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SolarCity accused of misappropriating solar company Cogenra’s trade secrets
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Sarah Buhr
| 2,016
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Solar company is suing Elon Musk’s over the use of shingling technology the company alleges SolarCity took from Cogenra and used to create a world-record breaking solar panel. Cogenra says it shared its “most precious and confidential trade secrets, manufacturing processes, and other intellectual property with Silevo and SolarCity” between 2010 and 2014. Silevo is a subsidiary of SolarCity and the complaint alleges these trade secrets gave SolarCity a leg up in manufacturing its own solar cells. “It was only by misappropriating Cogenra’s proprietary technology, including its trade secrets and other intellectual property, that SolarCity and Silevo were later able to announce a claim that they set a new world record for solar panel energy efficiency,” Cogenra said in the suit. The complaint also says Cogenra began shopping itself around to bigger solar companies in 2014 and, according to sources who , one of those companies considered a potential buyer was SolarCity. The possible acquisition allegedly gave SolarCity access to classified information. However, SolarCity calls the lawsuit “meritless” and says the whole thing began after it alerted SunPower to an ex-SolarCity employee who had unlawfully downloaded confidential information from the company and recently joined SunPower, Cogenra’s parent company, as a senior sales manager. “Instead of taking responsibility and ensuring the return of our misappropriated trade secrets, SunPower subsidiary Cogenra raced to court to divert attention from its conduct by filing a meritless lawsuit,” SolarCity told TechCrunch. “Cogenra’s complaint fails to identify any actual trade secret that Cogenra owns, much less that SolarCity supposedly misappropriated. We are confident the court ultimately will reject Cogenra’s claims, which are factually and legally baseless.” SolarCity also maintains its technology had nothing to do with Cogenra’s and that many companies like them have developed their own solar technology and that it offered to show Cogenra evidence it developed its technology outside of any information it may have obtained from Cogenra. “The facts are not helpful to SunPower, so Cogenra sued without bothering to learn them,” a SolarCity spokesperson said. Khosla Ventures, which owned 80 percent of Cogenra from 2009 to 2015, is also suing SolarCity in the case. Both Khosla and SunPower are calling SolarCity’s statement false.
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ClassPass sacrifices 10% of customers in pursuit of healthier margins
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Jordan Crook
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service for fitness classes, became a household name because of one simple innovation. Combining the breadth of a marketplace with a subscription pricing structure sparked a handful of similar startup launches (like Vive, which does the same thing with hair blowouts). But more importantly, it was the turning point for the company, putting it on course toward a . But this year, the company , moving customers from a $100 monthly payment to a $180 monthly payment, at its highest, marking the first wave of doubt over this new-found business model. ClassPass told TechCrunch exclusively that the company lost 10 percent of its user base following the price hike. That’s a steep cost, but it was also the price that had to be paid to get ClassPass back to profitability. For the month of September, ClassPass is now making approximately 20 percent gross margins. But let’s start at the beginning. Since 2014, ClassPass has been offering unlimited access to fitness classes across hundreds of local boutiques and studios for a flat $100 monthly price. But in April 2016, the company announced it would be hiking its pricing structure to $180/month for unlimited classes. Users could also purchase a ten-pack plan for $120/month and a five-pack plan for $65/month. Not unsurprisingly, ClassPass loyalists weren’t exactly pleased with the new deal. The original premise of ClassPass was to give people unlimited access to a variety of fitness classes. But if users bought into the promise — that they could work out as much as they want, whenever they want, wherever they want — ClassPass simply wouldn’t be able to maintain that $100 unlimited price point. See, ClassPass only pays its boutique partners for classes attended, and at a relatively steep discount (usually more than 50 percent). Since ClassPass users have different usage patterns — some may only go to a handful of classes while others might hit a class every day — a flat monthly rate ultimately meant that low-usage users were paying a premium to subsidize high-usage customers, who may individually be costing ClassPass money. While that’s unfair to the low-usage users, it’s also just bad business. Because ClassPass reduces the friction of going to a workout class, the product itself catalyzes a natural progression towards working out more frequently. “As the service got bigger under the unlimited tier, more deal-oriented users and fitness-oriented people alike were hearing about the service and joining,” Fritz Lanman, executive chairman of the ClassPass board, told me. Close to eighty percent of ClassPass users are new to boutique fitness, based simply on how the product works. It only follows, then, that low-usage customers would likely begin working out more and more frequently the longer they stay with the platform. If ClassPass achieves its goal of turning everyone into a workout fiend, the company’s $100 flat monthly rate effectively cuts off its own legs to do so. Just before the summer of 2015, ClassPass made its first change. In various markets, the company began testing a $125 unlimited tier instead of $99. Around this time, having virtually achieved the vision of giving everyone access to unlimited fitness classes had started to turn ugly. ClassPass was seeing dangerously low monthly profit margins, and some months, going entirely negative. Lanman told me that in December of 2015, six months after the initial price bump, ClassPass was operating at an 8 percent gross profit margin. And while the unlimited price bump (from $100 to $125) got ClassPass back to profitability, it didn’t solve the real problem: some users were still subsidizing others. “In a marketplace business like ClassPass, you’re looking for a take rate between 10 percent and 20 percent,” said Lanman. “And in a world where you have variable costs and different usage patterns, you have to price and create packages that serve each of your customers better individually. Customers benefit from revenue growth.” And so, the company grew its revenue on a per-user basis with the introduction of a far more expensive unlimited plan, supplemented by Base (five classes) and Core (10 classes) packages. Today, the company is seeing around 20 percent margins, which are more evenly distributed between all users, from the three-class-per-month user to the class-per-day user. But at what cost? By ensuring its own healthy margin on each, individual customer, ClassPass may have taken some incentive out of the equation. At $100/month, users were effectively rewarded for working out more. The more classes they took, the less they paid per class. Not only were they getting healthier, but they were saving money while doing so. The new pricing structure eliminates that incentive. That’s not to say that ClassPass users aren’t getting a good deal. After all, these folks are paying for more than the classes themselves. The technology platform allows for more flexibility, better recommendations, and less friction than any alternative service or individual gym might offer. And even without the incentive to reduce the class-by-class rate by going to more classes, ClassPass users can now rest assured that, whatever their usage, they are getting a fair deal. A twenty percent profit margin for a marketplace may seem a bit steep, but it’s not outlandish. Airbnb, arguably one of the strongest marketplaces out there, takes a 3 percent commission on each booking, plus fees from the host between 6 percent and 12 percent, according to the . But unlike Airbnb, ClassPass’s subscription pricing structure offers a level of protection against things like seasonality. In fact, ClassPass could make more than a 20 percent margin in the winter, when users may not go to the gym as much. And when summer rolls around, and everyone decides to go to yoga once a day, ClassPass can rest easy knowing that it’ll still generate revenue off of each of its users individually, without being susceptible to a spike in usage. As it stands now, ClassPass is seeing around 1 million reservations a month, with five percent month over month user growth. With the hard part over — watching one in every ten subscribers ditch the platform — and prices stabilized at a sustainable structure, the company can now start to think about how to move forward. The original ClassPass (then called Classtivity) was so much more than a fitness boutique marketplace. The original vision included any type of class or activity that would help you become a better person, from dance to guitar to gardening. With the ship back on course, I wouldn’t be surprised to see ClassPass venture into new territories. The most natural next vertical will likely be regular gym usage (as opposed to boutique fitness), where users could hit up local gyms for some treadmill time or weight-lifting. From there, we could see arts and culture subscriptions for events like the ballet or the theater, or subscriptions to pop-up restaurants. But without healthy margins, that future could never become a reality. “Ten percent is a big number, and it was a tough moment when we saw them leave, but after seeing how the business is going since the price change, we know it was the right decision,” said Payal Kadakia, ClassPass CEO. “It’s the only way to continue to create and move towards our bigger vision.”
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Supermodel Natalia Vodianova joins Disrupt in London to talk about digital philanthropy
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Mike Butcher
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is beginning to appear over the horizon. We’ve already announced that Accel’s will be on our stage. Today we’re delighted to say that we’ll also be joined by world-famous supermodel Natalia Vodianova. The Russian model, philanthropist and occasional film actress is well-known for her rags to riches life story and for her eight-season, seven-figure contract with Calvin Klein. But ‘Supernova’ — as she is known — also has an entrepreneurial streak. Last year Vodianova , an app which makes it possible to donate micro amounts, of £1 or $1, to charitable organizations across the world. These include Save the Children, Walkabout Foundation, and many others. But the app has a twist: it allows users to raise awareness about projects with just a tap of their thumb on the screen, as well as send of support. Elbi users can draw letters for schoolchildren who are learning the alphabet in Africa, send words of support to a child in a hospital in India, or volunteer content for a charity. Each day users are offered “three good deeds” to choose from. Elbi is a simple way for charities to engage with the smartphone generation. Drawings posted in Elbi can be tagged with the Love button (similar to a Facebook Like) and users can then make micro donations inside the app. If the content created is well received by users it will generate more “Loves” and therefore more money raised for a charity. Elbi was launched in New York last year in the presence of Bill Clinton, Chelsea Clinton and Madeleine Albright, and has been endorsed by Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales, and co-founder of the Bebo social network, Michael Birch. Vodianova has previously said: “Elbi is a platform that brings the power of social and digital worlds to charities and connects them with people around the world. With Elbi you can do small actions that make a big difference. That is what Elbi stands for — little actions that can make a big difference.” The two-day Disrupt 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. 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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With a team hailing from around the world Imprompt.io hacks on the fly communications
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Jonathan Shieber
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The team hailed from Lagos, New York, and suburban New Jersey and had been up for nearly 24-hours working on , a new collaboration tool for meetings on-the-fly for the . It’s a problem the hacking team knew quite well. Hailing from the coding staffing company , which pairs top-tier developers from Africa with startups and large tech companies in the U.S., the team was used to ad hoc meetings at all hours of the day. Brice Nkengsa, who runs Andela’s tech department from Lagos, worked with Tolulope Komolafe; an engineer at the New York-based funeral and estate planning services firm Everplans; Ladi Adenusi, a consultant at a large, New Jersey-based, financial services firm; and his Lagos-based Andela colleague Nadayar Enegesi, to pull together a hack using Amazon alexa, Slack, Google Calendar, Appear.in, Twilio, and node.js to create a new meeting service that the company plans to actually roll out internally. “Because the best ideas come from conversations in the hallway or late at night, this was an easy way to create a tool that we would use,” said Nkengsa. Indeed, Andela’s co-founder Christina Sass said that the company would definitely be rolling out the tool for use internally. By throwing a few Alexa’s in conference rooms, the company can track down employees across the globe and see if they’re available to meet… or can communicate asynchronously by transcribing the meeting and sharing it over Slack. “Whatever it is we are doing we want to make it work very well internally for hundreds so we can take it to hundreds of thousands,” Nkengsa said. As companies become more distributed, communications tools become increasingly important to keep people connected and allow project managers to be up to date on the latest developments of new builds. It’s not hard to believe that impropt.io could become another tool in the collaborative toolkit.
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A cautionary tale about humans creating biased AI models
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Matt Bencke
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Most artificial intelligence are built and trained by , and therefore have the potential to learn, perpetuate and massively scale the human trainers’ biases. This is the word of warning put forth in two illuminating articles published earlier this year by Jack Clark at and Kate Crawford at . Tl;dr: The field lacks diversity — even more spectacularly than most of our software industry. When an practitioner builds a data set on which to train his or her algorithm, it is likely that the data set will only represent one worldview: the practitioner’s. The resulting model demonstrates a non-diverse “intelligence” at best, and a or even offensive one at worst. The articles focus on two related areas in which diversity and demographics matter when it comes to building : the data scientist, and the data scientist’s choices for training data. Again, the theory is that though it’s subconscious, the practitioner’s selection of training data — say, images of peoples’ eyes or tweets in English — reflect the types of objects, experiences, etc. with which the practitioner is most familiar (perhaps images of a particular demographics’ eyes, or tweets written in British English). There’s a third area in which demographics and diversity matter, though. It’s just as important, and it’s often overlooked — it’s the annotators. Data used for training and machine learning must be labeled — or annotated — before it can be fed into the algorithm. For instance, computer vision need annotations describing the categories to which images belong, the objects within them, the context in which the objects appear and so on. Natural language need annotations that teach the the sentiment of a tweet, for example, or that a string of words is a question about the status of an online purchase. Before a computer can know or “see” these things itself, it must be shown many confident positive and negative examples (aka ground truth or gold standard data). And you can only get that certainty from the right human annotators. So what happens when you don’t consider carefully who is annotating the data? What happens when you don’t account for the differing preferences, tendencies and biases among varying ? We ran a fun experiment to find out. Actually, we didn’t set out to run an experiment. We just wanted to something fun that we thought would enjoy. The idea? Give people the chance to rate puppies’ cuteness in their spare time. While we design all of our tasks to be fun and engaging, they still require smarts and skills, and we figured it would be cool of us to throw in some just-for-smiles tasks. An adorable little brain break, if you will. And so we set up a “Rate the Puppies” task, served users puppy pics and asked them to rate each pooch’s cuteness on a scale of 1 to 5 stars. Everyone loved it. Including us. Duh! We love dogs! (Also cats! We love cats, too. And cat people. For the record.) when we analyzed the data, one thing immediately jumped out: On average, women gave higher cuteness ratings — a statistically significant 0.16 stars higher. There was a clear gender gap — a very consistent pattern of women rating the puppies as cuter than the men did. The gap between women’s and men’s ratings was more narrow for the “less- ” (ouch!) dogs, and wider for the cuter ones. Fascinating. I won’t even try to unpack the societal implications of these findings, the lesson here is this: If you’re training an artificial intelligence model — especially one that you want to be able to perform subjective tasks — there are three areas in which you must evaluate and consider demographics and diversity: This was a simple example: binary gender differences explaining one subjective numeric measure of an image. Yet it was unexpected and significant. As our industry deploys incredibly complex that are pushing to the limit chip sets, algorithms and scientists, we risk reinforcing subtle biases, powerfully and at a previously unimaginable scale. Even more pernicious, many AIs reinforce their own learning, so we need to carefully consider “supervised” (aka human) re-training over time. Artificial intelligence promises to change all of our lives — and it already subtly guides the way we shop, date, navigate, invest and more. to make sure that it does so for the better, all of us practitioners need to go out of our way to be inclusive. We need to remain keenly aware of what makes us all, well… human. Especially the subtle, hidden stuff.
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Toyota’s VR drive through a Syd Mead-created world is a near-future trip
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Darrell Etherington
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How do you convince a potential car buyer your vehicle is a future-focused choice? One way is to get one of the most iconic creators of cinematic futurescapes to help you build a virtual world that people can drive the car through themselves. Toyota enlisted , the creative visionary behind and ‘s vehicles, architecture and more. Mead provided concept art and designs for Toyota’s VR Prius Prime experience at Disrupt SF 16, which I tried out myself in a sneak preview earlier today. The demo includes a Tilt Brush-like immersive artistic creation component, followed by a “4D” VR ride. “The idea of inspiring new views into the world of future automotive reality was too exciting to turn down,” Mead said in a statement provided to TechCrunch. “Toyota has created a new world of mobility; a concept realized in a remarkable Virtual Reality tour that brings the future into our world of today.” Both the art piece and the drive use the HTC Vive, with the ride portion adding physical driver’s seat, complete with the actual steering wheel from the Prius Prime itself. You don’t actually do much driving with the steering wheel, as it moves itself along with the action in the VR world, and the seat moves around to make it feel more like you’re right inside the short featurette as it rolls. [youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tE4G0vBTbvw&w=680] Toyota tapped creative agency Saatchi & Saatchi to create the VR feature, including a custom-built painting environment similar to Tilt Brush. The original plan was actually to use Tilt Brush itself, according to Saatchi & Saatchi Executive Creator Director Dwayne Koh, but they ran into an issue where the Google software couldn’t export the artwork created by users, which is actually used by the immersive driving simulation later on. Koh also noted that their own software lets you paint one-handed, which is much more accessible for casual first-time users. The drive itself takes you through an animated world featuring landscapes and other cars pulled from Mead’s imagination, and it’s actually really convincing when paired with the movements from the seat. You actually have to buckle up when you use it, which I thought was just something to encourage safety in a cutesy way, but which actually is designed to prevent people potentially being thrown from the bucket seat. [gallery ids="1383779,1383778,1383777,1383776,1383775,1383774,1383773"] Actually using the demo station was pretty easy, with guides helping you through the process of creating your virtual art, and then handing you off to the driving pod, where you belt yourself into the seat and put your hands on the wheel. The narrative involves a stranger in a bit of a jam looking for a ride, and you volunteering to help him deliver a package. Said package actually ends up being (spoiler alert) the art you created earlier. It lasts a few minutes long, and the VR combined with the motion seat actually did make me a bit queasy, but that’s not unusual for me with VR. In the end the feeling was only fleeting, and really only at the beginning of the drive. Overall, it’s an interesting experiment in marketing and immersive narrative, but one that still leaves me thinking we still have a long way to go before we get to a place where the average VR storytelling experience is enjoyable for most.
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Toyota’s Prius Prime is engineered to give hybrid owners more EV feels
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Darrell Etherington
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Toyota’s Prius Prime is an updated take on the company’s popular hybrid, with more emphasis on the EV aspects of the vehicle, including a battery with double the driving capacity, and a few other tweaks that push the car closer toward the EV end of its dual identity, including an acceleration feature that lets the electric motor handle much of the pick-up when you first put your foot down. Toyota first gave us a glimpse at the , but now it’s giving the vehicle its west coast debut at Disrupt SF ahead of the office full reveal, which is coming soon. The Prius Prime’s tech bona fides lie both within the cockpit, and in the changes made to the overall body design and external components in order to help maximize efficiency for a hybrid with more electric boogaloo. [gallery ids="1383781,1383782,1383783,1383784,1383785,1383786,1383787,1383788,1383789,1383790,1383791,1383792,1383793,1383794,1383795"] Some of those changes include redesigned lines for the body panels, which vehicle comms manager Nathan Kokes said were created in order to maximize the energy efficiency of the vehicle as much as possible. That means, according to Kokes, paying attention to how changes to the exterior impact aerodynamics at a micro level. In addition to the panels for the car’s sides, this led to changes to the front grill, and a rear window that actually dips in the middle slightly to help air flow over and under the car in a way that creates as little drag as possible, which in turn leans to better battery life. Inside, there’s a new 11-inch capacitive touchscreen panel that’s set into the dash vertically. It’s a very Tesla-like move and one that Kokes tells me Toyota has found resonates well with the Prius’ target demographic. Customers who care about the tech powering their car via the drivetrain and power source also put a high value on the tech available via the infotainment system, too. Toyota plans to reveal the full range of trim options, pricing and availability details for Prime soon, as mentioned, but for now it does look like a potentially good option for that group of customers Kokes says it’s focused on with the Prius, who are curious about EVs but still want to keep a foot planted firmly in the traditional gas-powered car realm.
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US buyers gorge on startups while Europeans nibble
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Joanna Glasner
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U.S. companies have a massively greater appetite for startups than their European counterparts. Over the past five years, U.S. companies have purchased about four times as many startups as European acquirers, according to a new report from CrunchBase and entrepreneurship foundation . The study looked at about 6,000 acquisitions by European and U.S. companies since 2012 and found that U.S. acquirers completed 82 percent of the deals. U.S.-based companies also accounted for all of the 15 most active acquirers. Here are some more of the findings: The full report “ ” will be presented at the conference on September 12th in Mountain View, Calif.
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Michelle Obama asked girls to build solutions to improve access education
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Megan Rose Dickey
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Worldwide, there are 62 million girls without access to traditional education due to a lack of resources, safety and general attitudes about girls and women. In order to address this issue, First Lady Michelle Obama teamed up with AOL (TechCrunch’s owner) to launch the Let Girls Build track as part of the Built By Girls challenge, which recently culminated with a pitch day at Twitter’s San Francisco headquarters. “For many girls, the barriers involve resources,” First Lady of the U.S. Michelle Obama told TechCrunch via email. “Sometimes families can’t afford school fees, or the nearest school is miles away and they have no safe transportation to get there. Sometimes, there is a school nearby, but it doesn’t have adequate bathrooms for girls, so they have to stay home when they have their periods, and they sometimes wind up falling behind and having to drop out.” As part of the competition, entrepreneurial-spirited girls between the ages of 15 to 17 worked on tech products to help increase girls’ access to education. The finalists built projects including a build-your-own bracelet kit to help girls feel more safe on their way to school, a mass text service to provide safety to in-migrant girls in Cambodia and an initiative for developing global female STEM leaders through the distribution of hands on, educational content. “I always tell girls here in the U.S. that if you have access to social media then you have the power, right now, to step up as a champion of girls worldwide by sharing their stories and educating people about the challenges they face,” Obama said. “Even more important, you can take action to help these girls — the girls who took part in the Let Girls Build challenge are a perfect example of how you can make a difference.” TARA, the project geared toward ensuring the safety of in-migrant girls in Cambodia, won the Let Girls Build track and received $10,000 to further develop the product. There are a lot of safety concerns for girls in Cambodia, for girls and their families. With TARA, girls in Cambodia can access a community-based text messaging service that offers health and safety tips, advice. Created by seventeen-year-olds Kathy Kong and Lillian Yuan, TARA enables girls in Cambodia to subscribe to relevant educational information and advice around four topic areas: virtual schooling, lifestyle and health, career advice and ask anything. At the TechCrunch Disrupt SF Hackathon today, , to fight malaria. You can watch their presentation from Disrupt SF below.
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Why app development is going micro
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Peter Yared
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Application development has long been fraught with peril: Projects become bloated, expensive and never ship. Implementation technologies tend to match the bloat, ranging from Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) to Business Process Management (BPM). The “micro” trend in application development is focused on delivering bottoms-up, simple solutions to complex problems. Micro services can easily integrate multiple systems, micro apps can present them as easy-to-consume user interfaces and micro flows allow users to simply complete tasks across systems. This “micro wave” triad of services, apps and flows offers a new way to weave existing systems in novel, organic ways in order to deliver solutions immediately. Interoperability between apps has long been the holy grail of application development. Heavyweight, top-down architectures such as CORBA/IIOP in the 1990s evolved into SOA in the 2000s. Implementing a SOA required enterprise-wide mandates and coordination. Payload standards such as SOAP are heavyweight and fraught with incompatibilities, especially at the authentication layer. A few companies such as GE have had the discipline to implement a SOA, but for most enterprises, SOA projects have failed to gain widespread adoption. Even after success, the constant divestitures and acquisitions of the corporate world keep SOAs a moving target. Over the past few years, micro services have become vogue. Micro services are atomic, self-contained services that perform a single operation on a back-end system, such as a retrieving a customer record. The most common interface to a micro service is the well-known and very straightforward JSON/REST/HTTPS paradigm. Authentication is also straightforward and is typically easy-to-use API keys. The beauty of micro services is that they are incredibly easy to create, deploy and share. New and existing applications can easily call numerous external and internal micro services. Naysayers correctly point out the micro services can too easily propagate like mushrooms, fail to scale and are hard to share and discover. However, these are problems that should be corralled by policy within an enterprise, rather than heavy-handed technology. Making it easy for apps to organically communicate with each other has spawned a new generation of app creation and delivery that has made it far easier for both enterprises and software vendors to accelerate a new generation of applications. Since the introduction of iOS and Android app stores in 2008, mobile apps have taken over as many consumers’ primary interface to computing. With the plethora of apps available, it is so difficult to attract consumers to install an app on their device and keep using it. It is therefore very common for vendors to pile a bunch of features into their apps so they can retain existing users with new functionality, as well as attract more users. As a result, native apps are becoming increasingly bloated and hard to navigate. A new wave of “micro apps” is emerging that are intelligent and context-aware. Platforms supporting micro apps range from interactive Slack and Facebook Messenger bots to Google’s interactive answer boxes, such as weather and flights. These micro apps are typically single purpose and use a combination of straightforward user interfaces and context. Micro apps are based on HTML and load dynamically, typically bypassing app stores and loading directly into existing communication tools like Slack and Facebook Messenger. There is definitely pushback to the natural language aspect of “bots.” However, the ability to quickly load interactive micro apps directly into messengers and even search results is quickly gaining traction. Facebook Messenger, in particular, is quickly integrating new features, such as dynamic menus and interactive units, which can do anything, from helping you buy a shirt to ordering a pizza. Slack’s director of developer relations, Amit Shevat, sums up micro apps very well: “they must do one thing really well.” Business Process Management (BPM) tools help organizations implement top-down automation of business processes. They are typically very expensive and take a long time to deploy. BPM tools manage long-lived workflows requiring a combination of human interaction and machine-to-machine transfers. The first foray into micro flows were by companies like IFTTT and Zapier, which move data from one machine to another — for example, moving a Salesforce closed deal to Zendesk. While these services are popular, they have hit an upper bound in traction and revenue. New companies such as Workato are extending machine-to-machine workflows between SaaS systems, but they are very similar in complexity to BPM solutions, with a domain-specific language suited for programmers. The new potential for micro flows is in the arena of human-to-machine interaction. Now that messenger platforms like Slack and Skype provide rich, interactive HTML that lets users interact with back-end systems, there is an opportunity to reinvent how users interact with enterprise software. With micro flows, users can bypass complex and unwieldy legacy systems to perform simple actions, such as approvals. One of the biggest complaints of modern workers, particularly younger workers, is the difficulty interacting with legacy IT systems that have not been upgraded in years. Much like Generation X workers wondering why there were so many typewriters around, millennials are perplexed by the unnecessarily complicated and antiquated systems at most Global 2000 companies. Even executives and managers can benefit from micro flows for the multitude of approvals that generally require logging into systems they only occasionally use. Many companies have multiple systems for functions such as expenses. Although IT may have a long-term plan to consolidate systems, micro flows allow executives to interact easily with multiple systems through a single interface. Because micro flows typically require some type of interaction with a user, they can leverage notification features in mobile devices and messengers. Such simple, easy-to-use micro flows make it easy to fully integrate contributors into a more macro workflow. The combination of micro services, micro apps and micro flows build on each other to deliver a new paradigm for delivering the next generation of apps. Hopefully we can learn from the lessons of the past and not try to “grow up” the micro revolution.
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AI is for real and intelligent apps is its vehicle according to Madrona Group’s Matt McIlwain
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Jasper Kuria
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I think the most important thing about being successful in the venture business is being able to work with these great entrepreneurs. We try to find them at an early stage then roll up our sleeves and help them be successful. I spend a lot of time understanding team DNA. Why are they motivated to start a company? What are they hoping to do an in a unique way? The other piece is understanding big trends and their relevance to new opportunities being created in the marketplace. It is often at the intersections of these different trends that the best new opportunities emerge. I think we can have pretty significant impact but success really comes down to the company’s team.The key to an investor/entrepreneur relationship is building trust. You want the entrepreneurs to trust you enough to genuinely ask your opinion on matters like hiring and strategic direction. We can also make a big difference on both the size and quality of an acquisition based on how we manage the process of maximizing the exit. In all these ways, an engaged, trusted venture partner can influence the outcome. It is always scary to say why it is different this time around but I do believe with every fiber of my being that it is different! I think the main reasons why are: We can think of the intelligent application as a three-layer cake where there is data at the base, machine learning in the middle and the intelligent apps on top. You can push the insights generated by ML into these automated SaaS (Sofware as a Service) applications in real-time to do more intelligent things, whether in my travel and expense report, personalizing offers to customers, or in help-desk situations like ZenDesk is doing. We experience this daily when we get movie recommendations on Netflix, song suggestions on Spotify or interact with Amazon Echo and will continue to see more of these types of applications in the next decade. My point of view on this changed radically about 18 months ago when I saw some of the early developer kits of high end VR systems like Oculus and Valve. The experience was magical and, most importantly, I didn’t feel sick. For me, those were the two minimum bars. That said, we are still in the early stages of having technology, applications and experiences that are affordable and accessible to a large enough market to make VR and AR big successes. You’ve got to take a ten-year view. Ten years ago people didn’t think of using touch as the primary way to interact with computers. And most people now (at least in the US) have smartphones and smart pads with touch interfaces. In fact, you get frustrated when you can’t use touch. Ten years from now, we will take for granted having some kind of augmented real-world hologram experience. For example, taking a 2D spreadsheet and projecting the graphs into a 3D hologram that you can walk around and analyze from different points of view. Our thesis is we would like to invest in the platforms that enable specific applications, gaming or entertainment experiences. I think the hardware will be done by really big companies with lots of capital and gaming and entertainment is too hits-driven for venture capitalists to be successful. We prefer the horizontal layer where companies like Envelop-VR and sit. They are both enabling experiences across VR/AR platforms. I wear two hats in terms of my interests here. One is my personal interest and why I am on the board of Fred Hutch, a terrific, primarily cancer, research center. They have had amazing breakthroughs at the intersection of protein research (Biology and Chemistry), Data Science and Computer Science. For example, in immuno-therapy where you take immune system cells (T-cells) and retrain them to recognize certain proteins that are cancerous. You use a combination of lots of computing power and data science to eliminate cancer calls. A company called was spun out of Fred Hutch to work on this. I am really excited by these kinds of advances. The second hat I wear is as an investor in healthcare IT companies. You can look at historical healthcare data and infer that various outcomes were related to certain characteristics (what data scientists call features) in each of the patients. You can then predict fairly accurately–probabilistically–that a patient with a given genetic make-up will respond to a particular treatment strategy. I think outcomes based research is going to be important and we just invested in , which helps consumers and organizations make informed healthcare choices. I was delighted to have both Satya Nadella and a terrific Amazon executive, Mike Clayville join the board. Neither of those companies have had a board member in the past and they are important in our community. I think Both Satya and Mike agree that finding cancer cures is a great unifier of people. The learnings they’ve had in their careers in computer and data science can be applied to cancer research. And then there are questions like, “how do we scale fast and have a bigger impact?” Satya has incredible experience here. Lastly, I believe the cultural and operational skillset he has been applying at Microsoft will be helpful to Dr. Gary Gilliland, the CEO of the Hutch, the organization and even their entire ecosystem. I’ll give you the top two that come to mind: We’ve co-invested with Bezos Expeditions before and here’s why I like him as an investor. He takes such a long term perspective but is always bringing you back to the customer’s problem. He also understands that you need to experiment and iterate quickly to address the need. So while it is harder to get Jeff’s time when you are a co-investor, the approach he has applied magnificently at Amazon, we’ve also seen him use as an investor. He was at Sequoia for a number of years and we had a close working relationship. We partnered on and he was also the seed investor in AirBnB. I think very highly of him and his approach to working with entrepreneurs and other venture investors to build great companies. The team. I think a lot about this because I teach a class at the UW school of business and we ask our students about it. You can make a case for any of the factors but it really truly is the team that makes a difference. Being an entrepreneur is incredibly challenging. You are a pioneer and are often seeing something before others see it. It is so important that you love the problem, understand it and are passionate about solving it. But you need to bring others along (investors, employees, partners, customers) so also learn to be the chief sales officer. If you do these things you have a real shot at success.
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‘For the Love of Spock’ pays tribute to Star Trek’s logical heart
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Anthony Ha
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No one person can take sole credit for ’s success, . But Leonard Nimoy could make a pretty strong claim to being the franchise’s heart, or at least its face to the outside world, having portrayed Trek’s most iconic character on the original show, plus the animated series and six feature films. And that’s before his appearance in the 2009 reboot provided the key link between ‘s past and its current incarnation as a series of Hollywood blockbusters. Nimoy’s career is chronicled in a new documentary, , directed by his son Adam Nimoy (who began by directing episodes of ). that the film started out as a history of the Spock character and the broader cultural phenomenon. But after Leonard’s death in 2015, it transformed into a joint biography of the actor and the character he portrayed. opened in theaters and on VOD this weekend, and if you want a sneak peek, you can you can . The film covers the highlights of Nimoy’s life — which for 25 years, was closely tied to the story of . There’s Spock’s breakout success with audiences, helped by Nimoy and the writers’ piecemeal development of key elements of his character and culture. There’s ’s cancellation, followed by Nimoy’s efforts to leverage his fame into a career beyond — until he was pulled back into the show’s revival as a series of films. (He eventually directed two of the movies, including the enormously successful, whale-centric ). [youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1T_wXnT9hB0&w=560&h=315] There are moments when can feel like little more than a solid behind-the-scenes featurette — but it’s elevated in a few key ways. First, there’s the obvious depth of feeling that almost everyone brings to their interviews. William Shatner (Kirk) still seems shaken by his friend’s death, while Walter Koenig (Chekov) argues that unlike the rest of the cast, Nimoy is the only actor in the world who could have played his role. It’s not surprising that nearly everyone speaks about Leonard in glowing terms, but Adam also appears on-camera to talk about his often difficult relationship with his workaholic and sometimes distant father. It’s a tough balance for the movie to strike, dancing back-and-forth between the personal history and the broader narrative, but ultimately, it gives you a fuller picture of the man. If anything, I wished the film had been a little more forthcoming about the reasons behind father and son’s estrangement and eventual reconciliation. Now, if you’re not a fan, you might be wondering why a decades-old TV character is worth so much discussion and outright adoration — if so, this movie probably isn’t for you. Still, the documentary tries to explore and explain Spock’s broader significance. There’s his importance within the franchise itself, where his cool logic provided a crucial counterpoint to Kirk, the dashing captain, and McCoy, the moralistic doctor — and where his rare displays of emotion gave the show and films some of their most memorable moments. And there’s Spock’s importance to many viewers — to a gay fan for whom the Vulcan became an important symbol of outsiderness, and to the scientists and engineers whose interest in space was ignited by , and to whom Spock provided a key model of intellectual curiosity and the scientific outlook. gives viewers a glimpse at why a character distinguished by funny ears and arched eyebrows somehow became a symbol for scientific thought and a progressive outlook on the future — just as an oh-so-60s TV show somehow introduced a set of characters and a universe that are still going strong.
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CrunchLetter gives writers anxiety with AI powered VC newsletter generator
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John Mannes
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by Alexander Crosson and Naveen Kulandaivelu at today’s TechCrunch Disrupt SF Hackathon may be giving us tech journalists early warning signs of our forthcoming replacement by AI. While nowhere near advanced enough to conduct independent due diligence or investigative reporting, their project, , is aimed squarely at automating the way we get news. Newsletters from publications like TechCrunch and StrictlyVC, as well as platforms like CrunchBase, are painstakingly assembled by hand, but the team’s machine learning experiment leveraging Google’s Tensor Flow is already able to generate rudimentary venture capital deal summaries. The tool uses unsupervised machine learning to analyze the CrunchBase data set, alongside articles from major VC publications, to generate newsletters for folks following the startup funding beat. During the team’s presentation, the two showed a work in progress that could assemble a 30 word summary of a funding round. The brief outline included the amount raised, the VCs involved, and details on the funded company’s product or service. Rather than just parse the internet for information, the two settled on an AI solution because of its ability to generalize. Venture capital news was an ideal first step because of how acquainted the team is with the startup world, but the model could be used for a variety of topics and industries. While newsletters would still need human oversight, a sophisticated enough AI could use database entries as relational starting points in generating analysis with vetted character and word models to hold the grammar together. With the help of four GPUs, the team was able to train its framework in the brief hackathon period. This meant using the TechCrunch and WordPress APIs to pull over 15,000 articles. With more time, more data, and additional recurrent neural networks to train models for word and topic representations, Alex and Naveen expect to be able to generate longer funding round summaries that take into account more complex analysis like market competitors.
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Dooze is an alarm clock with consequences
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Frederic Lardinois
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I’m not a morning person and the snooze button on my alarm clock regularly gets a workout. If you suffer from the same issue (and own an Amazon Echo or similar Alex-enabled device), then maybe is for you. , and built the project during our Disrupt SF Hackathon this weekend. It gives you a strong incentive to avoid your snooze button because if you do, you’ll pay. Feng calls it “the alarm clock of your nightmares.” If you use Dooze and then tell your Alexa to snooze the alarm, you’ll be charged a set amount of money (using Braintree’s to charge your credit card). Do it again and that number increases. Then, if you snooze for too long, the service then asks a friend of yours to call you (using Twilio’s APIs). There is also an option to have Alexa ask you math questions if you snooze too long, too (I’m not sure which option is worse…). The team ran into into a major problem, though. Alexa doesn’t really allow you to set an alarm at this point. The team hopes that Amazon will add this ability in the next version, though, and as Feng and Okamoto told me, the plan is to come back to the service once Amazon makes it easier for them to work with alarms. It’d be cool if you could automatically make a donation to your favorite charity when you snooze, too, but that was probably beyond the scope of this weekend project for now.
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Doge Ball: remotely play with your dog and give it treats
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Ingrid Lunden
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Do you own a dog or a cat and also hold down a job that takes you out of your house? Chances are that if you do, you’ve bemoaned a common challenge: how do you make sure your pet doesn’t get too lonely while you are away? A project called , presented today at the Disrupt SF 2016 Hackathon, has developed a new piece of hardware that could be the answer. Part influenced by Sphero, and part influenced by connected consumer video products like the Nest Cam and baby monitors that let you watch and respond to your tots remotely, Doge Ball (a play on the Doge meme, but actually pronounced “Doggy Ball”, for Dog e-ball) is essentially a connected ball — in the demo version a hacked hamster running ball — that links up with an app on your phone. You use the app to make the ball move around to amuse your dog, and and you can prompt it to dispense a treat to your pet. “We love our dog, and we decided to buy a Nest Cam to see what our own dog was doing while we were away all day, and to try to talk to her, but she didn’t really respond,” said James Xu, one of Doge Ball’s three developers. “So we thought, wouldn’t it be great to have something that you could use to play with her?” Xu’s day job is at Nvidia, and while a lot of people bring their pets to work at the office, he said he couldn’t because his dog, an adoptee from a rescue home, found the crowds too stressful. “We’ve all had similar scenarios with our pets for 15 years,” added A Right now the Doge Ball is still in its very earliest stage as a product. There isn’t any video incorporated yet, but the group wants to include video (otherwise, how would you be able to see what you’re doing as the owner?) and has been tinkering with different ways of using it. Lawrence Chang, the third developer on Doge Ball who was drawn to the idea because he didn’t like the idea of his dog Cody along all day, said that one option is to put a camera into the ball itself although this would be hard to render in real time the rush of video that would come out of the ball; another would be to hook it up via APIs to cameras that are already on the market simply to watch the room it’s in, and maybe wake up the app when the ball began to move. The three are also still working on the mechanism for dispensing a treat. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tei8LRmouh4&feature=youtu.be There is a rush of startups that have come out to help you take care of your pets, from dog grooming to dog-sitting services, and while Doge Ball is a toy, it’s also, by way of its monitoring aspect, also a nice take on a way to help care for your pets as well. Doge Ball is tapping into a big market: in the U.S. alone, it’s estimated that Pets were taking centerstage in other projects presented at the Hackathon today: is a project was borne out of the fact that one developer, Jameela Huq, loves cats, and the other (who is her partner and housemate) is allergic. The concept is to let people in a neighborhood offer up their cats for cuddling to others in their neighborhood. Neil Pomerleau — her developer partner — notes that the same platform could be used also as a way for people to also offer cats for adoption or sale, although that’s not the immediate plan, with the concept of using the platform to pay for cuddling the cats also being optional, Huq said. “I lived in Japan for a while, where there are cat cafes everywhere,” she said. “I sort of think the cuddles could be enough, although Neil envisions selling them too.”
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PointShop.space wins the Disrupt SF 2016 Hackathon Grand Prize
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Brian Heater
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Nearly 1,000 eager participants converged upon Pier 48 yesterday for an all-night Hackathon, helping kick off Disrupt with a cold and foggy view of the San Francisco Bay Bridge (as though there were any other kind). The near capacity army of developers, coders, roboticists, engineers and all-purpose hackers broke up into 144 teams, tasked with designing and developing projects during a 24-hour energy drink and adrenaline-fueled whirlwind of inspiration. This morning, the teams to took the stage to showcase their sleep-deprived innovations to our panel of judges. We saw some really impressive work over the course of the morning and early afternoon, but alas, only one team can take home the $5,000 grand prize. PointShop, a hack that uses AR to aid gadget buying, wins the Disrupt 2016 Hackathon http://tcrn.ch/2chkqzw Posted by on Sunday, September 11, 2016 The top prize goes to the , which utilizes augmented reality to help give a consumer cloud-based contextual information about a purchase by simply lining up a phone camera with a real world product. Check out the runner-up of the Disrupt SF 2016 Hackathon http://tcrn.ch/2chkfEg Posted by on Sunday, September 11, 2016 Support Collective makes it possible for different companies to join together resources to offer email ticket histories. Utilizing that information gives participating companies the ability to learn from others’ customers. Safe Route wins 3rd place in the Disrupt SF Hackathon http://tcrn.ch/2cRrFSM Posted by on Sunday, September 11, 2016 As its name implies, Safe Route is designed to give users a safer path to their destination. The app utilizes Google Maps, Google Places, and Crimemapping.com APIs to help determine the best way to get from point A to point B, even if it means making the route a bit longer in the process.
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Last Mile Club helps you find fellow passengers who want to split a cab
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Sarah Perez
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At the TechCrunch Disrupt SF 2016 Hackathon, a team demonstrated a new ride-sharing app called Last Mile Club, which aims to help travelers with the final leg of their trip – getting from the airport to the hotel. Built over the weekend, the Android application addresses this often overlooked – and expensive – part of travel planning, by connecting passengers on a flight who are headed to the same destination. The concept for comes from developer Tommy Chan, who has spent a lot of time on airplanes himself. “The idea came to me because I just came back from Thailand, recently,” he says. “And the airport ride to the hotel was an hour and a half.” It seemed ridiculous to him that a ride of that length should only be shared by two passengers, Chan explains. “I was looking at this from a carbon footprint perspective,” he says. But sharing cabs can also help to cut down on the costs involved with those rides – something that could appeal to budget travelers. Plus, it offers a social experience and an opportunity to meet new people, similar to the ride-sharing apps’ commuter services, like UberPOOL, for example. [gallery ids="1383697,1383696,1383698"] Last Mile Club, however, is designed to be integrated into the airline’s Android-based in-flight entertainment system. When you launch the app, you would enter in your destination, then be shown who else on the plane is heading to your same hotel, or another nearby venue. After passengers are matched, the app connects to ride-hailing service Uber to book the ride and split the fare. It could potentially work with other services, like Lyft, but the team didn’t have time to build out that functionality over the weekend. “Uber is interesting because they have scheduled rides,” notes Chan, referring to the newer feature in the Uber app where you can request a car to arrive at a particular time and location. In addition, if the flight was delayed, that information could be communicated back to Uber in order to reschedule the ride for a later time, he adds. The app also takes advantage of Panasonic Avionics’ API and MapQuest’s Android SDK. The former lets Last Mile Club access things like passenger name, flight information, and their seat number, among other things. This could allow the service to be integrated into the airlines’ own native, mobile applications, if that’s something they wanted to do. However, the developers said they ran into issues because the Avionics API was returning static data – after all, they were only simulating a flight, not working with a live flight manifest. That made it difficult to create an application designed to match multiple passengers. Instead, the team ended up hard coding some of the passenger data for the purposes of the demo, they said. Besides Chan, the Last Mile Club team included developers KK Chen and Ben Komalo. Asked if they would continue to work on their project after the hackathon wrapped, Chan said they would be open to idea that if Panasonics would provide the data and the support.
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TheHighFlyers helps you join the mile-high chat club
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John Biggs
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When friends Eli Byers, Chad Fegley, Amrita Chawla, and Mari Lliguicota fly they’re usually bored. They spend a lot of time in the air and they wanted something that would make the miles go by faster. Their solution? . This clever hackathon hack lets you see when you’re passing cool stuff outside of the plane and even chat with other people on the flight. There is also a Watson-based chatbot that lets you ask questions about your trip and destination. The hackathon project is live now and isn’t quite ready for prime time, but the team plans on building it out this month and launching a finished version. “We wanted to change a problem everybody has when they travel,” said Fegley. “When you travel by yourself it’s boring.” They knew that creating a Slack room for the air probably wouldn’t be enough. So they added features. “We were also curious to see what’s underneath you. I like looking out the window and seeing awesome stuff,” said Chawla. The team imagines wine-lovers getting together to talk about wine on a flight to Bordeaux. Byers works at CodingDojo as an instructor and his friends are looking for work.
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Ludovic Ulrich
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SafeZone guides you to safe spaces in crises
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Jonathan Shieber
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The five person crew that developed Safe Zone wanted to do something more meaningful than creating just another geo-based social app. So on this, the 15th anniversary of the September 11th terrorist attacks, at the TechCrunch SF Disrupt 2016 Hackathon the team rolled out SafeZone, an app that guides users to safe spaces nearby. “We live in a time where public safety is more important than ever,” says Kevin Lay, a graduate at San Francisco State University and one of the five programmers who worked on the hack. The app uses the MapQuest API to show users a map to a safe zones (currently with a focus of police stations or hospitals) in the event of a crisis. The user only has to tap a single button and a map display comes up that shows the nearest safe zone and directions to it. The team is looking to add another feature that would connect users immediately to 911 emergency services, too. Terrorism, natural disasters and mass shootings are unfortunately the tenor and pitch of our modern world. It’s great to see technology applied to tackling these kinds of real-world problems. The other developers on the project, Sheen Kao, from CalPoly, Kai Mou (a developer who flew all the way from New York for the hackathon), Chris Gradwohl, from UC Santa Cruz, and Matthew Serna from SFSU all agreed that the project was a bit more substantial than your everyday hack… and they’re looking to continue working on the project. Working on only three hours of sleep, the team managed to pull together a rough demo of the project but plans to add integrations with Facebook. It’s an app that also resonated with the TC team. On our backchannels several writers chimed in with support for the project. Here’s hoping they roll this out. It’s a sad but necessary tool to have in today’s sadly terrifying world.
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With PeppAR Waiter, SoftBank’s cute robot shows you your food in 3D before you order
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Jon Russell
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Crappy photos in restaurant menus be gone! Robots and augmented reality are here and ready to kill you off. That’s the plan for the future, at least, as — an ambitious and forward-looking project from the hackathon this weekend — showed us. Developed by , who was involved in no fewer than four entries in the hackathon competition, PeppAR Waiter uses the adorable SoftBank robot Pepper and Chang’s own augmented reality service — — to create a futuristic ordering experience. Pepper plays waiter and takes your order whilst holding a tablet with the menu. Using AR, the tablet also previews your food with a hologram that you can see via a companion app on your phone or tablet. Food ordered and previewed successfully, Pepper will then go off and fetch your order once it’s done. (There may be robots in the kitchen, but .) but the addition of AR turns things up a notch. Chang’s other projects include and and from the hackathon. She used a menu from trendy SF restaurant , which is on the Holo Yummy platform, but could easily add other restaurants and even things beyond food. Ultimately, she said, this kind of technology could have a place in high-end restaurants or hotels, where customers want to know what they are getting before it comes and might appreciate the robotic service. PeppAR Waiter may not be the service that makes it happen, but either way it served up a fascinating look at the future. [gallery ids="1383548,1383547,1383546"]
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ESPN’s fantasy football site isn’t working on the most important day of the season
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Fitz Tepper
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Service has been restored and ESPN provided us with the following statement: “ESPN Fantasy is restored and we will continue to monitor. We identified a backend data access issue and resolved as quickly as possible. The issue did not impact data for teams, leagues or rosters. We sincerely apologize to all ESPN fantasy users.” As if the rising popularity of daily fantasy sports sites aren’t giving ESPN enough to worry about this season, the fantasy sports provider’s platform has been down all day. Today around 1pm ET / 10am PT (which is when the first round of NFL games started) ESPN’s fantasy sports platform crashed and became unreachable on the web and in their mobile app. ESPN confirmed the outage on their Twitter about an hour after kickoff at 11am PT, and as of now (more than 4 hours later) it is still down. While ESPN’s is up, as soon as you click to view your league or draft a new team the site won’t load, with your browser saying that the server dropped the connection. The app is just displaying a blank page, saying that “there was an error while trying to reach Fantasy Football”. Since today is basically a holiday for die hard fantasy sports fans, the outage hasn’t been well received. Fans typically check their fantasy team and scores every few minutes on Sunday (especially on the first day of the season), and now they have no idea how their teams are doing. Congratulations to for ruining the greatest day of the year for all of America. 👏🏽🏆 — DK / Daena Kramer (@justkramer) Even Claire McCaskill, the senior U.S senator from Missouri tweeted about how disappointed she is with the outage. Seriously this is not good. Opening day? Really? — Claire McCaskill (@clairecmc) While normally customers would just head to a competitor when a service goes down, ESPN’s fantasy players are essentially locked into the platform all season since they’ve already drafted teams and joined season-long leagues.
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The Autism Solutions bot helps autistic kids
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Haje Jan Kamps
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With one out of every 64 American children being affected by Autism Spectrum Disorder, it’s a huge problem worth working on. Shriya Sreeju (aged 6) agrees. She presented the powered robot to the TechCrunch Disrupt Hackathon audience today. “Pepper shows you a flash card on its screen,” Shriya explains. “If the kid shows the right card, they get a high five and the robot will say good job! When the kid gets two high fives, Pepper will do a happy dance and show a smiley on screen, to help show emotion.” The idea, Shriya explains, is to help autistic children build a better concept of emotions and learning to focus better. “My dad built all the things in the computer,” Shriya says, but explains that she helped design how the bot should work. “If you show the wrong card, Pepper will remind you the name of the card. It helps kids with autism learn how to stay focused.” She may not have coded the software, but when I spoke to her, it’s obvious she’s passionate about the problem. The passion showed especially when she took the stage: Her presentation was confident, clear and — with apologies to the other Hackathon presenters — better than a lot of other presentations we saw today. “Were you nervous up there?” I asked her when she came off stage at the end of the presentation. “No?” Shriya replied, apparently confused by the question. Awesome. [gallery ids="1383608,1383610,1383611,1383612,1383607,1383629,1383667"] “She has been playing with robots for a while,” says Sreejumon Purayil, who works at . He’s also Sreeju’s father. “We spend a lot of time exploring technology.” “I like a lot of things,” Shriya says, not ready to commit to a career in technology when she grows up. “Like arts and crafts, technology and gymnastics.” You can see the team’s demo below.
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Food delivery startup Takeaway.com raises $368M in IPO, valuing it at $1.1B
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Ingrid Lunden
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And it’s off to the races for another takeout food delivery business going public. Today, it was ‘s turn, an Amsterdam-based company with operations across Europe, which listed on Euronext Amsterdam. Takeaway.com priced its shares at €23 each ($25.82), giving the company an enterprise value of around €849 million ($952 million) and a market cap of around €993 million ($1.1 billion). The amount Takeaway.com is raising appears to be it would raise when it announced its intention to go public earlier this month. Takeaway.com has offered 7,608,696 shares, for a value of €328 million ($368 million) in the offering, in a combination of both primary and secondary shares (€175 million primary, €153 million secondary) ahead of the company starting to trade. (It had originally projected €175 million.) Trading will commence at 9am local time (3am Eastern). : Several hours into trading, the stock is per share, going as high as €25.36 today. That higher offering price says something about the current appetite in the market (sorry) for businesses in the “on-demand” e-commerce sector (which also includes the likes of Uber and Airbnb in the category), if the financials look healthy. In the case of Takeaway.com, the company said its sales in the first six months of 2016 were €50.5 million. Its net debt is currently €30.8 million based on €35.6 million current bank debt and €4.8 million cash and that it will use some of the money raised to pay that down. It made a loss of €11.5 million ($12.9 million) in the first six months of 2016. The company has around 7 million customers, it says. “We are very pleased to announce the listing of Takeaway.com on Euronext Amsterdam. The level of interest in our IPO underpins our strong belief that we have an attractive investment story with significant growth and value-creation opportunities,” said CEO Jitse Groen in a statement. “We welcome all our new shareholders and thank them for the trust they have placed in the Company and its employees. Their support will allow us to further build on our position as a leading online food delivery marketplace.” Similar to European rivals like (which went in London and has since doubled its market value to more than $4.6 billion) and (which is not public but has always put this route in its sights) and smaller, new entrants like , Takeaway.com has a footprint that spans a number of countries across Europe and a bit of Asia. It’s smaller than some of its rivals in terms of that footprint, which spans 10 markets and has actually pulled out of some like the UK. Unlike companies like Deliveroo or Uber Eats, Takeaway.com does not manage its own fleets of delivery drivers. Rather, it works with businesses that already have delivery people of their own, and provides them with an online portal and ordering management system, where their food and services can be discovered, ordered and paid for. As a startup, Takeaway raised just since being founded way back in 2000, with investors including MacQuarie and Prime Ventures.
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Andreessen: “I feel 50 pounds lighter” without Twitter
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Katie Roof
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Crunch Report | Beyonce, AI Partnerships and Instacart Shopper Boycotts
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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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Shazam is finally profitable after a billion downloads
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Lora Kolodny
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Shazam, the mobile and desktop app that acts as a digital ear and song identifier, crossed the 1 billion download mark recently, according to a on Thursday. The London-based company, , also announced that it has achieved profitability, at long last, thanks to a new focus on advertising sales, alongside revenue from commissions on digital music sales and traffic referrals to streaming music sites. Shazam’s CEO told the that the company is still sending 1 million clicks daily to streaming services like Spotify, Apple Music and others who do pay it for the traffic and conversions when they make a purchase. But advertising revenue now is greater for Shazam than other sources. Ads on Shazam are displayed while app users scan their environment to identify a song or other media like TV shows. The ads on display often have nothing to do with music. As TechCrunch reported then, Shazam raised in equity funding early last year at which point the company’s valuation had surpassed $1 billion. The company has been embarking on partnerships with other app makers and social media platforms in a quest to drive up engagement and keep winning over users. Competition has increased over the roughly 15 years of Shazam’s existence. Competitors now range from iOS and Android apps like SoundHound and MusixMatch, to audio recognition technology from the likes of Google, Facebook and Amazon. For example, Amazon’s Echo allows users to identify songs that are playing on integrated streaming media services like by asking questions like “What song is playing?” or “Who is this artist?”
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HBO’s new show Westworld explores the hedonism and horror of VR
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Josh Constine
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What if you could shoot or screw whoever you wanted without consequences? Would you feel bad about your decisions? Would you pity your victims, even if their digital memories were wiped clean? HBO dives into the heady, murky depths of virtual reality ethics with its new show , premiering October 2nd. Based on Jurassic Park author Michael Crichton’s 1973 book, Westworld revolves around an amusement park that seems like VR but is actually a real place populated by rich human “guests” and human-looking AI robot “hosts”. It’s the Grand Theft Auto video game set in the Wild West. Guests can do anything they like, from getting into gun fights to visiting the brothel, and they supposedly can’t be hurt by the hosts. But when these bots start deviating from their programming and the theme park’s corporate owners start losing control, the boundaries between real and fake blur. What was originally written as science fiction has become uncannily similar to science fact. And while today’s virtual reality companies shy away from the philosophical questions they’re inevitable posing to us all, Westworld boldly confronts them. In one of the first scenes, the show exposes how a lack of accountability can spiral into mayhem and sexual violence. “It was a chance to tell a frontier story on two levels” says Lisa Joy Nolan, one of the show’s creators. Westworld links the manifest destiny pioneers of the 1800s with tomorrow’s pioneers of technology. “Now science is both catching up with the imagination and exceeding it. It’s an iterative relationship.” Her husband and co-creator Jonathan Nolan insists that “I don’t think there’s a message or that the show is necessarily teaching anything. It’s first and foremost entertainment but I hope we’re asking interesting questions.” Yet the idea that we must raise these questions, no matter how uncomfortable, before their answers creep up on us is an important message itself. We can’t always see the ideas we embed in what we create without critical examination. “Everyone has implicit bias…You come from things with a set perspective. And whether you’re talking about creation like you create a child, or you’re creating a work of art, or you’re creating a work of technology, your implicit bias is a transferable thing” Lisa concludes. “What is the answer to that? I think you counteract implicit biases with discourse.”
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Virtual reality looks to its adolescence
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Lucas Matney
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VR to grow up. After more than two years of heavy public hyping since Facebook’s 2014 for $2 billion, virtual reality is reaching an important turning point. VR has been promoted up and down the street and consumers seem to have grown oversaturated with all the media coverage of expensive tech that’s inaccessible to them, but the platform is preparing for a mini-renaissance. The next couple weeks will be the biggest moments for VR in its consumer history. A lot of crazy hardware will be coming out, new platforms will be further defined and everyone will hopefully get a better picture of where this runaway futurism train is heading. There’s a lot happening. Sony will be the first console maker to release a virtual reality headset that tightly integrates with a gaming system (Oct. 13), Oculus will announce details regarding the launch of its motion-tracked Touch controllers and lay out other future plans (Oct. 6), and, perhaps most importantly, Google will show off some more details related to their Daydream platform and (likely) their own unique headset (Oct 4.). All of these events will continue in the broader goal of making VR a bit more accessible while also expanding the level of quality content to regular consumers beyond that available on Google Cardboard. I’d imagine it’s pretty damn annoying for consumers to buy what is probably their first desktop PC in like 10 or 15 years just to experience what’s being billed to them as the shift in computing. Desktop VR has honestly been a necessary evil, but moving forward it’s really just a manufactured niche that won’t be able to hug the exponential curves analysts are expecting from the platform in terms of headset adoption. In order to truly bring VR mainstream, developers and hardware manufacturers need to build systems that approach consumers where they already are. For the intrigued masses, that’s on mobile. For the casual-ish gamers, that’s on consoles. Sony has shipped over 43 million PS4s to retailers since the system launched in late 2013. When PSVR launches on October 13, users of any of the iterations of the console will be able to get in on the VR action. https://twitter.com/Lucas_Matney/status/780973866747256832 I’ve spent most of today playing with my PS VR review unit and while I can’t give away any impressions of my experiences with the headset until my full review is out, I will say that based on how Sony has sought to market and frame this device it’s clear that they’re playing a different game than Oculus and HTC. PlayStation is in the business of making expensive toys that you play with, and it’s clear that Sony is marketing PS VR as less of a than as a new, cool way to experience gaming. Much in the way that Snapchat is selling Spectacles as a “toy,” Sony is selling PS VR as a gaming-first device that with all of its glowing LEDs looks a little bit like a Star Wars helmet and seems to take itself less seriously. For the time being, virtual reality needs to move away from being billed as some sort of transcendent awakening wrapped in an ethical enigma, instead of what it is right now, just some really cool shit. In other words, stfu if your job title has the word futurist, evangelist, visionary or wizard in it. Consoles do really represent a big opportunity for VR in general. Things will stay pretty focused on gaming initially, but if and when Playstation and Xbox begin to see consistent high-quality non-gaming VR content I have no doubts that they’ll go out of their way to build a home for it on their platforms. The demand certainly appears to be there for PS VR in terms of pre-orders but moving forward it will be interesting to see what consumer interest ends up actually looking like for VR on gaming consoles. The key to ushering in a new platform shift is often getting cozy with the one that came before it. There are about 2.5 billion smartphones situated about the globe right now and though many are lacking in power and mind, these devices and the billions of smarter smartphones that come after them are the key for virtual reality moving forward. Google and Apple seem particularly well-situated to win early mobile VR (assuming there is indeed something to win), but with Apple concurrently buried in R&D efforts on multiple prototypes of AR and VR headsets, it does not appear that smartphone VR (as we perceive it now) is in its immediate product roadmap. Google is taking more of an Android approach to VR and it’s doing so… with Android. Google Daydream is one of the most important platform launches for VR thus far. The platform gives smartphone users a chance at their first “real VR” experience beyond Cardboard, while giving manufacturers of Android phones a clearer path to success in entering the VR space without having to completely rethink the virtual wheel. Daydream also gives developers access to a much wider base of potential users through the Play Store. Outside of Google’s Cardboard, Samsung has really been the only other large company to make a major effort in the mobile VR space. They’ve done so through their partnership with Oculus to create the Gear VR headset. While it’s certainly the best mobile VR experience to date, even Samsung knows the writing is on the wall and that Daydream is a platform that shouldn’t be ignored. The company was listed as one of the initial partners for Daydream and will likely be showing off their own headset designed for the platform soon. It all seems like a bit of a swan song for Oculus, which despite gaining an early toehold on the mobile platform, was always facing an uphill battle given the amount of system-level integration needed to ready smartphone manufacturers for VR. With the , Google has pretty much dropped a blanket upgrade to Android devices so that low-latency VR can be a reality across manufacturers for devices with low persistence displays. Low-latency is one base-level benchmark for acceptable VR, many would add positional tracking as another part that’s been missing from the mobile VR equation. Positional tacking, the nifty technology that allows VR users to move around in virtual space, is pretty essential to actually feeling immersed in a VR experience. Mobile VR’s lack of positional tracking has been one of the central defenses of developers in why more studios aren’t focusing efforts solely towards mobile. Don’t expect a shippable solution to come out of Google’s event next week, but expect to see that platform be amenable to third-party hardware solutions. Mobile inside-out positional tracking is certainly on its way but in the meantime I think it would behoove developers to see fixed point head-tracking as less of a deficiency than a necessary challenge. Delivering rich immersive experiences without relying on user movement can seem daunting and less rewarding, but once the honeymoon period is over and laziness reigns, it’s not unrealistic to imagine that seated experiences become the norm for most. Positional tracking will certainly improve everything, but solving things like locomotion and perspective will require solutions on the creative side. Sony and Google have the benefit of releasing their platforms on systems that they largely control. This raises a lot of questions for how Oculus and HTC are going to expand their horizons on mobile and console VR without just building a bunch more headsets. VR has been a space for the innovators, but as the big dogs join the game it might be tough to make a major dent without an established OS user base, at least until all-in-one headsets take off. One of the areas Oculus needs to make announcements in at its Oculus Connect 3 developers conference is the company’s renewed strategy for mobile. This goes beyond teasing positional tracking on Gear VR or any hardware upgrades. The window is rapidly closing for Oculus Home to establish a significant presence on mobile that moves beyond Samsung. They can either announce new partnerships in an effort to take on Daydream, announce ways that they can build Oculus Home into the Daydream experience or just throw up their arms and tease a best-in-its-class Gear VR and continue losing their mobile grip. HTC and Valve can likely afford to eek out the high-end and attract the VR nerds willing to drop a lot of money on Nvidia’s latest graphics cards (they really do need to share a mobile strategy as well), but Oculus should take its relatively high brand recognition and start shifting its high-quality VR experience on the PC to be optimized for consoles. Whether or not Microsoft’s 4K Project Scorpio Xbox One specifically taps the Rift to be its go-to compatible HMD, it’s difficult to imagine a VR future for Xbox in late 2017 that doesn’t at least incorporate Oculus. Oculus needs to lock-on to Xbox and create a meaningful partnership. Xbox likely has headset aspirations in its future but Microsoft is obviously focusing most of its talent towards HoloLens and Windows Holographic so this might be a better area for a partnership until they see whether the available user numbers make it a worthwhile investment. Virtual reality has a lot of potential to expand (and redefine?) social interactions, but other than simple telepresence with other headset wearers, not too many people know what that all looks like. With two years under Facebook’s watchful eye, it’s less clear than ever what the role of Oculus is in the parent company’s VR future. FB has been navigating virtual reality very, very carefully and has kept clear separation between the church of Oculus and the state of Facebook. Oculus needs to have its boundaries pushed a bit beyond gaming and earn some help from FB in experimenting with how to expand the bounds of social VR to connect headset and desktop experiences. The relaunch of the Rift as part of the release of the Touch controllers will give Oculus an opportunity to show off experiences that move beyond gaming, perhaps being able to bring your hands into VR will provide for richer social experiences on the Rift platform. Hopefully there are some announcements at OC3 regarding this. I would imagine Google has a bit to share on the topic of social VR as well. Other companies are doing cool stuff in the social space as well. Sony is experimenting with an interesting concept for PS VR called social screen, where VR headset wearers can play games with other people in the same room on the same system. This brings a level of interaction between gamers using headsets and “viewers” that hasn’t previously existed, lending the whole interaction more of a Wii Sports living room aesthetic than the bedroom loner narrative that’s being pushed more frequently. For companies in the virtual reality biz, this is going to be the month where things either become much clearer or much blurrier in terms of how your startup operates. VR is starting to move away from focusing only on the early adopters with infinitely deep pocketbooks towards early adopters that look a bit more like real live consumers. Mobile VR and console VR are going to be huge in gathering this interest, but what’s going to be more important is sustaining it for them with downloads that aren’t bite-sized variations of the “real” experiences being built for “real” VR run on $3,000 PCs. The VR hype cycle may currently be wading through the trough of disillusionment but with so many high-profile announcements on their way from powerhouses in the space, the end of 2016 may finally have a chance to live up to some of the hype.
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Prowler.io raises $2M to help AI systems make smarter choices
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Ingrid Lunden
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As we inch closer to a time when we may rely on truly autonomous devices to move us or do things on our behalf, the need for software that’s able to think on its feet (or mid-air) will be essential. Now, an artificial intelligence startup working on this emerging area of machine learning has raised a seed round of funding to try to do just that. Cambridge, UK-based , which is building a platform that can be used by makers of autonomous systems to help those machines think and learn to make better decisions, has raised £1.5 million ($2 million). The company is still largely in stealth with little information available online. But CEO Vishal Chatrath tells me that the funding — which comes from Passion Capital, Amadeus Capital and Singapore’s Infocomm Investments — will be used to continue research and development of its platform, as well as hiring more talent to build it. That new talent will be joining a small but noteworthy team: two of the co-founders, Chatrath and Prowler — the name refers to a voracious mind, thinking through all angles of a situation all the time; not a sneaky bot — is working in an area that currently has only a handful of peer companies, but is in demand across a number of industries. As Chatrath describes it, you can divide the challenges of developing AI into two general branches: perception and decision making. A lot of what has been created up to now has been on the perception side of the equation: computer vision, image recognition and other systems to help decipher the world around the machine. These problems, Chatrath said, are as good as fixed, even if they continue to be improved all the time. “F e used to think that no machine could identify a face as well as a human could, and yet now they do. That leaves the other branch used in building autonomous systems, decision making, which is the area where Prowler has been working. Up to now, there have not been many companies that have tried to tackle this area at an advanced level. Prowler uses a process called “reinforcement learning,” which is also what Google-owned and VocalIQ are using, Chatrath said. (The alternatives, used in many cases today, are autonomous systems based around premade, hand-crafted rules and , long strings of if/then types of commands, for example. These, however, have their limitations and the more complex a scenario becomes, the less likely that an autonomous system using these rules will be able to cope.) Chatrath said that the aim of Prowler is to make a platform that will be accessible by way of APIs and a set of pre-made scripts to use its thinking algorithms in a number of places. This could apply in industries like transportation, manufacturing, medicine and hospitality, but for now the first area that Prowler will tackle is the gaming world. If Prowler is the real deal — and it looks like a couple of NDAs with some strong companies, plus the funding from seasoned AI investors point to it being so — Chatrath says that the intention is not to build a company that simply will be snapped up by a bigger fish. “W
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Spotify could out-dance Apple if it does acquire SoundCloud
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Josh Constine
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SoundCloud as a company is a disaster, but it’s the only streaming service with the DJ sets and remixes kids love. So it makes perfect sense that Spotify is in advanced talks to acquire SoundCloud, the reports. Spotify already declined to buy it twice over the past year and a half; talks broke down over pricing. But since then, SoundCloud has hammered out deals with the major record labels to stop mass take-downs of its content, and its SoundCloud Go $9.99 subscription service flopped. That could make the acquisition less risky and cheaper, sweetening the deal for Spotify. The negotiations could still fall apart, but if Spotify acquired SoundCloud, it could finally have the weapon it needs to differentiate itself from Apple Music with something Tim Cook can’t just buy. SoundCloud SoundCloud is the “YouTube of Music.” Creators can upload music and other audio recordings to it directly instead of having to go through a record label or distribution service. That’s helped SoundCloud amass the biggest catalog in streaming: 125 million tracks, compared to around 30 million on Apple Music and Spotify. But while most music belongs to major record labels with which anyone can strike a streaming deal, what’s on SoundCloud is much more unique. Bedroom demo recordings, multi-hour DJ sets of other people’s dance tracks, unofficial remixes the original artists didn’t authorize. Some of it is the property of the uploader. Some of it is legally gray or straight-up copyright infringement. Some of it is only allowed because SoundCloud worked with rights management service Dubset to pay the original content creators, a bit like YouTube’s content ID. But users come to SoundCloud because it has what they can’t find anywhere else. Spotify would surely incur immense legal headaches figuring out how to integrate these tracks if it bought SoundCloud. But liberating this incredible content from SoundCloud’s clunky and sputtering interface and rolling it into Spotify’s polished apps alongside the official music people expect could be a winning combination. Plus, if Spotify wants to diversify its offerings, the podcast and other spoken word content hosted by SoundCloud could broaden its options down the line. Beyond the content, Spotify might consider firing as much of the SoundCloud team as possible to cut the constant losses endured by the Berlin startup. No matter what Apple did to pay big performers for early access and exclusives, it wouldn’t have as comprehensive of a catalog as SpotiCloud. If Spotify can make the deal happen without breaking the bank, it might have a better chance of fending off Apple with all its money and platform power. Luckily, Spotify raised $1 billion in debt financing earlier this year. The investment came with dirty terms that penalize Spotify if it doesn’t IPO successfully, but give it the firepower to make this kind of acquisition. And because Spotify already has its own good-enough radio feature and doesn’t need to buy Pandora, SoundCloud seems like the best use of its war chest.
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The Gravy Helmet
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John Biggs
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I t was a hot September night and we were being chased by a ghost. My two friends, Jon and Shane, were sweating. We’re older men, a little wide around the waist, and it was hot down in the basement. We had cleared away the kids’ toys and set up two optical sensors and a high-powered . We were playing with the HTC Vive. We were having more fun than we’d had in a long, long time. That’s right: I’m a but I managed to have a blast in VR. But let me preface all of this with one caveat: I would not buy a VR rig right now, today, this instant. As I will describe below, VR is great for a night of craft beer and ghost hunting, but it’s not nearly ready for general consumption. But we gave it a try anyway, donned the gravy helmet, and had a blast. Here’s our story. The door is open and you walk in. You’re delivering a pizza and, true to horror tropes, no one is home. You turn around and the door closes behind you. You move forward in stops and starts, exploring a room that looks like someone hasn’t unpacked after a move. You walk from room to room, meeting odd dolls that scamper off giggling when you’re not looking. Your friend pushes you which is a weird feeling when you are in VR. You have two hand-held controllers to move and you creep around the basement as best you can, hoping you don’t hit the couch or the TV. When your friend pushes you off balance, however, you think the game has come to life and you get scared. You scream. You wake up the kids. You take off the helmet. The kids pad down the stairs. They ask what you’re doing. You say it’s time for bed. The fear is palpable even though the game is ludicrous. You put the helmet back on. You’re back in the empty house, lightning crashing through the windows. The house goes black for a moment and someone is standing there in front of you. The lights come on and they disappear. You don’t want to go into dark rooms, but your friends make you because they can see your every move on a 2D screen while you live it in 3D in a virtual world just this side of the uncanny valley. Thunder claps. Quick footsteps echo against tile. A knife on the counter disappears along with a ventriloquist’s dummy. “Look, a clown!” a friend shouts. But you already see the clown. You stand in front of him. He won’t look at you but you’re sure that at some point you’ll meet him. The fear is palpable even though the game is ludicrous. The clues it offers make no sense and the voice acting is just this side of a middle school musical. But, put together, the experience is freaky. A clock chimes. It’s midnight. Emily is coming out to play. As the peal of the last bell fades into infinity, the screen goes dark and Emily hauls herself out of your nightmares and into your face. You tear off the visor and scream. The kids don’t come down this time. You told them you were playing a horror game. They don’t like those. The game is called and it’s basically a jump scare title. It is no more a game than a walk through a carnival funhouse but it is immersive and surprisingly effective. That’s what modern VR is good at doing: putting you (or your brain) into strange places and convincing you that you exist there, corporeally. You are in a massive, twisting . You are in a tropical paradise . You are playing a tabletop game with real animated pieces or shooting a shotgun whose pellets ping off rusted metal in a dry desert. You are there, exist there. You are not in a basement with two sweaty older guys. You are alone in a luminous space that reacts to your every move with no lag, no confusion, and no connection to the outside world. And sometimes you’re screaming. I truly enjoyed playing a lot of the Vive games. The Vive let us forget we were in a basement and put us in strange worlds full of air and light and color. The primary tool for this transport is a face mask studded with small sensors and featuring two racquet-like paddles for interacting with your world. At this point it is the best commercial way to move out of meatspace into a virtual world. The Oculus is not nearly as good as the Vive, and there aren’t many other tools with similar functionality, tracking and fluidity. The best thing about the Vive is that it feels totally real. In fact one of the most pervasive feelings is the sense that you are in a wide open space and that feeling carries over into real life for a few hours, making you think you’re floating in a dream. Thanks to the resolution offered by the Vive and a high-end graphics cards, your brain sees VR space as real. In some of the games you squat down to look under desks and when you try to get back up you reach out to grab counters that aren’t there. Robots and monsters that come after you are scarier because of their vitality, their three-dimensional reality. Emily isn’t scary because she’s in a game. She’s scary because she seems to exist in real life, right in front of you. But VR also has a flaw. Because the technology is still primitive, many of the spaces seem too “open,” as if you were floating in air. Despite many games purposefully simulating small, enclosed spaces, every game we played had a feeling of airy disconnection. This feeling can be good or bad, depending, but it removes some of the urgency of horror titles and the tension of strategy games. You are alone in a luminous space that reacts to your every move with no lag, no confusion, and no connection to the outside world. But that’s not the only flaw. The real flaw, the real fatal flaw, is that there is no good VR content. There is promise, but it’s just not there yet. Emily is no more complex than a Disney World roller coaster. Many of the games are still in beta and you can only play them for an hour or less before getting tired. Even a mini-golf simulator is at once weirdly over-ambitious and underwhelming. You experience mini-golf, all right, but the holes are long and convoluted and sometimes you teleport yourself over open space but are still able to smack the ball around. It’s exactly what you’d expect a VR mini golf experience to be yet it fails. The best games for the Vive – for VR in general – offer one of two mechanics. One mechanic is the “stuck behind a counter” mechanic. This mechanic assumes you won’t be moving around much in the play space and you are forced to stand behind a virtual counter, passing out guns or drinks or whatever to NPCs. The second mechanic is the teleport. Almost every game of value used this mechanic to move you around a larger world. One of the best games I played is called Budget Cuts and it’s an amalgam of Metal Gear stealth and Portal-like movement. It’s probably one of the best games for VR available. And that’s about it. You can pretend to work in an office and throw stuff around in games like Job Simulator, and you can kill robots in a stealth game. It’s like mobile gaming – you can play Scrabble or you can play Angry Birds or you can play tower defense games. There’s not much else that really melds with the mobile mechanic… yet. The same can be said of VR. I’ve always said that mobile has never gotten its . It’s never gotten its Halo. It’s never gotten its Myst. There are contenders, sure, and mobile games have enslaved our minds, to be sure, but none have opened them to the possibilities of the medium. The same is true of VR. My friends and I loved our time in virtual space, and we had a lot of fun but there is little impetus to return. VR is obviously a nascent medium, and if games like Doom and Star Trek come to the Vive I could imagine some sort of push to get and install higher-end rigs. But right now, it’s slim pickings. Even my kids, who loved the Vive at first, have started ignoring the system and are back to their mobile games and YouTube. Right now it’s like going into a teenager’s bedroom circa 1989, pointing to the NES and the Apple II and exclaiming that these are the future of computing. The truly prescient would nod their heads sagely but most folks would just go back to their TVs and Walkmen. Donning the helmet disconnects you from humanity and turns you loose in a wide-open space full of possibility. I remember the early days of personal computing. Computers, then, were toys, and the imagination necessary to see anything better out of, say, a Commodore 64 or an Atari 800XL, was immense. These machines booted into a flat world and you made it sing through dedicated programming and, alternatively, by slotting in-game cartridges and later disks to bring up the work of other programmers. You could see all of the struts and patches, however, and the same is true of VR. VR is a novelty, just as the Atari 800XL was. You could do some real work on it, sure, with a lot of dedication and imagination. But until the PC took over our desktops these computers were akin to the Vive – fun, nice to play with, and interesting only to a certain subset of a very nerdy population. Did I mention it was hot in the basement? The Vive has a foam face guard that goes around the perimeter of the goggles and rests on your forehead and cheeks. Every time we removed the helmet from our foreheads the foam was sopping wet, inciting fears of pink eye and other diseases as the visor was passed from dude to dude. It seemed fitting that we would experience something so visceral and human – another man’s cold face sweat – in a gaming rig dedicated to moving us all off into a virtual future. It was like taking your cousin’s sweaty Nintendo controller to play a round of Super Mario Brothers – you noticed at first and were grossed out but then you became engrossed. The Gravy Helmet offers little in the form of sustenance. It’s an add-on – gravy – and creates a singular, closed experience that is at once primitive and a harbinger of the future. Looking at an Atari 2600 would not have prepared you for any more than looking at the Lascaux cave paintings would prepare you for Rembrandt. Looking at the Vive will not prepare you for what is coming down the pike but you can see the broad strokes. As we wound up the cables and put the helmet down to dry out we realized we were hot, sweaty and tired. And we also realized we hadn’t spoken to each other directly in a few hours. Donning the helmet disconnects you from humanity and turns you loose in a wide-open space full of possibility. We drank the last of the beer and climbed the stairs out of the basement. We left behind the ghosts and the water bears and the mini-golf and played Risk for the rest of the night, settling back into meatspace and forgetting the evanescence of pixel-shaded monsters in the dark.
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Google’s Waze Carpool pilot expands to San Francisco-area commuters
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Darrell Etherington
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Google-owned Waze is slowly increasing the scope of its Bay-area commute service trial, but now the service is available via the standard Waze app for anyone who wants to sign up to be a driver, or through a separate, dedicated for riders. Google is still capping trips for both riders and drivers to two rides a day, designed for the morning and evening commutes. Waze provided the following statement to TechCrunch about the progress of the Bay area program: The Waze Carpool trial has been gradually opening to new users and is currently available to commuters in the greater San Francisco Bay Area who wish to be a part of the pilot. This includes drivers who can register via the original Waze app, and riders who can request a ride via the separate Waze Rider app. More information is available at . Google’s approach is very different from others looking to provide ride-sharing, mainly because its design focuses on using drivers who have regular day jobs act as the key service providers, whereas Uber, Lyft and others end up attracting a lot of drivers who use driving more as a primary source of income. In fact, Waze explicitly says in its FAQ for potential drivers that pay-outs are designed more to cover costs than to result in any kind of workable income. Waze has offered Carpool in Israel since kicking off a pilot there in 2015, and it continues to operate in that country. The Bay area pilot is its first U.S.-based trial. Google’s approach is much more appropriately suited to the term “ride sharing,” since payouts to drivers are minimal, and charges to riders are even smaller. The focus here really is on collaborative consumption, and as a result drivers aren’t required to provide the kind of vehicle and background checks that Uber, Lyft and the like require before approving drivers to join the service. The goal of reducing the number of cars on the road is a noble one, especially in the dense traffic of the Bay area, but in addition to revenue it collects from matchmaking, down the road you could also see Waze Carpool paving the way for an autonomously driven carpooling network – but that’s all speculation on my part. For now, it just seems like a slightly more cost- and ecology-conscious way to get to work.
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Level is a pair of fitness glasses that might be able to tell if you have diabetes or other diseases
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Sarah Buhr
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A pair of glasses, once relegated to nearly blind and blurry-eyed nerds, could one day save your life. At least that’s the pitch from . The eye exam provider just launched a new pair of smart glasses called Level that, for now, focus on fitness. Level not only provides the wearer with keen vision but also counts their steps, calories burned while wearing them and activity duration. The frames come from VSP’s innovation lab The Shop and are equipped with three sensors fastened at the temple including a magnetometer, an accelerometer, and a gyroscope. Level is Bluetooth-enabled and connects to an app to update the wearer of their activity or to let folks know where they may have misplaced their glasses. VSP believes there is a myriad of other applications for Level besides acting as a Fitbit for your face. “We’ve found that a visit to the eye doctor is often a person’s entry point into the healthcare system,” VSP global board member Ryan Wineinger in a statement. “In addition to identifying conditions like glaucoma, cataracts, and macular degeneration, comprehensive eye exams can also detect signs of other serious health conditions such as diabetes, high cholesterol and even multiple sclerosis. To explore how technology inside a frame can further strengthen the link between a patient and their eye doctor is a natural extension of the role the eyes play in overall health and wellness today.” Four-eyed folks interested in purchasing the device will have to wait awhile, though. Level is not yet commercially available and will take some testing before it is. VSP is with the University of Southern California’s Roski Institute and USC’s Center for Body Computing to try out the device on university employees first. And of course, Level isn’t for everyone as not everyone wears glasses all the time. Still, it’s a far closer look to something we are used to seeing in the wild than the Google Glass design, which was not well received by those outside the tech industry when it was first introduced. But, like Snap Inc’s new frames, we’ll have to see if these types of devices get wider adoption and become more acceptable as time goes on.
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Watson Financial Services is born out of IBM’s purchase of Promontory Financial Group
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John Mannes
| 2,016
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If Nathan’s Hot Dog Eating Contest had a big data eating contest brother, IBM would be a serious contender for first place. Today the tech stalwart announced that it had To make sense of this deal, you have to avoid relegating Promontory into the small box of financial services. Instead, it’s most practical to think of it as a big data company that also has a services business. While it’s true that it works with some of the largest banks in the world, it has slowly amassed a collection of regulatory and compliance data. Promontory also has a workforce that includes over 600 experts in the space. Earlier this year, IBM closed another equally obscure deal However, these two deals have a lot in common and indicate that IBM is hungry for companies in non-traditional spaces that have access to large stores of information. The Weather Company deal gave IBM Watson access to a large collection of weather data that helped to augment and add value to the Watson system in a very short time frame. The Promontory data will do much the same. Watson has grown to become one of IBM’s crown jewels. that its cognitive solutions division had posted revenues of $4.7 billion, up 4 percent year over year. This deal puts IBM up against companies like and that have their own regulatory and compliance solutions for the financial services industry. These services are focused on tracking, monitoring and analyzing regulatory changes. Other companies like Palantir have and for analyzing unstructured data for tasks like fraud production. IBM hopes its new, smarter, Watson can more effectively take on tasks like “financial risk modeling, surveillance, anti-money laundering, and Know Your Customer,” according to a press release from the company. IBM will be adding a new Watson Financial Services unit to the company’s new Industry Platforms Business created back in August. Assuming the deal closes, Promontory is expected to continue to operate as its own business unit. This means that clients of the company will continue to receive traditional services, even as the company puts Watson through school. Gene Ludwig, CEO of Promontory, is also expected to stay in his leadership role throughout the transition. If no additional issues arise, the deal can be expected to close late this year.
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Innovation is in all the wrong places
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Tom Goodwin
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I live a pretty cosmopolitan futuristic life atop a glass skyscraper in New York City, but I’ve yet to get a pizza delivered by drone, order a taxi from Alexa or open a hotel door with my smartwatch. I’ve also not booked a hotel from a bot (because trying that drove me crazy) nor consumed news from one, because that’s a terrible way to do it. In a world where what’s possible is advancing at breakneck speed, it’s odd that British Airways has developed an emotionally aware smart blanket, but doesn’t “do” email. It’s strange that IKEA has VR to help you experience your kitchen, but struggles with the basics of e-commerce. My car rental company has invested millions in onsite video-calling kiosks, but their app loses 50 percent of the bookings I make. We’ve got the questions wrong. It shouldn’t be how are you innovating or which project is doing new things, but why are you doing it and on what level. From pizza by emoji or bot or smartwatch, to emoji-inspired aubergine-flavored condoms, we’re experiencing a very superficial type of innovation. It’s something new, physically notable and at the edge of the relevant business. It’s typically the product of a small innovation unit, primarily with the goal of a funky press release, a great photo call or something to talk about on the next earnings call. And, generally speaking, it’s the wrong types of companies that are doing it. It’s CPG companies with beloved products but perhaps little to talk about. Maybe having a brand worth billions and steady sales is a bit boring. So we have special editions, apps and direct e-commerce with dubious unit economics. We have mattress brands becoming publishers. Why? Because Conde Nast, The New York Times or Hearst make it look easy? Or wildly profitable? Every new SKU is disruptive or, better still, reimagined. Yet many companies must innovate, desperately. The TV industry is making better shows than they ever have, but is suffering because they have little understanding of modern consumer behavior and choice architecture. We’ve got airlines that use incredible technology to keep their fleets in the sky and on time, but who routinely fail in even the most basic communication functions. From car rental desks that look shocked when it’s busy to hotels that can’t tell you when your room will be ready and ask for credit card details three times, physical retailers need to adapt to a world in which online shopping has made people impatient, expecting to find things immediately — and to be served even faster. For all companies, innovation needs to be deeper. Not token gestures on the edge, but fundamental rewiring of business from the core. Imagine a business as an onion of concentric layers. On the outermost surface would be communications — how companies express themselves. Inside this would be marketing — the services, promotions, pricing and products made by the business. At the core, upon which everything else is built, are the business values, culture, processes and systems. Only the most superficial changes happen at the edge. It’s easiest there, requires the least organizational effort and gets the most visibility. Launching an innovation lab or an incubation fund and a venture unit requires a few bodies in a trendy offsite office, even if they do nothing after the post-launch media hype wears off. Innovation at the marketing layer is interesting. It’s Honest and Dollar Shave Club, both pretty sizable changes to products or how they are sold, supplied and paid for. But while examples like this have huge valuations and momentum, it’s not clear how groundbreaking they are. The real examples of innovation come from companies built for the modern age. They’ve taken new behaviors, new technology, new workflows and, above all else, new consumer expectations. Here we see the obvious examples like Uber or Airbnb, but also companies like Facebook, which has become a media owner of vast scale that does not actually make any content. Here you can compare the revenue and costs of Buzzfeed and compare it to an old-world company like Conde Nast. Let’s consider Netflix relative to Blockbuster, but also Spotify compared to record shops, or Kodak and Instagram. The most rapidly grown companies in the modern age, like Tesla worth $30 billion, or Dropbox, Nest or WhatsApp, have smashed all known expectations of what’s possible because they innovated at the core. Technology will create vast and profound shifts. The mobile-first world has yet to really arrive. Mobile payments, digital wallets and the Internet of Things will create the best-ever canvas for business. Technologies like 5G, ultra-fast Wi-Fi, smart cities and other forms of ICT will form the architecture of the world in which businesses will operate. At the same time, people will change. Tolerance of waiting is already near-zero, same-day delivery is expected, as are free returns and UIs must be near-invisible and frictionless. Maybe you do need an innovation lab. Maybe working with startups is key. Maybe your organization needs impetus and expertise — but for goodness sake, no more iBeacon-driven vending machines, no more 3D-printed trinkets. Let’s stop thinking of technology as a trendy tattoo — a surface-level commitment best kept on a conspicuous but not often used part of the body. Let’s think of it as oxygen — essential to the beating heart of your business.
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Volvo to target luxury buyers with self-driving car coming in 5 years
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Darrell Etherington
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High-end vehicle, chauffeur included? You can see why it makes sense that Volvo would target the luxury end of the market with its upcoming self-driving car. Volvo announced plans to field a vehicle by 2021, thanks in part to a that will let it leverage some of their work, but now we have some more details, including the vehicle’s high-end approach. Volvo CEO Hakan Samuelsson told reporters at today’s Global Mobility Leadership Forum in Detroit that the autopilot function will be an upmarket option that comes with a price tag of somewhere in the neighborhood of $10,000, . The car it ships with will include a steering wheel — but only in case the owner opts to debase themselves by actually driving it in the style of the plebeians of the prior age. But steering wheel or no, Samuelsson says this will be a fully autonomous car, meaning those inside the vehicle can go ahead and kick back and “watch a movie or whatever,” per Bloomberg. Volvo’s approach is basically par for the course in terms of how new features make their way to consumer cars; start at the rarefied top, and then gradually flow down through the line first as options, then as included features at various trim levels, and finally becoming basically a universal standard. Where it doesn’t make par is when compared to the approach to autonomous cars seemingly favored by other car makers — Ford is looking to introduce self-driving first in fleets of taxi-style vehicles, and it sounds like GM is planning to do the same. Volvo looking at offering this feature first on vehicles sold to individual drivers for personal ownership is then out-of-step with some of its biggest rivals. Hopefully that means we’ll see both types of approaches to autonomous vehicles hit the road at roughly the same time.
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Watch Alchemist Accelerator’s Demo Day Right Here
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Samantha O'Keefe
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TechCrunch is pleased to bring you ‘s Demo Day, today, September 29th, from 3-5pm PT. Alchemist is one of those rare programs that focuses on enterprise startups. But these aren’t your parents’ enterprise companies. Pitches today will span products that create a mortgage marketplace, increase connectivity and help apps get more organic downloads. Investors and press will hear pitches from 11 enterprise companies. The demos start at and are expected to last two hours. You can watch it live via . Teams are listed below in order of appearance. – Automating People Knowledge Management. – Lendsnap automatically collects borrower qualifying documents for brokers and lenders. By linking to financial and payroll institutions, we securely deliver original W2s, pay stubs, bank statements and full tax returns in minutes instead of days. – Building a comprehensive hardware and software platform to help building managers and occupants achieve maximum energy efficiency together. – Provides Network as a Service (NaaS) for wide area wireless connectivity. Enables non-telco players to directly reach end-consumers, bypassing legacy telco providers, and 10x lower cost of a megabyte over Puloli means Internet of Things (IoT) and video delivery are far more business viable now. This is essentially the AWS-style public cloud for wireless. – Provides an open API to make it easy for B2B marketplaces to offer financing seamlessly. – Clouber offers a platform for Migration as a service (MaaS) for applications to securely migrate to and from public and private clouds and manage their assets in real time. – Provides sales prospecting and automation to help sales and marketing teams capture leads from social networks. LeadIQ pulls company info and social activity from multiple sources, saves to Google Drive; syncs w/ CRM; and offers Google Sheets extension for auto lead enrichment. – Shopper exchange network for e-commerce stores. – RankMyApp is a tool that helps apps get more organic downloads by ranking higher in the app stores; $28,000 MRR growing 21 percent MoM. – Provides the Adalog Suite to data science teams in the insurance and health sectors. The solution provides the shortest path from the business question to the delivery of a value-added service for decision making. – GoodTime automates the heavily manual and time-consuming interview scheduling process so recruiters can get back hours a day to do more strategic work.
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HP issues non-apology for blocking third-party ink cartridges
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Devin Coldewey
| 2,016
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HP was recently caught in the act using a “security update” to prevent its printers from operating with a number of recycled and third-party ink cartridges. After much outcry the company has relented and is issuing a rollback option — but they’ll be damned if they admit any wrongdoing. “We are committed to transparency in all of our communications and when we fall short, we call ourselves out,” the company states in a post entitled “Dedicated to the best printing experience,” which sort of says it all. “There is confusion in the market regarding a printer firmware update – here are the facts.” HP says it was just trying to protect its users and provide the best possible experience. Naturally, that meant issuing an update in March, waiting 6 months, and then activating a feature with no warning that caused printers to stop working with cartridges they printed with the day before. The EFF, Cory Doctorow specifically, for this anti-consumer behavior, and the questionable application of DRM attracted enough coverage that HP has been forced to, in their words, call themselves out. “We should have done a better job of communicating about the authentication procedure to customers, and we apologize,” HP’s post continued. “As a remedy for the small number of affected customers, we will issue an optional firmware update that will remove the dynamic security feature. We expect the update to be ready within two weeks.” Keep an eye on for the download link. HP, Keurig, Apple, and a hundred other companies all claim to be trying to give you the “best experience” when things of this character occur, but it doesn’t take much to see that the real object is to tie consumers even more tightly to each company’s carefully curated ecosystem. It’s usually pretty clear when that’s a benefit to consumers and when it’s a detriment; don’t be afraid to call them out when it’s the latter. If you weren’t affected this time, don’t worry — HP will probably give you another chance to get in on the fun: “We will continue to use security features to protect the quality of our customer experience, maintain the integrity of our printing systems, and protect our IP including authentication methods that may prevent some third-party supplies from working.”
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Natasha Lomas
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The first episode of the MegaBots webseries takes a wrecking ball to its six-ton robot
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Brian Heater
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Seems like we’ve been waiting forever for the big showdown between Team USA and Japan. We’re seemingly no closer at the moment, but at least the team at MegaBots can offer a bit of good old-fashioned destruction to tide us over before the massive machines go toe-to-toe. In the premier of its new web series (the trailer for which the other week), the team behind the fighting robot startup league go to town on their own robot, the $200,000 Mk. II. In order to stress test the six-ton bot’s protective casing, the team shoots it with its own gun and gives it several whacks with a wrecking ball. At the risk of spoiling the seven-and-a-half minute long video, it turns out it’s really tough to knock over a 15-foot-tall fighting robot. The new series sports some high production values (including the aforementioned $200k robot) for a YouTube exclusive, following the team as it designs its latest bot in the lead up to its face off with Japan’s Suidobashi Heavy Industry.
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MightyTV’s Tinder-style TV recommendation app comes to Android
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Anthony Ha
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, an app that helps you figure out what to watch next, is now . The startup is led by AdMeld co-founder Brian Adams, and it presents users with a stack of movie and TV recommendations which you swipe through, Tinder-style. If you’ve seen something already, you can say whether or not you liked it, which will influence the recommendations you see next. If you haven’t seen something and it seems appealing, you can save it to your watch list. The app is also connected to streaming services like Netflix and HBO Go, and it can even recommend things that fit in the overlap between your taste and another user’s. The Android app should look familiar to users of the MightyTV iPhone app, but Adams said it comes with “a few extra bells and whistles,” most notably a word cloud that the company calls your “MQ”, showing users their favorite genres and actors, based on their swiping data. Adams also told me that the company has rebuilt the machine learning technology that it uses to try to understand the taste of individual users — he described it as a “hybrid” approach that combines genre-based strategies for recommending movies (e.g., if you liked that war movie, you might like this one, too) with “collaborative filtering” based on user ratings. “We tend to get [good recommendations] faster now,” he said. “We can measure this, and we’re as good at 50 swipes as we were at 200 when we launched.” MightyTV isn’t releasing the total number of users who have downloaded the app since it launched in April, but it sounds like those users are doing a healthy amount of swiping — Adams said 350 is the average number of swipes in the first week. (And keep in mind that recommendations are the point of the app, while swiping is just the way to get there.) MightyTV recently , bringing its total funding to $4.25 million.
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Broadband access creeps along but DDoS attacks explode
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Devin Coldewey
| 2,016
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Akamai released its quarterly reports today, one detailing quality of access and the other attacks on companies and infrastructure. The slow march continues towards a better and faster internet for everyone — and that includes hackers. Broadband adoption is measured at various levels — 4, 10, 15, and 25 mbps — and it’s a mixed bag: the slower speeds saw growth, while the faster ones declined slightly on a global level. Many countries saw double or even triple digit growth year-over-year, though, so work is being done. Good job by Norway, Denmark, and Iceland especially. In the U.S., the highest average connection speed was to be found in DC: 24.3 mbps, just shy of the 25 mbps suggested by the FCC as the definition of real broadband. Those speeds are increasing with a quickness, however, with the connection speed in many states going up by 20-50 percent YoY. We’ll get there yet! Note that these measurements are very different from those done by and others; Akamai doesn’t include connections to streaming servers, for instance, lowering the average. There’s more detail on how they measure this stuff . IPv4 address are still being passed out like candy, even though at current rates they’ll be gone in a few years. Some are making the effort, though: with 38 percent of all connections over IPv6 last quarter, Belgium beats= the next country down (Greece) by 13 percent. And credit where credit’s due: U.S. carriers, both mobile and terrestrial, are pushing as well: Comcast and AT&T are approaching 50 percent of connections over IPv6, T-Mobile is at 61 percent, and Verizon (which owns Aol, which owns TechCrunch) is at an impressive 74 percent. It was a banner year for hackers too. The largest DDoS attacks ever observed took place, and they keep getting bigger. a 363 gbps attack this quarter, but others have rated higher: was hit with one above 600 gbps, and even more recently one aimed at a French web host was measured at . Well, what did you was going to happen with all that extra bandwidth we’ve been adding?
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Contractors are preparing to boycott Instacart over elimination of tips
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Sarah Perez
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Online grocery service is facing a boycott from shoppers who are unhappy about the company’s in favor of raising guaranteed delivery rates. Although Instacart the move as a way to smooth out the earnings curve for its shoppers, some of those affected by the change say it will instead reduce their incomes dramatically. In the case of top shoppers, some expect to lose up to 50% of their earnings, they claim. Hundreds of shoppers are now preparing a nationwide boycott on October 16th through 17th, when the new pay structure goes into effect. The hope is that enough will join in to impact the workload and delivery times, in order to force Instacart to reconsider the changes. It could be difficult to have a sizable impact, however, given that there are tens of thousands of shoppers working across the U.S., and they have no real way to organize outside of social media and word-of-mouth. The revamped payment structure and discussed At the time, Instacart COO Ravi Gupta that shoppers would instead make somewhere around $10-$12 per delivery, instead of relying on around $5 per delivery plus tips. He said that 20% of Instacart customers don’t tip, which is a “really tough experience for shoppers.” Instacart’s customers will now instead have the option to fill out a new “service amount” field, which sounds a lot like a tip. Instacart’s documentation says the “service amount” is paid out entirely to shoppers. As one observer, , Instacart tells customers that (Hendren says he’s not a worker or regular customer, and is not involved with the boycott.) Naturally, customers may believe the service amount is basically the new tipping field, but it’s really more like a “tip share” of sorts. The funds go back to Instacart, who then distributes the money to those who worked on the order, but at flat rates. In some cases, in-store shoppers (who are employees) prep the order, which is then handed over to drivers. But in many cases, one person both shops and delivers the order. Plus, the in-store shopper is actually an employee, not a contractor – and this pay change wouldn’t affect them, as they’re compensated differently. Only the full-service shoppers (contractors) are affected. https://twitter.com/Janesays392/status/781196999802490881 To even out incomes, as part of the shift away from tips; these commissions will also be increased on busier days. And the top 25% of shoppers will receive a $100 weekly bonus. This is in addition to extra pay for “larger orders, long distances, and other cases,” However, some shoppers say that the company is deliberately trying to muddy the waters with regard to how the service charge works. “While there are sometimes two people working on an order – an ‘in-store shopper’ and delivery driver – the majority of the time there’s only one person working on the entire order,” the boycott’s lead organizer (who is choosing to remain anonymous) told TechCrunch. “Independent contractors are the only ones affected with the new pay, and there’s never more than one independent contractor working on an order. The term ‘pool’ is absolutely misleading,” they said. The organizer also explained that top shoppers are impacted the most by this change, as they could lose over $100 per day through the elimination of tips. “The $100 weekly bonus is a joke,” they scoffed. “[Instacart’s] most loyal, top-rated shoppers are all outraged. Reducing our pay in hopes of finally becoming profitable isn’t new. Instacart already did this to us in March,” they added, referencing announced earlier this year. “But no one really cared that Instacart’s rates were so low because customers tipped so well. I’ve talked to over 100 employees one-on-one thus far, and no one expected this,” the organizer said. The shoppers are organizing their boycott via word-of-mouth, email, and social media. There is a , , , and and private Facebook groups. Twenty-seven people have signed up to lead the boycott in their local areas, which covers all major cities like New York, the San Francisco Bay area, L.A., and other markets, we’re told. Flyers are also being passed out to shoppers locally, and shared over email. Yesterday, over 100 shoppers received the printable boycott notes via email, the organizer said. However, an L.A.-based organizer, Ken Barton, said that organizing over email is challenging, because Instacart doesn’t share the names and emails of its contractors. Working with the lead organizer, the two used social media to network the group together instead. Barton also got involved because this change, unlike March’s pay cut, affects their tips. “Now that Instacart has decided to steal our tips in order to fold them into a new revenue stream for the company I realized I had had enough,” he said. “I felt I needed to do anything and everything that I could to organize shoppers together to vocalize their concerns with the company and the public at large.” An organizer in Seattle, Michael Rittman, meanwhile, notes that the new payment structure will impact customer satisfaction as well, as there will be no real incentive to pick quality items or be friendly, as shoppers are only paid based on speed. “Tipping accounts for about half – if not more than half – of the money I make,” Rittman laments. “I complained to my boss about it, and I will quote his response to me, ‘I’m not gonna lie, it’s gonna be harder to make the kind of cash you’ve been making’,” he was told. Under the new pay structure, shoppers’ base pay will be $0.50 more, and $0.20 per item more, but without tips. This helps in the cases where shoppers are stiffed, but in the 80% of cases where the shoppers get tipped, often well, it means they could make less than before. Instacart, for its part, is inviting shoppers to reach out to discuss their concerns. This is mentioned , where it also argues that pay will actually increase, as indicated by the chart below: Various organizers also report being invited privately to speak to managers, we’re told. However, the company, at this point, is not backing down from its plans. One email sent to a disgruntled shopper, basically explained it was a take-it-or-leave-it scenario, i.e.: When the new updates take effect on October 24th, you’ll be offered a new contract. If you don’t feel the new system works for you, you can choose not to accept it. In that case, of course, you would no longer have access to the platform. We would be sad to see you go, but that option is available. “They are hoping, company-wide, that all shoppers expecting fair treatment will either be fired or deactivate their accounts so that an entirely new fleet of naive shoppers can step in and take over,” says Barton. “People are always looking for work. There are plenty of new shoppers out there ready to take our place no matter how little they are paid, and Instacart is banking on that fact.” That being said, it’s hard to gauge how many shoppers will actually walk out on October 16th, as there’s no real means of tracking those who have committed to do so. That said, has over 100 followers, as one more visible metric. An Instacart spokesperson declined to comment on the boycott specifically, but said the company has “a direct and open relationship with shoppers,” and all the changes it made were actually based on shopper feedback. In fact, one of shoppers’ biggest complaints was that too much of their compensation was tied up in tips, the spokesperson said. “We are hearing a lot of positive feedback, to be clear. There’s a small minority of people who are angry and very vocal about it, which is totally their right. But we’re not that worried; we think things will get cleared up in terms of misconceptions,” they added. The company, however, is having to work very hard to make that happen. The company is communicating through emails, speaking on the phone to contractors, taking feedback, and even hosting open office hours in a number of U.S. locations. But at the end of the day, Instacart believes the pay change is in the best interest of all. “We have to make a decision that makes sense for all the shoppers and we can’t base it on a handful of shoppers,” says a spokesperson. is the email shoppers received detailing the changes: [gallery ids="1394719,1394718,1394717,1394716,1394715,1394714,1394713"]
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The race to be the all-in-one app
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Navneet Singh
| 2,016
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| 16
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There’s no denying that app fatigue is posing a challenge not just for new app discovery, but for new behavior discovery. If I weren’t completely tethered to the existing apps on my smartphone, I could be exploring new categories of apps that would enable new use cases that could eventually simplify and enrich my life. So why don’t the most popular apps just enable the latest, greatest use cases and create an “open loop,” networking their existing apps? Well, that’s exactly what Facebook, Snapchat, Google and other household names have in mind. Facebook Messenger lets me buy stuff or order an Uber within a conversation, and Google Now reads my mind to give me all the info I need for my day — and these are just the beginning. This article examines how the big players are campaigning to be the all-in-one app — and who stands a chance to get there. Open-loop and closed-loop networks are concepts from the payments world that could play a key role in determining the ultimate champions of mobile apps. An “open-loop” payment network allows users to spend at multiple sites, like a credit card, while “closed-loop” locks in the user, similar to a store’s gift card. In the app world, apps like Facebook, Google, Venmo and Snapchat act as open-loop networks, which allow users to interact with different products or brands within the app. Android Pay is an open-loop app that allows users to purchase goods from various stores like Walgreens and Rite-Aid, whereas the is a closed-loop network that you can only use at CVS. Although CVS Pay offers more functionality, it remains to be seen if consumers will think it’s worth the effort to download the app. Other payment apps and mobile wallets have all struggled to find traction, while Venmo’s user adoption has been dramatically increasing. As consumers keep getting bombarded by new apps to download, the ability to do more with existing apps becomes paramount. That is why closed-loop apps will continue to struggle, while open-loop apps have potential to become the dominant apps. Behavior patterns vary by user, but some things can be taken for granted. Whenever a user picks up their smartphone and presses a button, the OS takes over. If you can engage and satisfy the users before they fiddle with their device and enter an “app zone,” then you’ve got captive users. That’s why Apple and Google have been spending a great deal of energy on OS. Once a firm controls the OS, they have the ability to integrate app functionality directly into that OS. While Microsoft’s Cortana does a formidable job as a personal assistant, we believe that the overwhelming popularity of iOS and Android give Siri and Google Now a clear advantage (and far more usage). This does a good job of comparing the “active” personal assistant functionality of Siri and Google Now, and also mentions Google’s lead in “passively” providing relevant information to users. We think the latter — satisfying the user before being asked to — is key in the race to become the single destination. If you require users to actively interact with the phone, they’re much more likely to actively seek the app that’s best for the task. That said, although an assistant like Siri that is based on speech recognition does require some active engagement, most people don’t consider talking too much of a drag. One can do a lot with Siri with very little effort. There are good arguments to be made both for a passive mode that “reads the user’s mind” and provides relevant information, and a voice-based personal assistant that can do anything for you. In our opinion, Google Now does a great job of both. Although Siri is an excellent voice-based personal assistant, it has a bit of a ways to go to catch up with Google on the quality and variety of passive information. With so many use cases and such diverse user needs, is it desirable to have one destination that does it all? That depends on how the destination enables the use cases. If it leads to clutter and hard-to-discover functionality, that not only defeats the purpose of having an all-inclusive destination, but also leads to a really poor user experience. That’s what Facebook must have concluded when they carved out the Messenger functionality and separated it from the base Facebook app. On the other hand, if it’s easy enough to long-press your iPhone button and ask a question, there’s no reason not to enable the user to ask question, from “How’s the weather outside?” to “Can you text John my ETA?” Google Now also cleverly uses cards to display all kinds to different information in a common interface. Drawing users to your app is entirely different than getting them to stay in your app for a long time. And if your app is compelling enough that you’re almost guaranteed to have visitors, then never having them leave to use another app becomes your nirvana. Facebook and other social networks have long recognized the importance of this, and so have provided a host of information (news) and entertainment (games) options. And they continue to innovate, with Snapchat launching Discover and Facebook Messenger launching bots to enrich user interactions and keep them engaged. They also have started to delve into commerce options, such as how Messenger lets me order an Uber ride within a conversation. While Facebook and Snapchat are innovating with use cases to keep their users engaged, the app that is globally setting the prime example of a compelling all-in-one experience is WeChat. In its latest article, Forbes praises what WeChat lets its users do; “They can shop, hail a ride or book a hotel — right there while they are chatting with friends,” and blatantly . The Economist is equally impressed by how this super-app has become Chinese users’ default home on the smartphone, calling it “ .” We, personally, really like the fact that WeChat has gotten users to trust it with their financial information — this makes WeChat very well positioned to drive all kinds of commerce and financial use cases. Although WeChat presents a formidable case for a super-app in China, and Google Now has come a long way toward simplifying users’ lives, we don’t believe there will ever be a single destination for new users with increasingly sophisticated needs. Today’s global user is very demanding, with a multitude of complex use cases. We believe that you can categorize all use cases into a small number of behavior categories, e.g. information, entertainment and shopping. Different user behavior categories can then be best served by different enabling experiences –entertainment might be a natural fit for social platforms, and information might be best left to the OS. We think that a noble goal for apps and OS experiences is to address as many behavior categories as they intuitively and elegantly can within their destinations, without trying to be everything for everybody.
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Robots pave the way for our sci-fi future now
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Allan Martinson
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Walmart is experimenting with autonomous shopping carts. Domino’s, Uber and Auro are heavily invested in autonomous driving research. Robots are serving as security guards, performing surgery, checking inventory at grocery stores, assisting in warehouse work, delivering our room service and even hunting for . As robotics begins to leave controlled environments and navigate the real world alongside humans, the question remains: How will this affect the way we interact, work and talk to not only robots, but one another? It’s already becoming commonplace to see drones, survey robots and autonomous vehicles with drivers on autopilot. These aren’t just visions of grandeur in a Sci-Fi novel; they’re our reality now. And one of the most surprising results of the rise of robotics in our daily lives is that most people don’t seem to notice them at all. As robots used for autonomous delivery, for example, become more prevalent, you can expect that your walk to work will be accompanied not only by other people with places to be, but also by robots of different shapes and sizes, intermingling with the crowd seamlessly on their way to deliver. As you’re grocery shopping, drones will be flying overhead, on their way to check inventory while your rolls itself alongside you. Meanwhile, in the back warehouse, robots will be busy and moving goods from one spot to another for order fulfillment. It can already be seen at Stanford Shopping Center and in Uber’s inspection lot in San Francisco. Our offices, malls and retail stores will be protected by security guards of the , accompanying human patrollers. There will be robots like the , a mermaid-like robot that works alongside divers for deep-sea missions and treasure hunting to retrieve items and data at deeper depths than any diver can go. In fact, there will likely be an array of robots that work with us to go where humans haven’t yet dared to go. Robots will set new precedents for who and what are allowed to travel in public spaces. Currently, the policies of local governments on autonomous sidewalk vehicles varies from city to city and country to country. But one thing is for sure. As robots become more of a norm, legislatures will have to pay attention and define regulations and protections for the robots and companies using them. European Parliament drafted a this May calling on the European Commission to consider “that at least the most sophisticated autonomous robots could be established as having the status of electronic persons with specific rights and obligations.” This would saddle corporations with the responsibility of paying social security for their robots, just as they would human workers. The draft bill also proposes a register that would equate autonomous bots to funds established to cover its legal liabilities or that organizations should have to declare savings they make in social security contributions by using robotics instead of people, for tax purposes. The motion has seen huge push back from organizations like Germany’s VDMA and will need to win a lot of political backing in Parliament to pass. Regardless of the outcome, the motion has brought to light important questions about robot rights and human responsibilities to them. While there are many places in the U.S. where robots are already specifically allowed to operate, other states have not yet needed to specifically address regulations. Washington, D.C. recently lead the way in U.S. robot regulations when it passed a law called the “Personal Delivery Device Act of 2016” outlining the rules and regulations for delivery robots and, in turn, specifically allowing these kinds of robots to operate in the nation’s capital. This law will serve as an example as more cities and states realize the importance of addressing this new technology. The Federal Aviation Administration, after a significant amount of pressure from manufacturers and political figures, in June published final operational rules for the commercial use of small drones, those weighing less than 55 pounds. The rules turned out to be stricter than many had hoped, requiring pilots to be certified and within eyesight of the drone at all times. Pilots also can’t be in a moving vehicle and will have to be vetted by the TSA. Amongst other regulations, the drones can only fly at a maximum altitude of 400 feet. While reaction to the rules have been reportedly positive, the impact did drive Amazon to with the U.K. Government to begin drone delivery testing in more rural and suburban areas. The U.K. Civil Aviation Authority gave Amazon the delivery testing permissions that it was denied through the FAA regulations. There’s no doubt that the rise of autonomous robots will change the way we perceive many daily tasks. It will alter the way we interact with service providers and couriers. Our perception of robots will continue to evolve as they become commonplace on the road, in our shopping centers and in our homes. On our daily commute, in our jobs and during our leisure time, robot-human interaction will become the norm.
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Apple just killed one of the best battery saving hacks for your iPhone
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Jon Russell
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— assuming that — but you probably didn’t know that Apple has quietly killed off one of the neatest — and least-known — battery life hacks. If you’re anything like me and want to squeeze as much juice as possible from your iPhone’s battery (without carrying around an external power pack — which too needs to be charged) then you might switch the location/GPS setting off. That one thing — alongside conservative use of Bluetooth and WiFi — is for extending battery life, but it is frustrating. Having to dive into the settings menu and find the ‘location services’ option for the time you actually need GPS for Google Maps, Yelp, etc, is a major pain, while that option isn’t part of the swipe-up menu where you can access WiFi, Bluetooth and other settings . That’s where , an app that lets you slip app shortcuts into the pull-down ‘Notification’ center, comes into play. It is essentially a quick way to launch not only apps, but also system settings such the ‘Location Services’ menu where you toggle GPS/location on and off. One swipe down and a tap is an easy way to switch off the GPS setting and conserve a lot of your power. Unfortunately, iOS 10 has removed the option to include system settings inside launcher apps, so this masterful battery hack no longer exists. “Apple has released the iOS 10 final candidate and they did not restore this functionality and these system apps are still not launchable. This is disappointing, but it is still possible that Apple could restore this functionality in an update to iOS 10 in the future,” Cromulent Labs, the company behind Launcher, . Well this sucks — Jon Russell (@jonrussell) The company said it is “not sure that Apple understands how many users are relying on this functionality,” and it is urging users affected to provide the iPhone-maker with feedback to encourage a change. Launcher, and other similar services like and , are still great apps that will make you more productive on your iPhone or iPad, so if you’re into multitasking then you should definitely look them up.
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What do you call a ‘non-entrepreneur? Cuba’s best hackers
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Elizabeth Gore
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What a highly innovative person who builds a product out of nothing and launches something that will change people’s lives? Everywhere besides Cuba, ’d this person an . would never expect in the land of communism, censorship and classic cars that would find a hotbed of entrepreneurship. Technically, it doesn’t exist. But in my eyes, entrepreneurship is thriving in Cuba. Indeed, I’ve seen some of the world’s innovators in Havana who could win any hackathon. I recently had the opportunity to travel on behalf of Dell to Cuba to exchange ideas and learn from our friends that are a mere 90 miles from Florida. From recent visits by everyone from the president of the United States to the Rolling Stones and Elon Musk, Cuba has garnered some serious attention of late. While I was excited to hear the music on the planet, as an I did not have high expectations for my “educational” trip to Cuba because of the lack of support for capitalism. Upon arrival, I was immediately told that while the Cuban government does not officially recognize entrepreneurs, they allow individuals to register as “ ,” a category for the self-employed. There are 201 registrations available that allow someone to run a state organization, from private restaurants to hardware repair to even being a private clown. I very much dislike clowns, so this registration we could without. Each , or as I would like to say, “ entrepreneurs,” can only have a limited number of employees and make a capped “profit.” This is clearly problematic. We come from the land of scale and high growth. Additionally challenging is the fact that there is little to no access to the internet. If get internet access, it can be slow and limited. So how could there be a hotbed of entrepreneurship in Cuba? I have always thought that we should define people as entrepreneurs, not their actual businesses. On my trip, we spent day and night visiting young, innovative people who were creating the Cuban versions of Amazon, Etsy and Yelp. According to the , the number of rose from 150,000 to 500,000 between 2010 and 2015, and some estimates put the number now at 600,000. No internet? Let’s get around it… If there is a hotspot within 50 miles, will see a hundred people standing underneath to get even basic connections. Facebook is king. I went in to the artist ’s tech studio. He has one of the few Wi-Fi hot spots in Havana — not to mention extraordinary art –and every single person was on Facebook either for learning or social contact. These entrepreneurs (I have to start calling them what they deserve to be called) use these moments of connection to download every shred of information they need before going back to their homes (because there are no offices that not belong to the government, most of these people work from their homes). My favorite system for information sharing was “ ,” or “the weekly package.” This is an incredibly sophisticated system of delivering weekly memory sticks that can have up to terabytes of information. They host TV shows, news and, most importantly, products, offerings and services for entrepreneurs. These are not legal or officially counted, but it is said that 2 million of these could be floating around at any given time. They cost around 2 dollars a week for a subscription and are delivered with new information weekly. Many of us think of Cuba as the land of classic cars with drivers smoking hand-rolled cigars. However, like the cars, they have technology that can be up to 10 years old. In the U.S., the average person gets a new laptop every 4.5 years. Or, as soon as something breaks, we toss it and get a new one. I walked into repair shops that had personal computers, servers and laptops that are older than my 2010 Ford Truck. These innovators are the Alexander Graham Bells or Thomas Edisons of our generation. They fix, or even more accurately, invent, every day with any part they can get their hands on. I once walked into an ’s “office” in his living room. He has a registration for a “computer business.” He had seven people who had each created their own registration, so they didn’t exceed the limit on number of employees allowed. They had four different brands of used computers, all of which they got off a “boat” from Italy, and boasted they could fix any glitch within the systems. They were creating a DIY platform to sell Cuban crafts and art locally through , with hopes to someday sell outside of the country. If got your memory stick, would see their “online store,” with new products they would hand deliver to your door — à la Amazon. I would put this type of entrepreneurial mind-set up against any entrepreneurs in the world. Even with the limited access to technology, these innovative minds can hack their way into any solution. Their education system has significant coding classes, with more women taking them than men. If Cuba ever opens up, we won’t just be talking rum, cigars and classic cars. We will be greeting the next generation of innovators and “ entrepreneurs!”
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The FAA asks airlines to prohibit powering up or charging the Galaxy Note 7 on flights
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Brian Heater
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A day after the Consumer Product Safety Commission formally issued a recall of Samsung’s occasional explosion-making Galaxy Note 7, the FAA is offering against the troubled phablet. A week or so ago, the Federal Aviation Administration issued a fairly benign suggestion, “strongly advis[ing] passengers not to turn on or charge these devices on board aircraft and not to stow them in any checked baggage.” Today’s statement takes things a step further, but doesn’t go so far as issuing a full ban on the device, which has had at least 35 reported instances of battery problems, according to Samsung’s own numbers. The administration is asking airlines to prohibit passengers from powering on or plugging in their Galaxy Note 7 on a flight. The notice continues, Passengers must also protect the devices from accidental activation, including disabling any features that may turn on the device, such as alarm clocks, and must not pack them in checked luggage. The FAA adds that the regulation do not prohibit specific airlines from placing their own additional bans on specific devices/batteries.
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Venture capital is a hell of a drug
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Eric Paley
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There has been lot of money sloshing around the startup world for the past few years. Cheap and accessible has advantages: More founders get the opportunity to pursue big dreams and previously “unfundable companies” not only raise huge amounts of money, but some ultimately achieve unicorn status. Discussions about the downside of this trend are usually related to systemic risks, like the , but few are discussing the problem as it relates to founders — more equals more risk. But who is bearing this risk, and what really is the downside? Sure, providers are taking this risk — but they aren’t the only ones. On short-term basis, raising VC reduces founder’s personal risk by allowing the team to draw salary. Founders don’t need to put development costs on credit card or face short-term economic hardship. But while counter-intuitive, raising makes your startup riskier in two key ways. VC cash comes at the cost of reduced exit flexibility and the burden of an increased burn rate. Viewed probabilistically, the most likely positive exit for startup is an acquisition for less than $50 million. This outcome has little benefit to VCs, and they will happily trade it for an improbable shot at higher outcome. I regularly see entrepreneurs agonize over percent of dilution, while ignoring the fact that they are surrendering their most likely exit options for low-probability shot at building superstar startup. Billions of dollars have been outright wasted by founders selling future value that didn’t materialize, while surrendering present value that could have been navigated to great success. My advice: Don’t give up your present for future you haven’t validated. Beyond signing away exit options, new typically is raised to fund higher burn rates. That increased burn rate is great investment when it is being used to fuel model that is working. More often, the increased burn is used to search for model that works, and the company quickly learns that has no insights; it’s just money. Then the company cannot sustain the burn, the CEO decides to cut the burn way too late and cannot to keep the dream alive. Every dollar you spend is dollar of dilution. One rough rule of thumb is that startups should be able to triple their post-money valuation . If you can’t figure out how to get 3X leverage on every dollar you spend, you’re better off not spending the dollars — or raising them in the first place. Founders need to think of as power tool — fairly dangerous one — but instead often mistake it for some magical, infinitely renewable resource. In the right hands, power tools can solve some real problems. Used incorrectly, they can chop off your hands. Billion-dollar exits are brilliant, but they shouldn’t be how founders calibrate success. The mania for billion-dollar valuations is the result of the business model of the market — not some legitimate definition of startup success. Here’s very rough illustration of billion-dollar VC fund logic: This is why there is so much focus on billion-dollar exits. Not because this outcome is high frequency, but because few massive funds need it to be so. Let’s not just point fingers at the billion-dollar funds. Similar VC math causes irrational trade-offs for founders whether their investors have billion-dollar funds or quarter-billion-dollar funds. As general rule of thumb, assume that your exit needs to be approximately the size of the VC fund to “matter” in its returns. Of course, this is the tail wagging the dog, as the gatherers are encouraging irrational behavior of founders with sales pitch of “go big or go home.” No one says the truth, which is “go big or ruin your life.” When your business fails, which probability says it most likely will, that VC has 29 more shots on goal. You destroyed your single startup, not to mention the wasted sacrifice over years of your life. In most VC deals, the investor is taking much less risk than the founder. This is just fine for subset of founders. It’s great that Ferraris exist, but it doesn’t make sense for the average person to mortgage their home and their future to buy one when Toyota Prius can fetch groceries just fine. If one of your goals is making money, focusing on the exit price is bad idea. It’s quite . For example, the Huffington Post was reportedly acquired for $314 million, and Arianna Huffington made about $18 million. Michael Arrington sold TechCrunch to the same buyer for $30 million and reportedly kept $24 million. To VC, TechCrunch’s sale would have been “loss,” and many VCs would have pushed Michael not to sell. Yet Arrington was more successful, financially, than Huffington. One argument I’ve heard from many VCs is that founder won’t build billion-dollar startup unless they go all-in from the start. This is nonsense — to become billion-dollar business, founder first needs to build $10 million business. Founders shouldn’t jump to the end game before they’re ready. You focus on the first step and still become huge player in the end. This is empirically true — just look at , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , and to name just few. None of these startups embraced the “billions or bust” mentality at the start, though many are worth billions now. Most took very little until after they proved out product/market fit and knew how they could use the money to accelerate growth. Some didn’t take any at all. All were hyper-efficient in the way they used from Day One. Several have gone public, few have been acquired for billion-dollar sums. I don’t fetishize bootstrapping, but there is lot to learn by studying how these founders built huge businesses with efficient use of . I was very happy to build and sell startup for nearly $100 million, and while I would have liked to build billion-dollar business, too many founders treat the probability of either outcome as close to equal. Earning billion-dollar exits is startup nirvana, for sure. But selling for $500 million is home run, $100 million exits are amazing and $50 million exits can change the lives of families for generations. Even “humble” million-dollar exit can make huge difference in founder’s life. The point is, don’t be so quick to irrationally trade all of those options! Only trade these options when you’ve proven enough to have confidence that the future value of your company will be much higher. has no insights. Don’t trade solid business for lottery ticket. Irrationally raising money to scale something that doesn’t work does not result in building big business. Founders should focus on smart growth and use VC to support that — instead of treating it like steroid. Make efficient entrepreneurship your mantra. By all means, dream big — I’m not arguing that founders build small companies, solving small problems. If you have legitimate need for , by all means raise it. But on the flip side, don’t sell your chance for success by giving up optionality and prematurely scaling burn rate in the name of fundraising glory. isn’t the right choice for most businesses, but when used well, it can be very powerful. Unfortunately, many VC-backed founders are using it incorrectly.
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Two million people streamed the NFL on Twitter last night and loved it
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Fitz Tepper
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The numbers on last night’s debut of NFL’s Thursday Night Football on Twitter, and they are pretty damn good. More than 2M people watched the game on Twitter, to 48M who watched it on TV. The average user also spent 22 minutes watching on Twitter, compared to 25 minutes watching on TV (which is the only stat that is almost identical). More specifically, an average of 243,000 people were watching on Twitter at any given time, compared to an average of 15.4M watching at once on CBS and NFL Network (the two networks showing the game on cable). While the numbers seem low compared to cable, it’s actually a pretty big win for the network, which was able to show investors and the rest of the industry that at least some people will actually watch a live streamed game on Twitter. But perhaps even more important than the numbers was the very positive reaction almost anyone had that watched the game. Thousands of people (including myself) took to Twitter to share how impressed they were with the quality of the stream – even over LTE or 4G. At certain points Twitter’s stream was even more current than cable, which can lag behind 10 – 15 seconds. Many also commented that the Apple TV viewing experience (which put a timeline next to the stream) was a great way to watch the game. I'm watching a super clear, live stream of on …in Latvia. This is incredible! 💯✨ 👏🏼👍🏼👊🏼 — Timothy Hastings (@timothyhastings) Watching a perfect, real-time broadcast on the Twitter app is pretty amazing. — Downtown Josh Brown (@ReformedBroker) One pain point some had (including myself) is that the timeline of tweets embedded next to the stream was from essentially anyone who used certain NFL hashtags. I get being inclusive, but I don’t want to see random people’s commentary when watching football. Twitter should figure out a way to make sure these tweets are high-quality content that will enhance (and not distract from) the viewing experience either by hand-curating the tweets or only showing tweets from verified users. The next question is whether the stream will bring new users to Twitter that have never used the platform before. As of now you don’t have to log in to watch the stream, but Twitter it tempting users to log in so they can comment in the livestream (which almost reads like a troll box). However, some users post last night that they had totally forgot they had a Twitter account, and the Thursday Night Football stream is what brought them back to the platform.
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Grindr wants tech people to combat LGBTQ inequalities
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Megan Rose Dickey
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Lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer people make up . Meanwhile, trans people are almost . In short, there’s a bevy of issues that negatively impact the LGBTQ community. It’s time to do something about that. Grindr, the hookup app for gay men, is taking advantage of its massive reach ( ) and putting it toward some serious good. Born out of Grindr for Equality, is a hackathon that is culminating in a demo day next week at Grindr’s Los Angeles headquarters. “We really want to see great innovation to help support justice and equities for the LGBTQ community in international issues,” Grindr Head of People and Culture Jeremy Foreshew told me. In total, there are 13 challenges across four major issues affecting the LGBTQ community: homelessness, trans visibility and economic empowerment, international LGBTQ issues (refugees and travel) and access to sexual health services and PrEP. Grindr is taking advantage of the data from the White House and the U.S. Census Bureau’s Opportunity Project to enable Hack4Equality participants to solve the representation issue for LGBTQ people. Grindr is also partnering with Planned Parenthood, the Human Rights Campaign, the It Gets Better Project and others. “We’re just not being represented because no one is asking about us or has asked about us historically,” Foreshew said. “My colleagues provided anonymized Grindr data to basically put a rainbow filter over the census data, and to figure out if there are unique LGBTQ issues or flags that can be used to help solve problems.” Grindr expects over 100 technologists to be present at the LA demo day, with hundreds more participating around the world. Through Hack4Equality, Grindr is hoping some of the hacks end up coming to market, either as standalone products or ones that live within the Grindr ecosystem.
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Gillmor Gang LIVE 09.16.16
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Steve Gillmor
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This was a LIVE recording session of on September 16th starting at 2pmPT/5pm/ET – with: John Borthwick, Frank Radice, Kevin Marks, Keith Teare, and Steve Gillmor. Gillmor Gang’s Facebook page G3’s Facebook page
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Bazillion Beings are AI-driven bots that have to earn their keep… or die
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Mike Butcher
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Back in March Microsoft CEO Nadella announced “ ” while The Economist calls chat bots “ ”. So that’s the hype taken care of but what does a bot-driven world look like, especially in the context of the Artificial Intelligence that’s theoretically supposed to drive them? , a company exhibiting in Startup Alley at TechCrunch Disrupt in SF today, thinks it has an answer. They are creating what they call an “independent online life form” or “Lifo” (life form) in the form of bots that are designed to replace simple apps. Think of little artificially intelligent entities that offer services to users. Despite being pretty unheard of, the startup has signed up some interesting people to its board such as Stephen Wolfram, CEO of Wolfram Research, Raffi Krikorian, Head of Engineering at Uber, and former Twitter VP and Alex Seropian, creator of the Halo video game and former Disney VP. So what are these intelligent bots? Well, they are algorithmically generated mashups of public APIs and other microservices that in turn create new services. And there is a sort of ‘survival of the fittest’ approach going on here. If a given bot can monetize its services enough to cover its server costs, it survives. If it makes excess revenue, it’s cloned by the Bazillion Beings community, with possible improvements. Over time, the most successful bots adapt to the preferences of individuals through machine learning, and — in theory — the population of bots evolves to add more value to users and API providers. Bazillion Beings reckons this new ecosystem of intelligent bots could ultimately replace a traditional app store. What’s the problem they are solving? The idea is that simple smartphone apps are inefficient and intelligent bots would be faster and eventually better at providing services. The internet is now a much more machine-friendly place, the API economy is booming, so there is untapped potential that could be unlocked with AI-driven bots in a decentralized architecture built with blockchain technology. What does Bazillion look like today? It’s a iOS app which acts as a bot browser – a portal through which you can discover, bookmark, subscribe to and use bots. It also has the tools to clone, combine and transform bots to create new ones. Lifos are designed to be people-friendly, socially active bots that combine interfaces to sites like Facebook, Yelp or YouTube, to provide services to people. One of them might post daily blog entries for you. Another will coordinate among your Facebook friends to create a SoundCloud playlist and then tweet that as a birthday gift, or it might introduce you to people or create artwork using Wolfram Alpha and upload it to a Tumblr blog. Each lifo is created algorithmically and is different form all the others. If Bazillion sounds more like a sort of autonomous IFTT that’s ok, because IFTT could well be a competitor eventually, as well as Siris and Cortana. Then again the Bazillion model might look like the kind of things those guys would buy. So far it’s raised a small seed round and is raising a Series A.
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Highlights from Disrupt SF 2016
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Anna Escher
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The doors to TechCrunch Disrupt SF 2016 opened September 12 at Pier 48 in San Francisco. The three-day conference hosted over 5,000 attendees, with hundreds of thousands more tuning in online. In fact, Disrupt SF 2016 was the first media conference to stream on Periscope Live in full, making it one of our most watched events ever. In the much-anticipated Startup Battlefield, 25 companies pitched to a panel of judges in hopes of winning the Disrupt Cup and the $50,000 Grand Prize. TechCrunch editors pored over the judges’ notes and, after hours of deliberation, narrowed the list down to : , which lets you run SQL queries on a database using GPUs to do the heavy lifting, health data tracker , home lab testing alternative , competitive gamers coaching service , security threat checker and identity verifier/password killer .
for its visual e-sports analytics platform. The service is designed to coach competitive gamers, helping them discover their weaknesses and make adjustments for future success. The startup won judges over with a Gamer Performance Index, a visual map that cues users into areas of their gaming skills. E-sports is an increasingly promising market, making Mobalytics an encouraging company for this space. UnifyID was the runner up. PointShop, a hack that uses AR to aid gadget buying, wins the Disrupt 2016 Hackathon http://tcrn.ch/2chkqzw Posted by on Sunday, September 11, 2016 Before the conference kicked off, 1,000 hackers stayed up all night to create apps, sites and hardware in the Disrupt Hackathon. Each group had one minute to present to a panel of judges on stage. The top prize went to , which utilizes augmented reality to provide consumer cloud-based contextual information about a purchase by simply lining up a phone camera with a real world product. The two runners-up were Support Collective, which makes it possible for different companies to join together resources to offer email ticket histories, and SafeRoute, a hack designed to give users a safer path to their destination. On Day 1, the conference kicked off with speakers from the tech landscape who the stage to discuss the latest in the world of tech and startups. Facebook Messenger head David Marcus said the mobile web experience for . DraftKings CEO Jason Robins . Jager McConnell of CrunchBase announced the . U.S. Chief Technology Officer Megan Smith and Deputy CTO Alexander Macgillivray in tech. Blavity co-founder and CEO Morgan DeBaun announced that the news site for black millennials is . Twilio co-founder and CEO Jeff Lawson talked about the and how bots are overrated. Slack’s director of engineering, Leslie Miley, explained . Leslie Miley of Slack says tech has a greater role to improve economic disparity Posted by on Monday, September 12, 2016 Razer CEO and founder Min-Liang Tan and robotics companies. executive producer Mike Judge . Tim Armstrong and Marni Walden answered questions about . Day Two kicked off with Salesforce’s Marc Benioff taking the stage to announce the . Udacity’s Sebastian Thrun announced it is partnering with Mercedes-Benz and Nvidia on . Reid Hoffman and Josh Elman of Greylock Partners talked about in the startup universe. Melonee Wise of Fetch Robotics gave her i . U.S. Secretary of Defense Ashton Carter argued the case for . Marc Andreessen talked about the . Rana el Kaliouby from Affectiva and Danny Lange from Uber discussed . Janica Alvarez (Naya Health), Deborah Anderson-Bialis (Fertility IQ) and Ida Tin (Clue) discussed the . author Neal Stephenson talked about the alternative reasons he’s e . John Hanke of Niantic Labs said that . George “Geohot” Hotz of Comma.ai of his automotive AI startup. Comma.ai will ship a $999 autonomous driving add-on by the end of this year http://tcrn.ch/2cXIHPe Posted by on Wednesday, September 14, 2016 Zenefits CEO David Sacks talked about . Google’s Diane Greene talked . Leap Motion’s Michael Buckwald and Jim Margraff of Eye Fluence talked about . Day 2 closed out as Stephen Curry of the Golden State Warriors took the stage to discuss . On the final day of Disrupt, Cruise founder Kyle Vogt talked about . Adam Mosseri, a VP at Facebook and head of News Feed answered questions about despite censorship decisions. Hemant Taneja (General Catalyst), Bradley Tusk (Tusk Holdings), and Ted Ullyot (Andreessen Horowitz) discussed . Instacart CEO Apoorva Mehta talked about how he . Andela’s Christina Sass answered questions about . Boston Dynamics CEO and gave an overview of all the models the company is creating. Michael Koperwas and Diana Williams from ILMxLAB talked about making . Gui Cavalcanti and Matt Oehrlein from MegaBots laid out their vision for . The conferenced closed out with an interview featuring Shervin Pishevar from Hyperloop One, in which he announced that . Thank you to everyone who attended and tuned in to Disrupt SF 2016, and we hope to see you at December 5 to 6. You can find more photos from the event on our , and read more coverage in our .
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Google Maps picks up mapping analytics and visualization startup Urban Engines
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Brian Heater
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This isn’t so much an acquisition as a welcoming back into the fold. Urban Engines was formed in 2014 by a bunch of former Google employees, with backing from Google Ventures and Eric Schmidt. The startup was formed to help deal with urban congestion and improve user commutes. Last February, the company launched a self-titled app that brings some key features to mobile mapping – among them speedy computation, an augmented reality mapping mode and the ability to utilize maps offline line in the key North American launch cities, Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles, New York, Portland, San Francisco, Seattle, Toronto, Vancouver and Washington, D.C. Urban Engines uses the buzz phrase the “internet of moving things” to describe its big picture idea, utilizing analytics gathered by urban commuters to help control the flow of cities. And now the company is taking its data collection and platform back to the Mountain View mothership. Hidden , Urban Engines announced that it’s being rolled into the Google Maps team, “we’re excited to combine forces to help organizations better understand how the world moves.” There’s not a lot in the way of information regarding how the company will fit in the larger Google ecosystem, but certainly it has a lot to bring to the Google Maps app, as well as data analytics that will help bolster the mapping team’s underlying infrastructure.
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Meet Snugb Tulip, a smart baby cam to monitor your little one’s health
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Sarah Buhr
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Tulip, a cute little gumdrop-shaped baby monitor from is outfitted with a versatile camera that gathers data on room temperature, humidity and air quality around your baby’s crib. The camera can move in multiple directions for wherever your wee one has crawled and the device comes equipped with a wireless pulse oximetry sensor to capture data on your baby’s heart rate and blood oxygen levels — both important factors in monitoring and preventing Sudden Infant Death Syndrome (SIDS). Snugb’s Tulip is just a prototype for now, but it’s part of a new crop of parent tech helping those with kids ensure safety and security for their family such as , a baby sock and health monitor or , a washable cotton onesie with breathing sensors developed to check baby’s vital signs. The Snugb device comes with an app for easy monitoring in the next room and we’re told it will soon have a Kickstarter campaign for those interested in supporting the manufacturing process. We caught up Snugb founder Adam Rivera while he was in Startup Alley for the third day of TechCrunch Disrupt SF this past week. Check out the video above to find out more and see Snugb in action.
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Full coverage from Disrupt SF 2016
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Travis Bernard
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There’s an Intel modem and an extremely skinny A10 chip inside the iPhone 7
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Brian Heater
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While the rest of the iPhone obsessed world was getting ready to stand in line or just impatiently waiting for their pre-order to arrive, the teams at iFixit and Chipworks were sharpening their tools like underfed lumberjacks sitting down to a steak dinner. Both sites offered liveblogs of their iPhone 7 (and 7 Plus) teardowns and spotted some interesting tidbits in the process, discovering a handset that looks a lot more different on the inside than out. But first they had to dig through a whole lot of glue – a membrane of sorts that seems to play a key role in the phone’s newfound water resistance rating, along with the haptic home button, which also serves to eliminate a long time pain point of broken buttons. Among other issues, using glue as part of the waterproofing process may mean that you lose some of that feature when the phone is repaired. On the chip front, the A10 is front and center. And there’s a whole lot of it on the surface, with a 125 sq. mm footprint. The chip, which also bears the far less memorable name APL1W24, looks to be manufactured by TSMC (Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company), tapped in part due to its InFO technology, which keeps the chip extremely thin. On the unit torn apart by Chipworks (A1778), an Intel mobile cellular platform is present, including two RF transceivers, power management and modem. There may well be Qualcomm manufactured chips on the CDMA A1660 version, due to some CMDA licensing issues for Intel. Info on that is still to come. Both Hynix and Toshiba have been employed to provide storage for the new phone. As for memory, there’s 2GB on the 7 and 3GB on the 7 Plus, according to the reports. iFixit’s report gives the handset a bit of a mixed bag on the repairability front. In addition to the aforementioned glue, Apple has added yet another screw type, bringing the required screwdriver count up to four.
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Hard questions about bot ethics
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Amir Shevat
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are becoming a part of our life. I wake up in the morning and tell Alexa to play my Brazilian samba, I let Amy set my meetings and I check stats and reports in Slack. builders and users alike are starting to understand that are an integral part of our life. But what are the rules that govern these new tech friends? One big that people should ask, but often don’t, is “Does this serve me, or the service provider?” In other words, “Does this have MY interests at heart, or someone else’s?” Will the food-ordering recommend the pricey/low-quality items or the best-priced and quality food? Will the HR serve me or the company? Will the insurance try to facilitate me claiming the money or try to prevent it? There are also IP issues here: Who owns the materials/photos created by a that merges your photos into a collage? Who owns your shopping preferences? Having a personal assistant- hints toward user ownership, while talking to a representative- hints toward service-provider ownership. Users and service providers can’t always tell the difference, and more often than not just assume and do not think about this topic. Think about your Gmail or your photos on Facebook — who owns the data? The same goes for our . My take on ownership — I think there are cases in which user ownership makes sense, and others where it is clear that the service provider should claim ownership. The key is to be very clear and transparent about who owns what and what are the terms of service the users are opting into. Regardless of ownership, there is the matter of — can a share information with other or human overseers? Should information be anonymized? Do users have the right to be forgotten? Basically, is there a user- confidentiality agreement? My take on privacy — I think that, unless stated otherwise, there is an implied confidentiality agreement in which the is mandated to keep your personal and private information confidential ( pointed out to me some exceptions, like law enforcement or threats of self-harm). Transparency is key here as well — when submitting a to Slack, we require developers to create a privacy policy and to make it publicly available. In general, builders should keep user information private as much as possible. This is a subset of privacy and ownership, and a very important topic to discuss. builders are still exploring ways to monetize so can a serve you ads? Can the use data you provided, either directly or through the API, to optimize these ads for you? My take on ads — I think a should not serve ads unless it has a strong, express purpose that benefits the user in doing so, and even then only on B2C platforms. I would hate to see becoming the new tracking pixel. should not be prompting users to click on things and buy things unless explicitly asked to do so. This topic probably needs an article of its own. Because of the conversational nature of , they are much more prone for abuse. In a builders’ gathering called Botness, most developers claimed that people try all kinds of abuse, from cursing the all the way to hitting on the . This is a loaded topic, and is actually bi-directional. Are just like any other objects? Are they the new “punching bag” of the modern world? Should humans curse and abuse a ? My take on a being abused — I think there is a subtle difference here between “can abuse” and “should abuse.” At least until AI develops personality and feelings, you can not really abuse a , the does not care and your curses will most likely be filtered alongside other gibberish you might type. I do think that as a society we should not abuse . I think that as humans, abusing will make us more prone to abusing other humans, and that is clearly bad. Humans should treat services with empathy — losing empathy is generally a poor trend for humanity. Developers should ignore or have a polite canned response to any abusive language. Can spam or harass humans? Can a harm a human? Or even answer back? Should a curse back? Does software have a right to defend itself? My take on — I have already this includes spam, harassment and any other form of hurt. I think that until , through AI, become sentient, there is no justification for to defend themselves from this type of abuse (not talking about security). Moreover, I think answering is not the most effective way to make humans less abusive; simply answering “I can not handle that request” or just ignoring human abuse might be more effective UX. In general, I think empathy in conversation interfaces should be one of the pillars of design and a common best practice. Should the be ? Should we have racially diverse ? Should we have religiously diverse ? My take on gender and diversity — I think developers should think about diversity very . Some developers think that should not have gender — while this might work in English-speaking countries, it does not work in many other languages. In many languages everything has a gender — you can not refer to an object or a person without notating a gender. So, while in English might be “it” — in most of the world it can not. Because conversational UI implies a person on the other side, users may want to try to place the somewhere on the gender spectrum (as well as other diversity attributes). What should developers do? I think that, when applicable, developers should provide the user the choice to pick the ’s gender (and other diversity attributes). An example of that is with their Amy/Andrew configuration. Am I talking to a or a human? Is this trying to act like a human? Should the user know/care about the fact they are talking to humans or software? My take on impersonation — I think there are major use cases, from health to finance, where it is super important for the end users to know if they are talking to a human or a . In general, I think transparency is the best practice, and humans should not (as general guidance) impersonate a and vice versa. Most of these are not addressed today by the industry. This is not because of bad intents, it is because of lack of awareness. With empathy and transparency, developers can address these issues and provide users with a delightful and experience.
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Darrell Etherington
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News orgs sue FBI for details on San Bernardino iPhone exploit
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Kate Conger
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The Associated Press, Vice Media and Gannett, the parent company of USA Today, sued the FBI today in an attempt to uncover information about how the law enforcement agency was able to unlock an iPhone used by Syed Farook, one of the San Bernardino shooters. The Justice Department initially sought to force Apple to create custom software that would allow the device to be unlocked, but dropped its case when a third party found a way to break into the phone without Apple’s assistance. The case sparked widespread debate about encryption, with politicians including President Obama arguing for exceptional access to encrypted devices for law enforcement and tech leaders like Apple CEO Tim Cook saying that attempts to roll back encryption would cause broad harm to cybersecurity. USA Today, the AP, and Vice requested information about the exploit the FBI purchased to unlock the phone under the Freedom of Information Act. Their requests were denied by the FBI, leading to filed today. The FOIA requests asked for “basic contracting information” on the exploit, which the suit refers to as one of the FBI’s “most publicly-discussed and controversial acquisitions.” FBI director James Comey suggested the exploit was purchased by the bureau for close to $1 million, but has not provided details on the exact purchase amount nor the seller. Comey said that the exploit would only work on a “narrow slice of phones” including the iPhone 5c used by Farook, and that the FBI would consider sharing the vulnerability with Apple so that it could be fixed. “We’re having discussions within the government about, OK, so should we tell Apple what the flaw is that was found. That’s an interesting conversation, because we tell Apple, they’re going to fix it, and then we’re back where we started from,” . “As silly as that may sound, we may end up there, we just haven’t decided yet.” Even if the FBI did not share the vulnerability with Apple, Comey said that it is “quite perishable” and that the company would likely patch it “if Apple changes its software in some way.” The news organizations involved in the lawsuit argue that the vulnerability is of considerable public interest and should be disclosed and that Comey’s own comments reflect that. “Moreover, the FBI’s purchase of the technology — and its subsequent verification that it had successfully obtained the data it was seeking thanks to that technology — confirmed that a serious undisclosed security vulnerability existed (and likely still exists) in one of the most popular consumer products in the world,” the lawsuit states, adding that “there is no lawful basis” for information about the purchase to be kept secret. White House spokesperson Josh Earnest told , “I am confident that the Obama administration will comply with the law,” and that the administration has “tried to be as transparent as possible” about the situation. “Given the sensitive nature of the information, we’ve been quite limited in what we can discuss openly,” Earnest added. Apple has not commented on the lawsuit.
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Anyone can prototype and build with Shaper’s Origin CNC machine
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John Mannes
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CNC machining is not a new concept, but it has typically been relegated to the hands of skilled professionals with enough money to bankroll the expensive devices. The complexities of computer vision make Shaper’s machine considerably easier to use than its rivals. There is no reason to sweat the details on the Origin because being almost-sorta-kinda accurate is actually more than enough to produce professional quality products. A camera on the front of the device detects a proprietary tape placed at various distance intervals. With a frame of reference, software can produce an augmented reality representation of a desired cut that is visible through an onboard screen. Cutting with the Origin is about as easy as a game of connect the dots. All you have to do is drag the lightweight handheld machine along the traced route and the blade will actually adjust to make up for any inaccuracies or clipped corners. Origin can operate in any workspace with a wide-variety of materials including wood, carbon fiber, and vinyl. Just drag and drop designs to the cloud and the device will be ready to start making in a matter of minutes. For a limited time, builders, tinkerers, and creatives will be able to nap the futuristic device Eventually the price will jump to $2099.
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Underrepresented founders: apply now for Include Office Hours with USV
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Samantha O'Keefe
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TechCrunch Include are happening in NYC on September 27! Albert Wenger and Andy Weissman of will join TechCrunch to provide valuable advice and feedback to startups. Launched in 2014, Include is TechCrunch’s diversity program, aimed at facilitating opportunities for underrepresented groups in tech to take their startups to the next level. The Office Hours program is part of that effort. Once monthly, TechCrunch works with VC partners to provide feedback and advice to early-stage companies. To be considered for a meeting in our August session with CrunchFund in San Francisco or General Catalyst in New York City, . Underrepresented groups in tech include, but are not limited to, Black, Latino, Native American, LGBT and female founders. Preference will be given to teams that can meet in person. Startups should at least have a functional prototype. Let’s learn more about our co-hosts. is a partner at Union Square Ventures. Before joining USV, Albert was the president of del.icio.us through the company’s sale to Yahoo and an angel investor (Etsy, Tumblr). He previously founded or co-founded several companies, including a management consulting firm and an early hosted data analytics company. Albert graduated from Harvard College in economics and computer science and holds a Ph.D. in Information Technology from MIT. is a partner at Union Square Ventures. Andy began his career in the Internet in the mid-90s. Prior to joining USV, in 2007 he co-founded betaworks, which both created and invested in social, real-time applications and services. Andy was born in New York City and has a BA from Wesleyan University and a JD from Georgetown. If you’re interested in attending Office Hours with USV, by Wednesday, September 21st at noon PT.
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Behold! It’s the tiniest MAME cabinet in the galaxy
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John Biggs
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In the world of MAME cabinetry – essentially a subculture of arcade lovers who build amazing cabinets for their emulators – the goal is usually to either recreate the arcade games of yore or build something really wild. built something really wild. Originally a weekend project, this MAME cabinet is a few inches tall and uses a screen about as big as a thumbnail. The kit is far from complete and the screen is too small to be really usable for most games. However with a little downsampling and some judicious game choices you can play some Pac-Man or Dig Dug on this minuscule machine. The cabinet uses the display and a Raspberry Pi Zero. The creator, used a tool called to downsample and display the game frames on the tiny, tiny screen. https://vine.co/v/5JLgPiEYQ6V Burgess built the cabinet after discussing the idea of a “bonnet” for the Raspberry Pi Zero that fit over and added a great deal of functionality to the bare board. He wrote: This teeny cabinet is a cool and clever idea, but if you really want to have some fun please consider . At least you’ll be able to press the buttons without smashing the cabinet to bits. I built one with my son and it turned into a great weekend project. [youtube=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0O0DeRL7P-w]
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Lydia grabs $7.8 million for its peer-to-peer payment service
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Romain Dillet
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French startup raised $7.8 million (€7 million) from and in order to expand to other European countries. The startup lets you easily pay back your friends without any fee using a mobile app — among other things. Think about it as a sort of Venmo for France. While Lydia has only been available in France, with today’s funding round, the company plans to launch in other European markets. With 500,000 users in France, it’s time to look at other countries. Lydia plans to launch in the U.K., Germany and Spain during the first half of 2017. Lydia also has some ambitious goals, including reaching 3 million users in two years. Other startups in other European countries also provide peer-to-peer payment services — for instance, in the U.K. and in Germany. So Lydia will have to expand quickly before these local competitors become too ubiquitous. But Lydia doesn’t plan to stop at geographical expansions. Just a few weeks ago, the company a good old plastic card to pay in millions of retail stores. It’s a regular MasterCard, but you can customize it to your needs in the Lydia app. Transactions appear instantly, you can block and unblock online payments, foreign payments, ATM withdrawals and more. Similarly, you can set different payment limits and all changes are reflected instantly. When I talked with Cyril Chiche about this new product feature, he had an interesting take on the future of consumer fintech startups. According to him, all fintech startups start with a simple product and add features that make them compete with all other fintech startups. Eventually, they are all going to recreate all the services you’d expect from a consumer-facing bank — they just had a different starting point.
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Singapore’s Greyloft lands $1.1M to build a real estate agency for the digital era
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Jon Russell
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Singapore-based has raised $1.1 million to build out its vision of what a real estate agency should look and function like in today’s digital era. Wait! Estate agents? Aren’t they the bad actors that spoil things for everyone? It’s true that many startups attacking the real estate have chosen to disintermediate agents on the premise that their motivations are misaligned with those of the consumers they represent. At their worst, their goal is often to maximize their take-home of a deal, rather than satisfying their client 100 percent. India’s NoBroker, which , is probably the best example of that ‘direct-to-consumer’ model. Greyloft believes that it can solve the problem by bringing agents under its own roof and this seed stage financing, which was provided DSG Consumer Partners, Wavemaker, Cub Capital, Tigris Capital and JFDI, will help it build on its early promise. The startup was founded last year by ex-bankers Siddhesh Narayanan (CEO) and Archit Agarwal (CTO), who explained the vision as more of a ‘real estate 2.0’ than online property portal. In its system, it works with a selection of closely affiliate licensed agents who are incentivized to put the customer first, changing a dynamic that many believe is broken. Greyloft focuses on two pieces for its business: giving consumers — buyers and sellers — a platform for home rentals and sales, on the other side it generates leads and business for real estate agents. “We are doing every single thing an estate agency does, but much smarter,” Narayanan said in an interview. The company aims to attract agents by offering a CRM system that does some obvious things that real estate professionals don’t currently get access to using their existing setups, which are predominantly offline and analog. That includes software that manages multiple deals, transitions clients between colleagues, keeps track of paperwork, and can track client requests, meaning that agencies can take requests months in advanced. “Once they get used to the backend systems… it allows them to focus on customer service not being a push salesperson as agents are sometimes known for,” Agarwal said. Narayanan admitted that it is challenging finding the right brokers in Singapore since there is a small pool who are licensed, and Greyloft’s own approach takes some explaining. But, all things considered, the startup’s founders see the right kind of agents as essential to the process. “Buying property is one of the biggest decisions you’ll make in your life, and rent is also one of the biggest items [of expenditure] out there. You need an expert to advise you,” Narayanan argued. With its new funding secured, the company is aiming to “step on the pedal a little and get more customers to know us.” That will involve the creation of a dedicated sales team in Singapore and potentially exploring possible overseas expansion plans. Right now, Greyloft outsources its technology in India while it has a customer services team that is based in the Philippines. Singapore is no easy market to win, however. More establish rivals include iProperty, which was for over $500 million, PropertyGuru, which in its most recent funding in 2015, while there is also 99.co, from investors like Facebook co-founder Eduardo Saverin.
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Spotify finally launches in Japan, the world’s second largest music market
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Jon Russell
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Afters years of waiting, its music streaming service in Japan. that the launch would happen before September is out, and the company just about delivered on that timeframe. Spotify has had an office in Tokyo for at last 18 months, but protracted negotiations with record labels and the music industry have seen competitors like Apple, and Rakuten sneak in first with rival services. Now Spotify has joined its ranks with its free service and the paid-for option which costs 980 yen ($9.60) a month. Japan is a hugely lucrative market for music. which makes it the world’s second largest market behind only the U.S., but Japanese consumers prefer to buy their musical physically, , than digitally right now. Streaming service providers are viewing that as an opportunity rather than a threat, and success in Japan could give Spotify some momentum headed into 2017 when it is expected that the firm will make efforts to go public. Spotify says Hello to Japan — Shakil Khan (@shak) Spotify recently passed 40 million paying customers, and it’ll be aiming to add a large chunk more to that number from Japan. It its favor, it is the one mainstream streaming service in Japan that has a free-tier option for users. That goes some way to explaining why it has taken so long for the Swedish company to secure deals with record labels, but it could be a factor that helps its service gain some momentum in the country among users who are not used to paying for digital music consumption. This launch represents Spotify’s second major expansion in Asia this year. Back in March, , the world’s fourth most populous country, ending a quiet spell in the continent. Spotify with launches in Hong Kong, Singapore and Malaysia, but, prior to 2016, it had only expanded to one new market since then: the Philippines. We’ve heard whispers from inside Spotify that India is its next market of focus for Asia, although we understand that the company is studying the market and doesn’t have concrete plans for a launch right now. It might do well to observe Google’s efforts after this week.
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Didi Chuxing makes information security push with new U.S. research lab and hires
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Jon Russell
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Didi Chuxing, China’s largest ride-hailing company, has hired two distinguished security experts to lead a new U.S.-based research center as part of a major push to increase its data security efforts. , whose 30 year work history includes starting Palo Alto networks, and , who worked with Gong at FireEye and spent time with McAfee among employers, have taken key positions at the company, Didi announced today. Gong becomes Didi’s VP of information security strategy and vice president of the company’s new U.S.-based Didi Research Institute. Bu will be based in China where he’ll work directly with Gong as Didi’s VP of information security operations. In that role, he’ll manage the company’s existing information security team in China. Didi, which is , formally unveiled a China-based center , but little is known about its U.S.-based branch. The company isn’t saying a great deal at this point. A spokesperson said the center will be “a unit that helps to enable business inside rather than just focus on security” while Gong himself explained that he and Bu will “take responsibility for overall security” within the company. “We have detailed plans we are working on,” Gong told TechCrunch. “Clearly Silicon Valley is best place to attract many talents [and a] much better vantage point to see the demands and needs across the globe.” Gong has spent most of his life working in enterprise security environments, but he said that he and Bu were attracted to Didi principally because of the scale of the company’s business. that it has over 14 million drivers and 300 million active users with 10 million rides completed on its service each day. “The Didi platform and service it provides and number of people and partners in touches, presents probably the most sophisticated customer use case,” Gong explained. “[Bu and I] have been working in security for traditional enterprise, [this is the first opportunity] that represents a good blend of enterprise and new-age internet-based sharing economy. Plus we were very impressed by Didi’s ambition and ability to execute.” Lyft in the U.S., Ola in India and Grab in Southeast Asia which includes a roaming deal for its users across different services and an exchange of information and best practices. While , Gong said that he is “expecting” to engage in dialogue with those three companies as he settles into his new role. Interestingly, driver and passenger fraud is one area that Gong said will fall under his reach. Beyond simply safeguarding the data and passengers and drivers — such as driving licenses and sensitive travel information — from outside threats and operational data security management, the new push will aim to cut down the massive problem of ride fraud. With vast subsidies on offer for drivers and passengers, the Chinese internet is awash with offers to spoof rides and split the proceeds between fake rider and fake driver. This is both Didi and Uber China. Uber said last year that fraud accounts for 10 percent of all bookings in China, but experts have estimated the problem to be multiples higher. It isn’t clear how widely fraud impacts Didi’s business today after it raised prices and cut some subsidies following the Uber China deal, but Gong and his team will certainly “enable” business at Didi if they are able to stamp out even a fraction of fake rides.
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Crunch Report | Facebook’s futuristic frozen facility
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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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Cosette Jarrett
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A look inside how Here Be Dragons is pioneering VR storytelling
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Lucas Matney
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is a term for describing dangerous or unexplored areas. It’s also the new name of Chris Milk’s VR creative studio, formerly know as Vrse, that’s looking to explore the dangerous world of spherical video. The VR production studio is aiming to continue rediscovering storytelling techniques for the immersive medium. With filmmaker Chris Milk taking the role of Creative Director at the company, they’ve already positioned themselves well within the industry and have built partnerships with Apple, United Nations, The New York Times, Nike, Vice, NBC, Conservation International and U2. Here Be Dragons is dealing with many of the same hardware problems surfacing in the VR storytelling space, mainly the fact that there is currently no one-size-fits-all solution for capturing spherical video. “When we started out of the gate, the tools weren’t really in existence so we had to build the technology department at Here Be Dragons,” said Here Be Dragons President Patrick Milling Smith. “So we had very fresh voices and people who had a background in telling stories and then we married them with a more technological group.” Check out the video above to see a bit about the studio’s mission and how it’s tackling the burgeoning world of virtual reality filmmaking.
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Meet the I.D., Volkswagen’s first purely electric car on track for 2020
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Darrell Etherington
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Volkswagen did indeed debut its first dedicated electric car at the Paris Motor Show, as heavily teased. The I.D. revealed at the show is still labeled a “concept,” but VW says it’s due to become a buyable car in 2020, with a total range of ups to 373 miles per charge, driven by a 168hp electric motor. The concept design for the I.D., which will be Volkswagen’s first purely electric design (as opposed to vehicles like the e-Golf which also offer a gas-powered option) also includes some even more future-focused features, including “I.D. Pilot mode,” a fully autonomous driving feature. The carmaker says its self-driving tech will be ready for production vehicles beginning in 2025, if things go as planned. In the same year, Volkswagen intends to cross the million electric cars sold mark, the company noted in a press release. [gallery ids="1394310,1394311,1394312,1394313,1394314,1394315,1394316,1394317,1394318"] Autonomous capabilities help explain the interior design language of the I.D. concept, which VW’s PR describes as “the interactive center of a mobile lounge, or a supremely versatile Open Space.” This extremely indulgent marketing speak basically translates into a design that’s more flexible in case you don’t happen to have to be driving. I.D. is also significant for being the first compact designed around VW’s Modular Electric Drive kit (MEB) architecture, which was created specifically for purely electric car models (as opposed to electric conversions of existing vehicles, again like the e-Golf). The MEB is designed to be used in more car designs going forward, and is focused on maximizing vehicle ride comfort, safety, and use of space, with a floor-iterated flat battery pack, a long wheelbase and more. [gallery ids="1393973,1393981"] Other aspects of the design also come from the focus a connected vehicle experience. There also aren’t any mirrors on the doors, and instead cameras built-in to the front fenders give you a look behind you left and right. B-pillars are gone, too, since the front and rear doors, when closed, provide enough structural rigidity on their own. This probably also helps with maximizing energy efficiency for better range. The headlights actually sound like one of the more interesting aspects of the car – they’re designed as more thoughtful communication devices, and will “look” at the driver as they approach (which sounds max creepy), and signal when they’re in I.D. Pilot mode (from 2025 on obviously) with a different look, so other drivers know it’s driving itself. The lights also “look” in the direction the car intends to turn, and even “looks” at pedestrians and cyclists. All creepy when you think about a car doing this, but also pretty natural in terms of how we communicate with one another. Somebody’s watching you… VW’s I.D. Pilot self-driving tech uses lasers for primary detections, which are supplemented by ultrasonic, radar and photographic camera sensors. Traffic data is collected by individual cars and used to update a cloud-based model of real-time ground conditions, too, VW says. It all sounds very lovely and future-focused, but it’s worth remembering that this is still just a concept, even if Volkswagen currently sounds very confident about that 2020 launch date. The self-driving system is even further away from being a reality, so bet to take all of this as a partial preview of what will actually arrive in a few years’ time. [gallery ids="1394025,1394024,1394023,1394022,1394021,1394020,1394019,1394018,1394017,1394016,1394015,1394014,1394013,1394011,1394010,1394009,1394008,1394007,1394006,1394005,1394004,1394003,1394002,1394001,1394000,1393999,1393998,1393997,1393996,1393993,1393992,1393991,1393990,1393989,1393988,1393987,1393986,1393985,1393984,1393983,1393982,1393978,1393977,1393976,1393975,1393980"] We don’t yet know much about specific pricing or trim packages for the I.D., but Volkswagen says it’ll be “on a par with comparably powerful and well-equipped Golf models.” The current e-Golf starts at $28,995 U.S., so that’s probably a decent beginning point in terms of setting price expectations.
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With a new Costco partnership, Ticketmaster’s developer outreach hits the right notes
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Arik Hesseldahl
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Living in San Francisco for a few years, you learn a few things about the fall: First, the weather tends to be hotter and sunnier than the summer months. Second, you learn to avoid the area around the area around the Moscone Convention Center in late September and early October. That’s when the software giants Oracle and Salesforce hold their almost back-to-back annual conferences that draw thousands of software developers. The two compete to see who can throw the more epic parties complete with big name musical acts like Aerosmith (Oracle last year) and U2 (Salesforce this year.) But the time isn’t far off when another hot developer event may outdo them both (at least on the musical front) because it’s in the business of producing and promoting concerts. Consider the case of 40-year old Ticketmaster, the world’s largest vendor of concert and sports tickets. A unit of LiveNation, the $7 billion (2015 revenue) company that is the largest producer of live entertainment in the world, Ticketmaster has in the last year or so started acting like a software startup vying for the attention of third party developers. And it’s working. Earlier this year to its application programming interfaces (APIs). The move allowed partners like the concert-tracking app to sell concert tickets within the app. Other early partners include Facebook, Fox Sports and the music streaming service Tidal. This week Ticketmaster teamed up with the discount giant Costco on costcotickets.com. The site offers Ticketmaster’s huge inventory of event tickets — sports, concerts and theater — to Costco’s 83 million members. Ticketmaster typifies a growing set of older companies who have discovered that their futures depend on extending their reach into adjacent market segments, and that the best way to do that is by reaching out to third-parties and their developers. For Ticketmaster opening up its software platform has helped it address some of the long-standing problems that have always plagued the ticketing business, says Jared Smith Ticketmaster’s president for North America. For one thing, the best seats in the house often don’t sell for as high a price as they might because the people willing to pay a premium price don’t always know about them. Second, there’s a big advantage in catching a customer at the moment they learn their favorite band is coming to town, and making the buying experience easy. “There’s always been a universal hunt to make things easier and more contextual and to have your product in front of as many eyeballs as you can,” Smith says. “The open APIs help us widen our reach and build more seamless experiences.” Ticketmaster’s open API was the natural result of a series of less ambitious partnerships with Groupon and Broadway.com, Smith says. Groupon for instance regularly emails discounted tickets offers for Broadway shows and Major League Baseball games. The “Buy” links in those emails go back to Ticketmaster. As a practical matter anyone can get started using Ticketmaster’s API. Access is free and a developer can be up and running in less than a minute, Elshareef says. Active developers have gone from 250 at the start to north of 2,000, says Ismail Elshareef, Ticketmaster’s VP of Open Platform and Innovation. The company has far put on eight monthly “DevJam” events around the U.S. plus one in London. Others are planned for Washington D.C. on Oct. 1 and Berlin later this year. Tickmaster uses Apigee, the API-management platform to oversee and its APIs. (Apigee hosted its own Adapt or Die conference in San Francisco on Sept. 27, and Ticketmaster will be presenting.) Building test apps is free. But requests to Ticketmaster’s data are rate-limited. This ensures that before a developer deploys an app for production, they first have to contact Ticketmaster to ask for an increase in their quota. What’s coming in future versions of APIs? Smith says the company is looking to attack new market areas including sports and travel sites. “Strategically we’re going down some very specific paths and seeking partnerships,” he says. But there’s also new technology to explore like chat bots and AI agents to explore. Smith calls these “new surfaces.” “We don’t yet know where the big bets are going to be,” he says. “It may be artificial intelligence or chat bots or automated assistants. Whatever the next place to transact turns out to be, we want to be there.” Also down the road: A bigger presence for developers are Ticketmaster’s annual customer conferences. Chances are the concerts will probably be pretty good.
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FBI director warns that hackers have been ‘poking around’ voter registration systems
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Devin Coldewey
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The systems underlying our elections process are more important than ever this year, and the bad guys know it too. FBI director James Comey that “bad actors have been poking around” voter registration systems lately. “This is very different than the vote system in the United States, which is very, very hard for someone to hack into because it’s so clunky and dispersed,” he clarified, perhaps raising some eyebrows in the room. “It’s Mary and Fred putting a machine under the basketball hoop at the gym. Those things are not connected to the internet, but the voter registration systems are.” The FBI , saying that one state’s election board was compromised and others had seen multiple attempts. More activity has been observed since then. Comey did not specify who these “bad actors” might be, but he did mention there was “a variety of scanning activities,” something that indicates preparation for a more serious attack. “We are urging the states just to make sure that their deadbolts are thrown and their locks are on and to get the best information they can from DHS just to make sure their systems are secure,” Comey said.
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Facebook, Amazon, Google, IBM and Microsoft come together to create the Partnership on AI
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John Mannes
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The world’s largest technology companies hold the keys to some of the largest databases on our planet. Much like goods and coins before it, data is becoming an important currency for the modern world. The data’s value is rooted in its applications to artificial intelligence. Whichever company owns the data, effectively owns AI. Right now that means companies like Facebook, Amazon, Alphabet, IBM and Microsoft have a ton of power. In an act of self-governance, these five companies came together today to announce the launch of the new . The group is tasked with conducting research and promoting best practices. Practically, this means that the group of tech companies will come together frequently to discuss advancements in artificial intelligence. The group also opens up a formal structure for communication across company lines. It’s important to remember that on a day-to-day basis, these teams are in constant competition with each other to develop the best products and services powered by machine intelligence. Financial support will be coming from the initial tech companies that are members of the group, but in the future, membership and involvement is expected to increase. User activists, nonprofits, ethicists and other stakeholders will be joining the discussion in the coming weeks. “We want to involve people impacted by AI as well,” said Mustafa Suleyman, co-founder and head of applied AI at DeepMind, a subsidiary of Alphabet. The organizational structure has been designed to allow non-corporate groups to have equal leadership side-by-side with large tech companies. As of today’s launch, companies like Apple, Twitter, Intel and Baidu are missing from the group. Though Apple is said to be enthusiastic about the project, their absence is still notable because the company has fallen behind in artificial intelligence when compared to its rivals — many of which are part of this new group. The new organization really seems to be about promoting change by example. Rather than preach to the tech world, it wants to use a standard open license to publish research on topics, including ethics, inclusivity and privacy. “The power of AI is in the enterprise sector,” said Francesca Rossi, an AI ethics researcher at IBM Research. “For society at-large to get the benefits of AI, we first have to trust it.” The focus of the organization is a refreshing juxtaposition to more pop-culture discussions about the risks of artificial intelligence. While the jury is still out as to whether a singularity event could threaten mankind, we already face a long list of challenges in today’s world of AI. While computers are not at a point yet where they can take all of our jobs, they can amplify the negative tendencies that humans already possess. A biased world can result in biased data sets and, in turn, bias artificial intelligence frameworks. To combat this, companies like Microsoft have already formed AI ethics advisory boards. But, rather than override existing efforts, the new group augments projects already undertaken at individual companies and provides a forum for sharing valuable advice. The group plans to make discussions and minutes from meetings publicly available. Additional reporting done by Josh Constine.
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Some of Samsung’s washing machines are reportedly exploding now, too
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Brian Heater
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Probably not the kind of thing Samsung was hoping it would be dealing with in the wake of a , but here we are. And from the company’s media relations wing: It is important to note that Samsung customers have completed hundreds of millions of loads without incident since 2011. That message comes after the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission issued a warning to owners of specific top-loading washing machines manufactured by the electronics giant between March 2011 and April 2016, due to concerns over exploding units. The department pursued incidents filed by consumers in three U.S. states, including claims by a Texas woman that her washer “exploded with such ferocity that it penetrated the interior wall of her garage,” comparing the explosion to the sound of a bomb. The issue is believed to have been caused by “abnormal vibrations.” Samsung says that it is “in active discussions” with the CPSC. In the meantime, rather than issuing a recall along the lines of what the company issued with the Note, it is simply recommending that consumers just switch to the delicate cycle when dealing with bulky items, bedding and water-resistant material, as “[t]here have been no reported incidents when using this cycle.” The company is also whereby consumers can check to see if their own machines are potentially defective by entering a serial number. A suit filed in New Jersey, meanwhile, claims that the company has actively worked to destroy evidence of the problematic machines.
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Why have some of Silicon Valley’s top investors started investing in Latin America?
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Julie Ruvolo
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Latin America just might be the most overlooked emerging market on the planet. The venture dollars in Latin America can’t hold a candle to or China (compare China’s $11.8 billion in new VC funds for the first half of 2016, down 14 percent according the WSJ, to Latin America’s , and the region’s 600 million inhabitants get overlooked by investors who think that you need to reach a billion users to be a “real startup.” But with debut investments from Andreessen Horowitz (Colombia), Founders Fund and Sequoia Capital (Brazil) and QED (Mexico and Brazil), that appears to be changing. I spent the last couple of years about Latin American investments for TechCrunch, covering rounds in startups like , , and , and interviewing some of the leading local investors in the region, like KaszeK Ventures, founded by the wildly successful MercadoLibre team, and Redpoint e.Ventures, a joint venture between Redpoint and e.Ventures, obviously. Let me lay out the opportunity as local investors see it: The internet population is set to double from 300 million to 600 million. Half the population isn’t part of the banking system (and only 15 percent of Mexicans even have a credit card). And pretty much everyone is coming online . Also worth noting is that Brazil, with only half of its 200 million inhabitants online, is already the audience on every major social platform globally. And depending on you’re looking at, Brazilians spend more time online than any other population. (Bizarre to think it all with Orkut.) How about the venture data? VC investments have been steadily climbing over the past five years, and 2015 was a banner year, with deployed over 182 deals, back-to-back economic and political crises in Brazil, the region’s leading venture market in terms of both fundraising and investment dollars. And VC transactions in Latin America are up 46 percent year over year, according to from the Latin American Private Equity and Venture Capital Association ( ), a nonprofit supported by Omidyar Network (where I’m working). So for those of you who think there “isn’t much going on” south of the border, here are a few investment trends I’m tuning into: Just in 2016, we’ve seen Andreessen Horowitz make their first LatAm investment in , a Colombian grocery delivery service. Founders Fund also made their LatAm debut with investments in , a legal platform, and fintech startup . Nubank has raised over the past year from Founders Fund, Sequoia Capital (in their first Brazilian investment), Tiger Global, KaszeK Ventures and QED Investors, followed by a debt investment by Goldman Sachs earlier this year. Goldman also led a investment in Brazilian logistics startup CargoX this year, with participation from Valor Capital and Uber co-founder Oscar Salazar. In Mexico, Accel Partners and QED Investors have made their debut investments: Accel participated in a Series A in Mexican grocery shopping service Cornershop, led by ALLVP, one of the region’s most active VCs, and QED joined KaszeK, Quona Capital, Accion Frontier Inclusion Fund and Mexican firm Jaguar Ventures in an Series A in lending platform Konfio. Mexico also led the region in terms of deal count for the first time in 1H2016, with transactions (up 4.2X from 1H2015), largely stimulated by capital made available by government agencies Fondo de Fondos and the National Institute of the Entrepreneur (INADEM) over the last few years. (Brazil’s VC ecosystem had a similar jump-start with government funding from and ; also worth noting is that Susana Garcia-Robles at , the Multilateral Investment Fund, has personally led anchor investments in more than 70 funds in the region.) Fintech represents of IT investments (in terms of total dollars invested) in 2015, and of IT investments in 1H2016. In Mexico, in addition to Konfio, lending platform Kueski raised from CrunchFund, Rise Capital, Variv Capital and others (plus another in debt). In Brazil, the IFC led a Series C in GuiaBolso with KaszeK Ventures, Ribbit Capital and QED Investors. Interesting to note is that since half the region’s population is unbanked, pretty much every fintech startup is having a direct or inadvertent impact on financial inclusion. Brazil is the agribusiness market globally behind the U.S., but agtech is a massively underserved sector in LatAm, accounting for of venture investment in Latin America since 2011. That appears to be changing: Monsanto is investing in BR Startups, a Brazilian agtech fund managed by Microsoft in collaboration with Qualcomm Ventures. Qualcomm Ventures also launched a to get a drone on every farm in Brazil (there are over 2 million). And German pesticide giant BASF just launched . There isn’t much in the way of publicly available data on digital M&A transactions in LatAm (we’re working on it), but Movile appears to be the most active acquirer in the region right now. Fresh off a Series F, Movile subsidiary iFood, the region’s leading on-demand food delivery startup, SpoonRocket — their 15th acquisition in less than two years. And Rappido, Movile’s on-demand delivery and distribution service, is gaining traction in Mexico on the heels of a with 99Motos, their Brazilian competitor. With newly elected President Mauricio Macri in office, Argentina is organizing a series of structural changes to facilitate new company creation. Macri and National Secretary of Entrepreneurship Mariano Mayer just a package of laws to foster entrepreneurship and new company creation: Ley del Emprendedor would allow entrepreneurs to register and open a company online ; Ley de Sociedades de Beneficio de Interés Colectivo would be the region’s first legislation to define and recognize businesses with sustainable environmental or social impacts. There are also plans for the creation of 10 new funds to provide entrepreneurs access to capital (three will receive US$30 million each by year’s end), and legislation to allow crowdfunding. Similar legislative projects to encourage new company creation are also underway in Mexico City and Brazil.
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Better ingredients, better companies
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Shawn Carolan
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As an electrical engineering student at the University of Illinois, I had little money. I lived on ramen noodles freshman year and perpetually hunted for deals. I was overjoyed to find a pizza restaurant whose Tuesday-night special of two large cheese pies for $8 could provide a week of gourmet dinners. Papa John (a great entrepreneur) has a motto: “Better Ingredients. Better Pizza.” By using superior ingredients, he created a product that was the best amidst a sea of competitors. This analogy works in technology, as well. As better ingredient technologies arrive on the scene, they open the door for new, iconic companies to be formed that meet our needs in fundamentally better ways. Iconic companies massively shift behavior, yet the need for the shift isn’t always obvious. As humans, we typically accept the world we inherit. But as new ingredient technologies become available, new possibilities open up. Great entrepreneurs see the world from a different angle and take advantage of better ingredients to execute like crazy to craft superior products. The most iconic companies are actually those that transform the most familiar. Three iconic companies I’ve led investments in include , and . In none of these cases was Menlo Ventures sitting around yearning to watch movies over broadband, command our phones with our voice or avoid hailing taxis. Rather, we had been studying the ingredient technologies and, as we heard the entrepreneurs pitch, the opportunities felt both novel and compelling: A few other mobile-first greats that leveraged powerful new ingredients: The use of a few new ingredients on top of existing platforms allowed these entrepreneurs to provide step-functions in quality of life, time-to-value, usability and personalization that led to massive behavior shifts and billions in enterprise value creation. What seven ingredients will spice up the consumer products of tomorrow? Coming in the form of software libraries, semiconductors, sensors and know-how, there is an approachable list to consider in revolutionizing your market: Simply the fastest way for humans to communicate, Siri was Act One. , a more open platform coming soon from the Siri founders, will be Act Two. But others have come into the picture, like , the voice of Amazon’s Echo. Fellow owners know that it quickly becomes an integral part of daily life with the ability to launch music, search, shop and control smart-home products. As voice UIs appear in more products, consumers will quickly become intolerant of machines that cannot understand us. Shouldn’t your microwave understand “defrost this pound of beef.” Humans benefit greatly from complex pattern recognition (e.g. eat blueberries, not animal droppings) and software is starting to, as well. Google’s open-source library has been a major catalyst. We expect machine learning to make nearly all data-driven software easier and more personalized, but applications will vary widely. Consider , which learns art styles and applies them to your photos with just a tap. I’d love to train Mint on my categories in real time to make tax prep a snap. Put simply, reality augmentation adds to what you are already seeing or hearing, while virtual reality seeks to replace it. Pokémon Go has taken advantage of AR novelty to turn (many) quick bucks, but when the fad passes, companies like will allow real-time coaching, will make personal training affordable, kids will take amazing field trips with and somebody will come up with an Oculus/Vive killer app to justify the purchase: think virtual teleportation to those courtside seats or the front row of that concert. Google’s Instant Apps and iOS 10 iMessage extensions are examples of app functionality appearing everywhere, and the friction of using native platform resources like touch screen, mic, sensors and high res screens will go to nearly zero. ’s Kimoji keyboard is a hint of what’s coming, as users can now share selfie-like GIFs to portray an emotion or event rather than using words. Soon, credit card companies will send messages allowing you to pay the balance with a fingerprint. Computers “seeing” is a key ingredient in autonomous vehicles, a trillion-dollar market transformation coming soon ( saw it early). But vision comes in many forms, and chipsets by will enable startups like to offer playthings for your feline friends, and more. I’m excited to have more time playing and less time collecting tennis balls when a little bot can do the running for me. Changing behavior is challenging, but doing so can create a lot of value. Wearables have the potential to give in-the-moment feedback to change ingrained patterns. Industries ripe for innovation include prescription compliance ( ) and enhanced treatment ( ), physical activity ( ), posture (Lumo Back), breathing ( ) and athletic form ( ). As more sensors proliferate and connections are ubiquitous, we’ll have smarter houses that adapt to our needs, healthier bodies and better sleep. With the cost of human genome sequencing now within personal budgets, it’s fascinating to see the opportunities emerging to help couples have healthier babies, rip viruses out of cells, detect cancer via DNA mutations, prescribe drugs more precisely based on the patient, optimize performance of microbes and more. I’m hoping and praying for blood tests that can detect cancer and CRISPR treatments that can kill the mutations before patients miss a beat. It’s likely that products being worked on this very day, leveraging these new ingredients, are about to redefine markets. For entrepreneurs looking to create the next iconic companies, think like The Papa and see if better ingredients can help you stand apart.
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Facebook’s F8 2017 conference outgrows SF, hits San Jose April 18th-19th
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Josh Constine
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Facebook couldn’t fit all the developers for its into San Francisco’s Fort Mason any more, so at San Jose’s McEnery Convention Center on April 18th and 19th, 2017. Registration hasn’t started yet but will follow the same rules as last year, which you’ll want to follow if you’re trying to get a seat as it always sells out quickly. Luckily it’s not just some first-come, first-serve chaos, but you can . Facebook will personally invite partners, and everyone else will have to apply during the registration period, providing an explanation about why they want to go and why they should be there. Those selected will be expected to buy a ticket, which last year cost $595, about one-third the price of an Apple WWDC ticket. The now-annual conference will feature two days of keynotes, typically structured with CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s big talk and lots of core Facebook product news the first day, and deep dives into Facebook’s more futuristic 10-year plan technologies, like VR and internet connectivity, on the second day. There will be more than 45 sessions where developers can learn about how to take advantage of Facebook’s existing platforms and the new stuff it announces. While Facebook frequently holds smaller press events and consumer product launches, it typically reserves big developer announcements for F8. Facebook was supposed to hold one of those press event today, but instead cancelled the press meeting and told us the news it was going to announce. Cross-platform Analytics For Apps is now adding support for web measurement and cross-platform metrics. It says “ of people who own two devices switch between them to complete tasks or activities, and 77% of people who have three or more devices do the same.” That’s why developers will be able to understand user behavior across devices. There are also new features that let developers integrate offline information about customers, such as demographics, CRM data and profile information from a developer’s app. New metrics will help developers predict which content will go viral, and advertisers can target users who shared something from their website with a revamped . Expect more analytics features at F8 2017. It’s too far out to tell what Facebook will launch at its 2017 conference, but here’s a quick run-down of the biggest announcements from all the previous F8s: 2007 – The Facebook Platform for building apps and games 2008 – Facebook Connect for logging in to other websites with your Facebook credentials 2010 – Facebook’s Social Plugins, including the Like button for sharing from external websites 2011 – The Facebook Timeline profile and the Open Graph platform for auto-sharing from apps – Facebook Audience Network mobile ad network for helping developers monetize – The Facebook Messenger Platform for building lightweight content-sharing chat apps – The Facebook Messenger Bot Platform for building conversational chatbot interfaces The 2017 plan should come into focus early next year, but here are two big opportunities for Facebook on the developer front. It’s been rebuilding its games platform with . Facebook could announce significant new capabilities for game developers, from ways to port games from other platforms to analytics to monetization to live streaming gameplay footage. to become a much more prevalent computing interface now that speech recognition has improved and wearable devices like wireless earbuds are proliferating. Facebook voice and chat interface development platform Wit.ai last year and could possibly reveal new voice controls for Facebook and easy ways for developers to build these capabilities into its new apps.
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Aetna will help cover the cost of customers’ Apple Watches
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Brian Heater
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Aetna just in a big way. The healthcare provider announced a number of different iOS-only apps aimed at quantifying wellness and streamlining the healthcare management process that are set to arrive early next year. It’s also investing a ton in the Apple Watch, providing the wearable for all of its 50,000 or so employees (who are, naturally, enrolled in its own healthcare offerings) and offering a “significant” subsidy for customers during an upcoming enrollment period. The watch will be tied into Aetna’s wellness reimbursement plan, offering cash back based on customer activity levels. The move makes Aetna the first major healthcare provider to offer a deal on this scale. Apple, naturally, is pleased. Here’s Tim Cook on the deal: “Aetna’s new initiatives will be a powerful force toward creating better customer experiences in health care, and we look forward to working with Aetna to make them successful.” The news follows a doubling-down on health for Apple, including the addition of water resistance and built-in GPS on the , aimed at helping the company step up its fitness tracking game. And last month, it was revealed that the company to further bolster is health-tracking capabilities.
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Google’s home delivery service, Google Express, hits New England
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Sarah Perez
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Google today announced an expansion of its home delivery shopping service , which is now available across a large part of the East Coast. The service lets online shoppers order consumer products like electronics, clothing, health and beauty items, home décor and even dry good groceries, from either the web or a dedicated mobile app. With the expansion, Google Express will reach more than a dozen eastern states, or roughly 70 million more people, says Google. Starting today, Google Express has become available in the following states: Delaware, Maryland, New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania, Virginia, West Virginia, Connecticut, Massachusetts, Maine, New Hampshire, Rhode Island and Vermont. Shoppers in those regions will be able to order from a variety of retailers, including Costco, Kohl’s, L’Occitane, PetSmart, Stop & Shop / Giant Food (depending on city) Sur La Table, Ulta Beauty, Payless, Adorama, Road Runner, Vitamin Shoppe, Whole Foods, TRU/BRU and Paragon. In metro areas, shoppers can place orders for same-day delivery, while in more suburban and rural regions, the turnaround time will instead be next-day or two-day delivery. This puts Google in more direct competition with Amazon, whose Prime Now service offers same-day delivery in major cities across the U.S., while its Prime membership program offers two-day delivery on millions of items for anyone, whether an urban dweller or not. However, Google Express will no longer bring you fresh groceries, like milk, fruits, veggies or other refrigerated or frozen items. As part of a shift in strategy ahead of this expansion, . That means Google Express ceased to rival competitors like AmazonFresh, Instacart or Peapod, and instead will focus on the part of the business that’s easier to scale. The move also comes at a time when more shoppers are turning to Amazon first — a sea change Google is steadily trying to fight. , more than half (55 percent) of U.S. online consumers now begin their product searches directly on Amazon, up from 44 percent last year. Search engines like Google and Yahoo, meanwhile, saw declines. Google, for example, went from 34 percent to 28 percent year-over-year in terms of web users who began their shopping searches on its site. Google Express generates revenue by charging delivery fees of $4.99 for non-members, but subscribers can waive those fees by paying $95 per year — that’s roughly in line with the cost of a Prime membership. Plus, shoppers also have to abide by store minimums — which are typically $15 but can be as high as $35 — or risk paying additional fees. Google also earns revenue by collecting a percentage of each order. Deliveries, meanwhile, are handled by courier and delivery services. As of today, Google Express is available to around 75 percent of the continental U.S., the company tells TechCrunch. But the size of the market doesn’t indicate how many people know of and use Google Express for their shopping. Google declined to share revenue details, information on the number of deliveries it has processed or any other metrics that offer insight into the service’s traction and growth.
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Skymind raises $3M to bring its Java deep-learning library to the masses
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John Mannes
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, along with tools for implementation, today closed $3 million in financing from , , , , and . Skymind was previously part of Y Combinator’s Winter 2016 batch and has taken money from Joe Montana’s and a number of other prominent angels. Chris Nicholson, the company’s co-founder and CEO, decided to start the company after he noticed the steady stream of deep-learning researchers leaving the halls of academia for the six- and seven-figure salaries of large tech companies. With human capital becoming a finite resource, the challenge quickly became about helping companies leverage existing resources to play in the world of deep learning. Eighty percent of the world’s programmers are versed in Java programming. Nicholson, and his co-founder Adam Gibson, began to question whether it would be possible to build a library that would let those developers put their skills to work on AI challenges. This idea became Deeplearning4j, and it remains the core of Skymind. Nicholson describes his company as the Red Hat of deep-learning. , a company that produces open-source software for the enterprise community, has grown to become an over $14 billion company. For startups that produce software for the Fortune 100, the pressure to create in open-source has never been higher. Not only does open-source allow companies to stay competitive, it allows the startups producing the technologies to hire the best engineers. Skymind employs 15 people, but they are not all centralized in a single opulent Palo Alto or SoMa headquarters like most startups these days. Instead, members of the team operate out of Japan, South Korea and Australia. Many of these engineers came directly from the Skymind open-source community, where they were working on their own challenges with the library. Of course, the company does have a small SoMa headquarters, but it’s not nearly as integral to the core business. $42 billion French telecom Orange SA is already using Skymind and its Skymind Intelligence Layer (SKIL) to build and deploy production code for deep-learning projects. SKIL facilitates the digital interactions between Skymind and existing tools like Hadoop. Nicholson also notes interest from medium-size companies in traditional data-rich sectors like financial services and e-commerce. One sector that will not be leveraging Skymind is the top layer of large tech companies that have poured billions of dollars into developing their own open-source technologies. Google’s TensorFlow, Amazon’s DSSTNE and Baidu’s Paddle have all found their way into a number of external applications. Importantly, however, none of these tools are built for Java. Skymind libraries were downloaded 22 thousand times last month, and that number is growing at 17 percent month over month. Nicholson wants the company to continue to develop tools for data scientists. These tools could eventually include packages to better democratize access to reinforcement learning, a categorization of reward-based machine learning, for existing businesses. Other investors in the party round include Muse’s Matthew Bellamy, Hemi Ventures, JPush’s Chris Lo, Wei Guo, Rising Tide Fund, Ullas Naik’s Streamlined Ventures, Soma Capital, Lookout’s Kevin Mahaffey, GMO Venture Partners, FundersClub, S2 Capital, former head of Google search Amit Singhal and Google News creator Krishna Bharat.
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A robot learns to cope with the loss of an eye in an experiment carried out on the ISS
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Devin Coldewey
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Humans are pretty good at ballparking distances, even with one eye closed — but it turns out computer vision systems have a hard time with it. Researchers hope to fix that, or at least make robots a little more robust, by teaching them to navigate a space — in zero gravity, to boot. The reason we’re so good at it is that we’ve built up a huge library of knowledge about the objects and spaces we tend to inhabit: trees are about this big, and don’t grow indoors; TVs are flat and about this big, and tend to be near walls; doors are about this big and you can see the next room through them; etc, etc. It’s all very elementary to us but we often forget how long it took us to learn all that stuff (and how easy it is to unlearn when one is tired or drunk). Computer vision systems tend to rely solely on the facts: the depth information from stereo cameras, usually, complemented by a limited object-recognition engine that can pick out a box from the table it’s sitting on, or a knob from the door itself. But that assumes everything is working properly. What if one of the cameras is taken out of commission by a system error or a leaf blowing onto it? How will it safely navigate if it relies on having both 100 percent of the time? This applies not just to random robots, but to self-driving cars and other devices. An experiment backed by the European Space Agency and Delft University of Technology investigates the possibility of robots teaching themselves how to get around their environment, effectively, with one eye closed. “It is a mathematical impossibility to extract distances to objects from one single image, if the object has not been encountered before,” said Delft’s Guido de Croon in an ESA news release. “But if we recognize something to be a car, then we know its physical characteristics, and we can use that information to estimate its distance from us. A similar logic is what we wanted the drone to learn during our experiment.” The experiment took place on the International Space Station. They equipped a SPHERES (Synchronized Position Hold Engage and Reorient Experimental Satellites, essentially round, multi-purpose drones that work in microgravity) with stereo cameras, and had it roam around the Japanese ISS module. It took measurements with both “eyes,” but also ran a machine-learning task using just one, attempting to keep track of the module’s features and establish distances. Here’s the raw feed from one of the runs: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6mk0om2TPTo For instance, it would see with the stereo cameras that a hatch was 4 feet away and 2 feet wide — and at the same time, the single-camera stream would attempt to associate the image it saw with that information — a certain shape, growing larger at a certain rate, that sort of thing. The researchers could only dedicate a little time to the experiment — it has to be run by astronauts, after all, and they’re busy people — and the initial run was a mixed bag with several technical difficulties. But the technique has promise, and the single-camera estimate of distance got to be pretty good, though not good enough to navigate by just yet. They presented their findings today at the International Aeronautical Conference; you can .
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The 12 startups making their case at ERA Demo Day
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Stefan Etienne
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F They also pair participating startups with an industry-relevant mentor to help bring the startup to market. This year, the eleven of the twelve startups . One such notable alumni of the program is , a software company that assists clients with managing complaints — currently, they assist Burj Khalifia building management with customer complaints. This year, the startups range everywhere from B2B marketplace offerings, a cybersecurity platform and yes, even a connected dog house. Here’s the rundown on each company and what they’re all about. A DevOps (developmental operations) platform, that is designed to help software developers build, rollout and manage their containers through the cloud. is about making it easier for programmers at a company to build out and maintain new programs and projects, essentially becoming single-unit powerhouses. Caylent’s pipeline includes testing, building and deploying applications, including server management. Partnered with Docker for their container technology, thus enabling 1-click deployments of new code, monitoring and automated testing — turning a company programmer into a DevOps machine. Microsoft was also noted during their presentation as having invested cloud infrastructure in Caylent, adding to their potential appeal as a go-to solution in the field. An enterprise cybersecurity platform for secure communications . Aimed to target the increasing need for secured team communication and file sharing, suited for finance, health, legal and government — and yes, even a publication like . is looking for Slack’s lunch, essentially. Every other week or so, , and personal information is compromised. ClearChat wants to end that practice, while also being a better communication platform for teams who want to keep what they’re communicating about private and secure. A B2B marketplace that aims to go after the antiquated international ocean freight industry. , with the end-goal to not only save on shipping costs, but become the de factor way of doing shipping at scale. Currently, some of their initial clients that range from New York City to Dubai, so they’ve covered a few seas and oceans, already. Lead by Fauad Shariff, Petere Miner and Salima Fassell, the trio are dead-set on bringing new life to the shipping container industry by not only finding the most cost-effective offers for clients, but doing it through the internet — which is fresh, for an industry that is mostly reliant on fax machines and phone calls. Just how many clients who think they’re the right approach to this dilemma remains to be seen. We had these guys at Disrupt NY this year, but here’s the rundown: secure, temperature controlled dog parking, by the minute. Not particularly illuminating. is allowing stores to have a secure dog house on their premises, specifically Dog Parker’s. The business perspective is that retail locations will attract dog owners who otherwise wouldn’t be allowed within the store, usually due to health regulations, and thus will drive further drive business, no matter the industry. Meanwhile, the real idea is that dog owners will trust Dog Parker with the life and security of their dog, by locking it in the secured, anti-bacterial and temperate-controlled housing, which can be reserved in advance via an app, should the owner know they’re going to be in a certain area. Problem is, not one of my German Shepherds would ever fit in it. A startup founded by David Roger and Chris Benedict, in the 21st century, for both adult millennials and today’s children. Selling eye glasses aimed towards protecting the eyes from the blue light spectrum that causes eye strain and glare of screens (tech which is eerily similar to ), including preventing eye strain, which in turn is said to cause dry eyes and ultimately, poor sleep. After all, everyone stares at screens for hours and Felix Gray’s argument is that by providing an affordable solution for reducing eye strain for all of us who stare at screens for hours. Felix Gray glasses cost $95 with blue light filter or $75 without. Problem is, this is a temporary solution to a problem that may very well be fixed from the hardware, not optical, end. Founded by Catie Cole, Dae Lim and Harry Lee, . Its aim is to carry the marketing influence of beverage brands to consumers, through an iOS app. If you like Absolut vodka, but never drink it, then Absolut could like their vodka. Brands make use of the app by targeting a specific spot (a bar) for drinkers. Drinkers (the user), make use of the app on their end by specifying a drink they’re in the mood for, in a location of the user’s choosing It’s through this connection that beverage brands can target the user and provide the drink of choice — on the house, as part of a tasting. It doesn’t take long to realize that people like to have free drinks, and might even be more predisposed towards a brand that got them to try a beverage for free, that also turned out to be to their tastes. Bullet Bourbon and Ketel One Vodka are two of FROTH’s new partners, with plans for non-alcoholic brands to join the app later this year. InkHunter is an augmented reality platform that is aimed towards improving mobile apps overall, since AR is noted to be slow, or inconsistent on mobile. Founded by Oleksandra Rohachova and Pavlo Razumovskyi, — thus fulfilling one such user-case of their mark-based augmented reality technology. By drawing a smiley face where the tattoo is desired on the body, the inkHunter app will recognize the doodle and transform it to a tattoo on-screen, using AR. So far, inkHunter has scored more than 2.5 million App Store downloads. In their presentation, their hope is to go beyond the tattoo, and make use of their AR tech within the e-commerce, health and gaming industries. A data science-driven health startup, founded by Arif Sorathia and Brett Adelman, for sufferers of chronic and autoimmune conditions, like lupus. is an app that combines peer relationships, medication/side effect tracking and education materials, the user will enter their prescribed medications, experienced symptoms and some required personal info (like age and gender). Karate Health’s end-goal to educate patients about their conditions, while also giving health care providers a more cost-effective way of learning about their patients’ conditions and symptoms, to better improve research and clincial trials. In terms of being viable, Karate Health noted in its presentation that it’s on track to helping more than 1,500 suffers of lupus, and soon will expand its expertise to helping those with rheumatoid arthritis (RA). Founded by Mike Hartman, . An end-to-end deal and loan management system, it’s aimed towards modernizing an industry that hasn’t been up-to-date ever since the ’08 financial crisis. Koa’s current and future clients get to manage, analyze and execute their loan investments using a online control panel, from a computer, naturally. Koa’s claim to relevance is that Koa’s out-of-the-box software implementation allows the user to benefit from cost savings and increased profits. Not terribly exciting at first glance, but with the potential increase of clients, Koa’s ultimate vision is to allow trades between clients — and that may prove useful. , powered by AI and founded by Sean Lanning. By taking a picture or uploading a PDF, a teacher (or parent) can create assignments, and adapt those assignments to the individual needs of their students. Collaboration tools exist so that multiple teachers (or parents) can build better, more enriching assignments, ultimately competing with the staple education textbook publishers. Pairprep’s argument is that a team of 50,000 algebra teachers can produce better assignments for students than a few specialists at heavy-hitters like Pearson and McGraw-Hill. With 358,000 users, PairPrep thinks it has the strength and knowledge (from its library of teachers) to disrupt that industry. At first, teachers don’t pay for the basic features of the software, with the goal of getting schools to pay for the premium features (like individualized help for students) on their behalf. Founded by Houtan Fanisalek and Kenneth Kruger, . Their argument is using machine learning to improve the tracking from wearables like the Apple Watch and Moto 360 smartwatches. Thankfully, this isn’t about producing new hardware, but improving the sensors in existing wearables. SensorKit is the brains behind an app built by the same folks called , available for Android and iOS, which uses the platform to automatically detect user’s actions including bench presses, squats, rows counting reps, set and resting times — all coached to the user, using auditory feedback. Previously just an iPhone app, SensorKit will take advantage of the newly-unlocked sensors in the Apple Watch, so YouMove will launch on the Apple Watch, come October 7th. Co-founded by Julien Newman, . Gathering public sentiment data manually from pollsters and sign-up forms is a chore, so Turnout.ai scans those forms and types them into PDFs and searchable data. A “grassroots company with a grassroots app”, a pollster takes a picture of the lists and collected data, where Turnout.ai digitizes the data and can email supporters regarding the cause you have, which was outlined when signing-up. The first client added to Turnout.ai’s roster is Uber, which uses only the analytics engine (not the whole app) to find qualitative data from the data quantified by Turnout.ai’s analytics, thus in some ways avoid public backlash. Yes, in essence they’re mining conversations to assist companies and personal agendas — take that as you may.
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LoftSmart raises $1.7 million for its local rental marketplace for college towns
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Jonathan Shieber
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My first home-way-from-home was a room in a house with an unrepeatable nickname on West College St. in Oberlin, OH. I lived with 8 other people in a two-story, rambling warren filled with rooms and roomlets that had been created over the years to shelter increasing numbers of people in the same finite amount of space. While increasing numbers of college students are choosing the manicured life of professionally managed, newly constructed housing units, some people may still want the “college experience” of a crappy room in a run-down house with what real estate agents call “character”. Well, now there’s a service for that. New York-based has raised $1.7 million to create a Yelp-like review system and marketplace for students to find and lease local rentals in college towns across America. The investment was led by Corigin Ventures (a real estate-focused venture fund) and included additional money from Expansion Venture Capital, Full Tilt Capital, Metaprop NYC, and a number of individual investors (chiefly Jaffray Woodriff, who made a significant contribution to the round). A graduate of the AngelPad accelerator program, LoftSmart was founded by Sam Bernstein and Sundeep Kumar. The company grew out of Bernstein’s experiences at the University of Virginia and his co-founder’s experience living and working in Austin. The two created what they call a “Yelp for real estate” in their local markets. Now, with the new capital and a refined strategy, Kumar and Bernstein are reaching out to local property managers to create a leasing system that can be layered on top of their service. Initially, they’re reaching out to student housing developers with a way for them to more easily process and approve rental applications. But Bernstein says he has bigger goals. He’d like to unify the fragmented market for college rentals in the U.S., a market that Bernstein estimates to be several billion dollars. “We’re doing what TripAdvisor did to the hotel market 10 years ago,” Bernstein said in a statement. Currently the company’s services are available for housing markets across Texas and in Ann Arbor, Mich.; Amherst, Mass.; Berkeley, Ca.; Columbia, S.C.; Charlottesville, Va.; and Los Angeles.
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In the aftermath of Italy’s quake, tech supported relief efforts
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Marcello Mari
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On August 24th, a warm summer night, all of Europe was shaken when an earthquake measuring 6.2 on the moment magnitude scale, hit central Italy. “The town [Amatrice] doesn’t exist anymore…..it’s all gone,” said Sergio Pirozzi, mayor of the small town of Amatrice during an interview immediately after the tragedy. More than 290 people died, and dozens more are still missing. As an Italian expat in the UK I felt both extremely close to the population hit by the tragedy and quite powerless. I started to look online for ways to help my fellow citizens and I was glad to find out that many initiatives have been put in place. “ ” (A Help Now) is a crowdfounding campaign started to collect money to support the victims and the reconstructions of the areas hit by the earthquake. As of now, the campaign has raised almost $500,000. “We are very proud of this result and the level of solidarity expressed during this campaign. Donations came from all over the world and we are very grateful for this. Many were asking for a way to donate from abroad without having to pay banks the transfer fee, hence the idea of a crowdfounding campaign,” said Claudio Bedino, founder of Starteed — the company that provides the technology behind the platform. According to the organizers, around 15% of the money came from foreign countries with US making the biggest single donation with $5,000 from a donor in NY. Together with Starteed, the campaign was promoted by TIM, a telecom company, Corriere Della Sera, Italy’s leading daily newspaper and LA7 one of the country most influential TV network. This the first time that a crowdfounding campaign in Italy has been initiated to support victims of a natural catastrophe. Mark Zuckerberg made a controversial donation while visiting Italy for a friend’s wedding (Spotify’s CEO, Daniel EK). Facebook CEO’s donated $500,000 to the Italian Red Cross…in Facebook ads. While many criticized the donation for being not real money and, after all, it’s not going to cost Facebook nor Zuckerberg anything, others saw the real opportunity. “If this money is spent wisely and strategically, then they could potentially be turned into donations worth several millions of Euros,” says Alessandro Sportelli author of “La pubblicità su Facebook – solo i numeri che contano” a book on Facebook advertising. When questioned by the audience during his speech at LUISS University in Rome, Zuckerberg also pointed out that Facebook have done a lot to help families and friends of those hit by the tragedy. “We ran a “Safety Check” the day of the earthquake and […] has been one of the most successful we’ve ever seen across the world,” Zuckerberg was quoted as saying. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg speaks at the company’s headquarters in Menlo Park, Calif., Thursday, April 4, 2013. (AP Photo/Marcio Jose Sanchez) Not everyone donated, but people from all over the world expressed their solidarity through social media. In particular, Blogmeter, a social media monitoring company, registered in the first two days over 2.7million messages, 1.4 of which were in a foreign language, while the remaining 1.3 were in Italian. “This is the first time that regular people arrived before the institutions. Thanks to the hashtag #terremoto (earthquake), the news spread really fast since the early morning, while institutional accounts arrived only later,” said Vincenzo Cosenza of Blogmeter. Other popular hashtags used by the international community to express solidarity and support have been #prayforitaly, with over 450.000 messages, and #italyearthquake registering more 150.000 tweets. The Italian tech community also reacted quite quickly. A network of civic hackers, supported by ActionAid Italy, put together an initiative called “ ” starting from a Facebook group. The network used Telegram to collect and spread vital information, including videos, images and emergency request. “When emergency units were in need of connectivity cables, we immediately sent the request to the group and in less then an hour we manage to have everything they needed” tells Matteo Tempestini co-founder of the initiative together with Matteo Fortini. Unlike previous natural disasters, this time the overall telecommunication system never got disrupted. “There were moments in which some network went down. Thanks to our group of hacktivists, we got hold of the people in charge of that particular network and manage to get it restored,” said Tempestini. Cristian Quintili of ActionAid has been one of the first to be on the ground “The help we received from the hacktivists has been absolutely fundamental. We worked closely together to fill the gap of information due to the emergency and their network help us save several lives,” Quintili said. On a similar note “ ” (Emergency24), a “social network” for emergency management founded in 2012, connected the entire population affected by emergency, including citizens in need of information. Nontechnical people helped with communications as well, with organizations like The Italian Community of Open Street Maps updating their maps in real-time using satellite images and Waze to inform the community on transportation issues. Furthermore, the Italian “Protezione Civile” — the public body responsible to bring immediate help in case of emergency — immediately announced that they needed PC, tablets and smartphones to keep the communication going rather than money. “Progetto Nuova Vita” (Project new life) manage to collect over 100 devices to donate for the emergency. Thanks to the Internet, and all the initiatives to gather support, Italy realized the huge potential of new technologies to collect more than just money. Social media and new crowdfunding platforms worked as a tool to spread vital information and gain international support. The Italian network of civic hackers demonstrated that the help needed during such a huge crisis can come from people with skills that are not traditionally connected with natural disasters. Everyone can help, and help can come in ways that have never been taken in consideration before.
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How smart materials will literally reshape the world around us
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Max Moruzzi
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Over the past few years, the Internet of Things (IoT) has been the white-hot center of a flurry of activity. Startups that create embedded sensors for physical things have been snapped up by larger companies at a rapid pace, with deals for IoT startups totaling more than $30 billion in the past four years. The IoT may well be The Next Big Thing, but maybe the attention sensors is misplaced… What if we didn’t even need embedded sensors to allow things to gather data about their surrounding environment? What if material could be a sensor in and of itself? Sentient might sound like the stuff of sci-fi, but it’s quickly becoming a reality. A new generation of is being developed that can sense temperature, pressure, impact and other variables — completely removing the need for sensors. Not only can these capture and relay data to the cloud, they also can reconfigure themselves on-the-fly to react to changing environmental conditions. It’s as if are becoming not just , but “alive” — and it change the way things are designed and used in startling ways. How did we arrive here? Design and engineering used to focus on that behaved isotropically — which is to say, uniformly and predictably. In the isotropic age, you would create a design and then assign a material to carry out a specific role in that design. What if, however, you allowed to determine design, rather than vice versa? We see this in nature all the time. A seed, for example, works together with a specific environment to create a tree. This is an example of anisotropic in action. Unlike isotropic , their behavior isn’t predetermined, so their performance can be tailored to their environment. Welcome to the anisotropic age of design. Imagine an airplane skin that self-heals to remove dings and dents, thereby maintaining optimal aerodynamics. In the isotropic age that’d be virtually impossible to design — but in the anisotropic age, it becomes a possibility. Here’s how it would work: An airplane component (like the wing) is made out of a composite material that has been coated with a thin layer of nanosensors. This coating serves as a “nervous system,” allowing the component to “sense” everything that is happening it — pressure, temperature and so on. When the wing’s nervous system senses damage, it sends a signal to microspheres of uncured material within the nanocrystal coating. This signal instructs the microspheres to release their contents in the damaged area and then start curing, much like putting glue on a crack and letting it harden. Airbus is already doing important research in this area at the University of Bristol’s , moving closer to an aviation industry shaped by . The automotive industry, meanwhile, can use to manufacture cars that not only sense damage and self-heal, but also collect data about performance that can be fed back into the design and engineering process. The project — which brings technology partners together with a team of automotive enthusiasts in Southern California — is out to design the first car in history built with and engineered using artificial intelligence. In another example, Paulo Gameiro, coordinator of the EU-funded project and R&D manager for the Portuguese automotive textiles supplier Borgstena, is developing a prototype seat and seatbelt that uses textiles with built-in sensors to detect a driver’s heart and breathing rates, so it can alert drivers to tell-tale signs of drowsiness. Beyond transportation, more opportunities await in the construction and civil engineering fields, where can greatly assist with structural health monitoring. Today, the has hundreds of roads, bridges and other pieces of infrastructure that are slowly falling apart because of wear and tear and exposure to the elements. More often than not, . But what if you could build these structures out of “ concrete”? The “nervous system” within the concrete could constantly monitor and assess the status of the infrastructure and initiate self-repair as soon as any damage was sustained. There is a major project currently underway at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), called , that aims to the construction industry with exactly these types of advanced composite . The researchers at MIT are also hard at work at the newly formed . Their goal is to come up with a new generation of fabrics and fibers that have the ability to see, hear and sense their surroundings; communicate; store and convert energy; monitor health; control temperature; and change their color. These functional fabrics mean that clothes won’t necessarily just be clothes anymore. They can be agents of health and well-being, serving as noninvasive ways to monitor body temperature or to analyze sweat for the presence of various elements. They can be portable power sources, capturing energy from outside sources like the sun and retaining that energy. They even can be used by soldiers to adapt to different environments more quickly and efficiently. And if you accidentally rip a hole in your garment? Naturally, the nanosensors within the fabric engage a self-repair process to patch things up — in the exact same way the airplane wing and the concrete healed themselves. This is no Hollywood movie — this is reality, and a clear indicator of how quickly are coming along. These have an increasingly important role to play in shaping the — whether that’s airplanes and infrastructure or the clothes on our backs. By creating things that can not only capture data about their environment, but also adjust their performance based on that data, are starting to play an active role in design. This is the potential of , and it’s one of the keys to creating a better-designed .
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Brazil’s tech-sector bright spots beckon as it begins to emerge from long economic crisis
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Romero Rodrigues
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Brazil showed off its cultural brilliance, spirit and national pride on a grand stage during the recent Olympic Games in Rio. Despite a prolonged macroeconomic crisis, the world’s ninth largest economy is showing positive signs that it may roar back as an investment magnet and innovation powerhouse — especially driven by fast-growing tech sectors that have continued to deliver growth rates of up to in the face of overall disappointing GDP data. Just days after the Olympics closed in Brazil, the country has refocused its efforts to speed past its political scandals that hinder investor confidence in the future of Latin America’s biggest economy. The final decision to impeach former Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff gave many a sigh of relief from the political power struggle that’s consumed the nation for far too long. With only two months into President Michel Temer’s term, he’s been a “big hit with investors,” according to a published in late July. The country’s benchmark equity index has risen about 60 percent this year, and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) reports that consumer and business confidence seems to have bottomed out. A Morgan Stanley study released in mid-summer indicates that investor confidence and interest in emerging markets like Brazil is on the rise — especially in the wake of the uncertainty and economic fallout following the Brexit referendum vote. In a story about the study, reports that the IMF “says confidence in the Brazilian economy is slowly reawakening” and the organization has forecast positive growth for Brazil during 2017. , a Silicon Valley-based not-for-profit organization dedicated to bringing together the Brazilian-American ecosystem, hosted its at the Googleplex in Mountain View on September 16. The event attracts entrepreneurs, tech executives, investors, scholars, government representatives and private-sector leaders. from companies like Alibaba, Alphabet, Instagram/Facebook, Silicon Valley Bank, Stripe and Uber presented, and the conference’s main session theme was: “Navigating uncertainty: Meet Brazilians who are building solid businesses while riding the crisis.” In spite of the country’s downturn, tech spending in Brazil is rising and entrepreneurship is flourishing. and a more mature ecosystem is further boosting the prospects for the country’s economic engine to rev back up again, driven by technology sector innovation. Five of the hottest tech sectors in Brazil right now are: agritech meets IoT (now emerging, edtech, fintech, healthtech and marketing tech. Below are some of the outstanding companies that are being nourished and built in Brazil today, and why the five tech sectors they operate in promise rapid growth and strong investor returns. Brazil is a major agricultural powerhouse. It helps feed the world. The sector’s shown continued strong growth over the past few years. Brazil ranks among the world’s five largest agricultural producers and exporters. During the summer, Microsoft and U.S. biotech company Monsanto announced a new partnership to invest in agricultural technology startups in Brazil. Qualcomm is also investing in that fund. Some local VC Funds are getting more specialized in the space, as well. Brazil startups in the agritech space are pioneering new approaches with commercial IoT sensors, mobile technology, big data and biotech R&D to improve crop yields, increase profits and prove sustainable practices for global retail brands. Some of the agritech sector’s most promising innovators include: The Brazilian government has made improvement of the country’s education system a top priority, and the edtech industry has been booming as a result. Many startups are adapting tools already tested in other countries and designing them to suit Brazil’s cultural norms and needs. A key benefit to improving education is increasing the quality and readiness of the country’s workforce as Brazil’s economy improves and more jobs are created in the process. Some of the edtech sector’s most promising innovators include: Brazil’s banking and financial services systems have become quite sophisticated, one of the unexpected outcomes from the 500 percent average inflation per year during the 1990s. However, the market is very concentrated. Almost 80 percent of the two trillion dollars in deposits are concentrated in only five banks, two of them state-owned. The sector has been mired in paperwork, regulations and bureaucracy, which has helped lead to expensive credit for consumers and businesses. For instance, bank loans are a complicated and time-consuming process. Many consumers applying for loans on average pay eight to nine times the interest amount they should because those loans aren’t secured, which is a common practice in the U.S. and other regions. The emergence of new fintech startups in the country is driving more transparency, speed, automation, mobile access/management and customer self-service to the country’s financial services sector. Some of the fintech sector’s most promising innovators include: Brazil is among the world’s fifth most populous countries and its rapidly growing middle class is demanding even more high-end healthcare. A higher life expectancy and its “baby boomer” population is driving more healthcare demand. Medical technology is advancing at a rapid pace, making healthtech a leading investment sector. According to a , VCs invested $12.1 billion in 969 deals in the first quarter of 2016; the software industry received the most investment dollars. The second highest investment amount went to the life sciences sector. A number of Brazilian startups have emerged to address a big healthtech opportunity. Some of the healthtech sector’s most promising innovators include: Similar to the U.S. market, the opportunity for marketing tech is growing, while adtech’s prospects are still more challenging. As opposed to adtech’s focus on the automation and targeting of advertising across various media channels, a majority of marketing tech startups aim to develop and sell software, data analysis and online platforms — most frequently on a subscription basis (SaaS). Another emerging niche is a set of innovators focused on gathering more intelligence from IoT sensors and apps in physical locations such as retail stories, hotels, airports and other travel hubs and delivery of custom promotions, geo-location services (such as in-store navigation) and the optimization of more intelligent marketing offers to boost sales. Some of the marketing tech sector’s most promising innovators include: Sharpening creativity and seeking new paths in times of crisis is part of human nature — our survival instinct. In macroeconomic scenarios such as what Brazil has faced in terms of high interest rates, rising inflation and unemployment, there’s an opportunity to innovate and reinvent old industries as new again. I firmly believe we have never had a period that’s so conducive to invest in online and technology startups, especially in the five tech sectors covered here. Successful innovators in these technology arenas will continue to contribute to the broader growth and economic vitality in Brazil.
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SpaceX’s Mars Colonial Transporter can go “well beyond” Mars
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Darrell Etherington
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Elon Musk just teased that one of SpaceX’s more future-focused projects might be more ambitious than previously thought. On Twitter, the SpaceX CEO revealed that the company’s Mars Colonial Transporter (MCT) will need a new name, since in fact, it “can go well beyond Mars.” Turns out MCT can go well beyond Mars, so will need a new name… — Elon Musk (@elonmusk) This then promptly turned into a naming contest among Musk’s followers, with some great suggestions including “Heart of Gold,” which is lifted from Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy and which Musk said was his “favorite fictional spaceship.” Sorry, Serenity – at least Millennium Falcon got a shout-out for SpaceX’s existing reusable rocket line. Musk threw out his own suggestion, too: Maybe Ultimate Spaceship, Version 2? Mostly because it is not the ultimate and there isn't a version 1. — Elon Musk (@elonmusk) The MCT is SpaceX’s personnel transport craft, designed to be used with the company’s large Raptor rocket engine to transport the first humans to Mars, with a pilot unmanned launch planned for 2022, and a first flight with people on board slated for 2024. Musk’s teaser is timely – we should find out more about the MCT and its mission at the International Astronautical Congress on September 27, where the , and will deliver an address called “Making Humans a Multiplanetary Species.”
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Catching Pokémon with the new Pokémon Go Plus
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Darrell Etherington
| 2,016
| 9
| 17
|
Go Plus has finally arrived, giving Pokémon Go players a way to catch critters and collect items without ever taking their phones out of their pockets. After only a few hours playing with the Go, I already feel like it has a good chance of pulling me back into the game, at least for a little while, and the entire experience of using it is pretty painless. The Go Plus was easy to pair with my iPhone, since it uses Bluetooth LE, and you don’t even have to leave the Go app itself to connect them. All you have to do to pair is open Go on your device, go to the main menu (tap the Pokéball icon) and then hit Settings. There’s a new “Pokémon Go Plus” menu item provided you’re on the latest version, and then you just press the physical button on your device and tap the line item that appears in the app itself telling you it discovered the device. The hardest part of setting up the Go wasn’t anything to do with software, however – it was changing out the clip for the wrist band. This actually involved using a screwdriver (not provided) to unseat a single mounting screw, and then to screw that back into the backplate attached to the wrist band. The screw-based mounting doubles as access to the battery, however, and also means that you won’t be able to easily lose the Go Plus itself. It just means a big chunk of users might need the help of their parent or guarding initially. Once on, the band is light and comfortable though (think bracelet rather than activity tracker), and it buzzes well enough that you’d be hard-pressed to miss a notification. The single button will change color depending on what you’ve encountered (blue for PokéStop, green for previously encountered Pokémon and yellow for new Pokémon). Checking a PokéStop nbd — Darrell Etherington (@etherington) When you press the button in response to these notices, it’ll either trigger the stop, getting you some items, or attempt to catch the Pokémon. This depletes your stock of regular Pokéballs by one, then has you watching for the series of white lights that tell you a catch is in progress, and hoping you’ll be notified of a successful catch with a multicolored flashing light. A red light means the Pokémon got away, and there is not chance to re-attempt capture using just the Go – you either catch the Pokémon on first try or it gets away. Catching a Rattata as you do — Darrell Etherington (@etherington) On-screen notifications also provide more info, including the number of items you’ve received and whether you successfully caught a Pokémon. Overall, it’s a much-improved Pokémon Go playing experience for casual players who’d rather not be holding their phones constantly. Plus, Niantic has added more functionality than was originally promised, including step tracking for hatching eggs and buddy training, and the ability to catch Pokémon you haven’t encountered before. [gallery ids="1388166,1388165,1388167,1388162,1388163,1388164"] At least until the Apple Watch app arrives, I’ll definitely be doing most of my Go-ing via the Plus, and if the app lacks the ability to catch Pokémon as originally announced (and if it hurts Watch battery life), I’ll definitely be sticking with the dedicated wearable. Plus, it’s an overt signal that you’re part of a very nerdy club, which is nice.
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Gillmor Gang: Nickel and Dime
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Steve Gillmor
| 2,016
| 9
| 17
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The Gillmor Gang — John Borthwick, Frank Radice, Keith Teare, Kevin Marks, and Steve Gillmor. Recorded live Friday, September 16, 2016. It’s multiple streaming networks and the Third UI as the Gang meanders from iOS 10 to Twitter’s Apple TV global network debut. Debate prep for the deep learners. @stevegillmor, @Borthwick, @kevinmarks, @kteare, @fradice Produced and directed by Tina Chase Gillmor @tinagillmor
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What do you call a tech unicorn that goes public?
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Ravi Mhatre
| 2,016
| 9
| 17
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Are tech IPOs coming back? That is an ever-present question in Silicon Valley during any lull in the flow of shining private companies that get anointed as public companies. And we certainly have been in a long lull. This year, just one venture-backed tech company, , has made it public, compared to an average of 37 per year between 2001 and 2015. But the comeback question isn’t the right one to ask this time around. Looking for a magic window to open in the public markets for tech companies to leap through assumes there are separate criteria for tech companies and other companies. Those days are over. Tech is a part of every company and every industry in some shape or form today, which means that tech companies as investments are measured against any other alternative corporate investment — pure tech or not. So are tech IPOs coming back? Not anytime soon. But that doesn’t mean smart tech companies can’t pull it off — and in many cases, absolutely should. It must have always seemed a bit silly outside of the tech scene, all this talk of unicorns trotting their $1 billion-plus valuations out to one ever-more massive fundraising event after the next. But while Silicon Valley watched the paper fortunes of these magic companies go higher and higher (until recently), the rest of the world was more or less treading water — or drowning. Consider that the global economy has essentially been flat over the past several years; global GDP actually shrank during five consecutive quarters between 2015 and 2016. And despite seemingly low unemployment rates in the U.S. today versus what they were during the recession of 2008-10, many remain out of work while others are stuck in jobs with stagnant salaries. You don’t have to look far past the election rhetoric to understand why so much social unrest and turmoil persists here and abroad. Stir that all together and it causes people to conclude that we’re not in an economic growth environment; we’re in a flat, or probably down, environment that will likely get worse before it gets better. Contrast that sentiment to this herd of fantastically valuable, fast-growing tech startups and it’s no wonder the world outside Silicon Valley isn’t buying into the pitch. People are suspicious that any company could be on a path of radical growth when they’re treading water at a job for 15 years and haven’t seen a raise in the last five. Unicorns, lest we forget, are mythical beasts. Why should people believe? We’ve seen this movie before, of course. If you weren’t there in the late 1990s, well, the only thing more ridiculous than the IPOs were the parties. That should have been a clue that things were out of whack. Basically, the people who pry the public markets open or shut them down — the massive hedge fund guys in Connecticut, New York and Boston — decided they were open to buying these new emerging tech companies in the public markets, despite no viability (or revenue) as businesses. Then everyone piled in. All the pension funds, all your relatives — you heard of people who just traded tech stocks on their poky internet connection all day and said they were making a fortune. It was great! Everything was up and to the right, until, of course, it wasn’t. To be fair, the dot-com era did set in motion the real promise of the internet. Legendary VC John Doerr was right — even in all the hype, the internet was under-hyped. But as investments, everyone got ahead of themselves. And since then, belief in the story of technology as force for massive, valuable change — Google, Amazon, Apple and Facebook aside — has been hard to come by. Real estate became the next thing to inflate, and then the recession of 2007-2008 came crashing down on everything. What’s happened since then is that we have sort of had this recovery, but sort of not. There have been a handful of tech IPOs since the worst of the recession ended, companies like Facebook, LinkedIn, Palo Alto Networks, Tableau, Workday, ServiceNow and Splunk, but what happened in the meantime is that technology did what it is best at — moving relentlessly forward. Web-scale companies like Uber, Snapchat, Airbnb, Palantir, Flipkart, Pinterest, Dropbox, Spotify, Lyft, Nutanix, Stripe, AppDynamics, MuleSoft and many others emerged, as did ventures in big data, machine learning and a whole new technology infrastructure in the cloud. And the explosion of mobile technologies threw fuel on everything. Once again, the hedge fund folks looked up and saw there was real growth and that these technologies would bring about significant valuable change. Again, they believed, and piled money into — and really created — all your favorite unicorns. They offered the money at valuations that they thought the public markets would be receptive to. They got a little over optimistic. Public market investors weren’t having it — they were having a hard time understanding why a company like Uber should be worth 50X revenue when GM is 6X revenue. What’s it all mean now? I think it means that truly successful tech companies are going to have to measure up to the same standards that great non-tech companies live up to — brands like Berkshire Hathaway, Whole Foods, CVS, UPS, Starbucks and Costco that deliver great products and services, have strong growth, make real money and build an organization behind all of this that customers love. Miss any of that, and you can forget about getting any love from the public markets. And you need to think of the competition as not just the constellation of other startup companies in your space, but any great company that has shown the ability to become “technology forward” could be thought of as a competitor or an alternative. There are outstanding tech companies that meet all those conditions. And I believe that we are in a tech innovation cycle that really is changing the world. What that doesn’t mean is that some window flies open, and everything that isn’t nailed to the floor gets tossed through into the public markets. The tech IPO is dead. But great tech companies can — and will — still go public.
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Fox files suit against Netflix for employee poaching
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Darrell Etherington
| 2,016
| 9
| 17
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20th Century Fox is looking to get an injunction against Netflix to prevent it from luring away employees under contract, according to a new lawsuit filed with an LA court. Recent Netflix hires Tara Flynn and Marcos Waltenberg were apparently the proverbial straws that broke the camel’s back, as both ex-Fox employees had contracts signed that tied the to the studio through at least 2016. According to the suit, Netflix allegedly knew about the agreements in place before pursuing the hires of both employees, with the specific intent of incentivizing them to break their contracts. Fox is looking for damages in addition to the injunction against any further poaching. In a statement provided to , Netflix said that it “believe[s] in employee mobility” and doesn’t believe Fox’s use of employment contracts is “enforceable” under the law. Netflix has a fairly strong reputation for its recruiting processes, both on its tech side and in terms of creative talent. The streaming service’s string of creative hits definitely helps with its ability to poach top industry talent, and it has additional know-how thanks to its experience finding and keeping engineering talent in the highly competitive Silicon Valley job market. This suit means that legacy film and TV studios clearly see Netflix as a threat, especially as the streaming company continues to emphasize and invest in original content in order to simplify its licensing arrangements and offer a larger, more diverse library to potential subscribers than it might be able to if it relied wholly on externally developed programming.
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Microsoft will close its Skype office in London
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Darrell Etherington
| 2,016
| 9
| 17
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Microsoft is going to close Skype’s London office, in a move that could impact the jobs of the nearly 400 people employed there. The company told the that is will “unify some engineering positions,” but that it “will be entering into a consultation process to help those affected by the redundancies.” The London office is a key part of Skype’s history, since it was the primary engineering site and headquarters of the company before Microsoft acquired it, and it also survived Skype’s strange interlude under the ownership of eBay before it was acquired by the big M. While the move is no doubt a blow to London’s tech scene, some former insiders told the FT that it’s also not a surprise to see it go, largely because a steady stream of executive departures over the last few years have foretold a shift in the locus of power at the company. Post-acquisition, Microsoft has also done a lot of product work on Skype, with plenty of integration with Office 365 and a number of feature introductions that bring it closer in line with Slack. Microsoft likely now intends to build Skype from Redmond, which should help further align its strategic vision across its software products.
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A kid held up a sign with his Venmo ID on ESPN and thousands of people sent him money
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Fitz Tepper
| 2,016
| 9
| 10
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Each Saturday during the college football season ESPN hosts College GameDay, an pre-game show with a bunch of football experts and hundreds of screaming college kids in the background. Today one of those screaming college kids was , a student who brilliantly decided to hold up a sign with his Venmo username asking his mom to send him beer money. Cue the Internet, and instead of of getting a few bucks from his mom more than people sent him money on Venmo, including $50 from Venmo themselves. Update: More than 2,000 users have paid Sam. We counted. — Venmo (@venmo) Since Venmo has no minimum transaction amount, it’s possible that a lot of these were just $.01 – but more than likely most were at least a dollar, meaning Sam’s Venmo balance is probably looking pretty good right now. Even though the internet is going crazy about the brilliance of Sam’s idea, it’s important to note this isn’t without precedent. In fact someone basically did the exact same thing three years ago. Another enterprising student also went to College Gameday pointing to their Bitcoin address, and ended up getting $24,000 sent to him that day. It seems like 3 years is how long it takes for the world to forget about this little trick, so expect to see someone holding up a sign during the 2019 football season asking for donations on whatever the latest payment platform happens to be.
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Consumer Physics, creators of the SCiO molecular scanner, respond to Kickstarter claims
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John Biggs
| 2,016
| 9
| 17
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Like most small products with a cult following, . Those detractors took to the Internet recently to complain that the handheld molecular scanner, which raised $2.5 million in 2014, still hasn’t shipped. The result? Negative press and plenty of Tweets. I asked SCiO’s creator, Dror Sharon, what was going on with the device and when it would ship and, more important, whether it would ever properly scan an M&M.
Dror Sharon: To date we’ve shipped more than 5,000 units and are on track to ship the rest to backers by early next year.
DS: Since we started manufacturing and assembling SCiO units, we’ve hit several obstacles, including parts that came that didn’t meet our standards. The SCiO sensor is complicated technology and we have a high level of quality control. During the manufacturing process, we also iterated on the design of the SCiO sensor itself. This iteration made SCiO more accurate and more sensitive, and thus required more time to engineer and manufacture.
DS: We have no regrets. We are building a company, a worldwide developer community and user base, and we are tackling a very complex technological challenge. We understand that there is a small number of community members who are upset with the delays. We take their complaints and comments very seriously and our support team reaches out directly to everyone who comments or asks questions on our Facebook and Twitter channels. In cases where backers have requested refunds, for example, we have fulfilled those requests even though there is no legal requirement for a Kickstarter campaign to provide refunds when requested. Folks who are upset about delays – we offer them refunds, but the vast majority of them do not take the refund. Most are patient, understand what we are building, and prefer to wait for their unit to arrive. Some of the comments on our FB wall are by people that got refunds or were never part of the SCiO community to begin with.
DS: Out of the box, SCiO can scan food and pills. There are applets for scanning cheese, yogurt, and other dairy products; fruits, vegetables and fresh produce; and raw chicken, pork, beef and other meats for their nutritional values. It can scan over-the-counter pharmaceutical pills. It can act as a produce selector by measuring the sweetness of tomatoes. There are a number of further apps that are available to backers as beta versions – these are not complete but provide basic functions and a glimpse into the future of SCiO; for example, measuring one’s body fat. Lastly, users can “teach” SCiO using the Workshop app creator. You scan different materials, press a button, and “presto!”: a machine learning model is created in realtime that can now distinguish between them. It is a bare bones slimmed down version of the full blown SCiO Lab, our development kit. We got really good feedback on this feature, making SCiO fun and educational. It extends the functionality beyond the initial (limited) databases.
DS: We have no plans for candy or M&M specific scanning functionality, other than cocoa levels in chocolate. The pills app is not meant to scan chocolate, the scan was meant as a funny poke. I understand you’re making a joke here. However, we are seriously working on specific apps that solve real-world problems for consumers and industry. For instance, the beta app that can measure body fat percentage with one simple bicep scan. We are working with a number of Fortune 2,000 companies on industrial applications to deploy industrial IoT solutions that address real problems in the areas of agriculture, oil and gas, gemstones, cosmetics, pharmaceuticals, and much more. We have several developers working on companies based on the SCiO platform. Finally, several leading consumer electronics companies are in discussions with us to embed the sensor inside smart consumer appliances. We plan to share more about these development when appropriate to do so.
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Why I’m giving my company Election Day off
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Hicham Oudghiri
| 2,016
| 9
| 10
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This year’s U.S. presidential election is confusing for everyone. The popularity contest that has become the election is diluting our time, attention and ability to think critically. Which is ironic, given that we are more connected to information than we have ever been before, and the computation necessary to model problems has never been cheaper. The only certainty in the election is that the results will have a dramatic impact on all citizens, businesses and organizations around the world. With war raging across continents, inaction in the face of climate change and the disparity of wealth threatening the stability of the economy and open flow of invention, an easy solution would be to point fingers and place blame. What we really need to do is rise to the greater level of civic duty that our culture needs to govern our increasingly complex world. We need to be more involved and have an actual say in how we are governed. For that reason, I am giving my company off to remove any impediments from their ability to vote. I grew up in New York, but I was born in Morocco. My grandfather, along with his brother and Allal al-Fassi, started the first political party in Morocco. I grew up admiring him as one of the founding fathers of modern politics in his country. I was raised with a real sense of civics, which I saw in action whenever we would visit Fez. Interestingly, Morocco was the first country to publicly recognize the United States as an official state with the ratification of the Moroccan-American Treaty of Friendship in 1786. Signed by Thomas Jefferson and John Adams, it recognized Moroccan ports as open to U.S. ships and is the longest-standing unbroken treaty relationship in U.S. history. I am inspired by this history of diplomacy and always feel it important to be civic-minded. The commitment to make the world we live in one where countries and peoples are bound by productive relationships and trade is one of the driving forces as to why I’m an entrepreneur today. These early experiences also meaningfully impacted the kind of company I founded, the type of work we do and the team we recruit to be a part of, and contribute to, our bigger vision. Again, I am encouraging these core values at Enigma by declaring a mandatory holiday. True, some people can’t legally vote and perhaps some will abstain, but one thing is certain — they can’t come in to work. Why? I am trying to remove any ounce of guilt that could be felt by a single team member for missing a meeting, a client call or any other professional activity because they wanted to vote. Most, I expect, will spend at least part of the day focused on their role in the future of American society and the world — and that’s time well spent. I feel so much gratitude to have founded a company where not only can we afford to make such decisions, but where we all feel that this is simply the . With voter disenfranchisement issues still plaguing the citizenry, and many burdened by plight and diminishing wages, often working multiple jobs to make ends meet, we need to lead everywhere we can. We need to make a point about how important it is to care about everyone’s voice in this process. My biggest motivation is to respect the importance of being involved in the civic duties that are needed to protect the unique environment of the U.S. for entrepreneurs like myself. As a Muslim naturalized citizen of the U.S., married to a half-French, half-American Jewish woman with a two-year-old who holds three passports, I can assure you I sit at an intersection of culture, identity, race and religion that made the U.S. the only place where I could earn the trust and opportunities that I have. The opportunity to get a great education, the freedom from judgment by others and the support I needed to dream big — these are sanctities that I’ve uniquely felt in the U.S. throughout my life. The U.S. is the only business environment where I would be able to run the company I do, the way I have. And I’m not the only one; 49 percent of entrepreneurs funded by the venture capital community are first- or second-generation immigrants. Inherently, these people are risk-takers; they don’t only represent the tail end of the American Dream, they’re the beginning of it. They’re uniquely resourceful, they get their bearings and are strong enough to build, rebuild and build again. Finally, they are grateful for the freedom and justice in the United States we have all fought so diligently to preserve and cultivate. Let’s not let this election threaten the openness of our society by remaining complacent in the face of several policies rooted in fear that could threaten our growth. At Enigma, we focus on solving operational problems with data in the real world. That puts policy and regulation in the forefront of our minds. The very least we can do is rise up to the minimum requirement of voting for our president every four years. There is power in data, but it only helps us interpret the world when the point is to better it. I encourage you and your teams to join me and ensure that everyone who is entrusted with the right to vote wakes up on ready to stand up for a society that enables ingenuity and global transformation.
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Facebook isn’t just fighting ad blockers, it’s fighting the underlying causes of blocking
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Roy Rosenfeld
| 2,016
| 9
| 10
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Independent publishers are terrified of platform dependency these days, and for good reason: According to Parse.ly, Facebook is the to their sites. Facebook and Google together account for 65 percent of digital ad revenue, according to Pew’s State of the News Media 2016 . To put that in perspective, that’s up from around 0 percent just 10 years ago. Facebook is absolutely crushing them in mobile, too, where the real user growth is — and there, it’s not even close. That’s the reality, and it’s led a lot of publishers to conclude they’d be better off not competing with Facebook for eyeballs, choosing instead to forsake the exclusivity of their own properties and publish directly to the social network. Many side observers now believe we will soon witness the end of the — i.e. the wholesale migration of content away from independent publisher properties and onto Facebook. The thing is, Facebook has whenever it wants, and that publishers can’t rely on it as a stable channel. A savior for publishers Facebook is not. Indeed, publishers’ anxiety is both very real and very justified. How did this happen? The obvious interpretation is that Facebook has the scale, the traffic and, thus, the leverage. But that’s not all there is to it. Facebook has actually been a pioneer in finding the way to monetize their audience without pissing it off. And this is where its recent moves against ad blocking become very, very interesting. First, it’s worth reviewing what Facebook is doing right in its audience monetization strategy: Facebook is signaling to the broader advertising and publishing world that the future lies in fewer ads, more respect for consumer privacy and more deference to a user’s preferences. Many publishers are actually making solid efforts at delivering this type of experience themselves, but such efforts are going to waste because of the “binary” and unsophisticated nature of most ad blockers. By blocking all ads on all sites, these blockers treat all publishers as the lowest common denominator, throwing premium publishers (and Facebook) in with the worst-offending sites on the web — the ones that present the risk of malware, that invade privacy, that drag on load times, that ruin the user’s experience. So while many have interpreted Facebook’s move to “block the blockers” as a sign that Facebook is prioritizing its relationship to advertisers over users, it’s actually far more subtle. Facebook is trying to find — and own — the middle ground that neither advertisers nor publishers have been able to inhabit successfully. Odds are that Facebook find that middle ground. The question is whether the rest of the digital ecosystem can find it and maintain it independently. At the moment, the binary nature of ad blockers has forced each side (publishers and users) into entrenched positions that render the good faith attempts obsolete and leave the underlying causes of blocking unaddressed. If publishers respond by blocking blockers, or by increasing their ad load, users will only block more. And if users continue using indiscriminate blockers, publishers will have few good choices left. Far from simply waging war on the blockers, Facebook is trying to carve out the only middle ground that will be left when the war is over.
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At Amazon the Flywheel Effect drives innovation
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Ron Miller
| 2,016
| 9
| 10
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When Amazon CTO Werner Vogels talks about his company’s philosophy around innovation, it’s probably a good idea to listen. Amazon CEO and founder Jeff Bezos has always found a way to capitalize on technology trends, whether being an early online retailer, seeing the future of cloud computing and forming Amazon Web Services, or developing delivery drones and commercial rockets. Speaking at this week, Vogels says his company relies on several key building blocks and the ‘Flywheel Effect’ to maintain its technology edge. The Flywheel Effect is the idea that once you have your core tech pieces in place, they have an energy of their own that drives other positive changes and innovations. “You have to do a lot of innovation that sits under the covers. Anything you do like this will become a flywheel and will drive innovation,” he said. “We’ve built stuff nobody has built before with development process and methodologies that didn’t exist,” he said. Early on, , the cynical wondered who would want to buy storage from a book shop. Vogels said that the idea that Amazon was a retailer, because that’s what it was at first, really stuck in everyone’s mind. “We may be a retailer, but we are a tech company at heart. When Jeff started Amazon, he didn’t start it to open book shop. He was fascinated by the internet,” Vogels explained. Vogels says whatever they do at Amazon, it all starts with the customer and they work backwards from that. In practice, that means whatever they create there are five pillars supporting every move including security, performance, reliability, scalability and cost. He says the company is continually innovating those five core services. He says when you combine these principles with a customer-centric approach good things are going to happen. Vogels says working for Bezos, there isn’t a week that goes by that he doesn’t learn something. “He’s an amazing thinker and strategist, and an amazing visionary.” The biggest lesson he’s learned from Bezos is that you must have a vision whatever you’re doing. He says Bezoz describes two types of companies: missionaries and mercenaries. Mercenaries build products with a sale in mind, while missionaries build products because they believe deeply in the products. “We are missionaries. It’s why do we do innovation, to make life better for our customers.” Vogels said.
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