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Apple to introduce search ads on App Store along with changes to app review, discovery and splits
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Sarah Perez
| 2,016 | 6 | 8 |
Just ahead of its annual WWDC conference, Apple has announced a series of changes to its App Store, aimed at improving the experience for both developers and consumers alike. According to Senior Vice President of Worldwide Marketing, Phil Schiller, , the company is working to speed up the time it takes apps to go live, revamp how it splits revenue with developers, as well as improve app discovery. The latter will include the introduction of ads in App Store search, among other things. The improvements, many would argue, are long overdue. Developers have been struggling to get their apps noticed, downloaded and installed – and consumers are growing tired of trying new apps. In fact, , studies have shown. The overall goal with the changes, it seems, is to make the App Store feel fresh, put the right apps in front of the right users, and help App Store developers maximize their revenue in a market where acquiring and retaining users is growing ever more difficult. To start, Apple says that it has sped up the App Store review process, which used to take five days to complete. This is the period when Apple reviews apps before they’re allowed to go live, making sure they adhere to the developer guidelines, aren’t breaking any laws, and are safe for consumers to use. In the past month or so, App Store review has dropped to one day for many apps, Schiller told He noted that Apple reviews 100,000 apps per week, but it has now figured out how to make those reviews go faster. Now, it has a sustained rate of reviewing 50 percent of apps in 24 hours, and 90 percent in 48 hours. Not delaying app launches was one advantage Google Play had on the App Store – because it largely relied on algorithms, not humans, to scan its apps, they could launch quicker. (Google has since , but this has not appeared to impact approval times). In addition, Apple is introducing a new business model for developers who use subscriptions to generate revenue. Today, Apple uses the traditional 70/30 split – something that was introduced back when developers were largely monetizing through app sales. But times have changed. Now, apps using subscriptions will still see the 70/30 split in year one, but this will become an 85/15 split in subsequent years. Subscriptions will be available to all apps across all categories, including games, where before it was limited to categories like cloud services, streaming media, news, and dating services. will need to either offer content that is updated or delivered on a regular basis, or they can provide paid access to an ongoing service in an app, like cloud storage or massive multiplayer online games (MMOGs). Apple tells us all current subscriptions are eligible—if developers have subscribers they have already retained for over a year, the 85/15 split starts immediately, effective Monday, June 13. Developers will also be able to set territory-specific pricing, and they’ll be able to increase prices for new subscribers while keeping loyal customers at the older, lower pricing, we’re told. Subscription management for consumers will be easier, too, with an improved way to access, upgrade, downgrade and otherwise change subscriptions. Finally, and perhaps most notably, Apple will try to address the app discovery issue. The App Store has been plagued by discovery issues for years, according to many developers, who complain that it’s too hard for users to find their apps. To fix this, Apple will change its “Featured” section on the App Store this fall so that it won’t recommend any of the apps you already have installed, only new apps. , but there it also affected the Top Charts.) Apple is also bringing back the Categories tab in the App Store, for easier navigation, and it’s rolling out a 3D Touch-enabled means of sharing apps with friends. That is, if you press on an app on your iOS device’s Home screen, you’ll be able to share it with friends via social networks – a handy use case for the somewhat under-utilized 3D Touch “shortcut” feature on apps. The App Store is also going to be refreshed more often with new content, instead of just on Thursdays, Apple told . The biggest change of all is that Apple is rolling out App Store ads in search. That means when users search for an app by name or keyword, developers can bid on an advertising slot at the top of the search results lists – similar to how Google search works. Search is a critical way apps are discovered these days, as there are now 1.5 million apps on the App Store. That’s why this change, above all, is so important. Apple tells us that over 65 percent of apps downloaded on the Store come from a search query. The company stresses that there will only be one ad per search, it will be clearly labeled as such (with a blue background and an “Ad” icon), and it will have the same content as the app’s App Store listing. Apple will also not share data about users’ ad clicks with developers – they will get reports, but not user data. And ads will not be shown to users under 13, if Apple can determine that, Schiller told . will be handled through an auction system, with no minimums and no exclusives in order to make it accessible to smaller developers as well. Ads will launch into beta first in the U.S. on Monday before rolling out more broadly this fall. The changes will apply to all apps stores, not just iOS.
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Google adds U.S. Cellular’s network to extend Project Fi’s coverage
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Frederic Lardinois
| 2,016 | 6 | 8 |
Google today that it has added , one of the larger regional carriers in the U.S., to its . U.S. Cellular joins Google’s existing network partners T-Mobile and Sprint. What makes Project Fi different from mobile virtual network operators like Boost Mobile or MetroPCS is that it doesn’t just rely on a single network. Instead, it can switch between partners to select the best network available at any given time. The problem with this is that you need to use one of Google’s own Nexus phones (the 6P, 5X or Nexus 6) to use Fi because other phones aren’t able to perform the seamless network handoffs necessary to make this work. “By analyzing speeds from each network, Project Fi is able to predict the fastest network at your location — down to the city block — and automatically connect you,” Google explains. “We’re constantly adapting to consider how factors like new cell towers and newly-available radio frequencies are impacting real-world speeds.” U.S. Cellular currently operates in 23 states and offers 4G LTE coverage is both urban and rural areas. As far as , this also marks the first time U.S. Cellular is playing the host network to a virtual operator. Google says its users are able to spend about 95 percent of their cellular time on LTE networks and have a connection 99 percent of the time. Support for U.S. Cellular’s network will roll out over the coming weeks. Fi’s plans start at $20 per month for unlimited domestic calls and texts, with an additional $10 per GB of data per month. The service does not require any annual contracts.
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The gaming industry can become the next big target of cybercrime
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Ben Dickson
| 2,016 | 6 | 8 |
Video-game-related crime is almost as old as the industry itself. But while illegal copies and pirated versions of games were the previous dominant form of illicit activities related to games, have created new possibilities for cybercriminals to swindle huge amounts of money from an industry that is worth . And what’s worrisome is that publishers are not the only targets; the players themselves are becoming victims of this new form of crime. Recent trends prove just how attractive the gaming community has become for cybercriminals and how lucrative the game-hacking business is becoming, which underlines the importance for developers, manufacturers and gamers alike to take game security more seriously. The recent , the leading digital entertainment distribution platform, is a perfect example of how game-related crime has changed in recent years. For those who are unfamiliar, is a multi-OS platform owned by gaming company , which acts as an e-store for video games. But what started as a basic delivery and patching network eventually grew into a fully featured gaming market members, and thousands of games. Aside from the online purchase of games, the platform offers features for game inventories, trading cards and other valuable goods to be purchased and attached to users’ accounts. The transformation that has overcome the gaming industry, or more specifically the shift toward the purchase and storage of in-game assets, has created new motives for malicious actors to try to break into user accounts. Aside from sensitive financial information, which all online retail platforms contain, the Steam Engine now provides attackers with many other items that can be turned into money-making opportunities. This has fueled the development of Steam Stealer, a new breed of malware that is responsible for the hijacking of millions of user accounts. According to official data recently published by Steam, credentials for . Research led by has identified more than 1,200 specimens of the malware. Santiago Pontiroli and Bart P, the researchers who authored the report, maintain that Steam Stealer has “turned the threat landscape for the entertainment ecosystem into a devil’s playground.” The malware is delivered through run-of-the-mill phishing campaigns, infected clones of gaming sites such as RazerComms and TeamSpeak or through developed for the Chrome browser. Once the intruder gains access to victims’ credentials, they not only siphon the financial data related to the account, but also take advantage of the possible assets stored in the account and sell them in Steam Trade for extra cash. Inventory items are being traded at several hundred dollars in some cases. , “enough money now moves around the system that stealing virtual Steam goods has become a real business for skilled hackers.” Steam Stealer is being made available on malware black markets at prices as low as $3, which means “a staggering number of script-kiddies and technically-challenged individuals resort to this type of threat as their malware of choice to enter the cybercrime scene,” the Kaspersky report states. The malware-as-a-service trend is being observed elsewhere, including in , which, at present, is one of the most popular types of money-making malware being used by cybercriminals. A number of factors have contributed to the success of the attacks against the Steam platform, but paramount among them is the outdated perception toward security in games. Developers and publishers are still focused on hardening their code against reverse engineering and piracy, while the rising threat of data breaches against games and gamers aren’t getting enough attention. “I think it’s because in the gaming world as well as in the security industry, we haven’t paid much attention to this issue in the past,” says Pontiroli, the researcher from Kaspersky, referring to the malware attacks against games. Gamers are also to blame for security incidents, Pontiroli believes. “There’s this view from the other side of the table — from gamers — that antivirus apps slow down their machines, or cause them to lose frame rate,” he explains, which leads them to disable antiviruses or uninstall them altogether. “Nowadays you just need to realize that you can lose your account and your information.” A separate report by video-game security startup about cyberattacks against the gaming industry maintains that in comparison to financial services and retail, the video-game industry is new and highly vulnerable to cyberattacks. “Whereas other industries now have cybersecurity rules, regulations and standards to adhere to, online video games are just now recognizing that in-game cyberattacks exist and are harmful to both revenue and reputation,” writes the report. Matthew Cook, co-founder of Panopticon, believes that publishers are putting up with the unwanted behaviors of bad actors and accept it as a cost of doing business. “So often, the publishers we talk to refer to fighting back against these unwanted players as a game of ‘whack a mole’ that they can never win,” he says. In contrast, he believes, publishers can fight back and eliminate fraudulent or harmful activities, provided they get a head start in securing their games and are dedicated to keeping bad players out after they’re gone. “Unfortunately, slow, manual processes like combing through suspected bad actor reports, or performing half-hearted quarterly ban activities just won’t cut it anymore,” Cook stresses. “The bad guys have gotten too good, and there’s simply too much financial opportunity for them to be dissuaded by reactive rules and reports.” Efforts are being made to improve security in software, but there’s still a long way to go. For its part, Steam has rolled out Steam Guard functionality to help block account hijacking, and it is also offering two-factor and risk-based authentication through the Steam Guard Mobile Authenticator. The company is also toughening up the market place and has added new restrictions recently that use email confirmation and put a 15-day hold on traded items in order to mitigate the risks of fraud. However, lack of awareness and focus on gaming experience leads many users to forgo activating these features. “While [the security features] do provide a certain level of safety to their users, not all of them are aware of their existence or know how to properly configure them,” says Pontiroli. “Even with all the solutions in the world you still need to create awareness among the gaming crowd.” Security vendors are also taking strides to provide security for gamers without disrupting the gaming experience. Most security products now offer a “gaming mode” that allows players to keep their antivirus software active but avoid receiving notifications until the end of their session. Other firms, such as Panopticon, are working on special in-game security solutions that distinguishes suspicious in-game activities from normal player behavior through anomaly detection and analytics. The model is taking after techniques used by fraud detection tools in banking and financial platforms. This approach also helps deal with other fraudulent activities such as “ ,” the process of using to generate in-game assets and later sell them on grey markets, an activity that is raking in . The attacks against Steam are dwarfed when compared to that we’ve seen in the last year. Nonetheless, it is a stark indication of the transformation and shift that online gaming security is undergoing. Moreover, Steam isn’t the only platform that has suffered data breaches in the past months and years. A similar attack — though at a much smaller scale — was observed against late last year (the gaming giant , however). Several other gaming consoles and networks have been targeted in recent years, and the plague of . This shows that every online game and platform can become the target of cyberattacks. Nowadays, online games contain a wealth of financial and sensitive information about users, along with other valuable assets. And as is their wont, online fraudsters and cybercriminals will be following the money and aim for the weaker targets. So why bother taking the pains of hacking a banking network when there’s easier cash to be made in the gaming industry? Securing the games requires the collective effort of security vendors and publishers. As Kaspersky’s Pontiroli puts it, “Security should not be something developers think about afterwards but at an early stage of the game development process. We believe that cross-industry cooperation can help to improve this situation.”
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FinAccel takes on Southeast Asia’s lending industry with easy online credit service
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Jon Russell
| 2,016 | 6 | 1 |
Credit card penetration is one of those problems that isn’t really a ‘problem’ in the West. In the U.S. alone, at least one credit card, with 18 percent of consumers in the country owning two or three cards. That high level of credit adoption is one factor that has helped online commerce take off in the West. Or, to put it another way, the lack of credit cards in emerging markets like is one of the major hurdles that online commerce companies are facing. And it is a huge problem. Lazada, for example, is the most funded e-commerce firm in Southeast Asia, but before . The fact that countries like Indonesia have sub-10 percent credit card ownership is an important factor, . So far, the solutions have been bank transfers, which are time-consuming and painful, and cash-on-delivery, the idea that you literally pay for a product with cash when it is delivered to your door. That overcomes the issue that most of Southeast Asia’s cumulative 600 million-plus population does not own a credit card, but it presents new problems: an increase in return rates and higher potential for fraud or cash lost in transit. A number of companies believe technology can bridge the gap, using processes like virtual credit cards or over-the-counter payments. FinAccel is a new company that’s proposing a different approach: enabling a credit line for online purchases. The company is based in Jakarta, Indonesia, and it essentially acts as a layer between its credit card and lending company partners and consumers buying online. Started last year by Akshay Garg, who founded ad tech firm Komli, ex-McKinsey consultant Umang Rustagi, and Alie Tan, formerly of a number of startups, the company has raised an undisclosed seed round, which TechCrunch understands to be more than $1 million, led by Jungle Ventures to get started. Garg told TechCrunch in an interview that the idea is to disrupt the credit industry by enabling consumers to reap the benefits with a model that befits today’s digital era. FinAccel’s product — — is designed to sit at the point of sale like Visa, but enable customers to pay with one click and make repayments to FinAccel directly. Initially live in Indonesia only, customers have 30 days to repay the amount at no added cost, but the startup is planning to introduce credit card-style payback plans soon. That would be priced at 41.75 percent APR over a period upwards of six months, which Garg said is anything up to one-third cheaper than “nearly every consumer finance company in the market” and on-par with credit card holders. “You might say that’s high, but the cost of capital here is high,” he added. “We are basically putting a virtual credit in hands of five to 10 million people in next five years.” “We want to go hard against the consumer finance companies,” Garg said. “There’s a crazy amount of bullshit marketing in the industry today.” The goal, he explained, is more than just beating existing finance companies, though, since FinAccel wants to unlock new consumer spending opportunities, particularly in the e-commerce space. Like Alibaba’s micro-loan services in China, Kredivon is billed as making near real-time decisions on credit applications. The service uses over 1,800 data points to assess the credit worthiness of the applicant inside two minutes. Beyond expected information such as salary and job information, Garg said other variables considered including social media information from sources such as Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram among others. Garg explained that interactions on posts on Facebook can speak to how integrated a person is in their communities and society in general. But it is far from the only deciding factor. “Most people who are more integrated into society tend to be trustworthy, that’s not the sole determining one of 1,500-1,800 variables but one illustratable point. Also, for example, if you are tweeting about a car, that says a lot about you — if you’re buying a car in Jakarta, you’re definitely earning more than $1,000/$2,000 a month,” he said. Other less expected indicators including the kind of apps an applicant has on their phone — the Financial Times and Economist can be indicators of high social status, Garg suggested — while call logs (those who call more in emerging markets tend to be more affluent and not on pre-paid accounts), environmental data and device and app history on Android devices are all also factors. FinAccel is starting out in Indonesia, but it has plans to be present across Southeast Asia’s six main countries with an expansion that will likely kick off next year starting with Thailand, Garg said. “We’re launching in Indonesia because this is our core market, because it is hard to have a big business in Southeast Asia if you’re not present in Indonesia, plus the problems are the gnarliest here. Our view is that we are solving the toughest problem in the market right now, once we get a foothold here the plan is to launch in other markets.”
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Elon Musk doesn’t think Google will compete with Tesla — but Apple could
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Matthew Lynley
| 2,016 | 6 | 1 |
Tesla Motors CEO Elon Musk is watching the competition closely — including electric cars from existing manufacturers, and of course, potentially Apple. But he said at Vox Media’s Code Conference that he doesn’t view Google as a potential competitor. More clearly, he views that companies that might choose to work with Google as direct competitors to Tesla Motors. “Google’s done a great job of showing the potential of autonomous transport, but they’re not a car company.” Apple, however, is another matter. There has been a lot of speculation as to whether Apple will produce its own car. Musk was a bit coy on stage, but of course he has more information than most out there — so if he’s taking Apple seriously as a competitor, there’s a good chance the idea is at least being tossed around. “Apple, yeah, that’ll be more direct,” he said. But at the very least, he thinks Apple may have missed an opportunity to get a car out the door that could be aggressively competitive with Tesla Motors. Apple is notoriously secretive about its special projects, but at the very least, it doesn’t seem apparent that the company is at all close to even getting close to the process of scaling up production for a car. “I think they should have embarked on this project sooner,” Musk said. “I don’t know… They don’t share with me the details. I don’t think they’ll be volume production sooner than 2020. It’s a missed opportunity. There’s a dozen car companies of significance in the world, the most any company has is approximately 10% market share.” A significant part of that uphill battle comes down to building the manufacturing capability, as well as establishing a strong supply chain. “The sheer scale of automotive manufacturing, it’s hard to appreciate until you see the plants,” Musk said. That being said, creating and maintaining a strong supply chain has always been one of Apple’s strengths — though the rest of the whole process is likely an unknown to the company. In terms of whether Apple will successfully build a car, Musk was frank: “I hope it works out.”
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Elon Musk wants people on Mars by 2025
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Matthew Lynley
| 2,016 | 6 | 1 |
One can never underestimate the ambition of SpaceX and Tesla Motors CEO Elon Musk. After making a bold adjustment to Tesla Motors’ outlook, , Musk now says that he says SpaceX may be able to have people on Mars by 2025. More specifically, he expects to launch a manned mission to Mars in 2024, which would arrive in 2025. He made the comments at Vox Media’s Code Conference. Of course, all these could be subject to delays. The company had to delay the Falcon Heavy launch — Musk says the company hopes to launch it by the end of the year. But SpaceX has also managed to land several of its rockets, and it hopes to re-use those rockets in the next few months, he said. Musk’s ambitions to visit Mars — or die there, for that matter — aren’t unknown. But Musk is also known for having an aggressive mentality when it comes to expanding his companies’ efforts to accomplish his goals. “If you gotta choose a place to die, then Mars is probably not a bad choice,” he said. “It’s not some sort of Martian death wish.” SpaceX plans to start running the second version of its Dragon mission next year, which is capable of sending up to 7 astronauts into space, Musk said. From that, he expects the company to start missions to Mars with the Dragon V2 in 2018 — though it won’t necessarily start carrying astronauts just yet. “The 2018 mission will be a Dragon V2, I wouldn’t recommend traveling to Mars in that,” Musk said. “It has the interior volume of an SUV. This will be a very big rocket. And it also doesn’t have the capability of getting back to earth. We’ll put that in fine print.” Musk said that in September this year, he’s going to present the architecture for Mars colonization, and what it would require in order to transport a large number of people and a large amount of hardware to Mars. That’ll be necessary to create a self-sustaining and growing city on Mars, he said — and the company plans to start running missions at every opportunity starting on 2018. That means the company will be launching a mission approximately every 26 months, Musk said. The mission won’t be about finding a way to colonize Mars that’s a replacement for Earth, however, . “No, no, I think it’s great — why would we abandon Earth, it’s really nice here,” Musk said. “I believe is important to the future, ultimately be out there among the stars,” Musk said, “It’s not being a single planet species and moving planets, it’s about being a multi-planet species and have life extend beyond the solar system and ultimately to other star systems. That’s the future that’s exciting. You need things like that to be glad to wake up in the morning. Life can’t just be about solving problems, they have to be inspiring and make you glad to be alive.”
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How one Italian entrepreneur’s business changed after riding along with Rocket Internet
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Marcello Mari
| 2,016 | 6 | 1 |
It was a fairytale beginning. In the early days of 2015, the German behemoth Rocket Internet announced the acquisition of Italy’s first food delivery service, PizzaBo, for 51 Million euros. It was the third largest exit for a startup ever recorded in the Italian market and the first ever acquisition in Italy by Rocket Internet. Rocket Internet is by far the most successful German Internet company, famous (or infamous) around the world for cloning successful businesses and launching them in emerging markets. So when the news hit the media, everyone celebrated the buyout as a big success. The Italian market suffers from a lack of investments and generally a lack of large acquisitions –especially from foreign companies — so any success is celebrated (almost in excess of the achievement) Indeed, after the announcement, PizzaBo was named as one of the top 10 Italian startups by , Italy’s premiere outlet for the startup industry. Chief executive Christian Sarcuni was then on top of the world, or at least on top of the Italian Startup scene, as he was describing the acquisition as a “big revenge” over some investors that didn’t believe in the company at the beginning. “It almost felt like media were interested in PizzaBo because of the clamor created by the buyout rather then the service itself,” said Sarcuni to TechCrunch in an exclusive interview. But things began to turn as Rocket Internet displayed the flip side of its aggressive growth strategy and began making extremely and for taking on additional markets with the PizzaBo brand. “I met [Rocket Internet co-founder] Marc Samwer for the first time after the acquisition — he was introduced as the shareholders’ spokesperson but he was clearly the person in charge of the whole food department which he was controlling quite firmly and strongly. He was obviously the decision maker there, Mr. Sarcuni told TechCrunch. Like many other startups the world over, PizzaBo was a seed that sprouted with very humble roots. Its founder, Sarcuni, was originally from a small city in the south of Italy. He started his company in 2010 in Bologna, the largest university town in Italy (and therefore the best market for a pizza delivery startup). By the end of his first year he delivered 60,000 pizzas. And four years later, when that number was in the millions and the business had expanded to five more university cities Rocket Internet came knocking. “When I received the email from Rocket Internet, I literally couldn’t believe it. We submitted all the documentation they were after in less than 24 hours and the next day we had some of their people in our office to check the numbers,” Sarcuni said in an interview after the acquisition. The contract arrived on Sarcuni’s desk almost immediately, ready to be signed with a 51 million euro offer, according to Rocket Internet financial statement. At the time, Rocket Internet made a lot of promises to Sarcuni, one of which was not to change the company name and logo. But after few months the company changed the name to “Hello Food” — similar to the other Rocket business, Hello Fresh. “ remember this being one of our most difficult meetings – I did everything in my power to to make them change their mind, but there was no way,” Sarcuni said. Also, the internet giant promised to support the expansion to 20 more cities, but from Sarcuni’s words it seemed that team was too busy keeping up with the due diligence than to focus on the actual expansion. “Even when I realized that Rocket Internet was changing strategy, I worked extremely hard and to reach 20 cities as promised. We were ready for the big marketing push, but when I was in front of the cameras to shoot our first ever TV commercial for the national TV, I received a phone call where they where telling me that they pulled the funding for the campaign, without any explanation whatsoever,” he said. And this is the point were the situation became critical. Friday February 5 2016 Sarcuni woke up with a flood of text messages and emails to read. One of them in particular announced that his company has been sold overnight to the English food delivery market leader Just Eat, their main competitor. “I sat down with Just Eat country manager and we were both surprised. None of us have been told before about the acquisition and no one asked our opinion,” said Sarcuni. However, after the acquisition, things appeared to go more smoothly. With the new company, PizzaBo could go back to it’s original name and apparently gained more independence. But the calm waters belied a storm roiling underneath the surface. At the end of March 2016 everything the flood that would overwhelm the business crested. Just Eat, who refused since the beginning to have any agreement with Sarcuni, asked the team of PizzaBo to move closer to their headquarters in Milan from their current city Bologna. The team, which Sarcuni have always put at the core of PizzaBo’s success, refused to move fearing that the requests might hide some cuts. In a perfect Italian style, the team at PizzaBo started the first ever union action for a startup in Italy. But the union in charge of the negotiations with Just Eat appeared powerless against the British giant’s request, to the point where Sarcuni, who couldn’t stay true to his promises to his own team, decided to step down on March 15th. His resignation form the role of chief executive, at a company that he made with his own hands, with no debt, and without raising any money from an outside investor before the Rocket Internet acquisition, was the punctuation mark on his company’s decline. Despite the fate of PizzaBo, this is still the story of one of the richest exits in the Italian startup ecosystem. In the aftermath, Sarcuni is keenly aware of his mistakes.“If I had the chance to go back I’d probably not sold the whole company or at least I’d manage to keep control of it. For sure I would have chosen a more trustworthy partner,” he said. From their side, Rocket Internet claims that they had every right to sell PizzaBo as they owned 100% of the company. Moreover it was low-performing and not meeting Rocket’s expectations of building a market-leading food-delivery business in Italy. Still, Sarcuni’s experience may serve as yet another cautionary tale for entrepreneurs who hitch their fortunes to Germany’s startup “Rocket”.
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Crunch Report | Internet Trends Report 2016
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Khaled "Tito" Hamze
| 2,016 | 6 | 1 |
Tito Hamze
Tito Hamze
Joe Zolnoski
Joe Zolnoski
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Uber takes its most significant investment yet at $3.5 billion from Saudi Arabia
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Sarah Buhr
| 2,016 | 6 | 1 |
announced today it took $3.5 billion from Public Investment Fund (PIF), Saudi Arabia’s main investment fund as part of its latest round. The new investment is the largest to date for the ridesharing giant and brings the total balance of both cash and debt to more than $11 billion but doesn’t increase the company’s current $62.5 billion value. Uber rules the U.S. market as the dominant ridesharing service and continues to forge ahead on global expansion and the Middle East is a key area in the company’s future. Uber also operates in surrounding Middle Eastern countries such as Egypt and the United Arab Emirates and partners with those country’s government entities to hire and educate drivers. According to the company, there are more than 395,000 active riders in the region. “We appreciate the vote of confidence in our business as we continue to expand our global presence,” Uber founder Travis Kalanick said in a statement. “Our experience in Saudi Arabia is a great example of how Uber can benefit riders, drivers, and cities and we look forward to partnering to support their economic and social reforms.” According to the company, the investment aligns with , Saudi Arabia’s recently announced plans to reduce dependence on oil and oil-related industries. “This ambitious and far-reaching plan presents a number of goals, including unlocking strategic sectors such as tourism and entertainment, boosting employment opportunities and women’s participation in the workforce, and encouraging entrepreneurship,” PIF’s Yasir Al Ruymayyan said in a statement. However, the country has been criticized for not allowing women to drive and transportation is a huge problem for that half of the population. Saudi Arabia believes Uber offers a solution by supplying on-demand rides for women – Uber has been operating in the country since 2014 and says about 80 percent of all riders are female.
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Tumblr blocked in China before Tiananmen Square massacre anniversary
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Catherine Shu
| 2,016 | 6 | 1 |
is now apparently inaccessible in China. , a non-profit that monitors censorship by the Chinese government, first spotted the lockout earlier this week. . gets completely blocked in China. Sadly, HowHighAreXiJinping’sPantsToday?
lost in collateral damage — GreatFire.org (@GreatFireChina) Unlike other social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter, Tumblr has managed to escape being banned in China (so far). According to , a tool that shows what sites and keywords are currently blocked by the Great Firewall, access to Tumblr has been limited since May 25 and the platform was completely blocked on several days: May 26, May 30, and June 2 (today). It’s difficult to know the exact reasons why social media sites get blocked in China when they do since the government isn’t in the habit of issuing point-by-point bulletins detailing their arguments for censorship. GreatFire.org’s historical data, however, shows that Tumblr was also more heavily restricted than usual or blocked in June of 2014 and 2015. The Chinese government annually around the anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre, which took place on June 3-4, 1989, in an effort to keep news and discussion about it from spreading. There are large rallies every year in Hong Kong to memorialize the event, including . Families of Tiananmen Square victims recently . Tumblr was also blocked for several weeks in February and March 2011 after . Other reasons why Tumblr might be currently firewalled include a sex tape that is going viral, as (online porn is ), and more stringent online censorship measures that include a many people use to access blocked sites. TechCrunch has contacted Tumblr for comment.
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Intel CEO, known for diversity efforts, cancels Trump fundraiser
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Kate Conger
| 2,016 | 6 | 1 |
Intel CEO Brian Krzanich, widely known for his efforts to improve diversity in the technology industry, planned to host a fundraiser at his home for Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump this week. But after an Intel spokesperson fielded questions from the New York Times about the fundraiser, the event was cancelled. An Intel spokesperson said that the fundraiser would include “a full exchange of views,” according to the . Intel did not give a reason for the cancellation, and Trump announced that he would hold a on the same evening. Financial support for Trump, who famously and speculated this week about the race of the overseeing a lawsuit against Trump University, seems incongruous with Krzanich’s diversity activism. Krzanich has invested heavily in increasing diversity at Intel, spending on diversity efforts and working with Rev. Jesse Jackson on his PUSHTech 2020 initiative. But a closer look at Intel’s political donations suggests that the company’s political ideals may be more right-leaning than expected. Intel’s PAC, which is funded by contributions from the company’s employees, donated a total of $781,784 to politicians in 2015, according to Intel’s annual corporate responsibility report. Fifty-five percent of the money went to Republican members of Congress and their PACs, with the remainder going to Democratic leaders. The Intel PAC has donated to high-profile Republican leaders, contributing $10,000 to former House Speaker John Boehner last May, months before Boehner resigned his post as speaker. The PAC also gave $5,000 to Marco Rubio in his capacity as a senator, and $1,000 to the pro-life advocate Sen. Mitch McConnell. In addition to Intel’s contributions to members of Congress, the company also donated to several Republican groups in the last year, including a $5,000 donation to the Freedom Project last May and a $2,500 donation to Invest in a Strong and Secure America this January. Both groups provide financial backing for Republican members of Congress; Invest in a Strong and Secure America also donated $5,000 dollars to Rubio’s presidential campaign. Intel’s PAC also spends generously on the Democratic side of the aisle, contributing $10,000 a piece to Sen. Ron Wyden, Sen. Dianne Feinstein, Rep. Mike Honda, and others. Krzanich does not appear to regularly donate to political candidates himself, making his willingness to host a fundraiser for Trump even more striking. In 2009, Krzanich donated $1,500 to Wyden’s Senate campaign, according to data from the Center for Responsive Politics. Wyden is known for his advocacy on behalf of technology and has supported strong encryption in Congress. “We recognize that it is impractical and unrealistic to expect that we or our stockholders and stakeholders will agree with every issue that a politician or trade association may support,” Intel wrote in its 2015 responsibility report. “In such cases, we base our decision on the issues that will have the greatest benefit for our stockholders and key stakeholders. Should we identify significant incongruencies between a candidate’s record and our own policies, we will disclose this information as part of our political accountability disclosure process.” An Intel spokesperson provided the following statement: “Brian Krzanich is not endorsing any presidential candidate. We are interested in engaging both campaigns in open dialogue on issues important to the technology industry.”
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Forbes downgrades Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes net worth from $4.5 billion to Theranothing
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Sarah Buhr
| 2,016 | 6 | 1 |
Elizabeth Holmes, the once celebrated founder of Theranos, sat at number one on Forbes list of last year but has taken quite the tumble – the media outlet has since revalued her net worth to zilch. Holmes, 31, comes from a family with powerful political connections – both parents held important government positions in Washington – which helped her get her start and Holmes was reportedly worth $4.5 billion in stock for her blood analysis company. But her startup, once valued at more than $9 billion for its proprietary technology, hit a series of business failures and is now under investigation by and faces possible from the Securities and Exchange Commission. Forbes now places the company’s value at closer to $800 million after speaking to analysts and from its prestigious list. Holmes owns a 50 percent stake in Theranos, but the new valuation, which takes into account both the intellectual property and the $724 million in financing, gives Holmes a tiny fraction of her former net worth. Theranos has declined to share confidential financial information. “As a privately held company, we declined to share confidential information with Forbes,” Theranos spokesperson Brooke Buchanan told TechCrunch. “As a result, the article was based exclusively on speculation and press reports.” Holmes dropped out of Stanford to start her company in 2003 at the age of 19. She launched it out of stealth more than 10 years later, with backing from DFJ, Henry Kissinger, and others but came under scrutiny after several damning investigative pieces in the Wall Street Journal. The company now faces charges from the SEC and federal regulators could revoke its operating license or if Theranos fails to adhere to certain terms.
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Review: TUMI’s Luke Roll Top manages to be a charming business backpack
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Stefan Etienne
| 2,016 | 6 | 1 |
Though the TUMI Luke Roll Top is expensive for a backpack, it partially makes up for this by taking a military-inspired look (the roll top) and heavily stylizing it. This says a lot, considering that TUMI typically focuses on appealing to the business aesthetic, rather than just selling pretty backpacks — it just so happens that this one manages to do both.
The usage of a backpack is very linear: It goes on your back and carries your things. Whatever, whenever or wherever your bag might find you is separate from the bag’s job to survive the trip, while also keeping your belongings safe (and easily accessible). This backpack does a good job doing just that. Think about your favorite shirt, gadget, hat, even the shoes you wear: the taking to heart of the object isn’t instantaneous, but really a series of small events that lead to your loving it. So you can easily take it out a couple of times and it will turn into your favorite backpack. Unfortunately for me, by liking too many well-designed backpacks that are suitable for different scenarios — cycling, business, adventuring and so on — I don’t really have the chance to use it for everything. After all, there isn’t really a bag that can do it all. And yes, for the business travelers, there’s a little leather card holder for your contact information — the whole bag exhibits these thoughtful and useful additions. One thing that always concerns me about backpacks is how they look on my shoulders, but more importantly, a blazer. If the straps are too thick, you look funny. Too thin, it looks like a drawstring bag. Somehow TUMI incorporated tons of cushioning on relatively chunky straps without setting my blazer style off. Which is nice; and again, something that makes this roll top appealing to the business traveler. Also, there’s little to no back sweat, thank heavens. Things I dislike about TUMI’s bag are more subjective, like its lack of more color options other than black, leather, urban camo and green, or the exclusion of an elastic pocket for something like a water bottle — arguably you could just zip the bottle in one of the front pockets. For those with the budget who need a business pack styled like a roll top that can double as an everyday carry, then TUMI’s offering should be right up your alley. It’s comfortable to wear, holds a ton of gear (enough for a weekend trip), looks good and holds appearance with different levels of dress.
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Amazon sues sellers for buying fake reviews
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Kate Conger
| 2,016 | 6 | 1 |
Seller beware — if you buy reviews for your products on Amazon, the company might sue you. As part of its effort to combat fake reviews on its platform, Amazon sued three of its sellers today for using sock puppet accounts to post fake reviews about their products. Amazon has been aggressively pursuing reviewers it does not consider genuine over the last year, often using to discourage the buying and selling of reviews, but this is the first time it has sued the sellers themselves. Today’s suits are against sellers who Amazon claims used fake accounts to leave positive reviews on their own products. The fake reviews spanned from 30 to 45 percent of the sellers’ total reviews. The defendants are Michael Abbara of California, Kurt Bauer of Pennsylvania, and a Chinese company called CCBetter Direct. Amazon is asking for the defendants to be banned from selling products on any of its sites or accessing its services. The suits also ask for the profits the sellers made on Amazon, attorneys’ fees, and damages exceeding $25,000. [ : Amazon is demanding arbitration of the cases, which means they are likely to proceed more quickly than if Amazon were to go to court, and will not play out in the public eye.] Amazon says that, since early 2015, it has sued over 1,000 people who posted fake reviews for cash. Now, the company is going after the retailers themselves. Amazon said that it intends to eliminate incentives for sellers to buy fake reviews for their products. “Our goal is to eliminate the incentives for sellers to engage in review abuse and shut down this ecosystem around fraudulent reviews in exchange for compensation,” an Amazon spokesperson said. Amazon employs a number of methods to combat fake reviews, including suspending sellers and shutting down their accounts. The online retailer is also working to develop algorithms to detect fake reviews and prevent them from appearing at all. Last summer, it started ranking trusted reviews so that shoppers would see those first. Between the lawsuits and algorithms, Amazon says it is having success against fake reviews. “The vast majority of reviews on Amazon are authentic, helping millions of customers make informed buying decisions every day,” a spokesperson said.
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The trends driving electric vehicle development
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Ion Yadigaroglu
| 2,016 | 6 | 1 |
In case you weren’t paying attention, something amazing just happened to the automobile industry. The recent unveiling of Tesla’s Model 3 resulted in the largest product pre-order in history. The fact that within days of launch about 400,000 people paid $1,000 each for a car they will receive in 2018 is simply astounding. In addition to the $400 million wired to Tesla, this represents an order book of more than $15 billion dollars. There’s more. Three technology trends are converging in automobile transportation — and not a minute too soon, given the giant emissions and human carnage wrought by conventional vehicles: These three big technological themes have accelerated over the past decade, and they are now showing multiplier effects on each other. This convergence is leading to dozens of new startups. The traditional automakers are deploying large resources in this space, and now Tesla, Uber, Apple and Google — some of the most dynamic and successful technology companies in the world — are showing up in the driver’s seat of a new frontier. Battery technology is at the core of what is needed to further drive electric vehicle adoption. The issue is mainly lowering the cost of batteries, with performance already adequate for most applications. The cost of a kilowatt of lithium- storage has dropped from about $1,000 in 2008 to something like $200 today. There are numerous advanced technologies that promise costs of $100 and less in the years ahead. The scale-up of global battery capacity will require very large investments, in the tens of billions of dollars, which are only just beginning. The race for those future plants remains open, and we see it as a highly dynamic and exciting area of investment. On the ridesharing front, dozens of business models are addressing the absurd inefficiency of the current ownership model — where cars are left unused, on average, 23 hours of every day. By significantly increasing the utilization rate of vehicles, companies like Uber, Lyft, Kuaidi Dache, Ola and others are reducing the number of cars on the road. This has a direct positive environmental impact, by reducing congestion-related pollution and the need for additional road infrastructure, which will be multiplied with the roll-out of zero-emission electric vehicles. Automation is perhaps the most captivating and science-fiction-like development. Self-driving cars are already a reality. The challenge is how to manage the roll-out in terms of regulation and infrastructure. The inevitable coexistence, at least initially, of self-driving vehicles with their human-operated counterparts will certainly pose quandaries. Significantly less prone to accidents than human operators, self-driving vehicles allow us to imagine transportation without the associated carnage on the world’s roads. More than 1 million people were killed globally in vehicle crashes last year. An incredible boost to economic productivity and leisure can also be foreseen with millions of hours of commuting time becoming available for whatever we choose to do with them. Finally, the positive environmental impact is potentially the biggest win of these technological shifts. Sustainable transportation, enabled and supported by the deployment of renewable electricity infrastructure, will make a significant dent in global carbon emissions. Roughly three hundred billion dollars were invested in wind and solar power plants last year, according to . That makes renewable infrastructure one of the largest capital expenditures globally. I think a similar big bang will soon occur in transportation with the race for better batteries. Many companies are already embracing the inherent opportunities of large-scale change. Others that don’t fully embrace the powerful forces at play will likely be challenged the way coal firms and cheating car companies are stumbling today.
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Box down 7% despite “strong quarter”
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Katie Roof
| 2,016 | 6 | 1 |
CEO Aaron Levie told TechCrunch that the reason the $75.9 million in billings missed the mark is because of the seasonality of its business. “Larger customer transactions are happening in Q2 and beyond,” said Levie. Wall Street was expecting the billings to come in closer to $84.1 million. The company added Airbnb and GEICO along with 5,000 other clients this quarter and 3,000 and 4,000 customers in the third and fourth quarters of last year, respectively. In addition, Box launched new products in the first quarter, including , to improve its international adoption. According to Box, its Fortune 500 user base remains at 59 percent for the second consecutive quarter. [graphiq id=”27xQ5ms15R3″ title=”Box Inc. (BOX) Stock Price – Current Day” width=”600″ height=”562″ url=”https://w.graphiq.com/w/27xQ5ms15R3″ link=”http://listings.findthecompany.com/l/339705/Box-Inc-in-Los-Altos-CA” link_text=”Box Inc. (BOX) Stock Price – Current Day | FindTheCompany”] Though Box has recovered slightly in after-hours trading, the market is still searching for a long-term profitability strategy for the company. Wednesday, one of Box’s top engineering leaders and former Google Docs creator, Sam Schillace, that he would return to Google.
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Thread, the U.K. personal styling service for men, picks out £4M funding led by Beringea
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Steve O'Hear
| 2,016 | 6 | 1 |
, the U.K. personal styling service for men that uses a mixture of algorithms and humans to help solve the online clothes shopping problem, has raised a further round of funding. This time growth investor is leading a £4 million round (approx. $5.7 million), with participation from Balderton Capital and a number of the company’s angel investors. It brings total funding to around $16 million. “We’re keen to hire more engineers, data scientists and other team members to continue to refine the experience for customers. We’re also focusing on growing our list of brand partners. We raised this round to be able to do both those things while continuing to grow at the same pace as we have been recently,” Thread co-founder and CEO Kieran O’Neill tells TechCrunch in an email. A quick reminder of how Thread works. You join the site and take a style questionnaire and optionally upload photos of yourself. A stylist — as in an actual human — then reviews your information and, supported by Thread’s algorithms, the site generates style recommendations personalized for you, claiming to take into account more than 50 elements of style, from eye color and body shape to brand, fit and fabric. You then rate the items and the service promises to become smarter and more personalized over time. “All the stylists work with us full-time, based out of our office in London,” explains O’Neill. “They review the user’s information (and photo if they add one), then teach our algorithm what they think would suit the user best. The algorithm pulls together the perfect items and outfits across the 250,000 items our partners stock, and emails the selection to the user.” The business model is straightforward, too. If you like what Thread recommends — and that’s the whole point — then you are given the option to buy the items of clothing directly from the startup, who will then ship them to you, postage included, and share the revenue generated with the brands it partners with. “We always give people the best recommendations for them, the stylists are completely impartial,” adds the Thread CEO. As it stands, the service is targeting men only, despite Thread testing a version for women when it went through Y Combinator in 2012. “We’ll be relaunching womenswear in the future, but we don’t have a set date for that yet,” says O’Neill.
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Social Nature raises $1M to promote natural products with influencer marketing
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Anthony Ha
| 2,016 | 6 | 1 |
We at TechCrunch, but has a unique focus — natural products. The company is announcing it has raised $1 million in seed funding from investors, including Shopify co-founder Scott Lake, the Pereira/Wharton family, the founders of Pomme Natural Markets and Simon Whitfield ( ) and Brenda Irwin of Relentless Pursuit Partners. Founder and CEO Annalea Krebs insisted that she doesn’t see Social Nature as limited to a specific niche. “An entire generation wants better products,” Krebs said. “We are the platform for progressive brands who want to reach the millennial consumer.” The Social Nature model works by connecting businesses such as (plant-based meats), (probiotics) and (skin care) with consumers who might be interested in trying their products. Those consumers can agree to receive free products and coupons, then they can post reviews on the Social Nature, which can then be shared via social media. To be clear, Krebs said users aren’t paid for posting, and they aren’t required to leave positive reviews. The Social Nature team supposedly vets every product and its goal is to match people with things they’ll actually like, but, “We are not prompting them to say that they loved it. We’re asking them for their honest opinion.” More than 100,000 people have signed up to join the Social Nature community so far. Krebs described the model as focused on “everyday influencers,” not just people who have millions of followers. In other words, these reviews should feel like recommendations from friends, not from social media celebrities. As for what actually constitutes a natural product, it’s looking for “products that care for the planet, respect animal rights, benefit the community and promote wellness.” Krebs added that the company is usually looking for things like organic and fair trade certification, but obtaining those certifications can be “cost prohibitive for smaller brands,” so the team also makes “judgment calls” on a case-by-case basis.
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Sarah Perez
| 2,016 | 6 | 8 | null |
Tubular Labs raises $10 million to measure online videos across social platforms
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Lora Kolodny
| 2,016 | 6 | 1 |
Just how popular was that video of the mom laughing in her ? And how did that video stack up against the one that went viral in January? Are videos published by Last Week Tonight watched more or shared more than videos published by The Late Show with Stephen Colbert? Mountain View, Calif.-based is using big data analytics to figure out such important matters. The startup has also raised $10 million in a new funding round led by video-specialized investors to become the new standard for measurement of online videos, no matter where they surfaced on social media. Earlier, in venture funding from FirstMark Capital, Canaan Partners, Lerer Hippeau Ventures, SV Angel and others. Today, Tubular’s clients include ad and PR agencies, creative studios, media and entertainment conglomerates and brands behind popular products seeking to spend their advertising and sponsorship dollars wisely. In its early days, Tubular only worked with “influencers” and the multi-channel networks that distributed their videos to prove their worth to potential sponsors or advertisers. According to co-founders Allison Stern and Rob Gabel, as online video consumption exploded, Tubular expanded its analytics and software-as-a-service to be able to measure video plays, shares, likes and more across some 30 different social media platforms. The company also developed a of top video publishers to help marketers decide where to spend their sponsorship or advertising dollars, or where to publish their own, branded videos. “Media companies really get obsessed with their own scores, and why they’re moving up or down in the rankings,” said Stern. More specifically, Tubular can show its users reports that illustrate how many views and how a particular video has gotten on YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, Vine, Vimeo or on rising platforms like Twitch. The reports also show where a video garnered the most shares, likes or comments. And Tubular provides a cross-platform benchmark, called the ER30 score (“engagement rate”), that shows publishers how engaging their video was compared to all other videos out there. The company’s system knows, from metadata, if videos were livestreamed, user-generated, created by a professional in a studio, sponsored or ad-supported with commercial breaks. It analyzes data attained through public systems online with the help of a few APIs. But Stern said Tubular does not yet measure personal, private data such as how long a user spent viewing a video or reviewed segments within it. The new funding will go toward product development, hiring, sales and marketing, said Gabel. The CEO also said he wants to grow headcount from about 65 full-time employees today to at least 130 within the next year. Canaan Partners’ , a Tubular board member, sees the company as providing “a standard currency” for the online video industry. He said, “In the same way that Nielsen covered TV, or ComScore covered the Web 1.0, we think there’s room for Tubular to be the big player that emerges to cover online video.” Stern, who is co-founder and a vice president of business development at Tubular, added that of course the startup will add new social media platforms over time, as well. She declined to name names, but Snapchat is an obvious target with its growing discovery platform. Tubular is also preparing to analyze VR content, longer-term. After four years analyzing as much online video data as it possibly can, since 2012, Tubular has already come to understand which videos play best and where, said Stern. Stern said, “The mermaid pillow video got 35.9 million views in the month of January when it first went viral. But the Chewbacca lady killed it, with 154 million views and it just came out. Before that, the top 5 videos going back to September 2015, which is when Zuckerberg put up the first live video on Facebook, all had 33 million views or lower.” And Colbert is still getting more online video views than John Oliver, across social media.
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Mediachain enivisions a blockchain-based tool for identifying artists’ work across the internet
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Jonathan Shieber
| 2,016 | 6 | 1 |
On the internet, where “aggregation” is often , not everyone appreciates the compliment. Content (in all its forms) is increasingly both the commodity and currency of the digital era, but the speed and ease of near-instantaneous global communication and a capacity for infinite reproduction has served to make it easier to sever the work from its creator. Brooklyn-based is hoping to change that. Using a blockchain-like decentralized media library combined with content identification technology, anyone can register, identify and track creative works on the internet or in applications with the company’s tools. “Mediachain is a universal media library where the infrastructure is inspired by the bitcoin blockchain and utilizes a content ID technology that’s similar to the technology that powers Shazam or Google image search,” says company co-founder Denis Nazarov. Application developers can use the content’s metadata to automate attribution, preserve the history of the content’s movement and provide analytics to how content is being used. Here’s what the company had to say about the service on their own blog. Imagine being able to you see in your feed, learn the , or . Developers can build this and much more given the tools to discover and reuse information about our universal culture. The Mediachain repository already has more than 2 million images or metadata records in its content library from organizations including The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), Getty Images, the Digital Public Library of America and Europeana, the company said. “What if all the information out there on the internet was shared … using Mediachain anywhere the media is you can identify the author and the story behind the image,” says Jesse Walden, one of the other co-founders of the company. Basically, the goal is to enable more efficient and frictionless use of content, according to Walden. “Today when an image goes viral, millions of people may see it, but the creator of the work may never receive proper credit,”Walden says. And attribution is a foreign concept for many online. Misattribution or plagiarism happens. All. Shout out to all the photographers who’ve had their images of David Bowie used without license/credit all day, sometimes by legit companies — Matthew Perpetua (@perpetua) The. BREAKING NEWS: Twitter is hiding tweets reported stolen. And it’s referring to the author as a “copyright holder” — Plagiarism Is Bad (@PlagiarismBad) Time. To me, what makes so funny aren’t the stolen jokes he posts, but THE WAY he posts them. — Michael Ian Black (@michaelianblack) “Trying to enforce scarcity is a futile effort,” says Walden. “This is different from control and creating artificial scarcity.” That’s what the existing copyright organizations try (and fail) to accomplish, according to Walden. Both Walden and Nazarov came of age in the free-for-all file sharing ages of the early aughts. Napster, BitTorrent and Tumblr were platforms for file-sharing that were basically free… and basically anarchic. While those platforms were great for innovation, the two co-founders of Mediachain that I spoke with were conscious of the fact that creative control was often wrested from the hands of the creator in a way that didn’t enable them to interact with their audience. It’s one thing for the maker of a piece to cede control to their audience and another for a work’s originator to be rendered invisible to the people who appreciate it. Investors like Andreessen, Union Square and others, including the Digital Currency Group, LDV Capital, Alexis Ohanian, William Mougayar, Kanyi Maqubela, David Lee, Mathieu Drouin and Brian Message, agreed with the founders’ sentiment. “The idea here is that the economy online is an attention economy,” says Walden. “Everyone is a creator. You publish on Instagram and Tumblr and you have likes and followers. Through that you’re able to monetize through platforms and the way that you’re able to monetize, is by proving the ownership of a work,” he says. On Mediachain, ownership comes from publishing on the system and creating a Mediachain node. Developers use the Mediachain protocol to register content. As more developers log in, they are able to propagate the Mediachain dataset across different platforms. For both Nazarov and Walden, the problem of attribution is more than academic. Nazarov was a fine art photographer by training, before he went into programming, and Walden helped launch a management company for recording artists like Solange Knowles. “The long term blue sky vision that if creators are discoverable through their work, independent of distribution, then they can own the entire process of distribution and eventually monetization in a way that was impossible before,” says Walden. “We live in a world where we have a free market on how media is able to be delivered,” he said. The model, in the eyes of Mediachain’s founders, needs to be flipped. Instead, the power needs to be with the creators, not the platform on which they distribute.
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TheSkimm just raised $8 million, led by 21st Century Fox
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Connie Loizos
| 2,016 | 6 | 1 |
Newsletter startup has raised $8 million in Series B funding from what looks to be a very strategic investor: , which was joined by earlier backers . If you’re wondering what a newsletter might have in common with a global TV and film giant, the answer centers on theSkimm’s ambitions. To date, the four-year-old, New York-based outfit has been steadily building up its readership of largely female millennials. In fact, at our TechCrunch Disrupt event in New York last month, theSkimm co-founders (and former NBC producers) Danielle Weisberg and Carly Zakin that the newsletter now has 3.5 million subscribers worldwide. Those readers are getting theSkimm’s content — akin to a CliffsNotes of important news events — at no cost. To generate revenue, the 20-person company says it makes money through product endorsements and native advertising, both of which it says it’s transparent about. It also hopes to make money through a new calendar service that asks subscribers to pay $2.99 a month to be kept abreast of happenings from social events to new feature releases on Netflix. (Launched , Weisberg and Zakin aren’t talking yet about how many people have signed up for a subscription.) Yet the company’s bigger ambition (in its owns words) is to create a “multi-platform audience company” that somehow uses video, as well as print, to share news and product endorsements. It’s already naming the unit it will build Skimm Studios . Thus the tie-up with 21st Century Fox. As for more specific details, apparently we’ll have to wait. Asked about a potential video component at Disrupt, Zakin told reporter Katie Roof, “It’d be a shame if we didn’t use our video background.” In a published earlier today, the company didn’t add much more, saying only that it intends to reach its audience via “more platforms.” According to , theSkimm has now raised roughly $18 million altogether.
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Why gaze tracking startup Cogisen is eyeing the Internet of Things
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Natasha Lomas
| 2,016 | 6 | 1 |
How will you interact with the Internet of Things in your smart home of the future? Perhaps by looking your connected air conditioning unit in the lens from the comfort of your sofa and fanning your face with your hand to tell it to crank up its cooling jets. At least that’s the vision of Italian startup , which is hoping to help drive a new generation of richer interface technology that will combine different forms of interaction, such as voice commands and gestures, all made less error prone and/or abstract by adding “eye contact” into the mix. (If no less creepy… Look into the machine and the , right?) The startup has built an image processing platform, called Sencogi, which has a first focus on gaze-tracking — with plenty of potential being glimpsed by the team beyond that, whether it’s helping to power vision systems for autonomous vehicles by detecting pedestrians, or performing other specific object-tracking tasks for niche applications as industry needs demand. But it’s starting with tracking the minuscule movements of the human iris as a basis for a new generation of consumer technology interfaces. Although it remains to be seen whether the consumers of the future will be won over to a world where they are expected to make eye contact with their gadgetry in order to control it, rather than comfort-mashing keys on a physical remote control. “Voice control, voice recognition, works really, really well — it’s getting more and more robust… But interfaces certainly become a lot more natural if you start combining gaze tracking with voice control and gesture recognition,” argues Cogisen CEO and founder Christiaan Rijnders. “[Human interactions] are with the eyes and speech and gestures so that should be the future interaction that we have with our devices in the Internet of Things.” “We are not saying gaze tracking will substitute other interfaces — absolutely not. But integrating them with all the different interfaces that we have will make interactions more natural,” he adds. The startup has been developing its gaze tracking algorithms since 2009, including three years of bootstrapping prior to pulling in VC funding. It has just now attracted a bridge funding round from the EU, under the latter’s program, which aims to support startups at the stage when they are still developing their tech to prime it to bring to market. Rijnders claims Cogisen’s gaze tracking algorithms are proven at this point, after more than five years of R&D, although he concedes the technology itself is not yet proven — with the risk of eye-tracking interfaces being perceived by tech users as gimmicky. i.e. “a solution looking for a problem” (if you’ll pardon the pun). That’s why its next steps now with this new EU financing are exactly to work on making a robust case for why gaze tracking could be really useful. For the record, he discounts an earlier-to-market consumer application of eye tracking in Samsung Galaxy S4 smartphone as “not eye tracking,” “not 100 percent robust” and “quite gimmicky.” Safe to say it did not prove a massive hit with smartphone users… “There’s a legacy that we have to live with which is that things were — especially a few years ago — rushed onto the market,” he says. “So now you have to fight the perception that it has already been on smartphones… and people didn’t like it… So the market is now very careful before they bring out something else.” Cogisen is getting €2 million under the EU program, which it will use to develop some sample applications to try to convince industry otherwise — and ultimately to get them to buy in and license its algorithms down the line. Although he also says it’s push from industry that is driving eye tracking R&D, adding, “It’s industry coming to us asking if we have the solution.” The greatest push for eye tracking is coming from Internet of Things device makers, according to Rijnders — which makes plenty of sense when you consider one problem with having lots and lots of connected devices ranged around you is how to control them all without it becoming far more irritating and time-consuming than just twiddling a few dumb switches and dials. So IoT is one of the three verticals Cogisen will focus on for its proof of concept apps — the other two being automotive and smartphones. He says it’s positioning itself to address the general consumer segment versus other eye-tracking startups that he argues are more focused on building for B2B or targeting very specific use-cases, including that most creepy-of-all gaze tracking goal: advertising. “The algorithms are proven. The technology itself and the applications still has to be proven. It has to be proven that you are willing to put your remote control in the bin and interact with your air conditioning unit combining voice control and gaze tracking,” he adds. He names the likes of , , and as competitors, but, unlike these rivals, Cogisen is not relying on infrared or additional hardware for its eye-tracking tech, which means it can be applied to standard smartphone cameras (for example), without any need for especially high-res camera kit either. He also says its eye-tracking algorithms can work at a greater range than infrared eye-trackers — currently “up to about three to four meters.” Another advantage he mentions versus infrared-based technologies is the technology not requiring any calibration — which he says offers a clear benefit for automotive applications, given that no one wants to have to calibrate their car before they can drive off. Eye tracking (should it live up to its accuracy claims) also holds more obvious potential than face-tracking, given the granular insights you’re going to glean based on knowing specifically where someone is looking, not just how they have oriented their face. “Vehicles will never be 100 percent autonomous. They’ll be decreased degrees of autonomy. It’s easy for a car to decide to take away control from you — but it’s very hard for the car to decide when to give you back control. For that they need to understand your attention, so you need gaze tracking,” adds Rijnders, discussing one potential use-case in the automotive domain. When it comes to the accuracy, he says that’s dependent on the application in question and training the algorithms to work robustly for that use-case. But to do that, Cogisen’s image processing tech is being combined with machine learning algorithms and a whole training “toolchain” in order to yield the claimed robustness — automating optimizations based on the application in question. So what exactly is the core tech here? What’s the secret image processing sauce? It’s down to using the frequency domain to identify complex shapes and patterns within an image, says Rijnders. “What our core technology can do is recognize shapes and patterns and movements, purely in the frequency domain. The frequency domain is used a lot of course in image processing but it’s used as a filter — there’s nobody, until now, who has really been able to recognize complex shapes purely within the frequency domain data. “And the frequency domain is inherently more robust, is inherently easy to use, is inherently faster to calculate with — and with this ability suddenly you have the ability to recognize much more complex patterns.” Timeframe wise, he reckons there could be a commercial application of the gaze-tracking tech in the market in around two to three years from now. Although Cogisen’s demo apps — one in each vertical, chosen after market analysis — will be done in a year, per the EU program requirements. Rijnders notes the current stage of the tech development means it’s facing a classic startup problem of needing to show market traction before being able to take in another (bigger) tranche of VC funding — hence applying for the EU grant to bridge this gap. Prior to taking in the EU funding, it had raised €3 million in VC funding from three Italian investor funds (Vertis, Atlante and Quadrivio). Rijnders’ background is in aerospace engineering. He previously worked for Ferrari developing simulators for Formula 1, which is where he says the germ of the idea to approach the hard problem of image processing from another angle occurred to him. “There you have to do very non-linear, transient, dynamic multi-physics modeling, so very, very complex modeling, and I realized what the next generation of algorithms would need to be able to do for engineering. And at a certain point I realized that there was a need in image processing for such algorithms,” he says, of his time at Ferrari. “If you think about the infinity of light conditions and different types of faces and points of view relative to the camera and camera quality for following sub-pixel movement of the irises — very, very difficult image processing problem to solve… We can basically detect signal signatures in image processing which are far more sparse and far more difficult than what has been possible up to now in the state of the art of image processing.”
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Google AI produces a melody that rivals the Casio keyboard concerts of our youth
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Devin Coldewey
| 2,016 | 6 | 1 |
It’s 1989. Your parents are watching the Berlin Wall being torn down, but you’re upstairs in your room, fresh batteries in your Casio SA-1, prepping for your concert. The built-in beats are hot. You’ve been listening to the and you think you’ve been inspired. You select instrument number 02, “HONKY-TONK PIANO.” It’s time to tickle the plastic ivories and burn this mother down. Hit it! The beat drops here ^ Pretty good, right? But what if I told you that this was not an obsessively practiced performance by a precocious 7-year-old, but the , the work of the boffins at Google Research (specifically, and naturally, Google Brain)? You probably wouldn’t be surprised, because that’s in the headline. But imagine the impact if you’d skipped the headline and went straight to the body of the article (😂). Yes, this is the first public output of Magenta, “a research project to advance the state of the art in machine intelligence for music and art generation.” Machine learning, suggests Douglas Eck, one of the project’s scientists, has come a long way when it comes to speech recognition and other, more straightforward tasks. But can it learn what it is that makes a piece of music listenable, or a piece of art perusable? (We already know it can do .) “We believe that the models that have worked so well in speech recognition, translation and image annotation will seed an exciting new crop of tools for art and music creation,” wrote Eck. Like any other creative entity, Magenta needs to get its work out there, and it needs feedback. To that end, Google is soliciting creatives and coders both to join the community, check out the code, feed it data and so on. The project will live on both and use Google’s own open-source machine learning platform TensorFlow. So get in there and fork it. It’s far from the first time researchers have looked at the possibility of computer-generated music (research stretches back decades), but with the resources and brainpower of Google Research behind it, Magenta could be one of the more interesting efforts to do so. You can follow along with the team’s progress at the (currently minimal) .
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Verizon will make a $3B second-round bid for Yahoo’s Internet business, says WSJ
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Catherine Shu
| 2,016 | 6 | 6 |
Verizon may be moving closer towards purchasing Yahoo’s main Internet assets. According to a new , the telecommunications giant wants to make a $3 billion second-round bid for Yahoo. TPG, a private equity firm, also plans to submit a bid. Second-round offers are due by Monday and WSJ’s sources say Yahoo will hold at least more round of bidding. Verizon is currently seen as the leading contender after other potential buyers (including Time Inc., Alphabet, Comcast, AT&T, and IAC/InterActive Corp.) . (Disclosure: Verizon owns AOL, which in turn is TechCrunch’s parent company). The $3 billion offer Verizon is expected to make next week is lower than the $4 billion to $8 billion bids that Yahoo’s Internet business, which includes its news sites and ad business, reportedly garnered during its initial bid cycle. The WSJ says that this is because a sales presentation last month by Yahoo chief executive officer Marissa Mayer revealed that its online business—one of the main reasons Verizon is targeting an acquisition—is slowing. CNBC analyst David Faber, however, has . Yahoo and Verizon declined to comment. We’ve also contacted TPG.
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YC’s Instabug raises $1.7M Seed round led by Accel to grow beyond bugs
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Mike Butcher
| 2,016 | 6 | 6 |
I came across Instabug when I was in Cairo in 2013. Little did I know that this plucky startup, born in the Arab Spring, would eventually make it through Y Combinator’s Winter 2016 class. Now they have gone on to raise $1.7M in a Seed round led by Accel Partners to expand beyond their original aim of mobile app bug reporting. Other prominent angel investors in the team include Amr Awadallah, co-founder of Cloudera, and Jim Payne, founder and CEO of MoPub. Given that the startup still has most of its team back in Egypt, this is one of the bigger rounds in the MENA region. It also plans to grow its new San Francisco office. Instabug intends now to expand its suite of bug reporting tools to create a broader kit supporting mobile apps. Instabug’s simple SDK emerged in 2013 to allow mobile users to report bugs in apps simple by shaking their phones. Instabug cleverly then automatically attached screenshots, device details and user steps with each bug reported, aiding the developed. There are lots of competitors, too many to name. But Instabug allows developers to see bugs, feedback and crashes all together in one place. It’s now reporting across 12,000 apps, including 26 of the top 100 apps in the App Store. It’s now present in almost 300 million iOS and Android devices, says the company. In February, Instabug launched Instabug 3.0. This offered in-app conversations to enable teams to have conversations with their users inside their apps. Omar Gabr, CEO and co-founder of Instabug, says “We’re excited to draw the attention of Silicon Valley investors to Egypt, and help support the growing startup scene there.” Originally part of the Egyptian accelerator Flat6Labs Cairo, they raised $300K from angel investors in 2013.
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Tips for mitigating the risks of rookie founders from Spark Capital’s Bijan Sabet
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Harry Stebbings
| 2,016 | 6 | 6 |
The phrase, “I’m sorry, we just need someone with more experience” is a common refrain when job hunting and when looking for capital. Today, when fundraising, the majority of investors privilege serial entrepreneurs over first-time founders. Bijan Sabet, a general partner at , has decided to buck that trend. “First-time founders are so exciting to me,” Sabet says. But Sabet’s view isn’t widely held in the industry at large, so he has a few tips for entrepreneurs making their first trips to venture firms with their hats in their hands. The importance of a great team cannot be emphasized enough, Sabet says. “First-time founders have to surround themselves with great people,” he said. The trick is to figure out who will be responsible for each major work stream. “Specialization and clear division of labor is crucial as a startup scales into hyper-growth mode,” he said. Sabet illustrates this with the Tumblr journey. “David Karp went from a good CEO to a great CEO when he hired Derek Gottfrid as Head of Engineering,” according to Sabet. To make sure early hires are incentivized, Sabet recommends have a conversation at the beginning about equity and responsibilities. Establish founder vesting schedules. Come to a quick conclusion, and proceed to build the company. Account-based marketing is a strategic marketing approach to attain large enterprise accounts in SaaS. As Jon Miller, Founder at , described it to me, “it is fishing with a spear instead of a net.” However, a similar approach should be applied to the fundraising process. Dustin Dolginow highlighted that “capital is a crappy differentiator.” Therefore, use the funding process to build a team of operational experts in your domain. Investors will be there “to help you be the most successful you can be,” according to Sabet. Rookie founders going out to fundraise have very little supporting evidence to back up their claims that investors should part with their money. They have no past success to draw on, no definable traction and have never raised funding before. As a result, product must be core to their thinking. Sabet described being “hooked as an early user” of Twitter and the virtuous loops inherent within the product. This ability to quickly and sustainably entice investors with the product is crucial. Ultimately, the checklist for first-time founders going out to raise is endless. However, the common thread throughout is the importance of being strategic. Be strategic about hiring and assigning responsibilities. Be strategic about choosing investors — this relationship will likely last longer than most marriages. Finally, remember when all is tough and seems lost, 23 percent of billion-dollar-backed VC companies were founded by 20-24-year- olds.
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Instagram enables iOS share extensions to make posting photos faster
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Catherine Shu
| 2,016 | 6 | 6 |
The latest update makes it easier to post from other iOS apps. Instagram has enabled share extensions, which means users can now send pictures directly to their feeds from apps like Photos. Share extensions became available to developers . Apps that already have the share option enabled include (Instagram’s parent company) and , but it took Instagram about two years to finally add the feature. To use it on Instagram, update to the latest version and then open the app you want to send a picture from. Press the share button and tap on the Instagram icon. A window will open to let you write a caption before posting to Instagram. One drawback is that you can’t use Instagram’s filter and editing tools unless you open its app. The share extension means that it will be faster to share photos from other image editing apps that also have the feature enabled, however, which is handy for people who like to post several times a day (but a lot of hardcore users will probably think it doesn’t quite make up for Instagram’s controversial and mandatory ).
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Crunch Report | Mark Zuckerberg Hacked
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Khaled "Tito" Hamze
| 2,016 | 6 | 6 |
Tito Hamze, Jason Kopeck
Tito Hamze
Yashad Kulkarni
Joe Zolnoski
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Blue Origin continues successful, record-setting year with another NASA contract
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Emily Calandrelli
| 2,016 | 6 | 6 |
, the rocket company started by Jeff Bezos, has with NASA to fly and test technology payloads on suborbital flights with the New Shepard launch vehicle. Bezos’ company is the sixth partner that NASA has selected through the Suborbital Reusable Launch Vehicle Flight and Payload Integration Services program. Blue Origin will compete with the other companies, including and , for contracts in this program that will have a combined value of up to $45 million. The NASA contract is the most recent milestone in Blue Origin’s fast-paced development in recent years. Although the company was founded in 2000, Blue Origin has been notoriously secretive about their plans, progress, and technology development until recently. The company didn’t even have a detailed website until the late 2000’s. Earlier this year, they made when Bezos welcomed reporters into Blue Origin headquarters in Kent, Washington for the very first time. Because of this lack of transparency, much of what the public has heard about Blue Origin has happened in the last year – now that the company is promoting the routine launch and recovery of the New Shepard vehicle. Back in April, 2015, Blue Origin conducted the developmental test flight of New Shepard. Since then, things have moved rather quickly. New Shepard rocket launching with crew capsule / Image courtesy of Blue Origin In November, 2015, the company made history by completing their first landing of New Shepard after it had flown into suborbital space. The New Shepard space capsule, which is designed to eventually carry up to six crew members into space, also came along for the ride. After the capsule reached its peak altitude of over 62 miles, it descended back to Earth with the aid of three parachutes. Within six short months after New Shepard’s November flight, Blue Origin launched and recovered it two additional times (three times in total). Each of these tests also included a recovery of the space capsule, descending back to the ground with all three parachutes successfully deployed. New Shepard flight profile / Image courtesy of Blue Origin A fourth flight for the recovered New Shepard vehicle is already in the works. While a date hasn’t been announced, Bezos has mentioned that it will likely be before the end of the month. This particular test flight will include one intentional parachute failure during the descent of the crew capsule. In his statement to , Bezos explained the credibility of such a scenario, providing the example of the parachute failure during the Apollo 15 mission in 1971. You might remember the Apollo 15 capsule had one parachute fail during its return to earth prompting the recovery ship USS Okinawa to radio to Worden, Irwin and Scott in the Command Module “You have a streamed chute. Stand by for a hard impact.” – Jeff Bezos, Founder of Blue Origin Failed parachute during Apollo 15 / Image courtesy of NASA During the tour given to a small number of journalists earlier this year, Bezos that his company plans to have their first crewed test flights in 2017 and hopes to bring their first paying passengers into space as early as 2018. In addition to the business of perfecting reusable suborbital rockets for the purposes of research and space tourism, Blue Origin is also working with (ULA) to build a high-performance engine known as the BE-4. The BE-4 engine has been under development since 2011 and uses liquefied natural gas and liquid oxygen propellants, one of the first large engines with this combination. BE-4 is the only engine that can fly by 2019, meeting the congressionally mandated deadline to eliminate dependence on Russian-built engines. – Blue Origin website While the BE-4 would be used for Blue Origin’s future orbital rocket program, it could also be sold to ULA for use in their next generation rocket, the Vulcan. There are other rocket engines (like AR-1 engine) that could be selected by ULA for this purpose, but Blue Origin’s BE-4 is a leading contender. In controversial remarks that later forced him to resign, former ULA executive Brett Tobey suggested that Blue Origin was the obvious, preferred provider for their next rocket engine. Compare it to having two fiancées, two possible brides. Blue Origin is a super-rich girl, and then there is this poor girl over here, Aerojet Rocketdyne. But we have to continue to go to planned rehearsal dinners, buy cakes and all the rest with both. We’re doing all the work on both, and the chance of Aerojet Rocketdyne beating the billionaire is pretty low. Basically we’re putting a whole lot more energy into BE-4 for Blue Origin. – Former ULA Executive Brett Tobey The past twelve months have been good to Blue Origin. They’ve become the first company to vertically launch, land, and reuse space-bound rockets. Their BE-4 engine is slated to be flight-ready in three years’ time and could help ween the United States off of Russian-made rocket engines. They’re working with NASA to build out the research side of their business. And, if flight tests continue to go as well as they have in the past year, they could become the first private company to send tourists into suborbital space. Of course they still have a long way’s to go a lot to prove, but Blue Origin had gone along for nearly fifteen years without many headline-catching achievements. Now, they’re making up for lost time.
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Josh Constine
| 2,016 | 6 | 1 | null |
Why the recent hype about insurance tech will be just the beginning
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TX Zhuo
| 2,016 | 6 | 6 |
For those who follow technological innovation, it can often seem like certain areas of investor enthusiasm come out of nowhere — suddenly and with huge momentum. The wave analogy is often used, and not incorrectly — fevered investment propels increasing interest and drives new opportunistic entrepreneurs into a specific industry area, building until it inevitably crashes as certain companies underperform and interest moves elsewhere. There’s been a lot of discussion this year that i t is driving to the peak of a similar cycle, and it’s understandable why: Fintech has seen a huge amount of investor attention, and dollars have flown into some bold, high-profile companies. Many entrepreneurs are waking up to the fact that i is arguably one of the most old-fashioned, analog consumer services in existence, and they are creating companies to upend this premise. As a fund, we have invested in companies attacking the i industry from very different angles. We’ve seen that across the industry there is huge opportunity for reinvention, and we believe that innovation and investment in this area is far from being a temporary trend. Below we’ve outlined a few of the areas of opportunities we see, as well as some considerations for any entrepreneurs looking to get into the space. Well, for one thing, it’s an market, and an old one. The $1.1 trillion in premiums recorded in 2013 by the U.S. Department of Treasury represented approximately of the U.S. GDP. And, as everyone is fond of pointing out, it’s an industry dominated by very old institutions. Processes at the carrier level have, for the most part, been relatively unchanged by technology innovations, and many can seem almost comically dated. Companies are personnel heavy, with agents, adjusters and analysts comprising more than and using legacy systems built around paper documents. The average age of life i agents is , and it’s estimated there are an average of three duplicate processes in each customer sale. It’s not out of the realm of possibility that your company at some point ask you to fax them something. This has created a time-consuming, costly and often opaque system with which consumers are increasingly frustrated in the digital present. It’s estimated that auto companies spend a combined total of in advertising each year, but customer satisfaction is low. Take a look at some of the for a selection of the biggest players in health and car : Today’s consumers want to be able to get educated, get a quote and buy a policy from the comfort of their home (or cell phone) in less than 15 minutes. The industry is seeing the effects of this; for many “optional” products that used to be widely embraced, new generations are opting out in droves. A perfect example of this is life i . In 1960, 59 percent of U.S. adults owned an individual life policy; now only of U.S. adults do. An estimated four in 10 U.S. adults own no life policy at all, even though of households with children under the age of 18 say they would be financially challenged if the primary earner died. Every problem we outlined is an opportunity for disruption, and it’s important to note that “i ,” much like finance itself, is a broad ecosystem that both startups and incumbent carriers participate in changing. But there are certain areas for innovation that we are especially excited about from a concept and market timing perspective. Today’s world is driven by data, and there is a huge opportunity for to leverage data platforms to help improve their operations in everything from sales to underwriting. Real-time and near real-time data streaming — everything from environmental sensors to connected devices and wearables — allow insurers to better manage risk, improve subscriber loyalty and optimize sales opportunities. Customer relationships used to be managed solely through human interaction with an agent, but moving forward, relationship management must be primarily digital. And more so than simply replicating existing human processes, companies need to think in terms of a 360-degree view of social media engagement, mobile app interaction and even being mindful of geo-awareness from IoT sensors. Leveraging the cloud for the types of IT activities that don’t directly add value to the ultimate customer experience continue to be a focus area for insurers in 2016. And both for agents and customers, more intuitive user interfaces are needed, allowing for real-time access to policy and claims information and updates. Real-time access to data, combined with a digital interface, also presents the opportunity for reaching new customers with new product types in a way that is sustainable for insurers. A perfect example of this are the micro- policies for agriculture in countries like Kenya that utilize real-time weather data and mobile money transfer to create affordable and accurately priced micro- policies for farmers. The Internet of Things (IoT) and wearables have already seen rapid adoption for applications, with carriers offering discounts to customers who provide data from wearables, like or car . This has led to a positive incentive structure, rewarding lower-risk customers for good behavior, and financially incentivizing average customers to improve their healthy habits or driving safety. We feel this trend is at the , with logical extensions into everything from healthy eating habits to commercial applications for larger-scale products. Startups like , for example, are building tools for the construction industry to incentivize more diligent adherence to safety practices on build sites, and, in doing so, are lowering premiums for these projects in the process. Trends like connected homes and smart buildings continue to propel this market forward, and open opportunities for tailored incentives and more efficient pricing. We have seen a few different startups, like (small business ) and (peer-to-peer online P&C carrier), raise large rounds recently, which has garnered a fair amount of attention for some of the unique challenges of starting a new carrier in the U.S. Regulation is complicated and costly to navigate, and it requires a considerable amount of financial resources to maintain appropriate balances. That said, we believe there is huge opportunity still existing for carriers looking to provide commercial . McKinsey recently estimated that almost in the U.S. don’t carry small commercial coverage. This presents a real opening for companies that can access this market. We have spent much of this article focused on the potential benefits that come from IoT, big data and digital-first communication. These same systems, though, present a unique and fairly new set of risks fin which is still figuring out its role. Cyber policies for companies at risk of cyber attacks or data leaks, drone delivery, new auto policies for the world of autonomous vehicles — both for consumers and in industry — as well as issues like identity theft all present very tangible risks in our society opportunities for legacy (but also upstart) companies. How do you smartly quantify risk, how do you price it for the consumer used to a particular paradigm and what are the tools you need to be competitive? If you are building a distribution platform for products, you be taking only a fractional amount of the value of the contracts you originate. Because of this, it’s important to focus on products with high LTVs and low churn. Be mindful of the trade-offs you face when originating transactions, especially the trade-off between “customer servicing” and owning the end customer. it be valuable enough for you to bear the cost of servicing a customer regularly if you can own the relationship, or are you going to build a platform based solely around volume? Like many ambitious startups trying to disrupt highly regulated industries, there can be a temptation to trailblaze first and check on regulations later. This puts your business at risk of setbacks, as companies like Relay Rides, now Turo, . Turo faced an uphill battle with New York for not being compliant with regulations necessitating licenses for the sale of third-party policies, and faced a suspension of service because of it. Zenefits came under similar . Staying on top of regulations can be especially challenging — but important — when scaling a company quickly. Luckily, Washington is to call for more for regulation across the state and federal levels, but, for now, is regulated on a state by state basis. This can increase the cost of expansion considerably for new entrants into the space. When evaluating entrepreneurs in this space, we look for deep industry knowledge and a recognition that there’s little opportunity for one-size-fits-all innovation. Know all of the stakeholders for your product or platform, especially if you’re trying to innovate on the policy side. It may be a big market, but it isn’t an easy one. Do you want to be an agent or a carrier? It’s easier to get started as an agent, but, over time, there are greater margins to be made from being a carrier, especially at scale. For either option, how do you put your company in the best position to own the customer relationship? Being strategic around this increases your company’s leverage and defensibility. Web apps have historically been agents at cross-selling other products, and we believe this is because they have a hard time building a relationship with the customer. Even with a digital interface, when you own the relationship with the customer, you can have frequent but non-intrusive interactions that allow you to be there at important life events and capture “opportunity-driven” customers at a low CAC. Recognize, also, that there are many access points along the value chain for innovative solutions for some of traditional ’s stickier and more costly problems. Application of is a perfect example of this, and be hugely lucrative for companies that can create solutions for insurers, even though they won’t be a part of the agent versus carrier dichotomy. Traditional carriers, as well as entrepreneurs, have an important role to play in improving for consumers. Many are already taking steps to improve their processes, and those looking to stay relevant and keep customers should be thinking ahead. Online is quickly becoming the primary channel of choice for shoppers, but it is still a small channel for most carriers. Embrace new forms of communication — social media, mobile-first apps, and preemptive communications — for customers. Embrace the new technologies that help you adapt to a shrinking workforce. Drones can play a role in augmenting the work of traditional adjusters, IoT devices can provide automated data and blockchain technology can be used to battle costly issues like fraud. And, finally, get creative when thinking about new categories for products before they become ubiquitous. As we discussed above, there is huge opportunity to be a first mover in areas like autonomous vehicles and commercial drone usage. innovation is here to stay, and there is an opportunity for existing players, investors and aspiring entrepreneurs to shape this change. We believe the disruption — far from being a passing fad — has barely scratched the surface.
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Researchers find a way to snoop on you through your phone’s vibration motor
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Devin Coldewey
| 2,016 | 6 | 6 |
Cover up your webcam, disable microphone access and put on your tinfoil hat — but it won’t make any difference, because the Illuminati can get at you through your phone’s vibration motor now. Well, kind of, anyway. Your best defense? Talk in a high voice. The research comes from Romit Roy Choudhury and Nirupam Roy, associate professor and PhD candidate, respectively, at the Electrical and Computer Engineering school of the University of Illinois at Ubana-Champaign. It’s a surprisingly simple idea, really: A vibration motor is really like a tiny speaker. And every speaker can be a microphone. Think about it. Okay, if it’s not obvious — a magnetic surface that has its position controlled by an applied voltage can also be arranged so that its own position changes that voltage instead. One way it’s a speaker, the other way it’s a microphone. LRA motor diagram courtesy of Precision Microdrives. So it’s not “fundamentally surprising” that the vibration motor could be used to pick up sounds, , which will be presented later this month at in Singapore. But “the fidelity to which this is possible has been somewhat unexpected.” First though, it should be made clear that this attack can’t be executed over the air or anything. The motor has to be physically rewired, although it’s a simple enough job and could be done in a minute or two. A less invasive technique is conceivable, though. “It may be possible to exploit the power controller chip to collect the voltage fluctuation in the vibration motor,” Roy wrote in an email to TechCrunch. “However, we did not investigate this possibility.” Furthermore, only Linear Resonant Actuator (LRA) vibration motors were tested — while many cheaper and older devices use Eccentric Rotating Mass (ERM) motors, which spin a weight to create a vibrating motion, and would be “less susceptible to this attack,” Roy wrote. At any rate, once the reconfiguration is done, the vibration motor begins turning the vibrations it encounters into voltage variations, which Roy and Choudhury showed can be reconstructed into waveforms. Of course, microphones tend to make for bad speakers, and vice versa — to say nothing of a device that was only ever meant to buzz. Doug Roberts, of Precision Microdrives, among other things, wrote me to say “it’s very impressive that the researchers were able to pick out speech.” Despite the LRAs’ superficial resemblance to speakers, they’re really quite unsuitable for the task, due to having “very high Q factors.” (Checks out, but I had to check .) The limitations of rigging up this tiny thing as a mic appear instantly: The frequencies captured are only on the low end of the spectrum, petering off around 2 kHz. However, comparison of original spectrograms to recovered ones allowed the researchers to create a process for guessing what higher frequencies be present, and the result is… well, still not great. But we’re not recording an album here, and even in this degraded state the sounds can still be recognized by humans and voice recognition algorithms with decent accuracy: people got them 80 percent of the time, naive voice rec 60 percent. And this is just a proof of concept — others could come along and vastly improve performance. For now, though, the researchers confirmed that “If the voice does not contain enough low frequency sound to capture, the performance of the system will degrade.” So the way to foil this vulnerability is to talk in a high voice all the time. Go ahead, and let your friends laugh. You will be comforted by your security. (This will actually only kind of work, though — even high notes from sopranos tend to be below 2 kHz.) Is someone going to sneak into your house, steal your phone, quietly disassemble it, rewire it and then listen to garbled audio of you asking Siri for recipes? No, but that’s not the only attack vector. Devices like fitness bands or smartwatches, many of which lack microphones, still have vibration motors that are, perhaps, more enticing targets, because no one thinks to carefully monitor what they say around their step tracker. In the meantime, the researchers aren’t going any deeper in the intrusive direction; instead, and I for one applaud them for it, they are looking into more constructive applications. “We are rather exploring if similar techniques can help us to recover speech from the subtle vibration of vocal cords, facial bones or skull,” Roy wrote. “If possible, it can be useful to develop an assistive system for persons with speech impairment.” I look forward to further research on the topic. You can read more about it and listen to voice samples .
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Waking up with Pavlok’s wrist-shocking wearable alarm clock
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Brian Heater
| 2,016 | 6 | 6 |
I can’t help but think about shock collars when I wrap the bright orange silicone around my wrist. They’ve always seemed fairly cruel. And yet, here I go, putting one on myself — not for barking or wandering out of the yard, but for the crime of having a hard time getting my butt out of bed at 6AM. And while I certainly have more agency in the matter, the comparison isn’t entirely inappropriate. After all, even the name brings to mind a pack of dogs salivating in anticipation of mealtime. What the name is meant to invoke is a sort of forced conditioning. The full version of the hardware is designed to curb all sorts of bad habits, with a “manual zap” button users press when bad thoughts enter their head. The Shock Clock version that this spring is focused largely on helping people get out of bed in the morning. The company calls it “the only alarm you’ll ever need.” Of course, it’s a bit more complicated than that (isn’t that always the way?). For starters, the wristband needs to be connected to a smart device, meaning you’ll need to keep you phone or tablet pretty close to your bed to keep the connection — and for other reasons we’ll get to in a second. The compatible PavlokAlarm app is pretty barebones. There’s a button to pair the device, an adjustable time setting and options to toggle between how much of a rude awakening you want — a haptic buzz, sound or the titular zap. Set it, strap on the band and, you know, go to sleep. When it’s not electrically zapping you, the Shock Clock is reasonably comfortable. If you’ve ever worn a fitness tracker to bed, you pretty much know what you’re signing up for here. The module that slots into the silicone band is a bit bulkier than what you get on a lot of fitness bands, but not so much so that it’ll serve as a distraction as you attempt to sleep. As far as the alarm functionality goes, things work pretty much as advertised. You set the alarm and get the wakeup method of your choosing — at which point you get to scramble to find your phone to shut it off (or in the case of me a few mornings, just unhook the wristband and be done with it). Vibration is really the most pleasant of the bunch. It’s a bit like getting a smartphone notification to the wrist. Assuming you’re not a super deep sleeper, that should do the trick. The sound option, meanwhile, doesn’t really offer much advantage over just setting the alarm on your phone, but you might want to set it to go off in tandem with another method, just as a backup. And then there’s the shock. It’s…intense. It’s not painful, exactly, but it’s a bit more of a jolt than I was anticipating. Honestly, it’s not my preferred method for getting out of bed in the morning, but until someone builds a smart alarm clock into a puppy that will lick my face until I wake up, it’ll have to do. And besides, this is Pavlovian conditioning we’re talking about here. And that’s really the thrust of the Shock Clock. The product ships with an “evidence” dossier, explaining that while “Pavlok is not a medical device and no medical studies have been conducted to test its efficacy,” scientists have been studying the effects of electric shocks on behavior modification. The booklet goes on to list several studies, including one from the 1970s that apparently curbed one subject’s heroin usage. With that in mind, waking up on time is a pretty modest ask. I haven’t been using Pavlok long enough to be properly conditioned. I still need my alarm, and honestly, I’ve stopped wearing it to bed. The fitness tracking I have on right now is enough sleepy time wearable for me at the moment — as I suspect it will be for most. But who knows, perhaps there’s potential for integrating that into a more well-rounded wearable.
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Hibob raises $7.5M to help SMEs manage their people (and those pesky workplace pensions)
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Steve O'Hear
| 2,016 | 6 | 6 |
— yes we’re running that low on company names — is a new U.K. startup building out a cloud platform that helps businesses manage their people. It offers various HR tools, such as management of employee perks, staff engagement and reducing churn, and, perhaps crucially, “auto-enrolment,” which relates to recent pension legislation that will see every U.K. employer having to offer a workplace pension scheme. In fact, I’m told the latter was largely behind Hibob’s decision to launch in the U.K. first. Who said red tape was all bad? Currently operating an invite-only beta, Hibob is disclosing seed funding ahead of a full launch. The London/Tel Aviv-based company has picked up an impressive $7.5 million investment in a round led by Silicon Valley VC . I also understand , co-founder and CEO of TransferWise, is an investor, along with Robin and Saul Klein’s . Also noteworthy is Hibob’s co-founder and CEO , and likely part of the reason why the startup was able to raise a relatively large seed round for a European venture. He previously founded CDN Cotendo, which, in 2011, was to Akamai for around $300 million. In a call, Zehavi and Hibob’s CSO Andy Bellas explained that Hibob is targeting SMEs with a people-centric HR platform that is largely competing with Excel spreadsheets and other arcane methods in which small businesses attempt to manage their employees. That may or may not be true — there is no shortage of HR software — but it plays into a trend that is seeing this type of legacy offering being redesigned to sit in the cloud and with a more friendly UI. Specifically, Hibob aims to improve the workflow of managing and engaging employees, saving hours of administration, such as for ensuring compliance and generating an array of common HR reports. In the short demo I saw, generating these reports and tracking new-employee status regarding on-boarding or any routine administration was relatively painless. Another area that stood out is the way Hibob lets you drill down into various groups of employees based on common attributes that aren’t formerly work-related. This could include employees who have children or are members of various at-work ‘clubs,’ such as a cycling club. The idea is to try to have people management software actually reflect a workplace’s offline happenings and culture. In a brief email exchange, investor Taavet Hinrikus said he sees Hibob as serving a classic underserved market, and that dealing with HR for a small business is a huge pain and something that needs to be automated. “Next up is lots more stuff you can do around this and the employee relationship,” he told me. But really pension schemes is the big bet that Hibob is making. Come for the people management, stay for the auto-enrolment seems very much the mantra here. That’s because by solving the huge administration headache that mandatory workplace pensions schemes will create here in the U.K. — different rules apply to different employees based on how long they’ve been with a company — there is the opportunity for Hibob to also act as a pension broker. In other words, there’s gold to be found in those workplace pensions. “With the arrival of the long anticipated pension reform, there is a tremendous opportunity to combine world class HR software and a painless pension onboarding solution. Hibob represents what we seek in fast growth startups; product vision, a sound economic model and experienced leadership,” says Adam Fisher, partner at Bessemer Venture Partners, in a statement.
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$30M Stampede 2 supercomputer will provide 18 petaflops of data-crunching power to researchers nationwide
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Devin Coldewey
| 2,016 | 6 | 6 |
Watch out, global supercomputer Top 5, there’s a new contender. Or at least there will be soon, once the $30 million Stampede 2 is up and running. With 18 petaflops peak processing capacity, the new system will stand shoulder to shoulder with Cray’s Titan and IBM’s Sequoia — though a good deal behind China’s Tianhe-2. The idea then, as now, was to create a world-class supercomputing platform that could be accessed by any researcher with a problem requiring intense number crunching. Things like atomic and simulations, for instance, that would take years to grind through on a desktop but can be turned around in days on a supercomputer. Just imagine accounting for all the movements and interactions of the 750,000 particle analogs in this simulation of a colloidal gel! Or tracking the entropy of every pseudoparticle (?) in this 2,000 cubic-kilometer general relativistic magnetohydrodynamic rendering of a supernova progenitor! Right? “The kind of large-scale computing and data capabilities systems like Stampede and Stampede 2 provide are crucial for innovation in almost every area of research and development,” said Texas Advanced Computing Center director Dan Stanzione . “Stampede has been used for everything from determining earthquake risks to help set building codes for homes and commercial buildings, to computing the largest mathematical proof ever constructed.” Stampede 2 provides about twice the power of , which was activated in March of 2013. Both systems are funded by grants from the National Science Foundation, and built at the University of Texas at Austin. They didn’t just double the core count for the sequel, though. The 22nm fabrication tech behind the original is being retired, with 14nm Xeon Phi chips codenamed “Knights Landing” (and some “future-generation” processors, as well) forming 72 cores versus the first system’s 61. RAM, storage and data bandwidth are also being doubled; after all, you can’t crunch the data if you can’t move it. Stampede 2 can shift up to 100 gigabits per second, and its DDR4 RAM is fast enough to work as an enormous third-level cache as well as fulfill ordinary memory roles. It will also employ 3D Xpoint non-volatile memory, which is claimed to be faster than NAND but cheaper than DRAM, a sort of holy grail for high-performance storage use cases. Stampede 2 will be the first serious deployment of the stuff, so let’s hope that means it’s trickling down for us desktop users. But enough spec porn ( ), even though it’s all for a good cause. After all, scientists around the country are voracious consumers of this type of resource. The last decade, the UT press release points out, has seen institution numbers double, principal investigators triple and active users quintuple. And why should that growth slow down, as we find ever more ways to employ deep data analysis tasks in both the investigation of the natural world and the creation of new tools and services? There’s no indication of when Stampede 2 will power up, but given that the funding was just lined up, it’ll be a year or more at least — during which time, of course, that Top 5 supercomputer list could get even more crowded.
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T-Mobile is giving every customer a share of its stock
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Fitz Tepper
| 2,016 | 6 | 6 |
T-Mobile had another of its un-carrier events today, which now have so many regular giveaways they are starting to look like an episode of Oprah. First, the company announced that every current T-Mobile account holder on a postpaid plan will get one share of common stock in the company, which is . New qualifying customers will also get one share once they sign up with T-Mobile. Plus, existing customers will be able to earn another free share (or two if you’ve been a customer for over five years) for each new customer they — maxing out at 100 shares a year. The prospectus for the offering is , and gives a little more color on how exactly the promotion will work. Once a customer redeems the share via T-Mobile’s new app, the security will be held in a brokerage account at LOYAL3 Securities. Stockholders can then hold on to their new investment, sell their shares via the platform or transfer their shares to another brokerage account. Customers can even electronically participate in proxy votes to vote their shares. Notably, instead of issuing additional shares, T-Mobile says shares needed to meet the needs of the program will be purchased on the open markets. T-Mobile also launched something called , which is a new app that rewards customers every Tuesday with free stuff. These will include things from brands like Wendy’s, StubHub, Domino’s, etc. For the first week, the company will give away a free small frosty at Wendy’s, and a free movie ticket to see . These brands are more than likely offering the product at a discounted (or even free) price to T-Mobile to pass along to users, hoping to take advantage of the promotional reach of the cell phone company’s 65 million customers. Lastly, the company that all users who have already tried T-Mobile’s Wi-Fi calling feature will get an hour of free Gogo internet every time they fly. Gogo’s make this benefit a little less valuable than others, but it’s the thought that counts — at least until Gogo finishes overhauling planes with its faster satellite-based service. Users will continue to get unlimited free in-flight texting on any Gogo-enabled planes. All in all, the three new promotions are pretty huge, and while T-Mobile’s past giveaways now make this look like a regular thing, the reality is that these are all great bonuses that could legitimately sway new users deciding between different cell companies.
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Photo-sharing app for health professionals, Figure1, adds direct messaging
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Lora Kolodny
| 2,016 | 6 | 6 |
which started out as a photo-sharing app for medical professionals, has quietly added direct messaging to its platform, showing signs the startup wants to be more of a Facebook and less of an Instagram in its field. Toronto- and New York-based Figure1 only allows full access to its platform to users who are verified medical professionals or students, including: doctors, nurses, dentists, physicians’ assistants, x-ray and lab technicians, pharmacists, medical students or residents. The app has 1 million registered users to-date and, on average, 10,000 unique users check in to use Figure1 every hour according to co-founder and CEO Users typically share images of challenging or classic cases, and often seek help from the Figure1 community about , or even diagnose them. The app includes a “paging” feature that lets users solicit help immediately with time-sensitive cases from specific specialties. Patients’ personal information is not disclosed on the app, and Figure1 automatically blocks out faces, then provides additional tools to help users blur personally identifiable traits, such as a tattoos, from a photo before sharing. According to Levey, more than 65 percent of U.S.-based medical students currently use the app, as do medical professionals and students in 190 countries. Figure1 is available as an iOS, Android or Web app. Before now, Figure1 users could only post and comment on threads in front of a whole community of medical professionals. But Levey said some people, especially students, experience “stage fright” about contributing, while others want to branch off from threads to discuss less urgent but still interesting matters in healthcare, like a forthcoming conference or available grant funding for their research. Burgeoning user demand inspired the company to launch Figure1 Direct Messaging, Levey said. The company used SSL encryption and took other security measures to make Figure1 Direct Messaging compliant with the U.S. (HIPAA), among other requirements. The platform will require opt-ins for direct messaging. And the app will limit the use of Figure 1 direct messaging, by terms and conditions, to healthcare discussions. If or when somebody tries to sell to, harass or otherwise spam another Figure1 user via direct messaging, the recipient of the unwanted message can flag that conversation, routing it to Figure1’s moderation team for review. Levey said Figure1 also plans to deliver new services to its users through direct messaging, including: in-app customer support (kind of a no-brainer) and a more creative mentorship program. Figure1 will match medical students and residents around the world with established specialists who volunteer to mentor and give them career advice via Figure1 Direct Messaging. The company has not yet made an API key widely available, but is open to suggestions from potential partners on how its platform could be leveraged to improve healthcare and medicine. Alongside its launch of direct messaging, the company has also translated its app into Brazilian Portuguese and Spanish this week.
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SOLS CEO Kegan Schouwenburg on the ups and downs of running a 3D printed orthotics startup
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Brian Heater
| 2,016 | 6 | 6 |
“Sometimes I think back on that moment and think I must have been utterly insane,” Kegan Schouwenburg says with a laugh. “In retrospect, we were bringing out a new product with a new method in the medical sector, and we were going to work with doctors and sell a product through an app in an entirely new way that people have never used to buy products before.” A veteran of the manufacturing and 3D printing industries, she now finds herself in the fairly unexpected business of orthotics. Schouwenburg founded in 2013 as an attempt to utilize industrial 3D printing for a truly useful service for consumers, after decades seeing the technology largely relegated to prototyping and other behind-the-scenes fare. “We’re at the very beginning of the 3D printing industry, and footwear, at least in my opinion, is going to be the first real consumer-facing application that is really going to change it,” explains Schouwenburg, seated for an interview on the terrace outside of SOLS’ Manhattan headquarters. “I saw an opportunity to completely change how products are made. Nike is deciding what shoes they’re going to ship in 18 months. I want to decide what product I’m going to ship this week. With 3D printing and on-demand manufacturing, we begin to change that story, and you begin to create products in real-time, based on customer feedback.” The consumer-facing heart of the product is an iPhone app that guides users through a quick process, requiring them to shoot and upload two photos of each foot, which are used to generate an 3D model from which the orthotics will be generated. “The first photo allows us to find out what your foot length is,” she says. “And the second photo allows us to understand all of the contour geometry of the foot. All of that gets plugged into a complex data model that we’ve built. And we use that to generate an STL file. The other version of this world involves you finding a podiatrist, going to see them, and then probably waiting three to four weeks to get a pair of custom orthotics. We’re doing all of that in about a week.” And while shoe inserts likely weren’t at the top of most analysts list when speculating upon the future of the 3D printing industry, the company’s $99 mail order model was innovative enough to score $ in funding and land it in the offices of a number of medical professionals. “2015 was a year of hyper-accelerated growth for us, in which we charged headfirst into the medical industry,” says Schouwenburg. “I think about 10-percent of podiatrists have our technology in their office. In doing that, I don’t think we realized how quickly we were scaling and what that looked like.” 2016 got off to a much rockier start. In January, SOLS laid off 14 people – around 20-percent of its total workforce, a move Schouwenburg attributes, in part, to the company’s aggressive rush into the medical space. “The beginning of this year, we had to make some tough decisions,” she explains. “We decided to continue to operate in the medical market, but operate in a more scalable way. And we’ve focusing internally on growing the consumer side of the business, because we know that side will ultimately be much larger than anything we’d ever do in podiatry.” For Schouwenburg, those difficult decisions are an attempt, in part, to return the company to its original mission statement of providing consumers with fast and cheap access to custom insoles. “I grew up wearing orthotics,” she adds. “My mom spent $500 on a pair of orthotics and I felt bad about that. So here’s a product where we can scan, generate and print, and we can do it in a way that takes that $500 price point that people are paying when the go to a podiatrist and make it $99 – or hopefully one day even less than that – and allows anybody anywhere to have access to that product.”
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Microsoft officially launches Planner, its Trello competitor
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Sarah Perez
| 2,016 | 6 | 6 |
The Microsoft Office lineup is today: Microsoft , team collaboration software that lets you visually organize plans, assign tasks, share files, chat and more. The new app, , enters a competitive space which includes pro software like Atlassian’s JIRA Core, as well as other easy-to-use tools from startups like Trello and Asana. Very much like Trello, Planner also utilizes the concept of “Boards” to keep work organized. Within each Board are individual Cards that can have their own due dates, attachments, categories and conversations. These Cards can have documents or photos attached to make it easier to see – at a glance – what that Card is about, and the cards can be organized into columns called “Buckets” which can also be color-coded and prioritized. Another key aspect to the software is the “Hub” where you can track the overall progress of the plans, see who’s on time and who’s behind, and filter down to see your own tasks and assignments. What makes Microsoft’s offering compelling versus the competition is its integration with other Microsoft products – something that will appeal to organizations who are already invested in Microsoft’s Office suite and related services. For example, Planner is integrated into Office 365 Groups, which means that the conversations in Planner are also available in Outlook 2016, Outlook on the web, and the Outlook Groups Mobile Apps. Planner is integrated with OneNote, as well – every plan has a OneNote Notebook created for it, the company says. And the software works with Office, as users can attach Word, Excel and PowerPoint files to a Card. This document, then, is stored in SharePoint Online document library, which makes it available offline, too. As part of the Microsoft Office suite, Planner is an enterprise-ready tool, with support for technical requirements larger organizations demand, including multiple redundant backups, instantaneous recovery and HIPAA, FISMA, ISO27001 and EU Model compliance. While Microsoft has long had a project management tool with , many people found this too complex or too robust for their needs. There’s a learning curve to being able to fully take advantage of Project, which is why, often, users simply turn to Excel for managing projects, or one of the newer solutions, like Trello. But if a productivity app steals mindshare from Microsoft Office’s cash cow, the company tends to take action. Microsoft bought , , , , and , and considered buying , for example. In the case of Trello, it instead simply built its own. Planner will fill Microsoft customers’ need for a more lightweight, easy-to-use tool and replacement for SharePoint Tasks, which were removed well ahead of Planner’s initial debut. (The Tasks page to redirect users to Planner’s website a year ago, before Planner was formally introduced.) Microsoft says that Planner is rolling out now over the next several weeks to all eligible Office 365 customers, including Office 365 Enterprise E1-E5, Business Essentials, Premium and Education subscription plans. These customers will see the Planner tile automatically appear in the Office 365 launcher when it becomes available. [youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y4x8SO8bWkA]
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Uber intros ‘pause,’ discounts, and other quality-of-life features on new driver-focused blog
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Devin Coldewey
| 2,016 | 6 | 6 |
The debut post on Uber’s new driver-focused blog brings with it several features those very drivers may find useful — especially when clocking out. A “pause” switch lets drivers temporarily turn off new ride requests so they can grab a coffee or take a break. Hitting pause also lets drivers end their day cleanly, with the app automatically taking them off the grid when they drop off that last passenger, rather than making the driver turn down requests while they go. And with luck, that passenger will be going their way: another new feature lets the driver specify a destination, like home or downtown, and the app will only connect them with riders going that direction. Those trips apparently “do not count for promotions,” perhaps to keep people from just taking rides going where they’re going, essentially having passengers subsidize their commute. (At least, that’s what I’d do.) Drivers will also receive discounts for when they’re a passenger — but it’s not a flat reduction. They’ll get a 15 percent off voucher for UberX for every 10 riders they drop off, and a 50 percent off UberBlack for every 20 riders. Seems kind of stingy, but no sense looking a gift horse in the mouth. The new blog should be updated with any new features like this or clarifications on policies affecting drivers, so it ought to be worth following if you happen to be one.
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DOZ launches Quoter, a semi-automated service to get a quote and hire marketing freelancers
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Romain Dillet
| 2,016 | 6 | 6 |
While has been around for a while, the company is adding a nifty brick to its product offering with an automated tool to get a quote and launch a marketing campaign. Compared to good old marketing agencies, DOZ speeds up the hiring process quite a bit. If you aren’t familiar with DOZ, the best way to describe it is that it’s a marketplace of freelancers who are good at marketing tasks. So whether you need someone to write a copy, find leads, work on SEO or manage your social media presence, DOZ marketers can handle all of this for you. It breaks down the marketing agency into a marketplace approach. And yet, until today, when you joined DOZ, it was still a very traditional process. You’d submit a brief, wait for a while, get a quote, and go back and forth. Sometimes, you’re not even sure if a marketing campaign makes sense as you’re new to this world. With Quoter, you can submit a project, get a quote and decide in very little time. Quoter uses a chat interface to ask you all sorts of questions about your marketing campaign. Thanks to automated answers and real, actual humans, Quoter can tell you how much it’s going to cost. After that, you can accept, or you can walk away — and it’s not going to cost you anything if you decline the offer. DOZ then automatically matches you with marketers. There are currently 7,000 freelancers using the platform. Overall, they’ve accomplished 50,000 marketing tasks. While Quoter doesn’t reinvent DOZ’s core product, it makes it less intimidating when you sign up. [gallery ids="1332406,1332405"]
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Microsoft bets on Apache Spark to power its big data and analytics services
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Frederic Lardinois
| 2,016 | 6 | 6 |
Microsoft today that it is making a serious commitment to the open source cluster computing framework. After dipping its toes into the Spark ecosystem , the company today launched a number of Spark-based services out of preview and announced that the on-premises version of (which uses the increasingly popular open source R language for big data analytics and modeling) is now powered by Spark. In addition, Microsoft announced that R Server for HDInsight (essentially the cloud-based version of R Server) is coming out of preview later this summer and Spark for Azure HDInsight is now generally available with support for managed Spark services from . Power BI, Microsoft’s suite of business intelligence tools, will now also support Spark Streaming to allow users to push real-time data from Spark right into Power BI. All of these announcements mark what Microsoft calls “an extensive commitment for Spark to power Microsoft’s big data and analytics offerings.” These offerings include Power BI and R Server, but also the , which combines some of Microsoft’s big data and analytics services under a single umbrella that also features a number of machine learning tools. Microsoft, as well as Google, Baidu, Amazon, Databricks and others, will prominently at the in San Francisco this week. Microsoft promises to share more information about its commitment to Spark at the event, too.
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Facebook Live attacks Twitch with game streaming
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Josh Constine
| 2,016 | 6 | 6 |
If people spend a lot of time doing something on the Internet, you can bet Facebook wants a piece. Its latest conquest attempt is the video game streaming business ruled by Twitch and YouTube. Today, Facebook announced its working with World Of Warcraft maker Blizzard to build social login and Facebook Live video streaming into their games, starting with its new blockbuster Overwatch. Blizzard gamers will be able to login with Facebook so they can easily find friends to play with and share in-game content back to the News Feed. Thanks to the Facebook Live API, that includes live-streamed footage of them playing. Facebook users will be able to watch their gamer buddies battle monsters and compete for glory while leaving real-time comments. 100 million people use the Amazon-owned Twitch service each month, while 650 million play Facebook-connected games, showing huge potential for this new feature. Video games have become a spectator sport, and Facebook is angling to become ESPN. Facebook will have to play catchup to Twitch, which has spent years honing its player-picture-in-game-footage-picture video streaming and its live chat. The dedicated interface, ad and subscription monetization options for video creators, and thriving community of gamers will be tough to match. But Facebook brings its enormous user base, advanced streaming back-end, and social graph to the fight. Twitch’s dedicated game streaming interface If Facebook truly believe esports live streaming is the next big thing for the average viewer, not just gamers, it could shower players with view counts they can’t get elsewhere. That could in turn attract more publishers and their top-tier content that then lures in serious esport fans. We saw Facebook employ the same traffic funneling to pull in news publishers, celebrities, and recorded video creators. Once upon a time, Facebook was the center of the casual gaming universe with its FarmVille-fueled desktop platform. People spent countless hours mindlessly clicking to maintain their digital cities or homesteads. Facebook’s next foray into gaming could be even simpler for users: They don’t even play. They just watch.
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Unscaling politics
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Hemant Taneja
| 2,016 | 6 | 6 |
It’s the end of politics as we know it. And no, Donald Trump doesn’t get all the credit. America’s two major political parties are in the process of being unscaled. They’re being pulled apart and disrupted like so many other industries and institutions today. Pundits blame Donald Trump for the turmoil plaguing the Republican party and Bernie Sanders for the Democrats failing to pave a smooth way for their establishment choice. But there’s something less obvious and much bigger at play here. The economics of unscale, as I call it, are hard at work dismantling all large-scale, vertically integrated, mass-market institutions. New forces driven by technology are disrupting and reshaping everything from transportation and education to energy and finance. There’s every reason to think unscaling is having the same impact on the two major American political parties. Prediction: Trump and Sanders are only the beginning. In coming years, our two-party system will break into a constantly changing mix of multiple issue-oriented parties. There are two key aspects of unscaling that are acting on the two parties right now. First, while in the past a powerful company or institution could wield scale as a strategic advantage, technology is commoditizing scale by making it rentable. Over the past two decades, ubiquitous platforms have emerged that everyone can play on. The internet, mobile and social networks, online payment systems, cloud computing and open-source software have together created a world where a lean startup can now rent or freely use the tools they need to compete against global giants. The second aspect at play here is data. Newcomers, whether in the private or political sectors, have access to the data needed to tear down and reinvent just about anything. They can improve on a message or tailor a platform to make it more appealing to a specific set of customers. Today we have two big tents — Democrat and Republican — that try to pull in as many voters as possible. Their platforms are broad, aggregating opposing positions on dozens of issues, nearly assuring that neither party fully aligns with any citizen’s views. Like that 350-channel cable package that’s fast losing commercial appeal, unscaling of the political parties means it’s possible for upstarts to unbundle issues and repackage them to appeal to a narrower, but significant slice of the electorate. Now, with digital platforms and data at the ready, a startup party or candidate can develop a better “product” that’s more specific to what a segment of voters want. (Example: The fiscally conservative, socially liberal sect. Or unionized social conservatives.) Scale is no longer needed to have the reach to be a viable candidate. Social media is a platform available for free. Trump has more than 7 million Twitter followers, and his tweets get amplified by traditional media, which repeats them. Ted Cruz can rent computing through the cloud and rent sophisticated analytics to crunch data and find voters he’d appeal to — no need for great scale to do that. Barack Obama pioneered the use of micro-donations and social media as a political craft. Sanders (micro-donations) and Trump (social media) have perfected these tactics. With the infrastructure in place to solicit donations via platforms like Twitter and HubSpot the second an opportunity arises, the importance of the mega-fundraising arms of the big parties is quickly fading. Super PACs and $100,000-a-plate dinners will not be able to compete with instant donations of $5 here and $50 there from millions of enthusiastic supporters. Starting from a place of scale, especially within the major parties, is no longer necessary for a politician to create a national brand. Republican or Democratic validation used to matter — it would get candidates in front of newspaper editorial boards and on TV, access to phone banks and help draw the live crowds. Today, YouTube stars have bigger audiences than most TV shows, blogs cut out the media middleman and Meetup groups and Twitter get the crowds organized. The major parties will not go down without a fight. As we’ve seen with unscaled disruption in industry, it often runs afoul of old rules and laws that were set up to protect the old guard (see Uber and Airbnb). In politics, unscaling is already running headlong into election laws and rules set up for a two-party system. The delegate system, especially the seemingly opaque super delegate allocations and the Electoral College, are being called into question. When unscaling hits industry, politicians can be convinced to evolve laws to allow progress. In this case, the politicians who would be disrupted are the ones who would have to change the laws. Hence, a problem. But let’s say the laws get out of the way and politics can take its natural course. The economics of unscale predict that many startup parties will challenge the big parties and steal their members. Some will catch on, re-bundle voters around issues they care about and reach enough scale in a new way to have influence. In fact, some of the outcomes of an unscaled multi-party era seem like they have to be an improvement. If all this is true, it’s the end of Super PAC clout, because money will matter less. And startup parties will have better product-market fit, making their constituents feel better served and more involved. Today, most people feel their party only represents some of their beliefs. To get anything done — like, to get enough votes in Congress — startup parties will have to build coalitions. Maybe that sounds difficult, but then again, it can’t be less effective than the gridlock in place today. The two-party system has been challenged before. Theodore Roosevelt and Ross Perot ran as third-party candidates and won significant followings. But after those elections, things went back to normal. But those were the days before rentable scale and software infiltrating everything — before unscaling became the rule. Some argue that Trump and Sanders will prove to be anomalies and disappear. But I believe their traction and popularity is instead is a symptom of an unscaling of politics; the movements they engendered are only a taste of what’s to come.
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“Let me see your phone”
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Matthew Panzarino
| 2,016 | 6 | 24 |
Here’s one for your Friday. An older video, unearthed by a few days ago has been blowing up on the network. This group poem, performed by and , is one of the best expressions I’ve seen of love and trust in the digital age. “Settings>Privacy Settings>System Services>Location Services>Frequent Locations” We’ve all been there. https://twitter.com/iamjamajesty/status/744350864970702853 Here’s a if you’d rather watch that way. The video is from the 2014 Brave New Voices program put on by , a 20-year-old organization in San Francisco that promotes literacy via spoken word performances, education and festivals that include poetry slams and other events. If you’re in San Francisco, Youth Speaks’ next event is .
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The last driver license holder
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Mario Herger
| 2,016 | 6 | 24 |
Say hello to Liam. He recently celebrated his first birthday. Not only is he a cutie, he is the last person to get a driver license. Impossible? Not in your lifetime? I admit: I don’t know if Liam will be the last person to get a driver license. It could be Sophia or Ethan. This person may live right around the corner in your neighborhood. But one thing is certain: The last person to get a driver license is already born — the speed of technology development and recent announcements confirm that. The California alone issued to 13 companies licenses for road testing autonomous technologies. alone has 58 test vehicles on roads across the U.S., counting for 80 percent of all registered test cars. Google has accumulated an impressive 1.6 million autonomously driven miles, adding between 10,000 and 15,000 miles every week. In total, this counts for 90 percent of all test miles driven in California. Added to that are 3 million simulated miles every day, according to Google’s . , on the other hand, revealed that their customers have driven more than 100 million miles in Autopilot mode since its roll-out in October last year. And that Tesla is less than two years away from having a complete autonomous car. and are just two more digital companies that started testing autonomous cars. The technology is advancing rapidly. Given the overall number of miles driven and comparing them with the number of accidents, the cars are already as safe as human drivers: 12 accidents occurred with Google vehicles during the 1.6 million miles of road tests, and only two of them were the fault of the Google cars. The cars had an incident every 133,000 miles; this is on par with reported and non-reported . Traditional automakers who’ve been asleep at the wheel for some time are now ramping up their efforts with the goal to catch up with those newcomers from the digital industries. Honda, Mercedes, Audi, Ford and GM all have test vehicles and are frantically acquiring technology or entering into partnerships like and . Even suppliers like Bosch got test licenses. Additionally, announcements involving revealed that the focus of their i-series is shifting to autonomous vehicles; the is expected in 2021. Following Ray Kurzweil’s statement on , we will see exponential acceleration in the development of the required digital power and intelligence of self-driving car AI. Conservative expectations that draw from past linear experiences may be coming faster than most of us expect through the exponential component. , an automotive system architecture for standardizing automotive electronic control units, is expected to have in its 2018 release version 4.4 everything included for autonomous driving. This system standard is expected to be included by 2020 in the cars built by its partners, including BMW, Ford, GM, Daimler, Volkswagen and Volvo. Sensor technologies are also advancing rapidly, and prices are dropping. Modern cars are equipped with hundreds of sensors, including radar, cameras, GPS and accelerometers. Additionally required sensors such as are predicted to drop to a few hundred dollars in the next few years. Technology research firm listed all the companies that provide solutions for or drive autonomous technologies; the amount of companies is impressive. More than 200 companies work on autonomous driving solutions and — if we extrapolate trends from other hot industries — many more will follow. While the technological components to make the cars work and safe are crucial, insurance companies and regulatory agencies could become drivers for rapid adoption. Given that are caused by human error, the expected lower accident rate with self-driving cars may make insurance costs for human-driven cars prohibitively expensive. Although a today are still skeptical about handing over control to a machine, experiencing a self-driving car for themselves and seeing insurance rates go up for human drivers will quickly change that. Regulations may follow suit; by 2030, manually driven cars may even be outlawed or restricted to closed circuits. Given the facts of these joint efforts and the resources spent by major players, once Liam (or Sophia or Ethan) turns 16 in 2031, they will not be required or even allowed to get a driver license. Especially when we consider the of their age group. And they may not want to do it anyways. The declining rates of driver license holders among teenagers, a trend that also notice. All those developments bring us back to the question: What is the real task for a car? Not to give you the “joy of driving,” or “freedom” as car makers have been telling us. Cars are also not solving a mobility or transportation problem. Cars are connectors. They help us connect with other people, with places and with goods. However, the biggest competitor for connecting is in our pockets: the smartphone. While in the past teens argued about who the driver, now they argue about who the driver. The passengers can stay connected with their smartphones, the driver cannot (the driver must focus on the road). A self-driving car allows everyone to be connected in all modes: virtually and in reality. And this is why Liam (or Sophia or Ethan) will not really be excited to get a driver license, and will be the last one to take the exam at the DMV.
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Faraday Future says it is also making an autonomous car
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Sarah Buhr
| 2,016 | 6 | 24 |
Chinese-backed electric car maker says it is working on a self-driving vehicle. The company not so by LeTV joins a growing list of tech companies making autonomous cars, including Google, Tesla, Apple (big rumor) and even IBM now . Faraday revealed its first concept car, the , at CES earlier this year — an electric car with the look of a Hot Wheels toy. The car was said to be made with a variable platform architecture (VPA), and came with what the company referred to as a “UFO line” design dividing the black and silver body of the vehicle. It also came equipped with a space helmet for some reason. Faraday’s chief engineer seemed full of about the car and little else at the time — leaving many to wonder just what was under the hood. Meanwhile, Faraday’s parent company has been busy launching its own electric vehicle and an and it seems Faraday is following suit. We don’t know much about the new car, but the company has recently acquired an Autonomous Vehicle Tester (AVT) permit in California, which will allow it to start testing a self-driving car on public roads in the state. California has so far granted permission to 14 companies to test autonomous vehicles on public roads, including GM’s Cruise Automation, Google, Volkswagen and now Faraday. But the company is placing its bets beyond the Golden State. Faraday reportedly plans to start testing self-driving vehicles in Detroit, Michigan, as well. According to , the company approached Kirk Steudle, director of the Michigan Department of Transportation, in January to ask how to apply for autonomous vehicle plates. Though Faraday has yet to produce a working prototype car, it says it will be testing autonomous driving software, sensors, hardware and user interfaces in “real-world” environments in each state. California law a test driver to be present inside driverless vehicles and Faraday says it is working on a car that will allow those inside to switch from manual to autonomous mode. “Through this enhanced testing, and under the constant supervision of our qualified test drivers who will be behind the steering wheel at all times, we are confident in the success of the autonomous technologies that we are developing for future FF products,” a Faraday spokesperson said in a statement.
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Why a Palantir IPO might not be far off
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Connie Loizos
| 2,016 | 6 | 24 |
Earlier this week, BuzzFeed got its hands on a arranged by for its employees, one that asked current and former employees to agree to a host of stipulations. Among them, the 12-year-old, data analytics outfit asked former employees to renew their non-disclosure agreements, agree not to solicit Palantir employees for 12 months, and promise not to sue the company or its executives. As part of the purchase plan, both current and former employees also had to agree to notify Palantir “immediately” if contacted by a reporter and to send the company a “copy of the inquiry” within three days. BuzzFeed concluded that the arrangement was meant to “muzzle former employees,” which makes sense, particularly given insights into Palantir that BuzzFeed has been publishing this year. (It clearly has a friend or two who is close to the company.) Still, we’d posit that something else could be going on. Namely, it looks to us like Palantir may be preparing at long last for an IPO. Palantir, which has reportedly raised $2.3 billion from investors and was valued at during its last institutional financing round, didn’t respond to a request for comment. But there are a few reasons to think the company, which has long rejected talk of going public, may finally be getting its ducks in a row. Let’s start with this recent liquidity event, in which Palantir agreed to buy up to $225 million in common stock from employees. As Buzzfeed reported, the company offered those shareholders $7.40 per share. That’s a premium over the roughly $7 that outside buyers have been paying lately for employee shares on the secondary market. (As BuzzFeed noted, Morgan Stanley and Fidelity had marked down the value of the shares even more dramatically, to just below $6 as of late March.) Obviously, Palantir had to dangle some kind of carrot in exchange for the trade-offs it wanted. Indeed, founder Ben Black of , which purchases stock in private companies, calls the completely optional deal “a massive benefit for their employees.” But the arrangement also put Palantir in a somewhat fraught position if an IPO in the offing. Consider: If Palantir were instead to raise new funding any time soon at a substantially higher valuation, employees who just sold some of their shares might cry foul, saying Palantir was withholding knowledge of the fair value of the stock. Here’e another thing: Maybe with this stock buyback, Palantir was looking to clean up its cap table. This is the fifth company-arranged stock sale that Palantir has staged for its employees over the years, but in the meantime (and alongside them), employees and investors have also been free to sell shares to secondary buyers, which has apparently created a bit of market fatigue. As one source who asked not to be named says, “Very few people have information about the company. They’re trading based on guesswork and speculation, and the market is pretty volatile and maybe even artificially depressed by that lack of information.” “Limiting the shares and pathways that employees can sell shares makes sense,” adds chief economist Max Wolff of the merchant bank . “No firm wants too many shares on the market at one time.” Even if we’re wrong about Palantir’s motivations, a quick scan of its job openings suggests that it’s finally starting to think seriously about an IPO. The 2,000-person company currently has eight openings in its finance department, including for an who can “build a strong internal audit function that has the capabilities for SOX Compliance as well as business process optimization.” Sarbanes-Oxley, of course, is the controversial 14-year-old act whose intent is to improve corporate governance and prevent fraudulent accounting activities at public companies. Palantir seems well-positioned to test the public waters. Though sources tell us it isn’t yet profitable, the company reportedly saw bookings last year of $1.7 billion, roughly 60 percent of which came from commercial enterprises and another 40 percent from government contracts. Just last month, it landed a to support the United States Special Operations Command. If it had a mind to do so, through its new buyback, Palantir could have also locked up many current and former employees through a filing prospectus and even, conceivably, through the first months after a public offering. (At least, current and former employees who sold shares may perceive that they’re restricted, even if the law is on their side. As Cliff Palefsky, an employment rights attorney in San Francisco, notes for example, “Non-solicitation agreements are used frequently.” But in California, at least, “they’re not enforceable in most cases.”) Whatever happens, it’ll be interesting to see if Palantir’s newest terms and conditions are embraced by startups elsewhere. Palantir is anomalous in many ways, including its age, the tenure of its employees, and the amount of money it has raised from investors. Even still, “I wouldn’t be surprised if you start seeing more stipulations relating to company buybacks and tender offers,” says Shriram Bhashyam, who founded , a startup the connects shareholders of private companies with investors. “Many of these companies have the same counsel and board members, so a lot of information and practices get passed around.” Either way, notes Howard Caro, a managing director at the investment firm , “With large, successful, private technology companies staying private longer, executives and boards are realizing that they have to respond constructively to the inevitable build up of demand for pre-IPO liquidity.” What “constructively” means for each company will be worth watching.
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Ladar Levison finally confirms Snowden was target of Lavabit investigation
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Kate Conger
| 2,016 | 6 | 24 |
Ladar Levison’s three-year fight for freedom to speak about the government order that shuttered Lavabit, his secure email service, is finally over. Levison was finally able to today that Lavabit was targeted by the government during its investigation into the Edward Snowden leaks. Although Apple’s legal battle to keep its users’ data encrypted is more widely known, Levison engaged in a similar fight in June 2013, when government agents showed up at his doorstep in Dallas. The government demanded that Levison turn over data about a particular user, and served him with a non-disclosure order that prevented him from speaking about that user — until now. “It still feels a little bit weird saying Edward Snowden’s name in connection with my case. I always had to be so careful,” Levison told TechCrunch. Although the government accidentally revealed that Snowden was the target of its investigation when it left his email address in a March court filing, Levison has remained unable to speak about it. “Legally speaking, I was still barred from discussing it,” he said. Earlier this month, the government finally allowed the gag order to be lifted. “It’s a small victory in a much larger fight in an even bigger war,” Levison explained. He’s planning to celebrate his new freedom by presenting a talk at DEF CON 24 about compelled decryption, in which he will discuss his case in detail for the first time. Now that his case has ended, Levison is considering reviving Lavabit, perhaps as a service. He’s also launching , a legal defense fund that he hopes will serve other small businesses as they fight for encryption. He explained that his own experience taught him the struggle small service providers go through when they are forced to defend themselves in court. Levison founded Lavabit in 2003, and had a steady 10 years of operation before shutting down in August 2013. At the time, he announced his decision with a to users. “I have been forced to make a difficult decision: to become complicit in crimes against the American people or walk away from nearly ten years of hard work by shutting down Lavabit. After significant soul searching, I have decided to suspend operations,” he wrote. “I wish that I could legally share with you the events that led to my decision. I cannot.” Even after years of court battles, Levison is still glad Snowden chose to use Lavabit. “I think if anything, I’m glad it was him and not a degenerate or a scoundrel that I was left defending,” he said. “My fear was that I would be forced to defend a terrorist or a child pornography ring or organized crime or something of that nature. Instead, the person they went after that led to the eventual shutdown was a whistleblower exposing government abuse. That’s at the very heart of why I think privacy is so important.”
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JBL’s Charge 3 waterproof speakers are big on battery and bass
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Brian Heater
| 2,016 | 6 | 24 |
I do the same thing every time I get a waterproof device – I take it home, fill up the sink and dunk it. It’s a strangely cathartic, a sort of gadget baptism, and nicely refreshing for someone who spends so much of his time cautiously handling expensive hardware devices. The only thing that beats it are those companies with rugged gadgets that demand you bang them with a hammer. In these dog days of summer, however, I’ll happily settle for a quality dunking. When JBL contacted me, offering up a number of their latest products for review, I told them to skip the rest and just send along the Charge 3. It had been a little while since I’d had a quality dunking. Sure there’s the and a couple of fitness bands designed to be splash proof, but it’s been a full month since I played around with the , so I’m about due for a good speaker dunking. Right out of the box I was impressed with the Charge’s looks. JBL’s built a nice, solid piece of hardware here in a compelling form factor – in fact, this speaker’s cylindrical design is better suited to the Roll name than Logitech’s offering. Like the Roll, the bulk of the Charge is covered in a rugged mesh fabric designed for maximum waterproofiness and quick cleaning under the faucet after you invariably spill condiments all over the thing during your world-famous Fourth of July barbecue. Or maybe that’s just me… In the middle of the speaker is a big JBL logo and along the top is a row of big rubberized buttons for power, volume, Bluetooth, play/pause, and syncing. Along the bottom are four always-on lights letting you know how much, well, charge is left in the old Charge. On the back is a rubberized, ruggedized door that seals up the device’s ports: auxiliary, microUSB for charging and a full-sized USB port that gives the line its name, letting you top off your mobile device via its massive 6,000mAh battery, which promises 15 hours of playback time. The bulk of the sound output comes from the front of the speaker, though it’s flanked on the sides by two big passive radiators that visibly vibrate to offer up big, thumping bass – an impressive level for what is ultimately a pretty small speaker. The speaker’s cylindrical form factor also means that you can stand it up vertically, if you need to save a bit of space, vibrating the surface it’s sitting on in the process. The Charge’s sound isn’t great, sadly. You can pick out a pair of better sounding speakers for $150 with little problem. In fact, the big, booming bass does feel a bit like overcompensation. And while the speakers do get extremely loud, it comes at the expense of fidelity. These aren’t everyday listen to the subtle nuances of a Bach sonata speakers. These are big, bass bumping at the pool side party speakers – and the ability to accidentally knock them into water certainly puts them in a different class than most of their similarly priced competition. Oh, and they’ve got a built-in mic, so you can also take that important business call in-between games of Marco Polo.
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What UK startups make of the shocking Brexit vote
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Natasha Lomas
| 2,016 | 6 | 24 |
Tory government, Brexit has been an awful prospect hanging over U.K. startups since this time last year — the vast majority of which strongly hoped to remain in the European Union. Shock, disbelief and disappointment were common sentiments among the startups TechCrunch spoke to, many of which had scrambled emergency meetings to consider their immediate steps in the face of a seismic shift in the political and economic landscape of both the U.K. and the European region as a whole. Uncertainty is the prevailing feeling, as you’d expect, but for earlier-stage startups, and those in certain sectors with lots of customers in European markets, there can also be real fear. Or at least a sense that their founding tie to the U.K. might just have been unpicked. No U.K. founders were pretending they knew exactly what was going to happen as a result of Brexit, but concerns are plentiful in areas such as staffing and talent acquisition; how they will continue to serve European customers; and whether they’ll be able to effectively scale internationally from a British base. And against a backdrop of concerns and questions, founders are having to make key business decisions in the face of rapidly descending political fog and a plunging pound sterling. Welcome to Brexit-induced business blindness. None of the startups I spoke to is considering relocating out of the U.K. at this early stage, but many are thinking about how they might need to restructure their businesses going forward — including several that said they might well be setting up bases in other European countries in the future. Founder, Graham Parker, CEO of seed-funded online shipping platform U.K. startup , which operates in the U.S. and U.K. markets and has offices in the North of England as well as in London, is definitely in Camp Fear where Brexit’s “prolonged period of massive uncertainty” (as he categorically put it) is concerned. To date the business has ploughed most of its resources into the U.K. market. That might have to change, he said. “After today, having been live a year and working closely with a lot of British exporters, we’re really thinking can we afford to focus on just the U.K.,” he told TechCrunch. “There’s so much uncertainty around shipping, with the borders that would reappear all over the EU — no one knows what kind of complications that will have. We have customers that have big contracts in Asia and South America and places and they’re wondering will they continue to buy from Great Britain when it’s not in the EU and they lose the protection of EU trade tariffs. So we’re really worried. And we’ve been looking to say do we really accelerate our plans for the U.S.? “For us as a technology company it’s forcing us to say ‘can we afford to depend on this market when it’s so uncertain’? We just don’t know what will happen… We’re very worried that because of the uncertainty if business was to drop off our exporters in the U.K. we’re very exposed. So we’re weighing up the options of progressing more into Germany or progressing more into the U.S.” London-based, seed-funded , a maker of software targeting nonprofits to help with fundraising efforts, which has offices in the U.S. and the U.K., is immediately going to be switching marketing resources away from the U.K. “We have decided (this morning) that our sales and marketing focus will focus away from the U.K. market, as the volatility and uncertainty here will mean our customers will be less inclined to invest in new solutions,” said founder and CEO Jonathan May. May added that the startup will also now be focusing its new hires in the U.S., noting the “wider access” to skills there versus a go-it-alone Great Britain. “London was a very, very attractive home whilst it remained in the EU, giving us access to the integrated European market both from a staffing and a customer base point of view, as well as good access to the U.S. East Coast market. But now we will need to look at growth elsewhere. “We are looking at whether a base in Berlin would more appropriately serve the (geographical) European market, and give us access to the EU skills market,” he added. It is, of course, entirely possible that economic turbulence caused by Brexit rebounds on the U.K.’s European neighbors, too. And concern about the risk of a regional recession being triggered by Brexit is also making London-based early-stage digital signage startup reconsider its market focus. “I think we will double down on our growth in North America and Australasia where we are already doing well and maybe bring forward plans to base more of our team there and pause on Europe,” says founder and CEO Mark McDermott, adding: “That’s sad.” “We are currently raising our seed round and talking to existing and new investors in London and also in Singapore. I figured London was our likeliest bet, and it might still be, but right now Singapore looks like it will come with less baggage,” he added. It’s a similar story being told by the founder of London-based virtual clothes try-on startup , which operates in multiple markets and has raised Series B levels of funding at this stage. The company took the snap decision to pull commercial operations out of the U.K. market in their post-Brexit meeting this morning — in order to “reduce our exposure to zero,” with CEO and founder Tom Adeyoola also citing fears the U.K. brands they work with won’t be able to weather “uncertainty or potential recession” well enough. Brexit “accelerates Amazon winning the U.K. retail market” is his concise summary of the likely impact on the domestic ecommerce space. Adeyoola held out the forlorn hope of a second referendum being called in the fall, should the immediate economic shock to the pound evolve into a national recession and that in turn beget a grim realization of what’s coming down the pipe, even before the government has embarked on the vast task of unpicking treaties and renegotiating trade agreements and reconfiguring migration flows. He added: “I fear the U.K.’s ability to fight our corner in a global world now to help us become a global star. As the major organizations look to or threaten to move their HQs and operational centers, UKTI and the government will have more than their hands full along with renegotiation of trade terms to nurture the new emerging champions like us and won’t be able to fight against anti-competitive and antitrust behavior as they battle to keep them.” Offering a startup perspective from outside the U.K. market, Oisin Hanrahan, the Irish CEO of New York based on-demand cleaning company , suggested Brexit might provide uplift for Dublin’s position as a European tech hub — given that, like the U.K. capital, it’s English-speaking but, unlike London, it remains securely fixed within the EU… “Maybe there’s room for Dublin to become the new London of Europe,” he told TechCrunch. “I do think there will be real questions around the U.K.’s place in Europe. I think that’s a real challenge.” Right now he said London is Handy’s “second most important city” from a volume and revenue perspective. It remains to be seen how Brexit might change that. “Whenever you’ve got these periods of uncertainty it’s not wonderful for business,” he added. “Right now we’re in one of those moments where if you’re in a financial services business or you’re in a business that has a lot of cross-border dependencies between the U.K. and other European countries it’s a challenging time.” One thing in the Brexit mess that’s looking reasonably clear is that later-stage, better financed/resourced U.K. tech businesses are feeling less exposed to the risks created by a period of sustained uncertainty versus newer, smaller startups. Even though the larger entities are also more anchored in the domestic market. Early-stage startups can — and might — just up sticks and leave. London-headquartered, , for example, which is applying AI to b2b software for managing and signing contracts, is considering its future on that front. Its team is split between London (product and marketing) and Latvia (dev) right now. But founder Richard Mabey said it’s possible they might move the entire team to Latvia in the future — underlining that Brexit’s destabilizing uncertainty might extend to where entrepreneurs choose to try to build a business. Why bother trying to start something in a location where there’s one more (gigantic) uncertainty on your plate? On the more established startup front, Michael Kent, founder and CEO of London-based online international money transfer startup , which has been operating since 2012 and has raised some $46 million from investors to date, described the referendum result as “depressing” but said he does not envisage a huge immediate impact on the business. “I’ve already had all my investors on the phone,” he told TechCrunch. “We stopped trading for a period, 12 hours I think it was, whilst there was a bit of volatility in the market. And we did that because we didn’t want to expose our customers to huge swings in foreign exchange. “Up until last night that was looking like we might have been overly cautious. This morning it looks like we were pretty sensible because Sterling [dropped massively]. So we would have had lots of customers whose rates and orders were probably unable to be fulfilled… [But] we’re back up and trading and orders are going through and customers are sending money again. So things are back to normalish.” But even if things are “normalish” for Azimo’s day to day business, the looming reality of Brexit is forcing Kent and his team to consider how they might need to restructure for the longer term — in order to best serve what is now set to become two market entities, rather than one, in the not too distant future. “We need to think about how do we organize ourselves so we can both continue to service the U.K. market and the European market. They’re our two most important markets,” he noted, adding: “I don’t think we would ever leave the U.K. but if the U.K. do leave Europe, as is likely now, it’s unlikely the regime of passporting will be able to be effective in exactly the same way as it is now. And because of that we would need to set up operations outside of the U.K. so that we could service Spain, the Germans, the Italians, the French — all huge remittance markets. Full of migrants, sending billions of dollars back every year. “So we would look to set up additional operations in those territories… We’re certainly thinking about where else would we shift resources to? “There’s still loads of talented people in the U.K., and there’s still a fair amount of capital but I just think it’s going to get tougher for everyone — particular early-stage startups… It’s a shame but everyone, ourselves included, will think of at least moving some of our functions to other parts of Europe.” Kent, who is also an early-stage fintech investor, added that he would hate to be having to raise money from international investors as a U.K. startup in the current uncertain climate — underlining another key consideration that could encourage the newest startups to take their ideas elsewhere: the quest for funding, which just got that much more complex if your business is based in the U.K. “What is anything that’s based in the U.K. tackling a regional or a global problem worth right now? It’s hugely dependent on what happens in the next 12 to 18 months,” he added. On the human resources front, the post-Brexit uncertainty for existing EU staff is a huge worry for several U.K. founders I spoke to, including Metail, which has several staff hired in from the region. Founder Adeyoola said the management team’s intention now is to “lobby lobby lobby” government on this front. “We are aiming to be a global business and key to that is hiring the best global diverse talent possible,” he noted. But he also said they would not now be able to prioritize efforts specifically to hire EU staff. “The non EU visa process is at least certain so we can understand the ROI and length of stay. If an EU resident wants to come then great but with a fluffy two years of uncertainty we couldn’t of right mind devote hiring investment actively.” Another London-based startup — Series A funded , which operates in the food delivery space in the city but has designs on scaling internationally — named its existing staff as its immediate concern. Unsurprisingly so, given that European hires comprise a large majority of its team. (A much larger proportion, 75 percent, than voted for Brexit, incidentally… ) “We’re a London-based business and so we rely really heavily on talent throughout the EU… We really have a diverse European team and obviously my main priority is to make sure that they are safe,” said CEO and founder Rahul Parekh. “What I’m hearing is that that should be the case — the Europeans that are here working in London are not going to be asked to move back to Europe. But that’s by no means a certainty right now. That is my first and major concern.” That staffing concern is also intrinsically bound up with the future of the business, though, with Parekh going on to discuss concerns about whether the company will now be able to scale in the way it had hoped. After all access to key talent underpins everything a startup does. No people, no product; no product, no business… “Our expansion plans and our growth plans were very dependent on us being able to have access to that [European] talent pool… Not having easy access to strong talent from Europe will be a big bottleneck for us and I think a problem in terms of even getting investment,” he said, adding: “It’s really bad news. So we need to make sure we can find a way to mitigate that risk.” Parekh also complained that hiring outside the EU can be a “long and painful process.” As, doubtless, will Brexit be. “This really restricts our potential for getting talent and London has always been quite a diverse place — so it’s very disappointing if it stops being that way.” Hiroki Takeuchi, CEO and founder of London-based online payments company also worries for the impact on the city as a techhub — and thus the wider impact on the UK’s startup ecosystem as a whole. “I’m more worried about the long term impact on the ecosystem. What really scares me is that over the last five to 10 years London has developed immeasurably as a startup ecosystem and it’s on a really great trajectory. And I worry that this kind of shock could really impact London’s standing in the world,” he told TechCrunch. “I’m a very passionate Londoner. I want to see London succeed. I feel like I’ve been a part of the changes that we’ve seen in the London tech system and I’d hate for us to lose that momentum. But I can see multiple ways in which we could.”
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Can the smartphone cure Zika?
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Shawn DuBravac
| 2,016 | 6 | 24 |
The smartphone has become the digital Swiss Army Knife of modern life. Beyond making phone calls, it takes pictures and videos, facilitates purchases, connects us to our social networks, helps us navigate around town and runs applications for almost any imaginable purpose — including one you couldn’t imagine. Today’s smartphone is a high-powered microcomputer; incredibly, now all that computing power is being harnessed collectively for the greater good, in the search of a cure for the Zika virus. Most of us walking around with these mini-miracles in our pockets and purses cannot imagine life without them — so much so that it prompted President Obama recently to suggest that we might even be “ ” them. But he might want to rethink that with news of the project. The research project, spearheaded by IBM’s World Community Grid, is a tech platform that turns a network of volunteers’ personal computers, as well as Android smartphones and tablets, into a virtual supercomputer. Volunteers who download the World Community Grid app authorize researchers to run calculations on their devices, running virtual experiments on compounds that could become components in creating an antiviral drug to combat the mosquito-borne virus. There are roughly smartphones in use around the world, and an additional 1.4 billion smartphones are sold every year, to Consumer Technology Association research. In many developed economies, there are more smartphones than people, and ownership rates are growing even in the most remote corners of the world. Smartphones are so popular they continue to erode landline ownership, which has dropped to roughly of American households. They have also sidelined millions of digital cameras, a device owned by 80 percent of Americans as recently as 2011. Today, only of us own digital cameras. We are quickly and enthusiastically migrating our offline and online activities to our smartphones. We exist in an environment with tens of billions of connected devices popping up everywhere to replace the everyday objects in our public and private physical worlds. Parking meters, fire hydrants, bike racks, roadways, vehicles and even the lights and door locks in our homes are becoming connected. We integrate cameras, microphones and sensors into our physical living spaces. In many instances, these cameras and microphones deliver an on-demand service, so they must wait for us to intimate our next need or command. As we digitize, connect and “sensorize” these objects, we also begin to systematically collect data that was always there, but wasn’t being collected in a meaningful way and therefore was not digitally available. Therein lies enormous opportunity. And it’s an opportunity that has been embraced by the World Community Grid, which has been used previously to research malaria, Ebola and tuberculosis, among other medical maladies. The #OpenZika project allows researchers to run calculations on volunteers’ devices without incapacitating the owners’ use of them and, to date, without a reported security breach of the owner’s data. At the same time, it provides computing power to researchers that even eclipses that of supercomputers because of the limited availability of the latter. Alexander Perryman of the Center for Emerging and Re-emerging Pathogens at Rutgers University CNBC that the time researchers could get on a traditional supercomputer would equal only “tens of thousands of hours or hundreds of thousands of [central processing unit] hours,” whereas with the World Community Grid they can get the equivalent of 30,000 of CPU time. That will greatly facilitate and expedite the computational evaluation of potentially tens of millions of compounds in the search for a substance that can cure Zika, which, while seldom fatal, can cause birth defects in the babies of pregnant women bitten by infected mosquitos. The virtual screening of drugs is just the latest in the pocketful of miracles that today’s smartphones represent. Who knew? What’s next? Stay tuned.
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President Obama calls for diversity efforts and openness with Mark Zuckerberg at GES
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Kate Conger
| 2,016 | 6 | 24 |
praised tech companies’ efforts to improve diversity in their workforces and called for governments around the world to embrace openness and transparency today at the Global Entrepreneurship Summit. Obama encouraged companies to continue hiring workers from diverse backgrounds, citing tech companies’ diversity reports as a step in the right direction. The president also discussed censorship of the internet in Egypt and said international leaders need to welcome free speech rather than attempt to stifle it — even if that speech has negative effects. “It turns out that starting your own business is not that easy. That it can be especially difficult for women and young people and minorities,” Obama said. “You deserve the same chance to succeed as everybody else.” “Dozens of top tech companies are committing to make their technology workforces look like America,” Obama said, noting companies’ increased willingness to publish diversity data. The president also welcomed 11 entrepreneurs from Cuba to the GES. The group is the first from Cuba to attend the summit, which has been held around the world since 2010. “Hola, mucho gusto,” Obama said, waving to the Cuban contingent from his podium onstage at Stanford University. Antonio Gracias, the founder of Valor Equity Partners and a member of the (PAGE) program, funded travel for the group of Cuban entrepreneurs. “His support was critical in bringing these young Cuban entrepreneurs here,” Obama added. During a discussion with Mai Medhat, the CEO of the Egyptian startup , Obama mused on the international leaders’ willingness to censor the internet. “It is hard to foster and encourage an entrepreneurial culture if it’s closed and if information flows are blocked. What we are seeing around the world oftentimes is governments wanting the benefits of entrepreneurship and connectivity, but also thinking top-down control is compatible with that, and it’s not,” Obama noted. The president said his own experience with social media during the 2008 election shaped his attitudes about the openness of the internet. He described his 20-year-old advisors coming to him and telling him about “this new thing called Myspace,” and realizing how much potential social media had to shape the election. “They had all this stuff that I had never heard of. And if I had tried to maintain control and said, ‘No, we’re going with pamphlets because I’m used to pamphlets and I can control what’s in the pamphlets,’ I might not be sitting here,” Obama said. However, the internet has also become a potent tool for violent extremism, Obama noted, pointing to the recent mass shooting at a gay nightclub in Orlando as an example of online speech inciting violence. Violence shouldn’t deter governments from a commitment to openness online, the president said. During his panel on entrepreneurship, Obama also made announcements about GES and the PAGE program: The next GES will be held in India, and several new members will join the PAGE program, including Spanx CEO Sara Blakely and Stripe CEO Patrick Collison. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg (R) hugs U.S. President Barack Obama during the 2016 GES. (Photo by Justin Sullivan/Getty Images) Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg joined the panel to share advice with Medhat and other young entrepreneurs, including co-founder Mariana Costa Checa and founder Jean Bosco Nzeyimana. “I can’t wear a t-shirt like Mark for another six months, but I will take off my jacket so I don’t look so formal,” Obama joked as he welcomed Zuckerberg to the stage. Zuckerberg used the panel to plug Facebook’s connectivity effort, Internet.org. “The main thing I’m focused on is connectivity,” he said. “If you grew up and never used a computer or had access to the internet, it’s hard to imagine what you’ve been missing out on. We need to do a better job of empowering folks in different countries to spread connectivity.” He also noted that, when he started Facebook, he never expected it to grow into a massive company. He said that he expected another internet giant to build on his ideas about social media, and was told that Facebook was just a fad that would die out. He encouraged the young entrepreneurs in attendance to follow their dreams, saying that successful entrepreneurs “care fundamentally about the change they’re trying to create in the world and they’re not just in it to build a company.”
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Review: Acton’s Blink Board is a quirky board with an unpolished remote
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Stefan Etienne
| 2,016 | 6 | 24 |
As you can already tell, this is an electric skateboard. , and it won’t be my last. But here’s something I learned the past few days: Acton’s budget-friendly electric skateboard has been the least fulfilling of the electric rolling planks I’ve ridden. Summed up, it’s an electric skateboard with a few quirks. Unlike what the folks at Boosted Board have done with the product of the same name, Acton hasn’t poured more than a thousand dollars into the quality of the product. Remember: They’re trying to keep the cost low for a first-gen product. So, $500 gets you a Canadian Maple deck instead of bamboo and a simple plastic remote instead of the safety switch and scroll wheel seen elsewhere. Despite the compromises made to keep cost efficiency, the Blink Board skates pretty well once you get it going, but that doesn’t mean it’s not entirely without its shortcomings because of the circumstances. Honestly, I was never a fan of making something accessible if it meant watering it down. The Blink’s ride can be jarring, because such a small deck moving at high speed is less forgiving than say, a longboard. Despite my past experience with both powered and traditional skateboards, I’m reluctant to take the Blink Board out into the city streets. Instead, I opt for the safer runs at parks. Why? Well this transitions into the unfinished aspects of the board that defeat the purpose of having an electric skateboard — which is meant to be a means of transportation, on city streets. The problem seems to be the remote. The build quality is questionable, and feels like it could break. To add insult to injury, the slider itself is jittery, with power delivery that’s too sudden and uncomfortable. Additionally, you don’t really “brake” on the Blink Board. Instead, lean backwards and hope that it doesn’t jerk you forward, straight onto the concrete (which has happened). I haven’t been able to find a true workaround for this, as the three riding modes — beginner, intermediate and pro — all seem to give similar feedback via the remote. The acceleration and deceleration aren’t that graceful, which requires you to adapt and figure out the board’s handling characteristics. Battery life and range are the most forgiving here: expect to hit the 6-mile mark without having to conserve too much, but because a full charge will take you an hour (and the power brick is huge), it’s best to plan ahead. Buying the Acton Blink Board (mostly) boils down to budget. If you’re willing to drop $500 for an electric skateboard that isn’t entirely inept, but not the polished experience seen on more expensive boards, then by all means. However, if you aren’t limited by budget and can throw in a few extra hundreds, then seek other boards that would offer you more fun, speed and, ultimately, stability. If not, it’s up to you and this electric skateboard to make the most of each other, in which case just skate with it.
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ATM skimmer caught in the wild by a real security engineer
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John Biggs
| 2,016 | 6 | 24 |
[youtube=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ll4f0Wim4pM] Whoda thunk it? Tourist/cybersecurity expert was hanging out in Vienna when he walked up to an ATM. Because he trusts no one he decided to give the reader a little tug and came away with a working skimmer designed to look exactly like the card slot on the original machine. “It pays to be paranoid,” he said — and he’s right. pulled off the skimmer and took some pictures of it and will try to reverse engineer it when he heads back home (presumably with the credit card data still on it). Some Reddit users have spotted the pinhole camera that the hackers used to grab PIN codes, as well, a feature that lets full cards be stolen in seconds. Again: Any time you use an ATM, please check it. There are triggers in place that are supposed to prevent the installation of tools like these, but sometimes they don’t work and hackers are getting craftier. Always tug, rub and pull ATMs in the wild — even if it feels weird.
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WhatsApp hits 100 million calls per day
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Sarah Perez
| 2,016 | 6 | 24 |
In February, Facebook-owned WhatsApp announced it had worldwide, and this week, the company added another metric to demonstrate its ongoing traction and growth. According to a brief on the company blog, WhatsApp claims that it’s now handling more than 100 million voice calls per day on its service. This is equivalent to over 1,100 calls per second, the post adds, hinting that it will make calling better in the months to come. (The company was testing video calling this spring.) What’s notable also about this news is that voice calling is still a relatively new feature for WhatsApp. The company introduced the feature on Android in March 2015, At the time, WhatsApp had 800 million monthly active users and said it was handling more messages than there are global SMS texts sent each day. Competitors, including Facebook’s messaging service Messenger don’t break out their voice calling milestones in quite the same way, making a direct comparison more difficult. For instance, Microsoft’s 12-year old Skype, says its users make . That’s a bigger number, but it’s counting talk time, not actual calls, as WhatsApp is doing. Microsoft also that the software is used by over 300 million users monthly. Facebook, meanwhile, announced this April . Last spring, it had also noted that This made it challenging to compare its figures to Skype, too, since Skype users also place calls on the desktop. The users spent more than 50 minutes per day on Facebook, Instagram and Messenger combined, but didn’t include WhatsApp in that round-up.
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Oculus removes hardware DRM that locked games onto its headset
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Devin Coldewey
| 2,016 | 6 | 24 |
An Oculus update posted today quietly removes a feature that blocked Oculus software from being played on other headsets — something that the community has been up in arms about for a month. The update, Runtime 1.5, doesn’t include the feature retraction . The news came from the creator of Revive, a tool that allowed Oculus software to be played on Valve and HTC’s Vive headset — and which was seen as the target for the hardware lockdown in the first place. “I’ve only just tested this and I’m still in disbelief, but it looks like Oculus removed the headset check from the DRM in Oculus Runtime 1.5,” wrote the developer, LibreVR, , released early this morning. The removal is essentially a from Oculus, which over the last few weeks has faced hard questions from press and users about its strategy in locking down content to its own platform. Restricting games to its own hardware was seen by many as a move that benefited no one but Oculus, and harmed the VR community at large. A statement from Oculus issued to TechCrunch explained the company’s actions, or at least this most recent one: We continually revise our entitlement and anti-piracy systems, and in the June update we’ve removed the check for Rift hardware from the entitlement check. We won’t use hardware checks as part of DRM on PC in the future. We believe protecting developer content is critical to the long-term success of the VR industry, and we’ll continue taking steps in the future to ensure that VR developers can keep investing in ground-breaking new VR content. TechCrunch spoke with Oculus co-founders Palmer Luckey and Nate Mitchell last week at E3 in Los Angeles, and the topic came up then as well. Luckey explained the strategy of bringing developers into the Oculus fold as a move to advance VR at large by producing the best possible content — even if that content is only available for one system and not others. “Over time, that’s how the VR industry is going to move forward,” he explained. “The short‑term pain that some people feel, and I totally understand, is ‘I want to play this game and I’m not able to right now.’ The reality is, I can see where that’s painful for some people, but that doesn’t mean that it’s bad for the VR industry, or that it’s fragmenting it, or in the long run, it’s not the right way for the ecosystem to work.” The removal of the hardware check, however, indicates a soft boundary to the strategies Oculus is willing to use to effect exclusivity. At the very least, it suggests the company is willing to listen to the concerns of its community — provided they’re loud enough.
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A running tab of what tech people think about whether we’re living in a simulation
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Matthew Lynley
| 2,016 | 6 | 24 |
Are we living in a simulation? For whatever reason, this is a hot topic in Silicon Valley these days. It all more or less started when Tesla Motors CEO (and SolarCity CEO — check one off for the simulation argument there) Elon Musk that there’s such a high chance that we’re living in a simulation that it’s more likely we are than we aren’t. The argument here is that games are becoming so lifelike already, and are increasingly blowing past the uncanny valley with rendering and AI improving, that there’s a pretty high chance that we’re also someone’s video game simulation. Here’s what he said at the conference: “So it’s a given that we’re clearly on a trajectory to have games that are indistinguishable from reality, and those games could be played on any set-top box or a PC and there would probably be billions of such computers and set-top boxes, it would seem to follow that the odds that we’re in base reality is one in billions.” So, of course, we had to get to the bottom of simulationgate (or simgate, for short, is what we’ll call it). A couple of executives had answers to the question on stage at the Bloomberg Technology conference earlier this month, and we also pestered a few others on Twitter and over email as to what they think about whether or not we’re living in a simulation. Some answers are good, some are great and some need unpacking. But we decided that it’s important to keep a running tab of what people are saying about it. Jack Dorsey, CEO of Twitter and Square, : “if we’re in one, we’re likely in many.” (Solid points here for the applied to simulations.) Dick Costolo, the former CEO of Twitter, had : “Yes, you can tell because bacon and chocolate are good for you. That should make it obvious.” Here’s a longer answer from Marc Andreessen from the Bloomberg Technology conference: “There are some bugs in the system. Well so first of all, I think we need to leave it an open possibility that Elon is living in his own simulation. I mean, I really think we shouldn’t rule anything out… I think in practice, I’m a little too practical for that, and even if we are in a simulation, apparently nobody — apparently the programmer has gone to lunch, and so I think it’s up to us to fix the bugs.” GV’s Bill Maris had a more genuine answer: Andreessen later : “yes, but it’s awfully buggy.” SpaceX investor Steve Jurvetson dug into the details at the Bloomberg Technology conference: “Why is it we have the speed of light as this law? If you’re a game designer, that’s how you render the horizon line. If you look at smaller and smaller scales, pixels and voxels can be no smaller, there’s a minimum pixel size of the world… There’s no real proof in that, but it’s interesting food for thought.” That’s pretty compelling, and one of the best cases so far for the fact that we’re living in a computer’s dreamscape — aside from the existence of Tronc™. Here’s Andy Rubin, ever the jokester, at the Bloomberg Technology conference: “If I was living in a simulation I would hope to have some control over it. I would definitely give myself way more hair, that’s how I know I’m probably not living in a simulation.” And a long one from Yuri Milner from the same conference: I think that many people are putting this forward as an explanation to solve Fermi paradox… We now know that life should be pretty widespread in the universe given the latest discoveries. We should have been seeing the signs of extraterrestrial intelligence, we should have seen it already The reason we’re not seeing them, the only way to explain it is that we are living in a simulation which was created by them. I don’t necessarily agree with this basic premise, I think there are other ways to explain why we have not been visited, other than assuming we’re living in someone else’s simulation. But I also like one of the features of the simulation theory says, when would be a good time to switch off the simulation for someone running it, this is exactly when we discover that we’re living in a simulation. It’s interesting, we’ll see how it plays out. I asked Box CEO Aaron Levie about this one on Twitter, as well. “Unclear,” he said. “But any world where Trump is an actual presidential nominee sure feels like a simulation.” Jeff Bezos did not respond to an emailed query about whether or not we are living in a simulation. Provided we got his email right. And you never can tell, what with the uncertainty that I’m feeling about whether this is real life or not. Here’s a list of people who have yet to respond on Twitter: LinkedIn CEO Jeff Weiner (congrats on that $26 billion exit, by the way); Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella; Dropbox CEO Drew “Cash Flow Positive” Houston; outspoken VC Bill Gurley; Bill Gates; Y Combinator’s Sam Altman (likely too busy worrying about universal basic income); Reid Hoffman; Uber CEO Travis Kalanick; Google CEO Sundar Pichai; Apple CEO Tim Cook. We’ve got some more requests on the subject in the pipeline, as well. We’ll keep this post updated as more commentary comes in on the topic.
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YouTube expands creator outreach with new features, better support
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Sarah Perez
| 2,016 | 6 | 24 |
Along with news that it’s in its main mobile application, YouTube also this week a series of new features for its creator community. The details, which include a new , better support, a benefits program and other tools, were unveiled Thursday at VidCon, an event focused on online video and digital culture. In a keynote address by YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki, the company spoke of its investment in new technologies, like 360-degree videos and VR, as well as its , which is available to subscribers of the YouTube Red service. For creators, YouTube promised a number of new features for those participating in or joining its community anew, including better customer support, a redesigned Creator Hub and a benefits program. The company says that it has increased creator support by 100x, meaning that every creator who joins the Partner Program will — within one business day. This is a sizable increase in the level of support available before. The company previously offered this sort of direct support to thousands of video creators, and now it will extend that same support to millions. The Creator Hub is getting a makeover, too, in order to centralize access to resources like educational materials and the help center, for example. Before, creators had to navigate through seven different websites to find the material they need, but now they’ll be able to just visit the new , which is also fully localized in 23 languages, to find help and details on all of YouTube’s programs. [youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uGMGRyik5JI] A new benefits program called YouTube for Creators is debuting, as well, which will make it easier for creators to access the resources they need to grow subscribers. This includes things like access to the learning program dubbed “Creator Academy” and YouTube’s studio app, for example. As you reach different levels of subscribers (0, then 1,000, 10,000, e.g.), benefits also grow. Creators will be invited to attend “Creator Days” and local meetups and workshops at YouTube Spaces. When their audience is larger, they’ll have the chance to shoot videos at YouTube Spaces, get consultations regarding their channels, become ambassadors and enter the YouTube NextUp contest for increased exposure. At the highest level, they’re offered their own partner manager, among other perks. In addition to the improved and more centralized resources, and the formalization of processes already in place with YouTube for Creators, YouTube noted it’s rolling out a few more tools, too. It recently launched new comments control that let creators it’s to take into account that new creators need time to understand the rules; and . The new system lets videos continue to earn money while a Content ID claim is disputed, and this will reach all monetized users in the next few months.
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Anthony Ha
| 2,016 | 6 | 6 | null |
Omni Calculator brings math to the masses
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John Biggs
| 2,016 | 6 | 24 |
There are some men who want to watch the the world burn and others who want to offer it easily customizable embedded calculators. Mateusz Mucha belongs to the latter camp. Mucha is a sociologist by training who has built multiple small startups. His latest project, , is completely bootstrapped and has three employees building clever calculators for various formulae. “We have all sorts of simple math problems — ‘Can this business work out?,’ ‘Can I afford to buy this house?,’ ‘How many bricks do I need for my patio?,’ ‘How much ibuprofen should this kid receive?'” said Mucha. “But when people can’t or won’t do the math they make poor decisions based on hunches where they should rely on hard numbers. They start businesses that have no future, buy houses they can’t afford or exit the European Union when it makes no freaking sense.” Mucha’s product lets you create your own custom calculators and currently supports a number of helpful formulas, including BMI calculations, unit conversions and mortgage calculations. The current version is fairly limited, but he is building a customization system that will let anyone solve problems on-the-fly. For example, by taking a few common variables and connecting them using a drag-and-drop interface. Why do you need this? Mucha believes that real estate, finance and tech users will love his product, and the ability to add simple calculators to blog posts can really add value to content. He also thinks they can solve nearly every basic problem there is. “We only need one user that’s pissed off enough to spend two minutes on creating a calculator for it,” he said. The mobile app has 270,000 monthly active users and he’s seen 8,500 weekly users on the website during pre-launch beta. He has one enterprise client. His mission, not unlike those who wish to watch the world burn, is simple: to bring math back into our brains.
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Is the future of VR NVIDIA, Sony and Apple?
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Ondrej Homola
| 2,016 | 6 | 24 |
Virtual reality is all the buzz nowadays. And why wouldn’t it be when analysts like make estimates that the industry is poised to surpass the TV market in annual revenue by 2025. That would make virtual reality bigger than TV in less than 10 years. These estimates are so massive because the breakthrough technology has the ability to extend itself into so many markets — gaming, education, productivity and even adult entertainment. Estimates aside, one can often find the direction an industry is headed by following the money. In 2015 alone, in equity financing across 126 deals. Many of these companies backed include many virtual reality technologies you’ve already heard of, such as and . But can we believe all the hype? Will these companies be the leaders by the time Goldman Sachs’ estimate comes around? Having worked in the virtual reality space before it was a buzzword, I’ve seen a few things that lead me to believe there are three companies that will be as big, if not bigger, than some of the mainstream virtual reality names. is in the business of visual computing technology; its work started back in 1999 with the release of the (NV10). This consumer-level 3D hardware was ahead of its time with advanced video acceleration, motion compensation and hardware sub-picture alpha blending. It caught the eye of Microsoft and eventually became the graphics hardware for the game console. Recently, my team bought a couple of development devices for and AR. The recent announcement about Pascal-based consumer PC graphics supporting caught our attention, as they appear to be pushing to create premium products in the space. The company’s brand is a natural fit in the virtual reality space and it won’t have a problem getting attention when it’s ready, but what is potentially the most compelling aspect is what they are doing with the . This cloud gaming platform uses “cloud rendering” and “cloud computing” that will enable users to get high-end console-type graphics on their smartphones or even cardboard — at a reasonable cost. With the at a CAGR of more than 29 percent until 2020, is in a prime position to succeed with what I believe to be superior technology in the market. is a bit hidden behind all the madness. But, current PlayStation users can easily upgrade their consoles and . The PlayStation’s competitive price points have enabled it to compete with the Microsoft Xbox over the years, and now its headset gives consumers a more cost-friendly option compared to the $799 price point of the . Aside from the accessible price point, has a closed ecosystem with a network of developers with whom they have been working for years. PlayStation has a unique position to gain market share and be the clear winner of the virtual reality gaming ecosystem, similar to how Steve Jobs and won early in mobile. The big questions are — will they be aggressive enough and are they able to move beyond the borders of gaming? is notorious about being secretive; while it’s speculative, there are a lot of signs that it is developing a glove. The first point of evidence is a filed in 2011 for a “High Tactility (Magic) Glove System.” This invention is directed to a glove system that includes an inner liner and an outer liner operative to transmit user inputs to the input mechanism of an electronic device. It was originally believed that was creating a solution for consumers to use their iPhones in colder weather, but perhaps is was the start of something bigger. The second proof point is the company’s evolution of haptics, or the science of applying touch sensation and control to interaction with computer applications. Last year, released a Taptic Engine and the technology is currently used with Watch, MacBook and the latest iPhone devices. haptic technology sends impulses into the fingertips, giving you the sensation of, for example, touching different materials or pushing a button, allowing users to know what actions are being performed and what you can expect to happen. is getting serious in this area, hiring experts on haptics and revealing new technology such as a virtual touch desktop/keyboard based on its haptic technology. Sensing the direction already? , one of the pioneers known for creating the first device for healthcare and a visiting scholar of the Stanford Virtual Human Interaction Lab, acknowledged during an Upload Collective panel that “a big part of the ( ) immersion is the kinesthetic and proprioceptive aspect of having parts of your body in the virtual reality.” Current devices are offering us compelling visual experiences, motion tracking, gyro and sound, but there is still that one last sense that is not covered — touch. He indicated that “we are not there yet with haptics (in ) and it will take some time.” A third proof point is “ ,” a reference to the Stanford Virtual Human Interaction Lab — the white-hot center of /AR development. In a recent presentation, Jeremy Bailenson, director of the program, remarked: “ ” The fourth and final proof point is a famous “hidden port” inside the Watch. Perhaps just another interesting coincidence, but it would be more logical that it was intended to connect with another device like an Glove than if it was for the widely reported “external battery.” I have tried as well as augmented reality (AR) and mixed reality (MR) headsets. Those devices are great, but my first feedback for both was the same — the glove is missing. You need a glove for better interaction with virtual images. Visual hand recognition is not very accurate, further reinforcing the market potential for . I’m convinced that is working on Glove, and I wouldn’t be surprised if they were also working on AR and MR devices, as well. The market opportunity is too big, and to stay competitive with major competitors like Samsung and Google, it’s hard to believe they wouldn’t launch something in this space in the next couple of years. If you think about it, they have no other option.
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YouTube can still win the livestreaming war
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Sarah Perez
| 2,016 | 6 | 24 |
YouTube, sounding a little miffed that , reminded its community that it has been offering livestreaming on its site since 2011, “before it was cool,” in a series of announcements emerging from this week’s VidCon event. That may be true, but a single-purpose app like Periscope is easier to use, which aided in its adoption. It caters to those who want more of a push-button experience: click to go live. YouTube, now scrambling to catch up, says it will update its mobile application so that the ability to go live will be baked right in. According to the company, the main YouTube mobile app will be redesigned to include a big red capture button that will allow video creators to immediately broadcast what they’re seeing. This button was introduced last year to make it simpler to record videos on the go. (The fact that it didn’t occur to YouTube at that time to also introduce a livestreaming component is something it’s probably regretting these days.) If anyone was poised to capitalize on the renewed interest in livestreaming, it should have been YouTube. The technology had matured from the where apps like Flixwagon, Qik, Kyte and others were vying to become the dominant streaming video service. But these apps were before their time — mobile bandwidth that could handle livestreams wasn’t as available as it is today; not everyone even carried a smartphone; some apps required jailbreaking to use; and it wasn’t as seamless to distribute the videos as it is now, where they move instantly across channels like Facebook and Twitter, reaching millions of viewers. With last year’s and its , the writing was on the wall: the time to return focus to live broadcasting had arrived. The pain points of the past had been resolved, and the only real question is whether the market would end up consolidating around one or two key players, or whether an ecosystem of niche livestreaming services would bloom. But while YouTube, indeed, has had the tools on hand for years, as well as the robust technology to support livestreaming, it missed out on truly popularizing the feature among mainstream users. Livestreaming is something “bigger” creators took advantage of, while the rest of us everyday people picked up Periscope. After all, there’s a reason why a bunch of politicians — not necessarily the most technically minded folks — whipped out their smartphones and launched Periscope. The app is straightforward and easy to use. It’s engaging, too — with the ability to chat to the video creator and send “hearts” to show your support. YouTube’s mobile redesign looks strikingly similar to Periscope, in fact. Text-chat bubbles are overlaid on the video so the creator can talk to fans in near real-time, for example. It’s like YouTube was taking notes. But don’t count out YouTube yet, by any means. Periscope, and now, Facebook Live (thanks mainly to ) may be winning the battle for mindshare, but YouTube is gearing up for war. When creators go live on YouTube, they’ll be able to capitalize on the sizable fan bases they’ve developed over the years on the site. Viewers will then be alerted when their favorite creators kick off a livestream. And these notifications are a powerful mechanism YouTube has at its disposal — the company noted that it’s today sending out 10 billion notifications per month to alert subscribers to new videos. Also, more than a thousand of its new creators reach the 1,000 subscriber month every day, which demonstrates the network’s reach. Then there’s the fact that when a livestream is popular on YouTube, it’s very, popular. The 360-degree livestream of this year’s Coachella saw more than 21 million people tuning in — or, as YouTube points out, that’s almost twice as many as tuned in to watch the series finale of American Idol. (Sure, American Idol is no longer the behemoth it once was, but those numbers are still worth bragging about.) Plus, because livestreaming is a part of YouTube, the streams will have all the same features of regular videos — they can be surfaced via YouTube search, as well as via recommendations and playlists, and they can be protected from unauthorized uses. Perhaps most importantly of all is that these videos can take advantage of YouTube’s peerless infrastructure. As YouTube promises, “it’ll be faster and more reliable than anything else out there.” Reliability is something Periscope struggles with, at times. During the C-SPAN Periscope livestream from the House floor, for example, . (C-SPAN later cut over to a Facebook Live feed instead.) In other words, YouTube may have been late in its attempt at mainstreaming the technology it has offered for years, but when the livestreaming feature arrives in the No. 5 free application in the App Store, and made push-button simple, it will likely be a force to be reckoned with. YouTube says the new livestreaming functionality will arrive on mobile “soon.”
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Today is the last day to save $1,200 on Disrupt SF tickets
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Matt Burns
| 2,016 | 6 | 24 |
Attention, budget-conscious tech enthusiasts. Today is the last day to get tickets at the deeply discounted extra-early-bird price point of $1,795 apiece — $1,200 off the full ticket price and $200 cheaper than they’ll be tomorrow. So seriously, stop what you’re doing and to get your extra-early-bird tickets to the best startup show in the Bay Area. That ticket is your all-access pass to Disrupt, getting you into all of the events, parties and after-parties that take place during the show. You’ll get to watch a few dozen startups take part in the illustrious , in which they’ll be vying for the $50,000 grand prize, the coveted Disrupt Cup and, perhaps even more importantly, the attention of investors, press and the rest of the tech community watching in person and online. You also will be able to check out hundreds of early-stage startups on display in Startup Alley and Hardware Alley, pitching their products and services to the thousands of attendees on the show floor on all three days of the show. Plus, with all the parties and after-parties, you can keep those good times going long after the show floor closes. And that’s not to mention the series of interviews and fireside chats with some of the best and brightest minds in the business. Past speakers include the likes of , Houzz CEO and co-founder and Facebook founder and CEO , to name just a few. With all the awesome things we have planned for you at Disrupt, you’re definitely going to want to be there, and you might as well save $1,200 by getting an extra-early-bird ticket before the prices jump on Saturday, June 25. You can get your tickets to Disrupt . Disrupt SF 2016 runs from September 12-14 at San Francisco’s lovely Pier 48, and we can’t wait to see you all there.
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Bitcoin surges past $650 as Brexit result sends UK Pound tumbling to 30-year low
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Jon Russell
| 2,016 | 6 | 23 |
The global finance markets are slipping on Friday after the UK public voted to leave the EU, but there is one currency that is reveling in the uncertainty of the Brexit result: bitcoin. The cryptocurrency is notoriously difficult to predict. rose as high as $1,000 in 2013 and, while it has stabilized somewhat since that landmark valuation, it hit before cratering nearly 25 percent over the next week. That drop was thought by some be related to the British referendum on continued EU membership, but once the result was clear — with multiple media calling it a win for the Leave campaign — bitcoin grew legs and jumped past $650 just one day after it was at $550, . The price of Bitcoin versus the U.S. dollar today The price of Bitcoin versus the U.S. dollar over the past week That’s not actually a huge surprise given . The currency fell by more than 10 percent to hit a 35-year low against the Dollar, as question marks around how Britain will exit the EU — it would be the first member to do so — how it will find new trade deals, who will be in charge of the government, and more saw the Pound’s depression impact on markets across Asia and the rest of the world. This is what has just happened to sterling in historical perspective. Literally off the charts. Black Friday awaits. — John Authers (@johnauthers) https://twitter.com/TheXclass/status/746172673877651456 Asian markets right now. via — Anthony De Rosa 🗽 (@Anthony) Bitcoin looks like a particularly appealing vehicle for offloading the Pound given that peer-to-peer currency services like TransferWise paused working with the currency ahead of the Brexit vote due to potential market turbulence. “With the EU Referendum in the UK on Thursday 23rd June, exchange rates are likely to be volatile. We’ve been putting plans in place so that your transfers continue to be processed as smoothly as possible,” earlier this week. London-based TransferWise, which includes U.S.-based Andreessen Horowitz among its investors and , cancelled any pending British Pound transfers that were not completed by 8pm UK time on Thursday. TransferWise has now restarted GBP transactions.
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Flirtey delivers drugs by drone from ship to shore in New Jersey
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Lora Kolodny
| 2,016 | 6 | 23 |
The Jersey Shore is finally famous for something besides fake tanning. A Reno, Nevada-based startup called conducted the first domestic “ship to shore” drone delivery this week along the New Jersey coastline. The company’s proprietary drone is a six-rotor system constructed from carbon fiber, aluminum and 3-d printed components. No, they weren’t delivering Domino’s pizzas or anything for Amazon Prime. The company was demonstrating its ability to deliver medical supplies and samples by drone from a barge on choppy waters, to an onshore medical camp. Specifically, on the first leg of the trip, pathologists who were collaborating with Flirtey, loaded up the delivery drone with stool, blood and urine samples, which were delivered from land to a medical testing facility on the barge. On the second leg of its trip, researchers on the barge sent water purification tablets, insulin and a First Aid kit back to shore. The hope is that one day, private sector drone delivery services like Flirtey and government agencies will be able to use drones to transport crucial life-saving supplies to places where people are stranded, but damaged roads or lack of roads will not allow ground delivery and it wouldn’t be safe for a ship to dock or for a pilot to land. Geographically, Flirtey’s drone took off from a barge in New Jersey’s Delaware Bay, and flew across the Cape May Canal to drop off its precious cargo at the Cape May-Lewes Ferry Terminal. The flight was FAA-approved. Witnesses of the historic demonstration by Flirtey included: members of a disaster preparedness nonprofit called the , which helped organize the event, and of the United Nations’ (UNOCHA) as well as other researchers and partners from the and . According to Flirtey representatives, the accepted the company’s drone for its Air and Space Museum, which is where visitors can also see the Space Shuttle Discovery and the Wright Flyer. Co-founder and CEO of Flirtey Matt Sweeney said: “Ship to shore drone delivery fills a humanitarian need, but is also something that commercial shippers want. We think the next major step for the industry is to do commercial drone delivery to a customer’s home.” Flirtey’s news comes just after the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) and the Department of Transportation (DOT) issued new for the commercial use of small, unmanned aircraft systems in U.S. airspace.
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What the actual hell, Britain?
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Haje Jan Kamps
| 2,016 | 6 | 23 |
As I’m writing this, it looks as if Britain has voted to leave the EU. It’s hitting me like a ton of EU-approved bricks, because this decision just simply doesn’t make sense. Part of me — a very big part, I hasten to add — strongly believes in democracy, and if this really is what the want, then so be it. The people have spoken. I just don’t understand how we got here. How this was even sort of remotely possible. To understand why I’m so upset, I’ll have to share a story with you. I always describe myself as a post-nationalist. The question “Where are you from” causes me great anxiety, because it isn’t a place-name. It isn’t even an anecdote. I have a Dutch passport, but I left when I was 5. Well; I guess no 5-year-old leaves their country of birth. My parents did, and hauled me along with them. I grew up in Norway, before going to university in the U.K., and staying in the U.K. for a very long time indeed. In fact, the U.K. is where I’ve spent more years of my life than any other country. Being in the U.K. was easy; with a Dutch passport, and with the U.K. being part of the EU, there was never any question about whether it was OK for me to be there. A shrug and a raised eyebrow, accompanied with a gruff “welcome home” was as much as I could expect at the U.K. border. And, damn it, that’s the way it be. Europe is too small to worry about borders internally. The economies in question are too small and too insignificant to have an impact each to their own. The free-trade agreements baked into the core of the EU is what makes all of this possible; staying competitive in a rapidly growing, fiercely international world. As an EU citizen in the U.K., I wondered whether I ought to become a U.K. citizen. The only reason to do so would be so I could vote in the general elections. And after one of those elections a few years ago, I was angry enough about the result to actually pull the trigger. I went through the courses, I did all the training, I sat an English language test (you’ll be surprised to learn that even though English is my third language, I passed) and the naturalization test. I passed. But in the end, I elected not to take my British nationality. Why? Because the Netherlands were being a-holes and wouldn’t let me keep my Dutch citizenship. No biggie, I thought at the time. One EU citizenship is as good as any other. But the thing that gave me pause at the time was that a) getting a British passport would be expensive. By the time you’ve totted up all the fees, tests, etc., I reckoned it would cost me £1,500 (around $2,000 at the time) to get my first British passport. Add that to the fact that I would have to give up my Dutch passport, which would have been fine (I am about as Dutch as a load of English fools on a stag do smoking weed and shagging prostitutes in Amsterdam) — if it hadn’t been for the fact that this would be problematic in case I would ever need to be at the receiving end of an inheritance from my parents. Tax laws being what they are, being a Dutch citizen, I was advised, would be a huge benefit. So I did the math: Taking a British passport just to be able to vote in a handful of general elections would cost me around $500 per election. In other words, it just wouldn’t be worth it. So I abandoned my plans to take a new passport, and kept my Dutch one. That may, in retrospect, prove to have been a very poor decision. The only reason I was able to spend 14 years in the U.K. was my Dutch (EU) nationality. The only reason I was able to bring my beautiful (American) wife back with me after we lived in Argentina for a year was that, at that point, she was married to an EU citizen. These days, I live in the U.S., and I like it here. California is fantastic. Beautiful, downtown Oakland, California is lovely. But — as anyone who knows my wife and I can attest, even having a green card in this fair country doesn’t mean that anything is “forever.” And now, with the U.K. potentially leaving the EU, I’m properly, comprehensively and scarily boned. You see, the “remain” camp had it comparatively easy; they were simply arguing for the status quo. Perhaps they were going to argue to try to work on the EU from within, but that isn’t the point. Not the point at all. Because it looks like this referendum has triggered something far more sinister: A plunge into the unknown. The “leave” camp has been playing up some serious rhetoric — some of it fair, some of it utter bollocks. But the one thing it hasn’t offered is a real indication of what would happen should they actually win the election. And that is really, really scary. Because right now, knows what’s next. As it stands, it looks as if they won. And as an EU citizen living abroad, but having lived most of my adult life in the U.K., I am scared. Really, really scared. My wife and I bought our first flat together in London a few years ago. It’s a tiny little thing; a one-bedroom hole in the wall. It’s not fancy. But it’s ours. We planned to live there for a long time. But then, as it is wont to do, life caught up with us and, for various reasons, we had to move to be closer to her family in California. And now we’re in a really weird situation. I don’t know whether I will be able to go back to the U.K. I don’t know if I can come back to help run , which at some point employed 12 staff members (it’s fewer now, but I’d like to think that at some point I was personally responsible for 12 jobs and 12 people paying taxes in Britain). Right now, I don’t know if I’d be eligible to take a job in the U.K. I don’t know if I could found another company. Hell, I am not even completely sure they wouldn’t take one look at my passport and tell me to . Visiting as a tourist? Sure, why not. Anything else? Who knows. I don’t even know if I can go back to the U.K. to live in the flat my wife and I bought in London. Can you imagine being in a situation where you’re not able to move back into your own home, because a referendum went a way you didn’t expect? Can you imagine not being able to travel to work at a company you founded, because of a vote that caught you with your trousers around your ankles? Can you imagine the incredible anxiety caused by simply not knowing? A lot can be said about the financial impact of all of this — and I’m sure that will come, both on TechCrunch and elsewhere — but the main thing that’s sinking in for me right now is that nobody knows anything. The really petrifying thing we — everyone who are in situations similar to mine — are facing right now is that we have no idea what is going to happen next. None. The people advocating for the exit don’t have a plan. They have no specifics. Nobody knows what the policies, politics and laws will pan out to be for the next decade. I am not even talking about the next two years, when the country will have to keep its mind straight not to rip itself apart trying to find out what to do about all of this. Especially, come to think of it, exactly how it will negotiate its way out of the EU. I’m talking about what happens after that. The truly bleak and unknowable future. Don’t get me wrong. A tiny part of me is curious. The Economist-reading, political scientist part of me wants to know how Britain will negotiate an exit. How it would structure its laws, immigration politics, trade policies, and how it plans to extract itself from the rules and regulations it currently adheres to. That part would be to observe, and I genuinely look forward to that. It’s completely uncharted territory, and an academic’s wet dream. No country in the world has gone through it before. For a policy and politics buff like myself, the next 24 months are going to be a buffet of intrigue. But only if we can trust the current set of politicians to be even vaguely competent. And on that front, I have some reservations. Having said all of that, I would have to admit that the same part that is curious about the political ramifications of a Brexit is the same part of me that wonders how much I would bleed if I were to take a shotgun and put a hole in my foot. Yes, undeniably, the empiricist in me is curious. I love an X-ray and some emergency surgery as much as the next man. It would be . But nobody in their right mind would shoot their foot off with a shotgun. Much like nobody who knows what the implications are would have voted to leave the EU. As much as I would love to place my faith 100 percent in democracy, I simply cannot understand what just happened to the U.K. For Britain, it is going to be difficult. Scary. A path fraught with dangers, traps and tigers hiding behind the no-longer-EU-approved forest. And for me personally, this is an absolute tragedy. And I don’t know what to say about it. So without actually leaving you with a conclusion (sorry), I’ll leave you with the same words with which I started this piece… What the actual hell, Britain?
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Haje Jan Kamps
| 2,016 | 6 | 24 | null |
Twitter quietly launches tags to location feeds with Foursquare
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Josh Constine
| 2,016 | 6 | 24 |
let you see when tweets are from a specific place, like a business, sports stadium, or music festival. After a reader tipped us off, Twitter confirmed to TechCrunch it’s now rolling out this new location feature to all iOS users, with other platforms coming later. [Update: What’s new is that specific location tags now appear in the main Timeline and on profiles, clueing people in to the fact there are location feeds to browse. The Foursquare branding and design of the location feeds is new too. Despite confirming the news to us previously, Twitter says a basic version of location feeds was available before, but there was no way to tell a tweet was tagged with a location unless you opened its detail view. We’ve updated the article to reflect this.] Foursquare is powering precise place identification for the Twitter feature. In exchange it gets prominent branding, links back, and the ability to improve its own database. Foursquare CEO Jeff Glueck tells us “We’re excited about this integration, which has been getting deeper over time. Location can provide important context for any moment, and our location intelligence is best-in-class. We’re proud to support Twitter in the US, Canada, Brazil and many other geographies. Stay tuned for more to come.” Following renewed interest in location from Twitter’s role tracking the Ferguson #blacklivesmatter unrest, reported in late 2014 Twitter and Foursquare would strike a partnership. The two officially the deal in March 2015, and previewed a prototype of the feature. But underscoring Twitter’s trouble getting products out the door, specific location tags appearing in the timeline is only rolling out now, 15 months later. TechCrunch reader Carlos Gil (TheCarlosGil on Snapchat), gave us the heads up. Now when you tag a specific location (powered by Foursquare), it will be visible in the main Twitter Timeline. If you click through to the tweet detail and then click the location, you’ll be brought to a location feed with a map up top. There you’ll see a tab of tweets from that place or city, with the option to check tab dedicated to media such as photo from there. Getting to these location feeds can be a bit tricky. City-level location, which many users leave on all the time, still isn’t shown on tweets in the main timeline or profiles. You have to click into a tweet’s detail view to see it, then click on the city name to see its feed. Specific location tags will show up inside tweets on mobile as “- at [the location]”. But tapping them brings up a un-stylized list of recent tweets also tagged there. You’ll have to tap into one of the tweet’s detail view and then on the location in blue beneath the tweet to pull up the new Foursquare location feed. Twitter Location Feeds: From a tweet detail page/embed, tap the tag of a specific place to see the Foursquare-branded location feed — Josh Constine (@JoshConstine) There’s currently no easy way to Twitter Search for location feeds. Typing in “San Francisco, CA” or “TechCrunch HQ” doesn’t give you the option to check these feeds, though that seems like a sensible next step. Twitter already does this when you type a name, showing an option to follow that account above search results of tweets mentioning the name. It could do the same for places. In some countries where Foursquare data is thin, database. One is issue is that places are not geofenced, so unfortunately anyone can say they’re anywhere and spam the new location feeds. Location feeds accessed through the new tags will unlock the ability for users anywhere to immerse themselves in a place. You could drop into a sporting event, see what people think about a museum, find the favorite dish from a restaurant, check the vibe at a local park, virtually visit a concert, or even become engulfed in a protest. Instead of browsing a noisy hashtag with tweets from everywhere, you can discover what people on the ground are saying. Tis ability to immerse yourself in an unfiltered sea of information has always been one of the best parts of Twitter. Twitter has long struggled to get more users tweeting, not just lurking. Now suddenly there’s a better reason to tweet if you tag a place and city. Thanks to people browsing the new location feeds, your tweets could get extra visibility. With many Twitter users lacking a large audience and feeling like they’re yelling into the void, the chance to amplify their voices through location feeds could incentivize people to pull out their phones and tweet when they’re somewhere interesting. Eventually, getting more place-tagged tweets could help Twitter create location-specific Moments. Right now, Moments are heavy on the Internet’s commentary about real-world events and light on primary sources actually at the events. Done right, these curated location Moments could compete with Snapchat’s Live Stories to take you inside water cooler-worthy events. You probably don’t want to follow Chipotle, but might be happy to check in there on Twitter. This gives the company a way to improve its interest-based ad targeting even if you don’t interact with a place or business’ tweets. As Twitter lacks much volunteered biographical data, it needs what information it can get on what you care about. Location could help target you with hyperlocal advertising for nearby businesses, or marketing about similar places. Twitter has always been obsessed with hosting the what and the when. Here it’s finally getting a grip on where.
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iZotope, Photoshop for sound, closes another $7.5M in financing
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John Mannes
| 2,016 | 6 | 23 |
What does the trailer to Inception, a re-mastered Rolling Stones record and the podcast Serial all have in common? They’re all awesome. Their creators also all used products in the background to make them shine. , started by a group of MIT undergrads in 2001, hustled their way onto the competitive music scene by first releasing a free plug-in of a record simulator. Development went into overdrive in 2013 when the company closed its first $12 million round of venture capital. Today the company is announcing another $7.5 million in financing, with $2.5 million in venture funding from ABS Capital and individuals and a $5 million debt facility from Comerica. “We are like Photoshop but for sound,” said Mark Ethier, CEO of iZotope. Like Adobe, iZotope won an Emmy in 2013 for its contributions to television recording. The company produces software and hardware for creating, mastering, mixing and repairing sound. If I know anything about the truly audio-obsessed (cough cough, dad), it’s that they will do nearly anything to experience a new sound. I’m not talking about the mere audiophiles. I’m talking about people for whom the Native Instruments Komplete 10 library of 12,000 sounds is not enough. For those people, iZotope offers at least a temporary escape. A central focus of iZotope is on producing . Let’s say that you are filming the season finale of Mr.Robot and . White Rose is sitting next to the perfectly crackling fire, the expressions, the harp, the watch beep, it’s all perfect down to the haunting delivery of the story of Emperor Nero. Unfortunately, let’s say an extra in the background drops a tray of hors d’oeuvres. In the past, the scene would have to be reshot, potentially losing out on ideal chemistry. iZotope algorithms produce a sort of spectrogram, enabling musicians to see sound like a picture. Audio engineers can simply draw around the sounds they want to process and hit the delete key to remove them. The company has doubled since 2013 and now employs more than 100 people. The team plans to continue to expand product lines and work toward serving a broader customer base. iZotope works with a lot of big, names but the company also sells to hobbyists and people who have home studios and produce home videos. “The tools used to make sound effects in Star Wars are the same tools used by musicians to alter their drums,” added Ethier. Other products in the space emphasize simplicity and one-tap mobile solutions. While iZotope cares about user experience, it also prioritizes customization, control and cutting-edge processing. “We have a dedicated team of people researching new technology in the deep learning and machine learning realm,” noted Ethier.
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The automation of design
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Kai Brunner
| 2,016 | 6 | 23 |
Murphy’s Law decrees: “Anything that can go wrong, will go wrong.” For any of us whose livelihood depends on our labor, things going wrong could mean: “Anything that can be automated, will be automated.” Our labor or skill in exchange for pay has undoubtedly caused us to seek security in the notion that we’ll be forever needed. And yet time has shown that our ingenuity for efficiency orchestrates our removal from all forms of repetitive tasks. Energy and mechanization brought us from our fields into cities near factories, and in the past decades into offices behind our monitors. Engineers are even rendering themselves obsolete by automating the very thing they are critical for: thinking and making things. From automated software delivery, to self-modifying code, to self-assembling robots, will we be needed still? We’ve designed our environments and every object with which we interact by being creative and imaginative. Surely this could not be automated, right? We couldn’t possibly be replaced in this function. As a designer of enterprise software for DevOps automation, I’ve ventured to wonder, could automation do what I do? Can I design my own obsolescence? In his article , Latin American designer Sergio Nouvel explained the death of web design from the evolution of “high quality templates, mature design patterns, automation, and AI (…).” His conclusion, as I understood it, assured the continued existence of experience design because cohesively defining the experience comes from deliberate conceptualization. I agree with his view, as it seems we cannot automate the process of imagining what we want to experience. Homing in on automation and AI, there are two recent examples that substantiate that we’re heading toward having a layer of automation to remove a facet of design labor: visual layout. The pleasing harmony of structural elements, supporting elements, their positioning, their dimensions, their alignment, their hierarchy, their context and their color palette, all have long been the distinction of the skilled designer who brings the human intangible of aesthetic. Or is it the reverse? Maybe it is not us who create an aesthetic, but instead evolution has conditioned us to mimic nature’s patterns: symmetry, ratios, shapes and colors. If this is true, then through defined parameters, AI could learn these patterns and, as a designer would, explore design possibilities until user responses confirm a satisfying resting point. A San Francisco startup, , offers “websites that design themselves,” with their AI-driven layouts that organize and evolve the display of content by analyzing media, even adjusting color palettes and typography. Basically, their AI is making the decisions of a visual designer. However, a human learns to make decisions from purpose, passion, dedication and education. The Grid’s layout engine has alleviated a significant portion of the design labor, but the main ingredient of the outcome is still human: enjoyment and emotion. This past May, top honors at the , a solution that enables the update of website design using voice commands. Their leading use case is for web designers modifying layout using immediate feedback during meetings with customers. I promptly wondered, what if it wasn’t a professional designer talking? What if it’s a person willing to take the time to look at a template and instruct alterations? The iterative process would require no technical skill and soon enough a result would satisfy aesthetic sensibilities. As with numerous other industries, technology will have democratized specialized skills, cutting out middlemen and making it possible for non-initiates to the profession to develop a minimum of expertise to produce a satisfying outcome. In both these cases, AI and automation have demystified producing the design deliverable. The skill to go from conception to delivery has removed the visual designer as the gatekeeper and owner of the process. This is precisely where we come full circle to our initial insecurity: the fear of no longer being needed. Thinking our foothold resides in making decisions that are too complex for algorithms to expropriate them from us, the frontier that automation cannot cross into is where experience design requires team collaboration, creativity, financial imperatives, company culture, engineering ability and market objectives. AI and automation could not possibly take on all these variables — but how far could both go? UX design informed by business intelligence is not beyond AI and automation’s reach. The portion we might think is clearly within the boundaries of our creative synthesis is interaction design, where architecture, frameworks and iterations from feedback and validation shape an evolving user experience. Back in 1999 I was having a conversation with a colleague with whom I imagined an organic UI. We were defining a user interface that changed itself in step with the increasing knowledge of the individual user. Users would enjoy tailored experiences of the product corresponding to their increasing abilities. The product would have DNA, so to speak, which would enable it to change within the parameters of an evolutionary framework. Is this not where UX practices have led us today? Now, in collaboration with product management and engineers, I’m designing an enterprise software solution for Application Release Automation that helps DevOps teams work toward the continuous delivery of their software. As teams and I have been designing for automation, I often peer into the future, wondering what portion of information architecture, workflows and interaction design could be automated to produce an outcome comparable to what we’ve achieved so far. Again the reference to DNA comes to mind. What if we could parameterize the workflows, the UI patterns and the visual language we’ve developed to define the user experience. The labor in a design cycle resides in the many iterations to explore workflows and patterns that lead to the validation that our user’s needs are met. Within defined workflows and UI patterns, AI would power through iterations and present multiple viable options in a fraction of time. Next, it would push the options out to user testers, log the behaviors and determine through analytics which idea is best. The labor that follows in the hand-off of wireframes and specs for the engineering team would be entirely optimized into implementation engines that produce flawless and exact UI layout and behavior. The entire quality assurance process would in turn be optimized by meeting minimum acceptance criteria, thus entirely eliminating human error. This frictionless path would likely foster peace and harmony between teams never before dreamed of. This concept of automation in a UX design cycle seeks to mimic what software development and IT teams are already doing toward delivering releases more efficiently through the creation of automation pipelines. Repetitive labor and intensive tasks that are prone to human error are broken down into repeatable processes across a series of stages, from development, through testing, to production and into the hands of the users, confirming that what can be automated does truly get automated. Thus, certain roles in software engineering are marching toward their obsolescence, as best practices shed people while automations keep the show going. But this has been so in all industries, going so far back as the introduction of the first steam engine, on through to the mechanization of assembly lines. In each case, the automation was not the doing of the laborers. No, it happened them. With the automation in releasing software, the irony is that engineers are the ones imagining it into being. And as designers imagine the constructs of what’s next, it would only be appropriate that their elimination is self-inflicted. I predict that once we have automated algorithmic tasks for designing software, time will be freed for imagining new solutions and experiences, as we’re currently seeing with the resurgence of VR and the emergence of 360 video content. Automation frees time for the heuristic facets of design to evolve toward crafting experiences for deeper social connectedness, more efficient collaboration and broader creativity. First, however, there is a pragmatic motivation for eliminating algorithmic design tasks: Speed. That ever-competitive edge. Yet speed to market through speed of execution is often erroneously sought by sacrificing quality. From lack of automation, we drift toward inadequately achieving speed by removing key steps that ensure a better outcome in delivering a quality product. My former boss would often state: “Waste is sinful,” which I interpreted as time is wasted. Effort is wasted. Conversations are wasted. Talent is wasted. Market opportunity is wasted. Investment is wasted. I go so far as to say life itself is wasted in the inefficiencies of production. In the case of producing a superior user experience in software, when the vectors of speed and quality are in a tug-of-war, automation can end the war and get both vectors moving in the same direction. From his commission to rebuild Japan’s post-war manufacturing industry, the engineer and professor admonished: “Cease dependence on mass inspection to achieve quality. Instead, improve the process and in the first place.” In our modern software development organizations, committed to the pursuit of continuous software delivery, Deming’s words may well be the beacon to establishing a design process in which automation removes the inspection from humans, and built-in quality will come directly from AI rendering design solutions relative to a set of parameters. As a designer of enterprise software, I do not fear the elimination of my labor. I welcome it. I seek to enable it. I desire AI and automation to free me so that I may have the mental availability and the time to project and design the experiences of what’s next.
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On the floor of The New York Stock Exchange at Twilio’s IPO
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Fitz Tepper
| 2,016 | 6 | 23 |
Today Twilio braved the public markets and did what no technology startup has done all year – go public. The company began trading this morning on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker symbol TWLO, and didn’t disappoint. After pricing at $15 dollars, the stock opened at $23.99 per share and closed at $28.79 — a resounding vote of confidence from a public market still disappointed with the tepid performance of last year’s tech IPOs. To celebrate the offering, Twilio held a “code jam” (a NYSE-safe version of a Hackathon) with three developers on the trading floor. We got to talk to one of Twilio’s developer evangelists participating in the Code Jam to see what he was building, as well as NYSE President Tom Farley to hear about what the exchange thinks of the current state of the tech IPO market. Check out the video above to hear more about Twilio’s IPO, and see what it was like this morning being on the trading floor in the middle of all the action.
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Start your speculation engines, Apple is discontinuing its Thunderbolt Display
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Matthew Panzarino
| 2,016 | 6 | 23 |
Apple today announced that it is discontinuing its Thunderbolt Display, the large external display many use to connect to MacBooks or other Macs for extra screen real estate. This is very likely to fuel speculation (which has been ) that Apple will soon launch a 4K or 5K version of the display. The current Mac’s display is 5K and can be extended (in lower res) to the existing Thunderbolt Display, which runs at 2560×1440 — but I can tell you from personal experience that the difference in resolution sucks from a usability standpoint. One of the technical hurdles has been which connector such a new display would use, or whether it would just feature an internal GPU. Current Thunderbolt tech may (or may not, depending on who you ask) work for it if you run cables in parallel, or customize it using a wireless chip method . It might make sense, for instance, to use an internal GPU to enable laptops and other Macs without a powerful graphics processor to use such a high-res display. “We’re discontinuing the Apple Thunderbolt Display. It will be available through Apple com, Apple’s retail stores and Apple Authorized Resellers while supplies last. There are a number of great third-party options available for Mac users,” said an Apple spokesperson in a statement given to TechCrunch. There is still stock left, but once that stock runs out it will no longer be available. If you’re in the market for one either buy it on Apple.com now or try to score one at a third-party retailer. Why Apple would make an explicit announcement about this is anyone’s guess — though the most obvious is big corporate orders and education. We’re getting into buying season for the new year and they want people to be drafting orders with this in mind.
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13 TechCrunch stories you don’t want to miss this week
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Anna Escher
| 2,016 | 6 | 23 |
This week, Tesla announced plans to buy SolarCity, Twilio IPOed, the NY State senate passed an anti-Airbnb bill and we discovered the world’s largest Nerf gun. Read on for a recap of the biggest tech stories of the week. The Elon Musk empire could soon be uniting. — also owned by Elon Musk. Together the companies could allow you to outfit your home with solar panels that power a giant battery for everything inside, as well as your electric car. But is Musk just trying to bail himself out? Some might consider the chairman to be rescuing his 22.2 percent stake in the company by acquiring it with Tesla. Tesla offers to acquire Elon Musk’s SolarCity for $2.8B http://tcrn.ch/28M6Btz Posted by on Tuesday, June 21, 2016 The . Shock, disbelief and disappointment were common , “many of which had scrambled emergency meetings to consider their immediate steps in the face of this colossal shift in the political and economic landscape of both the U.K. and the European region as a whole,” writes Natasha Lomas. Twilio . It started trading at a price of $23.99 per share. That’s nearly 60 percent above . If the stock continues to do well, that could be good news for tech companies and investors, who are likely hoping that a strong showing from after the disappointment of last year’s offerings. We got an , and tried out Siri, the new Photos app, the updated Messages and more. But everyone wants to know is “will this new software screw up my computer if I hit the ‘update’ button?” In other Apple news, the company . The New York State Senate passed that would make it . The next step in the process is for New York State Governor Andrew Cuomo to either sign or veto it. If the bill becomes law, anyone in New York who posts entire home listings on Airbnb for less than 30 days could be fined up to $1,000 for the first violation, and up to $7,500 for the third violation. (yes, that really is the name) to build up its machine learning muscle, and also potentially to improve how it delivers photos and videos across its apps. The company, based out of London, has developed techniques of using neural networks (systems that essentially are designed to think like human brains) and machine learning to provide expanded data for images. The FAA its final . Under the new rules, pilots must always remain within visual line of sight of the drone and commercial drones will also only be allowed to operate during daylight. As for other operational limits, the FAA decided to set the maximum altitude to 400 feet above ground. The rules are a little narrower than many hoped. The music industry ramped up its campaign against YouTube as . The gist of the debate is that musicians and record labels feel that one law allows YouTube to host and monetize their songs without compensating the artists and labels fairly. It was confirmed that . The deal involves Quest Software and SonicWALL and could include other pieces. The price tag was more than $2 billion. Dropbox launched , as well as a few other new sharing features. A few YouTuber engineers built , a crazy-awesome four-foot-tall gun that shoots darts (pool noodles with toilet plungers inside) at 40 mph. Genetically modified crops are in metamorphosis right now, thanks to . In recent development, a federal safety board approved the first CRISPR trial to genetically alter humans. Humans! The Kellogg Company — yes, the cereal brand — is called Eighteen94 Capital (1894) to invest in food and food-related tech startups. Kellogg’s effort is just the latest in a string of funds created to grab stakes in hot startups in the massive global market for food.
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MassChallenge sets up camp in Switzerland
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Bérénice Magistretti
| 2,016 | 6 | 23 |
Lausanne, a small town in the Western part of Switzerland, has emerged as a surprising melting pot of innovative technology, and the latest feather in the town’s tech nest will be hosting the first Swiss chapter of . A large Boston-based accelerator program that is rapidly expanding across the globe, MassChallenge is a nonprofit and does not take an equity stake in startups that graduate from the program. Approximately 75 percent of the company’s funding base comes from corporate sponsorship. In the case of Switzerland, giants like and are some of the partners that are sponsoring the accelerator program this year. “MassChallenge has a unique format and mentality that we are eager to implement in Switzerland. This will hopefully instill a global vision that will go beyond our borders,” explains Benoit Dubuis, founding partner of and director of the in Geneva. With its new residents, Lausanne is following in the footsteps of Boston and London, which have already joined the MassChallenge network (Mexico and Jerusalem are also launching this year). With more than 450 applications from early-stage startups across various industries and countries, to participate in the four-month Swiss program, which launched on June 20. Top industries include high-tech (38 percent), social impact (11 percent) and of course healthcare and life sciences (24 percent), which is one of the predominant sectors of activity in Switzerland. Among the Swiss competing startups is , which provides a disruptive solution for a highly accurate digitization of artworks. The company’s portable scanner captures gigabytes of data describing the art in its finest details, which results in a true-to-life visualization via 3D topography, HD resolution and virtual relighting. It already has partnerships with several museums and just announced its official partnership with , a leading Swiss-based auction house. Within medical devices, is developing a sterilization-focused medical device for hospitals in developing countries. , the spin-off, is working on a wearable solution for the rehabilitation of upper limbs of paralyzed stroke patients. Companies are even being drawn from beyond the Swiss borders. The France-based startup , for instance, zooms in on the value of data by developing a visual analytics software that helps detect trends and patterns to answer any data-related questions. Egypt-based allows brand and content creators to understand exactly how their videos are performing on Facebook. But why choose Switzerland to implement a MassChallenge program? John Harthorne, the founder and CEO of MassChallenge, explains: “Switzerland has a strong entrepreneurial ecosystem and is home to some very advanced areas of tech. We can therefore leverage these resources to help future startups. There is also plenty of money in Switzerland. The idea is to try and convert this capital into risk capital to increase startup funding.” When asked about the small market size of Switzerland, which could be a disadvantage for some startups who wish to test their product, Harthorne turns this reality into an advantage: “Like in Israel, the small market size is one of the great strengths of Switzerland. Startups know that they can either go small and local or think big from the start and go global.” To this day, MassChallenge has 835 alumni startups with over $1.3 billion in capital raised. The 72 competing startups in Switzerland have free access to co-working spaces, wet labs and the prototyping lab located at , the Renens-based open laboratory next to Lausanne. They are also receiving coaching and mentorship by industry professionals. An outside pool of judges from the community will help select the finalists. This year’s experts include entrepreneurs and investors from , , and . The accelerator program will culminate in November 2016 at the MassChallenge Switzerland Awards Ceremony, where entrepreneurs will pitch their startups for the chance to win a share of 1 million Swiss Francs ($1,005,227) in zero-equity awards and in-kind prizes. “The fact that 450 startups applied for this first Swiss edition confirms the need to have a structured accelerator program in this region,” concludes Benoit Dubuis. “This addresses the country’s global ambitions and underlines the quality of its ecosystem.”
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Uber switches out surge for price transparency
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Sarah Buhr
| 2,016 | 6 | 23 |
No more pop-ups asking you to agree to those murky “2.1x” (or some other “x” amount) surge fares on the Uber app. Soon Uber will just tell you the price of your ride up front. Uber in May it was not doing away with surge pricing and denied an mentioning it would be killing surge. However, it seems Uber is doing away with the feature. Uber pricing will still fluctuate with demand, but now you’ll know the dollar amount you’ll be paying for the ride, instead; “no math and no surprises,” says Uber. introduced riders to exact fares two years ago and the ride-sharing company started to notice something — people seemed more likely to take Uber again when they were told up front how much the ride would cost. “Knowing how much a ride will cost in advance is clearly something riders appreciate: today uberPOOL accounts for over 20 percent of all rides globally,” a post in Uber’s says. Of course, uberPOOL is less expensive and it is also possible riders returned to Uber because of the cost savings on POOL, not because Uber told them how much the fare would be before they hopped in the car. But Uber’s product team has been testing the idea of offering the exact cost of the ride in select cities throughout the U.S. and India since April and says it believes riders are more likely to take another Uber in the future if they see the trip price upfront, not just because POOL is cheaper. The new costs are calculated similarly to the old “x” surge pricing so you might still end up paying a ridiculous sum in certain places or times of day where demand for a ride home is going to be high. The price is based on expected time, distance, traffic, the number of riders requesting rides at that time and the number of drivers available nearby, but at least now you’ll know exactly how much of a punch the ride will make to your bank account. Uber will also allow either the driver or rider to update the app if you change your destination in the middle of the ride and says you’ll get a notification in the app with the change in price. The rideshare company also told me you won’t have to worry if your Uber driver goes way off the map and tries to charge you more or if the route is suddenly busy and they need to change course. The price you agreed on will still be the price you pay. So no more lightning bolts and pop-up screens asking you to agree to “3x” surge or whatever it is after you stumble out of the bar or head all the way across town. Just like with hotels and airfare, the prices change all the time, but you’ll know what the price is before you book. According to Uber, “hundreds of thousands of riders” have already received the pricing transparency rollout — including those in Miami, San Diego, Seattle, New Jersey, New York and some of the bigger cities in India like Mumbai and Hyderabad. Uber plans to roll out the changes to pricing in the app globally in the next few months.
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Facial recognition systems stumble when confronted with million-face database
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Devin Coldewey
| 2,016 | 6 | 23 |
We’re all a bit worried about the terrifying surveillance state that becomes possible when you cross omnipresent cameras with reliable facial recognition — that some of the best algorithms are far from infallible when it comes to sorting through a million or more faces. The University of Washington’s is an open competition among public facial recognition algorithms that’s been running since late last year. The idea is to see how systems that outperform humans on sets of thousands of images do when the database size is increased by an order of magnitude or two. See, while many of the systems out there learn to find faces by perusing millions or even hundreds of millions of photos, the actual testing has often been done on sets like the Labeled Faces in the Wild one, with 13,000 images ideal for this kind of thing. But real-world circumstances are likely to differ. “We’re the first to suggest that face recs algorithms should be tested at ‘planet-scale,'” wrote the study’s lead author, , in an email to TechCrunch. “I think that many will agree it’s important. The big problem is to create a public dataset and benchmark (where people can compete on the same data). Creating a benchmark is typically a lot of work but a big boost to a research area.” The researchers started with existing labeled image sets of people — one set consisting of celebrities from various angles, another of individuals with widely varying ages. They added noise to this signal in the form of “distractors,” faces scraped from Creative Commons licensed photos on Flickr. They ran the test with as few as 10 distractors or as many as a million — essentially, the number of needles stayed the same but they piled on the hay. The results show a few surprisingly tenacious algorithms: The clear victor for the age-varied set is , while it and are neck and neck in the celebrity database. ( , from Shenzhen, China, gets honorable mention.) Conspicuously absent is Facebook’s DeepFace, which in all likelihood would be a serious contender. But as participation is voluntary and Facebook hasn’t released its system publicly, its performance on MegaFace remains a mystery. Both leaders showed a steady decline as more distractors were added, although efficacy doesn’t fall off quite as fast as the logarithmic scale on the graphs makes it look. The ultra-high accuracy rate touted by Google in its FaceNet paper doesn’t survive past 10,000 distractors, and by the time there are a million, despite a hefty lead, it’s not accurate enough to serve much of a purpose. Still, getting three out of four right with a million distractors is impressive — but that success rate wouldn’t hold water in court or as a security product. It seems we still have a ways to go before that surveillance state becomes a reality — that one in particular, anyway. The researchers’ work will be presented a week from today at the in Las Vegas.
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Used BMW i batteries store solar power at home
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Kristen Hall-Geisler
| 2,016 | 6 | 23 |
joins and in bringing energy storage home with its new system, which has yet to be given a catchy name. The system uses new or used batteries from the BMW i3 electric car to store power from solar panels for later use. It integrates with the charging station users are likely to have in the garage, so the stored energy from the sun can power your i3 overnight. Basically, if you keep your i3 long enough that the battery outlives its useful lifespan as a power source for your car, you can recycle it yourself. This system is plug-and-play, according to BMW’s press release, so you can use the battery’s remaining storage power in the stationary system after you get a replacement battery for the car. BMW i is also anticipating the near-future availability of second-life batteries, which would be retired batteries from other people’s i3 cars. Because the i3 has only been in production since 2013 (as a 2014 model year), there’s going to be several years of lag time before those batteries are ready to be recycled for in-home storage. But early batteries used in the Mini E test fleet have already been installed in a similar capacity at the University of San Diego, and energy distributor has already signed a contract for 20 MWh of second-life batteries, the largest order of used automotive batteries so far. The BMW i lithium-ion battery has a capacity of 22 kWh or 33 kWh. The company says that’s enough to power a typical American household, which uses 15-30 kWh day, for up to 24 hours. The BMW Group Technology Office is partnering with Pacific Gas & Electric Company and i3 owners in California to study how home energy storage and charge management can lower the overall cost of EV ownership. The study allows BMW to delay or interrupt charging during peak times, so if range anxiety is one of your EV issues, this might not be the study for you.
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How new tech can improve the loan process
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Kyle Kamrooz
| 2,016 | 6 | 23 |
Anyone who keeps up with the stock market is likely aware that is in . Anyone with professional lending experience is likely unphased by this. Peer-to-peer lending bypasses the regulations to which traditional lenders must adhere, which is why the concept took off during the 2008 recession, when lots of Americans were looking for loans that traditional lenders could no longer approve. So for Lending Club to oust its founder and chief executive Renaud Laplanche because of loan irregularities and lack of disclosure on a personal investment isn’t terribly surprising. When a business doesn’t face any outside regulations, it’s a lot easier for unsavory — and in this instance, illegal — activity to occur. Even so, peer-to-peer services remain popular. Because of that, traditional lenders are finally feeling pressure to use technology to improve their own processes. There are several ways technology can improve the loan process for both the lender and the borrower, and we’re already seeing substantial progress throughout the industry. For example, let’s look at Wells Fargo’s recent move to the online lending marketplace with its loan, slated to launch next month. FastFlex ranges from $10,000 to $35,000 and funds can be available as early as the next business day, with a weekly repayment schedule. Interest rates are to range from 13.99 percent to 22.99 percent based on the creditworthiness of the business. The program is designed for small businesses that need fast, short-term funding — precisely the kind of borrowers that often flock to online lenders like Lending Club. Wells Fargo is the first major bank to build an online lending platform in-house, which differentiates FastFlex from other initiatives we’re seeing in the industry, like J.P. Morgan’s partnership with . J.P. Morgan the partnership late last year, which combines Chase’s lending expertise with OnDeck’s digital platform to provide small-dollar loans to small businesses as quickly as the same day. Distribution partnerships like J.P. Morgan and OnDeck’s are a great way for traditional lenders and Silicon Valley’s fintech darlings to work together to improve the loan process for everyone involved, and I anticipate we’ll see more of them in the near future. The mortgage industry is another area where technology is rapidly advancing and improving the loan process. Closing a home loan today takes more time and has become more difficult and costly than ever imagined. Lenders are getting squeezed on margins and bearing the burden of increasingly heavy regulations. These costs and frustrations trickle down to the consumer, often crushing the excitement of homeownership. The good news is that both of these problems are being aggressively tackled by tech companies working to transform the mortgage experience and bring lending into the digital world. Mortgage lenders, once trapped in antiquated systems and manual processes, are rapidly adopting digital web-based loan solutions to streamline the process. In addition, we’re now seeing secure cloud-based “loan centers” that are accessible to borrowers 24/7 from computers and mobile devices to check loan status, upload required documentation, sign documents electronically and maintain a digital system of record. This would not be possible without innovative companies providing the underlying technology to help traditional lenders replace manual processes with data-driven workflows and automation. , a technology vendor we utilize at cloudvirga, is one such example. It provides automated verification of income and assets in minutes to lenders of all kinds — from mortgage companies, to auto loans and even credit card companies. FormFree’s founder and CEO Brent Chandler tells me its AccountChek solution was born out of a desire to reduce the burden on the borrower, while streamlining the process for the lender. “The digital transformation is now taking hold in the lending world,” Chandler said. “When digital, or direct-source, information is harnessed properly, that type of shift creates numerous benefits to the lending industry as a whole — from the proper allocation of credit to more liquidity. Ultimately, these proper solutions lead to stability. We like to refer to it as common sense underwriting.” Finally, as lenders and banks continue to adopt new technologies to improve the loan process, it’s only a matter of time before bots come into play. Bank of America has already a chatbot through Facebook’s Messenger app to provide customers with real-time alerts from the bank, with plans to increase the bot’s functionality throughout the year. Like we saw with mobile banking apps, it just takes one bank to innovate and set a new standard before all the others follow suit to stay competitive. As such, we’ll soon start seeing other banks launch chatbots of their own — and at one point or another, banks will realize that these bots can help streamline the lending process. In my experience, there are several questions that almost every borrower asks while applying for a loan, many of which could be answered by a chatbot. Because of that, I believe banks will inevitably start to pass those questions off to chatbots in order to free up loan officer time for tasks that actually require their expertise. Technology can — and should — be used to improve the loan process, but it should be done without forcing borrowers to gamble with peer-to-peer lending. It’s exciting to see traditional lenders and banks finally starting to embrace technology to move the industry forward in a safe, sustainable way.
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Malala Fund co-founder Shiza Shahid, AngelList partner to back “mission-driven” startups
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Lora Kolodny
| 2,016 | 6 | 23 |
During the at Stanford University today, , the equity fundraising platform, and activist announced a partnership to form a fund called NOW Ventures that will back what they’re calling “mission-driven” startups. That’s the latest label for businesses that want to make a positive social and environmental impact, while generating profits. These startups have been previously known as for-profit for good companies, world positive or social ventures, and double- or triple-bottom line businesses. NOW Ventures promises to invest in startups whose founding teams are diverse and include women. An advocate and activist for girls’ education and gender equality since she was 14 years old and living in her native Pakistan, Ms. Shahid is best known as a co-founder of the nonprofit with Nobel Prize winner Malala Yousafzai and her father, educator and activist Ziauddin Yousafzai. For the unfamiliar, the Taliban attempted to assassinate in October of 2012 when she was just 15 years old. She was targeted because she repeatedly wrote and spoke out about her experiences trying to attain a good education under the Taliban’s increasing military hold on her town. The Taliban shot her in the head, neck and shoulder while she was seated on a school bus en route home. She survived and continued to share her story. By the time she was discharged from the hospital in January 2013, a huge international and online outpouring of support for her and her family helped bring about a change in laws in Pakistan. The country ratified a Right to Free and Compulsory Education Bill in light of her struggles. The Malala Fund works to enable girls to complete at least 12 years of safe, quality education, according to its website, in communities across: Pakistan, Nigeria, Kenya, Sierra Leone and for children who are displaced . Ms. Shahid said despite her success building awareness and organizations in the nonprofit world, she is convinced that companies that generate profits to sustain themselves, while also helping others, have a better chance to effect big changes in the world, and can do so more quickly than nonprofits and philanthropists. “The hypothesis we aim to prove is that mission-driven companies are a better investment than purely profit-driven companies. We believe that they are creating more loyal customers, and generally aim to solve large problems, rather than to create cute apps,” Shahid said. A graduate of , Ms. Shahid admits she has no experience running a for-profit company or investing in startups, so she has enlisted AngelList’s Chief Executive Naval Ravikant and Chief Operating Officer Kevin Laws to teach her the ropes and run the fund with her. According to Laws, he and Ravikant will help NOW Ventures raise capital from limited partners, scout deals, conduct due diligence reviews of startups considered for investment and participate in the investment committee for NOW Ventures, casting votes that decide which companies the fund will back and how much they will invest. will serve as an advisor to the fund, as well, but does not have any members on the firm’s investing committee. Laws said that in addition to helping NOW Ventures form its fund and make deal decisions, AngelList will provide research organizations with extensive data about founders and investors, so they can determine “what works in mission-driven investing, and what doesn’t.” And, of course, deals where NOW Ventures invests its own capital will be syndicated via AngelList to the site’s network of accredited investors, who may add their own capital. NOW Ventures is raising its first fund as a , which allows NOW Ventures to broadly solicit and advertise the fact that it is seeking capital from limited partners.
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The Nintendo 64 turns 20 today
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Devin Coldewey
| 2,016 | 6 | 23 |
It was on June 23, 1996 that the Nintendo 64 made its debut — in Japan, that is. We wouldn’t see it on this side of the Pacific for another three months. But today is its proper birthday, and 20 years is a significant enough anniversary that we should probably just take a moment to remember just how awesome this console was — and is. I remember reading about “Project Reality,” AKA the Ultra 64, in Nintendo Power (I still have the issue); the glossy renderings of 3D worlds seemed so futuristic that even as a kid I was skeptical. After all, this was the era of Doom, of Mode 7, of SuperFX — 3D so simple it barely deserved the name. It’s hard to overstate, then, the revelation that was Super Mario 64. The size of the worlds! The density of objects and enemies! The countless hidden paths and stars! And it still holds up today in a big way. See if you can get your hands on a copy and give it a whirl — Nintendo miraculously, or more likely through a huge amount of hard work, nailed the controls so well that they are still considered by many to be the gold standard in 3D movement. Coincidentally, the N64 was “born” only a day after id’s Quake, which would be the other game to bring true 3D movement to the mainstream. It too holds up — and it’s still scary as hell. Co-creator John Romero on his blog. If Mario 64 proved that 3D games could be great, the rest of the N64’s lineup showed that 3D could be used in surprising and powerful ways. Wave Race 64 brought phenomenal water physics that wouldn’t be surpassed for years. Mario Kart 64 brought depth and verticality to madcap racing (though I still prefer the original). Ocarina of Time had you exploring a world almost too huge and complex to comprehend. And what can I say about GoldenEye 007? That it was perhaps the biggest after-school timesink of the era? That I was terrible at it? That you could tell who your friends were because they would gang up on whoever picked Odd Job before turning on each other? That it set new standards for level design? That it was the probably the best movie-to-game adaptation ever? That you could tilt the cartridge and make the NPCs dance? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VJSt91Ed5d0 The N64 came at a time when games were still considered kid stuff, even though games like Doom were raising red flags among parents and opportunistic pundits and legislators. Nintendo, with its commitment to family friendly gaming (generally speaking… 007 and Conker’s Bad Fur Day excepted), was the choice of millions for that reason and because the SNES had been such a huge success. But despite its bright colors and kid-friendly sensibilities, the N64 was a rock-solid platform that not only made a lot of us very happy for years and years, but also did important work in the history of gaming. It brought us classic titles that pushed the boundaries of what was expected of games, and made 3D worlds fundamental and integral with gameplay ideas rather than set dressing. Do you still have an N64 lying around? Take it out, blow off a cartridge or two, and give it a play tonight — that is, if your TV still has RCA in or, even less likely, an RF adapter for coax. The games might not be quite as eye-wateringly gorgeous as you remember them, but they’re still fantastic. Call over some friends, crack open a few cold ones (you can drink now! No more root beer) and play some License to Kill on Facility, or 4-player battle mode on Block Fort in Mario Kart 64. If you don’t have a good time, well, you’re a goomba.
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Facebook Live grows up with two-person broadcasts and waiting rooms for viewers
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Fitz Tepper
| 2,016 | 6 | 23 |
Today at VidCon Facebook pre-announced three new big product updates for Facebook Live, their live-streaming platform built into Facebook. The platform will soon let you do two-person remote broadcasts, pre-schedule your streams and create a virtual waiting room for viewers and broadcast with MSQRD’s face masks. The first upcoming update is the ability to stream a broadcast with two people in different locations — sort of like a remote interview. Essentially, you can invite a friend to “drop in” on your broadcast and join the conversation. Mark Zuckerberg hinted at this during his Live Q&A last week, noting that it would be cool if he could have different guests and celebrities participate remotely in his Live videos. The ability to stream with a friend will let content creators incorporate things like remote interviews and duets into their live videos, which will greatly expand the creative possibilities offered by the platform. This feature will go live later this summer, starting with Verified Pages, then roll out to other users. The company is also introducing waiting rooms, letting users hang out and wait for a broadcast to start. Content creators can pre-schedule the time they are going live, which will allow Facebook to send users a notification before the stream starts so they can be waiting when you go live. This solves an issue , which is that broadcasters don’t want to actually start their broadcast until a lot of people have tuned in, but early viewers leave because they get bored with watching the broadcaster wait for new users. It’s essentially a chicken and egg problem, and was a major issue for content creators on the Live platform. Now, Facebook can get users excited and assemble them before the actual live-steam starts, so broadcasters have a full audience the second they go live. Lastly, and on a more fun note, Facebook is adding the ability for users of the MSQRD app to go live on Facebook directly from the app. MSQRD is the (similar to Snapchat’s lenses product) that Facebook acquired in March. Once the update launches, users will be able to try on different masks and effects from within MSQRD, all while the footage is being broadcasted live to your friends. Broadcasting live to your friends can take a lot of guts, especially if you don’t have any interesting content to show them. Letting users broadcast live from MSQRD will arm them with funny content that should encourage them to go live more often.
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People are Facebook Live-ing the House sit-in too, Zuckerberg points out
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Devin Coldewey
| 2,016 | 6 | 23 |
After Republicans declared the House in recess during a Democratic protest demanding a vote on gun control, the cameras on the floor turned off — . The use of Periscope to document the sit-in has captured the hearts and minds of internetgoers, who proclaim the live-streaming app a necessity for liberty. Mark Zuckerberg would like to point out, though, that some people are using Facebook Live, too. “19 Members of Congress decided to go Live on Facebook and share what they were doing directly with citizens,” this morning. “As of 10am ET, those broadcasts have been watched more than 3 million times — and that number is still growing.” Three million is a lot, of course, but you can bet the Periscope numbers are much higher (Twitter hasn’t released them publicly yet, but we expect to find out soon) — it broke out of the rather small box that contains the insular, tech-savvy community that actually cares about live streaming video. Millions must have tuned in when CNN and other major networks posted the link, and if you were to count the people who watched it on national TV, it likely is one of the most-watched streams ever on the service. The Facebook numbers are nothing to sneeze at, but it must be said that the Periscope model is better suited to spontaneity and virality than Facebook Live. How many of those 19 members of Congress had to ask their interns for help navigating the Live setup process? Second question: How long before Facebook announces it’s streamlining the Live experience with (yet another) standalone app or new dedicated functionality within the existing one? If it means the chance to dominate a news cycle with the name of your product plastered all over the front page of every major news site, you can be sure the Live team is pulling all-nighters from now until then. Literally as I write this, Facebook announced new features for Live — but no streamlining. There’s a now, though.
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Storyboard helps you turn mobile photos into digital stories and books
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Sarah Perez
| 2,016 | 6 | 23 |
Even though printing photos is no longer the only means of viewing and sharing them with others, people still often want to do something more meaningful with these images — especially those of their family and children — than simply sharing them via ephemeral social media posts. A new application called , launching today from the Disney-backed startup , aims to help. The app offers pre-made templates and suggestions that you use to turn photos into stories you can share, or that become printed photobooks. Twigtale was originally founded by childhood friends Nishad Chande and Carrie Southworth. The idea was prompted by Chande’s frustration with using Shutterfly to create a personalized photo book. After staring at a blank page with no idea which pictures to use or what to say, the book took hours to create. Thus, Twigtale was born. The company already offers a variety of photobook templates, like “World’s Greatest Dad” or those for young children like “I Am A Girl” or “I Am A Boy,” among others. The new Storyboard application uses the same content personalization technology, but puts it into a mobile form factor. The app not only offers templates, but also recommends the photos to capture and post and offers text prompts that you can edit. This, the team believes, is easier for people to work with than a blank slate. For example, some of the included templates in the new app are “Family Trip” or “Graduation,” to give you an idea of how Storyboard may be used. After you load the templates with your own photos, you can then share the story digitally, or you can turn the story into a hardcover (9″x9″) or softcover book (8.5″x8.5″) for $29.99 or $19.99, respectively. The titles on the books are printed with a glossy finish, and templates are 24 pages. You can add, delete and rearrange pages with a maximum of 36 pages allowed, or a minimum of 8. There have been a number of startups focused on “story creation,” and one of the better entries in this space more recently, . Twigtale believes it’s different, however, because it’s trying to be more than a tool for collage-style albums — it wants to help with the actual storytelling itself, including helping guide the sequence and narrative. Plus, its business model relies on the upsell of the physical goods. [gallery ids="1343067,1343066,1343065,1343064,1343063,1343061"] L.A.-based Twigtale is a team of seven and has Disney’s investment thanks to its participation in the company’s accelerator program back in 2014. To date, it has raised $2.26 million from investors, including Larry Page, Anne Wojcicki, Wendi Murdoch, Elizabeth and Colin Callender, Tech Coast Angels and HBS Angels. The app is https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=31&v=4urAHRgV4Uc
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Samsung will acquire cloud-computing company Joyent
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Catherine Shu
| 2,016 | 6 | 15 |
that it has agreed to acquire cloud-computing company . In a statement, the Korean tech giant said that the transaction (its financial terms were undisclosed) will allow it to grow its cloud-based services for its smartphones and Internet-connected devices. Joyent will become part of Samsung’s mobile communications unit, but continue to operate as a standalone company after the deal is finalized. Key members of its tech team, including CEO Scott Hammond, CTO Bryan Cantrill, and VP of product, Bill Fine, will work on Samsung’s cloud projects. This is the third U.S. tech company that Samsung has bought in the last couple of years. The other two are smart home appliances maker , and , which developed the magnetic secure transmission (MST) technology that helps Samsung Pay compete against other mobile payment services like Apple Pay, as well as traditional credit cards. Founded in 2004, Joyent has been as peers like Virtustream, SoftLayer, and Metacloud . Its main products, which help power mobile and web apps, include container infrastructure platform Triton and cloud-based object storage service Manta. In a , Hammond wrote: “As a result of this acquisition, Samsung will become an anchor tenant for Joyent’s Triton and Manta solutions, and will help fuel the growth of our team and the expansion of our worldwide data center footprint. This acquisition, though, is about more than just adding financial muscle and scale. Joyent and Samsung share a culture of innovation and technical excellence, and bring together a set of highly complementary cloud, big data, mobile and IoT technologies.” According to , Joyent raised a total of $131 million in funding from backers including Intel Capital, Greycroft Partners, Peter Thiel, and Telefonica Ventures.
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Despite troubled online lending market, Payoff raises a big new round
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Connie Loizos
| 2,016 | 6 | 15 |
, a 7.5-year-old Costa Mesa, Ca., startup that makes loans for people looking to pay off credit card debt, has just raised a bunch of money and it’s looking to raise even more. According to a new , the company has raised $46.7 million as part of a round expected to close at $67.4 million. The company had previously raised $38.4 million from investors, including FirstMark Capital, Great Oaks Venture Capital, and Anthemis Group. Payoff targets millennials seemingly, with 10-minute-long quizzes to help users understand their financial “personality,” understand what their overall financial picture looks like, and assess how much finance-related stress is impacting them. The company got a lot of mileage particularly out of a it conducted that showed 23 percent of 2,011 survey respondents were experiencing symptoms commonly associated with post-traumatic stress disorder related to their finances. Among millennials, said Payoff, the number is 36 percent. Beyond its content, Payoff provides loan amounts of between $5,000 and $35,000, between two- and five-year-long terms, and for fixed rates of between 8 percent and 22 percent APR. Borrowers also are charged a one-time 2 percent to 5 percent fee when their loan is issued. Payoff seems to be steering clear of “subprime” borrowers, the kind that firms like loan to at extravagant rates (though those rates fall with every loan that’s paid in full). It instead requires that applicants have a minimum credit score of 660 and a minimum credit history of three years. Borrowers are limited to using the loans to pay off credit card debt, too. As for the money that Payoff is lending out, it largely comes from Eaglewood Capital Management. According to the WSJ, Payoff secured up to $250 million in debt financing from the firm to ramp up its offerings of unsecured loans. The online lending industry has been hard hit in 2016. As Todd Baker, a consultant to the financial services industry, , it took just one “blip” in the capital markets last summer for the banks, hedge funds and other institutions that have providing online lenders their capital to grow nervous about risk. When those lenders couldn’t give them better rates on loan sales while staying profitable, these investors “started looking for greener pastures,” noted Baker, adding that “Wall Street walks when it gets nervous.” Baker expects that to survive, more online lenders may need to remodel themselves into the institutions they vowed to replace, either by becoming banks, buying or selling to banks, or else striking up partnerships with banks. Payoff seems to be moving in that direction already. In January, it with , an institution that’s focused on money management. Additionally, cofounder and CEO Scott Saunders told the Journal last year that the firm hopes its content and quizzes will help it evolve into more of a wealth management outfit over time.
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Crunch Report | Bumble partnering with Spotify
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Khaled "Tito" Hamze
| 2,016 | 6 | 15 |
Tito Hamze
Tito Hamze
Joe Zolnoski
Joe Zolnoski
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Didi Chuxing completes $7.3B financing round that includes Apple’s $1B investment
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Catherine Shu
| 2,016 | 6 | 15 |
, the largest ride-hailing app in China, confirmed today that it has closed a $7.3 billion financing round that includes its recent investments from Apple and China Life. The news was , whose sources say Didi Chuxing’s valuation is now pegged at more than [the story has been updated to say $28 billion]. The company declined to comment on its reported valuation. The round includes $4.5 billion in equity from Apple, China Life, Ant Financial, as well as returning investors Tencent, Alibaba, China Merchants Bank, and SoftBank. The remaining capital consists of $2.5 billion in debt financing from China Merchants Bank and a $300 million long-term debt investment from China Life, the country’s largest insurance company. Didi Chuxing announced investments of and a few weeks ago. Apple’s contribution came as a surprise when it was revealed at the end of May and drew attention to Didi Chuxing’s dominance in China over Uber—but then Uber stole some of Didi Chuxing’s thunder by disclosing a whopping . The competing funding news spotlights how gigantic Uber and Didi Chuxing’s war chests have become. Didi Chuxing said its latest financing round brings the total capital it has raised to $10.5 billion, which it claimed in a press release makes it “one of the world’s best-funded Internet companies.” Uber, which operates in about 70 countries, has raised even more. According to CrunchBase, the company has . Its . In China, Didi Chuxing (which was founded by a merger of the country’s two-largest ride apps in 2015) has a wide lead over Uber. According to the China Internet Network Information Center, a government agency, Didi Chuxing currently holds a 87.2 percent share of China’s private-car hailing market. It claims to have 300 million registered users and 15 million drivers on its platform, who complete up to 14 million rides a day. Uber, on the other hand, to build its China business (called Uber China). Founder and chief executive officer Travis Kalanick said in March that he believes Uber China will become profitable in two years. During a , Uber announced it will be available in 60 Chinese cities in July, and now completes about 30 million UberPool (which lets passengers share a car) rides each month in China. The massive amount of cash each company is burning through in order to dominate China has , but both companies have denied any interest in a union. In a press statement, Didi Chuxing co-founder and CEO Cheng Wei said, “In just four years, Didi has created a firm lead in China’s mobile transportation sector. With our advantages in technology, platform synergies, and talented team, Didi is prepared to continue this momentum of growth.”
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Columbus, Ohio officially winner of DOT Smart City Challenge and $140 million in innovation grants
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Jay Donovan
| 2,016 | 6 | 23 |
With the Columbus Dispatch (and many possible runner-up cities) that Columbus was the winner of the U.S. Department of Transportation’s , official word was silent until this afternoon. Today in Columbus, U.S. Secretary of Transportation Anthony Foxx officially recognized and announced — to a full house at the Douglas Community Center in the neighborhood of Linden — that the city is indeed the winner and will reap the benefits of victory; a $40 million grant from the DOT, $10 from Paul Allen’s Vulcan Inc., plus $90 million in local matching contributions. Of the 78 cities that applied for the challenge, the seven finalist cities that Columbus bested were Austin, Denver, Kansas City, Pittsburgh, Portland and San Francisco. Plans for the grants will include: …and more. Foxx also shared feedback and details about how Columbus’s vision for transportation innovation stood out from the other cities that participated. He noted the creativity and comprehensiveness of the proposal, even describing how the city’s transportation solution could solve for infant mortality. He went on to say: “One of the issues that pre-existed this challenge and was concerning this community for quite some time is the fact that, in this area, the infant mortality rate is four times the national average. Rather than de-link this challenge from that challenge, what Columbus did was say ‘how can innovation help us solve that [infant mortality] challenge.’ And so one aspect of the proposal that you will now deploy in this community is linking the communities that are struggling most with infant mortality so that a mom who is trying to get to the doctor’s office has a transportation system that will connect to the doctor’s office, schedule the trip, and make sure she gets to the doctor. That’s pretty phenomenal thinking to solve a problem you have and that you want to see improve. Congratulations Columbus.” Update: I inquired with the City of Columbus for specifics on where startups factor in with this funding and innovation planning. I heard back from Alex Fischer, president and CEO, Columbus Partnership, with a statement: “Current startup activity in Columbus is unprecedented. Last year, the Kauffman Foundation ranked Columbus the country’s fastest-growing city for startup activity and earlier this month, the Foundation found that Columbus is the number one city for startups to go to scale. We have a long history of great entrepreneurs who have built great companies in our community, and startups will certainly play a role in making Columbus into an even smarter Columbus. Winning this grant will help us launch the next generation of entrepreneurs and accelerate the growth of startups. For instance, the City of Columbus is looking to partner with Mass Factory to deploy a customized application developed in Barcelona to assist persons with disabilities to utilize public transportation in Columbus. We are very open to innovation and welcome opportunities to partner with cutting edge technology startups to achieve the goals of our Smart Columbus program from wherever they are in the world.”
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Former Startup Battlefield competitor Satago raises £4.6m to help small businesses get paid
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Samantha O'Keefe
| 2,016 | 6 | 23 |
Back in November, TechCrunch , a U.K. fintech startup that was looking to help freelancers and other small business owners get paid on time. Satago started that lets users see how well (or poorly) companies are at paying invoices in a timely fashion, and has tools such as automated invoices, reminders, payment requests and integrated credit reporting that help freelancers keep track of their finances and outstanding payments. In January of this year, the team launched a pilot of Invoice Finance, a premium tool that actually paid freelancers and small businesses 85 percent of outstanding invoices up front, then the remaining 15 percent, less a small fee, once the businesses finally ponied up. Today, Satago is launching Invoice Finance in a big way. The company recently announced funding from ESF Capital. That funding will enable Satago to give its roster of 1,000+ freelancers and SMBs the same level of credit control as major corporations. Satago will now front outstanding invoices as small as £500 and up to £50,000 per client. With the bolstering of the launch of Invoice Finance, Satago CEO and founder Steven Renwick is predicting strong growth in the year ahead. “Late payments are a perennial issue for SMEs, damaging their finances as a result,” Renwick said in a press release. “But with this support from ESF Capital, Satago has the firepower needed to finally put SMEs in full control. We actually work to improve clients’ financial health before offering them finance, and we’re excited to now offer these capabilities to a much wider audience.” We are thrilled to see former Battlefield companies like Satago doing so well post-Disrupt, and we can’t wait to see the next crop of Battlefield companies at Disrupt SF 2016. And, we hope you’ll Apply !
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Good VR is great — and bad VR is abysmal
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Devin Coldewey
| 2,016 | 6 | 15 |
VR to be boring. It’s strange to think that something so futuristic and promising, something we’ve looked forward to for decades, be boring, but I can’t deny it, since I’ve experienced it myself. The fact is that with hundreds of companies joining the VR gold rush, we’re going to be panning a lot of silt for every grain of gold. VR is a powerful medium, but difficult to work with — because the developer is put in the position of creating a sense of self and presence, more is required of them, and while successes are almost impossible to describe properly, failures are conspicuous and easily dissected. It’s easiest to illustrate with actual examples. Easily the most interesting VR experience I’ve had at E3 (of a dozen or so) was an Oculus demo called “The Climb,” by a team at Crytek. Using the Touch controllers (a new innovation; previously a gamepad was used), you manipulate a pair of disembodied hands, gripping ridges and cracks to make your way up a cliff face. Like many VR games, it rather… boring. In fact, it’s genius, but only within VR — and like so many other games, the only way to find that out is to play it. Nevertheless, It’s excellent for several reasons, and these act as sort of guidelines for content that fits VR’s strengths and avoid its weaknesses. First, it takes place in a human-sized space. There’s no reason why games shouldn’t be in outer space or make you a god, manipulating continents, but to immediately engage an ordinary human, put them in an environment they can relate to. The methods we have for intuitively understanding to the space around us are too many to list, but they automatically come into play and make a virtual place more familiar if it’s designed to take advantage of them. Second, in “The Climb,” that space is familiar enough to interact with naturally, but designed to be different enough from ordinary spaces that it thrills. Just because something is human-scale doesn’t mean it has to be ordinary in terms of place, time, or emotion. A battlefield in the Civil War is human-scale. A civil rights protest is human-scale. An office at the Ministry of Magic is human-scale. In the case of “The Climb,” the world you’re in acts as scenery for the actual scene you inhabit, which is the human-scale series of grips and jumps that make up the game proper. Third, the in-game character is doing things that most people can’t do, but at the same time aren’t disorientatingly superhuman or difficult to follow. Having done a little rock climbing myself, I know for sure the protagonist would have “barn doored” or just slipped off the wall several times — so of course a strength and endurance greater than your own is implied, and a bit of suspension of disbelief is still required. But by attaching your controllers to a pair of in-game hands and having them correspond exactly to your reach and grip (you must hold down the trigger to grip the wall), limits are established to that power. The climber may be a construct, a character you inhabit, but the skill (or lack thereof) with which you traverse the wall is your own, and feels real. Fourth, everywhere you look is important. In one direction are the chalk marks indicating how you must proceed. Behind and below you is, usually, a dizzying drop that, in my case, took me by surprise and nearly made me fall over. To your left and right are lovely prospects of lakes shining in the sun, or bugs scurrying away from your hesitating hand as you gauge the distance to your next hold, or tantalizing glimpse of the checkpoint towards which you are making your way. In the real world, there is interesting stuff in every direction. If you look around — that thing VR alone lets you do properly — in this world crafted with pixel precision by artists, and you find there isn’t enough interesting stuff to look at, well, that may not be a fail state, but it sure makes for a less compelling experience. Not me playing, I looked cooler. I also had a very good time playing Farpoint, a first-person (naturally) shooter set on a hostile alien planet, the demo for which had me firing bullets, shells, missiles, and grenades at scary, scaly beasts that crawled out of the Mars-like surface through which I was advancing. It succeeds, however, largely on the strength of its core shooting gameplay; the tubelike gun accessory for PlayStation VR transforms in your mind into the futuristic shotgun in your virtual hands and the illusion is instantly convincing. The game fell short of creating a world where everything was interesting, though in an action game your attention is, naturally, attracted to the army of bugs looking to harvest your guts at any cost. Alas, I was disappointed by “Final Fantasy XV: The VR Experience,” despite being hyped for the game itself. Here, I found, was the worst possible outcome: a game that should and could be interesting, but does almost nothing right. Unlike “The Climb,” it sounds like a blast on paper. You and the other main characters from the game are in a battle with a Behemoth, one of the game’s most well-known monsters. You’re Prompto, the one who has a gun, supporting your buddies as they fight hand to hand. What it amounts to, however, and I’m heartily sorry to say it, is a disjointed and boring five minutes that may leave you less excited for the game than when you donned the headset. This image actually appeared in full motion at Sony’s press conference. Again you’re a disembodied hand, just one holding a gun — but right off the bat, the alignment was off, so it felt to me that the gun should be pointed up, when in fact it was pointed straight ahead. Right away there’s a disconnect: This isn’t my hand (I’m not “gripping” anything) and this gun is a video game construct (it’s not behaving as expected). For that matter, the demo was seated but your character is standing. Just one more thing that sounds minor but ends up nagging at the corners of your consciousness, nibbling away at the illusion. You hold the trigger down to fire an endless hail of bullets at the Behemoth, while your buddies slash and slash. Around the arena are scattered little blue spots. You point your gun at these and pull a different trigger to warp there instantly. It’s not a natural way to move at all, and you feel no sense of agility or skill in doing it — because it’s a supernatural act you had no agency in it except to pick from a multiple-choice selection of arrival points. Eventually enough damage numbers jump out of the Behemoth that it dies, and you are treated to a short cutscene where you’re in an empty passenger seat in a car being driven by the mechanic Cid (whom many VR participants unashamedly ogled). Your actions are proscribed; your position is static; your interactions make no physical sense. Even a 2D FPS on a PC with mouse and keyboard would be more engaging. It’s clear that little thought went into the content, and that a game that is hugely ambitious and successful already on multiple other fronts was simply packaged up into a “VR experience” to ride the wave (probably taking important hours away from important and talented dev team members that could be polishing the game proper). Personally, I think it does the title as much a disservice as a poorly made mobile tie-in game or tacky fast food promotion. If, as with 3D movies, VR games are as apathetically done as this brief demo, it’s going to be hard to convince millions to buy in. What was good about it was really one thing: you were there. But that “presence” is the one thing pretty much every VR experience can lay claim to now that the hardware is good enough. It’s one of the most important aspects of VR and what makes it unique, the worlds inside it convincing. The problem is it isn’t enough, just as photorealistic graphics in the latest console and PC games aren’t enough. Another successful VR demo, at HTC, that showed room scale gaming that actually worked. I don’t think that VR should be limited to small-scale environments like a rock wall or office or cockpit — but those do nicely as tutorials that teach what makes such environments engaging. VR is a powerful set of tools, but something is not valuable simply because it employs those tools. What is created still requires a great deal of craft and consideration, and, in fact, when the tools are so powerful, it is a double failure when they are used poorly. What we are going to have for the next couple years is intense experimentation in how VR can be used, and that is great news. How else will it grow and mature? But the people who will consume the products of that experimentation are smarter and more perceptive than they know, and laxity on the part of creators will be more obvious than ever. At the same time, VR will reward even more highly those who use their ingenuity and imaginations, making experiences that are as natural as the real, but can only occur in the virtual.
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Marketing tech company Performance Horizon raises $15.4M
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Anthony Ha
| 2,016 | 6 | 15 |
, a company aiming to help advertisers manage their relationships with marketing partners, is announcing that it has raised $15.4 million in Series C funding. The company says that with its software, brands and agencies can bypass the affiliate networks that online publishers usually rely on to get paid by marketers for driving purchases or other consumer actions. Performance Horizon’s tools (including features like campaign tracking and payments) allows the marketers to build direct relationships with the publishers instead. According to Erik Mikisch, Performance Horizon’s vice president of marketing, the problem with affiliate networks is that they usually work with thousands of partners for multiple brands, which means they need to “provide similar services to all their clients,” offering limited data and sticking to simple campaigns. “Performance Horizon’s platform enables customers to run sophisticated campaigns based on highly granular data, driving conversions for profitable products and rewarding key partners based on their revenues and profitability generation for the brand, as well as the acquisition of consumers with high lifetime values,” Mikisch said via email. Investors in the Series C include Greycroft Growth fund, Mithril and DN Capital. The company (which is headquartered in England but also has offices in San Francisco, New York, Sydney and Tokyo) says it will use the funding to expand its sales and marketing teams globally. Apparently it has its eyes on United States, continental Europe, China and Japan. Performance Horizon has now raised a total of $35 million. The company says it works with more than 200 clients and plans to double its headcount in the next 12 months.
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FBI built a massive facial recognition database without proper oversight
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Kate Conger
| 2,016 | 6 | 15 |
The FBI steadily, stealthily compiled a massive facial recognition database without oversight and in disregard of federal law, according to a report released today by the Government Accountability Office. The bombshell reveals that the FBI dipped into driver’s license photo databases from 16 states, as well as passport and visa photo databases from the State Department, feeding its facial recognition with millions of photos of Americans and foreigners who have never been accused of a crime. The FBI has access to a whopping 411.9 million images for use in facial recognition, roughly 30 million of which are mug shots. The sheer number of photos described in the GAO report is staggering, but what’s worse is that the FBI didn’t make public disclosures about the program required by law, the report says. The GAO recommended that the FBI make several improvements to its transparency process and assess its past failures. The report instructs that the U.S. Attorney General should determine why the FBI didn’t publish legally mandated privacy assessments as it expanded its facial recognition program. The Privacy Act requires government agencies to disclose how they harvest and use personal information like ID photos, but the GAO found that the FBI didn’t make the mandatory disclosures. “There appears to be no internal oversight on this system and that’s remarkable,” Alvaro Bedoya, the executive director of the at Georgetown Law, told TechCrunch. Bedoya previously worked for Senator Al Franken, the legislator who has frequently pushed for oversight of facial recognition technology and requested that the GAO audit the FBI’s use of the technology. “Today we found out that they have no idea if they’re misusing it or not,” Bedoya said of the FBI. “They’ve literally never done an audit.” Bedoya pointed out that many Americans don’t expect their driver’s license photos to end up in a federal law enforcement database. “When you turn 16 or 17, you don’t go down to the police station and give them your fingerprints; you go get your driver’s license. Turns out, it’s the same thing as far as the FBI is concerned,” he said. “They might not be storing these photos at Quantico but it has built, in effect, a nationwide biometric database using driver’s license photos. It’s breathtaking.” The GAO report also notes that the reliability of the FBI’s facial recognition technology is virtually untested, and testing it for accuracy is complicated, given that the FBI searches several different state and federal databases for photos. Studies have consistently found when identifying minorities, women and young people, and it’s probable that the FBI’s databases are susceptible to similar biases. The GAO made three recommendations to help the FBI test and audit the accuracy of the system and to ensure that the data from other databases is reliable, but the Justice Department argued that the FBI has done sufficient accuracy testing. “This GAO report raises some very serious concerns, and reveals that the FBI’s use of facial recognition technology is far greater than had previously been understood. This is especially concerning because the report shows that the FBI hasn’t done enough to audit its own use of facial recognition technology or that of other law enforcement agencies that partner with the FBI, nor has it taken adequate steps to ensure the technology’s accuracy,” Franken said in a statement on the report. The GAO findings come at an interesting moment in the FBI’s push for facial recognition. The bureau has asked that its biometric information be . Nearly 50 organizations have signed on to oppose this exemption, and public comment on the issue remains open until July 6. As the issue of biometric databases and individual privacy continues to grow, so does the FBI’s photo collection. The GAO report reveals that 16 more states are in negotiations with the FBI to provide access to their driver’s license photo databases.
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How do you truly secure the connected car?
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Oren Betzaleli
| 2,016 | 6 | 15 |
We’ve become accustomed to staying connected whenever and wherever we are. From Instagramming our exotic summer vacations to receiving alerts from our smartwatches about our next meeting — even ordering groceries via our mobile devices to skip the line — we have more than enough ways to stay tuned in 24/7. For better or worse, the fear of missing out (a.k.a. FOMO) is real, and businesses are quick to capitalize. To integrate the connected experience into everyday situations, retail stores have installed beacons at malls to alert us of promotions. CNN and The New York Times can now alert us to the latest headline-grabbing news in real time. A more novel and practical use case of how this is coming to life can be found in the healthcare industry. Last year, healthcare IT solution provider integrated its subsidiary, Healow (Health & Online Wellness) with wearable devices and fitness trackers. Through this integration, patient data from these wearables seamlessly integrates with personal health records. The synchronization instantly provides medical providers with the most up-to-date and useful information, taking healthcare service to the next level. All this connectivity is great, but it has also blinded us to the associated risks of being online at all times. As recently , connected devices — especially smartphones — are vulnerable to cyber attacks from hackers, so security is of the utmost importance. Just a little further down the road is the next major connected device: the vehicle. Admittedly, connected cars come with some well-founded safety concerns. While most of us aren’t overly concerned about our phones and computers being vulnerable to the threat of a cyber attack, we cannot afford to become complacent in safeguarding our cars. The stakes are higher when it comes to our vehicles — so high, in fact, that the FBI and National Highway Traffic Safety Administration shared a cautioning drivers of the increased risks that come with connected vehicles. Like phone security, car data security is not always assured. Skilled hackers can and will find data and sell it to the highest bidder — or exploit it in other ways. Connected cars layer in an added risk to driving, as drivers’ well-being can be in jeopardy if something goes awry. While hackers generally tend to access private data and systems for personal gain, they do have the ability to take control of connected vehicles and make unexpected stops or turns, which could cause accidents. Just last year, an experiment showed how researchers , taking over the transmission, steering and brakes. With GSMA Research estimating 100 percent of all cars will be connected by 2035 and that 75 percent will be autonomous by 2025, there’s an immediate need to educate the public on the various facets of car connectivity and safety. Concerned drivers must be made aware of the solutions available to reduce the vulnerabilities of a connected car. There are a multitude of solution options to help protect connected cars from cyber attacks, including secured hardware components at the chip level for secured operating systems and isolation and sandboxing capabilities that network protection at different layers (e.g. firewall) — all available to assuage drivers’ safety concerns and alleviate auto manufacturers’ cyber attack worries. However, even with all these mechanisms in place, nothing stops the hackers from continually trying to find and exploit new vulnerabilities. The only way to mitigate this ongoing risk is to enable the in-vehicle systems to learn new ways to fight back. To achieve this, connected cars need mechanisms that continuously update the vehicle software with the newest and most advanced security features. These updates can be done either manually at the dealer, or automatically over the air. Over-the-air (OTA) updates are used in a multitude of growing technology spaces today, including GPS, smartphones, tablets and more. In fact, there are currently more than 10 million vehicles equipped with the capability to receive software updates over the air. Similar to that of a smartphone receiving operating system updates and enhancements from the manufacturer, OTA updates allow car manufacturers and their suppliers to effectively manage all software components within the connected car. Given this capability, auto manufacturers can enable vehicles to mitigate any new cyber threats without calling the cars back to the dealers. OTA updates automatically sync with connected cars to ensure all software is current at all times, helping provide future-proof security coverage, cost savings and increased customer loyalty. To keep the car secured throughout its lifecycle, we must be able to update it at any point in time. OTA updates are the most effective and efficient way to accomplish this — they keep a car safe and circumvent potential cyber attacks, providing a tremendous security advantage over other vehicles. As consumer demand for connectivity rises in tandem with solid security needs, automotive manufacturers are increasingly adding smart components to the car development process. The added benefit of ingraining smart technologies early on is that the embedded software continuously receives updates from the moment the connected vehicle rolls off the production line to the end of the vehicle’s lifespan. OTA updates ensure that connected cars always have up-to-date maps and the latest cybersecurity features. Utilizing OTA, in-vehicle GPS units can quickly deploy updates of new user interface elements, maps and points of interest to the infotainment platform. Additionally, OTA-enabled vehicles have the advantage of deep-rooted analytics and prognostics, which monitor all vehicle diagnostics for optimal performance levels at all times. Simply put, connected cars with OTA-embedded updates operate with a higher level of safety and security throughout the automotive lifespan, giving automotive manufacturers — not hackers — the upper hand. OTA updates make life more convenient for car owners, as well. Rather than physically bringing a vehicle to the dealership for repairs or waiting for another form of manual installation for a software update, OTA updates are instant, seamless and secure, so drivers can continue riding while upgrades are made. Additionally, their monitoring capability enables vehicles to receive warnings about malfunctioning parts ahead of a breakdown. With this, car owners are able to better service their vehicles, ensuring consistent in-person security, as well as top-notch cybersecurity. By eliminating the need for physical software transfers, automotive manufacturers now have the ability to keep vehicles safely and securely running for an extended period of time without maintenance interruptions. Recall and warranty issues tend to be quite painful for consumers and extremely costly for automotive manufacturers. It’s safe to say any innovation that prevents maintenance trips and spending would be welcomed. Software-related recalls have doubled within the past few years — soon they’ll match mechanical recalls. Software malfunctions, such as the breakdown of GPS navigation and Bluetooth connectivity systems, are the leading cause of these recalls. In fact, of the $6.9 billion in recalls, attributes 6.4 percent, amounting to $436 million, to software. Today, cars can have more than . Inside the connected car, there are , and that number is growing exponentially. Software veteran Steve McConnell says that the industry average finds approximately 15 to 50 errors per 1,000 lines of delivered code. As such, it is nearly impossible to manually catch every security flaw or breach before someone with a malicious intent finds out and corrupts the software. Luckily, OTA updates are an innovation in car software that reduces the likelihood for recalls and guards systems against hackers and security breaches. They have key benefits, such as a small on-device footprint, enhanced operational reliability and platform- and OS-agnosticism for a solid fit with any connected vehicle system. Software updates continually reduce the level of required physical maintenance. As a result, vehicles will be protected over time and have fewer recalls and warranty issues. As soon as we drive away from the dealer in our new cars, what we envision is all the amazing road trips we’ll take with friends and family. Most of us don’t picture multiple trips to the dealership to update software throughout the year. OTA updates provide customer service benefits for today’s car owners, including instant enhancements, reduced maintenance costs and an extended vehicle lifespan, which ultimately increase brand loyalty. To roll out its new Autopilot feature, Tesla offered Model S owners with the Autopilot hardware who did not purchase the feature a 30-day, free trial. This barely scratches the surface for what’s possible. The combination of keeping customers safe through regular updates and the opportunity to try new features before making a final purchase decision will be key to fortifying customer loyalty to car manufacturers. A recent public service announcement puts the onus on consumers to remain vigilant about their software updates, but there’s a chance connected components won’t receive critical updates manually in a timely manner. The lack of convenience involved in updating software at a dealership will inevitably result in car owners missing updates here and there. Unlike any other connected device, avoiding software updates in vehicles gives hackers the ability to access data and/or control key car components, resulting in life-threatening danger. In the United States alone, there are people injured or disabled in car accidents. Situations where the driver could lose control because of malicious individuals necessitate OTA updates to protect car owners from cyber attacks. At the end of the day, consumers want a car that works at every point of interaction — without complications, security attacks or malfunctions. Similar to that of wearables, phones and other devices, there’s an unspoken assumption for ease of use, interactivity and security with each connected experience. As we move forward with connected cars, OTA updates will serve as that invisible hand guiding drivers toward truly secure and effortless experiences on the road.
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The Apple Watch needs an ‘OK’ button
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Matthew Panzarino
| 2,016 | 6 | 15 |
needs an action button. Something to allow you to confirm, acknowledge, activate and navigate using a physical press. There’s even a button right there, on the side, waiting for the task. The button, located right below the scroll wheel, was originally used by Apple for the People function. So few folks used this feature that Apple is canning it in watchOS 3 and replacing it with the “dock,” a series of apps that you swipe through like you previously did with the “glances” that popped up from the bottom. So now, you tap on the button and you get a swipeable dock of apps. Still not ideal. I’d venture to guess that so few people will use the dock that it could be up for replacement again with watchOS 4. When that time comes, I want Apple to replace it with a general OK or Action button. Something you can physically press when you need to confirm, stop a timer with sweaty hands, mute a notification, move “forward” in a stack — anything. I’ve been talking about this concept for a year with , founder of . But the importance of having a button seemed to pale in comparison to the issues loading and transferring data and keeping interaction times down to just a few seconds. We started the discussion up again after Apple announced such solid progress on fixing the slows this week at WWDC. Note that what we’ve come up with is not a blueprint for . Instead, it’s a way to start a discussion about the concepts of navigating a smartwatch. The smartwatch “era” is so young that Apple and (everyone else) is still gathering data about how, why and when they’re being used. Nothing is set in stone, so it’s a good time to think hard about how these things should work. The new Apple Watch software shows that Apple is still a company that looks at the data and makes intelligent, humane decisions about their products. It is not afraid to change its mind, which is important. And to its credit, the new dock, activated by the side button on the watch, employs intelligence in how it surfaces apps that you use regularly. And it’s a huge improvement over the People screen. Simply put, the People button misjudged how people would converse and communicate with the watch. Instead of being a place to initiate conversations, it is generally used to them, which makes a directory much less important. The new dock will start, by default, on the People screen, which minimizes the feeling of change for upgraders. But it will quickly fade down the list as people use other apps much more often. But the nexus of the problem is really about how the watch feels to use. Tapping the screen is regularly too sloppy or finicky a gesture for the situations and states in which humans use the app. All too often, when you force smoosh your sweaty fingers on the Watch after a long run or you attempt to precisely trigger a complication while holding onto a handle in a swaying train car it feels like trying to operate fine clockworks with a wet hot dog. When you want non-linear, immediate access to a function and you have the time and stability to do so, touch is great. When you want to pound the “pause” button on some music, end your workout or answer a call, there’s no substitute for a button. While we’re at it, apps need to stop being treated differently from faces. Faces and apps are both faces. You’re just getting different sets of information and actions from each of these. The Apple Watch is not a watch that runs apps, it’s a watch with a bunch of really powerful faces. That follows the watch paradigm closer than anything that we’ve got now. The loosey goosey honeycomb app switcher is, I’d bet, incredibly rarely used. It’s finicky and doesn’t offer the finite snap or scroll interface that would make so much more sense on a device that is practically allergic to fussiness. These two concepts go hand in hand. If we were to begin thinking of the Apple Watch as a viewing screen for faces, and to boil down the navigation concepts a bit to their core strengths, you end up with something like this: Vertically, you have your list of common apps. These are the ones you use every day. At the center is your default face. To scroll between these you use the wheel to move upwards and downwards — this would require giving up Time Travel, but once again I think the usage data would probably be light on this feature too. Add a bit of a snap to the first move beyond your face — a tiny bit of tension that prevents an accidental scroll — and you’re in business. On any of these screens you can scroll or tap to select and then confirm with your new fancy ‘OK’ button. You could even use it without looking at the screen or knowing anything beyond a bit of haptic feedback. At the very end of the list of face apps you could add a group of icons that would allow you to pin new ones to your list. Feel free to discuss and poke at this. It’s far from the world’s greatest design precis. I’m a voracious Apple Watch user, and, after over a year of allowing it to rub up against the real world with all of its indignities, I think that a healthy dose of simplification and physicality could help it move from something for gadget lovers and fiddlers to a truly indispensable device that acts as an interface between the physical and digital worlds. Something I’ve if you’re interested.
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Skillz is the biggest e-sports company gamers have never heard of
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Lora Kolodny
| 2,016 | 6 | 15 |
The very mention of e-sports tends to conjure up titles like Bethesda’s Quake, the arena shooter, or Valve’s Dota 2 and Riot’s League of Legends, both arena battle games, which are played by professionals for piles of cash with prize pools in the millions of dollars. But a San Francisco startup called paid out 21% of last year’s e-sports prizes worldwide, and is on target to pay out 38% of e-sports prize money won in 2016 tournaments according to the company’s Chief Executive Andrew Paradise. The claim is corroborated by industry reports from ESportsEarnings.com and other research firms that track how much e-sports tournaments are paying out. Skillz also broadcast 8.5 million minutes of its tournaments being played by professionals via platforms like Twitch and YouTube last year. This year, it expects to stream 40 million minutes. So why don’t gamers know Skillz by name, already? For one, the startup doesn’t own a game franchise of its own, or create titles itself. Instead, it sees itself as something like Netflix in its early days, says Paradise. Back in its red envelope era, Netflix helped studios make money from their “long tail” content, or older films loved by cinema-philes who wanted to watch them over and over again at home. It didn’t create any content of its own. Similarly, Skillz helps game developers and studios make more money from their existing titles by rendering them tournament playable for cash or bragging rights. Making even casual games like Bubble Shooter Tournaments, Real Money Pool or Mini Golf Stars competitive keeps players engaged with a game longer, and gets players to play more often. Because it works across so many different genres, and with a focus on a mobile user experience, 49% percent of players who compete for pride or prizes on Skillz titles are women. That’s bucking an industry trend. Other e-sports tournaments have been focused around PC and console games, and have typically drawn a majority-male user base. Despite some promotional efforts to include more female pro-gamers, they have also been seen as completely unfriendly or unappealing to women who would be pros or join teams. Skillz has even attracted Electronic Arts founder, Trip Hawkins, to its advisory board. Hawkins, who put sports games on the map with the creation of the Madden Football franchise and EA Sports, said he believes Skillz is making e-sports accessible to everyone, not just professionals and pros in training. He compared Skillz to programs at schools, intra-office leagues and even venues and rec centers that make traditional sports like baseball, basketball or football accessible to players who are not professional but would want to be if they could. “A whole tech stack for e-sports had not been built and standardized,” Hawkins said. “But there has to be a set of platform features to let players have accounts set up the way they need, be able to communicate and broadcast or be broadcast, make payments, manage transactions and receive prizes. That’s where Skillz has a head start.” Paradise declined to disclose the company’s exact revenue—which includes a mix of advertising, sponsorships, fees for running events online, and fees for paid tournaments. But he did disclose that Skillz generated $20 million in entry fees last year, and is on target to do $50 million in entry fees this year.
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HTC’s Mixed Reality demo shows onlookers what it’s like to experience VR
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Brian Heater
| 2,016 | 6 | 15 |
In these earliest days of commercial viability, virtual reality is running up against the same wall as so many technologies before it: how does a company translate it for the majority of consumers who won’t be able to demo it in the wild? HTC’s mixed reality is an interesting sort of work around, adding augmented reality to the equation, in order to offer a sort of voyeuristic interpretation of what players look like in a VR environment. “Mixed Reality is the closest people can get to understanding what VR feels like by actually getting to see the player in the game,” explains JB , the company’s Senior Manager of Product Marketing – Virtual Reality. “We’re recording the foreground, the player and the background, which is the green screen. We’re layering all of those together. That allows us to see the player in the environment. “ The result looks a bit rudimentary, pieced together in real time, the sort of green screen quality one might expect from cable access and the like, but it certainly gets the point across – at the very least, made us look slightly less dopey then we’ve looked all week donning VR helmets in crowded public spaces. With the addition of the space aliens from , passersby could tell that we were, in fact, saving the world all along. adds that the technology isn’t targeted at a commercial audience. Instead, HTC is aiming at companies looking to show off what they’ve been working on. “It’s for companies and developers who actually want to show people what they’re doing. Our marketing efforts are focused on getting Vive in the hands of as many people as possible. This is just a way to get people to actually experience what VR is.”
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Hoodline launches Neighborhood Kits that package local news and data for real estate agents
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Anthony Ha
| 2,016 | 6 | 15 |
After building out an editorial team , CEO Andrew Dudley said the startup has begun to explore new ways to make money. Not that Hoodline has been avoiding revenue, but the only way it has monetized until now is through advertising. Dudley told me the team agreed that Hoodline’s long-term business needs more than ads. “With the pressures on online advertising, it can’t support an entire newsroom,” he said. “So we’ve been looking for new ways to monetize what we’ve built for our local communities.” The initial answer: , which are embeddable widgets profiling everything about a neighborhood, including restaurants, schools, commutes and development news. Real estate agents (sometimes entire firms, sometimes individual agents) can then embed these widgets on their websites, giving prospective clients a better sense of where they might be moving. By drawing on Hoodline stories and data, as well as content from partners such as Mission Local and SFGate, the kits are meant to be more comprehensive and up-to-date than your standard neighborhood guide. “Many real estate agents told us that they needed much better neighborhood content than the static, easily outdated and incomplete information that existed,” said Jes Wolfe, Hoodline’s chief operating officer, in a statement. “I’m pleased to say these are already buying our solution.” When asked if there’s a tension between Hoodline’s editorial mission and the kinds of content that helps sell houses and condos, Dudley acknowledged that the kits are serving a different purpose than the Hoodline site itself — so they probably won’t be heavy on crime stories, for example. “There’s still the opportunity for neighborhoods to be shown in a full good and bad picture in our overall editorial body of work, but for this product, it’s important that we meet the customer need,” he said. But even in this “curated version” of Hoodline’s content, authenticity is important: “If the customer feels that this is not at all what it’s like to live there, we would hear about that pretty quickly.” Dudley said the Neighborhood Kits will soon cover all 38 neighborhoods in San Francisco. As for pricing, he said the details are still being tweaked. Founded in 2014, and with a newsroom led by former TechCrunch editor Eric Eldon (it’s his fault that I’m a tech journalist in the first place), last year. Dudley has hopes to expand to other cities eventually, but he said the priority is to prove out the business model in SF first.
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Uber settles on $7.5 million in background checks lawsuit
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Sarah Buhr
| 2,016 | 6 | 15 |
Uber faces a of legal troubles these days – the latest involves a court settlement of $7.5 million for background checks. Uber has agreed to pay the $7.5 million sum to a group of San Francisco drivers alleging the company acquired consumer background reports without asking them first. Uber also agreed to pay to San Francisco and Massachusetts drivers in April and faces a as well as a lawsuit from the . And those are just some of the legal issues . Uber faces mounting legal troubles all over the globe right now. Travis Kalanick, Uber’s CEO and co-founder, might chalk some of that up to the price you pay for disruption but the drivers obviously see it a different way in this case and others. An Uber spokesperson was not available for comment on this latest case, and neither were the lawyers representing the drivers. However, the lawyers representing the drivers in this background checks case have filed a memorandum of understanding in court today and are in the process of drafting a formal settlement. Uber seems eager to settle all these lawsuits as fast as possible as it continues to hemorrhage mountains of cash globally. Uber is burning $1 to $2 billion annually in China alone, according to . Kalanick told Canadian publication in February Uber was profitable in the U.S. The rideshare company recently raised and another from Saudi Arabia recently to continue its quest for world domination and all the legal troubles sure to follow.
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