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Zendesk’s “Automatic Answers” taps machine learning, AI to generate bot-style email responses
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Ingrid Lunden
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Chat bots have in recent months, and now we’re seeing some interesting examples of how that technology, where computers interact and respond to human requests, is being used to solve other problems. Today, is taking the wraps off “Automatic Answers”, a service for businesses to reply to emails from customers without ever having a human employee get involved. Automatic Answers is not your average, run-of-the mill email autoresponder. The service was built using a machine learning platform that Zendesk’s in-house teams of data scientists and engineers, which are based out of Melbourne, Australia, have been developing on for a while now. That machine learning platform was first announced last year and it also a service Zendesk , Satisfaction Prediction, which is able to monitor customer-company interactions to — as its name implies — determine whether the customer is getting what she or he needs. The machine learning/AI element means that the responses in Automatic Answers are not only reading and responding specifically to what you the customer is asking, but it is technically getting smarter with each response (and presumably using a bit of Satisfaction Prediction to figure out if it’s getting it right). Automatic Answers will work first in email because, as Zendesk’s VP of product Sam Boonin tells me, “Even in a world of customer services embedded in every communication channel from social to web to phone, email still represents the majority of interactions that are coming in.” Boonin is clear to point out that this is not Zendesk’s jump into bot-infested waters. “This is not a bot,” he said to me when I asked, bot or not? “Bots focus on long-running conversations, and while this uses tech similar to that this isn’t the intention.” Over time, however, this will change. Zendesk plans to add it into other platforms as well including social messaging platforms and anywhere that customers are contacting companies, part of the company’s wider aim to improve “ticket deflection” — or automated services that solve customers’ questions and problems without resorting to customer support people getting involved. But while removing humans from email interactions sounds very bot-like, Boonin said that this does not signal the decline of the customer care professional. (And, at the end of the day, with seats still the basic unit for how Zendesk sells its products, it’s unlikely for now to be a team it wants to wipe out any time soon.) Rather, because of the asynchronous nature of email, it has been a pain point for customer care teams to answer in an efficient and non-hands-on way, even when the requests are basic, such as password resets. That can become an acute pain point, especially when the company small or medium-sized and growing, Boonin said. “Automatic Answers is part of the promise of computing helping to automate tasks that are low-value,” he added. Automatic Answers will be fully rolled out later this year, potentially with a separate pricing structure. This is still being worked out, and for now it will start its rollout in beta, as part of Zendesk’s service suite, with the intention of using early interactions to feed the machine learning algorithms.
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A modern-day Renaissance: APIs fuel a cultural shift in businesses
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Ross Mason
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Since 2000, have gone bankrupt, merged, been acquired or fallen off the list for not keeping up with the ever-changing technology landscape. As software proliferates every corner of a business, IT is being crushed by project demands from business users who require applications and data to be always available and always connected. As a result, IT can no longer meet the demand by simply running faster on the hamster wheel. It’s impossible to keep up. For example, to match the pace of business required in today’s economy, General Electric (GE) is looking to embed technology in every function — from building and maintaining infrastructure to managing internal finances. To that end, the company in September 2015 to grow the company’s software and analytics business from $6 billion to a top 10 software company by 2020. GE understands that to survive in today’s world of cloud, mobile, IoT and big data, central IT needs to evolve and operate under a new model that caters to evolving business needs. The new operating model requires a two-speed approach to IT and the business, as GE Digital CEO Bill Ruh noted in an interview with GE needs to act as a nimble startup by offering intuitive software and services yet still support traditional business units that move at a slower pace. This isn’t the traditional “we’re a startup within a large organization” slogan. GE is creating a new way of operating at the core of its business. This new operating model requires IT to build reusable, self-service assets and infrastructure to avoid reinventing the wheel every time a project is delivered. Application programming interfaces (APIs), which are well-defined interfaces that allow diverse systems and software to talk with each other, are the key ingredient that brings everything together in an application network. As a result, GE Digital built its cloud-based platform to connect machines, data and people in real time for intelligent insights. For example, an airline company can regularly monitor machine and equipment health on the Predix platform and establish a proactive maintenance schedule to ensure safety, minimize downtime and extend asset life. By combining the physical and digital worlds, the 124-year-old GE is adapting its operating model with APIs to meet market demands and innovate more quickly than competition. This new operating model also encourages businesses to become ecosystems, where developers both inside and outside the organization can build new value on existing capabilities. For instance, by giving outside developers free access to its APIs, Expedia Affiliate Network ( ) allows its partners to directly access its technology platform and pull hotel rates, creating convenient user experiences and new revenue channels across third-party websites. Operating in this open, collaborative way, Expedia 90 percent of its revenue through APIs. Additionally, at the end of 2014, 200-year-old Citi launched a public virtual accelerator called and invited outside developers to solve financial problems with its production APIs and test data. With pressure from consumers to match the convenient services being offered by agile fintech startups, such as mobile apps and fingerprint touch ID, Citi is its operating model and empowering developer ecosystems to innovate as quickly as a startup, while maintaining its core business. For this reason, it’s not surprising that a month after GE Digital was announced, Citi a mobile-centric division called Citi FinTech. What’s great about APIs is they don’t require an understanding of how the system on the other side actually functions, allowing business users to self-serve. As a result, APIs are igniting a cultural movement that shifts IT away from delivering narrow projects to the business, and toward delivering reusable capabilities that enable business users to deliver their own projects in their own way. APIs and connectivity are becoming the de facto way for IT to provide quick access to data and assets. These APIs can be packaged in a way to make them consumable by many different business units, allowing them to self-serve data and capabilities as needed. It enables a broader audience of business users to access the things they need for analytics, applications and process automation. This philosophical shift away from IT as a technology provider to a strategic business enabler is key for any organization looking to match the speed and agility required in today’s economy. After all, today’s modern-day Renaissance is being fueled by binary code instead of literature, APIs instead of paint brushes and operating models instead of political structures. It’s time for organizations to rethink what success looks like and how they can get started with their own digital and cultural transformations.
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Made In Space plans to create a superior optical fiber in microgravity
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Emily Calandrelli
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, the company that owns and operates a on the International Space Station, has announced their next big project: growing optical fiber in microgravity. The company is scheduled to send a new manufacturing product to the ISS in the first quarter of 2017. If initial tests are successful, the company could begin producing higher-quality optical fiber for applications here on Earth, like fiber-based internet, medical devices and sensors for the aerospace and defense industry. The idea is that microgravity could possibly be an ideal environment to grow fiber. Today, optical fiber is used in many ways, but perhaps the application we’ve heard about the most is for telecommunications purposes (like in Verizon FiOS or Google Fiber). Infographic courtesy of Made In Space With fiber-based internet, information is transmitted through fine, hair-like glass fibers with pulses of light. While this is much faster than transmitting data with electrical impulses through copper wire (the traditional method used by companies like Comcast), its efficiency is limited by the quality of the glass. Terrestrially produced fiber, grown under the effects of gravity, suffers from certain glass impurities and microcrystal formations. These impurities contribute to scattering and absorption loss and reduce the overall quality of the fiber. This can result in signal degradation and becomes especially problematic when transmitting data across long distances. Made In Space’s microgravity-optimized, miniature fiber drawing system / Image courtesy of Made In Space Made In Space will attempt to create a better glass with their new product, “a microgravity-optimized, miniature fiber drawing system.” While a quantitative comparison is premature, the company believes that microgravity-grown optical fiber would improve both the response time and throughput advantage compared to traditional optical fiber currently in use for telecommunications. “Made In Space’s in-space manufacturing activities expand the commercial envelope to making valuable goods there too. We believe in-space manufacturing of goods valuable to people on Earth will soon drive significant commercial activity in space, perhaps one day creating a space-based economic boom.” — Andrew Rush, CEO of Made In Space Made In Space has partnered with , an optical fiber and laser company. Together, they’ll produce test quantities of microgravity-grown fiber on the ISS, and run further tests on the product once it’s returned to Earth. If results are promising, Made In Space is prepared to develop larger scale optical fiber production facilities in space. “The goal of this partnership is to combine our in-space manufacturing expertise with Thorlabs’ optical fiber expertise in order to rapidly develop microgravity-manufactured high-quality fiber and introduce it into existing and new markets.” — Andrew Rush, CEO of Made In Space The project was one of the twelve new research agreements awarded by the Center for the Advancement of Science in Space (CASIS) today. , selected by NASA in 2011 to manage the use of the ISS, acts as a gatekeeper and helps determine which experiments are allowed on the station. Once on board, Made In Space will use their new manufacturing facility to produce at least 100 meters of optical fiber. While the promise of a superior microgravity-grown, fiber-based internet is exciting, we’ll have to wait for that initial batch of fiber to come back down to Earth next year for a true comparison.
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DigitalGlobe unveils next-generation imaging satellite
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John Mannes
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It’s really frustrating when that super-fly Snapchat you took at 55 mph of the unreleased Tesla Model 3 you caught in the wild turns out blurry. DigitalGlobe will be able to snap that picture from 400 miles away, at 17,000 mph, with its new satellite. TechCrunch got a sneak preview of ‘s, nearly billion-dollar, satellite that will be able to send , #NoFilter, back to earth within minutes. Dr.Walter Scott, founder and CTO of DigitalGlobe, led the efforts in bringing WorldView 4 to completion. All the components are powered by solar panels on the base-unit. WorldView uses a standard base-unit from Lockheed Martin to cut down on costs and uses a custom adapter to connect the optics. WorldView 4 is very similar in capability to WorldView 3, the company’s previous imaging satellite. The United States Government currently has first priority over WorldView 3 but has not paid for first-priority direct access to the new satellite. This opens up additional opportunities to leverage imaging in the private sector. A second high-powered satellite will allow WorldView 3 to spend less time in transit for shoots. This amounts to more time capturing imagery for both satellites. There’s a good chance that you’ve seen DigitalGlobe’s technology before. A large portion of satellite imagery in Google Maps and Google Earth comes from the company. Companies like Facebook have used DigitalGlobe’s technology to identify rural villages to target for outfitting remote internet access. Other uses include the crowdsourced hunt for Malaysia Airlines Flight 370, the research by the AP into modern-day slave shipping, and the identification of deforestation zones. The US Government limits the clarity of imaging satellites for commercial use to protect national security. The Government itself has additional power at its disposal when imaging for national security. In the raid in Abbottabad on Osama Bin Laden’s compound, the US Government was able to leverage similar satellites to produce quality ground intelligence. WorldView 4 will be launching with the United Launch Alliance on an Atlas 5 rocket from Vandenberg Air Force Base on September 15th 2016. Before the launch, the satellite will be transported 250 miles south to the base from its current position at Lockheed Martin’s Sunnyvale campus. Here are three of the coolest gizmos on WorldView 4: WorldView took a page from ancient seafarers when building the satellite’s own internal location awareness system. Two star-trackers are affixed to the side of the satellite to observe the stars and identify location. They are shielded from external light with a special black lens-hood. Despite its size, WorldView 4 is light. The satellite weighs about the same as a pickup truck. Tiny thrusters help to position it into place and a Control Moment Gyroscope helps to position the optics at just the right angle. The communication system hangs away on a boom that rotates independently from the rest of the satellite. The antenna can point in any direction, no matter the orientation of the satellite. This is how WorldView 4 can capture an image in Florida and still relay the image back to Washington, DC.
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The US women’s Olympic volleyball team is using a wearable by VERT to monitor jumps
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Mark Lelinwalla
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The road to the for the U.S. women’s volleyball team has included grueling six-hour practice sessions, sparking the need for players to train smart — not just hard. After all, one critical injury could derail the team’s chances of a successful showing on the world stage. That’s where a tiny wearable by comes into play. While training for the Olympics, the squad used the VERT jump monitor, which fits around players’ waists and calculates their jump heights and counts. It then sends real-time data to an accompanying app. The team has also been using it as an injury-prevention tool. “It gave the coaches something to monitor our workload,” USA Volleyball outside hitter Kelsey Robinson told us. “Now we can track how many times a certain position is jumping and if they’re jumping more, they will shut us down and we’ll do other things like pass or serve, so we don’t physically exhaust ourselves. It has really helped our older girls who do have knee injuries and back problems.” That especially goes for the team’s captain and middle blocker Christa Dietzen, who played on the 2012 Olympic squad and battled injuries to make it to Rio. Being more conscious about how many jumps she made during practices allowed the coaching staff to preserve Dietzen’s health and prolong her career on the court. “They kind of learned, ‘Here’s how many times our players are jumping by position’ and in a very short period of time, they started to change their practices based on the data and that was probably the significant shift for them,” VERT president and founder Martin Matak told us. “All of the players were put on some kind of jump count.” Matak says players on the NBA’s Miami Heat also use VERT.
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Pokémon Go will soon get ads in the form of sponsored locations
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Lucia Maffei
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After having become of all time, Pokémon Go will soon include advertising, according to its developer. In an , Niantic CEO John Hanke said that “sponsored locations” would provide a new revenue stream, in addition to in-app purchases of power-ups and virtual items. In other words, retailers and companies will be granted the paid opportunity to be featured prominently on the game’s virtual map, in the hope to drive customers inside their facilities. A Niantic spokesperson declined to provide further details about the amount of potential revenue split between ads and in-app purchases. According to the Financial Times, the network of virtual “portals” mapped to on-street locations in Pokémon Go will be similar to the one featured on Ingress Niantic’s previous game. Brands that paid to create sponsored content in Ingress are pharmacy Duane Reade, café chain Jamba Juice and car-rental service Zipcar. In Japan, where Ingress is popular, brands that decided to buy similar in-game promotions are convenience store chain Lawson and Tokyo Mitsubishi Bank. Advertisers will be charged on a “cost per visit” basis, similar to the “cost per click” used in Google’s search advertising, Hanke said. Some U.S. retailers have already found that being featured in the game can drive tons of real customers into their stores. “The amount of people has been astonishing,” Tom Lattanzio, the owner of L’Inizio Pizza Bar in Long Island City, Queens, The New York Post yesterday. The Financial Times reported that the pizza restaurant saw business increase 75 percent after buying a $10 in-game power-up that lured Pokémon to its location. Pokémon have invaded the Art Institute! Catch them if you can and find 14 PokéStops around the museum. — Art Institute (@artinstitutechi) Other businesses and organizations have tried to attract visitors by emphasizing the large number of Pokestops around their buildings. The Art Institute of Chicago, for example, tweeted an invite to “Catch them if you can” around the museum.
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Lightroom for iOS receives the gift of universal RAW support
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Devin Coldewey
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Adobe’s Lightroom is a widely used tool among photographers, but the mobile version has always been hampered by poor RAW support — . Previously limited to DNG files, Lightroom for iOS now has the ability to open and tweak . It’s great news for pretty much everyone, and will make it much easier for photographers and editors to fit tablets into their workflow. No more shooting RAW+JPEG (ugh) or having to run everything through a converter, just in case. Linear and radial selections, always handy, were also added. Mobile devices aren’t always the best device for editing photos — generally the bigger screen the better — but they’re often the one you have on you, and of course devices like the iPad Pro do have fabulous screens. Metadata like adjustments and ratings will be added to desktop versions of photos when you sync. So why not zip through last night’s shots while you’re on the train, nixing misses and flagging good ones, or try out a few white balance settings? One thing to note is you’ll have to import the files directly (e.g. from the SD card) to the mobile device if you want the full RAW file; if you import from Lightroom on desktop you’ll get a preview version. RIP unused storage space! 💀 No love for Android just yet, alas, and no ETA.
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This AI-powered VC is smarter than your local startup cash dispensary
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Haje Jan Kamps
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You don’t have to sit through a lot of pitches before your will-to-live-o-meter points to “kill me now.” Imagine you’re a VC, sitting through your fifteenth pitch that day — are you still going to be enthusiastic? Probably not. So what happens if you could instead feed your pitch deck into a chatbot that gives you feedback, suggestions and eventually invests some money into your fledgling idea? That’s the idea behind , a brand new, AI-powered VC firm. Going through the automated pitch process is surprisingly fun, but — — at some point very early on in the process you’ll realize it’s a joke. “We are part of the early stage technology world,” one of the bot’s creators told me. “We believe our world is too heavily influenced by investor discussion that aims to be independent and analytical, but is actually driven by FOMO and pattern recognition. It’s populated by founders overly focused on winning investments, rather than building great companies.” A joke, sure, but like all good comedians, it does make a rather splendid point: It harder for to raise money — and that’s a discussion we ought to be having. In addition, there’s definitely something to be said for heavily data-driven investments in the startup world. . Over here in startup land, increased interest in data services like , and our own make me think that it’s only a question of time before VC investing will be AI-enhanced before long. Who knows, maybe we’ll have AIs signing checks soon, too. Oh look! There’s a comment field below! What do you think the future of venture investment brings?
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Blockchain-based banking backend Vault OS from ex-Googler emerges from stealth mode
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Devin Coldewey
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Despite holding the vast majority of the world’s wealth (or perhaps because of that), banks aren’t exactly hotbeds of cutting-edge tech, often relying on decades-old systems for everyday tasks. ThoughtMachine, a company led by ex-Google engineer Paul Taylor, is looking to change that with a modern, fully integrated, blockchain-based banking operating system called . The bombastic announcing the system’s emergence from two years of stealth development makes a lot of promises: the company “has solved the greatest challenge in fintech;” Vault OS is “100% future-proof,” “hugely flexible,” and “fixes broken banking forever.” Whether Vault OS is able to live up to its own hype is a question that will have to wait (legacy banking systems aren’t replaced overnight) — but it’s hard to deny that the problem is real and the solution, or at least what the company reveals of it, is compelling. ThoughtMachine’s Paul Taylor The main job of Vault OS is to perform the core function of a bank: essentially, maintaining a huge ledger. That’s something that a blockchain is uniquely suited to doing, of course, a fact that clearly did not escape Taylor, whose previous work led to the speech recognition software used by Google today. Each instance of the OS will run its own private blockchain and cryptographic ledger, hosted as a service by ThoughtMachine. Of course, whether banks will be willing to essentially permanently outsource their most fundamental operations is yet another big question. The benefits may be worth it: blockchains are secure, scalable, and versatile, and could conceivably replace legacy systems that limit or delay ordinary operations. Transactions would occur in real time, and are safely and centrally stored, allowing for deep data dives by both bankers and consumers. There’s even an API. Naturally there are a ton of questions that must be answered, and assurances made, and regulations complied with, before any bank will touch this with a ten-foot pole. I’ve contacted ThoughtMachine with several — will they release code or a whitepaper for inspection? How is data migration handled? What’s the timescale for rollout? — and will update this post if they get back to me.
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Endangered ferrets are being saved by drones that drop vaccine-laced M&Ms
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Fitz Tepper
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Here’s your weird but interesting technology story for the day. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) is to save endangered black-footed ferrets in rural Montana. The ferret’s main source of food is prairie dogs, which are being killed by the , a disease spread by rats and fleas that has . To date, biologists have distributed a sylvatic plague vaccine to prairie dogs by walking pre-determined routes and dropping every 9-10 meters bait filled with the vaccine. Distributing the vaccine by hand was very time-consuming; biologists could only deploy between 150-300 doses per hour. But now the FWS has found a much more efficient solution in the form of drones. The service has that will use a drone to treat up to 10,000 acres of land per year. The actual drone will be piloted by a private contractor who will navigate it across the prairie, distributing up to 3,000 doses an hour — making it 10 to 20 times more efficient than by distributing the vaccine by hand. So where do the M&Ms come in? The vaccine will be mixed with peanut butter, which will then coat M&Ms — for some reason the animals find that bait especially delicious, according to . While it’s not clear what type of drone will be used, the actual distribution will occur by mounting to the drone a dispenser (which will be a modified fish-bait machine) to fire out bait while the drone is in flight. While the plan hasn’t gone through final approval, it seems to be by far the most efficient method of vaccine distribution proposed. And depending on the drone’s success in Montana, don’t be surprised if you hear similar stories of drones optimizing tasks that were traditionally done by wildlife biologists.
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The Canadian Army is testing out bionic knee braces
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Brian Heater
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Halifax-based announced today that it has delivered the first 60 in of a planned 190 bionic knee braces to the Canadian Army, part of a $1 million (CAD) contract awarded to the company. The UpShots are the military grade version of the company’s assistive wearable, which utilizes liquid spring technology, promising lift output similar to those provided by the current crop of high-end electronic exoskeletons. The braces are designed to increase strength and defend soldiers against the muscle fatigue and knee injuries that come with frequent heavy lifting and the lugging around of equipment like body armor and helmets. Spring Loaded Technology is also offering up a commercial version of the knee braces, which are set to ship in September. The Levitation, which was backed via a earlier this year, is up for preorder, running a fairly cost prohibitive $1,750 per leg. The company will also be offering the military version to consumers for an unsurprisingly even pricier $3,800, along with a model specifically targeted at skiers, which runs $1,850.
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Farmigo shuts down its online farmer’s market
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Sarah Perez
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, an online farmer’s market that allowed consumers to shop for locally grown food via the web, then pick up those orders at nearby locations, says it will now be shutting down its delivery service. According to an penned by Farmigo founder and CEO Benzi Ronen on the startup’s homepage, the company can no longer continue its community delivery operations sustainably. Going forward, the startup will focus on its CSA Software Management platform instead. back in 2012, Farmigo was founded with the mission of making access to locally grown food more accessible. Traditionally, customers who wanted to buy from local vendors and growers would have to visit their area’s farmer’s market on a weekend – an operation that’s typically open only for a few hours, and isn’t always convenient to get to. Farmigo instead brought the area farms and their inventory online, so consumers could shop at any time. Their orders were then made available at a designated pickup location. This service was operating in New York, New Jersey, Northern California, and the Seattle-Tacoma area. In September, , claiming that its model could work where others failed because of its technology. Ronen said at the time that Farmigo’s end-to-end ERP system allowed it to track farmers’ inventory in order to track exactly what had been pre-ordered and packed. Drivers used that same system at the pickup site when managing customer orders. To date, the company had raised $26 million, according to . With the shutdown of delivery, Farmigo has laid off a good bit of staff, including full-time employees and contractors, but it declined to provide details on headcount. However, we’re told it still has enough funding to continue for the time being without need for further fundraising. With the delivery shutdown, the company is returning to its roots: it had originally built software for farmers, and this will again be the focus. Farmigo says it will reinvest its remaining resources into its , which is today used by 400 farms across 40 states, and extend it to connect farmers with additional sales channels, including farms wishing to sell to restaurants, for example. It currently charges 2 percent of transactions (or a $150 minimum per month), but as the software expands, that model may change. Designed for those in the Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) space, the software offers an alternative to paper forms and other traditional office software by helping farmers update member accounts, track sales, run reports, customize member emails, take payments, and more. In speaking with Ronen today about the delivery shutdown, he explained that decision to pare down the focus to the software side had to do with recognizing Farmigo’s strengths, as well as where it fell short. “It came down to whether we wanted to be a vertically integrated company that took on all responsibilities for all logistics, all software…at the end of the day, we thought that was too much to take on as one company,” he says. “Our expertise is in software, not in logistics.” To continue on its same path, Farmigo would have needed to continually raise funding, which is not what it wanted to do, Ronen noted. Farmigo is now discussing partnership opportunities with other, like-minded companies in the farm-to-table space whose expertise is in logistics. The hope is that it could reopen its delivery business with a partner’s help. Today, July 13th, is Farmigo’s last delivery day. Going forward, delivery customers can check out these lists for their area – , , and – in order to stay connected to their favorite producers. The shutdown comes at a time when some farm-to-table delivery startups have been struggling. Good Eggs outside of San Francisco, then in a new CEO in December. GrubMarket also all markets outside San Francisco last year. Unfortunately for consumers, this means the problem of easy access to fresh, local food is still a challenge. “The industry is not where it needs to be – there’s definitely need for better food systems,” says Ronen. “A lot of different companies and entrepreneurs are trying to figure this out, and no one has figured it out to date. We think we got some pieces right, but clearly many pieces we didn’t get right,” he adds. “I think only by real collaboration between the companies and partnerships will we be able to figure this out.”
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Getaround for camera gear ShareGrid raises $1M
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Haje Jan Kamps
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Even if you’re an active photo or video creative, chances are that your gear will be gathering dust on a shelf at least part of the time. At the same time, other photographers and filmmakers are in need of equipment. If that sounds like a rather fantastic business opportunity, , raising $1 million from and to grow beyond its test markets. ShareGrid was launched in 2015 and has been making life easier for photo and video professionals in its two test markets, New York and Los Angeles. Picking up some big money from MHS (who have ) and some smart cash from Archer Gray (who are ), the company is planning to launch its service in new locations throughout the U.S. “As producers, we have experienced first-hand the inefficiencies and challenges of renting gear that ShareGrid’s platform solves,” said Vinay Singh, partner and head of Archer Gray Ventures. The company currently has more than $100 million worth of gear listed on its site, and counts 12,000 photo and video creators among its members. The main selling point is similar to other sharing economy startups: Equipment owners see better utilization of their gear and are able to make some money in the process, while renters benefit from lower prices compared to the alternatives. Along with the investment, ShareGrid is announcing it is launching ShareGrid Hubs, a number of central locations to meet and drop off/pick up equipment.
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Crunch Report | More affordable Tesla Model X
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Khaled "Tito" Hamze
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Tito Hamze
Tito Hamze
Joe Zolnoski
Joe Zolnoski
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The future of car ownership that no one is talking about
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Ned Ryan
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It has never been more clear that transformational change to one of the world’s largest industries is just around the corner. Car ownership is supposed to change — and when it does, it is predicted to be one of the most monumental displacements of wealth the world economy has ever seen. But there are a lot of conflicting opinions and information out there. Industry experts and headlines are telling us that will rule the world, car manufacturers are becoming mobility companies and and mean the end of traditional car ownership as we know it. They’re also saying that car dealerships will die at the hands of online car-buying sites such as , , and . On the contrary, headlines are also touting that vehicle sales are at all-time highs, trucks are the leading category of new car sales and millennials are buying cars more than ever. There’s also the looming question of autonomous driving technology. Uber and Lyft want self-driving cars to replace their drivers ASAP, and companies like and are spending aggressively to position themselves for success in a theoretical, autonomous mobility landscape. But even , which has been developing this technology since 2009, is unsure if fully autonomous cars can become viable within the next 30 years. What is unequivocal is that there’s a lot of noise around the future of transportation. Like anyone who lives in Silicon Valley, I believe change is coming and that current car ownership models are ripe for disruption. But with personal car sales at an all-time high, the question is when — and how? The assumed agents of change are the likes of Tesla, Uber, Google, Apple or , but lost in all of these predictions is the linchpin for the entire auto industry. That’s the unsexy, yet enormous world of auto finance — the huge market that makes it all work. To put it in perspective, auto loan balances in the U.S. total more than $1.06 trillion right now. That number doesn’t even include the enormous leasing market. The largest auto lenders in the U.S. are also household names: banks like , , Chase and , and finance arms of car manufacturers like , GM and Ford. Auto loans, as an asset class, trail only mortgages and student loan balances. It’s clearly a massive market, but why does that matter? It matters because U.S. car sales are inextricably linked to a robust auto finance market. Indeed, 86 percent of new car sales in the U.S. are financed. Without individual financing products, car sales don’t happen. Financing props up the entire auto industry. In fact, the U.S. is far more reliant on auto finance than other countries. In China, where current new car sales outpace the U.S., only 26 percent of new car sales are financed. What does that mean for the future? New types of cars like the Tesla 3 or the Chevy Bolt will continue to emerge, and their features will be heralded as ushering in the future of transportation. For the most part, however, these innovative vehicles are going to be consumed in the traditional manner: They will be personally financed. That can’t be the future of car ownership. With the rise of companies like Uber and Lyft, it’s clear that we will need to see advances in new ownership models to support tomorrow’s transportation landscape. In fact, Uber recently received a $1 billion credit facility led by Goldman Sachs to . Uber (and Wall Street) are also recognizing the need for more flexibility with this deal — especially at a time when Americans are making larger monthly payments than ever on their cars and taking out record-size auto loans. Other flexible vehicle access products like (shared vehicle leasing program) and (on-demand car rentals) give us a glimpse into what the future of car ownership may look like. These types of emerging products will only be successful with a robust technology infrastructure — a stark departure from the differentiators in the auto finance market today. If we see a shift away from personal vehicle ownership and households no longer own, on average, 2.06 cars, then this will require an entirely new auto finance infrastructure. Ultimately, Google’s self-driving cars may become ubiquitous — but we’ll have to displace a lot of big names in today’s $1 trillion auto finance market to get there.
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Linux users can now make Skype calls from the web in Chrome
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Lucia Maffei
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The Alpha version of Skype based on WebRTC inherits the same features as the Alpha version of the Skype for Linux client. Thanks to ORTC, users were able to make free voice and video calls on Skype without needing to download an app or browser plug-in. “This is our initial step on our path to replicate ORTC capabilities beyond Microsoft Edge,” the team explained. Microsoft also today the Alpha version of a new Skype for Linux client. Skype for Linux Alpha, which features the latest UI, allows users to share files, photos and videos, to send a new range of emoticons and to make calls on the latest versions of Skype on Windows, Mac, iOS and Android. But it’s not compatible with the previous versions of Skype for Linux (4.3.0.37): With Linux Alpha, making or receiving calls to and from the previous versions is not possible. The Skype team warned users that Skype for Linux Alpha is not a fully functioning Skype client yet. Video calling and calls to landlines and mobiles are coming “soon” to Chrome browsers in Linux and Chromebooks, the team in a blog post. Users of Linux Alpha are encouraged to share feedback with the product team using the label “LinuxAlpha.” Skype for Linux Alpha Debian and Skype for Linux Alpha RPM are available for download
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Nintendo’s new magic
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John Biggs
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morning hours I pad down the hallway in my grandmother’s ranch-style home in Martins Ferry, Ohio. It’s June 1986. I’m eleven years old and still in my pajamas. The house has cooled overnight and it’s even a bit chilly but as the sun rises the dark roof will warm up and grandma will send me into the basement or to the library across town. Until then I can play my NES. I keep my games and console in a series of hard plastic boxes that go with me nearly everywhere. My NES was portable before portability was possible and I was an expert at packing and unpacking my console, leading out the cables, and reaching around my grandma’s big console television and connecting the forked cables to the antenna leads. I slot a cartridge – probably Zelda or Metal Gear – and grab a blocky controller. For the next few hours – and ultimately the next 30 years – my downtime will be defined by this process to varying degrees. The hours we spent gaming on that console defined my generation. Those born after about 1975 were not defined by music or a particular book but by pixelated characters on a screen. You could control your own destiny, at least every morning before grandma got up, and it gave an entire generation a feeling of mastery over the digital realm. And Nintendo was the first company to truly give that feeling a name and a nostalgic peg. Mario and Luigi, Link, and Ash were our avatars and Nintendo owned our playground. I have three kids. The oldest is 10. The youngest is four. They have every electronic device under the sun including multiple Raspberry Pis, a 3D printer, and two huge televisions, one connected to a Wii U. All of that stuff, in their minds, is junk. They use their iPads and they play games that follow the primitive dynamics of Atari 2600-era cartridges – kill or be killed, get the glowing dot from one side of the screen to the other, or blow up the city walls. The graphics are much better and the experience improved but, in short, we’ve come back to where we’ve started: the casual game as baseline and the in-depth games – the simulators, the RPGs, the graphical text adventures – are outliers aimed at an older audience. The cynics among us will argue that the long-form game, the console adventures that we grew up on, are no longer appreciated. What is appreciated is a clever, simple game dynamic and a sense of place. It’s Angry Birds for 5 minutes vs. Link for ten hours, Flappy Bird on the toilet vs. Solid Snake for a month. Nintendo never understood this change. Like an opera company facing the improbable popularity of sitcoms they figured the right people would still love opera. But opera, like long form games, are defined generationally. They lost their edge with a younger crowd. The result of this move towards the casual is a split in the gaming industry in which most of the money – the oxygen – has escaped the casual market and moved towards the “hard core” world of FPSes, MMORPGs, and other blockbuster-style titles. This shift left Nintendo without air. The DS and the Wii gathered dust while the expensive PC/console games grabbed one audience and the iPad grabbed the free-to-play user. Nintendo lost its old magic. The thing that drew us as children – the ease of play, the whimsy, the sense of immersion – are now available on low-cost commodity devices. The casual game has replaced the whimsical “kids” game and if there was one thing Nintendo did well it was kids games. What is missing, I would argue, is the story and depth, even imagined, that many Nintendo titles had. As evidenced by the Angry Birds movie, a game dedicated to the accurate simulation of the effects of gravity on avian life does not a mythos make. So where does that leave us and what does it mean that Nintendo, the epitome of Walled Garden economics, has released a game for commodity hardware? It means, first, that someone at Nintendo has finally gotten their head out of the Koopa shell and given up. Acceptance of a world outside of specialized hardware is the key to most casual gaming success and it made sense for the company to go that route. It also means that Nintendo as a purveyor of games has two choices. On one hand they can replicate the success of Pokemon Go by releasing games with a unique, casual mechanic and hope the lightning they caught can be transferred to other titles. Or they could create Nintendo games for mobile. Imagine version of Legend of Zelda for iOS. It would sell millions of copies. Or a deep, rich RPG that uses the mobile dynamic in a unique way, a Mario Go, for example. In either case Nintendo has to leave the former, cashed goldmine of cartridges and consoles and into the arid wasteland of free-to-play and freemium gaming. Can they pull it off? If Pokemon Go is any indication then they probably can. Pokemon Go is a unique experiment, though, but one guaranteed from the beginning to succeed. Bringing Pokemon, a title beloved by children and adults of all ages, to the real world allows you to recreate the in-game world in parks and thoroughfares everywhere. It makes the fantasy real, if only for a moment, and this is a wildly important consideration. Given that the game is based on another, similar title that had none of the runaway success is telling. Pokemon plus great game mechanics is a winner, just as Mario and Link in unique mobile worlds will probably net Nintendo millions. It’s just a matter of finding the right mechanic on the right platform. In the end Nintendo has abandon the old magic. It will never recreate that summer morning for me and every time I bring up a new Zelda game I long for that squeaking green top-down figure bopping merrily across Hyrule. The primitive opera of Link and Ganon, Mario and King Koopa, gave way to more complex iterations and, in the end, the scaffold of nostalgia can only hold up so much new storyline. On the flip side my children have no memory of Zelda or SMB and so they come at Nintendo as just another game company, one that, until now, has ignored their platform of choice. Nintendo is changing. It has to and it will. The results will displease the purists and will pit venerable figures with new upstarts. Nintendo will have to play in the garbage heap of addictive titles that is the free-to-play market and they will have to play well. And, in the end, they have to win or all is lost. There are no restarts in their game and they’re already down two lives. But with careful play, a quick wit, and an acceptance of the inevitable they can make it to the final castle. Here’s hoping.
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Pokémon Go tops Twitter’s daily users, sees more engagement than Facebook
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Sarah Perez
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Pokémon Go has quickly become one of the most viral mobile applications of all time. The game is now the biggest ever in the U.S.; it has now topped Twitter’s daily users, and it sees people spending more time in its app than in Facebook, according to reports from various tracking firms. An had pegged Pokémon Go as having surpassed dating app Tinder, in terms of installs, while it was . By Thursday, July 7th, the app had been installed on more Android smartphones than the dating app, the firm had said. Today, SimilarWeb tells us that Pokémon Go did manage to surpass Twitter in terms of daily active users on Monday, and now sees 5.92 percent of the U.S. Android population engaging with the app on a daily basis. The app is even seeing notable numbers of active users in countries where it hasn’t even been released yet, the company pointed out. (See chart below.) This is thanks to users locating then installing the Android APK file (the Android app, which can then be sideloaded onto your device). While the industry has seen the rapid rise of several other mobile games in recent years – including hits like Candy Crush, Clash Royale, Minecraft, and Slither.io, for example – a new report from Intelligence indicates that Pokémon Go has claimed the title of “biggest mobile game in U.S. history.” This is based on Pokémon Go’s peak daily active users, the firm says. On Monday, Pokémon Go saw just under 21 million daily active users in the U.S., topping Candy Crush’s rumored peak audience in 2013 as well as other top games like Draw Something, Clash Royale, and Slither.io, which hit their own peaks in various years. The report also noted that Pokémon Go is now closing in on Snapchat on Android, and the Pokémon Go Android application could even pass Google Maps on Android. But active users is only one metric of gauging a game’s success. Thanks to the competitive nature of today’s app stores, it’s also important to track how long users actually engage with an application. On this front, Pokémon Go is also breaking records. mobile users are now spending more time playing Pokémon Go than they are spending time in Facebook. Facebook, of course, still counts far more mobile users – its corporate site 1.51 billion monthly active users, for example, versus Pokémon Go’s 15 million mobile installs. (Not an apples-to-apples comparison, of course, but it gives you an idea.) Also remarkable: tracking firm SimilarWeb says the game is installed on over 10 percent of Android devices in the U.S., and over 15 percent in its other markets, Australia and New Zealand. (See below chart.) Meanwhile, on iOS, the average iPhone user spent 33 minutes in Pokémon Go on Monday, according to SensorTower’s data. That’s more than any other apps it analyzed, including Facebook, Snapchat, Twitter, Instagram, and Slither.io. Facebook saw the second-most average usage, at 22 minutes, 8 seconds, the firm reported, and Snapchat saw 18 minutes. Twitter, Instagram, then Slither.io followed. However, while SurveyMonkey’s data pointed to Pokémon Go being the biggest game in terms of active users, SensorTower noted that Pokémon Go is still beaten by others when it comes to time spent in games. For instance, Game of War sees nearly 2 hours of total daily usage for the average user, while Candy Crush Saga, sees daily usage of about 43 minutes. All this being said, the mobile gaming industry historically hasn’t always been kind to titles with tremendous hype, SurveyMonkey notes. Nintendo’s first mobile game, Miitomo, after early success that sent it to the top of the App Store. Pokémon Go may be different, however. In addition to capitalizing on the Pokémon brand, the app has in terms of keeping players active, engaged, returning and spending. The only issue for the game in the foreseeable future is continuing to balance the needs of the hardcore gamers with the more casual ones. You can already see an issue in some denser markets, where the Pokémon gyms (where the Pokémon battle) are dominated by the game’s top players, making it difficult for casuals to engage. ButPokémon Go can easily overcome this challenge by implementing one-on-one battles and trading, which it is likely to do.
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Land Rover’s lead engineer explains autonomous off-road driving
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Mark Lelinwalla
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When you’re Land Rover, you can’t just test connected and autonomous vehicles on regular roads. You have to live up to your rugged, but polished brand, simultaneously. That’s precisely why the automaker is testing off-road connected convoy research vehicles. It’s all a part of the company’s ambitious plan to create a fleet of 100-plus research vehicles over the next four years. The goal is to eventually get to the point where full autonomous off-roading is the new norm, through continuous testing of its connected and autonomous vehicle (CAV) technologies. To prepare for that day, Land Rover published the video below on Wednesday, showing two off-road connected convoy research vehicles communicating with each other. I spoke with Land Rover’s lead engineer for the project, Matt Reed, who explained how the connected vehicles communicated via Dedicated Short Range Communications (DSRC) boxes installed in each SUV to successfully off-road. [youtube=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gfbHjf2qeJE&w=560&h=315] “Currently, what we’ve got is two DSRC boxes from a company called Cohda Wireless and they use their software put into the car by their vehicle network],” Reed explained. “The CAN Bus is a vehicle-level network, which all current OEMs [Original Equipment Manufacturers] have, which contains lots of the driving data. You’ll have everything from ignition the car is in to things like the vehicle speed, the direction of travel, the GPS location, all of that information, which is used by the vehicle’s internal module to do everything from cruise control to turning your lights on and off.” “These boxes are connected to that network and we fix the signals that we want to look at, such as vehicle articulation, vehicle speeds and location, and then using that network, we pick off the information, which could be transmitted to a second car,” he continued. “The transmission is through those boxes and it’s using a 5.9 GHz DSRC.” Land Rover also leaned on the company’s Terrain Response settings to adjust to whatever uneven off-road surface the connected vehicles encountered during this experiment. Although there was a professional driver in this test, as the technology improves and full autonomy is achieved, Reed says a lead car would be able to off-road across tricky terrain, with a second car without any input following that exact route. Reed adds that with time there’s also potential to integrate mobile phone communications to the vehicle-to-vehicle data sharing. “So, for certain applications, you could have one car using a cell phone to connect to another car, which then DSRC connects to it,” he added. While that might be getting ahead of Land Rover’s plan, the next step is to continue to beef up its fleet of research vehicles to further test its CAV technologies. Just imagine the day when self-driving vehicles are off-roading in abundance.
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Line’s share price jumps 50% on Tokyo debut as IPO raises over $1.1B
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Jon Russell
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Fresh from a positive listing in New York on Thursday, messaging company Line saw its share price jump as high as 50 percent after it listed on the Tokyo Stock Exchange in its native Japan. In total, the company raised over $1.1 billion from the dual listing, which makes it the biggest tech IPO of 2016 to date. The company opened at $42 on the NYSE, up 33 percent on its list pricing, and . , which is its largest market and responsible for 90 percent of revenue, jumped to 5,000 JPY from an opening price of 3,300 JPY before settling to around 4,405 JPY at the time of writing. , but the success of its listing has been remarkable given that the company hasn’t shown much sign of growth lately. Boom — Jon Russell (@jonrussell) Line has 218 million monthly active users, two-thirds of which are in Japan, Thailand, Taiwan and Indonesia, but it only added 13 million to that figure over the last year. That’s around six percent growth. Revenue-wise, it blasted past $1 billion for the first time in 2015, but posted a loss of $76 million for the year. Last year, and its income of $298 million for the first quarter of 2016 — while impressive for a messaging app — isn’t a big increase in runrate on its sales for 2015. Nonetheless, investors seem bullish. Line’s first day on the New York Stock Exchange Line on the Tokyo Stock Exchange
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Sponsored Giveaway
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The 3 biggest sales mistakes enterprise software companies make
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Philip Levinson
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For early- to mid-stage B2B software and SaaS companies, selling in to the enterprise is hard. Getting a lot of enterprise customers to pay for your solution on a repeated and long-term basis without seeing your sales growth stall out at $15-25 million ARR? That’s really hard. Welcome to the challenging world of enterprise sales. Companies like , , and found lasting B2B sales success and turned their companies into pillars of the enterprise SaaS ecosystem. But the majority of private enterprise companies still face this Mount Everest of a challenge. Many factors can slow a company’s B2B sales progress, including competitive challenges, timing issues and product deficiencies. Here are three big sales mistakes we see private enterprise software companies make: George Mathew, , “In today’s enterprise software market, it’s important to define a user experience that is 100 times better than the status quo.” There are a number of reasons for this, including the fact that inertia, incumbency and bureaucracy are all working against you. For emerging companies, this means finding a way to be exponentially better with fewer resources. As a result, focus is key. Yammer co-founder David Sacks addressed this when he took over as CEO of Zenefits earlier this year. “Companies execute better when they ruthlessly prioritize and sequence their efforts,” “For us, that means hyper-focusing on the small business market where we have product-market fit.” What does this mean — “hyper-focusing … where we have product-market fit”? It means pursuing those market segments for which your product has a unique and compelling solution — exponentially better than the status quo — and pursuing only those segments. Many private B2B companies have developed solutions that are working for a subset of customers, but are still challenged with sales cycles longer than ideal. Average revenue per customer remains below the target. Or new customer sales growth is incremental, not exponential. In other words, the product-market fit is not compelling enough. Sometimes the market-fit issue with developing enterprise companies stems from insufficient focus. Ruthless prioritization, as advocated by Sacks, does not come naturally. Market fit can improve from having more ongoing dialogue with customers. For targeted sectors, your solution may simply be just a nice-to-have service and not compelling enough to overcome typical enterprise barriers. With more market focus, however, companies can find a sweet spot by developing an acute understanding of customers’ needs in a particular segment, which is more nuanced than the broader sector requirements. To succeed, resist the urge to broaden your focus too much or too soon, and then scale proportionately. Competitors come in many different shapes and sizes. As Zendesk CEO , “There’s an incredible variety of software products out there.” Indeed, read the “About Us” section of all the companies in your market universe, and consider how many of those view your space as theirs. Your competitors include other private companies and larger established incumbents with massive sales organizations. You also compete with customers’ own internally developed efforts, which may be inferior but can be difficult to overcome given ties to their own solution. Competition also includes service and reselling companies that represent third-party vendors. AppDirect co-CEO that 70 percent of on-premise software sales have traditionally been channel-based. He adds, “80% of on-premise software vendors operate a channel program to enable other companies to sell their products, while only 20% of SaaS vendors operate similar programs.” This channel and reselling hurdle highlights a competitive challenge for SaaS companies facing off against traditional software vendors. It’s a zero-sum game among vendors, so signing a customer means a loss for someone else. One often overlooked step is simply engaging with customers about the competitive landscape — including prospective as well as won/lost targets. Invest time to glean important, insightful information about your competitors and adapt accordingly. With enterprise sales, timing can make or break a company. Bad timing in the B2B sales process can stem from several factors. Here are three common timing issues: If you don’t give customers sufficient reasons to make a change, you will encounter too much inertia to close business. The enterprise customer’s default action is to stick with their current solution. Be aggressive in solving this problem by uncovering more unique, urgent requirements, and then credibly and proactively addressing those. More target market focus and customer-driven product iteration can help you move ahead of the curve. Enterprise markets can be unwelcoming to pioneers, so consider finding ways to bridge an entrenched solution to your ahead-of-the-curve solution. For example, introduced a secure enterprise mobile messaging platform to healthcare customers in 2010 but faced resistance from hospital employees that still relied on pagers. To overcome this, they developed a messaging solution that included . To get your foot in the door, you may need to support valued but possibly outdated requirements to help companies transition to your platform. SaaS products and business models have shortened sales cycles in some sectors for a number of purchases in recent years (e.g. see Harry Stebbings’ interview with Immediately’s CEO ). This is not true for all purchases in all enterprise markets, however, including large purchases in regulated industries or many Global 2000 companies. What to do about those long and costly sales cycles? “Selling to the consumer is about selling positive emotions. Selling to the enterprise is about suppressing negative emotions,” “Enterprise IT is not a culture of early adopters.” He is right — but there are a few practical strategies that can get slow-moving targets to move. Employing best practices with your sales and marketing processes is critical. In many Global 2000 companies, there are multiple groups of decision-makers or influencers involved, including product users, IT gatekeepers, administrative or executive groups and compliance teams, any of which can slow down your sales process. With incomplete information flowing back to the sales team, it’s critical to measure and track all customer communication and best practices by carefully utilizing your CRM and marketing automation tools — and then managing your team accordingly. Work to build a company wide culture to document customer communications and make best practices repeatable across sales, marketing, customer success and business development teams. Also, there are countless times that we have seen large, long-term enterprise deals go to a competitor that has successfully triangulated the buying process or leveraged backchannels. Your team’s success in triangulating with customer targets and establishing backchannels of communication with friendly insiders is vital to winning long sales-cycle deals. In fact, even though your product is B2B, perhaps the biggest mistake you can make is forgetting that your sales process is still P2P (peer-to-peer). Executives make decisions for all sorts of reasons that are not based simply on product features or depth of IP. With a long sales cycle, building rapport at many levels in the customer organization chart is critically important. Mastering these softer P2P skills can help drive successful triangulation and backchanneling, which lead directly to more enterprise sales. “We’ve seen that successful enterprise sales stem from a variety of factors,” says Nick Elprin, CEO of . “But in closing the largest and most important deals, people skills are ultimately at the top of that list.” Agreed.
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Crunch Report | Nintendo is Relaunching the NES
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Khaled "Tito" Hamze
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Tito Hamze
Tito Hamze
Joe Zolnoski
Joe Zolnoski
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One year since the New Horizons Pluto flyby, here’s what we learned
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Emily Calandrelli
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One year ago today, NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft Pluto and forever changed how we think about this frozen world. After more than nine years and three billion miles of traveling through the solar system, New Horizons swung by Pluto and its moons on July 14 , 2015. Although the spacecraft was moving at over 30,000 mph, it managed to capture images and data that revolutionized our understanding of Pluto and Kuiper Belt objects in general. New Horizons stamp released by the U.S. Postal Service “To say that New Horizons shook the foundation of planetary science is an understatement—discoveries already culled from the pictures and compositional and space environment readings have not only introduced us to the Pluto system, but hint at what awaits as scientists examine other worlds in the Kuiper Belt.” – NASA press release on New Horizons flyby anniversary With its iconic heart and blue, hazy atmosphere, Pluto has proven to be more complex and dynamic than scientists anticipated. A mission that was more than two decades in the making successfully made the world fall in love with Pluto all over again, even inspiring the to pay tribute. One year after New Horizons’ historic flyby, here are some of the most surprising things we’ve learn about Pluto. Image of Pluto taken by the Long Range Reconnaissance Imager (LORRI) aboard New Horizons, on July 13, 2015 / Image courtesy of NASA/JHUAPL/SwRI Pluto’s frozen heart was one of the first interesting features revealed in the initial images sent back from New Horizons during its approach. The image above was on July 13 , 2015 – one day before the flyby – when New Horizons was 768,000 kilometers (476,000 miles) from Pluto’s surface. As the spacecraft neared closer to Pluto, more was learned about this unique feature. Informally known as Sputnik Planum, the heart-shaped geological feature is actually a nitrogen glacier. In fact, it is now the largest known glacier in the solar system. Image of Pluto’s blue haze layer taken by New Horizons Ralph/Multispectral Visible Imaging Camera (MVIC) / Image courtesy of NASA/JHUAPL/SwRI Extending more than 200 kilometers above the surface, the blue haze layers were one of Pluto’s most striking features discovered by the spacecraft. Scientists believe that Pluto’s atmosphere is created through chemical reactions of sunlight interacting with nitrogen and methane on the dwarf planet. The chemical reactions create soot-like particles, forming a smoggy haze. Spectral features of water ice across Pluto’s surface / Image courtesy of NASA/JHUAPL/SwRI On Earth, we have water-ice that constantly goes through a large-scale volatile cycle. New Horizons discovered that Pluto has not just one, but four volatile ices (methane, nitrogen, carbon monoxide, and water) that go through freezing and precipitation cycles. The volatility is initiated as Pluto moves closer to and further away from the sun throughout its orbit. Measurements of Pluto’s four ices (methane, nitrogen, carbon monoxide and water-ice) across its surface / Image courtesy of NASA/JHUAPL/SwRI Of particular significance was the finding that water ice is across Pluto’s surface. The water ice acts as Pluto’s crustal bedrock. NASA that it’s the “canvas on which its more volatile ices paint their seasonally changing patterns.” [gallery size="tc-article-featured-image-wide" ids="1353430,1353431,1353432,1353439"] With icy hills, glaciers, snakeskin terrain, and snow-capped mountains, the diversity of Pluto’s surface was incredibly unexpected. Much of this geological complexity is the direct result of Pluto’s multiple volatile ices, making their mark on the surface as the dwarf planet works its way around the sun. Not only was Pluto found to be diverse, it’s also likely a dynamic, active world. Images of the surface appear to show sheets of ice that have flowed, or may currently be flowing, similar to the way glaciers move here on Earth. A composite image of Pluto (lower right) and its satellite Charon (upper left) / Image courtesy of NASA New Horizons brought eyes to a small planetary body deep into the solar system and made the world fall in love with Pluto all over again. The spacecraft’s findings challenged the scientific community’s definition of a “planet” and re-energized the debate around Pluto’s planetary status. Today, New Horizons is 300 million miles beyond Pluto and heading toward its next target: a Kuiper Belt object known as 2014 MU69. The spacecraft is scheduled to rendezvous with 2014 MU69, an ancient object thought to be one of the early building blocks of the solar system, on January 1 , 2019.
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Senate committee calls out Elon Musk, wants answers on Tesla Autopilot
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Lora Kolodny
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The U.S. Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation has called out Tesla CEO Elon Musk to answer some questions about the company’s Autopilot technology, and what the Silicon Valley automaker is doing to educate drivers about it. Sen. John Thune, chairman for the committee, seeking a response from Musk and Tesla no later than July 29th. The inquiry was prompted after a fatal Tesla crash in Florida, which we . During that crash, the driver had Autopilot engaged. In a second crash in Pennsylvania, which was not fatal, the Detroit Free Press reports that the he had Autopilot engaged. Musk issued a public statement today, however, that according to investigators’ findings, in Pennsylvania, and in fact could have prevented that crash. The Senate inquiry follows several federal agencies’ more formal investigations into Tesla’s technology business practices. As TechCrunch previously reported, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission is trying to determine whether Tesla had an obligation to notify its shareholders of the Florida crash sooner than it did. The National Highway Traffic and Safety Administration (NHTSA) and the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) are also looking into what exactly happened during the Florida crash, and whether or not Autopilot features contributed in any way. Sen. Thune published and publicized the committee’s letter on the same day that called on Tesla to disable Autopilot’s hands-free mode until the technology is further developed. , a partner at Connecticut law firm , who specializes in class action defense, management-side labor and employment litigation, said everyone is concerned about liability following in this market, for good reason. They also were when Google’s self-driving car in February — a minor accident with no fatalities — she noted. “This tech is so advanced and so complicated. Everyone wants to figure out how to regulate it so that we can get self-driving vehicles out on the road, where it could be very beneficial for disabled people, seniors, and to prevent thousands of deaths,” she said. “But it’s hard to know where to start and how to do it effectively. Everyone will be watching to see what NHTSA’s guidelines are as a next step.” The attorney, who does not represent any automotive clients, or have any connections to Tesla, said she believes specifically “There’s certainly no failure to warn on Tesla’s part.” Tesla gives its customers more than the small print, she said. There are meaningful disclosures that their cars aren’t toys, and if one does not operate a vehicle safely, a driver can make even the safest car unsafe no matter how well it is manufactured. Questions remain for regulators and politicians looking out for public safety above profits or rapid advances in technology. For example, does a tech or automotive company have an obligation to reach out to people who are using their products the wrong way; and how comfortable is the public with some people being part of a beta test out on the road?
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Dropbox’s Lepton lossless image compression really uses a ‘middle-out’ algorithm
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Devin Coldewey
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It’s not Pied Piper, but there are similarities. The “middle-out” algorithm that has its roots in the in HBO’s “Silicon Valley” may have been fictional, but something like it can be found in Lepton, a cool new lossless image compressor created by Dropbox. Lepton reduces the file size of JPEG-encoded images (and that’s most of them) by as much as 22 percent, yet without losing a single bit of the original. How is this possible? Middle-out. Well, it’s much more complicated than that, actually. Lepton gets one part of its savings by more efficiently encoding brightness values that are stored in a highly deterministic way in JPEGs. The details, which might be a bit hard to follow for the average bear (or, if I’m honest, blogger), . The middle-out bit comes toward the end of the decompression bit. The algorithm looks at the border between two of the 8×8-pixel blocks JPEG creates, where on one side the decoding is already done. The un-decoded side tends to follow a brightness gradient established by that found in the pixels leading up to that middle area, so the algorithm makes a prediction based on that. It then saves only the delta between this prediction and the real value — formatted to be a good fit for the VP8 arithmetic coder. From the middle…….. out. The brightness coefficients encoded this way tend to make up about 8 percent on average of images the team encountered, but they shrunk that 8 percent by about 61 percent, giving from this method alone a 5 percent reduction in overall file size. The other 17 percent (remember, the total is 22) savings comes from various other techniques that, if you can believe it, have an even entertaining story behind them. You won’t notice any of this; Lepton compression is only done on Dropbox servers, where your data is put into cold storage. When you request it, Lepton’s work is reversed (and fast) and you get the vanilla JPEG. But on Dropbox’s end, it saves petabytes of space. Lepton is open source, and Dropbox has . Feel free to tinker with it — and if you made it this far in this article, you’re probably likely to!
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Mushroom leather, tiny Zika detectors and lab-made breast milk debut at IndieBio’s third demo day
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Sarah Buhr
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room at the Folsom Street Foundry in downtown San Francisco this afternoon as people poured in to check out the latest innovations from Indibio’s third demo day. The accelerator’s demo day has grown so big we’re now . But it was just a couple years ago that the only pure biotech accelerator launched out of SOS Ventures. Many accelerators and venture firms have started to take a keen interest in the space since then, but Indiebio is still the one many look to in the industry for weird and interesting ideas like 3D printed animal parts and bioreactors to make better beer. The third event was no exception, with startups presenting more wild ideas on stage including mushroom leather clothing, a Zika-detecting tool the size of a stick of gum and human breast milk made in a lab. Here we present to you all 15 startups in IndieBio’s third batch:
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How far does the Pokémon brand have to carry Pokémon Go?
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Matthew Lynley
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How far can the Pokémon brand carry Pokémon Go? Will its popularity fade after that initial burst of activity thanks to the power of its brand? That’s a huge question that’s circulating now that the game has immediately popped to the top of the App Store and has cemented itself as one of the most successful game launches of all time. The mechanics of the game are fundamentally sound, and it has an extensive library of nostalgic content and a unique real-world experience that spans multiple demographics that should for the time being continue actively bringing in new players. But can it keep that up? Dan Porter, the former head of OMGPOP and one of my favorite game managers out there, lays out a good argument for why Pokémon Go . Already Pokémon Go has the makings of a cultural zeitgeist, tapping into nearly a decade of pent-up demand for a smartphone version of Pokémon. But it may lack some of the core elements — like strong user-generated content and a sharp difficulty curve after the initial ramp — that can sustain the game’s playability beyond just rapidly progressing through early content. I think pegging Pokémon Go as a potential bang-and-fizzle game right away might not be giving the game (or its developers) enough credit. I think if the game’s existing mechanics can’t sustain an extended player life already, then it has so much overhead that its brand can very easily carry it until future, more traditional user-generated content features come out. I’d also argue there are early elements of user-generated content already built into the game. There’s a challenge of avoiding feature-creeping the game to death, but it seems like the team has shown it has the developmental chops to build a really good game. This feels a bit like a too-soon question. We haven’t seen where the game’s development and iteration is going to go. That being said, Dan has a lot of great points in his post. I have a few I’d like to add here for the general argument on the internet happening: Despite Pokémon Go being already very highly polished from a mechanical standpoint, the game still actually feels a little half-baked (or, at least, three-quarter baked). It’s missing many elements of the core Pokémon experience, like trading. While that, for example, has the potential of cannibalizing the walking experience to gather new Pokémon (a strong element of UGP in the game), it also offers a unique opportunity for players to build a stronger social graph that piggybacks on other communication channels (real world, WhatsApp, Facebook, Craigslist, etc). That social graph doesn’t necessarily have to exist within a game if the UGC and UGP of the game is strong enough. There’s a ton of opportunity for additional UGC for Pokémon Go. The same could be said of trading. Encountering a player open to trading again has an element of randomness to it. Different players open to trading, in theory, should have different Pokémon. So once again a player has to improvise and negotiate a trade for a Pokémon if it’s one they have a strong desire to obtain. That player has to deal with a new personality and a new set of expectations when setting up the trade. Both of these help contribute to the staying power of Pokémon on Nintendo’s devices. Users are faced with an onslaught of UGC once they clear out the main storyline and gather their own set of Pokémon as they start battling and trading with other players. The battle is a strong UGP experience, but the opponent’s experience and team composition is also a strong UGC experience. The competitive elements might not be particularly palatable for casual users, but, nonetheless, it’s a big well of potential UGC and UGP to keep people engaged for the that span a development cycle of a Pokémon game. The intent of the developers here seems to be that they do not want to go the route of focusing just on content to extend the life of the game, but rather try to bake in additional UGC mechanics. They could always add more Pokémon, but that doesn’t address the problem of users racing to the end of the game and finding themselves with nothing left to do. The makers of Candy Crush Saga were great at pumping out new content, but eventually your player base will catch up and lose interest. I understand the necessity of keeping the features to a bare minimum. Very rarely are applications released in a complete form that never iterates. Even the most-polished games like World of Warcraft and Minecraft are in a state of constant flux, with new content and balance changes regularly coming out. It’s important to ensure that the experience like Pokémon, but is best suited for mobile devices. So! All that said, for now let’s assume Pokémon Go already is where it’s going to be in the next year. Does that mean it has to entirely rely on its brand in order to keep it rolling, and how far can that carry it? Let’s take a look at different cases of games that have been carried by brand equity at their launch. The first case we’ll look at is Minecraft: Pocket edition. This, like Pokémon Go, really nailed pretty much every aspect of the game development process. But it also had years of built-in brand equity among a very diverse set of demographics. To be sure, that starting base was definitely smaller than Pokémon. But nonetheless, here are the charts: So we can see here that it actually took a while for Minecraft to really ramp up, despite having some brand equity built up. But what we see from this sustained top grossing status is that it’s constantly attracting new players (because it’s a paid app) despite the lack of an internal social graph. The only incentive to getting a new player into the game is really to add someone new to play with, and you really have to hunt someone down to accomplish that. What Minecraft does really well is have the baked-in tools to inspire really strong UGP and UGC. It’s an augmented Lego experience, after all. So let’s look at a different, maybe more unique case. Kim Kardashian: Hollywood also represented a huge, untapped cultural zeitgeist that had yet to make its way into a mobile game. Then it came out with a and blew away most (all?) other games in the App Store. The charts: So this is another case that’s a little perpendicular to Minecraft. Kim Kardashian: Hollywood had a very strong set of tools for UGP. But what the game was really about was a lot of strong content that kept players compelled. The tricky part about that is producing enough content becomes a race against time to keep players engaged and not deleting the app. This led to a really powerful start, but it couldn’t sustain the momentum and eventually tapered off. We’re probably going to see something when a game about Taylor Swift or Kanye West comes out. A quick, but similar case before moving forward — let’s take a look at Candy Crush: Soda Saga, because it is probably the closest comparable given that it’s piggybacking off existing brand equity. The lesson from Kim Kardashian: Hollywood and Candy Crush: Soda Saga is really that brand equity can only carry you for so long, but holy hell does it give you a head start. That’s important for attracting a core “whale” user base that’s going to sustain the life of your game. And, lining up with Dan’s point as well, just glancing at the top grossing charts means you don’t have to sustain a constant flow of new players in order to be a successful game from a revenue standpoint. These games are clearly monetizing well for . So, here’s the rub: If you want to see a success like Minecraft, it’s clear you need both strong UGC and strong UGP. If you have good UGP and an accompanying social graph but lack in UGC, you probably built a highly monetizable game — and a potential cultural zeitgeist — that might not have the long shelf life of a game like Minecraft. If you have the brand to give you a boost, it buys you the room to figure out how to build in strong UGC. And Pokémon Go, which already has pieces of UGC in place, has that window to build stronger and more long-lasting tools. Before closing, I’d like to address the Words with Friends or Chess with Friends comparisons. While these also have strong elements of UGP and UGC, I’d argue that the playground for these games simply didn’t have the strong infrastructure to trigger that moment of inspiration in really casual players that progresses them toward the finish line. These kinds of games might be fun for creative or well-trained individuals, but the early curve was a little sharp in order to make the game fun to a huge audience without the patience to achieve that mastery without any guidance. If a player isn’t progressing — especially for games that aren’t obviously showing how the player is growing in skill or practice — then it might lead to some burnout outside the most devoted players. In the case of Pokémon Go and Minecraft, the depth of initial content is so structured that players don’t have to be grandmasters of Pokémon and Minecraft to have a really fun experience. They can just screw around with the entry-level content until they pick up the basics and not be restricted by the immediate stringent goals of games like Chess or Scrabble. Playing the same player over and over again also gives users an understanding of how the other player thinks, which kind of removes the potential of seeing brand new strategies that require extensive improvisation. There’s a massive universe of player-created content already available in Minecraft that’s a product of the number of active Minecraft users, and that’s how Pokémon Go should be moving. Having an explicit, smooth mastery and progression curve — and initial ramp — is critical to a long-lasting game, and in cases like Chess or Scrabble players may be paralyzed by the options and not know which move to make. They might also not know what the rate of their progression is, or how to gauge the “level” of their opponent. Match-3 is great for this because it’s more of a compulsive mechanic that feels very natural and tuning level difficulty is a little more straightforward. To be truly great at Chess or Scrabble, you pretty much have to study (online or other players) or have a dictionary out with you (which is totally cheating). Worst case scenario, as Dan suggests, is that it has a core devoted user base in cities that’s highly monetizable. There’s a good chance it’s already attracted the whales it needs to actively sustain itself. End of the day, I’m long Pokémon Go.
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Autopilot was off when Tesla Model X in Pennsylvania crashed
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Devin Coldewey
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The Tesla Model X that had autopilot disabled at the time, Elon Musk announced on Twitter. This info comes straight from the vehicle’s own logs. Onboard vehicle logs show Autopilot was turned off in Pennsylvania crash. Moreover, crash would not have occurred if it was on. — Elon Musk (@elonmusk) Tesla has been criticized over the last weeks for, as some say anyhow, offering its Autopilot semi-autonomous driving feature too early and using public roads as proving grounds. Consumer Reports just today until it’s safer. The news that it wasn’t even in use at the time of the crash should silence some critics, but hardly all: The full story of the crash isn’t known yet, and while Autopilot does not appear to be the cause, it may yet have contributed. Until a more thorough investigation yields its results, it may be best to withhold judgment — not that anyone will do that. This story is developing; more info as we get it.
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Tesla’s longtime VP of Production joins a venture firm ahead of its new fund raise
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Connie Loizos
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Greg Reichow, who in May left his post as Tesla’s vice president of production (and reportedly as one of its ), has joined as an investor. If the Eclipse brand isn’t entirely familiar, it may be soon, given its growing star power. Venture geeks might recall that Eclipse was originally part of Formation 8, a firm that has since disbanded but that, before doing so, raised a $125 million fund that was designed to invest exclusively in early-stage hardware companies. (Its original name was . Among its limited partners is Flex, the publicly traded contract design and manufacturing company formerly known as Flextronics.) Former F8 partner Lior Susan now manages Eclipse, with a team that includes not only Reichow but longtime Sequoia Capital partner Pierre Lamond, who’d been an F8 advisor and as a full-time partner last year. It’s been active, too. The firm has already invested in 27 companies, including making an early bet on the computational photography startup , which last week announced in fresh funding led by GV. According to a new , Eclipse is also raising a new, $125 million fund. The firm declined to comment when contacted earlier today about the fund and Reichow, but investors will undoubtedly welcome his involvement. In addition to his work at Tesla, where he helped oversee the launch of the company’s Model X car, Reichow spent more than seven years at the solar panel manufacturer SunPower.
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Zoom.ai believes an automated assistant is the fix for a weighty workload
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Darrell Etherington
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wants to give managers and others in enterprise a gift that has a very high value in business: Time. Company founder Roy Pereira told me at Montreal’ Startupfest that while tools are making us more productive, we’re also expected to handle more, and that’s causing a growing problem his startup hopes to address with AI. The startup, just six months old, is part of , one of eight startups selected to receive $200,000 in seed funding, working space in NYC’s Betaworks Studio and guidance from people at the top bot platforms, including Kik, Slack and more. BotCamp is designed to capitalize on the recent boom in interest in chatbots by growing some unique early-stage companies. has an approach that differs from chatbot startups, however. Its target users are enterprise customers, in a market more generally associated with consumer-facing products. Plus, founder Roy Pereira doesn’t even like calling Zoom.ai a “chatbot” company. “I don’t consider Zoom.ai a bot company,” Pereira told me. “Bots and the chat interface is really just a UI, the most appropriate UI for this problem I want to solve.” What Zoom.ai is, according to Pereira, is an “automated executive assistant.” The idea to create such an assistant came to Roy because of his experience at his last company, Rubicon Project (which ). At Rubicon, Pereira noticed that the new normal in the workplace, even for managers and executives, often involves a lot of menial work. Scheduling, looking up contact details, deciding where to have coffee, looking up some background info on a potential contractor — the list of things we do on a day-to-day basis that are relatively simple, yet time-consuming, continues to grow, even as tech makes other parts of our lives easier. “It takes time, and it’s faster to do it now than before,” Pereira said. “But we have so much more to do now than we did before. How would I want to interact with something that could solve this? I wanted an assistant.” But how do you manage creating a virtual assistant that’s as effective as a human one? The road so far for bots (Pereira may dislike the term, but he’s part of “BotCamp” so I’m just gonna go ahead and keep using it) is littered with examples of what happens when AI falls short of user expectations. That’s why Pereira said he realized early that the key to success was doing natural language processing (NLP) properly, and that requires understanding the user properly — most platforms, including meeting scheduler and potential Zoom.ai competitor x.ai don’t do that. That results in “goldfish” style behavior, Pereira says, where there’s limited or no memory and so the visual in virtual assistant is brought top of mind. To inform Zoom.ai about the user, what the company needs is data. Luckily, we as users are more and more willing to share said data, so there’s a fair amount of that readily available that Zoom.ai’s tech can plug into. And the resulting insights lead to more successful results. Aside from scheduling, what Zoom.ai can do is actually fairly broad, and includes things like sourcing warm introductions through mutual contacts, and setting up coffee meetings, complete with locations, without user input. But “Domains,” in bot parlance, are areas of expertise, and a key tenet of good bot design is that you keep your domain tightly focused in order to lessen the chance for mistakes. Zoom.ai’s domain seems fairly broad, which I thought might lead to a higher error rate than other competitors. Zoom.ai founder Roy Pereira But Pereira said they’re addressing that issue in a few ways, including training their AI on recognizing the same request articulated very differently. That’s because the way you ask for something on Slack is not the way you ask for the same thing on Skype or on Kik, and Zoom.ai can recognize things like emojis used in place of words, or parsing a lengthy request, like you might get via email. University of Toronto is one of the best machine learning schools in the world, and Pereira is using that to Zoom.ai’s advantage in terms of finding talent. But it’s not always easy, because Google, Apple, etc. are coming in and hiring into higher years. So Pereira says they’ve built a lot of the tech in-house, and they’re using some off-the-shelf stuff out there. Pereira thought that those tools, like Google’s free machine learning library, would be sufficient, but was surprised to find that they had to “10x” the available tech in order to get it where they wanted it for Zoom.ai. He says they’re flexible on that, however — meaning that if better external tools become available, Zoom.ia is not going to be particular about the source of their assistant’s smarts. The goal is to make it better, regardless of where the machine learning tech is coming from. Self-funded up until now, Zoom.ai’s first external funding is the $200,000 seed investment provided by Betaworks. Pereira says they’re waiting to bring on more investment until September, when they’re through with BotCamp. He says that as a seasoned entrepreneur, he now realizes the value of being choosy, and is also lucky enough to be able to do that. Betaworks will add a lot of value to what they’re already doing, he adds. The people who work there, their network, the mentors and more are all valuable resources, especially in so new as an area, Pereira notes. Zoom.ai is available on Slack, Telegram, Messenger, Kik, Line, Skype, Hangouts, Cisco Spark, SMS and email already, which is a long list because Pereira says the aim was not to leave anyone out. It’s currently available as a free preview, which is open to anyone. Virtual assistants may soon be commonplace as chat becomes an increasingly important point of contact between people and their devices. Zoom.ai’s bet is that business users will prove key drivers of AI advances, and it wants to be wherever they are. That could work well, provided Zoom.ai truly reduces your workload, instead of just changing what it looks like.
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Mentat will apply for jobs on your behalf and guarantee you get an interview
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Fitz Tepper
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Did you know nowadays there are more people who dislike their jobs than like them? While there was once a time where the vast majority of Americans were happy with their current job, now anywhere from 50 to 70 percent of employees are with their current position. Combine that statistic with the fact that of millennials expect to switch jobs every three years and it sounds like a good time to be in the employment industry. And while there is definitely no shortage of job listing sites, , a company launching out of Y Combinator’s Summer 2016 batch, does things a little differently. The company specializes in helping people who know they want a new job, but either haven’t been able to organize themselves enough to take the leap, or are literally too busy to find and apply to one. To help these people, Mentat will take over and optimize their LinkedIn and resume, then literally write cover letters and have one of their advisors apply to jobs for you, by hand. [gallery ids="1353269,1353267,1353268,1353270" orderby="rand"] The company also pairs you with a dedicated, real-life advisor to talk via phone, chat and email as much as you want during the process. The company has about 50 advisors on staff who have expertise in tons of different industries, so they can give you the best advice for the specific industry you want to work in. So where does the tech come in? Mentat says they are using machine learning to match job seekers with potential jobs, as well as matching them with one of their advisors with a similar skill set. The whole package costs $249, and Mentat will literally give you a money-back guarantee that you’ll get at least one interview. They also have a free tier which is similar to a traditional job site, and lets you find and apply to different jobs. But does it count if you get a job that you don’t even apply for? Mentat’s view is that most actual job applications just require you to regurgitate your resume, and end up being a pretty big waste of time. They handle this grunt work so you can focus on the interview, which is where a person’s actual personality and skill starts to come into play. Interestingly, Mentat is working to partner with educational institutions to buy their product for students. And in today’s market, where getting a job is really the only thing students care about, it may be a plus for prospective schools to be able to guarantee their graduates will get interviews post-graduation.
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Travis Bernard
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Ava promises to clone high-end wines without using any grapes
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Sarah Buhr
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You’ve heard of turning water into wine, but Alec Lee and his founding team of bioengineers have taken to their San Francisco laboratory to turn molecules into wine. “We create the wine without any grapes, yeast or any kind of fermentation,” Lee, the founder of , told TechCrunch. Ava does this by analyzing molecular profiles of select wines and reconstructing them as a bioidentical match to more expensive wines, like an $11,000 , which essentially put New World wines on the map for the industry. AVA in the wine industry stands for “American Viticultural Area,” and the startup’s name plays on it as a wine made in an American lab. The claim to make wine from a group of bonded atoms sounds a bit like alchemy, but Lee swears his products are the real deal. “It’s essentially just a big chemistry problem,” he told me before getting ready for his presentation today at . “We don’t need alchemy to change one kind of molecule to another. You can deconstruct water and replicate it in the lab, for instance.” Right now the startup is focused on replicating three wine clones — a Moscato d’Asti, a Dom Perignon and they just started work on a Pinot noir. But quantifying right out of the bottle is tough to do. Lee told me the biggest challenge is figuring out the concentrations of the different molecules. Each wine has between 80 to 200 compounds with both synergistic and anti-synergistic effects all in play to make it taste, feel and look the way it does. “The goal is to get to a point where you just need a glass worth to identify the molecules,” Lee said. Ava’s wine cloning lab in San Francisco. He sees Ava eventually getting into other luxury goods, like chocolate and coffee, but there are a lot of different wines in the world and the main focus is all on cloning the high-end good stuff for now. Regulation will be another hurdle for the startup. Lee isn’t even sure he’ll be allowed to label his product as wine. “It’s a regulatory dance even though it’s essentially wine, biogenetical wine,” he said. The startup is working on gaining the proper licensing to sell the product right now, but says that will be about six months down the road. The team might go the direct-to-consumer route, and told me they’re also chatting with some big distributors and retailers in the alcohol business to potentially place their wines throughout the world. Ava recently raised $2.5 million in funding from institutional investors with experience in the space, but did not want to disclose just yet who those investors are. The founders are presenting their product for the first time to investors, biotech enthusiasts and press at IndieBio SF’s demo day today — and, by the way, you can watch the live stream of the event on . They’ll be joined by a batch of startups making everything from a better coffee foam to mushroom clothing. “At a very high level, the way future generations will make food is through synthetics,” Lee said. “It’s just not sustainable the other way around. Wine is a very unique opportunity for us to legitimize synthetic foods because we can very quickly get to market. A rising tide lifts all boats and wine a great place for us to start.”
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Apple needs single sign-on to solve the tvOS adoption problem
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Paul Müller
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Just ahead of ’s recent annual ( ) held in San Francisco, we looked at the performance of . , we found that tvOS apps retained poorly compared to their phone- or tablet-based sister apps. Our conclusion was that any updates to tvOS must focus on solving this retention problem if tvOS is to be a success. WWDC rolled around and, as expected, Apple announced a series of changes to the way that tvOS works and integrates with Apple’s other products. Are these changes what tvOS needs to solve its retention issue? Our analysis itself was relatively small, yet powerful. We checked our incoming traffic for devices through the month of May, analyzing the anonymized and aggregated retention data from users on the platform. The study compared tvOS apps to the same apps on . It’s crucial to point out that the final study only included activity from three different apps, although those apps had been used by more than 5,000 Apple TV users. (The sample for iOS was more than 295,000.) This means that while the results are statistically significant, the predictive power across verticals is weak. Intuitively, certain apps are sure to perform: , for example, is a highly familiar format on the TV. The service is already available on devices and dozens of . Similarly, the apps we looked at were high-performers (third quartile or better in terms of retention) either in the entertainment and media vertical or home utilities. These are the types of apps you might expect make sense on the Apple TV. Yet in the data, the pattern was clear: There’s a serious retention problem for early-adopter developers on tvOS. So tvOS users aren’t engaging with these apps enough. To be fair, most platforms struggle with user performance in the early days. And there’s a chicken-and-egg problem — users will only commit to a platform if they can use it extensively, whereas developers will also limit their releases until performance can be proven. Since announcing , Apple certainly helped jolly things along by encouraging specific developers to port their apps to the TV. This is how the platform got to in the first place. But, performance could also significantly benefit from targeted improvements to the device ease-of-use. Retention is affected by a ton of factors. If the app’s selling proposition isn’t any good, then users will churn rapidly. Because we only looked at apps that were performing extremely well on iOS, though, this seems unlikely. Another common factor is a retention drop-off — a point at which during the user’s journey that it is difficult, or unappealing, to continue using the app. Game developers look for particularly tricky levels where the learning curve rises too steeply. E-commerce companies ruthlessly tweak their funnels to find specific points in the user experience that make people abandon carts. So is the data consistent with a retention drop-off on tvOS? The biggest difference in user retention between tvOS and iOS can be observed right at the beginning of the user journey. is about one-third lower than on iOS, which indicates that almost 80 percent of all users opened the apps once, but then never returned. This indicates that providing a more fluid flow to start using an app right away would significantly reduce the barriers that users experience when downloading apps onto the Apple TV. As usual, we picked up a device ourselves to try out the system in the office. Our downloaded the onto the device, but promptly quit the effort when he discovered how onerous it would be to type in our 32-character company password with the touch-sensing remote. That’s anecdotal, but perhaps still serves to illustrate what’s happened to 5,000 early tvOS adopters. across devices, as well as using the as an improved stand-in for the touch remote, could remove this roadblock entirely. This means that tvOS apps might become straightforward companions to what users are doing on their other devices — allowing them to migrate existing activity onto the big screen. People tend to use their smartphones while watching shows on the big screen. eMarketer recently reported as much as 50 percent usage among millennials*. Easily handing off from the smartphone to native formats on the Apple TV is a significant value proposition for multimedia consumers. And, this appears to be the use case that Apple is shooting for. Enabling this experience through single sign-on could be the game changing factor. Will it be enough to transform tvOS from a struggling platform into a worthwhile investment for app developers? Maybe not all by itself. Does it home in, at least, on the very issue that we’re observing for our partners with investments on iOS? We think so. Given the drop-off, and given the experience of our partners, single sign-on might be just the thing to bring tvOS users coming back to the apps.
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T-Mobile is giving its customers unlimited data to play Pokemon Go an unlimited amount
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Lucas Matney
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Pretty much every PR agency under the sun has had a meeting this week trying to determine how they can get a slice of the Pokemon GO popularity, and, to be fair, so has every newsroom. But now it’s time for T-Mobile to bask in the sunshine with its contribution to the media lightning storm. T-Mobile announced today that as a part of its “T-Mobile Tuesdays” promotion it’s going to be giving its customers unlimited data to play Pokemon Go until August 2017. The offer should should show up in the dedicated T-Mobile Tuesday app tomorrow, the company says, but you’ll need to claim the deal on a Tuesday by August 19. “[U]nless you’ve been living in a cave, you’ve either been playing Pokémon Go or hearing about playing Pokémon Go,” a company representative wrote in an email. “It’s an absolute global sensation, and it’s burning through customers’ data. And, where there’s a customer pain point to fix, the Un-carrier steps in!” (!!!) The data usage of Pokemon Go isn’t all that crazy or anything to be honest, but the amount that people are playing it kind of is, so this is probably a good thing to snap up on if you’re a customer of America’s third or fourth best carrier. Friendly reminder that while you’re enjoying that differential free data from T-Mobile, just remember that net neutrality is something T-Mobile DGAF about.
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Atlassian acquires Statuspage
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Frederic Lardinois
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today that it has acquired , a Y Combinator- service that allows online businesses to keep their users updated about the status of their online services. The financial details of the transaction were not disclosed. This marks Atlassian’s first acquisition since . Adding a service like Statuspage, which launched three years ago, seems like a natural fit for Atlassian. The company has long argued that every company is now a software company, after all, and that means virtually every company now also needs a service to keep users informed when things don’t work as expected. As Atlassian president Jay Simons told me, Statuspage was one of the earliest adopters of , which Atlassian acquired back in 2012, and Atlassian also hosts its on Statuspage. “We are super-excited about their leadership position,” Simons said about Statuspage. “They have established themselves as the premier provider of these services.” Statuspage currently counts the likes of , , and Citrix among its “thousands of customers.” Simons also noted that he sees natural integrations between Atlassian’s JIRA project management service and Statuspage, for example. Statuspage co-founder Scott Klein noted that his company was doing quite well. Atlassian, however, will give Statuspage access to Atlassian’s larger user base and will allow the company to accelerate its product development cycle. In their official announcement today, the Statuspage co-founders also note that when the team explored the acquisition, “we were aligned on three important things: our complementary cultures, our desire to offer S as a standalone product, and our shared vision of the future of software.” To this, Simons added that “the other aspect that drove the marriage here is that like Atlassian, Statuspage is really focused on reaching the Fortune 500,000.” Companies like Comcast, after all, have the resources to build their own status-alert systems. “But if you are not part of the Fortune 500, you need a service like Statuspage.” Statuspage will indeed remain a standalone product after the acquisition, and Simons tells me that Atlassian currently has no plans to change the pricing for the service (which ). For the time being, current Statuspage users won’t notice any changes, either.
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SwagBot will autonomously roll them little dogies along rough Australian ranchlands
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Devin Coldewey
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Is nothing sacred? The rugged trails that over history have been trod by cowboys, gauchos, ranch hands, and in Australia, swagmen, are now to be presided over by cold, calculating machines. is the vanguard of our incoming steer-driving overlords, its independent all-wheel drive churning carelessly the mud in which once toiled and their snorting charges. Actually, it’s pretty cool. SwagBot is an all-terrain robot vehicle platform created by the Australian Centre for Field Robotics with the goal of, eventually, autonomously patrolling the vast pastures and farmlands of the Australian countryside. Ro-hiiiide! It has a hilariously elevated ride height and enormous wheels so it can clamber over the inevitable stray branches and logs and wade through streams and marshlands. Cameras mounted on it can watch cattle or inspect trees and plants, and its flat head can even serve as a launch platform for a companion drone. The electrically propelled vehicle could eventually monitor and herd cattle, check for invasive plants (and spray them), inspect fences, and even do work around the house like carrying firewood. For now, though, SwagBot must be remotely operated; the autonomous part comes later. The project’s leader, Salah Sukkarieh, that the next year should bring collision avoidance, autonomous delivery, weeding, and sensors for animal monitoring. I’ve asked for more details as well and will add them to the story as soon as I hear back.
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Ford shows how humans and robots work hand-in-hand on its assembly line
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Mark Lelinwalla
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Your next colleague could be an industrial robot. Ford has a pilot project which could pave the way for humans and robots to eventually work hand-in-hand in all of the automaker’s assembly lines worldwide. The automaker has new collaborative robots, known as in Ford’s assembly plant in Cologne, Germany. The task involves co-bots and employees working together to ensure a perfect fit every time. If this trial run goes smoothly, Ford could ramp up its co-bots corps in more of its plants in the near future. “If we deem that is efficient enough, we can take a look at including them in other plants,” Ford rep Karl Henkel told me today. “The co-bots are an ‘and’ proposition and not a ‘or’ proposition. It’s not ‘can this robot do what a worker cannot do?’ They’re complementary, working together as a team.” Ford strategically picked fitting shock absorbers as the task because it’s typically a strenuous job that keeps workers on the assembly line for seven to eight hours. Co-bots, which stand just over three feet, help with that. Take a look at the co-bots and assembly workers collaborate in action. [youtube=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I8nMKH3y_1I&w=560&h=315] According to Henkel, Ford’s trial run with the worker-robot collaboration in Cologne is part of the company furthering its investigation in Industry 4.0 Automation, which embraces these co-bots and other automated technologies on the assembly line and beyond.
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Dave McClure talks numbers on 500 Startups’ international advantage
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Darrell Etherington
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500 Startups founding partner Dave McClure took the stage at Startupfest in Montreal on Thursday to chat with festival co-founder Phil Telio, and while a lot of what he covered was the McClure Classic Hits playlist you might recognize if you’ve ever seen him speak, he also shed some light on what he sees as 500 Startups’ competitive advantage in the field of high-profile fund/accelerator combos that also includes Y Combinator. McClure said that 500 now have about 1,500 investments spanning 60 countries, with a full third of their staff now both not born in the U.S., and working outside the U.S. McClure says that they’ve been making investments internationally since the very start, which is why over a third of their portfolio companies actually reside outside the U.S. That provides part of its advantage over big competitors, including YC, which McClure, whose metaphor-making ability may have been impacted by the Harambe debacle, called “the big gorilla on the hill.” “It’s tough,” he added, describing how he feels about the inevitable constant comparisons between 500 and YC. “It’s hard feeling like I’m Seabiscuit all the time.” A lot of startups at the festival were interested in some guidance around what 500 is looking for in portfolio companies, and McClure provided some pretty clear guidance. They’re basically looking for functional product, early customer traction and revenue “evidence that you’re not completely fucking stupid and that you’ve been able to execute on something,” McClure says. And that also means having numbers to back that up. “[It’s] not what do i think of your product, but what do your customers think of your product,” he said, and how can you show that in a quantifiable, numbers-based way, instead of by qualitative pitches and customer stories. On the other side of the funnel, what does success look like to 500? McClure said that an ideal case, rather than the ultra-rare unicorn, is a $10 million business that employs 100 people (the real goal, he said, is to contribute to the overall health of the economy by growing businesses that can hire), a valuation of between $50 and $250 million. This ideal case happens around 5 percent of the time, based on their current numbers, he added. In terms of Canada-specific numbers, he said that 500 currently has made about 40 investments over the last five years in the country, and added that they’d like to do more like 20 to 30 per year (using their ). They have people in Toronto, Montreal, Waterloo, Vancouver and Calgary keeping an ear to the ground to help hit those numbers.
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Microsoft triumphs in warrant case against U.S. Government
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Kate Conger
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In a surprise federal court ruling, Microsoft has won its lawsuit against the United States Government over a warrant for a customers’ emails. The company has been fighting since 2013 to resist turning over the emails, which are stored in an Irish data center. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 2nd Circuit ruled today that Microsoft is not required to comply with a warrant for the users’ emails if the data is not stored within the U.S. Microsoft’s case began in 2013, when a New York district court issued a warrant for emails and additional information about one of the company’s customers. Although Microsoft partially complied by providing some metadata and “non‐content information” about the customer, it argued that the emails themselves were stored in Ireland, and were therefore not subject to a warrant issued by a U.S. court. In 2014, a federal magistrate judge again ordered Microsoft to turn over the emails — but Microsoft appealed to the 2nd Circuit. Support for Microsoft’s case has poured in from industry, European government, civil liberties organizations, and even media: Amazon and Apple, the Electronic Frontier Foundation and the American Civil Liberties Union, and CNN and the Washington Post all signed on to amicus briefs in the case. The as well, arguing that the U.S. could pursue the data through existing treaties with Ireland rather than trying to circumvent the country’s sovereignty with a U.S.-based search warrant. “Foreign courts are obliged to respect Irish sovereignty,” the country’s lawyers argued in a legal brief. The case has garnered international attention and has been a lightning rod for debates about how and when law enforcement should be able to access online data. The Supreme Court seemed to tip in favor of extending government access to online information, regardless of where the data is stored, when it approved in April. The change would allow judges to issue search warrants for electronic media even if it is not located in the judge’s county (Congress is currently working to ). However, the 2nd Circuit wasn’t swayed by the Supreme Court’s acceptance of the Rule 41 modifications. Judge Susan Carney wrote in the court’s that Rule 41 only expanded a judge’s authority to issue warrants within U.S. territory, not beyond it. “The application of the Act that the government proposes ― interpreting ‘warrant’ to require a service provider to retrieve material from beyond the borders of the United States ―would require us to disregard the presumption against extraterritoriality,” Carney wrote. “We are not at liberty to do so.” Although the government may appeal the case further and it may eventually land before the Supreme Court, Microsoft celebrated its victory. “We obviously welcome today’s decision by the Second Circuit Court of Appeals,” Microsoft’s president and chief legal officer Brad Smith said in a . “It makes clear that the U.S. Congress did not give the U.S. Government the authority to use search warrants unilaterally to reach beyond U.S. borders. As a global company we’ve long recognized that if people around the world are to trust the technology they use, they need to have confidence that their personal information will be protected by the laws of their own country.” The court’s decision will likely be hailed as a win by other industry giants. Many companies rely on overseas data centers for their infrastructure, and is a particularly popular location — Google, Facebook, and other companies all use data centers there because of its cool climate and tax incentives. However, the ruling could drive governments to push for data localization rules that would require companies to store data within their borders. “The Microsoft case is a real world data point that sort of summarizes a situation that’s been happening over the last several years,” Lee Tien, a senior staff attorney for the EFF, explained. “The data that cops normally look at or normally want to get for criminal investigations, even for garden variety sorts of investigations as opposed to terrorism, is often going to be fond in the servers of a company that’s in the cloud. And therefore the server may be located outside of the territorial jurisdiction of the country that is investigating.” As law enforcement struggles to access data, legislators might use the excuse to require companies to store user data locally. Russia enforces a data localization rule, and Brazil and France have considered similar legislation. “What we have not had so far is a particularly good, well-informed and honest debate about these issues,” Tien added. “I don’t think we’re ever going to think data localization is a good policy. It’s very bad for innovation.” Although Microsoft has triumphed in this case, its other battle with the U.S. Government continues — the company is still over gag orders that prevent it from informing customers when the government demands access to their data.
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Bad UX kills
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Colin O’Donnell
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It clogs systems, causes accidents, wastes energy and makes people unhappy. It’s more than a experience on a website — in cities, user experience ( ) design can actually . We’re talking about signage, public spaces, civic and emergency communications and other forms of urban design that influence our daily routines and, in some cases, are there expressly for our safety. As more parts of our cities go digital, we have the opportunity to make cities not just safer and more functional, but more human, intuitive and enjoyable with that’s responsive to the world around us. While can cause anxiety, confusion and even injury, great user experience design can create efficiencies, keep us safe, get us where we are going faster and turn everyday city drudgery into moments of discovery, surprise and enjoyment. , with all their heavy infrastructure, mega-scale projects and regulations, can seem stifling and impossible. But by focusing on simple design adjustments on top of existing infrastructure, we can make huge positive impacts more nimbly, on shorter time frames and often with much smaller budgets. Great experiences don’t have to be complex: One of the greatest innovations in transit user experience in the past 50 years is not the autonomous car or the hyperloop, but rather a sign on a train that says “ .” This simple piece of vinyl has an immense ROI, having made a positive impact on hundreds of thousands of commuters, allowing them to catch up on precious sleep or focus intently, fundamentally altering commutes from lost time into productive hours. The Pentagram-designed “ ” warnings painted on the street at crossings is another lightweight, ingenious improvement. Its eyes prompt you to look the way they are pointing, and have likely saved countless cell phone zombies and tourists from getting run over by a taxi or bus, not to mention clearing the way for city emergency response resources. And Janette Sadik-Kahn’s famous here in New York transformed one of New York’s most famous landmarks. With little more than some paint, some lawn chairs and some cement flower boxes to protect pedestrians from vehicles, she turned a busy street into a pedestrian plaza. In cities across the world, mayors and planners have built on this model, turning streets into parks, closing them down to cars, opening them up to human interaction and improving the quality of life for residents and visitors. Digital technologies interfaced with the physical world give policy makers new tools to shape outcomes in response to on-the-ground conditions — think digital signs or physical actuators like movable barriers or lighting that can be pre-programmed and change in response to events in the environment. With this flexibility, city leaders can optimize for different outcomes at different times, while still using the same principles of our analog tools. We still need to , but updated for a digital context, we need . In the analog world, we use humans with clickers to count traffic. Now, we have access to massive data sets from mobile phone location services, as well as the rapid instrumentation of cities with computer vision and environmental sensors to understand on-the-ground conditions in real time. In the analog world, we had urban planners limited by access to data and their ability to model outcomes in complex city systems. Today, processing billions of real-time signals from our sensors, mobile devices — and relevant historical data sets — can support and inform action toward a desired outcome. Leveraging artificial intelligence from emerging systems like Google’s DeepMind or IBM’s Watson, these systems may identify alternatives we haven’t even thought of yet. With the flexibility of a digital infrastructure, we can act on data-derived insights and test hypotheses in real time. We can make meaningful but reversible tweaks to the built environment by changing a digital sign, traffic signals or even controlling actuators to modify space or real-world infrastructure like escalator direction. The feedback loop has improved, too. We used to have one-time community meetings or rarely answered surveys. Now, sensors and data sets can allow us to measure the impact of our intervention implicitly, allowing city dwellers to vote with their feet without compromising privacy — and enabling quick edits to improve algorithms and future outputs. Linking with city systems data from traffic cameras and mobile apps like Google Maps or Waze could change the direction of one-way streets and open highway shoulders to temporarily ease traffic. A block party nearby wouldn’t slow things down; it would be accounted for and routed around. The same sensors and apps that detected the traffic could help inform whether the interventions were working, improve algorithms and know when to revert things back to normal when the rush was over. Now, what if we could use these same tools to manage demand of the city itself? What if we could move people off culturally imposed peak cycles rather than build for them? Could we could do more with less? The possibilities of a digital urban isn’t all about machine-driven, cold mathematical efficiency; it is also about people and human values. These tools can be used to make a more beautiful, friendly city. One that accommodates varying needs, languages and abilities. One that adjusts to make things more comfortable, more familiar, more festive or more exciting. It’s time to turn the practice of to cities. designers will have a lot to do — figuring out what to optimize for and how to do it ethically will be a critical task. With millions of people, billions of pieces of data and thousands of touch points, what do you optimize for? Safety, speed of travel, enjoyment, economic improvement, discovery? How do you avoid the stale cycle of Amazon or YouTube recommendations? As we build more hooks from the digital into the physical world, we’ll have greater programmability, new kinds of experiences and countless, subtle ways to optimize city life. Figuring out what to optimize for may be the biggest question of our time.
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Dots & Co. tweaks the Dots games by adding a friendly companion
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Anthony Ha
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, the follow-up to the popular puzzle games Dots and Two Dots, earlier this week. If reading about the new game isn’t enough for you, you can watch me try it out in the video above. In many ways, Dots & Co. should feel pretty familiar to fans of the previous games. Your goal is to clear as many dots as you can by connecting dots of the same color. The cute art style and music are pretty similar, too. But developer has changed the gameplay in a few key ways. The biggest difference is the addition of a companion who hovers above the board. You power them up by clearing special dots; once they’re fully powered, they’ll help you out, for example, by clearing away all the dots of a certain color. My initial impression is that this preserves the things that work about the Dots formula without feeling like a complete retread. But, uh, excuse me while I go play for a few more hours, just to be sure.
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Crunch Report | WikiLeaks Publishes DNC Emails
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Khaled "Tito" Hamze
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Tito Hamze
Tito Hamze
Joe Zolnoski
Joe Zolnoski
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Running at 150,000 RPM, this tiny motor could help satellites keep on course
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Devin Coldewey
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Free space is clearly at a premium for tiny satellite designs like ASU’s Femtosat. The future is small in space: picture Cubesats the size of toasters and an inch across . A newly invented motor that’s both tiny and powerful goes hand in hand with that vision, providing compact spacecraft with the ability to adjust their position without using a drop of fuel. First, though, a little engineering lesson. Here comes the science! Tüysüz, in front, works on the high-speed motor. It’s not practical, especially in small, long-mission spacefaring units like satellites and probes, to use fuel for much of anything except critical accelerations and maneuvers. After all, you can’t exactly top off a New Horizons when it runs low on hydrazine. So in order to make small adjustments to a craft’s attitude, reaction wheels are often employed. Basically, these things are flywheels mounted inside the satellite that spin at a constant speed — and varying that speed (say by slowing counterclockwise spin on the Y axis), results in a reactive force from the satellite. Every action has its reaction, remember? And in this case, the reaction is that the satellite rotates around its center of mass proportionally to how much the wheel’s speed is altered. Like most things that rotate really fast, reaction wheels use ball bearings. But these bearings wear down over time and must be sealed carefully against vacuum and other things that might damage them. The Hubble has had two wheels replaced, and Kepler has lost functionality because of blown wheel mechanisms. Not only that, but even under nominal operation, the slight imperfections in every bearing add up, creating vibrations that can interfere with scientific instruments. This be on the quiz. Arda Tüysüz at Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule Zürich (we’ll go with ETH for now) and his colleagues at , a company spun off from the school, thought there must be a better way. And so there was! In fact, the solution was so simple one wonders why we didn’t do it years ago: use magnets instead of bearings. “There is nothing particularly new about it. The electronics, the magnetic bearings, understanding of the basic physical principle — it was all there already,” . By magnetically levitating the wheel, all kinds of problems are avoided and new possibilities unlocked. For one thing, losing the bearings means there’s no need for a vacuum-sealed chamber, lubrication or anything like that. There’s no vibration, nothing to replace. And because friction and mechanical wear are trivial in a free-floating rotor, it can be spun faster than a traditional reaction wheel — a faster. An early prototype of a system like the one Tüysüz describes. While mechanically operated wheels generally spin at a few thousand RPM, this floating one can be dialed all the way up to an incredible 150,000 RPM. This means 10- or 20-fold increased power from a motor the same size as a mechanical one — but perhaps more importantly, it means you can get the same power levels as before from a motor a tenth the size. For small spacecraft this could be a revelation: compact, efficient and powerful rotational motors that never wear out. Freeing up even a few cubic inches is a huge boon for just about any mission — that’s space that could be used for another instrument, a battery or fuel, or left empty to reduce launch mass. It’s no surprise that the European Space Agency has expressed interest in the system, even though at present the motor is still in prototype phase. Tüysüz and his colleagues from ETH Zurich and Celeroton published the details of their creation presented at a conference in Capri.
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Redbox is giving streaming another shot
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Brian Heater
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After unceremoniously on it Instant service back in 2014, your friendly neighborhood DVD dispenser Redbox is ramping up to give streaming another go. The movie distributor, whose vending machines have become a supermarket mainstay across the US, is taking another shot at Netflix with a small beta roll out for “a small subset of [its] customers” From the sound of things, this is all still very early stages. No definite pricing or timing, but the Redbox Digital app has been , and screen shots reveal a UI pretty on-par with what’s offered up by Netflix and its ilk, albeit with a download option entered into the mix, along with a cast button to stream it to compatible devices. At present, the app can only be accessed by members who have been given the proper Redbox thumbs up – a fact that has contributed to the app’s current one-star iTunes rating. The company doesn’t sound too confident about if or when it plans to pull the trigger on a wide release. “As we test and learn from our customers,” a spokesperson for the company , “we will make evaluations that determine any future course of action.” Presumably the 50 or so ratings that put the app at one star won’t tip the scales too much in either direction.
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Waiting for the right professional network
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Ashwin Ramasamy
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I recently asked an investor for some SEO advice (because he had run B2C companies). He came on a call to give his opinions on what we had done till then with SEO. I thanked him on LinkedIn. A few hours later, another SEO consultant offered his input. Curiously, he had a recommendation on his profile, from this investor. Eventually he got our business. He did not sell anything to us. It was more of an expertise giver-getter conversation. We were at par. This investor earned my goodwill and the consultant’s. I actively contribute to his deal flow in a small way. He isn’t asking me to, but I am prospecting for him. Do you see what happened? The SEO consultant did not engineer his way into a conversation with me. Instead, he used the fact that we have this investor as a common connection and gathered from the status that I’m in the market for SEO services. He took advantage of the insight and reached out at the right time. Today there is enough data available to bring people of similar or adjacent profiles closer, and inform them about signals and contexts where they could either help, pay it forward or seek help. Over a period of time, a community (a micro-market network) will form that will prospect for each other — be it for a job or a deal or funding. Ergo, we can replace awkward sales overtures with touch points precisely planned by a deep understanding of one’s extended network. We need sophisticated tools that don’t just help us fake our way to conversations using data points, but truly connect us with our customers and hiring managers through people, ideas and causes that we have in common. Sounds like LinkedIn, right? Wrong. Today’s professional networks have a “resume graph” or (to be flattering) a “prospect graph,” not a “[people’s economic] motivation graph” (the graph that plots their give/get instincts over time and in different contexts). In the absence of awareness of motivations and interests, people simply connect to ask for favors or sell in your face. That’s why you don’t accept connection invites anymore! In a network where there is no friction to connect, the connections themselves become superficial. We are connected because we can, not because we share common principles, background or traits. Un-nurtured connections turn cold, or at least become useless as connectors between you and your ultimate prospect. The result is that you’d resort to smarmy sales tactics for an intro through a common connection. Highly networked professionals (entrepreneurs) still don’t have a way to keep track of their personal network, and the signals that come from it, in a manner that they can act on or catalog for future use. There is abundant data in social networks like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, WhatsApp, email and offline conversations, but no packaged insights that prod us to reach out to people who are important for us. Example: LinkedIn and Facebook both know I am connected to a certain CEO of a SaaS company. He is organizing a SaaS conference in 2017, but neither network thinks it’s important to notify me about it and ask me to ping this CEO/conference organizer to ask if he needs any help. A real opportunity to help and thereby strengthen the relationship is lost. The circle that Google+ created or the groups that LinkedIn or Facebook designed did/continue to do an underwhelming job of surfacing contexts for professional networking with my first two degrees of professional acquaintances. Without context, there is no reason to be in touch. Lost in touch, we resort to cold methods of reaching out at the time of need. The network is vast, but its utility is minimal, because it isn’t designed to take advantage of context. Professionals react to “help requests” or ask for “tips, information or help” in an ad hoc manner across networks. Often, they don’t ask or give, just out of inertia. For the asker, this creates friction, and they don’t ask in the network the next time around. The networks don’t do a good job of parsing the person’s connections to suggest which subset should they target their broadcast to for a given context. The nudge to ask and the nudge to give has to be explicitly designed till the habit forms. The absence of a truly valuable professional network — one where the participants (users like you and I) gain more than the customers (recruiters and sales reps) points to the fact that a simple professional network isn’t a pragmatic design when we think about reinventing outreach. A professional network is only as valuable as the ease of access I have, as a user, to the real identities and network profiles of my connections. I need to know who I am connected with, what they care for, their needs and wants, whether they are a giver or a taker, etc. Professional networks also should acknowledge the fact that “giving and taking” is essentially commerce paid through social currency. Some pre-pay (karma or pay it forward), others post-pay (“I owe you one” as we practice in the world of selling). Networks that ignore the “intent” of connections and subvert the natural urge of commerce become materially less important networks ( ) for the purpose of outreach and relationship building. Come to think of it, a well-designed professional network will have to be a true market-network of professionals, where they engage with each other meaningfully through a clear understanding of each other’s profile and transact primarily to give or take help in professional contexts. Unlike a general professional network, a professional market-network will organize itself around interests and backgrounds (micro-networks, if you would) of the users, and enable them to transact with each other more than merely being used as sources of data — a gross under-utilization of the value of the network for all the participants. With such a network, outreach becomes focused and curated — making it a better experience for everyone involved.
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A $99 add-on that promises to bring 3D sound to standard headphones
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Brian Heater
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3D sound, it’s, ahem, all around you. From the look (or, rather, sound of it), hardware startups are convinced that the effect is set to be the next big thing in consumer audio, and Kickstarter, accordingly, is littered with headphones that promise a more immersive listening experience akin to the recent VR boom. Most companies went ahead and built the technology directly into a pair of headphones. A few, like , have taken a more modular approach, so users can bring their own headphones to the 3D party. is taking a similar approach, with the decidedly key benefit of actually being available now (as Waves’ own offering is ). At $99, the two modules are priced the same, though the latter looks to be a little less involved, with a smaller footprint and a more passive software offering. The 3D Sound Labs Module One isn’t the most elegant solution, but it’s fairly non-invasive, with an elastic band that’s secured around a headphone band. It then sits atop the headphones like a little trapezoidal antenna. The add-on syncs up pretty easily through the app, which also serves as your main method of interacting. You’ll need to listen to files through the app itself, which requires linking and downloading, and is all in all a bit clunky. Once on, it’s certainly a novel experience, most notably the built-in gyroscopes, which customize playback based on the positioning of your head. It’s cool, sure, but not quite the immersive experience I was hoping for out of the box. The app experience leaves a little to be desired, as well, and could certainly benefit from a bit more customization. It’s a cool trick, for sure, and nice that the company was both able to make it module and so small, but $99 is a pricey premium to pay on top of whatever you shelled out for those headphones.
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Pokémon Go is doing a lot of good, here are 3 surprising ways
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Lucia Maffei
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“What are they doing?” That was the question an older woman, probably around 70 or so, asked me yesterday. She was pointing to a group of 18-ish boys and girls near a YMCA, the biggest (and, so far, only) Pokestop in the city where I live. Without exception, the teens were all staring at their smartphones. “They’re playing Pokémon Go,” I replied. The lady didn’t comment, but her facial expression was a mix of disconcert and skepticism. Let’s face it: For people who didn’t grow up playing Pokémon, might seem like an overreaction. I understand their feelings. I can testify that some of the people who showed up acted like, well, fanatics. About 5.000 people showed up at a Pokémon Go meeting near Cloud Gate in Chicago last Sunday. (Photo: Lucia Maffei/TechCrunch) But even detractors of the game should admit that playing it gets people moving. This is a big deal at least in the U.S., where . And the game has other, more unexpected positive consequences. Photo credit: the University of Michigan Health System Under the section “Children & Family life,” the hospital a list of Pokémon landmarks in and around the hospital buildings to facilitate meetings among players, as well as a set of guidelines about how to play without invading other patients’ privacy. The Muncie Animal Shelter in Muncie, Indiana offered Pokémon Go players the opportunity to walk an adoptable dog for free while hunting for Pokémon and hatch eggs. According to a shelter representative, the response of the community was astonishing. “We have lost count of the number of people who came here to walk one of our dogs,” said Melissa Blair, assistant superintendent at the Muncie shelter since January. “Since a week ago, volunteers were probably over 250.” Blair also said that four dogs were adopted following a “Pokémon Go walking” with a potential owner. A local family, for example, showed up at the shelter twice and then decided to adopt a black labrador. “Children bonded with the dog, and the whole process was really natural,” Blair commented. Since its release in the U.S., the game has been blamed for some negative events, too. In Missouri, used the app to target potential victims and rob them. Many car accidents all over the world have apparently resulted from people playing while driving. Also, that a representative of the Holocaust Museum had to remind visitors that “playing the game is not appropriate in the museum, which is a memorial to the victims of Nazism.” So yes, critics have reason to shake their heads. But the examples above prove that there’s a lot of good, both for individuals and the community, that can come from the Pokémon Go phenomenon. The fact is that a video game inspiring the kinds of acts described above is a very rare thing, and you could argue that Pokémon Go is unique in the kind of scale it brings to its positive effects, and that’s worth paying attention to.
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Judge finds Gravity4 CEO Gurbaksh Chahal violated probation in domestic violence case
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Kate Conger
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A San Francisco judge ruled today that adtech CEO Gurbaksh Chahal violated his probation in a domestic violence case. Judge Tracie Brown ordered Chahal to surrender his passports to the court on Monday and will determine his sentence on August 12. After his guilty plea, Chahal was as CEO of RadiumOne. He went on to found another company, Gravity4. Scandal followed Chahal to his new company; a Gravity4 employee sued him for . The absence of the woman, who TechCrunch is not naming because she is an alleged victim of domestic violence, has created problems for the prosecution and defense alike. Assistant district attorney O’Bryan Kenney struggled to convince the judge to consider the woman’s statements to police and medical professionals as evidence. Chahal’s attorney, James Lassart, argued that the documents amounted to hearsay because the woman was not present. Lassart claimed that her absence harmed the defense as well because he could not require her to authenticate emails and text messages. Kenney has claimed that the woman is not present because she was intimidated by Chahal and his bodyguard, . After the September 2014 incident, Chahal and Alaisa exchanged text messages about reporting the woman to immigration authorities (during the revocation hearings, Alaisa claimed he did not remember sending or receiving these messages). But Alaisa did admit that he visited the woman at her home just hours after the alleged attack to discuss her immigration status. “I wanted to remind her what she told me [about her marriage],” Alaisa testified, adding that he was trying to protect Chahal and himself. “I did it for him and for me,” he said. Kenney argued that Chahal should not benefit from the woman’s absence, saying that testimony from investigators and medical professionals who examined her injuries should be considered. “The defendant should not benefit from his wrongdoing, his concerted effort to prevent the witness from ever coming to a courtroom,” Kenney said. It appears that, as the domestic violence investigation wore on, Gravity4 suffered — just as RadiumOne did during Chahal’s first case. Text messages between Chahal and his Gravity4 co-founder, Dan Grigorovici, were also used against the millionaire executive in court. Grigorovici left the company just months before the hearings began in April, according to his LinkedIn. Chahal’s attorney, James Lassart, did not return a request for comment. The San Francisco District Attorney’s Office declined to comment.
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Car breakdowns reach record high despite boost in auto technology
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Mark Lelinwalla
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In spite of the progress of car tech overall, the number of vehicles breaking down is actually spiking. , the American Automotive Association (AAA) tended to a record-high 32 million drivers with vehicle breakdowns last year. The main causes? A lot of flat tires, but also electronic keyless ignitions that sapped batteries and more. AAA also found that relatively recent advancements like maintenance reminders and engine alerts haven’t lowered the amount of drivers stuck roadside. I asked AAA how drivers might avoid breakdowns, either through their own actions, or failing that, and what car OEMs can do to fix the mess. When asked about possible tweaks with electronic key ignitions, an AAA spokesperson suggested that “consumers should keep their ‘smart’ key or fob at least 10 feet away from the car when it is not in use so inadvertent battery drains will be prevented.” Triple-A also advises that you “don’t leave the ‘smart’ key or fob in the car unnecessarily, or hang it on a hook in the garage next to the car overnight.” AAA believes that automakers should go back to providing spare tires as standard equipment to prevent more calls related to flats. But the organization’s last piece of advice should be the most obvious. “Overall, the best way to prevent roadside breakdowns is with proper vehicle maintenance,” AAA added. “While today’s vehicle technology incorporates maintenance reminders and dashboard alerts designed to prevent roadside trouble, drivers still must take action.”
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Weekly Roundup: Elon Musk’s master plan, Peter Thiel speaks at RNC and iPhone 7 leak
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Anna Escher
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History was made this week in tech as Peter Thiel wowed the crowd at the RNC, Elon Musk exposed Master Plan Part Deux and we saw yet another iPhone 7 leak. Want to receive the Weekly Roundup in your inbox? I would too. Now you can. . Billionaire investor and Silicon Valley wild card speaking on economic disparity, bringing Silicon Valley innovation to government and declaring that he is proud to be gay. He capped it off with his endorsement for Donald Trump. Whatever your thoughts on Thiel, it was a moment worth paying attention to. Will Tesla cars fly? Why did Tesla buy SolarCity? Why is Elon Musk It was a big week for Tesla as CEO Elon Musk released a to the “Master Plan” he . The plan detailed intentions to , car sharing and cargo transport. Here are the . Another day, another iPhone leak, this time pointing to . In addition to the iPhone 7 and iPhone 7 Plus, the Pro model would feature a dual-camera system as well as a smart connector at the back. Softbank made a bold IoT move as it ARM is known for its chip designs for mobile handsets (Apple is a customer) as well as for processors to power hardware in Internet of Things networks. Softbank’s CEO also confirmed to us that the . A few major tech companies reported earnings this week, and the highlights are as follows. after missing subscriber expectations. and $0.69 EPS. after it rejected a $3.5B buyout from SiriusXM. in revenue. , echoing the company’s story of the past few years. Now it’s just a question of when it’s assets will be snapped up. Dollar Shave Club as it was acquired by multinational consumer goods company Unilever for a reported $1 billion value. We about ecommerce, improv, and the acquisition. It’s been a year since Reddit cracked down on revenge porn and offensive subreddits. But the company still seems to be . According to our sources, numerous women and people of color have been quietly leaving the company by way of layoffs and resignations across multiple departments. “Management is terrible, a complete reflection of what the site is like,” one source said. There’s a red-hot new photo app blowing up the iOS app charts. Prisma morphs your photos into classic-style art, and We talked to Prisma co-founder and CEO Alexey Moiseenkov about what’s going to happen next – will it be a raise or an acquisition? We’ve been following Berlin-based Number26 for awhile, and this week the banking startup The company now has a banking license to operate in Europe, meaning that Number26 can now build its own financing products, such as savings accounts, investment products and credit offerings. In other words, the startup will become a full-fledged bank faster. It was a loud week on Twitter. , one of its most notorious trolls. The expulsion came after the Breitbart editor urged on a hateful mob that . The and it’s only going to get worse. It was a week of milestones. Remember how Facebook coerced users to download Messenger as a separate app? Looks like it worked. Facebook Messenger hit the billion user mark, and . It took the company six years to complete a billion rides around Christmas 2015. Now, just six months later, the company announced that they have completed their two-billionth ride. Six months is 180 days, meaning the company was providing an average of 5.5 million rides a day, or 230,000 an hour to hit a billion rides in six months. Big Data by all accounts is supposed to help humans perform better by augmenting our limited brain power. More data should come deeper understanding, but and it surpasses our human ability to understand it in a given moment?
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RNDMWRK randomizes remote work with subscription spaces
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Darrell Etherington
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Toronto entrepreneur David King learned something over the past four months, doing random bringing people together for random dinners at restaurants in Toronto: Many of the people participating were freelancers and entrepreneurs, and many of them wanted somewhere to work more often than they wanted a dinner party. He already had the two ends to his double-sided marketplace, he just wasn’t putting them together in the optimal configuration. That’s where his new startup came from. Through the startup, people want workspace sign up either on a monthly, three-month or annual basis (for $150, $100 or $50 respectively). The startup then provides access to a bar or restaurant, as well as wi-fi, coffee, tea and water all included. Plus, companionship. But the types of spaces is the key to the model’s difference from existing co-working setups. “About 75 to 80% of the time that space is sitting empty,” King says, describing the inventory surplus at restaurants and bars that normally only fill the floor during evening times. “It’s a great problem for tech to solve.” Other startups have identified the same issue. NYC’s offers the same kind of service in New York, LA, San Francisco and, soon, London. But there’s room for multiple players trading in this kind of resource – and potentially an urgent need in certain markets. Toronto, where RNDMWRK is starting off, has “the lowest office vacancy rate in North America,” according to a this week. Part of King’s plan is also to leverage the talents of the people who are frequenting the spaces to help other members. Office hours are part of the plan, allowing members including web developers, deal flow experts and people with skills related to solving specific problems connect with people who have relevant issues to address in their own work. Plus, people can offer in-kind services to other members to defray the cost of membership somewhat: One member is currently offering pro headshots. Costs for RNDMWRK for the space are relatively low, because they avoid staffing requirements using members to effectively hall monitor locations. Designated members are responsible for a space for five days a month, in exchange for a membership. Basically, in exchange, they’re asked to work from the space for the entire time it’s open during the day to other members. “I was originally typing with the idea of coffee shop coworking, but this made a lot more sense,” King explained. “All the people that I was on the same level as when I was a promoter now own their own places, so they’re pretty friendly. They see it as being really valuable for their business. It’s basically passive income for them.” For the businesses, King says the financial equation always makes sense. For wandering workers, the rates are more attractive than renting an office, and you get the added benefits of variety and companionship, as well as potential mentorship opportunities. As other co-working models encounter issues, like the drama going through, the appetite for alternatives is likely to grow. And RNDMWRK also keeps locations semi-secret, adding an exclusive, private club-type vibe to the startup. But it also relies on a certain category of customer: the social nomad, which is likely a somewhat rarefied demographic.
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WikiLeaks publishes 19,252 DNC-related emails packed with personal information
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Devin Coldewey
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WikiLeaks has put online a searchable database of thousands of emails sent to and from top figures in the Democratic National Committee — many of which contain personal and financial information of private citizens. Transparency in government affairs is one thing, but this seems careless — and callous. The 19,252 emails are , and it’s as easy as typing in “contribution” or “passport number” to find hundreds of results. Many relate to contributions made to the DNC, with the contributor’s full name, email, phone number, and address listed. While participating in the political process by donating to your party is in a way a fundamentally public action, and voting records and so on would likely turn up much of this same information, it’s hard to see the point in releasing this data, especially considering how easily it could have been systematically redacted. Some emails are of admitted interest to someone who wanted to see how the DNC works — vetting applicants for meet-and-greets with the President, for instance, or sorting out problematic donations. Others are purely personal: one has Jordan Kaplan, the DNC’s national finance director, setting up a time to view an apartment and joking about sweatpants. WikiLeaks and organizations like it are a valuable outlet for information that might otherwise be made deliberately difficult to get at, but the timing and spirit of this one give it a partisan feel. There are more to come, apparently. This is “part one of our new Hillary Leaks series” — as opposed to the old one, of the emails on the then Secretary of State’s controversial private server.
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‘Star Trek Beyond’ points the 50-year-old franchise back at the stars
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Anthony Ha
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Let’s start with the obvious: is a pretty good movie, but it doesn’t quite make it into the top tier of films like , and . , which opens today, starts with the crew of the Enterprise in the middle of its five-year, deep space mission. This is exactly what Captain James T. Kirk (played by Chris Pine) asked for at the end of , but now he’s complaining that things are starting to feel a little “episodic,” and he’s wondering about the point of it all. This could be the promising setup for a that’s meditative, character-driven and kind of meta — an attempt to redefine the franchise as it celebrates its 50th birthday. A few minutes later, however, a swarm of ships smashes through the Enterprise’s hull, and our cast is left scattered across the surface of a mysterious planet. From that moment on, the bigger questions are pretty much swept off the table in favor of action, action and more action. This didn’t bother me as much as I expected. Sure, I miss the more cerebral incarnations of . But if, post-J.J. Abrams, movies have to stick with the Hollywood blockbuster template, then at least the action is entertaining. In his four (!) films, director Justin Lin already demonstrated that he knows how to transform silly ideas into set pieces that are spectacular and thrilling, and he doesn’t disappoint here. So no, I’m not really sure why Kirk ends up speeding through the enemy base on a motorcycle, and I can’t explain why the final confrontation takes place in a ridiculously complicated-looking airlock. But I didn’t mind, because there were other moments when I was smiling so hard that my face could have split open. And even if the script by Simon Pegg and Doug Jung goes heavy on spectacle, it’s a significant step up from the past two films. For one thing, it manages to avoid any aggressively dumb moments. And where ’09 and seemed intent on repeating, tweaking or at best reinventing what we’d seen before, directs the franchise outward. The movie includes plenty of winks and nods to the past, but they don’t overcrowd the story, which is busy introducing new worlds, new civilizations and new characters. (Also, by revealing that John Cho’s Sulu has a husband, it finally includes a gay character on the bridge of the Enterprise). Perhaps the most important difference is a subtle one. In the last two movies, despite the fate of Earth continually hanging in the balance, the world felt awfully small, almost claustrophobic. The Enterprise zipped across the galaxy in a matter of minutes, as if the crew was just commuting across town. You could sense the hand of fate (a.k.a. the screenwriters) manipulating events to push the characters into their appointed roles. It was almost -y, the way stories set in the vastness of space still boiled down to the domestic drama and person-to-person combat skills of a few special people. Contrast that with , where the universe feels big again. By insisting on both the danger and the excitement of exploring the frontier, the movie convinces you that there are plenty more planets to discover, plenty more adventures to be had. That’s why, when Kirk concludes that being the captain of a starship is just too much damn fun, you’ll find yourself in enthusiastic agreement. “Fun” might seem like a bit of a letdown for a franchise that’s been associated with big ideas and progressive social change, but in a summer of bad news in the headlines and recycled ideas in the theater, we can’t take it for granted. At the movie’s end, when the crew sped off once more towards the final frontier, I felt grateful that they were still boldly going.
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In school or a recent grad? Get your cheap student tickets to Disrupt SF now
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Contributor
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Are you an undergraduate or graduate student looking to attend the best startup show in San Francisco? Student tickets to are still available at the deeply discounted rate of just $300. These tickets were previously only available to students currently enrolled in school, but we’re now expanding their availability to all of the recent graduates out there. If you graduated in May or June of 2016, you can now get in on the cheap Disrupt ticket action. To take advantage of this opportunity, all you’ll need to do is send an email to . Current students should send a copy of their valid student identification card and transcripts that show their current enrollment status. Recent grads should send their student IDs, transcripts and confirmation of graduation. Once we’ve confirmed your status, we’ll send you information on how to purchase your student tickets to Disrupt. Disrupt is a great way for students and recent grads to make connections with key figures in the tech industry, connections that could help lead you to your next major career opportunity. You’ll get to connect with some of the most influential minds in the tech community, from venture capitalists to entrepreneurs and, of course, your favorite TechCrunch writers and editors. And if that isn’t enough to pique your interest, you’ll also get to check out some of the awesome startups pitching their wares to attendees in the Startup and Hardware Alleys, check out the Startup Battlefield competition, and listen to top investors, innovators and entrepreneurs in the dozens of interviews and fireside chats we have lined up for the show. And, you can keep the networking going long into the night with all of the after-parties we have planned. Disrupt SF takes place September 12-14 at Pier 48 in San Francisco. We hope to see you there.
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Apple says Pokémon Go is the most downloaded app in a first week ever
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Romain Dillet
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Apple has told TechCrunch that has broken an impressive App Store record. While the game was only available in a few countries at the time, the app has attracted more downloads in the App Store during its first week than any other App Store app has in its first week, ever. Pokémon Go initially launched and Apple didn’t provide any hard number, but it’s clear that Pokémon Go became a massive phenomenon and an instant hit. The Pokémon Company has continued rolling out the game in more countries over the past few weeks and the game just launched today. The Pokémania isn’t going to stop any time soon. It’s interesting to see that more than eight years after the launch of the App Store, there are still some app phenomenons like Pokémon Go. Sure, has worn off. But you would be crazy to say that apps are dead. Instead, it looks like usage is shifting as people now know what they want to do with their phone. At first, it was a common thing to open the App Store to discover new apps and find new ways to use your phone. Now, everybody knows that your phone is the most powerful tool you always have on you. When you’re stuck with something or when you want to do something, you’re still going to look for an app in the App Store. And that might be the reason why Apple is doing in the App Store, because the App Store homepage isn’t useful for this kind of use cases. Similarly, app discovery as become a lot more social. Now that most people have a smartphone and nearly everyone is using messaging apps and social networks, it’s easier to see trends and jump on the bandwagon. Prisma is a good example of that. Just after its launch, it became a huge hit in the App Store. And now, big companies like Facebook are . The fact that Prisma photos kept popping up everywhere in your social feeds certainly fostered a lot of those downloads. And then, there’s iOS 10. As I wrote in my , Apple is breaking down its walled garden and adding extension points everywhere. Soon, you’ll be able to install extensions for Siri, Messages, Phone and Maps. In many ways, this is also quite useful when it comes to app discovery. With Messages in iOS 10, you can open a curated App Store with only Messages apps without having to leave the app. This way, you can make your phone more capable and extend the default apps with more features. I believe this is going to be the app trend that is going to drive growth for the App Store’s second decade.
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Hacking poverty through mobile tech and social entrepreneurship
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Thane Kreiner
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In Silicon Valley the term “hacker” has evolved to connote high praise for someone particularly creative, ingenious and adept at finding clever new ways to accomplish a difficult task. It’s with that framework in mind, rather than some of the other meanings that “ ” usually represents, that I suggested during my recent that Pope Francis and the UN are hackers of poverty. Global poverty qualifies as a difficult task. It must be, because even with all the money spent on helping to lift people out of poverty — an estimated $150 billion in 2013 alone — 4 billion of the world’s nearly 7.5 billion people still live on an average of less than $4 a day. And here are some other daunting statistics on the effects of poverty: 1.1 billion people lack access to safe drinking water. These ill effects of poverty are likely to get only worse, due to three trends: Unfortunately, attempts so far to alleviate poverty — typically in the form of centralized, official development or government assistance — are not working. That’s where the “hacking poverty” idea emerges. What would a poverty hacker do differently? The most successful distributed system to date is mobile technology. With 6.8 billion mobile subscriptions worldwide, more people on the planet have access to mobile phones than to toilets. Using this near ubiquity of mobile technology, poverty hackers are changing the economics of poverty through new strategies for investments, loans and credit. Already, mobile money in the global south is leapfrogging the global north’s centralized banking paradigm. Social entrepreneurship is proving its worth throughout the developing world by applying established business principles and practices to poverty-related issues. Unlike top-down aid approaches, social entrepreneurship fosters and supports solutions created within communities of poor and marginalized people, making those solutions more likely to be adopted and sustained over time. Social enterprises are hacking poverty by revolutionizing how energy and food are provided in the developing world, and also how solutions are financed, distributed and sold — and by shifting the economic dynamics toward the poor themselves. Where do Pope Francis and the United Nations fit into this conversation about hacking poverty? The pope’s recent , and the recent (SDGs), echo the same messages and call for essentially the same outcomes: The system is broken. It needs to be hacked. Pope Francis and the U.N. SDGs provide guidelines for how we can do things differently, more creatively, more effectively. Now, it’s up to all of us to follow through and take action — to become hackers of poverty in whatever ways we can. There’s literally no time to waste.
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Gillmor Gang LIVE 07.22.16
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Steve Gillmor
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– Keith Teare, Frank Radice, Kevin Marks, and Steve Gillmor. Gillmor Gang’s Facebook page G3’s Facebook page
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Why did Unilever pay $1B for Dollar Shave Club?
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Ryan Caldbeck
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Deja Vu moment: when another giant of consumer products is hoping to buy its way to success rather than innovate. This week, the news was Unilever buying five year old Dollar Shave Club for $1B. Last week, hundred year old Danone buying Whitewave foods. We’re likely to see many more more this year, if not just this quarter, such as Oreo maker completing their bid or . Personal care; food; beverages — in category after category, the pattern is the same. We are seeing the systematic outsourcing of R&D to the market. The model has been evident in the pharmaceutical industry, where behemoths rarely invent products themselves and would rather acquire a company and then handle distribution, regulation and consolidation — as The Economist . For a clear illustration of cost-cutting to deliver returns, consider the Brazilian private-equity firm 3G Capital Partners LLP’s buyout of Heinz in 2013, followed by Heinz’s $49-billion acquisition of Kraft. Since that deal last year, Kraft Heinz has cut more than 5,000 jobs and closed plants as part of a $1.5-billion . There’s now speculation that 3G is eyeing a . And, continues to move forward. They are trying to drive shareholder value by cutting costs, not by growing. Sure, these mergers consolidate, taking out costs that can then increase shareholder value in the near-term. But once the redundancies are removed, what are shareholders left with? The same problem that spurred the deal: shrinking market share due to no innovation. The key difference in shareholder value creation is that there is (by definition) a limit to the costs you can cut, but there is no limit to innovation. The failure of large consumer and retail players to innovate is clear in the . Amazon is racing ahead with innovations that deeply cater to today’s consumer, such as Dash to allow customers to reorder laundry detergent or coffee with literally a touch of a button. Meanwhile, Walmart struggles to hold its historical position as a low-cost leader by cutting cut costs, be it by cutting corners on quality or consolidating processes. For example, icing waste by its bakers to save on costs. The main alternative to cost-cutting, and an increasingly popular strategy, is to make up for lost ground on the innovation front acquiring young brands with dynamic new products. This strategy essentially outsources R&D and innovation to small brands that can afford to take risks; test new products in the market; and design interesting ideas for distribution, packaging and the overall brand experience. Faced with short-termism, where businesses are pressured to deliver quick shareholder returns, big brands simply can’t afford this risk and have it go wrong. Some large consumer companies now are looking for a better path by investing in companies at an earlier stage. That’s why in late June, Kellogg Company joined the trend of large strategics with venture funds, establishing its own , to invest in consumer startups and gain access to innovative products. Others are also making acquisitions to round out their product offerings – but frequently at a high price. Here are just a few recent examples: , maker of sustainable milk products, , Post Holdings Inc. acquire protein beverages and foods maker , and Steve Madden acquire Struggling to innovate, large corporations in consumer and retail have suffered a steady decline in market share. Big brands lost share to small brands in 42 of the top 54 most relevant food categories in the past five years, according to the research report “Food: The Curse of the Large Brand” from investment banking firm . Meanwhile, that between 2009 and 2013, large consumer goods companies lost 2.3% in market share. Giant CPG brands are having by innovative startups that are attuned to changing consumer preferences and are offering products that the market wants. That’s because one category after another is being transformed by new brands as consumers demand more – human-grade pet foods, organic products, convenient and healthy snacks. In yogurt, for example, large brands lost 19% in market share from 2008 to 2013, and emerging brands like Chobani gained 19%. Similarly, large brand coffees lost 7% of the market, while emerging coffees like Blue Bottle and Artis expanded 11%. In the bath and shower category, big brands’ market share has contracted 3% as upstarts like The Seaweed Bath Co. and Rock Your Hair, have gained 3% more of the market. Another example came across in a recent : Scrub Daddy, a new kind of kitchen sponge, went from startup to $35 million in revenue in just over a year as a result of exposure on Shark Tank. The numbers at some of the biggest consumer companies tell the story. Amid tailwinds of innovation amongst small brands in consumer, Pepsico spent $2.4 billion on marketing, and just $754 million on research and development in 2015. Remember the news on Dollar Shave Club? In 2015, $8 billion on marketing versus $1 billion on R&D. Think about spending 8x as much on marketing your stale old products as you do on building something new. Creating new, delightful products was simply not the priority. That’s why, faced with shrinking market share, pressure to deliver returns in the short-term, and trouble innovating, some of the largest consumer and retail companies have fallen into the dangerous habit of steady cost cutting and making acquisitions in lieu of innovating. But the disruption in CPG has only just begun. Cost cutting and mega-deals may buy time, but to truly succeed consumer and retail giants have to realize that innovation is the path forward. What’s next? How to integrate these new brands in a way that preserves their value. Value preservation will be the defining asset for many of the large public companies – those that do this we will will continue atop the market overall. More thoughts on that in a future post.
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NASA’s Curiosity rover can now pick which bits of Mars to scan on its own
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Darrell Etherington
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Curiosity may be an older dog (the rover landed on Mars in 2012), but it’s still picking up new tricks. NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory recently revealed (via ) that the robot can now pick its own targets when choosing rocks to scan with its laser spectrometer, a task formerly reserved for remote operation by scientists back here on Earth. JPL created the software that now lets Curiosity choose “multiple targets per week” for analysis by the rover’s onboard Chemistry and Camera (ChemCam) instrument. The majority of targets are still human-directed, but adding some autonomy into the mix allows Curiosity to continue ID’ing and analyzing targets of opportunity, even when there’s no person directing its ChemCam gaze. The software category that’s used to help Curiosity decide where to aim its laser spectrometer is called AEGIS, or ‘Autonomous Exploration for Gathering Increased Science.” It’s designed to help fill in the gaps, when humans are otherwise occupied. “This autonomy is particularly useful at times when getting the science team in the loop is difficult or impossible — in the middle of a long drive, perhaps, or when the schedules of Earth, Mars and spacecraft activities lead to delays in sharing information between the planets,” robotics engineer Tara Estlin, the leader of AEGIS development at JPL . NASA’s Curiosity Mars rover autonomously selects some targets for the laser and telescopic camera of its ChemCam instrument. For example, on-board software analyzed the Navcam image at left, chose the target indicated with a yellow dot, and pointed ChemCam for laser shots and the image at right. Curiosity’s autonomy operates within human-defined limits, too, meaning scientists can change the criteria for what constitutes a good target depending on what they’re interested in finding. Self-guided smarts also helps Curiosity support scientists in another key way: Our weak human eyes are terribly fallible when it comes to trying to target extremely fine facets of objects, especially when operating remotely across a vast tranche of space. AEGIS helps Curiosity use image analysis to hit even the smallest targets the first time, thanks to autonomously refined aim. Increased autonomy for space exploration means greater data sets, which means greater potential for ground-breaking discovery. Just be sure to always , NASA.
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Rocket Internet’s Jabong sold to Flipkart-owned rival Myntra for $70M
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Jon Russell
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Finally, Rocket Internet has managed to sell Jabong, its fashion e-commerce site in India, after more than a year of speculation. Myntra, the fashion portal which , has stepped up and bought its rival in . The deal is all in cash but it is not completed yet, it is expected to close within Q3 2016. Flipkart CEO Binny Bansal and executive chairman Sachin Bansal both confirmed the deal on Twitter, with Sachin keen to “make history” with Jabong. Today, got bigger! Delighted to welcome to the group! — binnybansal (@binnybansal) Welcome to the family. We'll create history together. — Sachin Bansal (@_sachinbansal) Global Fashion Group (GFG), the umbrella company that runs Rocket Internet’s fashion-focused e-commerce businesses worldwide, explained in an announcement that it spent months deliberating on which suitor to sell the Jabong business to: Following a strategic review of its Indian operation, the GFG Board concluded that Jabong’s position as India’s leading fashion e-commerce destination would be best served through a business combination with a local player. Having reviewed multiple options over a period of several months, the GFG Board has resolved to sell Jabong to Flipkart Group. that Myntra/Flipkart beat out a range of competitors, including Snapdeal and Future Group, but plenty of others have been linked with a deal in the past. Jabong was once thought to own one-quarter of India’s fashion e-commerce market, making it the chief threat to Myntra. Back in 2014, nearing a $1.2 billion deal to buy the company before months later. Alibaba, Flipkart, Paytm and countless others have been linked with deals since then as Jabong failed to maintain its position in the market. The (inevitable) sell-off comes amid challenging times for its parent company. at a drastically reduced valuation of $1.1 billion last week. We reported at the time that the group had met with as many as 90 investors and yet failed to land capital outside of its existing investor base. , Jabong’s sister company in Southeast Asia, earlier this year, and we wrote that the sale of Jabong and other unwanted businesses is likely to happen now that this new financing is secured. Jabong’s finances haven’t been too impressive of late. for 2015 with €211 million ($232 million) in GMV for the year. During its most recent quarter of business, Jabong’s losses narrowed to €11.9 million ($13.1 million) from €16.3 million ($17.9 million) one year before, but its margins nearly halved from 59 percent to 36.5 percent over the same period. That shift, which GFG put down to fewer discounts, was presumably to get the business into shape for a sale. Our source suggested that there could be other business units within GFG sold off, although that might be country-based operations like Zalora’s previous deal and not entire companies like Jabong. “Through the sale of Jabong, we are achieving a milestone in our strategy to refocus and invest in our core markets that show both, significant growth and revenue potential but also a clear and predictable path to profitability,” GFG CEO Romain Voog said in a statement.
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OpenStack will soon be able to run in containers on top of Kubernetes
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Frederic Lardinois
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, the open source project that allows enterprises to run an AWS-like cloud computing service in their own data centers, added support for containers over the course of its last few releases. Running OpenStack itself on top of containers is a different problem, though. Even though CoreOS has done on thanks to its oddly named Stackanetes project, that project happened outside of the OpenStack community and the core OpenStack deployment and management tools. Soon, however, thanks to the work of Mirantis, Google and Intel, the deployment tool will be able to use Kubernetes as its orchestration engine, too. Ideally, this will make it easier to manage OpenStack deployments at scale. “With the emergence of Docker as the standard container image format and Kubernetes as the standard for container orchestration, we are finally seeing continuity in how people approach operations of distributed applications,” said Mirantis CMO Boris Renski. “Combining Kubernetes and Fuel will open OpenStack up to a new delivery model that allows faster consumption of updates, helping customers get to outcomes faster.” This also means that OpenStack will soon be able to run in containers on Google’s Cloud — or really any cloud service that supports Kubernetes. “Leveraging Kubernetes in Fuel will turn into a true microservice application, bridging the gap between legacy infrastructure software and the next generation of application development,” said Google Senior Product Manager and one of the founders of the Kubernetes project Craig McLuckie in today’s announcement. “Many enterprises will benefit from using containers and sophisticated cluster management as the foundation for resilient, highly scalable infrastructure.” The Mirantis team tells me that it previously worked with Intel and CoreOS on Stackanetes and some of that work was essentially a proof of concept for this new project. “We expect that we’ll continue collaborating with CoreOS on the initiative we are announcing with Google and Intel today and will incorporate some of the things that were showcased in
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N26 launches its investment product in Germany
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Romain Dillet
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A few days after , (formerly known as Number26) is partnering with fellow German fintech startup to add a new service to its banking offering with its first investment product for German customers. vaamo manages different portfolios of risky and not-so-risky assets thanks to so that you don’t have to micro-manage these portfolios. Starting today, German customers can invest some of their money using the N26 app in a new N26 Invest section. You don’t have to talk to any financial advisor, you don’t have to visit a bank branch. “With N26 invest we hope to set a new standard in investing on your mobile phone. Our customers can invest with just a few taps and no paperwork, right on their phones,” N26 co-founder and CEO Valentin Stalf told me. “We offer them full transparency regarding fees and a great user experience with graphics that let you track the performance of the investment in real time.” In many ways, vaamo works a lot like or in the U.S. Coincidentally, both Betterment and N26 took part in our at TechCrunch Disrupt. These kind of companies are providing a hands-off, digital-first approach to investment. The hardest part is signing up. In the N26 app, you can swipe right from your current account to go into the savings & investment screen. While the company is still working on savings accounts, this is where you can sign up to vaamo and upload some money. You can then choose between three different plans ranging from low returns and low risk to high return potential and greater risk. After setting up a one-time deposit, you can also set up monthly deposits. All of this will sound familiar if you’ve dealt with investment funds. And then you’re good to go. vaamo portfolios are based on five different funds that hold 15,000 securities altogether. N26 promises transparency when it comes to fees. And this is important as we’re talking about multi-year investment plans — compounded fees can add up. You can add or withdraw money at any time. Up next, N26 plans to add real-time credit, savings and insurance products. While it’s interesting to see N26 partnering with vaamo, and , I can’t wait to see what the company will come up with on its own. Now that N26 has a banking license, it can do more than facilitate transactions with third-party services. [gallery ids="1358683,1358684,1358685"]
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Southeast Asia tech media company E27 raises $2.2M
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Jon Russell
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Singapore-based media company E27 has closed a SG$3 million (US$2.2 million) Series A round as it looks to redevelop its tech-focused news website and events business following some tough times. The company previously raised seed rounds, the most recent being , and there had been for the past month or so. Now the company has confirmed its raise from a bevy of new investors each of whom is involved in early-stage tech. The round was led by China-based TechTemple Group with participation from (also China), Indonesia’s and Singapore-based duo and venture builder . E27 is best known in Southeast Asia for its news site — — and its long-running events business. First founded in 2007, it has endured a rough past year which . With new money in the bank, though, E27 CEO and co-founder Mohan Belani plans to make new hires across the company to grow the editorial and events teams, as well as strengthen newer businesses which include a , Crunchbase-style and where third-parties offer bundled deals. “The objective here is to be an ecosystem player not just media,” he told me in a phone interview. “Media was our first foray but we realized that, as the company grows, challenges evolve. Our database and marketplace come together to serve the greater community — pair them with events, and you get a nice online-to-offine mix.” Belani said that E27 will work with its new investors in a fairly direct manner. He hinted that could mean events in China in sync with TechTemple Group, which provides a range of services to help startups including co-working spaces and incubation services, or Convergence Ventures, which is focused on early-stage investments in Indonesia. Likewise, the other investors have a dedicated early-stage presence which could also mean more potential for tie-ins. “A lot of the focus will go to events and online, we’re looking at being more heavily focused on the Southeast Asia market [because it is] the area we know best and work we know best,” Belani added, noting that the tech communities in China and India are . Tech In Asia is E27’s big rival in terms of editorial and the events business. Tech In Asia has raised nearly $7 million to date, , and it has more than 70 staff working on its business, which also includes Techlist, another Crunchbase-esque analytics service for Asia which . Those two aside, other blogs that focus on tech news across Southeast Asia include and .
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Crunch Report | Verizon Buys Yahoo
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Khaled "Tito" Hamze
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Tito Hamze
Tito Hamze
Joe Zolnoski, Gregory Manalo
Joe Zolnoski
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A Florida judge has ruled that Bitcoin isn’t money
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Fitz Tepper
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Ever since it moved into the mainstream Bitcoin has had a bit of an identity crisis. Mainly because no one is really sure whether it should be considered money or property. The IRS , the Commodity Futures Trading Commission , and most Bitcoin advocates like to say it’s the world’s most advanced currency. However, today one Florida judge it was property, strengthening that argument and potentially setting precedent in future Bitcoin-related court cases. Here are the details: In a case dating back to 2013, a defendant was accused of selling bitcoin to undercover officers for cash that the officers told the defendant was obtained illegally. The defendant was then arrested and charged with two counts of money laundering (because he was under assumption that the cash he was receiving was “dirty”), and one charge of acting as a money transmitter/payment instrument seller. Judge Teresa Pooler today both charges, essentially due to her decision that since Bitcoin isn’t money the defendant can’t be charged for illegally transmitting or laundering money. For the money laundering charges, the law states that it’s illegal for an individual to conduct a “financial transaction” with money that a law enforcement officer says came from an illegal activity. Judge Pooler agreed with the defense that the charge should be dismissed because a financial transaction is defined as involving a “monetary instrument”, which Bitcoin isn’t. For the money transmitter/payment instrument seller charge, Judge Pooler also agreed with the defense that Bitcoin doesn’t fall under the definition of “payment” instrument, and referenced the . Judge Pooler conceded by saying that “attempting to fit the sale of Bitcoin into a statutory scheme regarding money services businesses is like fitting a square peg in a round hole”. While the is only on the Florida state circuit court level, it could act as precedent for future similar cases. The reality is though that the ultimate decision on how to classify Bitcoin will end up in the hands of lawmakers. At some point state and federal lawmakers (and even those in other countries) are going to have to sit down and write a stricter definition of Bitcoin that will remove any ambiguity on whether or not it should be classified as currency or property.
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Google’s Android Phone app now identifies spam callers
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Jon Russell
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There’s nothing worse than answering a call from a number you don’t recognize and getting locked into an awkward sales or marketing call. Well, those incidents may be less frequent for many after to its phone app for Android. The Android phone app received a major update in 2013 when it added caller ID for incoming calls from businesses as part of the launch of Android KitKat. Now it is getting for spam recognition, although the feature is initially limited to those who own Nexus or Android One devices. Spam detection is a core part of Truecaller, which is particularly popular in India and other emerging markets. Truecaller also provides caller ID for incoming calls using a directory of numbers that are ‘crowdsourced’ by its users. Google said its new feature will allow users to block and report spam numbers, which hints that the company will use data from users to recognize sources of annoying calls, but its Android caller app doesn’t have the same community-approach as Truecaller. Nonetheless, the spam detection feature is sure to be useful for users who weren’t aware it was possible before now. Apple is also getting in on the act with a feature inside that helps identify spam calls. The software is already available in beta for iOS users with a developer account but coming soon for everyone else.
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Oculus update paves the way for room-scale VR on the Rift
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Lucas Matney
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The Rift’s best days are still ahead of it as Facebook’s virtual reality company prepares to drastically improve user experience by introducing its room-scale tracked motion Touch controllers in Q4 of this year. An update to Oculus Home is apparently prepping for Touch’s arrival by enabling users to connect multiple Oculus camera sensors to enhance movement tracking and give developers access to highly precise room-scale setups. Though the update allows for up to four sensors to be connected, most developers are likely looking to optimize room-scale titles for just a pair sensors which makes sense as the Touch controllers are expected to ship with just one additional infrared sensor included. I’ve spent a decent amount of time with the latest developer version of Touch and most setups are optimized for tighter experiences than the Vive with sensors set up about 4 feet apart from each other in front of the user. This leads to environments much less sprawling than the Vive’s 15×15 feet setups but setup is much snappier to get through on the user’s part as well. I will say that when you get turned around and aren’t facing the sensors, tracking coverage can actually get pretty bad due to occlusion. YouTube user tested the limits of the update by playing with four sensors synced through SteamVR using HTC Vive controllers. What results is a level of tracking precision that appears much smoother than anything I’ve seen in my own experience with the HTC Vive which can work with a maximum of two tracking sensors. It’s important to note that Oculus doesn’t even sell the camera sensors separately right now so the only way you could try this now is if you have four Oculus headsets sitting around with their included sensors or are a Touch developer so don’t go rushing to try this out just yet. You’ll just have to wait for the Touch controllers to be released which Oculus swears will happen by year’s end.
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Amazon partners with U.K. government to test its drones
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Frederic Lardinois
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Amazon today that it has partnered with the U.K. government to test some of the technologies that may one day enable its drone delivery service. In a partnership with the U.K. Civil Aviation Authority (CAA), Amazon now has the permission to explore beyond-line-of-sight operations in rural and suburban areas (something the U.S.’s Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) does not currently allow), test flights where a single person monitors and operates multiple autonomous drones and trial its sense and avoid technologies. All of these tests will happen in airspace under 400 feet. “The UK is a leader in enabling drone innovation — we’ve been investing in Prime Air research and development here for quite some time,” said Paul Misener, Amazon’s Vice President of Global Innovation Policy and Communications, in today’s announcement. “This announcement strengthens our partnership with the UK and brings Amazon closer to our goal of using drones to safely deliver parcels in 30 minutes to customers in the UK and elsewhere around the world.” Amazon says the CAA will be fully involved in these tests and that the outcome will “help inform the development of future policy and regulation in this area.” While the FAA recently announced in the U.S., the regulations currently don’t allow for drone delivery services because they, among other things, only allow for line-of-sight operations. There is no way Amazon could run its service under those rules, so the company is obviously looking to trial its technology in other countries instead. Amazon’s Prime Air division already has a base in the U.K. and it’s been testing its drones there for a while. Jeff Bezos also recently disclosed that Amazon is currently testing its drones , too (in addition to Canada). Speaking at an Amazon event earlier this month, Liam Maxwell, national technology adviser to the U.K. government, noted that the U.K. was one of the most progressive countries when it comes to testing new autonomous technologies like drones, and Amazon was among “a lot of major companies” testing products outside of main aviation spaces. While today’s agreement doesn’t exactly give Amazon permission to start drone deliveries, it marks a major step forward for Amazon’s ambitions in this area. “We are committed to realise our mission for Prime Air,” said Daniel Buchmueller, the co-founder of Amazon’s drone program who is partly based out of Cambridge, U.K. as Amazon’s aviation lead in the country, at a drone event the company held in London earlier this month. “We won’t launch until we can demonstrate safe operations.” Amazon is currently testing devices that weigh less than 55 pounds (25 kg), are battery-powered, can operate beyond line of sight of 10 miles, fly under 400 feet and travel over 50 mph. They are programmed to work with multiple redundancies in case of mechanical failures, and also include sensors and avoidance technology. “Many products are small and light, and we can efficiently move packages up to 2 kg in 30 minutes or less using small aerial drones,” Buchmueller said. So what does all of this mean for Amazon’s drone delivery plans? “With Amazon Prime Air, we’re developing a rapid delivery system that is safe, environmentally sound and enhances the services we already provide to millions of customers,” a company spokesperson told us. “This announcement brings us one step closer to realizing this amazing innovation for our customers.” As for Amazon’s plans in the U.S., the same spokesperson noted that Amazon is “working with regulators and policymakers in many countries in order to make Prime Air a reality for our customers and expect to continue to do so.”
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NIST declares the age of SMS-based 2-factor authentication over
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Devin Coldewey
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2-factor authentication is a great thing to have, and more and more services are making it a standard feature. But one of the go-to methods for sending 2FA notifications, SMS, is being left in the dust by the National Institute of Standards and Technology. NIST creates national-level guidelines and rules for measurements, and among the many it must keep up to date are some . An upcoming pair of “special publications,” as its official communiques are called, update its recommendations for a host of authentication and security issues, and the documents are up for “public preview.” I put the phrase in quotes because technically, a “public draft” triggers formal responses from partners and, in fact, from NIST itself. To avoid red tape, the Institute is trying out a new method for reviewing and commenting on the guidelines that isn’t quite so official: . “It only seemed appropriate for us to engage where so much of our community already congregates and collaborates,” . The public preview, to be sure, is still very incomplete, and includes questions built right into the text — “I think we are making this too hard,” reads one piece of marginalia. At any rate, the changes are numerous, but perhaps most relevant for Joe and Jane Six-Pack is the active discouragement of using SMS as an “out of band authenticator” — essentially, a method for delivering a one-time use code for 2FA. (Emphasis theirs.) If the out of band verification is to be made using a SMS message on a public mobile telephone network, the verifier SHALL verify that the pre-registered telephone number being used is actually associated with a mobile network and not with a VoIP (or other software-based) service. It then sends the SMS message to the pre-registered telephone number. Changing the pre-registered telephone number SHALL NOT be possible without two-factor authentication at the time of the change. , and will no longer be allowed in future releases of this guidance. For now, services can continue with SMS as long as it isn’t via a service that virtualizes phone numbers — the risk of exposure and tampering there might be considered too great. NIST isn’t telling for now, but more info will come out as the comment period wears on. But before long all use of SMS will be frowned on, as the bolded passage clearly indicates. The alternative is to use a dedicated 2FA app like Google Authenticator or RSA SecurID, or a dedicated secure device like a dongle. There are plenty of options — SMS was just the easy one. Curious about the other changes? Feel free to dive into the documents themselves (links are at the top of the ), and if you’d like to comment, use .
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The future is a smarter world of dumber devices
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Tom Goodwin
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With smartphones in all of our pockets, it’s easy to laugh at Thomas Watson’s remark that “there is a market for about five computers.” But what if he was off by only four computers instead of four billion? In the early 2000s, we lived in an era of expensive storage and slow connectivity. Those of us tasked with predicting the faced a dilemma: Would processing and storage get so cheap that each and every could store everything ever made, or would connectivity become so robust and far-reaching that everything would be stored remotely. The “ ” since that time has been a little bit of both. We settled on what became acceptable — a compromise of local and cloud-based storage. As we look around today, we still see this battle being waged — yet, if anything, it’s tipping away from and into the cloud. Smartphones clearly continue to get more sophisticated, but the pace of improvements is far from accelerating and, increasingly, the smartness is either in the software built for the , the platforms on the or the actual total outsourcing of intelligence to the AI of Google Now, Cortana or Siri. We’re actually seeing the proliferation of surprisingly simple machines, like the Amazon Echo or Google Home are effectively just microphones, speakers and a big tube to produce bass, and connectivity to the cloud. The cloud is where all the smartness lies and where the work is done. Will self-driving cars be making all decisions locally, assessing traffic conditions and best routes, or will they merely pass back data to intelligence elsewhere and get instructions in return? If humanoid robots appear, the same issues arise. In fact, we probably need to reconsider the role of electronics and start thinking in terms of systems that work together. We need to think less in terms of the atomic unit of the phone, of software and hardware, and more in terms of access to systems with , programs and partnerships. To best understand this shift, we need to look back at how electronics have developed, in four phases, with each transition separated by about 7-8 years from its predecessor: analog expansion, digital convergence, digital optimization and systemic integration. Prior to the digitization of media around the end of the 20th century, electronic were very different to how they are today. Media was all physical and radically different, and named after the physical we needed to play the media on. Around 1995 I owned a TV, a VHS player, a Walkman, a Discman, a cordless phone, a desktop computer, a CD player, a Hi-Fi and more. Every new year would bring some new technology and some new additive way to be entertained — in 1997 it was a minidisc player, in 1998 a LaserDisc and in 2000 a DVD player. This was the era of “peak .” Record stores were often forced to sell several physical formats of the same album at the same time, and so on. Digitization changed all that; we moved to an age where physical media only got simpler. My iPod replaced three music before my smartphone allowed me to throw that away, along with a bucketload of other items, not least a vast physical music collection. Older folks may moan about a throwaway generation, or the excess of a $1,000 smartphone, but the value of an uncluttered life is far greater, both for us and for the . People can now play computer games, access TV and navigate the with no need to own, let alone “have” anything. My Lonely guidebook collection in my parents house is a rare glimpse into the legacy of an expensive, bulky pre-digital age. With the smartphone firmly established in the late oughties as our definitive all-purpose personal , capable of serving as everything from watch to game console to flashlight, any that wasn t a smartphone suddenly needed a more compelling reason to exist in the eyes of consumers, and the results have been optimization of many things that before we hadn t really considered improvable. We ve seen like the Google ChromeCast make TV far better. We ve seen connected scales that weigh us and tell us the weather, and Philips Hue lighting and the Sonos Playbar sound bar. All are wonderful examples of items perfected to suit the needs of today’s demanding consumer. Yet we’re still seeing systems that don’t work. We’re still dealing with use cases that overlap. I believe the next tranche of consumer electronics will first start with people, who must think of the in which they live — which is increasingly one of as nodes in a system. One of the most amazing things about the Tesla and Echo is that they are reversing the long-established principle that physical things degrade with time. Thanks to software, you can now wake up to a far more improved product than when you left it. This is a new way of thinking. These are products designed with software, hardware and partnerships together, by companies that now realize our experience of products is about access to a system, rather than the delight of each machine alone. What makes mobile money work is retailers that embrace it. From smartwatches that open doors to airlines that accept mobile boarding passes, we need to think more in terms of commercial partnerships that large tech companies can make. We need to think of the as being the physical entry token to a sort-of club membership, of ownership as access rather than as a singular tangible entity. Device makers need to shift their entire way of thinking away from the physicality of devices to the creations of these clubs. The new questions for the future are not just what does the device do, but what does ownership allow, how can ownership feel like being part of a club? What unique experiences can I offer, not what unique functions have I engineered? Car makers need to think less in terms of vehicle performance and more in terms of the experience of ownership and being in the mobility sector, not the car-making world. Device owners need to be creating benefits for their system, from how their array of devices work together, to how they provide unique experiences, to how they interface with the world around us. Our phones, smartwatches and tablets increasingly access points to the hub of our lives in the cloud — our interface between the real and virtual. They’re how we navigate, buy and make decisions in both realms. It’s now time for all in the industry to think of how these devices can not just become great products, but great gateways to an easier, faster and better life.
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Pokémon Go estimated at over 75M downloads worldwide
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Darrell Etherington
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Pokémon Go has already earned one official record — . But it’s going to break a lot more records still: app analytics firm estimates that it hit , another record, and overall the company says that PoGo has racked up more than 75 million installs across iOS and Android based on their data. The time it took Pokémon Go to reach 50 million Android downloads is a record across games tracked by Sensor Tower, which put the news into context by comparing it to other Android top performers. The next-fastest was Color Switch, a puzzle game, and Slither.io comes in third, but those took 77 and 81 days, respectively, to pass the 50 million mark, which is a far cry from the short 19 days that Pokémon Go took to reach the same milestone. Sensor Tower also thinks there are lots of sparks left in PoGo’s metaphorical Pikachu: The game is only available in 32 markets thus far, out of a total possible 100 where Google Play and the App Store distribute their content. The firm predicts that a possible 100 million download achievement within the first two months of Go’s availability is within reach. For comparison, consider that only in January this year, after an original debut back in 2012. To be fair, games tend to achieve these kinds of stats more quickly, but it’s getting harder and harder to clearly distinguish between Pokémon Go as a game, and . Interesting, Niantic’s other location-based game, Ingress, has also experienced a surge in Japan in time with PoGo’s release: Sensor Tower notes that Ingress is now in Japan’s top 10 on the App Store for the first time. Maybe that’s because it’s a in-game than the in-game Pokémon finder itself.
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AOL’s Tim Armstrong explains the Yahoo acquisition and what’s next
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Anthony Ha
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Following a months-long bidding process, Verizon announced this morning that it’s . The goal, it seems, is to merge Yahoo with AOL (which ) to form a single organization that can compete with digital media giants like Google and Facebook. (AOL, by the way, owns TechCrunch.) The deal is expected to close in the first quarter of 2017. In an interview this afternoon, AOL CEO Tim Armstrong told me that because Yahoo was selling its assets through an auction process, it’s too early to go into detail about how the two companies will fit together: “I don’t have a roadmap.” The broad vision, he said, is to create a “house of brands” structure, with “strong leadership on all of the mega-consumer brands” as well as on the adtech and publisher side. Armstrong said the rationale for the deal is the combined scale of the two companies. He said that Yahoo reaches 1 billion users, which should help AOL “compete for the future” and . “There’s been a lot written about Yahoo, they get covered in the press like we get covered in the press, but I think when you strip away all of the noise around Yahoo, you get down to a billion users, a very talented team, a global brand and it seems like a powerful partnership for us if we’re living in the digital age,” Armstrong said. “There’s very few companies with the size and scale of Yahoo, who have the customer loyalty and consumer loyalty that they have.” As for what will happen to Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer (who’s ), Armstrong again claimed that it was too early to say. “Basically, the agreement that I have with Marissa is to work on the strategy, work on the structure, work on the cost structure, figure out how do we take advantage of all the different assets, and then really work on what roles are going to be there,” he said. You can read an edited transcript of our conversation below. From your perspective, what does Yahoo bring to Verizon and AOL? First of all, I think the biggest thing is the billion-plus consumers, and a billion-plus mobile consumers. In our lifetime, the scale effects are changing so dramatically… Even three years ago, when we did our strategic planning at AOL when we were a public company, we had put 500 million users as what we thought the minimal operating unit was going to be. Then updating it after the Verizon acquisition, we said it was probably 2 billion. So just in the course of a couple years, the scale effects and the mobile effect on the world have dramatically changed. We have a fundamental belief that you have to have a baseline and a foundation of scale to compete for the future, and that’s really what drove the deal. I imagine that when you talk about scale, it’s both scale on consumer-facing properties and then also on the adtech side? One of the things that’s interesting is that our business is split between the consumer-facing business and the advertising and publishing technology business. We want to reach 2 billion between those businesses combined. I do think, strategically, over a longer period of time, having access to the consumers directly will continue to be the most important driver of the value we can add to partners. I think we’ll end up with our brands, but bring the ability for other people to use our technology to help them build their own brands. That, at the core of this, is a huge part of the future outlook for the deal. We have to build really big consumer brands and we have to help other people build really big consumer brands. I would guess that if you don’t have that direct path to the consumer, it’s very easy on the advertising side to get commoditized and squeezed. Over the course of the last six months, having been at a number of different conferences — whether it’s been in Cannes in France, I went to Viva Tech in Paris and I was at the media conference in Sun Valley — one of the words that’s actually getting used the most in the world right now by different leaders is I think our key in the Yahoo transaction, as well as our own properties, is to make sure that we have a differentiation both on the consumer-brand side, but that’s then got to lead into what our differentiation is on the ads platform and publishing side overall. The skill set of differentiation is going to be one of the most important skill sets in the future of corporations, because of how pervasive technology is and technology can commoditize businesses very quickly. How complex do you think the integration of the two companies is going to be? The integration discussions are starting this week, so I don’t have a roadmap and the Yahoo people have not given their input on it yet. My guess is, we will try to come up with the fastest and simplest integration process we possibly can, and make those decisions over the course of the next six months. My guess is that’s going to be a big part of the integration discussions: Where do we spend our time? What integrations do we spend time on and what integrations do we not spend time on? But the idea is to turn it into one organization under you? I would say that we’re going to be in a house of brands structure. So I think you’ll see strong leadership on all of the mega-consumer brands that we have and then you’ll see leadership on the platform businesses. Today, if I were to simplify it down to a viewpoint, without starting on an integration process yet, it would be: How do we structure a very significant and global-sized house of media brands for the digital and mobile age, and how do we structure a platform organization that allows us to have some of the most robust platforms that serve other publishers and other advertisers as well? So from a structural standpoint, we’re focused on those two giant areas. After that, we’ll decide what all the positions are and the structure. Our process will be strategy, structure and then cost structure — how do we have the boldest strategy we possibly can, the simplest structure and a cost structure that allows us to be profitable and growing as we go after the future. I mentioned, I think, there’s five or six bigger internet companies, the Googles, the Facebooks, the Amazons. In general, those are gold medal companies and we need to, over the coming years, really train ourselves to compete and really thrive at a gold medal level of performance. We have very good competitors that set a very high bar in the industry. At both AOL and Yahoo, there’s been experimentation, especially on the consumer side, in terms of launching a separate brand or app and seeing if consumers like it. Do you think there’s going to be a culling of things that aren’t working? One of the things that’s an important part of the future is allowing the brands themselves to do a lot of the innovation. I think you’ll see us put more and more emphasis on R&D inside of the specific brands or platforms overall, and we’ll still do a lot of experimentation. I can guarantee you that we will take bold risks, that we will move to differentiation and that we will make mistakes along the way. We’re going to take a very growth mindset to this — which is, things won’t be perfect but they’ll intentionally not be perfect because we’re trying to invent a lot and have the brands really push themselves to be more global, be more mobile, be more video, be more data-centric overall. Yahoo and AOL have been pretty active in acquiring startups. Do you think that’s going to change? No, I think M&A will continue to be part of the future, but my guess is that M&A will slow down until we get this strategy and structure really straightened out. One of the things we’ve learned at AOL is that doing any M&A that isn’t tied directly into one of the powerful strategies we have tends to not leverage the acquisition fully. We’ve got to be really crystal clear about the strategy, and then really crystal clear about what capabilities we have and what capabilities we’ll partner for and maybe what capabilities we need to acquire. But I think we’ve got to go strategy first before we start doing more deals. Can you say anything about what Marissa Mayer’s role is going to be moving forward? One thing I would just say is that this deal is different than the Verizon-AOL deal. [With Verizon-AOL,] we had a year to plan it, we met with all the executives and everybody had their roles. With Marissa, because it’s an auction process, I think we’ve been going on-the-fly. Basically, the agreement that I have with Marissa is to work on the strategy, work on the structure, work on the cost structure, figure out how do we take advantage of all the different assets, and then really work on what roles are going to be there. Marissa’s running Yahoo, she will be running Yahoo, and I think as we get up to the close of the deal, that’ll be a time period both for Marissa and us to take a step back and say hopefully, we have something that’s incredibly meaningful and important. The Yahoo brand will be staying with us for a very long period time, we’ll be investing in it. I think it will really be up to Marissa and us to have a meeting of the minds in terms of where things are going to go. I’ve known Marissa for almost 20 years, so I have a very good relationship with her. I realize there’s going to be a lot of press written about it, but the reality is, press is different from my personal relationship with her overall. So I think we’ll be able to work very well together. Yahoo is a company where you can see a lot of opportunity, but at the same time it’s very easy to dismiss it as this company that had its heyday and the trend lines are not pointing in the right direction. So what, fundamentally, made you feel like this is actually something that’s going to point AOL in the right direction? Here’s my quick take on it: It’s hard to ignore a billion users. There’s been a lot written about Yahoo, they get covered in the press like we get covered in the press, but I think when you strip away all of the noise around Yahoo, you get down to a billion users, a very talented team, a global brand and it seems like a powerful partnership for us if we’re living in the digital age. There’s very few companies with the size and scale of Yahoo, who have the customer loyalty and consumer loyalty that they have. You’re also talking to the person who went from Google to AOL. (laughs) That was sort of the subtext. I tend to look beyond the headlines and [see] what the true opportunity is. I think Verizon does the same thing and I think Yahoo has done the same — if you’ve gone to Yahoo, you believe in the same things… You’ve got one of the largest companies on the planet with a very dedicated, resilient team of people that are excited about the future. At the end of the day, if you gave me a billion users or no users, we’ll go with a billion. Is there anything else you wanted to talk about? People are going to overestimate the amount of strategy work that’s gone in between the two companies so far, and they’re going to underestimate the amount of strategy work that’s going to happen between now and the close. I think that underestimated period is going to end up making all the difference for us.
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CrunchMatch registrations are now open for investors and startups
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Contributor
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At this year’s TechCrunch Disrupt NY 2016, TechCrunch introduced a new networking tool called CrunchMatch that helped 19 investors and 65 startups make a total of 88 connection meetings at Disrupt. At , TechCrunch is looking to take those connections to a whole new level. And to do that, we need all you investors and startup founders out there to get involved. TechCrunch is happy to announce that the registration process for CrunchMatch is now open, and signing up couldn’t be simpler. When an investor registers for Disrupt, they’ll receive an invitation to fill out a questionnaire about their investment interests. Startups who purchase Startup Alley ticket packages will receive a similar form. TechCrunch will use the responses to match investors with startups that fit their investment profile and interest areas. We’ll also help coordinate those meetings at a private space and at a time that works for both parties during the course of the Disrupt conference. CrunchMatch participants at Disrupt NY raved about the experience, with 85% of participating investors using CrunchMatch to scout future investments, and 93% of investors saying they would participate in CrunchMatch again. Sixty percent of investors found the CrunchMatch meetings effective, relevant and productive, and 83% indicated they had follow-up meetings with investors. The CrunchMatch program is free for Disrupt attendees, so we hope all you investors and startups out there will sign up to make promising contacts that could lead to your next major round of funding, or bring the next great startup into your investment portfolio. To participate, you’ll need to get your hands on tickets to Disrupt, and you can do that over . If you have additional questions, send us an email at . takes place September 12-14 at San Francisco’s Pier 48, and we can’t wait to see all you investors, entrepreneurs and tech enthusiasts.
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Google Maps gets a cleaner look and starts highlighting areas of interest
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Frederic Lardinois
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It’s been a busy week for the Google Maps team. As we reported , the Google Maps apps are getting a Wi-Fi-only mode and the team is also bringing to the mobile apps. The company kept the biggest announcement , though: Google Maps on iOS, Android and the web is getting a new and cleaner look with a more subtle color scheme. The idea behind the new look for the maps is to remove clutter. As Google notes, the team removed road outlines, for example, and also improved the typography on the maps so it’s easier to read street names, points of interest and transit stations. At the same time, the team also decided to try a new way of showing local information on the map. When you zoom in to a city now, you’ll likely see a few areas that are shaded in orange. These are “areas of interest” that feature a large number of hotels, restaurants, music venues or other points of interest. Google says it uses algorithms to determine these areas, but at times, it’ll also use human editors to highlight certain parts of a city. As for the new color scheme, Google says it wanted to go for a more “subtle and balanced” look. I’m not seeing the updates just yet, so chances are the company is still in the process of rolling out this new look to all of its users. The new design definitely looks cleaner, though, and fits Google’s overall design theme, which has recently focused on removing visual clutter.
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Google’s Omnitone surround sound project brings us closer to web-based VR
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Devin Coldewey
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As has been the case with so many industries, the pendulum of VR will eventually swing back from dedicated apps toward web-based systems — and when that happens, Google will be ready. It published details of a new method for delivering serious surround sound over the web — a system it calls . Plain ol’ multi-channel surround sound may be fine for watching a movie on a flat screen, but when you’re navigating a virtual environment with total spatial autonomy, you need a bit more. You need ambisonics, which simulates a full sphere of sound around you, giving sounds coordinates in 3D space and letting a renderer do the work of converting that coordinate into the appropriate sound waves. The problem Google’s Chrome WebAudio team faced was how to make this happen in the browser using the tools already available — so as not to clutter the web with yet another standard. The solution they came up with is clever, but really quite straightforward. The ambisonic sound stream is as much about the location of the sound as the sound itself, so Omnitone combines that location with orientation data from the VR headset’s sensors. So if your head is pointed rightwards and upwards X and Y degrees, that transformation is applied to the ambisonic stream right away and the whole audio sphere is shifted relative to the user. Then it makes its way to an eight-speaker virtual speaker setup, then is mixed down to stereo using a binaural renderer — and voilà, you’ve got passable streaming full-sphere surround sound using nothing but existing web components! — that is, if you can get them to load. I couldn’t. But there will probably be a more full-fledged rollout soon, with a YouTube VR experience or the like, so I’m not worried. Everything’s open source, of course; .
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Veeso wants to share your smiles and eye-rolls in VR
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Lucas Matney
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First-time VR experiences seem to bring about a pretty wide variety of emotional reactions from the people who try it, but right now there aren’t too many ways to actually convey how you’re feeling inside virtual reality. is aiming to become one of the first VR headsets to capture how you’re feeling through their sensor technology. The company just launched a Kickstarter campaign to drum up interest in their face-tracking developer kit. Tracking your movement, body position, head position and location are some of the skills existing high-end VR headsets have in their sensor repertoire, but a key item that’s been lacking is the ability to track the face that the headset is strapped to. Understanding where your eyes are looking or how your mouth is positioned is key to allowing you to convey emotions in VR, something rather essential to the gaggle of social VR apps that are already out there. Some of these things can be done already without the need for additional sensors. I’ve seen developers using audio cues from the mic to sync avatar lip movement with what users are actually communicating. It’s a bit rudimentary, but it’s also something that could clearly be improved with an integrated tracking sensor pointed toward the user’s mouth from the bottom of the headset. The Veeso headset not only tracks the user’s mouth and jaw but also has infrared eye-tracking sensors built into the headset to track the user’s line of sight. This is especially effective for social VR, saving you from weird interactions with avatars with dead eyes. It’s bizarre how essential eye contact is to making social experiences feel more comfortable, even in non-photo-realistic environments, but demos I’ve experienced with other companies’ eye-tracking tech have more than confirmed this. This headset appears to be primarily focused toward Google Cardboard use, which limits the graphics and gameplay capabilities an unfortunate amount, especially since Google’s next VR platform play, , will be seeing the light of day this fall. This is a developer kit, so don’t expect to order one and have a bunch of cool stuff to test out at launch — they want you to be the ones building all that, after all. You can currently snag an early-bird deal on the face-tracking headset dev kit for $80. Veeso is hoping to raise $80,000 with this campaign. The company says they’re hoping to start delivering the first batch of headsets in December of this year.
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Scale lets companies outsource their human-powered tasks with one line of code
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Sarah Perez
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A new startup called , officially launching today, wants to make it easier for businesses to outsource their core processes and tasks that require people, not algorithms, to handle. This could include anything from appointment scheduling to more complicated matters like content moderation, transcriptions, and more. Today, many companies handle outsourcing themselves by hiring and training contractors directly, via freelancer websites, or by taking advantage of Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, which lets anyone post tasks that any worker around the world can pick up and complete in exchange for a small fee. Scale, however, aims to one-up Mechanical Turk by offering higher quality output. “One big thing is that we’re screening our workers so heavily.” explains Scale co-founder Alexandr Wang. “On Mechanical Turk, it’s basically a crowdsourced model where anybody can sign up to be a Turker, I think is what they call them. That’s caused quality to be very low as a result.” When companies reach a certain scale or have a need for quality, Mechanical Turk doesn’t cut it, he adds. Wang and Scale’s co-founder Lucy Guo are familiar with the problems companies face when it comes to outsourcing duties to remote workers thanks to their time working for Q&A site Quora and Snapchat. Both companies rely on manual content moderation processes for things like handling images and posts flagged by users and other matters. They also have first-hand experience with the problem when they began their first startup, which was going to be a mobile app that helped people find and book doctors’ appointments. “But we couldn’t focus on product dev because we were just calling doctors all day,” notes Guo, who worked in product at both Snapchat and Quora, previously. This prompted their idea for Scale, which now offers developers to automate the human-powered functions. To use Scale, a company places a line of code into their app to allow certain tasks to be completed on demand. Tasks can include categorization/content moderation, comparison, transcription, and phone calling. Using a standard REST API, the requests are sent to Scale’s servers, where the task is distributed to team members, and, in some cases, an additional quality check is also performed after the worker completes the task before it’s sent back. On Scale’s side, it hires and vets independent contractors, who can offer responses to tasks in minutes. These workers have to prove they have a good grasp of written English and are capable of critical thinking skills. Unlike on Turk, they’re paid hourly and can earn roughly twice to three times as much as they would on a competing service. The hourly rate also ensures they won’t rush through tasks in order to make more money. In the future, Scale would like to bring the contractors in-house. Scale’s solution is especially timely as chatbots are on the rise, which allow businesses to communicate with customers more conversationally through popular messaging platform like Skype and Facebook Messenger, for example. But the problem with chatbots is that while many claim to be “powered by A.I.,” the truth is they lean on human labor, as well. This is true of ” which uses human helpers to augment its A.I. capabilities as well as the which works like an SMS bot, but actually is connecting users with real people who get the requested tasks done. “[Machine learning] and [artificial intelligence] are just not good enough right now, so when you send responses to chatbots they’re often just not able to process what you’re saying,” says Guo. “That’s why Facebook Messenger bots are so bad right now.” The freemium service offers five requests for free, then goes up based on number of requests, and whether phone calls are involved. Current customers include Houzz, job finding site HigherMe, Hush, and RealTalk, and seven more are in pilot phases with the three-week old startup. So far, it has already processed over 20,000 API calls, the founders note. Scale is a member of Y Combinator’s current batch, and has a small amount of seed funding from Arena VC.
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Zenefits gets a small fine in resolving regulatory concerns in Tennessee
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Matthew Lynley
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Zenefits has been under fire for skirting regulation, resulting in the ouster of its previous CEO Parker Conrad and a heavy-duty overhaul underway of the company. The results of that effort are now seemingly starting to emerge, starting first with a resolution in Tennessee which will cost the company $62,500 and allow it to continue operating. The company continues to have conversations with other regulatory commissions as it works to convince them that it has changed its tenor and is now ready to comply with regulations when it comes to operating its business. The hope here, it would seem, is that Zenefits is setting a precedent that it has left that behavior behind and doesn’t need to be severely punished going forward. This basically amounts to a slap on the wrist for the company, which previously instituted a program called “the Macro” that helped it skirt regulatory requirements in order to grow more quickly. That, in the short term, helped the company quickly rocket to a $4.5 billion valuation, but a series of reports lifting the veil on that behavior — as well as the company’s party culture — has forced Zenefits to basically make a 180. “Fortunately, new company leadership has demonstrated a dedication to righting the ship,” Tennessee Department of Commerce and Insurance commissioner Julie Mix McPeak said in a statement. “They have instituted new and enhanced agent training requirements as well as licensing controls to ensure that company employees comply with state licensing laws. They employed a reputable outside firm to help test and confirm these new procedures.” That started with Parker leaving the company and COO David Sacks taking over, as well as change in the board of directors. It also led to a series of layoffs, including offering employees a generous buyout package for those not interested in sticking around as it works to remake the company’s culture and operations. Around 10% of employees accepted the offer, which amounted to about two months’ severance. Most recently, Zenefits in the company as a continuing effort to reset expectations as it worked to change its direction — and likely the speed of its growth along with it. That decision would help it fend off potential lawsuits from investors who were kept in the dark regarding “the Macro.” Throughout all this, Zenefits has had to grapple with having to change its public perception and image. It hired a “chief compliance officer,” and Sacks even went so far as to say “We are becoming the Compliance Company” in an announcement Zenefits has a lot of baggage to deal with following Conrad’s actions, and managing that fallout has been a significant part of Sacks’ role since he took over. “I also want to thank our employees for doing the hard work of remediation,” Sacks said in a statement. “You have changed our company’s culture and values at a fundamental level. Because of your efforts, Zenefits has reached a watershed moment: not only does this agreement pave the way for us to continue operating in the great state of Tennessee, it also recognizes that Zenefits is a new company that has moved past its historical issues. We look forward to reaching resolution with other states soon.” Of course, this does not mean Zenefits will get the same treatment in other states. The company is under investigation in a few states including Washington and California, as first reported by BuzzFeed. Those states may seek to impose harsher terms on Zenefits, which has actively tried to investigate and self-report violations as a way to help reduce the potential impact on its business.
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Brian Heater
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24 tech experts weigh in on what exactly a ‘decentralized web’ means
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Devin Coldewey
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You may have seen some chatter here and there about the “decentralized web” — it’s something , for instance. But there isn’t a really clear definition of what the term means — and really, considering its nature, it would be surprising if there were. There are, therefore, a variety of opinions, as Syracuse University’s Master of Information Management found out when they . Brewster Kahle of the Internet Archive takes a literal but admirably concise approach: Arizona State’s Eric Newton took to metaphor: Author and activist Cory Doctorow says: Jake Orlowitz, of the Wikimedia Foundation, waxes oratorical: Read the other 20 quotes ; it’s interesting how they cluster around the same themes but emphasize one aspect or another. A decentralized web would look much the same way: many points connected not by a common authority, but by a shared intention.
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Gillmor Gang: Monetize This
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Steve Gillmor
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The Gillmor Gang — John Taschek, Keith Teare, Frank Radice, Kevin Marks, and Steve Gillmor. Recorded live Friday, September 2, 2016. Waiting for latency can be a lonely thing, but the media march toward live streaming reaches new urgency. Plus the latest G3 (below) with Mary Hodder, Elisa Camahort Page, Francine Hardaway, Lisa D’Apolito, and Tina Chase Gillmor. @stevegillmor, @jtaschek, @kteare, @kevinmarks, @fradice Produced and directed by Tina Chase Gillmor @tinagillmor [ustream id=91026539 hwaccel=1 version=3 width=480 height=302]
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The EU’s new regulatory environment might help fintech flourish
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Dennis Mitzner
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The EU’s efforts to regulate financial markets has opened new opportunities for global operators looking for universal to tap into the lucrative 28-country marketplace. While over-regulation can stifle growth, the industry, in pursuit of consumer trust, has a lot to gain from a clearly defined regulatory framework. “ startups will need a very clear regulatory and compliance strategy as well as their product and marketing strategies. The new regulatory environment is beneficial for those companies that are building data-driven businesses with transparency and data-integrity as the backbone,” said Marta Sjögren from , a Stockholm-based investment fund. Regulation often is an entry barrier because companies must be licensed by regulatory bodies to do business in each jurisdiction. For startups that want to expand, compliance is mandatory and the financial system has low tolerance for risk. “As a result, founders need to cooperate with regulators, budget for long waiting periods, find strategic partnerships that help their growth efforts and be in this for the long haul. is a marathon, not a sprint,” wrote Falguni Desai, the founder of , in a recent . The lengthy process to produce a clear regulatory space and the three-way dance between startups, banks and regulators are meant to create a safe environment for the consumer. What’s more, the entire value proposition of supple companies — in contrast to often rigid banks — comes down to delivering superior financial products more efficiently with lower costs. If companies want to be a better alternative, they need to gain the trust of the consumer. This is where the role of the regulator becomes essential. “At the end of the day, the aim is to protect as well as develop a trusting relationship with the consumer. Previously protecting the consumer and developing trust used to be done by one entity: the banks. Going forward, this might not be the case,” says Sjögren. In recent years, the EU has introduced a plethora of regulations, from standardized mobile and internet payments (PSD2) to voluntary regulatory framework on bank capital adequacy, stress testing (Basel 3), the Anti-Money Laundering Directive (AMLD), a European-wide initiative to standardize the processing of electronic payments in Euro (SEPA), harmonized regulation for investment (MiFID2), harmonized EU-wide insurance regulatory regime (Solvency2), a set of accounting (IFRS) and now the soon-to-be launched e-invoicing directive requiring all 28 EU member states to use specific e-invoicing for all B2G e-invoices by . Europe’s current e-invoicing adoption rate of 24 percent is and accrue savings of approximately 64.5 billion euros ($72 billion) per year for businesses. Without underestimating the lure of saving a cent, most of the regulations of the last years have been a direct result of the 2008 financial crisis. For new players, especially , the new regulatory environment is a godsend, as compliance is crucial for businesses. “The financial crisis has meant regulatory entities have been proactive both in Europe and the U.S., creating opportunities for new incumbents, but compliance is absolutely crucial,” said Sjögren whose fund recently took part in Helsinki-based e-invoicing platform ’s $4.5 million round. According to Sjögren, the financial industry is entangled in legacy infrastructure and decayed processes as old institutions have amassed centuries of data that have created conservative operational models that look to protect capital through static models, as opposed to using data in real time to assess risk. “Having become the epicenter of economies, these have in turn become monopolies in their own right,” said Sjögren. Regulatory measures, such as PSD2, will force banks to open their systems to businesses and the of launch APIs will allow startups to function as intermediaries between banks and customers. “ is quickly becoming the connective tissue for businesses around the world. When disparate systems and processes are connected, all business partners benefit through improved efficiency and insight to drive agile financial and business strategies. This helps them be more successful in increasingly competitive and volatile markets, powering economic growth,” said Cedric Bru, the CEO of payments supplier software . For companies like Zervant, new regulations lower the entry barriers for all players. For example, the e-invoicing directive, if successful, will take the European marketplace toward full digitization, making it easier for other online-based solutions to emerge. “The EU directive on electronic invoicing is great for us as it drives the digitalization of the invoicing segment. For small business — our core market — it means that they have to switch to using an invoicing software within a few years,” said Mattias Hansson, CEO and co-founder of Zervant. Digitization, coupled with an emerging consent on what the future regulatory framework should look like, is paving the way for all actors in , whether B2B, B2C or B2G. “ are extremely useful as they speed up the pace at which businesses can connect. There is a great opportunity for public and private partnership in developing the most relevant and impactful and guidelines that will allow all participants — irrespective of their size or industry — to reap the benefits of connected business,” said Bru. While many founders and investors have over the ambiguity and confusion of regulations, and there is such a thing as too much regulation, for the burgeoning financial technology industry — except for a few exceptions — too much might still be better than too little. Thanks to the , the U.K. is a leading hub. For other regulatory bodies such as the EU, the challenge is to avoid the many bureaucratic pitfalls of overregulation and instead embrace an open and progressive approach toward .
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The death of localhost and the rise of cloud development
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Tyler Jewell
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If there was any skepticism when Marc Andreessen declared software was “ Software development’s migration to the cloud is rooted in two longstanding, competing interests within IT departments: those of IT administrators and developers. The former favor stability, security and control, while the latter — a group Stephen O’Grady The divide stems from a question of who has root access. When development is done on localhost — the developer’s computer — the developer maintains control of languages, configuration and frameworks. But localhost’s properties limit the ability to scale and share, making it an unviable option across large teams and organizations. A popular alternative is central servers managed by IT, usually on VMs, but adoption of VM-based solutions such as VDI ( ), Vagrant from and have started to wane as VMs are large, difficult to share, expensive and not conducive to collaboration — just ask any developer how he or she feels about trying to share 2GB of VM images with a colleague. Developers have a tendency to hoard assets, such as code and computers — unless they are given a way to collaborate and be more easily productive thanks to the growing popularity of cloud solutions that enable sharing of development assets and processes. is the destination for collaborative code authoring, moving code from hidden repositories into the open to encourage feedback in the form of pull requests. When it comes to issue management, JIRA moves the process of software project management to a shared collective. Meanwhile, the adoption of continuous integration by development teams funnels integration testing to a centralized, collaborative pipeline. In short, there’s never been more emphasis on the collaborative deployment of code. However, development workspaces and runtimes — which facilitate the actual editing, building, debugging and analyzing Thanks to the rise of container technology (e.g. ), which supercharges development backends in order to match agile workflows, the entire development process — including workspaces and their runtimes — can now be hosted in the cloud. Cue the scramble by vendors to own this massive workload as developers move away from traditional desktop environments. Look no further than AWS’ recent moves on the most apparent battlefield: cloud IDEs, which have collectively drawn millions of active users and funding dollars. This momentum is also evidenced by the growing adoption of open-source cloud development. While Amazon intends to offer its own cloud development environments through Cloud9, software giants like Google, These activities signal a new era of agile development — one that reconciles IT and developer interests, capitalizing on containers and open source to make development and testing more efficient, powerful and collaborative. It’s time to declare the death of localhost. We’re entering the cloud’s “last frontier,” and the fight to conquer it is just beginning.
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IoT’s killer app is not home security
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Jon Hedren
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Photo courtesy of Flickr/ . The IoT “dream” as sold by the industry is pretty cool, but it’s still just a dream. For now, these devices remain generally shoddy, insecure and easily breakable — and must be treated that way, especially when the stakes are high.
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Mark Zuckerberg’s Africa tour tracks tech’s growing interests on the continent
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Jake Bright
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After a surprise Nigeria visit to meet with techies in Lagos, Mark Zuckerberg took his this Thursday. There, the Facebook CEO visited the iHub innovation space, reviewed the BRCK mobile Wi-Fi device, had lunch with Kenyan ICT Cabinet Secretary and met with tech leaders and Erik Hersman. Like the Lagos expedition, the trip was unannounced. “Originally, we knew that Facebook’s Ime Archibong was coming in,” said Hersman (a co-founder of iHub), “but we didn’t know about Mark’s visit until the last minute.” Archibong is Facebook’s Strategic Partnerships Director. Though no formal business commitments are planned on Zuckerberg’s first Kenya visit (something Facebook reps confirmed to TechCrunch), Hersman believes it is likely a precursor. “Look, these meetings in Nigeria and Kenya, it’s largely PR for everybody right now,” he said. “However, from the interactions I saw…between Facebook’s team and different people within the tech community, I think there’s going to be some real stuff happening soon.” While Zuckberg’s Nigeria visit was less anticipated — given the country only recently registered in — his dropping in on Kenya is less of a surprise. The East African nation of 44 million has become the continent’s unofficial tech capital, dubbed “Silicon Savannah” for its advances in digital finance, tech incubators and local IT innovations such as and the crowdsourcing platform. Local telco Safaricom’s M-Pesa mobile money product is . The company has used its mobile infrastructure to innovate a number of digital products, including solar electricity ( ), online TV and the recent launch of its (Little), an Uber competitor. The Kenyan government, which established an , is one of the continent’s more proactive in supporting its tech ecosystem. And iHub helped spur Africa’s tech incubator movement, which now includes more than 300 innovation spaces across the continent, according to a recent GSMA survey. From a tech perspective, Zuckberberg’s decision to visit Nairobi is relatively straightforward. Two initiatives he focused on were the BRCK venture and digital prototype startup , both outgrowths of the iHub infrastructure Erik Hersman and Juliana Rotich established in 2010. BRCK developed in response to local IT challenges of poor net connectivity and electricity. The solar-powered BRCK Wi-Fi product (about the size of an actual brick) provides device charging capabilities, 3G and 4G internet for up to 20 connections and now ships to over 60 countries. “He got a demo of the next generation BRCK device, and was pretty intrigued by our ,” said Hersman, referring to BRCK’s educational tablet for primary school students. Zuckerberg also reviewed the Gearbox-supported and home cooking product. “He was really interested in the integration of M-Pesa into other services,” said Hersman, noting the PayGo product allows Kenyans to finance the kit using mobile phones and M-Pesa mobile payments. Zuckerberg’s Nigeria and Kenya trips coincide with Facebook’s expanding Africa presence and the continent’s growing digital profile. Facebook has 84 million users in Sub-Saharan Africa, 17 million in Nigeria, 14 million in South Africa and 5.7 million in Kenya, according to spokesperson Sally Aldous. , a particular Facebook Africa play will be tapping the online advertising market that’s rising with the continent’s shift to digital commerce, expected to reach $75 billion by 2025. Facebook opened its first in South Africa in 2015, appointing Ogilvy and Mather advertising executive Nunu Ntshingila as Head of Africa. In Kenya, the company has provided financial support to iHub events and workshops (Erik Hersman confirmed). Kenya is also one of Facebook’s Internet.org , a program that allows users on Airtel networks to access limited internet services free on mobile. Facebook’s commitment to connect more Africans to the internet suffered a bit of a setback Thursday when the carrying the company’s Amos-6 satellite exploded pre-launch. As for what to expect from Facebook in Africa after Zuckerberg’s trip, company reps would not provide details. iHub, Gearbox and BRCK co-founder Erik Hersman sees possibilities to upgrade Facebook’s connectivity efforts, “Free Basics is growing but it’s still not the open internet,” he said. “There could be an opportunity to open it up around a business model that works.” Hersman also believes the Facebook CEO’s visit will also draw more attention to Africa from Silicon Valley. “He could have just visited South Africa, which is what more people would have expected,” he said. “Visiting Nigeria and Kenya sends a message that could get other global tech players off the sidelines. If Facebook is putting some time, interest, and money into these markets others will definitely pay attention.”
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Growing up in Generation AI
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Remi El-Ouazzane
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Machine learning approaches are leading to AIs being implemented in everything from medical imaging to stock trading. They are allowing machines to think in more human ways, while still bringing to bear the enormous benefits of big data. In 2016, many believe we are at the beginning of the next generation of computing — an “AI revolution.” Assuming the Age of Artificial Intelligence will succeed the Age of Mobile, what does that mean for the children who will succeed “ ”? What will it mean to grow up in the Age of AI? And how can we as a society facilitate the transition, ensuring at the same time that this progress will be put to good use? Current debates on automation already demonstrate the conflict we are in. Whether it is self-driving cars, factory automation or robots doing surgery, there is a large swathe of the population that approaches the topic with a sense of unease — even suspicion. The idea that a machine could remotely replicate a human at most jobs seems outlandish to many of us because we’ve witnessed their clunky rise to prominence. Adults alive today can still recall a world where computers did not exist in everyday life, and witnessed all the early growing pains. It is a generation that suffered chunky user manuals, crash screens and the Y2K bug. How does that compare to a child’s perception of the robust, intuitive and reliable systems in place today? But facts can’t be denied, and even though watched with skepticism by some, the insight that AI is improving processes and increasing safety and efficiency is winning recognition. The day will come when not handing over the steering wheel to a machine will be considered careless, if not outright irresponsible. From a legal standpoint, precedence was set 41 years ago in the 1975 case of where a pilot was deemed negligent for choosing to disengage autopilot and take manual control. How long until people are charged with similar negligence when deciding to disengage autopilot in a car and choose to drive manually? Tesla CEO Elon Musk has stated they will remove the “beta” label from Tesla’s own Autopilot feature once it demonstrates 10X safer performance than the U.S. vehicle average. At that point, it will be hard to deny that drivers still operating a car manually are behaving irresponsibly by eschewing an option statistically 10 times safer. Generation AI won’t need that kind of persuasion to let machines take over. The acceptance of automation will lead to fundamental changes in the way society views production and labor. If Generation AI embraces automation in all facets of life, the economy needs to, and will, adapt. Questions regarding redistribution of wealth, private enterprise or concepts like a universal living wage need to be addressed. The technological intellectual struggle will be followed by what may be an even more challenging one: the task of adapting or replacing the economic system that is rooted in the writings of a man . Just as Generation I demonstrated acceptance of iPads and smartphones, Generation AI will take for granted machines with advanced AI: machines with minds and a (perceived) ability to think on their own, and even machines equipped with artificial empathy and charisma. While society will have to answer the big underlying questions, Generation AI will have to figure out how to embrace AI in their private lives. Communication with chatbots, or the use of relationship simulators, sits on the realm of creepy today, but those who grow up with parents talking to Siri on the phone and Alexa in the kitchen will have fewer reservations about eschewing fickle human relationships for simulated companionship. Ideas about rights and protections for robots may not seem so odd to future generations. Of course, along with rights come responsibilities. Will we one day see a car accused of manslaughter? Or a personal assistant charged with criminal misconduct? And just before you scoff: It wasn’t so long ago that . Children very soon might grow up viewing machines as sentient beings rather than feats of engineering. The philosophical debates about what makes a “true AI” will be a moot point to them, because they are growing up in a world where machines interact with them in (only for us, surprisingly) human ways — long before they have any inkling of what actually makes AI tick. Realistic simulations of personality and empathy will make it much easier to anthropomorphize machines. Our ancient ancestors who witnessed the invention of the wheel probably thought it was rather useful, but had no inkling of the critical importance such an invention had on so many subsequent technological advances. Though we seem to have the glimpse of an idea that AI will impact future generations in a way barely imaginable, only time will tell how society will meet those challenges and adapt to a world where humans aren’t necessarily the only intelligent beings on this planet.
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Tales from the alternate era of the Ara
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Darrell Etherington
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day away from outlets, so I reach into my pocket and fish around for a battery module. The zoom camera pack clips out easy, making room for the added battery capacity, which should give me enough juice to get through the evening. I slip the camera module back into my pocket; I won’t need it, since at the party I’m headed to (a six-year anniversary party for wildly successful startup Color) I’ll probably only use the fixed-focal-length camera module that occupies another slot on the back of my smartphone. The party is boring — it’s the usual collection of over-eager networkers that flock to these industry events. Luckily, I find an old friend and we duck outside to watch the latest New Radicals video (thank god Gregg Alexander went back on his decision to retire from the biz, amirite??), which had just dropped on App.net, the world’s most active social network. A small crowd gathered because everyone’s HP Pre 8s and Google Aras were blowing up with App.net notifications, and everyone wanted to check out the video. Luckily, I remember that I have a projector module in the other pocket of my smartphone under-arm holster, so I quickly swap it out for a silent vibration notification unit that I won’t need for the next few minutes. Just before playing the video, I remember to slot a loudspeaker block in place of the headphone jack module, too. The video springs to life on the outer wall of the club hosting the party, and, for a few minutes, everyone tunes in, some Meerkatting the experience live via their Google Glass headsets. Because of the social activity and because I was early to spot the App.net premiere, the event actually could land a feature spot on Redbox’s daily streaming morning talk show the next day. Finally, it’s time to go home. My sensible, affordable compact electric Fisker sedan is parked not too far away, and since I’m not quite sure the best way to my place, I remove the projector unit from my phone and pop in a GPS nav module. The module also has a car communication stack, of course, transmitting the relevant data to my car’s dash infotainment system using a dedicated wireless frequency. Safely home, it’s time to kick back, grab my NuvoBook Rocket eBook XV and enjoy some “me” time. I click an induction-charging add-on into my phone in place of the speaker, then swap out the basic camera module for the ultimate reward — a digital aromatiser mod capable of simulating up to 150,000 distinct soothing odors. Serenity achieved.
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A different glimpse at VR’s future through Qualcomm’s eye-tracking headset
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Brian Heater
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Poor Qualcomm. Always the reference design, never the retail unit. It’s like being the guy behind the guy, the comedian’s comedian, the power behind the product that doesn’t get to reap the pomp and circumstance of retail displays and big and flashy press conferences. The San Diego-based company did kick off IFA a few days back with its own event, but coverage got buried under an ocean of announcements from the likes of Samsung and Sony. Tell people a company’s got and they sit up and listen. Tell them that it’s never destined to come to market, and it’s all blank stares again. But that’s just the fate of the reference designer. Third-party manufacturers have apparently been waiting with bated breath to get their hands on the thing, and we can expect to see their branded takes on the headset start arriving early next year. But there are still plenty of questions — not the least of which is whether there’s sufficient space for such a device. The issue isn’t the fact that there are already a number of VR experiences competing for a relatively small slice of the market (though that is, indeed, an issue), so much as the question of whether there’s space for a standalone device, one that doesn’t need a PC or a smartphone. The appeal of such a product seems clear, until you realize that it can’t compete with the processing power of a PC or the price point of a Gear VR (or, for that matter, Google Cardboard). poses similar questions, but the Vision isn’t bringing much to the fight, aside from the fact that it will actually be available to purchase in a timely fashion. Qualcomm’s design, on the other hand, offers some really intriguing baked-in functionality. At the top of the list is a four-camera tracking system — two track the eyes and two offer positional tracking. The in-house demos were pretty rudimental, all told — that’s kind of the thing with in-house demos. But while they don’t do much in the way of demonstrating the system’s full potential, they do offer compelling proof of concept, like the simple octopus demo, in which a lonely cephalopod floats in a blue sea, its eyes tracking your every movement. Walking around the room, you can take it in from all angles, including from below (read: octo-butt). A demo with an inquisitive dragon, on the other hand, does a good job of better expressing the graphic potential. The system does 1440×1440 per eye at up to 70 frames per second. Which is really quite good for a product like this, particularly given the fact that the processing power will ultimately be on-par with what you get from a handset running a Snapdragon 820. The price point is expected to be around that of “a high-end tablet,” according to the company, which puts it well above what Samsung is asking for its latest headset (until, of course, you add in the price of a phone). The success of the product will ultimately be in the hands of retail manufacturers, largely dependent on what they do with design and content. Either way, poor little Qualcomm is bound to sell a lot of chips, which is what reference designing is all about.
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We’re at peak complexity — and it sucks
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Tom Goodwin
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Virtually all companies are doing digital transformation wrong. We’re placing it around the edge, keeping it at arm’s length, like it’s a problem and not an opportunity. If companies are to succeed, we need to rebuild around what’s possible, with the greatest toolkit we’ve ever seen. We talk a lot about the vast changes technology has had on our lives and on business. We celebrate the huge shifts that have happened. We can now book flights from apps, pay for taxis with our phones and buy things in-store from shop-hosted tablets. We celebrate what we’ve done and what’s changed, not what was actually possible or what changes have yet to happen. I believe we should be collectively disappointed at our inaction — it’s time we thought harder, took greater risks and embraced a new world. Technology can either be applied at the core or at the edge, and a generation of leaders, consciously or unconsciously, has placed it in new units, in innovation labs and all manner of bit-sized chunks at the periphery. The new has actually been marginalized, as if it’s a way of thinking that could threaten them. New thinking has been something to process, not a new core of opportunity to ideate around. It’s as if managing a slow decline into their retirement was their aim, not unleashing potential to propel their businesses into the future. When we admire the likes of Airbnb, Uber, Facebook, Amazon, Snapchat, Slack, Tesla or Blue Apron, the thread that runs throughout is how they’ve put new technology and behavior at the core of their business — they’ve embraced technology from the start. For them, new technology has provided a new canvas with which to work and new implements with which to draw excitedly. They are led by CEOs and management teams who’ve grown up in the age of technology as a force for good, and who likely have kids that made them challenge everything they knew. It’s when you’re explaining to a seven-year-old on a tablet why they’re not actually “watching TV” that you realize how wrong conventional wisdom actually is. When McLuhan said, “we shape our tools and then they shape us,” he was right, but many of us have resisted the latter. We can book our flight from the new app from the new team that worked with the new code, and yet the desktop website looks like a disaster, making public the organizational fights in your company, representing a legacy of systems and patches that don’t quite work and not representing the needs of your customers. Things get worse once we get to the airport. We hear the endless taps of agents working with blue DOS-like screens. It takes 15 minutes of taps and phone calls to move your flight. This represents a hybrid of new augmenting the old, relying on a platform built for another age, with the cracks draped over by a new visual design. A key question to ask yourself is this: “If you had to build your company today, knowing how people use technology, what devices make possible, how people (not just millennials) behave and expect from life today and tomorrow, would it resemble anything like what it looks like today?” Would hotel reception desks be large stationary units that host bulky desktop computers? Would your car rental company be located where it is? Would it have 35 makes of vehicle? Would your systems work as they currently do? Would you invest in a retail footprint or best-in-class logistics and websites? Would you have invested so heavily in call centers when millennials prefer social media? Would you keep patient records, or anything else, on paper? Would you need faxes to process orders? Would your data be kept on 10 different servers? Would all your staff have desktop computers, work in cubicles and each have a desk phone? As a generation of CEOs who are now hanging-on are replaced by those who get it and are looking to build a legacy and a future for their companies, vast changes are coming. The one organizational principle to consider is this: “Are we embellishing our old-world thinking and processes with best-in-class technology, or are we building new processes and systems around what is now possible?” It’s easy to be limited in our thinking. If we gave account managers tablets and asked them to do their job with them, we’d assume it would be impossible. They need to create in PowerPoint and make weekly status reports in Excel. We’re used to operating at a task level, but if we consider that it’s their job to manage workflow and convey ideas, then we realize that real-time online dashboards, shared workspaces and cloud-hosted presentations don’t just do the job, but make it several times easier. We’re at “Peak Complexity” — a hybrid of old and new world systems. Slack and email. Downloading endless Java to allow us to do invoicing. Using WhatsApp at conferences and then email in the office. How many file-sharing systems? How many forms of conference-call software? How many more add-ons? If you plan on working for more than a couple more years, if your goal is making a difference, propelling your business to the future, not just an easy retirement, I ask of you one thing: “Think of how new technology and new systems and thinking can transform your company, and work around that.” If you do what comes easy for you, what comes reflexively to you, you’re actually doing a disservice to your company, your shareholders and your employees by leaving them vulnerable to disruption. You’re either retooling to create your future, or you’re just hanging on — I know what I’d rather do.
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As Turkey’s coup creates a new political reality, startups turn east for growth
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Elmira Bayrasli
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Turkey an . For the past year the country has incurred bombings, the rise of extremists, growing authoritarianism and censorship and, this past July 15, an attempted coup on its democratically elected government. Still, the country’s entrepreneurs and investors soldier on. Aytül Erçil, the founder of the visual recognition technology company , said, “It’s business as usual.” Yet while Turkish startups and investors continue to move forward, there is a question of how far they go and in which direction. Turkish entrepreneurs are showing they can “stay calm and carry on.” Turkey’s economy, which has only weakened by 2 percent and whose currency has bounced back, is also proving what London-based economist Timothy Ash called “ .” The same cannot be said of investors from the West, particularly, if ironically, Silicon Valley, where “saving the world” has become a catchphrase. Many have pulled out of upcoming conferences and events to take place in Istanbul this fall. “We’ve had nearly everyone from Silicon Valley cancel their plans to come to Startup Istanbul this October,” says Burak Büyükdemir, founder of the Istanbul-based startup accelerator . eTohum hosts , an annual global demo day and conference that draws entrepreneurs and investors from Africa, Asia, Europe, Latin America and the Middle East. Others from Europe and the U.S., Turkish venture capital investor Numan Numan says, are using Turkey’s many crises to “short change” Turkish startups, presenting term sheets and acquisition offers at reduced valuations. Numan is a partner at the Istanbul-based firm . “Now is the time to support our entrepreneurs — from all sides,” says Büyükdemir. “If we don’t, they will leave. We need to replace the current environment of fear with hope; we need to boost confidence that Turkey is still a good place to launch a startup and a good place to be an entrepreneur.” The Republic of Turkey flag hangs on the side of a building as show of solidarity following a July 15 coup. (DoD Photo by Navy Petty Officer 2nd Class Dominique A. Pineiro) Despite the past year’s turbulence, Turkey remains an attractive place for a number of startup investors. Last week, The Abraaj Group the close of a $526 million fund dedicated exclusively to Turkey. 500 Startups has closed on a $15 million fund dedicated to Turkey, as well. “Investments will continue,” Serkan Ünsal, founder of the market intelligence and research firm , tells me. He notes there are a number of Turkish-based venture capital firms — 212, Revo Capital, DCP and ACT — that have committed to financing Turkish startups. As a result,Ünsal notes, “things in the near term for the Turkish (startup) ecosystem will be fine.” The first test will be what kind of returns and exits these investments yield in 2017. “If they are low, that will cause alarm.” The second test, Ünsal says, is whether investors abroad will follow suit. “Investors from the Middle East and Asia continue to believe in the Turkish market. It’s a question of whether those in Europe and Silicon Valley feel the same,” he says. If they don’t, Turkey’s startup ecosystem will tilt east. An eastern tilt, Ünsal explains, isn’t necessarily bad. “Because investors from this region are used to political uncertainty, they might be more willing to make bigger investments. That, overall, can be a good thing for the Turkish startup ecosystem,” he says. Unpredictability is par for the course in Turkey says, Cem Sertoğlu, a partner with the venture capital firm . “As a young democracy located in a geo-politically charged part of the world, Turkey’s political stability and economic growth is tested from time to time.” Photo courtesy of Flickr/ . Back in March, Joachim Behrendt, an angel investor in Turkey, told me that among the things that will prove Turkey’s startup ecosystem is “internationalization.” “The ecosystem in Turkey, as well as founders, are very much focused on Turkey.” That, he said, is a problem if Turkish startups want to become global players. To solve it, Turkey must attract more people from abroad, as founders and investors, Behrendt said. “I’m worried if and how we can find the investors for the upcoming rounds when we intend to leave the narrow Turkish space. Turkey will continue to develop economically, and business will continue to succeed, but that does not automatically lead to attractive markets for angel investors,” Behrendt noted. “The main challenge for Turkey is managing the country’s perception abroad, especially among potential foreign investors,” said Didem Altop, managing director of . “If recent events lead to massive brain drain, this might undermine local startup ability to access to talent; short-term efforts to encourage successful entrepreneurs to keep reinvesting locally, a critical success factor in creating local jobs and building robust local ecosystems.” The best way to keep the local startup ecosystem thriving, Altop says, “is to keep mentoring and investing in them.” “At the corporate and investors levels, support for entrepreneurship has advanced from nice-to-have social responsibility projects to must-have core competition agendas,” Altop says. The Turkish government and, specifically, the Turkish Small and Medium Enterprise Development Organization (KOSGEB), has signaled its intention to make entrepreneurship a priority. In addition to the numerous funds and grants it awards to entrepreneurs, it plans to back three incubators and research centers in the United States — two in Silicon Valley and this fall. Raising money from abroad will not get easier, says Barbaros Özbugutu, co-founder and CEO of the payment system . “But it was not all that easy before,” he says. He notes that startups will have to focus on making profits, bootstrapping and retaining talent. “I am still positive about the potential of the country,” Özbugutu says. “Now we have to work harder — that’s it.”
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As e-sports’ popularity explodes, betting needs to be regulated
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Aurangzeb Durrani
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E-sports betting has boomed in the last five years, attracting investments from celebrities, investors and entrepreneurs like — , David Stern, has talked about it on many forums. Gambling in e-sports has charmed stakeholders, but it may have created a monster in the gaming industry. As with every growing industry, it’s vital to create checks and balances to avoid corruption. Already, critics are lining up with questions about the credibility of the betting system and its influence on the integrity of e-sports. We have already witnessed some match-fixing cases in the past, which involved betting, and many e-sports organizations — including the game developers — have taken strict actions against such incidents to discourage players from getting involved in this mess. Knowing that the large part of betting involves skins (the in-game items that provide visual upgrades for default looks), Valve took an initiative of increasing the waiting period to execute the transaction for skins after each trade. This not only prevented the manipulation of the marketplace, but also had a trickle-down effect on betting, causing delays in each transaction or trade of an in-game item. The final blow from Valve came when they , clarifying that it had no involvement with any of the betting sites and that these sites exploited the use of the “Steam” trading system by integrating the OpenID API. Valve has also started sending notices to these sites requesting they cease operations through Steam, and said that it will further pursue the matter as necessary. With restrictions implemented by Valve, both CSGOLounge and Dota2Lounge started to cut back on their item betting operations. The community by a couple of the biggest item betting sites. And on August 17, 2016, CSGOLounge and Dota2Lounge and Dota2Lounge announced the closure of virtual-item betting operations for both of the sites.
Since then, many websites have shut down their virtual-item betting services that were associated with Steam. However, money-based betting sites are still up and running. Earlier this month, the U.K. Gambling commission on virtual currencies, e-sports and social gambling, mentioning the possible risks and emergence of further issues for the betting regulation system and player protection. The paper defines the scope of virtual currencies, gambling and betting providers along with imposed regulations. It clearly shows the stance of the U.K. Gambling Commission regarding gambling/betting in e-sports. “In the Commission’s view, the regulation of betting on eSports is no different from any other event upon which bets can be placed.” According to the commission’s discussion paper, betting on e-sports involves risks that need to be managed just like betting in any other sports, including the risk of cheating and match-fixing — along with the threat that people will start gambling excessively. The discussion paper also warns the unlicensed gambling services of possible legal action if they operate without a proper license. And the commission said it had written to more than 100 unlicensed online gambling websites informing them that they should cease offering to British customers facilities for gambling. Some of them ceased offering gambling services when they received the letter. However, a few were the subject of payment-blocking by payment providers and the remainder are still the subject of ongoing enforcement activity. This paper reinforces the mission of the U.K. Gambling Commission to uphold the licensing of gambling services and betting providers. For this purpose, the commission can pursue a range of options, from delivering guidance to prompting criminal proceedings if a gambling service or betting provider continues to operate without a license. It’s obvious that the existence of e-sports gambling and betting sites have played a role in match-fixing. These betting providers also allow the players, sponsors and other stakeholders of a particular match-up or e-sports event to bet against themselves, which obviously creates conflicts of interest. The best example is the iBuyPower CS:GO match-fixing incident, where the team deliberately lost the match to alter the draws of the next-stage matches. Many players have been suspended by Valve, . Not all of the blame for corruption in e-sports should fall on the betting sites. Despite the players can receive, most league gamers aren’t paid enough for their continued efforts. However, in the case of CSGOLounge and Dota2Lounge, the sheer size of these sites and the total volume of bets on competitive matches at all levels simply made it impossible to effectively monitor the operations and activity. The absence of proper monitoring mechanisms allowed people to take advantage of this fact. “As I’ve said many times, I am for e-sports betting that is in line with the laws of the respective lands it takes place and is regulated. As much as CSGOLounge helped CSGO viewership grow it never really achieved that status and it came with its own set of problems,” commented Richard Lewis, e-sports game analyst. The emphasis here is on the regulation of the betting providers and their monitoring. Some companies offer this, like , which provides anti match-fixing services such as its Fraud Detection System, education workshops and intelligence reports to ESL and the ESports Integrity Coalition, as well as e-sports betting products and services to regulated bookmakers worldwide. “Our general position is that skins betting as it exists was and is a dangerous proposition because it is unregulated, with poor KYC and child protection protocols. We believe the betting on eSports is inevitable and growing, and therefore should be provided in a regulated, reliable environment,” said Alex Inglot, a spokesman for SportRadar. “Of course match-fixers use betting operators to generate profits but in our experience, proper monitoring can significantly deter those fixers, while educational workshops for players and participants also have a critical role in preventing match manipulation.” Since the growth of betting and gambling in e-sports in inevitable and it will remain a big factor, the industry needs to make sure it’s done correctly. “Looking to the future, I know many regulated and legal betting companies want to offer their services to the e-sports community. That will ensure that no underage gambling takes place, that the bets are monitored for irregular betting patterns and that people are betting in a responsible fashion,” said Lewis. “There’s a long way to go but I think we will be in a much better place when we leave skins betting behind and see what these companies provide.”
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Cinemapocalypse Now?
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Jon Evans
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Let’s talk box office! Because it’s one of my pet obsessions; I’ve long been curious how the rise of new entertainment tech (Netflix, Amazon, YouTube, Pokémon Go) will impact movies, our oldest and most storied cultural commons. And because I was trawling through Box Office Mojo’s numbers, as you do, and happened to stumble across something which makes me fear for Hollywood as we know it. (Stipulated: that might be no bad thing.) On the one hand, it’s been a great year for Hollywood: Gross revenues are up a from last year. On the other, though, the drumbeats of doom grow ever louder. analyst Hal Vogel: “The theater business has weaker prospects going forward than at any time in the last 30 years … It’s a superhero, mega-blockbuster, tentpole strategy run amuck.” (worth reading in full if you’re interested in movies) goes on to hit one downbeat after another: It’s a looming disaster … a business that feels increasingly irrelevant … That raises questions about whether the business can continue to sustain this many studios … The club of actors and actresses who can open a movie with their name above the title has plunged in recent years … studios have banked increasingly on sequels and spinoffs, with diminishing returns. Can confirm. Do you want to guess how many of 2015’s top-grossing 20 movies to date were not part of a franchise not a family-friendly animated movie? (Which I would argue are all members of a single massive meta-franchise.) Go on, guess. I’ll wait. Or, if you like, go look at BOM’s and count for yourself… Two. A pair, a brace, a couple. ( and .) That is not typical. Run through releases for the last 10 years, and all but of those years saw six or more original movies in the top 20 through August 31; the exception was four in 2011 … which had 16 more in the top 40, as opposed to a mere eight in 2016. In short, the latest numbers back up that article’s claims: Almost hit movies are part of existing franchises nowadays. Blame it on the audience; blame it on the studios; but accept that if you want something new, something fresh, something innovative, something exciting, these days you turn to TV, and you probably stream it. . . . . . (Well, season 1, anyhow). The movies? You go to them to reify your existing fandom, and that’s all. But wait. It gets much, much worse. Far more damning than those numbers, from a studio’s point of view, is this one. More competition for attention means: https://twitter.com/ballmatthew/status/760116049064914945 But wait! There’s good news. box office is way up, led by China. In fact, if you look at the on Box Office Mojo, you’ll find two movies in the top 20 that were basically in the USA — and — plus , which (rightly) flopped in America but was redeemed by its massive Chinese box office. That would have been unheard of as recently as a decade ago; but it’s not at all uncommon these days for movies to gross more money in China than America … and, as a result, for American-made movies to be increasingly targeted at Chinese audiences. Chalk that up as yet another unexpected side effect of tech-driven globalization. An interesting inverse of this is the forthcoming , feature Matt Damon. There’s been outrage over the “whitewashing” of a Chinese movie with Damon, but that the marketing China features Damon as just one of five co-leads, with Andy Lau in the primary role. Perhaps real cultural imperialism is the inability to imagine that Matt Damon is to a Chinese movie what was to : a sop to a foreign audience, made purely in hopes of boosting international ticket sales. That may or may not be the case with — but it’s coming, as China becomes the economic focus of more and more movie making. Which means a focus on movies that play well worldwide; big-budget action movies with already recognizable characters. Which is to say … even more of the same. No wonder is worried. The status quo is fraught, and the trend is only accelerating.
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Fossil sure has a lot of different smartwatches
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Brian Heater
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Fossil’s not messing around here. , the company announced plans to pick up fitness tracking company Misfit for $260 million, and, all the while, it’s been announcing connected wearables under its own name by the boatload. The company’s Q line, home to its various fitness trackers and smartwatches, includes a number of recent additions that were on display this week at IFA in Berlin. The company is leading with the Q Wander and Marshal models, announced in March, two full-on Android Wear devices that are running on Snapdragon’s Wear 2100. The new chip, which uses around a quarter less power than its predecessor (ever important when dealing with such small batteries and always-on displays) and supports LTE-enabled devices, will also be powering Asus’s newly announced ZenWatch 3. The show also sees the addition of four new hybrid smartwatches to the Q line, connected devices that work along the same lines as those offered by Martian. The Crewmaster, Gazer, Nate and Tailor all offer the same basic functionality, in addition to be pretty good-looking analog timepieces. They all do the standard array of fitness tracking, including step, distance and calorie count (and can be paired to various health apps), sleep monitoring and notifications. A physical button can also be used as a sort of remote control for the wearer’s smartphone, making it possible to control music and take a picture with a press. The biggest non-aesthetic selling point is almost certainly battery life — the new models can go up to six months using a standard watch battery. The line starts at $175 and is designed to appeal to a larger audience than the one-size-fits-all approach of companies like Samsung. The Q Crewmaster is big and rugged, the Glazer is a slim and blinged-out affair with rose-gold coloring, the Nate is pretty standard Fossil business-casual design and the Tailor is the most understated of the bunch. The new watches go up for pre-order on the 14th and hit Fossil stores the 26th.
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A circular satnav designed to blend in with a scooter
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Brian Heater
| 2,016
| 9
| 3
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Like Garmin, TomTom’s been getting . No wonder, really — it’s a space that’s seen exponential growth over the past few years, as in-car GPS systems have, at best, flatlined, thanks to the near ubiquity of smartphones. But TomTom’s not giving up the ghost. The company’s been playing around in the space to see what, if anything, might stick. This year at IFA, it debuted a new Wi-Fi-enabled GPS line, : a brightly colored circular satnav system that is, quite frankly, cute as a button. The VIO (see? Even the name is adorable) isn’t a standalone GPS in and of itself — rather, it draws all of that important information from the rider’s phone via Bluetooth. The system displays turn-by-turn directions and will show the face of a connection when a call comes in. The screen also has a built-in speed warning, turning red when the driver goes above the speed limit. The VIO is waterproof and its touchscreen works with gloves. It also features six different snap-on silicon covers designed to match the scooter’s color, because a mod can never be too fashionable.
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At long last, the player piano does multi-room audio
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Brian Heater
| 2,016
| 9
| 3
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We all knew in our hearts that if we just waited long enough, the Internet of Things would come around to self-playing pianos; that surely the cloud would incorporate that last vestige of ol’ timey technology. And now, here at IFA, the least portable of home audio systems has . Or, as Yamaha opens its decidedly hyperbolic press release, “For the first time in its 316-year history, the venerable acoustic piano can now play beyond the four walls of a single room to any room in the home.” That’s right. No longer shall we be hampered by the limitation of acoustics and our stupid, stupid ears. Yamaha has gone all Sonos with its latest player piano. The Enspire, the seventh generation of the company’s Disklavier line of reproducing pianos, has been incorporated into the MusicCast wireless multi-room audio system. Using the company’s iOS or Android app, you can control the piano right there next to Pandora, Spotify, Rhapsody and SiriusXM. The MusicCast system includes a slew of different speakers, including several made by Yamaha, so you, can, say, sit on the deck and listen to the piano do its thing. Granted, you won’t really be able to enjoy the visual novelty of your $27,000 piano playing itself, but you’ll know it’s there… and that should be enough, right? Announced in January, the Enspire has a number of high-tech amenities, at least so far as player pianos go, including built-in access to more than 500 songs. The piano is set to get a firmware upgrade for multi-room functionality later this year.
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Drop partners with Bosch to let users monitor their oven remotely
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Brian Heater
| 2,016
| 9
| 3
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This could actually go a ways toward easing my obsessive dial checking on the way out the door in the morning. Drop, they of connected kitchen scale fame, is partnering with Bosch to to the German appliance maker’s kitchen devices. The deal, announced at IFA in Berlin, starts simply, with the company’s Series 8 oven, bringing remote monitoring of key details like time, temperature and cook settings to existing devices. Things are set to blossom from there, including further oven functionality like pre-heating and integration with other Bosch appliances featuring Home Connect Support. In the future, users will be able to use the Drop app to check the contents of their fridge and do whatever sort of thing people could possible want to do with a connected blender. Sky’s the limit when it comes to milkshakes. Drop’s plans go even further, with vague hints of world (kitchen) domination, “Soon, we hope to be able to control appliances across the kitchen.” Somewhere a Drop executive is laughing maniacally between sips of a kale smoothie.
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The emerging Darwinian approach to analytics and augmented intelligence
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Mark Palmer
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Much has been made about the business implications of recent, rapid advancements in cognitive computing — that is, the possibility of advanced analytics tools to help human knowledge workers glean actionable insight from vast and deep lakes of historical, transactional and machine-generated information. When utilized , cognitive tools help humans identify patterns and surface previously undetected cyberattack patterns on your company, customer buying behavior or predictive signals of catastrophic equipment failure based on readings from sensor-enabled devices. But as your business inevitably becomes more algorithmic, you’re faced with the next problem: Many algorithms, once discovered, have a remarkably short shelf-life. Algorithmic excellence in analytics requires more than just great math; you must also become as agile at killing off weak or vanquished algorithms as a NASCAR pit crew changing worn tires — you need to be replacing them with promising new ones. And you need to do it continuously, quickly, mercilessly and with abandon. In the digital business era, it’s the survival of the fittest algorithms. In a cybersecurity example, after an attack, defense systems are updated to nullify the threat. But cybercriminals constantly invent new algorithms and attack again. To remain secure, firms must evolve the algorithms just as quickly as the attackers. Indeed, on Wall Street, trading algorithms have been found to be profitable for just six short weeks. After a month and a half, at most, competitors reverse-engineer your math and counter-attack. For example, in cybersecurity and fraud detection, algorithmic efficacy is what separates the wheat from the chaff. It is well known that the infamous Target hack was actually detected by Target’s systems; the problem was that the 200-strong security monitoring team didn’t have algorithms that could identify the real hacking events from innocuous errors — it was simply too much information. The most advanced field in algorithmic fraud detection is financial services, where the stakes are highest; one firm, Knight Capital, lost more than $440 million in just 40 minutes in 2013. Since then, algorithmic innovation has only accelerated. , one of the largest electronic stock agency dealers in the United States, whittles down more than 500 million events a day to the few hundred that matter. The key is to build a system to easily gather and score the analytics that reduce the noise of streaming data. As , it can take weeks and months to invent and refine algorithms that effectively identify which problems to attack. Once an organization has a set of strategies that work, they can run different strategies on different days depending on conditions, or invent new strategies based on old scenarios. Strategies can be implemented entirely from scratch, as you learn more, and as systems change and introduce new patterns of failure. Financial markets can only be as safe as the algorithms that monitor them, and those algorithms need to constantly get smarter. Another area of rapid algorithmic evolution is predictive maintenance. Now that the industrial Internet of Things provides streaming sensor readings from most equipment, it’s critical to immediately analyze those readings. That analysis predicts when a failure might occur based on algorithms that “see” the first signs of failure beginning to appear. At a large oil and gas company, our data scientists worked for more than a year to define and refine the right set of signals that are saving the firm tens of millions of dollars in lost oil production and down time. Within that six months, hundreds of algorithms were created, tested and retested to boil down to the most effective ones, and more are under research. It’s a constant evolution of the intelligence of algorithmic systems. Fortunately, we humans have invented tools that help quicken the evolution of algorithms from potentially eons to hours or minutes. These tools allow algorithms to evolve at warp speed, by augmenting the intuition and experience of knowledge workers to help them discover new algorithms, rapidly improve them, pre-flight them and deploy them in hours or days, not months or years. Leading data-driven companies constantly think about making their algorithms stronger. By promoting a hyper-fast culture of the survival of the fittest algorithms, they will ensure that today’s algorithms will be smarter tomorrow, and drive smarter business decisions for years to come.
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