data (also called “datascapes”) that shape our everyday lives. Data visualization, often generating extremely complex graphics, sometimes becomes artistic. Matt Willey, for example, draws inspiration from these forms with At This Rate and 2060 Poster, to show the impact of the economy and human activities on the environment. Matt Willey, 2060 Poster. Produced to raise awareness of the destruction of the Amazon rainforest. To give a timeline to the origins of what is today known as data art (also called information art or informatism), reference should be made to the minimalist artist Kynaston McShine and his exhibition “Information,” given at the MoMA in 1970. By choosing to present the combination of science, informatics and information technology with the most classical forms of art (including performance art, visual art, digital art and conceptual art), McShine proposes a first definition of data art. In the MoMA exhibition catalogue, he wrote: “Increasingly artists use mail, telegrams, telex machines, etc., for transmission of works themselves — photographs, films, documents — or of information about their activity.” For Kynaston McShine, art and information already formed one single progressive movement, in a period literally “made of information.” Other signs of data art are also apparent amongst pioneers of generative art, an artistic form calling upon computer-generated creation via algorithms and computer language. Mark Napier, Black and White, generative art (2003). However, before the advent of today’s extremely complex forms of data art, there were works like those by the artist Mark Napier, part of the generative art movement, who produced Black and White, a work based on the stream of information captured by “Carnivore,” a software program developed by the FBI in the 2000s. Julian Oliver, Packet Garden. Data Art, making the intangible visible. An increasing number of facets of our existence interact with each other through the multiple flow networks forming today’s information landscape. A historical and technological context that inspired Julian Oliver, for example, with Packet Garden, a project depicting our movements on the web portrayed as incredible engineered gardens, and Jason Salavon who, with American Varietal, offers a creative view of American ethnic plurality. Jason Salavon, American Varietal, 2013 / Real-time interactive system, structural steel, multi-touch screen. These intricately linked communication and movements are then assembled in huge databases by the algorithmic machine. This is what, for example, inspired one of the pioneers of data art, Aaron Koblin, with Flight Patterns (2009), a data art classic visualizing air traffic, a material representation of worldwide communication. from . Others, like the German artist Stefan Sagmeister, wish to resume the immaterial and abstract appearance of figures, streams and data recovery program. Move Your Money is a humorous, 3D inflatable metaphor — based on children’s bouncy inflatable castles — to make international monetary flows tangible. Love Will Tear Us Apart Again, Peter Crnokrak. In a more amusing — and rock ‘n roll — way, with The Long Black Veil, the artist Jeffrey Docherty creates an intangible map of the 1980s Punk and New Wave scene. Love Will Tear Us Apart Again by Peter Crnokrak is a diagram of the emotional impact of the resumption of Joy Division hit Love Will Tear Us Apart in different countries and by different interpreters. With Serendipity in 2014, Kyle McDonald proposes a map connecting people listening to the same piece at the same time on Spotify. Creative apps and imagination are considerable in this field. The goal of data art, inspired by very down-to-earth techniques to visualize data, is above all to make the invisible visible. However, by formatting these reams of data, data artists are not content with making legible the mesh of information from which it is formed, they also take a critical look at our society. By appropriating this intangible flow of data, data artists position themselves as observers and testify to behaviors, inferring details about mankind, the eternal demiurge — whether artists or sociologists, mathematicians or business men — for whom data collection indicates a compulsive need to control their even most abstract environment. Jonathan Harris and Sepandar Kamvar, We Feel Fine, net mapping the net collecting Internet sentences beginning with “I feel” or “I am feeling.” Nearly 10 million feelings and more than two million blogs were collected. However, with the evolution of generative graphics and data capture techniques, contemporary data art artists sometimes go beyond criticism to deliver instantly beautiful works of art that speak for themselves… almost. This is the case with Jonathan Harris and Sepandar Kamvar, with We Feel Fine, an exploration of human emotions, or Reynald Drouhin with Internet Protocol City, a generator of “ghost towns” transforming the IP addresses of Internet users into monochrome buildings, when abstract and cold data changes into the pure state of metaphoric beauty. |
Rapper and founder Ryan Leslie explains why his latest music isn’t on streaming services (for now) | Anthony Ha | 2,016 | 5 | 8 | If anyone wants to text and have a one-on-one conversation with a big-deal rapper, here’s his number: 646-887-6978. That’s not a secret. Leslie and encourages people to message him — it’s a way for him to develop a direct relationship with his fans. And now with his startup , he’s building tech tools to manage those messages and relationships. I spoke to Leslie about SuperPhone earlier this week . Some of this might be familiar if you , but I think Leslie spoke insightfully about his own experiences, how they led to the creation of SuperPhone and where the company goes from here. (For one thing, there are plans for a version of the product that serves regular consumers.) I also got to ask Leslie about the decision to keep his recent music, including his latest album , off streaming services like Spotify and Apple Music. (This discussion starts at around 18:30 in the video above.) “I absolutely love all of them,” he told me. “I love the ability for fans to be able to discover my music. The main disconnect that I have with streaming services … is that if a fan wants to let me know that they’re my number one fan on streaming — as it stands right now, that data is not passed to me.” In other words, his resistance to services like Spotify is more about data than money. After all, there’s not much cash being paid out here, so “you’re going to make most of your money with a direct relationship.” (And SuperPhone is supposed to help artists build and manage those relationships.) Leslie added that the data issue is something he’s been discussing with the companies in question: “Once that’s ironed out, that’s when my music will be back on those streaming services.” |
Lilwil’s personalized learning engine teaches teachers how to teach | Josh Constine | 2,016 | 5 | 8 | Every student has a unique learning style, but it’s tough for teachers to figure out whether they learn best through lectures, images, reading, self-directed practice or group projects. By using publicly available education progress data and personality analysis, Lilwil is able to automatically identify the best teaching method for a student and recommend it to their instructor. Lilwil was one of the hundreds of projects built overnight at the . It could make schools more efficient, keep students engaged and make teaching more rewarding. Personalized learning is becoming a big trend in tech with the to develop software and strategies in the space. First, Lilwil used the HMH API which has data on the grades and assignments of students in a large percentage of public schools. It then applies IBM’s Watson to assess the different personality traits of students based on their work such as openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness and emotional range. Lilwil then presents a personality analysis to teachers, along with suggestions for the best methods for assisting that student. For example, Lilwil could identify higher levels of extraversion and conscientiousness in a student, and determine that they’re best taught through role-playing simulations and roundtable discussions. Two of the Lilwil team’s founders, Lishing Chan and Will Ho, originally met in Singapore before coming to the U.S. They’d both had bad experiences in school because they weren’t taught with strategies that matched their disposition. That can be especially problematic in countries like Malaysia where one of the founders grew up, considering students can be physically punished with caning for poor performance. Their experiences inspired them, along with Luis Bosquez, to build Lilwil so other students have a more adaptive journey through education. Many teachers stick with the tough job because they love watching children blossom. Lilwil could make it easier to unlock these students’ full potential, making the teaching profession more satisfying and attractive to talent. Chan tells us “We thought there’s a better way to match learning styles and teaching methods to maximize how students learn. That group of students in primary and secondary school will be our workforce in the future!” |
AlexaSite wins the Disrupt NY 2016 Hackathon Grand Prize | Romain Dillet | 2,016 | 5 | 8 | night at the Brooklyn Cruise Terminal. But this time, you couldn’t see anyone waiting for a boat. Instead, the Cruise Terminal hosted a very special competition — the Hackathon. Around 650 engineers and designers got together to come up with something cool, something neat, something awesome. The only condition was that they only had 24 hours to work on their projects. Some of them were participating in our event for the first time, while others were regulars. We could all feel the excitement in the air when the 90 teams took the stage to present a short one-minute demo to impress fellow coders and our judges. But only one team could take home the grand prize and $5,000. So, without further ado, meet the Disrupt NY 2016 Hackathon winner. lets designers update websites using their voice. This technology could be particularly useful for designers working with clients. You could make small adjustments on the go without having to dive into your CSS sheets. AlexaSite uses Amazon’s Alexa API and works with Squarespace websites. Impressive! aims to make cutting edge accident, prevention and collision avoidance technology available to all drivers. It warns you when you’re approaching a dangerous area with a historically higher than average accident rate. It also warns tired drivers when they’re accidentally changing lanes. Bumperz leverages New York City’s open data when it comes to car crashes. Useful! helps you find and cook the best recipes with whatever you have in your fridge. But this hack’s secret sauce is that it works with your Amazon Echo and natural language. You can simply tell Hungry Host your ingredients, then the app will guide you step by step with instructions and timers. Neat! Kathryn Finney is the founder and Managing Director of (DID), which invests in the success of Black and Latina women founders by providing them with the network, coaching, and funding to build, scale, and exit their high-growth companies. DID runs the BIG Innovation Center, home to the BIG Accelerator, a 16-week program for high potential startups led by Black and Latina Founders. She is also a General Partner in the Harriet Fund, the first pre-seed venture fund investing in high-potential Black and Latina women-led startups. One of the first social media “stars,” Kathryn sold her site, The Budget Fashionista, in 2014. She was the editor-at-large at BlogHer, a platform representing 40 million-plus women influencers. An honors graduate of Yale University and Rutgers University and Eisenhower Fellow, Kathryn received the Champion of Change Award in 2013 from the White House for tech inclusion. She’s also listed in Marie Claire’s 10 Women to Watch in 2016, Entrepreneurs Magazine’s “Woman to Watch in 2016”, New York Business Journal’s Women of Influence Award, SXSW Black Innovator and more. She’s inducted into Spelman College’s “Game Changers Academy.” On February 26, 2015 she was honored by Manhattan Borough President Gale Brewer with the “Kathryn Finney Appreciation Day.” Trained as an architect with a decade-plus of experience in planning and design, Jean founded , the first-of-its-kind residential renovation marketplace, matching homeowners with local design and construction experts based on the budget, location, and style of each project. Sweeten has raised $4.3 million in funding, tripled in size in 2015, with more than $300 million in renovation deals posted. During her time as the Senior Manager of Global Architecture at Coach Inc., Jean built and managed web platforms for the design and construction of Coach stores internationally and received the company’s Chairman’s Award for her work. Jean graduated from The Cooper Union with a Bachelor of Architecture and was selected as one of 9 recipients of the 2011 Loeb Fellowship at Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design. Jean also co-founded and chairs the African American Student Union (AASU) at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design, dedicated to supporting African Americans in architecture, real estate, and urban planning.
Charlie O’Donnell is the sole Partner and Founder at . The fund makes seed and pre-seed investments and was the first venture firm located in Brooklyn where he was born and raised. Brooklyn Bridge invested in the first rounds of Canary, Orchard Platform, Tinybop, Hungryroot, Clubhouse, Ringly, and goTenna among others. He has also funded two companies, GroupMe and Docracy, out of the TechCrunch Disrupt Hackathon. Previously, Charlie worked on the investment teams of Union Square Ventures and First Round Capital. He bikes to work, in Gowanus, has done six triathlons, four marathons, and runs the kayaking program in Brooklyn Bridge Park. The longest he has consecutively been outside of the five boroughs of New York City is three weeks. Saron Yitbarek is the founder of , the most supportive community of programmers and people learning to code. She’s also host of the weekly CodeNewbie Podcast and a program manager at Microsoft for Tech Jobs Academy, a technical training program for talented New Yorkers ready to launch their tech career. You can follow her @saronyitbarek. |
E-susu aims to close the gap between community loan groups and traditional banking services | Natasha Lomas | 2,016 | 5 | 8 | An interesting hack presented on stage today at TechCrunch Disrupt New York 2016 is a platform for non-traditional banking services. Called e-susu, the app is designed for people who are involved with informal loan groups to help them better manage the process of lending money within a family or community group, as well as encouraging the saving process via increased transparency. The platform lets users track how much money is owed within the group, when payments are due and when they have been paid. Users can also create goals to specify what they are saving for, and a group messaging feature is also included, while the team plans to also integrate the ability to make payments directly into the platform in future. All sorts of cultures have some form of informal group loans for centuries to provide alternatives to traditional banking services, notes team member Nikki Puckett, 23, who when not attending tech hackathons works in finance. The name for these loan groups vary in different countries but is one example — hence the app being called e-susu. “Sometimes people can get in trouble for participating in it because if they are at work and they are collecting money that can be seen as something illegal. This takes that risk away and brings it to online platform and puts everything in one spot, all the group knows exactly what’s going on. So we’re trying to create an easily accessible platform,” Puckett tells TechCrunch. “Communities participate in banking services… but a lot of that is non-traditional. So we’re trying to bridge that gap by taking something that’s already done and just making it more visible, making it so that you can point to this and say now I can build credit because look at my history here.” “This is something which you could go to a bank and say we have participated in a savings program,” she adds. Puckett worked on the core concept and business planning for the team, as well as presenting the e-susu hack on stage. Another member of the team, Mahdi Hamdi, a 28-year-old full stack developer, reckons that as well as serving groups of people who are excluded from banking credit, the platform could have wider appeal with young people generally — because he argues millennials don’t trust traditional financial institutions. “I think millennials are shifting and renewing everything. Tourism now, people they don’t want to go to hotels, they want to stay with locals, even with finance — the shocking statistic I heard is that 73 per cent of millennials they prefer going to the dentist to going to a bank,” he tells TechCrunch. “We really don’t feel safe with these formal, financial institutions.” The team say they plan to continue working on the app – having originally come up with the concept at a prior hackathon. TC Disrupt NY is the pair’s second hackathon. |
Teach-U: VR uses virtual reality to let anyone learn piano or drums | Jon Russell | 2,016 | 5 | 8 | NYU Shanghai students Sean Kelly and Sam Shi want to use the potential of VR to increase access to information. Over the weekend at in New York, the duo initially looked into assisting students studying brain surgery but they switched their target and developed Teach-U: VR — a platform that lets students, and particularly young people, learn music. Kelly said they were drawn to the topic because of the potential to help young people develop their creativity. Since not everyone has the money or free time to learn with a teacher in a traditional setting, VR can be the platform for studying at a far lower cost or over long distances. “Music education has proven positive effects for children and adults alike — however when schools cut their budgets, music ed is often one of the first programs to be abandoned. This leaves hundreds of thousands of kids without music in their lives,” they explained. Kelly and Shi used Google’s Cardboard VR device with an infrared sensor from PMD added to enable hand gestures into the virtual environment. So beyond merely observing via Cardboard, users can reach out, touch and play their virtual instruments. They also adapted the setup — which was developed using Unity, Carnival’s SDK and good ol’ fashioned tinkering — to allow two concurrent users in the same virtual reality space: the teacher and the student. Initially, the service supports drums and piano. I had a play with it and, considering the project is less than two days old, I came away impressed, although the hand gestures required to play the instruments take a little practice to learn. Kelly and Shi study in Shanghai but are seconded in New York for this current semester. They plan to keep developing Teach-U: VR when they have time, and PMD was particularly keen to lend support to this promising idea. (You can read more about their hackthon experience .) VR is poised to breakout this year with Oculus, HTC and others all releasing their first headsets to the public. The initial focus and use cases are very much centered around gaming and content, but that’s really just scratching the surface. The ability to replicate environments and tap into mobile — Cardboard requires a mobile devices and not an expensive or sophisticated PC setup — means that anyone in the world can use it and get into any kind of scenario. So projects like this — which go beyond gaming to democratize access to information and education — will be key to making the most of virtual reality’s potential. |
Helix conducts research as you write | Kate Conger | 2,016 | 5 | 8 | Researchers often need to go beyond Google to find the kind of medical journal articles and flat data files necessary for their work. But many journal articles are locked away in databases like JSTOR or PubMed, which don’t have the reliable search capabilities of an engine like Google — so researchers have to waste time tracking them down. Enter , a word processor plug-in created at this year’s by Paul Burke and Neil Krishnan. Helix uses machine learning to suggest citations and relevant research as you write. Helix scans a writer’s text as he or she types and automatically pulls in recommendations for relevant journal articles, news and Wikipedia pages. The recommendations display in a queue alongside the writer’s main text, so they can be reviewed at a glance without leaving the word processor. A writer can request suggestions on a specific phrase or sentence by highlighting it, or just let Helix make suggestions based on the entirety of the article. “Many researchers use Google searches because journal sites have terrible search functions,” Burke says. He and Krishnan developed Helix to give researchers a faster option that won’t distract them or take them away from their writing. Burke and Krishnan primarily focused on medical research for their work at the Disrupt NY Hackathon, pulling journal articles from PubMed, but the duo hope to expand by adding other databases of journals as well. Burke and Krishnan built Helix using a free trial version of and . Unfortunately, when their free trial expires in two weeks, Helix might face some hiccups. But by then, Burke and Krishnan hope to approach Lateral about working together. Helix came together at the very last moment, as Hackathon projects often do. “The cutoff was 9:30 and I wrote the last line of code at 9:25,” Burke says with a laugh. “Before that, it wasn’t showable.” By the time of the demo, Helix looked impressive. Check it out below. |
Your voice is your password with Sesame’s Alexa app | Fitz Tepper | 2,016 | 5 | 8 | Between Alexa’s built-in functionality and , you can now use the platform to do almost anything. Simple voice commands let you do things like order a pizza, send someone money on Venmo, or even buy another Echo. But here’s the thing – anyone using your Echo can do these things without your permission, potentially putting you on the line for fraudulent transactions. Luckily, a team at TC’s decided to built , an Alexa Skills app that lets you add voice authentication to certain tasks. To use the service a user goes to Sesame’s web-based app, and gives a voice command like “Venmo Joe $10”. Sesame then authenticates the user’s voice by matching it with a prerecorded passphrase, and passes the request onto Alexa to fulfill. But why does Sesame need to be web-based and not native on Alexa? Because Alexa’s API doesn’t actually pass through voice to developers, only a text transcription of what the user said. Since a text transcription obviously isn’t enough to authenticate your voice, Sesame had to be built as an in-between between your voice and Alexa. Sesame’s current iteration lets you send a friend money on Venmo, order Pizza, and send a text message, but the team expects to add functionality like the ability for only certain users to change the song on Spotify or place an order on Postmates. In addition to Alexa’s Skills API, the team also used to power their voice authentication. The app was built by , , and Ryan Neff, who all met for the first time at the event. The team plans on polishing Sesame and eventually releasing it as a full-fledged product built on top of Alexa. |
The Blind Date Club turns your Echo speaker into a matchmaker | Sarah Perez | 2,016 | 5 | 8 | Can Amazon’s virtual assistant Alexa serve as a matchmaker? That’s the idea behind The Blind Date Club, a project from a team of coders presenting today at the TechCrunch Disrupt NY 2016 Hackathon. Designed as a voice-activated app for the Echo speaker, The Blind Date Club lets you search for dating profiles by voice, have them read aloud to you, and then get connected with your matches, also by voice. Yes, it’s sort of like an Alexa-powered Tinder. The idea for the app comes from a group of friends who live and work in New York at companies including General Assembly, RentHop, and Condé Nast: C. Spencer Beggs, Adi Hanash, Theresa Lau, Isaac Torres and Shane Leese. Due to Wi-Fi issues, Hanash chose to describe their hack onstage instead of demonstrating it, but we got a chance to check it out backstage. To use The Blind Date Club, you begin by simply asking Alexa to find you a date. You can also specify a gender by saying, “Alexa, find me a woman (or man).” Like Tinder, the app then returns a somewhat randomized match based on geo-location. But instead of swiping based on the person’s looks, the app reads you that person’s profile and details your common interests. In theory, these dating profiles would also be created by voice with users answering a series of questions posed by Alexa. However, for time’s sake, the Blind Date Club used dummy profiles to showcase how the technology works. If you like a match and want to be connected, you can confirm your interest by voice. If that person also matches with you, then you’re able to continue to interact with them. In a future build, this could even include sending each other voice files. The “blind date” part comes from the fact that you are matching first based on profile data, not photos. Users would first have to interact a few times before photos were unlocked, or before being provided a virtual phone number which they could call or text. (To be clear, these features are not available in the project as it was demoed today, but are ideas the team had in mind.) For those interested in the technical details, the application is an Alexa skill written in Node.js, and served from a custom HTTPS endpoint using .club TLD. The API is an Express app hosted on an AWS EC2 server instance with continuous integration provided by Drone. The API is defined in Swagger. This was the first time anyone on the team had developed for Alexa, we’re told. As the team explains, The Blind Date Club creates a social interaction component to Alexa. That’s an interesting idea, given how popular the Echo speaker has become and how it’s finding a way into the lives of more mainstream users. But despite being accessed daily for things like news, weather, traffic, music, podcasts, and other functions, we haven’t seen many attempts at building a social experience on top of the platform. The Blind Date Club could change that as it would create a social user base that connects over Echo by voice, not via text and photos and on the web and mobile. The team doesn’t know yet if they’ll continue to work on the app after the hackathon, however. But they’re now excited to build for Alexa in the future. |
Hungry Host uses Alexa to help you figure out what to cook tonight | Matthew Lynley | 2,016 | 5 | 8 | You have a bunch of ingredients in your fridge, and you don’t know what you want to cook. You just bought an Amazon Echo, dying to figure out some new things to do with it. Well, you can do both of these with a hack put together at the TechCrunch Disrupt NY Hackathon that does just that. With , you use Alexa to list off a bunch of ingredients that you have in your fridge, and it’ll dig through its database of recipes to recommend one to cook. It uses Alexa’s voice-powered interface, so you just rattle them off and get a recipe. It’s a project that was thrown together by a team of four engineers and designers in an all-night hackathon that taps into Alexa’s voice recognition to make the process of finding recipes and cookings completely hands-free. “I’ve been using a lot of meal kits like Blue Apron. It’s just been top of mind because I’ve been trying those things,” project designer Nisha Garigarn said, adding that the menu cards are annoying, “still a piece of paper — I slide it in between my cabinets so I don’t have to hold it.” There’s a second perk here — Alexa will rattle off the next steps for the recipe as you progress through the process. If you’re messing around with raw chicken, you probably don’t want to touch a tablet or a phone in order to find the next steps. Hungry Host will list them off and you can jump forward and backwards as you need to. “It was interesting figuring out how Alexa worked,” Garigarn said. “There were certain commands and you had to check how we were speaking — it was just really cool tinkering with it.” It’s just a hack, to be sure, so there’s a good chance that there will be some other in-depth attempts at doing something similar to this. But for someone who cooks a lot, it shows a lot of promise for the platform — and how a hands-free voice interface can work for use cases beyond simply asking for songs. It wasn’t a project that was completely premeditated — the team just wanted to experiment with the Alexa API. The team also included two other engineers: Zoltan Szaslas, who focused on the search part of the project, and Adam Chew. The fourth member, Jeneta Hot, said she came to the hackathon to dust off her programming skills, which she hadn’t used in a couple of years. “It seemed like something we could build in the hackathon, and I would use it,” Hot said. In terms of next steps, there aren’t any quite yet. Garigarn works on another startup called , a membership service that gives users access to co-working spaces around the city. Hot and the rest of the team don’t quite have any plans yet, either, but perhaps a curiosity around the project and Alexa might be a signal to the future of what they’re working on. |
The Eliza app makes mental health tracking as easy as talking to yourself | Lora Kolodny | 2,016 | 5 | 8 | The Eliza app asks users to record a voice memo, say, venting about an issue they’re dealing with at work or simply reflecting on their day. The app turns the user’s speech into text that’s ready for sentiment analysis. After each memo is quickly analyzed, Eliza generates an infographic that shows users whether they sound happy and calm, mostly, or maybe stressed and in need of support from friends and therapists. It also lets users see, over time, how they’ve been feeling. The idea is to get people to counseling, or at least to talk with someone they love and trust before they find themselves dealing with unmitigated and debilitating levels of depression, anxiety or other mental health issues. Developers , a junior at Vassar College, and , a senior at Lehigh University, used IBM Watson and Twilio technology to create this app, and built it on Ionic to make it cross-platform from the start. The students said they don’t want to turn this app into a startup, but will continue to work on it, ideally making it available for free to help mental health researchers. The duo also said they want to de-stigmatize mental health problems and therapy. “Sometimes you are in self denial that you have an issue, but if you have something in the palm of your hand feeding it back to you, objectively, you can’t deny it,” Min said. Hodge noted that Eliza also lets users share their information with a licensed therapist. She hopes that charting the data over time can help therapists see what’s working, or not, for their patients and prepare for counseling sessions, among other things. The team has competed at hackathons before and intends to keep doing so. They were the winners of the best use of VR award at Bitcamp earlier this year for BumbleAidr, a VR app to detect early onset of attention-deficit disorders in users. |
CrowdBuilder is a new app that’s taking on the fragmented event promoter market | Connie Loizos | 2,016 | 5 | 8 | According to the research firm IBISWorld, there are currently more than in the U.S., most of whom have limited geographic reach. Even including the industry’s largest player, Live Nation Entertainment, the biggest companies in the space account for no more than a quarter of industry revenue, estimated to be $23 billion annually. A new app, CrowdBuilder, plans to fully automate the process and do away with promoters entirely. The idea: to directly marry venues like restaurants, clubs and theaters with potential patrons who are given enticements to visit the space or event. In its current iteration, hosts log in and create an event to which they want to attract a crowd. Meanwhile, patrons log in, view these different types of happenings, and create a menu of events that they’d like to attend. When there’s a match, patrons receive an SMS message (using a Cisco API) with either a free perk or even a small amount of compensation that would otherwise go to a promoter. Given that CrowdBuilder was built just last night at our Disrupt Hackathon in New York, it has some kinks left to work out, including more advanced integration with LinkedIn and Facebook, which can give hosts some idea of who they are inviting to their venues, as well as enable friends to see which of their friends is attending a particular event. It has some other challenges to overcome, too. CrowdBuilder would need to build out a two-sided marketplace, which is no easy feat. The app has competitors, including Eventbrite, the event ticketing company that cross-promotes the events its users are hosting. Not last, in what could be seen as either really good or pretty terrible news, many similar apps have in recent years. Either way, the well-balanced team — including Nina Yang, a designer and iOS developer; computer scientist Irvin Cardenas (who has built a in the past and is at work on a modular humanoid at the moment); and Sharon Gai, a graduate student at Columbia studying knowledge management (she was here observing how enterprises might better organize their own hackathons) — seemed to have fun with it. You can check out their presentation below. |
This chat bot pretends to be you so you can keep up with your friends | Jon Russell | 2,016 | 5 | 8 | Too busy to keep up with your friends? There’s a chat bot for that. We’ve all been there. The deluge of information on Facebook is why I no longer bother to check the social network — because, even when I try my hardest, I miss the important announcements like baby births and marriage proposals. The growth of messaging apps helped here for a while. People broke out into groups where they make announcements and stay in touch, but now that chat apps are used by almost everyone, there’s a lot more information and it becomes impossible to read everything. So, once again, I miss most of my friends’ news and updates, but, added to that, they know I’m not reading or taking part in the discussion like I should be. That’s where The Chat Bot Club, one of the projects from this weekend, wants to help. It allows you to create a bot of yourself, which interacts and talks to your friends like you but without you having to do so. In other words, they think you’re there and paying attention, even though you (read: me!) are often not. Jersey resident Irene Chang came up with the idea after finding it impossible to keep up with her friends and their group chats on Facebook Messenger. The Chat Bot Club uses Cisco Spark and IBM Watson to run bots which learn your style — such as favorite phrases, emojis of choice, etc — and mimic it in groups. The Chat Bot Club is initially a working concept which was created in just over a day at the hackathon. It isn’t ready for your usage yet, but Chang plans to integrate APIs add support for services like WeChat, WhatsApp, Kik, Facebook Messenger and others. One thing I’d love to see added is a daily digest — some kind of report which gives me the down-low on what news and chatter my bot has seen each day. But, until then, you’d need to go back and recap the discussions to get that information. |
Deep Focus saves you from being inundated by unimportant messages | Megan Rose Dickey | 2,016 | 5 | 8 | If it’s your birthday, Mother’s Day or some other significant occasion, it’s likely you’ll receive a barrage of text messages, emails and calls. Even if it’s not a special day, between your friends, significant other and boss, there’s probably a fair amount of action on your phone. summarizes who has contacted you and lets you know how important that information is based on the emotions it has identified in the email, voicemail, text message, Facebook message, etc. From there, Deep Focus marks the message as either important or not important. [gallery ids="1318545,1318499,1318601"] “It’s hard to know what’s important and what’s not,” Jeff Rothkirch, a member of the Deep Focus team, told me. That’s why he and Quan Zhou tapped into Twilio’s messaging API to serve as a middle-person and IBM Watson’s API to determine what you should be notified about. The app works in real time, and you can see how it works by texting 470-823-7643. I sent Jeff a couple of texts to see how well it really worked. When I texted, “I am so angry with you,” Deep Focus marked the message as important. When I texted, “Ahhhhhh heheh,” Deep Focus marked it as not important. Makes sense! The emotion indicator was also spot-on, recognizing that my “important” message included a fair amount of anger and my “unimportant” message had some fear in it. Rothkirch and Zhou aren’t totally sure they’ll make it available to the public, but my fingers are crossed that they do. Check out the presentation below. |
VR Party is a social DJ dance club for virtual reality | Brian Heater | 2,016 | 5 | 8 | Twelve hours into last night’s Disrupt NY Hackathon, Andre Smith still wasn’t sure what he was doing. “People ask me about what my ideas are before the Hackathon,” he explains in a bit of a sleep-deprived daze. “I have no idea. I was already in deep. I didn’t really have a clear vision. I had all of this technology on my desk, but I didn’t know what to do with it.” After a previous year’s demo involving a misbehaving drone, the co-founder of New York-based software development firm was looking to do something involving virtual reality and motion capture – something visually arresting that couldn’t go horribly wrong. Halfway through the night, Smith was joined by marketer and part-time dev, Pocket “Pocket came in and said ‘you should do something with social and VR,'” says Smith. Twelve hours later, they had VR Party, a sort of spiritual successor to the dearly departed social music service, Turntable.fm. “Turntable.fm was a really immersive interactive experience,” explains Silbermintz. “It was like a game online. You could do something passive that was extremely social.” The system utilizes a Samsung Gear VR Headset and a motion tracking PMD sensor, working in a similar room-based format as Turntable.fm, where one to four users serves as the DJ, mixing records through motion detection as other users dance. Due to the time restraints of the Hackathon, the interactive dancing functionality has yet to be added to the program. The pair do plan to continue developing the program, most likely through Smith’s Suitefolio. In its final form, VR Party will have a built-in rating system, allowing popular users to rise through the ranks. “I’m going to enhance it,” says Smith. “Eventually I want to build a virtual resort.” |
TheHelpingHand.club uses Uber to direct homeless people to shelters | Katie Roof | 2,016 | 5 | 8 | But four gentlemen met at the event and decided to build an app that could help keep homeless people off the streets and give them the care that they need. Called TheHelpingHand.club, the app routes Ubers to nearby shelters, soup kitchens and hospitals. A user can open up the app and a map shows which local facilities are open. Just tap the icon to call an Uber to pick someone up and bring them to a helpful destination. “Sometimes you encounter people begging for money and you’d like to help them, but you don’t necessarily want to give them money,” said co-founder A. Adesina Lalude, a resident of Hamburg, Germany and a consultant for startups. With TheHelpingHand.club, you can “gift a ride to any homeless person to make sure they get to the destination” that suits their needs. Lalude met Kuldeep Marathe, a software developer for a financial company, in a shared uberPOOL ride on the way to the Hackathon. At the event, they teamed up with Chris Sullivan, a 17-year-old high school student from Maryland, and Sadruddin Saleem, a student at Northeastern. With dozens of teams competing to win the Hackathon contest, it’s not clear yet whether they will get a prize. Regardless, they hope that TheHelpingHand.club will “give people some tangible meaningful help,” said Lalude. |
MenuMe turns menu text into photos | Sarah Perez | 2,016 | 5 | 8 | At the TechCrunch Disrupt NY 2016 Hackathon, a team of engineers teamed up to create an app that can help travelers visiting a foreign country better understand what food is being described on a menu. Just by pointing their phone at the restaurant’s menu, the app will recognize the text and translate that into an image of the food item in question which is then overlaid on top of the camera’s viewfinder. The members of the team behind the hack, Ocean Huang, Brent Bevolo, Jose Portcarrero and Bret Deasy, initially came up with the idea for a menu-scanning app after first toying with an app that would scan the text in books. But they soon realized that wasn’t the best use of the technology at hand. “This was a natural pivot from the first idea,” noted Bevolo. The group started work on the MenuMe Android app at midnight last night, so it’s fair to say that MenuMe is not in a state where it can be uploaded to Google Play at this time. The app takes advantage of the Vuforia Android SDK to implement the text and image recognition functionality and to display the 3D objects in augmented reality. This is actually a simple but practical implementation of AR, in fact – it’s translating a language you don’t understand into the universal language of photos. Not only can you figure out what the menu reads, MenuMe could also help you decide if the meal looks tasty to you. While the hack demonstrated today was a bit thrown together, if the team decides to complete the project, they said they would use Google Image Search to source the food imagery to match the text. But will the app make it to Google Play one day? “We’ll see,” said Huang. Fingers crossed. |
911bot is a chat bot that could save your life | Jordan Crook | 2,016 | 5 | 8 | When you find yourself in an emergency situation, it’s hard to know what to do. And even if you do, panic can take over. 911bot, a product built at the Disrupt Hackathon here in New York, aims to help you out in a pinch. The Facebook Messenger-based chat bot lets you report emergencies to the authorities through a quick image-based interface. And as your report is sent through the system, it offers options to send extra information and media (like images and pictures) as well as directions on how you should handle the situation. For example, one of the most common reports is a traffic accident. If you report a traffic accident through 911bot, the system automatically calls 911 and files your request, complete with location information. However, it also lets you send video or pictures of the accident with important information on what you should and should not do. For instance, you should never move a person who has been in a car accident in case they have a spinal injury. This can cause more damage to their injury. Another common form of emergency is cardiac arrest. In this case, it’s crucial to take action quickly. 911bot sends over information on how to perform CPR. One of the founders explained to TechCrunch that, when CPR is administered within the first five minutes of an episode, the patient is 5x more likely to survive than when CPR is administered after the first five minutes of distress. [gallery ids="1318513,1318514,1318515,1318516"] This can mean the difference between life or death. 911bot used the Facebook Messenger API, ESRI for location data, and Twilio to build out the system. If you want to learn more about 911bot, head over to the website right . |
Strengthening authentication through big data | Ben Dickson | 2,016 | 5 | 1 |
The fact that plain to protect our digital identities is no secret. For years, the use of two-factor authentication (2FA) and multi-factor authentication (MFA) as a means to ensure online account security and prevent fraud has been a hot topic of discussion. Technological advances, , have created new possibilities, and manufacturers and vendors are offering in the domain of biometrics, physical tokens, software tokens and mobile codes. Yet, multi-factor authentication has its own set of challenges. For one thing, requiring users to respond to multi-factor authentication processes too often will make for a bothersome experience, and often leads to their total disablement by frustrated users. Moreover, many basic multi-factor authentication tokens can be , which effectively renders them useless against hacks. These complexities and flaws are proving to be an obstacle in the widespread integration of 2FA and MFA technologies, which in turn results in that get hijacked and compromised . In 2015 alone, their account credentials to malicious hackers. So how can you enhance account security without disrupting the user experience? The answer might be found in big data and analytics, two trends that have proven their worth in many industries. The idea is to unobtrusively gather information from several sources, including user behavior and device usage, to create a profile that is unique to the account owner and cannot be stolen or replicated by fraudulent users. The next steps would be to use the profile to detect activities that hint at malicious activity and only then initiate extra authentication steps to make sure the account hasn’t been hijacked or compromised. This model has many strengths. It’s not something you lose, such as physical tokens; it doesn’t require extra memorization efforts; it can’t be stolen or replicated, such as passcodes, or even fingerprint and retina scans; and, above all, it’s not cumbersome and it doesn’t introduce extra complexities to the user experience. This approach has become possible as a result of dramatic decreases in data storage costs and the explosion of cloud services, data collection technologies and advancements in web platforms and mobile technology. Several implementations of this concept are already showing promising signs. , an industry leader in the mobile identity industry, uses analytics and behavior-based authentication with its newly released platform, a software development kit (SDK) that enables web and mobile applications to measure and analyze a user’s behavioral biometrics in order to provide continuous authentication, even after the user has been verified with traditional security measures such as passwords. Behavior ID’s mechanics involve collecting data on a user by evaluating their behavioral patterns across a range of touch points, including how a user types on the keyboard, how they hold their device, how hard they press a device screen, their mouse dynamics, user interface interaction, etc. The data is then used to establish a “digital fingerprint from the user’s behavior,” as Steve Jillings, CEO at TeleSign, explains. The profile is stored in TeleSign’s cloud platform and helps the system detect and block account takeover attempts. The goal, Jillings says, “is to increase the level of identity assurance… without adding friction.” Behavior ID calculates a “similarity score” between the user’s current behavior and the historical, expected behavior. This helps streamline the experience for known good users, while raising the alarm on suspicious account access and providing the basis for challenging potentially bad or fraudulent users with re-verification, or two-factor authentication. “A layered approach is the best way to authenticate users and secure online accounts from fraud,” says Jess Leroy, Senior Vice President of Product Management at TeleSign. “Behavioral biometrics enable us to take that a step further by adding even more levels of assurance without adding any friction to the end-user or requiring them to take any steps to initiate or own any specific device to use.” Cybersecurity giant ’s is another platform that uses an analytics-based approach. Adaptive Authentication analyzes and registers the devices users employ to access their accounts, which includes information such as operating system, browser type and version. It also profiles user behavior, which accounts for various activities that are typical for the user. It then feeds this data in a self-learning statistical machine learning engine, which uses it to evaluate in real time the risk of activities being carried out on the account. This all takes place in the background, without requiring intervention on the user’s part. As long as users do not engage in abnormal behavior or do not access their account from a previously unknown or security-flagged location, they will not be interrupted. If the risk score of an action surpasses the threshold set by the organization, the system makes decisions based on policies defined for that type of activity. This can include anything from silently warning the security department to prompting the user for additional authentication or blocking access altogether. Analytics and big data have become an inseparable part of online businesses in recent years, and are helping companies increase revenue and improve user experience and customer service while lowering costs. This growing trend can also come into the service of cybersecurity and help balance security and convenience, and prevent fraud and improve identity security while avoiding all the complexities that traditional methods trail behind them. |
How Android gets to 100% market share | Matt Heiman | 2,016 | 5 | 1 |
Android already commands globally, and percent in the US. But you wouldn’t know it here in Silicon Valley — almost everyone I know has an iPhone. As the consumer technology landscape evolves over the next five years however, there are a number of reasons to believe that Android, and the Google stack more broadly, could take an even greater share and become the platform of choice, even here. Anecdotally, one of the most frequently cited reasons among iPhone users for staying with iOS is that they love the “blue bubbles.” iMessage, and its clever and seamless integration with iOS’s native SMS application, is an incredibly sticky feature of iOS. Over-the-top (OTT) messenger applications have many advantages over SMS. The assurance of knowing that one’s message has been delivered and the synchronous knowledge that the other user is typing add a deeper level of intimacy and immediacy to the conversation. The ability to easily share media, the lack of a character limit, the seamless continuation of a conversation while switching between desktop and mobile, and the lack of per-message international charges all add to OTT messaging’s appeal. But most importantly, OTT messenger platforms are valuable to users to the extent that one’s peers are also on the network. Since iMessage is built into the native SMS application on iOS, users also don’t ever have to switch to a third party application, and are automatically drawn into the network. No change in behavior is required. So OTT messaging in general and iMessage in particular exhibit powerful network effects. Hence the draw of the “blue bubbles.” Does this story sound familiar? A mobile hardware manufacturer with a proprietary OS and a captive OTT messenger application? Research in Motion, now known as Blackberry, had exactly this positioning with its popular Blackberry smartphones. One of the big draws of Blackberry, outside of the corporate environment, was Blackberry Messenger (BBM). But ultimately BBM wasn’t a strong enough draw to keep people on an inferior OS and third party developers created cross-platform messengers such as WhatsApp. Today, Blackberry OS has only a . WhatsApp just crossed . It is not inconceivable that OTT messaging applications like WhatsApp could replace SMS entirely. Alternatively, ) standard could bring all of the advantages of messenger applications to texting. In either case, the network effect of iMessage would be significantly diminished, greatly lowering the barrier for those wanting to leave the Apple ecosystem. iMessage is not invincible. While iMessage may be the most important example of Apple ecosystem lock-in, there are many other products where Apple lock-in could similarly be weakened. For example, the emergence of Google Photos as an application across Android and iOS significantly reduces the lock-in of Photos, the emergence of Spotify reduces the lock-in of iTunes, and the emergence of Drive and Dropbox reduces the lock-in of iCloud. One of the biggest problems with the Android ecosystem is fragmentation: every hardware OEM can operate different versions of Android and can significantly slow down the release of software updates. Fragmentation is frustrating both for developers and for users. At the time of writing, I still cannot get Android Marshmallow on my Droid Turbo, despite Google’s . In fact, as of April 2016, only globally had the latest Android Marshmallow OS installed. In contrast, Apple can push out a new OS to all of its devices as soon as it is ready; the only gating factor is how quickly users choose to install the update. App developers often choose to release on iOS first specifically because releasing on Android requires tweaking the code separately for all of the different versions in the market. But fragmentation is not solely the result of different versions of Android operating simultaneously. Many hardware OEMs, and even carriers, install their own software applications and layers on top of Android to customize the OS. When a customer uses the iPhone for the first time, he/she gets the identical interface to everyone else with a new iPhone. The same cannot be said for an Android phone, where the default calendar, SMS, email, keyboard etc. could just as likely come from Samsung or Verizon, despite the fact that Google itself offers all of these products. Without the integration of the Google suite of products, the relative attractiveness of Android over iOS is diminished. However, there is a possibility that in the coming years this fragmentation will be significantly reduced. Some OEMs, such as Motorola and HTC, are continually reducing the level of software customization on their latest models, bringing them closer and closer to stock Android. Another driving force for the reduction in fragmentation could be the suite of phones and tablets. While these phones are still manufactured by third-party OEMs, such as Motorola, LG, and Huawei, they are done so in close cooperation with Google and come with stock Android featuring Google software. Nexus phones get Android software updates immediately, because they are controlled by Google. To the extent Google is successful in proliferating these Nexus phones, it can mitigate the problems of fragmentation. Nexus could also represent an opportunity for Google to build a brand cache around its devices, making them more competitive with Apple at the high end of the market. As of 2016, most US carriers have finally eliminated two-year ; going forward, Americans will pay for their smart phone and their plans separately. One of the unique features of the US mobile market in the past was a relative price-insensitivity of consumers to devices since they typically didn’t pay for their devices or paid a highly subsidized price. In fact, on many cell phone plans, if a member chose to upgrade to a lower cost device instead of a higher one, he/she would not receive any of the economic benefit. This paradigm certainly encouraged individuals to purchase highly priced phones. But in a world where individuals buy their own phones at full retail price, they are likely to be much more price-sensitive. The current base price of an iPhone 6s, before any upgrades, tax, or Apple Care is $649. In contrast, the average Android phone can be Many may not even be aware that Google actually offers their own desktop OS, known as Chrome OS, which competes with Microsoft’s Windows and Apple’s OS X. Chrome OS today has of desktops globally, which is not a critical mass to attract the attention of app developers. But there are a number of emerging trends which could mean that Google, rather than Microsoft or Apple, could be the desktop OS of the future. Firstly, the relevance of software applications themselves is becoming less important as more applications move to the cloud. Even the dominant MS Office suite can now be accessed from the web browser with Office 365. With native software development becoming less important, and the browser becoming more important, the lack of scale in Chrome OS will not matter as much, since native applications are not necessary. Also, because Chromebooks are designed to leave most of the software and storage in the cloud, they have less expensive hardware components and sell for a fraction of the cost of Macbooks and most Windows computers as well. Perhaps the larger catalyst is within the next year. Doing so would instantly bring the world’s largest app ecosystem to Google’s desktop OS and would provide an even stronger value proposition for users to opt into an Android mobile phone. Of course, owning the desktop OS is not as strategically important today as it once was, and will likely become even less so going forward. But owning a across all devices and all technology use cases is more important today than ever. In a sense, Google as a desktop OS is the missing link in the picture: with a competitive desktop OS, Google could offer customers a consistent experience across all of their devices, further supporting the Android ecosystem and threatening Windows, OS X, and iOS. Apple is the and has consistently been at the forefront of device innovation over the last two decades. But as consumer technology evolves, software and Internet integration is gaining ever increasing importance over hardware. As the presence of the Internet continues to permeate more of our lives and the technology itself starts to “disappear,” the battle for the consumer may tilt in favor of the world’s largest Internet company over the world’s best designer of hardware. |
The tech elite are moving left this election cycle | Gregory Ferenstein | 2,016 | 5 | 1 |
This election cycle, the tech elite are almost exclusively backing liberals: Tesla’s Elon Musk donated to Hillary Clinton, Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg gave handsomely to the San Francisco Democratic Party organization, and Microsoft’s Bill Gates gave to three Democratic congressmen. Far from being the exception, recent data shows that the nation’s tech titans don’t have much faith that the Republican party has good long-term economic policies for emerging industries. More and more, the richest Americans are donating more to Democrats than Republicans. Image credit . But!–and this point is crucial–the anti-tax stereotype doesn’t explain why so many of the nation’s business titans would vote for the party that wants the IRS to take a greater portion of their wealth away. |
null | Sarah Buhr | 2,016 | 5 | 8 | null |
The future of apps should be better apps | Anshu Sharma | 2,016 | 5 | 1 |
A few weeks ago ran an excellent article entitled . While the premise that apps today have some major problems is sound, the conclusion, that apps are going to be replaced by something entirely new, was not. The future of apps is supposedly progressive web apps and emebedded dumbed down app functionality inside chat apps. While I think apps will have a surface area in many ecosystems — showing up inside stores and chat apps — it is just one facet of apps. Apps have many problems but we must solve them rather than imagining that the problems disappear when we put them inside chat or browser. You are just trading one problem for another. To me, Apps have the following problems and these new paradigms only address a handful of them while making others worse. When you get an inbound SMS or email and you click the link, only to discover that you must first download and install the app. This is painful because it requires me to make a decision whether or not I really want one more app “forever” sitting on my phone. In addition, most apps have a sign up flow that’s painful. In contrast, when you get a message on WeChat or Facebook, you don’t have to install anything — the platform has pre-decided that this app (like Uber) is worthy of embedding. But can iOS and Android make our app install process as seamless? What if “call a cab” can be set to “Uber” (default even)? The newer apps are getting better at this but the sign up, which itself is usually unnecessary, is too cumbersome on most apps. The app store could populate the app with the minimal information it needs to be functional, with my permission, and thereby making the signup mostly redundant. After the install hurdle, most apps are just forgotten and never re-used. Again, social platforms like Facebook can run ads (which they can monetize) reminding you to try out that app. But, what if my phone OS contextually suggested the right apps? When I take a picture, the 5 apps that store & edit photos, when I go to maps, the 4 apps that can call the cabs and so forth. In addition, help me navigate app to app — for example, taking me from Yelp to Opentable. : Many users have dozens of apps. The flat or folder oriented way to organize apps is just outdated. The least used apps should become partially invisible (and eventually silently deleted) — and the phone OS should surface the right apps contextually. but we treat them like proper nouns — named entities that look like files. There is a better way to organize these and make life better for users. If you move the apps to inside messaging, its not going to solve this problem. : The embedded app inside your messaging app is in a way (lightly) pre-integrated. But that’s only true for certain workflows. In a general sense, the mobile OS should be able to work with technology like to connect apps with each other in meaningful ways. The OS and the app stores of the two major ecosystms — iOS and Android — have a lot of gaps which are being filled rather nicely by messaging apps like WeChat. However, this is not the only way to solve the problems with apps — we can’t wish them away — the apps have generated 10s of billions of dollars for developers and 100s of billions for the ecosystem. We can fix the gaps in apps so that they become seamless and easy to use. The future of apps is apps. |
SAM Labs raises $4.5M to turn kids into IoT-mavens | Haje Jan Kamps | 2,016 | 5 | 1 | London-based just announced that it raised £3.2M ($4.5M) from a group of investors led by . In addition to the institutional investor specializing in commercial spin-outs from academic institutions, the round was padded out with smart money from a number of angels specializing in high growth education technology. The investment will The high-end Family kit comes with a ton of different gizmos, but simpler kits are available, too Sparked into life in 2014 with bringing the company its first 800 or so customers (yours sincerely included), SAM Labs are continuing to create tools and software to help kids involved with IoT programming projects. The company’s route to market has traditionally been via parents to children, with the kits being available via the company’s own website, or in London’s Science Museum. In the case of the latter, the company made of its inventor kit, which the company’s founder, Joachim Horn, says tremendously increased their exposure and number of sales. Part of the beauty of the SAM ecosystem is how intuitive it is to connect the buttons, sensors and apps. SAM Labs says more than 1,000 schools are already using the IoT learning kits as part of their learning- or after-school programs. With the new funding round, the company is setting its sights higher both in the UK and in a more international context, aiming to start marketing and selling to -oriented schools around the world. Embracing the tenet of play-based learning, the kits come with a series of projects for kids to play with, including things like learning Morse code, making electronic songs, or creating a proximity-based alarm system. The SAM kits are simple, small, battery powered building blocks that talk to each other wirelessly via Bluetooth. They can then be programmed to interact using the drag-and-drop application, which to get the various blocks to talk to interact; a button can turn on a light, send a Tweet, or start more advanced sequences of processes. Modules include buttons, LED lights, servos, sliders, tilt sensors, heat sensors, light sensors, and DC motors, buzzers and much more, which can be configured to do a stunning number of things, as witnessed by . In addition to the sensors, the virtual ‘cloud’ module can be used to use the computer’s camera to take photos, or to send messages out on social media. To me, the big epiphany I had around the company’s kits, is that whenever I try them out, I’m finding myself truly sad that they weren’t around when I was a kid: I can’t even imagine how I would have contained my excitement twenty years ago. SAM Labs’ kits are not entirely unlike ‘ offerings in this space, but the addition of the computer-based programming and the freedom of Bluetooth wireless means that SAM Labs kits are particularly well suitable as starting points for children who have a curiosity for electronics, engineering and technology. Let’s put it this way: I know what the 7-10 year olds in my life are getting for Christmas… Also worth noting for parents hovering over the buy-now button, is that, there’s a another thing that wasn’t around when I was a kid: Logical directions to ‘graduate’ out of SAM Lab’s ecosystem and into more elaborate hardware programming experiments on more advanced platforms like , , or -based projects. If you want to know more about the why and how, check out Joachim’s TED talk below. |
Twitter’s dysfunctional Wall Street relationship | Matthew Lynley | 2,016 | 5 | 1 | Twitter’s stock is cratering this week following its earnings report on Tuesday, down around 15% and shaving more than a billion dollars off its market cap — again. This isn’t even an all-time low for Twitter. But the company is a long, long ways from its successful run after its initial public offering. At the time, Twitter was showing — while slow — user growth and that it was doing a decent job of monetizing its user base. Twitter’s advertising products appear to be, at the very least, effective. Here’s the company’s revenue scorecard: But here’s the hard one: the company is expecting revenue between $590 million and $610 million in the second quarter this year. That’s way below what analysts were expecting (around $678 million), and the company isn’t growing its revenue as fast as industry watchers were expecting. This quarter, the culprit was that brand marketers did not increase spend as quickly as expected in the first quarter, according to the company. Twitter hasn’t shown that it can be a massive growth company like Facebook (or, at least historically, Apple) — at least, not yet, even despite the service’s users growing quicker than what was expected this quarter. It has to show that it can grow on multiple fronts now, if not all: user growth, revenue growth, new products and better advertising products. So despite stronger-than-expected (but still slim) user growth, revenue isn’t expected to grow as quickly as industry watchers were expecting — and that’s a big problem for the company. So naturally, this happened: [graphiq id=”2QWSte7cWjj” title=”Twitter, Inc. (TWTR) Stock Price – 1 Year” width=”600″ height=”492″ url=”https://w.graphiq.com/w/2QWSte7cWjj” link=”https://www.graphiq.com” link_text=”Visualization by Graphiq”] For Twitter to show that it can be a strong, independent public company, it has to convince investors that it can continue growing at a good clip. Twitter has been releasing a slew of changes and new products, such as a big change to its timeline (switching to one that’s more algorithmic) and new real-time services like Moments. And it’s trying to make the service less confusing and more palatable to new users. The question, now, is whether all that is working. But, even as it improves its advertising products and releases new parts for its portfolio of apps, there’s still an upper bound to what it can do with its revenue as long as its user growth continues to grow slowly. Last quarter, Twitter’s user base actually fell quarter-over-quarter — a big moment for the company. For a while (circa its IPO, basically), Twitter looked like a strong growth company on both a revenue basis (which it still, for the most part, is!) and a user count basis (which, even while it was slow, was still going up). This quarter, user numbers were back up — from 305 million to 310 million. That’s actually a better add than its last couple of quarters. But if it’s not going to grow at a strong enough rate to outpace the company’s ability to create new revenue-generating products and improve its advertising targeting to increase that business, then that’s going to be a problem for the company going forward. Again, Twitter has to increase the number of heads it can inevitably monetize, whether that’s through its developer network or its core Twitter users. Basically, Twitter has to show Wall Street that it can continue to grow — and Alphabet. Apple got hammered after its recent earnings report because it reported the first sales decline in , and its forecast didn’t look that much better. Apple, suddenly, was no longer a massive growth company with its core growth engine — the iPhone — beginning to stall. All this leads back to Twitter’s ability to, eventually, return value to investors. It’ll eventually have to did. Wall Street (and in particular activist investors) can exert pressure on the company to do just that — and force other events like board shakeups, . As Twitter’s shares continue to decline, it’ll become easier for activist investors to snap up increasing control of the company and force it to take action that fits their agenda. Twitter, unlike Apple, doesn’t have a monster market cap and could be more vulnerable to that kind of activity. There are a couple ways to insulate against this activity — Facebook, for example, plans to institute a new class of stock that keeps CEO Mark Zuckerberg in control of the company as he transfers his wealth to a new entity geared toward investments in positive efforts like education. But could Twitter get away with something like that? Tough to say, because all this would have to go through shareholder approval, and that requires confidence in the company. Twitter, however, does have some protection here: board members can issue preferred shares, giving it the ability to protect itself to an extend from activist investors. But it’s going to be a tricky road for Twitter. Another big downside to Twitter’s inability to keep its stock price up is that it’s going to be tougher to recruit good talent, which sometimes have compensation packages that include stock. That can quickly become a self-fulfilling prophecy: without good talent, good products might not materialize, user growth continues slowly, and the stock gets hammered again. And then the whole process repeats itself. So, what can the company do to stave off Wall Street in general? Basically show more growth, in more areas, and prove to Wall Street that it has an engine that will propel the company to generate more revenue, become more profitable and return more value to investors. And it’s going to have to, once again, innovate in order to get more heads in the room that it can monetize and improve that monetization engine. So far the company has been very bullish on Periscope as one of its core new products that’s around its live-centric focus, but we haven’t seen strong monetization materialize from that product just yet. Twitter also recently signed a deal to live-stream Thursday Night Football, something that could bolster its efforts in producing more live content. It’s still early days there, and already the company is going to face stiff competition from things like Facebook Live — which can tap into Facebook’s billion-plus user base. There’s also its developer network, which represents a new potential front for advertising revenue. If it can convince developers to tap into its advertising products like MoPub, it can find a new way to generate a new line of advertising revenue — which can help convince investors that it’s still able to create new products that will help the company continue to grow. Still, that’s early days, but the company is making a big bet on it. In short, Twitter has a lot of work ahead if it wants to keep Wall Street happy — and off its back. |
Keith Block talks life at Salesforce and being a Boston sports fan in San Francisco | Ron Miller | 2,016 | 5 | 1 | The day I met Keith Block at he was relaxing in a suite at the Hynes Convention Center, a man at ease with his at Salesforce. His Twitter bio, like mine, also lists him as a Boston sports fan. We had a lot to talk about. The day we chatted, Block had been front and center at the morning’s event keynote, which featured Boston band, performing for several songs, followed by an interview with . In fact, as I entered the suite to interview Block, an autographed Patriots 4X Super Bowl Champion hat was sitting casually on a table (I took a picture). We began our brief discussion talking a bit about our mutual love of Boston sports. He made it clear he had no divided loyalties, even though his company is based in San Francisco. Even when The Boston Celtics played the beloved Golden State Warriors, he scoffed at the idea he might have to choose. Oh no, he’s a Boston boy all the way. As a man who spent 20 years at Oracle before joining his old friend Marc Benioff to help run Salesforce, he felt no affection for his old company either. He was a man comfortable with his situation and there was no need for sentimentality. When I asked what a typical day was like, he joked, “Oh you know I chat with Bill Belichick.” In fact, he’s quite a busy guy and we had more to talk about than Boston sports. (Note the questions and answers have been edited for clarity and flow.) : You have so much responsibility with the titles of vice chairman, president and COO. What’s a typical day like for you? : My day — I’m customer focused. I like to be out in the field. I like to spend time with employees and our partners and I like to help drive transformation for our customers. I think it’s one of these things where your day never ends and we are a very fast growing company where the pace is very fast and we want to make sure we do the right things for all of our stakeholders and so I spend a lot of time on that. : How different culturally has it been for you to come from Oracle to Salesforce?? : When you think about our model — we talked about in the keynote today — the new technology model, the new business model. You know a lot of companies will say we are a cloud company too, but just saying you have the technology does not make you a cloud company. It’s really an interesting thing going on in the marketplace because other companies will say, “well, we’re a cloud company.” We pioneered the cloud. We created this bow wave and everyone is trying to surf in that bow wave behind us around the cloud, but it’s not just the technology model. You also have to have the right business model and when you think about our business model, it is a ‘shared success model’. Basically, as you adopt the technology, it’s married to our payment schemes. So that’s very, very important because if the customer doesn’t win, we don’t win. In the other companies who are in the perpetual license world — they can sell a lot of software up front and charge maintenance for it and you don’t get a lot of innovation for that and the risk is really on the customer, whereas in our model it is a ‘joint success model’. : Given all that Salesforce does around sales, marketing, service, mobile, IoT and so forth, what do you see as the key mission of the company? : Being relevant in the enterprise and getting more mindshare. The convergence of all these technologies — cloud, social, mobile, data science, IoT — converging together creates unprecedented opportunities to innovate in an unprecedented way. It has broken down the barriers between sales, service and marketing. And you know in traditional fashion, the fact companies have sensors is nothing new, right, and the data collection is not really that new, but what’s new is taking action. It used to be there was a classic silo of service and of sales and of marketing, but with all these connected technologies, everybody sells, and everybody services, everybody markets That’s where we have positioned ourselves. If you look at our entire customer success platform and all of our clouds. It’s all around the customer and it’s all around breaking those traditional barriers and getting a connection with a customer that’s never been there before. Last Fall at a press conference at Dreamforce, you said you weren’t interested in Quote-to-Cash vendors, in December for $360 million. What changed? : CPQ is a natural adjacency to what we do. In a sense we are very much listening to our customers because they want us to become more relevant and partake in helping them run their enterprise. They are looking for a few strategic partners and we are in the enviable position right now of in the industry of being asked to play the role of trusted advisor. Part of that is providing a vision and part of that is backing it up with the capability, which means we have to extend into our natural adjacencies and that’s the phenomenon we are seeing and it’s accelerating. : Are you interested in other aspects of the financial reporting beyond Configure-Price-Quote (CPQ)? : One of the things we do we have a good relationship with our customers. My entire career — I started my career in in consulting. Spent 20 years of my career in some fashion of consulting and I’ve had the opportunity to work with a lot of companies and we enjoy a very close relationship with our customer base and part of that relationship is listening. We want to listen to customers and we conduct ourselves in a manner which is conducive to us listening to our customers And if customers want us to have more significant role in the enterprise we will listen to our customers, but we will always be customer-centric company. |
Here’s why we only did three deals last year | Adam Marcus | 2,016 | 5 | 1 |
There has been a huge disconnect between private and public company valuations over the last few years. . It probably won’t be the last. During this period of froth, companies were able to raise capital at increasingly ludicrous valuations, and entrepreneurs turned fundraising into a sport — with all the associated bragging rights. Deals closed peaked in 2014, but all-time funding hit its highest point last year, meaning 2015 saw some of the largest funding rounds to date. Source: CB Insights, KPMG The net result of this exuberance was a pissing match over valuations and capital raised, so much so that recruiters used these attributes as key selling points when trying to hire. Source: PitchBook Most of us have recognized by now that we were in a bubble ( ), and we’re currently undergoing a full-fledged correction. The pendulum of power and control is swinging back to the investor community. And it’s in this proverbial pendulum where the problem lies. I’ve been involved with the tech community as both an operator and an investor for almost 20 years. I’ve had a front row seat over the course of numerous cycles and the change in ball control. What I believe gets lost in all of the hubris and egomania is the fact that entrepreneurs and VCs need each other to be successful — something First Round keenly pointed out in its to limited partners. Said another way, low prices and unmotivated teams are not good for VCs. Similarly, high prices and crappy VC returns are not good for entrepreneurs — implicit in bad returns is the fact that VCs won’t be able to raise funds and subsequently invest in new companies. And the numbers don’t lie. The average size of M&A deals has remained relatively flat over the past seven years (WhatsApp is the cause of the 2014 spike). Source: Thomson Reuters, NVCA Over the last few months, I’ve seen many of my VC peers salivating over the dramatic change in pricing and the increased leverage they have on deals. At OpenView, we have certainly experienced the change first hand. We no longer see companies coming in with multiple term sheets, valuation expectations in the 20-40X ARR range and timelines measured in days rather than weeks. Instead, we’re seeing folks coming in without term sheets and suggesting that the market should dictate their valuation with no immediate timeline. Frankly, I think this is a good thing for everybody. When we reflect upon the 2014-2015 timeframe I don’t think anyone will view this as a healthy period for our ecosystem. Most of the funds raised and deployed during that time will yield crappy results, as many of them were deployed at Formula One speed — 18 months versus 3-4 years — at sky-high valuations. The unfortunate byproduct of this latest boom cycle is that it has left many VCs with a bad taste in their mouths. And now they are looking to extract their due leverage. That’s where I get concerned. We’re hearing more and more VCs talking about issuing term sheets as an option on a deal with the assumption that they can re-trade the deal or just walk away. Clearly, FOMO has left the building. So this is what I’m requesting of my fellow VCs. I think we can all admit that prices were out of whack and they needed to come down. They have already come down and will probably continue to slide for the next few quarters. Entrepreneurs recognize that. BODs recognize that. What we need to focus on now is quashing the bad juju created by misbehaving during a deal process. This behavior simply doesn’t help anyone. If you are excited about a company, do the work before issuing a term sheet. You have the time. There is no ticking game clock. At OpenView we do all our business diligence before issuing a term sheet. Always have. Anything we do post-term sheet is confirmatory. Ironically, this process, along with our price discipline, is precisely why we only did three deals last year. Issuing a term sheet to figure out if you like a deal is destructive. There are many entrepreneurs from previous cycles who have developed a natural distrust of VCs given this bad behavior. These same entrepreneurs looked to extract their leverage when the pendulum swung back in their favor in 2014 and 2015. Now is our chance to stop perpetuating this cycle. Do your work. Offer a price that works for you and your firm. Remember you are playing for the upside, not managing for the downside. Let’s not draw blood from the stone. And maybe next time we won’t see whose top priority was price and capital instead of a more symbiotic equilibrium. VCs and entrepreneurs need each other to be successful. Don’t forget that. |
Homo Sapiens 2.0? We need a species-wide conversation about the future of human genetic enhancement | Jamie Metzl | 2,016 | 5 | 1 |
After 4 billion years of evolution by one set of rules, our species is about to begin evolving by another. Overlapping and mutually reinforcing revolutions in genetics, information technology, artificial intelligence, big data analytics, and other fields are providing the tools that will make it possible to genetically alter our future offspring should we choose to do so. For some very good reasons, we will. Nearly everybody wants to have cancers cured and terrible diseases eliminated. Most of us want to live longer, healthier and more robust lives. Genetic technologies will make that possible. But the very tools we will use to achieve these goals will also open the door to the selection for and ultimately manipulation of non-disease-related genetic traits — and with them a new set of evolutionary possibilities. As the genetic revolution plays out, it will raise fundamental questions about what it means to be human, unleash deep divisions within and between groups, and could even lead to destabilizing international conflict. And the revolution has already begun. Today’s genetic moment is not the stuff of science fiction. It’s not Jules Verne’s fanciful 1865 prediction of a moon landing a century before it occurred. It’s more equivalent to President Kennedy’s 1962 announcement that America would send men to the moon within a decade. All of the science was in place when Kennedy gave his Houston speech. The realization was inevitable; only the timing was at issue. Neil Armstrong climbed down the Apollo 11 ladder seven years later. We have all the tools we need to alter the genetic makeup of our species. The science is here. The realization is inevitable. Timing is the only variable. Not everyone has heard of Moore’s Law, the observation that computer processing power roughly doubles every 18 months, but we’ve all internalized its implications. That’s why we expect each new version of our iPhones and laptops to be smaller, do more, and cost less. But it’s looking increasingly possible there may be a Moore’s Law equivalent for genomics. In our world of exponential scientific advancement, the genetic future will arrive far faster than most people think or are prepared for. This future is arriving, quite literally, in baby steps. In fact, the first state-authorized genetically altered babies will be born in the UK later this year. The British Parliament in February last year to allow clinical trials of Mitochondrial Transfer, a process designed to eliminate the passing of mitochondrial disease from mother to child. The transfer of mitochondrial DNA from the female donor to the mother’s egg or nuclear parents’ early-stage embryo in this procedure is small, adding less genetic material than in a blood transfusion. But the third-party donor’s mitochondrial DNA will pass through the generations forever. The first of these facetiously called “three-parent babies” are set to be delivered as early as this summer. Mitochondrial Transfer is a first and in many ways relatively small step. But the use of heritable genetic alterations to reduce or eliminate genetic diseases will not and cannot end there. If we can eliminate mitochondrial disease with genetic transfer, won’t people with other genetic diseases want us to spare their future children? They will and we will do it, and our collective comfort level with genetic manipulation will increase. The birth of Louise Brown, the first “test tube baby,” in 1978 shows how quickly a new technology can shift from being revolutionary to normal. Then, her birth shocked the world and was called a “moral abomination.” Today more than 5 million babies have been born through IVF and the rate is increasing annually. , only 12 percent of Americans feel IVF is “morally wrong,” and having an IVF baby doesn’t surprise anyone. Enhanced reproduction will follow the same trajectory. As it does, our genetic future will unfold in three overlapping stages, each already in progress. First, we will use the existing technologies of IVF and (PGS) to a more focused effect. With PGS, two cells are generally removed from three- to five-day-old embryos that have been fertilized outside the mother, and then sequenced. The average woman having her eggs extracted produces 15 viable eggs. Younger women tend to produce more and older ones less. If all of these eggs are fertilized during IVF, the parents would usually have around the same number of preimplanted embryos from which to choose. Currently, PGS is used primarily to screen for single gene mutation diseases such as Huntington’s and Sickle Cell Anemia and, in rarer circumstances, for gender selection. With scientists around the world conducting massive amounts of genetic research and our knowledge of the genome expanding by the day, this process will eventually be used to screen for more complex diseases such as forms of cystic fibrosis and type 1 diabetes that are influenced by more than one gene. Once we understand how to spot diseases or disease susceptibilities in the genome, parents using IVF and PGS will have the option of choosing to implant embryos likely to avoid these outcomes. Given the choice of which of their natural embryos to implant, most will choose ones with the greatest perceived potential for optimal health. As the prevalence of this spreads, preimplantation embryo screening will begin to eliminate many of the terrible genetic diseases that have plagued our ancestors for millennia. But as IVF and PGS increasingly become the way people around the world conceive their children to avoid disease, many will want to know what the already-sequenced genomes of their unimplanted embryos say about other traits. When the was completed in 2003, the program had cost a billion dollars and taken 13 years. Today, sequencing a genome takes a day and costs around a $1,000. By the end of the decade it is projected to cost around $50 and require just a few hours. But most reasonably advantaged people will have their genomes sequenced as the necessary foundation of personalized care in the coming age of precision medicine even before those costs decline – a process being sped up by President Obama’s . As the massive amount of raw genomic data is compiled and compared to people’s life experiences and new tools are utilized to switch genes on and off in animal models, scientists will make even greater progress understanding complex polygenic traits and the broader ecosystem of the genome. The genetics of intelligence, for example, is influenced by thousands of genes. Michigan State Professor Stephen Hsu convincingly that we’ll be able to predict people’s IQs from their genomes with significant accuracy within a decade. Height is also the result of hundreds or more genes making different parts of the body a little longer, which is why tall humans aren’t just tall because they have necks like giraffes. , we’ll probably be able to predict height within a couple of years. In most cases, these predictions will not be absolute but mathematical propensities. An embryo might have a disproportionate genetic overlap with Olympic sprinters or winners of the Fields Medal for math or people who don’t get Alzheimer’s, and parents will be able to make relatively informed decisions on which embryo to implant based on big data genomic analysis. Because all of the embryos will contain the unadulterated genetic material of the two parents, we won’t need to have a complete understanding of the genome to make this approach appealing. A relatively well-informed guess will do. Armed with this information about which of their 15 or so embryos has the potential to have the lowest risk for genetic disease, the highest IQ, and the greatest potential for living a long and healthy life, many parents will choose to have that embryo implanted first if they are in or can get to a jurisdiction where this is allowed. The second overlapping phase of the human genetic revolution takes a further step by promising to bump up the number of eggs available in IVF. The average male ejaculation contains hundreds of millions of sperm, but human females can produce eggs in the low teens at most in the extraction process. Researchers have already developed technologies to induce unlimited numbers of mouse stem cells into egg cells and then actual eggs. Although this process is not close to being safe for humans, it is a good bet that one day it will be. If so, women undergoing IVF would be able to have not just 15 or so of their eggs fertilized, but hundreds. Instead of screening the smaller number of eggs as in traditional PGS, these parents would be able to review screens for hundreds of their own unadulterated embryos, supercharging the embryo selection process. Choosing from among hundreds of early-stage preimplanted embryos significantly increases the probability that genetic outliers — geniuses in one form or another, people with extraordinary skills — could be selected. It may even someday be possible to breed genetically selected male and female embryos together to speed up the generational genetic enhancement process. Although embryo selection, empowered by big data analytics, is the near-term future of assisted reproduction, other technologies are likely to push the process forward even more. In the third phase of the genetic revolution, many parents will consider the possibility of not just genetic selection but of genetic alterations for their children. The application of precision gene editing to alter the genetics of early-stage embryos is the farthest away from widespread human adoption but getting the most attention in the scientific community and popular media today. Gene editing tools have been around for years, but the recent development of the CRISPR-Cas9 (and lesser known cpf1) tool allows scientists to edit the genomes of all species with far greater precision, speed, flexibility and affordability than ever before — a breathtaking advance with enormous potential for good. CRISPR uses the cell’s own immune system to target, cut, and sometimes replace fragments of DNA. Its use is exploding in plant and animal research and applications. Just last year, scientists used CRISPR to fix defective genes in mice that had caused Duchenne muscular dystrophy and a rare, inherited form of liver disease. Preliminary lab work is underway exploring alterations of human cells to correct inherited blindness. Many other genetic diseases are in the queue. Preliminary experiments have recently begun in China and the UK with non-viable human embryos to explore potential ways to prevent certain blood disorders, miscarriages and HIV. It will be some time before CRISPR will safely be used to alter the heritable traits of humans, but that day will come because, like embryo selection, precision gene editing will help us fight disease and live healthier and longer. The scientific concepts behind CRISPR are complicated, but the actual application is not. Gene editing and other genetic technologies are no longer confined to governments, clinics, and large corporations. The DIYbio, or biohacking, movement is exploding around the world. High school kids can now engineer genes in their basements, hobbyists in their garages. With CRISPR, it will ultimately be scientifically possible to give embryos new traits and capabilities by inserting DNA from other humans, animals, or even synthetic sources. If splicing a single gene from a macaque monkey into a human embryo ensured the future child would not get Alzheimer’s or from a Naked Mole Rat to eliminate the possibility of cancer, would those crossings of the human-animal barrier be worth it? Would the answer be different if we were not selecting against disease but for traits like better vision, smell, or hearing? Of course, life experience will still matter in a genetics age. Being loved and cared for, eating healthy food, and having access to good schools and health care will always be essential for helping children of all types realize their potential. There’s no way to determine the balance between nature and nurture in human development. Both are important. But twin studies suggest genetic inheritance determines between 50 percent and 80 percent of who we become. Within that range, there is really no limit to the traits that can, over time, be better understood and potentially selected for or altered in some way on a genetic level. Our ever-striving species, which has embraced every technology promising to deliver enormous benefits but also bringing potential dangers — nuclear energy is an example — will not be able to resist the genetic revolution. Opposing it would be more like opposing agriculture because we have concerns about GMOs. We cannot and should not. We will want to eliminate genetic diseases in the nearer term, enhance human capabilities in the medium term and, perhaps, prepare ourselves to live on a hotter Earth, in space, or on other planets in the longer term. But we should make no mistake. The genie is already out of the bottle. The genetic era has begun. If ours was an ideologically uniform species, this transformation would be challenging. In a world where differences of opinion and belief are so vast and levels of development so disparate, it has the potential to be cataclysmic. For starters, not everyone will be comfortable with genetic enhancement based on some people’s understandable ideological or religious beliefs or for real or perceived safety concerns. Life is not just about science and code. It involves mystery and chance and, for some, spirit. For people of faith and many others, we will never understand what makes a human no matter what we know of genetics or body chemistry. And no matter what we think we know, history is littered with the corpses of past scientific certainties later proven wrong at best and deadly at worst. As recent advances in understanding the epigenome, virome and microbiome have shown, the human body is always far more complex than we appreciate. These types of concerns are largely intuitive to Americans and others. A of a thousand American adults conducted by STAT and Harvard’s Chan School of Public Health found that although 69 percent of Americans had heard nothing or not much about genetic enhancement, nearly the same number felt that genetically altering unborn babies to reduce their risk of developing serious diseases should be illegal. Eighty three percent felt that genetic alterations to improve the intelligence or physical characteristics of unborn babies should be banned. Those opposing the application of genetic technologies to their offspring for whatever reasons will always have the ability to opt out. Those choices, however, on both the individual and societal levels, will have consequences. If the division and violence that has stemmed from the genetically modified crops and abortion debates is any guide, the coming struggle over genetically selected and modified humans could well become a defining conflict for future generations. And just as conflicts over the future of human genetic engineering will likely emerge within societies, conflicts between states could easily break out as well. In the February America’s Director of National Intelligence delivered to Congress, genome editing merited its own section for the first time ever. Although the applications for biological warfare are currently America’s most pressing genetics-related national security concern, the broader set of genetic challenges are clearly not far behind. Beyond conflicts between groups and countries, the potential dangers to the species as a whole are also very real. Our evolution and survival to date have been based upon random mutation and competition. Might genetic technologies push us toward a dangerous genetic monoculture if we start selecting the traits of our children based on uniform, narrow, and culturally biased categories like IQ? No matter what the intention of parents, might genetic selection of children become a form of liberal or not-so-liberal Eugenics that challenges the moral core of our humanity? Might it encourage us to devalue the critically important and varied contributions everyone makes in a diverse society? Could it inspire parents to push their specifically-enhanced children toward predetermined destinies that could make them miserable? There are no easy answers to any of these questions. Recognizing this challenge, the United Nations General Assembly and other international bodies have tried to create global frameworks for genetic technologies. Because no global consensus exists, it should be no surprise they have failed completely. Leading scientists around the world also understand the implications and challenges of the genetics revolution and have been meeting regularly to discuss how to balance ethical and scientific goals. Whatever the intentions of diplomats and scientists, the fact remains that the science is surging exponentially, popular understanding of it is advancing linearly at best, and the regulatory framework surrounding it is only creeping forward glacially. This mismatch between what the science can do and how poorly people understand and are prepared for it is creating an extremely dangerous public tinderbox. Absurd numbers of Americans panicked a year ago when four cases of Ebola showed up in the United States. The American public had not been socialized to the challenge even though Ebola had been plaguing parts of Africa for decades. Because a rational conversation about the need to build infrastructure in West Africa to stanch the disease was therefore not possible, the American conversation, when it finally showed up so late in the game, sowed fear and forestalled a more logical and helpful response. A far more irrational and dangerous panic will likely emerge when genetically modified humans start appearing among us unless we can have an informed conversation today about the opportunities and challenges of human genetic enhancement. A species-wide conversation on our future has never before been carried out. We didn’t do it at the dawn of the industrial or nuclear ages for understandable reasons, even though we might have avoided some terrible outcomes if we had. With a growing percentage of the world population connected to the information grid in one way or another, we now have a limited opportunity to avoid making the same mistake and begin laying a foundation for decisions we will need to collectively make in the future. Given the political divisiveness of this issue, the window will not stay open long. Such a conversation would involve connecting individuals and communities around the world with different backgrounds and perspectives and varying degrees of education in an interconnected web of dialogue. It would link people adamantly opposed to human genetic enhancement, those who may see it as a panacea, and the vast majority of everyone else who has no idea this transformation is already underway. It would highlight the almost unimaginable potential of these technologies but also raise the danger that opponents could mobilize their efforts and undermine the most promising work to cure cancers and eliminate disease. But the alternative is far worse. If a relatively small number of even very well intentioned people unleash a human genetic revolution that will ultimately touch most everyone and alter our species’ evolutionary trajectory without informed, meaningful, and early input from others, the backlash against the genetic revolution will overwhelm its monumental potential for good. Homo Sapiens of the world, let us begin this conversation. |
West Ham becomes first English Premiership football club to sign an e-sports player | Jon Russell | 2,016 | 5 | 6 | West Ham United has become the first football team in the U.K. to embrace e-sports after pro gamer and World Cup runner-up , aka Dragonn. Market research firm the global e-sports market to reach $463 million this year and grow to surpass $1 billion before 2020, and, while the English Premiership is one of the most visible sports franchises globally, few teams have forayed into digital sports. Allen lost in last year’s FIFA interactive World Cup final but has qualified for every ranking FIFA e-sports event this year. The 24-year-old has taken West Ham squad number 50, and will wear the club’s shirt while representing them at professional tournaments. I am very proud to announce… that I am the official FIFA Player for . — Sean Allen (@DragonFIFA_) West Ham’s head of digital marketing, Karim Virani, told the club’s website that it had been looking to sign an e-sports professional “for a while.” “The digital game is incredibly popular with our fans, so we are really excited about what we have in store for them,” Virani added. “This is a big move for West Ham United. I have heard that Sean is a big player in the e-sports arena so I am delighted that we have managed to secure his services,” manager Slaven Bilic added. |
Bar Roulette routes your Uber to a random bar nearby | Haje Jan Kamps | 2,016 | 5 | 6 | Want to go party the night away but not sure where to go? ‘s has you covered. Press a button to summon an Uber and it will take you to a bar picked from the highest-rated bars on and . The twist? The app won’t tell you where you are going until you arrive. “Where are we off to?” “I have no idea.” “Cool, cool. Wait, what?!” Bar Roulette aims to break you out of your routines and add a bit of adventure to your life, taking you to places you may not have been before. The app is simple, but elegant; tell it where you are and the approximate area you’d like to go to. The destination area can be as small as a mile or as broad as 10 miles. You then choose whether you want your destination chosen from Yelp or Foursquare; if you pick the latter, you can use Foursquare’s price filters to select a destination that fits how fat and sassy your wallet is feeling that day. The app shows you the distance and estimates what your Uber will cost. Hit confirm and you’re on your way to merriment and adventure. Of course, the app also checks whether your destination bar is open, so it’s helpful for late-night (or early morning) bar hopping, too. The app is free, but there’s a $2.99 in-app purchase that unlocks additional features. “We have some good new features in the works,” Bar Roulette’s creator says, “one of those is the option to exclude Foursquare bars you’ve already checked in at, to increase the chance that we’ll take you somewhere you haven’t been before.” I can’t say that the app solves a problem I have: I usually can’t remember where I ended up anyway… But if are your thing, this may just be one way to shake up your routine a little bit. |
A $1 paper-based test can detect the Zika virus in around two hours | Brian Heater | 2,016 | 5 | 6 | “For our group it’s become an interesting case study in how quickly a group can mobilize in the face of an outbreak,” Dr. James Collins explains over the phone. The MIT biomedical engineering professor has been fielding press inquiries all day, in light of detailing the cheap, fast and effective tool his team developed to diagnose the growing threat of the Zika virus. “In late January, MIT sent out an email asking who was working on Zika,” he adds. “We were not. I turned to my team and former team members and asked them what we could do here. Could we use our synthetic biology platforms in a meaningful way and create a diagnostic test? The collective response was that we could, and everybody basically dropped what they were doing and turned their attention to coming up with this novel test, and in about five to six weeks, we did it.” In record time, the team — comprising members from Harvard, MIT, University of Toronto, Arizona State University, Cornell, University of Wisconsin-Madison and Boston University — built upon a technology developed by Collins’s team at Harvard’s Wyss Institute to create a simple, paper-based test that can be deployed to limited resource areas, detecting the disease in a fraction of the time and money of existing models. “We were trying to address a few needs,” explains Collins. “The need for a low-cost test and a need for a faster test and a need for a test that can be readily deployed in the field with little resources. I think this platform addresses each of those challenges nicely. The sensors themselves cost pennies to make. The development cost is also quite inexpensive. You’re talking probably less than a buck each for the test.” [vimeo 165325893 w=800 h=450] A drop of blood from the patient is boiled to release the RNA genome from the virus, followed by a bit more processing, at which point it’s applied to the paper. “What we’ve got is a really nice paper-based synthetic biology platform,” Collins says. “What we showed is that you can take the inner workings of cells, take a few dozen enzymes, and you can spot them on paper, freeze dry them, store them and distribute them at room temperature with very little loss of activity. That’s really at the heart of the innovation of the platform.” The whole process takes around two hours and can be performed entirely in the field with low-cost equipment, meaning it doesn’t need to be shipped to a big lab like the CDC for further testing. At present, the system is capable of detecting Zika and dengue, along with Ebola, the original target for the system. Collins believes that it will be applied to a wide of pathogens in future applications. “We’re looking to use the test for the flu. We’re looking to use the test for HIV. We’re looking to develop the test for Lyme disease. We’re looking to use it for leprosy. And in a completely different form, we’re looking to see if we can use the platform to develop rapid and inexpensive cancer diagnosis.” In the meantime, the team’s primary focus is finding the best and quickest way to deploy the Zika test to the areas hardest hit by the outbreak. “We’re in discussions with groups in Brazil and Colombia to explore how we can get this into the field and into the hands of patients,” says Collins. “More testing is needed, but the platform holds great promise, and when we couple that with the right folks, I think this can be moved quickly for deployment.” |
Gillmor Gang LIVE 05.06.16 | Steve Gillmor | 2,016 | 5 | 6 | Gillmor Gang – Dan Farber, John Taschek, Keith Teare, Robert Scoble, and Steve Gillmor. LIVE recording has concluded for today. Gillmor Gang’s Facebook page G3’s Facebook page |
Relay is a beautiful app for creating and sharing custom maps | Sarah Perez | 2,016 | 5 | 6 | Today’s mapping applications are focused on helping you navigate from one spot to the next, or discovering the businesses around you. But they tend to be utilitarian in nature, and not what anyone would describe as “fun” to use. A new mapping application called changes that. This simple, expertly designed app lets you create custom maps for your upcoming trips, so you can easily visualize in a single map view all the places you plan to visit. For example, you could add pins to restaurants you want to try, tourist destinations like museums or theaters, stores where you want to shop and even your hotel or Airbnb. By seeing all your pins on the map at the same time, you can get a sense of what’s around you and how far away you are from various locations. Using is simple, thanks to its thoughtful design. You can create as many custom maps in the app as you like, and load them up with pins of your favorite places. Plus, you can add notes for each destination to remind yourself why you want to go there, or any other tips you want to remember. Relay also pulls in helpful information to go along with these pins, including a business’s phone number and website address, if applicable. And with a click of a button, you can rename a pin, mark it as “complete” or get directions. In other words, Relay can function like a traditional mapping application by offering driving, transit and walking directions to your destination. The app is not a new startup, but rather a side project from Oliver Brooks, a digital product designer based in Canada. His day job is a Design Lead at MetaLab, a full stack design agency in Victoria, which works with clients like Slack, Coinbase, TED, Brit + Co. and others. This is Brooks’ first foray into mobile apps, he says, though he’s done some freelance work in the past. He designed Relay and worked with a developer he met through a friend, Craig Merchant, to code it. Brooks explains the idea for the app came from his own experience traveling and a problem he wanted to solve for himself. “I was really frustrated that you couldn’t do this kind of thing very well with Google Maps or Apple Maps. So, I felt like I might as well try to do something myself,” he says. “I just wanted to make a tool that’s really helpful and easy to use.” [gallery ids="1318184,1318182,1318181,1318180,1318179,1318183"] Brooks worked on this bootstrapped project during nights and weekends here and there over the past two years (!!!), and says it feels really good to finally have it done. Except projects like this are never really done, as it turns out. An update arriving in a few weeks will let users customize their pins’ color instead of defaulting to Apple Maps’ color scheme determined by business category. The sharing feature will also be improved. Right now it emails a custom file attachment, but the upcoming version will deep link to the custom map right in the app, or point to the App Store page for those who don’t have Relay installed. Relay is . (Side note: It has already moved into a prominent position on my iPhone’s second screen thanks to my upcoming trip to NYC for TechCrunch Disrupt.) Oh, and by the way, Brooks says he likes making videos, too: [youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sfpSLsrT9L0] |
Rethinking security for the Internet of Things | Mike Gault | 2,016 | 5 | 6 |
Many people scoffed in January 2014 when Cisco CEO John Chambers the “Internet of Everything” as a potential $17 trillion market, five to 10 times more impactful on society than the Internet itself. , it seems that Chambers’ prediction for the phenomenon more commonly known as the Internet of Things (IoT) could be on the conservative side. There’s no question that IoT is ushering in a new era of innovation, connecting the digital and machine worlds to bring greater speed and efficiency to diverse sectors, including automotive, aviation, energy and healthcare. But with sensitive data increasingly accessible online — and more endpoints open to attackers — businesses are quickly realizing that security cannot be an afterthought. The bad news is that they’re relying on the same solutions that have failed in the past — and which continue to fail. Created four decades ago to secure communications between two human parties, Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) was never designed to handle the complexity of managing 50 billion devices on industrial-scale networks. McKinsey that the cost of ineffective cybersecurity will rise to $3 trillion by 2020. Given that the number of connected devices is to reach 20.8 billion by 2020, there’s an urgent need to fundamentally rethink security for an always connected, high-volume, decentralized world of machines. Bruce Schneier that throughout the 1990s, everyone was focused on data in motion — communication between two parties — when they should have focused on data at rest. Emphasis on the former is a major reason modern security continues to fail. We need to consider data throughout its entire lifetime, not just secure transmission between devices, which becomes meaningless if the device itself is compromised. In the machine world, data begins and finishes as data at rest. In between, it passes through myriad interacting devices, customer transactions, user activities, access, authentication, software deliveries, API interactions… the list goes on. By focusing only on communication, there’s no chain of custody or way to audit the lifetime of data hosted in different environments administered by different organizations. One compromise anywhere in the chain, and the reliability of the collected data and any conclusions derived from it will be suspect. PKI was designed for Alice and Bob to encrypt and share secret messages, not for massive-scale transmission among millions of machines. Communication is stateless; if Alice thinks her key has been compromised, she can simply generate a new key pair and register the new public key. Previous communications (those before the key compromise) will not be impacted. Machines are stateful; the keys used to verify the integrity of their components have to be secured and managed throughout the life of the machines and the data they produce. The underlying assumption today is that machines and the sensor data they manage can be secured. But what exactly are we securing? Information security has three components: The overwhelming majority of modern security solutions — encryption, firewalls, two-factor authentication, tokens — target data confidentiality, erecting barriers against unauthorized access. But machines, their communications protocols, software, rules and exposed APIs will always have vulnerabilities. What happens when these weak points are breached and confidentiality has been compromised? In most cases, like Sony or Anthem, the , after which system administrators must identify which pieces of data were accessed and/or manipulated — an economically and socially costly task. Unfortunately, I don’t think there’s a security expert in the world who thinks we can build IoT networks without vulnerabilities. So we need a new approach. When breaches are detected, we need to know what data has been changed, and how. This is an integrity issue — and it should be the key focus of modern security in the age of “connected everything.” Focusing on integrity will require a different approach, and a new set of tools. Data integrity schemes based on , (SPDP) and (DPDP) are good places for the industry to focus its efforts. We can work on scaling these technologies, making them reliable for large networks. This is a necessary complement to endpoint security, especially for the IoT industry. As Schneier in relation to integrity attacks, “Again and again, we’ve tried to retrofit security in after the fact.” And, he warns, “once the attacks start doing real damage — once someone dies from a hacked car or medical device, or an entire city’s 911 services go down for a day — there will be a real outcry to do something.” The reality is that basing the integrity of networks and systems on the security of key-stores and the administrators who manage them is a failing strategy. Rather, truly effective solutions must continuously monitor the state of a network’s entry points and the data within. For all the energy and resources spent guarding against breaches, let’s devote equal attention to protocols for when — not if — they occur. |
Lenovo is launching a new $500 million startup fund | Jon Russell | 2,016 | 5 | 6 | Chinese tech giant Lenovo is investing $500 million in startups after it a new fund. Unlike other corporates, Lenovo has a history of making deft investments. Its first fund, created in 2010 and $100 million in size, includes Israeli facial recognition startup Face++, and biometrics specialist Nok Nok Labs from the U.S. among its 40-plus company portfolio. With its second fund, Lenovo said it is looking to back companies with synergies to its businesses and, in particular, those in the cloud computing, big data, artificial intelligence, robots and other Internet services spaces. Beyond backing upcoming companies, Lenovo has also launched an incubator program for its own businesses. In the same spirit as Baidu, which and , so Lenovo is pushing a “subsidiary incubation” program which allows some of its units to go independent, raise funding from third-party investors and tap into the new Lenovo Capital and Incubator Group (LCIG). Lenovo said that SHAREit, its file-sharing application, Lenovo Cloud, and Lenovo Connect as some of the first to benefit from going independent as a subsidiary, and it has others planned in the near future. “Technology breakthroughs are changing the way all of us live today. With our long-industry history and experience of driving and developing core innovations, we’re well-prepared to shape the future of game-changing technologies through funding and nurturing start-ups and bringing incubator projects to market,” Lenovo CTO He Zhiqiang said in a statement. Lenovo’s new fund and startup push come at a time when the company is restructuring amid a challenging business environment. While it remains the top PC seller worldwide, the market is shrinking which has impacted Lenovo’s sales. Analyst firm that Lenovo grew its marketshare from 19.4 percent in Q1 2015 to 20.1 percent in Q1 2016, but its actual shipment numbers fell by 8.5 percent over that same one year period. Lenovo is also struggling in the smartphone space. Last month, that the company had fallen from the world’s top five phone makers as its core . |
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