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Kristen Hall-Geisler
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Gillmor Gang LIVE 07.29.16
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Steve Gillmor
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– Robert Scoble, Frank Radice, Kevin Marks, and Steve Gillmor. Gillmor Gang’s Facebook page G3’s Facebook page
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Facebook tries a new way to release open-source projects
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Frederic Lardinois
| 2,016
| 7
| 29
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Last week, Facebook , a new project that helps React developers get started with their new projects. Turns out, that was only part of the story. Create React App was also the first project to enter the on GitHub. The Facebook Incubator is the company’s new process for releasing and ensuring that they do well in the long run. The best way to think of it is as a beta stage or proving ground for new open source projects from Facebook. As Facebook’s head of open source James Pearce told me, the idea here is to better manage the life cycle of these projects. He notes that Facebook has now open-sourced almost 400 projects and has hundreds of thousands of followers on GitHub. “We want to make sure we are managing this program at scale in the most effective way we can,” he said. To do that, Facebook decided that it would push most new projects through this program first to see how the community reacts to them and what the adoption is like. Pearce stressed that all of the projects in the Incubator — just like in Facebook’s — are projects the company also uses internally and that have teams actively working on them. You shouldn’t think of projects in the Incubator as a repository for weaker projects, he noted. To graduate from the Incubator, projects will of course have to demonstrate traction in the community, but Pearce told me that the company will also look at other surrounding aspects. Is the project being used by others? Does it have good documentation? How hard is it to integrate the project with other tools? How engaged can Facebook be with the community? “If we see there is resonance in the industry, it’s a good sign that it’ll graduate,” he said. Pearce did stress documentation is an important factor at various times during our conversation, and that’s definitely an aspect of open source that is often neglected. He told me that Facebook has a dedicated team of tech writers who work on this for its projects (with engineers helping out as well) and that the company is also looking at the new for potentially hosting some of its documentation projects, as well. While the Incubator is clearly meant to help get projects started on the right foot, Pearce argued that it’s not just about optimizing for the launch and growth phases but also about managing the life cycle of a project in the long run. Not every project turns out to be a success, after all, and occasionally Facebook ends up sunsetting some of the tools it open-sourced. That will still happen now that the Incubator system is in place, but the team obviously hopes it will be able to correct some of the issues with a project before it moves to the main repository. Pearce told me that Create React App is a good example for a project in the Incubator because Facebook wasn’t sure what the community would think about it, but he also noted that there will still be some projects that will skip the Incubator project. “Had we launched React Native now, we probably would’ve skipped the Incubator,” he said. The same goes for projects that Facebook is donating to larger organizations like the Open Compute Project. Pearce tells me that the Incubator isn’t going through its own incubation phase (“that’s too meta for me”), so we can probably expect this new system of releasing open-source software from Facebook to stay in place for the foreseeable future.
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Simversity’s Neeraj Bansal talks about the future of education
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John Biggs
| 2,016
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| 16
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This week on Technotopia I talked to the co-founder of education startup . He has a deep understanding of what it takes to build an online education platform and he also notes that the only jobs worth having in the future are the ones that can’t be replaced by machine learning. Education right now, he says, is a form of data replication. But when computers and wearables are able to solve everything but the most complex problems for us why do we need to learn the basics when we could focus on more in-depth study? The answer is obviously still unclear but it’s fascinating to think about just where we’re headed in the next twenty years of learning. You can and .
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How Drake can help you understand your business
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Sylvain Giuliani
| 2,016
| 7
| 16
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The startup world is full of crazy metrics, monolithic frameworks and over-engineered tools — all claiming to measure the impact of everything. It’s getting tiring; and frankly, a lot of these theories are too far from reality to be useful. As a founder or someone working in a startup, the main priority is always staying alive. Every ounce of budget needs to be spent efficiently. Should invest in paid advertising? Hire an intern? Take that trip to San Francisco that could make or break the ? It’s all about difficult decisions, and some of them be messy and complex. With options coming from every angle, need to find ways to make them as simple as possible. This is the only way bring focus back to how they will impact the . That’s the most important thing. How do prioritize? How do say no? This is where our good friend comes in. I’ve got to admit, I’m actually talking about , the man who came up with the in 1961. He hosted what was essentially a meetup for astrophysicists and, as would, started asking people how great it would be to estimate how much life there was in the galaxy. Obviously an insanely complex thing to be discussing in a meetup. But that didn’t stop him. started writing an agenda listing all the variables and topics they needed to discuss to try to approach this question logically. Eventually, he got every variable he could think of down. Using it, he created a complex equation on a single piece of paper able to estimate how much life there was in the universe: took something incredibly complex and broke it down into something easy to . This got me thinking — could apply ’s teachings to the messy and complex startup world? I thought I’d give it a go. Let’s take something like e-commerce as a simple example. Think about how define growth in an e-commerce . Which different variables do have? Here’s the list I came up with: Bring these variables together in a logical way and get something like this: There have it. Now if want to explain an e-commerce to mother, could. Obviously she probably wouldn’t be interested, but the same applies for investors. ’ve probably experienced quirky questions like “What’s quick ratio?” or “What’s SaaS Magic number?” These are all stats that inform VCs’ own equations that them uncover the diamonds in the rough. Talking to investors in this way helps them see that what level need to work at to build a successful . The same applies when hiring staff; these equations bring clarity to the and ensure everyone understands their roles and how it makes everything simple. Let’s take another example, like sales, which I had no idea about six months ago (so if ’re in the same boat, don’t despair). Someone came up with this direct equation called sales velocity: Suddenly, knowing nothing about sales, but still managing salespeople, doesn’t seem like such a daunting task. how well they are doing and where they need to focus by asking three simple questions: Instantly see how this equation helps identify top performers; but it also helps individuals see where they incrementally improve — whether they need to focus on closing more quickly, finding better qualified leads or targeting higher-value leads. ’s teachings are incredibly useful when need to bring order to chaos. And the applications go far further than the examples I’ve shared here. Using this theory, track performance of rationalize decisions; it’s even a great way to explain internally and externally — use it to show ’re in full control without overwhelming anyone. In a world full of Kissmetrics, Mixpanel, Moz and Mint, we often suffer from information overload, which leads to action paralysis. What’s important about ’s approach is it allows to only track what matters. And as see what doesn’t work, or isn’t impacting , stop measuring it. Now that know about the original ’ll start seeing yourself applying these equations everywhere, from informing teams to giving investors an overview of . So what are waiting for? Put on headphones, get out a notepad, and start simplifying.
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Bursting the chatbot bubble
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Arun Uday
| 2,016
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| 16
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Chatbots seem to be climbing the proverbial peak of the tech hype curve with every passing day. Popular messaging apps in terms of making their platforms open for bot development. Businesses are also rushing to embrace them, as evidenced by the interest they are eliciting from even staid institutions such . The frenetic action notwithstanding, the moot point, as always, is whether bots actually solve any real end-user need. The answer to that is not as clear as the chat platforms and businesses themselves would have us believe. Firstly, in most instances, the effort needed for completing tasks through chat . Add to that the superior aesthetics and visual appeal of a UI versus plain text (as with chatbots) and the case for a manual keyboard-driven input format becomes even harder to defend. Secondly, there is also the risk of misinterpretation as chatbots suffer from inaccuracies in understanding a user’s request. I had the privilege of attending when he was in India. After the talk, one of the questions asked of him was his view on the future of technology. He replied that in the future, he saw no need for a keyboard and that users would use computers by just talking to them. PCs would be intelligent enough to understand the instructions and act accordingly. He shared that Microsoft was investing a lot of research dollars into AI, speech recognition and the like (which later got rolled into their ). Fast-forward 16 years — millions of dollars and some of the best brains working on it didn’t prevent their showcase chatbot in less than 24 hours of deployment. Don’t get me wrong — this is not meant to be a taunt on their technical competence, but rather a mere reflection on the complexity of the problem. That’s the reason I find it bemusing that not only are chatbot developers springing up like mushrooms in the monsoon season, but businesses are also actually eager to avail of their services sans any credible evidence of a real user need for them. Think about it. Why would anybody want to replace an existing setup that is 100 percent accurate and takes less effort to use (i.e. UI-driven menus) with something that is inaccurate and requires more effort to use (i.e. chatbots)? Finally, there also is the danger of uncontrolled proliferation of bots. One of the contributing factors for the fall from grace of Yahoo messenger, the most popular IM service of yesteryear, was its inability to deal with the spam unleashed by its bots. In fact, so bad was the problem that it forced Yahoo to contrive the now familiar from automatically entering chat rooms. It also inspired academic researchers for distinguishing bots from humans. So, does all this mean that AI/ML/NLP have no place in the emerging tech landscape? No, there will be use cases where we will see many such genuinely useful applications being developed. Some of my bets would be in such areas as personalization, intelligent discovery, AR/VR, etc. — but not chatbots as customer service reps or order-taking agents. In fact, all experience suggests quite the opposite. When a customer has an issue, they would most likely want to skip automated response options and speak to a real person who can fix their problem — not chat with a semi-intelligent bot dishing out some canned responses. As with most advances in technology, once the current euphoria on bots dies down, we will see the emergence of real solutions to real problems coming out of the chat ecosystem. Or to borrow from a popular adage, my prognosis would be: Chatbots are dead on arrival, long live chatbots!
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Big data and its developer fallout
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Ben Schippers
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| 16
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As the internet social turf wars continue to mature, the land grab is becoming much better understood. With a few companies controlling 95 percent of the social , the internet is more closed and much more controlled than ever before. The term (and concept behind) has been thrown around a lot over the past 15 months. What I’m referring to here is user , primarily from social businesses that can be leveraged to build other apps and businesses if done within the confines of a company API. A few basic examples. Let’s take Facebook: A , product architect, entrepreneur, etc. may want to analyze names, pictures or shares. How about Snapchat: shares or number of sent items. Instagram: users, hearts or comments. Tesla: car location, energy consumption, last charge. The list goes on and on. The modern web has been built on an open exchange. I regularly get asked what I think makes a good app. The answer is simple: . More specifically: users and their respective meta- . Users are . Without them, no matter how flashy your app is, it won’t work. Period. The follow up question is always, “OK, how do I get users?” That’s the billion-dollar question. The existing social sites want you to believe that by connecting to them and through them that users will come. If only that were true. Just to set the record straight, you can’t buy users. And you can’t connect to existing sites to leverage users or anything in between. Users are . Distribution (i.e. finding and retaining users) is the hardest part of creating a successful app. As , we used to be able to go deep into the social graph on Facebook. Developers used to be able to inject meaningful in a sophisticated way to all sorts of web and app products and, most importantly, we used to be able to request datasets without getting throttled by bandwidth limitations. Just because a few companies say you can use their doesn’t mean it’s accurate. Over the past few years there’s been a massive shift. Sadly, the best way to illustrate such change is to look at the the rise and fall of . As Facebook opened their API and enabled users to do deep penetration into the Facebook Graph, Zynga, more than any other company, took advantage and built an incredible gaming business directly through the Facebook Graph API. Over time, Facebook began making changes to how developers could interact with specific and just as quickly as Zynga grew, they fell — and fell far. There are many companies, and small, that have suffered a similar demise. The modern social players lure you in like a kid in a candy store with no coin to spend, just endless temptation and promises of sweet solutions. The declaration of high-quality and fast exchange or deep penetration into graphs are the prose of all modern businesses’ API documentation. However, like most things in life, the devils are in the details, and boy, watch out. Sure, you can have the at desired speed, but once you hit the API threshold, the feed will go from Niagara Falls to a leaky sink faucet. If your business relies on ability to quickly retrieve , now what? Similarly, yes, you can access set graphs and do deep analysis, but dig a little deeper and you’ll find, they’ll give you only 1-3 percent of anything meaningful about a specific location, person, hearts, shares and so on. What good is only a small sliver of an overall user and his or her activity across the app? Finally, Zynga and many other lesser-known businesses illustrated that if you build a business on top of another business, you are at the whim of their decisions. They can and will change the way you interact with their which has major implications on the longevity and profitability of your business. The promised land of green pastures, endless and fast requests and deep penetration of user is over. The actual pasture is a tease, at best. As the internet and social businesses have matured, the value is the walled garden. By keeping user within the confines of the core business, the ability to market and sell advertising wins every time. It’s true that some of these businesses do advertising better than others, but a model where you can pay for robust versions of access is never going to survive. The markets are just too small to support that model. So where do we go from here? There is still a huge amount of potential, we just need to think in a more evolved way. You can’t simply think, “I’m going to come up with an idea and leverage an existing community to make it thrive.” APIs just don’t allow that type of development anymore. Like Uber has done most recently, as well as Pinterest and Snapchat, the mindset of the entrepreneur needs to be one of a new community, a more vertical, specialized approach — a “community around an interest.” Don’t make social be the single pillar of your business; have it be a feature. Thinking purely social without an overarching premise is ironically solitary, and surely the fastest way to the back of the app store.
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The email, data and privacy implications of Microsoft’s acquisition of LinkedIn
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Len Shneyder
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| 16
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We all took a collective gasp when we saw the price tag of . Now that the dust has settled a bit, we can pause and reflect on what this means from a , and perspective — given that all three are potential strengths, weaknesses and concerns arising from the merger of two giants. While at a conference recently, I sat down with my colleague and friend, and discussed how this deal could change the B2B landscape. Here’s what he had to say. What did you make of this deal when you saw the announcement? At first I wasn’t sure what their plans were outside of an existing partnership. The more I thought about it, the more I began to realize Microsoft, like Google and other enterprises, really lacks a real social media presence or product. On the other hand, is a company that doesn’t make operating systems or business software, yet they’re at the forefront of enabling the people who do. So then what are the competitive advantages for these two behemoths joining forces? Why would Microsoft want and how would they use it as a competitive advantage against Apple? Is that a rhetorical question? At $26 billion, the is much more than a checkbox. Apple doesn’t have a social platform per se, but some may perceive them as a social enabler: The App marketplace is a kind of social landscape, music is a socially engaging medium, as are movies — these are culturally significant and drive social engagements. But I think I see what you’re saying. Right now, Google has lots of on users of their Google Apps product line for B2B clients and Google doesn’t sell or share that out to anyone; on the flip side, we know that Microsoft has lots of on users in their Office 365 product line… it’s an interesting parallel when you think about it. Very true, I hadn’t thought of it that way. So what’s in it for Microsoft? Does this help them go toe-to-toe with the social giants or the operating system platforms? I think it’s more about Microsoft wanting to know you, the B2B user, and how you engage with business productivity tools. Additionally, the connections you make and maintain in the world serve as a kind of social launching pad for the products and platforms you use on a daily basis. From the content side, who you are talking to, and what you are talking about are equally important. Having all that information positions Microsoft better in today’s competitive B2B computer market, B2B collaboration, B2B operating systems market and the hottest market of them all: cloud computing. So at the end of the day, is king, it’s always what’s most important and represents a kind of B2B social intelligence that Microsoft only had in the form of usage through Outlook 365. They knew how people worked with their products, but they didn’t know what they were saying about their products and what those conversations meant in light of their products. Absolutely! This brings them up to par with Google. Google’s products are free, their service is free and free is always awesome in my book. Google’s cloud already has an expansive network of users. How does Google’s cloud stack up against Azure? Or does this even matter? I’m less interested and concerned about the direct cloud-to-cloud comparison of Azure versus Google. What we have to realize is that the merger gives Microsoft access to a plethora of already involved users with lots of “cloud” and the ability for those B2B users to easily share their Office 365 work product with many others outside of their company’s user base. It gives Microsoft the ability to know who you might be working with, partnering with or just plain sharing with. If you look at what the popular client CloudMagic has done with their “ ” feature that provides users a button labelled “Know More” after receiving or sending an , you can see the sender’s organization, location, , Facebook and Twitter profiles of that based purely on their address. Can you imagine the power and ability within any Microsoft controlled product like computer-based Outlook or the cloud-based Office 365 knowing more about the sender of the message? Taking it up a notch, what could Microsoft do or build if they knew more about what sorts of B2B emails you get daily? What your company needs based on received content? This puts Microsoft RIGHT into the B2B analytics game that many of their competitors are already in. I think you’re onto something. Google released , which was an algorithm designed to organize the clutter of your inbox. is so terribly personal that I don’t think it ever really took off; we’ve all been using for a long time and have our own human-driven algorithms. And IBM announced , which was a kind of inbox manager, as well, but it seems to have morphed into a quasi-business/social collaboration tool. Isn’t there a cautionary tale in these two product lines that have seen very little pickup? Absolutely, but I think IBM had no real foundation in the space to launch Verse. Inbox management apps are really a B2B tool and probably won’t see too much traction among B2C, so I’m not surprised that Inbox by Google is in a kind of limbo between the two. The Microsoft deal is much more pointed and focused; it adds a new interesting spin to ’s features and would start allowing the app to report your location similar to how the Google Maps app regularly reports and stores location for the day. Geo-location would add a unique dimension to Microsoft’s in addition to the social chatter of . Microsoft could ask and answer questions like which corporate titles are traveling more than others? What might be interesting markets that certain people are traveling to? What is being said in that marketplace and what tools if any are being used? What happens if Microsoft’s CEO all of a sudden starts showing up at 37.4233111, -122.0706458 ( HQ GPS coordinates). Could it be about a partnership, merger or just plain lunchtime golf? All this location information makes Microsoft better positioned to sell their products to companies AND opens a secondary market to sell access to research and analytics firms hungry for this kind of focused B2B . Airlines and hotels have to be excited at the prospect of learning more about their business travelers. Insights like where to build the next hotel and more information about business routes to add or hubs to build out could be mined and explored through this kind of . Past travel history, conference attendance, etc. could all be gauged long in advance because people discuss it on social platforms like ; smart vendors just need access to a rich source of . Not to rain on your parade, but the scenario you described above has all kinds of crazy and . I don’t think half of the rosy future you described above would pass muster in the EU. hawks are, as we speak, sharpening their talons to sink them into the flesh of any future intel products, don’t you think? As awesome as it is for B2B marketing and marketers, you’re right, there are some needed product enhancements and permissioning that has to occur before any of the ideas I’ve mentioned can be brought to market. Many security and people will want to review the app as it does change and, as they probably do, all new vendors or applications that are installed on their computers and mobile phones. That’s the easy part. Sort of like how users of Google Apps Collaboration cloud gives users full control of who can view, edit and own documents and more importantly be able to primary share first with their organization and co-workers before outsiders. My company ran through this exact assessment to ensure we weren’t leaking once we made the jump to the cloud. I also think that this won’t be an issue for the merger to continue here in the United States when it comes to antitrust issues or more importantly issues. I think the European regulators will want to look at any changes or use of by Microsoft with a magnifying glass (and maybe even an electron microscope) ensuring that the proper transfer and use mechanisms are in place and that end users have been given the consent, notice, choice and control over their information that is expected and required. I’m sure Microsoft, being a leader in the space, won’t have many problems ensuring they’ve given the end user the protection they deserve and are entitled to by law. Microsoft declared its support for the EU-U.S. Shield and has been a huge leader and supporter of through the . So taking off the table, and the business strategy, what do you think Microsoft is trying to do from an end-user perspective? How are they trying to make our lives better? Microsoft says they are simply trying to alleviate business people from having to go back and forth between productivity tools and social networks; I believe that to some degree. This may have been where they started, but it’s not a guarantee that this is where they’ll wind up once they all dive into the technology and ferret out the true value of what they have. Will this merger make more secure? Or let me rephrase it; has lots and lots of , and now that this will be exposed and used by Microsoft, does this automatically paint a giant target on both companies? I’ve said it many times, the increase in security breaches is not about just having the , but in how hackers will want to use that to continue sending out nefarious things like spam, phishing and ransomware. The first step in doing bad things with is compromising users, but if you can compromise a company, then you have more than just an address, you have the means by which to steal an identity. The huge uptick in the marketing vertical over the past five years is intentional. , no matter how it’s obtained or used, is the new gold standard. As the world becomes ever more -driven, smart businesses look to fully realize the benefits of the revolution, from streamlining internal processes and communicating more ably with current and potential customers, to lowering costs and creating jobs. However, all of these potential future scenarios have to be tempered with a strict application of best practices security and . As far as what you and I do, Microsoft is getting instant access to a mountain of user , including contact and device preferences, demographics, brand and organizational affiliations and even company-level marketing spend metrics. We know how powerful detailed can be as market research firms, hedge funds and retailers have all shown great interest in our item-level consumer receipt . What delivers is with proven practical applications (sell more ads or messages or whatever). One challenge will be convincing advertisers Microsoft will remain a neutral party (i.e. not muck with competitor ads and recruiting efforts). Satya Nadella has already said they will not make sweeping changes to the platform and Weiner will retain great autonomy. That’s probably a smart move, and actually would be helpful to the users of it. However, what I’ve said throughout this Q&A is that they will change the underlying sharing technologies like GPS tracking or reporting that the average user doesn’t see or really “care” about. That may be one of the biggest game changers to come out of this .
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Immersion is going to be immense
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Jon Evans
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| 7
| 16
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Pokémon; Macbeth; the Illuminati. Those may not sound like they have a lot in common, but they exemplify the three whole new forms of technology-driven entertainment that have erupted in recent years. We’ll soon combine all three–and, eventually, use them to create whole new multi-faceted immersive worlds that will make today’s entertainment look like radio dramas. At last! For years augmented reality has waited for its messiah, its killer app; and at last, undisputably, here it is. I mean, of course, Pokémon Go, yet another . Vernor Vinge a decade ago, while William Gibson was writing about augmented-reality “ .” In the years since, informative AR apps like and rose, fell, and died unnoticed. A small but devoted hardcore has been playing , and thereby basically playtesting PG, for years. And now, finally, we have a bona fide hit. Why did we have to wait so long? Partly for sufficiently powerful hardware to become ubiquitous. (I still remember how Layar stuttered on my first Android phone.) And largely, as Darrell Etherington , because of Pokémon’s pre-existing “tremendous success as a media property.” We will now doubtless see an explosion of failed copycats … and also major franchises looking for their own AR hit. (Marvel Universe? The Bourne Reality?) And we should also see new, more immersive AR hardware launch soon, such as ‘s debut product. In case you haven’t noticed, is right now. , , — wherever you look, new immersive theatrical experiences are popping up. These are to traditional theater as open-world games like are to linear games like . And you’ll note that, once again, the most successful examples are the ones which build on a known franchise: , a (very loose) adaptation of , and , inspired by . Theater is, of course, only one form of reality. Real-life immersive games like have become wildly popular over the last decade as well, as have “ .” I would argue that all of the above create the illusion of , a concept named and popularized by the anarchist writer Hakim Bey–and which in turn inspired Burning Man, , and its ilk. The great virtue and tragic flaw of TAZs is that they don’t scale; they are experiences unique to the few who are physically there. Even Burning Man only has room for 70,000 people each year. They are ideal for intimate, personal experiences. But not for any kind of mass cultural commons– –or at least they , until technology made it possible to have globally scalable immersive experiences. I refer, of course, to virtual reality — . Older than AR and VR, and currently slightly out of favor, use the real world as a platform, and imbue ordinary, unaugmented existence with secret meaning and purpose, by sending cryptic messages, delivering mysterious packages, leaving hidden clues that only initiates will recognize, etcetera. ARGs have often been used to promote more traditional media: for the movie , for — once again, leveraging an existing franchise. And of course the notion of a hidden layers of esoteric meaning interwoven with ordinary reality is an insanely common fictional trope: see , , , and every conspiracy theory ever told. But there are original examples as well, such as San Francisco’s . I put it to you that we’re going to see more and more of all three of the above forms of storytelling and gaming. That’s pretty uncontroversial. More interestingly, I predict we’ll start to see of them; experiences which start as augmented reality on your smartphone, progress to alternate-reality messages in real-world billboards and Instagram feeds, and encounters with paid actors, and eventually, if you’re willing to pay the subscription price to keep playing, lead you to a house or warehouse tricked out as an immersive theater, and/or a key to a secret VR landscape — while countless others are also playing, and collectively changing the ongoing shape of the story. Now imagine all the roaming PokemonGO players are also passing keys, messages, and physical items when they encounter each other — Andrew Miller (@socrates1024) Is that a mixed-reality game? A role-playing game? Immersive theater? Any and all of the above, and something for which we need a new name? I look forward to finding out–and between Pokémon Go, , Oculus Rift, the Latitude Society, and other new shoots too numerous to cite, I suspect I won’t have to wait all that much longer.
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Baidu, China’s dominant search firm, suffers record profit drop
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Jon Russell
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Baidu may be the dominant search company in China by some margin, but it is currently in the midst of its toughest period as a public company. The firm today reported its largest drop in profits since its IPO 11 years ago, triggered by a public enquiry following the death of a young man who took a cancer treatment advertised on its service. Nasdaq-listed Baidu reported net income of RMB2.414 billion ($363.2 million) for its Q2 2016 quarter, that’s down 34.1 percent year-on-year. Revenue for the three-month period came in at RMB18.264 billion ($2.748 billion), up 10.2 percent on the previous year. Baidu on the back of the government probe and instituted a number of new policies in response, including limiting the number of sponsored links on a page, attaching warnings to certain ads and continuing to vet its advertiser base, which now requires licenses. But, with search over 90 percent of its revenue and medical companies accounting for around one-third of that figure, the crisis has had a major impact. And it isn’t likely to just disappear. According to the , Baidu CEO Robin Li told investors on a call that it could take two or three more quarters for the business to fully recover. “Although a significant portion of our revenue is sacrificed, the steps we have taken to further bolster a healthy, safe and trustworthy online and offline ecosystem will result in long-term benefit and reward for Baidu,” Li said in a statement last month. In a statement following the results, Li put the focus on Baidu’s foray into artificial intelligence and self-driving cars. In addition, its wallet service — which is well behind Alibaba’s and Tencent’s offerings — grew to 80 million active users. “Baidu’s value proposition remains robust, and our enthusiasm and vision for the future remains undiminished. Baidu is very excited to lead in this age of AI to truly unleash the potential of our platform, serve our users and customers and work with key partners better than we could before,” he said.
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Sony posts $205M profit as downsized mobile business stops bleeding cash
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Jon Russell
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Sony ($205 million) profit for its Q1 2016. That’s down on the ¥82.4 billion profit it carded this time last year, but in general the quarter was a mixed bag of positives and negatives following the impact of cost-cutting initiatives. We already knew the firm would take somewhat of a hit this quarter after had on its manufacturing operations nearby. Revenue for the three-month period did reflect that, coming in at ¥1.613 trillion ($15.662 billion), down 11 percent annually. Other factors besides the quake, Sony said, included the strong yen — — “the deterioration in investment performance” of its Sony Life business, and the downsizing of its smartphone business, which brought in 33 percent less revenue than one year previous. There’s a positive side to Sony Mobile’s performance, however — it is now at breakeven. Slowing growth and increased competition in the smartphone market had , with the smartphone business alone responsible for a $544 million loss in the last financial year. So it is quite notable that its mobile communications division posted a very slender ¥400 million ($4 million) operating profit for the quarter. That, Sony said, was down to tactical withdraws from tougher markets, as well as a shift away from mid-range phones where competition is fiercest toward higher-end devices with better margins. Restructuring also boosted its home entertainment and sound unit, operating income which increased 85 percent annually to ¥20.2 billion ($197 million) despite revenue dropping seven percent over the period. Amid those changes, Sony’s PlayStation business, which , stood tall. Sony’s games and network unit — which includes PlayStation — was the stellar performer, accounting for the most revenue across the firm and over 75 percent of total Sony profits. It posted an operating profit of ¥44 billion ($427 million), up 126 percent year-on-year, on revenue of ¥330.4 billion ($3.2 billion) for the quarter, up 14.5 percent. Sony put down that impressive rise to increased PS4 game and console sales, as well as some cost reductions made internally, including lower marketing spend — which makes sense for a console first launch in 2013. Sony is tapping into the rise of VR with PlayStation VR, its $399 take on things, which is due to . Given that alternatives like Oculus require a suitable PC rig to work, PlayStation VR could make sense for many who don’t want additional cost or hassle. As mentioned at the top, many Sony units were impacted by the recent earthquake. Its imaging component business took a 26 percent revenue dip year-on-year, the semiconductor business was down 23 percent, and its component business saw revenue fall 23 percent. Sony Pictures carded a ¥10.6 billion ($103 million) loss which Sony blamed on currencies, despite some strong box office hits like , and revenue in its music business was up 9 percent year-on-year.
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Finding a film
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Haje Jan Kamps
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stopped to think about what it takes to bring an animated fish to life? How a team of people can take a spark of an idea and make it a reality so millions of pairs of eyes can stare in amazement at the big screen? I spoke with Pixar’s president Ed Catmull and one of the tech leads on “ ,” John Halstead, to find out more about the creative and technical journey behind the brilliant barrage of brightly projected pixels. In “Finding Nemo,” Dory helped Nemo’s dad find his wayward son. In Pixar’s latest film, it’s Dory’s turn: In a flash of clarity, our yellow-finned friend remembers she has parents and sets out on an adventure to find them again. Pixar’s history is deeply rooted in technology, tracing its lineage back to a division within called the Graphics Group. It was founded the late 1970s and among its first few employees was Ed Catmull who began to research how the company could use computers in filmmaking in general and especially how it would be possible to make a computer-animated film. Back then, the technology wasn’t ready for making movies, so we started selling our technology instead. It was spun out from Lucasfilm as its own company in the mid-1980s, at which point Steve Jobs invested $10 million into the company. Half of the money went toward the intellectual property rights from George Lucas, and another $5 million served as runway for Pixar. went into Pixar’s bank account to give it some runway. “Even all those years ago, we all just wanted to make films right from the start,” Catmull told me. He’s still on the company’s payroll, 30 years later, now in the big chair as president. “But back then, the technology wasn’t ready for making movies, so we started selling our technology instead. We were making little short films right away and when the technology was finally good enough, we could start making feature films.” “Luxo Jr.” was the first animated short Pixar created, and it was released in 1986. The two-minute short film shimmied into history as one of the world’s first computer-animated shorts, and it received a standing ovation on its debut. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6G3O60o5U7w The technology it started selling was the and . The former was a tremendously advanced computer made especially for data visualization. It only sold 300 units, but was popular for specialist uses in geophysics, medicine, and meteorology. RenderMan is a software package that calculates how light moves through a computer-generated scene, so the computer can generate images that look “real.” It has had tremendous longevity — the newest version of RenderMan, still developed in-house by Pixar, was used to make “Finding Dory.” A movie at Pixar starts with an idea, usually in the minds of one of the Pixar directors. The director comes up with a fraction of a story they want to tell, and it all grows from there. The first phase is called development, where the idea is sown in fertile ground, doused in some creative juice and poked and prodded for a while to see what it grows into. This is an example of a storyboard, drawn by story supervisor Max Brace. In development, the idea is subjected to a breadth of talent, trying to flesh out the idea, exploring which way it develops. There may be a little bit of , sketching and painting that gives a feel for what the movie will look like, but the plan at this point is to turn the idea into something that can be and developed into a full-fledged movie. “The main criteria for us feeling good about green-lighting a movie is that we feel it’s going to be a great movie,” explains John Halstead, the supervising technical director of “Finding Dory.” Our goal at Pixar is to tell the best story that we possibly can. It is sometimes painful, but ultimately, if it leads to a better movie, it’s worth it. Once everyone starts feeling the love for a project, the early pre-production process is wrapped up. There will usually be an idea of what the tone of the film is going to be and what core ideas will get explored, and there will be an outline of a story and maybe some art. This is the point where people like Halstead are attached to the project. “I represent the technical effort on the film,” Halstead explains modestly. In reality, he is the director’s right-hand person on all things technical, providing direction, vision and resources to all the technical teams on the film, which explains why he gets a shiny title credit front and center as soon as the film ends. There is a script of sorts from day one, but at this point in the process it’s not set in stone. From what I’m hearing from some members of the Pixar team, it’s barely even set in rapidly melting soft-serve ice cream. Script changes are a fact of life in the world of movie-making, but Pixar has a particular reputation for making significant edits in the story even quite late in the production process. That often causes friction among the artists and legendary amounts of work that needs to be (re)done in the process. But ultimately, it’s all done for a reason. Color scripts are used in the production to help guide the feel of the story through lighting and color. These ones are examples from “The Good Dinosaur” and were painted by Sharon Calahan in the pre-production phase of the movie. “Our goal at Pixar is to tell the best story that we possibly can. Our entire production process has been centered around that goal, and we to bend over backwards to accommodate that,” says Halstead. “It is sometimes painful, but ultimately, if it leads to a better movie, it’s worth it.” Once the script, or a portion of it, is given the go-ahead, the real work begins. It’s handed over to the story department, which takes the specifics of that portion of the story to heart, aligns it with the overall feel of the movie and creates a set of storyboards. The storyboards are like comic book versions of a shot, drawn by story artists for the purpose of pre-visualizing the film. They are placed in sequence by the editorial team, so that they convey scenes and deliver a rough sense of how the story unfolds. It’s a big job, too; more than 100,000 story panels were created just for “Finding Dory.” This is a concept art painting showcasing the exploration of color and the design of new characters and new environments. It was drawn by production designer Steve Pilcher. From here, the story team considers what each shot would look like, and how they would transition from one scene to the next. There’s also a series of drawings created with various degrees of detail. These drawings are mostly digital paintings made in Photoshop that help visualize what everything will look like. Each sequence gets a set of mood boards and concept drawings, too, to help illustrate the colors, lighting and feel of the scene. With all of that in place, it’s time to nail down the audio; everything is animated around the voice track, so it’s important to get that right early on. However, big stars like Ellen DeGeneres, Diane Keaton, Idris Elba and Willem Dafoe are very expensive, so for the early stages of the production, Pixar uses “scratch voice” — someone from the production team who voices the character so the animators have something to animate to. Sometimes, the scratch voice feels so right to the directors that they decide to not replace it with that of a “real” voice actor. When that happens, they keep (or re-record in higher quality) the original voice track for the final versions of the movie; that’s how you sometimes end up with a producer’s assistant receiving actors-style royalties for a Pixar movie they worked on. Once there is a voice track, the progress is shown to the director. At this point, the visuals are very simple. You have boxes moving around on the screen, perhaps some still drawings, and the scratch audio; it will be barely recognizable as a movie, but it’s enough to start getting some actual, er, from the directors. Up to this point, most things in the movie are all in two dimensions — paintings, drawings and so on — but the next step is to start building everything in 3D. With all of those things ticked off, it’s time for layout to step in. The layout department sets up the cameras and the basic lights and environment. But, you guessed it, given that Pixar creates digital movies, “setting up cameras” and “creating lights” and “prepping the environment” involves clicking mice and pressing keyboard keys, and not a lot of gaffer-taping long coils of cables to the floor for health and safety reasons. The lighting team will start setting up master lighting — the big light sources in a scene — to start creating the mood. The lighting process is actually tremendously complex. In earlier movies, Pixar could have thousands of light sources in a single scene, and it is possible to use a single additional light source just to get that perfect sparkle in a character’s eye. With the new rendering technology in use on “Finding Dory,” the number of light sources has gone down significantly, which saved a ton of time. I made it half-way through my interviews with Pixar staff before I had a mind-blowing realization: Nothing you see on screen on “Finding Dory” actually exists. Every hint of a smile playing across a character’s face, every hair, every chip in the paint in the scenery, every fan coral waving gently in the water, hell, — the minutest detail, every single last pixel you see on the screen — is the result of somebody clicking a mouse, moving a pen across a tablet, or typing merrily away at a keyboard. Yeah, I know. It’s incredible. To get a better feel for the characters, some will be created in clay so the digital artists can look at the characters from all angles. With that in mind, it’s the character department’s time to shine; every aspect of every character has to be created, and if you’ve never played with building worlds in 3D on a computer before, you’d be amazed at how much work happens at this stage. First comes the design, which is usually done in 2D first — sketches in Photoshop — followed by some basic 3D drawings. The most prominent characters also have clay models made of them to help bring them to life and to ensure they look right from all angles. With a good feeling for what the characters all look like, the general shape of the characters is modeled in a 3D design package, and then they are animated and brought to life by the animation department. Animators create the personality and “acting” of the characters. Another vital part of the character-making is rigging, which is the creation of a series of variables on a character that enables the animators to do their job. The rigging process is fascinating. If you were rigging a human arm for example, you can define the range of motion that is possible for an arm, a wrist or a finger, but you’d also need to think about what would happen with the skin and muscles around the arm as you move it. Try it now: Look at your arm as you bend your elbow; your muscles bulge slightly, the skin and fat around the inside of your arm creases and deforms. And if you turn your wrist, you’ll see that your elbow also changes its look. All of this needs to be reflected in the models on screen, and a tremendous amount of time is spent here to ensure that when an animator makes a character come to life with motion and emotion, it continues to look realistic. The final step of making a character come to life is shading. This is the process of making sure the surface layers of the characters are painted with the right color, texture and other characteristics. For example, a jelly fish might need to be mostly see-through, some fish are shiny, while others are more matte; and various body parts of the characters need different characteristics. There’s also a layer of simulation that happens after the animation stage. If a character is hairy, for example ( ), an animator can’t be expected to animate each individual strand of hair. The simulation team and riggers need to work together to give the animator enough tools to be able to do what they need to do. The simulation department adds the “secondary motion” of the fins and tentacles, and this simulation allows the characters to move naturally to complement the acting. In layout, the basic lighting and sets are put in place, so the animators have a framework to work in. This is also when the virtual lights and cameras are created and the rough camera angles are selected. Time to make the characters move: It’s animation time! The lighting department is responsible for integrating all of the elements – characters, sets and effects – into a final image. The fascinating thing about animation is how backward the lighting process is. In live action filmmaking, lighting tends to be one of the first things considered in a scene. In animation, it’s one of the last parts of the job. The lighting department uses virtual light sources in the scene to illuminate the characters and the set. Technical directors set up the lighting to draw the audience’s eye to story points and to create the correct mood. Of course, the characters don’t live in isolation; they also need a rich environment to live in. If you’ve seen the first 10 or so minutes of “A Good Dinosaur” (or even “Piper,” the short that is shown before “Finding Dory” in cinemas), you know what I’m talking about; you never quite know whether you’re looking at a computer animation, or one of the most fantastic drone fly-overs that was ever filmed. Allow me to spoil that one for you: It’s all made on a computer, and that’s precisely what is so incredible. The world changes all the time, and we have to relentlessly keep trying new things. Just like the characters, the environments have to be created from scratch: Modeled, shaded and, in many cases, animated to look perfect as the backdrop to the action happening in the foreground. Granted, the sets don’t get the same level of attention — neither from the moviegoers nor the filmmakers — as the characters driving the story forward. The backgrounds and environments are still important, however: If anything detracts from the story being told, or seems out of place, it jars the audience out of the magic. “We have to up the bar,” Halstead says, when I note that I thought the water on ‘The Good Dinosaur” looks better than the water in most live-action movies I’d seen. “On ‘The Good Dinosaur,’ we did a lot of things we’ve never done before, but that is true for every film we create, including ‘Finding Dory.’ The things we learned about water for ‘The Good Dinosaur’ came in handy, but with ‘Finding Dory,’ most of the film takes place water, and we had to raise the bar again.” “Innovation has always been part of animation,” Catmull adds, going back to the very beginning of the film genre to make his point: “Don’t forget that when Walt Disney started making movies, it new technology. It’s easy to forget that when looking back, but he was the person who originally understood that in order to further the artistic side, you have to look to technology. “All along, the technology has changed,” Catmull says about the last thirty years of animation. “The world changes all the time, and we have to relentlessly keep trying new things.” I would much rather be proven wrong by my own team than by another studio. Of course, with trying a lot of new things, you’ll find a lot of things that don’t work, too. “We are trying to foster a culture where it is okay to fail,” Catmull says. “Most of the time, I don’t even hear about the failures, and if I do, it is because someone is making a big deal out of something that went wrong. That isn’t what we are trying to do.” “Finding Dory” utilizes a lot of technology that wasn’t available even a few years ago. I try to dig deeper into whether it is the art that’s driving the technology forward, or whether it’s vice-versa, which is met by a hearty laugh from the Pixar veteran. “Problems only really occur when people don’t understand it’s a yin yang,” Catmull says, insisting that at Pixar, technology and art are driving each other forward. “We have reached a virtuous cycle now where artists expect new tools to be available to them that can help push their art forward. The tech teams, in turn, thrive because they are being pushed to their limits, too.” Of course, having a large number of artists and technical people experimenting with new and exciting technology and techniques is all fine and dandy, but ultimately, there’s a deadline, too: Pixar is a business like all others. Films need to get shipped to theaters, money has to be made and mortgages have to be paid. “They all know there is a deadline. But if someone has an idea, and I think they are wrong, I am not going to stop them,” Catmull considers. “I will fund the project anyway. If it doesn’t work, I would never say ‘I told you so’. It’s counter-intuitive, but here’s the thing: If the team believes they are right, they will work very hard to prove me wrong, and I would much rather be proven wrong by my own team, than by another studio.” “Animators get acting notes, much like directors would give to actors,” says Halstead, giving a series of examples. A director might ask a human actor to show more emotion, to speak with more fervor, to turn slightly or to show conflicting emotion — and the same is true for director’s notes on an animated film. “It is all about getting the characters to perform in a way that tells the story in the best possible way. That is true both for live action and animated films.” Animated characters get director’s notes much like live actors would. The only difference is that it isn’t a case of getting the actor back out of their trailer for another take, it’s sending an animator back to their workstation to make the tweaks. Once the dialogue is recorded by the talent — the famous performers you’ve likely heard of — it gets a lot more expensive to make changes, so it becomes more and more important to solidify the story and the script as the process moves on. “Calling Ellen back to record some additional lines is expensive, for sure, but the main challenge is scheduling,” says Halstead. “The bigger the star, the busier they are, and we have to be mindful of that.” “Finding Nemo” was a huge technological accomplishment in its own right when it came out, but Pixar’s debut fish movie was released over 13 years ago, and a lot has changed in the world of animated film since then. “’Nemo’ was the first film I ever worked on,” Halstead says, and briefly falls into a memory hole as he relives the days of writing code that would help fish to swim along paths, building the anemones and modeling coral, etc., before eventually moving into more of an effects-driven role, including water effects. Story-wise, “Finding Nemo” stands the test of time. Visually, the difference between “Finding Nemo” and “Finding Dory” is astonishing. “Everything has changed since ‘Nemo.’ Absolutely everything,” Halstead says, unable to pinpoint exactly what the biggest development is. Software and algorithm changes were enabled by much more powerful hardware, which drove further innovation. “We benefit not only from 13 years of advancements in the underlying technology, but also from 13 years of production experience, and finding better ways of making great movies.” In the “Nemo” days, water simulation, for example, was in its infancy, and while the movie does stand the test of time, seeing the difference between the water on “Nemo” and “Dory” is pretty spectacular. Everything has changed since ‘Nemo.’ Absolutely everything. “On ‘Finding Nemo,’ we actually had to scale back the number of shots where we had characters interacting with the surface of the water,” Halstead recalls, “And we had to be very careful with things like breaking waves and other movement. Today, we have the flexibility to do as much of that as we want.” The computer-generated water splash in the video below illustrates how far we have come in the 13 years since “Nemo” was released. This short video would have been all but impossible back then. In addition to the new tools Pixar developed themselves, the teams involved took on some new external tools. For lighting and shading, the company started using for the first time. For water effects, the company relied heavily on , a procedural tool for animation. “Procedural” in this case means that everything Houdini outputs is the result of math: simulations and equations all the way. Below is a demo reel for what can be done with Houdini, a software package that’s used extensively in VFX and animated films. It is heavily focused on simulations and makes computers do the heavy lifting to make effects look spectacular. Another new technology introduced on Dory is USD — . It’s a technology that helps describe and share geometric information between software packages; it keeps all the assets for a movie together all in the same file formats. It also helps ensure that if you make a change to an asset in one place (say, for example, you tweak the design of a cup in one scene) that the changes are carried through to all other scenes, as well. Pixar uses USD extensively, but is also hoping it will become a broader standard, later this year. One of the biggest changes in the past decade, Halstead tells me, is Presto, Pixar’s own home-grown animation software package. It was first used on “Brave” and has been used in all of Pixar’s movies since. The video below is probably only for the most hard-core animation nerds, but it is a rare glimpse at what Presto is like to use. The final big change is that Dory is the first Pixar film that is made with a brand-new version of its RenderMan engine, Renderman RIS. You’d have to be a truly profound film nerd to care about different types of rendering, so I’m going to skip that for the sake of this article, but if you really want to vanish in a deep (if beautifully rendered) hole of visual artistry, . Now let’s stop for just a second; imagine you’re creating an animated movie. That’s pretty daunting in itself, but also having three different in-house developed software packages to support? That’s just downright mind boggling. Of course, at some point the time comes to actually put the final movie “in the can,” ready to be shipped to theaters. Before that happens, you need to make some pretty big decisions about what the film looks like. One of the big challenges the team had was related to Renderman RIS. “When using path-tracing technology, one of the things you have to deal with is that the rendering algorithm generates a certain amount of noise,” says Halstead, comparing this “noise” to film grain on photographic film. “You can reduce the noise by rendering for longer and eventually the noise gets cleaned up.” Pixar’s render farm is racks on racks on racks of powerful computers ready to turn a jumble of assets into gorgeous final renders for the movie theaters. The problem is that this is an exponential process: It might take you just a few seconds to get a picture that’s good enough to get a feeling whether the animation works. Perhaps after an hour it looks pretty good or after a few hours it starts looking very good. But if you’re aiming for perfection, you’ll be running the poor farm of rendering computers ragged for ages. We could play the vinyl version of the movie, with a little bit of grain, or we can get you the CD. So the technical team decided to try an experiment. What if they rendered the same scene with different durations of rendering time, getting various amounts of grain, and then see what actually looked best? Ultimately, the feel of the film was going to be a subjective decision, and obviously, if the director insisted on near perfection, that would potentially mean putting the film’s release date back, or sending someone to the nearest RadioShack to buy another load of servers. “Our director of photography, Ian Megibben, had a great idea,” Halstead recalls with a smile. “The director loves music. He loves playing music. He loves listening to music. We figured that perhaps the best way to pitch this was to say that we could play the vinyl version of the movie, with a little bit of grain, or we can get him the CD.” The screening room must have been holding their breaths; if the decision would be to get the film as clean as possible, it would have had tremendous financial and timeline implications. But luckily writer Andrew Stanton chose to embrace a bit of grain, preferring the look of the movie that hadn’t been rendered to computer-enhanced perfection. Even with a bit of grain, “Finding Dory” wasn’t a lightweight. The average render time on the movie was around 53 hours. On average. For every single frame in the movie, rendered out in the final 2K resolution needed to show the film in cinemas. “We had some frames that were pretty fast compared to 53 hours,” says Halstead, “but we also had scenes where there was so much going on that it took 10 times more — 500 hours or more to render a single frame.” In “Finding Dory” there are 24 frames per second, 60 seconds per minute, 102 minutes in the film. And there are two cameras to render, because the film is in 3D. , that means you’re talking about a render time of, oh, 1,800 years, give or take. Of course, you can parallelize a lot of that; if you are rendering on a high-end, 16-core gaming rig with a ton of RAM, you might be able to get that time down to just a century or so. Eager as we are to see “Dory,” I’m pretty sure few of us would be willing to wait a few hundred years to enjoy the film, so it’s a good thing Pixar has a pretty beefy rendering farm. I had to get a picture of the sign outside Pixar’s render farm. Open 24 hours, indeed! More important than rendering out the final film: Imagine you are working on a scene, and you’re having to wait 53 hours to see what the changes you made to the scene actually . Of course, that’s no sensible way to work, which is why Pixar has an incremental rendering technology. Yes, the full, final, all-bells-and-whistles render will still take a long time, but you can get a good feel for what it is you’ve just changed much, much faster than that. A version with a lot of noise could be back in the order of seconds or minutes. Below you can see how progressive rendering works: At first, the picture is basically useless, but it rapidly becomes clearer. Whenever the animator moves the light source, it restarts the rendering from scratch. One of the core characters of the movie is Hank, a seven-legged octopus (“That means you’re a septopus,” as Dory points out in the film), which caused some tremendous challenges for the team overall. Think back for just a second to the bit where I explained what a rigger does: putting joints and bones and constraints for movement and all that fun stuff. Well, if you’ve ever spent any time looking at octopuses (and you should – or get some Scuba-diving lessons and find one yourself), you’ll quickly realize that “constraints of movement” aren’t really a thing for an octopus. They’ll ; their arms can stretch, expand, twist and turn, and they can practically turn their whole bodies inside out. Hank was a fun character to create, but how, exactly, do you animate a seven-legged octopus pushing a baby buggy? Now imagine the day at work where someone taps you on the shoulder and says “Hey, Jim, it’s your lucky day. Could you just rig this octopus for me really quickly? That’d be great.” “We were just kind of scratching our heads,” Halstead says. “We had no idea how to even approach this character; how do you make it appealing from a design standpoint in terms of making it a character people would feel was approachable and likable, fun to watch on the screen and can deliver a performance?” The team had to figure out even more basic challenges, like where his mouth is and how they would make Hank speak. To take but one example: An octopus’s mouth is in a place that wouldn’t make for a great kid’s movie close-up. But once the character was fully designed and rigged, then came a new generation of challenges. For example, there are scenes where Hank needs to be in a baby’s stroller or move across land. You won’t be surprised to find that Pixar’s animation team was unable to find footage for those particular actions on YouTube that they could use as reference. About a minute into the “Finding Dory” trailer below, you can see Hank in action. The film has been a long time in the making, but the hard slog seems to have worked out. Pixar’s movies take on average five years to make, an eternity compared to the two-year turnaround you’d expect from your average Bond film. “Finding Dory” netted the company its . It is so successful, in fact, that even though it opened just weeks ago, , which is the company’s most commercially successful film ever. “So, could I save the movie on a memory stick?” I ask Halstead, naively, and get a slightly nervous laugh in return. It would have to be one hell of a memory stick. “The whole film takes up more than 500TB,” Halstead points out. To be fair, that number includes all the final renders, assets, cached data, computer models, digital paintings, etc. — but it’s all data Pixar keeps for reference in the future. Let’s put it this way: If you were to put a backup of all of that data on Blu-Ray discs and you line them up on a shelf, your shelf would have to be as long as a football field. If you’d be dumb enough to try to back it up to CDs instead, you’d need quite a ladder to stack them all: your neatly piled pillar of CD cases would reach half-way to outer space. But ultimately, a movie isn’t a stack of zeroes and ones, just like a painting isn’t just blobs of pigment on a canvas. Like all art, it’s about what it makes you feel, and that’s where the real magic happens. To me, the most impressive part of “Finding Dory” is that you don’t think about the hundreds of people involved in making it, the render-farms whipped to within an inch of their lives, or the software that brought it all together. There are a lot of people and a lot of tech that made the movie possible, but it’s all invisible, stepping aside so we can just enjoy the film and keep on swimming.
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Crunch Report | Oracle Buys Netsuite
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Khaled "Tito" Hamze
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Tito Hamze
Tito Hamze
Joe Zolnoski
Joe Zolnoski
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How the media will rise in the face of the digital revolution
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Raghav Bahl
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The media is passing through an awkward digital adolescence. With falling revenues and smaller newsrooms, the industry is being squeezed into an unfamiliar online space against its will. Publications with hundred-year pedigrees are having to rethink and relearn their trade from the ground up. The industry has been in a and, while some publications have been plodding on, and complaining, others — like The New York Times — have been actively experimenting with new business models in order to turn things around. The publication’s latest venture, producing a Spanish language version for Latin America, . I am optimistic that the industry will prevail, despite the naysayers. So how will the media continue to adapt to the digital revolution and monetize its content for the age of online sharing? And how might platforms like Facebook, Google and Apple reinvent our concept of the exclusive? Before the great digital expansion, broadcasters and publishers had a fairly captive audience. Viewers were limited to the few television channels they had available or the newspapers they bought. Higher ratings and wider circulations meant bigger ad revenues, and distribution advantages gave the broadcaster and publisher greater power to monetize. Today, those advantages have all but vanished; consumers have free and easy access to many channels and are always just one click away from new content. Nowadays, audiences are less likely to head directly to destination news outlets. Instead, they are discovering this content on social media — 63 percent of Facebook and Twitter users say they access news on the social networks, . This is exposing social media users to a whole range of varied content. Not only are media outlets forced to write stories that stand out from the crowd, but they also must cater to an entirely new kind of consumer. In response, publications and marketers are creating bite-sized, easily digestible and shareable content that comes in the form of listicles, FAQs, photo essays, video content and so on. We’re also seeing a rise in clickbait — sensationalist content that attempts to lure readers with over-the-top claims, compelling imagery and shock tactics, ultimately to sell advertising. While the reader might enjoy the content, he or she doesn’t value that which lacks substance. Nevertheless, this type of content won’t disappear; it is perhaps not unlike poor-quality tabloids versus quality broadsheets in the old days. It falls into the category of the ephemeral and of mindless fun — something that has always been popular. However, I am optimistic that these changes will bring about an evolution of the industry, rather than its demise. The fact is, there are advantages to the new, digital world. For one, broadcasters and publishers now have a far cheaper distribution system. When I first began distributing television content and newspapers in 1985, distribution costs could reach a staggering 25 percent. Trying to reach an audience of over one billion — as — would have been unthinkable. Of course, consumers can click away from your content, but they also come to your product in the same way. As The New York Times has realized with its new foreign language ventures, the audience is no longer trapped in a demographic or geographical bubble — it can be global. Viewers, readers and consumers can now access online content from anywhere, at any time. These advantages will start accumulating and will become more advantageous as time goes by. Publishers are now making content for a new generation of younger consumers. that newspaper digital readership increased more than twice as fast as the overall internet audience in the age groups of 18-24, 25-34 and 35-44. Despite the prevalence of short-form content, millennial readers are in fact . What’s more, deep, meaningful content of is more likely to be shared, and that longer-form article . This is good news for journalists and publishers, as advertisers will once again value long-form content, and will likely pay more for content that drives more leads. Branded and native ad content can be seamlessly interwoven with quality journalistic content — through words, sound and moving pictures — and delivered on a nonlinear mobile platform. There is no doubt that this form of advertising content will increase in both relevance and in volume, and will replace more traditional forms of advertising. In this regard, we can draw a parallel to the old days, when advertising column inches in newspapers became 30-second commercials — now a staple of the television experience.Furthermore, the marriage of print and mobile is happening. Thanks to the prevalence of social channels, media is becoming ever more personal, and will from now on be consumed on a handheld device. This new animal will be fed with a new advertising format; multi-media and targeted ads are already driving revenues for some publishers. This will only increase. Despite broad changes to advertising revenue sources, this does not mean an end for recognizable subscription models. What we will see instead is a qualitative split in the media. On one hand we will have short-form content pulling in low-margin advertising revenue; on the other, we will have in-depth, insightful reporting that adds value to the readership and commands both subscription fees and far higher advertising revenue. Subscription models are sustainable for powerful media brands like The New York Times or The Economist. An established, loyal readership is always willing to pay, as the attests. And where less-well-known outlets — like , for example — provide in-depth, original reporting, consumers will part with their cash. Subscription models will also flourish when media outlets provide utility and advice — for entrepreneurs and investors, for example. There is an even bigger change on the horizon. We must look to digital platforms like Facebook, Google and Amazon for the future of exclusive news content. Facebook, the biggest of the bunch, has recently allowed users to monetize its news feed with video content — giving advertisers . This paradigm change will shift even further as this monopoly is challenged by other large platforms joining the race. When Google news, Apple and even Amazon follow suit, the power of the exclusive content provider will go up. Platforms will begin vying for exclusive, monetized content, increasing the value of the product and making publishers more powerful, in turn. Despite fears that it’s I argue the opposite — we are simply in a difficult transition from which we will emerge stronger and better. Along with the intensely crowded clickbait and popular quickie-content market, we will continue to see serious, quality journalism. The amazing cost advantages brought by free (or nearly free) distribution channels, and a growing global audience, means publishers can continue to operate and good content will still rise to the top. And when monetized social media content really takes off, we are likely to see a return to exclusive media and a huge boost in ad revenues, shepherded in by the biggest social and commercial online platforms out there. It’s time for publications to embrace the digital revolution, because it is only going to make them stronger.
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SurveyMonkey study finds social media apps ruled mobile in first half of 2016
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Lucia Maffei
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A new study from revealed the 30 most-downloaded and most-used apps in the American iOS and Android app stores so far this year. Social media apps like Facebook, Snapchat and Instagram ruled over mobile games in the first six months of 2016. Because Pokémon Go on July 6, that wildly popular new title didn’t even show in the rankings. Only one game cracked the top-10-most-downloaded list, Slither.io. And game titles appeared under the top 30 most-used apps in the U.S. Music apps made a strong showing, ranging from expected entrants like Pandora and Spotify to newer entrants Musical.ly. As well-intentioned as their developers may be, health and fitness apps didn’t crack the top 30 in either most-downloaded or most-used rankings. The report found that, as is typical, the most-downloaded apps are not the most used. The top five most-downloaded apps were Messenger, Snapchat, Facebook, Instagram and Color Switch, whereas the top five most-used apps were Facebook, YouTube, Messenger, Google Maps and Play Store. To find something that isn’t owned by either Facebook, Apple or Google on the most-used app list, you need to go down to the 13th slot where Snapchat is ranked. “Fully 40 percent of the most-used apps come pre-loaded on the operating system, highlighting the importance of Android and iOS to Google and Apple, and giving some insight into Facebook’s ongoing desire to control this deeper layer of the stack,” the report said. Here are the full charts: Image Credit: Survey Monkey Image Credit: SurveyMonkey
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What’s this whole email thing about, anyway?
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John Biggs
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know about the Clinton email scandal? If you’re anything like me, not much — yet! Let’s take a stroll into our political Swamp of Sadness where both parties are currently mired. One candidate became stuck there while trying to beat the dead horse of the Crooked Hillary meme and the other candidate is sinking simply because government email is just so damn crappy. Ready, Atreyu? This is the primary question, and the one that I suspect not many of us understand. An email server is a computer designed to send and receive email. It is not difficult to set up — can do it — but it is generally discouraged with the rise of cloud solutions like Google Apps, and the endless updates and tweaks necessary to keep it secure are often daunting. If you’re not careful, your email server can turn into a spam factory or hackers can crack your account and read your email. This is very common. Most of us have two email addresses, one for work and one on a service like Gmail. The Clintons have their own email system — Clintonemail.com — and it runs on Microsoft Exchange Server 2010. You can visit the server . There are a few other domains associated with the Clintons, as well, but she primarily used the Clintonemail.com domain on her Blackberry. You would want your own mail server if you didn’t like the one someone made you use. You’d also want your own if you want complete control of your email from stem to stern. Both of these things are true in the Clintons’ case. The initial impetus for the private server came in 2009 when Clinton and her friends wanted to use Blackberries for communicating with each other and for reading, presumably, State Department mail. There was no practical solution for Clinton to check her email on the go, as the system required a secure laptop to connect to secure government servers. Therefore, she relegated secure email to a standalone, secure laptop and used her own email address for correspondence with her staff. In fact, Clinton and her staffers . : A solution was proposed wherein Clinton could set up a server to forward secure email from her office, but this was too difficult and Clinton balked. Ultimately she continued to use her BlackBerry after being warned by security personnel that it was unsafe. This means she may have sent an email regarding State Department business using her BlackBerry. Coincidentally, the FBI found that the Clinton email server contained eight top-secret email chains and 36 secret email chains. The desire to have a private email address is strong in government. used his Gmail address on his official-looking super-cool-looking business cards. This is the same guy who wanted Clinton indicted for using her own server. We all know Jason Chaffetz would never use his personal email for work. — Abraham White (@abwhite7) Why does Rep. Chaffetz get a pass? Check : In light of intensified scrutiny on Clinton’s email practices, it seems a worthwhile question to answer: Why are members of agencies such as the State Department required to use government email accounts, while members of Congress are not? The answer lies in federal open records laws — most of which don’t apply to Congress. The Associated Press (AP) reported on this extensively last year, finding that members of Congress aren’t required to “use official email accounts, or to retain, archive or store their emails, while in office or after.” The Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) — the law that allows the public to request internal documents from government agencies — for example, does not cover members of Congress. Congress is also not subject to the Federal Records Act, which requires all federal agency employees to keep accurate records of their activities. Federal agency employees, of course, include Clinton, who was found to have violated the Federal Records Act by using a private email server while serving as secretary of state. The reason Congress is not subject to these rules, however, is because Congress makes its own rules. And Congress has never decided that it needs a law requiring its members to maintain records and make those records available to the public. Clinton, as a Federal agency employee, works under different rules, but she’s not alone in flouting the rules. Former Secretary of State Colin Powell, under the Bush administration, ran his own email server and later wiped it, saying of the : “I don’t have any to turn over. I did not keep a cache of them. I did not print them off. I do not have thousands of pages somewhere in my personal files.” Jeb Bush, while Governor of Florida, did the same thing: Finally in 2009 it was discovered that 22 million emails were deleted from a server run by the Republican National Committee called gwb43.com. Bush staffers, including Karl Rove, used this email domain — which stood for George W Bush, 43rd President — and the staffers wiped it when Congress began to investigate the dismissals of the U.S. Attorneys. “required the Bush administration to reveal that not all internal White House emails were available.” So clearly there’s a precedent for this “extraordinary” behavior. Running your own server could be a way for government officials to skirt the Freedom Of Information Act. This was a , but it’s unclear if this was the true impetus. Because government email servers are managed and archived by the State Department, they can be searched at will and a record of official business be kept. Clinton’s server couldn’t be audited in this way. It’s also very dangerous to run your own server. “Although the American people didn’t know about this, it’s almost certain that foreign intelligence agencies did, just as the NSA knows which Indian and Spanish officials use Gmail and Yahoo accounts,” ACLU technologist Chris Soghoian told . “She’s not the first official to use private email and not the last. But there are serious security issues associated with these kinds of services… When you build your house outside the security fence, you’re on your own, and that’s what seems to have happened here.” The biggest problem arose when it was discovered that for government business, employees had to disable many of the features of their government email servers in order to receive email from the Clintonemail domain. This included phishing programs that kept staffers from being scammed. Were Clinton’s emails hacked? We don’t know, although by China, South Korea and Germany. After all, Exchange Server is a Microsoft product. There’s bound to be a bug.
describes the situation succinctly: …after she took questions from the reporters yesterday about the email saga, the press focused in on the fact in reviewing her private emails, Clinton found roughly 60,000 messages. She handed over 30,000 to the State Department and determined the other 30,000 were personal in nature and disgarded them. It’s these 30,000 “personal emails” that are creating a stir. The Trump camp is also suggesting that these emails probably contain classified information, that they could have been compromised, and that having your own email server while acting as Secretary of State is tantamount to treason. Luckily, precedent (see above) shows us otherwise. FBI Director James Comey said that “Although there is evidence of potential violations of the statutes regarding the handling of classified information, our judgment is that no reasonable prosecutor would bring such a case. In looking back at our investigations into the mishandling or removal of classified information, we cannot find a case that would support bringing criminal charges on these facts.” Clinton was “careless” but not criminal.
There is a concurrent narrative spreading about a trove of emails . These emails came from DNC servers unconnected with the Clinton’s. That’s right: none of the recently released emails — which experts are blaming Russian intelligence for leaking — came from that Exchange Server we talked about above. Trump , suggesting that the Russians or Chinese may have emails related specifically to the Clinton email server. This is still unclear and apparently Trump meant the suggestion as a .
So now a few things should happen: the government should rework its email and security protocols to take into account a . It should maintain records of government correspondence as stringently as banks are required to store their correspondence and it should ensure that the email system be up to date and usable. Knowing what I know about government tech services I suspect this will take longer than expected and there’s very little budget to upgrade everyone to iPhones and hardened Postfix. Until this happens, however, White House staffers will probably be checking their Gmail more than they check their secure mail. Ultimately the FBI found that nothing was untoward in Clinton’s situation and while the decision to run her own server was reckless, it was not unprecedented. This will not stop Artax the beloved political horse from sinking into this particular political swamp, but I hope this digest is helpful when arguing on Facebook.
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The rise and rise of Mexican fintech
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Federico Antoni
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Nothing tells the story of how the Mexican tech ecosystem is steaming ahead in Latin America quite like the rise of fintech. The financial services space ticks all the right boxes entrepreneurs look for when launching a company: hard to solve problems, meaningful impact, transformational technologies, clear business models and a solid financing environment. On the flip side, Mexico’s fintech industry has everything VCs daydream about: large untapped markets, highly scalable models, startups with solid traction, successful references around the world and multiple exit scenarios. While ecosystem observers may have predicted this momentum, it’s worth taking a step back to analyze the forces driving Mexico’s fintech ascent in order to provide a framework for other industries and countries in the region. Mexico seems to be the ideal market to launch a fintech startup in Latin America. First off, there are plenty of experienced founders bringing a wealth of unique knowledge on the business, product and technical side. They are unleashing innovation by leveraging the solid financial infrastructure private companies and government have created in the past two decades. Moreover, the financial services industry is diverse, competitive and ever-changing, beating in time to the cutting-edge speed of technology. Finally, angel investors, family offices and VCs are all over founders in this space, eager and willing to invest more and faster. If you are preparing to start your first or next company, Mexico’s fintech opportunity is worth a long look. It may be your best shot at building the next great startup. Since the start of the Mexican tech wave in 2012, a new breed of experienced, tech-savvy and take-no-prisoners founders have emerged and are changing the face of the entrepreneurial ecosystem. Fintech, in particular, has attracted some of the best; from entrepreneurs with experience in Silicon Valley tech companies such as (PayClip) from PayPal or (Kueski) from Ooyala, to others bringing in relevant sector expertise like quant jock (Konfio), P2P pioneer (Prestadero), legal juggernaut (Play Business) and adtech star Pablo Hernandez O’Hagan (Pago Facil), to the ones who have started or scaled financial services businesses, such as hedge fund intrapreneur Fernando Ramos (Briq), and microfinance entrepreneurs Fernando de Obeso (Salud Fácil) and (Kubo) and pawn shop impresario Luis Creel (Cohete). It is common knowledge that innovation in Silicon Valley has been driven by first- or second-generation immigrants. Innovation can be tracked back to the Middle East, Russia and South Africa — more than half of the multibillion tech companies have been created by “foreigners.” So when foreign founders move to Mexico, we should all be cheering for them — even if the odd ecosystem hater won’t count their products as Mexican innovation (they might be closet Drumpf voters or, worse, delegates!). To complement homegrown talent, Mexico is lucky to welcome entrepreneurs like former AMEX executive Alejandro Constantino (Afluenta) from Argentina, former PlaNet Finance COO Christian Sinobas (KiWi) from Switzerland, serial tech entrepreneurs (Visor) from Brazil and from Spain (Aplazame) and former financial sector regulator (Rocket) from Colombia. Last month, ex-investment banker and now Secretary of Finance and Public Credit, invited most of the above to a private meeting about the upcoming fintech regulation. It was an impressive get-together, not just because the government is finally paying attention to the sector, but because of the high-level, candid and sometimes heated discussions with the highest ranking regulator. Mexico represents one of the largest consumer markets in the world, with an emerging middle-class paired with a growing service and manufacturing economy. Against this backdrop, the financial services industry is full of contrasts: Large, nimble banks and financial institutions thrive in a country with abysmal credit penetration, low financial inclusion and scary fraud levels. In fact, the SME credit gap is a whopping $10 billion per year, the gap in access to banking amounts to more than half of the population and the potential savings if fraud is stabilized to acceptable levels would save around 3 percent of GDP. These large numbers are what make the opportunity so urgently interesting. Most of the solutions to these persistent problems involve technology that will increase productivity and change lives all over the country. Financial inclusion and credit penetration are indispensable for a fair society. The emerging middle class across Mexico could gain access to home ownership, better consumer credit and more investment opportunities. SMEs could get access to short-and long-term financing to invest in working capital, growth and, yes, technology. More software in SMEs would in turn bring new opportunities for startups. There is an unprecedented opportunity to change lives and transform industries with fintech. Another exciting aspect of the future of fintech in Mexico is that most models will be built and scaled in an AI-enabled and mobile-only world. P2P platforms will scale with intelligence embedded into their algorithms and payment systems will include API-friendly platforms. Born in post-Uber Latin America, crowdfunding platforms and wallets will target millions through mobiles. Not only can we catch up fast to the U.S. and the U.K., but founders can build smarter companies with bolder disruption potential. Any fintech development relies on a network of pipes, connectors, valves and adapters for data and money to move through an economy. Mexican government, banks and financial companies have been investing in technology and infrastructure since the 1990s. Companies such as BBVA, Citibank, BlackRock, American Express, VISA and Western Union have dynamic Mexican divisions with broad coverage. Today, more than half of internet users bank online and microcredit institutions have fostered a better environment for financial inclusion by creating a culture of credit in micro-business owners. More recently, one of the more ambitious reforms Peña Nieto’s administration passed in the first half of its presidency was related to the finance sector. It provided a more favorable legal environment for credit activity to increase competition with more than 50 new bank licenses delivered in the past three years. Financial inclusion means a larger tax-payer base and is in turn a priority to increase the taxable base. Today, only 50 million Mexicans pay taxes; 30 million remain outside of the tax system. Smartphone penetration and internet usage is growing faster than the most optimistic predictions, set to reach more than half of the population according to certain estimates. This alone brings endless possibilities of leapfrogging old tech like ATMs. Speaking of retail, the largest convenience store chain, department store company and electronics retailer in LatAm are all in Mexico. Consumers can pay bills, receive remittances and make simple financial transactions in all of them. It is such a good business for retailers that most, including Walmart and Elektra, have their own bank. Moreover, large CPGs like Bimbo, Pepsi and Coca-Cola visit 500,000 stores every month, weaving a logistic network that founders can leverage for financial services that require physical distribution. Banks around the world are forever more involved in the entrepreneurial ecosystem. In Mexico, retail banks are large, growing and profitable (for now). After a wave of M&A activity in the 2000s, the financial services sector is dominated by Spanish and American banks (BBVA, Citi, Santander, HSBC and Scotiabank) and emerging local groups (Banorte, Gentera, GBM and Vector). These companies are building innovation centers and investing in Mexican startups as fast as they can. Recently, AMEX led a Series A round in payment system , Gentera invested in pay-day lender , GBM led real estate crowdfunding Briq’s seed round and Crédito Real acquired . Despite all the progress in the Mexican entrepreneurial ecosystem, angel investing is still badly lacking. However, a rare bright spot is in the financial services sectors. For example, angel investors have carried most of the financial burden for launching Resuelve tu Deuda, , , and OpenPay. Indeed, seasoned former and current financiers are participating as angel investors, including Augusto Alvarez, Fernando Padilla, Jorge Ortiz, and Javier Creel. Entrepreneurs launching in Mexico face a large and diverse base of institutional investors. We could all complain about the experience and interactions with some of them, but the truth is, we are lucky to have so many. The other good news is that, in general, the financial services industry has a strong appeal to investors. It has something for every kind of potential backer. The show-me-size investor couldn’t be happier when you show them 100 billion opportunities in Latin America. The show-me-traction investor is reassured by your hockey stick and ever-growing numbers — we have seen more traction in fintech than in any other industry. Vanguard investors — show-me-new — will be delighted when you explain your AI layer or blockchain protocol. More traditional investors, the show-me-the-exit kind, will be impressed by the M&A activity in the sector around the world, and, for back-up, you could always seduce the show-me-a-crowd-but-call-me-the-lead investor with a syndicate that includes local VCs, American VCs and strategic investors. We are already seeing the result of this wave of optimism not only in the seed stage but also in the Series A stage where VCs have led , most notably Kueski, Konfio and PayClip, respectively closing $10 million, $8 million and $8 million rounds. The table below shows the increased activity and how Mexico dominates Latin America in this space. But not everything in the garden is rosy. Mexico’s financial regulation was not designed for fast-paced innovation. Despite all the goodwill shown by the government, the money is still not in the bank when it comes to regulation. The industry as a whole faces the risk of a scandal related to a platform used by organized crime and professional scammers. Despite the promising results, scale is still years in the making. Having said that, Mexican fintech is taking off fast — and it’s just starting. You don’t want to be missing out.
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White Noise 7 is out, and wants to be like Instagram for restful sounds
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Lora Kolodny
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When software developer Todd Moore wrote up the code for his now-famous in 2008, it was a side project to him and one of the first mobile apps go live on the Apple app store. The app quickly climbed to the No. 1 spot in the Health and Fitness category, and has remained a top pick for years. At this point, Moore said, the White Noise app sees between half-a-million and a million daily active users, and has been installed tens of millions of times. Through the years, he has lost count of unique installs across various platforms, he said. The app is now available for iOS and Android devices, including connected TVs, smartphones, tablets and Mac and Windows PCs. There are premium, professional versions of it that users pay to download. Since 2008, the software developer turned bootstrap entrepreneur has started a small business, that supports White Noise and develops other free mobile apps and audio content. Some of the company’s other creations include a popular mobile puzzle game called and a white noise track called that’s garnered about 5 million spins on Spotify. Today, TMSOFT released the 7th version of its flagship White Noise app, and introduced some major new features, inspired by the many app users who would hound Moore to have company audio engineers record nostalgic sounds for them, the CEO said. The app now allows users to upload sounds from their lives and travels, share them on the and create perfect loops from these sound bites that are uninterrupted and seamless, and therefore more likely to help people sleep or concentrate than a rough-cut audio loop. The app is ad-supported. Users who upload sounds on the White Noise Market are doing so for free, not to sell their work as they might sell photos or videos on marketplaces like , or Moore said, “I just think people have gotten too accustomed to getting content for free on Instagram, YouTube or Facebook, to justify charging for this kind of thing.” White Noise 7 also has Spanish-language support, which could help the company grow its user base in new markets beyond or even within the U.S. Moore recommended some new, user-generated sounds to check out on the platform, including this sound of water flowing through a , a and his personal favorite for sleeping, the sound of created by TMSOFT’s sound engineers. Sounds recorded in beta tests of White Noise 7 were from around the world, including from the U.S., Bermuda and El Salvador, to name a few, the CEO said. The app faces competition, at least obliquely, from a plethora of small copycats, and streaming music services like Spotify, SoundCloud and Pandora, where users can find a fair amount of meditative sounds. But none of these feature automatic engineering tools that aim to make sound loops seamless, and actual white noise.
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Sprig pauses food delivery service in Chicago, lays off seven people
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Megan Rose Dickey
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Sprig is making some changes to its delivery model, and in order to do it as efficiently as possible, the company is pausing its operations in Chicago and . Sprig has also let go its local staffers in Chicago, the company later clarified, which includes its drivers and kitchen staff. In reviewing different aspects of the logistics behind Sprig’s delivery platform, the company realized that some customers are feeling frustrated with the lack of options available in their area. Sprig’s delivery platform works by giving each of its drivers a handful of dishes so that people can receive their meals in sometimes as little as five minutes. That’s the best-case scenario, but what’s been happening lately is that customers are opening up the Sprig app and seeing that dishes are sold out because there are no drivers nearby with those dishes. In the next few weeks, Sprig will start testing and implementing its new logistics model, which will include a group-ordering feature. The most salient points, Biyani said, are that the new model will provide more variety to the customer, as well as more availability. “I think those are the two things that are the most important,” Biyani said. “We’ve built this logistics model that is fairly complex. It requires real-time prediction of geo-spatial and temporal demand. Our goal is to make it easier for us to predict that demand and also for us to deliver customers more reliability with the meals they want.” Instead of testing out this new model in both the San Francisco Bay Area and Chicago, Sprig has decided to just focus on San Francisco, where it sees the most delivery volume. The food space isn’t an easy business, as proven by the demise of companies like , and , as well as a key departure at Munchery. But it seems as if the company is making these changes proactively, as the ,” and is approaching unit profitability in San Francisco. “This is totally a logistical change,” Biyani said. “It’s about moving food around a city where you have high density of customers and people want your product at a given time frame. It’s very operationally intensive. The change is about becoming more efficient.” It’s not clear when Sprig will resume operations in Chicago, nor would Biyani comment on when these changes will be implemented in San Francisco. That said, the changes will happen in stages and customers will start to notice more food options and experience fewer instances of food being sold out.
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Anna Escher
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Hanergy to build solar-powered electric cars
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Kristen Hall-Geisler
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It used to be that only car companies could build cars. But this is the twenty-first century, when seemingly anyone can build a car or four, including a Chinese solar power company. Hanergy Holding Group, which manufactures thin-film solar panels, has created a Solar Vehicle Business Division that debuted four solar-powered prototypes in Beijing. In a world where anyone can come up with an idea for a vehicle, few make it all the way to production. Hanergy announced its plans to build solar-powered vehicles last year, but it failed to produce prototypes on schedule, leading to doubt its capabilities. But this summer, Hanergy showcased four running and driving prototypes called the Hanergy Solar O, L, A and R (check that acronym!), each designed for a different use case. All the vehicles are lightweight and covered as much as practical in flexible thin-film solar cells. According to a press release, the cells will generate 8 to 10 kWh of energy with 5 to 6 hours of sunlight, which translates to a range of 80 km (50 miles). That range is in the ballpark with several EVs available from major manufacturers, like the Fiat 500e and VW e-Golf. That’s going to take some serious sunlight conversion, and Hanergy’s current cells have a conversion rate of 31.6 percent, the highest rate of any cells available today. Hanergy expects the rate of its cells to go in the next decade, which would be enough to power a car entirely with sunlight. In the meantime, you can plug a Hanergy car in and charge the lithium-ion batteries like any other EV for an expected total range, solar and plug combined, of more than 200 miles. Hanergy isn’t the only company working to integrate electric vehicles with zero-emissions solar charging. You may have heard of If you’ve been following automotive news for a while, you may remember the Fisker Karma, which at the 2009 Detroit auto show had a prototype vehicle with solar cells on the roof (that company went bankrupt in 2013 and is being rebooted as ). And in 2014, the was available with solar panels on the moon roof that powered a remote air conditioning system to cool the car before you got into it.
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AWS revenue hits a new record with $2.9 billion in Q2
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Frederic Lardinois
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Amazon earnings for its second fiscal quarter of 2016 today and for its AWS unit, it was once again a big quarter. AWS net sales hit $2.9 billion in the last quarter, up from $2.5 billion in net sales in the last quarter. That’s up from $1.8 billion in the year-ago-quarter. It’s worth noting that that’s a slightly slower quarter-to-quarter growth rate than in the last quarter, though. While Q1 net sales were up 64 percent year-over-year, they were “only” up 58 percent from Q1 to Q2. Operating income for AWS in Q1 was $604 million and accounted for more than half of all of Amazon’s operating income. This quarter, operating income was $718 million. Just like in the last quarter, that’s higher than Amazon’s operating income from its other operations in North America ($702 million) and internationally (where it lost $135 million). Unlike Amazon’s other business units, AWS operates with very high margins. In Q1, AWS was running with an operating margin of 27.9 percent, compared to an even better 29.9 percent in Q2. This rate has increased steadily over the last couple of quarters. While Google competes with AWS in the cloud computing space and also released its (or better, Alphabet’s) , Google sadly doesn’t offer specific numbers for its cloud business. Cloud Platform revenue is rolled into what Google/Alphabet calls “other revenues,” but it’s virtually impossible to say how much of this comes from its cloud services. Microsoft, too, doesn’t specifically talk about revenue from its Azure unit, but the company has said that its annual run rate has now hit $10 billion and that it expects that number to grow to $20 billion by 2018.
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Grubhub announces more investments following strong 2Q
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Lucia Maffei
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Takeout food delivery platform stock soared 26 percent following a way-better-than-expected second quarter earnings release. The online marketplace connecting restaurants and takeout diners beat analysts expectations, both for revenue and adjusted EPS. For the second quarter ended June 30, the company $120.2 million in revenue, whereas Wall Street $114.2 million. Non-GAAP net income per diluted share was 23 cents, or four cents above adjusted EPS expectations of 19 cents. In a phone interview, co-founder and CEO Matt Maloney said that the company did so well during the quarter because of investments in product improvement and, specifically, in the ratings and reviews of restaurants. Maloney added that investments in the delivery systems also led to more orders from diners. The company said it manages 271.000 orders a day and 7.4 million active customers, by creating a network of 44,000 restaurants. The majority of orders come from the largest metropolitan areas: Chicago, where Grubhub headquarters, is responsible for 10 percent of the orders, Maloney reported. “In the next year, we’re going to keep investing in product and delivery across the country,” Maloney told TechCrunch. “Most people will want to order in local businesses from us.” Grubhub is not the only option for people who want to order takeout. Other San-Francisco based startups in the delivery business, such as Postmates and DoorDash, have recently announced new features to attract customers. Postmates, for example, in NYC and for monthly subscription service, while DoorDash through its portal, at least as a pilot service. Adding a “special” feature to the online platform’s services menu – such as, quicker deliveries or alcohol orders – could be the key move for these startups to differentiate from Grubhub and grow. Now, neither Postmates nor DoorDash have numbers to compete with Grubhub, a $3 billion company. In the latest quarter, Grubhub posted net income attributable to common stockholders of $12.8 million, up 37 percent from $9.4 million last year. Profits were up considering the last six months and the 2015 comparable period as well. For the first half of 2016, the company posted net income of $22.7 million, up 14 percent from $19.9 million. In New York Stock Exchange trading today, Grubhub shares were trading up $7.37, or 23.98 percent, at $38.11. On July 27, the day before today’s earnings announcement, the stock closed at $30.74. [graphiq id=”1ChI6o7SHhr” title=”Grubhub Inc. (GRUB) Stock Price” width=”600″ height=”617″ url=”https://w.graphiq.com/w/1ChI6o7SHhr” link=”http://listings.findthecompany.com/l/30946917/Grubhub-Inc-in-Chicago-IL” link_text=”Grubhub Inc. (GRUB) Stock Price | FindTheCompany”]
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Alphabet’s huge Q2 shows its ads business may not be so challenged after all
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Matthew Lynley
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While Alphabet’s core advertising business has often been questioned as the net value of its ads has been in decline, there’s one thing that’s hard to argue — it’s still one of the biggest technology businesses in the world, and it’s growing. And it’s growing very quickly. Alphabet reported a second quarter that continued tech’s hot streak today, handily beating Wall Street’s expectations and boosting its shares by as much as another 5 percent. Google reported earnings per share of $8.42 on revenue of $21.5 billion. Analysts were expecting earnings of $8.03 per share on $20.76 billion in revenue. (Again, that 5 percent may seem small, but that’s adding tens of billions in value to the company.) In the context of Facebook, it’s definitely not growing at that same rate as its rapidly growing mobile advertising competitor. Facebook’s revenue grew nearly 60 percent year-over-year as part of its last earnings report. But the difference in the revenue the companies produce is staggering, and it says a lot about Alphabet’s business that it can continue to grow at the rate it is. Facebook is a younger company and , but it’s still dwarfed by Alphabet. In fact, Alphabet’s growth rate may actually be accelerating. In the second quarter last year, Alphabet’s revenue had risen 11 percent year-over-year. This time it’s up 21 percent year-over-year compared to the second quarter of 2015. This shows that Alphabet’s strategy of offsetting its declining advertising value with a huge increase in volume — as is necessary with the increasing shift of usage to mobile devices — appears to be working. That big surge in its advertising revenue was a result of increasing use of search on mobile devices, according to CFO Ruth Porat on the earnings call. That means Google can continue to show search ads, its sweet spot, in front of more and an increasing number of eyeballs than its traditional desktop search ads business. And even as Facebook’s advertising business is growing, so too is Alphabet’s. Perhaps that’s even a signal that the advertising businesses can coexist in the same ecosystem. Google can also lean on the strength of its machine learning capabilities to develop new ways to grow its advertising business through products like its own bots and its voice assistant tools. For the past year, Alphabet has been nipping at Apple’s heels. At moments Alphabet has overtaken Apple as the most valuable company in the world. It’s an interesting phenomenon, given the companies are still quite different, but shows how these large companies are on a slight convergence pattern. Alphabet is a software and services company that’s dabbling in hardware in an attempt to diversify its revenue. Apple, a hardware company, is making a strong push into its services to do much the same. And, to no surprise, both companies continue to print money — yet both are in an interesting position in where their traditional businesses are being challenged. While Apple’s iPhone sales slow, Google’s cost-per-click — a key metric of performance for its ads — continues to decline. That means the value of each ad, the backbone of its business, is starting to drop off and it has to find a way to replace that with a larger volume of ads on mobile devices. Last quarter, the company reported $17.7 billion in revenue, which means that even as its cost-per-click is still declining (it’s down another 7 percent this quarter compared to the same year over year), it’s clearly continuing to build a huge advertising business that’s growing at a very clear clip. That strategy appears to be working, as Alphabet said the number of paid clicks (its ads, basically) rose 29 percent this quarter from the same one a year ago. Alphabet’s “other bets” division, which consists of companies like its smart thermostat maker Nest, is also growing. Its revenue nearly doubled year-over-year in the second quarter. But even amid that, the division cost Google nearly $900 million in burn this quarter. Diversifying revenue streams is a difficult process — and one that’s still in its relative infancy for Alphabet — and the company needs to figure out how to distill some real value from that division. In other words, the situations and challenges both companies face as the two biggest technology companies in the world aren’t all that different. Google, while up dramatically on the year, has faced a rocky couple of months, much like Apple. For Google, the upstart that is causing it to face a bit of an existential crisis is Facebook — which has locked down an incredibly successful mobile advertising strategy, while Google’s is still a perpetual work in progress. Facebook isn’t the only company it is facing off against. Alphabet is developing its own cloud services, and its “other revenue” section — where it buckets together its cloud services and others like Google Play — jumped 33 percent to $2.1 billion in revenue. Amazon is, of course, way ahead of Alphabet as a cloud provider , and it’s hard to divine exactly where Google’s cloud business is, but it seems clear that the company’s investments in other kinds of services is growing. Basically, while Alphabet is still an advertising company, it’s increasingly facing off against the entirety of the tech universe. And it’s able to continue placing big bets on those other ventures thanks to the strength of its increasing mobile advertising business. [graphiq id=”2OO3pjlirLT” title=”Alphabet Inc. (GOOGL) Stock Price – 1 Year” width=”600″ height=”463″ url=”https://w.graphiq.com/w/2OO3pjlirLT” link=”http://listings.findthecompany.com/l/8520977/Alphabet-Inc-in-Mountain-View-CA” link_text=”Alphabet Inc. (GOOGL) Stock Price – 1 Year | FindTheCompany”] Reality eventually set in, with the stock settling up around 3 percent in extended trading. Of course, that’s more than $10 billion in value. But it seems clear thus far that Wall Street is satisfied — maybe more so after today — in the company’s strategy as it shifts its advertising business to suit a very different landscape.
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Amazon shatters earnings expectations
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Katie Roof
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Amazon shattered expectations when it reported second quarter earnings after the bell on Thursday. Adjusted earnings per share came in at $1.78, when Wall Street was forecasting $1.11. Amazon also beat revenue predictions, posting $30.4 billion for the quarter when analysts were expecting $29.55 billion. Shares ticked up 2 percent in after-hours trading. The company saw a significant increase in sales and profit from the same period last year. Net sales were up 31 percent and net income was $857 million, a large jump from last year’s $92 million. Amazon also spent many years unprofitable, while it invested in growth. In a statement, CEO Jeff Bezos touted the early success of their Indian business. “The team in India is inventing at a torrid pace, and we’re very grateful to our Indian customers for their welcoming response.” The company announced that it expects its revenue for the third quarter to be between $31 billion and $33.5 billion. Operating income had a wide range, forecasting somewhere between $50 and $650 million. Amazon tends to make a lot of experimental bets. They’ve had early traction with their Alexa voice-activated personal assistant device. And they have also built up momentum in their Amazon Web Services division, providing storage and cloud services for many large businesses. AWS has seen significant growth. The group accounted for $2.9 billion of Amazon’s quarterly revenue, up from $1.8 billion in the same period last year. The earnings release referenced this year’s Prime Day, calling it “the biggest day ever for Amazon.” They said that worldwide orders grew by more than 60 percent when compared to last year’s inaugural day. Amazon also touted the success of its , its latest Kindle e-book reader, and its The stock is up 43 percent in the past year. The company has a market cap of $355 billion. [graphiq id=”lmzm7goyScR” title=”Amazon.com Inc. (AMZN) Stock Price” width=”600″ height=”586″ url=”https://w.graphiq.com/w/lmzm7goyScR” link=”http://listings.findthecompany.com/l/19215472/AmazonCom-Inc-in-Seattle-WA” link_text=”Amazon.com Inc. (AMZN) Stock Price | FindTheCompany”]
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Gurbaksh Chahal out as Gravity4 CEO after probation ruling
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Kate Conger
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Tech founder Gurbaksh Chahal has handed over his CEO role at Gravity4 to his sister, Kamal Kaur, after a judge found last week that . Chahal has been removed from Gravity4’s and replaced by Kaur, who is currently listed as CEO of the company. Kaur previously held leadership roles at Chahal’s other companies, including RadiumOne, where she worked as VP of mobile, and BlueLithium, which was . Kaur’s bio on Gravity4’s website doesn’t acknowledge her former role at RadiumOne, but she is listed as a co-founder of BlueLithium. (A press release from the Yahoo sale lists Chahal as the sole founder, and has also been credited as a co-founder of BlueLithium.) According to her bio, Kaur most recently worked as the general manager of Samsung’s Smart TV platform. Chahal’s attorney, James Lassart, provided the following statement to TechCrunch: Ms. Kaur was promoted from EVP to become Chairwoman & CEO of Gravity4 on July 26, 2016, after Mr. Chahal stepped down on his own initiative. Ms. Kaur is a very well-respected person in the online advertising industry, and will be focusing on the continued growth of Gravity4’s international presence in 20 countries, while Mr. Chahal redirects his attention and focuses on the appeal of this matter. On behalf of Mr. Chahal and considering that this matter is still before the court, I am constrained to comment on the decision in this matter other than to say that a meritorious appeal is imminent. The CEO switch-up comes as Chahal waits to hear whether he’ll face jail time or an extended probation period after violating his probation. Chahal pleaded guilty to misdemeanor assault charges after attacking a woman in his apartment in 2013 and was placed on three years’ probation. A second woman accused Chahal of assaulting her in September 2014, and a San Francisco judge decided last week that there was enough evidence of the attack to determine Chahal had violated his probation. Losing his post as CEO must feel like deja vu for the millionaire tech founder. Chahal was also after his guilty plea. However, this time Chahal stepped down willingly rather than being pushed out by his board members, according to Lassart. Chahal has removed “CEO” from his LinkedIn, which now only lists him as the founder of Gravity4. Kaur has been a supportive figure in the courtroom during Chahal’s probation revocation hearings, which have dragged on since April. Chahal surrendered his passports to the court on Monday and a judge will determine his punishment on August 12.
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Oculus launch-exclusive Adr1ft nows lets you get lost in space on HTC Vive
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Darrell Etherington
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I’m going to put this right up front: Adr1ft isn’t for the weak of stomach. The virtual reality free-floating space survival sim left me a tad queasy, and I’m somewhere in the middle of the VR sickness sensitive spectrum. But for those looking to boldly barf where only Oculus Rift owners have barfed before, today. Even if you might feel a little unsettled, though, I’d still encourage Vive owners to give Adr1ft a shot. The launch discount of 50 percent on Steam right now makes it easier to take a risk, but the experience really is like almost nothing else available to virtual pioneers currently. Plus, even though it’s initially difficult to get your bearings when you’re floating free and able to do some crazy acrobats thanks to positional jets on your virtual space suit, I imagine real-life astronauts also have to power through some queasiness in order to experience the wonder and beauty of space. And once adjusted (helped in no small part by a feature that allows you to reset your position within your virtual character’s space suit if things get too wild), what Adr1ft offers is a very real-feeling zero gee simulation. But it isn’t just about virtual physics — the voice acting and environments lend a genuine sense of urgency, loneliness and panic to the whole thing, too. Truly effective immersive VR isn’t just about graphics, it’s about narrative and storytelling, and Adr1ft achieves that. So if you’re willing to weather some mild motion sickness, give it a spin.
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You can now control Nest’s Thermostat with your Apple Watch
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Greg Kumparak
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If you own both a Nest thermostat and an Apple Watch, you might’ve figured the two would’ve learned to play friendly by now. I mean, Apple Watch keeps you from having to pull your phone out of your pocket to see who’s bugging you while you’re trying to finish , Nest’s thermostat keeps you from having to pause just because you’re a little cold… surely, the two would work together in some sort of perfect, shut-up-and-let-me-watch- harmony? Before today, no. But now they do! Hurray! Nest just that adds Apple Watch support, allowing you to control your Nest thermostat from your wrist like the 2016 smart-home dwelling spaceman you are. Okay, but seriously, back to watching
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Corporate venture growth in Brazil is another sign of a mature tech ecosystem
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Anderson Thees
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Despite recent positive news and a renewed interest of international investors in the country, with some even forecasting an approaching “ ,” the crude reality is that Brazil is suffering. The country has endured a profound financial crisis for the last several years. The path to an economic turnaround has been delayed by a massive political crisis, aggravated by the unearthing of multiple corruption cases perpetrated during Brazil’s booming years. As the mess untangles and we go up from what many experts consider the bottom, the consequences for the region’s overall economy are now very real. It’ll likely be a long way up. Yet, for investors, it’s a lifetime opportunity. The harsh macro-economic conditions are a test for the build-out of Brazil’s startup ecosystem during the last 10-15 years. A silver lining and bright spot for Brazil is the tech sector, as confirmed in a “Fear is the path to the dark side,” but Brazil’s entrepreneurs have stayed confident and continued to found and grow viable, innovative companies, irrespective of the economy-at-large. To some extent, the financial crisis even creates interesting conditions for entrepreneurs, like an overall lower cost to build a business, higher availability of top talent and very real incentives for end users and companies to seek the efficiencies that technology startups typically unleash. Despite recent volatility, the country’s political crisis has an end in sight. Brazil has a vibrant democracy, a growing middle class and its ranks as the ninth largest global economy. While more than 100 million people in Brazil are already online today, there are nearly another 100 million more to go, indicating sustained growth in years to come. There’s now a universe full of opportunities for startups in Brazil, with the accelerating adoption of smartphones as the primary device to access the internet. If you step back to analyze what’s happened to the tech ecosystem in Brazil, there’s been a remarkable evolution. While it’s pushing it to say the macro-economic crisis in Brazil has been a positive, it’s had a sobering effect and brought the region to a higher level of maturity much faster. The average quality of Brazilian entrepreneurs has risen dramatically. Startups have tackled more profound problems, with more creativity and innovation, instead of merely trying to work from and recreate “copy and paste” business models. Brazil’s tech ecosystem has grown inspired by the way Silicon Valley works, instead of just copying what the Valley has done in the past. One characteristic of a thriving ecosystem — and a killer characteristic in Silicon Valley — is the symbiotic relationships between corporations and startups. I’m not only talking about M&As. The symbioses go far beyond that. For example, an expanding willingness and readiness of large companies to buy products and services from smaller, nimble startups. Other momentum-building relationships and transactions include: licensing and distribution agreements, “acqui-hires” and IP-driven acquisitions. They bring dynamic, vibrant and shorter cycles to the ecosystem. All this is common practice in Silicon Valley, but it was unheard of in new ecosystems, or at least it was in Brazil — until recently. A recurring explanation as to why this is commonplace in Silicon Valley and not elsewhere is “startup DNA” within global giants founded in garages. As former startups that were venture-backed with accelerated growth cycles, they’ve been there and they get it. By that token, a nascent tech ecosystem in a less mature market would have to wait for organic loops for this to repeat. The same pattern is underway in Brazil with companies like , , and . They’re all VC-backed companies that grew big and now play important roles in the Latin American market. The fast-growing global trend of corporate venture is fast-tracking new symbioses. Large corporations’ strategic decisions to invest in the innovation ecosystem in an organized way have built up significantly during the last five years. There are already more than 1,500 corporate venture units globally, and investment is accelerating in total number and dollar amount of the deals, according to James Mawson, chief editor of . That is irrespective of “startup DNA,” even for century-old family owned businesses. And it’s happening globally, from Silicon Valley and Detroit in the U.S., to China and Switzerland and, more recently, within Brazil and across Latin America. Corporate venture in Brazil was sparked by international corporations with lengthy experience in the field. They used it as a mechanism to enter, learn and help develop the region’s ecosystem while earning proper financial returns. In 2012, when Redpoint raised its first fund for Brazil, four international corporations joined with similar ambitions. In addition to investing as a limited partner, an innovation center in Rio, with a very interesting, ambitious long-term plan for the region. Other active corporate venture players in Brazil include Intel, Naspers and Qualcomm. The foundation’s been laid, and the trend is now accelerating. More recently, there’s been a potentially groundbreaking trend in which large corporations in Brazil without a startup heritage have started to pursue not only corporate venture strategies, but broader relationships with the startups. This trend can help fast-track and save a few cycles in the Brazilian ecosystem. It helps global giants better gel with and interact within the regional ecosystem. They no longer only invest in the venture funds or directly in startups. They also learn, teach, buy products and services, collaborate on research, “acqui-hire” and jointly distribute new, innovative products — which is all well-aligned with the needs of a nascent ecosystem like Brazil’s. VC firms have a vested interest in ecosystem evolution, and in working closely with corporations that invest in funds. In September, we helped called in partnership with Itau, the largest private financial institution in Latin America. Cubo is a major milestone for startups and large corporations to develop deeper and far-reaching relationships in Brazil. Since its launch, more than 100 large companies have approached us and Cubo’s leadership team to discuss how to better engage with the technology startup ecosystem in Brazil. New corporate venture funding has begun to blossom fast in Brazil. For example, , the airplane manufacturer, invested in a corporate fund focused on avionics and related technology. Porto Seguro, a regional insurance company, an accelerator, its first fund, Porto Growth Edge 1 and a new investment arm called Porto Seguro Capital. At the end of June, led a $40 million Series F round for Brazil-based mobile commerce platform Movile through its corporate venturing unit, Naspers Ventures. The same week, it is funding a new program to achieve the vision of a drone on every farm in Brazil through its initiative. Monsanto and Microsoft recently committed in agtech startups. Of course, agriculture is a significant part of Brazil’s economy, as the country is a world-leading producer and exporter of many crops. Last October, Brazil hosted its first corporate venturing event to help showcase the government recognizes the importance of the corporate venture trend and is committed to support the process. Led and organized by , investment officer at Apex-Brasil, the event will repeat this year in October. While still early, we believe the rise of corporate venturing in Brazil will be an important catalyst for the innovation ecosystem. The symbioses between large corporations and startups is very valuable, and not having to wait for as many cycles as earlier markets did would be a bliss. More corporate venture involvement with Brazil’s ecosystem and entrepreneurs will propel and better prepare and position the entrepreneurs and investors to take advantage of an upswing, whether in smaller waves or a “tsumoney.”
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Minecraft support for Oculus Rift is finally almost here
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Lucas Matney
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After months of teasing, Microsoft is finally almost ready to give Minecraft Windows 10 Edition Beta users a taste of VR. In a celebrating the first anniversary of Minecraft Windows 10 Edition Beta, Microsoft announced that support for the Oculus Rift will be coming “in the next few weeks” as a free update to existing users. People who want to get in on the action have until tomorrow to download the Beta if they want to enjoy the free upgrade. Microsoft has been pushing Minecraft gameplay in virtual reality pretty hard lately. A few months back, the company launched Minecraft Pocket Edition support for the Gear VR. While the experience itself was just okay, Oculus has really been pushing it as one of the few AAA full experiences available in the Oculus Home store at the moment. Rift support has been just around the corner for quite a while, and it seems that Microsoft is finally ready to unveil what it’s been working on. The VR version for the Rift will feature all of the major methods of gameplay available on desktop, including multiplayer, Creative and Survival modes. Again, no word on an exact release date. The is interestingly showing off the Oculus Touch motion controller and advertising “a new perspective” for the game, but there’s no detail on how exactly the game will be implementing Touch controls.
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Here’s a backpack for carrying around a 3D printer
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Brian Heater
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This is one solution to the problem of 3D printer portability –though, it’s not particularly elegant, as far as such things go. is, quite literally, the device’s shipping box with a couple of shoulder straps, so you can roll into the maker party like, The kit includes the aforementioned straps, a metal frame and screws, which anchor into the foam packaging, which also includes some extra space for tools. It runs €59.95 ($66.37), or you can get it free with the purchase of Utimaker 2 Go, the company’s most portable 3D printer, which run €1,195 ($1,323). It’s pretty big and bulky for a backpack not designed specifically with zombie apocalypse survival in mid, but if you absolutely need to transport a 3D printer around your city by bicycle, there are probably worse ways to do it.
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Baidu invests in ZestFinance to develop search-powered credit scoring for China
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Jon Russell
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Baidu has made its second investment in a U.S. fintech company inside a month after it put into ZestFinance, a big data firm specializing in credit scoring. Baidu, which operates China’s dominant search platform, took part in in June. The deal is part of an agreement that will see Baidu use ZestFinance’s technology to develop a credit scoring platform based on its search data. That’s important in a market like China where traditional credit systems are broken. There’s precious little formalized credit history data while many people don’t use banks heavily or are unbanked. With the internet becoming mainstream in China, which has the largest ‘web population’ on the planet, new opportunities to vet and verify potential customers for credit have emerged. “China interests me from a mission perspective,” ZestFinance founder and CEO Douglas Merrill told me in a phone interview. “There are a lot of people who deserve credit but live in a cash economy [with] no formal banking service to serve them.” “ZestFinance’s unique ability to analyze and process complex, disparate data to make accurate credit decisions is very valuable to the Chinese credit market, where a centralized credit scoring system has yet to emerge,” added Tony Yip, global head of investment, mergers and acquisitions at Baidu, said via a statement. “We look forward to working together to help transform the financial services market in China,” Yip added. ZestFinance was founded by ex-Google CIO and VP of engineering Merrill, and it uses machine learning and big data to transform information into measurements and signals for credit scoring. It has raised nearly $100 million from investors, with its most recent raise . JD.com also put money in as part of its strategic partnership last summer. Today’s news is latest in a number of moves from China’s top internet companies in their quest to narrow the country’s banking divide. and both operate digital banks and micro-loan programs, while Baidu stepped into the banking ring via . , Alibaba’s closest rival in China’s e-commerce space, to power the credit service run by its financial arm, which is . Then there are multi-billion dollar payment services like Alipay (Alibaba) and WeChat Pay (Tencent), too. A number of fintech startups are stepping up in Asia to offer a modern take on credit scoring using the internet and social media — — but Merrill told me that this is the first time search data has been used to power credit scoring. That’s something very unique to China, he explained, because Baidu’s search engine has around 80 percent marketshare and is a willing partner. Replicating the service outside of China would be interesting, he added, but challenging to set up. “Ultimately, you need access to data that can be turned into credit data,” he said. That would mean Google, if you look at search, which would be more likely to develop its own technology in that space, if it was interested at all. Then there is the issue of disparate languages. ZestFinance has now secured two partnerships in China, but Merrill said he is happiest to produce the means for large firms to make a difference rather than head into China directly. “We find China fascinating, we feel like we can help do something to help the world,” he added.
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Arm Holdings confirms Softbank is buying the chip designer for £24.3B in cash in big IoT move
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Ingrid Lunden
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In the wake of the historic Brexit vote and the fall of the Pound, the UK is now witnessing its biggest-ever technology exit. Today, that Japan’s Softbank Group has to pay £24.3 billion ($32 billion) in cash to acquire the company — known for its chip designs for mobile handsets (Apple is a customer) as well as for processors to power hardware in Internet of Things networks. It’s the IoT piece that interests Softbank the most, Softbank said. Notably Softbank is also to finance the acquisition. Both boards are recommending the deal, and said in statements today, but the sale will still need to get regulatory approval. Softbank has made many asset disposals of late, such as and part of its very , which should also help to finance this deal. The over the weekend that it was in , although its numbers were off by about £1 billion. Arm Holdings will remain an independent business in the UK post-acquisition, Softbank said, headquartered in Cambridge, UK. “We have long admired ARM as a world renowned and highly respected technology company that is by some distance the market-leader in its field. ARM will be an excellent strategic fit within the SoftBank group as we invest to capture the very significant opportunities provided by the “Internet of Things,” said Masayoshi Son, Chairman and CEO of SoftBank, in a statement. “This investment also marks our strong commitment to the UK and the competitive advantage provided by the deep pool of science and technology talent in Cambridge. As an integral part of the transaction, we intend to at least double the number of employees employed by ARM in the UK over the next five years… This is one of the most important acquisitions we have ever made, and I expect ARM to be a key pillar of SoftBank’s growth strategy going forward.” Arm was equally endorsing of the deal. “It is the view of the Board that this is a compelling offer for ARM Shareholders, which secures the delivery of future value today and in cash. The Board of ARM is reassured that ARM will remain a very significant UK business and will continue to play a key role in the development of new technology,” said Stuart Chambers, Chairman of ARM, in a statement. “SoftBank has given assurances that it will invest considerably in the business, including doubling the UK headcount over the next five years and maintaining ARM’s unique culture and business model. ARM is an outstanding company with an exceptional track record of growth. The Board believes that by accessing all the resources that SoftBank has to offer, ARM will be able to further accelerate the use of ARM-based technology wherever computing happens.” There are two parts of the deal that fit for Softbank. The company does indeed have an extensive mobile business, which has been ARM’s bread and butter for years (and even spurred rumors that back in 2010). But back in 2013, Arm could see the writing on the wall for the eventual shift in mobile (and subsequent slowdown of handset sales, which has come to pass), and it itself made a big investment into IoT by . This, it turns out, was a pretty prescient and smart move, considering that this part of the business is what motivated this deal. The deal works out to 1,700 pence per ARM Share, a premium of 43.0 percent on the closing price of 1,189 pence per ARM Share on July 15, 2016.
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SoftBank is reportedly bidding to buy chip giant ARM for $31 billion
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Jon Russell
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SoftBank is bidding to buy chip giant , one of the world’s most influential technology companies, according to multiple media. UK-based ARM designs chips for many of the world’s biggest tech companies, including Apple and Samsung, it has licenses with more 300 tech firms and has shipped over 60 billion chips based on its tech to date. that Tokyo-based SoftBank is offering a 43 percent premium on its closing price last week (£17 in cash for each share) in a transaction that could be worth £23.4 billion, or around $31 billion. That would make it the largest acquisition of a Europe-based tech firm to date. s and both confirmed a bid via sources, but neither reported a price. The offer is the first major tech deal since the UK voted to leave the European Union in a referendum held earlier this month. The UK has yet to exit the EU, but already the repercussions of that event have left the UK Pound down 10 percent against most international currencies — in the case of Japan, it is down nearly 30 percent against the Yen over the past year. That essentially gives any deal at this price huge value for SoftBank, despite the generous premium on offer. It is unclear if the revealing of SoftBank’s bid could trigger an acquisition battle. Intel has long been mooted as a potential acquirer of ARM, while it remains to be seen if major customers like Apple or Samsung would consider an offer. SoftBank’s apparent interest in ARM is also its first major move since Nikesh Arora, the man company chairman Masayoshi Son had picked as his eventual successor, . Arora’s tenure had seen SoftBank make bets in startups with investments across the U.S. and Asia, and in particular in India, . Lately, though, the Japanese firm has been cutting back somewhat. It has divested a number of its landmark deals — , and — in order to manage debt, much of which comes from its ownership of U.S. carrier Sprint. This deal with ARM shows, however, that SoftBank isn’t retiring its checkbook at all. It also could be a sign of the start of period of increased consolidation in tech. Coming weeks after , it feeds into speculation from top tech industry figures, like VC Marc Andreessen, .
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SpaceX successfully brings a rocket back to land for the second time
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Emily Calandrelli
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Tonight SpaceX successfully recovered yet another rocket, making it their fifth one in total. Elon Musk’s rocket company launched their two-stage Falcon 9 vehicle from Cape Canaveral at 9:45 pm PT tonight and subsequently recovered the first stage of that rocket back on land. The landing marks the second time SpaceX recovered a rocket on land and their fifth recovered first stage in all. Falcon on LZ-1 at Cape Canaveral — Elon Musk (@elonmusk) The Falcon 9 first stage was returned to what was known as “Landing Zone 1” in Cape Canaveral, Florida, about eight minutes after launch. SpaceX “Landing Zone 1” at Cape Canaveral / Screenshot of SpaceX livefeed SpaceX had previously completed four successful rocket recoveries in all: one on land, and three on a drone ship out at sea. Today was the first time SpaceX attempted to bring a rocket back to land since their successful land-based recovery back in December. Ideally, SpaceX would always be able to attempt rocket landings on solid ground. A landing pad on solid ground is more stable than one at sea. Plus, if you have to land a rocket at sea there’s an additional time and cost of having to move it onto land after the launch. Unfortunately, however, a land-based recovery is not always a possibility. For example, today was SpaceX’s seventh mission of the year, and only the first time (this year) that they were able to attempt a ground-based recovery. For missions like today, where a rocket “only” needs to deliver supplies to low earth orbit, it is less complex to direct a first stage to a recovery location on land. Dragon on its way to , Falcon on its way home — SpaceX (@SpaceX) But many other launches require supplies to be sent much higher (and go much faster), like for many commercial satellite launches. For these missions, the first stage will initially be moving much faster and there may not be enough fuel to navigate it efficiently back to land. Because of this, SpaceX is working hard to perfect recoveries on their autonomous drone ship out at sea. While successful, today’s rocket landing was only a secondary goal of the launch. To accomplish the primary goal of today’s mission, SpaceX’s Dragon capsule will be delivering supplies to the International Space Station. As their ninth resupply mission to the ISS (known as CRS-9), Dragon will be bringing with it nearly 5,000 pounds of cargo and research experiments to the astronauts on station. Dragon is scheduled to arrive at the ISS in a couple of days, on the morning of July 20 . Once it’s time to send Dragon home, it will be loaded with supplies that need to come back to Earth. Dragon is currently the only vehicle capable of bringing supplies in a pressurized environment back from the ISS. Fourth rocket arrives in the hangar. Aiming for first reflight in Sept/Oct. — Elon Musk (@elonmusk) SpaceX is working to recover first stages so that they can eventually reuse them on future launches and reduce the overall costs of rocket launches. While they have yet to re-use a recovered rocket, Musk has recently stated that they are aiming for a reflight in September/ October timeframe.
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Why metadata should not live forever
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Nico Sell
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The global in encrypted traffic and a wide of end-to-end encryption by mainstream tech companies is a transformative shift in information security worth celebrating. Billions of online users now enjoy default peer-to-peer security, shielding the content of web communications from prying eyes of criminals and corporate surveillance. Yet the industry continues to collect and store massive amounts of metadata associated with every digital transaction — conversations, purchases, data transfers. These extensive historical accounts of personal or business activities live forever, and are shared and analyzed outside of user control, becoming a breeding ground for the next wave of cyber risks at all levels — reputational, financial and national security. We have been led to believe that metadata — or rather, activity logs — is nothing to worry about; it’s only the content that . This may have been true a couple of decades ago when the frequency of digital communications between people and systems was minimal and storage prohibitively expensive. Today, metadata collection and mining has become an industry of its own — accumulating and matching information across countless databases to produce detailed records of everyone’s activities and associations. The goals range from targeting users with relevant advertising to behavioral pattern recognition to aimless harvesting of records for yet unknown future use. Every technology and service we use — from banking to communications to transport — combined with the massive visual we daily generate a historically unprecedented amount of information about our whereabouts, mapping out countless connections between people, businesses, locations and things. In practical terms, the depth and the historic nature of metadata collection would be similar to having someone follow you around 24/7 — online or offline — recording everything you do and who you do it with, only stopping short of listening to your conversations. This is clearly contrary to the dominating public narrative: metadata alone cannot be used to infer specific sensitive details about you. With the Internet of Things billions of new devices online in the next few years — from cars to smart homes to public utilities and healthcare systems — even more metadata will be fed into the global commercial databases, adding yet another rich and often unprotected layer of information about organizations, individuals and nations. Today’s corporate data collection, particularly of metadata, is easy and cheap, and it often occurs without meaningful user input and proper informed consent. Most people don’t know where their personal or business activity logs reside and for how long, how they are shared, what conclusions are derived from this data and how it may impact their personal lives or business prospects. “ ,” an infamous statement by former NSA director Michael Hayden, is a reflection of the intelligence community’s that activity logs have become so exhaustive that they are just as powerful in providing insight into people’s lives and minds as the content of their communications. A new by Stanford University found “telephone metadata densely interconnected, susceptible to re-identification, and enabling highly sensitive inferences.” When metadata is used and correlated with other open-source data without any restrictions, it can reveal profoundly intimate information about individuals. And, the content of digital communications, it is not under the Fourth Amendment and can be surprisingly to a warrant. Our national policy discourse, so intensely focused on the precedence of digital content over metadata, only further exacerbates the imbalance in how private industry — from global corporations to small startups — treats these two types of data. Most activity logs across global databases, as massive as they are, are stored unencrypted without much safeguards to protect data against exposure, nor are they properly secured or anonymized when shared with third parties. Collecting and storing any information, metadata included, in an unsecure way clearly fails a duty of care companies owe to their users. As a result, the global attack surface is rapidly increasing to expose individuals, organizations and government systems to vulnerabilities, leading to unauthorized collection and use of sensitive data. With no defense being 100 percent impenetrable, the private companies, as predominant data collectors and custodians of information, need to begin thinking long-term about why and how they collect and store our activity logs. When it becomes almost impossible to secure such large data sets, they turn into hazardous waste and a cause for user distrust rather than a source of cash flow. Think about what you can learn about a person or a company by simply looking through their activity logs across different networks — the answer is likely “too much.” While some data — content or otherwise — may need to be retained for several years for compliance or other reasons, there is a lot more information that does not need to live forever. The less time the metadata lives and the fewer servers it touches, the more secure we all are against targeted criminal attacks and cyber espionage. As information security becomes a national with cyber threats reaching epidemic proportions, both the tech community and policy makers must make it significantly harder and exponentially more expensive to exploit networks and databases containing activity logs. Here is an easy fix: Limit metadata collection to retain what is essential to your business and only for a short period of time. In addition, anonymize and encrypt the data, while adhering to the responsible information disposal processes. So long as we keep historically detailed activity logs across services — private or public — without effective means to clear the data that is no longer needed or can be secured, encryption remains a half-measure, giving only a temporary and illusory sense of security.
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OurMine claims credit for attack on Pokemon Go servers
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Kate Conger
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Having trouble logging in to Pokemon Go this weekend? You’re not alone. A hacking team called OurMine has spent the past several hours hitting Pokemon Go’s login servers with a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack, leaving some players frustrated and unable to log in to the game. The group said it would not stop the attack until representatives from Pokemon Go contacted them. In a post on its website, the group wrote: “No one will be able to play this game till Pokemon Go contact us on our website to teach them how to protect it!” Pokemon Go access was spotty throughout Sunday, with users complaining about the server outage. PSA: servers are down in + there are hardly any – Here for 3 weeks. Send help. — Nicole So (@NicoleMCSo) When the Pokemon Go servers are down — Danny Quinones⁶𓅓 (@TheKingDannyQ) man when ARENT the Pokémon Go servers down 🙄😤☹️ — krm (@booksandkiana) OurMine has made a name for itself by of tech leaders and celebrities. In recent weeks, the group has gained access to Sundar Pichai and Jack Dorsey’s accounts by breaking into linked accounts (Quora for Pichai and Vine for Dorsey) and using those accounts to post to Twitter. The group usually uses the opportunity to advertise its ‘security services.’ An OurMine member told TechCrunch that he or she is part of a three-person group of teenagers and that the team is trying to spread the word about security. Whether they’re hacking Twitter accounts or DDoSing Pokemon Go, the group insists that it’s just promoting stronger security and that, if it didn’t hack celebs and DDoS popular games, someone else would. While that’s probably true, OurMine isn’t necessarily a Good Samaritan group — it charges anywhere from $30 – $5000 for its services. “We don’t want other hackers attack their servers, so we should protect their servers,” the OurMine member explained. A DDoS attack works by flooding a server with traffic so that it can’t be accessed by legitimate users. OurMine tried to prove that it was behind the attack on Pokemon Go by notifying TechCrunch before the attack started. But OurMine isn’t the only group trying to knock the popular game offline — a group called Poodle Corp also claimed to have attacked Pokemon Go this weekend: https://twitter.com/PoodleCorp/status/754298236093857792 Even when hackers aren’t trying to ruin your fun, the game’s creators have struggled to keep their servers up and running — the game has suffered outages and glitches since it launched, and with 26 new countries added to the game this weekend, users were bound to experience some organic problems. We reached out to Niantic Labs, the creators of Pokemon Go, about the outages and will update if we hear back. The company addressed its server issues in a tweet yesterday, saying that the problems had been identified and cleared up. However, some users are still complaining of outages. The issues causing the server problems have been identified. Trainers should once again be able to search for Pokémon in the real world. — Pokémon GO (@PokemonGoApp) If you’re wondering who else is experiencing Pokeproblems, you can always check the game’s status on .
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How generation Z females could be the answer to tech’s gender diversity problem
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Taha Bawa
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At the Milken Institute Global Conference in May, moderator Rick Smith controversially asked five successful female entrepreneurs how they . The ladies were candid. , co-founder of Gilt and GLAMSQUAD, admitted it is harder; the panelists — including of Honest Company and of One Kings Lane — agreed. It’s no secret that the tech industry is very much a man’s world. Recent U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission figures show . In the Bay Area in 2015, just 8 percent of Series A startup funding went to female-led businesses, down from 30 percent in 2014. While the biggest names in tech strive to close the gap and build more inclusive working environments, the pool of talent on offer is predominantly male. The truth is, while retention is an issue, there are simply fewer women opting for a career in tech. But new initiatives and an uptick of Gen girls opting for sciences in top-tier universities paints a very different future. What are these young women doing that previous generations have not? And what does this all mean for Silicon Valley’s boys’ club? , a study director for the Institute for Women’s Policy Research, make the decision to steer clear of sciences at a young age. CNET reported at Indiana University, opt for subjects outside of science and computing. “It doesn’t occur to them as a career path,” said Maureen Bliggers, assistant dean for and education at Indiana’s School of Informatics. The proportion of female students in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) university courses has traditionally been very low, and, according to the , it is getting worse. 2014 figures show just 18 percent of computer science bachelor degrees and 19 percent of engineering degrees held by women. In subjects such as biology and social sciences, we start to see the tables turn, with a larger proportion of . While the number of women in sciences is growing, they are still vastly outnumbered by males. Statistics suggest that this dwindling ratio of women in tech may be a case of nurture over nature. In May, the better performance from girls over boys in a test of technology and engineering literacy administered to 21,500 students. In the eighth grade age range, 45 percent of were scored as proficient, compared to 42 percent of boys, showing the capacity of young girls to succeed in the sciences. Capability is not the issue; rather, it seems that external factors play a bigger role in dissuading women from opting for science-related careers. In 2013, the pointed to social and environmental factors that prevent a larger proportion of from entering STEM courses. The study claims negative stereotypes regarding young ’ abilities can lower aspirations and recommends a “growth mindset” to encourage more girls to participate and achieve in these subjects. claims the “real reason most women don’t go into tech” is that from early on they simply “aren’t as interested in technology-related work as men.” Marks proposes that the tech industry shift its focus from changing the current working culture to creating better educational opportunities for the young. reported that, in 2016, STEM graduates will be the most highly sought after, earning the largest starting salaries. For a that grew up in the shadow of the Great Recession, this is an attractive prospect. And while STEM courses continue to be male dominated, as a new age group of girls enters colleges nationwide, in the top schools this is finally showing signs of change. Between 2009 and 2013, UC Berkeley almost doubled its percentage of female computer science majors in the College of Letters and Science, up to 21 percent. In 2014, for the first time on record, UC Berkeley reported a . Redesigning its “Symbolic Programming” course as “Beauty and the Joy of Computing,” Berkeley emphasized the impact computing has in the world, and worked to tone down elements that may put off. Stanford University was also able to boost female computer science enrollment from 12.5 percent in 2008 to 21 percent in 2013, through efforts to make the program more widely inclusive. has become a pioneer for women in STEM studies. In 2013, for the first time ever, more than half the engineering majors and 47 percent of its computer science majors were female. University president Maria Klawe has played a large role in transforming the college, hiring a greater number of female faculty, employing a more personalized recruitment process and offering compulsory introductory computer science classes, pitching the advantages of this study in various fields. Little by little, these efforts are beginning to spread. Just last year, — which in 1952 had no undergraduate women — celebrated the highest proportion of female students, making up 41 percent of the new student body. The university attributed its new increasingly diverse freshman enrollment to “a more personal and tailored outreach.” These initiatives help to break the barriers to STEM study for many young adults. As the number of women studying these subjects grows, this creates a strengthened workforce and a new of role models. In 2014, featured a great number of successful women from the tech industry, including IBM’s , who studied computer science and electrical engineering; GM’s , who also studied electrical engineering; DuPont’s , who studied mechanical engineering, and many more. Fortune recognized that three of the top five women were engineers, but acknowledged that still only one in seven engineers are female. College enrollment efforts go some way to growing this proportion; however, better opportunities from a younger age are also key to this. The (NGCP) has reported that younger girls in the K-12 education stages are taking many high-level mathematics and science courses at similar rates to male students. There also is a greater percentage of young girls taking subjects such as advanced biology, pre-calculus/analysis and algebra II. A gap in physics and engineering, however, still persists, and this is typically worse in low-income and minority groups. Many initiatives aim to solve this, helping girls develop an interest in activities such as coding from a young age. They are experiencing positive traction. In 2013, , designed to help young girls interested in computer science, successfully attracted 15 million students in a week; more than half were girls. Other programs, such as the international nonprofit organization , run hackathons and coding bootcamps, and help connect women with tech jobs across the globe. There are a great number of organizations that aim to get young girls into computer science and engineering; for example, , and , the recipient of . Initiatives to spur this movement are not limited to educators or nonprofits — the tech world is also getting involved. Most recently, Oracle to the U.S. government initiative , after pledging to provide in support of the sciences this April. The initiative aims to help teenage girls across the globe get more out of their early education, and the investment will go to helping develop STEM performance in young girls. into its program Made With Code, which aims to teach girls how to code. The tech giant acknowledged that most girls decide very early on whether they will choose a tech career, and is working to provide resources to let young explore this opportunity. Others in the tech industry are actively seeking , offering training opportunities to learn new skills. was able to grow its number of female engineers by 500 percent by investing in training junior members; 80 percent of its customers are female, and Etsy aims to create a new of qualified to better match its clientele. We have seen that young are skilled and capable, yet still a disparity exists. However, by targeting the younger , educators and tech companies are creating a new workforce of successful tech executives that will help change the perception of the industry. These new role models will quash stereotypes and encourage others to consider tech career opportunities from a younger age. This means a shake-up for the Valley, where successful women, no longer a minority, will play a much larger role in advancing the industry.
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Chivas Regal’s “The Venture” rewards social entrepreneurs around the world
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Bérénice Magistretti
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Thursday night, “The Daily Show” host Trevor Noah announced the winners of ’s , an international contest open to social entrepreneurs who are using their business as a force for good. With a dedicated fund of $1M, “The Venture” is striving to enable social entrepreneurs around the world to scale and gain exposure. As part of the Chivas program, the group of finalists took part in an Accelerator Week program earlier this year, created by the at the Saïd Business School of the University of Oxford. Only five were selected to pitch at Thursday’s finale in front of a live audience and a jury that included actress and philanthropist Eva Longoria and Pernod Ricard Chairman and CEO Alexandre Ricard. All five received funding in the end, but the big winner was ($300K), a Colombia-based business that transforms plastic and rubber waste into an alternative construction foundation for permanent housing. The enterprise’s triple impact (social, environmental and economic) was a decisive argument for the jury. “From a business point of view, we were looking at the cause the company addresses, the scale of impact the project has and its long-term sustainability,” said Ricard. NEW YORK, NY – JULY 14: Finalists, Maria Pacheco, Kenny Ewan, Or Retzkin, Julia Romer and Oscar Andres Mendez join judges, Eva Longoria, Joe Huff, Sonal Shah and Alexandre Ricard at Chivas’ The Venture Final Event on July 14, 2016 in New York City. (Photo by Michael Loccisano/Getty Images for Chivas The Venture) took second place with $200K in funding. This knowledge-sharing platform for small-scale farmers allows members without access to the internet to share farming tips, ask, answer and rate questions all via a free SMS service. Two of the five finalists were awarded the same amount ($100K). Israeli-based startup is an affordable, mobile and screen-free communication device that allows “locked-in” patients to communicate anytime, anywhere. from Guatemala designs and sells handmade fashion accessories that are produced in 16 rural Guatemalan communities to retailers in 20 countries around the world. Finally, from Germany ($50K) developed an innovative solution in the form of a portable refrigerator that provides an electricity-free, sustainable solution for vaccine, medicine and food storage in off-grid regions like Ethiopia and Rwanda. The remaining $250K had been allocated throughout the last few weeks to the most popular social enterprises via a public voting. Conceptos Plásticos won that round as well, bringing home an additional $53,148 to its $300K prize. The divided $1M fund is a direct contribution from the Chivas Regal company, which has a long legacy of corporate social responsibility. “We don’t want to be the typical investors asking for a return,” said Ricard. “The number one criteria is really about social and environmental impact. ” The Venture Fund doesn’t take any equity in the companies it finances. NEW YORK, NY – JULY 14: Judge, Eva Longoria on stage at Chivas’ The Venture Final Event on July 14, 2016 in New York City. (Photo by Michael Loccisano/Getty Images for Chivas The Venture) Longoria also prioritizes social impact through her , which supports Latinas through education and entrepreneurship. The foundation estimates that more than 700,000 science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) jobs are currently going unfilled in the United States, yet only a small percentage of Latinas are graduating with the skills to fill them. “What I’m trying to do is educate Latinas to get into STEM fields, because Latinos are the fastest growing demographic in the United States so they’re the future workforce of our country,” Longoria said. “We have to steer them and direct them into the opportunities that are going to be available to them.” As a movement, social entrepreneurship continues to gain traction worldwide, with funds like specializing in social impact investment.
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Chat app Line targets $1.14B raise in what could be 2016’s largest tech IPO
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Jon Russell
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Line, the messaging app from Asia , . The company today announced pricing for its dual Japan-U.S. IPO, which could raise as much as $1.14 billion. The year started quietly for tech IPOs but . Line has priced its shares at ¥3,300, which represents . The company is all set to begin trading in New York on Thursday and in Tokyo on Friday — : Line had delayed establishing its IPO price range in late June as global markets reeled from the impact of the U.K.’s vote to leave the European Union. But the company subsequently raised its target range, indicating that investors are keen on the IPO despite recent market turmoil following the Brexit vote. Line initially had set an indicative price of ¥2,800 for its shares. Line is offering 13 million new shares in the first section of the Tokyo Stock Exchange and 22 million shares in the New York Stock Exchange. A further 5.25 million shares will be sold through a “green-shoe” option, which allows for the issuance of additional shares if there is exceptional demand. Line, which is owned by Korean internet giant Naver, counts 218 million monthly active users worldwide, two-thirds of whom are based in Japan, Taiwan, Thailand and Indonesia. The company plans to use the new capital to go after other markets in Asia and raise its profile for potential expansion plans elsewhere in the world. The company grossed $1 billion in revenue for the first time last year, making it one of the most lucrative app developers in the industry. But there are some notable points: it isn’t profitable, nearly 90 percent of its revenue comes from its native Japan, while more than 60 percent of its income is from its games. Stickers, which the company is well-known for, account for around one-quarter of its sales — .
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Pokemon Go T&Cs strip users of legal rights
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Natasha Lomas
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Players of Pokemon Go are not only giving up their right to act like sane human beings in public, as they walk around, zombie-esque, reaching into the phones held in front of their faces, they are also likely to be waiving legal rights if they don’t take a very close look at Niantic Labs’ for the game. As spotted earlier by , an arbitration notice states that Pokemon Go users automatically agree to waive their rights to any future trial by jury or class action lawsuit unless they opt out of a binding clause in the T&Cs… To opt out of the legal rights waiver, users need to email termsofservice@nianticlabs.com or can send regular mail to 2 Bryant St., Ste. 220, San Francisco, CA 94105. But the opt out process is only valid if exercised within 30 days following the date a user first accepted the T&Cs. Having a short opt-out window for legal rights embedded within T&Cs which the vast majority of users won’t read before clicking ‘I agree’ and rushing into their neighbor’s garden to try to catch a pikachu is a very aggressive stance. Binding arbitration means a private dispute resolution process, heard outside a courtroom, with individual users having to mount their own cases — rather than having the ability to band together in a class action, for example, if there is a data breach which affects multiple users in the same way. Only individual actions brought to small claims courts and actions seeking injunctive or equitable relief pertaining to IP infringement rights are unaffected. The rules under which any arbitration would take place are specified as those of the — “in accordance with the Commercial Arbitration Rules and the Supplementary Procedures for Consumer Related Disputes”, albeit with some Niantic specific modifications. Safe to say, private arbitration is a restrictive route for redress that clearly disadvantages consumers. We’ve asked Niantic Labs for comment on the arbitration clause and will update this post with any response. As previously noted, . And the states the company may share aggregated data with third parties, and identifiable user data with law enforcement agencies and other parties for a range of reasons it deems appropriate. The privacy policy further notes that in the event of a sale of Niantic users would need to opt out of having their data disclosed/transferred to the third party acquirer — again with only a 30 day window to do so: Information that we collect from our users, including PII [personally identifiable information], is considered to be a business asset. Thus, if we are acquired by a third party as a result of a transaction such as a merger, acquisition, or asset sale or if our assets are acquired by a third party in the event we go out of business or enter bankruptcy, some or all of our assets, including your (or your authorized child’s) PII, may be disclosed or transferred to a third party acquirer in connection with the transaction. In the event of such a transaction, we will give you notice of the transaction and the opportunity for a period of 30 days to refuse disclosure or transfer of your (or your authorized child’s) PII to the third party acquirer in connection with the transaction. So, , the devil is in the overlooked detail. Gotta catch all those catches!
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Too much big data running through my brain
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Ron Miller
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Big Data by all accounts is supposed to help humans perform better by augmenting our limited brain power. Computers, after all, have the ability to crunch data with lightning speed, something humans just haven’t been built to do. Conventional tech wisdom states that the more data you have, the better the outcome — even if that sounds counter-intuitive. That’s the thinking behind the NSA hoovering up as much data as they can get their hands on. With more data should come deeper understanding, but what happens when there’s too much data and it surpasses our human ability to understand it in a given moment? Chances are that too much information running through our small brains clouds our thinking, making it more difficult to do our jobs. Computers can slice and dice data with great precision, coming up with meticulous details about a given situation, but it could be another matter for mere humans who are left to process that data and apply it to our work. That’s because we can only deal with so much data, even when the machine is filling in for our limitations. We may have a handful of things we can keep in our brains at once, at least at the moment we are trying to be effective employees and do the job to the best of our abilities with the data the machines have been kind enough to supply for us. By all accounts, machines can get us so far, to take that information and process it to make meaningful connections. As a great real-life example, baseball has become a sport dominated by data. Former major league baseball player, Tony Clark, who is currently head of the MLB Player’s Association put it well , “There is value in having information. There is a danger in having too much of it.” Baseball players are like the rest of us, except they have to hit a baseball being thrown at 90+ MPH. Despite their great talent, they have to take this great information provided by the stats geeks in their organization, and use it to the best of their ability to hit the baseball. The problem as Clark puts it, is that there is a case of too much data while trying to do the job. Players, like all of us, have a plan on how to execute their jobs. It helps to have good data to build that plan, but you have to cut through the noise and get to the most important nuggets that will help you execute at the highest level. Photo: on Wikimedia Commons. As Clark put it, “Unfortunately, knowing what pitch he throws on Tuesday day games, on turf, the second week of each month, has no value to me. So you can put yourself in a position where I have so much information I can’t move, I can’t function, I can’t game plan in a way that allows me to perform the way I need to perform,” Clark told the Globe. That kind of exaggeration has a ring of truth to it as we go forth into the world of increasing amounts of data. Yes, machines can process that data and spit out all kinds of esoteric data points, many of which actually have little value. The challenge remains . Perhaps artificial intelligence will help in that regard, but ultimately it’s about finding the data that matters — whether that’s the right approach at the plate for a baseball player, the best customer to target or the new product idea to implement for a company or even government security agencies finding the greatest likelihood of a terrorist attack. Whatever the outcome, the data has no inherent value unless it produces an outcome to help us perform better — and finding the data that matters most is still a huge issue.
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INNOVATE2016: Libertarian Presidential candidate says “We need to Uber everything”
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Andrew Keen
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Given the unprecedented unpopularity of Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump, 2016 could well be the year of the third party candidate. Whatever one thinks of his ideology, candidate may be the pro innovation candidate that Silicon Valley has been waiting for. We need “to Uber everything” Johnson tells INNOVATE2016 guest interviewer . The sharing economy, he believes, is the “model of the future” and should be encouraged, rather than regulated against. It’s “so short-sighted” of local authorities, he insists, citing his problems in trying to rent his own property, to outlaw Airbnb. If I’m President, the 2016 Presidential candidate promises, “we’ll stop with the restriction.” Johnson may also be more in sync with Silicon Valley on both surveillance and immigration. The mass collection by the government of our personal data, he argues, has been pointless. He is equally outspoken on immigration, saying that “we are a country of immigrants” and we should “embrace immigration” by getting government out of the business of establishing quotas. So no walls for Gary Johnson. It’s going to be interesting to see how this radical pro innovation message plays out in 2016.
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USA just dropped Mr. Robot’s season 2 premiere on social media
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Haje Jan Kamps
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The U.S. television network had the mother of all surprises in stock for fans of its TV show . Completely unannounced, the network released the first 40-odd minutes of the first episode of its second series on social media in the middle of a Facebook Q&A. The preview was released about an hour ago – a on television. Tongue firmly in cheek, the ‘hacker’ on Facebook Live invites you to gloat over the 0.01%. It would make sense, perhaps, that a TV show about a renegade computer hacker “leaks” onto the web as a teaser like this, even as a marketing stunt — about , the broadcast was interrupted with a message. “Why waste more time on pointless speculation,” the masked figure on screen said, interrupting the Q&A session. “You deserve something new, something unexpected, something you’ve never seen before”, before rolling the first 40 minutes of the episode. The preview shows up and expires from various social networks. Keep up! The TV network is sending its fans on a wild goose chase around the internet to keep watching the episode, deleting it off its various accounts as it ‘expires’. ( , for example, . Awesome.) It’s a complete PR stunt, for sure, but given how closely it ties in with the show’s core themes, I’m delighted to see an old-skool TV network like USA embrace social media in order to whip its fans into a frenzy. It’s fresh, fun and it seems genuine — and helps keep the networks relevant and on the pulse in a world where streaming services are breathing down their necks at every turn.
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Still a virtual reality skeptic? Here’s why you shouldn’t be
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Ian Hetherington
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The original PlayStation console, launched when I was the managing director of Sony Computer Entertainment for Europe, shook the gaming world. The 3D environment was unfamiliar to gamers, and some in the industry at large were initially reluctant to adopt such a new technology. But with time, 3D gaming became the standard of video games, and 2D games began to be considered rigid and archaic. Consumers purchased PlayStation at record rates, buying , and blew out its Nintendo and Sega Saturn competition. As becomes a force in the gaming world (and other sectors), with and making enthusiastic pushes in its innovation, I can’ help but draw the evident parallels between the emergence of 3D-console gaming and quasi-nascent . Though some about and its likelihood of widespread use, it will become a widely adopted technology that can in turn drive adoption of other technologies, just like 3D-gaming technology did. Like 3D gaming catalyzed the million-plus purchases of PlayStation — and later Xbox and other 3D-optimized consoles — can play a significant role in incentivizing consumers to upgrade their mobile devices and/or operating systems. Specifically, ’s capabilities can entice consumers to update their smartphones, the same way 3D gaming incentivized consumers to update their gaming consoles. It’s no secret that Google’s mobile devices have plateaued in their upgrade appeal. In May 2016, just 35.6 percent of Android devices were running Android 5.0 to 5.1 Lollipop, which was released in 2014. What’s more, only 7.5 percent of Android devices are running Android 6.0 Marshmallow, the latest version of the operating system. Despite, or maybe because of, these disappointing metrics, Google is rolling out the , its next phone and tablet operating system. has the potential to drive adoption rates of Android N, and Google is tapping into this potential with the recent announcement of Daydream’s mobile capabilities in the . could even be the forcing function for users to adopt 4K smartphones, which I believe is the future of mobile technology. Along with leveraging capabilities to help with Android adoption rates, can also be an important factor in convincing people to choose Android over the iPhone in the first place. Although there are rumors that Apple is covertly investing in a that , we’re not really sure, and it’s unlikely consumers will actively hold out for this. With that said, companies like Google ’ jump the gun in assuming that all consumers will want to upgrade immediately because of . is perceived by many consumers as an impressive technology once removed. The pattern of new technology on the macro level starts like clothing in a fashion runway show — exciting to admire but separate from the flow of everyday life. Using 3D gaming as a fitting model, any new technology field matures by being brought to market first as a fringe item observed by the masses and used solely by the die-hard tech enthusiasts, and then it builds into something more. Right now, is in that observational stage necessary to the cycle that I witnessed for 3D gaming while at Sony. Concrete consumer uses cases are the next step to promote adoption and integration into everyday life as the collective becomes accustomed to entirely immersive experiences. Another key factor in the technology integration cycle is the innovating parties. Currently, tech giants like Google and Facebook have made the biggest bets on , and much of the news about the emerging technology circulates around these two behemoths. As ripens, other creators will establish their products and uses for . This “build it and they will come” pattern has established itself in many technology cycles; if we make an ecosystem attractive to developers, the industry will thrive on its own. In the months and years following PlayStation’s reveal, Sony discovered that though it could develop hardware and games exclusively in-house, independent video game designers were just as important, and a healthy competition between the two stimulated further innovation and creativity. Facebook and Google’s vision of , and ’s most known applications, are heavily consumer and gaming focused. However, enterprise is becoming an important vertical that will only continue to grow in relevance, rather than remain untapped. Enterprise /AR is already a prosperous alcove, with innovator boasting 1,000 enterprise organizations among its clientele. Outside of gaming, enterprise /AR will help individuals and organizations find immediate value in the technology. As opposed to seeing /AR as a separate entity, VCs largely view it as solving problems in existing sectors. Qualcomm Ventures’ managing director says “AR/ is the new UX/UI for everything, but it will take time.” The funding environment is focused on , with /AR as capabilities that can enhance the solution. To me, this means that enterprise/industrial use cases are where the money is/will be invested. Much like we’ve seen 3D capabilities unfold, will make room for third-party organizations to find their niche, whether that be consumer-facing or siloed to the enterprise. Powered by innovation, companies large and small will carve out their own space and offerings within the technology to make its applications broader. has great potential even beyond consumer-facing services, and will be implemented in all types of industries. Though it’s currently admired at a distance by most consumers and organizations, the cycle of technology tells us that adoption is not far off.
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Virtual and augmented reality need a PG-13 moment
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Pramod Sharma
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We’ve passed a significant milestone in consumer adoption of and augmented it’s clear that from a VR/AR experience. However, with and poised to become a mainstream force, it’s the opportune time to think about how kids will interact with these technologies. Kids, of course, and love video games, which is one of the core use cases of and . While clear progress on the path to and ’s culture-altering potential in entertainment and education is truly exciting, where kids are concerned, new technology faces the very real pitfall of parental backlash. Every new cultural shift, from the jitterbug and movies to the iPhone and social media, is accused of destroying our youth. The 1984 film created such a massive rolling boulder of parental outrage that the Motion Picture Association of America, which rates movies in the U.S., and are new and unique in their ability to immerse users, so with parents still grappling with , it’s only a matter of time before and are thrown under the boulder. In spite of concerns about appropriate content and screen time, no one can dispute the fact that and ’s potential holds clear, legitimate benefits for kids. However, that potential will only reach maturity if the industry acts now to head off parental backlash. Both innovation and funding in such a young industry would surely suffer from the chilling effect of mom and dad’s cold shoulder. But, quick and thoughtful action by industry players would provide insulation and allow the still nascent technologies to continue pushing the bleeding edge of technology while not bleeding out. Anyone who has endured the mind-numbing drone of rote learning can understand the allure of and as educational tools. Their immersive and engaging nature makes them exciting and . Teachers working to inspire enthusiasm and a love of learning in students understand the appeal of the experience and are . The opportunities are mind-expanding. Math, science, history, art, literature — and can turn static or abstract learning into dynamic, interactive, immersive experiences. For example, a project called in the Czech Republic enabled students to play around with atoms and get a “feel” for their behavior. Or take the startup , which launched the first field trip earlier this year, and gives students the opportunity to explore the world without leaving their classroom. This immersion empowers kids to gain a stronger grasp over what they learn and provides a safe place for them to explore and experiment. and also opens up new ways to collaborate and , as well as to accommodate students with different learning styles. Using technology encourages them to , and It promotes autonomy and independence, empowering kids to pursue the learning tracks that most interest them and figure things out on their own. As exciting as all this is, the upshot is that we’re still in the very early stages of and and their most compelling uses are yet to come. However, the potential that they promise is predicated on a healthy industry that can encourage and support innovation and experimentation. Taking action to insulate and from backlash offers safe harbor, but it may also create opportunities by courting a key market. More than 30 years after , the rating is one of the most sought after and profitable. Not only did the MPAA’s decision provide parents with an effective way to address their concerns, but it also created a new storytelling niche that grew into a profit center. Now is the time for and to grab its . Protecting innovation and cultivating a key market should start by taking a cue from the , television and console game industries and self-regulating. Concerns about age-appropriate content are easily addressed by a rating system, and concerns about screen time are as simple as providing controls like those parents use to control TV and iPad time. Allowing parents to input a code and set the amount of time their children are allowed to use and platforms will go a long way to putting parents at ease about how long their kids are using this new technology. Taken together, the steps outlined above will create goodwill in the market by acknowledging and embracing parents’ role regulating their children’s use of technology. It may even speed the uptake of educational and by clearly designating products designed to that market’s sensibilities. Do you think it’s time for and to self-regulate? What should that look like?
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Lora Kolodny
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Whatever happened to 3D printing?
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Signe Brewster
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guy who speaks earnestly about his line of work. At the time, the promise of desktop manufacturing had just entered the general public’s consciousness. The media reported breathlessly on the potential of local manufacturing and bio-printing. Governments raised fears about undetectable 3D-printed guns. Early adopters wondered whether they, too, needed a 3D printer or CNC machine in their homes. Cervantes was hopeful. Solidoodle was months away from shipping its next-generation printer. Today, Solidoodle is dead. The company ran out of funding in late 2015 after attempting to move operations to China, which led to a drop in product quality, unexpected shipping problems and a loss in confidence among customers. Cervantes announced its closure in March. “We proved we could be very successful for early adopters, but when we tried to cross the chasm into the mainstream market, there were production and financial troubles we couldn’t solve on the capital timeline we had,” Cervantes said. “We had a few external unplanned shocks such as the three-month West Coast Port Delay that combined together to cause irrevocable damage to our goals.” There’s no doubt that hardware is hard. The road from being a small shop to manufacturing overseas is littered with startup corpses. Solidoodle’s stumbles certainly brought problems, but it faced outside pressure, too. It was one of the first companies to market with printers that cost less than $1,000. But the $600 Solidoodle Press — the China-manufactured machine that led to the company’s fall — was suddenly up against printers priced at just a few hundred dollars. Dozens of 3D printer companies had cropped up with the intent of building beginner-friendly options. With that shift came the great desktop manufacturing industry shakeup. At the end of 2015, 3D printing veteran ceased production of its easy-to-use Cube printer. Its competitor, , announced layoffs for the second time in six months for its consumer-oriented division. A high-profile desktop CNC company never really emerged. By 2016, it felt like desktop manufacturing was in the rearview mirror, hanging out on the side of the road with 3D TVs and smart refrigerators. Except, desktop manufacturing is still growing. Shoppers bought more than 275,000 desktop 3D printers in 2015, up from 160,000 in 2014, according to the 2016 Wohlers Report. In 2013, the market had just broken 80,000 units. While growth has slowed, it’s still moving fast. So, who is still buying 3D printers and CNC machines? And will everyone else want one anytime soon? makes the Othermill Pro, a desktop CNC mill favored for fabricating circuit boards. Whereas 3D printers lay down melted plastic in a process called additive manufacturing, CNC machines use a drill bit to carve away at a material, a process called subtractive manufacturing. It follows a similar workflow as 3D printing: A digital file is fed into the machine, and then the mill does the rest of the work. It’s a bit more wasteful than 3D printing, but it’s compatible with classic materials like wood and metal. Similar to 3D printing, it has gone through a drop in price and rise in ease of use in recent years. Other Machine CEO Danielle Applestone mostly sees her customers using Othermills for prototyping. Before cheap desktop machines, companies would send their designs off and then have to wait weeks for each physical prototype to be printed or milled. Being able to make circuit boards at your desk is a recent innovation. When Tom Gerhardt and Dan Provost, founders of consumer hardware firm Studio Neat, begin thinking about a new product, they pick up an iPad and send sketches back and forth. The company makes simple items like iPhone stands and ice cube molds. First they build a model on a computer. Then they turn to their 3D printer, CNC machine or another tool in their workshop to build a prototype. Gerhardt and Provost spend as much time as they can on these early design stages. Studio Neat can go from idea to a first prototype within days, and then rapidly create new iterations. When a product is ready to be manufactured, they outsource nearly all of the labor. “I’ll do six or seven iterations a day,” Gerhardt said. “Being able to quickly turn those over and work through them, that is a complete game changer in terms of formal design and figuring out how things should feel.” Other Machine Co. This is desktop manufacturing’s draw. Across the world, engineering has accelerated. Any object you hold in your hands could very likely be a descendant of a printed or milled mockup. Corporations and Etsy shop owners alike love 3D printing because it gets them from paper to the real world in a fraction of the time. The cost of production doesn’t change whether you’re producing one item or 100. The thing about prototyping with 3D printers is that the end product doesn’t have to look great. It’s a way to get a sense of scale and feel, but not usually expected to be buyer-ready. There are certainly exceptions to this. Shapeways, for example, has an online shop where you can buy 3D-printed jewelry, sculptures and anything else you can think of. The draw is the uniqueness of the products — there are other materials that would make more sense if Shapeways planned to sell millions. Shapeways prints its products on machines that cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. Hobbyists, on the other hand, are printing items for themselves and expecting the same results. They want vases that look good enough to sit on their shelves and replacement parts for household appliances. So while Gerhardt said Studio Neat has never been compelled to upgrade from its relatively vintage MakerBot Replicator 2, consumers demand perfection. And that’s where the printers offered in the last five years still fall short. “Two years ago there was 3D printing news all the time. It was actually a bit of a concern to me because so much of what I saw in that news lacked the subtlety of the 3D-printing technology,” said Steve Schell, CEO of 3D printing company . “It wasn’t always clear whether these 3D printing applications they read about could be done at home, or if it was more research-grade or commercial and industrial equipment being used in these cases.” While Schell saw widespread adoption being five years away, non-experts he spoke with seemed to have the impression the technology was fast approaching. They asked him whether New Matter’s $399 MOD-t 3D printer was capable of printing living tissue and titanium. Solidoodle shared the same goals as the greater 3D printer community and desktop manufacturing industry: democratize making. Get machines into the living rooms of anyone who wants one, and make it incredibly easy for them to make whatever they wish. That means crossing over from professionals to the general public. The earliest desktop 3D printers used just a few hundred dollars in parts, but they were too complicated for the average person to put together and use. So the industry raced to offer a pre-assembled $1,000 machine. Then $500. That’s the cheapest it has ever been to make relatively complex objects with zero making expertise. But cheap and beginner-friendly don’t generally go together when it comes to hardware. 3D printers aren’t incredibly complicated, but they have lots of moving parts that like to wear out over time and break. Cutting costs can exacerbate this. I have reviewed exactly one 3D printer that didn’t break or develop a mysterious software issue within days of use. Using 3D printers is time consuming and aggravating. No matter how splashy and user-friendly their Kickstarter campaign copy is, they are almost never ready to work flawlessly for a beginner. Then, once you get a printer to work, there’s the hurdle of working with 3D models. If a casual user needs years of experience working with design software in order to be able to tell their CNC machine what to do, they’ll never make anything. “I think the hype surrounding 3D printing has waned — or is at least decreasing — because people realized it’s just a lot harder to design specific things than they thought,” Applestone said. “You can’t get around the fact that you have to learn (computer-aided design).” I grew up messing around with Photoshop and Illustrator. Making the leap into 3D design wasn’t too difficult for simple shapes. But designing a part with specific dimensions still eludes me. When it comes to additive and subtractive manufacturing, my designs are almost always downloaded from an online library of models. The industry knows this and has focused on building big libraries. This leaves 3D printers focused on generic items like toys and decorations — not that specific IKEA drawer handle you broke and would like to replace. There’s no shortage of things to print, but the truly useful use cases are still reserved for experienced makers. Gartner’s hype cycle holds that after inflated expectations comes disillusionment. 3D printers didn’t instantly solve our problems. No ultra-compelling application ever arose to inspire us to rush out and buy one. The public is happy to wait. Other Machine Co. Despite years of disappointing options, desktop manufacturing is not dead. New companies are still emerging and selling unprecedented numbers of machines. After disillusionment, according to Gartner’s hype cycle, comes enlightenment, and the industry is starting to catch on to what that might look like. Most desktop 3D printers have a similar design. A metal nozzle moves along a gantry system as it lays down melted plastic on a flat bed. The best 3D printers take this basic design and make it bulletproof. They use high-quality parts and make them easy to swap out. The worst put low-quality, proprietary parts in a closed box. Newer companies like New Matter are testing alternate options. The Mod-T moves its print bed around on two spinning rods, while the print head moves up and down. It’s an unusual design that simplifies how the printer works and allows the company to keep costs low. But there are only so many ways to reinvent the most common type of printer. Because each layer of plastic has to dry before the nozzle deposits the next one, they have a physical limit to how fast they can go. Engineers are injecting new energy into the industry by rethinking 3D printing altogether. Lately, interest has risen in printers that use a laser or projected light to cure liquid plastic layer-by-layer. HP’s secretive printer also uses light to speed up the printing process and open new material possibilities. “The technology is rapidly improving, and it’s going to continue to do so,” Schell said. “That will result in less expensive printers, which will help with adoption of course. It’s also about making the speed of the printing process improve, more consistent outputting terms of the strength of the parts created and a wider selection of material options so you can have the properties you need for the given object.” Other 3D printer makers are diving into specific applications, such as carbon fiber and food to draw interest in their machines. Applestone sees a bright future for specialization in the CNC mill space, too. Imagine walking into Gap and seeing a machine cutting custom pairs of jeans, or waiting at the dentist while your dental crown is made. Not everyone owns a sewing machine, but they hold an important place in our society. Desktop manufacturing will be the same way. “These technologies used to take up a whole room,” Applestone said. “What’s really exciting is when you shrink that technology down and make it affordable and easy enough for people to use, entire economies that we never thought of emerge.”
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Face computers slowly find their place in business
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Ron Miller
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How could you not? Born with great fanfare just four short years ago, the device quickly became the object of derision. People who wore them were “Glassholes.” There were hyper-privacy concerns related to wearing a head-mounted camera, and even the , which limited availability, seemed to contribute to the disdain people felt. Google finally in January, 2015 and it was easy to think that’s where it all ended. Yet, even though many seem to have hated the device, business was another matter. Google and other smart glasses manufacturers , where having a device that projected information in front of your face with your hands-free, had great utility — essentially a computer on your face. The smart glasses we’re seeing today aren’t just from Google. Companies like , , and , among others, are also making hardware with an eye toward business. Source: Microsoft The main player on the software/operating system side seems to be , a startup that’s developed a hardware-agnostic platform on top of which companies can build customized smart glasses applications and connect them to back-end enterprise systems. It’s important to keep in mind that we are truly in early days for these systems, and while some large companies see potential, they are still very much feeling their way with small projects — and there are still many obstacles to wider adoption. Today, while smart glasses aren’t exactly common place inside business settings, some large companies like Boeing, GE and VW are conducting pilots to learn how to make the best use of them. This could involve someone working on a shop floor dealing with intricate installation instructions or an oil and gas employee trouble- shooting a complex repair. Worker wearing Vuzix smart glasses. Sure, you could use a tablet or laptop and pull up instructions, but consider how useful it would be to conduct voice searches, while keeping your hands free as the information you need to conduct a repair is projected in front of your eyes, guiding you through a process, sometimes even “lighting up” the relevant parts. That’s what smart glasses bring to the table. Angela McIntyre, who covers the smart glasses market for Gartner says market size numbers are very preliminary, but by 2020 her firm expects the combined market for head-mounted displays to reach around 40 million units. This could include everything from virtual reality headsets like Oculus Rift and Google Cardboard to augmented reality tools like Hololens and smart glasses like Google Glass and the Vuzix M300. Of that, she predicts roughly 40 percent will involve purely business use cases. McIntyre sees business use cases breaking down into roughly three categories. It’s important to keep in mind these are primarily ideas based on what she’s been seeing and additional scenarios could develop over time. In fact, Paul Boris, head of manufacturing industries at GE Digital, who is running their smart glasses pilots says interest has been brisk with over 100 applications for pilots in his organization. He has kept it limited for now while they figure things out, but hopes to accelerate over time. Atheer smart glasses interface for order picker in a warehouse. Image: One scenario involves simply using the glasses as a head-mounted camera to take a picture or video of what you’re seeing, while keeping your hands free, and sharing it with an expert back at the office who can help identify the nature of the problem and guide you through the repair. McIntyre says this is the most cost-effective way to get started with smart glasses, but it is a limited use case. The next level involves projecting written instructions, a picture or video to explain a process without human help. Each job can be broken down into discrete steps, where you can’t move to the next step until you complete the previous one, ensuring the job is done in a precise and organized fashion. You can use a voice command to advance to the next instruction or to look up parts or procedures. In this case, the software is linked to back-end systems to deliver the correct information at the right time. While this type of application has the potential to deliver greater efficiency, it could take longer and be more expensive to develop. This is that assists technicians building intricate wire harnesses for jets. This involves inserting the correct wires into connectors, which can be quite detailed. Instead of constantly looking up and down from a laptop for the next instruction, using smart glasses, technicians can keep their hands on the wires and the connector while the smart glasses application guides them to the correct hole, providing a much more efficient way of working.
Finally, using augmented reality, the glasses could project an animated image overlaying what the employee is looking at. This can help guide them on how to fix or assemble something such as a dashboard or an air conditioner repair, highlighting the appropriate part at the right time. McIntyre sees this as an outlier case for the time being, but as the hardware advances, we could see more of this type of application. Coming up with a logical use case is only the first step. It gets much more complicated when your use case involves connecting to various enterprise systems. GE’s Boris sees this as the single biggest obstacle to widespread use of smart glasses in the enterprise today. As soon as people figure out how to get data from a variety of complex back-end systems in a more efficient way, it should open up the usage, but it remains a big stumbling block for now. The Boeing wire harness example involves accessing multiple systems across the various organizations that make up Boeing, creating layers of complexity. Often these are older legacy systems that weren’t built to play nicely with others, forcing a long and costly data conversion to make them work with a modern smart glasses application. Boeing employee scans a code while wearing Google Glass. Image: APX Labs is trying to solve this problem by being the underlying platform that connects the application to the headset and to the various external systems, but it’s not a simple matter and there is a fair bit of work that goes into making these connections work. McIntyre points out that it’s not just technical issues holding back smart glasses. There are also issues with the glasses themselves, which haven’t necessarily been designed to wear comfortably over an 8 hour shift. Battery life is still a challenge too, especially with resource-intensive applications. Some companies have to consider health and safety regulations where a face shield could be required as part of the smart glasses design before they could even consider using them. What’s more, manufacturers are still figuring out how to deal with smart glasses in combination with prescription eye wear, she pointed out. Like all new technology, over time the hardware and the software will evolve, and some of these issues will be resolved, but it’s an on-going process. APX Labs CEO Brian Ballard says that beyond all of this, the real challenge is finding use cases where smart glasses really save customers time and money. If you can take a picture with your smartphone or tablet, you might not get much bang for your buck by going with a smart glasses solution. He says companies have to be intelligent about finding good use cases where having your hands free gives you a significant productivity boost. For now, smart glasses are just beginning to find their way in business, but it’s clear that for certain jobs they could be truly transformative technology if they can find ways to overcome the current limitations.
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Black Lives Matter activist Deray Mckesson arrested while Periscoping
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Sarah Buhr
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Police arrested more than 200 people marching down the side of the road in Baton Rouge, Louisiana last night, according to , including a strong voice in the Black Lives Matter movement, Deray Mckesson. Mckesson, who is very active on social media and police reform projects, was taken into custody Saturday night while walking down the side of the road and . The protest was one of several held throughout the nation in support of two black men recently shot to death by police, Alton Sterling and Philando Castile. Protestors within the Black Lives Matter movement have been demanding justice from police over the fatal shootings this past week. Protestors where Mckesson was filming were shouting, “No justice, no peace. No racist police” as they walked down the street. Mckesson started mentioning police had been provoking protestors and showed officers of the law stopping those walking down the side of the road on his Periscope video when he was suddenly arrested himself. #BatonRouge protest and Deray McKesson’s arrest on Periscope. According to the , Mckesson was officially charged with “obstructing a highway of commerce.” The Periscope video clearly shows Mckesson on the side of the road and not in the middle of traffic. Mckesson mentioned in his Periscope that the road the protestors were on did not provide a sidewalk and people were walking down the shoulder of the road for that reason. Mckesson filmed the white line marking the side of the road in his video to show he was not blocking traffic as he walked. More than 100 people were also arrested in a St. Paul, Minnesota protest last night for forming a human blockade along I-94, according to the . It is unclear when Mckesson may be released. However, the arrest has further fueled online outrage from an already tense week of gun violence and protests. Update: Mckesson was released from police custody Sunday afternoon. . 's back! — Brittany Packnett (@MsPackyetti) However, it seems hundreds of others arrested last night have yet to be released.
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OMG Digital is basically BuzzFeed for Africa
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Megan Rose Dickey
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OMG Digital, a West Africa-based startup founded by Prince Boakye Boampong and Jesse Arhin Ghansah, is on a mission to bring relatable content to African millennials. The two are currently participating in Silicon Valley accelerator Y Combinator, with the hopes of becoming the BuzzFeed for Africa, or, a media site known for highly shareable content. OMG Digital launched its entertainment vertical, , about five months ago and has grown to 3 million monthly unique visitors, with 70% of those people coming back every month. It’s on track to become the biggest African consumer website by September. OMGVOICE sees a lot of its traffic from Facebook because “a lot of people spend most of their time on Facebook in Africa,” OMG Digital co-founder Jesse Arhin Ghansah told me. “Some people there think Facebook is the internet. That’s where we’re getting most our engagement.” OMG Digital currently serves three African countries, Ghana, Kenya and Nigeria, and has its eyes on launching soon in Tanzania, South Africa, Uganda and Zambia. Later this month, OMG Digital will launch a tech vertical to cover tech startups and culture. In addition to covering tech, OMG Digital will host tech conferences and startup pitches across all of the countries it serves in an effort to “bridge the tech community in Africa,” Ghansah said. In the next couple of months, the media site will launch a food vertical. In August, OMG Digital will also launch original video that covers all of the site’s verticals, touching on everything from tech to comedy to food recipes. Like most media companies, OMG Digital also has its eyes on digital marketing. To date, it is already working with a few brands in Africa around sponsored content and premium ad placements. OMG Digital currently employs two freelance workers in Kenya, three in Nigeria and three in Ghana. After YC, the plan is to bring all of the freelance writers on full-time. Post YC, the company is also looking to raise a seed round of funding.
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Pokemon Go is a hit at Hot Topic, but hardly happening at Home Depot
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Darrell Etherington
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As Pokemon Go moves into the real-world , one might wonder what businesses potentially stand to gain the most from association with Niantic’s world dominating location-based collect’em game. Well, Red Robin should plan a Squirtleburger™, if data gathered by location analytics firm is any indication. The company used info gathered from its opt-in audience of app users to figure out where people with Pokemon Go installed were shopping and eating, leading to a ranked index of which real-world U.S. retailers and restaurants are trainer favorites – and which ones are Pokemon poison. To on one’s surprise, teen thirst emporium Hot Topic is the most popular according to Placed’s data, while the top restaurant is Red Robin, as alluded to above. Other top retail locations is Fred Meyer, Victoria’s Secret and GameStop, while other popular choices for eats include Buffalo Wild Wings, In-N-Out Burger and Cold Stone Creamery. Businesses that Pokemon people don’t tend to frequent include supermarkets Food Lion, Publix, comfort food destination Cracker Barrel, and oldster-focused retailers like Bed Bath & Beyond, The Home Depot and Marshall’s. Pokemon Go is like a barometer of brick-and-mortar youth relevance. Currently, Pokemon Go’s worldwide downloads are estimated at around 30 million globally, according to dat from , with over $35 million in worldwide revenue grossed so far. With those numbers, becoming a real-world Go hotspot could have a non-trivial impact on store or restaurant business, so it’ll be interesting to see if current trainer destinations do more to amp up the appeal – or if the less popular locations try to turn things around.
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Insurance is ready for an upgrade
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Sam Friedman
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Insurance may be widely perceived as a sleepy backwater when it comes to innovation in technology, but that’s about to change. Whether the transformations to come — which we expect to impact the industry on a number of different fronts — end up bolstering a particular insurer’s future or undermining it depends on whether they seize the opportunity to reinvent their business models or stubbornly cling to the status quo. Take blockchain, which established a new type of public ledger for transactions using crypto-currencies. Insurers are just now starting to look at how this intriguing technology might help facilitate smart contract transactions, increase cybersecurity, reduce fraud and lower costs. But the same platform could also accelerate development of alternative risk-transfer startups by providing a reliable, ready-made infrastructure that new entities could leverage — such as peer-to-peer insurance groups, in which like-minded policyholders create a new type of consumer-driven mutual insurer. Insurance distribution is also primed for technological disruption, given the relatively high costs of approaching prospects and handling clients through a live agent and broker network. One such disruptor — aggregator websites, which allow consumers to compare prices from many carriers on their computer or mobile device — is far from new to the scene. But these platforms are proliferating, including some that are establishing symbiotic business relationships with well-known, high-profile retailers. Before long, most aggregators are likely to up their game by going beyond mere price-shopping services, helping consumers assess the actual value of the coverage being offered by competing providers. Meanwhile, enhanced connectivity among devices, properties and individuals will increasingly affect the exposures, costs and premium base of traditional insurers. For the moment, the most impactful technological shift in the industry has come in the form of usage-based auto insurance (UBI), fueled by telematic monitoring of a driver’s performance via a device installed in the vehicle or an app downloaded to their smartphone. UBI should revolutionize customer experience by creating an ongoing, interactive relationship with insurers, rather than limiting touch points to sales, claims and renewals. Insurers can capitalize on this trend by offering more than just coverage priced against key safe-driving metrics, including speed, braking and turning proficiency. They could also leverage their real-time GPS connection with customers to offer added value, such as safety and maintenance warnings, geo-fencing for teenage and elderly drivers and discounts on related products and services in partnership with outside providers. At the same time, new sensing technologies being incorporated in vehicles — including software that prevents speeding, drifting out of lanes and collision avoidance — could substantially lower loss frequency and force down premiums for auto coverage. Over the long term, the biggest connectivity-related disruptor could be broad deployment of a “driverless” car, which represents the culmination of new sensing technology. This disruptor may substantially reduce the need for personal auto liability coverage, while at the same time create a huge growth opportunity for product liability insurers, as responsibility for most accidents caused by self-directed vehicles would likely be shifted from the owner to the manufacturer or safety software producer. The threats and opportunities of connectivity-related disruptions aren’t limited to auto risks. The broader Internet of Things (IoT) movement is also creating “smart” homes and businesses, providing owners and third parties (including insurers) with the opportunity to watch over and direct elements of insured residential and commercial properties remotely. Indeed, before too long, IoT may enable carriers to become primarily the of safety and productive use of properties, rather than just the of damages should a loss occur. If IoT detects the imminent failure of a $100 compressor in a $1 million piece of equipment that prevents a $100 million business-interruption loss, an entirely new value chain is created. If carriers don’t seize the moment, outside tech firms could launch IoT platforms that already have an ingrained risk-transfer component, thereby beating insurers at their own game. Nor are life insurers immune to the disruptions caused by enhanced connectivity. More life carriers will likely take the plunge into telematics, including some utilizing a fitness-monitoring device to award points for those who exhibit healthy behaviors, thereby allowing policyholders to earn premium discounts and other rewards while facilitating a richer, more holistic relationship with their insurer. We also can expect an expansion of robo-advisers across the industry, modeled after the automated investment management services that are looming larger in the retirement-planning space. Personal lines and small-business insurers could enhance their robo-adviser capabilities with investments in rapidly evolving cognitive technologies, including human-computer interface tools such as gestural computing (algorithms interpreting human gestures), affective computing (recognizing and simulating human emotions) and augmented reality (duplicating real-world environments in a computer program). Last but not least, the rapid proliferation of fintech solutions is starting to provoke an attitude within the insurance industry of, “If you can’t beat ‘em, buy ‘em.” In an industry not generally known for innovation, insurers have already begun making strategic fintech investments to import cutting-edge capabilities. Technological disruption isn’t likely to be a singular event for insurers, but rather an ongoing challenge. As a result, efforts to mitigate the impact of disruptive trends, as well as capitalize on the growth opportunities they present, will be part of a continuous journey rather than a final destination. Carriers will need to constantly innovate and experiment as they adapt to the accelerating evolution in technology and consumer expectations, reinventing their products, systems and business models accordingly. Rather than be displaced by disruptive developments, insurers should be proactive in turning them to their advantage — in some cases by working with complementary providers from outside the industry.
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Crunch Report | Using Bitmoji in Snapchat
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Khaled "Tito" Hamze
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Tito Hamze
Tito Hamze
Joe Zolnoski
Joe Zolnoski
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Twitter finally bans Milo Yiannopoulos, one of its most notorious trolls
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Jon Russell
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Twitter has permanently suspended Milo Yiannopoulos, an editor at the conservative news outlet Breitbart and one of its most notorious trolls. The expulsion of Yiannopoulos, who counted more than 300,000 followers on the service, comes just one day after he urged on a hateful mob that . Jones received a barrage sexist and racist messages from users, including fake messages made to look like they came from her account. With little way to fight back, she decided to quit the service on Monday “with tears and a very sad heart.” Twitter I understand you got free speech I get it. But there has to be some guidelines when you let spread like that. You can see on the — Leslie Jones 🦋 (@Lesdoggg) Profiles that some of these people are crazy sick. It's not enough to freeze Acct. They should be reported. — Leslie Jones 🦋 (@Lesdoggg) The key moment appeared to be when Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey responded to one of Jones’ tweets: Hi Leslie, following, please DM me when you have a moment — jack (@jack) This is far from the first time that Yiannopoulos has courted controversy on Twitter. He became a driving force in GamerGate, which vaulted him to status on certain parts of the internet. , which Twitter typically gives to members of the media and celebrities, in January, which only seemed to amp up his interest in offending Twitter’s management and many who use the service. In a statement to TechCrunch, Twitter said: People should be able to express diverse opinions and beliefs on Twitter. But no one deserves to be subjected to targeted abuse online, and our rules prohibit inciting or engaging in the targeted abuse or harassment of others. Over the past 48 hours in particular, we’ve seen an uptick in the number of accounts violating these policies and have taken enforcement actions against these accounts, ranging from warnings that also require the deletion of Tweets violating our policies to permanent suspension. We know many people believe we have not done enough to curb this type of behavior on Twitter. We agree. We are continuing to invest heavily in improving our tools and enforcement systems to better allow us to identify and take faster action on abuse as it’s happening and prevent repeat offenders. We have been in the process of reviewing our hateful conduct policy to prohibit additional types of abusive behavior and allow more types of reporting, with the goal of reducing the burden on the person being targeted. We’ll provide more details on those changes in the coming weeks. TechCrunch reached out to Yiannopoulous, but we did not hear back. Yiannopoulos did release a comment via : With the cowardly suspension of my account, Twitter has confirmed itself as a safe space for Muslim terrorists and Black Lives Matter extremists, but a no-go zone for conservatives. Twitter is holding me responsible for the actions of fans and trolls using the special pretzel logic of the left. Where are the Twitter police when Justin Bieber’s fans cut themselves on his behalf? Like all acts of the totalitarian regressive left, this will blow up in their faces, netting me more adoring fans. We’re winning the culture war, and Twitter just shot themselves in the foot. This is the end for Twitter. Anyone who cares about free speech has been sent a clear message: you’re not welcome on Twitter.
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Unilever buys Dollar Shave Club for reported $1B value
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John Mannes
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Unilever creates and captures a unicorn with . Announced this evening, the $130 billion dollar multinational consumer goods company is speculated to be paying $1 billion, all cash, for the startup, according to . If the pricing is true, the transaction will be one of the largest ever in e-commerce. E-commerce is often a scary space for investors, but David Pakman, DSC investor and board member from Venrock, believes the space has a strong pulse. Venrock, along with other investors, will be getting a true venture 10X return with the sale, if approved in Q3. Other well known VCs, including Andreessen Horowitz, Battery Ventures, and KPCB, have been a part of DSC’s growth. However, Battery and KPCB previously sold their shares and won’t be benefiting from the sale. Woody Marshall, a Partner at Technology Crossover Ventures (TCV), emphasized the rapid growth of brand recognition for the direct to consumer company. TCV was the largest investor in DSC and will be benefiting significantly from the exit. Unilever approached DSC a while back wanting to build out a partnership without intentions to acquire the company. Talks escalated rapidly and a deal was put on the table and taken. Unilever offers DSC the ability to plug into existing international marking and distribution channels. DSC has grown to become a dominant player in the male grooming business since its founding in 2012. Its revenue last year was $153 million and had planned on toppling $200 million in the next year. This transaction thus also would represent the largest multiple for a e-commerce startup in history. The company’s 3.2 million members will be a valuable addition to Unilever and increase the company’s exposure to a growing demographic. While best known for its shaving service, the company also produces mens wash, skincare, and and styling products. Unilever will also benefit from Dollar Shave Club’s valuable customer data and existing customer base. Unilever plans to keep DSC’s CEO, Michael Dubin on through the transition and does not have plans to make any executive changes into the future. Dubin has been the creative face for the company, appearing in advertising, and becoming a close part of the brand. DSC will be retaining its Los Angeles, CA headquarters. We are reaching out to the companies involved and will have more shortly in this developing story.
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Only the privileged fear a robot revolution
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Ambarish Mitra
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Leading venture capitalists, scientists and CEOs all have the same prediction for artificial intelligence: machines will from both blue- and white-collar workers, “eat the world” and, ultimately, overthrow humanity. These histrionics have driven a widely accepted negative narrative about this technology’s potential impact on the future of humanity. That needs to change. Bringing artificial intelligence into the mainstream world should be met with hope and empathy, not fear. The concerns of these experts — wealthy men with unparalleled access to utilities, healthcare, public safety, education and job opportunities — are the concerns of privilege. Consider that in much of the world, the ability to see a doctor, eat a wholesome meal or bathe in clean water is still a luxury. The fear of a robot revolution may feel justified for the privileged, who have much to lose — but it’s a different story when you look at what the least privileged have to gain. We are still far, far away from a world where autonomous, truly sentient, artificial intelligence will exist, let alone be capable of harming humanity to any significant degree. If your fear today is of a so-called “robot revolution,” you’re missing the point. In a world of inequality and risk, we cannot ignore the opportunities AI will afford the least privileged among us in the nearer future. AI will take jobs away, yes. But it will also fill them on a scale never before possible, where they are needed most: healthcare and education, to start. The brutal fact is that low-income countries suffer from an extreme lack of doctors and educators. Even in developed countries, segments of the population have far less access to these services, most often because of the narrow availability of quality, affordable options. Expanding the global inventory of educators and doctors would have a massive positive effect on humanity as a whole. Consider the realities of life for the underprivileged… The quality of a child’s education is a layered and nuanced subject, but it has been proven time and again that the most marginalized groups in any population, regardless of the country’s overall income level, are the least likely to enter and complete school. It is estimated that have not learned basic literacy or math skills. Because the foundation that is laid for those skills is in early education, it’s noteworthy that in low-income countries only of the children who enter primary school complete it. In some of the poorest countries, fewer than half the children complete just four years of primary education. Education is a crucial element in changing population forecasts and raising socio-economic development, so not having the opportunity to even attain an education creates a frustrating cycle of poverty for millions of people. A similar frustration can be found in the resource gaps in basic healthcare. that anything fewer than roughly two healthcare workers (physicians, nurses and midwives) per 1,000 people is not adequate coverage for primary healthcare needs. However, low-income countries average 2.5 physicians per 10,000 people. In comparison, high-income countries have 28.7 physicians per 10,000 people. Let’s once again think of the most vulnerable among us: children. The in low-income countries is about 53 percent. More than half of our children dying would be met with nothing short of outrage in high-income countries, where the infant mortality rate is only about 5 percent. While it can quickly become very depressing to spend time in these facts and figures, depression is hopeless, and I truly believe that through artificial intelligence there is hope. Consider for a moment a few of the ways in which artificial intelligence is already working to make the world a better place. Google’s in the U.K. to use AI to identify what needs to be done to prevent an admitted patient’s condition from deteriorating. From there, it can also allocate that patient to the right staff and track what procedures have and have not been done. I think any nurse would agree this is a tremendous, life-saving asset — and one that only scratches the surface of what this technology will be able to do in the near future. Similarly, there are many AI experts who believe that artificial intelligence can and will be used to diagnose disease at scale, while than a human physician. Sadly, of preventable disease. I’m amazed there are not more advocates out there pushing that we develop this technology sooner. If harnessed to bring education to those aforementioned 250 million children who go without it, AI has the potential to . How? Because all of these are symptomatic of what happens when you increase the education levels of women. With the possibility to save millions of lives, reduce infant mortality rates and create a more sustainable and equal world, what is keeping us from taking action? When you boil it down, there are two huge challenges facing the proliferation of AI technology to low-income communities. The first is that establishing the necessary infrastructure is an investment to which those with the ability to do are averse. Their concerns, as outlined above, are in the potential impact of AI to their own happiness, not what it can accomplish elsewhere. Secondly, we have to acknowledge that we haven’t hit the tipping point for the tech. At Blippar, we’ve made strides to use AI and augmented reality to educate children; but I have to acknowledge that the technology isn’t ready to scale at the global level, nor is it yet in a place to teach children transferable literacy skills. I don’t think these issues are insurmountable, or even things that can’t be fixed in the next 10 years. Mark Zuckerberg has made it a personal passion project of his to , and one of the factors that makes that project possible is the proliferation of mobile phones. Of the 7 billion people that populate this earth, . Given the ever-growing ubiquity of smartphones and the ways in which people use them to access the internet, it seems only a matter of time before most of the world is connected. And considering the possibility of further developing and redesigning the learning boxes that fuel AI, cell phones could be the initial “robots” that start doing the teaching and diagnosing for those without alternative opportunities. When you think of the millions of lives that could be saved and improved by access to basic healthcare and education, it makes the idea of fearing the further advancement of artificial intelligence seem myopic. The fact of the matter is that any developments in a robot revolution are going to look quite differently depending on where you happen to live in this world. For some of us, artificial intelligence is scary because a robot barista means one less human with a job. But for others, a robot sanitation worker could mean access to clean, potable water. Many innovations in human history have led to job displacement, but people have always evolved and adapted. If you’re afraid of losing your job, imagine if you had to fear losing your child to a preventable disease. I get excited when I think of the technological advancements that AI can bring, but what I think is at the heart of the matter is the humanity that the “robots” behind AI could bring to us. A more equal world means a world with healthier, happier, more educated people. If that means fewer jobs, that may also mean more leisure time to spend together, to think, to enter a new Renaissance. We don’t need to fear a robot revolution. What we should really be concerned of is the kind of callous thinking that turns a blind eye to the suffering in the world and assumes there is nothing to be done to help.
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Pokémon Go launch in Japan postponed after email leak
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Jon Russell
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Game-maker Niantic has postponed today’s scheduled launch of Pokémon Go in Japan following an email leak. Yesterday today (Wednesday), but the companies behind Pokémon Go have canceled that plan, a source close to the launch told TechCrunch. One major reason for that change of heart is that internal communication from McDonalds Japan, the game’s sponsor, detailing the launch made its way to ( , “Japan’s Reddit”) and photo site . An initial morning launch time was pushed back to early afternoon as the email went viral. Later, however, the companies decided to cancel today’s launch entirely due to concerns that the hype generated would overload the game, our source explained. We don’t have an immediate update on when the game will finally go live in Japan, but understand that the launch is “imminent” but unspecified. The postponement will frustrate many in Japan who are still waiting but, on the positive side, Niantic, Nintendo and the Pokémon Company — the three firms behind the smash game — are confident that, if the game is launched right, their serves can handle the undoubtedly huge demand that Pokémon Go will generate in Japan. that the company needed time to ensure it had enough servers to cope with a deluge of Pokémon addicts in Japan. The delay means also that we will have to wait to see the impact of the first “sponsored location” in the game. McDonalds has agreed to become the first paying sponsor, turning its 3,000 stores in Japan into “gyms” where players can battle, adding a new source of revenue to the game beyond and . That’ll be a partnership to watch since there are . The success of Pokémon Go is unprecedented. Just two weeks after its U.S. debut, passed 30 million downloads and $35 million in revenue, and . That has — yes, in just two weeks — and all without launching in Japan, the home of Pokémon, yet. Pokémon Go is available in more than 30 countries right now thanks to a steady rollout across Europe last week. TechCrunch understands that Japan is planned as the first launch in Asia and, once the game is available there, it will be extended to other countries in the region.
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Car sharing leads to reduced car ownership and emissions in cities, study finds
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Darrell Etherington
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Cars are , and cars in cities can be especially heavy with their contributions, owing to traffic and population density. And while encouraging everyone to bike or use public transit probably isn’t going to convince everyone to ditch car ownership, car sharing services seem to be winning more city denizens over, and a new study shows that the results of said services are good, both for the environment and for reducing unnecessary personal budget burdens. The study ( ), conducted by research group Innovative Mobility Research (IMR) working out of the Transportation Sustainability Research Center at UC Berkeley, looked specifically at one-way car sharing in North America, with a focus on since it has the largest reach and is present in a number of major urban markets. With one-way car sharing, members of the service can pick up a car at one spot and drop it at another — here in Toronto, for instance, car2go vehicles can be picked up on city streets, in city-run “Green P” parking lots and at the airport. The IMR’s study focused on car2go members in Calgary, San Diego, Seattle, Vancouver and Washington, and relies on self-reported info derived from polling car2go users, combined with vehicle activity data provided by car2go for the purposes of the study. What they found was that both vehicle ownership and emissions from driving dropped as a result of car sharing programs being present in these cities. Reduced emissions are a reflection of reduced driving overall, as car2go members seem not to use cars as much as car owners, despite using public transportation just as much or even less than before car sharing was introduced. In the vast majority of cases, however, respondents reported walking more. In terms of ownership, the survey found that a small but non-trivial number of respondents either sold or didn’t bother to buy a personal vehicle as a result of having a one-way car sharing system in place. In total across all five cities, the study suggests that between four and nine owned vehicles were suppressed (i.e. sold or never purchased to begin with) per car sharing vehicle present in the city. That represents a huge shift in the total number of vehicles on the road, and the resulting cost from a manufacturing, ownership/usage and disposal perspective, if accurate. Anecdotally, car2go has done well here in Toronto. In addition to expanding pick-up/drop-off points from just parking lots to any residential street, it has added four-door Mercedes vehicles to its fleet (in addition to the standard smart fortwos that make up the bulk of its offerings). I’ve heard from a fellow TechCrunch writer that, again anecdotally, car2go has also become pretty commonplace in Seattle. Car sharing is still far from being the norm among city-dwellers when it comes to transportation options, but this study shows that even modest membership numbers could have big impact on the health of a city.
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After 3 weeks, Worldpay still fumbling millions of Etsy transactions
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John Mannes
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Etsy users had another bad week as payment processor Worldpay continues to cause problems. Late last week, some Etsy users began reporting that they had experienced duplicate charges. is approaching one thousand posts. In a statement, Worldpay admitted to causing the duplicate charges for Etsy users in its attempts to rectify the problem. “Ongoing technical work related to resolving this issue has resulted in a limited number of duplicate charges to Etsy customers.” Three weeks ago, Thousands of posts on Etsy’s bugs forum began pouring in. After a few days, for the outage. TechCrunch has also learned that a software update on one of Worldpay’s servers caused the outage. Despite learning more about what caused the outage, we still have no idea how close the company is to processing all of the backlogged payments. “Unfortunately I can’t quantify progress – understandably, to do so would be take people away from the core effort of resolving the issue,” said an anonymous source close to Worldpay. We sure hope that Worldpay internally has an idea of their own progress. The company seems to be right on top of the small size of the number of their customers impacted. “Worldpay is aware of an isolated issue on one of our gateways, resulting in a delay to settlement for a small number of customers,” said Worldpay in response to initial problems reported by Etsy customers. When you have 15,000 frustrated posts from your customer’s customer, and you’re the one causing the problem, you cannot continue to call the problem small. One percent, Five percent or Ten percent, it’s all a massive amount of money. These types of outages are common with tech companies but they rarely last more than a few hours or days. Etsy customers have been experiencing delays in processing refunds for weeks. As time rolls by, the company seems to be slowly getting more proactive, or at least more vocal about it. Yesterday the company made an announcement on its forums that it created a special payments task-force within the company to address lingering issues from customers. The company has issued refunds to buyers and sellers that were charged twice, and asks anyone still affected to write into Etsy Support. “Affected members will receive an email with more details and should receive a credit for the duplicate payment in three to five days,” said Stephanie Grodin, Director of Payments Product at Etsy. Last week, we instituted a few new processes to improve the resiliency of our platform, and since then new payments have been processing without delays.” Etsy isn’t the only Worldpay customer getting dragged through the weeds by the payments processor. Taxi services and gambling establishments are getting their share of the madness as well. This is millions of dollars of other people’s money that Worldpay is fumbling with. Our payment service provider are still experiencing withdrawal delays. We sincerely apologise for the inconvenience caused — StanJames.com (@stanjames) We are in contact with Worldpay but they are unable to provide us with a timescale, once again apologies — Kabbee (@Kabbee) Our payment provider Worldpay are continuing to experience issues processing withdrawals. We're working to fix ASAP. Sorry for inconvenience — BETDAQ (@BETDAQ) At this point, it almost seems irresponsible for Etsy to continue to use Worldpay for processing. Etsy is facing serious competition in the handmade goods e-commerce space and needs as many things to break in its direction as possible as it pushes up against industry giants like Amazon and Ebay. , a service very similar to Etsy, albeit with higher merchant costs. Etsy has been drastically underperforming since its IPO. Etsy stock has lost over 64 percent of its value from its peak on the first day of trading. Etsy stock is down almost 3.5 percent over the last five trading days. This comes ahead of the company’s second quarter earnings that will be announced in early August. [graphiq id=”jqTmz3jBvdr” title=”Etsy Inc. (ETSY) Stock Price – 7 Days” width=”600″ height=”549″ url=”https://w.graphiq.com/w/jqTmz3jBvdr” link=”http://listings.findthecompany.com/l/16266642/Etsy-Inc-in-Brooklyn-NY” link_text=”Etsy Inc. (ETSY) Stock Price – 7 Days | FindTheCompany”] On the other-side of the table, nobody in the financial world seems to care about Worldpay at the moment. Previously, Worldpay was under the umbrella of the Royal Bank of Scotland. The company was sold off to private equity for a few years and is now publicly traded. Their stock is up three percent over the last five trading days.
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One professor’s quest to 3D scan every fish in the sea
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Devin Coldewey
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If you were wondering what a mottled sculpin looks like, there are plenty of pictures available online. But while they may satisfy a curious tidepooler, the discerning ichthyologist demands more. That’s why a professor at the University of Washington is getting full 3D scans of every fish in the sea — every of fish, anyway. With a $340,000 CT scanner, a few lab assistants and a whole lot of fish, Adam Summers wants to build a complete catalog of the more than 25,000 types of fish out there. This isn’t some new mania: and knows the scientific benefits of this kind of data. Having digital models accurate to (say) the millimeter allows for instant, exact comparisons between species, or among several of the same species — you could even 3D print a skull, tail, vertebra or whole fish to compare with a real-world sample. It’s an invaluable tool, which is why Summers has made sure that all the data his lab produces is freely available. “Having this scanner has made it clear to me the incredible power of this system if you think about it the right way,” Summers said in a “These scans are transforming the way we think about 3-D data and accessibility.” The lab is on San Juan Island in the beautiful Puget Sound region of Washington, and Summers now has visitors to his watery paradise who want to scan their own fish. Not folks who just caught a big one, of course, but biologists and museum curators who want to digitize their own extensive collections. Summers thinks it’ll take between two and three years to scan them all, but that doesn’t mean his work will be over. Next he plans to scan the remaining 50,000 or so vertebrates on Earth — a considerably bigger task in several ways. So far there are somewhere north of 500 species of fish scanned, which you can browse . All the files are the full resolution and free to download.
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Facebook throws shade at Snapchat’s anti-creepy business
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Josh Constine
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“They’re going to hit some challenges and marketers are gonna start to ask questions when they get out of the experimental budget phase,” Facebook’s head of adtech said about Snapchat today. While Facebook tries to collect as much data about users as possible to prove its ads work, Snapchat has tried to avoid being creepy, despite that hindering its potential monetization — it refuses to use retargeting and other tracking methods. Today at , Facebook’s Dave Jakubowski was asked by Recode’s Kurt Wagner whether Snapchat would be able to win over advertisers if it doesn’t have the same insights about performance. Jakubowski admitted that Snapchat is a cool product. It’s hot. All the cool kids are using it.” but then launched into this rant, implying Snapchat doesn’t have the data to keep advertisers happy: Snapchat declined to respond when asked. On the other hand, Snapchat’s lack of a deeper permanent record about you seems to coax more frequent ephemeral sharing out of users. Teens feel comfortable being themselves when every detail about them doesn’t live forever in an ad engine. Plus, to improve the measurement of its content and ads. It recently added 10 adtech companies as measurement partners, alongside new ad units. In the end, it may just boil down to where these companies are in their lifecycle. Once upon a time, Facebook refused to implement retargeting based on outside data or put ads inside the News Feed. But as the IPO loomed, it conformed to advertiser pressure to improve targeting and ad visibility. We’ll see what story Snapchat sings when it’s its turn to go public.
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Facebook wants to use fluorescence to make its laser drones work better
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John Mannes
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A team of physicists and electrical engineers at Facebook a new idea for using luminescence to improve signal detection in free-space optical communication today. Facebook, in a partnership with Internet.org, has been to remote locations around the globe. Last year, the company came out with a plan, codenamed Project Aquila, to use lasers to deliver information across long distances. Most people are aware of fiber-optic cables used for transmitting information for the internet. Verizon FIOS, the largest service, provides high-speed internet via light. Such services are limited by necessity for a solid cable for transmission between points. Facebook’s drones will shoot signals embedded in light directly through free-space without a cable. To effectively transmit data through light, the terminal signal point must be optimized for collection of information. Light and optics are complicated over long distances because of interference, noise and other physical and environmental factors. T. Peyronel, K. J. Quirk, S. C. Wang and T. G. Tiecke, all employees at Facebook, present a plan to increase the effective area and field of view of an optical receiver without compromising response times. The team used a physical structure to guide the light. The structure was covered with wavelength shifting dyes that absorbed the light being transmitted and re-emitted it at a different wavelength. A portion of the emitted light is collected by the fiber and guided to a small photodiode that converts the light into current useful in a semiconductor. The team noted that the same process with omni-directional properties has been used before to concentrate light for solar energy harvesting. One of the issues right now with using Facebook’s drones to transmit internet is scintillation effects, also known as twinkling. Atmospheric turbulence causes optical fluctuations that ultimately result in signal fading. The researchers believe that the new technology might be able to suppress these effects. This research, while promising, is not going to be enough to get Project Aquila working delivering internet to rural areas. Battery life for the craft is still an issue, and the new optical technology will still need more testing in the real world.
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Reco thinks books are better when they’re recommended by people you trust
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Darrell Etherington
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I still love books, and I still have a fair amount of trouble finding new ones to read that I’ll actually enjoy. Helping with discovery is the idea behind , a new mobile app from Canadian bookseller and retailer , which provides users with a social network based around books, and people’s love thereof. “We have a kind of obsessive focus on who our customers are, and what they really value,” Indigo CEO and Reco co-founder Heather Reisman told me in an interview. “For the longest time, we’ve all been saying to each other that there is simply nothing better than a recommendation from someone you truly trust. There is nothing better than having someone who you trust, either a very good friend, or someone who’s an expert in an area that you’re interested in, say to you, read this book, it is irresistible ” Reco is designed to provide a platform where you can get exactly that kind of guidance on your reading list, in a way that, according to Reisman, involves as little stress as possible. Reisman says the reason people are looking for books to read to begin with is often to alleviate stress, so the process of discovery, as well as the process of making reading lists and recalling which books you meant to pick up, should be as frictionless as possible. In fact, that’s part of the reason why Reco exists as its own, standalone mobile app (on iOS currently, with an Android launch targeted for fall). Facebook, Slack and other existing social platforms have offered ways for people to share and recommend books in the past, but Reco wants to cut out the noise, giving you a self-selected community focused on books exclusively. “Facebook does all kinds of things, you’ve got lots of people on your network there, you have your grandmother, your sister, your aunt, etc.” Reisman explained. “This is your place just for this one focus. Very simple, very easy, and you don’t have to get involved in all kinds of other things.” Goodreads is another social network focused on very similar things, of course, but the network was born prior to the mobile era, and what Reco offers is a cleaner design, with a simpler interaction model and a greater focus on recommendations from your hand-picked network, as opposed to impersonally curated collections. Reco wants to essentially get out of the way of book recommendations, letting users themselves handle any and all content recommendations. What Reco does offer is a sign-up flow that lets you connect your Facebook account to find people to add to your own network, as well as recommendations based on genre and more interests you select. Books from your network are then presented in a home feed, with large card-style panels that each take up the majority of your display, with a book cover image and a brief paragraph explaining why the person made the recommendation. Users can heart or comment on any reco, as well as add the book to their own list, and metrics for all of the above are displayed on each. You also can tap through to view who exactly liked the recommended title, and who added it to their own list, which can either provide more insight into whether it’s something you’d like, or help you find other Reco users with similar tastes to follow. The app is free, but users can purchase books directly using unobtrusive links for each recommendation, which generates a commission back to Reco. In Canada, Reco uses Indigo and Kobo to complete the transactions, while in the U.S., Barnes & Noble, Amazon, iBooks and Kobo are the selling partners, and Reisman says the intent is to add even more providers. Reco has been available for a short while through an earlier soft-launch, but Indigo EVP of Print and Strategy and Reco co-founder Krishna Nikhil says around 40 percent of users are active every two days, and generally individual users are using it about 20 times per month, which is high, given that the primary purpose behind the app is to drive people to books that should keep them busy for a while before they need another recommendation. As a company, Indigo has made interesting bets on tech plays like this before: Kobo began life as an internal startup at Indigo, before being spun out and eventually acquired by Japanese e-commerce company Rakuten. Reisman says that Indigo is definitely open to starting up or incubating tech startups in the future, provided their goals align with Indigo’s core interests. It’s a refreshing approach by a company that could’ve easily been steamrolled by drastic changes in the retail market, and one that hopefully will bear interesting results in the future, too.
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Harassment of Ghostbusters’ Leslie Jones shows Twitter needs to change
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Kate Conger
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Leslie Jones, the star of the new “Ghostbusters” reboot and a cast member on “Saturday Night Live,” announced she was leaving Twitter after trolls bombarded her with racist comments. “I leave Twitter tonight with tears and a very sad heart,” Jones tweeted before going silent on her account, where she’d spent the last several days battling trolls. “All this cause I did a movie. You can hate the movie but the shit I got today…wrong.” The “Ghostbusters” remake has faced criticism since it was first reported that the film would feature an all-female cast, and much of the backlash has centered on the belief that men, not women, should be suiting up to fight ghosts. But trolls have singled out Jones, the only black star in the movie, for particularly pointed and racist harassment. Since the movie opened on Friday, Jones has received harassing messages on Twitter. “Ok I have been called Apes, sent pics of their asses, even got a pic with semen on my face. I’m tryin to figure out what human means. I’m out,” Jones . Although Jones said she was reporting the harassment to Twitter, the onslaught continued, with one user creating a fake account in her name and using it to tweet out homophobic and racist slurs. “Twitter I understand you got free speech,” Jones wrote. “I get it. But there has to be some guidelines when you let spread like that.” The situation finally caught the attention of Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, who responded, “Hi Leslie, following, please DM me when you have a moment.” Hi Leslie, following, please DM me when you have a moment — jack (@jack) Dorsey’s response is remarkably tepid, and proves that Twitter’s response to targeted harassment campaigns needs to change. Twitter often serves as a platform for large-scale harassment, and yet the company relies on users to report abusive behavior — which leaves victims to manage the deluge alone. Abusers know this and take advantage of it, returning to Twitter again and again to launch large-scale harassment campaigns. “We rely on people to report this type of behavior to us, but we are continuing to invest heavily in improving our tools and enforcement systems to prevent this kind of abuse,” Twitter said in a statement. “We realize we still have a lot of work in front of us before Twitter is where it should be on how we handle these issues.” Twitter’s policy is in stark contrast to other social media platforms, which proactively monitor for and remove harassment. Facebook uses artificial intelligence to scan text on its platform and provides about combatting bullying. Facebook also implements similar tech to police spam comments on Instagram. Twitter may be at a disadvantage because it lacks Facebook’s resources, and at least Twitter is committed to funding better tools to fight hate speech. But this isn’t a new problem for Twitter, and the fact that harassment continues to drive users off the platform doesn’t bode well for the company’s . Twitter’s best tool for blocking vile tweets en masse is its “ ,” which is only available to verified users and aims to block threats and abusive language. Twitter announced today that it will open up verification to more users, so the quality filter may soon become more widely available. However, users who are the targets of harassment campaigns may feel the need to monitor the threats they receive so they can keep track of threats and doxing and report these actions to authorities if necessary. Twitter’s lackadaisical approach to harassment is especially strange, given the company’s prominence in social justice campaigns. The company has been a platform for political organizing in the U.S. and around the world, and has taken pride in being the social media of choice for the Black Lives Matter movement. — Twitter Blackbirds (@Blackbirds) Dorsey also showed support for Blackbirds, Twitter’s black employee group, at CodeCon this year, sporting a . But Dorsey’s hashtag activism falls flat when black women like Jones can’t use Twitter without being overwhelmed by harassment. Twitter is at risk of becoming the next Reddit-like swamp of racism, sexism and homophobia. It’s time for Twitter to make #staywoke a way of living, not just a cute slogan on a t-shirt.
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Microsoft’s Q4 earnings beat Street with $22.6B in revenue, $0.69 EPS
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Frederic Lardinois
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Microsoft today earnings for its of 2016, its first earnings report after announcing its proposed acquisition of LinkedIn. The company’s earnings came in at a non-GAAP revenue of $22.6 billion ($20.6 billion GAAP) and $0.69 of non-GAAP per-share profit ($0.39 GAAP), and were well above expectations. Like in previous quarters, the results reflect strong growth in Microsoft’s cloud businesses. Wall Street the company to report earnings per share of $0.58 on revenue of $22.14 billion. The company’s stock was right after the earnings were announced. As Microsoft’s director of investor relations Zack Moxcey told me after the earnings announcement, the GAAP results this quarter still reflect the charges Microsoft took related to its phone business and adjustments for Windows 10 revenue deferrals. He also attributed part of Microsoft’s higher than expected earnings to the company’s lower than expected tax rate. In the year-ago-quarter, Microsoft’s revenue was $22.2 billion, but earnings per share came to a $0.40 loss because of the $7.5 billion charge Microsoft took related to its acquisition of Nokia. Without the charge, the company’s earnings per share would have been $0.62. “This past year was pivotal in both our own transformation and in partnering with our customers who are navigating their own digital transformations,” said Satya Nadella, chief executive officer at Microsoft. “The Microsoft Cloud is seeing significant customer momentum and we’re well positioned to reach new opportunities in the year ahead.” Like in previous quarters, analysts will be especially interested in Microsoft’s cloud revenue. In its Q3 report, Microsoft said revenue from its “Intelligent Cloud” business had grown to $6.1 billion, up 3 percent (or 8 percent in constant currency). Azure revenue had grown 120 percent year-over-year while its server products and cloud services revenue had increased 5 percent. This quarter, Intelligent Cloud revenue hit $6.7 billion and Azure revenue grew 102 percent year-over-year. Microsoft has long said that it expects its commercial cloud business to hit a $20 billion run rate by 2018. In Q3, it reported that its run rate was $9.4 billion. With this new report, that number has now hit $12.1 billion, which Microsoft prominently highlighted in its earnings release. Moxcey told me that the company is standing by its plan to reach a $20 billion run rate by 2018. Sadly, Microsoft doesn’t provide geographic breakdowns of its revenue numbers, but Moxcey attributed some of the growth in the company’s Azure business to Microsoft’s wide geographic footprint with regard to Azure regions. As far as Intelligent Cloud goes, Moxcey also noted that the company doubled its customer base for its enterprise mobility solutions year-over-year (it now has 33,000 customers), and that the installed base grew nearly 2.5x year-over-year. Here is a breakdown of Microsoft’s numbers for its other business units: (this includes Office, consumer Office and Dynamic, among other products): $7.0 billion, compared to $6.3 billion in revenue in the last quarter. Microsoft attributes this to strong growth across its productivity services and especially the fact that Office 365 commercial revenue grew 54 percent year-over-year and that its Dynamics CRM paid seats are growing at more than 2.5x year-over-year. (including Windows, Devices, Gaming and Search): $8.9 billion in revenue, compared to $12.7 billion in the last quarter. Phone revenue, unsurprisingly, declined 71 percent, but the company’s revenue from its Surface line continues to increase and was up 9 percent in the last quarter (mostly driven by the Surface 4 and Surface Book). Windows OEM consumer revenue grew 27 percent. For the commercial market, it grew 2 percent (which sounds low, but is far better than in previous quarters). Because Microsoft’s revenue in this area is largely driven by new purchases, Microsoft doesn’t expect the end of the free update offer to have a markable influence on next quarter’s results. Microsoft also announced that Xbox Live now has 49 million monthly active users and that its search advertising revenue was up 16 percent, largely due to the deeper integration of its search tools into Windows 10. During today’s earnings call, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella also noted that Windows 10 users have now asked Cortana 8 billion questions to date. For the full year, Microsoft reported $92 billion in non-GAAP revenue and $2.10 in adjusted earnings per share. The company’s operating income was $27.9 billion on a non-GAAP basis.
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Attention nerds: Chrysler announces bug bounty program
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Kristen Hall-Geisler
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If you like poking, prodding, and proving big corporations wrong, has FCA US got a challenge for you. FCA US is the umbrella company for Fiat, Chrysler, Jeep, Dodge, and Ram, and it wants you to find potential vulnerabilities in their vehicles’ cybersecurity systems. And they’ll give you money for it. FCA US put its bounty program up on , a community of cybersecurity researchers. There are only a few rules for bug bounty hunters, including providing the information FCA US would need to reproduce and validate the identified vulnerability. The company also asks that bounty hunters not destroy data, interrupt FCA US services, or “modify, access, or retain data that does not belong to you.” What do you get in return for following these basic guidelines? First of all, you get cash money, between $150 and $1500 per bug, depending on its severity. Also, you get FCA US’s promise that it “will not take legal action against nor ask law enforcement to investigate researchers participating in the program” — as long as you follow the rules. FCA US is specifically looking for bugs found in UConnect systems, especially apps for iOS and Android. They’re also asking the community to test for bugs in hardware they own or have access to for testing, like tire pressure sensors and remote keyless entry systems. Basically, if you think you can hack into an FCA US vehicle and compromise its cybersecurity, you stand to make a few hundred bucks. There are some off-limits areas, like dealer websites and DDOS attacks. To see the exact parameters, check out the Bugcrowd page for the . You may recall the infamous last summer, which FCA US quickly if not elegantly. The company apparently decided that if hackers gonna hack, it might as well harness their nerd power and pay them for finding holes in the code.
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Google introduces speedier ads to its Accelerated Mobile Pages program
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Anthony Ha
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Google has been working to create a faster news reading experience project. Now it’s bringing something similar to online ads. AMP is an open framework for creating articles that load more quickly, particularly on mobile. (They also can be sped up by loading from Google’s cache.) At the time , Google said it would allow publishers to run ads on their AMP-formatted articles, just like any other articles, and it’s . Today, the company unveiled an AMP for Ads program, which allows marketers to create similarly optimized ads, presumably to run alongside those fast-loading articles. As Paul Muret, Google’s vice president of display, video and analytics put it :
With AMP for Ads, we’re bringing everything that’s good and fast about AMP to ads. Unfortunately, most advertisers’ campaign creative are not fully optimized for mobile experiences. AMP for Ads allows advertisers to build beautifully-designed ads in AMP HTML so that the entire AMP experience, both the publisher’s content and the advertiser’s creative, load simultaneously at AMP-speed. Google is also announcing AMP Landing Pages — so marketers can ensure someone will have a similarly smooth experience after they click on the ad, rather than being driven away immediately by a slow-loading page. Among other things, AMP is a way for Google to make the mobile web more competitive with Facebook’s Instant Articles, so it’s worth noting that .
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For my daughter
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John Biggs
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eight. She likes princesses and Harry Potter and doll houses and making videos to Taylor Swift songs and she has a few very clear influences and/or heroes. Mal from the . Hermione. My wife. Me. Her great-grandmother Sadie. And now I want her to be influenced by the . The new Ghostbusters, not the version with Murray and Aykroyd. I want her to love the version with women. As an aside, when I started this post I was unaware of this , the Ghostbuster with an encyclopedic knowledge of New York history. On behalf of — I don’t know, the internet everywhere? — I apologize. We suck. I wish that after 20 years of regular internet use we’d all be better people. We’re not. We are literally the worst. I leave Twitter tonight with tears and a very sad heart.All this cause I did a movie.You can hate the movie but the shit I got today…wrong — Leslie Jones 🦋 (@Lesdoggg) But back to girls. When I was a kid I learned to love science from action movies. I built bombs with an old chemistry set so I could be like . I learned “survival” — really just running around in the woods — from . Some of my first programs mimicked the onscreen prompts from . I made a shoulder-mounted rocket launcher so I could be like . I was not a smart boy. Girls watched some of the same movies but, as we are fast learning, they didn’t get the same lessons. While I had a funny/smart Matthew Broderick to look up to, my sister had his girlfriend. Boys had and girls had… ? Strawberry Shortcake? Jem and the Holograms? What I’m saying is that boys were told that science was cool and that it was fun to kill people. Girls weren’t. To a degree we’re reaping that whirlwind now. But this isn’t about that. What this is about is why the Ghostbusters reboot exists. It exists in order to show that girls can tell fart jokes, that they can say scientific-sounding stuff and be taken seriously and that they can be cool and funny and useful. All of these should be things we take for granted, things that are obvious to us. And to many, they are obvious. But culture must remind us. It needs to remind us of this through movies like Ghostbusters. I need to know she could grow up to be a big nerd. Or not. But by having female role models across fields, that choice is hers. The importance of this movie isn’t in that it’s a reboot of a childhood favorite. It’s in the fact that it puts science and technology front and center in a film about women. Argue all you want about the logic of a reboot (I’ll point you to the awful Superman, Spider-Man and Batman reboots as being equally illogical). Argue all you want about the sexism of casting a hot male receptionist who is ditzy for comedic effect (I’ll point you to every single comedy between 1980 and 2016, but in those cases the receptionist was a woman). Argue all you want about the plot (I’ll cede that point. The plot was pretty rough). This movie was important because it shows girls that they can do what boys do. I made my own proton pack when I was a kid. It was made of cardboard and a vacuum hose. We ran around sucking up ghosts and fighting demons. My sister didn’t. Now I hope my daughter builds a proton pack. I hope she runs around with a light saber. I hope she learns to program because a cool girl told her she could. This movie shows girls that they can run science labs and have fun. It shows them the same things that amazing women like Limor Fried try to embody, the idea that talking about technology doesn’t make you less attractive, less friendly or less interesting. It shows girls an example of the kind of women who run the world and gives them pointers on the way to that goal. So I want more women-only reboots. I want them to remake Star Trek with an all-female cast. I want the hero of Independence Day to be a woman president. I want all of our childhood favorites to be recast. Or, barring that, I want Hollywood to give my daughter more women she can admire. Because she has a few already, but she needs many, many more. Culture is not yours. It is ours. We all share it. Things are injected into a culture in hopes of shedding light, in hopes of entertaining us, in hopes of inciting revolution. Culture is formed and reformed endlessly. Things change, the center cannot hold. If that angers you, that’s your problem. So give me more all-girl Ghostbusters. Send me . Bring more women like Ladyada and to my daughter’s school and tell their stories at Girl Scouts in the same breath as stories about Tesla and Edison. My daughter needs to see that technology isn’t a man’s world. I can show her, but she doesn’t always believe me. She needs to see it for herself. My daughter wants to be an actor. I hope she stars in a reboot of WarGames or Predator. Maybe not American Ninja. I hope she is seen on screen hacking into NORAD and meeting Professor Falken. I hope she averts global thermonuclear war. And I hope that in the next decade, when she is ready to become an actor, we will have grown up about movies and stopped whining so much. I doubt it, but I can dream. Busting ghosts and fighting aliens and averting thermonuclear war is everyone’s job. And we need to show the littlest, sweetest and most hopeful ones among us that this is unequivocally and absolutely true in all ways, every day. They deserve it. We owe it to them. The world is theirs, on loan to us only to improve and pass on.
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Legalist is making it easier for lawyers to find state court records
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Fitz Tepper
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Imagine a lawyer with a client who lives in one county and works in another. Or even a lawyer who litigates in multiple states. Both common occurrences, but situations that make it very hard to keep track of legal documents. Essentially, it should be easy to keep track of court records from multiple counties and states – but it’s not. In fact, it’s pretty awful. Most are hosted online, but each county could have different databases and even different databases providers, making it a huge hassle to constantly search for court records and updates. For example, Ohio has 88 counties, and you have to search each one separately for legal records. It’s such a mess that some lawyers have found it easier to have employees just drive from county to county tracking down records in person. Enter – a startup launching in Y Combinator’s Summer ’16 batch. Founded by Eva Shang and They are doing this by scraping these databases and aggregating the documents into one main searchable database. This takes a while – most counties and states have records going back to 1989. For example, the startup is currently scraping 10 different states – a process that is providing them with 400,000 new documents a day. Besides searchable records, the startup also offers email updates for cases. This means that the site will scrape databases each day for updates to flagged cases and automatically email lawyers with the new documents so they don’t have to manually check every day for case updates. So far the site is live for users in Massachusetts, Ohio, and Maryland – with more to come soon. These three states have provided the databases with documents for over 7 million cases and 110,000 different lawyers. The service is also free for any licensed attorney registered with their state’s bar association. However the startup plans on charging for additional features in the future. These include an option to see cases sorted by outcome based on a certain judge – this will help lawyers choose the best litigation strategy in a specific case. Another future paid feature is “predicted timeline”, which uses their millions of archived cases to provide an estimate on how long a certain case will take. The startup says that lawyers find this feature especially helpful because the first question a client often asks their lawyer is how long the entire legal process will take. For now, the startup is just focused on state and county records. This is because the vast majority of court cases happen on the state level. Out of an approximately 95 million cases filed each year nationwide, only about 1 million happen in federal court. Plus, federal court records are already organized in a central database called . So while Legalist eventually plans on adding federal records to their database, it isn’t an immediate need.
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Australia’s largest banks unite to challenge Apple Pay
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Jon Russell
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A number of Australia’s largest banks have come together to challenge Apple and its Apple Pay service in the country. Apple’s digital payments solution landed in Australia in April with and following thereafter, but the banks are unhappy that — unlike the latter two services — they are unable to rival Apple Pay by offering their own digital payments service for iPhone-owning customers. That’s because Apple outlaws third-party digital payment solutions on iOS, instead preferring to integrate banks and payment providers into Apple Pay. National Australia Bank, Commonwealth Bank of Australia and Westpac — the one, two and three lenders respectively — and Bendigo and Adelaide Bank seeking permission to collectively negotiate with Apple to enable their respective services without violating anti-competition laws. Just one major bank, ANZ (Australia and New Zealand Bank), partnered with Apple for Apple Pay in Australia and, unsurprisingly, it isn’t part of this complaint. Here’s the summary of the submission, which was : The applicants seek authorisation on behalf of themselves and potentially other credit and debit card issuers to engage in limited collective negotiation with providers of third-party mobile wallet services on conditions relating to competition, best practice standards, and efficiency and transparency. The applicants also seek authorisation to enter into a limited form of collective boycott in relation to a third-party mobile wallet provider while collective negotiations with that provider are ongoing. Apple did not reply to our request for comment. This appears to be the first action of this kind against Apple and Apply Pay. The U.S. firm has generally had success bringing banking partners to the service. It began with just six in the U.S. where it now covers 2,500 bank locations, while in China the 12 partners it launched with in February is now at 19. Apple Pay is currently available in nine countries: the U.S., the U.K., Canada, Australia, China, Singapore, Switzerland, France and Hong Kong. Back in May, that the company was working “rapidly” to launch in more countries, and a number of those launches have occurred since her comments.
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Hyperloop One files $250 million countersuit accusing BamBrogan of a “malicious smear campaign”
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Sarah Buhr
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filed a claiming he was part of a group of four employees engaged in misconduct and abusive behavior. The transportation startup developing a high-speed shuttle is suing the plaintiffs for at least $250 million in the Superior Court of California, Los Angeles County. Hyperloop One’s countersuit says BamBrogan and three other employees — referred to as “the Gang of Four” — “manufactur[ed] a rebellion and incit[ed] conflict in a transparent attempt to seize control of the Company.” The suit accuses the four of increasingly disruptive misconduct and staging a coup in May of 2016, asking select employees to sign a “threatening” letter demanding board members give up their shares and significantly change Hyperloop One’s equity structure. The counterclaim also alleges BamBrogan sought to start a competing company, Hyperloop Two, and of discouraging current and prospective investors in hopes they would invest in the new company instead. When that move failed, says the suit, BamBrogan and the others filed a suit as part of a “media ploy filled with lies aimed at smearing Hyperloop One.” BamBrogan abruptly left the company a week ago and sued the former colleagues for wrongful termination and claims of failure toward fiduciary duty. He also filed a separate restraining order against the company’s former head of legal counsel and co-founder Shervin Pishevar’s brother Afshin Pishevar for allegedly placing a hangman’s noose on his chair after a discussion, but last week. Images included in BamBrogan’s suit placing the noose on BamBrogan’s chair. However, the countersuit claims the “hangman’s noose” incident was a sham complaint the stuff of tabloid fodder and was a publicity stunt aimed at gaining leverage in BamBrogan’s case. BamBrogan’s suit accuses Shervin of a pay-to-play arrangement and of paying a public relations vendor from Pramana who represented the company well above a normal salary ($400,000 a year) while they were allegedly dating. The countersuit claims none of it to be true and says, “the salacious personal attacks on Shervin are lies, as no decision to hire, increase the compensation of, or terminate Pramana was made in any way based on Shervin’s one-time relationship with the Pramana representative. The woman is not identified in the suit, but her former employer has the salary accusation “inaccurate.” “Hyperloop One remains stronger than ever, especially now that it is rid of the Gang,” the countersuit reads. “The Company’s engineering team is running full speed ahead, led by Josh Giegel; all of its employees besides the Gang of Four have remained loyal; and its investors, employees, and Board stand united to keep forging ahead as the Company seeks to develop the world’s first Hyperloop.” BamBrogan’s lawyer says Hyperloop One’s countersuit is “revisionist history,” telling TechCrunch it’s “pure fiction, and that will be shown by the evidence.” He also counters there was no “Gang of Four” but a group of 11 employees from a cross-section of the company’s departments and that the noose placed by Afshin onto BamBrogan’s chair was a threat of violence recognized by the company, pointing out Afshin was fired shortly thereafter. We’re sure this isn’t the last you’ll hear of the ongoing drama between Hyperloop One and its former co-founder BamBrogan. In the meantime, you can read the full countersuit here: by on Scribd
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How international students are keeping US colleges afloat and powering the tech industry
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Kalpesh Kapadia
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Think back on your college experience and you may recall the presence of the House, an on-campus residence set aside for . The fact that there was likely only a single house for all the probably made you think your school didn’t have a large contingent. Now consider the fact that nearly 1 million foreign are enrolled at and universities across the United States — a figure that has jumped . As from across the world stream onto college campuses, these Houses increasingly make obvious the fact that foreign are not a “special interest” that can be neatly housed in one section of campus. Today, the opposite is true: not only make up an increasing share of the overall student population, but also single-handedly keep these institutions financially. Adding to this — amid considerable debate over a — are pursuing studies in science, technology, engineering and mathematics in record numbers, which in turn is the . The numbers on at and universities are astounding:– The is host to the of the world’s 4.5 million college and university , almost double the number studying in the United Kingdom, the second biggest host. Of the 974,926 in the 2015-2016 academic year, 586,208 were undergraduates, with more than 165,000 coming from China. In 2016, 45 states hosted more compared to the previous year, with five states witnessing double-digit growth rates. For example, Texas increased its student population by 18 percent. Eight institutions had more than 10,000 enrolled including New York University, University of Southern California and Columbia University. The economic impact of the increasing growth of in the is equally stunning. In the 2014-2015 school year, contributed more than to the economy and supported . Since the 1950s, the United States has been the destination of choice for foreign seeking higher education. However, the explosive growth in recent years is no happy accident. The rapid arrival of in the is coincident with the Great Recession, when public and private coffers tightened dramatically. Investment in higher education from state and local governments dropped to a low point in 2012 ( ). Since then, state and local government investment has grown to in 2015, but that’s still below pre-recession levels. Meanwhile, as a result of declining investments since 2008, tuition and fees at both two-year and four-year public institutions rose . Between 2008 and 2015, have essentially functioned as the bailout for and universities. This is largely because foreign often pay two to three times the tuition and fees of domestic , which helps compensate for declining subsidies and smaller budgets. Furthermore, most of these don’t require any financial assistance from . Around 72 percent of them receive the majority of their funds from personal and family income, as well as assistance from their home country governments or universities. This trend is seen across college campuses. at Idaho State University, for instance, pay more than $20,000 a year in tuition, around 2.5 times more than what in-state pay. At Purdue University in Indiana, the tuition paid by undergraduates amounts to almost half of all new revenue it has raised through tuition since 2007. At Oregon State University, where state subsidies per full-time college student dropped 45 percent in the past five years, the student population now exceeds 3,000 (up from 988 in 2008). This allowed them to add 300 tenure-track professors and expand enrollment to approximately 29,000 . Once on campus, around of end up studying fields related to science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM), creating a solid pipeline of talent for jobs in the technology sector. As recent research shows, immigrants already contribute heavily to the , having started more than half (44 of 87) of America’s startup companies valued at $1 billion dollars or more (“unicorns”). Specifically, nearly one-quarter of unicorns had a founder who first came to America as an student, which shows their path to success often begins on college campuses. Thus, in addition to addressing higher education budget woes and enrollment issues, are also filling the STEM gap in the labor market. To retain its historical preeminence, the will need to produce approximately beyond the current rate over the next decade, according to the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology. Currently, there are 478,815 studying STEM topics. and companies may view as a win-win situation, but that’s not to say the transition is easy. Tensions between and ones from Kuwait and Saudi Arabia at Idaho State University to the point of the Kuwait education ministry threatening to pull following reports of discrimination and hate crimes. In 2012, the Chinese and Scholars Association at Purdue University on campus following fee hikes targeted at , with signs that read “We are not cash cows!” A recent Wall Street Journal of dozens of large public universities revealed that in the 2014-2015 academic year, there were 5.1 reports of alleged cheating for every 100 . are fundamentally transforming higher education, but as recent events demonstrate, these young people are not here to simply foot the bill and silently create economic benefits to the economy. As the country gains more and more (and eventual workers) from abroad, there are big questions around how institutions need to accommodate these populations and ease the growing pains, from student relations to housing to classrooms and syllabi to student bank accounts and credit cards to work visas. Accommodating these early on will also have an impact on where they land their first jobs out of school. companies recruiting from the influx of who are specializing in STEM fields would do well to understand these ’ needs, desires and values — beyond what the typical American grad has presented to the job market. Immigrants may be the as it stands, but we are miles away from truly harnessing their ideas and innovations at scale.
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Crunch Report | Solar Impulse 2 completes record flight
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Khaled "Tito" Hamze
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Tito Hamze
Tito Hamze
Joe Zolnoski
Joe Zolnoski
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Watch TechCode’s Demo Day here
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Samantha O'Keefe
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TechCrunch is pleased to bring you ‘s Demo Day today, Tuesday July 26th from Mountain View, California. TechCode’s U.S. accelerator program focuses on artificial intelligence and hardware startups that already have a prototype. The goal is to help expedite commercialization for these startups by introducing them to partners and investors. TechCode also provides supply chain support, distribution, manufacturing and retail connections in the U.S., China and Europe, with a strong focus on China. Investors and press will hear pitches from 12 companies. Mark your calendars, the demos run from 6:10-9:00pm PT tonight and include a 6-minute pitch followed by 4 minutes of Q/A. You can watch it live right here.
– Builds innovative connected car products and services to help transform any car into a smart car within a few minutes. – Machine learning and AI to discover new tech products. – Creates leak detection and water use optimization technology to address undetected or delayed detection of water leaks that often lead to significant property damage or water loss. – Using a proprietary sensing platform, develops indoor air quality monitors that detect all the major components that make up air pollution. Intelligent IOT – Builds advanced weather sensors, AI and APIs for faster severe weather recognition and warning. – Builds augmented reality (AR) solutions for showcasing products in real time and real size. – Builds wearable technology that lets users tap into the dynamic use of gesture control for products such as drones or remote-controlled cars. – Builds smart eyeglasses. – Builds a smart ring that helps you feel safe and sound. – Builds a smart insole and shoe pod for runners and other athletes. – Builds a voice recognition robot and AI for kids. – Builds a smart camera stabilizer, compatible with a GoPro or any camera, that helps users capture steady footage.
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Deep learning software knows that a rose is a rose is a rosa rubiginosa
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Devin Coldewey
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We can’t all be botanists, unfortunately, but most of us do have smartphones, and that may be a start. A computer vision system built by Microsoft Research Asia can identify thousands of species of flowers with nothing but a picture. The Smart Flower Recognition System (Microsoft always did have a way with branding) began serendipitously, with the chance meeting of and botanists from the Chinese Academy of Science at a seminar. Rui’s image analysis work was a perfect match for the botanists, who were trying to figure out how to sort through millions of publicly submitted images of local flowers. Ah, spring! When a young researcher’s fancy turns to inter-disciplinary collaboration. The system is built on – what else? – machine learning, specifically a convolutional neural network trained in 800,000 flower images. Different species of flowers are differentiated enough that, like faces, they can be told apart by running them through a series of filters made to highlight certain features. Certain curves, certain dark spots, certain proportions – the subtle reasoning of the neural network mirrors our own intuitive recognition of familiar shapes and colors. “The flower-recognition engine enables domain experts to acquire plant distribution in China in an efficient way. Not only that, this engine can help ordinary people who have a strong interest in flowers to gain more knowledge.” I asked Rui when the Smart Flower Recognition System will make its way into some kind of web service or app, like so many other experimental machine learning systems. If I hear back, you’ll be the first to know.
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Israeli technology and the future of transportation
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Max Marine
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To get from Point A to Point B 12,000 years ago, we crawled, walked, jumped, tumbled, rolled, skipped, hopped, swam, danced, jogged, ran and sprinted. But then a small tribe in Azerbaijan created the first boat technology and we started moving ourselves and our things across rivers and streams. A 7,500-year trot into the future and humans domesticated horses, a biological technology that helped us move ourselves and our things faster along crooked paths and natural trails. It only took 5,200 more years before the steam locomotive ignited the industrial revolution, paving the way for Henry Ford and the Wright Brothers to help us move across countries and continents with relative ease and affordability. The quantum leaps in productivity created by the car, train, ship and plane have dramatically changed our lives and movements. But today, we’re at the forefront of a new revolution in mobility. From on-demand ride-sharing and navigation, to car ownership and autonomous connected vehicles, software has finished breakfast and is eagerly chomping away at lunch. And like most industries in which software is eating the world, Israeli innovation is playing an integral role. In the last four years, advances in computer vision and navigation technology have helped put Israel on the automotive map. In 2014, , an Advanced Driver Assistance System (ADAS), in the largest IPO in Israel’s history. Only a few months earlier, , a crowdsourced navigation app, for $1.1 billion, the third largest acquisition in Israel’s history. Many questioned the valuation and the logic of the acquisition — but it appears that Google’s foray into autonomous vehicles dovetails nicely with a ubiquitous mapping application that already knows your travel patterns. This past October, Google launched a service on top of Waze called RideWith, an Israel-based pilot connecting drivers with passengers who can “pitch in” for their daily commute. Moreover, Waze announced its new SDK back in January, and Israel’s , an AI dashcam app, was chosen as one of Waze’s early adopters. Nexar’s application crowdsources road footage to enhance safety and navigation, and just Series A led by . Oh, and let’s not forget , an Israeli application crowdsourcing public transit that raised $50 million from BMW, Sequoia and Nokia, at a $400 million valuation, and recently launched its own ridesharing service called Carpool in Israel. While Uber, Lyft, Hailo, Flywheel, Didi Kuaidi (China), GrabTaxi (SE Asia), Ola (India), Waze and Moovit attempt to capture their fair share of the daily commute and displace the DUI with a GUI, they’ll have to compete with three other Israeli companies: , and . Fresh off the heels of Rakuten’s $900 million Viber acquisition, Viber’s former CEO unveiled his latest pursuit: Juno, an ethical, socially responsible ridesharing service. and recruited thousands of top-rated Uber drivers by offering them equity, better pay and better benefits. Months later, Israelis and , PhDs who previously led engineering projects for the Israeli Air Force, announced Walk along the arterials of Tel Aviv, and you’ll see 10-person shuttles that traverse north to south, charging $1-2 per person for the service. Now you know where the idea for Via came from. More impressive still is in ’s Gett, an Uber rival generating $500 million in revenue across 60 cities. There are 12 companies left standing in the global ridesharing market, and nearly half were built in a country of 8 million people and the size of New Jersey. Israelis, known for their deep technological capabilities, are building much more than ridesharing apps. Look no further than Harman’s 2013 acquisition of , an augmented reality application for the car’s dashboard, its in 2015 for its over-the-air updating technology and services for the connected car and its 2016 $70 million acquisition of , an Israeli automotive cybersecurity company specializing in network protection for connected vehicles. Several months ago, , a startup of 41 employees led by 510 Systems’ founder , who built the technology underlying Google’s self-driving car, and , former Google Maps lead and CTO of the Israeli military’s largest software intelligence unit. The company is developing technology that will enable 18-wheelers to drive autonomously. From anti-car hacking company , which raised $26 million in September, to the stealthy creating an agnostic API for the connected car, Israeli innovation is surfacing across all layers of the global automotive supply chain. Yet Israeli disruption has crept into the post-supply chain, too. Take , for example, which was led by , the former co-CEO of Wix and venture partner at Greylock Israel. Vroom bills itself as the of used cars and raised a to buy Texas Auto Direct, the U.S.’s largest independent used-car dealership. This comes on the heels of June’s $54 million Series B from General Catalyst and T. Rowe Price and $300 million in projected 2016 revenue. Vroom’s biggest competitor, , raised $70 million in August at a $500 million valuation. Not surprisingly, Beepi’s co-founder and president, Owen Savir, was the former founder and CTO of iContact, the largest education technology company in Israel. Then there’s , the stealth connected device startup backed by Waze co-founder Uri Levine, that monitors the health of your car, diagnoses problems and collects quotes from nearby mechanics. The technology powering these global marketplaces was “Made in Israel.” Call it the shared economy, the on-demand economy or the Internet of Things. Call it the ridesharing era, the connected car revolution or the market network phenomenon. Nomenclature aside, the way humans get themselves and their things from Point A to Point B is fundamentally changing yet again. Moovit, Waze, Juno, Via and Gett are crowdsourcing urban travel; Mobileye, iOnRoad, Nexar, TowerSec and Argus are enhancing safety and security; and Vroom, Beepi, and Engie are building the automotive marketplaces of the future. Today, captivated behind our smartphones and laptops, we sit at the crux of another quantum mobility leap powered by Israeli technology.
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How Facetune and Enlight became top photo apps
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Katie Roof
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We caught up with CEO Zeev Farbman for a video interview when we were in Israel. He showed us some tricks to using the Lightricks photo apps and explained why he believes they were able to cut through the noise in a very crowded app category. Lightricks “takes the retouching capabilities of Photoshop and makes them easy to use,” said Farbman. He credits Facetune’s popularity to its simplicity. Facetune, which costs $3.99 on both iOS and Android, evens out skin tone, whitens teeth and erases blemishes. Although many photo apps can make similar adjustments, Facetune works by simply swiping the problem areas. In the era of “selfies,” the app quickly became a photo-enhancing favorite. Enlight, which also costs $3.99, but is only available on iOS, is designed to make smartphone photography look professional. More than just filters, Enlight touts its precision in adjusting light and color, which can also be done by dragging one’s finger. Enlight looks best for landscape or artistic photos. He demonstrated it for us in the above video. The startup, which has raised over $10 million in capital from Carmel Ventures, is based in Jerusalem’s Hebrew University. Farbman also attributes the team’s early traction to the startup’s close proximity to engineering talent. “The success of such a big endeavor is building this creative ecosystem,” said Farbman. Lightricks has a “huge pool of talent to attract the best people from.”
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What the NTSB knows about the fatal Tesla crash, so far
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Lora Kolodny
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The National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) issued a on the fatal crash involving a 2015 Tesla Model S and a 2014 Freightliner Cascadia truck in Williston, Florida in May. Unfortunately, the report yields no major new insights. The report confirms that the driver of the Tesla was going 74 miles per hour just prior to the crash, and on a highway where the speed limit was 65 miles per hour. It also confirms that he was using Tesla’s “advanced driver assistance features,” a.k.a. Autopilot, including “Traffic-Aware Cruise Control” and “Autosteer lane keeping assistance.” The NTSB made no promises about when a final report will be issued, but noted that it typically takes a full year to complete data analysis and answer questions about the probable cause of a crash in such investigations. A professor at George Washington University Law School, , who is also a founding partner of personal injury law firm , said fatality reports are usually investigated by state police, not federal authorities. The Tesla crash in Williston, Florida has garnered federal intervention, he said, because, “We are in an environment with vehicles on the road using increasingly complex technology, artificial intelligence that goes beyond the cruise control and event data recorders we’ve had for decades. The waters are muddied and unchartered with this technology when it comes to civil and criminal liability.” Results of investigations will help answer questions for the families of those harmed or killed in accidents, perhaps most importantly. But they will also help the U.S. establish a framework for law and legislation to bring those vehicles into everyday use domestically, Cohen suggested. Tesla did not yet respond to inquiries about how it is working with the NTSB, NHTSA and Florida state police to complete their various investigations into the fatal crash. Since the crash occurred, the company has been called upon by to “disable” and rename its Autopilot feature until it is made safer. Tesla responded with a resounding “no,” to Consumer Reports, and really all its critics, with this statement: “Tesla is constantly introducing enhancements, proven over millions of miles of internal testing, to ensure that drivers supported by Autopilot remain safer than those operating without assistance. We will continue to develop, validate, and release those enhancements as the technology grows.” Tesla Motors CEO Elon Musk has also repeatedly pointed out that Tesla Motors vehicles have driven 130 million miles on Autopilot with one confirmed fatality, which is a safety record better than that of human drivers. Last week, Musk published a for Tesla’s future, including the goal of making Autopilot 10 times safer than traditional driving. In the plan, Musk said at the current rate, the company would see 6 billion miles driven by Tesla vehicles with Autopilot engaged in about 5.5 years. That’s the point at which he expects the technology will be ready for “global,” mainstream approval. And of course, it’s not just Tesla’s technology that is under scrutiny. The company works with other vendors. For example, it has used image analysis processors to enable semi-autonomous driving. Today, Mobileye announced that partnership was coming to an end.
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Apple R&D spending is up as the company looks to new products
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Brian Heater
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The big takeaway from today’s Apple earnings call: The company is investing in the future. While it’s true that from $49.61 billion this quarter last year down to $42.4 billion, Cupertino’s research and development spending continues to trend upward. Over the past nine months, the company spent $7.475 billion on R&D — that compares to $5.847 billion over the same time period the previous year. And it’s part of a continued trend in the face of lowered revenues that points to a company looking to break out of a stagnation in innovation that has largely seen iteration on existing product categories over the last several years. Apple is spending more of its total revenue on research and development than it has in some years, pointing to a company that’s looking to shake things up once again. Asked about Apple’s investment in third-parties like , CEO Tim Cook explained that while that trend will likely continue, the bulk of the company’s investment has been and will remain in its own internal development. “We invest a ton of capital in our business itself to support research and development,” he said on the earnings call. “That’s the main source of our investment.” He added that the billion-dollar Didi Chuxing investment, while unusual, would help give the company added perspective on the Chinese market. As far as what Apple’s actually developing in-house, Cook hinted at a future lined with new devices. “There’s quite a bit of investment in products that are not currently shipping,” he added during the call. Cook, naturally, wouldn’t list any specific new products or categories for the company, but it goes without saying that it takes a lot to, say, build a new car. Just .
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Did Russian government hackers leak the DNC emails?
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Jonathan Shieber
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By now, it’s pretty clear that Russian hackers are responsible for breaches of the Democratic National Committee networks that occurred last summer and in April of this year — several forensic security firms have found evidence that traces the breach back to Russia. Now that DNC emails harvested during the breaches are starting to appear on Wikileaks, pundits are speculating that Russia leaked the emails in a bid to land Donald Trump in the Oval Office. But is the email leak also attributable to hackers on Russia’s government payroll? A new analysis released by security consulting firm has to prove that communicated with journalists about the leaked documents. A hacker set up a website and Twitter account to take credit for the DNC breach soon after it was initially reported, calling himself Guccifer 2.0 (a moniker modeled after a who is recently pleaded guilty to hacking American political operatives). That claim shed doubt on from and others that laid the responsibility for the breach squarely at the feet of organizations with ties to the Russian government and its president, Vladimir Putin. But ThreatConnect’s research suggests that Guccifer 2.0 is simply an invention of the Russian government to deflect attention from its involvement in the breach. The idea that a non-governmental actor pursuing a personal political agenda could hack the DNC and potentially sway an election is bad enough, an is arguably much worse. “Guccifer 2.0 has been part of a Russian denial and deception program,” said Toni Gidwani, director of research operations at ThreatConnect on a conference call today. Gidwani believes that the Russian hack may have initially been intended for low-level intel that could be used to support Russian narratives about the U.S., but morphed into an attempt to influence the U.S. presidential election. At the outset, the Guccifer 2.0 releases were following that pattern. Gidwani characterized the information leaked had very little impact on the U.S. news cycle, but became great agit-prop tools in Russia, whose state-affiliated news agencies picked up on each morsel as yet another example of the cornucopia of electoral corruption in the decadent West. It’s not just the technical nature of the leaks themselves that have some outlets saying Russia’s fingerprints were all over this hack. An released yesterday indicates that one of the hack’s earliest targets was DNC consultant , who was conducting opposition research on Donald Trump’s campaign adviser Paul Manafort, who allegedly made millions working as a campaign adviser for the now-ousted former Ukrainian president (and ostrich lover), . Quoting an email Chalupa sent to the DNC — released as part of the — Yahoo reports that Chalupa began receiving security notices informing her that her email account was being targeted by state actors: “Since I started digging into Manafort, these messages have been a daily occurrence on my Yahoo account despite changing my password often,” [Chalupa] wrote in a May 3 , the DNC’s communications director, which included an attached screengrab of the image of the Yahoo security warning. Why is Russia so involved? The theory among and is that Russian President Vladimir Putin would (unsurprisingly) prefer to deal with an isolationist-minded President Trump than a more hawkish (and much less friendly) President Clinton and is using cybercrime as a way to influence the U.S. election. also raised the specter of Russian involvement. “What happened over the weekend started to move us toward this middle course of action. … This game-changer scenario of Russia trying to influence the results of a U.S. election,” said Gidwani of the Wikileaks release, the resulting resignation of DNC chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz, and the that resulted over the weekend and on a in Philadelphia. But other security experts say that a sloppy email leak, filled with evidence of Russian involvement, would be uncharacteristic for the country’s sophisticated spy agencies. “There’s the breach and then there’s someone leaking emails to Wikileaks. Those two things don’t necessarily have anything to do with each other,” said Oren Falkowitz, CEO of the security firm Area 1 and a former NSA analyst. “The most salacious emails go back to a different time in the campaign. To release them at the beginning of the [general election] campaign isn’t consistent with a nation state’s objective to change the outcome.” The most contentious DNC emails released so far as “a mess,” and Falkowitz points out these messages could have had a stronger impact if released during the primary race. “They probably would have released it when it was really tight between Hillary and Bernie,” he said, adding, “To think the [Russian security service] FSB would not recognize the difference in impact of timing there is ridiculous. It’s spurious to say they’re trying to influence the election, and if they are, they are doing a really shitty job. You’re talking about one of the premier intelligence organizations in the world.” However, if Russia is behind the email leak, this wouldn’t be the first time the country has used hacking in an attempt to disrupt another nation’s election. During the Ukrainian elections in 2015, an organization called CyberBerkut on the election. A piece published in the aftermath called the country “ “. In a tick-tock account of the DNC hack and its aftermath, reporter Thomas Rid lays out the case for Russia’s involvement in no uncertain terms. Rid writes: The forensic evidence linking the DNC breach to known Russian operations is very strong. On June 20, two competing cybersecurity companies, Mandiant (part of FireEye) and Fidelis, CrowdStrike’s initial findings that Russian intelligence indeed hacked the DNC. The forensic evidence that links network breaches to known groups is solid: used and reused tools, methods, infrastructure, even unique encryption keys. For example: in late March the attackers registered a domain with a typo—misdepatrment[.]com—to look suspiciously like the company hired by the DNC to manage its network, MIS Department. They then this deceptive domain to a long-known APT 28 so-called X-Tunnel command-and-control IP address, 45.32.129[.]185. One of the strongest pieces of evidence linking GRU to the DNC hack is the equivalent of identical fingerprints found in two burglarized buildings: a reused command-and-control address—176.31.112[.]10—that was in a piece of malware found both in the German parliament as well as on the DNC’s servers. Russian military intelligence was by the German domestic security agency BfV as the actor for the Bundestag breach. The infrastructure behind the fake MIS Department domain was also linked to the Berlin intrusion through at least one other element, a SSL certificate. If the allegations are true (and the evidence amassed is somewhat persuasive), then the ramifications of the hack and their subsequent release are enormous. Dr. Anup Ghosh, CEO of the security company Invincea and a former DARPA scientist, noted that the leaked emails may not have originated from the hack of the DNC itself, since the DNC used a third party email service. “We know that the DNC used an outside service for email. What isn’t clear is if the emails compromised from a user’s account to this cloud-based service, versus was the email compromised from the compromise on the enterprise network?” Ghosh explained. He also questioned the motives that would drive the Russian government to dump DNC emails on Wikileaks. “From a Russian intelligence point of view, it seems sloppy; it seems traceable. get that people think the Russians want Donald Trump to be president, but there’s a lot of history between the Clintons and the Russians, and most of the time, countries work with whatever administration is in place. Trump doesn’t strike me as a predictable guy. I don’t think the Russians would want Trump as much as they would want to know what Clinton is thinking,” Ghosh said. In other words, why leak emails when you can quietly snoop on high-profile politicians instead? While snatching politically sensitive documents as part of an espionage plot might be part of statecraft and intelligence efforts (rightly or wrongly), Motherboard’s Rid points out that leaking those documents (and potentially manipulated ones) to a global audience represents an unprecedented and dangerous attempt by a foreign government that is openly hostile to U.S. policies and . Still, not everyone is convinced that Russia is indeed behind the hack. But one group might know for sure — Edward Snowden took to Twitter with claims that the NSA could clear up any confusion around who was behind the DNC security breaches. If Russia hacked the , they should be condemned for it. But during the hack, the FBI presented evidence. — Edward Snowden (@Snowden)
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Apple’s revenue dives 33 percent in Greater China
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Lucia Maffei
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China impacted Apple’s bottom line quite a lot this quarter — and not in a good way. But the company still plans to invest in the country, Apple CEO Tim Cook said right after . Let’s dive into the numbers. For this fiscal quarter, Greater China accounted for $8.85 billion in revenue, or a little bit more than 20 percent of the company’s overall revenue. Twenty percent is quite impressive — but remember when people were thinking that China was about to overtake the U.S. as Apple’s first market? Nobody is mentioning that anymore. China revenue is down 33 percent year-over-year, and 29 percent compared to the previous quarter. In other words, Greater China is one of the main reasons why the company’s revenue is declining. Apple Q3 2016 Unaudited Summary Data (revenue in millions). During a conference call with investors, Cook blamed the current economic environment in China for the disappointing performance. But the company won’t change course. “We will continue to invest in China,” he said. Cook also reported that, according to China Mobile, there are more iPhones in use in the country than any other smartphone. And yet, as always, investors don’t care about iPhones in use — they’d rather see some big sales numbers. But Apple CFO Luca Maestri also added that Apple expects to grow in Russia, Brazil and Canada in order to reassure investors. In June, in the city, having ruled that the phone’s design is too similar to a Chinese brand. Apple said that the order is still pending review, and that the iPhone 6, iPhone 6 Plus, iPhone 6s, iPhone 6s Plus and iPhone SE are still all available for sale today in China.
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Here’s why NASA is launching an asteroid sample return mission for the first time
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Emily Calandrelli
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On September 8, NASA will launch the spacecraft on a mission to an asteroid and return a sample of it back to Earth — NASA’s first mission of this type. In doing so, NASA hopes to learn more about the early formation of the solar system and, possibly, the origin of life. OSIRIS-REx, which stands for Origins Spectral Interpretation Resource Identification Security – Regolith Explorer, will travel to a near-Earth asteroid known as Bennu. Bennu is of particular interest because it’s a , which means there’s a good possibility that it’s covered in carbon material and organics, the building blocks of life. In addition to its scientific value, Bennu is classified as a and has a high probability of impacting our planet in the 22nd century. Studying Bennu now could be beneficial down the road in the event that future scientists and engineers need to develop an impact mitigation mission. Size of Bennu compared to the Empire State Building and the Eiffel Tower / Image courtesy of the University of Arizona Upon arrival at Bennu in 2018, the spacecraft will identify a scientifically interesting section of the rock and use its robotic arm to capture a 2.1-ounce sample. OSIRIS-REx is scheduled to depart the asteroid in 2021, and return the sample to Earth in 2023. Scientists want to get their hands on an asteroid because these are primitive rocks that represent the early building blocks of our solar system, and possibly of life. In general, it’s believed that asteroids are just leftover debris from the formation of the planets in our solar system, created billions of years ago. Studying them could reveal details about our early cosmic history and how planets form. There’s also an interesting hypothesis, known as , that microbial life was carried to Earth by asteroids, meteoroids, comets or other orbiting planetary bodies. The idea here is that orbiting bodies like asteroids are carriers of basic forms of life and have the ability to distribute them throughout the solar system, and possibly the universe. And the good thing about asteroids, from a scientific point of view, is that they likely haven’t changed much since their formation. On Earth, we have recycling processes like erosion that constantly change our surface geology. Asteroids don’t have things like oceans, wind, rain or tectonic plates to wipe their history away. In many ways, their history is preserved, making them ideal candidates for scientific study. OSIRIS-REx spacecraft hoisted on a rotation stand at NASA Kennedy Space Center / Image courtesy of NASA Once OSIRIS-REx arrives at Bennu it will need to identify the most scientifically interesting section to bring home. In an effort to test the panspermia hypothesis, NASA’s goal is to home in on a section that contains organic material, one of the building blocks of life. To find that perfect piece to bring home, the spacecraft is equipped with an instrument that will analyze areas of the asteroid and determine their composition. Known as the OSIRIS-REx Visible and Infrared Spectrometer, or , the instrument can identify different mineralogical and molecular components by analyzing how that particular section of the asteroid absorbs and reflects light. Different minerals and molecules have unique “spectral signatures.” OVIRS will measure how the asteroid surface interacts with visible and near-infrared light and match the outcome to known spectral signatures to determine the composition of that section. “OVIRS is key to our search for organics on Bennu. In particular, we will rely on it to find the areas of Bennu rich in organic molecules to identify possible sample sites of high science value, as well as the asteroid’s general composition.” — Dante Lauretta, principal investigator for OSIRIS-REx OSIRIS-REx will conduct a detailed survey of Bennu for over a year to create a map of potential sample sites. After NASA selects the final site, the spacecraft will move in to the asteroid for sample extraction. OSIRIS-REx will make contact with the surface for about 5 seconds and shoot a burst of nitrogen gas at the asteroid’s surface. This burst of gas will stir up small pieces of rock, which will then be collected. OSIRIS-REx surveying Bennu / Image courtesy of the University of Arizona If the first attempt fails, OSIRIS-REx has enough stored nitrogen gas for two additional attempts. The sample will be stored in the spacecraft’s Sample Return Capsule (SRC). SRC has the incredibly important job of keeping the sample safe and free of contaminants throughout its journey back to Earth and, ultimately, into a laboratory. If the canister breaks and opens upon touchdown, for example, the sample loses much of its scientific value and the entire mission could be considered a failure. Assuming all goes according to plan, the sample will arrive on Earth in 2023 and be transported to NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas for analysis. Scientists will spend the next couple of years studying the sample in the hope of better understanding how planets form and, potentially, the origin of life here on Earth.
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The new number crushing Twitter: revenue growth down from 60% to 20%
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Josh Constine
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Twitter has a new number that’s killing its share price, down 9.5% in after-hours following . First there was the user growth problem that still plagues it. Twitter’s monthly user count grew less than 1% this quarter and just 3% this year to 313 million MAU. But now its issue has festered. Now Twitter is facing a Today it announced its year-over-year revenue growth was just 19.9%, up from $502 million to $602 million. That’s down from its 60.93% revenue growth rate a year ago and 124.12% rate two years ago. Without scores of new users to show ads to, and some marketers questioning the performance of Twitter’s more missable formats like Sponsored Tweets, its revenue growth is plummeting and Wall Street doesn’t like it one bit. Twitter will have to hope video ad revenue from its growing set of with leagues like the NFL, MLB, and NHL can save it. The sleek and useful format of the stream atop the screen with a river of related tweets below combines the first and second screens into an addictive experience. Twitter offered a similar experience for watching the Democratic and Republican National Conventions, and could continue to expand the format to include dramatic content like TV show premieres. If Twitter can convince users to watch in its app instead of on television, the interspersed video ads could command high prices that might save its revenue growth rate
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You can now use Venmo to pay for things inside other apps
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Fitz Tepper
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In January Venmo that users will soon be able to use Venmo to pay inside other apps, similar to how most e-commerce apps already offer PayPal or Apple Pay as payment options. And (well, technically tomorrow) the feature is leaving beta and will be available to all Venmo users. The feature will make it easy for anyone with Venmo to quickly pay in other apps. Users will first have to do a one-time authentication between the app and Venmo, but subsequently won’t have to leave the e-commerce app to pay from their Venmo account. One downside — only 11 apps will support the feature at launch. These include Munchery, Gametime, Priv, Poshmark, Hop Market, Wish, Parking Panda, Dolly, Urgentli, Boxed and delivery.com. But, it’s safe to assume that more retailers should start integrating the payment option into their apps — especially since Venmo is such a popular payment option among younger crowds. And Venmo is also adding a few new features that should make it particularly attractive to younger users. Specifically, they are Split and Share, which allow you to, well, split your purchase among friends or share it to Venmo’s social feed. Splitting things (whether it is rent, utilities or just dinner) is one of the areas where Venmo really shines. It’s an extremely low-friction payment system, lacking any of the clunkiness that PayPal inherited from the 2000s. And for this reason, it’s extremely popular with teenagers and young adults, who frequently use the service to pay back friends or split things. So the native split feature should be a big draw for anyone purchasing something that is supposed to be split — like buying tickets for a group to an NFL game or even ordering food. In terms of specifics, the split feature won’t actually split the purchase (because that could delay the transaction if one friend decides not to approve quickly enough), and instead just automatically requests your friends pay you back via Venmo for the split amount. The feature launches tomorrow and developers can integrate Venmo into their app via . Venmo (which is owned by PayPal) will charge retailers the same fee that PayPal charges — 2.9 percent + an additional 30 cents.
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This new brain-scanning technique is literally mind expanding
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Devin Coldewey
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Sometimes it’s hard to tell the difference between science and technology ó almost all the time when it has to do with the brain. But this research from MIT that allows for vastly improved scans of the networks inside the brain is too cool to pass up, whether it’s tech, science, or somewhere in between. Getting up close and personal with neurons and other brain cells is a science that people have been working on for a century and more. Mainly the problem is that they’re so darn small, and packed so tightly, and connect in so many places at once, that it’s hard to tell where anything’s going. We have ways of imaging the brain at various levels, but each is highly limited in its own way. This new technique addresses several of the main problems. It’s called magnified analysis of proteome, or (conveniently) MAP. The summary from lead researcher Kwanghun Chung makes it sound almost too good to be true. “We use a chemical process to make the whole brain size-adjustable, while preserving pretty much everything,” Chung says in an . “We preserve the proteome (the collection of proteins found in a biological sample), we preserve nanoscopic details, and we also preserve brain-wide connectivity.” Heart (top), lung (middle), and spinal cord tissue before and after denaturation and expansion. “]Let’s expand that a little. The tissue sample (not living, naturally, and from mice) is suffused with acrylamide polymers. These form a very dense gel – but not so dense that other compounds can’t be sent in, first to attach proteins securely to the gel, then to render them suitable for detection. At this point, the gel is allowed to expand, increasing to four or five times the original size of the sample. Having something be 800 nanometers across rather than 200 is a big improvement when it comes to imaging and manipulating them, any molecular scientist will tell you. The key feature, though, is that this expansion is somehow non-destructive, preserving the details but blowing them up. After that, the usual chemical and biological tags can be used to dye and otherwise indicate certain types of cells, reveal where their axons reach to, and so on. A careful 3D scan with a microscope later and you’ve got a fantastically detailed map of quite a large chunk of cortex. It’s rather like trying to make out tiny letters written on the surface of a deflated balloon – it’s easier if you just blow it up a bit. The process is simpler than it sounds, and doesn’t use any exotic materials or radiation, making it potentially very useful for researchers of all stripes and budgets. And it should work on other tissues as well! MAP-processed tissue after being tagged with fluorescent, protein-specific stains. It has the potential to help us better understand real neural networks on both a macro and micro level; models using improved information may help explain how certain aspects of our vision or cognition work, and inform computer models looking to imitate the same. Lastly, it’s just cool. The seamless melding of biological, chemical, and digital imaging shows how far our tools and knowledge have come in each field. The fact that we can synthesize these disciplines to create something as cohesive as the maps you see above is… well, you read the headline. Chung et al’s research is published .
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IPO on horizon, subprime lending startup Elevate adds $545M in credit from Victory Park Capital
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John Mannes
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With an IPO on the horizon, subprime lender will have an additional $545 million credit faculty to support its growing customers. Elevate’s niche right now is providing loans to borrowers with creditscores between 575 and 625. As the company expands, it wants to provide loans to customers with even lower credit-scores. Ken Rees, CEO of Elevate, is quick to note that 65 percent of Americans are underserved as a result of their low credit-scores. With additional lending data, it might just be possible to underwrite loans with confidence for these underserved customers. Previously, customers of Elevate would have been forced to take title or payday loans. “20 percent of all title loans result in the customer losing their car,” noted Rees. Elevate’s revenue run rate is hovering around $500 million even while average customer APR has been falling. The company has seen an 80 percent growth in loans outstanding over the last year, while charge-off rates have decreased from 17-20 percent in early 2014 to 10-15 percent today. Charge-off rates monitor loans that a company feels it can’t collect. This news should help to ease analysts fears about predatory lending in the subprime space. Rees’ previous company, Think Finance, backed by Sequoia and TCV, got itself into legal troubles last year and was accused of There are two key differences between Elevate and its predecessor Think Finance. First, Think Finance’s model is based on licensing to third party lenders. Payday lender Plain Green, LLC, named in the lawsuit as the originator of the bad loans, was a licensed third party lender with Think Finance. In contrast, Elevate operates with a direct to consumer model. Second, Elevate has the power to incentivize borrowers to engage in sustainable borrowing practices by lowering APRs when users spend time looking at informational webpages and consuming video content. Because Think Finance is a service provider, it can only advocate best practices. It doesn’t have the power to adjust APRs. Elevate rewards borrowers for watching financial literacy videos with better interest rates on products like that are targeted at financial progression. The company also offers free credit monitoring. The average weighted APR for RISE is a hefty 160 percent, but it’s relatively tame next to a traditional 500 percent APR payday loan. RISE loans drop by 50 percent APR after 24 months, and fall to a fixed 36 percent APR by 36 months. Lending products Elastic and Sunny serve borrowers living paycheck to paycheck and in the UK respectively. Elastic is also built on pillars of financial sustainability. Borrowers also get access to financial literacy materials and are only charged when they draw funds. Over 65 percent of Elevate borrowers have experienced a rate reduction. All of these lending practices have improved customer retention for the company, 60 percent of Elevate borrowers who payoff their loan will get another. Typically these new loans will be granted at even lower interest rates. Elevate had previously considered an IPO but was forced to push-back. The stock market has been rather fintech-phobic in recent months. Lending Club, a peer to peer lending platform, has been the poster-child of the risk inherent in lending startups. Rees doesn’t think it’s wise to compare his company to Lending Club. Elevate and its 400 employees have been functioning much like a public company, releasing regular information disclosures for almost a year. “The main thing that the IPO does for us is reduce our reliance on debt financing,” added Rees. “Victory Park Capital has been a terrific partner but that debt isn’t free. Raising money in an IPO will support growth and drive down our cost of capital.”
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iPhone, iPad and Mac sales are down, but Apple only cares about services now
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Romain Dillet
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Apple just reported its , and investors are sending its stock through the roof. While the company managed to beat analysts’ expectations, Apple is selling fewer iPhones, iPads and Macs than last year during the same period. The long period of endless growth on all product lines is definitely over. In particular, Apple reported 40.4 million iPhone sales compared to 47.5 million last year — that’s down 15 percent. Mac sales are also down from 4.8 million units to 4.3 million (-10.5 percent). And even iPad sales, despite a , are still going down — 10 million vs. 10.9 million last year (-8.3 percent). Surprisingly, margins are all over the place. The company’s overall gross margin is down quite a lot from 39.7 percent to 38 percent. That’s most likely due to the release of . Selling a cheaper phone with the components of the iPhone 6s could only hurt the company’s margins. The iPad is an exception as Apple is now generating more money from this device while selling less units. Both the 9.7-inch and 12.9-inch iPad Pro models are more expensive than last year’s iPad Air 2. And yet, the company wants you to look the other way. As you can see in , the company can’t stop raving about its services. Apple Music, the App Store, Apple Pay and iCloud are starting to generate quite a lot of money. “Our Services business grew 19 percent year-over-year and App Store revenue was the highest ever, as our installed base continued to grow and transacting customers hit an all-time record,” Apple’s CFO Luca Maestri wrote in the release. Even on the earnings call Tim Cook mentioned services saying that “we expect it to be the size of a Fortune 100 company next year.” This quarter alone, Apple reported $6 billion in services revenue — up 19 percent year-over-year. Apple has been branding itself as a service company for a few months. But services at Apple is nothing new — .Mac, MobileMe, iCloud… iTunes, Apple Music, App Store, Maps… Apple is already a service company. But there’s nothing remarkable right now about Apple’s services. But it looks like the company is investing a lot on services as we can see with the Apple Music redesign happening just a year after the launch, or the . Apple is also spending a lot of money on research & development. But as the name suggests, it’s harder to tell what the company is currently building. So services is not only a good diversion from sales numbers, but also a diversion from these jumping research & development costs.
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What Peter Thiel doesn’t understand about US innovation
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John Mannes
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PayPal mafia last week at the Republican National Convention. Peter Thiel grew up in a time when the United States was winning World’s Fairs and conquering outer-space. To Thiel, innovation is about the freedom to dream, and anything short is a disappointment. He assured the crowd at the RNC that Trump would lead America toward a “bright future,” but the reality is that his vision of technology is a romanticized relic, a nostalgic memory of a kid in front of a TV set watching the Jetsons. “In 1968, the world’s high tech capital wasn’t just one city,” Thiel told the crowd at the RNC, citing exploration of Mars as an area where government has fallen behind. “All of America was high tech. It’s hard to remember this, but our government was once high tech too.” Thiel’s narrative is a potent one for those left out of the Silicon Valley gold rush. But Americans should be confident in technology. 90 percent of US states have seen an increase in patent output per capita since Thiel’s ideal benchmark of 1968. Thiel himself has profited off investments in companies that wouldn’t exist if not for government contracts and subsidies. Thiel fetishized the 1960s in his speech while ignoring the immense progress that has been made in years sense. “Opportunity was everywhere, my dad studied engineering at Case Western Reserve University just down the road from where we are now.” The America of today is building , , and . Since 1968, every state but five has increased its patent output per capita. Created by John Mannes using data from the USPTO and the US Census Even though Thiel credits Silicon Valley as a leader of invention, California doesn’t lead the pack when it comes to patents — Washington state, home of Amazon, is number one. While states that have seen the greatest increases in output efficiency are weighted towards the West Coast, states like Minnesota in the mid-west and New Hampshire in the north-east are surprisingly not far behind. Of course, not every patent gets spun up into an invention, and the patent system itself is in need of reform. But university research spending is up, our universities are more diverse, VC investment is up, and public-private partnerships are all the rage. Today’s realities of global warning and a failing healthcare system don’t reward the superfluous inventions that inspired us in the Jetsons. Why bankroll apartments that soar above the clouds when we may not have clouds in a few centuries. Thiel himself has been chastised for his similar grandiose visions of offshore sea colonies. Thiel is making a Jetsons appeal to a world fearing a Wall-E reality. But just because innovation means solving dirty problems — it’s not just landing a rocket on the moon— doesn’t mean that incredible things are not happening. When Thiel discredits the startup scenes in Austin, Denver, and Detroit, he is alienating the same folks he hopes to help. There are a lot of places in America that don’t look like Silicon Valley, but the solution isn’t to force them to look like Silicon Valley. Thiel is trapped inside the very Silicon Valley bubble he claims to have escaped. While the “hacker” mindset may be limited to a minority of Americans, tech hacks of the last five decades have touched every soul. Most of us have internet access and a smart phone to conduct business. A subscription to Amazon Web Services is a click away. Inventions have since 1968. Americans universally hate their government and Thiel was happy to fill the role of roaster at the RNC. “The future felt limitless, but today, our government is broken,” said Thiel. “Our nuclear bases still use floppy disks. Our newest fighter jets can’t even fly in the rain. And it would be kind to say that the government software works poorly, because most of the time it doesn’t even work at all.” Public sector adoption of technology has lagged well behind the private sector, but labeling government as broken is nothing more than a platitude. Not only has the Obama administration taken huge strides in its creation of the , the administration has taken a stab at growing Silicon Valley hustle in a city of bureaucrats . For the first time in history, , utilizing accelerators, and leveraging open-source technology. Interestingly, our society appears to no longer champion progress nationalistically. Rather than chanting “USA” for every tech unicorn born, corporations and founders are idealized. Notably, Steve Jobs has been responsible for not one but four movies in the last three years. We are all due for a reminder of just what the US is capable of in a script that doesn’t involve Jason Bourne or Edward Snowden. Today we have a US Chief Technology Officer and a US Chief Data Scientist. Open-data has powered countless municipal data projects. In New York City, . We have a long way to go, but in 1968, interacting with your government meant taking out a pen and paper, licking an envelope, and hoping for the best. Our government has taken an activist stance on fostering innovation, and Thiel’s projects have benefited from it. Thiel’s own Founders Fund has , a company whose success has critically depended on government support. SpaceX received a $20 million tax break to construct a launch facility in Texas. easily dwarf Thiel’s own contribution. To date, SpaceX has raised $1.25 billion from Founders Fund and others. It’s slightly ironic that Thiel would make such a claim about government software given that he himself is in the business of selling software to the government. Thiel founded Palantir back in 2004 to help the government, , make sense of big data. It would be foolish to argue that the public sector has been as innovative as the private sector over the last 47 years, but arguing that government is less innovative than 1968 is ill-founded. But heck if we want to play the anecdote game, the US spent millions . Rain issues aside, even the F-35 can beat that.
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Mark Lelinwalla
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Lifting children’s economic prospects through technology
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Deborah Bielak
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In March 2016, there were 159 technology billionaires, and four of the 10 richest people in the world made their money in the tech sector. We believe there are opportunities for these technology developers to play a differential role in philanthropy — one that brings together their ability to invest wisely and their acumen for using technology to change the world. Which types of technology-enabled interventions and tools most help to support healthy development and are worth big philanthropic bets is the subject of our latest research. We are advocating for targeted investments of $1 billion that can have profound social impacts — in this case, boosting early childhood education (ECE) to bolster upward mobility. From our research, early returns on some ECE tech-supported programs are promising, and the need for such solutions clear. Nationwide, 5.8 million children, from birth to age five, are not on track to succeed when they begin kindergarten. Put another way, in any given year, 1 million low-income five-year-olds are not fully ready when they arrive at kindergarten. They lack the cognitive skills, physical development and social and emotional maturity to succeed in a formal learning environment. Many come from English learner households and lack fluency in their language of instruction, and fall short on literacy, which impacts learning mindsets. Starting from behind makes it much harder to catch up. Children who enter kindergarten developmentally ready are significantly more likely to master basic skills by the third grade than those who are not school ready (82 percent versus 45 percent). This is the beginning of a yawning outcome gap over a lifetime. Performing at grade level by the third grade makes it more likely that the child will go on to graduate from high school. While socioeconomic status is the primary determinant of a child’s kindergarten readiness, race and ethnicity compound a low-income child’s disadvantage. The two groups facing the greatest disadvantages in math and reading are black students and Hispanic English language learners, where differences in cultural perception can affect how parents and teachers view a child’s social and emotional skills. There are significant bodies of research that tell us a great deal about what it takes to ensure that a child is ready for kindergarten. Children from birth to age five should have positive, caring interactions and relationships with the adults in their lives in every setting — from home to community to school. Adults in all of these settings should know what an individual child needs, and have the capacity to help that child fully develop. Adults also should work together across all settings to ensure a cohesive, shared approach to supporting that child. This is a tall order, but the benefits to children — and the country — would be immense. Some promising tech solutions include the kind of text-messaging services that young mothers in underprivileged situations have already begun to use. For instance, is a free educational mobile-phone service sponsored by the National Healthy Mothers, Healthy Babies Coalition. It works with some 700 partners, including an agency of the Department of Health and Human Services, to promote its use. Pregnant women and new mothers receive tips three times a week on how to have a healthy pregnancy and a healthy baby. The text messages are timed to the pregnant woman’s due date or the baby’s birth date. Subjects cover a gamut: breastfeeding, car-seat safety, developmental milestones, emotional well-being, exercise and fitness, immunizations, labor and delivery, nutrition, prenatal care, safe sleep and smoking cessation. The text messages also provide 1-800 numbers and other resources to learn more. Rolled out in 2010, more than 281,000 women had enrolled within the first two years and 96 percent said they’d recommend the service to a friend. For moms with preschoolers there’s , another text-messaging service that’s targeted at helping parents prepare their children for kindergarten. Each week during the school year, parents receive a trio of texts about important kindergarten readiness skills. The text provider cites the following example script: Developed at Stanford University, the Ready4K text messages are based on child development research and linked to state educational standards. They are also effective. In a San Francisco study, parents using Ready4K text messages engaged far more frequently in learning activities at home with their children than parents who did not receive the texts. Ready4K parents were also more involved at school, according to teachers. Overall, a 2014 York & Loeb found that children of parents who received Ready4K texts gained two to three additional months of learning in important areas of literacy. Evidence shows that such high-quality tech-enabled tools, if used correctly, can indeed improve a student’s cognitive skills, and thus academic performance, by 0.21 standard deviations on average. has calculated that if a kindergartener improves their basic cognitive level by this amount, they will see an increase in lifetime family income of $15,800. Let’s push the math to assume that over the five formative years, the new suite of technology-enabled tools can reach the primary caregivers of 10 million children who are not on track to be kindergarten ready. If only 3.5-7 percent of these children achieve the necessary academic outcomes by kindergarten, approximately 350,000 to 700,000 more children would enter kindergarten ready to learn. Bottom line: a cumulative increase in lifetime earnings of $5.5 billion to $11 billion. That’s a big payback from $1 billion, and we believe that philanthropy is ideally suited as the source. Private funders have the unique ability to provide the kind of high-risk initial capital that’s off limits to most government agencies. Such investments will require patient capital and funders with longer-term views. Our hope is that more philanthropists see how they can create significant social change by investing in the very industry that brought them such success.
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Ava launches a wearable to help couples conceive
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Samantha O'Keefe
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Tracking your period, peeing on a stick and carrying around a thermometer have been the dominant technologies over the past 20 years to help families conceive. If it sounds outdated, that’s because it is. TechCrunch Disrupt Startup Battlefield alum is hoping to change that with a wearable that helps couples pinpoint when a woman is in her fertile window and the time is right to conceive a child. The company is today announcing a $2.6 million investment to help bring their wearable to market. But does it actually work? Ava points to a clinical trial conducted at the University Hospital of Zurich with a group of 41 healthy women with ages ranging from 20-40. The women had no infertility indications and were not participating in any hormonal treatment. Women were followed for one year, giving the team approximately 180 menstrual cycles to observe. Ava’s fertility tracker looks for the gradual rise in estradiol levels at the beginning of the fertile window that signal the body is preparing for ovulation, and the rise in progesterone levels a few days to a week or so later that signify ovulation is complete. Hormones urinary LH and estrogen-3-glucuronide (metabolite of estrogen) were tracked along with physiological parameters, including bioimpedance (an approximation for body fat), pulse rate, breathing rate, sleep, movement, heart rate variability, skin temperature, heat loss and perfusion (the movement of blood from capillaries into tissue). Ava’s fertility tracking bracelet is worn only while a woman is sleeping and automatically collects these data points and uses them to predict her fertile window. The results of the Zurich study show that the Ava device detects an average of 5.3 fertile days per cycle with 89 percent accuracy. While dated technologies like temperature and period tracking have been shown to be effective methods, Ava’s bracelet and mobile app approach could resonate with the Fitbit generation. It also serve to eliminate issues of human error — measuring temperature incorrectly or just forgetting to track at all. The Ava fertility tracker also was recently approved as a Class One medical device by the FDA. In the future, Ava will look to complete trials with women with fertility issues, such as PCOS — polycystic ovarian syndrome. Ava’s target market is generally women 30 and above who have been trying unsuccessfully to have a child for a few cycles, but haven’t yet hit the magic one year mark that typically warrants a visit to the OB and/or Reproductive Medicine physician. The company has also received interest from women in their 20s and 30s who are not trying to conceive, but are currently focused on the fertility space. In November 2015, the that they had raised a $2.6 million venture round led by Swisscom and ZKB. The Ava fertility tracking bracelet has been available for pre-order since last fall, but today, the product is ready to ship and is .
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Apple’s cash on hand decreased for the first time in nearly two years
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Fitz Tepper
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Apple just reported earnings for Q3 2016, and the company . However, there was one number that we’re not used to seeing. Apple’s cash on hand actually decreased for the first time in seven quarters. Cash on hand this quarter amounted to $231.5 billion, which is down $1.4 billion from the $233 billion on hand at the end of Q2. As a refresher, cash on hand consists of actual cash and cash equivalents, as well as short-term and long-term marketable securities — essentially any investment the company can quickly turn into cash. The decrease in cash on hand tells us that Apple is finally figuring out how to utilize its absurdly large cash stash, something investors have long been complaining about. So what did they spend it on? Firstly, the company is spending more on research and development. Apple spent $7.475 billion on R&D over the last 9 months, compared with $5.847 billion on R&D over the first 9 months of 2015. This could be attributed to the company’s development of new products, including a , something that would certainly require a ton of upfront R&D spend. Secondly, Apple is finally making big investments. The company (China’s largest car-hailing app) this quarter. Lastly, Apple is continuing to utilize its cash by returning it to investors. The company issued a $.57 per share dividend, which is 5 cents higher than the year-ago quarter. This brings total dividend payments to $1.61 per share over the last 9 months, compared to $1.46 per share over the first 9 months of 2015. Plus, the company spent $23.7 billion repurchasing stock last quarter, compared to $22 billion during the year-ago quarter. Luca Maestri, Apple’s CFO, explained that this increased cash return is part of the company’s overall capital return program: “We returned over $13 billion to investors through share repurchases and dividends, and we have now completed almost $177 billion of our $250 billion capital return program.” Since the cash on hand decrease was only about $1.4 billion compared to last quarter, it’s likely that any of these items could have been the cause of the cash decrease. But regardless of the cause, investors are sure to be happy that Apple is finally spending its hard-earned cash.
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KK Fund announces second fund for early-stage startups in Southeast Asia
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Jon Russell
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Good news for early-stage startup founders in Southeast Asia: just completed the first close of a new fund for seed stage investments. This second fund is larger but undisclosed, like the firm’s first, but it is notable because it comes less than two years after that inaugural fund and its LP base is another reminder of strong interest in Southeast Asia from Japan. Tokyo-listed duo Sega Sammy Holdings and ad firm Septeni Holdings invested in the fund, alongside investment group Mistletoe, and a number of undisclosed family offices and individuals from Japan, the firm said. Singapore-based KK Fund was founded in 2014 by general partners , formerly of GREE Ventures, and , formerly with IMJ Investment. It has invested in more than a dozen deals from its first fund, which Saito told TechCrunch is not fully spent. That means that, in some cases, KK Fund will make investments across both of its funds. Saito explained that the new fund will allow KK Fund to increase its typical check size to around $400,000-$500,000 per investment. The firm is entirely focused on Southeast Asia, Hong Kong and Taiwan, and, in particular, companies within the online marketplace, logistics, fintech, and media and entertainment verticals. Typically, KK Fund will be the lead investor in deals — indeed $500,000 is a large amount to put into a seed or pre-Series A round in this past of the world — and it is predominantly looking for companies with a product, or early release, in the market already. Saito said that they have done a couple of investments pre-product when they are impressed by the team. There are plenty of Japanese investors as LPs within high-profile funds in Southeast Asia. Naver, the company behind newly listed Line, , while , but KK Fund targets a far earlier stage than those two. So what is it about Southeast Asia that appeals to its Japanese LPs exactly? The Japanese market is challenging for tech startups, not only due to some rigid business cultures but also the aging population and the fact that its economy is one of the planet’s most mature. Saito said that many investors are looking to green field markets like Southeast Asia, , to find businesses and industries than can grow fast. “There’s still a strong appetite for Southeast Asia,” he told me over the phone. “We started talking [to investors] in April and made our first close at the end of June. That’s quite quick, quicker than what we expected.” “In Japan, there are a lot of regulations in terms of finance and logistics, so not many startups are active in that space,” he added of investor motivation to pursue new business opportunities. “One Japanese [LP] company wants to import business to Japan or use Southeast Asia as a test bed market, so that is an attractive part.” KK Fund expects the final close of its second fund before the end of the year, and it has already begun investing the capital raised thus far. The firm has also added a new face to its ranks. Singapore-based Masahiko Honma has joined as partner from Incubate Fund, a Japanese seed fund. In his native Japan, Honma previously co-founded game development company . That gives him another tie to KK Fund’s founding partners.
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Nvidia launches new flagship graphics card, the $1200 Titan X
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Stefan Etienne
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The latest graphics card release from Nvidia is, in fact, the most powerful card it’s ever produced. With 12 billion transistors, the latest Pascal architecture, 12GB of GDDR5X memory and 3,584 cores at 1.53Ghz delivering an apparent 11 teraflops of performance, it’s a steadfast attempt at being the best there is. It’s meant for VR, gaming, and basically everything graphically intensive — it will melt what you have in your system like butter, in a second. Funny enough, : “It began with a bet. Brian Kelleher, our top hardware engineer, bet our CEO, Jen-Hsun Huang, we could get more than 10 teraflops of computing performance from a single chip. Jen-Hsun thought that was crazy. Well, we did it. The result is crazy. And, as of today, Jen-Hsun now owes Brian a dollar.” So what you’re telling me is, two executives had a bet and the end result is the most powerful product the company has ever produced? Cool story, guys. Now it’s time for benchmarks. The new Titan X will be available August 2 for $1,200 direct from nvidia.com in North America and Europe along with select system builders, with a release planned for Asia.
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Pokémon Go finally goes live in Japan with McDonald’s the first sponsored location
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Jon Russell
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, the land where Pokémania began. McDonald’s is the game’s first sponsor in a deal which, , turns the fast food firm’s 3,000 stores in the country into Pokémon Go “gyms”. The launch has been a long while coming for Japanese fans to say the least. The smash hit title first went live in the U.S. over two weeks ago, before coming to most of Europe and Canada last week. That’s left many Japanese fans disappointed at having to watch without being able to join in the fun. Even today’s launch hasn’t been without drama. The game has been ready to launch in Japan for days now, as we previously reported, but internal disagreement and a leak held things up. On Tuesday, and that seemed the case right up until the eleven hour when . A source close to the launch told TechCrunch that the Wednesday release time was originally 9:00 am before being pushed back to 2:00 pm and then canceled altogether. That’s all in the past now, and today’s release also coincides with school holidays in Japan — very deliberately, you’d suspect — which is only likely to give the game a further boost. The big question will be whether the servers, which are already inconsistent for many users across the world, can handle the strain of Japan’s Pokémon addicts piling in. The success of Pokémon Go, which has , . This week’s game delay saw for the first time since Pokémon Go’s release, but, with the game now finally out on home soil, the gaming giant is sure to see its market cap rise up once again as its is boosted both by a glut of new players and the McDonald’s deal. McDonald’s is the first company to tie up with Pokémon Go, being , and and likely to be equally as lucrative. 梅田に出没したピンジョン捕まえた(((o(*ﾟ▽ﾟ*)o)))笑 — 牛乳プリン🍮 (@milkpudding0108) 最初のポケモンはピカチュウ＼(^^)／ — にゃんにゃんゆまち (@yumachi822) What’s next for Pokémon Go now? A source at Niantic told us that Japan would be the ‘halo’ launch in Asia, so we can likely expect that the game will rollout to other markets in the region over the coming week or so. We don’t have details of which ones and when, but Niantic has already suggested that China could be a tricky launch, so that one might be delayed. that he wants the game to be live in 200 countries as soon as possible.
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Crunch Report | KickAss Torrents Owner Arrested
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Khaled "Tito" Hamze
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Tito Hamze
Tito Hamze
Joe Zolnoski
Joe Zolnoski
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Atmospheres of Earth-like planets studied for the first time
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Emily Calandrelli
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Astronomers used NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope to conduct the first atmospheric study of Earth-sized exoplanets and found evidence to suggest that two could be habitable. The planets have astronomers excited because atmospheric analysis revealed that they’re likely to be rocky worlds, the type of planet necessary to host life as we know it. Planets are generally broken down into two major categories: gaseous or rocky. In order to be deemed “habitable”, these exoplanets would need to be rocky like our cosmic home. By analyzing their atmospheres, astronomers found that these two planets are unlikely to have the light, large, and puffy characteristics of atmospheres found on gaseous worlds, like the ones in our outer solar system. Instead, data suggests that the atmospheres are more compact, similar to the rocky worlds we have in our inner solar system. “These initial Hubble observations are a promising first step in learning more about these nearby worlds, whether they could be rocky like Earth, and whether they could sustain life.” Geoff Yoder, acting associate administrator for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate The two exoplanets were part of a three-exoplanet system back in May. Orbiting a red dwarf star located 40 light-years away from Earth, the three planets had sizes and temperatures similar to Venus and the Earth. Artist illustration of two of the three planets in this system orbiting their star, which is smaller and cooler than our own sun / Image courtesy of NASA/ESA/STScI/J. de Wit The fact that they shared similar qualities to our planet is a big deal because one of the biggest questions in astronomy is “Just how rare is the Earth, and life that inhabits it?” To answer this question, astronomers are always on the hunt to find Earth’s twin(s) in the universe. The three exoplanets discovered in May were off to a decent start, so scientists wanted to learn more. “These Earth-sized planets are the first worlds that astronomers can study in detail with current and planned telescopes to determine whether they are suitable for life.” Julien de Wit, MIT astronomer, lead author on study Astronomer Julien de Wit at MIT led the team of scientists who made the discovery. They used Hubble’s to study the planets in near-infrared light. By analyzing how light interacted with the exoplanets’ atmospheres, the could determine concentrations of certain elements present in those atmospheres. This technique is known as . What was particularly exciting was the fact that low concentrations of hydrogen and helium were detected in the planets’ atmospheres. When high concentrations of these elements are found, it’s an automatic disqualifier for being considered habitable, so there’s still hope that the planets could be conducive for supporting life. “The lack of a smothering hydrogen-helium envelope increases the chances for habitability on these planets. If they had a significant hydrogen-helium envelope, there is no chance that either one of them could potentially support life because the dense atmosphere would act like a greenhouse.” Nikole Lewis of the Space Telescope Science Institute. To determine just how conducive to life these exoplanets may be, scientists want to learn more about the exact chemical make-up of their atmospheres, the surface pressure and range of temperatures found on the planet. “Now we can say that these planets are rocky. Now the question is, what kind of atmosphere do they have?” Julien de Wit, MIT astronomer, lead author on study Through more sensitive atmospheric analysis, astronomers could search for biosignatures, like carbon dioxide, ozone, water vapor and methane. Biosignatures like these are produced by living things, and aren’t likely to occur naturally, so they act as little red flags telling scientists that “Hey, there might be life living on my surface!” With this in mind, the researchers hope to conduct follow-up observations using Hubble and future telescopes like the James Webb Space Telescope, scheduled to launch in 2018. “With more observations using Hubble, and further down the road with James Webb, we can know not only what kind of atmosphere planets like TRAPPIST-1 have, but also what is within these atmospheres. And that’s very exciting.” Julien de Wit, MIT astronomer, lead author on study
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The role of higher education in entrepreneurship
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Eric J. Toone
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and recently published rankings of university entrepreneurship. Among the top 12 schools, the two lists share but a single institution — . How can two highly regarded agencies compile lists of excellence that have virtually no overlap? At one level, the answer is obvious: The two groups use different criteria and so arrive at different rankings. But the use of two sets of criteria that yield such wildly differing results suggests a much deeper problem. A lack of consensus regarding what to measure implies a lack of consensus about the goals of university entrepreneurship: It’s hard to measure success when you don’t know what that success looks like. So what is the role of entrepreneurship at the university? The relationship of the university with society changes continuously. In his classic treatise on the university, made the case for an educational mission; more particularly, liberal education. The rise of the research university, first in Germany and later in America, provided another role for the university — that of the search for knowledge. The and the creation of the land-grant university offered yet another role for the university — to “promote the practical education of the industrial classes.” Finally, the democratization of the American university through the middle of the 20th century brought education to the masses, along with the creation of programs more akin to training than enlightenment. Today, most universities accept, in varied measures, the dual roles of creation and dissemination of knowledge. Today, too, the university seeks to engage the world around it, and to use the university as a means to do good in the world. At Duke, for example, we list as one of our enduring values. “ .” MIT’s recently announced $5 billion includes Innovation and Entrepreneurship to accelerate “the path from idea to impact.” The university does good in the world through that translation into practice — converting the fundamental knowledge that grows at the university into real things and real actions that have real consequences for real people. And that translation at the university is entrepreneurship. This conception of university entrepreneurship does not divert attention from the long-established roles of teaching and research. Nor does it turn faculty into business men and women. Rather, it asserts that ideas form the basis of human advancement, whether in science and engineering, the arts, public policy or law. It holds that the means by which those ideas are converted into action are understood and can be taught. And it proposes that the impact and relevance of the university is enhanced by creating an infrastructure and a culture that allows the ideas that grow at the university to be converted to action, whether or not the conversion involves those who conceived the ideas. This formulation of entrepreneurship does not turn from the ethos of liberal education. Newman’s notions of the interrelatedness of knowledge are as relevant today as they were in 1853. But surely the application of knowledge, the use of that knowledge to solve real-world problems, is a part of the learning. In 1936 recognized and embraced such a notion explicitly: “The applications are part of the knowledge. For the very meaning of the things known is wrapped up in their relationships beyond themselves. Thus unapplied knowledge is knowledge shorn of its meaning.” Powerful examples of university entrepreneurship abound, from the hepatitis vaccine to the Honey Crisp apple. University entrepreneurship is CalTech’s , father of the modern VSLI computer chip and founder of at least 20 companies in all aspects of microelectronics. University entrepreneurship is , an associate professor of neurosurgery, and his team that developed an oncolytic poliovirus that provides a cure for the deadliest form of brain cancer — malignant glioblastoma. Today, patients treated with the virus are alive nearly three years after diagnosis; untreated one-year survival rates are near zero. University entrepreneurship is , a Duke undergraduate who constructed a factory in India to provide low-cost sanitary pads for women living in the vast slums of Mumbai. Suhani and her co-workers aim to replicate the model in 500 slums across the globe. University entrepreneurship is Eli Sachs, an MIT professor of engineering who developed a new low-cost way to make silicon solar cells. Sachs left MIT to build , a company with production facilities in upstate New York that aims to make solar power cheaper than coal. University entrepreneurship is Michael Prywata and Hermano Krebs, whose startup from Ryerson University in Toronto is developing exoskeleton robots that will allow victims of neurological disease and accidents to walk again. The 21st-century university will engage more fully with society than at any time in its past. Our value proposition is that knowledge enables a better tomorrow. We realize that promise through the translation of great discoveries into new cures, new technologies and new practices. We realize that promise by training young men and women after the liberal tradition of Newman, but at the same time instilling in them the notion that ideas have power in their application, and that knowledge enables progress through action. Entrepreneurship — the translation of ideas into products and actions — will live at the core of that university.
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Now anyone can build features for Cola messenger
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John Mannes
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, a messaging app that integrates apps into chats, is opening up its developer kit today to enable anyone to build new apps. The updated version available today comes with 12 “bubbles” that are essentially applications that run inside the messaging app. Users can share weather and flight information, gifs, and more without creating accounts with individual tools. The company’s priority is to reduce the barriers to accomplishing basic tasks with others. Think shared to-do lists where two people can check off items without leaving the messaging app. In addition to the new bubbles from Cola, developers will be able to use bubble development kits to create new features for the messenger. Similar to Apple’s App Store, Cola has an approval process in place to protect users. and users have had access to the application since March of this year. Late last year, Naval Ravikant led a $1.3 million seed round, with participation from Ravikant’s AngelList syndicate, which includes AOL founder Steve Case. Cola isn’t the first company to posit platformization of messaging clients. platform with built-in, app-like templates for small business owners to engage with clients. integration with Dropbox, Github, Trello, BlueJeans and even Uber. In an attempt to find market whitespace, Cola is targeting consumers. While its services are unique, it is still fundamentally competing with Facebook Messenger, Apple’s iMessage, GroupMe, WeChat, and others. One limitation of Cola is that you have to be inside the app to find and send content. If you want to send a gif, you cannot open it in Giphy. Users of Cola would need to use the Giphy bubble to send it. Moreover, to take full advantage of the integrations, both sender and receiver must have Cola downloaded. The app’s UI is very basic, though the added simplicity is more of a benefit than a drawback. It’s not quite the material design we are all used to, but it works and isn’t distracting. From an engineering standpoint, each bubble runs inside its own sandbox so users don’t need to worry about one failed message taking down the entire app. Cola leverages open source technology being led by Facebook called React Native to keep its service running smoothly. Developers will create native “bubble” applications in java script. Cola’s bubbles are useful, but it’s going to need a killer feature to draw in a critical mass of users. Opening up development to outsiders increases the likelihood that Cola will become host to features users don’t just want but need.
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