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We’re looking at cyberbullying the wrong way
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Matt Klein
| 2,016
| 9
| 24
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It has been that Twitter has an abuse problem. Whether it was the , the article or the unveiling of the platform’s own , many are blue in the face from yelling at the platform. However, blaming Twitter is a narrow-minded argument and a misunderstanding of the true problem at hand. By no means is Twitter faultless, as there is certainly room to grow by solidifying a stance between free speech and censorship. This is a difficult process that platforms such as and have gone through before, and still are experiencing. No network is immune, and no one has discovered the perfect balance, even if it existed. Twitter did not give birth to nor will they abolish it. Online abuse is omnipresent and not exclusive to one platform over another. It’s a behavior that starts with a mentality, not a platform. Attacking Twitter for its policing or lack thereof does not attack the root of the problem. Even if Twitter ceased to exist tomorrow, online harassment will not expire. A bully is a bully and a troll is a troll, no matter where you go online. For as long as online mass communication has existed, from the early days of AOL chat rooms, online has existed. So, in order to effectively address the issue of , one must not only question the environments that yield such behaviors, but examine how and why the behavior exists in the first place. The ability to hide behind not only a screen, and often an unidentifiable name or avatar, unquestionably leaves online harassment to prevail. Whether one’s absolutely anonymous or not, the reduction of faceless communication disallows immediate, raw or physical reactions and consequences. Infamously stated, “On the internet, nobody knows you’ a dog.” While the was originally printed in in July 1993, the claim never rang more true than it does today. You are faceless online. While publications recently touted that found “trolls are even more hostile when they’ using their real names,” the support in favor of the counter argument “anonymity promotes online ” is far more prevalent, substantial and logical. With this in mind, one possible counteraction to Twitter’s predicament would be to restore the faces from faceless communication. When verification and accountability exists, it can be presumed that harmful behaviors such as abuse and trolling will curb. However, is this a step in the right direction? Twitter’s problem is very real indeed, but the implications and possible solutions for this platform are apart of a much larger discussion pertaining to all human-connected developments. Going forward, need to ask which directions ’d first like to head in. As Jonathan Zittrain, the co-founder of Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society, states in Werner Herzog’s film , “ can design systems that are really anonymous or that are utterly identifiable down to the person, and it’s time for us to think about what contexts ’d want to support what.” In a context like Twitter’s, do favor identifiable and culpable communication or anonymous and immune expression… even if that enables trolling and ? While promoting his latest film, , Werner Herzog , “The internet is not good or evil, or dark or light-hearted, it’s humans.” This resonates quite well with Twitter. What end up imagining, producing and enabling online ultimately materializes the reflection of the human collection. So at the end of the day when point at a platform like Twitter, which many believe should be held responsible for , ’ accusing inherently innocent defendants. In reality, should be pointing at ourselves.
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Taking a swing for the Grammys with the new Lip Sync Battle app
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John Mannes
| 2,016
| 9
| 24
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The art of the lip sync has had a profound impact on the state of our…ok no, but dammit is lip synching fun. For those of you locked in a Faraday cage, pretending to sing has become all the rage these days. You have , , and of course the ever entertaining LL Cool J and Chrissy Teigen . On the show, celebrities battle each other by pretending to sing songs with dramatic effect. With a new app, anyone can now jam out in battles with their friends. It’s quite hard to go wrong with such a fun starting point, and for the most part, , , and , don’t let us down. Upon opening the app and selecting create, users are presented with a list of genres including pop, rock, rap, country, classics, and latin. There are also themed categories like love songs and a special section for tracks coming from prior Lip Sync Battles. Once you pick a song, the next step is to get to work recording. Rather than just straight recording on top of an audio track like in , songs are accompanied with lyrics to make it possible to record in one take. Users can also select a number of accessories that serve a similar purpose as lenses in Snapchat. You can go for a crazy glasses vibe, a cat ears look, and even a full flower child outfit. Wurrly did most of the development of the accessories and facial tracking in house. The groundwork has already been laid alongside another company called Facio to do emotional recognition. This means that in the future, tattoos, masks and other accessories will be able to alter their appearance based on your emotional state. If you’re singing a sad verse in a ballad, a mask could animate differently than during the power hook of a pop song. “Our intention was really to create a world of fun,” said Nadine Levitt, CEO of Wurrly. At the end of filming your epic production, there is a list of post processing effects you can choose from to put the final touches on a battle. This includes things like confetti intros, lights and pyro effects. Apps that license songs often struggle to build up and maintain a healthy and attractive music catalog. Levitt cites a relationship with Universal Music Group as one of the key factors that helped to get the licensing process off the ground. The starting library is diverse and even includes a number of country songs that haven’t garnered much attention on the show itself. Levitt sees the app as a way to continue to build the Lip Sync Battle community. To generate revenue, Wurrly will be offering specialty items to its community at a price. This could include limited addition effects and masks. Because the app has such a strong relationship with a real world show generating new content every week, Lip Sync Battle can also benefit by leveraging promotional content to boost fan engagement. The early version of the app works pretty smoothly although one drawback is that creations are tied to the app itself. You can share them for battles and link videos on social media, but they ultimately pull you back into the app. Synching between lyrics and music was also an issue in a few instances. Lyrics for the Eminem and Rihanna track Love the Way You Lie seemed oddly timed, and in one case, the lyrics for the Lynyrd Skynyrd hit Free Bird were incorrect. These were all relatively minor quips and will hopefully be fixed by the time heavy traffic starts battling. If you’re not already into the craze, the premise of lip syncing may seem about as odd as watching American Idol on mute while listening to the track on Spotify. However, there is something special about a nonjudgemental space where you can truly step away and not care about anything other than having fun with your friends. I spent about an hour after 5pm on a Friday making the gem below in the TechCrunch offices. I can’t completely say there was no office judgement, but as promised, it surely was a world of fun. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fumiORxba4g
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The ugly reality of an Oculus founder’s politics
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Anthony Ha
| 2,016
| 9
| 24
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It hasn’t been a great couple of days for Facebook PR. For one thing, the company admitted that, due to an error, . For another, that Oculus founder Palmer Luckey is backing the pro-Donald Trump organization Nimble America, a group dedicated to promoting anti-Hillary Clinton memes. Now, the video views story is more likely to be important to Facebook’s bottom line, but what Luckey is doing with a tiny piece of his in is much it prompted one TechCrunch writer (not me, I swear) to ask their coworkers for .” (And perhaps inevitably, it involves as a minor character — it seems Yiannopoulos was the one who connected Luckey with the anti-Clinton group.) Now that the news is out there, will it prompt any kind of backlash against Oculus, at least from people who don’t share Nimble America’s politics? It’s hard to see many consumers letting this affect their buying decisions. And even if it does, well, there are . The thing is, the Oculus Rift . And as it tries to get there, goodwill from developers and early adopters could still be key. So when a handful of developers have already said unless Facebook drops Luckey, it could be a sign that the company has some work to do. The news also complicates the picture that Luckey has built up in the media as . All those things could be as true today as they were a year or two ago, but now you also have to think about the Luckey who’s supported trolls who hijack conversations with , then explained that support by declaring, “Money is not my issue. I thought it sounded like a real jolly good time.” Luckey by admitting that he’s contributed $10,000 to Nimble America, but also denying that he authored under the username NimbleRichMan. He said he’s voting for libertarian candidate Gary Johnson and concluded, “Still, my actions were my own and do not represent Oculus. I’m sorry for the impact my actions are having on the community.” Some of the details of Luckey’s kinda, sorta denial/apology . For one thing, Luckey seems to have of the NimbleRichMan posts to The Daily Beast’s Gideon Resnick. And regardless, the core fact — Luckey’s support of Nimble America — is not in dispute. At this point, some of you may be concerned about the free speech implications of penalizing Luckey for his political views and actions. But of course Luckey is free to believe and support what and who he chooses. It’s just that everyone else is free as well to respond, whether that’s by expressing their feelings in blog and social media posts, or in reassessing their support of Oculus. This may also reinforce an emerging media narrative, one that suggests Luckey and Peter Thiel (the Facebook investor and outspoken libertarian who helped to ) are typical of a wave of tech millionaires and billionaires who use their fortunes to “ ,” -style. Maybe there’s an element of truth there — I can’t help but think of co-creator suggestion (as ) that “Silicon Valley is immersed in a titanic battle between the hippie value system of the Steve Jobs generation and the Ayn Randian libertarian values of the Peter Thiel generation.” But I also suspect that Thiel’s influence, while real, is often overstated because it fits into the story that journalists want to tell about those crazy tech libertarians. After all, we’re talking about a region and industry that has, by and large, . So on the one hand, Luckey (or whoever wrote the NimbleRichMan posts) may be about how he “started from nothing and worked [his] way to the top,” but on the other, you’ve got Nest co-founder Matt Rogers and calling Luckey a “ .” And if you want to focus on Facebook money, there’s to organizations supporting the Clinton campaign. So are there rich tech libertarians making a new trend? Maybe. But they’re part of an old, reliable one, too — even outside tech, it isn’t exactly a surprise to learn that the some of the fabulously wealthy might spend their money . Earlier this year, writer Blake Harris suggesting that much of the coverage (including TechCrunch’s) had described Nimble America inaccurately. Since then, he emailed me with more details about his reporting (he says he’s writing a book about Oculus), and he convinced me that I was wrong to describe Nimble America as spreading white supremacist memes. It’s true that two of the organization’s founders were moderators of The_Donald subreddit, which is how The Daily Beast connected them to the aforementioned memes. However, Harris said he saw no evidence that the founders had posted racist content themselves. And it seems like the goal of Nimble America was to bring a meme-style approach to advertising in the real world — so at the time of publication, the organization had only bought a single billboard declaring Hillary Clinton “Too Big To Jail.”
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Messaging app Telegram adds selfie masks, DIY GIFs
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Natasha Lomas
| 2,016
| 9
| 24
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With what looks to be an eye on Snapchat’s selfie-loving fanbase, messaging platform Telegram has beefed up its in-app photo editor in what it dubs an “ ” — including an option that lets users customize selfies by adding cartoon masks that automatically align on their faces. Snapchat of course has a . The Telegram feature is far less sophisticated than Snapchat’s lenses; more ‘selfie augmentation’ than full facial transformation, given it only works with photos (not video). And is really just another sticker set that can be added to photos you’ve already snapped. But the should not be underestimated. Masks can be applied via Telegram’s photo editor by tapping on the pen to edit the photo you’ve selected to send and then the envelope to bring up mask sets. Users are also able to create custom masks and upload them to the platform by using the / command and Telegram’s bot. (Users receiving photos with masks will also be able to see which sets the masks came from.) For now, there’s a range of cartoonish masks created by Telegram for users to choose from — such as animal faces, silly glasses, comedy beards, hats, wigs etc, along with other cartoonish props to drop into photos, such as stars, hearts, more cute animals, bubble-lettered captions and so on. Existing Telegram stickers can also be added in to photos. Also in this visually themed update Telegram now lets users create custom GIFs to send in their chats by recording a video and then tapping a new mute button to turn it into a looping GIF. GIFs can also be augmented with the usual emoji, text, colored scribbles etc. The startup showing founder Pavel Durov videoing himself pulling an expression akin to a smirking smilie. It notes that any DIY GIFs a user creates are saved to the app’s GIF section — “so that you can quickly react to anything with a set of your own prerecorded GIF-emotions”. Also added in this update: a trending stickers tab — likely as a way to help with sticker discovery. Visuals may be more universally understood than text, but finding the perfect sticker among countless pouts, smirks and side-eyes can be as time-consuming as searching for . Telegram is not breaking out any updated user metrics at this point, with Durov telling TechCrunch it’s keeping its powder dry for big yearly reveals on that front. The startup held a glitzy party at MWC in Barcelona last , trumpeting 100M monthly active users. At the time it also said it was adding 350,000 new users each day, with some 15BN messages generated daily. (For some comparative context, Snapchat, announced 100M active users back in .)
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Brian Solis talks about why AI won’t suck
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John Biggs
| 2,016
| 9
| 24
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This week I got the chance to talk to a private hero of mine, Brian Solis. Solis is a digital analyst and speaker who talks about the future and how big brands – Coke, IBM – will interact with humans. His new book and it’s designed to help big companies survive the changing tides of business and tech. Luckily, however, Solis didn’t just focus on his marketing work and instead we got to get into a wide-ranging discussion about future government, AI, and cities. He equates self-driving cars to the switch between film and digital – at some point it just doesn’t make sense to use film anymore, a prospect that both thrilled and upset this dedicated photographer. You can and listen to the interview below. You can download an and subscribe .
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Why is San Francisco trying to strangle its golden goose?
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Carl Szabo
| 2,016
| 9
| 24
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Detroit doesn’t place burdensome regulations on automobile manufacturers; Idaho doesn’t put undue restrictions and hurdles in front of potato farmers; and California takes steps to protect its farmers — because these industries are part of the lifeblood and identity of their respective states. These industries do more than just create jobs, tax revenue and prestige — they became a symbol of who they are, part of the fabric of the community and the economy. So it’s no surprise that their legislators focus on doing all they can to ensure that they thrive and survive. It really isn’t anything novel; it happens in almost every state. And then there’s San Francisco. The city appears hell-bent on hurting the innovation industry that has made the it the tech capital of the world. The tech industry creates hundreds of high-paying jobs and millions in tax revenue and has helped turn San Francisco into one of the most sought-after locales in the country. When companies such as Twitter, Airbnb, Zynga and others emerge in San Francisco, they perpetuate an innovation life cycle as they act as incubators for the next generation of entrepreneurs that will continue the economic boom. Despite all that, San Francisco seems intent on killing the golden goose. Instead of celebrating the growth of tech companies that add millions upon millions to the tax coffers, San Francisco demonizes their success. It starts with a that would only apply to tech companies. Eric Mar, a member of the city’s Board of Supervisors, even went so far as to say that the tax would serve as indemnification for the “downside of the technology boom,” according to The New York Times. It continues with the for tech workers that reduce traffic and pollution and encourage residents to stay in the city. And, finally, San Francisco continues its by mandating fingerprints and trying to shoehorn ride-sharing entrepreneurs into “employee” status. And lest we talk about the draconian regulations on home-sharing platforms that will cost San Franciscans millions… As a city that is home to sharing services like Airbnb, rather than embrace them, the city is consistently looking to pass laws to make them illegal. Rises wages and living costs are issues that are no doubt placing an added burden on the middle class of San Francisco. We need solutions to ensure that the San Francisco middle class doesn’t go extinct. But scapegoating San Francisco’s innovation leaders isn’t going to make the problem go away. On the contrary, it will make it worse. While San Francisco’s leaders attack tech industries, other cities recognize their benefit and are wooing these high-paying jobs to leave the Bay Area — and bring their taxes and prestige. Myriad other municipalities — from Boulder to Salt Lake City — are all taking steps to turn their city into the new tech-mecca. Through tax incentives, low-costs of living and an eager and educated work-pool, these cities are more than willing to woo the next generation of entrepreneurs to start their businesses there. Hopefully, San Francisco legislators will realize the amazing gift that arrived in their city — hundreds of talented, motivated, highly educated and innovative individuals. And rather than looking this gift-horse in the mouth and passing legislation that makes housing less affordable and adds more traffic to clogged streets and pollution to the air, the city will embrace the tech innovations, and innovators, that have made it the envy of the world. If not, San Francisco may soon see its tech-title taken away. If that happens, no doubt there will be hand-wringing, finger-pointing and questions about what went wrong.
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Camera manufacturers, you’re still missing the point. Be better.
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Haje Jan Kamps
| 2,016
| 9
| 24
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This is a photo of a sunset over Cologne. It was taken on a mirrorless camera, copied to my smartphone using Wi-Fi, edited using , then shared to Instagram within a couple of minutes of being taken. If my camera didn’t have Wi-Fi, it would probably still be sitting on a memory card somewhere. That would have been sad. Spotted at Photokina, the world’s largest photography trade show: A professional photographer, taking a photo, then taking a picture off the back of their camera to share the photograph on Facebook. It’s not that unusual an occurrence, but it served as the perfect parable on quite how vigorously the camera manufacturers have self-copulated themselves into oblivion. Professional photographer and writer John Aldred shared this photo on Facebook; a perfect illustration of the issue at hand. Also: Hello, mr Fox! Photo © John Aldred, used by permission. We live in a world where speed is of the essence. We take photos at 10:03 and we expect them to be on Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, EyeEm, Twitter and what-have-you by 10:05. This instant sharing is the strength of mobile photography, of course. How could it not be; modern mobile phones include the cameras and high-speed always-on connectivity to make fast sharing by default the only sensible route. If your camera has a data plan, sharing your experiences becomes quick, easy and natural. This is why Apple is running the advertising campaigns. This is why the iPhone 7 announcement dwelled on the camera and its advantages for so long. That’s why has one of the best cameras we’ve ever seen in a mobile phone. Microsoft knows this, too, and is pushing hard on the “phone for photographers” line with of phones. Although, sadly for Microsoft, a vanishingly small number of people actually wanted a Windows Phone. The problem? “Proper” cameras generally don’t come with the option to insert SIM cards, which complicates matters somewhat. A big for this is the borderline insane prices on data plans in the U.S. A passionate photographer might be willing to spend $10 per month to achieve mobile connectivity for their camera. $100 per month? Probably not. Samsung tried their best with its Android-powered, Wi-Fi and SIM-card enabled , but ultimately, the superzoom camera was an utter disaster. How bad? I’ve never seen a single one of them in the wild and Samsung appears to have quietly dropped any mention of it from its website. In addition, mobile phone standards still vary around the world. While ‘world phones’ are becoming more common, and you can expect to be able to use your high-end phone all over the world, those radios aren’t free. So we are stuck getting our photos from our cameras to our phones or computers somehow to share them. And that is precisely the rub. It’s a lot harder than it should be. Samsung’s Galaxy Camera was a great idea, but never seemed to go anywhere. Not least because cell phone plans in the U.S. are insanely expensive. Cameras are getting measurably better all the time, but better image quality is only half the battle. Arguably, cameras are ‘good enough’ now — that would explain why SLR owners are replacing their cameras with greater intervals than they used to at the dawn of digital SLR technology — but the rest of the taking photos and sharing experience is stuck in a bygone era. More crucially, perhaps, is that the population using dedicated cameras are changing faster than the camera manufacturers are adopting to the change. All the big camera manufacturers have been shipping cameras with Wi-Fi built in for a while. Canon’s first attempt in a high-end camera was the Canon 6D. A great camera, for sure, but jamming white-hot, rusty nails into your eyes was preferable to actually configuring and trying to use the company’s Wi-Fi app. Sony’s A7 had a shoot-then-copy-to-your-phone solution that actually Progress, and it wasn’t perfect, but at least it’s usable. Canon introduced Wi-Fi in its high-end 5D line last week, but the functionality is absent from , unless you buy . For an additional on top of your already credit-card-meltingly expensive, top-of-the-line camera. Insert facepalm here. There are a couple of inherent problems with using Wi-Fi for image transfer; the way it is usually done is that the camera poses as a hotspot and you have to connect your phone to it, which involves a trip to the Settings app. If anything happens to the Wi-Fi connectivity (a worryingly common problem on most camera platforms, in my experience), you need to leave the app, re-connect to the camera, and return to the image copying app. Hardly a very encouraging user experience. Not least because most phones assume that if you are connected to Wi-Fi, that is your internet connection, too. Sharing your photos, then, involves a cumbersome process of disconnecting and reconnecting to Wi-Fi, using the phone’s data plan, and other steps. It’s confusing if you know how it works under the hood, and borderline impossible if you don’t. From a technical point of view, fully understand why this process is clunky. From a usability point of view, I just about the excuses. Camera manufacturers – be better. Canon’s 6D included Wi-Fi functionality, but the app was so bad the company might as well not have bothered. One unlikely ally in this battle may prove to be Bluetooth — Nikon’s recently launched eschews Wi-Fi in favor of Bluetooth. While Bluetooth’s transfer speeds are lackluster, at least the ease of connectivity is a blast of fresh air. The company’s solution is the only thing that shines as a ray of hope in this abyss, so fingers crossed that this new ecosystem will finally start to address the issue. There will always be a slice of the market that puts photo quality above all else: Advertising, product photography and high-end portraiture among them. In other bits of the photography world, however, speed is the #1 concern. There are who are now operating with smartphones. iPhone 7 adds two prime lenses. That’s so cool I barely know what to do with myself. Apple even to show what it can do. Why? It isn’t down to the image quality, I’ll tell you that much – an iPhone is no match for a full-frame SLR with a 600mm lens on a football field. But it has other advantages. Being able to tweet out a play seconds after it happened is, in some circles, more important than the artistic love that goes into crafting an amazing sports photo. The bigger picture here is the shift that has been happening in photography over the past decade. People aren’t to high-quality photography, but if you look at how most people create and consume photographic content, there’s a huge change. On holiday, people are more likely to bring an SLR or advanced compact camera, but those photos typically get downloaded, edited, and shared after you get home. Or, more realistically, the photos are taken, copied onto a hard disk and then never looked at again. As more and more of us are living our lives on the pulse of what’s happening in the lives of others, even a few weeks of delay is too much: “Hey, I thought Eddie was in France last month, why is he posting pictures ?” Some travel photos are worth waiting for. Most probably aren’t. In a world of rapid sharing, seeing what’s happening when it happens is paramount. The exception might be people who are taking photographs that stand the test of times — artistic, technically close to perfect, and worth hanging on your wall. But let’s face it, that isn’t most of us. When you talk to casual — and even pretty serious amateur — photographers, you’ll discover that everybody would love to have higher quality photos in their lives. Drill deeper, however, and you’ll find that this desire rarely extends to actually carrying a hulking big camera around. Photography has shifted to being about sharing on social media. And that’s only worth doing if it happens quickly. Camera manufacturers know this. They do. They can’t be so stupid as to see and not understand why it is pointing downwards at an angle that would put any CFO’s sphincter muscles on high alert. And yet, even at this year’s Photokina — the biggest celebration of photographic equipment in the world, which this year was smaller than I’ve ever seen it — I see very little evidence that the camera manufacturers are prepared to offer their mainstream customers the solutions they want. I can only hope for their sakes that they’re still around to offer proper solutions the next time Photokina rolls around, two years from now.
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Why Salesforce might be interested in Twitter
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Ron Miller
| 2,016
| 9
| 24
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, and Salesforce.com could be a chief suitor. At this point, with so many possible bidders being reported, it’s hard to know what’s going to happen (if anything). But the big question for many is why Salesforce would even be interested in the consumer-facing social network. While nobody could say with certainty that the deal would happen, most of the industry experts we spoke to believe that if Salesforce were to win this deal, Twitter would be an excellent fit. R Ray Wang, principal analyst and founder at Constellation Research, says that for him it’s about the battle for what he calls ‘the relationship graph’ where the consumer graph and the enterprise graphs converge. “This is what made LinkedIn so attractive to both Microsoft and Salesforce. The graph is activated by artificial intelligence (AI) and this is why there is mass interest. Twitter, like LinkedIn, provides a very large and active graph,” Wang explained. That AI component could be key. Just this week, both Salesforce and its chief rival Oracle announced major AI initiatives with and at Oracle Open World. Meanwhile, for audience tracking, for advertising data and for marketing data, while Salesforce’s other primary rival, . Up to this point, Salesforce hasn’t had a data source like this to call its own. “Salesforce’s competitors are snapping up [data sources] and will integrate them into their platforms to add additional perspective and intelligence,” Brent Leary, co-founder at CRM Essentials told TechCrunch. “If this deal with Twitter happens, it’s to add a constant flow of information into their AI platform, to marry it with their transactional and customer information,” he added. That combination could provide additional data fuel for Einstein. There’s also plenty of room to use Twitter data across the Salesforce platform and product family, says Dion Hinchcliffe, chief strategy officer at 7Summits, an online enterprise community platform, built on top of Salesforce. “The enterprise social play for them is that there’s good alignment with Marketing Cloud and Service Cloud on social channels, though it could certainly augment their Community Cloud offering as well,” he said. As TechCrunch’s Ingrid Lunden pointed out , “Twitter is not that big in the greater scheme of things compared to Facebook and the aggregate of other platforms where “conversations” are happening.” Still, Hinchcliffe argues, it remains the most powerful platform for large-scale marketing and customer service and this could be what Salesforce is hoping to take advantage of by owning it. Of course, Salesforce has access to all that Twitter data now, but if a competitor got its hands on the social network, it could make it more difficult (or expensive) to take advantage of. Owning Twitter certainly would give Salesforce the integration upper hand, but Alan Pelz-Sharpe, an analyst with Digital Clarity Group, thinks it’s a risky proposition for Salesforce to take this course. “Licensing access to the data source is in my opinion a better and much more affordable route to actually buying the company. Twitter has over $2B in revenue and likely would demand a big multiple in any sale. Though a firm like Microsoft could absorb that kind of deal and barely be bruised if it backfired, it would be a massive [financial] risk for Salesforce,” Pelz-Sharpe told me. While nobody knows what will happen, the deal could make more sense for Salesforce than it appears at first blush. The problem for the cloud CRM giant is that the rumors alone are likely driving up the price to the point that the cost of acquiring Twitter may end up being too rich for its blood. That’s especially true when you look at the deep-pocketed rivals — including Google, Microsoft and Verizon — reportedly lining up for a chance to buy it. [graphiq id=”aXgOd4E9tvT” title=”Twitter Inc. (TWTR) Stock Price – Current Day” width=”600″ height=”561″ url=”https://sw.graphiq.com/w/aXgOd4E9tvT” link=”http://listings.findthecompany.com/l/445483/Twitter-Inc-in-San-Francisco-CA” link_text=”FindTheCompany | Graphiq” frozen=”true”]
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Hands-on with Pictar, which adds buttons and wheels to your iPhone camera
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Haje Jan Kamps
| 2,016
| 9
| 24
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There’s no denying that your smartphone’s camera is getting better and better for every generation, but what’s a poor photography nerd to do about controllability? ’s Pictar is shipping soon, and might be just the thing to teach your iPhone some additional photography skills. At Photokina, I had a chance to try it myself. “Smartphones have great cameras,” says Sean Henry, the photography industry veteran who brought Pictar to life. “But for advanced users, the functions are either hidden or hard to get to.” Pictar is a fantastically clever solution to that precise problem. It adds a grip with a shutter button and three control wheels to the iPhone. One of the wheels controls the zoom, one is programmable to a number of different functions, and the last is an exposure compensation wheel. The shutter button includes focus / exposure lock on a half-press much like you would find on traditional cameras. And, of course, it takes a photo when you depress the button fully. The way Miggo’s Pictar communicates with the phone is worth dwelling on for a moment. Instead of paying Apple’s Made For iPhone fees to communicate using the Lightning connector and narrowly averting the bullet of getting made redundant by iPhone 7’s , the product uses a really elegant solution. It communicates with the app by playing high-frequency sounds, inaudible to the human ear. The phone app, in turn, uses the microphone built into the phone to listen to the signals and act accordingly. A bit unconventional — and I had some doubts about how well this would work when I first saw the Kickstarter project — but I needn’t have feared. Even on a noisy trade-show floor, Pictar worked flawlessly. Best of all, the same product that works with iPhone 6 and 6s can be used with Apple’s newest iPhone 7. [gallery ids="1391899,1391902,1391900,1391901,1391898"] Pictar is one of those rare products that I never really knew I needed in my life until I tried it myself. Yes, it seems dumb and it is so easy to write it off as a gimmick… But you’d be wrong to do that until you’ve tried it. I’ve certainly never felt I needed a real shutter button on my phone. Having said that, the feeling of relief of being able to make adjustments by turning wheels rather than having to do complicated multi-touch or touch-and-hold maneuvers is strong. As a photographer, the product makes the iPhone feel like a much more capable piece of photographic kit, which is a remarkable accomplishment by Miggo. All of that isn’t to say that the product is completely perfect; the button-press for the shutter button felt a bit stiff compared to what you find even on an entry-level compact camera, and it’s hard to know by feel whether or not you’ve succeeded in doing a half-press. The turn wheels also felt a bit cheap — cheaper than its $120 price tag would indicate. If there’s ever a second version of it, I hope the manufacturers either drop the price or increase the feel of the product to be more in line with the phones it is designed to contain. “We are shipping in December,” Henry confirms. “If you want one as soon as possible, sooner rather than later!”
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A Google self-driving car was involved in crash in Mt. View today
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Lora Kolodny
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A Google self-driving Lexus RX 450h was involved in a crash with a van in Mountain View, Calif. on Friday afternoon, according to local police. Another driver ran a red light and crashed into the car. Thankfully, nobody was injured in the accident. Google issued the following statement with details about the crash: “A Google vehicle was traveling northbound on Phyllis Ave. in Mountain View when a car heading westbound on El Camino Real ran a red light and collided with the right side of our vehicle. Our light was green for at least six seconds before our car entered the intersection. Thousands of crashes happen everyday on U.S. roads, and red-light running is the leading cause of urban crashes in the U.S. Human error plays a role in 94% of these crashes, which is why we’re developing fully self-driving technology to make our roads safer.” Two local TV stations, and , reported that the Google autonomous vehicle had been “in control,” or in its self-driving mode at the time of the crash. However, the self-driving car was reportedly manned by a Google employee who took over its operation, and applied the brakes when the other car’s driver began crossing an intersection, apparently running a red light and colliding with Google’s vehicle. The crash comes just after the U.S. Department of Transportation made some major autonomous vehicle earlier this week, as TechCrunch then reported. Among other things, the self-driving auto makers and related technology firms to prioritize safety, and share data with the government and each other within reason. Google issues voluntarily every month reflecting data on the number of miles their autonomous vehicles have traveled, how many cars they have on the road, and details about any accidents in which they were involved. Generally, DOT officials say they want to ensure the U.S. can be a leader rather than a laggard in autonomous vehicles, while protecting the traveling public.
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Yi’s camera brings some underdog to the Micro Four Thirds market
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Haje Jan Kamps
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You may know from its or its fancy, , but at Photokina, the company launched its first mirrorless Micro Four Thirds camera, the Yi M1. Sporting a 20 mpx , a high-quality 3-inch touch-screen and a raft of sharing-friendly features, it’s crashing into a space that has been stale for a while. Cheek to cheek At launch, the company has two lenses available – a decent all-rounder in the form of a 12-40mm f/3.5-5.6 lens, and a portrait prime clocking in at 42.5mm f/1.8. The camera uses the Micro Four Thirds (MFT) lens mount, however, so it’s possible to tap into years and years worth of high-quality glass from a number of different manufacturers already. I had a chance to try the camera and I was initially underwhelmed; weighing in at 280g, I found it hard to keep stable (it weighs a third of , which itself is a tiny little thing carved out of a block of metal) and the controls were counter-intuitive enough that I didn’t immediately make friends with them. As someone who handles a lot of different cameras; that’s pretty rare and a little worrying. The focus ring on the lens is only ornamental, which seems like a weird design quirk It’s possible that the company is falling victim to its “minimalist design”. Minimalist is all good and well, of course, until you need to quickly adjust the settings on your camera. For much of the same reason that it is tricky to use , controlling the Yi M1 feels a bit ham-fisted to experienced photographers. In not including decent controls on the camera, it makes you wonder who this little thing is for. Yes, it’s small and has a good sensor, so you’d think it’d be perfect for travel photographers, but because its lenses don’t collapse out of the way, it isn’t as portable as you might want. All the settings are changed using the touch-screen, which means you can’t change them by touch. This choice makes me wonder who the camera is actually for. that the price for the camera plus a lens will be $499, although the folks manning the booth resolutely refused to comment on the pricing, saying it was “still being confirmed”. The company does confirm it is shipping the camera later this year, however. Given that Amazon is delighted to sell you , it’s tricky to see where Yi’s new mirrorless beastie fits into the market. It is the only 20-megapixel camera in that price bracket bracket — Panasonic’s GX8 costs almost a grand, and Olympus’ Pen-F sets you back $1,500 — but I’d hope we’re beyond pixel-chasing by now. Most importantly, both of those cameras have the handling of prosumer-level cameras, which the M1 doesn’t have. I only spent a few minutes with the camera and it is entirely possible that it grows on you after extended use. Unfortunately, cameras aren’t bought on extended use, but on reviews and on first impressions in person. Yi had best cross its fingers for glowing versions of the former, because on the latter, it falls significantly short of the mark.
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Home furnishings retailer Dot & Bo closes down
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Jon Russell
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Online furniture retailer has abruptly closed its doors today. The San Francisco-based company said in an announcement that it had been in “deep discussions to be acquired by a prominent public company” but, after those talks broke down, it had no option but to shut down. Dot & Bo contacted customers via email to inform them of its closure, which is effective today, while now directs to the same notice. The three-year-old company said it grew business 16-fold over its lifetime, and served “millions” of customers during that period. “We are humbled to have had such loyal customers and are extremely proud of the impact we made on the home furnishings market, but ultimately we were unable to find backers with the necessary vision to help us achieve our mission,” it added. The company declined to comment further when we asked for more information. Unlike many in the capital intensive e-commerce space, Dot & Co had not raised a huge amount of funding from investors, despite a founding team with impressive credentials — CEO Anthony Soohoo, for one, previously spent time with Apple, Yahoo and Trinity Ventures. Trinity Ventures and Oak Investment Partners are among its backers. The startup began life targeting young consumers with a ‘story-centric’ approach to selling furniture and home items, but earlier this year with a new service that offered free advice and consultancy to companies looking to spruce up or redevelop their work space. Despite successful exits like and , there have been less successful e-commerce ventures shutting their doors of late. In one such example, One Kings Lane, an e-tailer once valued above $1 billion, was that Recode .
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Oculus founder admits he funded pro-Trump group, but says he won’t vote Trump
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Jon Russell
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A day after that he had donated money to , Oculus founder (and Facebook employee) Palmer Luckey has come clean about his activities. Well, kinda. Luckey, whose wealth is estimated at $700 million courtesy of two years ago, — on Facebook, of course — that he had provided $10,000 in financial backing for the ‘alt-right’ group Nimble America but that “recent news stories about me do not accurately represent my views.” The Daily Beast reported a series of uncouth statements by Luckey — “I’ve got plenty of money… money is not my issue. I thought it sounded like a real jolly good time” — which included his support for Donald Trump’s White House candidacy, and his belief in challenging “the American elite.” The Oculus founder had earlier made public his support for the group via Reddit, where, writing under the ‘NimbleRichMan’ account, he offered to match all donations made to the organization, which is best known for its pro-Trump ‘shitposting’ activities. Writing on Facebook, Luckey denied publishing the Reddit posts and said he is neither a founder or employee at Nimble America. All good in theory, except that he had told Daily Beast writer Gideon Resnick that he did publish the posts himself, though the account was set up for him. Likewise, Resnick wrote that Luckey was listed as “vice president” of the group on its website. For one thing, he was "NimbleRichMan" as I described. In emails to me, as I reported, he said he posted with the account made for him — Gideon Resnick (@GideonResnick) Luckey also appeared to u-turn on his endorsement of Trump. According to one of the now-deleted Reddit posts that he told Daily Beast he posted — but then said on Facebook that he didn’t post — Luckey has “supported Donald’s presidential ambitions for years” and “encouraged him to run in the last election.” But, on Facebook, Luckey said he will vote for Libertarian Party nominee Gary Johnson. “I am a libertarian who has publicly supported Ron Paul and Gary Johnson in the past, and I plan on voting for Gary in this election as well,” he wrote. Welcome to the post-fact world. As for why he would make a donation in that case? “I thought the organization had fresh ideas on how to communicate with young voters through the use of several billboards,” he added. That’s one way to describe shitposting, which is . This is a message from , the founder of . — codyb (@CodyBrown) The incident is sure to have embarrassed Facebook, although the organization is getting plenty of practice in the business of dealing with embarrassing statements from highly visible members of its rank and file. Facebook board member — — although with a successful reelection despite a political affiliation that many in Democrat-heavy Silicon Valley disagree with. (Not to mention .) Then earlier this year, in February, , another company board member, about India after the country outlawed Facebook’s Free Basics initiative to provide free internet.
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Snapchat’s 10 second video glasses are real and cost $130
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Fitz Tepper
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Snapchat’s long-rumored camera glasses are . The startup’s first foray into hardware will be a pair of glasses called “Spectacles” and will go on sale this fall for $129.99, and confirmed to TechCrunch by the newly rebranded Snap Inc.. The glasses will only come in one size, but in three colors – black, teal and coral. To start recording you tap a button on the side of the glasses. Video capture will mimic Snapchat’s app, meaning you can only capture 10 seconds of video at once. This video will sync wirelessly to your phone, presumably making it available to share as a snap. Interestingly, the camera a 115-degree lens (which is wider than a smartphone or regular camera) and the video captured will be circular. It’s not yet clear how this video will be displayed in the app, but since the field of view is so large Snapchat could either crop it to a vertical format or update the app to allow viewing of circular views. [gallery ids="1391912,1391913,1391914"] While Spectacles will be available publicly sometime this fall, Snapchat CEO Evan Spiegel that they will have “limited distribution” and not “be relied upon for significant immediate revenue”. This means that Spectacles could end up being like Google Glass when it first launched – officially on sale to the public but pretty hard to come by. Oh, and in a potential nod to Apple’s to eliminate “computer” from its name, Snapchat will dropping “chat” from its name and rebranding to Snap Inc., . That’s a move to signify that Snapchat the app isn’t the only product the company now makes. Now we have the first official video for Spectacles. Unlike ahead of the announcement, this clip is much more Snapchat-like. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XqkOFLBSJR8
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Sarah Perez
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Crunch Report | Twitter’s four possible buyers
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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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$129 Google WiFi router that can team up with others tipped for Oct 4
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Darrell Etherington
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Google will build upon its OnHub strategy with a new simple Wi-Fi router for the home, according to a new report from . Dubbed simply Google WiFi, It will cost $129, the site reports, and will debut at an event Google has announced for October 4, where many suspect the search giant will reveal its latest own-brand Android phones, a 4K-capable Chromecast device and the availability date for Google Home, its Amazon Echo competitor. The new Wi-Fi router’s highlight feature might be that it can pair up with others to offer easy ways to extend your home network throughout the home, for better network coverage in hard to reach places. Droid-life the functionality as similar to , in a corroborating report, which basically means the routers will work together with a minimum of fuss to extend your network. Many modern routers can extend your network, but with the model used by Eero (and Google WiFi, if this report proves accurate), there’s virtually no setup required on the user’s part to spread their network around. Droid-life’s info says it’ll support AC1200 dual-band networking, and have Bluetooth connectivity. It may or may not be actually branded in the OnHub family, but the reports say it’ll work with existing OnHub devices and offer similar features, including IFTTT integration. We’ll find out for sure whether WiFi is on the docket for Google’s big event on October 4, which kicks off at 9 AM PT and which we’ll be covering here at TechCrunch as it happens.
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Twitter scores with NFL deal
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Dror Ginzberg
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With the start of the new NFL season upon us, across the U.S. — and indeed across the whole world — are turning their attention to who the winners and losers will be this year, and who’ll be making their way to Super Bowl LI on at NRG Stadium in Houston, Texas. With plenty of interactive and innovative ways for to get involved, such as , perhaps the most exciting news for is the NFL’s with . This landmark , announced back in May, sees social networks finally able to take on traditional , moving beyond being just a platform and into the business of content proper. It is clear that both the NFL and are seeking to tap into the explosion in popularity of streaming video, . For the NFL, this builds on a previous test case with Yahoo, streaming one game last season, which successfully yielded . What is also clear is that love to watch events live, as happens in real time, meaning is sitting on top of a massive opportunity here. The instant nature of conversation has always appealed to , with . That many of us use social networks while watching live programming is behavior that both and are aware of — but until now, neither have really made the most of this opportunity. CEO Jack Dorsey has said much about how he sees live experiences as being at the heart of the future of . The aim is to keep people on the social network for longer, increasing the opportunity for users to be targeted by advertising. In this sense, the with the NFL represents a moment not only for who now have a new, potentially much more interactive, way to watch their favorite teams, but also arguably ’s best opportunity to date to prove that it can be a valuable platform for advertisers. So, the questions now revolve around how the content and accompanying advertising is going to be presented to users. Since the announcement of the , we’ve had some clues from other . In early July, in a collaboration between , ESPN and the All England Club. However, it did also say that this experiment was “an extremely early and incomplete test experience, and we’ll be making lots of improvements before we launch it in its final form.” There was a lot of criticism of the Wimbledon experience, the small viewing area versus the size of the tweet stream being one. , which powers over 25,000 live events, making obvious to all that it will instead dedicate many more resources to try to make the live video experience as good as it can be for football . While there is much to improve on, it’s clear that social networks are aware of the behavior and needs of — whether the have a global reach like tennis and the NFL, or whether they have a much more niche audience. Similarly, recognize the importance of streaming — rather than broadcasting — so-called “minority” . At the end of June, Walt Disney Co. — owners of ESPN and ABC — a one-third stake in the video-streaming unit of MLB Advanced Media, the digital arm of Major League Baseball. This shows just how important it is for ESPN to be able to offer digital packages, rather than just traditional cable TV packages, in its fight to regain lost advertising revenue. With the biggest media company in the world moving to ensure that like don’t steal a march on them, the stage is set for some intriguing battles for live TV rights between established and innovative technology companies. The line between broadcaster and technology platform will continue to blur — NFL games broadcast live on is just the beginning. Hopefully the biggest result of this will be that consumers have a greater choice of more innovative, interactive ways to watch their favorite , while bringing like baseball — which don’t have a large following outside of the U.S. — to entirely new audiences. The potential for advertisers to then take advantage of an increasingly engaged and global set of will follow.
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Police are increasingly using social media surveillance tools
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Megan Rose Dickey
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We’re approaching a level of social unrest that we haven’t seen since the days of the Civil Rights movement. That means law enforcement agencies are trying to figure out how to manage and circumvent the unrest — a lot of which has resulted from the police killings of unarmed black people — through surveillance. You may remember that, back in August, had been secretly operating “wide-area surveillance” throughout the area. Well, that’s not the only type of surveillance law enforcement agencies are using. This summer, the American Civil Liberties Union of California from 63 police departments, sheriffs and district attorneys across California. Of the records they received, 40 percent of the agencies (20) used social media surveillance tools, and most of them started using them within the last year. But these agencies didn’t notify the public or lawmakers about their use of this type of surveillance. And none of the agencies examined by the ACLU have any policies covering how to use those tools in a way that actually protects civil rights and civil liberties. With these social media surveillance tools in hand, law enforcement agencies are able to target activists, according to the ACLU’s analysis of records. Agencies are using tools like , and , some of which . In addition to the fact that law enforcement agencies didn’t tell anyone about their use of social media surveillance tools, it’s unsettling to see the role Silicon Valley plays in all of this. Law enforcement agencies are using tools that are venture-backed and covered by the . Geofeedia, for example, has raised over $24 million in funding and is used by at least 13 law enforcement agencies in California, according to the ACLU. This raises the question: What responsibility do these tech companies and their investors have to the public? More on that another day. The ACLU is now pushing for more transparency and accountability through a multi-city legislative initiative, . The aim is to mandate that local legislative bodies give communities an opportunity to review policies and participate in decisions around surveillance technologies. “Whenever any kind of surveillance tech is being considered in a community, whether social media surveillance, license plate readers or stingrays — before any of those things are considered — there needs to be, at a minimum, public debate and conversation,” ACLU of Northern California Technology and Civil Liberties Policy Director Nicole Ozer told me. “And making sure the right questions are asked and answered about what’s the purpose of the surveillance tech and how it’s going to impact community members. All these kinds of questions that are sort of basic in making sure police and other law enforcement don’t have tools that are leading to discriminatory or abusive policing.” Some cities in California have made progress in police surveillance and transparency. That includes Fresno, where community organizers have pressured the police to scale back their social media surveillance program and are now working on passing a surveillance tech ordinance; Oakland, where community members formed a Privacy Commission that now is now advising the City Council on surveillance decisions and is working on a surveillance tech ordinance; and Santa Clara, . The goal is to get as many of these ordinances passed as possible, and to increase opportunities for police surveillance transparency addressed on the state and federal level.
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Oh Snap! Looks like Snapchat could be rebranding
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Devin Coldewey
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Ephemeral media app Snapchat appears to be doing a little disappearing itself. A and suggest that the company (though probably not the app) is preparing to rebrand as Snap, Inc. alongside its first piece of hardware, a pair of camera-equipped sunglasses called Spectacles. , taken after a copyright claim by Snapchat, briefly shows the glasses: big, swoopy shades with an integrated camera above the left eye. But we pretty much knew these things existed already: Snapchat for $15 million in 2014, and what we see is basically a rebranded version of their device. Snapchat has been keeping its eyewear development closely under wraps, and activity earlier this year suggested they were hard at work. The company raised $1.8 billion in May, and at the time sources told us that some of that cash would be going towards its hardware efforts — which appear to be coming to fruition. As for the new brand, a halo of circumstantial evidence makes it highly unlikely this is a hoax or spec ad. We checked out Snap.com and Spectacles.com — the pages are empty, but a whois lookup shows they’re registered to the same person. The same person who also happens to have registered Snapchat.com. Then, the logo. You may have seen some Snapchat ghosts on billboards around New York lately that have rather crazier eyes than normal. Notice something about this one captured by Michael Sippey? https://twitter.com/sippey/status/778073369660973057 That right eye (its right; our left) in particular seems familiar, doesn’t it? It also matches the shape of the camera and LED ring light on the glasses. It’s unlikely that the Snapchat app itself will be renamed — that would be brand suicide. Instead, Snap Inc. is likely to be the umbrella company that administers the various properties in this burgeoning media platform. It’s possible that this is not the final form of the device or logo; the video could be a promo or pitch for internal use, developed by an ad agency or design firm. Don’t be put off by the fact that it’s middle-aged folks and grandparents using the service rather than a bunch of teenagers — Snapchat has been working hard to target demographics other than the 13-25 crowd. We’ve reached out to Snapchat regarding the authenticity of the video and the move to Snap, Inc. We’ll update the story if we hear back.
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Apple’s iTunes soon to serve up “Spoken Editions” of publishers’ content
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Sarah Perez
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If you prefer listening to the news over reading the news, you’ll soon have a new way to do so, via iTunes. In the near future, you’ll be able to browse through a variety of podcasts focused on turning media publishers’ articles and news into audio content, dubbed “Spoken Editions.” On iTunes, podcasts branded “Spoken Edition” will be short-form programs that offer listeners an audio version of the publisher’s written content. That means you could “read” your favorite website or hear the news when you’re doing other things — like walking your dog, commuting to work or working out at the gym, for example. During early tests on iTunes, Spoken Editions for several media brands showed up. Wired, for example, will launch Spoken Editions for “Business,” “Science” and its homepage. TIME will offer a Spoken Edition called “The Brief.” Forbes, .Mic, Bustle, Playboy, OZY, and — yep — TechCrunch (which I discovered while browsing our iTunes page, of all things) will have Spoken Editions, it seems, as all popped up for a time on iTunes. The links to all the publishers’ Spoken Editions have since been pulled, after our discovery and outreach. For larger publishers, like Wired, iTunes also broke out the Spoken Editions into their own section: “Top Spoken Editions,” which was found below the “Top Episodes” (see screenshot below). This indicates that iTunes itself will be tweaked to better surface this particular type of audio content for users. One company helping to get publishers ready for Spoken Editions is SpokenLayer. When you click through to read the Spoken Edition podcast descriptions, it was noted that they were powered by SpokenLayer. That doesn’t imply an Apple partnership, however — iTunes’ platform is open to many podcasting networks and publishers. SpokenLayer’s involvement is in getting media publishers to move their content into this format more quickly, but Apple is simultaneously getting iTunes ready to feature this content, as well, as indicated by the early tests. , offers audio creation, distribution and monetization services to media brands. The company currently powers podcasts for a number of publishers, including Forbes, Huffington Post, TIME, Reuters, Smithsonian, Scripps and others, according to its website. Those recordings are then distributed on platforms like iTunes, SoundCloud, Stitcher, AudioBoom and Live365. The Spoken Editions will also include audio ads, where revenue is shared between the publisher and SpokenLayer. While text-to-speech audio recordings are not something that’s new to the podcasting industry, the way SpokenLayer approaches this process is interesting. The company has developed a proprietary ecosystem that involves ingesting the written word, then turning that into audio content that literally becomes the “voice” of the brand. “We have a distributed network of voice-over talent that is tagged and managed,” explains SpokenLayer CEO Will Mayo, who declined to talk about Spoken Editions in particular, but spoke more broadly about his company and technology works. That way, he says, stories sound different from one publisher to the next. “We make sure Wired sounds like Wired and any other publication sounds like those publications. The voice and style of any brand is in its writers and the reporting it does. That’s unique for every publication, and that uniqueness is honored,” adds Mayo. The move to feature this type of “text-comes-to-life” content arrives at a time when there’s an increased interest in podcasting and audio in general. Voice computing is now a huge and growing trend — Apple, in fact, is , which could easily help deliver these “Spoken Editions” into consumers’ homes. Podcasting has also entered its golden age, having seen in recent years. According to on the rise of podcasting, over half of Americans are now familiar with the term (55 percent, or 150 million), and 36 percent (98 million) count themselves as podcast listeners. Meanwhile, 21 percent — or 57 million — said they listened to a podcast in the last month. There are also now over 25,000 active podcasts with 12 million episodes of audio, video and documents, including content in over 100 languages. Based on current consumption year to date, customers are on pace to listen to a record 10 billion podcast episodes via iOS, iTunes and tvOS devices in 2016. Now, companies are looking to make podcast listening more of a daily, rather than weekly or monthly, activity. Amazon, for example, that brings access to short-form audio programs through . This includes spoken-word recordings from publishers like the The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, Harvard Business Review, Foreign Affairs, Charlie Rose, McSweeney’s, The Onion and other periodicals. Apple isn’t going so far as to develop a direct competitor to Audible Channels, but is rather tweaking its existing platform in a way that will better highlight this type of short-form content. Spoken Editions will roll out in early October, at which point we should have a fuller list of participating publishers.
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Hands-on with HP’s fun little photo printer
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Brian Heater
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HP, it seems, will always be a printer company. It’s an inescapable part of the company’s DNA. Precisely what shape that takes moving ahead, however, is another question entirely. After all, printers and ink cartridges aren’t flying off the shelf like they once were, which means the company has to get creative. Sometimes that manifests itself in interesting ways, as is the case with the company’s , and, sometimes, as with the recent addition of DRM to its desktop printers, things are a bit less cheery. The , on the other hand, is what happens when a serious company tries something fun — and HP pulls it off fairly well, with pretty low stakes on the pricing front. The photo printer runs $129, which is $70 less than the new Fujifilm Instax Share SP-2, and honestly, probably about as much as casual users will want to pay to print out smartphone photos on 2 x 3 paper. HP’s definitely got the ease of use portion down. Connect your smartphone via Bluetooth and it will automatically prompt you to download the Sprocket app. From there it’s just a matter of connecting to your camera roll and various social media accounts (Instagram, Facebook and Flickr to start). Tap into a photo, hit the print icon and the smartphone-sized Sprocket goes to work, spitting out a print in around half-a-minute, with a light buzz that lets you know it’s working. The printer uses ZINK (Zero Ink), a technology that’s been kicking around for a few years now, which relies on heat-activated dye color crystals in the paper. That means the system doesn’t require ink cartridges, which is a big part of the reason the printer is small enough to fit in the palm of your hand. It also means that the prints aren’t the most vibrant or sharp you’ll see, but they get the job done. The company’s also baked a little fun into the app with editing tools that include a series of filters, text overlays, doodles and frames. It’s a pretty basic set of tools, but it’s a nice little extra that HP will likely build out if the printer proves a success. It’s also a pretty good way to print out gratuitous bunny photos, if you’re in the market for such a thing.
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Jonah Peretti on staying innovative with BuzzFeed Open Lab
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Lora Kolodny
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What’s a media company doing making stuffed animals that can read your emotions? Figuring out the future, apparently. Received wisdom in business is that young companies innovate so naturally they don’t need help or special programs to foster innovation. So when a young media business like starts an innovation “lab,” it feels something like a college freshman sporting grandpa’s golf pants. Still, BuzzFeed, which was founded in 2006, started something called the BuzzFeed Open Lab one year ago; we caught up with BuzzFeed’s CEO and founder to find out how it’s impacting the company overall. Peretti said his inspiration for BuzzFeed Open Lab came partly from his own experience as a fellow at a tech, media and arts organization in New York called . “When I was at Eyebeam, and working on projects funded by the MacArthur Foundation, we hung out in this little warehouse working with no commercial focus to understand what’s happening in tech and media without constraint,” Peretti told me. “At BuzzFeed, of course, we don’t need a lab to innovate, but I’ve always liked things that feel more like a scene than something commercial.” The Open Lab program just admitted its . They include: Peretti said fellows in the experimental program over the past year developed futuristic technology and projects that stand to transform the way BuzzFeed sources news and tells stories for years to come. While that could mean Open Lab contributes to BuzzFeed’s profitability in the end, don’t confuse it with an incubator or accelerator. Fellowship money, office space, equipment and mentorship are granted with no strings attached. BuzzFeed Open Lab is not the only place where the media company hashes out new uses for emerging technology, of course. In recent examples, BuzzFeed launched in December 2015. The Facebook-only food video channels now garner billions of views every month, and have become a big franchise for BuzzFeed, Peretti said. More recently, BuzzFeed announced a reorganization of sorts, including the launch of , an entertainment division headed by Ze Frank, and video teams to support news and entertainment, separately. Video used to be a separate division within the company. “These things are perfectly of the moment,” said Peretti. “They fit with the way people are consuming video now. As a company, we focus on pop culture and reaching large audiences.” BuzzFeed Open Lab fellows instead spend time on tech that isn’t pervasively used as something like Facebook, Snapchat, livestreaming and online video are today. They also explore, and sometimes create, media formats that haven’t become dominant — and may never, in fact. The idea for the lab was also partly inspired by his sister’s early career. Stand-up comedian, actress and writer got started as part of a comedy troupe called Variety SHAC. “She would get together with people to try ideas, or test out materials, and with limited resources would learn so much because they had total freedom to experiment,” her brother recalls. According to BuzzFeed’s bureau chief in San Francisco , and BuzzFeed Open Lab senior fellow , the fellows in San Francisco frequently interact with the company’s editorial staff, and vice versa. News professionals can help fellows think about applying sophisticated technology practically to problems they may have never realized were a part of news gathering and production. Having a bunch of engineers and developers in-house has also given BuzzFeed reporters a resource for figuring things out like the technological feasibility of different inventions, or the impact of a certain development in an industry that they’re writing about, Honan said. The fellows present their work at a Show and Tell, the creative world’s answer to a Demo Day. Fellows in the most recent cohort developed , , , and for news gathering and investigations, and , and when held, help users track their own biometric and emotional responses to different stories they read or videos they watch. “There’s a lot of hardware or interactive stuff that’s nice, but it’s not helpful or useful to people. I’m building weird interface experiments that should make your life easier, including emotionally, while also being protective of you and your data,” said engineer and Open Lab fellow, Honan said he could see Sunu’s “emotionally connected toys” being used as a next-generation type of Nielsen People Meter if she wanted to find a commercial application for them. But so far, she doesn’t want to go commercial, Sunu confirmed. Perhaps the most anti-commercial project in the inaugural cohort of BuzzFeed Open Labs is the Saito Group’s system. The pseudonymously named Saito Group automatically ingests social media posts, namely Tweets and geolocation data, then turns them into found poems, which are projected onto surfaces like brick walls in public locations where they will likely have personal resonance with passersby. The developer behind the Saito Group declined to be named for this story as a condition of speaking with TechCrunch. “There’s so much public space. Every surface could be used for people to communicate,” Saito said. “I want to have people know about this [technology] and be able to contribute to it and put up works around their city.” Honan and Hickman said from the start they have focused outreach around diversity and inclusion, making sure to go beyond the usual suspects in tech in Silicon Valley to promote their program and draw in applicants. Asked what futuristic technologies, including from the Open Lab, BuzzFeed may soon employ, Peretti said: AI, virtual reality, drones and bots were all on his mind. “There is a lot of work to be done on the underlying tech before the media piece becomes important and you can reach a lot of people and lives with content with these,” Peretti said. “But if we understand these things as a medium, that will allow us to make better news and entertainment when they are scaled out.” Peretti also said, perhaps too humbly, it would be easier for robots to steal the job of a CEO than that of any writer or creative. “AI systems and robots can eliminate some of the drudgery of reporting work,” he said. “But it’s going to be hard for a robot to call and interview someone, or write something funny or insightful. On the other hand, it’s probably pretty easy for a robot to make decisions about where to allocate capital within a business.”
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Apptio rises 41% in cloud IPO
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Katie Roof
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The cloud software company, which targets CIOs, went public during a slow year for tech IPOs. Only a handful have braved the market following the dismal performance of last year’s tech stocks. Apptio CEO Sunny Gupta told us they were confident they were ready for this step. “We have been preparing for this moment for a long time,” he said. The enterprise company has 325 business customers and this will “allow us to get off to the next 1,000 customers.” Gupta believes that “IT budgets are rising” and that for whatever reason it was the “last major function in the enterprise” to transition to the cloud. Apptio has raised over $136 million, dating back to 2007. Five percent stockholders include Greylock Partners, Madrona Venture Group and Shasta Ventures. Ravi Mohan from Shasta Ventures said that he believes Gupta “and his team at Apptio have helped transform the way that enterprises approach IT spending,” calling him an “exceptional founder.” But Apptio is not yet profitable. In the six months ending in June of this year, the company lost $14.9 million. That decreased from $18.4 million in the same period the year before. Revenue grew from $47.2 million to $61.7 million in the same time frame. All eyes will be on ’s offering next week, which has been an anticipated IPO for nearly a year.
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Leica and Huawei express their love for each other with a joint research lab
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Devin Coldewey
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Before the iPhone 7 made dual lenses cool… no, scratch that, Huawei and Leica made it cool first (and ). The result of their collaboration, , has sold well enough that the two companies are taking their relationship to the next level — moving in together. In a joint research facility in Germany, that is. The Max Berek Innovation Lab will be established in Wetzlar, where the companies will conduct imaging research, but also work on VR and AR technology. Huawei has dipped its toes into the VR world with a , but Leica’s lens tech will surely be helpful in creating a more full-service offering. You can surely expect more Leica-Huawei combos soon; whether they’ll stick with the color/monochrome system or move to a multiple focal-length one, or something completely different — well, presumably they’ll figure that out in the new lab. Berek was one of Leica’s earliest engineers and the creator of the first Leica lenses, among other things; he died in 1949.
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Gillmor Gang LIVE 09.23.16
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Steve Gillmor
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This was a LIVE recording session of – today with: John Taschek, Frank Radice, Kevin Marks, Keith Teare, and Steve Gillmor. Gillmor Gang’s Facebook page G3’s Facebook page
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The 5 technologies that are going to define the next decade in cities
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Colin O’Donnell
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Cities have always been hubs of technological experimentation, shaped by the people who inhabit them and the tools they use. We can still see the marks, both charming and garish, from technologies of years past — from old aqueducts to telephone booths to the damage done by cars. The next wave of real-time technologies that will define the next decade are software (rather than hardware) upgrades to the city that will nonetheless transform the way we work, play and live in our physical environments — our “brick and mortar” cities. And these technologies, each transformative in their own right, when used in combination to develop new products and experiences, will have a multiplying effect on the rate of change we see in urban environments. (And clearly, in the future, all technologies will have two-letter acronyms.) 5G is just a marketing term right now, but there is no denying that mobile data consumption is exploding, and all of our future technologies will require vastly faster, ubiquitous wireless connectivity. Demands on networks are doubling every year. At this rate, with a bit of quick math, we can see that in the next decade we will have 1,000x the demand for mobile data. To meet these skyrocketing demands, we need to densify the mobile networks of years past. This means moving from macrocell sites that cover neighborhoods to small cells that cover blocks, down to femtocells and picocells that bring high speed, synchronized connectivity to your home and human-scale settings. Bandwidth has become the lifeblood of cities as much as water, good roads or electricity have supported thriving cities in the past. It’s really the base technology that all others are built on. Look for ubiquitous gigabit-speed wireless in leading cities over the next decade. Of all the sensors available, will emerge as the most important tool — and maybe the most controversial — for helping us understand cities over the next decade. Sound, air quality and others are important, but CV allows the broadest range of possibilities and supports the greatest number of possible use cases. From understanding density of populations, to usage patterns, to speed of traffic, to how resources are being used, CV will quite literally be the eyes of the city. This comes with well-warranted concerns for privacy, but with pioneers like managing tight security and on-device processing, and promising insanely detailed chip-based object recognition, there’s reason to believe we’ll arrive at a scenario that protects our privacy. And if you can’t imagine the city being covered in cameras, take a look around and count the number of cameras already in the city. Nearly every store, street corner, cab and cop has a camera. The change will occur in swapping out the human who reviews a recording today for a computer that processes the images instead. The innovation will happen when this computer-generated data can be shared safely and securely across the city to foster new combinatorial innovations. For instance, it could support a real-time 3D map of the city that could be used for guiding autonomous vehicles around children playing in the street, supply city planning departments with real-time data on resource utilization or help business owners understand customer trends and create more responsive services and offerings. If 5G provides the base connectivity layer required for cities to evolve, CV will provide the understanding and “ground truth” of what’s going on. Where virtual reality, augmented reality and plain-old reality mix together to bring digital overlays that incorporate real physics and computer graphics and create immersive experiences with the best of the physical and digital, we call this mixed reality. MR has perhaps the most limitless possibilities of all five technologies listed here, and likely will serve as the eventual replacement to the mobile phone. From virtual goods that reduce strains on our resources to overlays on the world for entertainment, education and work, MR has astounding implications. With the help of companies like , and , use cases and interfaces that Google Glass or Pokémon Go have hinted at will transform into seamless, natural combinations of the internet, physical city infrastructure and society. Imagine changing the architecture of a city on-the-fly, or making certain information about yourself visible to different circles, like your relationship status in a dating-overlay or your blood type and heart rate for first responders. We have more than one billion cars on the planet. That’s trillions of dollars of rapidly depreciating infrastructure sitting on the streets, used for only a fraction of its life. And even when cars are used, their most efficient use (when driven close to capacity at the top of their performance profile) happens briefly and rarely, like when you are loaded up with kids and all your stuff from your summer vacation. We have given these cars billions of square feet of prime real estate in cities around the world. Autonomous vehicles not only have the potential to change the idea of car ownership and last-mile travel, but also radically change the way we manage logistics and delivery of goods. We will see cities’ use of space and people’s travel habits change dramatically over the next decade, enabled by changes to vehicle sizes and the addition of intelligent routing, breaking down car travel into everything from package-delivering drones (think or ), to micro-buses making commutes efficient and cheap, to intelligent, tiny, easy-to-use single-person rideables. We need brains to bring these technologies together and make them work. And we’re not talking about order-taking robots or computers we need to program with every detail. AI should let us : tell the system what we want to achieve, help it when it needs it and course correct it as it goes along. With learning systems that can scale massively in scope via cloud computing and maintain responsiveness across billions of interactions on the most minute level via in-device edge processing, AI is the most unpredictable and existential technology of the bunch. It has the potential to bring things together to help us solve critical macro issues — we can use AI to make , and prevent crime — and the smaller, more personal challenges, like finding a better way to get to work, meet a mate or optimize your schedule to better suit your desired lifestyle. Sure, there are lots of other breakthrough “physical” technologies out there, from 3D printing to micro housing. But, it’s 1,000,000,000 times harder to move an atom than an electron, so we think these real-time software technologies will drive the greatest rate of change in cities over the next decade. Think of them as your five basic ingredients with which you can build an infinite range of recipes. The real power of these technologies will be unlocked when we combine them — 5G-connected AVs, utilizing data sourced from the city via CV sensors to anticipate obstacles in real time, using AI to process the data and coordinate with other AVs for maximal street-level effectiveness, all while passengers look out a virtual MR window onto their individualized city (two-letter acronyms are the future!). Keep your eyes open and you’ll see these five technologies popping up in development today, and then gradually becoming a core part of pretty much all of our interactions with each other and the city over the next 10 years.
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Maluuba wants to make chatbots smarter by teaching them how to read
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Frederic Lardinois
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its first Siri-like personal assistant at TC Disrupt San Francisco four years ago. Since then, the company has raised $11 million and has licensed its technology to a number of handset manufacturers that now use it to power their own personal-assistant features. As Maluuba’s head of product Mo Musbah told me, the company spent the last two years doubling down on how it could utilize deep learning in the context of natural language processing. To do so, it recently opened an R&D office in Montreal, for example. As Musbah told me, “our vision there is to build one of the largest deep learning labs in the world,” so the company is definitely not lacking in ambition. It has the luxury of focusing on R&D because its voice assistant OEM business is creating steady revenue for the company; today, it’s showing off the result of this R&D work for the first time. Over the course of the last few years, its team of researchers built a system that can take a text and then allows you to ask questions about it, using natural language queries. For the post you are reading right now, for example, you could ask: “Who is Maluuba’s head of product?” and it would return the right answer. Here is what Maluuba’s tool, which the company sadly isn’t quite ready to release to the public yet, can do: That’s a very hard problem to solve because the system has to work without the advantage of lots of training. This kind of machine comprehension, Maluuba’s head of research Adam Trischler told me, is what the team believes will help make today’s personal assistants much smarter. “We realized two things: first, the current experience with personal assistants is fundamentally broken. You can’t inject external knowledge,” he said. “Second: the conversations you have are very limited. We wanted to have a more conversational experience — and a more powerful experience.” The problem he is hinting at here is that when you ask a service like Siri or the Google Assistant any question outside of its domain, it simply passes you off to the web to do a search there. If these assistants could actually understand these unstructured documents better, then they could actually answer more questions. If it could do this in real time, even better. Maluuba’s technology can now do this and that’s a pretty big step forward, especially because the system doesn’t rely on external information when it analyzes a text to answer your questions. Musbah tells me that the company is looking at applying this technology to its personal assistant, but one of the lower-hanging fruits is actually understanding manuals (to help both customers and the call-center agents that often help them, for example). “The consumer application of this is really awesome,” he told me. “But the first step for us is the enterprise use case.” The company is already working with what Musbah called “some pretty large partners,” though he couldn’t disclose who this partner is.
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Marketers say Facebook video metrics scandal is overblown
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Josh Constine
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“The issue is being hugely overblown. Marketers do not care about it, and it has zero impact on spend.” That’s the response of Jason Stein, founder and CEO of 250-employee social marketing agency , to a report strongly criticizing an error in Facebook’s “average duration of video viewed” metric. The paper called the miscalculation “an embarrassment to Facebook”, which spurred a firestorm of criticism . But TechCrunch spoke to a dozen social marketing executives that work directly with these metrics, and the consensus was that there are far more important measurements to look at, and the error wouldn’t necessarily impact spend if marketers looked at analytics more holistically, Facebook did make a mistake by defining and calculating the metric differently, which should have been spotted and corrected sooner. Facebook’s non-standard choice to count a “video view” as anyone who watches a clip for at scant three seconds or more has caused confusion for years. The error could have made Facebook look favorable in comparison to other video channels. Facebook’s video metrics dashboard Facebook told TechCrunch “This error has been fixed, it did not impact billing, and we have notified our partners both through our product dashboards and via sales and publisher outreach.” Facebook’s VP of advertising for the “average duration of video viewed” metric error, explaining that “The metric should have reflected the total time spent watching a video divided by the total number of people who played the video. But it didn’t – it reflected the total time spent watching a video divided by only the number of “views” of a video (that is, when the video was watched for three or more seconds).” However, Facebook did announce the error to marketers , put up an advertiser help post explaining the issue, and highlighted the error on the video metrics dashboard itself so anyone looking at the data would know. It’s also replaced the broken metrics with a clearer “Video Average Watch Time” metric that divides by all plays including ones under three-second plays, and a new “Video Percentage Watched” stat. Since advertisers are charged based on ten-second video views [Correction: Ten-second, not three-second views], no one paid for views that didn’t happen. Facebook offers third-party video verification options from Nielsen and Moat so marketers don’t have to take its word on measurement. If the issue was as big of a deal as the WSJ report implies, you might expect marketer outcry to have happened immediately rather than a month later. Screenshot of Facebook’s announcement of the error published about a month ago The “whole thing is silly” megabrand AB Inbev’s Senior Director Of Digital Connections Azania Andrews. Stein tells TechCrunch “If a user scrolls past your video and doesn’t watch, why in the world would you want them in average view time?” Other marketers had more nuanced perspectives. Analytics provider CTO Andrew Montalenti told us “I think the metric measurement problem that the WSJ printed about was a honest mistake on Facebook’s side. If someone didn’t watch for at least three seconds, it’s an accidental view and shouldn’t be counted.” An audience development director at a media brand who asked to remain anonymous told TechCrunch “Facebook’s metrics are definitely problematic, but no more problematic than the ratings from Nielsen the entire television industry works off of. Agencies and brands will be fine, as big video numbers generally benefit both sides.” Social marketing agency Laundry Service’s CEO Jason Stein called the Facebook video metric scandal “overblown” The founders of social media advisors , Andrew and Gracie Foxwell, told TechCrunch “There are various other metrics that advertisers likely care more about, such as return on ad spend, time a user spends on their website, cost per acquisition, etc–in other words, advertisers and business owners will care most about their overall campaign objective vs. cherry picking one metric out of hundreds.” The Foxwells did note that “some advanced Facebook advertisers could have certainly shifted budgets due to the incorrect definition”. Montalenti also noted that “When marketers were trying to do apples to apples comparisons [with channels like YouTube] it made Facebook look way better” but added “I doubt it influenced day to day ad buying activity. I think it was just to evaluate the channel.” Independent Facebook marketing strategist Jon Loomer’s perspective is that “On one hand we expect the numbers to be accurate, we need the numbers to be accurate. And Facebook, for the sake of perception and trusworthiness, needs the numbers to be accurate…That said most advertisers see reach and view time as secondary or even tertiary metrics. When determining whether something is working, we typically focus on actions like clicks or conversions.” ‘s strategy director Joe Gizzi says the error “artificially inflates the scale in Facebook’s favor compared against other platforms and social networks. What it doesn’t do is inflate costs; Facebook doesn’t charge for views of less than three seconds in these types of campaigns.” The agency won’t be moving spend off Facebook. “We see Facebook as a strong and important part of our clients’ marketing ecosystems, and continue to use it to target consumers where they are spending a significant amount of time.” whole thing is silly. Full data by sec has always been available. We always look at 30 for comp 2 YT & 10 for Nielsen benchmark — Azania Andrews (@jewelazania) Sameer Kazi, CEO of social media analytics giant Simply Measured tells us “Accurate data is always important, but for most marketers and advertisers, metrics like this aren’t the complete picture, they’re a part of a broader data set…Although the error in reporting these video metrics is regrettable, the fact that Facebook has self-reported and is reporting the correct numbers is to be applauded.” Still, regardless of the impact of the scandal, it could rattle marketer trust in Facebook, which could in turn impact its ad revenue, which could be why Facebook’s share price is currently down about 1.6 percent today. “The doubt in accuracy may drive content and promotion elsewhere” said social analytics firm Sysomos’ Chief Product Officer Erica Jenkins. Facebook is in a tough spot. If it too forcefully contests the report, it could feed into fears that Facebook have become so big that it’s unaccountable to advertisers or publishers. But its current apologetic response might leave people with the impression that the situation is worse than marketers on the ground think. Ad and marketing platforms like Facebook should learn the lesson here that if you use non-standard metrics, you must be as clear and specific as possible about how something is measured. And if you run a company people already worry is destroying media while claiming not to be a media company, there’s little margin for error.
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Weekly Roundup: Apple’s auto rumors, GoPro’s new devices and CZI’s $3B pledge
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Anna Escher
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This week, Yahoo came clean about a 2014 hack, Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan announced a huge investment to cure disease, rumors swirled around possible car tech purchase targets for Apple and the AI startup space continued to heat up with a few chat bot acquisitions. These are the top stories of the week. We got our hands on all of Apple’s new hardware. A few consensus include that with two new finishes, virtual buttons and water resistance for the . Apple’s AirPods indicate its to becoming a true audio platform. While they’re reliable, they’re far from audiophile quality. The with the launch of the Series 2. The second iteration delivers on all the qualities a decent sport watch should have. , too. While this may not be the most exciting update, it signifies that after 15 years and 13 major updates, the Mac is now a mature platform. [gallery ids="1391686,1381811,1386331"] The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative took to Facebook Live to announce its pledge to across the world. The money comes from the $45 billion organization Mark Zuckerberg and his wife Priscilla Chan started to advance human potential and equality. Rumors abound in Apple’s autotech sector. Apple is said to be in acquisition talks with car manufacturer McLaren and . McLaren told the BBC that the company isn’t having any investment discussion with Apple right now, but the NYT wrote that Apple and McLaren about a potential investment. McLaren’s statement could mean that it’s an acquisition instead of an investment, it has closed, or the discussion has ended. Time will tell which way Apple will turn. GoPro debuted . But these products feel more like iterations than revolutions, even two years after the company’s major release. Despite a huge amount of enthusiasm and great marketing, one can’t ignore the sense that GoPro may be having trouble turning the page. GoPro’s newest products feel more like iterations than revolutions http://tcrn.ch/2cT518D Posted by on Tuesday, September 20, 2016 The plot thickens for Rothenberg Ventures, the SF-based venture firm that has been involved in an ongoing SEC inquiry. The firm is being investigated on the claims of deceptive financial practices including wire fraud and bank fraud, among other financial mismanagements. Now, the situation has attracted the attention of the FBI and the U.S. Attorney’s General, says one source. A claim now states that Another day, another hack. Yahoo confirmed it’s working with law enforcement to . Yahoo says that the user account information was stolen in 2014 by a state-sponsored actor. The stolen information includes people’s names, email addresses, telephone numbers, birth dates, passwords. led by Google Capital and TCV. However sources close to the deal say Airbnb has not yet closed the round, and that the company has the capacity to increase the ceiling to the a $850 million figure. If all goes according to the company, Airbnb would become the fourth most valuable private startup. Facebook came clean on a slight error in how it . A mismatch in how average video view time is and how it is — resulting in that number being reportedly inflated by half or more, for a short period of two years. While it’s hard to believe that it took this long, Twitter . As a refresher, that means media like photos, videos, GIFs, polls and Quote Tweets no longer eat into your character count. But links still do. Yay? Big tech companies are eating up AI startups. , a company helping developers build conversational, Siri-like bots. of Navid Hadzaad, formerly of chat bot building platform Angel.ai (once known as GoButler). Hunger for AI tech only proves that tech is ready to . An IT error gave the world – and it’s pretty meager. An Uber app security engineer noticed that North Korea had set itself to allow domain administrators to request a list of its national top-level domains. Engineer Matthew Bryant had to watch for this and it was automatically copied. . It came to light that , creator of the Oculus Rift, was . They dedicated the non-profit to proving “that shitposting is powerful and meme magic is real” and their primary goals were (or are) to disrupt online conversations and create funny pictures of Hillary Clinton. It’s not surprising that technologists would use their power to harm or confuse people. But doing so using a “shitpost” is. week, the Department of Justice, led by Attorney General Kamala Harris and Y Combinator-backed nonprofit unveiled , a statewide tech initiative to collect police use-of-force data from over 800 police departments.
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The biggest problem with Snapchat’s geofilter product
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Travis Bernard
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Snapchat’s current geofilter product is a nightmare for event managers, brands, and any commercial business because anyone can coat-tail or hijack the space. Let’s say you’re holding a political rally at City Hall, and you want to buy a geofilter for the augmented Snapchat space at the event. When you go to purchase it from Snapchat, your plan gets rejected. Why? Someone else has already bought the augmented space. Snapchat’s current policy is “first come, first served,” and you can’t reserve a geofilter more than 30 days in advance. The first person to book at 12:01 AM 30 days ahead of an event will always get the geofilter. There’s also a cap on the number of geofilters that can exist within a designated space. This means that anyone can hijack your digital space and promote a brand, cause or idea… as long as they “get” there first. In the case of the political rally, your opponent uses the geofilter to blanket the augmented Snapchat space with something counter to the cause. Something nasty. Something that will make your event attendees sick. That sucks for the group holding the event. It doesn’t necessarily have to be a heated political move. It could just be a cheap, cringe-worthy ad. Or a company trying to sponsor a space where they don’t feel like buying the physical or digital ad space from the event holder. Reflik advertised in our augmented space without being a sponsor. I have nothing against the . We love that startups want to be a part of our events even if founders can’t travel there. They played within the rules Snapchat made, but the rules need to change. One solution would be to introduce a verified tier that gives you control over your own space. If the venue owners see their space being used inappropriately, they could request a take-down from Snapchat. Another solution would be to remove limits on the number of geofilters that can exist in an augmented space. This could create a spammy experience on Snapchat, but at least if you forgot to book the geofilter 30 days ahead of time you would still be able to make a last-minute play with filters to engage your Snapchat audience. Snapchat would also make more money by doing this. But there’s a better opportunity out there for Snapchat; one that could make them a lot more money off the product. Snapchat should introduce an for geofilters. Think about it. It makes a lot of sense. A bidding system would net Snapchat more money, eliminate low-quality advertisers that can’t compete and make the system less of a headache for brands, event planners, and commercial businesses. There’s a reason that companies like , and all use live bidding systems for ad networks: It works. Snapchat has made a name for itself by always doing the opposite. Their ad platform has a weird set of rules with unconventional formats, and the geofilter product is no different. The reason Snapchat geofilters are an increasingly valuable ad unit is because everyday folks can play on the same level as big brands, generating longer and more attentive eyeballs than other ads. While it’s important that the rules allow for brands and commercial businesses to protect their space, it’s equally important that geofilters maintain their grass-roots experience. Snapchat has always done a great job pushing the creative envelope, but on the back end of their geofilters system it might help them to do what brands, advertisers, and businesses want, and what advertising titans are already doing: create a bidding platform. This would result in fewer headaches for advertisers and more fans of the geofilters product in the ad industry. Here’s to hoping no one puts a fugly geofilter on your wedding venue.
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How legacy brands and retailers can keep up with our tech-driven world
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Mona Bijoor
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The U.S. apparel industry is currently valued at , and with the high number of dollars pouring into the retail economy, are looking to technology to foster deeper connections with consumers and elevate the overall shopping experience. Whether it’s in-store or online, technology is becoming a lever to bolster brand loyalty and customer satisfaction. Resources such as shopbots and “virtual concierge” services are helping turn new customers into repeat shoppers. Previously an underutilized resource in the fashion industry, retail is now offering personalized shopping experiences that suit the needs of a diversified pool of consumers. Case in point, that aims to expedite and streamline the in-store shopping experience for customers. Watson, IBM’s AI technology, answer questions about inventory, store navigation, FAQs and specific questions regarding store locations. The “Macy’s On Call” system also evolves as it learns more about its customers. These cognitive research capabilities have helped Macy’s build a mechanism to enhance the brick-and-mortar experience in an age where online shopping is king. The department store chain has been to remain of value to shoppers who have ample choices — both online and in-store. With more people shopping online, the retail giant is closing stores and focusing heavily on providing superior customer experience with bots in the real estate locations they’ve retained. Technology presents a huge opportunity to reinvigorate the consumer experience, and other are following suit in order to with the growing desire for personalized detail. offer makeup tips, reviews and customer service answers, while Swedish-based clothing manufacturer H&M offers customers fashion suggestions and outfit recommendations. Both have some of the . The app’s easy-to-use interface has helped boost response times for customer inquiries. Through continuous use, these bots adapt to customers and effectively “learn,” allowing them to make suggestions based on purchase history and products best suited for specific customers. With its increasing popularity, , with big like Victoria’s Secret getting in on the action. Similarly, various social platforms are also playing an increasingly key role in consumer engagement for retail . Michael Kors has leveraged Instagram using the hashtag #InstaKors, which allows users to shop for special products directly on Instagram. Nike has also used Instagram to engage shoppers with special promotions and exclusive releases to customers coming back. This style of e-commerce gives customers a new way to interact with on a more intimate level, creating a stronger community for engagement that helps retain relevance. And social retail isn’t one-size-fits-all; many are turning to Snapchat to engage with customers. With 150 million Snapchat users, like , giving viewers access to the brand’s mobile sites while allowing users to shop without leaving Snapchat. With the current e-commerce revolution gaining traction, . Soon, shoppers ditch credit cards altogether; digital fingerprint scanners, which are expected to be implemented in the next few years, allow for secure, one-click checkouts. This in turn lowers fraud charges and makes it more difficult for hackers, as credit card data no longer needs to be stored. Additionally, when ordering online, same-day shipping is expected to become the norm. Waiting three to five business days for a product you ordered will become a thing of the past. Instant gratification — yes please. need to continuously evolve and integrate smarter shopping in order to advance in an increasingly competitive e-commerce landscape. From e-receipts to fashion-forward shopbots, technology is sure to continue shaking the way we spend and how build a cult-like following.
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The end of the automotive supply chain
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Alex Moazed
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Over the next 10 years, the differentiating source of and value in the industry will not be car parts or engines. Instead, it will be a network of software developers. The autonomous car will be here before we know it. Tesla autonomous technology has already amassed 100 million-plus miles. Legacy car manufacturer General Motors joined the action by acquiring self-driving startup . Apple has plans to release its own car by 2019, while Uber is planning to . When autonomous vehicles become available at scale, the car will transform from just a mode of transportation into a new-age entertainment hub, with captive consumers surrounded by its technology for an average of at least . The industry has been building cars for more than 100 years. The next 100 years will look radically different. Consumers will care less about the physical performance of the car and more about the software and experience of the car. Ring a bell? Enter the development platform for autonomous cars. This will be the smartphone wars 2.0. The market opportunity is at least as big, if not far bigger. As we saw with the introduction of the iPhone and Google’s Android, existing dominant players BlackBerry and Nokia were laid to waste. Steven Elop, the CEO of Nokia at the time, had a famous quote, which I referenced in my book Modern Monopolies: “The battle of devices has now become a war of ecosystems.” So too with cars. Around the time the iPhone was first introduced, Nokia owned 50 percent of the smartphone market, RIM 8.3 percent and Motorola 6.6 percent. Why did none of them build a development platform to draw in millions of software developers to build apps on top of their phones and operating system? That’s the billion-dollar question. Let’s hope automobile manufacturers realize the tremendous threat and opportunity in front of them. Which one will step up and be the automobile version of the iPhone? In platforms, there’s typically room for only one or two dominant players. Who will own the next 50 years of the industry? While bringing autonomous cars to consumers is an important task today, ultimately it will be table stakes, as any smart exec should expect that every new car will have autonomous capabilities to drive itself within the next five to 10 years. We’re already seeing this on a small scale with features like automatic accident-prevention breaking. Once consumers become familiar with the benefits (and relative safety) of autonomous cars, there will be no going back. The more exciting challenge is not in manufacturing an autonomous car, but rather in building a platform that connects software developers with consumers and passengers in these vehicles of the future. Automobile manufacturers must embrace business model innovation and diversify to become a platform companies, lest they face the same fate as Nokia and BlackBerry before them. Unfortunately, for the auto manufacturers, there will only be two winners. No one wants to be Windows Phone — but inevitably, more than a few of today’s major players will be. The auto companies that are first to successfully launch a development platform for autonomous cars will have a distinct advantage. Traditional enterprises usually innovate in increments. If they were to embrace true disruption, they would embrace business model innovation. are fundamentally different than existing linear models that drive today’s auto manufacturers. Platform businesses take many years to reach a point of critical mass, and have a great deal of risk and expense associated with making them successful. However, if they are successful, platforms enjoy winner-take-all dynamics and strong network effects that create a key defensive moat to keep competitors out. A lot of C-suite executives have their hands tied by external shareholders expecting quarterly performance. Building a platform business is like starting a new company, and it takes a long time for it to reach a point of maturity that satisfies investor expectations. Amazon is a great example of a platform company that has been able to manage investor expectations to tolerate many years of losses with the hope that Amazon’s strong network effects will eventually result in market dominance and shareholder earnings. companies should take a page out of Amazon’s playbook and position themselves for the next 10 years of investment. Though they may not see it yet, this move is necessary for their survival. But it also offers enormous upside: the chance to win the platform wars that are bound to revolutionize and challenge traditional approaches in the industry. Somewhat ironically, former BlackBerry co-CEO Jim Balsillie once said that this transition from linear to platform business is “where tech companies go to die.” Unfortunately for him, in the case of BlackBerry, he was right. Apple and Google have shown that this need not be the case. But time is of the essence. Executives and shareholders should be clamoring for today’s companies to embark on their platform journey as early as possible, lest they miss chance to win the battle for the future of the automobile. The future of cars is very clear. Now we’ll see who gets there first. Game on.
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Leica’s new instant camera has a selfie mode
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Brian Heater
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The Sofort is a strange duck. It’s a $300 instant camera by premium manufacturer Leica that looks a bit like a real world version of the Instagram logo. The price puts it well over Fujifilm’s offerings that also run on the Japanese company’s Instax technology, but this Leica we’re talking about here, so it’s really only natural that there will be a notable premium in pricing. The camera sports a handful of different modes, including, notably, self-portrait, a classier, more Leica way of saying selfie, which has a built self-timer mode. There’s also a rectangular mirror on front, so users can look at their face as they take a picture of it. Other featured modes including Macro, Action, and People & Party. There are a number of auto features, along with a manual override, which adjust things like focus on and brightness. Leica’s also got its own branded film specially for the Sofort, in both black and white and color, featuring “warm cream color” frames designed, no doubt, in homage to classic offerings from Polaroid. The camera and film will hit Leica stores and dealers in November.
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Are drones actually a sector or just another layer in the enterprise SaaS stack?
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Michael Berolzheimer
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The world is abuzz — the past several years have been an exciting time for drones. From videos of drones flying to marketing shots like , drones have gained the attention of consumers, enterprises and governments. Their ability to shoot remarkable photography and capture data, and potentially violate privacy and property rights, has led to a flurry of opinions, regulations and oversight. As a result, the landscape has become very cloudy, and we are increasingly asking ourselves if drones are actually a “sector” or yet another layer in the Enterprise SaaS stack? Hardware and software services have dominated drone investing to date — AngelList cites $1.9 billion. Infrastructure technology and investment have lagged, yet will be essential to support more advanced service providers and to enable true autonomous delivery over longer ranges to the consumer. This is creating a refreshed demand on the innovator side as early entrepreneurs (appropriately) jumped straight to providing enterprise and consumer solutions as the industry exploded. This, then, left a gap on the front end of the technology innovation curve that we believe now requires a Drone 2.0 refresh — technology building that will continue to support the key solution providers in expanding areas and thus perpetuate the cycle. We are seeing this with emerging enabling technology companies such as , and , among others, and believe there is room to run. Technical solutions around fleet management, smart routing, sensors and other technology aspects of the flying robots will take center stage again. To date, the majority of enterprise drone investment opportunities have been focused around a key solution provider. These opportunities often look like consulting practices that leverage a drone to sell a specific service to an enterprise, and are meaningful solutions for many industries, including construction, mining, insurance, forestry, police and government, among others. Indeed, each business has a viable place in both the drone “stack” and the targeted business vertical. However, the landscape is becoming increasingly fragmented and crowded, and thus difficult to see where outsized value lies for investors in order to achieve venture scale returns. As such, we assess the drone sector through the lens of a hub and spoke model. At the center is the key solution provider, whose size is variable due to various factors. Many of the supporting functions are outsourced to vertical specialists, and connected (and disconnected) to each other at various times… akin to a living ecosystem. The enterprise successes so far have largely benefited from first-mover advantage, and now face increasing competition from new entrants providing incrementally better solutions at slightly lower prices. We expect that solution providers will now defend their early customers through expanding their value propositions and outsourcing non-critical drone functions, including hardware, to the lowest bidder. Hardware and software startups have grabbed market share as the drone stack has emerged. It is important to note, as certain players broaden their reach up and down the drone stack, a true technological or business breakthrough must provide a step-function improvement over the status quo. An increasing number of these solutions are being absorbed by adjacent players, as developing it themselves is trivial. Deeper tech is harder to plug-and-play, due to the tight integration required, than the component companies will indicate to a prospective investor. Not only must a solution provider provide a core solution or service, it must solidify its place in the drone tech stack. This requires other technology (hardware, middleware and software providers) to build on all sides of the solution, and a structure where each additional client brings more value to the platform. For example, Dronesmith’s sensor management platform also allows for developers to continually develop and deploy sensing applications useful to customers. has become a resource for enterprises and service contractors to manage and expand their drone operations. Iris Automation, and others are tackling the biggest challenge facing the industrial drone industry: autonomous flight beyond the line of sight. It is an industry-wide belief that industrial drones cannot take off unless they become truly autonomous, requiring situational awareness and collision avoidance technology, the latter of which Iris offers. As the industry evolves, the key solution providers holding technological and business advantage will succeed, especially those showing platform effects. They will continually strengthen their core position and outsource the commoditized aspects of drone technology (hardware) or business (drone connectivity). built out many of these parts as the industry sprouted, and is now servicing the largest elements of the hub as the industry has matured around industrial applications. In the future, they will use multiple vendors to support their customers’ use cases. The workplace is clearly evolving as drones fly into the mainstream and onto the job site. Humans are pushed further up the knowledge economy chain, making our time more efficient and lives safer. We are seeing the biggest potential impacts in mining exploration (dropping prices by 10x), agricultural surveying (increasing crop yield by 40 percent-plus), geographical mapping, building and insurance inspection, package delivery, search and rescue efforts and forestry inspection. The effectiveness of drones in these industries establishes their placement in the stack and promotes network effects and technology innovation. Businesses that truly enable delivery or sharpen data collection and sensing will win mindshare and investment as industry players increasingly include them in budgets and workflows. is addressing fundamental changes in localization and computer vision. and are delivering on the promise of drones in rural areas. Infrastructure companies will also emerge in the next wave, enabling constant connectivity, sense and avoid or routed delivery. Marketplaces around contract work, images or other data will also expand the reach of this enabling technology. Drones hold promise to be a truly enabling technology supporting a variety of crucial global industries. The drone-first solutions to problems both known and to be discovered are foundationally solid, efficient and effective. The supporting web of hardware, middleware and software is now substantially robust enough to provide significant value to certain enterprises. As enterprise investors, we consider the broader business opportunity where drones and the technology drive change within large organizations, and aim to observe the drone “sector” though a wider lens. As with any enterprise investment, we embrace the specific problem a company is solving, who is going to pay for it and why it is the most effective solution. We, alongside entrepreneurs, must be certain we are saving companies both time and money. We must vow to think beyond “drones” and study the business problems and drone-specific solutions required to solve them. Having the discipline to build and support these companies is extremely difficult, but a better, safer and more efficient workplace will surely be the result.
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Canon borrows a few tricks from its DSLR line for its latest mirrorless
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Brian Heater
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Canon’s already got a handful of mirrorless cameras under its belt, but the company hasn’t quite committed itself to the format in the same way we’ve seen from likes of Sony, Olympus and Fujifilm. The company’s latest, unveiled early in the lead up the big Photokina event in Cologne next week, looks to mark a much whole-hearted shift toward the space. And in a sense, it serves as an acknowledgement that the category is both too popular to ignore, and can be embraced while making limited compromises when it comes to things like speed and quality. The EOS M5 draws fairly heavily from the company’s own DSLR line, namely the EOS 80D, with which it shares some key specs, including a 24.4-megapixel APS-C sensor. In fact, Canon’s claiming that the image quality is pretty comparable to what you’ll be able to get on the 80D. Also on-board with both cameras is the Dual Pixel CMOS autofocus, designed to help users grab shots in video mode. The camera’s also quite quick to the draw, with a 9-frames-per-second burst shooting speed. One of the downsides with the form factor versus its DSLR older cousin is a lower-rated battery life – kind of a given when you’re dealing with a smaller camera, really. The camera’s size does have its advantages, of course – at 13.4 ounces, it’s roughly have the weight of the aforementioned DSLR. The camera’s got a few other tricks on board, as well, including Bluetooth, WiFi and NFC pairing. It’s due out in November, priced at $980 for just the body. Canon will also be offering up a new mirrorless-friendly 18-150mm lens at $499. Or you can plunk down $1,479 to get it paired with the new camera in December.
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Pre-orders for the Fove 0 eye-tracking VR headset go live November 2
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Lucas Matney
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The first consumer VR headset to integrate eye-tracking is about ready for primetime. , a from Disrupt SF 2014, will begin taking pre-orders for the eye-tracking headset, now officially called the Fove 0, at There were a number of production issues that the rollout of the Kickstarter-backed headset until fall from a projected early March ship date. In addition to the few details regarding launch, the team at Fove also shared final tech specs for the device. The tethered headset will sport a 70hz 2560 x 1440 OLED display with a field-of-view somewhere in between 90 and 100 degrees. The eye-tracking capabilities on the headset will refresh at 120fps and enable features like foveated rendering, a technology which mimics the human eye to reduce the necessary display resolution at the fringe of a user’s sight. At these display resolutions there’s some question as to whether it actually lightens computing loads a significant amount. There have been a number of headset reference designs shown off since Fove’s introduction which have teased eye-tracking capability, including most notably the
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Unilever said to be the early frontrunner to acquire The Honest Company
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Matthew Lynley
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We’re hearing from our sources Unilever has been in serious talks with the Honest Company, and may very well win the bid for the e-commerce startup, though our sources stressed that the deal is in early stages. As usual, the deal is fluid and the final details could change (or not happen at all), and the exact price in the conversation could not be learned, though one source said the price could be more than $1 billion. The Honest Company would be the latest in a string of acquisitions in the e-commerce space by larger operations and consumer packaged goods companies. Unilever earlier this year acquired Dollar Shave Club , one of a number of large e-commerce acquisitions in recent months. Walmart also acquired Jet.com — another e-commerce operation that was burning through a remarkable amount of cash to grow — . It also underscores, even with the success of companies targeting a narrow array of products, that e-commerce operations with strong brands may still face steep challenges and make more sense in the scope of larger CPG and e-commerce companies with ample financing. With enough capital — and not subject to the whims of investors and Wall Street — larger operations and consumer packaged goods companies can wait out the loss-leading periods as they grow and potentially end up with highly profitable divisions with strong branding. Last week, was in talks with larger consumer packaged good companies to sell itself ( , and we too heard this was the case). From that information it would seem the batch would have included companies like Proctor & Gamble, but we hear from our sources the deal is probably going to come from Unilever. The Honest Company sells a number of consumer products like diapers, baby formula, bath and body care, and even laundry detergent. It’s also known for its high-profile co-founder, actress Jessica Alba, but there has also been a big surge in care and beauty products also driven by the popularity of personalities. One case is ipsy, a makeup subscription service , which has piggybacked on the immense popularity of online personality Michelle Phan. The Honest Company, too, , and it remains to be seen if it’ll be a successful venture. Highly targeted online products go beyond simple consumer packaged goods as well. While The Honest Company is gunning for beauty products, for example, . The general trend here is that startups are increasingly starting off with, or simply focusing entirely, on a narrow branch of products in the hopes to overtake larger e-commerce companies that are hoping to sell a wide array of products and may not necessarily have the time or capital to invest heavily in one division alone. In short, there’s a lot of competition for an operation like The Honest Company that can specialize in certain areas that are driving user acquisition from different sources like online personalities, and that further complicates large-scale e-commerce services looking to deliver a variety of products that might be overtaken by those smaller operations. The company generated around $275 million in revenue last year, , though even with that amount of revenue e-commerce operations can be notoriously difficult to operate. The Honest Company has also been the target of lawsuits, and at TechCrunch Disrupt NY earlier this year Alba said the company was . In August last year, The . Altogether, the company — founded in 2011 — has raised around $220 million. There have been whispers that the company is also slowly preparing for an IPO, but it looks like those plans may be nixed. Representatives from Unilever and The Honest Company did not respond to a request for comment.
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Rize teaches 3D printing some long-awaited new tricks
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Haje Jan Kamps
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Boston-based has developed a new type of 3D printing which eliminates the need for lengthy post-printing clean-up processes. The Rize text on the side of this grabby-hand isn’t printed on the object – it is part of the 3D printed plastic. Using a patented technology the company calls , its printers are able to imbue plastics with features they didn’t usually have. For example, it will be easier to remove 3D printed products from the build surface, it’s possible to inject dyes into the product to create parts with patterns, variable hardness and other superpowers. “We’ve developed a technology that enables 3D printed parts to have qualities that wouldn’t otherwise be possible,” Julie Reece, the company’s VP of Marketing explains. “This means that a single 3D printed part can have different qualities. It would be possible to print a running shoe, for example.” The company is currently in beta, but has a beefy* product roadmap and is planning on rolling out its various technologies and functional dyes over the next few years. It is currently raising a $5m Series A to wrap up its beta program and bring its next-gen 3D printers to market.
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Optimizely targets developers with its new testing platform, Optimizely X
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Anthony Ha
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has helped to popularize A/B testing — the idea of trying out different versions of a website to see which one performs better. However, co-founder and CEO Dan Siroker said the practice has largely been limited to marketers testing relatively superficial changes, such as the text or the layout of a page. So today, at its Opticon user conference, the company announced a new version of its platform, now dubbed , which Siroker said will allow for “experimentation in code.” “We made experimentation accessible to the mere marketing mortal — we made this good idea something that anyone could do,” Siroker said. “That same thing will happen for developers.” For example, Optimizely says customers will be able to experiment with search results, product recommendations, pricing and various product features. While I suggested that experimenting with the core functionality of your website or app might seem a bit riskier than fiddling text, Siroker replied, “Most of our customers love the idea of experimenting as a way to mitigate risk. The worst outcome is to go live too soon to 100 percent of [their] customers.” However, he added, “Most companies I talk to look at Amazon, Google, Facebook and think, ‘I could never afford hundreds of data science and engineers and analysts'” — so Optimizely X is supposed to put that kind of testing in their hands even if they don’t have those kinds of resources. Optimizely X includes support for experiments in Python, Java, Ruby and Node. Siroker noted that the platform will allow testing across different types of devices, including connected TV apps built for tvOS and Android TV. Optimizely X is scheduled to become generally available on October 4.
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Spotify will launch its streaming service in Japan this month
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Jon Russell
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After more than a year of hinting, Spotify is finally coming to Japan this month. The Swedish music streaming service will go live in the country before the end of September, a source at the company confirmed to TechCrunch. that the launch was imminent. The publication, one of Japan’s leading business publications, said that Spotify Premium would cost around 1,000 yen (close to $10) per month, and that’s the same price range we have heard. This launch in Japan, the planet’s second largest music market based on sales, has been a long time coming for Spotify, which recently passed 40 million paying customers. Last October — — that the company was increasing its focus on Asia with plans to land in Indonesia and Japan. of this year, and Spotify has been focused on bringing its service online in Japan since then. Spotify’s Tokyo office has been open for 18 months but it has been for two years. Yet, it has sat back and watched as others have beaten it to the punch in Japan. Messaging service Line, which and has nearly 70 million users in Japan, last year, while Apple, Google and have piled in with rival services. Spotify has certainly taken its time building out a team in Tokyo — it is for nine other positions — but there is some logic behind the delay. and there’s plenty of resistance to streaming and other online models from record labels. But, with annual music sales , Japan is a market that streaming companies hope can become equally as lucrative for them. That’s particularly important for Spotify given in the not too distant future. 40 is the new 30. Million. 😄 — Daniel Ek (@eldsjal) Spotify CEO Daniel Ek subtly revealed its latest user milestone this week Spotify has brokered deals with labels in Japan — and even hired staff from them — and it’ll be banking that the competition, which haven’t exactly set the world on fire there yet, have created early demand for streaming which it can piggyback on. Now, with anything up to a half a dozen notable streaming services available to consumers, Japan’s music industry is beginning its transition to digital. As for Spotify’s next move in Asia: that it was casting its eye on India, and the country could well be its next target. However, we understand that there’s been no solid commitment on that from Spotify yet. Nevertheless, given the slow speed at which it has expanded in Asia, we don’t expect to see a move into India — or other new markets in Asia, for that matter — for some time. Spotify and it is currently available in five countries in the continent: Hong Kong, Singapore, the Philippines, Malaysia and Indonesia.
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How virtual reality is transforming the sports industry
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Ben Dickson
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After , virtual reality made its reappearance last year with headsets such as Samsung Gear VR, Google Cardboard and Oculus Rift. But this time, it’s here to stay and, in less than a year, it’s already drawn attention and investment from and , and has made huge impact across , . Sports is one of the domains where technology is being put to use in the most effective and aggressive way. We’ve already become used to the presence of augmented reality (AR) in sports. Think about watching football without the projected first-down line or hockey without puck tracking. Now, with the sudden leap that VR has taken recently, the sport experience is being amplified and becoming more immersive in nearly every possible field, ranging from consuming content to training and recruiting athletes. Here’s how VR is revolutionizing sports, starting with the fan experience. Something that is being seen a lot lately is the use of 360-degree cameras to capture and stream sporting events in virtual reality. This is a boon to all those sports fans who can’t afford the luxury of flying half the world in order to see their favorite teams and athletes perform. In most cases, a VR headset and an app is all you’ll need to be taken to the stadium to look around for yourself as the action unfolds, all without leaving the comfort of your home. This is the most realistic experience you get from viewing a sporting event without actually attending in person. The Rio 2016 Summer Olympic Games kicked off with the promise of solid VR coverage by broadcasting networks such as and — a first in Olympics broadcasting — viewable with VR headsets through their respective apps. VR broadcasting still being in its experimental stages, the only catch was that, but for a few exceptions, the events weren’t streamed until the day after they took place. Hopefully, the next Olympiad will see more live VR streaming. The big leagues have also caught on to the potential value of the medium, and have been dabbling in it for a while by making considerable investments to bring the new experience to their fans. is a VR broadcasting startup that is betting big on covering professional sports and changing the fan experience. The firm has already given VR coverage to some of the main sports events, such as the between the Golden State Warriors and the New Orleans Pelicans last fall. The NBA has made the most progress in adopting VR, but other leagues are not far behind, and NextVR has already covered , the live-stream broadcast of the , the and a couple of NHL games. You can expect much to change in the coming months and years, including interactivity, stats and additional info added to the display, as well as on-player camera feeds enabling you to view the action from the eyes of your favorite athlete. We’ve already seen progress made in this field. Last year, Spanish startup used its smart wearables to offer player perspective video feeds at several sporting events, including a . The garment contains an embedded HD camera and a microphone, plus additional sensors that monitor player health stats. While a fun concept, player-perspective VR cameras might not offer the best experience, creating dizzying effects when viewed with VR headsets. For the moment, VR broadcast of sporting events is limited. While the 360-degree video feed allows you to move your head and look around, your point of view remains rooted in the spot, hence, some at all. Experts concur that we’re still some 10 years away before we can see true VR with proper video. In the meantime, there’s no shortage of companies trying to make headway in that direction. is a VR startup that gathers player data from soccer matches in order to create 3D simulations of the game. Users wearing VR headsets are free to explore the game from anywhere in the stadium, including the perspective of players, fans or officials. While the added degree of freedom is welcome, the fact that it’s using computer-generated graphics might not be appealing to a wide majority of the fans. However, the medium can be tremendously useful to sports teams, who can use it to replay and analyze the game from different perspectives. Beyond Sports has already partnered with soccer clubs Ajax and PSV in its native Holland, as well as the Royal Dutch Football Association and Utrecht University. Another notable effort is that of , the company known for its “freeD” 3D rendering technology. The technique involves the use of an array of ultra high-definition cameras positioned around the arena to create seamless, near-realistic 3D rendering of the action. While the technology hasn’t been used to capture full games, it has already been . One of the strongest arguments against the use of VR in consuming sports content is the fact that it takes away the social experience. Part of the pleasure of watching a game is having the company of family and friends. VR headsets, alas, only offer a solitary experience. The acquisition of Oculus by Facebook is partly attributed to fixing this shortcoming. Tech startup aims to tackle the social element with its VR offering. The company’s technology is similar to that of Beyond Sports. It displays a virtual reconstruction of the stadium and players in near-real time, and fans are invited to step in and view the environment from any viewpoint they want. However, Virtually Live adds social functionality to the mix. Fans appear as avatars and can interact with each other through VoIP. The firm wishes to thus make it more compelling for people to get together and watch games in VR. is also betting big on the social aspect of VR and has placed it front and center in its VR platform. Although the technology is more focused on socializing activities such as chatting, playing games and watching movies, it also has features that make it fun to watch sporting events in VR. Professional teams have long used the study of films to examine their own performance or assess opponents. But with the vantage point being much different from what a player experiences during the game, the results are not always optimal. Now, coaches and players train better by watching and experiencing plays again and again in virtual reality. This is the idea that, along with a $50,000 investment, got VR startup off the ground a year ago. STRIVR creates VR training videos shot from the player’s-eye view of the action during practices. It then enables players to receive realistic, repetitive training by visualizing through VR headsets situations they will face on the field. For instance, quarterbacks can review the options and opportunities they missed by going through a play several times and reviewing each of their teammates’ positions. This helps football teams prepare players for games without requiring their excessive presence on the field, where they risk being injured and exposed to summer heat. Teams can thus increase practice time without breaking the stringent rules that both the NFL and NCAA (college football) place on outdoor practice. Five college football teams enrolled in STRIVR’s technology when Derek Belch, the company’s co-founder and a former Cardinal kicker, went on a tour last spring, introducing his technology to different college programs. In June 2015, the Dallas Cowboys signed, on as well. Today, STRIVR’s system has become part of the training program for 23 college and professional teams, including the San Francisco 49ers, the Minnesota Vikings as well as one team each from the NBA, WNBA and NHL. The company expects to announce a partnership with a Major League Baseball team soon. Virtual reality has yet to manifest its full potential in sports. For instance, it can make the recruiting process much easier by making college campuses seem much closer to recruits. Athletes can visit stadiums, locker rooms, weight rooms and practically every place and aspect of their future team in the immersive experience of VR — without leaving their homes and stepping on a plane. We may also see new sports emerge that are totally based on VR and its sister technologies, augmented reality and mixed reality. E-sports have been around for a while, though many would argue that video games don’t count as sports. But with titles such as and , which are integrating video gaming elements and physical exercise, it may not be long before games that integrate AR/VR technologies become fully professional sports. The opportunities and possibilities are yet to be discovered, and we can expect many pleasant surprises in the near future. It would be an overstatement to say that virtual reality will soon eclipse real-life experience, but there’s no doubt that it will transform the sports industry forever.
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20-minute hot take: 2017 Volvo S90 Pilot Assist
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Kristen Hall-Geisler
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I’ve spent the last couple of days at a driving event, and the last car of the two dozen or so I drove was the with the latest version of IntelliSafe, which includes City Safety, Pilot Assist, and more. I’ve already put my name on the list for a more extensive test drive, but even with less than 30 minutes of drive time, I noticed differences. In the spring, I had a with the last version of this “semi autonomous drive system” — Volvo’s words, not mine — and I found it worked well then. The version in the S90 sedan is new and indeed improved. The lane keeping assist felt more assured, and the Pilot Assist technology worked up to 80 mph. I had a stretch of highway headed toward Portland, Oregon, to navigate in the early afternoon. I didn’t get anywhere near 80 mph, but that was fine for a quick test of the new system. There were open stretches where the car could get up to the speed limit of 55 mph, where I’d set the automatic cruise control. There were also congested stretches with cars speeding up and slowing way down across four lanes of traffic. Pilot Assist worked seamlessly in these conditions to read traffic and slow down when appropriate then speed up again when traffic got moving. It did a particularly good job when vehicles were merging onto the highway and I was in the right lane to take the next exit. But one of the most noticeable changes was that Pilot Assist no longer needs a lead car to lock onto. Even on those less congested stretches of road, Pilot Assist kept me at a constant speed and in my lane with minimum input from me, though I did need to monitor the situation in case anyone around me tried anything weird. When I needed to take that exit or merge into traffic myself, Pilot Assist took a break and the indicators went dark to let me know I was in charge. I would take over for the tricky parts of driving, and when things were easy and repetitive again, I reset the system and let it do most of the work. I kept my eyes on the road and my hands lightly on the wheel. If you take your hands completely off the wheel, Pilot Assist turns off. This is a step in the direction of semi autonomous vehicles, not a vehicle. . There are other safety features I wasn’t able to test on an urban highway, like the S90’s ability to detect pedestrians and bicyclists with City Safety, as well as Large Animal Detection when outside the city. I was also alone in the car, so I wasn’t able to get pictures of the Pilot Assist features in the console display while they were active.
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Here’s how to watch Thursday Night Football on Twitter tonight
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Fitz Tepper
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Twitter’s big day is finally here. Tonight is the first night of NFL’s Thursday Night Football, which will be streamed all season on Twitter (as well as CBS and NFL Network as cable partners). Twitter reportedly beat out companies like Facebook and Amazon for the exclusive mobile stream, and at the time it was a big win for the company under the then new CEO Jack Dorsey. Now it’s time to see if the move will pay off and bring the the platform new users who are coming for the football and not necessarily for Twitter itself. So how can you actually watch the game tonight? To find the stream you can go to the Moments tab inside the app, or you can go to to access it directly and from the web. The company also an Apple TV, Fire TV and Xbox One app yesterday for users who want to steam the game on their actual TVs. While the game will be available to watch on cable, Twitter would obviously prefer these viewers use their stream, so is launching these apps to make it easier. The viewing expierence is pretty much what people expected with a video stream at the top of the page, and live timeline of football-themed tweets below. There’s also a place to type in your own tweet which Twitter is automatically ore populating with a #TNF hashtag.
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Amazon Echo owners spend more on Amazon, says NPD
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Darrell Etherington
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We all suspected the Echo’s purpose was – at least in part – to drive more Amazon sales. And that’s exactly what’s happening, according to a new study by . The research company found that owners of the Echo spent around 10 percent more after they bought the voice-powered smart speaker than they did before. The NPD Group’s Checkout Tracking purchase monitor provided the data, analyzing customer spending and overall number of receipts, and found that there was also a 6 percent bump in the overall number of purchases made by Echo owners on Amazon.com when compared to their pre-Echo existence. Data for the study came from Echo’s full term of availability, which surprisingly actually spans two years (it feels like it’s been a lot less time to me). NPD also found that about half of the online spending done by Echo owners happens at Amazon.com once they pick up a device. It’s not a huge deal for other retailers yet because of Echo’s somewhat limited reach thus far – a recent . But it’s a trend that could be very good for Amazon long-term, especially as it brings the to market at a new, more affordable price point.
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Singapore’s ViSenze raises $10.5M to bring the benefits of AI to e-commerce
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Jon Russell
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There’s another round of funding for an artificial intelligence startup in Asia that’s focused on e-commerce. Fresh from last month, now Singapore-based has a $10.5 million Series B raise. Existing investor Rakuten Ventures led the round alongside WI Harper Group and Enspire Capital. A number of other investors also participated, including SPH Media Fund, FengHe Fund Management, Raffles Venture Partners, Phillip Private Equity, and UOB Venture Management. The startup was spun out of the National University of Singapore more than three years ago and it . ViSenze develops artificial intelligence for use in e-commerce, working with companies like Myntra in India and Zalora in Southeast Asia. Its first product was a visual search feature, and there are two new releases coming soon that will expand its focus to video and help retailers with off-site discovery, ViSenze CEO and co-founder Oliver Tan told TechCrunch. “We believe shopping behavior is very inspired by enriched content in the social web and media space,” Tan said in an interview. “If we can find interesting connections and help leverage content that inspires shopping behavior, then that can drive more engagement and conversions.” Currently being tested in closed pilots, one of the new products will enable contextual advertising inside and around video content. That’s to say that content owners will be able to insert relevant advertising into their videos, while advertisers will be able to contextualize their web advertising by making it relevant to the videos that they appear against or near. Global video site Viki, which is owned by Rakuten, is one partner — you can imagine that fashion-based advertising would resonate well against Korean dramas, one segment of programming that Viki is known for. So, for example, a Korean drama could include in-video ads for outfits worn by the cast, with links out to e-commerce stores that sell them. The other new feature will enable image to text. That will allow for more customizable searches from image uploads, for one thing. Currently, shoppers can upload a screenshot to find related products in an e-commerce site, but the image to text feature would enable them to customize their search for easily. That could mean selecting a different color, shorter/longer sleeves, etc. More wider, Tan said that the funding will be used for hiring — he expects to “easily” double the current headcount of 40 before this year is out — and to “double down on R&D and innovate further.” “The funding will accelerate our go-to-market strategy, and a large part will be re-invested in our tech,” he added. In addition, ViSenze intends to grow its offices in New Delhi, India, and San Francisco, which are primarily for business development, and open similar outputs in the UK and China. Tan said he is spending increased time in the U.S., where he believes there’s a heightened level of understanding around the benefits of AI and the importance of visual search for commerce. “It’s a very different market from Asia with different levels of sophistication. Many people [in the U.S. retail space] just get us right away,” he explained.
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Just how vulnerable is election technology?
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Larry Alton
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This year’s electoral process has been unconventional, to say the least, and most voters are either polarized or frustrated (sometimes both) with how we got to this point. Now, as this volatile election approaches the final threshold of November, citizens are skeptical about whether our electoral system — particularly the technology used in it — is precise, unbiased or secure enough to produce a fair, accurate vote count. In fact, think our electoral system is, in some ways, broken. But just how vulnerable is our election technology? Is it something we should be collectively worried about? First, I want to address some of the reasons why people fear the security of our voting technology. Elections are highly sensitive and impactful events, but the sensationalism of potential vulnerabilities puts people even more on edge. Media sites frequently play up the vulnerabilities of machines, and add fuel to the fire of rumors that circulate in political circles — such as the suggestion that through coordinated cyberattacks. This doesn’t invalidate fears of election vulnerabilities, but it does amplify them. Cyberattacks aren’t the only threats that make voting systems potentially vulnerable; in fact, most computerized systems naturally have infrastructures prone to errors and failures of various types. For example, voting systems in North Carolina because of a simple system error. The fact is, election machines are built by people, and people are capable of error; a single processing flaw could lead to lost data, misreported data or entire system failures. This alone isn’t problematic, but when coupled with a system that doesn’t recognize or report failures (as many election systems are set up), it can lead to an election with potentially flawed results. Researchers and specialists have proven, time and again, that it is possible to gain access to and manipulate certain types of voting systems. For example, can be infiltrated with vote-changing malware in the span of less than a minute, and fairly easily too. Even more recently, in 2011, it was shown how voting devices could be , enabling hackers to take control and change votes without ever even entering the voting establishment. To make matters worse, “hacking” at the voting machine level is only part of the problem — cybercriminals could also create false registered voters, or interfere with the process at other steps to manipulate results. Cybersecurity and cyberthreats are always evolving, and feeding off each other. Every time cybercriminals get a little more sophisticated, our defenses rise to the occasion and take another step forward to stay just out of reach — which is why it’s so important to regularly update hardware and software. There’s one big problem here; the United States does a poor job of updating its technology systems. According to Brennan Center for Justice, voting machines in 43 of our 50 states . Clearly, there’s a vulnerability issue with our electronic voting system; this doesn’t mean we’re definitely going to be the victim of a cyberattack, or that we should assume the system will produce false results, but it does mean we need to do a better job of protecting and counting our votes. The first and most important way of improving our voting technology is to simply update it regularly; old devices need to be taken out of circulation immediately, and both hardware and software updates are necessary on a regular basis to stay a step ahead of cybercriminals. This is expensive, but it’s a necessary expenditure if we want our systems to be safe. Better security checks and observation, including self-reported security breaches and data anomalies, could also help raise red flags if data is ever compromised. It’s important to recognize that even these added security measures will never be able to make our systems 100 percent safe, because there will always be flaws in our systems, and vulnerabilities are everywhere. If you fix a problem in one spot, there will always be another to exploit. None of this is meant to be comforting, but it shouldn’t scare you, either. Our election tech is vulnerable, but that doesn’t mean it’s in shambles; it just means we need to commit ourselves to making more improvements if we’re going to protect ourselves and the future of our elections.
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Official CPSC recall goes out for Galaxy Note 7 — replacements will be available September 21
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Devin Coldewey
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The flaming train wreck that is the Galaxy Note 7 recall finally has its official from the Consumer Product Safety Commission, and there’s now a hard date for when you can swap your phone for a new one: September 21. The CPSC previously issued a brief saying it was working on an official recall — but that the delay shouldn’t stop users from powering down the affected phones immediately. CPSC chairman Elliot Kaye announced more details today, and said at a press conference that he is “urging all consumers to take advantage of this recall right away.” The language of is similarly forceful. “Consumers should immediately stop using and power down the recalled Galaxy Note7 devices,” it reads. Do not pass go, do not check Instagram. Ninety-two phones have already overheated, resulting in 26 burns and 55 reports of property damage — don’t increment those numbers by failing to heed this advice. It’s been a protracted process, this recall: Samsung took action directly when reports of combusting phones began to bubble up, first in Korea and then elsewhere; it vacillated on the severity of the problem and eventually announced a full recall of the 2.5 million Note 7s already in the wild (about 1 million are in the U.S.). Thing is, the CPSC is supposed to be involved in the process, ideally notified within a day of learning that there’s a problem with a product. Despite the U.S. being Samsung’s biggest single market, the company failed to follow the rules, without the CPSC’s blessing. It could be that Samsung was working out whether they could get away with simply replacing the batteries in the phones, or whether recalling the entire device was necessary. That would, after all, be much cheaper, and users could keep the phones they’d bought. The full recall ended up being necessary, of course, and now owners of the devices at least have a date when they can get a new one, if they decide to give the phone — which, other than its habit of burning up now and then, is really quite nice — another shot. Put your phone’s IMEI or serial number into the box at the official to make sure you’re affected — ironically, after telling users to power down the phone immediately, the instructions suggest “going to “Apps > Settings > About Phone or General Management > Status > IMEI information or Serial number.” We’d recommend just checking the back of the phone.
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T-Mobile’s top brass warns some iPhone owners against iOS 10 upgrades
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Brian Heater
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Maybe don’t go upgrading to iOS 10 just yet, T-Mobile customers. The magenta-drenched uncarrier has to warn owners of the iPhone 6, iPhone 6 Plus, and iPhone SE against rushing into Apple’s latest major mobile operating system update after widespread reports of lost network connections. Apple is working to resolve the issue with iOS10 for customers. Don't download iOS10 if you currently use an iPhone 5SE, 6 or 6+ — John Legere (@JohnLegere) Both outspoken CEO John Legere and CTO Neville Ray have issued warnings on Twitter, noting that Apple is currently working to address the issue and expects to offer a fix within the next 24 to 48 hours. In the meantime, however, there’s a fairly inelegant workaround for the issue, for those who have already gone ahead and upgraded their OS. Ray suggests that users manually restart their handset every time a connection is lost. https://twitter.com/TMobile/status/776466023193030657 The carrier will put out word as soon as things are back up and running — assuming, of course, that users can get online to see it. Meantime, you can live vicariously through our that went up earlier this week. Thx for your patience while Apple fixed the iOS10 issue. If you're using iOS10 now, pls update to fix via Settings ➡️ General ➡️ about — John Legere (@JohnLegere) Looks like Apple addressed the connectivity issues pretty quickly here. The company issued a fix last night, so T-Mobile customers should be in the clear to download the new operating system. Those already impacted can .
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Katie Roof
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When music and technology collide
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Jessica Naziri
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Some might say that technology is killing the music industry. But if you look around, there’s a beautiful marriage there — the music industry is evolving every day, and artists are embracing technology in new and innovative ways. Take for example, Microsoft, which has been teaming up with bands such as Phantogram, Neon Indian, KEXP and many more to be a part of , where ideas and collaborations are born. “We’re really interested in showcasing the way that people in the music industry are considering how technology is impacting their work,” said Amy Sorokas, partnerships director for Microsoft Brand Studios. Most recently, the tech company partnered with electropop brother-sister duo Broods, with the help of creative agency, , and released a tech-driven for their latest single, “Heartlines,” powered by the Microsoft Band. And we say “powered” because the wristband plays a big part in the visuals of the duo’s music performance. The fitness tracker measures lead singer Georgia Nott’s heart rate as she performs in this video, as well as while she’s on the North American leg of her Conscious Tour. But reading that data is only part of the beauty here — we get to see it translated into a beautiful geometric display to help tell the story with the music. “They made visuals that are literally a part of me,” said Nott. “The whole concept is to show something that’s invisible, like feelings, adrenaline, things like your heart rate,” she added. Throughout the video you can actually see little heartlines connecting the two characters, telling a story behind the music. At the same time, bits and pieces of the biodata taken from the Georgia and Caleb’s actual reading from their Microsoft Band is used to animate the duo in the music video. “We had been hacking the Microsoft Band and discovered some great potential, but we were still looking for the right musician to work with. We knew that were developing a for ‘Heartlines,’ so this seemed like a perfect fit,” said Steve Milton, co-founder of Listen. As an electropop duo, working with technology just seems to make sense. “Technology is a massive part of creating and performing our music,” Nott said. “Art has no boundaries, and the more technology develops and intersects with art the more we’ll be able to create.”
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500px’s new app lets pros edit RAW photos, license their work and find jobs
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Sarah Perez
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500px, the photo-sharing service aimed at professional photographers, is today launching a new mobile app aimed at serving the needs of this audience by offering editing tools along with a way to license their images through the company’s custom photography service. The company last year rolled out its global photography on-demand service to select clients, and now the new app, called RAW, will make it more accessible to the company’s wider user base. The app includes tools that allow photographers to capture and edit files in the RAW format and arrives only days after Adobe a similar enhancement in its own Lightroom Mobile for iOS application. The new Adobe app, however, offers the ability to capture and edit raw photos using Adobe’s Digital Negative (DNG) file format. Both releases point to the advances mobile phones have made in terms of becoming tools capable of being used by pro photographers. In addition to editing RAW photos, the new 500px app also offers a variety of editing tools, like hue, saturation, luminance controls and the ability to create and use custom filters, including those created by the 500px community. When the editing process is complete, users can upload and license their photos to the 500px community along with social networks. They can also create, export and attach model releases to their photos. The company also plans to use the app to help photographers find jobs, it says. An “Assignments” section will soon begin alerting photographers who opt in about photo jobs nearby. The company is already working with partners, including Airbnb, Google and Lonely Planet, it notes, and plans to use assignments to connect its 8 million users to on-demand jobs. The app is a free download on iTunes.
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Crunch Report | Tesla Upgrades AutoPilot
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Khaled "Tito" Hamze
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Tito Hamze, John Mannes
Tito Hamze
Veanne Cao
Joe Zolnoski
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Email or IM? Rush’s app combines them both — with productivity tools thrown in too
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Jon Russell
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Email? IM? IM? Email? The rise of mobile messaging apps has challenged email as the primary communications channel for all things, including work — what happens when you blend them together? That’s the approach taken by , an app that combines email and messaging, but also includes your calendar and other productivity tools. Headquartered in Tokyo, Japan, but with offices worldwide, the app launch two months ago and a Mac version is in the works, too. Rush co-founder Jo Lau discussed the app with us at TechCrunch Disrupt San Francisco, where Rush is one of the exhibitors in the Startup Alley section. Rush is available for and .
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Guess what Dog PC does
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Brian Heater
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In this world, there are dogs. And also there are PCs. But dog PCs? “Ridiculous,” you say. But ladies and gentleman, I have seen the future of dog computing, and it is Dog PC. The PC for dogs. What kind of company would produce such a PC for dogs? Tesla, naturally. Not, mind you, the Tesla that makes electric cars. The one that makes T-Pai, an intelligent doghouse built into a five foot model of a London-style double-decker bus (not the dude who really loves autotune). At the end of the day, Dog PC is fairly tame by comparison: In some ways, the device isn’t really all that different from products like Petcube, which let customers feed and monitor their canines from afar. But in addition to built-in electronic food box, camera and speaker, Dog PC has a touchscreen designed to finally bring tablet gaming to the dog world. The system currently has a trio of games, including a version of Fruit Ninja, which the dog can play with the swipe of a paw. The device is designed to engage and entertain pups who are home during the day, so they can pwn noobs while their owners are off at work. The company plans to launch an Indiegogo campaign within the next six months, with Dog PC priced at between $400 and $500.
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Mobalytics is a coach for competitive gamers
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Lucas Matney
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If there’s one industry that’s consistently blowing past expectations, it’s competitive gaming. The e-sports market is expected to reach nearly a half-billion dollars this year, and gamers who take part in it are constantly trying to heighten their skills. is aiming to bring visual analytics to competitive gamers so they can discover their weaknesses and make adjustments for future success. Today, the company is launching a beta of its project out of ‘s Startup Battlefield. Mobalytics is beginning their grand experiment by targeting and optimizing their analytics engine for League of Legends, an insanely popular online battle title that has tens of millions of monthly active users and a vibrant community of hardcore devotees. When athletes want to bring their skills in a sport to the next level, they often look to coaching. For people playing League of Legends, that’s really something that’s only available to top competitive gamers. Mobalytics is hoping to serve that need by bringing visual analysis to gamers that they can get quick insights from before and after each match. The company wants to streamline analytics for gamers and put context behind the bodiless numbers that are spit out to users. The startup’s main bread-and-butter feature is their Gamer Performance Index (GPI). The visual map cues users into disparate areas of their gaming skills depending on the title. In League of Legends, these metrics are fighting, farming, vision, aggression, survivability, teamplay, consistency and versatility. With the GPI, you can quickly identify your own strengths and weaknesses, as well as those of competitors. On the visual front, the company is also looking to build up a series of icons and badges that players can easily call when checking on the skills of who they’re up next against in a new match. Mobalytics is aiming their service primarily toward gamers looking to add to their skills and break into the upper echelon of kicking butt. Co-founder Bogdan Su tells me the company isn’t really focusing on the top bracket of gamers right now, because, at those levels, differences in gameplay are much harder to isolate. The company has plans to expand to other e-sports titles like Overwatch, DOTA 2 and Counter Strike; with nearly 13,000 sign-ups for the beta, it’s clear the interest is there.
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$10 will get you a wire for your wireless AirPods
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Brian Heater
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Life is strange sometimes. Like, sometimes you buy a $160 pair of wireless headphones, and all you want to is find a way to add another wire to the thing. $10 might be a small price to pay, if it stands between you and losing one of those precious new that Apple announced earlier this week – far and away the largest complaint among internet pundits that didn’t involve their slightly awkward form factor. Case maker Spigen has with a solution of sorts that have managed the fairly impressive feat of being even more polarizing than the headphones themselves. The AirPods Strap is, quite literally, a strap for AirPods (it’s there in the name, really). It snaps onto the pods and makes them that much harder to lose. It’s “Compact, lightweight, and extremely durable,” according to the company’s press material. It also pretty much accomplishes the same thing as a bit of string or some dental floss – albeit without that nice minty smell. It’s set for delivery mid-next month.
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Lucy wants to make it easier for expectant parents to find and book support services
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Natasha Lomas
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, a Bay Area startup, which was founded this April and launched its beta today, reckons it’s found an underserved not-so-niche market to target: expectant parents. The team presented on stage today here at TechCrunch Disrupt SF 2016, after being lifted from startup alley as the day’s wildcard battlefield company. Lucy offers a marketplace focused on helping expectant families find support services. Specifically it’s for pregnant women in the third and fourth trimester, so pre-birth and post-partum. The idea being to serve up custom support plans for expectant parents to make it easier for families to locate and book allied (and vetted) health professionals. The team has a but it’s a mobile app play first and foremost. On sign up the app asks the user to respond to a few questions, such as whether it’s their first child and to quantify their attitude to particular services, before generating a suggested support plan, with recommended services viewable and bookable right in the app. Down the line they intend to support user ratings/reviews. Examples of the sorts of support services offered via Lucy’s marketplace include doulas, lactation consultants and specialist nutritionists. So basically anything other than the primary medical care that a pregnant woman would already have in place. The team is intentionally extending to support services beyond the point of birth when traditional medical services would be dropping away yet new parents’ need for help may well be stepping up. Helping to support women to continue and thrive in careers after having children is one big motivator for the Lucy team. “I deeply believe that the system doesn’t quite make room for women to be in leadership positions, so you don’t find a lot of women in leadership positions. And when you look at the data the drop off is always when they start families,” says co-founder Shannon Spanhake. “Two things happen: you’re starting a family, not only is this a major life transition, your body is completely changed, you might be mentally suffering from post-partum depression… and if you do go back to work you potentially even lose the will to fight for executive positions.” “I’m an OB-GYN and I know that the medical system and how we approach birth just doesn’t provide nearly the amount of support that we need to for expecting families — especially women,” adds co-founder Chitra Akileswaran, discussing how the team came up with the idea for the startup. She explained that while she is aware of “incredible practitioners” able to address a range of issues for expectant families and those with newborns — whether that’s emotional, physical or career support — she is unable to refer her patients to these allied health practitioners, so the platform aims to do that work of simplifying tracking down support services. “Increasingly we’re also finding that having this additional support — in the form of lactation, doulas, nutritionists, coaches — are actually improving health for women and their children,” she adds. “My patients don’t know how to find them… It’s a very murky market.” The team’s first sales pitch has been direct to enterprises, rather than families — as they reckon more businesses want to be able to offer benefits to help retain female employees. Currently the marketplace is only live in the Bay Area but they already have a handful of businesses signed up. The business model is also still being formulated but businesses currently buy packages to offer expectant parent employees. These packages include six sessions with practitioners on the marketplace, and open access to a care team support phone line called the Lucy Line. Lucy’s team is Friends & Family funded at this point. It’s also very much in the early learning startup stage, with the team conducting personal interviews with every user at this point to better understand their needs and offer relevant support services. Down the line the hope is this face-to-face research will feed into building a recommendation engine that can automate the support via relevant in-app suggestions — and allow the team to scale. “We’re already developing learnings from even the 50+ families that we’ve worked with,” says Akileswaran. “One thing that we’ve recognized is the importance of lactation support immediately after birth, and actually making that a core focus of that first couple of weeks because if women can’t feed their babies they’re not going to go back to work.” “Our plan is to start prototyping a recommendation engine pretty soon,” she adds. [gallery ids="1385421,1385431,1385430,1385429,1385428,1385427,1385423,1385422,1385420,1385418,1385417,1385416,1385415"] On the product is this something that’s going to save companies money or is this going to give expecting mothers a better experience – who are your customers?
The customer is actually the companies right now. We’ve broken that into two segments. So there’s self insured companies and fully insured companies. The self insured companies value the product because we can cut down and reduce their health spend. And for the fully insured this is a way for them to retain more women, lower attrition and be a family forward company. Have you been able to show it reduces attrition?
We’re just getting started but in fact one of our families – she’s a female engineer at one of the companies – and she just got back to work, and we heard from that people person that that basically paid for the program. How do you sell through to the employees? And how do you do that economically? What’s the longevity of that model when it’s a one-shot deal?
On boarding is a pretty important part of this process to actually show the value of the services in advance to families. The way in which we on-board is actually at the time that an expecting parent is telling their employer that they’re going to be needing leave. So we change that moment from one of anxiety to one where they feel supported, where they feel like their employer is really with them. After that they have a very personalized, high touch introduction to our service.
I’m an OB-GYN. I actually meet with all of our families. We understand that’s not scalable long term but what I’m doing is I’m soliciting their preferences so that we can build that plan for them. So it really gives them a sense that someone knows them, that a team is going to be there to care for them. What’s the most valuable thing that you’re providing?
One is that most families realize that 90% of the questions that they ask their OB-GYN aren’t able to be answered. I can vouch for that as a physician. What they’re going through is not just a medical event – it comprises the social transition of becoming a parent, the career transition and we’re able to support all of those other things. So the magic moment is not only realizing that they’re going to have a holistic team when they first enter our program, that’s going to take care of all of those other issues, but also that we’re extremely responsive – after they’ve had their baby, we’re there, we’ll go to the hospital and visit them there, we’ll go to their home and visit them there. That’s not something they’re going to get from the medical system. Have you thought about community? Other parents connecting?
Absolutely. That’s on our roadmap right now. That’s a really important part of what we see. The first thing that parents do when they don’t know what they need is ask their friends. And so community is going to be a really important aspect of what we build on our platform. Having a child is a very emotional moment. Human interaction is very important. So it seems like you’re going to be more of a tech-enabled service rather than just an app, right – is that correct?
It is a tech-enabled service. And the service providers, these are practitioners they have their own practices, so we’re just enabling them to help scale their businesses. What is your average selling cycle with your core customer?
The companies we’ve been working with so far are around 200 to around 1,000 employees. We’ve had a contract go through in a week and then we’ve had a contract take around six weeks. With the self insured companies we predict that those sales cycles will be upwards of six months, potentially. What’s pretty cool about this model is it kind of has a built in consumer mechanism. So the company subsidizes X number of visits and then the families can pay out of pocket after that. So the companies become channel partners for the families who become consumers. After a company signs up does a user sign up to the service very quickly?
Very quickly, yes.
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ZAP brings the manufacturing process to the cloud
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Brian Heater
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“Today it takes two to five years to get a factory to produce a car,” begins John Dogru. “A product’s timing to market is everything, and there’s a lot of latency. How do we, for the first time in history, go from the design to product instantly?” Rapid prototyping technologies like 3D printing have long dangled the promise of speeding up the lengthy manufacturing process (it’s right there in the name), but each still present their share of bottlenecks, including a number of proprietary system roadblocks that make it difficult for designers to move between different machines. Dogru’s company aims to streamline process. In its first incarnation as “the world’s first operating system for 3D printers,” the company moved workflow to the cloud, offering up a browser-based software solution that allows people to upload their CAD (computer aided design) files, format them in real time and print them through connected machines. “Manufacturing is one of the last things that hasn’t moved to the cloud,” he adds. “It’s basically still where computers were, 30, 40 years ago.” The company has already rolled out a pilot program to Duke University, helping hardware startups springing out of the university prototype their products with minimal friction. With the launch of ZAP, the company will extend its reach beyond 3D printing to other connected manufacturing machines like water jets, laser cutters, CNC machines and even robotic arms. The cloud platform operates on the simple premise that all of the machines utilize the same basic X, Y, Z coordinate system, so sending and executing files should be a fairly straightforward process. “All of these robots run on a three-dimensional system,” explains Dogru. “Why do we have different software for each of these things? Why can’t a designer just communicate his design with the machine.” ZAP’s interface is pretty straightforward. Once a file is entered into the system, users can chose their machine from a drop-down menu of dozens of different options. The system will layer the design on top of a three-dimension field that represents the manufacturing bed. It will also alert the user to the technical limitations of the system. Once the model is laid out, the user sends it to a connected machine (which appears in the interface as a live video feed) and starts the manufacturing process. “ZAP is taking this entire workflow, all your machines, designs and workflows real time into one platform so companies can get through prototyping and rapid manufacturing process faster, with zero latency,” says Dogru. “Connecting all your designers with ideas, directly with machines and as companies start to scale globally with R&D facilities world wide, they need to move this process into the cloud to save huge time, resources and ability drastically reduce time to market. “ The CEO sees the usefulness of ZAP’s cloud-based manufacturing platform extending greatly as 3D-printing technology transitions from solely a prototyping technology to an essential part of manufacturing. “ As these machines come down in costs, it becomes the way things will be manufactured in the future,” says Dogru. “Designers can go straight into production without having to change the factory setup. Customers can make instant revisions without stopping production. This is why Adidas and Nike are building 3D factories, that can be changed on the fly. We are helping in this transition.” And if the ZAP model proves successful, it could be quite lucrative for Dogru’s company, with $200,000 per license for companies utilizing the platform.
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Rex Animal Health is using genomics to keep livestock healthy
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Lora Kolodny
| 2,016
| 9
| 12
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A startup called wants to protect livestock from illnesses that can quickly turn into epidemics, and help farmers breed animals with the healthiest and most attractive traits. Today at , Rex unveiled technology to help veterinarians provide clinical support at the point on the farm, and predict the genetic causes of problematic traits in their herds, and in the diseases effecting them. According to CEO Amado Guloy, his company didn’t start out this way. The pet parent of a sick dog, he set out originally to build something like “Zocdoc for pets,” he said, to help people find and schedule appointments with veterinarians. But as a chemist by training, and -backed entrepreneur, he soon saw a much larger market opportunity in bringing data analytics and genomics to the farm. The company pivoted in 2015. Today, Rex Animal Health’s platform lets the people who raise cattle, pigs, chickens and any other animals in the food supply chain keep a digital record of their health issues, even converting notes on paper into digital data. [gallery ids="1385334,1385337,1385336,1385335,1385338,1385339,1385340,1385344,1385343"] The platform tracks which animals experience symptoms, which animals suffered from a veterinarian-diagnosed health problem and when, as well as the treatment measures taken, outcomes and associated costs to the business. Rex Animal Health standardizes the data to make comparisons and calculations easy. The company also conducts genomic and phenotype analysis, and gives farmers “weather maps,” or epidemiological maps, showing which viruses, bacteria and other health problems are sweeping a region. With these maps, the farmers and veterinarians who work with them can prioritize lab testing of their animals, and rule out or diagnose locally prevalent issues quickly. Over time, the company will combine electronic health records of animals with genomic data about both animals and the pathogens effecting them. “What we have is a genotype and phenotype database that nobody has built before, and that could help solve problems around disease transmission and sustainability in the global food supply,” Guloy said. Data could also help pharmaceutical companies speed drug development to stop recently mutated viruses or bacteria effecting livestock. And it could influence animal husbandry. If a bull consistently sires calves that wind up producing a lot of milk, for example, or a heifer and her offspring seem to never be affected by respiratory viruses, Rex Animal Health can use the data it’s amassed to track down the causal genes affiliated with these positive traits, the CEO explained. Knowing which animals have illness resistance and yield good milk and meat would encourage breeding of both into a kind of super herd. The company, which earlier raised bout $270,000 in seed money from Techstars and 500 Startups, is hoping to raise additional venture capital to expand its own genetic sequencing capability and hire more employees. They are competing against other startups bringing genomics and data science to farms, including Metabiota and Trace Genomics.
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Robin is automating lawn care with robots and putting an end to checks under the doormat
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Devin Coldewey
| 2,016
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A well-kept lawn is one of the most common mixed blessings with which homeowners can treat/afflict themselves. Robin is a startup looking to take as much pain out of the process as possible, both by improving the way you hire and pay for your yard’s care, and soon, by putting a robot on the job. “We were trying to find lawn care companies that were reliable, having to pay with cash or checks under doormats,” Robin’s co-founder, Justin Crandall, told TechCrunch. “I mean, we’re all tech guys from the 21st century, and it was hard to believe that there’s this $70 billion business that still operates the same way it did 30 years ago.” It isn’t really hard to see why. Lawn care businesses are often tiny — perhaps just two or three people and a truck — and tend to serve only a single city or even neighborhood; growth is high-cost and high-risk, and margins are low to begin with. Probably all you’ll earn yourself is trouble. So Robin isn’t trying to take over with fancy edgers or Square readers in every truck. Instead, it’s building relationships with existing businesses of all sizes and connecting them with people who crave a simple online transaction. Onboarding is simple: You put in your address and a quote is generated automatically from a database of property records, from which Robin estimates lawn size. You pick a start date and recurring times, and any extras like edging or weeding, then check out. Boom, you’re done. No on-site visits, no callbacks, no wrangling a payment method that works when you’re gone — like the inevitable check left under the doormat. It’s important, Crandall noted, to make the process as frictionless as possible: “This is a decision people hate to make. They will put it off forever.” So if they’re in the mood to sign up, you have to take advantage of it; as with other forms of e-commerce, a half hour delay, to say nothing of a day or two, can lose the sale. [gallery ids="1385291,1385290,1385289,1385286,1385284,1385287,1385288,1385285,1385299,1385298,1385297,1385296"] What Robin is doing is basically filling these crews’ dance cards, while also — critically — optimizing routes and job management. Bouncing a dozen miles around town a few times a day eats time and money, and since time money, that’s a lot of money being eaten. By working as a clearinghouse for jobs, routing and scheduling can be improved and everyone benefits. “We have crews that are extremely reliable, and we basically fill their excess capacity. The more jobs they can get done in a day, the more profitable they are,” said Crandall. The result is everyone works more and earns more, while scrambling less. There’s competition in the lawn care space, but not much, he said. Others are taking aim at real estate or multi-property owners, or aiming to be an “Uber for mowing,” which may make sense now and then, but really, lawn care is more of a perennial need than something you spontaneously desire. Robin also works with very small providers that generally work for less but have trouble filling their whole week with work. Crandall claims that gives them a significant price advantage over competitors, perhaps $10 a cut. The savings add up fast on the consumer side, and the extra work adds up fast on the provider side. But if Robin’s next gambit pays off, you’ll get a freshly mowed lawn on the regular without human involvement at all. The technology actually isn’t new. It’s just one of those weird situations where something has caught on everywhere but the States. “What’s amazing is that in Europe, these things are standard,” Crandall said. “There are like 200,000 of them over there! The technology itself is proven, but it is complicated to install, and there’s the price, of course.” So it’s that last part that Robin will be helping with: helping people justify and deal with the $1,000-plus price tag of joining the self-guided mowing set. “We’ll have these branded mowers, we’re going straight to the manufacturer and basically buying them wholesale. We come in and say let us install it, and then we’ll lease it to you for less than what you would pay for weekly mowing from a lawn service.” [gallery ids="1383903,1383902,1383901,1383900,1383899"] The robot takes care of the “labor intensive, low-margin” part of the job: the thorough weekly mow. But things like weeding, edging, fertilizing, trimming — these still go to human contractors. Mower makers like Robomow and Husqvarna see this as a potential opportunity to break into the U.S. market, which has resisted the tech for years, so they’re eager to cut a deal. The threat that haunts Robin is growth. Expansion isn’t just a matter of adding a city to a list. Contractors need to be researched and convinced neighborhood by neighborhood. And operations and sales will become increasingly complex; the business won’t run itself, and there’s constantly a need to tweak schedules, accommodate the vagaries of weather and human frailty, and so on. Robin is breaking even right now, but will have to sink a lot of capital into the robotic mowing program. Angel cash has taken them this far, but they’re hoping this move upmarket — and onto the radars of VCs everywhere — will make raising a bit more money possible when it becomes necessary. Crandall was previously at Bazaarvoice and ran sales at Invodo; his co-founder, Bart Lomont, is a veteran and drone builder with experience in organizing at the city level.
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MedRepublic launches a platform for overseas surgeries
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Katie Roof
| 2,016
| 9
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[gallery ids="1385210,1385220,1385217,1385209,1385228,1385207,1385218,1385219,1385239,1385238,1385237"] “What we’re doing is opening the door for people that are underserved in the United States or Canada,” said Page. MedRepublic is “allowing patients to have options to save their life.” He estimates that Americans spent over $10 billion on medical tourism last year.
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BlazingDB uses GPUs to manipulate huge databases in no time
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Romain Dillet
| 2,016
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Gathering petabytes of data about your customers is cool, but how can you take advantage of this data? lets you run high-performance SQL on a database using a ton of GPUs. The company is introducing a free community edition of its solution on stage at in our Battlefield competition. If you’ve been running complicated SQL queries, chances are it took so long that you nearly fell asleep in front of your computer. That’s because you’ve been running these queries on CPUs and it doesn’t scale well. “Sure you can scale up the servers, but operations become exponentially complex while operations are linear on our solution,” BlazingDB co-founder and CEO Rodrigo Aramburu told me before Disrupt. Relying on GPUs for a database is quite interesting. GPUs can run a ton of tasks in parallel and present a clear advantage for very specific tasks. In particular, companies have been using GPUs a lot lately for image processing and machine learning applications — but it’s the first time I’m hearing about taking advantage of GPUs for databases. [gallery ids="1385180,1385159,1385181,1385157,1385179,1385178"] Thanks to cloud computing, it’s become incredibly easy to store a lot of data in databases. But companies also rely on databases to build analytics dashboards, build business intelligence tools and more. That’s where BlazingDB shines. You can do sums, use predicates and run through many, many database entries in little time. The company just started accepting customers in June 2016, and there are already big Fortune 100 companies that want to use BlazingDB. “All of their tools take hours to process in SQL, and with our tools it takes minutes,” Aramburu told me. “We’re able to do massively paralleled processing across those thousands of cores.” Behind the scene, BlazingDB can work with GPU instances on Amazon Web Services, SoftLayer and Microsoft Azure. This way, the company doesn’t have to manage servers itself (at least for now), and big clients can even choose to manage the servers themselves if they want to work with sensitive data. “Our architecture is agnostic of server infrastructure,” Aramburu told me. “The code base that we’ve built out is not trivial and we’ve solved some pretty serious problems.” Customers can connect to BlazingDB programmatically, like with any other SQL database. For instance, you can build ETL-style (Extract, Transform and Load) scripts in Python to manipulate your data in BlazingDB. There are now six people working for BlazingDB. The company plans on working with big clients, building proofs of concept for them and signing big contracts. BlazingDB is also introducing a free community edition so you can play with it yourself. While building a company around SQL databases doesn’t sound sexy, BlazingDB’s approach is interesting. Many companies are now data-driven, and BlazingDB helps them make sense of all this data. Question: It seems way faster than anything we’ve seen. Can you talk about the switching costs?
Answer: We’re helping companies bring terabytes of data. Through the connectors, it’s pretty easy. Q: You showed DeepMind on one of your slides. Is that because they used GPUs with AlphaGo?
A: They’ve been working on deep neural networks, which are built on top of GPUs. Q: What are the downsides of this solution?
A: We’re not a transactional database. We’re not fast on this front. We haven’t implemented all the SQL standards. We don’t have window functions and store procedures. Q: Have you looked into seeing if it has already been patented?
A: We’re not familiar with any patent. Most people are implementing different SQL technologies and retrofitting them into GPUs. But we’ve started from scratch.
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Lyft paid to paint pink SF’s famous van on a stick
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Megan Rose Dickey
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Lyft has creative control over that . “Notice a little more pink during your drive on the 101? The newly-painted Lyft van is just one of the ways we made ourselves at home,” Lyft wrote on a blog post that has since been deleted. Lyft has confirmed to TechCrunch that the company leased the historic building, which is just under 7,000 square feet, for its new hub for San Francisco Bay Area drivers. Lyft said the company deleted the post because it was meant to go out tomorrow. Oh well. Located at 2300 26th Street in San Francisco, the hub is Lyft’s first dedicated space in California where drivers can hang out with each other, rest their feet and take bathroom breaks. In the next few weeks, the hub will also offer educational sessions and driver recognition events. Check out other pictures of the hub below. [gallery ids="1384997,1384995,1384993"]
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Sarah Perez
| 2,016
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TVTY raises further $6.7M to sync online ad campaigns with offline events
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Steve O'Hear
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, a startup that enables online ad campaigns to sync with offline events to make online marketing more timely and relevant, has raised $6.7 million in further funding. led the round, while previous investors Partech International and 360 Capital Partners also participated. The company says it will use the new capital to increase headcount in its R&D team and to grow its “customer success” teams across the U.K., U.S. and France in order to accelerate growth. It had previously raised $6.85 million in funding, . A pioneer of so-called “moment marketing,” TVTY has developed a platform that lets advertisers instantly launch digital marketing campaigns triggered by offline events such as TV shows or commercials, sports events and changes in the weather. It is used by both brands and agencies in more than 40 different countries worldwide, including Sony, Intel, Tesco, O2, GSK, Volkswagen and Nationwide. “It’s more important than ever for brands to be ‘in the moment’ when it comes to their marketing message if they want to cut through the noise, be relevant and optimize their media spend,” says Eliott Reilhac, TVTY CEO in EMEA. “That means delivering powerful messages in real time, that connect with people at the key moments when they reach for their smartphone or tablet to check the web or interact on social media. The problem for brands is how to do this at scale, in an automated fashion and in an ever evolving digital landscape.” To that end, Reilhac says TVTY’s proprietary technology monitors and reacts to more triggers than any other platform on the market (over one million, apparently), such as weather, sports, financial, health, TV ads and pollution. These are thought to be key moments when consumers turn to their devices to go online for more information in which they can also be bombarded with ads relevant to that moment. In addition, the startup’s “Universal Trigger” product lets brands use any public or private data feed to launch what the startup describes as “hyper-targeted moment marketing campaigns.” Examples of these types of data-driven triggers include real-time flight information, stock levels, box-office sales or public transport delays and can be as granular as required.
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ProductBoard helps product managers figure out what to build next… and why
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Sarah Perez
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today is launching a service for digital product managers that helps them better organize user research and determine which features deserve priority. Making its public debut at , this product management platform is already being used by over 100 paying customers during its beta to establish their product roadmaps and collaborate with engineering teams on their upcoming feature releases. Product managers today take input from a variety of channels when determining what to build next — for example, customer support tickets, emails, input from sales teams or even direct user research. But when it comes to organizing all this information in a coherent fashion, they still often turn to more generalized tools, like spreadsheets, Google Docs, note-taking apps or wikis to make sense of it all. ProductBoard, however, is designed specifically for organizing, aggregating and prioritizing a long list of features that need to be built. The service works with systems where product feedback is initially collected, such as Zendesk, Intercom and others. It also includes a Chrome extension for grabbing snippets from the web, can collect information you send in via email and works with Zapier for further connections to third-party apps. These feedback requests are then centralized in one interface, and can then be linked with the feature they would inspire. That is to say, ProductBoard lets you see who’s asking for the change, why the feature is necessary, what problem it solves and more. It also uses an algorithm that sums up the feature requests in its system to help product managers understand the problems those features would solve, and how they’re associated with the larger strategic drivers for the company. PM’s can then organize the features into a hierarchy directly in the app to help them visualize their priorities based on the data at hand. A user impact score is also displayed in the app’s right-hand column, which helps the business better determine how to rank which items to build before others. And when it’s time to actually begin the work of building the features themselves, ProductBoard integrates with the various systems engineering teams to do track their work — like Trello, Pivotal Tracker or Atlassian’s JIRA. In addition to sending data from ProductBoard to those systems, the service supports two-way sync so you can also see the feature’s current development status in ProductBoard. The idea for the startup comes from co-founder and CEO own background in product management. He has an MBA from Berkeley and master’s in computer science from Czech Technical University, and moved to the Bay Area where he later became employee No. 6 at business intelligence platform GoodData. Over several years at GoodData, he went from a junior PM role to become VP of product management, while the company itself grew from a small team of six to some 300 employees and raised $100 million in VC backing. There, Palan says he personally experienced the pains involved with product management today. “As product managers, designers and people who make product decisions, we have really been using tools designed for the delivery — engineering tools,” explains Palan. “They were all designed to help you build [the features]… There’s no concept of ‘customer,’ or of the problem or need that the product is solving. It doesn’t even exist in the user interface,” he says. [gallery ids="1384788,1384789"] These systems simply host long lists of features, but there’s nothing that helps you prioritize what should be at the top of the backlog, Palan adds. “The whole business side of it — who is it important to, why is it important, what problem does it solve? — they don’t help you with that at all,” says Palan. A Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) platform, ProductBoard offers tiered based on feature set, like which integrations (e.g. Pivotal Tracker, JIRA, Zapier, etc.) are supported. Pricing starts at $24 per month, and is then $99 per month for the “startup” plans. For larger companies, custom pricing is available. The service quietly entered public beta in October, but is today making its official public debut. Among its customers are Envoy, Avast, Shopkeep, BambooHR, Marqeta, Sprout Social, Trifacta, Striim and DotMailer. The San Francisco-based startup, also co-founded by CTO , recently raised seed in the form of convertible notes from and others.
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Keeping track of warehouse inventories with an army of fully autonomous drones
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Brian Heater
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When they wanted to stash the Ark of the Covenant away at the end of the first film, the government did what any self-respecting bureaucratic institution would, filing it away in a giant warehouse. Navigating even the most well-appointed warehouse spaces can get tricky, and keeping tabs on missing inventory a downright nightmare, requiring full staffs over several day-long periods to count and re-count pallets, in hopes of determining whether anything has gone missing. And let’s be honest for a minute: Humans just aren’t great at counting. Robots, on the other hand, well, that’s what they’re designed to do. “Lost inventory costs companies billions of dollars every year,” explains Marc Gyongyosi. The (that’s Intelligent Flying Machines) CEO founded his company in hopes of applying lessons learned for time spent working on human-robotic interfaces at BMW to the problem of costly warehouse inventory depletion. “From my background in industrial robotics, I very often saw that with the systems they current have in warehouses, things get lost all the time,” he continues. “You wouldn’t believe how often things get lost. And when they do go and search for stuff, they have to go and climb up forklifts and ladders. They even bring binoculars to find things.“ IFM’s solution to the issue of costly inventory depletion is a small army of drones, high-accuracy counting robots with onboard systems that allow them to navigate the insides of warehouses without direct human oversight. IFM’s drones are designed to deploy between warehouse shifts, taking off autonomously, scanning the aisles and landing themselves for a recharge. The process depends on the size of the warehouse and number of drones deployed, but on average, it should take around 20 minutes. The information gathered via scan is uploaded and cross-referenced with the company’s inventory software. Errors are noted and alerts are sent to tablets posted at the end of aisles, which workers check at the beginning of their shift to see if anything has gone missing. IFM has already begun a pilot program with different companies, including some unnamed automakers, and is planning its first commercial roll-out for next year. Gyongyosi adds that the system could have implications beyond its initial inventory solution. “We have Google Maps for the outdoors,” the exec explains. “But we don’t have anything like that indoors. And all of manufacturing is indoors. There’s a lot of data to be collected indoors, and this technology is the first step in creating a system that can collect this information autonomously. “ [gallery ids="1385035,1385031,1385030,1385028,1385020"]
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Pundit launches an audio social media app for millennials
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Katie Roof
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Co-founders Billy Shaw Susanto and Chris Aston told TechCrunch that they believe their forum for “bite-sized talkshows” will be used by young millennials who are looking to make voice chat more fun. “Unleash your inner Oprah,” Susanto said on stage. They hope that filters such as monster and robot voices set this apart from traditional voice messaging apps. Pundit encourages users to send short sound bites to their followers or via private message. The team recently graduated from NYU and has already secured a $120,000 investment from the Disney TechStars accelerator. Disney has had some of their top stars do AMAs on Pundit. They hope to eventually introduce voice filters so that people can sound like their favorite characters. “Voice and audio is the last frontier for innovation in social media right now,” said Aston, and he believes Pundit has what it takes to change things. The winner of San Francisco’s Startup Battlefield 2016 will be announced on Wednesday.
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Breinify tells online retailers what customers want to buy at a specific point in time
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Fitz Tepper
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Think of the last time you shopped online. You probably navigated to a home page that featured a dozen or so items, only one or two of which you may have actually been interested in. And while retailers try to use things like purchase history to predict what you want to buy, we all know that never really works. Why would I want to buy another style of winter jacket if I already bought one for the season? Luckily , an e-commerce recommendation engine launching at , thinks they have a better way. Instead of offering static recommendations based on things like past purchases and browsing behavior, Breinify combines a user’s demographics preferences, current interests and immediate intents to figure out exactly what they want to buy and when they want to buy it. [gallery ids="1385062,1385066,1385068,1385069,1385058,1385059,1385060,1385057,1385046,1385045,1385043"] So what exactly does this data look like and where does it come from? The first part is based on user behavior and comes from actions like which products they view and which links they click on a retailer’s website. The second part, data from across the web, is collected by Breinify crawling the web for a shopper’s different social identities on sites like Linkedin and Twitter. These social profiles tell Breinify which types of things you are interested in and other information they may think is relevant. And while the algorithm weighs this social data less than behavioral data that comes directly from a retailer’s site, it is a good backup (and can still let Breinify provide recommendations even if a user has never been to the retailer’s site before). The last element is the time-dependent part, and that is where Breinify’s AI engine comes in. Because even if a recommendation engine can tell a food delivery site that a user’s favorite food is pizza, what good does this do when the user is on the delivery site at 10am? A good recommendation engine needs to realize that a customer isn’t going to order pizza for breakfast and be able to offer a customer their favorite coffee instead of their favorite overall food. And that’s exactly what Breinify does. This sounds extremely complicated, and it is. But the startup has figured out how to package it in a way that is almost stupidly simple for a retailer to use — all they do is add a line of code to their site, which calls a custom API whenever a customer lands on the site. A few milliseconds later the API sends back a list of products that Breinify has determined a customer wants to see. Breinify charges per “activity,” which is any time a retailer asks for a list of recommended items for a specific customer, whether it is for a website, an emailed newsletter, etc. There is a free tier with up to 40,000 activities a month, a commercial tier with 30 million activities for $2,000 a month and a bunch of options in between.
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Restb.ai offers custom computer vision as a service
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Natasha Lomas
| 2,016
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Custom computer vision is the promise of bootstrapping Barcelona-based b2b startup . The team is pitching its machine learning algorithms at businesses wanting to fix a pain-point or aiming to enhance what they can offer their customers by being able to automatically determine what is in a particular image. While tech giants like Facebook and Google are using their own data to train their own AI algorithms for their own ends, Restb.ai’s big idea is to sell computer vision as a service, charging its business customers an initial training fee to build a custom model for their needs and charging per API call thereafter. The team launched back in March 2015 and has six customers at this point, according to Damia Garcia, the team’s VP of growth and biz dev, speaking to TechCrunch from startup alley here at Disrupt SF 2016. He added it has been focusing its early acquisition efforts on winning larger customers in multiple verticals, and is now looking to raise a seed round. One user of the tech so far is second-hand goods marketplace which has used Restb.ai to identify and prevent users posting images of illegal drugs to sell on the site. Garcia claimed the accuracy of restb.ai’s model, once it has been trained for whatever custom use the customer intends, is 98 per cent. The system works by the user typing in whatever custom keywords the model has been trained on — such as make/model for cars in the above example — and will specify a percentage of how certain it is of a particular identification. It works in near real-time — and he noted another application of the tech being police automating cross-referencing number plates with a car make/model to ascertain that a licence plate has not been swapped onto another vehicle. The training process for each custom model takes some three weeks, according to Garcia, while the amount of data needed to feed the AI varies depending on the application. He said between 150 and 2,000 images are typically needed for training a particular custom need, with data provided by the customer. In the demo car example 1,500 images were needed per car, although the algorithm can identify a car model from a photo of just a tail light (for example), or from a photo of a crashed car. It can also specify which side/view the image is showing of the car. Other examples of use-cases for Restb.ai’s computer vision as a service include for real estate marketplaces wanting to identify and index photos of apartment interiors, for example, doing away with the need to manually tag uploaded images and allowing for better targeting of content based on having a better taxonomy of image data; and a Norwegian mining company that’s using the tech to automate and speed up identifying particular mineral crystals — freeing some of its human staff for other tasks. Garcia named one US competitor — — but said they are focusing on general modeling, such as , whereas restb.ai is aiming to differentiate by offering custom deployments to meet very specific customer needs.
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UnifyID wants to bury the password once and for all
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Ron Miller
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The old-fashioned password gets little respect from hackers these days. In fact, it’s barely a speed bump for them to get past. The hacker can find your password or even the answers to your “security” questions for sale on the internet black market. , a participant in this year’s TechCrunch Disrupt SF Battlefield competition, sees a system that’s hopelessly broken — and they think they have a way to fix it. The trouble with today’s approach, says co-founder Kurt Somerville, is that it uses a system of secrets and you reveal the secret to get into the program or service. In his view that technique isn’t sustainable or scalable, and his company has a better way — implicit authentication. With UnifyID, instead of supplying a password, the system begins to build an understanding about who you are, the devices you use, the places you go, the sensors you interact with throughout a day, even the way you walk and the cadence of your typing. As you begin to build a reasonable profile, the software can compute a score based on the likelihood that it’s you. This technology is designed to know it’s you because you’re unique and you have different ways of behaving that make you, you. The first product, which is being made available in private beta this week at in San Francisco, is a Chrome browser extension with an iOS mobile app. (An Android app is coming some time in the future). You install the browser extension and the mobile app and it begins to learn about you and your behavior. You go to a website, and instead of asking for a user name and password, it logs you in using your Unify ID, so long as it’s confident it’s you. If there’s a question (and there is more likely to be a question when you first start using the product), it will send a challenge to your phone such as asking for your Touch ID. If you’re concerned about a company collecting this much data on you, they say that users are in complete control of their data. Data lives for the most part on the local device, not the back-end cloud servers and, to ensure the company can’t get at any data it does collect, it’s all encrypted. Even if they had the intention of selling data, they couldn’t because they don’t hold any actionable data. [gallery ids="1384981,1384985,1384980,1384979,1384978,1384974,1384984"] The initial product is free as a kind of showcase for the technology, but the company, which has an undisclosed seed round, plans to sell the ability to embed this technology to companies. You may be thinking that other companies have tried a similar approach, and you would be right. , but co-founder John Whaley says there are some key differences between what they are doing at UnifyID and what Google is doing. “Their technology is focused on a single device and platform: Android, and is purely local to the device. From our experience the accuracy and security goes way up once you combine sensor data from multiple devices,” he says. What’s more, he thinks the big four — Microsoft, Google, Facebook and Apple — will likely try to build similar systems, not as a single identity system for all, but for their individual platforms, and Whaley sees that as a fundamental problem — one his company is hoping to solve. “It is of course validating for us that other players recognize this opportunity. One of the biggest challenges of a small startup like ours is to educate the market to the future of authentication,” Whaley said. These companies have a big megaphone to get the public behind new types of authenticating, but he believes there’s still room for a company like his to innovate. “That being said, I think the space is ripe for innovation and a new and cool enough technology can have a major impact.”
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Tim and Marni talk AOL, Yahoo and Verizon, but don’t go to White Castle
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Jonathan Shieber
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Hi and . As the bosses of my boss’ boss, I just want to say that y’all did a really really great job on stage today. Glad to know that things are . It sounds like you’ve bitten off a pretty big bite of company with the deal and I’m glad to hear that y’all are taking your time digesting that Yahoo behemoth. Tim, when you said Verizon was just starting the process, and that there are 20 to 21 work streams that you’re going through and that you intend to have the strategy down by early fall, that gave me something to look forward to on the next all hands call. SO PSYCHED! Also emphasizing that the combined businesses should be “profitable and growing” seems like a really good idea. Beyond that, to focus on selling sleep, health and wellness to America (THAT’s an uphill battle), but the aggressive vision you have for HuffPo as the biggest media property in the world is a fantastic idea. Beyond that, there’s a lot going on at Verizon, which, Marni, as executive vice president and president of Product Innovation and New Businesses (man what a mouthful), did a really great job of addressing. And definitely planning on not being “a dumb pipe” is pretty sage advice. I think AT&T and Sprint are both taking more of a Rene Magritte approach to the problem. I’m not sure how cool it was of the moderator Anthony Ha to call out that , but way to say that y’all have been learning a lot from it. But the emphasis on Verizon’s really strong relationships with manufacturers and deep relationships with the auto industry is fantastic. , is it? It’s that factory floor where there’re tons and tons of machines that really need to talk to each other that can be a hugely attractive market ( ). On the content side, you’ve got , as well as a really robust ad network to play with. And then there’s been the cost-efficient way that Verizon acquired all of its assets. Good job M&A team. Finally, there’s this thought… which is really heartening. “We’re not planning on competing with Facebook and Google,” Tim said. Instead, like Switzerland, y’all are just partnering with everybody. I appreciate that. Going against those two is just inadvisable. Kind of like getting into .
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Apple works to fit the smart home under a single roof
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Brian Heater
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Wait for others to take the first steps, let things mature a bit, then swoop in with a simpler, more unified solution. It’s the first entry on the first page of the Apple playbook. And it tends to work like a charm. If you’re reading this, odds are pretty good that you’re in possession of some small piece of the connected home puzzle, a smart lightbulb or thermostat or maybe a security camera. Odds are also pretty good that if you’ve more than one such device, your handset is littered with just as many proprietary apps. It’s one of the great ironies of the connected home – it’s not really all that, you know, connected. Apple has been playing around in the space for a couple of years now. HomeKit was first announced WWDC in 2014, as part its big iOS 8 unveil. But it wasn’t a consumer facing solution, so much as a way to make sure that hardware and software developers were tailoring their technology to the company’s mobile operating system. It would be a full two years – and two major iOS releases – before Apple put its stamp on the consumer experience with the Home app for iOS 10 (out today, ). With Home, the functionality is built into the operating system’s DNA, via Control Center. There’s little question, really, why the company took its time here. The smart home is hard. It’s big and it’s broad, encompassing a huge variety of devices and functionality – and it’s littered with the bodies of failed attempts that just couldn’t get the job done. After all, it’s a lot to ask for a single unified solution designed to control a door lock, air conditioner and window shades all at the same time. There’s probably no one better positioned to take on the challenge than Apple. The company already has a massive install base, along with a trio of devices that provide different methods for interacting with the system – the iPhone, iPad and Apple TV, the latter of which serves as a permanent in-home hub, so users can interact with the functionality from afar. Home is a compelling next step. Over the past two years, the company has laid the framework for its connected home strategy through Homekit, and the iOS 10 functionality finally starts to deliver them under one room. Functionality is built into the Control Panel, with that familiar translucent overlay, though it still takes a bit of swiping to access, perhaps betraying the fact that the company doesn’t quite consider this a mainstream feature for the moment. It’s through that channel that most will likely interact with the functionality. The actual app is most useful during the setup process, which lets users group products into different rooms, create geofencing (so, say, your lights turn on when you enter your house), and put together “scenes,” packing different functionality into a single button press, so you can, say, turn off the lights and close the curtains when it’s time to go to bed. I suspect that most casual users won’t be all that interested in designing complex scenes, but there’s definitely value for those who demand complete control or just enjoy the work of developing different scenarios. It will be interesting to see if Apple doubles down and makes the whole set up even more customizable. The notion of the smart home has been around for quite some time, but past instances have either been cost prohibitive or far too fragmented. Home isn’t yet the catchall solution Apple is banking on, but it does feel like a compelling step toward cross-device unification as we line our walls and desks with ever more connected products.
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Meet the London startup powering Just Eat’s new illuminated scooters
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Steve O'Hear
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, the online take-out ordering behemoth, has announced a brand refresh today with a new fancy logo and strap-line: “Find your flavour”. The latter is in reference to the publicly-listed company’s new mission to create the “world’s greatest food community”. Their words, not mine. However, PR puffery aside, Just Eat is also announcing a number of tech updates. These include a new Apple Watch app for Apple’s WatchOS 3, a Facebook Messenger bot, and a new mobile app for delivery drivers to help partner restaurants keep customers updated on the status and whereabouts of their order. But perhaps the most striking new tech is Just Eat’s new range of branded illuminated scooters, which feature backlit boxes carrying the new Just Eat logo and will soon be lighting up the streets of London. The move will undoubtedly be seen — and I mean seen! — as the latest move in the battle for restaurant food delivery mindshare currently playing out in the UK capital city. This is seeing the likes of Uber’s Uber Eats, , , and vie for visibility. Interestingly, however, TechCrunch has learned that Just Eat has turned to London startup to power its new bikes. The six-month-old company, founded by Sam Merullo and Isobel Hume, offers a patented delivery scooter that boasts an illuminated “backbox” showcasing partner brands. It then either hires these out to self-employed drivers working in the on-demand delivery sector or to delivery companies themselves who want to take advantage of this additional day nighttime branding opportunity. According to ScootFleet’s website, it will also supply vetted delivery drivers, including the required insurance. That feels a little like what Delivery Hero’s Valk Fleet tried to do, . I’ve also learned that ScootFleet has partnered with a major city car park provider to store its brand-ready illuminated scooters in central parts of London, making it easier for them to be hired out on an ad hoc basis. It’s also a way for said unnamed car park company to monetize some of its spare capacity. Just Eat declined a request for comment on whether or not the two companies were working together or any further details relating to Just Eat’s new branded scooters.
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For your videos, Valossa knows if you’re happy or sad
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Haje Jan Kamps
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Video analytics platform just launched , a platform to help video creators, advertisers and other video boffins figure out what’s going on in video. In addition to computer-vision tricks (“Man on a beach”, “car interior”, “ “), the platform can do sentiment analyses (person is happy / person is sad / person is confused) and even heart rate analysis based on a high-definition video stream alone. I tried the platform out at TechCrunch Disrupt and was bowled over by how much the company knows about me, based purely on a video feed. The heartbeat feature, especially, is a neat trick. The company uses microscopic changes in the image feed to detect when heartbeats are occurring – and if my Apple watch’s heartrate monitor is anything to go by ( ) it’s actually remarkably accurate. Even if it proves not to be a hundred percent precise on an absolute basis, it could be useful for people analyzing video footage to see relative (i.e. heart rate increasing / heart beat slowing) changes. [gallery ids="1386307,1386308,1386309,1386310"] “There are many uses for our technology,” explains Ville Hulkko, the company’s chief commercial officer. “Especially for people working on huge film projects. Imagine you are looking for a particular piece of footage of a dog and a ball on the beach, for example. If you don’t remember when it was taken, you’ll spend a long time looking for the correct video clip. With our technology, it’s easy: You just search for it.” The company’s sentiment analysis engine is eerily good. You can try it out on the website, launched at Disrupt last year — try entering “dog gets lost” or “hero wears a suit” or “money is burned”, for example. Awesome, no?
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Stephen Curry on social media, charity and robotic referees
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Brian Heater
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Two-time NBA MVP Stephen Curry closed out the second day of Disrupt San Francisco by discussing his recent forays into technology investments and charitable organizations, kicking things off by talking , the social media startup he co-founded with former Davidson teammate Bryant Barr. “We met back in 2005,” the Splash Brother explained. “He left to go back to Nike and obviously I came out here to play basketball. We started brainstorming the idea two years ago to leverage off of my social media presence and the ways athletes interact with fans and sponsors off the court.” Curry and Barr launched the platform back in March. The platform is designed to serve as a conduit between big names like professional athletes and their fanbases, removing some of the trappings of traditional social media in the process. Curry added that social media was a “life and death situation,” with a smile, singling out Instagram as his favorite app, toward the end of the conversation, before adding, “and Slyce,” naturally. Curry was also on-hand to discuss , a UN Foundation organization the player is involved with that was launched to raise awareness about – and fight – malaria. “I was introduced to the cause in college, as well,” Curry explained. There was an event that Barr ran, a three-on-three to raise money to fight malaria. So, when Nothing But Nets approached me, it made perfect sense. Knowing the stats around malaria, how many children are affected by the disease. I have two daughters myself, and I know the feeling of wanting to protect them.” As part of his involvement, Curry donates three malaria nets for everything three-pointer he scores during the season – a tall order for the all-time leader. “402 [three-pointers last year],” he said with a chuckle. “That’s a lot of nets.” Curry also praised The Warriors’ aggressive push into training technologies like motion trackers. Asked what technology he’d be most interested in incorporating into his regiment, he joked, “One would be to just help me dunk more. I can’t do that. Something you can put in your calf.” As for whether he’d be okay with robots replaces refs, he added, “I would love that. But I would have to throw my mouthpiece at those new inventions.” In a quick lightning round, Curry chose Uber over Lyft (“Those rides with drivers are amazing. They’re the biggest fans.”), over , Clinton over Trump, Giants over A’s (as a Red Sox fan) and Magic over Bird. As for or , “Neither,” he admitted. “I’m not into it.” He did, however, manage to drop a little knowledge, name-checking Fluttershy Rainbow Dash — “I’ve got two daughters,” he laughed. “I told you.”
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Crunch Report | iOS 10 Available Today
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Khaled "Tito" Hamze
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Tito Hamze, John Mannes, Haje Jan Kamps
Tito Hamze
Veanne Cao
Joe Zolnoski
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These are the six finalists in the TechCrunch Disrupt SF 2016 Startup Battlefield
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Greg Kumparak
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Over the last two days, over 5,000 attendees (along with hundreds of thousands of people tuning in online) have watched 25 companies duke it out for the right to call themselves the Startup Battlefield Winner at Disrupt SF 2016. lets you run SQL queries on a database, using GPUs to do the heavy lifting for incredible efficiency. is a unified place to track your health data, interact with your doctors, and for doctors, pharmacies, and labs to communicate with patients. It handles appointment scheduling, payments, and provides patients with their records. helps customers find mail-order blood tests and runs their analysis through tried-and-true labs. They plan to offer at-home STD tests, breast milk nutrition tests, and tests for male fertility. is a coach for competitive gamers, so they can discover their weaknesses and make adjustments for future success. constantly checks your web-based app for security threats. You install it with a few command lines, and get a dashboard with analysis of your app’s security in return. thinks they have a way to kill the password. Instead of supplying a password, UnifyID builds an understanding of who you are, the devices you use, where you go, and builds a unique profile based on this to validate your identity. Who will win? Tune in to our live stream tomorrow tomorrow to find out — along with on-stage chats with Emmett Shear of Twitch, Kyle Vogt of Cruise, Marc Raibert/Spotmini the Robot of Boston Dynamics, Diana Williams ILMxLAB, and so, so much more.
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White House’s DJ Patil wants to disrupt the criminal justice system with data
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Megan Rose Dickey
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At TechCrunch Disrupt SF 2016 today, I had a chance to chat with DJ Patil, the nation’s deputy chief technology officer for data policy and chief data scientist. We talked about what he’s been up to at the White House lately, the criminal justice system and a recently-launched data justice initiative. in May 2015, 75 police jurisdictions have collectively released more than 150 data sets about policing, including information around the use of force and traffic stops. “The trick here and one of the big problems we don’t talk about is the technical challenges that police departments even face from collecting and opening the data,” Patil told me. “They don’t have a top-tier technologist who’s helping them think about these problems. So what we’re doing is creating community practices that help them see how to do this and make it replicable across the 18,000 jurisdictions that we have.” In June, to help ensure people with mental health issues, who have committed low-level crimes, don’t get locked up in the criminal justice system simply because they can’t afford a bond. Check out the video interview above to hear more of Patil’s thoughts about data-driven justice and criminal justice reform.
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UK’s national cyber security unit working on automated defenses
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Natasha Lomas
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The CEO of the UK’s new National Cyber Security Centre wants industry and government to work more closely together to combat cyber crime. Giving his first public speech as CEO of the NCSC, at the in Washington today, Ciaran Martin warned that far too many unsophisticated cyber attacks are succeeding, going on to discuss the government’s new more pro-active cyber security strategy — including looking into large scale DNS filtering as a potential method to automate blocking malware at scale. “The great majority of cyber attacks are not terribly sophisticated. They can be defended against. And if they get through their impact can be contained. But far too many of these basic attacks are getting through. And they are doing a lot of damage,” he said. And while he praised the efforts of the security industry to tackle cyber crime to date, he said the fact so many basic attacks are prevailing points to a systemic problem with the private sector’s approach — arguing there’s therefore a need for government to take a lead. The UK government named cyber security a priority area, back in , announcing a plan to nearly double spending, to £1.9 billion by 2020, including funding the setting up of the NCSC, which reports into spy agency GCHQ and is due to formally open its doors this fall. Martin described how the UK is taking a three-pronged approach with its cyber security strategy, beginning with what he dubbed the “organisational coherence” of establishing a central hub in the form of the NCSC. Next he said it’s prioritizing the defending of “the most serious threats” — such as cyber attacks on national infrastructure. (On the most serious cyber attacks side, he confirmed the UK has not yet faced “a single stand-out incident of hostile foreign cyber attack” but said he’s expecting one, adding: “Last year we detected twice as many national security level cyber incidents – 200 per month – than the year before.”) The third plank of the strategy is focused on improving the digital security ecosystem as a means to tackle the “unsophisticated, prolific threats” that he warned post a threat to consumer trust in the digital economy. This includes the government seeking to foster and even directly . Detailing some of the NCSC’s work aimed at combating the broad funnel of low grade cyber crime, he said the unit has been looking at what “a more activist and automated approach” can achieve — citing automated spam filters and content filters as some of the inspiration for its thinking here. Automated measures the NCSC is looking at include trialling a “ This is a clear, objective protective result,” he added. The unit has also been working with the private sector on a voluntary basis aimed at developing other automated defenses, according to Martin. He also mentioned an exploratory “ In the speech, Martin also took time to laud the partnership between the US and UK intelligence agencies. “There’s no closer, more important, or more successful partnership in global security,” he said, before adding: “As the world faces many uncertainties, our transatlantic alliance is as important as ever.”
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Nvidia’s tiny new self-driving AI computer sips power
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Darrell Etherington
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Nvidia revealed a new configuration of its in-car autonomous driving computing platform today, which vastly improves power efficiency and drops physical size compared to the original unveiled at CES earlier this year. The new single-core configuration will be used by Baidu in its own self-driving cars, as part of the between the two companies to create a complete, “cloud-to-car” autonomous driving system. The PX 2 AI computer is the second generation of DRIVE PX, and one that Nvidia says is in use among a number of OEMs, research institutions and other partners. It makes it possible to process visual and sensor data from self-driving car-mounted monitoring systems in real-time on board a vehicle, which is crucial for autonomy because it has to be able to act without a connection to a powerful remote server. Depending on the needs of car makers and researchers, PX 2 can scale from this single-core, palm-sized form factor to multi-core, multi-GPU builds, and even to multiple DRIVE PX 2s working in concert in a single car. A single PX 2 can provide AutoCruise and HD mapping features using input from on-vehicle cameras and sensors. The new system-on-a-chip should help considerably with expanding the potential appeal of PX 2 among clients, since its reduced size and power footprint will both be appealing to electric vehicle makers looking to minimize added wait and power requirements. Part of building high-efficiency, zero emission cars is paring down vehicle weight and power draw wherever possible – even relatively insignificant individual savings in various components can add up to an aggregate effect that has a measurable impact on range.
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Myki rolls out a password manager that locks all your info away on your phone
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Matthew Lynley
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Everything is getting hacked to the point that it’s getting kind of ridiculous — and everyone needs to have secure passwords. The trouble, however, is making them tough to crack and also being able to remember them. That’s led to a blossoming ecosystem of password management services like OnePassword. But if you ask Antoine Vincent Jebara and Priscilla Elora Sharuk, that’s not going far enough. Instead of locking those passwords away online and accessing them when you need to log in, their startup looks to keep them locked away on your phone instead. Users can activate the Myki Chrome extension to log into various services through their phone, but the passwords are never kept on remote servers — and even administrators don’t know what they are once new passwords are issued. The company launched at TechCrunch Disrupt SF 2016. “A big concern is the passwords are still in the cloud and people don’t want them to have access,” Jebara said. “Even when it comes to lawful access, in our case we don’t hold any sensitive info, which you can’t give away. We don’t want to have it, it’s your right to own and known where your proprietary data is.” Here’s how it works: When a user decides to log into a service — it can be anything, really — they’ll choose to log in through Myki. They then authenticate that login on their phone through the Myki app, which is locked by fingerprint or PIN in addition to managed remotely, and the password and login is dropped into the browser. Through an administrative panel, users can authorize a variety of services, whether traditional browser logins or complex enterprise software, for login through Myki. The company generates passwords for those services that are then passed over to the phone and kept there instead of online. The passwords and login signals relay back and forth from the phone in order to log into various services, and administrators can assign passwords to be reset on a regular basis. Myki is also constantly reporting back information about the logins. The administrative panel logs physical addresses, phone status (even battery level), IP addresses, geographic area, times and other kinds of irregular behavior, aiming to keep as many tabs on your password usage as possible. If something gets breached (through user fault or just a general hack) administrators can instantly trigger a mass reset, issuing new passwords to every user. Users operate the app using their phone number rather than typical credentials in an attempt to ensure that everything revolves around owning and operating a phone. “What interests us is that the user is the owner of the phone,” Jebara said. “If GitHub gets breached, you need to do a mass reset of passwords — this takes time in the enterprise, and you have to pray for [users] not to change the password with only a slight variation.” The goal here is to ensure that passwords remain complex, difficult to crack and easily accessible. Users have the option of looking at the passwords within the app (though an administrator can actually disable this, even though they don’t actually have access to the password), but they are designed to be kept on the device and away from remote servers that could potentially be breached. The device control can be extremely granular, all the way to allowing only certain IP addresses (such as in the case of different floors on buildings of larger companies) or even locking geographic regions. That’s important to keep the right apps only being used at the right time and making sure everything is used in a secure environment. Here’s another cool one: Users can actually share their login credentials with one another on a highly regulated basis. So if I need to give one of my colleagues a login to Getty or Shutterstock, for example, I can authorize them to use my account on a limited basis, and revoke that access at any time. Again, they’ll never see the password — that’s just for the account owner. Right now, the company isn’t built into various mobile device management providers, but that’s another welcome opportunity, Jebara said. “We like the idea of bundling with MDM providers because they do root detection. If you root your phone that’s where we draw the line. If you use an MDM provider and push the key, they do root the detection, and we do access management, and it becomes more powerful.” There’s always a risk for sticking all your passwords in one place. If your phone is compromised for some reason, like stolen by someone who somehow manages to crack the core iOS security and Myki, they’ll have access to everything to which you’ve given Myki access. To get around that — obviously use all the existing security features — Myki users can quickly revoke access to the device. Right now the company is targeting companies as primary providers, but there’s obviously a consumer hook to it, as well. If users start relying on it for their traditional work login, they may want to tie in their Gmail and Facebook passwords — and IT managers won’t have access to that information, Jebara said. There’s a reason all these password managers are reaching popularity — and companies are actively encouraging them. Often, user password behavior is pretty bad. They’ll re-use the same password for multiple accounts, the passwords won’t be strong, and they aren’t changed that often. That’s prompted a lot of breaches in the past several years, with hundreds of millions of credentials hitting the web. With Myki, Jebara is hoping to take that level of security one step further, and make it even easier to log in and out of services. Time will tell if having everything locked away on your phone will work out in their favor — but it’s certainly something that Apple is trying to do, . The fewer the touch points where individuals can capture sensitive information, the better, Jebara said.
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WeConnect is an app to support addiction recovery
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Natasha Lomas
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Keeping close, quantified track of personal progress is absolutely imperative for one group of people: recovering alcoholics and drug addicts. And it’s this often isolated segment of society that the startup behind the app is aiming to help. The team was chosen as today’s wildcard battlefield startup here at TechCrunch Disrupt SF 2016, plucked from silicon alley to present their product on stage. They also won the this summer. Their app-based support platform includes context-sensitive notifications to encourage timely communication within support groups; a dashboard view that structures the user’s day with activities they view as beneficial to their wellbeing (such as prayer or meditation); and ongoing tracking of their personal progress at attending recovery program meetings — including using geofencing to determine they really attended a particular meeting and even how long they spent there. It also includes an SOS button a user can press to send a message requesting specific pre-slected contacts get in touch — for moments when they’re feeling really low or in need of immediate support. The startup behind WeConnect, which describes itself as a social purpose corporation, is using technology to try to combat the sense of isolation that can cause addicts to relapse, says co-founder Daniela Tudor. Tudor, a former addict herself, came up with the idea for the app during her time in rehab after realizing she wanted a way to stay in contact with the people she met during her recovery program — and who helped her stay on track. “There’s three components to recovery,” she explains, demoing the app. “One is communication. So adding your connections; the second is clarity — so that’s whatever activity you consider part of your recovery, that keeps you centered and a good connection in relation with yourself. The third party of the recovery, which is probably the most crucial, initially especially, is what your in person support routine is — so that’d include any of these 12-step or CBT cognitive behavioral therapy sessions.” There’s also a rewards element built in to the app, with users able to earn things like coffee coupons and yoga lessons as they build progress towards their goals. She notes the team intentionally stayed away from loading too much gamification into the app to avoid making the technology itself potentially problematic. “We give rewards that feedback into your recovery loop, like yoga, fitness classes, coffee coupons. We didn’t want to gamify it too much because we believe that triggers another addiction — which is technology. So we’re giving only activities out or rewards that feed the person’s soul or their connection to their community or their own recovery.” Unlike other recovery or wellness apps she says WeConnect is private — pointing out there’s no way to search for other users on the app; it’s necessary to have a fellow user’s email and phone number in order to add them as a contact. “They have to confirm that you want them as part of your network. We’re also HIPAA compliant,” she adds. As well as helping former addicts to keep on track, the team is also providing data to the treatment providers who are working with them. They’re intending to monetize via this route in time, although their primary mission is a social one, to support as many addicts as possible, says Tudor. “For the treatment providers the huge value adds that we are is obviously improving outcomes gets them more referrals. The other part is that we provide them valuable data. Insurance companies are starting to cover treatment less and less — they’re looking for actual data-centric tools that can measure the success rate of programs, and how effective the approach,” she says. “The data’s out there that relapse rates are extremely high… It’s actually an opportunity for them to take that data and improve, and keep also centres and other providers accountable to a healthy treatment program that actually saves lives and reduces relapse,” she adds. Tudor has been working on the app since 2014, meeting one of her co-founders at a event. The closed beta of WeConnect was launched this June — it’s currently being used by in-patient treatment/rehab centers in Arizona, Washington and California as the team gathers more data to be able to prove their app can reduce relapse rates. After that, they intend to make their pitch to insurance companies. Beyond the initial focus on drug and alcohol addiction Tudor says they see potential to expand the support tech to address a broad spectrum of recovery needs, such as eating disorders and even people on domestic violence rehab programs. They’ve raised a $525,000 seed round of funding thus far, from strategic investor — and are now looking to raise a $3 million Series A at a $15 million valuation. Have you tested this and do you have evidence of success and efficacy?
We just started our early adopter program but we’ve had clients that have been using the platform who’ve told us it has definitely improved their accountability and communication. And we also track data on a daily basis to see how much people are on the app, what they’re interacting with on there, and what they’re staying accountable to. One thing I was wondering is can individuals who use WeConnect find someone else to connect to on the app?
When they’re on-boarded they have to add a minimum of two connections… but that’s up to the individual to be empowered and create that accountability community around them. Our app is very private so you’re not searchable. And we’re also HIPAA compliant so you create your own circle of accountability on there. I see why you’re going to treatment programs first. It is a smaller market but you have a better chance of having people fully engage with the product… But what use cases could you potentially just use parts of the product for? Is it an all or nothing thing? Or is there a partial way that still has value for a potentially larger market.
We’re planning to also go for eating disorders, domestic violence recovery, and create another standalone product for tech recovery. And then there is potentially even larger markets beyond that. The people who were facing these programs before you had this app, it was all paper and phone calls? Tell me more about that? And from your tests what is the most valuable feature people have said they found in the app?
When I walked out of treatment 28 days sober I had to get out of a bad relationship and go to meetings… all of that is extremely overwhelming… This creates a tight accountability and instant support network in your pocket… That’s how we’re solving that problem. The second question, they’ve said there’s two things: one, just seeing their progress from the past week when they’re getting down on themselves has been rewarding. And then the rewards themselves, they’re motivating them to do more activities than they would do in the first place. Is it too early to tell or could it dramatically increase results in recovery?
Yes, that’s our goal. What’s the business model thinking?
Currently we’re in the early adopter program. That price point is $365 – so $1 a day for a 12 months subscription per patient that we provide to the patient treatment center. That’s just our early adopter program pricing because it’s new. So we’re going to determine a different pricing model after that. But b2b. So the treatment provider pays not the patient?
So it depends. Some treatment centers are footing the cost themselves and some of them are taking that cost and putting it within the aftercare plan that they have for their patient – which also includes outpatient and check ins and a couple of oher features. So it depends. It’s a personal choice for the treatment center. But we bill the treatment center. Do insurance companies or medicare cover addiction programs?
They do. And we were approached today by two insurance companies and they’re really excited about what we’re doing but again the reason we want to be patient first is to get that data to give a really robust presentation to insurance companies. What’s your specific advantage? The technology is not difficult right so anyone could potentially do the same thing. Is your advantage in your experience?
I come from tech but I’m also in recovery. And my business partner also came from that space but having relationships in the recovery community that are really important to have. He does strategic partnerships and we both have experience in this space… Not anybody can just do this. [gallery ids="1386677,1386674,1386678,1386676,1386683,1386682,1386680,1386675"]
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Giftbit lets retailers create their own e-commerce currency
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Sarah Perez
| 2,016
| 9
| 13
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, a company that operates a digital gift card marketplace for online retailers, is launching a new product today at that will enable merchants to easily create their own custom currency — meaning gift cards, promo codes and refund credits — without having to build their own, internal systems. Available as an API, the new service drops into the checkout flow on the retailer’s website. Meanwhile, a web application also allows non-technical users — like the company’s biz dev team, for example — to create promo codes on the fly, as needed. For several years, Giftbit has run a profit-generating gift card marketplace, which is how it was able to identify this gap in the market. Traditional gift card networks, like Blackhawk and Incomm, haven’t addressed the e-commerce space, as they’ve historically focused on brick-and-mortar businesses, instead. “Successful businesses need the right tools to grow. They don’t build their own CRMs anymore. They don’t build their own messaging… they use Twilio. But we’ve really seen in the market that businesses are still building their own custom currency,” explains Giftbit co-founder and CEO Leif Baradoy. “Giftbit is the tool for that. In three to five years, we think people will wonder why they ever built their own custom currency themselves” he says. Once implemented, Giftbit can power any custom currency the business needs, whether that’s promo codes it’s distributing online, refund credits the customer service team needs to issue or even sales of the company’s own digital gift cards on its site. Merchants can also use the service to distribute codes with their own logo and branding; track, manage and edit contacts inside Giftbit; run detailed reports to see what’s working; email codes or download a set of links or codes to distribute themselves; and more. [gallery ids="1386586,1386585,1386584,1386582,1386581,1386580"] The tool will also soon integrate with other business tools, like Salesforce or Zapier, for example. And it will be available to Shopify Plus merchants, through the e-commerce platform’s marketplace. Because of its experience in this market, Giftbit’s system is secure, PCI compliant and capable of being used by enterprise-level businesses. Already, Giftbit has worked with several notable companies for its gift card marketplace, like Gusto, AutoDesk, Red Bull, LogMeIn, HubSpot and others. [gallery ids="1382758,1382757,1382756,1382755,1382754,1382753,1382752,1382751,1382750,1382749"] Ahead of today it has been running the custom currency product in a limited beta with 10 merchants, but because those trials are still in the early stages, it can’t disclose the names of the retailers testing the service. One exception is ClassPass, which is onboarding with Giftbit now. At TechCrunch Disrupt, the product is launching out of private beta and into public beta testing. As a software-as-a-service offering, Giftbit will offer 1,000 active codes for $90 per month. Those codes can be any currency code spent at checkout, including gift cards, credits or promos. From there, it’s $15 per month for each additional set of 1,000 codes. Based in Victoria, B.C., Canada, Giftbit’s team of 18 is backed by $2.1 million in seed funding, led by Freestyle Capital. The round closed in February, with the intention of helping fuel the development of this new service. Others participating in the round include Third Kind VC, Founders’ Co-op, Acequia Capital and Techstars.
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Apple also released watchOS 3 today and here’s what’s new
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Romain Dillet
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| 13
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Today has been a massive Apple update day. The company released , and also watchOS 3. After announcing it at WWDC, it’s finally here — and it’s a huge update. I won’t all the changes with watchOS 3. Instead, I’ll focus on three topics — speed, app switching and watch face switching. With watchOS 3, your favorite apps stay in memory so it feels much faster when you launch it. How fast you might ask? Nearly instantaneous, even on the original Apple Watch. And I can confirm that you’ll definitely feel the difference in action. In addition to this much-needed improvement, Apple has changed the behavior of the side button. Instead of opening up the Friends screen, the side button now lets you switch between your favorite apps in a Dock view. It feels like using the app switcher on iOS, but much faster. These two modifications have turned me into an Apple Watch app user again. I’ve never stopped wearing my Apple Watch, but the key features have always been reading the time and getting notifications on my wrist. I found glances not really helpful and the home screen too hard to use — you don’t want to spend 30 seconds digging for an app and launching it. But with the Dock, I’ve set up my favorite apps and I use them quite a lot. It’s easy to open them, they load quickly and they work well for quick interactions. Finally, changing your watch face was a bit cumbersome with watchOS 2. You had to deep press on your watch, then scroll, then select. Now, you can swipe left and right to switch from one watch face from another. Instead of using the same watch face every day, I find myself changing it up depending on what I’m wearing, turning the Apple Watch into a versatile fashion accessory. People who like switching bands will like this feature as well. If you want to download watchOS 3, plug in your Apple Watch, go to the Apple Watch app on your iPhone and install the update. It’s going to take a while, so I recommend doing it at home where you can leave your watch on the charging cable.
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Affectiva and Uber want to brighten your day with machine learning and emotional intelligence
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Devin Coldewey
| 2,016
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| 13
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Your phone doesn’t know how you’re feeling — but you may want it to if that capability came with a few fringe benefits. Affectiva makes emotion-detection software, and CEO Rana el Kaliouby was full of ideas today at Disrupt SF as to how it could be deployed, from gifs to Ubers. “We’re obsessed with emotional AI, we wake up thinking about it,” said Rana el Kaliouby. “I imagine a future where every device has a little emotion chip and can read your emotions, just like it’s touchscreen enabled or GPS enabled.” If you aren’t creeped out by that, you might see a few of the benefits. As el Kaliouby points out, technology is getting personal. “The way we relate to our devices and apps, it’s becoming very relational,” she said. “The way we act with technology is very like the way we act with each other. All these devices, whether it’s the Uber app or a calendar, they need to build a rapport with the consumer.” Humans with higher emotional intelligence are more likable, so why shouldn’t the same be true for devices? To spur discovery, Affectiva just opened up its SDK and APIs for free use, so app makers will surely try integrating them soon. And the more people that use the app, the more data the company has to work with. The system is already working from a database of 5 million faces “That’s allowed our system to learn the difference between a Japanese smile and a Brazilian smile,” el Kaliouby said, “or that women express emotions differently than men. Humans are still the ground truth, but in some cases the algorithms are better than an average human — it depends on the emotion too.” Of course, emotional intelligence isn’t just recognizing facial expressions and extracting moods. Also on stage was Danny Lange, head of machine learning at Uber. He was excited about the possibilities of — what else? — machine learning. “We’re seeing this major change where we move from newton, who thought he could calculate everything about this world, past present and future, to a Heisenberg model,” he said, waxing historical. “It’s more about predictions and probabilities.” Deep learning systems do their best work with lots of data, and fortunately Uber vehicles are racking up millions of miles, pickup locations, traffic problems, and so on. And UberEats provides another data set that can be cross-referenced and interesting correlations uncovered. A long history with both apps could put a car outside the moment you walk out the door, then recommend an alternative to the lunch you’ve chosen since traffic will prevent it from being delivered in a timely fashion — an alternative based on analyzing your previous orders, of course. The strange thing about these machine learning systems, though, is how opaque they are to analysis. The results are great — but the process is obscure. “It’s often hard to explain why they come up with the predictions they come up with,” Lange admitted. “You can’t look back into it. It’s almost impossible to explain why you get the outcome you get.” [gallery ids="1386073,1386066,1386065,1386064,1386059,1386058,1386056,1386055,1386054,1386053,1386071,1386063,1386062,1386061,1386060"] That means that sometimes these processes, both Affectiva’s and Uber’s, can produce unexpected results. To keep those within acceptable bounds, you need to control the data. When asked if the systems could discriminate — causing skewed results for certain genders, races, or the like — el Kaliouby grew briefly grave. “It could,” she said, “and we take that very seriously. When we train our models, we make sure the data is balanced.” People of all shapes, sizes, colors, and genders must be consulted — and are, el Kaliouby said. Lange concurred: “We have to be very cautious about that. It’s our responsibility to be careful what data we put in there.” “Emotional data” seems like a contradiction in terms, but clearly your innermost thoughts, feelings, and habits are of great interest to many in the tech world. Get ready to have your mind read and like it.
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Amaryllis Nucleics makes transcribing genes quicker, better and cheaper
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Devin Coldewey
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| 13
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The ability to read and record genes sits at the base (base pair, if you will) of biotech companies worldwide. So improvements to that ability are kind of like upgrading the specs of the industry itself. That’s what aims to do with its vastly improved method of transcribing genes from RNA. Now, it’s worth noting before we start that this doesn’t really fall under the definition of “technology” we usually find on stage at Disrupt. These guys deal with chemicals and pipettes, not code and product. But someone has to put the bio in biotech, and it’s as important to update the molecular machinery behind it as it is the usual chips and software. Amaryllis was founded by two PhDs, Brad Townsley and Mike Covington, who were in the field for years and were frustrated by the speed and expense of acquiring genetic data from RNA — which, if your high school biology is a little rusty, is the intermediary between the cell’s data storage (DNA) and its manufacturing facilities (ribosomes). “When we were at UC Davis, we were doing a lot of RNA sequencing — too much to be able to afford to do it all, plus it was taking too much time,” said Covington. “So we ended up developing a new protocol for making RNA machine readable — not only is it cheaper and faster, but it also is more accurate than a lot of the other kits.” If all it took was some frustrated researchers, the science would have advanced a long time ago. But it’s not that easy. Fortunately, as with so many interesting discoveries, this new technique was discovered “more or less by accident.” In the process of streamlining an existing protocol for sequencing RNA, they noticed some weird data. “Mike was able to use his informatics background to dig into the underlying mechanisms. We were able to optimize that until we got something that worked really well,” said Townsley. This isn’t just a little boost, either: We’re talking anywhere from half to a tenth the time needed with other techniques, and for a similar reduction in cost. It was too good to keep to themselves, they decided. “We started doing this just to make life easier,” said Covington. “We didn’t have any intentions of making a company.” “Yeah, we set out completely altruistically, then realized it was also a good opportunity for us,” Townsley added. “But it’s also the best way to get it out there, to commercialize it yourself. A lot of good new technologies will wither on the vine at a university tech transfer office. You have to hope someone is looking for exactly what you have and happens to be browsing the catalog.” [gallery ids="1386523,1386522,1386521,1386520,1386519,1386518,1386514,1386513"] They entered the and came out with a bit of cash. With that and their new “composition of matter” patent, the two started putting together kits that they could ship to researchers, universities and private institutions. All you need to do is follow the instructions and the RNA transcription will proceed apace, faster and more accurately than the competition. Amaryllis will also do the work for you, though the resulting data is so voluminous — hundreds of gigs — that it often makes sense to ship a drive across the country rather than host the files. It’s not scalable, they admit, but it helps build relationships. If they can get a few repeat customers, word could spread fast. Between the kits and transcription they do themselves, Amaryllis could do upwards of $100,000 in business a month just at current levels of production. But with just the two of them and their mostly academic backgrounds — Covington has done web app work, but nothing like building a whole service — the company is in the earliest of stages. Eventually they hope to make the kit business self-sustaining, outsourcing its production entirely. And with no one dedicated to sales, marketing, support or labor, they need staff. “We have a robot here…” Townsley offered. “And we’re close to UC Berkeley so we’ve put in for a few interns.” Ultimately, they’ll need money, he admitted. “We are looking to raise, because growth will be very slow if we can’t immediately start hiring people to do stuff. We’re two people, and there’s really 10 people’s worth of work to do. It might make a lot of sense for us to not worry about the kits at all, and for us to just focus on developing new products,” said Covington. “We’d be scaling by adding some technicians and some dedicated people in sales.” Amaryllis is a company as young as they get, but its product leapfrogs existing ones by a huge margin. With biotech companies bringing in billions in funding and revenue, that’s a hot commodity, and because of the serendipity involved in its origin, a highly rare one. Don’t expect these guys to be pipetting their own vials a year from now.
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Chatbot Sensay wants to connect the world by sharing knowledge
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Jon Russell
| 2,016
| 9
| 13
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. ; — but how many of those are actually useful? Nobody can go through that many bots individually, but it is certain that few early players in the “chatbot rush” have taken off in a major way. , one contestant at the Battlefield, is aiming to be that first breakout cross-platform chatbot — but, unlike most that provide services and information at a convenience via chat, its currency is people. Founders Ariel Jalali (CEO) and Crystal Rose (CMO) told TechCrunch that the premise of the service is to connect people by sharing knowledge, information and experiences. Sensay is available via SMS and a wide range of messaging apps — Skype Kik, Telegram, Messenger, WeChat and LINE — and the bot acts as a middleman to finding people who can offer you specific advice. That might be as diverse as finding a good Italian restaurant in the Bay Area, seeking help building a mobile app or getting a random person’s opinion on the romantic dinner plans you’re cooking up for your partner. The service dishes out virtual coins based on the perceived quality of interactions, with the person receiving information able to “tip” their Sensay to encourage goodwill and reward quality. Users can also specify their areas of expertise and become a “Sensay” in those areas, helping others with their areas of interest and requests. The Sensay bot is powered by AI, which Jalali said means it is always learning about both its users and their responses. That’s to say that, if there are five people ready to answer my query about sneakers, it’ll try to identify the person who is best suited to me. In instances where a quality dialogue has occurred or good advice has been dished out, the AI doesn’t can responses for reuse, but it does learn from them, he added. Rose said the service has more than 1.5 million registered users, with around one-third active on a monthly basis and one-tenth on a daily basis. That’s impressive engagement for messaging, which, , is a challenging medium to measure. and has raised a total of $6 million, including . The company isn’t looking to monetize its service right now, but Rose explained that once it reaches a “critical mass of users” it may introduce real-world currencies alongside Sensay coins. Jalali revealed that around half of all conversations on the service include “monetizatible” content, such as discount codes or affiliate marketing, so he’s confident that the company can hook into that, in addition to other revenue streams, when it judges the time is right.
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Spincle allows everybody to shoot VR content on their smartphones
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Lucas Matney
| 2,016
| 9
| 13
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VR content is really in the hands of the early adopters at the moment. For most consumers there’s just not much accessibility in creating VR moments. Launching today out of Startup Battlefield, is aiming to bring VR content capture to mobile in a way that’s highly shareable. Quite a few apps have tried their hands at being the Instagram for 360-degree content. They’ve failed for the pretty obvious reason that 360 capture devices are only in the hands of VR nerds and particularly adventurous photographers. The connectivity of 360 cameras and the smartphones people are using to post content often requires multiple apps and way too much patience on the part of the user. The best camera is the one you have on you. In almost every circumstance that’s your smartphone camera. Spincle wants to bring your camera new power and build out a couple of new types of 360 mediums. The rebirth of the panorama as a 360 photo has been a bit of an odd rebranding brought about by Google’s Cardboard platform and the proliferation of cheapo headsets. This evolution has also brought about something called the “magic window” or headset-less VR, where you can spin the phone around you and have a bit of a virtual reality experience. On the surface, Spincle is pretty much a social panorama app, but much in the way Apple “reinvented” the photo, Spincle is launching a pair of interesting formats that you can capture with your regular iPhone camera. One of the prime criticisms of VR photos/videos is that they’re all context and don’t offer any focus. Spincle takes a unique spin on this by building a photo/video amalgam that turns certain aspects of the panorama into a video and keeps the rest a static image based on how you capture the scene. This gives you more of the context unique to the 360-degree medium, while giving the viewer a clear window into the environment’s “Instagrammable” moment. [gallery ids="1386542,1386548,1386549,1386551,1386550,1386547,1386558"] Spincle is a sharp-looking app with a nice UI for you to view your own 360 photos and videos, but the founding team realizes that social networks are a hard game to get into and they’re aiming to make it as easy as possible to share across platforms. The files are exported as .mp4 files, but the company says that these 4K photo/video files are 20 times smaller than normal video files due to the company’s formatting techniques. Furthermore, the founders says these files will loop much like gifs when uploaded to Facebook, giving users a very unique interaction with content from Spincle when it pops up in their feeds. The other interesting mode that the company has produced is a single-camera 3D-capture mode that utilizes the spin of the camera to create a stereoscopic image with limited parallax view. The medium gives everyone with a smartphone the ability to create a cool 3D image without complicated equipment. It’s a bit more accessible to those in the VR crowd that are semi-regularly toting headsets, but as Google Daydream preps for a launch in the coming months, that crowd is going to be quite a bit larger. Even as Apple brings dual cameras to the iPhone 7 Plus and Lenovo gets ready to launch the first Tango-enabled phablet, it’s clear that cameras are getting smarter and more capable in capturing our environments and lives. Spincle brings some of these futuristic innovations to today’s smartphones in a shareable format that has a lot of potential to catch attention.
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Sqreen’s security shield automagically blocks attacks on your web app
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Romain Dillet
| 2,016
| 9
| 13
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French startup protects your web apps and services with little effort from your side. If you don’t want to deal with security yourself, Sqreen is a software-as-a-service product that automatically watches for attacks and protects your server in real time. The company is participating in the Battlefield at . If you already have a web app up and running, chances are you’re going to face SQL injections, XSS attacks, brute-force attacks on the admin login page and more sophisticated stuff. If you don’t have the resources to hire a security person or feel like you’re not competent enough, Sqreen can help you deal with these security holes. Integrating Sqreen on your site only takes a few minutes. You just need to execute a few commands on your server to install the Sqreen package and add a couple of lines to require the Sqreen module in your application. Sqreen doesn’t redirect your traffic or modify your code, so it should be pretty transparent for your user and code base. After that, Sqreen monitors attacks in real time. It doesn’t act as a firewall, it watches what’s happening in your application directly. It only requires an overhead of around 4 percent when it comes to server resources. The service between $49 and $99 per production host per month. [gallery ids="1386493,1386494,1386495,1386496,1386497,1386498,1386504,1386505,1386506"] Common attacks are then blocked and Sqreen suggests modifications to your code base to prevent further attacks. Sqreen works with Ruby on Rails applications. Starting today, it also works with NodeJS and Python applications. And because of the software-as-a-service approach, Sqreen is getting smarter over time by implementing rules that benefit all of Sqreen’s customers. In order to do that, the company is gathering as much data as possible from its customers. For instance, Sqreen uses memory dumps to find out about new attacks and improve its product. Eventually, the company hopes that it’s going to make Sqreen’s shield much smarter and will make it stand out from the competition. In addition to adding new rules, the dashboard has been completely redesigned recently and Sqreen has been adding new security features. For instance, if a user tries to attack a service and Sqreen finds out about it, this user will get flagged for other services that also use Sqreen. It’s a good example of Sqreen’s killer feature — the bigger it gets, the more powerful it becomes as it can build a community of Sqreen-protected clients that share the same shield with the same security rules. Before Sqreen, the two co-founders worked together at Apple on the security team. They would attack Apple’s own services and then report successful attacks to the development teams. According to them, this approach was quite frustrating — it would take quite a bit of time to find a security hole, report it and fix it. Sqreen’s shielding approach makes this process much faster, as Sqreen protects a customer before the customer has even fixed its code base. Big tech companies probably still need an in-house security team, but it makes security more accessible. [gallery ids="1383222,1383223,1383224,1383225"] Question: What kind of performance hit do you get?
Answer: It’s about 5 percent. It’s less than performance monitoring tools [New Relic] Q: How do you know it works?
A: We don’t protect against attacks that are way too specific to your application. Q: How do you find new attacks?
A: Each time an attack is reported, we send it to the back end. We have a feedback loop between the events and the protection. Q: Did your customers switch from another service?
A: There are security scanners, people who are trying to mitigate the stress, but you have nothing in between. They want to be aware of what’s happening and they want prediction. Q: How do you plan to sell it?
A: It’s a SaaS solution. Developers can install it very quickly. We don’t need a sophisticated sales pitch, that’s one advantage of our solution. Q: Given your background with 10 years at Apple, why did you decide to do Sqreen now?
A: We could feel this need. When you report security issues, we saw a really big gap between developers and security. Q: How big is your team?
A: 15 people and we’re based in Paris.
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Google’s Diane Greene talks AWS and machine learning at TechCrunch Disrupt
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Ron Miller
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Diane Greene, executive vice president of Google Cloud Enterprise, appeared on stage at TechCrunch Disrupt San Francisco with TechCrunch editor Matt Burns today, and talked about her role running Google’s massive cloud business. She came on board last year when , and she immediately brought with her enterprise credibility. Her resume includes helping start VMware before , then in 2007. At VMware, she worked on the virtual machine technology that would become the basic building blocks for cloud infrastructure services. Today, with that depth of experience, she is trying to help Google catch market leaders Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure. In fact, today she announced a big cloud win when from its own private cloud to Google — a huge win for the company. One of the primary reasons Evernote is choosing Google is to take advantage of its machine learning algorithms to process data in ways that weren’t possible on its current system (or that would have at least required a significant investment to achieve). [gallery ids="1386413,1386409,1386406,1386416,1386417,1386418,1386414,1386415"] As Greene pointed out, it makes so much sense to move to the cloud. “I honestly [don’t understand] why anyone would try to run their own data center. Now that I understand what our data centers can do, you couldn’t begin to understand our scale.” She pointed out that they invested $10 billion in CapEx investment in their data centers, and they have a staff of 650 people dedicated to security. She rightly states that no private company could begin to touch that kind of commitment. “I think everyone realizes they can be more secure and spend less money and let someone innovate in areas I can [then] take advantage of. I can partner with [this] innovator and focus on my core competencies for my customers and products,” she said. As for competing with AWS and Microsoft, who both offer that same value proposition, she says they can speak to customers on an engineer to engineer level, as well as offer a competitive price and highly efficient data centers. As she pulls the company together in a more organized fashion under her leadership, they can take advantage of these factors to continue growing. What she has to know is that her competitors have the same kinds of advantages she describes. What she does have going for her at this point is the fact that the market is just beginning to really take off. AWS is big leader in a small piece of a potentially huge market. If Google can gain even some of that remaining massive available market share, it will make a ton of money.
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Sarah Perez
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Apple’s iPhone 7 will be super limited in stores and all jet black and Plus models are sold out
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Matthew Panzarino
| 2,016
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| 14
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Apple has issued a statement tonight that is essentially setting expectations for those who hoped they’d be able to walk into an Apple store on Friday and pick themselves up an iPhone. The statement makes it clear that all iPhones will be in short supply for walk-in customers without a reservation. The statement also indicates that Apple’s jet black iPhones and have sold out completely in the initial online ordering period and that inventory will be available. Yep, that’s right, if you want an iPhone in jet black, just order it online and wait — you won’t find one in stores. This matches what I’ve heard, which is that jet black iPhone 7s are incredibly hard to come by — even for employees and executives inside Apple — especially the Plus models. Most reviewers and other early birds got matte black iPhone 7 Pluses to test — I only know of one exception. I personally love the jet black finish and, regardless of a tendency to scuff, am really attached to it on my review iPhone 7. I’ll be waiting to buy a jet black Plus. Apple’s statement is below: We couldn’t be happier with the initial response to iPhone 7 and iPhone 7 Plus, and we are looking forward to beginning sales through our retail stores and partners around the world.
Beginning Friday, limited quantities of iPhone 7 in silver, gold, rose gold, and black will be available for walk-in customers at Apple retail stores. During the online pre-order period, initial quantities of iPhone 7 Plus in all finishes and iPhone 7 in jet black sold out and will not be available for walk-in customers. Availability at partner locations for all finishes may vary and we recommend checking directly with them. Customers can continue to order all models in all colors on apple.com. We sincerely appreciate our customers’ patience as we work hard to get the new iPhone into the hands of everyone who wants one as quickly as possible.
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Create hassle-free slideshow presentations online with Slides
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Matthew Lynley
| 2,016
| 9
| 13
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Meetings are probably never going to die — and, along with that, neither are presentations. But the traditional route for making presentations is getting a little outdated, with tools like PowerPoint getting updated regularly but lacking a certain simplicity to them. That’s why Owen Bossola and Hakim El Hattab decided to start , an online service for creating, viewing and collaborating on slideshow presentations. The goal of Slides is to bring together all the best parts of discrete presentation management services out there, like PowerPoint and SlideShare, and make it one seamless experience. “There’s always a need for visual storytelling, and Slides at its core is a tool for visual storytelling,” El Hattab said. “Maybe you get more efficient with Slack, but with sales and marketing and education, there’s all these use cases that require presentation software. People present in a thousand different ways. We just try to tackle all of those.” The creation experience is pretty much what you’d expect. You’ll find various features that are present in a lot of other creation experiences and, following that, users can share links to the presentations and ways to watch them unfold in real time during a meeting. There’s also a limited commenting section built into the service, which is still in the sort of developmental phase, as Bossola and El Hattab didn’t want to feature creep the service right away. [gallery ids="1386469,1386468,1386467,1386481,1386480"] Slideshow presenters can also embed content from other services within the presentations. Because everything is viewed online, everything is therefore rendered on the Web — so rendering complex visuals can be more seamless instead of having to download complex PDF files or 3D visuals. There’s another benefit to rendering everything online, as well: they can be viewed on any device. In that way, even people remotely can watch the presentation happening in real time while on something like a conference call on their phones or tablets instead of having to be in the room. Even as the presenter is swiping through the slides, that will happen on remote devices. All this works in Slides’ favor, because it makes the approach to making presentations much more flexible. The composition tool has a quite similar feel to other standard tools (though it’s made to look a little more slick than existing ones), including features like altering the color schema to make sure text doesn’t get washed away in a darker background. The objects snap to a grid, it’s easy to import additional content and users have access to a lot of pre-existing templates — whether they’re made by the company or the standard stock slides offered by the company. Presenters can also use their phones as a combo clicker-note taking application, using it to advance through slides and review their notes on those slides. The tool — while highly flexible for developers — is clearly geared toward marketers and others who need to put together presentations, and trying to make that whole process as easy and seamless as possible. Naturally, there’s a big market for this (giant applications like PowerPoint wouldn’t get regular updates if it weren’t). “Since our format, at the end of it, is a website, you have a website for your presentation,” Bossola said. “Within that website you can include anything you can include in a website. All these specific kinds of areas, we have a lot of people in education that use text to write math formulas. We can be instantly flexible because it’s web based.” There’s an obvious consumer application to all this. It’d be great to have this kind of a tool when giving a presentation in college, for example, instead of having to wander through the Web for other tools or dealing with school licenses for PowerPoint. But the main sweet spot for Slides is going to be larger marketing divisions in companies, which are always going to need good tools to make engaging presentations. Slides is actually built on some open-source software technology that El Hattab had been developing over time. Developers were using the tools to create presentations, but had to hand-code them — which made El Hattab and Bossola realize they had a potential company on their hands. The company still plans to contribute to that resource, as well as update their service with any new tools components that come in from the community like bug and security fixes. There’s always a risk of building a company on top of open-source software, but El Hattab said that it’s part of the company’s DNA, and there are plenty of success stories like Automattic. There is, of course, competition in the form of companies like and . The Slides team has quite a long history in the content development space, with Bossola previously working at Thrillist and El Hattab coming from a digital production company. The hope is that if the company can keep the tools as simple, flexible and widely applicable as possible, they’ll finally have a PowerPoint killer on their hands.
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Crunch Report | Uber self-driving cars begin working in Pittsburgh
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Khaled "Tito" Hamze
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Tito Hamze, John Mannes
Tito Hamze
Veanne Cao
Joe Zolnoski
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Google launches final release version of Angular 2.0
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Frederic Lardinois
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After Google launched the first version of its in 2010, it quickly became one of the hottest web technologies. Since then, the web has changed, though, and when Google announced in 2014, it created quite a stir in the web development community because this new version wasn’t just an update, but instead a complete rewrite that wasn’t compatible with the older version. Today, after numerous preview and beta releases, the company is officially launching the final release version of Angular 2.0. “ 1 first solved the problem of how to develop for an emerging web,” the company writes in today’s announcement. “Six years later, the challenges faced by today’s application developers, and the sophistication of the devices that applications must support, have both changed immensely.” Application developers today, however, also have a far wider choice of JavaScript frameworks. Facebook’s React framework especially has a lot of momentum behind it, though, to be fair, the two projects have slightly different styles (Angular is a far more opinionated framework, for example) and strengths (React Native makes it easy to build native apps, for example). But given that Google doesn’t give developers who built applications with Angular 1.x an easy upgrade path, many of them are now looking at which technology to use next. Angular 2.0 introduces a number of new features, including better support for modern browsers and mobile development. The team also moved a lot of the core functionality into modules that now make it easier to use third-party libraries in addition to the built-in ones. The team now also recommends that developers use TypeScript to write their apps. TypeScript is a Microsoft-developed superset of JavaScript that adds features like static typing and class-based object-oriented programming. Looking ahead, the Angular team plans to provide developers with more guides and examples to help them learn Angular 2.0 faster. In addition, the team plans to put more work into animations for Angular 2.0 and move its out of its experimental branch. , a project that lets you render your app server-side so first-time users will quickly see a server-rendered version of your site, for example, will also soon get support for more languages. Going forward, the team will also move to releasing Angular updates through three channels (major, minor and patch). Major versions are those that introduce incompatible API changes. Minor versions signal the addition of backwards-compatible functionality and the version numbers for the patch version ticks up as backwards-compatible bugs are fixed.
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The future of human computer interaction will be multimodal
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John Mannes
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| 9
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We have been using the computer mouse for decades to interact with our technology. Touchscreens brought us a new way to input commands to our gadgets, but they rely on the same fundamental idea of the click. Even the new 3D touch on the iPhone 7 is just an incredibly sophisticated way of using the hand to answer a yes or no question. Both Michael Buckwald, CEO of Leap Motion and Jim Marggraff, CEO of Eyefluence agree that the future of human computer interaction will be multimodal. Marggraff is doing to the eye what Steve Jobs did to the finger with the mouse. His company builds eye-tracking technology for AR and VR. Buckwald takes it a slightly different direction by leveraging hand motion as a communication tool. “Everyone now has what would have been a super computer in their pockets 15 years ago,” added Buckwald. “But if you compare that to the ways that we actually use these devices, it’s still essentially binary.” Humans have a natural desire for communication to be a bidirectional process. We crave haptic feedback and real physical plastic buttons for a reason. However, when we uncover new methods of communication, we indirectly find ourselves with new and unfamiliar feedback. Sometimes this feedback is uncomfortable, like the nausea some of us feel after spending too much time in VR realities, but sometimes it can be beautiful. “Seventy-80 percent actually report that their brain is telling them they have gotten some haptic feedback,” said Buckwald, when addressing phantom sensations from users of Leap Motion’s Orion. This is fun for folks looking to escape their nine to five grind to Everest Base Camp, but it becomes incredibly valuable for others with amputations that suffer from phantom pain. VR has served to be a valuable tool in helping these people connect their missing limbs to a brain that is certain they are still present. Even worse, those with locked-in syndrome cannot communicate easily with the outside world. Communication becomes an extensive and tiring process and many struggle to keep up with the rapid-fire speech most of us take for granted. “The general notion of pointing at things to navigate through a menu can be done in tens of milliseconds with your eyes versus the time it takes you to use your hands,” added Marggraff. Just as some people like to talk with metaphors while others leverage humor, human-computer interact won’t play out as a game of winner take all. “If you want to grab a virtual object and hold it and move it around and look at it from different sides and then you would like to look at that object and find out the volume or maybe change its color and morph it in some way, well you could start with your hands and continue with your eyes,” continued Marggraff. What we are certain of, is that no matter the input mechanism, communication must be seamless, without delay or interruption. The natural and the realistic go hand in hand with the quality of the experience. Not only will worlds seem more immersive, they will also be less likely to make us puke. This can have implications for everyone. One day our children will be able to grow up in a world where they are capable of playing with friends on other continents through VR. This is the same hypothesis being explored by companies like AltspaceVR, with entire social networks built around shared experiences. The availability of content remains a serious limitation in the growth of VR as an entertainment platform. An “iPhone moment” can happen, but only with the propagation of multimodal human computer interaction.
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Timeular’s cute little box makes the hellish task of filling out your time sheets fun
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Jon Russell
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| 9
| 14
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Anyone who has ever worked with clients will know the pain of tracking your time. Yes, it’s important to know how long you spent so you can bill correctly, but it is tedious, hellish and horrid — and, added to that, too often left until the last minute, when it becomes harder to remember what was done. Enter and its pretty little eight-sided box, which makes tracking your time — dare I say it — actually a fun thing. The box is essentially a timer that sits next to you as you work. Each side of the box can be configured to a task or client so that, when you change what you are working on, you simply tip the box to sit on the label. Voilà, the stop clock for that new task begins. That’s hugely useful if your work is in client services, perhaps within a legal practice, a marketing agency, etc. The product — which is called ZEI — launches on Kickstarter next week, wherein it will be priced at less than $100. Compatible apps for iOS, Android, Windows and Mac are available to track the timings, retain your work history and more. Timeular plans to offer more services in the future to help its customers work more efficiently.
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Shervin Pishevar: The first Hyperloop will likely be built overseas
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Sarah Buhr
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Shervin Pishevar, well-known venture capitalist and co-founder in the two-year-old L.A.-based futuristic transportation company came to today to chat about shooting across the world people and things — faster than the speed of sound. But just how soon will we see that happen? Pishevar says his team is “full steam ahead” to get us there by 2021 and that the first one will likely be overseas. Plans to build the Hyperloop came from a conversation Pishevar had with his friend and founder of Tesla and SpaceX Elon Musk while on a trip to Cuba. It has since raised roughly $130 million in the first 18 months of operation, according to Pishevar. The company announced an additional $80 million in funding earlier this year, adding up to just over $92 million, according to Crunchbase. A Hyperloop spokesperson clarified the company has raised north of $100 million thus far. It will likely need hundreds of millions more to continue the race. But we are getting closer to hopping aboard, according to Pishevar. The company recently broke ground in Nevada for a new manufacturing plant and conducted testing of its propulsion technology earlier this spring, yielding a pace of 110 mph in 1.7 seconds — a fraction of the proposed 700 mph speeds. But, says Pishevar, that initial test was on a very short track and the tech is expected to speed up with longer distances. The company is busy gearing up for its “Kitty Hawk moment” next year when it begins testing on its passive levitation system. Hyperloop One has also made inroads to building its tech across the globe, partnering with several cargo ports, including in Russia, Finland and a recent announcement with DPWorld in Dubai. “The world economy is growing so fast. The ports are stressed. The real estate is expensive,” Pishevar said. The idea is to move ports to offshore places like the desert, thus opening up billions of dollars of waterfront property. Pishevar, also an Uber investor, thinks the idea makes a new kind of futuristic city possible, too. “You could Uber within the city and Hyperloop to other cities so you could go from New York to DC in 30 minutes,” he said. Though the company seems to be motoring right along with its plans, it’s not without its challenges. There’s another competitor in the space for one. Hyperloop Transportation Technologies, is also based in L.A., also plans to build worldwide and says it is working with governments around the world to do so. And both companies face building challenges and regulatory issues to get from point A to B. Hyperloop One is also in the midst of a with former co-founder Brogan BamBrogan and had a leadership shakeup. Pishevar did not want to talk about the legal woes, but did say he doesn’t spend his time thinking about the competition. “The thing I learned from Travis Kalanick, Elon and others is they don’t spend their time thinking about competition. They think about what they’re going to build next,” he said. “We’re not thinking about the past, we’re full steam ahead on the future.” What’s in the nearest future for the young transportation company involves lots of testing and working with governments to get it to the next phase. “Hyperloop is a decades-long effort. You’re moving steel and reshaping physical things so you need government to help you build,” Pishevar said.
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