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Robots, jobs and the human fear of change
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Steve Cousins
| 2,016 | 12 | 3 |
When it comes to technology’s impact on the economy, there continues to be concern that robots and other advances will lead to unemployment. But what does history really tell us about the impact of new technologies on jobs and the economy? And more importantly, what happens to America’s ability to compete in a global economy if we reject automation and stifle technological innovation? As a computer scientist, researcher and now CEO of a fast-growing robotics company, I’ve spent my career building technologies to improve people’s lives and help companies grow. I care deeply about how robots will impact society as automation continues to rapidly transform the economy. That’s why I am discouraged when, rather than celebrating innovation, news articles create fear around it. Boston research firm Forrester recently predicted robots will result in a by 2025. What the press coverage often omits is what Forrester says will be gained from robots. Forrester analyst J.P. Gownder , “While these technologies are both real and important, and some jobs will disappear because of them, the future of jobs overall isn’t nearly as gloomy as many prognosticators believe. In reality, automation will spur the growth of many new jobs, including some entirely new job categories.” A lot of data supports the fact that technological advances actually create jobs — eliminating dull and low-skill occupations, while simultaneously creating entirely new categories of work. A study of census data in England and Wales since 1871 found technology created far more jobs than it destroyed during that 140-year period. “Machines will take on more repetitive and laborious tasks, but seem no closer to eliminating the need for human labor than at any time in the last 150 years,” says the report, . Another from London’s Center for Economic Research shows the use of robots increases productivity and wages, while having no negative impact on overall employment. According to the study, the contribution of robots to the aggregate economy has, so far, been about the same as other important technologies in history, such as railroads and U.S. highways. In any case, robots normally don’t replace entire “jobs” but instead take over “tasks” — such as hauling goods, operating machines or providing information. When companies use robots to complete repetitive or dangerous tasks, it frees employees to do more interesting, valuable work. But what if Forrester’s predictions are correct and robotics result in significant net job losses in the future? Is the solution to stop researching, stop innovating and stop trying to create new technologies to maintain the status quo? In today’s competitive global economy, choosing to stem innovation would prove devastating to our country. The lists the U.S. as the 8th most innovative country in the world; in 2015 we were No. 6. Other nations, particularly South Korea in first place and Germany in second place, are forging full-force ahead to build innovation-driven economies. To remain competitive, the U.S. needs to accelerate its use of technology to develop innovative products, not slow down. Economies grow when companies create products and services that make life better, work easier and people healthier — whether that’s air conditioning, vaccines, robots or smartphones. I’m not naive enough to say automation won’t impact jobs. Historically, technology eliminates some jobs while creating others. As machines emerged en masse during the industrial revolution, laundry maids, blacksmiths and weavers were forced out of business. But many of these workers got better paying, more stable jobs in factories. The pace of change hasn’t slowed since then. Software, computers, mobile phones, robots and other technologies are constantly eliminating some jobs (video store owner, receptionist, mail room employee, typist, telephone operator, etc.) and creating others (video game programmer, 3D architectural designer, social media specialist, etc.). I agree with President Obama that automation will positively impact the economy in the long run — even if we experience growing pains along the way. In a , Obama said, “I tend to be on the optimistic side — historically we’ve absorbed new technologies, and people find new jobs are created, they migrate, and our standards of living generally go up.” Innovation is going to happen; we can’t and shouldn’t stop it if we want the U.S. to maintain its strong position in the global economy. It’s how we manage this transition that’s our collective challenge and opportunity. Income inequality continues to increase worldwide, with educated individuals gaining ground quickly in innovation economies, while lower-skilled workers fall behind. Instead of jettisoning the members of society who feel left behind by technological progress, we need to include them in the jobs created by innovation. Finding ways to incorporate all members of society in technology’s rapid progress doesn’t just include education and training — though those are essential — but also requires engineers to design intuitive, easy-to-use machines. With touchscreen interfaces and simple commands, many of the emerging collaborative robots are easy to operate. In the same way cashiers have learned to use high-tech registers — basically retail computers — people can learn to operate robots in service, hospitality, retail, healthcare or other sectors. Thus, as robots take over mundane tasks, humans can rise into more fulfilling jobs as operators of these machines. For my company, this means building our Relay delivery robot to be so helpful, reliable and easy to use that it becomes “part of the team.” As robots help companies achieve higher productivity and revenue, these companies will invest in hiring more staff. People have an innate fear of change, especially when it comes to technology disrupting the status quo. But history has proven that by embracing innovative technology like robots, we’ll see great progress; progress that grows the economy overall, helps people find safer, more meaningful work and secures America’s position in a competitive global market.
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Why Reed Hastings is the nation’s best chance for curbing the influence of money in politics
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Bradley Tusk
| 2,016 | 12 | 3 |
Donald Trump’s election proved and disproved a lot of political gospels, but one key issue no one is talking about is how the election underscored the growing inefficacy of political tv ads. Trump was wildly outspent on television in the primaries and then again by Hillary Clinton in the general. It didn’t matter. Part of the problem was his opponents’ lack of a compelling message, but part of the problem is that fewer and fewer voters watch tv commercials. Between Netflix, Amazon Prime, Hulu, and good old fashioned DVR, other than senior citizens watching traditional news broadcasts and people watching live sports, tv ads just don’t reach that many voters anymore. And since the tv buy is around 80% of the spend for any significant campaign (Congress, Mayor, Governor, President), as campaigns start to realize that ads hold less and less value (and as the political consultants who make their money on ad spends eventually age out and retire), campaigns simply won’t need as much money. Sure, digital ad spending will fill some of the vacuum but most of the current spend will go away. That’s one key to reducing the influence of money in politics. The other is turnout. Approximately 55% of eligible voters actually voted in the most recent presidential election. Needless to say, right now, turnout in most races ranges between low and abysmal (for example, average turnout in a New York City Council race hovers around 15%). Politicians aren’t stupid. They know who votes and because staying in office is their top priority, their choices and actions are designed to appeal strictly to two groups: (1) that 15% who actually vote in their race; and (2) major special interest groups whose money can easily impact a low turnout race (that’s why unions have so much power). I’ve spent much of the last five years working with startups like Uber and FanDuel to mobilize our customers and partners to advocate politically. And because we make it so convenient for people to speak out (they can tweet or email their views right from the platform), it’s actually easier to get people to advocate for a company than to vote in an election. That will all change when people can vote on their phones. If everyone had a week to vote (or even longer) and all you had to do was log in and Facebook, Snapchat, Instagram, Twitter and every other platform bugged you incessantly until you voted, most people would vote. And if turnout then went from 15% to 70%, politicians would quickly adapt their views to represent 70% of their constituents rather than 15%. That would dramatically reduce the ability of any special interest to materially dictate how a politician acts on any one issue. This won’t all happen in one fell swoop (especially mobile voting), but if we spend our time and energy focused on turnout and ease of voting rather than just agitating and suing for campaign finance legislation and litigation, we’ll ultimately accomplish a lot more. For those of us in politics who care about broadening representative democracy, focusing on mobile voting (both by creating a platform that ensures that you’re you and preserves secrecy of your ballot and then convincing jurisdictions to adopt it) is the only way to generate the actual outcome of a better, truer government for and by the people. More people voting and fewer donors mattering is how we get there. The cost side of the equation is already happening (I’m pretty sure we can count on Reed Hastings to keep doing his part). Trump proved that. Now let’s solve the demand side – and finally get the kind of democracy – and government – we all deserve.
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These science superstars just won the 2017 Breakthrough Prize
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Taylor Hatmaker
| 2,016 | 12 | 4 |
Today at the 5th annual , some of Silicon Valley’s biggest names will award more than $25 million to scientific research in departments across the globe. The event splices together research scientists far more accustomed to red tape than red carpets with tech’s deepest-pocketed and most idealistic upper echelons. The result is a flashy, hopeful hybrid event serving scientific good and valley ego alike. Did we mention that it’s hosted by Morgan Freeman? Like last year, the main awards honor veteran researchers in three categories: life sciences, fundamental physics, and mathematics. Here are this year’s winners: The three recipients will share a single $3 million award recognizing their meaningful advances in string theory, quantum field theory, and quantum gravity. Originally announced , these three winners will share a single $1 million prize, with $2 million divided among their 1,012 members of their research group. The special award, which “can be conferred at any time in recognition of an extraordinary scientific achievement,” recognizes the team’s collaborative research on gravitational waves and its implications for physics and astronomy. IBM Von Neumann Professor in the Department of Mathematics at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, for his many contributions to high-dimensional geometry, number theory, and many other theoretical contributions. A final prize, the Breakthrough Junior Challenge, honors students with an “original science video [that] brings to life an important scientific or mathematical idea or principle,” to the tune of $250,000, with additional prize money for their teachers and schools. Since its inception in 2012, the Breakthrough Prize has awarded nearly $200 million in sum, culled from foundations from the founders of Google, 23andme, Facebook, and DST Global: “Founded by Sergey Brin and Anne Wojcicki, Yuri and Julia Milner, and Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan, the Breakthrough Prize aims to celebrate science and scientists and generate excitement about the pursuit of science as a career. The prizes are funded by the Brin Wojcicki Foundation; Mark Zuckerberg’s fund at the Silicon Valley Community Foundation; and the Milner Global Foundation.” These aren’t the kind of numbers researchers are used to. As Silicon Valley charges ahead in private scientific pursuits ranging from bold to outright , the legacy scientific community trudges patiently along, just as it always has. Circumventing all of those pesky grant applications and pleas for government funding, the Breakthrough Prize seeks to pump some rocket fuel into meaningful science research being done the old fashioned way. Much like the Oscars and other less cerebral award shows, past Breakthrough Prize recipients coalesce into a committee to select future winners. Today’s ceremony will air live on the National Geographic Channel at 10 p.m. eastern. Fox will re-air a condensed version of the ceremony on Sunday, December 18 in the 7 p.m. evening slot.
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Impraise lets you tell your coworkers what a good job they’re doing
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John Biggs
| 2,016 | 12 | 4 |
“We’ve come a long long way together, through the hard times and the good. I have to celebrate you baby, I have to praise you like I should using a 360-degree feedback tool sold as as SaaS by founders who went through Y-Combinator in S14 and have offices in New York and Amsterdam,” Fatboy Slim once wrote and nowhere are these words truer than when used to describe . The company is, as the lyrics suggest, a way to “praise” your co-workers instantly and perform performance reviews without much fuss. Founded by Bas Kohnke, Steffen Maier, Arnaud Camus, and Filipe Dobreira, the company was built as a solution to maintain engagement in the team’s disparate offices. They’ve raised $4.7 million and have seen about 100,000 feedback interactions from 3,000 clients this month. “Many companies however still rely on Word documents or Excel sheets for their performance reviews so in that case even a word document would play as a competitor for us,” said Kohnke. “We differentiate by not only providing a feedback-tool but actually building a solution that creates a work environment where transparent recognition and candid peer feedback can happen naturally.” The team believes the yearly performance review wasn’t sufficient and that real-time feedback is far simpler and more effective – “especially for millennials,” wrote Kohnke. Feedback can be named or anonymous and the app works on most mobile browsers. Because it is SaaS the pricing is variable depending on the size of your team. To quote Fatboy Slim again, “Check it out now, the funk soul brother, for your advanced employee reporting software-as-a-service needs.”
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We need new candidates to run for office, and startups can help
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Jim Cupples
| 2,016 | 12 | 4 |
This presidential election pitted two candidates who were Why is this happening in our golden age of technology, when information is widespread and organizing easier than ever? We don’t like the candidates we see because we don’t have enough leaders, and I mean that in a political sense. We simply don’t have enough people running for office, and when we do, they all too often come from a narrow group made up of wealthy, white, middle-aged males. This isn’t some hunch of mine — the Now, if you live in Oakland, Calif., you may say, “What problem?” and that’s because they simply are a town with high civic engagement and frequently very good candidacy turnout. However, if you were to look in Los Angeles County, our nation’s most populated at over 10 million, you would see a Same thing in Cook County, Illinois, where in the 2015 municipal elections they only had 37 percent of their almost 700 local races with two people running. The other 63 percent of those races? Simply unopposed. I don’t believe that it’s people not caring, and I’ve placed my bet on the other side of the table: Plenty of people do care about local representation and are willing to step up and run. I’m betting that the only reason we haven’t been running is kind of simple: the information is not consolidated anywhere and it’s been difficult to uncover what we can run for and how to get on the ballot prior to the filing deadlines. For first-time candidates, the types of “fresh faces” we often claim to want, this process can be daunting and surely prevents some of our best neighbors and friends from running for office. Don’t settle for a hollow democracy with unopposed races. In fact, more and better candidates can engage others. Nothing drives voter turnout more than a popular candidate. Barack Obama and George W. Bush? Both were pretty popular candidates and it showed in voter eligible population turnout during years In 2016, we had Donald and Hillary, and the overall voter turnout has . What happened? We have more civic tech tools than ever, and more non-profits registering and educating voters, why didn’t they vote? Well, they just didn’t like the candidates and/or the message behind them. Misinformed? Sure. Just like every election cycle. But people didn’t rally behind either candidate and that was evident from the sluggish turnout they both received. So, run for office. You can win and begin a different aspect of civic engagement, or you can also be the person who helps voter turnout for the candidates you like up and down the ballot. Even if you lose, you’ll win.
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Kate Conger
| 2,016 | 6 | 22 | null |
GoPro releases the $299 Karma Grip handheld stabilizer
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Matt Burns
| 2,016 | 12 | 4 |
The GoPro Karma Grip is now available. The camera maker announced today that the handheld stabilizer is for sale in select stores and GoPro.com for $299. This is the same handheld grip that shipped with the — at least before the drone for battery issues. The Karma Grip competes directly with the DJI Osmo though both offer distinct advantages as I and. TechCrunch video correspondent found in testing. We took both products with us to South Korea and put them through their paces. The DJI Osmo offers more controls that video enthusiasts are probably looking for but the GoPro Karma Grip, when used with the Hero 5, has superior video quality. The Karma Grip feels like it can take more abuse than the Osmo. I’ve found the Karma Grip has encouraged me to dig out my older GoPro cameras. The stabilization makes a large difference in picture quality. The Karma Grip doesn’t ship with a camera. Instead, it’s available at $299 and buyers need to provide their own camera. It works with the Hero 5 and Hero 4 Black and Silver. GoPro says the Hero 5 Session will be compatible with the Karma Grip in the second quarter of 2017. The Grip ships with a case and bevy of accessories. At $299, the Karma Grip is good value for owners of a Hero 4 camera. But at $299 plus the cost of a GoPro camera (the Hero 5 is $399), the value diminishes. TechCrunch asked GoPro for an update on the availability of the Karma drone. The company did not provide a statement. Early last month, just 18 days after its release and , GoPro d all of the Karma drones.
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How to make debt pay
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Joe Xavier
| 2,016 | 12 | 4 |
Not all debt is bad debt. It’s conventional wisdom in the world of finance that the strategic use of debt builds better companies. The same is true for software. Companies that are strategic in their use of debt — in this case, — can develop products quicker, push them out faster and win in the market. The key word here is strategic. Technical debt must be balanced wisely — not enough and you’ll lose the race; too much and you’ll be in a hole out of which you’ll never climb. What exactly is ? The term was coined in 1992 by Ward Cunningham, the programmer who wrote the first wiki. Here’s how Cunningham described it: “Shipping first-time code is like going into debt. A little debt speeds development so long as it is paid back promptly with a rewrite. The danger occurs when the debt is not repaid. Every minute spent on not-quite-right code counts as interest on that debt.” In theory, there is no limit to how much you can tweak software. You could throw time and resources at a development project endlessly, always making it better and more efficient. In practice, no development team has infinite time or resources, and at some point, you need to make the decision to stop iterating and move on. This is when technical debt begins to accrue. There are warring schools of thought about the benefits and perils of engineering debt. That’s probably because when people think about software, they automatically think of well-designed, bug-free systems that work flawlessly. But the endless pursuit of a bug-free system that works flawlessly is a surefire way to limit your ability to build products and respond to your customers quickly. Technical debt is an asset that can be leveraged to break out of this cycle, ship products and beat your competitors. The key to success is figuring out where in the development cycle you can afford to accrue technical debt and when you need to start paying it down. To arrive at an answer, you need a framework for reasoning about technical debt. First, identify the parts of your stack where you afford to have any technical debt. In large-scale transactional systems, where every piece of data is essential, you’re better off spending more time upfront designing systems to last and be easily maintainable — so this is a bad place to accrue debt. The same goes for mission-critical systems, where reliability and high availability are paramount. Our philosophy for critical systems is to iterate, but don’t stop iterating until it meets a really high bar. Another yardstick here is how often you make changes in that part of the system/codebase; debt begets debt, so if a component changes a lot, it will accrue more debt… whereas with a component that rarely changes, you can generally accrue some debt and let it sit for a long time. But let’s say you’re adding a new feature to an existing product. You don’t know yet if that feature will actually be effective and popular among users. Your goal is to roll it out as quickly as possible so you can collect feedback and iterate. This is a place where you can afford to value speed over rigor. Here, time to market is more valuable than error-free code, and you can always go back and clean up the code later. The advantage with this approach is that you’ve spent the least amount of time to prove your idea and can use that time for other projects. Another key to technical debt is to always have an understanding of how much time it will take to go back and pay down your debt. If it turns out the new feature you’ve built is successful and starts seeing adoption, you have to move quickly to pay back the debt to keep users pleased and ensure that your new feature doesn’t crash your system. Never forget that there is a cultural component to technical debt. Most engineers are perfectionists. We want to build things the right way. We don’t like the idea of taking shortcuts. So it can be demoralizing for an engineering team to be constantly forced to accrue technical debt and push products out to market as fast they can. It is key to speak openly and often about technical debt with the engineering team. When my engineers are working in the design document, I encourage them to articulate the places where a particular design decision can cause us to accrue technical debt. This makes talking about technical debt less emotional, so it’s no longer a philosophical debate. This approach also helps align the mindsets of the product managers, who want to move fast, and the engineers, who want to build correctly. Most importantly, it allows us to maintain a realistic perspective of our code. We also create a timetable for fixing the technical debt we take on. In our business, new challenges are always popping up. It’s easy to forget the old thing and go to the new thing and let the technical debt build until it becomes a problem. We reduce that risk by creating specific future projects for coming back and cleaning up the old code. A side benefit of technical debt is its usefulness in ramping up new engineers on the code base. One tool in our ramp-up for a new engineer is to have them work with an experienced developer to refactor parts of the code base we earmarked for fixing. This is a good way to bring new engineers up to speed quickly. In summary, it’s easy to look at the world in terms of black and white, good and bad. But building software is more nuanced than that. If you go with a dogmatic approach that technical debt is always bad, you will never get products to market fast enough. And if you believe technical debt is always good, you can end up with a sloppy engineering culture and a buggy code base that will haunt you down the road. But if you maintain a clear head and a balanced approach, technical debt can pay huge dividends for your organization.
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User’s Guide to Disrupt London 2016
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Leslie Hitchcock
| 2,016 | 12 | 4 |
Disrupt London 2015 Startup Battlefield winner Jukedeck. Hard to believe that Disrupt London starts tomorrow! Check out this guide for helpful event info. We want you to have a successful experience at Disrupt. Check out these tips to have a great day. Make sure to download the latest Disrupt app to connect and message with other attendees at Disrupt, check out exhibitors and peruse the agenda. (Note: You can only hear from other attendees if you have the app and sign in with your ticket info. So get the app and don’t miss out on people who may be trying to message you right now!) The free app is available on and . Check out this on how to use the App and make sure to enable push button notifications to get updates during the conference! Universe is the official ticketing platform of Disrupt. If you purchased a ticket, you used . We love them and we think you will, too. If you haven’t purchased a ticket, please go do that You’ve asked and we heard you. We’re bringing the enormously popular TechCrunch Store across the pond to Disrupt London! Get exclusive, high-quality TechCrunch gear at the TechCrunch Booth. If you’re not able to make it, check out our items online at ! DevPost reprised its role at the Disrupt Hackathon, providing the platform for our . Thanks, y’all!
is inviting all Disrupt London attendees to a private, exclusive launch of their revolutionary new service – Gett Together, free transport to and from Disrupt London via Stratford Station and nearby hotels. No need to walk to the venue in the cold. Ride for to and from the event along pre-set routes that pass through the following locations: Holiday Inn Express – Stratford
Morning route to Disrupt: , .
Evening route back from Disrupt: , . Rides are not available between and . Gett Together staff will be on hand to help you at Stratford Station and across all listed locations. To book your free rides just follow the instructions below or . With so much happening at Disrupt, make sure to check out some special events and features. : At noon, five curated Fintech and Health/Biotech startups (Monday) and five AI startups (Tuesday) will demo on the Showcase Stage in the heart of Startup Alley. You can check out the exhibiting companies on Monday, adjacent to the Disrupt Showcase Stage. If you’re an arm-chair Disruptor, you can watch the conference action from the . See you tomorrow!
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How will Silicon Valley respond to Trump?
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Andrew Keen
| 2,016 | 12 | 4 |
Kapor Capital founding partner isn’t happy. Klein, one of technology’s leading social activists and impact investors, has been “deeply troubled” by the election of Donald Trump. She is particularly disgusted by what she calls the “unleashing” of “horrific behavior” since the election, such as what she fears might even be the now acceptable use of the N word on the streets of San Francisco. So what can Silicon Valley do to respond to Trump? We need, Klein says, to “get out of our bubble.” The time is right, she insists, for Silicon Valley to “double down” on diversity and inclusion in the workplace, as well as economic inequality in society. Technology is “never neutral,” she reminds us. And technologists can’t be neutral either. It’s time, she says, for “leaders to step up” — leaders like herself, of course, as well as voices of decency like . As always, many thanks to the folks at for their help in the production of this interview.
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Artificial intelligence and the evolution of the fractal economy
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Nikolas Badminton
| 2,016 | 12 | 4 |
Money makes the world go round, or so they say. Payments, investments, insurance and billions of transactions are the beating heart of a fractal economy, which echoes the messy complexity of natural systems, such as the growth of living organisms and the bouncing of atoms. Financial systems are larger than the sum of their parts. The underlying rules that govern them might seem simple, but what surfaces is dynamic, chaotic and somehow self-organizing. And the blood that flows through this fractal heartbeat is data. Today, 2.5 exabytes of data are being produced daily. That number is expected to grow to 44 zettabytes a day by 2020 (Source: ). This data, along with interconnectivity, correlation, predictive analytics and machine learning, provides the foundation for our AI-powered future. More than $2.1 billion has been invested in AI-infrastructure startups since 2010, with $1.3 billion being invested in 2015 alone. AI-application startups have seen the largest share of the investments, with more than $6.9 billion being invested in AI-applications startups since 2010 and a total raise of $3.6 billion in 2015 (Source: ). These movements are leading toward massive innovation being delivered in the financial services field, and AI is helping address the tensions of increasing data volumes, changing demographics and their wants, regulatory tensions, organizational and systems efficiency and a changing technical landscape. We now see more than 500 million people using bots and digital assistants. That is predicted to rise to over 2.2 billion by 2020 (Source: ). Those platforms, developers and data science teams that train AI are aiming to create a friction-free and simple experience with the devices we use to reduce the need for human-to-human contact to increase interactions. This is especially true for the banking industry to solve, where younger customers would rather see a dentist than listen to what their bank is saying (Source: ). This means disconnection and ultimately defection to other app-based platforms. Right now we do have a real issue with bots. When adoption of a system is low, the experience offered is not an optimal one. Even banks such as Royal Bank of Scotland in the U.K., which is launching a bot called in its service channels, is aware of this: Although Luvo initially needs to be trained to understand subjects, RBS insists it will earn its AI stripes by “learning from its mistakes,” which will make it “more accurate over time.” In the meantime, however, customers have to have patience while confined to a sub-optimal experience. SEB in Sweden is also deploying a bot, called (by ), for service to their 1 million customers. In addition, they have put it to use internally by deploying it to provide tech support for their 15,000 employees. This has led to a solid implementation. Beyond this, and closer to the customer, is the rise of “conversational commerce,” which is a mobile system that uses AI to parse speech and undertake anticipatory actions such as ordering your Mom’s favorite flowers for her birthday, or paying back your friend for money borrowed on a night out. Samsung stepped up and , and it’s rumored that the next iteration of Apple’s Siri will also evolve into the conversational commerce space as the payments ecosystem develops to make it easier for us all to be liberated from our hard-earned income toward networks of retailers. Beyond the bots, we will also look to robo-advisors for helping us with our investment portfolios and to deliver better returns. Companies like and are stepping up to the plate in North America and the U.K. There have been some impressive results in Korea, as well. Some robo-advisors are delivering 2 percent returns versus domestic equity funds at -3 percent and KOSPI at -2.2 percent. And in Japan, some banks have deployed , the emotional robot that goes beyond an algorithm to an assistant you want to engage with more deeply. This could be the key to early adoption. That’s great, but we are at the whim of developers collecting and processing data sets and then applying matching learning techniques. The ghost in the machine is real, and even these smart systems — with their lack of human ownership of knowledge around investments — may undermine these initial results. And then we need to consider fraud. Very early on (some 10 years ago) PayPal recognized the value in machine learning applied to fraud and has been implementing its own internal systems to detect suspicious activity — and, more importantly, to separate false alarms from true fraud — against more than 4.9 billion in payments (in 2015) for 188 million customers in 202 countries. So, it’s clear that wrangling data, machine learning and other AI techniques are delivering huge value to financial institutions and to the customer. These trends will continue; however, there are some considerations as we look toward what will happen between now and 2025. As AI becomes ubiquitous through powerful mobile devices with integrated AI platforms at the hardware level, we will see more controlled and close-system applications. Real power will be built in, and the code will be updated continuously. Through billions of users’ behaviors and generated data feeding the learning, we will see great advances in what can be automated and what can deliver value to the user on a daily basis. There will be a shift in the financial-services workforce toward specialist developers, data scientists, infrastructure architects, coding ethicists and AI trainers stepping up into more central and critical functions. Advisors, tellers and customer-service jobs will be greatly affected, and there will be less of a need for people to fill those positions. Banks, lenders, insurers, central monetary funds and new financial industry players will need to come together to identify opportunities and lay out a road map, along with deeply considered regulatory principles. We must ensure integrity and stability of financial systems in a unified and agreed way. To do this, ethics, regulation and governmental-policy decisions relating to AI usage will have to be considered and implemented at domestic and international levels. This is one of the biggest stumbling blocks as we move forward to a sentient banking world. The approach needs to be two-fold. They will need to replace the old-guard of regulations within the banking system with an independent body of data and AI experts that can provide stringent guidelines on how to ethically train systems to avoid positive discrimination or favorability. And then, ensure that data scientists and developers are trained to implement the ethics in a way that is consistent across banking and monetary systems globally. The IMF, World Bank and others will need to step into this role somewhat and wrestle to get more challenging economies like China and Russia on board, as well. The final hope is that once we have worked out how best to regulate and navigate this increasingly fractal ecosystem, that data sharing and overall market optimization will lead us to economic stability. The accompanying challenge will involve trying to wrestle that control from people making millions of dollars each year by continuing to rely on old-school models and gut feels. I feel hopeful that new players and pressure from customers will be the driving forces of change. I hope for a world with no multi-million-dollar-a-year brokers, hedge fund managers and banking leaders, and for one where the long-term effects of A.I. and advances in computing power (approximately 20+ years) will mean a wholesale redefinition of wealth, monetary usage, value and a focus on equality across societies in the world. Welcome to the future.
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Mischief managed: 5 hackathon hacks for Potter fans inspired by the Marauder’s Map
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Ingrid Lunden
| 2,016 | 12 | 4 |
Great news, Potter fans: Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry is no longer the only place in the world where you can find a working , the magical piece of parchment that let Harry Potter and others track the movements of people as they went around the Hogwarts campus and its many public and secret passageways. This weekend at the TechCrunch Disrupt Hackathon, several groups of intrepid of developers, under the spell of APIs from the likes of PubNub, IBM’s Watson, ESRI and Mapbox, built Marauder-Map inspired games, messaging networks and more. We solemnly swear they were up to no good (but the inspired results are actually quite cool): is an augmented reality interactive map and game that taps into some of the huge popularity of Niantic’s Ingress and Pokemon Go. The world is transformed into a scavenger hunt of sorts, where you travel around an area looking for the ingredients for potions and spells, and compete against your friends to do so. You can also create your own potion recipes for people in the same area as you, and name them using Watson-based image and voice recognition. And when you encounter friends, you can in turn have interactive spell battles for extra points. is an app that lets tour guides and school teachers track people during a tour, and also create activities (“treasure hunts”) for tour guides to present to their groups to help them interact with and experience their locations by way of looking for and responding to specific objects and locations in the specific space. While this is less of a play on the Harry Potter theme than some of the others, it’s inspired by the central idea of the original Potter partchment of being able to track people on a map. The idea, it seems, is to give the group in question either access using a phone or other device that can be picked up on the map, although in theory the guide or a member of the group can also turn off the tracking. is less game, and more communication: the app is built on the premise not only of seeing where your friends might be at that very moment, but then being able to leave messages for them when they get to another specific place. Why wouldn’t you simply send them messages wherever they happen to be? That wasn’t exactly addressed, nor is the fact that there are already some interesting takes on the location-aware social mapping challenge, such as Foursquare’s Swarm and Zenly out of France. But on the other hand, the proliferation of these services speaks to an opportunity and perhaps a need for one killer service. Plus, there are times when you might want to suggest a specific dish to your friends at a restaurant, or something else that you don’t necessarily care if they see, unless they are at the location in question. is an app brings us back to the gaming theme and anchors us firmly in Harry Potter’s world. In this case, you can challenge your friends to see who is the top wizard. You find other would-be wizards on a map, and then you whip out your phone and use gestures to essentially turn the handset into a magic wand controller. It looks like you can encant spells using the handset’s microphone, and the one who successfully blocks the opponent’s spells and casts her/his own is the victor. has a nice starting point: a blank page, inspired by the original map created at Hogwarts by Harry’s dad and his friends. To start the game you tap the screen and say aloud, “I solemnly swear I am up to no good.” This brings up a map of where you happen to be. On it is a key to several places to which you can walk, and by saying more spells aloud once you get to these places, you can open secret passageways to continue playing the game. This seems like a less social game than the others, which in a way is also good because it doesn’t rely on having other players involved to get it to work for you. Mischief managed.
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Three cheers for Valley capitalism
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Jon Evans
| 2,016 | 12 | 4 |
It’s easy to be critical of the tech industry, and even easier to be critical of capitalism itself. Let us all continue to do so; criticism is valuable. But let’s remember that we do so because they are so important. Capitalism is still what lifts the world’s least fortunate out of poverty, and technology increasingly feels like the last, best hope of a world otherwise dead set on ruining itself. I frequently complain about the industry myself in this space, but not this week, because I spent much of it in Havana … which basically felt like a picturesque disaster area, still under the thumb of oppressive one-party rule. It’s hard not to strongly approve of capitalism and free markets, for all of their flaws when left unchecked, after you see people excitedly queueing to buy tomatoes on one of the world’s most fertile islands. But Havana is just an extreme example. I travel a lot — I’ve posted to TechCrunch from some twenty nations during my tenure as columnist here, and have visited seventy more at one time or another — and there’s no denying that across the world these days, when people dream of their future, their most realistic hopes often seem tied more to American science, American software, and Chinese hardware than to local politics. That Havana tomato queue was just down the street from my Havana AirBNB, whose hosts made more than the average Cuban monthly salary each $35 night I stayed there. Yes, Americans, you too can both book and pay for AirBNBs in Cuba — and it has also thoroughly revolutionized tourism in the land of plenty known as Mexico where I write this, according to every Mexican in the tourist industry I’ve spoken to. In the evenings in Havana I would go to the park a few blocks away, purchase a card good for one hour of Internet access from a shady dude in the corner (private Internet acess still being largely verboten there) and be the only visible tourist there, surrounded by dozens of Cubans as lost in their Android phones as I was in mine, communicating with the world. For all of its obvious failings and its copious waste, the flywheel that is Silicon Valley and its outposts — spinning out startup after startup to test and experiment with new technology, absorbing their remains if they fail, accumulating their burgeoning energy if they succeed — remains an engine of change and progress unlike any other on the planet, with the possible exception of Shenzhen’s hardware ecosystem. I think we can at least all agree that it is vastly nimbler and more flexible, and arguably even more internationally influential, than the paralyzed, increasingly kleptocratic catastrophe that nation-state politics have become, and much more meaningful than most publish-or-perish science. So let us not cease in our criticism. Let us remember that capitalism is only our least bad alternative, rather than one which is actively good; let’s keep a wise eye out for something better. Let us lambaste the tech industry when it sins, which is often. But let’s remember to do so with a grudging respect, because there doesn’t seem to be a whole lot else out there offering much in the way of alternatives to various flavors of dystopia. We appear to be making a whole lot of mistakes, as a species, and love it or hate it, the tech industry seems to be the only fully functional system giving us at least the to innovate our way out of many of our worst errors before they catch up with us.
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VeeCee gives kids a shoppable wish list with virtual currency
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Jonathan Shieber
| 2,016 | 12 | 4 |
Giving kids a new way to get the things they want, with greater parental oversight, is a hack created by a four-person team from London’s Barking Dagenham suburbs. The group’s pitch was handled by 12-year-old, — the youngest presenter at this year’s Disrupt London hackathon. A programmer since 9, Odubanjo may be a kid, but he’s no rookie when it comes to software development. Alongside , , and , Odubanjo developed a site that allows children to upload a list of the things they want, and parents or guardians can either shop the lists or create an account with virtual currency that children can use to buy the things on their list. This virtual currency or “veecee” can only be spent after two adults authorize the transaction, which gives more control over the types of items that kids can buy, according to the group. The team built the service using JavaScript, Php, CSS and html using PhoneGap. The team used Shop Integrator for their storefront and Amazon Web Services for its hosting, domain name registration was handled by Radix. Too young to stay overnight at the hackathon, Odubanjo and Ashley started hatching plans for their hack days before the London event actually started. “We came up with VeeCee at the end,” of a week’s worth of brainstorming, said Odubanjo. “We got really hyped about it.” What was really unique, he said, was the service’s ability to give kids more control over the things they’re getting while at the same time providing parental oversight. Now that the hack’s done, the group intends to keep working on the project, incorporating blockchain tools like hyperledger or ethereum to create goal-oriented smart contracts. It’s a clever project for a group that first came together over a shared love of technology and coding in the back of a Barking library. It’s the home of the community’s local tech center, , which opened in April. “I saw Digilab when I was trying to get a library book out about C-Sharp,” said Odubanjo. “It’s like a makerspace, but better.”Brighter Steppings Seun Oshinaike With the help of Digilab’s developer, Seun Oshinaike, and local hackathon manager, Arigbabu; Frempong, Grigas and Odubanjo could see a viable business emerge from the hack.
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The Emotion Journal performs real-time sentiment analysis on your most personal stories
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Kate Conger
| 2,016 | 12 | 4 |
Andrew Greenstein, an app developer from San Francisco, started journaling a few months ago. He tries to write for five minutes every day, but it’s challenging to set aside the time. Still, he’s read that journaling reduces stress and can help with goal-setting, so he’s trying to make it a habit. At the Disrupt London Hackathon, Greenstein and his team built , a voice journaling app that performs real-time emotional analysis to detect the user’s feelings and chart their emotional state over time. (Greenstein says the site will remain live for 30 days as a demo.) By day, Greenstein is the CEO of , a digital agency. But he and his co-founder, Darius Zagrean, have become increasingly interested in artificial intelligence and how it can be used to address mental health issues. “I’d like to continue working on it because this stuff to me, the connection between human and computer, is so fascinating,” Greenstein said. The idea to apply AI to mental health challenges first came to Greenstein and his team during an internal AppWorks hackathon, during which one team built an app to roleplay anxiety-inducing situations and improve the user’s response to his or her anxiety triggers. “We wanted to get into AI as much as we could. It’s so clear that’s where the world is going. This one had the emotional factor that really grabbed me,” Greenstein explained. He decided to continue exploring the intersection of AI and emotion at the London Hackathon and built The Emotion Journal using IBM Watson to perform the real-time sentiment analysis. A user talks about their day and The Emotion Journal reacts quickly, changing color in response to the user’s feelings. The Emotion Journal also stores and color-codes logs over time, so a user can see at a glance what their recent emotions have been. “We talked a lot about how journaling needs to be more indexable, more searchable. Maybe you can learn something from a past session,” Greenstein said. Although The Emotion Journal is a promising merger between AI and journaling that might teach us more about our own mental health, it might not be around forever — Greenstein hopes to keep the project up in a demo state. So go check it out now while you still can.
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Welcometo.site wants to be your virtual receptionist
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Frederic Lardinois
| 2,016 | 12 | 4 |
Checking in at a co-working space or business to meet with somebody can often be a hassle that involves some phone tag and back and forth. , one of the many projects that came out of our today, wants to make this easier. It combines Cisco Spark’s messaging and video service with maps from ArcGIS and PubNub’s real-time APIs into a virtual receptionist. Team members Tom Shea, who previously worked on a number of startups and co-working spaces, and are currently working on a more general access control system, but for the hackathon, they teamed up for this more manageable project. When you use Welcometo.site, you simply type in the name of the person you want to meet with and the service will ping your contact over Cisco Spark. The person you are looking to meet with will then get an alert on Spark and will also be able to check in with you over video. In addition, you can share your location and see where in the building (or not) your meeting partner is on a 3D map. If your contact isn’t around, the service can then access your team directory to ping somebody else on your team. The team tells me that making the video calls over Spark was a bit of a hack, but at least in today’s demo, it worked smoothly. They expect that some of the code they developed during the hackathon will flow into this access control system. “Surprisingly — for a hackathon project — the code is pretty well factored with continuous automated integration, testing and deployment,” Bull said.
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Wandered.space helps you explore the cool spots all around you
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Anthony Ha
| 2,016 | 12 | 4 |
is a service for those moments when you want to explore the area around you, but don’t know where to go. It was created this weekend at TechCrunch’s Disrupt London hackathon by a team of three coworkers from Seattle-based . One of them, Skyler Hartle, told me that they were inspired by their visit to London and decided to create something that would help users uncover “the places that they just kind of walk by.” So Wandered.space looks at your location and suggests a nearby point of interest, which could be a restaurant, park, bar or other cultural site. If you keep using the service, you end up exploring all different kinds of locations across the neighborhood — which for me, at least, is a lot more appealing than just visiting one giant tourist trap. To accomplish this, Wandered.space pulls point-of-interest data from Factual and route data from ArcGIS. Hartle said the team is interested in continuing to work on the product — for example, it could develop more personalized journey recommendations based on your likes and dislikes.
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The Emotion Journal wins the Disrupt London 2016 Hackathon Grand Prize
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Romain Dillet
| 2,016 | 12 | 4 |
night at the Copper Box Arena in London. The arena hosted the handball competition of the Summer Olympics a few years ago. But this weekend has been all about a different kind of competition — the Hackathon. Some of them were participating in our event for the first time, while others were regular hackers. Their challenge was to come up with a neat, funny and smart hack in just 24 hours. We could all feel the excitement in the air when the 63 teams took the stage to present a short one-minute demo to impress fellow hackers and our judges. But only one team could take home the grand prize and £4,000. So, without further ado, meet the Disrupt London 2016 Hackathon winner. Journaling has proven psychological, stress-reducing, goal-orienting benefits when done regularly. But for many people, writing is harder than talking. The team used IBM Watson to create a smart voice journal. You talk to it about your day and it analyzes your emotions and stores the logs. If you do it once a day you can see a visual representation of your feelings and experiences over time. Using artificial intelligence to improve people’s mental health is quite neat. TechCrunch’s Kate Conger wrote about this hack because it’s pretty cool. Refugees suffer from distress and mental health conditions which are difficult to address without the support of friends and family or a mental wellness expert. Sayfe Space gives Refugees a platform to naturally describe their problems and get support by anonymously chatting with volunteers that can empathize with their situation and are keen to offer support. The team used IBM Watson for natural language processing and the chatbot interactions. Doshbot is an AI assistant that helps you save money. It integrates and pulls in your banking transactions, GPS location and mix them with your emotional tones and writing style on social networks, such as Twitter and Facebook. Saalim is a r ecovering serial founder and startup enthusiast, and has sought refuge at 500 Startups. There he’s an Entrepreneur in Residence, where he finds startups to invest in primarily for the London Series A growth & investment program and works with them specifically on Enterprise Sales, Customer Centricity and Applied Machine Learning. An old-fashioned polymath, he’s been a technical co-founder (CTO), a growth hacker (CMO) and led sales (CEO). Notable exits he’s been involved with include consulting talent on demand company Skillbridge (acquired by Andreessen-backed unicorn Toptal) and internet security firm ScanSafe (acquired by Cisco). For his sins he was once a News Corporation executive, and started his career at the Boston Consulting Group. He lives mostly in London and loves dogs and puns.
Kathy joined Facebook in 2010 and her mission has been to help clients reliably determine the impact of their advertising and strive for better industry measurement solutions for digital and mobile channels. Kathy has worked alongside top global FMCGs and Telco globally and across Europe in her current position. Before joining Facebook, London in May 2010, Kathy worked within the business development team at Harris Interactive UK. Stateside, she has served as a Vice President within a San Francisco based research consultancy, a government and academic research Director at Knowledge Networks and an Exit Poll consultant for the major news media in New York City. Alex is the co-founder and CTO of Peg, a technology platform helping multinational brands and agencies to find and work with top YouTubers. Peg is used by over 750 organisations worldwide including Coca-Cola, L’Oreal and Google, and has the backing of 27 top angel investors from the worlds of advertising and tech. Prior to founding Peg in 2014, Alex was a senior instructor at Makers Academy, helping hundreds of career changers train to become junior developers through MA’s intensive 12 week bootcamp. He also spent a number of years as a digital nomad, traveling and providing development consultancy to a number of tech giants and startups in Silicon Valley (including a year spent at GOAT from Y Combinator’s 2011 batch). His academic background is in Linguistics, and he takes a particular interest in the areas of machine learning and natural language processing. Carmen Ruiz Vicente is a software engineer at Google DeepMind, where she works on technology for health services and patient healthcare. She has also worked on the Google beacon platform, including the open beacon format Eddystone, and Google’s cloud services that integrate Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) technology with first- and third-party apps. She focused on the development of Android services that improve location accuracy and enable location-based interactions. Prior to that, she was a member of Google’s Privacy Engineering team, which is responsible for delivering and promoting tools, processes, culture and infrastructure to build privacy-robust innovative products and services. As a privacy engineer, she specialised in research and development on the topic of location privacy in location-based internet services. Carmen completed her Ph.D. at the Center for Data Intensive Systems in Aalborg University, Denmark. Her primary area of research was Privacy-preserving Data Management techniques for Location-based Services and Social Networks. Prior to joining Google, she was a post-doctoral researcher at Universitat Oberta de Catalunya (Spain). Keith Teare is Executive Chair and head of the Investment Committee at the UK’s newest investment company Accelerated Digital Ventures (ADV), with investments from the British Business Bank, L&G and Woodford Investment Management. He’s also the founder of Archimedes Labs, the Palo Alto incubator. Previously he was a founder of TechCrunch with Michael Arrington, and before that at Easynet – one of the first Internet Service Providers in Europe, and the first to do a public offering. He also founded RealNames. EasyNet and RealNames were both unicorns…. well before the term was coined. Marily has given 3 TEDx talks, she received the Women in Science and Engineering (WISE) Influence Award in 2015 and a medal of outstanding excellence from Imperial College London for her work in championing the women in tech community. She was the first Greek woman to receive the Google Anita Borg scholarship, she is now the director of the London Geekettes Chapter and is always trying to find new ways to empower women in science both in the UK and globally. She organized the UK’s first women-only hack at Facebook London in 2013 and has participated and judged a total of 20 hacks up to date. The most memorable one being HackEd, sponsored by Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, where her team won the 2nd prize. Claire has a longstanding passion for machine learning and computer vision! She is excited by solving real world problems, applying cutting-edge research in these fields. She was awarded a PhD from Imperial College London. Her PhD and postdoc research were in medical computer vision and was awarded 10 prizes and additional funding. Claire’s research yielded state of the art software which can interpret medical scans and predict disease severity by learning from thousands of images. She is now working in a commercial environment and continuing to develop machine learning and computer vision algorithms, whilst actively keep up to date with the latest research and academic trends to find new opportunities. In her free time she has been a great supporter of women in technology; engaging in mentoring schemes and co-founding and leading the London Geekettes with Marily Nika.
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My Bricks Online puts your smartphone in Lego to make playtime fun again
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Jon Russell
| 2,016 | 12 | 4 |
Lego! Lego! Lego! Who doesn’t like Lego? One of the most fascinating entries to the hackthon at TechCrunch Disrupt London makes the beloved bricks even more fun thanks to a smartphone. is a project that lets kids — or adults! — build Lego that uses a phone to add music or sound effects to the toy. The idea is to give kids an even stronger reason to put the iPad down and play old fashioned toys, ironically using a smart device. Team Filip Denker and Peter Papp, who created at the event last year and run startup , chose to use cars for the demo because they work best with sound, are easy to build, and a popular favorite with kids. But, they pointed out, the project could be used with any kind of Lego. Papp explained that custom mechanic toys or mechanic Lego is expensive and not always easy to find, so My Bricks Online uses an ordinary phone to make things more accessible. To make their hack, the guys used PubNub’s API to trigger actions based on colors shown to the device’s camera — meaning that the car made different sounds on a red, yellow or black service — with a HTML page showing lap times on the race track they built. They pointed that, if you have smart bulbs in your house, you could also trigger trigger those using IFTTT actions. There you have it, proof that tech can bring new life to old toys. [gallery ids="1423417,1423419,1423420,1423434,1423435,1423436,1423439,1423440,1423441,1423442,1423443,1423444,1423447,1423450,1423451,1423453,1423455"]
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Disrupt Hackathon app Notim.press/ed algorithmically detects fake news
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Josh Constine
| 2,016 | 12 | 4 |
Fake news is a moving target. Greedy publishers constantly start new websites of deceit, preventing manual blacklists from keeping up. That’s why one TechCrunch Disrupt London Hackathon team took an algorithmic approach to detecting fake news. (a clever URL that reads “Not Impressed”) lets you enter a URL and instantly see a site’s Alexa top websites ranking, sentiment analysis, bounce rate, domain location, and a headline clickbait detection machine learning score. If you see a low Alexa rank, negative sentiment analysis, high bounce rate, domain in the middle of nowhere, and a clickbait alert, you could infer that a link contains fake news. Notim.press/ed’s team is also working on a Chrome plugin that puts a truthfulness score right on Google search results so you know if something’s likely fake before you click. Tools like Notim.press/ed could empower Internet users to avoid fake news rather than waiting for big platforms like Facebook, Google, and Twitter to get their act together and crack down on it. Hopefully when they do, they’ll figure out a way to automatically flag freshly created fake news sites, rather than relying on blacklists that become outdated.
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HazMap wants to be like Pokémon Go for reporting hazards in public spaces
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Megan Rose Dickey
| 2,016 | 12 | 4 |
No one wants to be that person who falls in a ditch when they least suspect it. With , a project that came out of the Disrupt London 2016 Hackathon, you can ensure you’re not that person. Created by software engineer Oras Al-Kubaisi and risk management insurance provider Craig Polley, HazMap uses to let people crowdsource public hazards and maintenance issues in public spaces through Pokémon Go-like gamification and badges. “We gamify,” Polley told me. “It’s like Pokémon Go.” With the HazMap app, users snap a picture to report risks and other hazards to the most appropriate authority or agency based on geo-location. On the web, you can see a live, detailed map of the current risks and hazards in your area. There’s also a dashboard that ranks how municipalities are doing based on how quickly they address user-submitted reports. By trade, Polley is an insurance adjustor who deals with natural catastrophes, and trip and fall accidents. Right now, HazMap works throughout the UK, but the plan is to make it available globally. When people submit a report or hazard in the app, HazMap contacts the local council on your behalf. If there’s a sharp hazard in a children’s playground, you would expect a prompt response. But if it’s something like a pothole in a desolate road, the agency might decide to deal with that a bit later. No matter what the hazard, the public will be able to see if and when the agency addresses the problem. “Allowing the public to view it will create a sense of urgency for the council to fix it,” Al-Kubaisi told me. Al-Kubaisi and Polley also envision there being some sort of competition between the councils to be the most responsive to public safety issues. HazMap is currently available for Android, but the two plan to develop an app for iOS.
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Jooble makes finding jobs easier in developing countries
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Connie Loizos
| 2,016 | 12 | 4 |
According to the latest from , there are 2.6 billion smartphone subscriptions globally, and that number looks to jump to 6.1 billion smartphone users 2020, with much of the growth coming from developing countries. What that means: people who haven’t had access to modern luxuries are increasingly able to access valuable services on their phones. Some of the apps to emerge use SMS to improve health outcomes for people in developing countries. Another way to use SMS to improve smartphone users’ lives: connecting them with jobs. Such was the thinking behind the team of Jooble, a product that came out of Disrupt’s hackathon in London this weekend and that was built using the Python programming language and which uses Twilio’s SMS API. Created over the span of 16 hours by computer science students Vojta Petrus, Marcelo Gutierrez, and Peter Javorki, the idea was largely that of Gutierrez. Though he’s graduating soon from University College of London, he was born and raised in Bolivia knows well how useful an app like Jooble would be for people living in the countryside and eager to connect with agriculture-related and other jobs near to them. We sat down with Petrus and Gutierrez after they presented Jooble on stage, where they relied on a simulated database to illustrate how the app would work. They told us that among other next steps, they’d like to integrate IBM Watson’s natural language processing technology; they also talked about scraping the web for a whole bunch of job market information. Whether they flesh out the app further remains to be seen. Petrus and Gutierrez noted that there aren’t a lot of other startups tackling the problem they identified. At the same time, Petrus, who leads an entrepreneurship society at the University of Manchester, suggested he was largely keen on making connections at Disrupt, which is his first hackathon. Indeed, he said that though he and Guitierrez and Javorki (who is based in Amsterdam) met on Facebook in the days leading up the event, the three new friends plan to stay in touch.
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Court upholds warrantless surveillance of U.S. citizens under Section 702
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Taylor Hatmaker
| 2,016 | 12 | 5 |
The U.S. federal appeals court has ruled in a case that began with a and will end with unique implications for the private digital communications of American citizens. Digital privacy advocates had hoped that the appeals case for a contentious portion of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) known as . The provision accommodates U.S. surveillance of foreign targets located abroad, although its many detractors argue that Section 702 allows the U.S. government to collect the bulk communications of Americans in the process. Unlike its better-known phone surveillance programs, the NSA can leverage Section 702 to collect emails, instant messages and the browsing histories of the individuals it targets — and anyone who talks to them. The law essentially creates a loophole for the warrantless surveillance of American citizens, and provided a rare opportunity to examine that loophole in action. As explained in July: “…[Mohamed Osman] Mohamud is one of the few criminal defendants who knows for certain he was targeted under the FISA Amendments Act (FAA). Roughly a year after his conviction, Mohamud’s lawyers were informed that their client was surveilled under the FAA. His legal team, along with the ACLU and EFF, has since argued that the surveillance violated Mohamud’s Fourth Amendment rights.” The new ruling concludes that government surveillance of Mohamud, the target of an FBI sting operation, did not violate his Fourth Amendment rights. The decision deals a considerable blow to anti-surveillance advocates seeking to rein in activity under Section 702. “The court’s decision rests on the faulty premise that Americans lose the core protections of the Fourth Amendment when they communicate with family members, friends, business associates, and others abroad,” ACLU staff attorney Patrick Toomey, who argued the case, told TechCrunch. “Under this program, the government is spying on the international communications of Americans in vast quantity without ever obtaining a warrant, and it is storing those communications in FBI databases for use in criminal investigations. Contrary to the court’s ruling, this sweeping surveillance violates the constitutional safeguards intended to protect Americans’ privacy.” With everything at stake in , the court’s decision appears somewhat narrow, eschewing opinions on two specific surveillance methodologies: “Although § 702 potentially raises complex statutory and constitutional issues, this case does not. As explained [in the opinion], the initial collection of Mohamud’s email communications did not involve so-called “upstreaming” or targeting of Mohamud under § 702, more controversial methods of collecting information. It also did not involve the retention and querying of incidentally collected communications. All this case involved was the targeting of a foreign national under § 702, through which Mohamud’s email communications were incidentally collected. Confined to the particular facts of this case, we hold that the § 702 acquisition of Mohamud’s email communications did not violate the Fourth Amendment.” TechCrunch spoke to Andrew Crocker, an attorney with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, to clarify the bounds of the appeals court ruling. “First, the surveillance of the defendant did not involve the NSA’s so-called Upstream program, where the government taps directly into the fiber optic backbone of the Internet, a practice that the court said would raise more serious constitutional issues,” Crocker explained. “Second, the court said that the surveillance of the defendant did not involve a ‘backdoor search,’ that is when the government collects communications by targeting foreigners, but then turns around and searches its databases using email addresses or other identifiers belonging to Americans,” Crocker said. “On this second point, however, we think the court almost certainly got the facts wrong. Based on public evidence in the case, it seems the FBI did in fact search its database for Mr. Mohamud’s emails — which would be a serious violation of his rights, according not just to EFF and ACLU, but also to lawmakers like Senator Ron Wyden who have been trying to stop this practice.” In spite of today’s setback, privacy advocates will keep their eyes on the clock: Section 702 is in December 2017. Still, Congress could very well seek to extend the provision before it reaches that sunset date.
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Trivago files to raise up to $428 million in IPO
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Katie Roof
| 2,016 | 12 | 5 | null |
Microsoft researchers sound off on the next decade in tech
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Devin Coldewey
| 2,016 | 12 | 5 |
It’s Computer Science Education Week, in case you didn’t know, and in honor of this hallowed period Microsoft is publishing the thoughts of a few of its scientists and engineers on what will change in the tech world over the next decade. Seventeen women were asked to chime in — an effort to highlight their voices in a field dominated by men — and you can read their full comments at the official Microsoft blog. I wouldn’t do you any favors by repackaging their already concise thoughts, but here are a few predictions I found interesting: One longer quote I want to highlight: By 2027 we will have ubiquitous virtual reality systems that will provide such rich multisensorial experiences that will be capable of producing hallucinations which blend or alter perceived reality. Using this technology, humans will retrain, recalibrate and improve their perceptual systems. Wow, that escalated quickly! . See you in the multisensorial, hallucinatory future!
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Matthew Lynley
| 2,016 | 12 | 4 | null |
Facebook begins asking users to rate articles’ use of ‘misleading language’
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Devin Coldewey
| 2,016 | 12 | 5 |
A survey asking users about “misleading language” in posts is the latest indication that Facebook is facing up to what many see as its responsibility to get a handle on the fake news situation. At least part of its solution, it seems, is to ask users what think is fake. The “Facebook Survey,” noticed by of Philadelphia’s , accompanied (for him) a Philadelphia Inquirer article about the firing of a well-known nut vendor for publicly espousing white nationalist views. (It’s a small town, everyone knows everyone.) Facebook is asking whether this headline is fake? — Chris Krewson (@ckrewson) “To what extent do you think that this link’s title uses misleading language?” asks the “survey,” which appears directly below the article. Response choices range from “Not at all” to “Completely,” though users can also choose to dismiss it or just scroll past. Facebook confirmed to TechCrunch that this is an official effort, though it did not answer several probing questions about how it works, how the data is used and retained, and so on. The company uses surveys somewhat like this to , and it has used other metrics to attempt to and fake stories. This appears to be the first direct coupling of those two practices: old parts doing a new job. The feature could be seen as Facebook being transparent in how it is training its algorithms to detect misleading headlines, but is also an example of using its user base as, essentially, a rich well of free data into which it can dip its bucket any time it wants and on its own terms. And what it does with the contents of that bucket is anyone’s guess. Furthermore, because users are the ones propagating the fake news to begin with, it’s a curious decision to entrust them with its classification. The inmates are being invited to run the asylum, it seems, or at least there’s going to be a bit of A/B testing. Facebook’s handling of the proliferation of fake, misleading and clickbait posts has been the subject of widespread criticism. CEO Mark Zuckerberg has posted personally on the topic, but the he adopted early on seemed only to obfuscate the issue and incense critics. Another post a week later was , but the fact is hardly anyone knows exactly what needs to be done — although that has to change.
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GoDaddy buys WordPress services startup WP Curve
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Jon Russell
| 2,016 | 12 | 5 |
Web-hosting firm GoDaddy is beefing up its services after it acquired , a bootstrapped startup offering services and support for WordPress websites. The deal is undisclosed, but it will see NYSE-listed GoDaddy pick up WP Curve’s customer base, assets and “a few dozen” of its 39-person team, the firm told TechCrunch. WP Curve was founded three years ago by Australia-based Dan Norris and Alex McClafferty to give WordPress customers a central point of call for a range of services, like security, design, SEO, traffic growth, conversion and more. Basically, anything that can help sustain and grow a website and online business. The site offers various membership tiers starting from $79 per month. It claims over 1,000 paying members and more than 44,000 “jobs” completed since June 2013. GoDaddy isn’t saying too much about how it plans to use WP Curve after the acquisition. A statement from SVP of Global Customer Care Kevin Pigman suggests that it will join GoDaddy’s other services and largely continue to exist within the company: With this acquisition, GoDaddy will provide best-in-class, 24×7 WordPress support, ranging from quick content changes, installing plugins, and security/back up. WP Curve aligns perfectly with our GoDaddy Pro strategy supporting the WordPress community and fills a critical gap between standard customer care and the fully custom WordPress developer that GoDaddy Pro or Professional Web Service offers. that the deal came together this summer when its team first met with GoDaddy and identified synergies. Following the acquisition, existing WP Curve customers will be transitioned over to GoDaddy in order to continue their WP Curve membership. Norris, who runs a number of other projects, including , won’t be moving over, but McClafferty will join GoDaddy to lead the WP Curve product.
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Fitbit’s up and Apple’s down in IDC’s latest wearable market numbers
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Brian Heater
| 2,016 | 12 | 5 |
IDC’s latest are in, and everything looks to be coming up Fitbit. As smartwatch numbers declined, the larger wearable space is up overall, thanks in no small part to the Charge manufacturer. According to IDC’s numbers, Fitbit commanded nearly a quarter of the entire category at 23 percent, a year-over-year increase of 22 percent, with total device shipment volumes bumping from 4.7 to 5.3 million for Q3. Those numbers are, unsurprisingly, primarily made up of the new devices, namely the Blaze, Alta, Flex 2 and Charge 2 — the latter of which is currently the top-selling wearable here in the States. Low-cost Chinese hardware maker Xiaomi and GPS-turned-fitness-brand Garmin took the number two and three spots, respectively, while Apple dipped to fourth place, due to a pretty steep decline of 71 percent, year over year. That number is thanks, in part, to the company’s decision to release the product late in the quarter, though it’s hard not to view the loss of market share as part of . After all, in just the past week, rumors surfaced of Pebble getting swallowed up by Fitbit, while Motorola just up and admitted that it wasn’t moving enough Moto 360 units to justify a continued investment in the space moving forward. The overall numbers don’t look great, though the delay of Android Wear 2.0, the late-in-year release of the Samsung Gear S3 and the relatively minor upgrades to the Apple Watch Series 2 could all be factors in a category that doesn’t have the same shine as it did when it first exploded on the scene.
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Facebook, Microsoft, Twitter and YouTube collaborate to remove ‘terrorist content’ from their services
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Sarah Perez
| 2,016 | 12 | 5 |
Facebook, Microsoft, Twitter and YouTube today announced they would cooperate on a plan to help limit the spread of terrorist content online. The companies said that together they will create a shared industry database that will be used to identify this content, including what they describe as the “most extreme and egregious terrorist images and videos” that have been removed from their respective services. Facebook describes how this database will work in an in its newsroom. The content will be hashed using unique digital fingerprints, which is how its identification and removal can be handled more easily and efficiently by the company’s computer systems and algorithms. Using a database of hashed images is the same way that organizations keep child pornography off their services. Essentially, a piece of content is given a unique identifier. If any copies of that file are analyzed, they will also produce this same hash value. Similar systems are also used to identify copyright-protected files. However, where this new project differs is that the terrorist images and videos will not be automatically removed when content is found to match something in the database. Instead, the individual companies will determine how and when content is removed based on their own policies, and how they choose to define terrorist content. That could quell claims of censorship, but, on the flip side, if the companies aren’t quick to respond, it could mean the images and videos have a chance to circulate and be viewed before they’re pulled down. Facebook also notes that personal information will not be shared, though it didn’t say that this information is not collected. The government can still go through legal means to find out from which accounts the content originated, and other info as before. The companies will continue to make their own determinations about how they handle those government requests and when those requests are disclosed. The new database will be continually updated as the companies uncover new terrorist images or videos which can then be hashed and added to this shared resource. While the effort is beginning with the top social networks, the larger goal is to make this database available to other companies in the future, Facebook says. “We hope this collaboration will lead to greater efficiency as we continue to enforce our policies to help curb the pressing global issue of terrorist content online,” states the post. Given the recent discussions about the spread of fake news on social media, one hopes this new collaboration could potentially pave a path for the companies working together on other initiatives going forward. The problem of false news also damages all of social media, and has raised questions about what role should the companies play in battling that content. There are some who would claim that these companies have no business being arbitrators of the news or what’s right and wrong — and companies themselves would be glad to be “dumb” platforms, as well, in order to escape their responsibility in the matter. However, because of their outsized influence on today’s web, these companies are beginning to wake up to the fact that they will be held accountable for the content shared on their platforms, given that content has the ability to influence everything from terrorist acts and even politics on a global scale.
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Hacker News calls for “political detox,” critics cry censorship
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Lora Kolodny
| 2,016 | 12 | 5 |
Can social media even exist without political debate? What about trolls? , the social news site run by Y Combinator, is trying to find out. The head of the Hacker News community since 2014, Daniel Gackle (whose HN handle is “dang”) on Monday initiated a site-wide To introduce the temporary ban on political content, Gackle wrote: “For one week, political stories are off-topic. Please flag them. Please also flag political threads on non-political stories. For our part, we’ll kill such stories and threads when we see them. Then we’ll watch together to see what happens. Why? Political conflicts cause harm here. The values of Hacker News are intellectual curiosity and thoughtful conversation. Those things are lost when political emotions seize control. Our values are fragile—they’re like plants that get forgotten, then trampled and scorched in combat. HN is a garden, politics is war by other means, and war and gardening don’t mix.” When users sought more detail on what, precisely, would be defined as politics and blocked on HN this week, “Pure politics: conflicts around party, ideology, nation, race, gender, class, and religion that get people hot and turn into flamewars on the internet. We’re not so concerned about stories on other things that happen to have political aspects—like, say, software patents.” The post about the “detox” or “cleanse,” as Gackle called it, has drawn hundreds of comments on Hacker News since it posted this morning. Many users said this effort, even if well-intentioned, amounts to censorship. Many warned it would have the unwanted consequence of silencing the views and experiences of minority users, including women and people of color who comment on the site. Y Combinator CEO tells TechCrunch,”We don’t want to be the day to day US politics site. There are a lot of other places for that. And this just shuts down the lightning rod for a few days.” The CEO also acknowledged that, as is happening on social networks like Twitter, Reddit and Facebook, bigots have infiltrated the Hacker News community of late. Still, every social network going back to Usenet in the 1990s faces the same problem in abating trolls and maintaining a high level of discourse. Telling people they can’t do or say something online , or improve the , for the moderators of these online communities. We’ll see how Hacker News fares. Gackle wrote in an e-mail to TechCrunch to emphasize that the “detox” is just a one-week experiment, and he’s not sure what Hacker News will learn from it. “The idea came about because there has been an uptick in political flamewars and, worse, accounts that use the site exclusively to argue about politics and don’t appear interested in anything else. We already ban such accounts, but the trend in that direction made it seem like a good time to clarify what HN is and what it is not,” he wrote. We asked Gackle specifically for his response to critics who believe his project will silence underrepresented people on HN, and is essentially a form of censorship. He said: “Words like ‘silence,’ ‘underrepresented,’ and ‘censorship,’ are highly charged, and people use them to mean a lot of things, even opposite things. So before trying to answer such a criticism, I’d want to make sure I understand, and for that it’s best to be talking to a specific user about their specific concerns, not arguing in a general debate.” HN has developed and integrated software that tries to detect patterns of abuse on its site, but hasn’t written anything specifically new for the Political Detox Week or around political content. Gackle had plenty more to say to HN users. You can read his comments here on a of his answers to their questions.
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The clever, absurd RokBlok rides your vinyl’s grooves like a hipster race car
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Devin Coldewey
| 2,016 | 12 | 5 |
: Sometimes you think a gadget is new when it was Sometimes you see a gadget and think simultaneously, “that’s insanely clever,” but also just “that’s insane.” was one of those situations for me: Who but a mad genius would have thought of a record player that propels itself along the groove like a little remote control car? That’s it in a nutshell: It’s a wireless gadget the size of a stick of butter, with a needle on the bottom and little rubber tires with which it rolls itself around the record at 45 or 33.3 laps per minute. It’s cute as a button, clever as hell and utterly absurd. First, the idea that a portable record player is really even needed is suspect to begin with. And I say this as someone who owns not one, but portable record players. Sure, they made sense when records were the standard medium for recorded music, but when music became fundamentally portable they lost their utility (though not their retro charm). Who, I ask you, is going to bring a selection of 45s to the park? The same ones who bring their typewriters and mustache wax, I suppose. Notably, a dozen of them pre-ordered the RokBlok while I was writing this (admittedly overlong) article. Second, people who own vinyl often do so not just out of sheer nostalgia, but because they enjoy the ritual and apparatus involved. Warm up the tube amp, wipe down the record, sit down and listen to a whole side while sipping a cup of kopi luwak. Now, the sound on this thing is going to be pretty bad. Just right off the bat, the sound waves are coming out of the precision instrument used to read them off the medium. That ain’t right. There’s a reason audio fiends isolate the turntable from the speakers and other vibrations using cork and other dampers. I don’t think the creators of the RokBlok are ignorant of this, but it remains a fundamental challenge. Also, because the speaker is going in circles, the sound is going to phase abominably. Speakers don’t spin because you don’t want to bounce the sound off every surface around you in a counter-clockwise fashion! You can, of course, hook up another, better Bluetooth speaker or headphones. But isn’t that kind of defeating the purpose of an analog source? Shag carpet not included. Third, I don’t know about you, but the very idea of something riding around on top of my records, even with the softest of little rubber treads, kind of freaks me out. It’s doing 45 laps a minute! That adds up real fast! The creator that they designed around this and that they’ve played stuff hundreds of times without problems, but what can I say, it just seems like one of those things you just don’t do. And yet I find myself wanting one. It’s not that expensive — $60 for early birds — and it’s a fun party trick, or something to have at a music store for quick listens. And really, I feel like I ought to reward the ingenuity and design sense on display here. Even if it’s totally impractical. Plus, it comes with a weird folding player that you spin manually. How can you be without such a thing? This “new spin on vinyl” is — I wish them good luck.
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Why education should become more like artificial intelligence
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Sylvain Kalache
| 2,016 | 12 | 5 |
Artificial intelligence is all around us. It’s in our cars, our homes and our pockets. IBM is teaching to understand, reason and even to learn — helping to translate information into knowledge that can help drive more informed decision-making in medical care. Leading tech companies ship AI free within their products (Siri, Alexa, Google Assistant), powering our phones and the rapidly growing home personal assistant market. Indeed, they are becoming increasingly good at answering our questions, making us smarter. With all this information, this intelligence, at our fingertips and lips, shouldn’t our educational system catch up? Teaching not rote facts and figures, but instead teaching students the paths to find this knowledge on their own. Teaching students — as we do with computers through AI — how to learn. Unfortunately, our education system isn’t keeping up. We are stuck with centuries old methodologies, where schools and teachers act like the gateway to knowledge, but at a time when students can access all they want by simply asking Alexa. Finland understood this change and decided to get rid of the passive learning education and lecture format. on topics of their choice, practicing problem solving. Teachers guide students as they are learning on their own. Flexibility and the ability to retrain will be key for workers of tomorrow. The World Economic Forum estimates that will ultimately end up working in completely new job types that don’t yet exist. Computer-assisted ” and, actually, “ ,” even if we don’t know it. Our natural senses and functions are supplemented by computers and mobile phones (which relieve our brains of some of their data storage and processing burdens). AI is making us smarter. It helps humans get and process information in ways that humans on their own cannot. A few decades ago when we were looking for a piece of information, we had to go to the library and ask the librarian or consult the book index. Then we had to find the book and hope that it contained the information we sought. Not to mention all the hours spent combing through microfilm (and microfiche). Today, just ask your personal assistant and the answer will be delivered to you in seconds. But sometimes personal assistants are not smart enough yet to answer, and humans need to go back to search engines — that’s where being trained on self-learning becomes really important. It is actually hard to frame the right request to the search engine, pick which links look promising and then decide which piece of information is right. Sorry if I shock some of you when I say this, but “it’s on the internet so it must be true!” is a lie. The AI sector is booming, powered by the mix of cheap computing power coupled with gigantic amounts of data. This new engine allows engineers to successfully train neural networks at the heart of deep learning, the engine of AI. According to , already 2 percent of current VC-backed companies are working on training AI algorithms. “Learn how to learn” captures very well the challenge that these startups have to overcome: get these artificial brains to learn from the massive amount of all the data easily accessible today.
But to Mary Cummings, co-chair of the Global Future Council on AI and Robotics, “artificial intelligence is not nearly as smart as people would like it to be.” Machines still need to be guided and humans can use their power to perform their job better. That is actually already happening. Google’s search engine relies heavily on a neural network algorithm that millions of workers are using to perform their job. It has become so ingrained in our culture that we made it a verb: “let me Google that.” Since Homo sapiens created our first tools, we’ve continuously used new technology to do our job better. Sometimes the technology even takes over completely. Workers constantly have to adapt to change. But now, our world is changing at a pace faster than we’ve ever experienced before. Today’s goal for AI trainers is to reach singularity, a state where the algorithm will be able to learn by itself — resulting in a powerful super intelligence. But until this happens, our society needs to adapt to train the most powerful intelligence: humans. And training highly flexible workers who are able to retrain and take advantage of new technologies is critically important, as the World Economic Forum : “Creativity will become one of the top three skills workers will need. With the avalanche of new products, new technologies and new ways of working, workers are going to have to become more creative in order to benefit from these changes.” Let’s disrupt education and provide a recipe that is training workers for the 21st-century needs.
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OpenAI’s Universe is the fun parent every artificial intelligence deserves
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John Mannes
| 2,016 | 12 | 5 |
Every parent’s worst nightmare is a student spending more time playing video games and surfing the web than studying for school. But the team over at OpenAI believes that a “fun parent” approach could actually bring us all one step closer to the elusive generalized intelligence. , was created to train and measure AI frameworks with video games, applications and websites. , aims to reduce the potential harms of artificial intelligence by democratizing it. Atari 2600 games, 1,000 flash games and 80 browser environments with the goal of expediting the creation of generalized intelligence that can excel at more than one task. This new tool runs The ImageNet database is a massive, hand-labeled set of images. Researchers have used it for years to test their image recognition systems and compete for accuracy. Universe takes this all a step further by replacing images with flash games, web browsers, photo editors and even CAD software. One of the features of Universe that makes it so cool is its applicability to the real world. It is very easy to pull benchmarks of human performance on these sorts of tasks. Playing a computer game or browsing the web is far less wonky than asking a sample group to label trees, cars and clouds in images. “In April, we launched Gym, a toolkit for developing and comparing reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms,” explained OpenAI in a blog post. “With Universe, any program can be turned into a Gym environment.” Reinforcement learning is a branch of machine learning that leverages the idea of reward to optimize problem solving. Reinforcement learning draws its approach from behaviorist teaching, that action is driven by explicit reward and punishment. on the applications of reinforcement learning to mastering Atari games. Of course, to make reward explicit, one first needs to create a function for reward, fueled by some dynamic value. For an Atari game, this is relatively easy — it’s just the game score. But to make this method universally applicable, OpenAI had to build a convolutional neutral network-based OCR model. The model allows for easy parsing of game scores with ever-changing, complex typography and background imaging. Once parsed, the gameplay data can be plugged right into those reinforcement-learning reward functions. Other tasks like web browsing are not as explicit as video games, but that doesn’t keep them out of reach. OpenAI created what it calls the “Mini World of Bits” to benchmark both simple and complex browser tasks. If researchers can attain very high accuracy on a number of these tasks in a generalized manner, artificial intelligences will be able to tackle problems far outside the reach of today’s platforms like Siri or Google Assistant. OpenAI used the example of flight booking to describe a future where an AI could manipulate a website to search for, and ultimately book, flights.
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The latest Android Nougat update brings a piece of Pixel to Nexus phones
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Brian Heater
| 2,016 | 12 | 5 |
starts going live today as an over-the-air update — a roll out that will continue through the next several weeks to a select number of Google-approved devices, including the Nexus 6, Nexus 5X, Nexus 6P, Nexus 9, Pixel, Pixel XL, Nexus Player, Pixel C and General Mobile 4G (Android One), along with devices enrolled in Google’s Android Beta Program. Those devices will mostly be playing catch-up with the company’s last flagship, the Pixel, which got a bit of a head start when it launched with 7.1. It’s not exactly a major upgrade, but should help curb users who have been suffering from a little bit of Pixel-based jealousy. The update includes a more inclusive set of emojis, with male/female counterparts for those emojis that were initially just limited to one — include female welders and men getting haircuts. Because it’s 2016 and anyone can get haircuts and weld stuff, thank you very much. Other message-based additions include the ability to send GIFs from the keyboard of apps like Allo, Messenger and Hangouts. App shortcuts have been added to the home screen in this latest version, as well, launching favorites with a long press of the corresponding icon.
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Flutterwave aims to unify Africa’s fragmented payment systems and empower small businesses
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Devin Coldewey
| 2,016 | 12 | 5 |
of entrepreneurs in Africa, but their ambitions are often hampered by the lack in many countries of reliable and affordable digital payment systems. , from , wants to empower individuals and small merchants to take part in the thriving digital economy by letting them accept payment however it’s offered, and receive it instantly in whatever form they choose. The company today announced official availability of the payments platform, and a stout funding round to help usher it into the world. The problem the team aims to solve is plain to see, explained Moneywave CEO Iyinoluwa Aboyeji in an interview — there’s just no universally used and accepted payment system over there. “The ecosystem for payments in Africa is heavily fragmented,” he said. “Anywhere in the west, you’re able to leverage your credit card to pay and get paid. If I’m a small business in Nigeria, I can’t accept cards, the overhead will kill me!” Bank accounts, while common, are often empty, and merchants are frequently informal and not actual incorporated businesses, limiting the services banks will provide. As a consequence, card transactions make up less than one percent of the billion dollars or so changing hands digitally every day. Cash is common, and more than a few person-to-person payment systems, like the popular mPesa in Kenya, have arisen to fill the gap — but fluidity is still a problem. Transactions can take days, and fees are common when transferring or withdrawing money. And there’s no guarantee that a merchant will be compatible with the service or bank in question — mPesa is barely used in Nigeria, for instance. “What we’re trying to do is remove the barriers between these payment instruments and channels, Aboyeji said. “If what you have is mPesa, you should be able to pay into someone’s bank account. You can charge people’s cards. You can accept payments via a link on Instagram.” Moneywave isn’t a user-facing tech like Square or Venmo, but an API layer that can be integrated into your business platform, however modest it is. Payments of whatever type or currency — card, bank transfer, e-wallet — enter on one side and come out the other into the bucket of your choice. So it’s not necessary, for instance, to maintain a costly official business bank account in order to take Visa cards — meaning online and international transactions open up, which it hardly needs saying opens up enormous opportunities. Locally, a merchant in Nigeria doesn’t have to maintain a useless mPesa balance from visiting Kenyans, and visiting Kenyans don’t have to convert their mPesa balances to cash just to buy something in Nigeria. It’s done instantly and with a small flat fee that Aboyeji said is a fraction of what merchants might incur if they had to navigate the various payment instruments manually. If this sounds a bit elementary in the context of the payment systems we’re used to in the U.S., well, it is — which makes it all the more surprising that a solution at this level hasn’t been achieved yet for such an enormous market. Moneywave is the product, but Flutterwave is the company, which launched earlier this year . It’s been working with a few small African companies and merchants to iron out the bugs ahead of today’s official launch. Thrivesend is a person-to-person payment service that simplifies and reduces the cost of everyday money transfers, and Payme is for merchants who want to accept multiple forms of payments but don’t have the money or time to develop or implement standards-meeting mobile or web methods. Traction has been excellent for both, Aboyeji said happily. Banks and other services are on board, as well: “We’ve had a lot of banks want to get in on this. Everybody wants the platform,” he explained. “And I bet you a lot of smart African developers are thinking about what they can do with it.” Flutterwave is backed by an impressive collection of VCs: Omidyar Network, Social Capital, Greycroft, Khosla, Green Visor and more. The financial specifics are still confidential, but if Aboyeji’s optimism is any indication, it’s as healthy an A round as any out there. “It’s absolutely enough” for the company’s ambitions, he hinted, both on the map and among other banks and businesses. One pan-African bank is signed up and a second is on the way; this should help Moneywave to expand into French-speaking and East Africa. These early successes bode well for the conversion of a large part of Sub-Saharan Africa’s uniquely fragmented but potential-packed digital payments ecosystem. We’ll be keeping in touch with Flutterwave regarding the details of its funding and further news of its progress.
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Netflix goes big on unscripted programming with 20 original shows planned for 2017
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Sarah Perez
| 2,016 | 12 | 5 |
Netflix is making headway on its to fill half its library with original content. According to Netflix’s Chief Content Officer Ted Sarandos, the company is planning to release about 20 unscripted series next year, bringing it closer to its goal of having 1,000 annual hours of original programming available on its service in 2017. That’s more than the amount of original programming available on Netflix this year, but even so, Sarandos says that the 1,000-plus hours was a “conservative measure.” (Netflix that it was aiming for 600 hours of originals in 2016, up from 450 in 2015.) He also that Netflix is planning to spend roughly $6 billion in original content on a profit-and-loss basis in 2017, up from $5 billion this year, . Amid increased competition from new streaming services, Netflix believes that its investment in its own programming will help differentiate its service from rivals, while also simplifying the licensing situation. In addition, unlike with mainstream TV networks, Netflix can target niche audiences with its original programming — something that can help it attract more subscribers. Today, it has 30 original scripted series in development or release, and now it’s planning to expand further into unscripted shows. Speaking at the UBS Global Media & Communications Conference, Sarandos referred to unscripted programming as “a very interesting business.” He explained that Netflix’s advantage in this genre is not necessarily that it can come up with unique concepts, but its ability to scale its shows worldwide. “The content itself seems to be largely interchangeable. Meaning, if you want to see a show about hoarding, there are three different shows about hoarding,” said Sarandos, as by The Wrap. As an example, the exec mentioned Netflix’s investment in “Ultimate Beastmaster,” a reality competition series produced by Sylvester Stallone and “The Biggest Loser” exec producer Dave Broome. The series will include six country-specific versions — taking place in the U.S., Brazil, South Korea, Mexico, Germany and Japan — each filmed in their own language, with local competitors and local hosts. Sarandos also offered a brief update on Netflix’s other efforts in original content, including its investment in feature films. He said the Adam Sandler films Netflix made are popular, but didn’t detail how many customers were viewing them. However, he did note that movies in general account for a third of subscriber viewing on Netflix. Additionally, Sarandos dismissed the idea of bringing live sports to Netflix’s service. Though the exec had it would only get involved if it owned and created the event itself. In other words, Netflix doesn’t plan on bidding on the rights to live sporting events anytime soon. Today, Sarandos , saying “don’t look for us to be bidding for league rights,” but said that league creation may be something the company could be interested in.
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The TC Disrupt London Startup Battlefield finalists are InsideDNA, LiftIgniter, Oxehealth, PhenixP2P and Seenit
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Jordan Crook
| 2,016 | 12 | 5 |
Disrupt London Day 1 was a massive success. DeepMind’s Mustafa Suleyman . Autonomy founder Dr. Michael Lynch . And Boston Dynamics’ Marc Raibert showed off . But the heart of Disrupt has always been the Startup Battlefield, and this year’s London crew was no different. Twelve companies (plus a Wild Card) took the Disrupt stage with six minutes to present and demo their product, followed by six minutes of Q&A from a panel of esteemed judges, including Siraj Khaliq from Atomico, Don Dodge from Google for Work and Nic Brisbourne from Forward Partners. So without any further ado, we’re pleased to announce this year’s Disrupt London Startup Battlefield finalists: plans to help research and pharma teams identify the best drug target by using machine learning to analyze massive genetic datasets and identify likely drug targets. aims to rid the web of garbage link recommendations. So instead of showing the not-so-great links that you often see at the bottom of articles, companies working with LiftIgniter can make their websites more dynamic and personal for readers by using a machine learning model. uses existing cameras to monitor a patient’s heartbeat and other vital signs. Even when the camera is across the room, the camera can detect skin color changes and accurately read a heartbeat. wants to make live online video streams truly live. The company, which was founded in 2013 by Stefan Birrer, wrote a new live-streaming platform from the ground up that is able to scale to millions of devices without incurring the kind of latency problems that its competitors struggle with. helps event organizers and other businesses turn their biggest fans into a film crew. Seenit customers invite a select group of their own users, who can use the Seenit app to shoot and submit video from their smartphone.
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Netflix becomes the Top Grossing iPhone app for the first time
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Sarah Perez
| 2,016 | 12 | 5 |
Netflix’s decision in its iOS app over a year ago has helped the streaming service steadily gain more subscribers, and surge up the Top Grossing charts in the Apple App Store. Back in November of last year, reaching the No. 9 position. Today, Netflix has reached another milestone, as the app has earned the No. 1 Top Grossing spot on the U.S. iPhone App Store. Its bump up to the top spot was spotted by app intelligence firm , which has been following its climb since the introduction of in-app subscriptions last fall. Between then and today, Netflix has grown its weekly net revenue from under $50,000 to nearly $2.9 million, its report says. The app has come close to snagging the No. 1 spot on the Top Grossing chart before, Sensor Tower notes. The closest it got was on November 14th, 2016, when it ended the day at the No. 2 position. For what it’s worth, rival app intelligence firm App Annie didn’t record that brief fling with No. 2, and only credits Netflix with having achieved the No. 3 Top Grossing spot in the U.S. on November 8th, 2016. The discrepancies come down to how the firms measure and record app data, but regardless, neither had recorded the app as ever having earned the No. 1 one spot in the U.S. The milestone is significant for Netflix, as it indicates the company’s success at continuing to grow its U.S. subscriber base, despite earlier concerns that the U.S. market was nearing saturation. As indicated by Netflix’s Q3 earnings, the company appears to be — something that’s been attributed to the appeal of its growing library of original content. In addition to revivals that tap into viewer nostalgia, like “Fuller House” and “Gilmore Girls” — the No. 1 and No. 3 most popular original shows, — Netflix has original series that appeal to a variety of viewers. There’s its well-received political drama “House of Cards,” sci-fi series “Stranger Things,” comedy like “Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt” and “Orange is the New Black,” drug czar docu-drama “Narcos,” and Marvel comic book fare like “Daredevil,” “Jessica Jones” and “Luke Cage,” among others. The advantage of being a streaming service is that Netflix’s shows don’t have to each receive blockbuster ratings on their own, as compared with what’s required in network television to keep a series on the air. Instead, they have the power to reach niche audiences, that, when combined, can boost the company’s bottom line. Netflix aims to continue to bolster its library with more originals that will bring in new subscribers — more than doubling the number of hours of original programming in 2017 compared with this year. The company today announced its plans to delve into unscripted series as well, with around launching next year. While today represents the first time Netflix has scored the top grossing position in the U.S., the iPhone app has already earned this honor in other markets. It’s also now the No. 1 grossing app on iPhone in India, Mexico and Columbia.
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Tyson Foods launches new venture fund to back food and agriculture startups
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Lora Kolodny
| 2,016 | 12 | 5 |
, one of the world’s largest makers and marketers of meat products, has announced the formation of a $150 million venture capital fund to back food and agriculture startups. According to Tyson’s Executive Vice President of Strategy and New Ventures, Monica McGurk, the fund will seek to invest in startups solving problems around food production, distribution, nutrition, food waste and safety. The new venture arm will invest opportunistically in startups it is impressed by along these lines, and will not limit its deals to early-stage or mature companies only, nor to a particular product or technology-type. That means Tyson could be investing in everything from new types of packaging that can give a chicken a longer shelf-life, to sensors, software or robotics that can reduce food waste in factories or at restaurants, or innovation that’s more around a great new food brand. Perhaps surprisingly, Tyson is even interested in backing companies developing “alternative proteins,” as industry insiders call them, which are often vegetarian or vegan-friendly meat replacements. Tyson already took a stake in , which makes plant-based patties that aspire to have the same taste, juiciness and grill-ability of real beef burgers. That deal and others like it have been seen as a sign of sea changes in the meat industry in response to consumers’ concerns about global environmental issues and health. published a study earlier this year that forecast, “A global switch to diets that rely less on meat and more on fruit and vegetables could save up to 8 million lives by 2050, reduce greenhouse gas emissions by two thirds, and lead to healthcare-related savings and avoided climate damages of $1.5 trillion.” A Tyson spokesperson said, “O our desire to offer consumers choices and to consider how we can serve an ever-growing and diverse global population, while remaining focused on our core prepared foods and animal protein businesses.” While Tyson is based in Springdale, Arkansas its new fund, Tyson New Ventures LLC, will be headquartered in Chicago, a hotbed of activity for food tech startups since the rise of Grubhub and home to other food-and-ag venture firms including and . will lead the investment team at the new fund. Prior to joining Tyson, James was the Managing Director of Agriculture, Nutrition & Health investments for DuPont Ventures, and Chairwoman of the NVCA Corporate Venture Group. McGurk said that one reason Tyson decided to break off a serious chunk of capital to back startups was that consumer goods are an area lacking attention from corporate VCs. Plenty of money from private equity and venture capital funds has flowed to food, she noted. And other food giants including Campbell Soup’s Acre Venture Partners or Kellog’s Eighteen94 Capital have started venture investing, but are doing in partnership with outisde venture capitalists, rather than building their funds completely in-house. “We have the ability to finance entrepreneurs and give them oxygen, but we have capabilities to help accelerate their growth and improve the odds of success for them,” McGurk said. Specifically, the new fund plans to help its portfolio companies, or other startups it is evaluating for investment, to connect with experts in various departments of Tyson Foods for everything from research and product testing to business development. A startup working on technology to help restaurants reduce food waste may find it easy to meet one or two restaurateurs and test out new technology on a limited basis. But McGurk said, “It can be hard to make a technical solution work in a real operating environment at scale, especially if you have never been in the food service industry.” Tyson has connections to thousands of restaurants, food retailers and farms that raise chickens and other livestock for it. And the company runs a massive “chill chain,” and food distribution system, not to mention culinary test kitchens, and teams that build huge data banks of consumer insights on food preferences and what’s driving growth in food.
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How blockchain can help fight cyberattacks
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Ben Dickson
| 2,016 | 12 | 5 |
Imagine a computing platform that would have no single point of failure and would be resilient to the these days. This is the promise behind blockchain, the distributed ledger that underlies cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin and Ethereum and challenges the traditional server/client paradigm. In 2009, Bitcoin became the first real application of blockchain, a secure decentralized monetary exchange platform that removed the need for central brokers. More recently, blockchain has . Blockchain is the culmination of decades of research and breakthroughs in cryptography and security, and it offers a totally different approach to storing information and performing functions, which makes it especially suitable for environments with high security requirements and mutually unknown actors. The concept is already being used in several innovative ways to enhance cybersecurity and protect organizations and applications against cyberattacks. One of the main characteristics of the is its immutability. The use of sequential hashing and cryptography, combined with the decentralized structure, make it virtually impossible for any party to unilaterally alter data on the ledger. This be used by organizations handling sensitive information to maintain the integrity of data, and to prevent and detect any form of tampering. is a data security startup that is placing its bets on technology to secure sensitive records. It has already used blockchains to create a Keyless Signature Infrastructure (KSI), a replacement for the more traditional Public Key Infrastructure (PKI), which uses asymmetric encryption and a cache of public keys maintained by a centralized Certificate Authority (CA). Matthew Johnson, CTO at Guardtime, believes that while PKI was a suitable technology for digitally signing software, firmware and network configurations, it was never designed to authenticate data. “The fundamental threat with PKI is that you need to base your security on the secrets (keys) and the people who manage them,” Johnson says. “That is very hard to do well and impossible to prove — just as in the real world you ‘t prove a secret has been kept, in the security world you ‘t prove a key has not been compromised.” In contrast, instead of relying on secrets, -based security is predicated on distributing the evidence among many parties, which makes it impossible to manipulate data without being detected. “ has eliminated the need for trusted parties to verify the integrity of data just as in the cryptocurrency example it eliminated the need for a centralized authority to act as a bank,” Johnson explains. KSI verifies the integrity of data by running hash functions on it and comparing the results against original metadata stored on the . “This is a fundamentally different approach to traditional security,” Johnson says. “Rather than using Anti-Virus, Anti-Malware and Intrusion Detection schemes that search for vulnerabilities, you have mathematical certainty over the provenance and integrity of every component in your system.” KSI is already being considered by organizations such as the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) , and by the Estonian eHealth Foundation . On October 21, millions of users across the U.S. were cut off from major websites such as Twitter, PayPal, Netflix and Spotify. The reason was attack that brought down the DNS servers of service provider Dyn. The episode was a reminder of how a weakness in the current backbone become a bottleneck and a point of failure in a system that involves thousands and millions of nodes and users. “The killer weakness of the current DNS system is its overreliance on caching,” says Philip Saunders, founder of Nebulis, a . “This is what allows China to poison its DNS nameservers, censoring key social networks and banned keywords. At the same time it is also what makes it so easy for millions of autonomous devices under the control of malicious code to shut down whole networks and have these interruptions persist.” offers a solution, Saunders believes, a decentralized system would make it literally impossible for the infrastructure to fail under an excess of requests. Nebulis uses the Ethereum and the Interplanetary File System ( ), a distributed alternative to HTTP’s centralized structure, to make its DNS infrastructure immune to DDoS . “Blockchains, particularly the Ethereum platform, allow a different approach,” Saunders explains. “Only changes or updates to the record cost money in the form of network fees, but reads are free, as long as you have a copy of the .” As Saunders explains, with the Ethereum , you read straight from your own copy without imposing costs on the network. “This has great potential for lifting a great deal of pressure from the physical backbone of the internet,” he says. “It also means we do away with many of the redundancies of the traditional DNS and come up with something which is much better.” The team has finished the first draft of the Nebulis directory, which is currently undergoing testing. They plan to launch the first iteration of the directory soon. Encrypting data has now become a norm across organizations. However, when you want to act upon that data, you’ll have to decrypt and reveal its contents. “Currently, there’s really no option for computing over encrypted data in the market,” says Guy Zyskind, founder and CEO of , a decentralized cloud platform based on . “The result is that we only encrypt data at rest (i.e. while being stored on disk) or in-transit (sending over the wire), but not in-use. This means that when we process data, in whatever way or form, we end up decrypting it. This poses the usual risks associated with data breaches — an attacker with access to a system see the plain-text data.” Another problem pertains to the fact that we live in an era of cloud and on-demand services, where our data is accessed and processed by untrusted third parties. “There are many situations where we want to jointly work on data without revealing our portion to untrusted entities,” Zyskind says. “This happens constantly in the business world, where companies would like to collaborate without revealing sensitive information that they are prohibited from sharing due to security, privacy and even regulation reasons. Similarly, we’re seeing more peer-to-peer systems where users themselves would like to maintain their privacy and anonymity.” Enigma enables different participants to jointly store data and run computations while maintaining complete privacy. The platform uses to record time-stamped events and hashes of files that prevent attackers from hiding their tracks if they manipulate data. Additionally, Enigma uses Multi-Party Computation (MPC), a cryptographic technology that performs computations by distributing data and tasks among multiple untrusted parties and making sure each party only has partial access to the data. “The parties are trusted as a whole, decentralized unit, but not individually,” Zyskind explains. According to Zyskind, the combination not only prevents data from being tampered with, but also protects it from falling into the wrong hands. “The main point to consider is that the two technologies are complementary — both are needed to protect against a wide spectrum of cybersecurity threats,” he says. The paradigm be used in several settings involving parties that cannot directly share data with each other but have the need to perform joint operations over it. Potential use cases involve simple tasks like bookkeeping, aggregations and generating simple statistics. It also be used to train machine learning models over encrypted data sets owned by different parties. Enigma also can be used in fraud detection, where organizations jointly execute fraud-detection algorithms over their encrypted data without compromising privacy. provides a fundamentally different approach to cybersecurity, which go beyond endpoints and include user identity security, transaction and communication security and the protection of critical infrastructure that supports operations across organizations. The paradigm shift represented by provide the transparency and auditing that will enable us to make the most use of shared online services, while eliminating the potential security and privacy trade-offs.
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Vault is automating investment to offer affordable retirement plans beyond 401(k)
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Natasha Lomas
| 2,016 | 12 | 5 |
Former JP Morgan financial advisor Randy Fernando got the idea for his fintech startup Vault — selected as audience choice for the startup battlefield here at Disrupt London — after his mum asked him whether there were any retirement plan benefits she could offer staff as a hiring incentive at her small business pre-school. The problem was he couldn’t find anything. “That’s when the light went off,” he says, noting that in the US some 70 million people currently have no access to retirement — the majority of whom worked in small business. The core problem is that US 401(k) retirement plans are expensive and complex to administer, and the fiduciary risk is “extremely high” for SMEs, as Fernando tells it. So the startup’s fix is a digital investment platform to — in his words — “power retirement plans for small business” by automating investment selections to lower admin and advice costs. “We make retirement affordable for small business owners to provide,” Fernando tells TechCrunch. “Over 72 per cent of small businesses do not offer any type of retirement. Because traditionally they have not had access to 401(k). “Whether you’re an Uber driver, or you’re a small tech company — we have a solution that we feel fits best for you and your needs.” Vault’s investment portfolio management tool invests the money on behalf of the employee — so it’s an automated investment tool, enabling a lower admin burden for the SMEs offering it, and also helping handhold individuals who might otherwise be left on their own making complex investment decisions without access to expert financial advice. Vault also does not take a commission on the investment funds its software picks for users — unlike some of the big financial advisors. “[Financial advisors such as JP Morgan] typically put in their own funds, mutual funds, high price funds, where they can get commissions. We choose the lowest cost yet highest rated ones for our customers because we don’t get commissions based on what we recommend,” he says. “We act as a fiduciary to each customer. Meaning we do what’s in their best interest, not ours.” The software’s investment selections are tailored for each individual based on the modern portfolio theory — looking at factors such as a person’s age, income and risk tolerance, and adjusted as the individual nears retirement. The system also takes into consideration current market conditions and the team’s own investment expertise. Of course, as with most retirement plans, Vault can’t guarantee their investment decisions will be successful at the end of the day — although they do at least have lower fees to eat into customers’ capital over the lifetime of the plan. Vault launched its product today, here at TechCrunch Disrupt London, and also bagged its first customer (a self-employed female tech worker in San Francisco). If projections of growth in the gig economy are on the money it might just find its market of freelancers swelling considerably in coming years. The pricing for SMEs is $10 per employee per month. Employees are charged 0.5 per cent annually of the total assets invested — which Fernando also says is lower than 401(k) charges. “When I was an advisor at JP Morgan you were paying anywhere between 3 per cent to maybe over 5 per cent,” he notes. They also offer different plans — so an SME can match employer contributions if they like. The specific target market for Vault is self-employed individuals right up to companies with up to 99 employees. Portland-based Vault was founded in January 2015, and raised a $1.55 million seed round last year from several US business angels. [gallery ids="1424347,1424346,1424344"] Q: US only?
A: Correct Q: vs Betterment or Wealthfront which offer this, is there any other difference?
A: We target the small employers who are not targeted by these robo advisors Q: Is indirect effective for you guys? What’s the best go to market strategy?
A: We intend on starting out with basic content marketing through educational content Q: From a partnerships perspective you talked about financial companies. Size? And what’s in it for them?
A: We’ve been talking to the top 50 [companies]… They want to leverage more value specifically for SMEs Q: But couldn’t they just do this?
A: To develop this on their own it would take them at least three years, and over $50M just to develop it. Aside from that we want to partner with them, allow them to maintain their brand through an API Q: How long been working on this?
A: Just under two years Q: And less than $50M?
A: Yes, just under $1.5M Q: Imagine it’s 10 years from now… and you’ve figured this out – what does life look like for you guys?
A: I left my job to go out on a limb to do this… My family is in small business. That’s why I decided to build this A: This is the second fintech startup that I’ve joined… I’m doing this twice over because I love it Q: Its great to see you tackle a problem like this… but one of the problems also is people in a situation where they think they need the money taking it out. I didn’t see on your interface much to help with education
A: In my previous background I was helping financial advisors adopt social media… the biggest advantage we brought then was education.. and in order to deliver this at scale we need to provide an educational experience We see this interface evolving into something that is as much educational as something as it is to manage money Q: The ambition level – it sounds like you guys are attacking a really big market. Is Portland a place you can build a big business out of? What is the tech ecosystem like to support the ambition you guys have? I don’t know that many multi-billion startups out of Portland, other than Nike… A: there’s actually a lot of untapped tech talent in Portland, specific even to fintech.
We have people gravitating towards us who could work on something that could change an industry Q: Any investors coming there?
A: Yes but we have found investors in the Bay Area as well
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“Bullsh*t and spin”: Autonomy founder mocks HP’s $5B fraud suit against him
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Josh Constine
| 2,016 | 12 | 5 |
How could Dr Michael Lynch raise a $1 billion venture capital fund while being sued for $5 billion over alleged fraud in the $11 billion sale of his company Autonomy to HP? “The reality is, that doesn’t take much time” since he has a team of lawyers on the case, Lynch said on stage during TechCrunch Disrupt London. HP originally paid Lynch $730 million for his stake in Autonomy. Now its and what it thinks it overpaid for the big data company. HP ended up having to write-down nearly $9 billion of the $11 billion buyout after Autonomy fell apart in its arms. Lynch is countersuing for $160 million, claiming the fraud suit ruined his reputation. Lynch pushed to keep the focus on his Invoke Capital investment fund. But as shown in the video below, when pressed about the fraud suit he said “Not only did they own it for a year before they cried foul” but that Autonomy must have been working if clients were paying it hundreds of millions in cash. “If something’s wrong with a business, people don’t pay you” he noted, implying he’s performed well as a business man in the past. So in regards to why anyone would hand him a billion more dollars to invest despite the allegations from HP, Lynch bluntly said “The kind of investors that we deal with were very easily able to do that kind of analysis and work out that there was a lot of spin and bullshit going on.” The courts will attempt to cut through that BS as the lawsuit gets fought in London 2018.
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Emotionally intelligent computers may already have a higher EQ than you
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Andrew Thomson
| 2,016 | 12 | 2 |
From to to , the idea of creating robots that can understand, compute and respond to human emotions has been explored in movies for decades. However, a common misconception is that the challenge of creating emotionally intelligent computing systems is too great to be met any time soon. In reality, computers are already demonstrating they can augment — or even replace — human emotional intelligence (EQ). Perhaps, surprisingly, it is the lack of emotion in computing systems that places them in a such a good position to be emotionally intelligent — unlike humans, who aren’t always particularly good at reading others, and are prone to missing emotional signals or being fooled by lies. According to , “robots do not need to be able to feel in order to act in an emotionally intelligent manner. In fact, contrary to what people think, even in humans high EQ is associated with lower rather than higher emotionality. [High EQ] is about controlling one’s impulses and inhibiting strong emotions in order to act rationally and minimize emotional interference.” In the field of , sensors and other devices are also getting very good at observing and interpreting facial features, body posture, gestures, speech and physical states, another key ingredient in emotional intelligence. Innovative companies across a range of industries are now using computing systems that can augment, and even improve on, human emotional intelligence. In the high pressure environment of Wall Street, stock traders hold power over millions of dollars of their employer’s money, and split-second decisions can make or break careers. The emotional state of employees can determine if they are at an increased risk of making a costly mistake, or if they have just made one. Historically, the management culture in some industries hasn’t always optimized for considering the emotional well-being of employees.
However, leading banks like JPMorgan Chase and Bank of America are now working with tech companies to put systems in place to monitor worker emotions and boost performance and compliance. According to , a number of banks have partnered with , a startup founded by MIT graduates that produces sensor-laden badges that transmit in real time data on speech, activity and stress patterns. While it may sound like a scene from Orwell’s 1984, the badges also contain microphones and proximity sensors that can help employers improve productivity in teams by analyzing behavioral data. The devices would allow managers to assist employees who are “out of their depth” and take decisive action, and also to highlight positive behavior, which can be used in team training. If you’ve ever sat with white knuckles in the back of a taxi as your driver swerves through traffic, then you’re probably quite excited about the prospect of “self-driving” cars that are programmed to follow the rules and be safe. As autonomous vehicles begin to replace manned vehicles, our robot drivers may be a whole lot more responsive to how you feel about their driving. is a startup that is teaching autonomous vehicles how to read the comfort level of its passengers and learn to drive the way they prefer. This personalization is intended to both help increase passenger comfort as well as foster trust in self-driving technology. Off-the-shelf in-cabin sensors provide data on how the passengers feel about the car’s actions — such as acceleration, braking and steering. The collected biometric data is aggregated and analyzed, resulting in an AI whose driving style is responsive to a passenger’s comfort. BRAIQ’s software is effectively adding a layer of emotional intelligence on top of artificial intelligence. New tech is also being created that will teach self-driving cars to communicate their intentions. To replace a wave of the hand to let someone pass in front or your car, or a flash of lights on the highway to let others know you are going to pass, has created a deep learning AI for driver-less cars that allows vehicles to signal their intentions to humans through lights, sounds and movement. The new tech uses deep learning programming to assess what is going on around the car via sensors, and react appropriately to the situation. To effectively interact with pedestrians and other drivers, the cars could learn to use movements and sounds to indicate their next actions; for example, flashing lights to allow someone to pass, or rocking back and forward to indicate it will move forward. analyzes speaking patterns and conversational dynamics between call center agents and customers, providing real-time guidance to help phone professionals better engage and connect with customers. Agents are guided to speak with more empathy, confidence, professionalism and efficiency, depending on the emotion detected through callers’ speech, while early signs of customer frustration and intent to purchase help improve service and close deals. Real-time dashboards enable supervisors to monitor and proactively intervene in live calls. Supervisors are automatically alerted to calls in which a customer is having a poor experience. Cogito’s analytics provide objective insight into agents’ speaking behavior and customer experience on every call, and live customer experience scores help identify actionable best practices and trends for future training exercises. Law enforcement and government agencies around the world However, many experts question the continued use of the technology, arguing that the polygraph machines are . has created technology that reads emotional reactions that aren’t notable to the human eye. Using a mix of and advanced machine learning algorithms, the technology assesses facial blood flow information to reveal hidden human emotions. In a law enforcement setting, officials would be able to ask direct questions and then assess the respondent’s true emotions based on an element they cannot physically control — the blood flow in their faces. In a similar vein, researchers at MIT just announced , a device that, the creators claim, can assess a user’s feeling at that moment with an accuracy of 87 percent. The device reflects wireless signals off a person’s body, then uses algorithms to document individual heartbeats and breathing patterns, and the levels of brain arousal, according to . To date, the technology has only been used to assess whether a participant is happy, sad or angry, but, as the technology develops, it could be trained to be used in a similar way to a polygraph test. Although it might be creepy to think that in the future we will be monitored by machines that can detect our emotions, computing systems with emotional intelligence are already surpassing human capabilities. Far from being stuck in the realm of science fiction, they could soon be a reality in our homes, cars and offices.
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What interns and new grads really get paid at top tech companies
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Lora Kolodny
| 2,016 | 12 | 2 |
From woefully to legendary hiring bonuses at huge Silicon Valley companies, it’s hard for job seekers to know what they’re worth in tech. It’s even harder when they’re new to the rat race. One undergraduate computer science student at , Jesse Collins, has taken it upon himself to gather data from undergrads and recent grads to find out what’s going on, for real, around job offers and paid internships today in tech. Collins released the preliminary results of his survey this week, in a , and the study is already full of juicy tidbits. For example, Collins found that, according to 19 survey respondents so far, Facebook is offering an average annual salary of $109,526 with a massive signing bonus of $79,737 for employees in technical roles like iOS or full stack developer, or software or network engineer. By comparison, according to 31 survey respondents, Google is paying recent graduates in tech roles an average of $107,000 annualized salary with an average signing bonus of $27,327. And Microsoft was offering new grads a $107,455 annualized salary with a $26,591 signing bonus, according to 22 respondents. New Grad and Intern tech offers for 2017 💰💰💰 Data here: — Jesse Collins (@jtc_au) Looking at the self-reported salary and bonus data by job title, Collins found that software engineers and developers are out-earning their peers in user experience design and sales engineering by tens of thousands, annually. And even though government salaries are presumed to be much lower than those in the private sector, working in tech in a government office will score entry-level engineers and developers a slightly better salary, on average, than working for a seed- or Series A-stage startup, the survey suggests. It’s important to note that some large tech employers, including and , offer internships to both graduate and undergraduate students, and may be hiring people with doctorates and prior work experience into entry-level roles. That could account for some of those high salary and internship compensation numbers. Collins began his survey last year, asking recent tech hires and interns what offers they got and from which companies, as well as for a bit of personal information, including their educational background and gender. He says, “I’m interested in bringing transparency to job searches and salary negotiations overall, and hope that the data…will help prevent racial bias, a gender wage gap and the like.” Preliminary survey results show that women who are recent grads may be getting paid more on average than their male peers in entry-level tech roles. Women say they are getting $105,000 to $142,674 annualized salary on average, while men are saying they are getting an average annualized salary between $99,767 and $105,000. However, the same survey suggests that women are paid less, right after college, than men, at Facebook, Google and Twitter, taking stock, stipends, hiring bonuses and annual salaries all into account. And women are not getting hired as often as men, the survey also reflects, comprising just 14 percent of new grad tech hires who were gender-identified respondents. Collins isn’t the first to try to understand who gets paid for what in tech. Other noteworthy researchers include Harvard economics professor , 20-something software engineer , who began his own internship-focused survey as an undergrad at U.C. Berkeley, and companies that get paid by recruiters and job seekers, like LinkedIn, CareerBuilder or Glassdoor. A self-proclaimed machine learning and stats nerd, Collins cautioned readers of his spreadsheet that survey results are not final, and the data set he’s gathered is not big enough to draw broad conclusions about pay, or bias in tech. The information is self-reported and salaries were not adjusted for cost of living by region. And he hasn’t connected with companies to verify the data. The survey, is still open if you’re a recent graduate or undergrad who wants to contribute internship or job offer data. TechCrunch has reached out to a number of employers in the survey to verify the salary and other information reflected there. We will update this post if or when we have new information. Facebook does not comment on its employees’ compensation, a company spokesperson said. Meanwhile, Collins has accepted a full-time job as a software engineer at the Seattle office of after he graduates from Purdue. He declined to disclose his salary in a press interview.
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ESA commits half a billion to its next Mars lander despite predecessor’s crash
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Devin Coldewey
| 2,016 | 12 | 2 |
The European Space Agency is doubling down on Mars, dedicating nearly half a billion dollars to its follow-up mission to the planet’s surface — even though the first one quite literally cratered. But an ambitious joint plan to redirect an asteroid’s moon has been scuttled in order to find the funds. In October, the ESA hoped to join NASA on the surface of Mars with its Schiaparelli robotic lander. But the craft and plummeted more than two miles to the ground, ending up as little more than a scorch mark. The orbiter that delivered Schiaparelli to the planet, fortunately, is . A similar fate befell , another ESA lander, in 2003. So it would be understandable if they decided to at least temporarily abandon an enterprise that appears for them to carry a curse. , the ESA member states maintained a stiff upper lip and committed €436 million (about $464 million) to the project — a relatively small part of the more than €10 billion it negotiated to fund the rest of its missions. Like the first ExoMars, this one is a collaboration with Russia’s Roscosmos; €339 million of the remaining costs (it’s been underway for a while) will be provided collectively, but €97 million had to come from within the organization — meaning other projects would be the casualties of Europe’s Martian ambitions. Scrimping and saving here and there may have turned up a few millions, but in the end, the choice was made to cancel the agency’s . This was a pair of probes and a lander that were to be sent to the asteroid Didymos, where they would closely observe the results of a second mission, the Double Asteroid Redirection Test, which, as you might guess, involved hitting a space rock really hard and seeing what happens. Summary of the AIM mission. DART, actually a NASA mission, will continue, but AIM will no longer be accompanying it. It’s a major loss, because now the impact will have to be monitored from the ground, yielding only a fraction of the data AIM would have gotten, and at a fraction of the precision. Patrick Michel, the French planetary scientist who led the AIM project, : “A cool project has been killed because of a lack of vision, even short term, and courage, and this is really sad.”
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A sneak peek at Propel’s battling Star Wars drones
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Brian Heater
| 2,016 | 12 | 2 |
Last year’s breakout Star Wars toy was, without question, . It was the perfect synergy of technology and intellectual property, which brilliantly captured ’ breakout star droid. In the lead up to , there isn’t a single toy running away with the title, but are a pretty strong contender. Unveiled via a teaser this summer, the devices capture four key vehicles from the original trilogy: a speeder bike, an X-Wing, a TIE fighter and, naturally, that perpetual fixer-upper, the Millennium Falcon. The drones feature four rotors capable of accelerating from zero to 30 MPH in three seconds, with peak speeds of up to 35 MPH — however many parsecs that works out to. The first official Star Wars drones are here Posted by on Thursday, December 1, 2016 Propel showed off the drones’ aerial maneuvers in a San Francisco press event this week, just ahead of the products’ official Friday launch. They’re impressive little toys designed for laser-based dog fights, aiming their beams at one another until the loser suffers a controlled crash to the ground. With prices at around $250, the drones aren’t exactly cheap, but, then, wish-fulfillment rarely is. [gallery ids="1422940,1422941,1422942"]
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As acquisition talk surfaces, Pebble stays quiet about Time 2 shipping
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Brian Heater
| 2,016 | 12 | 2 |
When about a Fitbit acquisition of Kickstarter king Pebble, concerned backers were understandable concerned about what the news would mean for the status of their unreleased devices. While its hard to know how such a move might ultimately impact support for the company’s existing line of products, at the very least, Pebble 2 buyers can breathe a relative sigh of relief as that long awaited smartwatch has, in fact, started shipping. And we had a chance to a few weeks back. Things are less sunny for the other two products announced alongside that wearable. Those who ponied up for the Time 2 and Core are still waiting. In light of mounting reader concern, we reached out to the company to see what’s up. But Pebble’s not talking. The company confirmed that the Pebble 2 is out in the world, but refused to give an update on the two other products – either in the form of acknowledging a delay or offering up a word of hope that they’re still on their way. Of course, the Core isn’t slated to arrive until January, which still gives the company some breathing room. The Time 2, on the other hand, was slated for an arrival last month, according to the company’s Kickstarter campaign. Neither the company nor CEO Eric Migicovsky’s Twitter accounts have updated since the rumor first surfaced – save for a shrugging emoji. And while Pebble has promised to update us when more information is available, the silence on the matter surely isn’t doing much to instill confidence in its backers.
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Snapchat will make Los Angeles a stronger tech hub
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Justin Choi
| 2,016 | 12 | 2 |
If you were to write a history of Silicon Valley, you could do it by looking at a series of major diaspora. Companies like Google, Yahoo, Oracle and PayPal attract top talent for years; when they reach maturity or a major liquidity event, their talent disperses and germinates into the next generation of companies. The fruit doesn’t fall far from the tree, and the tendency of these companies to start up and grow nearby their progenitors has contributed to the virtuous cycle that maintains the Bay Area as the premier destination for entrepreneurship and technology today. Now that (OK, parent company ) has that could value the company at $25 billion or more around March 2017, it’s quite possible that the ensuing “Snapchat Mafia” could do the same for L.A. into the 2020s. And while no one company can single-handedly reshape the SoCal versus NorCal divide, Snapchat’s forthcoming liquidity event is timed alongside other major trends that can position L.A. at the center of future areas of growth. Many peg the origins of Silicon Valley to the moment when the Traitorous Eight left Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory for Fairchild Semiconductor in 1957. Members of that group went on to found Intel, AMD and dozens of other companies. The most well-known recent example is, of course, the PayPal Mafia, whose ranks included Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, Max Levchin, Jeremy Stoppelman, Reid Hoffman, David Sacks, Dave McClure and Chad Hurley, among others. The group is together responsible for Tesla, SpaceX, SolarCity, Yelp, LinkedIn, YouTube, Palantir, Yammer, Clarium Capital, The Founders Fund, 500 Startups… the list goes on. The value created post-PayPal is so illustrious and far-reaching that it’s hard to imagine such a confluence of people like that again. But there are other, perhaps lesser, examples: Facebook alumni brought us Path, Quora, Asana and a fair share of VC funds. Yahoo alumni created WhatsApp, Chegg, Slack, SurveyMonkey and Cloudera. The founders of Instagram, Foursquare, Pinterest and Twitter all passed through Google at one point or another. Today, L.A. has one of these bona fide tech superstars in its midst — one with the power to draw this kind of top talent down I-5. With at least 150 million daily active users and its stratospheric valuation, Snapchat is that company (for perspective, it was a mere seven years ago that Facebook was worth $10 billion). If you’re young and ambitious and loaded with talent, where would you go? Facebook, which has already gone through its hyper-growth and innovation stage, or Snapchat, where you can contribute to rapid growth and have your work make a bigger impact? A number of such individuals, like former Facebook product head Sriram Krishnan, have already made the jump. More will follow. Of course, it’s not just inertia that will keep the diaspora of Snapchat talent within L.A.’s orbit. “Content is king” has long been a mantra among Hollywood executives, but for the last 20 years, content producers have hardly been feeling like kings. The business model for selling and distributing content has — and still is to this day — become subject to radical disruption by new technology-driven players, mostly from the Bay Area. First it was the rapid rise of the internet itself, which destroyed the classifieds business most newspapers relied upon to turn a profit. Then, Apple’s iTunes and iPod toppled the music industry from its height in the early 2000s. More recently we saw the rise of social media, which is still upending the traditional advertising model for online publishers and spawning new publishers powered by clickable and shareable content. And now, of course, we have on-demand video networks like Netflix giving theaters, film studios and traditional TV broadcasters a run for their money. The last 20 years have seen this tremendous shift in content distribution platforms, away from the traditional media networks and toward the technology-driven platforms that deliver content on-demand via computer, tablet and mobile phone. In many ways, this has been the driving narrative of consumer technology in the 21st century: The traditional media establishment lost control of its distribution. That trend is about to change, and we will see the balance of power start to shift back to content. The disruptive platforms that brought about this paradigm shift in media — Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Google, Netflix — have for the most part been established. Having permanently shifted the way people get their content, these entities are no longer competing with traditional media, but with each other. The rise of platforms is now becoming the war of platforms. Going forward, the game is less about old entities coming to terms with new players than it is about these new players fighting for primacy among themselves. That war is being waged with content. Content is the differentiator between the warring platforms, and they are bidding up the price for quality creative. Already we’ve seen Netflix spend $6 billion on programming content in 2016, Amazon is spending $3 billion and Apple reportedly considered buying Time Warner. Twitter staked its hopes on broadcasting live sports like the NFL, while music platforms from Apple, Spotify, Amazon and Tidal compete for exclusive album releases. All of this is good news for L.A., which is the world capital for content creators (rivaled only by New York City). Paired with the high-quality tech talent that Snapchat is drawing away from Facebook, Google and Twitter, there’s the potent mix of ingredients to accelerate a startup renaissance here in the Southland. My friends from San Francisco complain about the rise of a tech monoculture in their city, and I understand what they mean. San Francisco used to draw creative and offbeat types from all kinds of backgrounds and with all kinds of interests, because it was beautiful, affordable and weird (in a good way). Not only is it much less affordable these days, it’s also less diverse and less interesting to those who aren’t totally focused on technology startups. Indeed, today’s Bay Area isn’t for everyone. By contrast, L.A. remains a vast, vibrant and diverse patchwork of varying scenes, each a bit different than the next, yet still accommodating to a wide range of interests and pursuits. The tech scene here is growing and maturing; it’s easier than ever to raise capital and hire good talent. But perhaps the greatest feature of L.A.’s startup scene is that it could never take over the character of the whole city. A lot of people find that an attractive prospect. The impact of that culture and diversity go beyond just quality of life — cue Google Glass versus Snap Spectacles. Spectacles have a fashionable cool factor that Glass ultimately did not — the product decisions that drove their respective developments were influenced by their environments. Snapchat’s L.A. roots give it a better sense of what’s cool, and what’s meaningful to its audience, whereas Silicon Valley focuses instead on what’s technologically achievable with less focus on what’s culturally salient. Snapchat may become the PayPal of SoCal; its momentum and the prospect of Snapchat billionaires and millionaires let loose in L.A. is enough of a draw to put Los Angeles in many up-and-coming tech stars’ consideration set. Content is becoming an important factor in the next chapter of tech, something that is core to L.A. culture. One can already see how the L.A. DNA of is influencing Snapchat’s journey. For those entrepreneurs getting tired of the constant class warfare and tech monoculture of the Bay Area, L.A. is cementing itself as an attractive option. The quality of life and relatively sustainable cost of living may prompt some to stay, as well. Snapchat will accelerate that trend, adding vibrancy to the tech culture of the city.
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Augmented reality treatment reduces phantom pain in missing limbs
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Devin Coldewey
| 2,016 | 12 | 2 |
Phantom limb pain is a mysterious ailment: people with amputations experience aches and acute pains in an arm or leg that isn’t there — making the problem notoriously difficult to treat. But a new type of therapy using augmented reality is surprisingly effective at reducing even the most intractable phantom pain. The AR therapy method, by Max Ortiz Catalan of the Chalmers University of Technology, . The team selected 14 amputees whose phantom limb pain was chronic and unresponsive to other therapy methods. The patients were equipped with myoelectric sensors that detect the signals in muscles that once controlled the missing limb. These signals are tracked and analyzed, and linked to movements in a virtual environment — opening the hand or twisting the wrist of an on-screen limb. Once this calibration is complete, the virtual limb is superimposed on a live webcam image of the patient, starting just where the real limb stops. The user thinks of movements, and the virtual limb executes them. Over 12 semimonthly sessions, patients were asked to put the virtual limb into various positions, use the sensors to control a car in a racing game, and so on. https://youtu.be/ek7JHGC-T4E Amazingly, by the end of the 12 sessions, reported pain was reduced by about half, and interruptions of daily activity or sleep from it were similarly cut down. The four patients on pain medication reduced their dose, two of them by 81 percent. Six months later, the improvements were still present, implying a lasting therapeutic benefit. “The results are very encouraging, especially considering that these patients had tried up to four different treatment methods in the past with no satisfactory results,” said Catalan in a news release. “We also saw that the pain continuously decreased all the way through to the last treatment. The fact that the pain reduction did not plateau suggests that further improvement could be achieved with more sessions.” If the idea that moving a virtual limb around in AR could relieve pain strikes you as strange, don’t worry — it is. But phantom pain is a poorly understood phenomenon and sometimes the effectiveness of treatments is matched only by their strangeness. Phantom itches are also a problem, for example: imagine how maddening it must be to have an itch you can’t scratch because the limb it’s on isn’t there. The solution, some have been lucky enough to find, is to arrange mirrors so that a limb that’s present appears to be in the place of the missing one. Someone scratches it, and the phantom itch disappears. Believe it or not, this and other forms of mirror therapy are established practice — though not always effective. This AR-based method is sort of like mirror therapy taken to the next logical level, and it may prove a valuable tool in the treatment of this mysterious but very real condition. Next up: more tests. 30 patients, this time with leg amputees as well. The paper describing this initial clinical trial was .
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The NFL will reportedly relax their social media rules so teams can post more GIFs and videos
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Fitz Tepper
| 2,016 | 12 | 2 |
About a new social media policy that effectively banned teams from posting any video-based content during games. The backlash was tremendous, with fans and teams criticizing the NFL for negatively impacting fan’s social media experiences, especially during a TV ratings slump. But now it seems the NFL has decided to relax these restrictions. In a , the league outlined a new set of rules that should make it easier for teams to share content with fans on social media. Here are the changes to the league’s social media policy, . Interestingly, the memo a “test agreement” with Giphy to make the GIF service “the source of high quality and authentic NFL GIFs of ancillary game and historical/iconic content”. While we reached out to Giphy for clarification on the partnership and are waiting to hear back, it seems like the GIF service will create and host “evergreen” GIFs for the NFL, and not create or host GIFs of gameplay. Even under the new rules, teams still can’t create their own GIFs or videos of gameplay, and will still have to rely on the NFL’s social team to capture and post GIFs and videos during games. This was the part of the rules that most frustrated teams, since they essentially had to sit around and wait for the NFL to create and upload a content. While the league may be good about quickly creating GIFS during a primetime game where there is only one broadcast, it obviously takes more time at 1pm on Sunday where there could be upwards of 8 games being played at once. Plus, if a team wants a GIF or video of a specific moment that the NFL didn’t think was worthy of a highlight, they email and request it to be made – a process that takes time. Ultimately, these new rules will will make it easier for teams to share content, but they still won’t necessarily be able to share content – meaning replays of the actual game.
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Copy and paste trick could unlock iOS 10 devices in Lost Mode
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Devin Coldewey
| 2,016 | 12 | 2 |
Lost and stolen iOS devices could be at risk if ne’er-do-wells learn of this blunt-force method of getting past Activation Lock. No special equipment or technical know-how is required, which means any geek off the streets can do it. Fortunately, it’s easily fixed — but until that happens, you might want to be a little extra careful about leaving your phone unattended. is described by Benjamen Kunz-Mejri, founder of German security outfit Vulnerability Lab. An earlier variation, discovered by , affected iOS 10.1 and was reported to Apple in October. Although the company attempted to fix the problem in 10.1.1, adding a twist — literally — the the attack means devices are still vulnerable after the update. When an iOS device’s owner activates Lost Mode through Find my iPhone/iPad, the device is remotely put into Activation Mode, requiring your Apple ID for it to unlock and return it to normal. But logging in requires an internet connection, and for that purpose you can opt to use wi-fi. So the attacker goes to the wi-fi network select screen, and selects “other network.” This is where things get hot. The network name and password fields here have no character limits! Apple wasn’t silly enough to allow arbitrary code execution from the fields, so there’s no serious buffer overflow attack here. But if you put enough characters into both fields (upwards of 10,000) the device will slow down and eventually freeze. Put the device to sleep with a cover, wait a few seconds, and open it up — voila, the home screen! That method worked on 10.1, but with 10.1.1, you have to do a bit of screen rotation and use Night Shift mode. The home screen only shows up for a fraction of a second, but Kunz-Mejri that one can get it to stay visible with a well-timed button press. The problem could be fixed with a simple character limit on those fields, a fix Apple apparently overlooked or didn’t have time to implement in the update. TechCrunch has contacted Apple for confirmation and further details, and this post will be updated if we hear back.
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Hands On With DirecTV Now, AT&T’s new streaming service for cord cutters
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Sarah Perez
| 2,016 | 12 | 2 |
This week, AT&T for cord cutters, who aren’t ready to subsist entirely on Netflix, YouTube and whatever else they can watch for free around the web. Launched on Tuesday, DirecTV Now offers access to over 120 live TV channels, in addition to on-demand programming, and the option to add on premium networks like HBO and Cinemax for just $5 more per month. With launch pricing of only $35 per month for the “Go Big” package of over 100 channels (normally $60/month), and promotions that include a free Amazon Fire TV Stick or Apple TV with prepaid service of 1 or 3 months, respectively, DirecTV Now is worth a look if you’re in the market for a streaming TV service. But how well does it actually perform? Having only a couple of days with the service so far, it’s too soon for a comprehensive review. That said, from this initial glance, it’s fair to say DirecTV Now offers a compelling alternative to existing rivals like Sling TV or PlayStation’s Vue. Starting with the cost, if you sign up at the $35 per month rate, you’ll be grandfathered in at that same rate for as long as you use the service. If you miss the limited time promotional pricing, you’ll be able to choose from four different packages: Live a Little – $35 / month (60+ channels)
Just Right – $50 / month (80+ channels)
Go Big – $60 / month (100+ channels)
Gotta Have it – $70 / month (120+ channels) Even at the standard pricing, $35 per month delivers a lot of channels without resorting to add-on bundles like Sling, and even if you tack on HBO for another $5, you’re still coming in well under the of $103.10. HBO and Cinemax are cheaper on DirecTV Now at $5 per month. Sling TV, by comparison, charges $15 for HBO as does Vue, and Sling charges $10 for Cinemax. In addition, AT&T subscribers can stream from the service to their smartphones and tablets without tapping into their wireless data plans. ( is still not fully decided, though.) The biggest drawback to DirecTV Now is that it only allows you to watch on 2 devices at the same time. That’s fewer than PlayStation Vue, which permits up to five total streams at a time. Meanwhile, Sling TV has two packages: Sling Orange only offers one stream, but Sling Blue offers up to three. At launch, can use DirectTV Now on iOS and Android devices, Apple TV (4th gen), Chromecast (Android for now), the web, Amazon Fire TV and Fire TV Stick, and select Google Cast-enabled smart TVs. Yes, there are some devices missing at launch, most notably Roku, Fire tablets and some smart TVs. But DirecTV Now already has plans to expand its device support next year, just like it also plans to upgrade its service after launch with more features. For example, its cloud DVR feature isn’t expected until next year. PlayStation Vue has a cloud DVR and . Lacking a DVR isn’t huge concern in terms of simply having something to watch, given that DirecTV Now isn’t only a live TV service – it also includes on-demand programming. At the start, 15,000 on-demand titles are available for instant viewing. A bigger worry, perhaps, is that DirecTV Now doesn’t offer CBS and Showtime, though it’s still trying to make a deal to bring those to its service. ( while Verizon still has the exclusive on mobile streaming.) With DirecTV Now, the ability to live stream other broadcast networks like NBC, ABC, and Fox is limited to select markets. But this doesn’t necessarily make it any worse than Sling TV or Vue – neither of which prioritize live streaming of broadcast TV. Those competitors also only make live broadcast streams available in select markets, and Sling sells its “Broadcast Extra” as an add-on. On DirecTV Now, you can still watch shows from networks like Fox, ABC or NBC – you just may have to watch them on demand. ( . To see if your city has local live channels, .) The rest of is everything you’d expect from cable TV, from lifestyle programming, to sports, to news, to educational channels, and kids TV, like Nickelodeon and Disney. Plus, DirecTV Now has access to Viacom channels, including Nickelodeon, Nick Jr., Spike, MTV, Comedy Central, and others, It has a ton of sports channels, too, like ESPN and its related networks, Fox Sports 1 and 2, Golf Channel, NBA TV, NBC Sports Network, NHL Network, Tennis Channel, and others, as well as some regional sports networks, depending on availability. AT&T is also bundling its teen-focused Fullscreen network, and a handful of originals. Fullscreen is not a big selling point, unless you have kids. And the originals are paltry and lower quality than what you’d find on Netflix. One of the biggest selling points for DirecTV Now, at least in this cord cutter’s opinion, is the user interface. As someone who has tried both Sling TV and Vue, I found I much prefer DirecTV Now’s look-and-feel. Sling TV is still a nightmare to navigate, but DirecTV Now is simpler. There are only four tabs at the top for moving through the content: the homepage, “Shows,” “Movies” and “Networks.” Unlike cable TV where you’re presented with a linear programming guide, DirecTV Now has a bit of a Netflix-like feel to it. In the TV section, curated categories point you to different TV genres, and not just “drama” or “comedy,” either. Instead, there are groupings that feature suggestions like reality game shows, alternative cartoons, shows for teens, crime TV shows, and more. These collections have catchy titles like “Made You Think” (educational shows), or “Way Out There” (shows with the man vs nature theme). There are also rows that feature DirecTV Now’s own recommendations, new shows and returning shows. DirecTV Now claims its service will personalize itself to your interests more over time. (As will its ads!). The Movies section is more simply organized by high-level genre (Action, Family, Drama, Comedy, etc.). DirecTV Now could make it easier to add on to your service or upgrade your plan, however. On the “Networks” tab, it shows a list of “unsubscribed” channels beneath those you can access on your current plan. Here, it doesn’t only tease with an HBO add-on, but also a couple of channels that are actually included in the pricier tiers. When you click “subscribe,” you’re informed you need to change your plan to gain access. But doing so means navigating to the Settings, clicking “User Account,” then “Manage My Plan.” A one-click upgrade right from the Networks screen would be a lot easier. I’m also not a fan of it taking 2 clicks to see all a network’s TV shows on a single page – that should be the default after you click on the logo. (Right now, you have to click a “Show All” button.) If you’re more interested in just watching what’s airing live, the Home tab will direct you to those shows. Like Sling TV, it ditches the text-only linear guide for rows of thumbnails you click through as the default experience, but you can still click over to “Guide” if you prefer a traditional layout. Plus, the Home page also offers suggestions of other things to watch, ranging from New Shows to Featured Movies and other content collections. Again, in limited testing, I ran into a couple of issues with faulty streams – errors when loading a video, or just slow loading. But did see more error messages and even crashes. The interface also sometimes was slow to load content as you scrolled further down the page. Some testers also ran into errors claiming they had gone over their number of permitted streams, though they hadn’t. Hopefully this, too, will be fixed soon. To what extent these are just launch week hiccups that will be worked out, versus more serious underlying infrastructure problems can’t yet be determined. DirecTV Now is not the clear winner compared with Sling TV and PlayStation Vue. It will come down to what’s most important to you: Pricing? Multiple streams? Channels? Device support? Cheaper HBO? User experience? Etc. But it’s definitely a service that’s in the running, given the features it offers today and those it has planned for the near future. : in the weeks since its launch, the service has struggled with performance and stability issues, and has denied customers refunds. Until these issues are resolved, we would not recommend signing up.
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Facebook invests $20M to catalyze affordable housing development in Menlo Park
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John Mannes
| 2,016 | 12 | 2 |
Across the Bay Area, affordable housing remains hard to come by. In a climate where many displaced residents point their blame at the techies, Facebook has decided to invest $20 million in what it calls “ .” In just the last six years, San Mateo County has added 54,000 new jobs while only building 2,148 new housing units to support growth, A large number of these jobs were born from the region’s high-paying tech sector. Facebook alone is expected to to over 7,000 in the coming months. Facebook’s plan to combat the lack of affordable housing is to build a coalition of community groups, philanthropies and companies to try to force action on the issue. Together the new partnership will focus on increasing the stock of affordable housing, generating new economic opportunities and supporting the legal needs of residents threatened with eviction and unsuitable living conditions. “We recognize our growth contributes to these challenges, and we’re committed to helping solve them so people can afford to live and work here,” said CEO Mark Zuckerberg To start, the partnership will consist of Facebook, the local governments of East Palo Alto and Menlo Park in addition to a number of other local groups including Youth United for Community Action, Faith in Action Bay Area, Community Legal Services in East Palo Alto and Comité de Vecinos del Lado Oeste. The vast majority of the company’s investment will be used to establish a Catalyst Housing Fund for “innovative and scalable” affordable housing. The specifics of what this $18.5 million pot will be used to finance haven’t been disclosed. Menlo Park locals tossed around ideas that included efforts to both change public opinion and the letter of the law. A marketing campaign could be used to ease community anxieties about approving new development. More tangibly, others pointed to repealing the state’s rent-control restricting Costa-Hawkins Act, allowing the conversion of garages to housing units and financing additions on existing houses made available at below-market rates. Facebook wasn’t able to comment on these policy initiatives today, but the company will undoubtedly run into them full force once things get rolling. “Affordable housing is a problem beyond the Bay Area too,” added Zuckerberg. “We can’t fix it by ourselves, but if we figure out ideas that work here, then I hope we’ll be able to bring them to more cities and countries in the future.” The rest of the money is being split across a number of secondary initiatives. $250,000 will go to Rebuilding Together Peninsula, a group that supports the renovation of blighted properties. $625,000 is financing job training in technical fields and a new Facebook community liaison to connect residents with jobs at the company. Finally, $500,000 will be funneled into a legal fund for people struggling with landlord abuses and other housing malpractice. We also contacted the City of Menlo Park for comment and will update this post if and when we hear back.
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Beddit 3 knows if you’ve been sleeping. It knows if you’re awake.
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Haje Jan Kamps
| 2,016 | 12 | 2 |
Jolted into existence with campaign back in 2013, followed by a version 2 that was sold in Apple Stores all over the world, is back with a third generation of its popular addition to the Quantified Self movement: sleep tracking. The product went on sale in September and immediately sold out, and the company is still selling Beddit 3 faster than it can make them. “I used to be an elite triathlete,” Lasse Leppäkorpi, founder and CEO of Beddit tells me, when I ask him how he ended up dedicating his life to sleep. “I was trying to qualify for the first-ever triathlon at the Sydney Olympics in 2000, but I tried too hard. I was diagnosed with , and started a long recovery process.” Part of the recovery was to pay very close attention to several health metrics, which included wearing a chest band 24 hours per day to monitor the recovery and to keep track of when Leppäkorpi would be able to train again. He soon discovered that trying to sleep while wearing a device was hard. Fast-forward a few years, and Leppäkorpi was working on a PhD at the Helsinki University of Technology, with the aim to solve this exact problem. Beddit 3 is the third-generation sleep tracker from the Beddit company “I started a PhD around the methods for measuring the forces that come from cardiac activity coming from outside the body. The field of medical science is called ,” Leppäkorpi tells me. As luck would have it, a lab mate had invented a sensor that worked particularly well for this technique, and the idea for a company was born. Beddit originally planned to market their products to hospital bed manufacturers, but given that this was happening in 2008 and the world was reeling from a financial collapse, the company started looking elsewhere. The company discovered that there was a huge movement where people were interested in quantified self, and that helping sleep better at home was a strong idea. “So far, we have collected over 3 million nights of sleep data, in what is one of the most comprehensive data sets on the topic in the world,” Leppäkorpi explains. The newest version of Beddit — Beddit 3 — comes with a number of new improvements and innovations. The previous version of Beddit needed to be stuck down to the mattress, which worked well, but meant that the installation was semi-permanent. I tried removing a Beddit 2 from a mattress, and you can tell where the strip used to be installed; not great if you live in rented accommodations and you have to explain to the landlord why it looks like you had a strip of tape across your bed. The new version is removable and portable, and moves the electronics away from the sensor strip; instead, the brain of the device lives in the USB plug. Smart, because it means that it becomes easier to move the device, and the installation options are more varied, as well. The USB plug itself also gains temperature and humidity sensors to collect additional data points into sleep research. “Our other big epiphany was that we didn’t just want to track sleep,” Leppäkorpi tells me. “Going forward, there is an opportunity for Beddit to be the Fitbit for sleep. We are making it easier to tag the things you do in life, and it analyzes your sleep against the tags you’ve added, so you can start seeing how the various aspects of your life affect your sleep.” The company is also working with sleep experts who can offer additional insights into why you aren’t sleeping as well as you should be. Beddit 3’s sensor feels and looks like a strip of cloth that runs across your mattress. It tracks respiration rate, heart rate and movement. The final innovation on the new product is the use of a capacitive touch sensor to determine whether you’re in bed or not. “The old automatic tracking didn’t work as well as we hoped,” Leppäkorpi explains, “which means that our customers had to remember to tell our app when they were in bed or not.” Obviously, people were prone to forget, and missed out on valuable data as a result. The new sensor works far more reliably, but can cause some weird side effects. For example, I plugged the sensor into next to my bed (tech journalists, eh?), but there was some sort of weird interference: Whenever I touched my iPhone 7’s home button, it would activate dozens of times per second. Beddit blames the USB power, saying that “disturbance caused by mains hum coupling through B or some near field loop passing switching power frequency,” and suggested I use the included USB power adapter instead. I’ll readily admit to being slightly grumpy about this: Having my sleep monitor taking up a wall socket while I have a perfectly fine USB power socket right next to my bed feels like a step backwards, but maybe that’s something the company can address in a future revision of the product. Either way; Beddit 3 is a huge leap forward from the company’s predecessor. If you have one of the older devices, getting reliable automatic tracking is worth the upgrade, I reckon. And if you don’t, but are planning to start tracking your nocturnal Zs, Beddit is the best solution out there. At it isn’t cheap, but it is undoubtedly a deeply impressive piece of kit. If you’re willing to invest in tracking how much exercise you get, it stands to reason to also figure out which factors have an effect on how much you sleep. In summary, Beddit knows if you’ve been sleeping, and when you’ve been awake. The jury is out on whether it knows if you’ve been bad or good, but be good, for goodness sake.
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Nigeria’s Black Friday sales test the e-commerce models of startups Jumia and Konga
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Jake Bright
| 2,016 | 12 | 2 |
Africa’s two leading e-commerce startups, and , topped their 2015 Black Friday merchandise sales in Nigeria—even as the country weathers currency volatility and recession. The shopping spree of the continent’s most populous nation has become a de facto test event for each venture’s business model. Collectively backed by over $400 million in VC funding, both Konga and Jumia are competing to bring online sales to the masses in a region still lacking many of the requisites for doing e-commerce. Even so, the development of digital shopping is barreling forward while reshaping the consumer landscape in Africa’s largest economy. “Black Friday as an event in Nigeria was actually brought by e-commerce. It’s now become a big adoption campaign,” said Jumia CEO Sacha Poignonnec. “The buzz around online promotions is leading many Nigerians to participate in their first Black Friday sales as they simultaneously make first e-commerce purchases.” While Nigerian Black Friday’s deepest discounts fell on November 25, many online retailers started promos the week before and are extending sales into the December holiday period. Konga launched its —or “utterly falling”—sales campaign on November 18, offering large markdowns on items ranging from microwaves to gaming consoles. The site significantly exceeded its 2015 Black Friday numbers. “Last year we did over 1 billion Naira [ ] in sales for the period. This year for Yakata and the 25th we did 3.5 billion Naira in sales and processed 155,000 total orders,” said Konga CEO Shola Adekoya. While Jumia was not able to provide its exact 2016 Black Friday sales figures, the company expects that it surpassed 2015’s order volume of 140,000 and confirmed 7.5 million website visitors compared to last year’s 2.3 million. To handle the increased Black Friday volume, both Konga and Jumia have been expanding their online, payments, and logistics capabilities since 2012, when both were founded in Nigeria. In Africa’s expanding tech ecosystem, Jumia is perhaps its most recognized startup. Founded by Germany’s Rocket Internet, the company became the continent’s first unicorn in when it surpassed $1 billion in market value after a $326 million funding round including investors AXA, Goldman Sachs and MTN. In addition to big capital, Jumia also has extensive reach. The venture was previously structured as Africa Internet Group (AIG), with Jumia.com as 1 of 11 startups in 23 African countries offering online services ranging from fashion and employment to real estate. The company went through a reorg in June 2016, rebranding AIG to Jumia and streamlining its online companies into : Jumia, Jumia Market, Travel, Food, Deals, House, Jobs, Car, and Jumia Services (a third party logistics provider). Though frequently referred to as Africa’s Amazon.com, Jumia’s business model has developed in distinctly different ways based on the continent’s challenges. Fewer than a quarter of African roads are paved, according to the International Road Federation, and many of Jumia Group’s core markets lack delivery options that are both affordable and reliable. And while smartphone and broadband penetration are rapidly increasing, fewer than a third of Africans have the Internet service needed to order goods and services online. Like its counterpart Konga, to pull off internet sales Jumia has been forced to build much of its e-commerce infrastructure from scratch. This includes founding its own delivery service of drivers, trucks, motorcycles, and pick up stations. On digital payments, Nigeria has seen slower adoption rates than other African countries such as . Thus, Jumia has adapted its own cash on delivery plans and in 2016 launched its digital payments platform. To overcome limited connectivity, Jumia created customer adoption centers where customer service reps help first time e-commerce shoppers place orders on Wi-Fi connected tablets and laptops. Jumia has also opened its site to allow local merchants to sell online through it infrastructure. Many have joined the startup’s direct sales team called JForce. For Black Friday 2016, Jumia offered (and continues to offer) discounts on 40,000 products while extending promotions over 12 days, according to CEO Poignonnec. “We have 13,000 sellers participating. We’re enlisting our delivery service, all our logistics partners, and our JForce agents to make it all happen,” he said. Jumia has also offered free-shipping on orders in Lagos, Nigeria’s largest city. Konga was formed in 2012 by Nigerian Sim Shagaya, a Harvard MBA and Google alum. In a , he shared a vision for the company that channels the continent’s strong trading culture. “Africa does not lack an abundance of people to buy things, sell things, or move them around. What Africa lacks is 21st century operating system to make it all work,” he said. Of Konga’s business model, Shagaya explained, “Our future operating system will be some kind of hybrid of eBay, Uber, and PayPal.” To that view, Konga created its own delivery fleet, , and proprietary third party logistics service, called . The company also launched in 2016, which allows any vendor to generate QR payment codes from mobile phone images to sell products online. In 2016 Shola Adekoya took over as CEO, with Shagaya staying on as Chairman of the Board. Though smaller than Jumia in capital ( ) and operating countries (Nigeria for now, with expansion plans) Konga also draws Amazon comparisons. “When people say ‘you will be the next Amazon, next eBay’ my general response is ‘no’ we will be Konga,” said Adekoya. He notes the startup’s work to become less direct retailer and more of a fee and commission based payments, warehousing, and logistics platform for Africa’s buyers and sellers. “Our job is to make e-commerce as easy as possible for businesses and consumers. Over 90 percent of products sold through Konga now belong to merchants,” said Adekoya. The company has also focused extensively on reducing the time-to-ship and improving the straight through processing of orders to delivery. For Yakata and Black Friday 2016, Konga offered discounts of up to 70 percent across all product categories. Best sellers were smartphones, laptops, tablets, and electronics accessories, according to CEO Adekoya. He also noted that internet traffic over the period was 76 percent mobile and 24 percent desktop with mobile contributing to 50 percent of gross merchandise volume. The popularity of Black Friday in Nigeria supports the value proposition for African e-commerce. Growing workforce age, smartphone connected, and urbanizing populations are expected to boost the continent’s yearly consumer spending above and online sales to , according to McKinsey’s Global Institute. Despite the country’s well-known challenges, e-commerce startups such as Konga and Jumia have adopted Nigeria first growth strategies due to the country’s dual distinctions as Africa’s largest economy and most populous nation, with over 180 million people. Recent tough economic times, connected to a global drop in commodities prices (Nigeria is a major oil exporter) and China’s business slump (one of Nigeria’s major trading partners) did not dissuade Black Friday sales. “It was a tough year. Nigerians were looking forward to and saving up for the gifting season. They understood they’d get more value for their money,” said Konga’s Adekoya. When it comes to evaluating Jumia and Konga as competitors, analysis is somewhat limited by lack of data. The private startups do not release detailed sales or revenue figures. As for Konga’s strategy to compete with Jumia’s size and capital, Adekoya highlighted Konga’s business model and execution, and his view that “for now” the e-commerce market in Nigeria and Africa is big enough for multiple players. “We focus more on efficient capital deployment, less on the competition, and more on the customer experience and building our infrastructure to improve that,” he said. “The ultimate winner will be the player who can satisfy the customer.” Jumia’s Poignonnec seems to agree, “We are competing on customer experience. So we are focused on proving to the customers, not just on price, but the entire experience, that we deserve more of their trust and loyalty.” Future events, such as IPOs, acquisitions, or partnerships could better illuminate which of Africa’s two big e-commerce startups leads in revenue, profitability, and market share. Until then, Alexa rankings provide some indication of traffic and popularity. Currently is ahead as the 6 most visited site in Nigeria compared to ’s rank of 14th. Of course, that could certainly change by Nigeria’s 2017 Black Friday online extravaganza.
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AWS shoots for total cloud domination
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Ron Miller
| 2,016 | 12 | 2 |
AWS held its annual — and as it revealed one new service after another, one thing became clear: the company with a marketshare lead that is by Gartner’s estimate combined, has no plans to slow down or rest on its laurels. If that market lead isn’t enough to shake up the competition, according to data from Gartner, on its servers, as all the other object storage services in their Magic Quadrant combined. All of this is bad news for competitors like IBM, Google and Microsoft (not to mention, Oracle and Alibaba), but AWS isn’t just dominating because it was first (although that’s part of it), it’s also continuing to innovate at an astonishing rate, adding around 1000 new features every single year up from 722 just last year, according to a chart posted by CEO Andy Jassy during his re:Invent keynote. The question is, how does the competition catch up in the face of this market dominance and pure power to innovate? Dharmesh Thakker, a general partner with Battery Ventures says one saving grace is fear of vendor lock-in. Nobody is going to put all their eggs in one basket anymore, nor is he about to dismiss Google or Microsoft just yet, two companies with in the cloud. “Microsoft Azure is a viable contender, and Google certainly knows how to manage infrastructure better than most tech companies, but the gap is significant and only growing by the day,” Thakker told TechCrunch. While Google and Microsoft can use their deep pockets to keep up on the innovation front, it’s harder to overcome the data disparity. “While Microsoft and Google can hire and acquire their way through the software stack to close the gap with AWS, the growing data-gravity gap — the amount of data managed by S3 which natively uses AWS services — will make it very hard for competitors to catch up,” he pointed out. Ray Wang, principal analyst at Constellation Research, isn’t ready to cede the enterprise to AWS just yet. He says that Microsoft and Oracle have a leg up in the enterprise, simply because they are comfortable and familiar, and they have a strong presence already. Moving from on-prem to the cloud with familiar tools is less daunting than moving everything to AWS, in his view. One area where Dan Sholnick, a partner at Trinity Ventures, sees AWS running behind is artificial intelligence, which is part of a huge transformation in how developers will be building software moving forward. The company , but it has a ways to go to catch up with Microsoft and Google, which have a head start in this important area. “Amazon is behind in AI and they know it. They are taking the infrastructure and development underlying [the Amazon Echo] and democratizing it. Amazon is making a big push with Rekognition, Lex and Polly, [services announced this week],” Sholnick said. Of course for every new feature, there is an equal reaction from the competition, regardless of who leads. The question for everyone at this point is can anyone actually catch AWS? It has to be a formidable task, no matter how fast you’re growing. But with an IT infrastructure market potential of $300 billion, nobody is throwing up the white flag just yet. As we’ve learned, things can change quickly in technology, even when there is an obvious and dominant market leader. Just because AWS has a big advantage now, doesn’t mean it always will, but as we saw this week, it shows no signs of slowing down, as it continues to put intense pressure on its competition.
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Emotibot wants to help chatbots know how you really feel
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Darrell Etherington
| 2,016 | 12 | 2 |
Emotional intelligence is a hard thing to achieve, even in humans. But it’s especially difficult in robots, and maybe even more so in chatbots, whose available tools for picking up on emotional cues are quite limited. is a Chinese startup focused on making sure personal assistants, chatbots and virtual customer service agents can accurately understand the emotional state of people they’re dealing with. Having someone respect your emotions while dealing with any kind of customer service interaction, you might know from personal experience, can make a huge difference in quality of service. Bots right now are pretty emotionally stunted; some can crack jokes, pulling from a pre-programmed pool of one-liners, but few, if any, can detect that you might not be in the best of moods for hearing a wisecrack and instead opting for a more sympathetic response. That’s exactly what Emotibot is promising potential customers; a chatbot with tact. To achieve that capacity for social decorum, Emotibot uses inputs include text, audio and visual signs via device camera, or a combination of all three depending on what channels are available. Right now Emotibot offers public-facing apps you can use via WeChat or on Android, to see what their emotional chatbot is capable of. The company’s main business is building custom solutions for clients looking to offer up their own emotionally aware chatbots, however, and they’re targeting all kinds of platforms, from messaging apps, to smart speakers and connected cars. Emotibot claims a 95.63 percent accuracy rate when detecting emotions via visual cues in China, which is industry-leading. Localization is obviously something that takes work with emotion detection, but the company believes its engineering talent is up to the task.
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Jordan Crook
| 2,016 | 12 | 5 | null |
Pandora shares up 11% on acquisition report
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Katie Roof
| 2,016 | 12 | 2 | null |
Facebook blocks links to B.S. Detector, fake news warning plugin
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Taylor Hatmaker
| 2,016 | 12 | 2 |
Not only is Facebook along with links to potentially specious news—it’s now blocking links to the . Over the past week, some Facebook users reported seeing next to links from established fake news domains, apparently without realizing a third party was responsible. We reported this phenomenon, later clarifying that B.S. Detector is in fact a third party plugin that both we and a number of Facebook users mistook as a testing feature. Irony! Now, if you attempt to share a link to on Facebook, you’ll be met with this message. Apparently, blocking fake news (detectors) is quite simple! “I believe they are doing this because of TechCrunch article that came out yesterday, falsely identifying a screenshot of my plugin as a Facebook feature under development,” Daniel Sieradski, design technologist and creator of B.S. Detector, told TechCrunch. “It would seem I’ve caused them some embarrassment by showing them to be full of bull when it comes to their supposed inability to address fake news and they are punishing me for it.” For now, the B.S. Detector plugin itself remains functional, as do links to the plugin on and the . As recently as four hours ago, links to B.S. Detector were functional on the site. https://twitter.com/selfagency/status/804737519720038400 “They could feasibly block the plugin, sure. They just need to counteract it with their own JavaScript or change the way they handle links in their code,” Sieradski said. “If blocking ads doesn’t violate their TOS, why should flagging fake news?” Under considerable duress following the election, Facebook has to combat the myriad forms of fake news that run rampant on its massive social platform. In the meantime, those efforts remain to be seen. We’ve reached out to Facebook for an explanation about the blocked link and will update if we receive a response.
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NFL games come to CBS’s streaming service, starting this Sunday
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Sarah Perez
| 2,016 | 12 | 2 |
CBS this week a significant deal with the NFL that could bring more subscribers to its over-the-top streaming service aimed at cord cutters, CBS All Access. Starting this Sunday, viewers will be able to watch all NFL games on CBS via the service, including regular, preseason, and postseason games. CBS All Access, in case you’re unfamiliar, is the network’s attempt at being its own version of Netflix. Instead of participating in a larger venture like Hulu, CBS wants to go it alone and is betting on exclusive content, like the new TV series, to pull in subscribers. While certainly has a built-in audience, a deal with the NFL could help CBS All Access broaden its reach even further. With the new deal, CBS All Access subscribers will be able to live stream all NFL on CBS games broadcast in their local markets, including Thursday Night Football, as well as pregame and halftime coverage. Of course, given it’s the NFL, there are a few caveats. For starters, the games are only available where CBS offers live broadcasts via its app. However, this is a sizable area already – CBS says coverage is available in over 150 markets across the U.S. For comparison’s sake, when CBS’s live, linear TV feed were available in 94 markets, it said that covered over 60 percent of U.S. households. The more troublesome issue, then, is that you won’t be able to watch the NFL games on mobile. Because of Verizon’s NFL deal, NFL on CBS games are exclusively available through the NFL Mobile app for Verizon Wireless subscribers. That means if you want to watch the games while on the go, you’ll need an iOS, Android or Windows 10 tablet instead. You can also watch online, or via a connected device like Xbox One, Xbox 360, Roku, Apple TV, Chromecast, Android TV, Amazon Fire TV and Fire TV Stick, or PS4. What’s interesting about the CBS deal is that it will improve next season. Then, CBS All Access subscribers (as well as pay TV customers), will be able to stream NFL on CBS content through the NFL’s digital properties. In other words, CBS All Access will work to authenticate you with the NFL’s service, the way your cable TV account once did. In addition to the NFL games, CBS All Access offer over 8,500 TV episodes on-demand, including current and older shows. However, it’s priced fairly high considering the limited content: ad-supported for $5.99 per month or $9.99 per month for the commercial-free tier. At these rates, CBS was taking a risk given the competitive landscape. Sure, audience may be willing to pay, but a service can’t survive off of one hit series alone. Targeting football fans, then, makes sense as another avenue to growth. This could also be why CBS has not done a deal with the newly launched online-only service, DirecTV Now. The new DirecTV Now streaming service from AT&T-owned DirecTV lacks the NFL Sunday Ticket, but will have Fox and NBC games, depending on where you live. It also has ESPN, and regional sports networks 19 MLB teams, 22 NBA teams, and 15 NHL teams. In other words, cord-cutting sports fans may need to combine both services for the broadcast access, or turn to their trusty antenna.
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Amazon isn’t playing nice with Plex’s new cloud service
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Sarah Perez
| 2,016 | 12 | 2 |
Media server software Plex, which helps you organize your own library of movies, TV shows, photos, and music, is now making it easier to access the content you’ve saved on other cloud storage services with an expansion of its Plex Cloud service. The company has added support for online services Google Drive, Dropbox, and Microsoft’s OneDrive – meaning you can stream your content from wherever you already have it saved online. First launched in September, for its new hardware-free media server, Plex Cloud, still in beta. The idea with the service was to eliminate the need to have an always-on PC or some other piece of network-attached drive in order to use Plex’s media player. The move was a significant departure for Plex, which had historically focused on turning a local device into personal media server. For non-technical users, Plex Cloud could be more appealing. They wouldn’t have to worry with installing software locally or organizing their content libraries, but could instead just upload your files to Amazon Cloud Drive, then stream from anywhere using the Plex app. https://youtu.be/DcWK3ealy9Y However, it hasn’t all been smooth sailing, the company admits. It says that it has run into to some “technical challenges” with its Amazon Drive integration which it’s trying to address. Users have been in the that they’ve been unable to upload their files to Amazon’s online service. Some customers suspect that Amazon has placed limits on the uploads – possibly due to how much content some people have been uploading – but Plex staff hasn’t confirmed any details. As TechCrunch’s Matt Burns out before, a partnership between a service like Plex and Amazon could be tricky due to the fact that some Plex users’ libraries contain pirated material – something that Amazon prohibits hosting on its servers. But it’s unclear for now what the exact issue is, as Plex will not say. (It was explained to us as “a wide range of issues – nothing specific.”) Still, it’s not a good look for the new service, which is only available to Plex Pass subscribers (Plex’s paid tier.) And many Plex Cloud beta users signed up for Amazon Cloud Drive – at $60 per year – just to use Plex Pass. In the meantime, Plex hopes that rolling out support for other online storage services will offer a workaround for those affected. Now you can link to Google Drive, Dropbox and OneDrive, and create libraries in Plex with content from any of them. Despite the issues with Amazon, Plex says it expects to start doling out more invites to Plex Cloud beta on December 5th.
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The periodic table gets four new official additions
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Brian Heater
| 2,016 | 12 | 2 |
Nihonium, Moscovium, Tennessine and Oganesson are officially official. This week, the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry added numbers 113, 115, 117 and 118 to the Period table of elements (114 and 116 – Livermorium and Flerovium – were added in 2012). While all of the above were initially synthesized between 2002 and 2010 and officially recognized by the in December of last year, the organization institutes a waiting period as part of the road to tabledom. In June, scientists were asked to submit names for the elements. The past five months were a devoted to an open period in which the public could submit questions about the super-heavy elements. As , the public was also unsurprisingly vocal with the naming conventions, suggesting everything from the Terry Pratchett-inspired “octarine” and “lemmium” in honor of the recently deceased Motorhead frontman (along with “rikenium,” “adamantium” and, yeah, “trumpium”). The final additions were decidedly more diplomatic. Nihonium was inspired by the Japanese word for Japan, Oganesson was named for Russian scientist Yuri Oganessian and Moscovium and Tennessine, which were inspired by a city and a state, respectively. The new elements will fill out the table’s seventh row, sporting the symbols Nh, Mc, Ts and Og.
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iStockNow tells you which Apple Stores have AirPods in stock right now
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Fitz Tepper
| 2,016 | 12 | 20 |
One of the best things about Apple’s retail strategy is that when it comes to inventory, they don’t ignore their brick-and-mortar stores like some other retailers do. So while the initial inventory of a product like AirPods may sell out online within minutes of going up on Apple’s site, you can typically count on Apple’s retail stores to carry stock on launch day. This was the case with AirPods – most Apple stores in the U.S had them yesterday – but they quickly sold out. So the issue is figuring out which stores have them in stock, especially since you can’t call Apple stores directly anymore. Enter . The site gives you live inventory updates for all major Apple products at every Apple Store around the world. While this information is available on Apple’s website, there’s no way to see it on a map view or check multiple stores at once – hence the helpfulness of iStockNow. The website has been around for a while, but is becoming useful again because of how hard it is to find AirPods. The site also shows stock of iPhones, MacBooks, Apple Watches – and the DJI Mavic, which joins AirPods as being the hardest gadget to find this holiday season. For things like iPhones and MacBooks you can filter by storage size, color, etc – which is also helpful when trying to find the exact device you want at a local store. The website refreshes whenever Apple’s inventory on their website updates, which seems to be each night sometime after midnight PT. While the website currently shows that no stores in the U.S have AirPods, keep checking frequently and you may see a local store turn green. If they do, you can order them on Apple’s website for in-store pickup. Oh, and the site also says they are working on free notifications, which would presumably let you select your local store and get an email when the item you are looking for is in stock. We have one thing in the works right now that’s notifications and it’s coming for free (as it used to be). cc — iStockNowCom (@istocknowcom)
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Crunch Report | Cyclists Don’t Like Uber’s Self-Driving Cars
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Khaled "Tito" Hamze
| 2,016 | 12 | 20 |
Tito Hamze, John Mannes
Tito Hamze
Joe Zolnoski
Joe Zolnoski TechCrunch C/O Tito Hamze
410 Townsend street
Suite 100
San Francisco Ca. 94107
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Uber, California DMV and Attorney General’s office to meet on Wednesday
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Darrell Etherington
| 2,016 | 12 | 20 |
Uber is going to meet with California’s Department of Motor Vehicles and the state’s Attorney General’s office on Wednesday afternoon, as first reported by and confirmed by TechCrunch via the DMV. The meeting’s specific purpose wasn’t shared, but it’s definitely going to involve discussions around the company’s deployment of self-driving Uber SUVs in San Francisco. The DMV could not provide any further info or details about the meeting to TechCrunch, but did say that lawyers from the state Attorney General’s office would be meeting with “representatives” from both Uber and the motor vehicle regulatory agency. Uber and the DMV have been trading statements in the press since Uber originally began its self-driving vehicle service (which uses semi-autonomous test cars with safety drivers and engineers on board) on December 14. Uber did not seek a self-driving test permit from the DMV, and instead argued that its cars did not require this clearance because its vehicles are not truly autonomous yet, and require drivers at the wheel at all times. The DMV responded requiring that Uber fulfill its permitting requirement, as have 20 other companies testing autonomous tech on state roads, and the California Attorney General’s Office , noting that Uber would face legal repercussions, including potential injunctions, if it did not comply. A meeting between the three could result in some kind of détente to the current stand-off, wherein Uber is continuing to operate its cars in clear defiance of the DMV and Attorney General’s requests. As Josh pointed out earlier today, this could all be a to distract from more fundamental questions, and, if so, we might indeed see a more peaceable agreement prevail after Wednesday’s meeting.
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Turkey maintains Tor block, flicks social networks offline for 12 hours
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Taylor Hatmaker
| 2,016 | 12 | 20 |
In light of the assassination of , Turkey further tightened its already restrictive limits on certain forms of internet use. The most recent censorship thrust followed the revelation that the state within its borders. Turkey appears to have clamped down on social app use for a roughly 12-hour period following the international incident. According to an update on , an organization that monitors real-time censorship data in the country, starting around 8:45 p.m. local time “[the] monitoring network detected severe slowdowns affecting Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and WhatsApp for some, but not all, internet users in Turkey.” The restriction appears to have mostly blocked the social networks listed above, with Turkish ISP TTNet and mobile internet providers remaining unrestricted. “The blocks have been lifted as of just around 6 a.m. local time the morning after the assassination,” TurkeyBlocks founder Alp Toker told TechCrunch via email. “This social media shutdown was unusual — though there was an official broadcast ban, some operators didn’t implement the block so their users could still get through the whole time. That could be down to an administrative error in implementing the ban, or even a refusal to comply, say due to contention about Russia’s role in Syria — we don’t really know at this point.” Confirmed: Social media slowdown for many users detected in after ambassador shooting broadcast ban — Turkey Blocks (@TurkeyBlocks) According to Toker, such a refusal wouldn’t be without precedent. During the 2016 , provider Turkcell claims to have resisted government demands to restrict its services. Previously, Tor provided one of the most useful workarounds for intrepid Turkish citizens looking for access and anonymity. Now, unfettered online access will be limited to those able to circumvent the state’s crackdown on Tor and VPNs. Custom VPN deployments and Tor bridge relays appear to remain viable for now. The Turkish government has a nasty habit of clamping down on social networks around major political events. In 2014, Turkish authorities blocked Twitter for a two-week period that only ended when a court ruling deemed the actions . In 2014 and 2015, Turkey cut access to social networks . In 2016, Turkey appears to be more comfortable than ever with short, strategic social app blackouts that usually last less than 24 hours. If history is any guide, Turkey may continue to ramp up its digital censorship, cutting access to chat services like WhatsApp on top of the VPN block. “Everything we’ve seen suggests the Tor/VPN block is here to stay, not a measure that gets switched on or off at request… So that’s a pretty serious escalation,” Toker said. “It’s when the two are combined that Turkey gets a potent new capability to restrict the flow of information as desired far more effectively than in the past. And it gets to collect more surveillance data on websites visited etc. which has reportedly been used to arrest alleged coupists and opposition group members in the ongoing crackdown.” If you’re in Turkey and need a solution, we’d recommend our guide on . With Tor off the table, it’s possible that some of the other loopholes still work, but it’s likely a matter of trial and error.
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BMW to open a new autonomous driving development center near Munich
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Darrell Etherington
| 2,016 | 12 | 20 |
BMW has already staked its claim in the self-driving production timeline, with plans to release an autonomous electric car by 2021. To help meet that goal, the carmaker is aimed at developing connected and automated driving tech in Unterschleissheim, Germany near Munich. The facility is designed to begin operations in mid-2017, and will host more than 2,000 employees once it’s fully completed. All aspects of development, all the way up to road tests, are planned for the new facility. The talent team at the location will pool a number of different groups from around the world, bringing together software engineers, machine learning specialists and more under one roof. BMW notes that this will make it possible to streamline the development process for its vehicles, allowing engineers to write code and then put it live in a test vehicle on location for instant trial and feedback. BMW’s focus here appears to be on making its tech-focused development teams nimbler and more responsive. Other automakers and suppliers have already taken similar steps, with many choosing to open engineering facilities in Silicon Valley in order to be closer to software development talent pools. Meanwhile, North American car companies like GM, which has a few different venues for its work on self-driving, including Detroit and Oshawa, are sticking closer to home. BMW’s testing of its automated driving tech is currently set to begin near its new facility in Munich, with a target kick-off date of sometime in 2017.
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The White House’s report on AI and the economy warns of increasing inequality
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Devin Coldewey
| 2,016 | 12 | 20 |
The White House has issued a sequel to on how the U.S. should approach artificial intelligence and its effects on various groups and institutions. focuses on the potential economic effects of AI, and while it’s far from a dark outlook, it does warn that with improper handling, automation could drive further inequality in this already deeply divided country. “You look at the last couple decades, we have seen an increase in inequality,” said Jason Furman, Chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers, on a press call discussing the paper. “In part that increase has been because of a technological fact: that technological innovation, more recently, has helped complement people with higher skills. So we now have a few decades of experience with technology helping to contribute to inequality.” AI, the report suggests, will continue this trend, and as such, requires the kind of proactive accommodation as other technologies, like those made for mobile phones and the internet. Three general strategies are suggested for making the inevitable automation of millions of jobs less impactful on the people doing those jobs. The report from October addresses this in more detail, but generally the government must be wary that it doesn’t fall behind other countries or private companies in its husbandry of this nascent technology. Diversity is encouraged in the report as an essential ingredient in problem-solving and planning, and algorithmic bias is mentioned in particular as a challenge to be overcome. I asked for more details on this last goal and whether any official best practices or guidelines would be forthcoming. “We’ve called for the inclusion of ethics in data science and computer science education to make sure that the technical professionals who are making these decisions are aware of the implications of what they’re doing and are equipped with tools to address these issues,” replied the Office of Science and Technology Policy’s Ed Felton, “but we don’t see this as an area for aggressive new government action.” While careful not to throw the country completely under the bus, the report is unsparing in describing the current plight of some aspects of the American educational system. If the United States fails to improve at educating children and retraining adults with the skills needed in an increasingly AI-driven economy, the country risks leaving millions of Americans behind and losing its position as the global economic leader. The report does crow a bit about the (considerable) accomplishments of the current administration in modernizing schools and curricula, but warns that failing to double down on this could have grave long-term repercussions. Training programs to put displaced workers back in the mix are also needed, but the U.S. spends far less than its contemporaries on them: The report recommends multiplying current spending by a factor of six. If workers have the opportunity to retrain and find a new job, they’ll take advantage of it. But naturally, that won’t happen if there are no such programs, and we’ll have no one to blame but ourselves when unemployment rises. With a new technology threatening to produce huge numbers of displaced workers, it behooves us to invest in unemployment and healthcare to make sure these people can stay on their feet while finding or training for the next opportunity. Ensuring that the existing protections are compatible with the increasingly populous gig economy is one specific recommendation, for instance, but unemployment benefits must also be made compatible with the prospect of extensive retraining programs. Wage insurance could make it more attractive for an expert in a deprecated field to take a lower-level job in an emerging field. Basic changes to labor practices are also recommended, not exactly as a response to AI but as a response to the inequality it may engender. Higher minimum wages, modern rules on overtime and benefits, accommodation of unions and so on. One other warning the report gives, though it isn’t attached to any recommendation in particular, is this: The winner-take-most nature of information technology markets means that only a few may come to dominate markets. If labor productivity increases do not translate into wage increases, then the large economic gains brought about by AI could accrue to a select few. In other words, if we don’t make sure that AI is working for everybody, you can be damn sure a handful of people are going to make it work for . Let’s try to avoid that. .
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With a bet on diversity, Blizzard reveals Overwatch’s queer character
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Taylor Hatmaker
| 2,016 | 12 | 20 |
After months of , Blizzard finally revealed which member of Overwatch’s colorful cast of characters counts themselves part of the LGBTQ community. The much-anticipated reveal came in a centered around Tracer, the spritely Londoner with gravity-defying hair who proved to be an early fan favorite and the literal face of the game. The comic, “Reflections,” is issue No. 10 in the ongoing series. Each issue reveals a bit more about the back story of one of its 23 playable hero characters. Blizzard played its cards right in “Reflections,” eschewing a heavy-handed coming out story for a wholesome last-minute holiday shopping blitz that ends in a queer kiss between the speedy character and a cute redhead in a not-that-ugly Christmas sweater. To its credit, Blizzard even tossed in a family moment to subvert the usual awkward narrative around queer people moping alone in existential abandonment for the holidays. Naturally, the eminently wholesome story is already because gay people are bad (duh) and should definitely never be depicted exchanging thoughtful Christmas gifts. Overwatch players go wild for this stuff, and with good reason: Blizzard clearly dedicates significant resources into developing a ton of free, high-quality companion content that is ultimately just a perk for dedicated fans. Even a cursory dip into Tumblr is usually enough to reveal what hero pairing fans are shipping that week and a massive undercurrent of fan art crafting alternate realities for the well-loved characters. Sorry, fans — looks like she’s taken. Lore and fan service are two of the things Blizzard does best, which is pretty much necessary if you’re going to keep a character-driven game alive and kicking for . With and a promising first year, Blizzard is all-in on making Overwatch the next big e-sports phenomenon. But that player base is just a sliver of the whole, albeit a lucrative one. With Overwatch, Blizzard clearly has its eyes on a bigger piece of a much bigger pie than your usual military shooter. While character choices around marginalized identities are positive PR for a consciously inclusive game, as a casual gay Overwatch player (both casual player and casually gay), I thought the reveal managed to avoid nearly every bad queer trope and hit the right notes. Even as the appeal to a broader base lines Blizzard’s pockets, I must reluctantly admit that my heart was indeed briefly warmed before returning to its normal state of solid ice. To keep the casual players coming back, and to expand the game’s appeal well outside the bounds of a Call of Duty-style first-person shooter, Blizzard has built out a deliberately international parallel story universe for its diverse band of characters, who hail from an array of (only sometimes ) cultures. Out of 23 characters, nine are non-white. Beyond its heroes of color, Overwatch is marketing to another swath of the population so often ignored: 10 of the game’s heroes are female, and only one serves the hackneyed gaming role of a white priestess/angel lady. The Tracer nod to the queer community shouldn’t hurt either — after all, the LGBTQ community boasted a collective in disposable personal income in 2015. In spite of around the reveal, a vocal cross section of Overwatch’s community — much like (/eyeroll) — remains grumpily averse to not-straight-white-dudes all up in their game. But like, that’s super dumb. Deal with it. Of course, you can play the game and not pay attention to the lore; it is a first-person shooter, after all. Whether you’re a Tumblr fan art virtuoso or an elite e-sports mechanical master, Blizzard is happy to keep building the game you’ve always wanted — as long as you keep coming back for more.
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Natasha Lomas
| 2,016 | 12 | 2 | null |
Nielsen will acquire Tribune-owned Gracenote for $560M
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Anthony Ha
| 2,016 | 12 | 20 |
Tribune Media Company today that it has agreed to sell (which provides metadata around TV, music and other media) to Nielsen. Gracenote says it provides the data for 12 million movie and TV listings and more than 200 million music tracks. It was first in 2008, then (not to be confused with its spinoff Tribune Publishing, ) in 2014. “Nielsen is a natural home for Gracenote,” said Gracenote CEO John Batter in the acquisition release. “Both companies have entertainment data at their core and have spent years delivering services to the world’s top media brands. Bringing together our data for driving discovery and tune-in with Nielsen’s deep insights about what people are watching, listening to and buying makes a formidable combination.” The deal is for $560 million in cash and is expected to close in the first quarter of 2017.
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Automakers aren’t really advertising electric vehicles
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Kristen Hall-Geisler
| 2,016 | 12 | 20 |
There are more plug-in vehicles available now than there were a decade ago, and the sales of those vehicles are growing. are up about a third this year over last year, and November 2016 marked 14 consecutive months of record-setting EV sales in the U.S. And yet the grand total of all plug-in vehicles sold in the U.S. in 2016 (not counting December) was just shy of 134,000. The total number of light-duty vehicles (cars, pickup trucks, SUVs, etc.) sold in alone was 1.38 million — 10 times the EVs sold over a period of 11 months. One reason EVs aren’t selling might be that they’re not being advertised. The commissioned a study that tracked automotive advertising in 2015. The result in a nutshell: manufacturers advertise for their gasoline-powered vehicles far more than for their electric-powered cars. In a stark example, in 2015, Ford advertised the gas-powered Focus about 4,750 times to a national audience on tier-1 cable and broadcast TV channels. It advertised the electric-powered Focus about 200 times to a national TV audience. The Mercedes-Benz C-Class small gas-powered sedan was advertised about 1,400 times nationally, while the B-class EV got no national advertising time at all that year. Nissan fared a little better in the results. Sort of. The gasoline-only Sentra was advertised 3,500 times nationally over the year, while the electric-only LEAF was advertised about 1,700 times — but only in California. But the Sentra was only advertised in California markets a couple hundred times, so markets matter. In California, there are 22 electric models at dealerships, but in other states . The next best markets for EVs offer 14 different models; a half dozen states have zero EV models available at dealerships. In some cases, it hardly matters if car makers advertise for these cars. found that even if there are EVs at dealerships, they sometimes weren’t even charged up enough to test drive. Tesla is at the top of this heap, as you’d expect. It only sells electric cars, it sells the most electric cars and its salespeople are knowledgeable about EVs. Also, they have charged cars to test drive. Maybe the introduction of the and plug-in hybrid minivan will change the advertising landscape next year. Maybe the following California’s zero-emissions vehicles (ZEV) standards will convince auto manufacturers to advertise their plug-in cars. Electric vehicles don’t work everywhere for everyone, but they work in a lot of places for a lot of people. Maybe that’s all the ads have to say to convince skeptical buyers to test drive a EV.
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Cloud security vendor Zscaler bats away patent infringement lawsuit
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Connie Loizos
| 2,016 | 12 | 20 |
, one of the world’s largest cybersecurity companies, closed its giant acquisition of Blue Coat Systems , ushering in a new regime under incoming CEO Greg Clark. He hasn’t wasted much time in disparaging upstarts in the market, either, including the well-funded, venture-backed companies , and . Now, lawsuits may be next. To wit, Symantec last week against one of its partners, , saying the cloud security vendor has infringed on seven of its patents, including around web security and threat prevention. Symantec didn’t inform Zscaler about the suit in advance of going public with it, evidently. In a to the outlet CRN, Zscaler’s chief legal officer said Zscaler “learned of Symantec’s lawsuit from their press release issued earlier this afternoon and [we] are in the very early stages of assessing their claims. While we are unable to comment on the merits of their claims at this time, we defend ourselves vigorously against lawsuits of this nature.” Zscaler has since begun reaching out individually to customers to tell them the suit is little more than a bullying tactic that won’t impact its business, shows a letter authored by Zscaler CEO Jay Chaudhry and obtained by TechCrunch earlier today. The nine-year-old company declined to comment on the letter or when, exactly, it was authored, but it reads: What follows next in this particular fight remains to be seen, but muscle flexing is a strategy that worked for Clark at Blue Coat, which he led from 2011 through its sale to Symantec. As he recently told CRN, by October, he’d already set up “war rooms” at Symantec akin to units he’d set up at Blue Coat to “put the lights out on everyone in that sector.” Clark added in that same interview, “We intend to deliver a similar situation as we integrate Blue Coat and Symantec and get going.” At a public speaking event in L.A. this fall, Clark surprised some when he told the crowd that “Cylance and some of the others have got some better marketing at the moment. We are working to change that. You will see a sea change in our market.” At that same event, he called Carbon Black and Tanium “trendy” and warned potential customers that each company addresses just one aspect of endpoint security. Zscaler has raised roughly $150 million from investors. Its backers include TPG and Lightspeed Venture Partners. The company in August of last year that it anticipated going public within 12 to 24 months.
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Greylock just hired Josh McFarland, who sold his Greylock-backed company to Twitter
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Connie Loizos
| 2,016 | 12 | 20 |
James Slavet says he has been trying to recruit entrepreneur Josh McFarland for eight years. That’s just two years after Slavet joined the early-stage venture firm as a partner in 2006. Apparently, Slavet’s charm offensive is finally paying off. The firm is announcing today that McFarland is becoming Greylock’s 10th partner. (There are now 19 people altogether on its investing staff.) It’s not such a giant leap for McFarland, who knows the firm well. When Greylock first approached him years ago, he was a product manager at Google. At the time, he was less interested in becoming a junior VC than in starting a company of his own, so Greylock invited him to become an entrepreneur-in-residence. Not long after, he and Mark Ayzenshtat — another senior software engineer brought in from Google to become an EIR — co-founded TellApart, an adtech company that sold to Twitter in April of last year for . It had raised just less than $18 million from investors. Ayzenshtat began spending time as an entrepreneur-in-residence at beginning in 2014. McFarland has meanwhile stayed put at Twitter, serving as its VP of product and doing a limited amount of angel investing. In fact, according to Greylock, McFarland will stay at Twitter until the end of the first quarter, at which point he’ll become a VC with the firm full-time. As for what comes immediately afterward, Slavet says that Greylock encourages new partners to spend time with other experienced partners, collaborating on new investments and helping existing portfolio companies. “Given Josh’s experience as an operator and his history with Greylock,” Slavet adds, “we anticipate that he’ll get up to speed quickly.” Greylock partner Josh Elman was also a product manager at Twitter before joining Greylock in 2011. He joined as a principal; he was promoted to partner in 2013.
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How Google’s Search business and humanity’s information is disappearing
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Steve Newcomb
| 2,016 | 12 | 20 |
Search, Google’s crown jewel, and humanity’s way of finding the world’s information, has big problems. These problems threaten the internet as we know it; if they’re allowed to continue developing, unchecked, the consequences will be far-reaching and severe. Collectively, these threats are called Dark Matter. Dark Matter is the information on the internet that search engines cannot see, index or search, and the more Dark Matter there is, the darker Google’s future. It’s the stuff buried within apps, social networks and single-page architectures. What makes Dark Matter so dangerous and difficult to stop is that the technology responsible for it is has also become essential to modern life. If its growth continues unchecked, Dark Matter could eclipse discoverable information, which would not only destroy Google’s Search, it could take the world’s information and lock it away inside private internet fiefdoms. Do we know how much Dark Matter exists? Like its astrophysical namesake, it’s difficult to tell directly. But we can measure Dark Matter’s impact on adjacent internet markets. For example, when you take a look at search advertising revenue, the problem becomes illuminated in shocking clarity. Ever since its inception in the late 1990s, Search has grabbed an ever-increasing share of digital advertising revenue. But in 2016, the IAB dropped a bombshell: It reported that , while . Something dramatic has changed. Social networks have extraordinary reach on the web — has at least one social network account. And the amount of content contributed to the social web is staggering. , almost 4 million posts are made to Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, and 400 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube. During that minute, Google processes 3 million searches. Those social networks are privately controlled. While Facebook is currently searchable, Mark Zuckerberg could decide, at any given moment, to make Facebook and Instagram’s content unavailable to external search engines, instantly transforming an enormous area of the web into Dark Matter. Google could choose to restrict YouTube results to its own engine. Twitter could keep individual tweets from appearing in SERPs. Each of these social platforms has the potential to become its own private internet. And how does the concept of a private internet play out? We are learning more, in light of the 2016 presidential election, of the existence of , which encourage unprecedented levels of confirmation bias, both in social media and search. That problem will only be exacerbated with the expansion of Dark Matter. Apps have defined the modern, mobile lifestyle. The problem is, they are totally separate from the searchable web as a matter of course. Apps came about in response to technology constraints on the first iPhone. They have developed into the central theme of this technological zeitgeist. Search crawlers have no access to the compiled code of native apps, which lives outside of mobile browsers. The content within apps is unavailable to search engines as a result of their construction. So with only a few exceptions, the information you enter into your phone is all Dark Matter. And consumers spend , trapping more and more of their connected lives in these disconnected islands. We’re sticking with policies that took hold in 2007. Since then, mobile browsers and devices have become significantly more powerful, and connection speeds have skyrocketed. So why haven’t we moved beyond the limitations of the native app? The web’s alternatives to native apps do little to solve the problem. The web is replete with single-page sites and web apps. While minimalist single-page executions can be beautiful, and have become wildly popular (despite some in the ) they, like native apps, also exist within their own unsearchable bubbles. That’s because the indexable data within single-page apps do not exist as searchable HTML files, it sits behind executable JavaScript code — and that’s meaningless to a traditional search crawler. Well, not quite. Google has updated its crawler technology so that it can see the data behind the JavaScript. The problem is, you have to build your site the way Google wants you to. And that’s one bridge too far for many companies. But where does that leave other Search providers, or single-page apps built on other technology? Where does that leave the users who want to use alternative engines, like Bing or DuckDuckGo? There are obvious benefits to single-page designs — like user-friendliness and reduced queries to servers — but are those benefits worth the loss of SEO-ability? If you abstract out these issues, you can see where this is going. Search — the core of our internet and the current information paradigm humanity relies on — will collapse under the weight of Dark Matter. As I see it, we have two options: Which scenario is best is a function of who you ask. But when will we know who won? Despite what popular media might suggest, many paradigm shifts don’t happen in a single, pivotal, “eureka” moment. They are evolutions, not events. They’re at the culmination of many years’ worth of work done by many great minds all contributing to the human effort to eventually solve an enormous problem. The echelon of innovations that lead to a lasting solution, which calls the adjacent possible, will be the battlefields that will shed light on who is winning the fight to control the future of information. Over the next decade, it will be a Game of Thrones amongst the Great Houses of Tech: Will Google retain the throne? Or will we see the fall of House Google, followed by a crowning of many kings?
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Twitter’s CTO Adam Messinger is leaving the company along with VP of product Josh McFarland
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Matthew Lynley
| 2,016 | 12 | 20 |
Twitter CTO Adam Messinger, who has been the company’s CTO for almost four years and with the company for five years, said today he was leaving the company. Twitter VP of product Josh McFarland is . Messinger made the announcement in — no surprise — a tweet: After 5 years I’ve decided to leave Twitter and take some time off. Grateful to for the opportunity and to my team for shipping. — Adam Messinger (@adam_messinger) So, in short, the round robin at Twitter’s top echelon continues. Last month, COO as Anthony Noto took over. And now Twitter has lost another pair of top executives. Beyond that, earlier this month Twitter’s director of media partnerships and head of news, government and elections Adam Sharp . Amid all this chaos, sudden changes at the top — which, for Twitter, seems like a regular event at this point — can lead to equal confusion down the ranks, especially as Twitter tries to remake itself into something a little less confusing to attract new users. While Twitter over the years has shored up its reliability (when’s the last time you saw the fail whale?) it still needs to figure out how to keep the upper ranks constant if it’s going to portray an image of stability for current and potential employees. While departures like Messinger’s aren’t all that uncommon — especially for executives who have been in those positions for a long time, it’s still happening at a rough time in Twitter’s history. Twitter is no stranger to executive departures, but at this moment it’s when the company is reeling from talks of an acquisition falling apart and the company having to figure out how to continue running as an independent company. It also comes at a time when, while the company was able to deliver some much-needed solid results, it in October. Twitter had a several-month saga of trying to sell itself to a variety of suitors, including Salesforce, which shortly before the company reported its Q3 results. McFarland, meanwhile, was VP of product for nine months and was at the company for around two years after Twitter acquired TellApart. That role has been an even more notorious round-robin, especially as Twitter has tried to figure out how to make the service more attractive and continue to grow — and convince Wall Street that it can last as an independent company. And the continued decline of Twitter’s stock, which the company very actively uses to attract and compensate talent, isn’t helping either. The company’s stock, since Dorsey took over a little more than a year ago, has in particular not done well: [graphiq id=”jZchBpaL3KJ” title=”Twitter Inc. (TWTR) Stock Price – 1 Year” width=”600″ height=”459″ url=”https://sw.graphiq.com/w/jZchBpaL3KJ” link=”http://stock-screener.findthecompany.com/l/8469/TWTR” link_text=”FindTheCompany | Graphiq” frozen=”true”] Here’s how the rest of the changes will shake down, : Twitter’s heads of product, design and engineering will be reporting directly to CEO Jack Dorsey, while VP of engineering Edward Ho will take over Messinger’s duties and also report to Dorsey. The Times is also reporting that he will not be heading to a competing social networking company.
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You won’t be able to fix Apple AirPods yourself and you probably shouldn’t try
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Greg Kumparak
| 2,016 | 12 | 20 |
When it comes to headphones — particularly those of the in-ear variety — DIY repairs are generally a no-go. If it’s a frayed wire shorting out, sure, grab your soldering iron and get to tinkering… but if it’s anything more complicated than that, you’re probably looking at buying a new pair. It’s no surprise, then, that Apple’s itty-bitty wireless in-ear AirPods aren’t something that you’ll have any luck patching up yourself. Even if you get them apart, they’re never going back together the same way. iFixit got their hands on a pair of AirPods and immediately started gutting them, as they do with just about every major gadget release. Even with a deep knowledge of how these things tend to fit together, they weren’t able to get the AirPods disassembled without a fight. “The earbud is a hot mess of cables and adhesive,” they write “and none of it seems particularly keen on coming out.” Things got particularly iffy once iFixit started cracking away at the AirPod charging case, at which point they needed a Dremel and dental tools to get to the bottom of things. Fortunately, iFixit brought back a ton of awesome photos to sate your curiosity — including an xray shot of the charging case, showing off what it looks like inside sans destruction. For anyone who might have gotten here by Googling “How to fix broken Apple Airpod” while standing over an AirPod and a pile of tools, let it be known: don’t do it. If you want to gut it for the sake of curiosity, go ahead — just know that it’s an autopsy, not a rescue mission. iFixit’s final “repairability” score comes in at 0/10, a score they generally reserve for devices that fall in the “Don’t even try fixing it.” category. Care more about how the headphones perform day-to-day as opposed to how they’ll do under the knife? Check out .
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Honda’s CES teaser reveals community car smarts, personal mobility plans
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Darrell Etherington
| 2,016 | 12 | 20 |
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z-XMA6YAh5c&w=680] Honda is going to reveal a number of announcements around its forthcoming “cooperative mobility ecosystem” at this year’s CES in January, and the car maker just dropped a teaser to preview some of what it’s going to talk about. Three new features are teased in the short video, including “Safe Swarm,” a trademark Honda applied for in November this year. It looks likely to be some form of vehicle-to-vehicle communication network that will let cars more safely negotiate roads with shared info, but it’s hard to tell from the graphics how this will work exactly. The second tease is Uni-Cub, which looks to be a personal mobility transportation device for individual use. This is also a big area for automakers in general now, who are looking to address personal transit as a way to capture more of the aging population market. Hyundai it plans to demo at CES earlier this week. Finally, the teaser shows its NeuV concept vehicle, which the carmaker revealed earlier this month will be the first automated commuter EV design with an artificial intelligence “emotion engine” on board. The concept design has been made in tandem with the company behind Pepper, the service bot with AI interaction onboard. Sounds like Honda will have a lot of future-focused announcements to make at the annual consumer electronics show, but the interesting question will be how far out this future actually is.
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I blame all of us for this terrible trailer for The Emoji Movie
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Darrell Etherington
| 2,016 | 12 | 20 |
Listen, it’s not only your fault that The Emoji Movie is a thing that exists; but you’re at least partly to blame. And so am I. We all have to deal with the fact that this movie got greenlit because of what we’ve done. Your first act of penance is to watch the above. Then, watch it again – that’s no less than we deserve.
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Moth eyes inspired the design of this hypersensitive camera
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Devin Coldewey
| 2,016 | 12 | 20 |
If you wanted to see in the dark, you could do worse than follow the example of moths, which have of course made something of a specialty of it. That, at least, is what NASA researchers did when that will capture the faintest features in the galaxy. This biomimetic “bolometer detector array,” as the instrument is called, is part of the Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy, or . This ongoing mission uses a custom 747 to fly at high altitudes, where observations can be made of infrared radiation that would otherwise be blocked by the water in our atmosphere. But even the infrared that does make it here is pretty faint, so you want to capture every photon you can get. The team, led by Christine Jhabvala and Ed Wollack at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, originally looked into carbon nanotubes, which have many desirable properties. But they didn’t quite fit the bill. The eye of the common moth, however — or at least, a design inspired by it — did what the latest nanomaterial didn’t. Insects’ eyes are of course very different from our own, essentially composed of hundreds or thousands of tiny lenses that refract an image onto their own dedicated photosensitive surface at the base of a column or ommatidia. In moths, this surface is also covered in microscopic, tapered columns or spikes. These have the effect of preventing light from bouncing back out, ensuring a greater proportion of it is detected. The team replicated this design in silicon, and you can see the result at top. Each spike is carefully engineered to reflect light downwards and retain it, making the High-Resolution Airborne Wideband Camera-plus, or HAWC+, one of the most sensitive instruments out there. Funnily enough, the sensor they modified was originally called the backshort under-grid sensor — BUGS. HAWC+ not only pulls in light from the far end of the infrared spectrum, but measures its polarity. This means the slightest changes in the light’s nature or origin will be detected. Dim features and events like early star formation and the black hole at the center of the galaxy can be observed more closely than ever before. “You can be inspired by something in nature, but you need to use the tools at hand to create it. It really was the coming together of people, machines, and materials. Now we have a new capability that we didn’t have before,” said Wollack in a NASA news release. “This is what innovation is all about.” SOFIA is underway, but the new sensor was just commissioned, so it’ll be a while before it can be built to spec and integrated with the rest of the platform. You can keep up with it and the rest of the observatory’s science .
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Facebook Live Audio makes talk radio social, starting with the BBC
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Josh Constine
| 2,016 | 12 | 20 |
Book readings, interviews, and news radio are coming to Facebook thanks to its new feature launching today with a few publishers and authors before opening up next year. A complement to its Facebook Live video streaming, it could bring audio-first content like podcasts to the News Feed, and provide a low-bandwidth real-time broadcasting options to publishers in low-connectivity areas. The first publishers with access will be (news radio), (Leading Britain’s Conversation talk radio), (book publisher), and authors ( pop psychology), and (fiction addressing race). Facebook writes “Early next year, we plan to make this new format more broadly available to publishers and people.” In case you want to keep browsing while you listen, Android users will be able to close Facebook and use any other app while Live Audio keeps playing. iOS users can only browse the rest of Facebook with the stream running, while opening another app will cut the sound. “We know that sometimes publishers want to tell a story on Facebook with words and not video” Facebook tells me. When publishers create a stream, they can either use their Page’s cover image as the default Live Audio image in the News Feed, or upload a different one. will be sent to a Page’s Live subscribers, and some of their most active followers. Broadcasts have a nice, long limit of four hours so they should accommodate a wide range of content, such as: Facebook has been rapidly expanding its real-time content offering. After rolling out Live video at the end of 2015, last week it beta launched and to the News Feed. Facebook’s engineering might may allow it to leap-frog Twitter, which got its Periscope acquisition launched before Facebook Live, but has stagnated since. Between being a free streaming format, and the traffic that Facebook can drive, Live Audio could appeal to a wide range of publishers. And for average users who have something to say but are camera-shy, Live Audio reduces the friction to becoming a broadcaster.
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7-Eleven delivers 77 packages via drone in first month of routine service
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Darrell Etherington
| 2,016 | 12 | 20 |
In the most brand synergistic accomplishment of all time, convenience chain 7-Eleven has completed 77 drone deliveries during month one of its commercial service in Reno, Nevada. Yes, that’s Triple 7s in America’s Other Big Gambling Town. The drone service is operated by Flirtey, a commercial drone service provider startup that started working with 7-Eleven on a commercial launch back in July. November was the first month that the Flirtey + 7-Eleven combo provided regular commercial service, sending out packages on the weekend to a group of 12 special customers who got to use the drone-on-demand offering via a custom app created for the purpose. The app allowed users to pick from their inventory, and then offered notifications along the delivery’s journey, starting when it was loaded and ending at when it landed on their doorstep. Items available included both hot and cold food, and over-the-counter medicines, according to a , which were transported in a Flirtey-made drone-mounted cargo container. The drones lowered these to the ground while hovering when they arrived at a customer destination, and most of the deliveries took less than 10 minutes from when they were ordered to putting the products in customer hands. Truth be told, I could go for a taquito or some daytime cold medicine right now, and it’s freezing out so I definitely see how this service is winning some fans among early customers. Flirtey and the convenience chain say they’re expanding service areas in 2017, so maybe I’ll get my wish by this time next year.
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Uber brilliantly sets self-driving battle at permission, not existence
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Josh Constine
| 2,016 | 12 | 20 |
Should Uber’s self-driving taxis be allowed on the road? If Uber’s shrewd strategy plays out, we’ll never even ask. Instead, Uber wants to divert everyone’s attention to a much less consequential question: Does Uber even need a permit to test self-driving taxis? The genius here is that it doesn’t matter if it wins or loses this fight. If it its permission with the California DMV, it doesn’t even get forced into basic oversight or regulation, it can just do as it pleases. If it , it will have to apply for a $150 and provide data to the CA DMV about accidents or when humans took the wheel. This will likely go to the . But either way, Uber self-driving taxis would continue to exist. That’s despite reports of them driving and potentially . It seems Uber learned a lot from its battles for app-hailed cabs in cities around the globe. Regulators will try to fight it no matter what. Its best plan of attack is to set the terms of engagement to minimize the impact if it is defeated. In the end, if it’s forced to get a self-driving permit, it looks like it’s conceding to play nice with government while the regulators proudly look like they beat Uber into submission. And the robo-cabs roll on.
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Uber’s Middle Eastern rival Careem raises $350M at a $1B valuation
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Jon Russell
| 2,016 | 12 | 18 |
2016 is almost out but there’s just time to anoint one more ride-sharing unicorn. Careem, one of Uber’s lower profile rivals in emerging markets, has taken a step into the global limelight today after it announced that it has raised $350 million led by Japanese e-commerce firm Rakuten and Saudi Telecom Company (STC). The investment gives Dubai-headquartered Careem a valuation of $1 billion. That’s according to , which reveals that it has acquired 10 percent of the company for $100 million. Four-year-old Careem in present in 47 cities across 11 countries predominantly in the Middle East but also Turkey, Pakistan and parts of North Africa. Across those territories, it claims 150,000 drivers — which it calls “captains” — and some six million users. The firm had previously raised $72 million, , so this new round — which is its Series D — is a major step up financially. The money looks like going towards market expansions primarily. and it revealed plans to reach 15 new cities across Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and Egypt in December alone. It said it is aiming to create one million jobs by expanding its driver pool and it also pledged to put some of the funds into R&D. Back in the summer, research strategy to “accelerate innovation in transportation-related technology infrastructure” in the Middle East. “We are inspired and humbled to work with world class strategic partners like Rakuten and STC” said Mudassir Sheikha, co-founder and CEO of Careem, said in a statement. “They not only bring significant institutional backing for Careem’s new horizons, but also global technology leadership and deep local experience bringing us closer to achieving our mission of improving the lives of everyone in the region.” That’s not quite all, there is more money coming. Careem said that this $350 million allocation is the first tranche of a larger $500 million round that it is currently working on. The company’s didn’t provide a timeframe for when the entire raise will be completed. Beyond Rakuten, which is already an investor in and , and STC, which is the largest telecom operator in the Middle East, other investors in the round include Abraaj Group, Al Tayyar Group, Beco Capital, El Sewedy Investments, Endure Capital, Lumia Capital, SQM Frontier and Wamda Capital. STC already has Careem equity through a previous investment made by STC Ventures, an independently controlled investment firm that counts the telco as its key LP, but now it is making its own deal as part of a “strategy to invest in the innovative digital world.” Uber is present in more than 400 cities worldwide, including the Middle East, and it has financial ties in the region. The U.S. ride-sharing giant announced in June that it had taken from Public Investment Fund (PIF), Saudi Arabia’s main investment fund, at a valuation of just over $62 billion. Back then, Uber said that it had 395,000 active riders in the Middle East region. In Saudi Arabia, where women are not permitted to drive, it said that 80 percent of its passengers are female.
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India’s NoBroker raises $7M more to connect home owners with buyers and renters directly
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Jon Russell
| 2,016 | 12 | 18 |
, the India-based property startup that wants to make property agents obsolete, has landed $7 million in fresh funding to expand its service. The company connects property owners with prospective buyers or rental tenants directly with no need for a broker, as the name suggests. , and this new raise is an extension of that. It is led by Korea’s KTB Ventures with participation from existing backers SAIF Partners, Beenext and Digital Garage. NoBroker claims this marks the investment in an Indian startup from a Korean investor — Beenext and Digital Garage are both anchored in Japan. In an interview, NoBroker founders Amit Agarwal and Akhil Gupta told TechCrunch that they didn’t need the capital but were keen to tap into KTB Ventures’ experience and further strengthen their finances. “It’s good to beef up [the balance sheet] a little bit so we can invest in more marketing and becoming number one in India,” the duo said. “Their Korean startup experiences will help us further with innovative ideas so that we can continue to grow exponentially. We are at an excellent position now in terms of customer growth and financials. Global network of KTB will also aid us in our future global ambitions,” CEO Agarwal added via a statement. NoBroker is currently active in four cities — Bangalore, Mumbai, Chennai and Pune — across which it claims to have “served” 1.5 million customers to date. The company explained that figure combines the number of property owners who have listed at least one location with the number property seekers who have contacted at least one property owner. It broke out that it has racked up a cumulative 500,000 listings and 600,000 downloads of its Android app. ( of smartphones in India run Android.) Gupta added that the firm estimates that each month it helps its customers save around $3 million in fees that would ordinarily go to brokers. (Little wonder, then, that in the past.) NoBroker has expanded steadily and slowly, but now it is looking to put its foot on the gas to prove out its business model in its initial four cities. It began monetizing its earlier this year and now it is turning its attention to themselves with an initial two packages. Gupta and Agarwal said they estimate that they have 1,000 monthly paying home owners to start with, and they have phased out the free option for house hunters. The sum of these efforts, the founders hope, is that NoBroker will be at break even over the next 24 months, which means the total capital raised from investors — which now stands at over $20 million — should give the firm around three years of runway. That focus on monetization is also twinned with a desire to be in India’s most populous cities. The founders want to own “a leadership position” in the current four cities before they expand to five or six more over the next 18 months. There’s no plan to be fully nationwide, Agarwal added, but they do want to take a bite out of India’s top 20 cities, which they estimate to be worth more than $4 billion per year in brokerage fees. This year, NoBroker experimented with an unannounced pilot in Manila, Philippines, but it is not immediately focused on expanding its service overseas at this point.
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Online Korean beauty retailer Memebox raises $60M more to sharpen its focus on the U.S.
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Jon Russell
| 2,016 | 12 | 18 |
Memebox, that sells Korean beauty products in the U.S. and Asia, has raised $60 million. The cash is an extension of the firm’s Series C round which initially closed at . The company said the money will go towards continuing its operations and increasing its global footprint. Korea, its home market, remains its largest country for sales, but the firm is increasing its focus on China and, in particular, the U.S.. Founder and CEO Dino Ha recently relocated to San Francisco from Seoul. The new money takes Memebox to more than $160 million in investor money since it was founded in 2012. The round extension was put together by a range of existing and new backers, which include Goodwater Capital, Altos Ventures, Cowboy Ventures, Mousse Partners, Formation Group, Funders Club, Pear Ventures and Cota Capital. Janet Gurwitch, a partner with Castanea Partners and former CEO of cosmetics brand , also invested and will become a member of Memebox’s advisory board. Memebox began as a beauty box service, providing a selection of cosmetics and products each month for a fixed fee, but as pioneers of business model such as Birchbox struggle, it evolved into a makeup and cosmetics store. Thanks to the rise of K-Pop and Korean drama series, the company has been able to surf a global wave of interest in Korea to expand its customer base. Today, Memebox sells its own brand products as well as those from third parties and industry names. It operates physical stores in Korea, but is predominantly focused on online. Indeed, it claims that, worldwide, an average of 88 percent of purchases come via its mobile — that figure rises to 94 percent for Asia-based customers. It said its annual revenues are over $100 million, but it is not yet profitable.
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Here’s our first look at Waymo’s new self-driving Chrysler Pacifica minivans
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Darrell Etherington
| 2,016 | 12 | 18 |
Waymo, the Alphabet company that was previously Google’s self-driving car project, has a new addition to its vehicle fleet: 100 Chrysler Pacifica hybrid minivans, which were produced by Fiat Chrysler specifically for the purpose of making them fully autonomous using Waymo’s tech, onboard computer power, sensors and telematics. The 100 new cars will join Waymo’s other self-driving vehicles in active service on public roads for more testing starting early next year. These vehicles were created through a close partnership between Waymo and FCA that actually saw engineering teams from both companies co-located at a Michigan engineering site, and testing of tech through the development process happened both in Chelsea, Michigan, and Yucca, Arizona on the FCA side, and at Waymo’s own test facilities in California. While the Chrysler Pacificas used are based on the 2017 production model that consumers can buy, changes were made to the vehicles’ electrical, powertrain and structural systems, as well as to the vehicle chassis itself, in order to make them better suited for using Waymo’s tech. This results in a much tighter integration than if the Alphabet company had just purchased Chrysler vehicles off the line and done their own aftermarket modifications on stock vehicles. Still, from project outset to these being ready to enter service took only six months, according to FCA. [gallery ids="1429642,1429641,1429640,1429639,1429638,1429637"] In a , Waymo CEO John Krafcik noted that the addition of the Pacifica, with its minivan form factor, to their test fleet, helps better represent the full range of vehicles and passenger needs among its range of self-driving vehicles. Prototypes in private tests have actually already seen a range of tests, including over 200 hours exposed to extreme weather, Krafcik says in the blog post. Bloomberg that Waymo is working with Fiat Chrysler on a larger fleet deployment of semi-autonomous Chrysler Pacifica vehicles for a ride-sharing service open to consumers, which could debut as early as next year. These 100 vehicles were previously announced by Fiat Chrysler and the Alphabet company earlier this year for testing, but any larger service launch will require more vehicles, according to the report.
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WTF is Brexit?
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Natasha Lomas
| 2,016 | 12 | 18 |
23, 2016, the polls closed on a UK referendum on EU membership and the counting began. The next morning Europeans woke to the news that the British public had voted to leave the 28 Member State bloc called the European Union. The result was 52 per cent to leave, 48 per cent to remain. The ugly word — coined ahead of the referendum as a shorthand conflation for ‘British exit’ — was apparently now lodged in the lexicon for good. But what is Brexit? And what does it mean for startups in the UK and Europe? Firstly it’s necessary to consider what the European Union is. The challenge of understanding the European project, as it’s sometimes called, is inextricably bound up with any explanation of the vote to leave the EU. Even supporters of the EU can have trouble articulating the scope and direction of a political, economic and fiscal union that has undoubtedly swelled in size and intent over time. But at its most basic level the EU is a group of countries seeking to collaborate on things like trade for mutual economic benefit, with the founding aim of avoiding any catastrophic reruns of the region’s combative history. Another relevant shorthand here is the word ‘Brussels’: the political seat of the European project in the capital city in Belgium where the Commission, the EU’s legislation proposing executive body, is based. It’s also the nickname of choice used to badge the EU by anti-EU media. Headlines in UK media railing against the latest ‘diktat from Brussels’ have long conveyed a narrative of national sovereignty being battered and bruised from afar — implying this is one of the principal ingredients of being a member of the EU, rather than flagging the potential and actual benefits of erasing some of the barriers that divide up a region of some 500 million people. Enter then, the Brexit campaigners’ mantra of ‘taking back control’, and with hindsight it was perfectly pitched to exploit a populist narrative of faceless Brussels bureaucrats meddling in national matters — and turn the in/out referendum into a bloody nose for establishment expectations. The truth of the EU is a lot more long-winded and difficult to digest than the alternative and over-simplistic clarion call to ‘cut and run’. But some 17.4 million people voted for Brexit vs 16.1M voting to remain (turnout was just over 72 per cent) so the UK now faces the unprecedented challenge of having to extricate itself from more than 40 years of EU involvement — detangling and understanding a massive body of law and regulations — and, likely, also forging its own set of bilateral trading relationships thereafter, all while carrying the massive burden of uncertainty that Brexit inexorably brings. Why does Brexit mean uncertainty? Because the UK government has yet to set out a detailed plan or strategy for Brexit. Although it is . Nor can we know for sure what kind of deal the other side in this divorce, the EU, will be willing to offer the UK. And in the same way that breakfast can mean many different things to many different people, there are many different possible Brexits — so the question at this point on the UK’s long and torturously winding road towards leaving the EU is what Brexit will mean? The early signs are that the UK government — led by post-Brexit PM Theresa May — is heading for a so-called ‘hard Brexit’, as it looks set on prioritizing putting caps on EU immigration — which would mean, in all likelihood, being cut off from access to the EU Single Market: the keystone principal of the European project which erases barriers on the movement of goods, capital, services and people across the region in order to turn a series of discrete countries into a single trading bloc. If the UK decides to put a red line on the free movement of people it can’t realistically expect the EU to allow it to retain access to the Single Market. The EU’s own priorities in seeking to preserve the wider Union kick in. So offering the UK a sweet pick’n’mix deal would be seen as encouraging other Member States to break ranks. And the EU has already been of its red line on freedom of movement. In the wake of the Brexit vote, the UK government also established a new department for International Trade — which heavily implies it’s envisaging a future outside the Single Market, i.e. where it’s cutting its own trade deals, rather than being part of the EU trading bloc. Without access to the Single Market, UK companies selling goods or services to the EU would be treated like any other country outside the EU that also does not have a trade or other treaty with the bloc — meaning tariffs, non-tariff barriers and long-since-mothballed customs checks and administration coming into sudden, unwelcome force. So, in other words, an overnight end to how UK businesses currently trade freely with the EU (and the bloc’s many trading partners). Add to that, negotiating a new trade treaty with the EU is widely considered credibly possible in the less than two-year timeframe afforded for the Article 50 EU exit process. Nor has the EU signaled it is willing to talk trade treaties during this period. ; it’s likely no trade talks could happen until Brexit had first been completed. So unless some kind of transitionary period can be negotiated by the UK government — and that’s starting to look like more of a possibility at this point, with key Brexit ministers at least now — we have only the prospect of deepening business uncertainty in the short term. There is another option: a soft Brexit, where the UK leaves the EU yet retains access to the Single Market (e.g., for example, a Swiss style model. Or by staying in the European Economic Area, like Norway). Which could mean business as nearly usual. The problem with this scenario is, as noted above, it would still mean agreeing to the free movement of people — and that flies in the face of the populist politics that delivered the Brexit vote. ‘Taking back control’ was not just about national sovereignty; there was a distinct, not-so-undercurrent of xenophobia during the campaign. And — for whatever reason — the UK government’s current trajectory looks to be being plotted by the hardest of hard Brexiteers. Which means the UK now suddenly seems to have adopted its own red line on EU immigration. In October, the Prime Minister herself : “I want [Brexit] to give British companies the maximum freedom to trade with and operate in the Single Market — and let European businesses do the same here. But let me be clear. We are not leaving the European Union only to give up control of immigration again. And we are not leaving only to return to the jurisdiction of the European Court of Justice.” So we return, inexorably, to the prospect of hard Brexit: the UK both exiting the EU and leaving the Single Market, pulling UK companies out of their established processes in the process — however much the PM claims she would like to retain access to the Single Market. (As Donald Trump might put it, you can’t always get what you want.) But why is Brexit relevant for tech? Firstly because startups are businesses with an above average likelihood of selling services outside the domestic UK market, given the global reach of the Internet. So the future of how UK startups scale is at stake — along with the future of London and the UK as a European startup hub. If, as is a distinct possibility, UK fintech companies lose access to financial passporting — the system that allows EU companies to sell services across the region without needing to be regulated in every country — it’s very likely we’ll see financial services companies shifting staff and even headquarters to other EU capitals. Indeed, we’re begining to see some of that starting to happen already — along with alarm bells sounding that the UK government really needs to secure a transitional period to . Money, people and ideas moving elsewhere will change the balance of startup innovation in the region and beyond. The in the value of the UK’s currency, pound sterling, since the Brexit vote is already impacting London’s competitiveness on the salary front vs other European cities — so where a London wage was a big pull factor before, because of the pound’s strength, UK startups are either having to offer higher wages or face stiffer competition on the hiring front from jobs in Berlin, Paris and elsewhere in Europe. Rising inflation in the UK is also pushing up the cost of living, which may in turn erode the attractiveness of setting up a business in London. And while the UK has, up to now, punched above its European weight in terms of access to funding, as well as having the pull of a sizable domestic market; the ease of the English language; and the vibrant diversity and famed tolerance of its capital city to recommend it as a base for entrepreneurship, other European cities will undoubtedly take up the slack if the country makes a hard Brexit, throttling its all-important talent pipeline by clamping down on immigration and amping up unwelcoming nationalist rhetoric, as well as (in this hard scenario) losing financial passporting, bouncing out of the Single Market and having the bolster of access to the removed. So whether it’s Dublin, Berlin, Paris or Stockholm, EU cities are already jockeying for position and to as an alternative, welcoming regional base for startup founders fearing what Brexit means for the future of London and the UK. The EU is also consulting on policies aimed at supporting what it dubs a — by trying to harmonize regulations that pertain to digital business to allow for a freer flow of digital services across the region, and build in support for relevant areas such as digital skills. While this is still a work in progress, and likely a lot less important in the near term than financial passporting, a UK that’s outside the EU would have to figure out its prioritizes vis-a-vis this Digital Single Market. Any UK businesses wishing to do business within the EU would . So the scope for Brexit affording UK companies the ability to ‘free’ themselves from EU regulation and do things differently is going to be limited to where they intend to sell services. If a startup is selling domestically it might be able to sidestep some EU regulation after the UK has Brexited. But as soon as it seeks to scale to sell within the EU it’s going to need to comply with EU law. So any potential ‘freedom’ offered by Brexit looks very limited indeed from a startup perspective. The Brexit vote also fractured UK society along multiple lines, with UK entrepreneurs one of the groups . So Brexit can feel like something of an anti-change, anti-technology vote. Some commentators have gone so far as to it is part of a larger populist movement that’s kicking against tech-enabled globalization and tech-powered automation — perhaps also helping to lift Trump to power in the US. Seen through that lens Brexit can look like a rejection of many of the new things startups are pushing for. And while history tells us that progress is not linear, a counter social movement against the thrust of software-enabled disruption feels like something of a wake up call. If the benefits of startup disruption are not being equally distributed then technology itself looks by populist movements channeled via existing political systems. Similarly, the Brexit vote could be a portent that the entire European project is also far more vulnerable to break up than its long years of collaboration and consensus-based rulemaking might suggest. And a wider break up of the European Union would make Brexit’s sinkhole of uncertainty seem like a drop in the ocean.
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“Find my Phone” is an amazing short film about a stolen cell
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John Biggs
| 2,016 | 12 | 18 |
[youtube=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NpN9NzO4Mo8] For your weekend consumption I present Find my Phone, a 30 minute film about a stolen phone. The filmmaker, Anthony van der Meer, rigged an Android cellphone with , a command-and-control system for Android that can survive a memory wipe. The app allowed van der Meer to record video, take photos, and even listen in on calls – all while tracking the phone around Amsterdam. Van der Meer pieced together a life out of fragments of the thief’s life and, when he finally faced the thief, he pulled back into anonymity, letting the phone go. Our phones are wildly personal parts of us and a movie like this one shows just how private – and dangerous – they can be. By following one cellphone thief for a few months we come to realize that with a little software and some bad intentions our cellphones can go from private property to electronic spy in a matter of seconds.
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The cleantech conspiracy
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Jon Evans
| 2,016 | 12 | 18 |
This, if you squint and adjust your tinfoil hat in just the right way, is the real story of the US election: the Russian candidate defeated the Saudi Arabian candidate. Why them? Because they’re more desperate than anyone else. Both are failed, fragile petrostates propped up only by oil money; so both see cleantech, and climate-change concern — ie Elon Musk — as the real enemy… It’s a conspiracy just-so story, but it serves to illustrate at least one important point. I don’t mean to imply that Hillary Clinton was especially in the pocket of Saudi Arabia; just that the of the has been so . Nor do I mean to imply that Donald Trump is a puppet of Russia; just that Russia worked hard to support his campaign and are delighted at its victory. I mean to point out, however, that Saudi influence — and now Russian influence — in the West serves to illustrate the strength and self-preservation powers of the world’s legacy fossil-fuel infrastructure. The world’s most valuable company is not Apple; it is . For many millions of people, along with trillions of invested capital, the to minimize the dangers of carbon dioxide and climate change, to deter solar, wind, and nuclear power, and to extend the era of oil as long as possible, are . For Russia and Saudi Arabia, especially, cleantech arguably threatens to become an existential threat. Nassim Taleb, who predicted the Syrian civil war years before it happened, also predicts that Saudi Arabia’s brittle regime will sooner or later suffer a similar fate. Plummeting oil prices would only accelerate that process. And if you don’t think of Russia as a petrostate, think again: Russia “relies on oil and natural gas for almost half its fiscal revenue,” . Imagine the world of 2026: most cars on Western roads are electric and self-driving; they, and the homes they park at, are charged mostly by solar, wind, and maybe even power power plants. Sounds wonderful, doesn’t it? …Unless you’re an oil producer. Bloomberg has also predicted that electric cars could replace of oil as soon as 2023 — and that’ll just be the beginning. Solar plants in the American desert, combined with a new energy grid, could power most of the nation. Similar plants in North Africa and the Middle East . Hence this nugget in the from the Trump Tech Summit:
Here’s an outlier that I personally liked, which Alphabet CEO Page brought up about infrastructure spending: The need to rejigger the electrical grids (something about AC current versus DC current, but everyone I spoke to was a little confused by this).
Pushing for a HVDC grid is a really smart way to fight climate change / global warming without actually inducing the irrational frothing rage that those words induce in so many oil executives, petrostate functionaries, and Western populists. Why are populists anti-environment? They just are; there’s no coherent or rational reason for it. The greatest trick the petrostates ever pulled, advertently or not, was to get the populist parties of Western nations to somehow line up with the (literal) dinosaur fossil-fuel industry. The consequences may be dire. Just because electric cars and solar powers are clearly a good idea, a win for everyone who doesn’t directly benefit from our legacy fossil-fuel infrastructure, doesn’t mean they won’t be fought tooth and nail, by the Western oil industry, by petrostates, and — bafflingly — by conservative populists. The first two groups probably cannot be convinced otherwise. Convincing that last group, however, whether we like it or not, may be our best hope for the future.
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The Future of TV isn’t apps
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Tom Goodwin
| 2,016 | 12 | 18 |
technology arrives we typically misuse it. Rather than rethinking what’s possible and transforming industries, we consistently use it to embellish what we’ve done before. Photo courtesy of Flickr/ The new world of TV is unbundled from time, removed from pipe and device agnostic. Our viewing habits have become more extreme, vacillating between the ultra-short, 20-second clip of a bee pulling nails from a wall, or the snatched 15 seconds of mannequin challenge, smashed uncomfortably against the 12-hour binge of Narcos or Black Mirror. TV is about to go under the most radical transformation imaginable. Lines are going to blur. What is stored locally and what in the cloud? When does TV become Video? What should usage rights be for nations and devices? Do we need a set top box anymore?
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“Darth Ventures” and the efficacy of Sith management techniques
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Scott Lenet
| 2,016 | 12 | 18 |
Everyone loves to joke how venture capital is the “Dark Side,” and most of the VCs I know are good-natured about simply accepting the comparison. It’s probably better than “vulture capital,” which was how we were ridiculed when I first started in the business in the early 90s. At my prior fund, my DFJ Frontier co-founder David Cremin coined the term “Darth Venture” in the early 2000s in one of his all-too-frequent clever moments, so I suppose we bear some responsibility for propagating the rhetoric that VCs are like the Sith, the champions of the Dark Side. While I personally identify with (young) Obi-Wan Kenobi, sometimes you just need to lean into the dominant discourse in your industry and accept how others view you. With that mindset, I thought it would be interesting to explore whether there is anything constructive that venture capitalists can glean from the Dark Side. To avoid doubt, the following analysis is not meant to condone the objectives of the Sith, which are galactic chaos, indiscriminate death, and dominance over others’ self-determination. Abuse of power = bad. Rather, this is an argument that the ends the means. And while Darth Vader may be the most popular character from the franchise, it is really Darth Sidious — Darth Vader’s boss — who personifies managerial skill. While Sidious, also known as Chancellor Palpatine, is written to be the most despicable character in the Star Wars universe (we can debate the Hutt), if one looks past the “evil despot” stereotypes, he demonstrates some surprisingly admirable traits and capabilities. I would argue that there are three best practices in Palpatine’s leadership style that every VC and entrepreneur should emulate: Let’s explore each. Palpatine, more than any other character in Star Wars, embodies strategic thinking and directs his activities toward ambitious, long-range planning. Isn’t this the exact stated approach of most investors? Think big and change the world. As a startup must, Palpatine takes a years-long approach to achieving his designs, making measurable progress, albeit in small steps. Beginning in with a trade dispute, Palpatine manages to set off a domino effect of changes resulting in a restructuring of the Galactic Senate, ultimately leading to his appointment as Chancellor, and then Emperor. Yes, the plays are straight out of the WWII Nazi leadership handbook, but if you ignore the remarkably unsavory goals, the sheer long-term vision and three-dimensional chess moves are impressive. Ultimately, by taking a long-term approach, Palpatine was able to disrupt his entire ecosystem, just as most VCs and entrepreneurs hope to do. Nothing exemplifies operational excellence like Order 66. 66, of course, is the campaign conducted in , in which the Jedi are systematically eliminated, all at once, by distributed forces throughout the galactic core. It is the ultimate stealth reveal, and by the time it is complete, the Jedi are completely neutralized. From a purely tactical perspective, it is an organizational masterpiece. One can easily imagine the late nights and weekends that were required to conceive and execute such a launch event (do the Sith even have a vacation policy?). For any entrepreneur or VC coaching her, this ability to manage a campaign with such a large number of moving parts has to be considered the gold standard. Did I mention that I am in no way in favor of plans that include killing? But the best analogy for venture capitalists from the management style of the Sith is surely their recruiting and training model, known as the “Rule of Two” in Star Wars mythology. At any one time, there are only two Sith: a master and an apprentice. And while our industry often describes venture as an apprenticeship business, I wish we were more devoted to this ideal. The reality is that there is really no place you can go to “venture capital school” (there is the excellent and extremely selective Kauffman Fellowship, which is effectively an internship model and available to very few; and there are a small handful of us who teach venture capital in graduate schools, including my class at the Marshall School at the University of Southern California). The Sith really distinguish themselves from the Jedi with their model of devoted employee development. Darth Vader receives individualized, hands-on attention and guidance from Darth Sidious, and it is clear that no other pupil is competing for his attention (I’m looking at you, Count Dooku’s severed head). The approach includes frequent face-to-face communication, by telepresence when necessary, and incorporates the notion that the student will one day become the master. That’s right, in the Rule of Two, the master must teach his apprentice everything he knows, until the understudy is so strong that he is able to assassinate his master. Far too often, our approach in venture capital is to take our apprentices, throw them into the deep end of the pool, and simply hope they can swim. There are other learnings, to be sure. The Sith are unbelievably skilled at business development partnerships, outsourcing, and delegation to outside ecosystem stakeholders. The Trade Federation and Galactic Empire are not really part of the Sith infrastructure; these are essentially business development deals. And by partnering wisely, two Sith can act fairly independently and topple an entire way of life. Isaac Asimov would be proud. Sort of. In the event I have somehow been too subtle, I cannot underscore enough that I am not in favor of death and destruction. But if we are going to be honest, the Sith are unbelievably competent adversaries for the Jedi, which is probably part of what makes the Star Wars saga so enduring and mythic. And they clearly can teach us something about how to get things done.
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Growth as a false signal in Y Combinator startups
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Doug Renert
| 2,016 | 12 | 18 |
One has to appreciate how Paul Graham built Y Combinator into the world’s flagship accelerator and handed it off to others to continue its impressive run at the top of the heap. In fact, I have yet to meet a founder who regrets joining the program. But after stepping away from the YC scene for five years* and then returning to observe the last two demo days, I now wonder if some of the views Paul shared in his original, widely read are being taken to absurd extremes. The evolution of his take on startup serves as an excellent example. Paul says in short that “a good growth rate during YC is 5-7% a week” and that “the best thing to measure the growth rate of is revenue.” He goes on to explain that successful startups follow an “S-curve.” Founders hope to have exited an initial period of slow growth by demo day, showing that they’re just starting to climb the steep slope of that curve. If all goes well, growth will not slow down until their company matures years later. Indeed, the conventional line of thinking now appears to be that a member of this “5% Club” is in great shape and that everything else should just fall in line. So many founders do everything they can to show that they’ve achieved this milestone by their demo day. This is not just the case with Y Combinator startups of course; it has become a common ritual across accelerator programs everywhere. Revenue growth has become, in essence, the presumed divining rod of a startup’s success. Much as farmers have used forked sticks over the ages to identify the location of water under their properties, investors are using early revenue growth to identify which fledgling startups will become the long-term winners. And this is despite the of Sam Altman and others at Y Combinator to caution against a “growth at all costs” approach. This increasingly heavy focus at demo day on growth, and growth alone, by investors and founders alike, has become absurd and unrealistic. It results in a false signal that will lead to disappointment and investment losses more often than not. Perhaps a look at what the actual revenue growth numbers look like will help everyone realize the magnitude of this absurdity. Let’s take a look at the exact revenue growth Y Combinator startups claimed at the most recent demo day in August. We ran the numbers on the 22 companies** in the group that shared their revenue and revenue growth metrics. Source: Tandem Capital These companies reported month-over-month revenue growth rates ranging from 6-200 percent. The average was 60 percent and the median was 41 percent. Six companies reported at least a doubling of their revenues each month. Source: Tandem Capital If we applied the companies’ monthly growth rates to their reported revenue, then after just one year the 22 companies would be generating about $21 billion in combined monthly revenue, or $963 million monthly revenue per company. If we annualized revenue for each company on the twelfth month after demo day, then annualized revenue per company would vary from $1 million to $159 billion. Of the 22 companies, 14 would have over $100 million in annualized revenue, and three of them would be generating more than $30 billion each, making them the 6th (besting CVS), 33rd (besting Procter & Gamble) and 91st (besting Nike) largest companies in the country, respectively. Source: Tandem Capital There is quite possibly another Airbnb or Dropbox in this Y Combinator class that will grow into a unicorn, but the overall results of the class will end up very far from the numbers above. Investors should realize that high growth rates over such a short window in the early days of a startup by no means indicate that it’s on track for unicorn status, or anywhere close for that matter. The paradox is that companies with long track records of growth do not typically join Y Combinator in the first place. They take their product-market fit and resulting revenue growth and run with it — all the way down Sand Hill Road. By all means, if a company does have sustainable growth under its belt, then the founders should promote that. They should promote the hell out of it, in fact. Investors simply need to be confident that any reported growth is authentic and did not arise from startup “slights of hand,” such as launch articles in the media, the opening of a waiting list or a one-time social influencer blitz. But more importantly, investors should recognize that most Y Combinator companies are still figuring out their businesses by demo day. They are not ready to push hard on growth just yet. This period of exploration should be expected and embraced. As investors, we should be focused on whether a company has impressive engagement and retention metrics. We should examine its early unit economics closely. We should see if its users absolutely love the product. If these foundational elements are in place, I for one am usually willing to bet that growth will come, and that it will come sooner rather than later. *I attended most of the early Y Combinator demo days, resulting in Tandem’s investments in companies such as PagerDuty, Flightcaster and ZumoDrive. However, when the round sizes of the companies became too large and the valuations too high to support Tandem’s then pre-seed model of investing, I tapped out. When Tandem started doing traditional seed investments of $1 million-plus earlier this year, I started attending the demo days again, and we backed one company in each of the last two cohorts (Deako and Sixa). **All company names have been anonymized. Two companies reported only GMV and GMV growth. To extract revenue from these numbers we assumed a 15 percent transaction fee.
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The carrot and stick of data breaches
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Michael Kende
| 2,016 | 12 | 27 |
Data breaches are on the rise. Just recently we saw confirming Yahoo! suffered another large, embarrassing breach (this time of more than one billion user accounts in August 2013). And the story continues to unfold around whether or not Russia breached United States cyber systems in hopes of influencing the 2016 presidential election. It seems like putting personal information in a website today feels a bit like getting into a car 50 years ago — with minimal seatbelts, no airbags and no testing, you just had to hope to avoid a crash. In the same vein, we just have to hope to avoid a data breach. Would we continue to go to a store that let strangers shop with our credit cards? Go to a psychiatrist who disclosed our confessed affairs in public? Work for a company that allowed anyone to access our confidential personnel records? Not a chance. Yet, Target had 40 million customers’ credit card numbers stolen and put on sale online; Ashley Madison’s records on 37 million married users and their personal affairs were taken and published online; and the US Office of Personnel Management had all records on past, present and potential employees stolen. The impact of these breaches is profound and lasting. Some users lost time and money protecting from theft their finances and their identity; others saw marriages dissolve and even committed suicide; and others may be subject to blackmail and exposure. All were let down by the very organizations they had entrusted with their personal information. Even worse, , 93 percent of data breaches could have been prevented. Systems are not always protected from known bugs; employees are not always trained to avoid phishing emails targeting their password. And when a breach does occur, steps were not taken to avoid harm, such as minimizing the amount of data stored and encrypting the data that was kept. The ; up to US$500 billion per year in costs for the organization, including a strong reputational effect. So, the question is, in some ways, a simple one: Why are many organizations not taking at least the basic steps to protect the personal information they hold? Is it because organizations do not bear all the costs of the data breach? Is it because there is not enough benefit for organizations in better protecting their users’ data? The answer to both questions is yes. Take the problem of password security as an example. Many of us have hundreds of accounts, and human nature being what it is, may use the same user id and password repeatedly, providing easy pickings for an attacker who learns one of our passwords. A password manager can help protect us by generating and remembering unique passwords for each of our accounts. Before putting all your eggs in the same basket, however, consider this: Many password managers include strict limitations on their own liability in their terms and conditions, as low as zero. A breach, exposing all passwords, which may be personal as well as professional, may create far more in losses, which the password manager would not have to cover. At the same time, while there is little doubt that password managers still have an incentive to invest in security, how can customers determine which password managers are the safest? To increase the incentives to invest in security requires a carrot and a stick. First, the stick — organizations holding data should bear more of the cost of a breach, so that they have increased accountability. At the same time, there should also be a carrot — organizations should be able to provide credible security signals to the market so they can benefit from their increased security levels. Cars today are much safer than 50 years ago. They have been tested for safety, they have been rated, the car companies and suppliers understand the liability they may face if there is a defect and they have a marketing incentive to compete on providing new safety features. This has evolved through increased awareness and demand, government standards and independent assessments. We expect this for our precious personal cargo; we should expect no less for our precious personal information.
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Technology dispersion is accelerating
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Sebastiaan Vaessen
| 2,016 | 12 | 18 |
Copycats are a dying breed. Each month the gap shrinks between a new digital service emerging in the U.S. and it being copied in other markets. This trend has big implications for global businesses, forcing them to rethink investment and innovation strategies. India is a good example of just how quickly technology dispersion is accelerating. For example, more than 13 years passed between the launch of in the U.S. in 1994 and the launch of , its equivalent in India. In 2013, it took just three months following announcing its Series A funding for India’s to launch. There are three key drivers behind this rapid acceleration in the dispersion of business models: For businesses expanding into high-growth markets, the implication of this trend is clear: While there’s a big opportunity, you must move fast. There are five ingredients that help startups meet this challenge: For entrepreneurs in high-growth markets, one thing is clear: Although launching proven business models seen elsewhere has been a profitable strategy until now, that game is largely over. With global tech players becoming bigger and faster than ever before, there’s simply not enough time to achieve critical scale. But that isn’t to say there aren’t opportunities for local startups. Global models eventually come up against the limits of local taste and context, and it’s within these local “moats” that home-grown startups can make their play. Local moats can be regional, political, cultural or economic in nature. But they have one thing in common: they enable differentiation. For example, the Chinese wall allowed to resist . And language and cultural barriers have enabled local content providers like Africa’s to compete with . Additionally, entrepreneurs in home markets can build strong businesses by . These local problems represent opportunities that might not be picked up by those working in the hubs of Silicon Valley and the like, and are therefore ripe for the picking. The accelerating pace of tech dispersion is driving great change in the global startup ecosystem. While there will be fewer “copycat” services in the future, we can look forward to a new wave of original innovation in high-growth markets that will create huge opportunities for the startups involved.
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An Amazon Echo may be the key to solving a murder case
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Sarah Buhr
| 2,016 | 12 | 27 |
Internet-connected devices may start helping in criminal cases. As first reported in , police in Bentonville, Arkansas have issued a warrant to Amazon, asking the company to hand over data from an Echo device to help prosecute a suspected murderer. James Andrew Bates, the suspect in the case, was charged with first-degree murder in November of 2015 after authorities found victim Victor Collins in Mr. Bates’ hot tub. Mr. Bates told police he’d invited Collins and two other friends, Owen McDonald and Sean Henry, over to watch a football game and said he decided to go to bed about 1 a.m., leaving the victim and McDonald to hang out and drink in his hot tub. According to Bates’ affidavit, he found Collins face down in the water when he woke up several hours later. However, McDonald says he left Bates and Collins around 12:30 a.m., which was a story confirmed by McDonald’s wife. According to phone records, Bates was also texting a woman throughout the evening and had placed several calls to his dad, other friends (including McDonald) and the Flying Fish restaurant. None of the calls went through and Bates told police these were accidental butt dials. Bates has several internet-connected devices in his home, including a Nest thermostat and a Honeywell alarm system, but the key witness in the case may be his Amazon Echo, which, as per The Information, police records say could have controlled the streaming music, which was being wirelessly transmitted throughout the night using Echo’s assistant Alexa. However, it’s unclear how much data police could extract from the device or how useful that data would be in the case. Alexa is always listening through a system of seven built-in microphones but waits for you to say the “wake word” to send it commands, like asking for the weather or which music to play, according to the company. The device also streams your audio to the cloud, including a fraction of a second of audio before the wake word. Amazon has so far declined to hand over information in the case, according to court records, and the company says it will not be releasing customer information “without a valid and binding legal demand properly served on us. Amazon objects to overbroad or otherwise inappropriate demands as a matter of course.” Police have seized the Echo from Bates home anyway, as material evidence, but the device that might offer a better clue as to what happened that night might be the home’s smart water device. According to The Information, court records show Bates’ home ran 140 gallons of water between 1 a.m. and 3 a.m. on the night in question. But the broader takeaway in this instance is just how much these IoT devices could be used for or against us, legally. This appears to be a first-of-its-kind case and we are sure to see many more of these types of inquiries in the future.
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Rent the Runway raises $60 million
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Katie Roof
| 2,016 | 12 | 27 |
Hyman told Recode that the company is now profitable on an Ebitda basis and has grown its revenue to over $100 million. TechCrunch has obtained documents that show that as of last year, the company was forecasting $121 million in revenue for 2016. This is up from $44 million in 2014. “This new round of funding will allow us to continue revolutionizing the fashion industry by giving millions of women access to designer brands,” Hyman said in an email to TechCrunch. “We will do this by accelerating the growth of our a la carte and subscription products, as well as our retail footprint. We will also further build out our operational capacity, which includes our world-class reverse logistics platform.”
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Sarah Perez
| 2,016 | 12 | 20 | null |
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