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Sylvania’s new smart bulb connects to Apple’s HomeKit without a hub
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Brian Heater
| 2,016 | 12 | 27 |
Roughly a week from now we’re going to be drowning in connected home product launches. It seems fairly likely that it’ll be the major story of this year’s CES, with smart home plays from Google, Apple and Amazon duking it out in the middle. Sylvania wisely is getting ahead of the fray, announcing its own offering a full week ahead of the Las Vegas melee. The longtime purveyor of electrical lighting solutions is a different approach to HomeKit connected devices, with a Philips Hue competitor that features its own built-in Wi-Fi radio. That means that, unlike much of the competition, the Smart Multicolor A19 immediately taps into the home network without the need for a hub. Screw it in, sync it to Apple’s Home app and the thing is good to go. Home compatibility also means that it can be incorporated into different “Scenes” and that Siri can be used to perform a variety of different voice commands with the bulb, including turning it off and on, dimming it and changing colors. The A19 will be hitting Amazon early next year. No word yet on pricing, but the current Amazon Alexa-compliant version is priced at $40 right now, so likely in that general ballpark.
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How startups outside the Bay Area can fundraise in a big way
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Todd Olson
| 2,016 | 12 | 27 |
Raising venture capital is tough for any startup. But it can be a little more difficult when you’re located outside of Silicon Valley. More difficult, but definitely not impossible. My software company is based in North Carolina’s Research Triangle, and we just completed a $20 million Series B round led by Spark Capital, with participation from all our existing investors, including Battery Ventures, Core Capital, Contour Venture Partners, IDEA Fund Partners and Salesforce Ventures. Here are five takeaways from that might be helpful to other startups not located a stone’s throw from Sand Hill Road. This is good, general advice for building a great company — it’s one of our company’s core values — and it’ll help your fundraising efforts, too. Happy customers are your best salespeople, and their voices can be particularly helpful when you’re looking for funding but are not well-networked in the VC community. Ultimately, VCs are looking for companies whose products alleviate pain for customers, aren’t easily replaced and present great upsell opportunities. Every VC you meet will ask you for customer references. You’ll pick your four best customers who will say great stuff — and then the VC calls blind references, looking for the real scoop. Once, I accidentally dropped the name of a prospect during a VC meeting. That probably wasn’t smart, as we hadn’t closed the deal yet. But when the prospect let me know the VC wanted to talk about us, I told him to go ahead. I knew we’d treated him well, and the gamble ultimately paid off. Aim to make every customer — and prospective customer — supremely happy, and they’ll sing your praises when asked. This is also good advice for anyone, but particularly if you’re in Raleigh, Atlanta, Chicago or some other non-California tech center and don’t have lots of connections in this world. Think long term, spend some time doing research and ask around to find the best potential partners. One easy tip: Look at the firms backing the companies you admire. ( is a great resource for this intel.) See who’s active in your space and who might be interested in diving in. ( and both offer free newsletters, for instance.) Look at what stage investors typically invest and make sure it lines up with your objectives. Figure out why these people should meet with you, whether you already have a warm connection or if it’s a cold outreach. Aim to meet with people informally for several months before you start formally fundraising. Ask for 20 minutes of their time to share what you’re up to. Keep it friendly, confident and to the point. Repeat as necessary. Remember: Adding a VC to your company (and partner to your board) is a really big deal and (if you’re lucky enough to have options), you should be super thoughtful in your evaluation (more on this below). It’s like getting married, but harder to undo. With our Series A, we wanted a B2B software-as-a-service (SaaS) specialist from a big firm, and we got that with Neeraj Agarwal. For our Series B, we wanted to complement our team with an operator who really understands our big vision. Megan Quinn’s background in product management at leading organizations — some with a consumer bent — makes her a great fit. If you’re not based in the Bay Area, find reasons to go there. Take every meeting you can get, even if it’s a brief chat with a lesser-known firm or a junior associate (assuming they seem thoughtful). Humility is really important to this process: You never know who’ll be helpful. I had one meeting with a VC who spent the first 20 minutes talking about the completely wrong business. He’d gotten us confused with another company. Not an auspicious beginning — but he ended up investing once he figured out what we actually did! Do what’s necessary to connect with as many people as possible. The occasional white lie won’t hurt, either — it’s OK to say you’ll be in town and would love to grab coffee, even if the only reason you’re in town is to get coffee with them. Get as much face time as possible — but also take note of who’s willing to come to you. As your relationships with VC firms develop, notice who delays visiting you or complains about the long flight. These little things signal whether a person is really committed to investing in your company or simply kicking the tires. I remember one VC who came out to our offices and made a point of mentioning how many direct flights there are between SFO and RDU daily and emphasized he thought it was an easier commute than a much closer major hub. He became an investor, too. Ultimately, you want to work with VCs who genuinely want to work with you. An enthusiastic visit is a sign of real interest. But keep in mind: Informally, you’re fundraising. Silicon Valley is a small world. Word gets around. Make sure that you’re carefully controlling the information flow. Share numbers selectively, and focus on telling your story and making connections. The critique you’ll sometimes hear about companies located outside the Bay Area is that we don’t “dream big” or “aim for the fences.” So if you want to scale into a large company, and you need capital to achieve that growth, you must articulate how it’s possible and demonstrate the ambition to realize it. This is about setting aggressive goals and then working hard to gain proof points. Do you have an aspirational customer that demonstrates the future? Work hard to close one or two. Do you have a hot-shot employee that you want to close that demonstrates your ability to hire a great team? Work hard and hire that person. Telling a big story is less about the telling and more about the belief that you can truly create a big company — and executing on it. It’s hard to play it cool when you’re asking for millions of dollars. But it’s crucial not to forget that you’re actually looking for partners, not buyers. If a VC isn’t fired up about your business, move on. Some investors will only invest within certain (often nearby) geographies; I’ve personally been asked countless times by investors if I’d be open to moving. Some just won’t be convinced by your story. That’s OK — accept that they’re not the firm for you and keep looking. Eventually you’ll find VCs who understand your model and believe in your vision. If you’re lucky enough to feel momentum building among interested parties, pay attention to that. You might think you’re on a slower funding timetable, but you also want to be ready to move forward when the right investors are ready. Be prepared to accelerate if necessary, but keep a cool head if you do. The wrong VCs will rush you; the right ones may express urgency but want a solid, mutual match as much as you do. Raising millions of dollars can be daunting. But like any form of selling, it’s about building relationships, doing right by those people and staying confident that finding that great fit benefits everyone. That takes time. And like any relationship, partnerships with VCs have to be built on authenticity. You can’t force it — you just have to keep looking until you find the right one.
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Amazon sold nine times as many Amazon Echo devices this holiday
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Brian Heater
| 2,016 | 12 | 27 |
Guess what – Amazon sold . Nine times as many as last year, according to its count. Of course, the company’s never been inclined to give specific numbers when it comes to this sort of thing, only revealing in a press release this morning that it moved “millions” worldwide. There were some telltale signs over the past couple of weeks, as the devices proved really tough to get ahead of the holidays both through Amazon and retail partners like Best Buy. And, of course, there’s the fact that the line is now available in more countries and price points than it was this time last year, thanks in part to the introduction of devices like the low-cost Echo Dot. More to the point though, both the Echo and Echo Dot were at the top of the retailer’s list of best sellers for the year, with Amazon noting that the company had trouble keeping the things in stock, “despite [its] best efforts and ramped-up production.” According to its numbers, Amazon shipped north of one billion items during the holiday season by way of Prime and Fulfillment by Amazon, with its own products topping the lists in a variety of categories.
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The top 10 TechCrunch news videos of 2016
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Felicia Shivakumar
| 2,016 | 12 | 27 |
From robots and explosions to self-tying shoes, here’s a rundown of the most-buzzed-about TechCrunch news videos of 2016:
An obvious, but not necessarily expected, from Apple this fall, Airpods have a lot going for them. Several TC staffers have them out and have good things to say. In fact, Editor-in-Chief, , listed Apple’s Airpods as one of his . After a three-month waiting period, Airpods finally so you can decide for yourself. This is Tesla’s Model 3 http://tcrn.ch/1M4RdIw Posted by on Thursday, March 31, 2016 At a somewhat more affordable starting price of $35,000, you could now opt for a sporty all-electric ride versus an Audi or BMW. It also packs like 0-60 in under 6 seconds, autopilot hardware built in to the base model, front and rear trunks, and of course that stunning sun/moon/see-everything roof made of a single pane of glass. Shoes , need I say more? Nike’s Mags with Hyperadapt 1.0 And the just take the already awesome achievement to the next level. A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket has exploded. Here's what we know so far: http://tcrn.ch/2c86Srv Posted by on Thursday, September 1, 2016 Earlier this year, SpaceX went on a Falcon 9 launching spree trying to land a rocket with varying degrees of success. After four previous attempts, SpaceX successfully landed on a drone ship in April, which was very exciting. Then a few month month later, we were back to . According to a recent article, SpaceX is looking . You can find a . At their Windows event this October, Microsoft , an all-in-one PC with a 28-inch PixelSense display. It’s the thinnest display ever built, according to Microsoft, Also , Spot Mini is smaller, lighter, less menacing . It looks like a dog and can climb stairs, open doors and more. These are Tesla's stunning new solar roof tiles for homes http://tcrn.ch/2fp4Rek Posted by on Friday, October 28, 2016 Elon Musk announced a new Tesla that will give your normal-looking roof solar energy gathering powers. Rather than stashing big panels up there, Tesla will offer high-efficiency glass tiles that closely resemble regular roofing material. Not much detail on how well it works just yet, but . Looking for more popular videos to watch? You can find a rundown of our top 10 hardware startup videos .
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Hey, Alexa, are things going to get weird?
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John Biggs
| 2,016 | 12 | 27 |
They say that news is what happens to a writer on his way to the bathroom and I’ve recently discovered something fascinating. Alexa – and, to a degree, Siri and Google’s OK Google solution – have become indispensable additions to our home. The kids tell Alexa to turn on the lights and start Netflix. We ask her how to spell words and do basic math. She tells us which day it is and what the weather will be. She sets timers for us and reminds us to buy milk. In short, she’s our own special helper monkey. Then we see the , and “Forget the onerous process of pulling your Pixel or iPhone from your pocket, unlocking it, opening apps, and tapping your desires onto a screen (Ugh!),” wrote Jessi Hempel on Backchannel. “Soon, you’ll speak your wants into the air — anywhere — and a woman’s warm voice with a mid-Atlantic accent will talk back to you, ready to fulfill your commands.” The world thought it wanted smart watches but what it really wants is to be heard. And Alexa and her ilk are only going to get more and more powerful. Analysts estimate that Amazon has sold six million Alexa-cabable since launch. This is a big enough number to make the Echo a fun addition to holiday festivities. Take my own home, for example. My parents fell in love with our Echo after asked it to play Roy Orbison for my Dad and my Mom asked it whether or not we’d need an umbrella. When I ordered one for them for Christmas my sister took it so I had to buy them another one. Like most nascent tech there is little impetus for the non-techie to buy or use aural interfaces outright but once they see how it works they’re hooked. The future of aural interfaces is clear. Our phones will soon be talking to us more and more. By slapping in some micro-earbuds – the AirBuds are making more and more sense now – and a smarter interface you can easily go your entire day without having to unlock your phone. Notifications can be read to you in a hushed voice. Top Twitter trends can hit your cranium while you’re driving. Add in a camera or NFC and you can tell which stores have sales or get details on who you’re talking to like some kind of friendly White House aide. Once you can start talking to your phone more than you talk to humans we enter a world in which the ears and not the eyes become the sensory organ of choice. This interface is obviously interstitial. Like most technologies we’ll bump up against the edges of a voice interface fairly quickly. Until we are able to “jack” directly into our computers for some real augmented reality, however, aural interfaces are nearly the next best thing. Voice interfaces are unobtrusive and seamless – you don’t need to know anything to talk to the Echo but the even the simplest phone requires some kind of literacy – and cellphones and cloud services are getting better and better. By melding the two we find ourselves at a perfect inflection point for the rise of voice and the fall of hunting and pecking on a glowing phone. What we most want from our devices is freedom. We want to be able to tell them to do the things we’re thinking and get immediate results. Turning off the lights in my home takes four physical taps on my phone or one sentence to Alexa. Turning on the Star Wars theme music takes five taps on my phone or one request to Alexa. Getting the answer to “seven times eight” (we have small kids) takes a solid six seconds of tapping or two seconds of talking. Once Alexa and other bots become ubiquitous we’ll all be shouting commands into the air and expecting our homes to react.
Unfortunately our robotic friends aren’t quite as smart as I’d like them to be. We’ve been talking about Star Wars around the house these last few days and I pointed out the to the kids. I asked Alexa for a bit more information. She in, her wisdom, pointed me to A Wilhelm Scream, a hardcore band from New Bedford, Massachusetts. I can imagine – nay, I crave – a world in which my home voice-controlled robot howls in pain over and over while we discuss the vagaries of sound design and inside jokes. A cyborg can dream.
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Fitbit gets another holiday bump and much-needed breathing room
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Matthew Lynley
| 2,016 | 12 | 27 |
The holidays have come and gone and — as usual — Fitbit got a bit of a lifeline. Once again, everyone is buying Fitbits for gifts. We won’t know how many, but if you just take a quick look at the download charts, Fitbit hit the top of the App Store (even in the presence of the gargantuan promotions of Super Mario Run). In fact, it looks like it’s a pretty popular gift for parents too — there are bumps in the App Store chart around Mother’s Day and Father’s Day. And it couldn’t come too soon. Wall Street is giving Fitbit a little bit of a breather with the stock up around 7% after it’s tumbled almost 75% this year. The year has not been kind as it’s had plenty of poor performance and also decided for some reason it would enter the smartwatch market. The whole wearable market itself isn’t doing that well, with . Fitbit continues to iterate, come out with new products, and it’s at least looking for answers in the increasingly challenging market. The company snapped up the assets from Pebble and some of the team, which rolled out one of the first true smartwatches thanks to a massively successful Kickstarter campaign. , but at least it means that Fitbit is in exploration mode beyond its normal trackers. For Fitbit, the difficulty curve is only going to get steeper as Apple doubles down on the fitness aspects of its watches. It has a Nike+ version of the watch and is clearly trying to lock down the fitness tracking market alongside the smartwatch market. Apple has always been known for premium products, and while we haven’t seen any numbers it’s possible that people may simply be willing to pay more for a fitness tracker that goes beyond just checking steps. Still! Fitbits seem to be good gifts, and people seem to keep buying them. We’ll see where everything lands when the company reports its earnings in the first quarter, and it’s going to need to show some kind of major breakout in order to not only show it can survive in the presence of more robust products like the Apple Watch but also slowing adoption for wearables in general. Fortunately for Fitbit, , so that’s one less thing to worry about going forward. [graphiq id=”aIdbBNXfZCB” title=”Fitbit, Inc. (FIT) Stock Price – 1 Year” width=”600″ height=”459″ url=”https://sw.graphiq.com/w/aIdbBNXfZCB” link=”http://listings.findthecompany.com/l/17807102/Fitbit-Inc-in-San-Francisco-CA” link_text=”FindTheCompany | Graphiq” frozen=”true”] Merry Christmas, Fitbit. You still have a lot of work to do for Wall Street, but for now you get a breather.
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The Apple Watch rolls out a new challenge for the New Year
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Brian Heater
| 2,016 | 12 | 27 |
Making excuses for breaking New Year’s resolutions used to be a hell of a lot simpler. Now that we’ve got social media for every life choice and are wearing our fitness levels on our wrists, there’s really no reason not to keep up. Which isn’t to say, of course, that we all couldn’t use an extra jolt. Back in November, Apple offered another holiday-themed fitness challenge – a 5K tied to Thanksgiving. Naturally, the company will be doing something similar tied to the New Year – an update set to start rolling out to Apple Watch owners on December 28 that’s designed to extend the challenge for a full month. When they pop their watches on in the morning, they’ll be greeted by the Ring in the New Year Challenge set for January 2 (to give wearers an extra day to recover, one assumes), designed to get users to close all three of the Watch’s rings for a full week during the month. As with the Turkey Trot, Apple will be looking to make this a social event, with shareable achievements and goals for hitting a full week’s worth of activity in early January – or as we like to call it here, CES.
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Cujo adds parental controls to its home firewall device
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Brian Heater
| 2,016 | 12 | 27 |
Cujo certainly felt like the right product at the right time when the smart firewall’s creators took to the Disrupt stage to debut the device back in May. Since its debut, IoT attacks have grown in prominence as users add more and more failure points to their home security ecosystem one connected device at a time. Since then, the startup has raked in crowdfunding and scored favorable reviews around the launch of its adorable little smart firewall devices. The product’s only around half a year old, so CES won’t be seeing a major upgrade for the Cujo, but the company is adding some extra functionality to the hardware. A software update will be bringing parental controls to the product – similar to what we’ve seen on mesh devices like Luma and Eero, making it possible for parents to manage kids access to specific websites and app. Using the system, it will be possible to control access via device or content, in order to set a daily limit on screen time, cut off tablet use at the dinner table, and otherwise block questionable content. The new features will be on display next week at CES.
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Samsung’s CES C-Lab startups are focused on skincare and kids
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Brian Heater
| 2,016 | 12 | 27 |
Samsung’s C-Lab experiments are rarely earth-shattering, but they’re usually fairly interesting. Since last year, the electronics giant has used the Creative Lab as a way to foster innovation within its walls, including everything from a wearable 360-degree camera to smart belt with the unfortunate but rhymey name Welt. The company’s using its presence at a big electronics show to bring exposure to a new crop of startups developed within its confines. This round includes a trio of projects, maintaining a focus on kids and health, themes the startups keep returning to with every subsequent batch. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z7czkpemc_w Tag+ is essentially a Bluetooth button designed to bring simple app functionality to real world toys. The device connects automatically to a tablet and offers a range of different interactions, including press, bumping and shaking, which present different social features and connect the product to a single profile that can be used to connect kids in real world playing situations. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2LuVOTmEYyk Both of the other new offerings are skincare-related. S-Skin is a teardrop-shaped scanner that analyzes redness, melanin levels and hydration using a built-in LED. The app tracks changes over time, while a microneedle patch supposedly delivers ingredients to address any problems spots. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HrkBgE2QwSo Lumini, meanwhile, is designed to address issues before they surface, including wrinkles, redness and pimples, recommending cosmetic solutions, accordingly. The three products will be on-display at CES’s startup area next week in Vegas, along with a quintet of other devices already successfully spun off from the project.
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LG is bringing a little floating speaker to CES
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Brian Heater
| 2,016 | 12 | 27 |
LG’s apparently . The company has already announced a number of the devices it plans to debut at the show, including a bunch of smartphones and monitors. Maybe it’s still got enough up its sleeve to present some legit excitement – then again, maybe it’s holding back the big phone announcements for Mobile World Congress. One thing we can say for sure, however – it’s definitely going to have a levitating speaker at the show. The isn’t the first Bluetooth speaker to combine music playing with floating. We’ve actually seen a number of companies give the odd space a go – including one that had the decided advantage of , which seems to be all the rage with Galactic Empires, these days. As for what LG’s unit does offer – you get 360-degree sound emanating from a “turbine blade-inspired design.” The subwoofer is built into what looks to be a fairly large base station, which also houses the electromagnets for the aforementioned levitation. The speaker is IPX7 water resistant and features a battery that promises 19 hours on a charge. Perhaps best of all, when the charge runs low, the speaker slowly descends onto the base station and fills its own battery back up. No word yet on pricing or availability.
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Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos and 18 others commit $1 billion to new cleantech fund, Breakthrough Energy Ventures
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Lora Kolodny
| 2,016 | 12 | 11 |
Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, Vinod Khosla, Jack Ma, John Doerr and 15 other high-profile investors have formed a new venture firm, , that will pour at least $1 billion into cleantech companies over the next 20 years. The firm’s goal, according to its own website, will be: “to provide everyone in the world with access to reliable, affordable power, food, goods, transportation, and services without contributing to greenhouse gas emissions.” BEV will invest in tech ventures at any stage, from seed through commercialization. The deals will focus on electricity, manufacturing, agriculture, buildings and transportation. Cleantech was once the rage in Silicon Valley, with total venture capital dollars invested in clean tech hitting $6.1 billion in 2008 before the recession. But cleantech became a dirty word following the cratering of startups that had taken venture capital, as well as significant amounts of government loans, grants, subsidies or tax credits. Along with scores of others that shut down, failing to save the planet or to realize meaningful returns for investors, were: solar panel makers ; , which attempted to make highly fuel-efficient cars; and waste-to-fuel company . (Remember them?) But a burgeoning world population, and energy needs growing along with it, are driving up demand for technology that can help people produce more of what they need with fewer resources. So cleantech is and being discussed again, favorably, even if some VC’s avoid labeling their portfolio companies as such. BEV is the formal, venture investing initiative of the Breakthrough Energy Coalition, a group announced at the 2015 Paris Climate Change Conference. The group, comprised of tech and finance all-stars, pledged to invest in early-stage startups in nations that were ramping up their public, R&D funding for cleantech, to reach a collective $30 billion by 2020. Besides making its venture fund known, BEV published a framework today called the which it intends to be “a guide to other public and private investors committed to reducing global greenhouse gas emissions.”
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WTF is daily fantasy sports?
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Fitz Tepper
| 2,016 | 12 | 11 |
or been to a professional sports game in the past year you’ve no doubt seen advertisements for daily fantasy sports companies like DraftKings and FanDuel. In just a few years the industry has become the hottest thing in the sports world probably since cable TV. And with the of the two companies, it’s pretty clear that they plan on sticking around for a while. As a whole, the daily fantasy sports industry is pretty new; DraftKings hasn’t even been around five years. But the two companies have raised a combined total of over $1 billion in venture funding. They quickly spent this money making their companies, and by extension the entire daily fantasy sports industry, a household name. To understand what daily fantasy sports is, it is first necessary to understand plain-old fantasy sports, because that’s been around a lot longer. A fantasy sport is a game where participants assemble imaginary teams using real players of different professional sports team. So for the NFL you’d draft a team consisting of one quarterback from Philadelphia’s team, a running back from Oakland, a wide receiver from Atlanta’s team, etc. Everyone else in your league does the same thing, and then your teams compete against each other. So how do you decide who wins? Points are assigned to certain actions — a quarterback throwing a touchdown is 6 points, or a wide receiver would net your team one point per catch he had that game. At the end of all the games you add up all of your players’ points, and whichever team has the highest score, wins. Traditional fantasy sports typically occur over an entire season — in September you and your friends would draft teams, and you wouldn’t find out who won until the season is over in January. This also means you’re stuck with the same players you draft at the beginning of the season, unless someone in your league wants to trade with you. But daily fantasy sports, as you can tell by its name, doesn’t last a whole season. It lasts a day: You draft your players in the morning, and by the time the games are over in the afternoon or evening, you know who won. Another difference is that, while regular fantasy sports typically focused on playing year after year in a league with your best friends, daily fantasy sports is usually played more online with random competitors you’re matched against. There’s also a money factor — daily fantasy sports leagues on sites like DraftKings can comprise hundreds of thousands of competitors, each paying a few dollars to enter — meaning the winner can end up winning millions of dollars in prizes. Traditional fantasy sports is legal. The Internet Gambling Prohibition and Enforcement Act of 2006 specifically contained a carve-out that differentiated fantasy sports from online gambling or sports betting. The rationale was that daily fantasy sports was always more about playing with your friends, and not about wagering money. And even if you did wager money with your friends, it would take a whole season (six-plus months) to figure out who won or lost. Losing money over six months doesn’t really feel like gambling or sports betting, where you can lose money in a matter of hours or minutes. Plus, there wasn’t much luck involved, because the results were spread out over a season — while a player may get unlucky and have one bad game, they could bounce back the next week to make up for it. The law of large numbers says that over time (like a 162-game MLB season) the elements of luck will get averaged out. So fantasy sports was thought of as a game of skill, because it was really about knowing who to draft. But then daily fantasy sports came along. It only took a few hours for participants to win or lose money, and results were seemingly much more luck-based than traditional fantasy sports. Because the federal government hasn’t yet ruled on daily fantasy sports, it’s up to the states to decide how they want to regulate it. And to be honest, states don’t really know to regulate it. Daily fantasy sports obviously is a lot less like gambling than straight-up betting on sports, which is only legal in Las Vegas. But it’s also a lot more like gambling than traditional fantasy sports, mainly because of the aforementioned luck factor. So what should states do? For a while, they didn’t do anything. But then in October 2015, things quickly changed. Basically overnight the U.S. Justice Department and FBI opened an investigation into FanDuel and DraftKings to determine whether daily fantasy sports is gambling, which would violate federal law. Both companies quickly lawyered-up, hired lobbyists and prepared for a battle toward legalization — after all, their future depended on it. Slowly but surely, states across the U.S. fell on two sides — banning it as a form of illegal gambling (like in Nevada and New York) or passing new legislation to explicitly legalize fantasy sports (like Illinois). But eventually, the tide turned. A few months ago, New York passed a law legalizing daily fantasy sports. And while it’s not yet legal in all 50 states, it does seem that progress is being made. Of course, the result of a lobbying effort like this is that DraftKings and FanDuel spent hundreds of millions of dollars just to stay alive. And while they are now back on the path to expansion and profitability, somewhere along the way the companies realized it was pointless to continue competing against each other — they were spending hundreds of millions of dollars in TV advertising each year just to outcompete the other, while also paying two separate sets of lawyers and lobbyists to obtain the same thing — legalization. So . Details are still vague, and there is no new determined company structure (or even company name). But one thing is certain, DraftKings and FanDuel will soon be one company. What does this mean for the industry? Even though DraftKings and FanDuel are the household names associated with daily fantasy sports, there are still other players, including Yahoo. These smaller providers may find it hard to compete under the shadow of the soon-to-be-formed giant that is DraftKings-FanDuel. Plus, daily fantasy sports ; there are still about 10 states that ban it, and about five where the legislation isn’t yet clear. So the lobbying work isn’t over yet.
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How blockchain can create the world’s biggest supercomputer
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Ben Dickson
| 2,016 | 12 | 27 |
As our desktop computers, laptops, mobile devices, etc. stand idly by for a huge portion of the day, . Large IoT ecosystems, machine learning and deep learning algorithms and other sophisticated solutions being deployed in every domain and industry are raising the demand for stronger cloud servers and more bandwidth to address the minute needs of enterprises and businesses. So how can we make a more economic and efficient use of all the computing power that’s going to waste? Blockchain, the distributed ledger that’s gaining traction across various domains, might have the answer to the dilemma by providing a platform that enables participants to lend and borrow computing resources — and make money in the process. “There is a growing demand for computing power from industries and scientific communities to run large applications and process huge volumes of data,” says Gilles Fedak, co-founder of , a distributed cloud computing platform. Fedak names several domains, such as product simulation, deep learning and 3D rendering, where demand for expensive computing resources and High-Performance Computing (HPC) is rising. “The biggest challenge for supercomputing is the demand to compress time,” says Jerry Cuomo, vice president of Blockchain for Business at IBM. “Business processes must now be completed at a significantly faster pace than before. The result is that the demand for computing power is increasing exponentially.” David Sønstebø, founder of , a distributed ledger for IoT, also underlines the need to achieve real-time computation and overcome the lag caused by current cloud-based models. “The biggest problem for computation overall is that the devices generating data are not located close-by to the data centers that perform the analytics,” he says. Courtesy of . Compute resource sharing platforms such as have existed for years. But they still depend on central brokers to distribute and manage tasks, which can make things complicated. One of the fields where centralized and cloud-based computing falls short is the Internet of Things, Sønstebø says. “As IoT grows, the need for distributed computing becomes an absolute necessity,” he says. Latency in round-trips, network congestion, signal collisions and geographical distances are some of the challenges faced when processing data produced at edge devices in the cloud. “Devices need to be able to trade computational resources with each other in real time so that the computational load can be distributed,” he says. Some of the emerging lines of software will not be supported by centralized architectures at all, iEx.ec’s Fedak says, such as , which, among others, will power , distributed AI and parallel stream processing. “This class of application is extremely challenging because they’re both data and compute-intensive, and they don’t cope well with centralized infrastructure,” Fedak says. Incentivizing resource sharing is also a problem with centralized models. “If you look at the last 10-20 years’ of progress in virtualization, it’s obvious that setting up any kind of environment in a data center or on an individual computer has become much easier,” says Julian Zawistowski , co-founder and CEO of distributed computing platform . “But when it comes to actually renting the hardware, it still tends to be painful: comparing the offerings of different providers is complicated, and it takes quite a bit of time and expertise to figure out the best solution for a given task.” “The issue with getting payment involved is that you need to check whether the participants are actually performing the work and also integrate payment so that the provider of the compute capacity knows that running the computations is going to be worth its time,” says Preston Byrne, COO at . This is easy when you’re dealing with trusted entities such as the Amazon Web Services HPC platform, but not so when you’re dealing with nodes that vary in hardware and power. A distributed network of computers managed by blockchain and smart contracts can create a shared economy where anyone with a computer can borrow idle computing power and make a side income. The peer-to-peer nature of the blockchain and distributed ledgers will also help move computation closer to where the data is being generated, and avoid bottleneck round-trips to cloud servers. Byrne suggests that while not being a computation platform itself, the blockchain can potentially create “a marketplace application that attacks the specific problem of linking buyers and sellers of compute time and allowing them to pay themselves in cryptocurrency without needing an intermediary like AWS.” IOTA’s Sønstebø further elaborates on Byrne’s point and says that distributed ledgers “shine in renting out computation in the fog, i.e. at the edge of the network.” IOTA has developed a distributed ledger based on Tangle, a scalable design that gets rid of the blocks and introduces a Directed Acyclic Graph (DAG) that reduces transaction times and removes fees, which according to Sønstebø creates the backbone for an outsourced distributed on-demand computational trade model for M2M environments. Golem, which recently in , has created a peer-to-peer computation sharing platform on the Ethereum blockchain, which it dubs ‘Airbnb for computers.’ Golem enables application owners and individual users to rent the computing resources of other users and pay for it directly in cryptocurrency. According to Eddy Azar, Growth Hacker at Golem, the platform has the potential to “reduce costs and increase speed in domains such as scientific research, machine learning and graphics rendering, while making it possible for anyone with an average or better computer to share resources and make a side income.” After submitting tasks to the Golem network, requestors are matched with providers based on prices, reputations and machine performance registered on the ledger. Resources are then sent to the provider for processing and are sent back after the task is completed. The provider is paid if the results pass verification tests. A user’s reputation is built-up based on their success in completing tasks and making payments. Developers can use Golem’s open-source code and task API to create program that uses the network and put it on Golem’s application registry, which Azar likens to an app store, and make it available for others to use and, if the developer so chooses, pay for. iEx.ec is another distributed computing platform, which uses the Ethereum blockchain to create “a market network for applications, data, and computing resources, including HPC ones,” says Julien Béranger, the company’s Community Outreach Officer. “It means that everyone will be able to offer their computing resources through smart contract deployed on the blockchain.” The platform uses Desktop Grid or Volunteer Computing to collect underutilized computing resources to execute very large parallel applications at a fraction of the cost of a traditional supercomputer. This is the model used in distributed computing platforms like SETI@Home, Folding@home and . The iEx.ec team hopes the combination will provide inexpensive, scalable and on-demand access CPU, GPU, data sets, storage and other resources. Blockchain makes a big difference, iEx.ec’s Fedak believes. “Because the blockchain allows for a decentralized infrastructure, it can bring the data closer to their producers and consumers,” he says, “whereas with centralized cloud computing, data-centers tend to be located in remote areas.” The demand for computation will continue to grow as we move forward. Whether cloud servers will scale up to meet the requirements in resources, costs and speed is yet to be seen. In the meantime, the blockchain proposes an alternative that can open up new possibilities and succeed where previous technologies have failed.
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Honda invests in Southeast Asia-based Uber rival Grab
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Jon Russell
| 2,016 | 12 | 11 |
Southeast Asia’s Grab, a ridesharing rival to Uber, has welcomed a new backer after Honda announced a strategic, undisclosed investment in the company today. at a valuation of $3 billion in September, yet still it is adding more backers. This deal is an extension of that huge Series F round, and it is the second of its kind this month for Grab following . While Honda is a major name to add to Grab’s investor list, it isn’t immediately clear how the companies will work together going forward, although we know it will initially focus on motorbikes. For those less familiar with Grab, it includes motorbike taxis on demand, alongside private cars and licensed taxis in six countries in Southeast Asia. That’s where Honda, one of the world’s largest sellers of motorbikes, can play a major part, although it is worth noting that the “GrabBike” service isn’t available in all of Grab’s country markets at this point. “Multiple areas [of collaboration] are in discussion, and that will include the sale of bikes to drivers,” a Grab spokesperson told TechCrunch, adding that Honda will focus on areas such as telematics and safety equipment, and it may expand to Grab’s four-wheeled vehicles later, too. That’s a lot more information than the accompanying press release, which simply said that Honda and Grab will “collaborate on various initiatives to enhance benefits for GrabBike drivers and riders.” While Uber is the obvious foe for Grab, the company is heavily focused on Indonesia, where Go-Jek, , leads the growing motorbike taxi market. If you’ve ever visited capital city Jakarta, with a population of 10 million and gridlocked roads, you’ll see why a bike gets you from A to B far, far quicker than a taxi. With that in mind, this deal with Honda seems focused on pecking away at Go-Jek’s lead in Indonesia, which is Southeast Asia’s largest economy and the world’s fifth most populated country. The Honda deal, like the Tokyo Century alliance, is another that seems to have been landed by Ming Maa, the former SoftBank executive who joined Grab as president in October. Maa’s role includes financial management of Grab — he’s taking over many responsibilities from Grab’s CFO, — alongside making deals. That’s an interesting position given his past with SoftBank and the potential for Grab to make an exit via an IPO. That’s something the company hasn’t talked about much, but it could be a dark horse for a listing in 2017 — either in Singapore, where Grab is based, or elsewhere. Grab is present in 34 cities in six countries in Southeast Asia. It claims over 24 million app downloads and a pool of more than 500,000 drivers. Uber’s data for the region is unclear, and Go-Jek is present in Indonesia only at this point.
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The Honest Company’s not terrible but not very good 2016
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Connie Loizos
| 2,016 | 12 | 11 |
has become a beloved brand in many homes in its five-year history. But the consumer products business has also taken its lumps in 2016. It’s currently fighting brought against it by consumers who say they were misled by the company’s labeling of various products, including its laundry detergent and sunscreen. Relatedly, Honest was by The Wall Street Journal earlier this year after the outlet commissioned two independent lab tests of the company’s laundry detergent and determined it contained an ingredient — sodium lauryl sulfate — that’s commonly found in other products but that Honest has warned consumers not to use. (Honest has disputed the labs’ findings and says its detergent instead uses a different compound called sodium coco sulfate. Still, it’s now reportedly reformulating its detergent .) The company also — gasp — failed to go public or get acquired this year, despite a back in February that it was exploring an IPO with the help of Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs and more recent reports ( by TechCrunch) that it was talking with several big consumer products giants about a sale. Among those Unilever, which soon after a different company that makes “green” household products — Seventh Generation. Presumably, each of these developments has been humbling for a young company that’s reportedly generating in annual revenue and was said to be valued at in August 2015, when it raised its most recent round of funding from investors. While Honest wasn’t the first consumer products outfit to market itself as safer than its predecessors, it has garnered a lot of attention from customers, investors and acquirers — as well as been a target for critics, it says — because of its star co-founder, actress Jessica Alba. Not that the company is throwing in the towel. Far from it, Honest instead appears to be undergoing a shift, both away from its origins as an e-commerce business, as well as from the broader non-toxic household products that it was originally focused around. In fact, don’t be surprised if Honest eventually goes public or gets acquired as primarily a cosmetics company. First, there’s the opportunity. While household products may be a much bigger market — and we aren’t suggesting that Honest will abandon this territory — the U.S. beauty and personal care market alone was reportedly valued at last year. It pays to sell lipstick. Estée Lauder, the New York-based maker of prestige women’s products, trades at a roughly $30 billion market cap right now. Meanwhile, Paris-based L’Oréal, one of the biggest personal-care companies in the world, has a market cap of $93.6 billion. One could also see how Honest, which became popular with parents willing to pay a premium to avoid certain chemicals, might change alongside Alba, who remains the face of the company. Though she was a parent to two very young daughters when the company was founded in 2011, she may be less interested in selling diapers, detergent and baby formula as her children grow up. (New parents may feel less of a connection to her than several years ago for the same reason.) Yet the bigger indicator that the company is switching up its strategy came when the fashion industry trade journal Women’s Wear Daily reported that Honest is cutting 80 employees, or roughly 14 percent of its workforce. Among those leaving are CFO and COO David Parker, and co-founder and president Sean Kane, who is reportedly stepping back to start a new company. Parker was previously CFO of the market research consultancy . Kane was previously a VP at the price-comparison platform . Honest CEO Brian Lee told WWD that the job cuts reflect Honest’s growing evolution away from its reliance on e-commerce and a focus on more offline channels. But Lee also mentioned wanting to grow Honest’s beauty business and to expand internationally — points that Honest’s chief marketing officer, Chris Thorne, on stage at our Disrupt show in New York earlier this year. Indeed, the company launched a makeup and skin care line in September 2015 under the label , and it seems to be making a push to make those products, which are available for order online, much more widely available on shelves. Most notably, Honest has been placing its skin care and makeup products in a growing number of locations, a chain of more than 700 beauty stores in the U.S. Thorne also said to expect standalone retail locations of Honest Beauty. (So far, it has only opened and closed a in L.A.) Honest Beauty further launched a recently, and WWD reported in October that it’s in Canada. That same piece also reported that Honest Beauty is looking to move into Western Europe and Australia. TC sources have also said for some time that the company is looking to expand into Europe. Honest Beauty is still a small business in the grand scheme of things. WWD has reported that brand had reached “more than $10 million in retail sales” as of October. But WWD that the new label is “upping its retail presence at Ulta by 20 percent” and that it recently hired celebrity makeup artist Daniel Martin as a creative color consultant to help with future product development. Will it grow to become Honest’s largest revenue stream? It’s too soon to know, and if Honest gets acquired any time soon, we may never find out. Still, faced with lawsuits over some of its household-related products — suits that Honest has described as “baseless” — it’s easy to imagine that the company is having more fun developing concealers and hairsprays right now, and looking for new ways to ensure that for everyone concerned, 2017 is a better year for Honest than 2016 proved to be.
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Protecting America’s critical infrastructure must remain a priority
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Charles Harrington
| 2,016 | 12 | 11 |
The months leading up to Election Day exposed major vulnerabilities we face in today s increasingly digital world. It s now more clear than ever that America s dependence on technology and web-based communication has forever changed the way government functions at every level. But it s not only our country s highly sensitive — and sometimes top-secret — data and intellectual property that government officials need to keep secure; America s access to drinking water, electricity, transportation networks and countless other types of critical infrastructure are significantly at risk from cyberattacks. Many, if not most, of America s control systems and infrastructure have been in place since long before cybersecurity was a concern. This means traffic-control centers, electric grids, water-treatment facilities and a slew of other vital resources are oftentimes ill-equipped to handle the growing threat of cyberattacks. The water and waste , which clean our sewage and provide us with safe and affordable drinking water, are among the most targeted areas of critical infrastructure today. According to the Department of Homeland Security, the United States has about 153,000 public drinking water systems and more than 16,000 publicly owned waste treatment systems. that the vast majority of Americans rely on these systems for potable and sanitary water, we truly cannot underestimate the devastating impact of water supply contamination or disruption to the network of pipes, pumps and other equipment that constitute the systems that regulate our water. The risk within the energy sector — which includes power plants and the electrical grid is just as significant. In fact, we saw the reality of this threat come to fruition in Ukraine late last year when the country experienced the world s first publicly recognized cyber-induced power outage on an electrical grid. Hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians were without power for several hours, and it wasn t long before the Department of Homeland Security warned Americans of the possibilities for a similar attack occurring in the United States. With the risks ever-apparent, it s no surprise to take necessary steps to modernize our roads, bridges, pipes, and ports to ensure they remain resilient and strong, as he proclaimed November to be Critical Infrastructure Security and Resilience Month. The president also noted that as our population grows and our technology advances, the demands of our critical infrastructure become increasingly significant. Indeed, technology s role in government — and society as a whole — will only continue to grow. But while our growing dependence on technology is largely to blame for the new cyber threats we now face, further technological advancements will also help mitigate these persistent and ominous threats. Advanced technology and strategic use of algorithms allow engineers and cybersecurity professionals to address vulnerabilities within existing critical infrastructure facilities and systems. For example, penetration testing can be used to assess and exploit vulnerabilities of a given facility or system. By exploiting our critical infrastructure s vulnerabilities, today s cybersecurity experts can effectively design, test and implement technical options needed to protect the security of critical networks and infrastructure. Yet despite the significant strides we ve made in combating these emerging threats, a number of pressing challenges remain. For instance, the private sector owns and operates the vast majority of America s critical infrastructure, meaning existing cybersecurity protection programs vary from one owner to the next The good news on this front is that cybersecurity investments have steadily increased in recent months as more stakeholders within the critical infrastructure community are beginning to understand the significant risks at hand. Even so, we can t afford to be complacent — and President-elect Donald Trump agrees. His 100-day action plan includes a tenet to work with Congress to introduce the American Energy and Infrastructure Act, which he states will leverage public-private partnerships, and private investments through tax incentives, to spur $1 trillion in infrastructure investment over 10 years. Ideally, ample funding to protect America s critical infrastructure against cyberattacks will be included in this initiative. Further, the president-elect must be ready to collaborate with our other elected government officials, infrastructure owners and the business community to combat the risks to these important systems all Americans rely upon
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Buying stolen data
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Danny Rogers
| 2,016 | 12 | 11 |
Think about your most prized possession. Imagine it in your mind’s eye. Maybe it’s a family heirloom, or something a close friend gave you, or something you worked hard to afford. Now imagine it gets stolen. Now suppose I’m your next-door neighbor, and I want to know if I’m in danger of being robbed, too. Should I go to all the local pawn shops and back alleys, buy up all the stolen property (including your prized possession) and take it home and look at it to see who it belongs to? Should I pay the people who robbed you to find out if they are going to rob me as well? What if I’m Facebook, and you’re one of the countless consumer web services that have been breached in recent years? This is the — that Facebook is buying up stolen credentials off the dark web to ensure that none of them could be reused to attack them — and it raises an outstanding issue that has circulated in industry and legal circles for a while. Namely, should companies buy stolen data from third parties to combat credential reuse attacks against themselves? Information security is the land of tortured analogies, and I’m certainly torturing the stolen property analogy. For starters, goods in the physical world are unique — my stolen candlesticks can exist only once, whereas a set of stolen credentials can be copied and resold repeatedly at no cost to the thief. But from a legal and ethical perspective, the analogy provides a good starting point to talk about the rampant, and quiet, practice of legitimate companies buying stolen data off the dark web. But before we dive into the sticky issues with the practice, let’s first talk about the motivation. As Alex Stamos, Facebook’s chief security officer, correctly identifies, credential reuse attacks are among the most pernicious and dangerous threats facing consumers on the internet. Tools to combat it on the consumer side — password managers so you never have to reuse passwords, two-factor authentication to enhance password-based security — all exist, but are not widely adopted among consumers (for a whole host of reasons). But how should companies combat it internally, when so many consumer credentials are floating around, waiting to be used against them? The question reminds me of another technology and security conundrum from an earlier era, when BlackBerry users were buying third-party batteries that were catching fire. While those batteries and the lax manufacturing standards of those third parties were to blame, it was BlackBerry that was perceived as the culprit, and proceeded to cryptographically tie their batteries to the phones, disabling the use of third-party batteries. Businesses took this lesson to heart — even if they aren’t to blame, incidents involving their products will always end up hurting their brand. Hence the motivation to act to prevent such occurrences. But what about the ramifications of such actions? For starters, the act of buying stolen data that doesn’t belong to you is, at worst, simply illegal, and, at best, highly dubious. It would be one thing if Facebook were buying their own stolen data back, or if a contractor were doing it on their behalf and with their permission. But buying stolen credentials from other services without their permission? It’s certainly over the line, at least by today’s law. There are also ethical concerns, namely legitimate dollars going to incentivizing the thieves to steal the credentials in the first place. By buying stolen credentials, one effectively guarantees a market for them, ensuring that there will always be a buyer for whatever it is the thief can get their hands on. It begs the question: How much of the black market for stolen information is created by legitimate companies like Facebook buying up data? It might be difficult to quantify, as few companies are ever going to discuss the practice in public, but I suspect it’s significant. In fact, I’ve heard anecdotes of companies that haven’t even been breached until one of their own contractors offered payment on the black market for their data! In this instance, and probably in many others, purchasing stolen data caused the very problem it was trying to solve. This practice needs more public scrutiny, quantification and honest conversation in industry and legal circles. At the same time, we need to focus much more on deploying technologies to prevent or neutralize these attacks — password managers, two-factor authentication, biometrics — and much less on incentivizing the sorts of activities we’re trying to prevent. In fact, I wonder if we, as an industry, just stopped buying stolen data outright, would the market for it dry up? It just might.
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Gillmor Gang: Reality Bites
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Steve Gillmor
| 2,016 | 12 | 11 |
The Gillmor Gang — Robert Scoble, Keith Teare, Frank Radice, Kevin Marks, and Steve Gillmor. Recorded live Saturday, December 10, 2016. Augmented reality meets the Beatles, Twitter-in-chief, Netflix does downloads, Snap go the Glasses, and Apple floats a two week window. What, no Mitt Romney? @stevegillmor, @scobleizer, @kevinmarks, @fradice, @kteare Produced and directed by Tina Chase Gillmor @tinagillmor
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Uber swaps car icons for Star Wars ships with Rogue One promo
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Darrell Etherington
| 2,016 | 12 | 11 |
Uber and Disney are giving Star Wars fans a bit more incentive to hail a ride to the premiere of with a new promotion that begins rolling out Sunday and should be available in the Uber app in hundreds of cities by Monday. The in-app features, which are available on an opt-in basis (so die-hard Trekkers don’t have to endure the pain) will replace the little car images on the Uber map with various Star Wars starships, including the iconic X-Wing. It doesn’t stop at fun graphics, either — there’s also previously unreleased video content from built-in to the app, which can be accessed once the features are activated by a user. No hint on what these might be, but I’d imagine small featurettes or one-off clips from the film are likely possibilities. For Disney, this is a smart way to get some last-minute promotion for the film in front of the huge audience of Uber riders out there. It’s running December 12 through the 18th, officially, so that will cover the launch window of Rogue One, which debuts in theaters on Friday, December 16. It’s also a clever activation by Uber, since it’s opt-in by default to avoid confusing or frustrating existing users who aren’t expecting Star Wars ships all over the place. And tie-ups with major films are a staple of Uber’s business model in recent years, including promotions run with , and , among others. Now, if only they’d figured out how to make an ACTUAL X-Wing show up at my door for the pick-up. Oh right, .
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Death to JIRA
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Jon Evans
| 2,016 | 12 | 11 |
I have long held that Atlassian’s ubiquitous JIRA bug-tracker / feature-planner serves a valuable purpose in the software biz: it gives project teams a common enemy to bond together against. Alas, it’s not worth it. JIRA’s design is fundamentally antithetical to good software development, if it is used for anything more than simple bug tracking. Allow me to propose a better way. When not writing this column, I’m a software engineer who works with many different clients at the software consultancy , so I see many different kinds of JIRA usage. Some organizations use it as Bugzilla++, which is fine and fair enough. But an increasing number seem to be using it to define requirements; just deconstruct the project into a flock of JIRA tickets, the thinking goes, and then you can use them to estimate, communicate, track progress and manage changes. Alas, this thinking is deeply flawed. A JIRA ticket comes with inevitable, built-in assumptions and ramifications. That the feature / behavior it describes is discrete. That it is ultimately binary, i.e. either complete or not. That it can be individually estimated. That it can be worked on in relative isolation. That its connections to tickets can be modeled very simply, using JIRA’s childishly simple notion of “linked” tickets. This is not how software is best built. Software is iterative; instead of building Subsystem A, then Subsystem B and then Interface AB, developers get some basic end-to-end A-AB-B information flow going, then (or beforehand) write tests for that initial trickle of data and learn from the discoveries made during that process — then often go on to deal with the unknowns and minefields elsewhere in the system, sometime for weeks on end, before returning to then expand that flow until all three are complete. But with JIRA, progress is measured in tickets waiting to be worked on, and tickets cleared. Even if this isn’t explicit, it is inevitable; no developer wants to constantly stare at a huge column of “To Do” and “In Progress” tickets; they want to get them off their plate and move them to “QA” and “Shelved” as soon as possible. And so JIRA ticketing subtly but powerfully tends to push developers to work on one ticket at a time, instead, which is often both less efficient and more prone to drastic late-in-the-game failure. Worse yet, they are implicitly pushed to the software they write in a way that maps to the JIRA tickets, even if this isn’t technically optimal — and it usually isn’t. Sure, they push back, and request a wholesale restructuring of the mental model of the project. But who wants to deal with that kind of social and capital load, on an ongoing basis? Far easier just to accept the implicit ticketed system architecture, often crafted in haste and in passing, often by a non-technical manager. Worst of all, this deconstruction into tickets means that there’s often no single place to go to for an overview of the system as a whole. The best software is developed by people who are able to concentrate on the fine implementation details while also keeping in mind the broader purposes of the system as a whole. JIRA makes that latter part extraordinarily, and needlessly, difficult. I stress that it’s not specifically JIRA itself which is guilty of this. All of the above is implicit in the notion of reducing software architecture and development to a set of “tickets.” JIRA’s great sin is only that of being the most successful and widespread ticketing system. The notion of specifying a software project with a set of tickets is itself the enemy. I promised a better way. It is astonishingly simple. We already have an extremely powerful descriptive system which can be used to specify complex systems while including ambiguities, uncertainties, interwoven relationships, iterative levels of success and an arbitrarily broad spectrum of scale and detail. It is called “prose.” For some reason many companies today seem to be terrified of the prospect of writing more than a couple of paragraphs of clear and simple prose. But a well-written 8-page document can define the nuances of a complicated system far better than a whole cumbersome flotilla of interlinked JIRA tickets. Indeed, it’s easy to envision an automated system which takes a simple text document, parses it into sentences, bullet points, paragraphs, sections and chapters, and tracks the estimation and progress of those elements — at whichever scale makes sense in that context — instead of tickets. (I suppose you could even automatically render them into JIRA tickets, if you really had to; but the point is that the master specification would be a single coherent prose document.) Feature planning is about communication. JIRA is fundamentally a terrible way to communicate the requirements of a complex system. Words in a row, if written well, will always be better.
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Few startups IPOed this year, but the ones that did soared
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Katie Roof
| 2,016 | 12 | 29 |
But next year is looking brighter, according to industry experts. There is a sizable list of companies in the pipeline and they are ready to go public as long as the stock market remains stable. (Big caveat: Trump’s unpredictable policies could potentially bring about volatility). “If you have a stand-out product and the company has been designed to scale beyond its first act, it’s a great time to go public,” said Ravi Mhatre, partner at Lightspeed Venture Partners and an early investor in Nutanix. “Public market investors do have appetite for the best companies.”
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2016 Africa roundup: drone delivery, VC, unicorns, exits and Zuck
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Jake Bright
| 2,016 | 12 | 29 |
year for African tech. The continent’s IT scene attracted major investment, produced its first $1 billion startup, launched a national drone delivery program, and drew one of Silicon Valley’s biggest icons to tour its innovation hubs. This from a region that only a decade ago generated almost no . That certainly wasn’t the case this year. Though Africa has yet to produce big startup profits, IT IPOs, or even its own dot-com bubble, it did register significant tech events over the last 12 months. A torrent of capital and a notable acquisition boosted the value proposition of e-commerce in Africa. , digital sales startup Jumia became the continent’s first unicorn when it surpassed $1 billion in market value after a $326 million funding round including investors AXA, Goldman Sachs and MTN. Founded by Germany’s Rocket Internet and based in Nigeria, Jumia is deploying the funds across its 11 startups in 23 African countries. Its e-commerce platforms offer online services ranging from fashion and employment to real estate. Jumia also launched its own digital payments platform JumiaPay, in 2016. , the African subsidiary of Swiss media and e-commerce company Ringier acquired Nigerian online shopping startup DealDey for an undisclosed amount. This created exits (rare hereto in African tech) for Ringier’s initial investors. The move was part of Ringier’s strategy to invest in four verticals within Africa: classifieds, content, digital marketing, and e-commerce. The Swiss firm formed Ringier Africa Deals Group, a joint venture with South African Silvertree Internet Holdings Ltd., for the DealDey buy and future market moves. Several notable tech names expanded on the continent in 2016. , Netflix went live in Africa, accelerating from 0-54 countries in one fell swoop. This presented a challenge to African VOD startup, , which countered with several of its own moves to enter new countries and produce more proprietary Nollywood content. in Nigeria and Kenya in July through a partnership with online shopping startup . The collaboration launched an eBay Powered by MallforAfrica platform through which U.S. businesses with a 300+ star rating can sell. eBay will add 11 new countries to the partnership in 2017, including Angola, Botswana, and Tanzania, according to MallforAfrica CEO Chris Folayan. Uber extended its product, country, and city reach in Africa in 2016. In , we reported on the company’s testing of unique service options on the continent not available in many of its global markets. These include cash payments, new safety measures, and mobile image direction apps. Uber gained a homegrown rival in Kenya in 2016 with Safaricom’s launch of the Little app. Little’s entry has spurred a tit for tat competition in Kenya’s ride hail market around price and product offerings between Uber and the country’s other viable digital-car services. The biggest winner so far . Big Blue also increased its Africa presence in 2016. We reported on IBM Research Africa’s project to create a cognitive computing equivalent to Watson, dubbed Lucy, from its Nairobi lab. The U.S. blue chip giant expanded that effort in August, opening a in Johannesburg, South Africa. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s unannounced August/September trip to Nigeria and Kenya put the global spotlight on Africa’s emerging IT ecosystem. he talked to startup heads (Hotels.ng, Afrinolly, and Andela), visited the Co-Creation Hub, hosted a Facebook town hall, and met with President Muhammadu Buhari. Zuck stopped by the iHub innovation space, reviewed the BRCK mobile Wi-Fi device, had lunch with Kenya’s ICT Cabinet Secretary and met with local tech leaders including Juliana Rotich and Erik Hersman. Facebook, which has roughly 85 million users in Sub-Saharan Africa, announced no new initiatives, saying the trip was about “learning and understanding.” There’s certainly more behind the scenes— most likely a 2017 upgrade to Facebook’s Free Basics program, which currently allows users limited mobile internet services gratis in 17 African countries. Throughout 2016 we covered California based drone delivery startup Zipline’s partnership with UPS and the government of Rwanda to launch drone delivery of crucial medical supplies in Rwanda. After several test rounds, Zipline went live with the program , becoming the world’s first national drone delivery program at scale. It’s a commercial endeavor, with Zipline earning revenues per delivery. Zipline’s Africa drone operation also gained the attention of the , which tapped the startup to test drone delivery of medical supplies to remote U.S. communities. , it looked like there was the strong possibility of Nigerian fintech firm Interswitch becoming Africa’s first public startup unicorn on a major exchange. CEO Mitchell Elegbe did not rule out a possible dual listing on the London and Lagos stock exchange. Another source said the company’s bankers selected an LSE IPO in Q4. The offering didn’t materialize but could still happen in 2017. In a , Elegbe said the delay was due to investor concern over Nigeria’s declining 2016 macroeconomic situation and volatile naira. On a possible 2017 public listing, a company spokesperson said that “an IPO remains an option.” The continent continues to gain international investments and is forming homegrown tech investment funds. In the digital finance space, Y-Combinator backed Nigerian startup closed this month on a $1.3 million seed investment from sources including Tencent and Comcast, CEO Shola Akinlade confirmed. The World Bank’s International Finance Corporation (IFC) also flagged more investment for African startups in 2016 as part of its . Kenya’s iHub incubator announced this month the launch of its new Africa Innovation Fund for startups. The raise, targeted at $10 million for Kenya and $40 million for other African countries, is still active, iHub’s interim-CEO Kamal Bhattacharya said. This follows a market trend of African innovation hubs shifting away from grant-based financing toward more for-profit and investment oriented models, as reported . So what big movements are worth watching in African tech in 2017? First, some failures. This isn’t exactly downbeat. Failing is an inevitable part of the tech ecosystem. The continent’s IT sector has been on a several year run of things growing, expanding, gaining new investment. Some attrition and creative digital destruction must be imminent. On the flipside, it’s about time one of Africa’s commercially oriented startups demonstrates notable profits. Yes, over 2016 the continent showed it can produce unicorns, exits, attract big VC, and even get close to a major IPO. But as Rebecca Enonchong , “To be taken seriously African startups need to win in the for-profit global marketplace.” Perhaps some examples of that will emerge in the new year.
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Samsung’s new curved monitor coming to CES is somewhat tailored for gamers
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Stefan Etienne
| 2,016 | 12 | 29 |
Right before the New Year begins — and with it, CES — . Take Samsung for example, with its new CH711 quantum dot curved monitor. The CH711 comes in two sizes: 27 or 31.5-inch displays, both with 2560 x 1440 (WQHD) resolution. Samsung is touting the deep and distinct 1800R curvature of the screen, a 178-degree viewing angle and 125 percent of sRGB coverage. Cables are hidden in the base, for the gamers like myself who prefer less clutter and more cleanliness. There are some specs missing, though. Samsung hasn’t outlined some of the most crucial specs of the new monitor, namely refresh rates and whether or not color is in 8- or 10-bit. The jury is still out as to whether or not OLED (typically used by LG) is better than the quantum dot display technology used by Samsung. It is worth noting that OLEDs can suffer from lag issues, while quantum dot displays can adjust to fast-changing colors better. Regardless, that can all be for naught if the refresh rate is less than 120, 144 or even 60Hz — for gamers, a higher refresh rate is usually better for competitive play. We don’t know the price and availability as of now, but TechCrunch will be at CES 2017, where Samsung will be debuting this monitor alongside other new hardware.
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How fast is fast charging?
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Kristen Hall-Geisler
| 2,016 | 12 | 29 |
EVgo announced this month that it has broken ground on what will be the first public DC fast charging station, capable of up to 350 kw, in California — more powerful even than current charging champs Tesla Superchargers. The EVgo station will be ready to charge up near the World’s Tallest Thermometer (yup) in Baker, California, this summer. This begs the questions: How fast are other fast chargers? And how fast is fast charging? The amount of time it takes to charge your EV depends on two things: how much power is being supplied by the charger, and how much power your car’s charging system can handle. An EV has to be compatible with the CHAdeMO standard, the SAE CCS standard or be a Tesla (which comes with plug adapters for the other standards) in order to use Level 3 stations. At a Level 1 wall outlet, it generally takes overnight — or longer — to charge up a depleted EV battery. At a Level 2 charger, it takes overnight, more or less, to fully charge. At a Level 3 station, a battery can be recharged up to 80 percent usually in under an hour. Those are the general rules; here are some specifics as reported by the manufacturers: EVgo has a network of more than 800 fast chargers in addition to the new high-power station, which will have four chargers at first with the capability to expand to eight. It will also have a solar-panel canopy to power the chargers and shade the people and cars using the stations, plus back-up batteries for the system in case you stop to charge at night. The station won’t have the Wi-Fi hotspot that you’ll find at a Tesla Supercharger, but don’t forget — it does have the World’s Tallest Thermometer.
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Facebook stalls in lawsuit alleging its facial recognition tech violates Illinois law
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Devin Coldewey
| 2,016 | 12 | 29 |
An Illinois law is proving a thorn in Facebook’s side as a class action lawsuit, alleging mishandling of biometric information, moves toward trial. The latest developments in the case have the social network objecting against releasing or even admitting the existence of all manner of data, but the plaintiffs aren’t taking “objection” for an answer. The case revolves around a 2008 state law known as the . BIPA basically makes it illegal to collect or use biometric data, such as a “scan of hand or face geometry,” without rigorous disclosure of methods, intentions and guarantees regarding that data. The class action suit, filed in mid-2015, alleges that Facebook has knowingly failed to perform this disclosure for its many Illinois users. Separate suits have been filed against Shutterfly, Snapchat and Google. The Shutterfly suit was settled, and Snapchat’s sent to arbitration. The Google case is technically ongoing, but the company argues that analysis of digital photos doesn’t count as biometric data, nor could an Illinois law prevent a California company from performing such analysis outside Illinois. Facebook has likewise fought the suit, aiming for dismissal under similar arguments. The clear-headed Judge James Donato determined in May that while proceeding under California law was something users had agreed to, it was unenforceable, as it would amount to “a complete negation” of non-California protections such as those found in BIPA. And as for the idea that a “scan” must take place in person, he called that interpretation “cramped” and noted that the law itself is so worded as to potentially include such “emerging” methods as bulk digital analysis. So the case proceeded, and the parties at odds have fallen to . Specifically, the plaintiffs say that Facebook must provide documents regarding the lobbying effort against BIPA that suddenly began after the case failed to be dismissed — State Senator Link proposed an amendment (at the urging of such lobbyists, opponents alleged) that would exclude digital images from BIPA provisions. The amendment was never adopted, but we intend to look into it nevertheless, as its changes would have been suspiciously beneficial to the companies under threat from the law as it stands — and who claimed to not be subject to it anyway. Documents from a case in Ireland with some similarities are also requested, as are some related to patents and source code surrounding Facebook’s facial recognition technology. Facebook, for its part, has objected to just about every word in the dictionary. In a document filed in September, Facebook objects to the definitions of: , and in fact in the plaintiff’s interrogatories. Facebook denies the implication that it has created, stored or used any biometric identifiers whatsoever, even though it’s beyond a doubt that it does, by any reasonable definition of the terms. It also claims that it does not maintain records on whether photographs contain people, a claim that seems at odds with basic facts regarding how its tagging and facial recognition processes work. There are legitimate objections, as well, of course: a request for a printed copy of the source code is indeed “frivolous,” for instance, and although Facebook tracks location, it doesn’t necessarily know the legal residence of a given user, so requests for that (critical for a class action relying on state jurisdiction) are also unable to be fulfilled. The company also offers some rather thin-sounding excuses, dismantled convincingly by the plaintiffs, as to why it can’t provide information on its lobbying efforts against the law it is accused of violating, as well as documents related to the Ireland case. And, as the plaintiffs point out, what few documents it has provided are often heavily redacted. A public version of one redacted document was found, in fact, and the redacted information was far from confidential — the plaintiffs argue — highly relevant. It doesn’t speak well for the other redactions, they say. I am not a lawyer, of course, but the court records show Facebook in a poor light: evasive, pedantic and stalling for time. It is understandably wary of exposing the inner workings of its facial recognition systems to an unsympathetic judge in a state with strong protections against practices it is conceivably (some would say assuredly) taking part in. And the repercussions of a company whose services transcend borders being forced to conform to a state law like this could be far-reaching. But time is running out: The deadline for discovery is in early February, and it’s hard to see how Facebook can continue to balk at providing some of the documents in question without provoking the ire of the judge. A call is scheduled for January 5 to resolve some of these disputes, and Facebook’s next court filing may successfully object to the objections to the objections to the objections mentioned above (but we’ll leave that to the judge to decide). I’ve contacted both Facebook and the law firm representing the plaintiffs — Robbins Geller Rudman & Dowd — and will update this post if either offers any comment. We will also be following this case as it develops, as it could prove a landmark one in terms of how biometric data is handled and disclosed by major companies like Facebook.
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2016 and the year ahead
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John Graham-Cumming
| 2,016 | 12 | 29 |
This past year was a big one for internet attacks, encryption, blackouts, speed and IoT, and 2017 is positioned to bring even more headlines for each of these. As Cloudflare prepares for the coming year, we made some predictions about what’s next for the future of the internet. But first, let’s review what we saw as a result of the widespread use and abuse of the internet in 2016. In both Gabon and Gambia, internet connectivity was disrupted during elections. The contested election in started with an internet blackout that lasted a short time. In , the internet shutdown lasted for days. Even as we write this, countries like DR Congo are discussing blocking specific internet services, clearly forgetting the lessons learned in these other countries. DDoS attacks continued throughout the year, hitting websites big and small. In March, we saw weekend DDoS attacks that were peaking at 400 Gbps, and in December, we saw a new pattern of attackers treating attacks as a regular job to be performed from 9 to 5. In addition to real DDoS, there were also empty threats from a group calling itself and demanding bitcoin for sites and APIs to stay online. Another group popped up to the same modus operandi. The Internet of Things became what many had warned it would become: an army of devices used for attacks. A botnet army of IoT cameras and a major attack took out DNS service provider . Non-DDoS attacks continued apace with hacks that need WAF protection like httpoxy and ImageTragick causing disruption for unprotected sites. And TLS experienced yet another attack called . But it wasn’t all doom and gloom. IPv6 saw significant mobile traffic and suddenly felt absolutely real. Apple announced that iOS apps must support IPv6-only networks and major ISPs started prioritizing IPv6 traffic. TLS 1.3 went live to dramatically simplify and improve the security of the internet. And the internet got a lot faster with widespread support for HTTP/2, including Server Push and WebP conversion. As the web has become more encrypted, the need to optimize TLS and TCP together has become more important and Cloudflare helped contribute to increased security with Origin CA, HTTPS Everywhere and giving protected WebSockets to everyone. Our team, comprised of engineers, programmers, cryptographers and hackers, took a look into a virtual crystal ball and came up with our predictions for 2017. Here’s what we think the year ahead will have to offer. Four years ago, we illustrated a blog post about a 65Gbps DDoS with a picture of the band Massive Attack. The following year, were back illustrating a 300Gbps attack; as internet speeds have gone up worldwide, so have DDoS sizes. In 2016, we’ve sporadically seen 1Tbps DDoS attacks reported from various service providers. We believe that in 2017, the baseline for a massive attack will be 1Tbps (and we hope that Massive Attack’s 2016 song releases presage a 2017 album). Although HTTP/2 has a large effect on web performance, it also depends on the TCP protocol for connections, which can cause performance problems on lossy networks. Google has been experimenting with a protocol called , which uses UDP instead of TCP. We expect such UDP-based web protocol experiments to continue and become mainstream. Our data says IPv6 is 27 percent faster, Facebook says , LinkedIn says between . Regardless of which numbers you believe, it’s clear that IPv6 provides a speed advantage. At the same time, ISPs and mobile networks are pushing for greater deployment of IPv6, and we expect IPv6 to be the norm in 2017 for all networks. Specifically for mobile networks, we believe IPv4 will be deprecated. This chart shows the percentage of top 25,000 websites (according to Alexa) that are available over IPv6: Cloudflare. Based on by Dan Wing. Back in 1996, potential collisions in MD5 were identified, but it wasn’t until 2005 that actual collisions were demonstrated. At the time, the death of both MD5 and SHA-1 were predicted. MD5 is now seen as cryptographically useless and has even been used in malware to forge a certificate. Since 2005, bad news about collision resistance in SHA-1 has been gathering and we predict that an actual collision will be computed in 2017. When people think of DDoS attacks, they are typically thinking of volumetric attacks against layers 3 and 4 (such as SYN floods). We believe that Layer 7 attacks (particularly against the HTTP and DNS protocols) will continue to rise in 2017 as attackers look for smart ways to knock web applications offline beyond simply volumetric attacks. At the same time, Layer 6 attacks against the TLS protocol will make an appearance. We have already seen such attacks in the past (attacks that were designed to consume server CPU by asking for slow or complex cryptographic operations) and smart attackers will continue their search for any weakness in a web application or protocol implementation. The number of mobile internet users surpassed fixed internet users back in , and today more than 80 percent of internet users own a smartphone, while 89 percent of their mobile time is spent using apps. This means that acceleration and protection of APIs (that are used by apps for their internet connectivity) is essential and trends indicate that mobile traffic will be 60 percent of all internet traffic this year. This switch to mobile puts more emphasis on optimized web experiences and robust APIs than before. The attack on Dyn’s DNS service showed how an often overlooked piece of the internet, the Domain Name System, is critical to its functioning. Much of the news around DDoS attacks until the Dyn attack was focused on attacks on websites and networks. With this realization that DNS is critical, its security will be taken seriously in 2017, and the protection of DNS infrastructure and servers will become a business necessity. At the same time, the open nature of DNS will come into focus and DNSSEC will take on a greater role in securing DNS responses from attack.
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Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian and Serena Williams are getting married
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Megan Rose Dickey
| 2,016 | 12 | 29 |
Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian and tennis superstar Serena Williams are engaged! Williams announced the engagement today on none other than : I came home
A little late
Someone had a bag packed for me
And a carriage awaited
Destination: Rome
To escort me to my very own “charming”
Back to where our stars first collided
And now it was full circle
At the same table we first met by chance
This time he made it not by chance
But by choice
Down on one knee
He said 4 words
And
In response to Williams’ post, Ohanian said, “And you made me the happiest man on the planet.” on his Facebook page. Ohanian and Williams have apparently been “dating forever,” one colleague said TechCrunch’s Slack room. Turns out homeperson was right. Rumors of the two dating first circulated back in October 2015, . Following the announcement on Reddit, the Women’s Tennis Association . Congrats to and on their engagement! 💍 💑 — WTA (@WTA)
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Jawbone fires back after Fitbit ends patent case
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Brian Heater
| 2,016 | 12 | 29 |
Fitbit celebrated the holiday this year by filed against fellow fitness wearable manufacturer Jawbone. Even so, the legal war being waged between the two sides appears to be a long way from over. In fact, Jawbone has issued its own filing this week that, naturally, accepts Fitbit’s motion to terminate the patent suit, while hitting back against the company’s decision to keep things going for as long as it did – and its stated justification for dropping. Fitbit certainly didn’t pull any punches with its request last week The company essentially said it decided not to go forward with the suit due to some apparent serious financial woes in camp Jawbone, stating, “SEC filings of one of its biggest investors now value Jawbone shares as worth nothing, as well as indicate that Jawbone has filed for bankruptcy or is in default.” At the time of the filing, Jawbone referred to the initial claims as “baseless,” and now the company’s gotten more specific in its own filing with the ITC. The document includes some choice cuts, including a defense against Fitbit’s claim that the company was essentially bankrupt. […] Fitbit calls into question the financial stability of Jawbone by relying on speculative press reports and third-party sources rather than any information directly from Jawbone. The publicly filed motion even goes so far as to assert that Jawbone has declared bankruptcy, despite the absence of any bankruptcy petition to cite and the fact that discovery obtained in this Investigation even in the last week is inconsistent with a company that has declared bankruptcy. Jawbone’s lawyers go on to state that Fitbit had all of the info it needed to end the case months prior, but instead opted to solider on “to further burden Jawbone with this proceeding, including seeking all of the technical details of a prototype product.” We’ve reached out to Fitbit for comment about this comment on the company’s comments. Fitbit has responded with comment,
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These are the 5 videos vying for Best Startup Video at the 10th Annual Crunchies
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Jordan Crook
| 2,016 | 12 | 29 |
The is right around the corner, and this year’s event will be bigger and better than ever. As a part of that, we’re including a brand new category: Best Startup Video! You might have the coolest technology, service, or gadget in the world, but without a fun video to show it off, does it really count? Pics or it didn’t happen, amirite? That said, we’d like to introduce the videos that have been nominated as finalists for the Best Startup Video Award. Take a look! [youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SJwrUaQvtsc&w=640&h=360] [youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q4VX5_m8zMc&w=640&h=360] [youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x6sSa5NpqUI&w=640&h=360] [youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XqkOFLBSJR8&w=640&h=360] [youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w5vE1MeMcbA&w=640&h=360] We humbly invite you to join us as we toast the best startups, leaders, and technology in the world. Plus, you’ll be able to rub shoulders with your friends and the rest of the startup community. You can purchase tickets . See you soon!
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Coca-Cola closes Founders startup incubator
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Ron Miller
| 2,016 | 12 | 29 |
After opening to much fanfare three years ago, Coca-Cola is shutting down The Founders program, in Innovation Leader. Under this program, the company nurtured young startups, hoping to siphon some of that entrepreneurial energy and pass it along to the big lumbering corporation. Over the last several years, companies have recognized the need to innovate, and the larger the company, the more difficult it is. David Butler, who, according to the report, has left the company, ran the program as VP of innovation. The company with the idea of giving startups with cool ideas some seed money — a million or less — along with access to the vast resources only a company the size of Coca-Cola could provide. Butler would scout the startups, then connect the ones he liked with an advisor, who could help them navigate the big company. at large companies over the last several years, including such well-known and varied brands as McDonald’s, CVS, Fidelity and GE. As Butler told me a couple of years ago at Web Summit in Dublin, when it works, the startup-corporation combination can be a powerful one: “Most large established companies have scale but lack agility. Startups have agility, but they’re looking for scale.” Put the two together and something beautiful could happen, or at least that was the hope. While the idea was to create companies that would be independent and hopefully find other sources of funding (and customers), Coca-Cola was trying to gain something by bringing these startups into the fold. The problem becomes giving the startup enough love without smothering it. A small company can’t always cater to the needs of its corporate benefactor, precisely because early stage startups by their nature lack the resources to take on too much too soon. Butler told me earlier this year that the company liked to find startups, even before they formed. “We set up meetings with startups. We try to find founders before they develop and create the startup.” They would start with a thesis related to a big challenge or opportunity in the company. They established relationships with early-stage VCs and seed funders, typically talking to entrepreneur-in-residences, looking for that company that could help them before it launched. Butler told me the company had funded 12 companies as of March when I last spoke to him. Among its biggest successes was , an online staffing firm, which was funded early by Coca-Cola Founders, but has raised $7.9 million overall, including . Perhaps Butler was being prescient when he told me about the difficulties in pulling this off. “When the [startup and the corporation] combine, it’s quite interesting. You need a translator to help them understand what’s going on. That’s why a lot of platforms inside big companies fail and you have to take the time.” Unfortunately, the Founders platform appears to be no more, but the companies who have received funding will continue to receive internal support. They just won’t go looking for any more. It’s hard to know if this is the start of a trend where companies back off this kind of corporate funding, or if Coca-Cola, whose , is just an isolated case of a company in transition.
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Obama announces sanctions for Russian election hacking
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Kate Conger
| 2,016 | 12 | 29 |
The Obama administration announced today that it will impose sanctions on Russian intelligence services and officials in response to the hacks of American political institutions during the election season. The sanctions cover nine individuals and organizations in Russia, and will prevent four officials from Russia’s Main Intelligence Directorate, or GRU, from traveling to the U.S. or keeping assets here. But the sanctions may not have a significant impact, the New York Times , since GRU officials do not often visit the U.S. Thirty-five Russian intelligence operatives will also be forced to leave the U.S. Three companies were also singled out in the of the sanctions: the Special Technologies Center, Zor Security, and a group called the “Autonomous Non-commercial Organization Professional Association of Designers of Data Processing Systems” that reportedly provided training to hackers. “I have sanctioned nine entities and individuals: the GRU and the FSB, two Russian intelligence services; four individual officers of the GRU; and three companies that provided material support to the GRU’s cyber operations. In addition, the Secretary of the Treasury is designating two Russian individuals for using cyber-enabled means to cause misappropriation of funds and personal identifying information,” President Obama said in a . “The State Department is also shutting down two Russian compounds, in Maryland and New York, used by Russian personnel for intelligence-related purposes, and is declaring ‘persona non grata’ 35 Russian intelligence operatives.” Obama expanded an executive order issued after the Sony hacks in order to sanction the officials and agencies, adding language that allows sanctions for undermining the election process. Hacks of the Democratic National Committee and Hillary Clinton’s campaign manager during the election season led to leaks that damaged the campaign. President-elect Donald Trump will have the power to alter the sanctions once he takes office, and it’s unclear whether the sanctions will stick under his administration. Trump, who has repeatedly dismissed intelligence community reports that Russia tampered with the U.S. election process, told reporters last night that he didn’t believe the sanctions are necessary. “I think we ought to get on with our lives. I think that computers have complicated lives very greatly. The whole age of computer has made it where nobody knows exactly what is going on. We have speed, we have a lot of other things, but I’m not sure we have the kind, the security we need,” Trump said. In addition to the sanctions, the Obama administration has also suggested that it will take retaliatory action in secret. His administration has been criticized for responding to Russian hacking too slowly, a charge that Obama during a recent press conference. “These actions are not the sum total of our response to Russia’s aggressive activities. We will continue to take a variety of actions at a time and place of our choosing, some of which will not be publicized,” Obama said in his statement, adding that his administration will report to Congress about Russia’s interference during this election season, as well as other hacking attempts on previous elections. The Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Department of Homeland Security issued a brief of the hacks of the DNC and published a list of IP addressed believed to be associated with the attacks.
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SoftBank lets Trump brag about creating jobs (he didn’t) so that it can buy T-Mobile
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Taylor Hatmaker
| 2,016 | 12 | 29 |
Yes, Trump is talking about the same that has nothing to do with him. In a convoluted turn of self promotion, the President-elect just revisited his not-so-humblebrag from earlier this month, falsely taking credit for , a joint $100 billion plan between SoftBank and Saudi Arabia to invest in emerging technologies. As announced in October, the fund’s creators plan to seed it with $25 billion and $45 billion respectively over the next five years. Given that Silicon Valley is world capital of tech innovation, a lot of that money was bound to land stateside regardless of Trump’s claims to take credit after the fact. Nonetheless, Trump continues to tout his election win for to create 50,000 U.S. jobs through its investments in Sprint, OneWeb and the Vision Fund. “I was just called by the head people at Sprint, and they are going to be bringing 5,000 jobs back to the United States,” Trump told reporters. “They have taken them from other countries. They are bringing them back to the United States… and also OneWeb, a new company, is going to be hiring 3,000 people.” SoftBank—and Sprint, by proxy—appear to be happy to play along with Trump’s creative PR flourishes, and with good reason. Coziness with the Trump administration could grease the wheels on a rumored acquisition of T-Mobile in a bid to combine the third and fourth largest carriers in the U.S. Masa said he would never do this had we (Trump) not won the election! — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) Masa (SoftBank) of Japan has agreed to invest $50 billion in the U.S. toward businesses and 50,000 new jobs…. — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) Earlier in December, SoftBank CEO and Sprint Chairman Masayoshi Son explained his relationship with Trump, that he visited Trump Tower to “celebrate his presidential job and commit because he will do a lot of deregulation.” SoftBank’s interest in purchasing T-Mobile is well known. In a 2014 interview with , Son emphasized that his decision to buy a majority stake in Sprint will only work if the company can scale considerably and compete: “The U.S. market is pretty much a duopoly. I always felt that we were coming to the U.S. market after it was already basically game over. The top two duopolists have such a strong brand, strong networks, strong customer bases. [Still] this is the richest market in the world, the center of innovation for the Internet. Mobile service is migrating from voice-centric service to data-centric service. We may have the last opportunity. If we have any chance to build a meaningful competitor, our Internet background may help a little bit on that end. But we need scale.” Later in 2014, SoftBank was said to have abandoned its plans for a potential merger, discouraged by U.S. antitrust regulation. That’s where the Trump administration comes in. Son’s interest in buying T-Mobile might have quieted down, but rumors suggest that it has leading into late 2016. The Trump administration means renewed hope for the deregulation that would make SoftBank’s long game acquisition of T-Mobile possible. Known telecommunications deregulator bubbled up in rumors about FCC appointments and Trump transition team member has even of the FCC altogether: “Most of the original motivations for having an FCC have gone away. Telecommunications network providers and ISPs are rarely, if ever, monopolies. If there are instances where there are monopolies, it would seem overkill to have an entire federal agency dedicated to ex ante regulation of their services.” Letting Trump falsely claim credit for SoftBank’s U.S. job creation seems like a small price to pay for a merger that could pave the way for the company’s .
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In light of discrimination concerns, Uber and Lyft defend their policies to show rider names and photos
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Megan Rose Dickey
| 2,016 | 12 | 29 |
Uber and Lyft have responded to regarding potential racial discrimination against passengers. Last month, Franken wondered why it’s necessary to include names and photos of passengers requesting rides, and what steps both companies can take to dissuade drivers from canceling rides on people with “black-sounding” names. In Uber and Lyft’s responses to Franken, both of the companies CEOs defended their respective policies. Uber CEO Travis Kalanick, who first clarified that drivers only see the first names of passengers and not photos of them, said Uber designed it this way in order “to ensure a smooth and safe pick-up process.” “For these reasons, we have real concern that removing names altogether (and replacing them with numeric codes, as the study suggests) would lead to more confusion and potentially less safe outcomes,” Kalanick wrote. “It is unlikely that riders would consistently use codes, and riders might enter the wrong vehicle or even ride with someone illicitly posing as a ridesharing driver.” Similar to Kalanick, Lyft CEO Logan Green defended Lyft’s policy of using names and photos, saying that they’re necessary in order to create a “digital trust profile” designed to protect both drivers and passengers. Lyft’s model “depends on drivers and riders being safe and secure,” Green wrote. He also said Lyft’s commitment to transparency “mandates that every Lyft user knows instantly who their driver is (via name and photo identification) and what vehicle he or she is driving (via a vehicle photo and license plate number). Moving forward, and in light of the study, Kalanick said Uber is committed to meeting with the study’s researchers to talk about their findings and suggestions in more depth, experimenting with new ways to prevent discrimination on Uber and reviewing its policies around how and when it tells drivers about the company’s non-discrimination policies. Kalanick went on to say that Uber will remain in touch with Franken as the company explores potential ways to mitigate discrimination. For Lyft, Green said that the company is committed to enhance its review of ride cancellations by specifically looking at cancellation rates and the quality of service in “minority census tracts.” But Franken is still concerned about the fact that neither Uber or Lyft are going to get rid of certain elements that make it easy for drivers to discriminate against passengers. “I appreciate the steps that both Uber and Lyft have taken to address my concerns regarding discrimination against consumers, including meeting with the authors of a recent study, communicating with their drivers about the companies’ nondiscrimination policies, and monitoring available metrics about ride cancellations. But I remain concerned that certain elements of an app’s platform design-like allowing drivers to see a rider’s name or photo before accepting a ride request-do not sufficiently guard against discriminatory conduct. I have expressed these concerns to the companies, and I look forward to working with them to address these challenges.” In recent weeks, both and have started using these little light-up thingymabobbers that help customers better identify which car is for them. That could definitely be part of a broader strategy to move away from using names and/or photos of passengers, but neither Uber or Lyft made any mention of them in their letters to Franken.
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Duolingo gets social
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Frederic Lardinois
| 2,016 | 12 | 29 |
, the popular language learning app, has long made learning a new language accessible to anybody with a computer or smartphone. Unlike being in a traditional class environment, though, using Duolingo was always a rather lonely experience. The company, whose app has now been used by over 150 million people, realized as much and today, with the launch of Duolingo Language Clubs, it’s adding a new (and optional) social component to its language learning experience. The company likens the clubs, which are now available in both the and of its app, to having gym buddies — but for your brain. The clubs allow you to share a newsfeed with your accomplishments with your friends — and to make the experience competitive, there’s also a weekly leaderboard. “Learning a language is an inherently social experience,” said Duolingo co-founder and CEO Luis von Ahn in today’s announcement. “One of the hardest things about learning a language is staying motivated, and we believe this new feature will draw friends and family together around a common goal to help our users hit their goals more quickly.” The new social features are now available for speakers of English, Spanish, Portuguese, French, German, Italian, Russian, Dutch, Hungarian, Ukrainian, Turkish, Korean, Chinese, Japanese, Vietnamese, Indonesian, Greek, Romanian, Czech, Polish, Thai and Hindi. The fact that Duolingo announced the new features today is probably no accident. With January 1st only a few days off, plenty of people are surely adding “learn a new language” to their New Year’s resolutions (which they will promptly forgot in a week or two). Add a slew of new smartphone owners (who got their new gadgets for Christmas) to that list and December and January are likely pretty important months for Duolingo.
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NFL games are now live streaming on China’s Sina Weibo network
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Sarah Perez
| 2,016 | 12 | 29 |
The NFL is hoping to expand its presence in China with a new deal that gives social media platform, Sina Weibo – often called China’s Twitter – the rights to live stream select games on its network, including the Super Bowl. The deal marks the first time a sports league will live stream games on the service, the NFL says. Additionally, Sina will gain the rights to non-game, video-on-demand clips, highlights and other NFL content. The games have already started streaming on Sina’s network, but the NFL only officially the deal this week. Six games have streamed over the past couple of weekend, the sports organization says. Going forward, Sina will live stream the final Sunday Night Football game in Week 17, three playoff games, and the Super Bowl. The NFL is interested in China because of fans’ growing viewership of its content in the country. Today, the NFL reports having over 1.5 million online viewers in China each week. On average, there are over 5 million views of NFL content each week. Many Chinese viewers tend to watch games played in the early morning via in-game video clips, the NFL notes. The sports league will cater to viewers’ interest in clips, by offering Sina users additional content beyond the live streamed games. The deal also includes clips and highlights and the rights to content like the Top 10 performances of the week, Top 5 Runs and Catches, and more. “Sina Weibo is an excellent partner for the NFL as we engage fans across the Chinese Mainland. We are excited about working with Sina Weibo to stream NFL games to millions of fans. We’re confident this will be a valuable long-term partnership for the NFL and our sponsors in China,” said Richard Young, NFL China Managing Director, in a statement. It’s not surprising that the NFL has sought out another online home for its games, given its continued interest in reaching younger fans via social media platforms and internet streaming sites. The organization already has a similar deal to live stream its games in the U.S., having been one of the first high-profile partnerships to team up with the social network on its live streaming efforts. The NFL has worked with Snapchat to bring content to and and on YouTube and Google Daydream. It has been targeting cord cutters through launches on over-the-top services like , , and too. With the Sina deal, the NFL is able to reach an expanded audience through one of the most popular social media sites in China. The service has a reported 132 million daily active users, 297 million monthly actives, and a market penetration similar to Twitter or YouTube. Users post over 100 million messages daily on the platform.
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The new Microsoft under Satya Nadella is still looking good on Wall Street
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Matthew Lynley
| 2,016 | 12 | 29 |
Almost three years ago, Microsoft named Satya Nadella as its CEO. Since then, Microsoft has reversed its fortunes and returned to being a growth stock after stagnating for nearly a decade — and 2016 was not an exception to that. Indeed, as Microsoft continued its transition to cloud-based services and adopting multiple platforms, as well as taking big bets like buying LinkedIn for $26.2 billion in cash and continuing to flesh out its Surface devices, it’s been rewarded by Wall Street. Microsoft even made an effort to steal Apple’s thunder with its Surface Studio, a desktop geared toward the designers and professionals that Apple has always more or less had on lockdown. And then there’s Hololens, another bet on augmented reality that could help further cement its foothold in the enterprise. You could argue, in Wall Street’s eyes, that 2016 was a year of continued investment in bets beyond the core original services that rocketed it to a massive technology company. All of this is something that’s really palatable for investors: a strong growth story backed by a strong leader with a lot of momentum going into 2017. Its Azure cloud services continue to look like a strong business — much like the business that’s propped up Amazon and given Wall Street something to be really excited about — and its Office products continue to chug along as it’s expanded to more diverse platforms. If you wanted any indication of the level of an about-face Microsoft is doing under Nadella, here’s one for you: . Wall Street finally has a unique Microsoft under Nadella that’s willing to throw a lot of things against the wall and break tradition. While it’s acquiring quite a lot of risk with these strategies, it provides potential growth for a company that was once just simply an enterprise backbone that continued to generate cash. Nadella took over Microsoft in the midst of a transition, and Microsoft is still somewhat in that transition. Its mobile bet didn’t play out and it’s started to refocus its resources to other parts of the business, and while all these bets still seem to be in their early stages, the arrow seems to point upwards. But like any company (even Google), these bets are going to take a while to play out. In reality, Microsoft’s revenue growth hasn’t really been all that impressive. [graphiq id=”6gEWa7XmJbD” title=”Microsoft Corporation (MSFT) Revenue & Growth Rate – Last 5 Quarters” width=”650″ height=”590″ url=”https://sw.graphiq.com/w/6gEWa7XmJbD” link=”http://listings.findthecompany.com/l/9638071/Microsoft-Corporation-in-Redmond-WA” link_text=”FindTheCompany | Graphiq” frozen=”true”] With all these bets comes a lot of risk. In November, Microsoft launched a collaboration tool that’s . Earlier this year Microsoft , but it decided to throw its resources behind Skype and Teams. Microsoft has tried to gun for enterprise collaboration before, such as when it , but has never quite seemed to crack it or gather the kind of praise and shine that Slack has garnered. (Granted, that pristine image of Slack seems to be within Silicon Valley and ) Microsoft has to ensure that it doesn’t fall to the same fate as Google, which rapidly threw resources behind a variety of perpendicular services like Nest and Google Fiber. Inevitably, Google CFO Ruth Porat indicated that the company would have to be more judicious about its spending on these alternative bets. While Microsoft’s alternative bets still seem to be closer in line with its core mission, it still has to ensure it’s making the right ones — especially when it appears to once again be going after a space like enterprise collaboration where it stumbled before. Still, once again, it’s a growth story. The upside for these bets continues to outweigh Wall Street’s massive concerns like the ones it has for Google or Apple. Shares of Microsoft are up more than 12% on the year, and in the past two years they’re up around 34%. For a company that spent nearly a decade in stasis and having disappointing long-term prospects for Wall Street, that’s quite a change of pace. [graphiq id=”17hsR1T0WvH” title=”Microsoft Corporation (MSFT) Stock Price – Year to Date” width=”600″ height=”459″ url=”https://sw.graphiq.com/w/17hsR1T0WvH” link=”http://listings.findthecompany.com/l/9638071/Microsoft-Corporation-in-Redmond-WA” link_text=”FindTheCompany | Graphiq” frozen=”true”] In 2016, Microsoft started to flex its muscles not as an old-school enterprise giant, but one that once again gets design and a future where everything isn’t necessarily running on a PC. Microsoft now looks to exist not only on the strength of its own hardware, but also with its professional services existing on nearly all platforms and running the backbones of the rest of the Internet. Then there’s the dabbling in machine learning, like what many other companies are experimenting with. Nadella basically at the Microsoft Ignite conference in September. Nadella laid out Microsoft’s plans to apply the techniques it has learned and data it has acquired in order to further augment its services like Office 365. And Microsoft earlier this year also opened up its virtual assistant, Cortana, . While all this may seem like something that’s a little original for Microsoft, it’s really a necessity for 2017 with Google and Amazon rapidly expanding their footprint for interactivity with users through things like Google Assistant, Alexa and Siri. Adding layers of machine learning to its existing services to make the experience more seamless and easier in general is going to be tabler stakes for 2017. For Microsoft, this can’t even afford to be an alternative bet and the company has to nail it down in order to supplement the core services and make them better. It earlier this year and there’s a lot of overhead to improve its products like Office with more natural language tools that can streamline the processes on which it’s built its entire business. It’s a strategy that looks to sit somewhere in the middle of a lot of what other companies are doing. Amazon is gunning for cloud services, while Apple is betting it’ll continue to gather momentum with new hardware and expanding its online services like Apple Music. Microsoft’s diverse approach — which, Wall Street loves diversity — appears to have a good look under Nadella.
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How viral open-source startups can build themselves into enterprise-IT powerhouses
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Dharmesh Thakker
| 2,016 | 12 | 29 |
In the last several years, hordes of new enterprise-IT upstarts have popped up in Silicon Valley, with some drawing lofty valuations from investors. They’re driven by new, more-advanced technologies in areas such as databases, software development, networking and cloud computing. And many are taking aim at old-school, IT incumbents like Dell, EMC, Oracle and IBM. But will these new companies ever be as valuable as those big names? It’s a legitimate question, mainly because of another technology trend that’s driving the current enterprise-IT renaissance: free, “open-source” software. Increasingly, almost all new enterprise-IT companies are incorporating open-source software into their products. They’re responding to demand from the big companies who buy their products, from banks to healthcare companies to consumer-product giants, who now favor open-source because of its lower cost, flexibility and agility. At an event we held this past spring, Goldman Sachs’ technology chief said his bank always considers open-source products first when evaluating new technologies. He even quipped that “open source is eating Goldman Sachs.” This presents a financial conundrum for enterprise-tech startups, because open-source software is, at its core, free. Companies have to get creative to wring revenue and profits from open-source; they do so by selling more-expensive, feature-rich enterprise versions of their products, or charging for maintenance and service, among other models. Still, on average, the cost of using an open-source product is three to four times cheaper than its proprietary counterpart. And, as , to date there have been very few landmark exits (IPOs or outsized M&A events) involving purely open-source companies — indicating Wall Street may still be skeptical about the business model. So, can the open-source business model create the kind of stratospheric market values that the proprietary software and hardware companies of the 1980s and 1990s did? We think the answer is actually yes — for three reasons. Because open-source software is free and easy to use, it can spread virally through organizations, from the bottom up, in ways that old-style, proprietary software cannot. This is because more-traditional software often requires licenses for specific users upfront. So there’s generally a big, expensive contract signed at the very beginning of an engagement. With open-source, technology gets a free foothold and then sticks around if it proves useful enough for people to pay for it (which is often). Software developers also love tinkering with their tools, which they can easily do with open source. Open-source startup , which sells “containerization” technology for software developers, is a good example of viral adoption by DevOps engineers, and is gradually loosening the grip more-established vendors like have in some organizations. Other startups find that their inexpensive, easy-to-implement technology can spread through companies because people find multiple ways to use it once it’s there. *, which helps companies store and analyze critical “time-series” data, is an example. Customers are using the company’s products to parse data generated by internet-connected sensors and also to monitor larger IT systems, among other uses. The company’s flexible technology is already in use at 40,000 sites with very little marketing. This all mirrors current trends in software development inside enterprises, which stress agility, speed and the use of on-demand, low-cost cloud computing. Want to build a new internal software app? Spin up an Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) instance. Need a new database to make it work? Download Cassandra from the Web. More often than not, open-source products are being used in these scenarios. Once open-source technology gains a foothold in an organization, it’s also often easier for startups to sell paid versions of their products to the customer, compared to traditional vendors. This reduces open-source companies’ sales-and-marketing expenses and frees up cash to spend on other things, like creating better products. Or, these savings can flow through to the bottom line and create profits. Open source is a relatively easier sell than the cumbersome, top-down sales model of proprietary software, for a couple of reasons. First, because the technology is already embedded inside many organizations, many companies deeply depend on open source to run critical software applications. So it becomes easier to sell premium versions of open-source products to these happy users, who don’t want to rip up applications that already work well. Second, when open-source startups have to make a real sales pitch, it’s much easier to target potential buyers. Startups have reams of information about how customers are already using their products, so tailoring sales pitches for upgrades is far easier than it would be if salespeople were going in cold. Essentially, open-source salespeople can rely on solid lists of pre-qualified leads instead of making cold calls. Open-source software startup , for instance, has been able to take advantage of its large and growing community of users to sell more enterprise-level, “in-memory” database products. *, whose popular open-source tools aid with software development and management, also finds plenty of customers willing to pay for more-sophisticated versions of its product. JFrog’s Bintray product already has a billion downloads, many of which can potentially turn into paying customers in the mid-term. Finally, many open-source companies find they can also run research and development more efficiently, and save R&D dollars, because a broad community of users is continually iterating and improving on open-source products. Big corporate users of open-source software — think Twitter, Facebook — essentially subsidize some of the R&D for the open-source technology they buy because it’s in their interest for the software to run well, and they use it at such scale. Finally, once companies start using open-source tools — both free and paid — a virtuous cycle of increased usage develops: Because these tools, even the paid ones, are so much cheaper than traditional software, companies use more of them. And this expands the overall market for the technology, helping fuel the creation of ever-bigger open-source vendors. One good example is , which specializes in analyzing data for enterprises. Elastic’s product is significantly cheaper than larger rival Splunk’s*, meaning customers can run Elastic’s analytics on more of the valuable data they’re generating and collecting. The increased usage — creating a larger total revenue pie for Elastic — makes up for the lower per-unit price of Elastic’s product. Or consider also open-source database company . Mongo can, in some cases, save around 70 percent compared with using Oracle’s Enterprise Edition, for instance. So some organizations will use Mongo’s product more extensively, expanding Mongo’s footprint within a company and increasing the company’s net deal size — and revenue. More broadly, this can expand the total addressable market (TAM) for all players in a market. In sum: The open-source business model is, in many ways, not intuitive. But as open source moves to the mainstream, emerging companies like MongoDB, and Elastic are growing quickly and could even tap the public markets soon. Whether Wall Street likes it or not, open-source software has become the de facto delivery model for all types of infrastructure software — and all of tomorrow’s enterprise-IT giants will have to embrace it. *
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A Look Back
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Contributor
| 2,016 | 12 | 29 | null |
Here and Mobileye team up on self-driving mapping tech
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Darrell Etherington
| 2,016 | 12 | 29 |
More companies working on autonomous driving have decided to work together to pursue their goals; Nokia mapping spin-out Here is working with Mobileye, the company that creates computer vision chips, cameras and other tech to support self-driving development on mapping service collaboration. The companies on Thursday, noting that they’re going to be pairing Mobileye’s Roadbook, which identifies and maps drivable routes in real-time using crowdsourced data, with Here’s HD Live Map, as a layer that can add to its existing data. Autonomous tech uses high-definition mapping to supplement info from onboard sensors, providing a continually updated look at what the car should expect to see on the road in addition to what it’s able to observe in its immediate surroundings. Mobileye’s also going to be using Here’s Open Location Platform as part of the deal, and Here will gain access to raw sensor data from vehicles equipped with Mobileye’s REM tech for real-time monitoring of road conditions. This should help Here’s HD Live Map get updates even faster, leading to them better reflection actual real-time driving settings for autonomous cars. Maps are a key ingredient in self-driving, and this should help both companies become more attractive supply partners to automakers as they seek to deploy self-driving vehicles and fleet services.
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Crunch Report | Soylent Is Back
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Khaled "Tito" Hamze
| 2,016 | 12 | 16 |
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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iPhone 7 was a top holiday gift, but Apple Watch is fading
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Sarah Perez
| 2,016 | 12 | 29 |
More iPhone 7 devices were unwrapped over the 2016 holidays compared with Google Pixel smartphones, according to new data released by analytics service Mixpanel. Specifically, in the first few days after Christmas, the number of unique iPhone 7’s increased by 12.7 percent, compared with an 8.5 percent increase for Google’s newest flagship. And when comparing iOS to Android devices in general – including phones, tablets, and iPods – more new Apple devices were switched on in the first three days after Christmas, than Android devices. The number of unique Apple mobile devices (excluding Apple Watches) increased by 12.8 percent during this time, down from 15.8 percent last year. Meanwhile, the number of unique Android devices increased only by 2.6 percent, down from 10.6 percent in 2015. These figures confirm which found that Apple devices had the most activations throughout the week leading up to Christmas Day and the start of Hanukkah, with 44 percent of activations globally. Samsung came in second place with 21 percent – an indication that the Note 7 scandal didn’t turn off potential Samsung customers in significant numbers. However, neither Apple nor Samsung capitalized on their new smartphones, according to , citing a lack of a dramatic rise for either tech company. Apple may have led activations with its 44 percent share, but that was down from 49.1 percent the year before, it pointed out. In the new report from Mixpanel, the firm additionally looked into the numbers associated with the Apple Watch, and found declines on that front in terms of usage. In what appears to be a reflection of consumers’ overall in smartwatches, Apple Watch usage in the month of December 2016 is now below where it was during the same time last year, following a steady drop since peak usage this May. This doesn’t mean that people weren’t being gifted new Apple Watch devices over the holidays – in fact, the number of unique Apple Watches increased by 8.9 percent this year, during the first three days after Christmas. However, that’s down from 18.6 percent during the same time last year, said Mixpanel.
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Weekly Roundup: Trump meets with tech leaders, Yahoo suffers another massive hack
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TechCrunch
| 2,016 | 12 | 16 |
This week, one could play Super Mario Run on iOS in a self-driving Uber if you lived in San Francisco. You could have also broadcast it live on Instagram or Snapchat to a group for the first time. These are the top stories in tech from this week, all in one place. President-elect Donald Trump this week, including Eric Schmidt and Larry Page of Google, Tim Cook of Apple, Satya Nadella of Microsoft and Sheryl Sandberg of Facebook. Oracle CEO Safra Catz , and the Strategic and Policy Forum . While it appears advantageous for Uber to strategically sign on to ensure a smooth IPO process, Musk’s motivations remain unclear. . The company was alerted by law enforcement to the breach of 1 billion accounts and has examined the data with the help of outside forensic experts. It appears to be entirely separate from the other . Verizon must be feeling just stellar. Uber’s self-driving cars in San Francisco, and were . Uber began the launch with Volvo XC90 SUVs outfitted with sensors and supercomputers in an expansion of the self-driving pilot project in Pittsburgh. Uber didn’t have a necessary state permit needed to test autonomous vehicles on public roads, but launched anyway and is Google announced that it is spinning out its self-driving car unit as a . It will operate under Alphabet and will be more focused on self-driving tech rather than the cars themselves. Facebook made a move to combat its fake news issue. The network will now with help from outside fact checkers at Snopes, FactCheck.org, Politifact, ABC News and . Baby steps? Move over, Pokémon GO. The hot new became available on the App Store for iOS and iPad. It brings back all the Mario nostalgia one could hope for, and costs $10. It also crushed Pokémon GO’s record for Day One game downloads, . Review: Super Mario Run is a hopeful glimpse of Nintendo’s mobile ambitions http://tcrn.ch/2hTSvrR Posted by on Thursday, December 15, 2016 Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, Jack Ma, John Doerr and 16 other high-profile investors formed a , which will pour at least $1 billion into cleantech companies over the next 20 years. They’re saying that they’re investing in tech ventures at any stage, from seed through commercialization and will focus on electricity, manufacturing, agriculture, buildings and transportation. Apple’s AirPod wireless headphones went up , and they’re charging $69 to replace a lost ‘Pod. Find my AirPods feature, anyone? Instagram is on a roll. The app became the latest social platform to introduce live streaming as it released its to all U.S. users. The app also , a huge milestone fueled by its algorithmic feed. Instagram is one to watch, people. Snapchat quietly shipped that lets you swap photos, video and messages with up to 16 people. Groundbreaking? No, but when an app has more than 100 million daily users, a feature like this could impact the way other messaging services like Messenger, WhatsApp or iMessage are used. A shakeup at Oculus occurred as to lead a PC-based VR division within the company.
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Tesla introduces fee for lazy owners who leave their cars at Supercharger stations
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Devin Coldewey
| 2,016 | 12 | 16 |
There’s nothing like driving your nearly-empty Tesla up to a Supercharger station for a top-up and finding every spot taken by other cars — probably all charged up and ready to go. Where are their drivers? How dare they? Tesla shares your anger and will soothe it by giving those drivers a different kind of charge. You know, the money kind. The company announced today that until it can make the cars move themselves once charged — probably not that far off, actually — drivers will need to undertake that task, and do it within 5 minutes of the car hitting 100 percent. Once that 5 minutes passes, a $0.40 per minute fee will begin to assess — retroactively inclusive of the first 5, so you’re looking at $2 right off the bat. “One would never leave a car parked at a gas station right at the pump and the same rule applies with Superchargers,” read Tesla’s announcement. How will one know that it’s done and you need to scoot? Why, one will get an alert on one’s phone, of course, via the Tesla app. One already does, in fact. So one never had any excuse. “To be clear, this change is purely about increasing customer happiness and we hope to never make any money from it,” the announcement also reads. What an odd thing to say! Get that money, Tesla. I predict a couple thousand bucks in the first month. If you don’t want it, give it to .
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Google Maps now notes if a location is wheelchair accessible
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Greg Kumparak
| 2,016 | 12 | 16 |
“Can I get in the building?” It might not be a question you find yourself asking regularly — but for the 3 million+ wheelchair users in the U.S., it’s a question that has to be considered. And starting now, it’s one that Google Maps is trying to help answer. “Wheelchair accessible entrance” will now be noted in a location’s “Amenities” section wherever Google is made aware of the accessibility. Accessibility info won’t show for locations — that data simply doesn’t exist yet. Organizations like have been building up the dataset for a while, but the available data doesn’t blanket major cities, much less the world. Google is turning to local guides (users who contribute location info in exchange for early access to new features) to grow their data set, but it’ll take a while. The effort is led by Googler Rio Asaka as part of his “20% time” (Google’s policy that has its employees spend one day a week tinkering on side-projects). “But wait!” you say. “Aren’t buildings supposed to be wheelchair accessible?” While the Americans with Disabilities Act requires new buildings to account for wheelchair access, the requirements for structures built prior to the act’s signing in 1993 (Heads up: PDF link). In major cities where many of the buildings were built decades ago, wheelchair access is anything but a given.
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Airbnb authorizes $153 million more funding
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Katie Roof
| 2,016 | 12 | 16 |
Airbnb does not have a comment on the filing.
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Brian Heater
| 2,016 | 12 | 29 | null |
Uber continues self-driving vehicle testing in SF in defiance of DMV
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Kate Conger
| 2,016 | 12 | 16 |
Uber won’t stop operating self-driving vehicles in San Francisco, despite from the California Department of Motor Vehicles to do just that. The DMV says Uber needs a permit to test its autonomous vehicles, but Uber argues that its vehicles aren’t autonomous at all and therefore it doesn’t need a permit. “We respectfully disagree with the California Department of Motor Vehicles legal interpretation of today’s autonomous regulations, in particular that Uber needs a testing permit to operate its self-driving cars in San Francisco,” Uber’s self-driving car lead Anthony Levandowski said in a to reporters. Levandowski repeatedly compared Uber’s self-driving cars, which have been on the road in since mid-September and , to Tesla’s self-driving technology. Tesla owners don’t need a special permit to drive their cars, he argued — so why should the Uber engineers who currently sit behind the wheel of Uber’s self-driving vehicles? In order to be considered truly autonomous, Levandowski said an Uber vehicle would need to be able to drive itself without human intervention and oversight. “We believe Tesla is right and our vehicles are just like Tesla’s. The vehicle is not capable of driving without a human operator. As long as that’s the case, it’s not an autonomous vehicle,” he said. The DMV, of course, disagrees. The agency ordered Uber to stop operating its self-driving cars in San Francisco after a captured an autonomous Uber speeding through a red light. The DMV warned Uber in a letter that the company will be confronted with “legal action, including but not limited to, seeking injunctive relief” if it does not stop the pilot program. The difference the DMV might see between Tesla and Uber? Tesla requires drivers using its Autopilot mode to keep their hands on the wheel, while Uber’s engineers hover their hands a few inches away from the steering wheels of their self-driving vehicles. In a Tesla, a driver will receive auditory and visual warnings if he takes his hands off the wheel, and if he doesn’t put them back on, the car will gradually slow down and that hazard lights will turn on. Uber invited journalists to ride and drive its self-driving cars this summer, and vehicle operators weren’t required to have their hands on the wheel. While Tesla has announced plans for a more fully-autonomous vehicle, the cars are still being tested — and Tesla has a DMV permit for those tests. Levandowski said that Uber’s defiance represents “an important issue of principle about when companies can operate self-driving cars on the roads and the uneven application of statewide rules across very similar types of technology.” Regulations on self-driving vehicles vary state-by-state, and Levandowski was asked why Uber couldn’t just go test its vehicles somewhere else since California regulators clearly aren’t welcoming. He said that Uber’s engineers deserve to see their work displayed in the city where they work. “We want to see our technology drive in the city we live in and the city we work in,” he said. Despite the DMV’s order, Levandowski said Uber’s self-driving cars will remain on San Francisco streets, picking up passengers.
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TechCrunch’s 2016 Gift Guide
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Travis Bernard
| 2,016 | 12 | 16 | null |
The relevance of media-streaming startups
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Alice Williams
| 2,016 | 12 | 16 |
With 86 million users across multiple countries and roughly , Netflix is the shining star of media-streaming startups. But it wasn’t always such a powerhouse. In the early days of Netflix, video rental companies like Blockbuster were the established opposition. Old media and distribution channels kept a watchful eye on the media-streaming newcomer, but felt no reason to be concerned. That changed in 2002, when — just five years after it was founded — Netflix went public. It has been a hit ever since. Blockbuster, on the other hand, was absorbed by DISH in 2011 after filing for bankruptcy, leaving just a handful of franchise stores operating throughout the United States. Times have changed, but ongoing public demand for innovative new access to entertainment hasn’t. Internet access and social networks have given consumers more options. Consumers, in turn, have started to play a bigger role in shaping the market. But now that we’re at a point where the entertainment and media (E&M) market is saturated with streaming offerings, the next logical questions to ask are: Where do we go from here? Is there still a place for media-streaming startups? The short answer is… yes. The E&M industry is going through a lot of flux, and traditional pay-TV subscriptions are falling — one noted that only 56 percent of viewers are maintaining TV subscriptions. In comparison, 23 percent are scaling back pay-TV packages, 16 percent have unsubscribed and 5 percent have never had a pay-TV subscription at all. Just two years ago, more than 90 percent of American consumers said they expected to renew their cable packages for another year, but that number fell to 79 percent in 2015. And as those subscriptions continue to drop, both networks and TV providers are looking to streaming technology to make up for the losses. We’re now living in a direct-to-consumer environment, and media operators are trying to figure out what that means. Consumers are embracing the world of streaming, with hitting the market every year. This push for easy access has led a lot of brands — including Verizon, NBC, Time Warner, Comcast and several others — to put money into startups, according to . Realistically, those big corporate buy-ins are greatly needed in the startup world. , a senior director at J.D. Power, “The streaming video customer experience appears to be stratifying across the different subscriber segments, with pay-TV service still having a major effect on the overall streaming video experience,” meaning pay-TV giants still hold a lot of sway in the market. That’s actually good news for the young over-the-top (OTT) media-streaming companies and others in this space that are in need of old-media money and exposure. It’s a win-win: Startups get funding, and established providers can invest in technologies and platforms that could help preserve their consumer bases. Talking about startup survival is one thing — but independent survival is another. There are plenty of examples of streaming startups that thrive well enough to get picked up by other networks or providers. Just this year, , a video-streaming startup, to strengthen its current and planned streaming offerings. But there are far fewer examples of streaming startups that have survived independently. It would take a streaming startup years to establish an audience comparable to any of the legacy media brands. An OTT streaming startup doesn’t just need exposure if it wants to survive without acquisition, either — it also has to find a way to do something that Netflix, Amazon, Hulu and dozens of other legacy media players aren’t already doing. Gaining significant traction is far more difficult in an established ecosystem without a significant technical iteration. Startups and mainstream media are stronger together, better able to create and distribute content, acquire users and gain a clear understanding of their needs as consumers and fans. So when we look at whether there’s still a place for media-streaming startups, the answer is complex — given current market saturation, new media-streaming startups may have a hard time differentiating themselves enough to keep up without some kind of bigger corporate buy-in. But if a streaming startup can find a need to meet, and if it can meet those needs better than any companies already out there, survival is possible. There will always be room, in this customer-centered industry, for smart startups to push the envelope — with or without the blessing of its bigger media-industry peers.
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Motorola’s hackathon-winning Moto Mods include a gamepad and skin-care monitor
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Brian Heater
| 2,016 | 12 | 16 |
You’ve got to hand it to Motorola, the smartphone maker does appear committed to its nascent modular smartphone offering. The company launched the Moto Z back in July, alongside four magnetic backings — a projector, a set of JBL speakers, a battery pack and protective casing. Since then, the company has launched a Hasselblad zoom lens, a Mophie-branded battery and a car dock, with plenty more mods, including a Tango AR camera. Part of growing the system is making it accessible to third-parties by opening the hardware and, more recently, launching a series of hackathons. The first one went down over the weekend in New York, with one happening in San Francisco next month. According to the company, there were 17 submissions by a total of 53 developers. A were chosen from the first event, including Advanced Audio, featuring digital-to-analog and analog-to-digital converters designed to deliver improved audio to the smartphone listening experience. The Sidepad concept might well be the most marketable of the three, delivering gamepad controls to the rear of the device. The third, Bella, leverages sensors to collect real-time data from the user’s skin to provide personalized beauty tips. The winners from the two events will travel to Chicago to present their mod to Motorola in hopes of getting funding from Lenovo Capital to actually bring the thing to market.
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‘Rogue One’ transports viewers to a bigger Star Wars universe
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Anthony Ha
| 2,016 | 12 | 16 |
For months, I insisted that I wasn’t going to see . I was kind of a whiner about it: Yes, I did see and yes, I mostly liked it, but I kept telling friends that I didn’t need to buy a ticket to a new movie every year for the rest of my life. I repeated that speech right up until I found out that had overlooked his invite to a press screening. So last night, despite my protests, I found myself watching another movie. Even then, I told myself it was for journalism’s sake. I maintained the lie for as long as I could, but by the time I walked out, I had to admit that I loved — more than , more than any film since . To be clear, it has its share of problems. The characters are drawn in such broad strokes that I imagine the final script was littered with Post-it notes reading FILL IN CHARACTER ARC HERE. It’s only thanks to the heavy lifting of the actors that our heroes feel like more than a generic band of ragtag rebels. (Hey, that was true in the original trilogy, too.) But despite the underdeveloped characters, this is an exciting start to Disney’s “anthology” films, which will explore stories outside the main narrative. in particular focuses on how the Rebel Alliance gets its hands on the plans for the Death Star — the same Death Star plans that Princess Leia is fleeing with in the very first shot of the very first film. Now, that might not sound terribly promising: Was anyone really demanding to know who stole the Death Star plans and why? The premise sounds particularly worrying since this is a franchise with a record of filling in its back story in … But it turns out that ‘s setup is exactly what was needed — it allows director Gareth Edwards and writers Chris Weitz and Tony Gilroy (working from a story by John Knoll and Gary Whitta) to tell a very different kind of story. Think about seeing for the first time. Think, in particular, about with its seemingly endless variety of aliens. Even more than , ‘s the moment when the movie convinces you — as no science fiction movie had before — that there’s a bigger universe beyond the edges of the screen. In Mos Eisley, you could almost believe that every single creature at that bar had an interesting story to tell. The subsequent films are also stuffed with cool aliens, spaceships and other hints at that broader world — a world further fleshed out in the gone-but-not-forgotten of novels, comics and video games. (There’s even .) But the actual plots of Episodes I through VII suggest that there’s only one story that matters, namely the grand battle between Jedi and Sith, Rebels and Empire — and only a handful of characters who really matter to that struggle. Everyone else is a bit player. Maybe it’s a personal thing, but this has always felt a little unsatisfying to me, as far as space opera fantasies go. Thankfully, isn’t about that grand narrative. It’s not about someone discovering that they’re the Chosen One destined to bring down an evil empire. Instead, it’s about people who are barely more than a footnote in the bigger story. This seems to free Edwards and his writers in a number of ways. For one, there’s a surprising grimness to the plot. You might not think that this kind of fatalism belongs in a movie, but if anything, it makes feel more grandly heroic than its predecessors. The rebels really don’t know if they’re going to succeed — and even if they do win, they know victory will come at great cost. doesn’t look like other movies, either. It’s certainly full of visual nods to but Edwards has also talked about his desire to create , which turns out to be surprisingly accurate. No, we’re not talking about here, but the action scenes have a visceral, down-to-Earth quality that puts them in a different universe from the carefully choreographed lightsaber duels of the prequels. Everything comes together in the finale, which connects a muddy gunfight on the surface of a tropical planet with a spectacular battle in the skies above. It’s a beautiful, thrilling sequence, leading into my favorite ending of any film. So ultimately, I left the theater resigned to the fact that I’ll be seeing more movies in the future. I’m sure I’ll be disappointed by some of them. But convinced me that this far away galaxy still has plenty of interesting corners worth exploring.
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Trivago closes up 8% in public debut
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Katie Roof
| 2,016 | 12 | 16 |
Schromgens says about a quarter of their business is now in America. He explained that this focus on the U.S. market is part of the reason they chose to list on the Nasdaq. It is a very competitive landscape with Kayak, Priceline and countless others looking to be the preferred site for travelers searching for hotels. But Schromgens hopes that their business model as a search platform instead of a booking site will help them attract the best inventory. Trivago makes money by charging travel agents and hotels on a “cost-per-click” basis. The company said it brought about 487 million “qualified referrals” in the previous year. Trivago has no plans to expand beyond hotel searches. “We don’t have to go to a vertical to solve another problem,” until the hotel search is perfected, Schromgens explained.
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Facebook Messenger strikes at Skype with desktop group voice calling
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Josh Constine
| 2,016 | 12 | 16 |
We might finally get to stop asking, “Wait, what’s your Skype name?” thanks to a test of new Facebook group audio calling on desktop. Facebook launched app in April, and now it’s working out the kinks to bring the feature to your home and office. It could become a useful alternative to traditional conference calls by piggy-backing on Facebook’s ubiquitous identity platform. Facebook confirms to me that this is a small test right now. Those with access will now see a phone icon on their group chats that they can hit to instantly invite the members to join the call. As messaging evolves beyond text and towards rich media, chat apps are racing to embrace voice and video. Oculus launched with a feature called Parties. in March. Google recently it will add audio-only calls to its new Duo video chat product. on desktop in March, and . WhatsApp launched last month, and was seeing as of June after launching the feature in 2015. Facebook first started offering audio calling on desktop back in 2013, but now it’s making VoIP more social. Group chat has come into the spotlight lately thanks to the rise of from the makers of Meerkat last month, calling it the place where teens “livechill” instead of having to give exhausting solo performances on broadcasting services like Facebook Live. Then last week, Houseparty hit #4 on the overall iOS app charts and raised led by Sequoia. We’ve long speculated that Facebook Messenger should launch its own group video chat feature, but there’s no telling when that will happen.
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Vine won’t be removed from the app stores, will instead relaunch as “Vine Camera”
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Sarah Perez
| 2,016 | 12 | 16 |
In October, Twitter announced it was shutting down Vine, its app that let users create and share 6-second looping videos. Today, the company says it won’t from the app store as it but will rather transition to a new, low-maintenance app called Vine Camera. From this new app, you’ll still be able to record Vine videos, but the larger Vine community will be gone. Vine Camera will launch in January, replacing the Vine app that’s live today. The videos recorded using the new app can be saved to your camera roll or posted directly to Twitter, the company says. That’s a similar strategy that Facebook-owned Instagram uses among its ecosystem of apps, too. Instead of trying to build them into their own social media brands, Instagram’s Hyperlapse, Boomerang, and Layout just feed content back to the main Instagram application. Vine Camera will do the same. In addition, Twitter will attempt to move the Vine user base to Twitter. The company says that it will introduce a new way to follow your favorite Vine stars on Twitter in the days ahead. “Stay tuned for a ‘Follow on Twitter’ notification soon,” the company said in a announcing the news, but didn’t offer further details on this part of the transition. The Vine website will continue to live on, as Twitter earlier promised. This will remain the place where you can browse through and watch all of the Vine videos created over the years. While many Vine regulars were upset about the shutdown, Twitter’s handling of this situation is better than how most companies in a similar position would have proceeded. It has , in fact, and is instead handling the closure itself. Unfortunately, it’s fairly common for under-performing products to simply get closed down entirely on a given date (hopefully, after a brief “data export” period), rather than kept at least partially online. Of course, if you’re ready to leave Vine for good, that’s still an option. Twitter had said it would offer a way for Vine users to export their videos and that feature is live on the Vine.co website now. It will also continue to offer exporting tools from its iOS and Android apps ahead of the transition to Vine Camera.
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Managed By Q lands $30 million in Series C funding
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Jordan Crook
| 2,016 | 12 | 16 |
, a service that automates office management, has raised $30 million in Series C funding, according to . Managed By Q started off as a NY-based platform that let office administrators more efficiently deal with the tedious housekeeping of an office, from cleanings to supplies to IT to handy work, all from the web. From there, office managers and admins can schedule deliveries, cleanings, and other office maintenance tasks directly from the app. You could think of it as a Handy for the enterprise. However, there are a few key differences between Handy and MbQ, the most significant of which being that Managed by Q employs full-time W2 workers instead of contractors. In fact, last March the company created an . The SEC filing doesn’t disclose who invested in the round, but thus far Managed by Q has an impressive list of stakeholders, including GV (with MG Siegler leading), Gary Vaynerchuk, Fabrice Grinda, Jessica Alba, and Greycroft Ventures. A source close to the company said that the round was a combination of new and existing investors, and that the funding would go toward expanding the marketplace and the technology platform. Managed By Q recently struck an exclusive partnership with Staples. As part of the deal, Staples will be the exclusive provider of office essentials for MbQ customers, and MbQ will be the exclusive office management service for Staples clients. The company is currently operating in New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, and SF/Oakland.
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If only Huawei’s handsome, high-tech Honor Magic phone was coming to the US
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Devin Coldewey
| 2,016 | 12 | 16 |
Lucky China, always getting the good stuff. First pandas, and now the . This curvy beauty is packed with interesting tech, from a dual-camera system on the back to an eye-tracking sensor from Tobii on the front — and a whole lot of custom software in between. The display underneath that lovely smooth glass is a 5-inch AMOLED one with a resolution, giving it an exceedingly high 577 PPI. Dual 12-megapixel cameras on the back, one color and one monochrome, should produce excellent imagery. The frame is itself a sensor, the home button is also a fingerprint reader, and on the front is an eye-tracking unit from Tobii, which generally builds them into laptops and monitors — this is the first smartphone they’ve put one in. “The consumer electronics industry is placing emphasis on eye tracking as a new, exciting interaction modality,” said Tobii Tech president Oscar Werner in a press release. “We see this happening simultaneously in gaming, VR and smartphones.” It’s used for a multi-factor authentication technique Huawei calls WiseScreen. When you pick up the phone, the frame senses how you’re holding it, and Tobii sensor checks your eyes. If you pass, it unlocks right away. Face recognition is also built in, and you can register your face and a few other ones that can check notifications. The usual caveats for biometric authentication apply, of course. As if that wasn’t “Magic” enough, Huawei’s custom Android build adds context-sensitive information to Wechat, maps, and the browser, giving you the usual AI assistant stuff: movie times, directions, tracking numbers, that sort of thing. One I might actually use: hold down the home button in the browser and it’ll pull up lots more info on whatever page you’re visiting, presumably more news stories, Wikipedia entries and so on. Alas, as with many of Huawei’s devices, this one is China-only, with little chance of appearing on this side of the Pacific. But if it’s a hit, you can probably expect some of these features, or let’s hope this fabulous design at least, to appear in an international device. We’ll be sure to check this thing out when we’re at CES in a couple weeks; in the meantime, if you can read it.
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Obama defends White House handling of Russian hacking
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Kate Conger
| 2,016 | 12 | 16 |
In his final press conference of the year, President Barack Obama addressed that hackers, associated with the Russian government, tampered with the U.S. election in order to sway the victory to Donald Trump. He defended the White House’s handling of the situation. “When I look back at how we handled it, i think we handled it the way it should have been handled,” Obama said. The president explained that the White House was primarily concerned with preventing hacking of voting machines or tampering with the voting process, rather than the email leaks that plagued the Clinton campaign. He said that focusing on the leaks would have made it seem that the White House was trying to advantage one candidate over the other and that he had made an effort to ensure his team was “playing this thing straight.” “Part of the goal here was to make sure that we did not do the work of the leakers for them by raising more and more questions about the integrity of the election right before the election was taking place — when the president-elect was raising questions,” Obama said. Obama explained that he instead allowed law enforcement and the intelligence community to investigate, brief Congress, and eventually inform the public. For his part, Trump has repeatedly expressed doubt at the intelligence community’s assessment that the hacking of the DNC and Podesta was perpetrated by Russia. Although he in July to release Clinton’s State Department emails, Trump has more recently denied that the hacks could be accurately attributed to Russia. “I don’t believe they interfered. That became a laughing point, not a talking point, a laughing point,” Trump said of Russia during his TIME magazine Person of the Year . “It could be Russia. And it could be China. And it could be some guy in his home in New Jersey.” Obama chastised Trump for not taking the hacking seriously, saying that preventing election tampering should not be a bipartisan issue. “My hope is that the president-elect is going to be similarly concerned with us having foreign interference in our election process,” Obama said, adding, “No American wants that.” The president called on the press and the public to reflect on the amount of attention paid to the leaked emails, which he said overshadowed more pressing issues during the campaign. “The truth is there was nobody here who didn’t have some sense of what kind of effect it might have. I’m finding it a little curious that everyone is suddenly acting surprised that this disadvantaged Hillary Clinton, because you guys wrote about it every day,” Obama said. “I do think it’s worth reflecting on how it is that a presidential election of such importance, with so many big issues at stake … came to be dominated by these leaks. What is it about our political system that makes us vulnerable to these kinds of manipulations?” Obama had harsh words for those in the Republican party who have supported Trump’s warmness with Russian President Vladimir Putin, and said that the bitter partisanship in D.C. has made it easier for fake news and propaganda to take hold in America. “[Russia] can impact us if we lose track of who we are. They can impact us if we abandon our values. Mr. Putin can weaken us, just like he’s trying to weaken Europe, if we start buying into notions that it’s okay to intimidate the press, or lock up dissidents, or discriminate against people because of their faith or what they look like,” Obama said. “Over a third of Republican voters approve of Vladimir Putin, the former head of the KGB. Ronald Reagan would roll over in his grave. How did that happen? It happened in part because for too long everything that happened in this town, everything that’s said, is seen through the lens of, ‘Does this help or hurt us relative to Democrats or relative to President Obama?’ And unless that changes, we are going to continue to be vulnerable to foreign influence because we’ve lost track of what we’re about and what we stand for,” the president continued. Obama reiterated comments he made in an on Thursday, vowing that the government would take action to respond to the hacking. The Department of Homeland Security and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence the hacking of Democratic agencies and operatives to Russia in early October, but the president refused to say directly that the hackers worked with the blessing of Putin. “Not much happens in Russia without Vladimir Putin,” Obama explained. But the president said the final determination on Putin’s involvement would not be announced until the review of the hacking is complete. Last week, White House homeland security and counterterrorism adviser Lisa Monaco said that the president had of the hacking that occurred during the campaign season and expected it to be completed before he leaves office in January. “The intelligence I’ve seen gives me great confidence in their assessment that the Russians carried out this hack — the hack of the DNC and the hack of John Podesta,” Obama said. However, the president said that much of the evidence would likely remain classified and would not be shared with the public. “We will provide evidence that we can safely provide, that does not compromise sources and methods. But I’ll be honest with you, when you’re talking about cybersecurity, a lot of it is classified and we are not going to provide it, because the way we catch folks is by knowing certain things about them that they don’t want us to know,” Obama said. Hacks and subsequent leaks of emails from the Democratic National Committee and Hillary Clinton’s campaign manager John Podesta trickled out throughout the campaign, and Clinton told donors yesterday that she believed the leaks contributed to her loss. “ Obama seemed to disagree that the hacks were the only factor that influenced Clinton’s loss. He called the media coverage of Clinton “troubling” but said that he would try to advise the Democratic party after his presidency to help it improve its campaign strategy for working class voters. Hackers employed a targeted phishing campaign, in which Podesta was tricked into resetting his email password, to break into Podesta’s account. The New York Times revealed this week that a Podesta staffer who had access to his email account accurately suspected the phishing email was the work of hackers, but declaring the password-reset message “legitimate” instead of “illegitimate” opened the gateway to Podesta’s emails. Wikileaks published the Podesta emails, as well as emails stolen from DNC staffers earlier in the campaign season. The leaks, which included transcripts of Clinton’s paid speeches at Goldman Sachs and speculations about Bernie Sanders’ faith, damaged Clinton on the campaign trail and proved to be useful fodder for Trump. Obama stopped short of accusing the Trump campaign of colluding with Russia in his NPR interview and said that it was not certain Russia intended to help Trump. “When I receive a final report, you know, we’ll be able to, I think, give us a comprehensive and best guess as to those motivations. But that does not in any way, I think, detract from the basic point that everyone during the election perceived accurately — that in fact what the Russian hack had done was create more problems for the Clinton campaign than it had for the Trump campaign,” Obama said.
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The Everlast Notebook is filled with smart, scannable pages that are also reusable
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Devin Coldewey
| 2,016 | 12 | 16 |
You’ve probably seen a few of these smart paper or smart pen things over the years — write in this special notebook and it gets saved to an app, that sort of thing. A new entrant to this niche space is , which obviates the necessity of restocking proprietary paper in that its pages can be wiped clean with a damp towel. No, to answer your first question, it’s not a tiny whiteboard. The Kickstarter page is very clear on that: The 36 pages (or 32 on the large-format version) are a “waterproof synthetic poly blend,” which when written on with a pen from the Pilot Frixion line can be wiped off over and over again, but only with a wet towel — normal rubbing won’t do it. It’s important to use the Frixions because they use an erasable ink that comes off the page completely (you can also just use the eraser for quick edits). When you’ve written on the Everlast, you can then capture images of the pages quickly with the Rocketbook app. The , by the way, was the notebook the company funded earlier this year, which you erased by putting it in the microwave with a glass of water for a while and then vacuuming up the ink. Yes, really. Your notes and sketches aren’t stuck in this random app, though: it’s just for scanning. When you snap pictures, it crops and processes the image and then sends it to the cloud services of your choice. The clever bit is that you don’t even need to fiddle with the app to do that. You select the services each page should go to by marking them at the bottom. The symbols look more like Lucky Charms marshmallows, but you’ll get used to it. You can send stuff to Dropbox, Evernote, Google Drive, Box, Slack, or to an email address. A couple minor caveats: the creators are honest about the fact that if you’re left handed and tend to drag your hand along what you’re writing, you’ll probably smudge it, since the Frixion ink takes several seconds to bond to the “paper.” And if you leave the ink on the page for more than 2 months, they say, it’ll leave a faint trace. The Everlast isn’t going to change the world, and it isn’t for everybody, but this is a cool way to do the analog-digital thing these other notebooks do, for cheap ($34 for early birds) and without actually using any paper.
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Pinterest has lowered its hiring goals for women in engineering roles
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Megan Rose Dickey
| 2,016 | 12 | 16 |
Pinterest found that the 30% hiring rate it set for women in engineering roles was doing too much, so it’s lowering its 2017 goal to 25%, . “We still aspire to 30%—but realize it’s likely going to take more than 12 months to get there,” Pinterest CEO Ben Silbermann wrote on the company’s blog. Over the past year, Pinterest’s hiring rate of women in engineering roles was just 22%, “one of the reasons being our prioritization of hiring senior women engineers vs. focusing on a larger number of junior engineers,” Silbermann wrote. While Pinterest didn’t meet its hiring goals for women in engineering roles, it hit — and sometimes beat — its goals in all the other areas. It’s worth noting that Pinterest is one of a handful of tech companies that actually set goals. Over the past year, Pinterest was able to increase the hiring rate of underrepresented minorities in engineering roles from 1% to 9% (a beat). Pinterest also reached its goal of increasing hiring rates for underrepresented minorities in non-engineering roles to from 7% to 12%. Moving forward into 2017, Pinterest’s goals entail a lot of maintenance, with the exception of lowering its hiring goals for female engineers to a rate of 25%. Regarding people of color, Pinterest wants to maintain at least an 8% hiring rate in engineering roles and a 12% hiring rate in business roles. The company also plans to extend its Rooney Rule requirement — where the company interviews at least one person of color and one woman for top-level managerial positions — to additional executive roles. “We put the processes in place to make the company focus on our new goals, but we would’ve made faster progress if we made sure every hiring manager understood how a diverse company advances our goal of building world class products,” Silbermann wrote. “We missed an opportunity to delve deeper and get managers to take ownership of the company’s goals alongside recruiters. If we could go back, we’d spend more time explaining the why as much as the how.”
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What the coming educational VR revolution teaches us about the tech’s future
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Pete Sena
| 2,016 | 12 | 16 |
Imagine the following scenario: A fifth-grade science class has just begun and the teacher makes a surprise announcement — today the students will be dissecting a frog. I’m sure you remember dissecting a frog as a kid — the sour-pickle odor of formaldehyde, the sharp scalpels slicing into rubbery skin. You don’t have to be an animal rights activist to grimace a bit thinking about it. But here comes the paradox. In this scenario, like-minded fifth-graders who are queasy about cutting open animals are excited to participate in this dissection. Indeed, no animal was harmed when the specimens were collected. What’s more, the teacher promises the students that they won’t have to clean up a messy station afterward. How? Thanks to the paradigm-shifting creations of , an educational VR/AR company, students can harmlessly dissect an animal on an interactive screen known as the . Students wear a special pair of glasses equipped with sensors and use a stylus that allows them to engage with a virtual image that can be turned or even disassembled. By importing VR/AR into the classroom, one minute students can explore the anatomy and organs of an animal without harming it, and the very next build and test circuits or set up experiments that test Newton’s laws. For young students who have been inundated by tech in almost every other domain of their lives, this form of learning comes naturally. “Kids say, ‘Well of course it should be like this.’ They believe they should be able to reach into a screen, grab something, pull it out, and interact with it,” said Dave Chavez, chief technology officer of zSpace. While VR is often discussed as a gaming technology, the gaming applications of VR are simply the . Educational startups have been working on VR material for classrooms ranging from kindergarten through medical school. Current estimates project that the global edtech market will reach ; VR will capture a big chunk of this pie. As for parents (and the rest of us), we continue to adopt the tech slowly. In 2016, only . While this can be attributed to cost and other barriers to entry that are being knocked down as the technology evolves, learning more about how VR is being used to reshape student engagement and communication teaches us more about how it will soon shape our digital experiences by serving as a conduit for previously impossible connections. “Virtual reality puts people first,” said Facebook founder after his recent at Oculus’ Connect Conference. “It’s all about who you’re with. Once you’re in there, you can do anything you want together — travel to Mars, play games, fight with swords, watch movies or teleport home to see your family. You have an environment where you can experience anything.” Throughout history, monumental developments have expanded society’s access to education. In the early first millennium BCE, the first written alphabets appeared and provided an easy medium for recording information relevant to the common good, whether it be a religious text or a business transaction. The following centuries witnessed the creation of books and libraries, which then allowed for written content to be stored and accessed by more than just the super-wealthy. Johannes Guttenberg’s invention of the moveable-type printing press in the 1450s made it even cheaper and more efficient to publish and purchase books on subjects like philosophy, mathematics and commerce. In the 20th century, the computer and internet transformed educational access more than any other past advancement, democratizing the world’s collective knowledge to anyone with a connection. The next step in the democratization of knowledge is VR. This emerging educational platform will make it possible for students to virtually visit museums in other continents, communicate in virtual learning spaces with fellow students in Johannesburg, Beijing or Sydney or attend a lecture at a prestigious university thousands of miles away. It can not be overstated how important this is for the future of education — a student’s capacity to discover and learn will no longer be limited to the environment around them. From a Teacher’s Handbook based on facilitating the education of children around the world: “Children learn best from experience. Children learn by doing, using their senses, exploring their environment of people, things, places and events. They learn from first-hand and concrete experiences as well as vicarious forms of experiences. Children do not learn as effectively when they are passive. Active engagement with things and ideas promotes mental activity that helps students retain new learning and integrate it with what they already know. If it is not possible to always provide concrete, first-hand experiences for the student, efforts must always be exerted so that the student will be able to understand the concept in a clear and concrete way.” With educational VR, it will always be possible to provide concrete first-hand experiences. While the current cost of adoption is too high for VR to reach under-funded schools, it will eventually decrease, as is almost always the case with new technologies. In the time that it takes, I’d bet the world becomes a . The internet democratized knowledge, VR will democratize experiences. It will continue to shrink an increasingly globalized world and facilitate better communication and collaboration across physical spaces. It will be the next innovation in the transmission of knowledge that not only shapes how we learn, but how we conduct business and maintain relationships with our friends, family and like-minded people, wherever they may be. Increasingly, the success of businesses hinges on their ability to communicate and collaborate. VR is the perfect medium for achieving these ends. Because VR will become a more and more integral part of the business world, the earlier students are exposed to non-gaming uses of VR, the more prepared they will be to interact in the virtual work spaces of tomorrow. Some students learn best by hearing, others by seeing. With VR, you get the best of both. Educational visionaries that develop educational VR hardware and software are not just improving learning; they are rethinking it altogether. One of the features that distinguishes the aforementioned zSpace 200 from other VR educational technologies is that students can easily collaborate and speak with one another while using their VR computer. “The most profound thing I’ve ever heard a teacher say is that many technologies build a barrier between us and the kids but this seems not to,” said Chavez. But even VR platforms that place the user in virtual worlds are not necessarily isolating experiences. , a developer headquartered in Ireland, has created a social learning platform called . Engage gives educators the tools to create their own lessons and immersive experiences, all without needing to commit a line of code. Inside these immersive lessons, teachers and students can connect and use collaborative tools like an interactive whiteboard. “In virtual reality when the avatar is two feet away from you, it really feels like they are two feet away from you,” said David Whelan, CEO of Immersive VR Education. Whether inside the Coliseum or a hospital ER room, Engage allows educators to transport their classroom to wherever it is most relevant to the students. “People learn best through experiences or doing tasks themselves. So if you are teaching, say, Aircraft maintenance and you are working on a Boeing engine. [In VR] You can bring in an engine, you can bring in parts, and have 4 or 5 students come in and collaborate in the virtual space. You [the educator] can say, ‘Alright guys you have 45 minutes to put this engine together and the students can lift parts that may weigh 4 or 5 tons, and manipulate them quite easily,” said Whelan. For now, apps like this are primarily designed to shift how students and teachers interact in today’s learning spaces. In the future, educational work spaces such as Engage lecture halls will double as business boardrooms or co-working spaces for creative problem-solving. Far too often, VR is mistaken to be a solitary, lonely experience — as a technology for play that enables escapists to further isolate themselves in a digitally created world. But this could not be further from the truth. Indeed, Facebook has invested so heavily into VR because their company’s vision is to connect the world. “This is really a new communication platform,” said Zuckerberg after acquiring Oculus. “By feeling truly present, you can share unbounded spaces and experiences with the people in your life. Imagine sharing not just moments with your friends online, but entire experiences and adventures.” Much of the material VR companies are innovating for classes will not be purchased for personal use but by school districts, colleges and universities. The price for the hardware and software will not be cheap. For example, the Oculus Rift retails for . Persuading these constituents to adopt VR/AR will be a challenge. Marketing will be critical for getting constituents to adopt VR in schools and higher education. VR edtech companies will need to develop innovative marketing strategies that drive educational organizations to invest in VR. The impediments facing the adoption of VR edtech are similar to those VR faces in being adopted in other domains. Once parents see the upside of educational VR, they will become more comfortable with VR enhancing other forms of communication and its application in other work spaces. Convincing early adopters to buy into educational VR systems like zSpace and Immersive will be critical for its spread. To give an example, one of zSpace’s biggest challenges is simply to get people to see it. Once young kids see it, they are enamored. “I’ve seen a kid run out to the curb and yank his mom out of the car…and tell her ‘Mom, look at this! Look at what I did!’ It makes me want to tear up,” said Chavez. “A lot people see VR as a gaming or entertainment peripheral, so the biggest challenge is getting educators who have been teaching lessons the same way for years and years to change their mindset,” said Whelan. “We have to convince them that it isn’t just a new way of providing the same old content, this a completely new way of teaching.” Especially during this time when state legislatures are gutting educational budgets, VR educational companies will need to get creative not just when it comes to promoting VR to educators but also speaking with local and state politicians. This latter group must be persuaded that educational VR is worth the price. To persuade them, educational VR firms need to get in front of parents, students, teachers, administrators and political leaders. Educational VR innovators must convince them that the windfall warrants the upfront investment. Where will educational VR head next? One possibility is that museums will begin to use 360-degree cameras and transform their collections and elaborate corridors into material that students all over the world can interact with by wearing an Oculus Rift or HTC Vive. Imagine a sixth-grade student in rural Arkansas putting on a VR headset in his social studies class. The teacher tells the class, “Today we are going to visit one of the greatest art collections in the world, the Louvre.” The app then transports the student to the gallery that houses Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa. What would normally cost several thousand dollars and constitute a luxury trip that most American students could only dream of can become an immersive, interactive component of the students’ curriculum. These virtual spaces will consist of customized avatars that can express features ranging from happy to confused. It won’t be long before a fourth-grade class in Newark, New Jersey will be able to go on a virtual school trip to the British Museum with a class of fourth graders from Kyoto, Japan. While the kids are on the virtual school trip, their parents can attend to their VR business meetings. You may think this sounds like sci-fi, but this futuristic school trip to the Louvre may seem like the Atari of VR. “I’m old enough to remember when computers came into schools first in the late 80s and early 90s. They sat there for years gathering dust because teachers didn’t want to touch them,” said Whelan. “But just like computers, VR will creep its way into education. In fact, I believe it will be adopted much sooner because people my age are teachers and accustomed to the rapid change of technology.” Whelan also points out that VR set-ups are actually much cheaper than early PCs. “When PCs first came out they were two or three thousand dollars, now you can get a really decent VR headset connected to a PlayStation for under 800 dollars, and the technology is just going to become cheaper.” VR will be the next link in the sequence that has witnessed the human urge to connect and enhance communication stretching back several thousand years. It is a reimagination of what education can become and it will prepare students for a connected future of democratized virtual experiences and global communication and collaboration.
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Google brings its upgraded keyboard app Gboard to Android
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Sarah Perez
| 2,016 | 12 | 16 |
Google today officially that it’s rebranding its Google Keyboard application for Android users to “ ,” the name sported by its newer keyboard app that sports a fully integrated Google Search engine, emoji and GIF search, and more. The keyboard’s Android launch had been spotted earlier this week by a of media and , who had also noted app arrived with a few new features, as well. Gboard was around six months ago, as a means of giving Google a better way to integrate its search engine on users’ devices. Instead of putting it into a separate app, Google bundled search into the screen people use the most – their keyboard. On Android, Gboard includes the same feature set as found in its iOS predecessor, as most of its changes were more about adding polish and addressing a few user concerns, rather than overhauling the core experience. In the new app, you can now tap a Google logo to start your search – a tweak that makes access to Google search a bit more obvious. The benefit of having search built in like this is that search results can be easily shared from your keyboard. This comes in handy when you want to share a business’s address, weather, flight times, news articles, restaurant info and more with your friend, without having to launch a separate app to dig up that information. Gboard will also predict possible searches, based on your chat which you may find either very useful or super creepy. For example, the company explains, if you’re chatting with a friend about the weather, the app may offer a prediction for “Weather” which you could then share with a tap. The app includes built in GIF and emoji search, too, like the iOS version does. A clever trick here is that Google makes it quicker to find the right emoji. Instead of scrolling, you can just do a search for the one you want (e.g. “monkey”). One new feature that arrives with the Android app is an option to always show the number row on the screen – something that was one of users’ complaints about the keyboard layout. The app added support for multiple languages, as well, which will help bilingual users with their searches and the app’s predictions. You can also choose to turn on Glide Typing, if that’s your preferred mode of text entry. And the app offers a standard lineup of keyboard features like text predictions, autocorrect, and voice typing. Gboard will work in over 100 languages , and more will be added in time.
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IoT redux… this time, it’s personal
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Jim Hunter
| 2,016 | 12 | 28 |
As we advance toward 2017, a quick analysis of our connected landscape indicates that the IoT is taking a short break from the internet and is now letting take a shot at it. All joking aside, the process of rapidly restructuring our world via technology — and functioning in the flux — has become our new normal. More of the same is on tap in 2017, but the most interesting of those changes will apply to the masses in increasingly intimate ways. Things will begin to get much more personal in the very near future, and IoT will be at the heart of it. Finding, manipulating and sharing our personal content is a global obsession that will evolve considerably starting next year. Though we aren’t quite at the level, we are producing and consuming massive volumes of personal content thanks to the proliferation of IoT products like wearables, drones, action cameras and the spectacular new . Such items are both popular and compelling because they digitally capture our experience from a variety of perspectives, and they do so with relative ease. In fact, most frustration now occurs personal content is captured; most complaints arise around the process of it when we want it. Discoverability and retrievability are elusive. Last , I hypothesized on this site about the “emergence of more natural interactions between people and ‘things’ in the coming year.” With the growth of Amazon’s Alexa, the introduction of Google Home and revamps to both Siri and Cortana, this has certainly come to pass. Natural voice interactions now routinely help us find things on the web (directions, weather reports, traffic updates, etc.), as well as manage our digital belongings (music, photos, apps, etc.). More practical uses of this construct will take leaps forward next year, and this same natural interaction will become key to how we more easily discover and retrieve our personal content. The context of what we say, where we are, what we’re doing, who we’re with and the environment within our content will all be leveraged to make our searching more seamless (like accessing our memories). We will find that voice and contextual conversation steadily become the preferred process for saving and finding what we want. So, rather than hunt and peck, click and scroll, we will increasingly call to our content to get it. Advancing voice processing technology ensures that the words we say while using our devices become searchable index points: “Find that video where I sang ‘Hound Dog’ ” or “Jump to the part where she says ‘yes.’ ” And with the expansion of video analytics services beyond traditional security applications and into contextual functionality by the end of 2017, we will see examples of “Play the clip where we made pizza” or “Show me all the videos from Central Park with Sam.” The key reason for this coming shift is that big players in social media are very interested in helping us document our own lives (more data is more better). Memories, moments, stories, timelines and updates are all set to leverage the lower-friction content capture from sources such as drones or connected eyewear. Social platforms will most definitely implement or acquire evolved video analytics engines over the next few years to accommodate that content tsunami. Of course, the amalgamation of all this personal content raises big hairy issues. Last December, I pointed out that legal jurisdictions would start to impose rules that “are more favorable to the preservation of consumer privacy by restricting where and how data can be extracted, moved, analyzed, and traded.” True to form, in late April of this year, the was adopted by the EU and will go into effect in 2018. This regulation is one of only a few that exist today, but we’re starting to see talk of its implications in . Regardless of what for their , the trend toward codifying commercial consumer data protection will continue as more and more-detailed data is acquired that needs to be protected. Consider the climate: The increase in data-generating IoT devices amasses mind-bending amounts of data “pixels” that combine to form a “picture” of the world. Collectively, IoT devices have already started to paint detailed digital portraits of consumer lives — identity, interests and behaviors. This is intimate information; how businesses use it must be reckoned with. To paraphrase from several great men, “With great data comes great responsibility.” Privacy failures will surely continue to occur in 2017, as companies ill-prepared to be entrusted with consumer data shirk their responsibilities. However, by the end of 2017, organizations that violate that consumer trust will begin to face legal reprisal. And it’s not just data that needs protecting; the capture devices of the IoT are also genuinely under threat. I was not alone in predicting that 2016 would be marked by at least a few dramatic IoT hacks; the worst of which (as of this writing) were the huge Mirai botnet assaults that transformed tens of thousands of IoT devices into an army of attack zombies. Sadly, this is just the beginning. Mirai’s significance was not just in the easy exploitation of poorly secured IoT devices or the scale of the Dyn DDoS attack, but in the bald-faced release of the source code that made it possible. Within about a month, you could online to launch your own DDoS attacks. Sadly, we can count on more internet havoc in the coming months. And I hate to even suggest it, but 2017 may be the year that loss of life occurs because of an IoT hack. We’ve absorbed our technology into our personhood. Nathan Heller called this “a symbiosis with cheap, empowering intelligences that we welcome into daily life,” and , “Phones today augment our memories; integrated chatbots spare us customer-service on-hold music; apps let us chase Pokémon across the earth. Cyborg experience is here.” But cyborg experience exposes us to new cyborg weaknesses. Just last year, a fast moving 3,000-pound metal projectile — in other words, an automobile — was remotely hacked to brake, steer and accelerate erratically. As 2017 dawns, we have entire fleets of vehicles for both commercial and consumer use moving toward self-driving, aka computer control. Might they also be subject to such takeover? And that’s just cars: Think of all those drones (especially the larger models), connected medical devices (pacemakers and insulin pumps), national power grids, smart ovens and on and on — all now mundane, all largely automated, all connected and thus all conceivably vulnerable. The very qualities that make these things so awesome also make them so potentially awful. I suspect IoT hacks will quickly get worse and more common, and the effects will be much more detrimental. On a more hopeful note, the industry is not just sitting idly waiting for this to happen. The need to “bake in” IoT security in manufacturing and service production will finally get the attention it requires. This year, based on growing concerns, my own employer joined the nonprofit and I am serving as co-chair of its Privacy and Security Committee. The IOTC’s key directive is to raise awareness among all stakeholders in IoT regarding the relatively simple steps we can adhere to as an industry to protect consumers, devices and the internet community at large. There are globally. The power sources for our technologies are also getting more “personal.” Battery production will continue to improve, storing more power and charging faster as the overall size of embedded power sources continues to shrink. Power transfer via induction will continue to land in wireless products; and for small devices, power harvesting will evolve through organic and material advancements. By late 2018, harvesting and induction will be key to enabling implantable technology that can live in our bodies for extended periods of time. I estimate that these advancements will help make implantables broadly viable within three years. I haven’t even touched upon how exponential leaps in artificial and augmented intelligence are driving much of this transformation, but I suspect that in 2017, the industry will become more engaged and aware of the potential dangers that AI brings. Watchdog activists will give way to industry oversight regarding AI best practices and constraints. Still, I predict there will be at least one true AI API released to general developers by early 2018. Regardless of the wonders and hazards we already face as we create the IoT and all its associated applications, 2017 will be another significant year for the increasingly convergent technologies that are becoming more ingrained in what it is to be human in the modern era — and more personal and integral parts of our daily lives.
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AppDynamics posts long-awaited IPO filing
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Katie Roof
| 2,016 | 12 | 28 |
Despite a competitive landscape, which includes New Relic and Dynatrace, AppDynamics has shown strong revenue growth over the past year. For the nine months ending in October, revenue came in at $158.4 million, compared to $102.8 million in the same period during the year prior, driven by strong growth in subscriptions. Losses widened slightly, with the company losing $95.1 million through October versus $92.4 million in the same period the year before. This means that last year, the losses were almost as high as AppDynamics’ revenue. Revealing the filing right now suggests that the company is hoping to finally go public in late January or early February. The company will be listing on the NASDAQ under the ticker “APPD.” Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs are co-managing the offering.
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FDA issues new security guidelines so that your pacemaker won’t get hacked
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Taylor Hatmaker
| 2,016 | 12 | 28 |
This week, the US Food and Drug Administration issued a set of recommendations for securing medical devices that could jeopardize the safety and privacy of their users. The report, titled “ ,” focuses on security throughout the lifecycle of a device, emphasizing that robust cybersecurity is an ongoing process that requires maintenance and regular software updates, just like any non-medical piece of hardware would. Falling short of formal regulation, the methods contained in the report are classified as “nonbinding recommendations,” a gentle term indicating that hey, these are just friendly suggestions, do whatever you want with them. In an accompanying , Dr. Suzanne B. Schwartz, associate director for science and strategic partnerships at the FDA’s Center for Devices and Radiological Health, acknowledges the industry’s vast risk: “In today’s world of medical devices that are connected to a hospital’s network or even a patient’s own Internet service at home, we see significant technological advances in patient care and, at the same time, an increase in the risk of cybersecurity breaches that could affect a device’s performance and functionality. “….manufacturers should build in cybersecurity controls when they design and develop the device to assure proper device performance in the face of cyber threats, and then they should continuously monitor and address cybersecurity concerns once the device is on the market and being used by patients.” Unlike smartphones and consumer computers that regularly see over-the-air software updates, things like pacemakers and defibrillators are more likely to be left alone once they enter the market, making them an easy mark for would-be attackers. Given that fact, the medical industry faces an array of new threats that it might be uniquely unprepared for. Beyond tampering with the functionality of devices themselves, patient databases are a rich target for identity thieves. As more networked devices blink online in hospitals, there are that many more ways to sneak into a poorly secured network. According to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, there have been more than , each affecting 500 or more individuals, reported since 2009. The number of breaches not noticed, reported or listed is likely far higher. In a section on uncontrolled risk, the FDA report runs over a few worst-case scenarios resulting from software vulnerabilities and how they should be handled, step by step: “A manufacturer becomes aware of a vulnerability via a researcher that its class III medical device (e.g., implantable defibrillator, pacemaker, etc.) can be reprogrammed by an unauthorized user. If exploited, this vulnerability could result in permanent impairment, a life-threatening injury, or death.” “As soon as possible but no later than 30 days after learning of the vulnerability, the manufacturer communicates with its customers and user community regarding the vulnerability, identifies interim compensating controls, and develops a remediation plan to bring the residual risk to an acceptable level.” “As soon as possible but no later than 60 days after learning of the vulnerability, the manufacturer fixes the vulnerability, validates the change, and distributes the deployable fix to its customers and user community such that the residual risk is brought down to an acceptable level.” Two months isn’t exactly the kind of quick-fix patch we might expect in say, an iOS vulnerability. Still, the medical industry isn’t alone in its lack of preparedness for massive hacks. Unsuspecting Internet of Things (IoT) home devices are notorious for capable of taking big chunks of the Internet offline with DDoS attacks. Like pacemakers, defibrillators, and , a hacked smart car quickly becomes life threatening—a threat so serious that the FBI issued a about remote auto exploits this March. The new set of FDA recommendations builds on a similar issued in 2014 that focused on pre-market security, and it certainly calls further attention to the industry’s gaping vulnerability. Unfortunately, without issuing actual regulations or a means of enforcing its many suggestions, it probably won’t move the needle. The real wake-up call is more likely to be a major security incident, with lives quite literally at stake.
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TechCrunch’s top 10 hardware startup videos of 2016
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Felicia Shivakumar
| 2,016 | 12 | 28 |
Go-karts, toy robots, laser tag and more, here’s a rundown of the most-watched hardware startup videos in 2016:
Small enough to fit into the palm of your hand, this wireless device makes it easy to print documents or photos on the go. The printer rolls back and forth on any paper giving you a full print in about a minute. Hands on with the 3Doodler Start, a $39 kid-friendly 3D-printing pen http://on.tcrn.ch/l/F9Sn Posted by on Friday, February 12, 2016 The is a kid-friendly version of the 3D printing pen with no hot points and a new eco-plastic material that makes building creations safe and fun.
Kids can build a LEGO drone with Flybrix kits http://tcrn.ch/2d7lpaw Posted by on Thursday, September 22, 2016 A build-your-own drone kit for kids, Flybrix is lightweight, “crash-friendly”, and retails for roughly a hundred and fifty bucks. Looking for more popular videos to watch? You can find a rundown of our top news videos .
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Amazon patents show flying warehouses that send delivery drones to your door
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Lora Kolodny
| 2,016 | 12 | 28 |
We’ve known about Amazon’s since 2013. But from Amazon, by CB Insights’ Zoe Leavitt, reveal more details about how the e-commerce titan could make drone deliveries work at scale, namely through “airborne fulfillment centers.” Yes, that’s a warehouse in a zeppelin. The airborne fulfillment centers, or AFCs, would be stocked with a certain amount of inventory and positioned near a location where Amazon predicts demand for certain items will soon spike. Drones, including temperature-controlled models ideally suited for food delivery, could be stocked at the AFCs and sent down to make a precise, safe scheduled or on-demand delivery. An example cited in the filing was around a sporting event. If there’s a big championship game down below, Amazon AFC’s above could be loaded with snacks and souvenirs sports fans crave. The AFCs could be flown close to a stadium to deliver audio or outdoor display advertising near the main event, as well, the filing suggested. The patent reflects a complex network of systems to facilitate delivery by air. Besides the airborne fulfillment centers and affiliated drones, the company has envisioned larger shuttles that could carry people, supplies and drones to the AFCs or back to the ground. Using a larger shuttle to bring drones up to the AFC would allow Amazon to reserve their drones’ power for making deliveries only. Of course, all these elements would be connected to inventory management systems, and other software and remote computing resources managed by people in the air or on the ground. The filing also reveals that the shuttles and drones, as they fly deliveries around, could function in a mesh network, relaying data to each other about weather, wind speed and routing, for example, or beaming e-book content down to readers on the ground. We reached out to Amazon to learn more about their progress on this concept, and whether or not they have an actual date for when they might launch, or even just test, their first airborne fulfillment center. The company did not immediately reply to inquiries.
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Twitter introduces 360-degree video live streaming
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Matthew Lynley
| 2,016 | 12 | 28 |
Twitter is taking another step into getting into live video by introducing 360-degree live streams through Periscope. Anyone on Twitter and Periscope can watch 360-degree live video, though currently only select partners can go live in 360 via Periscope, . While it’s only available for a limited number of partners for now, it makes sense that Twitter would start rolling out a tool like this as live streaming becomes increasingly popular on platforms like Facebook. 360 Sunset in Florida. First ever with — Alex Pettitt (@Alexpettitt) So, Twitter is trying to release yet another new product as it continues to try to find a new future for itself in 2017. This was a very challenging year for Twitter, which saw itself as the subject of a potential major acquisition before those talks fell apart. Since then, Twitter has struggled to figure out new ways to grow and has only incrementally added new products and features. It looks like live streamers will plug a camera into the bottom of a phone in order to start recording and broadcasting the video, which is seen in the screenshot below taken from the video (apologies for poor quality). With live 360 video, users can get a full capture of what’s going on for a broadcaster’s surroundings. Right now, as it’s limited to partners, which will no doubt use this as a playground to discover new use cases, it looks like there won’t be a of live 360-degree video for a bit. But this could also be a strong play to attract new influencers that it may see flocking to other platforms, giving them new tools (or toys) to play with in order to continue building their audience. If you want to read into the tea leaves a little bit here, the company post was authored by Alessandro Sabatelli, the company’s director of AR and VR. So feel free to speculate as you wish while Twitter has said it is starting to explore opportunities in this area. Making big changes to a platform with a wide audience — in Twitter’s case, though it isn’t growing as fast as Facebook, one with more than 300 million people — is always going to be tricky. But the company needs to continue to make big bets, particularly in video (it acquired Periscope), if it’s going to find a new way to ignite growth.
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The price of bitcoin is creeping back toward its 3-year high of $1,000
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Fitz Tepper
| 2,016 | 12 | 28 |
Does it feel like the only time you hear about Bitcoin is when the price is either abruptly soaring or sinking? Us too! This time it’s soaring. Bitcoin is up about 30% over the last month, and about 50% over the last 3 months. The current price is hovering . The last time it traded this close to $1,000 was in January 2014 when the – right before the giant Mt. Gox-related crash. But this increase in price doesn’t seem to be the insane rapid fluctuations that are ever-so-common with Bitcoin. As you can see above – the 50% increase has been pretty stable, accelerating a bit around Christmas time. And unlike recent fluctuations that were (at least loosely) tied to events like the or , this rally doesn’t seem to be caused by anything in particular. Sure, there is some general economic uncertainty in the world right now, but the stock market is doing well – and , a commodity that at least usually trades parallel to Bitcoin. So what’s causing it? No one knows for sure. Maybe it’s the usual hype that Bitcoin sees around Christmas time. Maybe it’s a delayed natural reaction from the halving – or maybe it’s just a sign that Bitcoin is doing better than people think it is. One anecdotal sign that Bitcoin as a consumer spending product may have more legs than people think – Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky asked for product suggestions for 2017, and accepting Bitcoin payments was the number one most requested feature for the company. I'm surprised by how popular this is in this thread (has overtaken loyalty program) — Brian Chesky (@bchesky) It will be interesting to see what 2017 holds for Bitcoin. While the general consensus was that Bitcoin as a consumer payments platform was dead (in favor of enterprise-focused solutions like custom Blockchains) that may not be the case anymore. Either way, remember that Bitcoin does what Bitcoin does, and don’t ever buy or sell coins with the hope of making a quick buck – because you’ll probably lose it.
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Echo owns the holiday and heads to court: It’s The Daily Crunch
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Darrell Etherington
| 2,016 | 12 | 28 |
Echo sold a lot – but Amazon isn’t telling exactly how many, in typical Amazon style. That mystery and more in The Daily Crunch for December 28, 2016. And if your Autopilot saves you, how do you say thanks? Did you get an Echo under the tree? A lot of people did, apparently – 9x as many as last year. But that could be nine people, total, since Amazon never reveals actual numbers, just multiples of past, also unreleased numbers. Still, it’s safe to assume this means a lot, since Amazon was also sold out of Echo hardware leading up to the holiday. Their strategy of selling the Echo at relatively low cost looks to be paying dividends in terms of extending their lead in the home voice command speaker market, which is likely small but growing. And talking to Amazon could become second-nature to a large number of consumers, young and old, which is a key hedge. Echo’s growing presence might have strange legal implications, since police are seeking to retrieve information from a murder suspect’s Amazon Echo. Amazon isn’t handing over the info until legally compelled to do so, but this is still a very interesting case to watch in terms of setting the pace for our voice-controlled future. Tesla has talked a lot about the safety potential of its Autopilot 8.0 software, which uses radar to actually see around objects in front and detect potential collisions before a human driver ever possibly could. But now there’s video of that actually happening, and it does make a strong case for more autonomous features like emergency braking systems. Like a rolling , that Model X is. RTR’s latest raise values the company at a higher valuation than its previous $520 million, Katie reports, and it’s now profile based on Ebitda evaluations. People like to be stylish but don’t want to pay full sticker price. Ford’s probably playing elaborate word games using the Fusion as its self-driving test platform, since there’s so much sensor fusion required in autonomous driving. But even if it’s not, these next-gen vehicles it’s deploying sound very clever indeed. Also never realized the reason they’re using Hybrid is that it’s the only way to get the power they need for the onboard computing. Cool. $850 million is actually a decent-sized fine, as far as regulator penalties against large companies go. The penalty was levied against Qualcomm in South Korea, where the chipmaker was found guilty of abusing its patent royalty practices in the country. Qualcomm should be a nice silicon community player and share more, says the South Korean antitrust regulator. Carmakers like Volkswagen want to own the whole hog when it comes to transportation services, and that includes parking payments. The German automaker just picked up a Canadian mobile payment startup to prove it, too. Get used to it – this is the new way forward for the automotive industry.
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Four reasons you shouldn’t launch your crowdfunding campaign at CES
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Jackson Wightman
| 2,016 | 12 | 28 |
It’s the Super Bowl for nerds — a place where the future is unveiled alongside a pile of the most ill-conceived, useless crap humans can dream up. We’re talking about the Consumer Electronics Show (CES), which now looms on the not so distant horizon of everyone who has anything to do with consumer-facing technology. In recent years, as crowdfunding has become an important part of hardware development, Vegas’ biggest trade show has come to occupy a new position in the minds of entrepreneurs bent on creating the next big thing. Indeed, if the legions we talk to in our work are to be believed, the event is a wonderful time to launch a crowdfunding campaign. The logic goes like this: CES is attended by more than 7,000 media reps, ergo, getting exposure is easy. These media reps won’t ever be in one place again, so if your campaign is not live, you miss out. People also tell us that it’s full of early-adopter geeks who are ready to back campaigns. As PR pros, this line of reasoning scares the living shit out of us. Here are four reasons to avoid launching your crowdfunding campaign at CES. Whatever device you’re planning to launch on Kickstarter is inevitably beyond cool. However, some of the gadgets the estimated 3,887 other exhibitors at CES have created may also be interesting. The show is a veritable tech candy shop, where there’s always something to be amazed by. Launching in this environment means you’re competing with many other players. Some of these, , proven brands with monster budgets, and they to tend to hog more than their share of media coverage. While the volume of noise at CES makes it hard to break through, even if you do, you’re product is likely to be covered in a way that’s not ideal. We don’t mean negatively, but rather the “grouped-in coverage” that’s a hallmark of big tech outlets’ output at CES. Being part of a piece on “ ” is not a horrible thing, but it’s definitely not as good as having an entire piece written about your product. In an era where trust is critical, backers want to see in-depth coverage and reviews. Your chances of getting these at CES are small. PR for crowdfunding campaigns is unique because of their inherent time sensitivity. You need media to drop in the first 72 hours of a campaign, which is when they’re lost or won. A key tactic for making this happen is to do a pre-launch demo under embargo. The ideal period for these encounters is a week to 10 days before your launch. This way there’s not an excessively long embargo to manage and media reps still have time to put together their stories. However, CES runs from , which makes it impossible to properly time your demos. You won’t get many folks looking to demo your product between Christmas and New Year’s Day, so you’ll have to demo in mid-December. This option means you’ll either be forgotten come launch time or an outlet will break your embargo (which is about as fun as a trip to the dentist). CES runs during the height of the Holiday Spending Hangover. It’s conceivable that those who launch in this period have a death wish. Just because CES is a bad place to launch your campaign doesn’t mean you should spend all your time in Vegas gambling and partying. The event presents a great opportunity to meet prospective investors, partners, backers and the media. In terms of future campaign backers, we strongly suggest having a highly visible place at your booth where people can sign up to get on your email list. Your email database is the foundation upon which good crowdfunding campaigns are built. You can do lot on this front at CES. The show provides a good chance to begin the “cozying up” process with journalists and bloggers. Use your time on the event floor to book later-date demos with media reps who come by your booth. The key is to show only certain elements of your product at CES and save the “wow” moment for the meetings that will eventually occur when you are ready to launch.
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Oculus acquires eye-tracking startup The Eye Tribe
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Josh Constine
| 2,016 | 12 | 28 |
The direction you look could one day control your VR or mobile experience thanks to Facebook and Oculus’ latest buy, . Oculus confirms to me that this is an official acquisition. The startup has developed a $99 eye tracking device developer kits for computers, and software that can bring and potentially virtual reality headsets. The Eye Tribe has also developed foveated rendering technology, that lets VR systems save computational power by only generating perfect graphics where you’re looking. Essentially it creates a focal point that moves with your eyes. This could allow to display more complex scenes at higher frame rates despite its mobile form factor limiting its rendering power. A whole class of headsets are starting to use eye-tracking to for foveated rendering, as well as letting you teleport around a location, or show the movement of your eyes on an avatar to make it more life-like. Other examples of what the tech could do include auto-scrolling of text while reading or sheet music while playing an instrument, and the ability to pause or control a video player with your eyes while your hands are occupied. Car interfaces could benefit from the technology. It could also provide gaze analytics to inform app developers and advertisers what people look at most. The Eye Tribe had from investors including Startup Bootcamp, and taken a $2.3 million grant from The Danish National Advanced Technology Foundation. The Eye Tribe competed in TechCrunch’s CES Hardware Battlefield in early 2014 when it first began shipping its dev kit. Lately it’s been working to get more developers on its SDK, building applications that benefit from eye tracking. an eye-tracking startup too called Eyefluence. The startup’s site put up a notice that it was changing directions earlier this month, and tech pundit shared a rumor that they’d been acquired by Facebook. The publication reported that the Danish business register lists Facebook became the 100% shareholder of The Eye Tribe on December 15th, and TechCrunch has now . Though Oculus confirms the deal, it did not share details such as the price, exactly who from the Eye Tribe team will be joining Oculus, or what will happen to Eye Tribe’s existing users. The Eye Tribe was developed out of research by the founders at IT University Of Copenhagen back in 2009. The company says the ITU Gaze Tracker they helped create has become the most popular open source eye tracking software. By 2013 the full-fledged startup had shown the ability to build its technology into an Android tablet device. This year The Eye Tribe unveiled a of its tracking device that it says can be as much as 10X cheaper than comparable models. In the meantime, an eye-tracking VR headset startup called , while Instruments has brought eye-tracking to avatars in A . https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2q9DarPET0o It’s unclear exactly what Oculus will do with the technology, though it has potential applications for identity verification for security, immersive games, and a wide range of applications that let you navigate by looking rather than using your fingers. Perhaps Facebook could one day allow you to at the Like button, or roll your eyes in Oculus VR to communicate that you’re annoyed.
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Facebook & Google dominate the list of 2016’s top apps
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Sarah Perez
| 2,016 | 12 | 28 |
Mobile applications from Facebook and Google dominated the new list of the year’s top apps released today by Nielsen. Not surprisingly, Facebook again grabbed the number one spot on the list, with more than 146 million average unique users per month, and 14 percent growth over last year. In fact, Facebook scored several spots on the top 10 chart, thanks to Messenger (#2) and Instagram (#8) – the latter which also showed some of the highest year-over-year growth, up 36 percent from 2015. Messenger came in second place this year, with over 129 million average unique monthly users, followed by YouTube with over 113 monthly uniques. However, it was Google, not Facebook, that grabbed the most spots on the year-end chart. According to Nielsen, Google’s apps YouTube (#3), Google Maps (#4), Google Search (#5), Google Play (#6) and Gmail (#7) were among those people used the most throughout the year. Given that several of these are considered the basic utilities you need on any device – search, maps, email – it’s also not surprising to find them so highly ranked. However, one notable change Nielsen discovered is Amazon’s surge in 2016. We already know that e-commerce sites during this holiday shopping season, and Amazon accounted for a huge proportion of those numbers – according to recent reports. But people are clearly doing more mobile shopping throughout the year, Nielsen found, as Amazon’s mobile app saw a 43 percent increase in terms of monthly average uniques versus 2015. Nielsen also took a brief glimpse into the state of smartphone penetration in the U.S., noting that 88 percent of mobile subscribers now use a smartphone, up from 86 percent at the beginning of the year. Over half (53%) are on Android, with 45 percent on iOS, and just 2 percent on Windows Phone. Blackberry is somehow still on the charts with a 1 percent share.
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Amazon tries to recreate Prime Day magic with the first-ever Digital Day sales event
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Sarah Perez
| 2,016 | 12 | 28 |
Amazon is known for creating its own, exclusive sales holidays and events to boost its bottom line, as it has done with – a day of sales which even tops and , at times. Now, it’s trying to recreate that magic with the debut of a year-end blowout sale it’s calling “ .” As the name implies, the new sales holiday will have a narrower focus: only digital deals will be included. For one day only, December 30th, Amazon will discount over 1,000 digital items across its site in order to encourage post-holiday spending. The move makes sense as many consumers receive new gadgets as gifts during the holidays. Amazon’s digital items complement those newly acquired smartphones, tablets, computers, gaming consoles, and more, by helping consumers fill them with content. According to the retailer, hundreds of movies and TV shows will be sold for 50 percent off, a number of top music albums will go for $5, a Plex Pass annual subscription – a popular service for cord cutters and those with large, digital libraries of their own – will also be discounted by 50 percent. A number of kids mobile games will be dropped down to 99 cents, while some video games will be up to 80 percent off. Amazon will also use the sales event to promote its own services – in particular, its called Amazon Music Unlimited, as well as , Amazon Rapids. The former will offer new customers a $10 discount, and the Amazon Rapids’ subscription will be 33 percent off. There are still other discounts for things like comics, graphic novels, ebooks, and various subscriptions, like the workout channel Daily Burn, Qello Concerts, and UFC Fight Passes. Software and service discounts include Microsoft Office Home & Business 2016, TurboTax, Norton, and H&R Block. The is much more extensive. However, there’s one big miss: Amazon isn’t using the event to discount its annual Prime membership, unfortunately. Deal-tracking website SlickDeals has for Digital Day as only including older movie and video game titles. This echoes some of the sentiments around consumers’ impressions of Prime Day – that Prime Day was Amazon’s equivalent of for instance. But despite those complaints, people Prime Day in massive numbers, making the 2016 event the biggest sales day ever (at that point), in Amazon history. It’s not likely that the under-hyped Digital Day will draw in the same, large crowd, but it could still produce a year-end bump for Amazon’s sales, even if it’s featuring some outdated content. Digital Day, of course, isn’t the first time that Amazon has targeted holiday shoppers with digital content deals. But in the past, and would end shortly after customers unwrapped their new gifts. This is the first time the retailer has ever offered a single day of more than 1,000 deals on its site, and the first time it has branded the shopping event as “Digital Day.” Customers can sign up on the landing page to be notified of the event’s launch. Digital Day will run for 24 hours only on December 30th.
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Samsung is bringing an Amazon Echo-compatible robot vacuum to CES
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Brian Heater
| 2,016 | 12 | 28 |
Samsung surely (hopefully) has bigger and better things up its sleeve for CES, coming off a year that was, at best, pretty damn rocky for the electronics giant. In the meantime, the company’s looking to build up a little hype ahead of the event by announcing a few things before next week’s great Vegas melee. Its latest offering may well be the most 2017 product we’ve seen lined up for the electronics show yet – a robotic vacuum that features Amazon Echo voice compatibility. Details are still pretty scarce at the moment, but one can likely safely assume that the will be in line with that debuted late last month with commands like “Alexa, ask Neato to start cleaning” and “Alexa, ask Neato to pause cleaning.” The functionality also looks set to come with the rest of the company’s WiFi connected Powerbots. The robo-vacuum is also more than a quarter smaller than its predecessor and features specialized functionality for getting close cleans up against walls, an issue with a number of other similar devices. As with other recent WiFi-enabled Roomba competitors, the new Powerbot features remote control via a connected smartphone app for when Alexa control just isn’t enough. More info on pricing and availability may well arrive along with the vacuum next week (!) at CES.
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Watch Tesla’s Autopilot system help avoid a crash with superhuman sight
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Darrell Etherington
| 2,016 | 12 | 28 |
Finally the right one. — Hans Noordsij (@HansNoordsij) Tesla is fond of talking about the safety potential of its Autopilot and upcoming autonomous driving technologies, but it’s rare that we get the chance to see them in action potentially saving lives. That’s the case with this video of Tesla’s Autopilot 8.0 software in action, which employs radar tech to be able to see around objects that would block a human driver’s field of vision. In this case, the Tesla Forward Collision Warning system (which sends an audible alert when a driver might be in danger of crashing into something ahead of the vehicle) sounds before you can even see the car immediately in front of the driver’s Tesla Model X braking. Why? It seems to have sensed the SUV in front of that vehicle coming to a sudden stop, which the smaller vehicle which ends up rear-ended it did not notice in time. This looks like it could’ve been a prime candidate for a pileup, including the Model X that captured the video, but instead as the dashcam footage shows, the vehicle not only alerted the driver about the potential collision but even started applying its emergency braking system before he himself could react and do so. The result is that the Model X stops well back of the collision (in which all parties luckily turned out to be okay, beyond the vehicle damage). Previous footage captured by Tesla drivers have shown other safety features, including how its that happens to the other vehicle ahead of the Tesla in this video. Tesla CEO Elo Musk also aims to field full autonomy in test capacity by the end of 2017, which the company believes will help boost its safety potential even further.
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Byte Foods raises $5.5 million for smart vending machines that serve local fare
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Lora Kolodny
| 2,016 | 12 | 28 |
Apple juniper kombucha or a BBQ chopped salad may soon replace the can of soda and bag of chips in a vending machine at your office. A San Rafael-based startup called has raised $5.5 million in seed funding to popularize its smart vending machines and delivery service stocking them with nutritious food and drinks from local vendors. If the idea of the internet-connected vending machine sounds a bit familiar, it has been around for more than a decade, actually. But according to market research by , only 1.5 million of the world’s 17 million vending machines are actually internet-connected today. Byte Foods is poised to grow as the IoT share of this market does as well. Berg predicts by 2020, the world will have at least 3.6 million internet-connected vending machines in circulation. Byte’s married cofounders Lee and Megan Mokri previously ran a business called 180 Eats delivering chef-prepared meals to subscribers, something similar to services offered by Munchery. But when they spotted a kind of smart refrigerated kiosk, made by Lemnos Labs’ alumni they had a vision to change their business and brand entirely. Byte VP of sales and marketing, Lee Mokri said, “It just made a lot more sense to deliver a lot of meals at once to one place, versus a lot of individual meals to different doors.” The founders licensed one of Pantry’s machines, and convinced a local employer to keep it at their offices, loaded up daily with the foods and beverages employees there craved. The machines feature a menu display that users can scroll through for product info, and a card reader where they can swipe to pay for whatever they want. Customers can take anything they like out of the vending machine to examine it without risk of being billed erroneously if they put the items back. RFID tags are affixed to each item, and tell the machine automatically the items a customer carried away, and how much to charge their card. Byte has developed software to predict demand for different items at each office where its machines are stationed. The software also helps Byte manage relationships with over 1,000 vendors, and engage in dynamic pricing, a.k.a. surge pricing, to facilitate sales of every last item before it spoils. Byte’s software also lets corporations subsidize and track aggregate data about their employees’ snacking habits, or participation in a meal perks program. Some companies today use Byte to offer food and drinks for free to employees who are working after a certain hour, for example. The plan can help smaller companies provide a meal perk long before they’ll be able to afford a Google-style cafeteria. After a successful test period with the Pantry machines, Lee and Megan Mokri rebranded as Byte Foods, and acquired Pantry this May, in an all-stock deal. Now, Byte has raised $5.5 million in a seed round led by Spring Creek Investment Management, a family fund based in Philadelphia with a special interest in food and agriculture. Other investors in this round included hardware focused fund, Bolt, and Bessemer Venture Partners. Spring Creek’s who is now a board member at Byte, said he expects the company to invest its seed funding into growth initiatives. He said, “Byte is fine tuning their food offering and variety, which is important in attracting repeat customers. There are many opportunities here to partner with various local food providers. The customer facing-side of their technology works well already. One key revenue driver will be expanding the number of refrigerators… and driving down the delivery costs by having route density.” Byte CEO Megan Mokri noted, “Our tech doesn’t exist anywhere else. We have inbound requests from all over the world to either license it or use our service…” Mokri said she aims to have Byte vending machines cost less than traditional vending machines, or keeping a stocked mini-fridge in the office. The company will be saturating the San Francisco Bay Area with its vending machines and temperature-controlled food delivery trucks but declined to say when it will expand into a new geography. Additionally, the CEO said Byte is developing software that will let customers be able to opt in for deals on their favorite items, freebie samples of new foods, or for alerts that tell them when one of their preferred foods or drinks goes on sale.
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Sarah Perez
| 2,016 | 12 | 16 | null |
Ford’s newest self-driving test cars have more compute power and better vision
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Darrell Etherington
| 2,016 | 12 | 28 |
Ford has developed a new generation of autonomous development vehicle, a hybrid Fusion that uses the same essential platform as its current vehicles, but with a big upgrade to processing power through new on-board computing hardware, as well as improved LiDAR sensors, which deliver a better field of view and improved overall vision to the sensor suite despite dropping two LiDAR units from the design. The new Fusion also contains software improvements, making for a better virtual driver. This new generation of car will replace the existing one, which first made its debut on streets in testing three years ago. Ford has been testing its cars in Michigan, California and Arizona in real-world settings, and plans to do more of that with a fleet expansion that should triple the size of the current testing pool to about 90 active vehicles sometime in 2017. [youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6QJeaK7U87o&w=600&h=338] Ford’s autonomous vehicle Chief Program Engineer Chris Brewer explained its progress in a , noting that despite the move from four to two LiDAR sensors, they can gather just as much data as the combined total used in the previous development vehicle. The two sensors combined provide 360-degree coverage and can see about “the length of two football field in every direction,” Brewer notes. Three optical cameras on the Fusion’s Roof racks, a front-facing camera behind the windshield, short-and long-range radar complete the picture the car sees, which is used together using the onboard computing power. This built-in supercomputer can generate a full terabyte of data per hour, Brewer says. All that virtual processing capability requires a second power converter, and also explains the use of hybrids – Ford notes that a standard gas-powered car just doesn’t have the energy to achieve autonomy right now. All of Ford’s work is preface to its plan to launch autonomous vehicles in a commercial setting in 2021, beginning with an self-driving ride-hailing fleet.
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Hulu is getting over 50 Disney movies thanks to new licensing deal
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Sarah Perez
| 2,016 | 12 | 28 |
In its continuing battle with Netflix, Hulu this week a new licensing deal with Disney which sees Hulu gaining the exclusive rights to stream a sizable collection of Disney movies via its subscription service. In total, over 50 titles will become available on Hulu in the months ahead, including “The Nightmare Before Christmas,” “Mulan,” “Pocahontas,” “Hercules,” “Lilo & Stitch,” “Tarzan,” and others. Some of the titles have already hit the service, including “The Nightmare Before Christmas,” “Mulan,” “Pocahontas,” “Hercules,” “Sister Act” and “Air Bud.” Others will arrive in 2017, such as “Con Air,” “Step Up,” “Gone in 60 Seconds,” “Pearl Harbor,” “Romy and Michele’s High School Reunion,” “The Mighty Ducks,” “Lilo & Stitch,” “Tarzan,” “The Emperor’s New Groove,” “Muppet Treasure Island,” and “The Princess and the Frog.” Disney, which has a 30 percent stake in Hulu, already offers other content on Hulu thanks to a deal with the Disney-ABC Television Group, announced earlier this year. This includes Disney Channel Original Movies and other programming from Disney’s TV networks. This new Hulu-Disney licensing agreement means Disney is now splitting its movie library between multiple services, as the company had a prior deal with Netflix, back in 2012, that allows Netflix to stream Disney films – including those from Disney, Walt Disney Animation Studios, Marvel, Pixar, and Lucasfilm – within the same window as they would be allowed on paid cable TV networks, like HBO. Netflix about this deal in May, and the titles started streaming in the fall. Disney also offers its , DisneyLife, in Europe, which includes movies, TV, music and other content. Terms of the multi-year Hulu-Disney deal were not disclosed, but the additions will go a long way towards rounding out Hulu’s content catalog with programming aimed at children. Streaming services often focus on their kids’ section, because it’s a key selling point for many paying subscribers. In the past several years, we’ve seen Netflix and Amazon both heavily invest in their own original kids’ programming, for example, while HBO a deal with Sesame Workshop in 2015 to bring the iconic “Sesame Street” to its service along with other shows. In addition to the expansion of the kids’ lineup on Hulu, the service also recently rolled out another Netflix-like feature with its This gives kids their own login to Hulu that’s separate from their parents, complete with personalized recommendations, viewing history, and their own watchlist.
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Volkswagen purchases PayByPhone for parking
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Kristen Hall-Geisler
| 2,016 | 12 | 28 |
PayByPhone, the app that lets you pay for parking (and parking tickets) with a smartphone, has been acquired by Financial Services. PayByPhone is based in Vancouver, British Columbia, and operates in Canada, the US, France, Great Britain, Switzerland, and Australia. In 2016, company processed $250 million in parking payments from 12.5 million users. Volkswagen Financial Services had already bought Sunhill Technologies, the largest cashless payment solution in Germany, last year, so expands the company’s parking payment possibilities. “It is important to make the distinction that it is Volkswagen Financial Services (VWFS) who acquired us, and they have a charter to focus on general mobility services,” said PayByPhone CEO Kush Parikh in an email interview. “Outside of being the largest parking payment provider, the key asset we bring to the table is the relationship we have via our flagship mobile applications with our users. The mobile relationship is a one to one relationship that can extend into a myriad of additional services.” PayByPhone is focusing on parking payments first before branching into other mobility technology spaces, like car sharing or ride hailing applications for this service. “Our plans are focused on making the parking payment experience as seamless and easy as possible for users,” Kush wrote. The company already has a program in London where license plates are coordinated with a user account when the car arrives in a lot, and then the user is charged for her parking time when she leaves. “[This] can quite easily be extended into the autonomous vehicle movement,” Kush said. PayByPhone’s expansion hasn’t been hindered so much by its ability to scale as by an entrenched parking industry “that continues to hold on to archaic cash and credit card based systems, which are very capital intensive,” as Kush put it. PayByPhone does expect that VWFS’s investment will help the company expand into new countries. Kush noted that while the company will be focused on making parking payments as seamless as possible, they do have an eye on the future. “Parking is a great way to attract users where their identities can be used for a myriad of additional services, including movement around cities (aka smart cities) and distributing our service into any application, such as mapping and travel applications.”
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LG’s headset that doubles as a wearable speaker is peak CES before CES
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Darrell Etherington
| 2,016 | 12 | 28 |
LG will be bringing a collar-like wearable wireless speaker to CES, which also includes in-ear buds for when you don’t feel like being a complete jerk. The connects to your phone via Bluetooth, and contains “wearable speakers capable of delivering 3D surround sound” when the attached earbuds are safely ensconced within the electronic noise scarf. This thing features four speakers in total, spread across its mass, including two full range ones and two downward facing low-range sub-like speakers that I guess deliver some thumping base to your collar bones. Also the sound was tuned in partnership with the folks at DTS, which is one of those companies that delivers the sound for blockbuster movies. there’s also a DAC on board for both headset and speaker. Why would I want to wear a speaker around my neck, you may ask? Well there’s more: it also vibrates to alert you of things like calls and texts on your connected device. So it’s sort of like a smartwatch for your clavicle, in addition to being a way to impress everyone on public transit with your ability to emanate club bangers or concertos from your neckline. If you want to look back and pinpoint the moment that companies began scrambling to do something with their wearable category investment after the most likely form factor, smartwatches, proved a failure, this is your reference point. Also a marquee-sized sign of things to come for the Consumer Electronics Show this year, when Everyone Will Still Be Trying To Make Wearables Happen.
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Debunking cancellation rumors, Niantic says Pokemon GO for Apple Watch is still “coming soon”
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Greg Kumparak
| 2,016 | 12 | 17 |
When Niantic first showed a Pokemon Go app for Apple Watch back in September, the only sort of launch date the company would give was by “ .” As December 31st quickly approaches, PoGo fans are starting to wonder if Niantic will ship things in 2016 after all. With wondering and doubt comes ample opportunity for rumors to spiral out of control. An email started circulating via reddit early this morning; supposedly sent by a Niantic customer service agent, it claimed the “port for the Apple Watch has been shelved” and that development had been stopped. While a few sites took the rumor and ran with it, it all seemed… a bit off, to us. Apple had featured it in its own announcement; to quietly kill it off months later would’ve burned some pretty crucial bridges. So we reached out to Niantic. The company is often quick to the no-comment when it comes to hearsay — but in this case, a rep for the company put it in clear terms: Thanks for checking with us! The image in that Reddit post is not real. Development on Pokémon GO continues, as it has since before the Apple announcement. We’ll have more news on the product soon. Meanwhile, the official PokemonGo twitter feed says: Pokémon Go for Apple Watch is coming soon. Stay tuned. — Pokémon GO (@PokemonGoApp)
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5G promises to transform the world again
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Tom Goodwin
| 2,016 | 12 | 28 | |
The last frontier of consumerizing travel lives in the workplace
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Matt Heiman
| 2,016 | 12 | 17 |
According to a , 74 percent of leisure travelers relied on the internet for travel planning. That’s not surprising; it’s generally understood that most consumers make travel plans online. But that same study found that 77 percent of business travelers also started their journey online. Similarly, 78 percent of business travelers used a smartphone during travel planning, versus 67 percent for leisure travelers. Yet in many companies, booking travel still involves emailing or calling an actual travel agent, who then books with the airline or hotel. For executives, it often involves first telling an assistant, who then communicates with a travel agent, who then communicates with the airline or hotel. Unsurprisingly, this process has lengthy reaction times, is prone to errors and loses traveler preferences along the way. So if business travelers are turning to new digital channels at an equal or even greater rate than leisure travelers for planning, why is business so far behind leisure in the migration of actual booking to digital? Among the many reasons that companies cite for using travel agents are: simplifying the booking experience for employees, saving money and enforcing corporate travel policies. But it is now possible for digital tools to outperform travel agents on even those criteria for which they were once preferred. The proliferation of mobile, improvements in user interface design and the ability of computers to ingest and analyze large amounts of data have changed the game. Having direct control of travel booking can result in a vastly better experience than having an agent book on one’s behalf. There are several reasons for this. Firstly, making changes is more complicated when the reservation is booked through a third party. Anyone who has made a hotel or airline reservation via an Online Travel Agency (OTA) is all too familiar with the experience of trying to make a change directly with the provider, only to be told that only the booking agent can do so. The same restrictions apply when bookings are made through corporate travel agents. Of course, if one needs to make a change, response times via agents can be slow, because they are limited by the availability of human beings. Secondly, important traveler information and what I’ll call “micro-preferences” often get filtered out by intermediaries. For instance, not getting TSA PreCheck because the travel agents didn’t include a Known Traveler Number or because he/she did so in a way that didn’t get ingested by the airline system. Similarly, while we can tell a travel agent about our basic preferences (e.g. window versus aisle, high floor versus low floor, etc.), it is unreasonable to expect another person to internalize our specific and subtle value trade-offs. Would you prefer a window seat toward the back of the plane or an aisle seat toward the front? Would you prefer a room in a low-quality hotel one block away from the office or a high-quality hotel one mile away? Business travelers can avoid the headaches of dealing with human travel agents, but to do so they require a highly simplified and frictionless booking experience. The appeal of using an agent is not having to waste time planning travel rather than doing one’s actual job. Amazon has done a fantastic job of building an e-commerce platform with the view that, as David Jaffe wrote, “the best customer service is no service.” In other words, every instance of needing to speak to a human represents a bug. Over time, Amazon has refined the interface such that the vast majority of customer service issues can be dealt with by the average user within the digital platform. Unlike travel agents, computer servers don’t mind working 24-7, and they have near instantaneous response times. New corporate travel platforms can leverage best-practice designs from e-commerce and consumer travel to simplify complex decisions and reduce the need for human intervention. For instance, changing or canceling a reservation on the mobile app is easier than sending an email to an agent. Even in drastic situations like a flight cancellation, new consumer travel apps like demonstrate how computing power and a good interface outperform agents. One often perpetuated reason for the benefit of using a travel agent is that doing so results in cheaper rates than by booking individually. The logic goes something like this: Travel agents aggregate demand and therefore can negotiate better rates from the providers. The reality is quite different. While travel agents do aggregate some demand, their scale pales in comparison to that of the travel providers: giant airlines and hotel chains. Moreover, in both hotel and air, the industry standard of “rate parity” means that providers offer the same rates across different channels. Corporate travel agents book via one of three Global Distribution Systems (Sabre, Amadeus and Travelport), the same sources used by consumer-facing OTAs. In some cases, rate parity can be broken, if done so behind a pay or membership wall, and in that way, travel agents can in fact access “unpublished rates.” But those rates are no better than what consumers can get individually via OTA loyalty programs like Booking.com’s “Genius” program. Additionally, corporate travel agents make money by charging $10-50 booking fees on top of existing prices. While that may not sound like a lot, it can add up, especially when agents charge by interaction rather than by itinerary. Travel agencies are an easy tool for companies to enforce travel policies and generally control travel expenses. But the opportunity to empower the employee and incentivize him/her to save money is more powerful than any set of rules could ever be. When a company sets a dollar limit for a given flight route or hotel night, it must do so at a sufficiently high level, such that only a relatively small percentage of cases leads to an exceptions process. But by doing so, the company is leaving money on the table. New corporate travel startups are finding ways to save companies money by motivating employees to choose cheaper options. For example, startups like and use data from real-time price analysis to determine cost benchmarks and split savings with the employee. Startups like reward customers for choosing less expensive options by offering travel credits and perks. The use of incentives to unlock hidden savings could be the killer feature driving adoption of consumerized corporate travel apps. The incentive of saving money has always motivated individuals, but only with advances in big data over the last several years have computers gotten smart enough to reliably calculate fair cost benchmarks. Without being able to ingest and quickly analyze real-time prices, it would be hard to imagine a computer determining what one should spend for a trip. Over the last five years, consumers have become accustomed to having the power of the internet in their pocket at all times. They have come to expect mobile airline tickets, booking hotels at the last minute from their phones and planning their next trip while commuting to work. These same consumers are now carrying those expectations into the workplace. It is sometimes easy to forget that a company is actually just an organized group of individual consumers. The time has come for startups capitalizing on these advancements to consumerize the $1 trillion global corporate travel market.
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HP’s OMEN X is a powerful and mostly satisfying gaming cube
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Stefan Etienne
| 2,016 | 12 | 17 |
A Recently the latter has been doing a great job of appealing to different user needs with their Spectre line, from premium ultrabooks, to the VR-ready desktop replacement OMEN 17 laptop . To better cater to hardcore gamers, HP teamed up with Maingear, a custom PC builder that’s well-respected in the gaming community. In fact, HP and Maingear are so confident in the OMEN X’s chassis design that you can actually purchase it as an empty case for $599. The specs of your new machine would then be entirely up to you; want to include two GPUs and four separate hard drives? Not a problem at all. Inside of , you’ll find a 4.0GHz Core i7-6700HK quad-core processor, 16GB DDR4 RAM and a GTX 1080 Founder’s Edition graphics card — a powerful trio that can handle any game that is based off DirectX 11 or 12 released this year — and most likely for a while longer. A 2TB traditional hard drive with 256GB SSD, Bluetooth 4.0, 802.11ac WiFi and a 1300W Gold efficiency power supply round off the rest of the specs. In terms of real-world performance, every title I’ve played has been pushed to a 3440 x 1440 curved LG monitor via a Displayport. For PC gaming purists who swear by 1080p HD displays, the frame rates I’ve seen of course will be higher. runs at a cozy 75fps on max settings, DirectX 12 enabled. maxed-out at a strong 70fps, while averages 60 to 80fps, also with max settings and V-sync enabled. Using a G-Sync screen with this system would most likely produce better results, but unfortunately I didn’t have one to test. An NVIDIA GTX 1080’s performance, pitted against other Pascal NVIDIA graphics processor is uncontested, unless you opt for the astronomically expensive TITAN X GPU ($1,200). Pitted against the slower GTX 1070 (both desktop and mobile versions) and you’ll see frame rates drop by 10-20fps. The GTX 1080 is worth the investment, while the TITAN X is not at all a requirement if you want to play today’s (or tomorrow’s) games on the highest settings on a 1080p or 1440p monitor. Strangely, three weeks into using the OMEN X, a reliability issue came up: it wouldn’t get past the POST screen (power-on self test), which is the bane of any computer user’s existence. Checking the motherboard and connections for irregularities changed nothing, but powering the system off, then turning it on the next day, only to find that it suddenly booted into Windows 10. That was all odd, and by all accounts meant that I had to swap systems. I would hope that wouldn’t be a trend for consumers who purchase their own systems. If I were building a yet another micro-ATX gaming rig, I would probably splurge and get the barebones OMEN X case for $599. Afterwards, I’d fill it with similar specs and a better motherboard, while sacrificing storage space for a faster, but smaller SSD. On the other hand, if you’re satisfied with the pre-configured builds and pricing that HP is offering, then make that your choice. After all, nothing is more fun than having more than enough processing power for everyday tasks, but also knowing you’re future-proofed to an extent with games, USB-C ports and the like.
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Romain Dillet
| 2,016 | 12 | 28 | null |
Tech can reshape the U.S. Peace Corps and bridge political divides
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Brian Forde
| 2,016 | 12 | 17 |
, President-elect Trump met with some of the top leaders of American tech companies. Some of these leaders are trying to find common ground after being on the receiving end of some of his sharp-worded tweets. Like many of my friends in the tech community, I’m faced with the reality of a Trump presidency and searching for a way to honor the calls of President Obama and Secretary Clinton for national unity and a chance for the president-elect to lead. My struggle comes from looking for common ground with a president-elect whose policy goals I largely do not support but recognizing from my time working in the Obama White House just how ineffective obstructionist politics can be for Americans who rely on a functioning federal government. As we seek to unite a divided country, one unconventional area where we might find common ground, and discover a hidden opportunity for the tech community, is updating a historic government agency — the U.S. Peace Corps. In December 2013, President Barack Obama was preparing to meet with a group of U.S. tech leaders at the White House. I was the senior advisor for mobile and data innovation at the White House, and I asked Reed Hastings, the chief executive officer of Netflix — and, like myself, a Returned Peace Corps Volunteer — if he would like to join me for breakfast with the director of Peace Corps, Carrie Hessler-Radelet. Reed enthusiastically replied, “Yes!” Carrie and I met with Reed the morning before his meeting with the President, and then I walked him to the West Wing. Reed seemed to relish his discussion with the President, jokingly . But I didn’t think much else of Reed’s visit until I saw media reports the following day. To everyone’s amusement, where they discussed how the agency had been influenced and changed by technology. Reed’s conversation with Carrie at breakfast that morning sparked two new questions: Photo courtesy of / Every year more than 3,500 Americans finish their Peace Corps service, mostly in rural areas in more than 60 countries. The Peace Corps has long acted as the last mile of international development, but it could also become the last mile of critical tech training. It has an unrivaled footprint of volunteers canvassing the planet — they are ambassadors of culture, teachers of water-saving agricultural techniques and emerging leaders in their own right. They’re building deep, meaningful relationships with local communities. Historically, federal agencies, non-profits and non-governmental aid organizations have heavily recruited this rich talent pool of international experience and resilience. One of the many positive side effects of the tech community working closely with the Peace Corps is also tapping into this rich talent pool of Returned Peace Corps Volunteers. These resilient Americans can supply the boost tech companies needs to grow businesses successfully and responsibly in the most remote parts of the world. As an example, more than thirteen years ago I served as a business and technology volunteer in Nicaragua. Based on the challenges my neighbors and I faced in making calls to the United States, I co-founded a small phone company in 2005. We erected 80-foot internet towers in rural villages to enable Nicaraguans to call the United States and other countries at a tenth of the price charged by established carriers. Eventually our company, Llamadas Heladas, became one of the largest phone companies in Nicaragua. I am not alone. Other Peace Corps Volunteers have also gone on to start much more successful tech companies, including Reed — who served as a high school math teacher in Swaziland — and Amy Pressman, who served in Honduras before co-founding her billion-dollar tech startup, Medallia. And it’s not just tech startups, Knight Foundation, with more than two billion dollars in assets to support, among other things, the development of civic tech, is run by Alberto Ibargüen, who served in Venezuela. President-elect Trump should choose a Peace Corps director with technology in his or her DNA. Critically, the next director needs to make technology a priority in every facet of the organization, from staffing and training to the partnerships it builds. Why? Great, tech-powered, business ideas can come from anywhere. Take Lyft, for example, a billion-dollar Silicon Valley company modeled after the successful ride-pooling in Zimbabwe. Or consider Ushahidi, a popular crowd-mapping tool used during domestic disasters — created in Nairobi. Facebook powers more than a billion people’s social media identities but the Government of India built the world’s largest biometric identity system for more than 1.2 billion people in a fraction of the time. One of the most successful mobile money companies, M-pesa, was not founded in America, but in Kenya. Analog versions of Deliveroo, Postmates and Munchery were implemented decades ago in countries such as India and Nicaragua. Ultimately, by bringing the Peace Corps into the 21 century, we can empower communities across the globe to take advantage of emerging technologies that can positively impact their lives. Peace Corps Director Hessler-Radelet has made dramatic improvements at the agency, including significant structural changes that make it easier to apply to serve as a volunteer — reducing the application process from several days to less than an hour. The Peace Corps has also expanded its digital footprint and improved its outreach, recruiting and marketing, resulting in a 100 percent increase in applications over the last two years. The agency’s Director of Innovation, Patrick Choquette, , a language training software company. The Peace Corps has also been that can be incredibly helpful in the wake of disasters. Building on these successes, the next director has the opportunity to make the Peace Corps an important player in spreading the benefits of emerging technologies — enabling this historic agency to have as much impact in the 21 century as it had in the 20 . The wave of technology change is only growing. Whether it lifts or further isolates many parts of the world is being decided now. The next Peace Corps director could help shape this future in the following ways: Finding common ground with someone whose policy goals you may strongly disagree with is incredibly challenging. But this isn’t about any one of us or the president-elect. This is about coming together as Americans, with the Peace Corps and the National Peace Corps Association, to help evenly distribute our future to the people who need it most — the communities Peace Corps Volunteers are uniquely trained to serve. This post was written in my personal capacity and does not reflect the views of MIT or my colleagues.
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Silicon Valley is a state of mind
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Manoel Lemos
| 2,016 | 12 | 17 |
“Silicon Valley is a state of mind,” said Ambassador Pedro Borio, Consulate General of Brazil in San Francisco, during a recent address at the annual at the Googleplex in Mountain View. A career diplomat since 1976, Borio spoke about the significant growth in ties and similarities between Silicon Valley and Brazil during the last decade, a stormy tide of a national political scandal beginning to ease and his prediction that Brazil would rise again. “When you look at the historical data, every time Brazil emerges from a major crisis, it grows the most,” said Borio. Corporate venture arms of multinational giants such as Chinese firm see a big opportunity in Brazil. In September, Baidu launched a new tech startup program to provide support and mentoring as a way to seek and identify scalable ventures in the country. are open between now and December 31, and applicants are being assessed by the Latin American Angels Society ( ). In exchange for the support and mentoring, Baidu will take a 10 percent stake in the capital of the companies selected for the program. VC investments in Latin America are increasing again, and top Silicon Valley firms are returning to the region or making their first LatAm investments, based on new data analysis released by . VC transactions are up 46 percent year over year, with $218 million deployed across 104 transactions during the first half of 2016. This follows a banner year in 2015, with 182 deals worth more than $594 million. Leading corporate ventures in the region include Monsanto, Qualcomm and Microsoft. Giants are investing indirectly as limited partners to established funds. Brazil’s investment opportunity is enticing, especially for the tech sector, because Brazilians ravenously devour digital content, and are very socially engaged. They spend 68 percent more time on blogs than the U.S. Indeed, current Brazilian internet users are online more than five hours a day. They check their smartphones more than 80 times per day. With only about half the country of Brazil online today, growth could be fast and furious. Baidu is banking on during the next three years, which is why the country is one of its top-priority investment markets. The real magic of Silicon Valley and other successful tech startup ecosystems is the creation of an environment to congregate and mix great minds and talent together. This creates an opportunity for synchronicity. In the most recent from Compass, São Paulo is ranked as the 12 best city for tech startups, and the only Latin American city in the top 20. , a new 50,000-square-foot coworking space in São Paulo that launched last fall, celebrated its one-year anniversary with a big gathering of entrepreneurs, academics, venture capitalists and corporate mentors. Cubo’s overall objective is to fast-track São Paulo’s startup scene, foster entrepreneurs and provide them with Silicon Valley-like perks, a close-knit community, more serendipity and vital business connections. At the end of its first year, Cubo achieved 100 percent capacity, with more than 58 startups and 250+ professionals working there, and another 250 visiting every day. Its companies now generate more than R$135 million in revenue, and they have collectively raised more than R$100 million. Sixty projects have been initiated between its startup residents and Itau, Cubo’s corporate co-founder and Brazil’s largest bank. Eighty pieces of new business have emerged between Cubo’s startups and outside corporations, and 650 new jobs have been created in the process. During a recent event at Cubo to celebrate its one-year anniversary, a new interactive map of São Paulo’s ecosystem was launched there. Called , its goal is to provide greater visibility about the current state of innovation agents in the region, including coworking spaces, incubators, universities, technology parks, VC funds, accelerators, associations and other noteworthy institutions. As the Brazilian startup ecosystem and corporate venture continues to grow and nurture innovation, a new trend is emerging: There are now more Brazilian tech startups expanding and investing beyond the region into global markets than ever before. For example, , the Brazilian mobile company founded in the late 1990s, reaches millions of Latin Americans with each tap and swipe of their devices. Eduardo Henrique, Movile’s head of U.S. operations, has said: “The goal is to become the largest mobile services and product company in the world.” It has , and its properties include one of the top-grossing children’s apps in the world, . Movile subsidiary , LatAm’s leading on-demand food delivery startup, made its 15th acquisition in two years with its purchase of U.S.-based SpoonRocket’s technology, and surpassed more than 10,000 restaurants using its platform, with significant growth occurring in Mexico. Despite the economic downturn, Latin America is one of the top regions in the world for e-commerce growth, . Last month, Rio de Janeiro-based , the largest mobile security company in Latin America, and opened a San Francisco office. In 2015, it was the first startup in Latin America to achieve a market value of more than R$1 billion, and it launched operations in Mexico. During the recent Olympic games in Rio, PSafe helped thwart more than 55,000 security threats. It recently signed an agreement with Cisco Wireless Portfolio for the creation of a new free and secure Wi-Fi service, being rolled out in Brazil first. Born as a physical retail store in the city of São Paulo in 2000, has grown into one of the largest e-commerce providers of sporting goods in the world, with operations in Brazil, Argentina and Mexico. Its sports brands and partners include the NBA, NFL, Puma and UFC. As of two years ago, Netshoes was eyeing a . , the fraud risk management company that innovated how fraud is handled in Brazil, is an example of a successful global export from LatAm. With a new U.S. office in Miami, it began offering it fraud-detection solution to U.S.-based e-commerce merchants . Founded in 2001 by two-time Olympic athlete Pedro Chiamulera, ClearSale added real-time biometric tools to its platform in August. Its more than 2,000 customers include Calvin Klein, Chanel, Ray-Ban, Sony, Staples and Walmart. While economic uncertainty is still a factor, Brazil is still one of the most intriguing emerging markets for investors, and macroeconomic conditions seem to be improving. During a recent last month about Brazil’s growth outlook, Bloomberg’s Erik Schatzker reported that Brazil’s stock market is up 40 percent this year, the Brazilian real is one of the world’s best-performing currencies and credit default swap spreads have been narrowing. There have been indicators that Brazil will make a turnaround, and the rise of corporate venture capital and the country’s maturing startup ecosystem are vital to its long-term success.
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Artificial intelligence finds its way into business through sales
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Ron Miller
| 2,016 | 12 | 17 |
Artificial intelligence (AI) had a coming out party of sorts in 2016. Even though it has been in development for decades, this year, with the perfect combination of cheap computing power and access to increasing amounts of data, it seems AI’s time has come. Its first foray in business has been directed at making salespeople more efficient at every level of the sales workflow. If you think about it, it makes sense to start with the part of the company that drives revenue. Certainly the vendors recognize that, says Alan Lepofsky, an analyst at Constellation Research, who is working on the impact of AI on work. He sees humans struggling with information overload. As we gather ever increasing amounts of information, it requires machine processing power to help make sense of that growing pile of data. “AI is hopefully going to help alleviate that by filtering information and automating tasks,” Lepofsky said. It’s certainly having an impact in the startup community. Just this week, we saw Conversica, a company that has built a virtual sales assistant on top of artificial intelligence underpinnings, . The tool takes advantage of natural language processing, an inference engine and natural language generation — fairly sophisticated AI technology — to undertake initial email contact with sales leads. Meanwhile Tact, a company started by a CRM industry veteran, part of a salesperson’s day. Using AI, it aims to help sales staff work in a more logical and efficient way, rather than be slaves to their CRM tools. Even as companies like these try to help salespeople work smarter in various aspects of the sales process, the CRM industry took to artificial intelligence in a big way this year with companies as diverse as , and coming out with CRM tools to not just record sales interactions, but drive more sales with built-in intelligence. Traditionally, CRM has been a place to build a record of customer interactions, but AI lets it be more than that, says Vanessa Thompson, SVP of customer experience insights at Bluewolf, a consulting agency that works with Salesforce customers. “With AI, customer interactions become fine-tuned and ultimately smarter with every interaction and additional piece of data,” she said. It’s about using the power of that platform to be a better salesperson, and giving them more time to spend working with customers and closing sales. “For a salesperson to predict where to spend their time or take next best action — they need the right data at the right time. They have to take data from every data source and they have to have a cognitive platform in place to evaluate that data to make decisions,” she explained. We are also seeing intelligence being applied to customer service with the increasing use of bots to handle initial contact with customers. The idea is to have the bot deal with simple tasks, handing off more complex interactions and requests to human operators to handle. This week, , a tool for incorporating messaging apps in their Service Cloud platform, combining the use of bots and live customer service agents. Sales and customer service could just be the beginning. Over the next several years, we’ll likely see AI moving deeper into every aspect of the business as companies look to use the power of the computer to augment and enhance their employees.
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California Attorney General gives Uber notice on self-driving cars in San Francisco
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Darrell Etherington
| 2,016 | 12 | 17 |
The California Department of Motor Vehicles sent Uber a notice asking it to terminate its pilot self-driving car service in San Francisco last week, but . Now, the California State Department of Justice has followed up, with an order from the Attorney General’s office that adds some teeth to the DMV’s earlier request. The DMV has noted that Uber would be subject to legal action in its original request for Uber to stop its tests and pursue permitting, as 20 other companies testing autonomous vehicles have done with the state regulator. But this letter insists that Uber “ ” (emphasis int the original) remove its test vehicles from any public roads in the state, and that it seek out the appropriate permit before reinstating any use of its self-driving cars. If Uber fails to meet these demands, “the Attorney General will seek injunctive and other appropriate relief,” according to the letter signed by CA Supervising Deputy Attorney Generals Miguel A. Neri and Fiel D. Tigno. Uber has maintained that its vehicles are not truly autonomous and therefore require no permit, but it’s a difficult position to maintain then the ride hailing company has also been touting its self-driving tech’s proficiency to media.
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Elon Musk might start a literal “boring company” to tunnel under traffic
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Darrell Etherington
| 2,016 | 12 | 17 |
Multi-CEO and future builder Elon Musk may have been so frustrated by sitting in traffic that he’s going to start yet another company – a boring one. Yes, – as in boring tunnels, using machine diggers to create undercut routes to alleviate surface traffic. Musk tweeted Saturday about being struck by inspiration for this new venture, making a series of “boring” puns before tweeting a seeming confirmation that he’s actually going to take this on as a serious pursuit: I am actually going to do this — Elon Musk (@elonmusk) The Tesla and SpaceX CEO is prone to goofs, but he’s seldom been known to troll quite so hard as to say outright that he genuinely wants to do something in quite this way. Musk also changed his Twitter bio to include “Tunnels (yes, tunnels)” alongside Tesla, SpaceX and OpenAI as his current pursuits. Here’s the thing about these tweets – they sound like a pretty juvenile response to encountering traffic; you’re average imaginative teenager has probably come up with two scenarios for getting around it: A) flying cars, and B) tunnelling under. But Musk’s reputation means he might actually have put some genuine thought into this from a feasibility perspective, and at least conceived of some kind of rough roadmap. If, that is, he isn’t just massively trolling as part of his unpredictable and unfiltered Twitter persona. For what it’s worth, I think he’s being genuine – and that means one more huge mountain to climb – or in this case, dig under – for tech’s most ambitious impresario.
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5 unexpected sources of bias in artificial intelligence
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Kristian Hammond
| 2,016 | 12 | 10 |
We tend to think of machines, in particular smart machines, as somehow cold, calculating and unbiased. We believe that self-driving cars will have no preference during life or death decisions between the driver and a random pedestrian. We trust that smart systems performing credit assessments will ignore everything except the genuinely impactful metrics, such as income and FICO scores. And we understand that learning systems will always converge on ground truth because unbiased algorithms drive them. For some of us, this is a bug: Machines should not be empathetic outside of their rigid point of view. For others, it is a feature: They should be freed of human bias. But in the middle, there is the view they will be objective. Of course, nothing could be further from the truth. The reality is that not only are very few intelligent systems genuinely unbiased, but there are multiple sources for bias. These sources include the data we use to train systems, our interactions with them in the “wild,” emergent bias, similarity bias and the bias of conflicting goals. Most of these sources go unnoticed. But as we build and deploy intelligent systems, it is vital to understand them so we can design with awareness and hopefully avoid potential problems. For any system that learns, the output is determined by the data it receives. This is not a new insight, it just tends to be forgotten when we look at systems driven by literally millions of examples. The thinking has been that the sheer volume of examples will overwhelm any human bias. But if the training set itself is skewed, the result will be equally so. Most recently, this kind of bias has shown up in systems for image recognition through deep learning. Nikon’s confusion about and HP’s in their face recognition software both seem to be the product of learning from skewed example sets. While both are fixable and absolutely unintentional, they demonstrate the problems that can arise when we do not attend to the bias in our data. Beyond facial recognition, there are other troubling instances with real-world implications. Learning systems used to build the rules sets applied to predict rates for parolees, crime patterns or potential employees are areas with potentially negative repercussions. When they are trained using skewed data, or even data that is balanced but the systems are biased in decision-making, they will perpetuate the bias, as well. While some systems learn by looking at a set of examples in bulk, other sorts of systems learn through interaction. Bias arises based on the biases of the users driving the interaction. A clear example of this bias is , a Twitter-based chatbot designed to learn from its interactions with users. Unfortunately, Tay was influenced by a user community that taught Tay to be racist and misogynistic. In essence, the community repeatedly tweeted offensive statements at Tay and the system used those statements as grist for later responses. Tay lived a mere 24 hours, shut down by Microsoft after it had become a fairly aggressive racist. While the racist rants of Tay were limited to the Twitter-sphere, it’s indicative of potential real-world implications. As we build intelligent systems that make decisions with and learn from human partners, the same sort of bad training problem can arise in more problematic circumstances. What if we were to, instead, partner intelligent systems with people who will mentor them over time? Consider our distrust of machines to make decisions about who gets a loan or even who gets paroled. What Tay taught us is that such systems will learn the biases of their surroundings and people, for better or worse, reflecting the opinions of the people who train them. Sometimes, decisions made by systems aimed at personalization will end up creating bias “bubbles” around us. We can look no further than the current state of Facebook to see this bias at play. At the top layer, Facebook users see the posts of their friends and can share information with them. Unfortunately, any algorithm that uses analysis of a data feed to then present other content will provide content that matches the idea set that a user has already seen. This effect is amplified as users open, like and share content. The result is a flow of information that is skewed toward a user’s existing belief set. While it is certainly personalized, and often reassuring, it is no longer what we would tend to think of as news. It is a bubble of information that is an algorithmic version of “confirmation bias.” Users don’t have to shield themselves from information that conflicts with their beliefs because the system is automatically doing it for them. The impact of these information biases on the world of news is troubling. But as we look to social media models as a way to support decision making in the enterprise, systems that support the emergence of information bubbles have the potential to skew our thinking. A knowledge worker who is only getting information from the people who think like him or her will never see contrasting points of view and will tend to ignore and deny alternatives. Sometimes bias is simply the product of systems doing what they were designed to do. Google News, for example, is designed to provide stories that match user queries with a set of related stories. This is explicitly what it was designed to do and it does it well. Of course, the result is a set of similar stories that tend to confirm and corroborate each other. That is, they define a bubble of information that is similar to the personalization bubble associated with Facebook. There are certainly issues related to the role of news and its dissemination highlighted by this model — the most apparent one being a balanced approach to information. The lack of “editorial control” scopes across a wide range of situations. While similarity is a powerful metric in the world of information, it is by no means the only one. Different points of view provide powerful support for decision making. Information systems that only provide results “similar to” either queries or existing documents create a bubble of their own. The similarity bias is one that tends to be accepted, even though the notion of contracting, opposing and even conflicting points of view supports innovation and creativity, particularly in the enterprise. Sometimes systems that are designed for very specific business purposes end up having biases that are real but completely unforeseen. Imagine a system, for example, that is designed to serve up job descriptions to potential candidates. The system generates revenue when users click on job descriptions. So naturally the algorithm’s goal is to provide the job descriptions that get the highest number of clicks. As it turns out, people tend to click on jobs that fit their self-view, and that view can be reinforced in the direction of a stereotype by simply presenting it. For example, women presented with jobs labeled as “Nursing” rather than “Medical Technician” will tend toward the first. Not because the jobs are best for them but because they are reminded of the stereotype, and then align themselves with it. The impact of on behavior is such that the presentation of jobs that fit an individual’s knowledge of a stereotype associated with them (e.g. gender, race, ethnicity) leads to greater clicks. As a result, any site that has a learning component based on click-through behavior will tend to drift in the direction of presenting opportunities that reinforce stereotypes. In an ideal world, intelligent systems and their algorithms would be objective. Unfortunately, these systems are built by us and, as a result, end up reflecting our biases. By understanding the bias themselves and the source of the problems, we can actively design systems to avoid them. Perhaps we will never be able to create systems and tools that are perfectly objective, but at least they will be less biased than we are. Then perhaps us, and we could find ourselves communicating with people outside of our .
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Soccer fans can watch the MLS Cup live in VR tonight
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Fitz Tepper
| 2,016 | 12 | 10 |
Sure, it’s sometimes tough being a soccer fan in America. For instance, the MLS Cup (the championship game for the major soccer league in America) hasn’t even been broadcast live on an English-language network since 2008! But tonight that changes. Fox is airing the MLS Cup tonight between Toronto FC and the Seattle Sounders starting at 8pm ET. And to make up for the lack of attention soccer typically gets, they are even going to stream it in VR. It will be available in Fox’s dedicated VR app available for iOS, Android and Gear VR, all of which are powered by . And even if you don’t have a VR headset to pop your phone into you can still watch, as the iOS and Android app lets you tilt and pan your phone to still get a 360 experience. LiveLike’s approach to VR is a little different than NextVR and a few other VR streaming platforms. Instead of just a floating broadcast, LiveLike has created a virtual world inside the Fox Sports VR App. So when you launch it you’re sitting in a “private suite” at a stadium looking out over the field — and you can pick different camera angles, essentially letting you switch between a suite behind the goal, on the sideline, etc. In my opinion it’s a much better experience than the floating screen that most platforms provide. [gallery ids="1426342,1426343"] There’s also a section of the app where you can just sit inside the suite and watch other games currently being shown on FOX or FS1. Because they are broadcast on a big virtual screen they don’t even have to be shot in VR — meaning you get live access to every game aired on FOX. For this portion you have to sign in with your cable login, but that makes sense — just like you have to sign in to the FOX Sports Go app. One downside — the app isn’t available for the HTC Vive or Oculus Rift. But this isn’t surprising — believe it or not, none of the major VR streaming services are available yet for these higher-end rigs. You can download the Fox Sports VR app on the and .
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Software is due for a bundling event
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Peter Yared
| 2,016 | 12 | 10 |
We are approaching a new phase of enterprise software, where every niche of Software-as-a-Service has been filled and cloud companies are being consolidated into larger companies. Markets have a tendency to cycle from bundling to unbundling, and software is due for a bundling event. The cloud, open APIs, next-generation messengers and machine learning are combining to turn the end-user interface to enterprise software into a unified experience. There have been attempts to do this, ranging from portal servers like Portal Software, to “Enterprise 2.0” collaboration software like Jive Software, to communications platforms like Yammer. However, none of these have stuck pervasively because they only solved one slice of the problem, various backends were difficult to integrate, it was hard to work with people outside of the enterprise and there was no machine learning to sift through all the data on users’ behalf. In just the past couple of weeks, Microsoft, IBM and Facebook have all launched next-generation collaboration interfaces for enterprises. Slack kickstarted the reboot of and Chatter a couple of years ago, and now the big guns are back and swinging. The key shift in these new messengers is the ability to integrate third-party software that can “push” messages with machine learning to help end users get only the data that is relevant. All of this is built on the rapid proliferation of micro services that allow easy access to most systems, including legacy systems. Some of the platforms even allow full integration of micro apps — simple, single-purpose apps that allow employees to quickly perform specific tasks. The most convenient feature is to allow end users to drive micro flows, where they can complete simple actions such as approving a purchase order. As I wrote previously in TechCrunch, the unique combination of micro flows, micro apps and micro services is enabling a new architecture I call the . We at Sapho have had the privilege of working with most of these nascent platforms; here are our impressions. Bundled with Office 365. Microsoft’s recent foray into this market is a very comprehensive, well thought-out product. The third-party integration is best in class, with tabs that can support fully contained micro apps delivered by third-party systems. The bundling of Skype’s voice and video features is seamless and performs flawlessly, and even integrates into a channel’s conversational flow. The product out of the gate scales 5x in active users per channel past Slack. This really is a new Microsoft: The desktop version of Microsoft Teams uses Electron and Chromium and the product is available at launch on Windows, MacOS, iOS, Android and, of course, Windows Phone. The interface is a bit busy; it packs a lot into the messenger frame. Microsoft will likely iterate on this and clean up the interface. Cognitive grouping of messages with extraction of summaries and action items. Watson Workspace offers the cleanest interface of all of the new messengers. The product is well planned and architected — like you would expect from an IBM technology, it can scale like a hockey stick. IBM has been a leader in bringing cognitive technologies to the enterprise; with Watson Workspace, it targeted one of the most painful aspects of messengers, which is not being able to find information easily. Watson Workspace magically organizes past messages into clusters and even extracts summaries and action items. It really has to be seen to be believed. The product is also free for users to start using, a first for IBM. The third-party integration is excellent, but the ability to integrate a micro app into the interface is still coming. IBM does not jump to top of mind for buyers looking for next-generation collaboration tools. However, IBM has a noteworthy footprint with traditional buyers, and leveraging the Watson product line brand is smart, as it is really starting to get traction with buyers look for next-generation software. Familiar user interface with algorithmic surfacing of content. The top benefit of Facebook Workplace is that everyone already knows how to use it. The interface is just like the consumer version of Facebook. Facebook’s magic algorithm that will surface content in a familiar feed. Facebook’s Messenger has been on steroids under the stewardship of David Marcus and Stan Chudnovsky. Facebook supports external team members out of the box, which is one of the main use cases for modern collaboration tools. Facebook’s algorithm is tuned to show you what you would like, whether it’s puppy videos or a Donald Trump echo chamber. At work, people really need to be exposed to data they don’t necessarily like. Facebook has historically been blasé about privacy, and supporting enterprise single sign-on does not make the content hosted in Facebook any more secure. Facebook just announced they will support third-party integrations but does not seem to have a sense of urgency to roll out an ecosystem. First of the second generation, strong SMB usage. Slack offers a clean, fun interface and is free to start using. It was the first to the market with a next-generation messenger client with cool features like autodetecting when code is pasted into a channel, and formatting it nicely. The third-party integration is quite good, but there are no plans to integrate micro apps directly into the messenger. Slack is the up-and-comer with a pure-play bottoms-up sales model, while the competition typically sells top-down to enterprise decision makers. Slack has not been able to deliver an enterprise-grade product. Every Slack team runs on a distinct Amazon server running PHP and can’t realistically scale past 150 users. Users have to open a separate window and maintain a separate user name and password for every Slack team they work with, which is especially egregious considering that all Slack teams operate under the domain. C’mon Slack, put the user database in Amazon’s Redis implementation and pass an auth cookie between servers — it’s a one month project! At some point the kumbaya culture has to start delivering; they need to have some frank conversations in the engineering department that will make some millennials sad. Can bundle with G Suite and Hangouts. Google is the dark horse in this race. Just add persistent chat groups to already! Two of the biggest enterprise players, Microsoft and IBM, are gunning for this market now. Microsoft has an edge with Office 365 bundling and IBM has an edge with cognitive computing. Facebook is a new entrant that must overcome enterprise reluctance with its well-known interface and surfacing algorithms. Slack has been sitting on its laurels and now has to catch up with larger companies that are out-executing it. Google entering the market would target primarily the lower end of the SMB market that uses G Suite and would provide further challenges to Slack. The exciting part of all of these players is that it is very quickly becoming possible to move beyond messaging and reinvent enterprise workflows with a new, modern interface. At large enterprises, in particular, this is sorely needed as workers become overwhelmed with information and stuck on old legacy software. Onward!
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Delivery Hero acquires Foodpanda as Rocket Internet shuffles online takeout pack once again
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Steve O'Hear
| 2,016 | 12 | 10 |
Rocket Internet has shuffled the online takeout pack of cards once again. This time the publicly listed German “startup factory” and investor is selling Foodpanda to its much larger rival Delivery Hero, of which it also holds a significant stake — a move that should help fatten up Delivery Hero a little more for a long-rumored planned IPO of its own. Terms of the acquisition remain undisclosed. What we do know, however, is that the acquisition of Foodpanda will be funded through the issuance of new shares in Delivery Hero to existing Foodpanda shareholders. As a result, Rocket Internet will increase its ownership in Delivery Hero to 37.7 percent on a fully diluted basis post-transaction. The transaction is subject to customary closing conditions and is expected to close prior to December 31, 2016. Meanwhile, Delivery Hero, which was at $3.1 billion and competes directly with publicly listed Just Eat, along with newer premium entrants such as , and , says the acquisition strengthens its “global leadership position” in online food ordering and delivery. The combined group is expected to process more than 20 million orders per month across 47 countries. Specifically, Foodpanda will add 20 new countries in Eastern Europe, MENA and Asia to Delivery Hero’s platform. It currently processes approximately 2 million monthly orders across the 22 countries it operates in, claiming to be the market leader in 17 of them. In addition, Delivery Hero says Foodpanda will enable it to consolidate its market leadership position in the Middle East. Both Delivery Hero and Foodpanda are headquartered in Berlin and began life very much as rivals, but over the last couple of years — and given Rocket Internet’s slightly stakes in both companies — have morphed into frenemies, of sorts. This has seen local properties , perhaps in recognition that the takeout aggregator space is increasingly a winner-takes-all market, where competing hard can be costly in terms of customer acquisition and retention. Today’s full purchase of Foodpanda by Delivery Hero brings that strategy to its ultimate conclusion.
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eSUB Construction Software raises $5 million to help subcontractors track jobs and get paid
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Lora Kolodny
| 2,016 | 12 | 19 |
A San Diego startup called has raised $5 million in a Series A round led by according to President and CEO Wendy Rogers. The company’s cloud-based project management apps help subcontractors track and get compensated for all the work they do on construction jobs. Rogers said, “There’s a saying that subcontractors get paid for the work they report not the work they do. And most people outside of the industry don’t realize this but it’s subcontractors who do about 99% of the work in construction, not general contractors.” Construction work can shift over time requiring additional labor, materials and expertise to deal with weather, project delays and changes due to discoveries on site, or design decisions that come from architects and general contractors. Rogers previously managed a consultancy representing and advocating for subcontractors in the massive U.S. construction market where disputes over payment are frequent. That experience inspired her to start eSUB in 2008. Her detailed knowledge of the way that subcontractors complete jobs was a key factor that led Revolution to back eSUB, according to a partner with the firm, The investor said, “Incumbent software providers in construction and real estate like Procore are serving the high-end of the market. But the people out doing the work in the field, the subcontractors, have such different workflows and concerns. A vast majority of people working on the subcontractor side are not used to enterprise software, so you have to have a product that’s very easy to use, especially on mobile.” According to research by , and by the construction industry spends the least on IT of all other major industries in the U.S. But the trend is shifting, and more than half of construction companies surveyed by Sage are now using mobile apps for: daily field reports, customer and job information, to access or share drawings, photos and other job documents, and to estimate job costs or generate project reports. Tapping into that trend, eSUB intends to use some of its funding to build additional native mobile apps with open APIs to help foremen, project superintendents, supervisors and other field workers get their jobs done. The company plans to expand from about 50 employees today to about 100 over the next year, hiring especially in its product and software engineering, customer support and sales and marketing roles, Wagner said. Prior to raising its Series A round from Revolution Partners, eSUB had raised a small amount of angel funding from returning investor The Investor Group, led by Sheldon Lewis, Raymond Levitt, and the Stanford Farmers Investment Club, a group of Stanford professors that make angel investments.
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Crunch Report | Zuckerberg Gets One Step Closer to Jarvis
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Khaled "Tito" Hamze
| 2,016 | 12 | 19 |
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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iPrice raises $4M for its e-commerce aggregator service in Southeast Asia
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Jon Russell
| 2,016 | 12 | 19 |
, an 18-month-old e-commerce aggregation service that’s active in seven countries in Southeast Asia, has closed a $4 million Series A funding round. The investment was led by existing backers Asia Venture Group (AVG) and Venturra Capital, with participation from Gobi Partners, DMP, Econa and Starstrike Ventures. Malaysia-based , in addition to that kicked the business off when it launched in early 2015. The fundamental idea of the service is to be a one-stop destination to make sense of online shopping in Southeast Asia, a region that contains some large e-commerce players — earlier this year, for example — but no single dominant entity. That’s unlike, say the U.S. and parts of Western Europe, where Amazon is the go-to, or China, where the likes of Alibaba and JD.com have built formidable empires. iPrice now has more than 100 staff and it works with retail partners to help them gain visibility, traffic and sales. While iPrice started out on the path of aggregator, CEO David Chmelar told TechCrunch that it has also adapted its business as it has collected data from both retailers and buyers with potential for new options in the future. “We started with product discovery, learned it worked well and started expanding it,” Chmelar, formerly with Boston Consulting, said in an interview. “We realized that what we now own is not the front end, but a huge sorted and cleaned out database that is unique to Southeast Asia. “We see ourselves as a meta search platform, someone who will look for the best use of that dataset for both consumers and sellers,” he added. Along those lines, this past September, and Chmelar said there are plans to use its data to introduce other features and services, including affiliate revenue plans to help smaller media companies and independent bloggers. Amazon is not yet present in Southeast Asia, where internet access is growing among the base of 600 million consumers, so such affiliate revenue is tricky at this point due to the fragmented nature of e-commerce in the region. (That said, , its first market in Southeast Asia, in Q1 of next year.) On the financial side of things, Chmelar said there’s potential for the company to reach break even and profitability thanks to this round, although he didn’t share a time frame for when that might happen. “Our ambition is to become the primary gateway to online retail in Southeast Asia,” he added. “Much remains to be done to make online retail easier for consumers, from Kuala Lumpur to Manila, and iPrice is paving this path.”
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New York City brings smartphone payments to metered parking
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Brian Heater
| 2,016 | 12 | 19 |
Starting this week, metered parking spots in midtown Manhattan are going mobile with a new system that lets drivers pay via smartphone. The is tied to a car’s license plate number, working along the lines of an EZPass. Drivers enter their parking zone and the amount of time they’re parking and it goes to work deducting money from the account. Drivers can add parking time remotely via the app to avoid a ticket. The system fulfills Mayor de Blasio’s promise to roll out a smarter metered parking system by year’s end — and with a full week or so to spare. The system goes live to select spots in midtown, between 14 and 59 street, with plans to roll it out to all of the city’s 85,000 Mini-Meter parking spots by the end of next summer. The Department of Transportation will identify participating spots with new signs and decals. The app is currently available for iOS and Android.
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Apple’s Tim Cook assures employees that it is committed to the Mac and that ‘great desktops’ are coming
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Matthew Panzarino
| 2,016 | 12 | 19 |
One of the memes to come out of the somewhat contentious rollout of the MacBook Pro is that Apple has given up on the desktop Mac. Given the slower upgrade cycle of desktops and how well my Retina 5K iMac is holding up, it took me a while to pay attention to what was going on there — until it had reached a fever pitch. The consensus was that Apple is no longer interested in keeping up its desktop business because the portable market was eating it alive. In a posting to an employee message board, CEO Tim Cook seems intent on putting that particular branch of discussion to bed. Cook cites the far better performance of desktop computers, including screen sizes, memory, storage and more variety in I/O (ha) as a reason that they are “really important, and in some cases critical, to people.” So no matter how you feel about the state of the Mac at the moment, you have new machines to look forward to. No mention of whether that meant iMac or Mac Pro or both, but at the very least it’s encouraging to those of us who couldn’t live without a desktop computer. Also posted to the message board was a section on what Cook thinks is Apple’s greatest differentiating factor, which I found particularly interesting. Though the Mac statements may be the news hook here, hence the headline, there are some interesting things in this section to pull apart, as well. But what comes after is probably the most interesting. He says this: I think this is an often overlooked cultural strength at Apple. A willingness to devote extra-ordinary resources, time and attention to a problem or piece of technical research because there is a that it may lead somewhere — eventually. All too often technology companies are obsessed with the goal. The end result. And everything is bent into service of achieving that goal. This methodology is not ineffective, but it is short-sighted. You may be able to get the result that you wanted by driving hard toward that goal, but you’re going to recognize the better, potentially more rewarding result You’ll never see it because any branch that leads you to such a potentiality would have gotten killed off as a distraction or failure before it had time to bear fruit. Anyway, this isn’t a philosophical screed, it’s internal PR, but it rings true with the company’s public actions and what I know of its internal culture. Interesting stuff. In the same Apple Web posting, Cook also talked about why he chose to go to the meting with President-elect Trump last week, and you . The full postings are below:
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