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It’s official, SES will be first company to launch on a used SpaceX rocket
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Emily Calandrelli
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Luxembourg based satellite company announced today that they’ve made an with SpaceX to be the first company to launch a payload on a used Falcon 9 rocket. The re-flight, scheduled to take place late this year, will mark the next big milestone on SpaceX’s path toward rocket reusability. To date, Elon Musk’s rocket company has recovered six Falcon 9 boosters, but hasn’t re-flown any of them. SpaceX confirmed to TechCrunch that the rocket that will be reflown was the one recovered on a drone ship during the to the International Space Station in April. This was SpaceX’s first successful recovery of a rocket on a drone ship. Since the beginning of the year, SES, the world’s largest commercial operator of geostationary satellites, had their strong desire to be the first company to fly a payload on a SpaceX used rocket. In fact, SES has a history of placing their trust in SpaceX. They were the first commercial satellite operator to launch with SpaceX in 2013 on a launch that was the company’s first mission to geostationary orbit. Thanks for the longstanding faith in SpaceX. We very much look forward to doing this milestone flight with you. — Elon Musk (@elonmusk) More recently, SES had their SES-9 satellite successfully delivered to geostationary orbit with SpaceX in March. On that particular mission, SpaceX attempted to return their first stage to a drone ship, but was . In a few months, SpaceX’s re-flight mission will take the SES-10 satellite, which will provide telecommunication services to Latin America, to geostationary orbit. “We believe reusable rockets will open up a new era of spaceflight, and make access to space more efficient in terms of cost and manifest management. This new agreement reached with SpaceX once again illustrates the faith we have in their technical and operational expertise.” Martin Halliwell, Chief Technology Officer at SES Re-using a rocket is intended to bring launch costs down considerably, which is why companies like SpaceX and are going through the trouble to sort out the difficult technical hurdles. Back in March, president of SpaceX, Gwynne Shotwell, that their company expected a 30 percent cost savings by reusing the Falcon 9 first stage. “Re-launching a rocket that has already delivered spacecraft to orbit is an important milestone on the path to complete and rapid reusability. SES has been a strong supporter of SpaceX’s approach to reusability over the years and we’re delighted that the first launch of a flight-proven rocket will carry SES-10.” Gwynne Shotwell, President and Chief Operating Officer of SpaceX When asked if this launch will, in fact, cost less, SES told TechCrunch, “We cannot disclose the amount, but what we can say is that by relying upon a Falcon 9 with a using a SpaceX’s reusable rocket booster, we are talking about a discount in launch cost as well as an increase in launch frequency due to the increased availability of qualified, pre-flown vehicles. Both aspects are important since access to space and timely availability of launch vehicles are key for us.” In addition to this re-flight, SpaceX has a few other exciting milestones planned for this year. Musk’s company intends to their launch frequency compared to 2015 and complete the maiden launch of their Falcon Heavy rocket. If all of this can be done in the remaining four months, 2016 is set to be one of the biggest, most ambitious years for SpaceX.
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Randstad buys Monster for $429M as recruitment consolidation continues
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Ingrid Lunden
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Yet one more significant piece of M&A in the online recruitment industry. Today Holdings, an Amsterdam-based human resources and recruitment specialist, that it would acquire job hunting portal , for $429 million in cash. The deal works out to per share in cash and is a premium on Monster’s share price at closing on Monday of . But it is a far cry from the heady days of 2000 — when Monster, which had gone public soon after being founded in 1999 (itself the of two early job startups), had a share price of over $91 and a market cap of nearly $8 billion. Even in 2007, when its stock was around $51, Monster was valued as high as $5.5 billion. ( ? It’s a song that gets played out in many versions.) It’s still an interesting exit for Monster, which was one of the veterans (and notably, survivors) from the first dot-com boom. It comes amid a spate of M&A activity in the space. Just in June, , a “Tinder for jobs.” And last month, . Indeed itself is owned by Japan’s recruitment and HR giant, Recruit Holdings. Monster will keep its brand and will operate as a separate entity, but the bigger idea here is to consolidate different aspects of the recruitment and employment industry for better economies of scale and a “portfolio of HR services,” in the words of Randstad. “In an era of massive technological change, employers are challenged to identify better ways to source and engage talent,” said , CEO of Randstad, in a statement. “With its industry leading technology platform and easy to use digital, social and mobile solutions, Monster is a natural complement to Randstad. The transaction is aligned with our Tech and Touch growth strategy and reflects our commitment to bringing labor supply and demand closer together to better connect the right people to the right jobs. We look forward to welcoming the Monster team and working together to shape the evolving global job industry.” For Monster, this is an important move to combine with a strategic and adjacent business at a time when companies like Recruit are dwarfing it in the pure-play recruitment space. The company is active in 40 countries, and had around 50,000 employers in its database according to its . But in comparison Simply Hired alone (as one Indeed property) covers some 50,000 employers. “Joining Randstad provides a unique opportunity to accelerate our ability to connect more people to more jobs,” said , CEO of Monster, in a statement. “Together with Randstad, Monster will be better positioned to fulfill our core mission, and our employees will benefit from becoming part of a larger, more diversified company. Equally important, this transaction offers immediate value to our shareholders. We are excited to join and be supported by Randstad, as we continue to build the best recruiting media, technologies, and platforms. We look forward to working with the Randstad team to ensure a smooth transition.” While Monster’s bread and butter and mainstay is its website, Randstad has a focus on recruitment centers. It has some 4,500 branches and says it’s placed some 2 million people in jobs. This will give them an online component to expand that.
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This is the new “Nearby” tracker in Pokemon Go
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Greg Kumparak
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The “Nearby” tracking system in Pokemon Go — the one that’s supposed to let you actually figure out where Pokemon are hiding without walking aimlessly — has been broken since day two or three after launch. It went from kinda working with a functional-if-confusing “footprint” system (three footprints = far, one footprint = close) to not working at all (all Pokemon showing three footprints regardless of distance) to just being totally removed. An update rolled out for Pokemon Go users tonight, and the change log mentioned that a new nearby tracking system was being tested with “a subset of users”. Here’s what that beta nearby system looks like in action, as demonstrated in a video grabbed by Dogecoin creator : https://twitter.com/ummjackson/status/762860057159618561 and another video: Not quite sure what you’re looking at? The “Nearby” drawer now has two sections: Nearby, and Sightings. “Nearby” Pokemon are those which happen to be close to nearby Pokestops. Tap one of those and the map zooms out to an overhead view, showing you which Pokestop you should head towards. It’s like they looked at the now-banned Pokevision and said “Well, if you can’t beat’em…” The Pokemon you’re looking for be near that Pokestop; according to most reports, they’re usually within about a block. Pokestops now have circles around them similar in sizing to the one around the player’s — if a Pokemon is within that circle, it counts as “Nearby” that Pokestop. Pokemon in the “Sightings” section have grass behind them rather than a Pokestop image — this means they’re in the wild and not immediately near a Pokestop, and you’ll have to hunt for them without any built-in guidance. Tapping a “Sightings” Pokemon doesn’t seem to do anything at the moment, and they don’t necessarily seem to be sorted by distance (hopefully this changes)… so you’ll still be walking a bit aimlessly, albeit with the knowledge that it’s near a Pokestop. “But wait, Greg! I updated the app, and I don’t see any ‘Nearby’ section!” Yeah — that’s the catch: it’s only been rolled out to that aforementioned “subset” of users. For now that seems to largely mean people in San Francisco — though some players in other major cities also report seeing it. Most people outside of a few major cities just see the “Sightings” section, even if they’ve got Pokestops nearby.
– If a Pokemon despawns before you find it, it finally . A bug that has plagued the game since launch kept despawned Pokemon in that drawer until something else replaced it or you force-quit the game, leading players to hunt for things that were LONG gone.
– Similarly, if you’re no longer within a reasonable distance of a Pokemon, it disappears from the tracking drawer automatically.
– If you’ve tapped on a Nearby Pokemon to start tracking it and it despawns, a pop-up appears to let you know it’s gone.
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Google Maps adds rides with Uber rivals Grab and Go-Jek in Southeast Asia
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Jon Russell
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There was once a time when Uber’s big advantage over the competition was . That’s long passed now. Earlier this year, — and that now includes Grab and Go-Jek in Southeast Asia. Customers across Grab’s six countries in Southeast Asia can now book a licensed taxi, motorbike taxi or private car straight from the Maps app. The same applies for Go-Jek’s motorbike taxi service in Indonesia. As with the Uber integration, the options kick in when a user has asked for directions to a place inside apps. Thereafter, the app will show the distance, location of the nearest vehicle and a price estimate. Clicking the ride option will then redirect to the Grab or Go-Jek app. “Google Maps has been helping people navigate the world for over a decade, and we’re excited to be able to make Southeast Asia more accessible through Grab’s affordable, on-demand local transport options,” . These new integrations come at an interesting time for Southeast Asia’s ride-sharing space. , and into the region following . , sources told TechCrunch. that China’s Didi Chuxing and SoftBank will lead an investment of around $600 million into the company. While Go-Jek, which is lesser known globally but leading the motorbike on-demand space in Indonesia, last week at a post-money valuation that TechCrunch understands to be $1.3 billion. The company also for the first time — this Google Maps integration may help that effort. The Google Maps app still prioritizes Uber over the other options, but the end of the monopoly has much in common with Google’s relationship with Uber, which is complicated to say the least. The search giant — which was its largest deal — but these days its alliance is a finely balanced one. Google practically pioneered self-driving cars, but . Uber has been dependent on Google Maps to date, but the company is to develop its own solution. It previously bought and . It isn’t just that Uber is stepping on Google’s toes. There have been many reports that an Uber rival of its own, and Waze — — does .
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Crunch Report | Walmart buys Jet.com
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Khaled "Tito" Hamze
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Tito Hamze
Tito Hamze
Joe Zolnoski
Joe Zolnoski
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‘Smart’ locks yield to simple hacker tricks
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Devin Coldewey
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It’s an open secret that the Internet of Things (if we must call it so) is pretty terrible, whether in standards, interoperability or security. You don’t really expect good security in a smart light bulb or coffee maker, though. A smart , however, really shouldn’t be quite this easy to hack. Two different presentations at DEF CON this year made it clear that there’s a long way to go before we should start trusting the average smart lock — or even the nice ones (though if you had to choose, the latter is the better). This may surprise you, or you might have been saying it for years. At all events, these guys proved it with gusto. Anthony Rose and Ben Ramsey, from Merculite Security, done with less than $200 worth of off-the-shelf hardware. Some opened easier than others, but in the end 12 out of 16 yielded. Locks from Quicklock, iBluLock, and Plantraco transmitted their passwords in plaintext, making them vulnerable to anyone with a Bluetooth sniffer. Others were tricked by the attacker simply replaying the same data they snatched out of the air when a legit user unlocked the door. Another entered a failstate and opened by default when it received an encrypted string that was off by one byte. Worth noting as well: doing a bit of wardriving, the two found plenty of locks identifying themselves as such, making it easy for an attacker to find devices to listen in on. This was a pretty poor showing altogether, although a few resisted Rose and Ramsey’s attempts: the Noke and Masterlock smart padlocks survived, and a Kwikset Kevo did as well — until they opened it with a screwdriver. Okay, that’s cheating, but the point stands. Perhaps of most concern, only one of the 12 vendors the two contacted to inform them of these flaws responded — and even then, there was no plan to fix anything. One that Merculite failed to crack was the August door lock, a rather more well known brand than the others (MasterLock notwithstanding). Fortunately, someone else had already made it their mission to break the thing wide open. put the lie to several of the claims set forth by August, and although it’s unlikely your average B&E artist is going to bother to circumvent certificate pinning and paw through your logs, the security holes are real. Or were real — the hacker notes that August, unlike the other companies whose locks were hacked, has been responsive and at least some the issues have been fixed. (An August representative declined to provide more detail on the fixes, though the CEO has commented below.) Many items that were too hard to get by ordinary hacking means like sniffers… could be found in plaintext in logs and the like. Jmaxxz is one of those hackers that doesn’t like to work any harder than he has to — and why should he? Still, it’s hard to believe that guests could ever award themselves extra lock permissions just by changing a string in the API calls from “user” to “superuser”! For now, it seems, these locks are long on convenience and short on security. If you don’t mind having less-than-stellar security on your pool house or mother-in-law, this could be a nice way to keep your keychain light — but for the front door, you can do better.
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Nintendo’s NES Classic Edition will add saving throughout gameplay
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Darrell Etherington
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Sorry purists: New players of classic NES games on the upcoming micro system from Nintendo won’t have to rely on barbaric codes that recall progress, or single session playthroughs to beat games. Speaking with French language radio show (via ), Nintendo of Canada comms person Julie Gagnon told listeners that the console will provide players with permanent save points, like more sophisticated games from the SNES and later era, as well as a temporary, instant save feature that lets you quickly capture and restore your game state so you can go to the bathroom, feed your child or bathe yourself without leaving the console running as in days of old. The new console, which ships with 30 classic games pre-installed, will also offer a “pixel perfect” display mode that shows each pixel from the original as a solid color square, instead of fuzzying things up via anti-aliased upscaling. It will also offer the option to play in classic 4:3 ratio, and has a simulation feature that mimics playing on classic bubble-fronted CRT TVs. So with pixel perfect visuals, there’s actually something here to please purists, too. And personally, I’m thrilled you’d be able to save. Maybe I’ll finally be able to beat some of the classics I never had the patience for as a kid. I’ll definitely try when the console comes out on November 11.
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Rackspace sells Cloud Sites unit to Liquid Web
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Ron Miller
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for over a week that was for sale, but today instead of the whole kit and kaboodle, the company announced it was selling its Cloud Sites web hosting unit to . The fact that Liquid Web is itself a cloud web hosting company would seem to make the two a perfect match, allowing the company to expand its business through acquisition. The two companies actually share a common marketing story around devoted customer support, and it is this element that Liquid Web believes will differentiate it from the rest of the web-hosting pack moving forward. “Unfortunately, our industry is trending toward unsupported services, which leaves fast-growing developers, digital agencies and designers alone, without a real person to turn to when they really need help,” Liquid Web CEO Jim Geiger said in a statement. The company press release announcing the purchase is peppered with the phrase “delighting the customer,” and with Rackspace’s Cloud Sites property in the fold, it believes it can extend that mission. With Cloud Sites, Liquid Web will now support several popular hosting platforms including WordPress, Drupal, Joomla, .NET, PHP and other development and production environments Liquid Web promises that it will keep the entire Cloud Sites unit intact in San Antonio, TX where it’s based, and that creative customers who have been using Cloud Sites should get a smooth transition to the new owners. In fact, Liquid Web is promising to expand Cloud Sites moving forward. It all sounds just terrific, but as we’ve learned, with any acquisition the proof of the pudding is in the tasting. Over the next several months, Cloud Sites employees and its customers will learn first-hand how smoothly the transition will truly go. As for the remainder of Rackspace, there is every indication that a deal could happen, perhaps soon, but for now that part remains in limbo until we hear further.
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Machine learning and “molecular Tinder” may change the game for OLED screens
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Devin Coldewey
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To say there are a lot of molecules out there is kind of an understatement. So searching for one or two in particular is like looking for a needle in a galaxy-spanning haystack. Fortunately, the science of machine learning and the irrepressible need for humans to swipe left and right on things make the search a lot easier, as Harvard and MIT researchers have found. The molecules they’re looking for are blue organic phosphors, a critical component for organic light-emitting diodes — likely the next big step in display technology. OLEDs rely on molecules that produce light of a specific wavelength when introduced to a current, obviating the need for the backlights found in ordinary LED displays. This means the screen could be thinner, more flexible, and more power-efficient, among other things. A flexible OLED screen from Nokia. Suitable phosphorescent molecules have been found for creating red and green light, but making blue has been a tough proposition for years. Existing OLED screens use expensive elements and their longevity isn’t so hot — it’s one of the main challenges to widespread adoption of the technology. Researchers feel sure that the molecule they want is out there — and many have found ones that are suitable in one way or the other (the one up top is a recent example from the ), but no one has found one that does everything right. “Molecules are like athletes,” said Harvard’s Alán Aspuru-Guzik, lead researcher on the project, . “It’s easy to find a runner, it’s easy to find a swimmer, it’s easy to find a cyclist but it’s hard to find all three. Our molecules have to be triathletes. They have to be blue, stable and bright.” To begin with, the team built a library of some 1.6 million organic molecules that could conceivably fit the bill. This huge database was scoured by machine learning algorithms designed by Ryan Adams, also from Harvard, in order to thin the herd. “Since the early stages of our chemical design process starts with millions of possible candidates, there’s no way for a human to evaluate and prioritize all of them,” said a co-author of the paper, David Duvenaud. “So, we used neural networks to quickly prioritize the candidates based on all the molecules already evaluated. This was a natural collaboration between chemistry and machine learning.” This elite cohort of molecules was then simulated, at a rate of about 12 hours per molecule, to find out more or less how bright and how blue each was likely to be. Then it was time to ditch the artificial intelligence and bring in the human kind. The “discovery pipeline” that reduced the number of choices from millions to hundreds. The 2500 candidate molecules had their data summarized into cards, and the team and collaborators (from MIT and the Samsung Advanced Institute of Technology) voted on which they thought were most promising. They nicknamed the process “molecular Tinder.” The result is a group of potentially hundreds of molecules that are the absolute cream of the crop skimmed from a sea of millions — and no one even had to draw their micropipette or spin up a centrifuge. Well, that part comes next, anyway. “This research is an intermediate stop in a trajectory towards more and more advanced organic molecules that could be used in flow batteries, solar cells, organic lasers, and more,” said Aspuru-Guzik. “The future of accelerated molecular design is really, really exciting.” It’s unlikely these molecules will be ready for manufacturing in time for the rumored OLED conversion of the iPhone, but they could very well contribute to the all-but-inevitable migration of the industry in that direction over the next few years. The paper describing the research was published today in the journal .
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Valuations wilt
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Connie Loizos
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A year ago, startup valuations hit a 12-year peak as the numbers of companies joining the billion-dollar-plus club soared. Today, those numbers are looking far more run of the mill. So suggests a new survey published by law firm Fenwick & West, which analyzed the venture financings of 195 Silicon Valley-based companies over the second quarter to draw its conclusions. Among the survey’s findings: up rounds — in which a startup’s price per share increases over its previous funding round — are down slightly. Specifically, in the second quarter, they exceeded down rounds 74 percent to 13 percent, compared with the first quarter of 2016, when up rounds exceeded down rounds 78 percent to 11 percent. (The other funding rounds were flat.) Valuations also dropped, and pretty dramatically. The average percentage change in the share price of companies funded during the quarter showed a 40 percent price increase for the quarter, but that’s down from the 53 percent jump in price that startups saw in the first quarter and the lowest amount since the third quarter of 2010. Meanwhile, the median price increase of financings in the first quarter was 31 percent, down from 36 percent in the first quarter. “It’s not like things are so horrible now,” says attorney Barry Kramer, who co-authored the survey. “But this is the third straight quarter of weakening valuations. They’ve fallen a great deal from where they were a year ago. And the question is: where do we go from here?” Kramer warns against drawing comparisons to the downturns of 2002 and 2008, noting that unlike both periods, when capital was in short supply, there’s currently plenty of money sloshing around Silicon Valley. Instead, he attributes falling valuations to human nature. On the one hand, investors are likely trying to figure out if there’s a valuation disconnect. On the other, many later-stage companies aren’t exiting through IPOs or M&A; that means investors who’d otherwise be focused on investing in and ramping up younger, newer startups are instead finding themselves spending more time with their older portfolio companies. Indeed, as TechCrunch , while there was a 3 percent rise in venture dollars put to work in the second quarter, that percentage was skewed by big investments in Uber, Didi, and their ilk. The number of global deal volume actually fell to a three-year low. For what it’s worth, deal terms haven’t changed much, which seems like a good sign for many startups. Asked if he was seeing an uptick in senior liquidation preferences — onerous terms that later-stage investors demand when they start feeling more nervous about the market — Kramer says he hasn’t. There was one quarter, he says, that senior liquidation preferences were featured in as few as 19 percent of financings, but “every other quarter, it’s ranged from 25 to 35 percent of deals, and in the second quarter, 30 percent [of Silicon Valley fundings] featured them.” That’s “nowhere near” the number of deals that have included such terms during tough times in the past, he adds. You can find Fenwick & West’s full survey .
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Driving new revenue sources through a digital ag revolution
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Arama Kukutai
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Ever since the acquisition of the first “Ag Unicorn” ( ), a flood of new digital agriculture startups has been trying to turn investor interest into market traction. Adding to the surge in market interest, to create a global agrochemical giant and earlier this year show that the big ag players are hungry for growth and market share. In fact, there were $31 billion in acquisitions by the “Big Six” ag companies between 2008 and 2015, with those key players reporting more than $22 billion available in cash for more acquisitions at the close of 2015. Whether they end up using those funds to acquire each other, new innovations or both, there is one common goal: to drive margin growth. The major ag players view the ability to offer new products and services to fill their pipeline as the key to their future growth — and digital ag has the potential to do just that. Digital ag is about improving the decisions farmers make about planting, fertilization, crop protection and irrigation based on the inputs, as well as yield and quality outputs, at harvest. Adding digital services that can integrate these decisions in support and enhancement of the seed biology and chemistry products that constitute the bulk of agtech’s “Big Six” revenue today is hugely strategic to the future of these and other major companies in the ag ecosystem. Traditional ag players will use digital ag to tie themselves more closely to the farmers’ on-farm decision-making platform. Indeed, the hardware distribution players ( , , ) and “Big Six” majors are already engaged or have developed their own platforms, and are looking for ways to partner with the potential new “disruptors” entering the market. For instance, and have been developing smart-farm equipment and integrated software for years and have recently started to foray into web and mobile-based tools. However, now VCs and entrepreneurs have fully turned their attention to technology opportunities in agriculture, with . However, the current wave of ag innovation will not necessarily equal strong market adoption. The adoption rate of new technology by farmers is notoriously slow — self-steering tractors and combines, for example, are less than 20 percent adopted after a decade or more of effort. Farmers demand a step change in value. Indeed, adoption is the key challenge facing these players, new and old alike. Certainly progressive farmers like or are counter-points that are aggressive about capturing better yield and sustainability, but they are pathfinders, not the mainstream. So how many of the dozens of digital ag players that were funded in the last few years can survive the coming Series B funding crunch? As farmers face declining commodity prices and tighter farm margins, these startups will only succeed if they can prove to farmers that they can deliver more value per acre through actionable insights. Digital ag success stories will be built on demonstrating utility, the economic gain per acre farmed. Based on accepted industry norms, farmers expect $3 of gain for every $1 invested. Selling to farmers is a complex task. A core challenge for farmers — and a major opportunity for agtech — is the need to do better with the resources and infrastructure they already have. The farming market is fragmented, with more than 97 percent of the 2.1 million farms in America remaining family owned, and most averaging less than 500 acres of land, according to the . Yet, the fragmentation doesn’t end at the land. Farmers are also being forced to wear more hats than ever before — from forecasting the weather and watching futures markets to becoming biologists, chemists and now data scientists and technologists. It can be overwhelming. To be a viable digital ag disruptor, companies need to ease the mounting burdens on today’s farmers by helping them make better use of their time while driving better performance on their farms. The digital ag players that will thrive are the ones that are extremely easy to use, can prove they deliver substantial value and have a strong business model. For example, takes machine data from John Deere farm equipment, analyzes it and automatically uploads new prescriptions to improve seeding, fertilizing and harvesting. Working with the equipment dealers to enhance the value of the hardware investment also means that AgDNA does not have to try to sell directly to farmers. Companies like , and are all tackling integration and ERP functions with sophisticated offerings that provide dashboard and “integration” platforms in a unifying suite. From a food safety perspective, adds value from post-harvest to processing by providing traceability and logistics management to protect the food supply chain. Not only can food processors know exactly where the crops came from and how they were managed in the field and during the shipping process, but it also gives processors ways to detect issues from certain field yields and correct them. Finistere portfolio company is working to develop a new class of sensor that can be self-installed and calibrated, as well as buried below ground, all at lower cost and connecting to intelligent adaptive algorithms that customize irrigation prescriptions on existing pivot and drip hardware. Many of these companies are also introducing a business model that is new to ag — adopting a SaaS solution to allow farmers to pay on a subscription basis instead of upfront hardware purchases. These startups target a wide array of issues for farmers — from pre-planting and planting to farm management, post-harvesting and processing. Investment opportunities in precision ag technology (soil monitoring, seed trait genetics, irrigation systems, crop protection and more) will continue to increase, and it is critical to look at the complete farming lifecycle. For every company that succeeds, there will likely be dozens that fail. Digital ag companies that are too complex for farmers to easily deploy across their farms will struggle to get adoption. In addition, we think data visualization tools that rely on public data sets like soil maps, land satellite data or public weather data have an uphill battle differentiating their offer while competing with “me too” products. Variable-rate fertilization is a key example where there are many competing offers seeking to help farmers drive better nitrogen and phosphorus application on farms, for example. is an interesting startup that is developing a different data visualization niche by using online satellite data in combination with drone imagery to manage disease and pest control, complete with automated alerts. Facing a surge of copycat technologies, digital ag players may also need to answer tough questions like, “What makes you different from the other five companies that might be trying to sell a similar service or product?” We think automation could be an important edge. Digital ag innovators like , , , and all stand out from the pack in terms of automation capabilities. It is important to note that it isn’t just about the underlying technology. Digital ag companies also need a compelling business model to thrive. Creating a market advantage in such a competitive playing field is key. Simply asserting “we increase yield” or “we are on a million acres” isn’t enough. There are a lot of data points that go into measuring yield in any given year, but this is also a major part of the challenge. Showing causation in yield improvement below 10 percent thresholds is hard to prove against a complex background of factors — and often requires multi-year field trials to build confidence. In this regard, one of the sobering factors is the patience and length of commitment required by the investors to support promising companies through this adoption cycle. In agriculture, it is clear that startups need more than disruptive tech to win. Business strategy execution matters, and the demonstrated ability to deliver true utility on a non-linear, scalable basis is the ultimate selling point for the farmer trying to figure out which solutions make the most sense for their farm. Digital ag companies need to create validation and early market interest through farmer uptake and certified field tests. Growth capital and farmland resources will be critical for companies looking to grow into viable, global farming businesses. But with countless digital ag companies claiming “millions of acres” under management, investors will need to cut through the hype and determine to which opportunities to provide capital support as they strive to get critical mass and cash flow breakeven points. Equally important, and a key part of the work Finistere is doing, is the “ecosystem” of go-to-market partners, and particularly distribution channel partners with a mutual interest in driving new revenue sources through a digital ag revolution.
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Nonprofits and NGOs, apply to showcase at Startup Alley at TechCrunch Disrupt SF
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Neesha A. Tambe
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Nonprofit groups and NGOs are now for exhibit space in Startup Alley at TechCrunch Disrupt SF on Monday, September 12 or Tuesday, September 13. TechCrunch’s diversity program serves as a platform to provide startup and tech access for underrepresented groups. This year, we are formalizing the inclusion of Nonprofits and NGOs in line with the Include mission at TechCrunch Disrupt. TC will host five organizations in Startup Alley on either Monday or Tuesday of the Conference. TechCrunch Disrupt’s Startup Alley is used to launch new companies and products. Participation in the Alley will give non-profits and NGOs a unique opportunity to engage with the brightest tech talent, entrepreneurs, and prominent investors from around the globe. Not to mention hundreds of press in attendance! Nonprofits and NGOs are eligible if they support an underrepresented or underserved community in tech, have registered 501c3 or an equivalent status for at least three years, and have not participated at a TC Disrupt in 2016. Organizations that are selected will be asked to engage with their communities regarding the conference after selection. Preference will be given to local organizations. Applications are open now till August 17. Groups will be notified of their participation status August 18. If you have additional questions, please email .
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The White House releases policy to help government agencies go open source
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Fitz Tepper
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The White House (led by United States Chief Information Officer ) has been pretty vocal about using technology to improve how government operates. They want to make sure code helps, not hurts, government agencies, and that the U.S. government can use technology just as effectively as a private company can. In March the White House issued a to bring the benefits of open source software to the government, and the , a set of rules that should help government agencies be more efficient with the code they write. The main requirement is that any new custom source code developed “by or for the Federal Government” has to be made available for sharing and re-use by all federal agencies. For example, this means that the TSA can have access to custom made software that was commissioned by the FBI. Considering there is probably a great deal of overlap in applications needed by certain branches of the federal government, this rule alone should save the government (and taxpayers) a great deal of money. The policy states that “ensuring Government-wide reuse rights for custom code that is developed using Federal funds has numerous benefits for American taxpayers.” But what about making this code available to the public? This is obviously a little more complicated and controversial, because federal agencies often deal with information not available to the general public. But that doesn’t mean the government isn’t going open source. The policy establishes a pilot program that is a compromise of sorts. Federal agencies will be required to release at least 20 percent of new custom developed code as open source software. While this is only a pilot, the hope is that it will encourage cost savings and increased efficiency within the federal government. You can , which is a lengthy memorandum from Tony Scott to the heads of all the departments and agencies within the U.S. government. The memo is an interesting read, and talks about the technical aspects of the new policy (like what to do if a federal agency thinks making 20 percent of their software open source would be a risk to the nation’s national security). It also notes that the White House will be launching Code.gov in the next few months, which will be the permeant home to the open source code released by these agencies.
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Internet Archive posted 10,000 browser-playable Amiga titles – go, play
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Brian Heater
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Seriously, go. Enjoy yourself. It’s Monday. We’ll still be here when you get back. It’s bound to be a long week. The world is coming apart at the seams. Your boss won’t notice if you play a round or two of from the comfort of your own browser (Firefox seems to work best on my end). We can’t vouch for the quality of all of the , but there sure as heck are a lot of them – 10,000+, by the site’s count, including favorites as and , along with what looks to be a fair amount of redundancy. I’m not really sure what the difference is between and , but I suspect it’s fairly minor, even for completists. Surely crawling through the pages of pages of vastly fluctuating game quality is part of the fun, right? Enjoy yourselves, gumshoes.
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GM testing Cruise’s self-driving tech with Bolt EVs on Arizona roads
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Darrell Etherington
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GM is putting its to good use in Arizona: The self-driving car startup acquired by the automaker in March is trialling its tech on public roads in Scottsdale. Cruise tweeted about the autonomous testing expansion, which uses Chevrolet Bolt all-electric vehicles, and which adds to the core fleet of testing vehicles already operating in San Francisco. We’re testing autonomous tech on Bolt EVs on roads in Scottsdale, AZ, in addition to San Fran. — Cruise Automation (@Cruise) Cruise’s self-driving Bolt hit San Francisco streets in May, but provided few details beyond acknowledging that it was doing testing. GM has aggressive goals in terms of productizing its Cruise acquisition, however: The Wall Street Journal reported that GM hopes to put self-driving taxis into usage tests in partnership with Lyft “within a year.” Scottsdale makes sense for a field test, since the area already plays host to Google self-driving cars, and the state has strong regulatory support for self-driving vehicle tests in general. GM’s Innovation Center is also based in nearby Chandler. GM confirmed the Arizona tests but isn’t providing any more information about this time.
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Twilio beats expectations with revenue of $64.5M in solid Q2 earnings
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John Mannes
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Twilio, exceeded revenue expectations today after the bell. Immediately share prices increased in after-hours trading before falling back to the market closing price. The cloud-communications company reported revenue of $64.5 million and a loss per share of $0.08. Twilio beat revenue by over 10 percent. Analysts had expected a loss of $0.14 per share on revenue of $58.22 million. Twilio stock was priced at $15 back in June for its IPO. Over the last two months, the company’s shareholders have been treated to a financial all-you-can-eat buffet with shares closing at $42.63 today. In addition to a beat on revenue, Twilio also announced that it has 30,780 active customer accounts as of June 30, 2016, compared to 21,226 active customer accounts the same time last year. Twilio issued guidance expectations of between $63 and $65 million Q3 revenue with an accompanying EPS of between $0.09 and $0.10. Yearly guidance signals full 2016 revenue of between $253 and $257 million. Also in the report, the company touted its new relationship with Facebook offering Messenger platform integration along with an Amazon partnership to deliver SMS messages for AWS’s Simple Notification Service. Despite pushing its share-price up 184 percent, investors have expressed concerns over revenue concentration. A significant portion of Twilio’s revenue stream lies in the hands of a small number of customers. Moreover, many of the largest customers feeding Twilio have not signed long-term contracts with the company. To address this, Twilio separated its earnings report into two sections, base revenue and total revenue. Variable accounts are “more likely to have significant fluctuations in usage…from period to period,” according to the company. Twilio services nine variable accounts representing 13 percent of total revenue. WhatsApp accounts for a significant portion of that. CEO Jeff Lawson stressed that investors can count on growth but shouldn’t expect it to occur linearly, on today’s earnings call. This quarter, Twilio rolled out add-ons in a marketplace to make it easier for developers to integrate technologies provided by groups like IBM Watson and Wolfram Alpha. Twilio’s Notify and Sync APIs, enable notifications across SMS and better synchronization of mobile and web apps respectively. New services can only help to grow the Twilio developer community but monetization efforts will be key into Q3 and beyond. A large community makes the process easier, but ultimately contracts and predictable “base” revenue streams are what drive growth and reduce potential investor anxiety and stock volatility.
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Darrell Etherington
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Music streaming social network Whyd is switching its focus to hardware
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Romain Dillet
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French startup started off as a social network for music lovers. Going forward, the company is going to focus on releasing a connected speaker. For existing users, the social network isn’t going away. Whyd is open-sourcing it and still hosting it at . Launched in 2012, Whyd has been looking at ways to . The social network let you bookmark tracks and share them with your friends. It worked with many different streaming sites, including YouTube, SoundCloud and Bandcamp. And if you’re really into remixes, mixtapes and alternative music, you know that it can be a pain to keep track of all the good stuff you find on SoundCloud, YouTube and other websites. Spotify and Apple Music aren’t there when it comes to hosting all the music in the world. Whyd was a good way to follow curators and see what they were listening to. But now that all major music streaming services are fighting for music discovery, it’s hard to convince users that they should use yet another platform for the discovery aspect. But Whyd isn’t giving up. The company is now trying to launch a new product — a connected speaker. The company promises “ultra high-end audio and intelligent voice control” and launched a . As for existing Whyd users, the website now lives at and the company is releasing the source code. Whyd hopes its most dedicated users will now take care of the code base with Whyd’s head engineer Adrien Joly still moderating the project. To be honest, I’m more curious about what the team has been up to with this mysterious speaker. It sounds like Whyd wants to build an Amazon Echo competitor with a better speaker, and focused on music. As the Amazon Echo is only available in the U.S., the company could easily get some customers outside of the U.S. The company says pre-orders should start soon.
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The massive Yuneec Typhoon H is pure aerial video magic
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John Biggs
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an era of true drone magic. First let’s get one thing out of the way: this thing costs $1,300. For the faint-hearted that price is surprisingly high. It includes a surprisingly powerful – if confusing – remote control and a full 360-degree 4K camera that is mounted under the drone like a sort of gimbal-powered webcam. The body is made of carbon fiber tubes, and the build is quite solid – one major crash didn’t take out much more than an LED cover on one of the six props. In short, if you’re going to get a drone this is a very strong candidate and can handily match anyone else in the space. The first thing you notice about this monster is its size. The six arms can fold down for easy storage, but it’s a lot more fun to have this sitting around like a giant flying face-hugger waiting to unleash havoc. Once you get over the initial shock of the drone’s size you’re surprised by its simplicity. Except for a fiddly gimbal under the legs, it is about as elegant a piece of consumer electronics as I’ve seen in a long time. This six-rotor flying machine is actually a camera platform. The webcam-like ball camera on the rotating gimbal records video in 4K UHD 30fps or 1080p 120fps. It can also take 12-megapixel photos. Charging the battery takes a few hours and it lasts for about 15 minutes of hard flying. There are multiple warnings when you’re about to run out of juice, and the drone will lower itself toward the ground if it’s about to hit empty. You can lift the landing pads up and out of the way with the flip of a switch and you have full 360-control of the camera. But how? With a huge, complex controller, that’s how. Color me simple but take a look at these: Those are some of the buttons on the very complex-looking remote control. In fact the controller is the scariest thing about this drone. It’s actually an Android tablet with built-in cooling fans, and there are more switches and knobs than a 1980s boom box. Luckily the controls aren’t very difficult to master. After turning on the drone all you have to do is go outside, connect to the camera, and press the big red button. The drone will start up with a satisfying whirr. Then just push the left control stick up and you can soar to 400 feet in about 20 seconds. The drone can fly about a mile away from the operator, although in practice, that’s not recommended. There is also a little “wizard” controller that lets you point the drone in different directions like a Wii controller, allowing for one person to control the flight pattern and another to record images and video. The drone also has obstacle avoidance and a fairly robust landing system. When it gets too close to a tree or building, the drone will tend to move away from the obstacle. And when you bring it down it will, for the most part, slow itself down. In many cases, however, I noticed that the drone experienced a bumpy landing on almost every surface including cement. Unless you slam down the power button as quickly as possible, the thing will tip and you’ll be out a few propellers. How are the images and video? Sadly I couldn’t get this thing into a place that could do the 4K video justice and an initial crash rendered the video a little shaky anyway. The crash was caused by the aforementioned “bumpy landing” where the drone touched down briefly and then quickly rose up right into a tree. This is not common behavior in the least and can be chalked up to operator error and the fact that I first flew this thing in crowded Brooklyn. Once I took it out into the wide open spaces of Ohio I found everything quite responsive. Trust me, though: the images and video are amazing. You can see some below but in general you’re looking at a high-resolution view of your world from 400 feet up. It’s great. The Typhoon H is amazingly easy to fly. Getting it up into the air is as simple as pressing a button and the controls are unique if a little odd in that, when set in their default configuration, forward is always forward for the drone. In other words, if you’re facing North and push the left stick forward the drone will fly north. If you turn to face East and you press forward, the drone will fly East. It’s an odd experience. You can also set up the drone to rotate around a target or follow a route between points of interest. This means you can set it up to fly in a Goodfellas-esque tracking follow from one place to another. It’s a bit complex to set up but it works well. Finally, once I moved the drone out of Brooklyn I found it amazingly easy to land. An automatic landing feature calls it back to you automatically without many issues, or you can simply turn the camera down and set crosshairs on an empty spot. Then press the left stick down and down you go, slowly approaching the ground with grace and aplomb. The Typhoon H controller looks complex at first but there’s not much to worry about when you’re taking the drone through its paces. In short, you’re basically dealing with a powerful drone with a powerful internal computer and you practically can’t crash it unless you’re reckless. The obvious worst thing about this drone is the price. At $1,200 you could get a few Parrot drones or an old DJI. However, the features and power of this drone make it well worth a look if you’re in the market for a mobile camera platform. I’d also worry a bit about the camera and gimbal. The entire enclosure is made of plastic and it cannot survive a direct hit with the ground unscathed. Luckily the big landing gear bears most of the weight when the drone comes down too fast but a direct hit on the camera with a tree branch or overhang can cause some major damage. It’s easy enough to replace the pieces but it’s a bit frustrating. I’m also slightly concerned about support. Yuneec is a smaller company in California and I’d be concerned about follow-up support if your drone goes into the drink. I didn’t have trouble getting a new landing gear after a crash, though, so they’re definitely doing their best to be responsive. Drones are magical things. They are model airplanes, flying cameras, and alien spacecraft all rolled into one. There is nothing more exhilarating than watching a drone like this one take to the air, and there is little more exciting than firing this thing up for the first time. It’s really fun. But this drone is also a tool. In the right hands this is a flying camera station and a unique tracking system. If you’re a cinematographer you can use this to take shots you wouldn’t normally be able to get and, with Yuneec’s , you will soon be able to watch the sky in VR video mode. It’s a prospect that should give every budding aviator chills, and it’s an exciting product coming out at an exciting time in the industry.
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German insurance startup Clark closes €13.2M Series A
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Steve O'Hear
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When I spoke with Jan Beckers, chairperson of fintech company builder , earlier this year, he was particularly bullish about the insurance sector and the shake up he expects insurance brokering to receive because of new technology. That’s something we are starting to see happen. Enter one of FinLeap’s existing portfolio companies, , which operates in the insurance space with an app to help you stay on top of your various insurance products. Today the Berlin/Frankfurt startup is announcing it’s closed €13.2 million in Series A funding, made up of both equity and media-for-equity financing. FinLeap is investing “several million Euros” once again, while additional investors include yabeo Capital, Kulczyk Investments, HitFox, TA Ventures, Tenderloin Ventures, along with various unnamed business angels. Media investment, which I understand will mostly be in the form of TV advertising but will also include some online and print, comes from SevenVentures (the venture arm of the ProSiebenSat.1 Group), Axel Springer, and media investor GMPVC. The split between equity financing and media-for-equity financing is roughly 75 per cent to 25 per cent. (Noteworthy is that FinLeap, which itself , is backed by institutional investors from the insurance industry, including Hannover Re, the third largest worldwide reinsurer.) Calling itself an “insurance robo-advisor,” Clark’s iOS and Android apps let you manage and purchase various insurance products. Specifically, it uses algorithms to analyze your current insurance situation and automatically propose opportunities to improve your coverage or the deal you are currently on. The startup’s insurance experts are also on-hand via the app to help with more bespoke insurance questions. Since the start of the year, Clark claims to have increased the volume of its managed insurance premiums five-fold, to 30 million Euros. The startup employs close to 20 people, most of whom are software developers. Competitors include , and , but Clark reckons it differs in the way it uses robo-advisors (ie a more automated approach) to assess each user’s insurance situation and to send chat-messages to alert you to insurance opportunities. “In addition, all clients have access to an in-app insurance cockpit,” the German startup says. “This works similar to fitness apps like runtastic or Nike running, i.e. the client can easily understand his ‘insurance fitness.'”
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The Instax Share SP-2 adds just enough modern magic to the instant print renaissance
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Darrell Etherington
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is worth a thousand digital ones. The SP-2 is a Wi-Fi picture printer, a device that harkens back to the glory days of Polaroid by giving you a pocket-sized, physical version of your favorite snaps from your smartphone, whenever and wherever you want one. It’s the sequel to the Share SP-1, Fujifilm’s original portable instant printer, and it competes both with that device while it remains in stock, and with official Polaroid competition via the Polaroid ZIP. For my money, Instax’s latest offering is the best of the bunch, because of how well the SP-2 captures the best parts of instant photography’s retro appeal, while making improvements that help highlight just how far tech has come. The SP-2 is very similar to its predecessor in physical design: They’re both basically thick little rectangular boxes, kind of like if you took an iPhone 4, put it in a heavy duty waterproof case and stacked two of those combos on top of one another. It’s not really a pocket device, but it is still broadly portable, and easy to throw in a bag, backpack or purse. Fuijilm also trimmed down the SP-2 when compared to the SP-1, and generally improved the hardware design. In place of gentle curves, there’s a slightly more modern angled aesthetic to the front of the printer where the pictures are ejected. It’s like when the rolling car body designs of the sixties and 70s started giving way to the aggressively geometric looks of the eighties. Last note on design differences is that the body sides are now rubberized, which makes it easier to grip the printer. The old version was overly smooth, despite some texturing on the sides, which combined with its larger size made me occasionally nervous I’d drop it. As with the original, the outside case boasts a simple LED indicator showing you how many prints are left in your Instax Mini film pack (they carry 10 each) and giving you an idea how much battery you have left. A big button on the side of the front is your power control, activating the printer’s dedicated Wi-Fi network, which you connect to with your smartphone to print (up to eight people can connect at once for party fun). And there’s a smaller button mid-body that lets you print the last photo you ran off from local memory again without even connecting your device. Also new to the SP-2 is the battery. The SP-1 used two CR-2 batteries, which are specialized units used mostly for cameras (meaning you’re unlikely to have too many on hand). That also meant it couldn’t charge easily, so if you ran out and didn’t have any spares, you were out of luck. The SP-2 uses a Fuji NP-45 battery, which is a lithium-ion battery used for a number of its compact cameras. Switching to this battery also allows for USB charging, using the same micro USB cable you probably use for a host of other gadgets. It’s also swappable, meaning you can stock up on the units (they’re about $12.50 per for first-party, or less for third-party versions) to keep fully charged ones on hand. Both the SP-1 and the SP-2 were rated for around 100 prints per charge, but the SP-2’s system is far more convenient, especially considering this is designed for use on the go. SP-1 print on the left, SP-2 print on the right. Picture quality gets a bump on the SP-2 vs. the first generation, with 800×600 pixel resolution at 320 dpi. The SP-1 could only manage 640×480 at 254 dpi. The actual difference you’ll experience when looking at prints isn’t as dramatic as the numbers might make it seem, however: Only when I printed the same photo on each printer and looked at them side-by-side did I notice that the SP-2 produces crisper results, especially with fine detail. The SP-2 also handles color better, delivering more accurate colors where the SP-1 tended to blow out (over-expose) your images vs. what you’d expect from looking at the picture on your smartphone. And while the SP-2 doesn’t blow the SP-1 away in terms of print quality, it does offer improvements that are clear when you see the pictures from each version side-by-side – while at the same time maintaining a bit of slight fuzziness that contributes to the retro appeal of instant printing overall. Fuifilm’s Instax SP-2 is the best instant printer out there, with printing time improved to about 10 seconds per photo vs. 15 for the older model, quieter printing, and a host of new app-based features including the ability to include real-time weather data, or info from Instagram like number of likes and captions directly onto the image. For $199, it’s what I would buy if I was in the market for a brand new mobile instant printer, no question. Fujifilm’s system for its Instax film continues to shine, too: The cartridges load conveniently and easily into the back of the SP-2 without much room for user error, and you can use the same packs you already have on hand if you’re an existing SP-1 or Instax camera owner. That said, if you’re picking one up looking for a major upgrade from the SP-1, you might want to save your cash. It is indeed an improvement, as I describe above, but the truth is that prints from both now adorn my fridge, and in a few weeks’ time, I probably couldn’t tell you which individual image came from which based solely on output quality. I’m still keeping the SP-2 I purchased, however, because both it and its predecessor more than make up for their cost in fun value for money.
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Learn News Feed strategy from Facebook VP Adam Mosseri at Disrupt SF
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Josh Constine
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Come to TechCrunch’s to hear how your company can win at and adapt to the Facebook News Feed. We’ll have Facebook’s VP of Product Management for News Feed about what gets seen and what doesn’t, and how to take capitalize on its frequent algorithm changes. Mosseri has been working on News Feed since 2008 and now he runs it. When Facebook moves to kill clickbait, promote Live video, or put your friends above publishers, Mosseri is the one in control. On stage you can expect him to speak candidly about how and why Facebook’s crown jewel is evolving. The News Feed impacts almost every business, from app developers to news outlets, from brands to mom and pop stores. Understanding how it works can be the difference between earning a landslide of viral traffic and disappearing into the social media black hole. Yet most people still don’t know exactly what factors into the News Feed ranking algorithm. Get your tickets to , September 12th to 14th to the learn the recipe to the News Feed’s secret sauce. until August 12.
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Uber’s deal with Didi is a win-win for everyone — except the ‘Anti-Uber Alliance’
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Jon Russell
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Many in the media and tech industry see as a failure for the U.S. ride-hailing giant. It’s easy to believe that the sale of Uber China’s operations to its closest rival is a face-saving exercise, an inevitable outcome for a U.S. company that tried to beat the odds and succeed in China. But the more you chew over the finer points of the deal, the more it looks like an astute piece of business for both parties. Don’t believe that this deal was created in haste. The rumor of a merger had been circulating for a month — with both sides denying it — and one source close to negotiations told TechCrunch that the two parties had tried to engineer a deal two previous times without success. So it was third time lucky but, more importantly, ongoing discussions suggest that this is more than Uber saving face — this is an alliance. Likewise, don’t believe that Didi acted out of kindness. Didi showed it can raise capital easily when it closed that even . It could have let Uber continue to spend billions in China and wither, but it wanted to remove its threat from China and perhaps elsewhere. This was two-way; not merely a tactical Uber exit. So, how does the deal play out? Firstly, and most obviously, Uber swaps its capital-intensive business unit in China that its own CEO said was costing it $1 billion per year, for a (potentially) near-20 percent stake in the country’s dominant ride-sharing company, valued at $35 billion. That’s a near-11 fold increase on . But there’s certain to be a lot more growth. Earlier this summer, that his company is taking just 1.1 percent of China’s taxi market. , which will legalize Uber and Didi from November, combined with this merger are sure to mean that Didi’s business grows multiples more — all with Uber as its largest single shareholder. That stake not only allows Uber to move towards a much-anticipated IPO by removing the China cash burn from its balance sheet, but it is likely to be a very lucrative holding in a business with vast potential to grow. Even if of its own. There are some who argue that Uber could have saved time and money and simply invested in Didi earlier if it wanted this kind of financial return potential. For one thing, it would have needed to choose between Didi Kuaidi and Didi Dache, which eventually merged. But, more than that, it is foolish to believe that Didi Chuxing would have grown into the company that it is today without rivalry from Uber. Uber, for example, pioneered peer-to-peer in China when . It hadn’t been done before at scale. Didi was unprepared and , introducing its take on the service some six months later. The company started out working exclusively with licensed taxis, and this example shows that competition with Uber clearly sharpened its business and helped shape its growth. The real negative here looks to be for Didi’s allies: Lyft in the U.S., Ola in India and Grab in Southeast Asia. , dubbed the ‘Anti-Uber Alliance’, last year for business synergies such as enabling users to roam between services when they travel, and sharing know-how. Alongside that, Didi made investments in its three allies: , and contributing undisclosed minority amounts to last year, and one year ago. While it often seemed like a PR play, the coalition does give Didi’s cohorts solidarity and support, and likely increased confidence to investors, all of which is important when you are battling a global giant like Uber, which is of in fresh funding on a whim. Well, that alliance looks uncertain at best, or messy at worst, following Uber’s deal with Didi. Not only has Didi struck a deal with the sworn enemy and given it a sizable chunk of its business, but it made an undisclosed investment in Uber’s global business which . That’s a drop in the ocean for Uber given the numbers it has raised, but, if the figure is correct, then that investment is multiples larger than the money Didi put into its fellow alliance members. Not only that, but Uber CEO Travis Kalanick will sit on the Didi board, no less, while Didi Chairman Cheng Wei will join the Uber board. Many, including yours truly, saw the alliance and those Didi investments as a possible first step to acquisitions to expand Didi overseas as and when it saw fit. But this deal with Uber throws all of that into contention. Who is to say that, in Southeast Asia, for example, Didi will back Grab with any vigor now that it is also aligned with Uber. It could let the market play out and then befriend the company that wins. That’s a hypothetical scenario, of course, but it was unthinkable prior to yesterday. Grab was bullish on the news, with before the deal was even confirmed. Tan said in a company-wide memo that we obtained that Uber’s exit was proof a regional rival could defeat Uber. “They’ve lost once, and we will make them lose again,” he told his staff. Fighting words indeed, but the conditions that forced Uber’s exit from China simply don’t exist in Southeast Asia which weakens the comparison. The subsidies war is almost certainly multiples more modest than China, and . While Tan publicly rallied his troops, you’d imagine that he was privately disappointed at the way this incident has played out. Lyft, for one, was more measured with its comment on the Uber-Didi deal. “Over the next few weeks, we will evaluate our partnership with Didi,” . “We always believed Didi had a big advantage in China because of the regulatory environment.” Ola of India declined multiple requests to comment publicly on the deal. It’ll take some time before the smoke clears and we understand more about how this deal impacts the global ride-sharing economy, but right now it looks like Uber is sitting a lot prettier than many people believe.
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Facebook is testing video ads during Live broadcasts
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Fitz Tepper
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If you watch a lot of Facebook Live broadcasts, get ready to see some ads. The company is now testing short video ads that will play during breaks in Facebook Live broadcasts, they . The move shouldn’t be a surprise for anyone who follows Facebook and their various video products. Video ads are lucrative for Facebook and a Live product devoid of ads would cause the company to miss out on tons of potential ad revenue. So how will they work? That’s a little less clear. For now, the company is just letting “a small group of publishers” insert a short ad break in their Live videos. The ads anywhere after five minutes into a live stream, and can last up to a maximum of 15 seconds. Facebook told advertisers that during the beta all ads shown during Live broadcasts will be taken from other promoted video campaigns already running on Facebook, but it’s safe to assume if the test is successful advertisers may soon have the ability to create custom ads designated to be shown during Live broadcasts. So what control will video publishers have? Adage reports that publishers can control what category of advertiser can show video during their stream, as well as turn it off if a Live feed isn’t appropriately themed to contain an ad (like a sensitive breaking news story). And in terms of revenue – during the test period publishers aren’t able to receive a portion of the revenue generated from ads during their Live broadcasts, but could in the future depending on how Facebook decides to structure their Live ad product. It’s also not clear yet if publishers will be able to set a designated “commercial break” where all viewers see an ad at once, or if Facebook will randomly commandeer a Live stream with a 15 second ad. If it’s the former and publishers can initiate a designated commercial break (and potentially generate revenue), it could actually be an ad product that publishers and content creators ends up liking.
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NSF dedicates $35 million to improving software used in science and education
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Devin Coldewey
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Big data is more important than ever in just about every scientific discipline — and the data is bigger than ever, too. To help manage that data and get it into the hands of scientists and students, the National Science Foundation is putting $35 million towards a pair of software institutes that will build the tools necessary for 21st-century research. The Molecular Sciences Software Institute will focus on — you guessed it — the molecular sciences. That’s everything from quantum chemistry and materials science to pharmacology and molecular biology. Research performed at this level of organization benefits greatly from computer models, but those models are limited in the number of factors, atoms, space, or time that can be simulated accurately. The MolSSI will be led by Virginia Tech computational chemist Daniel Crawford and hosted at the school’s Corporate Research Center in Blacksburg. The plan is to improve the software and infrastructure used in the field, and share those resources with the rest of the world. Sounds vague, but the specifics would probably be as difficult to describe as the problems these scientists are tackling. “The institute will enable computational scientists to tackle problems that are orders of magnitude larger and more complex than those currently within our grasp,” Crawford said in the NSF’s announcement. A double handful of other universities will be on the board of directors: Rice, Iowa State, Stanford, Rutgers, Stony Brook, UC Berkeley, and USC. Crawford told that the group plans to add more collaborators, from Europe and Asia to start. The MolSSI is funded to the tune of $19.4 million over 5 years, and much of the initial $5.8 million, officially awarded today, will go towards kitting out the new digs and hiring the founding scientists and coders. Simulations of ion channels with every atom accounted for, an example of work that will be enabled by the MolSSI. That leaves $15 million and change for the . This one will be ; its goal is to improve engagement with scientific resources at all levels, from students to researchers at the cutting edge. Science gateways are collections of tools, services, and apps that one can access through, for example, a web portal. For example, a university might decide make all the information from its MRI or astronomy experiments available to download and sift through — the gateway would manage that data and its users, and maybe provide online tools to visualize or analyze it. It’s an essential step for exposing scientific data to inquiry and inspection by other authorities or just curious citizens whose tax dollars paid for it. “Gateways foster collaborations and the exchange of ideas among researchers and can democratize access, providing broad access to resources sometimes unavailable to those who are not at leading research institutions,” said the project’s principal investigator, UCSD’s Nancy Wilkins-Diehr. The SGCI will be formed around a sort of pilot study done in 2015, a survey of 5,000 people in the research community that suggested 5 main areas on which the institute should focus. Briefly stated, they are: Incubating ideas to convert them into businesses; providing meaningful tech support to associated projects; creating a a shared, extensible framework for developing and deploying gateways; and finding and training gateway developers — the latter with a stated emphasis on inclusiveness, I’m happy to add. More details can be found at the or on the . This project too has a lot of partner schools: Notre Dame, Purdue, UT Austin (TACC specifically), UM Ann Arbor, Indiana University, and Elizabeth City State University. It’s a major investment by the NSF and quite an impressive spread of interested parties; their work will likely be less visible than this flashy announcement, but it’s important nonetheless. We’ll keep up with the Scientific Software Innovation Institutes as they grow and mature.
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Publishers dodged a bullet in their war with Facebook
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James G. Brooks, Jr
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Last year at this time, many publishers were wrestling with the question of what to make of Facebook Instant Articles. Facebook’s audacious proposition was that it would host content from publishers on Facebook, with no link back to those publishers’ sites. In return, the publishers could either run their own ads and or letFacebook handle placements and give up 30% of revenues to Facebook. A year later, Conde Nast and Hearst, among others, were Instant Articles. Then, in June something unexpected happened: Facebook to de-emphasize news and articles in its News Feed. Instead, the focus is going to be more on updates from friends and family. This makes a lot of sense for Facebook, which needs to maintain the quality of the user experience. For publishers and advertisers, though, it’s confirmation that Facebook is less a forum for interest-based content than a dressed-up message board for friends and family. Publishers should be glad for the reprieve and the chance to continue to cultivate their own audiences, even if their traffic will be hurt in the short term. Advertisers would be smart to see how the open web compares as a medium to Facebook’s walled garden. Facebook’s official for this latest algorithm tweak is that “We’ve heard from our community that people are still worried about missing important updates from the friends they care about.” The translation for that might be that users were annoyed with so much publisher content in the News Feed. I know that, personally, my News Feed has been littered with such content over the last year or, and, if you click on news stories, the ratio of published news-to-friend news climbs higher. While it’s hard to resist clicking on news, the reality is that you can find that content anywhere. If you really want a rundown of the day’s news, you can set up your own RSS feed on . Most people outside the media world don’t bother to do that, which is why published content continued to proliferate in the News Feed. However, the end result was that people began sharing less. In the third quarter of 2015, GlobalWebIndex found that of Facebook users updated their status and 37% shared photos. A year earlier, the figures were 50% and 59%, respectively. The fact that users under 30 are fleeing to Snapchat to carry on conversations without the prying eyes of their extended family is another headache for Facebook. Attempting to shore up its user base before more damage is done is a smart move. In the early years of the News Feed, Facebook offered sliders so users could select exactly what appeared, but later phased out these controls. For publishers, this latest move will bring some short-term pain. As Facebook acknowledged, referral traffic will decline for some. Since, for many publications, Facebook is their , this could be a bitter pill to swallow. Longer term, this is good news. By relying less on Facebook, publishers will be able to focus on boosting their presence on other platforms like Snapchat and the Facebook-owned Instagram and to try to penetrate Google News, which will attract more new users to their sites. For advertisers, Facebook’s latest algorithm change should prompt a reassessment of the social network as a platform for ad messages. Let’s face it; wedding announcements and political arguments aren’t the best places for a sales pitch. I’d argue that you’re better off using blogs and other media that discuss a common interest. For instance, if you’re trying to sell toy drones, you will probably have more luck placing an ad on a site that talks about that topic, instead of targeting someone on Facebook who . This preference is reflected in pricing. Facebook’s video ads cost compared to the U.S. average of . All of this means that I’m torn. As a user, I’m glad that Facebook is sticking to its knitting, because the platform is second-to-none as a place to stay in touch with people in your inner circle. As an advisor to marketers, though, I’d interpret this latest move as further proof that you’re better off putting your money elsewhere. And, finally, as an observer who would be happy to see publishers regain some control of their audience, I cheer this move. Congrats, publishers. It may not feel like it, but you just dodged a bullet.
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Here’s the 18th batch of companies from 500 Startups
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Matthew Lynley
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We’re already halfway through the year, which means it’s time for another batch from 500 Startups to start rolling out. This year, 46 companies are going through 500 Startups’ 18th batch, ranging from traditional B2B tools to a smart pill case that helps track whether or not people are taking their medication. 500 Startups has been dipping its toes beyond its traditional incubator model. Earlier this year it said it would launch a startup studio called 500 Labs. It’s important for programs like these to continue finding new ways to capture talent and companies that could end up turning into big hits. The competition is plenty fierce — 500 Startups is hardly the only incubator in Silicon Valley. But, of course, the incubator is and always will be a staple of 500 Startups. Without further ado, here’s a list of the companies rolling through the incubator:
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Didi wins, Uber retreats, but Chinese riders and drivers lose
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Josh Constine
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No one wants to fight a land war in Asia, not even Uber. It could have burnt mountains of cash battling for market share with local ride app juggernaut Didi Chuxing, between marketing, discounts, and driver incentives. Instead, Uber surrendered. It’s in exchange for a 20% stage in the merged company, while Didi has invested $1 billion into Uber at a stunning $68 billion valuation Essentially, didn’t think it could own enough of the Chinese market minus the enormous amount it would have spent competing with its new ally to do better than walking away with 20% of . Eliminating this hole Uber had been throwing money down, the coast is clear for it to IPO. If the deal lets Uber concentrate on winning the rest of the globe, it’s not really a loss to concede China. Just a battle it had to sacrifice as part of Word War Ride. But there is a loser in the UberChina – Didi Chuxing merger: the Chinese ride app user. Without these two super-powers trying to undercut each on ride prices and one-up each other on partner compensation, both drivers and riders are left at the mercy of what looks much more like an on-demand transportation monopoly. Compared to when there was hardcore competition, Didi won’t have to race to improve functionality, from its app interface to its routing algorithms. It won’t have to offer as enticing bonuses to the men and women behind the wheel. And it won’t have to make concessions to get more cars on the road so it always has the shortest wait time. China, historically lax on local monopolies, isn’t likely to break up a local business winner over anti-trust concerns. It all makes me thankful that the US has Lyft nipping at Uber’s heels, keeping it on its toes. Whether it’s Google Search butting out Yelp local results or Facebook’s approach to privacy, we’ve seen how domination of a technology space by one company leaves the masses with less power.
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Why Minecraft predicts the future of collaborative work
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Jim Fowler
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Kids are the ultimate beta testers. As soon as they figure out what a new technology is for, they try to make it do something else. They push boundaries, break rules, play with possibilities and share their results in real time. When I see how my son and his friends play Minecraft, I see the future of engineering and technology — and it’s an exciting one. Minecraft is like an immersive digital Lego set. It lets you build whole worlds out of a few simple categories of digital bricks. Then you can invite your friends or anybody with a Minecraft account to enter those worlds and interact with them, change them or create parallel worlds based on yours. Once you learn the basics, the level of complexity you can build up to is virtually limitless. The style of play in Minecraft is also great training for the digital workplace: it’s collaborative, real time, iterative and largely open-ended. There are also zombies and lava lakes and some really cool-looking monsters. Here’s how Minecraft is predicting the future of collaborative work. Microsoft, which purchased Minecraft for $2.5 billion in 2014, , their augmented reality headset. This means players can look down over Minecraft landscapes superimposed on surfaces in their immediate real-world environment and see other players as tiny avatars walking around. Imagine a team of engineers doing the same thing with a design in process. Some of the engineers could virtually shrink themselves down and go on a journey through their design, like the tiny explorers in who take a tour of the human body. Other engineers could look over the entire design at once, watching its construction as you might watch ants build an anthill. Minecraft is more than a game. Because third-parties and users can make custom mods, it’s evolved into a global platform for creativity and skill. Anybody is free to make custom items, characters and worlds that can be purchased and played. By developing something cool enough to convene and then tap into a global well of creativity, Minecraft’s developers have hit the jackpot. They’ve sourced more creativity than a single company could ever dream of officially hiring. For example: An entire representation of the fantasy world from George R. R. Martin’s Game of Thrones has been constructed in the game by a collective of volunteers. Another group built a working model of a 16-bit computer. Minecraft has even fired the imagination of people traditionally outside the gaming space. Irish novelist Julian Gough wrote the poem that plays at the ending credits of Minecraft’s initial adventure. And Denmark’s government commissioned a firm to make a life-size map of Denmark inside the game. In the digital industrial age, the companies than can make platforms capable of convening and unleashing creativity will be the ones that thrive. Your software can no longer just solve urgent problems. It also has to be the starting point for a whole ecosystem of solutions — some generated by you and some sourced by your customers and users. When my son gets home from school (and after he’s done his homework) he hops on the computer with five or six of his friends and they build worlds together. They code their own game mods and then build new worlds off of those. I would be lying if I said I understood half of what they get up to, and I am the Chief Information Officer of a global technology company. What fascinates me about how my son and his friends build complex things together is that nobody is really in charge, yet everything gets built, quickly and completely, with changes made as needed along the way. We’re already seeing this kind of spontaneous, highly effective collaboration at work in the corporate world. As CIO, I’ve watched people get more comfortable exploring and finding their own best way to use data. Earlier in my career, I tried to dictate how people used technology. Now, I just keep the maximum amount of data flowing to whomever wants it. I set up sensible guard rails, but, otherwise, I let people explore and experiment. Sometimes I feel like I’m playing referee for an open-ended, open-source, high-stakes game played with resources and data. The effortless speed at which my son and his friends work is also the future. I’ve seen the current generation of collaborative design tools available to engineers take the design and initial manufacture of huge industrial projects down from weeks to days, sometimes hours. Just imagine what will be possible when my son’s generation enters the workforce. There is a lot of talk about the lack of STEM education in America, and we absolutely have to make a formal, concerted effort to get more hard science into our classrooms. But we also shouldn’t overlook the many things outside the classroom that might kick off an active, lifelong interest in technology. My own journey to becoming a CIO began when I was a kid behind the counter of my father’s pharmacy. I was mesmerized by how one IBM computer running a single, proprietary application eliminated two days of extra work per month and allowed insurance companies to reimburse my Dad four times as fast as they had working off a paper system. The work I do today — optimizing enterprise resource planning for global businesses — is an extension of the initial excitement I felt working with that first IBM. This kind of childhood fascination and wonder have launched some of the most significant careers in computer science. Computing pioneers Claude Shannon and Danny Hillis bonded at MIT when they discovered that as boys they’d both designed simple electrical devices capable of playing tic-tac-toe. Shannon went on to invent the math behind search engines, and Hillis designed one of the first supercomputers. To spark more careers like those of Hillis and Shannon, and to make sure that our future workforce can speak the languages of both digital and industrial, we’ve got to make sure more kids come into contact with science, technology, engineering and mathematics in ways that draw on their natural independence and creativity. Recently, GE made a $25,000 donation to the Robotics Club at my alma mater, Van Wert High School. In the five years they’ve been around, the Van Wert Robotics Club has won tons of awards (Go Cougars!) — but that’s not the only reason GE chose to support them. We’re partnering with organizations across America that engage young people with technology in ways that draw on their natural independence and creativity. After all, the future of technology is in play.
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Crunch Report | Uber China Merges with Didi Chuxing
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Khaled "Tito" Hamze
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Tito Hamze
Tito Hamze
Joe Zolnoski
Joe Zolnoski
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In-car cameras let autonomous vehicles track passengers as well as pedestrians
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Devin Coldewey
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Powerful sensors and software have made autonomous cars impressively aware of their surroundings — but it isn’t just obstacles, pedestrians, and other cars that a vehicle’s AI needs to watch out for. It also needs to know what’s going on inside itself, and researchers from Fraunhofer are hard at work making that happen. “We are expanding sensor technology to the entire interior,” said Fraunhofer’s Michael Voit, who manages the research group, . “Using depth-perception cameras, we capture the vehicle’s interior, identify the number of people, their size and their posture. From this we can deduce their activities.” Lots going on in this car that the AI would probably want to be aware of. There are plenty of benefits in a car knowing how many passengers it has, where they are, and what they’re doing. In case of emergency — a sensor failure, for instance — the car will know how long it will take for a driver to reach the wheel. If a kid in the back seat slips out of their seatbelt while mom and dad are taking a nap (the privilege of owning a self-driving car), they can be warned. In a collision scenario, the car could steer so that it is struck in an unoccupied quarter. Airbag deployment, too, could be adjusted to the size or position of a passenger. Of course, some of these things can be accomplished with existing tech — weight sensors and the like — but more and finer awareness of the passengers is still a worthwhile goal in autonomous vehicles. Work is progressing on identifying various actions and common objects as well — understanding that a person is reaching for the sun visor, or installing a child seat, for example. So far the cameras have only been installed in the R&D company’s driving simulator, but the plan is to put it into a smartened-up minivan for real-world testing. Fraunhofer is working with Volkswagen Group Research, Bosch, Visteon, and others on this “Intelligent Car Interior” project, and the whole thing is funded by grants from the German government.
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Southeast Asia-based Carousell raises $35M for its social commerce app
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Jon Russell
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, a four-year-old startup from Singapore behind a listings app that enables peer-to-peer selling in Southeast Asia, has closed a $35 million Series B round to grow its reach into new countries and increase product development. The company is seen as one of the darlings of Singapore’s nascent startup ecosystem, given that founding trio Lucas Ngoo, Marcus Tan and Siu Rui Quek all graduated NUS (National University of Singapore) while in their early twenties having spent some time in ‘regular’ jobs. Added to that, this is certainly one of the more notable (largest) Series B rounds for a startup out of Singapore. The financing was led by existing investor , with participation from returning backers Sequoia (via its India fund which is used for Southeast Asia deals), and 500 Startups. The startup previously raised , and , so a new round was seemingly on the cards before too long. Indeed, that Carousell was trying to raise as much as $50 million from investors for this round. The company declined to comment then and, this time around, all Quek (CEO) would say of that report is that Carousell is “super grateful and happy that we have the support of our existing investors.” The app started out in Singapore as “a passion project to solve our own problems,” Quek said in an interview with TechCrunch. The simplest way to describe Carousell is a Craiglists for mobile via its iOS and Android apps. It uses a chat-style interface with photo uploading options to connect consumers who are interesting in buying-selling items together. The onus is on the individuals to arrange the sale and payment, since, right now, Carousell does not make money from its service. The company claims to have 35 million listings on its service with 70 new listings added per minute and active users spending 17 minutes inside its app on average. (Not bad, its users spend an average of 50 minutes a day across its core app, Instagram and Messenger, and that’s three apps.) Today, Carousell spans five countries — Singapore, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Malaysia and Indonesia — with plans to increase that footprint further. That may also include a foray outside of its existing focus on Southeast Asia, Quek said. “The problem we are solving is a truly global one,” he explained. “So we’re not bound by any region per se. Other markets [that we expand to] will be outside of Southeast Asia, but we’re doing work to finalize those.” The company nabbed , who was running Airbnb’s business in Southeast Asia, earlier this year to manage its international expansion plans. There’s plenty of competition for e-commerce dollars in Southeast Asia, a market where online is estimated to account for less than three percent of all commerce. Aside from Lazada, which this year, there are country-specific players like and Matahari Mall, run by retail conglomerate Lippo, in Indonesia, while informal commerce on social networks has grown to the point that even Facebook has dived in. The U.S. giant is that, alongside , encourages users in Southeast Asia to buy and sell items without leaving Facebook’s walls. Also, somewhat bizarrely, Rakuten, the parent of Rakuten Ventures, has in Southeast Asia called Rakuma. “We did not know about the launch of Rakuma,” Quek previously told me. “Rakuten is an investor through their venture capital arm. Rakuten Ventures’ investment in Carousell is non-strategic in nature. We operate independently and are not aware of their strategic plans.” Tough competition indeed, so perhaps it isn’t surprising that Carousell isn’t thinking about money too much right now. Quek said that the company (and its investors) are focused on scaling its app and that, while open to monetization potential in the future, there’s no immediate plan to do at this point. He did however emphasize that he is bullish that, once the time comes, Carousell won’t have problems bringing in cash. “The Carousell business model is essentially the classifieds model, which traditionally has [around] 50 percent margins,” he said. “We’re not reinventing the business model just reimagining the experience. We will eventually bring in monetization.” “Our immediate focus is on channeling all our energy to expanding internationally and making sure we have a strong product and engineering team,” he added. On that last note, Carousell currently has over 90 staff of whom around 24 are engineers. Quek said he hopes to double that engineering headcount by the end of this year. The big focuses for that team, he said, included improved search and buyer-selling matching, and a reduction in spam listings. As for an eventual exit strategy, such as Southeast Asia’s first notable startup IPO? You guessed it, no comment on that for now. “We haven’t really discussed exit options, the focus is always on making the largest impact,” Quek told TechCrunch. “We’re just getting started, international expansion will be one of our top most focuses.”
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Apple wants you to think about the iPad Pro as a computer
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Romain Dillet
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You can’t say you haven’t seen this coming. Apple CEO Tim Cook has said again and again that the is the company’s vision of the future of computing. And today, Apple is confirming this vision with a new ad. For the first time, Apple is calling the iPad Pro a computer. The ad ends with the tagline “Imagine what your computer could do if your computer was an iPad Pro.” In order to argue in favor of this vision, Apple showcases everything that makes the iPad Pro a capable device — the Smart Keyboard, the Apple Pencil, Microsoft Word, Excel and PowerPoint, Photoshop Fix, Procreate, Netflix, Safari, iBooks and more. In my experience, some people around me are embracing the iPad Pro and are using their computer less frequently. Others are just using the iPad as a complementary device and can’t even consider ditching their computer. But even the fact that many people (including me) are able to ditch their computer for a week and do all their work from an iPad shows that Apple is onto something. But old habits die hard… https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1zPYW6Ipgok
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OmniVirt brings 360-degree advertising to big publishers
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Anthony Ha
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is promising to help publishers and advertisers tap into the potential of virtual reality. It’s not the only startup working on VR/360-degree ads (other companies in the market include and ), but co-founder and COO Michael Rucker said OmniVirt stands out by offering a 360-degree ad experience in the mobile browser — users don’t have to buy a fancy headset, or even download a separate app. For example, on the New York Times website last week, and as I write this on Monday evening, there’s an OmniVirt-powered Infiniti ad on . It looks like a normal banner ad at first, but if you tap or click it, you can start exploring a 360-degree video. This approach may not be quite as exciting as a full-on VR experience, but Rucker suggested that it can help advertisers reach a much broader audience with their 360 content. Other publishers working with OmniVirt include Vice, AOL (which owns TechCrunch), the Wall Street Journal and Twitter. Rucker previously worked , and he said he teamed up with OmniVirt CEO Brad Phaisan because he sees similarities between the current state of VR advertising and the early days of — lots of experimentation and investment, but hampered by unclear standards. Right now, he added, brands and publishers are investing in virtual reality content, but they’re hitting “a little bit of a distribution wall.” Even if you don’t require users to buy a specific headset, just downloading an app for Google Cardboard is an “an additional barrier to consumer adoption.” “We are solving this challenge,” Rucker said. And while ads are the starting point, OmniVirt is also starting to work with publishers to support 360-degree editorial content as well. OmniVirt was previously known as AdsOptimal and has raised seed funding from investors including Andreessen Horowitz, General Catalyst, SV Angel and Y Combinator. You can .
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Glassdoor sued by user whose email was ‘leaked’ instead of BCC’ed
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Kate Conger
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A little over a week ago, Glassdoor began emailing its users to let them know of an update to the site’s terms of service. But rather than BCC’ing its anonymous reviewers, Glassdoor dumped their email addresses into a regular ol’ CC field, effectively outing at least 600,000 members of the site. Now, one of those outed users is suing. Melissa Levine, a Los Angeles-based television researcher, filed a class-action lawsuit against Glassdoor today, claiming the employment review site violated state law by including her email address in the CC field and exposed her to potential retribution from her former employers. A Glassdoor spokesperson said the company has not yet been served and therefore cannot comment on the case. “That the strict anonymity of users on Glassdoor could be so carelessly and recklessly violated and cast aside in such an amateurish fashion should make us all question the extent to which Glassdoor places profit over people,” Ben Meiselas, an attorney for Levine, told TechCrunch in a statement. Glassdoor encourages employees to review their current and former employers anonymously — users can’t view other reviews without first adding their own. Many of the reviews on Glassdoor are perfectly polite, but negative reviews often pop up, and it appears that Levine might have left a few unhappy reviews of her own. The company acknowledged the mistake in a statement shortly after the terms of service email update was sent. “As we’ve previously disclosed, a small percentage of Glassdoor registered users’ email addresses were viewable in the “to” field to a subset of other users who received a routine email. No other information was viewable or revealed. We have directly apologized to the affected users. We do take the privacy of our users very seriously and are taking corrective steps to ensure this doesn’t happen again. This certainly doesn’t live up to our own expectations of who we are and what we represent,” a Glassdoor spokesperson told TechCrunch. The email went out to approximately 2 percent of Glassdoor’s 30 million active monthly users and was sent in batches of 1,000 users at a time, so each user could see the email address of 999 other Glassdoor users. Glassdoor just raised a in June and is valued at $1 billion. The included a provision that forbids users from engaging in class action lawsuits, Meiselas explained. “The email where they violated the privacy of its users was the terms of service update with the arbitration provision. It is unconscionable to put forward an arbitration provision and in the same act (same email) violate the law,” he said in an email. Users can opt out of the arbitration clause by mailing a form to Glassdoor by September 12.
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Devin Coldewey
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Elizabeth Holmes is finally presenting her technology to scientists, including a “miniLab”
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Sarah Buhr
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Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes is presenting her blood analysis technology to a room full of scientific experts for the first time today at the American Association for Clinical Chemistry (AACC) conference in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Her big focus? A customizable, tabletop mini lab. The company has been widely criticized for not unveiling its framework for analysis in the past and this is the first time Holmes has agreed to unveil her technology. Holmes of a chat about her tech at the Future of Genomic Medicine conference in March amid mounting controversy surrounding her startup. Federal regulators deemed her Newark lab at the time. Theranos main partner Walgreens has since backed out, Holmes has faced a Congressional inquiry over her lab practices, was recently banned from operating in her own labs, had her Newark lab shut down and was threatened with possible criminal charges. To add to the injuries, Theranos’s worth from $9 billion to just under $800 million, leaving Holmes with just a fraction of her former net worth. Her presentation comes at a crucial moment for the company, given everything Theranos has endured over the past year. There’s no official live stream for those of us not in Philly but you can follow along with us on Stuart Blitz’s Periscope channel to find out what Holmes has to say today. Theranos tells TechCrunch Holmes will be discussing her lab testing framework, including the finger-stick blood collection device that has caused so much controversy. We’re also told the Theranos founder will present plenty of reproducible data and comparisons to traditional venipuncture methods as well as her methodology to collect the data and a demonstration of the “precision and accuracy of these chemistry, immunochemistry, hematology, and molecular assays (traditionally performed on separate instruments) using their analytical testing platform, including a novel molecular test for the Zika virus.” Many have criticized Theranos lab results, saying they wildly differ from those of other labs. While Theranos isn’t exactly opening up the kimono and much of the inner workings will likely stay behind the frosted glass walls of the company, it’s the first step for a company when it desperately needs the credibility to continue. It will be interesting to see how the scientific experts react to Holmes’s presentation today and find out if they think the technology adds up.
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To catch a Pikachu: NY Governor moves to ban sex offenders from Pokémon GO
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Devin Coldewey
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When you think about it, the ability for someone to put a “lure” on a spot of their choosing and attract young Pokémon fans to their location is slightly disturbing — which is why New York Governor Andrew Cuomo is trying to ban paroled sex offenders from playing Pokémon GO and other online games. “At my direction, the New York State Department of Corrections and Community Supervision has imposed a new condition of parole for sex offenders under community supervision,” wrote Cuomo in , the game’s developer. “This new condition will prohibit them from downloading, accessing, or otherwise engaging in any Internet enabled gaming activities, including Pokémon GO.” According to a on the governor’s official webpage, the restriction will apply to some 3,000 sex offenders; the letter also adds Niantic to the list of companies regularly updated on those offenders’ whereabouts and online handles. Sex offenders, in New York at least, are prohibited from accessing certain things online and for others must provide up-to-date info on their user names, apps being used, and so on. Facebook, Apple, and Microsoft are among the two dozen or so companies with whom this data is shared on a weekly basis. This isn’t a lifetime ban — sex offenders who are no longer on parole are subject to considerable restrictions and monitoring, but the proposed ban would not apply to them. State senators Jeffrey Klein and Diane Savino conducted independent investigations and found that many Pokéstops are located near locations of known sex offenders, as well; Senator Klein suggested that those be moved or removed, though that would be part of future legislation, he said . I’ve asked the governor’s office for more information on this and a few other issues, such as what other online games will be affected by the ban, and will update this post when I hear back.
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Clinton campaign to hold fundraiser at Black Hat hacker conference this week
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Kate Conger
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Cybersecurity issues have plagued Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton’s campaign for months, from her long-running email controversy to the recent hacks of the Democratic National Committee and the campaign itself. But cybersecurity experts appear to be embracing Clinton’s campaign — a fundraiser will be held for the campaign during Black Hat, a hacker conference taking place this week in Las Vegas. The event will feature Jeff Moss, the founder of the Black Hat and DEF CON security conferences, Jake Braun, a former security consultant for the Department of Homeland Security, and Michael Sulmeyer, the coordinator of the Clinton campaign’s Cybersecurity Working Group, according to . The trio is slated to discuss “cyber policy issues” facing the next president, and tickets will run from $100 to $2,700. The fundraiser comes just a few days after . A Clinton campaign spokesperson told TechCrunch that an analytics data program used by the campaign was breached during the DNC hack, but outside security experts had not discovered any breach of the campaign’s internal systems. Clinton’s campaign often hosts themed fundraisers (past tech themes have included national security and women in tech), but the focus on cybersecurity is a first for a campaign fundraiser. “This event was organized by supporters without any involvement from the campaign,” a campaign official told TechCrunch. Clinton herself is not scheduled to attend the Black Hat event and will instead be later this week in San Francisco, accompanied by campaign chair John Podesta and former actor Darren Criss. The San Francisco event is hosted by , a Clinton fundraising group focused on millennial voters. The Black Hat fundraiser is scheduled for Wednesday evening. After the first hour, the event will be open to all Black Hat attendees, reports.
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Salesforce buys word processing app Quip for $750M
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Ingrid Lunden
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is continuing its buying spree to expand the kinds of cloud-based apps and services that it offers to its customers beyond basic CRM. The company has just that it is acquiring , the cloud-based word processing app that was co-founded by Bret Taylor, formerly CTO of Facebook. We understand from two sources very close to the deal that the total price is $750 million. That includes cash and shares, as that it just filed on the deal notes “Quip capital stock with an aggregate value of approximately $582 million not including consideration attributable to Salesforce Ventures’ existing investment in Quip.” Quip was founded in 2012 and had raised $45 million in funding, with other investors (in addition to Marc Benioff and Salesforce Ventures) including Peter Fenton and Benchmark, Greylock, and Yuri Milner. Quip already counts several key companies, including Taylor’s former company Facebook, among its customers. In a announcing the news, Quip notes that it will continue to operate its business, but now under Salesforce. We understand that Taylor and his co-founder, ex-Googler Kevin Gibbs, will both be staying on post-acquisition. “We’re inspired by the possibilities ahead of us. As part of Salesforce, we will be able to expand our service more quickly and reach millions of people all over the world — which has been our mission since day one,” they write. “And, we’ll be able to extend the Salesforce Customer Success Platform in powerful new ways with our next-generation productivity capabilities. The possibilities of mixing data, content and communication are amazing.” It’s not clear why Quip — which was growing and in the enviable position of being very selective about taking funding from VCs — decided to sell up to Salesforce. But it’s an interesting turn in the ongoing consolidation that we’ve seen in the enterprise market, and how that is transforming the bigger companies that are doing the buying. Salesforce, , had tried to acquire LinkedIn earlier this year before the social networking company made the $26 billion jump into the arms of Microsoft. While Salesforce and Microsoft sometimes work together, they also compete, and adding Quip into the mix at Salesforce could one way for Salesforce to do that better (and counterbalance the fact that Microsoft is building and acquiring more products that compete with Salesforce on the CRM front). Quip, when it first launched as a mobile-only native app (it now has a desktop and web version), was described by my colleague Josh as a timely disruptor to the clumsy and very incumbent Microsoft Word. Salesforce could do enough just to offer this, as it is, as part of its wider portfolio of productivity services to tempt more customers to its platform, and away from Microsoft’s. But considering the price that it is paying, and the fact that the Quip team is joining as part of the deal, I suspect they could be aiming to do something even bigger. (Whether or not it will work is another question: one sticky point with Salesforce has been how the company integrates acquisitions. They are often bolted on, rather than truly brought together, is how it’s been described to me, so it will be worth watching to see how Quip fares on that front.) In any case, Taylor has had a pretty eventful summer. Quip’s acquisition comes about a month after he .
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Glowforge raises $22 million to popularize its 3-D laser printers, catalog of materials
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Lora Kolodny
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Of all the ways to make a 3-dimensional object, is still the freshest, whether what’s involved is plastic extrusion, milling away wood or metal, or the spinning of cells into functional living tissues. Now, a company that makes a desktop laser cutter and engraver for home or office use, , has raised $22 million to start mass production of its devices. The startup also plans to roll out a catalog of materials and premium designs for makers of every stripe, said CEO and founder Dan Shapiro. Glowforge originally ran a crowdfunding campaign on its own site where it generated $27.9 million in pre-sales for its . It also raised $9 million in seed and Series A funding previously. Founded in Seattle by repeat entrepreneur and angel investor — previously the CEO of Sparkbuy, a comparison tech shopping site acquired by Google — Glowforge today employs 35 full-time. Shapiro said the funding would be used for hiring and manufacturing, but also to help Glowforge make its new brand of “Proofgrade” materials known to users. The company has developed the Proofgrade line of materials with a coating that peels off after the materials are cut to specifications. A user can draw on the Proofgrade coating with any black, permanent marker and the laser will automatically cut or engrave along those lines, Shapiro noted. The coating has a UV bar code printed on it, which signals a Glowforge to automatically switch on the correct settings for handling that material, alleviating one of the frustrations of 3-D printing for new users. The company has worked with materials scientists to custom fabricate leathers, wood, acrylic and postboard so that they can be cut quickly, even if a design is intricate, with high-quality results, namely smooth edges. and , early backers of Glowforge, again invested in the startup’s Series B round. Foundry’s compared Glowforge to one of his earlier, and successful, investments in the nascent market of 3-D printing, Makerbot. Makerbot’s 3D printers brought fused deposition modeling (FDM), rather than laser cutting, out of the factory and down to the desktop. The company was acquired by Stratasys for . “In addition to extremely compelling hardware, Glowforge has put a ton of energy into their software and community, which is [a] hallmark of disruption in this type of a product as you shift from high end professionals only to the ‘prosumer,’” Feld said. The Glowforge has been known among culinary enthusiasts for its ability to cut through edible ingredients like chocolate and seaweed to make decorative sushi. The company is investigating what ingredients it could add to its Proofgrade line if any, Shapiro said. One of Glowforge’s packages, the Glowforge Pro, includes an air filter and a pass through slot that allows users to cut over-sized materials, essentially an extra long plank of wood or roll of leather. The company advises all customers to use an air filter, or vent outside, as laser cutting inherently generates fumes or smoke. Glowforge faces competition from a spate of 3-D printers and “personal fabrication devices” aimed at the maker community, and from makers of laser cutters such as FSLaser and EpilogLaser, which have primarily targeted business users.
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Brexit one month on: currency lows and talent fear
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Natasha Lomas
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a referendum vote in the UK delivered the shock verdict that a small majority of the British public wanted the country to leave the European Union. Next came the resignation of the Prime Minister and a precipitous drop in the value of the pound, which remains languishing far below its former heights. Various economic indicators now suggest the country is heading back towards recession. So how are UK startups coping with the unraveling of the old world order? In the immediate aftermath of the Brexit vote, . A month on, what — if anything — has changed for them and their businesses? It’s clear that Brexit remains a massive question mark over the future direction of the UK and its digital economy, with no plan for leaving the European Union yet set out, nor firm timetable for the government to trigger Article 50 — which would start the up to two-year process of disentanglement from the European project. So the current ‘post-referendum, pre- -Brexit’ period might well turn out to be “the quiet before the storm”, as one founder puts it. In the meantime, business in the UK isn’t grinding to a halt. And, generally speaking, things have returned to normal-ish for the startups we spoke to a month+ after the referendum vote — with some even reporting record summers. Although others have seen a small drop in demand. One, a currency exchange startup, attributed its dip to Brexit-based uncertainty, given the wild swings of pound sterling. For others there are also some potentially more disquieting signs, with evidence of a slowdown in decision-making with overseas partners and investors, as entities outside the UK grapple with what Brexit means for them, and assess possible risks — figuring out whether they need to rethink their own UK-market strategy. The strength and depth of any impact there — if hesitation turns into out-and-out rejection — is clearly going to take more time to shake out. The post-Brexit value of sterling has caused some of the most immediate knocks on the UK startups we spoke to, with founders generally having to be more “currency aware”, as one put it. Another founder notes having to absorb a rising salary bill on account of paying some of their staff in Euros. Another recounts having to help one of their suppliers, who they pay in GBP, by covering 75 per cent of sterling’s value drop after their supplier’s margin was all but wiped out overnight. The same business also tells us it lost out on a potential hire, after being outbid by a starup in another European country — which was able to offer a higher salary level because of the pound being so low. On the flip side of a fallen pound, UK startups are now cheaper to foreign investors, as we’ve seen with the Softbank ARM acquisition. And, if the UK economy heads for recession — with the accompanying knock-on effect on rents and house prices — the cost of living in London might become more affordable, in theory boosting its attractiveness to lower waged startup workers. But the same founder who suggested this went on to emphasize that the huge negatives of recession will obviously weigh very heavily in that scenario too. Another longer term concern on the money and currency front is what will happen to early stage investment in the UK, given how large a chunk comes from European VC funds. While, in the short term, funds have closed and still have that money to invest, and investments have continued to be made in UK startups since the referendum result, the question is what will happen when the time comes to close the next fund? Where will that money be ending up? In the UK, or elsewhere in Europe? The biggest and most pressing concern for UK startups in the wake of the Brexit referendum result remains what will happen with free movement, with many worried about the impact on existing non-UK EU staff and whether they will have easy access to a Europe-wide talent pool in future or not. There’s also anecdotal evidence from UK startups that some EU workers are questioning whether they should now accept a job in London or the UK, given the uncertainty over their future status in the country. One founder also recounted several instances of non-British EU workers being made to feel unwelcome in the UK after the referendum vote, and expressed concern about the UK’s social cohesiveness and the future trajectory of ‘Britishness’ — suggesting the UK could see a brain-drain if entrepreneurs feel compelled to look elsewhere for a social structure that matches their expectations for tolerance and liberal values. Perhaps the brightest point as UK startups perceive it in the gloomy summer after the Brexit vote, is that the country already has a new government in place, under Prime Minister Theresa May — who triumphed earlier than expected in the Tory leadership race after her last rival voluntarily stepped aside. One founder pointed out that if this coronation had not happened the government would still be leaderless even now — thankful of one small mercy in a time of vast uncertainty. Another founder expressed awe at the speed with which the Tory factions had regrouped around a new leader. While, on the flip side, several bemoaned the lack of a unified official opposition at such a crucial juncture for UK Plc. The official opposition Labour party remains riven with splits and embroiled in a self-induced leadership contest. Clearly not all the founders that TechCrunch spoke to are politically affiliated with the Conservative party but many expressed relief at a new Prime Minister who is perceived to be experienced and detail-oriented — a sense of partial relief doubtless encouraged by the fact she was a Remainer (if only a weak one). Technocratic, stable political leadership might not be able to save the UK from the fast-accelerating economic ravages of Brexit but for UK entrepreneurs — who overwhelmingly voted to Remain — it beats the alternative: the party’s hardline Brexiteer wing. Aka the “headbangers” as one founder dubbed them — noting that his biggest fear at this point is that “the full, totally cut-the-cord, independent UK [politicians] start getting listened to”. May’s reputation for political caution is therefore being (mostly) welcomed as a salve for self-inflicted Brexit harm at this early point on the post-referendum timeline. Not rushing blindly ahead is generally seen as prudent. Although some founders were eager for a little more business certainty, especially on key points like freedom of movement. The (relative) blessing of an experience Remainer as the least worse Tory leader for horribly uncertain times definitely only goes so far — and may prove to be a short lived honeymoon for May in time, as Brexit’s complexities pile up. Plentiful political concerns persist for startups about the sustained uncertainty of the UK’s future — from fears about looming recession, to the lack of a concrete Brexit plan, to worries about immigration and borders, and concerns about losing beneficial EU regulatory frameworks, like financial passporting. All topped off by founders’ underlying ideological objections to the UK divorcing itself from the EU. Make more connections is the sentiment you’d expect from the startup scene. So for many UK entrepreneurs, the Brexit vote clearly feels very personal indeed. On a micro level my firm, I guess my sector, the immediate economic impact — I’m more bullish. Customers keep coming. We had our strongest ever month last month. But as we should do — we’re growing fast. But at a macro level if you look at a lot of the leading economic indicators I’m a little bit worried because I think it’s probably going to be slack growth next year. In the UK. That’s not great for anyone… Recessions suck. We haven’t seen any fundamental weakness in customer demand. We’ve seen people continuing to transact, pretty much at normal rates. I think it’s more of a reflection of the kind of people that we serve — they tend to be people who are sending a good chunk of their monthly salary home and they’ve got to do that regardless of what the pound’s doing or whether Brexit’s happening or what the politicians are saying. So I’m not surprised. I think [business has] probably been a little bit weaker — we’ve seen a bit of a dip in large transactions. Because we handle anything from £10 to £1 million, in terms of the transaction size, so there is a big range. And I think we’ve seen less of the larger transactions, a little bit. But that’s kind of what you’d expect. The pound’s in the toilet, the Euro’s not doing much better… [On the political front] everything points to it being quite positive and having a pragmatic Prime Minister and Chancellor. And various hands in the government. But that could change… I’ve been broadly pretty impressed by how fast the new government has pulled itself together and seemed to be getting on with stuff. I don’t comment on political affiliations but I think having a full strength government that’s in place and is getting on with stuff is a major thing that you want — it limits the uncertainty. I would like to see them come out in support of tech, and I think there’s a new industrial policy that looks like it’s being formulated at the moment, and I think it’s important that technology and early stage businesses in the tech sector are fully supported as part of that. I haven’t changed my view. I think Brexit is a bad thing for the UK. And a bad thing for Europe. It’s fundamentally completely against the philosophy that underlies our business — which is bringing people together, and people moving around and sharing ideas is very powerful. And Brexit’s a reaction against that. So I think anything that says well actually we’re going to temper what we’re doing here and we’re going to take a conservative approach is great. I’d like to see the Prime Minister go farther and really consider whether it’s still the right thing to do for the country. I don’t think it is, and the closer we get to a ‘Brexit lite’ or no Brexit at all much better it will be for both the UK startup scene and our economic prospects in general. Geographic expansion was always on our roadmap but I think there’s a renewed urgency to where we need to locate ourselves. Like most tech companies we’re not just in one place. We’re in a whole bunch of places to make sure that we’re fully protecting our customers’ interests in what might be a situation where [financial] passporting isn’t universally accepted by the EU. At its essence, if the UK’s part of the EU you can get a license in the UK and you can service the 500 million or 600 million consumers who are all over the EU with your particular financial service, that you’re regulated to offer. If the UK is not part of the EU and there’s nothing that’s been put in place to keep that passporting process in force whilst the UK is outside of the EU then you have get a license somewhere else in Europe in order to service all those customers. That’s just fact. There’s not many facts in this debate but that’s one of them. Because we don’t know how that’s going to play out right now it would be remiss of us to just wait and see… Wait and see doesn’t really work for fast growing businesses. So we have to have a plan. There’s still no clarity on [free movement] and it’s still my number one concern. There’s been plenty of headlines out about this kind of thing… but it still seems very much up in the air so it’s still our biggest concern. Certainly from a business perspective we haven’t seen any impact — since the Brexit vote we’ve grown the most we’ve ever grown… and usually we see a bit of a drop off in summer, so we’re seeing the contrary to any drop off in impact… But as we’re growing and expanding we’re also hiring a lot and all across the board from developers to operations staff, which are engineering background to kitchen staff with the chefs, our entire team is full of European, non-British nationals, especially in the kitchen. Most of the top chefs in the UK come from Italian, French background. So this is definitely our biggest concern still and it’s a bit frustrating that there’s been no progress, or no information about how free movement would be affected even a month later. I haven’t seen a drop off in applications [from EU job seekers] but I’ve definitely had, anecdotally, a lot of questions and concerns from Europeans about the future — Europeans that we’ve interviewed for positions obviously concerned about the future. If they move to London now are they going to be able to stay for many years to come? They don’t know. There seems to be no clear cut-off point, because there was definitely a call for a cut-off point, some sort of date beyond which [their leave to remain status] was not guaranteed. And that hasn’t been cleared up at all. We’ve not seen a drop off in applications but I think there is a lot of concern about it. We’re going through a lot of expansion as the business grows, and as a result of that — and the uncertainty about the future — it’s very difficult for us to plan entering new markets. Because we don’t know what the impact will be even about Brits being able to go and work abroad. So people from our team here being able to go and lead new businesses abroad… Free movement obviously works both ways and for us there’s a big benefit from being able to send our key business leaders from here over into new markets. And it’s hard for us to plan that before we know what’s going to happen. But we haven’t made any changes in business strategy [since the Brexit vote]. We’re still focused on growing the business in London and the UK. And so far the business has been growing really well. The main concern I have is from a hiring perspective as we grow. We’ve not seen really any major new policies from the new Prime Minister or chancellor yet. Obviously we’ve had a lot of speeches about what’s potentially coming, and we’ve got a new cabinet, but we’ve not seen anything really in terms of concrete policies that affect our business so it’s not clear exactly yet. The only concern I have is that there’s been some talk about how the new Prime Minister sees corporate governance and wants to have much more influence on corporate governance. In our market there has been a lot of positive impact from EU regulation in the food market so for example the EU legislation on allergen labeling was actually a very positive thing for the food business because it was much less clear for consumers before what allergens were going into their food. And I think that that directive, which came from Europe, was actually a very positive thing. So you potentially lose a lot of that — so the UK will have to do it on its own. But my main concern is staffing as we grow the business. Making sure we can still attract top talent into the roles that we have, especially the chef roles, engineering roles, development roles. Because traditionally, up until now, we’re hired actively — in the UK as well — but very actively in Europe. I think the biggest impact will potentially be fintech. At this stage it’s far too early to tell — and no one has been specifically affected because there’s been no change… But there is some risk for fintech businesses depending on the rules around passporting of financial securities from the UK to Europe. The risk is much bigger for banks that are based here in the UK. That’s probably going to be the biggest impact but we’ll see. I’d hope that we’re able to negotiate keeping that. One thing that startups are pretty good at is dealing with uncertainty. We’re always operating in an environment of uncertainty by the very nature of what we’re doing — so increased uncertainty doesn’t phase us too much. I think where it is painful is where other businesses, potential customers, where it makes it harder for them to make decisions that makes it more challenging for us. But we haven’t seen too big an impact on that yet. Not much has changed in many ways. In many ways business carries on as usual. The biggest thing I’m worried about is that whole issue of open access to employees across Europe. That’s the one area where we have seen people questioning whether they should move to London, seeing a drop in the kind of activity around applicants from other European countries. There’s definitely a bit more hesitancy and obviously from our perspective we’re saying please come and join us, we will support you no matter what happens, we really believe this will be okay. But that’s probably the biggest impact that we’re seeing. And the one I’m most worried about. [Brexit’s impact on the economy] doesn’t make me worry about the prospects for our business too much. Our business isn’t hugely tied to the economy in many ways anyway — it’s not like we’re really feeling the heat of that. We definitely have seen a bit of a slowdown in terms of people making decisions and there’s a lot more umming and ahhing but it’s not something I’m worried about the long term effects of. For me, [Brexit] underlines the need for businesses like us even more. A lot of what we’re doing is building bridges between the different banking systems around the world. That’s the vision that we want to pursue and one of the ways I think about it is the more borders there are, the more bridges there are to build. And that’s a challenge but also an opportunity. And whilst on a personal level I feel the fewer borders the better, the reality is somewhat different and so we are trying to embrace that. Given that we’ve committed as a country to going down this path I think definitely the right approach is to say let’s not rush it, let’s get it right. The big question for me in my mind goes back to the labour point… this question of open access to labour is hugely important. The bit I still feel a little unsure on is it’s unclear to me how wedded Theresa May and her party are to the idea of closing off our borders. If that happens then I worry a lot. That will have a huge, long term negative impact on our country. It’s also one of the most contentious issues of the whole vote — one of the biggest reasons why Brexit happened was precisely because of this issue. So obviously it’s a very, very complicated issues with a lot of arguments on both sides. So who knows what’s going to happen there. We have been forced to be more currency movement aware. Almost our entire cost base is in GBP but increasingly our revenues are in USD or EUR, so we have needed to spend a bit more time making sure we’re not wasting money invoicing in the wrong currencies, and given the long sales cycles in our space, we’ve been careful to make sure quotes or price estimates are in the right currencies and have expiry dates on them. That’s the kind of stuff larger companies worry about all the time; I just hadn’t expected it to demand so much attention for us yet. I remain mostly concerned about the impact on growth and staffing — it’s the impact on people that is the hardest to do anything about. With the uncertainty around what will now happen and when — and the likelihood that this uncertainty isn’t going anyway any time soon — it’s really hard to assess the long term impact on the business. [Brexit] has influenced our short term strategy and — if it goes ahead — it will likely impact whether we grow our London team or focus hiring overseas to match our new business focus. Until there’s more clarity on exactly what is going to happen when we won’t be moving, but we are currently looking at taking advantage of the Estonian e-residency programme to ensure we’ll have no problems subsequently incorporating within the EU if the UK does leave. Until there is any degree of certainty on whether Brexit will definitely happen, and on what timescale, it’s not worth making other plans. It has put a spanner in the works of several EU projects we were thinking of partnering on. Our new business focus has shifted to the US… We think it was the right call. The market in the UK is a lot more uncertain and uncertainty leads to tightening budgets. I’ll be honest — I have no idea what Theresa May’s policy on Brexit actually is. It seems that the political expediency of saying “Brexit means Brexit” so as not to alienate a voter pool is almost all we have been given so far. Hard — and unpopular — decisions now need to be taken, in either direction, to resolve the uncertainty. That is all that matters from a business point of view. From a personal point of view, I would like the UK to find a way to stay in the EU and stay together as a union. I am concerned that stories travel faster than facts, and populism seems to be taking over as a result — whilst many of the socially liberal/left are interested only in facts. As Martin Luther King Jr said: “Those who love peace must learn to organize as effectively as those who love war” — and I think those words resonate really strongly with the Brexit vote, and the current political malestrom in the US surrounding Trump’s repeated and appalling soundbites. For us was particularly hard felt. 75 per cent of my team are from EU countries outside of the UK, we are backed by Seedcamp (whose biggest limited partner is the European Investment Fund) and 30 per cent of our customers are in continental Europe. In the short term, we have seen a small impact. Fortunately we drew down a large convertible note in Euros just before , but our salary bill has increased, as we pay some of our developer salaries in Euros. We have also had to issue to our customers on how may impact their legal contracts (we are a contracts platform). In terms of the future, we are feeling a bit more positive than we were. Anecdotally, we have not seen our ability to hire impacted, nor have we seen lower investment appetite from funders or a decrease in our customer acquisition rate. We are broadly adherent to the Saul Klein philosophy of ‘when gives you lemons, it’s time to make lemonade’. The fundamentals in London are good and we are bullish on its potential in the future. Where we still have concerns however is around certainty, and the government is not giving us the confidence we need to commit to stay in London. We have two main concerns. The first is that in the short term EU nationals currently residing in the UK may not be able to stay without applying for a visa. We are not so much bothered by the outcome of that decision – we can move very easily to Berlin if we have to — but it is the government’s sluggish decision-making that is most frustrating. What the UK tech industry needs is certainty and we are not getting it quickly enough. The second is that in the medium term there may not be sufficient appetite among the best developers, designers and marketers in the EU to come to live and work in London. London’s reputation as a leader in tech has to date been sufficient to draw talent to our business in spite of high rents and cost of living. Without that reputation, we may see our ability to hire the best people impacted. This is the line in the sand for us — if we can’t hire who we want to, we head for Berlin. A month on the main thing is uncertainty. You hear stories from people all the time because right now anything is possible post e.g borders and free movement. We sit at the intersection between tech and shipping, two areas that are seen as being potential big losers in We are very worried about the fallout and have already seen foreign companies ask us about duty rates for British goods post-B to see if they will increase, meaning they could potentially source elsewhere and hurt exports. Also speaking to US VC we can see a serious slowdown in the speed of talks with them, as well as a large global ecommerce group we were talking about a partnership. They have put it on hold for six months in order to survey the fallout from B Finally as a company we are live in the US as well as UK and are considering putting greater resource into the US market at the expense of UK development. A month has gone by since Brexit but in just the two weeks that followed we saw more resignations and sackings than the history of the whole Upscale group put together and more political instability than a banana republic. Startups are made to handle uncertainty and map a course through it, but I still feel intensely angry at having to deal with completely unnecessary obstacles: a nation knowingly inflicting self-harm. After all the parlour game manoeuvrings we at least have a technocrat now in charge who will stay on top of the job in hand, regain stability and be sensible. In impact terms for us that means at least no formal Brexit for two years. No real actual change and recession won’t be felt for another quarter yet. However, the mindset is forever changed and businesses have already reacted to the expectations: e.g. our trademark lawyers have already opened and beefed up their offices abroad in Germany and France. We ourselves have explicitly doubled down on international business development. We’ve also had to support one of our key suppliers who we pay in GBP by covering 75 per cent of the currency drop since Brexit which wiped out their margin overnight. The flip side of course is that we have become cheaper and more attractive to external investors. You’ve already seen a huge example of this impact with the two week deal by SoftBank to buy ARM post Brexit. But the biggest impact so far has been felt by our staff and potential talent. Significant destabilisation for our international contingent who feel that this country no longer wants them here. One employee’s French wife was told to pack up and go home on the tube, another’s Spanish boyfriend was left in the office of his architecture firm with another international colleague as his firm went out to celebrate Brexit on the 24th, with his bosses later boasting about how he was good value for money and couldn’t possible ask for a pay rise now. Another was shouted at and abused as he cycled home in Cambridge. A potential hire has failed to commit, seeking more time to evaluate whether Berlin should now be her focus instead. And finally a non-EU but international colleague has felt destabilised enough to seek out a particular academic opportunity and leave now because they feel the door might be closing because of what is coming in terms of immigration policy and academic research funding. For me and most of my friends be they Brits, EU or international citizens the vote on 23rd has had a fundamental impact on what we had taken for granted in British values meaning that we no longer see ourselves living here forever. That certain bond has been broken. Talent emigration is now more likely and more certain and government has a huge amount to do to rebuild and create a new tangible inclusive and attractive vision for this country. My most immediate front and centre issues are talent, talent, talent. Stuff related to laws, tariffs, trade — will take much longer to come to life and are outside of my immediate time horizon. Because I am focusing outside of UK in the main for business and investment, despite me not liking it, all the negative domestic economy issues will probably be monetarily beneficial apart from rising prices, i.e. we become cheaper through GBP collapse abroad; economic recession will depress office rents, house price fall or stagnation will mean more of my staff will be able to get onto ladder. But don’t get me wrong recession is BAD, BAD, BAD, full stop. I don’t want it. On a different note — journalists might now actually care about businesses like mine growing outside the UK for a change! We launched in Vietnam last week.
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Tesla moves forward on $2.6B SolarCity acquisition
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John Mannes
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Early this morning, Tesla announced that it had come to an agreement to acquire SolarCity in . Tesla first announced it back in June. In the wake of the announcement, both Tesla and SolarCity stock is being traded down. The . Rather, the deal will be moving forward at $25.37 per share. This is a loss of over $200 million dollars in SolarCity value over the last month based on shares of the company outstanding. [graphiq id=”2Y6j8TXlKfz” title=”Solarcity Corporation (SCTY) Stock Price” width=”600″ height=”617″ url=”https://w.graphiq.com/w/2Y6j8TXlKfz” link=”http://listings.findthecompany.com/l/15984994/Solarcity-Corporation-in-San-Mateo-CA” link_text=”Solarcity Corporation (SCTY) Stock Price | FindTheCompany”] When the announcement was first made back in June, . Unfortunately for SolarCity, investors didn’t get the same treatment this time. in sync with the announcement this morning, blaming lower than expected demand for its solar technology. Both Tesla and SolarCity filed Form 8-K’s notifying investors the companies had reached an agreement. SolarCity shareholders will receive 0.110 common shares per SolarCity share rather than the originally proposed 0.122 to 0.131. Members of both boards, including Musk, have recused themselves from voting on the transaction because of conflicts of interest. Tesla expects the transaction to produce $150 million in cost synergies in the year after the deal closes. The company wants to kick-back some of these synergies to consumers and make clean energy more accessible. Many of the synergies are textbook: combined customers and streamlined marketing. However, because Tesla has a retail network of its own, it will be able to sell direct-to-consumer right from its stores at the time a car is purchased. Tesla is now on the second part of its two-part master plan. The Tesla SolarCity acquisition represents the completion of the final goal in Musk’s first master plan. The decade old plan called on Tesla to “provide zero emission electric power generation options.” calls on Tesla to “Create stunning solar roofs with seamlessly integrated battery storage.” To create a truly vertically integrated energy company, Musk needs to own both power generation and the storage of energy produced. In time for its acquisition of SolarCity, earlier this week. At full efficiency, the factory will reduce lithium ion battery costs by 30 percent by 2020. To charge all these batteries, Tesla needs to get inside the solar market lickety–split if it wants full control of the space. To realize the full value that this acquisition could bring to Tesla shareholders, it is important to view the transaction in the context of Tesla’s future plans. Musk wants to push Tesla farther into the commercial space with electric solutions for public mass transit and cargo transport. Battery technology will not be limited to Powerwall and Powerpack in the future. To put Tesla’s hunger for batteries in perspective, the average car today can attain 25 miles-per-gallon while a semi in gasoline equivalent comes out around 5 miles-per-gallon. This presents both an engineering and economic challenge. Not only would Tesla need to supply enough batteries to close the gap, it would need to simultaneously reduce vehicle charging downtime while increasing battery output. Every minute spent charging extends delivery times. Every battery in a trailer results in fewer goods being transported. Tesla has its work cut out for it over the next decade. Investors are angsty about the acquisition because it means more uncertainty. Musk’s mission depends on success in not one but many areas of research and development. Autonomous driving technology could remove the driver all together opening up cab space for batteries. Reductions in the cost of batteries could open up Tesla’s technology to emerging markets. If Musk can catch the clean energy conversion at just the right time, Tesla will make a fortune that will bankroll other projects. Unfortunately, Breakout Labs isn’t funding Tesla right now and technical execution risk will reduce the value of Tesla in the short term on public markets. The transaction is expected to close in Q4 2016 after shareholders vote at their respective meetings.
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Skully officially admits it’s over
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Sarah Buhr
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It took more than a week for remaining Skully execs to admit to themselves it was time to shut down. But late last night the company finally sent customers an email, which was obtained by TechCrunch, telling them it has officially closed its doors. The startup’s troubles have been brewing for several months but came to a head two weeks ago when Skully’s board forced founders Marcus and Mitch Weller out of their own company. Days later most of the employees, including the engineering team, were let go and website sales for Skully’s much-anticipated augmented reality helmet were shut off. The site is right now due to what we’ve been told is a website vendor payment dispute. But the company is no more. Multiple sources inside Skully confirmed to TechCrunch the startup had run out of money and was trying to sell itself off to a subsidiary of Chinese conglomerate LeECo called LeSport. However, a number of disputes, including the possibility of an acquisition, how the founders were spending money and several manufacturing issues, caused a rift to form between the founders and investors. What was left of the executive team were left scrambling to save the company, even telling TechCrunch it was close to raising $6 million in bridge funding to get it through this mess. But it seems it was too little, too late to salvage anything. “Over the past several weeks our management team has worked feverishly to raise additional capital but unforeseen challenges and circumstances, beyond our control, made this effort impossible,” the letter to customers read. Skully says it is now filing for Chapter 7 bankruptcy, which also means customers likely won’t be getting a refund on pre-orders for the $1500 AR helmet Skully was working on. All of Skully’s assets are now subject to liens held by a secured creditor, according to the letter, which ended with an apology to those affected. However, there is somewhat of a silver lining for Skully’s customers. Smart bike tool maker Fusar has for the whole amount any Skully customer paid for their AR-1 helmet under what it is calling the program. Skully customers won’t be able to redeem the full amount at one time, but, says Fusar in an open letter on its website, they will have an opportunity to recoup the entire value of the original order over time and the company will only charge customers when their order actually ships.
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Are coding bootcamps only for the rich?
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Prasid Pathak
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Paul Fain, in , says one of the biggest criticisms levelled against bootcamps is they “don’t attract many low-income students.” The evidence certainly seems to support this. According to bootcamp industry-watcher , 79 percent of bootcamp students have a Bachelor’s Degree or higher enrolling. Additionally, Course Report found the average pre-bootcamp salary to be $46,600, putting bootcamp students . Furthermore, the true cost of a coding bootcamp is actually much higher than the tuition itself if you factor in the months spent unemployed during and directly after the bootcamp. This estimates someone making $46,000 annually would need nearly $34,000 in savings to attend the average coding bootcamp. Unfortunately, 62 percent of Americans have . So instead of modern coding bootcamps, low-income students are for-profit universities. The types of institutions known for , (the University of Phoenix’s six-year completion rate is just 4 percent) and . President Obama has praised coding bootcamps as a “ticket into the middle class.” If we want to make coding bootcamps more accessible to the people who need them most, we need to make two big changes. First, we need to offer financial aid options that allow students to make ends meet. Second, we need to consider part-time programs that allow students to work simultaneously. Many believe bootcamps aren’t able to help low-income students because the same type of federal financial aid isn’t available for coding bootcamps. To address this, last year the Department of Education launched the , a pilot to extend the federal student loan umbrella over a handful of coding bootcamps via partnerships with accredited institutions. Ted Mitchell, Under Secretary of Education at the U.S. Department of Education, the EQUIP program “represents a critical first step in broadening access to high-quality programs.” Provided that credible oversight is present, financial aid for coding bootcamp students can avail students of any income level to the technical skills for which there is high demand in today’s economy. Even with financial aid, low-income students are likely excluded from most coding bootcamps because they do not offer part-time options. We can see the importance that part-time options play in higher education by looking at the modern university student. Gone is the prototypical four-year, on-campus, full-time student experience. Instead, as tuition costs have gone up, non-traditional college students who work full- or part-time have become the new normal. According to the nonprofit , “75% of today’s students are juggling some combination of families, jobs, and school while commuting to class; according to the U.S. Department of Education, only 25% go full-time, attend residential colleges, and have most of their bills paid by their parents.” Universities have adapted, and many community colleges and online universities offer part-time options today. The same cannot be said of coding bootcamps, where only a handful are offering the same types of career programs in an evening/weekend format. Unsurprisingly, this lack of part-time options disproportionately impacts low-income students and students from underrepresented groups. For example, data from the National Center for Education Statistics shows that African-American students are 10 percent more likely to attend part-time (see ). If bootcamps really are going to be a path toward 21st-century jobs, as and the hope, we must expand financial aid and create schedule formats that enable lower-income individuals and adult learners with varied family and financial responsibilities to have the same path to modern technical skills.
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Mindshow turns you into a VR actor in your own production
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Lucas Matney
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For all of the talk there is about content being the one thing that’s really missing in VR, it’s pretty difficult for consumers to dive into VR and make anything. Visionary VR is aiming to change that with their new product called , which gives run-of-the-mill VR users the ability to dive into the medium and create a narrative from the perspective of the characters themselves. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2p9Cx4iX47E&feature=youtu.be Mindshow is an exercise in bringing content creation in VR to its most established extreme yet. Visionary VR has produced a tool that lets you define your environment, your interactive surroundings and the skin you inhabit. From there, it’s all about finding your childlike creativity and crafting something fun and memorable. “It’s about getting the recognition of life in something inanimate—something you created—that’s the feeling we had when we were kids,” Visionary VR co-founder and CCO Jonnie Ross tells me. I had the chance to get walked through a demo of Mindshow at VRLA by Visionary VR’s CEO Gil Baron. Of the dozens of demos I tried out at VRLA this weekend, Mindshow was the only one that left me both technically impressed and a little giddy. There’s something inherently powerful about seeing a character with your voice and movements play out a scene in an environment that you can control. Add in the social element of being able to take scenes from your friends and alter them and your left with a goofy, light-hearted creative medium that’s a blast to play around with and only made possible by virtual reality tech. In addition to the HTC Vive which I demoed it on, Ross and Baron tell me that Mindshow will be rolling out on the other major VR platforms including both the PSVR and Oculus Rift. Mindshow is still in its early stages of rollout and has just opened for early access to the platform.
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Neon Fever Dream is a gripping thriller set at Burning Man
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Contributor
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Below is an excerpt from
by Eliot Peper. Neon Fever Dream is about a dark secret hidden in the swirling dust and exultant revelry of Burning Man. It’s a fast-paced thriller with a diverse cast that weaves together everything from the ripple effects of the Sri Lankan civil war to the impacts of new technology on international organized crime. I chose this excerpt because it weaves together the most important elements of the story: international intrigue based on real-world issues, psychological thrills with lots of personal twists/turns/lessons-learned, and unique Burning Man setting. Bass reverberated through Asha’s body, and she let the rhythm guide her movements. DJ Xenn stood on a three-story platform, head tilted to press the headphone against his shoulder as he nodded ever so slightly along with the beat. Smaller stages stood to either side, the backlit shadows of naked dancers spinning and entwining on massive canvas screens. The crowd surged with the electronic crescendo, hundreds of wildly costumed people moving as one. Lynn grabbed Asha’s hand and spun her. Asha leaned backward as she came around and slid an arm behind Lynn’s back. Derek, Marlon, and the Vikings cheered the move, and one passed a plastic bottle filled with more champagne. Asha took a swig—the dust had parched her throat, and she welcomed the sparkling relief. Handing the bottle off to Lynn, she let the trumpets carry her into a series of whirling dance moves. Grids of multicolored lasers skewered the floating particles of dust and blasted into the night sky, perfectly synchronized with the music. A Mayan warrior emerged from the throng in front of her, gold and copper bangles scattering light in all directions. His movements were as graceful as a professional dancer and oversize pink sunglasses softened his angular face. Melodic undertones began to build on top of the synth beat. A beautiful girl with a short Afro in an olive jumpsuit unzipped to the navel swung a combat-booted leg over his thigh, and their movements became one with each other and the music. The crowd parted, and the couple’s movements mesmerized and inflamed Asha. DJ Xenn held a hand in the air, and the song reached for a climax along with him. The track crested like a tsunami, and the massive flamethrowers surrounding the circular dance floor belched seven-meter pillars of fire straight up at the stars. Heat rippled out over the dancers, and the couple’s lips met in a long, extended kiss that broke only when the girl pushed off the Mayan’s chest and spun away to disappear into the crowd. Asha turned to find Lynn biting her lip and staring back. Those gold and emerald eyes were hypnotizing. Supreme confidence and desperate loneliness wrestled in their depths. Cinnamon and smoke. “Come on,” said Asha. “Let’s get out of here.” The set was over. DJ Xenn spun a chill-out track and descended from the throne. The crowd milled and migrated toward the exit. They lost Marlon and the Vikings in the hubbub but didn’t bother finding them. Once Lynn and Asha had made their way out of Green Ocean and located their bikes, they started pedaling back to Camp Wino. The chilly night air whisked away Asha’s sweat and raised goose bumps on her arms. The glittering intoxication of the champagne waxed philosophical. Asha remembered cool evenings on the plantation, crickets chirping, tea leaves rustling, secrets exchanged. This was the thrill. This was the adventure she had been aching for. This was the pearl hidden in the oyster of life that her parents had never found. “On the drive in,” said Asha as they rode side by side across the dark desert, “you mentioned that you did some reporting on the Tamil Tigers.” “Yes,” said Lynn. The wind and dust had subsided, and they were able to ride barefaced. “Beijing was quietly sending financial and military aid to the government as they prepared for the final offensive campaign.” “Have you heard of the Karuna Faction?” Something cracked in Asha’s tone, like the first fault line to give way in an impending earthquake. Lynn shook her head. The leader of the Tigers had a falling out with his top commander and bodyguard, Colonel Karuna,” said Asha. “Karuna split off and formed an independent militia and then allied himself with the government. The government used them as a black ops unit, giving politicians deniability for messy wetwork. They disappeared political opponents and Tamils from all over the country, often demanding ransoms from expatriate family members as a fundraising mechanism. But I didn’t find out any of this stuff until after.” “After what?” Asha sucked in a breath. Her pulse was racing. She hadn’t ever told anyone about this besides Dov. She kept it locked away deep inside, but for some strange reason, she wanted to tell Lynn. It felt right to have it come out under a dome of brilliant stars in a place that felt apart from the world. “My parents are Sinhalese, not Tamil,” said Asha. “And despite the fact that their tea plantation makes them leaders in the local community, they’ve always avoided politics. They focus on the people they can talk to, see, and touch, not on ideological abstraction. So when the government started disappearing people in Colombo and Tamils started fleeing for the countryside, my parents quietly offered food, water, and sanctuary to the most desperate.” The night took on a silvery sheen, and Asha felt light as a feather. “Once, they even fostered a young boy, Rakash, whose parents had been killed. I was five years old, and he lived with us for about a year. I was delighted to have someone my own age to play with on the estate. He was like a brother to me, and we were masters of hide-and-go-seek. But my parents didn’t go to great lengths to hide their charity, and eventually word got out. Some elements in the Colombo power structure felt they were sympathizing with the enemy and undermining the government’s terror campaign against the Tigers, who were, if anything, even worse.” “The memories were buttoned up so tight that releasing them felt at once sacrosanct and sacrilegious. Asha glanced over and saw that Lynn’s face was tight, tiny lines forming at the corners of her eyes. “One night, after I had just turned six, five Karuna men showed up at the house. My dad hid me when he saw their truck coming up the drive. They beat him and my mom.” Dizziness rendered Burning Man’s neon midnight horizon dazzling. “Then they executed Rakash.” Something halfway between a gasp and a sigh escaped from Asha. “They were laughing as they drove away. It was all a big joke to them. Just another day’s work.” The words hung in the air between them as if branded in fiery script. They smoldered and morphed in the ensuing silence, taking on texture and weight. Asha was surprised to find that the admission made her feel more free than vulnerable. Secrets lost their power when shared. ���Asha, I’m sorry,” said Lynn. “I’m so sorry.” There was a foundation of gravitas under the words that made their stark simplicity more impactful. They came from the heart, a heart that knew pain. “I’ll meet you back at camp,” said Asha. “I need a bathroom break.” “I’ll go with you,” said Lynn, concern written all over her face. “No really, I’ll be okay.” She wanted a moment alone to pull herself together. Asha parked her bike and found a vacant unit in the long line of porta-potties abutting the street. She had expected them to be disgusting, but they were serviced multiple times per day and by porta-potty standards, things could be a lot worse. Regardless, she was glad she had a respirator. She closed the latch and peed. The EL wire stitched into her jumpsuit emitted psychedelic patterns of light that made the graffiti inscribed on every available surface roil and swirl. The hard walls of reality softened, revealing themselves to be nothing but permeable membranes. Her jaw opened and closed reflexively, and her tongue explored every corner of her mouth. Her heart rate accelerated, and her breath was hot, wet, and stale inside the respirator. It wasn’t a porta-potty. It was a closet. Light bled through the keyhole. Asha knew she shouldn’t look. No good could come from it. But dark curiosity metastasized into inexorable compulsion. It would not be denied. She didn’t stand much higher than the doorknob, so she barely had to bend over to glue her eye to the keyhole, vipers tangling in her gut. Her mother screamed before one of the men backhanded her across the face, knocking her unconscious when she hit the floor. Her father argued, then begged, then pleaded. But the men hadn’t come for words. They were not the kind of people who afforded words much weight. They tore off his shirt and beat him to within an inch of his life. Once they were finished with him, they abandoned him on the floor and hustled out through the back door, smashing things as they went. She heard them on the veranda. Laughing. Talking. Taunting. The gunshot snapped her body to attention. She bit her tongue and tasted blood as it echoed out over the tea fields. More laughing. Then an engine rumbling off into the night. She didn’t know how long she stayed in that closet. Finally, her father managed to pull himself over to her mother, checking her heartbeat and breathing with his broken hands. Ever so gently, he lifted her to the couch and then stumbled over to the closet, blood and mucus turning his face into a nightmare mask. Fear and confusion hummed at a high voltage inside Asha. This wasn’t how the world worked. Her father ran the estate. He was a gentle and well-liked leader within Haputale. People looked up to him. People respected him. The closet door opened, and he hugged her close, sobs wracking his body. His pants were warm and damp against her cheek. Eww. He had peed himself. Adults weren’t supposed to wet their pants. She pulled away, trying to escape. Gross, Thaaththi, you peed your pants. Although he reacted with a sad smile, she would never forgive herself for uttering those words.” You cannot control the world, but only you control how you react to it. Asha squeezed her eyes shut and shot out a hand. The plastic was smooth and cool beneath her palm. The reek of urine was coming from the porta-potty, not childhood ghosts. She was at Burning Man, taking a pit stop on the way home from a dance party. Haputale was a world away. Pushing her goggles up on her forehead, she swiped away the tears and stood. She walked her bike the rest of the way back to Camp Wino, letting her breathing and thoughts settle back into some semblance of normal. Locking it on the rack, she ducked under the canvas sheeting and stepped up into the van.” Lynn was lying on top of her sleeping bag, still fully clothed, reading a tattered paperback with a flashlight. Need welled up within Asha like lava bubbling to the brim of a volcano. Enough games. She knelt onto the mattress, gently pushed the book away, and slid a hand into one of the slits in Lynn’s leather costume to explore the flesh beneath. Lynn sucked in a breath, and her pupils dilated. Desire transformed from alluring to imperative. Asha leaned forward, and their lips met for the second time. What I want is to live my own life. The rest of the world could go fuck themselves. The sex was furious, tender, and heart-wrenching.
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Demystifying the booming mobile advertising market
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Eric Stein
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We’re on the verge of another digital revolution. I’ve seen it before, when I was at DoubleClick in 1997, and I’m seeing it now as begins to take over the hearts and minds of marketers, and corporations. At DoubleClick, I helped start our international operations and targeted large brands to convince them of the benefits of internet — “the most targetable media ever.” It was a tough job: The idea was novel and a little ahead of the at that time. (To put it into context, the was only sold on October 27, 1994.) I still remember the CMO of a Fortune 500 tech company didn’t even have email on her desktop in 1998. But the attention of consumers was quickly shifting to the internet, and the media spend had to follow. We used to tell ourselves that when the Top 10 online mirrored the list of the Top 10 in any given country, we would have arrived. Enter the dot-com . Many of these new companies had huge budgets, asked very few questions and were just throwing marketing dollars at user acquisition in whichever channel they thought might make sense — with web ads being the most popular. Driven by the spending frenzy from those companies, revenues from internet soared to an astounding by the end of 1999. However, the fundamentals underpinning the ROI of this spend were not really there (yet). The required level of customer acquisition was not attained; not enough customers were retained to sustain the level of expenditure. And the sole reliance on one single channel for user acquisition was never sustainable. Remember ? There were many more. *The first five years of internet advertising growth (1995-99) charted against broadcast (1949-53) and cable television (1980-84), presented in current dollars (adjusted for inflation). Source: IAB/PwC Revenue Report; McCann-Erickson By the summer of 2001, the dot-com bubble had burst and DoubleClick was no longer in the media business (and a lot worse would happen in September). From its peak in 2000, online would not recover until 2004. Of course, those who secretly desired for this new media to disappear would be sorely disappointed. The internet “scaled,” penetration and bandwidth increased, download speeds and the cost of technology plummeted and the internet morphed into what we have today. Consumer attention continued to shift to digital formats and the internet media in its entirety has taken the largest share (33 percent) in . growth picked up again in 2009, and this time is fueling the new wave of dollar spend. Apple launched the App Store in June 2008, and as we know it today started to take off. Consumers spend an of their time on devices, and device users have surpassed desktop users for media and website consumption. Similarly, spending now represents the largest share of total revenues. Furthermore, the discrepancy between consumption and dollars, a metric Mary Meeker has tracked since the early days of internet , has positioned the for further and faster growth in the coming years. To paraphrase Mark Twain, could the history of early internet be rhyming in 2016? Companies that focused on early have built huge businesses serving these . Take Facebook for example. revenues represented of all revenue for Facebook in Q1 2016, up 73 percent YoY. And app install ads already were accounting for of its revenue in 2015 — and the percentage can only go up. That number, as you can tell, represents a much higher proportion than the overall . Google claims that its app install ads product, Universal App Campaigns, has driven . With an , that’s about $3 billion in total revenue. Both companies have very good reasons to stay quiet about just who makes up that spend. Even a passing guess would not lead you to any of the Top 10 overall in the country. (This idea was recently , who stated that VC money was driving up the app install .) And again, the business fundamentals for traditional marketing are not there. What do I mean by fundamentals? It’s a mix of customer acquisition, retention and engagement. Marketers are paying anywhere and, yet, only 10 percent of those new users are using the app a week after downloading it. That means brands will need to make $30 per acquired user . There are not many businesses that can sustain customer acquisition costs of that nature. At the same time, the growth of and evidence that the app is a much preferred user experience is leading to increased focus on the part of traditional marketers who realize that they need to use this channel to fully engage today’s consumer. Consumers — at every step of the funnel — in a app than they do on the web (and even better than desktop), and convert at anywhere from 100 percent to 300 percent better than web. Furthermore, according to a , app users spend more than three hours per month on the top 1,000 apps, which is 18x greater than what web visitors spend on the top 1,000 web properties. The early money in app was spent by companies that had few other options when it comes to app marketing. When you are an app-only or app-heavy company, app install ads are the only quick and easy way to acquire new users. In fact, those are the types of companies that make up most of the highest spenders on these types of ads. Here are the Top 10 fastest growing apps within the 50-100 million range (as a proxy for app ads spend): Opera Mini web browser Uber File Commander – File Manager Sing! Karaoke by Smule SimSimi by simsimi inc. Kika Keyboard – Emoji, GIFs Slither.io Clash Royale SuperB Cleaner (Boost & Clean) Microsoft Word Source: , which specializes in app and analytics In fact, Chris Cunningham, global head of and brand partnerships at IronSource, “what’s driving budgets is not brands like Coca-Cola but gaming companies and lifestyle apps.” As more traditional marketers recognize the opportunity in engaging their consumers through apps, they won’t be as single-channel dependent. They will start to diversify their strategy and continue to acquire new customers in various channels and focus on converting their existing customers into new app users (and more engaged customers) through those traditional channels. Looking for ways to seamlessly integrate their apps into their other marketing channels will be increasingly important, and they’ll be able to grow their business without spending the exorbitant prices that many of the early adopters have needed to. Don’t look for me to be shorting Facebook or Google (I own both); they have too strong a business and amazing growth opportunities in . But I do think their reliance on app install ads is disproportionate, and it will recalibrate as the moves toward the Top 10 matching the Top 10 overall. Just like what happened with internet in the early aughts.
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Reminder: We’re meeting in Columbus on Wednesday
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John Biggs
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I’ll be in Columbus, Ohio, on Wednesday, August 10, to hold a night of pitches and open mic shenanigans so bring your guitar and pitch deck. The event will be at O’Toole’s 4796 W Broad St, right off I-270. We’ll start at 7 p.m. sharp with pitches, so get there after work. And at 8 p.m. we’ll have an open stage with live music – I’m going to play with my friend Rick so bring your phones – and networking. Want to pitch? . First prize is a table at Disrupt in SF, and two other teams will receive tickets to the event. We could also use a few sponsors for beer and what not. Get in touch if you’re interested. Also if you can think of any cool people who’d like to be judges, please let me know at john@beta.techcrunch.com. Special thanks to the folks at for grabbing the first round of beers! I’ll see you all next week!
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Gillmor Gang: Foot Traffic
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Steve Gillmor
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The Gillmor Gang — Keith Teare, Frank Radice, Kevin Marks, and Steve Gillmor. Recorded live Friday, August 5, 2016. The Gang is polled on Google’s AMP attack on the Web, the percentage of time on desktop vs mobile, and whether deep linking on Apple TV represents the new binge in media. Oh, and Trump meets FourSquare walk-in data on the latest G3 (below) with Mary Hodder, Halley Suitt Tucker, Francine Hardaway, and Tina Chase Gillmor. @stevegillmor, @kteare, @kevinmarks, @fradice Produced and directed by Tina Chase Gillmor @tinagillmor [ustream id=90315897 hwaccel=1 version=3 width=480 height=302]
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Tesla’s best-laid plans will have a challenge in convergence
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Richard Hui
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Driverless cars and ridesharing are poised to bring about the next big tectonic movement that technology provides for the human experience. In much the same way that the mobile phone has transformed the way we live, autonomous vehicles and transportation sharing promise to change the way we move. Tesla’s recent announcement of its exemplifies the of these technology trends. For Tesla, this is a natural evolution for the business that makes complete sense. There are many hurdles to overcome, but as these technologies develop, local and federal regulations may be the largest. Tesla’s plan believes that proper testing require approximately 6 billion miles (10 billion kilometers) in testing before worldwide regulatory approval be achieved. There is little doubt that cars reach a level of self-driving competence at some point. However, what driverless, shared vehicles mean and how they become adapted into today’s infrastructure could create problems as governments wrestle with existing infrastructure and deeply entrenched financial interests. The PC evolution, the internet, the switch from cell phone to smartphone, tablets and laptops — these are a few of the examples of profound introductions of new technology to our society that managed to cause evolutionary changes in our lives. Now both driverless vehicles and ridesharing can be added to the list. Auto manufacturers are already experimenting with and making investments into these capabilities: GM recently $500 million in Lyft, with Toyota suit in Uber and VW $300 million in Gett, a Tel Aviv-based ridehailing startup that operates in dozens of cities across Europe. The race is on. Mary Meeker, in her recent state of the technology industry presentation, a few slides to the intersection of ridesharing and autonomy. “Google wants to leapfrog straight to fully self-driving cars, which could take a while, Tesla wants to iterate its way there despite the risks of semi-autonomy and traditional car makers are combining the approaches while making strategic investments in ride-sharing startups… has succeeded in de-stigmatizing car sharing, and could achieve mass adoption as the time saved offsets the slightly higher cost compared to public transportation… questions to debate about how transportation change as autonomy makes cars into mobile living rooms.” The benefits of rideshare and driverless cars working together seem to far outweigh excuses to stay with the status quo. With the high costs of owning a vehicle, reduced interest in driving and potential revenue opportunities by sending your car out to earn income via rideshare, the new model feels overwhelmingly compelling. As outlined by Meeker’s slide: “ wane as its high costs and inefficiency give way to ride sharing.” As vehicles get into the market of being driverless-ready, rideshare companies provide an interesting option for owners of these vehicles. Although we are not quite there yet, solving the technology challenges that enable this new phase eventually happen. The revenue opportunity is too great and drive the innovation to commercialize as quickly as possible. Right now, most of the talk and focus has been on gaining acceptance by government regulators, mostly to do with security and safety concerns. “ are embracing self-driving cars faster than tech in the past, poising the nation for gains from the auto industry shift.” Still… there been significant, and tragic, accidents that may slow the adoption of autonomous technologies. With the of a Tesla driver using autopilot in Florida on May 7, 2016, government regulators may be forced to be more circumspect in their attitudes on how this technology progresses. To further add concern, another recently Tesla on autopilot certainly won’t help government speed regulation. Technology always evolves far faster than governments can keep up with. And as autonomous vehicles merge into the fast lane, understanding how they influence economies be critical. Knee-jerk reactions now could create large pileups down the road. Real-life examples of governments wrestling with ridesharing services are evident already. Take a look at , where recent intervention by the city’s government prompted Lyft and Uber to pull out of what had been a successful area for them. Some local governments banded together to come up with solutions on how to handle how rideshare companies integrate with their cities. From New York and Toronto to Athens and Barcelona, mayors are to deal with the changing situation. By combining ridesharing and driverless cars, companies are creating the potential for even more pressing issues for local governments on the horizon. With increasing populations and aging infrastructure, the cost of road maintenance and public transportation infrastructure seems to increase every year. The typical strategy has been to offload those additional costs through taxes on things such as gas, parking, insurance payments, tolls or even pay-per-mileage recently introduced in . Driverless cars and rideshare the potential to significantly reduce cars on the road and negatively impact revenues needed to support local transportation infrastructure. As owners of cars look to contract out their vehicles for usage in rideshare services to help support the cost of ownership, you’ll see fewer vehicles on the road. With EVs, hybrids and more fuel-efficient vehicles, fuel taxes are also at risk for decline. Increased carpooling also impact a reduction in the use of public transportation. Reduced parking and toll revenue combine with the aspects noted above, and jeopardize the amount of money that’s collected and needed to support local infrastructure. If driverless cars and ridesharing are going to be the next big thing, local governments need to look for ways to secure, grow and sustain revenue for the future. This dilemma potentially creates a barrier to the widespread adoption that would change the way we live. On one hand, you’ve got a technological and cultural shift about to happen, but from a tax point of view, governments create a problem for themselves by supporting this change. Despite doing what’s right for people and the environment, we don’t always see that playing out in economics. Uber isn’t accepted everywhere because it threatens local regulated, revenue-generating taxi services, even though it’s a great service for consumers. Meanwhile, people in communities where rideshare is restricted continue to pay higher prices to own vehicles. Until this problem is solved, you’ve got some local governments unwilling to move. Weave into that driverless cars, and you government’s seemingly working against themselves — if they aren’t careful, they’ legislate themselves into a deficit. The government is in total control of when and how these new technologies get introduced. Maybe they’ll decide to de-couple the rideshare from the driverless car, where people could still own driverless cars, but not use them to subcontract for rideshare services. Then you’ve got to restrict rideshare companies from owning their own vehicles now or face the same problem. Big decisions fraught with peril become evident from many angles. The overwhelming benefits ultimately see driverless cars adopted everywhere. And those cities that restrict rideshare be faced with even more questions by local residents critical of the decision that blocks communities from the inherent benefits. Governments to come up with different ways to pay for the system they’ve built, but their revenue requirements won’t go away. Perhaps driverless busses reduce the costs of transportation. Parking fees could be recovered by mileage tax, or charging drop-off and pick-up fees for rideshare trips. Maybe you’ll see chargeable driverless car “waiting areas” pop up. Or insurance cost-savings created by a decline in accidents could be offset by higher taxes underneath the noses of the consumers. One thing is for sure, these revenues to be made up somewhere. The question is where? With these questions still open, and a whole bunch of change coming, governments soon be in No Man’s Land.
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Airbnb raising a reported $850M at a $30B valuation
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John Mannes
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Tech unicorn and sharing economy darling Airbnb has informed the State of Delaware that it’s raising another heap of cash. TechCrunch independently verified that Airbnb indicated in a 28 page filing on July 28th that it has plans to bring in additional late-stage capital. Almost a year after its last raise of $1.6 billion, the company is said to be adding $850 million to its coffers, according to information While $850 million is a ton of cash, it is not the largest round the company has raised. Last year, in one of the largest VC rounds in history. The additional capital would only move Airbnb from the fifth to the forth most valuable tech unicorn at a potential valuation of $30 billion (tear). Mega-rounds have been popular this year with Uber raising from Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund. After the round, Uber followed up with , this time in leveraged loans. Even as a late-stage company, Airbnb has to be increasingly conscious of the capital it takes on. Too much equity dilutes early investors, while too much debt could put investors at risk if valuations were to suddenly tank. Debt as an asset class is paid off before equity. Airbnb has notoriously taken actions to strategically prolong an IPO, bringing on a $1 billion credit faculty last year to support growth without diluting investors. The company previously had , so while the round is large, it doesn’t deviate from prior anti-dilution strategies. With respect to deals that Airbnb reportedly walked away from, the $850 million dollar deal is tame. The Wall Street Journal Airbnb left money on the table, rejecting a deal that would have valued the company at $34 billion. Also according to the WSJ, to buy approximately $200 million in stock from employees in a buyback program. Stock buyback programs are particularly common among late-stage companies looking to remain private while offering some liquidity to early employees. Buyback programs are catered towards employees rather than venture investors and typically only apply to common stock. Early investors would have to be bought off the company’s cap-table to remove any pressure from preferred stock holders. Sequoia led a $615,000 seed round in Airbnb back in 2009. According to PitchBook, Sequoia utilized its XII fund for that investment and all follow-on Airbnb investments. That fund was created all the way back in 2006. This all comes amidst legal battles at home and abroad. Most recently, Airbnb over a law requiring Airbnb to verify that hosts had filed with the city before advertising their homes. TechCrunch reached out to Airbnb and other parties involved and will update this post as information comes in.
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Stand up against the stand-up
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Jon Evans
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It’s custom; it’s tradition; it’s dogma; it’s a cargo cult. It is well-intentioned, but all too often, ill-advised. It’s done because it is the thing one does. It wastes your time, shackles your mind, kills your productivity. It is the ritual that so many software developers suffer silently through, every day It is the daily stand-up. I say to you: no more! Before I lay waste to my target, let me first say: it’s not awful. If your team is all in one physical location; if they all start their work at exactly the same time; and if the stand-up takes fewer than ten minutes, with any issues raised immediately assigned to be dealt with later by ad-hoc groups for whom they are relevant — in that case a daily stand-up is, indeed, an excellent way to maintain momentum, identify problems as soon as possible, and foster team communication. Which is why the daily stand-up became A Thing, back in the days of yesteryore when nobody on your team worked remotely, much less in entirely different time zones; when nobody arrived an hour earlier or an hour later than anybody else; when “agile development” was still about actually being agile. Those were the years. But this is today. To quote : In many places, ‘agile development’ has become codified into a fixed, carefully specified process of “standups” and “scrums” and “sprints,” which is darkly ironic given that the key principles of the Agile Manifesto include “value individuals and interactions over processes and tools” and “value responding to change over following a plan.” So what did companies create and fervently follow? Agile processes, tools, and plans. Sigh. If you are a Certified Scrum Master, you are doing it wrong. Similarly, if you have a daily stand-up, it should not be because you take it as received faith that this is a good idea; it should be because you have carefully interrogated its actual purpose and outcome, and concluded that it is worthwhile despite its significant costs. I’ll get back to those costs. First let’s talk about a stand-up’s intended purpose: to maintain momentum, identify problems, and foster team communication. Back in the bad old days the only alternative for voice communication was email. Today, though, we have tools like Slack, or the like. If your team is in constant asynchronous communication via Slack and its ilk, why do you need a synchronous stand-up? Conversely, if your team in constant asynchronous communication, do you really think your problems are so small that a mere daily synchronous stand-up will help? Now let’s talk about the costs. Yes, there are costs. There are costs, ones which are often essentially invisible to managers. For further explication let me refer you to Paul Graham’s excellent essay “ “: there’s another way of using time that’s common among people who make things, like programmers and writers. They generally prefer to use time in units of half a day at least. You can’t write or program well in units of an hour. That’s barely enough time to get started. When you’re operating on the maker’s schedule, meetings are a disaster. A single meeting can blow a whole afternoon… Worse yet: for a lot of people, their sharpest, most productive time is first thing in the morning. So standups face a catch-22: they either occupy the very best and most productive time of many developers’ days, or else they detonate in the middle of the day, generally requiring at twenty minutes of context switching before and after. Figure your stand-up lasts twenty minutes. Then the developer time it occupies, including context switching, is one hour per developer. Suppose your team has eight developers: then a occupies eight hours a day of developer-time … in other words, is equivalent to an entire person sitting around doing nothing, ever. Now, granted, some people may find greater cohesion, greater sense of purpose, a greater sense of belonging, from a twenty-minute meeting once a day. Sometimes you may have a specific need for the whole team to sync up (before meetings imposed by clients or executive, for instance.) Sometimes, again, you actually do have everyone in the same physical location starting at the same time every day, the circumstances for which the stand-up was originally proposed. But for certain projects, and certain teams — I would suggest of them — the stand-up can and should be replaced with the : as soon as every team member comes online in their morning (or evening, if they’re like some night owls or faraway contractors with whom I’ve worked…) they contribute to a dedicated “check-in” Slack channel or equivalent, reporting what they did yesterday, what they’re doing today, what problems and unknowns they face. As others come online, they communicate to solve these issues, via text or voice or shared screen, coordinated of course by your friendly neighborhood project manager. But not all at the same time. In this glory era of asynchronous communication, synchronicity is highly overrated.
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Canon presents strong case with the EOS 5D Mark IV’s 30.4MP sensor and 4K
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Stefan Etienne
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One of the most beloved camera series out there, the Canon EOS Mark 5D was due for a refresh. Announced today, of the EOS 5D brings a 30.4 megapixel full frame sensor with 4K video capability, so this is truly an elite camera. Some of the specifications that have come to our attention include a full-frame 30.4 megapixel CMOS sensor with ISO range 100–32,000; still expandable up to 50–102,400. Being a camera that’s suitable for many different shooting scenarios, Canon included specs such as 7 fps continuous shooting, a 3.2-inch touch screen and WiFi capabilities. For the first time on a EOS 5D, Canon included 4K video recording at 30fps, while 1080p HD at 60 fps remains as a staple feature. Canon cameras are well-known for their video capabilities, and if put through its paces, can produce shoots of merit — I’d have to evaluate Mark IV, of course. Perhaps some of the most interested additions to the EOS 5D is going to be the 61-point which is insane to even think of. Paired with dual pixel focusing technology (the same tech licensed to Samsung for its Galaxy S7 family of cameras). Meanwhile, Canon’s Image processor runs the show with a stunning 150,000-pixel RGB+IR metering sensor. It’ll come out in September for $3,499, body-only. If a lens kit is more to your fancy, then Canon will eventuality sell you a EF24-70mm f/4L lens for $4,399 early next month, or with a EF24-105mm f/4L IS II USM lens for $4,599 in late October.
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MIT spinout NuTonomy just beat Uber to launch the world’s first self-driving taxi
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Jon Russell
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for , but the U.S. giant has been beaten to the punch for actually introducing autonomous vehicles by a far lower-profile company that is working on the other side of the world in Singapore. NuTonomy, a three-year-old company that span out of MIT, announced that its first autonomous vehicles available for public hire have hit the roads of the Southeast Asian country today. The name may not be familiar, but this development hasn’t come out of the blue. Cambridge, MA-based NuTonomy has been working with authorities in Singapore for some time as part of the country’s focus on surfacing new technology. Indeed, the Singapore Economic Development Board itself was one of a number of high-profile backers to take part in in May this year. As we wrote then, the company plans to introduce a fully-autonomous “robo” taxi service by 2018. Today’s announcement is a major step towards that goal, but NuTonomy has been privately testing self-driving cars in Singapore since April. It is also conducting trials in London and Michigan, and counts Jaguar Land Rover among its partners. Singapore is the real test bed thanks to the support of authorities in the country, who are switched on by the potential to embrace technology to reduce congestion and cars ownership. The public trial is a world-first, but it is starting in a small, controlled environment. Customers can use NuTonomy’s app to summon a ride for free, but it is limiting availability to a 2.5km square business district area in Singapore — “One North” — with just a handful of cars, all of which are a Renault Zoe or a Mitsubishi i-MiEV. Like Uber, the setup does require some human presence. Each car will include a NuTonomy engineer who will “observe system performance and assume control if needed to ensure passenger comfort and safety.” The trials are likely to be hugely impacting for NuTonomy with the data captured from public rides going towards hitting that target of a fully self-driving car fleet by 2018. on timeframes for when Uber will expand its self-driving car push. That’s where NuTonomy has a huge advantage in Singapore, a country that is just 720 km square with a government that pushes technology through a smart city program which includes open data, APIs and more. “NuTonomy’s first-in-the-world public trial is a direct reflection of the level of maturity that we have achieved with our AV software system. The trial represents an extraordinary opportunity to collect feedback from riders in a real-world setting, and this feedback will give NuTonomy a unique advantage as we work toward deployment of a self-driving vehicle fleet in 2018,” NuTonomy CEO and co-founder Karl Iagnemma said in a statement. To speed its development, in a rare acquisition that could be worth as much as $600 million. , that’s a pretty quick and enthusiastic pick-up from Uber, to say the least. It makes you wonder if Kalanick and co made efforts to acquire NuTonomy, given that knowledge of its technology has been in the public domain for some time and it has clearly made progress, too.
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Crunch Report | North Korea Netflix Clone
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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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Fujifilm debuts improved X-A3 mirrorless and fast, weather-proof 23mm lens
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Devin Coldewey
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It’s a good day for photographers who favor the Fujifilm system. The camera company announced an update to its X-A series mirrorless cameras and solid new lens today. The X-A3’s main update is the sensor, a new 24.2-megapixel model — up from 16 on the X-A2. Unfortunately, although the megapixel count is similar, it isn’t the same sensor or image processor as you’d find in the X-Pro2 and X-T2, Fuji’s high-end mirrorless offerings — it uses a regular Bayer-type layout, not Fuji’s proprietary X-Trans (if you don’t know what those are, don’t worry about it). It does, however, have expanded focus modes and, of course, a few million more pixels on it than its predecessor. To videographers’ delight, the X-A2 will also now shoot at 60p, 50p, and 24p in addition to the standard 30p. No 4K, though; you’re limited to 1080/720 vertical pixels. This camera is at the low end of the interchangeable lens pile, meaning it’s aimed at a more casual crowd — the kind that appreciates a good selfie. To that end, the rear LCD flips up, and the camera begins hunting for eyes to focus on. You can also set it up so you hit the shutter button but the shot only fires when you and your friends all get near each other and smile. This is all on the well-established and charming retro-style, dial-covered body that Fujifilm has excelled in creating over the last few years. There’s an improved faux leather finish now, too. You’ll be able to pick up the X-A3 for $600 with the standard 16-60mm F3.5-5.6 kit lens, or less without. Get the black one. If you already have a decent camera body, though, you might be tempted by the lens Fuji announced today. It’s a $450 23mm F/2 that, unlike many of its brethren at that focal length and speed, is also weather sealed. Keep in mind that there’s not much point to that unless your camera is sealed, too — something that doesn’t happen until the X-T series in the Fujifilm lineup.
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Why AI consolidation will create the worst monopoly in US history
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Vinod Iyengar
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Forget Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump — we need a trust-buster like Teddy Roosevelt, who in 1902 attacked the Northern Securities Company, a railroad holding company led by J.P. Morgan and James J. Hill. Amid the flurry of recent tech M&A deals, you would be forgiven for missing a relatively quiet acquisition: Apple for around $200 million. On its own, the Turi deal wouldn’t raise eyebrows were it not for the record amount of M&A in artificial intelligence, with the giants Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Microsoft leading transactions. in any market is expected, but is consolidating at such a rapid clip, at such an early stage and by so few companies that there are strong reasons to be concerned. Congratulations should be extended to Turi’s founders and investors, and, to a lesser extent, Apple for reaching an agreement favorable to both parties. However, congratulations must end there. The biggest losers in the Apple-Turi acquisition are likely to be literally everyone else aside from Apple and Turi shareholders. But first, a bit of context: According to recent research by , mergers and acquisitions of startups increased by a factor of seven between 2011 and 2015. More than 30 private companies working to advance artificial intelligence technologies have been acquired in the last five years by corporate giants competing in the space. There have been six major acquisitions already in 2016. Alphabet’s Google is leading the acquisition race, having made around 10 acquisitions of or machine learning startups in the past five years, followed by Apple, which has bought three. To make matters worse, most startups have been acquired of their first funding round — demonstrating that it’s not so much a well-developed product that these tech giants are after, but rather the technical talent and intellectual property at stake. These figures are astonishing, and the Turi acquisition is emblematic of how the biggest tech companies in the world are in the middle of a shopping spree for companies. Google DeepMind CEO was right to point out that the benefits of should accrue to everyone, not just the few. “I think ultimately the control of this technology should belong to the world, and we need to think about how that’s done,” . Hassabis and Alphabet just happen to be one of five companies that are doing exactly the opposite. When five companies have dominant control over the talent and IP behind an emerging, potentially transformational field such as , it hurts everyone beyond the acquired and acquirer. This is true for a number of reasons. First, early-stage acquisitions stunt the growth of the industry as a whole because the acquired company’s products and solutions are often shelved in favor of the acquiring company’s existing product road map. The startup’s customers are also left stranded — Apple is unlikely to maintain Turi’s existing customer base — leaving them to find new business partners (who may not yet exist). In addition, walled gardens inhibit innovation in favor of profit margins. While tech giants may open-source non-critical components of their software, they’re unlikely to do so with their core components, as they want to maintain their competitive advantage. Collaboration and knowledge transfer are therefore discouraged. Any of power hurts end users and limits access to technology — and an is unlikely to be any different. Think of telco providers. One only needs to read a few online reviews to understand that being forced to choose between Time Warner and Verizon as your ISP is not a recipe for innovation or customer satisfaction. Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Microsoft likely continue to poach new and machine learning startups, regardless of the cost to end users or the industry as a whole. These companies simultaneously sit on vast stores of user data that are rivaled only by governments. Only by making machine learning and more open, transparent and shareable — the opposite of what’s happening now — companies have a fighting chance to make something that benefits everyone. At the beginning of the 20th century, Teddy Roosevelt changed the course of American economic by leading the charge against the monopolies of his day, such as those that dominated the oil and steel industries. Maybe it’s time for a little trust-busting in what may be the most important field of our day: .
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‘MegaMIMO 2.0’ wireless routers work together to triple bandwidth and double range
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Devin Coldewey
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Wireless interference is one of those things that we tend to not think about, because, well, we can’t see it. But routers are all over the place, sometimes several in a room when you’re in an office, conference, or campus — and make no mistake, it’s an epic battle at the frequencies they share. Some enterprising researchers have found a way to make those routers work together, though. Dina Katabi and her team at MIT”s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory call it , and they claim some pretty serious improvements: three times better data transfer speeds and doubled range. “In today’s wireless world, you can’t solve spectrum crunch by throwing more transmitters at the problem, because they will all still be interfering with one another,” said MIT grad student and lead author Ezzeldin Hamed. “The answer is to have all those access points work with each other simultaneously to efficiently use the available spectrum.” Essentially the team created a technique for letting multiple routers harmoniously send multiple streams of data to multiple targets without those streams crossing. It’s done by aligning the phase of the transmissions — look, don’t question it, it’s science. The specifics can be found in the paper describing the method, , which will be presented next week at . It does require custom hardware at this point, but nothing outlandish or big. It’s also “soon-to-be-commercialized,” which could mean integration with established router or making a brand new one — and the team also notes that the same technique could be applied to cellular networks, although of course it would require a bit of tweaking.
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Vish Banthia
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Uber offers retirement plans to drivers as legal battle continues
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Kate Conger
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Uber drivers are being given the opportunity to save for retirement. The announcement comes as Uber’s legal battle over whether it should categorize drivers as employees or independent contractors continues, and Uber tells TechCrunch that it designed the retirement savings feature based on driver feedback. Last week, a Uber had reached with San Francisco and Massachusetts drivers over their employment categorization. Some drivers spoke out about the settlement, saying they were shortchanged, and U.S. District Judge Edward Chen appeared to agree — he called the settlement unfair for drivers. However, Judge Chen’s interpretation of the law may push many drivers, who sued over the lack of reimbursement for expenses and notice before termination, out of the settlement. “It now seems very likely that the scope of this case may be drastically reduced to about 8,000 drivers,” the drivers’ attorney, Shannon Liss-Riordan, told . Retirement plans are typically part of an employment package. By offering the plans to drivers, Uber seems to be softening its strict stance that drivers are contractors. However, the plans won’t change drivers’ employment classification — Uber won’t match any of the funds drivers save through the plan, as employers traditionally do. Betterment accounts will be free to Uber drivers for one year (the investment company usually charges a small fee to maintain an account) with no minimum balance. After the first year, drivers will have to pay a discounted fee of 0.25 percent on the amount in their account — for instance, if a driver saved $5,000, she would pay $12.50 to Betterment. If an individual quits driving for Uber, she can take her Betterment account with her. Uber says the program is important because it will encourage the company’s 600,000 U.S.-based drivers to start saving if they haven’t already. “Nearly one–third of Americans have no retirement savings or pension. And research consistently shows that when people have access to a retirement account, they’re more likely to save than not,” Uber regional general manager Rachel Holt wrote in a announcing the program. A Betterment spokesperson said the company was uniquely positioned to win the contract with Uber because it has a strong mobile platform, in-app financial advice and low costs. Although Betterment hasn’t shared sign-up data, the company is prepared for 10,000 to 100,000 Uber drivers signing up per day. Retirement plans aren’t entirely new to the gig economy. Lyft began offering a to its drivers last year in partnership with another investment and savings startup, . Lyft drivers pay a flat rate of $3 per month for the Honest Dollar retirement plans, regardless of how much — or little — they save. Lyft also helps connect drivers with health insurance, roadside assistance and other benefits. Uber’s introduction of retirement plans earned some praise from Senator Mark Warner of Virginia, where the retirement plans have not yet been introduced. “Local and regional experimentation is crucial to developing a workable model for portable benefits,” Sen. Warner said in a statement. “I am encouraged that Uber is taking steps to be part of these conversations, and I look forward to continuing to engage with other on-demand companies and state and local leaders who want to be a part of this discussion.”
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MIT’s new way to make metal could significantly lower air pollutants
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Darrell Etherington
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Serendipity has long been a staple of scientific study, and a new discovery by MIT is no exception. Researchers at the school were trying to build better batteries, but . The study resulted in a brand new, far less polluting way to make antimony, which itself isn’t very applicable in a broader manufacturing context, but the method could be applied to copper and nickel, which are common ingredients in everyday electronics. MIT says that the new smelting method “virtually eliminate[s]” the greenhouse gas emissions that come along with traditional means of producing metals. Those emissions are consistently a source of concern from watchdog agencies like . The new process isn’t just better in terms of producing hazardous byproducts, it’s also cheaper according to MIT, which provides an additional incentive for commercializing it and applying it to more metals than just antimony. The smelting process itself isn’t entirely new; it’s a variant of the electrolytic process used to make aluminum. But it hasn’t been used to make antimony before, and explains why: “Antimony sulfide is a very good conductor of electrons,” [research paper author Donald] Sadoway says. “But if you want to do electrolysis, you only want an ionic conductor” — that is, a material that is good at conducting molecules that have a net electric charge. But by adding another layer on top of the molten semiconductor, one that is a very good ionic conductor, it turned out the electrolysis process worked very well in this “battery,” separating the metal out of the sulfide compound to form a pool of 99.9 percent pure antimony at the bottom of their cell, while pure sulfur gas accumulated at the top, where it could be collected for use as a chemical feedstock. While the original goal of the project was to charge this so-called battery, what happened instead was the production of antimony, with the added benefit of capturing the sulfur, which ordinarily bonds with oxygen in the air during the process used to smelt the metal today, resulting in a pollutant that’s a major contributor to acid rain. Theoretically, the process could be applied to much larger volumes of material, and to metals like copper and nickel, as mentioned. The types of metal it might work with are essentially limited by melting point — antimony’s is very low, while those of copper and nickel are slightly higher. Other metals like steel might be harder to make, because of the much higher melting point of the key steel ingredient iron. Still, it’s a promising discovery and one that could act as yet another reminder that accidental outcomes are the best kind when it comes to scientific research.
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Harvard’s Octobot is the first autonomous machine to be made with all soft robotics
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Devin Coldewey
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For years roboticists have been looking into using softer materials for parts rather than the usual metal and plastic — sometimes even building . But this Octobot from Harvard is the first that not only contains no hard parts but is also entirely autonomous. Robert Wood and Jennifer Lewis, both at the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering, describe the Octobot in a paper . The creation won’t be winning any awards for agility, but given that autonomy is generally created by a computer governing a robot’s movements, this is a significant milestone. “The struggle has always been in replacing rigid components like batteries and electronic controls with analogous soft systems and then putting it all together,” explained Wood in the . “This research demonstrates that we can easily manufacture the key components of a simple, entirely soft robot, which lays the foundation for more complex designs.” The robot is mostly 3D printed, and afterwards its body is inlaid with channels that both power and govern its movement. That movement is pneumatic, powered by gas derived from hydrogen peroxide, the robot’s fuel. It pushes fluid through the limbs, inflating them — and if it were only that, it would still be impressive. But the key bit here is that the microfluidic network is cleverly designed to feed back on itself, shutting down the inflation of one limb and starting the inflation of another in a predetermined sequence. It does its thing (such as it is) on its own, without any need for the researchers or environment to provide power or guidance. The microfluidic network, it should be mentioned, builds on the work of chemist and co-author George Whitesides, also from the Wyss Institute. Admittedly, it’s a vastly simpler machine than any other autonomous robot, but it’s also the first of its kind. Soft robotic materials are promising in many fields, but especially in those where the bot has to operate around — or inside — humans. The plan is to double down on the octopus design — a logical idea, considering the power and versatility of “the boneless one,” as Hesiod called it. The next version of Octobot, the researchers suggested, will be able to swim and interact with objects around it.
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HP reports better than expected $0.48 EPS and $11.9B revenue in Q3
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John Mannes
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After the close of the bell, technology stalwart announced better than expected numbers . This comes after a relatively flat week on the public markets for the company. Analysts an adjusted EPS of 44 cents on $11.44 billion in revenue. Instead, HP reported an EPS of $0.48 cents and revenue of $11.9 billion. The EPS numbers reported beat HP’s internal guidance of $0.43 to $0.46 per share. Third-quarter net revenue is down 4 percent from Q3 2015. As soon as the report dropped, HP stock shot up initially in after-hours trading, seemingly reversing a downward trend that began this afternoon just after 2 PM EST. Unfortunately it didn’t last long, and investors started pushing the price back down minutes later. The company has struggled to find footing after splitting back in November of last year. The HP reporting earnings today sells printers and computers, whereas Hewlett Packard Enterprise services businesses. HP Enterprise has a $36 billion dollar market cap while HP runs about a $24 billion dollar market cap. Both companies have seen stock price growth since January, but HPE growth at 43 percent significantly outpaces the 24 percent growth seen at HP. The printer market specifically is a point of distress for traders, with HP seeing double digit revenue declines servicing the space in previous quarters. In the report, HP noted that its printing business is still struggling, but that its PC business is stabilizing. “Printing net revenue was down 14% year over year with a 20.4% operating margin. Total hardware units were down 10% with Commercial hardware units down 2% and Consumer hardware units down 14%. Supplies revenue was down 18%.” [graphiq id=”jViw0VAaaln” title=”HP Inc. (HPQ) Stock Price” width=”600″ height=”617″ url=”https://w.graphiq.com/w/jViw0VAaaln” link=”http://listings.findthecompany.com/l/1171342/Hp-Inc-in-Palo-Alto-CA” link_text=”HP Inc. (HPQ) Stock Price | FindTheCompany” ] We are updating this post with additional analysis from the HP earnings call.
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Whisker sensors could control the robots of the future
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John Biggs
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Rats and other whiskered animals use senses that we don’t yet possess. In addition to being able to run mazes and lick our faces to confirm we aren’t covered in BBQ sauce, scientists have confirmed that some animals use their flowing front whiskers to sense wind position, a technique that could be used in future direction-sensing robots. A team of students working at Northwestern’s McCormick School of Engineering have found that rats “use their whiskers to help locate airflow sources.” While this seems like common sense, there has been no way to prove this until now. During the trials some of the rats were given a painless whisker haircut, a move that resulted in a 20 percent decrease in performance. The rats could have used any sense data to perform the task — from feeling the wind on their fur or sticking their little rat noses into the wind — but it was clear the whisker usage was far better at the task. “The rat clearly uses more than one cue,” said study author Chris Bresee. “But rats still choose to rely heavily on their whiskers, which suggests that whiskers facilitate wind-sensing even when wild rats explore naturally.” The team is working on artificial “flow sensors” that can be added to robots, creating bendable systems that vibrate in the wind. Receptors at the base of the whisker can then be read and translated into location data. This means future robots could use these sensors to read their positions, sense their speed or even move toward high or low pressure areas. “Estimating the structure of airflow is particularly important when locating an odor source,” said Professor Mitra Hartmann. “And odor localization is important for finding explosives, chemical spills, and biological agents.” Not bad for some foof.
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Customized online prescription acne treatment provider Curology raises $15M
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Matthew Lynley
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David Lortscher was one of a few dozen people practicing dermatology in New Mexico when he realized a huge problem in the field: There weren’t enough dermatologists, and people were skipping out on visits because they thought it was for more affluent people or took too long. So Lortscher decided to start , which provides acne and anti-aging treatment and prescriptions through a visual diagnosis done with your phone, with his brother working remotely in Hong Kong to try to bring dermatological treatment to a more broad audience. Instead of waiting months for an initial appointment for a prescription — and then potentially months after that for a follow-up — the goal for Curology was to get the treatments into the hands of patients as quickly as possible. Users take a photo of their skin condition, which is uploaded to Curology’s team of dermatological specialists. They then decide on a customized treatment schedule and prescribe medication — generally in the form of a topical acne and anti-aging treatment — and send it to patients for about $20 per month. To do all this, has raised $15 million from , along with and in a new round of financing. Curology’s launch highlights some of the challenges of telemedicine. To basically become a fully licensed medical practice that can distribute its treatments, Curology had to become licensed in each individual state. The difficulty of getting each license can vary, but it still is very time intensive and can hamper the launch schedule of companies hoping to get a similar business off the ground. “At first we were pursuing making a downloadable app, and that didn’t make it into the final experience,” Lortscher said. “We started doing an HTML5 web app, we’re really happy we did because people who did want to sign up for this thing, they don’t want to go through the process of downloading an app first, they want to click right through the browser to get started. I wanted there to not feel like there’s any barriers.” Curology decided to go a different route in two ways: relying on medical professionals doing diagnoses instead of AI-powered image recognition, and focusing just on anti-aging and acne treatments that are easier to do with a visual diagnosis. That’s really all Lortscher had to do as a practicing dermatologist in order to prescribe treatments, which frustrated him that so few people had access to and were waiting so long to get treatments. “We do use photos, those go directly to medical professionals,” Lortscher said. “The interesting thing, you cannot prescribe medication using AI, that is not a thing. It would not be good medicine. These are prescription meds we use, and running that through something without a licensed human making the ultimate decision would be irresponsible.” The whole process of building the formula wasn’t necessarily easy either. Building the kinds of packaging and products for something like this requires a careful balancing act of ensuring that the ingredients both have a long shelf life and don’t end up deactivating each other. That includes both active and inactive ingredients, and figuring out which agents to use in the first place. There will be a lot of competition on the horizon. The biggest one is obvious: Proactiv, which has a massive marketing presence across a wide variety of channels and a huge install base already. If Proactiv were to adopt the kind of telemedicine model that Curology is starting to deploy, it could easily start chewing into the market and grow beyond its already sizable customer segment. But Proactiv, and other startups that might expand into acne treatment, isn’t worrying Lortscher — at least not yet. “That’s something that I’m sure some day will happen, the fact is we have 50 million people in the country with acne, 3 million of which are using Proactiv,” Lortscher said. “That’s way more than we can service in the next 2 years, and way more than Proactiv can service. It would be scary, but I think it would end up being immaterial just because there are so many people with this problem, it’s such a real need someone else taking half of the market isn’t going to materially affect what we do.” The company is also going to have to be able to train up staff (which isn’t exclusively dermatologists, but are all trained in dermatology and can prescribe treatments) that can quickly adapt to unique cases, like allergic reactions or treatment plans that aren’t working or making things worse. At the moment — and for the foreseeable future — Curology doesn’t expect to expand beyond its current treatments. That’s both because the market is so large and its current business is much more accessible with visual diagnosis. With those boundary conditions in place, that means that it’s a reasonable model to scale up as it can make the process of diagnosing patients more and more efficient. Moving forward, it’s time for Curology to start getting the word out there. The company is raising financing right now because it wants to start expanding its marketing — and, of course, the rest of the team, which is five times larger than it was a year ago. Thus far the company has largely grown through word of mouth, but applying similar principles that other pharmaceutical startups have used to grow — like paid acquisition on Facebook and other channels — may help it grow into that 50 million-person market Lortscher talks about.
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Payment innovation: Take the better option now
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G. Nagesh Rao
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During my travels through Vietnam and Sri Lanka as an , I saw and met with amazing innovators and change agents looking to build on their nation’s respective digital and technological economies. These high-tech entrepreneurs are working to ease and enable democratization of information and resources for those off-line and online in emerging economies. As technology becomes even more central to our lives, innovation is spilling over into everything on a global scale, including retail. And when small and great sums of money are on the line, you can be sure all parties involved will work tirelessly to protect themselves. Consumers are faced with more payment options at the check-out counter and online than in any other period in history: cash, credit, debit, mobile payments, biometrics — the list goes on. The embrace of advances in fintech inspires a notion of security and reduction in fraudulent activity. However, it’s necessary to examine what requirements should be prescribed given the digital divide that still exists in both developed and emerging economies. Let me preface this by saying this piece is not intended to be hostile toward innovation. In fact, I’ve devoted my career to championing innovation and believe technological advances have had innumerable positive impacts on our society. That said, every industry needs to seize opportunities to make better and more productive what we currently have, while simultaneously developing and introducing next-generation technologies. The current debate around payment technology and the fintech space is a prime example of this. When discussing advancements in payment options, many immediately think of PayPal, Amazon Payments, Google and Apple Pay, which garnered a lot of attention when they were released. Driving home this point are the on morning shows touting mobile payments as “the next big thing.” Thank you, Matt Lauer. But as reported earlier this year, consumers are simply not making the shift to mobile payments. According to the article, a recent eMarketer survey found that an estimated $8.7 billion in purchases were made with phones in 2015, a paltry 0.2 percent of the estimated $4.35 trillion of in-store sales last year. Another projects the mobile point-of-sale market will only reach 38 percent by 2024. So yes, Mr. Lauer, mobile payments are the next big thing — as long as by “next” you mean years from now. Mobile payments technology has plenty of hurdles remaining, from innovation to adoption to deployment. For instance, how many retailers — large and small — have payment terminals capable of accepting mobile payments? Not many. And while there haven’t been detailed studies tracking how many retailers currently accept mobile payments, studies have shown that of American retailers currently accept new chip-enabled cards — which is . In the end, it all comes down to having the most up-to-date payment terminals. If a vendor does not accept chip cards, chances are slim it is taking mobile payments. We’ll get into chip cards later. Adding to this problem is the fact that . Clearly, America is still far from adopting mobile payments as our primary method of payment, unlike the digital sophistication that has emerged in South Korea and Estonia. Yes, I said Estonia. If you want to study a digitally sophisticated and connected country, look no further than ! And lest we forget the constant worry among smartphone addicts (me included) that their phones will die. Trying to catch Pikachu on Pokémon Go will make swift work of a battery! So, on top of not being able to send a hilarious snap, if someone’s dead phone is their only form of payment, they’ll be in a very bad predicament. Better hold onto those Hot Topic gift cards. Jokes aside, there’s no denying that mobile payments are more secure than the old-school magnetic stripe cards. The most unsophisticated criminal can figure out how to program and deploy a skimming device to capture consumers’ credit card data and make counterfeit cards. However, credit card issuers and retailers have made progress in combating counterfeit credit cards by introducing and accepting chip-enabled, or “EMV,” cards. Every time a chip card is dipped into a payment terminal, a unique number is generated to complete the transaction, which can never be used again. This has rendered counterfeiting cards nearly impossible. Unfortunately, the transition to chip cards in the United States came with one major snafu: Consumers are still verifying each transaction with a signature rather than entering a PIN. Industry arguments and talking points notwithstanding, I find it hard to believe there’s someone out there who thinks signatures, basically an ever-changing scribble if you’re like me, are more secure and difficult to circumvent than a PIN. Nevertheless, there seems to be an endless supply of excuses for why PINs received the boot. My favorite BS explanation is that . Apparently there is an asinine argument that we Americans are really dumb, because people in almost every other developed country in the world have been verifying their credit card purchases with PINs for years, yet we do not. Surely if we can remember our garage door codes, ATM PINs, office log-in passwords or our smartphone passcodes, we have enough bandwidth to remember a PIN for our credit cards. So what’s the hold-up on making consumers’ credit cards more secure? In a surprise to no one, some banks and credit card companies are fighting tooth and nail against the idea because of the . Companies like Visa and MasterCard control the networks that process signature transactions, and PINs would add necessary competition that they view as jeopardizing their market power. It’s also clear that smartphone manufacturers like Apple think numeric passcodes like PINs are more secure than biometrics. If you haven’t noticed, you are required to enter a PIN when you restart your device, even if it’s programmed to accept biometrics. And if you try to access a page with sensitive material on an app — like paying your Chase credit card — you must enter a passcode. While biometrics can sometimes be used to verify your identity, passcodes like PINs are considered a more sufficient form of proof, which is kind of counterintuitive. So while innovations like mobile payments and biometrics may one day change the way we safeguard consumer financial information in the digital age, we cannot neglect the here-and-now of both online and off-line users. The overwhelming majority of Americans use credit cards at the point of sale, and it’s hard to see that changing anytime soon. Unfortunately, we’re falling short in protecting them, even though the remedy is both simple and in widespread use around the world. It’s time we pair chip cards with PINs to better protect consumers now.
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Astronomers have found the closest exoplanet to Earth
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Emily Calandrelli
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For the first time, astronomers have a planet orbiting our sun’s nearest neighbor. The newly identified (a planet outside our solar system) is officially the closest known exoplanet to Earth, located at a distance of 4.25 light-years away. They’re calling it Proxima b, and it orbits around our nearest stellar neighbor, Proxima Centauri, every 11 days. Astronomers believe Proxima b is a rocky world that’s a bit more massive than the Earth. Best of all, it’s at the right distance from Proxima Centauri to support liquid water on its surface. For these reasons, Proxima b may just be the closest planetary host for alien life. Proxima b’s orbit around Proxima Centauri compared to Mercury’s orbit (the Sun’s closest planet) around the Sun / Infographic courtesy of the campaign Compared to our Sun, Proxima Centauri is a smaller, cooler star. In the infographic above, you can see the area highlighted in green, which marks the Goldilocks Zone where liquid water could exist on a planet’s surface (an important ingredient to support life). This zone represents an area that’s not too hot and not too cold, but just right to allow for liquid water to exist. Because it’s a cool, red star, the Goldilocks Zone for Proxima Centauri is considerably closer than the Goldilocks Zone for our Sun (outside the space shown in the infographic above). Compared to Earth, Proxima b’s orbit is unique. It takes about 11 Earth-days for Proxima-b to complete one orbit around its star and astronomers believe that it’s very unlikely that Proxima b has seasons. An artist’s impression of Proxima b orbiting the red dwarf star Proxima Centauri / Illustration courtesy of the European Southern Observatory Also, because it orbits so closely to its star, it’s possible that Proxima b is bombarded with ultraviolet and X-ray flares from its host star, making the existence of life (as we know it) potentially more difficult. Proxima b is far from the first exoplanet to be discovered. Astronomers around the world have the existence of over 3,000 exoplanets to date. But Proxima b is special. It’s a planet similar in mass to the Earth in the Goldilocks Zone that we discovered around the solar system’s star in our galaxy. “Many exoplanets have been found and many more will be found, but searching for the closest potential Earth-analogue and succeeding has been the experience of a lifetime for all of us.” Guillem Anglada-Escudé, led the team of astronomers in the campaign to observe nearby stars Not too long ago, astronomers weren’t sure how common exoplanets in general were – let alone ones similar to Earth, which were assumed to be unique and probably very rare. And now we’re finding an Earth-like planet in the next stellar neighborhood? All of this makes the search for life elsewhere in the universe more exciting and more plausible than previously thought. “The search for life on Proxima b comes next…” Guillem Anglada-Escudé Discovering the existence of Proxima b is just the first step. Astronomers will now go to work to conduct follow-up observations of the Earth-like planet. With what they know now, scientists believe that Proxima b is one of our best targets to hunt for evidence of life elsewhere in the universe. And if they find anything? Well, 4.25 light-years is a long distance away, but projects like are already working on the technologies to travel to nearby stars like Proxima Centauri. So, in case we ever do answer the age-old question “Are we alone?”, we just might have a chance to go check it out for ourselves.
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Optimization startup SigOpt raises $6.6M
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Anthony Ha
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, a company aiming to “ ,” announced today that it has raised $6.6 million in Series A funding. When startups talk about optimization, they often mean trying out a few different variations and then choosing the ones that get the best results. With SigOpt, it’s more of a continual process, where the technology can look at your results and recommend what to test next. For example, SigOpt might test one set of ads, then, based on those initial results, use the same creative assets to create new versions with which to experiment. This isn’t just useful for improving websites and ads, but physical products, too — one of the first SigOpt customers used the technology to test different chemical combinations for shaving cream. “The things that define the perfect customer for us are some kind of sophisticated model or process in production that affects business value,” said co-founder and CEO Scott Clark. “When that’s the case we can fine tune that model or process to increase the business value that comes out of it. There doesn’t necessarily need to be a team of expert data scientists — they just need to be able to tune it.” Many of SigOpt’s early adopters come from the consumer packaged goods and financial services industries. Over time, Clark said the plan is to offer more of a self-serve product. The Series A was led by Andreessen Horowitz, which . Another previous investor, Data Collective, participated in the new funding, as did SV Angel, Stanford University and Blumberg Capital.
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Twitter’s new button lets you accept private messages from your website
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Sarah Perez
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Twitter today continues to push forward with its increased emphasis on its messaging feature, with the rollout of that allows visitors to privately message an individual or company directly. The feature, now one of several website buttons available, follows the company’s recent test of a change to brands’ customer support profiles’ that , not tweet, at the business’s Twitter account. In that case, a new “Message” button appeared on the profile on mobile – taking over the full space where “Tweet to” and “Message” used to live side-by-side. Early testers included big names like Apple, Uber, Beats, Activision, and others. Today’s update, meanwhile, is about making it easier to message a business from the web. The company already offered buttons for following, sharing, mentioning, and hashtags, but not DM’s. So, to some extent, this is just about Twitter rounding out its product offerings to be more comprehensive. Announcing our new Message button. Now people can easily slide into your DMs from your website. Get yours now! — Twitter Dev (@TwitterDev) However, the button’s arrival comes at a time when Facebook has been moving to make its chat app Messenger the default way that consumers interact with businesses. The social network , which puts a “Message” button at the top of the page, assuming the business in question uses chat. And earlier this year, including things like Messenger links and scannable Messenger codes for initiating chats, business usernames based on Page names, and Messenger greetings. Twitter, meanwhile, has become known better as a place where consumers go to complain when things go wrong – often posting angry tweets, with the brand’s @username attached. By shipping more tools that let customers take that sentiment to a private chat, businesses could then continue to use Twitter as part of their marketing, consumer outreach, and support strategies, instead of shifting all their communications to Facebook. pasted our user id and handle — Chirpify (@Chirpify) : The feature is functional, the customer above didn’t fill out the form correctly.
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CRV, the venture firm, campaigns against Trump in new statement
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Connie Loizos
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The U.S. presidential election is fast approaching, and a growing number of VCs who’ve historically shied from making taking sides publicly, are , , and about who they are backing and why. The early-stage venture firm CRV, formerly known as Charles River Ventures, is taking things a step further, having just published a called “F*ck Trump” about the firm’s rejection of Republican candidate Donald Trump’s “anti-immigration statements.” We talked with CRV general partner George Zachary earlier this morning about why it bothered. GZ: It doesn’t make a difference how he’s doing in the polls. We feel strongly about the topic. Several weeks ago, we had an off-site, where we talked about strategy and where we also talked about the election. And each one of us felt offended by what Donald Trump has been saying, including what he has been saying specifically about immigrants. Your grandparents were Greek. My father came from Greece. This country was built by immigrants. It’s time for us to speak up about it. GZ: And they’ll continue to vary, but we have to be authentic here and speak up on behalf of the people who come to this country and build. Half the teams we’ve backed were founded by immigrants. Our nine partners come from seven countries. GZ: We weren’t focused on that risk, but we don’t really care about that risk. Threatening immigrants coming in to this country — a country of refugees — is very scary to me. It would basically be cutting off the ability for new economies and industries to be built. Trump is entitled to his opinions, but I haven’t heard any other presidential candidate say the things he has, ever. GZ: Yes, we’ve instituted a program to pick up all the costs for the visas of our immigrant founders. We have one founder in the program right now, but that’s our policy from here on out.
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Halo 5: Forge gives PC users level creation powers on September 8
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Darrell Etherington
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, the level creation tool that lets players build their own worlds and create new game experiences for Halo 5: Guardians, has come to Windows 10 PCs. The free download puts gamers in the developer’s seat, and adds support for mouse and keyboard, and up to 4K resolution, likely beating out the Xbox One add-on in terms of giving you finer control over world building. Xbox One owners get another treat, though – Anvil’s Legacy, a free add-on for Halo 5: Guardians that adds a content browser to Forge mode on the Xbox. The updates also bring more parity between both platforms overall, which allows for cross-platform play of content made using Forge. The updates also add new weapons, new pas and new customization features to the Xbox One game. [gallery ids="1374326,1374327,1374329"] Forge for Windows 10 was first announced in May, and debuted on the Xbox One in December of last year. Its level building tools are somewhat reminiscent of Microsoft’s other big headline gaming property, Minecraft, but with more emphasis on helping players build new missions focused on multiplayer combat, with support for up to 16-player simultaneous missions on Windows.
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Best Buy bets on VR for the holidays with 500 stores demoing Oculus Rift
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Darrell Etherington
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Best Buy has provided in-person demonstrations for Oculus Rift basically since there were real Oculus Rift headsets to demonstrate – the retailer announced back in May it would provide demos at 48 locations in the U.S. Now, it’s doubling down on that bet, with a plan to give customers a taste of VR in 500 locations in time for the holiday shopping season, . Lest you think Best Buy is leaning entirely on Oculus to wow consumers with virtual goodies, the retailer is also going to be running demos of PlayStation VR in 200 locations, on a rotating basis among a number of stores. Sony’s PlayStation-based offering doesn’t come out until October, however, so Oculus could be the only game in Best Buy town for at least a little while. It’s a big deal for Oculus, since VR is definitely something that has to be experienced to impress, especially if you’re the average consumer who likely has only a passing interest in the tech to begin with. But Best Buy needs a win, and VR presents a potentially big one, especially for a big box retailer that makes up its margins in the sale of accessories. VR is partly driving a , and Best Buy is just littered with PC rig and PlayStation add-ons that could benefit from the halo effect of Rift and PSVR sales. But Best Buy’s bet here is likely more about experience than immediate return. Few people expect VR headset sales to burn up the consumer market in this, their debut year of availability. The HTC Vive and Oculus Rift combined, with mobile VR headsets like the Samsung Gear V, are expected to sell only around . Even at the top end of estimates, like (which even excludes Cardboard-type viewers), the category is modest relative to the industry’s big sellers, like smartphones and TVs. There’s no doubt that VR faces a bit of a chicken-and-egg problem in that you mostly have to try it to know you want it, and widespread demo station presence at Best Buy will help immensely with that. But that also means VR will get one of its first true large-scale market tests – and the results of that test could help define how much investment and effort goes into the future of VR from here on out.
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Leap Motion shows off Interaction Engine for their VR hand-tracking tech
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Lucas Matney
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VR makes the most sense when you don’t have to learn the controls and stuff just works. Today, Leap Motion dropped an early access beta version of their Interaction Engine which makes it easier for developers to build VR environments can adroitly manipulate with their hands. In a , the company calls the engine “a layer that exists between the Unity game engine and real-world hand physics.” The company already an early version of their Interaction Engine this past February with the “blocks demo” of their updated Orion tracking platform. The new developer tools are now available as a module for their . Leap Motion is quickly becoming the industry standard for VR hand-tracking tech and the feature evolutions they’re implementing are beginning to really leave competing companies in the space in the rearview mirror. This early access beta of the Interaction Engine gives developers access to the real meat of what makes Orion unique. Not only has hand-tracking recognition seen great improvements in finding the joints of your fingers no matter their position, but the team has made it entirely less frustrating for users to interact with in-game objects so that it’s clear when you want to grab an object or smack it out of your view. Leap is beginning to work with headset manufacturers on integrating their sensors directly into headsets, and although current owners of Oculus Rift or HTC Vive headsets can attach their Leap Motion sensors directly to their headsets and check out some short demos, it’s still in its dev kit stages so stuff to actually do is limited. Being able to use your hands in virtual reality can be more than just something neato, accurate hand-tracking tech helps users navigate VR experiences intuitively with one less piece of input hardware in the way.
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Crunch Report | New Tesla Model S Upgrade
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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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Ford leads $24M investment in India-based vehicle rental company Zoomcar
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Jon Russell
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Ford is continuing to invest in tech startups, this time with an emerging market twist. Hot on the heels of , the automotive giant has backed , a Zipcar-like company that operates in India. Subsidiary Ford Smart Mobility led a $24 million Series B round, with participation from returning investors Sequoia Capital, Nokia Growth Partners (NGP) and Empire Angels. The company’s valuation was not disclosed. Four-year-old Zoomcar closed last summer following . This new round — which had been as early as July — takes it to over $46 million in VC money to date. Zoomcar is a car rental service based on successful Western models like Zipcar, which was three years ago. The startup is based in Bangalore and it currently claims to offer 2,000 cars around seven of India’s tier-one cities, with 75 percent occupancy and 1.5 million app downloads. Ford was Zoomcar’s first OEM partner, and the startup said Ford provides “most” of the vehicles on its platform. “As Ford expands its business to be both an auto and mobility company, we are pursuing a long-term vision to develop services and solutions that make it easier for consumers to move through cities using multiple modes of transportation,” Ford Asia Pacific mobility director John Larsen said in a statement. “Our investment in Zoomcar will help strengthen the company’s role in shaping India’s developing mobility space and provide new transportation options to help make people’s lives better,” Larsen added. Zoomcar has major plans to grow its fleet of cars rapidly, and that centers around that is called ZAP, or Zoomcar Associate Program in full. That’s a hybrid model that lets car owners and Zoomcar work together to make a vehicle available for lease via Zoomcar’s platform when it isn’t being used by its owner. It’s basically an Airbnb for car ownership — although it only applies to new purchases, as laws in India forbid the sub-rental of existing cars. Here’s how it works: Zoomcar boosts its inventory by getting access to cars without buying the assets in full. Access isn’t 100 percent, but it could mean a car is driven when the owner is at work, on vacation or simply not using it. On the other side of the table, the setup helps car owners get a vehicle at a much lower price. First, Zoomcar matches them to dealers, insurance companies and others involved in the buying process, including favorable rates. Once the vehicle is acquired, it joins the Zoomcar fleet and the company pays the owner money when it is used. Zoomcar claimed that ZAP participants can expect to get around a 90 percent return on their investment in a vehicle, which is pretty significant if it pans out that way. There’s also a minimum guaranteed revenue per month and provisions to “make sure that your car is kept in top shape at all times.” The marketplace approach blows Zoomcar’s previous asset acquisition process out of the water. Not only is it saving considering sums on spending, but it has the potential to scale its fleet very rapidly. Indeed, Zoomcar CEO and co-founder Greg Moran told TechCrunch in an interview that he expects ZAP to account for 70 to 80 percent of all cars on the platform over the next year. It is early days, but Moran added that ZAP could make up half of Zoomcar’s vehicles as soon as the first quarter of next year. In the longer run, he said the approach can grow its total fleet more than ten-fold to 25,000 vehicles across 25 cities by 2018. Clearly then, beyond what Zoomcar is already doing, Ford has additional interest in the company since the ZAP program is an effective means to reaching and selling to would-be car owners in India’s billion-plus population. Might there be the potential for other collaborations? Moran acknowledged that Ford is one of the many pioneering self-driving cars — which — and other technologies, but he declined to say more on other ways they may work together. “Autonomous vehicles are not something we’re looking at in the near term,” he explained. “With a lot of these newer initiatives, there is a lot of red tape for permits etc. in India. With autonomous vehicles, there will be a whole new set of regulations and we want to get more regulatory guidance before” committing to investment and spending. “But it’s something that we obviously think about,” Moran added. “Ford was our first partner when we launched the business, and we share the same common values. They have a longer-term view on the technology, product and financing pieces.” International expansion is another topic for the future that isn’t a priority right now. “India is quite an ocean,” Moran said. “Although at some point in the next 24 months [expansion] is in the cards for us.” When pushed for potential expansion markets, Moran mentioned “big markets in Africa” like Nigeria, or countries neighboring India in South Asia, as places where the company can tap into its expertise and business without language being a huge barrier. Two years may seem like a while, but the Zoomcar CEO is confident that building a business in India stands Zoomcar in good stead even if others take first mover advantage. “Those markets right now are really untapped,” he said. “Even if someone comes into the markets [now], we will have a huge advantage based on our business… [such as] data on users, historical driving behavior, payments and all these elements that put this whole piece together.” More immediately, Moran is focused on growing Zoomcar’s reach in India’s biggest cities. Unlike rivals like ride-hailing service like Ola — which is closing in on 100 cities, and includes long-distance ride services — Zoomcar is deliberately moving slower with an “efficient growth” plan. “We will continue to go much deeper,” he explained. “Others have blasted out to 100-plus cities and kept very a horizontal strategy, but with around 80 percent of revenue coming from five or six cities, it derails them from profitability.” Zoomcar, while operating a different business model, is cash positive now, according to Moran. Don’t expect Zoomcar’s 185 staff numbers to rise fast, either. The company is seeking “a select few” hires on its business team of 160, including a COO, but again it is a case of slow and steady wins in the race. In theory, at least.
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Tech is primed for an upswing
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Ben Schippers
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The past 15 months has created a lot of confusion around where the sector is going. I’m constantly being asked by entrepreneurs if the timing is right to start a new business and would I invest in these current markets? Yes and yes. The endless chatter about the bottom falling out, valuations being too high (they were) and companies going out of business created a minor drought in seed and venture deals getting done and companies getting started. That time has passed. Drama creates page views, but the reality of the markets is simple: Interest rates are as low as they’ve ever been. Money is flowing and flowing at very attractive rates. If there’s ever a time to start a company, it’s right now. There are more engineers looking for work at this very moment and fewer entrepreneurs pitching. The timing is ideal. More importantly, venture firms are raising and closing new rounds. The majority of those funds must deploy their capital , so there’s a lot of money sitting around needing to find a home. Seed funds are investing at a normal rate, and, while valuations have swung back to a normal size, deals are closing. I’m not advocating building apps for the sake of more apps. Those won’ get funded. I would urge entrepreneurs to attain funds, while they’re available, for strong ideas, if it’s not at the valuation you think is acceptable. (The way around valuation discrepancy is to take less at a smaller valuation, keep costs at a minimum and make up the difference at the next raise.) There are areas that are more prime to start than others. Apps are great, but they’ve been done, so the barrier to entry is low. Consumers and the larger market have reached a certain threshold of saturation. As those markets have matured, as we’ve seen with others, entrepreneurs are having to solve more difficult problems to get ahead. After all, businesses that solve difficult problems provide value. In that vein, firmware and software coupled with hardware are required to power almost everything. Those markets are far less saturated and much more attractive for investors. Entrepreneurs should be thinking outside of the core internet. that are prime for discovery and exploration, mostly related to ARM chip architecture. Speaking as a fellow entrepreneur, there is not a better time to start a business. Keep your nose out of the blogs and see the forest through the trees. Be aware that the larger landscape paints a very different picture. It’s an ideal time to be building products — the markets from all aspects are prime.
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The 48 startups that launched at Y Combinator S16 Demo Day 2
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Josh Constine
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The world’s most prestigious startup school launched 48 companies today at part 2 of its Summer 2016 Demo Day. Nanoparticle analytics and delivery robots were amongst the products revealed in the B2B, biotech, enterprise, edtech, fintech, and hardware verticals. You can that launched yesterday, and from the first half of the batch. Here are our picks for the , with all of them below. Trying to distill trends from the hodgepodge of startups at Demo day can be futile, because the real winners are the ones ahead of the trends. For example, TechCrunch thought Airware’s drone operating system was a little too early in 2013. It turned out to be smartly ahead of the curve. Now you see lots of drone startups in YC, but many are chasing Airware which has gone on to raise $70 million. Justin Kan, Twitch co-founder and YC partner Y Combinator president Sam Altman explains “The best company at any given Demo Day is not the one that fits the theme of that Demo Day. it’s the one that fits the theme of 2019.” Altman cites the Alan Kay quote that “the best way to predict the future is to invent it”, adding “I think short of that, the future is basically unknowable. What I like about YC is the companies get to invent the future. They don’t have to guess.” One important development is that 30% of this batch’s companies were founded outside the US, a bigger portion than in the past. YC partner Justin Kan credits that to the program being around long enough that it’s funded successful companies from tons of countries. He says founders used to ask “Would YC even fund a company from Indonesia or Thailand?” but now there are role models they can look to. “The startup mindset has seeped out of the Silicon Valley” Altman tells us. “One of the things that will surprise people is how much of a world-wide phenomenon startups will become.” Altman notes that while tech has led to most valuable companies in the world being based on the west coast of the US, he doesn’t expect that to persist, so YC has to fund international startups. And now, here are all 48 companies that launched at YC Summer 2016 Demo Day 2: Drones present a serious threat to security. Every year, there are thousands of security incidents with drones that can include contraband delivery and near collisions with aircraft. ApolloShield is selling a device that can take control of unwanted drones, disconnect operators, and safely land the crafts. To date, the hardware can defend against about half the drones on the market. The company said that law enforcement clients need an average of five devices that cost $30,000 per device per year. Who knew there’s already a billion dollar-plus market for office snacks? That’s what Ohmygreen — a provider of healthy office snacks — is going after. The company already serves larger companies like Lyft and Amazon, and boasts a 55 percent gross margin. The company has an $800,000 monthly recurring revenue, too. Ohmygreen does 700 deliveries every month, but at its core, it’s a logistics company, CEO Michael Heinrich said. That makes plenty sense — it allows Ohmygreen to optimize its delivery network and supply chains for its specific kinds of snacks. “This allows us to get those gross margins, 55 percent is 3-5X that of industry leaders,” he said. “That’s the same as Twilio.” Student outcomes are as much a product of learning as they are a product of wellness. Emote wants to put powerful behavioral information in the hands of teachers before students even walk into the classroom. The company recognizes that 300,000 students are pushed out of class every single day and wants to do something about it by helping teachers recognize and plan for student interactions so that disruptions don’t occur. Emote will be in 33 schools by the end of September and another 135 by January. This represents 1.3 million in potential revenue and the company cites sales cycles of just three weeks. Payments processing is stratified across Africa. The continent is host to over 276 wallets, 500 banks, and 7 card networks. Flutterwave is producing an API for payment processing that can organize this market and create efficiencies. The company has already processed $20 million in payments over the last three months and stands to gain a lot from a 0.3 percent processing fee. In the last month, Flutterwave doubled its payment volume in an African market of over $360 billion yearly mobile payments. Services are available in Nigeria and Ghana and will be expanding to nine more countries by the end of the year. For scientists, applying to grants is a drag. It just doesn’t make sense for some of the most educated people on the planet to spend their time filling out forms and searching for funding sources. Instrumentl offers universities and research institutions access to a database of federal, state, and corporate money — for a monthly fee of $35 per seat. But Instrumentl isn’t just a database, it leverages machine learning algorithms to identify and push relevant grants towards applicable research. Scientists simply use the platform to build a project description and the platform takes care of the rest. Harvard, Yale, and Texas A&M are already using the platform and the company is generating 200,000 in annual recurring revenue. Oleg Rogynskyy and his team at People.ai want to help companies understand what sales teams are doing on a daily basis. People.ai integrates with calendars, phones, and emails and logs sales activity that leads to closing deals. The idea is that sales teams can track best practices from top performers and close more deals. Over 100 companies have partnered with people.ai over the last four months at a price of $50 per seat per month. Live streaming video gaming sessions may seem like a dream job, but it can be a lot of work to engage with interested viewers. Revlo is an audience management platform for streamers. Early users have seen a 40 percent increase in viewership time and a 2X increase in new viewer retention. Today there are 16,000 active streamers on the platform, paying $10 per month, to use its chatbots, leaderboards, and virtual currency to increase engagement. Quero Education is an ed-tech startup out of Brazil that is promising to help solve under-enrollment issues at Brazilian universities. Contrary to what most of us would think, coming from schools challenged daily by a lack of professors and dormitories, enrollment at Brazilian schools would need to double to just match the number of available seats. The company’s platform offers information across colleges in additions to discounts at over a third of schools in Brazil. Quero takes a 12 percent cut of tuition which averages $3,000 per year in the country and has generated $7 million in revenue at a 5X yearly growth rate. Many companies struggle to find working capital when it is most needed — the end of the month when employees and contracts need to be paid. Fellow is an API for invoice financing that removes friction for companies. The API auto-underwrites and finances invoices. In three weeks, four companies have started using Fellow, financing approximately $120,000 in working capital. In the past, companies had to either have huge revenue streams, or deal with months of bureaucracy to get credit lines from banks. HiOperator wants to help companies get access to customer service, no matter their size. The company scales phone, email and chat support services with easy integrations and a pay-as-you-go model that contrasts with other services that have large on-boarding fees. Ten companies are already using HiOperator, resulting in $11,000 in monthly recurring revenue. HiOperator’s services can integrate into key customer service platforms and centralize all information into a single platform. Innov8 wants to bring coworking to India in a big way. They group has already built two centers in the country with 100 percent occupancy and a 200 person waitlist. The spaces utilize differentiating design to convince a growing number entrepreneurs in India to pay the monthly fee. Coworking is burgeoning in India because of it offers reliable infrastructure while at the same time reducing costs. Innov8 charges occupants $150 a month, which represents an average of about a 50 percent reduction of office costs. Online services like CodeAcademy have been growing for a few years, but Vidcode wants to target students directly in their schools by providing projects adapted for a younger audience. Vidcode partnered with Snapchat to let students build and implement filters. Students can also use Java to build Pokemon and memes from scratch. The company is currently working to expand a high-profile contract with New York City Schools. Since launching, Vidcode is growing at 40 percent monthly by charging districts and schools $50 per student using the platform. Today, our email productivity is more dependent on plugins then the mail client itself. We use them for read receipts, for scheduling, and for contact management. Polymail wants to integrate all of these features into a core email service. The company is focusing its efforts on businesses that predominately use email services like Outlook to manage their communication. The well designed service already has 7,300 daily active users and 2,000 companies putting it through the paces. Taking a page from Slack, the service is free to teams for now and will be monetized with upgrades, including additional CRM features. Every week, veterinary hospitals have to purchase supplies from dozens of vendors. Amazon has been aggregating products online for over 20 years, but Vetcove wants to make sure that the veterinary supplies market is not ignored. By forging partnerships with vendors, Vetcove hopes to increase its returns. Having spent their lives working in the space, the team has leveraged connections to bring 1600 veterinary hospitals onto the platform in the last year, representing 7 percent of all the veterinary hospitals in the entire United States. From this large customer base, Vetcove saw $860,000 in purchases last week. Music technology today is highly compartmentalized. We have Spotify to play our music, phones and computers to store it, bluetooth to stream it, and Alexia to talk to it. Companies like Sonos have brought audio technology forward to the doorstep of the streaming generation, but Whyd wants to go even further by integrating voice control into the speaker itself. The company is working with companies that make products for audio mainstays like JBL and Harman Kardon. This week alone, consumers have purchased 50,000 worth of the speakers. Commerce in India is largely driven by mobile interactions over platforms like WeChat. Over 50 million small businesses sell over WeChat in the country. Meesho is an e-commerce platform for small businesses in India adapted for platforms like WeChat. Shop owners can interact directly with potential buyers. Businesses that use Meesho have seen a 30 percent increase in sales within a month of starting use. The company not only wants to jump on trends of mobile communication in commerce, but the overall trend of small businesses in India moving to digital platforms to manage sales. India is expected to see 10X growth over the next four years in this space. RoseRocket is helping trucking companies work with other trucking companies. The team recognized that most technology platforms servicing the trucking industry created tools under the assumption that trucking companies were in competition with other carriers. In reality, companies collaborate daily and most shipments spend time on other carriers trucks. At any given time, three million trucks are on the road, and 50 percent of orders are outsourced at some point during their transportation. The software costs trucking companies $10,000 per month. In addition to subscription revenue, RoseRocket also makes approximately $50,000 in commissions from each trucking company for facilitating connections. Mobile payments and even coupons have come to our smartphones, yet we still carry building access cards with us to work. Proxy is working to replace RFID cards with smartphones. They have created a sensor for doors that connects to phones. The readers work seamlessly with smartphones and do not require any application to be open when entering a building. Besides being convenient for workers, the readers collect valuable data on the number of workers in an office at any given time and the amount of time they spend there. Local governments use outdated phones, spreadsheets, and email to organize spending of over $1.1 trillion per year in the US on trash pickup, police dispatch, traffic lights, and more. Seneca System offers a software system that ties all departments of a local government together so they can sensibly respond to requests from citizens and each other. Seneca Systems already has big cities like Houston, Chicago, San Jose, and Boston paying for its $60 per employee SaaS, with 100 percent month over month growth in monthly recurring revenue. There are 10.5 million total local gov employees in the US, and 47 west coast cities in Seneca Systems’ pipeline already, meaning Seneca Systems is chasing an enormous market. If it can lock down the foundation of management infrastructure for local govs, it could expand into more IT services. There’s a new asset class for investors — and it’s actually in litigation, where investors help cover the cost of litigation in exchange for a share of the outcome. By 2016, it’s become a $3 billion market, Legalist CEO Eva Sheng said. That’s where Legalist, an algorithmic risk assessment startup, enters. Legalist gathers data from cases dating back to 1989 to figure out the risk and case duration for a specific case, gauging 58 variable correlated with case outcome. It’s basically quantitative analysis for case outcomes, though it’s “not Peter Thiel funding Hulk Hogan,” Sheng said. The firm has already invested in one case for $75,00, with an expected outcome of $1 million, Sheng said. Web publishers lost $22 million last year from having their ads blocked. 22 percent of US users have ad blockers, and usage is growing 50 percent per year. CoinTent helps publishers detect users with ad blockers, and either deny them access or let them pay $1 for ad-free access. CoinTent recovers an average of 25 percent of lost revenue, and takes a 30 percent cut of what it recovers. Eventually it wants to build a cross-web subscription service for ad-free browsing. With ad blocking rapidly growing, publishers need a solution, and CoinTent could build it for them. Fire alarms are everywhere, but there’s a lot of opportunity to go beyond that, James Popper says. That’s the goal of Amberbox, which is to not only detect fires, but also active shooters with gunshot detection. Going after just the existing market alone, it’s a $26 billion market, but Amberbox is going for a new subscription-style model. The devices network with each other in order to create a large system that can notify authorities and managers quickly and help them lock down entire campuses. The devices cost $50 per month, or around $1,250 per three-story building, Popper said, and the devices break even after around 3 months of revenue. There 12 billion food and package delivers in the US every year. But the on-demand meal and grocery industries are being held back by the high costs of human deliverers. Robby makes self-driving delivery robots that can autonomously navigate sidewalks to your door. Robby can reduce costs of deliveries from $5 to $10, to $1 to $2 each. Its MIT PhD-built bots have already made 50 deliveries, and Robby about to start a pilot program with Instacart. If Robby can make deliveries cheaper for the consumer, it could unlock enormous growth for the on-demand economy. Nearly every company is going to throw an event at some point. Whether it’s for employees in order to increase retention to throwing conferences in order to attract new customers, it’s a huge expense for companies. And the outcome isn’t always obvious, because there hasn’t been a strong set of tools to manage the direct outcome of those events. That’s what Eventgeek is hoping to do, plugging into multiple channels like Salesforce or Twitter to track new followers ro sales leads. The company charges around $10,000 per year, which with a market of around 250,000 companies represents a $2.5B opportunity, CEO Alex Patriquin said. The company is growing 48 percent month-over-month. 66 percent of US 8th graders have a reading difficulty level below their grade level. That means they can’t read their textbooks to study, so they fall behind. RocketLit re-writes textbooks at seven different reading levels and serves students the appropriate version. In a pilot, low performing students scored 90 percent on their science exams and every student went up two reading levels in a single year. RocketLit has $1 million in pilots set up, and is hoping to disrupt the $14 billion textbook market. If everything online adapts to the user, so should education. Last year, LinkedIn , an online learning platform. Online education itself has become a huge market. But the course completion rates and retention is far too low, according to Jumpcut CEO Kong Pham — because the lectures are simply too boring. He’s hoping that his team can build a company based around “Spielberg-like” online courses, starting with professional networking videos like learning how to network and become better at social media. The company has $85,000 in monthly recurring revenue and is doubling month-over-month with a $17-per-month subscription model. It’s going to be challenging for sure: it’s going to be hard to figure out how to make highly cinematic videos that go into tough subjects like computer science and mathematics. But Pham and his team — which have previously built a company in viral video — hope they can crack that market. Companies send CrowdAI photos, and the startup tells clients exactly what’s in them. It can recognize farm land, factories, oil rigs, and much more. One company uses it to detect the number of shipping containers in satellite photos of ports, and sells that data to hedge funds. Big companies pay a fortune for accurate human tagging, while small companies rely on computers that can be inaccurate. CrowdAI blends humans and machine image scanning to accurately and cheaply provide image recognition. It’s already working with Planet Labs and self-driving car company Cruise. With a team of technical co-founders, CrowdAI could grow to help industries like medical imaging and the military too. Trading on the stock market has become an arms race to build the fastest smartest algorithms. OneChronos hopes to level that playing field by bringing new trading mechanisms to online trading that reduce that arms race down to a more sane transaction system. The company syncs up atomic clocks to eliminate the need to race over a network, and building tools to help traders move more volume at a fair price. And it’s also letting customers run code directly inside the exchange in an additional effort to reduce cost for financial firms. CEO Kelly Littlepage says that it has signed 6 letters of intent — a $7 million revenue potential — but it has quite a few hurdles before launching next year, including filing with the SEC. But the hope is that, if all goes well, OneChronos will be a new, next-generation NASDAQ exchange. Oil, gas, and chemical companies have to send samples to a slow, expensive lab to test their materials. Validere makes a handheld device that can give results cheaper, faster, and without trained technicians. At $50 per test, Validere is 5x cheaper than labs because it uses liquid property indicators combined with computer vision algorithms and public databases of chemical properties. Validere already has $750,000 in paid pilot programs, and it’s aiming at a $22 billion industry. The startup’s team PhDs from Havard and other elite schools is solving the problem not just by shrinking lab equipment, but making it easy enough for any truck driver to use. It can be hard to keep track of everything that’s going on at a campus, whether that’s messaging between new student acquaintances that might have each others phone numbers or paying for school resources. OOHLALA is hoping to build a complete resource for all those tools for students with what Daniel Jameel, CEO of the company, says is a “mobile OS for the school.” That may sound pretty broad, but it sounds like colleges are starting to apply it: the company has around $1.5 million in annual recurring revenue and tripled in size year over year. The company charges $50,000 across a total addressable market of 60,000 schools — or a $3B potential market. The company has 150 paying colleges in 7 countries, Jameel said. Developers use GitHub for writing code, AWS for servers, and New Relic for monitoring, but they need something to manage how their code is deployed. Opsolutely lets them granularly push code to their infrastructure with dedicated software, instead of using expensive, custom, error-prone in-house scripts or Heroku. Opsolutely already counts GitHub and Eero as paying customers for its $100 per web service per month tier. With some companies running hundreds or thousands of internal web services, Opsolutely is entering a $3 billion market In Latin America, the ticketing process is even more of a pain than dealing with Ticketmaster and other ticketing services. In fact, customers sometimes even have to go to stores to pick up paper tickets that they purchase through Ticketmaster, Livement CEO Roberto Novelo said. Livement hopes to fix that by allowing people to not only purchase tickets online, but also purchase concessions within stadiums through an app. The company charges a 7 percent transaction fee plus a 25 cent charge for tickets, and Novelo said the company booked $500,000 in gross ticket sales in a month. Right now the company has signed with 6 teams, and is starting off in Latin America to start off given the pain points that exist there. While the wealthy top 15 percent have traditional and robo advisors to help them with finances, 100 million main street US families go unserved. SmartPath helps families track their expenses, complete online training, and earn rewards. Right now, they could score gift cards for getting smarter about money, but eventually Smartpath wants to get them lower interest rates on their loans. Though it sounds boring, 67 percent of users keep at it, and it’s growing 30 percent month over month. SmartPath charges employers $1 to $5 per employee per month. It targets them because companies already spend $800 million on financial wellness since it makes employees more stable and productive.
Would you pay $30 to get your medical records before your next doctor visit? That’s what PatientBank is hoping, given that the traditional process of getting records might involve actually physically visiting an office or ordering them over the phone. With that model, PatientBank has already gathered more than 10,000 records from 2,300 hospitals to date, and generates around $4,000 in weekly revenue in its two months of operations. Given that there are more than a billion doctor visits every year, it’s increasingly important to have an all-in-one place for medical records, but it’s been a huge challenge to move records from one health professional to another. PatientBank seems to take a more patient-centric approach, and we’ll have to see if that model pans out to be a good financial model.
Sales reps are bad at personalizing emails or contacting the right decision maker, leading to an average email response rate of under 3 percent. Saleswhale analyzes a company’s emails and makes actionable recommendations about how to improve. One pilot saw it raise a company’s response rates from 6 percent to 31 percent. Saleswhale is already working with huge companies in Asia like Grab, charging $75 per rep per month. For now it’s focusing on Asia, where it says sales tech is five years behind the US. There are legions of sales people out there, and Saleswhale could make them smarter instantly. Checking out is one of the most complicated parts of the shopping experience. Self-checkout kiosks can be painful to work with, and the alternative is hiring someone just to handle the process — and that’s all there’s ever been. Selfycart is launching in order to add a third one: checking out on your phone. It’s basically just an app where users scan products and pay for them through the app. Selfycart charges 2 percent to retailers per transaction, instead of the retailers having to pay for large checkout operations. Instead of kiosks, retailers only need a sales associate to validate transactions. Selfycart customers can use Apple Pay, credit cards and PayPal for their transactions. It can take up to 500 pages of documents to apply for a loan, leading 80 percent of people to go with the first lender they find so they don’t get the best price. Lendsnap helps compile the 30 different documents from a loan buyer’s online accounts, from bank statements to W2s. By charging $100 per loan, Lendsnap can chase a $1.8 billion opportunity. Eventually, it wants to pre-compile people’s documents to create a loan marketplace. Loans are already scary enough, Lendsnap could at least make them easy. Tracking construction issues can be difficult across a large number of construction sites. BulldozAIR wants to build a whole suite of tools that use mobile devices to keep track of all the tasks construction workers complete visually. Workers take photos of things like wiring issues, for example, and explain the technical components in the app. That information is then shared across the entire network, which BulldozAIR charges $290 per worker per year. That’s enabled BulldozAIR to generate $20,000 in recurring revenue this month, and targeting $36,000 monthly recurring revenue next month. The company is targeting Europe for now, but that alone represents a $3.7B market, CEO Ali El Hariri said. One of the most important parts of economic health is the ability to make purchases with credit and debt. But for immigrants in the U.S., they might not have access to credit because they simply have no credit history in the States. Nova Credit is looking to bridge the gap between the credit history immigrants have internationally with creditors in the U.S., giving them a set of data to make a call as to whether to issue a line of credit. Those scores are equally important when it comes to renting apartments or taking out loans, too. Each credit pull costs lenders $30, and with 10 million immigrants in the U.S., that already addresses a multi-billion dollar market, CEO Misha Esipov said. In the next two months, the company will link to firms in India, Canada and Germany, and expects to cover 90 percent of the immigrant base in the U.S. in a year. Most e-commerce sites just show the newest, cheapest, or best selling items first. NeoWize analyzes browsing behavior like clicks, hovers, and scroll-bys to instantly personalize the items people see. Pilot customers saw a 10 percent to 30 percent increase in store revenue. Now NeoWize is built into AbanteCart and is targeting other ecommerce platforms instead of individual stores to quickly scale out. It’s growing 70 percent week over week, and is now in 1300 active stores. If you don’t personalize your site, people will bounce, so NeoWize shows them what they’ll actually want. When you’re inviting a friend to try out a new product, the process is probably pretty clunky — you have to dig up the right contact, and for the app makers, it’s not as likely that they’ll get a high quality user. Ivan Kirigin, who ran growth at Dropbox for two years, is hoping to apply machine learning to a person’s private social graph (including their contacts and emails) in order to recommend the best people to invite to a new app or product. Starting off with business-to-business customers, YesGraph will rank invites by company email domain, job titles, location, and a number of other data points. And the more data about a person’s social graph and behavior YesGraph collects (privately), the better the targeting gets across all kinds of data points, making the results more and more accurate for other companies’ invite flows. If farmers have an opportunity to predict what’s going to happen to cattle as soon as they’re born — whether they’ll be susceptible to disease or need less feed — they can plan accordingly. But testing for those kinds of parameters can cost up to $100, TL Biolabs CEO Fred Turner said, coming from companies like illumina and eating up potential profits. TL Biolabs is trying to build a cheaper test — it costs $15 — using proprietary technology to get those kinds of predictions. By doing that, Farmers can optimize their operations in order to get the best possible outcome from their cattle. The company is currently running a pilot with the Scottish government to test 20 percent of the cattle born this year, which is a $1 million pilot, Turner said. Companies spend $61 billion a year on human bookkeeping, but computers can do it better, faster, and cheaper. Sway has built an automated bookkeeping tool that connect to online accounts like Stripe, PayPal, and other infrastructure to pull the data it needs. Instead of a person spending 10 hours punching that data into spreadsheets manually, Sway can do it in 10 minutes. At $99 per month, Sway wants to replace bookkeeping for 500,000 businesses. This job won’t exist in 10 years, and Sway wants to accelerate the change. Medical errors are the third leading cause of death in the US, and that’s partly due to inconsistency of care. Doctors and nurses forgot to check everything. Elemeno Health compiles best practices for hospitals into a checklist tool that ensures caregivers aren’t missing anything. Its pilot with UCSF saved three lives, over 300 hospital days of work, and $1.1 million. Elemeno’s co-founder worked on the frontlines of hospitals to gather the knowledge, and now he wants to bring those surefire processes to every doctor and nurse. When shopping for a home, there’s always going to be a huge cost that goes along with the mortgage: the utility bill. But that might be hard to estimate, especially when digging through potential homes on Zillow or other sites. UtilityScore is building a back-end tool that allows those companies to call up estimates for all 82 million single family homes for utility costs, giving potential home buyers more information when deciding whether or not to make a purchase. That information comes from a collection of more than 7,000 different sources, founder Brian Gitt said. That same data can also help companies like solar panel providers demonstrate to potential customers how much money they would save, making it easier to sway them. The same can be true to other home improvement providers and the like that might make recommendations on how to reduce those costs. All this leads to a total potential market of $1.5 billion, in which UtilityScore would charge around $95,000 in licensing on average per year. Recruiting can be expensive, but finding the best talent for your company is absolutely critical to success. But what often gets overlooked is that the people a company hires also have an opportunity to keep learning and become more valuable to the company over time. WorkRamp is building training software for companies like PayPal and Square that helps further train those employees, increasing the impact they have at a company over time. Sales representatives, for example, can come on to WorkRamp and record a pitch that their peers and mentors can view and send feedback in order to get better at their jobs. That’s one example of the exercises, which are designed to be more personalized. The company has booked $120,000 in annual recurring revenue from those companies already. One third of ambulance time is spent filling out paperwork. RigPlenish says it can reduce 40 minutes of paperwork per ambulance run to just 4 minutes. It charges $2,000 a month to automate checklists and compliance while improving communication between ambulance hubs and hospitals. It already has a paid customer and letters of intent from two more big players that together amount for 4.4 million ambulance runs per year. With 55,000 ambulances in the US, RigPlenish is addressing a $1.3 billion market. Next, it wants to improve the backend software for fire trucks and police. Responders should be saving lives, not doing busy work. By pumping nanoparticles into fracking wells and detecting what comes back up, GTrack can quantify the amount of oil and gas available to suck up. It allows oil and gas companies to learn more about where and where not to drill. In one pilot, a company spent $20,000 on GTrack, but soon learned it didn’t need to undertake a $500,000 cleanup operation. Its team has spent seven years working with nanomaterials and has three patents. Oil and gas companies spend $12.5 billion a year on production analytics already, and next GTrack wants to get into industries like geothermal, mining and groundwater remediation, and power plant runoff. Anytime fluid flow needs to be traced, GTrack’s nanoparticles could show what’s happening underground. —
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Listen to the premiere of TCBC, a new podcast from TechCrunch
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Darrell Etherington
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TechCrunch has a new podcast, and it’s , 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. It’s something new we’re trying, and hopefully it helps bring home the stories we cover here at TechCrunch, giving you additional context that can be hard to convey outside of good conversation. Hopefully, TCBC will help you get a fuller picture of the biggest stories in tech, with the perspective that you’d ordinarily only gain from speaking someone with deep, specific knowledge of the issues at hand. For this first episode, I spoke to TechCrunch policy and security reporter . We talked about Gawker.com shutting down, Defcon, NSA hacks and the impact of data security on the U.S. election, and more. You can listen via the stream embedded above, or , or in your podcast player of choice. Let us know what you think, and stay tuned next week for episode two.
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Narrative Science can now describe your Tableau charts for you
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Lucia Maffei
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‘s shares soared 13 percent on Tuesday following that it has appointed a new CEO and that the data analytics provider has partnered with a Chicago-based company that develops natural language generation (NLG) tools. The result of the partnership is Narratives for Tableau, a free Chrome extension that automatically creates written explanations for Tableau graphics. Let’s say, for example, that you have a chart — made with Tableau — of sales and profits of your business for a certain amount of time. The extension, which works with Tableau Server 10.0 or the free service, will generate a narrative description of the data by writing sentences such as “Sales and profit ratio moved in opposite directions from January 2011 to December 2014,” “This extension was built from an extremely close collaboration between Tableau and Narrative Science,” Stuart Frankel, CEO of Narrative Science, wrote in an email to TechCrunch. “While sitting outside the platform, the UI and experience feel similar to the Tableau experience.” Narrative Science is best known for a platform that can take data — say, sports scores — and turn them into stories. Narratives for Tableau is one example of applying Quill’s capabilities, Frankel pointed out. In an email to TechCrunch, Francois Ajenstat, chief product officer of Tableau, said the company did not provide funding for this project. “ Once Narratives for Tableau has generated the text, users can customize it by choosing a paragraph- or bullet point-style for the description, among other things. If users are not satisfied with the results, they can also make changes to the text. “Within the settings modal, users can add context about the data and turn on and off analytic packages to change narratives,” Frankel wrote. “In addition, users can copy and paste outputs from visualizations and narratives into external documents and make changes to the text.” Then, users can embed both narratives and interactive visualizations in a web page. The Chrome extension is a public preview that serves as a first step toward more deeply integrating advanced NLG into Tableau. Currently, Narratives for Tableau only works in Chrome. “That said, we are working with Tableau to determine the next steps for the development of the product including other methods of deployment,” Frankel wrote. The partnership between Tableau and Narrative Science was made public around 24 hours after the announcement that Tableau as president and CEO, effective September 16. Christian Chabot, Tableau’s co-founder and current CEO, will continue to serve as chairman of the board of directors. [graphiq id=”bPGRinYwsEB” title=”Tableau Software Inc. (DATA) Stock Price” width=”600″ height=”617″ url=”https://w.graphiq.com/w/bPGRinYwsEB” link=”http://listings.findthecompany.com/l/14692592/Tableau-Software-Inc-in-Seattle-WA” link_text=”Tableau Software Inc. (DATA) Stock Price | FindTheCompany” ] At the beginning of August, because of higher than expected expenses for the quarter. In New York Stock Exchange trading today, Tableau closed up $7.35, or 13.4 percent, at $62.22. Narratives for Tableau is available from the Chrome Web Store. A getting started guide is also available
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White House LGBTQ Tech and Innovation Briefing addresses national issues
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Megan Rose Dickey
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The country faces a plethora of issues that affect millions of people every day. Although there has been some progress as a society around pro-LGBTQ legislation and healthcare, there is a lot left to be done around poverty, criminal justice reform, federal statistics around LGBTQ people, youth solutions, mental health, the environment, education and inclusion in tech. Today at the White House, over 300 lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer people came together for the third annual LGBT Tech and Innovation Briefing to address some of our nation’s biggest problems. an engineer at Google working on the self-driving car project, a senior manager at Hulu, a data scientist at Tesla, someone who worked on custom gender and anti-abuse at Facebook, me (yay!) and many other technologists. The idea was to bring together some of the best LGBTQ minds in tech and include them in government processes. The day included welcome talks by U.S. CTO Megan Smith and Lesbians Who Tech CEO Leanne Pittsford, Ask & Offers from attendees, talks on issues like criminal justice and entrepreneurship and group breakouts on those topics. Keeping LGBTQ people at arm’s length has surely contributed to the marginalization of the community. It’s beyond past due for the government to ensure that everyone is represented in legislation and public services. Smith also mentioned how there are 22 million young people who receive free lunch and breakfast during the school year, but how that number drops to 5 million during the summer. There’s plenty of technology around restaurant and food delivery, Smith said, “but what about real-time poverty?” Examples of startups that are trying to effect change for marginalized populations include , which helps to ensure low-income students get access to meals over the summer, and , which helps homeless people access resources via crowdfunding. But startups working on real issues that affect millions of people are few and far between. Just think about how big of an impact the tech community could have on actual, life-altering problems people face in our society if the same amount of resources went toward them as they do to more consumer-driven products. The LGBTQ Tech and Innovation Briefing is also about building the foundation for the most “innovative and inclusive technology summit” this November, Lesbians Who Tech CEO Leanne Pittsford said. Visibility and representation matters, Pittsford said. That’s why today’s event, as well as the upcoming inclusion and innovation week in November, have intentional inclusion at the core. That entails representation goals of 50 percent people of color, 50 percent women, 20 percent trans and gender non-conforming people, geography, company size, type of company and skills. “We want to show the world this is what inclusion and innovation looks like,” Pittsford said. During the Ask & Offer portion of the morning, all of the participants gave brief talks on who they are, what they were looking to get out of the day and what they can offer other attendees. The offers included opportunities to work on tech that enables marginalized communities to improve interactions with police and to help with back-end engineering. The second part of the morning included lightning talks on the environment, women and girls, health and mental health, the Tech Hire and Inclusion pledge, entrepreneurship and innovation, youth solutions and programs, federal statistics on LGBTQ people and criminal justice reform. According to Denice Ross, senior policy adviser at the White House and co-lead of the Police Data Initiative, thanks to the Police Data Initiative, , 75 police jurisdictions have collectively released more than 150 data sets about policing, including information around use of force. “Two years ago, there were zero data sets about use of force or officer-involved shootings,” Ross said. “Now there’s more than 150 out there.” Moving forward, the Police Data Initiative’s ask to the LGBTQ tech community is for people to get more involved with their local police departments by doing ride-alongs, learning about the culture and then working to liberate data that’s locked inside legacy systems and offer data visualization to tell a more complete story of what’s going on. In the afternoon, we broke out into groups to discuss potential solutions across the areas explored in the morning’s lightning talks. That part of the day was off the record, but the point of it was to outline how attendees in November can dive right into the problems and start creating solutions.
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Live video minus Facebook equals Alively
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SMS is terrible, yet it’s still the way more than half of video gets shared on mobile. Meanwhile, Facebook is trying to turn everyone into famous broadcasters when most people just want to show close friends what they’re up to. That’s why Facebook’s product manager for Live, Vadim Lavrusik, defected from the social network to start his own video streaming called . With a camera home screen, Alively lets you choose a few friends who’ll get the link to your narrowcast. They can then watch your HD video in Alively or on the mobile web. Rather than focusing on real-time streaming, Alively video comes across 10 to 30 seconds late so it has time to transmit at the highest possible quality. Not only do friends get a more vivid window into your life, but the videos are sharp enough to be worth saving. You can keep them in Alively’s cloud so they don’t fill up your phone. In fact, Alively will prompt you to upload your existing videos to free up space. Alively hopes that by ditching the public streaming to which Facebook Live and Periscope default, you’ll be less shy about jumping in front of the camera. There’s no Likes, just comments. And instead of locking you into a social network, it’s built around your phone contacts, like how Snapchat started. “We want people to live in the moment rather than focus on how many likes they’re getting” Lavrusik tells me. “Teens on Instagram will post a photo and delete it if it doesn’t get enough Likes in a time period. ring back the purity of sharing.” To fund that dream, Alively has raised $800,000 in seed funding from some of the top early-stage social investors, Greylock and SV Angel. Alively is the kind of app that could have blown up if it launched a year or two ago, before Periscope and Facebook Live began to dominate the burgeoning mobile live streaming market. Meanwhile, mobile messaging apps like Facebook Messenger and WhatsApp offer a better way to transmit video files. Now, it will have to wedge itself in between the social networks and SMS, and hope to expand to conquer some of their use cases. The issue is that if these other platforms get better at narrowcasting, it could squeeze out Alively. While privacy, HD video and freeing up phone space are strong selling points, Alively will have to convince the world of the joys of close friend live streaming to succeed.
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New York Times journalists reportedly targeted by Russian hackers
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Kate Conger
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The FBI is reportedly looking into hacking attempts against U.S. journalists that may have been orchestrated by Russian intelligence services. New York Times journalists were among those targeted, and the report. The New York Times that its Moscow bureau was targeted, but said the paper has no reason to believe the attack was successful. It’s not yet clear why the reported attacks on the Times and other publications are being attributed to Russia, but CNN tied them to the recent . The security firm CrowdStrike tied Russia to the DNC hack after an analysis of tactics and malware used, CEO . An FBI official told the AP that specific reporters were targeted rather than the Times network as a whole. However, the Times refused to confirm the investigation. “Like most news organizations we are vigilant about guarding against attempts to hack into our systems,” Times spokesperson Eileen Murphy told the AP. “There are a variety of approaches we take up to and including working with outside investigators and law enforcement.” She that there was no evidence of a system compromise in any of the Times’s networks, including in the Moscow bureau.
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YC-backed CoinTent says it can help publishers deal with ad blockers
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Anthony Ha
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might be the solution for publishers worried about the money they’re losing to ad blocking. The San Francisco-based company started with a focus on paywalls, but it’s recently moved into offering publishers ( ) a broader range of solutions to deal with ad blockers. That doesn’t just mean inserting more ads. CEO Bradley Ross described CoinTent as “the full stack of ad-block detection, user engagement and recovery measures.” That can mean asking ad-blocked users to turn off the blocker or whitelist the site, hiding content from anyone with an ad blocker turned on or asking readers subscribe or pay for individual articles. Ross said CoinTent is also working with some publishers to create “ad-light” experiences so that they can still show ads without annoying readers with an aggressive, flashy experience. As for whether these types of solutions might turn into (or another metaphor of your choice) against ad blockers, Ross said he doesn’t see it that way. Rather than simply circumventing ad blockers, he said that at CoinTent, “Our focus is on, how do you create the right choices for the right users?” Ross said publishers can install CoinTent on their sites in just 15 minutes, then recover 30 percent of the revenue lost to ad blocking. A former product manager at Zynga, Ross emphasized the importance of testing different strategies and using different approaches for different types of visitors. “If you look at the game world, you segment your audience — who are our new installs … who are our users who come back every so often … and who are the whales who are just obsessed with our game?” he said. “That just wasn’t going on in the media space — everyone’s seen as the same eyeballs.” CoinTent is part of the current class of startups at Y Combinator. In fact, it’s on-stage today at Demo Day.
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Hollywood’s take on cybersecurity
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David Hunt
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It can be tough going to the as a expert. From the soapy stolen-identity flick “The Net” to the slick, punchline-packed take on surveillance depicted in “Ocean’s Eleven” and “Speed,” films handling the very real issues of internet security and modern computer science are overwhelmingly unrealistic (and far too reliant on Sandra Bullock). experts are a small and elite group, and, more often than not, feel the same way watching about our field that genuine medical doctors do as they watch Patrick Dempsey and Kate Walsh trade flirtatious one-liners over a flat-lining patient’s body on “Grey’s Anatomy,” or how when watching CSI. It’s entertaining, perhaps, but not enough to counter the cringe. This baseline frustration explains some of the crazy hype for “Snowden,” Oliver Stone’s hotly anticipated take on the most famous government whistle-blower of our time. Even the story of the film’s evolution is fascinating to those of us who work in the same fields as Snowden once did: Director Oliver Stone was so paranoid about the National Security Agency interfering in his project that he packed up cast and crew and moved the entire set to Germany — and even in Europe the long fingers of the U.S. government continued to stymie him throughout filming. Snowden, the bashful, bespectacled geek who has single-handedly become both the hero and the villain of a global debate over internet surveillance, is enough of a figurehead today to draw in crowds for this film. The star-studded cast, which includes Joseph Gordon-Levitt in the title role, also doesn’t hurt. But as we get our tickets and popcorn ready, it’s a good time to take a look at the rare handful of film and TV projects that actually got hacking, and the complicated business of security in the cybersphere, right. The ultimate geek-geist flick, this 1983 classic wasn’t just a great film — it was a real-world game changer. The film stars Matthew Broderick as a brainiac teen who manages to hack into the NORAD database. But when President Ronald Reagan saw the a few days after its opening, he was concerned. He gathered his chiefs of staff together and asked the magic question: Could this happen in real life? The answer, troublingly enough, was yes. As Fred Kaplan laid out in a in The New York Times, “WarGames” was the direct cause of the United States’ first-ever national directive to secure its computer technology. If that’s not enough box-office trivia to get the geek set salivating, I don’t know what is. Modern television audiences have two things going for them when it comes to tolerance for hacking plots: They are finally starting to understand that cyberattacks are real threats and matters, and, their taste, thanks to the injection of Netflix and Hulu originals into the marketplace, is becoming more sophisticated. So it was good timing, last spring, when the USA Network debuted its ambitious new drama “Mr. Robot.” The program, about a expert and hacker battling both a global corporation and his own mental health issues, soon developed a cult following and nabbed a Golden Globe for Best Drama. So what sets “Mr. Robot” apart from the other hacker series that have flooded the market in recent decades? Realism. This isn’t a sugar-coated, watered-down version of hacking made digestible for audiences who hardly know how to check their own email. This is edgy, gritty television, the kind that delves with equal boldness into the depth of mental illness as it does into the intricacies of ’s back doors and secret passageways. Audiences were ready to be shown hacker life like it is; as a result, the fan base grew and grew. The personal computer revolution of the early 1980s was one of the most important time periods in the history of American technology, and no television program captures it better than “Halt and Catch Fire.” The problem is that, despite being accurate, razor-sharp and genuinely entertaining, hardly anyone watched the show. And that’s a shame. The show is just as good at exploring the relationships that people have with each other as they do with machines, and today — 30 years after the PC revolution, when our lives are absolutely owned by our iPhones and our tablets and our smart TVs, there is phenomenal material to be mined from this subtle period drama. “Halt and Catch Fire” has had two strong seasons on AMC and is set for a third. If you haven’t watched it (and the numbers alone mean that you most likely haven’t), it’s time to tune in. “Is Blackhat the Greatest Hacking Ever?” asked Cade Metz last year. “Hackers Think So.” In pride of place on this list of TV and film programs that get right is Michael Mann’s smoothly executed 2015 thriller, which was all but ignored by the masses but continues to be eagerly watched, dissected and re-watched by experts across the globe. A black-hat hacker, of course, is your bad-guy geek, the kind who brings down financial systems and charges through security back doors just for his own malice and personal gain. Mann’s film, in addition to having the classic Hollywood trifecta of good-looking actors, thrilling cliffhanger plotlines and a globe-trotting, costume-shifting script, is refreshingly accurate and hits close to home. Who among us hasn’t considered using our powers for evil, not good? It’s that careful dance of good versus rotten, of power struggles played out both in real life and across the map of a keyboard, that makes “Blackhat” such a fantastic film. It’s fun and witty and unfailingly authentic. So while you’re waiting for “Snowden” to hit the box office, check it out — you won’t be disappointed. In fact, you might want to consider a marathon for team building and plain old fun. Some of the classics draw blank stares, but that seems like a great excuse to pop a bag of fresh popcorn and get the entire crew together for a night.
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NSF puts $110 million toward building out the XSEDE national computing initiative
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Devin Coldewey
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It’s in the country’s best interest to stay at (or at least near) the forefront of advanced computing techniques, and the National Science Foundation has just to make sure that happens. , or the Extreme Science and Engineering Discovery Environment, is a “virtual organization” established in 2011 and composed of members from many universities and research organizations. It organizes and improves resources like supercomputers that need to be shared by research efforts all over the country; XSEDE helped produce things like and the pictured above. You can , but suffice it to say, it’s enabling some important work. , scheduled to expend its $110 million over five years, will continue that work, expanding it in new directions and funding the maintenance of existing efforts. Another picturesque example of XSEDE-enabled work; in this case, atomic-level simulations of surfaces being bombarded by lasers. “As the role of computational and data science in advancing scientific and engineering frontiers has grown, it has produced a significant increase in the demand for supporting infrastructure,” said the program’s principal investigator, John Towns, of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. “The XSEDE 2.0 project recognizes that investment in physical infrastructure must be complemented by investment in software and human services.” In other words, you can’t just build the biggest supercomputer and let the rest work itself out. XSEDE 2.0 will pay for updates and maintenance on the gear, sure, but it will also fund the work that makes that gear available to researchers of all stripes — some who might not even know those resources exist. The air of social consciousness is similar to that of another recent NSF grant, which put $35 million toward . Education, training, outreach, development, support, allocation, analysis — these will all fall under the auspices of XSEDE 2.0. Though the effort is nominally centered at Urbana-Champaign, major operations will be taking place at the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center, UC San Diego and UT Austin — and 15 other partner institutions. It predates but is nevertheless a part of the National Strategic Computing Initiative, which was created via Executive Order by President Obama last year. The NSCI is “whole-of-government effort designed to create a cohesive, multi-agency strategic vision and Federal investment strategy, executed in collaboration with industry and academia, to maximize the benefits of HPC [high performance computing] for the United States.” There’s a more detailed summary, including the NSF’s role in it, .
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This all-analog DNA circuit calculates without going digital
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Devin Coldewey
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It’s a sign that we’re living in the future when using our own genetic machinery as is nothing new — but make no mistake, it’s still very early days in this field and there are plenty of surprises ahead. Today’s surprise, for instance, is the use of DNA to do exact arithmetical calculations entirely in analog. One might expect that any calculating done by a DNA would sort of by definition analog, but that’s not the case. In fact, DNA is useful for this kind of thing precisely because it is, in a way, already digital. The process of arranging base pairs into codons, which is how DNA encodes information, is remarkably like how we use binary symbols in sequence to form bytes. Such a ready digital analogue, if you will, makes DNA a natural fit for the type of programming we’ve already developed. But that’s not the only way to use it. Duke computer scientists, led by Professor John Reif and grad student Tianqi Song, have shown that DNA can . DNA strands, of course, have two sides, and pieces with bases that correspond — adenine with thymine, cytosine with guanine — will naturally attach to one another. And the more matching base pairs, the better the fit. This makes it possible to create various strands that will interact with each other in predictable ways — this one with a great fit will displace that one, and a third will displace one but not the other. (Note: this paragraph originally listed the wrong chemicals for DNA’s bases, which for some reason I wrote in a hurry and forgot to double check. That’s embarrassing.) You get enough of these pieces, you can start building a logic to how they interact. That’s what the team did, and by controlling the input strands and watching for the final concentrations of each, they created a process that can do addition, subtraction, and multiplication — with more complex operations on the way. A diagram from the paper shows (if you can read it) how the molecular logic gates cascade, resulting in a higher or lower concentration of telltale DNA strands. Now, this isn’t meant to replace digital computing, naturally, or even digital computing using DNA. Simple calculations take hours to do, and the logic isn’t easily adjustable. “We can’t even begin to think of competing with modern-day PCs or other conventional computing devices,” cautioned Reif in the Duke news release. But, he added, “Even very simple DNA computing could still have huge impacts in medicine or science.” Slow they may be, but these operations are being done with just a handful of easily replicated strands. Imitations of digital computers involve much more molecular machinery — which also happens to be highly fragile. Analog DNA computing could be done within the body’s natural environment, since it could be carefully coded to avoid strands being interfered with by the usual genetic processes. Graduate student Tianqi Song (left) and professor John Reif (right). DNA calculators swimming in your bloodstream could constantly be calculating the levels of a medication, activating a protein signal when it dips below a certain level. Strands attached to special molecules made to detect, say, cancer cells could also start a process that alerts doctors or even kickstarts the body’s own immune reaction. The research, which was funded by the National Science Foundation, was published in the journal .
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Postleaf is an open-source blogging platform for the design-conscious
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John Biggs
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Content management systems are boring until you have to use one. You can install a little Drupal or WordPress, pick up some , or just dump to , the graveyard for posts about protein shakes and VC funding. But what if you could roll your own CMS? And what if you made it really cool? That’s what Cory LaViska did. LaViska is the founder of and has been making it easy to edit stuff on the web for nine years. Rather than build and sell an acceptable CMS, however, he took all of his best ideas and made a far better CMS. And he made it open source and called it
. The real killer feature is inline editing. LaViska has had extensive experience in making it easy to build web pages so he’s added some truly simple editing to the product as well a Zen mode. He’s also making easier backups including a system that backs up both content and images, ensuring that when your server dumps you won’t lose all your hard-won posts. “I believe that inline editing is the future of content management. I first brought this feature to Surreal CMS a few years ago and users absolutely loved it,” said LaViska. “Some time later, I was looking for a blogging platform for a personal project, but I couldn’t find a single one that shipped with inline editing. That’s when the idea for Postleaf was born.” And things seem to be taking off. It was already featured on Product Hunt and it’s a popular GitHub repository. “The download count is somewhere around 1,500, but I don’t have an exact number because of an integration error early on,” he said. The project is currently in beta but it will be getting plugins, themes, and additional features soon. LaViska wants to see this take over as the de facto CMS for the design-minded, a nice mix of Medium, Ello, and a better Tumblr. That he offers all the code for free is gravy enough to make up for the death of Gawker which, we should note, used the decidedly un-pretty Movable Type. You can download the code . [vimeo 173818268 w=640 h=360] from on .
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EVEN Electric will sell only EVs, but not in the US
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Kristen Hall-Geisler
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EVEN Electric may be based in Ottawa, Ontario, but it has its sights set on selling electric vehicles from multiple brands worldwide. The sales and distribution network — not a dealership — will have new and pre-owned EVs available via centralized processing centers in several countries. Buyers order their car online, and it will be shipped from the nearest processing center to a local Customer Center, or even your house. The idea is to reduce the overhead required when there’s a stand-alone in every city. With the EVEN model, the inventory is more mobile, depending on demand, and the customer isn’t required to interact with a guy in a horrible tie. Microsoft has partnered with EVEN to provide the backend technology that allows buyers to compare vehicles, check the current inventory at processing centers, and place an order. The pilot project for the EVEN model took place in Iceland last year, where according to a press release 100 cars were sold and an additional 200 orders were left unfulfilled due to lack of supply. Additional real-world retail experience comes from John Gordon, one of EVEN’s three co-founders, who has been running a multi-maker EV dealership in Canada since 2013. The company is now working with Canada, Norway, Panama, Ireland, Belgium, and the United Kingdom to bring the EVEN experience to buyers. You’ll notice that the United States is not on that list. Given how testy the traditional dealerships have been about direct-from-the-manufacturer retail model of sales, a multi-maker non-dealership model is going to be a challenge here. EVEN does have one wheel in the door in the States. It’s partnered with , a Los Angeles company that makes products for the EV charging infrastructure industry. But while a retractable cable reel, which EVoCharge makes, is handy for a charging station, it’s not a processing center with dozens of EVs on hand waiting for buyers. The laws regarding who can sell vehicles and how, and the culture around car sales, will have to undergo a major overhaul before a company like EVEN Electric might try to crack the US market.
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Tesla’s new Model S P100D adds range and cranks Ludicrous Mode up a notch
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Darrell Etherington
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Tesla has a for the Model S and Model X line of electric vehicles, which includes an improved Ludicrous Mode that boasts a 2.5 second 0-60 mph time on the Model S, which is 0.1 second faster than the Model S’s previous max, and only 0.2 seconds off one of the fastest accelerating production cars available. The 100kWh battery option isn’t just for speed, of course – it also adds range, giving you 315 total miles according to EPA-standard estimates, which is over 20 miles more than the maxed out version of the previous top-end 90kWh battery. But let’s get back to that Ludicrous Mode option, w which part-and-parcel of the beefier battery upgrade. For comparison, consider that the 2014 Porsche 918 Spyder is one of the fastest production cars available, with a 0-60 mph time of 2.3 seconds, and a 9.9 second quarter mile. As mentioned, Tesla’s own maxed out previous Model S before today could manage 0-60 in 2.6 seconds. That car started at $847,000 new; the P100D is about $134,500 delivered to start. Even the Model X is quick off the draw, with a 2.9 second 0-60 mph time when equipped with the P100D and Ludicrous Mode. The cost of the upgrade is considerable, since you can upgrade from the price of the P90D Ludicrous for an additional $10,000 if you pre-ordered but haven’t received your vehicle. If you’ve already got the P90D in your garage or driveway, you can upgrade for $20,000, which Tesla says includes the cost of recycling the old battery pack. Tesla is also being upfront about the fact that the expensive frills of the P100D models will go to good use – it notes in its official blog post that the sales of these will help “pay for the smaller and much more affordable Tesla Model 3 that is in development.”
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A look inside Hyperloop One’s wildly fast future
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Sarah Buhr
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What’s really going on at – the futuristic transportation system proposing to shoot humans from point A to B at 750 miles-per-hour? The startup from Hyperloop Transportation to Hyperloop One and in the Nevada desert this spring; announced in Series B funding; suffered an executive and the former co-founder filed a lawsuit; HO then a countersuit; built a demo plant; and announced a possible major shipping operation out of several key areas across the globe, including with a major Russian investment group in and in with DP World – the third largest global shipping company on the planet. Oh and we’re going to hear from investor and Hyperloop One co-founder Shervin Pishevar on stage in a few weeks. Naturally, we thought it was time to see for ourselves just how close the technology behind the proposed hyperloop is to reality. Co-founder (and ex-SpaceX engineer) gave us a sneak peek at what the startup is working on at headquarters. What we saw is something that puts us on the brink of what is sure to change our world and the way we live in the very near future if HO can get its system up to speed. Check it out for yourselves in the video above to see the beginnings of what may soon be the thing to ship us and all the goods we’ve ordered on Amazon around the world in less than a day.
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STX Entertainment acquires VR studio Surreal
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Lucas Matney
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Virtual reality is quickly earning a reputation in Hollywood beyond its nerdy niche, with many industry professionals shifting resources and attention to catching this platform wave early. , the Hollywood TV and film studio behind flicks like and , has just acquired VR content producer to begin powering some of their own efforts in the virtual reality space. Terms of the deal were not disclosed. The company will operate as a separate division within STX, and will keep Surreal’s co-founders, Rick Rey and Andy Vick, at its helm, now serving under the titles of Co-Presidents of VR and Immersive Entertainment. Surreal has produced more than 70 immersive experiences in the last year across VR content types including live-action 360-degree video, 360 live streams, stereoscopic VR video and some fully interactive VR content. The pair will be working on content that complements traditional film and TV projects in addition to leading entirely unique VR initiatives, according to a company press release. As co-heads of STX’s Surreal division, they will continue to develop a wide range of original VR films, TV series and branded programming, as well as immersive derivatives of STX film, television and digital properties.
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New .blog TLD opens up early registration applications
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Devin Coldewey
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One of the few new top-level domains that actually makes sense, .blog, is starting the process of registration. Automattic, which runs WordPress.com and a number of other , owns .blog and is handling applications at . The company isn’t deviating from the usual methods: a “sunrise” period began a few days ago during which people with trademarks can make early domain requests. Apple.blog, TechCrunch.blog, Trump.blog, . It’ll cost you $250 all told to apply now: $220 for the early bid and $30 yearly for the domain itself. If multiple people want the same domain, they take it to the Octagon. (Or just have an auction.) On November 2, the “landrush” period starts — that’s when generic words and names go up for registration. As with any TLD, there will be some “premium pricing for higher-value names,” so don’t think you’re going to get dog.blog for pocket change and flip it for millions to Petco. The rest of us peasants get to put .blog on the end of our names, hobbies, and yoga studios come November 21.
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Lisn’s new app lets you stream songs for your friends while chatting
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Sarah Perez
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The joy that comes from listening to music with friends is something that’s been around ever since…well, ever since music. But today, thanks to digital services that let you listen anytime, anywhere, music is now more often a solo experience. A new app called wants to change that, by offering you a way to listen to music with a friend, no matter how far apart you are, and chat about it right in the app. “It’s like sharing earphones,” – and indeed, it does seem like the modern-day version of handing one of your earbuds to a friend. The app allows you to stream and share tracks via SoundCloud and Spotify (either full tracks via Spotify Premium, or 30-second previews). These songs are then synced in real-time when your friend tunes in to listen along with you. The idea is that this offers a more interactive, engaging way to discover new music. Not only is there a personal recommendation involved, the co-listening experience is meant to be more fun than having a friend simply share a link to a song over a messaging app. That being said, Lisn supports the ability to forward songs through other apps, too. And it offers a way for you to listen to shared music even when your friend is not online. That is, you can tap the push notification or head into the app to listen to the recommended track whenever you choose. In this case, the sender will receive an alert that you’re streaming their shared track, and they can pop into the app and join you, if they’re available. When you find a song you like, you can save it to your Spotify or SoundCloud library for later streaming. In total, there are over 130 million tracks that can be shared then saved from Lisn. The idea for the app arose from a hackathon project back in October 2015, says Lisn co-founder and user interface designer Abhinav Chhikara. Vibhas Jain and Abheyraj Singh, previously met while at Housing.com where they worked on the company’s mobile team. Jain was also the lead designer at , India’s most used digital wallet, before joining Lisn. And Singh, notably, worked on Airtel’s – one of India’s most popular streaming apps. A , Bhargav Sosale, was a school friend whose background includes startup experience in Singapore. Following the hackathon, the founders begin to work on the app full-time. During its beta, Chhikara says they found Lisn was used more heavily by younger people. But it appealed to others as well, he claims. [gallery ids="1373790,1373789,1373788,1373786"] “To give you an example of how people have been using it, we’ve got couples in long distance relationships using the music-plus-chat experience to communicate. Friends from university who’ve now moved to different cities are using it to stay in touch and exchange tracks,” he explains. “Music producers using it to send music to their team and other collaborators, listening to it together and talking about certain parts of the song as it plays,” Chhikara adds. The app launched earlier this month, and recently hit . Now that the app is live, the team is working on bringing Lisn to Android, as well as adding features like group chat, queueing, playlists in search, and more. The app will also include support for more music services in time, with Apple Music at the top of the ‘to-do’ list (assuming they can get API access.) For now, Chhikara says Lisn is focused on growth, not monetization – that means the app is a free download, ad-free, and doesn’t require any subscription to use. The idea for social music listening, of course, has been tried before. For example, Turntable.fm was a hot site back in the day – so hot, in fact, for a time. However, However, Turntable.fm didn’t launch in the mobile-first era, and it was more about DJ-led sessions, not friend-to-friend recommendations as in Lisn. To give Lisn a try, you can download the app .
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Samsung will launch the Gear S3, its newest smartwatch, on August 31
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Jon Russell
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Samsung will introduce (yet) another smartwatch this month. The Korea-based giant teased a launch event at the IFA electronics show in Germany, the date to for is August 31 and, as the invite above rather heavy-handedly hints, this will be the Gear S3. , according to analyst estimates. Samsung was one of a number of firms to hold or improve its numbers — Apple’s estimated sales cratered — and it is back with a new offering in an effort to increase interest, notably right before Apple is predicted to refresh its own smartwatch range in September. The Gear S2, Samsung’s most recent smartwatch, at the very same show. The company’s early watch models struggled for acclaim, but we found the Gear S2 to be surprisingly good, with an attractive interface and well-designed spinning bezel. That leaves us and doubtless others intrigued by what Samsung has planned next. What hints can we glean from the Gear S2? Well, the year-old device is available in two options — as the Samsung Gear S2 3G or the Gear S2 Classic — and to include Apple-esque gold and silver editions. that Samsung will go further and out three versions of the Gear S3 this time around, including an ‘explorer’ edition that could feature a crown, more buttons and changeable watch bands. Either way, there’s not long to wait to find out for sure. Like other Samsung unveilings, the Gear S3 launch event will be streamed online so you can watch at your own convenience. Stay tuned for a timely innovation. August 31. Berlin. — Samsung Mobile (@SamsungMobile)
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Google launches Duo video-calling app, a dull cross-OS FaceTime rival
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Josh Constine
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Can Google spring back from its social failures with a bare-bones video-calling app that unites iOS and Android users? Today it’s , which lets you video call people one-on-one via their phone number. You can watch our video demo of Duo here: Duo is best understood as a no-frills FaceTime competitor that works with Android devices instead of just Apple products. Nabbing those users who want to video call their Android friends is one avenue for success. Duo looks a bit bland, though, since it can’t do group calling, video effects or text chat. If you want to video call someone without Duo, you’ll have to invite them over SMS with an app download link. Starting from zero users with that level of uncertainty might push people to go with a competitor their contacts are likely to already have. That’s a big disadvantage versus the ubiquitous Facebook Messenger and Skype’s video call features. “The logic is that [apps] will succeed if they’re solving a use case really well,” Google’s VP of product management for consumer communication Nick Fox tells me, though this ignores the fact that a product needs to solve something others haven’t already. Fox explains that Google focused on three things with Duo. First, “if there’s anything that was our North Star, it was to be super, super simple.” Second, Fox says, is speed and reliability, thanks to Duo being built on Google’s WebRTC video framework to handle HD or 2G. And third, “The human element. You don’t hear Google talk about this all that often, but we wanted to enable the human on the other end of the call to really be the experience.” At least Duo succeeds at that. You open it, with no need for a Google account, and see the camera facing you. At the bottom is a list of recent calls and frequent contacts, with another tab that contains a full list of contacts who either have or don’t have Duo. Start a call and it goes full-screen. If someone misses a call, they’ll get a notification. That’s basically it. Don’t expect any Hangouts mustaches or costumes, but the video quality is solid. The one innovative feature Duo sports is called Knock-Knock, which lets the recipient of a call see the caller before they accept and turn on their own camera. Fox says that otherwise, entering a call can be “pretty abrupt” since you don’t know if they’re lazing at home, in business mode at the office, or on the go. With Knock-Knock, “as a recipient of the call you see them beforehand so you know their state of mind. I make silly faces to my kids…so when they see the preview, they start with a laugh.” This late in the game, Google will be fighting a steep uphill battle to get Duo traction. Video calling isn’t a non-stop use case like text chat, and is often an extension of those conversations. Marooning Duo in its own app and not allowing it to connect to any other Google communications apps or websites is a bizarre choice. People might forget to use it even if they do download it. Duo’s best bet will be the developing world thanks to its optimization for poor network connections like 2G. It can degrade video quality or switch to audio calling if there’s weak connectivity, and it can seamlessly hand off between cell and Wi-Fi connections in mid-call without dropping. The developing world has only recently gotten the phones and network connections necessary for video calling. The top chat app there, Facebook’s WhatsApp, still doesn’t have video calling, although it’s in the works. Perhaps a dedicated app for video calling over data could find some of the success WhatsApp did replacing SMS. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CIeMysX76pM With Duo and Allo (and Google Chat, Android SMS, and Spaces) for consumers, RCS messaging services for carriers, and Hangouts for the enterprise, Google is still a bit chaotic when it comes to communication. It seems to be reeling from failing to secure the acquisition of WhatsApp, which turned Facebook into the dominant global player. The whole Duo situation is embarrassing for Google considering how the technology involved in Hangouts seemed light years ahead of its time — almost five years. Google only now getting serious about mobile video chat is cringeworthy. Duo is either Google blowing up its consumer communications stack by surrendering the rest of the chat space and keeping Duo separate so the underused apps don’t weigh it down, or it’s another misstep by adding more disconnected islands to the archipelago. Despite all its engineering prowess when it comes to organizing information, Google is still awkward when it comes to creating inter-human community.
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Crunch Report | Pokemon GO Lifetime Bans
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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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Peter Thiel’s moral sleight of hand
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Kate Conger
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In this case, Gawker wasn’t just forced to take down the video, it wasn’t simply penalized or fined. It was forced to declare bankruptcy (the company’s appeal is ongoing), as was founder Nick Denton. Daulerio may have to follow suit. (Personal bias alert: One of the authors of this post used to write for Daulerio, while the other used to write for Thomas.)
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Another Salesforce acquisition with BeyondCore enterprise analytics grab
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John Mannes
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Business analytics platform BeyondCore will be officially joining Salesforce, by BeyondCore CEO Arijit Sengupta. BeyondCore is an enterprise analytics tool that bolsters business intelligence with computational and statistical analysis. While Salesforce could have gone fishing and come up with a number of business intelligence companies to buy, BeyondCore was already integrated with the Salesforce platform. “We decided to show off our integration into Salesforce, which would be part of our upcoming BeyondCore 7 release,” said Sengupta in the post. Salesforce has an active corporate development team and has eaten at least nine companies this year, including three since the middle of last month. The company’s places Microsoft squarely within their line of sight. Quip enables cloud-based word processing. Interestingly, BeyondCore consistently touts its integration with Microsoft Office. That said, there is little indication that BeyondCore will completely dissolve into Salesforce. “We’ll continue to deliver our innovative technology to customers as part of Salesforce and deliver the same great service you’ve come to expect from us,” reiterated Sengupta. Sengupta founded BeyondCore back in 2004 and raised a cumulative $9 million in financing from Menlo Ventures in a Series A back in 2014. The transaction comes at a time of . A number of transactions, including Quip, came with at-least leaks of massive acquisition values, but an even greater number have not produced anything in the way of financial headlines. BeyondCore and Salesforce declined to comment on the specifics of this deal that’s expected to close later this year. Some speculate this is the result of a cooling in valuations and a need for exits. However, it’s important to remember that not every transaction will fit neatly in a box. “Acquisitions can still fill holes in the cloud space,” said Brent Leary, co-founder and partner at CRM Essentials. “Being able to more seamlessly integrate data analytics with cloud components fills a hole.” Whether the transaction will turn out to be a critical key in an assault against Microsoft, or simply a strategic acquihire is yet to be seen. Until then, we will be eating popcorn waiting for the next Salesforce acquisition.
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