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Facebook invents “virtual reality emoji” gestures
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Josh Constine
| 2,016
| 10
| 6
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and your VR avatar’s face will turn “angry.” Put your hands on your face Home Alone-style to express “shock.” Triumphantly thrust your hands in the air and your virtual self’s face will show “joy.” These are what Facebook calls “VR emoji,” and they’re the company’s vision for how we’ll convey emotion in virtual reality. We’re not talking about yellow illustrated emoticons popping up over your head. Instead, your avatar’s eyes, eye brows, mouth and other facial features will change to mimic how we exhibit body language in the real world. Michael Booth, Facebook’s head of social VR, describes that “when you send a message and you want to make an emotional point, you stick an emoji on there.” We lose tone and physical cues when we text, so emojis emerged to clarify what you really mean. Otherwise, the recipient won’t know whether you’re excited or worried when you say “oh my.” Booth wanted to alleviate similar sentiment ambiguity that exists in social VR as you don’t usually see someone’s real face. The solution goes far, far beyond the you can leave on 360 News Feed content to express more nuanced feedback than just a “Like.” “We’re coming up with a language that triggers your avatar to make certain emotions,” aka “VR emoji” Booth tells me. “We can’t just be a blank presence. [In VR] we have eyes, we have mouths. We need some kind of emotions or it seems like totally flat affect.” If you say something shocking to a friend in VR, but their face stays completely static, it breaks your sense of presence. We’re accustomed to facial cues. For example, in the real world if you’re in the middle of a long explanation and someone doesn’t understand you, you can recognize the confused expression on their face. That tells you to dumb it down a bit, provide more background context or say it again in a different way. Without VR emoji, your conversation partner would either have to interrupt you, flail their arms in a non-obvious way or wait until you’re finished. With Facebook’s VR emoji, you can shrug with your palms up, and your face will show an easily recognized expression of confusion — eyes scrunched and mouth crooked. Though Booth warns the gestures behind its VR emoji vocabulary are sure to change over time. Mark Zuckerberg dives into how our brain processes social VR None of this depends on eye or facial tracking, which would require additional hardware to be built into VR headsets. Startups like are building these headsets, and apps like VR chat room make your eye movements visible on your avatar. But eye tracking isn’t built into the Oculus Rift, Gear VR, Google Daydream and Cardboard, HTC Vive or PlayStation VR headsets. The hand-tracking that VR emojis require is proliferating much faster toward the scale Facebook craves for its product. Booth details four of the main goals Facebook has for using avatars to create the sense of believable human presence in social VR: Facebook is still so they look like you. One option is an internal drawing tool where you illustrate a version of your face to plaster onto your avatar. Another is to use an sensor or other image-capture device to model your head. Facebook could potentially even try to recreate your VR face from the photos tagged of you on its social network. Whatever it offers will have to work reliably, otherwise you could end up with a grotesquely disfigured avatar version of yourself that would break rules No. 1 and No. 4 above. Luckily, Booth knows plenty about avatars. He spent 10 years making video games at Valve and another two at Blizzard. He was planning to start his own VR game studio, but then Facebook showed him the “Toybox” social VR demo, which he says “really blew my mind.” He joined Facebook, and since December has been working on the successor to Toybox, Facebook’s unnamed social VR prototype . Presence isn’t enough. VR needs utility — things to do in there. Along with the VR emojis, overlaid on the scene. They showed how you’ll be able to play cards, watch TV and sword fight together. If you see something cool, you’ll be able to take a VR selfie, turn to your wrist and see a button to instantly share the photo to Facebook. You’ll even get a change to take a Facebook Messenger video call and show someone in the real world what your avatar is up to in the virtual realm. That’s just the start, though. Facebook is plotting to turn you into a VR videographer. Booth tells me it’s developing a way for you to “basically have a virtual camera you can pick up and move around.” This way, friends without headsets can see what all the hype is about by watching your VR antics straight from the Facebook News Feed. “You become a 2D camera man for your friends in VR,” Booth says. “With video streaming, you become a superstar.” The evolution of Facebook’s social VR avatars, from generic figures to blocky heads to polished faces to emotional creatures That concept of expanding Facebook Live streaming from the physical world to your adventures in the digital one ties social VR back to the company’s core product that’s increasingly focused on video. While Oculus and Facebook started quite distinct, the dividing lines are blurring. If Facebook can build a compelling social VR experience at scale, Booth says “we’ll figure out some way to monetize it. I’m sure advertising will be very interesting in VR.” For now, though, this is all just the next way Facebook wants to accomplish its mission of connecting the world, making friends feel closer together no matter where they are. From basic profiles to photos to auto-play videos in the News Feed, from text chat to multi-media Messenger apps, from web to mobile and now to VR, Facebook continues to evolve. But no matter the technology, Booth says Facebook’s staying true to its principle of “People First.’
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In buyers’ market, acquirers look to lock in management teams longer
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Connie Loizos
| 2,016
| 10
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Acquisitions are often celebrated in the press. But academic research suggests that 70 percent to 90 percent of mergers don’t succeed, owing to a wide variety of factors. Buyers overvalue the synergies they’ll derive, or they underestimate the impact of the associated costs, or they rely too heavily on assumptions about where a market is heading. Of course, another reason acquisitions don’t always go as planned is that founders often leave a year or two after their company has been gobbled up. That’s changing in for exits, where a growing number of well-funded companies and their investors are hoping that if an IPO isn’t in the cards, an acquisition might be. And in addition to other changing deal terms, acquiring companies are seemingly thinking long and hard about locking up talent longer than they have in the recent past. You saw it happen when the e-commerce company Jet sold to Walmart for a whopping $3.3 billion in August. According to Recode, cofounder and CEO Marc Lore agreed to stay on with Walmart for an atypically long as part of the acquisition agreement. In fact, according to that same August report, if Lore leaves before the summer of 2021, he’ll forfeit a sizable amount of both cash and stock that could otherwise earn him up to an estimated $1 billion. Lore may be exceptional in many ways, including his understanding of e-commerce and how to compete specifically with Amazon, which acquired his . It’s easy to understand why Walmart wants him around. He probably won’t be alone, though. Steve Fletcher, a managing director at the global investment bank , notes that it’s “hard to say” whether it’s universally the case that management teams are getting locked into longer contracts with acquirers in this market. “I don’t think anyone has a large enough sample size to say that,” he notes. But he adds that of the deals he is seeing, there is a move to sign on incoming talent for a longer period, sometimes “three or four years as opposed to [the previous standard of] 18 to 24 months.” Vas Natarajan — an investor at the venture firm Accel Partners who focuses on products and services that target developers, designers and media creators — makes a similar observation. “In the last four or five years, there’s been a rash of these acquir-hires, where the founders have left after 18 to 24 months,” Natarajan says. “But I know from talking with heads of product and corp dev teams [that they are now asking], ‘How can we do it in a way that’s much more retentive than in the past?’ M&A teams are starting to think more about structuring things in a way that you retain what you buy.” How big a trend this becomes is far from clear. As a baseline, , a San Francisco-based outfit that provides M&A post-closing services to companies, says that of the 735 private M&A transactions it saw between 2012 and 2015 featured an earn-out period of four to five years. Meanwhile, 47 percent of those deals featured earn-out periods of 1 to 2 years. Founders who are more driven to start companies than reap their full reward from an acquirer will surely leave no matter the earn-out period anyway. Still, there’s reason for corporates to believe that longer agreements make sense. In 2013, PayPal, then a division of eBay, acquired the Chicago-based payments gateway Braintree in an all-cash deal worth . As part of that deal, the incentives of Braintree CEO Bill Ready were structured over a long period of time. In retrospect, that decision looks to be paying off for Ready and PayPal — which spun off into its own last year. As of September of last year, Ready was already running all product and engineering at PayPal. , he became the first person since it became an independent concern to be named to the role of chief operating officer.
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ASUS’s Zenvolution event features four upcoming devices and one awkward portmanteau
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Brian Heater
| 2,016
| 10
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Zenvolution doesn’t really roll off the tongue. But hey, you come for the gadgets – the clever word play is really just a bonus, at best. And the company certainly has a lot to showcase on that front, covering all of the requisite bases with a new laptop, phone, tablet and watch. Let’s start with the notebook and go from there, shall we? The company’s got a new version of its ultrathin Zenbook, built around a 12.5-inch 1,920 x 1,080 display, that’s already drawing comparisons to the MacBook – but, then, that’s just kind of a thing people do when a new thin and light laptop comes out. The notebook packs an Intel Core i7 into an 11.9mm, two-pound frame. Pricing on that one starts at $1,100. The ZenFone 3, meanwhile, while already announced, is now getting some Stateside love. Its unibody design is set to arrive before the end of the month, sporting a Snapdragon 821 encased in a metal unibody design. There are (a slightly overwhelming) number of different configurations for the handset, including two sizes (5.5 and 5.7 inches) and up to 6GB of RAM and 256GB in Universal Flash Storage. Prices range up to $869. The cheapest of the bunch is the 5.5-inch Zenfone 3 Laser, which can be picked up now for a reasonable $199. The Zenwatch 3, meanwhile, which made its debut on stage at IFA in Berlin not all that long ago, will run $229 in the US when it arrives, likely next month. The new 9.7-inch ZenPad features 2K resolution and built-in LTE. The downside of the last bit is the slate will be a (TechCrunch parent) Verizon exclusive when it lands October 13. They seem to be getting all of the exclusives these days. The handset gets a very carrier-centric pricing plan, portioned out at $13.74 over two years – that’s around $330 when all is said and done.
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Toppling democracy one byte at a time
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Ben Johnson
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As the saying goes, “all politics is local.” And now, so is hacking. Cyber attacks popularized on the silver screen are now occurring in every aspect of our life. Our election system is not immune from this new reality. We don’t need to consult research to see the vulnerabilities of electronic voting systems. It’s . During the past month, the FBI that voter registration databases in states across the country have come under attack, as well. Many electronic voting machines and voter databases are inadequately protected and woefully outdated. An iPhone is more secure in a lot of ways than the systems that will determine the November outcome. As far as breaches are concerned, the by the FBI is only the beginning. We must make addressing this risk a priority. The more electronic voting becomes, the more instances where a few bytes can determine who wins. It’s scary when you think about the fragility of the system, but it’s real. And it’s already here. In 2012, cast their ballots using an electronic voting machine. Now, imagine if 39 percent of total votes are found fraudulent this November. The severity of the situation is immediately apparent. It’s not solely about an attacker compromising individual voting machines. There are supply chain and chain of custody concerns, too. Sometimes, votes pass through systems that have network or internet access, so it’s not solely about the individual machines at each precinct. If the FBI has no problem reading the information from the majority of voting devices, others would have no problem manipulating that same information. We must demand better. The solution starts with a choice: go big or go home. Our society has to either make sure the entire digital-voting system has strong, end-to-end security or we go back to paper. Period. From the parts used in the manufacturing of these digital-voting machines to the delivery, storage, operation and verification, we must consider where vulnerabilities could exist at every stage. Technology has advanced and given us options for mitigating risk. Could we open source the operating system (for independent scrutiny) and make sure the software running on the operating system matches that code exactly? Could we implement stronger chain of custody methods similar to when digital evidence is collected? Could we use newer technology, such as blockchain (the underlying technology of bitcoin) to help increase the trust of our transactions? However, as with most aspects of cybersecurity, a large aspect of this is the people problem. Given the security expertise deficit and the resources required to support securing such systems, we need to make up our minds about whether or not we are ready to rely on these technologies for critical positions of power and ballot measures. Do we invest in technology and the people to validate and monitor that technology, or not? All is not lost for November, however. With all the talk of vote manipulation, there are some aspects of the upcoming election that should comfort us. First, most voting machines are not connected to the internet, so manipulation would have to occur with either physical access or during the supply chain (the manufacturing and selling of the systems). Because most of the systems are old, the manipulations would have had to occur years ago. That leaves physical access. And most security experts will tell you that if you have physical access to a device — any device — all bets are off. Remember Apple versus the FBI? Physical access needs to be limited, so we must request that individuals do not have prolonged physical access to these devices leading up to the election – it’s not just about voting day. Obviously, fraud can occur with paper ballots, as well. I’m sure some Florida voters still wake in cold sweats over the nightmares of hanging chads. No system is perfect, but toeing the line between the two is no way to establish a successful strategy. And sure, there’s a lot of diversity in the systems used to cast votes, but that diversity starts to dissipate when you look at state and local elections. There are too many moving parts. Too many points of failure and vulnerability. By taking a middle ground, we’ve put ourselves at an increased risk of insufficiently protecting the security of both methods. Vote manipulation could be the pinnacle of an attack campaign against our elections, but simply casting doubt over the election process is enough to cost our country a lot of time, money and confidence. We cannot allow that to happen. For now, the fastest path to the restoration of trust is to trash the digital systems and go analog. Let’s have a paper trail. It might be a contrarian view, but I value the health and integrity of our election process. Avoiding a future where a few bytes can manipulate democracy is the responsibility of every voter. We can sit down and go back to the drawing board to design next-generation digital voting systems and build in integrity, privacy, chain of custody and transparency from the beginning. With only weeks until our election, what should you do? Vote and have confidence in the process. Election officials, manufacturers of devices and government agencies are working to reduce the risks of vote manipulation. There is no reason to believe that a “hacked election” will occur in November. But if we blind ourselves to the risks, and if we fail to have significant discussions about how future elections will be conducted, we will fail to maintain integrity of how we choose who leads us. Let’s embrace modern technological solutions or stick with pen and paper. After all, elections should be determined by the will of the many and not the will of the (cyber) few.
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Yep, there’s now a subscription handbag service: Ivory Clasp
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Sarah Perez
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There are subscription services for , , , , and even , so why not one for handbags? That’s the premise, at least, behind a new startup called , which is promising to offer quality, stylish handbags that retail for over $100 for just $45 per month. The service sends name-brand bags, not knock-offs, and allows you to keep the purses you receive. Like most subscription apparel and accessories services, Ivory Clasp starts off with a style quiz to learn your individual taste. This basically consists of you choosing the handbags you like best from a series of photos. This data helps the service send you those handbags you’ll like best in the future. Subscribers can choose to pay $45 per month, or $45 bimonthly to receive a new bag every other month. The bags are also in-season, as opposed to the older, excess inventory you’d find being sold off at retailers like TJ Maxx. In fact, the company that if you find the bag online anywhere – including Amazon – for less than $98, they’ll refund your money. And if you don’t like the bag you receive, you can also send it back for a full refund. The idea for Ivory Clasp comes from , previously the co-founder of the Y Combinator-backed startup , and car rental startup ; along with Sean Rimokh, who is the son of ‘ Chairman and CEO Jack Rimokh. (Zolty, , made a mistake in his early 20’s when he hacked investor Jason Calacanis’ voicemail as a prank, in hopes of getting attention for his startup. Calacanis later him, and Zolty seems to have learned a lesson about when hustling crosses the line.) Signal Brands, meanwhile, is one of the world’s largest handbag companies, which licenses the Guess?, Splendid, Ella Moss, Trina Turk and Isaac Mizrahi brands. Not surprisingly, these same brands appear to be shipping via Ivory Clasp’s service. Splendid was the first one I received, for example.* The founders couldn’t speak to Signal Brands’ relationship with Ivory Clasp, nor its investment situation, due to their licensing deals. However, it’s not a subsidiary of Signal Brands, and has its own agreements with the brands its ships. Ivory Clasp also can’t exactly advertise which brands those are – that’s also part of the deal. In other words, these brands involved don’t want to be associated with a “discount” service, but they’re happy to get their products into the hands of the right kind of customer. At other times, they can leverage Ivory Clasp’s need for inventory to bump up their minimum order quantity with factory suppliers in order to get better rates as needed. While subscription handbags may sound like a bit of an unneeded luxury, it fits into a larger trend in e-commerce. “The problem we’re solving is that there’s a new, 21st century girl who doesn’t have time to be super involved in fashion, or doesn’t have the money to spend on high-end bags or high-end clothing,” says Zolty. But at the same time, this customer doesn’t want to shop at discount stores, he says – they want current styles that are in fashion. Ivory Clasp keeps around five or six styles on rotation at any time, in order to meet the style needs of customers, while also making sure customers don’t get the same brand every month. The startup has been testing the service for a few months with over 300 active users, and has hit $10,000 in monthly recurring revenue. What’s surprising is that 40% of customers have opted for the monthly subscription. “The average women, regardless of price point or demographic, buys basically five to seven bags per year,” notes Rimokh. “So we launched this business with a bimonthly target,” he explains. But the founders decided to add the monthly option to see what would happen, and soon saw that only every 6 out of 10 users opted for bimonthly. In addition, a small percentage (around 3-5%) start as bimonthly then upgrade to monthly, the realized. “We say users are more likely to convert from bimonthly to monthly than to cancel,” Rimokh adds. However, while Ivory Clasp may be doing well among early adopters, it will be challenged by the now numerous subscription clothing services like StitchFix, Le Tote, Rent the Runway, Trunk Club, and others, all which ship bags along with apparel. Whether it can carve out a niche for those who want the occasional handbag, and not one they pick out for themselves, still remains to be seen. Ivory Clasp is backed by an undisclosed amount of seed funding. The service is ; using the code TECHCRUNCH will give you 25% off.
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News in VR with RYOT
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Sarah Buhr
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, the Culver City, California-based virtual reality outfit by the Huffington Post last year, works on the cutting edge of the news business, bringing audiences straight to the scene. That’s an unusual use of the new medium – most VR startups focus on sports and gaming empires. But RYOT took its VR team to the Rio 2016 Olympics, was there for the Democrat and Republican presidential conventions and rode along on a Syrian refugee boat with Susan Sarandon – all in the name of a new type of immersive journalism. It most recently to stream VR news and comedy shows from its studios in Culver City. TechCrunch caught up with the RYOT team to take a look at what they’re up to and find out what’s next for this unique VR startup.
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Coupa up 87% in software IPO
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Katie Roof
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Sony packs more power into its compact cameras with the RX100 V and a6500
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Devin Coldewey
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Sony has a pair of new cameras for sale — though perhaps “new” isn’t the word, since they’re more like upgrades to existing devices. The price is upgraded, too. You’re not getting away for under a grand, though you’ll be getting a lot of camera for your money. is, as you might guess, the fifth iteration of this pocket-size powerhouse. The capabilities and the price have gone up every year, but it’s always been one of the most consistently well reviewed cameras out there. New to the V is a sped-up autofocus system, which at 0.05 seconds Sony claims is the world’s fastest, though those records don’t tend to stick around for long. 4K video is now oversampled rather than collected from binned pixels (if this doesn’t mean anything to you, don’t worry), and phase detection AF is maintained during shots, rather than switching to contrast detection. An interesting addition is 24 FPS burst shooting in 20-megapixel RAW+JPEG for up to 150 shots. That 24 happens to be the most common cinematic framerate, meaning this thing essentially can shoot RAW video at 24 FPS for 6 seconds at a time. Having that in a pocket camera is pretty amazing — this could be a B camera on real shoots. The a6500 is an update to the a6300, naturally, which was already a highly capable camera. What’s new is a similarly overhauled AF system, in-camera optical image stabilization, and a touchscreen. The 24-megapixel sensor is the same, but the image processor has been updated. These improvements make the camera more approachable than its predecessor, which was praised for its versatility but not its ergonomics and interface. Hopefully Sony put some real work into the touchscreen UI. You’ll be able to pick up an RX100 V this month for a grand, and the a6500 will come in November for around $1,400.
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Netflix’s Reed Hastings believes AT&T Time Warner merger could be good for consumers
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Sarah Buhr
| 2,016
| 10
| 24
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Netflix CEO Reed Hastings isn’t bothered by the idea of a marriage between mobile powerhouse AT&T and HBO’s parent company Time Warner, “As long as HBO’s bits and Netflix’s bits are treated the same [by regulators],” he said. Hastings, who was speaking at the Wall Street Journal Live conference this evening with Comcast over a proposed Time Warner merger in 2014, fearing the deal could mean Comcast would have the ability to block broadband internet access to Netflix customers. However, Hastings sees the AT&T Time Warner deal as potentially beneficial and says his main concern is Net Neutrality. “I think AT&T’s going to be aggressive about building a national competitor to all of the cable companies like DirectTV has been to the satellite companies — and if they pull that off that would be in the consumer’s interest,” Hastings said. However, the streaming entertainment company CEO gave a long pause when asked if he might consider going after Time Warner himself. “Next question. That was not a no,” he eventually said. Though Hastings was coy about any potential acquisition of a major content provider he might be interested in he was not shy about mentioning some of the original content Netflix is now producing. The company has shared original content for a while now via House of Cards, Narcos and others but it debuted its first big, in-house production, Stranger Things, this summer — and that approach is the way of the future for Hastings and his entertainment platform. “We’re going to evolve past just the Hollywood enclave and really try to unleash the world’s great, high-end creators,” he said. Netflix, now in 130 countries running on more than 600 ISP’s, takes that goal region-by-region and Hastings seems practical about how to reach different consumers in different areas, but he says he has a long way to go to capturing attention away from all the apps and social media networks and all the other things that take away from giving Netflix our attention. The real challenge, he says, is figuring out what the next thing is to capture that attention, “Is it VR, is it gaming, is it pharmacological?” he said. Hastings then entertained a weirdly off-script and hilarious projection about that last part, “In twenty or fifty years taking a personalized blue pill, you just hallucinate in an entertaining way and then a white pill brings you back to normality is perfectly viable; and if the source of human entertainment in thirty or forty years is pharmacological we’ll be in real trouble,” he said. But, getting back on track, Hastings was hopeful AT&T might throw in some money in the future to make some of those original shows Netflix is famous for, right alongside competitors like Hulu, Amazon and his company. Overall, Hastings believes he’s in the business of “turning money into joy” and “eliminating boredom and loneliness” more than anything. AT&T and others who want to own original content, not just control the pipe see the advantage in that — Netflix just , adding 3.2 million subscribers, with expectations to grow subscribers — and revenue — even more this holiday season.
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Alan wants to turn health insurance into software-as-a-service
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Romain Dillet
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Ok, my headline is a bit provocative, but it’s kind of true. French startup is launching today a brand new full-stack health insurance company in France. Compared to existing products, Alan wants to make the experience much sleeker. Here’s how it works. The company just raised $13 million (€12 million) from CNP Assurances, Power Financial, Partech Ventures and business angels. Alan isn’t just a fancy front-end or a broker for Axa or Allianz. The startup manages everything. It has worked with regulators to become an official health insurance company. And this is no small feat as it’s the first new health insurance company in 30 years. Alan has a simple offering and target companies directly. In a few minutes, you can sign up to Alan and cover all your employees for €55 per month per employee. American readers will find this number crazy low, but it’s on par with competitors in France. Alan doesn’t try to undercut the competition. Instead, you get good coverage for an average price. You can also choose to cover your partner and children on Alan for an additional €55 per adult and €40 per child. The startup is targeting small companies and startups at first. In the future, Alan is also thinking about letting freelancers sign up. And it didn’t take much to make Alan more appealing than existing health insurance companies. Alan lets you sign up on the web. The HR department can then access a dashboard where they can manage coverage for their employees. The employees can also access Alan’s dashboard to submit reimbursements, add their partner on their health plan and get more details about their coverage before going to the dentist for instance. While many health insurance companies are stuck in the 20th century, Alan operates as a modern web service. Alan will add a map with doctors and prices around you so that you can know for sure that you’re fully covered. I think it could also be a good opportunity to integrate with other services, such as , so that you can book an appointment from Alan’s dashboard. And why not work with as well to make it easier to sign up to the two services. While health insurance isn’t sexy, it could also be a very lucrative market. French companies are now required to offer a health insurance plan to all their employees and pay for at least 50 percent of the premium — so that’s tens of millions of potential customers. Alan has worked on its plan for months and has simulated years of reimbursements to know that it’s a viable business model. Health insurance companies in France don’t have big margins. The big ones keep offering plans because they have other more lucrative insurance products. If Alan can automate many different steps and keep a low headcount, a young startup like this one could still compete with the big competitors out there.
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Flex raises another $3 million to replace tampons
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Megan Rose Dickey
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Flex, the tampon alternative you can wear during sex, has raised a $3 million seed round led by Vivek Ranadive’s new fund, Capital, with participation from Cyan Banister of Founders Fund, Ellen Pao and others. This comes just a couple of months after from Y Combinator, Amplify.LA and others. Flex plans to use the funding to fine-tune its products and further develop its online tech to better serve customers. BOW Capital’s investment in Flex is one of the fund’s first several investments, though, the fund is not yet ready to disclose the other ones. To be clear, this is the same fund that is . While the focus of the fund is on the research, students and faculty of the UC system, it’s not a requirement that every startup the fund backs is affiliated with the UC system. “As a founder who knows how tough building a company can be, the traits I look for most are passion and grit,” Ranadive said. “Getting to know Lauren, where she’s come from, how she built the company and team, the commitment she’s shown to serving women, we saw both those traits in spades, and we’re excited to share in her journey.” Flex is about $20 per cycle — depending on if you buy one box at a time versus subscribe, and how long and heavy your periods generally are. If you subscribe to a quarterly box, it’ll cost you $15 a month. Diva Cups cost about $40 and it’s recommended that you replace it at least once a year. “There are a lot of great companies in this world, but very few that tackle difficult and uncomfortable problems,” Banister said. “Menstruation is a very real experience that half of the world’s population works around. There hasn’t been a lot of innovation which makes the experience more comfortable, safer and less error prone while reducing stigma. Something that just about every female will face in their lives should have the brightest minds behind it, and I think the FLEX team is well positioned in that regard to pursue a massive opportunity. Equally important, I tried FLEX and I’m a convert. I immediately ordered for our home and office and I’m relieved to say goodbye to tampons for good.” It’s worth noting that Flex is not the only startup tackling menstruation and feminine hygiene, which is a $15 billion market and one that is expected to . There’s , the reusable panties that hold up to two tampons worth of liquid, and there used to be Softcup, but . There’s also Clue, a period tracking app and . Flex recently shipped its first batch of orders to over 20,000 customers in the U.S. I haven’t had a chance to use Flex yet, but I do have one in my possession and will use it the next time I start bleeding. So, check back in about one month for my review.
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Palmer Luckey absent from Oculus conference keynote after troll scandal
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Josh Constine
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Oculus co-founder and Trump troll financier Palmer Luckey was conspicuously missing from the keynote stage at today’s Oculus Connect 3 conference in San Jose, CA. That likely related to the backlash against news that Luckey donated $10,000 to Nimble America, a pro-Trump non-profit dedicated to bashing Hillary Clinton with offensive memes. Luckey on stage at last year’s Oculus Connect conference Luckey typically dispenses high-level thoughts on VR’s potential at Oculus events, since he had the original vision for the company and built its first headset prototype in his garage at age 18. He spoke during the conference’s main keynote last year, and appeared in videos shown during the 2014 keynote.
Following a Daily Beast story about Luckey’s involvement with Nimble America, he an apology on Facebook saying “my actions were my own and do not represent Oculus. I’m sorry for the impact my actions are having on the community.” However, the typically left-leaning tech sector have continued to harshly criticize Luckey, and some Oculus partners claim they will withdraw from the platform. , , and Superhypercube developers say they will withhold their apps from Oculus as long as Luckey is employed there. Facebook and Oculus have declined to punish or demote Luckey. All of Oculus’ other top executives, including co-founders Brendan Iribe and Nate Mitchell, top scientist Michael Abrash, and Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, all appeared on stage, making the lack of Luckey more obvious. Palmer wasn’t even included in any of the pre-made videos. It seems Oculus would rather hide Luckey away than court more controversy by allowing him to continue to be a face of the company.
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Senators ask FCC to investigate Stingray surveillance tech
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Kate Conger
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A group of Democratic senators asked the Federal Communications Commission to investigate cell site simulators like Stingrays to determine if the surveillance devices used by local law enforcement agencies are disrupting cellphone service for ordinary consumers and 911 calls. The senators are also asking the FCC to look into whether Stingray use disproportionately affects people of color. Cell site simulators, commonly known as IMSI catchers or by the brand name Stingray, pose as normal cellphone towers. When nearby phones connect, the simulators can capture their unique ID numbers, track their locations and intercept the contents of calls and messages. Law enforcement agencies tend to be secretive about their use of Stingrays, but several civil rights groups, including Center for Media Justice, ColorOfChange.org and New America’s Open Technology Institute, claimed in August that the Baltimore Police Department’s use of the devices was inhibiting emergency calls and unfairly targeting communities of color. The organizations complained to the FCC, asking it to intervene. According to the (PDF), BPD used Stingrays 4,700 times over the course of nine years to investigate everything from kidnappings to petty thefts. Because the devices affect any phone within a 200-500 meter radius, it could absorb not only a suspect’s calls but also calls to emergency services, suicide hotlines and other important resources. The complaint also cites USA Today reporting that shows BPD most commonly used Stingrays in black communities. “We are particularly concerned about allegations that cell site simulators — commonly referred to as ‘Stingrays’ — disrupt cellular service and may interfere with calls for emergency assistance, and that the manner in which cell site simulators are used may disproportionately impact communities of color. While we appreciate law enforcement’s need to locate and track dangerous suspects, the use of Stingray devices should not come at the expense of innocent Americans’ privacy and safety, nor should law enforcement’s use of the devices disrupt ordinary consumers’ ability to communicate,” Senators Al Franken, Patrick Leahy, Ron Wyden, Sherrod Brown, Edward Markey, Elizabeth Warren, Jeff Merkley, Tammy Baldwin, Bernie Sanders, Tom Udall, Martin Heinrich and Chris Coons wrote in a letter to FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler. The senators are asking the FCC to explain the cellphone interference caused by Stingrays and how the devices should be licensed and regulated.
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Ant Financial partners with First Data and Verifone as part of its global expansion
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Jonathan Shieber
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As hundreds of newly minted Chinese millionaires and billionaires continue their global shopping spree, is expanding its reach to make sure they can buy whatever they want, wherever they want, and however they want. On the stage of today’s Money 2020 conference in Las Vegas, the company announced a slew of partnerships in the U.S., with the payment processor First Data and hardware manufacturer Verifone. The partnerships expand on deals that the Chinese financial services giant (and Alibaba spinout) has cut across the globe. Last year the company was working in Hong Kong, Korea, Macau, and Taiwan working with merely 15,000 retailers. Last month that number had reached 80,000 stores in 70 countries including the U.S., the UK, Germany, Australia, New Zealand, Thailand, Singapore, Malaysia, and Vietnam. Alipay’s biggest markets are Korea, Thailand, Hong Kong, Japan and Germany.
The foray into the U.S. market marks one of the remaining crown jewels in terms of luxury tourism for Chinese travelers. Also as part of its U.S. strategy, the company has named Souheil Badran as general manager of Alipay North America.
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Twitter’s sales team is taking a hit in big upcoming layoffs
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Matthew Lynley
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Well, now we know why Twitter decided to move its earnings report to before the market opens ( ). Bloomberg is reporting that the company may cut up to 8% of its staff, or around 300 people, and that the cuts . As usual these situations are very dynamic, so all of the above could shake out to be different than expected, but we’ve heard plenty of similar rumblings about layoffs for the past few weeks. In particular, one thing we’ve heard from sources is that the sales teams are in the crosshairs for the layoffs. Slowing revenue growth may be the culprit, especially as alternative platforms like Facebook and Snapchat continue to grow much more quickly. (And in addition to that, rumblings of these cuts roughly coincided with . So, read into that as you will.) Either way it seems like the company is trying to slim down as the hope continues to fade that a larger company will swoop in and buy it. A representative from Twitter declined to comment. Twitter has been on an absolute rollercoaster since Dorsey took over around this time last year. Dorsey , and throughout his time as CEO, has seen Twitter’s value cut nearly in half. That’s been a result of slow-to-no user growth, slowing revenue growth, and being constantly dogged by issues surrounding trolls on the platform. (The latter .) Hope came in the form of reports that Salesforce, Disney, and others were all looking at buying the company. That added billions of dollars to Twitter’s market cap before being promptly stripped away . Without an obvious suitor, Twitter’s going to need to figure out a way to be more forward-looking and hopeful to Wall Street. Starting with layoffs to make the business more efficient is sometimes where things go. But it’s still going to come down to actually improving the product. Trolls aside, Dorsey has actually not made any dramatic sweeping changes to the service other than adding more of an algorithmic touch to the feed. And attempts to make it less confusing, like removing contributions to character limits for kinds of media and trying to fix @replies (and “canoes”), still haven’t helped make the service more sticky and attract new users. (There’s , but that story still hasn’t seemingly played out yet.) Twitter will report its third-quarter earnings at 4:00 a.m. PST on Thursday. If you want to potentially hear more details about that (or, perhaps, that’s the day they’ll formally announce it), set your alarm clock and grab a cup of coffee. We, too, will be tuning in.
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Google buys Eyefluence eye-tracking startup
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Lucas Matney
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Google wants to know everywhere that you’re looking. Today, Eyefluence announced that it has been acquired by Google. The eye-tracking interface startup founded in 2013 had raised $21.6M in funding from investors including Intel Capital, Jazz Venture Partners, Motorola Solutions Venture Capital and NHN Investment. Terms of the deal were not disclosed. Eyefluence shared the announcement quietly today in a , spotted first by : Today, we are excited to announce that the Eyefluence team is joining Google! With our forces combined, we will continue to advance eye-interaction technology to expand human potential and empathy on an even larger scale. We look forward to the life-changing innovations we’ll create together! As Google launches its Daydream virtual reality platform next month with its Daydream View headset, there is already attention being directed to its next-gen headset efforts. Eye-tracking is a very important technology to future virtual reality headsets. Other companies in the space like SMI and Tobii have devoted efforts to using the eye as a method of signaling attention in interfaces but Eyefluence has devoted itself fully to using eye gesture cues for navigating menus and making selections. Eyefluence enable users wearing head-mounted virtual reality or augmented glasses to use their eyes as a mouse and making selections only with their eye movements. Eye-tracking has other more technical use cases like foveated rendering which allows high-density displays to selectively choose areas of the screen to display images at lower-resolution based on where you’re focus actually is on the display. Other companies in this space include , which is beginning pre-orders for its VR headset with eye-tracking sensors early next month. This acquisition is really not a huge surprise for most who had seen Eyefluence’s impressive technology up close. I with Eyefluence CEO Jim Marrgraff about his thoughts on the future of human-computer interaction at Disrupt SF last month and he had some bold ideas.
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The Amazon Echo gains MLB Gameday Audio just in time for the World Series
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Matt Burns
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The MLB just made it a bit easier to listen to the Indians destroy the Cubs during the World Series. After enabling the skill, subscribers to MLB products just need to tell an Echo to ask MLB to play the Indians. And like that, the Echo turns into your personal Bob Uecker, streaming the play-by-play directly into your room. The app will work the same way during the next season, a MLB spokesperson tells TechCrunch. Fans with a subscription can listen to any live game radio broadcast during Spring Training, the regular season and Postseason without blackouts. To have access to this ability, listeners need to subscribe to MLB.com At Bat Premium, MLB.TV or Gameday Audio. This is the MLB’s first integration with the Amazon Echo and the ability hits just in time for the 2016 World Series, which will of course be over in four games after the Indians crush Chicago’s hopes and dreams and bring another championship home to Cleveland this year.
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Study estimates cost of last year’s internet shutdowns at $2.4 billion
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Devin Coldewey
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Whenever there’s a shutdown of internet access or restrictions placed on an app, we shake our heads disapprovingly because we know it’s a fundamentally bad idea to do that. But what exactly is the cost of those shutdowns? suggests well over $2 billion over the last year. The study, by Brookings analyst Darrell West, is a very rough estimate of these costs. We’re talking back-of-napkin rough — well, assuming you were sitting at the bar with MIT and World Bank economists. Essentially, West collected numbers indicating how much of a country’s GDP can be reasonably estimated to be fully internet-based, or how much money in that country relied on a given app. Divide that by 365 and multiply by the number of days the shutdown occurred, carry the 7, and voila: That’s just the top few countries — the list goes on quite a bit longer, as a good deal of countries shut down the internet or individual apps between July of 2015 and June of 2016. The total comes to about $2.4 billion. West cautions that this number is just an estimate, and likely a very low one: It is important to point out that this analysis only looked at the economic impact on Gross Domestic Product. It did not include estimates for lost tax revenues associated with blocked digital access, impact on worker productivity, barriers to business expansion connected with these shutdowns, or the loss of investor, consumer, and business confidence resulting from such disruptions. As such, the $2.4 billion figure is a conservative estimate that likely the actual economic damage. Still, it’s a start: If a leader thinking of flipping the kill switch is informed that it’s going to cost the country a million dollars an hour and inhibit activity at all levels of business and governance, they might think twice — or at least turn it back on a little sooner than planned.
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Kodak teases a new phone for an October 20 reveal
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Devin Coldewey
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Kodak accidentally teased an upcoming phone today in a now-deleted tweet. Fortunately, the image accompanying the tweet is also easily found at . It shows what is presumably the power button on this new Kodak phone, embedded in a nice machined bezel and with a Kodak K stamped on it. But you knew that, since the picture is right up there. You probably also know that Kodak will share the details come October 20th. But maybe you missed that part of the headline or didn’t look all the way to the right in the picture. You don’t have to remember this date, we’ll do it for you. This isn’t the first Kodak phone — the came out last year but didn’t exactly make a splash. It looks like they’re going upmarket with this one, which is definitely the way to go when you’ve got a prestige brand like Kodak, however watered down it is at this point.
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Trying on Nike’s limited edition, self-lacing ‘Back to the Future’ shoes
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Anthony Ha
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Nike announced earlier this week that it will be its self-lacing shoes inspired by — but only 89 pairs, which will be (tickets cost $10), with proceeds benefiting the ‘s research on Parkinson’s disease. I got a chance to (briefly) try on a pair of Mags and discuss the technology with Nike Senior Innovator Tiffany Beers. Even though the odds are that you won’t get to try out these shoes yourself, the technology is the same one powering , which will be a widely available consumer product. Beers talked about the long process of making self-lacing a reality — she said Nike designer Tinker Hatfield first asked her to look at the problem in 2005. She also explained why this could be more than just a cool novelty. (Though it is just undeniably cool to hear and feel the laces tightening around your feet.) “Athletes can adjust these on-the-fly,” she said. “So time out in basketball, they can let bloodflow go back to the feet. Running performance, you know, if the shoe gets wet or if your foot’s swelling in a marathon, you can just change it.” You can .
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Google pollutes new Chrome tabs with ‘article suggestions’ – here’s how to disable them
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Devin Coldewey
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The original new tab page. You know what people love? When you take something familiar and useful and replace it with content “for you” that you actually didn’t ask for. That’s one of the more visible changes in the , which swaps out the bookmarks and recently visited items (above) on the new tab page for “suggested articles.” The ‘suggested articles’ feature. I don’t know about you, but I open a lot of new tabs every day, and I appreciated the utility of the old new tab page as much as I dislike the idea of Google constantly guessing at what I might want to read. And while it may be a nice option , it’s a bit much for Google to just push this content, which for all we know is sponsored, onto every new tab on mobile. Do you like it? Nice, enjoy! But if not, don’t fret: it’s (relatively) easy to disable, as Android Police reader Matt . All you need to do is change two hidden settings. Copy each of the links below (you can trust me) and paste them into new tabs. Each will bring up a complicated-looking settings page, with one item highlighted at the top. Tap the little drop-down menu, which probably reads “default,” and select “disabled.” Don’t touch the other stuff unless you know what you’re doing — some of these are important. It’ll prompt you to restart Chrome after you make these changes — do so and you should be back to the old new tab page. Even if you aren’t seeing the suggested articles feature yet, you should be able to preemptively disable it this way if you’re on a recent version of Chrome. Just switch things back to “default” if you want to give the feature another go. Google will likely add a better way to do this in the future, but for now this is how it has to be done.
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IPO pro Lise Buyer on what you need to IPO in the next six months
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Connie Loizos
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Last week, I sat down with IPO pro Lise Buyer to talk about the Bay Area ecosystem for a that’s broadcast from Wharton’s San Francisco campus. Buyer was the host and I was the guest, but because the IPO market is top of mind for so many in the startup industry right now, I asked if I could turn the table for a few minutes on Buyer, who is best known for helping to architect Google’s 2004 IPO and for the IPO advisory firm she founded in 2007, . She shared whether she thinks the IPO market will pick up substantially next year, and what it takes right now to become a publicly traded company. LB: After the first six months of the year, we’re on track to have a pretty average year in terms of IPOs; there’s momentum. LB: I think IPOs are going to grind to a halt temporarily in November, even leading up to November, pretty much starting [this] week, because everyone is afraid of the election, and markets don’t like uncertainty, and whatever you think of the candidates, one of them is a little less predictable than the other. And should Donald Trump be elected president, I’d expect the markets to express some . . . I’ll be kind and say, wicked bad indigestion. And I don’t think anyone wants to take their company public in the middle of that. LB: Are these solid companies? Yes. Do I expect [their share prices] to say where they’re trading? We’ll see. A number of them did very small deals, and they did very small deals because no one was quite sure of how the market would be. So if you have a product to sell and you’re not sure of what kind of price you could get, [you start with little inventory]. Twilio did a IPO in June, and they recently announced a $450 million follow-on offering. When they announced that, their share price [fell]; then they announced that they’d had a terrific quarter, and the stock is recovering. It’s a supply-and-demand issue. LB: We’ve seen this periodically for years. It used to be that you sold 10 to 20 percent of your shares in an IPO but LinkedIn only sold 8 percent of its shares. Valuations are low, so companies are smart to take advantage of the [demand created from] limited supply. Also, why sell for a low price and take the incremental dilution? The best path is to prove the company can function effectively as a public company, and once investors are convinced that the risk isn’t that great and that the company understands the ramifications [of being publicly traded], do a higher-value secondary. LB: Investment banks have the ability to release the lock-up early. So you have to get your bank’s approval to do it, which basically means that you agree to use the same banks [that underwrote your IPO]. So we’ve seen them not infrequently after four months in those cases where the company has met expectations and its stock has performed well. If a company’s shares aren’t trading above its IPO price, you won’t see an early lock-up. LB: A year ago, everyone was talking about growth. Growth, growth, growth, growth. Then, public investors said, “We care that these companies aren’t going to need to be taking new investments from private investors or even public investors. We want to see these are grown up companies that can stand on their own two feet and be profitable, or at least cash flow profitable.” So the pendulum swung in the opposite direction, and I think we’re swinging back a little bit now, to the point where investors are saying, “You don’t have to be profitable by Q4, but I want to see a real path to profitability because the private investor waterfall has dried up.” LB: I’m not going there, but when you have super-high profile companies, you get almost unlimited demand from [financially unsophisticated] investors. People want to buy it at any price. And sometimes that bids the stock way up on opening day, and sobering up is investors’ problem. LB: People often put too much emphasis on any one deal, and the world doesn’t work like that. The bigger impact is that we’ve had eight IPOs in September that were successful, which means that institutional investors are interested in new growth opportunities. Surely there are highly valued unicorns that will be watching what Snap does, but it’s a very small subset of candidates that looks like Snap. LB: I do think the markets [get put on] hold until afterward. What really happens immediately after is you have Thanksgiving and Christmas, and while we might get a few more offerings between now and mid-December, it wouldn’t be surprising to see a number of public filings in January. LB: No, not a huge number, because it’s not a short process, and if you didn’t start it by August at the latest, you aren’t going out in 2016 or early 2017. LB: The goal is to work closely with about four companies per year, though timing is always challenging because companies think they’ll be out in nine months, and nine months sometimes turns into a two-year deal. Our goal is to be a McKinsey, meaning smaller and elite, opposed to the larger accounting firms that work with many more customers. So there are no junior people on staff. Leslie [Pfrang, a former managing director at Deutsche Bank Securities] and I are selling our frontline experience gained over the last 20 years. LB: Almost everyone who can [because there are size limitations]. That’s perhaps a positive from the JOBS Act; companies that are uncertain about markets can get the ball rolling without getting their numbers out in front of the competitors. The downside is your employees don’t know until 15 days before [a company’s roadshow], and that leaves employees almost no time to do personal financial planning. Confidential filings also give institutions less time to do research unless it’s a company like Airbnb where there’s plenty [in the public record] to research. LB: You need to be able to forecast your financial results; you can get out otherwise, but it won’t look pretty three to six months later. You need to have your team in place. If the team is in flux, it just makes things that much more challenging. It’s not uncommon to see CFOs change within the year, but that’s far from ideal. And certainly, the CEO and head of sales should have been there for a year. You’re in a much stronger position if your team has been there for a year or more. Be able to tell you story in a succinct way that will appeal to investors. So many management teams are excited about their technology that they forget to talk about how the application of that technology that will generate P&L over time. Be able to tell a credible story about how your numbers will improve over time. People who make their operating margins look their very best at the IPO only have one direction to go. Convey to investors that you’re attacking a very large market. Otherwise, they’re going to wonder why you’re going public and not an acquisition target.
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Matthew Lynley
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NHTSA releases best practice guidelines for vehicle cybersecurity
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Darrell Etherington
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Following its , the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration has released a similar set of guidelines or “best practices” for cybersecurity in vehicles, designed to provide guidance for car makers. The best practices document is 22 pages and is non-binding, meaning there’s no regulatory imperative requiring that car makers meet these standards. The stated purpose of the document is to help improve car security in the face of hacking attempts and to encourage auto manufacturers to proactively incorporate this kind of thinking in their efforts as a matter of course. It’s aimed at anyone making a motor vehicle, including individuals and organizations like suppliers, car makers and aftermarket service providers and alteration shops. The basics include recommending a “layered approach,” which will prioritize the security of critical systems over less safety-specific features, and also encourages information sharing in “as close to real time as possible” in the case of cybersecurity events. The mechanism for this sharing is the Automotive Information Sharing and Analysis Center, which NHTSA encouraged car makers to create jointly, and which it will now encourage to expand membership to suppliers and others involved in cybersecurity maintenance and practice. A request for data sharing around critical events is also a core component of NHTSA’s autonomous driving guidelines, and it’s obvious in both cases that the government agency wants the entire industry to learn from incidents that pose a lot of potential risk. The guidelines also encourage disclosure of any discovery of potential vulnerabilities, as well as retention of data related to self-audits, which include attempts by car makers to test their own systems for vulnerabilities. You can read the full guidelines embedded below: [scribd id=328759298 key=key-O1gwjCB9BjJ26rlgfpUz mode=scroll]
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The tech industry’s regulatory crisis and how Silicon Valley lost touch with Washington
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Tim Hwang
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More than around the world tuned in to watch the first of three presidential debates — a number that almost rivals the Super Bowl, and surpassed the Oscars, Emmys and NBA Finals combined. With all the buzz being generated in and around the upcoming elections, no industry is exempt from their impact — Silicon Valley and the tech industry included. Though it might seem novel, the Valley is not sheltered, nor is it immune to national politics — a fact that the Valley used to know. From Oculus VR founder regarding his association with the white supremacist, alt-right group “Nimble America” to at the RNC, Silicon Valley players are increasingly entangled in the high stakes of politics. But make no mistake, this is no anomaly, but rather a trend that will only continue to accelerate over the next few years as “ ” and stands in almost direct contrast to the industry’s level of participation over the last few years. Take the ride-sharing industry’s constant contentious tussle over everything from driver compliance to the classification of workers. Or Airbnb’s existential crisis in New York, where the existence of the entire industry is currently at the mercy of Governor Cuomo’s pen. Or how about Zenefits’ string of extensive lawsuits and fines over insurance regulatory violations, leading to a CEO change and a renewed focus on regulatory scrutiny. Theranos, of course, is no exception to this trend of high-profile government mishaps as its recent shutdown by the FDA can prove. Digital currencies, drones, autonomous vehicles, peer-to-peer lending, renewables — the list goes on and on with stories of tech companies that have largely ignored regulatory guidelines and political participation on their way to attaining their fleeting unicorn status. Most of these companies, given their private valuations, are shielded from the volatility in stock price that would normally accompany public regulatory scrutiny, but it’s clear that these recent battles have inflicted real damage. The amazing thing about these recent battles and ethos of non-participation is how much of a shift they have been from the foundational history of Silicon Valley. From the financing of the first supercomputer by the Atomic Energy Commission to the creation of GPS, the graphical user interface and hypertext by the military, the relationship between the Valley and Washington soured dramatically after the Cold War ended. It’s important to note that this recent phenomenon of is a relatively new movement that took hold in the mid-1990s. How did Silicon Valley, an industry , lose touch with its roots so quickly? This line of thinking — that regulations can easily be skirted or ignored entirely — became the dominant philosophy for CEOs, VCs and employees in this last generation of entrepreneurs who found their footing in the midst of massive platform shifts in computing power and the internet — both government-initiated projects. Removed from directly collaborating with the government (thanks to privately financed companies that created the PC and browsers) and amidst a culture of distrust for government intervention (see: and Reagan tax cuts), they were free to believe that startups — and by proxy innovation and wealth — were untouchable against the pesky likes of government. Jeff Bezos went so far as to dictate to his employees which states they could and could not travel to during the height of , leading Amazon’s legal teams to create extensive maps and approval processes to enforce them. Microsoft, of course, is no exception to the rule, as its history with antitrust officials can prove. When asked about Bill Gates’ largest mistakes as the head of Microsoft, Brad Silverberg, long-time Microsoft exec, replied: “Bill [Gates] did not engage — either himself or the company — in the political process early enough… Bill’s attitude was the government should just go away and leave Microsoft alone… Well, this approach of not constructively engaging the government and concerned politicians, of not alleviating concerns that were not going to go away, was a disaster. The US federal government, many states, and the EU all essentially declared war on Microsoft, and Microsoft paid a devastating price.” Which brings us to today. The technolibertarian beliefs of the 1990s, and the increasingly distributed nature of “software eating the world” in every industry possible, made it almost inevitable that Silicon Valley would find itself in the middle of a regulatory crisis. Now, as innovators move further into established industries, they have the unpleasant task of convincing policymakers to review legacy regulatory frameworks established to protect these industries from disruption. Unlike the Valley, traditional industries like healthcare and insurance had established teams in Washington and state capitals to fight the public policy battles that, quite frankly, should be fought in a democratic society. Just because we can 3D-print pharmaceuticals and guns in a garage, should we allow it? Just because we have new mobile devices that enable payments, should we allow non-FDIC-insured companies to establish banking processes for millions of Americans? How should leaders like and place their companies in fights for things like LGBT rights? And what of the needs for privacy versus our national security in a post-9/11 world à la Apple’s recent fight against the FBI? We are living in an era that is much more globalized, much more complex — and where the regulatory stakes are higher. Participation and awareness in politics can be the difference between large financial and reputational penalties and winning and creating a market; something that should’ve been intricately on the minds of everyone as they watched the debates. This is an open secret that just about every other industry knows. It’s certainly one that the tech industry in particular used to know, but has forgotten. With a growing number of and a renewed interest in presidential politics, it seems that Silicon Valley is finally returning to its roots; the pendulum of Silicon Valley is swinging back toward its historical roots. It is the reason VCs like a16z and NEA have set up folks like Ted Ullyot and Scott Frederick to assist in leading internal government operations — and the reason some of the first hires in startups disrupting traditional industries today are increasingly becoming a government and compliance-focused team member. And it seems like the industry has taken an unprecedented interest in from investors to CEOs as we get closer to Election Day. With higher stakes and increasingly broader responsibilities, the expectations around relations with governments around the world have changed. Hopefully you kept this in mind as you watched the debates. The future of our industry will most certainly be shaped by the outcome of this election.
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Twitter decides to release earnings while most of us are sleeping because reasons
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Matthew Lynley
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A lot of the industry watchers that follow Twitter are out here on the West Coast, where the company is based. And for good reason! The Twitter diaspora exists in a large force out here and are great to keep in touch with in order to keep context, and it’s important to be in general geographic proximity of the company’s headquarters. Which is part of the reason we’re a upset with a stunt Twitter just pulled: . Normally tech companies tend to report after regular-day trading ends at around 1:00 p.m. PST. There are a lot of reasons for this — but, in general, it’s tradition. And it’s less of a nightmare for the Left Coast. Earnings reports are usually watershed moments for public companies. Once a quarter, we get a good read as to what’s going on behind the curtain. Twitter is no exception, and, in fact, it’s been a big disaster train for the past several weeks. First it was , then and now . All the while, Twitter’s rollercoaster stock has continued a general trend: down. Since co-founder Jack Dorsey took over the company (while still running his payments startup, Square) the stock is down nearly 40 percent, and the swings throughout discussions as to who would buy Twitter moved billions of dollars on the market every day. Things are not going well over at Twitter right now. So we watch these reports very closely, especially finance nerds like some of us at TechCrunch (and ). Twitter’s excuse is that it’s because analysts, who ask questions on conference calls following the earnings reports — which are often just as illuminating — said . In Twitter’s partial defense, this is true: Google, Amazon, Atlassian and others all report on Thursday, as well. But, 4 a.m. PST? So, what’s going to happen? Will we end up seeing more of the same — slow user growth (or declines) — or is there something deeper that might be happening while the rest of us might be asleep? Will they announce some big stuff like layoffs? Are they actually getting bought? Or, even worse, that the company is going to go private in another Dell-level LBO? Just to be clear: You can probably file this under conspiracy theory. But either way, joke’s on you Twitter. We’ll still have people up to watch the earnings report. We emailed Twitter to see what fun news they’re trying to drop while most of the West Coast is asleep, and will update the post if they respond with a comment.
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OpenDataSoft raises $5.4M to turn data into APIs
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Romain Dillet
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French startup just raised a $5.4 million Series A round (€5 million) to make it easier to manipulate huge sets of data. and invested in today’s round, with existing investor also participating and helping with the deal. Interestingly, this is one of the first investments in a French startup from Salesforce Ventures. OpenDataSoft is a software-as-a-service solution that is all about making data more useful. Many companies, cities and governments sit on top of a ton of data but aren’t doing anything with it. OpenDataSoft can help you with the first steps when it comes to analyzing, processing, visualizing and sharing this data. In particular, as the name suggests, OpenDataSoft is a good way to make other companies and developers take advantage of your data to reuse it in other services. For instance, a railway company could convert all their timetables into an API using OpenDataSoft. Then, app developers could use this data to create a transit app, for example. In particular, I feel like a company like OpenDataSoft could be key when it comes to making cities a bit more data-driven. Many services and local governments don’t digitally talk to each other. Integrating all the moving parts of a city could help local government make everything more efficient. (I the term “smart city.”) In addition to its European office, the startup is going to open a new office in Boston to get closer to the American market. But that’s not all. The company also wants to expand into new markets, such as Germany, Italy, Spain and the U.K. OpenDataSoft won’t necessarily open offices in all these countries, but you can expect some hires when it comes to business development in these regions.
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Chronocam secures $15M to power its ‘biological eye’ computer vision system
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Lucas Matney
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Not everything in our field of view at any given time is all that interesting; often, it’s only when something consistent changes that our eyes take notice. Paris-based is looking to further develop this concept in the computer vision space with its new camera technology being optimized for autonomous vehicles. Today, Chronocam announced that it has picked up $15 million in a Series B funding round led by . Robert Bosch Venture Capital, iBionex, GmbH, 360 Capital, CEAi and Renault Group also participated in the round. The company had previously raised an $850,000 seed round. Computer vision is a space where Intel is continuing to make significant moves. Intel last month that it is acquiring computer vision VPU-maker Movidius, which has become popular largely for how well it does low-power on-device processing. The company’s RealSense team has also done quite a bit of work in building sensors for autonomous cars, drones and virtual reality systems. Computer vision companies are increasingly looking to take image processing back from the cloud and get everything happening on-device so that the data can be interpreted as quickly as possible. Chronocam is particularly great for this on-device processing because its systems grab nearly 20 times less data than a standard camera system. The camera works by analyzing the captured image on a pixel-by-pixel basis. Most of the static information captured on devices isn’t really important until something changes. For autonomous cars, knowing everything about the scope, brightness and color of the sky isn’t important until there’s a sudden storm and hail is dropping out of the sky. Chronocam plans to package this computer vision technology into a full end-to-end system, which it hopes to ship next year.
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The Luminox XCOR 5261 Chronograph wants to send you (and your wrist) to space
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John Biggs
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frontier. These are the voyages of the starship Your Wrist, whose bold 80+ year mission is to help you carry grocery bags and wear watches like the Chronograph. This unique automatic chronograph from a watchmaker most known for brightly luminous and rugged timepieces, is an homage to spaceflight and looks pretty darn cool. is a private spaceflight research facility in Midland, Texas. Their mission is to commercialize spaceflight and they’ve already flown their super-cute XCOR Lynx rocket plane. The company has been in a quiet period recently after pivoting to focus on rocket engines but they’ve teamed with Luminox to make us all junior spacemen. The watch is a standard day-date chronograph with recessed pushers and a blue and orange color scheme. The seconds hand has a little Lynx space plane at one end and the face is made of carbon fiber. Luminox is famous for their tiny luminescent tritium tubes that glow without being “charged” by visible light. This means you can see the hands and sub-dials in pitch dark no matter how many times you’ve already gone around the moon and back. The watch also has a nicely shaped band that seems to meld right into the massive titanium case. The watch runs a Valjoux 7750 movement – a workhorse mechanical movement that is found in hundreds of watches from multiple brands – and it is water resistant to 200 meters. Primarily because of the movement the watch costs $3,000. This means you’re getting a solid, always visible chronograph for about the same price as competing models although, to be completely transparent, you can get pieces with the same movement for about $1,000. What you’re truly paying for here is the tritium tubes in the face, the bulky and extremely rugged case, and a cool story. Is all of that enough to drop $3,000 on a watch? Luminox makes watches that last. That means this piece should serve you in good stead for a few decades and, if you like the odd spaceflight design, it will complement your moon boots/Saville Row suit. That said, it is a hard pill to swallow. I personally like the clever design and the spaceflight pedigree. While this is no Omega Speedmaster – the first watch on the moon, if you’ll remember – it’s definitely an interesting departure for Luminox. The company makes multiple styles and types of watches, from cheaper SCUBA quartz models to more ambitious models like this one. As a one-off piece for the brand it’s a cool idea and a clever implementation although I suspect you’ll agree the price is a little high. As we move into the era of commercial spaceflight, however, I think it behooves us all to remember that pretty soon things like a Valjoux 7750 movement will truly go the way of the dodo. Celebrating mechanical watchmaking while imagining commercial orbital flights is a fun but of mental gymnastics and it’s nice that Luminox is bringing their all to celebrate slipping the surly bonds of Earth with a nice watch strapped to your wrist.
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InContext Solutions raises $15.2M to bring retail experiences into VR
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Lucas Matney
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Virtual reality offers businesses the ability to see consumer habits in digital environments before committing the resources to actually building out those environments in the real world. For , a major market opportunity that they’ve been able to isolate is giving retailers the opportunity to test and explore new in-store retail concepts inside virtual reality. Today, the company announced that it has closed a $15.2 million round of funding led by Intel Capital and Beringea. The company has raised about $40 million to date. Previous investors include Plymouth Venture Partners and Hyde Park Venture Partners. The company has largely relied on WebVR solutions previously but is looking to use this funding to more seriously approach the use of virtual reality headsets. “This latest round of funding gives us strong strategic backers who share our vision of even more robust, fully-immersive virtual reality solutions for retail,” said Mark Hardy, CEO of InContext Solutions, in a statement. “We have long been a leader in web-based VR, and this investment allows us to aggressively develop our VR platform, further lowering costs and improving speed and revenue for our clients.” The company’s ShopperMX platform has been a simpler way to built virtual display models and understand how certain concepts are catching users’ eyes. InContext has been working with analytics features like heat maps to help visualize how users approach new display types that are being built and proposed. The company was started in 2009, long before consumer virtual reality began to drift back into public consumption. With virtual reality headsets, there is only more potential in gathering rich data regarding consumer attention. This investment from Intel Capital comes after InContext Solution began a partnership with Intel to begin developing virtual reality solutions together. Intel has announced a number of VR initiatives related to its RealSense platform, including its all-in-one .
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VR audio startup Dysonics closes Series A led by Intel Capital
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Lucas Matney
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If you had the chance to watch the second episode of the new season of Black Mirror, you won’t take much convincing when people tell you how important realistic 3D audio is to immersing you in a virtual reality/mixed reality experience. is a startup in the VR audio space looking to build the hardware and software workflows that give VR content creators high-fidelity solutions to bringing top-notch audio into their content. Today, the company closed a Series A investment led by Intel Capital with participation from Rawah Partners.The investment was shared as part of a broader Intel Capital announcement disclosing $38 million in new investments across 12 frontier tech companies including Dysonics. The amount of funding for this specific investment not disclosed. The company had previously raised a $750k seed round in 2012 from Rawah to get the company up and running. Dysonics has a few products out right now, including a head-tracking system called RondoMotion, aimed at bringing head-tracked 360 audio to regular headphones and RondoMic, a high-fidelity all-in-one microphone array capture system. Right now, the company is working with LA-based to handle rentals of the RondoMic. The RondoMic is definitely a product geared towards professional use. First off, the thing is the size of a watermelon and has a carbon fiber shell so it’s pretty apparent that this device means serious business. The RondoMic utilizes eight custom Telefunken M60 FET microphones (the high-end mics retail for about $600 a pop). Dysonics CTO Bob Dalton estimates the RondoMic could likely sell for something above $10,000, but specified that the company largely intends to focus on rentals with this particular version. As Dysonics grows, Dalton tells me it’s looking to looking to grow its market potential outside of solely focusing on high-end professional users and embrace the high-end consumer markets with devices that come in different shapes and sizes but still produce compelling high-quality 360 audio capture. Virtual reality audio is a bit of a wild space at the moment. Despite major presences from established audio giants like Sennheiser and Dolby, there really haven’t been too many standards established. With the high-end high-fidelity hardware the company is making, it would be easy to frame Dysonics as hardware company, but Dalton is weary with that classification. The real growth potential for the company is with its end-to-end VR audio solution. Rondo360 is an application and set of plug-ins that works across digital audio workstations to process binaural audio and make handling 360 audio much more seamless. The system is agnostic to your channel configurations or hardware, meaning it plays nice with most people’s go-to setups. “The world of VR audio is pretty fragmented at the moment,” Dalton told me. “The market is kind of open to new solutions that can solve a lot of these problems in terms of the overall fidelity, the realism of the experience, the distribution of the content and the performance on the playback side.”
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Uber will deliver up to 5 free flu shots and a free care pack to users
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Darrell Etherington
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Last year, Uber launched UberHEALTH to deliver on-demand wellness pack and optional flu shots. For 2016, it’s doing it again, with Uber for Health, which similarly offers on on-demand “flu-fighting” care pack when you request one in-app, with optional free flu shots for up to 5 people at your location. And this time around, the entire thing is free. With last year’s program, Uber was charging $10 for the flu care package and offering the shots free, but now both are available without charge. The option to request the care pack and the optional flu vaccinations are available via the “Health” option that will appear in the Uber app on Tuesday October 25, between 11 AM and 3 PM in 17 cities across the U.S. Uber notes in a blog post that getting a flu shot isn’t just about your own health – each person who gets one reduces the risk of others catching the flu by between 50 and 60 percent, since there’s fewer transmission vectors walking around. The free flu shots will be administered by registered nurses arranged through partner Passport Health, and as you’d expect the nurse and vaccine receiver are the only people involved who have access to the consent forms and related paperwork. Last year, the only reason people might have had not to participate was a cost associated with delivery of the wellness pack, while flu shots were available entirely free at designated locations. This year, since the whole thing is free, there’s absolutely no reason not to take advantage if you happen to live in a city listed below where Uber for Health is available. Participating Cities/States: Philadelphia, PA; Baltimore, MD; Washington DC; Syracuse, NY; Albany, NY; Rhode Island; Boston, MA; Connecticut; Portland, ME; Delaware; New Hampshire; Houston, TX; Tallahassee, FL; Jacksonville, FL; Birmingham, AL; Chicago, IL; Columbus, OH.
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The future of books is coming, but it’s coming slowly
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John Biggs
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This week on Technotopia I had the opportunity to speak Laura Dawson, an and the future host of a podcast dedicated to ISBNs. To say that she has her finger on the pulse of the publishing world is an understatement. Dawson knows the ins and outs of the big houses and she understands how they think. Interestingly, almost every publisher is well aware of the importance of metadata and the publishing industry – rather than being the benighted industry we all expect it to be – is quite high tech. The bad news? There won’t be much change in the industry for the foreseeable future. Dawson, for her part, expects to see major changes happen within a decade at best, although the vagaries of book sales are definitely speeding up that timeline. Dawson agrees that publishing is a little slow but she thinks books will still be around for a long time – in some form. She’s most excited about the ability to connect books together – something that fans of the WWW might find familiar – but less like hyperlinks and more like the ability to move through knowledge seamlessly from thought to thought. It’s heady stuff. You can download the or .
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Early stage VC holds up (even as late stage plunges)
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Joanna Glasner
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“We do see significant amounts of data added after the close of a quarter,” said Crunchbase CEO Jager McConnell. While there is some margin of error for projected numbers, it is estimated at below 5%, not enough to change the general thesis that early stage is not experiencing the large, across-the-board declines seen at later stages.
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Cuban: AT&T-Time Warner will create more competition
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Katie Roof
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The administration should kill the Time Warner/AT&T merger. This deal would mean higher prices and fewer choices for the American people. — Bernie Sanders (@SenSanders)
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WTF is machine learning?
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John Mannes
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of headlines about machine learning might lead one to think that we just discovered something profoundly new, the reality is that the technology is nearly as old as computing. It’s no coincidence that Alan Turing, one of the most influential computer scientists of all time, with the question “Can machines think?” From our science fiction to our research labs, we have long questioned whether the creation of artificial versions of ourselves will somehow help us uncover the origin of our own consciousness, and more broadly, our role on earth. Unfortunately, the learning curve on AI is really damn steep. By tracing a bit of history, we should hopefully be able to get to the bottom of wtf machine learning really is. Our first attempts at replicating ourselves involved jamming machines full of information and hoping for the best. Seriously, there was a time when the prevailing theory of consciousness was that it could arise from just a ton of information connected together. Google could be seen by some as the culmination of this vision, but while the company has indexed 30 trillion webpages, I don’t think anyone expects our search engines to start asking us if there is a god. Rather, the beauty of machine learning is that instead of pretending computers are human and simply feeding them with knowledge, we help computers to reason and then let them generalize what they’ve learned to new information. While not well understood, neural networks, deep learning, and reinforcement learning are all machine learning. They’re all methods of creating generalized systems that can perform analysis on new data. Put a different way, machine learning is one of many artificial intelligence techniques, and things like neural networks and deep learning are just tools that can be used to build better frameworks with broader applications. Back in the 50s, our computing power was limited, we didn’t have access to big-data, and our algorithms were rudimentary. This meant that our ability to advance machine learning research was quite limited. However, that didn’t stop people from trying. Back in 1952, Arthur Samuel made a chess program using a very basic form of AI called alpha beta pruning. This is a method for reducing computational load when working with search trees that represent data, but it’s not always the best strategy for every problem. Even neural networks showed their face in yesteryear with Frank Rosenblatt’s perceptron. The perceptron was way ahead of its time, leveraging neuroscience to advance machine learning. On paper, the idea looked something like the sketch to the right. To understand what it’s doing, you first have to understand that most machine learning problems can be broken down into either classification or regression. Classifiers are used to categorize data, while regression models broadly deal with extrapolating out trends to make predictions. — it takes a set of data and splits it into multiple sets. In this case, the existence of two traits with respective weights is enough for this object to be classified in the “green” category. Classifiers today separate the spam from your inbox and detect fraud for your bank. Rosenblatt’s model uses a series of inputs, think features like length, weight, color, and assigns each of them a weight. The model then continuously adjusts the weights until an output is reached that falls within an accepted margin of error. For example, one could input that the weight of an object that happens to be an apple is 100 grams. The computer doesn’t know it’s an apple, but the perceptron can classify the object as an apple-like-object or a non-apple-like-object by adjusting the classifier’s weights with respect to a known training set of data. Once the classifier has been tuned, it can ideally be reused on a data set it has never been exposed to before to classify unknown objects. The perceptron is just one example of many early advances made in machine learning. Neural networks are sort of like big collections of perceptrons working together, a lot like how our brains and neurons work, which is where the name comes from. Skipping forward a few decades, advancements in AI have continued to be about replicating the way the mind works rather than simply replicating what we perceive its contents to be. Basic, or “shallow”, neural networks are still in use today, but deep learning has caught on as the next big thing. Deep learning models are neural networks with more layers. A totally reasonable reaction to this incredibly unsatisfying explanation is to ask what I mean by layers. To understand this, we have to remember that just because we say a computer can organize cats and humans into two different groups, the computer itself doesn’t process the task the same way a human would. Machine learning frameworks take advantage of the idea of abstraction to accomplish tasks. To a human, faces have eyes. To a computer, faces have pixels that are light and dark that make up some abstraction of lines. Each layer of a deep learning model lets the computer identify another level of abstraction of the same object. Pixels to lines to 2D to 3D geometry. This fundamental difference in the way humans and computers evaluate the world presents a serious challenge to creating true artificial intelligence. The Turing test was conceptualized to evaluate our progress in AI, but it largely ignores this reality. Turing’s test is a behaviorist test focused on evaluating the ability of computers to emulate human output. However, mimicry and probabilistic reasoning are, at best, only part of the mystery of intelligence and consciousness. Some believe we successfully passed the Turing test in 2014, when a machine convinced 10 out of 30 scientists that it was human during a five minute keyboard conversation (and yet Siri still tries to search Google for every third thing we ask her). Despite progress, scientists and entrepreneurs alike have been quick to over-promise the capabilities of AI. The resulting boom and bust cycles are commonly referred to as AI winters. We have been able to do some unbelievable things with machine learning, like classify objects in video footage for autonomous cars and predict crop yields with satellite imagery. Long short-term memory is helping our machines deal with time-series for things like sentiment analysis in videos. Reinforcement learning, takes ideas from game theory, and includes a mechanism to assist learning through rewards. Reinforcement learning was a key part of how Alpha Go was able to upset Lee Sodol. That said, despite all progress, the great secret of machine learning is that while we usually know the inputs and outputs of a given problem, and the explicitly programmed code to act as the intermediary, we can’t always identify how the model is going from input to output. Researchers refer to this challenge as the black box problem of machine learning. Before getting too discouraged, we must remember that the human brain itself is a black box. We don’t really know how it works and cannot examine it at all levels of abstraction. I would be labeled crazy if I asked you to dissect a brain and point to the memories held within it. However, not being able to understand something isn’t game over, it’s game on. This post introduced many of the basic concepts underpinning machine learning but leaves plenty on the table for future WTF is pieces. Deep learning, reinforcement learning and neural nets could all stand on their own but hopefully after reading this post you can visualize the field itself and draw connections to many of the companies we cover daily on TechCrunch.
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Honeycomb, a TV and video ad management startup from Adstream founders, scores £3M Series A
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Steve O'Hear
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, a TV and video ad management platform founded by James Carpenter and Richard Carter, who both previously founded Adstream, has raised £3 million in Series A funding. It follows a £1 million “friends and family” round in May this year. Leading the Series A is U.K. and U.S.-based VC Beringea, along with a number of individuals from the worlds of television and advertising. The latter includes David Bell (a senior adviser to AOL and Verizon, and former Senior Advisor to Google), Richard Jameson (the former CFO of brand services company Tag-worldwide), and John Spearman (Chairman of visual effects company Framestore). Officially launched in August, Honeycomb’s platform streamlines the process of TV and video ad delivery by automating elements of the submission process, which typically involves a lot of tedious data entry. I’m told that this results in numerous steps between the creative industries or post production houses and ads appearing on TV. But by utilising Honeycomb’s tech, creative agencies and post production houses can submit content in about half of the time or less, while the possibility of human error is reduced significantly. “The process of getting a TV or video advert from the creative agency, post production house or similar, all the way to a broadcaster or online publisher is painful,” says Honeycomb’s Carpenter. “There could be 30 steps in the process, across email, phone and even fax, all with the potential for human error. It’s slow, frustrating and expensive. Not only that, it hinders quality”. Honeycomb’s other key selling point is that, unlike leading competitors, including Carpenter and Carter’s former company Adstream, it charges the same amount for HD or SD content, meaning that advertisers don’t need to compromise picture quality. “Our competitors charge an inflated fee for High Definition content, and that’s per destination they send the content to, which can add up,” says Carpenter. “As a result, creative agencies and their clients sometimes opt for Standard Definition versions of their advert, which can look poor when sandwiched between HD TV programmes”. However, in addition to automating elements of the submission process, the data sharing part of Honeycomb’s platform also lays the groundwork for the startup’s much more ambitious plans and, along with the track record of Honeycomb’s founders, is likely what attracted its VC backers. That is, the company wants to help usher in so-called in the next two to three years. Explains Carpenter: “This as yet unrealised ‘holy grail’ of TV advertising will allow media buyers to purchase TV ads based on audience data, rather than relying on ratings of individual shows and channels. We work with partners on the agency and broadcaster side to make sure that all interests are well covered. Our system allows that the adverts can be delivered basically fully automated to the ‘publisher’ with all the necessary metadata and then can be inserted in the matching media buckets with the right audience”.
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What we learned about Elon Musk’s Mars plan in his Reddit AMA
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Emily Calandrelli
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Elon Musk, founder and CEO of SpaceX, hosted a this afternoon. He noted that the AMA should focus on SpaceX’s plans for Mars, which Musk during the International Astronautical Congress last month. This will be under /r/spacex, not the general AMA. Meant to be supplemental to the IAC talk. — Elon Musk (@elonmusk) Overall, Musk mostly answered questions about SpaceX’s plan to colonize Mars and the technology required to get there. He stated that their Interplanetary Transit System (ITS) would be powerful enough to travel back to Earth after landing on Mars at any point during Earth and Mars’ orbits. This is a feature particularly useful for human missions where emergencies may arise and an immediate mission to or from Mars may be necessary for survival. Musk mentioned that one of the biggest ITS challenges they’re working on right now is finding a way to properly seal their carbon fiber tanks in the ITS booster. Building large rocket parts out of carbon fiber is relatively new, so SpaceX is currently working through tests with a carbon fiber ITS oxygen tank model. Other interesting AMA revelations are detailed below. In a few different questions, Musk was asked more about what the SpaceX Mars plan would actually look like. He explained that the first missions to Mars would involve the SpaceX Red Dragon capsule without crew. These would be scouting missions designed to test their landing technology as well as their capability. SpaceX ITS system architecture / Image courtesy of SpaceX Then the ITS spaceship, otherwise known as the Heart of Gold spaceship, will fly to Mars with equipment required for a Mars-based propellant plant. Next, the first crewed mission, which will have about a dozen people, will fly to Mars to troubleshoot the propellant plant as well as the Mars Base Alpha power system. Eventually, Musk said, SpaceX plans to double the number of flights each time Mars and Earth become closest to each other, which happens every 26 months. This synodic period between Mars and Earth actually becomes a challenge when you consider that it may not be convenient to travel between these planets during this window. For risk-averse agencies like NASA, this small window is restrictive and a bit scary. What if you have an emergency on Mars a month after you land and need to return to Earth? Well, one Reddit user pointed out that the SpaceX ITS system appeared to have enough power to make those types of emergency missions, if necessary. The user asked if the ITS spaceship could “be used to fly between Mars and Earth even outside the launch windows enforced by the synodic period, when payload mass is not a primary factor? It could be used for emergency purposes such as medical supplies/instruments and experts, or for other high priority but low mass cargo like critical replacements.” Musk replied with a simple “yes.” Musk also reaffirmed what many in the Reddit community , which was that SpaceX’s carbon fiber oxygen tank for ITS was really the star of his IAC presentation. Making large parts out of carbon fiber is a very challenging thing to do, so the fact that SpaceX seems to have already built a full-size carbon fiber tank for their ITS was a pretty big deal. SpaceX carbon fiber oxygen tank model for ITS booster / Image courtesy of SpaceX “Yeah, for those that know their stuff, that was really the big news :) The flight tank will actually be slightly longer than the development tank shown, but the same diameter. That was built with latest and greatest carbon fiber prepreg. In theory, it should hold cryogenic propellant without leaking and without a sealing linker. Early tests are promising.” Elon Musk, CEO of SpaceX SpaceX’s Interplanetary Transit System consists of a booster, and a spaceship. When it comes to the robustness of ITS, Musk noted that the ITS spaceship could handle peak loads of 10 to 15 g’s without breaking up. He went on to say that the ITS booster would work nominally under 20 g’s but might be able to handle 30 to 40 g’s without breaking up. For reference, a nominal reentry for the Space Shuttle went through a max of about 3 g’s during launch or reentry. One Reddit user pointed out that the ITS booster can hover and asked if SpaceX ever planned to use that capability. Musk said that it wasn’t likely. “A high acceleration landing is a lot more efficient, so there wouldn’t be any hovering unless it encountered a problem or unexpected wind conditions. A rocket that lands slowly is wasting a lot of fuel.” Elon Musk, CEO of SpaceX When asked what the interior of the spaceship will look like, Musk said that they plan to release live mockups of the spaceship in a year or two. When asked about the major challenges that need to be overcome for his Mars plan to be successful, Musk said that the biggest challenge originally was finding the right material to make the ITS engine out of. “It used to be developing a new metal alloy that is extremely resistant to oxidation for the hot oxygen-rich turbopump, which is operating at insane pressure to feed a 300 bar main chamber. Anything that can burn, will burn. We seem to have that under control, as the Raptor turbopump didn’t show erosion in the test firings, but there is still room for optimization.” Elon Musk, CEO of SpaceX Now, he said, the biggest challenge is to seal their carbon fiber tanks (located in the ITS booster) properly. “Biggest question right now is sealing the carbon fiber tanks against cryo propellant with hot autogenous pressurization. The oxygen tank also has an oxidation risk problem as it is pressurized with pure, hot oxygen. Will almost certainly need to apply an inert layer of some kind.” Elon Musk, CEO of SpaceX And on a non-Mars topic, Musk was asked about the reusability of the Falcon 9 rockets currently flying. He stated “I think the F9 boosters could be used almost indefinitely, so long as there is scheduled maintenance and careful inspections.” He emphasized that the current Falcon 9 rockets in production would be retired soon and that their next version would be designed for easy reuse. The new Falcon 9, which he calls “Falcon 9 Block 5” – the fifth and final version in the Falcon series, is scheduled to have its first flight in six to eight months.
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With a green light from the Feds, states race to regulate driverless cars
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Eric Tanenblatt
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California lawmakers and regulators just conditionally approved the road-testing of high autonomy cars that require no driver or even human controls, becoming the first state in the nation to flesh out an innovation-nurturing framework after federal regulators last month gave the green light to driverless technology. —eight by legislation, another by executive action, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures—have established a regulatory framework, even loose, for autonomous vehicles. But none compare to the California scheme, which allows for technologists to take the next step by entirely removing human drivers. Now, it’s not often you find a former aide to Presidents George W. Bush and George H.W. Bush praising California red tape. And yet here I am. To date, even the most audacious pilot programs, like , Pennsylvania, require the presence of a safety driver who can assume control in the event of a dynamic situation that overwhelms the car’s mapping and radar systems. The US Department of Transportation rates driverless cars like those in Uber’s road test (i.e., with conditional automation technology that allows the car to manage most operations but still requires a human safety fallback) at the third of its , based on a scheme developed by the Society of Automotive Engineers (known today simply as SAE), with Level 0 representing complete human control and Level 5 representing complete robotic control. warmed what had been something of a cold war among the states on driverless experimentation. So what was once cold is today hot: technologists and state lawmakers alike are now shooting for the moon, moving beyond the already-adventuresome Level 3 autonomy of Uber’s Pittsburgh pilot to as-yet-undeveloped Levels 4 and 5. Within days of the DOT unveiling its new policy guidance, the Governor of California signed into law a first-of-its-kind bill in the Bay area. A day later, the California Department of Motor Vehicles independently released (i.e., steering wheels and pedals for accelerating and braking). The practical effect of the feds’ new framework, which more closely resembles a loose best practices guide for the states than a cohesive national plan, will be a regulatory arms race among the states and the major regulatory jurisdictions within each–how best to address ; how to settle passenger liability in ; and whether to remove outmoded laws that would impede adoption, like or those requiring the presence of . What, for example, happens when a California operator (that is to say, the passenger) of an autonomous vehicle without human controls crosses the Golden State’s border and veers into Oregon, which has zero autonomous vehicle laws on the books? Good question—and one for which we don’t immediately have an answer. What immediately clear is that a mishmash of varying rules and competing degrees of acceptance among the states won’t help to foster widespread adoption of this 21st-century technology. Whether manufacturers can satisfy the imperative to bring the states into general alignment—a lobbying campaign of unprecedented scope to roll back outmoded laws and to adopt cohesive liability laws—is the single greatest hurdle to mass market adoption of driverless cars. Too often, questions about regulation—about when, where and how to unroll the red tape—are framed as a binary choice between innovators and regulators, progress and stagnation. But the truth is that smart, cohesive regulation, such as California’s, will empower the autonomous vehicle space by cultivating consumer confidence in a technology that, until recently, seemed impossibly futuristic. States must work in concert—with each other, with the federal government, and indeed with the industry itself—to forge a deliberate, cohesive national framework that ensures the safety of consumers and the public, while also fostering innovation. California’s speeding down that road.
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The NFL: Twitter’s Kingmaker?
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Ben Shields
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The NFL has a distinguished history of successful partnerships with upstart media companies. When it became the home of Sunday Night Football in 1987, ESPN’s unprecedented growth accelerated. Then, in 1993, the NFL sold its NFC Sunday afternoon package to Fox, firmly establishing it as the fourth major broadcast network in the U.S. In turn, both deals expanded the NFL’s reach and significantly increased its media rights revenue. This fall the NFL is working with another new media partner: Twitter. In a $10 million deal, Twitter is live streaming for free 10 Thursday Night Football (TNF) games. It is part of Twitter’s overall strategy of making live events the centerpiece of its platform. For its part, the NFL reportedly passed on higher bidders for the digital TNF package to test new distribution models with a trusted partner. Twitter faces some inherent limitations with the deal: it is only one year, the TNF broadcast is simulcast on CBS (or NBC) and the NFL Network and it can only sell a small percentage of the ad inventory. However, Twitter can position itself for its own long-term transformative NFL moment if the following happens this season: The BAMTech-powered HD broadcast has been a hit so far, but because it is the same broadcast as the linear networks, Twitter has an opportunity to showcase why the viewing experience is better on its platform. The curated tweets alongside the action are a promising start. If Twitter can enable fans to personalize their experience, participate in meaningful ways and maybe even monitor their fantasy teams, it could convince fans, content owners and advertisers that it should be the premier destination for live sports on any device. Offering a premium product for free and without requiring a sign-up is undoubtedly an attractive proposition. More than 2 million people tuned in for the first game. The questions include: Are these existing Twitter users? If not, how will Twitter convert them into users? Moreover, how will Twitter convince both new and existing users to keep coming back? If Twitter can translate the traffic into new users and increased usage, the $1 million per game rights fee it is paying could very well be an efficient marketing expense. With its NFL streams, there’s no question Twitter will sell more video advertising year-over-year. The longer-term revenue opportunity is for the company to determine the degree to which tweets drive media consumption. This question has vexed the media industry for years. Now with games on their platform, Twitter should have the data to understand the effect of people and brands tweeting about a game, leading to answers that could persuade media buyers to spend more on Twitter advertising. On the surface, Twitter stands to gain the most from this partnership, given the current state of its business relative to the NFL, which took in a healthy $12 billion in revenue last year. But that doesn’t mean this experiment is of little value to the NFL. The NFL is gaining further insight into structuring and pricing its lucrative media rights portfolio for the future. The league’s executive vice president of media, Brian Rolapp, has spoken of the Thursday Night Football linear and digital package as a form of . With the majority of its content locked into multiyear rights agreements, the league has experimented with different models and partners, with this year arguably the boldest test of all. Moreover, selling rights to a non-traditional media company like Twitter opens up the bidding process to a host of new potential partners, creating more competition for NFL rights and thus driving up the cost. In addition, the NFL will better understand how fans consume their content on a variety of platforms. The TNF package is a cross-media research petri dish, with the live games available simultaneously across a number of networks, platforms and devices. Understanding where and how fans watch live games will help the league optimize its programming, marketing and distribution strategies. The NFL and Twitter partnership is the latest grand experiment in the future of television. Regardless of the results, the deal is representative of three ongoing trends in the industry. First, social platforms like Twitter are media companies. In the quest for big television ad budgets, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Snapchat are all acquiring and/or producing premium video content. Second, content creators like the NFL are diversifying their distribution models as viewer behavior changes. And, third, live sports content is and will continue to be a powerful innovation driver for the media business. The NFL on Twitter this season will be a sight to behold. The games should be pretty entertaining, too.
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UK spy agency GCHQ paid NZ firm Endace to power Internet fiber-optic taps
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Natasha Lomas
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The 2013 Snowden documents revealed UK intelligence agency , covertly gathering vast amounts of digital comms data under a surveillance program code-named — apparently with the help of commercial partners. Now leaked documents obtained by confirm GCHQ paid New Zealand-based to create data capture systems to enable it to tap high speed Internet traffic. Endace’s touts its ability to offer “100% accurate network recording, any speed, any network”, going on to note: When organizations buy our products they buy the confidence that all of the network traffic will be captured, analyzed, stored or sent to wherever it needs to go. For network forensics and diagnostics knowing you’ve got every packet captured, indexed, and written to disk is a huge advantage. It allows the teams responsible for maintaining and protecting the network to work fast and effectively when the chips are down. It also notes the company does business with: Endace’s name has previously been linked to state surveillance via a from the companies seeking to sell services to spy agencies. But the new cache of documents detail specific purchases and product requirements, such as a £245,000 charge in a to accelerate “feature enhancements” to certain of its data capture and monitoring products which it says have been “identified” in discussions with GCHQ. The document adds that the majority of these enhancement are “of a bespoke nature” and would not otherwise have formed part of its planned commercial roadmap for the unit. The cache of internal documents include emails, customer lists, project updates, product overviews, contracts and financial reports. has also reported on the documents, which were leaked to The Intercept via the open source whistleblower submission site, . They underline how GCHQ was pushing to ramp up its surveillance capabilities. The Intercept notes that as of 2009 the agency was tapping into 87 different 10Gbps capacity cables but by March 2011 it wanted to beef that up to 415 cables. While an earlier July 2010 document, setting out its vision for 2013, describes its ambition to “. In one contract with GCHQ Endace is revealed to have been bound to the UK’s Official Secrets Act — thereby enforcing non-disclosure of its contract with the spy agency. The leaked documents also reveal Endace used New Zealand government research funding to develop certain surveillance products for GCHQ. Endace was founded in New Zealand back in 2001, spun out of an academic research project. The company was acquired by California-based Emulex in 2015 but , as a private company. In a statement at the time CEO Stuart Wilson said: “Operating as an independent company again allows us to continue to deliver innovative solutions to our customers under the Endace brand they’ve known and trusted for more than 15 years.” In another of the leaked documents, a — which the company described as “aimed at solving the deep storage problem faced by network analytics users” — Endace gives several sample customer user stories, including a scenario in which a ‘Friendly Government Agency’ (FGA) “has the encryption keys for a well-known chat program” and wants to unencrypt all packets set on the network in the last 24 hours to look for a particular text string — Elsewhere in the documents the company switches between referring to FGA and GCHQ, heavily implying FGA is its internal code-name for GCHQ. And while it’s not clear how true-to-life that particular customer user story is, with its apparently jokey reference to Domino’s Pizza as the preferred food of terrorists, the general thrust of the capability request is presumably exactly what GCHQ was after at that point — which was in turn driving Endace’s product development decisions. Another data capture product being developed by Endace with GCHQ’s requirements in mind, code-named , was designed to enable data traveling at up to 100Gbps to be intercepted. The first version of the tech was apparently delivered to the spy agency in November 2011, after which they requested some additional capabilities — including a feature described as “Separate MAC insertion by IP type”, perhaps seeking the ability to target individuals via the hardware addresses of their devices. In addition to selling tech to enable GCHQ to tap fibre optic cables at high speed and massive scale, the documents reveal Endace selling surveillance-enabling technology to a raft of other government agencies and bodies, including in the U.S. and Canada, Israel, Denmark, Spain, Morocco, India and Australia. In the Moroccan instance, The Intercept notes the particular security agency in question — the DGST — has been implicated in torture. Endace is also revealed to have a large number of telecoms customers — including AT&T, AOL*, Verizon**, Sprint, Cogent Communications, Telstra, Belgacom, Swisscom, Deutsche Telekom, Telena Italy, Vastech South Africa, and France Telecom — and also finance giants on its customer lists, such as Morgan Stanley, Reuters and Bank of America. The Intercept flags another which details another strand of its business is providing a “lawful intercept” product, in this case to US telco Sprint — likely as part of a legal requirement that telcos have an intercept capability for equipment on their networks in order that they can provide extracted data to law enforcement and security agencies on request. That said, Endace does also sell network monitoring equipment to companies wanting to check and maintain their own networks — including to help investigate data breaches and network security incidents. One such customer there is . On the finance side, its providing financial companies with monitoring technology to help “high-frequency traders to monitor, measure, and analyze critical network environments”. *TechCrunch’s parent company **The parent company of TechCrunch’s parent company
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Driverless cars will be widespread by 2020
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Andrew Keen
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is CEO of That said, however, he is very impressed with Obama’s transportation policy, particularly the recently announced By the 2020 election, however, Sonnad believes that driverless cars will have become ubiquitous. The impact will be “completely transformative”, he said. And while it’s hard to imagine the kind of issues that will dominate the 2020 election, Sonnad suggests that the autonomous car might well have become a more relevant political issue by then. If Sonnad is correct, we should also expect the ubiquity of driverless cars to have an impact on the increasingly angry debate around technological unemployment, especially given the broader impact of AI on traditional industrial jobs. As always, many thanks to
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Advancements in artificial intelligence should be kept in the public eye
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Parag Mital
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Artificial intelligence allows machines to reason and interact with the world, and it’s evolving at a breakneck pace. It’s already driving our cars, managing our health and even competing with — and sometimes beating at our on games — our best and most talented humans. Many advances in AI can be attributed to machine learning, which works by tapping massive computing power to crunch through enormous amounts of digitized data. Now consider that most of our data, the best minds in the business and more computing power than you could ever imagine sit with just a handful of companies. For these reasons, only a few companies in the world are best situated to understand the true potential — and the current limits — of AI. In response to AIs rapid developments, more than 8,000 leading researchers and scientists — including Elon Musk and Stephen Hawking — have an alluding to AI’s potential pitfalls and possible detriment to humanity. Their main concern is that an existential risk faces humanity: an AI in control of . The letter goes on to state that autonomous weapons are quickly becoming the third revolution in warfare, after gunpowder and nuclear arms, and that AI researchers must focus their research on what is beneficial for humanity, and not just what is profitable. However, much of what is researched with AI may not be public knowledge, and is likely internal research that’s closely held by just a few very wealthy corporations. How can the public make informed decisions about something that is kept secret? Luckily, there are many who are willing to help us understand the current and future potential of AI for the benefit of humanity. These folks include recent nonprofits such as and , with notable donors including Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla and SpaceX. OpenAI’s mission is: …to advance digital intelligence in the way that is most likely to benefit humanity as a whole, unconstrained by a need to generate financial return. Since our research is free from financial obligations, we can better focus on a positive human impact. OpenAI’s technical goals go on to state that they are out to solve a general AI, or an AI that can perform any task, and perhaps develop a body to go along with it. They’ve hired many notable AI experts, and raised $1 billion in investment in 2015. OpenAI certainly has the talent to move things forward, but can a nonprofit really keep up with massive corporate innovation? If so, they’ll need to excel at the two major developments that have made machine learning a success: the exponential increase in computing power, and access to massive amounts of data. To help provide access to the computing power, they’ll need, , a graphics chip manufacturer specializing in optimized ML hardware and software, that just delivered their first supercomputer to OpenAI — a $129,000 machine known as the world’s first deep learning supercomputer in a box. Of course, it’s not hard to imagine that Google, Microsoft, Amazon or Facebook have many more orders of magnitudes of computing power than any one machine could have. That’s not to suggest that these corporations are hiding their computing power. Instead, Google for example, has open-sourced its AI library, called , and is quickly scaling its online cloud computing platform to enable access to state of the art equipment to include clusters of NVIDIA hardware. More worrisome for OpenAI than keeping up with corporate computing power, however, is being able to access the same data. Every ML algorithm requires data to learn — enough data to generalize well enough to the scope of the population. Plenty of data sets for ML have been available since the early 1990s. However, it’s only in the last few years that our digital sharing economy has enabled mass collection of our personal data and behaviors, something an AI needs in order to learn. OpenAI, on the other hand, has no users to mine for data, so it must rely solely on open data sources. Another potential concern is that OpenAI is co-chaired by , CEO of Tesla and SpaceX, and , president of . Will their own companies take advantage of an all-star AI research team with billions of dollars in funding? And will OpenAI employees even care if they are given stock options in Y Combinator and soon SpaceX? Regardless of potential pitfalls, OpenAI is the only nonprofit organization dedicating itself to the humane development of AI. Now that AI is becoming more general, its developments are already surprising us. A nonprofit led by the brightest minds sounds like exactly what the world needs to help us understand the future of AI, and to lead the way toward a positive impact on society. Rather than a corporate-driven scenario, where AI could be used for the financial advantage of a select few, the nonprofit recognizes the potential for AI to develop a better future for all. That includes medical applications that will save lives, cars that will reduce accidents and a general AI that can benefit humanity.
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The banana republic of big data
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Lorelei Kelly
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“The money is in the noise,” said a former poorly paid congressional staffer, now successful social media guru, when I asked why she left. A noisemaker herself, she warned, “It’s going to get louder and deeper.” There’s a reason Americans feel dispossessed by their government. We citizens have fewer and fewer opportunities for substantive interaction with our leaders. Corporate-funded organizations and narrow interest advocacy campaigns stand in as proxies for citizens as the distance grows between leaders and those they represent. This distance changes the dynamics of democracy. When external entities provide to our representatives ready-made policy research and recommendations, the incentives of Congress stop being aligned with engagement, knowledge-seeking and deliberation — its primary trust-building functions. Instead, a “talking points industrial complex” — which may or may not be adequately inclusive — thrives. Competition for leaders’ attention becomes seriously big business. When the winners are those with the loudest voices, and having the loudest voice involves spending the most money, the interests of the average American get lost in the noise. The talking points industrial complex is exploiting the vulnerabilities of our most democratic institution just as Congress moves into the 21st century. In 2010, the Supreme Court allowed unlimited and anonymous money into our governing system with the Citizens United decision. It has metastasized. Big money donors now purchase access to power both through political campaigns and policy information shops. The first of these were earnest translators of academic jargon and complex ideas. They acted as curators of institutionally relevant information. Today, many of the biggest and best-funded think tanks also depend on support from wealthy vested interests. They have become a PR-savvy tribe of “thought leaders” with political action committees and trigger-happy social media mobs. “Goon squads with sharpies” is how one current Hill staffer described them. And, they are interfering with the kind of informed democratic participation that holds leaders accountable for seeking and using the best knowledge available for decision making. The old adage that knowledge is power still applies in the Information Age. The problem is that today the information that turns into knowledge for policy making often comes at a civic price. American citizens are paying this cost because we cannot be adequately represented by institutions that are paralyzed because of their attention-deficit challenges. In a twist of unintended consequences, new companies are using data in ways that make it easier than ever to track and understand the activities of Congress. However, their subscription-only services are too expensive for regular people and even for many members of Congress. Thus, public data that was intended to provide average citizens with better information with which to hold leaders accountable has provided yet another means for moneyed interests to gain the upper hand in policy discussions. In the worst cases, public knowledge is re-packaged and . Like governments the world over, Congress cannot effectively discern and synthesize critical policy information in today’s loud, politicized public discourse. Our democracy is currently coping with a volume of digitized noise that is crushing the civic soul of government. Still, Congress has the responsibility to process information coming from every direction and seek information from stakeholders who are not typically represented in the inflow. Congress currently lacks the capacity to perform these duties. Moreover, wealthy private interests are willing to fill the void wherever Congress lacks deep policy expertise or tech talent. Our legislature does not lack information, it lacks a modern capacity for sorting through the information to arrive at representative, unbiased policy judgement. At a moment when propaganda, viral memes and are vanquishing public discourse, Congress’ deliberative defenses are weak and vulnerable. Committee hearings are down by 50 percent since the 1990s. is at 70 percent of 1979 levels. Congress bitterly decries the consolidation of power to the president — the House even created a — but this damage is self-inflicted. Starting in 1995, Congress began to of its own technical, decision-making and oversight capacity. These cuts have left it with inadequate methods for coping with the weaponized information of our digital era. Some representatives see as a way to be more efficient and with constituents, but members are lucky if they get a computer science intern for the summer because budgets for technology help are minimal. Absent the technical resources to modernize its processes and better manage the information deluge it faces every day, Congress will see the toward diminished capacity continue. This will deprive members of their voices and shut the public out of policy discussions about issues that impact their lives. When the two most obvious components of modern public life are noise and money, members’ daylight hours are devoured by fundraising and appeasing the loudest interests — often self-serving and narrow. They do this instead of diving deeply into policy issues, talking to each other and having substantive interactions with constituents. In other words, they can’t perform the very democratic functions that lead the nation forward. Congress needs an Information Age infrastructure that receives a broad scope of credible input from all stakeholders, synthesizes it and provides output that facilitates a comprehensive, common understanding of the issues so leaders can deliberate and develop sound public policy. Instead, it has a last-century information monopoly and it is grinding to a halt. On the inside, Congress has made great strides to automate publishing, webcast hearings and convert U.S. code to an interactive text template called XML. It is among the most open legislatures in the world. However, from the outside, Congress looks like it is doing everything possible to avoid improving civic interaction about the big issues of the day. What if we move some of Congress’ information infrastructure into the states? Building a new and more decentralized knowledge-gathering system for Congress can increase its capacity and serve its institutional needs for broader participation. By focusing on senators’ and representatives’ constituencies, it can align political interests with a more evidence-based process. Potential already exist. Land-grant schools, museums and libraries, citizens with expertise, local professional organizations — these would become the public interest curators — representing voices that often go missing in today’s public policy clamor. A thoughtful plan would facilitate their participation at the right time and place in the legislative process. It would strengthen, not replace, the excellent knowledge resources that Congress already has — committee staff, the Congressional Research Service, the Government Accountability Office and the Congressional Budget Office. Congress is a durable institution. It is not built for direct democracy, but it can facilitate a more inclusive one, especially if it has public support to start experimenting. To do this, Congress needs help fully integrating into the Information Age. But this cannot happen through the profit-motivated efforts of corporations selling upcycled public data back to Congress or developing new platforms for citizens to petition Congress. Congress must create new norms and rules of engagement for itself and depend on a public — not corporate — intellectual infrastructure to collect and synthesize representative, reliable data and formulate public policy. Not all information is created equal, after all. Public policy requires authoritative knowledge, not just sentiment analysis. The tech industry is a vital player in modernizing Congress, but democracy cannot be renewed with emojis and private algorithms hosted on an advertising platform. Instead, the tech industry should dedicate its best data scientists to the new Librarian of Congress, Carla Hayden. America needs a data center with a civic search engine. If we can’t reverse Citizens United, let us engineer it into irrelevance. Information integrity, reputation, location and inclusion should be decision rules for this civic-purpose algorithm. Finally, senators and representatives must begin to change the practice of democracy itself. Hearings and briefings, for example, should feature new methods of collaborative input, distance-participation, visual data that forecasts and explains outcomes and opportunities to integrate data throughout the deliberative process. How about an engagement challenge for moving parts of the process into the states? The urgent need to adapt our Congress so it can manage well in today’s information environment puts us at a crossroads: Will our legislature be the banana republic of big data, exploited and incapable of benefiting the public with its own valuable information and technology? Or, will it be a 21st century democracy that uses these new knowledge endowments to move society forward?
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AT&T’s new streaming service, DirecTV Now, just got a lot more interesting
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Sarah Perez
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AT&T’s soon-to-launch live streaming service, DirecTV Now, just got a lot more interesting following . Announced , DirectTV Now was already an anticipated new arrival on the cord-cutting scene, thanks to its plans to stream over the Internet without having to agree to traditional pay TV contract. More of a rival to Dish’s Sling TV or Hulu’s forthcoming live TV offering, than something like Netflix, the acquisition will give AT&T access to Time Warner’s formidable media properties for its video service at the best possible terms. That could translate into better packages and pricing for DirecTV Now subscribers. That is, more of the quality pay TV channels could be offered under one low price point, instead of breaking up the available channels into “skinny bundles” – , saying that these smaller packages aren’t scalable. Instead, when AT&T in March announced its plans to launch its own streaming service, DirecTV Now, it said the idea would be to offer all the content you’d typically find in a regular pay TV bundle, but un-tether it from the set-top box. The company had described it as “pay TV as an app.” With Time Warner’s content coming in-house, AT&T has gained access to wealth of TV and movie properties, including HBO, CNN, TBS, TNT, Cartoon Network, and the Warner Bros. film studio, home to the Harry Potter and DC Comics franchises. Through Turner, its has the rights to the NBA, March Madness and MLB. That will help with its channel lineup and selection. And with HBO under its wing, AT&T can take advantage of the technical learnings HBO has acquired by running its own, successful over-the-top streaming service, HBO NOW. As any Sling TV subscriber can tell you, there’s still plenty of room to compete in this area by offering a streaming TV service focused on cable-like programming, but with fewer glitches and a better user experience. Sling TV still has an awful interface, despite its upgrades, and has , as with the season premiere of “Game of Thrones,” for example. HBO, meanwhile, has seemed to better figure out how to handle massive loads of viewers. Then there’s the fact that, as a carrier, AT&T has will offer better deals to DirecTV subscribers who are also AT&T customers. that the data require to stream it on mobile, would be incorporated into the content cost. This could help AT&T better compete with T-Mobile, which has been marketing its “Binge On” services as a way to stream music and video from over 100 top services without counting towards your data plan. For AT&T, the deal, of course, means the carrier has a way to make money from mobile video, which is also what it’s betting on as the future of TV. More people today aren’t just cutting the cord, they’re forgoing a pay TV subscription altogether, opting for over-the-top subscription services like Netflix, or even just free video content like YouTube. That has put AT&T, like other mobile operators, into the position of being a ‘dumb pipe’ – something all are loath to do. With a mobile-optimized streaming TV service, sold as an add-on to its cellular service, that changes. But while there are advantages to the deal from AT&T’s perspective, consolidation like this could be bad for competition. AT&T will own some of the best video content around, and could then deny it to rivals, raise the licensing costs or use it as a bargaining chip in rights negotiations. These concerns, however, , who could require certain concessions for deal approval – like not withholding HBO from rival streaming services, for example – or not discriminating against competitors’ content on its service – something Comcast had to agree to with its own NBCUniversal deal.
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Hillary Clinton will likely be as pro-innovation as President Obama
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Gregory Ferenstein
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Indeed, Hillary Clinton is the latest in a long line of “New Democrats” who have attempted to rebrand the party since the 90s as more tech friendly. (AP Photo/Kevin Lamarque, Pool, File)
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Weengs, a shipping service for online sellers, picks up backing from LocalGlobe, Cherry, and Seedcamp
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Steve O'Hear
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, a U.K. startup that has developed a shipping service for small retailers and online sellers that takes care of the hand and leg work (quite literally) required to send out orders, has picked up £2.2 million in backing. It plans to use the capital to expand beyond London, including other cities in Europe. Backing the seed round are Robin and Saul Klein’s LocalGlobe, , and Germany’s . A number of unnamed angels also participated, in addition to Greek VC fund VentureFriends. Prior to today’s funding, Weengs, which launched in July 2015, had raised a mere £175,00 in angel funding. Aiming to take care of the most laborious and time-consuming aspect of selling goods online, Weengs offers a packaging and shipping service via a smartphone app: You simply take a photo of the items you want to send, add the destination address, and request a pickup. Then, within as little as an hour, one of Weeng’s so-called “Angels” — not to be confused with the startup’s angel investors who I’m sure don’t get their hands dirty — will collect the item, take it to the startup’s warehouse where it is professionally packaged, including a custom-built box. Finally, the package is shipped via one of Weeng’s shipping partners, which include Royal Mail, DHL and DPD. It costs £5 per pick up plus shipping rates. “Small retailers and online sellers struggle to fulfill their online orders when it comes to packaging and shipping with a carrier. They have no resources or experience to offer the shipping services their big competitors offer which usually results in delayed deliveries or damages due to poor packing. We offer high-scale logistics to them at an affordable price,” explains Weeng co-founder Greg Zontanos. “We collect their items unboxed from their location, package them professionally with our own materials and then ship them at discounted shipping rates with reliable carriers. This means our customers can promise same day shipping, deliver their goods intact and with great packaging and save themselves money and time. We also help them with international shipments so that they can address bigger markets; first by creating custom-built boxes and reducing shipping costs, and second by doing all the customs paperwork for them”. The business model is potentially neat, too. Aside from charging a pick up and packaging fee, which alone might set off a few unit economic alarm bells, some of Weeng’s margin lies in the discounted rates it can attain from its partner delivery companies through bulk purchasing, not all of which is passed on to customers. Of course, to make that really work scale will be the name of the game. To that end, Weeng’s typical customers are power Ebay sellers, and boutique stores, such as those listed on Trouva. “Such a shop is usually being run by one or two people and they don’t have the time to find packing materials, do the packaging, book a label online and queue at the post office or arrange a collection within an 8-hour time window. All they need to do with Weengs is to take a photo… with the Weengs app, add the destination address and request a pickup” Zontanos adds.
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Employment in China’s tech industry
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Norman Chang
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Despite murmurs of tumult and slowdown in the Chinese economy, the fact remains that China’s economic engine has been on a tear — at roughly 6.5 percent or more for the last six years. Much of this growth has been fueled by China’s emergent tech industry, as even in Silicon Valley, China’s BAT companies (Baidu, Alibaba, Tencent) and hot startup scene have become part of everyday conversation. According to , human capital has accounted for 11-15 percent of China’s GDP growth, and the supply of qualified employees is having a hard time meeting the market demand and growth. This has resulted in high turnover in human capital as companies try to outbid each other for the best talent. For starters, a 20-30 percent increase in compensation package is considered the norm in China. However, there is much more depth to this phenomenon, so let’s examine it further. Talent moving into big cities for employment opportunities has been a classic global phenomenon — especially in times of growth — and a persistent trend in China during recent years. However, surprisingly, we are now starting to see an exodus from the Tier 1 cities in China (such as Beijing, Shanghai, Shenzhen). Higher standards of living in these cities have become an issue for younger employees (the same has been observed in Silicon Valley). Let’s take Beijing, not just China’s capital, but the most preeminent internet hub, as an example: Monthly rent for a one-bedroom apartment is approximately RMB¥2,300-5,000 ($340-750 at recent exchange rates) outside of the city and RMB¥5,000-9,000 ($750-$1,300) in the city center. Moreover, prices for housing and rentals have been rising at 16 percent and 12 percent, respectively, annually. These numbers may not seem impressive when compared to rent in Silicon Valley, but they’re not so easy to stomach when you take into account Chinese salaries. For example, Baidu in Beijing typically offers a starting annual salary for young tech talent ranging from RMB¥106,000-136,000 (roughly $16,000-$20,000). Apples to apples, this would be like monthly rent of $3,750-$6,500 on a salary of $100,000 in the U.S. Not surprisingly, young people in China are finding it difficult living in the city. Indeed, many eager young employees who came to Tier 1 cities in search of work and opportunity have returned home in search of alternatives. As a result, employers in Tier 2 or 3 cities are benefiting from the new surge in talent. Tech companies and startups outside of Tier 1 cities may see an advantage in terms of cost-effectiveness and margins when compared with their counterparts in Beijing and Shanghai. Many large tech companies have their own internal hierarchies and promotion tracks. These myriad combinations of letters and numbers can often be arcane and confusing to potential employees. Below, I show a comparison between equivalent levels at the Chinese BAT tech giants, and some U.S. counterparts — Microsoft and Amazon. U.S. internet giants internal levels Chinese internet giants internal levels Most of the talent traffic happens in the mid-levels — Baidu’s scale between T4 and T7 and in Microsoft’s scale between 62 and 65. These levels are also chiefly responsible for driving up market standards for compensation packages. If an employee jumps ship from a foreign company like Microsoft, Google or Amazon to a local Chinese employer, it’s possible to negotiate for up to two additional levels of seniority, including compensation. However, this does not apply in reverse. And while U.S. companies in general follow the seniority level limits, compensation ranges for the local Chinese companies are not posted because there are simply too many exceptions. A key note for Westerners interested in China: For foreigners, the term “expatriate package” is becoming rarer in China. Local pay is the way to go and has become widely accepted, even when relocation to China is required. For more in-depth data, I refer you to the following article: . OK, good to know all the phenomena mentioned above. What if I am in the job market or hiring there? Here are a few tips for you. The turnover rate for talent in China has become quite high, even when compared to Silicon Valley. It is not surprising to find candidates switching jobs every one or two years, especially for the most competitive talent. In addition to salary, corporate titles are considered an important bargaining chip during employment negotiations, and there is a tendency to see higher titles in Chinese local companies compared to foreign companies in China. For example, a Senior Manager in Amazon can be treated as the equivalent of a Director position in Baidu — an important note to keep in mind when recruiting or conducting business with Chinese companies. Below is a table of popular online recruiting tools in China, with information that may help you find the right candidate at the right platform. Some sites provide their own recruiting services, like hiring consultancies, so popular candidates may be hidden even when subscription to these sites are in place. Yes, this can happen! What you see here is just a snapshot of today’s Chinese tech industry, but the human capital market in China is continuing to transform quickly! Many of these statistics and trends will shift in the next couple of years, but it’s important to understand some of the challenges faced by companies in China required to spur their aggressive growth. As has been a common trend in China, swift adaption will be the key to stay ahead in the market.
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Funders must give minority founders a fair deal
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Kathleen Kelly Janus
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I learned a shocking statistic recently: Less than of venture capital funding goes to black founders. This must change. Minority founders are, in general, more in need of outside financial support. For many people of color, the “friends and family” plan for raising seed money, which so many founders rely on — asking parents, aunts, uncles and grandparents for support to get their ideas off the ground — isn’t an option, because their family members don’t have the resources to offer such funds. While white families in the U.S. have on average $100,000 in net worth, African American families, for example, have on average just $7,500. When funders fail to give entrepreneurs of color a fair chance, it’s everyone’s loss. The exclusion of minority entrepreneurs from funding streams was discussed in panel after panel at the recent Social Capital Markets ( ) conference, which brings together thousands of impact investors and social entrepreneurs to discuss their approaches to solving the world’s toughest challenges. presented shows that even the high-tech accelerators and incubators whose mission is to increase funding for underrepresented groups often have recruitment and selection biases that prevent diverse entrepreneurs from having access and exclusive programs that don’t feel inviting to women and minority entrepreneurs. The reasons for the funding gap are multiple. First, bias is without question at play. Much of this may be implicit rather than explicit. While explicit bias is conscious discrimination, implicit bias is unconscious, largely the result of cultural messages, such as stereotypes. For example, studies have shown that even managers who do not believe they are biased tend to hire people like themselves. When of the partners of venture capital firms are white and nearly of foundation board members are white, we must expect that unconscious bias skews funding decisions. Second, many minorities do not have access to the education about the informal “rules of the game” of seeking funding that so many of those who are awarded funds receive, whether by upbringing or by attending an elite school, or both. In his 2010 book Chris Rabb describes these rules, which provide a powerful advantage in networking and in the fierce competition of pitching to funders. Another reason for the gap is that venture capitalists or philanthropists often are unaware of the importance of the problems that minority founders are seeking to tackle. For example, the co-founder of , an accelerator for entrepreneurs of color, Marcus Carey offered the case at the SOCAP conference of a black entrepreneur, , pitching a business model for creating a supply chain for hairdressers in communities of color. The problem is that young women of color seeking hair extensions regularly confront poor consumer experiences, an issue that a white man who doesn’t know about the culture of these communities would not immediately relate to. On the positive side, presenters at SOCAP offered a wealth of solutions that funders can easily implement to begin leveling the playing field. Here are just a few: Capital markets have never been more competitive. If you’re a VC looking to get an edge, broadening your pipeline is a great way to do good and do well at the same time. Take the investments of , founder of Lotus Software, whose investment firm Kapor Capital focuses on investing in founders from underrepresented communities. In the firm’s current portfolio, 38 out of 74 investments have been made in companies whose founder is a woman or is from an underrepresented minority community. According to of Village Capital, which trains startup entrepreneurs focused on real-world problems, Kapor’s $500,000 investment in African American entrepreneur , CEO of , a company creating financial instruments for the poor, has grown to administer to help poor Americans get out of debt. This proves that inclusive funding can lead to large payoffs, for funders, for the funded and for us all.
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Overdosing on VC: Lessons from 71 IPOs
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Eric Paley
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Venture capital is a . Used properly, it’s like adrenaline energizing many of the greatest companies of the past fifty years. Used incorrectly, it creates toxic dependencies. The conventional wisdom in the startup community is that when building the very best companies, more capital can be leveraged to accelerate even greater growth. But does this “go big or go home” approach stand up to scrutiny? In the best case scenarios, do companies that load up on venture capital actually outperform those that more efficiently deploy capital? . At we’ve been talking to our community about the virtues of what we call “efficient entrepreneurship.” We’ve written recently about the downsides of heavily funded companies, including the loss of exit optionality, and perils of , but how does aggressive venture capitalization look on the upside? By studying the best cases of venture capital success, what can we learn about the benefits of raising lots of money? The results were surprising – by examining the technology IPOs of the past five years, we found that the enriched (well capitalized) companies do not meaningfully outperform their efficient (lightly capitalized) peers up to the IPO event and actually underperform after the IPO. Raising a huge sum of money is a requirement to join the unicorn herd, but a close look at the best outcomes in the technology industry suggests that a well-stocked war chest doesn’t have correlation with success. Of the 20 most successful publicly-traded startups over the past five years (measured by current market cap), 14 raised in the neighborhood of $100M or less. Six raised less than $50M. One raised no capital at all. These are shockingly small amounts of money when you consider the median privately-funded unicorn has raised . Evaluating startup performance is a messy business. Late stage companies are rightfully secretive. Acquisitions are messy financial affairs often engineered to obfuscate the true value of a transaction. The IPO market was the most transparent proxy we could find, and while imperfect, it is instructive. With notable exceptions, most of the biggest outcomes in venture capital are a result of IPOs. By studying the relationship between venture capital and IPOs of the past five years, we can get an idea of whether raising more capital in the best companies correlates to better outcomes. The data includes 71 companies that raised a total of $10.2B in venture capital Their combined market cap is $566B, or 55X the capital invested The average startup on the list raised $144M in VC to build a company worth $7.9B The median startup on the list raised $79M in VC to build a company worth $1.8B Acknowledging that there is only one Facebook and that it is an extreme outlier among outliers, we excluded the company from most of our analyses. Absent Facebook, the overall numbers still look pretty strong, but it is astounding to see how much one company skews the totals: 70 companies that raised $9.6B in venture capital Their combined market cap is $202B, or 21X the original investment The average startup raised $137M to build a company worth $2.8B The median startup on the list raised $79M in VC to build a company worth $1.8B We only looked at companies that held IPOs between 2011-2015. It would be interesting to go back further than five years, but it is also instructive to examine what is effectively the “unicorn era” in which private companies raised unprecedented amounts of capital. We excluded companies that were founded prior to 2000 (e.g. GoDaddy, FirstData), companies with unorthodox financing paths (e.g. Match Group, RetailMeNot), and companies in Asia and Russia, because they have significantly different financing environments. The result is a dataset, , that includes 71 companies. Most of the data was taken from , except where noted. We also excluded late-stage private equity, secondary offerings, and debt from the calculations, though they are recorded in the spreadsheet. We were less interested in the money raised in the IPO, as we viewed as a graduation point from the venture capital game and is largely a direct function of company size. The data certainly contains imperfections, though we did our best to get it right, and we’re open to feedback on the dataset, which is why we’re making it public. This data might suggest that “go big or go home” makes some financial sense, especially for investors. The most heavily funded companies do have larger total dollar returns. Counted together, the 20 best funded companies on the list raised $6.7B in VC and have an aggregate market cap of $62B, for a ~9X return. The 20 least funded companies on this list only raised $623M in VC, yet managed to return $48B to investors, or an 77X return. That’s a $14B dollar difference in aggregate returns. That’s non-trivial, especially to VC as an asset class. However, ~$12B of that difference is accounted for by Twitter, who raised a little less than a billion dollars in VC. So aside from those Facebook and Twitter, venture capitalists spent ~$5B to make an incremental $2B. It’s important to note that the stock market is volatile and that over the course of writing this post, the 20 most enriched companies have fluctuated dramatically. Still, the variance is usually driven by one or two outlier companies. It is true that there are a few companies founded each year that drive the bulk of the returns. It is also true that in the case of only a couple of outliers (Facebook and Twitter), heavily funding the best companies is a winning strategy for investors. However, It is not clear that VCs have been able to consistently identify the best performers and have instead overfunded even the most successful companies. This isn’t a knock on the VC model—it’s an asset class predicated on risk. The best firms in our industry have shown an ability to run this high risk playbook over many funds. It should be a lesson for founders though. Companies like Facebook and Twitter are critical for the health of the ecosystem, but are not a good model for other startups. Unless a founder is very confident that they are building the next Facebook scale business, they would be better served focusing on creating higher multiples instead of a higher exit value. VC can afford to risk overfunding a dozen companies in order to be a part of the epoch-defining winners, but entrepreneurs only have one shot. As a founder, are you willing to take 4X more risk for what, even in the best cases, results in a 24% premium? That’s basically what the companies on the top of this list did: The median enriched startup raised $193M to build a company worth $2.1B The median efficient startup raised $37M to build a company worth $1.7B dilution, falters along Is this actually the best model for VCs? It’s conventional wisdom in the VC market that investors should heavily lean into their winners, but are you better off doubling down on winners for diminishing returns or funding a new crop of startups with the potential to return 10, 20, or 30X? The most enriched companies raised $567M to return $3.5B or 6X The most efficient companies raised $12.9M to return $2.8B or 218X The most enriched companies raised 44X more money to get a 25% better return Market value at the IPO is important because it is often a marker of the venture capital exit value, but it’s also interesting to consider how these enriched companies compare to their efficient peers in the long term as public companies. Does instilling a sense of fiscal restraint early, where growth comes from disciplined customer acquisition, not a venture capitalist’s checkbook, lead to more sustainable businesses? It turns out the efficient companies have performed significantly better as public companies than the enriched group: Though it’s a ridiculously small sample, look at companies that raised an objectively large sum of money—say over $200M (nine companies in this sample), versus an equal number at the bottom of the list. The results are staggering: The 20 most efficient startups have appreciated by 89% since their IPOs Their enriched counterparts only grew by 22% in the same period. Our hypothesis is that too much capital over time creates a culture that substitutes cash for creativity and operational discipline. Big balance sheets allow companies to grow inefficiently, to paper over problems with headcount and spend, rather than confronting the core engine of value creation. Having less money forces a management team to make hard decisions early on and to cut off potentially wasteful problems that otherwise could linger indefinitely. This efficient ethos becomes part of the long term culture of productive performance that is difficult to infuse in the enriched companies that never operated in a constrained way. There is a fair counter-argument that the enriched cohort had higher valuations at the time of the IPO and that the value was captured by private market investors rather than public investors. While possibly true, entrepreneurs and VCs should consider the implication of this argument is that public market investors may apply significant discounts to the that has raised large amounts of private capital prior to an IPO. It’s important to take a step back and consider how surprising this data set really is. The venture capital industry accepts as an assumption, that in the best outcomes, more money accelerates more success. Some would argue that it’s nearly impossible for a true winner to be overcapitalized – these companies are reinvesting the capital into their success economic engines after all. Capital gives you the ability to make more investment in drivers of the business – talent, R&D, customer acquisition, etc. Intuitively, it makes sense that enriched companies should do better than their lightly funded counterparts. We would have expected to see correlation in these numbers and be debating the embedded causality assumption that we assume in the venture industry. In other words, we’d expect to debate whether the money caused the success (causality), but take for granted that the most successful companies were in a position to raise the most money (correlation with unclear causality). It’s shocking that no meaningful correlation is present in the data. Although the best performing companies are in the best position to raise the most capital, they don’t necessarily do so. With the exception of a few critical outliers, the better funded companies aren’t meaningfully bigger or better performing and actually become worse public companies. VC is an outlier business, a vocation premised on volatility, but the fact that highly-funded companies aren’t clearly outpacing their cash-restricted competitors shows there is a point of diminishing returns for capital even among the very best companies. The data suggests that VCs struggle to understand where that point is. The adage in VC has been that there are only 15 companies born every year that matter. If loading cash into companies is your game as a VC, it appears that there are only 2 companies over the past 5 years that actually mattered. That’s a nearly impossible game to play. Looking at the data, 15 of the 20 best performing startups of the last five years raised less than $125M from venture capitalists. (We’re including Wayfair in this tally, which didn’t raise any capital for the first 10 years of the company’s life and whose deal was more akin to late stage private equity). Four, Atlassian, Shutterstock, Textura, and SkullCandy succeeded with no venture capital whatsoever. Splunk and Palo Alto Networks, combined, raised approximately $105M and currently have a shared market cap greater than $20B. Groupon and Zynga each raised , nearly $2B in total, and are currently worth ~$5B. We know this analysis is imperfect. Some of the companies that IPO’d in 2015 haven’t yet reported four quarters as public companies and even if enriched with VC, might have more positive long term results. Still, this data should give founders and VCs pause. Though increasingly unfashionable in the unicorn era, it is quite possible, and perhaps even advisable, to build a billion dollar publicly-traded company with under $50M in venture capital. Looking at the data, 15 of the 20 best performing startups of the last five years raised less than $125M from venture capitalists. (We’re including Wayfair in this tally, which didn’t raise any capital for the first 10 years of the company’s life and whose deal was more akin to late stage private equity). Four, Atlassian, Shutterstock, Textura, and SkullCandy succeeded with no venture capital whatsoever. Splunk and Palo Alto Networks, combined, raised less than $100M and currently have a shared market cap greater than $20B. Groupon and Zynga each raised , nearly $2B in total, and are currently worth ~$5B. Fundraising is a strategic choice that needs to be as carefully considered, just like your product roadmap, marketing strategy, or hiring plan. Unfortunately, entrepreneurs tend to make funding decisions opportunistically, or even worse, out of a sense of pride or false validation. If you’re enjoying success, money will be thrown at you. It’s flattering and having a strong balance sheet can be a good thing, but it does limit optionality and creates more difficult exit paths. Capital is rarely your biggest constraint or the biggest opportunity in front of you. Worst of all, the evidence shows that there is a limit to how much your balance sheet will help the long term value of your company even in the very best outcomes. Putting this data set in perspective, while the enriched companies underperformed, they were modestly financed compared to today’s unicorns. Our median enriched company (top 20 in terms of capital) raised $193M before going public. Today’s unicorns sit at a median of $284M in capital raised and they may yet need to raise more money to reach the public markets. Our data suggests that this is not a positive sign for long term success. Buyers beware! The point of this isn’t to encourage bootstrapping; nor is it celebrating slow growth. We’re not advocating a “Just Say No” position on raising venture capital – we’re VCs after all. Though some companies are able to achieve huge success without fundraising at all, they are very unusual. Startups don’t get bonus points for trying to build a company on hard mode. The founders of these efficient startups had the same ambition and hunger to build businesses as their enriched counterparts. They just did a better job of it. These more efficient entrepreneurs are building real, international multi-billion dollar organizations with far less risk and likely own much more of their companies. The surprise in this analysis is that it appears likely that being capital constrained to some degree was helpful, not harmful, in that journey. The mystique of entrepreneurship used to be in the magical act of making something from nothing. Now, we celebrate founders who act like banks by raising huge sums from venture capitalists. We think this is unhealthy and needs to change. While the startup market has been flooded with capital, founders don’t need to raise huge sums to be successful, and it seems that even in the highest upside cases, raising less money leads to better companies. Yet today, most founders are convincing themselves to take the opposite approach. We’re making an argument for the efficient use venture capital, not against the use of venture capital. Venture Capital is an essential ingredient in the success of many startups, and there are rare times when adding huge amounts of capital is justified. But like most drugs, there is a time and place for their use and the side effects should be clearly noted to potential users. Our portfolio contains a number of companies that have followed the enriched model and others that were so efficient that they seemed fueled by the scent of a petrol soaked rag. The advice for both is the same. Think about how you would run your company differently if the money in the bank was the last you’d ever get? The answer to that question could make you a billionaire.
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Gillmor Gang: Bret Taylor Talks Quip
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Steve Gillmor
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The Gillmor Gang — A Conversation with Bret Taylor and Steve Gillmor. Recorded live at Dreamforce 16 Thursday, October 7, 2016. As CEO of Salesforce acquisition Quip, Bret Taylor returns to the Gang for a chat about his early work on Google Maps, co-founder of the legendary FriendFeed social network, CTO of Facebook, and his new role at Salesforce. @stevegillmor, @btaylor Produced and directed by Tina Chase Gillmor @tinagillmor
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Multi-media journalists face jail time after reporting on North Dakota pipeline protest
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Lora Kolodny
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Investigative reporter and co-founder of Amy Goodman, is now in the state of North Dakota after her report on a Native American-led pipeline protest there went viral on Facebook. about the new charges against Goodman late Saturday. The news organization, which spun out of WBAI-FM, creates programming which is syndicated via radio, podcasts, cable television, public access television, live streams and Web downloads. Goodman’s story, , has been viewed more than 14 million times on the social media platform, said, and was picked up by mainstream media outlets and networks including CBS, NBC, NPR, CNN, MSNBC and The Huffington Post (a site owned by TechCrunch’s parent company Verizon). Additionally, , is facing felony and conspiracy charges that could carry a 45-year sentence for filming at another pipeline protest in the state, IndieWire reports. Edward Snowden noted Schlosberg’s predicament on Friday with a that said, “This reporter is being prosecuted for covering the North Dakota oil protests. For reference, I face a mere 30 years.” This reporter is being prosecuted for covering the North Dakota oil protests. For reference, I face a mere 30 years. — Edward Snowden (@Snowden) Authorities released Schlosberg, who also runs a production studio called , after originally detaining her but they confiscated her footage and refused to release it according to public tweets from , a fellow filmmaker. For those unfamiliar with the pipeline protests, the are seeking to halt the construction of a $3.8 billion pipeline saying its development will encroach on their tribal burial sites and taint their water supply at the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation. And environmentalists in a group called Climate Direct Action are seeking to stop the movement of tar sands from Canada into the U.S. via a pipeline operated by TransCanada in Wallhalla, North Dakota. Schlosberg was filming the activists as they interfered with normal operations of the pipeline’s valves. The demonstrations in North Dakota have been ongoing for months. Native American advocates and environmentalists have protested the pipeline’s development in other cities and states, as well. On October 10th, witnesses at a captured footage of a pickup truck plowing into a group of activists protesting the pipeline’s development, and calling for Columbus Day to be changed to Indigenous Peoples’ Day in their state. Several and thoughts about the on Facebook as well. The Reno incident injured five and sent one to the hospital. The rally was organized by the American Indian Movement of Northern Nevada (AIMNN). It remains to be seen whether the charges against Goodman, Schlosberg and other journalists covering the Standing Rock protests against the Dakota Access pipeline will stick. But these cases highlight the increasing power, and risks, associated with online distribution for news stories covered by independents, and earlier missed by mainstream networks. Virality and independence, it seems, can attract prosecutorial ire.
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Let’s have a little compassion for (some of) the trolls
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Jon Evans
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It’s looking pretty grim out there in social media land. A lot of what once was conversation has devolved into warfare. The issues of our time — Trump, Brexit, identity politics, housing and homelessness, how to pronounce “GIF” — seem to divide us ever more starkly, and so we huddle within our filter bubbles, and/or lash out at those outside. It’s hard to shake the sense the trolls have won. You know who I mean, right? The random drive-by commenters who argue with you on Facebook. The dogpile cesspools of abusive assholes who haunt Twitter. The acquaintances who seem to escalate every disagreement, no matter how trivial, into an angry flamewar. The people who don’t just disagree with you, but hatefully scream their disagreement. They may be a tiny minority of the population, but they care so much about having their opinion heard, at times they seem to be a majority of the conversation. Whenever this happens, though, I try to remember two things. First, this immortal :
the Hummer that just cut me off is maybe being driven by a father whose little child is hurt or sick in the seat next to him, and he’s trying to rush to the hospital, and he’s in a way bigger, more legitimate hurry than I am … [the] lady who just screamed at her kid in the checkout line, maybe she’s not usually like this. Maybe she’s been up three straight nights holding the hand of a husband who is dying of bone cancer … Of course, none of this is likely, but it’s also not impossible–it just depends on what you want to consider … The only thing that’s capital-T True is that you get to decide how you’re going to try to see it.
Second, a man I interviewed some years ago who had spent ten years in the California prison system. “Don’t get me wrong,” he said to me, “there are some bad men in there… but most are just fuckups like me.” Some few trolls are vile abusers who deserve no compassion, but most, I submit, are just fuckups. You may be furious about Donald Trump’s candidacy; you too may believe that as many of half of his supporters are “deplorables,” but even so, what about the half who are not? I give you this great John Biggs piece “ .” I give you David Wong’s “ .” More generally, I propose: don’t let the truly awful people convince you that they represent all of their side, because if you do, they win. Now, I understand that a lot of people have no time for this kind of moral hairsplitting. I understand that as a white man, I have the rare privilege of knowing that if I’m attacked it’s because of I am, rather than I am. I understand that people attacked for they are tend to be, quite rightly, seriously disinclined to consider the psychological intricacies of who their attackers may be. Fair enough. But please bear in mind: I’m not suggesting that we try to have compassion for (some of) the trolls because it’s the abstract ideal right thing to do. I’m suggesting it because it . Nothing sticks in a truly awful person’s craw like compassion, even if feigned (although banning / muting them would be better yet; freedom of speech does not mean anyone has to listen to you.) More to the point, nothing is more effective when reacting to a sick or hurt person who is lashing out, and I think (and/or hope) that describes a lot of the apparently terrible people out there. At the same time, compassion is also, I fear, the human instinct most quickly and easily leached out by social media, which seems to render us all a little bit more sociopathic. So just as an experiment, just to see what happens, maybe try to make a point of adding a little more to our collective online lives — rather than demonize each other even further.
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How startups can use data to grow smarter
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Dale Chang
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Tech investing isn’t what it used to be — even compared to six months ago. Investors are applying greater scrutiny to deals. Many wonder if the days of the mega round that produced the likes of Snapchat, Uber and Magic Leap are . Founders are realizing they can’t favor growth over profitability, or vice-versa — both are crucial to success. There’s a reason VCs are calling for — they don’t want to see newly minted unicorns shrivel into unicorpses. Companies need to spend their capital carefully, with an eye on steady, sustainable growth. As the pendulum continues to swing more toward smart growth, startups are naturally forced to rethink their approach to operations. Based on my experience advising portfolio companies and consulting, I believe that data-driven operations is the new table stakes for survival today. Here are a few fundamentals of data-driven ops I’d share with any company straddling that line between high-growth and sustainability. One of the most important decisions is choosing a set of benchmarks and metrics that will actually help you measure progress toward specific goals — whether it’s profitability or growth. Don’t reinvent the wheel — look at how other companies measured up at similar stages. If you’re an enterprise SaaS company, for example, compare yourself to other SaaS startups rather than any type of company. Another best practice is to look at the data in aggregate — don’t rely on one company’s experience. I advise portfolio companies to use cumulative data (not just anecdotal evidence), whenever possible, to inform operational decisions. Many VCs keep detailed data on key metrics, like employee compensation, sales & marketing spend, rent and other big expenditures. For example, Scale developed the SaaS Index, which tracks the performance of 58 companies, to benchmark the metrics key to the success of subscription-based software businesses. , , and are examples of other resources that index startup metrics. Sales efficiency is a key indicator of sustainable growth. You need to know the levers that drive sales efficiency — whether it’s lead costs, conversion rates or sales productivity — in order to thrive and make smart decisions. Think about sales efficiency as an ecosystem that you must constantly nurture. While it’s difficult to boost your sales efficiency with any single decision or policy, it’s easy to see it slip if you’re not keeping your eye on the ball. In gauging sales efficiency, I recommend our portfolio companies use our , which measures the efficiency of your go-to-market model. The Magic Number is a relatively straightforward calculation: (Revenue change x 4)/Last Quarter’s Sales and Marketing Spend. A high magic number (x>0.7) might mean it’s time to step on the growth pedal, while a low magic number (x<0.7) could indicate trouble down the road. Regardless of which situation you find yourself in, it’s important to understand your company’s financial health. While sales efficiency is important, there are plenty of other meaningful benchmarks and KPIs that are important for businesses to monitor. You might study customer churn, sales rep productivity or (NPS) to gauge how your company is tracking toward its goals. It’s important that everyone on your team or company is aligned on the definitions for the KPIs you choose. Once you’ve done this, you can make sure you’re improving on those KPIs against your historical performance, as well as the benchmark universe you’ve decided on. Whether you think we’re headed for a downturn or not, there will always be ups and downs in the market. Right now, there is more of an emphasis on sustainability, given current uncertainty over the economy, criticism over companies that are running out of money and an uncertain IPO market. No matter the economic climate, you should think about incorporating data-driven benchmarking into your approach to scaling your business. Keeping a close eye on how you’re tracking against your metrics enables you to have a clear understanding of your performance, and provides you with early indicators that you are doing well or that you need to course-correct.
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Firefox users chalk up HTTPS encryption milestone
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Natasha Lomas
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A majority of Mozilla users were served encrypted pageloads for the first time yesterday, meaning their web browsing data was secured from snoopers and hackers while in transit. The HTTPS milestone was tweeted by Josh Aas, head of the initiative which has been working to help smaller websites switch to encrypting their web traffic. . telemetry shows more than 50% of page loads were HTTPS yesterday. First time that has ever happened. — Josh Aas (@0xjosh) Mozilla, which is one of the organizations backing Let’s Encrypt, was reporting that 40 per cent of page views were encrypted as of December 2015. So it’s an impressively speedy rise. That said, there are plenty of caveats here — the biggest being it’s just one browser, Mozilla’s Firefox, which lags far behind the dominant default browsers of the mainstream web. pegs Firefox at just a 7.77 per cent global marketshare for July 2016 vs 49.5 per cent for Google’s Chrome and 13.68 per cent for Apple’s Safari browser. Add to that, is also only a subset of Firefox users who are running Mozilla’s telemetry browser performance reporting feature. The telemetry feature is also not default switched on for most Firefox users (only for users of pre-release Firefox builds). And it’s just a one-day snapshot. All of which is to say the sample here is certainly very salami sliced and clearly not representative of mainstream web usage. So, while the speed of the shift to HTTPS among this user group is noteworthy and encouraging, there’s still plenty of work to be done to make encrypted connections the rule for the majority of web users and web browsing sessions. The Let’s Encrypt initiative, which , is doing some of that work by providing sites with free digital certificates to help accelerate the switch to HTTPS. According to Aas, Let’s Encrypt added more than a million new active certificates in the past week — which is also a significant step up. In the initiative’s first six months (when still in beta) it only issued around 1.7 million certificates in all. . has added more than a million new active certs in the past week. — Josh Aas (@0xjosh) As well as carrots there are sticks driving websites to shift to HTTPS. One of which is Google, which has said it intends to — thereby brandishing the threat of a traffic apocalypse for sites that do not roll out encryption.
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Stefan Etienne
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Watch all six episodes of the series Trust Disrupted: Bitcoin and the Blockchain
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Travis Bernard
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Our latest video series explores the world of bitcoin and the blockchain, and you can now watch all six episodes on and . The series features Nathaniel Popper, a reporter and the author of the on which the series is based, along with several bitcoin developers, influencers and scholars tracing the history of bitcoin and analyzing its future. Episode 1 seeks to explain the blockchain, the technology that allows bitcoins to be transferred between entities, and the motives behind its creators. The episode also examines the platform’s future and how it will be received by governments and big banks, the very institutions its creators were trying to sidestep — or even overturn. Episode 2 explores bitcoin mining and the role that miners have in governing the system. Episode 3 dives into bitcoin’s identity and how it must choose what it wants to be. Episode 4 investigates the rise of blockchain. Episode 5 looks at Ethereum and its possible implications as well as the effects of a hack on its Decentralized Autonomous Organization. Episode 6 explores the battle between the open blockchain (Silicon Valley) and the closed blockchain (Wall Street).
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Crunch Report | Baidu raises a $3 billion fund
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Khaled "Tito" Hamze
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Tito Hamze, John Mannes
Tito Hamze
Joe Zolnoski
Joe Zolnoski TechCrunch C/O Tito Hamze
410 Townsend street
Suite 100
San Francisco Ca. 94107
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What it takes to secure the elections
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Ben Dickson
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While virtually every industry and domain is flourishing and being revolutionized by technological advances, more than three-quarters of U.S. citizens will vote for their next president on paper ballots this November. The main reason for this is concern over . In the wake of major breaches, such as the and , it is now feared more than ever that the presidential elections might be . And that’s why any form of technology being used in elections is generally frowned upon and regarded as a potential attack vector for malicious actors. But is this a pattern that has to repeat itself every four years? Are we doomed to choose our leaders in settings that one expert described to me as reminiscent of the dark ages for fear of major hacks, or is it possible to see future elections leverage the full power of the newest tech without fearing cyber threats? To answer the question, we must know what are the vulnerable components of an election, what are the threats and how can we leverage technology to protect one of the most valuable achievements of mankind against those threats? To guarantee the full integrity of an electoral process, you need to protect two things: the results and the process. Results account for technologies that directly affect the vote counting and the outcome of the elections. This is the area where cyber attacks can have the most damaging effect, because, if possible, a well-placed hack can bring into question the integrity of the entire electoral system. Electronic voting machines, which replaced the older punch card system following the , are being . Most are more than a decade old and are running Windows XP, which is . And they are being for their security issues. The main concern is, of course, vote tampering. “In terms of voting equipment, manufacturers must secure their code and physical components used to execute the code,” says Edward Robles, CEO of cybersecurity tech company . “Could someone reprogram the equipment to alter the vote tally, redirect votes, or simply fail to record certain votes at intervals, etc.? Unfortunately all of this has been proven possible and researchers have gone so far as to .” In another case, that would allow anyone within half a mile to modify every vote, undetected. And the steps to do so required no technical expertise. And vote switching isn’t the only problem that electronic voting equipment can cause. “On election day, DDoS is likely to be the most damaging attack scenario, as it can severely cripple the voting process by taking down crucial supporting services and infrastructures,” says Igal Zeifman, director of marketing at , referring to the type of attack that would take down servers and machines by overloading them with remote requests. “Consider what would happen if the attack was used to take down the voting system itself or even one of the local election agencies. The result could be catastrophic.” And there is precedence of . Why aren’t voting technology and equipment updated? Part of it has to do with the way the voting system is managed in the U.S. “There is no singular regulatory body that oversees what occurs on election day,” Robles says. “The voting process is regulated at the state level with guidelines from NIST as well as the Election Assistance Commission. The result is an underfunded process reliant on old technology and a lack of uniformity in a world of growing technical complexity and thus, vulnerability.” The EAC is the agency that verifies and certifies the integrity and security of voting machines. But its guidelines are voluntary, and states decide which standards they want to adhere to. At least 28 states are using systems that were never certified by the EAC. “Because elections use state rules and are done by county-level officials, there are almost always going to be mistakes made,” says Sean Sullivan, security advisor at . Sullivan refers to as an example. However, despite all premonitions surrounding electronic voting machines, there is little known evidence or history of direct tampering of voting equipment or results. And as Sullivan explains, the fragmented way that elections are administered actually make it virtually impossible to stage a systematic attack against the elections. That’s why Republican presidential nominee when he . But ludicrous as it might sound, Trump’s presumption is not completely without merit. As it happens, you don’t need a full-scale attack to undermine the integrity of the elections. “To ‘hack’ a US presidential election, all you need to do is to obviously tamper with one county’s system, then leak that the tampering occurred,” Sullivan says. “Many people will rush to assume that all of the other typical issues that occur may also be the result of hacking — and thus, you’ll end up delegitimizing all of the results.” The outcome, Sullivan further explained, would be “a damaged winner who will be undermined in the international political arena.” This could become a major point of contention in swing states, where the winner is decided by a few hundred votes. By not having an uncontestable method to verify votes, chaos could ensue if a recount is called for. As 100 percent security can never be guaranteed, the only way to deal with the threats involved in voting is to include auditing mechanisms that could eliminate doubt. The most basic and impulsive reaction is to revert to paper-based voting ballots or involve some sort of paper trail that could be used to cross test results. “The threat of cyberattacks on elections in conjunction with lack of funding have essentially kept voting technology limited to offline systems with paper backups where chain of custody and physical security are crucial,” says Robles. “It would appear that our smartphones and tablets are far more sophisticated and secure than the voting technology in use. We should consider ways to leverage popular technology with strong authentication to enable a secure and easy way to deploy the democratic election process.” However, there are barriers to introducing and implementing technologies that will literally affect the entire population. “Any technical solution must take into account that a significant percentage of the electorate is not technology-literate,” says cybersecurity expert Jeffrey Carr. “Things like encryption keys, two-factor authentication, and even using a mobile device may be a bridge too far for the elderly or the unskilled.” That’s why experts believe that elections can leverage technologies such as smartcards — aka chip and pin in the U.S. — which have been tried and tested in the financial industry, a domain where the user base and threats are in many ways similar to the elections. “Smartcard technologies are available in several European countries for online identity authentication,” says Sullivan. “They aren’t widely used. If a country such as the United States were to get serious about rolling out such tech, it would be a game changer.” Countries like Estonia are already to ensure the integrity of their e-voting system. “Everyone knows how to use a debit or credit card, and with the advent of chip and pin authentication this might be the best way to introduce a more secure electronic voting system,” Carr concurs. “One that functions in a similar way as making a purchase with all the same fraud prevention mechanisms in place that banks use.” The supporting infrastructure needs a revamp, as well. In the wake of recent hacks, have urged the government to grant voting processes and results protection akin to what is being used in critical infrastructure, such as banking. Sullivan underlines the need to secure servers and back-end networks that support the voting system. “Network monitoring is rapidly becoming a requirement,” he says, and stresses the role that emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence can play. Sullivan’s firm, F-Secure, is focusing on building a service that will monitor network activity with machine learning and report to human experts who will filter out the noise. The will help network admins detect and stop breaches before they become damaging. “This is the sort of service that many organizations such as banks are now moving to adopt,” Sullivan says. “In my opinion, government can’t afford to lag behind.” In terms of developing electronic voting systems that are auditable and tamperproof, a notable effort has been the use of , the immutable, distributed ledger that powers the bitcoin cryptocurrency. would be to issue a wallet and digital coin to each voter, which they will send to the wallet of their candidate of choice in order to cast their vote. The vote will be irreversibly stored on the blockchain, and voters can verify that their vote has been counted. Startups such as and V-Initiative are leading efforts in this regard, and the technology has already been used in elections in Norway, , and . Waiting for an absolutely secure system before moving on to online or electronic voting would be wishful thinking. A more realistic approach though, would be to use a mix of reliably tested technologies along with provisions to ensure auditing and recounting in case of failure or doubt. Because of their short lifespan, campaigns are for the most part woefully weak in securing their data against cyber attacks. The focus is rarely on cybersecurity, there’s little or no federal and local oversight on security practices, office workers are undertrained in avoiding attacks against themselves and their data and there’s no proper security staffing and infrastructure to protect the networks and servers against data breaches. Meanwhile, the information stored by campaigns, which includes donor information, internal emails, opposition research and vulnerability studies, is quite sensitive, and makes them attractive targets for powerful parties such as nation-states, intelligence agencies, hacktivist groups and black-market hackers, all interested in swaying the elections in their favor or laying hands on valuable information. “An information leak about campaign strategy, candid communication not meant for public consumption and private data about candidates and those backing them can all have a significant impact on a campaign,” says Robles. The starkest example might be the DNC hack, which leaked opposition research, painted a divided image of the Democratic Party and led to the . But that’s only a prelude to what else hackers have in stock for the elections, many have warned, . While the hackers who breached the DNC campaign were well-resourced and , the attack could’ve most likely been prevented if the campaign had set . A more recent was carried out through a and tools that can be easily obtained online. And the effects can move well beyond U.S. borders. “Tampering and leaking of documents is undoubtedly sending a very clear message to European leaders — some of whom have important elections coming up next year,” says Sullivan. Aside from data breaches and data leaks, campaigns should be wary of other types of attacks. “I don’t think an attack can severely undermine voters’ trust,” says Incapsula’s Zeifman. “However, there are some examples in which cyber criminals were able to influence public opinions in voting scenarios.” Zeifman warns of the and points to that registered 80,000 fake votes and undermined an online petition seeking a second post-Brexit EU referendum in the U.K., which had gained a total of 3.6 million signatures. Campaigners are loath to spend a hefty part of their limited budget on buying equipment and software to secure a campaign that will last mere months. An alternative would be to use cloud-based security, a sector that since the previous elections. Cloud-based security such as web application firewalls (WAF) and DDoS protection services do not require any upfront investments and can be paid for in an on-demand model, which makes them especially advantageous for election campaigns. “These solutions use traffic inspection to filter out malicious bots, by identifying visitors based on their behavior, point of origin and HTTP/S signature,” Zeifman says, whose company offers a suite of cloud-based security solutions. “This is enough to ensure that whoever accesses the system is, at the very least, a human and not a piece of attacking software.” Another characteristic of cloud-based security is the ability to scale based on the changing needs of clients. As an example, as Zeifman explains, Incapsula combines traffic analysis with on-demand scalability by sharing its 2 Tbps network capacity with any server or website that comes under a DDoS attacks and is suddenly dealing with more traffic than it can handle. This can become crucial if a campaign gets attacked by opponents such as state-backed APTs. “This will ensure that no website on our service will ever go down to DDoS attacks,” Zeifman says. Compromised user accounts can also deal terrible damage to campaigns. are being compromised every year, including some that belong to . A well-placed account compromise can badly hurt campaigns, which largely rely on social media networks and online services to disseminate news and information to supporters. Again, security practices in this sector leave a lot to be desired. Robles refers to the as a recent example. “Powell’s opinion matters to many people and the release of this information will arguably have an impact on this election,” he says. “For public figures, much of their personal information is known or easy to find and it may be easy to reset a password based on basic security questions. This highlights the need for strong, easy to use authentication technology.” Robles believes that in order to prevent the hacking of accounts. His own company is focused on providing reliable and easy-to-use authentication based on mobile technology. Presidential elections happen every four years. We tend to talk about security issues while the campaigns are running, and forget about them after the elections are done. But the threats will remain, and come to haunt us again with a vengeance when the next cycle begins. Hopefully, by leveraging the right set of technologies, policies and practices, we’ll be able to see future elections take place in a safer environment and without the fear of being influenced by malicious parties, whether foreign or domestic.
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Billionaire tech investors support divisive plan to ban San Francisco’s homeless camps
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Sarah Buhr
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The debate over what to do about San Francisco’s homeless population has been building for awhile among the many startups and residents here. But now tech billionaires Ron Conway, Michael Moritz and well-to-do hedge fund manager William Oberndorf have each thrown about $50,000 behind a measure to rid San Francisco of its homeless tent cities. Other notable investors, including Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer’s husband and venture capitalist Zach Bogue, have also donated. Bogue gave about $2,500 to support it. Known as Proposition Q, the proposal would authorize city officials to forcibly remove the tents and other structures from sidewalks after giving its residents 24-hour written notice. The measure also says officials can only take these measures after first offering access to a shelter. However, opponents of Prop Q say this would only make life harder for the city’s homeless. And it may be a measure made in vain. As of the beginning of August, the city had 1,203 shelter beds, with 875 people on the waitlist. “With Proposition Q, we’re just taking away someone’s tent and making them sleep on the cold concrete,” Jennifer Friedenbach, executive director of the Coalition on told the . “They’re not going to disappear.” Many opposing the proposition also take issue with monied tech investor’s involvement. Their donations make up the majority of the $270,000 treasure chest in favor of Prop Q so far and those on social media and elsewhere have argued the city’s wealthy could put their money into something more useful. https://twitter.com/cryptoterpenoid/status/786360393501245440 Conway initially declined to comment but wrote back pointing out he’d been involved in projects to help the city’s homeless before and telling TechCrunch, “Prop Q only allows for encampment removal when real housing or shelter is offered and that’s why I support it. It’s not healthy or compassionate to let human beings suffer in tent cities and we shouldn’t allow it when there’s real housing, shelter and supportive services we can provide for people instead.” Bogue, who served on the board of the Bay Area homeless outreach organization the for the last several years, said he supported the proposition “because it would provide more resources to help get the homeless off the street and into shelters…The encampments are unsafe and inhumane, and frankly, I hope that this is not our solution to homelessness in the city.” Speaking on behalf of Moritz, Nathan Ballard, spokesman for the campaign to support Proposition Q said it was, “inhumane to allow people to live on the street when shelter is available. Mr. Mortiz and Mr. Conway have joined San Franciscans from all walks of life who support Prop Q because they urgently want to see an end to the human suffering on our streets.”
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The combination of human and artificial intelligence will define humanity’s future
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Bryan Johnson
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Through the past few decades of summer blockbuster movies and Silicon Valley products, artificial intelligence (AI) has become increasingly familiar and sexy, and imbued with a perversely dystopian allure. What’s talked about less, and has also been dwarfed in attention and resources, is human intelligence (HI). In its varied forms — from the mysterious brains of octopuses and the swarm-minds of ants to Go-playing deep learning machines and driverless-car autopilots — intelligence is the most powerful and precious resource in existence. Our own minds are the most familiar examples of a phenomenon characterized by a great deal of diversity. Yet, HI is unique among this variety of intelligence because of its unparalleled ability to design, modify and build new forms of intelligence. HI is what defines us as humans and our relationship with everything on earth. Now, through the combination of HI and AI, we are at the brink of intelligence enhancement, which could be the most consequential technological development of our time, and in history. Intelligence, in its varied forms, powers every opportunity we pursue and every problem we seek to solve. It sits upstream from everything else. It is at once the master tool and the master of all tools. It is not only the most general means to do things, it is also the meaning-making force that decides what is worth doing. Intelligence is what allows us to create forms of governance, cure disease, create art and music, discover, dream and love. Intelligence is also what decides that these things, rather than other things, are worth doing, by translating discoveries into meanings, experiences into values and values into decisions. The evolution of human tools, from rocks to AI, can be seen as a trajectory of increasingly powerful effort arbitrage, where we exploit our comparative advantage relative to our tools to do things better, and do more new things. Along this trajectory, tools that embody significant levels of intelligence are our most powerful yet. In this pursuit of effort arbitrage, the smallest of intelligence advancements has the power to yield enormous gains for humans, individual and collective. A seemingly simple change 2.5 million years ago — using stone tools to butcher animals — led early hominids down the path to becoming modern humans. From that modest starting point, throughout human history, we created tools that increased our individual and collective intelligence and became extensions of our natural selves. We started with crude functional tools such as hammers and axes. Over just a few tens of thousands of years, we progressed to more intelligent tools, such as thermostats, and governance technologies based on rule-of-law rather than despotism. With each advance, we happily relinquished a small part of our agency for known pre-programmed outcomes. Our tools could begin doing bigger and bigger things on our behalf, freeing us up for other, more desired tasks. This progression has continued. As we’ve become more familiar and comfortable with our tools doing things for us, we’ve eagerly traded more of our agency for the anticipated gains, even when we’re unfamiliar with the choices and assumptions built into a particular instance of that trade-off. In general, our risk-taking has paid off, and the resulting real gains have generally far outstripped losses. For example, Amazon’s recommendation algorithm is one of the most powerful forces in the world, determining which books are read, what ideas are listened to and what we learn — yet how those recommendation decisions are being made is unknown to most of us. The gains of discovering countless new reading choices are clear. The anticipated losses, including reduced human connection and loss of privacy, either didn’t play out as expected (for example, through various online media, we can now connect with far more people through books, beyond the local indie bookstore owner) or are ones we readily make (giving up some privacy around our reading habits in return for better recommendations). We’re at an interesting transition point where we are moving from using our tools as passive extensions of ourselves, to working with them as active partners. An axe or a hammer is a passive extension of a hand, but a drone forms a distributed intelligence along with its operator, and is closer to a dog or horse than a device. Such tools can interact with us in ways never before possible, such as working with us in a choreographed dance for a talent competition or helping us script a novel or new sci-fi movie. Our tools are now actors unto themselves, and their future is in our hands. Think about the evolution of the car: from horse and carriage to Model-T, from cruise control to adaptive cruise control, and now to driverless cars. Engineers are now programming cars using subtle ethics models to determine, in situations where an accident is unavoidable, whether to hit pedestrians or veer off the road and jeopardize the driver’s life. The conclusions such cars reach in real situations might well be very different from the decisions you or I might make if we were in the driver’s seat, but with hindsight we might judge them to be much better, even if they initially seem alien to us. Ideally, such technologically evolved decision-making abilities can flourish alongside evolving HI, to rethink assumptions, reframe possibilities and explore new territories. We’ve already seen chess evolve to a new kind of game where young champions like Magnus Carlsen have adopted styles of play that take advantage of AI chess engines. With early examples of unenhanced humans and drones dancing together, it is already obvious that humans and AIs will be able to form a dizzying variety of combinations to create new kinds of art, science, wealth and meaning. What could we do if the humans in the picture were enhanced in powerful ways? What might happen if every human had perfect memory, for instance? In short, we are poised for an explosive, generative epoch of massively increased human capability through a Cambrian explosion of possibilities represented by the simple equation: HI+AI. When HI combines with AI, we will have the most significant advancement to our capabilities of thought, creativity and intelligence that we will have ever had in history. While we’re starting with HI+AI in health diagnosis, transportation coordination, art and music, our partnership is rapidly extending into co-creation of technology, governance and relationships, and everywhere else our HI+AI imagination takes us. The biggest bottleneck in opening up this powerful new future is that we humans are currently highly limited in how we can participate in these possibilities. Our connection with our new creations of intelligence is limited by screens, keyboards, gestural interfaces and voice commands — constrained input/output modalities. We have very little access to our own brains, limiting our ability to co-evolve with silicon-based machines in powerful ways. Relative to the ease and speed with which we can make progress on the development of AI, HI, speaking solely of our native biological abilities, is currently a landlocked island of intelligence potential. Unlocking the untapped capabilities of the human brain, and connecting them to these new capabilities, is the greatest challenge and opportunity today. The single most powerful avenue for achieving this unlocking today is neuroprosthetics. In recent years, research labs around the world have made enormous strides in understanding how the brain works, how to connect it to outside sources and how we might tap more deeply into its potential. The most immediate need for these devices is apparent in the growing number of people living longer lives while suffering from neurodegenerative disorders. These devices — by directly extending HI, including our memory and other cognitive capabilities — could lead to unprecedented longevity of the mind and body. (Full disclosure: I’ve started a company in this arena.) There are other paths to improved HI including genomics and pharmacological interventions. But these have one severe limitation, their inability to extend the brain’s ability to communicate with our tools of intelligence (AI). To truly realize the potential of HI+AI, we need to increase the capacity of people to take in, process and use information, by orders of magnitude. For this, neuroprosthetics are the most promising avenue to meet this challenge. From the writings of Isaac Asimov to Terminator and Doctor Who, we have seen visions of future intelligence that have influenced how we all imagine our machine-filled future. These visions have sensitized society to the downsides and risks of potential future machine intelligence. As with all new technologies, losses are much easier to imagine than gains. It is certainly true that with every new technology we create, new risks emerge that need thoughtful consideration and wise action. Medical advances that saved lives also made germ warfare possible; chemical engineering led to fertilizers and increased food production but also to chemical warfare. Nuclear fission created a new source of energy but also led to nuclear bombs. As we embark on the greatest human expedition yet, now is the time for a discussion about HI+AI. But rather than letting risk-anchored scaremongering drive the discussion, let’s start with the promise of HI+AI; the pictures we paint depend upon the brushes we use. The narratives we create for the future of HI+AI matter because they create blueprints of action that contend for our decision-making, consciously and subconsciously. Adopting a fear-based narrative as our primary frame of reference is starting to limit the imagination, curiosity and exploratory instincts that have always been at the core of being human. We are all alive at a time when we are gaining access to unprecedented powers of creation. Using our natural intelligence and the external extensions of intelligence we’ve progressively built over the last millennium, we have now developed tools of creation such as genomics, synthetic biology and robotics that literally allow us to program our existence in any way we can imagine. We have progressed from players to makers of the game. It’s something that I feel immensely grateful for and which has me jumping out of bed in the mornings. We’re living a story of epic proportions and the future is ours to seize. This is precisely why HI is the most important thing we could possibly be working on right now. At a time when the greatest opportunities in history are before us, we shouldn’t become the biggest limiting factor in our own stories.
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Echo Spatial Perception starts rolling out to Amazon’s Alexa devices
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Brian Heater
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Of course Amazon wants you to own an Echo device. But not just one. The company really, really hopes to get one into every room of its customers’ homes. That’s where the second generation of the comes in — $50 a pop, and even cheaper if you buy them in packs of six or twelve. Granted, I live in New York City, but that roughly works out to four Dots per room for me. It’s a lot. Perhaps overkill, even. It’s a bit of an issue, of course, when those products start competing for your attention — a kind of, “oh no, I have too many robot helpers in my home” problem, but a problem nonetheless. Last month, Amazon announced a fix in the form of the scientifically sounding Echo Spatial Perception. The feature essentially helps the device know which one of the devices is closest to the person trying to get Alexa’s attention. Amazon has officially started rolling out the feature to some of its devices today. ESP will hit first-generation Echoes and Dots first, with another round coming to generation two in the coming weeks.
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Add Google Assistant to your phone by tweaking two lines of code
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Devin Coldewey
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Want , but don’t want to spend your allowance on a Pixel? I’ve got good news and bad news. The good news is you can get it with two tiny tweaks to a single config file — the bad news is you’ll need root access, and there’s no guarantee it’ll work on your phone in particular. ⚠️ ⚠️Don’t try this unless you know what you’re doing. Fiddling around in root and bootloaders can and does brick phones. — lots of users are reporting problems. With that said… XDA user and shiba inu runs the with details and a growing compatible-phones list, and . First of all, you’ll need Nougat installed. If you have root, use a file explorer to find build.prop, under Root/System. Search for the following two values, and adjust them like so (or add them if you don’t find them): Save and reboot, then go to Settings>Apps, select Google, and clear its data and cache. It should reload with Assistant built in, which you can call up with a long home button press. Don’t have root? You may still be able to get the feature if you have an unlocked bootloader; you’ll need to go through a custom recovery image or the built-in fastboot. Even more problems are being reported with this method, though, possibly due to mismatched build.prop files. Mit Panchani runs you through the process below. Uninstall the Google app entirely to start. Then download the files from (thanks FaserF) and flash them, GoogleAssistantVelvet.zip first and then GoogleAssistantBuildProp.zip second. Reboot, OK the extra permissions Google now wants and you should be off to the races. Sound like too much trouble? It might be! It’s risky! You probably shouldn’t. This Assistant doesn’t sound like all that much fun anyway. You’re going to anyway? Well, I tried.
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Audi axed its electric supercar, per report
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Matt Burns
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The Audi R8 e-tron is dead if from Car and Driver is to be believed. The production version of the car was unveiled at the 2015 Geneva Auto Show and apparently Audi produced fewer than 100 vehicles — which sported a $1.1 million window sticker each. When announced, the e-tron seemed like a key part of Audi’s future. Built in the same vein as the R8, the e-tron sat on top of Audi’s line as a shining electric halo. A 92 kWh battery-powered two electric motors provided 456 horsepower and 679 pound-feet of torque. This resulted in an acceptable but not neck-snapping zero to 60 mph time of 3.9 seconds. The e-tron was the only R8 model available with rear-wheel drive. The rest of the model range was equipped with all-wheel drive. The e-tron was Audi’s entrant into the automobile world’s EV supercar race. When the concept was announced in 2010, many automakers were producing one-off electric concepts of various flavors. Mercedes-Benz , while BMW turned the stunning BMW Vision Efficient Dynamics into a relatively affordable hybrid supercar. So where does this leave Audi? The German automaker currently sells the A3 e-tron, an affordable plug-in hybrid hatchback. But owned by Volkswagen, Audi likely has several major EV projects in the pipeline, though none have been detailed. And none will be as gorgeous as the e-tron.
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Alibaba backs PlaceIQ, a provider of location tools and data
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Anthony Ha
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has a new, big-name investor — Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba. The companies aren’t disclosing the size of the deal; they’ll only say that it’s a strategic, minority investment, and that it’s an addition to that PlaceIQ announced at the beginning of this year. Co-founder and CEO Duncan McCall told me this is part of a larger partnership, where Alibaba will be using PlaceIQ’s technology. “I don’t want to speak for [Alibaba], but in my mind, they didn’t want to invest in a company — they wanted to find a strategic partner,” McCall said. PlaceIQ combines location data with “first-party” data from marketers to provide a fuller understanding of consumer behavior — not just whether someone’s visited a car dealership, for example, but whether they’re actually shopping for a car, and what kinds of TV stations they’re likely to watch. McCall said Alibaba could use PlaceIQ’s technology in a variety of ways, including marketing, product recommendations and providing data for broader decision-making. In his view, this illustrates how location data has become useful for more than mobile advertising, or even advertising in general: “Location now becomes less about sales and marketing and more real technology making decisions and business insight where that becomes much more important.” McCall also suggested that as PlaceIQ looks to expand internationally, it will continue to follow this partnership model. “For us, our core value is in the data and technology,” he said. “When we want to get into [a new geography], let’s find the market leader and deploy with them.”
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Google’s latest Transparency Report sets more records in government request numbers
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Devin Coldewey
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Google has added the data from the first half of 2016 to its ongoing page, and the changes are pretty much what you’d expect: more requests. Some frivolous, some legit, some top secret. Requests for user information jumped to a record total of 44,943 (up from the previous six months’ 40,677), with the U.S. leading the pack, as usual, with 30,123 of those — second place goes to Germany, then France a distant third, with India and the U.K. at her heels. New to the board: Algeria, Belarus, Cayman Islands, El Salvador, Fiji and Saudi Arabia. Welcome! None produced more than a handful of requests, though. The U.K. overtook India, but other than that, the top 5 are unchanged. An average of 64 percent of those requests were granted, though Google doesn’t (and in most cases can’t) give details of which accounts and data were requested. The statistics for content removal requests are more detailed, but that data is still from late 2015; I’m sure we can expect updated numbers there soon. Richard Salgado, the company’s director of law enforcement and information security, that a single National Security Letter was made public, changing the numbers of NSLs received in the second half of 2015: what was once 0-499 is now 1-499. Smells like freedom! On the other hand, Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act requests increased in the same period, to somewhere north of 21,000 — considerably more than the year’s first half, which had around 16,000. We won’t know 2016’s numbers for a while, as there’s a mandatory six-month delay on reporting them. It’s been a more or less continuous climb since 2009, so don’t expect the numbers to go down, or if they do, not by much.
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Turn a DJI Phantom 4 into a search & rescue drone with the EXO 1 exoskeleton
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Matt Burns
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The DJI is a fantastic all-purpose drone, but with the , it becomes a dedicated search and rescue tool. The 3D-printed add-on quickly attaches to the drone and adds a host of features key to making the drone a valuable tool for first responders. There are GoPro mounting points at various locations around the exoskeleton that can be used for cameras, lights and any number of the various devices and accessories that have adopted the mounting design. Plastic zip-ties are used to connect the kit to the drone. The designer points out that the mounting points work well with Knog Qudos lights because of their small, but powerful, lights and GoPro mounting ports. The EXO 1 can be equipped with a novel but simple payload system. Using carabiners and neodinyum magnetics, the drone can lift a small payload and deliver it to a person without landing — just pull to release the payload from the magnet. This exoskeleton was part of a design contest sponsored by DJI and Shapeways, no doubt to show the versatility of the Phantom 4 and Shapeways 3D-printing service. The EXO 1 won the contest, netting the designer $1,000 and a Phantom 4 drone. The EXO 1 is currently available for ordering from Shapeways for $113.
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What regulation crowdfunding in the JOBS Act means to entrepreneurs and startups
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John Rampton
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was signed into law by President Obama in 2012, allowing companies to acquire funding through online portals from non-accredited investors, which roughly accounts for 97 percent of the population in the United States. On May 16, 2016, Title III of the , also known as r c , or , was the last section to be implemented by the SEC. With such a large pool of potential investors looking to enter the market, it would seem that the and investment communities would be extremely welcoming of Title III — but it seems like the exact opposite is happening. This could be because not enough is understood about this type of . As a founder who has tried all types of , I’ve seen significant benefits to all platforms, including equity . Equity c shares similarities with Kickstarter campaigns in terms of how a company must spread their message to potential investors about their products in order to successfully raise enough funding. However, the main difference between equity , rewards-based and donation-based is the investor’s end goal in rewards-based , such as Kickstarter and Indiegogo. Rewards-based fundraising is aimed at enticing investors based on the benefits they would receive in relation to the amount they contribute. As a founder, I’ve used this type of and have helped others do so with great results. It’s been ideal for taking a prototype to the next level because those investing are excited about the concept they see and are incentivized to invest because they will most likely be one of the first to receive the new product. I’ve experienced wildly successful rewards-based been the reason our company could move to the next level in our development. Donation-based funding that comes as goodwill from the community. This method is geared toward charitable contributions rather than capital acquisition, which is the aim of equity . When investing through equity , an investor receives shares in the company instead of a final product, which tends to yield a greater benefit for the investor long-term. The way the shares are structured allows the founders to retain control of their company even after selling a portion of their equity to multiple investors across the country. While equity was developed with the intention of providing significant benefits, many have professed some major concerns related to how equity might change the funding landscape. The major concerns include the numerous intimidating filing requirements that must fill out for the SEC, the need for constant reporting to the SEC, the requirement that company financials be made available to investors and the review or audit of financials by an accountant based on how much you have raised. However, others believe these requirements are justified. Manny Fernandez, CEO and co-founder of and the 2014 Equity Leadership Award recipient, notes, “When a company is just starting, transparency in terms of financials is irrelevant because there is nothing to hide from potential investors. This is one of the various ways in which established investors are trying to maintain control of and prevent them from finding alternate funding opportunities apart from the traditional methods. It makes good business sense to all involved.” Another concern has been the liability companies might face when an investment venture, failing to generate any returns or growth, shuts down. A decision such as this made by founders may motivate some jilted investors to seek compensation for their lost investment. However, when an entrepreneur fills out a Form C, full disclosure is made to potential investors about the risks, which are associated with investing in the company. It is highly unlikely that any disgruntled investor would be able to win any lawsuit seeking reparations as long as general risks involved in their investment are disclosed to potential investors. Also, investment limitations based on income level have been established by and the SEC to help investors not risk their entire pension or life savings by making one bad investment. Another issue has been the fact that because there tend to be with equity , the cost of using this type of platform might outweigh the benefits of it, as smaller individual investment amounts may raise the amount of investors on the cap table. In addition, the fee charged by funding portals reduces the total amount raised. However, although the amount per investor is smaller, there is also a larger amount of people who are helping you watch the business grow. For me, as an entrepreneur, I’ve spent a considerable amount of time and money looking for potential investors for my digital wallet startup who are not always readily available, in the local area or willing to invest in the idea that they are pitched. Instead, with equity , I pay a fee and then get access to more investors, which has saved me considerable time, money and effort, as well as enables me to get started on building out my company sooner. One of the greatest benefits with equity is that I can set my own terms for the shares of the company, providing me with more autonomy and freedom. The shares sold through equity are limited to only one class of securities, so there are no voting rights. Instead, the investor is simply investing in the company’s profitability and success. This process has helped me maintain control and minimize any potential threat of investors commanding the direction of the company during the early stage of fundraising. Some have expressed their dislike of the fact that there is a fundraising limit of a million dollars over a 12-month period. However, it’s important to remember that this type of funding is typically only for the first round, and it can be used again for future stages of growth or other types of funding can be implemented at that point. Also, some of my companies started on much less funding and I was able to leverage more funding through equity at a later stage when I really needed a larger amount. In March of this year, before Title III was implemented, the bill was introduced into Congress to address and improve upon some of the shortcomings of the current legislation. The first proposal is to increase the annual fundraising limit from $1 million to $5 million, which allows who require larger amounts of capital in the seed round to use equity as a potential source of funding. The second proposal is the “test the waters” provision, which allows to gauge the interest of potential investors through an online portal before they take the time, effort and money to extend an initial offering. The third proposal is to allow for the use of SPVs (special purpose vehicles), which would help keep their cap tables organized because the investors of low-dollar amounts are grouped together into one large fund that appears on the cap table as one large entity. These proposed fixes are now up to the Senate to decide, and it will take for it to be passed. In the meantime, I highly recommend considering equity crowdfunding, as it has offered an additional avenue for funding without having to contend with investors who want to take over and run my business. As an entrepreneur, I know that risk is just part of the game. If I always played it safe, I wouldn’t be here today, with a rapidly growing online invoicing and payments business. The risk involved with equity is minimal. What I always recommend before using any kind of funding vehicle is to do your research, understand what is involved in terms of benefits and risks and determine how you could use the funds wisely at a certain stage in your startup’s development. Today’s equity marketplace also has credible platforms that are driving greater success for those using this funding source and connecting more quickly to the investors they need to become successful.
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Lyft partners with Brookdale to bring on-demand rides to senior communities
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has struck a landmark partnership with one of the largest operators of senior living facilities in the U.S., Through this partnership, Brookdale residents will be able to book a Lyft ride, on-demand or pre-scheduled via a concierge in their community, no smartphones or apps required. The rides will be billed to their rooms, and they won’t have to give out personal credit card information to book them. According to Andrew Smith, Brookdale’s Director of Strategy and Innovation, Lyft’s app will also be included in tech education courses for seniors living in Brookdale communities. Seniors who do use smartphones, or web-enabled feature phones, will be able to learn how to book Lyft rides on their own from Brookdale tech educators. The partnership is the latest indication of Lyft’s strategy to gain users in the massive, aging boomer demographic. Uber has , partnering with cities to and senior groups and facilities within them to offer tech education and services. In January, Lyft announced it was launching , a service that lets a “requester” book non-emergency medical transport for seniors. Via Concierge, a requester puts in a passenger’s name, pick-up and drop-off locations and Lyft dispatches a driver with a vehicle that can accommodate their needs, including wheelchair-friendly vehicles. Brookdale does run some transportation services of its own to take seniors on a regularly scheduled basis to shopping centers, museums and other cultural or social hubs, as well as medical appointments. But Smith said Lyft will give residents more personal freedom in between those scheduled rides, and can help Brookdale tap into a network of Lyft drivers and avoid having to navigate all the mom and pop transportation services in every market where they operate. Brookdale is currently facing a filed by a nurse, Marjorie Prather, who previously worked there alleging $35 million worth of Medicare billing fraud. The case was recently reopened by the U.S. Court of Appeals after previous dismissals. The Lyft service is currently being piloted at 10 Brookdale communities around the San Francisco Bay Area and Phoenix, Arizona. If it proves a success, Brookdale will consider expanding it across their 1,114 facilities across 47 states, where more than 100,000 seniors live today. Both companies are slated to discuss innovation and technology design for and with seniors at the Aging 2.0 OPTIMIZE conference in San Francisco on Friday October 14th. seeks to improve the lives of older adults through media and events that bring senior care professionals together with tech entrepreneurs, and connect both to senior communities who can inform the design of their products and services.
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These soft robotic muscles could help with physical therapy
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Devin Coldewey
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Robotic exoskeletons are one of those technologies that tend to be associated with warfare or at least the industrial sector, but soft robotics and artificial muscles like make them suitable for more delicate operations as well. The Reconfigurable Robotics Lab at the Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne is working on this versatile technology, specifically a tubular muscle made of elastic materials, the motion of which can be tightly controlled. They can stretch and bend when activated by air pumps — currently not small enough to wear, but getting there. Alone, they look like weird little worms. But by packing these actuators into bundles, the researchers have made simple robots that act as a credible analogue to human muscles. Sure, you could use them to create super-strong workers or punching machines, but the Swiss aren’t like us. They’re taking a more humanitarian path. “We are working with physical therapists from the University Hospital of Lausanne who are treating stroke victims,” said EPFL’s Matthew Robertson in a university news release. Several of the robotic muscles are arranged on a belt and stretch up the lower back. “The belt is designed to support the patient’s torso and restore some of the person’s motor sensitivity.” It combines the best of rigid electronics with soft passive assistance like compression garments. They’re powerful enough to help, but not so much that anyone needs to worry about being injured by them. And there are plenty other applications envisioned for the tech. The team published their work in , and has kindly made the hardware design and software tools .
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You have less than 24 hours to apply to the Startup Battlefield at Disrupt London
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Samantha O'Keefe
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Yes, you read that right. for the Startup Battlefield at Disrupt London close tomorrow, Thursday at noon PT! Time to get going. You can do it. Startups should note that teams from across Europe and around the world are all eligible to participate in the event. We’re looking for the hottest seed-stage startups to launch on our stage and all verticals are welcome! Don’t leave €30,000 on the table. Alumni from our European Battlefield events are a very strong group. This summer 26 (formerly Number26) and secured a full banking license. Aircall for its call center software-as-a-service. Olly by Emotech to bring their AI-powered robot to market. Lystable continues to bring on clients at an alarming rate, as well as including Max Levchin. Photomath launched a with the ability to solve handwritten math problems and Hamwells is shipping its . Crate.io, the winner of the Battlefield from Disrupt London 2014, for their next-gen SQL database. Recently, the Battlefield has been the launch vehicle for startups in batteries, biotech, bitcoin, cloud computing, consumer hardware, dev tools, education, fintech, e-commerce, healthcare, emerging market connectivity, security and many others. Creating a new market? We like that, too. For more information and to apply to the Startup Battlefield, head and submit your application by October 13th at 12pm PT. Startups will find out in early November if they are selected to participate. So what are you waiting for?
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NHL’s streaming season kicks off with new Apple TV and ‘Arena’ apps
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Darrell Etherington
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It’s time for hockey season, news related to which I must cover because of the circumstances of my birth (Canada). So I will tell you that the NHL has a new slate of digital offerings for fans of the ice-based sport, including a new tvOS app for the latest generation Apple TV (which debuted during the pre-season). Also new this season is Arena, a new app created by streaming partner BAMTech which is designed to supplement the in-person experience at games in the venues of 12 participating NHL teams. This is the first full season during which MLB spinoff BAMTech is the streaming provider, and digital product provider for the NHL. BAMTech emerged as an early powerhouse in digital streaming, powering everything from live sports to the standalone HBO Now subscription streaming app. They’re the standard-bearer in the industry, especially when it comes to managing the kind of scale of viewership only live sports can attract. NHL.TV, which the NHL’s over-the-top streaming service, allows viewers to stream any out-of-market game both live and on-demand, across a variety of platforms including iOS, Android, Xbox One, PlayStation 4 and now Apple TV. Streaming is available at 60fps, in HD resolution, and DVR features offer pause/rewind controls for live games. On iPad, the app also offers multitasking and picture-in-picture features on applicable device models. Ironically, NHL.TV isn’t available in Canada, where streaming is handled by Rogers GameCentre Live instead. As for Arena, it’s a bit like MLB’s Ballpark, giving NHL fans at the 12 participating arenas the ability to check out a calendar of local events, as well as letting them buy their tickets and then present them on device for redemption. In-arena promotions, as well as in-seat delivery of concession items, are also built-in. The app will also help fans share their experiences on social with upcoming features, and paves the way for a full suite of mobile payment offerings for in-venue retailers to come. Now I must return to playing hockey, which Canadians are required to do constantly during all daylight hours from October 1 through the end of April.
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The Impossible Foods burger heads West
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its West Coast debut today, starting with Jardiniere and Cockscomb in San Francisco and Crossroads Kitchen in Los Angeles. The startup, which has a whopping in venture capital so far for its plant-based burger that aims to look, taste and bleed like real beef announced it is now available in California. The announcement was made to a room full of press at Tank18 in downtown San Francisco. But the company made its official earlier this summer at chef David Chang’s Momofuku Nishi in New York City.
And there’s been a continued amount of hype around this burger so far among foodies. In addition, the four-year-old Redwood City company scored in funding at the beginning of October. But what might be thought of as an unseemly amount for what appears on the surface to be another fake meat product has been through years of vigorous research and an endless amount of testing and trying in a Silicon Valley lab. The goal? To make a meaty substitute that, if you didn’t know it, might think is the real thing. “We wanted to look at what is meat and look at in a way that no one has looked at it before and break it down into all the molecular components that make up meat and try to understand what makes meat meat,” Impossible Foods principle scientist Rachel Fraser explained. A demonstration of how the meat is made in Impossible Foods Redwood City, California lab. The ground beef product is supposed to be, calorie for calorie the same as a hamburger. It’s also vegan, provides all your essential amino acids and B vitamins, plus adds about six grams more protein. The company opened up about how it makes the, er, sausage, on a recent press tour I went on at its lab in Redwood City. It won’t surprise you to find the burger is made up of the usual stuff regularly used to make vegan meat products – wheat protein, soy, some water and salt. But the real beauty here is the addition of something called heme. Heme is found abundantly in animal muscle tissue. It’s part of the process that brings oxygen to our blood and what makes it turn red. It also gives meat that tangy, bloody, vinegar taste. And, weirdly, it can also be found in the roots of soybeans. A filtration system used to further refine the heme. This is the same type of filtration you might see at a winery to bring out the full flavor of the grapes. Impossible Foods makes gobs of the stuff and then adds it to its ground beef to give it that beef-like flavor and really make it sizzle on the grill. Founder Pat Brown also says the Impossible burger uses three-quarters less water to make than a cow burger and he points out not only are we saving on precious water resources but using a plant-based burger also saves on greenhouse gas emissions and the vast amount of land used to raise and feed cattle. All that sounds nice, but the true question is if it tastes enough like the real thing to get folks to make the switch. I got to try the burger both while on the tour and today and, honestly, if I didn’t know it wasn’t real, I don’t think I’d even notice a difference. But I did know — and though it was very close while hot off the cooking station — my mouth knew this was something not quite the same. Lab workers at Impossible Foods test the plant-based burger during a press tour. The company tells me it isn’t stopping with the beef. It has bigger ambitions with other meats and dairy products as well. While it didn’t want to say which product it might start into next, Impossible Foods did tell TechCrunch that was an ongoing discussion among the team. And it plans to make its meat available beyond fine dining restaurants in hip cities. Brown mentioned at the press conference today he hopes to place Impossible Foods products in grocery stores and other food markets globally in the future. After all, people love meat and, despite the fact that a lot of the is often cruel and bad for the planet, for the most part, we’re ourselves from eating it anytime soon.
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How a unique approach to auto repair led to a new kind of shop software
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Darrell Etherington
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At in San Francisco, the publicized focus on hybrid vehicles actually masks the real differentiator: a focus on people. Founder Carolyn Coquillette started the San Francisco-based auto shop in 2007, and as you can see from the video above, everything from the decor to the space it occupies is a departure from what you might expect from a mechanic – and that extends to the software that runs the whole thing, which Coquillette showed me during a recent visit. For Coquillette, it wasn’t enough to change the spatial arrangements and interpersonal components of an auto shop; the technology that helps track service, manage inventory and communicate with customers also needed a major overhaul. Typical shop back-end software is essentially of Stone Age vintage, especially compared to the average software customers have on their smartphones. Coquillette saw the need for improvement as an opportunity not only for Luscious Garage, but also for other auto shops looking for a better solution for managing work, handling inventory and providing more transparency to customers in a way they could easily understand. After starting out with a custom shop management platform dubbed “Hyspace,” Coquillette began work on turning that into something more mature, which became a product in its own right and is used by others facing similar back-end modernization challenges. With a dedicated team, including lead developer Tyler Olmstead, Hyspace became Shop-Ware, with a fresh code start in 2013 and an MVP launch in 2014; made its official debut as a full-featured shop management platform in January of 2015. The web-based interface is easy to navigate, visually appealing, dynamic for use on a variety of platforms and builds in both staff-facing inventory and workflow management, as well as client-facing communication for work approvals and work history, and QuickBooks integration for integrated bookkeeping. When Coquillette showed me what it could do in terms of communicating exactly what service your car needs and why, it was revelatory – Shop-Ware can help build a more trusting, long-lasting relationship between consumers and car service providers thanks to its easy-to-parse reporting features. For customers, navigating car shops can seem like a daunting task, especially if you have no technical expertise. With Shop-Ware, Coquillette has made that a lot easier, while also making communication between staff members and general operations a lot easier. Like Slack, Shop-Ware is a great example of how a roll-your-own approach to building a tech tool in pursuit of your primary business can end up being something plenty of others can make use of, too.
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Valve teases next-gen VR hardware
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Today at the company’s Steam Dev Days conference, Valve teased a host of announcements related to the company’s efforts on its OpenVR platform, including a new prototype SteamVR controller. The company, which built most of the underlying VR tech for the HTC Vive, first shared some statistics regarding SteamVR, highlighting that the online store now has over 600 virtual reality titles and is registering 1 thousand new VR users every day. VR gamers can play purchases from the Steam store on both the HTC Vive and Oculus Rift, among other systems. The news that really excited the audience of developers was that related to the company’s Lighthouse tracking system which the company to developers this summer. The tracking system allows devices outfitted with sensors to connect to Valve’s base stations receivers and then, through the magic of lasers, show up as tracked objects in the virtual world. Valve wants the Lighthouse standard to be as “ubiquitous as wi-fi,” and is thus open-licensing the tech to any dev that want to check it out. As of now, the company says they have 300 hardware partners building Lighthouse-tracked devices. Valve still wants to lead by example however. The company showed off a controller design at the conference which they said will allow users to drop and pick up virtual objects without letting go of the controller. What that actually means is a bit up in the air, though it seems that would mean the controller is wrist-mounted. We’ll know more soon as the company said it will be letting developers at the conference demo the technology later today. New Vive controllers coming soon. Prototype available at — Robert Merki (@robmerki) The company also implied that they will be unveiling new Lighthouse base stations in 2017, suggesting that next year might welcome a host of new VR hardware products from the company. History / timeline of Valve's lighthouse tracking developments. — Shawn Whiting (@shawncwhiting) Not much in the way of details on these devices, but we’ll keep our eyes open for more details.
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Yahoo adds security event tracking to its Account Info page, but still no “delete” button
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Sarah Perez
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Following news of its large-scale data breach affecting 500 million account holders, Yahoo today to its that will better alert users to unauthorized activity on their accounts. The feature is similar to Google’s in that it tracks the account activity and devices associated with your Yahoo account, but it doesn’t provide as much detail. In Google’s case, users can view their (like logins, password changes, changes to recovery options, new app passwords, etc.). This includes the dates and times that as well as the IP addresses which were used to access your account. There’s even a map of the location provided as a small thumbnail next to the account activity on the detail screen. And each event is tagged not only with the timestamp, IP and location, you’ll also see which device was used for the activity, as well. Yahoo’s tracking screen is more simplified. The top section shows the recent devices (e.g. Chrome, Mac OS X) where the Yahoo account has been used, followed by a log of the most recent activity or changes to your Yahoo account. However, in this bottom section, Yahoo is only logging the activity and time. You can’t click on each item to see the additional details for each individual event, like IP, device or location. Instead, if you want to drill down to see things like the IP or location, you have to click on the device (Mac OS X, e.g.) at the top of the screen. Here recent sign-ins on that device are listed with locations, IPs and timestamps. The problem with Yahoo’s activity logging is one of design. On the main screen, each item – like a password change – doesn’t have an IP, device and location provided; meanwhile, clicking on the device at the top (where you can see things like IP and location) seems to only show you the logged sessions, not the other activity. This layout makes Yahoo’s activity log more confusing to read and understand than Google’s. Plus, none of this will really help Yahoo users deal with the aftermath of the data breach, which actually took place in 2014. Yahoo passwords have been reset, and the company wiped out the prior answers to users’ security questions. [gallery ids="1400874,1400873"] The problem is that this information, now in the wrong hands, can be used to compromise users’ accounts across the web, not only because of password reuse, but also because many sites ask the same security questions when users attempt password resets. (Like, “what’s your mother’s maiden name?”, “Name of first pet,” etc.) Meanwhile, the company still hasn’t addressed the problem in which by disabling the feature that allows them auto-forward their email. ( .) Nor has it added a simple “delete my account” option from the Account settings screen. Instead, users have to dig through to find the URL to It also continues to , before permanently deleting them, in case a user chooses to reactive the closed account.
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GM’s car sharing company Maven hits the streets of San Francisco
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, a car sharing company out of General Motors, is driving its way into San Francisco today. The announcement made late Thursday evening is one part of a continued roll-out in several cities throughout the U.S., which started at the beginning of this year. It’s city based car sharing service called Maven City is now available in nine cities throughout the nation, joining Lyft’s new driver rental program Lyft Express Drive, which was introduced this summer. GM has been cozy with Lyft for a while and added a whopping half a billion dollars to its last funding round. There have also been rumors the major car manufacturer was to buy the rideshare company. Maven says about 10,500 Maven members and Lyft drivers have used Express Drive so far, logging nearly 15 million miles between them. But there are plenty of other ways to get around in the City by the Bay – Lyft, Uber, MUNI and taxis among them. And Maven will also be competing with older, more established car-sharing outfits. Getaround has been around since 2009 and the even older Zipcar — which was — launched in the year 2000. Maven started rolling out a in late September, allowing drivers to pick up a car in one place and drive it to the next destination without needing to return it. But Zipcar has also been offering a one-way service . Still, Maven believes it will stand out in S.F., especially among the tech crowd. “Maven’s blend of new cars with seamless technology provides a fully connected car sharing experience that helps bring our members closer to the experiences, places and people they love,” Maven’s VP of urban mobility Julia Steyn said of the expansion to San Francisco. Maven uses your smartphone to unlock and access the vehicle. Some of the other car sharing services do this, too. But unlike Getaround or other peer-to-peer car sharing, Maven uses GM’s cars and can thus offer high-tech integrations like Apple CarPlay, Android Auto, OnStar, SiriusXM radio and 4G LTE wireless connectivity. Maven says for $8 an hour you can rent any of its 60 tech-savvy vehicles placed in busy areas throughout the city (compare that to Getaround, which starts at $5 an hour and goes up from there, depending on the car). But will these tech offerings entice San Franciscans to use the service? It certainly makes the experience more enjoyable and if you’d rather drive a nice, newish GM car instead of your neighbor’s Tesla the service might be for you.
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Verizon wants you to know its Google Pixel phones will get immediate Android updates
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Brian Heater
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Verizon wants you to know that everything is fine. It’s learned its lesson. The carrier’s Google Pixels will get Android updates at the same time as the unlocked versions. False alarm. Of course, that original five-day-long concern , noting last week that its version of Google’s eagerly awaited Pixel handset would be carrier-controlled. Here’s the original statement from the company, Monthly security updates will come from Google (for all models), and system updates will be managed by Verizon for Verizon models, and Google for unlocked models bought from Google Store. That, naturally, got everyone a bit worried. Carriers, after all, don’t have the best track record when it comes to offering up system updates in a timely fashion, a fact that’s doubly concerning with a handset for which the latest and greatest version of an operating system is one of the strongest selling points. The carrier clarified things a bit today in a statement . Here’s that, in part. First and foremost, all operating system and security updates to the Pixel devices will happen in partnership with Google. In other words, when Google releases an update, Verizon phones will receive the same update at the same time (much like iOS updates). Verizon will not stand in the way of any major updates and users will get all updates at the same time as Google. Verizon’s also quick to note that the handset is carrier unlocked and that, while it ships with three VZ-branded apps (Go90, My Verizon and Verizon Message), you can delete them off the phone and just pretend like none of this happened.
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Watch Pitch@Palace’s Demo Day here
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Samantha O'Keefe
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TechCrunch is pleased to bring you Pitch@Palace’s Demo Day today, , live from the Harwell Science and Innovation Campus. Pitch@Palace was set up by The Duke of York to amplify and accelerate U.K. tech entrepreneurs. At Pitch@Palace Boot Camp, 31 teams will give a three-minute pitch. Judges will then select the 12-15 best startups to pitch at St. James’s Palace to an invited audience of high-profile investors and key business leaders. Startups span many verticals, including media, fintech, edtech, data analytics and energy and environmental technologies. Tune in Friday at 9.30am GTM+1 to catch all the action.
(In order of appearance) – AI provides information management software and services that enable organisations to easily transition to, and make the most of, cloud technologies. – Digi.me returns personal data to the individual for their own insight and benefit and to allow apps/businesses to access rich data with consent for mutual benefit. – Flock is a big data-driven artificial intelligence platform for drone-flight risk reduction. We make drones safe and smart in congested urban environments. – Satavia is a data analytics and visualisation company that develops environmental awareness solutions for aviation. . – We provide real-time customer insight, recognition and validation of “PEOPLE in PLACES” using face recognition technology. – DoodleMaths is a tablet-based, adaptive and intuitive maths learning programme for 4-14-year-olds. Progress and motivation grow in just 10 minutes a day. – How Do I? teaches life and vocational skills through step-by-step videos linked to the learning environment using NFC technology. – Cumulus Energy Storage is enabling renewable electricity — by developing the lowest cost, grid-level energy storage batteries using Copper/Zinc technology. . – Invented a product for taps which allows you to wash your hands with only 2 tablespoons of water and uses no energy for heating of water. . – Our aim is to provide clean, affordable energy to the off-grid market in Africa, particularly the half a billion mobile phone users living off-grid. Senergy Innovations – Senergy Innovations are bringing to market the world’s first nanocomposite solar thermal panels that will deliver affordable solar heating and cooling. – AID:Tech brings transparency and real-time analysis to the distribution of resources by governments, NGOs and charities. – An end to financial advice charges, to restore faith in the finance industry and engage the financially excluded, RiskSave aims to manage retail assets for free. – Embeddable sensors, systems and analytics for fast, repeatable, through-life detection of cracks, corrosion or defects in structures. – We help new and nearly moms live better — by giving them the information and motivation they need to live happily and healthily, on the exact day they need it. – We use AI to understand what content an audience wants a brand or publisher to make, before they make it. – Inkpact provides growing businesses personal communications at scale, providing messages handwritten by humans to engage customers, making a lasting impression. – Landmrk is a flexible white-label platform that enables you to deliver digital content to your audience at specific physical locations. – Lobster is the world’s own place to source photo and video from social media users directly. – A social venture using scalable technology to improve communication channels between prisoners and their families. – Providing publishers a frictionless micropayment strategy where consumers pay for content with their time and attention by engaging with FreeWall adverts. – Swytch is a revolutionary mobile operator that works alongside your existing operator, providing amazing features such as multiple mobile numbers on one phone. – A timeline of everything that’s happened in your family, from your earliest ancestors right through to today. – The Google of 3D. A spatial intelligence engine that is ordering the emerging AR/VR 3D world. – Next generation parental controls using behavioral analytics and AI to protect families online. – PROWLER.io is building self-learning, tuneable and controllable AI-bots for autonomous decision-making. – WaveOptics has developed augmented reality technology that fuses incredible image quality with lightness and manufacturing scalability, creating immersive augmented reality that is viable and accessible. – Action.ai’s mission is to provide a high-quality route into the Smart Chatbot market. The company aims to be the e-commerce platform for the smart chatbot space. . – Personalised assessment and screening accessible system which provides solutions to barriers to education and employment and criminal justice system. – EasyVideo; ‘how to’ videos for learning disabilities on any mobile device — simply scan household items to find out how to use them. . – JumPack is an innovative portable, wearable jump ramp for use by extreme sports athletes engaged in BMX, MTB, skateboarding, snowboarding and stunt scooters.
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Crunch Report | Soylent Bars Are Getting Recalled
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Khaled "Tito" Hamze
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Tito Hamze, John Mannes
Tito Hamze
Joe Zolnoski
Joe Zolnoski TechCrunch C/O Tito Hamze
410 Townsend street
Suite 100
San Francisco Ca. 94107
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The AI disruption wave
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Rudina Seseri
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Information technology evolves through disruption waves. First the computer, then the web and eventually social networks and smartphones all had the power to revolutionize how people live and how businesses operate. They destroyed companies that weren’t able to adapt, while creating new winners in growing markets. While the exact timing and form of such waves of disruption are hard to predict, the pattern they follow is easy to recognize. Take the web/digital disruption, for example: There was a technological breakthrough (e.g. Sir Tim Berners-Lee’s WWW), which built on/took advantage of existing technologies (e.g. TCP/IP protocols and installed computer base) and gave rise, seemingly slowly, yet in fact exponentially, to new applications and platforms that disrupted existing markets (e.g. Amazon) or created new ones (e.g. Google). Today a new wave is emerging. Much like the web took advantage of existing technologies, this new wave builds on trends such as the decline in the cost of computing hardware, the emergence of the cloud, the fundamental consumerization of the enterprise and, of course, the mobile revolution. Furthermore, the proliferation and of smart devices and “things” have enabled the ability for constant communication and sharing, while social networking natives (Snapchatters of the world unite!) have turned constant sharing and self-expression into a “need.” The result is the emergence of what we have coined as pervasive connectivity. Pervasive connectivity leads to an explosion of ever richer and personalized data, which creates entirely new opportunities for new ways to process that data and extract valuable and actionable insights. Artificial intelligence allows for just that. AI is defined, rather broadly, as the capacity of machines to exhibit intelligence. It has several components, such as learning, reasoning, planning and perception, all of which have improved greatly in the last few years. Machine learning (ML) has achieved remarkable breakthroughs, which have, in turn, driven performance improvements across AI components. Perhaps the two branches of ML that have contributed the most to this are deep learning, particularly in perception tasks, and reinforcement learning, especially in decision making. Interestingly, these advancements have arguably been driven mostly by the . And the results are staggering: continuously better performance in increasingly complex tasks at often super-human levels (e.g. , and ). However, it is still early days, and there are still several challenges: Most breakthroughs are in “narrow” applications and use supervised methods that require big labeled data sets (which are often expensive to create), most algorithms (still) achieve (just) sub-human performance, training requires considerable computing resources and most approaches are based on heuristics with lack of theoretical frameworks. While most of these challenges will likely be overcome in the mid to long term, most applied AI products created today will have to take them into consideration. This is why it’s crucial that companies that are planning to leverage AI have a flexible approach (i.e. initially one can either get the necessary data to train the ML algorithm for good-enough performance or have a non-AI approach), create a continuous flow of information from the user ideally of “labeled data” (to develop AI features and drive its performance) and focus on use cases that are either underserved or have a “human in the middle.” Even though currently most of the attention is devoted to the developments created by big tech firms (e.g. , , ), I believe it’s the startups that use this (or a similar) approach that will drive the AI disruption wave in both enterprise and consumer markets — and some are already doing just that. In the enterprise, AI is creating new ways for companies to interact with consumers and new ways for employees to communicate with each other, and with its IT systems, is driving both greater revenues and improved productivity. Marketing is a typical early adopter of new technologies and it has already embraced AI, fostering greater awareness and conversion metrics across sectors. In social media, companies like * have pioneered the use of machine learning to improve campaign effectiveness. New image recognition techniques powered by deep learning have enabled startups like to improve visual intelligence and search, enhancing overall user experience. In e-commerce, was able to create a suite of products that allows for better personalization. In sales, new products that reimagine the UI between sales teams/prospective customers and CRMs are greatly improving productivity and driving conversion. is enabling instant access to CRM data by sales teams through their platform of choice. allows for access and update of CRM information through natural language. has created a sales assistant that is able to better screen and follow up with sales prospects. In HR, startups are trying to improve the effectiveness and efficiency across activities. is aiming to revolutionize enterprise knowledge management, starting with a seemingly simple conversational agent that will eventually become a full-fledged proactive knowledge agent. has created a two-sided conversational agent for recruiting that aims to reduce the overall recruiting time while improving the level of satisfaction on both sides of the table. When it comes to productivity, companies like are trying to considerably remove the pain out of scheduling and create a much more seamless user experience. Finally, other companies are creating broader platforms that have applications across sectors: is using transfer learning to train algorithms considerably faster across applications; analyzes people’s text and voice messages to reveal their psychology, personality, decision-making style and emotions in real time. In consumer markets, perhaps what excites me the most is how AI is creating new platforms and redefining how we interact with technology in spaces that are crucial in our day-to-day lives. One such space is the home. * is a friendly and intelligent social robot that is bound to revolutionize it. It uses human-like reactions to create a better user experience, while being very helpful across a wide array of tasks, from doing intelligent video calls in which the camera is able to adjust automatically depending on who’s talking, to suggesting ingredients as you’re cooking and helping out with more interactive storytelling for children. Another such space is the car. is a great example of a startup that was able to take a technology quickly to market and leapfrog incumbents, through its beta launch of autonomous cars in Singapore. While most people focus on the long-term potential and threats of hypothetical developments in AI, it is its current limited and applied form based on heuristics that is driving the new disruption wave. Just like in previous waves, this change seems subtle and minimal, but it is becoming so pervasive that it will soon become impossible to ignore. In a world of pervasive connectivity, AI is key to harnessing the power of data. Companies have to create an AI advantage to survive — Google, Facebook, Amazon and countless startups know it, and you should, too. AI is already changing many aspects of our daily lives both at home and at work. However, this is just the start. AI is slowly, steadily and pervasively redefining our relationship with technology, enhancing human capacity and, fundamentally, how we live.
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Returnly raises $3.2M to immediately refund your money after an online return
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John Mannes
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Returning a product you bought online is inherently a statement of dislike, but smart retailers are quickly learning that they’re far better off if they shelve their defensive impulses and instead embrace your dissatisfaction with open arms. This is because it turns out that a smooth return process makes customers considerably more likely to repurchase in the days following the calamity. , a new company based north of San Francisco in Marin county, promises to help mend the strained relationship between merchant and customer after a return. The company’s CEO and founder Eduardo Vilar wants to use data to put once lost revenue back in the hands of merchants. A conversation with Eduardo Vilar, founder of Returnly in San Francisco’s Mission neighborhood To do this, Returnly is capitalizing on patterns in online return behavior by taking the role of middleman — helping consumers avoid the dreaded holdover period between the time a good is returned and the time a refund is received. The company just closed a $3.2 million seed round led by Index Ventures with participation from SV Angel, FJ Labs, Mundiventures, and angels including Ariel Poler. Returnly fronts consumers their money in the form of an online wallet that can be used for repurchases from the same brand. Once the retailers receive the original good, the money is taken out of the wallet and put back in the customer’s account. This essentially amounts to a pot of money that screams ‘buy something with me’ to customers with puppy dog eyes. There are all sorts of behavioral economic forces at play in such a situation, but needless to say, people’s propensity to repurchase goes through the roof. Vilar is employing a team of ex-Glassdoor data scientists to run A/B testing for brands, helping them to visualize the difference that the fronted cash makes. Brian Pokorny, a partner at SV Angel, noted that at the end of the day, it was really conversations with merchants, Returnly’s customers, that led the well known firm to push to join the deal. Merchants using Returnly have a lot of reasons to be happy. The company collects nearly all of its revenue from commissions on post-return sales. The rest of its revenue comes from an initiation fee charged to online retailers when they first adopt the service. Together, this still amounts to a low risk value proposition for companies like and that are already benefiting from Returnly. Vilar has a background in mathematics and actuarial science which he used to help the company leverage its own equity to power initial transactions. In the future, Vilar hopes that Returnly can show institutional investors that the financial instrument he created is not only predictable but profitable. Some users may find it frustrating that Returnly doesn’t let them use the instant cash refunds for other purchases, but it’s important to remember that without the service you would have no money whatsoever for anything for up to 21 days.
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Uber hits another roadblock
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Megan Rose Dickey
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Uber, the ridesharing behemoth that recently began operating driverless cars and exploring self-flying drone taxis, can’t seem to catch a break these days in the legal arena. The New York State Department of Labor has ruled that two Uber drivers, Jakir Hossain and Levon Alesanian, are indeed employees — not contractors — and therefore eligible to receive unemployment benefits, . Now, Hossain and Alesanian are eligible for weekly unemployment payments of up to $425 each. Back in July, the New York Taxi Workers Alliance sued the state on behalf of the two drivers for refusing to “ .” Hossain and Alesanian had filed for unemployment after getting deactivated from Uber’s platform, but their applications were not being reviewed for months. This ruling only applies to the two drivers, but now the NYTWA is seeking a “comprehensive audit” of Uber. “I think this is a game-changer,” NYTWA Executive Director Bhairavi Desai said at a press conference today. “Uber has depended on the political structure turning a blind eye. What these decisions do is force a microscopic review.” The hopes is that Uber would be forced to make all of its drivers employees. If that happens, Uber would suffer a hit on its bottom line. Some of the differences between independent contractors and W-2 employees are that employees are eligible for minimum wage, workers’ compensation insurance and other protections, while contractors are not. Employers also have to “withhold income taxes, withhold and pay Social Security and Medicare taxes, and pay unemployment tax on wages paid to an employee,” . For employees, W-2 status gives them access to training programs and, more importantly, benefits like overtime, or reimbursement for gas and other car expenses. In short, that means it would be more costly to Uber if it had to offer W-2 employment to its drivers. “Nearly 90 percent of drivers say the main reason they use Uber is because they love being their own boss,” an Uber spokesperson said in a statement. “Drivers use Uber on their own terms; they control their use of the app along with where and when they drive. As employees, drivers would lose the personal flexibility they value most — they would have set shifts, earn a fixed hourly wage, and be unable to use other ridesharing apps. While the Department of Labor has ruled that several drivers are independent contractors, we have appealed the other determinations.” But this is just the latest in a series of legal woes the company has been facing. Uber’s that aims to achieve employee status for drivers. Meanwhile, back in August, .
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Tiny, levitating balls make up this weird ‘JOLED’ display
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Devin Coldewey
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LCDs are old hat, my friend. What you need is . That’s what researchers at the Universities of Sussex and Bristol have cooked up, and it’s exactly as weird as you think. Though not as weird as . The display uses “Janus objects” as “physical voxels” with “acoustic levitation.” That about sums it up, right? Well, maybe it could use a bit more detail. The Janus objects are basically tiny polystyrene beads. They’re held in midair by opposing ultrasound forces being emitted from speakers above and below; each bead has its own little ultrasound pocket it sits in. By modulating the sound, that pocket can be moved around, changing the position of the bead. That’s great if you want a display that only shows white dots. To spice things up, the researchers painted one side of the dots (making them two-faced and thus “Janus”), and coated them in titanium dioxide, giving them an electrostatic charge. This lets a configurable electric field manipulate the direction they’re facing, degree by degree or all at once. What you get in the end is a grid — 6×7 in this case, not exactly Retina resolution — of beads hanging in midair, able to spin in place to change colors and display monochromatic imagery. It’s actually more than a little like a floating e-paper display. They call it JOLED, but I can’t piece together what the acronym actually stands for. Janus Objects Levitated and Electrostatically Driven? It’s a good a guess as any. The position and spin can be changed in response to input, too, allowing a user to move the ball around a track or between obstacles. With enough of these, one can imagine creating floating, touchable shapes suspended in the air. Or maybe a ball-powered display pops up above your monitor to give you a slightly jittery second monitor. The University of Sussex’s Sriram Subramanian and Deepak Sahoo will be at the ACM User Interface Software and Technology Symposium.
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Mobile marketing and data startup mParticle raises $17.5M
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Anthony Ha
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announced today that it has raised $17.5 million in Series B funding. The New York City startup helps marketers collect user data through a variety of services and then funnel that data to other marketing and analytics tools. Co-founder and CEO Michael Katz said this not only reduces integration challenges and technical difficulties, but also helps businesses get a more unified view of their customers. Contrasting mParticle with existing tag management and data management companies, Katz added, “Now we’re in this era where consumers are interacting with brands in very much a multi-screen format. And it’s mobile first, and it’s app centric. The tools that were brought to market yesterday to solve for the challenges then just don’t work very well or at all in these multi-screen app environments.” The Series B was led by Bain Capital Ventures, with participation from Social Capital (which that mParticle announced at the beginning of this year). The company says it’s managing data on more than 1 billion mobile users each month, with new customers that include Jet, Hulu, Foursquare, Postmates and Chick-Fil-A.
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From the distributed workforce to the partnered economy
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Ajay Chopra
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Despite what some politicians say, no country is an island in today’s rapidly changing world. In the same way, no company can survive as an island, either. Most won’t have noticed $6.5 million Series A for a company called , but it’s indicative of a major change occurring in businesses today. Companies’ growing reliance on a distributed workforce have been occupying headlines and podcasts for the past couple of years. However, these conversations must now turn to how companies increasingly depend on partnerships as their force multiplier. The most successful companies today live or die based upon their business partners, whether they be channel partners, technology partners, suppliers or outsourced operations partners. Some of the wisest business leaders realize that the only way to scale and remain competitive is to stick to their core competency — then, work collaboratively with other groups whose complementary core competencies can make a business process more efficient than by trying (and largely failing) to create such disparate capabilities themselves. The result? A business that is more nimble, while remaining focused on building greater value for shareholders, employees and customers. When each party does what it is expert at, everyone can add value efficiently up and down the value chain. Furthermore, by working with a broad demographic of partners externally, companies are able to be far more responsive to market and perception changes. Integrated partners are able to relay changes back to the core company more quickly, and, when there is a response the partners are involved in developing or supportive of, they provide a sizable ambassadorship that would’ve otherwise taken huge investments of time and effort to rally organically. It’s no wonder, then, that the largest hotel company in the world, Airbnb, does not own any hotels, relying instead on a network of accommodation provider partners. Fun fact: This network includes more than 1,400 castles, which I doubt they would have had access to otherwise. And the largest “taxi” company in the world, Uber, doesn’t own any cabs. Instead, they rely on an expansive network of driving partners. For companies like Airbnb, Uber, ClassPass, Thumbtack and countless others, partners are mission-critical to their operation and value proposition. They would not exist without these partnerships working seamlessly to help them execute their core competency and vision. And the partnership trend isn’t limited to just consumer companies. Significant open-source software companies, starting with Red Hat years ago and Docker more recently, would cease to exist without the partner communities on which they were built. The networks of partnerships that all kinds of companies are acknowledging as essential to their businesses are growing and becoming more diverse in terms of their purpose, size, type and geographies. In the same fashion, in light of recent changes in the economy, traditional companies are rethinking and re-investing more in their partner programs, too — relying even more on affiliates, resellers, franchisers and any external network that can broaden their reach and impact. Naturally, as with any business development, this new paradigm is creating other business opportunities. There’s come a growing need for companies to quickly and coherently communicate with and manage fluid relationships with these partner communities. Good-old emails no longer need apply. Just raise your hand if you think that would be the best way to send a mission critical message to a Lyft driver about surge pricing in New Orleans at 6pm tonight! Furthermore, the tracking and engagement of ever-growing groups of partners across their actions and milestones can result in significant internal team demands. Some companies have long offered group communication tools that go beyond emailing to more dynamic communication, but they’ve largely been left for people to adopt to their own needs. Google Groups, Facebook Messenger and others weren’t built around the specific needs of managing sizable groups of people like on-demand workers or a city’s-worth of dinner hosts. Slack and HipChat provide a good hub for informal conversation and the sharing of materials, though targeted toward internal teams. Mobilize provides a more developed platform for communicating, scheduling and driving impact with regard for diverse partner contexts. Companies large and small — from MasterCard to Maker Faire — are already migrating to Mobilize’s platform from other solutions so they can better manage their growing external partnerships without having to grow internal teams. There are already internal job titles and consultants lining up to help manage these groups, so the need for platforms focused on managing these networks of partner groups is only growing. As these partnerships grow and the platforms that support them develop, rhythms for partner relationship management will evolve. Today, these rhythms are more a tap on the drum set. Someday they’ll become fluid jam sessions. This will require focused attention and understanding of how different groups live, behave and what they want from these partnerships, as well. But the companies that engage in the partnered economy will be rewarded with the strongest ties with these groups, through to their customers, and become the most adept at working through market and other changes beyond their control. This in turn will allow them continued growth and tenure at the top of their industries.
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VR battle royale: PS VR vs. HTC Vive vs. Oculus Rift
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Lucas Matney
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I’ve spent quite a bit of the last few months with headsets strapped to my face. Whether that has enriched my life significantly or left it in shambles I cannot say, but I will report that the games are at least starting to get really fun and the video content is only getting better. The PlayStation VR launched today, and with that there are about three great options for consumers to embrace high-quality VR, but — first off — should you even buy one of these things? If you’re a hardcore gamer, yes. If you’re a chronic tech early adopter, yes. If you’re someone who is either at Burning Man or always talking about Burning Man, yes. For everyone else, I’m pretty dubious. Basically, don’t save your allowance for one of these things, a Gear VR should more than hold you over. I think one revelation I’ve come to in the past few months is that update cycles for these PC-powered headsets are probably going to appear much more in line with gaming consoles (probably 3-4 years) rather than something like a mobile phone. The personal investment is just so high for consumers, and the technological jumps will be so significant in the headsets thanks to rapidly evolving optics/sensors that there’s likely not going to be a ton of compatibility between iterations. In other words, if you’re feeling like you’re interested but are going to wait for round 2 of these high-powered headsets, be prepared to wait until 2019 or 2020. If you’re still reading and feel like a VR purchase may be in the cards, here’s a quick rundown of the major headsets. $499 for headset + camera + controllers
Requires a PS4 system
Uses legacy Move motion controllers
Display resolution: 1080×960 OLED (each eye)
Display refresh rate: 120Hz $799 for everything
Requires a beefy PC
SteamVR OS
Room-scale tracking with motion controllers
Display resolution: 1200×1080 OLED (each eye)
Display refresh rate: 90Hz $599 for headset and Xbox One controller,
$199 for Touch controllers (available Dec. 6)
Requires a beefy PC
Oculus Home OS
Display resolution: 1200×1080 AMOLED (each eye)
Display refresh rate: 90Hz Okay, so those are the headsets; now which one should you buy? I’m actually going to go ahead and give you a real answer here. If you don’t want to buy a really expensive computer, buy the PS VR. It’s definitely not the best headset, but the price is right and you won’t have to worry about keeping up with GPU Joneses with periodic system upgrades. Also, Sony’s existing relationships with game studios will likely lead to some AAA titles hitting the platform first. If you’re a VR diehard who’s personally invested in ensuring that virtual reality remains an open platform, buy the HTC Vive. While Oculus and PlayStation are all about the exclusives, HTC is buying into Valve’s SteamVR system, which hopes to ensure that one piece of content will play across headsets. But in the end, if you’re comfortable spending the dough, buy the Oculus Rift. The Vive may be the best overall experience right now and its tracking is fantastic, the new Touch controllers (coming Dec. 6) are the best of the bunch and the amount of awesome Oculus exclusive gaming titles I saw at OC3 was staggering. Some new technologies will allow you to run the Rift on a less powerful PC. Additionally, Oculus’s close alignment with its parent company Facebook will ensure that the VR giant stays on the cutting edge of non-gaming social applications that will undoubtedly grow its network potential. The Xbox One controller days led to lackluster VR content experiences, but the headset’s best days are still ahead of it. It’s early days, but it’s not way too early. You’re not really going wrong with any of these headsets — they’re a big jump up from the Google Cardboard in capability and complexity and price — but based on your needs, the above might help you find the experience.
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PlayStation VR is easily the winner in virtual reality right now
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Darrell Etherington
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Consumer virtual reality has a clear new leader today, and it’s the just-launched PlayStation VR. Unequivocally, this is the best VR experience currently available outside of the kinds of high-flying, super-secret test rigs that exist out there for army training or whatever that cost millions of dollars. That includes top-of-line hardware like HTC Vive and Oculus Rift, as well as smartphone standouts like Samsung Gear VR. I own the HTC Vive, and I’m not abandoning it by any means. I also have and use Gear VR, and I’m excited to explore Daydream VR further, after getting a small taste of it at Google’s Pixel launch event. And if you’re looking for an assessment of which . But despite all of that, it’s clear to me that PlayStation VR is the new gold standard when it comes to consumer VR, and could go a long way to proving that the technology is accessible and viable for everyday users. Is PSVR perfect? Not at all — the visual fidelity and room-scale VR are both better on my HTC Vive. Plus, it doesn’t have the wireless freedom you get from Gear VR. I’ve even noticed some tracking issues where the PlayStation camera seems to lose sight of the headset temporarily, leading to disorienting jitters in the immersive experience. But what PlayStation VR offers is simplicity — from setup, to calibration, to actual use, the experience is very similar to what you’ve experienced before setting up any new console. It’s definitely due partly to having gone through the process of setting up much more complicated systems, including Vive, but unboxing and using PSVR consistently results in a “that’s it?” response from my brain, which is tuned to expect more hassle leading up to the actual VR stuff itself. Simplicity alone isn’t enough, however, and the PSVR manages the right balance between simple and powerful, giving an end-user experience that’s as likely to wow the average person as is a high-end Vive or SteamVR game, but without the high-end technical requirements or comfort level with tech. The other reason PlayStation VR wins is because of game selection. At launch, the game library is impressive already, and the best part of it is that all the experiences deserve to be there. Not all of them are necessarily amazing, but all the ones I’ve tried have impacted my overall opinion of VR for the better. That’s definitely not true of everything I’ve tried on the Vive, or on Gear VR. If PSVR has a significant remaining issue, it’s that it’s still too expensive; despite not reaching the stratospheric pricing of Vive or Oculus, especially when you factor in the cost of the PC, PlayStation VR’s price tag is likely too high to attract much of a crowd beyond the core gamer group. But it’ll live in households where it’s much more likely to be exposed to a range of different kinds of users, which is exactly what VR needs right now.
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Levchin’s Affirm secures $100M credit line from Morgan Stanley
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John Mannes
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This morning, announced a new $100 million credit line from Morgan Stanley. The money will go directly to supporting the company’s current financial products that help customers purchase goods and spread their expenses over a period of time. Morgan Stanley is not the first institutional lender to issue a line of credit to the company. In May of 2015, Affirm closed a line with Jefferies as part of a round that consisted of both equity and debt. Affirm disclosed at the time that but declined to disclose the debt to equity breakdown of that figure. “Today’s credit line is an indication from Morgan Stanley that they believe in our credit and underwriting practices,” said Jeremy Solomon, head of capital markets for Affirm. Solomon noted that the company’s current short-term loans will be the primary benefactor of today’s credit and any new products would need additional debt from diversified institutional investors to propagate. A syndicate was not needed in this round as Morgan Stanley was willing to fulfill the entire transaction. Like most fintech companies, when Affirm first began issuing credit, the company had to use equity as its primary method for financing until it could prove to larger financial institutions that it had an understanding of its customers’ risk profiles. CEO of Affirm, and former co-founder of PayPal, Max Levchin has steered Affirm since its founding in 2012, raising $525 million along the way. To date, all loans remain on the company’s balance sheet. Solomon explains that this was deliberate to prove to outside investors that the team is fully invested in their idea and willing to bear the risk. Importantly, however, Affirm doesn’t underwrite and service its loans by itself. It works in association with Cross River Bank to provide loans to customers ranging from $50 to several thousand, according to Solomon. The company has tripled its transaction volume over the last year. Affirm also declined to comment on default rates, but insisted that they’re strong.
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A test flight with Zipline, makers of humanitarian delivery drones
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Lora Kolodny
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a hopeful note about drones, following that members of ISIS packed a hobbyist drone with explosives in Iraq, killing two Kurdish fighters who captured and disassembled it. Before the founding team of Zipline departed the United States to be present for the program’s launch in Rwanda, they gave TechCrunch a tour of their testing site, a base on a private cattle ranch just outside of San Francisco. On a hillside dotted with grazing cows, horses and farm dogs, TechCrunch also got a first look at Zipline’s unique robotic systems for launching and landing their “Zips.” Because of security concerns, Zipline asked TechCrunch not to disclose the specific location of this ranch where it has set up its headquarters and conducts its test flights. Executives at the startup actually prefer to call their technology “flying robots,” “small planes,” or “Zips” and not drones. That’s because they use a fixed-wing, rather than quadcopter or other multi-rotor design. are the default image people get when you say “drone,” now, as they’ve become mainstream in consumer electronics. Other startups, including and , have created multi-rotor drones to deliver everything from food and building supplies to medicine and biological samples. None have yet established a national delivery service and become operational as Zipline has today in Rwanda. According to co-founder and CEO Keller Rinaudo, the fixed-wing design of Zipline’s drones allows them to fly greater distances on less power than any quadcopter design, and allows them to launch and fly reliably through variable weather. That detail is critical when you’re flying in areas of the world that do not have the infrastructure to allow frequent recharging, he said. The Zips are also battery-powered, so they don’t have to be refueled where it’s hard to find any reliable supply of diesel. Zipline CTO and co-founder Keenan Wyrobek said the company expects to get 1,500 flights out of each of its small planes before they need a new battery. The Zips don’t land when they drop off their payload, whatever it is, most commonly blood or vaccines that need to arrive quickly in order to save a life. Instead, they hover over a “mailbox,” or an area about the size of two parking spots, delineated by a clinic, and drop off the package in a simple box from about 40 feet in the air. That way, Rinaudo explained, healthcare professionals on the ground do not have to learn how to operate drone technology, or worry that a landed drone may be raided for parts and taken out of commission, or even damaged or eaten by a curious wild animal. With a 40-employee operating team today, most in the U.S. and others based in Rwanda, Zipline has raised both grants and venture capital to support the development of its planes and software to run fleets of them. [gallery ids="1401611,1401613,1401614,1401612,1401610,1401607,1401608,1401606,1401605,1401604,1401603"] Rather than taking donations to deliver humanitarian aid, Zipline is focused on demonstrating its value to, and working directly with governments in nations that lack infrastructure, such as roads and railways that they would need to efficiently distribute medical supplies on the ground. A Zipline investor, Paul Willard, a partner with and former Boeing engineer, said a great deal of the company’s magic is to be seen in its practicality and pragmatic approach to the market and engineering. One big technical problem the company had to solve in order to make a difference in developing nations, Willard said, was around landing small planes where there would be no runways or roads to do so. The company took a page from the playbook of aircraft carriers, he said. Aircraft carriers out on the ocean are equipped with four wires above a landing deck. Pilots aim to catch the second wire, but frequently fail and just fly around. When they succeed, the plane is rapidly pulled down. In an early design, Zipline set up deep-sea fishing rods on either side of a table and tested the concept at a small scale. The ultimate solution they came up with looks more like a bouncy castle or giant inflatable mattress set out in front of two robotic arms that bob up and down raising a wire in the wind. The arms of the “Bob,” as Zipline employees call this rig internally, receive a signal from approaching Zipline planes, and can raise to a level where they will likely snag the plane and land it safely on the mat. Zipline planes use a precise kind of GPS technology, called RTK GPS, to land in that small space, and to precisely target “mailboxes” whenever they make a drop. The company has set up its launchers and landing rigs next to medical supply warehouses in Rwanda, which serve as a central distribution point to reach the nation’s clinics and hospitals. Zipline employees pack the drones, launch them and recover them at these distribution centers. Wyrobek explained the company’s focus on medical supplies comes from a wish to make an immediate, positive income on health outcomes around the world. He recounted that in his travels throughout Latin America and Africa, families in remotely located communities can’t just go to a pharmacy to get a common antibiotic ointment, let alone blood for a transfusion or a rabies vaccine. If a clinic doesn’t have even simple things in stock in these places, a simple infection can escalate very quickly. To restock, a pharmacy would have to send someone two hours down a dirt road to catch a small boat, and then catch a bus that only runs twice a day up another road, and so on. “Too many people die from very curable diseases or injuries,” the CTO said. “When you think that most blood and vaccines need to be refrigerated, we have another problem. We focused on speed and reliability to solve that problem.” When fully loaded, a Zipline plane weighs about 14 kilograms and flies at variable speeds, aiming to make every delivery within 25 minutes. The company flies about 15 to 30 of its planes simultaneously in Rwanda. A back-end system tracks the whereabouts of each Zip, and the inventory they carried. The planes are also aware of each other’s position and routing in-flight. Rather than using vision or depth-sensors like cameras and LiDar for navigation, the planes use data provided by GPS and by the local government’s answer to the Federal Aviation Administration; in Rwanda, that is the Civil Aviation Authority. Zipline is aiming to set up 20 distribution centers by the end of next year and to be operating in at least two more countries. Hopefully, others will become willing to try and invest in drone technology, Rinaudo and Wyrobek said, after seeing Zipline’s technology and its impact in Rwanda.
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HP plans 3,000 to 4,000 job cuts over the next three years
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Brian Heater
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HP isn’t out of the woods just yet. In to this year’s 2016 Securities Analyst Meeting, Dion Weisler, the President and CEO of the newly formed HP Inc., attempted to put a positive spin on a tricky situation. “I’m proud of the progress we have made in our first year as the new HP. Our focus is clear, our execution is solid, and we are positioned well for the next step in our journey,” he said. “We are confident in our strategy and believe it will continue to produce reliable returns and cash flow, while also enabling HP to invest in differentiated innovation and long-term growth.” The growth the company’s top executive is hoping for, however, will involve some series restrictions. Among them is the fact that the company will be letting go some 3,000 to 4,000 employees over the next three years, according to . The details are still fairly vague, with the report noting that “changes to the workforce will vary by country, based on local legal requirements and consultations with employee works councils and other employee representatives, as appropriate.” As per the plan, the company anticipates savings of $200 million to $300 million per year starting in 2020, according to the paperwork. Prior to that, however, there will be $350 million to $500 million in charges for the company, including $200 million attributable to labor costs. The numbers are a sizable chunk of a total workforce of around 50,000 people. Earlier this year, the company — which is one of two successors to technology giant Hewlett-Packard (alongside Hewlett Packard Enterprise) — announced plans to cut 3,000 jobs by year’s end.
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Google starts highlighting fact-checks in News
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John Mannes
| 2,016
| 10
| 13
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Today to its popular Google News service. The site aggregates popular timely news from multiple sources and has traditionally grouped them with tags like “opinion,” “local source” and “highly cited.” Now readers can see highlighted fact-checks right next to trending stories. The company cites the growing prominence of fact-checking sites as one of the reasons for creating the tag. Content creators will be able to add the new fact-check tag to posts themselves using a will be used to compile and organize stories offering factual background. The Schema community builds markups for structured data on the internet. The group is sponsored by Google but also has support from Microsoft, Yahoo and Yandex. Casual readers in the U.S. and U.K. can find nuggets of fact within the expanded view of news stories and mobile versions of the service. Fingers crossed the new tool doesn’t result in stories claiming that rising to the top of our feeds. On a support page, Google explains that it if posts are improperly tagged as fact-checks. “Please note, that if we find sites not following those criteria for the markup, we may, at our discretion, either ignore that site’s markup or remove the site from Google News.” This may not prevent false stories from rising up in Google News, but it will make it a lot harder. It doesn’t appear that very many fact-check stories have propagated yet on Google News. We couldn’t find any in a quick visit to the site, but given the timeliness of the presidential election in the U.S., we can only expect the system to be put through its paces in the coming weeks.
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Brain-computer interface lets a man with a spinal injury feel robotic fingers
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Devin Coldewey
| 2,016
| 10
| 13
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“Index… ring… pinky… index… middle…” Nathan Copeland is telling a researcher which of his fingers he feels a touch on. But the researcher is touching a robotic hand, not Copeland’s, whose hand hasn’t felt a thing in over a decade. In this “proof of principle” experiment, a man whose spinal injury removed all sensation from his limbs was able to “feel” pressure on several robotic digits connected directly to his brain. It’s a long way from a cybernetic hand, but it opens the possibility of using one to even more of those who need it. Now, two caveats: First, this isn’t the first time a robotic hand has sent sensations to a user’s brain; that’s been happening for a while, and depends on how you define those things. Second, it’s important to note that as cool as this all sounds, it’s still unbelievably crude compared to the subtlety and intricacy of the nervous system — we’re nowhere that level of control or even understanding of it. That said, this is still important research because it skips a step many other prosthetics rely on: the peripheral nervous system. If you need to send signals from a replacement hand, you can often plug in further up the arm, tapping in where those signals would have gone anyway. But with a spinal injury, those signals never reach the brain, so that approach doesn’t work. What Robert Gaunt and his team at the University of Pittsburgh have done is essentially plug the robotic arm directly into the brain, bypassing the intermediary nerves and spinal cord altogether. Copeland was in an accident 12 years ago that left him a quadriplegic. But 16 years of operating his limbs means he remembers what it feels like when his hand is touched — and that means his brain remembers, too. So the researchers had Copeland concentrate on the feeling of having different fingers touched, and tracked the brain activity associated with that feeling. Then they surgically implanted four sets of fingertip-sized microelectrode arrays into Copeland’s sensory cortex, where those feelings were centered. Render of the microelectrode arrays used. Over the next few months the team repeatedly stimulated those areas of the brain, finding the patterns and locations that produced the sensation of being touched on the index finger, ring finger and so on. Eventually, Copeland was hooked up to a robotic hand, each finger of which corresponded to the circuit in his brain. He got 85 percent right at first, then later nearly 100 percent. This is highly validating, although everyone involved will tell you how early this is. “The ultimate goal is to create a system which moves and feels just like a natural arm would,” . “We have a long way to go to get there, but this is a great start.” For one thing, the sensation needs to be evened out — “sometimes it feels electrical and sometimes it’s pressure, but for the most part, I can tell most of the fingers with definite precision,” Copeland said. The many gradations and types of touch are miles off. This is also a one-way street: No data is being passed from the brain to the arm. Control methods would rely on completely different neural circuitry, in the motor cortex; it’s a whole different field of research. But this kind of feedback, going straight from the prosthetic to the brain, is important for intuitive controls that allow a user to grip and manipulate things in a natural way. The team’s work is . It was funded through DARPA, the US Department of Veteran’s affairs and several other grants.
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Hillary mentions internet
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Josh Constine
| 2,016
| 10
| 13
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Hillary says Trump “makes you just want to look at cat GIFs”, and she even pronounced it correctly.* Hillary Clinton appealed to the tech crowd of San Francisco today at a campaign event, discussing technology in more depth than she or Trump has in weeks. Clinton said that because of Donald Trump’s bragging about sexual assault and insults toward immigrants, Muslims and other Americans, “It makes you want to turn off the news. It makes you want to unplug the internet or just look at cat GIFs. Believe me, I get it. In the last few weeks I’ve watched a lot of cats do a lot of weird and interesting things. But we have a job to do, and it’ll be good for people and for cats.” Donors in the audience cheered wildly, perhaps louder than after any of her policy promises. No word on if her uptake in meme consumption influences her stance on net neutrality. *To be clear, she pronounced “GIFs” with a hard G the way it should be.
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Trust Disrupted: Bitcoin and the Blockchain episode 5 explores the most exciting blockchain innovation
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Rebecca Friedman
| 2,016
| 10
| 13
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In this episode we catch up with the founder of Ethereum, Vitalik Buterin, and dive into its implications in the world of cryptocurrency. Ethereum is considered the most exciting innovation using blockchain technology, as its use cases go beyond that of bitcoin and could eventually have more overarching effects on how we run the world. However, after a recent hack of its Decentralized Autonomous Organization, its future is uncertain. You can check out the first four episodes of the series . The final episode will be released on the site tomorrow.
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DeepMind’s differentiable neural computer helps you navigate the subway with its memory
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John Mannes
| 2,016
| 10
| 13
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In his best-selling 2011 book , Nobel Prize-winning economist Daniel Kahneman hypothesized that thinking could be broken down into two distinct processes — aptly named fast and slow thought. The former is all about your gut, the initial automatic responses you have to things, while the later is calculated, reflective and time-consuming. A new algorithm from DeepMind is beginning to show us that so-called “slow” thinking may soon be within the reach of machine learning. the Google subsidiary explained a new approach to machine learning that uses something called a differentiable neural computer. Of course, the new computer isn’t a physical piece of hardware, it’s more of a technique for organizing information and then applying that prior knowledge to unique problems. Neural networks operate using what essentially amounts to a very sophisticated trial and error process, eventually arriving at an answer. These frameworks are great for some tasks, but have room to improve in applying stored connected facts to real-world challenges. DeepMind’s technique merges notions of memory with more traditional neural networks using a “controller.” The controller saves information by either storing it in a new location or overwriting a previously occupied location. Throughout this process, an association between the information is formed via the timeline of when new data was written in. The controller uses that same chronology along with the actual content of what has been saved to retrieve information. The framework created is navigable and proves itself effective for drawing insights from graph data structures. These graph structures are complex representations of data that are commonly used to represent things like customer purchasing preferences and GPS navigation information. DeepMind tested its differentiable neural computer on the London Underground and was successful at generating routes from the structured data. According to the company, the next step in development will be trying the new algos on larger data sets. You can read more about these new tools on DeepMind’s site
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Verizon says Yahoo privacy breach had “material” impact
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Katie Roof
| 2,016
| 10
| 13
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After being asked about the hack in a a couple of weeks ago, AOL’s Tim Armstrong said, “the data thing was something new that got introduced and we’ll work through that together with” Yahoo. He added that he wants to be “protective” of the Verizon shareholders.
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Crunch Report | Galaxy Note 7 banned from all flights
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Khaled "Tito" Hamze
| 2,016
| 10
| 14
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Tito Hamze, John Mannes
Tito Hamze
Joe Zolnoski
Joe Zolnoski TechCrunch C/O Tito Hamze
410 Townsend street
Suite 100
San Francisco Ca. 94107
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While the IPO market roars back, venture remains leery
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Ben Narasin
| 2,016
| 10
| 14
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The IPO market is poised to make an almost complete 180° turnaround after a bleak Q1 and a very quiet summer. JPMorgan alone said they were , and has successfully launched nine in the U.S. to strong demand. The broad market (S&P 500) has largely recovered, as well, from a low point of 1,810 earlier this year to a current (near) record level of 2,193 (as of September), a 21 percent move. In contrast, venture capital investments, which had recalibrated alongside the IPO market in the second half of last year, have remained sedate with a clear flight to quality; fewer rounds, for higher-quality companies, with larger check sizes. Private funding activity cannot recover as fast as the public markets. While the music seems to be back on at the IPO party, aspects of the private market re-calibration may be permanent. Eighteen months ago a SAAS company with $1 million of revenue in their first year of operation would have had a solid shot at a Tier 1 Series A. Today, those companies go wanting, resorting to “second seeds” and “inside rounds.” The IPO window quickly cooled in August of 2015, marked by the and IPOs. Both were significantly oversubscribed deals that opened and traded poorly, as they weren’t able to attract real buyers/holders. The buyer fatigue was palpable. IPO volume dried up and a buyer’s market set in. A few IPOs dribbled out over the remaining months of 2015, with only two notable tech deals: and . This was followed by an almost complete freeze at the beginning of 2016. This closure was very well publicized, with pundits claiming it was because of market volatility caused by any number of factors, including the election, oil prices, the Fed raising rates, Brexit, China/Brazil economies, etc. There’s been little resolution to many of these factors, yet investors have still regained an appetite for IPOs. Insiders claimed there was a complete shift in investor sentiment from growth to value, or more specifically to growth value in the form of profitability or an obvious path to it. Investors were also concerned about debt-laden companies. This message reverberated across Silicon Valley, where companies were advised to decrease burn and show sustainability by demonstrating an ability to make money. Tech multiples, which compressed significantly at the beginning of the year, have recovered, but not to levels as lofty as early 2015: Two months ago, the general consensus was that the IPO market would shut down until at least 2017 — essentially 17 months with almost no IPO deal flow. June 22, 2016, Twilio ( ) (a healthy premium to the last private round) and traded up 92 percent day 1. Since then, TWLO has traded up 278 percent and the IPO window has opened wide. Just like that, IPOs are back in favor… all fear evaporated, all hesitation erased without any resolution to the supposed issues that precipitated the pullback originally. Perhaps all anyone needed was a breather in the shape of the most severe IPO drought since the recession. Private company fundings followed the IPO market’s lead dropping from 1,333 in Q3 2015 to 1,137 in Q4. Deal volume stayed suppressed through Q2 2016, and this year is on pace to be slower than 2012. Dollars raised in 2016 versus 2015, but not as significantly as deals quantity; fewer deals for larger dollars were done for the biggest and best private companies. As the IPO market cooled, private funding showed an even more severe and immediate flight to quality. Uber and Snap alone account for $4.5 billion of the $31.8 billion in U.S. VC-backed financing in 2016. High-flyers like Slack, Airbnb and Spotify also commanded sizable rounds at, often, sizable prices. Select innovative sub-sectors, such as artificial intelligence, insurance tech, autonomous driving and virtual reality also saw demand and excitement in line with early 2015 levels. Otherwise, venture investors have returned to more cautious, diligence-focused investing, as they had before unicorn euphoria hit, and with the complete retreat of crossover investors, venture remains largely a buyer’s market. The bias toward proven stories has led to a significant decrease in the number of unicorns created in 2016. Twelve unicorns were created in the first two quarters of the year, compared to 49 in Q2 and Q3 of 2015. With stocks touching all-time highs, and IPOs once again coming to market (and performing), the public market recovery is clear. Banks have said the IPO market will remain extremely active through the end of the year and into 2017. The cracks in venture can’t be repaired that quickly. Renewed VC prudence hasn’t slowed down innovation, but it has slowed getting that innovation through the funding machine. There has been a meaningful shift in VC interest in a company’s technology to the company itself. VC investors want to see infrastructure, track record and reliability, not just the next big idea. The rhetoric of “tell me how you are going to become the next billion-dollar business” has turned into “tell me how you are going to make this a sustainable business.” So the large, clear winners still attract a buying frenzy, but it has become much harder for most companies, especially smaller companies, to raise. However, opportunity is knocking for VCs willing to go against the grain that have now been given more time and pricing power to selectively uncover the next unicorn.
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WristWhirl lets you control your smartwatch with hand gestures (and look mad while you do it)
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Devin Coldewey
| 2,016
| 10
| 14
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It’s a funny thing: Smartwatches are supposed to be the more accessible alternative to your smartphone, but you can operate a phone with one hand, while the watch takes two. Luckily, Dartmouth researchers are on the case, and have engineered a way to use your wrist as a sort of joystick, allowing you to use your smartwatch one-handed. It’s a very hacky project; this isn’t some custom app running on an Apple Watch. Xing-Dong Yang and his colleagues built their own smartwatch with a 2″ display, a wristband and a dozen infrared proximity sensors. The prototype is literally duct-taped together. The proximity sensors monitor how far away the bits of your hand are, collating that information into a larger picture of the position of your wrist. This data is sent instantly to the watch, where it drives a virtual cursor. Tilting your hand down moves the cursor down, and so on. Tilt in a pattern to launch or switch apps, scroll up and down and play games, all without using that second hand of yours. And it only detects gestures when you want it to: another sensor detects the sound made when you tap your thumb and index finger together (!), which turns the recognition software on and off. There are already gyros and accelerometers in smart watches, but having to move the watch around when you want to zoom in on a map seems pretty weak, especially once you’ve seen WristWhirl in action. Will you look insane flipping your wrist around while staring at your watch? Yes. But onlookers will soon know the convenience of this form of input and it will become mainstream. Remember how we used to look at people talking into Bluetooth headsets? (Actually, we still look at them that way.) Now, I don’t think anyone was hurting for lack of being able to use their smartwatch while carrying groceries (shades of in the video) — but this is still a clever solution. Of course, the thing looks like a bomb at present, so it’s not quite ready for deployment. “Our plan is to build a self-contained version using an Apple Watch,” wrote Yang in an email to TechCrunch. “This way we can test the idea in a more realistic setting.” Developers would have a field day. It’s very futuristic. Yong and his co-author, Jun Gong, will be presenting their work at the ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology next week. .
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