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Apple returns fire on Spotify, calling out ‘rumors and half-truths’ over App Store rejection
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Devin Coldewey
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The dispute between Apple and Spotify over subscription revenues continues today with a letter from the former accusing the latter of using “rumors and half-truths” to advance “unfair and unreasonable” demands. obtained by TechCrunch, though technically correspondence between Apple general counsel Bruce Sewell and Spotify general counsel Horacio Gutierrez, is clearly meant to be a public rebuttal to allegations made earlier this week. , but the gist is that Spotify has been attempting to circumvent Apple’s cut of subscription revenue by pushing its users to upgrade on the web rather than in the app. Today’s letter emphasizes the fact that this is a clear violation of the App Store rules. “We find it troubling that you are asking for exemptions to the rules we apply to all developers, and are publicly resorting to rumors and half-truths about our service,” it reads. “Spotify’s app was again [i.e. after being resubmitted on June 10] rejected for attempting to circumvent in-app purchase rules, and not, as you claim, because Spotify was simply seeking to communicate with its customers.” Spotify, of course, disagrees. The war of words being waged in these letters doesn’t move the ball much one way or the other, but is a play for hearts and minds: Apple wants people to think it’s running a tight ship, and Spotify wants people to think it’s challenging a stifling status quo. It’s hard to tell which way the cookie will crumble, but if I had to guess, Apple is the least likely to give way. It can afford to lose millions per month to maintain the strict-but-fair persona, but Spotify is actively inconveniencing its users losing a growing fortune. People are so fickle these days that they’ll switch services rather than deal with the friction of a web sign-up process.
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Hyperloop One co-founder and CTO Brogan BamBrogan steps down
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Sarah Buhr
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co-founder and CTO Brogan BamBrogan is out at the company and former SVP of engineering Josh Geigel will be taking over BamBrogan’s role as CTO. The move, though abrupt, may have been a long time coming. The company has been shifting Bambrogan away from public comment for months and switched him to the CTO role, appointing former Cisco exec Rob Lloyd as CEO in September. Hyperloop One is one of two companies in the L.A. area working to bring forth to ship humans and cargo in a vacuum tube at lightning speed all over the world. BamBrogan joined Shervin Pishevar to build on the idea in 2014, but the company has been picking up lately – breaking ground on a Nevada test site this spring, locking in several global partnerships for construction, cargo and real estate, forming an alliance with the Russian government to build a Hyperloop in Moscow and has pulled in $80 million so far to build out an idea for rapid transportation technology of the future. It seems odd to switch out leadership at a time when the buzz around the Hyperloop is just starting to heat up, but there’s been some discord at the top, according to a source. The tensions within may have spurred recent changes. Hyperloop One declined to comment on what may have caused the sudden departure of BamBrogan beyond a released statement. “Josh has been a valued engineering leader as co-founder and SVP of Engineering since the company’s inception,” read the statement. “Co-founder and CTO Brogan BamBrogan has decided to take a step back from Hyperloop One. We appreciate everything that he has done to put us on the path to creating the world’s first Hyperloop.” The news of BamBrogan’s departure comes Just days after Afshin Pishevar was ousted from his position as general legal counsel and replaced by his understudy Marvin Ammori. Afshin is the brother of Hyperloop One’s co-founder and chairman Shervin Pishevar. A source tells us BamBrogan will no longer be involved in the company in any day-to-day role. Geigel, who has been at the company since its inception in 2014, will now gain the title of co-founder and get a seat on the company board. first noted the new appointment. Both Geigel and BamBrogan worked in senior positions at SpaceX before joining Shervin to start Hyperloop One. Geigel also held positions at Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic and Echogen Power Systems. BamBrogan is credited with designing the second-stage engine of SpaceX’s Falcon 1 rocket and serving as lead architect for the Dragon capsule’s heat shields.
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Brian Heater
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Knocki turns your tables and walls into smart device controllers
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Anthony Ha
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By most standards, has had a home run , blowing way past its $35,000 target with more than $1.1 million committed. But it sounds like CEO Jake Boshernitzan is still hoping for more support in the campaign’s final hours (it’s scheduled to end at 3am Eastern on Saturday). After all, he said that Knocki deliberately set the campaign target on the low side, since the company had already raised . “We already have the capital and the resources where we can actually get the units produced in whatever volume,” Boshernitzan said. “Really, the goal of the campaign was to get the production volume higher … I don’t think we want to have 50 thousand units, but 10 thousand, 15 thousand, 25 thousand — which is well beyond the volume we’re shipping out — would be perfectly sustainable for our strategy.” Let’s back up for a second and talk about what Knocki is actually trying to do. It’s a small, wireless device that you can attach to surfaces like walls and tables. You can then tap those surfaces to control other smart devices like lights and thermostats — the pitch is to “make any surface a smart surface.” The basic idea might , but Boshernitzan said that one of the most important principles behind Knocki is that “simple is better.” In his view, these kinds of taps are one of the simplest ways that people can interact with their various Internet-connected devices. He acknowledged that there’s a lot of interest in exploring voice-based interfaces, but he sees that as complementary to Knocki, because voice control isn’t always the best solution — like if you’re in a loud room. Or imagine you’re going to sleep, and you want to turn off the light, lower the thermostat and set the alarm. Instead of giving each command separately, wouldn’t be great if you could just tap your Knocki-enabled nightstand?
I liked the vision, and I was impressed by the quick demo that Boshernitzan gave me before the campaign launched, but I wondered if the regular consumers really have that many smart devices. “If you purchase Knocki and don’t have a Nest thermostat and you don’t have Philips Hue light bulbs, if you don’t have all these different smart devices, there’s a lot of capability even if you just have a WiFi network at home and a smartphone,”Boshernitzan said. For example, you could attach a Knocki to a table and then create a tap pattern that you use whenever you’re trying to locate your phone. Or you could attach a Knocki to your door and get notifications anytime someone is knocking. You can . As of this writing, there are still a few “super early bird” offers available, where you can pay $79 for a Knocki, with scheduled shipping in December.
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UN agrees to adopt expanded resolution on online speech rights
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Natasha Lomas
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A vote today by the United Nations Human Rights Council (UNHRC) has agreed to affirm an expanded resolution on online rights. Russia and China had tabled several amendments to the text but these were rejected by the sponsor countries who argued they were an attempt to dilute its focus. The resolution, with the stated aim of bolstering “the promotion, protection and enjoyment of human rights on the Internet” was submitted to the UN council by Brazil, Nigeria, Sweden, Tunisia, Turkey and the US. Three amendments proposed by China and Russia were rejected, another was withdrawn. Good news today: Human Rights Council affirms online rights, condemns internet disruption and shutdowns. — Edward Snowden (@Snowden) It’s not the first such resolution on online rights adopted by the UNHRC, following two previous HRC resolutions adopted by consensus in and . But the latest resolution UNHCR apparently goes further than the prior consensus, with additional focus on Internet censorship — emphasizing the importance of an accessible and open Internet to the achievement of development goals, and calling for accountability for violence, detentions, harassment and other violations against people for expressing themselves online. The resolution also “condemns unequivocally” measures to block or disrupt access to online information. Which, it must be said, does make you wonder how Turkey’s name is among the list of submitting countries… given multiple of . And while on the face of it you would expect China and Russia to oppose moves to condemn Internet censorship, given both nations exercise considerable and growing control over web usage in their respective nations, Russia’s representative on the council Alexey Golytyaev sought to shift focus onto online privacy rights during today’s meeting of the Council — warning of an “imbalance” in the resolution text and urging that more attention be paid to safeguarding privacy rights online. “We witness an increasing number of violations of [the] right [to privacy] committed both by State and non-state actors. Recent revelations by courageous whistleblower Edward Snowden, reports of the special rapporteur on the right to privacy as well as a number of investigations have clearly shown the scale of such violations,” he said, pointing to rising use of unlawful wiretaps, hacking of comms devices and the sifting of “major data streams without authorization”. Aka, activities that the U.S. Government has been shown to indulge in via its mass surveillance program… “In many cases these violations are committed against foreign citizens in extraterritorial way,” Golytyaev added. “These activities not only violate human rights, they put at risk the very foundation of civil liberties, freedom of opinion and expression, freedom of thought and conscience.” So basically this is Russia arguing the U.S. is being hypocritical by seeking, via the UN, to censure speech rights on the Internet when it uses the same Internet infrastructure to perforate privacy rights en masse. In a later contribution Golytyaev also voiced concern about attempts by certain unnamed states to push an agenda seeking to maintain a “hierarchy with respect to their role on the Internet”. Ah geopolitics! The extra kicker here of course is that Russia’s lower house of parliament that critics — including, yes, courageous whistleblower Edward Snowden — have warned will in fact hammer online privacy rights in Russia. So errr… The new privacy-perforating law, when law it becomes, will oblige Russian telephone and Internet providers to store records of all comms for six months and all metadata for three years. It also includes requirements that these companies help intelligence agencies decode encrypted messaging services. So yes, this is very much a game of pots calling kettles black — played out within the diplomatic horseshoe of the UNHRC. A Chinese intervention was rather less camouflaged in its intentions, with the country representative requesting in one of the (subsequently) rejected amendments that the phrase in the resolution text “a comprehensive human rights-based approach” be changed to “a comprehensive and integrated approach”. So, in other words, that a reference to Human Rights be deleted. A suggestion that was obviously rejected by the sponsor countries. It’s not called the Council for nothing. Defending the resolution against the charge that it ignores the importance of privacy rights online, the Nigerian rep argued on behalf of the sponsor countries that the text, as drafted, already includes reference to and support for privacy rights. He further noted that privacy has been specifically dealt with in other UN resolutions — for example, the UN General Assembly adopted a resolution on the right to privacy in the digital age in — reiterating a desire not to dilute the focus of the resolution in upholding human rights online. And although the Russia rep warned of the risk of racism and extremist views being spread online, the country did subsequently join the consensus on the resolution — even after its amendments were rejected. Despite all this diplomatic action, the adoption of an online human rights resolution by the UNHRC doesn’t really change anything in practical terms, beyond adding to the geopolitical points scoring game — where the . Not least because the universal declaration of human rights already applies . Which means both online and offline. Clue is in the word ‘universal’. Add to that, the UN is not itself an enforcement body, unless you count trying to shame countries into changing their ways as serious teeth. And given that human rights remain a cause for concern in many of the UN’s own member states it seems a pretty safe bet to expect the state of human rights online to continue to reflect the mixed bag state of human rights offline.
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Security researcher gets threats over Amazon review
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Kate Conger
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For the average Amazon shopper, reviews are just a casual part of the experience. You might pay attention to a by George Takei or spend half an hour laughing at the parody reviews for “ ,” but you probably don’t thoroughly examine every review before buying a product. But for sellers, reviews are no laughing matter. Amazon retailers sometimes go to extreme lengths to guarantee good reviews, as security developer Matthew Garrett recently discovered when he wrote a of an internet-connected electric socket. When Garrett politely pointed out that the socket in question was woefully insecure, he received emails from the manufacturer claiming that the review would get employees fired and that other reviewers were campaigning to get Garrett’s review taken down. The socket in question is the , a $30 device that lets you turn the power from a wall outlet on and off using your phone. It’s a nice way to turn your lights on and off if you don’t want to invest in smart bulbs, or to turn other plugged-in devices on and off. The AuYou Switch works whether or not you’re home — so you can switch your lights on in your apartment while you’re still in your office. But like so many Internet of Things devices, the AuYou switch seems to have a serious security flaw. As Garrett explains in his review, if your phone is connected to your home Wi-Fi, it sends the on/off command to the socket directly. But if you’re not home, your phone sends the command to a server in China, which then passes the command along to the socket. “The command packets look like they’re encrypted, but in reality there’s no real cryptography here at all,” Garrett explained in his review. The result is that the unique network ID of your socket is transported in an unencrypted form to the Chinese server — and anyone who gets their hands on the ID can then control the socket. The only way Garrett could prevent his socket from being compromised was to block the server, which would keep anyone, including him, from controlling the socket remotely. “If anybody knows the MAC address of one of your sockets, they can control it from anywhere in the world. You can’t set a password to stop them, and a normal home router configuration won’t block this. You need to explicitly firewall off the server (it’s 115.28.45.50) in order to protect yourself. Again, this is completely unrealistic to expect for a home user, and if you do this then you’ll also entirely lose the ability to control the device from outside your home,” Garrett explained in the review. Getting your internet-connected socket taken over by an intruder isn’t exactly a cybersecurity nightmare — at worst, you might end up with a hacker treating you to a strobe light party as they switch all your lights on and off. There’s also a slight possibility that repeatedly cutting the power to one of your devices might damage it. But this isn’t the end of the world; it’s just a sort of dumb security flaw. This makes the manufacturer’s outsized reaction all the more unusual. Garrett sent me a few of the emails he received from the company. “Just now my boss has blamed me, and he said if I do not remove this bad review, he will quit me. Please help me,” the representative wrote. “Could you please change your bad review into good?” Garrett responded that he would update the review if the manufacturer fixed the flaw. The AuYou representative insisted she would be fired if the review was not updated. A week later, she followed up again, asking Garrett to take down the review. The representative then said that she would report Garrett to Amazon if he didn’t take down the review, and that other Amazon reviewers had written in to complain about it. Of course, no one needs to lose their job over a single Amazon review. Garrett says he’s not sure if he’s being manipulated or if someone’s job is really on the line. “If I thought that there was a realistic chance that people were going to lose their jobs over something I was writing, that’s something that would make me reconsider,” he says. “On the other hand, the attitude that many companies have of not giving any indication of caring about the security of the people they’re selling to is horrifying in its own way. That is important — to make people aware when choosing these devices.” Garrett has a point: security researchers do a public service when they let customers know about security vulnerabilities in popular IoT products. Amazon is a natural clearinghouse for these sorts of notices, and researchers shouldn’t face threats for posting honest security reviews. TechCrunch reached out to Amazon to ask how it mediates disagreements between reviewers and sellers, but Amazon declined to comment, citing consumer privacy. Amazon has a history of for trying to buy or fake reviews, and has who sue reviewers over negative reviews.
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Mobileye says Tesla auto braking tech wasn’t designed for scenario behind fatal crash
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Brian Heater
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Following yesterday’s news of the NHTSA’s investigation into involving a Tesla Model S, , the Israeli technology company helping power the carmaker’s Autopilot feature, has sent a statement to TechCrunch regarding the incident. “We have read the account of what happened in this case,” reads the text attributed to Dan Galves, Mobileye’s Chief Communications Officer. “Today’s collision avoidance technology, or Automatic Emergency Braking (AEB) is defined as rear-end collision avoidance, and is designed specifically for that.” The statement strikes a decidedly different tone than , which both mourned the loss of the driver (since identified as Ohio-based tech entrepreneur Joshua Brown) and reiterated the company’s safety measures, noting that, “Autopilot is getting better all the time, but it is not perfect and still requires the driver to remain alert.” Galves, likewise, explains that the current generation of technology is not equipped to deal with the specific scenario that played out in the May 7 collision, though plans are in place to introduce it eventually. “This incident involved a laterally crossing vehicle, which current-generation AEB systems are not designed to actuate upon,” the statement explains. Mobileye systems will include Lateral Turn Across Path (LTAP) detection capabilities beginning in 2018, and the Euro NCAP safety ratings will include this beginning in 2020.” The technology, it seems, has not yet been equipped to react to the specific case in which a vehicle turns across a lane. According to Tesla’s account from yesterday, “Neither Autopilot nor the driver noticed the white side of the tractor-trailer against a brightly lit sky, so the brake was not applied.” Mobileye was once again , when it was officially revealed that the company will be working with Intel to help bring BMW’s first fully self-driving car to market by 2021.
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Virtual reality training ramps up for the 2016 NFL season
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Mark Lelinwalla
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Football is a downright violent sport. If players aren’t injured in the games themselves, there’s a chance that they could be hurt in practice. It happens all the time. While there’s no substitute for actual football practice, there is a technology enjoying rapid growth in the NFL and it involves taking contact-free virtual reps: virtual reality training. CEO and founder, Derek Belch, says his company alone has seven NFL franchises that have invested in his immersive, 360-degree virtual reality training software and could have a few more by the time the 2016 season kicks off this September. So, essentially a majority of the league will be using VR to gain an edge soon enough. That’s an incredibly fast adoption rate. The Dallas Cowboys became the first team in the NFL to buy into STRIVR’s VR training last June. Six more franchises reached an agreement with the Silicon Valley-based company since then. Belch is also expecting an additional few franchises to sign up over the next two months. While Belch said he’s not at liberty to mention all of STRIVR’s NFL clients, the Cowboys, Arizona Cardinals, San Francisco 49ers, Minnesota Vikings and New York Jets have been publicly announced before. “Truthfully, I’m surprised it hasn’t grown faster based on some of the results we have seen,” Belch said. “There are a lot of reasons why football is a good fit [for VR].” So, how does it work? Well, once a team calls on STRIVR with interest, Belch shows them a generic demo of the software, hooking them up to an Oculus Rift or any other VR headset. From there, if an agreement is made, the company captures 50 or so plays that the team runs during practice. [youtube=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QSJVU7PK660&w=560&h=315] Although Belch wouldn’t plunge into the company’s secret sauce nor financial terms with teams, he says STRIVR uses everything from GoPros to high-end to capture footage, before using a combination of custom-built computer and camera solutions, and custom software which automatically fits video together at the highest quality… and swiftly. Belch says the turnaround time for STRIVR to deliver a finished product to teams after initially recording them ranges from 90 minutes to two hours, down from the four to seven hours it took the company last season. Belch credits improved software for that. Once players throw on their VR headsets, they’re immersed in a 360-degree virtual environment, allowing them to read and react to plays like they do in practice, except this kind of practice doesn’t involve pads nor contact — something ideal for players working their way back from injuries. “I don’t think it’s going to prevent injuries,” Belch said of VR in the NFL. “There’s nothing better than actual, physical practice on the field. But I will say because we saw it last year and we’ll see it again, I’m injured and can’t practice and shouldn’t practice on a Thursday or Friday and so instead of practice, I go into VR. I don’t think we’re going to prevent injuries, but I think we may be able to help players to keep their bodies fresh when they are injured and prevent further injuries.” Belch estimates that a third of NCAA Division I football programs are using VR training technology, with 13 high-powered college gridiron teams using his company’s software, and that STRIVR has seeped into the NBA and NHL as well. That being said, Belch says the technology remains wet behind the ears when it comes to sports. “We’re still very much in the early adopter phase,” Belch said. “There are still some teams wondering if it’s legitimate. This is very real and it’s here to say.” [Updated].
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What’s next for Twilio and its unicorn brethren?
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John Mannes
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Brexit. Trump. The Federal Reserve. The world threw nearly everything at . Despite market volatility, the company continues to impress. The week the world met Twilio can only be defined as positive. Unfortunately, the greatest challenges for the company lie ahead. Herd behavior fuels IPOs. Casual investors often jump in immediately because of the media hype. This pushes the stock price up. In recent years, the following days have been brutal for investors. If you manage to get your hands on coveted shares prior to the moment trading goes live on an exchange, you can basically celebrate before the market even opens. For the rest of us, it’s not always as fun. The following two graphics only take into account exchange traded value. This is the change that an everyday investor is going to see. In five of the last high-profile tech IPOs, three increased in value on their first day of trading. Over the following week, four lost value from their first-day high. Twilio closed up 20 percent from the time it hit the markets. A week later, the company’s share price had increased over 52 percent. Twilio’s current market cap is fluctuating around $2.9 billion. While revenues were up 78 percent in 2014, the company still operates at a loss. The company fits squarely in the middle of the road with regards to market cap and doesn’t stand out in its lack of profitability. The companies in the following chart are deliberately not labeled. We are looking at general market trends, not comparing companies. Every single one of these companies has lost value on the public markets since they began openly trading. If the first few weeks after an IPO are fueled by emotion, the first few months are fueled by numbers. Somewhere between the two, lockout periods end for early investors and the market gets a more toned idea for the value of a new company. Day-one trading value is utterly disconnected from long term success in the public markets. Despite a slow start, Fitbit had a very successful early run. While the share price was up over 30 percent in the first three months, the company has gone on to lose 62 percent of its day one trading value. In a few months time, Twilio will have generated enough data to be evaluated as a longer term investment. History tells us the company will lose value but it has already bucked expectations in the first week so much is left to be seen. Sorry, Silicon Valley. Contrary to popular opinion, the entire economy is not tech wrapped in tech topped with extra tech. Twilio is a single data point that is easily lost in a sea of financial data. If the stock market stays healthy, money will continue to be allocated to higher-risk asset-classes like venture capital and private equity. With sufficient of money to sustain unicorn growth, companies have little reason to run to the unpredictable and bureaucratic public markets. The paradox with this line of logic is that companies only want to hold their IPOs in healthy markets. With Microsoft’s purchase of LinkedIn and elevated private equity activity in tech, there is a confidence void around the value of unicorn companies in the long-run. David Cohen, Co-Founder of TechStars, argues that companies have always been consolidated off public markets. The economy is cyclical and right now large companies have enough cash on hand to acquire smaller public companies. “Going public is one step in life cycle of company, it’s not the last step,” added Cohen. It’s becoming popular to speculate what effect Twilio will have on the tech world. Public markets aside, Twilio has already “made an impact” on tech. One of Twilio’s greatest strengths was its market strategy. Twilio was largely developer-first. Other companies following this path have their eyes keenly focused on the enterprise communication company. Cohen noted that his own investment strategy has been influenced by the early success of his Twilio investment. “In 2010 I had a meeting with SendGrid and my first thought was this is Twilio for email,” said Cohen. “We likely wouldn’t have funded SendGrid without Twilio.” SendGrid provides a backend API for transactional email like receipts, password reminders, and sign-up verification. Companies tend to not make bold financial decisions during periods of uncertainty. The US great-recession officially ended in 2009. The period of growth after it brought some of the most successful tech IPOs in history. Facebook, Twitter, and Zynga capitalized on a period of intense growth. Private capital had been hard to come by in the recessionary years. Public markets were not performing fantastically either but by June 2009, when the recession was lifted, the Nasdaq was already up 33 percent from its low point in February. The boxes were rapidly being checked for healthy markets on the horizon. The CBOE Volatility Index (VIX) is one of the commonly used metrics for uncertainty. This chart shows market volatility as captured by the VIX between. Values this year are markedly higher than in 2015. Few have wanted to IPO their precious unicorn baby into what could become Dante’s Inferno. [graphiq id=”iLb9mQcfsc5″ title=”CBOE S&P 500 VIX Futures (CFE:VI)” width=”600″ height=”519″ url=”https://w.graphiq.com/w/iLb9mQcfsc5″ link=”http://mutual-funds.credio.com” link_text=”CBOE S&P 500 VIX Futures (CFE:VI) | FindTheData”] The bottom line is that Twilio will not bring back tech IPOs on its own. CEO Jeff Lawson has all tools at his discretion to make the company great for the long hall. We can expect a trickle of mature unicorns coming to pasture. The rest of the tech IPOs will come when market confidence meets a fall in private capital. Source: NVCA Yearbook 2016
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Silicon Valley’s favorite fixer: Bradley Tusk
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Connie Loizos
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If the producers of the next “World’s Most Interesting Man in the World” commercial were looking for a Silicon Valley type, a prime candidate might be Bradley Tusk, a 42-year-old New Yorker who advises companies such as FanDuel and Tesla that are disrupting highly regulated industries. Tusk made his bones in Silicon Valley through advising Uber, which paid him in equity for his services while still a Series A company, dramatically boosting Tusk’s net worth (he says he hasn’t sold any), and in the process, creating a model for his newest firm, Tusk Ventures. Right now, , founded less than a year ago, has a dozen clients. Most of the 30 staffers who work at the company come out of politics at “high levels,” says Tusk, and each helps two clients navigate their respective regulatory waters, such as keeping them up to date with a curated email that they receive by 7 a.m. every morning. His services come at a steep price: clients pay Tusk Ventures in equity and agree to sell him up to 10 percent of their company. (Tusk is raising a venture fund to ramp up his investing activities, though he declined to speak about any specifics at a dinner with reporters earlier this week. ) Startups make room for Tusk in their cap table because of his connections. Tusk was formerly Michael Bloomberg’s campaign manager, helping him to get elected to an unprecedented third term as the mayor of New York City after convincing the New York City Council to extend the role’s term limits. (Tusk also worked with Bloomberg to explore a bid for the current U.S. presidential campaign. Although he claims he found a way for Bloomberg to win, Bloomberg apparently thought the solution was too complicated.) Another complementary business, seven-year- old , develops and runs political-style media campaigns for a host of Fortune 500 companies, including Google, Walmart, AT&T; media companies like AMC, NBC News, The Weather Channel; and institutions like Stanford. Somewhat astoundingly, Tusk oversees three other outfits, too: a casino management company called (it owns one casino in Fresno); , a custom archives business for companies and individuals; and a focused on reducing hunger in the U.S. Did we mention he’s also current New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio in next year’s Democratic primary? Oisin Hanrahan, CEO of Handy — an online platform for booking household services, and a client of Tusk Ventures — jokes that the more clients Tusk takes on, the “earlier my morning emails seem to arrive.” Most of Tusk’s clients are sent to the outfit by venture firms that want to mitigate their risk. Revolution introduced Handy to Tusk. Another client, the ed tech startup Alt School, was introduced to Tusk by Andreessen Horowitz. FanDuel, in which Tusk Ventures owns a sizable stake, was sent to the company from the private equity firm KKR, FanDuel’s biggest shareholder. (Though it’s hard to measure Tusk Ventures’s impact on the decision, last month state lawmakers in New York moved to , months after being halted by the New York attorney general.) Tusk Ventures won’t work with every startup it’s sent — and with Uber’s valuation rising to $60 billion, there’s no need. Tusk tells of recent engagement that went south quickly saying that, “We had a company that, had you asked me on day one would I want to invest, I would have said, ‘Yeah, they’re amazing.’ But I got to work with them, got to know their regulatory problems, I saw the CEO up close, and I just didn’t like any of it.” Not only did Tusk Ventures not invest, it exercised a clause that allows the firm to back out of any deal within the first 60 days. Says Tusk, “We’re there either because we believe in the company, in which case we’ll use our investment rights, or we’re gone.” Startups that aren’t clients can also find themselves on the receiving end of criticism. At that dinner this week, in front of half a dozen reporters, Tusk questioned whether Airbnb is worth the that the home-sharing platform is reportedly seeking right now from new investors. “They are raising now at a higher valuation, but if you were to say, ‘Here is what the New York and San Francisco markets are really worth in full legal compliance’ and then re-run the numbers . . . I don’t know that they are still that $30 billion company.” The “enemy is important to take into context,” he continued. If the “boogeyman is casinos,” as with FanDuel, or “taxi medallion owners,” as with Uber, “they’re kind of sleazy guys.” Meanwhile, the affordable housing advocates that are fighting Airbnb are “kind of likable, right? So they’re just harder to beat.” It’s a similar issue for Tesla, said Tusk, noting the many car dealerships around the country that are threatened by Tesla’s direct-to-consumer model. “The [dealership owners] are these fixtures in their community, and they sponsor the Little League team, and they’re part of the parade every year. It’s really hard to overcome that.”
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¡Finalmente! Facebook makes it easier to post status updates in multiple languages
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Frederic Lardinois
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Facebook today announced a new feature that makes it easier to publish status updates in multiple languages. Until now, you either had to post long updates that included all of the translations of the text or maybe post multiple updates — one for each language. Back in February, Facebook started a new feature that allowed Page owners to write a status update in multiple languages, and now the company is also starting to roll this out to individual users. Here is how this works in practice: you simply write your post in one language and then look for the “Write post in another language” prompt in the composer. You tell Facebook what language that next version is in, write the translation, and either call it a day or add even more languages. Readers then see the text in their preferred language. That sounds pretty straightforward, but Facebook says it actually took quite a bit of engineering work to make it happen. The team needed to develop a way to store all of the translations, for example, because the way the service was previously engineered, the assumption was that every post contained a single message in one language. The next challenge then was to determine which language to show to which user. Facebook says it uses “several signals to determine the most relevant version of the post to show each viewer, including the language preferences and the locale that people selected for their accounts, as well as the language they most commonly post in (using a naive Bayes classifier to determine the probability distribution of the text across the languages our system can identify).” While Facebook PR tried to sell this system to us as ‘AI,” the concept of naive Bayes classifiers have been around for a very long time (Thomas Bayes, after all, developed the theorem this is based on ). Facebook does say, however, that it plans to use these multiple translations to improve its machine translation system, too. “This will move us closer to our vision of removing language barriers across Facebook,” the company says. If you are part of the test group, you can now enable this feature, look for the ‘Languages’ section in your account section to enable the multilingual composer (and Pages owners who haven’t opted in yet can find instructions ).
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Tesla says drivers using Autopilot remain safer than regular drivers
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Jon Russell
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Tesla has reiterated that drivers using Autopilot mode remain safer than those who don’t. The new disclosure came as the automaker continues to deny reports from Fortune that it misled investors and the public by taking too long to reveal details of a fatal accident involving one of its customers who was in Autopilot. that it acted improperly by not revealing details of the crash until , and today — in response to what it described as Fortune’s “fundamentally incorrect” reporting — it said that autopilot mode remains safer than regular drivers. , Tesla argued that one accident doesn’t make auto pilot unsafe: That Tesla Autopilot had been safely used in over 100 million miles of driving by tens of thousands of customers worldwide, with zero confirmed fatalities and a wealth of internal data demonstrating safer, more predictable vehicle control performance when the system is properly used. That contrasted against worldwide accident data, customers using Autopilot are statistically safer than those not using it at all. That given its nature as a driver assistance system, a collision on Autopilot was a statistical inevitability, though by this point, not one that would alter the conclusion already borne out over millions of miles that the system provided a net safety benefit to society. . While it didn’t name him directly, the firm said it was “beyond saddened by their loss” of “a friend to Tesla and the broader EV community.” “We would like to extend our deepest sympathies to his family and friends,” it added. The company has taken significant criticism for its handling of the tragic accident, and this new statement on the matter is sure to divide people with its strong stance that, statistically, Autopilot mode can’t prevent all road fatalities. Tesla went into detail rebutting Fortune’s two articles, claiming that the publication “jumped the gun” on its story and did not wait 24 hours as requested for Tesla to provide its full side of the story. Fortune, meanwhile, . The publication reiterated that it contacted Tesla and its CEO Elon Musk for comment and clarification before running its stories.
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Germany’s Brillen.de raises $49M from TCV to take its eyewear marketplace international
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Ingrid Lunden
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, a bootstrapped, family-run company in Germany that has built an online business selling its own eyewear by tapping into a network of independent and local opticians, has raised €45 million ($49 million) in its first-ever VC funding. The money comes from a single, notable, investor, (which has the likes of Facebook, Spotify, LinkedIn, WorldRemit and Zillow), and according to co-founder Daniel Thung will be used to take Brillen.de’s model to new international markets in Europe and beyond. The company is not disclosing its valuation but says that it made “tens of millions” in revenues in the last 12 months from its existing business, which is currently live in Germany, Austria, UK and Spain. But SuperVista (Brillen.de’s parent company brand) is projecting to pass hundreds of millions in sales this year, and “it has been profitable since day one,” according to John Doran, a principal at TCV. The last decade has seen a lot of disruption in how glasses are made and sold. Eyewear company has become something of a poster child for how online companies can harness the concept of vertical integration to disrupt traditional industries; there are dozens of other companies that sell contact lenses, glasses and eye care services online that are made by others; and on the street a lot of independent opticians are being supplanted by mega-chains. And that’s before you consider that there are to bypass the physical visits, or with the whole concept of corrective lenses altogether. Brillen.de is a somewhat unique idea in the context of these. The company, started in 2012 by independent opticians that came from a family of vision specialists (including an ophthalmologist who sits on the board and holds several patents in the field), isn’t aiming to put opticians out of business: instead, independent shops are a necessary component for selecting and fitting the eye wear that Brillen.de makes and sells. And for these optometrists, it’s become an essential way of competing and staying relevant. “A typical independent optometrist attracts only a few customers in their store per day,” Thung said. “We drive more customers to their stores. On average we double their customers per day. It is a win-win for them so we find our optometrists are extremely loyal to us.” In addition to developing the glasses themselves, Brillen.de also provides all the billing and customer management services for each buyer. Putting family allegiances to one side, one main reason that Brillen.de is tied to working with physical shops is because of the kind of lens that it sells. It mainly focuses (sorry) on the progressive variety, which is the modern, smooth lens that includes prescriptions both for seeing up close and far away, depending on which part of the lens you are looking through. Getting measured and fitted for these lenses cannot be done virtually; it requires physical visits to opticians, and there are now about 700 of them that work with the company. The idea of acting as a platform for independent contractors or specialists to find new customers sounds similar to a dozen other marketplace businesses — from cleaning/home care services like Handy and Thumbtack, or doctor finders like Zocdoc, through to transport services like Uber. But it’s a concept that hasn’t largely been applied to this segment of the market. “We don’t have any direct competitors as there aren’t any other companies in Europe with an affiliated network of independent opticians like us,” Thung said. “We’re mostly competing with high street eyewear retailers such as Fielmann or Apollo.” The market for corrective lenses is projected to be worth some €30 billion annually in Europe by 2017, according to Credit Suisse, and around $90 billion globally. But because of the complexity of making progressive lenses, these account for about two-thirds of that value, TCV’s Doran tells me. Brillen.de says that its progressive eyewear is typically 40-50% cheaper than its competitors. The concept works, and part of TCV’s investment seems to be aimed at moving in and building it out before others get there first. “We’ve seen that Warby Parker is moving to our model,” Doran notes. “They have figured out that progressive lenses are where the money is, but they have discovered that it’s hard to sell them online. That’s why they have started opening stores.” As part of the funding, Doran and TCV venture partner Simon Breakwell will both join Brillen.de’s board.
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Forerunner Ventures ups the ante with a new, third fund
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Connie Loizos
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, an early-stage, San Francisco-based venture firm that focuses almost exclusively on e-commerce businesses, has raised a $122 million fund, shows an that was filed earlier this morning. The firm was founded by Kirsten Green, who is listed on the filing along with Eurie Kim, a partner who joined the firm in 2012. The all-female firm also features an operating principal, Melissa Grillo Aruz, and associate Nicole Johnson. Green, an equity research analyst who followed the specialty retail sector earlier in her career, didn’t respond to an interview request of earlier today. The firm’s newest fund is its third, and it’s a sizable step up from Forerunner’s previous $55.5 million fund, which was reportedly . It’s also three times bigger than the firm’s first institutional fund, which closed with in 2012. Some of the firm’s many bets include the online and offline eyewear retailer , which was reportedly last year but remains privately held; , another retailer that makes men’s clothes and has been extensively written about as a ; and Dollar Shave Club, a four-year-old, subscription service for razors and other men’s toiletries that says it’s on target to this year. Many of the firm’s bets remain too young to have exited just yet, though one, Shuddle, a two-year-old transportation platform that was widely billed as an Uber for children, after failing to raise follow-on funding.
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Crunch Report | Snapchat Memories update
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Khaled "Tito" Hamze
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Tito Hamze
Tito Hamze
Joe Zolnoski
Joe Zolnoski
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Pokemon Go is now available in the US for iOS and Android
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Greg Kumparak
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Aaaaand there it is: Pokemon Go is available for iOS and Android in the US. You could’ve gotten it a bit early if you wanted to do some account trickery when it launched — but if that seemed like too much work, US folk can now find it for and . Go forth, dear friend, and
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Tech needs to stamp out anti-blackness
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Megan Rose Dickey
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In the U.S., it’s as if laws and regulations only apply to people of color — and when people of color bend them, they lose their lives. When white tech CEOs bend the laws at massive scale, they’re rewarded with billions of dollars and prestige. “You know how Silicon Valley advocates an Uber-esque model where everybody is an entrepreneur, disrupting markets while the law lags behind?” Anil Dash, a prominent figure and diversity advocate in the tech industry, . In a follow-up tweet, , “Realize that & were brutally killed for being black while selling (cigarettes & CDs) cheap consumer products.” Last night, two Baton Rouge, Louisiana police officers fatally shot Alton Sterling, a 37-year-old black man whose left arm was pinned down, according to a video captured by a bystander. Sterling’s right arm was not visible in the video. In the video, two officers are seen holding down Sterling and later someone can be heard saying, “He’s got a gun! Gun!” Shortly after, the video shows an officer pulling out a gun. You can’t see the shots fired, but you do hear them. Sterling was pronounced dead on the scene from multiple gunshot wounds to the chest and back. Police were initially responding to a tip from an anonymous 911 caller that a man in a red shirt was selling CDs outside a convenience store and pointed a gun at someone, . Dash drew a compelling connection between how Uber and Airbnb’s businesses — both run by white men — are predicated on breaking the law and asking for forgiveness. They’re rewarded with billions of dollars in valuations, while Sterling and lose their lives for selling CDs and cigarettes, respectively. “ & were killed by cops for bending the law to far lesser degree than execs at AirBNB & Uber. Billions vs bullets,” . That “billions vs bullets” comment really jumped out at me. It pretty much sums up what racism, anti-blackness and white privilege looks like. Tech is the most powerful, wealthiest industry in the world, and our antiblackness is so pervasive we can't even say it. — Anil Dash (@anildash) “point on this thread is to call voices in the tech community [he’s] part of to speak up against violently antiblack systems.” Other people in the tech industry have chimed in today, like Shervin Pishevar, executive chairman of Hyperloop One and founder at Sherpa Capital, and Tiffani Ashley Bell of The Human Utility, formerly known as Detroit Water Project, who about developing tools to combat police brutality and anti-blackness. It started when Pishevar for a tech solution that could potentially save lives from police brutality. and it would be amazing to see you work to stamp out anti-blackness in your sphere of true influence, tech + VC. — Tiff’Chaka Ashley Bell (@tiffani) Pishevar also said that “we should use all tools and techniques to stamp out these murderous rates of brutality and fight anti-blackness,” and that he has already started doing some work around this. I’ve reached out to Pishevar and will update this story when I get more details.
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How Hardware-as-a-Service will save IoT
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Ajay Kulkarni
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Here’s the dirty little secret about the Internet of Things: The Things might not work, and you might not use them. consumer, many of your gadgets collect dust tucked away in a drawer (I must admit, I have large box full of wearables and other things with which I don’t know what to do). business, many of your devices not perform well expected, turning into maintenance-heavy money pits. This is because it’s hard to gauge the usefulness of new, innovative Thing. Some won’t be useful; others stop working. Even the ones that you love, the hard-working devices that serve you every day, soon become obsolete, replaced by newer, better, shinier Things. And so we keep buying these new Things, seduced by their promises — and later often find ourselves saddled with buyer’s remorse. But soon, thanks to concept called – – – (HaaS), we’ll have fewer of these regrets, because we’ll own fewer of these Things. Thanks to HaaS, the way individuals and businesses consume products is changing. – – – , which clearly has roots in Software- – – , is business model where companies sell packages that include , software, maintenance and, sometimes, installation, for monthly fee. Under HaaS, customers pay for services, not Things; consequently, HaaS contracts often include s -level agreement (SLA). Here are some examples: is smart-home company that offers security sensors, smart locks, thermostats, installation, servicing and 24/7 customer support for monthly fee. Most of this is made by the company. Plans start at around $60/month, with free trial period and minimum contract length. , their strategy seems to be working. with Virgin in the U.K. for 65 new high-speed Hitachi trains. Under that deal, Hitachi maintains ownership of the trains, and is paid based on their trains’ reliability. In fact, transportation is the leading edge of HaaS. Bike-sharing programs like NYC’s provide access to bicycles for little $15/month. In many cities, car-sharing programs like and have replaced the need to own car. to provide an everyday transportation option for commuters, further reducing car ownership needs. Even the large tech companies are starting to get on board. Earlier this month, allowing business customers to pay monthly fee for Microsoft Surface, unlimited phone/in-store support and upgrades. for their device product lines. And some analysts believe that an “ ” subscription-based revenue model is the answer to that company’s woes. – – – is here because it makes sense. Almost all is depreciating asset: why would we want to own it? For example, when driven off the lot. In these cases, it makes simple economic sense not to own. HaaS also taps into the current zeitgeist of minimalism, and less-than-400-square-foot houses , well the growing . There are many more advantages for customers. HaaS transforms an up-front capital expenditure into an ongoing operating expense, which also allows for more accurate cost/value comparisons: e.g. “Is this worth $X/month to me?” Operating expenses become cheaper through shared use, especially for Things we don’t always use: e.g. bike/car sharing. There is less worry about maintenance because of bundled-in servicing, which means any errors, bugs and other misbehaving gremlins become the headache of the provider. Included servicing also caps the total cost of ownership: You know exactly how much it cost for long you use it. With HaaS, problems are fixed faster: Sometimes the provider is not paid if the Thing is not operating (e.g. Hitachi’s trains), which incentivizes them to repair equipment quickly, even proactively (i.e. preventative maintenance). And there is less need to worry about obsolescence. You pay for the , not the ; newer, cheaper often enables the provider to offer better to you, which encourages them to upgrade. HaaS also has advantages for companies, just software vendors benefited from SaaS. HaaS is easier to sell because of the lowered up-front cost. HaaS contracts generate predictable monthly revenue. HaaS plans create longer customer relationships, which can drive further sales. Bundling , software, maintenance and installation improves margins: Pricing becomes function of the value provided, not of the underlying (and diminishing) costs. In other words, HaaS can be shield against the endless march of commoditization. Of course, HaaS is not completely new — we’ve already seen similar transformation with SaaS, which paved the way by making subscription services widespread and generally accepted. HaaS is also result of the recent flood of innovation released by the lowered barriers for building : cheaper components, easier prototyping, more accessible contract manufacturers, newer distribution channels and -friendly investors. It is the next step in the evolution of product-delivery models: from buying, to financing, to renting/leasing and now to HaaS. The key difference with HaaS is you pay for the usage of the , not the asset, which is why we see HaaS under variety of names: Smart-Home- – – (Vivint), Trains- – – (Hitachi), Cars- – – (Zipcar, car2go, Uber), etc. In other words, HaaS is new way of thinking. HaaS changes the relationship between the vendor and customer, extending one-time transaction into long-term relationship. This means customers need to pay more attention to how their vendors operate, and vendors need to pay more attention to their existing customers. Of course, HaaS may not fit all products. Some devices be so cheap that they’re disposable. Some be so expensive that they’ll require up-front payment just to support cash flow needs (especially for startups). Other businesses still thrive off of crowdfunded pre-sales. But HaaS is here, and we are better off because of it.
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Blackmoon launches in the US to match investors with balance-sheet lenders
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John Mannes
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It was only a matter of time before Tinder for balance-sheet lenders and debt investors became a thing. Financial matchmaking platform launched this week in the United States. The platform is designed to help institutional investors access non-bank balance-sheet loans. The Russian marketplace Lending-as-a-Service platform is also adding a New York office to its international footprint. Fair warning, the word comes up a lot in this piece. For simplicity’s sake, let’s assume an originator is any place where a loan is issued. We encounter originators in the primary loan market when getting a car or student loan. Blackmoon, on the other hand, operates in the secondary market. An originator can hold a loan on its own balance sheet or it can sell off the loan to third-party investors. This is not new and has gone on for quite a while. Historically, mortgage originators have held on to healthy loans and sold off unhealthy loans to third-party investors. Holding a balance-sheet loan allows the originator to reap all the financial benefits of the investment. Unfortunately, greater risk comes with greater return. When a balance-sheet loan is held, the holder assumes the default risk or credit risk of the loan. Originators sell off loans to third-party investors to isolate credit risk from financial returns. Originators forgo some profit in exchange for reduced risk. Blackmoon has built a financial platform that enables institutional investors to invest in balance-sheet loans. This enables originators to offer loans to third parties without going through a complex sales process. Instead of building marketplace infrastructure, investors can integrate their existing backend with the Blackmoon API. More than 70,000 loans have been purchased through the Blackmoon marketplace from eight originators in seven countries. The company ambitiously wants to hit $1 billion in brokered loans over the next year. Most of the online lenders Blackmoon has worked with are European online lenders processing alternative loans. Blackmoon has implemented a proprietary series of algorithms to evaluate and price loans. The company facilitates the communication of lending data between originators and investors. Originators using Blackmoon maintain a relationship with borrowers while offloading credit risk. Because the connection stays intact, originators can claim a servicing fee in exchange for maintaining the relationship with borrowers. Servicing loans is a lucrative business for originators. Originators maintain these benefits while keeping loans off the books. This frees originators from being required to hold capital against debt. Unfortunately, this money comes at a cost for originators. If a loan goes bad, the originator is tasked with negotiating a restructuring. In the event of a loan default, the originator is limited in what it can do because the loan is contractually owned by the investor. One reason this market is fairly unaddressed is because of the complex legal requirements for debt transactions, according to experts in the field we reached out to. Blackmoon says that the process is currently only standardized in Europe. The process in the U.S. is dependent on the type of loan being transacted. Blackmoon uses a broker-dealer license in most cases. There is a standard, fixed amount of responsibility assumed by the originators. Most people’s gut reaction, when encountering alternative investing platforms in the fintech world, is to start prophesying a financial apocalypse. Industry experts caution that the market is so underdeveloped that it is hard to say how things will play out once institutions have access to it. Secondary loan markets have been around for a very long time and creativity, even excessive creativity, in the finance world is not ending anytime soon. Hopefully, fixation with a new type of loan investment will keep investors at bay long enough to avoid a race to the bottom in loan quality. Importantly, the platform is servicing institutional investors, not everyday investors. Right now, Blackmoon is focused on curating the best quality investments possible.
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Signs of a new Samsung Gear VR are surfacing
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Lucas Matney
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It’s been less than a year since the consumer Gear VR was first shown off and it already seems as though Samsung and Oculus are regrouping to push out a new version of the pre-eminent mobile VR headset. A inexplicably found a listing from an Indian imports database that highlights a new model number (SM-R323) for the Gear VR device being shipped. Interesting, because the number falls after the current Gear VR’s SM-R322 model number and the Gear VR Innovator Edition’s SM-R321 before it. We know literally nothing else, except that these units are just “for testing and evaluation purpose.” The timing on this is very interesting, though. With the existing headset less than a year old and with a new Samsung smartphone (a new Note) on the horizon, which may embrace a new USB Type-C connector, the compatibility of the existing Gear VR with Samsung’s entire line might be timing out. All of this is occurring as Mobile VR is about to be blown wide open by . It’s still unclear whether Samsung has any interest in boosting the compatibility of its next-gen Galaxy devices with Daydream or if it will continue to go it alone. This particular iteration is critical to Oculus, whose Gear VR play has proven extremely valuable to the VR company, which has by most estimates seen much of its market penetration coming from the mobile platform (granted, most of those headsets were given away for free). Oculus’s model of working directly with Samsung at a system level was valuable in terms of promoting the seamlessness of software and hardware, but with Daydream that model may soon find itself outdated and untenable moving forward. The key will be launching the next-generation Gear VR with features that make it an irresistible upgrade, even among Daydream-compatible phones. The biggest feature on most people’s wish lists is inside-out positional tracking, which would give VR headset wearers the ability to move through space within virtual environments without having external sensors set up. Right now, Gear VR users are constrained to engaging with content by moving their heads around from a fixed point. Oculus CTO John Carmack has waxed poetic on the challenges of nailing positional tracking, so it may be premature to expect this feature in a next-gen Gear VR headset, but it also seems to be the clearest hurdle in the foreground, for what it’s worth. Other possibilities could involve eye-tracking or hand-tracking systems, but it likely won’t be anything that finds itself too at odds with the PC-powered Rift, as Oculus is moving toward being as cross-platform as possible content-wise. All of the inside-out position tracking work being done at Oculus is targeting dedicated cameras, not using the built in cell phone camera. — John Carmack (@ID_AA_Carmack) In other words, don't expect general purpose position tracking to show up as a software-update feature for existing GearVR systems. — John Carmack (@ID_AA_Carmack) It has been less than a year since the consumer Gear VR was unveiled, so it might seem a bit early for a new headset to emerge, but with how quickly sensor tech is evolving, it’s pretty unrealistic to expect that headsets will iterate at the same pace as game consoles. Whether a new headset comes forth mid-cycle for the S7 around the Galaxy Note 6/7 launch (expected next month, so perhaps a bit unlikely) or holds out for the S8 launches will pretty dramatically impact what the headsets are capable of specs-wise and just how progressive Samsung seems amongst its mobile VR competitors.
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NASA’s newly upgraded Pleiades supercomputer delves into the mysteries of star formation
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Devin Coldewey
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NASA scientists are bringing one of the most powerful computers in the world — just recently given a tune-up — to bear on the question “Where do stars come from?” So next time your toddler asks you that, you’ll be able to say something smart, like “hyper-dense elongated stellar filaments, child.” Pleiades is NASA’s flagship supercomputer, and over the last few months its keepers have with some hot new hardware. Sixteen racks of old and busted Westmere Xeon X5670s made room for 1,008 Broadwell nodes, bumping peak theoretical performance to 6.28 petaflops. That would Höchstleistungsrechenzentrum Stuttgart’s Hazel Hen and about even with the Swiss National Supercomputing Centre’s Piz Daint. That’s good, because the researchers need every flop. Using data gathered from a number of telescopes and instruments, as well as theoretical models, the ORION2 star formation simulation incorporates a wide array of forces: “gravity, supersonic turbulence, hydrodynamics (motion of molecular gas), radiation, magnetic fields, and highly energetic gas outflows,” . The results, helped along by the visualization team at NASA’s Ames Research Center, are hypnotizing. This video shows a “giant molecular cloud” over a period of 900,000 years as simulated by ORION2: A zoomed-in version can be seen at the . Astrophysicist Richard Klein, from UC Berkeley and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, leads . “Without NASA’s vast computational resources, it would not have been possible for us to produce these immense and complex simulations,” he explained in the release. So what did they actually learn? Well, when two regions of interstellar gas love each other very much, they succumb to gravitational forces and become turbulent, eventually collapsing into stellar clusters in chains and forming stellar nurseries. That more or less tallies with direct observations, but our window on the cosmos is necessarily somewhat limited, so we can’t just watch a protostar form over a million years or two. Models and simulations help with that. Better resolution is the next step: Simulating at a more precise level would let the researchers study the formation of stellar disks, thought to be the structures that eventually coalesce into planets. “Understanding star formation is a grand challenge problem,” Klein said. “Ultimately, our results support NASA’s science goal of determining the origin of stars and planets, as part of its larger challenge of figuring out the origin of the entire universe.”
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Nike releases open-source software to play with the techies
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John Mannes
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, the home of all things athletic, is joining the ranks of the programmers with its launch of open-source software. Last week, Nike published three : a JSON parsing framework, a distributed tracing solution for Java and a lightweight logging library written in Swift. The company also open-sourced the code that its own site on GitHub. While it’s cool that the company is experimenting with open source, the bar is high for traditional retailers to impress in the tech space. Many non-traditional companies have started releasing open-source projects. Walmart Labs, Target, Best Buy and even , for example, have GitHub accounts for sharing projects. One motivation for companies to post open-source content is to improve brand image. The fight for technical talent has never been more fierce. Companies like Nike want to engage potential employees early on and brand themselves as a tech company in the process. For all intents and purposes, companies like Nike and Walmart have been tech companies in disguise for quite some time. Nike has 10 iPhone apps and two iPad apps on the App Store. Nike also has an entire website dedicated to developer APIs for Nike Fuel. Walmart has three iPhone apps and an open product catalog API. We reached out to Nike for comment and will update this post.
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Rooster Teeth’s Burnie Burns on pioneering online-only video
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Felicia Shivakumar
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With more than 4.5 billion views and 8.5 million subscribers , plus their own video platform, there is no arguing that has paved their way as one of the premier online entertainment content brands. Starting the company in the spare bedroom of house 14 years ago — before YouTube, free video hosting or web encoding — Burns had a lot of ideas of what Rooster Teeth could be, but no way to know that video would change the way it did. This weekend Rooster Teeth, known as the creators of and other popular web series, held their annual RTX conference in Austin. Game developers, publishers and exhibitors came from near and far wanting to connect with the Rooster Teeth audience. The event featured demos of new products, debuted new RT content and showcased playthroughs of games yet to be seen by the public. Think of it as SXSW meets Comic Con, but with never-before-seen games streaming everywhere. The inaugural kicked off in 2011 with roughly 200 people and has since grown to more than 60,000, including special guests like Oculus creator Palmer Luckey and popular online video creators like . The Rooster Teeth team says they plan to continue to expand the RTX brand internationally with RTX Sydney in February 2017. TechCrunch swung by RTX to see what all the fuss was about. While there, we had some time to catch up with Rooster Teeth co-founder, Burnie Burns, to talk about the event, growth and the humble roots of the Rooster Teeth brand. Can you talk about the overlap between the Rooster Teeth fans and gamer community? Any news from the event that folks should know about? We announced new content, including new seasons of some of our most popular series, including , and , the addition of two episodes to the current season of our new animated series Camp Camp, a new series from our popular team and we officially greenlit a new animation and pop culture podcast called Fan Service. It was an eventful weekend. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4ul1CRGMBEg Media has changed dramatically in the past 10 years. What technology has made the biggest impact on your company? What moment did you realize that Rooster Teeth was a business? We started about three years before YouTube existed, so we had to host all the videos on our own servers at a co-location facility. When we got so many hits on our first few videos and we estimated our bandwidth bill was going to be about $12,000 a month, we knew that we had to establish a business model ASAP. As an independent media company, do you or have you ever considered yourself a media startup? Rooster Teeth essentially started its life in the bedroom of someone’s apartment, so we definitely have startup roots. We still have an ambitious and risk-taking startup mentality, we just now have more resources to do the things we’ve always wanted to do. How big is the company now? The company has around 220 employees, which is about double what we had this time last year, with growth coming to all areas of the company, including animation, live action production, broadcast production and in the production of features and series such as Day 5 and Crunch Time. We recently announced that paid subscribers to our FIRST SVOD platform is at 135K subs, with expectations to exceed 200K by end of year. When you started adding in new original programming, how do you know what people would want to see? Rooster Teeth has always listened to its community, and has grown and been around for so long because we take their feedback to heart. Creatively we try to stay true to ourselves, and make content that we know we would want to see, while also considering feedback from our audience. Rooster Teeth has often gone against the grain when it comes to distribution and sponsors. That must be working OK for you, considering the recent launch of FIRST, which allows fans to subscribe for premium content and early access? Rooster Teeth are definitely pioneers in the world of subscription online video. When we started the company, we asked our fans for help so we could continue making Red vs. Blue and they answered in a really big way. This was our Sponsorship program, and it has been a major reason why Rooster Teeth has grown. Does having such a loyal following make doing things your own way a lot easier? We’re very fortunate to have this great community of fans, and it has definitely allowed us to take some risks and try new things. What has the reaction been within the community so far? In 14 years of working in online video, I have learned that the internet demands progress, but the internet hates change. It’s our job to make sure the changes are actually progress. So far our fans have been pretty supportive. We saw a great response at RTX to our new Double Gold membership level, and we’re still seeing great response from fans who are signing up to watch our new series Day 5. Fans love the brand. At it’s core, what is it that you think they are drawn to, connect to? At Rooster Teeth, we make content that we want to watch. We do not make videos simply because we think there is an audience for them. We make it for ourselves and have faith that there are enough people out there like us that will want to see it as well. This gives us a genuine, authentic voice that our viewers trust. For us, it means we have a massive global audience that is really like a huge group of friends.
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Homan Yuen
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Tesla’s reported Autopilot 2.0 will face new goalposts for ‘smart’
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Darrell Etherington
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Two separate reports claim Autopilot 2.0, an enhanced version of Tesla’s Autopilot semi-autonomous driving tech, is coming to vehicles soon, potentially as part of the upcoming 8.0 update of Tesla’s software. that Autopilot 2.0 is confirmed as “coming soon,” while discussed the feature in an earlier piece focused on the overall 8.0 version update for Tesla vehicles. What would Autopilot 2.0 bring to the table? According to the TechnoBuffalo report, it would use the new dual-camera hardware that has been spotted in some prototype Model S and Model X units roving the streets. Thanks to those cameras, the Autopilot 2.0 system has a couple of new abilities, according to the site’s anonymous source, including a way to automatically detect and stop in response to stop signs and red traffic lights. Electrek says that the new Autopilot 2.0 features, which include more than just the ones reported by TechnoBuffalo, will rely heavily on the new sensor suite, so it’s unlikely that a lot of the advances will be backward compatible. Any forthcoming Autopilot updates released by Tesla will be met with new levels of scrutiny, both in terms of public perception and likely regulatory attention, too. These new features definitely sound like net wins in terms of advancing progress toward a safer autonomous vehicle, but everything has changed now that we’ve seen two recent accidents involving Autopilot, one of which and one . In many ways, we’ve been warned: Players like Google and Ford have made no secret about versus a more graduated approach like the one Tesla has implemented with Autopilot. At the very least, it seems likely that Tesla will rethink how it presents driver-assist technologies like Autopilot, and it could also make some technical tweaks along the lines of what Tesla owner and industry observer Marco Arment suggests in his . As for Autopilot 2.0, it’s hard to imagine the company proceeding with a rollout of any successor to its autonomous tech in the midst of everything else that’s happening, even if on paper the benefits of the new features would improve safety overall. We reached out to Tesla for comment on any forthcoming updates to Autopilot but did not receive a response in time for publication.
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(Some) LPs speak up
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Connie Loizos
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Venture capital used to be such an insular, under-the-radar industry that entrepreneur-investor Marc Andreessen has said that he’d never heard the term before arriving in the Bay Area in 1994. He’s hardly alone. It wasn’t until the mid- to late-1990s, during the dot.com boom, that the world became acquainted with what venture capitalists do. And it wasn’t until after venture capitalists Fred Wilson and Brad Feld began publishing insights about their work roughly 12 years ago that the art of VC blogging began to border on competitive sport. The exercise has paid off for many investors. Among those to actively raise their profiles (and presumably, increase their deal flow) through blogging are Jason Lemkin, whose new venture fund we covered ; Hunter Walk of ; and Mark Suster of . (CB Insights has a longer rundown of VC bloggers .) Institutional investors, the money behind the VCs’ money, have not followed suit, though there’s reason to think the industry is thinking more about outreach at long last. Indeed, though these limited partners (LPs) have largely remained mum, not sharing much about their selection process, not blogging, and not talking publicly with reporters, a few signals suggest a change may be afoot, including recent feedback from one investor from a mid-size university endowment, who recently shared on background that he’s been asked to raise his profile. The reason, simply: competition. As you may have noticed, a of so-called top-tier venture funds now manages more of the money flowing into venture capital than ever before. Still, these firms can only responsibly manage so much, which puts pressure on LPs who want stakes in those venture funds. Perhaps because of uncertainty about the market, LPs are also less interested in brand-new funds right now than in the second or third funds of micro-venture firms that are starting to prove themselves. , which has the amount of money it is managing in the last four years, is just the latest example. These managers, too, can only make room for so many LPs. Then there’s foreign money. More specifically, there’s more of it than ever to compete with. Take , which is the investment advisory arm of Shengjing Group and the largest global fund of funds in China. Its U.S.-based managing partner told this reporter in March that Peakview has to invest in U.S. venture firms. To curry favor with them, it’s promising to help their portfolio companies bridge networking gaps between the U.S. and China. How LPs are working to gain an edge differs. While many debate their strategies internally, other institutions are proceeding, slowly, into public view. This spring, for example, the 33-year-old global private equity fund of funds took to Twitter to share part of its approach to venture investing and why it favors funding early-stage firms. (We should note that these tweets are among 130 total that the firm has ever published, but, baby steps.) 1/ We’re often asked about the risk/reward trade-offs for early vs late stage venture investing; we look to our data (5,500+ realized deals) — Horsley Bridge (@HorsleyBridge) 2/ Failure rates (i.e., where value < cost) are remarkably similar across going-in stages: 62% for seed/early vs. 52% for mid/late… — Horsley Bridge (@HorsleyBridge) 3/ …yet the odds of achieving the all-important 10x+ investment are 60% greater when investing in earlier rounds at lower valuations — Horsley Bridge (@HorsleyBridge) 4/ In short, the “downside protection” afforded by investing later is fairly small, while the upside potential is significantly dampened — Horsley Bridge (@HorsleyBridge) 5/ As a result, nearly all great late stage venture funds, like their early stage peers, are driven by a small number of outsized winners — Horsley Bridge (@HorsleyBridge) 6/ In our experience, the best late stage VCs recognize upside potential as key to outperformance and place their bets accordingly — Horsley Bridge (@HorsleyBridge) Other LPs are taking a more active approach, comparatively, including , a managing director at the fund of funds group who appeared at our most recent Disrupt event and who has famously written a widely read for years. You can see why it’s a popular read. In one recent entry, he offers this unvarnished fundraising tip: “‘You’ll be sorry you missed this’ has never once worked as a tactic to get me — or most LPs for that matter — interested in a fund. Neither has telling me, ‘If you miss this fund, you’ll never be able to get into future funds.’ Such bluster usually earns [a] one-way ticket to my ‘managers’ folder, a place that is alphabetically and existentially distinct from my ‘interesting managers’ folder.” of — who oversees a $400 million fund whose capital comes from software giant SAP and that has backed roughly a dozen early-stage firms — is another LP whose star is rising because of her public outreach (which has included for TechCrunch). Over coffee recently, Clarkson talked at length about the “connective tissue” that now exists between LPs, VCs and startups, as well as the array of activities that Sapphire involves itself in, including helping organize regular events and making introductions to its VCs’ portfolio companies. Asked why she bothers — Sapphire already has investments in an array of strong firms, including August Capital, Data Collective and the Berlin-based firm Point Nine Capital — she seemed surprised by the question. “I don’t pretend that what we’re doing is brain surgery,” she said, laughing. “But we’re passionate about the value that an LP can have, and if you have the ability to do it, why not?” Besides, she added, “We really think there’s a lot more that the world wants to know [about what LPs do].”
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Glassbreakers shutting down personal mentorship platform to focus on enterprise
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Megan Rose Dickey
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Enterprise is where the money’s at. Today, is shutting down its consumer-focused platform for peer-to-peer mentorship for women. This comes a few months after Glassbreakers launched its . “Our opportunity to accelerate inclusion in the workforce through our technology is monumental – especially for a small startup,” Glassbreakers Co-Founder and CEO Eileen Carey wrote in an email to users late last month. “The time has come to put all of our efforts into our enterprise suite of software solutions. We are thrilled to make an impact on a global scale with our incredibly innovative enterprise partners.” Current members of the Glassbreakers community will be transitioned onto Glassbreakers Take The Lead, a platform in partnership with Take The Lead, an organization that aims to help women excel and reach gender parity by 2025. The hybrid platform will be powered by the Glassbreakers enterprise software solution and career resources from Take The Lead. This platform . Glassbreakers has been working with Take The Lead for “quite some time,” Glassbreakers spokesperson Rose Dawydiak-Rapagnani told me. “They are paying customers and now with Glassbreakers Take The Lead, they are our partners.” She went on to say that the partnership will allow for Glassbreakers’ “consumer product community to continue to connect with great peer mentors alongside Take The Lead’s large community.” It’s a smart move for Glassbreakers to solely focus on the enterprise market. In 2013, big corporations collectively spent $8 billion on diversity, , but none of that money went toward software. Glassbreakers’ enterprise software solution is geared toward companies with at least 10,000 employees and aims to offer mentorship for women inside their respective companies. “Our enterprise software solution is really focused on employee resource group management, and we need to be hyper focused on deploying that product with our clients right now,” Dawydiak-Rapagnani said. Back in January, Glassbreakers raised $1.98 million from Social Leverage. At the time, Social Leverage General Partner Gary Benitt said that he believed the company’s enterprise model solves a huge pain for large businesses. “We see tremendous growth opportunities with Glassbreakers as the first to market enterprise software for diversity,” Benitt said. Meanwhile, Glassbreakers co-founder Lauren Mosenthal and now-former CTO is no longer at the company. Mosenthal left Glassbreakers at the end of June, and Dawydiak-Rapagnani, who said that she left to “support other opportunities.” I’ve reached out to Mosenthal, and will update this story if I hear back. Here’s a throwback to when Mosenthal was still at the company.
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Canonical-Pivotal partnership makes Ubuntu preferred Linux distro for Cloud Foundry
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Ron Miller
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, developers of the Cloud Foundry open source cloud development platform and , the company behind the popular Ubuntu Linux distribution, announced a partnership today where Ubuntu becomes the preferred operating system for Cloud Foundry. In fact, the two companies have been BFFs since the earliest days of Cloud Foundry when it was an open source project developed at VMware. When VMware, EMC and GE spun out Pivotal as a separate company in 2013, Cloud Foundry was a big part of that and the relationship continued through today. Dustin Kirkland, head of Ubuntu product and strategy at Canonical, said he was surprised it took so long to formalize it, but today’s announcement marks a more official partnership. It should help make life easier for Cloud Foundry customers running Ubuntu Linux in a number of important ways. First of all, it enables easy Ubuntu Linux upgrades and automated security patch management to give Cloud Foundry users quick access to any critical updates. It also gives them access to Level 3 Ubuntu support. That means when there’s a problem that Cloud Foundry support personnel identify as an Ubuntu issue, the ticket gets transferred to Ubuntu where they handle it. In grey areas, which happen occasionally, Kirkland said they will work together to sort it out, but both companies have extensive experience performing support triage. What’s more, the two companies have agreed to work together on a security certification framework, so that Ubuntu and Pivotal will be involved with the organizations writing the security standards manuals, which Ubuntu uses as a guide to build the most secure operating system possible. This is particularly important because the two companies can now help define and write these standards in a way that makes sense to them. “We’ve signed up and are contributing to next iteration of these benchmarks, and we’re taking a more active role in developing these guides going forward.” Kirkland explained. Since its inception, Pivotal has raised an astonishing $1.7 billion, according to Crunchbase. In its most recent round in May, Pivotal led by Ford Motor Company on a valuation of $2.8 billion.
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Remember hoverboards? Half a million are being recalled as fire hazards
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Devin Coldewey
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Hoverboards! The must-have trash gadget of the holidays, now gathering dust in a million closets and garages nationwide, is being recalled in even larger numbers than before due to “a risk of the products smoking, catching fire and/or exploding.” Someone warn Justin Bieber! If you have any kind of hoverboard, AKA a “self-balancing scooter,” as the Consumer Product Safety Commission refers to them, you should probably . If you have a Hover-Way, Powerboard, Hype Roam, iMoto, Airwalk, Hovertrax, Wheeli, 2Wheelz, Hover Shark, X Glider, X Rider, Orbit, or hoverboard sold by Overstock.com, it’s being recalled. Do you have one of the popular Swagway X1s? Grab a fire extinguisher. It’s amazing you haven’t been burned already: there have been of that brand alone burning up, and more than a quarter million are being recalled. That these things are unsafe was kind of part of the appeal, but people were expecting twisted ankles, not house fires. Enough have exploded that this widespread recall was initiated. Reports of burning hoverboards have made fabulous TV news fodder for months, and videos showing them blowing up have millions of views on YouTube. Some are almost certainly fake, of course, since they hawk hoverboards in the descriptions — superior models, naturally. Why do they explode? Because they’re all cheap knockoffs ordered by the hundred thousand from factories in China that (unlike plenty of other factories in China, I hasten to add) don’t care about producing a high-quality device. You’re getting bargain-bin mainboards, sloppy solder, and cast-off batteries wired together to meet power requirements. When a Furby-like holiday rush occurs, there’s gold in them thar clueless consumers, and these factories pump them out by the millions. Smart importers snatch up thousands of the things for a hundred bucks each, slap a sticker on them and mark them up 500 percent and sell them on the boardwalk. There better ones out there, with calibrated drive software and high-quality batteries, but generally unless you crack the suckers open you won’t be able to tell which is which (unless it’s already on fire, in which case it’s probably a knockoff). Hoverboards have already been banned from various establishments, airlines, and other locations owing to their tendency to, if not explode, at least produce chaos. If you have an affected hoverboard, check whether you can get a refund or whether you’ll have to send it in for repairs or credit towards a new one.
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NextVR scores $20 million from a Chinese investment firm
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Lucas Matney
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NextVR confirmed today that the company has received $20 million in funding from a Chinese investment firm as a part of an upcoming Series B raise. The news surfaced earlier this week on after regulatory documents from CITIC Group Corp. were discovered. The $20M is just a slice of the Series B raise; Variety reports that NextVR is looking to raise $80 million at a $800 million valuation. In an email, a company representative confirmed the investment from CITIC, while also detailing that the company “will announce additional investment partners soon and provide more information then.” While most VR content networks grow at a sluggish pace due to the slow but steady proliferation of virtual reality headsets, NextVR is aggressively pursuing strategic partnerships. The company, which is backed by Formation 8 and Comcast Ventures, has already signed multiyear partnerships with and to host a great deal of live content in VR. The company has been doing a notable job at becoming the mainstream bet for big time media/broadcasting outlets to start experimenting with virtual reality. As the company starts moving its VR content capture efforts globally, this raise from a Chinese investment firm gets even more interesting for NextVR’s future exploits.
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Pokémon Go has already taught me so much
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Darrell Etherington
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I’ve been playing for most of today because no force in heaven or on earth could stop me, and here are a few things that I’ve learned about the game, myself and life as a result. More like Prof. Dreamboat Five is a lot of kms for those of you confused by the metric system You can’t buy your way to being the very best and retain your honor Use these instead That’s actually an empty dog bowl. I totally don’t eat dog food though. Honest. Objectively the best People just managed to get out of frame when they spotted a wild beard (me) apparently taking a picture Yep, that’s three percent in five minutes Pokémon Go is still only available on a limited basis worldwide, and it’s also clearly dealing with fervent interest in terms of server capacity, so I’m not going to dive into any kind of real review. But it is already core to my personal identity.
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Light raises $30M and announces L16 camera is delayed until 2017
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Haje Jan Kamps
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If you were eagerly awaiting your “late summer” delivery of your pre-ordered , today will bring an impatient tear to your eye. In parallel with announcing having raised $30 million from ( Google Ventures), the company sent out an email to early supporters telling them they’d have to wait for a while longer. I’ve known the delay was in the cards for a while, but the company has consistently denied that anything was awry. When I queried the company about it back in March, a spokesperson said, “We are on track and the second group of shipments are for the fall.” Since the pre-order launch, quite a few things have changed. Originally, the company announced it was planning to provide 35-150mm optical zoom equivalent. The company claims that its pre-order customers wanted a wider focal length, and are changing the zoom range to 28-150mm optical zoom equivalents instead. Light’s L16 is undoubtedly an unusual looking beastie — but teaching it to see is turning out to be a bigger challenge than the company anticipated. In addition, the company announced it is bumping the memory spec from 128GB to 256GB of built-in memory. It is unclear exactly what it is that’s causing the camera to be delayed until “Early 2017,” but it’s never good news when a company is changing the specs of an already announced product; it sounds good, of course, but more often than not it means the changes in spec solve a problem in engineering along the way. Pure speculation, perhaps, but a source within the company tells me it has had problems getting the camera’s firmware to behave sensibly, and that the camera was struggling to operate as intended. “Since our launch, we have become intimately familiar with the mantra the company told its pre-order customers. “We have made a monumental amount of progress thanks to a remarkable team.” “We encountered an unforeseeable delay in production of the critical, highly customized ASIC chip,” a spokesperson for the company told me today. “does the bulk of the heavy lifting for the L16, and is the cause of the anticipated shipment delay.”
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Gridstore acquires DCHQ and becomes HyperGrid
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Frederic Lardinois
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, a company that focuses on building software and data center appliances for Windows Hyper V-based clouds, today announced that it has acquired , a service that helps enterprises move their applications to any cloud or container infrastructure (with a specific focus on Java-based applications). With this acquisition, Gridstore is changing its name to HyperGrid and the old DCHQ platform is now called HyperForm. The new company offers three products: the , the HyperGrid on-demand platform, and HyperConverged Infrastructure as a Service (HCIaaS). The new product here is HCIaaS. “HCIaaS is the first solution that bridges the needs of traditional and cloud-native developers with IT Operations, delivering an AWS-like environment for your Enterprise that enables complete DevOps,” the company says in today’s announcement. A company spokesperson similarly described the new service as “an application aware offering that brings the simplicity and ease of use of HCI together with a pay as you consume pricing model that scales elastically.” In case you were wondering, hyperconverged, which is probably one of my least favorite terms in the enterprise jargon, basically means combining compute, storage and networking into a single software and hardware platform that uses commodity hardware and a unified management interface. It’s worth noting that Gridstore/HyperGrid isn’t exactly the only player in this space. With Nutanix, HP, Oracle, EMC’s VCE, Cisco, NetApp and others, there are plenty of vendors who are also betting on . Gartner’s pegs the overall market for hyperconverged infrastructure services at about $2 billion this year and $5 billion in 2019. DCHQ’s technology will become an important part of HyperGrid’s offerings. It will allow HyperGrid to offer better support for containers on its platform and also enable enterprises to more easily adopt containers and its platform. It’s worth noting though that DCHQ/HyperForm will continue to support other cloud and container infrastructures, including VMware vSphere, OpenStack, AWS, Azure and others. “We are thrilled to have DCHQ be an integral technology for HyperGrid,” said DCHQ CEO Amjad Afanah (who co-founded the company together with Intesar Mohammed) in today’s announcement. “HyperGrid solves a real pain point for our customers struggling with innovation in the digital economy. Our combined platform will dramatically simplify IT Operations and help enterprises deliver applications faster and cheaper than going to the public Cloud.” The terms of the acquisition were not disclosed, but Gridstore recently raised a $19 million Series C round and has raised a total of $44.47 million . https://youtu.be/HjcER-r5InI
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Clinton launches app designed to gamify campaigning
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Brian Heater
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For better or worse, preaching the gospel of your candidate no longer requires leaving the couch. As anyone who’s cracked open a social media account over the past year can corroborate, the platforms are lousy with campaign slogans, incriminating links and, um, spirited discussions. In the lead up to next week’s Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia, Hillary Clinton’s campaign is launching an app designed to turn an iPhone into a “digital HQ.” What does that mean, precisely? It’s essentially a way for the campaign to offer up a one-stop shop for outspoken followers to follow along at home, with check-ins to events and televised speeches, quizzes on the candidate’s policies and the like. The app is designed to gamify the campaigning process, offering up virtual badges and real life prizes for activities like sharing videos through Facebook – as if eager followers needed another reason to post candidate affirming content on social media. As , the simply titled was inspired by FarmVille and built by former employees of DreamWorks Animation, Charity: Water and Livestream. At the very least, it’s a decidedly more positive approach to social sharing than the campaign’s recent Trump Yourself app.
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Metal 3D printing takes flight
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Filemon Schoffer
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While many designers and engineers find success with 3D-printing parts in plastic for prototyping and low-volume production, producing parts out of metal using similar technology has recently led to the creation of some of the most exciting 3D-printed parts in memory. With key patents for metal printing , things are looking particularly exciting. Although the mainstream consumer adoption of 3D printing might be falling behind on certain expectations, metal 3D printing for product designers and engineers seems to be delivering on all the potential that 3D printing has in store. At its core, “metal 3D printing” is a simplified term for a metal-based additive manufacturing process; primarily either Direct Metal Laser Sintering (DMLS) or Selective Laser Melting (SLM). Unlike conventional metal fabrication techniques that rely on removing or stamping metals to arrive at an intended design, metal 3D printing builds objects up layer by layer through fusing material together with a programmed laser that literally draws each layer shape until an object has been produced. When combined with modern and powerful design tools that optimize simulation and analysis to generate an optimal design solution — such as newer generative design tools used to produce lightweight, latticed designs that are functionally optimized and accurate for production via additive manufacturing — the resulting parts not only take less time to design, but are also significantly stronger and lighter than part designs that are produced using conventional manufacturing methods. In space exploration, for example, industry leaders such as Elon Musk’s SpaceX and NASA have fully embraced metal 3D printing as a way to produce rocket ship parts that have drastically lowered costs while highly improving performance. SpaceX, , relied heavily on the custom metal parts for the combustion chamber of the SpaceX SuperDraco engine. for their rocket engine that was put together with 45 percent fewer parts than pumps made through conventional manufacturing processes. It seems like it’s only a matter of time before an entire rocket engine is capable of being 3D printed. Thus, 3D printing may be overhyped in some industries, but it is certainly delivering in others. Closer to Earth, the aerospace industry is one of the fastest-growing industries to adopt 3D-printed metals because of the capability to dramatically reduce overall aircraft weight while increasing construction efficiency and allowing for design customizations. As of today, aircraft manufacturing giant Boeing has produced more than on airplanes that have been delivered to their customers. Similarly, . The company is even making their unique technology accessible to other professionals outside Airbus. Just like 3D-printed metal parts are revolutionizing air travel both in space and on Earth, they are also allowing for breakthrough achievements in the healthcare industry. The outlook is so promising, in fact, that the for medical procedures. Recent successful applications of metal 3D printing in the medical sector include and a — both of which were custom tailored for cancer patients using digital scans after tumor removal surgeries. Subtractive metal manufacturing methods, including grinding, machining and milling helped bring us some of the most exciting products and technologies within the last 200 years, but it’s only taken us a handful of years to realize just how powerful additive metal manufacturing can be. Paired with powerful new design capabilities from modern CAD software and the ability to create entirely new geometries that were otherwise impossible to manufacture, industries that have come to rely on complex metal products — particularly space exploration, aerospace and healthcare — are experiencing a manufacturing revolution thanks to the capabilities of 3D printing. At its core, it seems that these industries of highly customizable, complex metal parts, produced in relatively limited amounts, are the perfect market fit for 3D printing. With new metal 3D printers and materials popping up left and right, it seems only fair that the hype for metal 3D printing continues to thrive.
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Democratic National Committee chair steps down following Wikileaks email release
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Brian Heater
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In a massive shake up just ahead of Monday’s convention in Philadelphia, Florida congresswoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz announced today that as the head of the Democratic National Committee after the end of the event. The move comes as calls for her to resign have increased in the wake of a . In amongst the 20,000 messages exposed on Friday were exchanges that seemed to illustrate a strong bias against presidential candidate Bernie Sanders. Over the weekend, the Vermont Senator responded to the messages — including one that suggested highlighting his religion in order to negatively impact his campaign — with calls for Wasserman Schultz to resign. Sanders, not surprisingly, reacted positively to the news. “Debbie Wasserman Schultz has made the right decision for the future of the Democratic Party,” he wrote in statement issued tonight. “While she deserves thanks for her years of service, the party now needs new leadership that will open the doors of the party and welcome in working people and young people. The party leadership must also always remain impartial in the presidential nominating process, something which did not occur in the 2016 race.” Hillary Clinton had decidedly more positive words for her “longtime friend,” writing in a statement, “I am grateful to Debbie for getting the Democratic Party to this year’s historic convention in Philadelphia, and I know that this week’s events will be a success thanks to her hard work and leadership. There’s simply no one better at taking the fight to the Republicans than Debbie.” The presumptive nominee added that Wasserman Schultz will serve as the “honorary chair” of the Secretary’s 50 state program. In spite of the timing, Wasserman Schultz insists that she will still play a role in this week’s convention. She wrote in a statement, “as Party Chair, this week I will open and close the Convention and I will address our delegates about the stakes involved in this election not only for Democrats, but for all Americans.”
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Regenerative medicine today is like the internet in 1993
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Andrew Keen
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is the co-founder CEO of , a regenerative medical company that has crowdsourced blood samples to create the world’s biggest and most diverse bio-repository. According to Smith, regenerative medicine is the next big thing in medical science — so disruptive, in fact, that he says it’s akin to the Internet in 1993. No wonder, then, that ORIG3N has already raised over $15 million with the last December’s from healthcare specialists Hatteras Venture Partners and Syno Capital. Given all the over Theranos, the issue of the regulation of regenerative medicine is, of course, really salient. But according to Smith, we don’t need massive new regulation for an revolutionary industry that can potentially enable the creation of more personalized and cost effective drugs. Indeed, he says that 20th century regulation from above featuring traditional FDA processes doesn’t work anymore. Instead, he says, we should learn from Japan, which has pioneered a light touch style of regulation built especially around this new technology. Education is important too, Smith insists, for introducing regenerative medicine to both the public and to government. As well as the creation of a healthy ecosystem to drive medical innovation. As always, many thanks to the folks at CALinnovates for their help in the production of this interview.
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Don’t feed the trolls — tackle their abuse of platform power instead
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Natasha Lomas
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In the ever accelerating social media feedback loops of the modern Internet age, ‘don’t feed the trolls’ is a phrase that appears to have fallen out of fashion, favor and collective memory. The result? An impoverished quality of debate that frequently and increasingly appears to be approaching something resembling mass hysteria as trolls are delivered dining on-demand. Simply put: you can’t have meaningful discussion if you are forever polarizing into two sides simply screaming at each other. Both apparently convinced to the threat-sending death that one worldview rules supreme. Case in point: Just this week Twitter finally fell into the trap of the Internet’s most self-aggrandizing troll — the self-styled “supervillain” Milo Yiannopoulos — by . Twitter had previously punished Yiannopoulos’ provocations by removing his privileged blue-tick status. It’s now gone the whole hog and ‘no-platformed’ the platform-loving self-promoter. The predictable result? Yiannopoulos gets to step up his native swagger by parading a status as the ‘victim of Internet censorship’. Quoth he: 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. The straw that broke Jack Dorsey’s quavering resolve to let one professional troll’s tweets flow was the latter’s sophisticated ability to marshal his Twitter followers (aka his ‘adoring fans’) to fire forth a stream of targeted abuse on his behalf. Not that Yiannopoulos takes responsibility for the actions of his followers, of course. He walks the provocateur’s fine line — ensuring the abuse he personally doles out, while horrible, remains just that: one person’s unpleasant viewpoint. So he wouldn’t admit to anything as crass as getting others to do his dirty work. The wider point here is that tech platforms — most especially Twitter’s broadcast network — can be trivially manipulated to magnify a particular sentiment. Whether that’s a humorous trending hashtag or vile racial abuse. Social media platforms are already structured to disseminate information. But with a little bit of choreographed intent a relatively small set of networked connections can be chained together to hugely theatrical effect — repurposing mainstream outlets into single cause megaphones. All the modern day Internet ‘supervillain’ (or social justice warrior/SJW, if you prefer) has to do is pout out their call to action, which will disseminate onto sympathetic fellow forums, and watch as their adoring fans pile in. Then they merely need sit back in a high backed computer desk chair and let out a devilish laugh. And so in the latest instance of Yiannopoulos’ slickly executed social media manipulations a public critique of Ghostbusters actor Leslie Jones yields a vile stream of targeted abuse — and the understandable reaction from Jones to quit Twitter. “I leave Twitter tonight with tears and a very sad heart,” she tweeted, before departing the platform. “All this cause I did a movie. You can hate the movie but the shit I got today… wrong.” What do trolls crave? Attention. What do they feed on? Outrage generated by provocation. How do you accelerate trolls’ outrage cycles? By doing what they’re hoping you’ll do – firstly by paying them attention, and then by reacting in a way they can paint as unjust (e.g. shutting them down). Or which they can celebrate as a win (e.g. the shutting down of their target). In the Leslie Jones case Yiannopoulos can chalk up two wins: his own censorship by Twitter, and the self-censorship of Jones quitting Twitter after he criticized her performance and his fans piled in to racially abuse her. This is the ‘by the book’ formula that lurks behind the well-trodden maxim ‘don’t feed the trolls’. Yet Twitter just fed the Internet’s self-styled king troll a two-course meal of the very finest troll dining. So what can we learn from this sorry situation? Apart from the obvious – that trolls are horrible and racial abuse is intolerable. One clear takeaway is that the structures of social networks are being far too trivially subverted and manipulated by entities with malicious or determined intent. Twitter clearly can and should do far more to stop orchestrated pile-ins designed to amplify abuse and carry out campaigns of harassment on its platform. Bottom line: it’s not free speech if it’s a choreographed campaign of targeted abuse. As I’ve , at the time of the #Gamergate saga: “…small, orchestrated online groups can magnify the impact and influence of fringe viewpoints by weaponizing mainstream digital services to repurpose these platforms as propaganda machines. This is not a new thing but the frequency with which it is happening online appears to be growing, and the toxicity being generated is becoming harder to escape as the tactics in play are honed and polished to ever greater effect.” But arguably there’s something else we need to consider. We can perhaps also say that certain malicious entities are holding up a (black) mirror to the political correctness they abhor – aka the modus operandi of their SJW foes – and using the same single issue megaphone method, aka the bounce back amplification made possible by follower-based tech platforms, to win (or so they would argue, as Yiannopoulos has) the Internet’s ‘culture wars’. At this strange juncture in the evolution of the mainstream media, see also: Donald Trump achieving a similar effect by subverting the news media’s drama-seeking lens. The point is that when debate gets closed down and nuance gets tramped underfoot and empathy gets battered to death we all lose. That’s the ugly truth Yiannopoulos is illustrating via a sort of ‘media process deconstructing performance art’, if I can put it that way. Point is: Any single opinion amplified via this megaphone method of follower armies intent on crushing alternative perspectives can be oppressive to those with a differing view. Moreover, no one who self-styles as an ‘Internet supervillain’ should be taken at face value. Such a person is stating they are playing a role and inviting us to critique their melodrama. Their mission is to force their enemies to confront their own Manichean flaws, reflected in reverse. To not deconstruct the drama is to walk right into the massive pitfall trolls exist to set. And that’s where we are now: With the self styled king troll gloating over the Twitter whale tangled up in his subtle net. Zooming out again, it’s becoming increasingly clear that the shouting down of points of view on the Internet happens on all sides of the political spectrum – whether it’s leftwing campaigners taking up a diversity/feminist/gay rights/etc etc cause, and urging their followers (implicitly or intentionally) to shout down opposing viewpoints. Or conservative supervillains jerking liberal chains and rattling leftwing cages on mainstream tech platforms by acting out a manist, white-supremacist tantrum-pantomime in plain sight. You could argue that neither radical left nor radical right appears willing to accept there might be more shades of grey than are allowed for by one particular entrenched perspective — as they fight their take-no-prisoners culture wars via the tech platforms that give them the power to turn a personal viewpoint into a weapon of mass media destruction, aiming to level the landscape of debate via the tribalism of fervent follower armies. Yet the Internet is connecting more diverse viewpoints than ever, as more and more people come online. So we’re going to have to get used to confronting alternative views. Simply screaming down difference doesn’t seem to be an approach that will scale. You might not like the message but trigger-finger shooting down of the other side’s messenger is perpetuating the Internet’s culture clashes by encouraging a ramping up of verbal violence and a reduction in the diversity of debate available on tech platforms – which are fast becoming the only mass media. (And, as , pile-in public shamings that close down debate by cementing a majority judgment are fast becoming the new majority entertainment.) If your actions end up stripping out the possibility for nuance or individual disagreement and demanding complicated humans reduce to polarized positions then you can’t be too surprised if braindead abuse is all you’re left with. And so we are all impoverished by Twitter’s knee-jerk banning of single transgressing individuals while it fails to address the underlying problem of the hijacking of its platform by orchestrated abuse campaigns. As tempting as it may be, censoring individual trolls is not how the technology industry wins the war against trolling. Individual stupid opinions are just that: one voice in a sea of voices. Tech platforms need to tackle those actors who would weaponize a personal viewpoint by cutting the strings to the puppet armies that give them disproportionate volume to force their views on others. It’s not the single bad or provocative opinion that should trouble society and its technology platforms. We should not fear to engage with difference or publicly shun ignorance. Indeed, by closing down the single voice of the other you hand that entity a verified status as a persecuted individual. You gift them additional fuel to pour on the fires they live to start. Rather you need to take away their power to turn one opinion into a mass attack. It’s the follower armies that wreak havoc on mainstream platforms that Twitter should be seeking to close down with tools that prevent pile-ins of orchestrated abuse. And with rules and structures designed to pop not promote filter bubbles. Social discourse suffers if it can’t support an understanding of alternative views. And empathy is rarely encouraged by closing the door on a lone problem voice. At the end of the day, if you don’t offer the courtesy of listening, how can you properly articulate the valid reasons why you disagree?
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Yahoo’s board reportedly agrees to $4.8 billion Verizon bid
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Jonathan Shieber
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According to , Yahoo’s board has accepted the terms of the Verizon offer . The core assets of the company that started life in Jerry Yang and David Filo’s 1994 Stanford dorm room as “Jerry and David’s Guide to the World Wide Web” — and at one point was one of the highest valued properties on the internet — will now join another former high-flyer of the internet’s earliest days, Aol (full disclosure: the owner of TechCrunch), in the Verizon stable. It’s hard to overstate how dominant a player Yahoo once was. The company, which now holds most of its value in its Alibaba investment, was once a $125 billion behemoth that dominated internet search and commanded one of the highest valuations of any online business — it was Google before Google was Google. Like Aol, Yahoo was never able to fully recover from the dot-com crash. The advent of Google (and then Facebook) pushed both early Internet portals further toward irrelevance as one Google’s search algorithm prevailed and Facebook a new method for browsing online — replacing monolithic portals with personalized feeds tailored to the tastes of social networking peers. And in the age of mobile browsing and apps, the company’s relevance eroded even further. Yahoo grew up with the early Internet and for a time it was the site for nearly everything. From an online directory, the site ballooned to include email providers (Four11), web hosting services (Geocities), and video and radio simulcasting through the $5.7 billion acquisition of Mark Cuban’s Broadcast.com. https://youtu.be/N___4_StGtQ The acquisition strategy that brought the company success in the late-90s foundered in the wake of the dot com crash. Marquee deals for have f . Still, it looks like Yahoo chief executive Marissa Mayer will be able to enjoy a comfortable landing, whatever becomes of her after the Verizon deal. is speculating that she could receive a severance package worth about $57 million, after raking in cash and stock worth $218 million during her time at the top of the faltering giant. The terms of the sale aren’t official, but (among others) is reporting that the $41 billion worth of Alibaba shares that Yahoo holds will remain in the hands of its current shareholders (along with Yahoo Japan and some patents).
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Why car tech companies should look to Amazon for inspiration
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Darrell Etherington
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automotive tech available ahead of the arrival of fully self-driving vehicles should, ideally, be incredibly sophisticated, and completely invisible to users. So far, of all the major tech companies, Amazon is the closest to striking that balance. Computers are complicated, and one thing drivers don’t need in cars is complication. The safe operation of big, heavy, motor-powered vehicles that can travel as high speed relies heavily on an attentive driver paying attention to the control systems they use to make the car go, as well as to the world around them. Computers, whatever other advantages they have, require attention and focus to operate; figuring out how to make a computer do what you want, especially for any kind of advanced operationn, was always (and remains for many) a learning experience nearly on par with mastering a new language. You probably shouldn’t be learning a language while operating a 2,600-pound piece of metal going 60 miles-per-hour. Not if you want to do either well, at least. Computers have come a long way in terms of being intuitive to pick up and use, both thanks to user comfort with computing in general, and improvements on usability and interaction models. The iPhone is probably the single best example of a computing device whose interaction mechanics were expressed in a way that made it generally easy to operate for users of varying levels of interest or expertise in computers overall. But even the iPhone still requires attention and focus to accomplish basic tasks, and even with its general ease of use, there are subtleties of its interface, features and systems which many everyday users likely still don’t grasp: The lasting appeal of ‘how-to’ guides for even simple features in terms of drawing traffic from search proves this to be true. The fact is that any visual UI that exists in software is going to take time and attention to learn, and sustained attention to operate. This is true of in-car infotainment systems including OEM-specific platforms, as well as CarPlay and Android Auto. And it’s true still for dash-mounted climate control and driver-assist features, even when these are manipulated via essentially standardized physical controls, like buttons, dials and switches. Plus, with these more basic features, there’s no underlying intelligence – they don’t have any sense of context, and they generally operate in isolation. Where Amazon seems to have made a leap that would have particular benefit in the automotive world is in making invisible to users the computing layer, while retaining contextual intelligence and computing power behind-the-scenes. “I think what technology is finally realizing is that technology is subordinate to humans,” Shopify CEO and founder Tobi Lütke explained during a recent talk at Startupfest in Montreal. “We’re starting to be not too enamored anymore with “ooh it’s a computer,” and it being something we need to learn.” Lütke then cited the as the perfect example of what he meant. At first, OEMs rushed to build computers into their appliances, with full touchscreen UIs and plenty of integrations. But, Lütke noted, we didn’t need our washing machines to be a computers with a touchscreen, we just needed a connected button. Indeed, for cases like the ones the Dash is designed to address, we’re much better served with a single button that translates our immediate need into direct action, using Amazon’s backend services to complete the ordinarily complex tasks of address details, shipping infrastructure and payment handling. And it’s contextually intelligent – it knows enough to discount additional presses that follow quickly on the heels of the first. Dash is a good starting point for creating tech that supports the driver without adding unnecessary complexity to a task that should be as distraction-free as is possible. To the user, it’s a single dimension of interaction possibility, but behind the scenes, it’s making a lot of complicated things happen in a way that makes the most sense for the context in which it’s used. There’s no mastery for the user to acquire, and yet the results serve their intent near-perfectly. But a single button or switch will always have limits, and that’s where another Amazon tech can serve as a further guide: , too, can be a teacher for those working on car tech. The voice-powered assistant does require some learning to use well, but it’s a far cry from the learning curve required by any modern visual operating system. Amazon has done this by design, by keeping Alexa’s interaction models limited, effectively ensuring a user can’t get too turned around in the process of becoming an expert operator. Alexa eschews any visual interface whatsoever, which is one reason why it’s often perceived by critics as being more successful as a voice-powered assistant than competitors from Apple, Microsoft and Google. There’s no fall-back state for users; they either learn how to operate it by voice or they don’t operate it at all. Pair that with Amazon’s relatively narrow rules for what kind of phrasing Alexa will successfully interpret, and you have a small set of knowledge users have to acquire, with only one means to acquire it. The learning curve might be steeper initially than if they’d tried to do full natural language processing, but it’s also shorter, meaning users can pick it up quicker and be more successful with their queries over the long term. It’s exactly the kind of interface that makes sense for an in-car computing platform. That steeper, shorter learning curve is like the one involved in learning how to drive a car in the first place: it’s a new set of actions different from nearly anything else we do in life, but it’s tightly circumscribed, and giving users a very finite, but highly distinct set of new things to learn. A voice-based interface would be similar, and would also have the advantage of skipping any kind of visual interface, which, as mentioned above, only adds complexity if presented in tandem with an audio equivalent. And Alexa can have the same kind of front-end simplicity and back-end sophistication that Dash possesses, albeit with an expanded function set and greater contextual depth. It’s why projects like the joint effort between that aims to foster “friendship” might actually have more potential than other pairings between cars and computer companies that focus more on translating existing models of mobile computing to in-vehicle experiences. We need driving companions ahead of full autonomy, not driving computers. All of the efforts of tech not related to fully automating the driving experience should aim to give drivers more reason to pay attention to what they’re doing. And that’s why Amazon’s efforts to increasingly defray the mental load involved with platform mastery by effectively making the platform invisible have so much potential in transportation tech. “Until you get to the point where the driver can be completely disengaged, which is this level 4 autonomy, then there shouldn’t be an intermediate step where the driver is less engaged,” Bryson Gardner, CEO and co-founder of told me in a recent interview. “The delicate part is, that if you have something that’s really stressful for the driver, than you do want to eliminate that stress.” Computer proficiency is kind of badge of honor, something that, since the dawn of computing platforms, has been earned through effort, time and mental labor. Even with the advent of more democratizing UI, as on the Android and iOS smartphones we use every day, the bar remains too high for something we intend to use while safely controlling potentially deadly machines. Cars, more than anything, provide the opportunity to explore what comes next for computers, when sophistication is invisible and everyone starts out an expert.
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Drip irrigation provides a conduit for change
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Hachim Badji
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Democratic governments are, by their nature, slow-moving creatures — and that’s the way it should be. Social stability generally requires that change be evolutionary, not revolutionary, lest the changes imposed set off turmoil that could eventually cause much more harm than the hoped-for good. While that principle works fine for most aspects of society, it’s woefully inadequate when it comes to implementing technology for the public good, especially in the developing world, where governments have few resources to provide the services citizens sorely need. Technology that could be employed to solve the problems of millions who are on their own because of this lack of resources often goes unused, because governments cannot overcome the “slow” paradigm they have become used to. As a result, good ideas often take years to implement. One way to prompt governments into changing their thinking, we have found, is to develop a strong private success paradigm — where the private group tackles a major social issue, helping to solve a problem that has been plaguing society. The success of that “win” tends to inspire a desire to solve other problems — and prompts government to take on that responsibility itself, instead of relying just on the private partner, in order to remain relevant. A real-life example of this process at work is the increased use of drip-irrigation technology in India, the result of inroads made by one of the world’s biggest producers of drip-irrigation equipment, . The company has been operating for years in India, providing farmers with more efficient ways to water their crops while saving not only resources, but money on water purchases, fertilizer, etc. That India has a water problem has been highlighted in numerous studies, including its own latest , which says that Indian agriculture — which must feed nearly a billion people — is “still heavily rainfall dependent.” , with farmers generally using flood methods to water their crops, a method of farming that is increasingly untenable as due to drought (even as some parts of the country have been inundated by floods in recent years). According to the government, water shortages were affecting in India, as recently as April. Drip irrigation could help India’s farmers be more productive while saving water. With drip irrigation, farmers water their crops using the precise amount of water needed, instead of just releasing large amounts of water onto a field as they would with flood irrigation. To advance the use of drip irrigation, NaanDanJain — a joint Indian-Israeli company — in 2012 . Farmers can borrow up to 100 percent of the cost of a drip irrigation system and pay it back from the profits of the crops as they sell them. With the systems, farmers are able to save up to 70 percent of the water they would normally use in flood irrigation, meaning they spend less on water, are guaranteed a better crop (because they aren’t dependent on abundant rainfall, without which flood irrigation becomes very expensive) and thus take home more money. After seeing the success farmers had using drip irrigation, the government of the Indian state of Maharashtra ( ) is going all-out for drip irrigation. “In Maharashtra, we currently use drip-irrigation on two million of the 20 million hectares of land used for agriculture, and we plan to expand that to 5 million over the next several years,” in a recent interview. Part of that program will be providing loans to farmers to help them install drip-irrigation systems, and lobbying a drip-irrigation manufacturer to open a facility in India, which would reduce the costs of the systems and make them even more affordable to farmers in his own state, and eventually the entire country. “When that happens we are optimistic that many more farmers will adopt drip irrigation,” said Fadnavis. “Meanwhile, we are planning to mandate the transfer of whole industries to drip irrigation. Currently, we are working to install drip irrigation in all our sugar cane fields.” The “takeover” of implementation and financing of drip-irrigation systems by Maharashtra is exactly the kind of process we hope to see throughout the developing world. A small light in the darkness can go a long way to guiding people down the right path — and the more government sees private organizations succeeding, the more likely it will be to get involved (if only to take credit for the success itself!), and the more likely it is to gain the confidence it needs to begin taking responsibility for other problems that need solving. It’s our hope that this process will accelerate and grow throughout the developing world.
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Prisma for Android is now live for all in the Google Play Store
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Brian Heater
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The hits just keep on coming for Prisma. Just over a month after and almost immediately capturing the imagination of the Instagramming masses in the process, AI-fueled photo filtering app is Prisma is . That’s a mere five days after the app first launched in beta on Google’s mobile operating system, through a limited invite system. Prisma for Android is out! Get it right now at — Prisma (@PrismaAI) The app certainly isn’t the first to promise to turn your smartphone snaps into “artwork,” but the output speaks for itself, with a slew of “art filters” that transform photos into a wide swath of different sketch and painting styles with impressive speed and aesthetic complexity. The app quickly made its way up the top of the App Store charts, hitting number 10 in the US around the time a few days back. That number has since settled down a bit, but the app is still holding steady at a solid number 17. This will, no doubt, prove a watershed moment for the latest App Store darling – it surely won’t escape the notice of industry insiders that Instagram a mere week or so after it launched launched its Android version. Acquisition rumors have already been swirling around the Russian company for some time — and, hey, the company’s head just happened to be visiting with the social media giant around the time we spoke to him. Facebook batted away such speculation, but Moiseenkov added, cryptically, “For now I can’t disclose all this information. By the end of the week I think we can discuss more.” Whether that means acquisition, funding or something else remains to be seen. [gallery ids="1357961,1357962,1357963,1357965,1357967"] For now, you can see what the fuss is about The Android version of the app contains some three dozen different filters, constituting a large cross section of different styles from modern to classical to anime — and even a reference.
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Researchers use neural networks to turn face sketches into photos
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Lucia Maffei
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We all have a soft spot for , the app that . But the reverse process — transforming artwork into pictures — is no less fascinating. And it’s not far from becoming real, researchers in the Netherlands said. A team of four neuroscientists at is working on a model for inverting face sketches to synthesize photorealistic face images by using deep neural networks. The results of the study ( ) were first made available in the online archive and have recently been accepted at the in Amsterdam. Scientists said applications of their model could include fine arts, for turning self-portraits into something more akin to a photo, but also in forensics, for turning sketches based on eyewitness accounts into something a photo-recognition tool could use, for example. “We were inspired by the recent work on neural style transfer, an algorithm to reimagine photos in the style of artworks,” Yağmur Güçlütürk, 29 and Umut Güçlü, 30, the two PhD students in cognitive neuroscience who developed the study together with Marcel van Gerven and Rob van Lier, wrote in an email to TechCrunch. described a technique to reimagine a photo of the city of Tübingen, Germany, in the style of , the oil on canvas painting by Vincent van Gogh. “This example got us thinking about its inverse problem. That is, what the artworks of Vincent van Gogh would look like as photos,” Güçlütürk and Güçlü wrote. Here is how Güçlütürk and Güçlü describe how their software, which uses an artificial neural network, works: “Let’s say that I, scientist, want to teach you, artificial neural network, how to convert sketches (inputs) to photos (outputs). First, I construct a very large dataset composed of sketch and photo pairs. I give you the sketches and ask you to convert them to photos. Randomly, you choose a strategy and give it a go. At first, your photos would not look like the photos in my dataset. I compare your photos with the photos in my dataset and point out your mistakes. Based on my feedback, you adjust your strategy and give it another go. Gradually, the quality of your photos would improve.” Examples of the synthesized inverse sketches from the LFW dataset. First image in each column is the ground truth, the second image is the generated sketch and the third is the synthesized inverse sketch. (Source: “Convolutional Sketch Inversion” Study) Repetition played a huge role in teaching the model how to match sketches and photos (which is pretty much standard for training neural networks). “We repeat the last two steps over and over again,” Güçlütürk and Güçlü wrote. “Finally, your photos would look like the photos in my dataset. If everything goes well, you can use your newly learned skill to convert not only the sketches you have already seen, but also the sketches you have not previously seen to high quality photos.” To train and test the algorithm, the scientists used computer-generated sketches based on the photos , an online resource with more than 200,000 celebrity images, and , a collection of 13,000 images of faces from the web. The hand-drawn sketches were taken from . Converting some sketches of their own faces — drawn by Yağmur — was one of the first things the two PhD students tried. Thanks to the algorithm, they also tried to obtain a photorealistic representation of the face of three famous Dutch artists (Rembrandt, van Gogh and Escher) based on their self-portraits. Self-portrait sketches and synthesized inverse sketches along with a reference painting or photograph of famous Dutch artists: Rembrandt (top), Vincent van Gogh (middle) and M. C. Escher (bottom). (Source: “Convolutional Sketch Inversion” Study) The two researchers are now looking to see how they can bring their work to market. They are looking at applications in the fine arts and forensic arts world for monetizing their work. “Our spinoff company, , is already working on such applications, and we hope to bring them to market soon,” Güçlütürk and Güçlü concluded.
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Apple lays the groundwork to kill online advertising
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Cyrus Radfar
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Their products help us learn, communicate and navigate the world. While we tap away, the companies behind these innovations are battling for the future of computing. Each and every one is actively defending their core businesses while placing bets on the future. Their tangled business relationships help mask the underlying strategies that drive them; however, Apple’s strategy and upcoming tactics to stifle Google’s chief revenue source are becoming clear. As technologists and consumers, we’re lucky to be around to watch one of the most exciting games of corporate chess unfold. As I see it, Apple has four moves left until they can call check on Google’s king, search. I’ll go through some of the high-level landscape and assumptions that are driving the strategy before I dive into how it could all play out. Before we dive down this rabbit hole, there is one thing you should know. We’re not stumbling into another “Apple will kill Google” post. There are too many assumptions to be sure Apple will execute on this strategy. This post is speculating based on a range of facts and public statements from Apple. Apple has a with Google that prints them a hefty amount of cash. Pundits have tried to understand the structure of the deal, but most agree that Apple has the leverage. What’s relatively known based on leaks is that there is more than $1 billion paid each year by Google to win the default search option on Safari. Based on more recent leaks from Google’s Oracle trial, a revenue share number of 34 percent came out. It wasn’t clear whether that was Google’s or Apple’s take, but logic leads me to think that it is Apple’s. Putting that in perspective, Google they crossed a threshold where they are receiving more queries on mobile than on desktop. In 2014, Goldman Sachs that more than 75 percent of mobile revenue for Google was coming from iPhones. It’s unknown how much of that is via mobile Safari versus the Chrome app on iOS. Based on public filings, Goldman stated that Google had roughly $11.8 billion in mobile search revenue and more than $200 million of other mobile advertising revenue. Of the $11.8 billion, 75 percent, or approximately $8.85 billion, was believed to come from iOS devices. Goldman continued to predict that about half of that was from users who were using Google, solely, because it was the default option. That places the estimated total value for Google of being the default option at $4.4 billion. Revenue on mobile has gone up since 2014 as Apple continues to grow and mobile usage increases. If Apple were indeed getting the $1 billion plus a 34 percent revenue share, that would earn them as much as $4 billion in cash for directing users to the best option for search. This number is a high bound. People searching directly through Chrome and Google apps on iOS lessen the impact; however, it’s not feasible to break down how much the apps save Google on their search tax. Two facts help put the estimate in context. In 2014, Google raked in more than $66 billion in revenue, so this would’ve reduced their margin by up to 6 percent. In the same year, Apple’s total advertising was around $1 billion, or 0.6 percent of their annual revenue. That nearly 50 percent to $1.8 billion in 2015. It may be fun for Apple to look at their financials and remind themselves that Google is footing much of their marketing tab. It reminds me of how the tax on tobacco funds anti-tobacco education. You don’t need to work at Apple or Google to see how different they are culturally and philosophically. Apple CEO, Tim Cook, stated the difference plainly in their public : Apple took direct shots at all advertising-powered companies, like Facebook, Twitter and Google. Apple is one of the most prominent brands, and they reach hundreds of millions with their products. They wield an enormous megaphone as they argue that advertising companies aren’t aligned or concerned with user privacy. They take every opportunity to remind users that local processing means they’re safe, private and secure. The fingerprint scanning was the first time I picked up on this narrative, then again at WWDC 2016 when they spoke of their new facial recognition capabilities. They make sure to promote how they leverage local processing and local storage. In turn, they allude to cloud processing being less private and unsafe. Google has always bet on cheap hardware with cloud processing, and Apple has been their foil. In Google’s ideal future, devices are a commodity that relies on the cloud. The more this future is realized, the less value the world will see in Apple’s high-end hardware and local processing. In the end, Apple’s hard line on privacy and love of local processing foreshadows a future where Apple could turn even harder against the behavioral advertising industry with their products and services. Part of Apple’s strategy stands on one big assumption — we will prefer to search in a context where we trust and understand their relevance ranking. Google has been open that a threat to its long-term growth is verticalized search and has focused on solving for context and intent within a query. Historically, they limited that threat by doing everything they could to keep their search inventory as close to the top of the funnel for a user engaging with an internet-enabled device. For example, on Android phones, the search is on the home screen, and there’s voice-activated “OK Google” search. With Chrome and other browsers, they took over the URL input field and made great efforts to be the default search. On many Android TVs, voice search is a prominent feature on the screen and the remote. Because Google sits so high in the funnel, they have little to no context for what query is coming. Solving that problem has required the scale and infrastructure that they worked tirelessly to engineer over the past 18 years. Google continues to be the king of building context on-the-fly and accurately understanding the intent of the searcher. They’re maniacal focus on machine learning and bet on Google Assistant demonstrates they’re doubling down on building context within a conversation with Google rather than betting that people will prefer multiple assistants. Nevertheless, the best way to beat Google is within a known context with catered result formats. We’ve all been there. When we want food, clothing, an OCD fix or visual inspiration, we search Pinterest; for video tutorials, we go to YouTube (a Google property); for products, we hop over to Amazon; for a restaurant, we launch Yelp; looking for someone, we search Facebook, LinkedIn or Twitter. Vertical search is growing, and behavior is surely changing. The New York Times in 2013 that Amazon had overtaken Google in shopping searches. The growth of all the services mentioned earlier reminds us that it’s possible that people, going forward, may trust a brand with each specific intent rather than trusting Google for everything. Predicting what’s next for a product or company can be obvious when it’s incremental, evolutionary or a major feature disparity with a competitor. In the case of Apple, the question isn’t what’s next as much as when. They release new features at a cadence that leaves the market wondering if they have something else up their sleeves. The most recent move that guides the prediction was the World Wide Developer Conference (WWDC) 2016 announcement that Apple Pay would come to Safari on the Web in the fall. The assumption is that it will only be available on Safari for stated privacy reasons. Apple Pay is the first move that will begin to steal market share from Chrome. Moreover, it gets Apple a strong foothold across the web as a widget and library that web developers learn to install. The second move was foreshadowed at WWDC 2016, as well as by the addition of single-sign-on (SSO) to tvOS, and the opening up of Siri, Messenger and Apple Maps to developers. All these moves show Apple understands the more they can open up their tools to third parties, the richer and more powerful those services become. As developers find growth through these new channels, an apparent hindrance for them will be maintaining identity. Sign-up is a massive barrier to entry, and Apple could take SSO to iOS and subsequently to the Web. To protect users, Apple can argue users should always log in with TouchID. Moreover, on the web, they can claim that users must use Safari to secure the handshake between their device, the computer, the browser and the third party. One could say this would be more of an attack on Facebook than Google, but both are threats to Apple. Maintaining control of the ecosystem by enabling fragmentation under their terms seems like a good strategy. At the present moment, Siri hasn’t opened up yet to the developer community. When she does, she will be handling some basic use-cases, or what voice developers call, . They are launching with the ability to activate messaging, ride booking, workout, payments, photo search, climate and radio for CarPlay and homeOS. With the first intents, Apple isn’t eating a lot of Google’s lunch because most don’t use Google for these activities. However, it’s inevitable that Apple will release new intents that would be fielded directly by verticalized apps: It’s open to discussion whether Apple will pick winners as “default” options or they’ll require the user to install a given app and state the app name in their voice request. In the case where Apple decides, it would make sense for them to strike a few more distribution deals. Note that Amazon, alone, spends more than $150 million per year on search advertising. Nevertheless, the more intents Siri handles, the fewer queries Google may need to field. The simplicity of Apple Pay and the fact that users may prefer TouchID SSO to passwords would drive growth in Safari’s share of the market. In the near term, more searches through Safari puts pressure on Google’s margin with the search tax. It’s prudent for Apple to continue to limit Google’s ability to advertise on Safari by creating their own native ad and content blocker within Safari. They’ve already blocked , turned off third-party and opened up Safari on iOS to . It aligns with their strong stance on privacy and user control that we discussed earlier. The reason, I believe, Apple is waiting is they don’t want to attack publishers’ ability to monetize their work. They want to come out with a “privacy friendly” alternative. The inventory may find new creative from Apple’s new App Store ads or existing iAds. The change would hopefully come with an additional carrot to move content into Apple News where they’ll provide additional distribution and monetization opportunities for publishers. Apple’s strategy isn’t a big overnight win. It’s a slow squeeze or blockade that hopes to stifle, frustrate and distract Google. The biggest impact on Google is limiting their growth by minimizing their ability to hold their massive margins for searches within the Apple ecosystem. Limiting Google’s growth affects their ability to look as attractive to public markets which, beyond the financial implications, hurts their capacity to attract and retain the best talent. Google realizes and has disclosed in public SEC filings that their core business is at risk and continues to invest in their moonshots in wearables, mobility, transportation and expanding internet access. Google won’t sit idly by as their business is cannibalized. It’s likely that they too will integrate with any new Siri voice intents like any other third-party developer. It would be a way for them to save money on the search tax — assuming they can snatch searches that would otherwise go through Safari to their search engine. They can tie themselves in so someone can ask, “When is my next meeting via Google?” or “Where is the closest grocery store via Google Maps?” Google should be working on the universal way for Android devices to sync with the mobile and desktop browsers to authenticate with the fingerprint scanner that’s available on many of the devices. They already have more than 1 billion users using their identity system and OAuth on millions of sites, so they’re well-positioned for the opportunity. It’s noteworthy (pun unintended) that newer Samsung devices within their native browser. Moreover, Android and iOS users or (on iOS, as well) to use their thumbprint to unlock the correct password and autofill it for a given site. The path I’m suggesting may or may not be what pans out in reality. However, the fact that it’s reasonable to believe that the plan is feasible reminds us how quickly the landscape can change in technology. Flanking a seemingly invincible giant in our industry is not only possible, but probable. My biggest takeaway is that the future is a lot more open and flexible than it may seem. Every technology is perched insecurely on an eroding foundation waiting to tumble inevitably into obsolescence.
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PonoMusic goes dark for several weeks as the company switches providers
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Brian Heater
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Neil Young’s music service is apparently down, but not out. In a note , the hi-res music provider announced that it’ll be going offline for for “several weeks,” due to the recent acquisition of Omnifone, which has been the driving force behind the service’s infrastructure. The company’s purchase has led Pono to seek a new partner for PonoMusic, striking a deal with 7 Digital, a London-based digital music platform that has worked with a number of high-profile partners, including Samsung and BlackBerry. In its letter, Pono insists that the move, while “well underway, [is] not yet complete,” hastening to add that the move won’t affect any of its dealings with big music labels. What all of this means for the Pono faithful is no more music purchases for what’s likely to be several weeks from last Wednesday. The service is, naturally, looking to put a positive spin on the whole order, insisting that the new 7 Digital deal will bring “fresh opportunities to improve our overall service,” along with the addition of some new titles. Talk about having a wheel in the ditch and a wheel on the track.
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Solar Impulse 2 takes off the final leg of its round-the-world flight
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Brian Heater
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In the wee hours of the morning, took from Cairo, embarking on the last leg of its round-the-world journey. The 17 and final part of the trip is set to end in Abu Dhabi, where it first set off from in March 2015. The last leg of the journey is anticipated to take around 48 hours, at which point pilots Bertrand Piccard and Andre Borschberg will have flown a total of 21,748 miles, marking the first such journey for an aircraft of its kind. BREAKING has taken off from for the last flight of the journey to — SOLAR IMPULSE (@solarimpulse) Of course, the plane and its pilots are already in the record books a few times over, having secured the record for the longest solo flight (from Japan to Hawaii) and crossed the Atlantic, both fuel-free. The pilots anticipate relatively smooth sailing as Piccard takes control one final time. Though, , the hot, thin air above the region could pose some troubles to the solar plane’s motors. A series of delays have pushed back the flight over the year, including, most recently, a bout with an upset stomach that delay the initial July 18 takeoff of this last leg.
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Don’t make founders’ equity even
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Gary Schall
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Sometimes I think about replacing the table in my office with a sofa and a box of tissues. I’m a lawyer, but sometimes I feel like a therapist. When startup founders sit down with me to hash out equity splits and trust and commitment issues, their tempers sometimes flare. Uncomfortable silences ensue. Feelings get hurt, and tears sometimes fall. This is an awkward and uncomfortable step in the process of forming new ventures, and there’s no question that many founders would rather bypass all this potentially messy stuff. In fact, many do. They form their companies, assure one another they’re all in this together and, as a gesture of good will, divide their equity equally. While a split of 50-50 or 25-25-25-25 might appear to be the fairest arrangement, in most cases, it’s a recipe for disaster. This seemingly innocuous decision can set a startup on the course for failure. Investors don’t like it because it positions founders to become deadlocked when tough decisions need to be made, and it may not reflect the contributions and commitments needed to rapidly grow the startup. Even-equity splits can also be the source of headaches and additional legal fees down the line. Prospective investors will want to know how your startup has divvied up ownership, so be prepared to explain your reasoning. If you’ve opted for an even-steven split, funders anticipate two complications: The founders unwisely assume they’re all going to be equally committed to the venture and making equal contributions. They’re clueless about the varying level of responsibility and long-term commitment each will make. Or, they’re just not savvy enough to ask these tough questions. Investors scrutinize the equity split to determine the founders’ level of contributions and commitment. They want to make sure the management team is incented appropriately. And on the flip side, they want to see that people who aren’t engaged in the startup’s success can’t exert a disproportionate influence. That was the problem facing a Boston startup with three founders. Two were working full-time on the venture, dedicated to making it a success. The third, the brains behind the technology, was part-time. However, their ownership split didn’t reflect their commitment. The two guys who had staked their futures on this venture each held a 25 percent stake, and the other founder held the rest. The technology was critical, but the two full-time founders were doing the heavy lifting to build the startup. Five percent would have been a more appropriate allocation for the tech guy. When a founder who is not involved in day-to-day operations holds outsized voting power, the potential for decision logjam looms large. That’s a red flag for investors. This startup was very lucky; the founders managed to convince an angel to take 15 percent of the company, effectively diluting the 50 percent owner’s holding to below a majority. You’ll want to use equity allocations to incentivize your founders to stick it out and grow the business. I strongly recommend that founders institute a one-year vesting cliff, earning 25 percent of their stock after they’ve completed their first year of service with the company. The balance vests equally over the next three years of service, rewarding those who are loyal through those difficult early times. A vesting plan can help forestall a situation I’ve seen too many times to count: A founder with a 20 or 30 percent stake loses enthusiasm and moves on after six or eight or 10 months, necessitating the buyback of their shares and/or their transfer to other founders. Those transactions cost time and money, and founders usually don’t have much of either to spare. So think hard — and get some counsel — on who gets what. Ask yourself whether the allocations you’re considering now will be fair in six months or a year. It may appear wise to be more generous with options for your tech people than your sales team because without that genius, there wouldn’t be anything to sell. Remember, though, that if your company is going to thrive, it must shift to sales. An incentivized sales team is a motivated sales team. Although I regularly warn my clients about the perils of equity splits, now and then some founders prove me wrong (or maybe just defy the odds). I recently advised two college juniors whose hardware startup had tremendous potential. They wanted to form a company and split the equity equally. One was going to take a leave of absence from school to devote his energies to the startup. The other was determined to first earn his diploma. They hesitated when I suggested that their levels of commitment be reflected in the allocation of shares. They spent weeks talking over various scenarios. They researched how a 50-50 split might play out with prospective investors. They met with a respected advisor at their college. They sat down with me for a few counseling sessions. After extensive analysis and candid discussions, both remained thoroughly committed to the half and half split. This could have been a winning recipe for early failure. But the founders’ willingness to devote the time to thoughtfully reach consensus and together defy conventional wisdom presaged a huge success: Their startup was accepted into a premier accelerator program and is thriving. At least in this case, I was happy to eat my words.
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That new ‘Mystery Science Theater 3000’ series is hitting Netflix
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Brian Heater
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That reboot – you remember the one, right? Jonah Ray, Felicia Day and Patton Oswalt all signed on and you threw your screen like an angry Fry from Futurama meme (helping the project reach $5.7 million on the crowdfunding service). It’s finally got a home. The 14 new episodes of the show will be, perhaps unsurprisingly, , which has long served as a second (or, like, fourth or fifth) home for older episode of the series. In the not-too-distant future. — Netflix US (@netflix) The news arrived as Joel Hodgson and company were starting up their Comic Con panel, announced as a powerfully understanding tweet from the streaming service. There’s no official date for when the show will hit the US, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and UK, but the company’s knowing “not too distant future” nod will have to suffice for now. Old school cast members Mary Jo Pehl, Bill Corbett, and Kevin Murphy are back for the reboot, along with new comers Hampton Yount and Baron Vaughn, playing a pair of robot sidekicks. alum Dan Harmon and Joel McHale have signed on as writers, under the watchful eye of former head writer, Elliott Kalan, who gets that title again on this latest installment.
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Four official ‘Star Wars’ drones are arriving this fall
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Brian Heater
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It was just a matter of time, really. With the new slate of Star Wars films on an annual schedule, and drones invading the skies all around us, the timing was right for this kind of synergistic force push. RC toy maker is launching a quartet of drones modeled on some familiar modes of transportation from a galaxy far, far away. Launching this fall/winter, the Lucasfilm-approved flying gadgets are available as Tie Fighter, X-Wing, Return of the Jedi-style speeder bike and that reliable old hunk of junk, the Millennium Falcon, priced at between $200 and $300 – though there’s no official word on stateside availability, at the moment. From the look (and price) of things, the collection will be couple of plastic toys, with four rotors capable of zero to 30MPH acceleration in three seconds and peak speeds of up to 35MPH, along with a slew of aerial tricks. The drones also have a built-in laser tag-style game for aerial battles. Interested parties (outside the US) can reserve them now through the . They’ll arrive just in time to help .
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Lora Kolodny
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Let’s meet in Chicago for a mini-meetup
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John Biggs
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I’ll be in Chicago this week and I’d love to meet some startups. I’m thinking about holding a micro-mini-meetup on Tuesday, July 26 at a location to be determined. Here’s what I need from you all: Email or tweet me with recommendations where we can meet. I like to just hang out in bars but I could do a co-working space. I know there are a few in town but I’ve lost touch with folks there so it would be great if you could drop me a line. My email is and I’m on TwooterTalk. I expect we’d meet at about 7pm and I’d be happy to run a pitch-off. If you’d like to pitch just and I’ll let you know the details when I have them.
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How much does it matter if your software quality sucks?
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Jon Evans
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I ran across a fascinating piece by Leo Polovets of Susa Ventures this week, provocatively titled: “ .” You should go read it, but its central thesis is simple: “in today’s world of SaaS tools, APIs, and cloud infrastructure … technical resources are rarely the cause of success or the reason for failure.” Is he right? Yes! But he is also wrong. The most beautiful, elegant, powerful software in the world cannot save you if you fail to achieve “product-market fit.” (If you don’t like industry jargon, let’s use Paul Graham’s phrasing: “building something people want.”) Your software cannot save you if you have no viable business model (aka “building something people want so much that someone will pay for it.”) And it will not save you if nobody is ever offered your product, or ever hears of it (aka sales/marketing failures.) But if and when you get past those high hurdles — that’s where your software quality can make or break you. I see a lot of this in my day job: I’m an engineer (slash manager, slash principal, slash whatever) at , a software consultancy — and startups often come to us with the Startup Software Quality Problem. The Startup Software Quality Problem is this: a startup has successfully built, and maybe even launched, a Minimum Viable Product, with software courtesy of their sole technical co-founder and/or a cheap dev shop somewhere. Now, having launched it, seeing how real people actually it, they want to quickly iterate its strengths and fix its weaknesses, or perhaps pivot to focus on a new facet of what they’ve built — only to find that they , because they’re stuck in quicksand. That’s what poorly architected, dubiously written, high-technical-debt software is like. Quicksand. It’s buggy, too, usually, in an intermittent and hard-to-reproduce way, frustrating users, developers, and co-founders alike. Bug fixes that should take hours take days; changes and feature requests which should take a few days occupy whole weeks; and you get into a vicious spiral where this slowdown causes everyone to be slow desperate to iterate faster that you can no longer take any time to try to pay down your technical debt, so instead you just keep exacerbating it. Needless to say, this vicious spiral can and often does become a death spiral. It’s true that Minimum Viable Product software is not, and should not be, built to be perfectly elegant and scalable. But if it’s quicksand software, and you building something people want, then now it’s harder, slower, and more expensive to re-target, while competitors and newcomers with higher-quality software can iterate with speed and abandon. Even if you have built something that people really want, the time spent hiring new engineers and rewriting your entire codebase is time that your higher-quality competitors can use to overtake you. Quicksand software is often so difficult to repurpose that a complete from-scratch rewrite is a better option than trying to reuse any of it at all. Needless to say, founders who have spend hundreds of hours and tens of thousands of dollars constructing this quicksand never want to hear this. Software quality doesn’t dictate your , that’s true. But it does dictate your . In the absence of any competition, this doesn’t matter, but if you think you live in a field without any competition, a very painful awakening awaits. The slower you can move and iterate, the faster your startup can and will die. It’s true that, as Polovets points out, building a product that people want is the most important thing. (Which in turn can be partitioned into “your idea” and “your .”) And sales is probably second. But while your software may not be your startup’s heart or lungs, it’s still a vital organ that can and will kill you. Worse yet, it will do so slowly, even subtly, after long illness, possibly without you ever even recognizing that it was the proximate cause. Don’t handwave it off as something to worry about later. I assure you that you will regret that bitterly.
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Recasting Silicon Valley’s role in society
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Daniel Del'Re
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Silicon Valley culture showcased itself at Bloomberg’s recent technology confab in San Francisco as much as the companies, products, entrepreneurs and venture capitalists on the dais and sidelines. Speakers and attendees alike traded extraordinary visions of the future: colonizing other planets, commuting to work in flying cars, employing self-programming computers and extending human life by centuries. One of the conference’s most celebrated guests, , offered a vision for entrepreneurship itself, defining it as the ability to see how the world potentially could be, then inventing what is needed to change it. And herein lies the perennial dilemma for Silicon Valley: The same questions that spur its entrepreneurs and their backers to remake the world are often the same questions that lead it into conflict with the forces that define reality for the majority of people. Why can’t I rent my home out for a day here or there? Is there a better way to order a car than hailing a taxi? Shouldn’t cars be able to drive themselves? What if I could hook up my refrigerator to the internet? Who needs a keyboard when you can talk to a computer? Each of these queries has prompted driven, creative people to start “disruptive” companies and invent new products that commercialize technology in ways that improve everyday experiences. Yet, at the same time, these questions — and the answers provided in the form of applied tech — offer as much uncertainty as they do improvements. Why can’t I rent my home for a day here or there? No reason, unless it triggers a trend that saps affordable housing in underserved markets to accommodate tourists. Sure, there are better ways of ordering cars, or turning vehicle ownership into income — but what about the people who have spent time and money getting licensed as professional drivers, the value of which is now eroded? Should heavy machines that can go 150 mph really steer themselves? Even more pressingly, the Bloomberg conference took place against an ominous background. It occurred days after the worst mass killing in U.S. history. The U.S. presidential race and the Brexit vote have laid bare the disconnect between the body politic and its elected leaders in developed and “representative” democracies. And the promise of an economy that reliably generates jobs, living wages and retirement security seems arguably more tenuous than at any point in living memory. , the author of much, often dystopian, science fiction, said: “The future is here. It’s just not evenly distributed.” If it’s hard to see how flying cars, the Internet of Things and extending life by 10X are anything more than quixotic fantasies, then it’s arguably a problem of the uneven distribution, whether real or perceived, of the benefits that can arise by bringing the Valley’s vision to reality. The vision that so many in the Valley have for their ventures should include a much more genuine and clearly articulated connection between technology and practical realities and outcomes that make their work relevant to those who do not live and work within the immediate orbit of Valley luminaries. Valley companies, and those of the tech community worldwide, have the potential to improve lives, strengthen the fairness of markets and play a crucial role in fostering a new era of economic prosperity. But that message can get lost in a narrowly cast, self-aggrandizing vision for the “disruptive” role that their products can play in society. Take blockchain technology. It can digitize not just financial transactions, but virtually any contract, in a secure way that makes agreements, modifications to them and the parties to them much more transparent, permanent and enforceable. The dominant portrayal, by contrast, is as an arcane and Randian technology that allows so-called crypto-currencies to flourish as a rebuke to central bankers and the fiat currencies they control. Similarly, the Internet of Things is generally discussed as a fait accompli, but also as a somewhat creepy networking of household and personal appliances instead of a potentially huge benefit to affordable and preventative medicine. The hype around virtual reality’s future potential overshadows augmented reality, which has immediate applications for education. And “edtech” itself often gets reduced merely to putting devices in classrooms instead of being portrayed as a way to train people faster, better and cheaper to do new and different jobs. Recasting Silicon Valley’s own role in society in a similar fashion could resuscitate its connection to all Americans. At a time of rising uncertainty over the stability of employment in a “gig economy,” among other societal challenges, it is increasingly important for Silicon Valley and its companies to do more than invent, inspire or disrupt. Valley companies need to find space in their culture and ethos for a belief in solving not just the technical challenges of individual experience, like creating online markets that people can use to rent out homes, but recognizing and, where possible, addressing broad phenomena that cause anxiety across wide swaths of society. That may be setting a high bar. But it shouldn’t be any more challenging to surmount than making cars fly, especially if we live by Andreessen’s words: Imagine the world how it can be and then find a way to make that vision a reality.
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Pop culture stimulates the evolution of the LA tech scene
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Michael Yanover
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It wasn’t so long ago that venture capital was a suburban California phenomenon. Los Angeles didn’t have much in terms of a real tech scene — and even the actual city of San Francisco only had a few venture capitalists or tech companies. I remember the days when I would go to Silicon Valley and spend very little time in San Francisco itself. Now, satellite VC offices have sprung up in San Francisco, moving more of the investment energy up there. And that great migration of companies and activity from the Valley to the City touches upon what is now happening in Los Angeles — and why, as Randy Newman puts it, “I Love LA.” These days (and I know it’s a truism), technology is in everything. And anything that is consumer related had better have a lot more going on than just a veneer of high-tech — or a digital sheen. While innovation still rules, many consumer-driven technology companies begin with fairly off-the-shelf solutions. What makes these companies resonate with the consumer, what makes them unique, is their ability to create an individual brand and translate that brand into a great consumer experience. The best consumer businesses require creativity and a knack for understanding the user experience that hits a nerve just right. As design, UX and UI evolved, and design aesthetics became a requirement rather than an afterthought, San Francisco began its ascent. Consumer brands demand a consumer-driven focus and, therefore, better access to the type of creative community that exists in the City rather than the Valley. And so the Twitters and Ubers and (even) Salesforces found that San Francisco was the place to be to attract the right kind of people. But LA takes it one step further. And it goes beyond just great branding and consumer experiences. There is a real reason why , and started in LA and why many more great “tech” companies will make LA their home. (It’s not just because rent is cheaper in SoCal.) It’s because something is happening. And it is something big. And that begins to explain why, as VC investment in Northern California slowed from 2014 to 2015, in LA it was up by more than 50 percent toward the end of 2015. These LA companies are actually tapping into cultural phenomena, trends and fundamental lifestyle changes. And where better to start these companies than LA? They are deeply emblematic of the pulse of pop culture, and pop culture is the pulse of the world. In this, for better or worse, LA leads the way. I don’t want to downplay the great technology that goes into companies like Snapchat and Tinder, but do you think it’s any coincidence that the behavioral patterns of consumers which these services elicit and foster began with LA’s finest? Or do you think that the marriage of a significant social movement with celebrity and branding that defines The Honest Company and its rise could have happened anywhere but LA? The success of e-commerce in LA is further accentuated by the of to , and it could be that the next great LA e-commerce business emerging is , which not only answers the question of what we should eat but how we should shop for that food. And of course, gives the “have-nots” of the world a place to buy used high fashion from the “haves” of LA and beyond. Changing channels, where better than LA to center the burgeoning e-sports world, which has its roots in an apartment in West Hollywood where the team behind created League of Legends. Following quickly on its heels now is , a mobile Twitch of sorts, feeding off the energy of LA’s youth. And these companies do not even begin to address the opportunities arising from the fundamental shifts now occurring in video and VR/AR, and why LA will dominate as those new media continue to evolve — as a reminder, Facebook bought SoCal-based Oculus! The next batch of LA-based VR companies are too numerous to mention, but certainly include and , the latter of which specializes in live event-based VR (especially sports). Sure, most of the best technology will probably come from Silicon Valley (and now SF) for several more years to come. But I’m not so sure that the game changers in consumer experiences (or video) will. And as we see LA evolve and spin-offs spawn from LA’s best companies, we will likely see a lot more activity in the City of Angels. Besides, as Randy notes, “Everybody’s very happy; ‘Cause the sun is shining all the time; Looks like another perfect day” in LA!
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Building as a modular gadget
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Fedor Novikov
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In recent years, researchers and companies have been exploring new ways to improve buildings through analytics software, prefabrication, connected devices, new materials and construction automation. It’s striking that most of these efforts are trying to patch problems within the legacy framework of “permanent” construction. The assumption that buildings should be designed and constructed as permanent objects is commonly treated as an axiom. Could it be that the one thing that is taken for granted is the biggest problem with buildings as products? Buildings are not permanent, but we tend to think of them as such. This mental construct determines the way we design, construct, operate and regulate buildings. Just like cars or planes, buildings are complex products have different . Source: ATD; Bock and Linner (2015) In permanent buildings, all components are stitched together as if they had the same useful lifetimes. Wires, plumbing and electronics are practically buried inside walls, floors and ceilings. This makes upgrades and renovations down the road inevitably messy, time-consuming and expensive. Renovations of permanent buildings require partial demolition without a possibility to fully reuse these materials or components. According to the EPA, building renovations contribute to 40 percent of all construction waste, almost just as much as the demolition itself. At the end-of-life, permanent buildings need to be demolished. This creates a long-term environmental problem as construction and demolition waste amounts to 30-40 percent of landfill volume (EPA). If we continue building as usual, the amount of non-recyclable demolition waste will keep increasing in perpetuity. What’s even more concerning is that, in a majority of cases, parts of buildings or even the building itself could become morally or functionally obsolete long before its physical end-of-life. Source: Survey on actual service lives for North American buildings According to the : “…no meaningful relationship exists between structural material and average service life … most buildings are demolished for reasons that have nothing to do with the physical state of the structural systems.” Urban economic cycles are much shorter than any given building’s useful life span. That means permanent buildings can sometimes be harmful and countercyclical: As buildings are designed to be permanent, putting new devices inside walls, floors or ceilings would require new construction interventions. Ironically, while wireless internet allows connected devices to be placed relatively anywhere, they are constrained by legacy infrastructure — location of electric wires and outlets, as well as permanent walls. To avoid this barrier, multiple startups are making standalone devices to be placed inside of permanent buildings. Although standalone devices may have different purposes, they use lots of similar or even identical components. claims that 80 percent of home electronic devices launched since 2012 could be built from just 28 common electronic components. At room scale, it becomes redundant and wasteful, and pushes the overall system cost. In other industries, computers with programmable OS killed most standalone devices. Recently, Tesla managed to turn cars into programmable gadgets with customizable interfaces. Buildings are the next ultimate gadgets. Transition from augmenting “dumb” environments with standalone devices to integrated connected gadgets If the end goal is to have a seamless programmable environment, the building itself should become the ultimate packaging for the IoT infrastructure, not standalone devices (just like a mainframe is hidden inside a computer or a phone). One emerging example of an integrated smart home that would run on Apple Home OS is being developed by . Ironically, such buildings may end up being outdated soon after they’re built (similarly to what happened with apartments and hotel rooms that permanently installed old iPhone docks in walls). Integration of smart home/office infrastructure within a permanent building framework is not future-proof. We’ve run into a vicious circle: obsolete permanent buildings lead to standalone devices; poor experience with standalone devices leads back to a new generation of integrated permanent buildings that would end up obsolete again. The only way to break this pattern is to make buildings modular, reconfigurable and upgradeable. It is a prerequisite for the future of a programmable built environment. A more sustainable approach to construction could be designed around the useful life of different building components. Buildings should be regarded as complex modular objects rather than permanent sculptures: This approach is somewhat similar to the way electronics or cars are designed and manufactured. Electronics have common standards like USB ports or proprietary standards like Apple Lightning connectors that remain unchanged throughout the generation of the products. This makes it possible to upgrade a small share of components in newer models and initiate trade-in programs aimed at refurbishing and reusing components with longer, useful lives. Japanese large-scale prefabrication companies pioneered the approach to buildings as upgradeable gadgets several decades ago. According to , the focus in the Japanese prefabrication industry is shifting to “service design” related to the building’s life cycle. For example, companies like keep track of all components’ service lives and proactively conduct maintenance and upgrade work similar to the way most cars are serviced. provides building and apartment layout reconfiguration services. goes as far as to provide trade-in programs for used buildings in exchange for newer constructions. Japan has demonstrated to the world that modular building can be of very high quality, and serviced as industrial gadgets. Elsewhere in the world this approach has not gotten much traction. In the United States, a couple of organizations are already working toward improving building reusability, modularity and reconfiguration. . OBI standardizes building blocks to allow building reconfiguration over the structure’s lifetime. At the moment it’s a DIY system somewhat similar to , but with higher integration utilizing off-the-shelf building materials. , an Austin-based startup, is working on standardized micro-living pods that could be easily transported to different locations and even involve entire cities. KASITA also introduced a modular interior wall system that allows users to personalize it and upgrade it over time. However, the pods themselves are not reconfigurable. In commercial buildings, based on the realization that the company had no idea how it would evolve organizationally in the next 10-20 years. Thus, they envisioned a campus that could be flexible enough to adapt to whatever the future holds. Reusability and upgradeability of buildings should be an important lens for evaluation of emerging construction and smart home solutions. For example, concrete 3D printing has been promoted as a promising construction technology. Projects in , and have received much press and attention. However, 3D printing of buildings may be following a dead-end branch of construction technology evolution because it operates within the legacy framework of permanent buildings. One important constraint in the transition toward reusable and reconfigurable buildings, it appears, would be cultural, rather than purely technological. The image of buildings as timeless fortresses, even if numbers suggests otherwise, is too ingrained in the Western culture (in Japan, for example, cultural attitude is different, and it’s acceptable to design buildings with a relatively shorter useful life). Therefore, design of reusable and reconfigurable building should ensure that at any given moment in time they permanent.
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NASA releases new video showing the globe age one year
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Emily Calandrelli
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Last year around this time, NASA released the of Earth taken by the EPIC camera on the satellite. Since then, that camera has captured a full year of our planet from its location at Lagrange Point 1 about one million miles away. Compiling over 3,000 images, NASA put together a video showing a sunlit Earth age one full year. EPIC takes at least one set of images every two hours. Even with this sporadic view of the Earth, footage from EPIC reveals clouds moving across the globe and large weather patterns swirling across the sky. Each set of images is recorded in ten different wavelengths. The wavelengths red, green, and blue were combined to create the color that you see in the video. Within one short year, EPIC has already seen a variety of interesting events. Series of EPIC images showing the moon’s shadow move across the Earth during a total solar eclipse / Images courtesy of NASA/NOA In March, EPIC captured a total solar eclipse, showing the moon’s shadow move across the face of the Earth. Those on Earth who were located in the path of the shadow were able to see a total solar eclipse. During a solar eclipse, our moon passes between the Earth and the sun. From our Earthly perspective, we look up in the sky and see a sun eclipsed, darkened by a circular shadow, for a brief period of time. Series of EPIC images showing the lunar transit that took place in July, 2015 / Images courtesy of NASA/NOAA Because of DSCOVR’s unique position, it witnesses one or two lunar transits each year. Since DSCOVR is located between the Earth and the sun at all times, and the moon orbits around the Earth, may lead you to believe that you should always be able to see the moon from DSCOVR’s perspective. But because EPIC has a very small field of view, the moon is incredibly Earth (see scale below), and the moon’s orbit is tilted about five degrees, it’s usually outside the frame of view. Distance between the Earth and the moon to scale / Screenshot from BuzzFeed video “209 Seconds That Will Make You Question Your Entire Existence” The first lunar transit was on July 16 , 2015 and the second lunar occurred July 4 of this year. Series of EPIC images showing the second lunar transit that took place July, 2016 / Images courtesy of NASA/NOAA [gallery size="tc-article-featured-image-wide" ids="1357817,1357816,1357819,1357818"] In addition to total solar eclipses and lunar transits, EPIC has seen a trio of large storms marching across the Pacific Ocean (first image), forest fires in Southeast Asia (second image), as well of views of the North and South poles (third and fourth images). EPIC’s ability to view both the North and the South poles over the course of a year is due to Earth’s tilt. This is the same reason we experience seasons throughout the year. When we see the North pole tilted toward EPIC, that means it’s also tilted toward the sun and the northern hemisphere is experiencing summer. Similarly, when the South pole is tilted toward EPIC, that means those in the southern hemisphere are experiencing summer. EPIC is an Earth Science instrument on board the DSCOVR satellite, a National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration mission, which launched in February, 2015. The spacecraft always remains between the sun and the Earth at a special gravitational balance point called Lagrange Point 1. At this location, DSCOVR is “parked” between the Earth and the sun at all times, allowing for it to make observations of an Earth-facing sun and a sun-facing Earth at all times. DSCOVR location in relation to the Earth and sun / Image courtesy of NOAA From DSCOVR’s vantage point, scientists can study cloud cover and weather patterns throughout the year. EPIC’s spectral images will enable the measurement of ozone amounts, aerosol amounts, cloud height and phase, vegetation properties, hotspot land properties and UV radiation estimates at Earth’s surface. Altogether, these images provide a constant view of our planet that we’ve never really had before. With DSCOVR’s mission life set at five years, we can expect more sunlit global images coming our way from EPIC for at least the next few years.
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The assimilation of robots into the workforce as peers, not replacements
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David Bruemmer
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One might ask why we would ever want to create that can do human work when we have so many people who need jobs. The goal of robotics should be to replace humans with , but rather to improve productivity and safety, removing humans from harm’s way and enabling them to focus on things that humans should be doing. We can agree that humans shouldn’t be carrying heavy loads, exposing themselves to radiation or finding land mines. What is less clear is the gray area, where the line that divides human and robot competency is becoming blurred. People wonder whether will displace their jobs. It’s an important question, especially because it’s already obvious that robotics has impacted the . Which industries will see the greatest integration of robotics, and which ones are likely to be impacted? There are a number of misconceptions, and even fears, about the of in the workplace. Overcoming these involves a greater understanding of the value of humans versus and the current technological limitations to . Including in the workplace is an “all or nothing” scenario. The most important question is how humans and should work together to improve quality and safety rather than how can replace humans. What people rarely understand is that robotics ’t necessarily produce a net loss in human jobs. One of my colleagues helped develop the Kiva which eventually became the basis of Amazon’s logistic centers. He explained that the original appeal of was that they would reduce the human labor . That never happened. What did happen was that the massively improved the productivity of each human, allowing Amazon to scale operations. No human was ever fired — in fact, more humans were hired. The same thing was true for my work with military . The original premise signed law by Congress was that half of our armed forces would become unmanned. The original aim was to cut labor costs, but, as with Amazon, the labor savings never came. What did happen is that saved lives and improved the safety and productivity of each soldier by conducting tasks like landmine detection and mapping out radiation and chemical spills. It also created a lot of jobs associated with building, maintaining and using . A Pew Research Center indicated that although technology is often sold as a means to reduce labor, it may actually create more high-paying jobs than the low-paying jobs it eliminates. However, the study also indicated a broad concern regarding how the use of will play out. When asked how robotics and self-driving cars would impact the , 48 percent of experts surveyed believed that would directly displace human workers for both blue-collar and white-collar jobs. On the other hand, 52 percent believed that robotics will create more jobs than it displaces. Gartner estimates there are in the world around us. The volume of sensor data coming from these connected entities is expected to increase dramatically, accounting for more and more of the . are poised to be crucial arbiters of the new, machine-intensive ecosystem of sensors, interfaces and actuators that we are building up all around us at home and in the workplace. can handle the complexity of this increasingly intricate world, allowing our attention to focus on the humans around us rather than on screens, buttons and keys. The more time we spend training ourselves to surf the net and text, the less our lives human lives of the last century. Today it is entirely possible that we are becoming robot-like faster than are becoming like humans. This is an inevitable course, but rather something we are consciously deciding to do. We need to carefully consider how much we value direct human interaction. Part of this is preference, but profit and performance considerations may override our preferences. From a performance perspective, humans and are necessarily good at the same things; we need to both comprehend and plan for the differences between humans and . In biology, co-evolutionary development occurs when two species evolve in relation to each other. In an ideal future, robotics applications will allow us to embrace the unique, vital essence of what it means to be human — creativity, imagination, love — and prevent the need for us to become more like machines. We need to objectively differentiate ourselves and our skills from what can do. The general wisdom, based on understanding of from the past decade, is that humans are good at high-level decision making and understanding the purpose and context for a task. are generally good at repetitive physical labor and reactive, high-precision tasks that require careful attention to detail. With a new generation of on the way, this understanding may need to change. I seem to have very interesting discussions whenever I get a haircut. One day I was explaining to my hairdresser that I work with and she stopped cutting, visibly upset and remarked that she would probably be out of a job before too long because of the development of robotic intelligence. I thought about it, and realized that would most likely replace my job before they replaced hers. Her job was really, really hard. She had to take hopelessly vague tasking like: “Give me a George Clooney haircut but kind of a bit more fun and crazy.” What does that mean? I can pretty well guarantee that a robot won’t ever know what that means. Regardless of trying to understand the semantics, a much harder task is figuring out how many small scissor cuts will result in an emerging look. Cutting hair is an easy job; I know I could never do it. I believe it would scare any robot as well. I told my hairdresser she had nothing to worry about, but she still looked at me skeptically. What she didn’t realize is that even if could cut hair effectively, she still had a major advantage. She had softly massaged my head and neck before she started cutting and she breezily discussed just about any topic while making her customer feel at ease. Machines will impact the jobs of surgeons and professors long before they impact her job. We already have perform surgical tasks more precisely and reliably than human hands. Likewise, distance education and automated testing are already changing the landscape for education. Hair cutting remains a domain where human artisans reign supreme. Humans excel when resourcefulness and contextual understanding are important. It is difficult to imagine a robot with the broad range of problem solving, general purpose knowledge and dexterity necessary to be a facility superintendent: fixing broken garbage disposals and broken toilets, maintaining the boiler, replacing a leaky pipe, etc. struggle in these unstructured environments where MacGyver-like problem solving is necessary. Like the hairdresser, apartment superintendents have little to fear from any time soon. As we consider the complexity of various human jobs, we must rethink only what we value in general, but how we pay people in particular. Maybe we’ll end up paying hairdressers and building superintendents more than surgeons and professors? will change the contours of our , but hopefully for the better. Even the professor and surgeon, who can already see impact from various forms of robotics and AI, need feel that technology is replacing them. The advent of the calculator did steal something vital from mathematicians. It did change what we value from them. Few of us feel enmity with calculators because we’re generally happy to let calculators outperform us in that arena. will be much more than calculators, but still the key will be to ensure that we value the right things. We need to ensure a framework where human input and robot input can be properly interwoven. All too often, we focus on either full human control or full autonomy, and neither of these is likely to be optimal. While working with the Department of Energy we found that operators who had spent many years honing their ability to drive with joysticks were quite resistant to the notion that the could do the driving for them. In one experiment, drove the course twice, once in a mode where the robot took no initiative and once in a shared control mode where the human felt like they were in control but the robot wove its way through hallways and openings. As expected, performance was significantly better in the mode where the robot helped with the driving. Less expected were the operators’ responses when asked about their “feeling of control.” They actually reported feeling more in control while using the mode where the robot did most of the driving. They took the credit for the good driving when really it was robot initiative that made them successful. Humans often don’t know what they’re good at, but the introduction of a well-structured human-robot interaction approach can help us maintain high-level control while taking away the low-level details. If we can get the task allocation right, the humans of the future won’t be fighting with to shovel dirt, find landmines or drive mining equipment. Rather, humans will be caring for people and having interesting conversations about how to make the world a better place. They should be doing whatever they love and spending time with whomever they love — which will hopefully be a robot. Despite persistent fears regarding robot overlords, we will be as free as we choose to make ourselves. We can do this by fighting with but by fighting fiercely to maintain our distinctness and our essential nature.
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The government should be measured in its reaction to the Tesla crash
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Jim Scheinman
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When Joshua Brown’s Tesla Model S collided with a semitrailer truck on a Florida highway in May, it became the in an autonomous vehicle. Mr. Brown served in the United States Navy for over a decade, and had a long life ahead of him passing at the young age of 40. His death is tragic and I send my deepest condolences to Mr. Brown’s family and friends. I was hoping to never have to read about such a tragedy that befell Mr. Brown, but feared that it might be inevitable. I’m an investor in autonomous vehicle and self-driving technology* startups and I believe that we will have self-driving cars on the road much sooner than most of the ‘experts’ who are predicting post-2020. Through Ventures, I was a seed investor and board advisor in Cruise, , and we have made two other autonomous tech investments in our newest Fund that we’ll announce soon. I’m not alone in believing in the growth of this nascent industry: Goldman Sachs predicts that the market for advanced driver assistance systems and autonomous vehicles . Because of my active role working with early-stage companies in this industry, I’ve learned a lot about the technical advances as well as discussed in depth some of the trickiest regulatory and moral issues. Any new significant advances in technology, especially ones that involve critical and potentially dangerous daily consumer habits like driving a car will often be met with fear. Fear of the unknown, fear of what society will look like in a world where there are only self-driving cars, and fear of something new. The nomenclature around autonomous vehicles and self driving cars can be confusing — the most common reference point is the government’s defined : Last year and Americans wasted a whopping . These are just a few of the reasons why self-driving cars are necessary and will improve our world. The outcome of the into the Tesla collision has the potential to profoundly impact the future of the autonomous vehicle and self-driving industries. Tesla recently came out with , saying that the accident was a rare circumstance, that neither a human nor the autopilot system could have foreseen, and that Model S vehicles are still safer than human drivers on the whole. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) — the federal body responsible for preventing crashes and investigating this accident — will certainly have more to say on this topic. Their stance and mandated regulations will have a strong impact on the future of this important technical innovation. While I acknowledge and appreciate the role of governmental agencies to protect its citizens from harm, I encourage the NHTSA to be rational and measured in their response. Today, the United States has a significant lead in the autonomous vehicle and self-driving car industry. The NHSTA would be wise to not set us back years or even decades by inappropriately overreacting to where we need to eventually be: a world where there are only level 4 full autonomous self-driving vehicles on most roads. *While many use the terms “autonomous” and “self-driving” interchangeably, carmakers make a distinction. Autonomous vehicles can move independently but look similar to contemporary vehicles on the road and have human ownership. Self-driving vehicles refers to a whole new class and design of vehicles where there is no steering wheel, or necessarily personal ownership. (source: )
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Crunch Report | Coup Attempt in Turkey Blocks Social Media
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Khaled "Tito" Hamze
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Tito Hamze
Tito Hamze
Joe Zolnoski
Joe Zolnoski
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10 quick tips for becoming a Pokémon Master
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Felicia Shivakumar
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Pokémon Go is of all time — at this point, you’re either playing or you’re sick of hearing about it. If you’re in that first camp, keep reading. We are only a week in and several members of the TechCrunch team are level 20 or higher. We have put a ton of mileage into the game. Hundreds of miles in fact. And here’s what we think are the best tips to help you become a Pokémon Master in no time.
Let’s start first with hunting down and catching stuff. DON’T JUST WALK AIMLESSLY! When you tap on the bottom right, you’ll pull up the “Nearby” drawer. The footprints beneath Pokémon are a rough indication of how far away they are. The drawer is sorted by distance, and it’ll update as you walk around. Tapping a Pokémon focuses in on it. Each claw represents roughly a 100 meter distance. If you drop down from three prints to two, you should feel pretty confident that you’re headed in the right direction.
When catching Pokémon, look at the colored circle that appears when you’re throwing. Green means easy; red means hard. See how the circle shrinks over and over? The smaller it is, the better your odds are of making a catch. But, you only get that odds bonus if the ball lands INSIDE the colored circle.
When entering a gym battle, swipe from right to left to see what you’re up against — then pick your Pokémon based on what you’re about to fight. The game offers up what it thinks might work, but it’s often wrong. Click the suggested Pokémon to swap them out, and order them based on what you’re about to fight. Fighting a Fire Pokemon first? Throw your strongest Water Pokémon at it right off the bat. [gallery ids="1354009,1354006,1354007,1354010,1354005,1354015,1354014"] Speaking of battle, when the little blue bars in the upper left fills up, you can hold down on the screen to unleash a special attack. Watch for yellow flashes around the edge of the screen during a battle. When these occur, your opponent is about to deal damage — this is when you want to dodge by swiping the screen. Practice on the weakest gym you can find to get the timing down.
Ultimately, you want a bunch of Pokémon of varying types with high “CP”, or combat power. The higher your own level, the more high powered Pokémon you’ll encounter. Even if you and your friend click the same Pokémon, each of you might see a Pokémon with a different CP count. You’ll still find plenty of weak ones even at higher levels, but the potential cap gets better as you do. There’s a strategy to storage and everyone’s seems to differ slightly. Generally, it makes sense to transfer low CP Pokémon to the Professor to earn candy for power ups and to evolve high CP. Holding on to high CP duplicates of both rare or easy to find Pokemon helps you level up and evolve more powerful fighters.
Want to level faster? Use those Lucky Eggs you pick up in the most efficient way by batching your evolutions. You get 500 XP every time you evolve a Pokemon, even if you’ve evolved that Pokemon before. You get even more if it’s a new addition to your Pokedex. Pidgies and Wheedles are the easiest to evolve — so don’t pass them up! Gather a ton of them, fire off a lucky egg, evolve them all rapid fire, and drown in that super sweet XP.
You’ll collect hatchable eggs at Poke Stops. Make sure to always have one or more in an incubator — as you walk, they get closer to hatching. Use your one “Infinite” incubator to hatch 2km eggs, since you’ll inherently hatch more of those. You might want to wait to hatch 10km eggs until you’re at least level 18; those eggs have the potential to hatch rare Pokemon and you want your rare stuff to start out strong so you don’t waste candy powering them up.
This game has a ton of bugs. Even if it hasn’t crashed recently, you want to restart it every once in awhile. Pokémon can get stuck on the “Nearby” radar when they’re not actually there anymore. So if you’ve been chasing one for ages and you’re not getting any closer, try rebooting.
Once you’re over the whole AR thing, you can turn AR off with the switch in the upper right. This makes it easier to aim.
You can tap on the X at Poke Stops to grab all the items — you don’t have to tap each one.
Different cities, even. Stuff that’s rare in Oakland might be common in San Francisco, and vice versa. Try hitting parks, lakes, and other places with unique terrain. You know you’re in a good spot when you see a bunch of other players with lures set up on the Poke Stops.
If you’re getting really intense, research how to use Niantic’s other game, , to plan ahead before you leave the house. Done properly, you can use Ingress to find Pokestops that are close together and where spawns are likely to occur.
That’s it! Happy hunting!
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Let’s start getting excited about robots taking our jobs
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Andrew Heikkila
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A recent found that a majority of Americans believe that . With tech giants like to produce autonomous passenger vehicles, as well as positioning themselves to revolutionize the commercial transportation industry, many are already discussing how we’ll handle history’s first slew of “driverless” experiences. It’s no wonder, then, that talk about technological unemployment is becoming increasingly popular, with many commercial drivers beginning to question whether or not they’ll still have jobs in the years. While the concept of a world filled with autonomous workers is relatively new to us, digital disruption obviously isn’t, and we’ve consistently overcome technological unemployment in the past. Sure, there have been winners and losers, à la Netflix and Blockbuster, Uber and taxi cab companies, etc., but empirically, we’ve seen that when an industry is affected, key players will usually make a big shift, users are happier and life goes on. This is what we’d call the optimistic view of things, the side of folks who like to think that even if begin to take our jobs, we’ll always find a way to create new ones. On the other end of the spectrum we have the pessimistic view of things, and can see this explored by TechCrunch columnist in multiple articles. He wrote a piece in mid-2013 titled “ ” that really dove into what could happen on the macro scale after the robot revolution occurs, invoking images of “post-capitalism,” the haves and the have-nots and the dangers of Orwellian dystopia. This dichotomy often causes the focus of the discussion to revolve around whether or not technological unemployment will become widespread — but more interesting than that is how few are discussing whether it happen. Yet, why shouldn’t human beings shoot for a future where automated labor creates abundant resources and kills person-based labor as we know it? Our economy is already with meat-based bodies and . Wouldn’t the ultimate outcome of a labor-less society be some sort of technologically induced, universal equality? Evans touches on this a bit. To many, technology is a great equalizer. It almost always has been, which is why Luddites were pondering technological unemployment more than a hundred years ago, worried that low-skill workers aided by machines would replace master craftsmen during the industrial revolution (spoiler alert: they did). A more recent example of technology as a potentially broad equalizer comes in the form of blockchain technology. Those following the tech industry have no doubt heard it touted as the next great thing since sliced bread, capable of disrupting and decentralizing everything to . Blockchain is particularly relevant in this case because of that term: decentralization. Without getting too heavily into it, blockchain is the driving technology behind bitcoin currency. Because it’s not printed by banks or governments, nobody “owns” it, meaning that no centralized authority can control it. Applied to autonomous work, centralization means that somebody would own the world’s best source (or sources) of labor, controlling who gets to benefit from and reap the proverbial fruits of this labor and who doesn’t. This is where all the doomsayers get their ammo. In a world where robot workers autonomously provide humans with innumerable resources, most importantly food and shelter (what else do humans truly work for and require?), currency no longer becomes important. Labor sources are currency at that point, and the ingrained human assumption, “objects must have owners,” gives rise to the idea that autonomous labor sources will inevitably become patented and centralized. The ideas of value, ownership and work are intrinsically tied together in the Western world. Decentralized technology that indiscriminately provides unlimited resources to a planet full of flesh-and-blood-humans might sound like a communist pipe dream, but would be the ultimate equalizer in the long run. Societies would no longer be able to measure the value of a human being by their individual economic contributions to the system. Let’s go back to the oft-used self-driving car example. Once driverless technology is perfected, estimates show that and will be destroyed. This is only a problem because these people will no longer have a source of income, while many others will. If, on the other hand, all of the world’s jobs were destroyed and handed to decentralized, autonomous , the playing field would be level. Of course, any attempt to achieve this future would most likely be met with resistance by those who currently benefit from a centralized system, and the short-term future would most likely see marked inequality amidst the chaos. Economic identities die hard. Fortunately, economic identities do die. The Guardian ran an article in 2014 on how as technology creates a more uncertain, gig-based economy. Evans calls this shift , and posits that society’s ingrained “assumption that every able-bodied adult have a full-time ” is the actual problem standing in the way of an automated future. “I submit that the actual problem is that full-time jobs are assumed as the fundamental economic building blocks of our society,” he says, “and that we lack the flexibility or imagination to consider, much less move towards, any alternative structure.” The debate covering centralization, decentralization and our individual economic identities is the first hurdle — and it’s not necessarily a one-sided debate. If a decentralized system was doling out resources equally to a seven-billion-and-growing population of human beings, how long before overpopulation and lack of resources would do us in as a species? What potential downsides would come with abandoning the values of labor and discriminatory resource attribution? Would equal distribution mean that we have to relegate “eating” to consumption of or other nondescript to conserve resources? It might sound silly to some, but all facets must be considered. Let’s imagine, however, that some semblance of Utopia is actually achieved. Technology not only allows us an unlimited, autonomous source of labor, but also endows us with the ability to extend our resources, achieve lasting peace and basically cure society of all ills. What then? What would humans do with their time if they didn’t have to compete with one another to garner wealth and resources? As a sort of thought experiment, let’s imagine that the other most successful animal on this planet, ants, were suddenly magically endowed with the ability to build autonomous, self-replicating versions of themselves. These “artificial ants” can work more quickly and efficiently than their organic counterparts, and can do everything from hive construction, to territorial defense, to gathering food. The philosophical question is, if not work, what is left for an ant to do? There are recent — workers kept in reserve until they’re needed for a really big task. Would the rest of the “working” population join these idle ants and simply do nothing, forever, while the artificial ants plug away, performing the jobs organic ants used to? What would the difference between the two ant populations really be besides chemical makeup? Are carbon-based ants truly just tiny organic machines? Cogs in a behavioral/social system that evolved over time to optimally promote survival and reproduction? Are human beings cogs in a similar machine? Obviously, the analogy isn’t perfect. There are huge differences between populations of humans and ants. For example, while many believe that ants are controlled by their queens, the truth is that ants . They’ve evolved a working, decentralized system that puts the interests of the whole over the interests of any one individual ant. Sure, each ant has a to do, and some ants do nothing sometimes, but everybody gets fed, everybody has somewhere to live and everybody is essentially equal. Human beings, on the other hand, consider the individual in the equation, and not just the sum of parts. We want to be better than our neighbors, so we try to buy a better TV or a more stylish car or a bigger house. In developed worlds we work hard to make money so we can buy things, live lifestyles or have experiences. These things define us. If, suddenly, every human being on the planet was given access to anything they ever wanted, with the caveat that they could never actually own anything again, how much of the population would try to find a way to exploit and elevate themselves above others anyway? Additionally, how much would really change out of the scenario if we dropped the “no ownership” caveat? Is the inevitable formation of hierarchy via social values such as “exclusivity” and “ownership” simply the result of and principles we see everywhere else in nature? The truth is that nobody knows. A society that fully embraces technological unemployment will be forced to make extremely personal and existential observations daily that most people put off until they’re over 60 and retired, after life has already “passed them by.” If history is lucky enough to repeat itself, perhaps we’ll see sequels to the Renaissance and Enlightenment periods — but we’ll never know until we start getting excited about taking our jobs.
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How to circumvent Turkey’s social media block
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Kate Conger
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Overall, internet traffic in Turkey may have dropped by half, according to CloudFlare data. CloudFlare CEO Matthew Prince , “From CloudFlare data, appears there’s about a 50% drop in Internet traffic coming out of Turkey.” To our friends in , you now have unlimited data to stay connected with — TunnelBear (@theTunnelBear) VPNs are a popular resource for Turkish citizens trying to access social media during a blackout: Hotspot Shield reported a 322% growth in new installs in Turkey within the first 2 hours of the reported coup.
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How to get your photos featured on Apple’s Shot on iPhone billboards
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Haje Jan Kamps
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Been near a billboard recently? You’ve probably seen . As a photographer, you may have felt a pang of envy; why aren’t photos up there for the world to see? I tracked down Jordan Ison, one of the photographers featured in Apple’s most recent campaign, to find out how his images came to be featured in the world’s biggest art exhibition. “I take a lot of photos and I get a lot of spam related to those photos,” says Ison, “but in this case I received two very cryptic emails from two different people the same agency. There was something about them that made me reply. I’m glad I did!”
When the budding photographer did reply to the email, the first thing the agency did was to put an incredibly strict NDA in front of him. He signed, meaning he couldn’t talk about anything, to anyone, for any reason; in fact, Ison was hesitant to even name the agency. “You wouldn’t believe what a sense of secrecy there is,” Ison laughs. “We have a Facebook group for the people who are featured in the 2016 campaign. When people have communication with the agency, they never mention names in the Facebook group. It’s always ‘my contact’ and ‘the agency,’ never names.” While Ison never told me the name of the agency, it’s that the advertising agency in question is , using their sub-brand to reach out to photographers. Ison started his photographic journey when he first bought an iPhone 4. Jordan Ison in front of a billboard in San Francisco featuring his photo. “I’d never really taken photos before I bought an iPhone,” he says, as he’s fiddling with the camera strap on the Rolleiflex he brought with him to our interview — a very different type of camera than the iPhone. “But as soon as I started taking pictures and posting them on Instagram, it woke a new hobby in me.” From the start, Ison was tagging his photos on Instagram, including the hashtag. That was the beginning of a habit that would eventually land his photographs on billboards all over the world. The agency contacted potential participants in the Shot on iPhone campaign with a very simple message. “My client wants to use your photograph for something they are doing,” the emails read, cryptically. The project only had a codename — which Ison declined to share with me, which seems straight out of a spy movie to me. “The process was interesting. They gave me nothing to go off of. They didn’t say it was the Shot on iPhone campaign until the very end,” he shrugs. “They actually wanted to talk to me about a different photo at first,” Ison says, showing me a gorgeous shot of the Bonneville Salt Flats on his phone, “but they also asked me if I had any other shots they could take a look at. I sent them half a dozen shots, and in the end that was lucky: They went with another photo than the one they had found.”
“They found the images using a hashtag on Instagram,” Ison explains. “But they must have seen as well, as I don’t have my email address on my Instagram account.” “For each photo I submitted, the agency wanted a comprehensive questionnaire filled in. They wanted to know the circumstances for why I decided to take the photo and the story behind it,” Ison told me. “The context for the photos seemed really important to them; they wanted to know the who, why, where and what in depth.” The agency also asked the photographers to sign a declaration that they owned the copyright to the photographs and that they were willing to let the agency use the photos for commercial purposes. The photographers were paid for the use of the images, but not as much as you might think. The eye-catching photos can be seen on posters and billboards all over the world. How’s that for an expansive art exhibition! “I was paid much better than I would normally be paid for a stock image,” Ison says, without wanting to divulge the exact amount. “Was it around $2,000?” I asked, picking a number out of the air. “It was less than that,” Ison admits. “The agency would drop hints, saying they were still selecting and curating the photographs, and would tell me I was still in the running, but also made it clear that nothing would be final until the billboards went up,” says Ison, adding that the four-month process was filled with mystery. He didn’t find out that his photos had made the final sift until four days before the billboards went up in locations around the world, but knows that his photos have been featured all over the place, including in more than a dozen magazines, smaller billboards all over the world and — the biggest compliment of all — on mural-sized billboards in San Francisco, Minneapolis, Milan, Berlin, Kuala Lumpur, Perth and Guangzhou. “Being featured in the campaign is both exciting and a bit humbling,” Ison says, but he is realistic about the impact it will have on his photographic career. “I may get more attention from this, but I may not. The important thing to me is that it spurs me on to keep taking photographs. Knowing that my photos are good enough to be used in a campaign like this is really motivating.” The photographers in the current Shot on iPhone campaign have tracked each other down on Facebook and are sharing each others’ photographs from buildings around the world. In this case, one of the group’s members found Ison’s photo covering the side of a shopping mall in Guangzhou, China. This year’s campaign was called ‘colors.’ Each of the photos is almost monochromatic. Want your photo to be the next to be lit up, featured, the size of the side of a building, in countries all around the world? There’s no magic bullet for getting picked, but here are five tips that should increase the chances of your photos floating to the top of the pile: Good luck!
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Rick and Morty is coming to virtual reality
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Greg Kumparak
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Er, wrong show. W-w-w-whoa, Morty. Rick and Morty is coming to virtual reality by way of the HTC Vive. Beyond that, there’s… not a whole lot to know, just yet, except that it’s called “ ” and is being built by Owlchemy — the same folks who made the silly but oh-so-wonderful for Vive. Oh, and they released all of 15 seconds of gameplay footage: The company says they’ll be showing the game off at San Diego Comic Con in July — alas, no word on a release beyond that, just yet. Will Mr. Meeseeks be there to help me along the way? Will we be able to go into a simulation within a simulation We’ll hopefully find out soon.
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13 TechCrunch stories you don’t want to miss this week
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Anna Escher
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This week’s headlines saw Pokémon Go mania, iPhone 7 leaks and the biggest tech IPO of the year so far. Here’s a quick roundup of the top tech news of the week so you can get back to hunting Charizards. Pokémon Go completely took over this week, as the global rollout continued. The app Want to get better, faster? Here are Everything you need to know to get started playing Pokemon Go http://tcrn.ch/29Lm3HC Posted by on Tuesday, July 12, 2016 According to leaks that emerged this week, the . One photo showed that the 7 would feature redesigned antennas, giving the phone a sleeker look. The new model shows a bigger, protruding camera lens, perhaps indicating the rumored dual-lens camera system. As always, take rumors with a grain of salt. Line, the mobile messaging app from Japan, went public in what was the . Line’s share price jumped 50 percent on its Tokyo debut as the IPO raised over $1.1 billion in its dual listing on NYSE and Tokyo Stock Exchange. Here’s . Tech executives . “We have listened to Donald Trump over the past year and we have concluded: Trump would be a disaster for innovation. His vision stands against the open exchange of ideas, free movement of people, and productive engagement with the outside world that is critical to our economy — and that provide the foundation for innovation and growth,” the letter says. It’s signed by an impressive list of executives from Slack, Twilio, Yelp, Reddit, Twitter and more. Recently departed Hyperloop One co-founder Brogan BamBrogan (for allegedly placing a hangman’s noose on BamBrogan’s chair after a disagreement) against the company’s former head of legal, Afshin Pishevar. He also filed a lawsuit against both Afshin and his brother Shervin Pishevar (for wrongful termination and claims of failure toward fiduciary duty). , determining Pishevar was not a threat to BamBrogan since the two no longer live or work together. A spokesperson for Hyperloop One called the lawsuit “unfortunate and delusional.” Amazon’s AWS made an acquisition to continue building out the services that it offers on its cloud storage platform. , a San Francisco-based startup that has built an integrated development environment for web and mobile developers to collaborate together. , announcing that Prime Day 2016 was the “biggest day in the history of Amazon.” Microsoft debuted its aimed at getting devices into the enterprise. The initiative will allow businesses to lease Surface devices, as well as subscriptions to Office 365 and Windows 10. The company says this will allow customers to benefit from access to the latest hardware. Founders of the AR helmet maker . Skully jumped into the tech scene two years ago after for the company’s AR motorcycle helmet that lets riders see traffic behind them. The founders have been on a different page than investors regarding the future of the company for quite some time, said a source. Unity Technologies, which has become indispensable to the gaming industry, . With the rise of augmented and virtual reality, we are rapidly approaching the likelihood that the future will be built on Unity. The ongoing investigation surrounding a number of Tesla crashes that allegedly involved Autopilot continued as Was Tesla’s Autopilot mode too much autonomy, too soon? We’ll have to wait and see. Google made another small acquisition to help it continue to build out its latest efforts in social apps. The search giant to enhance its Spaces group chat app. Twitter continued its push into the livestreaming competition as it announced a to its service. Earlier this week, to livestream financial news. Most companies don’t even give their own employees access to their data centers, but because Facebook open sources most of its server and networking designs, it’s a bit more open to allowing outsiders in. We got , where your data goes to die and where your photos from 10 years ago live.
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HelloMD looks to its ‘Quora for cannabis’ as a source of growth
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Darrell Etherington
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I’m in Canada, and I’m having a conversation about weed. So far, everything’s tracking. But this isn’t just a casual convo — is a startup focused on health, community and access to information, and they’re based in the U.S. (with people in SF and Colorado). And while the core business began as a way to use for medicinal marijuana prescriptions, HelloMD founder Pamela Hadfield tells me it’s since become something more. After spinning up around 15 months ago the above-mentioned focus on connecting patients with doctors via video, Hadfield and her VP of business development Larry Lister tell me they increasingly saw people coming to HelloMD not necessarily for prescriptions, but for more general information about legal medicinal marijuana in the U.S., and for guidance on the often-confusing tangle of dispensaries, marijuana brands, specific methods of treatment and more. Other startups, like , look to provide a social space for cannabis users to connect, but HelloMD is looking specifically to offer access to info. “It’s a confusing marketplace, it’s so hard to find legitimate, trustworthy information,” Hadfield said, noting that because of limits on academic research regarding marijuana as medicine in the U.S., as well as bans on advertising or marketing medical marijuana products, finding even basic info can be a challenge. “We want to engage [medical marijuana users], and connect them, and become that centralized resource for them,” Hadfield explains. “So we thought: What would be the easiest way to connect this community?” Telehealth is part of facilitating those connections, but, increasingly, HelloMD is also seeing a lot of traffic to its Q&A resource, which operates a bit like a Quora for cannabis. Medical professionals, as well as companies operating in the space, and even other community members, can provide answers to questions posed by users. Browsing the archive, you’ll see debates that include citations of lots of academic studies, as well as medical journal articles and anecdotal information based on lived experience. And Hadfield and Lister say that’s driving a lot of news sign-ups, and a lot of new organic traffic from search, which accounts for 65 percent of HelloMD’s current traffic overall. “We’re seeing 28 percent compound growth rate in registered users,” Hadfield said. “We have 70,000 registered now, and are looking at a goal of one million registered in 12 months time.” It’s ambitious, but there’s reason to believe the demand is there to help meet that goal. 26 states in the U.S. have some kind of medicinal cannabis legalization on the books, which accounts for about 150 million people with access — and with questions. And while the largest current age brackets for cannabis users are between 25 and 55, the fastest growing is the 55 and up group. That’s likely to result in an increasingly large addressable market as the population continues to age up, and, as reveal, increasingly when those people have to deal with ongoing pain, they’re looking away from prescription pills and toward medical marijuana. HelloMD is currently bootstrapped, but Hadfield and Lister say they’re looking for funding, though they also say they’re currently cash-flow positive and will be in a place this calendar year where they’re comfortable continuing to self-fund if the investment picture doesn’t line up. I asked if they’ve approached cannabis-specific funds; they said they have, but a recurring issue they encounter is that those funds take them most of the way through the investment funnel and then say they’re ready to invest, but have to convince LPs to commit first. There’s still a stigma, Lister notes, despite . Most of HelloMD’s revenue comes from their telehealth prescriptions, which cost $49 per consult, but they’re now taking in some money from brands connecting with users on the platform. And the social Q&A is what Hadfield says may end up being the real innovation they bring in terms of long-term impact. “That feels right now like the most disruptive thing we’ve done,” she said. “People can get advice from sources they trust.” Obviously, there’s still opportunity for misinformation to spread, but with a sizeable community that includes a fair number of medical doctors, it’s a far better resource than typing a question into Google and trying to navigate the results on your own.
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Sales startup Immediately will shut down as team members join New Relic
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Anthony Ha
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, a startup that built mobile sales tools, will be shutting down at the end of the month, while part of the team will move on to cloud-monitoring company . According to the official announcement, both (which offers a number of features, including phone logging and detecting when emails are opened) and (a “ “) will be supported until the end of July, and then shut down. To be clear, New Relic is not acquiring Immediately or its assets, just hiring some of its team members. Immediately CEO Branko Cerny said he will not be joining New Relic, but the four members of the startup’s “core product team” (including Cerny’s co-founder and CTO James Mock) will. “The thing that I’m proudest of in the entire Immediately journey is the density and caliber of technical/product talent that we were able to accumulate on the team,” Cerny said via email. “These are world-class builders of products that are technologically very complex, but in their experience feel very simple.” A New Relic spokesperson confirmed that “key members of the team from Immediately are joining New Relic’s product and engineering team.” in seed funding from investors, including .
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Removing the human element from autonomous commercial drones
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Lior Segal
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Since the industrial revolution, economic advancement has been achieved by increasing efficiency and reducing human labor through greater mechanical autonomy driven by technological innovation. For many, commercial drones represent the next enabler of economic benefit using robotic platforms. The applications are many: filming, surveillance, delivery and many other tasks that can improve efficiencies. Yet, most of these tasks require a person in the loop. Recent have started paving the way for commercial drones. However, the true economic potential will not be realized unless further changes are made. The concept of autonomous robots only works if several levels come together, each of which either replaces or improves human-based tasks with software or hardware. But to better understand what autonomous drones truly mean and where things stand today, you must break down the contributing elements. This is the keystone of the drone industry, both commercially and recreationally. It allows the drone to perform predetermined routes (waypoint based), from takeoff to landing, with many on-flight fail-safe protocols. One might add obstacle avoidance technology, relevant for some applications, such as offered by recent TechCrunch meetup winner or . Basically, it replaces traditional navigation provided by a trained human. Drones also face the limitation of their battery life, requiring human intervention to swap batteries or charge and place them in a container protected from the elements. This is crucial to allow ongoing performance in many applications, without the need for an on-site operator to take care of it. Taking this capability a step further is to use computer vision or other analytics and basic AI capability, where the drone not only operates, but also creates insights based on the data it has harvested, and translates them into actions. Moreover, the drone may even perform basic tasks, without any human intervention. For example, imagine a drone constantly monitoring piles of construction materials and seamlessly ordering supplies on a real-time basis as they are needed. The first level, autonomous flight, is one of the most basic capabilities, but is in the U.S. by a “line of sight” regulation, while thriving in like Africa. Leading drone companies such as and use the above autonomous level to create ongoing data collection that is processed and provided to the end-user as a decision tool. Many startup companies are tackling the second level of autonomy by offering element-protected charging stations; most recently, premium-level solution. Yet, the true fulfillment of this charging station is to allow end-to-end autonomous capabilities, which requires taking the person out of the loop to operate in a scalable and unlimited way. Today, innovation is taking place in the area of offering real-time solutions, where on-the-fly analytics takes place, allowing real-time understanding and response. This requires solving an algorithmic challenge of real-time detection while in flight. Once solved, the on-flight detections create, over time, a cloud-based database that can be used to create useful insights and rule sets, allowing real-time responses.
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Facebook, Twitter and YouTube blocked in Turkey during reported coup attempt
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Devin Coldewey
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The Turkish military has deployed in Istanbul and Ankara, and the government has apparently blocked social media in response to what is being reported as an attempted coup. Turkey Blocks, a Twitter account that regularly checks if sites are being blocked in the country, reported at 11:04 PM Istanbul time that Facebook, Twitter and YouTube were all unresponsive, though Instagram and Vimeo remained available. Access was restored after about an hour-and-a-half, according to the research agency Dyn Research. Confirmed: Twitter, Facebook & YouTube blocked in at 10:50PM after apparent military uprising in — Turkey Blocks (@TurkeyBlocks) Some residents of Turkey appeared able to access social media, likely via a VPN or some other anonymizing service. Anyone affected might want to try for Windows and Mac OS or for Android (or try some of the other ). The U.S. State Department acknowledged reports of a social media block in the country and suggested anyone trying to contact friends or family use email, text messages or phone calls instead. Reports that social media is blocked in . Use email/phone call/SMS to contact loved ones in area. — Travel – State Dept (@TravelGov) Twitter’s policy team said it did not think the site was fully blocked in Turkey. “We suspect there is an intentional slowing of our traffic in country,” Twitter said in a posted in English and Turkish. Twitter’s livestreaming app Periscope and Facebook Live appeared unaffected, broadcasting several livestreams from Istanbul. Facebook did not provide a statement on the reported blocks. “We are aware of reports that YouTube is down in Turkey, however, our systems seem to be functioning normally,” a YouTube spokesperson told TechCrunch. Many in Turkey are publishing images of military occupation of important landmarks like bridges, and one tweet shows what appears to be a fighter jet flying very low over Ankara. Tanks have been photographed at Istanbul’s Ataturk Airport. Turkish soldiers block both bridges on the Bosphorus in Istanbul and jets flying low in Ankara. Reason not clear yet — Selin Girit (@selingirit) https://twitter.com/HazalKoptagel/status/754035715709739008 Video of a helicopter opening fire in Turkey via @Havrekhshaeta — BM-21 GRAD (@bm21_grad) The Associated Press that the Turkish prime minister, Binali Yildirim, has confirmed that there has been a coup attempt by a group within Turkey’s military. Fighting is apparently ongoing. President Erdoğan appeared on Turkish television via Facetime to address the coup. 's President appears on local TV via FaceTime, says "attempted uprising" will be given necessary response — The Express Tribune (@etribune) The following statement from the group was reportedly read on local television: Turkish Armed Forces have completely taken over the administration of the country to reinstate constitutional order, human rights and freedoms, the rule of law and the general security that was damaged. All international agreements are still valid. We hope that all of our good relationships with all countries will continue. However, the takeover does not seem to be “complete.” Turkey’s prime minister Yildirim said the coup would not be successful. Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan, who is typically unsupportive of social media, to condemn the coup attempt and call on the country’s citizens to oppose the takeover efforts at the airports and in public squares. is updating live.
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Legion Analytics is building bots to automate your sales pitch
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Anthony Ha
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is looking to make your sales team more productive with the help of artificial intelligence. We covered the startup last year when it was part of Y Combinator’s fellowship program and . CEO Jamasen Rodriguez told me that the company’s vision has expanded — it’s not just focused on lead generation anymore, but rather becoming “a full-stack sales company.” And part of that vision involves automating the mundane parts of the sales process. Bots are a pretty trendy topic right now, and Legion Analytics’ claim of using natural language and machine learning technology is pretty familiar, too. What’s different, according to Rodriguez, is the way the company’s technology can analyze text and “understand the sales meaning of that text.” The idea isn’t to replace salespeople entirely, but rather to free them from a lot of the more time-consuming back-and-forth over email of answering basic questions and scheduling demos. That, in turn, should allow a single sales rep to pursue many more leads at one time. In fact, Rodriguez said his company has already been using the A.I. sales rep (which it calls Kylie) to promote its own products. How human does Kylie sound? Well, Rodriguez said the technology even understands rudimentary small talk — if you mention a child’s soccer game, Kylie will ask about the game later on. And he said one of the prospects actually started flirting with her. (I’ve emailed Kylie myself and gotten the basic sales pitch on Legion Analytics. But, uh, I’m not trying to flirt.) That also brings up another question: Should potential customers be told that they’re interacting with a bot? Rodriguez said the goal is to be as human-like as possible, so you probably don’t want to spill the beans right away. At the same time, he has told customers the truth about Kylie later on — after all, it’s kind of a selling point for his company. He suggested that each company using Kylie will probably want to make that decision on their own. Rodriguez is now looking to test out Kylie with a variety of companies and industries. If you’re interested, you can .
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Netflix launches Flixtape so you can make ‘mixtapes’ of your favorites movies and shows
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Sarah Perez
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Just in time for the weekend, Netflix today the launch of a new service called , which the company describes as a way to make short playlists of your favorite Netflix titles. “It’s like a mixtape, but for Netflix,” the site explains. The new tool lets you create these lists based on a genre or theme of some sort, then share them with friends or family over text message, email or social networks like Facebook and Twitter. There are a number of ways you can use something like Flixtape. You can make your own mixes of favorite movies or shows, just for reference’s sake, or you could create curated recommendations for friends. Unfortunately, Netflix has decided to limit the number of titles that can be added to each Flixtape. The editor allows you to replace and remove any of the three titles it suggests, then you can search for and add up to six total titles. While it’s true that “mixtapes” are not supposed to include dozens upon dozens of entries, it also seems odd to have an artificial limit in place given the potential to create long-standing collections here. That said, Flixtape is still fun to use. And it’s a clever way to work around the fact that Netflix’s recommendations system doesn’t effectively tap into our social connections as well as it could. Today, Netflix shows you what’s trending and what’s popular with friends, but has failed to offer a simple way for members to share more personal, word-of-mouth recommendations with each other individually. Flixtape solves that problem. Like the mixtapes of days past, Flixtapes are meant to be personal and customizable, says Netflix. You’re able to customize their “cover” with the title, doodles and even add the name of the person you’re sharing it with. These elements can be dragged around the screen. [gallery ids="1353711,1353717,1353710,1353709"] If you’re stumped on what to add, Flixtape’s website offers a variety of pre-made lists, like “The Family Reunion Flixtape” or “The Besties or Frenemies Flixtape,” for example. You can also push a button to get suggestions when you pick a given topic. Later, when the recipient opens their Flixtape, they can see the list overlaid on top of background imagery for the show or movie in question, and then can click to watch the title on Netflix, assuming that they’re a member. At this time, it doesn’t appear that Flixtape will be built into the main Netflix application itself, however. This is not the first time Netflix has launched a standalone site aimed at promoting its service in content in recent months. In May, for example, the company , Fast.com. But in that case, its mission was more to shame poor-performing ISPs, while Flixtape is more of a social effort. [youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R49qlR5TTEs&w=854&h=480]
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Getting ripped with BowFlex’s ‘smart dumbbells’
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Brian Heater
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Let’s just push past the whole inherent irony of naming a product category “smart dumbbells,” shall we? This is 2016, we’re living in the future. And really, if something isn’t connected to a smartphone, does it really exist? No. Of course it doesn’t. BowFlex has been showing off it for a couple of years now, and, much to the chagrin of my poor, poor FedEx delivery guy, the things finally started shipping this year – and, for the record, are extremely unpleasant to lug around in 95-degree New York City humidity. Inside, things are decidedly more pleasant. Here we can sweat on purpose, in tightly controlled reps monitored and logged by the home fitness company’s 3DT mobile app (iOS or Android), registering a jaunty chime for every completed lift. The dumbbells themselves are different from the kind I’m accustomed to at my friendly neighborhood New York Sports Club. This is due in no small part to the weight adjustment feature, allowing each one to hold anywhere between five to 60 pounds. The weight is displayed as both kg and pounds, on the two sides, the numbers, changing as you rotate the bar to adjust the weight with a click for each 2.5 pound increment. Pretty handy – and decidedly less embarrassing that buying a pair of five-pounders from the company (and likely cheaper than going for the full set). Whatever weight you chose will stay attached to the dumbbell and the rest will stay behind on the stand. The downside is that the dumbbells are quite large – and when you’re lifting less than the full 60 pounds, the unit has the tendency to jiggle around – not quite the solid mass of self-contained analog systems. The 560s connect to a smart device via Bluetooth, keeping tracking things within a 10-foot range. Flip into Just Lift mode and the system keeps track of reps, calories burned, time and total pounds lifted (which starts to look pretty impressive pretty fast) and lets you know how long to rest in-between. The tracking is pretty solid, though I did have a few miscounts. On a whole, the localized sensors seem to be more accurate than what many wrist-worn wearables are capable of. The app features a slew of different workout options, including a six-week strength training plan and around a dozen different exercises. Users can customize their own, as well. There’s also a Journal option that archives workouts and a slew of different instructional videos to show you how to lift right. A pair of dumbbells runs $499 – and an extra $100 bundles in the weight rack, which offers a handy place to stash a mobile device. It’s a pretty loft price to pay for not having to keep track of reps in your head that at this point feels more far more like novelty than necessity.
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Encrypted comms company Silent Circle closes $50M Series C
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Natasha Lomas
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Encrypted comms company Silent Circle, which also makes a security-focused Android smartphone called the Blackphone, has announced it’s closed a $50 million Series C round of financing, led by Santander Bank. The company was in the news recently on account of brought against it by former business partner Geeksphone for non-payment of an outstanding $5 million, relating to the sale of the latter’s half of the joint venture. Court documents pertaining to that litigation suggested Silent Circle closed an unannounced $25 million Series C round earlier this year. Letters from the court case also reveal it had been hoping to raise an additional $20 million to pay down some of its debt at the time but had been unable to raise that additional funding. It’s unclear whether the $50 million Series C announced today is all new money for Silent Circle, or whether it includes the earlier $25 million Series C detailed in the court documents. Silent Circle has now confirmed that the Series C includes the $25M previously cited in court documents. Since buying out its hardware partner in the Blackphone joint venture Silent Circle has shifted from more of a prosumer focus with the original Blackphone smartphone sales pitch to pushing what it dubs an enterprise privacy platform business — which brings together a suite of software services, such as its Silent Phone secure calling, messaging and file sharing software with encrypted calling plans that expand secure calling to non-subscribers, and user management services via a web-based admin console that targets businesses needing to manage mixed estates of iOS and Android handsets in a BYOD world. Silent Circle’s hardware foray with the Blackphone was supposed to complement this software platform strategy but court documents from the litigation reveal that the first generation device in fact failed to deliver the expected sales, forcing Silent Circle to fall back on its software business and cut operational costs, including making significant staff reductions. Key co-founder Jon Callas recently departed the company for a role at Apple, while another senior employee who joined from Geeksphone is also no longer at the company. Various other more junior employees have apparently been let go. Silent Circle said today that the new financing will go towards “eliminating its debts”, as well as further investment in product development, customer service, business development and marketing activities. As part of the funding round cyber security investor Bob Ackerman is also joining the board. It’s not clear if Silent Circle intends to settle the litigation with Geeksphone now it’s closed a full Series C — again we’ve asked, and will update with any response. General counsel Matt Neiderman told TechCrunch: “We intend to continue with our claim against Geeksphone and defending against their claim.” Neiderman is now also listed as its interim CEO, although co-founder Mike Janke remains as chairman. Another former CEO, Bill Conner, departed last month according to his . On Neiderman temporarily occupying the CEO role, a spokesman for Silent Circle told TechCrunch: “Matt has been with since its formative days and has worked closely with the other company leaders on the executive team. As Chief Legal Officer he brings a valuable skillset, both as the firm moves through its current litigation and positions itself to experience even more growth and momentum in the enterprise privacy market. He has been a part of all the key aspects of the business. So, he’s a good fit for the role.”
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NASA shows off the design for its Mars 2020 rover
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Devin Coldewey
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The rover NASA plans to send to Mars in 2020 is taking shape, and today its near-final design was revealed, along with details on several of its cool new instruments. (Check out an absolutely huge version of the image above .) In an effort to save costs and, really, because it makes a lot of sense, the Mars 2020 rover is going to share a lot of hardware with Curiosity. Why design a brand new platform when the old one is doing a fabulous job? “Since Mars 2020 is leveraging the design and some spare hardware from Curiosity, a significant amount of the mission’s heritage components have already been built during Phases A and B,” said George Tahu, Mars 2020 program executive, . “The project is proceeding with final design and construction of the new systems.” Normally phase A and B would be largely concept and research work, but instead of reinventing the space wheel, Mars 2020 just re-outfits it. The mission is very focused on the search for life, and it’s being equipped with tools specific to that job — and it’s also being made with an eye to future missions rather than trying to get everything done on its own. The landing zone will be chosen for its perceived suitability for life — ancient rivers, mild temperatures, that sort of thing — and Mars 2020 will be doing more than scraping the surface for clues. It has a new coring drill and a rack of sample tubes into which it will deposit the core samples for future collection and analysis. Careful examination of Martian resources will help determine the feasibility of things like harvesting oxygen and other elements from the environment on manned missions, and ground-penetrating radar will watch for interesting formations beneath the surface. And the usual set of crazy cameras and other sensors will record all manner of interesting readings for planetologists to decipher back home. Perhaps the most exciting addition for the average Earthling is the microphone. Not only will it record the sounds of the rover’s descent and landing, but also the ambient noise from the surface. “This will be a great opportunity for the public to hear the sounds of Mars for the first time,” said Matt Wallace, Mars 2020 deputy project manager. “And it could also provide useful engineering information.” What will it sound like? Probably very quiet, considering the thin atmosphere, but it should be cool nonetheless. The landing itself will be improved as well. The same system will be employed, in which the delivery vehicle deploys a parachute and then a powered hover platform that deposits the rover on the surface, but with . A “range trigger” will choose the perfect moment to release the parachute, improving the precision of the landing, and downward-facing cameras will double-check the landing zone for dangerous ground and divert the lander if needed. If all goes well and there are no delays in engineering, funding, or planning, Mars 2020 should launch in the eponymous year, and arrive at its destination in February of 2021.
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Wrike launches project management tool for marketers
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Frederic Lardinois
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The team behind spent the last few years building a general-purpose project management service that businesses can to their own needs. That clearly worked, because as Wrike CEO Andrew Filev told me, the company’s revenue grew 120 percent last year and it now has about 400 employees and 12,000 businesses on its paid platform. Now that this platform is in place, the team is looking at how it can better serve certain verticals through more specialized products. With , the company the first of its new vertical solutions this week. “We achieved great results in horizontal layers,” Filev said. “We built a work management solution for everybody, but now we can go deeper in certain verticals.” Filev noted that targeting marketers was an easy choice because 40 percent of the company’s new revenue is already coming from this vertical. “So we considered doubling down and when we did that, we noticed how great an opportunity it was,” he said. Unsurprisingly, the product was designed around the typical marketing workflow, which often revolves around , requests, assignments, reviews and approvals. The Wrike team also noticed that a lot of the creative work in marketing agencies happens in Adobe tools like Photoshop and InDesign. To integrate these into Wrike, the company built for the Adobe Creative Cloud that brings some of Wrike’s features right into Adobe’s tools. Wrike then combines all the images and other content into a single visual tool for handling proofing and change requests. Users who want these extra features will pay a on top of Wrike’s . A free trial version of Wrike’s new proofing and approval tools is now also available for all paying users. Filev did not want to talk about which other verticals the company is currently considering as it expands this program, but the company is clearly interested in adding more of these specialized solutions over time.
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Elon Musk adamantly standing by improving radar even though it’s so close to lidar
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Mark Lelinwalla
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In the past, Elon Musk has rejected Lidar, saying it’s unnecessary to achieve full driving autonomy. But in taking to his Twitter account between late Thursday night and early Friday morning, the Tesla CEO couldn’t help but announce improvements to the automaker’s radar … which isn’t Lidar, even though the end results sound awfully Lidar-like.
So, if the ramping up of radar brings Tesla’s technology that much closer to what Lidar would deliver, then why not just use Lidar? Perhaps, Musk just doesn’t want to give up his forward drive with radar and take steps back to include the same Lidar technology he has put down on several occasions. For what it’s worth, Musk did back up his tweet with advantages that radar delivers over Lidar.
We wonder if Musk would ever cave in and just adopt Lidar as Tesla’s competition in self-driving technology — most prominently, Google — is doing.
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A Vice President Pence would be bad for building US culture of innovation
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John Mannes
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With a , it’s official that Governor Mike Pence of Indiana will be Donald Trump’s running mate. But Gov. Pence’s record in the tech industry has been clumsy at best. At first glance, the plans sound robust. $100 million to support university entrepreneurship, $30 million a year for a state investment fund, $500 million from pensions to fuel early and mid-stage Indiana startups, and a plan to make venture capital investment tax credits transferable. Unfortunately, building a successful entrepreneurial ecosystem is not only about throwing around money. The reason that building startup ecosystems is so difficult is that it is an innately human process. Creation demands a culture of inclusiveness of ideas. Capital is never enough on its own. Gov. Pence’s VC investment tax credits only work if the state can breed strong investment opportunities to begin with. VC tax credits are designed to attract outside investment to Indiana’s startups. The majority of this capital comes from Silicon Valley, New York City, and Boston. Investors in these cities might not have to worry about the details, but entrepreneurs do. Founders need to position their companies to attract and retain top talent. Pence wrote . In it, he cast himself as a jobs-savvy governor with deep knowledge of the tech industry. He took credit for attracting Salesforce to invest in the state. Silicon Prairie, it’s a beautiful image, very quaint and very bullshit. During Pence’s term as governor, Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff paid some Indiana employees , who requested to relocate outside the state. He canceled all programs that required employees to travel to Indiana. Why would a company CEO do this? Gov. Pence supported and ultimately signed , which protects the rights of individuals who believe their religious liberties are being threatened at the cost of the safety and acceptance of the LGBTQ community. In the video below, re-tweeted yesterday by Salesforce’s Benioff, Gov. Pence refuses to answer any direct questions about whether the intent of the law was to discriminate against the LGBTQ community. Anti-Gay Pro-Discrimination Mike Pence his nationwide push for LGBT discrimination a year ago. — Marc Benioff (@Benioff) Salesforce, Angie’s List, and other tech companies came out strongly against the RFRA. After Salesforce threatened to halt expansion in the state, that prevents the law from being used as a defense to discriminate against the LGBTQ community. What’s particularly troublesome about this is that Gov. Pence is selling himself as pro-tech and pro-Salesforce. Salesforce wasn’t wooed to pasture in Silicon Prairie by the swift progressive politics of Gov. Pence. Salesforce , in 2013 because it had a great product with large economies of scale. The transaction provided the company a large representation in the state and 3,000 employees to look out for. The Government of Indiana does provide Salesforce with tax incentives as a reward for job creation, but that’s where the relationship stops. Smaller companies have it even worse. Unlike salesforce, early-stage companies don’t have the bully-pulpit to protect their employees in the same way Salesforce does. Indiana must find a way to not just grow entrepreneurial seeds, but find a way to keep rapid-growth, high-technology companies in the state. It’s easy to attract an early-stage founder with a check for $3 million, but it grows increasingly difficult to compete with out-of-state capital for larger rounds in the 10s and 100s of millions of dollars. The dollar amounts become high, word-of-mouth travels, and uncompetitive deals become competitive. For a Silicon Valley investor, Indiana startups can be a relative bargain. Labor, space, and the competitive market landscape reduce premiums on deals in places outside prominent startup ecosystems. For Indiana’s plan to payoff, it’s critical that startups want to stay in the state for the long-run. Visit Indy, Indianapolis’ convention and business bureau, in corporate investment. Angie’s List to Indiana. The money quickly adds up and starts to chip away at the shimmer of the governor’s new innovation plan. The state of Indiana might have brought some amazing tech companies to its state, and that’s something to be proud of, but Governor Pence doesn’t get to claim responsibility.
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Crunch Report | Hyperloop One founder’s lawsuit
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Khaled "Tito" Hamze
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Tito Hamze
Tito Hamze
Joe Zolnoski
Joe Zolnoski
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Uber and Gilt are selling passes for unlimited uberPOOL rides in NYC
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Fitz Tepper
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Here’s a great deal: Uber and Gilt City are teaming up to offer a rides in New York City. The deal is being called a “commute card” and can only be used Monday through Friday during commuting hours (7-10am and 5-8pm) in Manhattan. These are the same hours during which Uber offers $5 flat rate uberPOOL rides in NYC. As a refresher, uberPOOL is Uber’s carpool product where the company matches you with riders headed the same direction. The packages are either two-week unlimited for $49, four-week unlimited for $79, or eight-week unlimited for $159. These prices equal saving of up to 60 percent off (the packages would normally be $100, $200, and $400 respectively, assuming you take two $5 POOL rides a day). Better yet – this deal means commuting in an uberPOOL is cheaper than taking the subway. A monthly unlimited MetroCard is $116.50 (compared to Uber’s deal of $79), although an unlimited subway card can also be used outside of commuting hours. The deals can only be purchased on Gilt, which is a big score for the discount shopping and experience site. While Gilt does frequently offer packages like this for young startups looking to acquire new customers, it’s rare to see deals for 60% off an established service like Uber. It’s also not clear if this is a deal that Uber will continue to offer after July and August, which is when the packages are valid. Presumably the company is using it as a marketing tool to recruit new users to POOL, which is a service that benefits tremendously from economies of scale. The more people using POOL the better the chances are of a two riders being matched, which saves everyone money – including Uber. The packages , and while there are thousands available, will more than likely sell out soon.
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Magic Leap says it will debut its product . . . “hopefully soonish”
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Connie Loizos
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Anyone hoping that would share exact plans today about when it will debut its “mixed reality” technology was probably a little disappointed. At a Fortune conference in Aspen this afternoon, Magic Leap founder and CEO Rony Abovitz and company CMO Brian Wallace called the company’s products “very real” and “not a research project anymore.” They also seemed to hint that they’ll release their tech this fall. But they stopping short from explicitly saying so. Said Abovitz of the now 600-person company, which operates out of a former Motorola factory in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., “We have production lines that look like aircraft carriers with class 100 [which feature controlled levels of contamination]. That’s running right now. We’re debugging our high-volume production line. It’s [being] made in the U.S., this summer. So we’re in that go mode, and hopefully soonish, the public will see [our products]. Magic Leap has raised $1.4 billion from investors at this point, including Alibaba, Andreessen Horowitz, and Google. In fact, Google CEO Sundar Pichai sits on the company’s board. (It also counts director Peter Jackson as an advisory board member.) Asked what’s so expensive, Abovitz — whose last company sold for a few years ago — noted that Magic Leap is “building a full-stack computing company,” from its chip designs to sensors to software to much of its content. “We took on the whole problem, including the manufacturing [because] we wanted to deliver something that never existed before and there was no way to do it unless we created everything from scratch.” The company’s technology, as both described by Abovitz and Wallace, certainly nothing short of revolutionary, even while it has competitors in Microsoft’s HoloLens headset and Meta, another maker of an augmented reality headset. Though it requires a kind of “lightweight” headset that only its employees, strategic partners, and “thousands” of other people who’ve signed NDAs with the company have so far seen, Abovitz took pains today to distinguish Magic Leap’s technology from tech that outsiders have experienced to date. “With [virtual reality],” he said, “you generally put a cell-phone-type screen in front of your eye; it’s sort of like a stereoscopic device. With [augmented reality], most people associate that with a heads-up display, and that’s not what we do, either. We give you a neurologically true visual perception. As long as you aren’t touching something, our digital objects, environments, and people really are neurologically true. It’s one of those things that you have to experience to believe.” In fact, Abovitz said people can be rendered so realistically that the company is thinking of making them “a little brighter, a little hyperreal” to help “distinguish between what’s Magic Leap and what’s not.” In the meantime, the company did shed a little more light on its plans. It said, for example, that while it intends to focus first on games and entertainment, it sees its tech being used in a variety of ways, including for e-commerce, healthcare, and workplace productivity. (Wallace went so far as to say that in the “2020s, 70 percent of the people in this room will be wearing a device like Magic Leap.”) Abovitz and Wallace also seemed to stress the importance to Magic Leap of working with outside developers. Wallace said that there are “already external developers working on our systems day in and day out, creating content and experiences.” Abovitz meanwhile mentioned a “secret lab”in San Francisco’s historic Presidio national park where Lucasfilm is headquartered. (The Disney subsidiary announced a strategic alliance with Magic Leap .) It’s “right outside from the Yoda fountain,” he disclosed, quickly adding that visitors require certain privileges (i.e., they need to be employees of Magic Leap or Lucasfilm) but that there’s also a “developer lab that we’re building out [where] all kinds of devs from the Bay Area can come and hang out and hopefully build stuff before launch.” If you’re interested in learning more, you can catch the full interview here:
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Oxford study shows how tiny bacteria ‘wind farms’ could power electronics
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Lucia Maffei
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A team of scientists from Oxford University used a virtual prototype to demonstrate how the natural movement of bacteria could be harnessed to turn cylindrical rotors and provide a steady power source. The study, , showed that the chaotic swarming effect of bacteria can be organized into biologically driven power plants, similar to This system, researchers said, could someday be the microscopic engine for man-made devices that are self-assembled and self-powered, from optical switches to smartphone microphones and components. “The most exciting thing is that the system organized itself,” said co-author Tyler Shendruk, from Oxford University’s Department of Physics. “We didn’t have to engineer fancy gear-shaped rotors, they were just smooth disks.” The team of researchers — which also includes Sumesh Thampi, Amin Doostmohammadi, Ramin Golestanian and Julia Yeomans — simulated a suspension of bacteria swimming around microscopic rotors. In this case, no real bacteria were used, but Shendruk said that bacteria have been commonly used in experimental works. Shendruk explained that when many bacteria swim together, they swarm and drive chaotically swirling flows that scientists call “active turbulence.” Harnessing these impromptu flows to do anything useful is tricky, because they’re so disorderly. For example, when Shendruk and his team pinned a single freely rotating disc in a simulation of active turbulence, results were not good: “It was spun randomly around, like a weather vane in a hurricane.” The key finding was placing an entire array of rotors in active turbulence. Thanks to the array, spinning spontaneously organizes. “When I saw the array of rotors each rotating in the opposing direction of its neighbors, I thought Shendruk remembered. The team discovered that as long as the rotors were close enough together, every single rotor in the simulation permanently obeyed the pattern. However, the system produced the tiniest imaginable amount of power. “Charging an entire cell phone is inconceivable to me right now,” said Shendruk. “To give an idea of just how small the amount of work we’re talking about is, let me say that a previous work on a microscopic gear in a bacteria swarm was estimated to give 1 femtowatt.” One femtowatt is 1.0⋅10 watt. “Even huge arrays of rotors won’t power your entire cell phone. But it might provide a little power to a microfluidic device that is being used to produce cells or to power a tiny microbot,” Shendruk said. “It’s very possible that someone could build this experimentally and that would be really neat.”
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Opening the gates on Indian financial data
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Piyush Khaitan
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India’s digital landscape is changing faster than we can imagine, and it could mean huge improvements in financial access for many. As we speak, three key factors are converging to create a new, more robust digital ecosystem in India, permanently changing the way we do business. The proliferation of smartphones, a government initiative and a new payments interface are changing the market, and garnering attention from major brands like . For those among the , this could be a huge step toward — allowing them to save, borrow, build credit, make payments, purchase insurance and build better lives. The first component of this digital ecosystem is smartphone proliferation. In February, India passed the U.S. to become the (behind China). There are more than 1 billion mobile phone connections in the country, and 250 million of those are smartphones. Smartphone sales continue to rise, making up a larger percentage of total phone sales. Suddenly, a very intelligent device is getting into the hands of many Indians, which is bound to change the way we reach people, even across once-insurmountable distances. The second is the Aadhaar profile, a 12-digit unique identification number available to all Indians. As impressive and useful as smartphones are for connecting people to the internet and formal financial services, that connectivity means nothing without first having identification. Started in 2009 by the , the government agency has issued more than 1 billion Aadhaar numbers so far, which amounts to more than 80 percent of the population. This sweeping new program gives many Indians something they’ve never had before: government-issued, formal identification. This is no small matter — MasterCard CEO Ajay Banga that “not having an identity is effectively like being in prison. Everybody is going around with their hair on fire about the Internet. If you don’t have an account, it will be the Internet of everything, but not the Internet of everyone.” And to get an account, you first need to prove you are who you say you are. The voluntary identification system makes that easier; it links a unique 12-digit number to basic demographic information and biometric data, such as fingerprints and iris scans, all of which are stored in a central database. The proliferation of Aadhaar numbers lowers several barriers to financial access. Indians can now link bank accounts to their Aadhaar number, and the Aadhaar card is a valid ID for purchasing a SIM card, opening a bank account or accessing government services like a pension or subsidized ration. Aadhaar can help India’s new smartphone-driven connectivity reach its potential — and matter to the hundreds of millions of people living without formal financial services. Finally, there is the Reserve Bank of India’s (RBI) , which allows money to move between two Aadhaar profiles via a smartphone. For the first time, the UPI makes it possible for Indians to do a huge number of transactions that are not only cashless, but branchless. The cost is down to less than one rupee per transaction, which is the equivalent of about one penny. are already incorporating the interface into their mobile apps, and RBI is hopeful that more will join them. For , the ability to conduct business via smartphone makes them less reliant on bank branches or kiosks, improving their practical access to financial services. The confluence of these three factors, alongside and the increasing availability of , and small banks, has the potential to create a flourishing digital ecosystem with an immense amount of available data. This will be for businesses like , which makes it our mission to to revolutionize lending for Indian small businesses. A competitive market of cashless financial services is good news for the future of financial inclusion in mobile-savvy India.
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FiveAI picks up $2.7M to build AI-driven software for autonomous vehicles
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Steve O'Hear
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is a rather ambitious U.K. startup that’s building AI-driven software to help accelerate the development of autonomous vehicles. The young company wants to apply the latest developments in computer vision and AI/machine learning to enable self-driving cars to do more of the heavy-lifting in regards to understanding and navigating their immediate environment. To enable FiveAI to continue building out its autonomous vehicle software stack and grow its team of AI/machine learning and other software engineers, the startup has raised $2.7 million in funding. The round was led by with participation from Spring Partners and . Specifically, FiveAI wants to use AI/machine learning and computer vision to remove the need for highly detailed “prior 3D mapping” of environments, which I’m told is the predominant method used in autonomous vehicle navigation. Instead, the startup’s software stack, coupled with an array of onboard sensors/cameras, aims to enable autonomous vehicles to safely and accurately navigate even complex urban environments with much simpler maps. Should it work properly, this approach would have a major advantage of negating the need to survey, maintain and share detailed 3D maps of the world’s roads. Given the size of the task, however, it might be fair to conclude that $2.7 million won’t get FiveAI very far and is dwarfed by the amount of money Silicon Valley, such as Google and reportedly Apple, is pumping into autonomous vehicles. That’s a point I put to Stan Boland, co-founder and CEO of FiveAI, who told me that the startup could have raised a larger round but wanted to balance the runway required to reach the first stage of development with the current valuation of the company. The plan, he says, is to get to simulator supervised road testing before raising a larger round. The startup will then begin working with vehicle OEMs to develop production-ready software. On that note, Boland has a track record shipping huge software projects, albeit this is his first AI or auto-industry startup. He’s previously co-founded and was CEO of two European tech/comms success stories: Element 14 (acquired by Broadcom) and Icera (acquired by NVIDIA). And, for those of you who like me are old enough to know a little about the history of the British computer industry, he was also CEO of computer-maker Acorn. Meanwhile, Boland is talking up the U.K. and FiveAI’s potential as an autonomous vehicle leader. He says the country has the software engineer talent and AI expertise required, not least because of the high standard of AI/machine learning teaching at leading universities, such as Oxford, Cambridge and Imperial. He also thinks the U.K. is well-positioned to develop a regulatory environment to help accelerate the development of self-driving cars.
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AR helmet maker Skully investors boot founders, replacing them with Martin Fitcher as CEO
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John Mannes
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Anonymous sources have confirmed to TechCrunch that Skully co-founders Marcus and Mitch Weller have been kicked out of the company by investors. Marcus served as CEO of Skully while his brother Mitch served as chief of staff and provided business operations, product management, and material logistics support to the company. Skully jumped into the tech scene two years ago after for the company’s augmented reality motorcycle helmet that lets riders see traffic behind them. The device also allows wearers to play music, receive directions and check weather information, hands-free. The founders have been on a different page than investors regarding the future of the company for quite some time, according to a source close to the matter. Both Marcus and Mitch are on the Skully board of directors along with Victor Westerlind from Intel Capital and Nicholas Brathwaite from Walden Riverwood Ventures. Skully has sold thousands of its heads-up display helmets so far but has been troubled with shipping delays. One source we spoke to told us that Skully has only shipped 20 helmets so far, which conflicts with another source who said it was more than that but under 100. Part of that may have been due to a manufacturer issue, which held up production and is a common scenario with hardware startups. Reports are conflated regarding cash flow with some saying that the founders are running out of capital. One source told us that the last straw for Marcus appears to have been a botched acquisition by LeSports, a subsidiary of Chinese company LeEco – though another source said it was unclear who was responsible. This source also told TechCrunch Skully talent has slowly been poached without direction from the management team. Tesla the company’s head of engineering in May. Marcus’ loyalty to his brother may have ultimately cost him the position. Marcus had been under investor pressure to remove Mitch but did not take action, according to a source. Skully has raised $14.95 million from two investments and an Indiegogo campaign over the last two years.
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Bvddy, now on Android, matches athletes of like skill to play and get fit together
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Lora Kolodny
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About 80 percent of the U.S. adult population, aged 18 and older, each week to meet federal guidelines, according to the most recent available data from the Centers for Disease Control’s Healthy People 2020 study. That means a majority of us are pretty lazy, ‘Murica. The guidelines only call for moderate to light aerobic physical activity for 150 minutes each week, or 75 minutes of vigorous activity each week, including strengthening exercises twice weekly. As the numbers show, the older we are, the worse we are at staying fit. founder and CEO Pedro Ast wants to change all that with an app that helps athletes keep up their game after high school or college. Specifically, the Miami, Florida startup makes a mobile app called Bvddy (like “Buddy” only spelled with a “v”) that matches athletes in a given sport with others who have similar skill levels and are looking to play at the same time in a mutually convenient venue. The Bvddy app, newly available on Android today and iOS, asks users to identify the main fitness categories that interest them, from “The Great Outdoors” to “Weight Loss” to “Leagues.” It then helps athletes, or would-be athletes, book dates for fitness activities, including traditional stuff like basketball, tennis, soccer, running or golf, as well as activities loved by enthusiasts that are not necessarily mainstream, like kite surfing, mixed martial arts or dodgeball. “Bvddy is purpose-built for matching up grown-ups around physical activities,” Ast says, “and it feels something like a dating app in use.” Players rate each other, which encourages users to be honest about their fitness, proficiency or how experienced they are in a given sport. The company recently raised $1.5 million in seed funding, after raising $750,000 in angel funding earlier, to support its expansion and hiring plans. An investor in Buddy Tech, with Grupo IDC, said his firm backed the company because, “Unlike social networks like Facebook, Bvddy is not just trying to connect people. They are surgically attacking the pain points athletes face when trying to enjoy the sports they love, from playing with, and against the right people, to booking your place to play or finding instructors.”
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Invites sent out for Samsung’s August 2 Unpacked smartphone event
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Lucas Matney
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Samsung just mailed out invitations for its Samsung Unpacked 2016 event, where it’s expected to unveil its latest Note smartphone. The event is taking place August 2 at 11AM EST, and will be live-streamed on . The device is likely going to be called the Note 7, something seemingly confirmed by the language on the invite itself. This is being done for unity’s sake for the product line, despite the fact that there was never a Note 6. The invite also seems to declare that the smartphone stylus accompanying the Note 7 is here for another year, at least. We already have a pretty good idea what the exterior of the device is going to look like thanks to images leaked online by prominent Samsung leaker Evan Blass. Main takeaways from the images are the edge-to-edge curved screen and what appears to be an iris scanner. Samsung Galaxy Note7 in (from l to r) Black Onyx, Silver Titanium, and Blue Coral — Evan Blass (@evleaks) The internals are a bit more up for debate, particularly whether the Note 7 will adopt a USB Type-C port and the updated Snapdragon 821 chipset. The invite is scant on details, but we’ll be there next month keeping you updated on what is announced regarding Samsung’s latest flagship phablet.
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Comcast business phone service is down and small businesses are freaking out
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Fitz Tepper
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Comcast’s business phone service seems to be having a . While the company that some customers may be experiencing problems with phone service, the issue seems to be pretty widespread, with reported outages in dozens of cities across the country. Apparently inbound and outbound calls are either not being completed at all, or are met with a recording saying the number is no longer in service. Comcast has a that says the outage is effecting SMB (small to medium business) voice service only. While some of us may no longer think landlines are necessary, the reality is that they are the lifeblood of millions of small businesses across the country. And those small businesses aren’t happy. , Facebook and Instagram to let their customers know that they are still open during the outage. While some are non-essential businesses, the outage is also effecting urgent-care locations like local police departments and emergency veterinary hospitals, which are technically set up as small businesses.
Typically, most of us are accustomed to the internet going out and landlines being the only reliable way to communicate in an emergency. It seems that today the opposite it true, and people are turning to services like Twitter and Facebook to communicate with their customer base. We’ve reached out to Comcast and will update this post if we get any new information from them.
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Oculus launching the Rift without the Touch controllers probably wasn’t a great move
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Lucas Matney
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The Oculus Rift launch has been a rocky one that hasn’t exactly left fans of the highly influential consumer VR platform . Today, Oculus CEO Brendan Iribe announced a few things ( ). He clued us into the fact that after three-and-a-half months, the Oculus team has at last caught up with pre-orders and that Oculus’s cool motion-tracked Touch controllers will be arriving in Q4. The last time they discussed timelines for the Touch release, they were delaying it to the second half of 2016, so now we’re at the second half of the second half of 2016, which is still accurate, but likely a bit disappointing to the people who have been earnestly waiting. Oculus Rift is now shipping in 2-4 days. Apologies for initial delay. We're fully caught up & ramping production. Touch ships in volume Q4. — Brendan Iribe (@brendaniribe) The decision to delay Touch was one that sounds like it had to be made from a manufacturing standpoint, but having decided to publicly launch the Rift without them (essentially as a beta product), Oculus is going to have to suffer some pretty severe growing pains and deal with a lot of frustration from consumers and developers in Q4. Sometimes you have to make tough calls and do the right thing: — Palmer Luckey (@PalmerLuckey) First off, it’s hard to overemphasize how important Oculus’s proprietary Touch controllers are to the boundary-breaking VR experiences they’re needing developers to put together. The games that just utilize the bundled Xbox controller are perfectly fine, but they largely end up selling the Rift as some sort of all-encompassing 3D monitor rather than the full VR system that it is. Meanwhile, some of the Oculus exclusive Touch titles I’ve tried are amongst my favorite VR experiences to date. Yet, for developers looking for multi-platform releases of “next-gen” content (i.e. almost all of them), most have been forced to develop primarily for the Vive right now, with plans to later port experiences to the Rift once Touch is released. I’ve spent a decent amount of time with the latest Touch dev units and they really do represent the fruition of all the impressive engineering and thoughtful product designing happening at Oculus. Compared to the Vive’s controllers, their ergonomics are preferable in an entirely non-trivial way and they just feel a lot more user-friendly. I’ll leave final judgments for the consumer release models, but I will also say that the experience with the Touch controllers is impacted negatively by the considerably less powerful infrared tracking system Oculus is shipping with that tightens the scope of your available movement and occasionally leaves you feeling constrained by the occlusion problems that fail to track the controllers as accurately as need be. For all intents and purposes, the Touch release is basically going to serve as a secondary system launch for Oculus, which should theoretically give the company a shot at learning from the woes that accompanied the Rift’s launch in late-March that left a lot of pre-order customers pretty pissed off. Unfortunately, not pissing off the pre-orderers again might be an intensely difficult task to carry out with launch 2.0. Product issues aside, in order to take the sour taste out of early adopters’ mouths, Oculus is going to have to be super competitive with pricing for Touch, something that might be difficult given the added cost for the bundled secondary camera sensor. If Oculus can hit a $200 price point, it will still leave early adopters positioned to complete their Rift VR ecosystems for a price similar to that of the $799 HTC Vive. Convincing novices who shelled out $599 for the Rift headset to throw another $200 toward some cool controllers may prove frustrating, especially given the fact that some of the Rift’s coolest unreleased titles I’ve played thus far are launching with Oculus Touch and won’t be compatible with the Xbox One controller. This puts Oculus in a shitty situation where it really is just going to end up pissing off everybody yet again as it strives to keep the bundled all-in-one price lower than the sum of its parts, which they will be able to do (a bit) by getting rid of the Xbox One controller. This is going to leave people who made pre-orders feeling like they’re paying a premium for the non-bundled Touch when they were the ones giving Oculus the initial support they needed. Again, not so happy. On the developer side, all of those launch titles that Oculus has been pushing for months are going to turn into the Xbox controller-toting ugly stepsisters that Oculus keeps behind closed doors. Given the button layout on the Touch controllers, I’d imagine the older titles will still be playable, but their lack of motion control is going to make them feel distinctly last-gen, and all of a sudden developers are going to be focusing all of their resources on building titles for Touch, leaving all of those Touch-less pesky pre-orderers out of the loop. All of this will be happening while Oculus is preoccupied facing its most formidable external threat — Sony’s console-powered PSVR, which will be dazzling holiday shoppers with its low price point and fleshed-out gaming ecosystem. Oculus is likely going to have a rough time convincing novices to flock toward its more sophisticated VR platform when they have the option of purchasing a PS4 and PSVR for just a smidge more than the Rift, which will still, of course, need a power-hungry PC. Oculus did what it felt it had to do in regards to shipping the Rift without the Touch controllers, but it was a far more complicated decision than just breaking another ship-date promise. Now, Oculus has tied its hands by fracturing game development across two input methods (Xbox One and Touch) that existing users are going to want/need both of for the foreseeable future in order to play the content that’s out there. Here’s the thing, though. Oculus isn’t going to prioritize both controllers with the system because of quality, developers aren’t going to want to build content for both inputs because of time constraints and people who pre-ordered might not buy Touch because of cost. Ultimately, Oculus made a huge tiny mistake in regards to controllers that is probably going to screw up the Rift ecosystem for longer than the company thinks it will.
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Sen. Al Franken questions Niantic over Poképrivacy policy
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Devin Coldewey
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Always with his finger on the pulse, Senator Al Franken (D-Minn.) today sent an official letter to Niantic asking about particulars of the Pokémon Go privacy policy. “I am concerned about the extent to which Niantic may be unnecessarily collecting, using, and sharing a wide range of users’ personal information without their appropriate consent,” . “As the augmented reality market evolves, I ask that you provide greater clarity on how Niantic is addressing the issues of user privacy and security, particularly that of its younger players.” The Senator touches on the “bug,” which was (and, though I’m waiting to hear back from Google about this, may never have been as big a deal as we all made it), but also asks for specifics on several other items found in the terms of service and privacy policy: I actually asked Niantic several times about these same issues yesterday but haven’t heard back yet — but I’m guessing Sen. Franken will have more luck. The Senator is a reliable advocate for the progressive aspects of technology, but his office is also highly tuned in to potential violations of privacy by the likes of , and new platforms like .
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More EVs—and more kinds of EVs—are expected to be sold this year
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Kristen Hall-Geisler
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If it seems like EVs are everywhere, you’re closer to being right this year than ever before. expects the EV market to grow 62% year over year in 2016, which adds up to nearly 200,000 EVs being sold this year. Navigant points to long-range battery electric vehicles (BEVs) with price tags under $40,000, like the ($37,000 MSRP) that’s expected to hit dealerships in the fall, as being key to this growth. A press release also mentions the , the latest , the plug-in hybrid (PHEV), and the forthcoming as driving the trend, pun definitely intended. For the past five years or so, EVs have gotten a bit more of a market share on the West Coast. Navigant says the growth is going to come in the Northeast. Manufacturers are going to need to ramp up marketing to in several New England states, including Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and Vermont, that have joined California in an effort to get more zero-emissions cars on the road by 2025. It may be easier for consumers to find an EV that works for them as ranges get longer, prices drop, and more kinds of EVs become available. That’s getting a bit easier, according to the Department of Energy. In 2015, there were , from two-seaters to standard-sized SUVs. More than half, 60%, of all the plug-in electric vehicles sold last year were midsize or large cars, like the Nissan Leaf and Tesla Model S. Navigant and the DOE agree that the market for plug-in electric vehicles effectively began in 2011, when there was a whopping four models available. (Here’s a note for trivia night: The DOE does not list a Tesla as being available in 2011. The company had stopped taking orders for the Roadster and had not yet started production on the Model S at that point.) Now, there are 29, from the all-electric Fiat 500e to the Volvo XC90 Plug-in Hybrid. Sales since 2011 have grown from about 20,000 to 120,000, which is a six-fold jump, but it still accounts for fewer than 1% of all vehicle sales in the US. Navigant’s predictions for 2016 could take EVs over that hurdle.
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Google aqui-hires deep search engine Kifi to enhance its Spaces group chat app
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Ingrid Lunden
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Google has made to help it continue building out its latest efforts in social apps. The search and Android giant has hired the team behind , a startup that was building extensions to collect and search links shared in social apps, as well as provide recommendations for further links — such as this tool, . Terms of the deal are not being disclosed, but, according to Google engineering director , the app’s team will be joining the company to work on , Google’s group chat app. Google tells me it is not commenting on the exact number of people joining. It looks like Spaces could use the help. The app and has had a very lukewarm run in the market so far, currently lingering around 577 in the U.S. iOS App Store and 284 in the U.S. Android store, according to stats from App Annie. This is essentially an acqui-hire. In a earlier today, Kifi noted that the app is not coming to Google. It will only remain alive for another few weeks, after which point it will stick around for a few weeks more for data exports only. While the app is not living on, it sounds like the kind of tech that Kifi’s team — co-founded by Dan Blumenfeld and Eishay Smith (although Blumenfeld left the company some time ago) — will continue. Considering Space’s current focus on group chat, it sounds like this means they could tweak Kifi’s link sharing and link recommendation technology to use them in that context, and to be able to collate them with links from other applications and platforms. Delighted the Kifi team, with their great expertise in organizing shared content and conversations, is joining the Spaces team to build features that improve group sharing.” Google has disclosed to date. Among them, other recent M&A moves that point to Google building up its talent in areas like social and apps include (a Slack-like app) in Singapore and in Paris (to improve image recognition in apps). Kifi had raised in funding from Don Katz, Oren Zeev, SGVC and Wicklow Capital.
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Watch the Indiebio Demo Day here
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Samantha O'Keefe
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TechCrunch is pleased to bring you Indiebio’s Demo Day this Thursday, July 14th from San Francisco. Backed by , Indiebio is the largest life sciences accelerator to date. Indiebio provides each startup in the accelerator with $250,000, lab space, and expert mentors including 23andMe co-founder Linda Avey and father of the Human Genome Project, George Church. Investors and press will hear seven-minute pitches from each company. Mark your calendars, the demos run from 3-5pm PT this Thursday and you can watch it live right here. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BArDvf9_U90 (In order of appearance) – Mycoworks is a biomaterials company that uses mycelium and agricultural waste to create natural alternatives to leather. Their materials are performance engineered, animal-free, sustainable, and cost-competitive, with immediate applications in footwear and fashion. – SyntheX uses synthetic lethality to create peptide therapeutics that can treat incurable cancers. They have developed an evolutionary platform which can test 10 billion protein variants in one petri dish to evolve new therapeutics. – Ava creates wines molecule by molecule to replicate the terroir of classic high end wines without grapes. The future of food is synthetic. – Knox is bringing hospital level asthma management technology to families at home with the first tool that provides predictive insights to parents of asthmatics to prevent asthma attacks, enable proactive medication management, and give patients and parents peace of mind. – Food poisoning is a serious global concern today with over 1 in 6 people getting food poisoning every year. AstRoNA has engineered a simple to use handheld detector that can be deployed on-site at every phase of food production, from field to table, giving labs accurate results within one hour. – BioNascent is building better health outcomes for babies who aren’t breastfed, by producing proteins found in human breast milk to develop an alternative to dairy based-infant formulas. – Amaryllis empowers researchers by accelerating important discoveries in genomics. Amaryllis technology halves the time and reduces the cost of RNA sequencing by 8-fold to accelerate cutting edge cancer diagnostics, pharmaceutical development, and food security innovations. – MiraculeX is growing the next generation of protein sweeteners which will be the best-tasting and healthiest sweeteners. These natural proteins have zero calories, no bitter flavor, and taste better than sugar. – OneSkin has developed a real human skin model that can replicate ethnicity and age to develop the world’s first line of personalized skin care products. – Willow Cup is creating a line of the most indulgent plant-based milk products available, starting with an on-the-go latte. Willow Cup plans to disrupt the entire plant-based milk category using its patented plant protein library. – Endura is creating an agricultural spray to activate drought tolerance in crops that can reduce water use by 33%. – Natural flavors and fragrances is the fastest growing category in a market worth over $23B globally. Ardra’s promiscuous enzyme technology enables them to make flavors at a lower cost and higher margin than any other natural alternative. – mFluidX has created a diagnostic chip the size of a pack of gum that replaces bulky and technical laboratory instrumentation for DNA / RNA analysis. This power-free disposable chip costs 1000-times less than current technology and can be rapidly deployed to diagnose infectious diseases anywhere. – Marrying the power of machine learning with proprietary protein function maps, Jungla is the world’s best predictor for variants of unknown significance in the genome starting with cancers. – Qidni has built and tested an implantable artificial kidney to revolutionize dialysis technology, which has not changed in the last 50 years.
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Sarah Perez
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Juno probe’s tiny sensors to perform big science around Jupiter
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Devin Coldewey
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One of the striking things about the probe, , is its simple and streamlined design — compared to other spacecraft, at least. The engineers had a hell of a time packing everything in there, but it helps when critical sensors have shrunk in size from “breadbox” to “soup cracker.” Nikolaos Paschalidis, now at NASA’s Goddard Flight Center, has been working on miniaturizing those chips for years. The sensors are cute so they dance “Before my work, you had electronics that were very big – over two pounds,” he said . More size means fewer instruments fit on the craft, and more weight means they take up more of the payload — both restrictions that surely chafed the designers of early probes like Voyager and Galileo. These Application Specific Integrated Circuits, or ASICs, are purpose built (as you might guess from the name) and, in Juno’s case, designed to be highly resistant to radiation, of which it will get a major dose in its travels around Jupiter. With Juno, thanks to the work of Paschalidis and others, designers had more freedom. Although even at Saltine size it was no joke getting everything in there, Principal Investigator Scott Bolton told TechCrunch in an interview just before the craft . “I can’t tell you how long it took,” he said. “We had teams of engineers and scientists all trying to solve this jigsaw puzzle. And then when we got the boxes in, we realized we had to put the cables in.” But the result is a craft with a gratifyingly wide array of instruments. Bolton was excited about the brand-new microwave radiometer, but the extra-small ASICs on Juno are part of its Jupiter Energetic Particle Detector Instrument, or JEDI. This set of tools detects — what do you think? — energetic particles, with precision greater than a billionth of a second, using sensors you could fit in your coin pocket. Juno is in the faraway part of its wide elliptical orbit around Jupiter right now, but the science instruments are warmed up and ready to do some science towards the end of the month when the probe makes its first real pass at the planet.
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Uber for 911 transport is a horrible idea
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John Mannes
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The Washington D.C. Fire and EMS Department , according to NBC Washington. It’s a horrible idea. Washington’s plan is to hire a team of nurses who could evaluate a caller’s condition over the phone and direct them to an Uber if they are deemed stable. Already this is odd given that the purpose of an emergency responder is to evaluate the condition of a 911 caller. “Someone who fell and broke his/her ankle could have potential underlying conditions,” said Alexia Haralambous, a DC area EMT. “A diabetic emergency, that had not yet fully presented itself, could have caused the event. Through a full EMT protocol, the responder would likely eventually check the glucose levels of the patient and determine that there is something larger.” To account for potential deterioration in the condition of a transport, the Uber would need to be equipped with sirens, lights, and an extensive radio system for communication, added Haralambous. A few weeks ago I needed to get some stitches out of my chin so I visited a local clinic. While I was there, I saw a man get an EKG after displaying signs of heart trouble. The man went to the clinic under the impression that he was suffering a routine ailment. Unfortunately, the diagnosis was severe. The doctors on-site recommended an immediate ambulance transport but the man decided to self-transport instead. This person was not only risking his own life but the lives of everyone on the road. Even with training, it’s unlikely that a ride-sharing driver would be able to ensure both patient and vehicle safety. Even if this patient was in the backseat, rapid deterioration could catch a driver off-guard and trigger an accident. Such a partnership is not an extreme departure from previous car-sharing partnerships. Uber told TechCrunch that it already has healthcare partnerships in select cities in Florida and Georgia. Uber helps seniors and the chronically disabled in Atlanta get to doctors appointments, fitness classes and other similar services. In Gainesville, Florida, Uber partnered with local stakeholders to provide technology tutorials to seniors on how the service could be used to maintain mobility and freedom. We reached out to Lyft, and the company reported similar goals to aid in the transportation of populations that struggle to maintain mobility: In all of these partnerships, the decision-making power rests with the rider. A rider can choose to ride whenever and wherever they would like. The problem with DC’s plan is that the health and safety of 911 callers would rest on the shoulders of a remote nurse who would be unable to visually assess the condition of a caller. This puts the patient in an unnecessarily dangerous situation simply because the city’s budget cannot keep up with 911 call volume. That said, props to DC for contemplating an out of the box solution to a serious problem. We just don’t need to . Maybe next time. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uyeJE2vMSLE
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An interview with the anonymous founder of PostGhost
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John Biggs
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was a service that stored and displayed the deleted Tweets of celebrities and politicians. Created as a way to keep public discourse honest, citing a failure to comply with API rules. The resulting brouhaha led me to track down the anonymous founder and ask him or her a few questions about what happened.
PostGhost: This has been primarily a one man project over a few months. I’d rather not name myself quite yet as I’d prefer the focus to be on the site.
PG: My API feed has been up and running, recording deleted tweets since February, and the site’s been up since around April, but as soon as Twitter saw the site was going viral and that people were publicly able to hold verified power users accountable for their deleted tweets, they shut it down.
PG: I noticed in the fall in winter that Twitter was going to be a defining and, possibly, deciding factor in the 2016 Presidential election, and has a massive impact on the national conversation every day. Twitter reauthorized Politwoops, which tracks deleted tweets from politicians. However, many public figures besides politicians practice political speech on Twitter who aren’t themselves politicians – like journalists. For instance, Megyn Kelly has a reach far exceeding almost every politician, and yet, I’m now prohibited from showing the following deleted tweet:
Or this one:
Or this:
These accounts aren’t politicians but all are very visible public figures with far more followers than most politicians and thus have an outsized ability to make their voices heard online. was created to create a public record of such important tweets. I think having full accountability for these powerful voices is incredibly important going into the election this fall.
PG: I haven’t gotten a specific reason – and in fact have only seen the auto-generated message posted on postghost.com right now. Twitter most likely has concerns about user privacy, which I understand and respect. Of the 400 million plus Twitter accounts, 99% or more are individuals who do have a right to privacy. However, Twitter itself maintains a list of verified users, which are “highly sought users” and “key individuals and brands” – these users have, on average, 123,000 followers. According to Medium, this list contains journalists, media outlets, politicians, governments, NGOs, actors, etc. Some random examples: Fareed Zakaria, Mumford and Sons, Nordstrom, and of course, Wired. These are accounts that exist in the public sphere, and have an enormous ability to influence public discourse simply by tweeting. PostGhost only reported on deleted tweets by public verified users with 10,000 or more followers, to make sure there was no way it would capture any tweets from private individuals. Of course, this is the same subset of users Twitter relies on to create its most valuable content, so its obvious why they’d apply different rules to them than to politicians, despite both groups being comprised of public figures. Twitter doesn’t even . PG: They’ve given themselves the right to shut down any API user they choose – legally, of course they can shut us down. What I don’t think the public fully realizes, though, is the lack of accountability in the dominant platform for massive online speech in 2016. In any other medium – radio, TV, blogs – there is no undo button. If a public figure slips up and says something revealing on live TV, any individual or member of the public is free to reprint that statement, to comment on and discuss it at will- the First Amendment makes sure of it. However, a massive amount of public discourse now happens online, on Twitter, and since they control the platform, they can decide the rules with no accountability or oversight whatsoever. PG: Twitter has been, above all else, a huge force for spreading free speech around the world. But as you imply, Twitter is a private company that is increasingly becoming a public good. As such, the public has a right to treat public speech on Twitter exactly like public speech anywhere else and comment on it, share it and critique it – even if the speaker later regrets the statement. PG: I’d love to, but I’m waiting for Twitter’s response and will have to go from there. Public pressure on Twitter – at least to make their rules on deleted tweets more transparent and fair – would help, but this is not an issue that usually gets much attention. I think Twitter has a responsibility to explain why they allow Poltiwoops to record deleted tweets from accounts that that organization deems worthy, but won’t entertain the option for anyone else – especially given the massive power to influence discourse held by Twitter accounts with hundreds of thousands or millions of followers. They need to recognize that political speech is not an activity limited to politicians, and the public should be free to discuss deleted tweets from influential celebrities, journalists, and the media as freely as they can for politicians. PG: The site went viral after a very popular Youtuber Because the account (@tmartn) was verified and has 1.2M followers, PostGhost covered it, but no other site did. Here’s a deleted tweet we recorded from him: In other words, the site caught on when people realized it was a new way to hold accountable the influential accounts they follow. I don’t want to give exact numbers, but we had about a week of heavy traffic before Twitter shut it down. PG: This already happens every day – Google “deleted tweet” and you’ll find thousands of articles tweets deleted by public figures which users screenshot and send in. Screenshots are easy to fake though (see http://simitator.com/generator/twitter) and so at present, it’s impossible to definitively verify whether a deleted tweet you see online is real. This week, The Guardian linked to that the UK is “overrun with foreigners” was real. I don’t think people should have to guess whether or not a deleted tweet is legitimate or not, especially when, as we saw in Brexit, their vote may depend on it. To wit – these are some tweets posted then quickly deleted before and during the Brexit vote: Tweets with enough reach to influence voting, but with no way to find them after the fact, as the celebrities who posted them quickly deleted them:
These should constitute an important part of the public record on Brexit, but they’re nowhere to be found online aside from the sites that just happened to screenshot them.
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Pokémon Go updated to address privacy concerns
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Darrell Etherington
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After users and press noticed that when signing up, to modify the permissions required. Now, less than 24 hours after Niantic made that promise, the update is live, and limits asked-for info to just “Know who you are on Google” and “View your email address.” The new Google permissions setting means that the game’s creators can now see your Google profile information, which includes basic information like your gender and age if you’ve made that available. You can check what info you’re sharing . Niantic’s statement from earlier says the company didn’t intend for the account sign-up process to ask for full account permissions to begin with, and that Pokémon Go was actually only ever accessing your Google User ID and email address anyway. The company also said it had begun work immediately on correcting their error once it was discovered, and this 1.01 update seems to back that up. Today’s account access update reduces permissions even for existing players, so no further action is required by users. Early reports, including from a source using the 1.01 update via a beta prior to its launch, also suggests that this update improves overall stability. Pokémon Go, while clearly immensely popular, has been prone to issues including random crashes and game state freezes, since its launch last week, so any improvements are definitely welcome. Here’s a look at the complete update notes for the new version:
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Is Section 702 on the verge of reform?
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Kate Conger
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that authorizes the government’s bulk collection of internet data is being tested in a federal appeals court, giving anti-surveillance advocates hope that reform might be on the horizon. The 9th Circuit of the U.S. Court of Appeals heard arguments last week about the warrantless surveillance of an American, Mohamed Mohamud. Mohamud was convicted of in Portland — the plot was part of an FBI-facilitated sting operation — and is currently serving a 30-year prison sentence. The appeals case provides a rare proving ground for the law that props up vast NSA surveillance because Mohamud is one of the few criminal defendants who knows for certain he was targeted under the (FAA). Roughly a year after his conviction, Mohamud’s lawyers were informed that their client was surveilled under the FAA. His legal team, along with the ACLU and EFF, has since argued that the surveillance violated Mohamud’s Fourth Amendment rights. “The Supreme Court has emphasized that a surveillance statute is reasonable only if it is precise and discriminate. The FAA is neither,” lawyers from the ACLU and the EFF wrote in an filed in Mohamud’s appeal. ACLU staff attorney Patrick Toomey argued his case before a three-judge panel in the 9th Circuit last week. But he had barely begun his argument about the constitutionality of FAA surveillance when Judge Carlos Bea, one of the three judges hearing the appeal, cut him off. “Is your argument based on the premise that even though the government legally procured information through the use of 702, once it had information on a U.S. person, it should not look at it?” Bea asked, adding, “Humor me, accept that as a premise. Accepting that the government procured the communication within the bounds of the Constitution and the statute, once it had that information, it cannot rummage around in that database?” Still, Toomey is optimistic that the court could issue a ruling that imposes limits on the FAA, particularly on Section 702, which allows the U.S. government to surveil foreigners outside of the U.S., regardless of whether they are suspected of a crime or have a connection to terrorism. Critics say that Americans’ communications are often vacuumed up along with those of foreigners. The law will be up for reauthorization in 2017, and Mohamud’s case — and the court’s ruling on it — have the potential to drive reform. “I think reform is definitely possible,” Toomey told TechCrunch after the hearing. “Just as we saw with the USA Freedom Act, the courts have a role to play in shaping the law around surveillance and the public discussion of it.” Even though Judge Bea questioned him on the premise that Section 702 is unconstitutional, Toomey said he was encouraged that the court agreed to hear from the ACLU and the EFF in the first place. “It’s clear they understood the significance of the issue,” Toomey said of the judges. Although the FAA has withstood before, Mohamud is the first defendant to mount his own appeal. The Supreme Court paved the road for Mohamud’s appeal in 2013, when it declined to hear an ACLU case challenging FAA surveillance because the ACLU could not prove that it had been targeted under the law. Mohamud is one of the few Americans who can definitively claim to have been subject to FAA surveillance — and so he is one of the few Americans who can challenge it. (A similar case is also playing out in the 2nd Circuit; the defendant, Agron Hasbajrami, was informed after his conviction that under the FAA.) Mohamud’s first brush with the FBI came just weeks after his 18th birthday, according to . The teenager had threatened to run away to Yemen, and his father called the FBI in a desperate attempt to prevent Mohamud from leaving the country. Meanwhile, his mother found him hanging out at a playground — but the damage was done. An FBI agent checked Mohamud’s email address in a database and discovered that he had been in contact with Samir Khan, the editor of several extremist magazines. Khan was the subject of an FBI investigation — and so Mohamud became one as well. The FBI placed Mohamud under physical surveillance, added him to a no-fly list, and had undercover agents posing as militant recruiters contact him. The agents say that Mohamud proposed planting a bomb during one of their early meetings. It’s still not clear exactly what information the FBI obtained about Mohamud using FAA-authorized surveillance. It may have been his communications with Khan, but the prosecution refused to clarify this point during Mohamud’s trial. Mohamud’s defense team complained about this secrecy during trial, saying that it sought “suppression of unknown evidence […] gathered at unknown times by unknown means by unknown persons and agencies operating under unknown protocols,” BuzzFeed reported. But whatever the evidence was, it may be enough to overturn Mohamud’s conviction. If the 9 Circuit finds that Mohamud was the target of unlawful surveillance, some of the evidence against him could be thrown out. Mohamud’s lawyers have argued that he was entrapped by FBI agents, convinced to commit a crime that he would not have attempted on his own. Prosecutors have countered that Mohamud’s communications with Khan showed he was predisposed to terrorism and would have pursued it without the FBI’s influence. If the appeals court finds that Mohamud’s emails were illegally obtained, it could strengthen his entrapment defense. Because of the complex legal issues entangled in Mohamud’s case, some advocates believe that the 9th Circuit may not focus on the FAA issues in its ruling. “If people raise legitimate questions about this program and show why it’s overbroad, why we’re failing to meet our human rights obligations, we may have some luck convincing people that the statue needs to change. It will be an uphill battle,” Jadzia Butler, a privacy fellow at the Center for Democracy & Technology, told TechCrunch. Butler isn’t bullish that the 9th Circuit will drive reform: “It probably won’t, is my guess,” she said. “It’s a three-judge panel and two were more focused on evidentiary issues.” Ideally, any reform of FAA would narrow the kinds of information that can be collected and would prevent backdoor searches for Americans’ data, Butler says. “The minimization procedures also permit the government to conduct so-called ‘backdoor searches,’ in which the government searches its repository of FAA-collected communications specifically for information about U.S. citizens and residents — like Mr. Mohamud — including for evidence of criminal activity,” ACLU and EFF lawyers argued in their brief. “These kinds of queries are an end-run around the Fourth Amendment, converting sweeping warrantless surveillance directed at foreigners into a tool for investigating Americans in ordinary criminal investigations.” Even if the 9th Circuit ultimately doesn’t impose restrictions on government surveillance, reform may come from Congress. The Senate Judiciary Committee began its [pdf] of Section 702 in May, and some senators believe that changes to the law are necessary. “Additional reforms are needed to protect Americans’ privacy, and restore global trust in the U.S. technology industry,” Senator Patrick Leahy said.
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Android Pay launches in Australia
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Jon Russell
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Google is continuing the expansion of Android Pay in Asia Pacific after , its most significant launch in the region to date. Android Pay initially landed in Asia with last month, and today it is in Australia, which has a population of around 22 million people. , Android represented around 64 percent of smartphones sold between March and May this year, with iOS on 36 percent, so Australia should represent a good-sized market for Android Pay. (Singapore, by contrast, is heavily skewed towards iOS and a population of just five million.) One thing to note about Android Pay’s launch ‘down under’ is that the service has the support of 25 banks but only one of the largest four: ANZ. It does have usual names such as Visa and MasterCard which will provide wider support for eligible Android device owners with credit and debit cards. , Google said it expects to add more bank partners “later this year.” Australia is heating up as a market for mobile wallets. Apple launched its payments service there in April, and . In an interview with TechCrunch in May, Jennifer Bailey, VP of Apple Pay, told us that the company is “working rapidly” to expand the service across Asia, Europe and other parts of the world. It looks like Google is racing to do that, too.
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Ousted Hyperloop One co-founder Brogan BamBrogan is suing Shervin Pishevar, claims harrassment
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Sarah Buhr
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Recently departed co-founder Brogan BamBrogan has filed a restraining order against the company’s former head of legal Afshin Pishevar and a lawsuit against both Afshin and his brother and BamBrogan’s former startup partner Shervin Pishevar. Hyperloop One, the brainchild of Elon Musk to transport people and goods across the country at 700 mph in a vacuum tube, has raised $92 million so far, largely backed by Shervin Pishevar’s VC firm Sherpa Capital. Pishevar is the board chair and co-founded the company with BamBrogan. But BamBrogan abruptly left the company last week without explanation, by Josh Geigel as the new co-founder and CTO. The sudden departure follows another immediate removal of Afshin. Recode, which Afshin’s departure, also noted that assistant general counsel David Pendergast left around the same time. Afshin also allegedly threatened BamBrogan, according to the court documents, as well as footage from a surveillance camera, by placing a hangman’s noose on BamBrogan’s chair after a dispute between BamBrogan and Shervin about a trip to Russia. Hyperloop One announced it partnered with the in June to build a transit system in Moscow. Neither Hyperloop One or BamBrogan were available for comment at the time we first published but Hyperloop has added a comment on the suit below. According to a source familiar with the matter, things had been tense at the top for some time. According to the filings, BamBrogan was forced to resign from his position. Here are some images included in the suit. 1st is Afshin Pishevar allegedly carrying noose, 2nd Brogan with noose — Johana Bhuiyan (@JMBooyah) BamBrogan requested a temporary restraining order against Afshin after the incident in mid- June and has filed four court documents in the case, including the temporary restraining order and a civil harassment restraining order, as first reported by . The restraining order hearing is scheduled for this Thursday in Los Angeles County Superior Court. There’s been much skepticism over Hyperloop’s technology, but the hefty funding and leadership gave the company a boost and some credibility. However, the recent lawsuit alleges the technology and executive team may not be all we’ve been led to believe. The filings, which name Shervin, Afshin, Joe Lonsdale, Robert Lloyd and Hyperloop One as defendants, claim the technology that BamBrogan and other plaintiffs — Dr. Knut Sauer, David Pendergast and William Mulholland — helped to build is being “strangled by the mismanagement and greed of the venture capitalists who control the company.” On top of that, the suit claims several employees had complained to Shervin about technological issues but were ignored and that the defendants violated labor laws and used the company to boost their romantic lives, personal brands and wallets. Part of the complaint personally attacks Shervin, accusing him of dating the company’s PR vendor and increasing her salary from $15,000 to $40,000 a month. “Those with the expertise to bring the hyperloop concept to fruition—the team that has done an incredible job building out hardware with their heads down and hands in the dirt—have been systematically marginalized,” reads the court document. “…while the ‘money men’ who do not understand the technology spent little time seeking to understand its potential, focusing instead on puffery—turning the company into a marketing-driven exercise, instead of the engineering-driven enterprise it should be.” A Hyperloop One spokesperson responded to the accusations with another statement, calling the lawsuit brought by former employees of Hyperloop One “unfortunate and delusional.” “These employees tried to stage a coup and failed,” reads the statement. “They knew that the company was aware of their actions, and this lawsuit is their preemptive strike. The claims are pure nonsense and will be met with a swift and potent legal response.” Update: the plaintiff’s attorney Justin Berger sent out a statement this afternoon countering Hyperloop One’s statement saying it was “long on rhetoric and short on facts.” “The company’s spin is belied by the facts and the chronology of events, as laid out in great detail in the Complaint,” Berger said. “Plaintiffs and seven other top employees quietly approached the Defendants in May with reasonable proposals to set the company back on the right track. They were met with hostility, threats of costly legal fights, and a noose. Defendants violated California law and they will be held accountable.” The court documents on the lawsuit are below: by on Scribd
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