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Listen to TCBC Episode 2: Brian Heater on IFA, Galaxy Note 7 and more
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Darrell Etherington
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In case you , TechCrunch has a new podcast, and it’s TCBC, a show where I speak to a different writer on staff each week about their beat, the stories they’re following, and the tech news that’s most important to them right now. This week, it’s almost time for IFA, the CES of Europe (the other CES of Europe that isn’t MWC, at least). Our resident hardware expert Brian Heater is on his way there, and he gave me a preview of what to expect. We also talked about the Samsung Galaxy Note 7, which he recently reviewed, and the Kobo Aura One, an e-reader from the only company that’s been able to continue competing with Amazon in that highly specific space. You can listen via the stream embedded above, or (and leave a review), or in your podcast player of choice.
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New sensor system can predict when senior citizens are heading for a fall
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John Biggs
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Falling is awful. It causes irreparable harm to senior citizens and the fear of falling reduces senior citizen mobility drastically, creating a feedback loop that can be catastrophic. Now, thanks to a team at the , caregivers can predict falls up to three weeks out, allowing for care and assistance before its needed. The system is non-wearable and uses cameras to assess gait speed and stride length. The researchers found that a “gait speed decline of 5 centimeters per second was associated with an 86.3 percent probability of falling within the following three weeks.” Further, a shortened stride length “was associated with a 50.6 percent probability of falling within the next three weeks.” With these two pieces of data caregivers can intervene before things get out of hand. “Aging should not mean that an adult suddenly loses his or her independence,” said Marilyn Rantz, Professor Emerita of Nursing. “However, for many older adults the risk of falling impacts how long seniors can remain independent. Being able to predict that a person is at risk of falling will allow caretakers to intervene with the necessary care to help seniors remain independent as long as possible.” The team based their system at TigerPlace, a retirement residence in Columbia, Missouri. They installed sensors around the location and set up an email alert system “when irregular motion was detected.” It’s a great use of some intelligent technology and, what’s more, it requires no wearables and is completely passive.
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Instagram Stories diverges from Snapchat by suggesting who to follow
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Josh Constine
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Who decides who’s cool? Snapchat refuses to recommend accounts for fear of feeling heavy-handed. Maybe it learned from Twitter, whose old one-size-fits-none suggested user list immediately made it noisy, impersonal and ruled by an oligarchy. But Instagram is betting that algorithmically personalized suggestions could make its addictive… even if your friends are boring. Today, atop the Explore tab, Instagram will start showing some users a bar of Stories from accounts you could follow, with the feature rolling out to everyone soon. Based on who you follow and the topics you care about, the tailored recommendations will make it easy to add someone new to your Home feed’s Stories section. The suggestions are sure to get plenty of attention because Explore is surprisingly popular. Instagram says 100 million people visit it every day — the first time it’s revealed a stat about Explore. That’s one-fifth of Instagram’s 500 million monthly users, and one-third of the app’s daily actives. Instagram’s Director of Product Management Blake Barnes describes why people visit Explore, saying, “Some seek it out as the primary way they use Instagram…Some people view it as a dessert.” Beyond being entertaining, Explore helps people keep their feed fresh with new accounts. That’s critical after six years of photo sharing. This follows Facebook’s strategy of using artificial intelligence for curation instead of humans, like it just started to with . Algorithmic suggestions will allow personalization of Explore Stories at scale. When the tab was first launched, it was called Popular and merely showed the most Liked and commented-on posts across Instagram. That ended up too skewed toward generic iPhotography, so the Facebook-owned app began in 2014, and eventually started and themed . Now Explore could give Stories a boost as it competes with its forefather, Snapchat Stories, which for pioneering the ephemeral slideshow format. Explore enhances Instagram’s biggest talking point here — that more people already have an interest graph and audience on Instagram than Snapchat. Instagram refused to give specifics about how its version of Stories is growing, but Barnes did say “We’re really excited to see how quickly they’ve caught on, whether with everyday users or celebrities and brands.” He recounts how his favorite story yet has been basketball star LeBron James showing himself lonely and eating cereal on a rented yacht. “Stories removed the fear of over-posting or worrying about Likes and comments,” Barnes explains. After of month of using Instagram and Snapchat Stories, Instagram’s product clearly lags behind. Uploads don’t always get added properly, the lack of colored text is annoying and I miss the selfie lenses and geofilters. Yet I’m getting more of my real friends watching and replying, and the rewind feature makes consumption easy to control. Snapchat doesn’t seem to be outright losing users to Instagram Stories, but the real threat is that this copycat could be cuddly enough to keep non-Snappers from straying. Barnes concludes, “It has the early signs of being a product people love.”
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New York subway is offering free ebooks (and Wi-Fi) for your commute
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John Biggs
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In an effort to highlight its upcoming launch of more in-train Wi-Fi (not to be ), the New York MTA, Transit Wireless, and publishing powerhouse Penguin Random House are getting together to release ebooks and articles timed to your commute. This project mirrors a product launched in London last year. As notes, even Governor Cuomo is in on the fun. “New York’s transportation network must continue adapting to the changing needs of its ridership and a key part of that is delivering the amenities that have become essential components of everyday life,” he said. “Bringing Wi-Fi into underground stations helps riders stay connected throughout their commute, allowing them to check in with friends or family and access news or entertainment. We’ve made tremendous progress in modernizing the system and Subway Reads is a fun way to introduce riders to the new Wi-Fi experience.” is giving away a few Kindle Fires and they are offering 175 short stories and chapters for riders. You can even take the stories off the train and above ground. It’s odd that the MTA feels it needs to advertise its exciting free Wi-Fi offer in any way. Given the previous inaccessibility of the system’s eldritch tunnels I figure all you have to do is post a sign that says “Free Wi-Fi” and people would jump. However, the ebook offering is a clever way to kick things off and it’s better than the previous system of trapping and tagging
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Facebook’s Trending Topics algorithm already screwed up
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Kate Conger
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Well, that was fast. Three days after Facebook said it would who curate the Trending topics section and replace them with a purely algorithmic system, the company trended a . The mistake seems like an easily avoidable one — the story on Kelly, which claimed that she had been booted from the conservative-leaning Fox News for being a secret Hillary Clinton supporter, had the unmistakable scent of bullshit. But without a human to catch the mistake, the story shot to the top of Facebook’s Trending list, beating out Beyoncé’s VMA performance and Anthony Weiner’s sexting scandal, before it was removed around 9:30 ET this morning. By trending the fake story, Facebook lent credibility to the hoax. TechCrunch understands from a source familiar with the situation that Facebook’s algorithm for Trending relies on the number of articles and posts about the topic — a relatively easy system to spoof with a fake, viral headline. The Kelly story was initially promoted to Tending because it met the conditions for acceptance at the time, according to Facebook’s review guidelines. However, on re-review, the topic was deemed as inaccurate and was removed from Trending. Facebook declined to comment on the matter. It’s a worst-case scenario for the company, which faced outcry from conservatives in May when that Facebook’s news editors were purposefully suppressing conservative stories in favor of liberal ones. Although it ultimately seems that the accusations of bias were overblown, Facebook wasn’t able to produce complete logs to back up its curation choices during that time. This also isn’t the first time since the dismissal of human editors on Friday that Facebook’s Trending section has been misled by an algorithm. Over the weekend, , including one calling Ann Coulter a sexist slur and another about a video of a man masturbating with a McDonald’s sandwich. Facebook justified its decision to eliminate human editors last week by saying that the move was necessary in order to scale Trending topics to a broader audience. However, the company is learning a swift lesson in quality over quantity. The majority of Facebook users aren’t fact-checkers or journalists, as a quick scroll through your own Newsfeed will readily confirm. Surfacing stories based on how often users post about them is a surefire way to make clickbait trend — something Facebook’s supposedly guards against. However, Trending’s reliance on clicks and re-shares in this case makes Facebook’s once-helpful news module far less useful for everyone.
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Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg hopes to show off his Jarvis-like home AI next month
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Darrell Etherington
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Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg is living at least a few years out ahead of anyone reading this post – the founding executive told an audience in Rome ( ) today that he hopes to demonstrate his home’s artificial intelligence system, which controls things like air conditioning, lighting and more based on things like face and voice recognition. Zuckerberg’s , an annual goal the CEO sets for himself and makes public. Past challenges have included learning Mandarin, and the more modest goal of reading two books every month, which for someone with Zuck’s free time, might actually have been more difficult to achieve than creating a for his sole personal use. Here’s why his challenge this year isn’t necessarily a personal Waterloo for Zuckerberg: he has the help of “all these Facebook engineers who are doing all this awesome AI work in speech recognition, face recognition,” according to the Q&A, which happened live just a few hours ago. What exactly can it do? Hopefully we’ll get a full breakdown next month, but he told the people in attendance in Rome that it opens up the security gate at his home automatically when he approaches, and it also responds to voice commands that let him control the temperature (which he noted his wife Priscilla Chan cannot do, because the system is coded to recognize only his voice thus far). When Zuck first explained what he hoped to be able to do with his home AI when the yearly challenge was complete, he wanted not only smart home device control, but also friend recognition and automatic entry from the security system, as well as alerts for his young daughter when she needs taking care of. I suppose if you’re anticipating a feature where a lot of work gets done in a VR environment, having your own personal Jarvis would come in handy.
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Anthony Ha
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Google’s new app Crowdsource asks users to help with translation, transcription & more
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Sarah Perez
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A new Google application called has quietly appeared on Google Play, asking users to perform brief tasks that will help improve the quality of Google services like Maps, translation, image transcription, and more. The app, surprisingly, doesn’t offer any sort of rewards or micropayments in exchange for users’ work, however – which means it won’t be much of a threat to distributed workforce platforms like Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, for example. It’s also solely focused on helping Google improve its own services, not tasks from third parties, as on Mechanical Turk. The new app was first spotted by the blog . Google confirmed to TechCrunch this is a pilot project, posted this morning. Crowdsource asks users what languages they’re fluent in, ahead of allowing them to handle translation requests. Beyond that, it features large buttons that let you choose from a selection of micro-tasks like image transcription, handwriting recognition, translation and translation validation, as well as map translation validation. [gallery ids="1376350,1376349,1376348,1376347,1376346,1376345,1376344"] It seems odd that Google would launch an app like this, without offering something to users that would actually encourage contributions. After all, the company is already familiar with the model thanks to , which offers Google Play credits in exchange for answering free surveys. Throwing out a few credits in exchange for helpful contributions across transcription services, translation and more, seems like it would have made sense. Google, however, suggests that users contribute to Crowdsource because by doing so they’ll know that they’ve “made the internet a better place for your community.” (I don’t know Google, have you the internet? It’s not all sunshine and puppies over here.) Asked why people use an app like this, rewards, a Google spokesperson replied: “people may be inclined to use [Crowdsource] because, for many languages, tools like Translate, Image Recognition, etc. aren’t very good right now.” Crowdsource’s tasks take no more than 5 to 10 seconds to complete and include the sort of horrible things you often have to do on web pages to prove you’re not a bot, like figuring out what some blurry photograph reads. Android Police notes that most of the images users are asked to translate are street signs, and describes the handwriting samples are “chicken scratches.” Yep, sounds fun. Google, of course, has relied on crowdsourcing for a number of its products. Back in 2006, it for example, which asked users to tag images. That project lives on at a website , in fact. The company says that the app is not the final form factor, and it’s “thinking through incentives” now. Crowdsource is a free on Google Play. No iOS version is available. (Probably because Google knows better.)
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Crunch Report | Intel’s VR headset
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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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Intel will start producing ARM chips to boost foundry business
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Lucia Maffei
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Chip maker Intel and British semiconductor IP company ARM an agreement that could help boost the chip giant’s custom foundry business. The deal, revealed today at the the Intel Developer Forum in San Francisco, will allow Intel Custom Foundry to make ARM processors for third parties. made it clear that the company is in the midst of a shift, and it needs to gear up for the Internet of Things. The agreement with ARM Holdings, which by Japanese tech giant Softbank a month ago, could be the first step in this direction. “This will allow Intel to compete with Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing and Samsung foundries for the business of the likes of Qualcomm and Apple,” Abhinav Davuluri, equity analyst for Morningstar in Chicago, in an online note. As part of the collaboration, ARM and Intel Custom Foundry will accelerate the development and implementation of ARM SoCs on Intel’s 10-nanometer process. Specifically, Artisan Physical IP, ARM’s intellectual property, will be made available in the process. Optimizing this technology for Intel’s 10 nm process means that foundry customers can take advantage of the IP to achieve best-in-class PPA (power, performance, area) for power-efficient, high-performance implementations of their designs for mobile, IoT and other consumer applications,” Zane Ball, co-general manager of Intel Custom Foundry at Intel, in a blog post. Ball added that Intel has partnered with ANSYS, Cadence, Mentor Graphics and Synopsys previously. Intel also is making chips for customers such as Netronome and LG Electronics, which recently announced device that will be the first handset to ship with Android 7.0.
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Journeying from entrepreneur to investor and back again
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Navin Chaddha
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Jonah Goodhart started his entrepreneurial journey while still in college at Cornell University. What started out a bit haphazardly with an email list turned into solid learning opportunities that have informed his business decisions along the way. After the acquisition of his second company, Right Media by Yahoo in 2007, Goodhart decided to go in a different direction and started investing in other people. This angel fund, WGI, helped to fund numerous data and next generation location companies. But Goodhart missed creating and running a company. In 2010, Moat was launched to make digital a more effective medium for brands to reach consumers via measurement and analytics. Building on the belief that people and culture are the core of the company, Goodhart set out to bring in team members that were both positive and paid attention to detail: two key ingredients to a successful start-up. Throughout the process, Goodhart acknowledges the challenges of raising capital and the importance of finding investors that have the right chemistry. “One of my conclusions throughout that process is that raising money is sort of like baseball. If three out of ten like you and there’s a fit, then you’re in the Hall of Fame. I think venture investing is hard to do because there’s a lot of signals that investors are juggling. There’s groupthink challenges. There’s a reality that each firm is different and has different goals and not every entrepreneur is a fit with every firm or every partner within every firm, but you have to find the right chemistry. That’s really the key,” Goodhart said. [soundcloud url=”https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/273680714?secret_token=s-4Zz0g” params=”color=ff5500&auto_play=false&hide_related=false&show_comments=true&show_user=true&show_reposts=false” width=”100%” height=”166″ iframe=”true” /]
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The OMEN series is HP showcasing it has real PC gaming savvy
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Stefan Etienne
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The arrival of new gaming products from HP is very infrequent. After all, HP isn’t a PC gamer’s first choice in hardware, at all. Well if you’re Hewlett-Packard, what do you do? Well, you design a complete PC gaming line, evidently. HP’s efforts begin with the OMEN X desktop, a tower with support for dual GeForce GTX 1080 GPUs — the best there is. If you’re an AMD fan (for some reason) then the R9 Fury X top-end graphics card is also supported in dual configuration. Core i5 and Core i7 processor configurations are also available, depending on how ready you want to be for VR headsets and gaming. Meanwhile, the chassis itself is well-ventilated (is a rather interesting cube) and offered in a barebone configuration through a partnership with Maingear, so that PC gamers like you or myself can build the system to exact specifications and wiring. To go with the gaming desktop, HP’s first NVIDIA G-Sync curved monitor also is being debuted. Called the OMEN X curved display, it’s basically as described: a curved gaming monitor, with G-Sync tech to prevent visual tearing and input lag. But you need a match OMEN headset, keyboard, mouse and mousepad, right? Right. Danish gaming accessory manufacturer SteelSeries is doing a collaboration with HP here, and will release those aforementioned products in mid-September. That’s $79.for the OMEN headset, $99 for the OMEN keyboard, $59 for the OMEN mouse and $19 for the OMEN mouse pad. If none of that is to your fancy, then the OMEN 17 laptop might be. It’s part of the first crop of GTX 1060 and 1070-equipped laptops, but also has a G-Sync enabled screen with resolution options up to 4K (that’s cool). Quad speakers tuned by Bang & Olufsen are also part of the package, with a DisplayPort capable of 2K or 4K output, and a 95W polymer battery that HP says is supposedly going to last 7.5 hours on a single charge. I’d love to see that tested. The rest of the Omen 17 laptop’s specs are also high-end, including DDR4 memory, two USB type-C ports, eight USB 3.0 ports, a 3-in-1 media card reader, three DisplayPort ports, an HDMI slot, 802.11ac Wi-Fi and a gigabit ethernet slot (because LAN parties!). Availability for the OMEN X Desktop is planned on October 16, with a configuration starting at $2,099.99. However, HP gets will stock it earlier on August 17, starting at $1,799, with the standalone OMEN X chassis at a starting price of $599. As for the remaining costs: the OMEN 17 Laptop will start at $1,599, without a specific launch date announced. Finally, the OMEN X by HP curved display currently has no pricing info available, and will debut in 2017.
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The next $1 billion startup acquirer won’t be a tech company
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Alex Taussig
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Acquisitions starting with a “B” are not uncommon in the tech industry in Silicon Valley. Roughly two to four billion-dollar deals have gone down each quarter (on average) over the last few years. The recent purchases of by GM and by Unilever turned heads for another reason: The buyers were as non-techie as you can get. The in Detroit — HQ of General Motors. Strategic prerogatives motivated both deals. For 108-year-old GM, the Cruise deal instantly makes it a contender in autonomous transportation — not an insignificant move for an automaker with little software DNA. For 86-year-old Unilever, the DSC deal allows it to compete more effectively on a direct-to-consumer basis with its nemesis, Procter & Gamble, which owns the shaving giant Gillette. in Rotterdam, Netherlands. If the buyers had been Silicon Valley companies, these deals would be less remarkable. Instead, we find two “traditional” consumer product companies paying Silicon Valley prices for startups. And, of course, the buying streak continued with the , of which $3 billion is cash consideration. Will we see more old-line consumer businesses buying their way into innovation in the coming years? I think so. Examining the resources of those companies, it becomes evident that more deals of this type are possible, and, in fact, quite likely. I pulled public company data from the Fortune 500 list of the largest companies in the U.S. and filtered for categories like consumer goods, services and logistics. I then removed any companies with less than $1 billion of cash on the balance sheet, because startups are unlikely to take public company stock in a slower growing business in lieu of cold, hard cash. The chart below shows the cash balance and growth rate of the 31 remaining companies: Source: Public company filings via Sentieo and Yahoo Finance (7/30/2016). These companies have $133 billion of cash in total, with a median of $2.4 billion. Nine of these have greater than $5 billion of cash on hand: Coca-Cola ( ), Procter & Gamble ( ), Pepsi ( ), Walmart ( ), UPS ( ), Costco ( ), Nike ( ) Disney ( ) and Twenty-First Century Fox ( ). To buy a company for $1 billion, these companies would spend less than 20 percent of their cash on hand. (Walmart spent more than one-third of its $8.7 billion of cash to buy Jet, so perhaps the list should be even longer!) Furthermore, their growth rates are anemic. The group’s median growth rate is 2.6 percent annually, which is a little more than double the rate of inflation and roughly one-seventh that of the “five tech horsemen”: Facebook ( ), Alphabet ( ), Amazon ( ), Microsoft ( ) and Apple ( ). Nearly all the growth in the consumer space is therefore being fueled by software. It stands to reason that many of these 31 companies are thinking about what their software strategy is, or how they can use the internet to form more direct relationships with their customers. In the future, there may be a fuzzier line between a “consumer products” company and a “consumer technology” company. Making that transition should be a scary proposition to many of these old-line businesses. It requires new products, fresh talent and the willingness to take risks and make big investments. Yet, the cash is there — $133 billion of it, to be precise. Using it to buy one’s way into the future doesn’t seem like a crazy idea. Of course, the cynical finance student in me knows that these deals are notoriously difficult to execute for large, slow-growing companies. GM trades at 0.66x its $158 billion in annual revenues, so it has two problems. First, almost any tech acquisition will be dilutive to its share price , which Wall Street hates. Second, to add even a percentage point to GM’s growth rate would require it to contribute $1.6 billion of new revenue from its target. Both of these problems seem intractable to a finance wonk analyzing the deal, and yet GM was able to pull off the Cruise deal. No doubt some very senior managers at GM had to put significant credibility on the line to get this deal done. Not every legacy consumer company will have the conviction that GM, Unilever or Walmart had in recent months, but some will. If you’re considering the M&A path for your company, my advice would be to start developing senior relationships at a number of these non-traditional acquirers today. You might be educating them about what the future could be like, but in a more capital-constrained environment like 2016, these players have the cash and motivation to make a deal happen. And, now a precedent exists.
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Univision wins auction to acquire Gawker Media
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Anthony Ha
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Univision has won the auction to acquire Gawker Media’s websites and business. , reporting the acquisition price was $135 million and would cover all seven of Gawker’s websites. The company’s founder Nick Denton confirmed the deal in an email to reporters: Gawker Media Group has agreed this evening to sell our business and popular brands to Univision, one of America’s largest media companies that is rapidly assembling the leading digital media group for millennial and multicultural audiences. I am pleased that our employees are protected and will continue their work under new ownership — disentangled from the legal campaign against the company. We could not have picked an acquirer more devoted to vibrant journalism. Best known for its Spanish-language TV network, Univision isn’t the most obvious acquirer, but it also owns and recently . (Gawker, by the way, posted what were supposedly internal screenshots of .) The sale is the result of , a.k.a. wrestler Hulk Hogan, who sued the company after it published a clip of a sex tape featuring Hogan. Hogan’s lawsuit was bankrolled, in part, , who recently wrote arguing that . A Florida jury sided with Hogan, awarding him $140 million. The company is appealing the decision, but the judge denied Gawker’s request to delay the payment. As a result, in June and went up for auction. that basically set the floor for the auction. — LittleThings also made a $10 million offer for Jezebel, but it was . The sale still need to be approved by a bankruptcy court judge.
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Intel unveils a ready-to-fly drone, the Aero, to win over developers
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Lora Kolodny
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At the on Tuesday, Intel unveiled a new, hardware product — a ready-to-fly drone; specifically, a quadcopter, aimed at software developers rather than casual hobbyists or commercial drone operators. Intel’s drone is a fully assembled unit that runs on Intel’s Aero Compute Board with a Linux operating system, RealSense for vision and comes with Santa Monica startup AirMap’s software development kit pre-loaded. , generally, helps drone users fly only where it’s safe and legal to do so. Other chip makers, like , and , have been vying to gain market share in the burgeoning, if not yet clearly regulated, domestic and international drones market. But they’ve done so by selling their microprocessors to other hardware manufacturers, including companies that make UAVs or cameras and other systems that are integrated into them to enhance functionality, usually around filming and aerial data capture. Ambarella has supplied chips in the built-in cameras on DJI’s drones, and for GoPro cameras that can be mounted onto 3D Robotics drones, for example. And Qualcomm’s Snapdragon Flight platform and 4k cameras have been used in drones like the Tencent-Zerotech model called YING that sends data from mid-flight to Tencent’s social media platforms QQ and Wenxing. Intel is also an equity investor in drone tech startups, including: Yuneec, which makes drones that automatically avoid obstacles even in tight spaces; Airware, developers of an operating system for commercial drones; and PrecisionHawk, makers of a fixed-wing drone and software for agricultural and other commercial drones. Intel also acquired Ascending Technologies, a German autopilot tech company, in January of this year. The inclusion of AirMap’s software development kit in Intel’s Aero Ready-to-Fly quadcopters is a boon for the startup, which only launched this week at a closed conference for developers in Santa Monica, California. AirMap was already a partner of leading drone makers DJI, as well as 3D Robotics and Aeryon Labs. The startup’s CEO Ben Marcus told TechCrunch on Tuesday that AirMap is on a mission to “make drones a part of everyday life.” He said pervasive drone use can’t safely happen without an air space management system that covers the lower air space where drones fly, and relays that real-time information to drone operators, manufacturers and app developers about air space conditions. AirMap also makes data accessible in real time to other stakeholders like airports and regulators who need to know how and where drones are operating. The will be available to purchase by the end of this year, but Intel did not announce a firm on-sale date or price.
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Barnes & Noble drops its CEO after deeming him ‘not a good fit’
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Brian Heater
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Easy come, easy go in corporate bookseller land. Less than a year after starting his gig as company head, Ronald D. Boire has been unceremoniously let go from his CEO gig at Barnes & Noble. The once ubiquitous book store chain made the announcement today in a somewhat , noting that its Board of Directors, “determined that Mr. Boire was not a good fit for the organization and that it was in the best interests of all parties for him to leave.” Barnes & Noble is kicking off its CEO search yet again after picking up Boire from Sears Canada in July of last year (he officially started his brief tenure in September). As a result of their temporary CEO-lessness, the Nook-maker has asked Executive Chairman Leonard Riggio to postpone his planned September retirement until the position is filled. The bookstore chain currently comprises 640 retail stores across 50 states, down from 726 in the late 00s.
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Twitch is acquiring popular video game community and software maker Curse
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Romain Dillet
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Live streaming video platform (a ) is doubling down on video games with the acquisition of a significant player in the world of video game communities: . The terms of the deal are undisclosed and Twitch declined to comment beyond the . Curse operates myriad websites and services — some of them were created in-house over the past few years, others were acquired. In 2006, Curse started with a website that offered mods for World of Warcraft. While World of Warcraft is past its prime time, the company managed to create new communities for new games with huge audiences. For instance, Curse operates database and guide websites for League of Legends, World of Warcraft and NFL games, video game news sites, many different high-traffic forums around Minecraft, Pokémon, Diablo III and Hearthstone, and all the GamePedia wikis. The company also has various mod databases. That’s quite a lot — more than 30 million people visit Curse’s properties every month. In addition, the company has recently launched a product for computers simply called . This is a TeamSpeak competitor so that you can meet up with your online buddies and play together. It integrates an IRC-like chat feature that lets you chat with your teams, a VoIP feature so you can coordinate with your teammates while you play and, yes, streamer tools to make it easier to stream on Twitch or YouTube Gaming. Twitch could use some parts of this app to work on an in-house broadcasting solution. Right now the company to install third-party software. And, of course, Twitch is acquiring big video game communities, as well as people who know how to foster those communities. At heart, Twitch lives and dies by its community of streamers and watchers. Interestingly, Curse and Twitch share the same niche. Curse isn’t competing with mainstream video game news sites. The company carefully chose to focus on competitive online video games. And if you look at Twitch’s right now, you’ll see a lot of overlap with Curse’s communities — League of Legends, Hearthstone, Dota 2, Counter Strike, Overwatch… I’ll interview Twitch CEO Emmett Shear at next month, so we’ll definitely talk about this acquisition.
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Operator fuses bots with humans to build cyborg shopping experts
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Josh Constine
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Big purchases are scary to make online without anyone there to quell your fears and answer questions. wants to give you the same peace of mind, not with mechanical chat bot responses, but through real humans with knowledge about whatever you’re buying. Today Operator 2.0 launches with a new Discovery tab where curators assemble recommendations about their favorite products in a category, and can offer guidance about which to get. That said, bots will still help handle mundane interactions to free up experts for more subjective work. Operator CEO Robin Chan tells me the update will help the app push its $90 average purchase size and 10-15% conversion rate, which destroys the typical 1-3% conversion rate on ecommerce sites. Not only could Operator’s experts give you the same personalized suggestions like you’d get from a lifelong record store clerk. If they promote the app and rally their own social graphs to score more commissions, they could give Operator a critical growth boost. from Uber co-founder Garrett Camp’s startup studio Expa. Run by Chan, former head of Zynga’s Asia business and a successful angel investor, Operator raised a $10 million Series A from Greylock. But the and apps have been slow to take off because they’re trying to teach people a totally new way to shop. Instead of searching through a product database, Operator lets you type in a request for something over chat, like “brown mens shoes size 10 or 11 that are light but good for hiking”, “earbuds with the best bass under $100”, or “a super comfy leather couch that’s easy to move around.” Tracking down products with those specific traits would be tough for an amateur. But Operator hosts shoe, headphone, and furniture experts who already know what’s best. “The products that work for us are considered purchases” says Chan. “If you’re going to spend a couple hundred or a thousand dollars on a thing, you want to talk to someone.” This could be Amazon’s weak point. Competing with the commerce juggernaut on price or selection is a fool’s game. But plenty of digital shopping carts get abandoned because people are just too unsure to pull the trigger. Operator pays commissions only, but hopes that can work out to at least $15 an hour. At first glance, that’s less than an Uber driver makes, but there’s no cost of gas, car, insurance, or the stress of being at the mercy of morons on the road. High performers could earn more through commissions. The core of Operator’s challenge remains inserting itself at the moment of intent, and redirecting users from their go-to search engine or big box retailer. Chan promises he has some tricks up his sleeve for acquiring users and “getting them to understand this new model”. Whether Operator becomes a household app or ends up some tech giant’s acquihire will depend on it. “We think of Operator as the third wave of commerce” Chan concludes. At first, everything had to be bought in person at a store. You got great help, but it was inconvenient. Next, websites let you conveniently buy from home, but you didn’t have assistance. Combining the ease of the internet with the help of a human could spur the next evolutionary leap in shopping.
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In Japan, Priuses can talk to other Priuses
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Kristen Hall-Geisler
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While the US waits to get in Cadillacs next year, has already rolled out a pretty robust V2V, or vehicle-to-vehicle, system in three models available in Japan. The latest version of the Prius, the Lexus RX, and the Toyota Crown, a luxury sedan sold in Japan, all have the ITS Connect system available as an option. The cars communicate using a channel abandoned by analog TV transmissions when they switched to digital a few years ago. The cars send and receive very simple–but very useful–information: location, speed, and heading. “People ask about privacy” regarding these communications said Toyota spokesperson Hideki Hada in a phone interview, “but this is very obvious information.” He’s right. The cars can communicate up to 300 m (nearly 1000 feet) in a 360-degree radius, a distance that allows a lot of humans to also see where your car is, how fast it’s likely going, and where it’s headed. Also, the vehicles are communicating directly with each other, no cloud required, via two small antennas on each car. The messages being sent and received are very small and frequent, Hada said, and do not require a lot of processing power. These three models are equipped to handle V2I, or vehicle-to-infrastructure, communications too. Some traffic signals can send information with their current color and the number of seconds before the light will change to the next color. If it’s about to change to green, the car will tell the driver. If it’s about to change to red, the Prius will kick into an aggressive regen braking mode to recover more energy. Besides managing traffic lights, ITS Connect will also communicate with the car ahead while you’re driving to improve adaptive cruise control and let you know if an emergency vehicle is headed your way. Hada said it was still too early to see a quantifiable benefit to having V2X communications since there are so few cars on the road using it so far, but more people are adding this optional tech to their new cars than the company expected. There are two factors driving that uptake. First, worked with the Japanese government to promote this technology and educate consumers. Hada used a video of a winter pile-up of multiple cars as an example. V2V would help a driver avoid this situation, he said, because it’s communicating with cars 300m ahead that are saying they have stopped. This information would be relayed to both the driver and the central processor to avoid the hazard. Why not just let the car’s sensors save the day? The collision system alone uses cameras and radar. “These can’t see that far,” Hada said. “Their ranges are far too short.” The same processor receives all information from the sensors and V2X, so the brake system “knows” there’s an accident ahead. With V2V communications, the driver now has more time to apply that brake or evade rather than waiting for the imminent collision and the safety system to kick in at the last second. “If we add one more signal–V2V,” Hada said, “then we can have an earlier warning.” Now for the second reason people have been eager to add the V2X option: price. Buyers can see right on the invoice what ITS Connect costs: a whopping 17,000 yen. Which is $265. “The goal is to have it in every car, but it takes a while,” Hada said. “We’re not only doing it for tech appeal, [though] we started rolling it out on high-tech appeal cars.” Red-light communication similar to what the ITS Connect can do is the first step in V2I communications, one that is also taking with three of its 2017 models. And if your city has talking traffic lights (not all do), you can also try out the app for iOS and Android in whatever car you have.
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How to prevent your IoT devices from being forced into botnet bondage
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Ben Dickson
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A Delaware-headquartered brick-and-mortar jewelry store recently lost access to its online resources after subduing a major, multi-staged DDoS attack — the sort of hack that brings down server by burdening it with huge amounts of simultaneous requests. DDoS attacks are nothing new, but are. The main culprit behind this particular attack was , armed with high-bandwidth connectivity and scattered across the world. The rise of botnets was , and behind the Delaware jewelry episode are another reminder of how dangerous botnets can be. With more and more unguarded becoming connected to the internet every day, malicious bot lords are having an easier time conscripting new recruits their — and their next target can be smart fridge, light bulb, kettle or door lock. Here’s what you need to know about botnets and what can be done to fight this mounting threat. As has become common knowledge, the barriers to compromising are much less than generic computing such as PCs and smartphones. “Unlike personal computers or servers, most are not well protected — or even protected at all,” says Igal Zeifman, a senior manager at cybersecurity firm . “This is despite the fact that many are hooked up to a high-speed broadband connection and possess many of the processing functionalities as regular computers.” Imperva Incapsula is well-known for having raised the alarm about the looming threat of botnets on several occasions, some dating as early as . Zeifman believes that . Work done by other experts corroborates Zeifman’s opinion. Researchers at recently found cybercriminals to be adapting the source code of LizardStresser, an infamous malware, , with internet-accessible cameras accounting for 90 percent of the targeted . Matthew Bing, one of the researchers, described in a that the cumulative bandwidth available to the nodes have been used to launch 400 Gbps DDoS attacks against banks, gaming sites, ISPs and government institutions. Some of the problem stems from inherent limitations characterizing . “Device constraints agents such as antimalware, antivirus and firewall to be run on the device to protect itself, thus, traditional IT security practices are difficult to deploy on ,” says Preetham Naik, business development expert at . These constraints include computation and storage limitations, as well as the use of stripped-down versions of known operating systems such as Linux. As Zeifman points out, the combination of advanced computing capabilities, high connectivity and lackluster security makes “perfect candidates for recruiters.” Also relevant is the mostly autonomous nature of . “The basic issue is that most are ‘Things’ that are meant to do a very specific function,” says Deepindher Singh, founder and CEO of manufacturer . “Once set up, we tend to forget that they are actually connected to the internet or that they are actually vulnerable to attacks.” Limited-user interfaces are another contributing factor to overlooked, Singh believes, referring to non-present or “cumbersome access methods like using a web browser or app” to monitor each device. “When was the last time somebody logged their light bulbs to do a tcpdump to check if there were rogue packets?” he asked rhetorically. Not everything is related to unchangeable constraints. As Chris Hodson, CISO for EMEA region at cloud security company Zscaler, , security development life cycle for is often expedited or bypassed because of strict deadlines around time to market or the cost of the hardware. “Manufacturers are looking for hardware components which are affordable and increase profit margins,” Hodson says. “Cheap, lightweight components in often lack the capability to provide fundamental security services, such as encryption, as its hardware simply cannot support it.” Subex’s Naik emphasizes the need for manufacturers to adopt “security by design” as a development policy. “Considering are expected to remain in service much longer than IT ,” he says, “the ability to patch and maintain the should be an important design consideration.” Naik also stresses the need for manufacturers to carefully examine third-party components before integrating them products. A published last November by the Austria-based consulting firm SEC sheds light on the security implications of non-assessed component reuse across . Cesare Garlati, chief security strategist, , underlines the need for security baked-in at the hardware and chip level, pointing to the fact “that patching isn’t high on the priority list for admins.” Galarti’s comments are also a reminder of another epidemic problem that is leading to the growth of botnets, which is . For instance, the LizardStresser captures its targets by attempting default credentials on it finds , which happens to be a very effective tactic because most consumers forego changing default factory settings on . Consumers’ lack of appreciation for security isn’t creating stimulus for vendors to create more-secure products. “Vendors try to change the situation, but it is costly,” Steffen Wendzel, researcher at Fraunhofer Institute for Communication, Information Processing and Ergonomics says. “They also get no real benefit as customers do not pay for security.” A details how lack of awareness by different parties involved in the development and use cycle is contributing to the production of flawed products. ZScaler’s Hodson further drives the point by saying, “Until consumers demand that security is embedded the hardware development life cycle, manufacturers would feel no pressure to change their methods.” Manufacturers can control some of the damage by educating consumers and enforcing stricter security policies, suggests Zeifman. “For example, manufactures could be doing more to implement better password management policies and periodic firmware updates,” he says. Naik concurs, stressing that vendors should make complex passwords a requirement for their products. “Customers should be to change passwords and change them often,” he adds. While presently most botnets are aimed at web and application servers, they can be put to much more destructive use. “I believe that the ultimate goal of botnets is not to send spam,” says Wendzel, the researcher from Fraunhofer. “Instead, they will only make sense if they actually use their physical capabilities. Either they measure their environment (perform surveillance) or they change their environment (perform physical actions). This is what makes botnets much more serious than traditional botnets.” He further elaborates on the topic in his paper. “For instance, if you sell oil or gas as a local provider to some smart city/region, then you could attack the smart homes in that city,” Wendzel says. “Doing so, you could increase heating levels. In result, people would need more oil/gas and then would sooner buy oil/gas again.” and such as changing passwords and turning off unwanted features go a long way toward fending off some of the more basic — but extremely efficient — attacks such as brute-force device credential scans. But in tandem with the rise of botnets, attackers will develop more sophisticated methods to target and ensnare unprotected and vulnerable and use them to stage massive DDoS attacks, which will demand more advanced protection measures. “Mitigation of such assaults relies on the ability to both scale up networking and computing resources, and to accurately analyze incoming traffic to weed out malicious visitors,” Imperva Incapsula’s Zeifman says, which he believes can be achieved through cloud-based security solutions rather than on-premise security tools. Imperva Incapsula’s cloud security platform, Zeifman describes, leverages the power of the cloud to perform multiple functions simultaneously, such as inspecting incoming traffic and identifying threats through behavior, signature, IP history and cross-examination with tons of information it consolidates from millions of endpoints. The platform is comprised of multiple scalable components, including a Web Application Firewall (WAF) and a DDoS mitigation system. The power of the cloud is in its elasticity and its ability to evolve and adapt to the changes that overcome the threat landscape. “The detection methods are as varied as the different attack vectors available to the offenders,” Zeifman says. “As botnets evolve, so do the security solutions in what has often been described as an infinite game of cat-and-mouse.” Subex’s network monitoring platform protects against botnets through a three-tier defense mechanism based on signature, heuristics and anomaly detection. According to Naik, new threat signatures are detected by an honeypot network covering different device architectures; anomalies are identified by profiling individual device behavior based on parameters such as periodicity of transmissions, payload size, protocols and ports; intrusions ecosystems are detected by an integrated Intrusion Detection System (IDS); and web interfaces are secured through a WAF. 75F’s Singh believes the propagation of botnets should be stemmed at the source by enforcing correct design and development policies. His startup is focused on adhering to a paradigm he describes as “having secure gateways that protect all on-premise .” gateways are much more capable of running security solutions, which can add a layer of protection to sporting limited compute resources. 75F also adds UX modules such as touch screens and LCD displays to and gateways in order to minimize the need for remote TCP access. In cases where remote access is required, creating unique passwords has been made part of the setup process to protect against brute-force attacks. 75F thoroughly examines and tests instead of rushing to ship; this eliminates the need for over-the-air (OTA) update mechanisms, which can be used by hackers to push malicious updates, Singh explains. At the end of the day, botnets are a threat among others, and as is the case with all cybersecurity threats, defenders need to plug all the holes — attackers only need to find one. Therefore, as botnets becoming a clear-and-present danger, it is only the combined efforts of everyone involved — including consumers, manufacturers and IT pros — that can stop the threat.
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Cogito leverages human behavior to nudge customer relationships
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John Mannes
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We’ve all had crappy customer service calls. Primed by staticky elevator music and the ever-mysterious agitating echo, most of us come into calls with strained patience. On the line, customer service and sales agents are paid to build relationships, but after a long day of working with callers (who typically only call if they’re having a problem), even the bubbliest of people can start to fade. MIT Media Lab spinout is crunching the numbers to give workers real-time feedback on call performance to gently nudge better conversation habits. Cogito tracks dialog speed, pauses, interruptions, volume changes and tone, among other metrics, to provide real-time recommendations. Cogito has effectively modeled typical conversations in various contexts and industries. The rapport of an outbound sales call will be much different than an inbound call from a frustrated customer. Data collected is compared to norms in specific call types and tangible conversational recommendations are fed back. The technology is squarely focused on communication by phone, but real-time conversation analysis is primed for growth. In addition to serving call centers, the DARPA-backed startup has dedicated resources to solving a number of non-commercial problems. The U.S. Military Academy at West Point is working with Cogito to provide to cadets real-time feedback on negotiation skills. Many of the greatest applications of speech analysis will come at the nexus of qualitative behavioral analysis and quantitative lexical analysis. As we accumulate larger data sets and our algorithms get sharper, we can expect to see things like better propensity modeling anchored with omnichannel data. Cogito is already working with teams of hundreds of employees at companies like Aetna, Humana and BlueCross BlueShield. Customers have reported a 15 percent decrease in average call time and a 10 percent decrease in the average number of callbacks. Joshua Feast, CEO and co-founder of Cogito The simple reality is that most data analytics solutions do a really good job at the quantitative part, but fall short when it comes to influencing real-world best practices. There’s an API for just about everything these days, but doing behavioral nudges right takes an immense amount of data and a very low margin for error. A few misplaced recommendations, especially when used by managers for evaluation, can result in disengaged employees and strained customer relationships. Joshua Feast, CEO and co-founder of Cogito, believes that one of the best things about the American entrepreneurial ecosystem is the innate competitiveness of large players. He says that fear of disruption has had a lasting impact on the willingness of corporates to give new technologies a chance. For Feast, the most challenging part of his role at Cogito is managing product development, not getting in the door at potential clients. At first, the thought of a behavioral nudge can seem condescending, but in the right context it can be helpful. Nobody likes to be told what they already know — if a customer service agent is speaking louder because a customer is hard of hearing, they do not need to be reminded about rapport. In the event that an abnormal conversation isn’t even recognized by the agent, a service like Cogito can be informative rather than pejorative. Take for example automobile technologies that can detect deviations between steering wheel movement and road markings and advise drivers to take a break. Despite nearly universal disdain for backseat driving, such nudges can not only be lifesaving but appreciated. To this purpose, has raised $7.5 million since 2007, with the bulk of the money coming from a $5.5 million Series A in 2015 led by . While Feast recognizes the large size of the market, he stresses the importance of a clear focus. The company is working with Salesforce, and is focused on putting the product in the hands of healthcare and insurance agents.
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Food-sharing startup Josephine doesn’t want to be like the rest of the gig economy
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Megan Rose Dickey
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Silicon Valley’s gig economy isn’t known for being very supportive of its core workers — the ones working on the ground, making deliveries and picking up and dropping off passengers. The “best” cases in point are Uber and Lyft, two on-demand ride companies that have been . “We’ve been thinking a long time about how tech platforms can be less extractive and provide more value to the communities,” Josephine CEO Charley Wang (pictured above) told me. “We did a lot of research into cooperatism and the B-corps. We finally felt like we were at a good place where we could make meaningful stakes in trying to be an ethical employer and non-extractive platform.” While that’s all well and good, back in May, — the company’s first launch city — after some cooks in the East Bay received cease and desist letters for the illegal sale of food from their homes. It turns out that ” — foods that are unlikely to grow bacteria at room temperature — like baked goods (cookies, biscuits, pastries), candy, dried fruit, popcorn and dried pasta. “I think overall the approach we took on leaning in to policy and leaning into systems change work has been difficult,” Wang said. “The proven method for platforms is to put your head down and continue to grow as quickly as possible where our approach is trying to work with and being really transparent about policy and systems changes we’d like to see from the get go. That has come with its own challenges. Luckily, the shut down led to our ability to connect with a lot of folks who are currently in our coalition.” Now, Josephine is focusing its efforts on Seattle, Denver and Portland, despite the fact that there are similar cottage food laws in , and . “In our push to markets, we’ve been proactive about reaching out to local regulators and officials — really getting to know people who have been in those markets for a long time who are experts and have relationships, and leaning on those to navigate,” Wang said. “In deciding to go to Portland and Seattle, there was research on the legislative and political climate as well.” Regarding California, there’s a longish road ahead for Josephine, but Wang seems optimistic that it will work out in Josephine’s favor. That’s because Josephine is currently drafting legislation with its opposition, the California Conference of Directors of Environmental Health. Despite some of Josephine’s challenges around food legislation and regulation, investors don’t seem to be fazed. At the end of June, Josephine completed a $2.5 million funding round from SV Angel, Kapor Capital and other impact investors.
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China launches the first quantum communications satellite – and what is that, exactly?
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Devin Coldewey
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Congratulations are in order for China: by , the country has achieved an interesting — if somewhat difficult to explain — milestone in space and cryptography. Quantum Experiments at Space Scale (QUESS), nicknamed Micius after the philosopher, lifted off from Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center at 1:40 AM local time (late yesterday in the U.S.) and is currently maneuvering itself into a sun-synchronous orbit at 500 km. So what’s in the package that’s so exciting? QUESS is an experiment in the deployment of quantum cryptography — specifically, a prototype that will test whether it’s possible to perform this delicate science from space. I’ll attempt to explain, but bear in mind that hardly anyone on the planet truly understands quantum physics, and some of them are probably bluffing. So this is just the basics — and feel free to correct me if I’m wrong, professor. Inside QUESS is a crystal that can be stimulated into producing two photons that are “entangled” at a subatomic, quantum level. Entangled photons have certain aspects — polarization, for example — that are the same for both regardless of distance — in fact, the satellite will test that at 1,200 km, which will set a new record. The how and the why are beyond our pay grade here, so just take entanglement as a given. And let’s not even get into the faster-than-light communication argument here. The trouble with this tech is that photons are rather finicky things, and tend to be bounced, absorbed, and otherwise interfered with when traveling through fibers, air, and so on. QUESS will test whether sending them through space is easier, and whether one of a pair of entangled photons can be successfully sent to the surface while the other remains aboard the satellite. If this proves possible, the satellite will attempt quantum key distribution via these entangled photons. When measured, a photon will show its observers a random polarization state — but critically, entanglement means the other photon will always show the random state. These correlated polarizations can be the basis of a cryptographic key known only to the observers. (Note: the explanation that was here before was incorrect and has been changed.) The best thing about this is that apart from the original distribution of the photons, there is no transmission involved, or at least not one we understand and can intercept. Whatever links the two photons is intangible and undetectable — you can’t entangle a third one to listen in, and if even if you managed to interfere with the process, it would be immediately noticed by the observers of the original entangled photons, which would cease to be perfectly correlated. As you can imagine, an undetectable and perfectly secure channel for digital communications is of enormous potential value for an endless list of reasons. China is early to the game with QUESS, but they’re not the only ones playing. Other quantum satellites, though none quite so advanced, are in the ether right now, and more are sure to come. The experiments from the whole set will definitely be interesting — if anyone can find a way to explain what’s going on in them.
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Soylent begins shipping its $2 nutritional bars
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Sarah Perez
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Interested in a lactose-free, animal-free, nut-free nutritional bar made with soy protein, algal flour, and some sort of sugar made from beets? If that sounds delicious to you (???), then you’ll be glad to hear that the is now shipping. The latest in the growing lineup of meal replacement products from the Andreessen Horowitz-backed startup aiming to change the way people eat, the Soylent bar is a 250-calorie snack bar that can also serve as a light meal. The bar’s arrival was previously announced, at an estimated $2 per bar. Today, the company confirms that the bar – Soylent’s first edible (not drinkable) item – will be priced at $22.80 for Soylent subscribers or $24 for single orders per a 12-count box. As for the product itself, the bar’s macronutrient breakdown involves 38 percent of its calories coming from lipids, 43 percent calories from carbohydrates, and 19 percent calories from protein in each bar, the company says in a brief . This equates to one-eighth of an average adult’s recommended dietary needs. Soylent will also be donating $0.25 (one meal) to the World Food Program USA for every box of bars it sells, with the goal of providing one million meals to those in need by the end of 2016. The company already sells a number of other products, including its , its ready-to-drink , and it just recently debuted its latest invention, , which replaces your morning coffee with plant-based nutrition combined with caffeine. Designed to appeal to those looking for more convenient ways to eat while still receiving balanced nutrition – something that not all diet bars and protein bars can claim – Soylent has been somewhat controversial. That’s not only because its name was snagged from the dystopian about people eating people, but also because its products were perhaps over-hyped at launch as ” and other cloying accolades before it even proved the market. (Founder Rob Rhinehart is controversial himself, too, with causing him to face criminal charges.) Meanwhile, Soylent’s products have mixed reviews, ranging ,” to “ ” and even a “ …” While there are certainly some Soylent devotees – the company has shipped over 25 million meals since May 2014 – I can’t personally bear it after last year. That said, the company has continued to iterate on its formulas over time, so the bar may not be as bad as its predecessors in the taste department.
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Ford acquires SAIPS for self-driving machine learning and computer vision tech
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Darrell Etherington
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Ford outlined a few of the ways it’s aiming to , and part of the plan involves acquisitions. CEO Mark Fields revealed at a press event in Palo Alto today that the automaker , an Israeli company focusing on machine learning and computer vision. It’s also partnering exclusively with Nirenberg Neuroscience, to bring more “humanlike intelligence” to machine learning components of driverless car systems. SAIPS’ technology brings image and video processing algorithms, as well as deep learning tech focused on processing and classifying input signals, all key ingredients in the special sauce that makes up autonomous vehicle tech. This company’s expertise should help with on-board interpretation of data captured by sensors on Ford’s self-driving cars, and turning that data into usable info for the car’s virtual driver system. SAIPS’ offerings include detection of anomalies, persistent tracking of objects detected by sensors, and much more. The company’s past clients include HP and Trax, but its partner group doesn’t appear to have included much in the way of driving-specific applications. Ford noted during today’s announcement event that it identified SAIPS as a potential target through a tech scouting operation it began in Israel in 2013, and quickly determined that the company’s machine learning expertise would help bolster its own efforts. The Nirenberg partnership similarly takes research applied in a different area to the problems of full autonomous driving. Dr. Sheila Nirenberg’s research focuses on restoring sight to patients with degenerative retinal disease, but Ford thinks the tech can be used to help its virtual drivers greatly improve their own vision systems, and process information in ways similar to how human drivers would. Ford also noted their previously-annouced investment in Civil Maps to augment their 3D mapping capability. High-res 3D maps are a key ingredient in any full-fledged self-driving efforts.
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Joy aims to be a smarter wedding planner for the modern bride
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Sarah Buhr
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Planning a wedding is right up there with moving and job hunting as one of the most stressful things you’ll do in life. I would know. I’m getting married in 10 days. So when Y Combinator startup approached me about their intelligent wedding planner startup I was already in the eye of the storm using the in the U.S. . Both sites – and the , other wedding planning platforms out there – aim to help you organize a smooth event by including a picture gallery, guest list manager, link to where you are registered, your love story and information on the event itself. Joy does all that, but also incorporates an assistant to help you navigate, provides customizable designs, an app for updating info and tools for handling the real life event such as the ability for guests to upload their photos as they take them and share on a big screen during the reception. Joy co-founder Vishal Joshi got married nearly a decade ago when wedding sites weren’t really a thing just yet. The idea for Joy came to him while he was working at Microsoft. His friend (and now co-founder) Michael Bach’s sister was getting married and vented her frustration at the process. Then they roped in Kaiwalya Kher (who was at Adobe at the time) to help them and soon started thinking of the site as a social connection platform for all your guests. “We can actually send a push notification to your entire guest list the day that you are getting married,” Joshi told TechCrunch. That would be helpful. Getting people to RSVP has been a challenge and if you’ve ever planned a big event you’ll know vendors want to know how many guests you’re going to have so they can provide enough food and drink and have enough staff on hand to handle it all. Sending out a push notification to those who have not RSVP’d or to remind all those coming to the event when and where to go, parking info and all that would be fantastic and something TheKnot.com doesn’t do. Guest list management also isn’t easy on any of the platforms I’ve tested and is one thing Joshi says is actually a very complicated problem. He says he’s intensely focused on fixing that issue on his own platform in the next month and a half. “The space you are talking about it has been an impossible problem for everybody,” said Joshi. He told me his system will use something similar to Slack’s magic link to sign in and handle the guest list. TheKnot.com handles the list by giving you a choice to lock or leave the guest list manager open. if you don’t lock the system anyone can invite themselves to any event, even if they are not on your guest list and just came upon your site. Obviously, that’s a nightmare for any bride and groom who don’t want randoms just showing up to private events where not every guest was asked to participate. However, the problem becomes more complicated when you lock your invite system on the site. That forces everyone to RSVP using their first and last name exactly as you typed it on their invitation. But that proved to be confusing to many of my parents’ older friends. People tried to do all sorts of things like add their name with their spouse’s name, use their nickname, add them and their kids all on one RSVP, not hyphenate their name when they usually do hyphenate. The whole thing so far has proved to be a mess and we’ve had to send step-by-step instructions or add people manually. So hopefully Joy figures that one out. It won’t order the flowers, tailor your dress, get the right bartending service or handle reception management for you like an IRL wedding planner might, but after trying it out I can say the UI is slick, the live slideshow is a nice touch and Joshi joked that his platform is a bit like an intelligent bridesmaid telling you to bring an umbrella if it’s going to rain. “Joy understands the context,” Joshi said. “You will not see her but she’ll be there.”
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Nvidia’s GTX 10-series notebooks deliver VR power on the go
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Darrell Etherington
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Eventually, we’ll never leave our VR-enabled domiciles. But until that happens, we occasionally need to go outside – and Nvidia’s mean that when you do, you can at least take VR with you. The new 10-series GPUs for notebooks follow the 10-series desktop line launched earlier this year, which , the first card by the company to sport Pascal architecture. Pascal is designed with machine learning and AI applications, but also brings impressive graphical prowess to Nvidia’s GPU lineup. What’s notable here is that Nvidia isn’t created an M series from the 10 line – these are the 1060, 1070 and 1080 you already desperately want to put in your gaming rig, just included in notebooks instead. Pascal is onboard for the 10-series mobile lineup, too, and offers up to three times the performance of its previous top of the line notebook cards, which should make dropping into VR with compatible headsets much easier. VRWorks tech from Nvidia, which gives developers access to APIs and libraries that enable more advanced and immersive VR experiences, are also supported by the new lineup. [youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kd9LP6RGh5Q] You can pick up GTX 10-series notebooks from a range of OEMs and system builders, so your long nightmare of having to endure real reality when you travel or leave the house is nearing an end.
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Ford to ship self-driving cars without steering wheels, brake or gas pedals by 2021
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Darrell Etherington
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Ford says it’s going to deliver self-driving cars by 2021 – and these will ship in volume, and will also lack steering wheels, brake or gas pedals, offering full Level 4 self-driving features which don’t require a human driver at all, the company announced at a press conference in Palo Alto today. The car maker says that it has held off making any announcements about when to deliver self-driving vehicles until now because it isn’t in a race to make announcements. But it did say it is making self-driving vehicle deployment a priority, because of the advantages it offers in terms of customer experience and . “We’re no longer just an auto company, we’re also a mobility company,” said Ford CEO Mark Fields at the press conference. He made that declaration after discussing Ford Mobility Solutions, which is a subsidiary Ford began to help it develop automated fleet driving services. [youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lITdVxm_hD0&w=854&h=480] Ford also announced it was going to ramp up its Silicon Valley operations, doubling its employee population in the tech center to over 300, with expanded offices and labs in Palo Alto. While self-driving cars are planned for mass production by 2021, Ford doesn’t see these replacing personal transportation in five years’ time. Instead, the company anticipates these being used mostly in urban environments as supplements to mass transit, while individual car ownership will continue to focus on vehicles with driver assist functions, but which ultimately still give humans control.
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Romain Dillet
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Philips Hue announces a $40 motion sensor to automagically turn your lights on
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Romain Dillet
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is expanding its line up of smart light devices with a motion sensor. This one is pretty straightforward — when you walk in front of the sensor, your Hue lights will turn on. What’s different from other motion sensors? It works on battery, so you can put it anywhere around your home, such as the corner of a hallway, a bathroom or a garage. Philips says the device is supposed to work for two to three years with two AAA batteries. It costs $39.95. Then, it connects to your Hue Bridge and executes a Philips Hue command. It can even detect whether it’s nighttime so that it doesn’t turn on all the lights during the day. And you can choose a specific scene in the Hue app and pair it with the sensor. Based on the configuration screens in the Philips Hue app, the motion sensor is highly configurable. You can set up specific scenes for daytime and nighttime, you can adjust the daylight threshold and you can set different levels of motion sensitivity. The back of the device is magnetic and you can adjust the viewing angle up to 30 degrees horizontally and vertically. That’s about it. A pretty simple device that could be quite useful if you don’t want to take out your phone to turn on the lights. Also new today, Philips is introducing two new form factors for its light bulbs with (“White Ambiance” bulbs). Given that these cheaper lights can be useful in a bathroom or a hallway, the new BR30 and GU10 form factors will work well above your bathroom mirror in those pesky recessed ceiling lights. The flagship “White and Color Ambiance” A19 bulbs are also receiving yet another update with richer colors. It’s somewhat difficult to emit blue and green lights using LEDs. With this minor revision, Philips has improved the color spectrum for blues and greens. I’ve never thought “what if I filled my room with green light,” but if that’s your thing, these new bulbs will do a better job. [gallery ids="1376012,1376013,1376014,1376011"]
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INNOVATE2016: How digital can reinvent American government
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Andrew Keen
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One of America’s leading experts on the technology of government is , the executive director of Deloitte’s . Eggers’ great observation, articulated in his new book , is that digital technology offers a unique opportunity for American government to reinvent itself. Yes, he acknowledges, the US government often doesn’t work. But that’s no excuse, he says, to get rid of it. Instead, we need to digitalize government – especially its bureaucracy – to enable new efficiencies in government. It’s the biggest challenge of our age, Eggers insists, and should be a much more compelling challenge to smart young innovators that launching the next dating site. Digital technology, he says, can solve many of America’s deepest political problems. Our real challenge, he argues, is imagining what’s possible. Take, for example, our bulging prisons. Mobile technology, Eggers says, can reinvent prisons by enabling the authorities to establish much more flexible relationships with inmates, thereby radically reducing the prison population. Sure, it’s a radical – perhaps even crazy – idea. But he insists that’s exactly what government should be doing – hatching crazy ideas, launching moonshots, reinventing the world. As always many thanks to the folks at for their help in producing this interview.
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How connected cars are turning into revenue-generating machines
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Kumar Abhimanyu
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History repeats herself, but she mumbles. Some have expressed that she enjoys rhymes or puns. One must lean in close and listen carefully to understand exactly what she’s getting at. Most of the time we can only in retrospect discern what she was trying to say. Sometimes, though, history’s intent is clear. Evidence suggests a chain of events that will yield to an educated guess of the near future. That’s where we stand right now with the state of connected cars: History is repeating itself, with a slight variation. There is a close correspondence in the patterns of disruption when you compare the future of connected cars to the past of the smartphone industry. At some point within the next two to three years, consumers will come to expect car connectivity to be standard, similar to the adoption curve for . As this new era begins, the telecom metric of ARPU will morph into ARPC (average revenue per car). Note: In this case, the term “connected” brings together related concepts, such as Wi-Fi, Bluetooth and evolving cellular networks, including 3G, 4G/LTE, 5G, etc. In that time frame, automotive OEMs will see a variety of revenue-generating touch points for connected vehicles at gas stations, electric charging stations and more. We also should expect progressive mobile carriers to gain prominence as essential links in the automotive value chain within those same two to three years. Early in 2016, that transitional process began with the quiet but dramatic announcement of a statistic that few noted at the time. The industry crossed a critical threshold in the first quarter when (32 percent) rose above the net adds of smartphones (31 percent) for the very first time. At the top of the mobile carrier chain, AT&T led the world with around eight million connected cars already plugged into its network. The next big event to watch for in the development of ARPC will be when connected cars trigger a significant redistribution of revenue among the value chain players. In this article, I will focus mostly on recurring connectivity-driven revenue. I will also explore why automakers must develop deep relationships with mobile carriers and Tier-1s to hold on to their pieces of the pie in the connected-car market by establishing control points. It’s important to note here that my conclusions on the future of connected cars are not shared by everyone. One top industry executive at a large mobile carrier recently asked me, “Why do we need any other form of connectivity when we already have mobile phones?” Along the same lines, some connected-car analysts have suggested that will encourage consumers to simply add to their existing wireless plans connectivity in their cars. Although there are differing points of view, it’s clear to me that built-in embedded-SIM for connectivity will prevail over tethering with smartphones. The role of will be decisive for both carriers and automakers as they build out the future of the in-car experience, including infotainment, telematics, safety, security and system integration services. Consider the U.S. mobile market as a trendsetter for the developed world in terms of data-infused technology. You’ll notice that . Year-over-year sales of mobiles have registered a 6.5 percent drop in North America and have had an even more dramatic 10.8 percent drop in Europe. This is because of a combination of total market saturation and economic uncertainty, which encourages consumers to hold onto their phones longer. While consumer phone upgrades have slowed, non-phone connected devices are becoming a significant portion of net-adds and new subscriptions. TBR analyst Chris Antlitz summed up the : “What we are seeing is that the traditional market that both carriers [AT&T and Verizon] go after is saturated, since pretty much everyone who has wanted a cell phone already has one… Both companies are getting big into IoT and machine-to-machine and that’s a big growth engine.” At the same time, AT&T and Verizon are both showing a significant uptick in IoT revenue, even though we are still in the early days of this industry. AT&T crossed the $1 billion mark and of $690 million in the IoT category for last year, with 29 percent of that total in the fourth quarter alone. While ARPU is on the decline, data is consuming a larger portion of the pie. Just consider some astonishing facts about data usage growth from 2016. Global mobile data traffic grew 74 percent over the past year, to more than 3.7 exabytes per month. Over the past 10 years, we’ve seen a 4,000X growth in data usage. After phones, cars will be the biggest category for mobile-data consumption. Most cars have around sub-systems built by different functional units. The complexity of integrating these systems adds to the time and cost of manufacturing. Disruptive companies like Tesla are challenging that model with a holistic design of telematics. As eSIM becomes a standard part of the (TCU), it could create one of the biggest disruptive domino effects the industry has seen in recent years. That’s why automakers must develop deep relationships with mobile carriers and Tier-1s. Virtualization of our cars is inevitable. It will have to involve separate but interconnected systems because the infrastructure is inherently different for control versus convenience networks. Specifically, instrument clusters, telematics and infotainment environments have very different requirements than those of computing, storage and networking. To create a high-quality experience, automakers will have to work through hardware and software issues holistically. Already we see Apple’s two-year expanding to a three-year span because of gentler innovations and increasing complexity. The consumer life cycle for connected cars will initially have to be much longer than it is for smartphones because of this deep integration required for all the devices, instruments and functionalities that operate the vehicle. Disruption is everywhere within the auto industry, similar to the disruption that shook out telecom. However, there are several critical differences: The value in connected cars will increasingly concentrate in software and applications over the hardware. The connected car will have a vertical hardware stack closely integrated with a horizontal software stack. To dominate the market, a player would need to decide where their niche lies within the solution matrix. However, no matter how you view the hardware players and service stack, there is a critical role for mobility, software and services. These three will form the framework for experiences, powered by analytics, data and connectivity. Just as content delivered over the car radio grew to be an essential channel for ad revenue in the past, the same will be true in the future as newer forms of content consumption arise from innovative content delivery systems in the connected car. As the second-most expensive lifetime purchase (after a home) for the majority of consumers, a car is an investment unlike any other. Like fuel and maintenance, consumers will fund connectivity as a recurring expense, which we could see through a variety of vehicle touch points. There’s the potential for carriers to partner with every vehicle interaction that’s currently on the market, as well as those that will be developed in the future. When consumers are filling up at the gas pump, they could pay via their connected car wallet. In the instance of charging electric cars while inside a store, consumers could also make payments on the go using their vehicles. The possibilities for revenue generation through connected cars are endless. Some automakers may try the Kindle-like model to bundle the hardware cost into the price of the car, but most mobile carriers will prefer it to be spread out into a more familiar pricing model with a steady stream of income. Once this happens and carriers start measuring ARPC, it will force other industry players to rethink their approach more strategically. For example, bundling of mobile, car and home connectivity will be inevitable for app, data and entertainment services as an integrated experience. In the big picture, though, connectivity is only part of the story. Innovative carriers will succeed by going further and perfecting an in-car user experience that will excite consumers in ways no one can predict right now. As electric vehicles (EVs), hydrogen-powered fuel cells and gain market practicality, cars may run without gas, but they will not run without connectivity. The first true killer app for connected cars is likely to be some form of new media, and the monetization potential will be vast. With Gartner forecasting a market of on the road by 2020, creative methods for generating revenue streams in connected cars won’t stop there. Over the next few years, we will see partnerships proliferate among industry players, particularly mobile carriers. The ones who act fast enough to assume a leadership role in the market now will drive away with an influential status and a long-term win — if history has anything to say about it.
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Can foreign tech companies win in China?
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Edward Tse
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People have often referred to Google, Facebook and Twitter as cases where foreign tech companies are blocked in China. In reality, while Facebook and Twitter were indeed blocked, Google chose to withdraw because they didn’t want to comply with Chinese censorship regulations. It’s important to note that most foreign tech companies were not blocked, and companies like eBay, Amazon, Viadeo and, of course, Apple and Samsung all entered and competed in China. Another such example is Evernote. They, too, found success through a focus on meaningful localization. Not only did they hire locally, they employed localized marketing strategies by leveraging local social media like Weibo and WeChat, and had localized customer service, which supports real-time customer support on the mentioned platforms. They did thorough market research before entering in 2012, and looked to solve the “pain points” of the Chinese consumer, mainly security and privacy. Lastly, they had an easy-to-recall Chinese name (Yinxiang Biji) with a memorable pun. This strategy paid off; within the first year after launch they had 4 million users in China, and by 2015 their user base reached 17 million.
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What Salesforce’s acquisition of Quip means for enterprise software startups
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Jon Lee
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A new player has entered the productivity race. For decades, Microsoft reigned as the market leader in productivity — until Google pushed into the space with Google Apps. Now, with the of , Salesforce is joining Microsoft and Google in the race. The implications, however, extend far beyond productivity and CRM. Recent developments in — including , and and — point to a shift in the market. (not just productivity apps) can no longer be siloed applications bolted together with varying degrees of integration. Today’s tools are expected to be cross-functional, with native integration, real-time collaboration and smart communication at their very core. giants across different verticals are moving in the direction of end-to-end solutions in an attempt to own more of the workflow — Salesforce’s of will only intensify the competition. For , it’s indicative of more mergers and acquisitions to come. spending is on an upward trend, and is expected to reach ; meanwhile, and investors have taken notice. There are currently 1,425 active in the space — — and there’s been an influx of venture funding. According to PitchBook, venture funding of productivity has more than doubled, from $4.75 billion in 2012 to $11.46 billion last year. This year, these have already raised $6.26 billion to date, and the median deal size is up 25 percent compared to 2015, reflecting current market demand and investor appetite. With investors hot on , the market will become more fragmented and saturated than ever before. End users are already inundated with dozens, if not hundreds, of similar solutions, each which focus on filling one specific business need as effectively and efficiently as possible. In an environment where the biggest technology leaders are looking to for new innovation and transformation, there will likely be a coming spike in M&A activity. A historical analysis of CrunchBase data reveals an ongoing trend: are seven times more likely to get acquired than they are to shut down, while only 4 percent make it to an IPO. Productivity is a loosely defined category, but it starts with word processors, spreadsheet applications, presentation and others (think Microsoft Office or Google Apps for Work). Aside from , there are still quite a few notable disrupting this space. Standalone solutions like , the interactive presentation startup that’s raised $73 million and attracted 75 million customers, and , Dropbox’s answer to Google Docs, are pushing the boundaries of how productivity apps should function. Others like aren’t reinventing the wheel, but instead are innovating on existing products. The young startup, which raised $3.4 million in seed funding, connects spreadsheets like Excel and Google Sheets to make it easier to import data from third-party services like , and . Any of these types of could make for a strategic by larger companies that are either looking to strengthen existing products or expand their offering into other verticals. Email clients and collaborative communication platforms are at the epicenter of modern workflows. For a giant like Salesforce, whose core product (CRM) relies so heavily on email communications, in this segment are particularly attractive targets for an . offers a collaborative email platform that reinvents (or at least improves) email by adding a social layer with the “shared inbox.” Founded in 2013, Front has raised more than $13 million from investors, one of whom is Slack’s co-founder, . Speaking of Slack, many messaging-based platforms are attempting to displace email as the main form of communication. , a startup that’s raised $19 million, and seed-stage and are also following in Slack’s footsteps with team messaging platforms that aim to enhance productivity and collaboration. There are many other verticals within — from project management and marketing automation to business analytics — but CRM is especially interesting, given two factors: (1) Salesforce’s involvement in the race and (2) CRM’s role in driving revenue and business growth, making it one of the most valuable categories in . That said, CRM are plentiful and only a few are interesting enough to stand out. , a startup founded this year, offers a CRM to help businesses manage text message communications, which could make for an interesting addition to an existing CRM suite’s arsenal. So which are gunning to take ’s place? The answer is surprising: none. There are hundreds of task/project management apps and dozens of communication platforms, yet full productivity suites are few and far between. Sure, there are solutions like , and , but these can hardly be considered . That last part is important because , with their fresh outlook and high risk tolerance, are the true drivers of innovation. Whether the lack of in this segment is because entrepreneurs and/or investors perceive the barrier to entry to be too high, or they see limited opportunity, ’s is sure to spark new interest. Meanwhile, giants will continue snapping up these upstarts to bolster and innovate higher-performance offerings in an attempt to provide customers with a seamless, uninterrupted workflow.
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Retooling AI for the workplace
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Dan Reich
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One of the first computers required punch cards. I repeat, punch cards. Yes, you would take a piece of paper with tiny holes and use it to interact with the device. Now we have computers the size of soda cans that sit in your house and control your lights, provide weather updates, solve math equations and tell jokes, all by simply speaking to them… and some of them have better jokes than my actual friends. In many ways, we all should have seen this coming — we can thank our Hollywood friends for that. We had C-3PO and R2-D2 running around the galaxy with Luke trying to help him save the universe from his dad. “Artoo says that the chances of survival are 725 to 1. Actually Artoo has been known to make mistakes… from time to time… Oh dear…” More recently, we’ve had others as full-fledged assistants that are smarter than most humans, like TARS from Interstellar and Jarvis from Iron Man. As you’re reading this, you’re probably doing some kind of . It’s a thing we spend one-third of our lives doing, after all. (Sleep and Netflix supposedly make up the other two-thirds.) Given the massive chunk of our lives spent at , shouldn’t we enjoy the tools we need to use for our jobs? Shouldn’t they feel more human and delightful, like Amazon’s Alexa or some of the other consumer-facing applications we rely on daily? I think so. And how much more effective and productive could you be if you had something like TARS or Jarvis helping you with your job? I think the answer is… a lot! Many of the consumer-facing AI solutions we see today are built on the backs of generic APIs. Let’s take something like Siri, for example. If you wanted to know the weather, you would simply ask: “Siri, what’s the weather?” Siri could then transcribe your question and reach out to or another weather service for the answer using your location as a proxy. Based on the answer, you’d have the immediate information you need to determine whether you should take an umbrella to or not. However, introducing a similar, frictionless AI in the enterprise is a bit more challenging. Things are a bit more complex because each organization uses varying degrees of tools and workflows to run their business. Borrowing from the weather example above, let’s say you wanted to know how much revenue was booked for the business in the first quarter. You might ask: “Siri, how much revenue did we book in Q1?” If this “Siri for ” existed, it might give you an answer along the lines of “$100mm.” From here you might want to drill deeper into revenue generated from each product line. If you were the Chief Revenue Officer of Microsoft, you might want to know how that revenue breaks out between Office 365, Windows and Xbox… and you might want the answer to be in top-line revenue because that’s how you like looking at the forecast. Do you see how nuanced this can become? As we start to account for organizational preferences, things get complicated very quickly. It’s easy to see how replicating “Siri for ” is a much heavier problem to solve because of the variance amongst organizational processes, systems and preferences. For consumer applications, there isn’t nearly as much divergence in the answers users expect (see above); this does not hold true for businesses. This same issue applies in the context of scheduling. There are companies like and trying to take the simplicity of Alexa or Siri and apply it to the tedious task of scheduling meetings. It’s one thing to say: “Siri, book me a meeting with Jon for some time next week.” But all of a sudden you realize there are a handful of non-trivial variables this “scheduling Siri” would need to take into account. Things like the location of the meeting, preferences of the person taking the meeting, the availability and coordination of both parties instead of just one and so on. And let’s take one more vertical application similar to “Jarvis for .” Within the legal industry, an AI-powered lawyer called has emerged. Firms can ask ROSS questions like they would their colleagues on important data, like citation resources, and it returns an answer. Their secret sauce is based on using natural language processing (NLP) to query publicly available law documents. But can ROSS adopt to the style of the firm and specificity of a given case? Maybe some firms have found that very recent court rulings tend to be the best support, while others rank searches based on credibility and prominence. In all the instances, there is nuance, which means some level of unique configuration and intelligence is required. This should comfort those fearful of waking up one day and having their job completely replaced by a robot. More realistically, the robot will allow them to be 10x more productive and allocate more time to higher-leverage tasks. We’ve seen this story before; each time we experience new technological breakthroughs, we learn that people’s jobs are changed but not altogether replaced. From a 1928 issue of The New York Times: In all these different instances, the end result and goal for a user remains the same. A perfect “Siri for ” would help reduce complexity and guide the end user to more quickly arrive at the information they need to make a decision or take an action. In the enterprise, even slight improvements can mean huge revenue increases and significant cost savings. But, let’s take it a step further and explore how this at evolves and becomes more over time. The previous example highlighted the ability to look up information. What about having the AI suggest and take actions for you? Say the VP of Sales at Microsoft needs to forecast her revenue for the quarter. We’ll call her Samantha. To do that, Samantha would need to have accurate close dates of when she thinks her deals will close. In this hypothetical example, she has five deals that are supposed to close , but the AI knows there has been no communication with those accounts for more than four months because it understands your email, social media and phone communications. Is it likely those deals will close? Probably not. Therefore, the AI would know to automatically change the close dates for forecasting purposes, or make a suggestion like, “Hey Samantha, I noticed a discrepancy between your sales activity and your proposed close dates. Would you like me to change the close date for you?” Voilà. The dates are closed and Samantha doesn’t look like a slouch at the next forecast meeting. It’s easy to see how facilitating this level of workflow is entirely too complex for an out-of-the-box plug-and-play solution like Amazon’s Echo or Apple’s Siri. It requires a greater degree of configuration that is specific to the organization and which becomes smarter over time based on user input and data. To facilitate this there needs to be a middle layer or conversational run-time between the various systems and data sets in an organization so an end user can quickly and easily do their job without having to open a new app or piece of software. As Satya Nadella, CEO of Microsoft : “In software development terms A.I. is becoming a third ‘run time ’— the next platform.” I couldn’t agree more. So what does this all mean? The next frontier of software development and technological breakthrough will happen in a conversational run-time. I call it “conversational CRM.” It is the inevitable evolution of the technology stack for the enterprise. This next era will occur on top of conversational interfaces because it is where is already getting done and everyone already knows how to use them. This is why we are building on messaging platforms like Slack, which will serve as the conduit to facilitate enhanced intelligence at . Moreover, there will be even more companies, big and small, that crop up to help power some of the underlying technology that makes this intelligence and conversational workflow happen. For example, Google recently unveiled , which is an “open source software library for numerical computation using data flow graphs.” To break that down in English, this sort of technology enables computers to do computations that more closely mirror the way human brains think and make decisions. Some people call this “deep neural networks.” There’s also IBM Watson, which provided the backbone for ROSS mentioned above. Within the realm of smaller startups, you have companies like and Wit.ai, , that have built a simple natural language processing API that helps developers turn speech and text into actionable data. This sort of technology will help bring that “Siri-like” experience to many other applications and experiences. So as computers continue to shrink, and eventually shift from robots the size of soda cans to no interface at all, the next area of innovation will live in the messaging context (voice, text, email). Interactions between humans and machines will occur in the same place, side by side, all working toward a common goal of driving businesses forward. The lines will get blurry, and, just like the movies, we, too, will have our own R2-D2 or Jarvis at no matter where “ ” may be. There was once a vision to put a personal computer in every home. Many companies today have a similar vision, which is putting a personal AI for in everyone’s . Think of it as a “Jarvis for ” of sorts, except Jarvis will have cousins that each specialize in their own, unique vertical.
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All deals on AngelList will soon be private (plus other updates you should know)
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Connie Loizos
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Earlier this week, we with Naval Ravikant, cofounder of five-year-old , a popular platform that matches startups with early-stage investors. Three million people, including 50,000 accredited investors, have created profiles on AngelList since its founding, and AngelList now uses that information to pair startups with capital, pair startup employees with employers and, more newly, pair startups with customers. It’s become a big business, as well as a confusing one, Ravikant readily admits. And while we can’t report on one interesting new, performance-related wrinkle that’s coming soon, he walked us through many other stats and initiatives. Our chat has been edited for length and clarity. NR: Seventy-five percent of the deals are now private, up from 45 percent a year ago. It’ll be default private soon because a lot of the hot deals tend to be private. Also, that public-private dichotomy is always really hard for entrepreneurs [in fundraising mode] to figure out, so they start associating our brand [with a place to share information publicly to accredited investors], which is a negative, so they don’t want to go on here. We might take a hit on liquidity by making the default private, but at the end of the day, it’s all about getting the high-quality companies. NR: Gil is a unique case. He’s the one who’s always breaking the system. We’re more catering to operator-angels, meaning people who have operating jobs, or VPs at big companies or who’ve started their own startups. It’s people who aren’t professional VCs but who do four to six deals a year, investing in alumni and people they know. NR: We had 55 deals led by 41 leads close in June; we had 44 deals led by 38 leads close in July. The average for most leads on the platform is a couple of deals per year. As for demographics, I’d say over half [the people who lead deals on the platform] are in Silicon Valley. NR: They’re syndicates, too; they’re just targeted to later-stage investors. It isn’t a [big part of the platform] yet but they’re fully automated. We don’t charge you any carry for any investors you bring in. It’s a one-time charge of $8,000 and we handle all the K-1s, reporting, accounting, collections, filings, regulatory compliance, accreditation. It’s all online so people can track their exits, distributions, and bank accounts, and we can distribute stock in cash. So it’s like setting up a Schwab or e-Trade system for people who want to do that. Pejman Mar [ ] has used it. uses it. Then there are a lot of one-offs. We also now have a network of 20 family offices, and when we get a later-stage deal, with a lead investor’s approval, we’ll show them those and they can vote on whether they are in or out. It’ll take a year to fully fill out, but you could see 200, 300, 400 [family offices] accessing SPVs in all the hot companies at some point. NR: We’re not really built for that. For starters, we don’t support management fees. We also don’t support custom [limited partner] documents; you’d have to go cookie-cutter with our Syndicates model. What we are starting to see is people who [build a track record and graduate to their own fund], though that’s kind of a failure for us. [Laughs.] NR: Between $120 million and $160 million is coming from [accredited individual investors]. The other roughly $40 million comes from partnerships and funds that we run on the platform. One of those is the [$400 million seed fund] CSC Upshot fund [in partnership with a ]; another is [a $25 million fund raised by mostly individual investors outside of AngelList]. That’s managed by Dustin Dolginow, formerly of Accomplice; Jeff Fagnan, a general partner at Accomplice; and me. Then there’s a third that we’ve raised from individuals who join AngelList and want a basket of AngelList companies; we try and pick the best 100 to 150 deals for them. I manage that with our COO, Kevin Laws; and Parker Thomson [formerly of 500 Startups]. NR: We have heavy conflict of interest rules, so when I’m running a deal [as a Syndicate lead], I don’t vote in any of the funds and I’m recused from anything involving the deal. NR: [The platform] is still free for anyone who wants to use it freely. But for someone with limited time and a certain budget and a specific role they need to fill with good engineers, we launched a service three months ago called A-List. We do the work of going through AngelList and finding the top couple hundred candidates, then we put [the hiring company] into this format where we make sure the parties are matched up very well and we charge $10,000 for a successful hire. NR: It’s between 1 percent and 2.5 percent, judging by the percent of candidates who update their profile later with a new employer who was introduced to them on AngelList. Over the last two months, there’s been around 200,000 active candidates, so we think [our hit rate is] between 800 and 2000 hires a month. NR: More. We’re the largest hiring platform for startups on the planet. NR: It’s still being built, but we’re also working on AngelList Enterprise, so companies can even find customers at some point. Say you want bug tracking software; all these companies have AngelList profiles on the platform and they tell us what their tech stack is and [other details like] how many customers they’ve signed in the last 90 days, and that’s all we need to help [both sides to connect]. It’s all free, but you can see how it would eventually make money. Right now, we’re just seeing if it’s even useful to users. NR: We’re not at breakeven, but I expect in the next six to 12 months, we will be, for sure.
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Meesho wants to make selling through WhatsApp more efficient and less painful
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Jon Russell
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but it continues to frustrate the many small businesses that rely on it for sales but suffer for its lack of advanced features. Messaging services like Line, WeChat and even Facebook Messenger have become platforms that let business users get dedicated usernames and accounts, manage group chats, set up stores and use bots for communication, all while WhatsApp remains basic. last year, for example. Prior to that, businesses tapping into its popularity had to literally key in all updates on a phone. That doesn’t scale when dealing with hundreds of potential customers. The problem is particularly acute in India, where WhatsApp is estimated to have over 100 million users. As the country’s most popular app, WhatsApp is unparalleled as a distribution channel for selling online or retaining customers, despite being largely ill-suited to the role. That’s where , a startup in Y Combinator’s latest batch, is hoping to change things and empower WhatsApp sellers. The company is a ‘Shopify for mobile’ for India at the most basic level, Meesho co-founder Vidit Aatrey told me in an interview. Essentially, it adds commerce features to WhatsApp to allow businesses to engage with customers and sell product more efficiently. “Small businesses in India use WhatsApp groups a lot, posting details of their products daily, and then using cash or bank transfer to collect payment” Aatrey explained. “But the whole model has many challenges, especially for the buyer who can’t search, while the seller can’t categorize products. If you’re looking for a sari, for example, you need to keep scrolling through chats — but there are hundreds of photos [in a group] per day — customers are spammed to hell, photos get downloaded to their device so they need to clean their phone regularly, and there is no [formalized] way to collect payment.” Given that Facebook, the company that owns WhatsApp, , Meesho has identified a genuine problem here. Meesho aims to soothe some of the WhatsApp commerce pain points by moving much of the buying experience to its dedicated mobile shopping app. There, customers can browser ‘carousels’ of product, ask questions to the buyer, and make an online payment via a clickable URL if they prefer that to cash or bank transfer. (That’s powered by Razorpay, .) Beyond the transaction itself, Meesho also alerts sellers when potential customers are viewing their store on the platform — giving them a chance to interact — while it condenses new product listing alerts into one message per day which is sent via a Facebook Messenger bot. Yes, that is yet another app, but it removes the irritating WhatsApp spam — since only a fraction of products are relevant to a customer — and could deliver a more qualitative interaction and, ultimately, sales. Meesho and Messenger are also important mechanisms for outreach, too, Aatrey said. “Facebook is generally used by small businesses for customer acquisition, but they do not keep their customers there because they can’t push messages to all users,” he explained. “If 100 people like a Page, for example, maybe 10 will see each message in their Timeline.” That’s important given that small businesses in India which Meesho targets don’t tend to invest money in Facebook ads, boosting their posts or pretty much any marketing activity at all. Aatrey said the sign-up process is easy, deliberately so because Meesho is working with people who may not be particularly tech savvy. Retailers simply provide a Facebook page URL, which the service uses to pull product info and images and create a Meesho shop automagically. Meesho claims over 1,000 businesses on its platform right now but it is not monetizing its service at this point. Aatrey said there are no plans to make money at this point, but his current thinking is that, when the time is right, Meesho will take a commission from sales it helps facilitate. That again ties back to a reluctance to spend on the marketing side. The company raised an undisclosed seed round last year which, in addition to the money it took for its place at Y Combinator, gives it sufficient capital to “sustain ourselves for a long time,” according to Aatrey. That makes YC demo day, one of the premier gatherings of investors worldwide, a less pressured situation. “We had raised before YC, so we have money,” Aatrey said. “If something good comes our way that’s fine, but it isn’t like we need to raise.” Following the end of the YC batch, Aatrey and fellow co-founder Sanjeev Barnwal will head back to India to rejoin the six other people on the Bangalore-based team. Meesho is planning a number of updates, which will eventually include discoverability options to enable customers inside one store to find products from other Meesho-powered retailers. While he admitted that being in the U.S. is a challenge since his business runs on India time, Aatrey highly recommended other Indian founders to consider a stint at YC. “We have learned to talk to our users better and understand their needs,” he said of the program. “YC helps you learn a few habits that are important, for example focusing on one thing at a time and talking to customers every day. When you start doing that, you’ll see positive results.” “For someone who hasn’t worked in U.S., I’d definitely recommend YC — even if they need to be in India for operations,” he added.
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Walter Duncan of Quick Key has some fascinating fixes for our edtech problems
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John Biggs
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Guys like Walter Duncan know what they’re talking about when it comes to edtech. Before becoming co-founder of Quick Key, Duncan spent years teaching in schools public and private and knows what teachers deal with on a daily basis. His product, which reduces the amount of time it takes for teachers to grade tests, is ingenious and is taking off. I spoke to him this week on Technotopia about the future of education and the problems facing inner city schools. One of his most salient points? While folks in the suburbs could never imagine plonking their kids into a VR headset and sending them to virtual school, kids stuck in environments that are unhealthy, dangerous, or distant can benefit immensely from seeing and hearing teachers who know what they’re doing but may be miles or even continents away. Digital education isn’t for everyone but it is massively important. You can download the MP3 and subscribe .
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Crunch Report | Getting to the bottom of NSA hack
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Khaled "Tito" Hamze
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Tito Hamze, John Mannes
Tito Hamze
Joe Zolnoski, Gregory Manalo
Joe Zolnoski
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5 ways beacons are transforming the enterprise
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David Chao
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Bluetooth beacons are proven technology. So why isn’t anyone using them effectively? Sure, companies are using them. Google uses “beacons” — you’ll find a of their use in retail and other B2C contexts. with iBeacons in their stores. , pushing to customers special deals on sandwiches and McNuggets. By 2015, were all using beacons to track users and boost sales. But are we seeing a return on that investment? Recently, the beacon buzz has been rather quiet. Even with adoption by big brand names, the promise that beacons would “revolutionize retail” seems to have been premature. How many of you have apps on your phone with beacon-powered push messages enabled? I’m guessing not many. It turns out that as a culture, we’re tired of being marketed to. We’re sick of ads, and we’re creeped out by businesses stalking our movements. For many of us, 10 percent off toilet paper on our monthly Target run isn’t worth the hassle of downloading an app, then managing a barrage of notifications that we find mostly irrelevant. Beacons, or an evolved version of them, will likely infiltrate our retail experiences eventually. But we’re not there yet. That doesn’t mean, however, that beacons aren’t useful. The real innovation around beacons is happening not at your local mega-mart, but in the enterprise. Retail showed us that beacon technology works. In the enterprise, we’ll see how it can add real value. I believe that beacons will be one of the vanguards of the “smart office.” Like devices such as Nest streamlined our home environments, beacons will help us work more efficiently, productively and collaboratively. Here are some examples of what that will look like. Just like Bluetooth lets you unlock your car without a key, beacons can streamline employee access to everything from physical spaces to electronic records. Using beacons could eliminate extras like key cards and make proprietary systems and fobs unnecessary, saving the company and its employees time and money. What if you always knew where every piece of equipment was located without annoying codes to determine inventory? Beacons can be used to track valuable property for improved asset management. With beacons, employees will spend less time tracking down the stuff they need to do their jobs. This application could be convenient for things like computers, but life-saving in places like hospitals. It also enables companies to learn how assets are being used in order to plan more effectively, optimizing equipment purchasing, rental, utilization and attrition. Similarly, beacons enable employees to be aware of each other’s location. Maybe it’s not a big deal in your smaller office, but on huge corporate campuses, it could make it easier to connect with colleagues, set up impromptu meetings or even just find your buddy for lunch. In short, it empowers casual interactions to get work done. Non-office work environments see tremendous opportunity, as well. Tracking people’s locations on construction sites, in warehouses or in factories could bring benefits even more critical than productivity, like keeping people safe and compliant. And in an emergency, knowing where people are could literally make the difference between life and death. Another use case specifically relevant to large corporate campuses, beacons can help people understand where they are, and where they need to go. By pushing information, including your location, a map or specific directions to a conference room (plus the Wi-Fi password once you get there), beacons can empower more time spent working, and less time spent wandering. Beacons can help our offices become more efficient and secure, protecting and enabling our people and assets without an army of manual resources: These examples are just the tip of the iceberg. Beacons and their ecosystems have incredible potential to transform how we do work, from the conference room to the construction site. Best of all, they’re cheap and adaptable. For 10 bucks a beacon, you can increase productivity, security, collaboration, comfort, efficiency, safety and more. I’d call that a smart investment in the soon-to-be-smarter office.
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Engaging kids in design-based learning
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Gian Paolo Bassi
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While most kids their age are glued to various digital devices, often wasting hours playing mindless games or watching cat videos, 164 fourth and fifth graders, along with eight elementary school teachers, have been using those same devices to explore new paths to learning. In 15 classrooms across Texas and Virginia, students are using manufacturing design and digital fabrication processes to create physical models, learning the underlying mathematical concepts and using them in meaningful contexts. The pilot is a focusing on the “E” in STEM education (Science, Technology, Engineering and Math). The project started at the University of North Texas and is based on a scaled-down version of , which originated at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Students design their projects in 3D on a computer, then make the item using simple materials. A wide range of digital tools and facilities available to students and their teachers are transforming the K-12 education system. and makerspaces provide creative areas where kids can design, invent and learn. Video games (e.g. Minecraft) and virtual reality (VR) are being employed as design-based learning tools. 3D printers are more readily available — in schools, in collaborative spaces and at home. All these tools and the widespread commitment to STEM education are introducing kids to 3D design at a very young age. There is no shortage of national interest and enthusiasm for STEM. believes that more STEM-focused curricula can help rectify America’s education woes and the decline of the American manufacturing industry. Deputy Secretary for the U.S. Department of Education Jim Shelton says, STEM advocates believe this new generation of young people is being inspired by increased access to new kinds of tools, machines and methods. Is it simply the democratization of manufacturing? Or is the maker mindset and further enablement of hands-on, design-based education driving a seismic shift in mentality — from consumer to producer? With the shift to offering these tools earlier in a child’s academic journey, we’re not just providing great access to design-based learning, we’re also instilling in students a “sense of agency,” helping them develop their ability to confidently design and create. According to project: ” I see and hear these themes echoed every day in conversations with 3D CAD customers, especially with recent college graduates, but also from our education team that works in the K-12 segment. Whether it’s labeled STEM or the more encompassing STEAM (add A for Art), students get truly engaged with learning. It’s encouraging to see students inspired by initiatives that bring educational lessons to life, like the new and rapidly expanding pioneer program, which helps teachers engage students with VR and Google Cardboard. This immersive, 3D experience enables virtual journeys, from the bottom of the sea to the surface of Mars. Through , more than 78,000 students in the U.S. are active participants in what the Agency by Design espouses as “sensitivity to design.” These students make real-world calculations to build robots that are capable of scooping up and shooting balls, jumping over obstacles or making other seemingly impossible moves, all in a maker spirit that weaves together the numerous disciplines of STEM learning. According to , a nonprofit, non-partisan news site covering education in America, the has something missing in its classroom: chairs. In his recent piece, , Mark Keierleber writes, “Instead of sitting with paper and pencils at desks, students stand at work tables and tinker with LEGOs, robots, wooden blocks, and circuit boards.” Kids at the , along with those 164 students in Texas and Virginia, are just the tip of the iceberg. That iceberg is upending and bringing millions more students to the surface as they start to experience the power of STEM, the maker movement and new methods of teaching like blended and personalized learning. These students and teachers may not use the same language as President Obama, the Department of Education or the Agency by Design project, but the message is the same: “I want to learn how to create something amazing.” It isn’t just technology, or a STEM focus, or even a maker mindset; instead, the focus should be on how schools can help children realize they are not just consumers — they are designers, creators, makers and producers. Today’s fifth graders will be lifelong STEM learners.
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Reigns is a medieval game of life or death (mostly death)
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Felicia Shivakumar
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Reigns is a new gaming app, currently featured as a favorite by Apple. You are a king and the answer to whether you live or die — and how — is in the cards. Quite literally. As ruler, you are presented with a deck. Each card is someone in your kingdom who is asking for help or notifying you of a problem on the rise. How you answer determines your fate. A swipe to the left is one answer, the right another. But the tricky part is you need to juggle resources. You must keep the people and the church happy, while having enough money and troops to keep your kingdom safe. It is really easy to splurge your resources in one area, for a good reason, but it will cost you — your life and your reign. Layered on top of this delicate dance of power is the objective you need to fulfill: meet a witch, recruit a minstrel and have an heir — and other kingly duties. Each time you fulfill an objective you are rewarded with new cards in the deck to make the game more interesting and hopefully less deadly. The motive behind this game is to extend your reign (i.e. stay alive) for as long as possible. An interesting dynamic is that every game you play is kept in a timeline and each new play uses the decks you have built out in your past lives. As you browse your timeline, for each reign you are given a name and title that best describes what type of ruler you were, like Henry the Blessed, George the Sorcerer or James the Wicked. This naming convention strangely helps you remember past games and the mistakes you’ve made. Overall, I found the game to be quite clever. There are fun dynamics between certain recurring characters in your deck, like the doctor and the witch. As you build trust, certain characters tattle and make fun of each other to you, their trusted ruler. There are mythical elements like witches, werewolves and even the threat of polyamory in your kingdom, which lend the occasional giggle — particularly in this rather odd stretch of the game, where you are making decisions while clearly on some sort of weird drug trip. I also enjoyed the well-designed variations within the game. You might be lost in a dungeon, impaired with old age or dueling a foe. All serve as a welcomed break from the standard swipe-right decision making. But, what stands out the most in this game is the artwork. It is simple, but haunting. It is done in a modern geometric style that leaves a lot to the imagination. It is simple, moody and not what you’d expect from a medieval or card-based game.
[gallery link="none" ids="1371105,1371102,1371103,1371106,1371108,1371109,1371107,1371101,1371110,1371112"]
Reigns is a dark and weird game, but entertaining and worth it if you’re looking for something different to play. Right now it sits at the No. 3 game overall, paid or not. And for good reason. It’s a great game. It launched last week and has been featured 281 times on the iTunes home page worldwide. Reigns is $2.99 on and .
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Picture This Clothing turns your kid’s crayon art into a sweet dress
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Devin Coldewey
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It’s a magical world we live in, people. Where once our brilliant crayon drawings were condemned to live forever two-dimensionally on a piece of dog-eared construction paper, now they can be given the life they deserve — either as an endearingly grotesque plush doll or, with this new service, an awesome dress. is from MartianCraft’s Jaimee Newberry, who earlier today. Sure, you could get stuff printed on the front of a CafePress shirt or something, but be honest: that’s weak sauce. Look at the dress! Full bleed, knees to shoulders. The same design appears on the back, too. All you do is pick a size, download and print the template, then color away. When you’re done — and by you, I mean your child, of course — you take a picture of the finished design and upload it — voila! You should receive your finished dress in a couple weeks. I love this cat on a scooter one. I’d rock that in a hot heartbeat. You can also add some doll-sized dresses to your cart that will fit a Barbie, Ken, or compatible format. Picture This isn’t associated with Mattel or anything, though — I asked, because I was suspicious. Newberry also mentioned that we can expect more designs if the dress takes off. “In essence, this is a proof of concept,” she wrote. “We focused on something really targeted (girls dresses, sizes 2-12), but absolutely have growth plans if this baseline concept proves to have a place in the market. The response from our launch this morning has been incredibly positive!” If your kid isn’t so into dresses, remember there are other options: and both turn drawings into toys, and other services produce wrapping paper, flags, and so on.
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Coursera’s co-founder Daphne Koller set to start anew at Calico
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John Mannes
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In a blog post, Coursera co-founder Daphne Koller the company to join Alphabet subsidiary Calico. Koller founded Coursera with Andrew Ng back in 2012 after working together on artificial intelligence research at Stanford. The two supported the company’s growth until Ng left to become chief scientist at Baidu’s research arm. Today Coursera has grown to teach 20 million students material from 1,300 courses. Though both have now officially moved on to new challenges, Koller and Ng remain co-chair’s of the Coursera Board of Directors. Rick Levin has been the CEO of Coursera since 2014 when he left his post as President of Yale University. Calico was created by Google back in 2013 to tackle human aging and diseases associated with age. Koller is already as the company’s new Chief Computing Officer and will be beginning her official duties next week. “At Calico, I will work on the development of new computational methods for analyzing biological data sets, to help move to achieving these important scientific and societal goals,” said Koller in a blog post. We reached out to Koller and will be updating this post with additional information. Until then, we wish her the best. Hat tip:
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Social investing site Instavest raises $1.7M in seed funding
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Fitz Tepper
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Part of YC’s Winter 2015 class, is a startup trying to turn investing — an activity most of us are used to doing privately — into a social activity. The site launched about a year and a half ago with the goal of helping average retail investors learn from others who have more experience in investing and the stock market. Today the startup announced they closed a $1.7 million seed round with participation from Y Combinator, Skype co-founder , and more. The original version of Instavest allowed experts to share their stock trades (and rationale) for others to see and potentially duplicate. If the stock did well, the service then let the users offer a portion of their profit to the expert as a “donation.” But the site was missing something — it lacked direct integration to a user’s brokerage account, so traders would have to manually navigate to their broker to execute each trade, then go back to Instavest to log it into their profile. This was definitely a hassle, and was an extra step that stood in the way of users seamlessly buying stocks shown on the platform. But this is now changing, as Instavest has also announced they have integrated with 10 of the most popular online brokerage firms, so customers can buy and sell stock directly from Instavest’s site. These firms include popular platforms like and , plus about 8 more. The site connects with these firms via their individual APIs, and after a one-time authentication you can buy and sell stock with your preferred brokerage without leaving Instavest. This direct integration soft-launched about two weeks ago, and the startup says the total value of stock held by users has already grown 10x, or 1,000 percent. This crazy growth shows just how important it is for startups to provide users with a frictionless experience — prior to the direct brokerage integration, most users probably just gave up on purchasing a stock because of the hassle it was to navigate to their brokerage firm and actually execute a trade. The company also is launching a new way for experts to make money on the platform. While the optional donation method worked (and will be kept), it also had some friction — mainly because users could just decide not to reward an expert for a stock tip. So now the startup is letting experts create their own paid subscription newsletter to send their stock tips to any user willing to pay somewhere between $50-100 per month. While these tips will be released to Instavest’s general (non-paying) user base a few days after the expert’s newsletter is sent, paying users can potentially gain a huge advantage by buying or selling a stock before the general public. Offering this additional way for experts to generate revenue is an essential step in growing the platform. Just like how on-demand services like Uber and Postmates need to provide enough steady income to convince partners to quit their full-time jobs for the gig economy, Instavest needs to attract and retain successful investors if they want to become the place to go for great investment advice.
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Huawei replaces Xiaomi at top of Chinese smartphone market
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Brian Heater
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The out of analyst firm IDC show a major shakeup in the Chinese smartphone market for Q2. During an especially rough quarter, local handset maker Xiaomi’s shipment dipped significantly from 17.1 to 10.5 million year over year, according to the firm. The 38 percent drop was enough to knock the company down to the fourth position, as Huawei took over the top spot with 19.1 million units moved, comprising 17.2 percent of the country’s massive market share. Huawei was followed closely by fellow domestic manufacturers OPPO and Vivo, at 18 and 14.7 million units, respectively. For its part, Xiaomi IDC’s numbers, pointing to higher estimates from other prominent research firms, though all noted numbers significantly below Q2 2015’s 17 million. The highest spot by a non-domestic company on IDC’s list was secured by Apple, which rounded out the top five with 8.6 million shipments, also down fairly significantly (31.7 percent) from 12.6 the year prior.
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Devices could recycle radio waves instead of transmitting them with new ‘interscatter’ technique
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Devin Coldewey
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If we’re ever to have things like smart contact lenses and permanent brain implants, one of the things we need to figure out is the power problem. Those devices need energy for collecting, processing and especially transmitting data — but that last one might not be a problem anymore, thanks to a new technique called interscatter communication. Producing a wireless signal that’s strong enough to be detected five or 10 feet away isn’t that costly energy-wise when you’ve got a big all-day battery you can recharge easily, like in a smartphone. But for tiny devices, especially those intended for use inside the body, power is a much more serious consideration. Their batteries are tiny and it’s not like you can just pull your pacemaker out and juice it up on your laptop. So anything that reduces power draw is welcome for the next generation of smart embedded devices. To that end, three graduate students from UW’s electrical engineering program created a technique that eliminates the necessity to wireless signals at all. Instead, using interscatter, the device can essentially harvest and re-deploy signals it receives. It works like this: One device, say an earpiece, transmits a special “single-tone” signal carrying no data, in the Bluetooth frequency. The interscatter device receives this signal and allows it to bounce off its antenna — but not before it has manipulated it ever so slightly, re-encoding the blank signal as a Wi-Fi one. This altered transmission (really a sort of distorted reflection) can be picked up by a phone or laptop just like any other data over Wi-Fi. Cool, right? And the best part is, because that slight alteration of the received waves is all that requires power, it’s more efficient than producing that Wi-Fi signal itself, and 1,000 times more efficient than Bluetooth. Savings that huge could open up possibilities for lots of implanted devices, but that’s by no means the only possibility. The team has also built interscatter into some prototype credit cards that recycle signals to communicate with a payment system or each other. One of the next steps in the project will be to miniaturize the technology further; so far, it’s been built on bulky FPGA boards, but once the design is finalized it could be shrunk down onto an ordinary integrated circuit board. But because the signals are standard, the other devices can be anything, from Apple Watches to Samsung Galaxy phones. is by Vikram Iyer, Vamsi Talla, Bryce Kellogg and their professors, Shyamnath Gollakota and Joshua Smith; it will be presented August 22 at the in Brazil.
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“Mr. Robot” is now a mobile game that’s played through a fake messaging app
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Sarah Perez
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The hit cybersecurity-focused TV show “ ,” a psychological thriller popular among the tech crowd for its is now a mobile game. Released by in association with NBCUniversal, and developed by in collaboration with Universal Cable Productions, the game is played through the fictional E-Corp messaging app, allowing players to communicate in real time with characters in the show. The game continues the show’s technically correct naming scheme, too. While episodes of the show are often titled with names referencing video files, like .avi or .flv, for example, the iOS game is called Mr. Robot: 1.51exfiltrati0n.ipa — the .ipa referring to the iOS application archive file format. On Google Play, the file is named Mr. Robot:1.51exfiltrati0n.apk, referencing the Android app file format instead. (Gotta love these little details.) The game itself takes place during the first season of the TV show, according to the app’s description. The premise is that you find a smartphone on the ground outside the Fun Society Arcade at Coney Island. As fans of the show know, this is the meeting place for the hacking group, fsociety. As it turns out, the phone you’ve found belongs to Darlene, one of the show’s main characters and a black hat hacker poised to commit a large-scale cybercrime. You’ll “play” the game by texting different employees of E-Corp, the global tech company being targeted by the hacking group, as well as interacting with characters in the show, like Elliot, Darlene and Cisco. [gallery ids="1370975,1370974,1370973,1370972"] Through your chats, you’ll make choices that have consequences that affect the game’s narrative and story over a week’s time. Something like a modern-day choose-your-own adventure, players are offered different templates of responses they can use to answer the incoming messages. “There’s a distinct Telltale style to all of the character interactions that our fans will find familiar, and fans of the show will be engrossed all through the night as they race to help fsociety pull off the unthinkable,” said Steve Allison, SVP, Publishing at Telltale Games, in a statement about the game’s release. The game is not free — it’s a $2.99 download on the and , but it doesn’t include in-app purchases or advertisements. Below is a developer interview offering a behind the scenes look at the making of the Mr. Robot game: [youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cIasj_1eBMQ]
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Blockai’s new tool combines tweeting and claiming copyright
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Anthony Ha
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is supposed to help photographers and artists defend their intellectual property. Now it’s launching to make that process easier — or at least better-integrated with Twitter. Previously, Blockai users would go to the startup’s website to upload their work, creating a record in a public database (namely, the ) stating that they’re the creator. However, CEO Nathan Lands said, “We don’t imagine artists are sitting on Blockai all day,” so it’s also trying to integrate with other tools, starting with Twitter. Just tweet the image that you want to register and include the hashtag #blockai; the image will automatically be registered (assuming you’ve already got a Blockai account — otherwise it’ll ask you to set one up). As Lands explained , the idea is to offer users a way to create proof of their copyright without going through the trouble of registering with the Library of Congress. Then if you see someone reusing your photo or your artwork without permission, you can send them a copy of the Blockai certificate, which would seem “a lot more serious” than sending a screenshot from social media. (Lands has said the certificate could also serve as evidence in a court of law, although that’s untested so far.) Blockai will also search the web for similar images, so you can be proactive in watching out for copyright violations. The service is free for artists to use. The plan, eventually, is to charge other customers, such as media companies. The ultimate goal, Lands added, is “to answer, for every file on the web: Who owns the copyright?”
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Y Combinator’s Multiply Labs launches a 3D-printed vitamin with a time-release twist
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Sarah Buhr
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There have been quite a few “clean” vitamin and supplement startups popping up lately — , , and are just a few of the venture-backed chosen in the space — and many offer different combinations for better hair, brain power, focus and energy in several different packages and subscription plans. Elysium even claims to help with longevity. But believes it has something special the others don’t — a personalized capsule for time-released nutrition. Most supplements are made one-size-fits-all, regardless of weight, height, gender or nutritional needs and package nutrients separately to help with one thing or the other. But Multiply Labs offers all of the above by allowing you to manually select the types of supplements you want in a single, time-released pill. Courtesy of Y Combinator: Joe Wilson (Head of Product), Tiffany Kuo (Head of Marketing and Operations), Alice Melocchi (CTO), Fred Parietti (CEO). Most supplement companies use a standard beaded capsule to release contents into the body. But that poses a problem if you need to take certain vitamins and minerals that would otherwise cancel each other out. Large doses of minerals like calcium or magnesium and are therefore less effective when taken together, for instance. However, Multiply Labs claims it can time its capsules, which are printed with a patent-pending pharmaceutical polymer, to control the release of the nutrients at certain intervals throughout the day. The technique makes it possible to swallow just one pill when you’d normally need to swallow several pills at different times to get the same effect — and could be used for more than just the release of vitamins in the future. Co-founder and CEO Fred Parietti, who has a background working in the pharmaceutical industry and worked on his Ph.D. in the field at MIT, alluded to as much as part of the startup’s future plans. “But, for now, it’s just vitamins and supplements,” he told TechCrunch. It works using a “fully automated, robotic filling system to fill each pill with each customer’s unique set of supplements and quantity combinations,” according to company spokesperson Tiffany Kuo. So, for example, if you want less iron or need a caffeine boost in the middle of the day, you’re able to adjust the quantity on Multiply Lab’s site before you order. Choosing vitamins based on your gender and age aren’t unique to the industry. After all, , but the timed release is an interesting twist with ramifications for the pharmaceutical industry as a whole. It will be interesting to follow this young company as it continues to develop. But before you rush to buy, know that Multiply Labs isn’t shipping these supplements yet. You can, however, start to design and pre-order them on the site; the startup plans to start sending out its product in early 2017.
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Cisco and Fortinet say vulnerabilities disclosed in ‘NSA hack’ are legit
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Kate Conger
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A group calling itself the Shadow Brokers dumped data online this weekend that it claimed to have stolen from the Equation Group, a hacking team widely believed to be associated with the NSA. Firewall makers Cisco and Fortinet have now confirmed that vulnerabilities included in the data dump affected their products — a disclosure that lends credence to the theory that the Equation Group is indeed an NSA operation. Cisco said in a that two vulnerabilities in the Shadow Brokers’ data could be used to breach its Adaptive Security Appliance (ASA) software used in its firewalls. “An exploit could allow the attacker to execute arbitrary code and obtain full control of the system or to cause a reload of the affected system,” Cisco’s disclosure says. The data being offered for sale by the Shadow Brokers is dated between 2010 and 2013, so Cisco firewalls may have been vulnerable for years. also said that some of its products released prior to August 2012 contained a vulnerability that would allow an attacker to take execution control over a firewall. More recent versions should not be affected, Fortinet said, although the company noted that its investigation into the code released by the Shadow Brokers is continuing. Cisco security engineer Omar Santos wrote that one of the two vulnerabilities affecting Cisco products was patched in 2011. However, Santos said he wanted to discuss it publicly “to increase its visibility with our customers so they can ensure they are running software versions that defend against the exploit Shadow Broker has shared.” This exploit is referred to in the Shadow Brokers’ dump as EPICBANANA. The second exploit, EXTRABACON, affects all releases of Cisco’s ASA software — but getting it to work is is tricky. (Santos walks through it in his .) The exploit would allow an attacker to take full control of the firewall system, but its complexity — and the fact that Cisco hadn’t discovered and patched it — suggests it was developed by a talented adversary. Meanwhile, the Shadow Brokers also claim that their exploits will work on firewalls from Juniper Networks and TopSec, but neither company has publicly acknowledged the leak. The Shadow Brokers say they have additional yet-to-be-released exploits and are offering the data for sale in a Bitcoin auction. The group is asking for 1 million bitcoin (around $568 million at current rates), but the auction has yet to receive any significant bids. If the auction is unsuccessful, the vulnerabilities contained in the Shadow Brokers data may still come to light. Wikileaks has claimed to have access to the data and says it will publish a “pristine copy” soon. We had already obtained the archive of NSA cyber weapons released earlier today and will release our own pristine copy in due course. — WikiLeaks (@wikileaks) The NSA has not returned a request for comment.
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Cisco confirms it will cut up to 5,500 jobs, or 7% of its global workforce
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Matthew Lynley
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We that Cisco was planning a major cost-cutting operation to reduce its costs by around 15% throughout the month. It looks like the first stage of that is a round of cut jobs, with Cisco announcing as part of its earnings report that it will cut up to 5,500 jobs, or 7% of its workforce. The move isn’t unexpected as Cisco works to transition to a new era where it can’t simply focus on only building its core networking hardware. The company has been aggressively spending on acquisitions since the beginning of last year, including in a move into managing Internet of Things devices. “Today, we announced a restructuring enabling us to optimize our cost base in lower growth areas of our portfolio and further invest in key priority areas such as security, IoT, collaboration, next generation data center and cloud,” the company said in a statement. “We expect to reinvest substantially all of the cost savings from these actions back into these businesses and will continue to aggressively invest to focus on our areas of future growth.” An acquisition like Jasper Technologies is as much a signal in its move to considering a new phase of networking technology, which is its core competency. But the idea of how devices are networked is certainly changing over time, including as the diversity of devices that require some kind of networking continues to expand. Still, its competency seems to be working for Cisco — at least for now — as it reported a beat in its latest earnings report. The company reported earnings of 63 cents per share on $12.64 billion in revenue, compared to Wall Street’s numbers of $12.57 billion in revenue and earnings of 60 cents per share. Big rounds of layoffs like this are common as companies look to find new footing in times of transition. Microsoft experienced this in full force as it under the new leadership of Satya Nadella. It’s not just a question of bringing in new blood and fresh eyes in the form of hires and acquisitions, it’s about rejiggering the structure of the company to promote new ideas and spur innovation — and sometimes that means that roles simply vanish into the ether as things get more streamlined. All this seemed expected — though the final number came in lower than the — as investors barely blinked in extended trading, with Cisco’s stock only falling 1%. The job cuts will start in the first quarter of its next fiscal year. [graphiq id=”76rnhEzVifj” title=”Cisco Systems Inc. (CSCO) Stock Price – 1 Year” width=”600″ height=”463″ url=”https://w.graphiq.com/w/76rnhEzVifj” link=”http://listings.findthecompany.com/l/12486635/Cisco-Systems-Inc-in-San-Jose-CA” link_text=”Cisco Systems Inc. (CSCO) Stock Price – 1 Year | FindTheCompany” ]
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Airbus wants to make self-flying airborne taxis a real thing
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Darrell Etherington
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Ford might be looking to put for on-demand taxi scenarios by 2021, but that’s thinking small by Airbus standards – the aircraft manufacturer wants to make for dense urban areas where traffic congestion is a real and growing problem. You probably won’t be able to hail a flying taxi by 2021, but Airbus wants to put a prototype in the air by 2017. Airbus’ , an innovation-focused unit located in Silicon Valley, is working on building a self-flying vehicle platform codenamed Vahana ( for those curious), which is designed to carry both individual passengers and cargo, which could also help it act as a last-mile provider for companies like Amazon. Airbus’ project leader from the A3 group Rodin Lyasoff says in the that putting Vahana in the sky by 2017 is doable, since the individual tech pieces needed to do that are “most of the way there,” including batteries, motor and basic avionic underpinnings. One of the biggest challenges the team currently faces from an engineering standpoint is building a comprehensive obstacle avoidance system – like the ones that help Google’s driverless cars navigate roads, but optimized for skyborne vehicles. Demand for fleets of autonomous personal and cargo transport could eventually result in “millions” of aircraft deployed worldwide, according to Lyasoff, but there’s a huge hurdle in the way in terms of real world testing, since no country currently allows for the kinds of remote flights needed to prove viability of operating this kind of fleet in urban areas. But a drone parcel delivery service operated by Airbus has been greenlit for testing over Singapore’s National University campus starting in 2017, paving the way for future tests. Long-term, Vahana’s ultimate end goal is to pave the way for shared autonomous vehicles that ferry passengers, which Airbus is calling “CityAirbus.” These would be bookable via smartphone by individuals who would then report to their nearest helipad to climb aboard and strap in for a ride with fellow passengers. Sharing with multiple users defray the cost, according to airbus, making this a more affordable autonomous ferry service closer to modern public transit options. I guess this means we might actually get those flying cars we were promised?
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Step trackers in Happy Meals let you tone your McNuggets
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Devin Coldewey
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The latest move by McDonalds to distance itself from its enduring image as a greasy, unhealthy fast food apocalypse is once sure to please fitness-conscious parents: for a limited time, every Happy Meal now comes with a working pedometer. is a simple device that comes in six colors that, once activated, tracks a kid’s steps and their general activity level. Steps show on an LCD and the activity is indicated by a light that blinks more rapidly as (theoretically) the child exercises. It’s timed to coincide with the Olympics, naturally, though it’s not actually an official promotion. It’s only available in the US and Canada for the next four weeks — which is probably costing the company a fortune, even if these little things only cost a buck or two each to make. Believe it or not, this isn’t the first time McDonalds has offered pedometers with its meals. It also gave them away as part of another fitness awareness campaign. With luck the devices will spur an interest in, you know, walking and stuff. In retrospect, it might have been better to tie this to Pokemon GO than the Olympics, but who can say? : Never mind! that McDonalds is recalling the trackers because of possible skin irritation issues.
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Netlify, a service for quickly rolling out static websites, raises $2.1M
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Matthew Lynley
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Mathias Biilmann — a former CTO of a firm that built websites for small businesses — says developers have gotten so used to using Github as a central workflow, they expect the entire rest of the developer experience to work the same way. “The way that a front-end developer would work would be to go into a server and change how things were structured, but then Git came in and became the basic way of operating,” Biilmann, co-founder of Netlify, said. “You get more and more the expectation that pushing to Git something happens.” That’s his goal for his and his co-founder Chris Bach’s new company. basically initiates its own kind of repository that pushes both to a Github repository and its own services. Then, those updates execute and are distributed across a wide network of content delivery networks to deliver pre-built static pages to visitors — with Netlify picking the best one from the cloud services available. Netlify then distributes all those static sites across its own content delivery network, meaning that when visitors access those pages they are pre-built. The idea here is that, instead of a program running every time a visitor goes to a page, the pre-loading has already been done and the user is immediately served a page that’s directed from the closest geographic server, in order to reduce load times. More dynamically built pages may also be vulnerable to slowdowns if they suddenly get a spike of traffic, Biilmann said. The hope is that, by simplifying the deployment process, he can convince developers that are looking for a lightweight page experience to use something like Netlify instead of simply deploying directly to Amazon Web Services or other providers. To do all this, the company has raised $2.1 million from Bloomberg Beta and Tank Hill Ventures. Part of the process that’s developed over time is simply pushing Git updates directly to a server, like AWS. The expectation over time has become to simply run a push update through a command line and expect it to work on the other end. Since this has become an increasing expectation over time, especially with front-end developers, Biilmann and his team decided to build a set of tools that bundled together all the necessary components of building out those pages and deploying them. So, Netlify enables those developers to roll out changes across a larger network of servers that can easily be rolled back with those kinds of simple updates. And all this can be done directly from a command line interface. So, why pre-built? There are a few reasons: sometimes, when visiting a site, the page will build dynamically based on the applications running on something like Amazon Web Services. That not only requires the page to build itself, but also leaves open the opportunity for malicious attacks (like finding a vulnerability in a Flask server, for example). By essentially pushing the site in isolation from a CDN, they aren’t tapping into a dynamic setup that might be open to attack. “We say static site it’s not like 1994 where sites were static, 99.9% of sites serviced by Netlify are very dynamic,” Biilmann said. “They just interact with the browser instead of having to be built server-side every time.” If a developer ends up breaking a line of code, they can quickly roll back to a previous instance of the site that’s out there. While most of the operations can be done from a command line interface, Netlify users can also view a snapshot of their running pages through a web-based interface and monitor their health. At the moment Netlify doesn’t serve tools that interact with a database layer. Biilmann says this is primarily because many modern pages implement an experience that’s hooked through a set of APIs into other services. One example he gave would be running comments through an API like Disqus, or running search functions through another API. Investors in Netlify include Heroku founder Adam Wiggins and Github founder Tom Preston-Werner, who clearly seem to have an interest in helping individuals deploy fuller — and faster — website experiences with a simpler developer experience. The challenge for Netlify will to keep those experiences simple and quickly adjust to developer demands for these kinds of tools. It’s not much of a stretch to imagine something like AWS implementing a similar tool, and with so many developers already running on AWS, it might be hard to peel them away. But Biilmann says that, while larger companies have enjoyed the capability to deploy these kinds of experiences, tools like these will help attract a wider long tail or developer activity.
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Marvel’s TV universe expands with ‘Runaways’ order from Hulu
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Darrell Etherington
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Pretty soon, there will be a Marvel universe version of every kind of content, and the next genre up for inclusion is the teen drama. Hulu has placed an order for an adaptation of , the Marvel Comics series featuring a rag-tag bunch of teenagers trying to be heroes in the face of the ultimate arch-nemeses – their parents. is relatively young by Marvel lore standards – the series was created by Brian K. Vaughan (of fame, for indie comic fans) and Adrian Alphona in 2003, and has enjoyed a four volume run since then with the most recent concluding in 2015. Upon discovering that their parents are actually a group of super criminals, the teens band together, combining their inherent powers, along with tech lifted by their evil parentals to thwart their plans. Basically, it’s teen rebellion writ large with the help of superheroic fantasy, all taking place in Marvel’s rich fictional world. At Hulu, the project will be helmed by creators very familiar with teen trials and troubles according to – Josh Schwartz and Stephanie Savage, who together created , while Schwartz previously did solo. Executive producers on the project include Marvel TV’s Jeph Loeb and Jim Chory, which is great news because they helped create and for Netflix. But everyone involved in this has my spidey sense tingling a bit, if only because they’re all so terrific and the source material is so great that I’m tempted to say “how can this possibly go wrong” – which usually doesn’t end well. Still, let’s give Marvel the benefit of the doubt; they haven’t really had a big miss on TV or in film in recent memory. Here’s hoping doesn’t break with tradition in that regard.
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Autonomous buses take to the busy streets of Helsinki
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Devin Coldewey
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Make way for robot! Two driverless buses will be hitting the streets in Helsinki for some real-world testing for the next month or so, reports . The EasyMile minibuses have previously been tested on public roads in Finland , but this is the first time they’ll be mixing it up with everyday traffic there. Finnish law, amazingly, doesn’t require a driver to have a vehicle — making it an ideal test bed for at least some kinds of self-driving technologies. These EZ10 buses are intended for short-range shuttling of people, for instance between a train station and bus stop will only travel at a jogging pace. It may seem old hat to Valley-dwellers who see Google’s self-driving cars zooming around the streets of Mountain View, but different vehicles, with different purposes, in different countries, following different traffic rules may as well be a whole different industry. I’ve asked EasyMile for more information on what specifically the company will be testing for, and will update this post when I hear back.
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Why startups need a defensive IP strategy
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Joe Medved
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One of the things I really love about working with startup founders is that they are by nature an optimistic crowd: They set out to build amazing things, change the world and fundamentally shift the way people view things. What they often don’t realize, though, is that in the midst of brutal competition, the path to scale and success is often lined with unexpected co-travelers and events. There are plenty of misfortunes that can befall startups: , 23 percent don’t have the right team on board and 8 percent are beleaguered by legal challenges. Though it’s impossible to plan for everything, there are definite safety belts you can put in place, especially from a legal standpoint. Most founders I meet aren’t focused initially on intellectual property (IP) defense. They are, as they should be, thinking about how to build the best product that they’re able, and how to get the most customers to use it. What they often don’t see coming is that their success can sometimes make them a target for frivolous litigation. Lawsuits are distractions and cash drains, especially when you’re a lean startup in the midst of managing high growth. Nobody wants to be a cautionary tale; here are some ideas on how to protect your startup. Knowing about the risks is half the battle. More and more, some companies are using litigation as a way to edge out competitors; in fact, there is an industry around that helps companies on the receiving end stand up to those with deeper litigation pockets. Often, the litigation is around IP. Patent trolls are another threat. More than that are targeted by trolls make less than $10 million in revenue, and more than 80 percent of patent troll lawsuits have been multi-defendant suits using weak patents brought against companies with less than $100 million in revenue. For trolls, startups are easy targets, because startups often have limited resources, lack internal patent expertise and, with the average cost of defending a patent lawsuit hovering at $3.2 million, have a huge incentive to settle. If you’ve got intellectual property that’s meaningful, by all means, protect it. Filing a patent allows you to stake a claim to that IP, monetize it through licensing and collaborate with others while protecting what’s yours. Indeed, filed for a patent before they received funding; 33 percent of funded companies file for a patent at some point in their life cycles. For those companies that find themselves under attack by frivolous litigation, an unfortunate but necessary path for defense may be to actually acquire patents from trolls. By taking patents away from trolls, and using them , you are actually disabling it as a weapon in the overall troll arsenal. It’s not the source of the patent that matters, but instead, how you use it. Find like-minded companies that believe in innovation and support the view that patents shouldn’t be used as revenue-producing weapons. Though it’s often in a startup’s DNA to be stealthy as they look to disrupt mature markets, with regard to IP there are some great examples of big tech players working to educate, defend and ally with other tech companies to fight frivolous lawsuits. For instance, , one of our portfolio companies, recently joined , a nonprofit community of companies that includes global giants like Canon, Red Hat, Dropbox and Logitech, as well as startups. Member companies agree to provide immunity for one another in case their patents at some point fall into the hands of a troll — providing a real deterrent to frivolous lawsuits. There also are organizations like that offer products and services on the defensive front. If you’re hit with a troll suit, talk to the other companies involved. You may be able to band together to make it economically and strategically more efficient to support your cause. Startups are the world’s engines of innovation. When you succeed, you become a target. Nobody needs a frivolous lawsuit. Line up your defenses before you need them, and be prepared.
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Garena’s Nick Nash explains the business behind Southeast Asia’s $4B tech giant
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Jon Russell
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Quick, name a unicorn in Southeast Asia! The most obvious names that come to mind might be Grab, the Uber rival that is , Lazada, the e-commerce company , or perhaps Go-Jek, the motorbike taxi on-demand service in Indonesia that . How about ? Despite a low profile, the games company is valued at close to $4 billion from Khazanah Nasional Berhad, the Malaysian government’s strategic investment fund, and Chinese tech giant Tencent, a long-term, existing investor. That round makes Garena Southeast Asia’s highest-valued tech startup — if you can call a near-$4 billion company a “startup,” that is. Yet still little is really known about it. That’s probably because the company shied away from media attention for the longest time — getting at the company to confirm on record, used to be mission impossible for reporters — but over the past year or so that barrier has dropped. Today, Garena execs are prominent fixtures at tech events across Asia and beyond. Last month, I had the opportunity to interview Garena President at the in Bangkok, Thailand, to find more about this intriguing company, which began in games but has expanded to payments, shopping, messaging apps and more. Nash — who previously spent more than a decade with General Atlantic, heading up its ASEAN business among other things — covered a range of topics in our chat, including:
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Crunch Report | Robots are everywhere
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Khaled "Tito" Hamze
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Tito Hamze, Jason Kopek, John Mannes
Tito Hamze
Joe Zolnoski
Joe Zolnoski
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Breaking news: Bill Maris is leaving GV
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Connie Loizos
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Bill Maris, who founded (formerly known as Google Ventures) in 2009, is leaving the unit at the end of this week, according to a from Recode. Maris, a neuroscience student at Middlebury who cofounded an early web hosting company before joining Google, is reportedly being replaced by David Krane. Krane is a managing partner at GV; he joined the venture arm in 2010, after spending nearly 10 years as Google’s director of global communications and public affairs. This is quite a bombshell, and, as Recode notes, comes on the heels of a string of other recent, high-profile departures within Alphabet, parent company to GV and several other units. Android cofounder Rich Miner to start an education project within Google. Alphabet also recently with Tony Fadell, the cofounder of Nest Labs (acquired by Google for in early 2014), and at Google’s self-driving car unit, including CTO Chris Urmson. Maris wielded a tremendous amount of power at GV, which, as he in an on-stage interview in February, currently invests $500 million a year. Not everyone realizes that despite GV’s bench of investors, every decision fell to Maris. As he explained the process during that sit-down: “[A]ll the investment decisions I make, going into a company or when and how to come out of it, is in collaboration with the partner who brings [the deal] forward. So we talk about all the opportunities as a team and everyone is invited to that discussion – not just the investing partners. And we don’t take a vote. It’s not like a democracy in any way. But everyone knows where people stand and we try and give each other good advice, and at the end of the day, the person who brings it forward and I decide whether to move forward or not.” Asked why GV wasn’t run more democratically, he told me, ” I have no idea, because I’ve never worked as a venture capitalist before. I masquerade as one now . . . But basically it started out with just me. The buck stops with me. So if we succeed, credit all goes to the team. If we fail, the blame should fall all on me; that’s how management should work.” Whether that top-down process will change now remains to be seen. GV didn’t return requests for comment this evening. But a source close to GV suggests that Krane is most assuredly a permanent replacement as CEO, having been promoted to managing director two years ago and working in the most senior post at GV under Maris. (All other GPs operate at a separate level.) This same source says that Maris, who had a child earlier this year, has no known plans. A second source who asked not to be named says Maris has told friends he’s mulling several ideas but wants to take some time off first to recharge. Certainly, the move seems sudden, based on TC’s recent conversations with Maris, in which he gave no indication that he’d be leaving GV. While Recode speculates that strife between Google Capital and GV may have played a factor, as well as that Google has been investing in more companies directly off its balance sheet, what’s clearer is that GV has some valuable stakes in its portfolio, including Uber. GV had led Uber’s $258 million Series C round in 2013 — at a $4 billion valuation. (It’s now valued at a reported $60 billion valuation.) Last month, during a separate sit-down with Maris at Fortune’s Brainstorm Tech conference in Aspen, Maris noted to me that Uber was . Krane also led GV’s investment in Nest Labs and still-private Blue Bottle Coffee.
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While many on-demand food startups fail to deliver, iFood picks up $30 million to expand in Latin America
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Jonathan Shieber
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Startup food delivery businesses may have spoiled globally, but investors in Latin America think at least one startup has a fresh take on the industry. The Brazilian on-demand food delivery company, has picked up $30 million in new financing to expand regionally and solidify its grip over the online food delivery markets South of the US border. While Olympic athletes are going for the gold in Brazil, iFood is hoping to reach the top spot on the podium of food-delivery startups with its new money. This new financing comes from some investors iFood knows well. , the Naspers-backed mobile commerce powerhouse and the publicly traded, UK-based, global online takeout service, , were in the Brazilian company. It’s the continuation of a very tangled web of connections between the three companies. Earlier this year, iFood acquired Just Eat’s Brazilian operations Hellofood Brazil, and will use part of this new cash infusion to expand into Mexico by acquiring Just Eat’s Mexican business, SinDelantal. Movile has a 60% controlling stake of iFood, while the British food delivery giant Just Eat is a global player in online takeout ordering, and owns a 30% stake in iFood, according to previous reports in TechCrunch. , Mexico’s largest food delivery service, was bought by JUST EAT in February 2015, and the Mexican company got another boost from JUST EAT when it merged the operations of its recent hellofood Mexico acquisition into the company in February 2016. With the new deal, iFood is taking a 49% stake in SinDelantal, and the business will become a joint venture between iFood and its 30% backer, JUST EAT. The price of the acquisition was not disclosed. “At iFood we are constantly thinking about our mobile experience. We want to be the best and easiest way to order food from your phone”, explained Felipe Fioravante, CEO and cofounder of iFood. “Movile’s mobile expertise has been essential in creating our world-class experience which we are always improving.” This new investment in a Latin American food startup serves as a counter point to a global market that has not been willing to place more orders with the food-delivery industry. Consolidation and capital destruction have been the orders of the day globally, with JUST EAT and iFood coming out as beneficiaries. In the U.S. SpoonRocket shut down (its assets were ). And in Europe Rocket Internet to JUST EAT. In emerging markets the situation has been even worse. , as a recent report from Bloomberg indicates: Writing for the website, Saritha Rai reports: Venture capital is drying up and startups are disappearing. TinyOwl, a pioneering Mumbai-based food-delivery app that raised $23 million from investors including Sequoia Capital, has run through most of its money and will merge with a smaller delivery firm, Runnr. PepperTap, a grocery service backed by Sequoia and Snapdeal.com, shut down in April, following the closure last year of Dazo, a startup with financing from executives at Google and Amazon. Even the country’s only food tech unicorn, Gurgaon-based Zomato, saw its billion-dollar valuation by analysts at HSBC Securities and Capital Markets (India). Business in Brazil and Mexico especially tell a different story. Since launching five years ago, iFood has signed deals with over 10,000 partner restaurants to its and is racking up roughly 1.7 million deliveries each month. “It was a natural decision to work with iFood in Mexico after seeing the success in Brazil,” said David Buttress, the chief executive of JUST EAT, in a statement. “iFood has an intimate understanding of the local markets as well as expertise in executing on mobile. It’s a winning combination that we’re looking forward to expanding on.” Beyond that intimate knowledge are some surprising numbers about growth for technology and services businesses across Latin America that could be a factor in the big bet JUST EAT and Movile are making on the market. In language that’s about as dry as dirt, the World Bank actually gave the country a pretty glowing assessment for its financial prospects in the medium term. According to the bank: Sustained macroeconomic, price and financial stability as well as continued investor confidence will contribute to a rebalancing of the sources of growth with increasing (net) exports and private sector investments complementing the steady expansion of private consumption. Further progress in the implementation of structural reforms in the financial, telecommunications and energy sector is expected to strengthen the basis for a more vigorous expansion of economic activity over the medium term. For the World Bank that’s like a 3.5 star review. What’s equally compelling is the share of the economy that’s going to e-commerce despite retrenchment in other sectors (a trend that’s happening across many emerging markets). In Latin America the ith only online, Latin Americans make up 38% of WhatsApp’s user base and 20% of the Facebook user base), point to a population that’s waking up to social media. At the same time, US tech companies are waking up to the promise of the region. PayPal recently with Mexican telco giant América Móvil to launch a mobile wallet platform. America Móvil, which has , or close to AT&T’s audience, also cut a strategic deal with Uber that includes a portion of Uber’s LTV (lifetime value), underscoring the central role of mobile for the region These are all trends that bode well for iFood’s continued success. And show the power of digital businesses even in markets where macro-economic pictures look far less rosy.
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CareSkore gets $4.3M to bring machine learning to preventive care
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John Mannes
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Among other things, wants to use machine learning to anticipate mortality. However, the newly endowed platform is more than just a Facebook poll that tells you how you’ll meet your end this Christmas by being squashed by a falling piano. Storm ventures, Cota Capital, Rising Tide Fund and Liquid 2 Ventures are rallying behind the Y Combinator graduate with today’s $4.5 million seed round. CareSkore is combining clinical, socio-economic, demographic, and behavioral data to paint a holistic picture of patients that doctors and insurance companies can use to provide better preventative care. The platform is and Hadoop to cut through massive third party data sets and generate insights by finding relationships between environmental and clinical data. From a data-science perspective, CareSkore uses ensemble learning techniques like random forest analysis to combine various statistical models to produce a less noisy, more accurate result. The platform can inform doctors of patients who are most likely to skip an appointment and who are likely to forget or intentionally fail to take medication on time. In addition to mortality risk, the platform analyzes readmission risk, fall risk, and infection risk by taking into account patient charts on file with hospitals and doctors offices. Doctors can use this information to inform their work, and proactively reach out to patients with appropriate recommendations and additional services. Patients receive personalized text messages or phone calls gently nudging them to take action if a new risk factor emerges. CareSkore offers disease specific templates for conditions like COPD and diabetes that can make care recommendations. Patients can also use the system to inform doctors of new symptoms or questions about a condition or care plan. Information is passed on to social workers who ensure information gets to the right person. In many cases, data is fed back through the system to inform future CareSkore predictions. The space is hot, with a number of players opting for different angles to enter the market. by Welltok last year, but the company focuses more on health risk management than direct patient communication. Third-party intelligence is where CareSkore looks to set itself apart from other analytics platforms like and . CareSkore uses 23 environmental data sources, including Google Maps and Google APIs, to contextualize patient data. While it would seem lucrative for the company to repackage data for insurance companies to incorporate into premium analysis, Jas Grewal, CEO of CareSkore, is perfectly happy sticking directly with the healthcare market. The relationship the company has with insurers is focused on supporting preventative care. If insurance companies can make the same proactive efforts as doctors, everyone benefits from reduced claims. Since graduating from Y Combinator, Grewal has brought in $1.2 million in revenue from signed contracts. Another $3.4 million in revenue is sitting in the pipeline to be processed before the end of the year. The company’s SaaS model is based on the number of admissions for both in-patient and out-patient care charged monthly, quarterly or yearly in addition to a one-time up-front implementation fee. In addition to long sales cycles in the healthcare industry, CareSkore also has to grapple with implementation hurdles. Grewal wants to reduce the on-boarding time for new clients from two to three months down to a few weeks. Without a standard format for patient data, the company has to convert some legacy patient tracking systems into a format usable by the platform. Fortunately, four large companies including control 80 percent of the hospital market and CareSkore is working to lock down partnerships with all four. With the Affordable Care Act, the market has shifted to incentivize just about everyone to focus on preventative care. “There has been a push from the regulatory side in this direction,” noted Arun Penmetsa, a Principal at Storm Ventures. “The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) has made a push toward using quality as the leading metric for reimbursement.” If Grewal and his early team of 15 can nail the execution, the M&A market remains hot for smart applications of data science that can support patient care and bridge the gap between the home and the hospital.
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UPDATE: Twilio’s IPO and the rise of the next 100M developers
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Anshu Sharma
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recently exceeded expectations with an that priced them at . For some, this proves that are the future of business. While they are certainly an indispensable asset, as more and more businesses turn to the cloud, what about the rest of us? What about the admins and the marketers and those who are equally important to a business but don’t code? shouldn’t be the only ones who can take advantage of APIs, because, while they are great to have (we’re very happy to have all of ours!), they are hard to come by. As more of our business functions rely on disparate SaaS services, citizen are finding ways to empower themselves and connect their apps. They want a solution that is customizable in a way that would require a developer but… without a developer. The Salesforce platform was a pioneer here — it was the first cloud app that allowed a non-coder (“admin”) to customize the app, create new databases and workflows and build reports. During my tenure at Salesforce, I saw many lives and careers transformed, as people who didn’t view themselves as “technical” began building and customizing apps — becoming the go-to person for their companies. The new zero-code tool box includes, but is not limited to: Cloud platforms like Amazon Web Services, Azure and others allow to get away from the business of day to day provisioning and management of servers. But cloud app platforms like , , , etc. take it a step further, hiding even the code layer behind clean APIs. Using software like , , or these APIs can be stitched together without code, creating a workflow that calls these apps to do things like creating leads, deleting files, initiating phone calls etc. Using the example of Twilio, you don’t need to know what a SIP server is and you don’t need to deploy it to an app server — with the Twilio API, you simply pass the correct parameters and a phone call or a text message goes out. Companies using cloud apps like Twilio are not using them alone, but in tandem with other cloud apps or their own software. We can easily see the impact of creating a comprehensive workflow with several apps to build out an entire process. Take the example of a company that relies on a constant stream of millennial temp workers to keep their service operations going. Their solution needs to answer the following questions: How do you make it easy for a large number of applicants to apply? How can you streamline the high-volume screening process? How can you automate the onboarding process? Without a developer at your disposal, you’ll need a different set of tools — but you can achieve the same results. By using various cloud apps and an integration platform that is flexible and requires no code a custom workflow can be created without custom development. An interested applicant can apply via text message using Twilio with a photo of their resume. Their information will automatically be uploaded into Box where a hiring manager can manually accept or deny the applicant without breaking the automatic workflow. If the manager approves, the applicant goes into a new folder in Box and Twilio sends them a text message letting the applicant know they’ve been hired. At the same time, Workato will deploy a test via SurveyMonkey to make sure the applicant is fit for the temp work; when it is completed, the fully vetted applicant is ready to go. Software is eating the world, but we don’t have enough to eat the world fast enough. Enabling the people who will build the apps that automate our daily work, connect our mobile apps and customize our reports has the potential to be a bigger business than the multi-billion dollar IT stack.
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Yelp will soon let you skip the line at restaurants thanks to Nowait partnership
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Lucia Maffei
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and announced a partnership that will enable Yelp users to check nearby restaurants’ wait times and “get in line” remotely from the Yelp app. Yelp will be making an $8 million strategic investment as part of the partnership, which was announced as part as yesterday. Based in Pittsburgh, PA, Nowait is a mobile platform that has a network of more than 4,000 casual-dining restaurants across the country, including national chains such as Chili’s and First Watch. By using the Nowait guest app, users can see how long they would have to wait at a restaurant that does not accept reservations, as well as put their names on the waitlist without being physically present at a restaurant. When their table is ready, users get a text message. Customers can also text back to say they’re running late, and restaurants can decide whether or not to hold the table for them. Nowait charges restaurants a monthly fee. The company, which received its first round of funding in August 2012, has now raised a total of $23.5 million. Nowait’s services will be integrated into the Yelp app “in the coming months,” said Ware Sykes, Nowait CEO, in an interview with TechCrunch. “We don’t have a specific deadline.” “This partnership has multiple benefits,” said Sykes. “It helps us by enabling us to drive more traffic to our restaurants and it allows us to bring the Nowait experience to as many consumers as possible.” Asked how the company is going to use the $8 million investment from Yelp, Sykes said: “Our first priority is opening up the Yelp network to the Nowait restaurants. We are going to expand our restaurant and customer base.” Restaurants are 18 percent of reviewed businesses by category on Yelp, the company said. According to Yelp’s media relations, many people begin using Yelp to find restaurants, then discover other types of businesses, like plumbers and dog groomers. Chad Richard, senior vice president for business development, said in an interview with TechCrunch that Yelp discovered the existence of Nowait thanks to references from friends and colleagues this spring. “Nowait is a very complementary service to our existing offering for consumers and restaurants,” said Richard. “They have fundamentally created technology that replaces pen and paper systems for restaurants that don’t take reservations.”
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Toyota Research Institute provides $22M to University of Michigan for AI studies
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Darrell Etherington
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Toyota Research Institute (TRI), a Toyota R&D organization headquartered in Silicon Valley, is providing in an initial research grant with the University of Michigan. The funding follows Toyota’s opening of a third research facility for TRI at the U of M campus, which it officially . The funding is earmarked for artificial intelligence research specifically, and follows similar investments and facilities at Stanford near the Institute’s Palo Alto HQ, and in Cambridge, where Toyota has a similar research agreement with MIT. Toyota isn’t new to U of M; the car-maker has two Toyota Technical Centers near the academic institution, and it has worked with faculty there on connected cars and research into advanced safety measures. Toyota is also a founding member of the university’s Mobility Transformation Center, which is a multi-departmental effort focused on building future transportation systems that incorporate shared autonomous vehicle networks. This new investment from Toyota is yet another clear sign that the automaker is looking to drive R&D advances in robotics, machine learning and artificial intelligence through close relationships with top academics in the field. The University of Michigan is one of the top graduate schools in the country for AI studies, according to many top schools listings, and it’s also a key North American research center for automotive tech. The money isn’t just going towards car research, however; the University also says it’ll be used in studies related to “partner robotics,” “indoor mobility” and “student learning and diversity,” in addition to car tech. Interest from car companies in academic research to spur innovation is coming from all the major manufacturers, including , U of M’s nearby neighbor. The increased pace of development, aided by new entrants to the market including Google and potentially, Apple, means we’ll likely see more research partnership and further extensions of exiting ones for at least the next few years.
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How Apple will convince us to love the dongle
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John Biggs
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Hi, and welcome to my obligatory hot take on the we’re about to see rolling out of Apple. I’m not an absolute fan of this idea, but we’ve seen this sort of behavior from Apple before — most notably the move from the 30-pin dock jack that probably caused a bit of an , forcing users and most notably hotels to upgrade their in-room docks. Now the same thing is happening, but with a far more common technology. And people are pissed. I understand the concern. We all have a favorite pair of headphones. I like my Bose QuietComforts and my Philips running earbuds. I pack them everywhere I go. But how great would it be if both of those things didn’t get tangled up with each other? In general, wireless headphones are great. They’re comfortable on plane rides and they’re quite pleasant when it comes to running and sports. But what is really going to change is the dongle. It’s Apple’s half-hearted attempt to let you use your old technology on their new hotness. I’ll wager that we’ll see a million little things that will hang off of the iPhone to enable wired headphones, each in a different color, size, price and quality. It will be an ecosystem of dongles. As it stands now, Apple’s use of the dongle has been… clever? My MacBook always has its little USB port dongle attached, a port that costs $79 and does little other than allow me to charge my iPhone. But still it hangs there, like a forlorn growth in form but absolutely essential in function. It’s this move, the decision to completely shed all external ports on a fully sized laptop, that let Apple make a beautiful, usable and ultralight computer. It also gave haters plenty of opportunity to jeer at the computing equivalent of a Maserati, which requires a huge spare truck tire attached to it to drive more than a city block. But, for better or worse, that’s what Apple’s good at: convincing you that you don’t miss the things you’ve lost. Sure, I sometimes miss the DVD player, but thanks to the loss of DVD players in laptops I haven’t looked at an optical disk in years and have figured out better solutions. Sure, I miss the Serial port on a PC for plugging in old junk but, at this point, most of that old junk is dead anyway. We’re moving into the future here, and the future has fewer ports. So never fear: You’ll be able to plug your Beats into your iPhone. You’ll just need a dongle to do it, and I’m sure there will be plenty of colorful options. And, slowly but surely, you’ll notice you’re buying wireless headphones over wired, USB-port-less laptops over USB-ported and you’ll slowly come to accept the inevitable: that ports have held us back and the future is seamless, clean and yet, somehow, full of dongles.
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Former Facebook engineers launch Fabric, an automated personal journal of your life
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Sarah Perez
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Technology has made it simple to record and archive our digital memories through posts, snapshots, videos and more, but it can sometimes be a struggle to surface our past – our memories, activities and other experiences – in an easily accessible way. A new mobile application called , built by two former Facebook engineers, aims to solve that problem. Co-founders Arun Vijayvergiya and Nikolay Valtchanov spent several years at Facebook working on many of the products that connect the social networks’ with their past. Vijayvergiya built the first version of the Facebook Timeline at a hackathon, which was then called Facebook Memories. (It was accidentally released, before becoming Timeline ) In addition to being the first engineer on Timeline, Arun also worked on projects like Friendship Pages, Year in Review and On This Day. Meanwhile, Nikolay was focused on Facebook’s integrations with running and biking mobile applications. After leaving Facebook, both worked on various projects together, but returned to this idea of an automated journal for your life. Arun, in particular, was inspired to create a project in this space after receiving a printed book about his dad that was filled with stories friends had written about him in college. The book had details about trips he had taken and people he had known – things that Arun didn’t know about before. “When I leave this world, I want to leave with a story I can tell about myself – not for everyone, but the people who care about it,” Arun says. A book like his dad’s perhaps, but digital. Fabric, which is available now on iOS, works to build that story for you automatically as soon as you first sign up. It pulls in your photos from Facebook, Instagram and your Camera Roll, then plots them out in a map view. On the side, a timeline appears, showing you when you took those photos. When the import is complete, you can then swipe up to see your daily journal. The app tracks things like the people you saw, the places you visited, and the recorded moments from that day, which are displayed as colorful circles you can tap on when in the journal view. Fabric has a social component, as well. If you add a friend to the app, it will begin tracking whenever you two hang out together. In the future, the goal is to allow users the ability to record anything they want to remember – whether that’s a note, a song, or anything else. And they’re working on different ways to help you surface your past that’s different from the way Timehop or Facebook lets you look back on the same day a year ago, or several years ago. Instead, Fabric will be able to answer questions like “when is the last time I saw mom?,” for example. “In the really long-term, we want to be an augmented memory solution. You want to be able to search through your brain at some point – we think that will exist. We’re trying to take the first step towards that,” Arun says. The company, which is in the current Y Combinator class in Mountain View, is bootstrapped for the time being. Arun and Nikolay are the only two full-time employees. Fabric is also being advised by , whose personal annual reports brought him internet fame, and who . The new app is .
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Kyocera’s new rugged handset doubles as an action cam
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Brian Heater
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Rugged is just kind of Kyocera’s thing, when it comes to handsets, and does its best to uphold that tradition with a Military Standard 810G grade rugged body and IP68 certification, which its dustproof and can withstand a two meter dunking for up to 30 minutes. None of that’s really all that different for the line, but the Pro does bring a newfound focus on camera features, in an attempt to offer bundle an Android smartphone and GoPro-style action cam. That means a 13-megapixel camera on the rear (couple with a 5MP selfie machine on the front), a 135-degree field of view and an on-board image process that gives it action, sports, slow-motion and underwater modes. https://youtu.be/zKjlR-nPw1A The camera’s rugged five-inch 1920×1080 display doubles as a viewfinder, which should couple nicely with the forthcoming action camera mounts, while built-in cellular connectivity means videos can be posted directly from the device. There’s a 3,240mAh battery on board, along with front-facing speakers, and, interestingly enough, some enterprise focused features for the action sports enthusiast who really needs file paperwork in the field.
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No Man’s Sky players discover over 10M unique in-game species overnight
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Darrell Etherington
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The space exploration game features biodiversity that would make Earth weep with envy, and players are incredibly avid taxonomers. Hello Games founder Sean Murray tweeted today that players have racked up over 10 million species discoveries thus far in-game, which is around five to 6.5 times the number of known species on earth, depending on whose numbers you trust. While human scientists may differ on the exact number of unique species accurately catalogued on Earth, No Man’s Sky universe has servers to back up its totals, giving its developers a running tally of all the in-game activity accomplished by intrepid explorers. For instance over night we hit 10 million species discovered in NMS… that's more than has been discovered on earth. WHAT IS GOING ON!!! — Sean Murray (@NoMansSky) The discoveries are rolling in despite server issues, which have caused a lot of players to see the red indicator that means the service is having trouble connecting. The reason seems to be overwhelming interest in the unique title, which offers over 18 billion planets to explore, as the number of . Another sign that the interest is high: Two players actually managed to find each other in the first day of the game’s availability, something Murray said on Twitter has “blown [his] mind.” Murray has said the chance of two players running into each other in-game is “pretty much zero” given the universe size, so that might be even more amazing a feat than the 10 million species discovered. In my initial play time, I found a fair number of new species, and you can see one of them, my new best friend right here:
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NASA awards companies $65 million to develop habitats for deep space
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Devin Coldewey
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NASA is serious about going to Mars, and not just for a quick visit, either. It just , spread over two years and six companies, for the purpose of developing and testing deep-space habitats that could be used on the way to — and on the surface of — the Red Planet. It’s part of the organization’s NEXTStep (not to be confused with the NeXTSTEP OS), an ongoing partnership program under NASA’s that funds private research into technology for space exploration. were for a variety of things, but this year they’re all on the same track: “deep space habitats where humans will live and work independently for months or years at a time, without cargo supply deliveries from Earth.” We’re talking spaceships here — big ones. The numbers are bigger, too: the previous year’s contracts amounted to a total of perhaps $15 million divided 10 ways — $65 million 6 ways is, it hardly needs saying, a much more considerable investment. The lucky companies are all taking to the problem of deep space habitation. Clockwise from top left: Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Sierra Nevada, and Orbital ATK’s concept spacecraft. Bigelow is a name you may already be familiar with: the Bigelow Expandable Activity Module was recently attached to the International Space Station and is currently . The company plans to develop one about 20 times larger (330 vs 16 cubic meters) that they call the Expandable Bigelow Advanced Station Enhancement, or XBASE. There are advantages to being able to pack your modules tightly and expand them later, but the BEAM’s troubled deployment shows there are challenges as well. Of course, that’s what testing is for. Lockheed Martin doesn’t want to let good space gear go to waste, either; its plan is to refurbish one of the carried by the Space Shuttles into a livable multi-purpose environment. The idea is, essentially, to use proven equipment as a base to test future developments, like data and crew transfer between the module and, say, the Orion spacecraft. NASA concept of the interior of a habitable module. Another avid recycler is NanoRacks, whose commercial experimentation platform outside the ISS just went live yesterday. Nanoracks has a rather crazy idea: convert the final rocket stage, with its spacious fuel compartment, into a habitable space. It’s working with Space Systems Loral and the United Launch Alliance to see if this is crazy enough to work — or just plain crazy. Sierra Nevada (specifically its subsidiary Space Systems) has perhaps the most ambitious plan. Over four commercial launches, the company wants to build on one of its Dream Chaser cargo modules, adding a propulsion system, an expandable environment, and life support. Taking it in stages means better risk management. Boeing and Orbital ATK didn’t provide many details: the former just says it’s building a full-scale prototype for extensive testing, and the latter is adapting one of its Cygnus spacecraft to the purpose. It’s all very early, of course, and these projects, among others, are for exploring possibilities and finding potential problems, not actually producing something we can send to Mars or beyond. The technology investigated by these companies will have to prove itself on the ground first, then in orbit, and eventually in cislunar space — the “proving ground” for long term mission hardware. NASA didn’t specify how much each project was receiving, or the exact timelines or deliverables expected from each — although results are certainly expected by the time the contracts’ 24 months are up. I contacted NASA for more details and will update this post if I hear back.
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Innovaccer raises $15.6M to give businesses one stop for all their data
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Matthew Lynley
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Abhinav Shashank was working on an academic project at Harvard with his colleagues Kanav Hasija and Sandeep Gupta — figuring out how to pool together large data sets from hundreds of different sources and APIs and manage them — when his business colleagues started asking him to help apply those tools. The result was Innovaccer, a set of software that mashes together data from different enterprise sources and online data sets (ranging from Oracle data, SQL databases to social media feeds) to bring together a large database where companies can build application layers. That technology has seen applications ranging from health care to media, but the core remains the same: getting all the relevant data in one place where businesses can divine the information they need to best operate. To do that, Innovaccer has raised $15.6 million led by Westbridge Capital Partners. The goal is basically to provide businesses with a white-labeled tool to apply high-level data analysis of large sets of data pulled from multiple different sources. With the right approach, firms can build tools to point that activity in pretty much any direction they want. “The core platform remains the same, which is basically the integration, the data management layer and the dashboard,” Shashank said. “You don’t end up using iOS or Android, you end up using Gmail and Uber. From an application layer standpoint there are a few changes you need to do from what media wants to measure to what a healthcare wants to measure, versus what a bunch of other companies want to measure.” Keeping an advantage is going to be a race against time. Innovaccer has to ensure it can very quickly onboard new data integrations and provide easy tools to apply new kinds of applications on top of them. If not, it’ll just be another piece of software in the stack that will collect dust in the corner while firms stick with more reliable, typical suppliers of this kind of technology. The company has already seen applications in various fields like health care, where pooling data from multiple sources allows firms to create tools like electronic health records systems and a comprehensive patient overview. Innovaccer’s goal is to create a central piece of technology that can be morphed into something that’s industry-specific, while still constantly being improved by adding new sources of data. In the case of health care, Innovaccer can pull information from the billing systems, claims systems and other pools of information it supports to put together an overview for a patient. Those data sources may be particularly useful for various industries, but the point is to ensure that at some point companies aren’t required to individually bring in information from discrete sources and just rely on software to do that. There is plenty of competition for tools like this. There are many applications that focus on those specific industries — like electronic medial record systems in health care, for example — and other companies that provide high-level analytics like Palantir or IBM. Innovaccer’s challenge will be to ensure that it can prove it has enough core data to justify getting firms to build application layers on top of it, and that the data they have is more valuable and more useful than what businesses might find in other services.
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Tor’s new social contract includes ‘no backdoors’ pledge
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Natasha Lomas
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It hasn’t been the best summer of PR for the Tor anonymizing browser, given that one of its prominent developers — Jacob Appelbaum — stepped down amid allegations of “sexual mistreatment” in . So it’s perhaps not too surprising that the pro-privacy organization has decided now is the time to publish a social contract, promoting what it dubs its commitment to ‘advancing human rights’. “We believe that privacy, the free exchange of ideas, and access to information are essential to free societies. Through our community standards and the code we write, we provide tools that help all people protect and advance these rights,” Tor writes in the contract, which also includes pledges to be transparent and open; to build tools that are free to use; to widen access via education and advocacy work; and to be honest about the limitations of its technology. The contract can be read in full below. (aka The Onion Router) is a network technology designed to increase the privacy of web users by encrypting and randomly routing Internet connections via a worldwide network of volunteer relays — thereby making it harder for individual web connections to be traced back to a particular user. However the flip-side of any anonymizing technology is the risk of criminals or bad actors using it to cover their tracks. So there’s an eternal publicity war to be fought — especially given recent for there to be ‘no safe spaces for terrorists online’. It’s been clear for some time that encryption technologies are in the mainstream firing line, as evinced by high profile battles such as earlier this year over access to a locked iPhone. Or the UK government’s weasel-worded reworking of the legal framework for state investigatory powers in a way that . Loudly promoting a human rights and free speech angle appears to be Tor’s counter strategy to all that. The organization has also recently been seeking to diversify its funding away from dependence on its primary backer, the U.S. government — launching a to solicit donations from appreciative web users. A first push that . Although the bulk of its financing still comes from the same entity that has used technology for systematic mass surveillance of web users — so there’s an inevitable tension between Tor’s privacy mission and the (surveillance) state that feeds it. All of which provides some context for what is perhaps the most specific pledge in the social contract — not to build in any backdoors. “We will never implement front doors or back doors into our projects,” Tor writes. The rest of the contract, for all its warm-sounding words about transparency and honesty, might be accused of lacking specific substance — if you were reading it with a critical eye and keeping count of qualifiers and caveats. We’ve asked Tor why it’s publishing a social contract at this point in its evolution and will update this post with any response. In its PR announcing the social contract it describes it as “a set of behaviors and goals… we want for our community”. “We want to grow by supporting and advancing these guidelines in the time we are working on , while taking care not to undermine them in the rest of our time. The principles can also be used to help recognize when people’s actions or intents are hurting . Some of these principles are established norms; things we’ve been doing every day for a long time; while others are more aspirational — but all of them are values we want to live in public, and we hope they will make our future choices easier and more open,” it adds. Here’s Tor’s six-point social contract in full: 1. We advance human rights by creating and deploying usable anonymity and privacy technologies. We believe that privacy, the free exchange of ideas, and access to information are essential to free societies. Through our community standards and the code we write, we provide tools that help all people protect and advance these rights. 2. Open and transparent research and tools are key to our success. We are committed to transparency; therefore, everything we release is open and our development happens in the open. Whenever feasible, we will continue to make our source code, binaries, and claims about them open to independent verification. In the extremely rare cases where open development would undermine the security of our users, we will be especially vigilant in our peer review by project members. 3. Our tools are free to access, use, adapt, and distribute. The more diverse our users, the less is implied about any person by simply being a user. This diversity is a fundamental goal and we aim to create tools and services anyone can access and use. Someone’s ability to pay for these tools or services should not be a determining factor in their ability to access and use them. Moreover, we do not restrict access to our tools unless access is superceded by our intent to make users more secure. We expect the code and research we publish will be reviewed and improved by many different people, and that is only possible if everyone has the ability to use, copy, modify, and redistribute this information. We also design, build, and deploy our tools without collecting identifiable information about our users. 4. We make and related technologies ubiquitous through advocacy and education. We are not just people who build software, but ambassadors for online freedom. We want everybody in the world to understand that their human rights — particularly their rights to free speech, freedom to access information, and privacy — can be preserved when they use the Internet. We teach people how and why to use and we are always working to make our tools both more secure and more usable, which is why we use our own tools and listen to user feedback. Our vision of a more free society will not be accomplished simply behind a computer screen, and so in addition to writing good code, we also prioritize community outreach and advocacy. 5. We are honest about the capabilities and limits of and related technologies. We never intentionally mislead our users nor misrepresent the capabilities of the tools, nor the potential risks associated with using them. Every user should be free to make an informed decision about whether they should use a particular tool and how they should use it. We are responsible for accurately reporting the state of our software, and we work diligently to keep our community informed through our various communication channels. 6. We will never intentionally harm our users. We take seriously the trust our users have placed in us. Not only will we always do our best to write good code, but it is imperative that we resist any pressure from adversaries who want to harm our users. We will never implement front doors or back doors into our projects. In our commitment to transparency, we are honest when we make errors, and we communicate with our users about our plans to improve.
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Quizlet launches a redesign with an eye towards international expansion
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Lora Kolodny
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the popular app that lets students create interactive study sets and prepare for tests in any subject, is unveiling a redesign today, including a new website, logo and redesigned mobile apps soon to come. The new Quizlet was created with an eye on international expansion. The San Francisco edtech startup now offers translated and localized versions of its study tools in German, Spanish, Chinese (both simplified and traditional) and Japanese, American and UK English. Quizlet CEO Matt Glotzbach notes that the localized product should be especially useful for teachers who want to incorporate Quizlet study tools and study materials, as well as Quizlet Live into their classrooms. Quizlet Live is a relatively new product from Quizlet that runs question-and-answer matching games for small teams to play against each other, offline, in the same room. Localization of the Quizlet user experience included more than translating the labels on buttons and website copy, Glotzbach said. For example, different countries see students treating their teachers with a different level of formality, and not all teachers grade on an A to F system. An A in the UK means a student has scored about 70% or higher in a course or on an exam. That’s not quite as high as an A in the U.S. And in Germany, students are graded on a 1 to 5, instead of A to F basis, for example. The company will continue to translate Quizlet for use in new markets, and has Korean among the languages on its near-term road map, the CEO said. The redesign includes a few new feature additions to Quizlet Live, including the ability for a teacher to add audio content into the game’s questions and answers. According to a company statement, Quizlet now boasts 20 million monthly active “learners,” or users who study and don’t just create study materials for others. It also reports that over the past year, users including education professionals, created 60 million study sets on Quizlet. Founded in 2005, Quizlet resisted taking on any venture capital until late 2015, when its CTO and founder Andrew Sutherland decided the company needed capital to expand globally. The company raised $12 million in Series A funding from Union Square Ventures, Costanoa Venture Capital, and Owl Ventures at that point and soon brought Glotzbach on to lead Quizlet in a new growth phase.
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XPRIZE launches AI 2020 competition with IBM Watson
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John Mannes
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Close your eyes. What do you see when you think about artificial intelligence? defying human orders? savagely murdering her maker? What about taking over the country from deep inside the Pentagon? With a new competition, to think slightly more pragmatically (or at least less apocalyptically dystopian) about the implications of artificial intelligence research on the future of humanity. To date, more than 1,000 people have registered to form teams with plans to tackle such issues as health, climate, transportation, space travel, robots, city planning, surgery, education and even civil rights. Because the competition is an open challenge, teams are expected to come up with criteria on which they will ultimately be judged in 2020. Some teams may be backed by corporations or angels, while others may go it alone as a team. Labs, startups, a group in a corporation or even a spinoff can constitute a team. “We think this prize specifically might drive a lot of financing activity,” said Amir Banifatemi, XPRIZE lead for the competition. The interdisciplinary nature of the competition is what makes it so exciting. Teams may be comprised of some folks adept at traditional skills, like machine learning, and others with knowledge of cognitive science, mathematics, linguistics and even design. The AI competition officially starts in March 2017 and offers a number of check-ins and milestone awards. The final presentation will be at TED 2020. Because the challenge will occur over multiple years, final projects will include technologies and utilize skill sets that don’t exist today. XPRIZE was founded 20 years ago to catalyze radical breakthroughs that could benefit humanity. The nonprofit gained recognition for coordinating the Ansari XPRIZE for suborbital spaceflight, which resulted in the flight of SpaceShipOne in 2004. The winner of the AI prize will receive $3 million courtesy of IBM, with the runner-up getting $1 million and the third-place recipient getting $500,000. If you think you have what it takes to change the world with AI, .
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Darrell Etherington
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Palantir acquires data visualization startup Silk
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John Mannes
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‘s co-founder and today that private data analytics unicorn would be acquiring the company. The transaction appears to be an acqui-hire, with members of the Silk team directly joining Palantir in new roles. Founded in 2010, Silk helps data journalists, activists, NGOs and businesses without the need for complex software and programming knowledge. “Silk.co as a platform will continue to operate,” said Khafaji in a blog post. “Nothing will change to current Silks, and you can still create a new Silk for free.” The Silk team noted that it was willing to transition to work on “even bigger and more important data problems,” signaling that the deal is likely not indicative of any new consumer pivot for Palantir. The $20 billion Palantir produces data analytics solutions for the U.S. government to aid in counterterrorism, as well as a platform for the financial services industry to support fraud detection. Silk raised three small incremental rounds of financing totaling $3.66 million from NEA and others between 2011 and 2013. As a result of today’s announced transaction, there won’t be anyone left to operate the Silk platform, amidst assurances that all Silk data will remain secure and proprietary. “Silk.co will operate ‘as is’ and we will not be able to provide technical or customer support to new or existing Silk accounts any longer, nor will we be doing any further development work or adding new features to the hosted Silk.co product.” We have reached out to both Khafaji and the Palantir team and will update this post with comments when we get them.
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Algolia wants to bring transparency to service-level agreements
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Romain Dillet
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(SLAs) are key when it comes to choosing a service that is going to play an important part for your own service. Cloud hosting services have an SLA, software-as-a-service products have an SLA, even . Software-as-a-service startup just its SLA, and it’s interesting to see how the company is wording its policy. SLAs are simple: if a service goes down, the provider agrees to pay you back to compensate for the inconvenience. But some services make SLAs hard to understand, and you don’t really know what you’re getting if a service goes down. For something critical, you want to make sure that a service is willing to pay a lot of money if it goes down — it’s the best way to know that it is serious about staying up nearly 100 percent of the time. And yet, downtimes happen. Even suffer from downtime. So 100 percent of service availability is just wishful thinking. You want a company’s word that it is going to do everything possible to fight downtime. Algolia is a critical that powers many of the services that you use and love. If Algolia goes down, you won’t be able to search for stuff on Medium, Twitch, Periscope or CrunchBase. Those big clients want to make sure that Algolia is making everything possible to stay up. Otherwise, it becomes a trust issue and you’re going to look for another search provider. Usually, services check every minute if everything is running smoothly. And yet, 59 seconds of downtime in a month means that you can theoretically only claim 99.9977 percent of uptime. Algolia wanted to go further. So the company threw away all the usual monitoring services and built that checks if everything is running fine every 30 seconds. This way, the company can provide a premium SLA. If you’re a premium customer, “we replicate your search on at least three different machines hosted by three different providers in three different data centers with three autonomous systems using at least two different Tier1 upstream providers,” Adam Surak says. And the company promises 99.999 percent of uptime thanks to its monitoring network. And instead of boring, complicated terms of services that tell you “for every minute of downtime, you’re eligible to blah blah blah,” Algolia has three charts that make it easy to understand what happens if the service goes down for 2 minutes, 20 minutes or 2 hours: [gallery ids="1366978,1366979,1366977"] All of this information will sound useless if you aren’t using Algolia. But I feel like this is the kind of transparency that you should expect from your software-as-a-service provider. And I hope more companies will create this kind of charts to illustrate their SLAs.
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Facebook’s 360 video Guide and Heatmap can steer or track where you look
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Josh Constine
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Facebook has to train people how to make great video if it wants it “at the heart” of its services like Mark Zuckerberg promised, so today it launched a slew of . Creators can now see the audience demographics of their video viewers, what moments were most engaging in their live broadcasts, and how shares and cross-posts boosted their view counts. [gallery ids="1366997,1366995,1367000,1366996,1366998,1366999"] But more interesting is the pioneering work Facebook is doing around bringing narrative to the . In the 250,000 360 videos uploaded to Facebook so far, viewers always had to choose for themselves where to look, but creators couldn’t tell what angles were the most eye-catching. fix that.
lets 360 video makers set a default path for the viewing window to move through in order to create a lean-back experience. When uploading a 360 video, the new 360 Controls tab lets producers “Enable Guide” and then select points in the video they want people to see. When users watch, the viewing window will default to automatically move around the 360 video sphere and focus on the selected spots. This way, creators can tell a story without worrying that viewers will miss the important parts, like “a diver plunging into the water or a shark swimming up behind them”, Facebook writes. And viewers can swipe out of the Guide to choose where they look, and tap the Guide button again to return to the director’s track. You can see the 360 Guide in action on these videos, including the recording of Usain Bolt’s world record 100 meter sprint, and cruise through New York Harbor allows video creators to see where people looked inside their 360 video. A visual map shows the most viewed angles by measuring whenever viewers moves more than 30 degrees. Heatmap will be available on all videos with over 50,000 unique viewers from late-April onward, and can be found in the Video Library’s Publishing Tools for each video. Creators can use Heatmap to inform what points of a video they want in their Guide Facebook is building a bigger and bigger lead in 360 social video by developing these technologies. While YouTube also has 360 playback, Twitter and Snapchat lack it. Zuckerberg has repeatedly said he sees Facebook evolving from text and photos to videos and 360 content. But with any new medium, creators are still figuring out what works. These new analytics could push 360 video from the “Train Pulling Into The Station” demo phase into an age of real artistry.
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SEC looks into Hampton Creek’s mayo buy back scheme
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Sarah Buhr
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The Securities and Exchange Commission has opened a preliminary inquiry into Hampton Creek after it was of running a secret project to buy up its own mayonnaise product from stores. Bloomberg, which first the news of the buybacks, now says the agency is looking at whether the startup inappropriately counted revenue from these purchases made with company money. The scheme is said to have started in 2014 and was played out by undercover contractors hired by the company to buy up large quantities of Just Mayo – a mayonnaise product made by Hampton Creek that uses pea protein instead of eggs. The SEC could not be reached at the time of publishing. However, the inquiry does not necessarily mean Hampton Creek will face formal charges. The agency’s inquiry is just an initial step to look into the matter. “We’re aware of the informal inquiry and we’ll be sharing the facts, as opposed to the inaccuracies reported by Bloomberg,” Tetrick told Bloomberg in an e-mailed statement. The news comes after founder Josh Tetrick revealed to employees the company was about to join the unicorn club at a $1.1 billion valuation, telling them the startup had raised a previously undisclosed $100 million in funding and that several more investors from Asia, the U.K. and Germany would be adding to the round, which would put Hampton Creek in the same category as other startups that have reached the one billion valuation mark. Though , which first reported the unicorn valuation story, also pointed out the startup stood to lose up to $63 million this year. Hampton Creek has not returned our email over the SEC inquiry at the time of publishing but Tetrick has on his own site the buybacks were for “assessing the product from the customer perspective.”
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Crunch Report | Samsung Drops Galaxy Note 7
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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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Lyft pauses Carpool service
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Megan Rose Dickey
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Well, that was fast. Less than five months ago, . The idea was that people would pick up passengers on their way to work and make anywhere from $4 to $10 per ride. The service, which was only available in the San Francisco Bay Area, has since shut down because not enough drivers were interested in participating, . “We’re pausing the test because it’s too soon to scale to a meaningful level where supply (Carpool drivers) meets demand (Carpool passengers),” a Lyft spokesperson said in a statement to TechCrunch. Back in May, I wrote about a that works with companies like Tesla, Twitter and Cisco. At the time, I wondered if Lyft was better positioned to tackle carpooling, given its roots with Zimride. Flash-forward to today and Lyft’s Carpool feature is no more, while Scoop is still going strong, saying that it’s the largest carpool network in the country. In its first year, Scoop put more than 125,000 people in cars. That said, this is probably not the last time Lyft will try its hand at carpooling. “While we think a scheduled carpool feature is the right long-term strategy, it is too soon to scale to a meaningful level where supply matches demand,” a Lyft spokesperson said. “We learned a lot and will apply it to new and existing projects — like Lyft Line — as we drive our vision forward to solve pain points in commuting.”
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Is big data in big trouble?
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Dave Mariani
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We recently saw two critical developments in the big data and analytics space. ( ) released earnings and missed their forecast by $0.05; their stock dropped 5 percent. Then ( ) announced a revenue miss that sent the stock into a downward spiral. What’s going on with the business intelligence (BI) and Hadoop space? Should we run for the hills, far away from the BI and big data space before it implodes?! Sensational headlines are sometimes just that… sensational. Behind the missed forecasts lie some important trends that investors and technology corporate buyers should keep in mind. First off, let’s take a look at pure performance. Tableau, the leader in business intelligence (by most accounts) grew 35 percent year-over-year. Thirty-five percent. What other publicly traded analytics company has grown at this pace over the last year? Moreover, we should look at their results in the context of the industry as a whole. . Thirty-five percent growth is fairly exceptional by this benchmark. And take a look at Hortonworks’ results for this past quarter: total revenue grew by 46 percent year-over-year. Investors’ expectations are tough to manage. Technology buyers and industry observers should benchmark the performance of both organizations against the rest of the industry before they make an informed judgment. Quick perspective: also reported revenue recently, and its business shrunk by about 4 percent YOY. All things remaining equal, Hortonworks could generate more revenue than Teradata by 2020. If you are a technology buyer, you are probably looking beyond these earnings. You are paying attention to the other developments that occurred in this space this summer: acquired in July, got absorbed by private equity firm in June. You might also have heard that Amazon is planning to release its business intelligence visualization solution next month, and you know that both Microsoft and Google already have products in this market. Betting on one vendor for visualization and business intelligence is becoming increasingly difficult. Rather than worry about the earnings of the industry players, it’s better to focus on their approach and architectural vision instead. For one, the market is not very receptive to a monolithic and closed approach. When looking at Platfora’s architecture, you might have noticed that its biggest merit was its end-to-end integration, from the data platform to the visualization layer. This approach can only work for very specific use cases, for a few, highly specialized end users. It rarely works for organizations that want to expose a data service for a wide range of use cases for hundreds or thousands of users. Next, Tableau pioneered and drove the industry’s move to self-service business intelligence. Microsoft, Google and Amazon decided to enter the visualization market aggressively because Tableau’s success has demonstrated the power of putting data in the hands of business users. Platform vendors can now clearly see this is a growing, thriving market. Tableau has identified that there are more than 900 million underserved information workers that need business intelligence. That alone is about 10X the market currently called “Business Intelligence.” As Microsoft and Amazon drive down the price point of business intelligence, the industry is bound to see BI proliferate and expand into places we thought out of reach.
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Snowden docs link NSA to Equation Group hackers
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Kate Conger
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A group calling itself the ShadowBrokers dumped data online last weekend that it claimed to have stolen from a hacking team widely believed to be linked to the NSA. The data contained and ignited speculation that the NSA had been hacked. Expert analysis of the data suggested that the NSA and the Equation Group are one and the same, but confirmation came today from , which found references to the dumped malware in its trove of documents provided by whistleblower and former NSA contractor Edward Snowden. The Intercept reports: The evidence that ties the ShadowBrokers dump to the NSA comes in an agency manual for implanting malware, classified top secret, provided by Snowden, and not previously available to the public. The draft manual instructs NSA operators to track their use of one malware program using a specific 16-character string, “ace02468bdf13579.” That exact same string appears throughout the ShadowBrokers leak in code associated with the same program, SECONDDATE. The Snowden documents show that tools were used in spying operations against Pakistan and Lebanon. The data posted by the ShadowBrokers marks the first time NSA hacking tools have become publicly available, causing concern that the tools could be used more widely. The Intercept published the documents that reference these Equation Group tools so you can for yourself.
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Making earphones customized for hearing ability, Even tunes up $2 million
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Jonathan Shieber
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MeQ Inc., the company behind earphones, the tunable earbuds that adjust to users’ unique hearing abilities, has raised $2 million as it looks to expand its business. Financing came from firms like Firstime Venture Capital, whose managing director, , the former chief executive of the Israeli arm of the advertising firm McCann Erickson and the chairman of McCann Worldwide Group’s operations in Israel, will take a seat on the board. Seed investors First Time Ventures and also participated. Other backers include: Gadi Amit, president and owner at ; , a former partner at Mayfield Fund and MD at IdeaLab; Israeli athlete and national soccer team captain, former Big Lots president and chief executive ; and a former senior vice president of Zulily. Even’s technology works through a combination of software and hardware. To tune headphones, Even requires its customers to take a two-minute hearing test that determines their ability to hear certain frequencies at different volumes. The company officially launched on June 28th to a , and now, after shipping two batches of its product, the company is looking to speed up its growth. Founded by classically trained composer and sound designer Danny Aronson, and his CTO partner Ofer Raz, MeQ has plenty of competition in the headphone market. Not only is the company’s product battling the wildly popular Beats and the , other headphone and earphone makers out there, but other startups as well. Indeed, is another headphone maker promising to tune to its listeners’ frequency. It raised nearly $1 million with close to 3,800 backers through a popular Kickstarter campaign. The difference between the two? Nura has yet to ship. “We developed with a group of audiologists,” says Aronson. “We give you a 90-second hearing test and then optimize that based on your specific hearing profile.” The company has done more than 750 clinical tests of the product and swears by its efficacy. Tests can be re-taken and the headphones can be re-tuned, as well. “The equipment is embedded in the headphones and stored in a flash memory in the headphones,” Aronson said. “You can redo the ear print process as many times as you want. The earphones can change over time with you as the user.”
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Nova Credit launching from Y Combinator to give immigrants access to U.S. credit
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Jonathan Shieber
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Access to credit and establishing a credit history aren’t a luxury for people living in the US, they’re a necessity. A credit score is required to rent most apartments, get credit cards, and essentially make a way in the modern American world But for millions of immigrants (roughly 15 million) landing on U.S. shores — even ones who had successful jobs abroad — there’s no way for them to access credit. They’re basically starting from scratch, after a lifetime of being productive members of society in their home country (in most instances, ). That is, until now. Launching at Y Combinator’s demo day this weekend, is looking to change that paradigm. The company, founded by three Stanford graduates, Loek Janssen, Nicky Goulimis, and Misha Esipov, has developed what may be the world’s first cross-border consumer credit reporting agency. Collecting credit information and credit proxies (like cell phone billing receipts and records) into a single report it calls the “Nova Credit Passport”, Nova Credit passes the report onto the lender so that they can make a more informed determination on whether to accept or reject a credit application. For credit card companies and lenders, the availability of a new report that scores immigrants’ credit, opens up roughly $600 billion in new lending opportunities. “You come here and you start from scratch,” said Janssen in an interview. “What we’ve been working on for the last eight or nine months is creating a systemic solution to that problem.” Both the UN and the World Bank have identified financial inclusion and the ability to access global credit as one of the keys to development and poverty alleviation globally. In an article for the Kellogg School at Northwestern University in Chicago, Paul Christensen a clinical professor of finance was quoted saying, “Simply giving everyone a bank account does not necessarily accomplish that goal.” Neither do marketplace lending platforms or access to microfinance. Christensen argues that financial inclusion should focus on a more fundamental goal: providing people access to a full spectrum of affordable, high-quality financial services, including credit. While microfinance has had an impact, Christensen told : “Microfinance companies proved that poor people, wherever they are, could be creditworthy,” Christensen says. “That was an important step.” The increased adoption of credit reporting around the world and the onset of mobile banking have exponentially increased the amount of available data to provide better insights on potential borrowers worldwide. For the three founders, who are all under 30, the problems of credit accessibility was more than academic. The 28-year-old Esipov watched his parents struggle when they moved from Russia in 1990. While 26-year-old Janssen and the 28-year-old Goulimis, who worked as a full-stack developer and a Bain Consultant, respectively, had to start their financial lives over when the moved to the U.S. to attend university. Nova makes its money by charging lenders for access to their reports, in the same way Experian and Equifax do. So far, the company is concentrating on two markets, India and Mexico, which account for roughly 21 million immigrants to the U.S. every year. As the company expands it intends to add countries in the UK, the European Union, Brazil, Russia and China. Launching at Y-Combinator’s demo day this weekend, Nova Credit is already generating buzz among financial services companies. has also partnered with organizations immigrant organizations like and . “We’re partnering with credit unions and fintech lenders,” said Goulimis. “Credit unions are committed to financial inclusion and trying to move away from taking shots in the dark [and] on the other hand we’ve been working with bigger fintech lenders [who] are trying to underwrite people who are unbanked.” Ultimately, Nova seems to be the culmination of something financial theorists, development organizations and lenders have been looking for for a long time. “If you’re in the financial services space, it’s time to wake up and pay attention to this massive, potentially very profitable market,” Christensen told KelloggInsight. “For everyone else, making sure people have access to credit is the best way to expand your market.”
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Facebook’s new teens-only app Lifestage turns bios into video profiles
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Josh Constine
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“What if I figured out a way to take Facebook from 2004 and bring it to 2016? What if every field in your profile was a full video?” asks Facebook’s 19-year-old product prodigy Michael Sayman. The answer is for people 21 and under, which Facebook is launching today. It asks for your happy face, sad face, likes, dislikes, best friend, the way you dance and more, but instead of filling in this biography quiz with text, you shoot videos. Lifestage turns those clips you recorded into a video profile others can watch. While technically anyone can download Lifestage, anyone 22 or older will only be able to see their own profile. That’s because it’s built for high-schoolers to learn more about their classmates. A quick swipe lets you block and report people, too, in case anyone sketchy tries to creep on the kids. When you sign up, with no need for a Facebook account, you select your high school, and will then see the video profiles from people at your school or ones nearby. And for added virality, Lifestage only shows you other people once 20 people from your school are using it. That way, you nag your friends to join. In that way, it mimics the way Facebook was originally launched — school by school — because social apps are no fun if you don’t know anyone using them. Sayman isn’t another 30-year-old product manager from an elite college. His parents from Peru and Bolivia raised him in Miami. There he taught himself to code at age 13 with tutorials he found on Google. His first product, a $1 app with tips for the Club Penguin game, earned thousands of dollars. That money helped his family stay afloat during the recession after their house was foreclosed upon. You can . Michael Sayman, Facebook product manager and creator of Lifestage By then the app was overloading the free tier of Parse, the Facebook-owned mobile backend hosting service. Sayman negotiated a massive discount that let him keep operating 4Snaps. But Mark Zuckerberg ended up inviting Sayman to come visit Facebook, create a special presentation for its F8 conference and eventually intern there. He’s spent the last two years getting acquainted with the social network and coming up with the idea for Lifestage. “I wanted to work on an app that my demographic would relate to, or at least that my friends would want to use.” Along with a team of three engineers and one design contractor, Sayman is now ready to ship his brainchild. To build Lifestage, Sayman tells me “I went back and looked at Facebook from 2004. At the time I was in second grade.” Thanks for making the rest of us feel old, kid. Back then, Facebook opened to your own profile, not the News Feed. Lifestage works similarly. You’ll see a bunch of bio questions you can answer with videos. The more you fill in, the more questions are unlocked. In the feed you’ll see people from your school who have recently updated their profiles, which you can tap through to see specific answers, or swipe through to skip to different sections. To instill some gamification, people get ranked with higher levels if they’ve added more to their profile. You’ll also see a sunglasses-smile emoji by people who recently updated, while those who’ve let their profiles languish will show a frown or even the poop emoji. There’s no way to contact people directly in Lifestage, since Sayman explains “my friends and I have a bajillion messaging apps we already use and love, so what’s the point of having another messaging app? It just seems annoying to me.” Instead, each users gets a “Reach Me” line of text that appears beneath their name, which could be used to show off their Snapchat or Instagram handle, or another piece of contact info. Lifestage could capture the attention of teens that Facebook fears might slip away to Snapchat. When asked about Snapchat, Sayman said “I think of it like really great competition. They’ve got a great product and there’s a lot to learn…about how people have started to evolve the video space.” That said, he does note that his Instagram Stories are getting more than his posts on Snapchat. The worry for Lifestage is that Facebook has a poor track record with standalone apps, having shut down Poke, Slingshot, Paper and Notify. Facebook clearly doesn’t see it derailing Snapchat, because Lifestage’s promotional materials include Reach Me text like “Snapchat me.” Oh, and Facebook launched it on a Friday afternoon, the least-read time for blogs. It’s almost like it’s not supposed to succeed on its own. Instead, Lifestage could teach Facebook how to improve its profiles with video, as Mark Zuckerberg wants “video at the heart of all our apps and services.” Facebook launched profile picture videos at F8, but they don’t seem all that popular yet. Lifestage takes an innovative stance. You could say your dog is your favorite pet, you love Radiohead or that this is who you’re dating. But with videos, those aren’t lines of generic text. They’re totally unique videos that truly tell the story of who you are. That same idea could make Facebook seem fresh, even if it’s almost as old as the kids Lifestage was built for.
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Trans women and non-binary femme tech entrepreneurs have a new legal resource
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Megan Rose Dickey
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Transgender and gender non-conforming people are at risk of injustice and discrimination in education, housing, healthcare, public accommodations and employment. As a result of such widespread discrimination against trans and gender non-conforming people, they can be subject to exclusion from spaces that offer tools and resources around entrepreneurship and business development. Through , trans women and non-binary femme entrepreneurs will be able to access pro-bono in-person or web-based services to help them incorporate their businesses and legally change their names. This is all thanks to a partnership between , a network of women investors, law firm Goodwin and Riley Hanson of Inclusion Through Innovation. “A name is a signature of who a person is,” Hanson told me. “For trans people, having their correct name on their documentation, and being able to use it in all situations where a name is normally used, can prevent them from being misgendered and it’s a way to say ‘this is who I truly am’ to the world.” Meanwhile, it can be dangerous to have a legal name that could out someone as trans or non-binary. When trans and gender non-conforming people were required to present their IDs that did not match their gender identity/expression, 40 percent of those surveyed reported being harassed, 3 percent reported being attacked or assaulted and 15 percent reported being asked to leave, conducted by the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force and the National Center for Transgender Equality. It also can be costly to change all of the appropriate documents, contracts and licenses after incorporating a business. That’s why FEMPRENEUR.XYZ wants to make sure that when trans or gender non-conforming entrepreneurs incorporate their businesses, they are registering the business under the name they actually go by. “If we’re helping [participants] to incorporate businesses with their legal name, which is misgendering them, they’d have to redo all the paperwork,” Pipeline Angels founder and CEO Natalia Oberti Noguera told me. “It’d be great if we could help them get the correct legal name before they even do any of the business incorporation so they can have their papers from day one with their correct name that is legal and doesn’t misgender them.” Another goal of FEMPRENEUR.XYZ is to try to get more trans women of color to participate in the Pipeline Angels pitch summit. Through the pitch summit, Pipeline Angels has invested more than $2 million in more than 30 companies. “I’m passionate about activating local capital for entrepreneurs,” Oberti Noguera said. “When the whole , I took a moment and was like, as a cis ally, what should I do. This is where I had my aha moment. How amazing would it be if most, if not all entrepreneurs who applied to Charlotte’s Pipeline Angels summit were trans women or non-binary femme entrepreneurs.” That’s when Oberti Noguera reached out to Hanson. Hanson, a non-binary femme, said they didn’t feel like they were eligible to apply for Pipeline Angels because of how they identify. So, Oberti Noguera decided to update the pitch summit criteria with more inclusive language. Through FEMPRENEUR.XYZ, Oberti Noguera and Hanson hope to reach at least 40 people through the in-person launch event in Charlotte, an in-person event in New York and even more people via a webinar hosted on AerialSpaces, an and Tiffany Mikkell. Anyone who is interested in participating in the FEMPRENEUR.XYZ entrepreneur workshop can .
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Google will phase out Chrome apps for Windows, Mac and Linux
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Brian Heater
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First, if you’re using Chrome apps on Windows, Mac or Linux, I’m sorry for your loss. Second, please take some solace in the fact that you really were one of a kind. As , active usage numbers were pretty low for the offering. Today, approximately 1% of users on Windows, Mac and Linux actively use Chrome packaged apps, and most hosted apps are already implemented as regular web apps. It’s not surprising, then, that the company is starting to phase them out as it works to simplify its browser. Standalone Chrome apps will be going the way of Buzz and the Nexus Q, phasing them out over the next two years. It’s a multi-step process, beginning with the limiting of newly published apps to users on Chrome OS by the end of the year. In the second half of 2017, Windows, Mac and Linux apps won’t appear in the Chrome Web Store, and early the following year, people using the aforementioned operating systems won’t be able to load them at all. To help ease the transition, Google is providing developers tools to help migrate their apps to the Web.
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InsiteVR grabs $1.5M in seed funding to bring 3D models to life in VR
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Lucas Matney
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Most of the companies raising funding in the VR space right now are focused on entertaining potential consumers. Perhaps getting less attention are the companies jockeying to provide cool solutions for the enterprise. just raised a $1.5 million seed round to tap into the architecture and construction markets and make early visions of projects more accessible to these industries’ clients through VR. Investors in this round include , , GREE VR Fund, Tracy Young and Ralph Gootee of , Greg Castle and Rothenberg Ventures. Whenever the topic of non-entertainment use cases for virtual reality is brought up, it doesn’t take long for the practice of virtual walk-throughs to be brought up. There are plenty of existing startups tackling this issue when it comes to real estate, but said construction and architecture industries aren’t being catered to as directly when it comes to integrating virtual reality software into their workflows and presentations. InsiteVR allows architects to better communicate with clients by giving them the opportunity to dive into CAD files with clients and scope out spaces in a more lifelike manner. Customers of InsiteVR can upload their models to the service and view them on Gear VR, Oculus Rift or HTC Vive virtual reality headsets. InsiteVR relies on “asymmetrical VR presentations” to allow multiple VR users to explore content together and collaborate while a desktop user directs them through various environments. The company began from a winning hack at the 2014 TechCrunch Disrupt Hackathon. From there, founder Angel Say took and met up with his college roommate Russell Varriale and the two got to work. The co-founders took the new company, InsiteVR, through YC’s winter 2015 accelerator program. Fast-forward a year-and-a-half and the VR software has been used to host more than 4,000 projects with around 2,500 architectural models being processed for VR through the software. Notable projects that have used InsiteVR’s modeling viewer include Unity’s SF Headquarters, Microsoft’s Raleigh Office and the Philadelphia 30th St. Station redesign. This space is sure to grow more crowded in the coming months, but Say and Varriale believe that their attention to customers’ needs in the specific industries they’re focusing on now is allowing them to build a product that is a more appropriate fit for their customers than other available products.
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Gillmor Gang LIVE 08.19.16
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Steve Gillmor
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– Robert Scoble, Frank Radice, Kevin Marks, Keith Teare, and Steve Gillmor. Gillmor Gang’s Facebook page G3’s Facebook page
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Steve Jobs enters the International Photography Hall of fame alongside Annie Leibovitz and Ken Burns
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Devin Coldewey
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It’s the 50th anniversary of the International Photography Hall of Fame, a museum and foundation in St. Louis, and among the inductees this year are some real whoppers: Annie Leibovitz, Ernst Haas, Ken Burns… and Steve Jobs. Say what you will about the plague of Instagramming millennials descending on the fair field of photography, the fact is that Apple has led the charge on mobile imaging basically since the original iPhone and its amazing 2-megapixel camera. And for that focus we must give Jobs his due credit. : Steve helped create products that revolutionized the creative world and became essential tools for designers, filmmakers, music producers and photographers. Passionate about photography both in his work and personal life, his most profound contribution to the artistic community and the world is the iPhone which, in less than a decade, has changed both the art of photography and the industry around it. The iPhone and its reliably solid camera and software are probably the most important contributor to Jobs being entered into the hall of fame, but it’s worth noting that Apples were used by creatives long before that happened, and for good reason. Early choices on displays, inputs and standards made them essential for work in type and design — and, of course, Photoshop was originally a Mac exclusive. On that note, John and Thomas Knoll, the creators of that famous and enduring piece of software, are also being inducted. It’s hard to overstate the effect Photoshop has had on the world of photography — not to mention other software that came from the house that it built, like Lightroom. Sebastião Salgado, famed photojournalist, is also being recognized, as well as Graham Nash, whom you might know from Crosby, Stills & Nash (plus or minus Young). (Let’s hear some love for .) “This year’s inductees represent the perfect combination of innovation and artistry; bridging photography’s pioneering past with its fantastic future,” said IPHF director Patty Wente in the announcement. There will be an event officially celebrating the new inductees on October 28, so if you were thinking of visiting, keep that in mind.
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Amazon’s latest original pilots now streaming, including ‘The Tick’
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Darrell Etherington
| 2,016
| 8
| 19
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Want to sit in judgement of original content and decide its fate? Now’s your chance — Amazon’s latest slate of original , and it includes , a Kevin Bacon-starrer adapted from the novel by Chris Kraus; , yet another incarnation of the comic character who first graced TV in a much-beloved three-season animated series on Fox; and , a vehicle for Jean-Claude Van Damme doing more post-modern self-depiction following the 2008 film in which he did a similar thing. If you haven’t been keeping up with Amazon’s original video efforts, the e-commerce company produces a slate of original pilots on a regular basis, and essentially has them battle one another for full production pick-up, using the feedback of streamers as the deciding factor on whether or not they get made. Past pilot season rollouts have been busier affairs; the most recent included eight original series, which debuted not too long ago (in June). This three-show lineup keeps things more focused, and might be a sign that Amazon is turning its attention to quality over quantity. It’s definitely keeping things thematically tight, though — all of these are half-hour comedies, whereas previous pilot seasons have included a mix of different genres of shows. Reviews on Amazon show high marks for each show so far, with way out front in terms of the sheer volume of reviews amassed so far. But while it may be less obscure in intermediary steps between pilots, audiences and full productions runs, the shows Amazon takes to series don’t always add up in terms of the tale of the tape via reviews and views (Bezos wants some Emmys, too). Still, it’s kind of fun even if you’re not directly deciding the final fate of any of the programming, and there’s free original content involved, so go check it out.
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Facebook’s new teens-only app Lifestage turns bios into video profiles
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Josh Constine
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| 19
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“What if I figured out a way to take Facebook from 2004 and bring it to 2016? What if every field in your profile was a full video” asks Facebook’s 19-year old product prodigy Michael Sayman. The answer is for people 21 and under Facebook is launching today. It asks for your happy face, sad face, likes, dislikes, best friend, the way you dance, and more, but instead of filling in this biography quiz with text, you shoot videos. Lifestage turns those clips you recorded into a video profile others can watch. While technically anyone can download Lifestage, anyone 22 or older will only be able to see their own profile. That’s because it’s built for high schoolers to learn more about their classmates. A quick swipe lets you block and report people too in case anyone sketchy tries to creep on the kids. When you sign up, with no need for a Facebook account, you select your high school, and will then see the video profiles from people at your school or ones nearby. And for added virality, Lifestage only shows you other people once 20 people from your school are using it. That way, you nag your friends to join. In that way, it mimics the way Facebook was originally launched — school by school. Because social apps are no fun if you don’t know anyone using them. Sayman isn’t another 30-year-old product manager from an elite college. His parents from Peru and Bolivia raised him Miami. There he taught himself to code at age 13 with tutorials he found on Google. His first product, a $1 app with tips for the Club Penguin game, earned thousands of dollars. That money helped his family stay afloat during the recession after their house was foreclosed upon. You can . Michael Sayman, Facebook product manager and creator of Lifestage By then the app was overloading the free tier of Parse, the Facebook-owned mobile backend hosting service. Sayman negotiated a massive discount that let him keep operating 4Snaps. But Mark Zuckerberg ended up inviting Sayman to come visit Facebook, create a special presentation for its F8 conference, and eventually intern there. He’s spent the last two years getting acquainted with the social network and coming up with the idea for Lifestage. “I wanted to work on an app that my demographic would relate to, or at least that my friends would want to use.” Along with a team of three engineers and one design contractor, Sayman is now ready to ship his brainchild. To build Lifestage, Sayman tells me “I went back and looked at Facebook from 2004. At the time I was in 2nd grade.” Thanks for making the rest of us feel old, kid. Back then Facebook opened to your own profile, not the News Feed. Lifestage works similarly. You’ll see a bunch of bio questions you can answer with videos. The more you fill in, the more questions are unlocked. In the feed you’ll see people from your school that have recently updated their profiles, which you can tap through to see specific answers, or swipe through to skip to different sections. Lifestage could capture the attention of teens that Facebook fears might slip away to Snapchat. Facebook has a poor track record with standalone apps, though, having shut down Poke, Slingshot, Paper, and Notify. Instead of succeeding on its own, Lifestage could teach Facebook how to improve its profiles with video, since Mark Zuckerberg wants “video at the heart of all our apps and services”
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Mimo’s new app teaches you how to code on your iPhone
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Sarah Perez
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Apple’s is popularizing the idea of learning to code on mobile devices, not desktop computers. But its focus is only on teaching kids to code in Swift. A new application called goes beyond that, with mini-lessons for not only Swift, but also HTML, CSS, JavaScript, Python, SQL and more. The idea with Mimo is to break down computer science lessons into smaller chunks, allowing aspiring coders to practice coding in lessons that don’t take longer than a couple of minutes to complete. This way, you can work learning to code into your daily routine, whenever you have a few minutes of downtime — like on your daily commute, while in the waiting room for an appointment, in between classes or anywhere else. Each lesson in Mimo begins with a short sentence, a code snippet you interact with and motivational feedback that displays after each interaction. The app is gamified as well, meaning players collect points, badges and other achievements as they progress in the app. Currently, there are courses for HTML, CSS, JavaScript, Swift, Python, Ruby, Java, C#, C++ and SQL, plus introductory programming courses for those who are new to coding altogether. The company says it plans to expand its lineup over time, with new courses added on a bi-weekly basis. Planned additions include topics like hacking, machine learning, R, Raspberry Pi and Terminal, for example. The idea for comes from Johannes Berger (CEO), Henry Ameseder (COO), Dennis Daume (CTO) and Lorenz Schimik (CPO), all of whom have a technical background except for Ameseder, who is a business grad with software development experience. This same group worked together on a prior app in the same space called , which Berger built during his senior year at university. The team came together after the app was hunted on Product Hunt last year, as the others showed up offering help on improving the design, expanding to Android and marketing the app further. Swifty now has a million downloads, says Ameseder, and has made around $100,000 since its launch. [gallery ids="1372244,1372243,1372242,1372241"] While that’s not a lot of money, Ameseder says Swifty worked in terms of proving there’s a market for learn-to-code mobile applications. Apple’s entry into the space has only helped solidify that position. With Mimo, the team is focusing on catering to the growing number of people with short attention spans, but who also have multiple idle moments they fill throughout their day on social media and games. “With Mimo we wanted to build something that allows us to utilize these moments for something fun and meaningful,” Ameseder says. “If our assumptions prove right, most people will use Mimo on the go –- during train rides, waits, and other moments they have on a regular basis.” The app is catering to young adults, ages 18 to 35, but Ameseder notes they’ve heard of users as young as 8 trying it out, and they’ve received inbound interest from universities, including Yale, as well as the Austrian government. The team is hoping they’ll be able to eventually take Mimo to the classroom. For now, however, they’re participating in the TechStars program in Berlin, and prepping for Demo Day. In the long term, the team believes they could expand this mini-lesson concept beyond computer science. The Mimo website touts ambitions to develop similar resources for other subjects, like entrepreneurship, finance, test prep, math and more. Mimo today is available and includes two free-to-complete courses. Afterward, you can choose to subscribe to the app’s content for $49.99 per year to gain full access to all the courses in the app, as well as those that arrive in future updates. Though only released on August 13th, Mimo already climbed this week, with more than 950 upvotes. It also has a 4-star rating on iTunes.
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Reimagining the ecosystem for identity verification
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Dylan Casey
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| 19
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What’s in a name? When it comes in the form of a password, everything. The password has long been the safeguard — and in many cases, the only one — to protect our online identity. With increased mobility, and our need to stay constantly plugged in, our online identity today extends into almost every touch point of our lives. From checking social media as soon as we wake up, to streaming music on a commute, to doing one last email check before hitting the pillow at night, our digital identity allows us to consume, connect and transact as we move through the day. Indeed, more than 3 billion internet users currently rely on their digital identity to do a multitude of things online — they bank, shop, consume entertainment, share personal information and connect with friends and family. All these online activities are made possible through a process of seamless identity verification. This happens behind the scenes, making our online experiences easier, across devices and without compromising on safety. At one point, passwords seemed like the most obvious way to verify account ownership. But, over time, and with the increasing complexity and diversity of internet usage, we can all agree on one thing: Passwords suck. The majority of users don’t make their passwords complex enough to prevent bots from cracking them to gain unauthorized access. They create simple passwords that are easy to remember and easier to enter on mobile devices, and they use them across different accounts. In turn, breaches have become more common. Consequently, security is top-of-mind for companies, but it’s tough to encourage users to develop and memorize passwords using a string of letters, numbers and special characters — a process they most often loathe. This is exacerbated by the fact that different websites/services often have different password requirements (e.g. one site may ask you to provide a password that’s at least six characters with one capital letter and one number, while another may ask for a password that’s at least eight characters and require a capital letter, a number and a symbol). The need to transform this outdated model is clear, but it requires overcoming certain approaches that have been the foundation of an entire ecosystem for decades. For one, what’s the right balance of usability and security? Consumers crave simple and seamless interactions with technology. Historically, identity platforms skew toward security, while usability suffers. Ironically, if something isn’t usable, it doesn’t matter how secure it is, because users will find a way to make it simple and compromise on security. Another consideration we must take into account is how to challenge learned behavior. People are used to signing in/out every time they want to check their email, and even relying on sites to “remember” your password. Add in new scenarios like losing your phone, having a dead battery or being logged out of an active session, and you’re back to square one. Over time, this username/password model has permeated across tech infrastructures. So in order to change what it means for a user to be signed in, we must re-architect networks in a way that challenges these inherent processes within an account ecosystem — from both a systemic standpoint and the user experience. And we can do this in a number of ways. What we think of as “If X, then Y” authentication allows users to be authenticated on device A, based on actions taken on device B. We see this with most major tech companies that now offer two-factor authentication (2FA) systems for an added layer of security around their platforms, including Facebook, Twitter, Evernote and more. Upon login, it requires the user to submit a password and re-verify that submission using an additional passcode, such as a PIN that’s been sent to a second piece of equipment (your mobile device, for example). This “second factor” ensures a hacker cannot guess your password, as this unique code has been provided to a device under your control. We’ve all experienced being logged out of an account “due to inactivity,” such as when you’re looking at your bank account online and step away from the computer for a given amount of time (typically only a few minutes) — par for the course, but annoying as heck! Session logic automatically expires authenticated sessions based on a set time frame, but by building new trust and delegation models and changing from a rules-based to a heuristics-based system to determine the length of the session, we can alleviate this behavior and get time on our side. Another solution is to support seamless toggling between accounts. All-in-one digital wallet managers that use cross-platform storage verification to house passwords, PINs, software licenses, credit cards and more — think and — are increasingly popular with consumers, as they alleviate the need to enter different passwords across multiple accounts. We took the first step toward killing the password altogether when we Account Key last fall, which lets users conveniently access their Yahoo accounts via push notifications sent to their mobile device. This ensures that once you activate Account Key — even if someone gets access to your account info — no one else can sign in. Further, an Account Key user doesn’t have a password to use on our other sites — or one to forget — and as a result, they’ll never get locked out of their account, nor will their account get compromised because of data breaches. Banks and other companies are integrating biometrics technology such as TouchID fingerprint authentication for instant login, bringing account access right to your fingertip. Google, for example, is testing its Trust API with financial institutions, which will run in the background of your Android, enabling you to log into services with trust scores made up of biometrics and user-specific data points, like location, facial recognition and typing patterns. Facial recognition software is also improving our online experiences, easing the act of identifying and “tagging” people in your photos. A “first-world problem,” if there ever was one, but convenient nonetheless. With these innovations, and more surely on the way, we’re headed toward alternative methods to prove account ownership — making people’s online lives easier and safer. Soon enough, security questions like “What’s the name of the street you grew up on?” and “What’s your maternal grandfather’s last name?” will become obsolete, as new digital authentication practices continue to surface to answer and verify the most important one: “Who are you?”
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More new Pokémon revealed for Sun and Moon, and one is a pile of sand
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Darrell Etherington
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[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-1hsh267tUM] The Pokémon Company, what is going on right now. How is it possible that one of the new pocketable monsters you created for Pokémon Sun/Moon is actually a pile of sand?? Look: What are you doing to me? Do you think this is okay? Here’s what the sand blob evolves into when hit with a water attack: THAT’S A DAMN SANDCASTLE, POKÉMON! Get it together. Meanwhile, there are other new catchable characters coming to the game, all revealed at the . The ones that just blew our minds above are Sandygast and Palossand, both ghost/ground type, and there’s also Crabrawler, a punchdrunk boxing crustacean, and Stufful, an adorable red panda type thing that almost makes up for these sand things. [gallery ids="1372189,1372190"] These new Pokémon join a host of other new creatures unique to the Alola region, the setting for the new . The Pokémon trading card game is also getting new “GX” series cards, which add special attacks to the games that can be used once per game, and these GX-specific Pokémon cards are being introduced alongside the Sun/Moon series the the Pokémon TCG universe. I still love Pokémon and even sand piles can never change that.
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There’s an Apple-1 up for auction
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Brian Heater
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Yeah, you could pick up (now $29,000), but can you really call yourself an Apple fan if you don’t own an Apple-1? That earliest of Apple paraphernalia is about as rare as they come, but if you act fast (and drop a boatload of money), you can snap one up now. Fundraising site Charitybuzz has early computers up on its site for auction, currently going for $270,000. That’s a steal compared to the decidedly nutty estimated value of $1 million listed on the site, but the auction’s still got under a week left, and past models have actually gotten pretty close to the 1 million mark. Corey Cohen, who runs the site MyAppleComputer.net has a lot to say about the machine, explaining that the so-called “Celebration” version is likely among a small number of prototypes that were never sold to the public. Says the site, “At this time, this is the only known Apple-1 to show the signs of starting out as a blank original-run board and not part of the two known production runs, so this board appears to be unique from all other known Apple-1 boards.” And hey, for good measure, your hard-earned Apple bucks will also get you the ’76 Apple-1 instruction manual and a slew of cassettes, including and , for some truly old-school computer gaming action.
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UK spy agencies’ use of mass surveillance backed by external reviewer
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Natasha Lomas
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The UK government’s independent reviewer of terrorism legislation has supported the inclusion of bulk collection powers contained within the controversial Investigatory Powers bill. The opposition Labour party had called for a review of bulk powers, arguing the government had yet to make an operational case for their inclusion in the draft bill — although the party to support the bill’s passage through the House of Commons. Privacy and human rights groups have also criticized bulk powers, arguing the powers are disproportionate and unnecessary. In a , published today, the external reviewer — QC David Anderson — writes that there is a “proven operational case for three of the bulk powers [bulk interception, bulk acquisition and bulk personal dataset], and that there is a distinct (though not yet proven) operational case for bulk equipment interference” [aka hacking]. Although he also notes that his review did not consider proportionality — saying that remains a matter for parliament to consider: “The Review was not asked to reach conclusions as to the proportionality or desirability of the bulk powers. As the terms of reference for the Review made clear, these are matters for Parliament.” On the controversial matter of bulk collection (aka mass surveillance) Anderson argues such powers play an important role for UK security services in “identifying, understanding and averting threats in Great Britain, Northern Ireland and further afield”, adding that “where alternative methods exist, they are often less effective, more dangerous, more resource-intensive, more intrusive or slower”. He does have one recommendation — suggesting the Investigatory Powers Commission establishes a technical advisory panel of independent academics and industry experts “to advise on the impact of changing technology, and on how MI5, MI6 and GCHQ could reduce the privacy footprint of their activities”. “Though it found that the bulk powers have a clear operational purpose, the Report accepts that technological changes will provoke new questions,” he adds. “Adoption of its Recommendation will enable such questions to be asked, and answered, on a properly informed basis.” The IP bill is currently being scrutinized by a House of Lords bill committee, where it has faced opposition from peers — with concerns including its and potential to . Responding to Anderson’s report today, the Liberal Democrats — whose peers have been among the most critical of the draft bill — called on the government to table an amendment to give effect to his recommendation for a technical advisory panel. In a statement the party’s Home Affairs spokesperson Alistair Carmichael said: “As Anderson himself states ‘the Review was not asked to reach conclusions as to the proportionality or desirability of the ‘ it now falls to us in both the Commons and the Lords to assess whether the are proportionate and desirable in a democratic state.” “Despite it being one of the most intrusive , the provision to capture and store all of our web histories for 12 months has not been scrutinised in this report. Liberal Democrats continue to be utterly opposed to this excessive and authoritarian measure that not only erodes our privacy but will likely to prove to be a waste of money and fall foul of our courts,” he added. Civil rights group Liberty, which is challenging the legality of bulk collection/mass interception in the European Court of Human Rights, is scathing about the report, arguing it falls “far short of the impartial, probing and well-evidenced investigation into the necessity of ‘ ’ so urgently required” — and dubbing its conclusions “fatally flawed”. “Human rights laws require that secret surveillance measures can only be justified where they can be shown to be ‘strictly necessary for the obtaining of vital intelligence in an individual operation’,” writes Liberty. “Today’s report fundamentally fails to demonstrate that this is the case.” Specifically Liberty argues the report failed to answer whether information gathered via bulk powers was the “critical factor in preventing or detecting serious crime, and whether that information could have been obtained from smart, targeted surveillance instead”. The group is also critical of Anderson for focusing only on what it says are “claimed successes of bulk power use” — based on “anecdotal assertions from the intelligence agencies”. “It fails to inspect evidence of their failures, or to provide clear, evidence-based methodology to explain its conclusions,” it adds. Liberty also hits out at the less than three-month timeframe the reviewers were given to complete the report as “clearly insufficient” — and points out that Anderson’s advisors included a former director of technology and engineering at GCHQ, and a former director of intelligence for the National Crime Agency, arguing the review panel was thus not institutionally independent of the security and law enforcement agencies.
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