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WTF is crowdfunding?
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Khaled "Tito" Hamze
| 2,016
| 9
| 4
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a lightly inebriated jaguar by its tail without hitting half a dozen crowdfunding campaigns these days. Looking at some campaigns, it seems like it could be the ultimate get rich quick scheme: you dream up a harebrained idea, create a pretty video and BOOM. Make it rain. Except running a successful Kickstarter or Indiegogo campaign is a lot more complicated than that. In this video, we take a closer look at some of the common pitfalls. Creating a campaign is only part of the battle – pressing the big red “go live” button is the culmination of a lot of work, but what not a lot of people realize, is that creating the campaign is only the start of a long process. In a way, crowdfunding campaigns are mini-startups in their own right. Crowdfunding can be scary for startups. Instead of operating in the relative comfort blanket of being in “stealth” mode, you’ve shown your hand to the entire world. Your customers know what you’re planning to do, which limits how agile you’re able to be at that point. Your competitors will definitely be following the campaign carefully. Hell, they’ll often back your campaign with a single dollar, to get access to the backer-only updates further down the line. There’s a definite art to it. You have to figure out a business model, including who your customers are, why they might want to back your campaign and how you are going to reach them. You have to figure out how you’re going to design, iterate and really sell your project. The crowdfunding page itself is a pretty big project, especially if you want to create a video that really wakes people’s imaginations. And finally, once the excitement of the campaign itself dies down, it’s time to deliver on your promises. At that point, you’re hoping that all the math you did up front turns out to be correct. There is no shortage of crowdfunding campaigns that end up shipping $50 backer rewards that cost the company $60 to make. We looked at hundreds of crowdfunding campaigns and, in the video above, highlighted some of the pitfalls that we see many startups make. But don’t worry; we won’t spoil it all for you. There are still plenty of mistakes left that you can make all by yourself. Hopefully, it’ll get you thinking in the right direction to make your crowdfunding a success. So that’s a little bit about crowdfunding. If you want to know how to run a successful campaign, let TC teach you in the video below. Good luck!
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Ben Dickson
| 2,016
| 7
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General Catalyst’s Niko Bonatsos on why timing and empathy are key to founder success
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Jasper Kuria
| 2,016
| 9
| 4
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If I had to pick one, I’d timing. But again, it could be explained as foresight or genius of the founder to launch the startup at a great moment in time. The most successful companies have a confluence of factors aligning to work in their favor. Take Facebook, for example. Mark Zuckerberg founded it at a time when everyone was getting online and broadband was becoming pervasive. More people had camera phones, were taking pictures and creating lots of user generated content, making the platform more engaging—by the way, this was the case for Instagram as well (smartphones had high quality cameras and people enjoyed sharing their pics on FB). If you are swept by a rising tide, you have no option but to swim up! In contrast, some really talented and hardworking founders just happen to work on the wrong things and don’t attain the same level of success. Some even tried Zuck’s idea but were too early. It often isn’t their fault. The timing just wasn’t right. I was a Fulbright scholar and startup founder at Stanford. When I realized my startup was not working I just had month to decide what I wanted to do next, otherwise I’d have to leave the country (would have lost my status post-graduation). While being a student entrepreneur I had met a bunch of VCs and got inspired by their exposure to so many talented founders and their understanding of a ton of business sectors. I have always been obsessed with feeding my intellectual curiosity and thought that VC would be a good personal fit for me. Fortunately, I got introduced to General Catalyst via a mutual friend from Stanford as they were just opening an office in Silicon Valley. I was truly intrigued by the firm’s unique ability to partner with founders building category-defining companies. Also, I found the people I met genuinely nice. After GC made me a job offer, I quickly accepted. It’s been a tremendously fun, exciting and successful experience so far. There was definitely that same timing element I talked about earlier, being the right person at the right time for the right opportunity. Sure. To clarify my thesis, it is products that seem stupid or annoying . In addition, there should be a small group of early adopters who really care about the product. This shows that the product has long term potential and the fact that it is controversial makes people talk about it a lot. Early startups don’t have the resources to do marketing and PR and so having a controversial product gets you free marketing. Eventually, though, the product must become mainstream for the company to be successful. Thanks for the compliment. It is still early days and I have a long way to go but I’ve been incredibly fortunate to work with some amazing founders. I think the founders do all the hard work and deserve all the credit. VCs just smile! I’ve also been fortunate to get mentorship from the talented and experienced VCs at General Catalyst and other firms. I am truly enjoying what I am doing now. Working with founders is lots of fun so I don’t see myself doing anything different in the near term. But if I were to do a startup today, it would probably be in Genomics or Artificial Intelligence. Both of these fields hold promise and I believe there are great opportunities. As an engineer, I would want to work on coming up with new, more efficient AI algorithms. The first is founders who don’t know their numbers. I am talking about the post early stage company that has launched a product and has users but the founders either don’t know their metrics or are trying to hide something. The second, also related, would be the founders not having empathy for and understanding their users. As a founder you need to understand the key reasons that are driving adoption of your product, in great depth. Lastly, I want to invest in people who are learning animals. This is a tough one to assess in the thirty minutes to an hour I have with a founder but it is absolutely critical. I don’t care if you are expert now but I do expect that you will be one in three years. Learning animals care a lot more about learning instead of being right. Do they treat every decision as an opportunity to learn? Do they think from first principles? If you put them in front of an industry expert, can they get him/her impressed with their learnings and logic about how things will play out in that sector? Have insane levels of empathy for your users or customer and really try to understand their pain points. Only by doing so will you be able to create something valuable and compelling for them, and as a result you will be successful.
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A former Rothenberg employee is now suing over breach of contract and more than $100K in Amex charges
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Connie Loizos
| 2,016
| 9
| 4
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David Haase, a former employee of the beleaguered San Francisco-based firm Rothenberg Ventures Management Co. (RVM), is suing the firm and its founder, Mike Rothenberg, saying he was asked to run up more than $100,000 in business expenses on an American Express account at the direction of Rothenberg and never repaid. In his lawsuit, filed last week in San Francisco, Haase says he joined Rothenberg Ventures in April of this year and tasked with “providing various services of a Chief Financial Office for RVM” while also doing work on behalf of the company’s affiliated businesses, including its four-year-old venture arm, , and its virtual reality production house, , founded in May 2015. Haase says in his suit that in May, he opened the account with Rothenberg’s approval “for the purpose of acting as a credit line for the day-to-day expenses incurred by RVM.” These included business expenses charged by Rothenberg’s “numerous administrative assistants at his direct request.” Part of those expenses included payroll, according to our sources. As of the suit’s filing, Haase’s account was overdue in the amount of $109,352.20 and, according to his suit, Rothenberg has “wrongfully and capriciously refused to pay” that debt, leaving Haase to deal with the charge, as well as the accruing interest on the amount. The suit says that Rothenberg “disavowed any responsibility on the part of RVM” despite having previously paid expenses charged to the card to the tune of $140,000. Haase’s charges don’t end there. In a claim that may be of even greater interest to those following the case, Haase also says that Rothenberg co-mingled the accounts of Rothenberg Ventures and River Studios. Whether this could prove problematic for Rothenberg isn’t yet clear; even LPs seem confused about how much of River Studios they own and how distinctly it was managed from Rothenberg Ventures. But Haase’s suit goes so far as to allege Rothenberg of treating “such accounts as personal accounts, to such an extent that such business entities were in fact his alter ego.” We’ve reached out to Rothenberg, Haase, and Haase’s attorney, Patrick Terry of the law practice , for comment. None has responded thus far. While one might wonder why Haase would open an American Express card in his own name on behalf of RVM — particularly given that he’d joined the firm just one month earlier — sources suggest Haase has long known Rothenberg through mutual friends at Stanford, where Rothenberg was nabbing his undergraduate and M.S. degrees while Haase was working toward his M.B.A. (Rothenberg left Stanford in 2007; Haase graduated in 2008.) Haase, who left the firm this summer, is far from alone in moving on. As we reported in mid-August, Rothenberg Ventures has experienced a in recent months and is answering questions from the SEC after a lower-level employee alerted the agency to what this person reported as wire fraud and breach of fiduciary duty. A source says the employee was subsequently fired and is now suing the firm for retaliation. All SEC investigations are conducted privately. An inquiry does not mean that the agency will file a case in federal court or bring an administrative action. Former employees say the firm’s biggest asset — Rothenberg — also became its biggest handicap over time as he spent lavishly on marketing the firm to prospective investors. Among the firm’s pricey outlays: buying tickets to the Golden Globes, actor Chace Crawford’s 30th birthday party in West Hollywood, and spending unsparingly to a for Coldplay. The firm also paid handsomely for season tickets to Golden State Warriors games, as well as converted a 1930’s bungalow in Austin into a during this year’s South by Southwest Festival. According to , Rothenberg Ventures raised roughly $47 million across four funds and employed roughly 60 people at its peak, some of whom were working for the firm on a contract basis. Despite RVM’s aggressive spending, including on River Studios, Rothenberg Ventures appears to have some valuable stakes, including an early position in the point-of-sale firm Revel Systems, which is in talks with IBM about an acquisition. (We understand this deal will close unless Rothenberg’s involvement derails it.) Haas is seeking full restitution, as well as an injunction to prohibit RVM from “continuing to engage in the unfair business practices” outlined in his suit.
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Technology is finally changing the apartment rental experience
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Omri Barzilay
| 2,016
| 9
| 4
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The real estate rental market is a highly localized, relationship-based industry driven largely by individuals living and working in their own cities, causing many to acknowledge the longstanding difficulty of streamlining disruption to this market. In recent years, however, that hasn’t stopped a multitude of innovators from seeking novel ways to improve the process’s efficiency. If early innovators like and primarily entailed bringing real estate data online, newer innovators harness data not only to improve analytics for landlords, but also to improve efficiency for apartment seekers. This becomes more important as New York City, for instance, begins to see the start of an expected surge in rental apartments — more than 38,000 market-rate rental apartments, mostly in Brooklyn and Queens, are expected to be completed over the next three years. With the advent of new technologies, the market has begun to shift nearly every aspect of the rental process, from leasing applications to communications with landlords and agents to payment processing. “You really don’t have to look back more than five years and the only real option for renters searching for an apartment was Craigslist,” said Matt Reilly, Director of Growth at “However, the Craigslist experience just doesn’t cut it with today’s digital-savvy renter. More than 90 percent of people looking for their next living situation are searching online first and more than 60 percent are looking on mobile.” As rentals become commoditized and fewer people are satisfied being tied down to static assets, a number of players have sought to empower potential renters in new ways. The first, and perhaps most obvious, is enabling rental without a broker. New York-based real estate startup , for example, launched in 2015 to serve as a platform that cuts out the middleman and seamlessly connects renters with apartments. What this means in practice is that by aggregating real-time rental inventory directly from property managers and landlords, rather than through third-parties, the app enables renters not only to browse and filter listings as could be done on other platforms, but also to schedule showings at the tap of a button using an in-app calendar feature. , an earlier-stage New York startup, also saves time by automatically scheduling multiple apartment visits to fit its users’ schedules. “Just as Uber and Seamless enabled millennials to seek transportation and food in less manual, more automated ways, Oliver empowers renters by decreasing the time spent contacting third-parties to ensure that the apartment door will be open whenever is most convenient for them,” said Zachary Katz, Oliver’s Chief Strategy Officer. “Our vision is that in a few years, as the on-demand economy grows, no one will accept that viewing apartments requires calling and emailing landlords, or otherwise paying a hefty broker’s fee. To frame the terms in the classical economics, platforms like Oliver will be uniquely positioned to capture value from the inefficient gap currently wedged between supply and demand.” Others have invested resources in improving the process for brokers themselves. , a residential leasing and marketing platform, streamlines the leasing process using cloud-based software, which enables listings to be shared, leads to be tracked and clients to be managed in one easy-to-use platform. Earlier this year, , a website that optimizes how brokers can proactively approach potential and current clients with appropriate, targeted listings, became Zillow’s fifth consumer-brand acquisition, with the shared goal of using data analytics to bring transparency to New York’s real estate landscape for brokers. As agents spend less time at their desk and more time closing on rental deals via mobile applications, has also focused on automating more redundant tasks by allowing agents to upload important documents, negotiate transactions and get bank-approved e-signatures in a single platform. Others are playing matchmaker in different ways: by connecting potential roommates to each other. , which raised $4 million in seed funding led by and already boasts more than 375,000 users in North America, as well as smaller market players like , make it simpler for renters to find and connect with compatible roommates, whether renting an extra room in an apartment or searching together for an apartment. Other startups are seeking to disrupt the traditional corporate housing and long-term stay marketplace. Startups like , an online marketplace that removes the hassle from finding furnished housing, aggregates not just long-term but also short-term inventory, geared toward individuals who might previously have focused their searches on more standard month-to-month property managers. In doing so, they are filling the grey area between Craigslist and Airbnb, serving the needs of individuals looking for something more permanent than a vacation rental yet more transient than a typically longer lease commitment. Disruption hasn’t been limited to the search process. Even payment solutions and mobile are being integrated into newer platforms by companies like RadPad, an end-to-end photo-based rental marketplace aiming to become an A-to-Z platform for renters and landlords alike. similarly reduces the hassle of paper checks and improves the rent payment and collection process by serving as a platform for renters to pay their leases directly to their property managers by credit card, debit card or e-check. As lead-generation platforms begin to focus more on empowering with complex data analytics those involved in the rental process, an increasing number of startups, both small and large, are empowering renters with more flexible co-living options, capitalizing on the trends toward both optimized roommate matching and pre-furnished apartments. , the international co-working startup valued upwards of $16 billion as of March 2016, announced in January that it has begun to convert some of its spaces into fully furnished, flexible apartments. “ replicates the security and comfort of a suburban neighborhood, but with the energy and vigor of a major city,” said the company in a statement, highlighting the company’s strategy to provide residents with private and semi-private housing accommodations alongside community events like fitness classes and potluck dinners, as well as a digital social network. , another co-living startup, also offers what it calls “flexible, community-driven housing,” and, in doing so, is revolutionizing the way apartment rental is traditionally done. As more user-friendly startups begin to steal market share from Craigslist, the value of disruptive innovation that reduces rental-market opacity has become ever clearer, and speaks to the expectations that renters, agents and landlords now have around enabling the rental process, primarily offline in years past, with new technologies. Even more incremental changes, from video walk-throughs to new ways of slicing community rental data, have begun to play significant roles as startups cram into the real estate market, hoping for even a small slice of a huge pie.
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Understanding the economy of the crowd
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Philip Soffer
| 2,016
| 9
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When you think about crowdsourced work, you probably think about and, maybe, Uber. On the one hand, an anonymous platform where people feel like mechanical parts. On the other hand, a face-to-face platform where people are rapidly obsolescing and doomed to be . I call this the “Turk Myth,” that crowdsourced work is only done by people because we haven’t built good enough robots yet. The Turk Myth is unfortunate because it creates a fatalistic spiral: If people think of crowdsourced work as exclusively low-skill, they demand less of crowdsourcing platforms and the workers they employ; this in turn leads to an underinvestment in the training and management of those workers. Thus, the Turk Myth becomes the commodified reality for many. Like many myths, this one has a basis in fact. There’s a lot of clickwork in the gig economy that’s neither well-paid nor fulfilling. But there’s also a crowd economy that rewards human agency and creativity. If you’re thinking of using crowdsourcing to move your business forward, make sure the Turk Myth doesn’t “crowd out” the more complex (and more hopeful) reality. You can bend the curve toward more cognitively and financially rewarding work, and get great results in the bargain. Here are three things to think about if you want to maximize your return on crowd intelligence. If, as the Turk Myth suggests, people are anonymous parts performing low-skill tasks, it doesn’t pay to spend time helping them improve; as was said of convict labor once, “ .” But just as with other kinds of work, in crowdwork training, pride and positive reinforcement improve results. Because crowdwork is more ad hoc and distributed than traditional labor, much of the management happens through a software platform, but it’s still management, and it demands a specific set of skills and practices. Most importantly, a continuous feedback loop connecting the end-customer with the crowdworker fosters both quality and job satisfaction. In skilled work such as graphic design, market research and , the customer is the ultimate judge of quality, so your input matters. Make sure you communicate expectations directly to the workers, and engage with them directly when necessary. A crowdsourcing platform should relieve you of the burden of convening the crowd, parceling out their tasks and assigning work efficiently, but if it makes the workers invisible, you can’t solicit additional insights that create value for you. In software testing, for example, crowdtesters who discover defects in the software can also collaborate with you to help diagnose them. Crowdworkers take pride in their work, and crowd platforms that capitalize on this encourage collaboration. Crowdworkers need to earn money. They also seek projects that are interesting and advance their careers, and prefer conditions that are fair and transparent. If you’re employing a crowd workforce, this interplay of financial and personal incentives determines whether you’re getting the best possible work for your money. You’ll get the best results if you understand the crowd economy. Passengers detest Uber’s , but it transparently reinforces an economic lesson: Financial incentives matter. When the number of people who can perform a task is limited by geography, skill requirements or interest, a crowd platform must create liquidity, typically by changing the incentives. If you engage with a crowdwork platform, make sure you understand how these incentives work — both for the people doing the work and the people hiring them. A crowdsourcing platform that doesn’t flexibly create incentives for people to meet demand is unlikely to command the loyalty of the best workers, and headline numbers of workers at your disposal (1,000,000!) are meaningless if the task requires skill and the incentives are not effective. Challenging work attracts better workers. While Turk-work has become synonymous with micro-tasking of dull and repetitive tasks, Turk-workers usually engage in other forms of crowdwork that are more interesting. Recent on crowdwork in the U.K. found while 68 percent of crowdworkers reported performing “clickwork” or short office tasks, 60 percent also reported performing “creative or IT work.” Our survey of our most prolific testers found that almost half have full-time tech industry jobs. Motivated by a desire to sharpen their skills and the challenge of discovering interesting bugs in new software, these professionals typically demand more pay for the lower-skill work of performing scripted tests. Increasingly, crowdworkers are organizing online to highlight unfair practices and direct their peers toward crowdwork platforms that treat them better. Because word travels fast, greater transparency in incentives and fairness in work practices also tend to attract motivated workers. Germany’s largest union, IG Metall, runs a where crowdworkers rate platforms on their pay and fairness, and are . Perhaps counterintuitively — at least for American managers skeptical of unions — the movement toward greater openness in crowdsourcing practices benefits potential employers as much as it benefits crowdworkers. By encouraging skilled workers to enter the crowd workforce, crowdworkers’ organization increases the range of jobs that can be crowdsourced, thus providing more choice and liquidity for prospective employers. That’s good news, because crowdsourcing’s primary benefits don’t come from cost savings. Some businesses can micro-task routine work to save money, but most can’t. More commonly, organizations employing crowd workers cite like flexibility, workforce diversity, speed and the ability to solicit people’s opinions. For example, by using a global testing workforce, a development team in Canada can see whether their app works properly in Spain, Vietnam or Egypt. By using a demographically targeted crowd for fast market analysis, a fashion designer can test patterns with thousands of customers before buying cloth. And by sharing prototypes with novice users, crowdsourced UX research helps interaction designers avoid confirmation bias. Crowdsourcing also can increase velocity by parallelizing work, so a sales team researching prospects can do it in hours rather than weeks. In none of these cases is cost the primary benefit, nor is in-house labor necessarily being replaced by the crowd. Rather, the crowdworkers’ judgement enables businesses to take on new opportunities, mitigate risks and move faster. The greatest crowdsourcing opportunities arise when you couldn’t get the same results at any price without a crowd. When I started working in brand communities in 2005, online community management was barely recognized as a discipline; now it has a standard set of skills and practices. Despite a buzzwordy obsession with ninjas and gurus, we also see this happening in social-media management. The same thing will happen with crowdwork management. Managing crowdworkers effectively requires a combination of empathy, technology and business sense. If your business — or your crowdwork platform — thinks of them as purely interchangeable and their labor as a commodity, you’ll get commodity results. That’s the danger of the Mechanical Turk myth: It’s a mutual race to the bottom for employers and crowdworkers. We can all do better. And we should.
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Samsung’s smart belt is now on Kickstarter, and it’s still called WELT
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Brian Heater
| 2,016
| 9
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In Berlin, it means “world.” There’s probably something to be read into that, but I’ve been here covering IFA for several days now and quite frankly, I’m coming up short. The gadget and now it’s kind of, sort of ready for prime-time. Along with its appearance on the show floor, the product has with an estimated delivery date of January. Granted, it’s not the runaway success of , but it’s well on its way to meeting its goal with more than a month left to go. The product was created by a spinoff of Samsung, a small hardware startup committed to integrating fitness tracking into a belt. It’s not the first company to do so, but it looks to be the strongest implementation thus far. The question, of course (once you get over the whole “what’s up with the WELT name” bit) is why, in a world of fitness tracking everything, would anyone require that sort of integration in the object whose primary function is keeping your pants from falling down? Honestly, I’m not sure. But 230 or so backers are feeling it. What the belt does bring to the proverbial table verses other form factors is the ability to track your waist-size. And as I walked the halls of IFA today looking at scales that measure body fat and the like, it’s clear that we’re nearing a point where the information offered up by such devices can serve to either motivate or bum the wearer out. It all feeds back to the ultimate issue with many of these wearables – sure they can serve of data to their hearts’ content, but how do they get us to profoundly alter our habits?
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The thing that makes IFA a hard show to cover is also its best feature
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Brian Heater
| 2,016
| 9
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Today concludes my fourth IFA. Or maybe my fifth. These tech conferences tend to blend together after a while. The first time I attended the show, I hadn’t really heard of the thing, to be honest. Even this year, a number of my colleagues still hadn’t. In the U.S., IFA hasn’t risen to the ranks of a CES or even an MWC, somehow. It has, however, become of show of increasing international import. The first year I attended, Samsung launched the Galaxy Note, and in doing so caused the industry to completely reconsider screen size, a game changer in the smartphone space. That phone was 5.3 inches. It seemed unwieldy and excessive and destined to become a niche device. At this year’s show, ZTE launched a 5.2 inch device. It named the thing “Mini.” IFA’s success as a truly international show can be linked, in part, to timing. The late-August/early-September date makes the show an ideal forum for holiday-focused launches, both in Europe and internationally. And while it hasn’t yet matched CES in terms of sheer number of high profile product launches, a number of big companies happily used IFA to announce key products, like Samsung’s Gear S2, Lenovo’s Yoga Book and a pair of new Xperia handsets from Sony. Timing isn’t everything. While IFA lacks Stateside name recognition today, attendance numbers are huge. Earlier this year, CES boasted record-breaking attendance of 170,000. Last year, IFA’s visitors numbered 245,000, by the company’s count. It’s a big show – with one key feature that differentiates it from events like CES: As a cab driver told me last night, as we approached the historic Victory column monument flanked on all sides by promotional flags, “I don’t understand why they advertise. Everyone in the city knows about IFA.” From a professional perspective, IFA and other big events are ultimately something I’ve come to dread as much as I enjoy them. At IFA, Friday is traditionally press and industry day on the show floor. Saturday, the floodgates open. Suddenly the halls are clogged with families and individuals gawking at the spectacle. IFA landmarks like LG’s “display tunnel,” 216 55-inch curved screens that alternate between blue whales and the cosmos, becomes an obstacle standing between you and the next story. It’s a similar sort of anxiety as the kind that washes over me in the halls of the San Diego Convention Center during Comic Con, which claimed 130,000 in attendance people last year, albeit without all of the walkway-clogging cosplay. But the claustrophobically-packed halls are also a reminder that most people aren’t here for their health or out of obligation. They stand in long lines and pay a fee of €17 per person, per day because technology is exciting and sexy. Technology is unifying, it’s popular culture. It’s a common language among visitors from nearly every part of the globe. They want to look at every phone and touch every tablet and try out that crazy new VR bungee jumping demo at Samsung’s booth. You don’t really get that at a show like CES, where we’re all there as professionals. It’s something I’m going to try to do be more mindful of, the next time I feel the anxiety that comes with business travel and conference-level work loads ahead of the next big show. Until then, however, I’ve got, like, five more stories to write.
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A wristband and your finger can replace your phone, but you still need a phone to use it
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Brian Heater
| 2,016
| 9
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The most exciting part of Samsung’s IFA booth is also its most understated. Somewhere toward the middle of the huge, brightly lit hall are a series of tables showing off non-Samsung products, a perfect microcosm of the ways in which large electronics corporations are reaching beyond their own walls for inspiration. Not that these companies don’t have any connection to the technology giant. Many are run by former Samsung employees, spinoffs of sorts from the phone manufacturer. Among the most intriguing is SGNL, a product from two-year-old startup Innomdle Lab that has already earned more than six times its goal after . The product is a strap designed to connect to a watch, smart or otherwise. It uses body conduction, sending a vibration from your wrist, through your hand and finger, and ultimately into your ear. You just hold your finger up, secret service-style, and you can take phone calls. I’m not 100-percent sure what the practical application is for such a thing, but I completely understand why 2,000 backers (and counting) went slightly gaga upon watching the video. And yeah, it works. And there’s a microphone built into the wristband, to boot, so the person on the other side can hear the conversation even with the phone in your pocket. The sound isn’t exactly clear — as anyone who’s tried a headset with similar technology can tell you, it just doesn’t come across as clearly as a devoted speaker. It might have been due in part to the crowded show floor, but my demo sounded roughly as clear as one of those Winston Churchill radio addresses from WW II. We shall fight on the beaches, and all that. Interesting, yes. Necessary, no. But Kickstarter is rarely about necessity. The project still has more than a full month left on the crowdfunding site if you’d like to back it. It’s expected to start shipping to backers in February.
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What cities need to know about drones
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Brooks Rainwater
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| 9
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As drones increasingly fly through our cities in the coming years — delivering our latest order from Amazon or other on-demand retailers — the regulation of our airspace and the environment in which we co-exist with flying robots becomes more and more present and real. The conceptual shift that we have gone through — even with the term “drone” — is quite dramatic. Mentioning drones in conversation two years ago might have prompted thoughts of warfare, human rights or national defense strategy. Now commerce is top of mind. In fact, when we talk about drones today, the average person most likely thinks about how retailers could deliver goods to them, whether another hobbyist has been flying too close to airports or even the or even how local governments can use them to monitor infrastructure. The way we think of drones and the things we use them for is changing When it comes to drone usage and operation, there is a critical role for cities — both in relation to community residents using these tools and through the regulation of the space we all enjoy and use every day. The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) predicts there will be in use by 2020, so it is not a matter of cities will have to deal with them, but From the government standpoint, there are a range of areas where drones can be incredibly useful. This technology has the potential to replace potentially hazardous operations like fire-fighting or infrastructure inspection, help find missing persons, allow construction crews to monitor sites for safety hazards and empower hospitals to transport urgently needed medication to remote locations. Additionally, many retailers, like 7-Eleven and Walmart, are exploring the use of drone technology for . The increased accessibility and popularity of drones has everyone — ranging from realtors to inspectors to photographers and others — clambering to use them to better analyze the world around them. Drones have the potential to revolutionize many industries, particularly as their technology advances. However, drones also present challenges for cities. They raise safety, privacy, nuisance and trespassing concerns, all of which are compounded by the lack of accountability associated with most drone operations. There are safety issues that must be faced, for instance, when operators fly drones over people or near planes. Additionally, city residents often have privacy concerns when any small device hovering nearby could potentially be taking photos or video. The fear of a drone trespassing into previously non-shared space is heightened when these vehicles can be operated remotely. This anonymity makes it increasingly difficult to identify operators who fly recklessly, harass individuals or cause injury to persons or property. serves as a primer on drones for local officials, providing insight on the recently released FAA rules relating to drone operation, as well as offering suggestions for how local governments can craft their own drone ordinances to encourage innovation while also protecting their cities. The helpful thing about the FAA is that it moved to establish categories for operators, guidelines for safe operations and a minimum threshold for FAA investigations. This allows local and state authorities to still have an opportunity to legislate on appropriate operating space and behavior, as well as enforcement. Our new report makes recommendations for how cities can focus their energy when enacting their own drone-related ordinances. The power of land use and zoning helps cities designate when and where drones may take off, land and operate, as well as any operational limitations or criteria. Additionally, cities can punish operators for operating an unmanned aircraft in a manner that recklessly endangers persons or property while considering appropriate enforcement infrastructure. Both commercial and recreational drone operation can powerfully benefit cities, and rather than ban them outright, cities have an opportunity to consider how this new technology might serve or enhance city operations and residents. Additionally, the startup that the new regulatory environment should facilitate could be a boon to economic development efforts in cities. With the rules of the road now established, businesses that want to use drones as auxiliary business tools or start whole new services will be well-served moving forward. The lines between convenience and privacy continue to be blurred across so many emerging disruptive technologies — and frankly, the idea of regulating airspace that is so (physically) close to people is something that is rightfully concerning, because people don’t want drones dropping on their heads or looking in their windows. When the previously unimaginable becomes the new normal, it is critical to have our mayors and other local leaders out in front to address these abrupt transitions. At the end of the day, certain aspects of drone regulation might look different in different places depending upon the type of activity taking place. It is necessary for city officials to address the spheres of drone activity that will most impact our cities, from private to commercial and public use. As drones whirring overhead become mainstream, we will become more familiar and comfortable with them as tools, rather than threats. The enhancement and development of this technology presents a number of opportunities for cities. The challenge for local elected officials will be crafting policy and regulations that enable this drone technology to serve their cities in the best, most appropriate ways, embracing innovation while still considering safety. Cities play such a vital role in the ongoing autonomization of society. Within this broader shift toward autonomous vehicles, robots in the workplace and broader community life, and, of course drones, city leaders share the primary goal to protect their community members while promoting innovation and economic growth. As drones fly through the sky and land on lawns, rooftops and more, cities will be the critical connector that brings together this future we are all flying toward.
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And this is why VR headsets are headsets and not sunglasses
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Brian Heater
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They fall off. A lot. And nothing rips you from the escapism of VR faster than having a pair of glasses constantly fall off the bridge of your nose. No sudden movements and you should be fine. I’m not saying never to the idea. I can certainly see a time in the not too distant future when such devices might become practical. For now, however, there are too many wires tethering you to reality, too much weight frontloading glasses. I don’t know, maybe you can get one of those dorky sunglass bands people used to wear in the 1980s. For now it all seems an inelegant solution to an unnecessary problem. For its part, unfortunately named VR startup Dlodlo (really?) is already talking about future-generation products — ones that are slimmer, wireless. When that happens, we can definitely revisit this conversation. For the time being, however, there’s little more appeal to the project than the one sentence pitch, “hey kids, VR sunglasses!” I tried the glasses on. They didn’t offer much over your standard headset — in fact, they were really less immersive than the majority of VR products out there. But they make you look more like “Rowdy” Roddy Piper in than the Rift or Vive, and, ultimately, that has to count for something.
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We become the people in ‘WALL-E’ one VR massage chair at a time
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Brian Heater
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Little by little, next thing you know you’re sitting in a massage chair, wearing an Oculus Rift, acting like you’re not in the middle of a crowded German trade-show floor. You can let yourself go for a few seconds at a time, and for a few seconds at a time, it kind of starts to work. You vacillate between closing your eyes and keeping them open for the full effect. You know the demo is only a few minutes long, so you want to cram as much experience into your time as possible. There are, after all, only two chairs and a gaggle of curious show-goers queuing up in front of you at the Medisana booth, staring, but patiently waiting their turn. It’s pretty pleasant, really, if you can get over the self-consciousness and façade of it all. Once you’ve calibrated the eye piece and chosen between genders of masseuses (of course), s/he greets you on a secluded French beach. Occasionally a seagull flies into frame. The white noise of the sea washes out the convention center din. S/he walks behind you, though you couldn’t check if you wanted to — you’re seated in one of those big, expensive Sharper Image-style massage chairs. And besides, you’re straining yourself for calm. S/he tells you to breathe. Breathe. In and out. How much stress have you had in your life that you’ve completely forgotten to breathe? Life is strange. Not necessary VR-in-a-massage-chair-on-a-German-convention-center-floor strange, but strange nonetheless. And for a moment, as you sink into the chair as s/he coaches you to, you think, maybe those people in had it right. Maybe sucking down goo in one of those Matrix pods wouldn’t be so bad, after all. Maybe. Then the foot rest lowers and the screen goes all white. Show’s over. Back to work.
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As long as robots look adorable and make us coffee, we’ll be eating out of their robotic hands
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Brian Heater
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It doesn’t take much. For all the bluster around the conversation about Skynet and robotic overlords, we still melt when a diminutive robot flashes the slightest hint of humanity through a small set of blinking eyes — and then does something nice for us. Sony’s Xperia Agent robotic assistant captured the tech world’s attention when it debuted at MWC in Barcelona back in February. But it wasn’t until it showed us how good it was at brewing a half decent cup of coffee that it really won us over. It’s a long show, I’m tired and still jet-lagged. It doesn’t take much, honestly. And the cute factor certainly doesn’t hurt. The robot’s got a spherical head with a small camera and two blinking vertical eyes that follow you around as it helps you get things done, Siri/Alexa-style. It will help you schedule appoints and the like, and when hooked up to a compatible Nescafe machine, it will be more than happy to brew you a hot cup of java. Not happy. That’s not the right word. Stop humanizing the robot, Brian. Tell the assistant you want a coffee and it’ll ask you what strength (dark, medium or mild), or if you just want the usual. And then the coffee starts. And that’s pretty much it. Like I said, it doesn’t take much. The robot is still a proof of concept at this point, but I got my cup of coffee this morning, and really, isn’t that the most important thing?
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If nothing else, StikBox is a good way to hide the fact that you own a selfie stick
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Brian Heater
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What if I told you that you could hide the shame of carrying around a selfie stick, protect your smartphone have a free kickstand all in one go? How much would you pay for such a luxury? $10,000? $100,000? $8 million? Try around $40, American. The StikBox is actually a pretty solid idea that seems to work fairly well. It’s a plastic iPhone/Samsung handset that features a slatted metal back. Pull the metal up, rotate it around and extend it into one long rod — BOOM… selfie stick. The case is the result of a successful Kickstarter campaign launched late last year, with the first units starting to ship now. Like your standard selfie stick, the StikBox connects to the handset via Bluetooth. When you first extend the case, it launches the company’s app — a key differentiator between the product and some similar offerings that have sprung up in its wake. And, naturally, it’s got a built-in button that snaps those photos from (slightly) afar. The company is also looking to release a lighter-weight carbon fiber version for the next iPhone.
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Your washing machine should be smarter about washing clothes than you are
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Brian Heater
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Washing machines have always felt like a sort of necessary evil. I’m wouldn’t go so far as suggesting that no one enjoys washing clothes — heck, I find doing the dishes kind of cathartic. People are weird. But most washers feel like big, dumb machines. Machines that break down, lose our unmentionables and often ruin the clothes they should be cleaning. It doesn’t seem like too much to ask, in this age of smart everythings, that our washing machines know more about washing our clothes than us dumb humans. A prototype showed off by Hoover Europe (a spunoff entity now under the umbrella of the Italian company, Candy) at IFA this week offers some potentially compelling steps toward a day when our washing machines will work with us more than they do against us. The machine features smart cycles that adjust to its owners habits and work to operate during less power consumptive times of day. More compelling is the integration of TED — that’s textile expert detector, not the thing where people stand on stage with headsets and talk about stuff. For now, the device is a standalone scanner that is able to determine the makeup of a clothing product when placed atop it. That information can then be sent to the machine to best decide which cycle to put the garment through. The plans, which could see the product coming to market as early as next year here in Europe, don’t actually integrate the technology directly into the washing machine. Rather, it would exist as a standalone device to pre-scan clothing or, perhaps, be attached to the side of the machine, so users can just hold clothes up to the side before tossing them in.
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William Hurley on Honest Dollar’s sale to Goldman Sachs
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Jordan French
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Faced with myriad regulatory hurdles and a changing landscape dominated by “too big to fail” banks, investors and entrepreneurs alike have traditionally shied away from fintech. But that doesn’t at all bother Whurley — born William Hurley — who once on a mind-controlled skateboard powered by an XBox Kinect. His latest startup, , bucked the trend in fintech after it “won” South by Southwest this year by announcing its acquisition by Goldman Sachs. Despite regulatory headwinds and plenty of competition, Honest Dollar carved out a niche in financial services by servicing the self-employed people in the “gig economy” who lack access to a retirement plan or 401k. Honest Dollar “wasn’t really validated because we weren’t necessarily people from finance” according to CEO and co-founder Whurley. Acquired by Goldman Sachs only one year after its launch, Honest Dollar gained early traction with corporate customers who used the service as both a retention tool and a gap-fill for contractors who wanted access to retirement benefits that are traditionally reserved for full-time employees. Today, Honest Dollar counts Lyft among its clients. The acquisition opportunity started under serendipitous circumstances. Whurley’s other company, Chaotic Moon Studios, and led to a meeting with a financial adviser from Goldman Sachs who offered to manage Whurley’s money. Whurley took the meeting as an opportunity to instead pitch Honest Dollar as a fit for Goldman. “Added to Goldman Sachs,” Whurley said, “the combination would be unstoppable.” Whurley also spoke of one guest he invited to South by Southwest at the time of the Honest Dollar acquisition announcement. Whurley invited President Obama to the annual tech conference in Austin and also invited him to his home for a fundraiser featuring rapper J. Cole and co-host . “The best part of the event,” says Whurley, “was riding in the Presidential motorcade.”
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The biotech empires of Silicon Valley and Europe
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Bérénice Magistretti
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As biotechnology , two hubs have emerged as hotbeds of innovation for the resurgent industry. While the two-square-mile patch of South San Francisco bustles with more than 70 biotech firms, including , and , an equally influential geography has grown along the Lemanic Arc of Switzerland and into the heart of Basel, where pharma giants like , and (which acquired Genentech in 2009) have their headquarters. “Silicon Valley has a very strong life science sector that is enriched by the undeniable strength of the Valley in IT,” said Patrick Aebischer, president of the . “In Switzerland, the Health Valley is trying to take advantage of our unique position in micro/nanotechnology coming from a long tradition of watchmaking.” California indeed has a very strong culture of IT stemming from Intel’s first programmable computer chip in the late 1960s. Biotechs are therefore reaping the benefits and merging science with the power of IT (i.e. bioinformatics, digital therapeutics, cloud biology and computational medicine). and its storage of data in synthetic DNA is a good example. has also followed this trend, specializing in neuro-computing by building co-processors made of biological neurons that work alongside traditional silicon processors. Beyond its talented horologists, Switzerland is also known for its expertise in technical engineering, which has had a considerable impact on the scientific application of micro/nanotechnology. Be it implants or nanomolecules, the country is known for its precision. illustrates this with its Lab-on-Skin nanowearable devices that exploit biochemical information on the skin’s surface. In terms of microtechnology, designs customized in vitro cellular microenvironments for cancer drug screening. In terms of academic influence and support, both valleys have their fair share. and have spun out many success stories in the field of biotechnology, a phenomenon that the Swiss Federal Institutes of Technology in and were quick to follow. But even though Switzerland’s biotechs are supported by a strong academic structure, the country lacks Silicon Valley’s aggressive entrepreneurial mindset. It’s not just about the research anymore. In this highly competitive entrepreneurial climate, scientists need a comprehensive business approach to push their research onto the market. San Francisco-based , an accelerator for biotechs, is doing just that: supporting scientists in their research as well as mentoring them on how to pitch to investors. Nonetheless, an overzealous marketing strategy can also be detrimental, as was the case for , where the founder’s charisma took precedence over actual scientific data. Fickle hypes can therefore be misleading and blow into over-valuations. This is where the risk-averseness of the Swiss pays off at times, especially in an industry as non-transparent as biotechnology. In either case, funding is needed — something Bay Area biotechs aren’t deprived of. Their funding has increased from $1.89 billion in 2014 to $2.76 billion in 2015, according to the published by and the . “Investments in the Silicon Valley biotech industry are on pace to reach the second highest level in MoneyTree history,” states Greg Vlahos, a Life Science Partner at PwC. “This shows continued confidence from the venture community.” Unfortunately, this does not translate to Switzerland. Even though the country thrives on its private banking system, biotechs (and startups in general) are having a hard time tapping into Series A and B funding as the excess capital generated isn’t effectively converted into risk capital. “Although Switzerland places 30% of its national income into savings, two thirds of this amount are redirected into collective saving structures rather than direct investments,” says Benoit Dubuis, the Director of in Geneva. “However, new initiatives are gradually reversing this trend, as can be seen with projects like “Le Fond suisse pour l’avenir” (The Swiss Fund for the future), which aims to invest part of the capital collected by pension funds into venture capital.” While Swiss entrepreneurs patiently wait for the implementation of these projects, a step in that direction has already been taken. Invested capital in Swiss startups has increased from CHF 450 million ($465.6 million) in 2014 to CHF 650 million ($672.6 million) in 2015, according to the . On the life sciences front, biotechs raised more than 63 percent in financing over the previous year, totaling an amount of CHF 310.7 million ($319.2 million) in 2015. Top VC firms like and have jumped on the bandwagon by launching sector-specific funds dedicated to life sciences. In the case of Andreessen Horowitz, the Sand Hill Road powerhouse launched a $200 million last year, which invests in mostly early-stage startups at the intersection of computer science and life sciences. Geneva-headquartered Index Ventures set up Index Life VI in 2012, a life sciences-focused fund, which resulted in the creation of an independent venture firm earlier this year baptized . It invests primarily in Europe, with a particular focus on therapeutics. “Although trade sales continue to be a viable exit strategy, the biotech segment of the public markets is much more robust and visible than it was 10 years ago,” explains Bruce W. Jenett, Senior Counsel in life sciences at . “Biotech IPOs are therefore a very promising bet for liquidity.” And he is right: of the 18 venture-backed IPOs during the first 6 months of 2016, 14 were biotech companies. In light of this, Silicon Valley is the right place to be as IPOs are rare (almost non-existent) in Switzerland. Be it the size of the market, the vibrancy of the stock market or the number of VCs, California-based biotechs have the best chance of exiting through a successful and fruitful IPO.
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Zilingo lands $8M for its marketplace for fashion sellers in Southeast Asia
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Jon Russell
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may not be a name known to many prior to today, but the under-the-radar e-commerce company has closed an impressive $8 million Series A round to scale its fashion-focused operations in Southeast Asia. The round was led by Sequoia India, Indonesia-based Venturra Capital and Susquehanna International Group, with Wavemaker Partners, Beenext, Beenos and Digital Garage also chipping in. Zilingo previously raised $2 million, so this takes its total to $10 million. Not bad for a company that has deliberately kept a low profile. The days of capital intensive business dominating e-commerce in Southeast Asia are over. In this post-Rocket Internet era, startups are pioneering more sustainable business models having learned the lessons of Lazada, which before , and Zalora, the parent of which . Zilingo is one such company. Founded by former Sequoia India analyst (CEO) and ex-Yahoo engineer Dhruv Kapoor (CTO) after a trip to Bangkok stirred an awareness in fashion in Southeast Asia, the service is a marketplace for fashion sellers in Thailand, Singapore and (soon) Indonesia. There’s a lot to like about Zilingo’s business. Not only did the founders move to Southeast Asia for the potential of the region — where among its 600 million consumers and — but they are building a sustainable business to boot. The company targets the long-tail of vendors, otherwise seen as too small for larger e-commerce companies, the kind that exhibit and sell offline within markets and malls across Southeast Asia. Why the focus on the smaller retailers when others have deemed them too much hassle? Well, Zilingo believes that Southeast Asian fashion sellers — such as those in Bangkok that attract weekend shoppers from Singapore, China and elsewhere — have vast potential online that nobody else is catering to. On the business side, it estimates that small sellers collectively account for 60 percent of retails sales in the region. Zilingo pegs the entire long-tail fashion and beauty industry at around $20 billion per year. “We saw that there was 60 percent of the fashion market being catered to by SMEs, but none of these had ability to sell online at scale [and] all other online businesses wanted to get sales or push their own brands,” Bose said. Zilingo lets its sellers — it claims to have over 2,000 right now — price their goods as they’d like, it simply takes 10-15 percent of any sale. That is enough to cover costs since Zilingo itself doesn’t house product. Indeed, once it has covered promotion, packaging and other costs, that boils down to a positive margin of one to two percent, Bose told TechCrunch in an interview. That translates to positive unit economics and in the near future, she admitted, higher GMV — the total volume of sales on the Zilingo platform — and user growth could increase those take home margins to four or five percent. “Never once did we sacrifice the unit economics for GMV to order to get a better valuation for fundraising,” she added. “We said: ‘Hey, that is a bad business.’ Instead, we let the business pay for the business and money we raise covers salaries, marketing, etc. Essentially we don’t end up burning a lot of money, we might even get profitable soon, and this excess cash allows us to aggressively market ourselves.” Zilingo has one other particularly notable feature. Kapoor and his Bangalore-based tech team built out a seller management platform which helps small retailers — who again are often dismissed as not being worth it for larger platforms — formally organize their business. Zilingo’s software is free and it also hooks up to other e-commerce platforms, such as Zalora, which Bose believes helps establish relationships with new sellers and maintain those with existing ones. “It offers inventory management, API for logistics, bank account integration and we are adding working capital loans and other features,” she explained. “We’ve created a nice moat around our business to give us access to 60 percent of the market supply. We think we can get fairly unrestricted access to the long tail.” Zilingo co-founders Bose and Kapoor With this funding in the bank, Zilingo plans to launch for sellers in Indonesia — Bose, who currently resides in Bangkok, will move to Jakarta to get a proper feel for the local market — and ramp up its technology and marketing. Indeed, one of the early fruits of that push is the new look Zilingo mobile app which includes more video coverage of products. That’s designed to rotate on a three-day schedule that, in theory, has customers coming back to check out what is hot. “We want users to come on board to discover fashion trends,” Bose explained. “Even if they shop just once a month, that would be great. Our userbase is 23-40 years old, but we want younger users [and] they engage way better with video than static images.” Right now, over 80 percent of Zilingo’s sales are within Southeast Asia itself, but Bose revealed that there has been interest from wholesalers in Europe and Asia Pacific who see the service as a convenient and cost effective way to move product into their markets for resale. Right now, she clarified, there is no plan to offer a different kind of service to accommodate this demand, but that could change if the future if supply is high enough. The immediate focus is more local, to take on competitors like Zalora and . “We want to get more sellers, expand into Indonesia and win the fashion commerce market,” Bose said.
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SpaceX’s Falcon 9 explosion, Proxima b and SETI: Listen to TCBC Episode 3 with Emily Calandrelli
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Darrell Etherington
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On this week’s episode of TCBC, the podcast where TechCrunch’s writers go in-depth about the beats they love and obsess over, we talk to , our resident space reporter and the host of – season 3 of which premieres this coming Saturday on FOX. Luckily, there’s been no shortage of space news lately: , which occurred last week during pre-launch testing is the biggest and most-headline grabbing example. Emily talks me through what the incident might mean for SpaceX, and for its clients, and we go into some background about why SpaceX has had such an outsized impact on the space-based industry to begin with. We also talk about two other recent pieces of headline outer space news – the signal received by a Russian SETI team which , and , an exoplanet discovered orbiting the star nearest Earth beyond the sun, which occupies its own star’s habitable zone. There’s also a fair amount of sci-fi in there, which I couldn’t help but interject wherever possible. It’s basically the podcast of my dreams, so I hope you enjoy listening as much as I did recording it. You can listen via the stream embedded above, or (and leave a review), or in your podcast player of choice.
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Intel buys computer vision startup Movidius as it looks to build up its RealSense platform
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Lucas Matney
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Intel’s RealSense platform was the star of its Intel Developer’s Forum conference in San Francisco last month and it seems the company is only looking to grow the scale and capabilities of its computer vision tech. Today, the company announced that it is acquiring the computer vision startup behind Google’s Project Tango 3D-sensor tech, . In a , Movidius CEO Remi El-Ouazzane announced that his startup will continue in its goal of giving “the power of sight to machines” as it works with Intel’s RealSense technology. Movidius has seen a great deal of interest in its radically low-powered computer vision chipset, signing deals with major device makers, including Google, Lenovo and DJI. The eight-year old company has about 180 employees with offices in Silicon Valley, Ireland and Romania. The company had raised $86.5 million in funding across several rounds from investors including Summit Bridge Capital, Capital-E, DFJ and Emertec Gestion amongst others. Terms of the deal were not disclosed. “We’re on the cusp of big breakthroughs in artificial intelligence,” wrote El-Ouazzane. “In the years ahead, we’ll see new types of autonomous machines with more advanced capabilities as we make progress on one of the most difficult challenges of AI: getting our devices not just to see, but also to think.” The company’s Myriad 2 family of Vision Processor Units are being used at Lenovo to build the company’s next generation of virtual reality products while Google struck a deal with the company to deploy its neural computation engine on the platform to push the machine learning power of mobile devices. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GEy-vtev1Bw At its recent IDF developers conference, Intel made major announcements related to its depth-sensing RealSense platform, including a new virtual reality platform called , feature upgrades to its autonomous drone piloting and other initiatives aimed at enhancing computer vision in consumer and enterprise devices. Intel wants to get its RealSense sensor tech in as many devices as possible and a major key is keeping the power usage low enough to appeal to a broad array of devices. Movidius gives Intel an in to get its sensor tech on low-powered mobile devices. Movidius’s SoC claims a sub-1 Watt power budget, a rate much lower than competitors. “We see massive potential for Movidius to accelerate our initiatives in new and emerging technologies,” said Josh Walden, Senior Vice President and General Manager of Intel’s New Technology Group. “The ability to track, navigate, map and recognize both scenes and objects using Movidius’ low power and high performance SoCs opens up opportunities in areas where heat, battery life and form factors are key.”
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11 reasons we didn’t invest in your company
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Phil Nadel
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Like most VCs, we often review dozens of deals each week. We have developed a funnel that enables us to quickly eliminate those that do not fit our general investment criteria (e.g. industry, stage, model). The deals that survive this initial culling process are subjected to much greater scrutiny and due diligence. This process includes a thorough review of the deck, financial statements and projections; discussions with the founders, customers and other investors; and a review of third-party information relevant to the company, its product and industry. Companies are eliminated from further consideration during various stages of this process and, in the end, we ultimately invest in a small percentage of the deals we review. When we decide not to invest in a company, we always take the time to explain to the founders the reasons for our decision. The purpose of this article is to provide a review of the 11 most common reasons why we choose not to invest in companies in hopes that some founders will find it helpful in improving their chances of raising capital. If we detect that a founder is not being forthright, we immediately lose interest. Venture investing is based on relationships; being opaque makes for an inauspicious beginning of a relationship. If a company doesn’t have something that is proprietary that makes it defensible against potential competitors, then its success will lead to its downfall. What do I mean by that? Without a moat, the company’s success is easily replicable. The more success it has, the more competitors it will attract. But if it has a secret sauce — which could include technology, processes, knowledge, relationships, etc. — its odds of sustained growth are far greater. And while first-mover advantage is helpful in the early stages, it usually doesn’t mean much in the long run (e.g. Myspace). We like to invest in companies where our capital can be used to fuel revenue growth. If a company has not yet identified cost-efficient marketing channels that are scalable, they are more likely to burn through our capital experimenting and testing to find them. We prefer to invest in companies that have already done at least enough of this initial testing so they can use our investment to scale the channels that are working. And we have a strong preference for founders who intimately understand paid customer acquisition and don’t reply to our questions about growth by saying “We’re hiring a growth hacker.” We find there is a direct correlation between the depth of a founder’s knowledge of the company’s KPIs and the company’s success. First, founders must demonstrate they understand which metrics are important to their business. Second, they must demonstrate they are properly measuring and calculating those metrics. Finally, they must know which levers to pull to affect each KPI and which KPIs need to be tweaked for the business to succeed. When we invest in a company, we like to see that it will have at least 12 months of post-close runway. Raising money requires a lot of time and effort and distracts founders from growing the business. We want the company to have adequate resources to enable the team to focus on growth without having to worry about quickly raising another round. Also, the next round becomes much easier to raise if a company has demonstrated 12 months of improving KPIs and growth. To calculate post-close runway, founders must know the current cash burn and must have formulated detailed projections of how they will spend the funds they are raising and how much cash they will be burning each month post-close. This calculation can be done assuming: (1) zero revenue, (2) current revenue with zero growth or (3) reasonable revenue growth based on historical trends. We often see companies that have innovative, sometimes ingenious, solutions to a problem faced by a relatively small group. For a company to achieve exit velocity, it needs to be addressing a large enough market to make its upside revenue potential meaningful to an acquirer. If a company can’t demonstrate to us that the size of the market that its solutions address is reasonable (for us, that is usually north of a $1 billion-per-year market), we usually pass. We find there is a disproportionate decrease in investment risk relative to the increase in valuation when a company makes its first sale. In other words, the risk decreases more than the valuation increases once a company graduates from pre-revenue to building and shipping a product for which someone is willing to pay. Thus, we think it prudent to invest after a company has made this first sale and has shown some early evidence of product-market fit. We like to invest in companies whose founders have a clear vision for how to grow the company to 100x its current size. While getting there will certainly require the company to deviate from this vision, not having a vision makes it infinitely more difficult. A North Star keeps founders on track, even in the craziest storms. Companies often tell me “we have no competitors.” I generally find this difficult to believe and push back with “How is your target market currently solving the problem you intend to address? That’s your competition.” Beyond this rudimentary knowledge, founders should thoroughly understand the solutions being offered by their competitors, which market segments they are addressing and how they are selling. A company’s potential customers will be comparing the company’s product against other available solutions, and sharp founders will have properly positioned the product for success. Not being extremely knowledgeable about these other options and differentiating your product accordingly is a recipe for failure. Products need to be built and products need to be sold. These tasks require vastly different skill sets that are rarely possessed by the same people. We prefer to see a founding team with experience in a variety of disciplines, from engineering and development to sales and marketing. Having all disciplines baked in from the founding of a company helps ensure that it creates both great products and products that can be sold. Yes, companies can hire talent in areas in which they are deficient, but then that deficient area is not really part of the company’s DNA. Plus, it’s always preferred if the folks managing the hired hands have experience in the relevant area. We want to see that founders are 100 percent dedicated to the company before we jump in. At a bare minimum, they need to be working full time on the business. Ideally, they have invested a relatively significant amount of their own money in the company, as well. Paul Graham that once founders take steps such that it becomes “unthinkably humiliating to fail,” they quickly become “committed to fight to the death.” We agree. This list is not exhaustive, but hopefully it gives founders a helpful checklist to make sure they are addressing some of the most common reasons why we (and probably other early-stage investors) pass on deals. And, by the way, if you’re doing all of these things right, we’d love to hear from you.
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The four public policy questions every startup should ask
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Eric Tanenblatt
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Quietly incubating in dusty, ramen-scented apartments and college dorms all across the country, the brainchild of some sleep-deprived twenty-something will revolutionize our lives in ways that today seem wholly unimaginable: how we hail on-demand services, how we communicate and interact with one another, how we work, how we play, how we sleep. Almost everyone you encounter these days is nursing aspirations they might develop the “ “– even my own college-aged son, designed to take commuters off thoroughfares during peak hours and instead direct motorists to nearby businesses and volunteer opportunities. Most of these apps will fail, but a select few will fundamentally reorder the way we live. These inventors, whose focus is naturally consumed with the 1s and 0s and the dollars and cents of their applications, may not yet realize their eventual impact — or, for that matter, those entrenched businesses they’ll anger. When Amazon.com launched in the summer of 1996 with a lifeline investment from the parents of founder Jeff Bezos, the then-longshot retailer sold only one thing (books) — , no less. Today, the company has grown into the world’s single-largest online retailer, with product offerings in everything from technology to groceries. The company is ubiquitous now. But even the most grandiose of dreamers couldn’t have imagined that Amazon’s by 2011. When it launched, Amazon never anticipated that it would develop to pose such a transcendent threat to traditional brick-and-mortar retailers. But they did. And the threat they presented was so profound that big box retailers confederated en masse to lobby municipal, state and federal governments to make digital retailers levy local and state sales taxes, just the same as conventional merchants. As a necessary function of a product launch, startups are myopic — they’re frenzied, they’re broke and they’re not remotely cognizant of the serious public policy hurdles to which they’re racing. That’s the problem. When the home-sharing platform Airbnb hit the on-demand economy in 2008, they failed to anticipate and divert the ferocious lobbying response of hoteliers, just as ride-sharer Uber did with taxi cab commissions across the country. Of course, both companies got savvy fast and managed the reaction by incumbent interests, and aligned lawmakers and regulators. But what might have happened had they developed policy mitigation strategies from the outset? Here are the four public policy questions every startup should be asking from Day One. In telemedicine, there are scope of practice laws; in ridesharing, there are driver security checks and liability coverage requirements; in home-sharing, there are hotel taxes. In each case, these liabilities crept up late-term to stunt growth. The disruption economy’s most successful actors often operate in highly regulated spaces that have seen little or no innovation in decades — healthcare and medicine, transportation, banking and lending. That’s precisely why these startups have become so successful so quickly — but that’s also why it’s imperative they recognize the threat of operating in regulatory darkness. No legacy business system or industry is immune to disruption in 2016: Everyone and everything is in jeopardy of being supplanted. It’s important that startups audit not only those businesses whose bottom lines they will immediately threaten (pending market penetration), but also those they may grow to threaten. Why? These are entrenched organizations that have strategically cultivated tremendous political capital (read: they make steep political and charitable contributions) that have predisposed regulators and lawmakers. Favors will be called in — favors that will smother the threat in red tape. Does the nature of your business, or the personal reputations of those involved, dispose the political class and outside influencers to affect hostility or warmth? Are you disrupting an industry (optometrists, nurses, labor unions, trial attorneys) that’s explicitly protected by the political class? Which lawmakers and local political officials have regulatory oversight over your industry — and has the industry you’re disrupting been an active political contributor? Is the incumbent industry you mean to disrupt well-received in the press, like nurses, or something decidedly short of that, like cab drivers? If you’re legitimately disrupting an industry, there’s a reason: they’re doing something poorly and you can do it better. But in many cases, the public doesn’t recognize that an incumbent industry could be serving them better. By strategically leveraging the press to influence public perception, you indirectly influence regulatory rule-making and legislative decisions.
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Blowing up on Kickstarter, Hello brings video conferencing and security to any TV
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Mike Butcher
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The $6.7 billion telepresence and video communication category hasn’t evolved much since we were introduced to Cisco and Polycom. At the same time Smart TVs are making video conferencing easier. But it’s still not easy. Hello is a new startup addressing this space — created by two former refugees from the war in Kosovo — which has now passed . The primary competitors in the professional are Polycom, Cisco, and Lifesize. But the price for one Hello device will be $199 which is a lot cheaper than the industry average of $5,000+. Kickstarter users will get free unlimited use of Hello services for life. Today we only have two options if we want to do some kind of video interaction with our TVs as consumers or professionals. Buy an expensive Smart TV with apps built-in and a camera. Or, at the high-end, spend a small fortune on a Cisco or Polycom video conferencing system which usually means losing the first 15 productive minutes of every meeting wrestling. The Hello device is designed to be affordable for businesses and individuals. It requires only two cables – HDMI and power – and then turns any TV into a voice-controlled cross-platform communication device, with wireless screen sharing, live broadcasting, and motion-activated security surveillance features. But it’s not a typical webcam, it is a voice-controlled device that you can use to talk with friends, family, and colleagues on a video chat service, monitor your kids or pets at home, interact with your business partners or your team, and share your phone or tablet screen without extra cables. It will also act as a security camera in a home as it will send you notifications to any device when it detects unusual activity. Hello has a 4k video sensor, an array of 4 smart microphones, a 130° field of vision, built-in accelerometer, and a tilting lens, so everyone in the room is seen and heard. The platform will now work on Skype, Facebook Messenger, Google Hangouts, and Cisco WebEx. Users can wirelessly share the screen of any computer or mobile device on any Hello-equipped TV, stream live events using the Solaborate platform, and keep an eye on homes and offices while away with HELLO’s motion detection and notification system. The device is cross-platform, working with Windows, Mac, iOS, Android, and Linux. While other devices work with Miracast, Chromecast or Airplay exclusively, Hello supports wireless sharing across any device or platform. And unlike these competitors, Hello offers live broadcasting and security camera features, doesn’t require any training to install and use, has Airplay+ChromeCast+Miracast for wireless screen sharing across any platform or device, and voice control is an intuitive way to command Hello, something you won’t find on others. They will be charging for the purchase of the hardware device, but to supplement this revenue, Hello services will be subscription based, giving users the choice of a monthly or yearly subscription – exact subscription fees are currently being determined. The founders are siblings Labinot and Mimoza Bytyqi who fled the war in Kosovo in 1999, arriving as refugees on the West Coast of the US. Labinot worked with SAP for seven years, before launching his first business – CoreALM. The siblings launched Solaborate together in 2012.
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Four reasons you really shouldn’t miss Disrupt SF, kicking off one week from today
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Ned Desmond
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starts a week from today. There’s still time to get on board, and here are a few reasons why you might be sad if you don’t. You can still . #1 , , , , . If those names got your attention, so will these: the Warriors’ Steph Curry, U.S. Secretary of Defense Ash Carter, author Neal Stephenson, HBO’s creator Mike Judge, and Pokemon Go CEO John Hanke. We have robotics, with Melonee Wise (Fetch) and Marc Raibert (Boston Dynamics); we have health with Janica Alvarez (Naya Health), Deborah Anderson-Bialis (Fertility IQ) and Ida Tin (Clue); and we have so much much more over three full days of programming… . #2 . Last month, two Battlefield winners, (Disrupt NY 2014) and (Disrupt NY 2016), were acquired, the first by Snapchat and the second by Microsoft. To date, 76 contestants in TechCrunch’s startup competition have been acquired or gone public, and many more of the 610 Battlefield alums are on their way to big exits. Check out the to see all the great companies that launched on our stage. At Disrupt, attendees get a ringside seat to watch the latest Battlefield batch pitch to stellar judges to win the Disrupt Cup. #3 Networking. There will be more than 5000 attendees at the show, almost all entrepreneurs, technologists, investors, and media. Finding old friends and discovering new ones is a challenge, so three things: the new Disrupt mobile app, , and lots of gatherings, including some very focused ones. Disrupt attendees can download the Disrupt app from the Google Play or Apple iTunes stores starting this Wednesday. It’s pre-populated with attendee and exhibitor information, features in-app messaging for attendees, and makes it easy to watch sessions missed on demand. is a program for investors looking to set up meetings with startups that match their interests. Hundreds of companies and startups are participating. Then there are the After Parties on Monday and Tuesday night, as well as special receptions focused on , , and of course . #4. . In addition to the Battlefield companies, more than 500 curated companies will exhibit on the floor over three days, a new batch each day. Check out the line-up at the . Thanks to CrunchMatch and the Disrupt app, it’s never been easier to find the right people and companies, though letting serendipity do her thing on walk down Startup Alley is always a good idea too. Everyone comes away from Disrupt with great new ideas, insights and contacts. Don’t miss out. .
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Why the advertising industry needs to embrace AdBlock
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Vinay Kumar Mysore
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I am now part of the problem. The advertising industry is wringing its hands and shaking its fist at the use and growth of ad-block technology, but I am not above temptation. I simply installed it. And much like the many million people who have done so already, I love it and probably won’t ever fully abandon it. So instead of excoriating people for using them, it’s time we reflect on how we got here, what its inevitability means for our future and whether this might even be a trend worth embracing. The most commonly cited statistic on ad blocking that roughly 200 million people worldwide installed ad blocking on their computers as of August 2015. That group is rapidly growing: Cumulatively, these reports indicate that the number of individuals using ad blockers will have doubled many more times over within the coming year or two. And their impact is real. Ovum and The Wall Street Journal that in 2015 alone, publishers lost $24 billion dollars in ad revenue because of ad blockers. Ad-block technology stops almost all ads a person might otherwise see. Search ads, banner ads, remarketing, pre-roll, YouTube ads, social posts and even some “native” ads are all covered. When loading a page, looks at from where content is being called and uses that information to infer what is or is not an ad. On computers, AdBlock typically comes as a plugin to install in a browser. On mobile, it takes the form of browsers or browser settings that do the same. It’s easy and relatively tinker-proof. With one or two clicks, an ad-free internet is at the fingertips of anyone. In response, some websites now have AdBlock walls. Upon arrival, AdBlock users are requested to enable ads by putting the site on a whitelist. Users are often amenable; the that more than 40 percent of users agreed to whitelist the site when provided with a message about the need to pay for high-quality content. However, the bulk of internet publishers, along with the bulk of online ad inventory they represent, have not pursued similar measures: perhaps because they (rightly) assume that click-bait headlines and repurposed content aren’t reason enough to get users to turn off their ad blockers. Their objective is traffic, and lots of it. Meanwhile, premier content publishers are beginning to understand how much their core audience dislike their many ads and now even offer products that obviate the need for AdBlock in the first place. Publishers like the NYT and even YouTube now hawk ad-free supra-subscriptions for their most dedicated and ad-weary audience members. Fundamentally though, everyone understands that a world with ads online is an untenable one. AdBlock Plus that 75 percent of their users supported sites having ads, so long as they weren’t too many and weren’t aggressively disruptive. In response, AdBlock Plus developed the , outlining a series of rules for ads on sites, most all of which follow common sense. If a site agrees to meet these standards, AdBlock Plus will not block their ads. Moreover, much like the Times’ experiment, the latest IAB/YouGov study on ad blocking in the U.K. half of all users willing to disable blockers in exchange for content. The IAB U.S. survey that most users are blocking ads for specific reasons — reasons that can be addressed. People understand the value of ads in supporting content; it’s just that now they are demanding better accountability from the system. For publishers who sign on and are part of this advertising future, it means significantly fewer digital ads. It means higher premiums on banner ads, pre-roll ads and the like, and, quite possibly, an end to the cost savings previous models of digital advertising offered. It will mean that running a series of banner ads will not a campaign make. Challenged by the fact that the cheap replication of a print-style advertising model no longer is profitable, more publishers will have to look to more innovative ways to incorporate their commerce with their content. This is a position that the entire advertising industry needs to move to embrace. The honest truth is that the prevailing model of digital advertising, of ubiquitous cheap ads, is a broken one. The incentives in this model have encouraged the worst behavior: publishers squeezing more and more ads into a cluttered space and marketers pointing to these masses of impressions and clicks as the sign of a job well done. Ads that aren’t viewable, bot-generated clicks, phantom ads across the internet, video ads that aren’t seen or heard or both: These are all symptoms of a business model that rewards quantity over quality. Worse yet, the common model of digital attribution compounds the same tension. Standard practice attributes on-site success to the final ad clicked or final ad seen, rewarding mass amounts of bottom-of-the-funnel advertising. Whoever is responsible for that last ad takes full credit for that consumer’s decision to convert. Again, incentives in this model encourage the worst behavior: publishers flooding consumers with cheap ads to claim credit and marketers pointing to the cost-efficiencies of the same ads as the sign of a job well done. Successful marketing is nothing if not pragmatic. So long as this is the nature of success, it’s unsurprising that all parties pursue the same end game. Admittedly, some of this is beyond the industry’s control; unlike other mediums, there’s no body that can similarly regulate the nature of all digital ads and their quantities. So long as the model of digital advertising is about quantity, impression counts and video views, and so long as the medium of digital advertising involves barraging users with thousands upon thousands of ads per day, it the correct and right strategy to get as many ads out as possible to get the most chances of success. When these are the rules, the winning strategy will be a simple numbers game. However, widespread adoption of ad-blocking technology upends this model and gives everyone a chance to slay digital advertising’s Ouroboros. Publishers either must have such high-quality content that users will agree to let them show their ads, or, if their content is not sufficiently compelling, have to abide by a model that puts a real cap on the number of ads they can deliver. Fail to do either, and none of the ads are seen. This immediately helps combat a number of the inventory issues digital advertising faces. Phantom ads and viewability are less likely to be concerns when the ad ecosystem supports a much smaller set of permissible ads. The better the publisher, the larger the premium offered by digital advertising for their content. And with fewer chances to show an ad, the quality of those ads must go up. Advertisers will need to develop higher-quality ads and will have the budget to support it given the cost of the medium. And consumers get higher-quality ads while also avoiding the barrage of bargain-quality banners they hate so much. This demands more of our industry, not the simple escalation of an arms race. Any advance in our technology to force ads upon users will be met with an equal development to block them. At this point it’s wholly Newtonian. Facebook’s recent , followed by the immediate to AdBlock Plus, is instructive. The sad truth is that Facebook’s own announcement acknowledged that the issue consumers had was not with ads, but with how currently live in our marketplace. Instead of language chastising consumers for their selfishness, instead of spurious accusations of secret profit behind ad-block technologies, the advertising industry needs to recognize that it has built no good will, that its failure to stop and active decision to escalate this problem is the direct cause of consumers’ actions. Far too often the incentives of digital advertising allow the industry to revert to a simple formula, and the consequence has been more ads, more often, to more irritated consumers. Yet we didn’t change course. People want services and people understand the importance of ad support. They just want better ads. Now people have a tool powerful enough to hold the industry accountable, and their voices are finally being heard. The shame is that for an industry that prides itself on understanding consumers, it has taken us this long to listen to them.
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Apple rolls out its new, personalized playlists to Apple Music subscribers on iOS, macOS betas
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Sarah Perez
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Ahead of , the company has begun rolling out new, personalized music playlists to Apple Music subscribers, who are beta testing the soon-to-be-released iOS 10 mobile operating system and macOS Sierra. Originally at this year’s Worldwide Developers Conference in June, Apple Music’s new playlists are a direct challenge to Spotify, is so popular it saw . Apple, meanwhile, is taking on “Discover Weekly” with its “My New Music Mix” playlist, which is updated every Friday with new tunes. This playlist was called “Discovery Mix” when it was shown off at WWDC but, given the rebranding, it seems Apple decided its name was too similar to Spotify’s mix. [gallery ids="1380041,1380042"] “My New Music Mix” is found in the “For You” section of the Music app, and currently offers 25 tracks selected based on your listening history. The idea here is to expose Apple Music subscribers to more of the sort of songs and artists you would like, based on those you like to play – effectively, the same concept as Spotify’s “Discover Weekly.” The real question will be which service has the better algorithm? That remains to be seen, as the Apple Music feature only just rolled out this weekend, and no one has had enough time to test it, just yet. Alongside “My New Music Mix,” Apple Music subscribers on iOS 10 are also seeing the addition of another playlist called “My Favorites Mix,” which updates every Wednesday. This one includes both songs you love “and more,” says Apple, in its description. The here refers to the fact that the new playlist will use your most-loved tracks as the basis for adding more songs that match those you already like. This offers a different sort of twist on new music discovery, as it subtly mixes in new music with some of your favorite tunes. As with Spotify, Apple Music customers can subscribe to either playlists and configure them to automatically download the new tracks as they arrive. The two new playlists are now showing up in the Apple Music app on iOS 10 beta, as well as in iTunes 12.5 on macOS Sierra. The addition of the playlists is part of a larger makeover for Apple Music, which was criticized for being a bit cluttered in its original design. At WWDC, the , which included dropping its social networking attempt dubbed “ ” from the bottom navigation tabs, and placing users’ libraries in the front-and-center of the application, among other things. Despite the issues with the earlier layout, Apple Music has presented a formidable challenge to Spotify, just by its nature of being built into Apple’s OS. The company revealed in June it has already reached 15 million paid subscribers. Spotify is still ahead with 30 million paying customers, and 100 million listeners, however. But a revamped Apple Music which comes with better music discovery features could pose a threat.
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Garena, Southeast Asia’s most valuable tech startup, lands additional funding
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Jon Russell
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, the games firm that is Southeast Asia’s most valuable tech startup, has closed additional funding from three new investors. They are , an affiliate of Singapore sovereign wealth fund Temasek, Indonesia’s , and , a Japan-based fund from Taizo Son, the younger brother of SoftBank CEO Masayoshi Son. The amount raised was not disclosed, and Singapore-headquartered Garena did not reveal a post-money valuation. That last valuation was $3.75 billion from Khazanah Nasional Berhad, the Malaysian government’s strategic investment fund, and Chinese tech giant Tencent, a long-term, existing investor. The company has raised over $500 million to date. Its other investors include General Atlantic, the Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan, Keytone Ventures, and Skype co-founder Toivo Annus. Garena is best known for the gaming business it started in 2009, which accounts for most of its revenue, but today it also operates a payment service called AirPay and social commerce app called Shopee. Garena said in a statement that its annual revenue surpassed $300 million last year, a figure that it claimed represents “compound annual revenue growth of more than 95 percent over the past five years.” It didn’t reveal its profit/loss for 2015. While Garena didn’t say a whole lot in this announcement, it did reveal some notable figures for its two newest ventures. Shopee, an e-commerce app that latches on to the popularity of social media to enable social commerce, has reached 1.4 million sellers and “annualised” GMV of $1.3 billion. That sounds impressive — before — but Shopee’s GMV figure is being calculated using monthly figures rather than an entire year of sales, as Garena president Nick Nash told me when in July. In other words, if you scale one of your best months of business, you can get stellar “annualized” sales. (Although, to be fair to Garena, Shopee has been running less than a year — but the effect is the same.) In addition, for now Shopee isn’t charging merchants for its service. Subsidization is normal, but it does distort some figures. Ultimately, Shopee’s progress is promising, but the figure are a stretch. The same applies to AirPay, which Garena said “now has an annualized gross transaction value exceeding US$510 million.” Impressive, again, but important to bear in mind that it is an “annualized” figure. Nonetheless, it is impossible to avoid the fact that Garena is putting its significant weight into social commerce and payments, two areas in Southeast Asia that many companies, including and , are making a big play for. With over 600 million consumers and , the region for internet companies. “We are proud to welcome three of Asia’s most respected investment firms to Garena,” Garena founder, chairman and group CEO Forrest Li said in a statement. “Their insights and connectivity across the region will support and accelerate our mission to ‘connect the dots’ for our customers.” Son, who made his name with Yahoo Japan by founding gaming giant Gungho, added: “It’s crucial to for the world to have companies which create large positive impacts in diverse fields to brighten the prospect of our future. I am very proud of the work Garena is doing and look forward to many years of partnership.” The deal will see Son and SeaTown’s Archana Parekh join Garena’s advisory board.
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European VC Northzone closes €300 million fund
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Steve O'Hear
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, a 20 year veteran of the European VC industry, has closed its 8th fund, capped at €300 million, which it will deploy to “early-stage” startups in the region. Specifically, these will be A, B and C rounds, and although investments will span the whole of Europe, there will be particular focus on key tech hubs, including the Nordics, London, and Berlin. The VC also says that, despite turbulent times, the fund was oversubscribed and that LPs consist of existing investors in previous funds it manages, as well as new “top tier institutional” investors (e.g. pension funds and large family offices) who wanted in on the Northzone action. The VC — which currently has around €1 billion under management, making it one of the largest in Europe — says it’s been an impressive year for Northzone with exits including the IPO of Tobii, and the sale of Avito in what it claims was one of the largest venture-backed tech M&A deals in Europe. Northzone also continues to be pretty active of late. Recent investments include game-based learning app Kahoot, on-demand sales workforce platform , and auction site Catawiki. The VC has already made two investments from “Northzone VIII”: Zervant, the Finnish e-invoicing company, and , the Barcelona-based mobile-app for blue collar jobs. Regards the type of sectors Northzone’s new fund is targeting, a spokesperson for the VC told me it is seeing lots of interesting developments in fintech, e-commerce, media and B2B SaaS, and that Northzone is keen on companies that take a mobile-first approach.
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Snapchat joins the Bluetooth SIG, fueling hardware speculation
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Darrell Etherington
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Snapchat has given observers another reason to suspect it might be working on hardware – the social network company joined the Bluetooth Special Interest Group (SIG) according to the . The SIG industry association maintains the Bluetooth wireless standard, and membership is a necessary prerequisite for companies that want to employ Bluetooth in any hardware devices. Snapchat is an “adopter” in the SIG, which is a free tier that provides member companies with a license to build Bluetooth-enabled products, and to work with other Bluetooth SIG makers on collaborative efforts. AS the FT notes, the only cure for companies to join the SIG, generally speaking, is if they intend to actually launch a wireless device. Other companies dealing primarily in software are members of the SIG, however, including Facebook. But Facebook has dabbled in hardware previously, including with a project last year where it as part of a wireless, location-based ambient advertising push. Snapchat’s own hardware plans including Bluetooth tech might be more ambitious; the FT report notes that it has recently done a lot to suggest an interest in augmented reality hardware, including the acquisition of AR headset startup Vergence Lab, recent hires and a number of acquisitions in computer vision and AR software. A report earlier this year suggested Snapchat might already have . Snapchat has good reason to be interested in AR as a category; its smartphone app is scene by many as one of the most successful existing examples of consumer AR, mainly through the use of their image filters, which can be applied to live video captured by a user’s device camera.
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Softbank has completed its £24B cash acquisition of ARM Holdings
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Ingrid Lunden
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One of the biggest tech deals this year — and the biggest ever in the UK — has now closed. Today, Softbank that it has completed its acquisition of ARM Holdings, the semiconductor firm that it said , in order to make a big jump into IoT. As a result, ARM will be delisted from the LSE effective September 6. Softbank has said that it plans to run the company as a standalone business. The news comes a couple of days after the deal , paving the way for the close. “Pursuant to the terms of the Acquisition, SBG purchased all of ARM’s issued and to be issued shares (excluding any ARM shares already owned by SBG or an SBG subsidiary) for cash, for a total acquisition price amounting to approximately GBP 24.0 billion (approximately USD 31.0 billion or JPY 3.3 trillion),” the company noted in its announcement. “Subsequent to the completion of the Acquisition, ARM will be delisted from the London Stock Exchange as of September 6, 2016 (GMT) and will cease to be a listed company.” Softbank will announce the financial and operational impact of the consolidation once it is verified, it said. The companies will start to consolidate their financials as of today. As we reported at the time the deal was announced, the acquisition of ARM is a big play by Softbank to jump into Internet of Things technology, a sizeable pivot for a company that has made its name more recently around mobile and fixed internet services for consumers, and large investments in outsized- and fast-growing tech companies. Masayoshi Son, Softbank’s CEO and founder, earlier this year surprised the industry when he announced that he would not retire as he had previously planned, and the acquisition — which he to initiate and close — is, in a sense, a mark of how he plans to run things in this next phase of the company’s life. It’s in contrast to a different spin on the deal, where some believed that Softbank opportunistically swooped in on ARM because of the decline of the pound in the wake of the Brexit vote. That referendum, where the majority of voters in Britain said they wanted the UK to leave the European Union, caused a huge reverberation in the UK economy, and a drop in the value of the British pound. “Brexit did not affect my decision,” Masayoshi Son said in a press conference the day the deal was announced. “Many people many are worried about Brexit and concerned about he complex situation of the country, but good or bad… I did not make the investment because of Brexit.” He added that although the price of the pound declined by about 16% in the two weeks that Softbank and ARM negotiated, but ARM’s share price went up by about the same amount, meaning they cancelled each other out. There were other financial factors in play as well: in the weeks leading up to the deal, Softbank sold a of its Alibaba stake and its , and today it announced a large loan for some $9 billion (¥1 trillion). “This is not opportunistic about the currency,” he joked. “I have wanted to do this but was waiting for the cash to come in. “I’m not investing in a distressed asset,” he continued. “I’m investing in a paradigm shift…. that’s my passion, and that’s my view.” If Softbank was in the thick of it at the “beginning of the PC internet,” in Masayoshi’s words (he invested in via Yahoo when it only had 16 employees), and then doubled down on mobile (by way of Softbank’s investments in various mobile companies and ) then — he believes — IoT is the natural progression of that. For ARM, the company has been been one of the UK’s biggest tech success stories. Its growth coincided with the rise of smartphones and its chip reference designs are used by the likes of Apple and many others. That smartphone business is still there — just last month, longtime chip rival Intel, interestingly, announced it would for smartphone chips, in hopes of boosting its own smartphone chipmaking business (in this case to grow business with third-party smartphone chipmakers). But more importantly, ARM has been shifting its own business to IoT for several years now, in anticipation of a time when growth of its bread-and-butter business might slow down. (And indeed, that is exactly what’s happening: as penetration has reached saturation in many markets, and people are waiting longer to replace the phones they already have.) While there are definitely a lot of products out there now that are “connected” — that is, many ordinary “dumb” objects like refrigerators, locks and lights can now be controlled wirelessly by way of internet connections — the bigger market for IoT products and services is really only just at its start. ARM — and now Softbank — hope that by getting into the game early, they can dominate much as ARM has done in smartphones.
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Sonali De Rycker and Niklas Zennström join TechCrunch Disrupt London, Dec 5-6
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Mike Butcher
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is happening once again this December and we have some of the most iconic entrepreneurs and thought leaders in the tech industry lined up to speak. The two-day conference runs December 5 to 6 in the Olympic Village’s Copper Box Arena and features Startup Alley and Startup Battlefield where one startup will take home £30,000. We’re delighted to start announcing our first speakers for the event and the first ones are pretty well-known. joined Accel in 2008 and helps lead the London office. Sonali focuses on consumer, software and financial services businesses. She led Accel’s investments in Avito (Naspers), Lyst, Spotify, Wallapop, KupiVIP, Calastone, Wonga and SilverRail. She is also an independent director of Match Group, Inc (public). Prior to Accel, Sonali was with Atlas Ventures. She grew up in Mumbai and graduated from Bryn Mawr College and Harvard Business School. is CEO and Founding Partner at Atomico. He is an experienced entrepreneur, previously co-founding and managing globally successful technology companies including Skype, Kazaa, Joost and Joltid.
In 2006 Niklas created Atomico to help entrepreneurs primarily outside Silicon Valley to scale their businesses domestically and globally. It has so far invested in more than 50 companies on four continents, and Niklas works closely with a number of leaders of portfolio companies so that they benefit from his own experience as an entrepreneur. Before starting Atomico, Niklas co-founded Skype, where he held the position of CEO from its inception until September 2007. In 2005, Skype was sold to eBay Inc for $3.1bn, the largest European venture capital exit to date. Subsequent to this, Skype was bought back by a consortium that included Niklas, and was sold to Microsoft for $8.5 billion cash in 2011. In 2006, Niklas was recognised by Time Magazine as one of its 100 Most Influential People, and he has received numerous awards for entrepreneurship including being voted Entrepreneur of the Year in the European Business Leaders Awards (2006), the KTH Great Prize from the Royal Institute of Technology in Sweden (2009), the Oxford Internet Institute’s Lifetime Achievement Award (2011), H.M. The King’s Medal (2013), and the Gold Medal from the Royal Swedish Academy of Engineering Sciences (2013). In 2007, he co-founded Zennström Philanthropies, where he is actively involved in combating climate change, improving the state of the Baltic Sea and encouraging social entrepreneurship. Niklas is also a keen yachtsman, and has won three Mini Maxi World Championships and one TP52 World Championship with his yacht racing team Rán. , and, of course, we’ll have parties. Lots of ’em! Extra early bird tickets are now available to purchase for the discounted price of just £800 a piece. Or sign up with a co-worker and you can save an additional £100 off each ticket with our multi-ticket (2+) discount. You can get your tickets at this price until September 16. For all you students out there, the deal is about to get even sweeter. We have a limited selection of student tickets to Disrupt London 2016 for just £100 plus VAT, provided you have both a valid university ID and current transcripts. To reserve your £100 student tickets to Disrupt, simply send a copy of your transcripts showing your current enrollment status, as well as a copy of your university identification card to students@beta.techcrunch.com. Once you’re approved, we’ll send you instructions for how to complete your registration.
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The invisible @apple tweet
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Matthew Panzarino
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Here’s a silly thing because it is the ass end of a Friday. Apple just started using the Twitter account — — that they’ve had since 2011. And they’re using it to send out a tweet that promotes the Apple event next week where they’ll introduce new iPhones including a twin lens model with images that rival an SLRs in low light capability, sharpness and depth of field effects.
But the tweet doesn’t appear on the account’s timeline: How? You may ask. . The only way Apple can have a tweet floating out in the ether on Twitter without somehow attaching it to its main timeline is a specifically scoped ad buy. They can buy a tweet that exists as an island, basically. Credit goes to Andy Baio for with this procedure, which some call or dark posting and I call Deep Subtweeting, last year. Also credit to Hardbound.co founder who also , if not the source of it. In addition to the Promoted Tweet, Apple has spun up a custom hashtag emoji, which may have set it . Anyway, if you’re interested in retweeting to get the auto responder, the . Happy Friday. Also Elon Musk sent a memo to Tesla and ship as many cars as they can in a bid for profitability. So there is that too. : The auto responder appears to be powered by IC Group From the looks of it, is working with Apple, Twitter to power bot experiences. Future Twitter product? — Daniel Sinclair 💤 (@_DanielSinclair)
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Crunch Report | SpaceX Hyperloop Test Track
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Khaled "Tito" Hamze
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Tito Hamze, John Mannes
Tito Hamze
Joe Zolnoski
Joe Zolnoski
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Jeremy Bloom on sports technology and his new startup show
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Katie Roof
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The CNBC series takes a look at investment opportunities in the sports and action space — from electric bikes to underwater jet packs. The startups with successful pitches can receive investments from the show’s judges. For more of our conversation with Bloom, watch the video above.
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Multi-process Firefox brings 400-700% improvement in responsiveness
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John Mannes
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Earlier this summer to rollout a multi-process architecture, codename Electrolysis, for Firefox. In the months since, Mozilla has completed its initial tests on 1 percent of its user population and the initial numbers are good, according to Asa Dotzler, director of Firefox at Mozilla. The company is reporting a 400 percent improvement in responsiveness and a 700 percent improvement in responsiveness for loading large web pages.These numbers mean that users are far less likely to see their browser freeze, pause, lag or crash. Dotzler himself used the word “janky” to describe previous versions of the browser. Over the next week, multi-process will be coming to 10 percent of total Firefox users. For now, users with add-ons will not be getting the new architecture. The staggered rollout is fairly industry standard to avoid shipping bugs. Having two independent groups of users allows Mozilla to benchmark metrics from the new version against unconverted users. For now, multi-process is limited to a single content process and a single browser process. Later versions will include multiple content processes and sandboxing. In the coming weeks, Mozilla will push multi-processing to 100 percent of their initial cohort of users. This group represents 40-50 percent of total users. Within the next six months, a majority of users can expect to have the capabilities. Here is a little cheat sheet of upcoming releases: Over the coming months, engineering teams will be shifting their efforts toward improving security and adding new web developer features. Teams spent a large amount of time ensuring the new browser would be accessible to as many groups as possible. Bi-directional editing turned out to be a larger project than expected, and users that need right-to-left support will get it in Firefox 49-51. One of the initial fears of Firefox users was that Electrolysis would be so RAM-intensive that it would severely slow the browser down. Dotzler noted the memory reduction his teams achieved after spending the last five years on a project called MemShrink. Such a low starting point made multi-process possible. Adding a single additional process added about 20 percent overhead. There are currently no plans to dedicate a process to every single webpage. Right now teams are working to define a fixed number of processes for future rollouts. The question is whether new versions will coalesce pages randomly into a fixed number of processes or coalesce pages by domain. “We can learn from the competition,” said Dotzler. “The way they implemented multi-process is RAM-intensive, it can get out of hand. We are learning from them and building an architecture that doesn’t eat all your RAM.” While most may not remember, Electrolisis is not Mozilla’s first attempt to bring a multi-process architecture to Firefox. Six years ago, brought a multi-process architecture to Firefox on mobile. The company abandoned the efforts after noticing it was creating a bottleneck on mobile, according to Dotzler. Today the Firefox mobile browser runs as a single process but with advancements in the processing power of smartphones, it is possible that additional content processes could come to mobile again in the future.
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What if cybersecurity followed physics?
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Ron Moritz
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The first cybersecurity unicorn kernel popped in late 2013 with the announcement of investment. Today, 10 privately held companies hold membership in the ultra-exclusive cybersecurity unicorn club. With the addition of each new member, eyebrows are raised and questions are asked. What underlying data supports such valuations? Would there ever be sufficient revenue in the cybersecurity market to sustain unicorn valuations? Are cybersecurity unicorns outliers or are we at the start of a sustainable trend? Trojan Unicorn image courtesy of . Enough has been written about investor exuberance and enthusiasm for cybersecurity. Those who predicted a market correction, including me, were wrong. So what happens next? Where do these unicorns and the high-valued public cybersecurity companies go from here? The answer can be derived from two concepts in physics: entropy and collisions. Elevated valuations suggest a lack of predictability and risk in the market; in a word, entropy. Entropy portends a gradual decline into disorder. Collisions may offer an alternative. As defined by , collisions are “an encounter between particles (such as atoms or molecules) resulting in exchange or transformation of energy.” When two atomic nuclei unite to form a heavier nucleus, the result is an enormous release of energy. Controlling that energy — harnessing it for good — also applies in M&A. Large technology companies are frequently hampered by their inability to generate new revenue and growth from natural or organic innovation and turn to inorganic growth that, like fusion, is about transformation: The idea that one-plus-one is greater than two. Uncontrolled, ill-conceived and poorly managed, such collisions could, of course, implode, explode or otherwise have negative results — but let’s apply some positive thinking and imagine the possibilities. We expect that through a controlled collision between two unicorns, between a unicorn and an equivalent high-value public enterprise, or even between two high-value public companies, there will be a positive transformation: a bigger and more credible merged entity providing better services and generating more revenue than the services and combined revenue of each company operating alone. We currently count 10 privately held unicorns, including CrowdStrike, given its “near” unicorn valuation in summer 2015; 11 publicly traded cybersecurity companies with a mid-2016 market cap over $1 billion; and two unknowns: The RSA Division of EMC and the security division of Intel. Obvious but deliberate exclusions in this narrative are companies with diverse product lines where cybersecurity is but one focus, such as , , , , , and , to name a few. Let’s consider a few possible what-if collisions, starting with the most obvious. Trojan Unicorn image courtesy of . Suppose that Tanium, a next-gen , collided with Qualys, a leading, albeit legacy, vulnerability assessment and management company. The result would enable full-cycle security services, from assessment and discovery to resolution and remediation, with a significant improvement in automation. From end-point devices through the cloud services those end-points connect into, and everything in between, the combined company would provide coverage. Qualys is a tired company. Tanium is a young buck full of spit-and-polish. The combination delivers both market access and a broader and more holistic solution set. What’s not to like? Next, let’s look at the combination of what goes out with what comes in. Network admission took on renewed urgency with the introduction of bring-your-own-device. ForeScout, has driven this category for well over a decade. While being the last company standing in the NAC category delivers revenue, being a one-trick pony has limitations. In contrast, while firewall companies (both traditional and next-gen) focus on data that streams, they are less concerned with who is on the networks, why they are there and what they are doing. Adding such insight would be interesting and valuable, especially given recent innovation in exfiltration. A collision between ForeScout and either Check Point, Fortinet or Palo Alto Networks will deliver necessary understanding not available today. Collisions, by the way, need not be limited to horizontal synergies. Could ForeScout’s admission control be further enhanced and made more effective if delivered in combination with Okta’s identity management and single-sign-on solution? After all, knowing both the person and the device is more powerful than relying exclusively on one or the other. Or perhaps ForeScout might align best with Illumio’s adaptive security model, an update to legacy network-centric security? If Illumio’s goal is to obfuscate network-layer constructs upon which ForeScout depends, then making ForeScout more accessible and easier to deploy sounds like a good fit. But perhaps the most intriguing combination remains the illusive collision between Symantec and RSA. Envisioned more than a decade ago, this coming together of two industry titans may ultimately be the most powerful and energetic transformation possible. Both companies could use a major refresh. While Symantec may have sparked a small fire through the acquisition of , it remains entrenched in a narrow set of categories. Capturing a dominant market share requires moving beyond comfort categories and embracing complementary capabilities. RSA is many things. Though de-emphasized, it remains a leader in the encryption and identity space; it aspires to be a dominant provider of governance and compliance solutions; and it would like to ensure its seat at the forensics table. All are areas where Symantec is absent. Moreover, RSA needs freedom from limitations imposed on it both as a division of EMC and, in the future, as a company unaligned with the future strategy of . The complexity of cybersecurity means that opportunities for innovation abound, but the price has been category and sub-category explosion. As my colleague, , pointed out earlier this year at the , there are more than 1,440 cybersecurity companies globally fitting into over 80 classifications. As a result, there is no one dominant cybersecurity vendor with an exceptional market share but, rather, a number of category leaders of varying sizes. So, what if the giants began colliding? We’ll continue to explore additional unicorn-unicorn, unicorn-public and public-public possibilities in future posts — tune in!
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Samsung spills the details of its Note 7 exchange program in US
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Devin Coldewey
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If you’ve got a Galaxy Note 7, you’ve probably already heard about the recall. But the specifics differ for each region, and Samsung just now for what your options are here in the land of the free. First thing you’ll want to do is go to wherever you bought your device — they’ll be doing the exchange there. Then you get to choose what kind of exchange you’re looking for. You can get a new Note 7, of course, “as early as next week” — presumably, once the shipments of non-inflammable batteries have arrived and they’ve been swapped in. But you can also get a plain Galaxy S7 or a S7 Edge — both solid devices — and get refunded the difference between the two. Accessories will be replaced as well, so you won’t be out any cash if you bought a case or screen protector. In addition to a new device, everyone who does the exchange will get a $25 gift card or bill credit. If you have questions, check to make sure your phone isn’t on fire and then dial 1-800-SAMSUNG and they should be able to help you out.
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Airbnb releases first transparency report on government requests for user data
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Kate Conger
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Airbnb received 188 requests for users’ data from governments around the world in the first six months of this year, according to the company’s . The home-sharing company provided data in response to 82 of those requests. Airbnb is publishing a transparency report as part of its , an initiative to make the company more transparent to the public and to the local governments in the cities where it operates. “We’re building a more transparent community and sharing data about our community with the general public,” Airbnb spokesperson Christopher Nulty told TechCrunch. “We felt that this is an important first step. In the future, we’ll look to share additional sorts of data about our community.” In releasing its transparency report, Airbnb is joining the growing cohort of tech companies that regularly publish information about the government requests they receive. , , , and others make transparency reports available, but most of those companies receive a much higher volume of requests than Airbnb. Google was hit with 40,677 requests in the second half of 2015, while Facebook received 19,235 requests during the same period. These companies hold troves of user data that is valuable to law enforcement, so it makes sense that they’d be slammed with requests. But Uber and Airbnb likely receive fewer requests because they don’t hold the same rich repositories of user communications, photos, and personal information. In its inaugural transparency report released in April, Uber said it received only 469 law enforcement requests over a six-month period. Nulty says Airbnb’s numbers are relatively low because the company works to promote safety for its users. “We take trust pretty seriously on our platform and we think that’s reflected in our report. During the first six months of 2016, we had more than 31 million arrivals across the globe, but an incredibly low number of requests. The vast majority of people on our platform are having safe experiences,” he said. Airbnb’s report says that the company works to inform users when their data has been requested by a law enforcement agency “unless we believe that doing so would be futile, ineffective, or create a risk of harm.” The company also included a canary in its report regarding , which allow federal authorities to request user data from tech companies and often come with gag orders that prevent the companies from discussing it. Companies are only allowed to disclose how many NSLs they’ve received in ranges of zero to 499, but Airbnb says it hasn’t had to worry about NSLs so far. “To date, we have not received a national security letter or other similar request that would limit our ability to disclose it here,” Airbnb says in its report. Airbnb breaks down the requests by country of origin and discloses how many of the requests resulted in a disclosure of data, but doesn’t say whether the requests came from federal or local agencies or specify what kinds of data was disclosed. According to the company’s law enforcement guidelines, Airbnb will give basic information on users such as name, address, and payment data in response to a subpoena. Further details like reservation history require a court order, while messages and other communications require a warrant. The majority of requests for Airbnb user data came from French authorities, followed by law enforcement agencies in the United States, Germany, and the United Kingdom. Airbnb received government requests from just 21 of the 191 countries it operates in around the world. Even though Airbnb received a relatively low number of government requests, Slack is still winning the race to be the company with the fewest disclosures of user data — in its , Slack revealed it had received just one government request.
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The billionaire’s plaything
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John Biggs
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James Bond has to fight a madman with his own fleet of Space Shuttles. The movie was made in 1979, a golden age for government-subsidized spaceflight. Back then the thought that a man like Hugo Drax could afford a fleet of shuttles was ludicrous. The thought that private businesses could send anything bigger than a breadbox into orbit was silly. Sure the sight of Jaws, the silver-toothed assassin that almost ate Bond’s face, and his odd love interest was funny but the thought that the private sector could build a space shuttle was far funnier. Fast forward to yesterday when a privately-funded rocket carrying a privately-funded satellite exploded on the launch pad. Luckily no one was hurt but that an industrialist has essentially outpaced government in the realm of daily spaceflight – and that that selfsame industrialist’s rocket blew up on the pad – is at once awful and fascinating. Spaceflight has always been a human aim, not just a personal one. While we can argue that all government programs lead to some sort of private gain, either through the dispersion of technology into the private sector (think Tang) or the dispersion of cash into contractor’s pockets, we must also argue that the space race was a national ,if not a global, triumph. In the end it doesn’t matter if America or Russia or China won or lost. What matters is that we “slipped the surly bonds of Earth” and saw a way forward for our backward and war-like species. I’m worried, then, that projects like SpaceX are dangerous. They are not dangerous because they can explode nor because they are locked away inside corporations. I’m worried because we as humans don’t get the share in the joys, the dangers, and the elation that these new technologies bring. NASA is a seeming government boondoggle that has not only put men on the moon but that has explored mars. It is a shining beacon of intellectualism and science in a dark time and working at NASA used to mean something. I’m worried because private corporations drain NASA of its brainpower. They snap up research organizations wholesale – just ask Carnegie Mellon’s robotics program about Uber – and try to trap genius with shortsighted equity plays. They blow up a rocket on a launchpad and we chortle. The thought of two of the richest men in California fighting about is funny. But spaceflight is deadly serious. It’s our way off this planet and it proves that we are bigger than ourselves. We are held down by implacable laws of physics and biology and yet we assume that, one day, we’ll board a rocket to Mars the way we board a Greyhound to Toledo. It has to happen, right? But if the private sector controls the technology, if the private sector controls the launches, and if we consider the private sector’s efforts goofy at best and mundane at worst, we’re losing something important. I remember the hours after the Challenger exploded. Until that day in January spaceflight had a golden sheen. Space was within our reach. I was eleven. I was in fourth or fifth grade and our teacher wheeled in a big tube TV and turned it on. Some of the students and teachers were crying. Others sat rapt. I remember the twin horns of the engines twisting off into the blue. I remember the awe on the ground as they watched the launch and the explosion. I remember the joy turned to horror as things went wrong. I remember people saying that a teacher, Christa McAuliffe, was up with them and that she wasn’t coming back. I remember the faces of McAuliffe’s parents staring up at the blue sky wondering what had happened. Maybe that was the beginning of the end for public spaceflight. Maybe we want government out of space the way we want it out of everything else. But NASA was and is an organization beyond political wrangling, their mission so pure and quixotic that you wonder why our own selfishness allowed it to exist at all. We humans are not normally kind to each other and we do not share. But international space programs are defined by sharing. We have space stations and research-based space centers. Thanks to NASA and other governmental organizations we entered the 21st century arm in arm instead of at each other’s throats simply because open technologies like satellite imaging, GPS, and environmental science helped us all soar higher. It’s hard to blow up the Earth when you can see it whole, its beauty hard, bright, and clear. Back in 1979 it was ridiculous that a rich man could steal a space shuttle. Now it’s not so ridiculous. Space travel is our right, our goal, and our ultimate defining trait. These days computers dream, robots replace us behind the wheel, and the world groans under our weight. Rockets let us shine as a species, they let us point up and away and go there. I’m not sure they’re quite ready to be a billionaire’s plaything.
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Investors, here are the Startup Alley companies at Disrupt SF
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Matt Burns
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We’re thrilled to announce that you can catch a glimpse of all the Startup Alley companies on . In addition to being a great resource for investors, the site is also mobile-friendly so you can easily view info on all of your favorite Alley companies right from your mobile device at the conference. The hub is separated into days and categories, so you can see all of the social companies that will be on display on day 1 of the conference, for example, making it incredibly simple to keep track of the companies you’re interested in talking to. Each company on the hub has a profile that contains information about the company and their product or service, as well as any investors in the company thus far and how much money they’ve raised to date. The profile also contains contact information for the company founders and representatives so you can easily have all the information you need to get in touch at your fingertips. And if you’re so inclined you can share interesting company profiles with your followers on Twitter, Facebook, Google+ or LinkedIn with the share buttons on the left side of each company profile. We wanted to make it super easy for all the investors at Disrupt to learn more about the companies that will be on display in Startup Alley and Hardware Alley, and we think the Startup Alley hub is a pivotal resource for you as you plan your days at the show. Speaking of the show, at San Francisco’s massive Pier 48 just down the road from AT&T Park, and we can’t wait to see all of you VCs, entrepreneurs and tech enthusiasts at the show. And if you somehow still haven’t purchased your Disrupt ticket, you can do so .
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Chris Moore of Redpoint Ventures: the market “feels like it’s in flux”
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Connie Loizos
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Chris Moore is an increasingly rare breed. At the founding of 17 years ago, Moore joined as an associate and — unlike today’s associates who often are cycled in and out of venture firms — he was made a partner. Since then, Moore has led deals in numerous companies that have gone on to sell for sizable amounts, including Auditude, by Adobe; Right Media, (and later ) by Yahoo; Efficient Frontier, by Adobe; and Blue Kai, by Oracle. He also led Redpoint into Refresh, earlier this year by LinkedIn for undisclosed terms. Earlier today, before leaving Redpoint’s Sand Hill Road office for the long weekend, Moore talked with us about what he’s seeing in the market right now and why it “feels like it’s in flux.” More from that chat, edited for length: CM: I know, it isn’t really clear right now which way the market will go. We had a real run-up last year and the year before, with lots of money coming into the system and momentum investing and all the unicorn hoopla. Then, late last year, it started to feel a little more discriminate, I think in part because the funding ecosystem was just getting exhausted. CM: In January and February, we had that public market hiccup, and we all said, “Ooh, this is it. It feels like the start of the correction.” And it didn’t really happen. Interest rates are still low and tech is still the one place where there’s growth in the world and investors are still looking for growth. I do think there’s more focus on the fundamentals, and that translates from the later stage growth market all the way down to the Series A market. I think we’re even starting to see it a bit in the seed market. CM: The pace has slowed a bit over last year, but not a lot. Still, I know we’re more focused on the “show me” rather than the “tell me.” We’re looking for market validation and proof points in the form of customer momentum and evidence that the business model can work. CM: No, not at the Series A stage. If you start asking for [onerous] terms, it’s hurts the company and it hurts us, because your next set of investors are going to say, “Hey, they got those terms at the Series A; we want them, too.” CM: Interestingly, we haven’t seen valuations fall. Of the deals we’ve done this year, they are just as high as they were last year. I think the same thing is true of many growth stage companies; people are stretching to be in those special companies. The marginal companies are going to have a tougher time. There’s a hissing, the sound of air being released, but it’s better than the bubble popping like it did in 2000 and 2001. CM: It’s a great question. Think about that LinkedIn acquisition alone. That’s billions of dollars back in investors’ pockets. Where is it going to go? Arguably, there’s still way too much money in the system. We’re just trying to be super disciplined and when we see outstanding entrepreneurs and proof points that they’re disrupting large markets, we pay market rates. CM: The China guys are starting to come over here. These internet platform companies — Alibaba, Tencent — they have global aspirations for their businesses and they’re figuring out where growth will come from next. But we’re still seeing it far more at the growth stage of things. CM: We’ve historically been pretty balanced between consumer and enterprise. In last year or two, we’ve probably made a slight shift toward enterprise. The consumer side is a little more cyclical. We’ve had these big platform shifts over the last several years – the web to social to mobile. I still think we’re still just scratching the surface of mobile. But people are looking for what the next big platform will be that enables the next flurry of consumer opportunities. Is it AR? VR? Is it next-generation interfaces, whether voice or messaging platforms? My guess is that you’ll continue to see the steady growth of new, compelling, mobile-first experiences that can get [meaningful] distribution. For example, we’re seeing a lot of marketplace models that may not be sexy but are rethinking the way these big offline businesses work. We’ve invested in , which is building a mortgage origination business. We funded , which provides on-demand warehouse capacity. We’re starting to see more of these models emerge. We’re just picking our spots.
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Bitmovin grabs $10.3M as it looks to crack VR video adaptive streaming
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Lucas Matney
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It’s pretty odd that even while people are chatting about producing the VR video’s crazy theoretical future with 8K resolution per eye, stereoscopic rendering and light field-ready footage, I’m still here struggling to keep Louis C.K. clips from buffering on my mobile phone. For VR to be successful, companies are going to need to start correcting some of the growing pains of high-quality streaming. is aiming to start solving some of these issues through a technology called adaptive streaming, which dynamically adjusts video quality depending on the user’s device and internet connection. The company says its technology encodes videos 100x faster and provides higher quality output than any other service on the market. Bitmovin’s technology does more to solve the issues related to optics-quality mismatches between different VR headsets. It doesn’t make sense, for instance, to stream insanely high-res footage to a mobile VR headset with a standard HD screen. As high-end VR tech progresses, this mismatch is likely only going to get wider. “This year a lot of VR headsets from Oculus to HTC and Sony, as well as 360 degree cameras such as the Orah, Giroptic, Nokia’s Ozo, etc. are entering the market,” said Lederer, Bitmovin’s CEO. “A big change is coming in how we make and watch video.” Bitmovin is aiming to get behind that big change before its competitors do. The company has just completed a $10.3 million Series A round of funding led by . Lederer is hoping to use the funding to accelerate development of Bitmovin’s adaptive streaming tech on new mediums like VR. The startup is already providing services for some of the most recognizable names in the VR industry, but most of the company’s efforts currently lie in more traditional video streaming landscapes, something its founders have a pretty significant background in. Bitmovin’s co-founders created the MPEG-DASH video streaming standard, which powers streaming on services like Netflix and YouTube and accounts for 50 percent of peak U.S. internet traffic. Bitmovin’s HTML5 player can play videos using the MPEG-DASH and HLS formats on a wide range of platforms, including desktop web and mobile, as well as Smart TVs and VR headsets. “Consumers have come to expect high-quality video anywhere, and on any device,” said Teddie Wardi, principal at Atomico. “They have little patience for buffering and skipping, and will solve this problem.”
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Weekly Roundup: SpaceX explosion destroys Facebook satellite, Google takes on Uber
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Anna Escher
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This week, what would have been Facebook’s first satellite was destroyed in a Falcon 9 explosion, Facebook changed its Trending Topics layout and new information about the Dropbox password breach was unveiled. These are the top stories of the week, and you can , if that makes your life easier. SpaceX experienced a while completing a routine static test-fire that destroyed Facebook’s $200 million Internet.org satellite. there were no personnel injuries in the blast, but the rocket and payload were destroyed. There are three stages of questioning to go through when a rocket explosion occurs, and . In a Facebook post, Mark Zuckerberg wrote that he was by the loss, but . A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket has exploded. Here's what we know so far: http://tcrn.ch/2c86Srv Posted by on Thursday, September 1, 2016 Tick tock, tick tock. Is it September 7 yet? Apple sent out invites for its , where it will most likely unveil the next iPhone. Leaks that the iPhone 7 could feature streamlined antennas and a more prominent camera, as well as a dual-lens camera system in the larger model. It looks like the audio port is going away, too. There have been many rumors about a new MacBook Pro with a Touch ID sensor and an . The Apple Watch should also receive an update. As always, we’ll be at the event, live-blogging and tweeting to bring you all the updates. To the frustration of English-browsing users, in favor of increasing the scalability of the product, as well as fired the human editors who curate the Trending section. It didn’t take long for the At least . Both Dropbox and Last.fm revealed the from four years ago. Remember the ? The company initially said that user emails were the only data stolen, but the number may have been much higher than we originally thought. It turns out that passwords were also acquired, leading to the PSA: please enable two-factor authentication. Apple was . The European Commission is saying that Apple benefited from illegal tax benefits for its European operations, and that Ireland must recover the so-called “illegal aid.” Apple CEO Tim Cook responded in a letter to customers calling the move with “no basis in fact or in law.” Stay tuned. Watch out, Uber. The new service uses the Waze app to connect commuters for shared carpooling, and is said to be much, much cheaper than Uber. At first, . But as the company pieces together its delivery business (including growing shipping operations, centralized hubs, air transport and last-mile delivery) the e-commerce giant . Facebook cloned Snapchat once again with a new . Messenger already lets you make video calls, but the new service lets you and a friend instantly share real-time video with each other. Does your appearing at the top of the screen? Well, an iFixit report asserted that the problem is the result of a design flaw and a “Touch Disease” lawsuit hopes to elevate the case to class action status. Bad news for those who are lazy/rich enough to outsource their laundry to Washio, as the service announced it will be . The startup had raised a total of $16.8 million in funding. A slew of new gadgets were introduced at . Some highlights include the strangely fascinating , the and . We also got to take for a spin. Taking Sphero’s BB-8 Force Band for a spin http://tcrn.ch/2bKV7qm Posted by on Thursday, September 1, 2016 Blue Apron, valued north of $2 billion and potentially gunning for an IPO, is as much a shipping company as it is a food startup; therefore, questions about carbon emissions, food transportation and packaging waste must be taken into consideration. But is the company part of the problem or the solution? TBD. DraftKings, the fantasy sports startup entrenched in legal battles,
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Microsoft is putting Cortana machine learning in a fridge
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Darrell Etherington
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Microsoft is to rebuild the refrigerator and make it smarter, faster, strong; well, maybe just smarter. The new collaboration between the two will see Microsoft provide computer vision technology, via its Microsoft Cognitive Services Computer Vision API, to let the fridge identify objects contained within. Why would you want a fridge that knows what it’s holding? It’ll save you those extra return trips to the grocery store for things you forgot, for one. The deep learning algorithms in use will be able to learn new food types based on its experience from processing millions of generic food packaging images, and it should be able to get smarter very quickly while in use when and if it eventually comes to market, using data gathered from a wide pool of real-world users. Other fridges have the ability to let , but Microsoft’s data science team worked directly with Liebherr on this prototype to make a fridge that won’t force you to rely on your pathetic human eyes looking at a grainy image over a poor cellular connection to roll the dice while shopping. The fridge is just a prototype for now, though, so you’ll have to do with your uneducated, idiotic produce cooling box for now. But in the meantime, if you want some Microsoft in your refrigerator, .
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ILMxLAB’s Diana Williams and Michael Koperwas will join us at TechCrunch Disrupt SF
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Darrell Etherington
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Every fan’s dream is to be there – to inhabit the rich world created by Lucasfilm and the creative minds behind the epic films and their surrounding media universe. , the immersive entertainment division of Lucasfilm, is working to make those dreams come true. Michael Koperwas and Diana Williams are two of the creative forces that help ILMxLAB make its magic, and we’re excited to announce that they’ll be joining us on the Disrupt SF stage. Koperwas led the process of coming up with prototypes for some of xLAB’s earliest work, including the 360-degree video trailer for , and the virtual reality mobile-based experience . His tenure at ILMxLAB extends from its founding in June 2016, but his career at Industrial Light & Magic spans 16 years, and includes credits on films such as , , and the . Williams is a member of Lucasfilm’s Story Group, which is responsible for tying together the narrative threads across the expanding creative universe. She is also the creative liaison to ILMxLAB, where she helps ensure the immersive augmented and virtual experiences the studio creates also blend in with the larger creative universes within which they reside. Prior to joining Lucasfilm, Williams helped bring critically acclaimed comic book series to life. Join us at Disrupt SF to hear Williams and Koperwas discuss the creative process involved in telling stories that bring the audience inside the action like never before. Disrupt SF runs September 12-14 at Pier 48, and you can .
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The LMS market glacier is melting
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Phil Hill
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The world of edtech is strange and full of apparent contradictions. Venture capital investment has exploded since 2010, hitting an all-time high of in 2015, with private equity and strategic acquisitions pushing this number even higher. Dozens of startups, if not more, vie for the attention of presidents and provosts. If you look at adoption rates by schools, just one category continues to consume the majority of edtech attention and budgets in higher education: the much-maligned learning management system (LMS). But the glacier may be melting. It would be easy to look at the and think that nothing much has changed over the last decade. Despite the success of more recent entrants like and , has, by far, the greatest market share, with companies like , and open-source alternatives like far behind. The LMS oligopoly is nothing if not resilient, historically leaving little space for competition. But this view by itself would be misleading. Higher education moves at glacial speeds, and judging the market based on the surface issues misses some important recent dynamics. It’s true that Blackboard still has greater market share than any other technology player in higher education. But Instructure’s Canvas LMS won almost 80 percent of higher education implementations this year — a shift that may reflect the growing influence of faculty, rather than institutional, priorities in LMS purchasing. Consider this: While the LMS reached a saturation point among colleges and universities around 2003, it is only in the past 3-4 years that the vast majority of courses or faculty members routinely used an LMS. The established legacy providers (e.g. and ) are, in turn, investing millions of dollars in re-architecting their platforms to reside in the cloud and enable a new approach to the user experience. And while platform switching was historically driven by forced migrations (Blackboard buying competitors and terminating product lines), today’s selections are most often rooted in involuntary reasons, such as moving to the cloud or improving the end users’ experience. Perhaps most significantly, most schools are no longer looking for just one system to manage the virtual classroom. We are now seeing entire institutions, such as and , designing new architectures where the LMS is but one core component. This move is enabling broader adoption of pedagogical approaches, such as competency-based education and personalized learning. Once we get broader adoption of new pedagogies and new student support models, such as institution-wide or discipline-specific adoption, we may see longer-lasting trends and business models for the technologies outside the LMS. Technologies that generate analytics-driven feedback for faculty, provide targeted coaching or advising support for students or enable new learning modalities, such as flipped and blended classrooms, may very well be the beneficiaries of redirected spending and mind share. Of course, the challenges to higher education’s tech-enabled transformation are multifaceted. Initiative fatigue abounds. Venture-backed apps and solutions are, all too often, reflective of dystopian fantasies about higher education’s mass disruption more so than the real-world needs of faculty — and students. But chief among challenges for early-stage edtech companies and investors is the stronghold of a $2-3 billion LMS oligopoly that has, for more than a decade, indelibly shaped campus-wide technology infrastructure — and, in turn, limited the penetration of new layers of technology that extend or operate in parallel to the LMS. Contrary to the popular narrative, edtech is having an impact on how colleges and universities operate, but higher ed has to change in its own ways. It is a public good that by necessity should not quickly follow each new tech solution proposed. Deep changes are happening, and often these changes are driven by higher ed institutions themselves, with technology in a supporting role. Understanding the higher education market often requires one to ignore the time scale and see the changes as slower-moving but longer-lasting than those in consumer markets. The glacier is not only melting, but reshaping itself. For those investors and vendors that want to have a lasting impact, patience is required to understand the opportunity and lessons of LMS market changes.
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Sanbot is a humanoid robot with penguin flipper arms and a touchscreen heart
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Brian Heater
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When I arrived at Qihan’s IFA booth, a rainbow-colored trio of Sanbots were performing choreographed moves to some unrecognizable pop song. Because, well, when you want to get people to stop at your both in the middle of a giant show full of gadgety distractions, you pull out all the stops. The plucky little robot has flipper arms, a pair of wheels for feet and a body chock full of various sensors to help it perform a factotum of different jobs, from security guard to nursing home companion to educational assistant. According to the company, this iteration of Sanbot has already been deployed at various spots in China from retail establishments to airports. Sanbot’s got a Kinect-style 3D camera and HD camera about its LED eyes, a touchscreen tablet in its chest and infrared sensors at its feet. The rear of its head houses an HD projector, while two speaker grilles and a subwoofer are built into its torso. The robot can be controlled via the tablet, an Android or iOS app, or it will simply take its AI marching orders from the cloud. IFA marks Sanbot’s debut outside of China, with the company looking to find the robot some gigs in the European service industry – and honestly, the pricing isn’t crazy, at 45,000 yuan (around $6,000). The company will also be revealing an updated version of the robot with articulated hands in China later this month. Meantime, do yourself a favor and watch this video, in which the appearance of “Temptation Sensation” (the theme song) is maybe the 8th or 9th strangest thing:
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Fleex now lets you learn English by streaming Netflix shows
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Romain Dillet
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When I first covered , it a neat little video player that let you learn English using your favorite movies or TV shows. Since then, has acqui-hired the team behind Fleex and now plans to relaunch the language learning platform with a new killer feature — Netflix shows. Maybe I’m biased because it’s basically how I learned English, but I think watching all your movies and TV shows in a foreign language will drastically help you when it comes to learning that language. At first, you start with subtitles, then you switch the language of the subtitles so that both the audio and the subtitles are in the foreign language. Then you drop the subtitles altogether. You’ve got to force yourself so that when you go to the next phase it feels difficult to understand at first. On Fleex, you start with subtitles in both your native language and English. Slowly, Fleex removes subtitles in your native language. For the hardest parts of the video, you still get subtitles in both languages, but not all the time. Then Fleex removes subtitles completely. At any time, you can pause the video, click on a word to look up the definition in and add it to your list of words you want to learn. Fleex costs €6.90 per month or €39 per year. It still works with TED talks and your personal videos if you don’t download the Fleex player on your computer. But the company is also adding Netflix as a source. I couldn’t try it yet, but it’s supposed to go live any day. So how does Netflix support work? It’s a client-side integration. Netflix doesn’t have an API, but uses an HTML5 player that browser extensions can play with. For instance, you can add subtitles and interactions on top of the Netflix player. “Netflix wasn’t available internationally a couple of years ago,” Reverso CEO Theo Hoffenberg told me. “But now, Netflix is quite open and we can work with the Netflix player directly. It’s not an API, but it’s open.” The good thing is that Netflix can’t stop them from doing that as everything happens in your browser. From Netflix’s servers, it looks like yet another person streaming a show on Netflix. And Netflix will probably be happy that you’re spending more time (and money) watching Netflix content anyway — it’s a win-win.
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Finally, Windows 10 on a refrigerator door
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Brian Heater
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To the thousands, nay, millions who were holding out for a Windows 10 fridge before upgrading, we’ve got some pretty great news straight from the IFA show floor. Granted, it’s still just a prototype with no firm release date, but here you go. LG put a fully functioning Windows 10 tablet on the door of a fancy new icebox. And it’s a massive tablet, at that – measuring 27 inches, powered by an Intel Atom processor located up top. It actually seems to work pretty well, in the demo we got on the showroom floor. It’s surprisingly responsive – a lot more than many of the sorts of displays companies jam onto their appliances in the name of smartness. The coolest bit here (what pun?) is that the fact that the big touchscreen surface turns translucent, revealing the fridge’s contents behind it. That means that you can virtually pin things like purchase dates to the surface, directly in front of a perishable. Of course, the demo refrigerator had like four things in it. As large as 27 inches is, it can get pretty crowded, pretty fast. You can also do all of the standard smart fridge door stuff, a la Samsung’s Tizen offerings, like finding and displaying recipes, watching YouTube videos, or, in the case on the demo on the floor, looking at a big picture of Vladimir Putin’s head in the news.
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Google’s new Project Muze proves machines aren’t that great at fashion design
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Sarah Perez
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Google’s AI technology may be capable — thanks to its neural network-powered computer vision program — but when Google turned its machine learning technology to the world of fashion via its new experiment , the results were less than compelling. Designed in partnership with European e-commerce company , Project Muze is an attempt at building a neural network capable of making creative decisions resulting in virtual fashions that will be transformed into real-life clothing. The project is based on Google’s open-source platform and consists of a neural network — meaning, an algorithm that’s modeled on the human brain — and a set of aesthetic parameters, the company . Google showed the neural network things like color, texture and style preferences from more than 600 fashion experts to train it. It then learned to connect those preferences back to people with similar interests. [gallery ids="1379377,1379376,1379375,1379374,1379373,1379372,1379371,1379369,1379368"] The aesthetic parameters were derived from and data sourced by Zalando, which has an understanding of design and trends. Google says it will show off Project Muze at the trend show in Berlin this week. There, Zalando’s designers will showcase three of Muze’s creations, as inspired by fashion bloggers , and . These will be translated into real clothing. But would you wear any of Project Muze’s clothing? We tried out the online project, which asks you for inspiration through a series of questions about your favorite music, art and current mood, and finally asks you to draw on your screen. Project Muze then came back with this weird thing: What even is that red mesh that’s just hovering over the model, suspended apparently by invisible strings? And the patterns on the clothing move and flow, as animations — something real-life clothing can’t mimic, of course. Independently, the pieces may be wearable… well, except for the red-mesh thing… seriously, [gallery ids="1379365,1379366"] Meanwhile, other Project Muze creations are just as odd, if not more so. I call this one “ugly pajamas wrapped in a vine:” Or perhaps you prefer “ugly, puffy pajamas?” Maybe “pointy shawl that looks like an amethyst crystal attached to your body?” Or “dress where you’re wrapped like a present?” Giant cape with clashing jumper? Among the least offensive pieces was this “pointy cocktail dress:” Or maybe the “knee-pad pants” and “tight hoodie with elbow holes?” [gallery ids="1379388,1379387"] Some of the items could make for an interesting runway piece, I suppose. But in terms of creating real-world, wearable clothing, it seems like the machines have a way to go. But hey, what do we know? We’re just tech bloggers over here. Maybe this is high-fashion and we’re dumb. Still, at least our clothing isn’t going to poke you with its sharp points when we bump into you on the street, or strangle its wearer with a swirling vine… Wait, … what are these machines up to, you guys?
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Gillmor Gang LIVE 09.02.16
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Steve Gillmor
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This was a LIVE recording session of – today with: John Taschek, Frank Radice, Kevin Marks, Keith Teare, and Steve Gillmor. Gillmor Gang’s Facebook page G3’s Facebook page
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European insurance tech startup FinanceFox closes $28M Series A
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Steve O'Hear
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“We’re not a bunch of startup dudes saying we’re disrupting insurance… we’re not a bunch of arrogant pricks,” co-founder and CEO Julian Teicke told me during a call late last week. The company, which is announcing $28 million in Series A funding today, is one of a number of European ‘insurtech’ startups who are attempting to bring insurance into the digital age. But, unlike others, such as and , Teicke says FinanceFox is as much a platform for existing insurance brokers as it is an app to bypass them altogether. That’s because brokers can transition their customer base onto the app, as well as use it to spot holes in and sell additional coverage. And by fully digitising their core processes, brokers are able to provide a much more efficient and up-to-date way of communicating with customers, helping to retain them along the way. “We’re working together with industry experts who have experience,” says the FinanceFox CEO, adding that his father is a 30-year veteran of the insurance industry. The startup’s boss in Switzerland is Michael John, who is also the president of the national brokers association. This, says Teicke, brings an immediate level of trust, not least amongst insurance brokers with whom FinanceFox partners and who might otherwise see insurance startups as a threat. “I call the brokerage industry the broken brokerage industry,” he says, arguing that brokers who adopt platforms like FinanceFox will survive and those that don’t will be out-innovated by tech players. “They’re losing customers to digital players… they have high administrative costs, they have a lack of technology and efficiency in their processes, and they have no way of communicating with customers in a really innovative way. They are in a situation where they need to act”. Price comparison sites, which remove the broker altogether, were the first to eat into the broken broker market, but a knock on effect is that a customer’s insurances are more fragmented than ever, making it a nightmare to track all of your coverage and deal with multiple insurance providers. In turn, this is seeing a new breed of mobile-first insurance apps offering to consolidate and help you manage your entire insurance cover. To that end, FinanceFox lets you store of all of your insurance policies in a single app, through which you can also file and manage insurance claims. It does this by essentially making FinanceFox your legal representative, able to deal with existing (and future) insurance companies on your behalf. During the on-boarding process, FinanceFox will contact each of your insurances in order to digitise your current policies, from which it can monitor coverage and suggest better, cheaper or more appropriate insurance. “FinanceFox eliminates all pain-points,” is how Teicke put it to me . This, , includes when it’s time to actually file a claim. Notably, the service is free of charge for the customer, with the startup and its partner brokers making money via a “service component” paid by insurance companies in return for FinanceFox handling most of the admin and support side of insurance. , the business model has been around for almost as long as insurance brokerage has existed, but it’s also one that incentivises insurtech startups like FinanceFox to digitise as much of the insurance process as possible and drag insurance companies and brokers along with it. “We want to be an agent of change for the whole insurance industry,” says Teicke. Meanwhile, I’m told that Target Global, and Horizons Ventures have led FinanceFox’s Series A. Existing investors Salesforce Ventures, Idinvest, Speedinvest, Seedcamp, AngelList, Victory Park Capital, and Samuel Skoblo also remain on board. FinanceFox is based in Zurich, Vienna, Berlin and Barcelona with over 80 employees, and plans to expand to Austria next.
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Allo brings Google’s smarts to messaging
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Frederic Lardinois
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Google first and , its new messaging and video chat apps, at its I/O developer conference earlier this year. Duo launched about a month ago and today it’s Allo’s turn. With Allo, Google is combining everything it has learned from its previous messaging products with the company’s machine learning smarts. Indeed, Allo marks the first time you’ll be able to use the Google Assistant, the company’s more conversational version of Google Now that will also soon find its way into products like Google Home, Android Wear and others. Given that Google already owns Hangouts, a messaging service that also includes video chat, the obvious question here is why the company would launch another one. As Google’s VP of communications products Nick Fox told me, the reason for this is that the company wants to position Hangouts as its productivity and enterprise service, while Allo and Duo are its consumer products. “When we think about the enterprise case, it’s actually different from the user case,” he said. “We made a choice to have a different case for enterprise and one for consumers.” The team basically decided that in order to build the product it wanted, it had to make a set of core decisions (which included splitting video and text chat into two different apps) and start from scratch. One area in which you can see this new approach is that Duo and Allo are based around your friends’ phone numbers — not Google accounts. As far as the core messaging experience in Allo goes, everything is pretty straightforward. The Allo feature that got the was the ability to make text appear bigger or smaller (to shout or whisper) when you press and hold the send button and then drag up or down. I don’t think that’s Allo’s most exciting feature, but it does allow you to add a bit more personality to your chats. Talking about personality: Where Apple went with lots of corporate partnerships with the likes of Disney and Nintendo, Google opted for working with independent artists for its stickers in Allo. There are currently just under 30 sticker packs in Allo. Themes range from a pack that features an alcoholic and moody sloth to ones that feature partying marshmallows, Otto the Octopus and Stella the Starfish and a very sad puppy. The style here is more often reminiscent of some of the edgier animated shows on Comedy Central. All of the packs are available for free. You can, of course, also send images (and draw on them), share your location and dictate text. All of that is table stakes, though — and Fox pretty much agrees with that, too. “Because messaging is already used by billions of people, people think messaging is a solved problem,” he told me. “But we don’t see it that way. We actually think we are on the cusp of a new generation of messaging apps. We think of it as smart messaging.” What makes Allo different then is its integration with Google’s machine learning smarts and the Google Assistant. I mostly think of Google Assistant as the conversational version of Google Now. While you could already have some basic back and forth with Google Now ever since it started understanding pronouns, the Google Assistant takes this to a new level. There are two ways to work with the Google Assistant (which is officially still in preview) in Allo. You can simply chat with it directly, just like you would do with a friend. Or you can bring it into a conversation by typing and asking it a question. When you first start directly, it’ll politely introduce itself, ask if it can use your device’s location and then give you a few examples of what you can do. Like Google Now, it can tell you the weather, and it lets you set timers, alarms and reminders and ask general questions. You can also use it to see the latest news or specific news about a person or event (and subscribe to daily updates about them) or ask about nearby restaurants, flight delays and other standard queries you are likely familiar with from Google Now. You can also play a trivia game and, if you feel like you are in a confessional mode, you can tell the Assistant things about yourself, too. Ideally, this results in a conversation with the Assistant, though you do hit upon its current limits pretty quickly. Too often, you ask it a question about a topic it doesn’t know about and all the Assistant returns is a link to a web site. At that point, the conversation simply ends. The ideal conversation is basically: “Show me some nearby sushi restaurants.” “Here are the listings for sushi restaurants within 4 mi.” “Which ones are open now?” “Here are listings for Shogun Sushi within 10 mi.” “Give me directions to there.” And then you get directions. At every step, Allo presents you with a few tappable options, too. For the most part then, chatting directly with the Assistant doesn’t always live up to its potential yet, though it’s easy to see how this will become more useful as it gets smarter over time. Where the Assistant does come in handy, though, is in chats with other people. You can easily pull in a Google search for a restaurant when you are looking to go out as a group, for example, or want to give directions to somebody. While support for the Google Assistant is probably the marquee feature of Allo, its use of smart replies — that is, the canned, pre-written responses you may already be familiar with from Google Inbox — is also very interesting. For the most part, these work really well. When you are chatting with the Assistant, this feature will often pull up useful follow-up questions, but even as you are just chatting with a friend, it’ll regularly pull up just the right response. In the worst-case scenario, that means you may end up having a conversation with a friend that’s really just two bots talking to each other, but ideally, the response you would’ve typed is there already and you can save yourself a few taps (which is especially useful when you are on the go). Smart Replies even works for photos, so when your friends send you pictures of babies, you can save yourself from typing the obligatory “oh, he’s so cute!” By default, all of the chats in Allo are encrypted using standard protocols. Allo does have an , too, though. Once you turn that on, chats are end-to-end encrypted and you also get the advantage of features like discreet notifications, which doesn’t show the message content in the standard mobile notifications, and message expiration, so your message auto-deletes after a set time that you can set from 5 seconds to a week. The obvious question here is why Google didn’t turn these features on by default. Fox tells me that when the chat is end-to-end encrypted, features like smart replies and the Google Assistant simply can’t work because Google’s algorithms can’t see the content of the chats, either. For some people, that may just be what they want. “We think it’s important that users have the choice,” Fox told me. And given that users do have a choice, chances are most of your friends won’t be on Allo just yet. For them, the app allows you to kick the message over to your SMS client to chat with them, but for Android users, Google is also introducing a new feature called “ .” With these, your friend still gets a notification and the ability to write an in-line response, just like you would do with a chat app you have installed on Android. The message will also include a link to download Allo, of course. Google’s strategy around messaging has been rather confusing in the past. Hopefully, the focus on specialized apps will put an end to this for the time being, especially if Hangouts does indeed become its enterprise/productivity app. I understand Google’s reasoning for launching yet another set of apps, but, personally, I would have rather seen the company build these features like Google Assistant into the Hangouts app (and I assume it will actually do that in the future). To be fair, the Assistant is still in preview; I’d like to see it get a bit smarter still, though. When it gets everything right, it’s a great user experience — but step outside of its comfort zone and you’re better off just doing a regular search in your browser. As Fox rightly noted, though, there is a reason it’s in preview right now. He also noted that part of that reason is that it’s meant to work together with Google Home and other Google apps that are either not on the market yet or don’t feature Assistant support yet. For now, Allo is the only app that features the Assistant, so some of the cross-service functionality remains limited. Still, Allo is a competent messaging app that gets all its core features right. I can see myself switching to it from Hangouts for chatting with friends and family (though I do miss the fact that there’s no built-in voice-calling feature yet).
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NASA’s asteroid-harvesting mission solicits proposals for its robotic spacecraft
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Devin Coldewey
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Asteroid mining is coming soon to a planet near you: this planet, and in 2021, to be specific. But NASA’s Asteroid Redirect Mission has lots of work to do before that point. Today the space-faring organization issued an from four partners on how they would go about creating the robotic spacecraft that would perform the actual asteroid redirection in question. This mission is a bit different from OSIRIS-REx, which . The idea there is to go to an asteroid, grab a piece and return it to Earth — difficult enough, but it wouldn’t be the first collection of “live” asteroid matter — that was already achieved by the Japanese probe a few years ago (an astonishing achievement, by the way). ARM’s goal is to select, lift and redirect into a stable, man-accessible Lunar orbit a boulder from a passing asteroid. Astronauts could explore the space rock in this relatively safe environment, bringing back samples to Earth at their leisure whenever stopping by the Moon. Boeing, Orbital ATK, Lockheed Martin and Space Systems all participated in a “conceptual design phase” in which the basics of the spacecraft were established, but this is the opportunity for each to differentiate itself from the others. The configuration of, say, the sensors with which the ARM craft will scan the surface, or the mechanism of its lander, are still up in the air. Those four will have about a month to get their proposal together: October 24 is the due date, and NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory will make its decision some time next year.
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Crunch Report | macOS Sierra now available
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Khaled "Tito" Hamze
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Tito Hamze, John Mannes
Tito Hamze
Joe Zolnoski
Joe Zolnoski
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The Oculus Touch motion controllers will cost many moneys
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Lucas Matney
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Oculus is just months away from releasing the Touch controllers and we now have a better idea of just how much they’ll hurt your wallet. A GAME store display revealed that the launch price of the controllers will be £190 in the U.K. That’s about $212 in the U.S., which is a bit more than many Rift owners hoped for, though the U.S. price is more than likely to sit pretty at $199. Oculus Touch controllers to cost £190 in the UK. Crikey. — Nick Summers (@nisummers) Though this is the price many in the industry expected, it is still a bit disappointing that existing Rift owners are going to have to shell out nearly the price of a console to bring a functionality to the Rift that has already been . Worth noting is that this price also includes an additional camera sensor to improve tracking for the system. Touch brings motion-tracked input controls to the Rift platform. It means the system is going to grow a lot more comparable to the experience users have on the HTC Vive. Now you’ll be able to interact with content in a way that hasn’t been possible with console controllers like the Xbox One controller that the Rift shipped with. This is going to be a huge launch for Oculus. The company already has a healthy stockpile of titles ready for launch and is essentially treating this as a relaunch for the headset. No official word on the timing of shipment; the only time frame from Oculus is Q4 of this year, but I’ve heard from people familiar with the matter that the Touch controllers may be shipping as early as late October. I’ve reached out to Oculus and will update if I hear anything back.
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Federal policy for self-driving cars pushes data sharing
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Kate Conger
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expected to radically transform transportation as we know it. The agency today released its (PDF), a document that will govern the way self-driving cars are developed, regulated, and policed in the U.S. According to the policy paper, NHTSA hopes to broaden the guidelines’ reach by collaborating with the governments of Canada and Mexico. The federal guidelines will push autonomous vehicle manufacturers into sharing data about their failures with each other and with the government, a move that is already being met with resistance from the tech and automotive industries. When self-driving cars crash, data from their must be retrieved by NHTSA and the manufacturer for crash reconstruction and analysis. “Vehicles should record, at a minimum, all information relevant to the [crash] and the performance of the system, so the circumstances of the event can be reconstructed,” the policy says. That record will then be shared with federal regulators and other manufacturers, and manufacturers are on the hook for ensuring their customers understand how their crash data will be distributed. How that data will be shared between the companies racing against each other to build the first self-driving car is yet to be determined, but what’s clear is that tech companies aren’t happy about the idea. David Strickland, who represents Uber, Google, and Lyft through the Self-Driving Coalition for Safer Streets, told reporters today that “the devil is in the details” when it comes to data sharing, and that’s going to be a sticking point for all private companies involved, especially in a space as closely competitive as autonomous vehicles. Strickland indicated that the industry would likely push back against the data sharing requirements. “There is competitor data, there’s confidential business information, there’s a number of aspects which have to be respected. But on the other hand, safety is a number one priority, and figuring out the right context and space that we can ensure that while protecting the data rights and, frankly, the property of all the innovators and manufacturers should be properly balanced and that’s going to take some time,” he . Of course, the NHTSA knows that convincing manufacturers to share their crash data isn’t going to be easy. The agency is exploring data sharing mechanisms that will keep data anonymous and avoid antitrust complaints. “While the specific data elements to be shared will need further refinement, the mechanisms for sharing can be established,” the federal guidelines say. Car companies are not known for embracing the concept of open source. Exceptions make headlines, as when Tesla made its patents available to any competitor who wants to use them “in good faith” in 2014. But Tesla still guards the driving data that powers its Autopilot autonomy features, which is gathered from the Tesla vehicle fleet. Tesla did, however, end up complying with both an initial request from the NHTSA for data logs from the fatal May 7 Model S crash, and with a modified follow-up request from the agency. George Hotz’s Autopilot-syle highway self-driving startup Comma.ai open-sourced the driving data it used to build its first successful prototype, but it’s also keeping a far greater store of data to itself as a competitive hedge. In recent conversations with TechCrunch, Uber, Lyft and GM have all separately pointed to the vast stores of driving data collected by their respective fleets as key competitive advantages in the race to develop truly effective autonomy. And of all the data used to train these systems — information related to how autonomous vehicles handle challenging conditions or actual impact events — might be most valuable in terms of creating a really robust, adaptable self-driving car. If Uber can handle more varied road conditions without engaging a human driver than can Lyft, for example, that’s going to translate into lower cost-per ride and better margins. One proposed solution would require companies to upload their data to a third-party aggregator — yet another party that tech companies will likely want to exclude from accessing their data. However, using a third-party data collection service outside the NHTSA may have the benefit of shielding autonomous vehicle manufacturers’ data from the general public. If NHTSA serves as a clearinghouse, data generated by Uber and others will be subject to public records requests, allowing journalists and members of the public to explore the datasets. Uber has already fought this battle on a state-by-state basis, trying to keep data on its drop-offs and pick-ups from the public. The ride-hailing company was unsuccessful in New York, where the city’s Taxi & Limousine Commission . But on Uber’s home turf, the California Public Utilities Commission earlier this year rejected a request from TechCrunch for similar data, saying it was considered “confidential, for the present.” Ford told TechCrunch in a statement that it “appreciates [U.S. Secretary of Transportation Anthony] Foxx’s leadership and NHTSA’s thoughtful efforts to advance the future of mobility and ensure the United States continues to drive transportation innovation,” but would not comment specifically on the company’s position regarding the prospect of having to share more data with government agencies or outside groups. Whatever data automakers are forced to share, making the requirements at the federal level means that companies will be able to avoid this state-by-state variance. “I think it’s great that they’re at the federal level. I think that’ll be much simpler and easier to work with than a patchwork of state and local agencies,” Lyft CTO Chris Lambert told students at Northeastern today. The NHTSA doesn’t want companies to share data with each other only when their cars crash — they also want companies to share information about when they’ve been hacked. “As with safety data, industry sharing on cybersecurity is important. Each industry member should not have to experience the same cyber vulnerabilities in order to learn from them,” the policy says. However, while NHTSA wants to get its hands on crash data, the agency seems ambivalent about receiving vulnerability data. And that may be a good thing. Although the government has made significant demands on autonomous vehicle design, safety, and data sharing, its requirements for cybersecurity are vague. The policy says manufacturers must “implement measures to protect data that are commensurate with the harm that would result from loss or unauthorized disclosure of the data,” but it leaves companies to determine the harm. A manufacturer should be held responsible if it introduced security vulnerabilities that allowed a hacker to take over and crash a car. But it’s easy to imagine scenarios where companies might try to shirk responsibility. For instance, what if a domestic abuser tracks his victim using geolocation data hacked from an autonomous vehicle and uses that information to harm her? When it comes to cybersecurity, NHTSA says more research is necessary before regulatory standards can be finalized. The agency is staying out of the cyber debate — for now — and is instead asking manufacturers to share vulnerability information directly with each other through the industry cybersecurity clearinghouse Auto-ISAC. Auto-ISAC from being privy to its vulnerability disclosures, meaning that the federal government could be cut out of the cybersecurity picture. But, given increasing concerns about the and frequent , it might be ideal to keep information about how to hack self-driving vehicles secret from the government. The debate over how, when, and with whom to share autonomous vehicle data will continue over the next few months as the NHTSA accepts feedback on its policy from industry stakeholders. But getting industry and consumers to agree with the Department of Transportation on data sharing is a challenge. The White House Frontiers Conference coming to Pittsburgh in October, where President Obama has said , may be the next chance we get to see this challenge played out in public.
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North Korea accidentally lets slip all its .KP domains — and there aren’t many
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Devin Coldewey
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North Korea is famously secretive and restrictive — the regime goes to great lengths to both prevent the outside world from learning what goes on there and prevent its citizens from learning about the outside world. An IT error just gave us a glimpse at the country’s online ecosystem — and it’s a pretty meager one. Late last night (Pacific time, anyway), Uber app security engineer noticed that North Korea had set itself to allow domain administrators to request a list of its national top-level domains. Bryant had to watch for this kind of thing — he wasn’t just sitting there hitting refresh. The list was automatically copied over, and Bryant . It didn’t take long, either: There are a whopping 28 .KP domains registered. (And no, you can’t get your own.) The Technology subreddit and collected screenshots of the sites. Some English-translated ones can be seen here, and mod Jabberminor collected more in the original thread. This isn’t the limit of what North Koreans, or at least those with internet access, can see from inside the borders, but it is an interesting look at the few websites being administrated within the country. That there are so few, and that those few are so inundated with propaganda, is certainly indicative of the government’s ongoing exertion of strict control over internet-based communication and business. Don’t be surprised if the live sites are a little slow to respond — being on the front page of Reddit will do that.
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Samsung’s replacement Note 7 units are starting to hit US stores
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Brian Heater
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I’m writing this from a plane. As we boarded, the flight attendant asked that we not use or charge our “Samsung 7” phones on the plane. The wording was a little awkward, but she more or less got the point across. It’s been . What was supposed to be the company’s moment of triumph has proved to be one of the biggest consumer electronics headaches in recent memory. After issuing a voluntary recall (the company is noticeably keen on leaning on the “v” word in all of its press material) thanks to a few dozen reported cases of issues with the Note 7’s battery, the first major replacement shipment is arriving here in the States. More than 500,000 of the handsets will be disseminated throughout carrier and retail stores, where impacted customers will be able to exchange their phones for the less volatile variety. As previously noted, the new, safer version of the Note will feature a green version of the battery icon, versus the old gray-scale, indicating that the handset is one of the safe ones. Users who still haven’t ditched the old Note will be greeted with a less than subtle software message urging them to make the change, Once installed, users will be prompted with a safety notice that urges owners to power down and exchange their recalled device. The notice will appear every time a user powers up or charges their device. The new devices are set to arrive in stores by tomorrow.
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Up the mountain with GoPro
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Brian Heater
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is better than it’s ever been,” Nick Woodman explained to a rapt audience at GoPro’s mountain press conference yesterday. “Demand is kicking tail,” he said as the crowd cheered loudly. That’s how it went pretty much all day. Enthusiastic uniformed GoPro employees as far as the eye can see, beginning with a morning press conference that featured the enthusiastic C-level executive dropping to his knees on stage to pull the company’s new drone from its custom backpack to audience applause. But, as Woodman explains, the Karma isn’t just a drone. And also, he doesn’t like to use the word “company” to refer to GoPro, he likes to think of the organization as a group of friends or perhaps a family working toward some common cause. “GoPro is so far from a consumer electronics company,” he tells the audience at the tail end of a day of activities aimed at testing its newly announced hardware offerings. “It just so happens that our products have electronics in them. GoPro is an experience sharing company.” Woodman refers to lofty concepts like chi and reincarnation when talking about the company’s newly unveiled drone – and suddenly it becomes pretty clear that GoPro didn’t just stumble upon the name Karma because it sounded good or was in a Radiohead song. Woodman says he believes in the power of his company’s technology to effect positive impact on its users’ lives. Toward the back where I’m seated, a woman in GoPro clothing passes out complimentary Coors Lights. GoPro certainly knows how to throw a party, and the company’s made the international press a part of the festivities. It’s all a big to-do, away from the usual conference room meetings. A big and almost certainly costly undertaking, though between the rock climbing and ziplines, most of the international press members present don’t seem too put upon with the long trek to the Sierra Nevadas, even if it’s a rather resource intensive undertaking to try out a pair of new cameras and score a few precious minutes with the company’s new drone. The day’s extreme sporting events dotting the pine tree blanketed mountain high above the California/Nevada state line are punctuated by high fives and hollers. A guy walks around with a speaker strapped to his chest, echoing electronic music through the Squaw Valley off-season. Employees unironically toss words like “sick” and “stoked” into casual conversation. The Red Bull flows like wine. Three key hardware devices made their debut on-stage yesterday morning – two versions of the company’s action camera (don’t call it an action camera) and the aforementioned, long-awaited drone. The consensus, if one can be found, is that the diehard seem pleased, stoked by general sickness and the tech press is somewhat disappointed. Though we’ve long ago resolved to the fact that we’re impossible to please. Action cameras (don’t call it an action camera) have been good to GoPro. They’re what transformed the company from unknown a hardware startup looking to make handheld cameras for surfers into one of the best known technology names of the past 10 years. And indeed, GoPro does them well. It will continue to do so, even as competition floods in from companies large and small, and supply seemingly begins to outstrip demand. There’s also something to be said for doing what you do well, and giving the people what they want. But GoPro’s newest products feel more like iterations than revolutions, two years after the company’s last major release. And besides, nobody came here to talk about the Hero – least of all GoPro. It’s been seemingly forever since GoPro first let slip that it was setting out to work on its own drone. Back then, the company teamed with DJI to bring their respective expertise to product that might someday make the drone truly mainstream. As evidenced by the considerable shade tossed up on Twitter by DJI’s Corporate Communications Manager, however, that relationship has long since soured, tossed on a refuse pile and summarily lit on fire. I'm sitting in New York City. I'm watching a competitor unveil a new product. I ain't worried about a thing. — Adam Lisberg (@adamlisberg) The company has also had a high-profile relationship with fellow California startup, 3D Robotics, a partnership that involves some deep integration and also resulted in the drone maker becoming the first third-party to use GoPro branding on its packaging with the company’s blessing. For the past few weeks, GoPro has offered up Karma teasers at regular intervals, revealing nothing about the quadcopter, nonetheless. And indeed, the company has offered up an interesting product and one that, at $799, is at least somewhat more within the grasp of consumers than the company’s $5,000 Omni VR rig. The fact that it folds up into a backpack is compelling. So, too is the removable three-axis Grip gimbal, which, if the company has any sense, will also be available as a standalone. Most compellingly of all, the drone is dead simple. I’m not an experienced drone pilot by any stretch of the imagination, but I had no trouble flying the thing in the strong mountain winds. Once synced, the system literally takes off with the press of a button on the touchscreen attached to the company’s game-style control. Two sticks control the drone’s direction and altitude and a wheel on the side adjusts the direction of the camera, as a live feed displays hi-res on the small screen. I could see users navigating entirely by the imagery gathered by the on-board Hero, but first time nerves got the better of me and I ended up watching the drone in hover in the sky. When it’s time to land, another press of the screen will bring it back – though our GoPro rep did end up finessing the landing manually, due, he said, to the high winds in the area. The landing pad, I’m told was too small for such a precious landing. I suspect that mostly, however, the company didn’t want to risk the drone tumbling down a mountain in such an environmentally volatile spot, flanked by members of the international media. Even after such a long wait, a few key features do feel notably absent, including, most prominently, the ability to track a subject – which seems like a main selling point of selling a drone to action sports enthusiasts. I spoke to a rep during the event who told me, at the very least, it’s somewhere on the product roadmap. According to Woodman, the feature, as it currently exists, just isn’t good enough to make it onto a GoPro product. “We made a decision to focus on other features,” he tells the audience, wrapping up his end of day Q&A. “We don’t think those technologies are at a place to where what the customer expects. We want to exceed customer expectation and not lead them astray.” It’s hard to say, then, precisely who the Karma is for at present. It’s undoubtedly a compelling product, but as the company will readily admit, drones are far from mainstream. Perhaps the company will be able to sneak them in through some sport enthusiast back door, the way FitBits and GoPros eventually trickled their way down into becoming mainstream. In his talk, Woodman insists time and again that, “Our goal is to help people become great storytellers.” The Karma certainly marks the beginning of a new chapter for the company, but one also gets the distinct impression that GoPro is having a little trouble completely turning the page.
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DeepMind wants its healthcare AI to charge by results — but first it needs your data
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Natasha Lomas
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because from today ‘Don’t be evil’ rides again, via the DeepMind AI division of the Alphabet ad giant, as a Hippocratic assurance to ‘Do no harm’. It’s no small irony that DeepMind’s new mantra for its , voiced by co-founder Mustafa Suleyman at an outreach event today for patients to hear what the Google-owned company wants to build with U.K. National Health Service data, is uncomfortably close to its old one — i.e. the one that embarrassingly fell out of favor. Suleyman cited the Hippocratic oath when discussing his takeaways from patient feedback on the company’s plans. “[Do no harm] has to be a mantra we repeat and becomes an inherent part of our process,” he said towards the end of the three hour discussion session which was live streamed on (with a call for comments via a Twitter hashtag). “And [do no harm] should be the first measure of success before any deployment or before we attempt to demonstrate any utility and patient benefit,” he added. After taking questions and listening to views from the small group of patients, health professionals and members of the public selected by the company to be in the audience, Suleyman flagged other takeaways. One of which was the need to widen access to the patient engagement channel DeepMind has now opened up. He conceded it was unfortunate the event had been held in Google’s shiny, central London offices. “As you say this is a fancy, intimidating building and I’m sorry for that, in some ways, it’s a shame that that’s the tone. I really agree with you that we have to find other spaces, community spaces that are more accessible to a more diverse group of people,” he said. “As we formalize the process [of listening to patients] we want to make sure that there are other people being paid around the table and patients’ contributions should also be paid, and we’ll make sure that that’s the case. Potentially we should be thinking about how to run sessions like these on the weekends or in the evenings, when different stakeholders might have more time to get involved,” he added. Alphabet’s AI division also said today it is intending to “define” what it dubs a “patient involvement strategy” by 2017. Although DeepMind kicked off data-sharing collaborations with the NHS last fall — inking a wide-ranging data-sharing agreement with London’s Royal Free NHS Trust in September 2015 — and only publicly revealing the DeepMind Health initiative this February, two months after beginning hospital user tests of one of the apps it’s co-developing with the Royal Free… So it’s hard not to see its attitude towards patient engagement and involvement as something of an afterthought up to now. It also looks like a response to the (the Royal Free) — given that criticism of that project (Streams, an app for identifying acute kidney injury) has focused on how much patient identifiable data the Google-owned company is being given access to power the app, without patient knowledge, let alone consultation or consent. (DeepMind and the Royal Free maintain they do not need patient consent to share the data in that instance as they say the app is for direct patient care — a point the company now reiterates on its website, in a section labeled ‘ ‘.) The UK’s data protection watchdog, the ICO, is investigating complaints about the Streams app. The National Data Guardian, which is tasked with ensuring citizens’ health data is safeguarded and used properly, is also at how data is being shared. Streams was also not registered as a medical device prior to being tested in hospitals — but , according to the MHRA regulatory body. So DeepMind Health’s modus operandi has already rocked a fair few boats — even as Suleyman was at pains to stress it’s “very early days” for DeepMind Health in his public comments today. Tellingly the Google-owned company also now has a section of its Health website labeled ‘ ‘, where it describes its intention to create “meaningful patient involvement” and claims it is “incorporating patient and public involvement (PPI) at every stage of our projects”. (Although here, again, it notes another future intention: to create a patient advisory group to “contribute more extensively to our projects” — suggesting it could have done much more to involve patients in its first wave of NHS projects and research partnerships.) “What we’re really doing today is to try and invite people openly to come and help us design the mechanism of interaction,” said Suleyman, summing up DeepMind’s intention for the outreach event. “Many people in this room have much more expertise and experience than we do and we recognize that we have a lot to learn here, and so today I think is an opportunity for us to learn. We’re really grateful for people’s time. We recognize that it’s valuable and we really think this is potentially an opportunity to do this the right way.” He did not directly reference the Streams app data-sharing controversy, although the entire session was structured to illustrate (as DeepMind views it) the benefits of sharing health data for patients and health outcomes — and thus create a strong narrative to implicitly defend its actions — with much talk of the economic squeeze on the publicly funded NHS and the need to move towards earlier diagnosis of conditions to save resources as well as lives. Tl;dr: DeepMind’s sales pitch to grease the NHS health data funnel is that AI could automate efficiency savings for a chronically cash-strapped NHS. Ergo: you can’t afford not to give us your data! And while Google’s podium included speakers who do not work directly for Alphabet, all speakers at the event were selected by the company to speak, so unsurprisingly aligned with its views. For example, we heard from Graham Silk of health data sharing advocacy group, , rather than — say — Phil Booth from health data privacy advocacy group , which has been critical of DeepMind’s handling of NHS data. Need to move argument over big data in health to the benefits, away from sterile security debate – G Silk — Tim Mustill (@Astrocytecomms) graham silk's rhetoric on data sharing similar to anti-terrorism narrative: "if you oppose this people will die" — dan mcquillan (@danmcquillan) Point is, if you’re creating the ‘public’ forum, you’re controlling (in large part) the scope and tone of the debate. As indeed on other tech-policy intersections relevant to its business interests — also, incidentally, after being forced to respond to outside events (such as when it marshaled its resources to ). That said, today’s audience was inevitably a little less on point, given the event was at least theoretically open to any member of the public to apply for one of the 120 seats (although we don’t know how DeepMind selected participants). And audience members did at least raise the other big potential benefit of health data sharing: i.e. the financial benefit to Alphabet’s bottom line — by asking how DeepMind intends to monetize any machine learning algorithms it develops using the public data it is being given free access to. https://twitter.com/LouisWihl/status/778239231881805824 On the business model question, Suleyman suggested a form of payment by results model is where Google’s thinking is at this nascent stage, as it seeks access to more public heath data-sets to feed machine algorithms that it hopes will deliver profit-bearing fruit in time. “We have to build a sustainable business model on this. We’ve been clear about that from the outset. And what we’ve avoided doing is nailing that down too early — and luckily we have the resources to explore what the most effective business model would be around our interventions so that essentially we get paid when we deliver value. That’s what we would really like to do. The existing providers get paid for their activity — the vast majority, if not all, of their payments are delivered when that piece of software is shipped,” he said. “What we would like to do is get paid, at least some proportion of what we get paid, to be connected to the actual concrete, clinical outcomes. And I think that’s another area where patients can really play an active role in helping us to identify what the important metrics are to patients — as well as the hospital, in terms of its efficiency and the way that it runs itself. I think that’s going to be a really challenging aspect of the model but we’re super committed to trying to innovate on that as much as we do on the technology.” During his talk, Suleyman also spent time presenting a couple of slick-looking concept health apps for patients and doctors, designed to allow them to view and interact with health data on their phones — a prototype concept DeepMind is calling Patient Portal. “Here we have Robert at home, reading through his data at home from his recent appointment,” he said, introducing one of the apps as if he were pitching an idea at a startup competition. “What he’s been able to do is see that he’s got an upcoming follow up appointment, a routine post-op appointment, where it is, and confirm that he’s able to attend… potentially he can get directions and also add it to his personal calendar.” However the concept apps are pure vapourware at this point. DeepMind has not started work on Patient Portal app, Suleyman confirmed, going on to underwhelmingly describe the concepts as “the sorts of things that we might like to expect over the coming years”. Nor is it clear how any such a visions of an app-delivered NHS could be achieved in any near term timeframe, given all the extant NHS systems that it would need to integrate — and, crucially, be comfortable sharing data — with DeepMind in order to realize the promise of real-time health data nestling under the fingertips of patients and doctors in a friendly smartphone format. So really the concept apps were the most blatant part of DeepMind’s sales pitch today — using the familiarity and popularity of smartphone apps to try to win over the UK public to an alternative vision for the future of NHS healthcare delivery. One which would necessitate all their data being opened to a third party commercial entity to manage and control — and be paid for doing so. ‘If only those pesky information governance processes would step aside we could get on with saving lives and prettifying your blood test results in handy app form’, was the not-so-subtle subtext here. Not everyone on the #DMHpatients hashtag was convinced with the calls to loosen up information governance, however… I actually disagreed with on that point. Trust means not having to control what a 3rd party does — Paul Wicks (@PaulLikeMe) Safe to say, DeepMind trying to recruit the user/general public to apply political pressure on its behalf to achieve — for all Suleyman’s talk of ‘social impact missions’ — commercial, profit-driven ends is a pretty standard playbook for Just in this case it’s not Uber getting on-demand ride hailers to protest at ‘out-of-date city authorities’ getting in the way of their ride home, it’s an ad targeting giant seeking to encourage a far more liberal attitude to the sharing of individuals’ health data (data which has also been taxpayer funded, under the UK’s free-at-the-point-of-use NHS). The first question from the audience following Suleyman’s presentation of the Patient Portal concept highlights the uphill climb DeepMind faces to convince the UK public to trust a commercial giant with their health data — with the questioner zeroing in on security and privacy concerns, something Suleyman’s presentation had glossed over. Referring to DeepMind’s concept apps, a patient called Bernie noted: “You did not mention anything about how that information on the phone would be protected”, going on to ask where the data would be kept — on a doctor’s personal phone or a hospital-owned device? — and adding: “Would it not be safer for a mobile phone or something that would stay in the hospital so that that information didn’t actually go out of the hospital?” Suleyman responded that streaming data to devices and using secure elements on smartphones are some of the ways DeepMind believes it can secure patient data to enable a Patient Portal style scenario of app-enabled healthcare. “The plan is to stream data so that it’s not actually stored on the local mobile device. The objective is to try to make that data available when a particular clinician or indeed one day a patient needs and wants to access that data. At the moment we already have techniques for streaming that data in a very secure way so when your email is checked, for example, we have the best security infrastructure, the best controls in place to make sure that only you can access that data. And so whether that’s via a passcode on your mobile phone or fingerprint recognition we think that there are methods for ensuring that that data can only be accessed by the right person and at the right time,” he said. “One approach [for which devices do we stream the data to] is to stream it to Trust owned devices. And we will make that possible as well. So where Trusts have invested in smartphones just like they have done with pagers that’s definitely possible. We also think it’s technically possible to do that to personal mobile devices as well, of the clinicians. And the way that this would work is there would be an encrypted operating shell — or OS — within the mobile phone which won’t touch other data on that phone. And that will be controlled by the Trust. So, for example, the data and the streaming and the application won’t be accessible out of, say, Trust wi-fi. It will be possible to log and record every access or edit or update to the data by that clinician. And so this will product an audit trail of essentially who has looked at which piece of data at which point.” “There’s precedent at being able to do this very successfully in many other areas so technically this is a very mature set of tools and systems. It hasn’t reached healthcare yet, and so we’ll need to be very, very careful and involve lots of people in the way that we design and deploy that approach but we do believe that it’s technically possible to do it in a very, very secure way,” he added. At various points during the presentation Suleyman talked about the potential of artificial intelligence, describing AI as DeepMind’s “core expertise”, and adding that it as “very important that we can leverage our core expertise to try and advance the cutting edge of research”. Yet always qualifying the company’s ability to achieve results via AI as only that: a possibility. He mentioned DeepMind’s research , where it is using machine learning to try to automate analysis of retinal eye scans, and dubbed another research collaboration — with University College London Hospitals, which is looking at ways to use AI to automate radiotherapy treatment targeting — as “early research”. “We think this might be something that we could potentially contribute to,” he added, injecting yet another qualifier. During the event it was increasing evident that DeepMind’s pitch to transform healthcare outcomes via machine learning algorithms is just that: a pitch, not a promise. The company has gained access to a lot of NHS data already but it does not yet have data to prove the effectiveness of AI for predicting and/or diagnosing disease and improving healthcare outcomes at scale. It needs the data to feed the algorithms to build the models before it can do that. So really it needs access to the large data-sets the NHS holds if it is to build anything of worth. DeepMind is therefore in the tricky position of having to sell the UK public on providing free access to their most sensitive personal data before it can offer any concrete benefits in return. Without public buy-in it will struggle to access the pipeline of data it needs as its lifeblood. So you really have to wonder why it’s taken the company the best part of a year to realize how critically it needs to fully involve and engage patients with what DeepMind Health is doing. Concluding its debut patient outreach event, Suleyman made a direct appeal for public involvement in what he dubbed “our process” — saying DeepMind is seeking help to determine what to prioritize as it builds clinical apps in collaboration with NHS Trusts willing to share data with the Google division. And, again, a public personally bought into specific future healthcare apps and outcomes is likely to be far more supportive, and far less suspicious, of a commercial entity asking for its health data. (And, as many Silicon Valley tech giants could tell you, winning public support is the go-to strategy to sway regulatory rigidity these days.) So it’s not hard to see what DeepMind is doing here — and it boils down to burnishing its PR credentials. Yet holding what was supposed to be a ‘patient-centric’ event in swanky London offices underscores just how far removed their thinking still is from the patients they hope to serve. “We really want to put patients, families, carers and members of the public at the heart of our work. We’ve tried from the start I think to put the voice of clinicians and to some extent patients at the centre of what we do. And we see this as really very early days. And so we invite you to participate directly in our process,” he said. “Importantly we have the choice of lots of different priorities for our clinical apps. there are lots of different directions we could go in and we recognize it’s important to involve lots of different stakeholders in settings those priorities. So far we’ve done our best to involve a bunch of diverse stakeholders but now we think it’s time to sort of formalize that process and have that as an inherent part of what we do, going forward.” “We also think that it’s an opportunity for people to play a role as critical friends to help us to get this right. So we don’t expect this to be an opportunity for free feedback on our products. That’s not what we’re here to do; we’re here to invite criticism and essentially pay people to be part of a rigorous process, and not pay people where that’s appropriate too,” he added.
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Mike Rothenberg allegedly wired $5.2 million from Silicon Valley Bank without investor permission
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Sarah Buhr
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reported last month, Mike Rothenberg, the beleaguered founder of the San Francisco-based venture firm Rothenberg Ventures, has been involved in an ongoing SEC inquiry into possibly deceptive financial practices within his firm that include wire fraud, bank fraud, breach of fiduciary duty and retaliation against a lower-level employee who was fired and allegedly threatened with a lawsuit after bringing these allegations to the SEC. We have since learned of several details in the investigation. According to our sources, Rothenberg is being investigated for several money transfers to and from his personal account to that of , a virtual reality production house funded by Rothenberg in June of last year, and , a subsidiary of Rothenberg Ventures. Rothenberg also ordered the firm’s bank, Silicon Valley Bank, to wire money on several occasions, reportedly without his limited partners’ knowledge, including wiring himself $1.2 million in what he called salary and a $5.2 million loan to the firm that was initiated on Christmas Eve of last year, according to documents shown to TechCrunch. Rothenberg incrementally wired the $1.2 million to himself in amounts ranging from $200,000 up to $600,000 from the accounts of several Rothenberg entities on January 4, 2016, shortly after the loan went through from Silicon Valley Bank. While we don’t know how much of a salary Rothenberg was entitled to, this seems an unusual process to getting it. According to other VCs, a typical salary for someone in Rothenberg’s position would normally be closer to $100,000 to $150,000 for a small startup firm like his, and the total spending for all operational expenses would be 2 percent of the fund. Rothenberg Ventures was under management for $50 million, meaning the total spent per year would typically be closer to $1 million for all expenses, including the founder’s salary. The inquiry into the firm partly explains a of employees, though many further accuse Rothenberg of financial mismanagement so extreme that several people are still waiting to get paid by the firm for back wages. Indeed, one employee, David Haase, is currently suing the firm for breach of contract, saying it owes him more than in business expenses that he accrued on a personal American Express card at Rothenberg’s direction. Another former senior executive said Rothenberg owes him at least $40,000 in back wages. A third employee has filed with the California Division of Labor Standards Enforcement for $70,000 of unpaid wages from the firm. Both the SEC and Silicon Valley Bank declined to comment on the details of the SEC inquiry, but at least two former Rothenberg employees, including one senior-level executive with financial knowledge of the firm, have been in touch with the SEC over these allegations. Rothenberg Ventures has also attracted the attention of the FBI and the U.S. Attorney’s General, says one source close to the matter, who has been asked to speak with both institutions about the accusations. Very worth noting: No formal charges have been filed as of this writing. All SEC investigations are conducted privately, and an investigation does not mean that the agency will file a case in federal court or bring an administrative action. Rothenberg Ventures has recently been rebranded as . Meanwhile, Rothenberg himself has updated his LinkedIn profile to reflect his work status as founder of Frontier Tech Ventures. Rothenberg did not respond to queries from TechCrunch about the outfit’s new brand, possible criminal investigation or financial dealings, but the name change would seem an attempt to distance the outfit from both the SEC’s questions and the company’s now damaged public reputation. It would also seem to reflect a behind-the-scenes effort to save the firm. According to numerous sources, investors are still open to the possibility of continuing to work with the firm, though they do not want Rothenberg involved further. Meanwhile, say these same sources, Rothenberg is angling for ways to step aside, rather than step down. The clock is ticking, say these same investors, who are growing more frustrated with the situation by the day, yet are still hoping to avoid a legal battle with Rothenberg.
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Tumblr brings Apple’s Live Photos to the web
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Sarah Perez
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today is version of its service, while also rolling out that will allow other web developers to do the same. The company has released an open source JavaScript library it calls “Laphs” — or Live Anywhere Photos — which lets you support Live Photos on any website. To activate a Live Photo on the web, you use a click-and-hold instead of a hard press, as on mobile. Apple’s Live Photos, a file format introduced with the iPhone 6s and 6s Plus, are the combination of a still image and a short video, which are combined to create a unique playback experience. To make this work on the web, Tumblr receives a copy of both the still image (.jpeg) and the video (.mov) after a user posts a Live Photo from their iOS device. It transcodes the .mov file to a .mp4 to make it work properly on all browsers. Tumblr then uses its solution to bring Live Photos to the Tumblr web experience by combining the .jpeg and .mp4 files to recreate the Live Photo playback effect. Tumblr was already an early adopter of Live Photos, which appear still until pressed, using the iPhone’s 3D Touch-enabled screen. Then they animate, giving your photos Because of Live Photos’ similarity to GIFs, which are hugely popular on Tumblr, the blogging site was quick to roll out support for the new format on mobile. In fact, it became the first third-party service to do so — even beating and It also supports turning Live Photos into GIFs via its GIF Maker feature on mobile. Now, through , Tumblr could potentially drive further adoption of Live Photos even beyond its own site. And the company is working to bring Live Photos to Android, as well, it says. Live Photos on Tumblr’s site are marked with the Live Photo icon — the familiar concentric circles. This is found at the top left of the image in question. For example, there’s a Live Photo you can about the new feature. To view the Live Photo in motion, simply click on it with your mouse and keep pressing down.
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Timeular’s neat little device to make time tracking fun is now on sale via Kickstarter
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Jon Russell
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Last week , a nifty little box that makes the dreaded chore of tracking your time at work easy, and . Essentially it is an eight-sided device that is Bluetooth-enabled and acts as a timer. You simply program each side to a different task and tip it when you’re working on a particular task or change to another. The polyhedron is called the Zei and costs €69 (just under $79) for the first 1,000 early birds, and then €79 ($89) thereafter. There’s a cheaper option for a DIY model (€39) and, at the higher end, a series of packages that look targeted at larger companies with many employees that fill out timesheets for their work. That could be a legal practice, marketing agency or any business that works with clients and/or bills based on time. Timeular was developed over a paid beta testing period that filled up quickly when announced earlier this year. Aside from the hardware, it includes compatible apps for tracking time spent on work and assigning tasks to the box. There’s also a pro version of the software with features designed to boost productivity. that the team is working to develop a productivity recommendation system, too. The Austria-based company is aiming to raise €75,000 from this crowdfunding campaign — you can find full details on its Kickstarter page .
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Microsoft wants to crack the cancer code using artificial intelligence
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Sarah Buhr
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Cancer is like a computer virus and can be ‘solved’ by cracking the code, according to Microsoft. The computer software company says its researchers are using artificial intelligence in a new healthcare initiative to target cancerous cells and eliminate the disease. One of the projects within this new healthcare enterprise involves utilizing machine learning and natural language processing to help lead researchers sift through all the research data available and come up with a treatment plan for individual cancer patients. IBM is working on something similar using a program called , which analyzes patient health info against research data. Other Microsoft healthcare initiatives involve computer vision in radiology to note the progress of tumors over time and a project which Microsoft refers to as its “moonshot” aims to program biology like we program computers using code. The researchers plan to discover how to reprogram our cells to fix what our immune system hasn’t been able to figure out just yet. Microsoft says its investment in cloud computing is a “natural fit” for this type of project and plans to invest further in ways to provide these types of tools to its customers. “If the computers of the future are not going to be made just in silicon but might be made in living matter, it behooves us to make sure we understand what it means to program on those computers,” Microsoft exec Jeanette M. Wing said. Indeed, with all the research data available, the Microsoft project, like others in the healthcare machine learning space — including in — could help speed up medical discovery for this debilitating disease.
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Hacking for investor profit
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Casey Ellis
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Just over four years ago, I was walking out of a conference center in Melbourne with butterflies in my stomach. I’d just sat through what still is the most viscerally disturbing information security talk I’ve ever seen. The late Barnaby Jack, a brilliant security researcher well-known at that time for his work on “Jackpotting” ATMs and remote hijacking of insulin pumps, had just demonstrated in front of 300 people how he could wirelessly take control of an Implantable Cardioverter Defibrillator and cause it to discharge enough electricity to jump a 12 mm spark gap. “Unfortunately, this has to be a video demo,” he said, “because if any of you have one of these inside right now the demo might kill you.” recently executed a stock-short trade based on information provided by cybersecurity startup , which outlined security vulnerabilities in . Jude Medical’s pacemakers and defibrillators. The alleged findings bear eery similarity to the vulnerabilities I saw demonstrated four years ago — it appears they either went undiscovered or unremediated. ’ alleged security failures ( ) included a series of flaws that could allow anyone to tap into implanted devices and cause potentially fatal disruptions. While the cybersecurity of safety-critical Internet of Things (IoT) devices — i.e. physical devices that are connected to the outside world via the internet or wirelessly — has been a serious concern in the security industry for a long time now, this marked the first open and public disclosure of a ’s security vulnerability specifically designed to manipulate the stock of a publicly traded company. The deliberate making cooperation between the firms brings to light a few questions about the and process of disclosure, the use of vulnerabilities for financial gain and changes to come in this industry. Vulnerability disclosure are an inherently murky area. There are countless vulnerabilities that exist unpatched in software systems, including the medical devices that are implanted into humans every day. Ideally, vulnerabilities are discovered when the vendor learns about them through their own testing or through the help of security researchers operating under a “Coordinated Disclosure” or bug bounty model. Other times, vulnerabilities found are kept secret, and used for attack, unbeknownst to the manufacturer or their users. Then there’s what is called “Full Disclosure,” where discovered vulnerabilities are simply disclosed to the public, sometimes before the vendor has had the opportunity to respond. These three scenarios are status quo for disclosure. It could be argued that a better approach to this situation would have been for the security researchers to share their findings with Jude Medical under a Coordinated Disclosure model. Given that they were contracted with and not Jude Medical, they were not obligated to do this, and may have felt that Full Disclosure was the best motivator to Jude Medical to fix the problem. Full Disclosure is most frequently chosen out of frustration at a slow response or bad communication by the impacted organization. The risk of Full Disclosure can be mitigated by organizations, firstly by taking whatever steps are necessary to identify and fix vulnerabilities in the first place, then by establishing clear channels and expectations between security researchers and vendors around newly identified ones. Safety-critical vulnerabilities have safety-critical impacts, so the exposure of vulnerability details in devices carries inherent risks that forces an ethical consideration. Will this action give an adversary the methods and time to create a critical impact on a user of that before it is patched? Or will . Jude Medical correct the vulnerability before this can happen? Then there are the legal considerations. The Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) and Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA) are designed to prevent malicious discovery and use of vulnerabilities, but these acts can also impede legitimate security research. As a result of input from external security researchers and pressure from the public to accelerate their security efforts, exceptions from both were late last year for cars and a handful of medical devices. The research by MedSec was almost certainly conducted under this exemption. Another, longer-term, legal question, is how the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) will react to this new signal of potential alignment between security researchers with investment organizations. Infamous hacker and internet troll Andrew “Weev” Auernheimer proposed exactly this model under a few years back, so it’s not a brand new idea (and, indeed, it may not even be the first time a short-trade has been executed off the back of this type of information), but this is certainly the first time it has been openly executed. Certainties that are unpredictable (like vulnerabilities) tend to have derivative markets form around them. The reality is that “long term” will really mean long term in this context, as it will require regulations to be designed and ratified, no matter whether the SEC approves of this or not. Between the gaping vulnerability of the internet-connected world, the frustration researchers often experience in their attempt for vendors to pay attention and fix life-threatening vulnerabilities and the new pathway for creation demonstrated in this situation, it’s likely we’ll see this type of thing again. This is a wake-up call for the medical industry, and an opportunity to respond proactively, fixing the vulnerabilities that exist in its products. Ultimately, there is a strong safety and financial advantage to engaging those who can help find and responsibly disclose vulnerabilities. With an improved approach to the security of devices in general, backed up by a crowd of highly motivated and brilliant security researchers on their side, organizations can reduce the risk of both their patients or users being harmed through malicious action, as well as the likelihood of becoming the next Jude Medical.
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Makerbot doubles-down on its sure bets, professionals and teachers
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John Biggs
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The promise of premium home 3D printing hasn’t panned out. Hobbyist printers are common and cheap these days – there are – but the original vision of a 3D printer on every desk didn’t quite pan out. And Makerbot learned that piece of news the hard way. When the company started it was the brand to beat. Makerbots were well-made, nicely designed, and reliable. They were proudly made in Brooklyn in a way that electronics hadn’t been manufactured in that borough for a century. in fact, in July 2015 the company opened a new factory in the heart of hipster country. “The launch of factory here today is just evidence to the fact that we expect and are committed to remaining here,” said Makerbot CEO Jaglom that July at the factory’s opening. A year later that factory closed. Growth fell. The Makerbot name became, in a way, toxic. A poor cultural fit as well as a class action lawsuit related to the company’s seemingly faulty Smart Extruder brought the high-flying company crashing down. Now it’s bringing things back home. Fast forward to today. As , Makerbot has launched two new printers, a “Professional” model and an educational one. Rather than offer a few simple sizes – a tiny one, the Replicator Mini, for fun, a bigger one called the Replicator, and the biggest one, the Z18 – they’ve focused on two markets, education and pros. Even their website, once a whirlwind of consumer facing fun, is now focused primarily on those two segments. It’s a strange thing to watch. Makerbot was supposed to commercialize the 3D printer, to give us all a reason to churn out plastic gewgaws with our super-cool 3D printer. Instead it brought about countless competitors who all raced to the bottom and, after rushing to market, a faulty product that ruined its reputation. Makers aren’t going away. There is still plenty of call for a home 3D printer. Now that they are inexpensive, efficient, and easy-to-use there is little reason to pay a premium for a premium product when you can pick something up at half the price. I’ve had Makerbots since they launched and I haven’t had trouble. But I know plenty of owners that did. Now that the company has gone from general-purpose fun machine to a professional and serious 3D printer company, I suspect many of those frustrated owners will abandon the brand for something cheaper. While Makerbot still has the best software and the new models have some truly interesting improvements (including a unique flexible bed that makes it easier to remove prints) I think the true test will be who wins the hearts and minds of average person looking for a 3D printer in the next few years. Given that no one has truly cornered the market I suspect they will do a quick Google search and find Makerbot complaints, lawsuits, and product announcements… and will head somewhere else.
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BMW Films are back to wow a new generation of potential car lovers
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Darrell Etherington
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[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hNDgwzpIE6c&w=800&h=448] Probably the first time I saw Clive Owen, it was in a to advertise its cars. At the time, I didn’t really care all that much about cars (I had one, and it was fine, and that was all I needed to know about that) but these short movies still had a considerable impact on me, mostly because they were so well-made. The original series starred Owen as the The Driver, an otherwise unnamed protagonist with a flare for fine wheel work. They also starred BMW cars, which were very capable co-stars when paired with Owen’s keen ability to whip vehicles around in ways that frustrate opponents and get hard jobs done with a maximum of cool. The originals also featured a steady stream of star directors and on-screen talent, including then-power couple Madonna and Guy Ritchie. Owen’s stoic Driver makes a return these many years later, having aged better than myself, and he’s going on adventures with a new cast that includes standouts like Jon Bernthal (The Punisher from Netflix’s Daredevil), Dakota Fanning and Vera Farmiga. The Escape is directed by Neill Blomkamp of District 9 fame, which means it’ll probably be better than most of the things you’d pay $10 or more to go see in theaters today. The Escape’s inaugural episode (assuming there are more than one) will debut on October 23, which is just over a month away. If you didn’t catch the original and are wondering what all the fuss is about, or you just want to relive the magic, of The Hire on YouTube.
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Facebook makes its dynamic ads more friendly to brick-and-mortar retailers
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Anthony Ha
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Facebook just some new features for its dynamic ads, aimed at making the format more appealing to businesses with brick-and-mortar stores. show you different products based on your activity and interests. Now, the company says it can incorporate data about local product availability, pricing and special offers into these ads. So instead of just showing you the product, the ad can direct you to a specific store where the product is available at a specific price. Then if the product sells out at local stores, the campaign can start featuring something else from the catalog. Maz Sharafi, a director of monetization product marketing at Facebook, described this as a way to “take [the dynamic ads] product and make it relevant for brick-and-mortar retailers.” He suggested this could be particularly useful for big companies that want to run national ad campaigns driving shoppers into local stores — advertisers including Abercrombie & Fitch, Macy’s and Target are already testing the new unit. More broadly, Sharafi said this is part of Facebook’s efforts to make its ads more useful businesses with real-world storefronts — in the same vein, the company already introduced . To further those efforts, the company is also announcing the ability to optimize an ad campaign for store visits — in the same way that Facebook started letting advertisers , it’s now letting them target users who are likely to actually go to a store. “This is one of the most important end-to-end challenges and opportunities that exists in this space,” Sharafi said. “People are spending majority of their time on mobile, but the majority of sales are happening offline, in stores. How do you connect the two?”
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Tesla patches exploit that left Model S potentially vulnerable to remote access
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Darrell Etherington
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Tesla moved quickly to patch a vulnerability discovered by that rendered the Model S susceptible to remote attacks, provided the Tesla Model S was currently making use of its in-car web browser, and also physically close to and connected with a maliciously modified Wi-Fi hotspot. Keen’s security team had been focusing on Tesla vehicles over the course of several months, and were able to combine a number of security vulnerabilities in order to achieve the exploit they demonstrated, which allowed them to remotely gain control of the vehicle to trigger things including the turn signal, the sun roof, the seat position and unlock the doors while the vehicle is parked. When in motion, the exploit allowed the researchers to control the vehicle’s wiper blades, fold in the driver- and passenger-side rearview mirrors, open the trunk, and even bring the vehicle to a stop. [youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c1XyhReNcHY] Keen Security Lab reported the vulnerabilities to the Tesla security team prior to discussing it publicly, and Tesla moved quickly to patch the exploit vector, issuing an over-the-air software update that’s available now to Model S owners within two weeks of receiving Keen’s report. Here’s the statement Tesla provided on the issue and the fix: Within just 10 days of receiving this report, Tesla has already deployed an over-the-air software update (v7.1, 2.36.31) that addresses the potential security issues. The issue demonstrated is only triggered when the web browser is used, and also required the car to be physically near to and connected to a malicious Wi-Fi hotspot. Our realistic estimate is that the risk to our customers was very low, but this did not stop us from responding quickly. We engage with the security research community to test the security of our products so that we can fix potential vulnerabilities before they result in issues for our customers. We commend the research team behind today’s demonstration and plan to reward them under our bug bounty program, which was set up to encourage this type of research. Model S owners can, and are encouraged to update their vehicle firmware as soon as possible, but as noted in the release, if it’s going to be a while before you can properly install the update, in the meantime as long as you avoid connecting to any suspicious open Wi-Fi networks and/or avoid using your browser, you won’t be at risk.
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Ingrid Lunden
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Kickstarter is breaking down assumptions about where innovation can occur
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John Mannes
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still think Kickstarter can replace venture capital need not look further than to see just how separate the world of crowdfunding is from traditional early-stage finance. While it’s easy to point to products like as a sign that crowdfunding sites like Kickstarter are gaining ground against traditional institutional financiers and angels, the reality is that the vast majority of projects were never in the sights of Sand Hill Road. Rather, Kickstarter is illustrating that all it takes to sustain innovation outside of Silicon Valley is the right incentives. Across the entire United States, technology products and services make up only 3.7 percent of all Kickstarter projects. For contrast, 43 percent of projects are categorized as film or music endeavors. Not only is tech underrepresented for the country overall on the platform, it’s underrepresented in the cradle of innovation — Silicon Valley. Instead of leading by a mile, as it regularly does in venture capital, the region is neck and neck with a handful of other cities. Nationally, roughly 3,273 tech projects have been backed on Kickstarter. San Francisco on its own represents just over 7 percent of these. In contrast, PitchBook data suggests that the same region accounts for more like 13 percent of tech companies nationwide. That’s almost twice the influence, and that’s generously excluding tech bastions like Palo Alto, Menlo Park and Mountain View. Left: Compiled with data from PitchBook Right: Pulled from Polygraph Drilling down even further, just over one-half of 1 percent of all projects created in San Francisco are for software. In fairly striking juxtaposition, a quick query of startups founded in San Francisco after Kickstarter’s 2009 founding date gives us a conservative estimate that over 54 percent of San Francisco startups provide software as their core product. On the other hand, hardware is overrepresented on the Kickstarter platform. Twenty-four percent of tech projects, or nearly 2 percent of all projects in San Francisco, provide hardware. This is in contrast to the relatively tiny PitchBook estimate of 2.9 percent for regional venture-backed startups. Pulled from Polygraph So if the Bay Area is underrepresented in software and overrepresented in hardware, where does it stand overall? With respect to the total number of Kickstarters, the city fails to stand out. After crunching the numbers, San Francisco can claim ~237 tech projects on Kickstarter, while New York can claim ~262, and that’s with only 2 percent of the city’s projects falling under the tech label. Cities like Minneapolis and San Diego stand out even more as tech hubs in ways not reflected in traditional metrics of venture capital. However, the cities’ most backed projects are a smart water bottle and a pair of 3D audio headphones, respectively. Compare this to the traditional unicorn titans incentivized by places like Silicon Valley and you would be looking at Uber and Airbnb. While it may be next to impossible to close a multi-billion dollar growth round on Kickstarter, the platform’s diversity makes a strong case for how easy it can be to displace innovation. Kickstarter heavily incentives hardware projects as a result of their rewards-based financing model. Historically, Indiegogo was the primary location for tech projects, with Kickstarter receiving the connotation of artists’ paradise. Software projects have propagated on the site, but only after the company . The effects from this are still present today and are only becoming more confusing with the rise of equity crowdfunding. Unfortunately, the same homogeneity that helped the platform grow limited its ability to deliver on expectations to disrupt the entire traditional startup ecosystem model. What the data does show is just how rapidly other cities can pick up the slack from Silicon Valley when a strong creative community takes over — it’s just a matter of dialing in the right incentives for the types of products created. Network effects have kept innovation concentrated in a small number of regions for a very long time as a result of density of people, capital and education. While crowdfunding has utterly failed at upsetting this, it has shown that it doesn’t take Robert Noyce and the traitorous eight to create entirely new innovation ecosystems where power has nothing to do with your Twitter followers or limited partners.
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Higher education goes Hollywood
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Ryan Craig
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As I began my career in higher education in the late 1990s, technology seemed poised to upend the entire academic enterprise. The New York Times, in an article titled “ ,” speculated that “just by doing what he does every day, a teacher potentially could grow rich instructing a class consisting of a million students.” Kim Clark, dean of the Harvard Business School, seemed to agree: “Faculty are dreaming of returns that are probably multiples of their lifetime net worth.” The zeitgeist was that a star system was about to be born, with million-dollar online courses starring celebrity faculty. As anyone who has taken an online course will tell you, none of this came to pass. More than 3 million students are enrolled in online degree programs that are largely text-based, delivered by faculty who have neither become famous nor rich. Meanwhile, the Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) phenomenon of 2012 has come and gone as quickly as the . Higher education has definitely not gone Hollywood. But Hollywood isn’t just about stars and blockbusters. Hollywood starts with talent, and in particular, spotting talent. Tinseltown is full of stories of serendipitous discoveries of talent: Lana Turner at a malt shop; Harrison Ford installing a door at George Lucas’ studio; Charlize Theron arguing with a bank teller. Over the past decade, reality television has been dominated by programs like American Idol, America’s Got Talent and The Voice documenting the quest for entertainment talent. In the field of entertainment, it’s easy for anyone to spot talent. Equally easy to spot — and perhaps more entertaining — is clear lack of talent. What’s not entertaining, however, are the prospects of hopefuls cast aside by Hollywood’s star system. The glamour of the Hollywood few must be viewed in the context of millions of hopefuls who never made it. While technology didn’t upend higher education by creating faculty celebrities, it is making it easier to spot talent, which will have a much greater impact. In the technology sector, the advent of coding repositories like GitHub has made it simple to evaluate programming talent — an imperative in a sector where top employees may be an more productive. And while few employers have gone as far as , which has begun hiring solely by evaluating code (and without interviews!), many have significantly elevated the importance of code reviews in their hiring processes. Traditional credentials appear to be receding in importance; Google’s Senior VP of People Operations is reported as saying that grades in degree programs are “worthless as a criteria for hiring.” There’s a good reason for this. Research demonstrates that are more predictive of job performance than any other factor — about 5x more predictive than years of education, 3x more predictive than job experience and 50 percent more effective than unstructured interviews. But when Hollywood comes knocking, you take the bad with the good. So while Bay Area coders with stellar GitHub accounts command unprecedented starting salaries, would-be programmers without kick-ass code can find themselves shut out of good jobs where they might have succeeded in a more innocent era, when candidates with (mere) degrees were hired as entry-level developers. Work samples are having a moment. , an ePortfolio network that allows students to make their papers, problem sets and presentations (and the competencies therein) visible to employers, has grown to over 180 colleges and universities and 5 million-plus students and alumni in just over one year. Employers across a range of industries — not simply IT — are now utilizing Portfolium to identify and recruit talent. Soon, employers of all stripes — marketers and manufacturers, architects and accountancies — may be able to identify raw talent as readily as Lana Turner at the malt shop 80 years ago, or a 10x developer on GitHub today. Of course, aspiring accountants won’t be interacting with agents or managers, but rather with bots encouraging them to pursue certain coursework or to compete projects or virtual internships in order to further their competency profiles. If the work product is good, they’ll be evaluated by an actual human hiring manager and considered for employment. If not, they’ll have little hope of breaking in. And realistically, it won’t be accounting, but rather high-return professions where 10x performance is plausible, such as finance, entrepreneurship, medicine, engineering and biotech. It’s likely that predictive algorithms will detect talent for employers earlier than currently seems possible — in high school or even middle school. If so, both educators and parents will need to be wary of early tracking, for fear that specialization at an early age might lead to false encouragement or disappointment. (Although, admittedly, few 12-year-olds will be crushed when they learn they’re not cut out for investment banking.) The emergence of star systems in other high-value fields will necessitate equivalent “stage moms” — parents who are vigilant in ensuring their children are able to pursue an appropriate and balanced educational trajectory (something that requires a great deal of work in Hollywood). Beyond high school, the Hollywood-ization of higher education is likely to create problems for colleges and universities. Among places in the U.S. where college is least valued, Hollywood and Silicon Valley are near the top of the list. Star systems can blind us from the value of higher education. The opportunity cost of a four-year college experience is unthinkable for many aspirants, so formal post-secondary education becomes something to pursue later. As it becomes easier to spot talent for most high-return careers, will colleges be left behind? Recognizing that technology makes it much easier for employers to spot talent, colleges and universities need to embrace work samples. As technology-enabled star systems emerge in other high-value fields, institutions — and their credential programs — must emerge as clearly superior environments for students to produce superior work product. This will be the outcome employers (and tuition-paying students) expect. Failure to do so will result in high-growth employers disregarding colleges and universities as a source of talent, and students voting with their feet — away from colleges, and toward alternatives pathways in the programmatic areas that should be most vibrant for universities. As technology makes higher education go the way of Hollywood, if colleges and universities fail to make work product central to the enterprise of higher education, what was once University Avenue could easily become a Boulevard of Broken Dreams.
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Don’t just pardon Edward Snowden; give the man a medal
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Jon Evans
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As Barack Obama’s second term comes to an end, an increasingly loud of are calling for a dramatic final presidential act: the pardoning of Edward Snowden. Authoritarians are horrified by this, and, as usual, they are wrong. A pardon really isn’t enough. As , Snowden deserves a medal. I can hear the outraged naysayers already. “It was treason!” “He broke the law!” “He should have followed official channels!” They’ll probably point to the House Intelligence Committee report on Snowden, turning a wilfully blind eye to what Barton Gellman calls its “ .” But whether you revere or despise Edward Snowden as a person, the cold hard fact is that America is a far better place because of Edward Snowden’s so-called “treason” — even if it was illegal. A certain apoplectic subset of the intellectual lazy seem unable to cope with the notion that an action can be simultaneously “against well-intended laws” and “good” — and yet, this is so, and the Snowden revelations act as a superb object example. Let’s perform a results-oriented analysis, shall we? I’m not aware of any allegations, much less proof, that anyone was actually harmed by his revelations. (Well, there are the crazies who think that bad guys had never before dreamed of the notion that they might be surveilled. Apparently bad guys don’t watch movies?) But the revelations utterly transformed the ongoing discussion — the increasingly critical discussion — regarding how much Western governments can and should surveil their citizens, and how much tech companies are allowed to protect their users. Consider earlier this year, when the FBI wanted to compel Apple to for the sake of the contents of a phone they must have already been fairly certain was useless. Consider the proposed Feinstein-Burr bill that would . In the absence of Edward Snowden, these authoritarians could have tried the “we’re the US government, we would never abuse this sacred authority!” approach. Thanks to Snowden, we know better than to believe that. Thanks to Snowden, we no longer believe that star-chamber rubber-stamp courts are particularly likely to mete out justice. Thanks to Snowden, authoritarians were forced to confess that their testimony to Congress was, rather than true, the “ ” testimony, a.k.a. a lie. Thanks to Snowden, we learned that the NSA were essentially secretly building the tools of a police state. I don’t mean to imply that they intended to use them as such; but it is foolhardy in the extreme to build the tools of a police state in the blithe unthinking certainty that they can and will only ever be used for good. And yet that is what authorities everywhere wish to do, and, in fairness, are incentivized to do. It is very hard to work against your incentives for the greater good of your people. But . So pardon the man, bring him home, and give him the Medal of Freedom. It’s no less than he deserves.
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Salesforce Einstein delivers artificial intelligence across the Salesforce platform
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Ron Miller
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Say what you will about Salesforce, the company is always looking ahead. This afternoon, it announced Salesforce Einstein, its artificial intelligence (AI) initiative. The timing, which comes just ahead of rival Oracle’s , is probably not a coincidence. Regardless, the larger AI theme is something Salesforce has been working on across various pieces of its platform over the last couple of years. Today’s announcement is about tying it together to show the breadth of this approach. Every year has its leading technology trends and clearly this year, artificial intelligence and its close cousin, machine learning are our favorite flavors. When the biggest companies including Google, Microsoft and AWS are building AI and machine learning tools, it is more than simply a buzzword. Salesforce has always tried to stay ahead of the curve. It was after all, one of the first true cloud offerings (even though we didn’t call it that then). When last year — when IoT was itself flavor the year — it caused some raised eyebrows, but Salesforce recognized that devices and sensors would be giving signals that its users could collect to understand customers and markets better. A year later we have Salesforce Einstein, which isn’t so much a product as a technology umbrella under which all of Salesforce’s artificial intelligence pieces live. Being a Salesforce announcement, it is of course broad and includes lots of individual components, but the gist here is that Salesforce wants to use every aspect of its platform to take the complexity out of AI, giving Salesforce CRM an intelligence blast, while exposing the AI APIs to let customers build intelligent apps on the Salesforce platform. The company pulled together 175 data scientists to help create Salesforce Einstein, while leveraging acquisitions such as MetaMind, PredictionIO and RelateIQ. In fact, MetaMind founder Richard Socher, holds the title of Chief Data Scientist at Salesforce now. Salesforce Einstein will touch every one of its products in some way eventually. Among the AI pieces it is including in the platform are advanced machine learning, deep learning, predictive analytics, natural language processing and smart data discovery. Ultimately, it’s not very different from exposing any other parts of the platform to customers, but it’s focused on making a smarter CRM tool, one that surfaces the information that matters. Sometimes this information may seem apparent, signals any reasonably good sales person would be looking for. Salesforce’s goal here is to put this key data front and center, and it believes even the most skilled sales pros will benefit from this approach. For inside sales teams making cold phone calls all day long, the system can surface the most likely candidate as the next call automatically. For sales people working territories, it can keep them apprised of key information such as when a competitor’s interest shows up in the news. While you could argue that an astute sales person would be tracking this information, the Salesforce Einstein approach is designed to leave nothing to chance. One of the issues for companies trying to build smarter applications is having access to a quality data set. Salesforce has access to a large body of information about customers, territories, and so forth, and it can provide aggregated data from customers who choose to share that information (without exposing any competitive details). It made clear it won’t share information if a company opts out, and it can assure that through the concept of data tenancy — that is, that each company has its own place of residency on the platform. Pricing and availability will vary, and may involve an additional charge, or could be included with the cost of the license, depending on the service. Einstein AI tools are built in across the platform such as Community Cloud with automated community case escalation and recommended experts, files and groups; Analytics Cloud with smart data discovery and Commerce Cloud with product recommendations. All of these are all generally available today, while others will be announced over the coming months. Prediction.IO is an open source machine learning tool, and is available . It’s important to note that Salesforce didn’t necessarily invent these AI approaches, but is building a version of many AI and machine learning tools. That said, what Salesforce is attempting to do here is highly ambitious, and this is just the start. Being somewhat early, it could be some time before it really begins to take hold with customers in a broad way, but in typical Salesforce fashion, it wants to be there whenever customers are ready.
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Productive mobility is poised to give business a virtual boost
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Diomedes Kastanis
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Throughout history, new technologies have constantly changed the way we’ve worked. They’ve been responsible for full-scale revolutions. And continued investments have come as corporate demand for worker productivity . We should expect augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR) to eventually attract increased spending in the enterprise as they combine with new mobile network advancements to make an emerging trend called “productive mobility” a reality. Productive mobility is about being as productive out of the office as inside, and as productive in a virtual instance as a physical one. Consider to streamline plane assembly workflows, decreasing assembly time and reducing errors by 25 percent. This is amazing. It’s also just the beginning of this reality-transforming workplace future. That’s where critical mobile network developments come in. Many of the most exciting AR applications require instant environmental interpretation, and rapid delivery of contextually relevant information and functionality. VR, in particular 360 stereoscopic video, greatly raises the payload overhead of rich media. Fixed and mobile broadband network advancements like fiber and 5G, along with service provider-centric content delivery topologies, deliver higher throughput with lower latencies. New convolutional network designs find patterns among previously insurmountable massive data sets, enabling rapid, intelligent predictions about the network, the things connected to it and the users engaging with it. This is opening new doors to productivity and information sharing in the enterprise. Today, typical network management sees supervisors tracking field technicians using a wall of screens. Those in the field can share what they see via streaming phone video, but that leaves their most precious resource — their hands — unusable. A VR interface replaces a wall of screens with a massively expanded desk space, giving supervisors front-seat insight into what their techs experience. Remote feeds are shared by techs via their AR-enabled headsets, and access to tutorials, checklists, voice guidance and visual cues from supervisors collectively shortens repair times. For common issues, this information is automatically displayed as the tech works through repairs. Experts and highly skilled contributors need no longer be physically present to solve remote issues — their precious knowledge now a scalable resource thanks to the application of AR and VR. It’s hard to think outside the box when your work ends at a screen’s edge. Network managers must monitor large sets of data to assure performance, services and more. Current work spaces are cramped with 2D screens and computers. Keyboard and mouse-based input limit speed and interactivity. Locating and sharing the right views while collaborating with others can be cumbersome, particularly during time-sensitive crises. VR changes this dynamic. It provides a virtually scaled collaborative canvas that lets teams work from shared data sets, spread out and arranged in a manner not possible with physical screens. Virtual hands can manipulate data, such as rotating a globe to identify the geographical source of an issue. Voice commands further streamline work flows, allowing collaborators to ask common questions, access different network views or perform complex tasks while simultaneously drilling down into other resources. Along with hand gestures and voice commands, VR creates a team fluidity that is lacking in today’s work environments. Different team members can have different default views based on their roles, with global communication taking place in the same virtual environment. The power to move. The freedom to be everywhere at once. The right tools to get things done better and faster. This is what productive mobility is all about, and VR and AR are playing a central role. The use cases and applications discussed here aren’t just cool ideas. Some were on display this year at IBC in Amsterdam, showcasing transformative approaches to common enterprise needs to operators, content owners and broadcasters. Productive mobility isn’t a theory, it’s a practice, advanced by network innovations and interface achievements. An exciting new future of enhanced enterprise productivity is within reach — even if a VR headset is required to touch it.
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Oracle buys Palerra to boost its security stack
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Ingrid Lunden
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Oracle is kicking off a in San Francisco this week, and to mark the event, it’s announced an acquisition. Oracle is buying , a cloud security startup co-founded by Oracle alums Rohit Gupta (its CEO) and Ganesh Kirti (CTO). Terms of the deal were not disclosed but we will try to find out. Palerra was founded in 2013 (originally called Apprity) and with investors including Norwest Venture Partners and August Capital. Palerra’s business currently focuses on providing security automation for enterprise apps, covering not just data in the apps but as that data “moves across services and it offers several layers of protection across infrastructure and software services,” as we about them last year. Given how many apps today integrate and exchange data by way of APIs, that makes for a significant business. The company will continue to serve its existing customers as well as work on more services for the future, Gupta notes in a announcing the news. included VMware, Pitney Bowes and Jefferies. It also has partnered with the likes of Microsoft. At a time when companies are facing more sophisticated cyber attacks than ever before, Palerra’s feature set is in demand: it covers breach discovery, compliance, insider threat detection and incident response. While Gupta and Oracle are not giving many details of the new product road map, Gupta notes that they will be working on integrations with Oracle’s platform. “Together, Oracle and Palerra will help accelerate cloud adoption securely by providing comprehensive identity and security cloud services,” he writes. “The combination of Oracle’s Identity Cloud Service and Palerra’s CASB platform plan to deliver comprehensive protection for users, applications and APIs, data, and infrastructure to secure enterprises in their adoption of Cloud and SaaS applications.” In his own , Oracle’s security and identity SVP Peter Barker added that the solutions will cover “users, applications and APIs.” You can see how the company could apply it as an added feature covering its own enterprise software, or as a standalone product much as it is sold today. Oracle has made well over 100 acquisitions to date, but not many in the area of security. Others include in 2005 and device management startup in 2013.
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Facebook ads still slipping past Adblock Plus via stripped-down code
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Josh Constine
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The Adblock Plus crowdsourced hacker militia can’t keep up with Facebook’s disciplined army of engineers. When Facebook first announced it would , Adblock Plus (ABP) built a in two days, boasting that “We promised that the open source community would have a solution very soon…This time that community seems to have gotten the better of even a giant like Facebook.” But it’s been since , and the social network’s marketing messages are still getting through. Despite the fact that ABP’s browser extension gets the final say on what appears on your screen, it can’t build filters fast enough when Facebook has total control over the code it serves. Adblock Plus communications manager Ben Williams ABP parent company Eyeo’s communications and operations manager Ben Williams admits it needs to dig deeper and make more drastic changes to keep fighting Facebook. “They have basically removed every identifier that’s findable in the first level of ads”, he says while raising fear about Facebook’s ads one day being indistinguishable from content to its users as well. Williams insists his company knew this would happen. “You’ve got to think that a company like Facebook has…a playbook. It’s kind of been how we expected.” That contrasts with the confidence of Williams’ blog posts a month ago, where he “What we hope users will remember is that there is a gargantuan, unstoppable community” “Should Facebook circumvent again, I’m sure another solution will arise from that open source community.” Now ABP says it will need more time to fire back at Facebook. “We’ll have to change the software, and we’re very, very careful. We have to do some testing.” Williams says that though Facebook has scrubbed the parent elements of its ads code, “We’re in the process of being able to block based on the one of the child elements. I’d say we’re a couple weeks away from that.” In the meantime, ABP has its own ad exchange called the Acceptable Ads Platform. It essentially lets websites serve privacy-safe ads that ABP won’t block from appearing to 90 million of its browser extension’s users in exchange for a six percent cut. That money will be critical if Adblock Plus wants to keep funding a war with a tech giant that earns $2 billion in profit per quarter.
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Here are Apple’s new ads for the iPhone 7 and Apple Watch Series 2
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Romain Dillet
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Apple just released not one, not two but three new ads for its new devices — the iPhone 7 and the Apple Watch Series 2. They all tout new features, such as water resistance, low light camera performance and new fitness features. Let’s start with my favorite one. In “Midnight”, a young man goes for a night ride on his skateboard. He rides in the suburbs, sees a deer (!) at a gas station and ends up at the top of a hill, overseeing the city. It’s beautifully shot. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R27KHLQ0cIU The second iPhone ad shows a man preparing his bike and iPhone for a ride during an epic rain. He’s using his iPhone with a handlebar mount. I hope he’s not going to die though… https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rTFPB4OUqrM The last ad features the Apple Watch Series 2 and focuses on fitness features. Yes, you can now swim with your Apple Watch, and do all sorts of dangerous sports. With this ad, it’s clear that Apple really wants you to consider the Apple Watch as a fitness-tracking device. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5t21_e7_-cQ And in case you missed it, Apple released an awesome-looking iPhone 7 teaser video last week. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ClRhvr7SK6E
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The government technology pitch
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Luke Fretwell
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Crisis has a history of dictating government technology disruption. We’ve seen this with the anticipation of Soviet Union aerospace and military dominance that sparked the emergence of DARPA, as as with the response to 9/11 and subsequent establishment of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security. And, of course, there’s the ongoing, seemingly invisible crisis around security that’s expediting an infusion of public sector funding, particularly in the wake of the that exposed the personal records of millions of federal employees and government contractors. The Healthcare.gov launch debacle is the most recent and referenced example of crisis spawning government technology progress. The federal government woke to the issues surrounding outdated digital practices — from procurement to technical — and quickly launched two startups of its own: and the (USDS). The failings of Healthcare.gov and subsequent creation of 18F and USDS has inspired others — such as the state of California, large cities and local governments — to fund a surge in attention to digital — from web to data to security — to address outdated technologies powering the technological infrastructure that runs our governments. But innovators don’t wait for crises. They imagine a different path, whether it’s a new approach to solving an old problem or a moonshot that leapfrogs business as usual. They observe the world, realize potential and fund and build engines of change — and forward-thinking, optimistic entrepreneurs and investors are starting to do this with government technology. “Think right now,” co-founder Evan Burfield said in an . “Who’s is the most iconic entrepreneur in Silicon Valley, the one all the kids these days are aspiring to? It’s Elon Musk. Every one of his businesses is based on a regulatory hack.” With the need to do more with less, to address an aging workforce and more and more pressure to recruit and retain the next generation of public sector leaders, government is being forced to adopt quicker than ever before. We’re at a pivotal moment with government technology infrastructure, much of it built on older technologies, with little mobile functionality and proper security protocol, all compounding the need for innovation. And customers are starting to demand it. According to an : 86 percent of those surveyed “want to maintain or increase their digital interaction with government” 73 percent are “neutral” or “not satisfied” with digital government services percentage who want online transactions for licenses/permits (66 percent), taxes (45 percent), fines/tickets (39 percent), report non-emergency issues (38 percent) Mobile: 32 percent want to use tablets to access digital government services; 38 percent a mobile phone (51 percent for ages 18-44) This is the opportunity for innovators. While the government digital services trend has taken hold, it doesn’t adequately address the needs of the 20,000 cities across the United States. Services costs quickly add up and don’t scale, but software-as-a-service does, and this is where private sector entrepreneurs are re-imagining how government works. As Marc Andreessen said, “software is eating the world.” Its appetite for government is beginning to get bigger, and interest from accelerators to venture funds is piquing. , specifically focused on government enterprise technology, aims to “harness the power of transformers, technology, and capital to help government become more efficient, responsive, and better able to serve society.” To date, Govtech Fund founder Ron Bouganim has raised $23.5 million to help make this happen. “VCs historically ran for the hills whenever they heard the word ‘government’ and for good reason: software sales cycles were measured in years, governments often required a ton of product customization and a byzantine structure of prime and sub-contractors made it impossible to actually deploy solutions even after a deal was won,” Bouganim. “However, in the past couple of years, a number of trends including government adoption of the cloud, budget constraints, a massive government personnel retirement cycle and an open data movement have coalesced to create an openness on the part of government agencies to embrace new technologies and a dramatically shortened sales cycle — our portfolio companies’ average is just 86 days.” (Bouganim says this has since shortened to 73 days). But it’s not just vertical investors and enthusiasts exploring government technology opportunities. Established venture capital firms like , and incubators and accelerators like and are also taking note. Y Combinator is beginning to explore entrepreneurial opportunities around cities, on this front, and has graduated a number of government-focused startups. To date, has raised nearly $50 million, including investments from Andreessen Horowitz, to bring financial benchmarking and transparency tools to government. Even Google has created its own city-focused venture with . Other startups — for public records management, for constituent relationship management, for 911, for 311, for law enforcement, for city analytics, ProudCity (my company) for city websites, and others — are beginning to replace legacy systems as the next-generation government SaaS stack. Former White House Office of Science and Technology Policy Deputy Chief Technology Officer and now partner at Insight Venture Partners recently about his firm’s government technology investments: “Why are these markets attractive areas for Insight, given conventional wisdom that government can be challenging to sell to, and expensive to serve? … First, government is a large market. … Second, government desperately needs better software. … Third, government requirements, while challenging, can sometimes advance product development for our companies.” In “ ,” OpenGov founders Zac Bookman and Joe Lonsdale highlight four points on why investment in government disruption is a ripe opportunity: 1) Old technology provides opportunities for order-of-magnitude improvements; 2) Big institutions signal huge markets; 3) Industry pressures demand new efficiencies; and 4) Challenging sales cycles increase barriers to entry and foster customer retention. “The right path for a startup-company in an old-line industry is arduous and immensely rewarding,” write Bookman and Lonsdale. “Conventional wisdom says that it’s too hard to build a business in government (or other major industries), and this has kept many from trying. Grand outcomes await for those top young companies bold enough to venture and win.” , state governments will spend $47 billion in IT and local governments $52 billion in 2016 — a 3.25 percent and 2.5 percent increase, respectively, over 2015. Couple this with a long tail of 19,000 cities, 89,000 agencies, 3,000 counties, 98,000 schools and 119,000 libraries, and the opportunity is there to enjoy entrepreneurial success, disrupt the seemingly impossible and, as Tim O’Reilly says, . For the bold, grand outcomes await.
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Lyft’s ambitious future vision includes self-driving dominance by 2021
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Darrell Etherington
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started picking up passengers with self-driving test cars in Pittsburgh – so it’s not surprising that just a few days later, Lyft has something to say on the subject. Lyft’s response may not be autonomous cars in active duty, but it is a lengthy, detailed treatise on how , as penned by Lyft co-founder and President John Zimmer. The Medium post from the Lyft exec articulates a vision of the future that would see most of the rides on Lyft’s network of cars handled autonomously by 2021. By 2025, Zimmer anticipates that personal car ownership, specifically in U.S. urban areas, will essentially be a thing of the past as denizens opt to use shared vehicle networks. “I wanted to write a long piece because this is the stuff we’ve been working about almost 10 years now when we started Zimride in 2007,” Zimmer told me in an interview. “There are a lot of marketing stunts happening where you put a few cars on the road, or you make announcements and press releases, but the thing that nobody’s talking about is you have this once-every-hundred-year opportunity to – if we work with the right stakeholders – to actually impact how our cities work.” Lyft co-founder John Zimmer at TechCrunch Disrupt SF 2013. Zimmer’s post is a little reminiscent of the breathless portraits of the future adorning pages of Popular Science in the 50s and 60s, but it also stems from a desire to fix genuine problems. He told me reinventing urban spaces has actually been one of his goals from the very beginning, as he got the idea for Zimride (which actually predates and launched Lyft, but which was ) because of an urban planning class he took in college. “You have cities that are mistakenly designed for cars, that are majority paved. I think about things in terms of occupancy,” Zimmer explained, noting that his college education was in hospitality management, so he thinks about the issue in those terms. “If you think about ground transportation, 96 percent of the time the car is parked, that’s like a horrible, horrible business. American spend more money on cars than they do on food, and the thing is parked 96 percent of the time […] and it takes up a large amount of city infrastructure.” Parking lots like this one in Tokyo currently take up vast tracts of otherwise useless urban space. While he’s excited about the potential possible to address those issues when you transition to a world where vehicle ownership is not the dominant mode, and self-driving is the norm, Zimmer also isn’t under any illusions about the challenges potentially preventing his vision from becoming a reality. He says it’s “not certain” at all that we can make this happen. “It’s not going to happen if we’re just doing stunts, and just talking about what the inside of an autonomous vehicle looks like,” he noted, while also adding that the design of the in-car experience is definitely still an important piece of the puzzle. Car design is part of the competitive advantage of a model like Lyft’s, he claims, and one that will work in concert with a future mileage-based subscription model Lyft sees as viable in a hybrid autonomous fleet-based offering. “Let’s imagine you sign up for – just like you have with Spotify or Netflix – a monthly subscription to Lyft, you’re going to have a choice between five to ten different experiences,” he said. “Let’s say you want the car or the hotel on wheels that allows you to do writing on the way to work, or you want to take a nap and there’s a sleeper car, or you’re with a bunch of friends and it’s kind of like a bar on wheels. With the Lyft plan you’ll be able to access those five or ten different experiences.” That’s part of why autonomous car deployment will work best via managed fleet networks like the one to be operated by Lyft, according to Zimmer, when compared to the model Elon Musk has articulated for an eventual future in which a network of individual owned Teslas can be rented out on-demand as needed, driving revenue for the vehicle owner themselves. Essentially, Zimmer’s critique of Musk’s model comes down to consistency and quality of experience, cleanliness and maintenance, all of which are easier to guarantee when a fleet is centrally managed. How Lyft sees human driver demand increasing with near-term autonomous advancements. Credit: Lyft. But what about jobs? Critique of autonomous fleet transportation networks typically includes concern for the human drivers currently employed by Lyft and others. Zimmer somewhat counter-intuitively argues that in the near-term, the demand for human drivers for Lyft will grow rather than decrease ahead of the transition to autonomous vehicles. He says the realities of urban transit will swell demand for shared services like Lyft, increasing the need for drivers while tech catches up to the point where vehicles can operate without anyone behind the wheel. Lyft is also hoping to be flexible in terms of partners in its own role within the overarching system, operating at the network level, on par with operators like AT&T or Sprint in the overall wireless market today. Zimmer stressed that this was the company’s focus in response to a question about whether the company didn’t require more control over the hardware side of the equation to deliver on its ultimate vision. “The key for us, and what we’re focused on now, is being the network,” Zimmer said. “At the same time, we’re the only company that has a close relationship, in the form of GM owning a 10 percent stake in Lyft, we have this company that for 100 years has built safe vehicles, and I do think it’s important to have that type of relationship because the connection and the experience will be that much more dialled when there’s that kind of relationship.” Zimmer’s vision is definitely compelling, but the key ingredients will need to start coming together quickly to back up his roadmap. As he noted in our interview, Lyft is already testing vehicles with autonomous tech with GM, so that part at least has begun in earnest. As for the rest, we’ll have to watch where the road takes us.
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Devin Coldewey
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Uber-owned Otto to offer freight hauling services using autonomous trucks in 2017
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Jon Russell
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this summer in a deal worth up to $680 million and it plans to put the company to work next year. That’s according to comments from Otto co-founder Lior Ron, who that Otto will enter the long-haul freight business in 2017. To recap, which can handle driving on U.S. highways. It doesn’t entirely automate the process since human drivers are needed to negotiating coming on and off highways, but the technology may enable drivers to rest more and make their deliveries faster in the future. The technology remains under development, but with Uber’s considerable resources now on board, Lior and his team aim to begin working with warehouses and stores to partially automate the driving process and generally improve efficiency. “In Uber, you press a button and an Uber shows up after three minutes,” Ron told Reuters. “In freight … the golden standard is that it takes (the broker) five hours of phone calls to find your truck. That’s how efficient the industry is today.” Uber is fast diversifying beyond its core business of transportation. Uber Eats, its food delivery business, is projected to grow massively worldwide with , but experts Reuters talked to are more skeptical of its move into freight. For now though, Lior and his team are engaged in conversations with potential partners. The company plans to more than double its current fleet of six trucks to kick things off.
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Three things venture capitalists need to show their own investors
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Harry Stebbings
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“The table stakes for [venture capitalists] has never been higher,” says Judith Elsea, co-founder of the fund-of-funds , in our latest interview. With the rise of stronger and stronger operational models, like , the value add VCs must provide has increased significantly. So in this world of heightened competition for LP money, what do LPs want to see in prospective fund investments? According to Elsea this can be broken down into three key elements. Just like startups, startup investors must ensure they are optimising their burn rate and being as capital efficient as possible. As Elsea highlights, “if a VC is not reinvesting their management fees, they are already behind.” This reinvestment will increase the value add of the VC and increase what Elsea believes is the most important element, ‘founders opinion of the VC’. With the increased availability of data, venture firms must not only be using this to source and find the best companies but using it as an engine for growth for their current portfolio companies. are a prominent example of this. They have a dedicated growth team, using data to advance the position of their companies. Elsea states her’s and the LP communities ‘respect for their forward thinking nature’. The term ‘scrappy’ is rarely associated with VCs with the common ideas of plush glass offices with vast board rooms. However, those days are over. As we said earlier, the table stakes for VCs has never been higher and if you want to get into the best deals, you have to fight and be scrappy. There is no better example of this than one of Elsea’s own funds, Felicis and their investment in Rovio. Aydin Senkut, General Partner at Felicis, that he ‘relentlessly pursued Rovio’ over several continents to get the deal done. It is this hustle and hunger that will separate the top performing VCs from the media in the coming years and increasing competitive environment of VC. Ultimately the most common reason LPs reject fund managers is due to lack of differentiation. Therefore, if you reinvest your management fees in operational segments that have not been taken by other funds. Finally hustle harder than anyone else. As Matt Mazzeo , ‘hustle is what separates the good from the great’. Once these 3 components are in place, it is time to get fundraising.
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Crunch Report | DJI releases its new drone, the Mavic Pro
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Khaled "Tito" Hamze
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Tito Hamze, John Mannes
Tito Hamze
Joe Zolnoski
Joe Zolnoski
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GoGoGuest helps coffee shops manage their Wi-Fi, customer-by-customer
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Anthony Ha
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Be honest: Have you ever spent an entire day working at a coffee shop, despite only buying a single cup of coffee? I’ve definitely been guilty of this, and I’ve also been to coffee shops that try to fight back by removing outlets, turning off their Wi-Fi or outlawing laptops on certain tables. A startup called is taking a different approach that could help coffee shops combat this kind of freeloading — and deliver a better experience for paying customers. GoGoGuest installs printers in coffee shops, so that when you make a purchase, you get a receipt with a unique code. Depending on how the coffee shop has chosen to implement the technology, this code might be the only way you can get onto the shop’s Wi-Fi, or it might be your ticket to a special high-speed, “premium” network. Then, after an hour or two, the coffee shop can ask you to make another purchase if you want to stay online. I’ve tried this out myself at GoGoGuest’s first location, the in San Francisco, where I ordered a cup of chai, got my code and was surfing high-speed internet a few seconds later. The company says it’s already seeing a 30 percent conversion rate from customers who are spending two to six hours online. Co-founder Christopher O’Connor acknowledged that all of this is already possible with existing Wi-Fi technology — but it’s complicated enough to do that most coffee shops haven’t tried it. (Put another way: I’ve been to many shops where there’s a single password for the Wi-Fi, and only a handful where I got an individual code.) So GoGoGuest makes it easier by handling the installation, then gives store owners and managers a dashboard where they can manage the system. In addition, O’Connor said GoGoGuest provides store owners with a “boatload of analytics” about their customer activity. That means they can test the effectiveness of different marketing strategies and even offer promotions on an individual level: “If you see that someone is your best customer, you should maybe start treating them differently than the person who’s on YouTube all the time and isn’t buying anything.” GoGoGuest also offers for consumers, allowing them to browse a curated list of nearby coffee shops. As the system gets installed in more locations, you can imagine those stores being highlighted in the app, which could also be used to deliver targeted offers and promotions. O’Connor said he sees GoGoGuest as a way for “mobile, social workers” to find places where they can work with the guarantee of a good internet connection, while his co-founder Jessica Valenzuela added that it’s a way for independent coffee shops to promote themselves and “be better positioned against the bigger coffee shops.”
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Tyra Banks on startup investing and her new TV show
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Katie Roof
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Tyra Beauty is both “beauty business and badassery,” Banks quipped in a video chat with TechCrunch. It’s a “cosmetics experience, not a cosmetics line.” She spoke of the business model, where they employ salespeople called “Beautytainers,” to spread the word about Tyra Beauty through word of mouth.
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Musk says under 5 percent of SpaceX is working on Mars mission, 2024 launch is ‘optimistic’
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Devin Coldewey
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Elon Musk , but he’s not rushing it. In a conference call following the SpaceX CEO’s presentation today at the International Astronautical Conference, Musk noted that the project is still essentially a hobby at the company, drawing only a fraction of its efforts. In response to a question about whether the company should be worrying about colonizing the solar system when its rockets are still exploding on the ground, Musk was conciliatory. “Less than 5 percent of SpaceX resources are working on planetary transport stuff,” he said. “So it is very much a secondary or tertiary priority to understanding exactly what happened on the last mission.” “The pace of progress on Mars depends upon the pace of progress of SpaceX,” he explained. “Our success rate with Falcon 9 is roughly 93 percent — it needs to be a lot better. We need to get Falcon Heavy launched finally, Dragon 2, and make sure we manage the company such that we’ve got sufficient cash flow and funds while it’s developing — and of course, I will supplement that personally.” Inside the SpaceX Crew Dragon In the near term, the Dragon project must go forward both as an integral part of SpaceX’s current business and as a precursor to future missions. “We want to use Dragon 2 as a pathfinder. We need to sort out interplanetary navigation, deep space communication at high bandwidth… then entering Mars’ atmosphere and, you know, landing,” he said. “What is landing like tremendously heavy? Dragon will be about ten times heavier than anything that has landed on Mars before.” NASA’s Curiosity would be the next-heaviest, and they weren’t concerned about bruising colonists, or taking off again afterwards. The hovering technique worked well for a science buggy, but “you can’t do that with a giant spaceship,” Musk told the audience. It’s also unclear how the dust and debris will fly or provide sufficient resistance to rockets. He was pretty candid about the craft’s chances, in fact. “I wouldn’t give the first Dragon landing on Mars high odds — I mean, 50 percent. The history of landing on Mars is not a good one,” he admitted. “So for a first timer, I’d say if we get 50 percent likelihood, I’d say that’s pretty good.” Those are the robotic missions, of course, with 2 slated to launch in 2020 and more whenever it’s practical to do so. For manned missions (which tend to require more than a 50 percent projected success rate), the goal is 2024, but that plan is definitely not etched in stone. “I mean, that’s optimistic,” he said. “I would describe that as an aspiration, and within the realm of possibility — a lot of things need to go right.”
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Best Buy partners with PCH to bring hardware startups to its brick and mortar
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Brian Heater
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“It is still incredibly important for startups to get their products in front of customers in stores,” explains Highway1 head Brady Forrest. “Startups traditionally face hurdles to entering brick and mortar retail, and that is why PCH is working with Best Buy to innovate in-store retail with things like direct to store shipping, which drastically reduces inventory cost for a startup.” Early today, Highway1’s parent company PCH International announced a deal with Best Buy that would offer hardware startups precious shelf space in amongst the brightly lit aisles of mega-retailer Best Buy. will start small, with a devoted space in the big box store’s Silicon Valley store — a newly opened space located in Google’s home turf of Mountain View, after relocating from Yahoo’s stomping ground, Sunnyvale. Among the first round of products are the Spotify-enabled headphones, the smartlock and the smartplug. According to Best Buy, the partnership marks a more aggressive move toward courting new companies. “We’ve worked with startups for years, but the Ignite program will make it even easier and faster for customers to get their hands on these new, cool, meaningful products from startups,” a Best Buy spokesperson told TechCrunch, citing beer tap and pet monitor as examples of products currently available in the company’s retail locations. Interested parties can for review by a team comprised of members from both PCH and Best Buy. “Best Buy sees a lot of startups with great products ideas, and this program will help more of them get into consumers’ hands with access to the PCH platform,” Forrest adds. “PCH works with hundreds of startups and many of them will be considered for the program. One of our early alums, Flic, is apart of the Ignite in-store experience. As for whether the program will ever grow beyond a single-store anomaly, neither side is ready to shed much light on things, though Best Buy notes that “the products included are also available online.” It seems likely, however, that the Mountain View store is being regarded as a pilot for future growth of the partnership, which has the potential to both keep the retailer closer to the cutting edge, while increasing PCH’s already considerable reach among hardware startups. Startups, meanwhile, get distribution from one of the biggest retailers around, including the decided benefit of real-world customer interaction.
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Samsung waiting to see where VR hype cycle lands before moving on standalone headsets, next-gen 10K displays
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Lucas Matney
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At a company event today in San Francisco, Samsung President & Chief Strategy Officer Young Sohn detailed that the company is actively pursuing both smartphone-focused VR headsets and standalone solutions. The decision to market and ship a dedicated all-in-one device would rely largely on where the VR market goes in the upcoming months and years, he says, and whether the clunky headsets can gain wider adoption. “Is [virtual reality] hype or mainstream? I don’t have a good answer for you today,” Sohn said. Back at the company’s developer conference in April, the company the development of a standalone VR headset. Sohn confirmed to me that the company is indeed looking at all-in-one VR solutions, but it seems that the company is in a bit of a wait-and-see period regarding how it approaches the form factor. Sohn detailed that he believes the industry is at the peak of its hype cycle and that “there’s a bit of a chicken and egg problem right now” for shipping all-in-one headsets when the market hasn’t entirely proven itself thus far. Samsung is currently one of the largest manufacturers of mobile VR headsets. There are over a million Galaxy and Note owners utilizing the company’s $99 Gear VR headset, though a large chunk of that user base likely received those headsets for free based on pre-order promotions for the company’s handsets. The company is also one of Google Daydream’s first partners and is more than likely going to release a separate mobile headset for that platform. Sohn highlighted battery efficiency, latency needs and display tech as areas where hardware needs to improve for the company’s next wave of VR product offerings. The next-generation devices will need pixel densities “at least two times” that of current displays, Sohn detailed. The QuadHD displays currently available on Samsung’s Galaxy and Note smartphone lines may be more than adequate for regular smartphone usage but when the device is slotted into a Gear VR headset and places inches away from the user’s eyes, the display limits become much more visible. Sohn said that virtual reality technologies would definitely be a driving incentive for the company to “move faster” in building next-gen displays, but also posited that building a 10K mobile display would likely require an investment of “at least $5 billion to $10 billion” from the company. Later at Samsung’s event today, CEO Mary Lou Jepsen referenced the company’s efforts on an unconfirmed while discussing medical applications for high-density displays. These standalone headsets differ from mobile solutions in that no secondary compute device is required with all of the compute, display and sensor tech baked into a single device. Intel and Qualcomm have both shown off reference designs for all-in-one VR devices but are not looking to immediately market these devices to consumers. The move toward all-in-one is a necessary evolution for the industry but companies across the space seem unsure if the market is there yet. Samsung has been leading the way in mobile VR thanks to its partnership with Oculus, but with Google’s Daydream VR platform soon to launch broadly, it’s clear that there’s about to be a lot more competition for the tech giant in the space.
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Tinder Boost lets you pay your way to the front of the line
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Jordan Crook
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is introducing a new premium feature called Tinder Boost. The feature will let users pay to have their profiles displayed first to other users on the app in the same locale for 30 minutes. According to the , it’s all about saving users’ time and making sure that the Tinder experience is maximized during the time that they’re actually using the app. From the : You’ve got people to meet and places to be. In fact, Tinder was designed with this in mind, providing you a simple, fun introduction to new people nearby so you can get out and meet them in the real world. Still, sometimes there just aren’t enough hours in the day and what you need is a boost in the right direction. Tinder Boost gives you exactly that: a way to be one of the top profiles in your area for 30 minutes. Increase your chances for a match—you can get up to 10x more profile views while boosting. Tinder often tests new products in Australia first before going live globally, and Tinder Boost is no different. Australian Tinder users will have access to Tinder Boost soon, while other markets will have to wait until Tinder launches the finalized product. Which brings me to pricing. Just as much as Tinder is using Australia to test the product itself, the company is likely also going to be testing pricing. That said, you can expect this particular feature to err on the pricier side, given that it’s only useful if it’s relatively scarce. If everyone in a five-mile radius is able to purchase a quick Boost on a Friday night, showing up ‘first’ in someone’s Tinder feed starts to lose its effectiveness, and ultimately, its allure. Tinder Plus users will get one free Boost per week, with the ability to purchase more. Users who don’t have Tinder Plus will also be able to purchase Boosts without joining the premium tier. To use the feature, you must be in Tinder swiping mode. Taking cues from the , a premium feature that lets you send someone an extra-special like instead of a regular like, we can expect the Boosts to be sold both as singles and in packages. That said, Tinder isn’t sharing exact numbers on the price just yet. “With Tinder Boost, users can maximize their time and match potential by being one of the top profiles seen in their area with the tap of a button,” said Sean Rad in an emailed statement. “With 1.4 billion swipes a day on our platform, sometimes our users want to be sure that they are swiped to the front. We think our users in Australia will love this feature and hope to release it globally soon.” [gallery ids="1393428,1393429,1393430,1393431,1393432"] Tinder isn’t the first to offer a product that puts you at the front of the dating line. Match.com, a brand within Tinder’s parent company Match Group, also offers a that puts a user’s profile in the Popular Singles tab and at the top of search results. Bumble, an app like Tinder but where women are in the driver’s seat, also launched a time-saving feature as part of its , letting you see at the top of your feed people who have already liked you. However, like Match’s Boost, Tinder stands to generate even more revenue off the Boost feature as it’s sold on top of Tinder Plus (save for the free weekly Boost) and it isn’t available for free to unpaid users. Tinder Boost is now available in Australia and we’ll be sure to let you know when it launches globally.
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What to look for in the next Pokémon Go
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Penry Price
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If you had to crown an “App of the Summer,” would undoubtedly be at the top of the list. The app became a household name within days of its July launch and was . This easily could have been this generation’s , but somehow has pulled off something other brands can’t even conceive. While ’s developer Niantic has been praised for introducing augmented reality to the smartphone-wielding masses, to understand the app’s success, you have to look at the long arc of content marketing that is driven by messages that speak to our innate human desires, and the nostalgia that only comes from something ingrained in our collective consciousness. By combining these elements, built one of the most resilient brands in recent memory. It also provided a playbook for other brands looking to catapult their intellectual property into viral success. Video game makers have relied on content to drive their success since the Atari was in vogue. They didn’t call it content marketing back then, but the effect of layering movies, TV, games, memorabilia and other media has built a handful of wildly successful franchises and gaming companies. After all, Super Mario Bros. — — began its life as a marketing tool for the Nintendo Entertainment System. Nowadays, will launch a dedicated website, discussion board, customer engagement team and fully staffed social accounts for every new game it releases. Game developers have realized that content is the best way to make their games sticky and profitable over the long term. And while downloads , it’s still , bar none. If playing feels indescribably natural to you, that’s because it is. ’s creator, Satoshi Tajiri, outside Tokyo. is a digitized version of : collecting things. People tend to collect things for two reasons: to create a reflection of their personal preferences, or to classify things into groups, like you would with a stamp collection. sends this innate desire into overdrive by implicitly encouraging users to compare their collections. The race to “catch them all” pits users and their collections against each other. Whether it’s through routines, schedules or habits, we’re constantly trying to bring order to our lives. For some, creating order means playing until you’ve caught them all. I had a feeling may come roaring back to life when I saw the franchise’s in February. The ad, featuring children and adults alike, captured the nostalgia fans have for , which has now existed for 20 years. Players who started with on their Game Boys are now old enough to be showing it to their kids. knows this — it’s no coincidence some of the few words in the ad are a father telling his son, who just discovered the fantasy universe, “you can do this.” This kind of emotional resonance happens when companies can reinforce brand values and emotions over long periods of time. Nintendo has created an immersive universe for its customers built on emotion, fantasy and joy. There’s a reason has become . Without a deep understanding of its users and their passions, would just be another Yu-Gi-Oh! — a fad tossed aside after running its course. proves that brands can monetize their customers’ nostalgia if they play their cards right. There’s no single reason for ’s success. Video games have long leveraged content to entertain users. The very activity of catching harnesses the innate desire to organize our lives. By taking a horizontal, long-term view to its content, also engendered powerful nostalgia in its customers. The game signals the power of brand nostalgia: Its sweet spot is kids who grew up during the 1990s, but the game , not just millennials. As a result, millions of players . Brands can emulate this approach by optimizing their content for the long haul and creating immersive universes for their customers. Rome wasn’t built in a day. is a fantastic app (my son loves it) — but don’t hand all the credit to its augmented reality or its media buzz. has been working toward its virality for decades. What we’re seeing now is a perfect storm of variables — one that other companies will likely be deconstructing, analyzing and experimenting with for years to come.
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“Good guy” loan startup LendUp pays $6.3M for overcharging violations
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Josh Constine
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LendUp was supposed to be different than the payday loan sharks that rip off the poor when they need emergency cash. But in its early days, charged customers illegal fees, miscalculated interest rates, falsely advertised loans nationwide that weren’t available there and misled people that borrowing from LendUp would boost their credit score. Now LendUp will have to pay $6.3 million for the violations in a combination of refunds, fines, and settlements. That includes a $1.8 million fine by the federal for failing to keep its promises, and a $100,000 fine from the California Department of Business Oversight for the fees and interest rates. LendUp CEO Sasha Orloff spoke to TechCrunch, admitting his company didn’t have a big enough compliance and legal team to review all of its promotions and features. To remedy the situation, LendUp proactively refunded any wrongly charged customers and ceased all problematic practices as soon as the investigation began. Now, Orloff says his 190-employee company has a 15-person-plus legal and compliance division — more people than the entire LendUp team at the time of the infractions. LendUp CEO Sasha Orloff You can read the full announcement from the CDBO here: [scribd id=325542599 key=key-oLfd8zbwy9LW6P1R2WZ5 mode=scroll] In a to the press, Orloff tried to pass off the problems as growing pains of a young startup, which he told me was cash constrained, and had to make tough decisions about who to hire and what to build. He wrote, “These regulatory actions address legacy issues that mostly date back to our early days as a company, when we were a seed-stage startup with limited resources and as few as five employees. In those days we didn’t have a fully built out compliance department. We should have.” The penalties might merely be a speed bump for LendUp, though. It raised a to bring itself to in equity funding, giving it plenty of cash to pay the fine and keep operating. Founded in 2011, , which comes with a flat fee and lets you borrow more if you pay back promptly. More recently, it launched the LendUp credit card, which is free if you pay back on time and lets you pause charges and watch your credit from an accompanying smartphone app. The company claims to have saved LendUp positioned itself as a compassionate alternative to high-interest credit cards and scammy debt trap payday loans that can charge up to 500 percent to 700 percent in interest. That might ring hollow if customers dig out LendUp’s skeletons. Now LendUp claims it’s locked those skeletons in the closet long ago. Orloff writes, “We are a different company today, with a compliance team of ten and a separate in-house legal team of six, including our Head Regulatory Counsel and seasoned General Counsel. Importantly, those teams are brought in at the beginning of the development lifecycle for every new product and feature.” Additionally, Orloff tells me LendUp hired former regulators to come in and build out its compliance program. A study shows it now makes good on its claim about boosting financial health, as a third-party review by TransUnion found LendUp customers are more likely to raise their credit score than non-borrowers or those borrowing from another lender. To customers, Orloff writes, “We take our commitment to operating in a transparent, compliant and socially responsible way very seriously.” He says the company’s morale remains strong because employees believe it’s evolved significantly from when it was one-twentieth its size and made these errors. The startup wasn’t allowed to discuss the ongoing investigations until they were recently completed. But now Orloff is sad about what regulators defined as a fee. He and General Counsel Angela Jeffers explained that LendUp offered a 30 cents per day discount if borrowers pledged to pay back early. But if customers missed the self-imposed discount deadline, their discounts would be removed day-by-day, which regulators considered a fee. You can read LendUp’s full statement here: [scribd id=325543071 key=key-QWmR7KW1ct7kyK7D5wBO mode=scroll] LendUp didn’t have to legally admit wrongdoing… but it clearly did things wrong. , which had to fire it CEO, blow up its whole brand and start from scratch rebuilding trust with insurance clients. But LendUp has given old-school banks and competitors in the increasingly crowded fintech space the ammunition they need to cast doubt on the startup’s claims of trying to help the poor. That jeopardizes LendUp’s dream of building a compassionate modern banking brand, which attracted investment from top VCs like Andreessen Horowitz, Kleiner Perkins, GV (Google Ventures), AFSquare, Data Collective, Kapor Capital and SV Angel. Alternatively, the fines could be seen as growing pains that signal LendUp was trying to rush to market and stake a claim, which some investors endorse. Uber’s cavalier attitude toward regulation has shown the potential of the “move fast and break things” mantra popularized by Facebook. But Uber typically hurt taxi drivers by sidestepping the rules while providing convenience to its users. LendUp’s customers are the victims here.
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The OX is a flat-pack truck for the developing world
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Kristen Hall-Geisler
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The Global Vehicle Trust has revealed its OX prototype, a truck that can be flat-packed into itself for transportation anywhere in the world. When it arrives at its destination, the OX can be unpacked and assembled by a trained team of three professionals in about 12 hours. (Insert your own favorite IKEA joke here.) The GVT was founded five years ago by British businessman and philanthropist Torquil Norman with the purpose of developing cost-effective transportation. He brought Gordon Murray on board, the man behind McLaren road cars, with the following brief: the vehicle has to have high ground clearance and generous approach and departure angles; its layout has to be configurable for multiple uses; and the cab has to fit three people. And voila: OX. The version we’re seeing now is the XP3 prototype, which has received interest from aid agencies and Norman’s contacts in Africa. The GVT is raising money now to further fund the project to its completion. The OX can be packed six to a shipping crate in its flat-pack form. Once assembled, the rear space can hold up to 10 people or eight 44-gallon drums. The front cab does indeed seat three, with the driver in the center so the vehicle can be used in countries that drive on the left or right side of the road. Even assembled, the OX is a bit of a transformer. The bases of the rear bench seats can be removed and placed under the wheels for traction in sandy terrain. The tailgate slides off and can be turned lengthwise to be used as a loading ramp. The OX’s dry weight is a substantial 1,600 kg (3,527 lbs), and it can haul a payload up to 1,900 kg (4,188 lbs) with its 2.2-liter diesel engine. The two-wheel-drive vehicle has been engineered to perform as well as a four-wheel-drive vehicle, an important consideration in areas where roads are not maintained or are nonexistent. The goal now is to make the OX a reality. As Norman said in a press release: “Our priority now is to raise the funding to complete the testing and take the project to fruition. We believe that the OX has huge potential for charities, aid organisations and development programmes. My dream is to one day see an OX in every village in Africa.”
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Google unleashes deep learning tech on language with Neural Machine Translation
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Devin Coldewey
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Translating from one language to another is hard, and creating a system that does it automatically is a major challenge, partly because there are just so many words, phrases and rules to deal with. Fortunately, neural networks eat big, complicated data sets for breakfast. Google has been working on a machine learning translation technique for years, and . The Google Neural Machine Translation system, deployed today for Chinese-English queries, is a step up in complexity from existing methods. Here’s how things have evolved (in a nutshell). A very simple technique for translating — one a kid or simple computer could do — would be to simply look up each word encountered and switch it with the equivalent word in another language. Of course, the nuances of speech and often the meaning of an utterance can be lost, but this rudimentary word-by-word system can still impart the gist at minimal fuss. Because language is naturally phrase-based, the logical next move is to learn as many of those phrases and semi-formal rules, applying those, as well. But it requires a lot of data (not just a German-English dictionary) and serious statistical chops to know the difference between, for example, “run a mile,” “run a test” and “run a store.” Computers are good at that, so once they took over, phrase-based translation became the norm. More complexity lurks still in the rest of the sentence, of course, but it’s another jump in complexity, subtlety and the computational power necessary to parse it. Ingesting complex rulesets and making a predictive model is a specialty of neural networks, and researchers have been looking into this method — but Google has beaten the others to the punch. GNMT is the latest and by far the most effective to successfully leverage machine learning in translation. It looks at the sentence as a whole, while keeping in mind, so to speak, the smaller pieces like words and phrases. Google’s animation shows how the parts of a Chinese sentence are detected and their relevance to the words to be translated weighed (the blue lines). It’s much like the way we look at an image as a whole while being aware of individual pieces — and that’s not a coincidence. Neural networks have been trained to identify images and objects in ways imitative of human perception, and there’s more than a passing resemblance between finding the gestalt of an image and that of a sentence. Interestingly, there’s little in there actually specific to language: The system doesn’t know the difference between the future perfect and future continuous, and it doesn’t break up words based on their etymologies. It’s all math and stats, no humanity. Reducing translation to a mechanical task is admirable, but in a way chilling — though admittedly, in this case, little but a mechanical translation is called for, and artifice and interpretation are superfluous. points out several advances — rather technical ones — that reduce the computational overhead required for processing language this way and avoid its pitfalls. For example, the system tends to choke on rare words, since their rarity makes them difficult to recognize and associate with other words. GNMT gets around this by breaking uncommon words into smaller pieces that it treats as individual words and learns the associations for. Actual computing time is reduced by limiting the precision of the math involved and using Google’s Tensor Processing Units, custom hardware designed with neural network training in mind. The input and output systems are very different, but still exchange information where they interface, allowing them to be trained together and form a more unified in-out process. That’s about as specific as I can get on that one; the details are in the paper if you think you can handle them. The resulting system is highly accurate, beating phrase-based translators and approaching human levels of quality. You know it has to be good when Google just deploys it to its public website and app for a difficult process like Chinese to English. Spanish and French also tested well, and you can expect GNMT to expand in that direction over the coming months. One of the downsides is that, as with so many predictive models produced by machine learning, we don’t really know how it works. “GNMT is like other neural net models — a large set of parameters that go through training, difficult to probe,” Google’s Charina Choi told TechCrunch. It’s not that they have no idea whatsoever, but the many moving parts of phrase-based translators are designed by people, and when a piece goes wrong or becomes outdated, it can be swapped out. Because neural networks essentially design themselves through millions of iterations, if something goes wrong, we can’t reach in and replace a part. Training a new system isn’t trivial, though it can be done quickly (and likely will be done regularly as improvements are conceived). Google is betting big on machine learning, and this translation tool, now live for web and mobile queries, is perhaps the company’s most public demonstration yet. Neural networks may be complex, mysterious and little creepy, but it’s hard to argue with their effectiveness.
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Occipital launches $500 dev kit to turn your iPhone into a room-scale tracked VR headset
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Lucas Matney
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For iOS or Mac users interested in VR, there isn’t a lot you can do right now without migrating to the dark sides of Android or Windows. is aiming to get people on the iOS platform access to some more cool VR opportunities. Today, the company opened up a $500 development kit today that brings room-scale motion tracking to iOS (as well as Android) smartphones, Upload . The dev kit utilizes the company’s sensor. This has already been mounted to iPhones and iPads to help people build 3D meshes of their environments but this is the first attempt to give the sensor a VR-focused application. The iPhone is still a pretty imperfect platform due to system levels constraints in regards to latency, but this is the best that can be done until Apple gets its act together. Room-scale allows users to enjoy VR no matter where they move in a space. It will also allow you to move around in VR without bashing into your couch or wall due to its depth-sensing capabilities. It’s easier to see than to explain honestly. Just check out the quick video below. Despite a plethora of rumors related to Apple’s planned entry into the VR/AR space, there hasn’t been anything on-the-record other than CEO Tim Cook simply saying that augmented reality had huge potential. iPhone users that are interested in VR are pretty much stuck with Google Cardboard for the time being, and with Android Nougat’s upcoming VR mode, that experience is going to be trailing behind significantly. With these add-ons from companies like Occipital, we’re seeing what the next generation of smartphone cameras are going to be capable of. Apple’s iPhone 7 Plus introduced dual cameras which allow for some variation of depth-sensing for the sake of creating more stylish photos, but many are expecting the company to begin integrating more advanced tech in future models, perhaps relying on sensors from PrimeSense, a startup Apple acquired in late 2013 for a reported $360 million. Occipital wants their tech to eventually find its way into manufacturers’ hearts and consumers’ devices. For now developers can take a look to secure a kit and start building.
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Everything you need to know about SpaceX’s plan to colonize Mars
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Darrell Etherington
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on Elon Musk today as he gave a keynote speech at the International Astronautical Conference in Mexico. Musk began by saying that their goal is to “make Mars seem possible, make it seem as though it’s something we can do in our lifetimes, and that you can go … that anyone can go if they wanted to.” The reason to go is that we have two paths as humans, Musk said: One path is we stay on Earth forever and eventually face an extinction event. The alternative is to become a spacefaring and multiplanetary species, “which I hope you would agree that is the right way to go,” Musk said wryly. The goal then is to create a self-sustaining city that isn’t just an outpost, he explained, but that “can become a planet in its own right.” Mars makes sense for this because of a number of reasons, including its size similarity to Earth. And options within our solar system are limited otherwise, as there’s Venus but it’s essentially a hot acid bath, Musk noted. The moons of Jupiter and Saturn could work, he added, but they’re too far off. We could conceivably go to our moon, he went on to note, saying that he has “nothing against going to the moon,” but it’s challenging because it’s much smaller, there’s no atmosphere, it’s not as resource-rich and its day is 28 Earth days long. Whereas early Mars was a lot like Earth, Musk said, and if we could warm Mars up we would once again have a thick atmosphere and oceans. He added that it “would be quite fun” to colonize the red planet, because Mars has gravity that is 30 percent that of Earth, making it possible to bound around. The big issue facing the feasibility of Mars colonization, Musk said, is actually that there is not an intersection of sets of people who want to go and who can afford to go (in fact you cannot go currently for infinite money). A more optimistic cost number would be about $10 billion per person using the current model based on extrapolation from moon landings, he said. So we need to achieve overlap between people who want to go, and people who can afford to go, by reducing the cost of moving to Mars roughly the equivalent to the median house price in the U.S., which is around $200,000. At that point, Musk said, it gets to the point where almost anyone, if they saved up and this was their primary goal, could make it to Mars. Still, that cost reduction is a big stumbling block. “It is a bit tricky,” Musk said, making one of the understatements of the century. So how to improve the cost of trips to Mars by “5 million percent”? The key ingredients are full reusability of ships and vehicles, and the rest is made up by refilling in orbit, actually producing more propellant on Mars for return trips, and choosing the right propellant to make that possible and efficient. With frequent flights, Musk noted, the cost of a trip on a terrestrial aircraft that’s $90 million goes down dramatically. It costs $43 for LAX-to-San Diego flights, for instance, versus $1 million for single use trip if the aircraft were turned every time it made the run. The number of times it’s feasible to re-use craft for Mars, versus flying commercial on Earth, is less, since you can use the spaceship part only every two years. But the booster and tanker can be “used as much as you like,” he said, letting you refill the spaceship in orbit and giving you a very large payload capability for that spaceship’s trip to Mars. Not refilling in orbit would require a three-stage vehicle, which would increase the cost per ticket by 500 percent, Musk said. Spreading the capacity over multiple booster trips would help you reduce the required size of the fuel tank, and the sensitivity to performance quirks, meaning you can actually have a shortfall in performance with a couple extra refilling trips. That margin for error also helps reduce costs. The reusability of ships back and forth between Mars, is another key cost reduction ingredient, and that requires building a propellant plant on Mars, Musk said. Luckily, Mars happens to work out well for that because of CO2 atmosphere and water ice in the soil. The choice for fuel type is the final ingredient in managing costs, and there are three main choices: kerosene, hydrogen/oxygen, and deep-cryo methalox (a type of methane). It’s hard to make traditional jet fuel (kerosene) on Mars, and hydrogen is expensive and difficult with the planet’s conditions. Methane is the clear winner, easier to produce and less cost per unit than most via methane (and deep-cryo methalox specifically). SpaceX’s IST’s rocket portion will come back within 20 minutes from launch, Musk said, in the working system. The fuel tank portion looks like the spaceship; in fact it is almost identical by design to lower costs. This section will go down and back three to five times to fill the spaceship fully. The system itself can handle 1,000 re-uses per booster, 100 per tanker and 12 per spaceship. The idea would be to launch a fleet of spaceships at once to maximize the cargo and passenger capacity for a trip to Mars. It would be “kind of like Battlestar Galactica, if you’ve seen that thing,” Musk noted. “Good show.” The ship itself is “quite big,” giving a sense of scale with the graphic above, and noting that “in the long term, ships will be even bigger than this.” Each ship is designed to fit around 100 people or thereabouts in the pressured cabin, plus cargo, including luggage and materials to build foundries, factories, pizza joints, and “you name it,” Musk said. Musk’s target sustainable population is 1 million people for a Mars colony, and that means 100 people per trip is 10,000 trips. He said TeslaX “might end up expanding the crew section and bring 200 or more per flight,” in order to help lower the cost per person even further and require fewer trips. “Ultimately, you want 1,000 ships,” he said, though building up a fleet that large will take time. What time frame will it take to reach 1 million Mars colonists? From the first ship to make the trip to Mars, Musk estimates between 20 and 50 total Mars rendezvous, which will take around 40 to 100 years. While the crew compartment render he showed on stage looked relatively spare, Musk says it “has to be really fun and exciting, and can’t feel cramped or boring.” To that end, it’ll be set up for “zero-G games, floating around, movies, cabins, restaurants, more.” Amenities are important, clearly. In the spaceship, the crew cabin would be on top, with flat packed, dense cargo compartment underneath. Cargo capacity would allow up to 450 metric tons of cargo to be transported per trip to Mars. Trip time to begin with would be as low as 80 days to start, with an ultimate goal of getting it as low as 30 days in the more distant future, Musk said. SpaceX has been refining its shield technology with its Dragon capsules, with the goal of creating one that can work effectively but require no refurbishment across many flights, Musk noted. The ship itself will be made most of carbon fiber, which makes it “a fairly significant technical challenge” to make deeply cryogenic tanks out of that material that doesn’t leak. But recently, developments in the tech allow you to create this without having a certain liner on the inside, Musk noted. Their version is also designed to be pressurized via heat exchanges with the engines used to pressurize fuel tank and oxygen tank, which is simpler than systems with Falcon 9 where helium is used to pressurize fuel tank, and nitrogen for further pressurization. with the new design, you only need two ingredients, he explained, as opposed to four for Falcon 9, or five if you consider ignition liquid, since this would use spark ignition, and all of that would contribute to further cost reduction. Musk revealed that SpaceX has already built a fuel tank prototype, using carbon fiber and to scale, and showed an image of the vast, orb-shaped structure. Another key ingredient with the spaceship is that no booster is needed on the moon or Mars, you just need the spaceship itself, and the “booster is just there for heavy gravity wells,” Musk says. The ingredients are there on Mars to create a propellant plant “with relative ease,” Musk said, to fuel up the craft for the return trip to Earth. The “trickiest thing is the energy source,” he added, but SpaceX believes they can do it with a wide field of solar panels. The first flights would indeed still be expensive, but the cost architecture Musk is working with allows for improvement to, or even beyond $200,000 per passenger, extending to as low as $100,000 or below over time depending on amount of cargo taken with a passenger. Here’s where Musk addressed the key question on most observer’s minds: funding sources. The “challenge to fund this whole endeavour,” he said, displaying the slide above. But added that SpaceX expects to generate decent net cash flow with satellite launches. There are also “many in the private sector “interested in funding a base on Mars, he said, as well as similar interest in government. Ultimately, he believes the project will be a comprehensive public/private partnership on the scale of founding the U.S. or other global nations. For now, the goal is pretty near-term: “Just making the most progress we can with the resources we have available,” according to Musk, and to keep moving forward. He added that he believes just proving it’s a real, viable project will generate a lot of interest, that could help funding “snowball” over time. “The reason I’m personally accumulating assets is so that I can fund this,” Musk said, noting his only goal in accumulating personal wealth is to make life multiplanetary. As for timelines, Musk cracked that while he’s “not the best at this sort of thing,” and SpaceX is being “intentionally fuzzy about this timeline,” it’s looking to complete the first development spaceship in about four years, and to start doing several little flights with that — “maybe even go to orbit,” relatively “stripped down.” He also floated another revenue possibility here, saying that “we could transport cargo to anywhere on Earth in 45 minutes” using this tech, so if you had a floating platform you could go do very high-speed delivery of large amounts of goods near-in to urban centers, but he added that “we’re not counting on that.” As for the booster, that’s “fairly straightforward” because it’s essentially a scaled up version of Falcon 9, Musk said. So, “if things go super well,” an initial crewed Mars flight could happen in the “10 year time frame,” Musk anticipated. The goal until then is try to send something to Mars on every Mars rendezvous from here on out, by transporting cargo via initial test missions. “Want to send Dragon 2 to mars in a couple years,” he said, “And do another Dragon mission in 2020. With every Mars trip, they intend to send useful payload, and eventually a spaceship. So “at least 2 or 3 tons of useful payload to Mars,” he offered. Musk claims the production capabilities are already almost there for creating the new Raptor engine in necessary volume at a price that isn’t budget breaking. That’s in part because it’s actually the same size as the Merlin engines that SpaceX makes today, even though it can manage three times the thrust, thanks to containing three times the pressure. Tank was a big challenge for the reasons mentioned above — that carbon fiber is difficult to maintain with cryogenic propellant contained within. SpaceX has actually built one, however, and initial tests are promising, as Musk says there isn’t any indication of leaks thus far. While Mars colonization is the goal, that isn’t the outside limit of where the ICT can reach. “This is actually more than a vehicle, it’s a system that includes rocket booster, space ship, tank, and in situ propellant plant,” Musk said, adding that “with those four elements, you can actually go anywhere you want in the solar system.” You could, theoretically, “make flights from Mars to Jupiter no problem,” he noted by establishing propellant depots that can help you refuel on Jupiter and Saturn’s moons, or even further out on Pluto. “This system actually gives you freedom to go anywhere you want in the greater solar system,” he said, though he wouldn’t recommend it for interstellar travel. There’s a lot still to prove in terms of feasibility, not the least of which is sourcing all the money required to make this a reality. Musk outlines some potential sources, including, he joked (or was it serious?) Kickstarter. But Musk himself showed that he knows how unlikely all of this sounds. “I probably will name the first ship that goes to Mars Heart of Gold,” Musk said, referencing the ship from . “I like that it’s driven by infinite improbability because our ship is also infinitely improbable”
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IBM releases DataWorks to give enterprise data a home and a brain
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John Mannes
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| 27
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While the gears of research are turning fast developing new methods of machine intelligence, another, perhaps more impactful, trend is brewing in the field. Open source frameworks like Apache Spark are hitting their stride at the ideal time to put data analytics in the hands of the business development analyst without forgetting about the needs of the data scientist. IBM’s new Project DataWorks is built with both Spark and IBM Watson at its core to prioritize speed and usability without sacrificing robust analytics. The best way to think about DataWorks is as a sort of Google Docs for data analytics. In practice, companies have huge data libraries that often end up in a variety of decentralized locations. IBM’s new product eats all this company data and puts it in one intuitively accessible place. T o keep all that data at the fingertips of those who need it, IBM has deployed a dashboard that displays data assets broken down with access, user, and categorical stats. IBM calls its technology for organizing data catalogs. With natural language search, users can pull up specific data sets from those catalogs much more quickly than with traditional methods. DataWorks also touts data ingestion at speeds of 50 to 100s of Gbps. Leveraging technologies like Pixiedust and Brunel, users can produce data visualizations with as little as one line of code. These visualizations can bring life to things like association and classification models, enabling everyone in a business to gain insights at a glance. Both enterprises and small businesses can access the new DataWorks tools via IBM’s Bluemix cloud platform. There will be a traditional pay as you go monetization structure, where anyone can come and run the system for hours, days, or months. But IBM also thinks that data analytics could take a page from cellphone carrier data plans and charge users a flat monthly subscription fee. Rob Thomas, VP of analytics for IBM, argues that the biggest savings for companies will be in human capital. IBM DataWorks really opens up the ecosystem so that users don’t have to have to be retrained in specific open source skill sets. The sweet spot for the new platform will be serving the usual suspects like retail, financial services, and telecoms, but Thomas notes that medium size businesses are also gravitating to the platform. The IBM Watson system powering much of DataWorks has been a key source of growth and revenue for the company. Watson can only continue to improve with new use case challenges. Many of the core technologies for DataWorks are based off of components of The original catalyzer of the deal was the company’s platform for analyzing large unstructured datasets. Now, instead of weather, and with augmentation from Watson, businesses can produce market and company research with the same fundamental tools.
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Honeywell’s new HomeKit and Alexa compatible smart thermostat runs $149
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Brian Heater
| 2,016
| 9
| 27
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Honeywell’s been doing its thing for well over a century now, with its thermostatic roots stretching back even further to the 19 century days of coal heating. The company’s connected thermostat history, meanwhile dates roughly back to 2013, with the simply named WiFi Smart Thermostat, released following a bit of a patent dustup with Nest. Announced today, Honeywell’s latest offering looks to undercut the competition on pricing, with a $149 MSRP — $100 less than both Nest and Ecobee’s most recent offerings (and $50 less than its own Round WiFi offering, announced back at CES). The is square and monochrome – looking akin to an oversized 1980s digital watch. The new thermostat has Apple HomeKit functionality built in, making it controllable by way of Siri or iOS 10’s new Home app. There’s also built in support for Amazon’s Alexa offering and the Stringify protocol. It’s also, naturally, compatible with Honeywell’s own Lyric app, a new version of which is due out next month, with improved control settings. As with most of the competition, the Lyric T5 features adaptive learning to adjust to users’ preferences, along with geofencing settings change settings when someone is within range. There are also built in warnings for extreme temperatures and when time comes to change a filter. The differences between Honeywell’s current thermostat offerings are as follows, The new thermostat is due out next month.
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Airbnb revamps its app with new tools for hosts, improved messaging
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Sarah Perez
| 2,016
| 9
| 27
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Airbnb may not be ready to unveil , Airbnb Trips, just yet, but in the meantime the company is a big makeover. The upcoming version of the main Airbnb app will introduce a number of new features for hosts, including things like message templates for quicker replies and a calendar that lets them easily see who’s staying when, at what rate, and more. The changes aren’t live immediately, the company , but will rather roll out over the next couple of months. The revamp itself was prompted by host feedback during last year’s conference. Hosts said they heavily rely on the app because, often, hosting isn’t their full-time job. Instead, they manage much of their activity, including responding to incoming messages, while on the go, the company found. With the new app, messaging will be featured more prominently and given a smart upgrade. Where before, the Inbox was buried in the app’s navigation, requiring four clicks to access, it will now sit directly on the homescreen as the first button. In addition, hosts will be able to store responses to frequently asked questions in order to answer guests’ messages more quickly without having to type out responses on their phone’s small screen, or copy and paste from a saved document. Instead, hosts can use these “message templates” to create pre-written responses to questions, like requests for directions, or those about the check-in and checkout times, requests for the Wi-Fi password, and more. In the messaging interface, a new option will let hosts pick one of these saved responses with a tap, which they can then choose to edit or just send through. The app also lets hosts share photos through messaging, which brings it more on par with a true messaging experience. In addition, the updated Airbnb app will include a new calendar feature that allows hosts to see their bookings through a variety of different views. For example, the “Overview” screen will show the dates that are booked and free for all their listings at a glance, while another screen lets you drill down into each booking to see more information. Tabs at the top of this screen let you switch between a “month” view that will show the faces of the guest overlaid on their booked dates, while a “details” screen lets hosts see bookings, availability, and rates by day. You can even click into a day and toggle the availability on or off, and adjust the pricing. Also of note, the app was built using Airbnb’s (DLS) which allows for rapid iteration, and a shared vocabulary across teams. It also aids the company in making a variety of products that will feel more connected to each other – something that could help if Airbnb chooses to launch a second application for travel services in the future, as previously . This isn’t the first time Airbnb has made over its mobile app with the needs of hosts in mind – after all, guests only use the app on occasion, while active hosts may launch it daily. , Airbnb reimagined the app to allow hosts to answer messages, accept bookings, update their calendar, manage upcoming guests, and more, right from the mobile interface. This is also when it introduced the “Host Home” flow for adding listings to the platform without the need for a computer. Airbnb says the new features will roll out on both iOS and Android over “the next couple of months.”
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