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Hack for the environment at the Disrupt SF Hackathon
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Kate Conger
| 2,016
| 9
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This weekend, hundreds of developers and engineers will pack into the Disrupt SF conference space for our , a 24-hour race to build a brand-new product. Competitors will present their inventions on stage and win prizes, in a TechCrunch tradition that’s launched products like GroupMe. But this year, we’re doing things a little differently — we’re making data from the National Institute of Standards and Technology’s available for developers to incorporate into their products. The Net Zero facility is a home in Maryland that NIST has transformed into a laboratory for conducting research on energy efficiency. The four-bedroom house produces all of its own energy, with some to spare, sending the excess back to the electrical grid. It’s a model for the American home of the future, and it produces valuable data on energy use and production that developers can use to create new energy-efficient products. The data comes to us from the Department of Commerce, which touts itself as America’s data agency. DOC produces and publishes vast datasets, generating enough information every day to fill the Library of Commerce twice over. That includes the weather data and import/export data that form the backbones of many a startup. Without that weather data, your favorite weather app couldn’t function. And companies like Flexport, which we’ve called “ ,” use DOC’s trade data to better serve their customers. “When I became Secretary of Commerce, I made harnessing the power of Commerce data a top priority for the Department. To me, it was idle inventory on the shelf that I knew — from personal experience — has the power to create economic opportunity and change lives,” Secretary of Commerce Penny Pritzker told TechCrunch. “The hackathon is not only an opportunity to put our data to use in new and creative ways — it is also an opportunity to learn what we can be doing better.” We hope that our Disrupt SF hacking teams will take this opportunity to show these government folks how we do it here in Silicon Valley. They can use the Net Zero home’s data sets to inform other projects, or create projects that are completely focused on renewable energy. Teams can work to make homes smarter or create analytics tools to provide insights on energy efficiency. We’ll have data available from the house on 400 variables across 11 subsystems, including temperature, energy, lighting and electrical usage. “We would love to see developers create tools that visualize home energy use patterns. For instance, many Americans do not know that a clothes dryer consumes more energy than almost any other appliance in the home. With this information, individuals could make decisions that reduce the amount of energy they use and lower their energy costs,” Pritzker said. “We are also interested in the creation of an algorithm that predicts energy production from the home’s solar panels. This type of information could be used as the basis for predicting energy production under various environmental conditions.” The market for these products is already enormous and is growing larger every day. In December, the United States and every other member of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change agreed to work to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. In order to meet the commitments laid out in the Paris Agreement, it’s estimated that the world will spend $13.5 trillion. That’s a big opportunity for major businesses, small startups, and bootstrapped products that are still only a glimmer in a hackathon participant’s eye. “This is an enormous opportunity for American businesses,” Pritzker explained. “Consumers are increasingly demanding products that are sustainably produced and cost effective.” “Bottom line, the transition to an advanced energy economy is not just a moral responsibility to our planet and future generations today, it is good business,” she added. We hope our Disrupt hackers agree!
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Incoming McAfee CEO Chris Young on his company’s post-Intel future
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John Mannes
| 2,016
| 9
| 9
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to spin off its security unit into a reincarnation of McAfee, attention is quickly turning to Chris Young, the guy tasked with steering the security ship through tumultuous waters and back toward relative independence. Young has been running Intel’s Security Group for quite some time now as senior vice president and general manager. While he will officially be given a CEO title in his new role, the position will be a rare point of continuity for a team that has changed hands twice in the last five years. We sat down with Young to get the scoop on what the transaction means for the future of McAfee and how the company will be challenged in the coming months to navigate a separation from Intel and find its stride in a rapidly changing cybersecurity ecosystem. McAfee was founded in 1987 by yoga aficionado and reported John McAfee. Some years later, in 2011, . The transaction was critical in that it tilted the company’s focus toward the hardware layer. This transaction was heavily criticized, but Intel remained bullish that McAfee would support the company’s growth into chip-level security solutions. DeepDefender, a tool for detecting and removing rootkits, became the key product of the acquisition. It leveraged a priority load position to do its work, McAfee, renamed the Intel Security Group by this point, continued to report growth, but never really met expectations from investors who patiently waited five years for a revolutionary new Intel security product that never came. Wednesday’s announcement marks a significant turning point in McAfee’s history, away from chip-level innovation toward securing the Internet of Things for consumers and consolidating the number of cybersecurity companies enterprises have to work with.
While Intel will still own 49 percent of McAfee, Young says the company shouldn’t be seen as half chip company. Young and his investors from TPG, which own 51 percent of the company, have a plan for the future that involves riding that trend of service consolidation by enterprise customers. It’s common for large Fortune 500 companies to have security teams that work with dozens of cybersecurity providers for a slew of niche needs. Young explains that this creates accountability issues and communication problems when a company needs to respond to a hack. McAfee wants to partner and buy its way to the top of the cybersecurity food chain to establish itself as a force within the industry that can connect the growing number of startups in the space via the central McAfee platform. The plan is incredibly ambitious for a company that is on Day Two of finding its identify separate from Intel. Young believes that capital from TPG will enable McAfee to acquire security companies more broadly that may not have fit in with the initial Intel vision. McAfee still has offices co-located with Intel, but will be moving offsite in the future. Amidst all the change, employees have been anxious about what they are expected to do during the transition. Despite lofty goals, Young is instructing employees to “just keep doing what they have been doing.” A transaction of such large magnitude is more than enough to keep him busy ironing out financial details and establishing the organizational structure, leadership and vision for the company. When the dust settles, and Young has forged a company identity, McAfee will focus on securing enterprise data centers. He also wants the company to continue working with device manufacturers and service providers to bolster the security of things we use every day, like cloud storage, communication and file sharing. For consumers, focus will remain on offering a one-stop shop for simplifying security. McAfee’s enterprise division is larger than its consumer division, but not by much. Users should be able to purchase a single security solution that can evolve and remain device-agnostic. This is what sets McAfee apart from device manufacturers that secure their own devices, says Young. And while the Internet of Things has been mostly underwhelming to date, McAfee will be further developing partnerships to put an end to vulnerabilities on the accessories we use with our core devices.
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User’s guide to Disrupt SF 2016
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Emma Comeau
| 2,016
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Hard to believe that Disrupt SF is just around the corner! Check out this guide for helpful event info. We want you to have a successful experience at Disrupt. Check out these tips to have a great day. Disrupt SF’s location at is great because it is close to public transit and easily accessible via any shared ride service. for parking lots and transit stop locations. We strongly encourage you to take transit or ride-sharing service each day of the conference. The Giants play at AT&T Park and evenings and afternoon. and are located on South St. between 3rd St. and Terry A Francois Blvd. It’s about a 12 to 15-minute walk to Pier 48 from those lots.
9/12: $16 all day if park before , $38 all day if park after
9/13: $16 all day if park before , $38 all day if park after
9/14: $38 all day Parking will be at a premium and each day due to the games, so we urge you again to use public transportation or take a ride-share service if possible. The easiest way to transfer onto MUNI from BART is at Embarcadero BART Station; SF MUNI’s and stops are both an easy 10-minute walk to Pier 48. For those coming from the South Bay, is very close to the venue and a light 10-minute walk to Pier 48. Make sure to download the latest Disrupt app to connect and message with other attendees at Disrupt, check out exhibitors and peruse the agenda. (Note: You can only hear from other attendees if you have the app and sign in with your ticket info. So get the app and don’t miss out on people who may be trying to message you right now!) Download the app for and . Universe is the official ticketing platform of Disrupt. If you purchased a ticket, you used . We love them and we think you will, too. If you haven’t purchased a ticket, please go do that You’ve asked and we heard you. We’re launching a TechCrunch Store at Disrupt SF! Get exclusive, high-quality TechCrunch gear at the TechCrunch Booth. If you’re not able to make it, check out our items online at ! DevPost is reprising its role at the Disrupt Hackathon, providing the platform for our . Thanks, y’all! Located in the back of the session hall, Chinese translation headsets will be available for main-stage speaker sessions. Chinese-speaking volunteers will be on site throughout the conference to assist as needed. With so much happening at Disrupt, make sure to check out some special events and features. : At noon, five curated VR/AR startups (Monday) and five AI startups (Tuesday) will demo on the Showcase Stage in the heart of Startup Alley. Monday: Check out the VR Pavilion just south of the Showcase stage. Mingle with them at the VR Reception from 5-6pm, right inside the pavilion. Tuesday: AI startups will be exhibiting in the AI Pavilion just south of the Showcase stage. Mingle with them at the AI Reception from 5-6pm, right inside the pavilion. If you’re interested in learning more about the Chinese tech and business landscape, we’re hosting a reception on Monday from 6-8pm onsite at Disrupt, sponsored by GGV Capital. If you would like an invitation email us at marketing@beta.techcrunch.com. is the official venture arm of the original Silicon Valley startup, focusing on global early-stage investments. with attorneys from Perkins Coie to get courtesy legal advice. is the first ever Pilot-as-a-Service platform that solves Proof-of-Concept pains for global enterprises and startups/ISVs. proov will be hosting onsite to address PoC problems for free. Our partners love to celebrate innovation. will be awarding the Best International Digital Startup award, to be given to a company that exemplifies presence in the international and digital landscape in business today. is the Official Mobile Payments sponsor of Startup Alley. Hungry or curious? Braintree has got you covered! Visit the booth to learn about payments, fuel up with a fresh donut from the food truck outside and try your hand at their claw machine to win anything from a gift card to a comfortable bed. is the Official Automobile sponsor of Disrupt. Go on The Impossible Quest, a personalized VR experience starring Toyota’s most advanced hybrid yet, Prius Prime, and you. Take a test-drive through a limitless world inspired by visual futurist Syd Mead (Blade Runner). If you’re an arm-chair Disruptor, you can watch the conference action from the . See you on Monday!
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Jordan Crook
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Coupa is the latest unicorn to file for an IPO
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Katie Roof
| 2,016
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Yet Coupa is amongst a small group of tech companies that are expected to IPO this fall. Many are being advised not to go public too close to the U.S. presidential election, in case an unexpected outcome (Trump) wreaks havoc on the markets.
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Facebook steps in to prove the value of chatbots with Tommy Hilfiger
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Josh Constine
| 2,016
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Here come the fashbots, and this time they might actually be useful. Facebook’s seemingly half-baked chatbot platform soured many on the potential of conversation user interfaces. The first bots built by outside developers back in April were clumsy and more trouble than just using a website. So Facebook’s Creative Shop is getting involved, working with bot creator Msg.ai and the Tommy Hilfiger fashion brand to make a flagship chatbot worthy to point to. The TMY.GRL A.I. Messenger Bot will promote today’s debut of . People can discover it by tapping the message button on Tommy’s Facebook page or posts, opening a shortlink URL or scanning its Messenger QR code. Through the bot, fashionistas can type questions or select pre-made queries to learn about Gigi, see behind-the-scenes content from the collection’s runway show event and, most importantly, shop for items from the nautical-themed clothing line. Facebook still hasn’t built a native checkout and payment flow into its Messenger bot platform. Shoppers will be linked out to Tommy Hilfiger’s website to put in their credit card details and confirm purchases. While that might give brands a deeper sense of control over the experience, it likely also reduces conversion rates as leaving Messenger gives them a chance to get distracted or reconsider buying something. It’s something Facebook will hopefully build soon. I asked why the company is diving into the unproven world of bots, Tommy Hilfiger himself told me “We’re really focused on going directly to the consumer. We are obviously distributed in our own stores and in department stores, but going directly to the consumer is really part of the motive and the future of the omni-channel process.” Puneet Mehta, CEO of Msg.ai, explains that consumer goods companies are attracted to bots because of “the relationship aspect, not just sales.” If they can create a memorable, interactive experience with their brand instead of just one-way marketing, customers will keep coming back. That’s why Facebook’s marketing experts from its Creative Shop, which typically help out advertisers, got their hands dirty on developing this bot. How did a 31-year-old company come up with the idea for a chatbot? Hilfiger tells me it started with “a conversation I had with Sheryl Sandberg of Facebook. We talked about innovative ways to enhance the shopping experience. We’re always a bit ahead of the curve.” Chasing new technologies hasn’t always panned out. While Tommy Hilfiger’s Instagram and Snapchat strategies have been a success, 25 years ago it unsuccessfully tried to build touch-screen vending machines. Hilfiger explains that “We had lots of trials and tribulations with that. The credit card system was working, the touch-screen heated up.” But now he feels that by relying on a dependable company like Facebook, there’s less to worry about and more to gain as customers embrace new ways to shop. Tommy Hilfiger CMO Avery Baker tells me that “one of the things that’s always been important in fashion is customer service and the experience in a store.” The TMY.GRL A.I. Messenger Bot will try to answer people’s questions and offer a more immersive, responsive feel than shoppers usually get online. The bot will try to capture some of the personality of talking to Gigi herself, while remaining transparent that there’s not a human on the other end. “No one wants to feel like they’re being spoken to by the corporate animal,” Baker admits. Fashion still seems like an unlikely candidate for chatbot success. People can’t touch or try on the clothes, and the bot doesn’t know enough about the user’s style to make smart recommendations about which items they might prefer. But Hilfiger believes this brand-specific bot could perform better than multi-brand retail shopping bots like Spring, which launched with the Messenger bot platform and was quickly proven confusing and unconvincing. Tommy Hilfiger (center) “I think if you’re an established brand and the consumer is familiar with the brand, they have confidence that that certain cotton or cashmere or denim is the quality that would be acceptable, that they would be confident that the fit would be okay,” Hilfiger concludes. “There’s a lot of different reasons why people shop online. Now they can receive shipments, try on items, and send back what they don’t accept. They don’t necessarily need to touch and feel.” At the very least, Tommy Hilfiger could use the campaign to lure people into messaging their bot first. That’s critical, since Facebook Messenger only lets brands message people who’ve already pinged them. Getting conversations started is essentially the new version of getting people to Like your Facebook Page. Better to build an audience early than get left behind.
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Dropbox responds to accusations its Mac desktop client hacks OS X security
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Natasha Lomas
| 2,016
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Dropbox has responded to concerns about how it implements the desktop client of its cloud storage service on Apple’s macOS platform, conceding it needs to do more to communicate how the integration functions and the permissions it’s requesting. “Clearly we need to do a better job communicating about Dropbox’s OS integration. We ask for permissions once but don’t describe what we’re doing or why. We’ll fix that,” Dropbox’s Ben Newhouse, from its desktop client team, told TechCrunch. Concerns about Dropbox’s desktop client circulated on and today, after two on an Apple help blog detailed what the writer dubbed OS X security “hacks” by Dropbox. In one of the Dropbox is described as “using a sql attack on the tcc database to circumvent Apple’s authorization policy.” And while allegations that Dropbox was creating a spoof dialogue box to phish users’ passwords proved to be incorrect, critics continued to slate its implementation of an official OS X security dialogue box that they said appeared designed to mislead users into handing over their admin passwords in order to grant Dropbox root access to the system via the Mac’s Accessibility permissions list. To clarify: It is a legitimate OS X dialog with misleading text + they hack around the OS security for accessibility — toto (@mrtoto) Addressing criticisms about the scope of the permissions the client requires, Newhouse said: “We only ask for privileges we actively use — but unfortunately some of the permissions aren’t as granular as we would like. “We use accessibility APIs for the Dropbox badge (Office integrations) and other integrations (finding windows & other UI interactions).” “We use elevated access for where the built-in FS APIs come up short. We’ve been working with Apple to eliminate this dependency and we should have what we need soon,” he added. Newhouse also asserted that Dropbox is not viewing or storing Mac users’ admin passwords. “We never see or store your admin password. The dialog box you see is a native OS X API (i.e. made by Apple),” he said. As to why Dropbox needs admin privileges in the first place, he said: “We check and set privileges on startup — the intent was to make sure Dropbox is functioning properly, works across OS updates, etc. The intent was never to frustrate people or override their choices.” It’s also using the permissions users grant via the OS dialog to edit a SQLite configuration file to put itself on the Accessibility list — although it’s certainly not making it plain that’s what users are granting when they respond to the prompt for their admin password. “We’re all jumping on this. We’ll do a better job here and we’re sorry for any anger, frustration or confusion we’ve caused,” he added. However, the company’s justification for utilizing root access to put itself on the Accessibility list in order to gain system-wide, elevated privileges did little to impress some critics. Responding to Newhouse’s statement one Hacker News commenter, riobard, wrote: “At this point you need to follow up with convincing technical details of why Dropbox needs the circumvention to counter the accusation and rebuild the damaged trust. “The reason for needing Accessibility API listed in your response is pretty vague, especially for those Mac users not having Microsoft products tainting their systems. I’ve deleted Dropbox from my Mac for now. I’m not installing it back till there’s reasonable explanation and remedies.” Another Hacker News commenter, kybernetyk, called out Newhouse’s phrasing about “granular permissions” as a “nice euphemism for ‘catch all’ permissions… .” “Now a malware can target your scripts and get a free ride to all your system yay,” added partycoder, another Hacker News user. For any Mac client users unconvinced about Dropbox’s and/or concerned about the security implications of granting the app root access, AppleHelpWriter has detailed a process for removing Dropbox from OS X’s Accessibility preferences .
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Galaxy Note 7 recall gets government treatment as the CPSC piles on
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Devin Coldewey
| 2,016
| 9
| 9
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The Consumer Product Safety Commission has finally weighed in on the Galaxy Note 7 debacle, urging users not just to be careful, , but to “power them down and stop using or charging the device.” Samsung preemptively after reports of spontaneous combustion, which the manufacturer blamed on bad lithium-ion batteries. The company is also , but the CPSC isn’t entirely convinced yet. The government body is “working quickly to determine whether a replacement Galaxy Note7 is an acceptable remedy for Samsung or their phone carriers to provide to consumers.” In other words, they may still decide that the problem is of a scale sufficient to issue a complete product recall. This could be the case should the problem causing the fire prove to be in the phone itself, as well as the battery. The CPSC and Samsung are working together on a more official notice with advice on what to do (other than turn it off); until then, stay safe.
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Opportunities and challenges in commercializing space privately
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Qasim Mohammad
| 2,016
| 9
| 9
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The dawn of the age was, in many ways, a direct response to heightened competitive political and military rhetoric from major global superpowers in the latter part of the previous century. The pressure to conquer stemmed from the threat of progress by foreign nations, and, consequently, an ideology. But when government involvement in increased in such countries as the United States in the 1980s, so too did the unexpected accidents and disasters. The need for diversification as a means to mitigate technology-related risk ultimately served as an important catalyst to slowly open up the world of to private enterprise. As an example, the Challenger accident in 1986 forced the Department of Defense to look for alternatives to the Shuttle. It was deemed too risky to have just one launch vehicle for missions. Relatively young companies such as and are ushering in the next era of exploration as part of a new free market. Their progress to date has generated a significant amount of enthusiasm among the masses for a fresh set of safe and sustainable methods of transportation to the cosmos. And wherever there’s enthusiasm, there’s also interest from sources of private investment capital. , VCs are paying more attention to technology startups that are accelerating the commercialization of . In 2015, VC investment in the sector increased by 253 percent year-over-year, and a whopping 2,052 percent since 2012. Although the capital deployed to date is concentrated on a few companies, such as SpaceX, and , the influx still represents an appetite from select private investors to support the sector’s progress. A surge in interest in outer by sources of private capital presents the opportunity of rapid growth and commercialization that should, through the laws of supply and demand, drive down costs associated with cosmic ventures in the long run. This reality will make the economy as accessible as any other on Earth several decades down the road. Private enterprises are also expected to take financial pressure off government institutions to engage in basic tasks like launching rockets, thus saving plenty of taxpayer dollars for other initiatives. The exploration and study of has been embedded within a narrative that emphasizes and epitomizes human progress under the guise of our species’ evolution. For many, this is reason enough to invest in the commercialization of . But when stripping out this narrative, what exactly are the economic reasons for undertaking the huge financial and biological risks associated with exploring ? Do the risks currently outweigh the ? For starters, with government bureaucracy having entirely controlled for the past few decades, it only seems fitting for people to have a desire to fly up there and do what could have been done only by a select few astronauts a short while ago. tourism companies like and the eccentric entrepreneurs behind them (i.e. Richard Branson) have . But the whole notion of being able to “experience ” is arguably being used as a precursor to the heavier and more profitable forms of private enterprise, each of which is scheduled to make an appearance in the coming decades. Although tourism represents the most prominent and active form of private enterprise interests taking shape in the cosmos today, other planned commercial ventures are also in the works for the foreseeable future. plans to open the door for corporations to bypass bureaucracy and fly people toward the Red Planet. Besides flybys and ceremonial long-distance trips, businesses are also looking toward asteroid mining, energy development and pharmaceuticals. In the case of asteroid mining, there is huge potential to generate significant economic returns through extracting resources from a typical Near Earth Asteroid (NEA). It has been suggested by some scientists that one NEA may , making it a lucrative business for private investors and business professionals to pursue. will represent the world’s first interplanetary mining mission. With respect to energy development, -based solar panel farms are being contemplated to power technologies and locations, as well as equipment here on Earth. But given the high up-front investment costs required to complete such a project in comparison to output and revenues, the capability isn’t expected for another several decades. And finally, in terms of pharmaceuticals, conducting medical research in micro-gravity conditions . In addition to tourism, resource extraction and scientific research, commercialization is taking shape through media, branding and advertising initiatives. Each of the current and planned uses of by private enterprise present the opportunity for media syndication on mass levels that can generate significant revenue and global corporate ad impressions for various project-specific stakeholders. For example, companies like Virgin Galactic and continue to use celebrity endorsements and paid-for, license-friendly media campaigns to generate interest in their services and get mass populations to see as a frontier fit for conquering. Also, several exist for corporations like Mars One to syndicate and license content for small-scale missions and turn them into global phenomena, which will drive further interest in exploration among the general population and the private enterprise sector. The organization has . The net result of such branding activities is a significant step forward for the private enterprises engaging in commercial activity. These initiatives are poised to influence governments to further deregulate for the sake of making the consumption of content easier and more affordable. There are many prevalent in , but for each opportunity there also exists a major challenge. As by the United States House Science Subcommittee on , three things in particular make exploration and development a not-so-attractive proposition: lack of financing for new ventures on a mass scale, lack of secured insurance and an inability to forge self-sustaining commercial markets. Indeed, many of these factors are changing, but they still present major roadblocks for entrepreneurs and private institutions. In terms of lack of financing, private capital is still not flowing freely and blindly through to -based enterprises like it is with internet-, digital media- and hardware-related technology businesses. In 2015, . Of this total, just over $2 billion was deployed to -based companies across 44 deals. This makes sense, as the typical investment horizon for a VC is 7 to 10 years. -based enterprises represent much longer investment horizons with a far greater risk of failure. And, naturally, without the necessary seed or growth-stage capital, it becomes very difficult for any entrepreneur to run a successful -based private enterprise. As such, building a -based business has largely been within the realm of successful tech billionaires. There also is a lack of adequate and secured insurance, which is because of the inability of insurers to see and test the reliability of -based technologies in the recent past. Few financial institutions are capable of providing -based enterprises with the financial insurance that matches the scale of initiatives in . Insurance is key for private businesses to offset the risk that was previously absorbed by governments, and to be able to engage in cosmic activities profitably with minimal risk, insurance capital needs to be available more freely. Lastly, an inability to forge self-sustaining commercial markets in the past puts into question the commercial viability of ased enterprises. Two decades ago, the commercial satellite business was expected to achieve independence within a few years of being established, but government involvement is still needed to this day to see projects to the execution phase. It can be argued that this was previously due to a lack of capital from private markets, as well as a lack of information available about commercialization within the public sphere. Luckily, these barriers are becoming less of an issue over time as the private sector absorbs the know-how that currently resides within the public sector. In terms of risks overall, entrepreneurs still need to prove they are up for the tasks related to . Many fear that lives will be lost because proper precautions will not be taken. , these concerns are not totally unfounded. After all, if something goes wrong in , whose fault is it? And in the case of an international incident, which country’s laws apply? These are important questions. commercialization is here to stay despite the and obvious roadblocks. If history is any indication, the ostensibly innate human quest to conquer the “final frontier” will always prevail over rationality and intelligent foresight. This is a matter of the human condition, after all. All of that having been said, continuous pressure should be placed on private institutions to ensure that the most prudent and wise decisions are made along the journey to commercialize . Too much money and too many lives are potentially at stake to suggest otherwise.
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Google’s WaveNet uses neural nets to generate eerily convincing speech and music
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Devin Coldewey
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Generating speech from a piece of text is a common and important task undertaken by computers, but it’s pretty rare that the result could be mistaken for ordinary speech. A new technique from researchers at Alphabet’s DeepMind takes a completely different approach, producing speech and even music that sounds eerily like the real thing. Early systems used a large library of the parts of speech (phonemes and morphemes) and a large ruleset that described all the ways letters combined to produce those sounds. The pieces were joined, or concatenated, creating functional speech synthesis that can handle most words, albeit with unconvincing cadence and tone. Later systems parameterized the generation of sound, making a library of speech fragments unnecessary. More compact — but often less effective. , takes things deeper. It simulates the sound of speech at as low a level as possible: one sample at a time. That means building the waveform from scratch — 16,000 samples per second. Each dot is a separately calculated sample; the aggregate is the digital waveform. You already know from the headline, but if you don’t, you probably would have guessed what makes this possible: neural networks. In this case, the researchers fed a ton of ordinary recorded speech to a convolutional neural network, which created a complex set of rules that determined which tones follow other tones in every common context of speech. Each sample is determined not just by the sample before it, but the thousands of samples that came before it. They all feed into the neural network’s algorithm; it knows that certain tones or samples will almost always follow each other, and certain others will almost never. People don’t speak in square waves, for instance. If WaveNet is trained with data from a single speaker, the resulting synthetic voice will resemble that speaker, since really, all the network knows about speech comes from their voice. But if you train it with multiple speakers, the idiosyncrasies of one person’s voice may be cancelled out by someone else’s, the result being clearer speech. Clear enough that it outperforms existing systems handily, though it isn’t without its quirks — perhaps a few more speakers need to be added to the stew. It can’t read text straight out just yet; written words need to be translated by another system not to audio but audio precursors — like computer-readable phonetic spelling. An interesting side effect of this is that if they train it without that text input, it produces an unnerving babble, as if the computer is speaking in tongues. What’s truly interesting, though, is the WaveNet’s extensibility. If you train it with an American’s speech, it produces American speech. If you train it with German, it produces German. And if you train it with Chopin, it produces… well, not quite Chopin, but piano in a logical, one might even be tempted to say creative vein. Whether it could produce a whole two-minute prelude is hard to say; composition isn’t quite as easy to systematize as basic chords and chromatic agreement. WaveNet requires a great deal of computing power to simulate complex patterns at this extremely low level, so it won’t be coming to your phone any time soon. If you’re curious about exactly how they arranged their convolutional layers and other technical details, .
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Rebecca Minkoff’s Fashion Week show uses augmented reality to help real women shop the look live
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Sarah Buhr
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Not only is augmented reality helping us capture all the Pokémon, it’s also made its way to fall preview show at this Saturday. About 350 fashion-forward individuals will get an up-close look at the new line in person, but those not able to snag a ticket can feel like they are right there with a 360 live experience provided at the show. And, something even more telling of where the fashion industry is headed — they’ll also be able to see how Minkoff’s newest line looks on their own body using an app called . Minkoff and her brother/co-founder Uri Minkoff partnered with the startup to help real women connect with the brand. It works by uploading a photo of yourself and then picking out clothing items from the show. Zeekit will then overlay those items on your body using the size you choose. So instead of mentally noting how a certain item would look on you instead of that lanky model, you can see it in augmented reality and in your size. The brother-sister duo has used tech to connect with its audience at past shows, like drones and VR, and the latest experience is an outgrowth of what’s worked to bring in consumers. But Uri, who recently caught up with me via phone, also says it’s a way to keep up with women in a new tech-savvy era of fashion to improve his brand’s bottom line — particularly with reduction of returns. “The industry standard for returns is 20 percent to 40 percent,” he told me. Zeekit could help reduce headaches by more accurately predicting which size dress or slacks look best on your body. But Rebecca Minkoff’s show isn’t the only one integrating tech. Thanks to fashion bloggers and the rise of social media, items once kept close for months at a time by designers and fashion editors are readily available to see — and buy. More brands like Minkoff and Hilfiger are now selling items seen on the runway that day, and other lines like Noon by Noor, Band of Outsiders, Prabal Gurung and others have also hopped on the VR bandwagon to introduce the latest to armchair fashion fans, as well. But Uri says tech has also changed the habits of a younger generation of buyers. It’s an Instagram era, and young women are staging their own fashion shows now. We’re seeing more diversity in the industry and real women on magazines. They’re not buying if they think the fashion is made for lanky models and not them. Integration of VR and augmented reality apps like Zeekit enable real women to see themselves in the clothing, not just runway models, and Uri believes the app could help boost buyer confidence in his brand. It’s a way to make his line accessible to every woman, not just a five-foot-ten-inch, bone-thin model. “I think that will then take away some of the elite nature and exclusivity that has been part of fashion and bring it to a more real place that will further spark interest in relatability,” Uri said.
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Twitter launches an Alexa app
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Sarah Perez
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Too lazy to read your tweets? Now, Amazon Alexa can just read them to you instead. Yes, that’s right: Twitter today has an , which means you can listen to the latest from Twitter right on your Echo speaker or other Alexa-powered device. The new app can give you general information on trends, or deliver information from your own account, says Twitter. According to the app’s description (or its “Skill’s description, in Amazon parlance), you’ll need to authenticate with your Twitter account in order to get started. Afterwards, you can launch the app by saying “Alexa, open Twitter.” The virtual assistant can then read your home Timeline to you, as well as your Mentions, Retweets, and Likes. As with other Alexa Skills, you’ll have to learn how to ask for these items, by saying things like “Alexa, ask Twitter for my own tweets,” “Alexa, ask Twitter has anyone retweeted me?,” “Alexa, ask Twitter for my Mentions,” “Alexa, ask Twitter what is happening?” and so on. In addition, the app can provide more general information from Twitter’s service, like the current trends or the local trends — meaning, trends for your particular location (e.g. “Alexa, ask Twitter for trends in Seattle”). None of this seems to be a particularly efficient way to consume the rapid-fire information that’s published to Twitter’s network, but the fact that Twitter felt compelled to launch an app on Alexa speaks to the growing importance of Amazon’s voice computing platform in consumer’s lives. As of June, Amazon there were tens of thousands of developers working on Skills for Alexa, whose . Of course, we all wish that Twitter was spending its time building a feature that would let us edit our tweets, instead of (the horror!) or new ways to hear our tweets read aloud, but I guess Alexa was a box the company felt the need to check. You can switch on the new Twitter Skill in the Alexa app on mobile or web, then authorize it to access your Twitter account. New on Amazon Alexa! Use the Twitter Reader skill to hear trends, top Tweets, notifications & more! Just . — Twitter (@Twitter)
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Crunch Report | Facebook Snapchat Clone in Poland
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Khaled "Tito" Hamze
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Tito Hamze, John Mannes
Tito Hamze
Yashad Kulkarni
Yashad Kulkarni
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Meerkat, star app of 2015, is officially dead
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Greg Kumparak
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Remember ? It came out of nowhere in early 2015 — a star of SXSW, in particular — and was on everyone’s tongue for weeks. Then came Periscope, a strikingly similar competitor built mostly in stealth mode, and word that Twitter had acquired it for nearly $100 million dollars before much of the world even knew it existed. Suddenly, interest in Meerkat fizzled. A year and a half later, Meerkat is dead, officially, as the company behind it shifts its efforts into a new project. Ben Rubin, co-founder of Life On Air (the company behind Meerkat), announced this afternoon that Meerkat has been pulled from the App Store: We just removed Meerkat from the AppStore 😔 bitter sweet moment seeing it go while celebrating — Ben Rubin (@benrbn) The company itself, however, carries on: they’re now focusing on Houseparty, a group video chat application they’ve been building in secrecy for months. Houseparty lets you quickly jump into “parties” of up to 8 people simultaneously, creating drop-in-drop-out style video chats between any friends who are online at the same time. According to published this week by The Verge, Houseparty is already approaching its millionth user. Meerkat’s has been shuttered and pushed into private mode, and its website now forwards to .
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The Cancer Moonshot needs a heavy dose of computational infrastructure
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Julia Fan Li
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Top cancer researchers recently reported their findings and recommendations to President Obama and Vice President Biden’s Cancer Moonshot task force. To my surprise, in the Blue Ribbon Panel’s report heavily concentrate on enabling computational infrastructure. Each recommendation included these key words: sharing data, engaging patients, precision medicine, genetic understanding, interdisciplinary, ecosystem and genomics. Cancer is a major health challenge of our time. Caused by abnormal cells dividing in an uncontrolled way, cancer is a leading cause of death worldwide, with more than 14 million new cases and 8 million deaths each year. Most of us have had our lives impacted directly or indirectly by a cancer diagnosis. Ending the emotional and economic burden of cancer has been subject to many false starts over the years. But, as someone whose work focuses on computational biology, and at the intersection of biology and big data, I am confident that computational infrastructure is the vital ingredient to help the recommendations become reality. Below are four key ways that computational infrastructure can be part of the recipe for success. Cancer is first and foremost a genetic disease, driven by mutations, or errors, in our DNA. Identifying and characterizing these errors requires specialized machines, skilled personnel and complex data analysis. Even today, the precise molecular causes of many cancers remain unknown. As a result, many patients with cancer are treated without having a precise genetic diagnosis. To truly understand, diagnose and treat cancer, we need a better sight of its genetics. This aligns with the panel’s recommendations to conduct retroactive analysis of biospecimens from patients treated with standard of care, to better understand tumor heterogeneity and to generate human tumor atlases. Governments and private industry are recognizing the research and population health benefits of genomics sequencing. Multiple large-scale sequencing projects have been initiated worldwide; for example, the U.S. government’s , the U.K. government’s and the AstraZeneca-led for drug development and discovery. Thanks to these and other projects, millions of sequenced cancer whole genomes will be a reality. An estimated . As the number of sequenced genomes grows, this data set will be an increasingly rich resource for the cancer research community, enabling precise characterization of the molecular changes that define cancer cells. Two of the 10 recommendations specifically call for a direct patient engagement network and the creation of adult (and pediatric) immunotherapy clinical trials networks. However, collaboration is at the core of all 10 recommendations, as the Blue Ribbon Panel unequivocally calls for better data sharing. The scale of the data used in cancer discovery means computation has a huge role in supporting research. Every sequenced genome requires 300-400 GB of hard disk space just to store the raw and processed files. By 2025, the amount of human genomic data , exceeding the storage requirements of astronomy and YouTube (the other two major data-sprouting entities). Downloading and sharing this data will be difficult, time-consuming and costly. Working in real time on a collaborative analysis with a colleague on a different continent will be nigh on impossible. To overcome these challenges, the cancer research community is increasingly turning to the cloud to store and analyze cancer genomic data. The U.S. National Cancer Institute (NCI) initiated to enable researchers to access (TCGA) — the world’s largest public genomic data set — containing over 2 petabytes of sequencing and other data from more than 11,000 patients. Rather than waiting weeks to download the data, researchers can log in to a cloud-based system to explore the data and run large-scale analyses. A key value of the cloud is that collaboration is default; researchers can log in to the NCI Pilots from anywhere in the world and work together on a project. Recommendation 10 calls for the development of new enabling cancer technologies and explicitly points to the need for computational platforms that connect several layers of biomedical data. As the size and complexity of the data sets used in cancer research grows, it will be important to develop new data structures for representing and querying millions of cancer genomes. One possibility here is to use structures, which represent all the genetic variation of a population in a lightweight data format. This approach reduces the storage and memory demands of working with large genomic data sets, better enabling researchers to work with the data. Massive genomic data sets will need to be analyzed alongside other molecular data, clinical data (including electronic health records) and behavioral data (for example, measures of patient behavior and risk exposure). Ideally, these data sets need to live side by side for comparisons to be made — and advances in computational layering and cloud computing can help accomplish that. The report emphasized the importance and potential promise of immunotherapy, which co-opts the body’s own immune system to directly attack the foreign cancer cells. Use of these therapies is made possible by detailed molecular characterization of the tumors. Silicon Valley entrepreneur Sean Parker is a prominent backer of immunotherapies, having provided a $250 million grant via the to help . These therapies are effective, but not yet perfect, and much more development is required. However, clinical development costs can be decreased by using computational resources earlier in the R&D value chain by identifying stratified groups of patients who can benefit from genetic profiling prior to commencing clinical trials. Using computational methods in development, the immune repertoire can be profiled on a population basis and can help clinicians predict better outcomes. Alongside biological and computational advances that will make possible high-resolution molecular characterization of cancer, there has never been a more favorable climate in which to do cancer research. The U.S. government is leading the high-profile fight through charismatic and committed champions such as Vice President Biden and the U.S. and . When thinking about cancer research, people conjure up images of white coats and test tubes. We don’t immediately think of computational cores, cloud computing, APIs and Python scripts. But I believe computational infrastructure the not-so-secret ingredient that glues together all 10 recommendations of the Blue Ribbon Panel and ensures we achieve 10 years of progress in cancer research ’ time.
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Honest Co. is reformulating its soaps after ingredients controversy
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Lora Kolodny
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The consumer products startup founded by Jessica Alba, , on Friday told that it plans to reformulate its dish soap, laundry detergent and other cleaners after an earlier controversy over their ingredients. The Honest Co. markets its products as gentler, healthier and more environmentally sustainable than those of mainstream brands in the U.S. However, reporters with The Wall Street Journal and a third-party testing laboratory earlier found that some products made by The Honest Co. contained ingredients that the company previously said it excluded, namely, sodium lauryl sulfate (SLS). While SLS is used in plenty of soaps and cleaners already, and is generally seen as safe, The Honest Co. claimed it wasn’t the healthiest option for consumers and was harsh. The Honest Co. claimed, counter to the WSJ’s findings, that its own lab tests never detected SLS in its products. The five-year-old startup also said then that it used sodium coco sulfate not SLS. But SCS happens to be made with SLS commonly, so The Honest Co. remained under scrutiny and is even facing lawsuits over its labeling. Recently, a that could have seen Unilever acquire The Honest Co. for a price in the ballpark of $1 billion derailed at the last minute over pricing considerations, sources tell TechCrunch. Instead to acquire The Honest Co. predecessors, , for an estimated $600 million to $700 million in cash. (Seventh Generation and Unilever have not disclosed the financial terms of their deal.) Sources involved in M&A dealmaking in the consumer goods industry are also telling TechCrunch it would be highly unlikely if Unilever were to acquire Honest Co. at this point. But other titans in the field, such as Procter & Gamble, Clorox Co. and Johnson & Johnson, could potentially come courting. They are all rumored to have sniffed around the Santa Monica, Calif. startup already. Honest Co. has raised $222 million in venture funding to date, and generates about $300 million in revenue annually. It sells its products direct to consumers online, as well as via its own pop-up shops and major retailers like Target, Costco and Whole Foods. Honest Co. executives could not be reached in time for comment. A company spokesperson sent this statement: “
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Here’s how you can stop jumping back and forth between Google’s calendar and map apps
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John Mannes
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Logistics are difficult, especially when every day you’re trying to keep track of 9 meetings, 13 phone calls, a dinner, a post-dinner, and a post-post-dinner. In a recent update, Google has decided to do its part to make daily logistics easier . Now when you open Google Maps, you’ll be able to see upcoming travel arrangements so you can quickly add them to your map for directions. This includes things like plane tickets, restaurant reservations and hotel bookings. Once you select one of these upcoming events, the updated Maps will show you directions to your next engagement directly in the navigation window. This helps you keep things straight, without requiring you to constantly jump back and forth between the two apps. Just don’t forget to enter the location for events when you add them to your calendar, or even these new features can’t save you. If it gets to be too much, you can dismiss upcoming events at will. Google even created a new personal content manager under the settings menu to toggle off what irritates you. For now, these features are rolling out exclusively to users on Android devises. Also remember that to take full advantage of the update, you will need to remain signed into both applications on your phone. Three cheers for productivity!
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Twitch announces Twitch Prime, Loyalty Badges and video uploads
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Greg Kumparak
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Twitch, the video game live-streaming service acquired by Amazon , kicked off its annual TwitchCon conference this afternoon with a keynote. With keynotes generally come a bit of news… and sure enough, here’s what’s new: The first Twitch Prime “loot” bonus: Twitch Prime members will get access to Tyrande, from Blizzard’s Heroes of the Storm, as a new hero in Blizzard’s Hearthstone. Twitch also dropped a bunch of numbers, for those keeping track: Twitch had an average of 622,347 concurrent viewers in 2016, peaking at 2,061,718 viewers at once in April. Two million people streamed games in 2016, with 17,208 being partnered (that is, in a revenue-share agreement by roll of mid-roll ads and subscriptions) with Twitch. Overall, those 2 million streamers broadcasted more than 10 billion minutes of game content.
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Rosetta goes out in a blaze of glory — and science
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Devin Coldewey
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Let’s all take a moment and pour one out metaphorically for Rosetta, the pioneering spacecraft that gave our newly spacefaring race its first comet landing. The orbiter early this morning, making a controlled crash into the comet’s surface, destroying itself in the process but gathering valuable data down to the last minute. This was a risky, fascinating and very successful mission, despite the hard landing and subsequent loss of the Philae lander. Making a rendezvous with a comet is as difficult as it is awesome, and today is the end of 12 years of hard work by the team at the European Space Agency. Many missions end with the doom of their own hardware, and Rosetta was planned no differently from dozens of other probes and orbiters. In this case, Rosetta’s final job was to sample gases and dust from the comet’s scanty atmosphere, and snap high-resolution images from just hundreds of feet above its surface. (It had been orbiting some 19km up.) The final image you can see up top; above is a mosaic of the area where it came to rest. And below, you can hear spacecraft operations manager Sylvain Lodiot announce the formal loss of signal. “Thanks to a huge international, decades-long endeavour, we have achieved our mission to take a world-class science laboratory to a comet to study its evolution over time, something that no other comet-chasing mission has attempted,” said the ESA’s director of science, Alvaro Giménez, in the blog post summarizing the mission’s conclusion. “The mission has spanned entire careers, and the data returned will keep generations of scientists busy for decades to come.” Got to cut this short, I’m getting emotional. Here’s to the next mission. — ESA Rosetta Mission (@ESA_Rosetta)
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Weekly Roundup: Snapchat’s new Specs, Beyoncé is a tech investor and SpaceX’s plans to colonize Mars
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Anna Escher
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This week, Elon Musk revealed SpaceX’s plan for humans to inhabit Mars, Google rebranded its cloud services and rumors swirled about a Twitter bid. These are the top stories of the week, and The little blue bird may find a new home soon. Word is that are all eyeing a Twitter bid. If Google buys, . But of all. All eyes were on Elon Musk this week as he detailed . He believes humans have two options: One path is to stay on Earth forever and eventually face an extinction event. The alternative is to become a space-faring, multiplanetary species. He clarified that and a 2024 launch is optimistic. If there’s one company cool enough to pull off the “computer on your face” concept, it’s Snapchat. The messaging company rebranded to Snap Inc. and made its first foray into hardware with the . Yes, they’re actually real and will cost $130. But will they end up Google brand, and . Facebook wants work to be as addictive as socializing. , the company’s enterprise communication and collaboration network, is launching on October 10. A week after GoPro announced its new Karma drone, DJI introduced its new . At $999, the Mavic is smaller and better at tracking than GoPro’s offering. DJI’s folding drone is smaller and better at tracking than GoPro’s offering http://tcrn.ch/2ddSnmB Posted by on Tuesday, September 27, 2016 Queen Bey is bringing her business skills to the tech world. $150,000 into , an app for buying concert merchandise and skipping the line to pick it up at the show. Where will AI lead us in the future? Facebook, Amazon, Google, IBM and Microsoft came together to launch the . The alliance was formed for the purpose of conducting research and promoting best practices when it comes to advancements in artificial intelligence. This year, ClassPass jacked up its prices from a $100 monthly payment to a $180 monthly payment, at its highest, marking the first . Following the price hike, the company lost 10 percent of its user base, but it was also the price that had to be paid to get ClassPass back to profitability. Here’s where the company is now. New tech-backed voting initiatives seem to be popping up on the daily, and . But will VC-funded registration apps and big-dollar donations really change the course of this election? Contractors are over the elimination of tips. The new payment structure is meeting criticism because it will eliminate tips, but guarantee a delivery commission. Only the full-service shoppers (contractors) are affected.
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Apple is screwing up HomeKit; here’s how they can fix it
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Daniel Conrad
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The real magic of the Internet of Things happens when devices work together. It will be magic when Siri, on your iPhone, can adjust your thermostat or confirm that you locked the back door; when your door lock can tell your sound system you’re home and you don’t even have to push a button to start the music. That’s not the reality we live in today, because most devices can’t talk to each other. Without a common language, this magic can’t happen. Apple (through ) and Google (through ) have introduced programs to enable this type of communication. As owners of the two dominant mobile phone platforms, they are both well-positioned to set standards for in- device communication. And yet, Works with Nest adoption is light years ahead of . Looking at the numbers: currently boasts compatible devices from 7 manufacturers. The page shows 95. Nest connects to washing machines, pet feeders and baby monitors. works with Philips lights and not much else. Apple’s been making devices for a long time. They’re in a lot more homes than Nest, and their retail stores should give them a tremendous advantage in attracting partners. Also, connecting to iPhone should be easy. So why does Nest have an order of magnitude more device partners? The fundamental difference in approach is one of hardware versus software. Apple requires hardware integration. Nest does integrations in the cloud. Our team built one of the first devices that connected to Nest. The integration and certification test process took one engineer a few days to complete. Nearly everything happens in the cloud, not on the user’s local Wi-Fi network. It didn’t hurt that we were well-supported by the team at Nest, or that their documentation is publicly available and excellent. Or that is awesome. (Google actually Firebase — maybe just to make Works With Nest even better?) Apple does things totally differently. You have to apply for access to the MFi developer program to even look at the documentation for hardware integration. Seriously, you have to wait weeks for approval just to read the HomeKit device requirements. Apple requires an authentication chip be added to your hardware that you can only buy from them. Existing products can not be connected to without this change to their electrical design. You also have to build your product with one of their approved manufacturers. If your current manufacturer is not on the list, you must move your line to a new factory. You have to test and certify your device in one of Apple’s approved labs. I understand there are only a few of them — a friend here in San Francisco had to send his devices to the U.K. for testing. I’ve even heard that Apple reviews your packaging to make sure the colors don’t clash with their branding schemes. I’m honestly choosing not to believe that that’s true — but maybe it is. Most importantly, Apple requires much of the device-to-device integration to happen on the local Wi-Fi network — rather than talk to servers, your device talks to an iPhone through the local Wi-Fi network, and the iPhone talks to the other devices. That means that logic must be baked into the firmware on the device itself, and any future modifications or extensions of the system mean updating that firmware. This is not how it’s supposed to work in the days of the internet. Devices should be connected to the cloud. In the cloud, servers can talk to each other. We can fix bugs without risky over-the-air firmware updates. To be clear, there is a place for non-cloud connections between devices. We used to ship a music synchronization device, and the low-latency communications we needed required local communication. Nest offers the Weave platform for local communication between devices, too. Bluetooth devices can’t connect to a Wi-Fi access point, so they need to communicate with a phone directly. But there’s no reason to integration at the device level when you can do it in the cloud. It’s strange to me that Apple can get this so wrong. It’s like in a world with email, they’re asking us to use a fax machine. My first thought is that they might want to limit the quantity of devices to improve the average quality. If they make it expensive enough, maybe only the best devices will get through. The Amazon reviews on Alert’s suggest otherwise. In today’s day and age it’s often not the rich companies building the best devices. Maybe it’s just that Apple fundamentally still thinks like a hardware company. That is, when they think of integrations, they instinctively begin with lists of hardware requirements. Whatever their goal, the end result is that is going to fail unless Apple changes its approach. I hope they do. God knows Nest could use a healthy competitor.
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Nutanix up 131% on first day of trading
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Katie Roof
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With clients like Toyota and Best Buy, Nutanix aims to make it easier for businesses to manage their data centers. Its cloud offerings are making infrastructure “invisible, so the businesses can focus on applications and services,” CEO Dheeraj Pandey told TechCrunch. David Blumberg of Blumberg Capital also invested in Nutanix, saying that he “believed in their strategic vision to bring web scale architecture to the data center.” “Dheeraj and the team have not only engineered incredible products, but they’ve engineered an incredibly company — a company we think can really scale,” said Ravi Mhatre, partner at Lightspeed. Like many of the recent tech IPOs, Nutanix opted to list on the Nasdaq stock exchange. Its ticker is “NTNX.”
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Twitch appears to be getting its own version of Amazon Prime, called “Twitch Prime”
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Sarah Perez
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It appears that are not the only thing Amazon has been working on with the live-streaming site it owns. A small number of Twitch users are now reporting seeing a new section called “Twitch Prime” pop up in their profiles. According to a banner ad spotted by one user, Twitch Prime will include perks like “free loot every month,” as well as exclusive discounts on new-release games, ad-free viewing and more. Well this is… interesting. Twitch Prime Oo Apprently you get it as Amazon Prime member and gives you ad-free viewing. — Dennis S. (@der_rod) It appears the user, Dennis Sädtler, who’s based in Germany, was accidentally shown a test of Twitch Prime, as he encountered a “test game” that popped up with placeholder text along with a few more details about joining Twitch Prime. He says the content was only shown briefly, around 1 PM EST on Friday (17:00 UTC). The screen also informed him that Twitch Prime was included with an Amazon Prime membership at no additional cost. That means, like some of Amazon Prime’s other benefits such as Amazon Music or , Twitch Prime will be sold both within the larger $99 per year Prime membership package as well as a standalone subscription. The banner touted a 30-day free trial, but Sädtler was not able to catch the pricing. In addition to this sighting, another Twitter user, Tyler Kizner, found a non-functional link to Twitch Prime in his Settings section, next to “Channels & Videos,” also for a brief time. The link replaced the “Turbo” section that was there previously. That would make sense if Twitch Prime was a rebranded Turbo — that removes ads and offers other features for $8.99 per month. https://twitter.com/TylerKizner/status/781911273168596992 Kizner said the “Twitch Prime” link was non-functional when clicked, and redirected him back to the Twitch homepage. (The banner link is , and continues to redirect at this time.) Sädtler told us that he’s been data mining Twitch’s site for a few weeks, and caught a few other references to Prime, which was being referred to internally as “Premium.” He spotted other new features, too, like “Twitch Launcher,” which he describes as a small program for downloading games bought on the Twitch-integrated Amazon platform. This includes games like “Breakaway,” the first Twitch-integrated Amazon Game Studios title. While services tend to test new features all the time, there’s a good chance that Twitch Prime is going to be announced today, given that TwitchCon, the live-streaming company’s annual conference, is currently underway. back in 2014 for over a billion dollars, but the gaming site has operated relatively independently until lately. In recent days, that has changed. For example, Amazon on Twitch, and yesterday it announced the first Amazon Game Studios titles Twitch was not immediately available for comment.
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Nintendo shows off some highly nerdy features of the NES Mini
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Devin Coldewey
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Nintendo has further taken the wraps off the — which is to say, the one we’re all buying ourselves as soon as it’s available. An aggressively retro-themed video released today visually demonstrates three of the NES Mini’s features. Brace yourselves, it’s about to get real nerdy in here. Most relevant to the average player is the save state option — Nintendo calls them suspend points. Those of you who’ve used emulators or the Virtual Console will be familiar with this, but old-school players will be amazed and possibly offended. Basically, you can save the game at any moment — mid-jump, just before a boss, before opening a randomized chest, etc. Then you can reload if you die, get a bad item, or just want to play through a part again. The new video shows that each game will receive four suspend point slots, which you can write to by dropping a cute winged screenshot onto them. It’s a great improvement over the VC system, though certain emulators have implemented something like it for years. That will be helpful for many, I’m sure, but the other two features are strictly for purists and nerds like myself. First, there’s the option to switch between a 50Hz and 60Hz internal refresh rate; games running on PAL rather than NTSC ran ever so slightly slower, and European gamers might find the feel of the controls is off in 60Hz mode. It’s a thoughtful inclusion. Next is the display modes, which is where it gets real nerdy. The NES was almost certainly played on a 4:3 CRT television over something like an RF adapter or possibly RCA. The output of the NES, however, was not quite 4:3 (~256x240px), so the pixels would be stretched — that is, not quite square, the way they are on the screen you’re looking at. This, combined with the poor video signal carried by cables at the time and the naturally analog look of CRT phosphors, gave NES games a very distinct and recognizable . The NES Mini will have three display modes (click above for a bigger version): Which you use is really a matter of taste. It might look better to send the pixel-perfect signal and stretch it on your TV rather than in the box. As for the CRT filter, well, and I know how this sounds, but I’ve seen better. There is actually a pretty significant community of people who design these things, making them ever more accurate, adding slight distortion to simulate the glass of the old sets, traveling distortions, tweakable chromatic aberration, all that stuff. People are willing to — we’re talking hundreds of dollars here — for a device that essentially adds structured noise to a clean digital video signal. It sounds crazy but that’s how serious some people are about recapturing that feel of sitting in the living room playing Final Fantasy or Metroid for the first time. And I guarantee a few of them work at Nintendo and insisted on adding this level of control — nay, I would guess they wanted even more granularity — to the display options on the NES Mini. One other piece of news that broke yesterday: Japan will be getting its own version of the console, but it’ll look like the country’s original Famicom, complete with hardwired controllers and a slightly different selection of games. How fun is that? Both will be available soon: the NES Mini on November 11 for $60, and the Famicom Mini simultaneously for an equivalent amount of money, but in yen, obviously.
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Apply now for Include Office Hours with First Round Capital!
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Samantha O'Keefe
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TechCrunch Include are happening this October 10th! Phin Barnes and Bill Trenchard from in San Francisco 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 October 10th session with First Round in San Francisco by Wednesday, October 5th at 12pm PT. 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 be at the prototype stage. Let’s learn more about our co-hosts. As a founder, operator, advisor and angel investor, Bill has helped dozens of companies launch, manage through hyper growth and win. Before joining First Round, Bill led LiveOps to $100 million in sales and hundreds of employees as the industry’s leading cloud contact center. He also founded Jump Networks, a leading web calendar and personal organizer acquired by Microsoft. As an angel investor and founding partner at Founder Collective, Bill made investments in category-killing companies, including Uber, IronPort (acquired by Cisco), Adroll, PowerSet (acquired by Microsoft), Lending Club, HomeRun (acquired by Rearden Commerce), Tapulous (acquired by Disney), Slide (acquired by Google) and Chegg. At First Round, Bill has led investments in companies, including Looker, Flexport, LendingHome, Bright and buddybuild. Before joining First Round, Phin worked at AND 1 from “Day 2″ and founded a fitness video game company. In his first job after college, Phin spent six years helping to scale AND 1 Basketball from $15 million to over $225 million in revenue. As the creative director for footwear he led product direction, managed relationships with national retail accounts and created the initial concept for the signature AND 1 marketing property — the AND 1 Mix Tape. After training for an Ironman in 2002, he wanted to build fitness technology and founded an independent video game company to do it. The company developed and published Yourself!Fitness, the first fitness game for Xbox and PlayStation 2. Phin managed product, marketing and distribution and secured retail partnerships with Nordstrom and Best Buy, as well as promotional partnerships with Procter & Gamble and McDonald’s. If you’re interested in attending Office Hours with First Round, by Wednesday, October 5th at 12pm PT.
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Yahoo open sources its porn-detecting neural network
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Devin Coldewey
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Ever wonder how things get marked NSFW on the internet? It’s Yahoo. Yahoo does it — with their special-made, smut-trained, porn-detecting neural network. And now you can, too, because the team behind the system has . I guess you could say they’re down to fork. I jest, of course: Yahoo’s algorithm doesn’t do it all. In fact, detecting NSFW imagery is an infamously difficult problem. To paraphrase the famous saying, , but you — admit it — have a lifetime of viewing pornography to reflect on when you make that categorization. Machines, however, are totally innocent — or they were, until Yahoo corrupted them by training an image-recognition engine on thousands of porn pics. They can never return to that state of grace we have stolen from them — but on the other hand, your online searches are less likely to randomly contain erogenous zones. Seriously, though, convolutional neural networks are an excellent tool for classifying images, as research has shown again and again over the last few years. After being trained on a database of a specific type of imagery, their algorithms home in on certain patterns — if it’s dogs, they learn to see tails, noses, snouts. If it’s cars, they recognize wheels, door handles, grills. And if it’s porn — well, use your imagination. The result is a system that can comb through a vast variety of imagery and give each a score, from 0 to 1, on how NSFW it thinks that particular picture is. This could be useful in many situations, and not just censorship ones. Titillating imagery is all well and good in its place, but being able to sift it out is useful when, for example, handling large data sets sourced directly from the web. Such a system could also inspect your emails and messages without any human intervention or (some would argue) any intrusion of privacy, and warn you if an image is potentially NSFW (handy for when coworkers try to prank you). You’ll need to provide your own porn to train the model with, but if you’ve read this far, I doubt that will be a problem. There are more details available at the , and the model is available for download .
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PewDiePie’s new game “Tuber Simulator” hits the top of the App Store, crashes
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Sarah Perez
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What happens when the world’s biggest YouTube star Felix “PewDiePie” Kjellberg to download and play his new mobile game? The game promptly shoots up to the top of the App Store, and the . That’s what happened, at least, following the and launch of “PewDiePie’s Tuber Simulator,” the video star’s latest game, which parodies the life of a full-time YouTube creator. The game was published to the App Store and Google Play on Thursday, and hit the charts hard. It went from the #25 Overall free app on the App Store on launch day to the #2 app today. (It would be #1 if Apple didn’t insist on including its iTunes U app in the App Store charts.) The game also became the #1 free iPhone game in just 20 hours, and is the #1 free app in 10 countries. It’s also the #1 free game in 29 countries on the App Store, reports app store intelligence firm Sensor Tower. Such is the power of the YouTube fan base. “Tuber Simulator” was launched via Revelmode, PewDiePie’s joint venture with Maker Studios, and published by Montreal-based Outerminds. The game crashed shortly after launch, as the servers were overwhelmed by the demand. Users began seeing errors when they tried to set up accounts, and Outerminds has been working to resolve the issue. As of a few hours ago, the game publisher announced on Twitter it was “almost done” fixing the “Error 99” problem people were experiencing. We are almost done fixing the Error 99 when creating your channel. Thanks for your patience. — Outerminds (@Outerminds) Thanks for your patience guys! We are working as hard as we can to resolve all the server issues. — Outerminds (@Outerminds) “Tuber Simulator” is similar in spirit to the “learn-to-be-famous” hit game “Kim Kardashian:Hollywood,” as it has players learning to become a YouTube star by making videos, gaining views and subscribers, and then buying equipment, furniture, clothes and more via in-app purchases, as their fame grows. However, unlike the Kardashian title, “Tuber Simulator” features 8-bit style graphics, giving the game a classic look. “Tuber Simulator” is also backed by voiceovers from PewDiePie, and includes a minigame called Puggle. The launch comes alongside news that PewDiePie will be teaming up with one of the designers behind “Goat Simulator,” Armin Ibrisagic, to produce multiple games in the future. Ibrisagic’s new studio, on the future titles. According to the deal terms, Kjellberg will provide creative input on multiple games for iOS, Android and PC, but no further details were revealed. This is not Kjellberg’s first foray into mobile gaming, however. Last year, he released “Legend of the Brofist,” which was also published by Outerminds. That title held the number one spot on the App Store for three weeks.
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New Google Tilt Brush demo shows what it’s like to paint with friends in VR
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Lucas Matney
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One of the more fun usages of virtual reality to have already emerged is Google’s Tilt Brush. The VR painting simulator is often one of the first things I demo to first-time VR users and it really allows people to lose themselves in a VR world and make it whatever they want it to be. Art is more fun with friends, and it appears Google is discovering that as well. Today, the company is a new prototype of the app that allows you to “share ideas, draw and create with others” as you design and build VR creations. Tilt Brush is currently only available for the HTC Vive because of controller restraints on Oculus at the moment, it’s just a prototype at the moment but the team is hoping to develop it into a full-fledged feature soon. In addition to the multiplayer feature, Google’s VR team is continuing to use Tilt Brush as an experiment in building a creative platform. Tilt Brush is experimenting with some other cool features including custom avatars, so users can personalize their VR look; Portal Brush, so they can peer out into the real world using the HTC Vive’s front camera; and a few other techniques to bring animation into the VR world. Tilt Brush is constantly checking out new updates, but this is a particularly huge one given the massive potential for increasing the scale of creations and the level of collaboration.
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So now we have a federal CISO
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Jeff Williams
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So now we have a (Brigadier General [retired] Gregory J. Touhill) as part of the (Office of Management and Budget). But what does that really mean? We have had a series of leaders who have played a similar role over the years. Do you remember our first “Cyber Czar,” Richard Clarke? Clarke later wrote a book called “Cyber War: The Next Threat to National Security and What to Do About It.” The George W. Bush administration had a whole series of short-term appointments, underscoring the difficulty of this role. Some other appointments include Rod Beckstrom, who became head of the National Cybersecurity Center and Howard Schmidt, who served as the White House Office of Cybersecurity Coordinator. I think it’s great that we once again have someone with the responsibility to tackle cybersecurity for the country. Having a leader means there’s now a single person to fire when something goes wrong. Hopefully that means he’s motivated to get organized about protecting our nation’s information infrastructure. But it’s also possible (likely?) that this is yet another short-term appointment that makes it feel like we are doing something… anything… without ever making any real progress. The first obvious question is why make the CISO part of OMB? They’re good auditors, but do they have the technical chops for this job? Historically, the NSA, DHS, FBI and even the FTC have all played a role in actually setting cyber strategy. The good news is that OMB has connections with all government agencies and has quite a lot of power to implement and manage functions. However, OMB is reactive — it can’t make any new rules or policies… that vision is going to have to come from the president or Congress. So what should a federal CISO actually be doing? The CISO role isn’t very sexy and, frankly, is an almost impossible job, even for a single company. The scope and complexity of the federal CISO role is inconceivable. The job sounds like it is on the front lines of technical security policy and defense. However, it’s mostly about setting priorities and then managing a complex budget and a variety of teams. Unlike China and North Korea, we have an incredibly open network where government does not have control over anything. Most of our critical systems are in the hands of private companies, well outside the influence of the OMB. This means that the federal CISO won’t have any visibility into how the vast majority of our critical systems are defended. Even worse, nobody, including the new federal CISO, has the power to take action to protect our country. Every tech thriller movie has somebody who yells “Cut the hard line!” But with our hyper-connected networks, there really isn’t much that a federal CISO can do to respond or even help in case of attack. There’s not even a centralized way to protect federal agencies, much less the entire country. On the surface, our cybersecurity challenges might look similar to a military problem — how should we respond when someone attacks? But frankly, we aren’t very good at detecting attacks, and when we do, the “attribution problem” makes it almost impossible to figure out who did it. Which means bluster and threats are often the only response. That’s the path to cyberwar. We are the most vulnerable country on the planet because we have the most dependence on technology and we are the most open about our network. The only strategy that makes sense to me is to avoid a cyberwar at all costs. We must stop the posturing and scare tactics. We should be very careful about how we talk to the world about our cyber-attack capabilities. And we should work with the ISACs ( and ) and the appropriate agencies in other countries to establish agreements that will help detect and respond to cyber attacks. I’m hopeful that despite his military background, our new federal CISO can see past war-planning and focus on proactively improving defenses. Currently, our network security isn’t great and our application security is in disastrous shape. The CISO role can change the game by working to create a culture of security in both the federal government and, more broadly, in private companies — everyone building the systems that we have to trust. We need to change our thinking from “we’re secure unless we get hacked” to “we’re secure only when we have the right defenses and continuously monitor them.” My highest priority recommendation for our new federal CISO is to make security visible. You will have the power, through regulation and audits, to make both agencies and companies disclose exactly how they are building applications and securing systems. We need visibility into how people are trained, which processes are used to build and test and which tools are used to create our nation’s information technology. You can get the market to help you protect the country… but first you have to solve the information asymmetry problem between technology producers and consumers.
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Atomic is like Google Docs for interface prototyping
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Romain Dillet
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Meet , a prototyping service for your next mobile app or website. It works in your browser, but it’s a lot more powerful than you’d expect. Atomic handles animations and lets you make interactive designs. And you can collaborate on your designs with your team in real time. The startup launched the this week adding a bunch of new features that make your design more interactive and easier to create. Atomic launched in September 2015 and costs between $15 and $35 per month. But first, let’s take a step back and look at Atomic’s features. While there are many native apps for quick prototyping, such as , they don’t provide a good multiplayer experience. If you’re working with a team of designers, you’ll want to use a service that sits in your browser. In fact, Atomic has released a Sketch plugin so that you can export your designs. There are many cloud services for interface design, such as , and . Eventually, it depends on the way you like to work, but I can see many designers choosing Atomic over say InVision — the service feels polished and flexible. When you’re working on a design, it starts with interface drawing. If you’re not using Sketch, you can add buttons, text and images from your browser. Compared to Photoshop, it is tailored to interface design. I’m not sure Atomic is as powerful as Sketch on this front, but you can keep using Sketch for the initial steps as Atomic doesn’t stop there. You can then add animations and interactions. You get to decide which type of click, tap or swipe you need to do to trigger something. And a sort of mini-video editor lets you configure interface changes based on these interactions. Some parts of your interface can be scripted — “if this happens then do that after 3 seconds.” With the second version, you can also add text fields in case you’re designing an app that relies a lot on text fields. You can also re-use components of your design in multiple screens. The ability to re-use parts of your design and work in teams should be a big time saver for teams of designers. And finally, you can preview your designs in your desktop or phone’s browser. Other people can comment and add notes for a specific area of your design. Atomic could be a good way to test different designs before working with developers on the actual implementation. [gallery ids="1395136,1395137,1395139,1395140,1395141,1395142,1395143"]
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Lora Kolodny
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Facebook “Messenger Day” is the chat app’s new Snapchat Stories clone
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Josh Constine
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Facebook is stealing the Stories format and invading countries where Snapchat isn’t popular yet. Today in Poland it launched “Messenger Day”, which lets people share illustrated filter-enhanced photos and videos that disappear in 24 hours, just like on Snapchat. By using the international popularity of Messenger to spread the Stories format, Facebook could boost retention and return visits to its chat app while becoming the primary place where people post off-the-cuff lifecasting content before they get hooked on Snapchat. Sources in Poland spotted Messenger Day and sent TechCrunch’s John Biggs these screenshots. We reached out to Facebook for comment, and it told us “We know that people come to Messenger to share everyday moments with friends and family. In Poland we are running a small test of new ways for people to share those updates visually. We have nothing more to announce at this time.” Additionally, Facebook says it frequently runs small tests before rolling products out to other regions, but there’s no guarantee it will expand this feature beyond Poland. It’s unclear, but Facebook might not bring it to the US unless it really blows up abroad. 60 million people in the US and Canada already use Snapchat daily, and aggressively pushing Messenger Day there could annoy them. But in countries where people aren’t that familiar with Snapchat, it has nothing to lose by experimenting. Much of the feature works exactly like Snapchat Stories, with the ability to draw or add text to images. Facebook’s one big innovation with Messenger Day is the use of graphic filters as suggestions for what to share, instead of just to celebrate holidays and events or to show off your location like with Snapchat’s geofilters. At the top of the Messenger thread list, users see a row of tiles representing “My Day” and friends’ Days they can watch, but there are also prompts like “I’m Feeling”, “Who’s Up For?” and “I’m Doing”. Tapping on these tiles provides a range of filters “I’m feeling…so blue” with raindrops and a bubbly blue font, “I’m feeling…blessed” with a glorious gold sparkly font, “Who’s up for…road trip” with a cute car zooming past, or “Who’s up for…Let’s grab drinks” with illustrated beer mugs and bottles that cover the screen. This feature allows people to share visually appealing images even if they aren’t great artists or especially creative. These prompts could also spur usage when people are bored, sparking their imagination. Messsenger is already an app people use all day with close friends, so it could end up a better home for the Stories format than cramming it into Facebook’s core app, which the company and . The Stories slideshow format has proven to be a powerful way to share more than the perfectly polished pics people post to Instagram. That’s why of Snapchat Stories, but its . But Facebook suffers from the same problem of people only sharing their biggest life highlights, which don’t happen that often. Facebook is already so stuffed with features and probably isn’t opened as frequently as Messenger. Now Messenger Day wants to make this casual sharing option ubiquitous before Snapchat can. That’s a similar strategy to Instagram Stories, which I hear is flourishing in places like Russia where Snapchat adoption is low. This is the benefit of Facebook being a giant company earning $2 billion in profit a quarter. It can clone fast thanks to its enormous team, translate and localize features for testing in certain markets, and cross-promote what works with its inescapable feed and chat apps. Messenger Day might not lure many people away from Snapchat, but Facebook could stunt its competitor’s growth by racing to to bring its own Stories to the unclaimed corners of the earth.
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9 tricks to appear smart in brainstorming meetings
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Sarah Cooper
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During these largely pointless exercises, the point is to contribute using the mere gravitas of your presence, make other people’s ideas seem like your ideas, and look like a true leader by questioning the efficiency of the whole process. Here are 9 tricks to make you look like you’re the creative force on your team. Use one of these phrases: Use one of these phrases:
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Clinton campaign and Dems get $20M from Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz
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Josh Constine
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It’s no secret that of her presidential opponent Donald Trump when it comes to fundraising from Silicon Valley — but the second-largest donation of the election season just pushed her financial lead even further. The $20 million infusion comes from Asana and Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz and his wife Cari Tuna. Several funds, PACs, and Democratic organizations supporting Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign have received a combined donation of $20 million. In a post titled , Moskovitz explains the donation, saying, “If Secretary Clinton wins the election, America will advance much further toward the world we hope to see,” which is one that of “increased tolerance, diversity and interdependence in the name of mutual prosperity.” The League of Conservation Voters Victory Fund and For Our Future PAC, two organizations focused on environmental and labor issues, will each receive $5 million, while the other $10 million will go to the DSCC, the DCCC, MoveOn.org Political Action, Color Of Change PAC, as well as “several nonpartisan voter registration and GOTV efforts.” Moskovitz said in his post announcing the donation that he was motivated in part by a desire to defeat Trump in the November election. “If Donald Trump wins, the country will fall backward, and become more isolated from the global community,” he wrote. “This decision was not easy, particularly because we have reservations about using large amounts of money to influence elections,” Moskovitz added. “That said, we believe in trying to do as much good as we can, which in this case means using the tools available to us (as they are also available to the opposition).” Moskovitz and Tuna have been supporting philanthropic causes with a serious focus on efficiency through , but this is their first presidential campaign donation. The couple are the youngest to agree to the Giving Pledge, an initiative by Bill Gates and Warren Buffett that asks billionaires to give away most of their wealth to charity. Moskovitz’s wealth is estimated to be approximately $10.5 billion, and Tuna has charted the couple’s giving as president of Good Ventures. Tuna explained her philanthropic interests in a 2014 Washington Post profile, saying that she wanted to invest in U.S. policy, international aid, scientific advancements and global catastrophe response. Campaign finance is new to Tuna and Moskovitz, but a bitter campaign cycle inspired them to branch out. The election, Moskovitz wrote, “has become a referendum on who we want to be — as individuals, as a nation and as a society. Will we be driven by fear, towards tribalism, emphasizing the things that divide us? Will we focus on how to advantage those most similar to us while building barriers to separate us from the rest of the world?” The $20 million donation puts Moskovitz and Tuna in the ranks of mega-donors like Tom Steyer, a former hedge fund manager who has reportedly put over into this year’s campaign. Steyer focuses his donations on climate change initiatives and is the co-founder of the For Our Future PAC that received $5 million from Moskovitz and Tuna. Steyer advised the couple on their foray into political giving — prior to this, Moskovitz had only donated a little more than $5,000 to political campaigns, according to Federal Election Commission data.
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Crunch Report | Airbnb Fights Discrimination on Platform
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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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AI can make your money work for you
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Nathan Richardson
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The way we thought of apps back in 2008 is how we’ll view artificial intelligence ; 2016 will look like the AI stone age. Although apps have created completely new behaviors, especially in the fintech space with mobile banking and shared payments, the app economy, unfortunately, seems to be reaching a peak, and monetizing an app has become an uphill battle. Apps will be the technology of the past, ushering in a new era for AI. Bots today are merely app replacements or novelties, and the experience still feels like talking to a robot. But with bots eventually becoming smarter than today’s apps, they’ll inevitably solve the problems that apps cannot fix in entirely new ways that haven’t even been realized yet. Let’s take a look ahead. In the future, for example, bots, and AI in general, will help you make money off your checking account. Did you know that extra cash in your checking account is a missed opportunity? Every day, it loses value to inflation. To generate better returns, you could keep the bare minimum in your checking account and invest the rest. However, unexpected expenses can drain your account suddenly. Without extra cushioning in your checking account, you risk getting slapped with bank fees or credit card debt that quickly cancel out any gains from your investments. It feels like you can’t win. Either you’re missing out on capital gains, or you’re playing limbo with your account balance. AI will make this struggle a thing of the past. Advances in AI will create a robo-accountant that knows your spending better than you do. By analyzing your purchase history, it will constantly move money between your checking, savings, investments and credit cards. This way, your checking account’s balance is always in the narrow “sweet spot:” high enough to avoid fees, but not so high that you miss out on investment yield. Right now, finding that sweet spot is time-consuming and anxiety-inducing. In time, the robo-accountant will know when you’re likely to splurge. It will know when your car will need a repair, when your electric bill will spike. It will know when you’re actually better off carrying a balance on your credit card than paying your bank’s minimum-balance fee. A fee-minimizer/yield-optimizer could exist without AI, but it wouldn’t work that well. AI incorporates the ability to make complex judgments based on your history of spending habits, the fees from your various financial institutions and countless other factors. This is the crucial link that makes the product useful: It plans ahead so you don’t have to. Your robo-accountant will take everything into consideration to make sure you get the most yield from your money while minimizing the fees you pay across the board. AI will enable us to increase our wealth while decreasing our anxiety. Given that more than 60 percent of Americans worry about missing their retirement goals, this is no small feat.
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The Swiss watch industry is doomed
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John Biggs
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slide in Tim Cook’s keynote that probably made the watch industry potentates choke on their oysters St Jacques. It was a simply a clear comparison between Apple Watch sales and sales of traditional watch brands, both high and low. And it wasn’t good. At the bottom of the barrel was Japan’s Casio, makers of heavy-duty watches designed to take on tank treads and falls from your dresser. Further up the list was Longines, a mid-level brand with a long and storied history. Then Patek Philippe under Citizen and Seiko. Near the top was Fossil, the brand most of us get for high school graduation. Then the Apple Watch. Then Rolex. This list, when read with a watch lover’s eye, is an outrage. It’s like showing a list of car brands – Toyota, Bugatti, Ford, Mercedes – and ranking them by sales, not quality. The list would be an affront. To the watch lover – and the brands that cater to them – none of these upstarts, the Casio’s, the Citizens – deserve to be on the same slide as Patek Philippe and Rolex. Omega and Cartier – mid-level brands – maybe, but not those patresfamilias of the watch industry. But there they are. And that’s exactly why Swiss watchmaking is doomed. And that’s why more and more smaller brands are appearing to fill the yawning chasm between affordable and ludicrous. First we must understand that the watch industry is about glamour. Watches have a deep and important history and are some of the most beautiful and well-designed objects of our era. But they are also just jewelry, and expensive jewelry at that. Watch makers have built a wide network of retail “doors” and they created artificial scarcity by making those doors take – not choose – product of the brand’s choosing. Regional manager didn’t like your store in Pittsburgh? He’d make you buy ten middling watches, a few expensive but unusable bands, and maybe a few good pieces. Then retailers mark them down, give discounts to favorite customers, and place orders for “grail watches” that wouldn’t be filled for months or years. The Swiss watch industry, during the 1980s and 1990s even into the 2000s was in firm control of its inventory, retail sales, and profits. And times were good. Now watches are a commodity. Companies like Daniel Wellington and MVMT are selling millions of dollars worth of acceptable if poorly-constructed watches – thereby gutting the Swiss low-end – and with advanced manufacturing techniques we are seeing smaller brands produce mechanical timepieces. Glitzy houses like MB&F and more staid, traditional places like F.P. Journe – companies who make beautiful watches for the sake of their beauty and complexity – may make it out of this maelstrom but only in the same way vinyl producers have found a small niche with music lovers. Don’t believe me? Check out this report . “July was not a strong month for Swiss watch industry exports,” they wrote. “The fact that there were two fewer working days this year certainly penalised the results to some extent, but that was not the determining factor because at the same time Swiss exports were higher overall. The industry saw the value of its exports lose 14.2% compared to July 2015 at 1.6 billion francs.” The media is piling on. “Is time being called on the watch industry as a reliable source of income for Switzerland?”
It gives me no pleasure in stating any of this except for a small surge of schadenfreude: barring some miracle this line will fall and fall. In short, their hubris did them in. Many would claim Tim Cook’s slide is bogus. Rolex doesn’t publish sales numbers but we can estimate the company is making and selling about a million watches a year making it hardly the rarified brand that most watch neophytes think it is. If Rolex is the brand to beat, and you can be certain they want you to think so, then in a few months Apple will beat it handily. Why? Because people don’t watches but Apple understands why they them. Quality workmanship is the first leg on Apple’s little watchmaking stool followed by a wide range of well-made accessories. Functionality is the third leg. Can your Rolex tell you the temperature in Cupertino? You may not care on a daily basis but if you’re about to take a red-eye an Apple Watch is far better than a Rolex at telling you whether to bring a coat. As I’ve said again and again, watchmakers brought this upon themselves. To create an air of exclusivity they jacked up prices and created artificial shortages. They ignored the Internet until it was far too late and ignored their true market – the watch obsessives who visit sites like and and post wrist shots on . Samsung even brought on, in its own, ham-handed way, an editor from in order to steal some of the panache from the Swiss brands. Sadly, if things keep heading this way the only things those obsessive sites will write about are Samsung and Apple smartwatches. The thing that really hurts? The Glycine Airman was once the watch to wear pilots in the early 20th century. It had a 24-hour dial and could tell two timezones at once. The Airman rode on the wrists of airline captains and helicopter pilots and there some examples so worn by use and abuse – yet still ticking – that you wonder how they survived. The watch had a story. Last month Invicta – a brand more at home on QVC than in anyone’s collection – . It was a fire sale. And it will happen again and again until there’s nothing left. Jony Ive said “Switzerland is fucked.” He was right.
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FAA warns not to check your Galaxy Note 7 or fly with it on
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Devin Coldewey
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An exploding phone is by no means a good thing, but if it has to explode, it’s hard to think of a worse place for it to do so than on a plane. Well, not hard, but it’s definitely a bad one. In the wake of the occasional combusting Galaxy Note 7 and its , the FAA has advised passengers to exercise caution when flying with the device. The administration ruined Samsung’s afternoon : In light of recent incidents and concerns raised by Samsung about its Galaxy Note 7 devices, the Federal Aviation Administration strongly advises passengers not to turn on or charge these devices on board aircraft and not to stow them in any checked baggage. They didn’t even issue a statement like this when hoverboards were blowing up left and right — of course, airlines ended up banning them anyway. No word yet from the Consumer Product Safety Commission, which does the official recalls for troublesome devices like this. Please, Galaxy Note 7 owners. Fly safe, and if you haven’t already started the process of swapping in your device for a new, less inflammable one, .
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Peak Design and building a company on the Kickstarter platform
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Haje Jan Kamps
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away in stealth mode on new products and services with an Apple-esque fear of news leaks. decided to go to the other extreme, building a company in full view of its audience — and in the face of its competitors. Because they eschewed traditional investors in favor of a series of Kickstarter campaigns, I decided to take a closer look at how the team makes it work. There are a few companies that have built successful businesses around repeat Kickstarter performances. Pebble, for example, has come a long way from its original . Between it, and its campaign, the company made $43 million worth of sales from the platform. Peak Design feels different from the other . One of the biggest differences from its peers is that the company has chosen not to take external investment — and not for lack of offers. “I feel that if we take external investment, we would be letting the backers down to a degree,” says Peter Dering, the company’s founder. When pressed, he won’t say that the company won’t ever take investment, but the status quo is that he still owns 100 percent of the company, but that doesn’t seem to matter as much to him. The customers, though, that’s a different story. “It would be a bitter pill to swallow for some of our earliest backers. There are people who genuinely care and who know how special it is not to have investors.” Peter Dering, founder of Peak Design, with a mold for the company’s Capture Pro product. You’d have thought a photography equipment manufacturer could get a photo of its founder in focus, eh? The original Capture Clip was where Peak Design’s story began. The story of Peak Design started when Dering was traveling. Wanting to have his camera available at all times, he was securing his camera to a strap on his backpack using a carabiner. It worked, but wasn’t ideal, and it got him thinking… shouldn’t there be a better way of carrying around a camera? The idea of having a camera tripod-compatible carrying clip came up, but there was a problem… “I spent six months designing the first prototype, made out of wood. My problem was that I didn’t know anyone who had brought a product to market before,” Dering says, admitting that he made things up as he went along. “My breakthrough happened when I was traveling cross-country from California to New York. I was on a hike and met Dave Stoltz, who works as a machinist,” Dering tells me. The two got to talking, and — long story short — before long, Dering had his first metal prototype. “It just worked. It worked so much better than I could have ever dreamed of.” With the first metal prototype done, a lot of the heavy lifting was done, but the product still needed to find a way to market somehow. Which was when a second coincidence struck home. “The TikTok+LunaTik campaign raised just under a million dollars around the time that I was trying to figure out how to get the Capture Clip to market,” Dering says, referring for a product that turns an iPod Nano into a wearable. “It really moved the needle; three people told me about the campaign in the same week. It made me realize that Kickstarter was the missing piece of the puzzle.” The Capture Clip campaign was — well above the $10,000 goal Dering was targeting. “I can’t really look at the video anymore,” Dering laughs. “I made it in Windows MovieMaker 7… Let’s just say we’ve come a long way since then.” Late-night design in progress at Peak Design’s San Francisco office. The Leash system introduced an innovative quick-release system for camera straps. When the idea came to do the second campaign, for the company’s second set of products, the , Peak Design’s team faced an interesting challenge. At the time, Dering felt the platform was firmly focused on independents, dreamers and people who wanted to create something new. It wasn’t clear whether it would it be okay to do a Kickstarter campaign. “We reached out to Kickstarter for guidance,” says Dering, “but they made it clear they didn’t want to talk to us about that. Nobody was willing to give us a definitive ‘yes,’ but on the other hand, they didn’t give us a definitive ‘no’ either. We were very hesitant to do the second campaign, but in the end we decided to go for it and see what happens. Kickstarter represented half of our revenue up to this point. It was 10 times more potent than any of our other selling techniques, and we needed the Kickstarter crowd’s help to get the product to market.” Click. Done. “The first campaign had everyone jumping up and down, cheering us on,” Dering explains. “We didn’t want to get accused of abusing the system.” From the campaign’s video, it’s obvious that even as the campaign went live, the company had second thoughts about whether it was the right thing to do. A full 20 percent of the Kickstarter video was dedicated to explaining why the company returned to Kickstarter a second time. The team needn’t have worried. Although it wasn’t as successful as its first campaign, the Leash and Cuff still raised a respectable chunk of cash in only 22 days — much shorter than its original 75-day campaign –with $216,000 pledged from more than 3,100 backers. Having found a successful formula, Dering slowly started hiring a team and continued running one Kickstarter campaign per year. Peter Dering. In focus, this time. Over its Kickstarter campaigns, Peak Design found its stride, and continued launching better and better photography equipment. An updated version of the company’s original Capture product, the , while its camera worth of pre-orders from the crowd. The company’s previous campaign — its fifth — seemed to really hit the sweet spot, with a , which netted the company a cool $4.9 million from more than 17,000 backers. This was the Kickstarter campaign that smashed all of Peak Design’s previous records, collecting nearly $5 million from more than 17,000 backers. “What made the bag successful was a range of different things,” the company’s marketing boss Adam Saraceno told me. “First of all, the bag that we make has to have some very photography-specific functionality, including the dividers and the quick access points. But, almost as importantly, it is not a camera bag — and that was intentional. We call it the Everyday Messenger bag for a reason: We designed and marketed it around more than just the needs of a photographer.” The first two campaigns raised around $200k. The next two clocked in around the $750k mark. And then things started going a bit silly. With a campaign that dwarfed anything the company had done before, the company had to change gears. It started spending a lot more time with its suppliers in Vietnam. “The plan was never to make photography equipment,” Peter Dering explained to me. “I called the company Peak Design because I wanted something with the same initials as my name. P and D. There’s no ‘photography’ in the name, and that is intentional.” For its most recent trick in the form of a trio of bag products called the Everyday Backpack, Tote and Sling, the company returned to Kickstarter, of course. As I’m writing this, . Peak Design’s new Everyday Backpack is undeniably a ridiculously cleverly designed backpack. With a suggested retail price of $260, it had better be pretty special, too. Dering showed me prototypes of the bags and I can see why people are excited about them. Well, all of them except the tote bag. I guess I never really saw the point of a tote bag, but then, what do I know. The company has sold almost 1,800 of them as part of its Kickstarter campaign, netting a healthy $261,000 from that product alone. So, how does the company deal with operating in full view of its customers, competitors and distributors? “It’s a choice we’ve made,” says Dering. “If we didn’t want to do Kickstarter campaigns, we’d have to raise money from somewhere. I’m not a control freak, but I don’t see what would be gained from giving up our freedom.” Dering is still the company’s sole founder, and owns every single share of the company. “I have given around 28 percent of the company to our staff as a ‘phantom stock.’ It doesn’t mean they own part of the company, but they do share in the profits,” Dering explains. “I pay myself a salary that’s big enough to pay for food, rent and my life. If I exceed that and want to pay myself more money out of the company’s profits, I pay it out as a dividend.” Peak Design’s current Kickstarter campaign has raised more than $5 million and is gunning for the $6 million mark. In other words, should Dering take $1 million off the table, he would stick $720,000 in his own account and distribute $280,000 to his staff. “I call it a fairness doctrine,” Dering explains. “I live a super happy, easy, stress-free life. I want to extend that to my employees. In the meantime, when we’re all in this together, I like to be at the front lines.” I find it intriguing that Peak Design has decided to plot a different path for itself. Like so many of the other startups I write about here on TechCrunch, Peak Design’s headquarters are in San Francisco. Unlike most of the other companies, Dering & Co. have few aspirations to chase valuations and unicorn status. “No amount of money can replace this company. I feel like we are a big family. It feels like we are in it together, all winning,” Dering says. Then, pensively he adds, “I’ve had some shitty jobs in my time. With Peak, we’re optimizing for creating awesome products and optimizing for happiness.” Optimizing for happiness means optimizing for humor, laughter and feeling comfortable enough to be silly. I’ve seen that in action whenever I’ve run into the Peak Design gang at trade shows. For example, the time I came to the company’s booth and saw it covered in black plastic garbage bags, with its products taped to the sides of the booth. Working hard? More like hardly working, amirite? Oh. You working hard? Er, ok. My apologies. Carry on. “The airline lost our fucking luggage,” Saraceno grumbled as I pointed at the booth behind him with a questioning shrug. “Luckily our distributor had some of our stock handy and our booth looks pretty cool like this, too.” “I can’t over-emphasize the importance of hiring genuinely funny people,” Dering told me, before launching into a couple of unprintable anecdotes. He concluded: “We have some funny motherfuckers at Peak Design.” No two companies are the same, but I can’t help but feel that Peak Design is a bit less the same than many of the others I’ve run into. As long as the team is able to keep their sense of humor about them, I expect them back on Kickstarter again next year. As for the company’s product? “Hey, let me get the current campaign out of the way first,” Dering retorts, refusing to even hint at what might be next. “I do have 22,000 new backers to look after before we worry about our next campaign.”
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NASA has successfully launched OSIRIS-REx, their first asteroid sample return mission
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Emily Calandrelli
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NASA’s spacecraft has successfully launched from Cape Canaveral with the help of 1.2 million pounds of thrust provided by an Atlas V rocket. The spacecraft will journey to a near-Earth asteroid known as Bennu and return an asteroid sample to Earth. This will be NASA’s first asteroid sample return mission. Designed to return a sample as large as two kilograms, the mission is likely to bring back the largest sample of alien rock since the Apollo 17 mission in 1972. LIFTOFF! Our OSIRIS-REx spacecraft begins its journey to asteroid Bennu and back! More: https://blogs.nasa.gov/osiris-rex/ Posted by on Thursday, September 8, 2016 This mission is the first of its kind for NASA and is a uniquely difficult one. Grabbing a space rock and bringing it back to Earth may not seem that complicated, but mission success for OSIRIS-REx will be dependent on the execution of a number of complex maneuvers over the course of nine years. Here are just a few of the things that NASA’s asteroid sample return mission must get right to complete a successful mission. OSIRIS-REx will need to fly toward Bennu at 12,000 mph and then pump the brakes to less than 0.5 mph to intercept the asteroid. Then, a relatively large sample will need to be collected in the tricky environment of microgravity. If that sample gets contaminated by anything the spacecraft brought from Earth, or from something else it encounters before it can be delivered to a clean room for analysis, the mission is compromised. So, OSIRIS-REx must go above and beyond to protect that sample, especially during the intense return through the Earth’s atmosphere. NASA isn’t the first to attempt this difficult feat. The (Japan’s NASA-equivalent organization) launched the first asteroid sample return mission back in 2003, but things went once the spacecraft reached the asteroid and a large sample was unable to be collected. While a successful launch is a great first step, the OSIRIS-REx team won’t be able to breathe a sigh of relief until September 2025, when the Bennu sample has successfully been brought home and analyzed. OSIRIS-REx, which stands for Origins Spectral Interpretation Resource Identification Security-Regolith Explorer, will reach the Bennu asteroid in August, 2018. Upon arrival, the spacecraft will take months to analyze the asteroid and identify a scientifically interesting section to sample. OSIRIS-REx surveying Bennu / Image courtesy of the University of Arizona A couple of years later, around July 2020, OSIRIS-REx will use a robotic instrument known as to make contact with the asteroid and shoot a burst of pure nitrogen gas at the rock. This gas will push bits of the asteroid’s surface into a sampling chamber. Then, in March, 2021, OSIRIS-REx is scheduled to depart Bennu and begin its trip home. The spacecraft should reenter the Earth’s atmosphere in September, 2023. At that time, the sample will be delivered for two years of thorough analysis at NASA’s Johnson Space Center. Why is NASA going through all of this trouble to study an asteroid? Well, for one, this particular asteroid has the potential to impact Earth in the 22 century — and it’s large enough to do some damage. Because of this, there’s the possibility that we may want to intercept Bennu in the future for the purpose of deflection. So, there’s benefit to flight-testing some of these capabilities now (before some people’s lives depend on it). There’s also significant scientific reasons for studying asteroids. Scientists believe that asteroids are primitive rocks — leftover debris from the formation of the planets in our solar system created billions of years ago. As an added benefit, asteroids don’t have recycling processes like we have here on Earth (wind, water, tectonic plates, etc.), so they haven’t changed much since their formation, making them uniquely interesting scientific specimens. Because of their historical significance, studying an asteroid like Bennu could help us understand how planets form. Perhaps the more interesting reason to analyze a Bennu sample is that it could help us understand how life began here on Earth. There’s a theory known as that states that microbial life was carried to Earth by asteroids, meteoroids, comets or other orbiting planetary bodies. Scientists predict that Bennu contains organic materials, which is one of the ingredients for creating life as we know it. To test the panspermia theory, the OSIRIS-REx team will work hard to identify a section of the Benny asteroid that contains organic material for sampling. Nine years may sound like a long time, but NASA’s most ambitious planetary spacecraft ( , , etc.) have always taken many years to complete their mission. And if everything with OSIRIS-REx goes according to plan, we may just have answers to some of the biggest questions scientists have asked about the formation of Earth and the origin of life.
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The U.S. names its first chief information security officer
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Kate Conger
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A former Air Force general and Department of Homeland Security official has been appointed as the first federal chief information security officer, the White House announced today. Gregory Touhill will take charge of cybersecurity across the federal government, planning and implementing policy changes to make the nation’s critical infrastructure and government agencies more secure. Touhill is the first person to fill the CISO role, which was announced in February as part of President Barack Obama’s Cybersecurity National Action Plan and has sat vacant since then. He will “play a central role in helping to ensure the right set of policies, strategies, and practices are adopted across agencies and keeping the federal government at the leading edge of 21st century cybersecurity,” according to the . Touhill’s appointment, which was first reported by , comes as the cybersecurity of the federal government has been increasingly scrutinized. Officials have attributed recent breaches of political organizations like the Democratic National Committee and of state election boards to Russia, and cybersecurity have fretted that the American election system is particularly susceptible to hacking. Currently, Touhill works on protecting critical infrastructure and government networks for the Department of Homeland Security. He is expected to start his new job later this month, Reuters reports. And although the task of managing cybersecurity for the entire federal government may seem daunting, Touhill will have help from his newly appointed deputy, Grant Schneider, who is currently the director for cybersecurity policy at the White House’s National Security Council. It’s not clear how long either Touhill or Schneider will have their new jobs — as presidential appointees, they could quickly be replaced by the next administration.
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Breathometer teams up with Philips to take on bad breath
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Lucas Matney
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Eighty million people in the U.S. struggle with bad breath — many of them don’t even know that they do, but the people around them are likely all too aware. Last year at CES, teased a connected device called Mint that measures a user’s breath and gives them some tips on how to improve their oral health. At IFA this year, Philips announced that it’s partnering with Breathometer to deliver the startup’s breath analysis system, called , alongside the company’s Sonicare oral health brand in a bundled product suite. Sonicare Breath care bundle This partnership means a lot for Breathometer, opening the company’s breath analysis tech to millions of Sonicare customers who are mindful of oral care. As the company evolved, Breathometer saw that the opportunity offered by health and wellness breath analysis far-and-away eclipsed the potential in structuring the company solely around testing for boozy breath. So they pivoted. Other biomarkers like blood and urine analysis can deliver highly accurate results, but they aren’t the most consumer-friendly when it comes to severe invasiveness. Breath analysis can offer health insights regarding lung health, asthma, metabolic rates, diabetes and others. “What leaves breath analysis as an open arena — a huge untapped market opportunity — is that its science has been proven, unlike Theranos,” Yim told me. “However, it’s never been properly brought to a consumer market in a user-friendly form factor, connected device experience and so that’s really the opportunity that Breathometer offers.” The partnership with Philips is huge for Breathometer, given the potential to expand their breath analysis connected device into different areas of health and wellness moving forward. Yim detailed that his company will continue working with Philips on new product areas, but will also be looking at other long-term device partnerships. For its part, Breathometer opened pre-orders for the $100 Mint in a standalone capacity on its own site last month and will start shipping September 30.
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It’s a long, hard road from idea to IPO
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Ron Miller
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It may not seem it, but coming up with an idea for your startup is probably the easiest part of launching your own company. As one industry insider told me, there are a million ways to screw up that idea through poor execution, and many, many lose their way. Yet a precious few fight through the problems and the challenges, and somehow, with a bit of luck and a lot of moxie, make it to IPO. The four original founders of Box, one of those companies that made it through that long journey, talked about their experience in a panel discussion this week at BoxWorks. While CEO Aaron Levie and CFO Dylan Smith have long been the public faces of Box, there were two others — Jeff Queisser, chief systems architect and Sam Ghods, services architect — all childhood friends in Seattle, who quit college to follow the startup dream. The group seemed destined to launch some sort of startup, and often bounced ideas off one another, even after they went their separate ways to college. After Levie came up with the idea of what would be Box as part of a marketing class, the group saw potential — at least Smith did. Ghods didn’t see the value right away, but eventually all four were on board and Box was born. These guys were living a Silicon Valley cliché in the early days, giving birth to their idea in a dorm room, then quitting school and renting out a converted garage that acted as their office and living space. You have to remember, these were four young men in their early twenties with no business experience whatsoever, yet they fell into their roles, as Levie with some marketing classes would be CEO, Smith with his financial sensibilities became CFO, Ghods with some coding background headed up engineering and Queisser, who had spent summers installing cable modems, became the de facto head of IT. Box’s four founders around 2005 outside their converted garage apartment/headquarters. The core group soon began selling Box subscriptions and were making a little bit of money. They even found an early backer at DFJ, who gave them some initial funding and helped form their fledgling board of directors. One of the first inflection points for any startup is when you move beyond the core group of founders and begin to look for additional employees. The core group has passion, and in the case of Box, were four guys who had grown up together, further complicating the hiring dynamic — but as with everything, they had some luck in the deal (and they have some advice for those starting on that journey now). The core team knew they were looking for a good cultural fit, but they were warned don’t get people who have the same exact skills and think just the way you do because you just get an echo chamber. Early on, any startup needs people who can cover a lot of jobs. When you get a little bigger, specialization begins to take over. Even if they weren’t quite sure what they were looking for, they had a sense. They definitely had a “no asshole” rule and they needed someone they would be comfortable brainstorming with in a small room for hours. They lucked out when they brought in Karen Appleton as their eighth or ninth employee. She brought a level of professionalism and business experience the founders lacked, and she encouraged them to form partnerships. “We were 19 or 20 years old. We didn’t know how it would work to hire more experienced people. Karen was the first of those hires and changed our hiring trajectory from cultural fit to cultural add,” Smith explained. One thing that most startups do is pivot from the original idea, and Box was no exception. In about 2007, they began to recognize that consumer online storage was becoming increasingly specialized with Flickr handling photos and YouTube video. They didn’t think they could compete with that, and at the same time they began to recognize a need for a file-sharing product for business. There were a lot of heavy discussions about how to proceed. Eventually Box switched to the enterprise, but they didn’t make the transition willy-nilly. They actually went out and hired a consultant, who made some calls and gathered some data for them to confirm they were making a sound decision. You have to remember in 2007, the iPhone was just coming out and it wasn’t obvious that content and collaboration would move to the cloud. The consultant confirmed that some companies were thinking about this and there would be a business in that space. There was still a lot of discussion among the founders, but they eventually all agreed it was the way to go — and it turned out to be a good decision. A couple of years later, the iPad came out and this was a major turning point. “I had a simple rule of thumb. Bet on whatever Steve Jobs is betting on,” Levie joked. The company turned its attention to the iPad right away and was one of the first enterprise companies with an iPad app. It was then that they realized content management was changing in a big way and it was going to be about protecting content in motion. The founders learned you need to compromise, and that was all part of the process. They also were voracious readers, and reading books like and helped shape the company philosophy over time. They all recommend getting mentors and learning as much as you can, because it’s tough going it on your own. You don’t know what you don’t know, and mentors who have been through the startup experience can help point you in the right direction — and they found when they asked, people generally wanted to help. They also say there will be scary moments in the life of any company. They point to 2008 when they went looking for a Series B round in the middle of a huge economic crisis as one of those times. There will also be tough times. You will definitely fight with your co-founders and you may question what you’re doing, but if you believe in the core mission, you can reach the goal of becoming a public company. It worked for Box — and it’s worth noting that the four founders remained close friends through it all.
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Revel Systems inks payments deal with Shell as rumors swirl of a sale to IBM
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Ingrid Lunden
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that point-of-sale startup is in early acquisition negotiations with , and while both Revel and IBM declined to comment when we asked about it, a deal that the startup announced today could provide an interesting clue for why a company like Big Blue might be interested in buying it. Today Revel announced a deal with , the oil and gas giant, to implement its point-of-sale system across its retail network of gas stations globally. Shell Retail operates 43,000 sites in 70 countries and sells 160 billion litres of fuel and $6 billion in retail sales annually. Revel will be rolled out at these Shell businesses country-by-country. The U.S. (Shell’s biggest market) is unlikely to be among the first, Lisa Falzone, co-founder and CEO of Revel, said in an interview. Features that Revel will cover in its system built for Shell include fuel and convenience store card payments; managing pumps and fuel inventory both straight from the iPad and remotely; loyalty programs; convenience store inventory; and operating in offline mode. The deal is a significant one for a company like Revel. Similar to its many new-wave competitors in the area of point-of-sale commerce, from payments providers like Square, to those like Clover that have been , to that are also trying to consolidate and acquire point-of-sale technology (indeed Revel is also ) — Revel has focused largely on smaller and medium-sized businesses. Revel itself has installed some 25,000 POS systems with retailers to date. Its include some medium-sized businesses like the bakery chain Cinnabon, but the majority are still in the small-businesses category. Revel signing a deal with an operation the size of Shell is a sign of how smaller and more disruptive companies are starting to gain more credibility with large enterprises — a target market for large system integrators like IBM. Revel’s POS system is typical of the shift that is underway in the world of commerce. Designed to work on commercially available tablets like the iPad from Apple, software from these younger payments and POS companies is doing battle with more clunky, expensive and antiquated incumbents. In its case, Revel’s software will be replacing a “thirty-year-old software system,” Lisa Falzone, co-founder and CEO of Revel, said in an interview. “What we offer is not proprietary hardware,” she added. “Off-the-shelf hardware is so much easier to scale.” Coincidentally, IBM itself has a first-hand awareness of what companies like Revel are replacing in the market: the company in 2012 divested its own hardware-and-software POS business, selling it to Toshiba . While Falzone said that she “can’t confirm or deny” if IBM is working on a deal to buy Revel, it’s interesting to consider that IBM has been making some other key acquisitions to speed up its move away from its legacy business in other areas, as well, for example in cloud computing to offset declines in its legacy server business. Revel’s solution for Shell will be based around iPad devices, which is another interesting crossover for IBM, which has been in a to develop more , one route to selling more of Apple’s hardware into those businesses. “With we are implementing new tablets and payment options that are easy to use, innovative and will improve the customer experience so that customers keep coming back to Shell,” said Maggie van’T Hoff, CIO, Shell Retail, in a statement. said that it has raised more than $130 million in funding, with DCM Ventures, Roth Capital and private equity firm Welsh, Carson, Anderson and Stowe.
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How to watch Disrupt SF 2016
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Travis Bernard
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Everyone has a different preference for how to watch Disrupt, so we’re giving you tons of options. Here’s what’s on deck for the show. The event kicks off with the Hackathon on Saturday, September 10 at Pier 48 in San Francisco. Hackathon presentations start at 11:30 am on Sunday, September 11, and the main event takes place starting at 9 am on September 12. The full agenda and ticketing information can be found .
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Snapchat could buy startups without raising money via new credit line
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Josh Constine
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Buying cool is the best way for big companies to stay cool. Snapchat rightly believes in itself, and now it’s getting bankers to bet on that vision without selling its precious equity. Snapchat has secured a line of credit led by Morgan Stanley, potentially with other banks participating, . Snapchat can borrow against that credit line and pay it back later if it needs cash in the lead up to a likely 2017 IPO. That will give it flexibility to go public when the time is right without worrying about having to raise another round of equity financing to pay its expenses. It already earlier this year. But the other opportunity afforded by the credit line that today’s report doesn’t discuss is that Snapchat could use the credit line to make acquisitions. Snapchat bought Looksery to power these animated selfie lenses that kept it the coolest thing in social Snapchat has already proven itself a prolific buyer. smart glasses developer Vergence Labs for $15 million to jumpstart its hardware division, and QR code startup Scan.me for $50 million to power its QR Snapcodes. Snapchat bought augmented reality filter startup last year to create its animated selfie lenses. This year Snapchat , and personalized Bitmoji sticker startup . And it’s in talks to acquire mobile search and social planning startup . CEO Evan Spiegel seems to have taken a note from Facebook, the company he himself refused to sell to. By acquiring new products, even at steep prices, Snapchat can stay ahead of competitors and avoid growing stale. Snapchat quickly integrated its latest acquisition of Bitmoji to let users send personalized avatar stickers Though it’s unclear how much credit Snapchat has to play with, its loyal teen user base and budding advertising revenues are worthy of Wall Street’s faith. It’s supposedly on track to earn $350 million in 2016, and wants to be a $500 million to $1 billion business in 2017. If it can maintain its cool, it could continue earning the big bucks and pay back any cash borrowed. Having the extra credit line gives it the funds to buy startups it thinks could keep it at the forefront of digital culture.
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Chipotle to test burrito delivery by drone with Project Wing at Virginia Tech
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Lora Kolodny
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Alphabet’s innovation lab X has a drone-focused team called Project Wing which has just announced a plan to commence aerial burrito delivery, in partnership with Chipotle, on the campus of Virgina Tech next week. Project Wing’s mission it to make fully autonomous, or self-flying drones, that can deliver anything to anyone. But the X team is focused, for now, on delivering small packages in the U.S. and elsewhere. It made a first run in 2014 in Queensland, Australia, delivering a first aid kit, candy bars, dog treats and water to farmers. The burrito delivery that will begin next week is not open to the public, and is just a test of the service. Virginia Tech is home to a U.S. Federal Aviation Administration test site, which is run by the Mid-Atlantic Aviation Partnership. The MAAP is authorized to conduct projects using unmanned aerial systems at Virginia Tech with the express purpose of researching and gathering data that it will share with federal authorities. The data will help inform regulations governing drone usage for commercial and other purposes in U.S. airspace. A spokesperson for Alphabet’s Project Wing wrote in an email to TechCrunch: “We’re increasingly optimistic about the potential for UAS to open up entirely new approaches to the transportation of and delivery of goods — including options that are cheaper, faster, less wasteful and more environmentally sensitive than what’s possible today with ground transportation.” Over the course of the burrito-delivery tests, Wing’s aircraft will fly autonomously over hundreds of meters of open ground on a closed testing site, navigating from a loading area to a delivery area. Students and employees will be invited to participate in the tests, ordering from a kiosk and waiting in a designated area for their food. Chipotle will have a food truck on site where it will prepare the orders. The Wing drones (unmanned aerial systems) will hover above a designated delivery area and lower the burritos in their packaging to the ground. The tests are expected to generate data on “navigational accuracy and vehicle performance,” to be provided to the FAA, according to a press statement from Virginia Tech. Chipotle executives were not immediately available to comment. The company is the latest among a handful of food and grocery businesses to begin testing drone delivery in partnership with tech firms. and have also conducted food delivery tests in New Zealand and Reno, Nevada, in partnership with the drone tech startup .
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Restaurant tech startup Salido raises $2M
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Anthony Ha
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, a startup that describes itself as “the restaurant operating system,” is announcing that it has raised $2 million in additional funding. This round from strategic investors doubles . Phil Suarez, who to launch well-known restaurants including ABC Kitchen and the eponymous Jean-Georges, led the new funding. Founded by Shu Chowdhury, Salido started out as a point-of-sale system for restaurants and has expanded to a broader set of tools that allows restaurants to manage their customer data, their workforce and their inventory. Chowdhury said that at first, this approach “was very unpopular because it wasn’t sexy,” but it’s become more compelling, particularly because of the comprehensive data that Salido has been able to collect. “Our goal is to fix the inside of the restaurant,” Chowdhury said. “We know that the feature set and the data model that we’ve built addresses the needs of the restaurant. We don’t believe reservations is a business, it’s a feature. We don’t believe ordering is a business, it’s a feature.” For example, he said that Salido has restaurants’ menu information, “I can easily open it up to online ordering,” which can also mean connecting with reservation systems like OpenTable. In addition to working with high-end restaurants, Salido also has customers from the more casual side, including Num Pang and ‘Wichcraft. Chowdhury isn’t saying how many restaurants Salido is currently working with, but he did note that the system has processed $27 million to date for more than 1 million total guests.
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Sarah Perez
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SpotHero is ready for the future of autonomous parking
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Kristen Hall-Geisler
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is not new to the on-demand parking game. It raised in 2012, and another in Series B funding in 2015. This for a service that allows drivers to prepay for a parking space in a garage via app before the car ever leaves the driveway. “You can reserve a spot for three hours or three days,” said SpotHero co-founder and CEO Mark Lawrence, “and you can make the reservation for right this minute or in two weeks.” You just scan your phone when you enter the garage and scan it again when you leave. You know where you’re parking and how much you’re going to pay — no driving around and no surprises. While this is all very convenient today, Lawrence has his sights set on the future of driving, or not driving, as the case may be. Right now, the human interfaces with the phone, which interfaces with the online garage. In the future, the car will take the place of the human to connect with SpotHero, which connects with the garage to reserve and pay for the space. “It could be an algorithm that says, ‘I need this autonomous pod or car to be stored for x amount of time,’ and it will run some calculations,” Lawrence said in our phone interview. “The algorithm will check to see if it can park farther for cheaper, and take traffic into account.” The challenge, today and tomorrow, is that the garages have to be online for this to work, whether it’s a human or a car that wants to connect. “Parking facilities have to be online or they’re invisible,” Lawrence said. “They’re not going to be able to capture the largest share unless they’re visible. Let’s get these facilities online and make them available for ecommerce.” SpotHero has a sales and marketing team tasked with increasing parking companies’ awareness of this source of revenue. The team takes a rising tide lifts all boats approach: “We say, ‘Here are all the interfaces out there; it’s not just SpotHero,'” Lawrence said. The team has to educate the parking companies on the tools available and the scanning and redemption technology required for future-proofing their businesses. “Otherwise, how are they going to communicate with consumers right now and also with cars that drive themselves in the future?” We dove into the futuristic idea of electric autonomous pods during our conversation, which Lawrence acknowledged is an “angelic view.” Electric cars are more efficient than gasoline, but much of the grid in the United States is still powered by coal, and “there need to be macro changes before EVs on a grand scale are possible,” he said. “But even when the energy issue is solved, parking isn’t going to go away. Cities don’t want empty vehicles just roaming around.” He’s predicting those futuristic vehicles will need to park themselves when not in use, and SpotHero will be ready to make the connection.
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Actev Motors, co-founded by Tony Fadell, prepares to start shipping its smart go-karts
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Connie Loizos
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, a young, Mountain View, Ca.-based company, is gearing up to ship its eagerly anticipated all-electric smart go-karts beginning this fall. The vehicles, for kids ages 5 to 9, cost roughly $1,000, including a Formula One-like body kit that comes in silver or red, and shipping. They come with a lot of neat features that tech-savvy parents will appreciate, too, including an app that lets parents adjust the speed at which their kids are driving (up to 12 miles per hour), a geofencing function that keeps kids within a particular boundary and collision avoidance, so junior won’t run into the neighbor’s house. Recently, we toured the company’s offices, where it fabricates and tests out what looks to be a growing line of products. In fact, if all goes as planned — Actev is raising a Series A round currently — its next major product line will center on a go-kart for grown-ups. CEO Dave Bell, who founded the company with Tony Fadell (of Apple and Nest Labs fame), declined to share specifics about how many pre-orders the company has taken or exactly when the karts will reach customers’ homes, but we gather they’ll be arriving in driveways in the next month or two. [gallery ids="1382486,1382482,1382484,1382483,1382487"]
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To compete with Amazon, Walmart should cut itself in half
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Tien Tzuo
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wasn’t pretty. Overall revenue growth came in at a tepid 0.7 percent for the first of the fiscal year. Its e-commerce sales grew 11.8 percent, but the total e-commerce market is tearing ahead at 15 percent quarterly growth, which means they’re actively losing that market. Oh, and it , a massively unprofitable e-commerce vendor, for $3.3 billion to make up for it. So how did the market react? ’s stock spiked 3 percent. I guess in today’s retail market, you win by not losing. It’s hard to imagine a world without . Ninety percent of all Americans live within 20 minutes of a Wal-Mart store. They have over 1.5 million employees at 5000 stores, and serve over 140 million shoppers a week. But the too-little-too-late move by to acquire Jet.com is yet another signal that we are witnessing the downward spiral of a $230 billion company. A world without is now not only possible, but likely, unless it makes some big moves soon. So here’s an idea: Turn of those superstores into integrated online fulfillment centers, with local pickup and delivery services, but no more customers walking through the front door. That’s the only way is going to find out who its customers really are. I get it. Brick-and-mortar infrastructure is vastly different from e-commerce infrastructure. You don’t just flip a few switches and turn a giant retail store into a provisioning warehouse (though you could argue that most big box stores are just huge, confusing warehouses anyway). But needs to triage its general merchandise business now, before it winds up dying on the vine with the rest of the retail market. And the best way to know your customer is over the internet. Retail needs to flip the script — the online experience has to come first. Right now e-commerce might represent only 10 percent of total retail sales, but , is anyone going to be driving five miles to a supercenter to buy toothpaste and shampoo? needs to make some systemic changes soon in order to challenge ’s real killer IP — customer insight. has been selling online for the last 15 years. But Walmart doesn’t know anything about you when you walk into one of its superstores. It’s got some pick-up delivery options and some loyalty payment gateways, but e-commerce is still just 3 percent of its business. Today over subscribe to Prime. Now, what does know about its customers? Everything. It knows the entirety of their browsing activity and their purchase history (the first book you ever ordered on is sitting right there in your order history – go look it up). Also note that currently has two-hour delivery in two dozen metropolitan areas, and same-day delivery in many more. Today’s novelty services will become tomorrow’s table stakes. doesn’t deal in customer segments; it deals in customers. All that helps explain why it recently became the world’s fourth-largest public company, joining Apple, Alphabet and Microsoft, and kicking Exxon Mobil down the list. It’s not a coincidence that those first four companies are hugely successful at wrapping ongoing services around unique subscriber IDs, while the fifth one sells you gas. is trying to buy into that subscriber ID club with Jet.com, but it’s too little, too late. Today’s consumers are looking for more than coupons, free samples, and blue light specials. They expect businesses to know them, understand their needs, and build customized offerings and services around this knowledge so they can have the products they want, when they want them, and how they want them. They want products to just happen. needs to start orienting around a future in which e-commerce will become the dominant retail channel. It needs to start learning who its customers are. It needs to put those greeters in delivery vans.
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Announcing the Disrupt SF Hackathon sponsor prizes and API workshop schedule
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Contributor
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This year’s TechCrunch Disrupt SF Hackathon is set to be the best yet. We’re a few days away from the main event and are giddy with excitement. Check out the sponsor prizes and agenda of events to prepare yourself for an amazing hackathon experience. Team with the ‘Best Voice User Experience Using Amazon Alexa’ will win Amazon Echos for the whole team. Braintree makes it easy to accept payments in your app or website. Get integrated quickly using our guides and select from our range of client SDKs (available for iOS, Android, and web) and server SDKs (available in Ruby, Python, PHP, Java, .NET, and Node.js) to help you collect payment information and run transactions. $5,000 will be awarded to the hacker or team with the most innovative integration of Braintree’s SDKs. Cisco Spark is about making work easier – connecting teams and apps to improve productivity, deepen customer engagement, or solve business problems. Start a conversation or team, send messages, post content, call anyone from anywhere, or share your screen. Build an innovative and working solution, integration or bot using our Spark APIs. You can use our open APIs in tandem with other APIs to create something unique! Prize: 1st Place — Best use of Cisco’s cloud collaboration APIs: DJI Phantom 3 Standard drone for each member of the winning team (up to 5 members). 2nd Place — Best use of Cisco’s cloud collaboration APIs: Apple Watch for each member of the winning team (up to 5 members). We’re awarding the team that best uses a .CLUB domain name for their submitted project. We’ll be judging on a variety of criteria, including the domain’s relevance to the project, the creativity and/or innovation of the project and domain, and the design of the project’s website. Prize: $5,000 Best use of Esri ArcGIS mapping technology wins $5,000! ($2500 cash, plus $2500 valued ArcGIS Online subscription). ArcGIS is the Location Platform for Apps. Quickly add maps/geo to your apps using Esri’s online services and SDKs. Develop in the API of your choice and deploy on any device. Sign-up for a free developer account at http://developers.arcgis.com using voucher, TCSF2016. Prize: $2500 cash, plus $2500 valued ArcGIS Online subscription Harman International is providing two different SDKs for the first commercial readily available hackable headphones (Everest Elite) and the first glance-able speaker to market (Pulse 2). The winners will be the teams (2) with the best overall use of Everest Elite SDK and the Pulse 2 SDK. Ready for some gear? One team member is required to register each person and join our Slack community: http://bit.ly/harmantc16. Prizes: Best Overall use of Everest Headphones SDK: Winning team receives up to 5 Everest Elite Headphones, Pulse 2 Speakers and Omni 10 Speakers. (value of $2,500) Best Overall use of Pulse 2 SDK: Winning team receives up to 5 Everest Elite Headphones, Pulse 2 Speakers and Omni 10 Speakers. (value of $2,500) Participate in the HERE hackathon contest during TechCrunch Disrupt to bring location solutions to life. HERE has cross-platform APIs to solve real-world location problems: positioning, geocoding, routing, indoor mapping, traffic and more. As the leader in location intelligence, HERE allows developers to incorporate location services and IoT enhancements. The team with the best use of the HERE Location Platform wins $5,000 in prizes. Prize: $5,000 IBM Watson combines a number of cognitive techniques to build and train a bot – defining intents and entities and crafting dialog to simulate conversation. The system can then be further refined with supplementary technologies to make the system more human-like or to give it higher chance of returning the right answer. Watson Conversation deploys a range of bots via many channels, from simple, narrowly focused Bots to much more sophisticated, full-blown virtual agents across mobile devices, messaging platforms like Slack, or even through a physical robot. Prize: Win an Apple Watch Sport (each member of the winning, team up to five members) with the new IBM Watson Conversation Service. Incorporate location-based functionality and build a geospatial-focused project across web, mobile web, native mobile and desktop. Leverage our core geospatial platform that powers MapQuest.com and our mobile apps, which are used by millions of users every month. The powerful geospatial platform includes mapping clients and web services including Directions API, Geocoding API, Search API and more. Prize: MapQuest wants to help our top team of hackers enjoy more out of life. Find your next adventure with $5,000 from MapQuest. You’ll receive $5,000 in gift cards to put towards your next vacation. Winner receives $5000 for most creative and innovative use of Panasonic Avionics’ InFlight APIs; including the use of other Sponsor APIs with our framework. Runner up team will receive tickets to Disrupt. All developers who use our APIs in the Hackathon will receive a commemorative T-shirt! Win $5,000 by using a Radix Domain name for your hackathon project.
Choose from .TECH, .STORE, .ONLINE, .SPACE, .SITE, .HOST, .PRESS and .WEBSITE
– All Domains names are FREE for Hackathon Participants
– Mention your domain name on stage during judging
– Radix Domain should be the primary domain for hosting your project. Prize: $5,000 Graph LoVE – Load, Visualize, Extract. Use the power and flexibility of YaaS micro-services around commerce and customer profile graphs to react and interact with customers in a much more personal way. Create magic moments for consumers by understanding a customer’s motivation and intent, in real-time. Predict, Analyze, Conclude. Best use of Graph APIs. Maximum $5,000 worth of Amazon gift cards. Prize: $5,000 Leverage available SDK’s and the appropriate scripts for Pepper, the humanoid robots, to create compelling, interactive applications that could be used in real world environments Contest Eligibility:
All participants in the SoftBank Robotics Hackathon must be proficient with Python, C++ and/or Java
Judging Criteria Categories:
• Be creative! We’re looking for imaginative applications that delight users.
• The application must interact with people by leveraging at minimum the following API’s: Animation, Dialog, and Tablet.
• Preference will be given to additional API usage in clever and imaginative ways.
• Declare an interesting use-case and show how your application solves it.
• We’re are interested but not limited to the following areas where Pepper might be used: Retail, Hospitality, Entertainment, Education, Travel, and Health Care. Prize: 1st place – $3,000, 2nd place – $1500 & 3rd place – $500 Prize: Pebble smartwatch Use NIST’s Net Zero Energy Residential Test Facility (NZERTF) data to create either a data product with a viable business model that helps homes become smarter and more efficient or some visual analytics to extract meaningful insight. Build something that will further the impact or research into energy efficiency. Prize: Meet with the Secretary of the Department of Commerce, Secretary Penny Pritzker. Develop your hack using the ThingSpace IoT development platform at thingspace.verizon.com. Best use of Verizon ThingSpace Device Messaging APIs, Connectivity APIs or Personal Cloud Storage APIs in an IoT application wins: 1st Place $3,000 2nd Place $1,500 3rd Place $500 Win an Axon 7 for “Best Mobile Design” or a Spro 2 for the “Best Mobile Concept” Want to learn a bit more about the tools available at the hack? Take a deep dive into a few APIs in a classroom-style setting just after the opening of the hack on Saturday. 12:30pm – Registration opens (come fed or bring a brown bag lunch, beverages served) 1:30pm – Hacking Kickoff and Opening Announcements 2:00pm – API Workshops begin 7:00pm – Dinner Midnight – Tamales and beer, courtesy of 7:00am – Breakfast served 9:30am – Hacking concludes and hacks submitted to wiki 10:00am – General public welcome to enter to attend hackathon presentations 11:00am – Hackathon presentations begin 2:00pm* – TechCrunch and Sponsor awards presented *Final awards may be held earlier or later depending on duration of hack presentations.
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The transformation of sport will bring rich rewards
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Simon Baker
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The inflation-busting deals being secured by sports rights owners around the world demonstrate the unwavering value of live sports. for live Premier League TV rights for three seasons from 2016-17, representing a 70 percent increase on the previous cycle. Meanwhile, for rights to the Olympics through 2032 and the cost of a 30-second slot for advertisers in the Super Bowl reached a new peak of . Amid concerns over cord-cutting, the rise of time-shifted viewing and the unstoppable growth of digital and mobile platforms, the value of sports rights remains unquestioned. However, the industry remains ripe for change. The unique eccentricities of the sports industry — where the focus has typically been on improving the performance of the athletes and the size of sponsorship deals — have held back progress as the broader business world has benefited from a wave of tech-enabled productivity gains. It’s hard to believe, but in the world of cricket, many sports associations and bodies continue to record their assets (in this instance, the “cricket match”) on paper and have no way of directly communicating with their customers. And while the national governing boards invest in technology to improve the performance of their teams, it’s not being leveraged to identify future stars and fans early. Ultimately, they should be managing their customers from cradle to grave — i.e. from when they first start playing or watching the right through their lives as fans. One of the biggest challenges facing major sports leagues is the flat-lining growth in home markets, where demographic expansion is slowing; population growth has virtually flat-lined in Europe, while rising at a mere . Meanwhile, the emerging markets offer both vast audiences ( ) and an emerging middle-class with an interest in western culture and sports. Whilst sports leagues are increasingly scheduling friendlies and regular-seasonal games in overseas markets, the opportunity to engage a global fan base using digital and social platforms is enormous. Indeed, the world of sports media and broadcasting is now experiencing major seismic changes. With more than , and many millions more on other social channels around the world, there is an incredible opportunity for all manner of sports to reach a vast global audience — But the greatest beneficiaries may turn about to be the smaller sports properties, whose avid fan bases are underserved by linear broadcast and cable TV. This no doubt have a profound impact on women’s sports, for example. Social media is also advancing the experience for viewers of prime-time sports fixtures, providing an additional and complementary experience outside of sports events. The to provide hockey fans with a “behind-the-scenes” look at the game is one of a growing number of examples of how social media is bringing fans closer to the action both on and off the ice/pitch/field. Of course, the emergence of VR, too, have fascinating implications for sports fans all over the world. The sports-betting industry has long been a key contributor to the sports industry and an important part of the sports experience for many fans. According to some reports, the , although much of this is currently illegal. Interestingly, we are also now seeing greater flexibility from regulators; as a result, new opportunities are emerging — the best-known example being fantasy sports and the meteoric rise of and , both now thought to be worth . The digitization of the sports industry generate an explosion of data that can be sliced and diced by fans. The stars of sports look set to reap the of this digital . While the rising value of sports rights and globalization of sports are already driving pay packages higher for athletes, it is the power and influence of leading athletes on digital platforms that change industry dynamics forever. Football stars can have larger audiences than the clubs they play for, and vastly outnumber the reach of traditional broadcasters in some countries — Cristiano Ronaldo alone has . Indeed, it was the sponsorship deals with athletes that made Beats headphones a global success story and led to the . Athletes are increasingly looking beyond traditional endorsement deals and seeking exposure to the success of startups, including New England Patriots’ Tom Brady, who inked a deal with Under Armour that included equity, while English Premier League footballers Cesc Fàbregas, Thierry Henry, Robin van Persie and NBA star Tony Parker are all — a company featured at and which is well positioned to benefit from media consumption trends. Two former New Zealand cricket captains, Stephen Fleming and Brendon McCullum, are foundation investors, with others making subsequent investments — their involvement was particularly helpful in the early days of our company. And Kobe Bryant is now taking it one step further with the launch of a with partner Jeff Stibel; current investments include sports media website . Even as political and economic uncertainties foster a more cautious investment climate in the broader technology industry, the passion of sports fans endure. In a sector that is ripe for change, and with major technology trends driving a more immersive sports experience, it brings great opportunity. With the next billion sports fans also now emerging in markets like China and India, it be fascinating to see how this industry changes over the next decade.
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China’s anti-trust regulators are investigating the Didi-Uber deal
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Jon Russell
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China has opened an investigation to determine whether violates national anti-trust laws. The development — which was — was confirmed by Didi. “We are in communication with the authorities,” a spokesperson told TechCrunch. At this point there is no indication when the probe, which was triggered by feedback, will be completed. The Journal reports that there have already been two meetings between regulators and Didi, which did not apply for an anti-trust review because it believed that the value of the deal did not cross the minimum threshold. The deal was announced on August 1, and it will see Didi — the ride-hailing leader in China — fully acquire Uber’s business unit in China. Uber will be given a 5.89 percent stake in the newly merged entity, with preferential equity that is equal to a 17.7 percent economic interest in Didi Chuxing. Existing Uber China investors, which include China’s dominant search firm Baidu, will get 2.3 percent of the new business. In addition, Didi will invest $1 billion into Uber and each CEO will take a board seat with the other company. “Uber and Didi Chuxing are investing billions of dollars in China, and both companies have yet to turn a profit there,” Uber CEO Travis Kalanick said in a statement at the time of the deal. “Getting to profitability is the only way to build a sustainable business that can best serve Chinese riders, drivers and cities over the long term.”
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Crunch Report | SpaceX Rocket Explodes at Cape Canaveral
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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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Apple might live-tweet the iPhone 7 launch from its @apple account
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Jon Russell
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Apple is upping its Twitter game after it took the wraps off an official account on the microblogging service. The account — — has been around for some time. It has already picked up more than 55,000 followers at the time of writing but, as of today, it got an official Apple feel with a company profile pic and background image. There aren’t any tweets yet, but with , it is likely to use the account to market the product or perhaps even live-tweet the September 7 event. My guess as well: they’ll live tweet the event. — Mark Gurman (@markgurman) Apple has other product-focused accounts on Twitter — including , and — but this is the first time it has gotten a central company account. So if you’re a Twitter user and keenly interested in the next iPhone, you might want to follow — that’s in addition to us here at , of course. We’ll be at the iPhone launch next week to bring you all the details.
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Google ends modular phone Project Ara, though licensing may be an option
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Stefan Etienne
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After three years of development, starting at Motorola then transferred to Google’s Advanced Technology and Projects group, Project Ara is being “suspended” and ultimately, is cancelled. Even after selling Moto to Lenovo in 2014, Google has touted the modular smartphone project as not only an alternative to current smartphone design, but the future of smartphone customization. This change in tune might come as a surprise to Ara hopefuls, due to Google’s commitment to the project, including a . Still, it was fraught with delays and compromises to the types of components that could be made interchangeable. Now, it’s dead in the water. While the from says that the project is currently iced, Google may consider the option of working with its hardware partners to license Ara, so that its features may just appear in Android phones of the future.
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A totally real conversation between Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg about a rocket
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Devin Coldewey
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Apple patches zero-day vulnerabilities in Safari and OS X
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Devin Coldewey
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The aimed at activist Ahmed Mansoor last week prompted a quick response from Apple, with a patch for iOS arriving the day of the news. Turns out the three (!) zero-day exploits deployed against Mansoor kind of worked against Safari and OS X, as well. Apple issued a patch today to fix that, but you’ll need Yosemite or El Capitan to receive protection from these exploits. Improved input sanitization (sic) and improved memory handling — and presumably these changes will be baked into Sierra (where, incidentally, the “macOS” naming convention starts as well). Safari gets an and some improved memory handling of its own. All these pieces of software are working from a shared code base to some extent, so it’s not surprising that they would share vulnerabilities. This should wrap things up, though. Check for updates under the Apple menu to get yourself inoculated against the “Trident” attack.
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Intel could put fireworks out of work, gets FAA permission to fly drone fleets at night
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Lora Kolodny
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As r Among others, CNN has obtained the right to fly a tethered drone over people for news gathering purposes; PrecisionHawk obtained an exemption to fly its agricultural drones “beyond the line of sight,” or where operators can’t see them with the naked eye; and BNSF Railroad has obtained the right to fly over people and beyond the line of sight to monitor its operations on the ground, according to a from the FAA’s Michael Huerta. One interesting exemption from FAA’s Part 107, or Small UAS Rule, went to Intel. According to a company spokesperson, the waiver enables the company to fly at night, and put one pilot in charge of multiple drones. Intel claims the waiver that allows a single operator to control a big fleet of drones is the only one of its kind issued so far — though certainly more exemptions are in the works. “This was granted because Intel has taken steps to reduce risk associated with its drone flights and proven itself through prior flight testing, technology, operational history and flight experience,” the company representative said. One upshot of Intel’s Part 107 exemption is that old-fashioned fireworks could be replaced, especially over drought-stricken and fire-prone areas, by fleets of drones carrying colored lights in formation across the sky. Intel has already demonstrated its fleets of drones performing in concert in a test in Palm Springs earlier this year. Here’s a video of the “Intel Drone 100.” So long, pyros. Nice knowing you.
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Despite looming jail time, Gurbaksh Chahal is back as Gravity4 CEO
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Kate Conger
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Gurbaksh Chahal is back as CEO of Gravity4, the adtech startup he founded and was forced to relinquish control of after his probation was revoked in a domestic violence case, according to a post on the company’s website. Chahal handed the reins of the company to his sister, , after a judge found in July that he by attacking a woman in his apartment and threatening to report her to immigration authorities when she discussed filing for a restraining order against him. James Lassart, Chahal’s attorney in the domestic violence case, told TechCrunch that Chahal “stepped down of his own initiative” after his probation was revoked. San Francisco Judge Tracie Brown ordered Chahal to for the probation violation, but that sentence was stayed pending an appeal from Lassart. In the meantime, Chahal has surrendered his passports to the court. It’s not clear why Chahal is back as Gravity4’s CEO — or how long he will last. Kaur was listed as CEO on the company’s team page until last week, when she was removed without explanation. Her profile has now been replaced with Chahal’s, which describes him as a “diehard entrepreneur” and makes no mention of his legal problems. Lassart, Chahal’s attorney, did not respond to requests for comment about the latest CEO swap, but said at the time of Kaur’s appointment that Chahal would be focusing on his appeal. Chahal’s brush with the law began in 2013, when he attacked a woman in his San Francisco penthouse. Chahal pleaded guilty to misdemeanor assault charges and was placed on probation for three years. A second woman accused Chahal of kicking her in the same apartment in September 2014, and Judge Brown determined that there was enough evidence of the attack and immigration-related threats to find that Chahal had violated his probation. Even though Chahal pleaded guilty to the charges, he still maintained his innocence in a series of since-deleted blog posts, claiming that the charges were “bullshit” and that “there is a difference between temper and domestic violence.” Chahal has fought to maintain control over his companies through all his legal battles, which have included lawsuits from employees in addition to the criminal charges. At the time of the initial charges against him, he was the CEO of another company, RadiumOne. However, after his guilty plea and he went on to found Gravity4. It looks like he’s planning to fight for this company, too, although he’s still facing jail time.
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We’re one step closer to the Holodeck with this 20-camera 3D body-capture setup
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Devin Coldewey
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Have you ever been in a VR conference call and thought, well, I know what everyone looks like from the , but what about the other sides? The Fraunhofer Institute for Telecommunications has your back — and theirs. Researchers there have created a powerful multi-camera setup that captures in 3D every aspect of someone and dumps it straight into a VR experience. The goal is to create avatars in virtual reality that are not just photorealistic from certain vantage points, but show the entire person, along with all their presence and gestures. Turns out this requires quite a bit of hardware. “We are currently using more than 20 stereo cameras to map a human,” explained Oliver Schreer, who leads the research group, in a . Each depth-sensing camera sends its data to a central processor to be fused into a single representation. “In developing these algorithms, special care has been taken to ensure they work efficiently and fast, so the movements of dialogue partners can very quickly be converted into a dynamic model,” said Schreer. It still takes a few seconds, but the result is a virtual model that has every detail intact, from hairstyle to wrinkles in a shirt. Every little movement is also captured, from blinks to high kicks. It can be inserted into a virtual environment and viewers or interlocutors can move all the way around the avatar and inspect it from any angle. The first application the researchers have worked on is a teleconferencing one, but Schreer sees the system being applied in entertainment, as well. “Film producers could use it to transfer the movement of actors into scenes more easily than ever before,” he said. Or shows could be recorded this way and viewers could navigate the whole scene in VR alongside the characters. The system is still very lab-bound, of course, and no one is expected to set up 20 cameras in their conference room (well, we might). The team is working on improving the cameras and the software that handles the image streams. Alas, it’ll still be a few years before we get a real Holodeck.
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43 million passwords hacked in Last.fm breach
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John Mannes
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Crikey: 43,570,999 user accounts were breached in a hack of Last.fm that occurred in March of 2012, . Three months after the breach, in June of 2012, Last.fm “We are currently investigating the leak of some Last.fm user passwords. This follows recent password leaks on other sites, as well as information posted online. As a precautionary measure, we’re asking all our users to change their passwords immediately.” The number of passwords and the severity of the hack were not uncovered until today. The passwords were stored using unsalted MD5 hashing. Rather than storing passwords in plaintext, nearly every site that stores critical user information utilizes some form of hashing. Hashing is a method for encrypting data, but some methods are far superior to others. MD5 is seriously out of style, in part because it is not mathematically intensive enough to resist modern methods of brute-force cracking. Moreover, Last.fm didn’t use salt in its hashing process. Salting is the practice of adding a random string of numbers to the hash for each individual password, making them more secure and decreasing the likelihood that they will be cracked if the passwords are ever leaked online. Unfortunately, Last.fm did not take that step, and LeakedSource reports that most of the passwords were easily cracked. , our advice is that you change your password immediately if you have an account on Last.fm. The most popular password pulled from the Last.fm database was 123456. Seriously, it’s 2016 people — use a platform like LastPass to generate randomized, complex passwords that are unique to every service for which you sign up.
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How CIOs climb from the back room to the boardroom
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Tom Frangione
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Today more than ever, technology is transforming how enterprises do business. The IT profession has evolved from being reactionary to proactive, and CIOs now have a seat at the table to drive company strategy. Greylock COO Tom Frangione catches up with Kim Stevenson, Intel COO for the Client and Internet of Things Businesses and Systems Architecture Group, to discuss how startups can sell to larger enterprises, the importance of IT innovation and what the future of machine learning means for enterprise companies. CIOs are becoming the expert source on enterprise trends and new innovative solutions to help companies gain and maintain a competitive advantage. IT topics, like security and data analytics, have become part of the boardroom discussions and key components to a successful business strategy. Even machine learning and artificial intelligence are entering the enterprise market and being looked at as the next opportunity for innovation. “Whether it’s customer support, identifying security issues or greater levels of automated testing, machine learning has wide-ranging use cases,” says Kim Stevenson. Companies rely on technological innovation to keep one step ahead of the competition, and startups have proven to be a good way to do that. For startups looking to sell to larger enterprises, it’s important to understand the company’s larger roadmap and business needs. The best startups can “deploy well and scale well” while using customer feedback to pinpoint which features are needed. Startups should add exponential value to their customers, and be prepared to scale alongside the larger enterprise as they grow in size and needs. “Are they a company or a product? Once you won that initial deal, you have to deliver functionality and features rapidly. The best companies listen to us as their customers as to what features and functions we might want.” [soundcloud url=”https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/280781787″ params=”auto_play=false&hide_related=false&show_comments=true&show_user=true&show_reposts=false&visual=true” width=”100%” height=”450″ iframe=”true” /]
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Stefan Etienne
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No, Palo Alto isn’t going to ban coding
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Devin Coldewey
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A in The New York Times on a culture clash taking place in Palo Alto set off a bit of speculation as to the possibility of “a ban on coding,” as the article put it. Well, don’t worry. That’s not going to happen. It was Mayor Patrick Burt himself who was quoted in the piece, and whose office was reported as looking into such a ban. I contacted Burt and the city council to see if they could provide a little clarity. “Unfortunately, the Times article did not capture accurately the issue,” he wrote in an email. The downtown area, he explained, has never actually been zoned for “software and hardware research and development,” the category under which many tech companies fall — instead, large parts of the city have been zoned for the purpose, specifically the 10 million square feet of the Stanford Research Park. But tech companies have established themselves downtown as well, and until recently no one really made a big deal about it. A city council representative intimated much the same thing in another email. “A couple of larger companies have decided to stay in the downtown area as they grow,” Burt wrote, “taking over nearly all office space that becomes available and driving out the local service and business service companies as well as start ups who cannot compete for that space with the larger and more affluent companies. These smaller companies have been getting driven out of the downtown, creating more of a monoculture than what has been a more diverse and vibrant environment.” “What I and some of my colleagues on the city council are considering is to clarify and update our downtown zoning codes,” he continued. “We are interested in for the first time formally allowing ‘Research and Development’ in the downtown up to a certain size, but not allowing large corporate campus functions to take over.” So it seems that far from banning coding downtown, the plan is to it. Of course, that doesn’t mean the move couldn’t be considered hostile to some of the companies that have helped make Palo Alto the town it is today. Especially when seen in the light of another piece of regulation recently introduced that limits new office construction to 50,000 square feet per year in the same area. What some see as unsustainable growth is reflected in, as with other tech-heavy towns, a jump in the price of living. Former Planning and Transportation Commissioner Kate Downing in August, citing a lack of progress in accommodating affordable housing and other measures. “I struggle to think what Palo Alto will become and what it will represent when young families have no hope of ever putting down roots here,” she wrote. “And meanwhile the community is engulfed with middle-aged jet-setting executives and investors who are hardly the sort to be personally volunteering for neighborhood block parties, earthquake preparedness responsibilities, or neighborhood watch. If things keep going as they are, yes, Palo Alto’s streets will look just as they did decades ago, but its inhabitants, spirit, and sense of community will be unrecognizable.” A familiar refrain for many a resident, and not just of Palo Alto, I’d wager. Just what to do about that horrendously complicated issue is a whole other ball of yarn, of course. But with the city putting the brakes on new office development, things may slow down enough that housing and infrastructure can catch up.
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Glitzy watch manufacturer MB&F announces the Balthazar clockwork robot
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John Biggs
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Today in Part 23 of our series entitled Goofy Rich-Person Gadgetry, we present the MB&F Balthazar, a posable robot that tells the time and has a “dark side.” First, a little context. This is basically a “novelty” designed by a watchmaker to sell to rich people. It’s entirely hand made and features an exposed mechanism and dual dials that tell the time. I’ll let MB&F explain themselves: By “dark side” they mean you can twist his jolly head to display a leering skull face, which makes it just the thing to scare your cat. The fact that this clock runs for 35 days on one winding and that he has a little regulator wheel in his head are kind of the high-tech draw here. Getting a clock of this size to last that long is no mean feat, and fitting all the geegaws and whatnots into such a small package is pretty cool. While it can’t shoot lasers or scare your cat (much), it can look cool on your big, dark wooden desk next to the scalps of your sworn enemies.
The Balthazar joins the in the MB&F weird robot family. It costs $52,875. [youtube=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eMV8MHTLRf8&feature=youtu.be]
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Blue Apron’s “Farm Egg” makes me question everything
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Jordan Crook
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It may seem as simple as just that. An egg. The food that Atkins and Paleo diets made popular once again. The food that draws one of many dividing lines between vegetarians and vegans. But this particular egg is one of the more layered, even scrambled (if you will), symbols of Silicon Valley startup-dom. It’s easy to dismiss the of the tech world as outliers, but much harder to look at the overall impact of our tech darlings when it comes to the betterment of global society. Blue Apron’s “Farm Egg” has me asking these questions. Is Uber creating a million jobs only to eventually take them away with self-driving cars? Is Tinder empowering a generation to meet someone in the digital age or creating a generation of promiscuous, lonely souls? Or, more pointedly, is Blue Apron creating a shitload of waste in their quest to save the Convenience Generation from fully industrialized agriculture and obesity? Enter, “Farm Egg.” here it is. here's Farm Egg — Brian Lee (@BrianLeeWow) At first glance, “Farm Egg” to represent an out of Blue Apron. Compared to buying eggs by the half-dozen at the grocery store, the packaging of a single “Farm Egg” in excessive cardboard (most of which is likely for insulation against bumps and bruises during transportation) doesn’t appear to be all that “Eco-friendly.” You can dive deeper into this thesis, and uncover the of recycling Blue Apron’s markedly (as in, it’s on the box) “Eco-Friendly” packaging. After compiling all the cardboard and paper products, the process involves melting and emptying the plastic cool-packs that keep Blue Apron food fresh, and finding a place to recycle plastic bags (you can recycle LDPE at retail locations, like ). If you’re willing to do all that for the earth (which is totally likely since you’re also the kind of person who doesn’t have time to shop at the grocery store, and thus, a Blue Apron user), the final step in the recycling process is to make your peace with trashing the plastic film, which has “a limited recycling market once it comes in contact with food.” That said, Blue Apron argues that its packaging waste has decreased by at least 50 percent since launch four years ago. “Farm egg is kind of ironic since most grocery stores sell eggs in Styrofoam cartons that aren’t recyclable,” said Blue Apron CEO Matt Salzberg. “We offer less food (reducing food waste) and less packaging per unit of food than any grocery store.” Plus, Blue Apron has launched a returns program for users to send back everything (the box, the cool-packs, the plastic and the paper) with a UPS return label, at which point the company will recycle the packaging for you. “Literally, tons of packaging is returned to us each month for us to recycle,” said Salzberg. For generosity’s sake, let’s just assume that each of Blue Apron’s are properly and fully recycled. That still doesn’t account for the fact that some of those meals traveled miles and miles, likely in refrigerated trucks, from one of three Blue Apron fulfillment centers in the United States. The company has one fulfillment center in New Jersey, which services the entire Eastern Seaboard, one in California, which services the West Coast, and one in Texas, which takes care of the fly-overs. For users in New York, California and Texas, that’s not all that bad in terms of emissions. But users who aren’t in populated areas, or in Southern Florida, are receiving food that has traveled hundreds of miles. But is Blue Apron really the culprit when it comes to food transportation emissions? California avocados, Florida oranges and Wisconsin cheese don’t even scrape the surface of an industry where the of carbon emissions come from food , not transportation. And Blue Apron specifically selects suppliers that are within the general region of their fulfillment centers, sourcing food as locally as possible to reduce emissions. Plus, for the fraction of emissions that come from food transportation — driving it to the store for retail, plus customers driving to and from the store to purchase it — Blue Apron’s exclusion of the grocery store middle man may even be efficient. Before arriving at the fulfillment center, where it’s prepped to be shipped — I can just imagine little “Farm Egg,” separated from its friends, slipping into that individualized, stickered cardboard holster before being placed in an insulated box — Blue Apron foods come from hundreds of hand-selected, family-run farms and suppliers. That’s not so bad, either, considering how dangerous can be for the planet. The company has a team of over 50 people who work to both select suppliers and help them improve their practices, ensuring that the minimum of pesticides are used and that agricultural farmers are taking good care of their soil. And then you have to factor in how Blue Apron’s perfectly portioned meal-kits, complete with and dear “Farm Egg,” must reduce food waste. Folks who buy food in bulk at the grocery store waste of it, according to this USDA study. With Blue Apron portions, that number shrinks to almost nothing. “Most industry experts will tell you that food waste, given all the resources that go into growing food, is ten times worse for the environment than packaging waste,” said Salzberg. Not to mention, Blue Apron helps people cook. People who otherwise wouldn’t. Researchers at Johns Hopkins that cooking actually leads to a much healthier diet. Which begs the question: Is Blue Apron, and little “Farm Egg,” part of the problem or the solution? It’s difficult to weigh the extreme (but mostly recyclable) waste of Blue Apron’s packaging with the general good it does for the nation’s food waste and its users’ health. But we can be sure that Blue Apron, valued north of $2 billion and potentially gunning for an IPO, is as much a shipping company as it is a food startup, with a small team of employees focused entirely on boxes, plastic bags, ice packs, and… the delicate cardboard cradle for “Farm Egg.” “Farm Egg” may just be another ridiculous, hilarious symbol of Silicon Valley’s disconnect with the world’s most pressing dilemmas. Maybe. “Farm Egg” may also be a truly fitting symbol for the way the tech world approaches global problems with a holistic perspective. At first glance, “Farm Egg” seems like a joke, a step backward in our global progress, solving a problem that we don’t actually have — just go to the damn store and buy a half-dozen eggs, lazy bones! But “Farm Egg” also represents an improvement to each of the pieces of the food industry. After traveling a short distance from a cage-free chicken farm to one of Blue Apron’s fulfillment centers, where it was dressed up in recyclable materials, Farm Egg eventually ended up at the home of a user, who cooked it up for dinner without wasting anything, and… hopefully, recycled the packaging afterwards.
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At Pear Demo Day, 13 companies to watch
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Connie Loizos
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As dozens of Teslas baked in the sprawling Palo Alto parking lot of a local law firm yesterday, 100 top investors packed into a high-ceilinged meeting room. There, they listened as 13 startups deliver four-minute presentations about why they’re worth watching. The companies — all of them roughly six months old or younger, and all led by current college students or recent graduates — were part of the program of three-year-old , an early-stage venture firm that annually invites computer science students from top schools to build companies in their office with a $50,000 uncapped note and no strings attached. (Until recently, the firm was known as Pejman Mar Ventures.) So far, Pear seems to be choosing these student teams wisely. Out of the eight groups that presented a year ago, one startup sold to Google and four others have raised seed funding. Pear’s inaugural class, in 2014, also saw one startup, FancyThat, . Certainly, the venture capitalists gathered yesterday seemed enthusiastic. Ross Fubini, a partner at Canaan Partners, partway through the presentations that it was “looking like the best demo event of the year.” Another investor, Lux Capital partner Shahin Farshchi, told us afterward that he also thought it was “fantastic, with something for everybody, including consumer companies, analytics and AI companies, and deep tech for investors like me.” For those who weren’t there and may be curious, here’s what you missed: This company makes AI-powered time sheets to enable companies to better understand how and where their teams are spending time. According to the founders (who come from Stanford and UC Santa Barbara), 45 million people fill out time sheets in the U.S., and they estimate that this adds up to $11 billion in lost time. (Think of lawyers whose time is valuable and may spend upwards of 15 minutes a day tracking their billable hours.) They argue that made more efficient, the market could be a whole lot bigger, too. If you agree and want to reach out to them, you can do that at founders@allocate.ai. Its tech allows users to send encrypted, password-protected, self-destructing iMessages that can even be disguised and masked inside of fake replacement texts. This struck us as useful for a variety of cases, and we hope we’re right about that. Its 20-year-old founder, Tyler Weitzman — who says he has built 30 apps since his middle school days — is now dropping out of Stanford to “go all in on BlackSMS.” To learn more, you can check out a longer piece that TC wrote earlier this year. To contact Weitzman, you can email him at founders@black-sms.com. This data company says it can provide persistent and reliable information from space through a constellation of shoebox-size satellites that it’s building. How do they differ from the satellites of other startups? Its tech relies on synthetic aperture radar, meaning it sends radio waves down to the earth’s surface that — based on the reflection of the radio waves that go through the clouds and don’t require illumination from the sun — can capture images at night and despite heavy cloud cover. (Many other new constellations rely on optical technologies instead.) Capella does have competitors, including Ursa currently sells information to customers based on traditional (read big, bulky) satellites that employ synthetic aperture radar, and it’s planning to develop its own constellation of satellites. But it’s pretty much an open race at this point. You can reach the founders at founders@cappellaspace.com. This company has developed a set of algorithms that it says can understand and explain any deep learning process by looking at inputs, identifying recurring patterns and other stuff. Why bother drilling into why machine learning processes work like they do? For one thing, regulators are starting to push back against “black box” technologies. Most notably, the EU recently to pass legislation that guarantees EU citizens a “right to explanation” when machine learning models are used to make decisions that impact them. The founders say the company is not raising money. (We’re not sure we believe this.) They also say their tech, currently in use across eight genomic labs in the U.S., has already attracted substantial interest from Alphabet, including from Google’s mobile development team and Alphabet’s life sciences subsidiary . You can reach them at founders@deeplift.ai. This startup is a messaging-based platform that lets fans connect with celebrities directly. Right now, it uses Facebook Messenger, SMS and Kik to enable communication via a single thread, and the idea is to bring Twitter-like interactions to messaging. For example, a fan of runner Usain Bolt could presumably interact with Bolt one minute and swimmer Michael Phelps the next, all without changing platforms or opening another dialog box. The founders have impressive backgrounds — Harvard, Amazon, McKinsey — but we’ll admit to being underwhelmed by this one. For what it’s worth, we didn’t think much of Snapchat early on, either. You can email the founders at founders@hellohotline.com. This startup’s tech vows to “supercharge” analysts everywhere. The pitch: analysts become consumed with trying to understand predictive modeling, geospatial analytics and a bunch of other stuff that may not be central to their role with a company. Kofa says that it’s giving them reusable point-and-click tools to solve part of this problem. Its technology also allows analysts to build atop each others’ work. We don’t know how unique this is, but Kofa’s founders previously founded FancyThat. They stayed on with Palantir (which, as mentioned above, the company), but they left a little earlier this year to strike out on their own again. So far so good, seemingly. They say they’ve already raised some pre-seed funding and are “closing a six-figure deal” with a customer as you read this. This startup aims to let customer service reps easily and immediately take over the screen of a user who needs help, all thanks to a single line of JavaScript. Motif says it also enables companies to retroactively record their users’ screens five minutes before and after any predefined customer action. If your first thought is, “What about my privacy?,” close your eyes and think about the last time you tried communicating what was on your screen to someone on the phone and how long that took. If Motif can save us from that hell going forward, we’re all for it. It’s not clear how big the team is. We do know that founder Allan Jiang is currently studying computer science at Stanford and is set to graduate in 2018. You can track him down at founders@usermotif.com. This company is trying to help immigrants access loans from U.S. companies, which can be hard to do, if not impossible, as there’s no easy way for U.S. lenders to get immigrants’ credit history data. Nova’s solution? To connect lenders to global credit bureaus all over the world. An immigrant applies for a loan from an institution that Nova has partnered with, and via an API integration, the lender — which pays Nova $30 for every file it pulls — uses that information to make a decision. Voila. The company launched two months ago and has already partnered with three lending institutions. You can find the founders, all from Stanford, at founders@neednova.com This startup is a SaaS platform that aims to help retailers leverage messaging apps as a new channel to acquire customers. Now brands like Tori Burch no longer have to rely on email promotions and ad targeting alone; with Pluto’s tech, they can remind customers while they’re in Facebook Messenger about that color-blocked pea coat that they might have put in their online shopping cart and not purchased. Not that we’ve ever done that. You can find the founders at founders@getpluto.co. Take a photo, turn it into an online sticker and send it without leaving your messaging app. Or access your friends’ and other communities’ creations, and send their stickers without leaving the conversation. Like Hotline, this company sounds to us like less of a company and more of a feature, but features get acquired, and plenty of people seem to “get” this one. According to Script’s team of founders (most from Stanford), the thousands of users who’ve been introduced to the service over the past four months have already created 3.2 million stickers. For what it’s worth, CEO Katia Ameri also spent two years as a venture associate with Pear before starting the company. Ameri and her co-founders can be reached at founders@script.me. This startup is building a marketplace for college admissions and career advice, starting with an essay editing tool that invites high school students to submit their admissions essays and, for $49 per essay, get feedback from students at the colleges they are going to attend. We didn’t hear anything terribly new here; there are catering to ambitious high school students and their parents. Then again, it’s a huge market and no one has a lock on it. You can find the founders at founders@synocate.com. This company, founded by a team of PhDs from Carnegie Mellon and elsewhere, makes sophisticated visual analytics software that they say can ingest billions of data points and intuitively create visualizations at massive scale, making it a lot easier for customers like insurance companies, for example, to see which pockets of people they aren’t targeting and should be. If you want to track down the founders to learn more (they also have a pretty neat demo they can show you), you can find them at founders@xseer.io. We thought this company was among the most interesting of the bunch. (Farshchi thought so, too.) In a nutshell, it’s applying deep learning to ultrasounds, which typically require either a radiologist or other technician’s expertise, which can translate into a long wait for anxious patients. More specifically, its software compares ultrasounds with millions of other images and videos (more results than a radiologist could see in his or her lifetime), thereby empowering primary care physicians to interpret the images and quickly take action. This is a “hot” space. Entrepreneur Jonathan Rothberg told Technology Review a couple of years ago that he has raised to create a new kind of ultrasound imaging system that’s nearly “as cheap as a stethoscope” and will “make doctors 100 times as effective.” Viz, which is focusing on the hip initially, hopes its software can enable existing machines to do the work instead. To reach the founders, write to founders@viz.ai.
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Bradley Tusk, Hemant Taneja and Ted Ullyot are talking policy at Disrupt SF
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Kate Conger
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It’s a question every major startup must answer eventually: What do you do when the regulators come knocking? The answer varies depending on who you ask — for Uber, the solution used to be holding firm and butting heads with regulators, but in more recent years the ridesharing company turned to former Obama advisor to fight its battles. Airbnb fought back against regulation in its hometown of San Francisco by plastering the city with , and is now and other cities over their home-sharing laws. For , the answer seems to be shutting down. Some of Silicon Valley’s fiercest battles the last few years have been over policy, not competing products. Handling regulatory fights or averting them altogether is becoming a cottage industry — and at Disrupt SF, we’ll be talking to some of the leaders in that field. of Tusk Ventures, of General Catalyst Partners and of Andreessen Horowitz will be joining us onstage at Disrupt SF to tell us how they guide startups through the sometimes murky regulatory waters. It’s not only in a startup’s best interest to pay attention to regulation; investors are becoming more interested as they look to mitigate risk for their portfolio companies. Tusk heads up Tusk Ventures, a policy advisory firm. He recently guided Fan Duel and DraftKings back from the brink of extinction after regulators in several states decided the fantasy sports sites were illegal and shouldn’t be allowed to operate. The sites just had a big win in New York, where , in part thanks to Tusk. Taneja has a track record of investing in highly regulated industries like healthcare. His investment philosophy centers on what he calls “economies of unscale,” and he believes that that drive the tech industry. Ullyot has spent more than a year building out Andreessen Horowitz’s policy team, which aims to be a point of contact in Silicon Valley for lawmakers who are considering new regulation of the tech industry and for startups that are still learning the regulatory landscape. Ullyot’s team also advises Andreessen Horowitz’s investments when policy could have an unexpected influence. Join us for a discussion about the regulation of the tech industry at Pier 48 in San Francisco, September 12-14. Tickets are available so !
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Tech and government: The state of our union
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Matt Weinberg
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Technology innovators tend to operate with an ethos that they consider diametrically opposed to that of government, frequently leading to friction and adversarial attitudes. They view tech as fast-moving, inventive and needing to be free of bureaucracy — while government is staid, stodgy and constrained by restrictive red tape. Government, however, remains an ever-present force in the operations of any company, technology or otherwise, and can be friend or foe. Given the current regulatory, legal and political climate in our country, and while technology becomes increasingly more pervasive in our society, there is an urgent need for members of the tech community to devote greater attention to what’s happening in Washington, D.C. All branches of government — legislative, executive and judicial — contend with a host of weighty issues that carry high-stakes consequences for the industry. In recent years, Congress has confronted a growing number of technology-related topics, like intellectual property, immigration reform, privacy and surveillance. Decision-making in Congress follows a tried-and-true system, with established industries deploying lobbyists, consultants and advocacy groups to relentlessly court legislators in largely the same manner they have for decades. These entrenched interests that are evident in so many government fights have battle-tested resources, long-term relationships with policymakers and experience at navigating the halls of Congress. Notably, significant new coalitions and advocacy groups have recently emerged to help guide the technology community through Congress’ playbook. A on Capitol Hill, for example, which brought together leaders in blockchain technology, was a promising example of a burgeoning new industry creating inroads with the elected officials who wield influence over its regulatory future. The speed of technological change can sometimes have federal regulators playing catch-up. Take unmanned aircraft systems, or drones, for example. Planes have historically had a protracted production cycle; to design, assemble and certify a new aircraft takes considerable time. This lengthy manufacturing process seemed to fit the regulatory process well, which by its nature is deliberate and circumspect. However, the change in pace of drone technology is rapid, and with half a million recreational drones already registered with the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), and the widespread use of drones for commercial purposes just around the corner, government must move fast to keep pace in this new environment. Fortunately, concrete action is being taken by numerous government agencies to ensure that drone policy is crafted responsibly. On August 2, the White House hosted , which brought together leaders in government, academic and private industry to discuss the near and long-term implications of drone technology. In addition, the National Science Foundation (NSF) has committed $35 million to “accelerate the understanding” of how to regulate drone usage and how to unlock the technology’s full commercial and civic potential. This new industry, which will impact sectors ranging from construction to retail and create thousands of new jobs, should be forged collaboratively by both private and public actors. The White House’s initiative, coupled with action by the FAA and NSF, demonstrates that the government can also gather the appropriate stakeholders to strengthen interdisciplinary dialogue around technology policy solutions. Or take the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), which has found itself at odds with certain technology companies, namely Internet Service Providers, as it has solidified and advanced open internet and net neutrality regulation. Some in the tech community are concerned that the FCC’s regulatory policy will create an ecosystem overly favorable to streaming platforms. Technology companies are also finding themselves increasingly engaged with local governments, where intense regulatory battles are unfolding. Take ridesharing behemoths Uber and Lyft’s recent showdown over whether to impose fingerprint background checks when screening drivers in Austin, Texas — one of the country’s fastest-growing technology hubs. After a contentious, multi-million-dollar campaign, voters approved the new ridesharing security measure by a whopping margin. This created an untenable business environment for Uber and Lyft, and both companies swiftly ceased operating in Austin. Uber and Lyft seemed to expect — and rightfully so — that both their customers and Austin’s technology workers would come out in full force to support their right to operate. To the contrary, they stayed home and, in turn, handed the opposition, a portion of which had never even used either service, a resounding victory. The technology community also should be closely monitoring what’s happening in the judiciary, especially the Supreme Court. Pending and future cases carry high stakes for tech innovators — small and large — and consumers alike. Consider the closely watched trial between Apple and Samsung over design patents. If the Supreme Court doesn’t reverse the lower court’s ruling, it could deal a shock to our intellectual property system. It could encumber innovation and investment and make companies that create technology products vulnerable to costly litigation and attacks by patent trolls. This is but one example of a legal case with significant implications for the entire technology community. Finally, at times certain technologies have been antagonized by interest groups that blame innovation for lost jobs and diminished opportunities. These interest groups have reached out to aggrieved communities seeking to fan the flames of discontent. The pain of disruption is very real, and policy makers should take concrete steps to both mitigate potential job losses and allay unfounded fears. Still, technology innovators mostly strive to improve the lives of their customers and seek to save them money, make their businesses operate more efficiently, bring them prosperity and access and connect them to people around the world. This message often gets lost and misconstrued amid economic turmoil. It is clear that the relationship between technology and government will become ever more significant to the future of our economy. If innovators in Silicon Valley, or startups hoping to become the next unicorn, think that government will not play a role in shaping the technology sector, they are uninformed or naive. The Wall Street Journal recently published a graph that displayed the top 12 private companies by valuation. For half of these companies, which as of 2015 represented a combined valuation of $113 billion, interaction with government is core to their business. An equally misguided position would be for government officials to believe that technology innovators and entrepreneurs will cease looking for ways to solve problems, disrupt inefficient systems and industries and catalyze regulatory change. The goal should be to forge an economy that is both conducive to prosperity and cognizant of the dramatic and sometimes painful changes that can occur with rapid progress. Our future should not be shaped exclusively by giant technology companies or overreaching government bureaucrats but by sedulous professionals on both ends of the spectrum dedicated to employing judiciousness and patience in the pursuit of common goals.
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Crunch Report | DJI Folding Drone Leaked Photo
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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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Star Trek and Harry Potter have ruined business travel
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Mark McSpadden
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Most of us techies agree that optimal travel is (Star Trek) or (Harry Potter). The dream is instantaneous point-to-point transport. All business transportation should be evaluated based on how close it comes to approaching this ideal. Because modern travel isn’t instantaneous, our main metrics are productivity — the ability to work while en route — and convenience — how easy is the whole process of getting from one place to the next. In approaching the teleportation ideal, an airplane’s greatest strength is speed. Air is the fastest option we have. The longer the trip, the greater the advantage for air over other forms of travel. A car’s greatest strengths are simplicity and flexibility. It’s one vehicle from point-to-point, operating on any schedule and any route. Trains offer the greatest productivity but stick to a fixed track. Buses’ greatest strength is cost, but they tend to be a “jack of all trades, master of none.” Optimizing travel requires balancing speed with simplicity and flexibility. It’s toward this magic ideal where the opportunity exists for travel companies to collaborate in building the flexible systems of the future. “Driverless cars” is the obligatory buzz phrase these days for any discussion of transportation. But we forget that the promise lies in the wholesale transformation of regional travel. While most of the press around driverless cars has focused on complex urban settings, most of the real-world tests have been on highways. These are settings with similar speeds and limited variables. When it comes to regional distances of a few hundred miles or less, there are a wealth of competing travel options — cars, planes, buses, trains. But every option has complications: detours, delays, transfers, distractions and wind resistance are as true for ground as for air. Driverless vehicles offer a tremendous opportunity for airlines and ground-based transportation companies to partner with each other, leveraging their historical strengths to improve travel for everyone. Over the past year, I’ve logged flights from my home in Dallas to Thailand, Hong Kong, Argentina, Seattle, New York and San Francisco. In that same time, I’ve traveled by car to conferences in Austin, Houston and College Station. This is the “ ” — , all less than 250 miles apart. It’s a region ripe for experimentation and innovation in travel. There are air routes connecting Texas cities. After all, regional, decentralized Texas flights is . The inconvenience of flying short distances rarely seems worth it to me; the complexity doesn’t outweigh the speed. As much as I love flying, it involves navigating a tremendous number of transitions: getting to the airport (via ride-sharing, public transit or driving to self-parking), checking bags, navigating security, walking to the gate, waiting at the gate, boarding, waiting for takeoff — the actual flight — taxiing to the gate, debarking, walking to baggage claim, waiting at baggage claim and transport to the final destination (via ride-sharing, public transit or rental car). For longer flights, these steps represent the minority of total travel time. But for Dallas to Houston — the longest leg of the Texas Triangle — the 45-minute flight is a tiny part of a total travel time of 3-4 hours. It’s also challenging to be productive en route because it takes so much time to negotiate all the transitions of the trip. You simply can’t be highly productive during so many micro moments. If I make the 240-mile drive from Dallas to Houston, my productivity is limited to phone calls and podcasts. But 230 miles of the trip is on highways. In a car with a viable and safe highway driverless mode, 95 percent of the trip would become fully productive time to use a laptop or augmented reality headset, engage in video conference calls or catch a nap. Even if I have to manually drive the car within cities, I’d still gain 3-5 hours of productive time on highways, depending on traffic. And if there is an interruption because of a wreck, mechanical failure or weather event, I still have all the advantages of a car — the ability to change routes, stop for a meal or pull off at a rest stop to watch a sunset over the Texas horizon. In countries with higher population densities than the U.S., high-speed rail has largely replaced regional passenger flights. For instance, airlines in when there is a competing high-speed rail. However, the U.S. hasn’t built a similar infrastructure. Texas lacks any high-speed rail ( ). China’s example is still relevant as we think about inconvenience thresholds in travel. High-speed rail is widely idealized as a transportation option — and for good reasons: It tends to be highly convenient, connecting city centers in a way that is fast, safe, affordable and comfortable, with a minimum of overhead time and the benefit of a low-carbon footprint. The ultimate example of this would be a . However, high-speed rails require significant passenger volume to be viable and — where they don’t already exist — significant time and money to plan and implement. In contrast, cars that can function autonomously on highways can adapt to any scale and to any region, yielding the productivity benefits of high-speed rail across a far greater range of routes and situations. Airlines understand logistics better than any other segment of the travel industry. As autonomous vehicles proliferate, airlines have the opportunity to bring their experience to a new arena. Airlines could partner with ground transportation companies to create the infrastructure to link autonomous vehicle travel to existing flight routes… or perhaps talk to Tesla about piloting its . Here’s a potential playbook: I can imagine a world where booking travel is a far more flexible and consistent process: My ticket gets me from point to point within a promised time period; it’s up to the travel provider to integrate the pieces necessary for my trip to be on time and seamless. Airlines are among the companies best positioned to manage the logistics to compete in this magical world of integrated travel. The hardware to make driverless cars a reality is largely in place. The software continuously improves, making the hardware more useful. The dominant challenge to adoption is in changing public opinion in favor of autonomous vehicles. There are plenty of responsible and compelling arguments for and against autonomous cars. Increased safety, reduced costs and environmental consciousness must be balanced against software bugs and cybersecurity threats. But, ultimately, I believe the road to adoption will be paved by a demand for convenience and consistency. Humanity has an amazing track record of trust. With every innovation of the internet era, we have shown a willingness to give up privacy, personal information and personal security in return for convenience. Similarly, with autonomous vehicles, our concerns will likely fade once we experience the new technology. Google’s driverless car testing supports this idea: “Within about five minutes [behind the wheel], everybody thought the car worked well, and after that, they just trusted it to work,” reported the . Very soon, from the front seat of our driverless cars, we’ll be able to see the next future of travel: . This opens a whole new set of opportunities for companies to collaborate on end-to-end travel. For travelers like you and I, we’ll be one step closer to Star Trek. Beam me up!
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iZettle buys intelligentpos to expand from mobile payments to commerce solutions
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Ingrid Lunden
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While Square continues to take , a would-be homegrown rival has made its first acquisition to expand from mobile payments into a wider set of commerce solutions. — the Swedish mobile payments startup backed by the likes of Intel, American Express and Spanish banking giant Santander — has bought , whose cloud-based software lets businesses in the hospitality and other industries manage their inventory, loyalty programs and customer flow. Terms of the deal are not being disclosed, iZettle CEO and co-founder Jacob de Geer told TechCrunch. The Edinburgh-based startup had raised only prior to its exit. De Geer said that intelligentpos will add another €500 million in processing volume to the €3 billion that iZettle already processes annually. Intelligentpos is a cloud-based service and is complementary to iZettle in a couple of ways. The first is in its feature set and how it is used by customers. Both take advantage of using generic hardware (in their case, an iPad or Android tablet); iZettle has built a service focused on simple and quick transactions, while intelligentpos is essentially focused on everything else around the business-customer relationship, with its biggest product to date focused on the hospitality industry. The second way in which they complement each other is in their pricing: Up to now, iZettle’s revenues have come by way of taking a small percentage commission on each transaction made by the merchant (like Square, the basic cut is 2.75 percent). Intelligentpos, however, is a built on a SaaS model, “and that adds a different type of revenue stream we haven’t been working with up to now,” de Geer said. Intelligentpos has up to now focused most of its efforts on the U.K. market, but de Geer said that under iZettle, the intention will be to take that elsewhere: iZettle has made a mark not only in Europe, where it competes against the likes of PayPal and SumUp/Payleven for small business customers (many of whom may not have had any payment card acceptance in the past because of the high rates charged by banks); but also Brazil and Mexico, by way of its strategic investment from Santander. De Geer said that while it may have taken several years for iZettle to make its first acquisition, it won’t be the last. , the company is looking to go beyond its original payment roots as a route to more recurring revenue and a wider customer base. That’s also included services like business financing in the past, and de Geer said that today, the next target “could be anything.” “It can be something in [payment] terminals to small business insurance,” he continued. “There is a lot out there right now ripe for consolidation. I know what all of them are looking for is a scalable way to acquire new customers and that is one of iZettle’s core strengths. And we are regulated, which means we can work with any financial service.” The company, he added, is buying intelligentpos with a mix of cash and equity, bringing on employees as well as customers and tech. iZettle has to date raised , with the most recent coming a year ago and valuing iZettle at around $500 million, according to sources close to the company.
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3D printing technologies explained
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Filemon Schoffer
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If you’ve ever been lost in the midst of all the , you know how hard it is to get a grip on the different machinery, applications and companies involved. Patent disputes, crafty marketing teams and feuds amongst inventors have led to a point where identical go by different trademarks and are limited in their applications because of potential infringements. Many “new — actually trademarks — are presented as revolutionary, when they are in fact similar or the same as existing systems. For the industrial designer or engineer it’s important to have a grasp on these because they can tell you a lot about possible applications and limitations from the outset. This is generally not an easy thing to do. To shed some light on the situation, and help you understand the different here’s an overview to get you started. The overview contains all the main additive manufacturing of today, starting with process descriptions and guiding through all the individual and material options, ending with the key industry players. Using the overview, it can be particularly interesting to have a look at where new fit into the grand scheme of things and what can be expected of their applications and possible limitations. A little more than a ago, Joseph M. DeSimone, a chemistry professor from UNC Chapel Hill, walked onto a stage and left the audience in complete awe. On stage he unveiled a technology dubbed Continuous Liquid Interface Production (CLIP) that promised to be up to a 100 times faster than comparable and capable of creating smooth, strong parts, equivalent to their injection-molded counterparts. By the end of the 10-minute presentation, a solid object had risen from the bath of the obscure printer he had brought with him. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UpH1zhUQY0c&feature=youtu.be As can be seen in the overview, technology is similar to existing DLP technology. What differentiates it is the use of “a photochemical process that carefully balances light and oxygen to rapidly produce parts.” Photopolymerization typically produces parts that are weak, brittle and degrade when exposed to UV light. Carbon claims to overcome this “by embedding a second heat-activated reactive chemistry in their materials,” resulting in high-resolution parts with engineering-grade mechanical properties.” Carbon is backed by notable investors, including Google, Autodesk and Sequoia Capital as the company managed to raise $141 million to date. Their debut printer, the M1, is priced at $40,000 per year with a minimum three-year term — a subscription-based model that is quite new to the industry. NanoParticle Jetting (NPJ) technology, by the Israeli company , promises to introduce inkjet-based technology to the metal industry. It’s a revolutionary approach, considering that Material Jetting (e.g. inkjet-like) have so far only been successfully applied to produce plastic or wax parts. In the XJet system, “print heads deposit an ultra-fine layer of liquid droplets” containing metal nanoparticles onto the build-tray. Extremely high temperatures cause the liquid “jacket” around the metal nanoparticles to evaporate and the metal parts to bond at the desired location. Compared to , the process produces “a stronger binding of the metal with virtually the same metallurgy as traditionally-made metal parts.” The liquid feedstock also comes in sealed cartridges, eliminating the complex handling process of metal powders. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9wiZUr6Ryow&feature=youtu.be After a decade’s worth of research and development, and $25 million in funding from Autodesk and Catalyst, XJet revealed its technology at RAPID 2016 in May. The company now has seven machines operating in its Rehovot, Israel HQ, but is yet to announce an official launch date and its first product. Once on the market, XJet could potentially disrupt the production of short-runs of complex metal parts in major areas of production. The rumors turned out to be true when HP announced its first printer in October 2014. With abundant resources and decades of expertise in 2D behind it, the company’s first printer will hit the . https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VXntl3ff5tc Multi Jet Fusion (MJF) dispenses millions of drops of chemical agent per second — similar to what the company pioneered with 2D paper — onto a thin layer of powdered material, while instantly curing it. Ultimately, this new process allows one to set the properties of each individual volumetric pixel (or as HP calls it; the “voxel”), thus controlling the mechanical and physical characteristics throughout a part with the ability to add more detail, including color and structural mechanics, than ever before, HP notes. Offering an end-to-end solution for $155,000, HP’s machine is priced rather competitively. Currently there’s only one available material (nylon), but the company is planning to roll out more materials in the coming months, showing vast potential for future development. Looking at these recent developments it’s easy to get caught up in the hype (once again) of each new technology — but between the economics, speed and quality of these new systems, it truly seems we’re on the cusp of a future of fully functional on-demand and local production. Let’s allow ourselves to ride the hype wave a bit longer.
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Robots and on-board ovens deliver on Zume’s promise of better pizza
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John Mannes
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a time when the Pizza Hut Stuffed Crust pizza was enough to get people excited. Today, in a world of and custom-modified , being excited about pizza is just not as easy as it used to be. founder Julia Collins and her Elon Musk-esque approach to pizza doesn’t care much for the rest of the pizza industry. In her mind, the pizzavations of the previous decades are irrelevant if the pies arrive soggy, cold and packed with chemicals. with robots, a truck, 56 ovens, a passionate staff and some predictive analytics. Marta the sauce-spreading robot When I traveled to Zume Pizza’s Mountain View headquarters, I half expected to walk into a restaurant. Instead, what I saw was a quintessential Silicon Valley tech startup. Not tech in the way that ordinary pizza chains have internal innovation teams for building apps, but tech in the way that the office had a front-and-center, surrounded by external monitors — with no pizza in sight. Not far from the monitors was a tiny door that led to the heart of the operation. A small, conservative setup with a handful of employees and well… you know… robots typically seen on the assembly line of an automotive plant. While the robots make for great publicity, the machinery actually makes your pizza better. A tomato sauce-dispensing robot, Pepe, and a sauce-spreading robot, Marta, can actually spread sauce more evenly than a human. Bruno, a six-axis beast, can pick up pizzas off the end of the line and put them into the oven without the training typically required to master the use of a pizza peel. After the pizza comes out of the oven, it is boxed in specialty pizza boxes that alleviate the effects of steam on the crispness of the pizza crust. The compostable sugar cane-based box has ridges that redirect the flow of any drippings, and the top of the box can absorb additional moisture. Bruno the robotic pizza peel From here, a team of “pilots” take the pizza and deliver it to customers using a data-driven logistics platform to coordinate deliveries. To most people this would be impressive, and it rightfully is. Making pizza with robots is cool, but it’s not enough to deliver on the company’s goals of serving up Neapolitan pizza to everyone. Artisan pizza cannot sit; even with the innovations in the pizza boxes and delivery routing, the delivery time still averages 22 minutes, and that simply isn’t fast enough. Zume has been investing heavily in oven design. This is because in the future, pizzas will not be cooked on-site. They will be cooked during the delivery process itself. Collins has turned a truck, the type you would see delivering UPS packages, into a pizza factory. A custom-designed rig holds 56 GPS-connected pizza ovens housed on gimbals to prevent sliding on hills. When the truck hits the streets, it will be able to receive orders and begin cooking independent pizzas when the truck approaches a specific delivery. The Zume team has also been collecting data on pizza ordering habits through its app and wants to be the first pizza delivery service to proactively reach out to customers to sell approaching pizzas. For example, if a family tends to order a Sweet Corn Elote, one of Zume’s specialty pizzas, every Thursday at 6:30pm, Zume can reach out at 6:15pm and try to sell the pizza while it’s out on the truck waiting to be cooked. If the pizza isn’t sold, it can be sold in the traditional way. Because the truck is quite large, the final delivery infrastructure will resemble a hub and spoke network. Each region the company expands to will have a single robot-equipped pizza-making facility and a single pizza-cooking truck. A fleet of Fiats and e-Bikes will allow the trucks to park off campus at a school like Stanford and deliver pizzas to dorms. Zume is also toying with the idea of a rewards system for customers who are willing to come to the curb for direct pickup. In a fun, albeit scary twist, Zume Pizza’s robotic ambitions were funded in part by SignalFire. that uses machine learning to identify and diligence optimal investments. Chris Farmer, founder of SignalFire, and Julia Collins are both building tools that can to some degree replace traditional jobs, but ultimately their tools are not designed to replace humans. It’s more about building a world where people and robots can coexist side-by-side. Zume still employs a chef to design the pizzas, dough rollers and drivers — though the latter is likely on its way out. Collins is focused intensely on pizza right now, but has ambitions to build the If it’s any consolation in the meantime, last time I checked humans are still better at actually eating the pizza than robots. When we lose that, I think it will officially be time for us all to succumb to our pizza-eating robot overlords.
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Motoring community DriveTribe secures $6.5M from 21st Century Fox
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Mike Butcher
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, the vertical online community for motoring fans by former Top Gear presenters Jeremy Clarkson, Richard Hammond and James May, has now secured $6.5 million (£4.9 million) from 21st Century Fox. The move comes less than three weeks after the announcement of its $5.5 million Series A funding, led by and . The site expects to launch in November 2016 as the “world’s digital hub for motoring” and has been co-founded by the three celebs, together with their long-time producer/collaborator Andy Wilman, and serial technology entrepreneur Ernesto Schmitt. The site will feature “Tribes” — basically forums — hosted by the three celebrities, along with invited stars, bloggers, writers and videographers, who generate and curate the content. A content engine will target the best content for each community. It sounds like it will be a like a bunch of motoring Facebook groups lumped together, with some more tech thrown in. “We saw the DriveTribe platform and we were blown away by its ingenuity,” said Peter Rice, CEO of FOX Networks Group in a statement. However, the jury is out on whether it will be successful. Most attempts to corral individual celebrities into one platform — such as Tidal — have not fared well.
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What’s next for the U.S. drone market?
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Lora Kolodny
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Following a major for the domestic drone industry last week, industry insiders are expecting a big uptick in dollars invested in U.S. drone-tech companies — just maybe not an immediate one. As we previously reported, the U.S. Department of Transportation and the Federal Aviation Administration implemented , or Small Unmanned Aircraft Systems rules, bringing some eagerly awaited clarity to the industry. The regulations don’t allow for commercial use of drones at night, flying of drones over people or flying of drones beyond the visual line of sight. Companies still have to seek ad hoc exemptions from federal authorities to do these things for business purposes. Depending on how quickly the DOT, FAA and other relevant offices can evaluate exemption requests and grant them, the Part 107 rule could actually slow the roll out of anything like drone delivery services, or pervasive use of drones for news gathering, surveillance or inspections in populated areas and at night. Global UAS Practice co-chair at the D.C. law firm Hogan Lovells, , also a co-executive director of the , said: “Of course, Silicon Valley is operating at lightning speed and D.C. is operating at the pace of bureaucracy… But it’s understandable in ways because the FAA, DOT and others need more information before they can draft regulations.” In this next cycle, she said, she wants to see drone tech and service providers step up and provide all the data they can to regulators, but also to the public, so that people can learn more about the potential benefits of drones. Ellman believes that even the Part 107 rules as they stand today will help open the doors for more innovation and investments in the field, especially around drone-tech education and safety-related technologies. Menlo Ventures’ Managing Director , an investor in , the delivery drone-tech venture, and , a maker of drone detection systems, agreed. “With clarification about the rules of the game, investments flourish in any industry. Once people know what the rules are they can decide how to play it.” Ganesan expects investment in vertical, or industry-specialized drone-tech startups and drone services, to ramp up directly as a result of Part 107. “Nobody wakes up and says I want to use drones at work. They want to solve business problems and know what’s going on around a farm or their pipelines. Drones can help them do that, but many will rely on service providers and specialists for this,” the investor said. Longer term, he expects a larger capital outlay to flow to drone-tech companies after regulators allow beyond the line of sight flying of drones, using autonomous flight, collision avoidance and other remote piloting systems. Those who are not already evaluating drone-tech deals, Ganesan believes, may have seriously underestimated the long-term impact of the technology. An old Silicon Valley chestnut states that short-term effects of major new technologies are generally overestimated, but long-run effects are underestimated. Subtraction Capital General Partner , who previously worked at Boeing as an aerodynamics engineer, said, “Setting a high bar that companies know how to clear” is the most important thing that regulators can do to ensure the U.S. is a leader in the drones industry. “There’s still need for a lot more clarity before U.S. markets are at the fore. But plenty of companies are getting funding now and off to the races, even if that’s somewhere not in the U.S.,” Willard noted. Subtraction Capital is an investor in , which is launching a medical delivery drone service in Rwanda. He also compared the drone-tech market to that for medical devices and pharmaceuticals. Medical devices and new drugs are often launched and studied beyond the U.S. before the companies making them raise large venture or private equity rounds to come into compliance with strict U.S. regulations. Several other startup founders and drone-tech investors have shared worries with TechCrunch that commercial drone regulation requiring tech companies to seek out variances could inadvertently benefit winners and create barriers to competition for others who do not get federal exemptions, or do not get them as quickly as others.
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Buddha was a data scientist
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Tara Cottrell
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More than two millennia ago, wandering the footpaths of ancient India, preaching in village huts and forest glens, was biohacking his health. He tried holding his breath so long his ears exploded, and even the gods assumed he was dead. (He wasn’t.) He then tried extreme fasting, reducing down his daily meals until he was living on just a few drops of soup each day. He got so thin his arms looked like withered branches and the skin of his belly rested on his spine. was trying to do what we’re all trying to do on some level — improve ourselves and stop suffering so much, sometimes by employing pretty far-fetched techniques. But in the end, he rejected all these crazy extremes — not because they were too hard, but because they just didn’t work. believed in . Every time he tried something new, he paid attention. He collected evidence. He figured out what worked and what didn’t. And if something didn’t work, he rejected it and moved on. A good knows when to quit. When started teaching, he advised his students to do the same. He didn’t ask anyone to take his instructions on faith. He explained that the way most other teachers insisted you believe everything they said was like following a procession of blind men: “the first one does not see, the middle one does not see, and the last one does not see.” didn’t want us to trust — he wanted us to see. Our beliefs should be based on . He applied this same thinking to food. Most religions include some sort of dietary restriction: Islam prohibits pork. Orthodox Jews refrain from mixing milk and meat. Catholics avoid certain foods during Lent. Some devout Hindus won’t eat anything stale or overripe or with the wrong flavors or texture. Usually these rules are presented as divine commandments. Asking why we should eat this way is beside the point. There isn’t necessarily a reason for the commandment — the commandment is the reason. took a different approach: His rules were grounded in his own experience. Like a lot of us, he tried some crazy diets. But what worked for him was very simple. He gave little advice about what his monks should eat, but he was very particular about when they should eat it. His followers were basically free to eat anything they were given — even meat — but only between the hours of dawn and noon. didn’t give a mystical or supernatural explanation for this odd time restriction. But he was pretty sure it would improve their health. He had tested it on himself. “Because I avoid eating in the evening, I am in good health, light, energetic, and live comfortably,” he explained. “You, too, monks, avoid eating in the evening, and you will have good health.” If were alive today, he’d be surprised to see so many Silicon Valley techies and Brooklyn hipsters embracing intermittent fasting as a new craze. But he’d be gratified to see the evidence mounting for the health benefits he claimed for time-restricted eating. We now have numerous scientific studies confirming the original collected. In 2014, for example, Dr. Satchidananda Panda and his team of researchers at the prestigious Salk Institute for Biological Sciences outside San Diego published a study on obesity in mice. They took one group of mice and instead of their normal food, offered them a diet of high-fat, high-calorie foods — and let them eat as much as they wanted. The results would surprise no one: The mice got fat. Then they took another group of mice and offered them exactly the same seemingly unhealthy diet, but this time they only let the mice eat for nine to 12 hours each day. During the rest of the day and at night, the mice got only water. In other words, these mice had the same all-you-can-eat buffet of tasty, fattening treats. The one rule was that they could only stuff themselves during some of their waking hours. This time, the results were a surprise: None of these mice got fat. Something about matching their eating to their natural circadian rhythms seemed to protect the mice against all that otherwise fattening food. It didn’t matter if they loaded up with sugars and fats and other junk. It didn’t seem to matter what the mice ate, or even how much of it, only when they ate it. In other words, the backed up . Other have produced similar results. Dr. Panda’s team even tried fattening up the mice by starting them on that first any-time diet, and then switched them to the time-restricted version. These mice didn’t just stop gaining — they started to lose that excess weight. And it doesn’t stop with mice. Researchers have asked men and women to restrict their eating to certain hours each day, and those people lose weight, too. Some of the best researchers studying food and health have been confirming ’s original rules. Whether you call it intermittent fasting or time-restricted eating, ’s ancient biohacking wasn’t an anomaly. The he collected on himself has now been replicated by countless others. Like any good , learned to ignore the outliers. He realized early on that the truth is rarely found in the extremes. He practiced instead the “middle way,” a philosophy of perpetual compromise and moderation. Modern time-restricted diets follow this same sane path — not quite dieting, but not quite eating anything any time either . Every day becomes a balance, with a time for eating and a time for fasting. These days, we can all do what did: Become your body’s own observe yourself as you eat to see what works for you and what doesn’t. We weren’t designed to eat at all hours, an unfortunate luxury we have with all the cheap and readily available food in first-world countries. discovered this long ago. Now we know it too.
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LG keeps the second screen and adds more cameras for its Nougat-sporting V20 flagship
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Brian Heater
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A day after IFA and Labor Day and mere hours before Apple takes the stage in the same city — LG really doesn’t have a knack for timing. It’s unfortunate to say the least. Here in the States, the company has been hovering around third place in smartphone market share. Globally, that number is a few spots lower, as companies like Huawei and Xiaomi have risen in the ranks. And , for all of its modular bluster, failed to set the world ablaze, owing in no small part to a component ecosystem that has yet to get off the ground. All of which is to say that the V20, announced today during an evening press conference, is a key device for the company. Not make or break, perhaps, but really, really important. It’s not like the company has made a conscious effort to bury the thing, of course. LG’s been taking the opposite of Apple’s approach, gleefully letting little bits of info about the product slip here and there, most notably , when it revealed that its new flagship will be the first to sport Nougat – no small honor in the dog eat dog world of Android handsets. As if there were any doubt, the new handset eschews the G5’s modularity, instead fully committing to its role as the successor to last year’s well-received V10. That bit aside, the premium device is LG’s kitchen sink phone, not unlike Samsung’s Note. The upgrades don’t present a unified force so much as the company’s desire to be everything to everyone – an admirable goal, but a tough one to land well. It’s got a premium look and feel, with a body built from both aluminum and the aluminum alloy AL6013, a material that incorporates silicon and is used to build airplanes and the like – so it should be good enough to protect the rear of your handset. Though, for good measure, there’s also Silicone Polycarbonate on the top and bottom to lend some durability to the product. In fact, the handset is rugged enough to earn it a military rating of MIL-STD 810G. And about the back – once again the company has made it removable, which means the battery is swappable. The once standard element of phones is now rare enough to qualify as a feature, but hey, it’s a good one. Not that you’ll need it all that often, as the on-board battery is a healthy 3200mAh. All the while, the company has managed to keep the handset a reasonably thin 7.6mm (down from 8.6mm) The 5.7-inch display clocks in at a 2560 x 1440 resolution, which works out to 513ppi. And, naturally, the company has opted to keep around the V10’s standout feature, the Second Screen, which offers a more functional version of what the Galaxy Edge has, albeit up top, rather than on the sides. The screen, which takes advantage of some Nougat enhancements, has been improved, with increased brightness, bigger fonts and expandable notifications. That one features a 160 x 1040 resolution at 513ppi. Video and audio both front and center on the new handset. The V20 features improved electronic image stabilization, paired with dual-cameras on both the front and rear, offering standard and wide range shots (120 and 135-degrees, respectively). The two-camera system is particularly pronounced on the back, where both are visible, lined up side by side. Audio recording has been improved all around, as well, with the phone now grabbing HD Audio through a trio of mics, while B&O helped pitch in to improve playback, a feature often overlooked on even the most high-end handsets. The V20 runs on a Snapdragon 820 with 4GB of RAM and features a standard 64GB of storage, which can be augmented via a microSD slot. There’s a USB-C port on the bottom and, yes, even a headphone jack. The phone launches in its native South Korea this month, with more availability info coming soon. Pricing should be comparable to the V10.
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The Coros LINX is a smart bike helmet that makes sense
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Devin Coldewey
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are thick on the ground, a full gadget ecosystem is hard to come by. Seattle startup is looking to change that with the LINX, a helmet-app combo (with handlebar controller) that lets you listen to music, take calls, get turn-by turn directions and track progress made along your route. I’ve tried it, and this thing actually seems like a good idea. Here’s the pitch: The LINX is an ordinary-looking helmet that has two bone-conduction speakers attached to the straps, a microphone up front and a battery and wireless unit built into the back. It pairs with your phone and a control puck that attaches to your handlebars, allowing you to listen to music, take calls, get turn-by-turn instructions or fitness updates and a few other handy features. Critically, it also leaves your actual ear-holes (or whatever the technical term is) free to hear traffic, squealing tires, pedestrians and all the other noises for which any responsible cyclist should be on the alert. Coros has been touting its gear in a limited way for a couple of months, but it’s hoping to take things to the next level with a . I met up with Coros co-founder Chuck Frizelle to test the gadget (on the beautiful day seen above), then took it for a much longer ride of my own (up to and through an old railway tunnel near Snoqualmie Pass, if you’re curious). See, I wouldn’t be wasting your time with a random Kickstarter unless I knew it actually worked! The helmet itself is indistinguishable from any other modern helmet; it’s aerodynamic, provides the usual protection, has standard adjustable straps and comes in a variety of colors. The only sign that there’s something weird about it is the pair of nuggets hanging by where the chin straps diverge around the ear. Those are the bone conduction speakers, and although it takes a bit of fiddling to get them in the sweet spot, they work just fine and won’t bounce around if you’ve got the thing on right; a normal strap would also remain more or less firmly against your temple. I found the helmet as comfortable as any other, and the speakers never squeezed or chafed. Of course, the sound isn’t exactly booming. The limits of bone conduction mean you won’t be getting much bass, but beats came through all the same, just attenuated. Mids and upper mids are plenty audible, and the various artists I listened to sounded fine. More importantly, I was also able to hear other cyclists calling out, cars approaching, my own bike operating well (or not) and other auditory cues important to riding safely. In my opinion, this alone is a feature worth having for any cyclist who likes to listen to music or take calls while they ride. Regular in-ear headphones block too much sound, and ordinary Bluetooth bone-conduction headsets are unlikely to be in stereo — and, for that matter, may pop out and get run over. Integrating this function into the helmet feels like the natural evolution of this tech; honestly, I’m surprised it took this long to happen. The speakers will work just as plain Bluetooth ones, but if you’re cool you’ll load up the app (iOS and Android) and utilize its other functions. The microphone is embedded in the front tip of the helmet, which struck me as insane, but it turns out it works way better than putting it on a strap or something. Calls sounded fine, and voice quality from the microphone (we did a helmet to helmet call) was comparable to other headsets. Based on their tests and my usage, the battery should last for at least a dozen hours (and probably way more) before you have to recharge via USB. You can set up routes ahead of time to follow with turn-by-turn directions, set it to alert you every mile or kilometer or once you’ve reached some other checkpoint and there’s an emergency function that texts a contact your location and situation if the app detects a fall. Sharing rides among friends and pros, with ghost-racing functionality, is planned, as well. There’s also a walkie-talkie function if you have multiple helmets synced together — handy for groups or teams coordinating. Nice to know a few seconds ahead of time if someone needs to pull over, or if there’s a turn coming up on an unfamiliar route. All the data (unless it’s paired as an ordinary BT headset) actually routes through the control puck, which you can use to answer calls, skip tracks, adjust volume and so on. There isn’t much to say about the controller — it works, which is about all you need it to do. Coros didn’t design the LINX from scratch; the company has been working with a major Chinese bike gear supplier to bring the device over here, with all the tweaking, redesigning, testing and app-building that entails. The Kickstarter campaign, which starts tomorrow, is intended to, well, kick-start things and get a good batch of early adopters on board — but the helmet and tech are already built and the features in place, so as far as I can tell there’s no reason to worry about broken promises. Retail will be about $200, which is definitely on the high end for enthusiast helmets, but the early-bird orders will go for $100. Honestly, for that price, I think the LINX is a steal for anyone who does a lot of serious riding or commutes to work — especially if you tend to take calls. It enables a lot of things without subtracting from safety (although you’ll have to multitask a bit), and a few of them together could make a ride with friends into a safer and more social experience. [gallery columns="4" ids="1380789,1380786,1380785,1380784,1380782,1380781,1380780,1380779,1380778,1380777" orderby="rand"]
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Squire makes software for barbershops
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Fitz Tepper
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, a company that launched last week at Y Combinator’s Demo Day, makes software for barbershops. Not salons or beauty parlors or wherever else you get your hair cut… just barbershops. So what makes a barbershop so unique that it warrants its own software platform? A few things. First, most customers book a barbershop appointment the day of service, not weeks in advance like at a salon. Plus, a lot of barbershops rent their seats to a barber who is an independent contractor — this makes the back-end organization a little different than a typical salon. Plus, the industry isn’t exactly niche. The entire men’s grooming industry will bring in more than this year, and barbershops worldwide are obviously a huge part of that. So to support these unique use cases and try to grab a piece of that $20 billion total customer spend, Squire built a platform for both the customer and the barbershop owner. Squire’s customer-facing app The customer-facing platform is a mobile app and website that lets users find barbershops close to them and book an appointment without having to call or text. Plus it lets you pay and tip your barber without having to use cash. Customers like it because they can book a haircut (and pay for it) just as easily as calling an Uber, and shops like it because it brings in new business from users who wouldn’t have normally found their shop. The back-end platform for barbershop management is a little more complicated. It handles customer relationships, payments, scheduling and more — the startup says that it provides “all the technology that any shop would ever need.” Bringing high-tech solutions to an old-school industry like barbershops is typically a recipe for disaster — just look at how painful the decade-long adoption of ordering and delivery technology by restaurants has been. But Songe LaRon and Dave Salvant, co-founders of Squire, said the reaction from barbershop owners has been pretty much the total opposite. The duo quickly discovered that barbershop owners have already realized how technology has helped other industries increase their profits, and are ready to get on board with this whole technology thing. Plus, owners obviously understand that they need to give their customers what they want, and customers definitely want to be able to book and pay on mobile. Squire’s back-end software for barbershops Squire is currently live in a little over 100 shops in New York and San Francisco, and hopes to get to 1,000 shops in the next year. The company also is planning on rolling out a POS system to appease the people who still want to pay with cash and card. Interestingly, the service is currently free for any barbershop that wants to use it — essentially the startup wants to get as many shops as possible on board, then monetize down the road by charging for extra services like accounting or marketing. Customers currently pay a fee of $1 per transaction, but that’s hardly a revenue generator — the money for Squire will be in signing up as many shops as possible, then slowly start charging them for new features.
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OEMs and startups: The incubator at Jaguar Land Rover HQ
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Kristen Hall-Geisler
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The first question you might have when learning that Jaguar Land Rover has its technology headquarters in Portland, OR, is, “Why?” There’s an easy answer for that question, said Rupert Poole, Senior Collaborations Manager of Future Technology at the facility in Portland. JLR, as it’s known, already had a relationship with Intel, and Intel is located in a Portland suburb. There’s also a thriving startup culture in Portland, and it’s not hard to travel up and down the West Coast to other tech hubs. The first JLR facility in Portland, the Open Software Technology Center, opened in July 2014. The nearby JLR Tech Incubator opened six months later and a third building next door to the incubator, the collaborative lab, is undergoing renovations to create space for test chambers and vehicle bays. I got to tour all three — including the very much not-yet-completed lab. While about a hundred JLR engineers are working on infotainment and connectivity tech to be tested in simulators and eventually introduced into and vehicles, a handful of startups are down the street developing new technology that may or may not end up being used by the British automaker. All engineers, whether they’re JLR employees or startups, have access to collaborative brainstorming spaces — with walls you can write on and buckets of LEGOs. The incubator hosts 12 startups each year for six-month periods. “We found that three months is too short,” says Danielle Alexander, the manager of the incubator. The teams get access to space, funding, tools and equipment — including Jaguars and Land Rovers — partnerships, mentors and engineering and technology expertise from the JLR staff. Like other that want to work with startups, the JLR Incubator is looking for small teams that have more agility and speed than a century-old automotive manufacturer. It’s also looking for technologies that dovetail with automotive needs rather than overlap, such as augmented reality, connected car, human-machine interface (HMI) and data visualization technologies. When I visited the facility, I met with the half-dozen startups currently in residence. One, , is developing a technology directly applicable to the auto industry. Its small, puck-shaped devices attach to the steering wheel and monitor all of its shakes, wobbles and corrections. In the same way that (some) drivers can tell the car is out of alignment or the shocks need replacing, Carfit analyzes the information from the steering wheel and sends the diagnosis to an app. But not every startup in the incubator has such a direct relationship to the automotive industry. Take , which is developing a streaming, curated video service for kid-friendly, interactive, educational content. In a connected car, kids could pick and choose and stream at will without the parent in the driver’s seat needing to monitor their every choice. Or , a drone that can pivot its rotors for maneuverability or remain stable while flying in wind. This could come in handy when scouting for emergency response or to looking ahead at an uncharted off-road course — something Land Rover drivers have been known to take. “Infotainment and connectivity are the only parts of a car where consumer expectations are set against other technologies,” Poole said. “All other expectations are set versus automotive technology.” By bringing the cutting edge of connectivity into the incubator, where startups work with the local engineers and have access to 10,000 JLR engineers worldwide, a decades-old company gets access to the latest innovations.
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Samsung investigating reports of Galaxy Note 7 explosions
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Darrell Etherington
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Samsung is looking into reports from multiple users that the recently released Galaxy Note 7 has issues wherein a few . A Samsung spokesperson told TechCrunch that they’re “conducting a thorough inspection,” and reported earlier that a potential recall of all Note 7 devices is one option on the table. Here’s Samsung’s full statement on the situation, provided via email to TC: In response to questions on Galaxy Note7, we are conducting a thorough inspection. We will share the findings as soon as possible. Samsung is fully committed to providing the highest quality products to our consumers. Yonhap reports that a Samsung official informed it the cause of the incidents has been traced to the Note 7’s battery, and that it’s expected to reveal the results of its current investigation (which could include a recall) as soon as this weekend or early next week.
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Pinterest brings on a new head of engineering who specializes in image search
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Matthew Lynley
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Pinterest said it has hired Li Fan, the former head of image search at Google, as the company’s new head of engineering. Much of Pinterest’s most promising technology involves searching for objects within photos and then using that technology to rank and display the most relevant content to users, whether that’s through search or the traditional feed. Users searching for those products may inevitably want to buy them, meaning the products are critical both for its user engagement and commerce products. That’s increasingly important as Pinterest’s commerce ambitions continue to grow. Offering users the ability to find objects within photos — even through photos they take — can drive them to products they may be interested in inevitably purchasing. In that sense, Pinterest’s visual search (something that Pinterest has quickly distanced itself from the pack with) is becoming one of the best tools that marketers can use to push users closer and closer to a moment of conversion. Most of Pinterest’s content comes from businesses, whether through the form of promoted content or users simply organically posting products on the service. As a result of that, Pinterest has developed a wide array of advertising tools that helps marketers get their products in front of users at various points in their lives, whether that’s through random discovery, searching or inevitably saving and making a purchase. Pinterest has also begun rolling out a series of new video-focused tools, both for marketers in the form of advertising products and native videos for Pinterest users. Not surprisingly, a core component of those products will be developing visual search tools for elements within those videos, and continuing to staff up the company with visual search experts is going to be key to those efforts. The company’s former head of engineering, Michael Lopp, . Lopp wasn’t the only engineering departure in the past several years, as the company’s head of mobile and product engineering. Fan held senior engineering roles at Google for the past eight years or so, and prior to that was VP of search at Baidu. So, in the end, a hire like this isn’t that surprising. But what is interesting is, after having a quiet front of the year, Pinterest seems to have started to get very aggressive with new acquisitions and hires. It recently acquired the teams behind and , not to mention a number of smaller companies.
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Romain Dillet
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Lost in translation: Streaming in China
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Yoel Zanger
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The rapid growth of streaming is taking the globe by storm, but no country seems to have the market potential for OTT video streaming quite like China. While , it is not a surprise that more than 720 million Chinese internet users seem like the next big opportunity. The reality, however, is less than perfect. Prior to 2014, it was like the “Wild East” in China, with little regulation and rampant piracy. This radically changed following a ; since then, the OTT business in China consolidated and became highly regulated by the government. Indeed, only seven companies were granted the license to distribute streaming video. The majority of broadcasted content is controlled by China Central Television ( ), which owns the internet-based China Network Television ( ) and its subsidiary Future TV. The additional OTT players include (established by ), (a subsidiary of ), ( partners), Southern TV, and Twitch-like live streaming platform . With (the country’s biggest online gaming and social media company) distributing OTT content under a CCTV license, one can easily understand that gaining such permission is not an easy task for newcomers. Additionally, U.S. content is very popular in China, but also heavily regulated. Tencent acquired rights to distribute NBA games, as well as some HBO and Time Warner titles. Other examples include online streaming company , which streams Netflix’s and web services company online video unit, . But online content providers have to put emphasis on homegrown content, as well, because, according to Chinese regulations, broadcasters and streaming services can’t dedicate more than 30 percent of their programming to foreign content. That is likely the reason Netflix is not rushing to go big in China. Chinese viewers are accustomed to local alternatives of the most popular online global giants, including Baidu for Google, Alibaba’s for YouTube, for Facebook, Tencent for WhatsApp and for Twitter, to name a few. For a long time, China has been mastering the art of creating substitutes of Western solutions in order to feed the digital needs of the internet-hungry population. Government censorship dictates the rules that foreign companies unsurprisingly find difficult to abide. Unlike YouTube, almost half of the content on Youku includes full-length episodes, cartoons, movies and TV shows that have been uploaded by license-holding partners, such as film and TV production companies in China. On top of sourcing original and licensed content, Youku is investing in high-end user-generated content and programming created by semi-pros, targeting audiences that turn to online platforms for entertainment. To enforce copyright infringement and censorship rules for inappropriate or offensive content, Chinese internet companies allow the government to scan their video libraries. This is something that YouTube, the online video king in most parts of the world, will not allow. And yet Youku and iQIYI, the most popular online video services in Mainland China, reach tens of millions of unique users on their apps for TVs, and hundreds of millions on mobile devices. Live streaming is a huge deal in China. Its skyrocketing popularity can be attributed to the fact that the young mobile users are hungry for more edgy content compared to what is made available on SVOD platforms that are constantly filtered by the government. Live streamers are eager to build an audience, and many of them try to do this through crazy and provocative stunts. Because these feeds are more challenging to control, leading Chinese live streaming platforms caught the attention of regulators, who demanded these companies hire teams of censors to purge inappropriate videos from their platforms. But the Chinese live streaming phenomenon has an additional aspect that U.S.-based networks like Facebook, Twitter and Snapchat haven’t been able to crack so far: monetization. Chinese live streaming platforms like or offer publishers, even the non-celebrities, money for their streams. The viewers can send the streamers virtual “gifts” when they see something they like, while the creators can then trade the value of those “gifts” for actual cash. For instance, by broadcasting 3-4 hours a day. It is no wonder a recent report from Tencent showed and not to gain exposure. What is perhaps most surprising is the adoption of UHD 4K TV sets and content in China, especially when compared to the United States. Some manufacturers we’ve met with have stated that close to 40 percent of their shipments in Mainland China were UHD TV sets. This aligns with the that reported two-thirds of big screen TV sets sold in China were UHD sets, compared with a significantly lower number in North America. Based on these findings, one would assume high penetration rates of 4K content and existence of broadband infrastructure to deliver the high bit rates. However, the internet connection is unstable there. Viewers can experience great connectivity, and a few minutes later, have none at all. To overcome this challenge, OTT providers in China limit their content offering to 4 Mbps — and even less for mobile. Content providers seem to be well aware of the fluctuating network: During peak hours they proactively limit the video resolution to lower quality SD. UHD requires at least 15 Mbps, which means the network and infrastructure is failing to support those 4K TVs. Indeed a paradox. There has been a lot of hype in the media on Chinese investments in VR, with predictions for the local market to . It’s expected that companies from all over the world will experience the “China VR rush,” and it’s beginning to happen already. Taiwan-based HTC , and plans to open 10,000 VR experience stores across the mainland. Disney-backed is a VR content company called Jaunt China by partnering with Shanghai Media Group and China Media Capital. But as of today, high-quality and immersive experiences of VR streaming will be difficult to achieve because of bandwidth issues that cause buffering and fluctuating image quality. That said, most everywhere in China recently, investors and vendors expect to see the two magical letters of “VR” on most presentations or documents. If anyone wants to raise capital now in China, having these two letters in your deck substantially improves chances of getting Chinese backing. One of the current challenges OTT companies in China are facing is the ability to deploy true UHD content. With subscription fees of 30RMB/$4.50 per month (versus $8 per month for a basic plan on Netflix), offering crisp 4K resolution to their consumers will generate additional revenue via premium subscriptions, as well as attract additional viewers from the cable and satellite base. The majority of the costs stem from original content creation and licensing, so there is much pressure to improve the bottom line by reducing companies’ CDN (Content Delivery Network) and server-related expenses. While the online video business flourishes, so do vendors’ costs of distributing the content. For example, Baidu-owed iQIYI has been operating at a loss for the past few years, while its . To find more cost-effective solutions, many content providers turn to Peer-to-Peer (P2P) technologies. By utilizing available storage space on users’ set-top-boxes, Smart TVs and laptops, those companies can significantly reduce their delivery and storage-related expenses. This method is widely adopted in China, while (for obvious reasons) it is less popular outside the country. Although complex, China is shaping up to be the land of opportunities when it comes to streaming business. The road to success is full of obstacles dictated by the local government, its unique way of doing business and consumer culture. It will be fascinating to see how both domestic and foreign companies will capitalize on this tremendous market opportunity.
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There’s still a gender wage gap in tech
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Megan Rose Dickey
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and recently declared that there’s no wage gap between men and women at their respective companies. That’s cool, I guess, but that type of men-versus-women analysis is far too simplistic. There’s still a major wage gap that affects transgender and gender non-conforming people in the tech industry. Between December 2015 and February 2016, Trans*H4CK, the nonprofit organization that aims to serve and support the trans and gender non-conforming communities in tech, surveyed over 600 people in tech who identify as trans, genderqueer, non-binary and/or intersex. More than half of those surveyed reported making less than $76,000, and 22 percent reported making less than $20,000, But the average salary in tech is $96,370, . So, in comparison to the tech industry as a whole, there’s a big discrepancy in wages paid to trans and gender non-conforming people. Trans* H4CK launched the survey late last year because, up until now, there were no hard numbers about trans people in tech, . The numbers are disappointing but, unfortunately, not surprising. In the most recent , 90 percent of trans and gender non-conforming people reported experiencing harassment, mistreatment or discrimination, and 47 percent said they had either been fired, not hired or denied a promotion because of their gender identity. The tech industry’s gender gap is close to the U.S. average (5.4 percent), and falls in the middle among industries, . That said, the tech occupations with significant gaps include computer programmers (28.3 percent), computer-aided designer (21.5 percent) and video game artist (15.8 percent). Unfortunately, the Glassdoor data doesn’t take into account the presence of trans and gender non-conforming people. Meanwhile, there’s also a racial wage gap, which has received far less attention than gender-related wage gaps. Though it hopes to close the racial pay gap by the end of this year. I’ve reached out to Ziegler and will update this story when I hear back.
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Obama and Clinton weigh in on cyber warfare tactics
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Kate Conger
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into American political organizations’ networks are driving discussions about the rules of engagement for cyber warfare, and forcing America’s own hacking of foreign governments into the light. President Barack Obama told reporters at the G-20 summit in China that he has been in discussions with other world leaders, including Russian president Vladimir Putin, about creating a set of standards for cyber warfare. The debate over how and when to hack another nation has also reached the presidential race, with Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton calling last week for increased cyber capability for the U.S. military and for international norm-setting. “Look, we’re moving into a new era here where a number of countries have significant capacities,” . “But our goal is not to suddenly, in the cyber arena, duplicate a cycle of escalation that we saw when it comes to other arms races in the past, but rather to start instituting some norms so everybody’s acting responsibly.” But as Obama and Clinton call for discussions of cyber attacks, experts say that government-led hacking is already booming, and the lack of international guidelines has led to unintended consequences for ordinary civilians caught up in cyber conflict. The U.S. and the United Nations are each working to develop rules of engagement for the digital arena, but in the meantime, countries are deciding for themselves whether or not to follow the same guidelines for cyber capabilities as they do for traditional weaponry. “This behavior is already being engaged in. We don’t have the procedures in place but we’re already engaging in that way, so we’re putting the cart before the horse,” says Amie Stepanovich, U.S. policy manager at the digital rights organization Access Now. Stepanovich points to examples of U.S. hacking efforts like , malware believed to be developed in a U.S.-Israeli collaboration that spread beyond the Iranian nuclear facility that was its initial target, or a that knocked the entire country of Syria offline. These incidents, she says, demonstrate how cyber attacks can unintentionally impact broad swaths of the population — and show why nations need clear rules about cyber attacks on infrastructure. “It’s something the next administration is going to have to address. All of our interactions are moving into the digital space very quickly and we’re seeing cyber activity that could determine the outcome of an election,” Stepanovich says. “Making sure there are protections for human rights and for people becomes exceptionally important on the internet because we all use the same infrastructure.” Clinton is positioning herself to lead that conversation. Her remarks last week at the American Legion convention offered insight into how the Democratic presidential candidate views the recent cyber attacks against Democratic organizations, and how she believes the U.S. should respond. The U.S. military should be ready and able to hack back against governments who target the country online, Clinton said. She pointed to the breach of the Democratic National Committee as an example of a cyber attack against the U.S., and advocated political, economic and military responses to such attacks. “We need a military that is ready and agile so it can meet the full range of threats and operate on short notice on every domain, not just land, sea, air, and space, but also cyber space,” Clinton said. The former Secretary of State went on to add: We’ll invest in the next frontier of military engagement — protecting U.S. interests in outer space and cyberspace. You’ve seen reports Russia has hacked into a lot of things. China has hacked into a lot of things. Russia even hacked into the Democratic National Committee, maybe even some state election systems. So we have got to step up our game. Make sure we are well defended and able to take the fight to those who go after us. As president I will make it clear that the United States will treat cyber attacks just like any other attack. We will be ready with serious political, economic and military responses. And we are going to invest in protecting our governmental networks and national infrastructure. I want us to lead the world in setting the rules of cyberspace. If America doesn’t, others will. Of course, the U.S. already engages in plenty of cyber warfare. To use Clinton’s words, the U.S. has hacked into a lot of things. But her speech suggests an expansion of this kind of hacking is the best response to the recent Russian intrusions into the DNC and the Clinton campaign. Hacking back has been a matter of policy debate in the U.S. for years, and the question of how to respond to cyber attacks isn’t entirely resolved. Most of the debate has centered around how to protect U.S. companies from intellectual property theft, but how and why the U.S. should hack a foreign government is a bit of an open question. The State Department currently views cyber attacks as similar to physical ones, and bases its policy on . “When determining whether a cyber activity constitutes an armed attack sufficient to trigger a state’s inherent right of self-defense, the U.S. government believes that states should consider the nature and extent of injury or death to persons and the destruction of, or damage to, property,” Christopher Painter, the State Department’s coordinator for cyber issues, in July. If the government decides that a cyber attack injured people or destroyed property, it can launch its own counterattack. Although the DNC hack embarrassed top Democrats, the incident didn’t sow death or destruction — so it seems that Clinton is open to expanding the kinds of hacks that merit hacking back. “There is no universal red line for what constitutes an act of war. That determination is always context-specific, and nobody should expect it to be different with cyber,” says Mara Tam, an independent ICT policy and security specialist. Tam, who has a background in conventional nonproliferation and arms control, argues that governments should launch and respond to cyber attacks in the same ways they do physical ones. “When Hillary talks about things like hacking back, what we’re really talking about is a doctrine of proportionate response,” Tam explains. “Proportionate response doesn’t mean tit-for-tat, hack-hack back, which is what many in the information security community seem to assume. In practice, if the harm suffered from a cyber attack requires a response, that response may not occur in the cyber domain at all. It could well be a diplomatic response or an economic response.” Clinton’s doesn’t include an official stance on offensive hacking, but a source familiar with her campaign says that Clinton would likely respond to a cyber attack through diplomacy and sanctions, with military response as a last resort. In addition to Obama’s G-20 discussions and those underway at the State Department, the United Nations has also been working to establish guidelines for government hacking since 2009, when it formed the Group of Governmental Experts on Developments in the Field of Information and Telecommunications in the Context of International Security (UN GGE). The UN GGE reconvened this August to continue developing this framework. But in the meantime, government-led hacking is already underway. And because hacking doesn’t necessarily cause the same physical harm that traditional military action does, there are bound to be situations where the old rules just don’t apply. “What we’ve seen, particularly with Russia, is that military applications of cyber are not necessarily looking for a kinetic effect. If you want to cripple your adversary’s ability to act coherently and with confidence, applications of cyber which embrace the informatic character of the domain are very effective,” Tam says. It’s these kinds of attacks — ones that disrupt and misinform without causing harm to civilians or critical infrastructure — that have politicians struggling to come up with a proper response. As Obama noted yesterday, “What we cannot do is have a situation in which suddenly this becomes the wild wild West, where countries that have significant cyber capacity start engaging in competition — unhealthy competition or conflict — through these means when, I think wisely, we’ve put in place some norms when it comes to other weapons.”
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Postmates is raising at least $100 million to fuel its on-demand ambitions
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Katie Roof
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We’re hearing from sources that Postmates, which is among a few companies that are seen as operating in the difficult on-demand space, is raising at least $100 million in a round led by Founders Fund. Sources stressed that the round has not closed, and that things may change over time. Despite the challenges of working in an on-demand economy — which can sometimes lead to punishing gross margins and high operational costs — we’ve heard that Postmates is actually in okay shape. dated last year highlighted gross margins of around 20%. Postmates’ CEO Bastian Lehmann has said before that the company — which, at the time we reviewed the leaked documents, we also heard was on track. The company is operating in an area of steep competition with the likes of DoorDash, . That moment was somewhat of a microcosm of the financing environment at the time: DoorDash sought a valuation of $1 billion, but inevitably had to settle for something lower. However, in Postmates’ situation, we hear that this round is not a down round. The company . For Postmates, this is obviously good news. While the company offers more general product delivery, it’s also clear that restaurant delivery is an aggressively growing space. It’s going to need capital to increasingly compete with those companies. If the company’s financials continue to be healthy, this offers quite a bit of overhead to grow and expand into new markets — including internationally — as well as come up and experiment with new business models that may be loss-leaders at first but prove to be successful in the long run. Postmates has been busy. It’s working on getting its Postmates Plus unlimited delivery service — in which users pay a monthly fee to get free delivery on orders over $25 — ramped up. Postmates in June and expanded to several new markets. So on that front if the company is able to do that, it usually means one of two things: either it’s going well and something seems to be clicking, or the company needs to aggressively attract new users and tweak it in order to figure out the business model. Again, for this case, we hear from the sources it’s the former. It also gives itself room to run aggressive marketing campaigns to attract new customers — on Labor Day — which can also help drive customer loyalty and keep them sticking around instead of jumping to other services. That kind of marketing can be costly, but in the end it can help attract a swath of new customers, and amid increasing competition Postmates has to show it can come up with unique customer acquisition strategies. All this helps keep customers to continue from the service, and if they start to pay more per order, shift to its subscription business model. There’s another challenge for Postmates, too: keeping drivers and couriers to stick around with the service. You’ll often jump into an Uber, only to find that those drivers are also working for Lyft. In the case of Postmates, there are a lot of other courier options, and Postmates has to nail down the right operational costs in order to keep its drivers happy and its financials healthy. But for a business like Postmates, that can require scale — and having additional financing can help it attract new drivers and keep them around. Postmates still pays its couriers as 1099 workers instead of salaried W-2 workers, but if its business is palatable enough, that may attract workers who are looking for a more flexible schedule even with salaried roles available. There are also other competitors like GrubHub and UberEats, not to mention some different approaches to food delivery like Sprig. But the company is plenty ambitious, with Lehmann . Indeed, however, many in Silicon Valley view on-demand companies across the board facing challenges, especially with the giant shadow of the $60-billion-plus company Uber above them all. Uber’s ambition is also not to be taken lightly, as this is a company that’s also working on self-driving vehicles. The sum of this is that establishing growth for businesses like Postmates, which operate best at a large scale, is expensive and requires continued financing, either to continue experimenting with models or attract new customers. The on-demand space is clearly challenging — . We periodically get glimpses of how well the space is doing, and it appears that investor interest has yet to fade. Yet still, we have yet to see a company in the on-demand space go public. Postmates declined to comment on the story.
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Callstats.io raises $3M Series A round for its WebRTC analytics service
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Frederic Lardinois
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, a relatively new web standard that allows you to make audio and video calls from your browser without plugins, is becoming increasingly popular. But as more companies and products adopt it, the need for getting better insights into how these calls perform (or when they drop and why) also increases. specializes in monitoring WebRTC connections and helps its customers use the data it gathers to improve their connections. The company today it has raised a $3 million Series A round, led by , that will allow it to continue to develop its product. This round brings Callstats.io’s total funding to $3.5 million. True Venture partner Om Malik will join Callstats.io’s board. “WebRTC has the potential to revolutionize communications and the web by being so frictionless,” Malik said in a canned statement today. “The sophisticated monitoring and diagnostics such as those developed by Callstats.io are only going to improve and enhance the opportunities brought forward by this new approach to communications.” As the company’s co-founder and CEO Varun Singh told me, the team wrote the first prototype of the service back in 2013, around the time WebRTC became something people started paying attention to. By summer 2014, Callstats.io raised a small seed round and signed up its first customer. The team then focused on building out the product and adding new customers throughout 2015. The company also worked with a number of SDK providers to get its service integrated into tools like Twilio, Jitsi and others. As Singh noted, Callstats.io still had enough runway to make it to early next year, but he decided to raise now while he could still do so on his own terms. Looking ahead, the Callstats.io team plans to focus on its diagnostics services. “We always say our product is about detecting issues and deploying fixes,” Singh said. “Today we can fix problems with about 20 to 30 percent of the calls. We believe that with more technical investment we can fix 50 percent of the issues.” That’s really what Callstats.io is about. It’s one thing to give people monitoring data, but it’s another to make it actionable for them. When calls to users on a certain network regularly drop, for example, Callstats.io should be able to tell its users how to fix this issue by automatically reducing bandwidth rates right from the start of the call. As Singh told me, developers like to hard-code high-quality settings right into their apps, for example, but the networks often can’t handle that, so what they need is some way to programmatically decided which settings to use at the start of a call. “We are a data-first company, but we want to be a communications company,” Singh explained.
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What to expect from Sony’s PlayStation event
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Darrell Etherington
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Sony is having a PlayStation event tomorrow in New York, where it plans to provide an update on its PlayStation business and PS4. Most people agree that means it’s going to show us a couple of PlayStation hardware updates, including a previously announced more powerful PlayStation 4 (supposedly codenamed “Neo”) with support for 4K and more robust virtual reality, and a slimmed down PS4 with the same specs as the version currently available. This is definitely the main event if you’re ranking potential announcements at home. The PlayStation Neo has been rumored since earlier this year, and Sony took the unusual tack of actually making it official that a higher-end PS4 was en route back in June ahead of E3, without then showing the hardware at E3. At the time, Sony Interactive Entertainment President Andrew House told the FT that the new PS4 would have a higher price tag than the existing version, and be designed to live alongside, rather than replace it. It will boast features like 4K support and likely smoother performance for VR gaming via PlayStation VR, the headset accessory due out for PlayStation 4 this fall. The plan from a games perspective is that every forthcoming game will still support the original PS4, and some of those will also offer improved graphics or other support for the PS4 Neo, as well, according to House. Sony seems very much to want to position this new device as hardware aimed at a subcategory of its core audience who value high-end graphics (likely those who might otherwise decamp to PCs for better VR visual via Oculus or HTC), and not as something that will ultimately replace the PS4 entirely. It’s not known from current leaks when the PS4 Neo will launch, but speculation puts it at sometime early in 2017. While Sony hasn’t confirmed the existence of a redesigned PS4 itself, multiple leaks have supposedly resulting from the Sony console going on sale early in a couple of places accidentally. Sony didn’t help things by getting posted video removed, which all-but-confirms that the leaks were legitimate. This hardware revision would be very similar to what Xbox did with the , which basically lost some weight and size, without altering its internal capabilities too much. It does however support 4K and HDR video playback, which is useful if you have a TV that offers those features. A PS4 Slim could mimic that approach, gaining a couple new tricks as well as the hardware design refinement, but it sounds like it’ll more likely be the same as the PS4, yet small(ish). Immediate retail availability is likely in this case, given it’s been leaked so prolifically. We know a lot about the PSVR, including price and release date, but we don’t yet know everything. Sony could definitely make some announcements here, including about what the PlayStation 4 Neo will add to the virtual reality experience. It could also make some additional announcements around what games will be available at launch, although it has already talked about the launch titles at various times in the past, with . There’s also a new PS4 DualShock 4 controller design, according to the same leaks that revealed the slimmer PS4 design. The redesign basically just rearranges the light bar present on the controller so you can see it from the front while actually using the controller, which sounds like a useful tweak for what’s already arguably the best controller in the business. We’ll have all the news live tomorrow as it happens from New York, starting at 3 PM ET.
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How Facebook News Feed Works
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Josh Constine
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ultimate guide to how Facebook chooses what to show in your News Feed, and how you can get your content seen by more people. Understanding how the News Feed works is tough because the algorithm is always changing. So TechCrunch launched this research project for today’s 10th anniversary of News Feed, interviewing Facebook’s team members, compiling the company’s announcements, and reviewing a decade of our coverage. The result is this helpful explainer, which we’ll keep updated as new changes roll out so it’s always accurate. Facebook prioritizes stories you’ll Like, comment on, share, click, and spend time reading, which we’ll refer to as “engagement”. Facebook also runs both online surveys and offline focus groups to get more feedback about what stories people think should appear. The more engaging the content, the more you’ll come back to Facebook, and the better it can accomplish its mission of connecting people while also earning revenue from ads shown in News Feed. Over time as more people and Pages join Facebook and each shares more content, there’s more competition for the limited available space in the News Feed. While people have increased the amount of time they spend on the News Feed over the past 10 years, viewership hasn’t grown as fast as the amount of stories shared. This causes a natural decline in the reach of what’s posted to the News Feed, in terms of the percentage of people who see a story out of everyone eligible to see it. This is why Facebook Pages see the percentage of their followers who see their content shrinking over time. It’s an inevitable result of people sharing more frequently, rather than some conspiracy of Facebook’s to force businesses to buy ads. The best way for you to counteract this decline of reach for your own content is to learn what Facebook’s algorithm prefers. There are also several other significant factors that determine what you see in the News Feed, though not as heavily as those above – When Facebook releases a new product such as Live video or Slideshows, the company needs to test how much people want to interact with it. It may initially show too many or too few News Feed stories about the product until it receives enough feedback to learn the appropriate level of visibility. The more Facebook knows about you, the more relevant the ads will be. If you fill out your profile and Like the Pages of things you care about, Facebook’s ads will become more personalized and relevant, informing you about products, apps, events, and more that you’re truly interested in. Facebook gives you both implicit and explicit ways to teach the News Feed what you want to see. Implicit signals come from your normal behavior on Facebook. If you keep Liking stories from a certain friend or about a particular topic, you’ll see more of them. If you always skim past someone’s posts or never click on the stories shared by a Page, you’ll see less of them. That’s why it’s important to actually Like things you like, and not pity-Like things you don’t really care about just to be nice to someone. Facebook also provides explicit tools for directly telling News Feed what you do and don’t want to see. Every story has a little drop-down arrow in the top right corner that lets you: There’s also a See First option available in the News Feed settings. This lets you pick people or Pages whose posts you always want to see at the top of your News Feed, which can be useful for staying informed about a loved one, best friend, favorite brand, or your own business. Facebook is constantly tweaking the News Feed. It adapts to prevent people from gaming or tricking the system, embrace new media types, and correct flaws that lead people to see things they don’t care about. Facebook publishes News Feed FYI to be transparent about the changes. This article will adapt too. As Facebook publishes more FYIs, we’ll add them to this list with a short summary of what each means. That way you can keep referencing this article and share it with friends or colleagues that don’t understand how News Feed works. Here are all the News Feed change announcements so far: – Timely, relevant, from a source you trust, you would share it or recommend it, genuinely interesting and not trying to game the News Feed, not low quality or a meme, wouldn’t complain, doesn’t get hidden, complete Page profile, fan base overlaps with other high quality Pages. – Fewer ads that other people hide, Fewer ads similar to ones people have already hidden – More links to high quality articles, Fewer links to meme photos, related articles to ones you clicked, highlighting stories with new comments – More text status updates from friends, fewer text status updates from Pages, more link share stories from Pages, fewer text updates with embedded links from Pages – Page posts that tag another Page may be shown to followers of the tagged Page – Fewer Page posts that explicitly ask people to Like, comment, or Share. Fewer Page posts that have already been shared by that Page, fewer spammy links that use inaccurate language or formatting to trick people into clicking – More explicitly shared stories from third-party apps and fewer implicitly or automatically shared stories – More videos people watch and watch for a long time, more videos to people who watch videos and fewer videos to people who skip videos – Fewer links that don’t tell people much about what they’re clicking to, fewer links to web pages where people don’t spend much time and come right back to Facebook, more links to web pages where people spend a lot of time, more links to web pages people talk about after visiting and fewer links to web pages people don’t talk about after visiting, more stories with links shared with the link format and fewer stories with links in the description or caption of a photo or video. – Using surveys about why people hide ads, fewer similar ads to ads someone hid because it wasn’t relevant to them, fewer ads shown to anyone that people hide because they were offensive, more heavily weighting the hides by people who infrequently hide ads – More stories that reference current Trending Topics, more stories shown soon after they’re posted if people Like them soon after they’re posted but Like them less later – When you hide someone’s story, you can select to see less from that person in the future without completely unfollowing them – Fewer posts that solely push people to buy a product, install an app, enter a sweepstakes, or that reuse the exact same content from ads. – Fewer posts that people flag as hoaxes or delete after posting because they are scams or deliberately false news More posts from friends instead of Pages, fewer stories about friends Liking or commenting on a post, more posts from the same sources for new users without much content in their News Feed – More stories that other people spend significantly more time looking at in their News Feed than other stories. – A new feature lets you choose friends or Pages whose stories you want to see first at the top of your News Feed – People who hide an extremely high number of stories in their feeds including ones they’ve Liked and commented on will have their hides taken less into account by the News Feed algorithm – More videos that people turn on the sound for, watch full screen, or watch in high definition. – Fewer videos and more status updates and links shown to people with slow Internet connections, re-showing stories you’ve already loaded if you have no Internet connection – More stories similar to ones you react (just as with Likes) – Fewer viral stories that surveys say people would rather not see – When someone has slow connectivity, Facebook will re-rank previously downloaded stories by relevance and display them instead of a loading symbol – More stories that surveys and qualitative research show people would be likely to both rate highly and engage with – Over time, Facebook hopes to show people more stories similar to the ones they React to in a certain way, so people who often use the “Haha” Reaction see more funny stories – More Live videos shown while they’re currently Live – More links to Instant Articles and mobile web pages loaded inside of Facebook that people spend more time viewing, fewer posts in a row from the same Page – More stories from humans you care about, and fewer stories by businesses and news outlets – Fewer news stories purposefully trick people into clicking by omitting or exaggerating core details – More stories Facebook predicts will be relevant to you personally because they’re related to your interest, engage you in broader discussions, and contain news – More relevant stories shown when you have a weak internet connection by cached and new stories to prioritize the best ones whose photos and videos have already downloaded – Popular, viral fake news stories flagged by users will be for evaluation. Stories confirmed as fake will be down-ranked in News Feed, and be labeled with warnings that they’re disputed. Fake news sites masquerading as legitimate publishers through domain trickery, and articles people share significantly less often after reading will be down-ranked in Feed as well – Facebook uses percentage of a video watched as a signal for quality, but will since watching 75% of a 10 minute video is more actual watch time than 100% of a 1 minute video – Posts that are will be promoted in News Feed. Posts related to a topic that is currently going viral in real-time because lots of people are posting about it or a Page post about it is receiving lots of engagement will be shown higher in the feed while the topic is still hot – Websites that contain little substantive content and are covered in pop-ups; interstitials; and aggressive, shocking, sexual, or misleading ads will be downranked in News Feed and will not be allowed to Facebook buy ads – Link posts with clickbait headlines that withhold or exaggerate information will appear lower in the News Feed, and Facebook can now detect these in 9 languages beyond English. – Links shared by as these links are often clickbait, false news, or sensational. – Links that a lot of people on Facebook are talking about or that have been reviewed by third-party fact checkers will show Related Articles before they’re clicked. These Related Articles will show alternative takes on the same topic by different news sources, or truthiness reports from fact checkers. – Links to mobile sites that load quickly, including Facebook’s Instant Articles, will appear more prominently in the News Feed. – Pages and accounts will be deactivated if they share links or ads that point to landing pages that use “cloaking” to show Facebook’s content moderators an innocent version of a site while showing everyone else spam, scams, and porn. – News Feed will now have a more lightweight, readable design with bigger link previews that put the URL domain above the headline so people are more likely to notice and avoid spoofed URLs. – Pages that publisher links with play buttons in the preview thumbnail that make the post look like a native video or static images uploaded as videos will have their posts shown to a lot fewer people. – Pages that repeatedly share links to articles labeled as false news by Facebook’s outside fact checkers will no longer be able to buy any Facebook ads. – Links to news article will now include an information button that can be clicked to see the start of the Wikipedia entry about the publisher to help people avoid sharing stories from phony or disreputable outlets. – News outlets can now look to Facebook’s publisher guidelines to learn how to succeed in News Feed, which include sharing accurate, meaningful, and safe content. – Facebook’s original programming Watch shows will get better feed placement if they maintain consistent viewership, or if a user follows the creator’s Page but not the Show’s page. – Users can now tap the Snooze button in the drop-down arrow on a News Feed story to hide the story’s author from their feed for 30 days, as an alternative to permanently unfollowing them. – Posts that shamelessly beg for clicks with calls to action such as “Share with friends to win a free trip” or “Like if you’re an Aries” will get less visibility in News Feed. – News articles that are labeled false by third-party fact checkers will no longer show red flags that can actually entrench people’s misguided beliefs, and instead show Related Articles from other sources to give users more accurate alternate perspectives. – In a massive overhaul to News Feed’s algorithm, Facebook will now show more content people actively discuss through comments and shares such as posts from friends, and show less content people passively consume including publicly shared publisher content, news links, and videos. Facebook’s goal is to increase time well spent and well-being, even at the cost of total time spent and ad views in the short term. – Facebook will survey users to find out which news outlets are the most broadly considered reputable, and show more links to these publishers and less from those people consider inaccurate or distrustful. — We’ll add more News Feed FYIs as they’re published to keep this list up to date. The best tactics for appearing prominently in the News Feed end up being quite straight-forward: share things that are interesting, authentic, and resonate with your audience. That typically means visually compelling media, funny or emotional content, and important news that’s fascinating to a wide audience. Avoid overly self-promotional spam, dry or long-winded content, and boring looking media that only appeals to a fraction of your audience. So before you post, ask yourself, is this actually interesting or entertaining to other people? Or are you just vainly bragging about your life or greedily marketing your business? Facebook’s News Feed algorithm is complex, but the humans it serves are still pretty simple. We all just want to be stimulated. Do that, and Facebook will share what you have to say.
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French on-demand delivery startup Tok Tok Tok to close, sells tech assets to Just Eat
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Steve O'Hear
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The European on-demand delivery fall out continues. This time it’s the turn of France’s , a Postmates-styled , which sent an email to customers earlier today announcing that it was shutting down and that the startup’s tech platform has been acquired by an “leading player” in the industry. However, TechCrunch has learned that online takeout giant Just Eat is the partial acquirer. The publicly-listed company has purchased of Tok Tok Tok’s “tech assets,” according to sources. It’s also my understanding that the logistics technology will go towards continuing to evolve Just Eat’s own restaurant technology to help its restaurant partners better manage their drivers. That’s because, unlike Deliveroo or Uber’s UberEats, for example, Just Eat operates an online takeout ordering marketplace only, leaving partnering restaurants to actually deliver the food themselves or, more recently, with last mile delivery startup Stuart. When contacted, Tok Tok Tok co-founder Serge Alleyne declined to offer further comment, citing a confidentiality agreement with the platform’s acquirer, except to maintain that it was “great news” for the startup, which we’d heard was on its last legs for a while now. He also said that Tok Tok Tok “had one of the best platforms and technology to sell on the market” and predicted further consolidation within the on-demand delivery sector. European on-demand delivery companies have faced tough times recently, specifically food delivery services. Take Eat Easy shuttered, as did Delivery Hero’s . Meanwhile, heavily funded Deliveroo has been feeling the heat from UberEats, both of which have been going on . And I haven’t even mentioned .
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Retail POS service Green Bits wants to revolutionize the budding marijuana industry
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Samantha O'Keefe
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With the sale of marijuana either for recreational or medicinal purposes becoming legal in more and more states, new and existing retailers are struggling to find ways to keep track of inventory while remaining compliant with various state and federal laws. , a cloud-based financial management application, are tackling this problem with their next venture, . Green Bits at Disrupt 2015 and is an iPad-based pot-focused point of sale (POS) solution. [gallery ids="1380600,1380599,1380598,1212683"] Green Bits is designed to integrate seamlessly into a store’s workflow to help them meet customer demands with speed, accuracy and, perhaps most importantly, automated compliance, by integrating with the Alaska MCB, Colorado MED, OLCC, and WSLCB Traceability APIs. Green Bits has achieved a 376 percent growth rate in the past year, and now serves 60 percent of all pot shops in Washington state, including all 10 of the top-revenue-generating stores in the state, and 22 of the top 25. Perhaps even more impressively, the company boasts a 0 percent churn rate… well, mostly. The team tells TechCrunch that Green Bits did temporarily lose one customer to a competitor. However, within months of switching POS providers, the customer came back after they realized just how much better the Green Bits system was for their needs. The company was cash flow positive in Q1 2016, and is processing approximately $700 million in sales this past year. Green Bits has grown from 4 to 12 employees and expects that number to be closer to 25 by the year’s end. have marijuana-related questions on the ballot in 2016, and with , the budding marijuana industry is only going to soar… well, higher.
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Investing in AI offers more rewards than risks
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KR Sanjiv
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It’s difficult to predict how artificial intelligence technology will change over the next 10 to 20 years, but there are plenty of . By 2018, more than 3 million human workers; by 2020, smart machines will be a top investment priority for more than 30 percent of CIOs. Everything from to is already being replaced by that’s increasingly able to replicate the experience and ability of humans. What was once seen as the of technology is already here, and the only question left is how it will be implemented in the mass market. Over time, the insights gleaned from the industries currently taking advantage of — and improving the technology along the way — will make it ever more robust and useful within a growing range of applications. Organizations that can afford to heavily in are now creating the momentum for even more to follow suit; those that can’t will find their niches in at risk of being left behind. While some may argue it’s impossible to predict whether the risks of applications to business are greater than the rewards (or vice versa), analysts predict that by 2020, of all economic transactions will be handled by autonomous software agents. The of depends on companies willing to take the plunge and , no matter the challenge, to research the technology and fund its continued development. Some are even doing it by accident, like the company that paid a programmer more than half a million dollars over six years, only to learn he . Many of the advancements are coming from the military. The U.S. government alone has requested for next year, as automated drones are set to replace the current manned drones used in the field. drones simply need to be given a destination and they’ll be able to dodge air defenses and reach the destinations on their own, while any lethal decisions are still made by human eyes. On the academic side, institutions like the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the University of Oxford are hard at work mapping the human brain and attempting to emulate it. This provides two different pathways — creating an that replicates the complexities of the human brain and , which comes with a slew of ethical questions and concerns. For example, what rights does an have? And what happens if the server storing your emulated loved one is shut down? While these questions remain unanswered, eventually, the proven benefits of systems for all industries will spur major players from all sectors of the economy to engage with it. It should be obvious to anyone that, just as current information technology is now indispensable to practically every industry in existence, will be, as well. Until now, has mostly been about crafting preprogramming tools for specific functions. These have been markedly rigid. These kinds of -based computing strategies have become commonplace. The of will be dependent on true learning. In other words, will no longer have to rely on being given direct commands to understand what it’s being told to do. Currently, we use GPS systems that depend on automated perception and learning, mobile devices that can interpret speech and search engines that are learning to interpret our intentions. Programming, specifically, is what makes developments like Google’s DeepMind and IBM’s Watson the next step in . DeepMind wasn’t programmed with knowledge — there are no handcrafted programs or specific modules for given tasks. DeepMind is designed to learn automatically. The system is specifically crafted for generality so that the end result will be emergent properties. Emergent properties, such as the ability to program software that can , is incalculably more impressive when you realize no one programmed DeepMind to do it. Traditional is narrow and can only do what it is programmed to know, but Olli, , learns from monitoring and interacting with passengers. Each time a new passenger requests a recommendation or destination, it stores this information for use with the next person. New sensors are constantly added, and the vehicle (like a human driver) continuously becomes more intelligent as it does its job. But will these systems be able to do what companies like Google really want them to do, like predict the buying habits of end users better than existing recommendation software? Or optimizing supply chain transactions dynamically by relating patterns from the past? That’s where the real money is, and it’s a significantly more complex problem than playing games, driving and completing repetitive tasks. The from various platforms — like — clearly indicate that is expanding, and these more complicated tasks will become a reality in the near-term horizon. Soon, will be able to mimic complex human decision-making processes, such as giving investment advice or providing prescriptions to patients. In fact, with continuous improvement in true learning, first-tier support positions and more dangerous jobs (such as truck driving) will be , leading to a new Industrial Revolution where humans will be freed up to solve problems instead of doing repetitious business processes. The benefits and risks of investment are nebulous, uncertain and a matter for speculation. The one known risk common to all things new in business is uncertainty itself. So the risks mainly come in the form of making a bad investment, which is nothing new to the world of finance. So as with all things strange and new, the prevailing wisdom is that the risk of being left behind is far greater, and far grimmer, than the benefits of playing it safe.
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Former Rothenberg employees allege mistreatment and cash management problems
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Lora Kolodny
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As TechCrunch has previously reported, there’s been an from the Rothenberg “ecosystem,” amid claims of a significant breach of and other unconventional behavior by the venture firm’s founder, Mike Rothenberg. This week, we have learned more details about alleged employee abuses within Rothenberg Ventures, recently re-branded as , as well as the River Group, a virtual reality business including and several other units. The allegations are that Rothenberg put pressure on employees to align with his political beliefs in a very public way; left employees without reimbursement for approved work expenses that they charged to their personal cards and accounts; and hectored employees who were on doctor-ordered medical leave to keep working while they were not fit to do so. An attorney representing Mike Rothenberg said that the allegations being reported today and in prior stories here were “inaccurate to a troubling degree” and “biased” but did not further elaborate. In more than one instance former employees say Rothenberg pressured colleagues who were on medical leave to continue doing work, even after he had received letters from their doctors ordering time off. TechCrunch reviewed correspondence between Rothenberg, and an employee confirming that he knew this person was too sick to work, and correspondence that indicates Rothenberg contacted this person during their sick leave with work requests. Rothenberg also reportedly required employees to pay for approved work expenses on their own debit or credit cards frequently, according to six former employees of the fund and VR business. In many cases he failed to reimburse them, they said, and even told former employees their expenditures would require new approvals and could be repudiated by him. As TechCrunch’s , former employee and Chief Financial Officer for Rothenberg Ventures Management Co., David Haase, has even filed a lawsuit against Rothenberg for breach of contract and failure to reimburse him for $100,000 in business expenses. Today, several former employees have more than a thousand dollars in un-reimbursed expenses paid with their personal cards, as a result of this rampant practice, they said. In some cases, Mike Rothenberg gave executives his own American Express “black card,” to handle large, approved expenses, including to pay vendors for services rendered they said. Normally such expenses should be paid from a corporate account, and accounts payable department. Later, some former executives said they were notified by payment tech companies including Square, that their unrelated merchant accounts had been shut down because there was seemingly fraudulent activity associated with their names. That’s because, former employees explained, there was so much chaotic use, and so many large charges, on their boss’s card and their own personal cards, they were flagged by financial institutions as possibly having been hacked, or worse, committing fraud. Mike Rothenberg was also thought to be disputing legitimate charges with his credit card provider, former employees believed. Finally, Rothenberg pressured employees to align with his political beliefs. According to several former employees in both the venture firm and the virtual reality business, Mike Rothenberg became “obsessed” with the notion of defeating Donald Trump in the forthcoming election. He would call and text employees at all hours of the day and night, they said, including on their personal mobile phones, to rant about politics, and encourage them to post anti-Trump content to their social media feeds. Suddenly, without advanced notice to employees or limited partners in Rothenberg Ventures’ funds, Mike Rothenberg unveiled plans for an anti-Trump think tank he called River Institute, at an event called Founder Field Day in May. had been originally planned as a place for investors, industry insiders and members of the press to interact with River-affiliated virtual reality tech startups, and to try out the headsets, VR experiences, games and other technologies that they had developed. While it was previously reported by TechCrunch’s Connie Loizos and Sarah Buhr that Rothenberg Ventures had potentially and governance of its funds, the new allegations about Mike Rothenberg’s cash management and treatment of employees raise a host of new concerns.
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Gillmor Gang: Just A Scratch
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Steve Gillmor
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The Gillmor Gang — John Taschek, Keith Teare, Frank Radice, Kevin Marks, and Steve Gillmor. Recorded live Friday, September 23, 2016. With two days until the First Debate, the waiting’s almost over and the voting begins on all available channels. Cast your ballot now! Plus the latest G3 (below) with Mary Hodder, Elisa Camahort Page, Halley Suitt Tucker, and Tina Chase Gillmor. @stevegillmor, @jtaschek, @kteare, @kevinmarks, @fradice Produced and directed by Tina Chase Gillmor @tinagillmor [ustream id=91612386 hwaccel=1 version=3 width=480 height=302]
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The hopes and headaches of Snapchat’s glasses
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Josh Constine
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only company cool enough to possibly dismantle the Google Glass stigma. Awkward, useless, and a threat to privacy are how many think of computers you wear on your face. Can Snapchat show off the masterful marketing and smooth execution required to produce a product that won’t die on stores shelves or in a desk drawer? To quickly recount the basics, a video of Snapchat’s new camcorder sunglasses leaked last night. reported it, so the company rushed out the news with a piece that was planned for Monday. Snapchat is renaming its corporate self to Snap Inc, and launching its $130 Spectacles this fall in limited release. They’ll be one-size-fits all in black, teal, or coral colors. Spectacles let you tap the glasses’ rim to instantly record 10 seconds of video, three taps to record a maximum of 30 seconds, with a light on the front alerting people you’re recording. The video is captured with an 115-degree wide view lens in a circular format that can be watched full-screen on a phone in any orientation. The video is stored on the device and can be wirelessly offloaded to a phone over Wifi or Bluetooth so users can edit and share via Snapchat later. Spectacles’ battery should last a day, and you can get up to four full recharges from the portable charging case. But the real questions are whether people will want or need Spectacles when they already have a camera phone, how Snap Inc can avoid them becoming geeky or creepy, and how they might change the future of the startup and how we capture social media. Spectacles and their charging case. via Business Insider Here we’ll explore the pitfalls and potential glory facing Snap Inc’s Spectacles. – Everyone already carries remarkably powerful cameras in their pockets. The biggest challenge for Specs will be defeating the status quo: taking photos and videos with your phone. Hold your iPhone or Android up in front of your face with one hand, and the experience might be similar enough to Specs to make them unneccessary. If you have Snapchat on your phone, do you need Spectacles? via Business Insider Snap Inc will have to prove how different and awesome the 115-degree, circular, first-person format is. That might require getting Specs into the hands of some talented creators before a wider release. Specs have to nail more than footage of skateboarding and playing with kids. They will have to show versatility, and might need some Specs-only animated lenses, filters, or other image embellishments to differentiate them enough from the super-engineered cameras in our iPhones. Spectacles raise the larger question of whether cameras are so important that sometimes we’ll want a dedicated non-professional capture device even if we have to remember to carry it around and charge it. Or whether the convenience and power of our always-with-us smartphone cameras do a good enough job already. – Try shooting video at a crowded concert from eye-level instead of thrusting your phone in the air, and you’ll quickly appreciate having your camera in your nimble hands, not strapped to your head. Getting the best angle often requires some maneuvering that’s much easier with your arms involved. Footage from Specs could come out shaky and jerky unless Snapchat can work in some auto-stabilization magic. Otherwise the videos they make could be dizzying or too hectic to watch. – Google Glass got handed to geeky developers and techies first, who quickly associated the device with awkward social behavior and an “I’m better than you because I’m from the future” attitude. The infamous Scoble shower Glass photo still haunts the wearable industry. Reversing this stigma will require Snap Inc to carefully manage first impressions to make Spectacles aspirational, not deplorable. Unfortunately the “trying to be artful” portraits of Snap CEO Evan Spiegel wearing them are already establishing a slightly pretentious aura. Snap Inc CEO Evan Spiegel makes Spectacles seem a bit prtentious in this photo by Karl Lagerfield for WSJ – Snap was smart to make it obvious when Spectacles are recording with a big warning light. But after “Are your recording me!?!” and businesses putting up “No Google Glass” signs, people are sure to be a little uneasy. We’re used to someone having to raise and aim their camera or phone at us before they’re able to record us, which gives us time to modify our behavior or turn away. Knowing that Spectacles could start shooting with a quick touch, even with the warning light, could make people uncomfortable being around anyone wearing them. Snap will have to find some way to communicate polite practices for how to use Specs before someone crosses the line and ignites controversy. https://twitter.com/sippey/status/778073369660973057 – Better cameras, network connections, and social networks have led to an explosion of lifecasting, led by Snapchat Stories (and copied by Instagram Stories). But they pose a risk to the way we experience our greatest moments. When something special happens, today most people bust out their phones rather than bask in the moment. Fans in the front row destroy their chance to connect with their rock star heroes by thrusting a phone between them. Then, people divorce themselves from the action while they stare down, editing their content with filters and captions before sharing. Spectacles let you live life rather than stare at your phone Snapchat’s recently launched feature fights the second part of that sequence by letting you save what you record so you can edit and share later when you have some downtime. Spectacles could fix the first, removing the foreign object of the phone from the capture process. There’s still a device in the way, but at least it’s translucent, so you see the world directly while recording an identical view. Spectacles could actualize the metaphor of creating a window into each other’s lives, instead of watching our own lives unfold on a screen. – Building the camera itself rather than just the software gives Snap Inc a tighter grip on the experience. It could include hardware that wouldn’t fit in a phone. It can experiment more dramatically with how people record. And it provides deeper ownership of the data that comes out, which will be tucked in Snapchat Memories. Even if video ads remain Snap’s core way to earn money, diversifying beyond video ads could boost confidence in the startup’s expected IPO. Snapchat could earn $200 million if it can get just one percent of its daily users to buy them. The more of their stack a company owns, the more it can control its destiny. If Facebook is the News Feed, and Google is search, Snapchat wants to be the camera. – Spectacles v1 only record the world around you, but future iterations could enhance it. Eventually, perhaps they could automatically give everyone a mustache, highlight your friends in a crowded room, let you watch other people’s Spectacles content like you were seeing through their eyes, or host a developer platform with untold applications. Snapchat’s selfie lenses were the first delivery of AR to the masses, and the company has been who could build the next wave of augmentation. Perhaps they’ll add voice control or other IoT integrations in the future. What’s it like to walk down the red carpet? We’ve seen plenty of footage following a celebrity, but Spectacles could let us be the center of attention with fans and paparazzi fawning around us. We might get to see a concert from the singer’s eyes, or walk to runway as a fashion model Though Snapchat has always been for teens, parents might love the ability to hold their baby with both hands while recording. GoPro built the idiot-proof adventure camera, but Snap could build one for saving everyday joys. The marketing of Spectacles is an enormous opportunity for Snap Inc, but one fraught with peril. Initial perceptions could make or break Specs, and perhaps define how fast or slow we’ll adopt other types of head-worn computers. The most sensible strategy might mimic that of the acquirer Snapchat spurned. Facebook became an international hit in part because people desperately wanted to join what was seen as an exclusive, elite club. Each stage of Facebook’s rollout expanded it a rung down the social hierarchy. This way the next demographic to get it always idolized the last. Harvard, then elite US colleges, other American colleges, international colleges, high schools, and eventually everyone. It’s the opposite of how Google bungled roll outs of Google Glass (weird developers first) and Google+ (geographically and socially unclustered tech elite first). Snapchat might be best putting Spectacles on the faces of aspirational figures first — widely respected yet hip celebrities. If the first content coming out of Spectacles include the perspective of stars from classy movie premiers, epic concerts, raucous parties, and stunning sporting events, it could cement the idea that people you want to be wear them. Similarly, Snapchat might only want to distribute the original pairs of Specs through some kind of trusted network of influencers. And when it sells them publicly, it might be best to start in cultural capitals like LA and NYC, where the world already looks for what’s cool. Spectacles need to feel aspirational. via Business Insider Spectacles are a gadget that won’t be judged by their specs, but by whether they can change human behavior. Cramming new ways to act into our society will always be tougher than packing processing power into a chip. Overwriting the disgust instilled by Google Glass will take all of Spiegel’s skills. We might assume that one day, eyewear computers will shrink and strengthen to the point they become commonplace. But maybe Snap Inc has the stylish reputation and daredevil ambition to make that day come much sooner.
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