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5 supercar secrets starring the 2017 McLaren 570GT | Kristen Hall-Geisler | 2,016 | 10 | 20 | Supercars are called super for a reason: these are not everyday sedans. They’re more powerful, more strikingly designed, and more expensive than the cars we usually drive to work. But there are some things you probably don’t know about supercars. I’ll use the 2017 McLaren 570GT to illustrate. The frunk McLaren GT570 storage The takeaway here is that supercars, even “the most practical model ever launched by McLaren Automotive,” are exceptional. They are built for people who view driving as a pleasure, not a task to be endured. These are for owners who are willing to pay $215,000 in the case of the 570GT to hear the engine wind through the twisties all the way to the cabin in the mountains. These drivers are not bringing huge coolers or entire wardrobes along. So while supercars are not very good for mundane chores like getting groceries, picking up one kid after school in the 570GT would be certifiably awesome — as long as their backpack isn’t too big. |
Henrik Fisker teases upcoming EV’s “butterfly” doors | Matt Burns | 2,016 | 10 | 20 | Well, damn. Henrik Fisker just took to Twitter and gave a lesson on teasing upcoming products. According to his tweet, the upcoming reborn Fisker EV will have wild butterfly doors — you know, the type of doors kids will put on their hand-me-down Honda Accords. He says in the tweet the crazy doors are for easier ingress and egress, but really he’s just throwing down with Elon Musk and the Model X’s Falcon doors. A Breakthrough: Innovative new butterfly doors in our new Fisker model, for easier ingress/egress. More next week… — Henrik Fisker (@FiskerOfficial) Reports initially said the upcoming car would be revealed in 2017, but it seems Fisker is ready to unveil the car next week. the vehicle will have a 400 mile range thanks to the company’s focus on battery tech. The new company also hopes to become a key supplier of battery tech to other OEMs, which, if successful, could help it fund its own car projects. This isn’t Henrik Fisker first go at outlandish designs. He was responsible for several of the most iconic cars of the last 20 years. While at BMW in the ’90s, he worked on the design of the BMW Z8 and X5. Later he was the design director at Aston Martin and in charge of the production design of the DB9 and V8 Vantage. In 2005 he started Fisker Coachbuild, eventually becoming Fisker Automotive, where they started out as a coach builder and later started designing and building their own cars including the Fisker Karma. Fisker was even hired by Tesla to help with the initial Model S design though it’s said there was a falling out. Tesla accused Fisker and partner Bernhard Koehler of stealing trade secrets while working for Tesla later used in the formation of the original Fisker Automotive. |
Tim Cook on the Digital You | Andy Gstoll | 2,016 | 10 | 20 |
In Tim Cook’s recent with ABC, he gave us insight into what he thinks the “digital you” will do. He specifically mentions real-time meetings in real spaces — “this gives the capability for both of us to be very present and be talking to each other, and have other things — visually — for both of us to see,” said Cook — acknowledging the all-too-obvious first use of a digital you. But what else is there? Having been lucky enough to have met my digital self (see below) thanks to a company called , I have some thoughts. Like humans, the digital you (AKA will go through an evolution. No, Scotty won’t be beaming me or you to Klingon to do battle like Captain Kirk — but pretty damn close. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sl92q-obETc The first step? It probably won’t be the “Skype on steroids” that Cook alluded to. That technology — your digital avatar moving in the real world, in real time — requires multiple camera angles, serious computing power and the right equipment to watch, at least in the short term. For consumers, the digital you will evolve a little differently. First, we will see non-interactive, static 3D models — you’ll be trying on clothes without even getting out of bed. Companies like were trying this — even three years ago. That can evolve into dynamic 3D models — the digital you will be able to move, and maybe talk. Next, you’ll get animated and go virtual. Wearing a VR headset like HTC Vive or Oculus Rift, your digital you can be present in virtual spaces to have a date, collaborate with colleagues or play a game. Check out , or, see what is doing — they are working on enabling real-time holoportation in VR. While the quality of the person’s rendering is still rough, there is no question that it will be perfected over time. This could get pretty fun, too — imagine the viral-hit animated renderings of apps like MSQRD or Snapchat (which is ) on a full-size scale. (If I built the first human-size digital you animation app, I’d be inclined to name it after the shape-shifting Polyjuice Potion from Harry Potter!) But let’s go where Tim took us: not virtual reality, but augmented reality; if you will, reality-reality. Back to what he said: “[Augmented Reality] gives the capability for both of us to sit and be very present, talking to each other, but also have other things — visually — for both of us to see.” So video chat — in the real world. He continues: “Maybe it’s something we’re talking about, maybe it’s someone else here, who’s not here present, but who can be made to appear to be present.” It’s an interesting (and obvious) stipulation — there’s no question that accessible video chat like Skype or FaceTime has evolved the way we communicate with those far from us, whether it’s colleagues or friends and family. But I think Tim’s holding back. What else could the digital you do? Whether or not Elon Musk is right and , it’s time for me — the real me — to speculate. Let’s take a tip from House of Cards, and follow the money: Where’s the income stream? It’s a great question. In the case of Skype on steroids, it’s a service. Beyond that? It seems that the end user is either the consumer, or, potentially, the product (in the manner that Facebook users are the product). For retailers like Amazon or — or anyone selling clothes, accessories or wearables — the application is immediate and obvious: increase sales with deeper market penetration and more connected customer conversation. But what next? The possibilities are interesting: celebrity visits in your home, virtual gaming environments (except the environment isn’t virtual, it’s your living room) or even education — ballet lessons, lectures and more. There’s even a real-world example: If you’re a HoloLens developer, you can play with the appropriately chosen As you can see, Microsoft has already started playing in this space. In addition to the George Takei giggle, they also ran a — and have advanced the technology even more to create the video below, which is a bit more complicated than what they’ve done by teleporting Takei. This brings us to the interesting dichotomy of the digital you: The one others (and you) can observe, and the one you experience — where your eyes are replaced by cameras, and your ears by microphones. Which raises the question: How far can it go? Can haptic sensors let the digital you… feel? Are we talking the with Sandra Bullock and Sylvester Stallone in Given the porn industry’s history of tech innovation, the answer is, probably — but adding in haptics, smell or 3D audio can have other benefits, too. Once those cameras and sensors can capture other environments accurately enough, you can be places you aren’t. For instance, in a nuclear waste area, or in training for a war zone… any time you want to experience or manipulate the meatspace without actually being turned into ground beef. The other question: Can the digital you do one job, while you do another? Depends. Driving and texting clearly has bad repercussions. But even though we should probably limit multitasking to walking and chewing bubble gum, it is possible, to a degree. However, much of the multitasking limit may come from our RAM-deficient human grey matter, not technology. A college professor probably can’t teach physics in one classroom and mathematics in another. But can a homeowner paint his deck while balancing his budget? Or weed the garden while delivering a lecture? Maybe. Where it does clearly work, though, is when one simply needs to in two (or more) places at once — great for a CEO who needs to present to shareholders or investors, or politicians meeting and greeting citizens. Moral questions above notwithstanding, the existence of the digital you gives rise to a few other concerns: namely, can the digital you be hacked? The answer here is clearly yes. Anything we choose to throw up online is going to be vulnerable. How does the digital you get verified? Do you need a digital passport? Are we all going to need Base 58 binary-to-text encoding à la bitcoin? Part of this depends on how quickly the technology advances, what we are doing with it and how responsible we treat this unstoppable development. The digital you probably will not be signing checks any time soon, but it is not hard to imagine hackers and scammers achieving impressive new levels of old-school social engineering hacks — if you were worried about Granny giving away the bank to a scam artist, it might be even harder to resist if said scammer looks like you and is sitting in her living room. The good news? While it might be very easy to mimic the appearance of someone, voice and intonation are probably a bit more difficult. The best defense against criminalizing the digital you might simply be the people you know. The truth is that most of us will probably be most fascinated by meeting and seeing real (at least, appearing to be real) people — we want to see our friends, kids and family, and be transported to a place where they are, if only digitally. Eventually, I think that immersive experience — sharing a setting, a location, essentially occupying a mutual space — means the digital you will eventually exist beyond virtual reality and move into augmented reality. This, I believe, is the ultimate use case — although not necessarily the most common, or useful — simply the most evolved form. Just think what companies like can do if speculation about their hardware is true! If that is how great minds like Cook see holoportation helping , I agree with him. As to when that will become a real reality, we can only make predictions. If the past three decades have taught us one thing, it is that the future is arriving faster than ever — and virtual people made out of pixels will be here before you know it. But, much of this depends on hardware, and the price of said hardware. One thing we do know? The two big players, Microsoft and Apple, are in. Tim’s talking the talk and walking the walk — Apple is , and he clearly says in comparison to VR that “my own view is that augmented reality is the larger of the two, probably by far.” So even though you may know yourself pretty well, get ready — soon you’ll also meet your own digital you. Although I am guessing Tim will have the chance to meet his, first — if he hasn’t already. |
A trip to Google’s New York City Pop-Up Shop | Brian Heater | 2,016 | 10 | 20 | It might be reading too much into things to note, right off the bat, that is a mere block or two from Apple’s own Prince st. location. After all, that five block radius has hosted brand stores ranging from Samsung to LittleBits. Beats had a flagship shop down there before, as well, being swallowed up by Apple. There’s even, weirdly enough, a Cap’N Crunch themed pop-up just around the corner on Broadway. It’s a heavily trafficked, upscale shopping area (between the copious perpetual Manhattan construction) – an ideal spot to pop in and play around with shiny new smartphone or VR headset between brunch and a trip to Dean and Deluca. The temporary location is hard to miss with the big Google flag flying outside and the large security guy standing at the door, clicking a hand tally counter as people walk through the door, so the drive for some time with the new Pixel doesn’t push things over capacity. The place is white-walled and well lit, broken up by flowing wooden columns. It’s the sort of space you might visit to overpay $500 for a messenger bag. But the Made By Google shop isn’t about direct sales so much as it is getting its trio of recently announced devices in the hands of trendy consumers. Text on the entry wall welcomes visitors to its “little corner shop.” To its right, an automated sculpture spins cardboard modules that alternately spell out the company’s name and display brightly colored designs in keeping with the Made by Google aesthetic. The store is broken up by product. In the back, two small glass cubicles are made up to look like a living room and kitchen, where Google reps demonstrating Home’s smart home functionality, from turning on the TV to beat boxing by request. A line of people nearby wait to test out the new Daydream handset, just in front of a row of Pixels. OK Google, where can a guy get some mimosas around here? [gallery ids="1404748,1404749,1404750,1404751,1404752,1404753,1404754,1404755,1404756,1404757,1404759,1404760,1404761,1404762,1404763"] |
ADL report indicates anti-semitism against journalists has exploded on Twitter | Jonathan Shieber | 2,016 | 10 | 18 | According to a new report from the , anti-semitic hate speech targeting journalists has seen a meteoric rise on Twitter — thanks to the rhetoric in the 2016 Presidential Campaign. The organization, which has a long history of battling anti-Semitism (both real and perceived), established its task force in June in response to what was already a marked rise in anti-semitic abuse of reporters online. The report used a broad set of keywords and combinations of words to capture anti-semitic language on social media. In all, some 2.6 million tweets that were found to contain language that’s consistent with anti-semitic speech were posted on Twitter between August 2015 and July 2016. And those tweets had 10 billion impressions. The rise in an anti-semitic language only intensified as the U.S. presidential campaign got into full swing from January 2016 to July 2016. The ADL focused its research specifically within the Twitter swarm on 50,000 journalists who received a total of 19,253 anti-semitic tweets. In a sign that Twitter really hasn’t managed to solve its trolling problem in the slightest, more than two-thirds of the tweets, were sent by 1,600 Twitter accounts. According to the survey from the ADL, those accounts were disproportionately likely to self-identify as Donald Trump supporters, conservatives, or as part of the “alt-right” — a group of right wing extremists that contain a number of white supremacists. These Twitter trolls really didn’t like 10 Jewish journalists. Roughly 83% of the tweets sent out by groups went to journalists including the conservative columnist Ben Shapiro, Tablet’s Yair Rosenberg, the Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg and Jonathan Weisman, and CNN’s Sally Kohn and Jake Tapper. Twitter’s response? The company deactivated about one-fifth of the offending accounts. “The spike in hate we’ve seen online this election cycle is extremely troubling and unlike anything we have seen in modern politics. A half century ago, the KKK burned crosses. Today, extremists are burning up Twitter” said Jonathan A. Greenblatt, the chief executive of the ADL in a statement. “We are concerned about the impact of this hate on the ability of journalists to do their job and on free speech, which is why we established this Task Force. We hope this report hastens efforts to combat the surge of hate on social media. We look forward to working with Twitter, media companies, and other online platforms to limit hate and harassment and preserve freedom of speech.” Much of the online harassment of journalists came from the anonymous army of egg-trolls, but the ADL singled out two neo-Nazis responsible for some of the attacks. Andrew Anglin, founder of the popular white supremacist website “The Daily Stormer” and Lee Rogers of Infostormer (formerly “The Daily Slave”). The two were banned from Twitter, but have used other platforms to encourage anti-semitic trolling. The report is the latest in a string of analysis the ADL has undertaken detailing the rise of tech-driven hate crimes since 1985. The group has worked on identifying Twitter as a recruitment tool and has coordinated with Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Twitter, Yahoo, and YouTube to create online. |
Crunch Report | Facebook Live: Scheduling and Lobby Feature | Khaled "Tito" Hamze | 2,016 | 10 | 18 | Tito Hamze, John Mannes
Tito Hamze
Joe Zolnoski
Joe Zolnoski TechCrunch C/O Tito Hamze
410 Townsend street
Suite 100
San Francisco Ca. 94107 |
Glassdoor will now tell you if you’re being underpaid | Megan Rose Dickey | 2,016 | 10 | 18 | Some people get really uncomfortable when talking about salary, so Glassdoor has released a new tool to help people better determine their worth in compensation. Know Your Worth aims to help people gain insight into how much money they make in comparison to other people working the same or similar job. asks you for your job title, employer, current salary, location and years of relevant work experience. Know Your Worth, which is still in beta, is currently able to calculate an estimated market value for 55-60% of the workforce in the U.S.. This comes after this year that found that in the United States, women make about 76 cents for every dollar men earn. The tech industry’s gender gap is close to the U.S. average (5.4%), falling in the middle among industries. But it’s worth noting that the tech occupations with significant gaps include computer programmers (28.3%), computer aided designers (21.5%) and video game artists (15.8%) Although Glassdoor is by far the most well-known careers site, it’s not the only company with this type of tool. Comparably, which launched earlier this year, aims to provide more transparency about compensation and help people better understand if they’re being paid adequately. Based on Glassdoor’s assessment of millions of salary reports people have shared on the platform, my current pay falls within the range of what a typical reporter makes, which is between $50,000 and $80,000 a year. Glassdoor also takes into account current supply and demand trends in the job market, and recalculates your market value weekly. Because Comparably is still in its early days, not enough people are on the platform for Comaprably to be able to provide me with an accurate assessment of how my pay compares to that of other tech journalists in San Francisco. Meanwhile, Glassdoor has a lot more money and resources than Comparably. Glassdoor has raised $200 million, with its most recent round of $40 million led by T. Rowe Price in June. Comparably, which . [gallery ids="1402509,1402507,1402508"] |
Civil liberties groups ask for ‘moratoriums’ on face recognition tech | Kate Conger | 2,016 | 10 | 18 | Armed with new research, civil rights organizations are urging the Justice Department to investigate law enforcement’s excessive use of face recognition technologies. A coalition of asked the Department of Justice today to investigate the use of face recognition technology by local and state police and the FBI, after a report by the revealed half of adult Americans in certain jurisdictions have had their images scanned by authorities’ face recognition software. The Georgetown report also indicates that there is no significant regulation of the use of this technology, that the software can be inaccurate, and that the use of face recognition will disproportionately impact communities of color. “Face recognition technology is rapidly being interconnected with everyday police activities, impacting virtually every jurisdiction in America. Yet, the safeguards to ensure this technology is being used fairly and responsibly appear to be virtually nonexistent,” the organizations wrote in a to the civil rights department of the Justice Department. The coalition asked DOJ to focus its investigation on police departments that are already under investigation for biased policing In its letter, the groups urged DOJ to focus its investigation on police departments that are already under investigation for biased policing practices and to ensure that neither federal nor local databases are biased against people of color. “This technology is not limited to serious criminals. It’s not limited at all, really,” said Alvaro Bedoya, the executive director of the Center on Privacy & Technology and a co-author of the report. “By standing for a driver’s license photo, you can be searched by the police or the FBI. This is not business as usual.” The report, titled “ ,” draws its information from public records requests to 106 police departments across the country. The Georgetown researchers found only one department that had received legislative approval for its use of face recognition technology and that most departments do not audit their systems for accuracy or bias. “The Perpetual Lineup” builds on that showed face recognition systems were less accurate on people of color, women, and young people. “Commercial face recognition systems are 5 to 10 percent less accurate on African Americans than Caucasians,” Bedoya said, adding that the National Institute of Standards and Technology had only tested for racial bias in facial recognition once and that two leading companies interviewed by Georgetown researchers could not identify any tests they had run on their own software to measure racial bias. Despite these accuracy problems, the report points out that face recognition systems are already widely in use by American law enforcement agencies, some of which run recognition algorithms in real-time on crowded streets, scanning people’s faces without their knowledge. “We have to ask ourselves, ‘Does that look like America?'” Bedoya said. The ACLU, which is one of the organizations involved in the letter to the Justice Department, questioned the use of face recognition technology during protests. An ACLU report last week showed that police in Baltimore had used in combination with social media posts to identify and arrest people who participated in a Freddie Gray protest. ACLU’s legislative counsel Neema Singh Guliani said that such uses of face recognition technology could chill speech and explained that the ACLU is asking governments to “push a pause button and issue moratoriums on certain uses of this technology.” |
In its VR/AR push, Twitter trolls itself | Lucas Matney | 2,016 | 10 | 18 | PR recovery 101: when you screw up this reality, move on to the next one. Twitter seems to be slowly building up its AR/VR hires as its other real-world hopes and dreams rise and fall around it. News today that the company has hired former AngelHack founder Greg Gopman to start working on virtual reality efforts at the company. [ : Greg Gopman now claims he was fired by Twitter less than a day after that the company had hired him as a contractor. Gopman was embroiled in a 2013 scandal over offensive remarks he made about the homeless and the subsequent fallout. Today on Facebook, “Anddd I’m fired. Thanks TechCrunch”. When friends asked what happened, he added “They wrote a smash piece on me last night and comms didn’t want to deal with it.” When asked for a statement, Twitter provided “no comment”. : Gopman told TechCrunch “Working at Twitter was actually awesome. Much better than I expected. I worked on an incredible team and we were doing really amazing things. Yesterday we were flying. And now it’s all over. I still love them and wish them the best.”. Gopman’s claims raise the question of whether Twitter was aware of Gopman’s past remarks about the homeless when it hired him as a contractor. If it wasn’t, it failed to do proper due diligence on a potential hire. If it was aware and hired him anyway, was it appropriate to terminate his contract simply because of news reports about something from three years? -Josh Constine] Anddd I'm fired. Thanks TechCrunch. Posted by on Twitter has yet to really announce any major initiatives on the VR/AR front—sure, they may have tested a 360 video or two—but it largely seems like their attention has been focused on other items like the rampant abuse and harassment on the platform. For a company with such an abuse problem from trolls, it might initially seem like a double win that they’ve hired Gopman, a “VR expert” who’s also voiced his passion for dealing with “degenerates.” That is, until you realize that the “degenerates” he’s referred to as a “burden and liability” were SF’s homeless population. That’s correct, this is the same Gopman that was lambasted after he lost it in a long-since deleted Facebook rant on SF’s homeless problem. (emphasis is mine) Just got back to SF. I’ve traveled around the world and I gotta say there is nothing more grotesque than walking down market st in San Francisco.Why the heart of our city has to be I have no clue. Each time I pass it my love affair with SF dies a little. The difference is in other cosmopolitan cities, In downtown SF the . Like it’s their place of leisure… In actuality it’s the business district for one of the wealthiest cities in the USA. It a disgrace. I don’t even feel safe walking down the sidewalk without planning out my walking path. You can preach compassion, equality, and be the biggest lover in the world, but . There is nothing positive gained from having them so close to us. Twitter did not immediately respond to my inquiry on whether they were aware of Gopman’s past comments. The revelation of Gopman’s new role comes as news emerges that Twitter’s harassment issues seem to Salesforce and Disney from making bids to buy the company. Given Twitter’s troll problem, you wouldn’t think they would hire someone for their VR program whose past opinions read like some of the worst of the company’s user base (albeit far more wordy than 140 characters can allow). But then again, Twitter’s moves thus far in VR haven’t made a ton of sense. First official day with @TwitterVR About a month ago I left UploadVR and to explore a few things and this is where I… Posted by on While social media competitor Facebook has been at the forefront of VR innovation with its groundbreaking 360 video/audio technologies, Twitter has remained stagnant. Snapchat has gained a great deal of attention for its augmented reality smart filters, but Twitter is still far behind. Inexplicably the company still doesn’t even have a native 360 video viewer available for those wanting to show off that increasingly popular type of content. With so many AR/VR moves that should be happening, it’s odd that hiring Gopman was the one that Twitter made. Most of us have said things online that we later regret, and you don’t necessarily want to rake someone over the coals for the rest of their career over one dumb post. But even Gopman’s efforts to make amends for his comments have gone poorly. Gopman has had a real uphill battle recovering from what he called “the stupidest mistake of my life.” A six-thousand-word from earlier this year detailed all of the work he’s done in “educating himself” on the plights of the homeless in San Francisco since his FB post. Now, people can and do change, but for all of Gopman’s seemingly tireless work spent bringing notice to the plight of the city’s most needy, there’s always been one person more in need of redemption and attention, himself. He’s let us take part in his learning experiences alongside him by sharing his experiences to a and tagging journalists in tweets so they can see how he’s learned to care. All living up to a Silicon Valley aphorism that no good deed goes unposted on Medium. https://twitter.com/StartupGreg/status/571095951856656384 “Last year I wrote a rant on Facebook voicing my displeasure with San Francisco’s homeless community. It went viral. People thought I was a monster…” Gopman . “But the worst part about it was that it distracted San Francisco from the necessary conversation our community needed to have on reforming our broken homeless policies.” After a few more self-referential blog posts and lots of data points, Gopman formed a collective to tackle the problem in the best way he knew how, striving to create a homeless community . Gopman did not get the positive attention he was expecting. After part of his plan, which involved for the model homeless, was picked up and torn apart by the media. Gopman later posted (and deleted) an email (this time on Twitter!) from the Director of Public Policy at the SF Mayor’s Office of Housing Opportunity, Partnership & Engagement. In the email, the official called Gopman a “ ” who was using his efforts to “help clear his google search profile of all the horrible things he said.” Another official told that Gopman’s efforts had ceased because “people working with him got sick of his ego.” Rendered mock-ups of Gopman’s idea for geodesic domes that house the homeless Distraught with how difficult it was to bring about change to San Francisco’s decades-long homeless problem in one year’s time, Gopman departed on what he called an “Eat, Pray, Love trip in Asia.” Returning from this nine-month sabbatical, he started a job search and settled into a business development position at , a virtual reality entertainment/media/working space startup, where he was in charge of recruiting new employees and helping to create something called a “bi-monthly VR Lifestyle nightclub experience.” He stayed with Upload for about nine months before joining the team at Twitter this month as a VR Program Manager where he’s now working on “partnerships, product launches and recruiting,” areas which Twitter clearly needs to be bringing more positive attention to, something his hiring will likely not do. For how loud Gopman’s detractors have been on social media, the company where he has just been hired is going about its VR efforts rather quietly. Twitter’s AR/VR efforts are currently contained within the Twitter Cortex engineering group. It’s headed up by Alessandro Sabatelli, whose VR/AR company IXOMOXI, was acquired by Twitter in June. His startup built an app for the Gear VR called “Lucy,” aimed at music festival goers, which put kaleidoscopic LSD-inspired filters over footage from the passthrough camera on the phone. Since Sabatelli’s hire, the company has also been looking at how to integrate Periscope with 360 video to establish live feeds of different events that Twitter’s users can experience alongside each other. “Our main push right now is live and how we experience live events together,” Sabatelli told a crowd at an event that Twitter Cortex hosted with UploadVR at the Siggraph 2016 conference. A on the site urges potential Cortex applicants to “imagine going to the biggest concert ever thrown with millions of people in attendance from all over the world interacting live in new and exciting ways.” A to Periscope brought the ability to stream live video from external cameras, 360 video streaming and live-stitching appear to be on the way for the Producer feature as well so this feature may be coming sooner than others. Snapchat-style filters are an area that Cortex is also clearly looking to move towards, the company currently has job openings with knowledge of “face detection, recognition, body tracking and/or pose detection.” This is a necessary move, what isn’t clear is why it’s taking so long to bring anything live. Sabatelli has only been in his role since June so he’s not necessarily to fault, but why Twitter has dragged its feet in heightening the computer vision capabilities of its platform is a mystery to me. It’s possible that the persistent rumors of takeover bids have sidelined major feature movement on the platform, but then again Twitter has always been slow and cautious in expanding its feature set. VR/AR tech is still very early in its life cycle, but Twitter isn’t even bothering to openly experiment with finding the related features that users will enjoy now on their smartphones. Snapchat has its fun and crazy smart filters while Facebook has one of the largest libraries of VR videos and photos out there (and oh yeah Oculus, an entire VR headset company). Twitter has not only failed to find its own niche but it has failed to even try to replicate the successes of other social media companies. For large companies, it doesn’t take a whole lot these days to be seen as progressive force in the AR/VR field, but Twitter’s odd inactivity in the space—and today’s questionable hiring decision—don’t seem to be particularly intelligent moves, especially as the company looks ahead to such an uncertain reality. |
Internal expense fraud is next on machine learning’s list | Chris Baker | 2,016 | 10 | 18 |
What reactions did people have to the movie trailer for (which was created entirely — and for the first time — by an AI bot, and a pretty famous one at that)? “That’s creepy.” Which is a fair reaction. Computers can now write, read, learn and speak. And for some, this is pretty scary — people are terrified that bots will snatch their jobs and eventually take over the world and render humans useless (films like haven’t helped this). Many people naturally hold irrational fears. Just look at the amount of individuals terrified of sharks when, in actual fact, they’re much more likely to be killed by shopping on . So when it comes to machine learning, businesses shouldn’t shy away, they should embrace it and make it work for them. Previously, AI was only something to which techie people in Silicon Valley had access; this is no longer the case. The technology’s growing pervasiveness is seen in the increasing popularity of service bots and digital assistants like Alexa and Siri getting constantly smarter. It’s great that companies like , which , plan to use machine learning and artificial intelligence to predict and prevent fraud everywhere online — especially with reports suggesting card issuers and banks could be saving with the help of machine learning fraud-detection systems. We know machine learning is already proving its worth in the financial services sector, so there’s no reason why it can’t lend a hand to enterprise technology. And more specifically, the process that time forgot — the tedious expenses process. As it stands, machine learning hasn’t been used to detect dodgy expenses, though we’re certainly moving in the right direction for that soon to become a reality. But how much of an issue is internal expense fraud? And what might bots detecting our expense anomalies look like? Worryingly for businesses, dodgy expenses are increasingly becoming a cultural norm — one which is seriously affecting bottom lines. From government to the private sector, high-profile cases of this are commonplace. But digging deeper than the headlines, at Concur we found that thought it was acceptable to fudge their expenses, coupled with the Financial Fraud Action revealing in the first half of 2016. Can machine learning swoop in to save the day for businesses (and the dodgy expenses process)? Perhaps. AI’s ability to analyze huge swathes of data and spot patterns could be just the help the issue of workplace fraud needs. Unlike humans, machines won’t be affected by hangovers and sleepless nights, so the likelihood of a bot missing a dodgy-looking expense is more unlikely than us mere mortals. This isn’t to say that it will make finance teams redundant; instead, it will simply make their lives that bit easier by taking on the heavy lifting. And technology can only work effectively as long as there’s someone monitoring and using the data in clever ways — showing the need for both bot and body. However, it’s also important people don’t assume just because a machine states something that it’s necessarily correct. This is exactly what when he questioned the foolproof computer that detected an “incoming missile” from the United States — the protocol was to retaliate with a nuclear attack — but Petrov suggested the computer was wrong, by using his brain, and saved the world in the process. Machine learning offers clear advantages. Not only would it complete the job in a fraction of the time, freeing up finance teams to take on the more important tasks, it also could put people off the age-old “oh I’ll slip in that receipt from Sunday lunch last week” when they’re faced with an intimidating bot. We’re already living in a digital world. It’s seen in every sphere of our lives, from contactless payments to simply how we consume everything online. So really, it’s in finance departments’ best interest to supercharge their outdated Excel docs into something more apt for the modern world, so that when the inevitable occurs — and machine learning detection systems are put in place — they’re halfway clued up into handling them and all hell won’t break loose. |
Tim Cook and Bill Gates were on the list of potential Hillary Clinton VP’s | Sarah Buhr | 2,016 | 10 | 18 | Hillary Clinton was considering several tech leaders among a list of potential running mates, to leaked emails supposedly from Clinton’s campaign manager John Podesta. In an sent March 17, 2016, Podesta mentions a “first cut” of those Clinton might consider as her vice president. In one section of that list, organized into “food groups” is Tim Cook, Bill and Melinda Gates, GM’s Mary Barra and Xerox’s Ursula Burns. Wikileaks started releasing thousands of what it says are Podesta’s emails in early October and has said it will continue to release more of them daily up until election day. While Podesta has not verified whether or not the content in the Wikileaks emails are real, he has acknowledged his emails have been hacked; pointing the finger at Trump aide John Stone and accusing him of aiding Wikileaks founder Julian Asange. The email also mentions Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz, Coca-Cola’s Muhtar Kent and Clinton’s now running mate Tim Kaine. Clinton’s primaries foe Bernie Sanders also made the list but is mentioned at the very bottom and not grouped with anyone else. Some of those listed in the tech bucket may have made the first draft due to both their influence in Silicon Valley and their relationship with the candidate. Clinton has been cozy with Silicon Valley and vice versa — several, have held sizeable fundraisers for the Clinton campaign. However, none of the named tech leaders have the political experience needed and may have been strategic picks who could add to the campaign’s coffers rather than become serious contenders. You can see that possible strategy at work in another leaked email on the site dated June 20, which shows Cook had requested a one-on-one with Clinton. “I think this is one we should proceed cautiously. He’s supportive but new to this so I think we shouldn’t come on too strong,” Clinton’s head of fundraising Lindsay Roitman wrote to another staffer, chief technology officer Stephanie Hannon. The U.S. government has Russia of aiding Wikileaks in hacking the Democratic National committee’s emails in order to influence the election. The Clinton campaign has further accused Wikileaks of taking part in the scheme, the Trump campaign knew about the leaks ahead of time. |
Pepe’s creator teams with the Anti-Defamation League to reclaim his chilled-out frog | Brian Heater | 2,016 | 10 | 18 | It’s been a weird few years for Pepe the Frog. A wild ride that ought to be reserved for the likes of Mr. Toad – or maybe if anyone tries to deep fry Kermit’s legs again. Anyone who knows Pepe and his creator Matt Furie knows that the pair are candidates for two of the least likely people/amphibians to show of up . But here we are. Last last month, the creation the cartoonist refers to as “just a chilled out frog” was presented that dubious diction, with Furie’s name coming along for the ride. When I spoke to the cartoonist the other week in the wake of that revelation, he didn’t know what the make of the whole thing. I remember being excited for him a few years back when one of the characters featured in was suddenly gaining traction in the strangest places, from bodybuilder message boards to Katy Perry’s Twitter feed. Australian jet lag got me like — KATY PERRY (@katyperry) Sure there’s no direct correlation between meme life and money (unless you’re ), but it was, at the very least, a peculiar sort of recognition for an artist whose work might not have otherwise had a chance to extend too far beyond the insular world of independent comics. A post shared by (@donaldjtrumpjr) on For Furie, as with most of us, the turn seemed sudden. Within the space of weeks, Donald Trump tweeted our an image featuring Pepe and and Rachel Maddow both dspent time name-checking him as a hate symbol. The last time I spoke with the artist, he expressed interest in taking his creation back, but seemed at a loss for ways to accomplish this. https://youtu.be/neuzEen7N1E Earlier this week, that it would be working with Furie to “take back” the chilled out cartoon, in order to “use the frog’s likeness as a force for good.” Furie, for his part, seems to have taken a momentary reprieve from the maelstrom of interviews, but Eric Reynolds, Furie’s long-time editor at responded to our request. “It was disturbing to me that Matt’s name was innocently yielding search returns in the ADL database despite having absolutely nothing to do with the co-opting of Pepe by racist assholes,” Reynolds said. “Matt is as peaceful and chill a dude as Pepe is a frog, so I’m tremendously relieved that the ADL is stepping up and working with Matt to clear Pepe’s good name. I look forward to this news cycle passing when President Clinton is elected. “ Furie’s own feelings on the matter are probably best summed up by a cartoon posted yesterday on comics journalism site, the Nib, which features Pepe transforming, panel by panel, into a Trump-like figure. According to the ADL, the artist will continue to create work featuring Pepe with “a series of positive Pepe memes and messages, which ADL will promote on its social media channels with the hashtag, #SavePepe.” Here’s Furie from the same release, “I aim to reclaim the rascally frog from the forces of hate and ask that you join me in making millions of new, joyful Pepe memes that share the light hearted spirit of the original chilled-out champion.” |
Ecuador says it cut Julian Assange’s internet access to prevent interference with the election | Devin Coldewey | 2,016 | 10 | 18 | Ecuador has claimed responsibility for cutting off Julian Assange’s internet access, calling it a “temporary restriction” aimed at preventing him from interfering with the U.S. election. WikiLeaks tweeted about the outage over the weekend and claimed confirmation it was Ecuador yesterday. Turns out they were right. An was issued by the Ecuadorian government explaining their actions. A translated version read in part: The Government of Ecuador respects the principle of non-intervention in the internal affairs of other states. It does not interfere in external electoral processes, nor does it favor any particular candidate. Accordingly, Ecuador has exercised its sovereign right to temporarily restrict access to some of its private communications network within its Embassy in the United Kingdom. This temporary restriction does not prevent the WikiLeaks organization from carrying out its journalistic activities. WikiLeaks rather disagrees, of course, and has already “activated the appropriate contingency plans,” of which it must have many, considering its controversial status and leader. The organization also alleges that John Kerry requested this internet cut-off during meetings in September. Since Assange is holed up at the Ecuadorian embassy in London to prevent his own extradition, he hasn’t got much recourse when they change the Wi-Fi password. It’s unlikely he won’t find another way to get online, or just post by proxy, so this restriction seems largely symbolic. No word on when the restriction will be lifted; we’ll investigate this and other questions further. |
OpenTable rolls separate country apps into single app with global booking | Natasha Lomas | 2,016 | 10 | 18 | wants you to book a table for dinner right after you book your city break away. The restaurant booking platform is consolidating multiple apps for different countries into a single multi-language global app that supports bookings at restaurants in other countries, it said today. The idea is to make it easier for users to browse eateries and make bookings in unfamiliar locations and languages. The platform already includes diner reviews and menu info to help users pick a place to eat. Consolidating multiple, siloed apps into a single interface that can reach across borders also looks like a strategy to maximize activity from an existing user-base by simplifying access to its booking platform. The new global booking functionality covers more than 38,000 restaurants across its network globally. Cities covered include Berlin, Dublin, London, New York, San Francisco, Sydney and Toronto, and the feature currently supports five languages: English, Spanish, French, German and Japanese. Commenting on the move in a statement, CEO Christa Quarles said: “This evolution in how we engineer our current country sites and apps, means we can now power great restaurant experiences across multiple cities, in multiple languages, becoming a true ‘Global Dining Passport’ for diners across the world.” The veteran restaurant booking player was back in 2014 for $2.6 billion. |
Tinder Boost, letting you pay to skip the line, goes live worldwide | Jordan Crook | 2,016 | 10 | 18 | , the feature that lets users pay to have their profile shown first in the feed, has gone live worldwide as of today. The company started testing the feature in late September in Australia, and has finally decided to let it loose across Tinder’s global community. Tinder Boost lets users pay to have their profile bumped to the front of the feed for 30 minutes. While Tinder Boost is activated, other relevant, potential matches within the area will see your profile before anyone else’s. Here’s what Brian Norgard, Head of Revenue and Core Product, had to say about it: We are always looking at ways to improve our user experience. Our tests in Australia and the U.K. show us that users receive 8-10x more profile views and 3x more matches on average when Boost is activated. is still testing pricing, but we’re seeing single Boosts go for $1.99 to $3.99. As expected, packages are priced at a discount based on the volume of Boosts you buy in a package. Tinder Boost is being treated as a separate premium feature from those usually included with Tinder Plus, the monthly ad-free premium Tinder membership that includes unlimited swipes and free weekly Super Likes. The update seems to be rolling out slowly in the App Store, but it’ll likely hit most users’ phones over the next few days. [gallery ids="1393431,1393429,1393428"] |
Call A Deplorable / Elitist breaks you out of your echo chamber | Josh Constine | 2,016 | 10 | 18 | Put in your phone number, talk to someone with the opposite political views. That’s the idea behind two new sister sites, for use by Hillary supporters and for use by Trump supporters. “We hope that every voter can take the time to share their story and listen to what others have to say before election day,” write the project’s creators. Most people just assume everyone on the other side is crazy, and they just avoid or ignore them. That’s not too difficult despite our broad connections via social media. Facebook’s research shows of people’s friends have a conflicting political view. Yet you might not hear from them because Trump supporters in Democrat communities or Hillary supporters in Trump communities might be afraid to speak up. The Wall Street Journal’s shows just how different the echo chambers can be. What you’ll find at CallADeplorable.com But the “Call A” sites make it easy to reach across the aisle yourself. I just had a relatively civil conversation with someone who gave me a down-to-earth perspective from a world I don’t hear about often. He may have shouted a bit before hanging up, which made me thankful that the “Call A” sites connect you over an anonymous Twilio line and don’t actually give you each other’s phone numbers. But it still felt productive. “Regardless of who wins, the biggest problem is that the country is so clearly divided over what issues should be focused on. That problem doesn’t seem like it’s going to go away,” says Call A co-founder , a former Facebook product manager with his own anonymous, pixellated video chat app called . Roche insists that “I don’t think any of Trump’s views are reasonable,” and admits that “you’re not going to change people’s opinions, especially not over a phone call.” He might shut the sites down if they cost too much in Twilio charges and he can’t find a sustainable way to finance it, saying, “I don’t really see this as a long-term product.” Right now he’s buying ads to fill the Trump supporter side of the calls. Any attempt to mend the divide in our country seems worth a shot, though some of the calls are sure to devolve into trolling or abuse. “Acknowledging the other side exists could do some good, and people would see it less black and white. Maybe you can allow them to see that someone came to the conclusion of voting for Trump through all their life experiences. You can judge that as right or wrong, but if you’d been through their life situation, you might do the same,” Roche concludes. “I thought connecting people and letting them have some empathy would be good for both sides.” |
Social media display company Tagboard acquires Capture | Anthony Ha | 2,016 | 10 | 18 | announced that it has acquired , another startup in the social media and user-generated-content business. Tagboard helps marketers find and create displays for social media conversation around a brand or topic. (When I covered the company a couple of years ago, I described it as a “ ,” which is both accurate and terrible-sounding.) Capture, meanwhile, works with news organizations (including CNN, BuzzFeed and the Weather Channel) to find relevant photos and videos on social media and get permission to publish them. So it sounds like there’s some overlap in what the two companies do, albeit for different customers. Tagboard says it will continue to support both products, while also bringing Capture features into Tagboard. Capture’s New York City headquarters will become one of the Seattle-based company’s offices, and Capture CEO Jordan Osher will become Tagboard’s vice president of business development for New York. “What this acquisition represents for us is a new level of growth, but what it means for our joint customers is even more significant,” said Tagboard CEO Josh Decker in a statement. “We’ll continue to support the Capture products for their clients while working on platform integration.” The financial terms of the acquisition were not disclosed. |
The future of work manifesto | Sondra Rasch | 2,016 | 10 | 18 |
We humans are hunter-gatherers domesticated into becoming farmers. Around 10,000 years ago, we discovered the wonders of agriculture. To make farmers out of hunters, we used social norms and sanctions. This tension of our origins is described in the fable of Cain and Abel, which ends with Cain the farmer slaying his brother, and God’s favorite, the hunter-gatherer Abel. Hunter-gatherer society wasn’t great, but it is where most of our genetics evolved to fit Life for a farmer and a hunter-gatherer is very different. As hunter-gatherers, we were on the move, and our activity was low-stakes. We spent more time exploring opportunities and met strangers via mutually beneficial trade. As farmers, we were bound to one place, exploiting our existing knowledge, protecting against threats from strangers. Farming was a pretty horrible activity for a hunter, but it gave us a lot of food This big change in how we lived our lives happened so quickly that genetic evolution didn’t have time to catch up. We humans still carry within us the values and preferences of our inner hunter-gatherer, but in a cultural straightjacket to make us farmers. The era of humans as farmers is now over. Since the industrial revolution, machines have taken over the toil. In an incredibly short period of time we have gone from a world where most of us worked in agriculture, to one where almost no one does. Yet our farmer-based values are still in our culture and in the workplace, a cultural vestige that reduces our happiness and productivity. Like a cultural post-traumatic stress disorder, we are exerting huge effort to keep alive structures from a bygone era that no longer make sense. When we mechanized agriculture and built the first big industrial firms, we borrowed farmer values to coordinate our activities. Work on a factory line wasn’t so different from work on a big farm — it made sense to keep people in line using the same methods. Now, work is changing again. In the past three years, the amount of people participating in the online freelancer economy has grown an incredible 53-fold. The internet has allowed the building of tools that caused the external coordination costs to drop drastically. As this external coordination cost keeps falling, we no longer have to bundle together tasks into jobs. We no longer need our farmer straightjacket to be productive. We are witnessing a dissolving of the economic benefit that the farmer culture once had. For the first time in 10,000 years, we have the opportunity to shed our self-imposed shackles, and for the majority of people to return to values that are more in line with our nature. As with all big transitions, how we design work in this moment will matter. A lot. Like the founding of the United States could only be done once, the founding moment of what will become the future of work will have big and lasting effects. The values we build this protocol on will mean much for many humans, now and in the future. There are many fast-growing companies right now that are adopting freelancer or remote-work business models. In the last few years this model has started to make sense in many professions, and the shift has happened fast. So fast, in fact, that many people aren’t realizing this is still the Wild West. While some companies are exerting good efforts, freelancers in general aren’t being treated very well — neither by companies nor governments. This is my stake in the sand — not just to hold us to a high standard — but to hopefully inspire other companies and freelancers to start holding themselves to a higher moral standard in this new way of working. Our manifesto for the future of work is to use technology to build a way of working together that is superior in productivity, yet better matches our instincts; to free humanity from the mental shackles of wage slavery. Too many people have restricted access to free movement, reducing the productivity of billions of talented people. We believe it should not matter what your source is, but what you do. Many are not paid their fair share according to what they contribute. We believe one should receive equal pay for equal work, without discrimination. Too many people have to travel far to get to work at times that are inconvenient for them and for the rest of society. Everybody should have the flexibility to work from wherever they want, and when they want. Far too many people spend too much of their time searching for a job, or searching for projects. We believe we should use technology to match people with the projects in which they are interested. Too many people are working on something they do not find interesting, but that others do. We believe we should increase the size of our markets, so that many more can choose to follow their passions, as well as learn new things. And, sadly, many people spend time at workplaces where they are miserable. We believe work should be a tribe that provides you with meaning and enjoyment, where you are part of something bigger. Too many people are at risk of not getting paid for the value they produce, or for losing their job. We believe we should pool our resources to provide everyone with a stable income, where you always get paid what you are promised, regardless of whether other people fail to meet their commitments. Far too many people live in trustless environments, where trust is replaced by costly and unwanted surveillance. We learned in the Nordics that it is possible to create work without constant monitoring; reputation-based repeated interaction builds a robust culture built on trust. We’re still far away from the ideals listed above, but they represent lighthouses to guide us toward the kind of workplace we are building here at Konsus. If we succeed, I see the future of work as having the flexibility to work from wherever you want, when you want, on the things you master, with security. Companies will have the full potential of humanity at their fingertips. In 10 years, work and jobs will look quite different from today, in a very good way, a more equitable, free and efficient way. |
Autonomous cars are going to be great for jerks, study finds | Darrell Etherington | 2,016 | 10 | 18 | If you’re kind of an ass when you drive, autonomous cars are going to be great for you, a new study from the London School of Economics and Goodyear has found (via ). Basically, self-driving cars will opt on the side of safety and caution, which means aggressive jerks who drive like morons will be able to bully them all over the road. The study found that, surprisingly, drivers who tend to be more aggressive (and therefore among the least likely to want to give up control to a robot, especially a weak robot that’s a huge wimp when it comes to wanting not to terrify people or run them down) are actually those who favor an autonomous future, because in that world they can count on most of the soft baby bot cars to get out of the way when they careen toward them unsafely in order to assert their sad, pathetic, frustrated dominance. This is fine, because the people in those self-driving cars likely won’t notice because they’ll be enjoying life instead of stressing about having to defensively drive in order to deal with huge jerks weaving in and out of traffic on the freeway. It’s also fine because any enjoyment of their dickish driving will be short-lived, since autonomous cars sharing the roadway with human-driven vehicles is probably going to be very short-lived, especially once we have more data to back-up the safety advantages of self-driving cars. Aggro drivers could also hasten their own demise, if they end up causing accidents trying to bully the bots. Enjoy your sunset, road warriors. |
You can endorse your preferred presidential candidate on Facebook now | Kate Conger | 2,016 | 10 | 18 | Facebook rolled out a new feature today that lets users endorse presidential candidates, a move that will probably bring even more acrimonious comments about this election cycle into your News Feed. Yay. Here’s how it works: You can go onto any candidate’s Facebook page — yes, this includes third-party candidates like Jill Stein and Gary Johnson; no one is getting left out — click “Endorsements” in the left-hand column and add your own endorsement. Facebook’s Help Center has on how to make endorsements. You can choose to make your endorsement public to everyone who visits the candidate’s page (and surely no one will abuse this to shitpost on the page of a candidate they oppose), or you can make your endorsement only to your friends and family, if you haven’t blocked them all already for posting racist memes. It looks like Facebook plans to make the feature more widely available to candidates in state and local elections, too — the company says the only thing you need to do to receive endorsements is change the category of your page to “Politician, Political Candidate, or Government Official.” Facebook also added an “Issues” tab to the candidates’ pages, cribbing a feature that Google incorporated into Search earlier this year that allowed candidates to list directly in search results their positions on a variety of issues. |
null | Brian Heater | 2,016 | 10 | 20 | null |
What is LeEco and why should you care? | Brian Heater | 2,016 | 10 | 18 | Maybe you’ve heard of LeEco (nee LeTV). Maybe you’ve seen some news about the company’s phones or its plans to launch a car. If you live in the U.S., however, odds are pretty good that your knowledge of the company doesn’t extend beyond the occasional passing mention. But the company’s big, and only getting bigger. Early today, research firm Strategy Analytics posted numbers charting the Chinese technology company’s recent growth. It’s a pretty impressive rise. Best known for its video streaming services (earning it the nickname “the Netflix of China”), the company is a fairly recent entrant into the smartphone space. forecast a growth of 541-percent in smartphone shipping from 2015 to 2016, rising from 3.9 to 25 million, qualifying it for the title of the “ Says the firm, “LeEco is clearly growing at a very rapid rate and the vendor is an emerging threat to mass-market smartphone rivals such as Alcatel, Huawei and Samsung.” And the company has India and the U.S. in its sights. Tomorrow we’ll be hearing quite a bit about the latter, as the company takes to the stage at a press conference in San Francisco, detailing, among other things, plans to set up shop in Silicon Valley in a major way, with 12,000 hires and a 48-acre office complex purchased from Yahoo this summer at the cost of $250 million. And LeEco has been planting other seeds for a stateside run, including the launching of an and the purchase of Southern Californian budget TV maker Vizio. And then, of course, there’s its . Tomorrow’s press conference , as well, should you want to tune in at home. |
Finally, a robot crib from Yves Behar | Devin Coldewey | 2,016 | 10 | 18 | Yves Behar, designer of many round-edged objects, has at last turned his attention to the piece of furniture rated “most restful” by babies: the crib. His robotic, Wi-Fi-enabled creation, , also puts to rest the classic “what’s snoo with you” joke, since now everyone will know what Snoo is and won’t ask. It had a good run, but it was probably time. Snoo is one of these electrified cribs that rocks your baby to sleep automatically, but a few other features give it a chubby little leg up on the competition. A built-in swaddling strap lets you lock baby down, and mesh sides let air flow freely through. It monitors the baby’s movement and noise, playing womb noises and rocking with a “womb-like motion,” whatever that means, to calm them down. This is ostensibly to prevent parents from having to get up in the night and do this themselves. Of course, repeatedly experiencing the parents’ voice, touch and smell would seem to be an integral part of creating the bond between parent and child. But this way the child grows up learning to rely on technology for comfort in all occasions, just like adults do. Pediatrician Harvey Karp, with whom Behar worked to create Snoo, probably recommended this. Sleep patterns are also collected and sent to a companion app, which may actually be nice for parents who like to track that stuff. There’s a little shield inside the crib that blocks the baby from being hit by the Wi-Fi signal, though you can also turn it off altogether. The Snoo, from Happiest Baby, costs $1,160 — so you might need to have an extra baby to get your money’s worth. We’ll wait for reviews to see whether it’s better than a . |
Waiting impatiently for Apple to release new Macs? You’ll get them on October 27th | Matthew Panzarino | 2,016 | 10 | 18 | So I’ve been hearing for weeks now that Apple has been waffling a bit on a date for its late-October Mac event. But, according to my sources, a date has been picked: Thursday, October 27th. So those looking for a new MacBook, hold your horses. And if you’re a journo, flights are getting iffy but hotels are pretty cheap still. I reached out to Apple for a comment on their secret, unannounced event but shockingly they did not reply. Apple typically holds its events on a Tuesday or Wednesday. But it to Tuesday the 25th, so that was out. And the , which takes place on October 26th, knocks Wednesday out. It almost didn’t rule it out, I think, but that would have looked pretty silly on Apple’s part. Better they go the day after. The event should hold news for those looking for new Mac models. A bunch of stuff has been previously rumored and reported and the stuff that seems the most accurate is new 13″ and a new MacBook Pro with a and Skylake Intel processors. New iMacs could appear, as well as a standalone 5k monitor to replace the Thunderbolt display. That device that enables MacBooks or older Macs to drive the much higher-resolution display. Make Apple Release Macs Again — Mike Rundle (@flyosity) Apple’s Macs, save the MacBook, have not been updated for over a year. |
This probably isn’t the RC droid you’re looking for | Darrell Etherington | 2,016 | 10 | 18 | There’s a new remote-controlled Star Wars droid on the way, but it might not be the one at the top of most people’s gift lists. The R/C Mouse Droid (via ) is about as basic as a bot can get, but the tiny scene stealing droid will be very familiar (and possibly even cherished) by fans of the original series, where it had a pivotal role expressing very animal-like terror at Chewbacca. The Mouse Droid has a remote and is powered by rechargeable batteries, and will be on sale at Disney theme park gift shops starting in mid-December. You’re basically going to have to be a hardcore Disney fan to pick one up, or at least be close to someone who is so that you can ask them to help you out. It’s adorable though, so please get me one if you’re my friend and you’re going to a Disney park soon. |
Tesla Powerpack 2 has twice the energy density, began shipping in September | Darrell Etherington | 2,016 | 10 | 27 | Tesla posted an appetizer of sorts for its , via a blog post that details , the second iteration of Tesla’s commercial and utility energy storage solution. The Powerpack 2 actually started shipping quietly in September, with a brand new energy module on board that’s capable of achieving twice the energy density or around 200 kWh of storage. Powerpack 2 also has a new inverter designed and built by Tesla, and this is, according to the company, the “highest efficiency and highest power density utility-scale inverter on the market,” and also has the benefit of being easier to install. Tesla says it has delivered batteries adding up to over 300 MWh in total energy storage capacity, which is an impressive feat given that in the U.S., an average home consumes around 11 MWh per year. Tesla revealing this little piece of news ahead of time indicates that it wants to make sure there’s plenty of time and attention left for the remainder of its announcements tomorrow, which will include the first look ever at its integrated solar roofing solution, and Powerwall 2.0, its second-generation home energy storage solution. We’ll be there and bringing you the news live on October 28 starting afternoon Pacific time. |
Apple says no fun allowed on the Touch Bar | Devin Coldewey | 2,016 | 10 | 27 | is . Apple’s interface guidelines warn against all kinds of fun things that developers probably started thinking about when the new MacBook Pros earlier this week. No doubt some apps will find a way to be creative even under the stern eye of Apple’s party police, but it’s clearly discouraged. Here are a few choice items from Apple’s guidelines telling developers how to create Touch Bar interfaces: Now, admittedly, some of these things could be annoying or pulled off poorly. And it’s clear that Apple wants developers and users both to think of the Touch Bar as an extension of the , not of the . But prescribing usage in that way often isn’t a good idea. The fact is it’s both, and ought to be used for both. Who wouldn’t want a stock ticker there, or a Twitter feed, or a progress bar for downloads and file operations? There are plenty of possibilities to explore here, and it seems a disservice to insist that things remain monochrome, key-shaped and static. I for one was thinking of what the first Touch Bar games would look like, or how it could act as a Rainmeter or MenuMeters-like at-a-glance view of my machine. Even if we’re going to keep things boring, why not have copy, paste, save and all those on there? Sure, they duplicate shortcut keys, but so do a bunch of the things they showed onstage today. Standardizing stuff so users know more or less what to expect is a good idea, especially with a new feature like this, but this is more stifling than standardizing. Experimentation with novel user interfaces has created all kinds of fun apps with intuitive and interesting controls. Apple is pretending it already knows everything about how this interface should be used, when it’s actually a wide open field. Whether any of this matters depends a lot on how rigorously Apple enforces these design guidelines. Will it be satisfied with simply encouraging its own limited vision of what should appear on the Touch Bar, or will it actively discourage apps that step outside it? We’ll know soon. But it would be a shame to see this cool new feature fall short of its potential. |
Jeff Bezos, Mayo Clinic back anti-aging startup Unity Biotechnology for $116 million | Sarah Buhr | 2,016 | 10 | 27 | Every once in a while someone in Silicon Valley brings up the possibility of living forever, or at least a really long time, but first we’re going to need to figure out a way to enjoy all those extra years. is a startup focusing on medicines to help us do that by slowing the effects of age-related diseases. And the company announced it has pulled in a whopping $116 million in Series B financing today — some of which came from Amazon’s Jeff Bezos. Sometimes your body keeps aging cells around longer. These cells stop dividing after some form of stress,which is an anti-cancer mechanism that keeps damaged cells from dividing and growing out of control. But too much build-up of those types of cells leads to other problems as we age. Unity looks for ways to help your body shed older cells causing inflammation and other diseases linked to aging. Unity holds a great amount of potential in preventing our bodies from aging as fast and that has perked some of the top investors in science and medicine and is one of the larger private financings in biotech history. But it’s not the first time Bezos has invested in biotech. The Amazon CEO placed his bets on back in 2014, through his venture capital arm . Juno is one of the IPO success stories in the biotech world for its breakthrough discoveries in cancer medicine. The Scottish-based mutual fund Baillie Gifford, which has also invested in several biotech companies, also invested in this round — as did Venrock, ARCH Venture Capital, Mayo Clinic and WuXi Pharmaceuticals. The company also announced it would be placing Keith Leonard — the former CEO of KYTHERA Biopharmaceuticals — in the role of CEO and that previous CEO and co-founder Nathaniel “Ned” David will now be Unity’s president. |
Apple’s MacBook Pro event recap | Felicia Shivakumar | 2,016 | 10 | 27 | In the second Apple event in the past two months, Tim Cook ceremoniously took the stage today at Apple HQ to keep us posted on what the company has been working on. The event opened with a moving message toward making Apple technology accessible to all without too much detail on how exactly that is going to happen. Followed by a not so humble-brag session about the positive reception of the iPhone 7 and iOS 10. Memories — the feature that uses AI and facial recognition on your whole trove of pictures to create new slideshows each day — has been a popular addition to the native photo app. Tim Cook says there have been . He also said that since iOS 10 was launched, more than 60 percent of customers have installed it. And there are now up from 1,000 just one year ago. Two thousand of these apps are games and you can also expect a high-profile one Apple TV in the near future – on the platform by year-end. Speaking of TV, there is . This new iOS app will allow you to track your favorite shows and movies across the video apps on Apple TV platform. The company has partnered with video providers in order to aggregate their content into a single view, so Apple TV owners can more easily see what’s available to watch instead of worrying about which app actually houses the content. When you click or ask Siri to watch one of the programs, you’re just taken to the right app. Unfortunately, Netflix is not participating in this experience, it’s been reported, and Apple did not explain why on stage or offer any promises of future integrations. As for hardware, on the 25th anniversary of the release of Apple’s first netbook computer, the PowerBook, we get the new MacBook Pro. According to Apple, is the thinnest, lightest, and most powerful version of the Pro to date. With improved graphics performance, a brighter display, better speakers, and a new thermal architecture that promises to be quieter and lessen system overheated, the device looks worth the four year wait. In this latest version of the Pro, the trackpad is now double the size and finally includes the Force Touch. The keyboard has been updated as well to include the “butterfly” keyboard seen on the most recent MacBook. on each side keep the new netbook looking clean and uniform and yes, it still has a headphone jack. Most notably, in the premiere models, Apple has done away with the Mac’s row of function keys and replaced it with a mini Retina display named, Touch Bar. directly with whatever software you are using, adjusting its touch functionality to the task at hand. The right side of this bar also includes TouchID, utilizing the new Apple T1 chip for security. And this wouldn’t be a piece of Apple hardware without Siri built-in. The new Pro is available now starting at $1499 and will be shipping in the coming weeks. Not mentioned at the event, Apple seems to have pulled the 11-inch MacBook Air from all of its online stores following its MacBook Pro presentation. The base-level MacBook Air is now the 13-inch for $999 and — more RAM. Apple touted the 13-inch Pro’s specs against the existing 13-inch Air, emphasizing that it was thinner and lighter — in addition to being more powerful — despite the much-steeper price. And that’s it. We’ve got the new MacBook Pro we’ve been waiting for, it has a crazy cool-looking Touch Bar, and a TV app that has the potential to make cordcutting more appealing to the masses. [gallery ids="1408104,1408204,1407945,1407906,1408157,1408165,1407912,1407966,1408020,1408076,1408128,1408431,1408366"] |
Does Gillette know your name? | Sophie Bakalar | 2,016 | 10 | 27 |
What innovations are you most excited about right now? My guess is that when you’re scrolling through tech blogs or Product Hunt, you’re probably clicking on the most buzzworthy technology or trendiest social media app before a new consumer product. And that’s understandable: How do you get excited about a new snack food or laundry detergent when virtual reality, artificial intelligence and autonomous cars dominate the news? It’s easy: Because consumer goods impact every facet of our lives, from our personal health and comfort to how we socialize with each other and care for our environment. Americans may spend a staggering , but we interact with consumer products even more frequently than social media. Every day, we each spend more than two hours preparing and eating food, seven hours sleeping on a mattress and nearly 24 hours wearing clothes (well, most of us anyway). And incredible things are happening across all these categories. You just have to pay attention. Food is undergoing such a transformation that many product labels bear little resemblance to their predecessors of decades past. Whether lab-grown, like Ava’s wine or ‘ meat patties, produced from plants, like ’s mayonnaise or Ripple’s milk, or made from insect flour, like ’s protein bars, ingredients are definitely not what they used to be. And that’s a huge improvement for our bodies, our environment and our wallets. Reducing animal-based ingredients and using protein-rich alternatives isn’t just more sustainable, it’s a lot cheaper and healthier. Does Gillette know your name? Probably not, even if you’ve purchased hundreds of their razors from your local pharmacy over the years. But you can bet does. As commerce shifts from wholesale to a direct-to-consumer model, companies are using their relationship with you to create a superior customer experience at a lower cost. By actually getting to know you, startups can build truly bespoke experiences and products, such as ’s tailored tuxedos or ’s skin-specific beauty boxes. Consumers who have come to expect near-instant gratification and thoughtful UX design from tech products like Uber and Snapchat are now getting that same level of convenience and personalization from their consumer products. Like most next-gen consumers, urbanites are clamoring for fresh, local food. Historically, they’ve resorted to highly processed, low-nutrient industrial products shipped from distant farms, but now vertical farming — a technique that grows food in vertical stacks — is making it easy to get fresh produce to everyone. Last month, to encourage the next generation of “real food” entrepreneurs. Farming is suddenly becoming “cool” again, and the rising number of agricultural scientists are already finding inventive new ways to feed our growing cities as the population continues to shift from rural to urban areas. More than . Is it any wonder, then, that consumer products have historically been geared to that same demographic? Fortunately, times are changing — albeit slowly — and more diverse founders are democratizing the goods their companies produce. The success of startups like , which makes health and beauty products for African-Americans, has proven that goods geared toward minorities are in high demand. Similarly, feminine hygiene products didn’t evolve for decades until female founders finally got access to capital and disrupted the category. Now and are providing convenience, comfort and cost efficiency to half the world’s population. While your grandmother might be shocked that you’re willing to pay $5.99 for a gallon of organic milk, the costs of many consumer staples have actually been falling for the past few decades. The inflation-adjusted price of milk, for example, is 50 percent lower today than it was 40 years ago. Price might not be the sexiest topic — particularly when stacked against cars that can literally drive themselves — but it can have a big impact on our day-to-day lives. Just 30 years ago, Americans were spending nearly 30 percent of their income on consumer products. Now, that number is only 19 percent. And yes, some of that change is because we’re making different choices (25-35-year-olds now spend more on ), but it’s also because many staples are just relatively less expensive than they used to be. Ongoing innovations, like the aforementioned foodtech revolution and the shift toward a direct-to-consumer model, increasingly free up more of your paycheck — so you might actually be able to afford that autonomous car some day. If that’s not enough to inspire you — if you’re still more excited about tech than consumer goods, then I have good news: before long, the two categories will be virtually indistinguishable. In the words of Marc Andreessen, . Is the Apple Watch a software device or a consumer product? What about an electric oven controlled by a mobile app? If a startup makes sneakers with built-in step trackers, are they an apparel manufacturer or a tech company? Software is no longer limited to cell phones and computers; it’s improving even centuries-old products. Technology is inherently exciting. It inspires the hopeful, science fiction-loving futurist in all of us. But you spend all day, every day interacting with consumer products. Even marginal changes to those products can have an outsized impact on your quality of life. And the changes we’re seeing aren’t marginal. Products are changing so dramatically that you won’t even recognize your closet or pantry in another five to ten years. And that’s definitely something to get excited about. |
China’s ZTO Express stumbles in its NYSE debut after raising $1.4B in IPO | Ingrid Lunden | 2,016 | 10 | 27 | Logistics may be the name of the game when it comes to e-commerce, but the IPO market can still prove to be a fickle place for even the biggest players. Today, China’s , the company that provides shipping and delivery services to Alibaba among others, scored both a hit and a miss in its . First, the company raised $1.4 billion in its IPO — making it the largest IPO of the year. Then, the company made its public debut on the NYSE — and that’s where the problems started. With the IPO selling at $19.50 per share, ZTO opened trading at $1.10 off that price at $18.40, and it continued to lose ground from there. It finally closed at $16.57, 15.03 percent down from its opening price, with lackluster interest throughout the day: It’s a surprising performance, given the IPO size and some of ZTO’s financials. The company posted revenues for the first half of 2016 of $639 million and net profit of $115 million. And its operating margins are 25 percent — a favorable proportion compared with Fed Ex and UPS, which respectively have margins of 9.5 percent and 13.3 percent (figures provided by ZTO). On the other hand, its current market share is 14.3 percent in China, its main market, and it is facing tough competition. Asked about the stock’s performance, James Guo, the CFO, said the performance didn’t match up with what ZTO saw during its roadshow. “Pricing IPOs is always very difficult,” he said. “We met with hundreds of investors all over the world over the past two weeks and investors were very excited about our story. We saw strong momentum during the book-building process, and the deal itself ended up being over 15 times subscribed. “We priced the offering at a level that we thought would be fair for all parties involved. Of course it’s usual to see some volatility in the stock price of deal that is as big as ours, but as far as the share price goes, it’s not our place to comment. We’ll let investors in the market decide that. At the end of the day, we think that if we continue to focus on executing our strategy and creating value for our shareholders, the share price will take care of itself over the long term.” Prior to going public, ZTO had raised funding from Sequoia, Warburg Pincus and Hillhouse. |
Accel cofounder Jim Swartz: It hasn’t burst, but it’s a bubble all right | Connie Loizos | 2,016 | 10 | 27 | Earlier this week, the , a “hub for entrepreneurship” in the center of Carnegie Mellon University’s Pittsburgh campus, was officially launched in an event attended by upwards of 600 students, alums, and professors. They’ll have even more to celebrate when construction on the 300,000 square-foot business school where it’s being housed is completed in 2018. At the center of all: Jim Swartz, who cofounded the storied venture firm Accel Partners in 1983 and who last year donated $31 million to CMU, where Swartz nabbed his master’s degree in 1966. The native Pennsylvanian says the gift is designed to help Pittsburgh cement its new role as a thriving tech center. (Google, Microsoft, and Uber are among a growing number of companies with local campuses.) We talked with Swartz earlier today about the donation, as well as whether he remains active on the venture scene, and, if so, what he makes of the current state of things. Our chat has been edited for length. JS: It’s been a continuous process and I’m still involved to a significant degree. Arthur and I ran the firm, then we brought in Jim Breyer, and the three of us ran it, then he ran it, then we created an operations committee that ran it, and now there’s a fourth generation. But we’re still involved, [mentoring the VCs there], helping wherever we can with new projects, or selling our ways into things. We’re not under the gun anymore, though, which is a good feeling. JS: I’m not San Francisco bubble crazy, but I’m reasonably active, funding two or three companies a year, something like that. I still look for really good technology and great people. JS: It won’t end well. I’ve been at this since 1970 and Arthur and I have seen five or six cycles at this point. This one is prolonged for sure. In truth, I thought [the last bubble] was over in 1997 and let it run and thank goodness because we made a ton of money. I think the difference here is , which has made it incredibly different and unsavory to take companies public. The regulatory environment is too difficult. Before, if you had $50 million in revenue and could show a profit, you could go public; today that number is what, $200 million, $300 million? New funds are filling the funding gap. Accel Growth is one of them, and lot of other firms have taken advantage of things, too. But it creates questions about whether [founders] ever want to go public and how investors will get out. JS: Just because it doesn’t burst doesn’t mean it’s not a bubble. The private market deflates, it doesn’t crash. It just takes time for all this to work itself out of the system. You’ll get to the point where people conclude these unicorns aren’t as valuable as we thought. That’s happening around the edges already and we’ll see more of that. But I don’t think you’ll see a collapse. Instead, people will forget about them, reporters won’t write about them, they’ll just disappear, and returns will go down. Over time, some funds will disappear that didn’t make money. JS: It might soften or level off, but I agree. In comparison, Pittsburgh has become an incredibly desirable place to live over the last five to 10 years. I don’t have any stars in my eyes about it becoming Silicon Valley, but the stage is set for a run there, largely because of Carnegie Mellon, but also [the University of Pittsburgh] and [Pitt’s] medical complex. There’s an awful lot of intellectual property there. JS: [The gift] is the result of a long-term understanding between myself and the university . . . there are a lot of things we can do. It really kicked off when came in [as CMU president in 2013] with a vision for creating a modern business school that’s in the center, and not at the edge, of campus, as at Harvard and Stanford. Everybody talks about cross-disciplinary activity and busting down silos, but Carnegie Mellon is way ahead of everyone on that front. |
Apple’s new MacBook Pro kills off most of the ports you probably need | Lucas Matney | 2,016 | 10 | 27 | Apple just a shiny, super thin new MacBook Pro. But for what was birthed, a lot of widely-held standards had to die. Today, Apple removed the MagSafe 2 charging port type, they stripped away the HDMI port, they ripped out the SD card slot, they shuttered the Thunderbolt 2 ports (which you probably used like three times) and they most notably killed the standard USB port. All these ports, which power data transfer and charging for most everything you likely use, have been replaced by four Thunderbolt 3/USB-C ports. Surprisingly the folks at Apple saw it fit to give the headphone jack a stay of execution on the new model. 2014 MacBook Pro Complaining about Apple sacrificing existing consumer needs in terms of connection types is getting pretty tiring. Most have made a lot of sense, generally when the company was retiring the proprietary standards that it was largely the only one pushing. See: Firewire or Thunderbolt 2. Others, like losing the headphone jack on the new iPhone 7 or ditching the old USB on the new MacBook have created a bit more of an uproar among users that aren’t psyched about needing a dongle on-hand at all times to connect their device to things they need. But even with the death of the headphone jack, Apple was making a broader declaration that it believed most headphone manufacturers would soon be adopting bluetooth and designing wireless headphones. With this MacBook Pro, Apple still sees people needing all of these other ports (see slide below), they just don’t seem to care that consumers will need to buy a separate accessory in order to do so. What Apple does have on its side here is that USB-C/Thunderbolt 3 are invariably the future thanks to their more compact design and faster transfer speeds. USB-C and Thunderbolt 3 are different connection standards with the same physical port. This is an important note because while the MacBook Pro ports are compatible with both types, the regular MacBook only interfaces with USB-C. This justification by way of superiority might sound a bit unsatisfying to MacBook buyers who had to hear this exact same reasoning when Apple wasted space on the Thunderbolt 2 ports that were ultimately only adopted by a few high-end peripherals, but this time around Apple isn’t the only one leading the USB-C/Thunderbolt 3 revolution so this will likely see a different outcome. That doesn’t make it any easier for consumers who have loads of devices—many made by Apple—that will now need a dongle to connect to their “professional” computer. The argument for most users defending the single USB-C port on the new MacBook was one of frequency. How often do you really need to plug something into your laptop in an age of Airdrop and Dropbox? But if that’s the case why even give consumers four of them on the MacBook Pro? Well, theoretically because the Pro is for “power users.” But for all of the Final Cut X and Logic power users that will enjoy editing content on the highly-touted new Touch Bar, how many are ultimately creating that content using classic peripherals that won’t be updating to USB-C connections anytime soon? Ports aren’t just window dressing to professionals, they’re necessary connections that offer you freedom to plug-and-play with new tools no matter where you’re traveling. How many filmmakers are going to try to show a project they’re working on a projector and will have to ask whether anyone has a dongle so they can connect to HDMI? How many photographers are going to be stuck without access to a compatible card reader now that the MacBook Pro has ditched the SD card slot? People won’t even be able to physically connect their iPhones to Apple’s flagship laptops without a $25 new cord. These could ultimately just be growing pains that will subside as the Thunderbolt 3/USB-C standard gets adopted, but going all-in while so few devices use this standard is really annoying. The veiled suggestion that the USB Type-A, HDMI port or SD card will be anywhere near obsolete by the time Apple offers another MacBook refresh occurs in a few years is just laughable. Apple has always been accused of being arrogant with their decisions to abandon legacy technology or embrace new standards. They’ve grown to distort this criticism into a declaration of . The difference is, in the past events Apple has largely just been integrating emerging connection types alongside old standbys, but thanks largely to the fact that Apple’s products are rapidly growing thinner than the port types themselves, the company is ditching what consumers need and changing its philosophy towards connection standards in what really seems to be fundamentally unfriendly to consumers. |
null | Emily Calandrelli | 2,016 | 10 | 18 | null |
LinkedIn Q3 sales up 23% to $960M in its last earnings ahead of MSFT acquisition | Ingrid Lunden | 2,016 | 10 | 27 | Microsoft expects to close its $26.2 billion acquisition of LinkedIn by the end of this year — pending some final regulatory approvals — and so, in light of that, today LinkedIn a very basic earnings report for Q3. It’s also skipping the customary analyst call and is no longer providing financial guidance for the coming quarter. Still, the company reported growth in its key metrics, a positive note for the next stage ahead. Revenues for the third quarter were $960 million, up 23 percent on a year ago; earnings per share were $1.18 (versus $0.78 in Q3 last year) with non-GAAP net income at $163 million; and membership numbers were up 18 percent to 467 million. The financial numbers beat analysts’ projections: on average, they were revenues of $959 million and EPS of $0.91. Mobile now accounts for 60 percent of all traffic to LinkedIn, the company said, growing at double the rate of its desktop service. “In Q3, continued product investments across our platform drove another quarter of strong engagement and financial performance,” said Jeff Weiner, CEO of LinkedIn. “As we look forward, our combination with Microsoft creates the opportunity for us to dramatically increase the impact and scale with which we deliver value to our members and customers.” The company has continued to provide updates to its products in areas like education and recruitment, two lines of business that I expect will continue to run as they are today, but also see increasing integration with Microsoft products and services, too. Breaking out the segments, LinkedIn’s recruitment business, Talent Solutions, continues to make up the majority of its revenue, up 24 percent year-over-year to $623 million, with only $67 million of that coming from learning solutions (the Lynda.com business). Its ad business, Marketing Solutions, brought in $175 million, while premium subscriptions brought in $162 million, with Sales Navigator (also a key product for Microsoft in its bid to compete with Salesforce) the strongest premium subscription product. |
Amazon plunges on earnings miss | Katie Roof | 2,016 | 10 | 27 | Revenue of $32.7 billion was in line with what Wall Street was expecting. [graphiq id=”lisSupp6SiN” title=”Amazon.com Inc. (AMZN) Stock Price” width=”600″ height=”617″ url=”https://sw.graphiq.com/w/lisSupp6SiN” link=”http://listings.findthecompany.com/l/19215472/AmazonCom-Inc-in-Seattle-WA” link_text=”FindTheCompany | Graphiq” frozen=”true”] “Because Alexa’s brain is in the cloud, we can easily and continuously add to her capabilities and make her more useful — wait until you see some of the surprises the team is working on now,” said Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos in a statement about the digital assistant. As it gears up for the holiday season, Amazon issued fourth quarter guidance, with net sales between $42 billion and $45.5 billion. Shares have been up nearly 37 percent in the past year and closed Thursday at $818.36. |
Hands-on with Apple’s new Touch Bar MacBook Pro | Brian Heater | 2,016 | 10 | 27 | At first glance, it looks an awful lot like the same MacBook Pro we’ve become accustomed to seeing over the last several years. The TrackPad is the first indication that something’s different here. It’s huge — twice as big as the last version, and thankfully now carrying the Force Touch technology the company perfected with the last version of the standard MacBook, perfectly mimicking the analog click to the point where it’s virtually indistinguishable. If you’re standing off to the side, you’ll spot the ports. Two Thunderbolts on each side, clean and uniform, and the balance is once again restored for the Apple aesthetic universe. Save of, course, for the headphone jack still located on the right side (for now, at least). The eagle-eyed might pick up the fact that the system is thinner — or that the screen is brighter, though it probably helps to have an older version right by it for sake of comparison. From there, however, you’ll pick out the key new feature, the row of function keys now lost to obsolescence, in favor of a thin, black, glossy strip. The Touch Bar (a much catchier name than the rumored Magic Toolbar, mind) is, in a word, neat. Sure the company put the new feature through its paces onstage, but press conference demos and in-person usage are two different things entirely. The strip itself is glossy. Not quite slick, but frictionless enough so as to run a finger across with little effort. It’s a secondary Retina display, which mean it’s capable of displaying some fairly high-res graphics, in spite of the fact that most of what you’ll be interacting with will be big and button-like functionality. Click into Photos, however, and you’ll get little thumbnails that you can scroll through. Click into Safari and you get small images of the tabs you have open. It’s quick and responsive, reacting to multi-touch and the amount of pressure the user applies. It also adapts quite quickly as you toggle between different apps. It’s a really cool and really versatile new addition — like having a small mobile display embedded directly into the notebook. As with the onstage demo, most of what the Touch Bar functionality Apple was showing off post-event involved its own proprietary applications — though I did see a brief demo of Excel, which was, as with Excel itself, a bit complicated to grok during a quick walk-through. With its software, on the other hand, the functionality was largely intuitive. I could see myself getting the most use out of music playback, which includes a lot of the functionality currently built into the function keys, along with track scrubbing — something else that will likely appeal to video editors. It’s not quite the Surface Studio, but it’s easy to see how the company is essentially using the second display as a surrogate for touchscreens — something it has long refused to include in its line of computers. On a whole, color is used sparingly with the buttons, in-line with the keyboard itself, though some is used here and there to highlight some functionality — the flag in email is red, for example. Emojis, on the other hand, are a regular explosion of color. And they’ve invaded the MacBook in a big way. We’ve long been monitoring the continuously blurred line between MacOS and iOS, through features like Control Panel on the desktop. It’s continued here, but it’s happening on a front most didn’t predict: that tiny swath of real estate between the screen and keyboard. Like iOS, the Touch Bar pops up your most frequently used emojis by default. You can also scroll through them. The scrolling is quick and responsive, but I could certainly imagine it getting tedious when the time comes to pull up something more obscure. The keyboard, meanwhile, is similar to the version on the latest MacBook, featuring an improved version of the Butterfly Switch technology. It felt a little less soft, but unlike the trackpad, the company hasn’t quite mimicked the old-school keyboard. Granted, it’s hard to draw too firm a conclusion having only spent a small amount of time with it, thus far. Also worth a mention are the speakers, which have been noticeably improved over the last version. They’re both louder and richer. Apple calls them “room-filling,” though I listened to them in a pretty large room. So, more on that, along with everything else when review time rolls around. |
It looks like Apple killed its cheapest laptop for consumers | Matthew Lynley | 2,016 | 10 | 27 | Apple seems to have earlier today, and with that, the death of the 11-inch MacBook Air is official. At the event, Apple unveiled a series of new laptops, including a thinner and more lightweight 13-inch MacBook Pro — which still had function keys rather than the touchpad in its higher-end models. Apple spent a lot of time comparing it to the 13-inch MacBook Air, but the 11-inch version did not even get a nod. Instead, it seems like Apple has decided to move on from the model. Originally priced at around $899, the base-level MacBook Air is now the 13-inch for $999, while the 12-inch MacBook costs $1,299. The lower-end MacBook Pro without the touchpad starts at $1,499. The MacBook Air ushered in a new era for Apple, prioritizing a lightweight laptop experience — with a thin chassis and an extensive battery life — over the clunky nature of the old MacBook Pros. They were also incredibly cheap and served as a great starter device, especially with the 11-inch MacBook Air sliding around $100 below the $1,000 mark. Apple updated the devices regularly, but it seems like it’s trying to move the spotlight to its new devices. Indeed, Apple touted the 13-inch MacBook Pro’s specs against the 13-inch MacBook Air, emphasizing that it was thinner and lighter — in addition to being more powerful — despite the much-steeper price tag. Apple seems to have tried to keep the same inspirational cues that the MacBook Air brought about, in terms of fast storage and long battery life (the MBP has around a 10-hour battery life). But it seems that the 12-inch MacBook is now the design standard that it is starting off with, and it is ready to ditch some of its aging devices. |
Asana co-founder discusses Thiel’s donation to Trump | Kate Conger | 2,016 | 10 | 27 | Asana co-founder and head of product Justin Rosenstein discussed the political views of his controversial investor and former board member Peter Thiel today at the conference in San Francisco. Asana isn’t the only company to face questions about its continued relationship with Thiel in light of his ongoing support of Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump — Facebook and Y Combinator have also recently faced pressure to distance themselves from Thiel. Thiel spoke in support of Trump at the Republican National Convention and donated $1.25 million to his campaign after the release of a tape that showed Trump talking about non-consensually grabbing women’s genitals. The timing of his donation triggered questions about Thiel’s motivations — did the financial investment indicate idealogical support for Trump’s comments on sexual assault? Rosenstein said today he doesn’t think that’s the case. Thiel wants “what’s best for the world,” Rosenstein said, adding that he hasn’t spoken with the investor and Facebook board member since prior to the donation. “My understanding is that he disagrees with the many grotesque things Trump has said, but that the foreign economic policies Trump has are so important that it makes him the best candidate for president. I strongly disagree with that position,” Rosenstein explained, “But it’s something I can wrap my head around.” Thiel will reportedly address his support for Trump in a . Rosenstein co-founded Asana with Dustin Moskovitz, who has vocally and financially Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton during the election. Despite Rosenstein and Moskovitz’s personal views, Rosenstein said that conversations about politics and Thiel’s role at Asana have been “transparent” and that the company strives to make sure Republican employees aren’t alienated in those conversations. His comments echoed those by , who said that cutting ties with Thiel would harm the diversity of opinions at their organizations. Thiel in 2012 through his Founders Fund and also joined the company’s board of directors. Rosenstein said he is no longer a board member, although it’s unclear when Thiel left. |
The 13-inch MacBook Air model is still alive | Romain Dillet | 2,016 | 10 | 27 | Surprise, the MacBook Air is still alive! The new MacBook Air is Apple’s new cheap laptop. While everybody thought the 12-inch Retina MacBook was going to replace the MacBook Air, it’s not going to be the case just yet. Apple just updated the MacBook Air page on its website after . While the 11-inch MacBook Air is (R.I.P.), the 13-inch MacBook Air is still there at the same price and with the same specs. “We’re going to continue to offer MacBook Air 13-inch in our line”, SVP of Marketing Phil Schiller said onstage, without saying anything else about the state of the MacBook Air. Here’s what’s happening. The MacBook Air still starts at $999 and comes with the same 1.6GHz Core i5 processor processor, the same amount of RAM (8GB), the same 128GB SSD storage, the same 12 hours of battery, all of it at the same price. The previous $1,199 isn’t changing either — still 8GB of RAM and the same processor, but 256GB of storage instead. So if you wanted an affordable computer, you can still get a MacBook Air for $999, but it comes with the same outdated components. It’s clear that the MacBook Air is on the way out. But the cheapest 13-inch MacBook Pro, or even the 12-inch Retina MacBook, are still too expensive for many people. That’s why Apple is putting the 13-inch MacBook Air on life support until it can make another laptop under $1,000 again. An earlier version of this post stated that the entry-level MacBook Air got an upgrade from 4GB to 8GB of RAM. Apple already switched to 8GB of RAM a few months ago. |
Apple TV App Store has 8,000 apps, 2,000 of which are games | Sarah Perez | 2,016 | 10 | 27 | At the Apple press conference this afternoon, Apple CEO Tim Cook gave a brief update on the state of the Apple TV app ecosystem. Today, the app store has grown to include 8,000 apps, the exec said, 2,000 of which are games. A year ago, the store had , which indicates steady if not remarkable growth for the Apple TV app store, as well as developer interest in creating games for the living room device. However, 8,000 apps is nowhere near the size of the iOS ecosystem which has and sees 100,000 new and updated apps submitted weekly. To some extent that can be attributed to the fact that, outside of games, using apps on Apple TV tends to be a more passive experience. It’s a place where you consume content, like photos and videos and streaming TV, for example. In terms of video, Cook also noted later at the event that Apple TV now has 1,600 apps from video content providers, ahead of the debut of the new TV app for Apple TV, iPhone and iPad. In addition, Cook said there would be one high-profile app coming to Apple TV in the near future: Minecraft. The game will arrive on the platform by year-end. |
Hooch raises $1.5M to expand its drink a day subscription cocktail app | Fitz Tepper | 2,016 | 10 | 11 | , a subscription-based drink startup has raised $1.5M in new funding, bringing total funds raised to $2.7M. All of the investors in this round were considered strategic by the startup, and include celebrities like Russell Simmons, Shaun White and Chris Burch. As a refresher, the app charges $9.99 per month for the ability to claim one “free” drink each day at a different bar or club in your city. It’s a win-win; bars get new customers in the door while users get to discover new venues (and get a heavily discounted drink in the process). The app works with 400 bars across New York, Los Angeles, Miami, Dallas, Austin, San Diego, New Jersey, Phoenix and Hong Kong. Hooch has also been able to sign on some established bars and clubs, including Dream Hotels, The London Hotel in Los Angeles and even Laduree in New York. Signing up established partners is always a challenge for a new app in the hospitality and restaurant industry, and these well-known brands give Hooch major credibility in an industry where apps come and go even faster than new restaurants and bars do. Hooch will use the funding to roll out product enhancements that are designed to make the app easier to use for both the bar and customer. For example Hooch will launch a “touchless redemption” process, so bartenders don’t have to grab your phone to confirm your free drink. The startup is also working on a mobile payment solution where you could follow up on your free drink by ordering more drinks and paying your entire bar bill through the app. This could potentially be a lucrative feature for the company, as they would get a small slice of each transaction. The company will also use this funding to expand geographically, and hopes to be in 35 cities in the next year and a half with San Francisco, Seattle and Houston being next on the list. To support this growth Hooch plans on raising a Series A in early 2017, with a target of $4-5M for the round. |
Mozilla strives for performance boost with new Project Quantum | John Mannes | 2,016 | 10 | 27 | As the web becomes less about static webpages and more about intricate web apps, browsers are being pushed to their limits to display interactive content without lag and erratic frame rates. Today, , Mozilla outlined the development of , a browser engine designed to address these changes at a fundamental level. When the project is completed, it’s promised to bring a smoother browsing experience to Firefox users. Work on Quantum is leveraging and to deliver a smoother browsing experience on more intensive websites. Rust, a programming language, was initially created as the side project of a Mozilla employee. It was designed to be fast while ensuring thread and memory safety when developing parallel programs. This is important because Servo, the second piece to the puzzle, is a Mozilla-sponsored, community-based parallel web engine. Servo will be the source of many of the underlying components for Quantum that will actually improve the rendering of webpages. Separate from this endeavor, Mozilla has been hard at work to bring the benefits of a multiprocess architecture to Firefox users for quite some time. Though Mozilla has put a large amount of its resources into the development of Electrolysis, Electrolysis is being painted as a necessary first step that laid the groundwork for Quantum development. From here, Mozilla wants to throw out major components of its Gecko engine, replacing them with more efficient components that will play better with parallelization and GPU offloading. “We’ll be re-engineering foundational building blocks, like how we apply CSS styles, how we execute DOM operations, and how we render graphics to your screen,” said David Bryant, Head of Platform Engineering at Mozilla. The new engine will also focus processing power more effectively to prioritize the most important web content. Together with Electrolysis, set to roll out to all Firefox desktop users in the coming months, Quantum should improve the stability, security and overall quality of the browsing experience. Mozilla hopes to push out an initial iteration of Quantum by the end of 2017 for Android, Windows, Mac and Linux Firefox users. That means that, for now, iOS users are not going to be invited to the party, but Mozilla says they are hopeful they can be included in future releases. |
Get ready for a me-too CES | John Biggs | 2,016 | 10 | 27 | That record scratch you just heard came from thousands of designers and R&D specialists who suddenly have to remake 3D models of laptops, phones and desktops. That sigh is coming from hundreds of programmers stepping up their new interfaces and that ripping noise is myriad press releases getting torn up and rewritten. After all, it’s almost CES time again and and just rewired the design paradigm for every single me-too, laggard CE company around the world. Companies that you haven’t thought about in a solid year — Sony, LG, HP, HTC, Dell, etc. — have been working all summer on new models to display at this ages-old event. A thinner, nicer laptop here, a gaming rig there. Maybe a curved screen for the truly adventurous! There isn’t much focus on 4K just yet — the content isn’t there — but it’s a consideration, and everyone is ready to rock and roll with Retina-style displays to ensure you can’t see a single pixel. But now what? Microsoft’s new looks like a tablet on a stand but is powerful enough to render parts of a Pixar film. Slap on a dial and you can pick colors and tools and the screen doubles as an upright and a drawing pad. Given the tendency for folks like Sony and Dell to cater to the lowest common denominator, what can they do to compete? Expect a few clever hacks from the likes of HP — maybe a touch-sensitive all-in-one that is cheaper than Microsoft’s $3,000 PC — but it’s a bit late in the game and I doubt any of the OEMs knew what was coming. Next we have the iPhone. Who knew that you could put all kinds of cool stuff into a phone if you took out the headphone port? Plus taking out the headphone port lets you sell an entire constellation of wireless devices, a dream come true for folks like Altec Lansing and Skullcandy. But if only one phone in the dozens that will be released in Vegas is wireless-only, what’s the point? Expect a few me-too headphone-less phones this year, but not many. Then, when consumers least expect it, they’ll throw out headphones wholesale. Also expect plenty of “Portrait Mode” camera knock-offs, touch-sensitive non-mechanical buttons and metallic colors. After all, wherever Cupertino goes in mobile, the rest of the world follows. And now we have the . While the Touch Bar had been rumored for some time, I doubt anyone expected anyone to actually get excited. That’s a mistake. Ever since the days of the geeks have wanted a touchable LCD interface focused on hot keys and keyboarding. Now that the MacBook Pro has gotten it, expect a Sony laptop with a “Touch Spot” and a Samsung ultralight with a patented “Touch Fun Sensor.” Alienware will probably have a “Gaming Touch Zone” alongside HP and Dell’s “Productivity Mini-Screen.” These new designs are an October Surprise for major CE makers. They also mean that CES will be a little more boring this year as manufacturers increment rather than evolve. I fear 2017 will be a sad year for CE. The Pixel and the iPhone will be the phones to beat, the Surface models will be the laptops of choice for certain professionals and MacBooks will be the choice for many more. And manufacturers will have to race to figure out ways to wow and impress while Microsoft and Apple do it on a whim. |
New FCC rule protects users from the prying eyes of ISPs | Devin Coldewey | 2,016 | 10 | 27 | It’s a good day for consumers, and the advertisers are tearing out their hair: The FCC today that severely restrict what data ISPs can collect from you without your consent. The Association of National Advertisers called the rules “unprecedented, misguided and extremely harmful.” If that isn’t a strong endorsement, I don’t know what is! The rules are briefly summarized, which is usually a sign they’re strong and far-reaching. The nut of the new rule, , is this: “ISPs are required to obtain affirmative ‘opt-in’ consent from consumers to use and share sensitive information.” Note that it doesn’t say they can’t that information — more on this later. And just what is sensitive information? The rule lists the following, but it’s not meant to be all-encompassing: It’s perhaps easier to define it by what sensitive information . Simple things like email address, service tier, IP address, bandwidth used and other information along those lines doesn’t require your permission for use. This affects terrestrial ISPs like Comcast as well as mobile carriers like T-Mobile (Note: TechCrunch is owned by Aol, which is owned by Verizon, definitely an ISP). Naturally, that kind of data is extremely valuable for advertisers, and this particular golden goose just stopped laying. Who, after all, will opt into having that information shared with their ISP for the purpose of being advertised to? FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler at Disrupt in 2015. Advertisers say that this info is critical for offering consumers ads relevant to them, and that they use it responsibly. And that’s largely true. But FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler makes the only response necessary to that particular objection: “There is a basic truth: It is the consumer’s information. It is not the information of the network the consumer hires to deliver that information.” This is your data, and you control who sees it. Do you want to provide it so you can get ads targeted to your browsing habits and demographics? Go for it! That’s your now. One concern is that ISPs will simply bury this consent in one of the many documents we tend to agree to without reading them. But you can always opt out, and the rule specifically prohibits the ISP from refusing service if you don’t opt into data sharing. Even if they decide to incentivize it — discounts or service improvements — the FCC will examine these situations case by case to see if they are reasonable or predatory. Now, there a bit of a loophole. A section of the FCC order fact sheet saying that de-identified, or anonymized, data is usable “outside the consent regime.” The phrasing was unclear so I checked with the FCC on this. It turns out that ISPs can sensitive information without your consent — provided they properly de-identify it before it. That sounds a bit like the honor system to me. Don’t expect an email tomorrow asking what you’d like to share with your internet provider, though. These rules won’t go into effect for at least a year — although that doesn’t prevent companies from complying earlier than that. |
null | Romain Dillet | 2,016 | 10 | 27 | null |
Is machine learning sexist? | Yvonne Baur | 2,016 | 10 | 11 |
We’ve been hearing a lot about diversity and inclusion recently, and one of the areas that a lot of people are particularly interested in and excited about is applying . Done right, this can be a huge boost supporting our efforts to go beyond bias across all areas of the organization. But there are potential pitfalls, as well; if not done right, machine learning can actually make your business biased. Let’s look at Google’s word2vec, for example. Using a millions-large set of Google News data, Google researchers extracted patterns of words that are related to each other. By representing the terms in a vector space, they were able to deduct relationships between words with simple vector algebra. For instance, the system can answer questions such as “sister is to woman as brother is to what?” (sister:woman :: brother:?) correctly with “man.” But therein lies the challenge of these rules: Because the system is trained with existing news, it will also follow the very bias in those articles. And in the Google News set, those articles proved to be shockingly biased. For instance, if you enter “Father:doctor :: mother:?” it answers “nurse.” For “man: computer programmer :: woman:?” it will give you “homemaker.” So, does this mean machine learning is sexist? No. But this example of machine learning ruthlessly exposes the bias that still exists in our journalism and journalists today. Statistically, the statements are correct using just what can be derived from the articles. But the articles themselves are obviously biased. Similarly, if a bias exists in your organization, whether in the way people are hired, or developed, or promoted, just taking the existing data as a basis for your machine learning may actually achieve the opposite of what you are trying to achieve — meaning it can reinforce and amplify bias instead of eliminating it. If you have always promoted men, the system may well see being a man as a predictor of someone getting promoted. Google search has run into such problems when it displayed more prestigious job postings to men than to women, or when it only showed male images on the first page of a search for “CEO.” These, and many other, examples show that bias can creep in to even the very algorithms that are meant to eliminate bias. The algorithms aren’t intentionally bad, but they reflect either the bias of those who programmed them, or the bias of the underlying data that was used to train the system. Therefore, a fundamental rethinking and a careful approach to software creation itself is needed. Extra care has to be put into training the people who create the systems, and into incorporating research into the machine learning algorithms so you don’t accidentally create more bias. The system has to be re-trained to think differently, just like your employees. Initial machine learning experiments can be useful to expose bias, but taken without modification, could actually make your problem worse instead of eliminating it. So before taking all machine learning at face value, think about the raw results as indicators of existing bias, and make sure your system was created in a , using data without bias. |
Nuheara’s earbuds/hearing aids are open for general pre-order | Brian Heater | 2,016 | 10 | 11 | are strange little things. It took a rep a few tries to properly explain the things when they first crossed my radar. And honestly, it wasn’t until I took the things for a spin on the crowded Manhattan streets that I really grasped what they were all about. The simplest way to explain them is as a sort of combination wireless earbuds and hearing aids. They do all of the standard earbud things — music, calls and the like — but also feature a voice amplification mode that makes it easier to hear people in a crowded environment. I tried an early model and was impressed by how much easier it was to carry on a conversation on the sidewalks of New York — though there were still some kinks to work out at the time, like the fact that the device has the habit of amplifying the already unpleasant sound of bus brakes. Today marks the next phase of the product’s journey to retail, as pre-orders shift from the Indiegogo campaign to . Those initial orders are now set to arrive for backers in late December — just in time for Christmas, or at least soon thereafter. That initial shipment includes 4,000 units being sent out to backers in 82 countries. Those who pick up the earbuds in this second round, meanwhile, should be getting them next spring. |
Crunch Report | Obama wants to go to Mars by the 2030s | Khaled "Tito" Hamze | 2,016 | 10 | 11 | Tito Hamze, John Mannes
Tito Hamze
Joe Zolnoski
Joe Zolnoski TechCrunch C/O Tito Hamze
410 Townsend street
Suite 100
San Francisco Ca. 94107 |
Facebook hires The Sims’ Rachel Rubin Franklin to lead Social VR team | Josh Constine | 2,016 | 10 | 11 | What will friending, sharing, and messaging look like in virtual reality? Facebook has tapped video game giant Electronic Arts’ VP Rachel Rubin Franklin as of the team. Last week, Mark Zuckerberg presented thanks to Facebook, and Franklin will now work to bring that experience to the world. at EA since 2011 before being poached by Facebook. There she was an executive producer, GM, and VP on the studio running the blockbuster game The Sims 4, which was the best-selling PC game of 2014 and 2015, moving over 5 million copies. She previously worked at cloud gaming startup OnLive, as well as game studio Activision after earning a degree in applied math and computer science from Carnegie Mellon. Franklin is “a new hire as head of the Facebook Social VR team” the company tells me. She will work with Facebook’s other Social VR leadership, including Michael Booth and Lucy Bradshaw who virtually appeared on stage with Zuck during the demo at the Oculus Connect 3 conference. Regarding her hiring, Facebook’s CTO Mike Schroepfer “It is a blast to fuse the experience of people who have developed many successful immersive online worlds with engineers who have decades of collective experience building Facebook.” The challenge for Franklin and her team will be creating a product that delivers the potential of virtual reality headsets to permit intimate social interaction for people geographically separated, while making the experience feel familiar and accessible to Facebook’s 1.71 billion users. For example, Zuck demonstrated the ability to take a , which a holographic screen popping up from your virtual phone — like R2D2’s projection of Princess Leia. Facebook has also which lets users change the facial expressions of their avatars with hand-based gestures, like shaking your fists to make your face angry, or thrusting them above your head to convey joy. Franklin will have to figure out how to make these experiences intuitive rather than bogging down Social VR with instructions. Meanwhile, she’ll have to carefully balance the vividness of feeling like you’re having a face-to-face conversation with a friend without falling into the uncanny valley where friends’ avatars seem creepy because they’re close to seeming human but with jarring flaws. The evolution of Facebook Social VR, from blocky generic characters to life-like custom avatars that can express emotion Facebook has an enormous opportunity in VR since it has much more insight into helping people socialize than the other big virtual reality players like HTC, Sony, and Google. If it can combine its social network and Oculus acquisition into an experience other platforms can’t copy, it could differentiate Facebook’s VR platform beyond the games and cinema apps available on every headset. |
Waze and Esri make app-to-infrastructure possible | Kristen Hall-Geisler | 2,016 | 10 | 11 | The interactive navigation app , with its 65 million active monthly users, has partnered with , which provides geographic information systems (GIS) software to 25,000 state, local and national governments. While the combination isn’t quite the vehicle to infrastructure (V2I) communication that will enable autonomous vehicles in the future, it is a kind of app-to-infrastructure system that improves traffic and creates more reliable maps for drivers right now. This isn’t anything new for Waze. It’s been running the Connected Citizens Program (CCP) since 2014, a free two-way data exchange with its municipal partners. It just announced its hundredth partner recently, Transport for London, but it works with cities around the globe, from Jakarta to Rio de Janeiro to Montreal. “Esri is a leading GIS software provider,” said Adam Fried, new business development manager at Waze. “Any time we see an opportunity to augment our data, we do it.” With so many municipalities already using Esri, it was easy to add Waze data to cities’ current mapping software. Fried said one of the biggest barriers Waze had encountered with municipalities was resource constraints — time, money and technology. Teaming up with Esri “meets our partners where they are,” Fried said, without having to invest in specialized software or training. It’s also not anything new for Esri, which partnered with in 2013. “Cities are using our software as a system of record,” said Andrew Stauffer, who works with civic technology at Esri. Cities already have data on things like miles of roadway, street signs, school zones and school districts. “That’s what brought this problem to light,” Stauffer explained. “A community we were working with said, ‘You guys make some amazing maps and great analysis software, but how do we get the data out there into the public? Nobody’s going online to check a PDF or web application [for road closures, etc.]. They’re relying on apps to do navigation.’ Helping that city solve that problem is how we got introduced to Waze.” Stauffer described its part in the partnership as “taking the firehose of information from Waze and turning it into action.” Depending on how the municipality wants to use that data, it can take the Waze reports of a vehicle at the side of the road and dispatch emergency vehicles. Or it can detect a traffic jam and tweak the traffic light timing to ease congestion. Waze has already done just that with its Connected Citizens Program. “Boston took our data and analyzed it at major intersections for traffic flow. The city addressed signal timing and decreased congestion by 18%,” a major accomplishment in Boston. “Esri allows us to magnify that exponentially.” The possibilities range from the massive to the very small. During recent flooding in Louisiana, Waze worked with the Louisiana Department of Transportation, the city of Baton Rouge and others to disseminate information about shelter locations, closed roads and the best ways to navigate to safety. But Waze and Esri have also worked together to allow drivers in Johns Creek, Georgia, to report potholes and the city to respond by patching them. In case you’re worried about the government getting all up in your business via Waze, Stauffer notes that the data shared by Esri and the municipalities using its software is open data. Waze anonymizes and aggregates its data, so “we [at Esri] don’t have to figure out how to anonymize it,” Stauffer said. “They take it seriously, protecting their users,” he said of Waze. Waze also has more than 420,000 volunteer editors making sure maps are updated and information is verified. Stauffer said that in addition to Waze’s own verification and points system, the Connected Citizens Program allows users to see whether an event like a road closure was reported by the city or by users. There’s a little logo for the municipality that will pop up on the map to signal that it’s authoritative content. Both Waze and Esri see two-way communication as a way to ease traffic and get drivers where they need to go safely and quickly, whether that’s to work or during an emergency evacuation. “It’s shocking how much open data will fix things,” Stauffer said. |
Sheryl Sandberg shoots down rumors of a role in Clinton administration | Kate Conger | 2,016 | 10 | 11 | Rumors have swirled for months that if Hillary Clinton succeeds in her bid to become the next U.S. president, she would appoint Facebook chief operating officer Sheryl Sandberg as . But Sandberg shot down those rumors today at the , hosted by the Internet Association. “I’m staying at Facebook,” Sandberg said when asked during a fireside chat if she would serve as the next Treasury Secretary or Commerce Secretary. When pressed by moderator Cecilia Kang of The New York Times, Sandberg insisted, “I really am staying at Facebook. I’m very happy.” Sandberg got her start during Bill Clinton’s administration, when she served as chief of staff to then-Treasury Secretary Larry Summers. Sandberg left D.C. to work at Google before joining Facebook in 2008. Given her history at the Treasury Department, the speculation that she might snag the appointment makes sense. Sandberg has also maintained a close relationship with Hillary Clinton during the presidential campaign. She gave Clinton her in July, and WikiLeaks released emails this morning from Clinton’s campaign manager, John Podesta, that showed Sandberg met with Clinton last year to go over “ .” Although Sandberg said she wouldn’t consider a role in government, she told the audience at Virtuous Circle that she cares about policy issues. “I think the issues we’re here to talk about, the issues around policy, matter. So government matters. I don’t have a job in the private sector thinking government doesn’t matter; it does. And the issues that bring this community together are: what is the policy framework that allows companies like The Honest Company to start so few years ago and scale the way they have,” Sandberg said, giving a nod to her co-panelist, Jessica Alba of The Honest Company. |
Five years of observations from tandem satellites produce 3D world map of unprecedented accuracy | Devin Coldewey | 2,016 | 10 | 11 | A pair of satellites operating in tandem for five years have produced a depth map of the planet so exact you could theoretically zoom down to street level and tell an adult from a kid, or spot a breaking wave at Malibu. The immense database — some 2.6 petabytes — is available for free to researchers. TanDEM-X and TerraSAR-X are twins created by the German Aerospace Center, or DLR; the first was launched in 2007 and the second in 2010. Once aloft, they found each other and began flying in formation — about 350 feet apart, but exact enough that error was measured in millimeters. Together, these two spacecraft circled the globe over and over, their interferometric radar instruments scanning the same areas from slightly different angles, like two super-acute eyes in the sky. The 500 terabytes of data they beamed down over the years was continually processed to create real-world elevation models. The result is a 3D topographic map that’s precise to a single meter — far better than any other large-scale map out there. “We are now all the more fascinated by our initial scientific findings,” . “Using the current elevation model, we have shown that in some regions of Earth, glaciers are losing up to 30 meters in thickness per year in the area of the glacier tongues.” The incredible resolution and accuracy of the new data set is powerful enough, but the satellites aren’t done yet; built to last five years each, they may last for five more. There’s still fuel in the tanks and no reason to stop imaging. In fact, a follow-up mission is already being proposed that would use new methods to provide depth maps of the world’s land masses every eight days — though not in quite as high fidelity. “We are once again anticipating a surge in scientific interest,” said Alberto Moreira, the project’s principal investigator. “Accurate topographical data is essential for all geoscientific applications. Earth as a system is highly dynamic, which is also reflected in its topography. Through frequent updates, we could capture such dynamic processes systematically in the future.” The DLR data is free for any scientific investigator — do you need a high-resolution topographic map of the globe for some reason? . |
Signal gets disappearing messages — but for tidiness, not privacy | Devin Coldewey | 2,016 | 10 | 11 | Messaging app is proud to be end-to-end encrypted, and privacy is their watchword — but its new ephemeral messages aren’t being billed as tools to that end, and nor should they be. Disappearing text and pictures are the main addition (along with a meatspace verification tool) of the latest version of the app. But while once people thought of expiring pictures à la Snapchat as a way to send racy or sensitive information, the fact is it adds very little to your security, if any at all. Screenshots, a separate camera, copy and paste — it’s easy to give ephemeral messages permanent form. Instead, Open Whisper Systems as a way to prevent digital clutter. Disappearing messages are a way for you and your friends to keep your message history tidy. They are a collaborative feature for conversations where all participants want to automate minimalist data hygiene… It’s really a much more sensible way to think of this kind of messaging, and in fact this is the way young people like miliminals generally use it. No one really cares about last week’s conversations. Like Rafiki says, they’re in the past! So grab the new version of the app for or and hakuna matata. See, I’m hip. |
Toyota official highlights issues with NHTSA guidelines and California self-driving rules | Darrell Etherington | 2,016 | 10 | 11 | At a forum on Capital Hill designed to gather input from industry stakeholders on NHTSA guidelines, Toyota Motor North America director of technology and innovation policy Hilary Cain pointed out that proposed changes to California’s self-driving test guidelines would make a voluntary process requested by the new essentially mandatory. This could block current ongoing tests and prevent new ones from starting, Cain noted. “If we don’t do what’s being asked of us voluntarily by NHTSA, we cannot test an automated system in the state of California. That is preposterous and that means testing that is happening today could be halted and that means testing that is about to be started could be delayed,” Cain said at the forum, according to . California regulators have proposed modifications to their existing guidelines that would relax certain aspects of requirements for companies and institutions testing self-driving cars on state roads. The new rules would allow human drivers and steering wheels to be entirely absent from test vehicles, provided the cars have two-way communication and NHTSA approval to operate, which requires adherence to the 15-point checklist proposed by the federal highway safety agency in guidelines revealed last month. Previously, the guidelines required that self-driving test vehicles be tested by a third-party rather than meet the 15-point checklist. During her comments, Cain also told the forum that because the NHTSA guidelines imply accountability and enforcement, to which automakers will be subject, they might be too vague as they currently stand. In an opinion piece penned by Barack Obama alongside the introduction of the guidelines, the president seemed to indicate that the guidelines contained flexibility by design, to ensure they wouldn’t unduly stifle the potential for innovation in the self-driving industry. Toyota, when contacted for comment regarding Cain’s comments and the car maker’s official position on NHTSA’s proposed rules, provided the following statement to TechCrunch: We are pleased that NHTSA is exercising leadership by issuing federal guidance on automated vehicles and trying to address the emerging patchwork of state laws regulating automated vehicle performance. We also welcome NHTSA’s plans to use existing authorities to allow automakers to bring this technology safely to market. There are other concepts in the guidance that will take further analysis and careful consideration, but we look forward to working with NHTSA to finalize a federal framework that is best for consumers and their safety. |
Facebook, Twitter cut off data access for Geofeedia, a social media surveillance startup | Lora Kolodny | 2,016 | 10 | 11 | According to a new study published today from the , major social networks including Twitter, Facebook and Instagram have recently provided user data access to the location-based, social media surveillance system used by government offices, private security firms, marketers and others. As TechCrunch , Geofeedia is one of a bevy of technologies used, secretly, by police to monitor activists and the contents of their discussions online. The that both Twitter and Facebook (which owns Instagram) made some immediate changes in response to their study’s findings. “Instagram cut off Geofeedia’s access to public user posts, and Facebook cut its access to a topic-based feed of public user posts,” the ACLU said. The ACLU also noted in their post: “Neither Facebook nor Instagram has a public policy specifically prohibiting developers from exploiting user data for surveillance purposes. Twitter does have a ‘longstanding rule’ prohibiting the sale of user data for surveillance as well as a Developer Policy that bans the use of Twitter data ‘to investigate, track or surveil Twitter users.’” On Tuesday, following the publication of the ACLU findings, that it would “immediately suspend Geofeedia’s commercial access to Twitter data.” Based on information in the ’s report, we are immediately suspending ’s commercial access to Twitter data. — Twitter Public Policy (@Policy) A Facebook spokesperson tells TechCrunch: “[Geofeedia] only had access to data that people chose to make public. Its access was subject to the limitations in our Platform Policy, which outlines what we expect from developers that receive data using the Facebook Platform. If a developer uses our APIs in a way that has not been authorized, we will take swift action to stop them and we will end our relationship altogether if necessary.” It’s worth noting that Facebook’s generically limits developers. For example, it says developers are not permitted to “sell, license, or purchase any data obtained” from Facebook or its services. And they can’t transfer data they get from Facebook, including “anonymous, aggregate, or derived data,” to any data brokers. Finally, developers are not permitted to put Facebook data into any search engines or directories without the social network’s explicit permission. We have reached out to Geofeedia for comment but executives were not immediately available for an interview. A public relations consultant for Geofeedia sent a lengthy statement, attributed to Geofeedia CEO Phil Harris, defending the company’s practices in general. An excerpt follows: “Geofeedia is committed to the principles of personal privacy, transparency and both the letter and the spirit of the law when it comes to individual rights. Our platform provides some clients, including law enforcement officials across the country, with a critical tool in helping to ensure public safety… Geofeedia has in place clear to prevent the inappropriate use of our software; these include protections related to free speech and ensuring that end-users do not seek to inappropriately identify individuals based on race, ethnicity, religious, sexual orientation or political beliefs, among other factors. That said, we understand, given the ever-changing nature of digital technology, that we must continue to work to build on these critical protections of civil rights.” |
The Markforged Mark X lets you teleport precision custom parts from designer to printer | John Biggs | 2,016 | 10 | 11 | The promise of 3D printing has been kind of a dud. Aside from a few cool Yoda heads and some small plastic pieces, there have been no “indie” players doing much interesting in the space except . Markforged is a Boston company we that makes carbon-fiber reinforced plastic parts using traditional 3D-printing techniques. This means the objects they print are stronger, lighter and more resilient than steel. Now they’ve added “more precise” to that list. The Markforged Mark X is a unique 3D printer that uses laser scanning to ensure pieces that come off the machine are precisely as ordered. In other words, you can send objects that will get the “the strength and quality you’re expecting,” says founder Greg Mark, an aerospace engineer and MIT grad. “We invented Continuous fiber reinforcement (10 issued patents), and in-process laser-micrometer quality control,” he said. “We’ve also pushed the surface finish of plastic extrusion to approach the surface finish of SLA. Now there’s one machine that combines the strength, surface finish, and quality control to enable end use parts. Supply chains will never be the same.” Essentially the system prints very fine, very strong objects and constantly tests them for structural accuracy. When you send an object to the $68,000 printer, it ejects exactly the part you requested with exactly the right measurements. “The in-process quality control is based off a laser micrometer integrated into the print head. With 1 micron Z axis resolution, and 50 micron X/Y resolution, you get high-resolution scans of your part, which you can pull dimensions off of in real time or use to check the accuracy of the part,” said Mark. The system has two print heads, one for plastic and one for carbon fiber. You can set the hardness of the object while you manufacture it and, more importantly, you can control how light the object is. I’ve seen many Markforged products and they’re as solid as steel but as light as plastic. They’re surprisingly cool. Thanks to the measurement system you can basically send objects to a printer in your office or a thousand miles away and ensure that the object that comes out is exactly as you designed it and has unrivaled strength. In other words, instead of sending a milled piece of steel you can send and print a digital file. Current Markforged owners will get a discount on the Mark X but, given this thing is almost $70,000, I doubt many hobbyists will pick one up. It’s still one of the coolest implementations of 3D printing I’ve seen, however, and it’s pretty darn close to teleportation. [youtube=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=odcaLfivg8c] |
C1X raises $8.5M for its advertiser and publisher tech | Anthony Ha | 2,016 | 10 | 11 | has raised another $8.5 million in what it says is the first part of a Series B round of funding. The company was founded by Mukundu Kumaran (CEO) and Daisuke Nagayama (chief operating officer and chief global strategist) — Kumaran previously worked as an engineering director at Yahoo, and is “to simplify how the basic advertising transaction works.” The C1X platform includes products for advertisers and publishers, offering what Kumaran called “a full-stack platform that addresses the core issues that buyers and sellers face today.” In his view, those issues include fragmentation, poor workflow and a lack of transparency. So on the buyer side, for example, he said the company offers the “C1X Audience Guarantee” that allows advertisers to reach their target audience across publishers, while offering publishers tools like programmatic direct and header bidding to give them more control over their ad inventory. As for the new funding, it was led by Japanese firm Venture Labo Investment, with participation from existing investors. Although C1X is headquartered in Silicon Valley, it has an office in Japan (as well as India), with plans for further expansion through a deal to create a trading desk with Dentsu and Cyber Communications. C1X is also backed by a number of Japanese investors, including University of Tokyo Edge Capital (which led ). “We have been aggressive in our global expansion because we know that our versatile, proprietary product suite can be tailored to solve the exact pain points of key players in each unique market,” Nagayama said in an emailed statement. “We have formed premium partnerships in the United States, India and Tokyo, and we are also planning to also open offices in Dubai and Singapore this year to expand into the Asia Pacific, Middle East and African markets. An earlier version of this post incorrectly stated the size of the new funding. |
Tech companies like TaskRabbit are engaged in affirmative action, and that’s ok | Megan Rose Dickey | 2,016 | 10 | 11 | Aiming to increase diversity and foster inclusion in the tech industry is not the same as affirmative action, TaskRabbit CEO Stacy Brown-Philpot said on stage today at the Internet Association’s conference. “I wouldn’t say it’s affirmative action but it’s a recognition,” Brown-Philpot said. “Our company should represent the population and we know we have to over-index in certain ways to get there. It’s a belief around being intentional, measuring and holding yourself accountable to real and specific results, and holding yourself accountable in a relatively short timeframe.” But what Brown-Philpot described fits the definition of affirmative action. TaskRabbit and other tech companies incorporate recruiting strategies like partnering with diversity organizations like CODE2040, devoting 20% of the company’s external recruiting budget to attend at least one career fair a year focused on recruiting black people and posting job descriptions on job boards that target African-Americans — and that’s a good thing. There’s no need to shy away from the “affirmative action” label. The term “affirmative action” is a loaded one, even though all it really means is that you ensure the employment or admission of people regardless of race and/or gender: “Affirmative action policies are those in which an institution or organization actively engages in efforts to improve opportunities for historically excluded groups in American society,” . “Affirmative action policies often focus on employment and education. In institutions of higher education, affirmative action refers to admission policies that provide equal access to education for those groups that have been historically excluded or underrepresented, such as women and minorities.” What tech companies say they’re trying to do around diversity and inclusion affirmative action. Unfortunately, some people associate affirmative action with discriminatory ideas like “lowering the bar” and “reverse racism,” the latter of which is . Affirmative action can also feel condescending for black people, including myself, when others suggest that our accomplishments are due to affirmative action, instead of as a result of intelligence and hard work. Although I disagree with what Brown-Philpot said — I think TaskRabbit and others are engaged in affirmative action, and that’s fine — the moderator, Christina Passariello of the Wall Street Journal, set her up with a loaded question. She asked if efforts to include diversity and inclusion were the same as affirmative action, with the implication being that affirmative action is a bad thing. Spoiler alert: it’s not. Ensuring equal access and opportunities for people, no matter what their race, gender, sexuality, physical ability, etc. is how our society should function. But given that our society is not set up that way, thanks to things like years of systemic racism and discrimination, affirmative action is still necessary. Even after the Supreme Court’s landmark affirmative action decision this summer in Fisher v. University of Texas, it seems that the phrase “affirmative action” is still a sensitive one. Maybe it’s easier for executives like Brown-Philpot to distance their diversity and inclusion efforts from the label. But, with the Supreme Court asserting the legality of affirmative action, what is there to fear from using the phrase? Brown-Philpot also discussed the importance of companies starting these diversity and inclusion efforts early on, when the company isn’t massive in size. “When I joined Google it was 1,000 people,” Brown-Philpot said. “It took me two and a half years to look around and realize there weren’t a lot of people like me. So David Drummond and I got together and put together a group.” She later said, “It was really late. I think that’s part of the challenge [Google has] in fixing [diversity].” During the question and answer portion of the panel, I asked Brown-Philpot about the pressure she feels as one of the few black female CEOs in the tech industry. “There is pressure,” Brown-Philpot said. “I don’t pretend there’s not.” She went on to talk about what it was like when she transitioned from a high school that was 98% black to a college, University of Pennsylvania, that was just 6% black. “There’s an expectation of performance because I made it in some way when other people didn’t,” Brown-Philpot said. “I had no option. Failure was not an option for me. I could not fail.” |
Google acquires FameBit to connect YouTube creators with marketers | Anthony Ha | 2,016 | 10 | 11 | Google just that it has acquired , a marketplace that connects video creators with marketers who want to sponsor their content. This could be an important step for Google’s YouTube, where monetization has been a big concern — not just for YouTube as a whole, but also for . YouTube has been working to provide more support on this front through , but we’ve also seen the growth of multi-channel networks that creators join up with for ad sales and business resources. By acquiring FameBit, YouTube might look like it’s getting more competitive with those MCNs, but in YouTube’s Ariel Bardin said that’s not the case:
Creators will always have the choice in how they work with brands, and there are many great companies who provide this service today. This acquisition doesn’t change that. Our hope is that FameBit’s democratized marketplace will allow creators of all sizes to directly connect with brands, as well as provide a great technology solution for companies like MCNs and agencies to find matches for their creators and brand partners. FameBit was backed by Los Angeles startup studio Science, Inc. When last year, he said the marketplace is focused on “long- and mid-tail creators,” not just the big YouTube stars who get most of the attention from MCNs. In , Kierzkowski and his co-founder Agnes Kozera said the platform has been used to 25,000 branded videos, and that FameBit will run as “a standalone operation” for now. The financial terms of the deal were not disclosed. |
As the Note 7 dies, Oculus loses face(s) | Lucas Matney | 2,016 | 10 | 11 | The Note 7 debacle hasn’t been good for anyone — not for Samsung, not for Android, not for consumers, not for airlines, not for fire departments, not for stylus-lovers and certainly not for Oculus. The Facebook-owned virtual reality powerhouse currently has its entire mobile VR future pinned on the successes of Samsung’s handsets and the discontinuation of Note 7 production is likely going to stunt Oculus’s Gear VR sales (and brand) in a pretty damning way. Today, shortly before Samsung a recommendation that all Note 7 users shut off their devices, Oculus disabled Note 7 support for the Gear VR. Users on discovered the message this morning. Exploding phones admittedly do not seem ideal for a peripheral that straps the phone to your face, so the real surprise is that it took this long. The success of the Gear VR is intimately tied to Samsung in more ways that just the phones. Samsung injected major life into the Gear VR platform by capitalizing on the excitement of the Galaxy S7 and shipping a ton of free headsets with pre-orders. The $99 Gear VR is currently Oculus’s main touch point with consumers, most of whom have likely not even seen higher-end VR systems like the Rift. Oculus announced at their OC3 conference last week that there were over 1 million monthly active users on Gear VR, much of this likely having a lot to do with giveaways on the part of Samsung. No official numbers are out there in terms of sales, but analysts from SuperData Research estimate that while the Oculus Rift will sell just over 355 thousand units this year, there will be over 2.3 million Gear VR’s in the wild by year’s end. Long story short, Gear VR is huge to Oculus’s brand and now the platform’s immediate future is likely going to see a very unfortunate period of slowed growth given that the next new compatible device from Samsung probably won’t emerge until next spring. This comes as Oculus just released an of the Gear VR specially designed to accommodate the Note 7 (while also backwards-compatible with other Galaxy models). It added a USB Type-C connection, added a bit of padding to make the experience more comfortable and opened up the slot a bit to accommodate the larger 7’s larger form factor. With the Note 7 now deceased, no one has any explicit reason to buy the new headset; the old one will work just fine and is selling for $55 on Amazon right now, nearly half the price of the new model. For the time being, the new Gear VR is a peripheral waiting on a product. (I’ve reached out to Oculus for comment on how the Note 7 production cease will affect the rollout of the new Gear VR and will update if I hear anything back.) The worst thing that can happen for Oculus right now is a six month stalling of customers with brand new phones who might have been interested in checking out VR. Without a major Samsung launch to entice consumers to Oculus, for a bit the company will have to sell itself through its new content rather than piggybacking off the sales of a new smartphone. All of this comes as Google is readying for the launch of their mobile VR platform, Daydream, which already has multiple handset makers, including Samsung, ready to build compatibility for the platform into their devices. Google’s first headset, the , is launching next month and includes a VR motion controller. The platform capitalizes on a new VR mode in Android Nougat which brings low-latency VR to new smartphones with OLED displays. In the end, Oculus was fortunate to make it out of this situation without any exploding storylines that incorporated a Gear VR headset, but by losing the newest phone on their rather exclusive platform, the headset maker is going to have to shift its mobile strategies if it hopes to keep hype alive for itself and the mobile virtual reality platform. |
Obama wants to go to Mars, but will the next administration? | Emily Calandrelli | 2,016 | 10 | 11 | President Obama an op-ed on CNN today, praising the accomplishments of NASA to date and encouraging the nation to keep its sights set on Mars. While it was an inspiring endorsement for NASA and space exploration, it comes on the tails of a intended to prevent the next presidential administration from changing NASA’s plan to send humans to Mars by the 2030’s. The combination of these two events indicates that the administration may be worried that the next presidential administration could ultimately choose to steer away from the program that NASA has in place today. With what happened to NASA’s Constellation program just six years ago, and the criticisms around NASA’s current Journey to Mars, their fears may be justified. One of NASA’s many Journey to Mars campaign posters / Image courtesy of NASA Just a few weeks ago, the Senate Commerce Committee, in an unprecedented move, passed a with language intended to prevent future changes to NASA’s strategy to send humans to Mars. Calling for continued development of NASA’s technologies required for a journey to Mars, the bill is expected to provide stability at NASA as the next president takes office. The underlying implication is that the next administration could choose to cancel NASA’s Journey to Mars. This type of drastic move wouldn’t be unprecedented. Back when President Obama took office, NASA was focused on bringing humans to the moon – not Mars – in a program known as . Through the Constellation program, which began in 2004, NASA was developing two different rockets (Ares I and Ares V), the Orion crew capsule, and lunar lander technologies. Artist rendering of NASA’s Ares I and Ares V rockets as part of the Constellation program / Image courtesy of NASA But in 2010, after of the program from leading space industry experts led the Office of Management in Budget to denounce Constellation as “over budget, behind schedule, and lacking in innovation,” President Obama cancelled the program along with the development of Ares I, Ares V, and the lunar landing technologies. In passing the recent legislation, Senator Ted Cruz (R-Texas) who co-sponsored the bill, stated the importance of preventing another Constellation situation. “The last NASA reauthorization act to pass Congress was in 2010. And we have seen in the past the importance of stability and predictability in NASA and space exploration – that whenever one has a change in administration, we have seen the chaos that can be caused by the cancellation of major programs. Whether it was the cancellation of the Constellation program, whether it was the cancellation of the space shuttle, the impact in terms of jobs lost, the impact in terms of money wasted has been significant.” Senator Ted Cruz The bill itself isn’t legally binding, however. Changes in funding, technology breakthroughs or international developments could still alter NASA’s exploration plans at any point down the line. It will eventually need to be passed by the House as well, but the bill does guarantee continued funding to specific programs within NASA’s Journey to Mars strategy including the Space Launch System (SLS) heavy-lift rocket, and the Orion crew capsule. Perhaps the most important takeaway, though, is that the bill puts certain lawmakers on the Congressional record, stating they agree that major changes in NASA’s current Mars-bound exploration strategy would seriously damage the progress of the organization. Senator Cruz, as well as the other senators who sponsored the , are certainly justified in worrying about potential changes to NASA with the changing administration. Not only because of what happened to Constellation, but because of the conversation around NASA’s very expensive SLS rocket. NASA’s plan for SLS has endured its fair share of criticism over the years. Many have called the agency’s heavy-lift system the “ ,” citing the fact that it isn’t funded at a sustainable level, is already behind schedule, and has yet to have an agreed upon . These, of course, are many of the same criticisms leveled about the Constellation program that ultimately caused its demise. On top of that, neither presidential candidate has on whether they believe we should send humans back to the Moon or focus on sending the first humans to Mars. So whether or not the next president even cares about sending humans to Mars is anyone’s educated guess. Cancelling major programs like NASA’s Constellation or the Journey to Mars, after billions of taxpayer dollars have been invested, leads to obvious hardships – wasted time, wasted money and loss of American jobs to name a few. But perhaps an even worse scenario is to invest in an exploration path, year after year, that will ultimately be too expensive to go anywhere. This mistake feeds into the common that NASA is more of a “jobs program” than a results-driven organization. Ultimately Congress has a decision to make. Do you want to go to Mars or not? If Congress is going to compel the next administration to continue on NASA’s Journey to Mars, one thing is for sure: NASA’s budget will need to be raised. Otherwise, it may end up being another space program to nowhere. |
How artificial intelligence is changing online retail forever | Babak Hodjat | 2,016 | 10 | 11 |
Artificial intelligence is all around us, from searching on Google to what news you see on social media to using Siri. And with the momentum around AI growing every day, it’s not surprising that some of the most innovative retail sites have recently been experimenting with the use of AI, as well. Businesses that ignore this growing trend will find themselves playing catch-up for years. The big question is how exactly is this new technology going to change retail. E-commerce is a space with a lot of potential, in part because it’s such a data-rich industry, and, there’s some momentum around AI gathering already. What’s more, a lot of the AI techniques that are enjoying success in other applications are well-positioned to make serious impact on the space, streamlining retail processes and transforming the online experience into something more like talking to an experienced salesperson at a brick-and-mortar location. Deep learning is a great example of this. It’s been the fuel for much of the recent success in applied AI, so it is not surprising that some of the first attempts at augmenting the shopping experience have been making use of the power of deep learning in classifying images. If you look at something like , you can see the beginnings of how deep learning fit snugly in a retail context. Another example is technologies that allow you to take pictures of things you see in stores, on your commute or even in an ad and make the items in those pictures shoppable. That can easily serve as the start of a shopping experience: You see something you like, but you don’t know the name or where to get it, or you just want something similar to, say, a pair of shoes you see in a shop window (e.g. ). But taking photos is not the only modality for shopping, and there are other areas in the shopping experience where AI can play a part. In fact, the e-commerce user experience has more or less stayed the same in the past 15 years. And that means that certain metrics, such as conversion rates, have stagnated. An online shopper, who often knows what they are looking for, is faced with the task of coming up with the right search terms, or scrolling through many pages of inventory to find it. Attempts at augmenting the keyword search experience with natural language have not made a major difference yet, partly because of the fact that shopping, for most users, is a very visual experience. Deep learning can be of help here, too! Auto-encoding features of images in an inventory based on similarities and differences brings about a rich model of what is available in the inventory, and the model is surprisingly close to how we as humans perceive shoppable items. The model alone, of course, is not enough: We need a way to understand a shopper’s preferences as they interact with the inventory. Another AI technique, called online learning, can be of use here, where sites are able to analyze every click through an online inventory in real time to understand customer preferences and create a personalized shopping experience. Obviously, other non-visual aspects of shoppable content, such as price, size and match, must also be taken into account, helping to weight the visual models toward user preferences. Already we’re seeing multiple, superior avenues for product discovery enabled by AI: You’ll be able to take pictures of items you like, search visually online and get personal recommendations based on an AI-generated model. But that’s just the start. Another AI breakthrough you’ll see applied to online commerce is website and content optimization. Traditionally, this has been done through trial and error, and verified using A/B testing software like . The issue with this sort of optimization, of course, is that improving online content is a multi-point optimization problem. There are many degrees of freedom available for exploration, ranging from font size, messaging options and images to use all the way to options to provide, ordering of pages and even the layout of the pages. Although testing professionals have smart hypotheses, different audiences respond to different messages. Sometimes the smallest tweak moves revenues the most. Sometimes a full-scale overhaul is needed. (EAs), a class of AI techniques, are uniquely suited for these kinds of problems. Inspired by principles of survival of the fittest, EAs generate a population of candidate solutions — in this case, configurations for online content — then measure their performance and move on to building new candidates based on the more successful candidates already measured. In other words, you give a program messaging ideas, image options, page layouts and more, and the EA mutates, combines and evolves to find the best configuration for success on a particular site. What’s really fascinating about this approach is that AI can measure the candidate solutions live, against the existing user base, and improve the performance in an ongoing basis. Each user nudges the system to make tweaks and optimizations. In essence, this means constant and continual optimization that can actually evolve with changing user patterns. It is almost like the content is alive! That’s the kind of technology that will make every visit more valuable. Marketers and sites will be able to present optimal messages and page designs to get users to what they want, faster (and, of course, close the sale). But again, there’s more. , in the form of assistants and automated customer service reps, are becoming increasingly common across the industry. They have the potential to create a pleasant experience for the user, one that is directed at identifying exactly what best suits their needs, while promoting the brand identity through the chatbot persona itself. Many companies building conversational systems — such as — are banking on this brokering of intent to online services as their ultimate business model. It’s not hard to imagine extending this to shoppable content. AI is also primed to make the massively complicated (and data-rich) world of logistics much easier for retailers, from making sure the right products are in the right warehouses to actually predicting which items will fly off shelves. Interestingly, as far as consumers are concerned, a lot of these AI breakthroughs will lead to one central concept: adaptive, in-the-moment personalization — AI that can intuit what a shopper’s style is and adapt its recommendations as she or he shops; AI that can evolve a website to specific consumer needs; and AI that can understand user concerns and answer complicated questions. In other words, at every step of the buying journey, from discovery to delivery, AI will deliver tangible and important advantages for both retailers their customers. It will make shopping both easier and more personal. And it’s already happening, all around you. |
Blockchain is empowering the future of insurance | Kevin Wang | 2,016 | 10 | 29 |
The embers of innovation are beginning to char the massive underbelly of the in the world. Every segment of insurance is under competition by entrepreneurs touting new ways to underprice risk, creating new types of premiums and servicing consumers in a tightly regulated on-demand economy. While most startups attempting to gain traction in the insurance market fall under incremental innovation, Blockchain for insurance could be characterized as disruptive. The underlying technology of the world’s most adopted digital currency, bitcoin, is quickly becoming one of the hottest topics across a number of industries. More than just a distributed database for bitcoin, Blockchain’s ability to send, receive and store information has the underlying power to disrupt the way businesses process digital transactions. The implications of decentralized ledger technology (DLT) are astounding: Digital trust is now an ever reasonable possibility; meaning online and offline assets can now be assigned ownership and the transference between those parties can be proven both linearly and cryptographically. Specific to insurance, Blockchain technology has the power to simplify the claims process, alleviate high premiums, help insurers create niche coverage and, most importantly, benefit those who live in catastrophe regions. Blockchain adoption has the power to transition new and existing models of insurance, including P2P insurance, parametric insurance and microinsurance, into a new digital age. Blockchain is powerful because of its secure platform connecting capabilities. New distribution methods like peer-to-peer insurance (P2P) could end up restructuring the entire market. P2P insurance empowers policyholders to a greater portion of the premiums rather than the individual private wealth managers working to produce returns for insurance companies. A number of well-funded startups are already beginning to stake their place in the P2P insurance market. One example, , is a peer-to-peer supplemental unemployment insurance protocol that uses the policy holders’ social capital to replace underwriters. , enables different parties to jointly store and run computations on data while keeping the data completely private. In the foreseeable future, specific P2P insurance platforms may begin to use smart contracts to set claims and match demand between consumers in an online market, solving many of the current issues when transferring digital assets or accessing private data. Another use case for Blockchain is parametric insurance. Instead of indemnifying the pure loss, insurers would agree to pay a certain amount upon the occurrence of triggers within preset smart contracts. For example, if an earthquake were to occur in a given region above a magnitude of 5, the smart contract would automatically pay 20 percent of the insurance claim to policy holders. Contracts require mutually trusted third-party administrators (TPAs) to adjust. As parametric insurance becomes popular, its process will likely improve to play a key role in the widespread adoption of smart contracts. Product-creating startups like can be used to create cross-border risk pools, allowing individuals from all over the world to access its exchange protocol via digital currencies. Rainvow’s Ethereum platform facilitates niche coverages to automatically compensate unforeseen transportation costs on rainy days. Platform-creating startups like * facilitate highly specific insurance policies. These systems allow TPAs to create triggers or oracles for smart contracts, promising to make parametric insurance easier and more adoptable by insurance carriers. The fast growth of IoT-based technologies and sensors have fueled startups and corporations, giving access to real-time data that may ultimately give way to new methods of settling insurance disputes. Automobiles could be assigned tokens by their manufacturers; rather than having the incident go through an insurance company, vehicles could adopt tech for cars to assess driving accidents automatically. A fender-bender would trigger instant compensation within the smart contract based on sensor and party data. Blockchain has several perceived benefits in microinsurance, as well. It can enable trust between peers to increase transparency for populations living in remote regions of the world. Its beauty lies in its simplicity. The virtual nature of the transactions could side-step governmental bureaucracy to make geographic limitations irrelevant within its context. These features make the future of microinsurance very appealing. , an Italian Blockchain startup, uses the Blockchain protocol to enable philanthropists to donate digital currencies to underfunded, hard to reach nonprofits in remote regions of the world. It even allows people to trace their donation and the manner in which it is used. Their risk assessment platform allows Good Samaritans to pool their money while limiting fraud exposure. The future of insurance could flourish through an intelligent adoption of Blockchain, with applications in digital currencies, fraud solutions and smart contracts. Large insurers have the potential to benefit immensely. However, its implementation will mean that insurance companies will have to change their underwriting process, the structure of the policy, as well as risk underwriting. Blockchain allows for cheaper, more consumer-oriented products to be developed that could chip away at the premiums collected by large insurance companies. would be the cooperation between Blockchain startups, carriers, brokers, reinsurers, etc. However, most likely many segments of the insurance industry will be subject to disruption and may follow the way of milk men or lamplighters… a precautionary tale for incumbents in the insurance industry. |
The history of innovation in recruitment technology and services | Michael Overell | 2,016 | 10 | 29 |
2016 is a watershed moment for the recruitment industry. LinkedIn and Monster are being acquired, and CareerBuilder — three of the highest-profile tech companies in the space. Microsoft is making a grand entrance, while cashed-up incumbents watch closely from the sidelines. The ripples will span the entire industry — from founders, investors and service providers to job seekers. Basically everyone in business. How will it impact you? This article brings clarity through a historical lens. It provides a framework for how the industry has evolved over the past 20 years, to help founders, investors and practitioners understand and navigate the biggest trends currently underway. Recruitment is an attractive target for disruption — hundreds of billions spent every year, with inefficient business models and widely felt pain. But despite thousands of startups taking billions in investment, the truly structural innovations can be mapped on a single page. And the fundamental workflow of recruiting has remained remarkably resilient to technical change. Today, like 20 years ago, we still source candidates, put them through a process of interview and selection and need someone to manage that process. The framework below maps the most important shifts across three distinct periods of innovation. The arrows show the “direction” of innovation, from which new models emerge. For example, job aggregators (like ) emerged in the mid-2000s to disrupt online job boards. Source: RecruitLoop This framework generalizes the recruitment value chain and ignores thousands of startups and innovations that haven’t had widespread impact. And the emergence of a new model doesn’t make a previous one redundant (e.g. job boards are widely used today) — but it does provide context for when and how many well-known companies have emerged. Before diving in, observe that innovation over the past 20 years has been horizontal (left to right), and constrained within specific steps in the value chain. That’s all changing in 2016. First, let’s take a look at the defining models and companies that have shaped each step in the value chain, before examining the biggest trends shaping the industry today. We’ve simplified it into three understandable steps — find the candidates, track the process, then do the process. In the beginning there were newspapers. If you wanted to find candidates, you paid for an ad in a physical newspaper. Simple, effective and expensive. Hello, internet. emerged in the late-1990s to steal eyeballs from newspapers and print media. The defining companies of this era were , and — completely reshaping the job advertising and search experience for both employers and job seekers. Despite becoming obvious targets of disruption, job boards still contribute 10-15 percent of In the mid-2000s, social networks split the market into categories of . Job boards were for active candidates, but they were limited to traffic they could earn or buy. Then Indeed found it easier to aggregate ads from other websites, and introduced “pay-per-click” job advertising. became the dominant model for active sourcing — in 2012 and drives 58 percent in the U.S. But the defining company of this period was . It created a new category for passive sourcing by bringing profile data online. Now anyone could search for potential candidates, whether they had applied to a job or not. Previously, recruiters had an information arbitrage over employers, thanks to their “proprietary” databases. No more. Candidate data became free to anyone with the tools and skill to find it. The job board model was soon attacked by a different source of data — . crept onto the scene, applying lessons from Expedia and Yelp on the power of user-generated content. It quickly added an Indeed-style aggregator to become the job site, visited by nearly at some point during their search. Meanwhile, became recognized as a distinct activity within recruiting, supported by an entire category of new tools and technology. The biggest innovations in this period are people search engines that aggregate profile data from across the web — e.g. (acquired by LinkedIn), (acquired by Monster) and dozens of others still fighting for share. The (ATS) is the CRM of recruiting. Most companies are stuck using old, ugly technology they need but don’t like. The ATS emerged as a distinct category of software in the 1990s. Like most software in that period, it was installed on a customer’s server, and focused on enterprise companies. The defining company of this period was , which successfully navigated the move to SaaS (in Wave 2) and was for $1.9 billion. It still dominates the market with . In the early 2000s a new category of “web-first” ATS emerged, in line with the general trend to SaaS. New players gained share, including and . This wave also saw consolidation, with enterprise incumbents Oracle and SAP seeking to establish full suites of HR software. Then expectations changed. Enterprise software needed to be effective sexy. A new breed of ATS emerged — user-friendly, mobile-first, open to integrations and free of technical debt. In the last few years more than $100 million of investment has flowed to new players, including , , and . It remains a brutally competitive space, and the winners will combine product innovation with aggressive marketing and sales. Despite 20+ years of technical innovation, most money in talent acquisition is still spent on — both external and internal. The popular notion of “disrupting recruiters” has merit, but misses three important factors: (a) someone needs to use the tools and manage the process, whether external or internal; (b) there is huge fragmentation and range of service providers; and (c) the recruitment services industry itself has seen major innovation and disruption. The 1990s through to the mid-2000s were a gold rush for . Proprietary databases gave them an information arbitrage, and they could charge employers a premium. The industry was flooded with all manner of folk looking to strike it rich. Many agencies were sales-intensive environments with few rules; owners became rich, and some went as far as listing public companies. The hangover began in the mid- to late-2000s with two conflicting trends. First, the popularity of LinkedIn and other technologies empowered many companies to reduce spend on external recruiters and manage the process internally. This period saw a major trend toward teams. Many agency recruiters made the shift to an internal environment. They still “did” recruiting, just for a single company, often in a more stable environment. Second, (RPO) emerged as large employers realized they could get the benefits of an internal team — at lower cost — by outsourcing their entire recruiting function. Early players were acquired by incumbents — e.g. Sourceright ( ), TheRightThing ( ). Today’s standalone leaders have attracted significant investment from private equity — e.g. (KKR), (Frontier Capital). RPO is currently a $3-4 billion industry growing at 10 percent per annum, but is generally restricted to high-volume employers due to high costs of delivery. Over the past five years, technical innovation has trickled down to reshape the profession of recruitment. Specialist , focused on the technical activity of candidate identification and outreach, have emerged as a category distinct from recruiters. In parallel, have blurred the lines between internal and external. Independent recruiters (and sourcers) now have more options to work for themselves, using new tools and platforms, under a variety of pricing models (e.g. hourly, project-based, success-based). This has benefited employers by reducing cost and increasing flexibility. 2016 is a watershed moment with many of these trends converging. The next wave is coming — will it be a period of consolidation, innovation or both? Here are four shocks already underway, along with questions that will shape the industry for the next decade or more. Microsoft has aggressively entered the space with its $26 billion of LinkedIn. Integration will take time, but will have far-reaching implications across the industry. Will this open the doors for other major entrants? We know companies like Salesforce, Google and Facebook , and that Salesforce in particular has a in HR tech. Is Microsoft’s entry likely to dampen or increase those ambitions? Then there are the “forgotten” giants of Oracle, SAP and IBM, with deep pockets, major horses in this race and a risk of falling behind the next wave of innovation in recruitment technology. How could these companies or others find ways to enter the space? Randstad (No. 2 recruitment services company globally) is acquiring Monster, to support of building the world’s most comprehensive portfolio of HR services. This isn’t the first big example of vertical integration — after Recruit Group (Japanese conglomerate) acquired Indeed — but could be the most impactful given the potential for integration. Vertical integration is also happening in other areas; for example: investing in steps beyond the job posting: emerging, blending technology and services: expanding and integrating with an aim of owning the entire recruiting workflow. How will incumbent service providers or traditional models respond to vertical integration? While the top end is consolidating and integrating, the number of startups focused on recruitment technology has exploded. It has never been easier or cheaper to start a tech company, and the industry has been flooded with founders and new investment chasing the next big thing. Many of these new startups feel like features more than businesses, and will pivot or disappear. For practitioners and potential customers, it’s more difficult than ever to cut through the noise and understand which new technology can truly impact your hiring process. What will be the next breakout technologies and innovations to scale? Traditional service providers — recruiters, sourcers, executive search consultants — face pressure on margins as they compete against tech-enabled solutions. Many are adapting to different pricing and business models. The best will continue to specialize by industry, geography and stage of the hiring process. Generalist providers will struggle. Incumbents that don’t make bold moves will be left behind. In an environment of technical consolidation and increasing competition on the ground, many will exit the industry or simply perish. How can incumbent service providers differentiate to maintain margins and stay relevant? This article does not propose answers to any of these questions. The intention was to frame the historical context and biggest trends currently driving the industry. The only prediction is that 2016 will be remembered as a watershed year in recruitment services and technology. How will it impact you? |
Gillmor Gang LIVE 10.29.16 | Steve Gillmor | 2,016 | 10 | 29 | This was a live recording session of – with: Robert Scoble, Doc Searls, Keith Teare, Frank Radice and Steve Gillmor. Gillmor Gang’s Facebook page G3’s Facebook page |
Lume Cube is back on Kickstarter with a smartphone-friendly light source | Haje Jan Kamps | 2,016 | 10 | 29 | When first crashed into the world’s consciousness, they did so with an $80 smartphone-controlled, waterproof light aimed at the GoPro-loving extreme sports market. Today, the company launched a Kickstarter campaign for Life Lite, its followup. Life Lite is 33 percent less bright, but also half the price and half the size. The new addition is aimed at people shooting live video with smartphones. “We hoped this was going to be successful,” said Lume Cube’s founder and CEO Mornee Sherry in an interview last week. “And the original Lume Cube is now available for sale in more than 45 countries.” The Lume Cube Life Lite can still be used with GoPros, of course, but its slightly thinner form factor means it’s better suited to smartphone photographers — and people who want to be able to throw a small light in their pocket or bag The original Lume Cube became a darling of extreme sports fans all over the world, but the cube-shaped light was too big and too pricey for some of the company’s customers. The response became the Life Lite. Waterproof to 30 feet (10m) and outputting up to 1,000 lumens, the light isn’t as high-spec as the original Lume Cube (which went to 100 feet and output 1,500 lumens), but at half the size and half the price, it might just be the perfect match for people who have different needs from their lighting situations. “There’s a bit of a difference in philosophy between the lights,” Sherry tells me. “Lume Cube is practically indestructible. You can run over it with a truck if you want. It was designed to be a good match with the GoPro cameras, which are notoriously bad in low light. The extreme sports angle meant that the original Lume Cube had to be ultra durable and super bright.” The photographic landscape has changed a lot since 2014, however: The number of people filming and streaming with their smartphones has gone through the roof. Small cameras are much happier in low light than they used to be, and the relentless focus on indestructibility is less important to the current generation of filmmakers. The company’s Kickstarter campaign is going live any second, you can find the link to the campaign . |
What product development teaches us about self-improvement | Pini Yakuel | 2,016 | 10 | 29 |
While the digital revolution has brought with it many conceptual changes, one of the most pronounced is that of the version release. Your phone is considered outdated if it’s a year old, and obsolete if you bought it three years ago. Whenever you connect to Wi-Fi your apps undergo a version update. The Facebook you’re using today is not the same version you posted to last week. Tesla cars run version releases overnight. And software is updated regularly — just as you manage to wrap your head around the latest iPhone UI, a new version is out. Chock-full of new features! A new interface! New functionality! Products are not the only ones prone to constant change and improvement. So are work processes (e.g. from waterfall to scrum), team dynamics, organizational structures and business functions. In Japan, the concept of — literally, “change for the better” — has been applied to the workplace, referring to activities that continuously improve all functions and involve employees from the CEO to assembly-line workers. It is a concept now deeply embedded in the collective consciousness — and it can’t help but filter into the realm of the self. Self-improvement is nothing new. All religions call for personal development, as did the ancient Greek and Roman techniques of Aristotle was all for it, as was Confucius. But never have these ideas turned into such a sprawling industry as in the age of version releases. Self-help, coaching, fitness, beauty enhancement, workshops and motivational speaking are all aligned to bring out the next version release of you. The pressure to improve and evolve has never been greater. But the crux of the matter is that improvement is easier said than done: It demands both a will and an ability to change, but also a strong enough backbone as to not lose your identity or sway to the wind of every passing buzz. And it demands an ability to cope with the fallout of change, because moving things around often uncovers a weak underbelly. But most of all, it requires you to take honest stock of where you are and where you want to go. Not to mention the stamina to work your way through the obstacles that surely will come. Eventually, I heeded my dad’s advice and hired a developer. The thing is, I never let him go. On the contrary: I hired more developers and product people, who have since released the first version of our software, and then improved on that for version 2.0 and have been going on ever since, soon to release version 5.0 to our growing cadre of more than 200 clients. In the interim, there were dozens of smaller releases, coming out monthly, and a constant buzz of ongoing version updates. Along the way, I also released new versions of myself: versions better able to cope with change, better adapted to the turbulence inherent in building and running a startup on three continents, and, as life demanded, better suited for marriage and fatherhood. And I did this by implementing in the realms of the self the hard lessons I learned from my work in product. Here they are, in a nutshell: Product teams look for new features to build based in part on user feedback. In the context of interpersonal relationships, we often tend to scoff at criticism or negative feedback, but those are actually golden opportunities for growth. Just as developers sometimes have blind spots concerning the product, or misunderstandings regarding the ways people will be affected by different features, so do we as individuals regarding ourselves. We should seriously and open-heartedly listen to feedback from those around us (co-workers, friends, family) to identify areas for self-improvement. Similarly, product teams are typically held to deadlines. The optimization they’re looking for is not some vague idea, to be considered when the time is right. Deadlines demand a serious, concentrated effort that yields results, and is a great tool for focusing. In the same vein, people should set their own deadlines for self-improvement. Goal setting is a crucial element in both product and personal improvement. Products are also often created or updated to fill holes in the marketplace with a unique differentiator. This demands an understanding of the product’s identity, of what needs development and, no less important, what not to develop. This same idea could apply to people too, especially in the workplace, where employees should look around and identify what no one else in their company is doing and then build the skills and expertise to help their company succeed in a certain area. And it is no less relevant in a social and interpersonal context. As you progress with the methodology of your self-improvement, the tenants of “agile marketing” can also come in handy. For example, develop small, incremental releases and iterate. This is a very optimistic concept for personal development: The goal you’re aiming at doesn’t need to happen in full tomorrow morning. It’s enough that you take small steps toward it, one after the other, to ensure that you will get there eventually. Soon after my son was born I realized that version releases are actually built in to human development. It was as though he was releasing a new version of himself daily, with a major release every couple of months: The first smile — a killer feature! The roll over — an audience grabber! The first step — now more user-friendly than ever! And in order to do this he was relying on user feedback, sticking to hard-coded deadlines, carving out his unique differentiation and running the most agile show in town. This age of the version release carries with it a trade-off. On the one hand, nothing is ever finished, everything is temporary and the new quickly becomes outdated. Staying relevant is becoming ever harder. On the other hand, it carries the sweet and hopeful promise for betterment. There will always be the next version release — of your favorite app, of that annoying bug in the software, of the camera on your phone — and, if you work hard enough, even of you. What is the essence of human life but continuously striving to become the best version of yourself, ultimately achieving your full potential? |
DroneDeploy launches a directory for professional drone operators | Lora Kolodny | 2,016 | 10 | 11 | DroneDeploy wants businesses to be able to find a drone services provider as easily as anyone can find a place to eat dinner, anywhere in the world. So today, the company unveiled a new free . Take, for example, a real estate developer who needs a finely detailed map of land where it may soon build a giant, corporate campus. Instead of buying drones equipped to scan that property, then training or hiring pilots to fly them, the developer could just flip through the profiles on the Drone Mapping Directory, look at examples of maps they’d created in the past, then connect with the most desirable vendors in their area. DroneDeploy developed this directory at the behest of its users, said CEO Mike Winn. Of course, helping professional drone operators tap into unmet demand in the market will also lead to increased use of DroneDeploy’s technology. For the unfamiliar, DroneDeploy makes cloud-based software for drone operators which allows them to plan flights, then rapidly gather, store, analyze and create visualizations using data gathered from those flights. DroneDeploy users have mapped and analyzed over 6 million acres in over 130 countries to-date, the company says. Its systems are available on a freemium basis. Paying users get more storage capacity and professional features. They can, for example, create co-branded DroneDeploy maps to include in portfolios or deliver as final projects to their own clients. Winn said that since the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration released its , making it easier for individuals to become certified, commercial drone operators, small businesses providing drone services have been proliferating in the U.S. More than 12,000 individuals have been certified as remote pilots under the rule since it went into effect in late summer, the CEO said. Rather than building and flying their own proprietary drones, drone services providers use state of the art, available technologies to do things like shoot aerial videos for media and entertainment, conduct aerial surveys of farms, construction sites, or critical infrastructure, gather property damage information for insurance providers, or fly drones to gather data for scientific research. Other directories and marketplaces exist for booking drone service providers, of course, including JobforDrones.com, or for aerial photography, Dronebase, and Airstoc. The global market for commercial applications of drone technology is expected to exceed $127 billion in revenue by 2020, according to |
Zcash, Blockstack, and appcoins, oh my! | Jon Evans | 2,016 | 10 | 29 | It’s time to check back in to what’s happening in the world of cryptocurrencies! Which—give it credit—is . Some things seem evergreen; the Bitcoin civil war is resurgent; the Ethereum’s growing pains continue. But out there on the horizon, some strange and interesting things are happening. I give you, for instance, appcoins, Blockstack, and Zcash. Forget Bitcoin, say the appcoin true believers; forget Ethereum; heck, forget venture capital. Any project that can find a way to implement some time of internal cryptocurrency–an “appcoin” used to pay for goods or services within that project’s remit–can use that, first to crowdfund millions of dollars’ worth of initial development costs by selling “pre-mined” coins, then to share the rewards of success with those lucky / visionary initial users and investors. It sounds appealing! It has precedent; it’s exactly how Ethereum itself was funded, after all, and plenty of early Bitcoin enthusiasts got rich from that enthusiasm. You can see why blockchain enthusiasts unhappy with Bitcoin’s direction of late, such as Coinbase co-founder Fred Ehrsam, are about the idea. But — totally aside from questions of whether this is technically legal — like all crowdfunding, appcoins run the risk of questionable incentivization; “make a lot of money up front” is a lot more tempting than “build something extraordinarily difficult and cutting-edge, and then see if there’s money in it,” as Bitcoin and Ethereum did. Appcoin poster child Steemit, for instance, provoked More to the point, we’ve been here before; Ethereum isn’t just the second big blockchain, it’s the only one of post-Bitcoin blockchains to have any real impact. So-called “altcoins” faded away because they were buggy, insecure, untrustworthy, and/or provided no lasting value beyond de facto gambling. As the always-interesting Preston Byrne, an attorney and co-founder of permissioned blockchain startup Monax, : Back in 2014, it seemed a new hot “bitcoin 2.0” was being released every other week (be it Dogecoin, Auroracoin, Maidsafe, SwarmCoin, Bitshares, or otherwise). Most of these experiments ended in failure or a slow fade. Now, it seems, for reasons known only to God, the appcoin concept is back on the table again Things aren’t the same now. (Also, MaidSafe isn’t really a cryptocurrency.) Today, appcoins are being woven into projects which use them as their internal currency, rather than simply existing for their own sake. But it’s still far from clear that we are moving into a world of many independent “appcoin” blockchains. In some especially technologically ambitious cases — such as Ethereum — a new appcoin / blockchain may be called for … but absent such ambition, such an approach often smacks painfully of a solution searching for a problem. Appcoin caveat emptor. There are currently about 710 digital/crypto currencies, almost 4x the number of fiat currencies recognized as legal tender today — Andy Weissman (@aweissman) What interests me most about cryptocurrencies is neither the “crypto” nor the “currency” part. What interests me is that they are decentralized, permissionless services, which rely on — and thus can be curtailed by — no central controller. People say the Internet is about disintermediation, but in fact an astonishing amount of our online activity is conducted via the five Stacks: Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google, and Microsoft. The notion of disintermediating some — now interesting and disruptive. True power of decentralized tech is disintermediating large software co's that host multisided networks & win via leverage as central hosts — Zavain Dar (@zavaindar) Hence my interest in decentralization technologies such as and, lately, , a Union Square Ventures / Y Combinator startup which is trying to construct a new internet for decentralized, server-less applications … The blockchain is utilized to maintain a cross-application identity system, securely mapping user IDs to usernames, public keys, and data storage URIs. Developers don’t have to worry about running servers, maintaining databases, or building out user management systems Which, as a software developer myself, sounds lovely, but also very much like one of those very many tools / frameworks which sound great until you get deep into their weeds, after which you ultimately realize that their technical limitations ultimately tend to cause more problems than they solve. Perhaps I am wrong; I hope I am wrong. Perhaps I am being reflexively cynical because it sounds so exciting. Perhaps we shall see when its emerges from public beta. That browser, as I understand it, builds web pages out of decentralized data stored by individual users, in Dropbox or similar services, without any central servers being required. What’s more, it would use blockchain (Bitcoin’s) for domain registration, something I’ve been calling for for a long time. “All of this, by the way, also makes building websites easier,” The . As a frequent website builder, I remain skeptical until I see the details. But I am hopeful. Which is also how I feel about which also , and which I’ve been looking forward to for some time. It’s another cryptocurrency, but it’s not just another cryptocurrency: to quote, er, , it would allow transactions that did not contain any public information about their sender receiver amount — but all of these things can still be verified using zero-knowledge proofs memorably known as zk-SNARKs, for “zero-knowledge Succinct Non-interactive ARguments of Knowledge.” This is pretty remarkable. And I know I just spent a paragraph waxing skeptical about new blockchains, but Zcash is — like Ethereum was — a fundamental technological advance, not just a new project using the same technology. The prospect of truly anonymous transactions may sound alarming to some, but in a world in which privacy withers further away every day, it can also sound a lot like a reassuring bulwark. More prosaically, to quote founder and OG cypherpunk Zooko Wilcox Interesting… has been pondering cryptocurrency at least as long as Satoshi Nakamoto, who cited him — Erik Voorhees (@ErikVoorhees) in about Zcash: “There are regulatory and commercial and moral reasons for privacy from all sectors,” he says. To give a commercial example: Apple wouldn’t want Samsung to be able to track its transactions and gain valuable competitive intelligence. Wilcox sounds : “I want to be able to say we were there, pushing for that great transformation that began to wash away the suffocating mass of inefficiency, corruption, and isolation — the transformation that unlocked the potential of billions of humans who had been trapped behind walls — cooperation boundaries!” And, encouragingly, ZCash paid for , which will hopefully help them avoid some of the roadblocks that Ethereum has hit. …Of course, once again, when you get into the weeds, you always find skeptics with coherent arguments. touting its competitor Monero, which uses rather than zk-SNARKs to anonymize transactions. But the weirdest and most cinematic thing about ZCash is not abstruse arguments about relative efficacy: it’s the esoteric ceremony with which it had to be initiated, after which occult secrets had to be destroyed. No, seriously. An unavoidable side effect of the math is (to oversimplify) when the ZCash blockchain is initially set up, it is possible for its originators to retain “secret keys” that will allow them to anonymously create and spend new counterfeit ZCash whenever they like. ZCash itself calls these secret keys “ ,” and they that last week they went through a mathematically and physically elaborate ceremony in which the network was initiated and the “toxic waste” was then destroyed. Their is both deeply surreal and truly awesome. Does the world possibly want to adopt a currency whose viability fundamentally this to have happened? …I don’t know! (The parameters can be swapped out, if believed compromised, but how can you guarantee the set of parameters?) Still, regardless of whether ZCash as currently enacted will become an economic force, I am bullish on its technology; it is a major and impressive next step towards guaranteed privacy and, therefore, – . Back in the cryptocurrency mainstream, if there is such a thing, the Big Two blockchain ecosystems of Bitcoin and Ethereum have been awfully busy as well. Ethereum hard-forked, , to deal with an attacker targeting its security flaws, again! ( .) The Bitcoin community is , again! …Also, beyond the sturm und drang, a lot of interesting stuff is happening. Blockcerts, “an open standard for digital academic certificates on the Bitcoin blockchain” from the MIT Media Lab, . In a world awash in fake credentials, this looks like it could take off. Meanwhile, as banks and big companies dip their toes into the blockchain pool, the “ ” has finally been completed. They’ll have to move a lot faster than that, though, if they hope to keep up with today’s pace of change. |
The reasons why Twitter won’t let anyone save Vine | Josh Constine | 2,016 | 10 | 29 | There are so many ways Twitter could end up looking like a fool if it gave up control of Vine that it would rather bury the app than sell it. There’s little to gain and a lot to lose. So in the spirit of Vine, I’m going to break down the reasoning into 6-second snippets of text: That all makes sense. But… By killing off Vine instead of allowing someone else to breathe new life into it or assigning a small skeleton crew to maintain the app: |
VC firm Daphni announces its first $165 million fund | Romain Dillet | 2,016 | 10 | 16 | Paris-based VC firm is announcing its inaugural fund for seed and Series A investments. The team will manage a $165 million fund (€150 million) and try some new things when it comes to venture capital in Europe. On paper, Daphni looks like many other funds. A bunch of limited partners have given a big pile of money so that a team of tech-savvy people can invest everything in startups. But Daphni wants to work a bit differently with both startups and LPs. For each investment, Daphni’s LPs will have the opportunity to co-invest with Daphni keeping the lead when it comes to board seats, carried interest, etc. But the trick is that a Daphni LP like Société Générale doesn’t have to pay any management fee for its own investments (obviously). So let’s figure out the pros and cons of a strategy like this one. For the LPs, the pros are quite simple. It’s an effective discount on management fees if they take advantage of this opportunity. It’s a way to access a part of Daphni’s deal flow and educate your team when it comes to startups. It’s a way of saying that you love startups. And if you make the right investment decisions, it’s a way to financially overexpose yourself to successful startups. The cons are that you don’t actually have a say when it comes to board decisions because Daphni doesn’t want too many cooks in the kitchen. As an LP, your investments are capped based on the total amount you put in Daphni’s fund. For instance, if Nokia invested $10 million in Daphni (I don’t know the exact amount), they can only co-invest $10 million in total with Daphni. As for startups, there is one big pro and one big con. The big pro is that you can get more money more quickly, ending up raising more easily. The big con is that you have to be careful when it comes to sharing data with Daphni’s LPs. On Daphni’s platform, you can choose not to share some info with specific LPs because you think they might compete with you or you don’t want them to know anything about your business. This opt-out feature will be key. Talking about the platform, like other VC firms, Daphni has developed its own deal flow management platform. This way, companies can on Daphni’s website, LPs can decide to co-invest on the same platform, and Daphni doesn’t have to explicitly send emails to LPs for every investment opportunity. Daphni has been co-founded by Marie Ekeland, Willy Braun, Mathieu Daix, Pierre-Yves Meerschman and Pierre-Éric Leibovici. The typical Daphni investment will sit anywhere between €300,000 and €3 million. LPs include super business angels and big companies, such as Bpifrance, Crédit Mutuel Arkéa, Société Générale, Fnac-Darty, Nokia, SWEN Capital Partners, ProBTP, MAIF, and more. The team also wants to host tech events and wants to develop a content strategy. And that’s about all there is to know about Daphni for now. Obviously, the portfolio and the track record will be more important than anything else, but we’ll have to wait on this front. Named after one of ‘s stage names, Daphni wants to try new things with a new LP-VC relationship with some strict rules, a platform for entrepreneurs, VCs and LPs and a . In other words: welcome Daphni. |
Why the top entrepreneurs are seeking corporate venture money | Neal Hansch | 2,016 | 10 | 11 |
When needed to get young viewers to tune into the 2016 Olympics in Rio this summer, it turned to , the social media-driven media company in which it had invested $200 million a year earlier. NBCUniversal knew the millennial audience — and the lucrative advertising dollars that follow them — would be key to achieving their aggressive advertising goals. The challenge? NBCUniversal’s most popular shows draw viewers in their 30s, 40s and beyond. Conversely, more than half of BuzzFeed’s audience is 18-34 years old, according to industry tracking firm Comscore. NBCUniversal knew they needed to connect with the most coveted audience where they were already consuming content on a daily basis — Snapchat. But instead of handling this content itself, NBC enlisted a team of producers from BuzzFeed to focus on the creation of videos covering this Olympics. Across both NBCUniversal and BuzzFeed channels on Snapchat, the content received 2.2 billion views and 230 million minutes of consumption in two weeks. At the time of the investment, Buzzfeed founder Jonah Peretti was quoted as saying that the funding would allow the company “to grow and invest without pressure to chase short-term revenue or rush an IPO.” NBCUniversal has proven able to leverage BuzzFeed’s attractiveness to advertisers and valuable audience data, while the startup gets financial security and connectivity to resources, scale and new business opportunities that spawn across NBCUniversal’s portfolio of brands. This is just one example of the power of corporate venture capital and the mutual benefit it can generate for corporations and startups alike. The convergence and disruption that is driving these corporate venture capital (CVC) deals is not limited to the entertainment industry. As more corporate leaders realize the benefits of leveraging balance-sheet dollars to engage with emerging companies in their industries, there has been an explosion in the number of active corporate venture arms. Large corporate incumbents recognize that engaging with the startup community is necessary to stay on top of the disruptive innovation around their core business and stay ahead of the curve with emerging technologies and new business models. This movement is taking place across all sectors and is driving competition to invest in the most sought-after startups more fiercely than ever. To gain access to the most prized deals, VCs universally pitch startups on the “value add” they can bring to bear, beyond simply the cold, hard cash on the table. The value highlighted typically is tied to an investor’s past entrepreneurial success, operating experience, industry Rolodex and co-investor relationships, as well as a range of other resources that may help drive the startup’s success. At the same time, entrepreneurs are waking up to the many distinct strategic advantages that CVC investors are increasingly bringing to the deal table, including significant funding at all stages of the life cycle, strategic advisory and operating support, as well as scale and growth drivers; in other words — access to target customers, distribution channels and paths to exit for their startups. The venture industry as a whole has continued to evolve in recent years, due in part to the advent of and myriad other crowdfunding and emerging alternative funding options for entrepreneurs. At the same time, CVCs have also matured, expanded and increased their share of total investment dollars deployed each year. “Corporates are realizing that innovation and disruption is coming from outside of them,” says Mark Sherman, managing director at , the investment arm of Australia’s leading telco and diversified media company with a $50 billion market cap. As a result, more and more corporations are launching accelerators, incubators or venture arms, hiring “Chief Innovation Officers” and spinning up in internal labs — all in an effort to connect with startups and embed themselves more deeply in the global tech ecosystems. Because of the unique benefits they offer, CVCs have emerged as a powerful class of investors and competitors to traditional venture capital. Historically, most CVCs have been followers and “deal takers not makers,” while also largely only active in later-staged fundings. More than ever, CVCs are increasingly getting involved in deals that span all different stages — from seed to growth and even post-IPO — as well as leading those rounds. According to the National Venture Capital Association, corporate venture groups have invested more than $1.2 billion in nearly 200 deals in the second quarter of 2016 alone, the vast majority of which were to seed-stage and early-stage companies. Activity levels have skyrocketed by most measures, and over the last five years, the number of corporations making venture investments has risen to more than 800, as tracked by . CVCs deployed nearly $30 billion in funding across 1,300+ deals in 2015, , topping 2014’s previous records of $16.7 billion in 1,245 deals. In fact, last year CVCs participated in 1 out of every 5 venture deals, and companies as diverse as JetBlue Airways and The Campbell Soup Company have launched new venture arms. VCs are uniquely positioned to provide compelling advantages that entrepreneurs don’t find with other investment options. These advantages typically stem from their ability to drive growth and revenue for their portfolio companies by leveraging their parent companies’ scale, specific domain expertise, talent and customers. “Our Members are some of the leading corporations in the world and we have seen firsthand how they unlock strategic value by leveraging their unique resources across portfolio networks,” says Tina Sharkey, senior partner of Sherpa Foundry. Corporate VCs often work closely with the senior leadership of their parent companies’ core business units to stay on top of their expertise and interests and to share information on potential deals. At Salesforce, which is a founding member of Sherpa Foundry and one of the top five most active CVCs on the globe, each investment requires a business unit sponsor that commits to working with the startup. This ensures the startup receives specialized attention from company leadership and maintains a tight alignment with Salesforce goals. Condé Nast, another member of Sherpa Foundry, exercises a similar approach via (AVP), a venture capital firm affiliated with Condé Nast’s parent company, Advance Publications. “Through our strategic partnership with Advance Publications and its operating businesses, AVP has the unique the ability to tap into a broad range of operators with domain and/or functional expertise that can be deployed in our portfolio companies as consultants, advisors and members of boards of directors,” says , founding partner at . More and more entrepreneurs are opting to take strategic CVC investment because of the practical support they are able to provide. “Entrepreneurs value the tactical assistance CVCs offer that most other institutional investors cannot — day to day operating insights, active industry connections and real-time deep domain guidance,” says Sharkey. According to Matt Garratt, VP of Salesforce Ventures & Corporate Development, Salesforce Ventures leverages the company’s sheer scale and scope of its network of topical experts to provide applied support for immediate issues and day-to-day challenges that its portfolio companies face. “If a founder says, ‘I need help with pricing for my field service application,’ I can bring in someone who runs pricing for all our field services business lines. This is not a general high-level discussion,” says Garratt. Ibnale agrees. “For each investment we make and for each issue — strategic or tactical — that we aim to address with a portfolio company, we have the ability to look within Advance business units to find the specific talent and capabilities that we need,” he says. CVCs have the clear ability to connect their portfolio companies with relevant champions or partners from across their corporations. says Banse of Comcast Ventures, which has been active since the late 1990s. For example, CVCs can provide startups direct access to their own sizable customer bases. They’re able to do this because they know the specific problems their customers face and can assess fit with the solutions offered by companies in their portfolios. For example, introduced their portfolio company , a virtual network monitoring startup that solves performance management issues, to Salesforce’s customer base to improve user connectivity to their services. Another examples is , a video marketing platform, which was made available to any Salesforce customer that used video content in their products. “They’re a fantastic partner,” Garratt says. “We don’t have video capability ourselves, so we’ve integrated Vidyard across virtually all our products.” Telstra Ventures invests in companies that are strategically important to their parent company, and the investment team looks for startups whose products can work for their end customers and/or where Telstra itself may be a user — or both, as is the case with . “Entrepreneurs love that because it generates revenue,” Sherman says. “We’re very focused on driving revenues for our portfolio companies.” The group has invested in nearly 30 companies since starting four years ago, including , , and . Tapping into the global depth and reach of in-house experts is another area where corporate VCs are often uniquely positioned to assist startups, particularly those seeking to expand internationally. , for example, has nine offices globally, which allows them to help startups with everything from market intelligence to moving their headquarters. This happens frequently with European startups looking to move to the U.S., says Patrick Eggen, senior director at Qualcomm Ventures. For example, Qualcomm initially discovered and bet on when the founders were still solely based in Israel. When the company moved its headquarters to the United States, Qualcomm continued to work with the remaining team in Israel, while also supporting the new operations in the states. “Waze maintained the majority of their engineering and operations team in Israel so QCV provided support in both geographies seamlessly,” said Eggen. The role of CVCs in the venture ecosystem has never been more visible or impactful than it is right now. Corporate venture leaders know they must leverage their native and distinct advantages to provide measurable value for startups in order to distinguish themselves from the proliferation of institutional and other capital options. For entrepreneurs, this evolution and increased competition in the venture funding landscape means more potential sources for backing and greater emphasis on what assistance each can bring to the table to help get their company to the next level. |
null | Darrell Etherington | 2,016 | 10 | 11 | null |
K Fund is a new €50M VC fund investing in early-stage Spanish startups | Steve O'Hear | 2,016 | 10 | 16 | Joining the likes of Kibo Ventures, Seaya Ventures, Nauta Capital, Samaipata Ventures, and JME Ventures, Spain has a new VC on the block. is a €50 million fund that will invest in Spanish startups with an international outlook, making lead investments at both the seed and Series A stages, writing checks of between €100,000 to €2 million. I’m also told it will do follow-on rounds with a maximum of €7.5 million invested per company it backs. K Fund’s team is made up of a number of fairly well-known actors in the Spanish startup and tech scene, including Iñaki Arrola (Coches.com, Vitamina K), Carina Szpilka (ING Direct), Ian Noel (Bonsai Venture Capital), Ignacio Larrú (IE Business School), Pablo Ventura (JME Ventures), and Jaime Novoa (Novobrief, Tech.eu). Its LPs are described as a mix of public institutions, such as EIF, and private investors. Targeting early-stage Internet and mobile companies, like most new VCs in Europe, K Fund is talking up the operational experience of its founders and its entrepreneur-friendly approach, citing the value-add, aside from cold hard cash, it aims to provide to the startups it backs. I understand three investments have already been made from the fund. They are Salupro, Lucera and . Over the next few years K Fund expects to build a portfolio of between 20 and 25 companies. Partner Iñaki Arrola says in a statement: “We truly believe that what differentiates our fund from others is our entrepreneur-focus: our objective is to work with them and to transfer our knowledge and value so that they can build bigger and more profitable companies. We’re aware of our limitations, and that’s why not only we’ve brought on board a great set of investors, but also two additional structures”. Those “additional structures” include a network of what K Fund calls operating partners, made up of a group of professionals with experience in the technology sector and who it says will help the firm in the analysis of projects and also to support portfolio companies in the areas of business development, design, engineering and marketing. |
A Look into Chile’s innovative startup government | Conrad Egusa | 2,016 | 10 | 16 |
For better or for worse, Chile is often held up as the economic model for Latin America. In the Lost Decade of the 1970s-1980s, the region was tripping over itself to fall down a spiral of debt and ruin. In the decades of uneven recovery that followed — hailed as “miraculous” in Chile’s case — many countries found themselves looking toward the continent’s first and only member as an example. Now Chile is drawing attention again, this time for an initiative seemingly at odds with its reputation for stable fiscal management. Six years ago Chile set out to transform itself into the innovation and entrepreneurial hub of Latin America. It was a bold vision, one that required a correspondingly bold commitment from the government. Luckily, that is exactly what it received. Since 2010, Chile has distributed upwards of $40 million to 1,300 budding businesses from almost 80 countries. As of last summer, those companies had generated roughly 1,600 jobs in Chile and $100 million in outside fundraising. According , some 200,000 Chileans have received benefit in one form or another from government-backed entrepreneurship programs. Critics say the return hasn’t merited the investment. They say that most of these companies fail without government assistance or leave to set up shop elsewhere as soon as they’ve finished taking advantage of Chile’s generosity, low costs and relatively light tax burden. But the net impact is impossible to dispute: There now exists a robust and growing culture of entrepreneurship where once there was nothing. The rise of “Chilecon Valley” — as the nascent startup scene is sometimes called — couldn’t have come at a better moment for the country. Chile has weathered the worldwide financial crisis and falling commodities prices better than could have been expected. It has maintained its enviable status as a net-creditor throughout. But the economy has been slowing for some time, and, after years of counter-cyclical stagnation, unemployment as a result. The means that Chile’s need to incorporate new innovation is approaching something of an existential crossroads. This has raised the stakes on an entrepreneurial experiment that countries across the world have been trying to replicate. More so even than other up-and-coming tech centers, the story of startup entrepreneurialism in Chile is a story of concerted government policy. In Chile, that policy is formulated, first and foremost, by the Corporación de Fomento de la Producción de Chile ( ), which is tasked with promoting economic growth in the country. Established in 1939, CORFO has a decades-long track record of anticipating and encouraging the next stage of Chilean development. Previously that meant everything from telecommunications to banking services. More recently, promoting small business expansion in some of Chile’s far-flung regions was the priority. Beyond the past decade, the emphasis has been on innovation, and startup innovation in particular. It helps that operates under similar constraints to your average startup. In 2014, Chile of its GDP on research and development — less than any other OECD member. CORFO’s innovation annual budget today sits at just $45 million. Those in the private sector who have worked with CORFO say the limited resources have made it resourceful. If nothing else, restricted access to funding has forced CORFO to think hard about how best to exert a multiplying effect on the broader startup economy. In 2010, years of consultation and planning culminated in the launch of Start-Up Chile. The accelerator’s twin mandate was to elevate Chile’s international profile and build out a local culture of entrepreneurism. The project benefited immediately on both fronts from , which took place the month before CORFO began the rollout of Start-Up Chile. The country’s first major exit, it put Chile on the map internationally and validated the government’s faith in innovation. More importantly, it gave homegrown entrepreneurs something to aspire to. Start-Up Chile’s debut came at a fortuitous moment for other reasons, too. Europe was in the midst of a recession, from which it has been slow to recover, and the United States was entering a piqued quagmire over immigration, from which it has yet to emerge. The combination made Chile’s open-arms approach all the more inviting to companies the world over. Inti Nunez, head of entrepreneurship at CORFO Twenty companies from 14 countries accepted Start-Up Chile’s offer in its first “pilot initiative.” By 2012, 500 companies from 37 countries had graduated from one of its accelerator tracks. While acknowledging some of its obvious shortcomings, The Economist wrote that, according to the goals it had set for itself, the program had “ .” The following year lent credence to that assessment. First, Latin America’s most active early-stage VC fund, , opened a Santiago branch and started investing in the Chilean market. Then another Latin American fund, , raised $15 million to invest primarily in Chilean companies. That same spring, PayPal acquired Multicaja for an undisclosed sum, citing Chile’s 10 million internet users and growing online consumer habits. In December, Microsoft announced it would be partnering with CORFO to open an innovation center for early-stage ICT companies in Chile. As an initial benchmark, Microsoft said the center would aim to serve 2,000 companies and 6,000 entrepreneurs over the next six years. The center was only possible because of a law passed a year earlier, allowing CORFO to invest directly in third-party incubators and accelerators. It was the result not just of smart policy, but adaptability. Ultimately, it’s that willingness to make changes based on performance and shifting conditions that makes the Chilean experiment so promising. CORFO and Start-Up Chile recognized, for instance, that just 32 percent of companies passing through Start-Up Chile wound up staying in the country long-term. In 2015, a new investment vehicle was created to address the apparent talent drain. The agility with which Start-Up Chile has worked to address serious structural problems is encouraging, but Chile has also done much to assuage the other looming concern investors have when dealing with a government-led initiative: the prospect of political jockeying. Successive administrations have changed, however, Start-Up Chile’s basic mission has remained constant, and its annual funding has gone up incrementally from $7 to $9 million. Today, about one-third of the people in a country that spans more than half the length of South America live in the same central mountain valley the Spanish picked for their colonial capital almost 400 years earlier. Santiago is big by any measure, but what makes it truly imposing is its size in relation to the rest of Chile, the sheer extent to which it’s concentrated the country’s power and wealth. This is where decisions get made; it’s where business gets done. The buildings are larger, the avenues wider, the infrastructure newer and better maintained. The disparity is especially noticeable when it comes to Chile’s startup ecosystem. By most estimates, about 90 percent of all startup activity occurs in Santiago. Given that the government is at the center of most of that activity, it’s worth explaining in greater detail how Chile’s public programming works. As Inti Nunez, CORFO’s head of entrepreneurship, explained, CORFO has pioneered a process called the “Startup Journey,” which categorizes a country’s startup ecosystem into distinct sections. In the Startup Journey, CORFO funds more than 50 different distribution points, be they incubators or co-working spaces, and it also employs more than 1,000 mentors throughout the country, with the aim to maximize an entrepreneur’s chances of success. CORFO monitors distribution points’ performance closely, through a system that certifies every step of the acceleration process. As an example, if an accelerator is looking for funding from the government, it needs to obtain a certification to show it is actually producing results. The most recognized player in Chile’s Startup Journey is . Now in its 16th generation, the accelerator brings between 250-300 companies a year to Santiago — out of a pool that has grown significantly with each successive round of applications. Businesses are evaluated along a trajectory and invited to apply to one of three distinct acceleration classes. Start-Up Chile Executive Director Rocio Fonseca speaking at an event The “S Factory” gives female entrepreneurs still in ideation a $14,000 grant and 12-week mentorship grounding. Companies ready for “Seed” guidance get $30,000 over six months. Once a business has passed through “Seed” or some other early-stage CORFO training, the approximately $90,000 “Scale” program helps them with funding and to gain traction in Chilean or other markets. Big international conferences like Seedstars World and MeetLatAm have been coming since 2012 and 2013, respectively. Digital Bank Latam, the venture investment conference, is on its way later this year. NXTP’s Hackathon is one of many regular local productions. At — put on by Josefa Villarroel — entrepreneurs get together to share laughs and commiserate about business failures. The Founders Institute’s Santiago branch opens up mentorship and feedback sessions to startups. Co-working spaces, including , and , house some of the startup activity in the city. The downside to all this activity is that its immense geographic concentration has become self-perpetuating. Santiago is more expensive, more chaotic and more polluted than the rest of the country, but, almost invariably, successful companies that start in the region end up migrating there, if not for market access then for exposure to capital. Firms like , and stick primarily to the capital, where they’re based. Their networking ties are naturally stronger nearby, and even when they find promising prospects out in the regions, relocation often factors into the terms of investment. Leaders in Santiago’s startup ecosystem include Rocio Fonseca of Start-Up Chile, Juan Carlos Muñoz-Boudeguer of Chile Global Angels, Diego Philippi of Magma Partners, Alan Farcas of Nazca Ventures, David Alvo Verdugo of NXTP Labs, Marcelo Diaz Bowen of , Gert Findel of , Allan Jarry of and of Microsoft. A self-professed “old guy” at the ripe age of 28, Tomas Gentina came up in much the same way most of the other leaders in the Chilean scene did: traveling to conferences in Spain, applying to programs in the United States and internalizing whatever he could from blogs and international tech luminaries. “Six or seven years ago, no one here even knew what a startup was,” much less how to grow one, he said. “Our schools weren’t preparing us with the knowledge we needed. There was no one here to learn from.” Now Gentina is the director of marketing at , a state-backed incubator affiliated with the Pontificia Universidad Catolica de Valparaiso. The outlook for the next generation, he says, has already changed considerably. Gentina alone has invested in 35 companies in the past three years. He says Chrysalis’s current portfolio consists of 70, mostly software-based, startups. In April, the university opened the doors to , a 1,200-square-meter co-working space designed to promote open innovation and high-tech, industry partnerships with big companies in Chile and throughout the region. It’s part of an ambitious project to push Valparaiso into cutting edge fields like big data, augmented reality and biotechnology. It’s not the typical Silicon Valley model, but, then again, the typical Silicon Valley model hasn’t worked anywhere besides northern California. Fernando Fischmann, the founder of , a design and construction firm that uses patented, eco-friendly technology to build artificial lagoons, honed his idea on a secluded seaside property he purchased south of Valparaiso. With tens of billions of dollars in real estate development projects completed across the world, the company he eventually created is Chile’s sole unicorn to date. Valparaiso has some relative advantages in that respect, but plenty of daunting challenges. The culture, for one, just isn’t there yet — which is why, Gentino said, Chrysalis has placed renewed attention on “getting really involved in our own university, with our own students.” Start-Up Chile has started offering an additional $10,000 in funding to companies willing to set up shop outside of Santiago, but Gentino has enough trouble getting his own companies to stay. Leading startups in Valparaiso include IoT startup , founded by Paloma Farías and Johannes Wiig, , founded by Clemens Haaser and Moritz Hawelka and VR startup , founded by Juan Reyes and Mario Miranda. Centers in the city include the , led by Walter Rosenthal, Ignacio Cuevas, Deborah Ahumada, Javier Gotschlich and Tomas Gentine, , led by Werner Kristjanspoller, Andrés Castillo, , led by Mauricio Cifuentes, and , led by Jaime González. Startups working in the Hub Global Pucv, Chrysalis’s headquarters in Valparaiso It’s possible that the type of ecosystem growing in Valparaiso could take even firmer root 400 miles south. With dozens of colleges and educational institutes in an urban area of fewer than 100,000 people, Concepcion rightfully has a reputation as the university capital of Chile. It’s also the most important nexus of Chilean industry. Local leaders see that combination of young talent and business demand for innovation as the pillars of a potent startup economy in the making. Others have picked up on the potential, too. In 2012, organizers said they picked Concepcion to be the second site for Startup Weekend, the international conference, because the city represented “an important encounter point between students and industry.” , the Hack Way brought national and international observers and businesses to a local university to evaluate entrepreneurs’ performance in the 24-hour End of the World Hackathon. Incubators like (affiliated with the Universidad de la Frontera) and (affiliated with the University of Concepcion) specialize in problem solving catered to engineering and agricultural demand in the surrounding areas. is another center in the city’s ecosystem. For the time being, innovating around local needs seems to be the most viable path forward for regions removed from the Santiago nucleus. , a Start-Up Chile graduate that has created technology to extract potable water from atmospheric moisture, is already working with 40 families in Cachiyuyo, a small city in the northern Atacama desert region. Further north still, in Iquique, the Universidad Santo Tomás teamed up with the local mining association to put on a running seminary designed to “strengthen the technological capacity” of regional extractive industries. “Before, everyone in Chile was trying to do business like it was the United States, and nothing was ever going to get done that way,” said David Alvo, of NXTP. “Now, there’s so much more experience, more perspective. A generation of entrepreneurs learned how to make things work here, and now those lessons are being shared with the whole ecosystem.” Indeed, get just about anyone in the scene talking and they’ll gladly check-off the weaknesses. Smartphone and internet penetration is good, but there’s no real consumer market to speak of for software and tech. B2B exchanges have drawn more interest, but actual deals have been limited to just a few industries, finance principal among them. More companies are being started than ever before, but with limited capital to help them scale post-accelerator, more companies have been fizzling out, too. “When they start with free money, entrepreneurs don’t always do the things that matter to survive,” said Alvo, the venture investor. Not even bullish insiders like Gentino think the Chilean scene is anywhere close to self-sustainability. “If CORFO suddenly withdrew from the picture, everything would collapse immediately,” he said. With all that in mind, there are two important reasons for optimism. The first is time. “Think about it like a startup,” said Alvo. “How long does it take to get your product down? Then your business model? Then to actually generate revenue? Then to start planning for an IPO or an acquisition? If the startup scene here were a business, we’d just be reaching the stage where you’d want to start seeing results.” The other reason is timing. Relying on copper, wine, avocados and fish to keep a country going in a century destined for cataclysmic upheaval is not without its own risks, after all. “We have a decision to make as a people,” said Gentina. “Are we just going to stay with the way things are and hope it works out? Or do we want to protect ourselves against the boom-and-bust pattern, to prepare ourselves for climate change and all the other major changes that are coming?” Chile’s startup scene is reaching the point where it is ready to assume a bigger role in the economy. Chile, as a country, should be ready for it to do so. |
The hiring game | Ryan Craig | 2,016 | 10 | 16 |
With nearly 8 million Americans unemployed and looking for work while nearly 6 million jobs remain unfilled, it’s fair to say that technology has not disrupted the labor market in a good way. In fact, most employers believe technology has made hiring harder. Approximately 85% of job descriptions are posted online, and with each job description yielding hundreds of digital applications — the vast majority presenting uniform credentials (i.e., degrees) that are very difficult to differentiate — the sanity of hiring managers depends on keyword-based filters in applicant tracking systems (ATS) that yield candidate pools that are workable, albeit incredibly imprecise. For any given ATS-filtered candidate pool of, say, 20 or 30, it’s likely that there at least as many false positives + false negatives. For employers and candidates alike, the hiring game has become somewhat of a crying game. That crying is loudest in areas of shortage and where traditional degree/pedigree-based filtering is least relevant. Coding is the clearest example of both. Employers are desperate for other channels and signals that will allow them to source applicants and filter candidates more effectively. Enter companies like CodinGame and CodeFights that are bringing fun and joy back into hiring through gamification. Ever been online and asked if you can code better than an Uber engineer? You’ve just been challenged to a CodeFight. The two-year-old San Francisco company is gamifying hiring by providing thousands of coding challenges across dozens of coding competencies — , and — to experienced and first-time hackers alike. Candidates compete against bots or against each other in timed competitions, or against themselves in the self-paced where they brush up on their skills. Challenge, competition and immediate gratification (the “achievement-dopamine cycle”) — seminal elements of every video game you’ve ever played — are deployed for the purpose of educating, sourcing and filtering candidates. Game-qualified candidates circumvent the broken hiring funnel – entering as candidates and, according to CodeFights, converting to hires at a ratio of 5:1, as opposed to filtered candidates in the main funnel who only convert at 30:1. Candidates seem to understand the appeal of jumping the queue. CodeFights reports 1.5 million challenges attempted in the last month, and a customer base that has doubled each month for the past quarter. Gamified hiring allows employers to break away from degree and pedigree-based hiring. Coding is particularly ripe for this, as the rapid emergence of bootcamps like and demonstrates that colleges and universities aren’t keeping up with employer demand. As a result, talent is evaluated based on what you can do – not where you have gone to school. It’s a fresh, level playing field that appears to result in a more diverse pool of candidates. 80% of candidates placed by CodeFights did not attend an elite university or come from a major tech city like SF or NY. Moreover, 30% of candidates placed to date are women — 3x higher than the Silicon Valley average. And gamified hiring allowed CodeFights to place this . Employers like Uber, Asana, Dropbox, Thumbtack and Evernote have already hired through CodeFights. It seems unlikely that the impact of gamified hiring will be limited to coding. CodeFights Founder and CEO Tigran Sloyan believes gamification represents the future of sourcing and filtering for any objectively measured skill. This includes fields like accounting and finance and any regulated or licensed field where there’s a qualifying exam (healthcare watch out!). It also includes skills that may not be immediately objectively measurable, but where crowdsourcing can quickly yield an accurate judgment on performance e.g., design. According to Sloyan, “While using pedigree as a proxy for skill was reasonable 30 years ago, it’s unnecessary today because excellent postsecondary education is available from a wide variety of institutions and sources. In the 21st century, we hope to say farewell to pedigree and usher in an era of skill-based recruiting.” It’s not difficult to imagine that games like this become a central building block of our . And it’s likely that we won’t wait to play these games until we’ve graduated and begin looking for jobs. Think about all the homework a new college graduate completed over the last decade. If that homework had been gamified, she would have graduated with a massive, highly differentiated competency profile that would allow her to jump the interminable hiring queue. And more of the homework would have been completed. Unlike CodeFights, homework doesn’t provide immediate gratification, competition or new discovery. So watch for postsecondary and secondary education providers to gamify coursework and homework. As hiring is gamified, technology will begin to make hiring easier. And employers and candidates will breathe a sigh of relief that The Hiring Game will no longer be as sad (or as surprising) as . |
INNOVATE2016: Are we on the verge of Brexit 2.0 | Andrew Keen | 2,016 | 10 | 16 |
is a general partner of and a serial entrepreneur and best-selling author. Like everyone else, both inside and outside Silicon Valley, he’s got little else on his mind but the upcoming election. While he’s strongly in favor of Clinton, he nonetheless fears the reappearance of the BREXIT card in the vote. “The danger”, says Romans – who lived in London for ten years, is . The danger is taking the election for granted and then being sucker punched by a vast undercurrent of populist anger against the establishment. That said, Romans is no great admirer of the establishment. The biggest problem with the American political system is that anyone with a bit of cash can buy it, he says. Nor is Romans a fan of large corporations — especially when it comes to innovation. Real disruption, he says, will never come from within big companies like Hewlett-Packard or IBM. Instead, innovation will always come from the edge — nurtured by funds like his own and executed by agile teams of entrepreneurs and technologists. So perhaps it’s a little strange that somebody so critical of the establishment should be so supportive of Hillary Clinton, who is anything but an insurrectionist. For Romans — and so many start-up entrepreneurs — there’s quite a different between mindless political insurrection and productive economic innovation. As always, many thanks to the folks at for their generous support in the production of this interview. |
WTF is a container? | Frederic Lardinois | 2,016 | 10 | 16 | You can’t go to a developer conference today and not hear about software containers: Docker, Kubernetes, Mesos and a bunch of other names with a nautical ring to them. To understand why containers are such a big deal, let’s think about physical containers for a moment. The modern shipping industry only works as well as it does because we have standardized on a small set of shipping container sizes. Before the advent of this standard, shipping anything in bulk was a complicated, laborious process. Imagine what a hassle it would be to move some open pallet with smartphones off a ship and onto a truck, for example. Instead of ships that specialize in bringing smartphones from Asia, we can just put them all into containers and know that those will fit on every container ship. The promise behind software containers is essentially the same. Instead of shipping around a full operating system and your software (and maybe the software that your software depends on), you simply pack your code and its dependencies into a container that can then run anywhere — and because they are usually pretty small, you can pack lots of containers onto a single computer. Why is this such a big deal? Before containers became popular, so-called “virtual machines” were the go-to technology to allow a single server to run lots of different applications that were isolated from each other. That’s the technology that made the first generation of cloud applications (and even web hosting services) possible. If you had to spin up a new server for every application, the cost would have gone through the roof. The way virtual machines work, however, is by packaging the operating system and code together. The operating systems on the virtual machines believes that it has a server to its own, but in reality, it’s sharing the server with a bunch of other virtual machines — all of which run their own operating systems and don’t know of each other. Underneath it all is the host operating system that makes all of these guests believe they are the most important thing in the world. You can see why this is a problem. The guest virtual machines basically run on emulated servers, and that creates a lot of overhead and slows things down (but in return, you could run lots of different operating systems on the same server, too). In the context of talking about shipping containers (and to take that metaphor to its absurd end), that’s akin to having a big container ship with lots of little pools that all feature their own small specialized container ship. Containers work very differently. Because they only contain the application and the libraries, frameworks, etc. they depend on, you can put lots of them on a single host operating system. The only operating system on the server is that one host operating system and the containers talk directly to it. That keeps the containers small and the overhead extremely low. Virtual machines use so-called “hypervisors” as the emulation layer between the guest and host operating system. For containers, the rough equivalent is the container engine, with the Docker Engine being the most popular one right now. Containers became a core feature of Linux a long time ago, but they were still hard to use. Docker launched with the promise of making containers easy to use and developers quickly latched onto that idea. Containers simply make it easier for developers to know that their software will run, no matter where it is deployed. They also enable what’s often called “microservices.” Instead of having one large monolithic application, microservices break down applications into multiple small parts that can talk to each other. This means different teams can more easily work on different parts of an application and, as long as they make no major changes to how those applications interact, they can work independently of each other. That makes developing software faster and testing it for possible errors easier. To manage all of these containers, you need another set of specialized software like Kubernetes (which Google originally developed) that helps you push those containers out to different machines, makes sure that they run and lets you spin up a few more containers with a specific application when demand increases. And if you want containers to know about each other, you also still need some way of setting up a virtual network, too, that can assign IP addresses to every container. Containers can run all kinds of applications, but because they are so different from virtual machines, a lot of the older software that many big companies are still running doesn’t translate to this model. Virtual machines can help you move those old applications into a cloud service like AWS or Microsoft Azure, however, so even though containers have their advantages, virtual machines aren’t going away anytime soon. |
Iraq founders gather at Fikra Fair to show their nation has more to offer than oil | Lora Kolodny | 2,016 | 10 | 16 | This weekend in Baghdad, tech entrepreneurs and local government officials gathered at the to network, demo their apps and show the world that Iraq has more to offer than oil. According to the , challenging realities of daily life for many people in Iraq include sky-high food prices, cash shortages, a lack of communications infrastructure, and restricted access to healthcare or education especially for women and girls. Armed conflict between Islamic State, Kurdish, Iraqi government, militia and international forces have destabilized and displaced 3.2 million Iraqis, and interrupted the education of 3 million children there since 2014, HRW reports. Humanitarian needs are burgeoning and the conflict is ongoing. Clearly, Iraq’s entrepreneurs face hardships well beyond those of their tech-touting counterparts from Silicon Valley to Beijing. TechCrunch interviewed one of the Fikra Fair’s organizers, , about what’s motivating a new generation of Iraqis to start tech companies, despite the challenges. Edited excerpts follow below. The fair is an attempt to put Baghdad back on the global map for innovation. We have been trying to change this stereotype that Iraq is a country of war and nothing good can come from it. By bringing almost all of the startups here together to showcase what they have built, we hope maybe in the near future they can become known not only nationally, but internationally as well. Three startups here that stood out in my mind were Mishwar, BotLab and EARV Labs. is an online service where you can order your groceries, and pay either on delivery or with one of the e-payment solutions we have in our country. developed a bot that you can integrate with your store on Facebook. It will answer customers’ questions. This is one of the first bots I have seen in Arabic and I think it has a promising future if marketed well. Then there was …The team is developing applications that take advantage of augmented reality. Their first attempt is an AR menu that lets you see all the selections in front of you on the screen, and when you click on an item, get more details about it. Google and Apple… The only local equivalent to a big, international company we have now is which is very similar to Amazon. You can buy what you want online, and have it delivered to your house. The company is always mentioned when we want to motivate people about starting their own business. And it is considered one of the most successful startups in Iraq. Due to the security situation here, we don’t have venture capitalists or other people who are willing to risk and finance our startups. The community is trying its best to get financial support, but founders are always getting the same answer which is we can’t work with you because of the security concerns. Most of the startups in Iraq are now self-funded. This is a big problem because they can’t scale their business when they have to spend most of their revenue on developing their technology or keeping their business going. Their work can barely support them financially. As I learned working on Startup Weekend in Baghdad for the past two years, and meeting many entrepreneurs here, one big challenge that most tech startups face is the skills gap. Iraqis before 2003 didn’t have access to the internet. And our education system still is not very reliable, so most of the graduates—even if they studied computer science, or any field related to tech— don’t have the appropriate skills to pursue a career in tech. The tech community in Iraq, including our business Fikra Space, is trying to change this by holding bootcamps for web development, graphic design, and mobile app development. But this is not enough. The gap is simply huge. If our education system doesn’t change, then tech startups have a big problem ongoing and I expect they might have to leave the country or outsource their work to foreign developers and designers as they grow. We started the Fikra Fair in hopes that when the world sees that the startup community in Iraq is growing, they will get to know this community and help it to grow even bigger. The effect we are trying to achieve, as well, is to try and push our government to invest in youth and their projects because our economy is failing. If we rely only on oil then it will only get worse. |
The loss of an ARM | Luke Hakes | 2,016 | 10 | 16 |
Japanese telecoms firm recently British microchip manufacturer . ARM’s shareholders approved the $32 billion deal at the end of August, and the company was delisted from the London Stock Exchange on September 5. The deal represents the largest acquisition of a European technology company. Ever. Since SoftBank’s intentions to take over ARM were revealed, there has been a slew of commentary mourning the loss of a British institution to a foreign company. There has been a lot of negativity around the deal, which has led many to speculate that the U.K. is simply incapable of holding onto businesses after they reach a certain size. While there’s no doubt that there should be an element of sadness about the sale of such an iconic organization, we shouldn’t be viewing it quite so negatively. The fact that we have a business for which someone was willing to pay $32 billion is a demonstration of huge success, and may kick-start the next wave of British startups. Yet criticism is still rife, and the U.K. technology industry is all too often assessed in direct comparison with Silicon Valley. In the wake of the ARM deal, many have questioned why we don’t have our own Google or Facebook or any number of other global, Valley enterprises. In my opinion, it isn’t a lack of talent or ambition, but rather a lack of role models. When there is a company like Google or Facebook to point to, it demonstrates to both investors and entrepreneurs alike just what scale is possible. The U.K. has seen a historical lack of capital available to take startups to the next level, whereas the Silicon Valley has been awash with capital for far longer, enabling the multi-billion dollar businesses we know today. However, a lot has changed in recent years, and London now has both home-grown and foreign investors looking to invest in British businesses. The U.K. has a number of startups that can, and will, scale up. In fact, according to Silicon Valley Bank, there are 51 startups around the world worthy of $1 billion+ valuations, and 18 of those are British. Over time, we’ll see those — and many more — companies grow and, in turn, instill a greater level of confidence among founders and entrepreneurs that they, too, can scale. It is, after all, an ecosystem where success breeds success, and there are many different ways to scale and succeed. In a move that’s the reverse of what we usually see, U.K. tech company recently announced its of U.S.-based Hewlett Packard’s software business for $8.8 billion. It’s an interesting deal, not just because it’s bucking a trend but also because part of the assets contain what’s left of Autonomy. In some ways it’s a U.K. technology company — albeit one with a damaged reputation — coming back into the fold. If European founders and venture capitalists are going to have the confidence to grow big businesses in Europe, I believe this is the kind of activity we need to see in order to grow the confidence of the market. There’s no doubt Europe is moving in the right direction, particularly when you consider the maturity of the venture capital market in the region. While Silicon Valley has had a buoyant market since 1972, the market in Europe took longer to mature, but is now rapidly accelerating. In my opinion, parts of the U.K. startup ecosystem have achieved in 10 years what took the Valley more than 40. But we’re not going to reach dizzying heights overnight. Entrepreneurs and investors alike need to become more comfortable with the idea that it is possible to build multi-billion dollar businesses. We’re already seeing the shift with founders holding on to their businesses that little bit longer before exiting, and that is a trend that will continue, if we allow it to. Part of allowing this to happen means accepting businesses will be acquired when their founders feel the time is right. There are plenty of serial-entrepreneurs in the country who have created, nurtured and ultimately sold businesses, to then use the proceeds to either start a new venture or support other founders in theirs. And this is exactly what is likely to happen with the proceeds of ARM. That can’t be seen as a bad thing. So instead of mourning the loss of ARM, we should celebrate it as an achievement and move on to the next wave of British success stories. We need to encourage the ecosystem to thrive, scaling up the businesses we have today and using the proceeds of ARM to invest in a whole new generation. |
Peter Thiel will donate $1.25M to the Trump campaign, despite the latest controversies | Mike Butcher | 2,016 | 10 | 16 | Peter Thiel surprised Silicon Valley enough when he endorsed controversial Presidential candidate Donald J. Trump at the Republican National Convention earlier this year. Valley investors and entrepreneurs — the vast majority of whom do not support Trump — are likely to be even more taken aback by the news that Thiel has chosen this point to donate $1.25 million to his campaign. The timing is interesting to say the least. Trump is currently being eviscerated in the media after evidence emerged about his insulting behaviour towards women, recorded by the syndicated program “Access Hollywood,” and a number of his accusers went public. According to sources close to the investor, Thiel is motivated by his view that feels the country ‘needs fixing’, and thinks Mr. Trump pull it off. The New York Times reported that Thiel will make his first donation in support of Mr. Trump’s election via a combination of super PAC donations and funds given directly to the campaign. No other high-profile tech investor supports Trump, with most supporting Hilary Rodham Clinton’s Democratic candidacy. Uber investor Shervin Pishevar, for instance, is a high-profile investor and supporter, while LinkedIn founder and investor Reid Hoffman has pledged to support a crowd-funding campaign for veterans if Trump releases his tax returns, and even produced a satirical card game: “Trumped Up Cards: The World’s Biggest Dek.” Trump’s racist and sexist attitudes are also at odds with Silicon Valley’s ongoing concerns over its lack of diversity. He has criticised tech firms such as Amazon and Apple, as well as taking a polar-opposite view on immigration from the tech industry. All of which makes Thiel’s support for Trump — a self-professed gay man who emigrated from Germany as a child — a position which the vast majority of the tech industry views as bewildering. Thiel also funded the wrestler Hulk Hogan’s successful lawsuit against the gossip site Gawker (which was later forced to close), a move viewed by many as anti-democratic by many in tech. But whether there will be tangible ‘blowback’ in the tech world from his move remains to be seen. Voices in tech commenting on Thiel’s decision are starting to appear online today. Catherine Bracy, Co-Founder and ED of techequity.us and formerly of @codeforamerica and #Obama2012 tweeted: Tech leaders: when you make excuses for Peter Thiel for supporting Trump, we hear you. Women and ppl of color are taking notes. — Catherine Bracy (@cbracy) Founder of Thington Tom Coates weighed in with One can only assume Peter Thiel made his money by accident, because I see no evidence of intelligence here: — Tom Coates (@tomcoates) And Laura I. Gómez, CEO of @GetAtipica, and who has 280,000 followers did not mince her words: https://twitter.com/laura/status/787474286046908416 Thiel just became a part-time advisor of Y Combinator, viewed as the Valley’s most powerful accelerator, a move which is being hotly discussed in relation to this story. It’s a fact which could make board meetings between Thiel and YC founder Paul Graham, given the latter’s concerns about a Trump presidency: Others may be reassured to hear Trump has only a 15% chance of winning, but it terrifies me. In Silicon Valley 15% is a good chance. — Paul Graham (@paulg) |
These are Tesla’s stunning new solar roof tiles for homes | Darrell Etherington | 2,016 | 10 | 28 | Tesla founder and CEO Elon Musk wasn’t kidding when he said that the new Tesla solar roof product was better looking than an ordinary roof: the roofing replacement with solar energy gathering powers does indeed look great. It’s a far cry from the obvious and somewhat weird aftermarket panels you see applied to roofs after the fact today. The solar roofing comes in four distinct styles that Tesla presented at the event, including “Textured Glass Tile,” “Slate Glass Tile,” “Tuscan Glass Tile, and “Smooth Glass Tile.” Each of these achieves a different aesthetic look, but all resembled fairly closely a current roofing material style. Each is also transparent to solar, but appears opaque when viewed from an angle. The current versions of the tiles actually have a two percent loss on efficiency, so 98 percent of what you’d normally get from a traditional solar panel, according to Elon Musk. But the company is working with 3M on improved coatings that have the potential to possibly go above normal efficiency, since it could trap the light within, leading to it bouncing around and resulting in less energy loss overall before it’s fully diffused. Of course, there’s the matter of price: Tesla’s roof cost less than the full cost of a roof and electricity will be competitive or better than the cost of a traditional roof combined with the cost of electricity from the grid, Musk said. Tesla declined to provide specific pricing at the moment, since it will depend on a number of factor including installation specifics on a per home basis. [gallery ids="1408998,1408985,1408994,1408987"] Standard roofing materials do not provide fiscal benefit back to the homeowner post-installation, besides improving the cost of the home. Tesla’s product does that, by generating enough energy to fully power a household, with the power designed to be stored in the battery units so that homeowners can keep a reserve in case of excess need. The solar roof product should start to see installations by summer next year, and Tesla plans to start with one or two of its four tile options, then gradually expand the options over time. As they’re made from quartz glass, they should last way longer than an asphalt tile — at least two or three times the longevity, though Musk later said “they should last longer than the house”. |
Wish is raising again, and giving late-stage investors protection | Connie Loizos | 2,016 | 10 | 28 | , a San Francisco-based e-commerce mobile app that’s taken off in the U.S. and Europe by selling watches, clothing and other items extremely cheaply, is raising a new round of funding, a new filing shows. (The research company CB Insights first.) Neither the size of the round nor the valuation are included, but the filing shows that Series F investors coming into the round are receiving liquidation preferences that will allow them to get paid ahead of earlier investors — which isn’t uncommon in later-stage funding rounds. A survey released in August by the law firm Fenwick & West — one that analyzed the venture financings of 195 Silicon Valley-based companies over the second quarter — showed that senior liquidation preferences were featured in of financings. Wish’s CEO, Peter Szulczewski, is notoriously press shy, but he came to a event hosted in February by this editor and shared numerous details about the business, which previously raised from investors and was reportedly last valued at $3 billion. (According to the app-analytics firm , it’s also the second-most popular shopping app in the U.S., and the 39th most popular app overall.) We published our notes after that February interview; in case you missed them, we’re republishing them here, below. Szulczewski, a computer scientist by training, noted that he’d spent 6.5 years at Google solving “really big matching problems” before cofounding his company, ContextLogic, from which Wish evolved. The idea was to build a next-generation, mobile ad network to compete with Google’s AdSense network, whose tech was “relatively stale” at the time, in 2011. Szulscewski and his cofounder, Danny Zhang, realized they were “pretty bad at business development,” though, so eventually pivoted to Wish. Wish began as an app that asked people to create wish lists, then the company approached merchants, letting them know a certain number of customers wanted, say, a certain type of table. Things took off from there, he said. “We thought that being more relevant and showing the right recommendations would be critical; what we didn’t predict was the types of products and the types of merchants. “Because shopping on smartphones is relatively new and sort of an impulsive experience, the average order value tends to be relatively low. I don’t think people are comfortable with buying a $5,000 TV on their phone. I think even $300 is high, as most people want to compare prices, read through reviews, etcetera. People were willing to spend $20, $30, $50, but not much more than that [which we learned]. “Another part of our hypothesis that did work was that we’d be so good at relevance that these merchants would ship these things directly from their distribution centers and factories, and we’d cut out all the middle men. But were naïve [about who would do this]. A brand like Nike isn’t going to do that; it would be undercutting all its other retailers and its brand, on which it spends a lot of marketing dollars. “[On the other hand], if you’re an unbranded merchant who’s selling a dress or a wall mount, you just have your manufacturing and shipping costs, and those are the people we work really well with and why we have such good prices. We know who’s interested in fishing, and our merchants can reach them for free. The value proposition for the consumer is really cheap stuff. For merchants, it’s, ‘Hey, I don’t have to do anything. I just upload a CSV file or do it through an API or enter it manually, and I just start seeing sales.’ “The two biggest biggest retailers in the world are Walmart — which sees revenue of half a trillion dollars a year, primarily from U.S. customers — and the Alibaba subsidiary Taobao, which is the biggest platform in China. And both focus on value-conscious consumers. [That’s because] the median household in the U.S. is around $52,000 a year. In Europe, it’s even lower.” “Last year, [gross merchandise sales] was single-digit billions. It took us just under three years or so to get there. We do charge a take rate of 15 percent. Part of the reason is we do a lot more than, say, Alibaba, which doesn’t charge a take rate. “Take your local merchant in Shenzhen, where the majority of the world’s goods are manufactured, both branded and unbranded. That merchant has no idea how to sell to people in the Netherlands, France, Brazil, the U.S., Australia. He also has no idea how to communicate with those customers, so we take care of all of that. What merchants get in return [is] suddenly, they get an additional audience of more than a billion smartphone users who don’t really cannibalize their existing market.” “We’re shipping little things – not TVs or motorcyles or bicycles. And it turns out it’s relatively cheap to do that. Even by air, it will cost $1 or $2 unless the item is unusually heavy or large. [Largely we rely on a partnership between the USPS and China called ] I think most countries have these kinds of treaties. I’m not sure what percentage of our goods use the program, but it’s really efficient. Everything is shipped by air and it’s surprisingly cost effective.” “From what we’ve heard, the partners involved are very happy with it. If it goes away, it goes away for everyone, so the prices would probably rise for everyone. But we also have interesting back-up solutions even if it does.” “In the U.S., the average time is 13 days or so. Across the world, it’s maybe a little higher. In certain countries like Brazil where logistics aren’t as optimized and there may be much more regulation around imports, it could be as long as 30 days on average, so it really depends on the market.” “Initially, it was a lot of fashion. Then we got make-up, home décor – cheaper or smaller items. What’s really taking off now is a lot of hobby stuff. Certain parts for cars, for example. Things for people who are into fishing gear, paintball, surfing, photography, drones. So a lot of different sets of users are coming who don’t need a branded good but need something that works, like fishing bait.” “The answer is yes and that’s starting to happen. There’s one package of like 20 toothbrushes that costs $3 dollars that we’re selling tens of thousands of every month. Paper towels are too large and too heavy to ship out of China but maybe we have a partnership with someone here who ships it out of their warehouse and we offer it that way. So we are thinking about non-discretionary more and more and it’s starting to creep into our platform.” “We realized early on that unless you set out to build a really massive, self-sustainable business, you’re just not going to be able to do it. Basically, really big companies have these people in corp dev, god bless you [laughs], but there’s this asymmetry, which is like: the founders’ time is the most precious commodity that you have. You only have 24 hours a day. But there are corp dev people at these companies who have an infinite amount of time to spend with these founders… We want to build a self-sustainable business. We think that just like Alibaba, just like Walmart, we can get to hundreds of billions [of dollars in market cap]. I think both those companies were built on the same premise of saving time and money for their consumers. We’re doing the same thing on your phone.” “I was at Yuri Milner’s house for some kind of dinner party, and I met Richard [Liu], who’s the founder and CEO of JD, and I find their business fascinating; it’s the exact opposite of what we do. [Editor’s note: Unlike Wish and Alibaba, which directly connect buyers and sellers, JD is more like Amazon, buying branded goods from manufacturers, storing the inventory in its own warehouses and, once purchased, delivering the goods quickly – often the same day.] I think JD has the best logistics in the world. They have 80,000 employees delivering these goods. And we’re the exact opposite, so we struck up an relationship and we could probably learn a lot from them, and they could probably learn a lot from us, because we’re not competing because they’re not really doing anything outside of China and we’re not entering China, at all. So we really like them and yes, they invested $50 million in the last round.” “We take a tech-driven approach to curation and it’s slowly evolving to be more pretty and I think we’ll get there. But every time we try curation — the algorithm, in terms of conversion — it just destroys any kind of curation. It’s an order of magnitude difference. So we’re always trying things and maybe there’s a way to algorithmically curate [a prettier] interface. So that’s always been a priority for us. “[Another priority is] customer purchase experience, which is, ‘Hey, maybe for some of the products where we can forecast the sales really accurately, you should be able to get them in less than three days.’ That’s probably possible for half the GMV if we’re running at scale. “We’re also focusing more on customer support, which was, last year, up until November, horrific. Now it’s getting better.” “If you think of the rise of Taobao, they’re at 50 purchases per user per year. Amazon is at 15, by the way, which I’ve heard from many people and I think is accurate [information]. I think JD is somewhere below Amazon – they don’t give me that kind of data. “We’re at 5 purchases per year and that’s growing relatively quickly. We’re not something you use every week but we certainly want to be. As think as long as we can provide the most bang for the buck for consumers, we’ll get there.” “It’s true that consumer expectations in China are very different. Like, if you order a red sweater and you get a blue one, [shoppers are] like, ‘Eh, next time.’ So we have a lot of merchants that have only sold to Chinese consumers and we have to educate them that it’s not okay to ship a blue sweater because you don’t have any red sweaters in stock. [Laughs.] “We also have to educate them on what ‘counterfeit’ means. We have to literally tell them that you can’t just put an Apple logo on something and sell it, that that’s wrong. Some genuinely don’t know that. They’re like, ‘It’s my factory, I can do what I want.’ “I think there are more engineers on the platform team, working with merchants, than there are on the consumer-facing product team [because it’s] more important to educate and work with the merchants to create a win-win situation.” “Two years ago, the merchants were like, ‘I’ll try this. I don’t know what the hell it is, but I hear other merchants are making money, so I’ll give it a shot.’ And if you tell them, ‘Hey, if you take this inventory and put it in the U.S. or Germany or Spain, you’ll make more money,’ they’re like, ‘No. You’re the fifth thing on my mind. There’s Amazon, Taobao, my own e-commerce site.’ But after you have two or three years of these merchants getting meaningful revenue and sales and it’s growing month over month, then you get their buy-in. Then it’s, ‘Okay, now you’re the third thing on my mind.’ Then, ‘Now you’re the second.’ ‘Now, you’re the first or second; how can I get more sales?’” |
Tesla’s Powerwall 2 packs over twice the energy storage | Darrell Etherington | 2,016 | 10 | 28 | Tesla’s new Powerwall 2 is part of Tesla Energy, the company’s new comprehensive approach to green, all-electric power delivery. The updated home energy storage product is similar to the last one, in that it’s a large, rectangular (now with more rectangularity) device designed to live on a wall in your home (likely in the garage or somewhere similar) – but the big differences are on the inside. The Powerwall 2.0 has more than twice the energy storage capacity of the original version with 14 kWh capacity. Over double the capacity means double the ability to keep your home humming with guilt-free electric power, culled from the new solar roof offering for private homes that Tesla also unveiled today. Musk said that the Powerwall 2 has enough power to charge lights, sockets and refrigerator for a standard 4 bedroom home for an entire day. The new flatter design and more angular look, and will be available for $5,500 per unit. Improving supply for power storage has been one of Musk’s key goals with Tesla recently, and it’s clear it wants to do even more with Powerwall 2. Production for Powerwall 2 begins in the next few weeks, and then installations will start in early December, according to Tesla. In a Q&A following the event, Tesla CEO Elon Musk said that they full “expect to sell more Powerwalls than cars,” since the product has so much appeal in parts of the world where power isn’t reliable, or widespread, or is very expensive. |
Live from Tesla’s special event in L.A. | Greg Kumparak | 2,016 | 10 | 28 | Tesla’s holding a special event at 5:30 PM PT today at Universal Studios in L.A., and we’re live on location to bring you al the news as it happens. Tesla will be unveiling their solar roofing product for the first time at this event, as well as the second generation of the Powerwall home energy battery, and perhaps more as well. We’ll be bringing you the action from the event live as it happens starting right here at 5:30 PM PT, so tune in below to see things unfold. |
Apple’s new Intel driven MacBook Pros have a secondary ARM processor that runs Touch ID and security | Matthew Panzarino | 2,016 | 10 | 28 | When will Apple ship a MacBook with an ARM processor? This is a question that has been top of mind for observers of the company ever since it started designing and building its own chips from the ground up. The answer to that question is now, sort of. Apple’s new 13” and 15” MacBook Pro models come equipped with a Touch Bar – that bar and the accompanying Touch ID sensor are powered by both the Intel processor at the core of the laptop and an Apple designed T1 chip. That T1 is the same chip that is inside the S2 in the new Series 2 Apple Watch. The T1 consists of the processor in the Apple Watch’s S2 and the Secure Enclave. As noted by Apple in its keynote, handles security for the Touch ID sensor, but it also performs a variety of other tasks. It secures the camera, the keychain which stores your passwords and the Touch Bar. Some of these details were posited yesterday by . I was able to get more details and expansion on the nature of the T1 and more of its functionality from some of my sources. The T1 also sends pixels to the Touch Bar though the MacBook’s main processor is what actually renders that content which is then sent over. The touch events on the Touch Bar are driven completely by Mac OS X – making this the first component that takes advantage of MacOS’s touch support. Though transmission of data is handled by the main processor, Apple Pay dialogs on screen are completely rendered by the T1 to take advantage of the Secure Enclave, a portion of the chip set aside for personal information just as it is in iPhones and Apple Watch devices. The Touch Bar itself runs a lean, modified version of watchOS, likely because that’s what the T1 needs to run it, send data and render images. What Apple is doing with this hybrid configuration is very interesting. Instead of ‘switching’ to ARM chips, it chose to build custom chips for a precise task and use them specifically for it. Just as the Intel chip is good at the heavy, multi-threaded lifting of OS X, the T1 was made for the security of Touch ID and the lightweight lifting of rendering Apple Pay dialogs securely. This specialized chip approach is one we’ve seen with the motion coprocessor in the iPhone, but it also makes a ton of sense on MacBooks, where specialized tasks are better handled by specialized tools. What other things are enabled by this onboard T1 in the future will be interesting to see. I’m also more sure than ever that an ARM-powered keyboard for iMacs and Mac Pros with Touch ID . |
Three reasons carriers are building new cell networks for the Internet of Things | Daniel Conrad | 2,016 | 10 | 28 |
Around the world, wireless carriers are building all-new cellular networks for the Internet of Things. These new networks won’t work with cell phones — they’re made for IoT devices that don’t yet exist. These aren’t small players, either. , , , , , and many others are building all-new nationwide IoT networks. and are upgrading their networks, setting aside spectrum just for IoT. , , Nokia and Ericsson are selling equipment to make it work. New networks are necessary because cell phone networks fall short for IoT in three ways: battery life, cost and wireless coverage. Solving just one of those factors would be enough to justify new networks. Solving all three is a game-changer for IoT — and that’s what these new networks plan to do. Let’s take those three reasons in turn. Cellular phone networks are not power-efficient. And they never will be. Mobile phone networks were originally designed for car phones. Coordinating a “hand-off” from one cell tower to another at 65 MPH — all without interrupting a phone call — was the technological breakthrough that made cellular networks possible. Those hand-offs require sophisticated algorithms and continuous communication between phone and network. Because of that legacy, devices on cell phone networks must communicate multiple times with the cell tower. That’s very expensive for battery life. To get of battery life, IoT devices need to spend most of their time in “sleep” mode, using the radio. Cellular phone networks don’t allow that. While you might think you can just turn the device off and turn it back on, reconnecting to cell phone networks can take several battery-draining minutes. If you’ve waited impatiently for your phone to re-connect after a flight, you know what I’m talking about. The new cell networks for IoT take a different approach. First, they use low-power radio chips, optimized to minimize the power cost of data transmission and reception. The power draw on these systems is typically an order of magnitude lower than cellular radios. Second, they allow devices to sleep for minutes or hours without contacting the network. Devices spend 99.9 percent of their time in low-power mode, waking for just milliseconds to send or receive data, to read a sensor or activate a control. That increases battery life by several orders of magnitude. Achieving years of battery life is a really big deal for IoT because it effectively eliminates installation costs — no wires to run, no batteries to charge. IoT can become truly set-and-forget, which matters a lot when you’re placing thousands or millions of devices. That’s a big deal — and reason enough to build new networks. But there’s more. Putting IoT devices on cell phone networks is expensive. First, supporting IoT devices is costly to cellular carriers. Wireless spectrum costs billions, and carriers never have enough of it. IoT devices that pay less than a dollar per month will never get network access priority over cell phones with $100 voice and data plans. The opportunity cost of supporting IoT devices is too high. To solve that problem, the new IoT networks are built either on unlicensed bands, or in the relatively unused “guard bands” between channels of licensed cellular spectrum. Either way, the spectrum is effectively free. But using cell phone networks is also expensive for developers of devices. LTE radios are complex, require multiple antennas and require expensive IP licenses. They cost tens of dollars. Chipsets for the new IoT networks are a buck or two at scale. Finally, network certification is expensive. For example, it costs $50,000-100,000 to certify a device on Verizon’s network, and the process takes months. Certification is necessary because flawed devices might interfere with phones on Verizon’s network. They are justifiably careful. New IoT networks are designed to be robust to interference, because they’re designed to operate in shared bands where interference is the norm. And in many cases, an end-user can set up their own gateway, just like a Wi-Fi access point, at no cost. Which brings us to the next point. The truth is, LTE isn’t everywhere. And IoT devices have a nasty tendency to be deployed in precisely the places that today’s cell networks don’t reach: like flood detectors in basements, parking sensors in underground lots and soil sensors in rural corn fields. New IoT networks handle coverage concerns in two different ways. First, the networks are optimized to maximize deep indoor penetration, rather than bandwidth. A basic rule of RF modulation is that you can trade range for bandwidth by transmitting a lot of bits to represent a single bit. While LTE is optimized for data-hungry smartphones, new IoT networks are optimized for short messages — say, a sensor reading or a command to set a thermostat. They’ll get far more range at the same power levels, albeit at bit rates often less than 1 Kbps. Second, in some cases, gateways can be self-deployed, plunked down like Wi-Fi routers. So if your local carrier doesn’t reach your basement, you can drop your own gateway nearby to bring it online. Self-deployed networks will be critical to the rollout of these technologies, especially in the early days as carrier-operated networks are still rolling out. This is how IoT actually happens. Long battery life, low cost and ubiquitous coverage — all in one package. I’ve spent years working on connected devices, and to me that sounds like the holy grail. It means set-and-forget devices that work everywhere. I can’t wait. |
Weekly Roundup: MacBook Pro makes waves, AT&T acquiring Time Warner and RIP Vine | Anna Escher | 2,016 | 10 | 28 | Apple and Microsoft both held big hardware events this week, unveiling a few new devices like the new MacBook Pro and the Surface Studio. Twitter announced it is shutting down Vine and laying off 9% of the company. Oh, and AT&T is acquiring Time Warner for a whole lot of money. These are the top stories of the week. Tim Cook took the stage at an Apple MacBook event at Apple HQ in Cupertino to announce the . Most notably, in the premiere models, Apple has done away with the Mac’s row of function keys and replaced it with a mini Retina display called the Touch Bar. directly with whatever software you are using, adjusting its touch functionality to the task at hand. Apple seems to have pulled the 11-inch MacBook Air from all of its online stores, too. Here’s the and of the MacBook event. What you can do with the Touch Bar on the new MacBook Pro http://tcrn.ch/2fk7tKj Posted by on Thursday, October 27, 2016 Apple wasn’t the only company to show off new devices this week. Microsoft also held a hardware event where it announced the , a new and the new all-in-one $2,999 PC, the . This is the $2,999 Surface Studio, Microsoft’s iMac http://tcrn.ch/2dWW55t Posted by on Wednesday, October 26, 2016 Are carriers still worried about being dumb pipes? After days of speculation, it was confirmed that in a mix of cash and shares. The deal will bring the carrier a huge trove of content producing properties, including HBO, CNN, and the Warner Bros. studio that will give it a leg up in its own video and content business. It’s earnings season again – and here are this week’s highlights: In a surprising miss, after posting Q3 earnings and stock fell 6% in after hours trading. in its earnings report and may cut up to 9% of its staff, or around 300 people. Apple reported earnings ahead of its huge holiday retail season that were . Remember the DDoS attack last week that took out Twitter, Amazon, Shopify and other sites? Dyn said last week it identified “10s of millions” of unique IP addresses involved in the massive botnet attack. This week, Chinese company Hangzhou Xiongmai that made up a good portion of the devices involved in the breach. Nothing loops forever. Twitter announced that it’s , its standalone short-form video app. Cue the Maybe not everyone is . A new showed that smartwatch shipments experienced “significant” declines in the third quarter, as total shipments were down 51.6 percent from the same time last year. Just 2.7 million units were shipped in Q3 2016 versus 5.6 million in Q3 2015. These numbers indicate that smartwatches may be having a hard time finding traction among the majority of consumers. Another city, another Airbnb lawsuit. , Attorney General Eric Schneiderman and Mayor Bill de Blasio over legislation that would make it illegal to advertise listings that can’t legally be rented out for less than 30 days. The bill was passed in June and signed into law by New York Governor Andrew Cuomo last week. Airbnb is claiming the law is a violation of the Communications Decency Act, which protects internet companies from liability for content posted by users. The FCC that severely restrict what data ISPs can collect from you without your consent. The Association of National Advertisers “unprecedented, misguided and extremely harmful.” If that isn’t a strong endorsement, I don’t know what is. Amazon continued its efforts to across its site with new lawsuits aimed at two U.S. sellers and one from the E.U. The suits claim to have evidence of customer review abuse – meaning the defendants created fake reviews for their products which then influenced customer buying decisions. Sometimes, “pivot” isn’t a strong enough word. One example is the story of the startup , but is now somehow thriving again. Steve Newcomb’s $30 million-funded open source JavaScript startup was going down in flames, with a spiraling burn rate and no business model. Laying off 90 percent of the company and forging an entirely different direction was the only option. |
Let your Vines live on forever with this Giphy conversion tool | Devin Coldewey | 2,016 | 10 | 28 | was perhaps not entirely unexpected, but it’s sad nevertheless. Luckily, six-second videos are pretty easy to archive for posterity, and all-purpose GIF platform Giphy wants you to do just that. : The original video with sound can be downloaded via the “source” button on the lower right once you import your Vines. In a brief post on Medium, that, because of the company’s love of all things looping, it’s that lets you download and keep your Vines forever, or just keep them alive on Giphy itself. A Giphy representative told me that one of the engineers had the idea yesterday and threw together this tool “because loop 💙”. You’ll need a Giphy account, and you’ll be able to convert individual Vines or your entire Vine account catalog. Now, you may be thinking, “Uh, Vines have sound, GIFs don’t.” We’re on the same page, reader. I asked about this. The video will be saved as a GIF (in addition to any higher-fidelity archival format we don’t know about), and the sound will be saved separately. It’ll only be shareable as a GIF at first, but that could change later. Let’s hope so, because the sound is pretty critical on some. https://vine.co/v/5bUtXB2epYn The tool isn’t live yet, but expect it to appear very soon . I’ll update this post when it does. : And it’s up! |
Vehicle security device Ernest launches today | Kristen Hall-Geisler | 2,016 | 10 | 28 | Ernest is a bit difficult to describe. It’s a device, it’s two devices, it’s an app, and according to its founder, Arturs Pumpurs, it’s a kind of virtual butler. The system secures your vehicle, tells you where it is, and controls your garage door or, if you have one, gate. The Kickstarter campaign starts October 28 and runs through December 7. The project began as a way to protect vehicles, with a Bluetooth 4.0-enabled device that can be installed by the user but should probably be installed by professionals. That’s because if you have the immobilizer feature, Ernest keeps fuel from getting to the engine unless it recognizes your device. You can allow other people with other devices to use the car, and you can also revoke those privileges. The Ernest GPS devices, like many car-related apps and devices, will show you your car’s location plus driving information like speed and distance. It will also guide you to your car if you forgot where you left it or you share it with other people. The same secure Bluetooth-based sharing principle applies to garage doors and gates. This requires a second Ernest device that you install in the gate or door panel itself, not in the car. Then, you connect the same Ernest app on your phone, the one that controls access to your vehicle, to the door device. Once again, you can share and revoke access to your garage door. While Ernest would make one person or family’s life a bit easier, there’s potential here for security in the sharing economy. When your car and private garage are used by multiple people, knowing who has access and cutting off that access when, say, their vacation rental is up would be helpful. If a car is being shared, it would be nice to know who used it when and how many miles were driven by each owner. Just set every user up with the app and give them access. During the Kickstarter campaign, the Auto GPS (without the immobilizer feature) starts at $60, and prices go up from there. It’s too expensive for a fleet operator to use, but it might work for limited sharing situations. |
Facebook draws criticism for ‘ethnic affinity’ ad targeting | Anthony Ha | 2,016 | 10 | 28 | ProPublica today — specifically, the ability to include or exclude users from a given ad campaign based on their “ethnic affinity.” These capabilities have existed for a while (Facebook told ProPublica’s Julia Angwin and Terry Parris Jr. it began offering them within the past two years as part of its “multicultural advertising” efforts), and to the advertisers who’ve used them, they might seem like a natural extension of broader practices like . However, Angwin and Parris noted that there are federal laws around housing and employment that prohibit discriminatory advertising. In fact, they said that when they showed the ad-targeting options to civil rights lawyer John Relman, he responded, “This is horrifying. This is massively illegal. This is about as blatant a violation of the federal Fair Housing Act as one can find.” Facebook has responded with from Christian Martinez, its head of multicultural. Martinez notes that ethnic affinity isn’t based on your ethnicity, exactly, but rather whether your “likes and other activity on Facebook suggest [you’re] interested in content relating to particular ethnic communities” — and that users can adjust their ad targeting preferences. (This might sound like a lawyerly distinction, but then, we are talking a potential legal issue.) Martinez also says this kind of targeting isn’t a bad thing: For example, a nonprofit that’s hosting a career fair for the Hispanic community can use Facebook ads to reach people who have an interest in that community. And a merchant selling hair care products that are designed for black women can reach people who are most likely to want its products. As for the more discriminatory practices that this targeting could enable, Martinez says: Our ad policies strictly prohibit this kind of advertising, and it’s against the law. If we learn of advertising on our platform that involves this kind of discrimination, we will take aggressive enforcement action. We also realize that, as a website, we often aren’t in a position to know the details of an apartment rental or job application — and so we will also remove an ad from our platform if the government agency responsible for enforcing discrimination laws tells us that the ad reflects illegal discrimination. |
The head of 3D for Windows explains how the feature became a new centerpiece for the OS | Brian Heater | 2,016 | 10 | 28 | Microsoft’s future is three-dimensional. Up to now, we’ve seen the company embrace the notion in dribs and drabs, through the HoloLens and its work with Minecraft. But earlier this week, at , the company went all in, making 3D content creation a core principle of both its upcoming Windows 10 Creators Update and hardware like the Surface Studio. Asked how long the company has been focused on the space, Megan Saunders is cagey. “Some time,” the Windows 3D Initiative general manager answers after a drawn-out pause. She adds quickly that she was also on the HoloLens team prior, drawing inspiration to help lower the 3D content creation bar for entry from her own children, who were interested in the space, but didn’t possess the necessary skills to operate complex CAD programs. “Today, if you look at the 3D market, most of the toolsets are for professionals,” she explains. “If we can enable people to access that more immediately, then there’s a lot of opportunity for people to do richer, more compelling, more comprehensive things. We want to see what we can do to make that more approachable for people.” The answer, in part, comes in the form of Paint 3D – a revamp of the company’s perennial graphics creation application that long ago became shorthand for bad computer art. The new version of the program certainly lowers the threshold by which one can refer to themselves as a “3D content creator,” but as one anticipates with Paint, the results are largely fairly basic. But Paint – and Creators Update – are really just the first step in getting people locked into Microsoft’s broader 3D strategy. “It is an ecosystem effort,” Saunders explains. “There are several pieces that we will be rolling out, but Paint is specifically a beginning step. Anyone can download it, and then what we’ve done is integrate our 3D community with Paint, so it becomes easy to remix an existing 3D object.” Also on the list was a feature that turns handsets into mobile 3D scanners, demoed onstage by Saunders herself when she captured a faux sandcastle during the event. “We’re going to start by launching on Windows Phone. We have a lot to still learn around that. Enabling the experience is kind of challenge. We’ve invested a lot of time thinking about how to make that easy for people to do. As that grows and takes off, we want to be where people are. We want them to be able to enjoy the experience on their devices.” https://youtu.be/Itc5ihHDAnY For now, it’s rolling out piecemeal to the company’s bigger software offerings like PowerPoint. In the future, however, Saunders and team see 3D content playing a much larger and more integral role in the way we use our computers and share information. 3D might become a new category alongside pictures and videos where we can store and share memories – choosing to keep them digitally or 3D print them for posterity should that seemingly ever farther off promise of consumer 3D printing ubiquity ever come to fruition. https://youtu.be/jurc3SxztGw “There’s potentially a new category in memories,” says Saunders. “People spend a lot of time capturing photos and videos of sentimental moments or friends and family members. We also have a lot of the same sentimental attachment to things, but we don’t have the same preservation tools. “ |
BlackLine surges 40% in software IPO | Katie Roof | 2,016 | 10 | 28 | null |
I am in a test for Twitter’s new @ reply design and it is a mess | Matthew Panzarino | 2,016 | 10 | 28 | : Everyone and their mother has an opinion about stuff Twitter is doing wrong. This one is mine. Twitter is testing a new design of the @reply that is intended to ‘clean up’ the conversation view by completely removing usernames from tweets. (a group of users that Twitter is having take the features for a spin to see how they react) and it is a mess. Here’s an example of the new reply setup: This is a reply to a bunch of people, good luck figuring that out. Another example is in the header image I put above this article. Am I involved in that conversation? Who else is that is not pictured? Who knows? There’s a bunch of weird, junky stuff going on with this choice. Here’s a few things: The solution for this mess should probably start with removing the user names from the character count but leaving the actual user names themselves. Much in the way that a link (eventually, still not implemented, lol) or photo is added and appears in the tweet but does not count towards the character count. There are so many bad decisions being made at once it's hard to keep up — Matthew Panzarino (@panzer) The argument against this is that ‘normals are confused by ‘@ names’. I disagree. I think that this may have been an issue early on but enormous swaths of people have been familiarized with usernames by the huge audience for tweets on mainstream media, TV and the web, as well as in pop culture like Jimmy Kimmel’s Mean Tweets segments and on and on. People understand usernames as names. Removing iconography like profile pics or ‘@name’s’ from the tweet deletes important context and creates confusion where there is no need. I understand completely that this is just a test of something Twitter do. I am just encouraging them very strenuously not to. If they want to make conversations more friendly, I’d suggest a nested, forum-like response thread. While I was still at Twitter, I proposed, unsuccessfully, that replies always get treated as second-class citizens. Smaller avatar, etc… — Doug Bowman (@stop) |
The silver lining to all the bad news around diversity in U.S. tech | Hadi Partovi | 2,016 | 10 | 28 |
This isn’t just happening in one school or in one state, it’s happening nationally. In Arkansas, Governor Asa Hutchinson passed a bill to fund access to computer science in every school, and in just one year Arkansas a 300% increase of females studying computer science, and a 600% increase among African American females. When Oakland decided to offer computer science in every high school, ! Changes like this have spread across the country, from Rhode Island to Utah, from Broward County to Spokane, and in the largest cities like NYC, Los Angeles, and Chicago. What brings me the most hope is this year’s launch of the new , a new Advanced Placement (AP) course developed in partnership with the . This course introduces students to the foundational concepts of computer science, with a curriculum and learning progression that has been designed specifically to attract and engage students who are traditionally underrepresented in the computing field. The 2016-17 school year marks the first time this course is being taught at a national scale across hundreds of classrooms, with a College Board AP exam to be administered in the spring. Although the enrollment figures are not yet available for classrooms, I fully expect that the diversity numbers paint a very different picture than what you see in the traditional tech industry, or in traditional AP computer science. Of course, this isn’t purely an education problem. Unconscious bias or downright discrimination greatly impacts the gender and racial imbalance in computing. shows that women are 11 times more likely to land a job interview in tech if their gender is masked during the hiring process. And show that tech companies do a worse job retaining or promoting female engineers. These are very real problems, and the solution isn’t simply to wait for education to address the hiring pipeline. But it will also be mathematically impossible to address the workforce diversity gap without addressing the same gap in the education, and the results in K-12 are an encouraging step in the right direction. At a time when most of the news you see or read is bad news, the story of what’s happening in K-12 computer science offers a beacon of hope. These numbers suggest we may be able to reverse the gender gap and racial imbalance in the tech workforce and to provide a ladder of opportunity to the youth who need it the most. We owe a debt of gratitude to these teachers, for bringing the opportunity to learn computer science to so many millions of students, regardless of gender, race, or socioeconomic background. The most impactful way you can help is to encourage a teacher to try offering computer science in the classroom. If you want to go even further to help support this teacher-powered movement, you can in a classroom: sign up to help with an Hour of Code this December, or help a computer science teacher inspire students throughout the school year. In light of all the bad news that is reported daily, the story of computer science in America’s classrooms provides a glimmer of hope. Working together, we can change anything. Help us spread the word. |
Samsung brings the Note 7’s Blue Coral color to the Galaxy S7 Edge | Brian Heater | 2,016 | 10 | 28 | One of the unsung casualties of long, sad death of the Note 7 was poor, poor Blue Coral. It was a really striking addition to an already lovely phone, a sort of shimmery light metallic blue. Every since Samsung and basically every regulatory body around put the kibosh on the phablet, however, the closest we’ve gotten is the Google Pixel’s Really Blue option. Which, while the phone is, as advertised, quite blue, it’s just not the same. But there’s still a shade of hope for Coral Blue holdouts. Samsung will be – not a bad compromise, all said. There’s one key caveat here, however: no sign of stateside availability. In fact, for the moment, the handset has only been announced for Taiwan and Singapore. Never say never, of course. There have been some leaks floating around regarding the device’s arrival on Verizon at some point. And hey, even if the company wasn’t planning to release it before, well, these certainly qualify as extenuating circumstances, as the company heads into the holiday with one of its biggest product lines out of commission. Meantime, here’s a bonus shot of a mermaid holding the phone in somebody’s really nice bathroom: |
Watch 500 Startups’ Demo Day here | Samantha O'Keefe | 2,016 | 10 | 28 | TechCrunch is pleased to bring you 500 Startups’ Batch 18 Demo Day, also known as Demo-ween, today, October 28th, starting at 12:00pm PT. 500 Startups is a global seed fund and startup accelerator founded by Dave McClure and Christine Tsai. 500 has invested in a variety of technology startups all over the world and maintains regional funds focused on Korea, Thailand, Turkey and North Africa, among other locations. 500 Startups has been vocal in its efforts around diversity and in Batch 18, 19 percent of companies have a female founder, 22 percent have a black or latino co-founder and 28 percent are international founders. Demos start at 12:30 and are expected to last until 4:15pm. You can watch all 46 companies live:
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Apple taps LG to build external displays for its new MacBooks | Brian Heater | 2,016 | 10 | 28 | The shedding of various other ports in favor of ThunderBolt 3 ubiquity will no doubt be one of the biggest pain points for many when it comes to upgrading to the new MacBooks. Though the new ports do have benefits. Take the fact that the 15-inch version is capable of powering up to four 4K displays simultaneously. It’s overkill, likely for 99.9-percent of us, but hey, it’s nice to know the feature’s there if you need it. The company was happy to show off that functionality on stage yesterday, but interestingly enough, the company enlisted another hardware maker to help out, rather than going it alone. Apple says it’s been working closely with LG to create designed with the new MacBooks in mind. LG’s 27-inch UltraFine 5K (5120 x 2880) and 21.5-inch UltraFine 4K (4096 x 2304) displays will be stepping to fill in the void left by Apple’s proprietary Thunderbolt screens. Present, naturally, is the ability to charge the laptop through the same cord delivering audio, video and the like. There’s a FaceTime reader camera/mic setup and, perhaps most compelling, a trio of USB-C ports built in for desktop docking. The models, which Apple is more or less positioning as the official displays for the new MacBooks, run $1,300 and $700, respectively. They’ll ship in the November/December timeframe. |
Maven expands car-sharing network to L.A. | Darrell Etherington | 2,016 | 10 | 28 | GM’s car-sharing service is adding yet another city to the list of places where it’s available: Los Angeles. The addition of L.A. comes quick on the heels of its recent , which means there are now two California markets on board. Maven is GM’s in-house alternative to offerings like Zipcar and Enterprise CarShare. The program will host an initial fleet of 60 cars for members to choose from in L.A., available on-demand 24 hours, from pick-up locations located in the downtown, Little Tokyo and South Park areas of the city to begin with, with planned expansions down the road. Maven is also touting over 23 million miles driven across 12,000 reservations at this point, after a launch in early 2016. That number also includes makes driven via GM’s Express Drive program with Lyft, whereby drivers who want to act as service providers for the on-demand ridesharing network can rent out cars on demand, too. “Los Angeles is a natural fit for Maven because of the city’s incredible appetite for cars,” said Julia Steyn, vice president of Urban Mobility and Maven in a press release. Part of GM’s goal with Maven is showcasing new vehicles, which means members get access to Chevy Cruze, Malibu, Tahoe, Volt, as well as GMC Acadia and Yukon, and Cadillac ATS, CTS, CT6, XT5 and Escalade. Drivers will be charged a rate depending on their vehicle, starting at $8 per hour and with daily rates also available. All cars include OnStar, and in-car 4G LTE wireless connections. |
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