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Samsung’s Gear S3 goes a little too big
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Brian Heater
| 2,016 | 12 | 19 |
Samsung’s never shied away from going big. Big phones, big TVs, big watches. In fact, that was one of the defining characteristics for the first few generations of the Gear line, the first few of which were really more wrist-worn tablet than smartwatch. Things thankfully mellowed out a bit last year with the introduction of the S2, a more minimalist approach to wrist-worn computing that married clever functionality with a refined OS and a design that actually looked like an honest to goodness watch. But 2016 marked a return to big. Samsung was all about pushing things close to the breaking point this year, and in at least one notable instance, well beyond. The marks a return to big. As ever, the company’s jam-packed the watch with features — which might feel like they were overflowing were the watch not so darn big in the first place. In many ways, the new watch feels like the Galaxy Note strategy applied to the wrist — albeit without all of the baggage that has recently become associated with that line. This really needs to be mentioned right off the bat — there’s really no way around it — the S3 is really, really big. Really, really. Sure, it’s not quite Galaxy Gear huge, but it’s distractingly big. I’m roughly six feet tall and possess what I assume to be average-sized wrists for a male individual of my height, and the Gear S3 still felt big. Just for the sake of conversation, I asked two 5’4″ coworkers to try it on, and the wearable looked downright comical. When the device first launched at IFA, I asked a rep about the thought process behind releasing such a large watch, and he chalked it up to fashion, citing the popularity of 42mm watches. Perhaps, but coupled with the added case depth required for a smartwatch’s electronics and battery, and you’ve got a device that could serve to cut out a large portion of the populace by size alone. The S3 weighs in at 63 grams, owing in no small part to its stainless steel casing. That’s around 13 grams heavier than the new Apple watch (which was itself heavier than its predecessor). And at 12.9 millimeters thick, it’s not really made for wearing with long sleeves. My sweater managed to pull over it (albeit with a visible bump), but my button-up shirt had a bit more trouble making it over. And forget trying to sleep with the thing on. It’s hard to understand why the company didn’t, at the very least, offer the watch in two different sizes. After all, it’s available in two different configurations. As such, Samsung has alienated all but a small sliver of the smartwatch-buying audience. The S3 Frontier also marks an aesthetic departure from its predecessor, with a steel case that takes on a more classic design that its sporty (some might have said “plasticky”) predecessor. It’s certainly a classier and more versatile look than many other smartwatches and fitness bands. With the right band, it can fit in comfortably in, say, an office setting, which isn’t something that can be said for many of the neon colored wearables out there. The rubber strap that ships with the Frontier version is a marked step down from the design of the watch itself. It’s designed to play alongside the watch’s rugged focus, lending itself to outdoor excursions and sweat-addled workouts. Of course, the upside of the standardized 22mm strap is that you’ll never want for options on that front. Samsung actually teamed with a pair of designers to create bands specifically for the watch — but save yourself some cash and just pick up a regular old strap. The S2’s best feature has, thankfully returned. And it’s even better than before. The rotating bezel was a terrific addition to that last device. At 1.3 inches, the display isn’t super small, so far as smartwatches go, but as with Apple’s offering, additional input is needed for quickly moving through screens. The wheel does the job fantastically and even more intuitively than Apple’s option. This steel version is smooth, zipping through menus, though the small articulation gap between bezel case is a bit of a magnet for lint and other small particles that could require the occasional blast of canned air for maintenance. The watch does sport a pair of buttons, as well — back and power — which sit fairly flush with the watch casing. The 1.3-inch display is a touch larger than the S2’s, but still doesn’t cover the same ground as the Apple Watch’s 1.65. At 278ppi, it’s also a bit less pixel dense, but it’s plenty bright and sharp. Samsung’s Tizen icons are clear and bright, even in daylight. The device features an Always On mode, to make it function more like an analog watch, though that’s turned off by default and hidden under the Style menu in settings, for reasons the battery-life warning make clear. That’s packed behind the latest version of Gorilla Glass, making the watch shatter and scratch resistant. That, coupled with a big steel frame, makes for an extremely rugged wearable. It’s listed as MIL-STD-810G Military Grade Rating, which protects it from drops up to 4.9 feet and IP68, which puts its water rating at up to five feet for 30 minutes. It’s also protected from extreme temperatures, making the Frontier every bit as rugged as its name implies. The battery has been upgraded to 380 mAh, a marked bump over the Apple Watch’s 273 mAh. The company rates life at around three days, but I was able to get closer to two days with Always On mode off — owing likely in no small part to the onboard LTE on the Frontier. You’ll find yourself charging it less often than the Apple Watch, but you’re still not getting near fitness band territory here. The LTE is a great option, the usefulness of which depends entirely upon how you interact with your watch. If you have your phone on you all or most of the time, it’s probably not worth the added cost, which breaks down to an extra $10 a month in addition to an existing data plan or $40 for a brand new one on AT&T. If, however, you’re looking to the wrist as a temporary liberation from the watch for, say, long cross-country runs, it’s a terrific feature. Either way, it’s a solid addition to the smartwatch that seemingly already has everything, delivering quick data directly to the watch without needing to be tethered to a handset at all times. And there’s always the bonus ability of using the built-in speaker to make wrist-based phone calls, finally fulfilling the long-awaited Dick Tracy promise. The S3 also brings built-in GPS to the watch (previously only available on the specialty 3G version of the S2), another big bonus for the wearable’s outdoorsy functionality, and brings a lot to the table on the fitness tracking front, particularly for hikers and runners who like to go long distance. Among other things, Samsung’s got the decided benefit of several generations of smartwatches under its belt. The company switched from Android to Tizen between the Galaxy Gear and Gear 2, and really hit its stride with last year’s S2. The software experience is smooth and customizable — holding down on an icon, for instance, lets you customize and re-order screens. The app selection is still limited compared to the competition, but you’ve got some key ones here, including Uber and Flipboard, along with the recent (and important) addition of Spotify. You can add a select number of apps directly onto the watch or flip over to the phone to view more and get the full app store experience. For the most part, I found my engagements limited to Samsung’s own apps; the company has done a good job building up its own ecosystem. The company’s S Health has become quite robust over the last few generations, making the most of onboard sensors like GPS and heart rate, and Samsung Pay brings added utility of paying by scanning your wrist near a card reader. Samsung’s had a few generations more than much of its competition to refine its smartwatch experience. Last year the company finally hit upon a winning formula with the S2, a great combination of design, functionality and software refinement. And while the S2 is getting a good number of software upgrades to bring it up to speed, the $350 S3 Frontier offers some key hardware bumps over its predecessor. Those largely feel iterative, but welcome. The new size, on the other hand, is a big misfire for Samsung. The smartwatch space is already a marginalized one, and making a massive device like the S3 further restricts the product from too many wrists.
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Tim Cook explains to Apple employees why he met with President-elect Trump
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Matthew Panzarino
| 2,016 | 12 | 19 |
In a series of answers to questions posted on Apple’s internal employee info service Apple Web today, CEO Tim Cook commented to employees on some hot-button topics. We obtained some of the answers to interesting questions about a few topics, including the fate of the Mac — but more on that later. First up is probably the most topical: Why did he feel it was important to meet with President-elect Trump? The short answer: You have to show up to have a say. Cook was that met with Trump last week. The group included Sheryl Sandberg of Facebook, Jeff Bezos of Amazon, Larry Page of Google, Satya Nadella of Microsoft and others. There has been a lot of discussion about the event, but the most prominent difference of opinion among commentators was whether it was worth engaging Trump in this manner at all — given that the publicly expressed values of many of these leaders were at such odds with statements he has made during and after his campaign. Cook’s case in the internal communication, which we verified is legitimate, is that there was more value in engaging than there was in not doing so. “Personally, I’ve never found being on the sideline a successful place to be,” writes Cook. “The way that you influence these issues is to be in the arena. So whether it’s in this country, or the European Union, or in China or South America, we engage. And we engage when we agree and we engage when we disagree. I think it’s very important to do that because you don’t change things by just yelling. You change things by showing everyone why your way is the best. In many ways, it’s a debate of ideas.” So much for the “take your tech and stay home” camp. The response was given, specifically, to the following question: “Last week you joined other tech leaders to meet President-elect Donald Trump. How important is it for Apple to engage with governments?” In his response, Cook says that there are specific issues that Apple cares about deeply and that it would need to become an advocate for those things. “It’s very important [to engage]. Governments can affect our ability to do what we do,” he responded. “They can affect it in positive ways and they can affect in not so positive ways. What we do is focus on the policies. Some of our key areas of focus are on privacy and security, education. They’re on advocating for human rights for everyone, and expanding the definition of human rights. They’re on the environment and really combating climate change, something we do by running our business on 100 percent renewable energy.” Though this is far from a statement of intent, and he doesn’t mention them specifically, Cook’s strong statement does touch on a variety of topics that abut controversial Trump stances. “We very much stand up for what we believe in. We think that’s a key part of what Apple is about. And we’ll continue to do so,” he concludes. During the close reading and aftermath of the meeting, Cook’s dour expression (seen above) at the table became a meme of the moment. His stoic mien somehow transmitting what most people hoped was the attitude at the table: “I can’t believe I have to be here but someone has to do it.” Cook’s statements to employees seem to back that up. No one knows for sure whether President-elect Trump will in fact enact many of the sweeping changes to immigration policy, cybersecurity and environmental protection laws that he promised during the campaign — but his cabinet selections so far are not doing much to disabuse people of that notion. If there is going to be a healthy counter-balancing of those policies from the private sector, then CEOs like Cook must be willing to take a firm stance publicly. I was able to get a hold of this internal posting and it’s out there now, but it would be encouraging (as by Kara Swisher) to see these kinds of statements made “on the record” — and for them to be made by more people at that table. I await your calls. Cook also talked about the future of the Mac desktop and Apple’s differentiating factor in a more and more crowded tech sector, but I’ll have in a bit. Here’s the posting in full: It’s very important. Governments can affect our ability to do what we do. They can affect it in positive ways and they can affect in not so positive ways. What we do is focus on the policies. Some of our key areas of focus are on privacy and security, education. They’re on advocating for human rights for everyone, and expanding the definition of human rights. They’re on the environment and really combating climate change, something we do by running our business on 100 percent renewable energy. And of course, creating jobs is a key part of what we do by giving people opportunity not only with people that work directly for Apple, but the large number of people that are in our ecosystem. We’re really proud that we’ve created 2 million jobs, just in this country. A great percentage of those are app developers. This gives everyone the power to sell their work to the world, which is an unbelievable invention in and of itself. We have other things that are more business-centric — like tax reform — and something we’ve long advocated for: a simple system. And we’d like intellectual property reform to try to stop the people suing when they don’t do anything as a company. There’s a large number of those issues, and the way that you advance them is to engage. Personally, I’ve never found being on the sideline a successful place to be. The way that you influence these issues is to be in the arena. So whether it’s in this country, or the European Union, or in China or South America, we engage. And we engage when we agree and we engage when we disagree. I think it’s very important to do that because you don’t change things by just yelling. You change things by showing everyone why your way is the best. In many ways, it’s a debate of ideas. We very much stand up for what we believe in. We think that’s a key part of what Apple is about. And we’ll continue to do so.
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NASA tech could track firefighters where GPS can’t reach
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Devin Coldewey
| 2,016 | 12 | 19 |
In the chaotic environment of a fire or disaster area, knowing where your fellow firefighters and first responders are is of the utmost importance, but GPS and other positional tracking systems aren’t always reliable. A project from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory aims to solve this with a tracker that relies on a totally different kind of electromagnetic phenomenon. GPS, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth and other transmission methods rely on radio waves, which bounce around like crazy indoors and fail to penetrate many structures. JPL’s Darmindra Arumugam and his team created a system, called , that relies instead on what are called quasistatic fields. Fields, like those you’d find around a magnet or any electric device, are limited in range because they don’t propagate, like waves, but some are only trivially affected by barriers like walls. Things within those fields exhibit predictable effects — for instance, a piece of metal will want to align itself in a certain way when held above and to the right of a magnet, but a different way when held below and to the left. The quasistatic EM fields used by Arumugam (so called because they aren’t completely stationary) are actually emitted by devices on the people being tracked; receivers outside would detect the fields and be able to tell exactly where the devices were and even which direction they were facing. That could not only help track multiple emergency personnel but alert others right away should their transmitter suddenly go horizontal or otherwise move in an unsafe fashion. The fields span several hundred feet — not big enough to use on a battlefield or out at sea, but more than big enough to encompass a fire in an office or a collapsed building. Right now the devices are backpack-sized, but those are just prototypes; Arumugam, who designed the system and all-important tracking algorithms, demonstrated it in this form recently for the Department of Homeland Security, which helped pay for its development. But the plan is to shrink it down to pocket size, which nothing about the technology prevents. “Right now in phase 2, the transmitter is about the size of a shoe box,” said the DHS’s Greg Price in . “When we move to phase 3, it’s going to go to about the size of something you can fit in the palm of your hand — so start thinking about a button or something, that may be on the PPE [personal protective equipment] of the first responder.” And that’s not the only application for this technology — as you’d expect from a JPL project, there are applications up in the Big Black as well. “POINTER could be used in space robotics,” said Arumugam in a JPL news release. “It could be used for tracking robots in underground tunnels, caves or under ice. They need to be able to navigate themselves, and we don’t have sensors today that would be able to track them. For us, this is a great opportunity to develop a technology for NASA and non-NASA uses.” If you’re curious about other tech NASA and its offshoots have created that may be working their way into the world, check out , its publication that tracks and profiles the companies and inventions that have found commercial success as well as scientific.
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Microsoft’s plan to use machine learning to improve eyecare in India
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John Mannes
| 2,016 | 12 | 19 |
Competition that results in better care for people suffering from visual impairments is the right kind of competition. Following , Microsoft India announced this morning that , the Microsoft Intelligent Network for Eyecare, to bring data-driven eyecare services to India. Whereas DeepMind’s swing at ophthalmology targeted the UK, Microsoft’s ambitions are a considerably more global. The tech company is working alongside researchers from the United States, Brazil, Australia and, of course, India to train machine learning models that can identify conditions that can lead to blindness. Microsoft’s key strategic partnership is with the L V Prasad Eye Institute in Hyderabad, India, one of the most prestigious hospitals in the country. The company is focusing heavily on children, with ambitions to predict outcomes for refractive surgery and the rate of change of myopia in children. Google’s DeepMind opted instead to partner with the UK’s National Health Service to analyze eye scans to spot wet age-related macular degeneration and diabetic retinopathy — two conditions that can lead to blindness. Its idea being that early discovery can lead to early intervention and the prevention of serious optical damage. Eyecare is turning out to be a popular strategy for non-traditional companies to test the potential of machine learning in the world of healthcare. Eye conditions lend themselves well to image analysis, a space that’s having quite a moment. isn’t new, it’s been used to analyze radiological imagery for years, but tech companies are ever warming to the idea of doing their own research in the space.
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Hyundai’s future mobility plans include wearable robotic assistants
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Darrell Etherington
| 2,016 | 12 | 19 |
Hyundai has some details around how it’s exploring autonomous driving, and the carmaker is also looking at other aspects of personal mobility, via robotics. This is not unique to Hyundai; for years other automakers like Toyota and Honda have been exploring how personal robotics complete the mobility picture. But Hyundai’s vision might be more achievable near-term than functioning, independent robots. The automaker is focusing its personal robotic efforts around “wearable robots,” or robotic exoskeleton devices that can supplement or augment the mobility of their wearer. These efforts are organized around three different streams: medical devices for people who would be totally unable to get around without them, assistive devices for people who have difficulty moving around and wearable bots that can boost a wearer’s ability to carry loads or perform other tasks not normally manageable by a lone human. Hyundai exoskeleton At the end of the spectrum where these robots could restore mobility to paraplegic users and others who’ve lost the ability to walk, these exoskeletons could provide standing and walking capabilities; they are a light-enough design (at around 40 lbs) to be transported and put on without any extra help, and with transportation possible even on a user’s existing wheelchair. They could help users achieve up to a 2.5 km/hr walking speed, and operate for around 4 hours on a single charge, according to the current prototype design (pictured above). An even lower-profile (10 lbs total weight) waist-mounted exoskeleton design Hyundai revealed today is suited to use by workers looking for a little bit more lifting power, or just a bit of a boost when they have to endure repetitive tasks or long periods on their feet. The design also offers four hours of active use from its battery, and would connect to a mobile device via Bluetooth for fine-tuning. Hyundai exoskeleton A third design aimed at combining elements of both the others to provide boosted mobility capabilities to elderly users or others whose motion options are limited would offer running assistance for speeds of up to 12km/h, and a carrying capacity of up to 88 lbs without any noticeable strain for the user. All of these could go a long way toward completing that mobility picture with in-home and last-mile transportation, an increasing area of interest for automakers. These aren’t likely to go up for sale before 2020, at the earliest, but that could be just in time to preface the autonomous driving revolution on the other side of the equation.
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5-year, 2-petabyte digital survey of the night sky is the largest ever released
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Devin Coldewey
| 2,016 | 12 | 19 |
Astronomers have a powerful new resource in the Pan-STARRS survey of the night sky, carried out over five years and half a million exposures from the top of Mauna Kea on Maui. The two petabytes of data released publicly today cover three quarters of the night sky and show billions of stars, galaxies, asteroids and other stellar objects. This isn’t the kind of imagery you print out and put on the wall, although the picture above, which shows the whole survey space in visible light, is quite cool. Think of images from Hubble and the like to be like extreme telephoto portraits of individual features, while this is an ultra wide-angle shot of our whole cosmic neighborhood. In fact, it’s thousands of them layered over one another. These repeated observations over time are useful for tracking near-earth objects, bright but brief events and large-scale features. Pan-STARRS has found dozens of asteroids and quasars, and is helping define things like the mysterious “cold spot” in our universe’s cosmic microwave background. Some of the project’s successes are described in . “Pan-STARRS has already made discoveries from Near Earth Objects and Kuiper Belt Objects in the Solar System to lonely planets between the stars,” said the University of Hawaii’s Ken Chambers, director of the project’s observatories, . “It has mapped the dust in three dimensions in our galaxy and found new streams of stars; and it has found new kinds of exploding stars and distant quasars in the early Universe.” This release is the “static sky,” which is averaged values over the five years of observations, but a second, larger data set will come out next year with more temporal granularity. If you know what you’re looking for, you can find how to call it up .
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Putting data back into the hands of owners
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Dr. Jans Aasman
| 2,016 | 12 | 19 |
Ever wondered why your physician owns the information from your blood work? Or why your dentist owns your x-rays. Or some financial services company owns your credit information? Most people forget that social media companies own the messages, pictures and videos that they post everyday. The pervasiveness of this paradox is considerable. In healthcare, x-rays, lab work and diagnostic results of patients are owned by the facilities that administer them — yet the patient paid for the tests. In financial services, banks, lending institutions and various credit agencies own their clients’ information and charge them to view it. Online, an assortment of social media magnates owns every tweet, post and comment — and only begrudgingly returns them to their creators after many months, if ever. Why is this the case? Until recently, with the ability to capture, store and secure digital information, only the most well-staffed and best funded organizations could afford the infrastructure and expertise to furnish such data assets. But advances in consumer technology devices, cloud computing, security measures and internet adoption rates have substantially altered this paradigm. Today, most people have a computer, tablet or a mobile phone that can access the internet, along with the ability to store gigabits of information and images securely in “the cloud.” These technologies have made it possible to put data back into the hands of their owners. In healthcare there is a growing desire for patients to own their medical records. Interestingly, this desire is not coming from patients, it’s based on the view from medical practitioners that patient care and quality of life is directly influenced by the ability of patients to access and utilize their data. This view is core to the , a White House program for personalizing healthcare treatment for individuals and groups that have historically been underrepresented. Its mission statement points out that “Success will require that health data is portable, that it can be easily shared between providers, researchers, and most importantly, patients and research participants.” The expedient exchange of diverse data types is critical to the success of this initiative, as it will provide a more holistic view of patient care while synthesizing what have traditionally been distinct entities and data types. are striving to create situations in which patients can access their data for second opinions, research studies and a synthesis of sources to facilitate more active patient involvement in care. One of the more recent examples in this movement , which provides the means for patients to store and access their healthcare data to assert more control of their own care. Gliimpse provides a platform in which users can store all of their healthcare data and share it with others. Apple’s interest in the company is aligned with its other healthcare ventures, which include apps for both monitoring and researching healthcare data. These strides to put data back into the hands of owners share a number of similarities with a separate movement to re-decentralizing the internet, which involves some of the most notable names, companies and technologies in IT today. Perhaps the most well-known example of the move to democratize ownership of data is found in the efforts of Tim Berners-Lee. The progenitor of the World Wide Web has streamlined his internet activism efforts , in which he and his MIT cohorts are attempting to return ownership of social media data to the users that create them. Solid leverages some of the core concepts of semantic technologies, such as the existing standards found in the W3C and a linked data approach to exchanging attributes. It is the architecture for a new cadre of social media tools — currently under development — that shun the silo-based approach of contemporary social media entities. The project is largely spurred by the desire to create an outlets that own the data of the masses. Advantages to decentralization include the collective impact of data from various applications and sources on each other, allowing consumers to form a more complete picture of their data for specific use cases. None of the applications would actually own the data, allowing users to readily transfer and deploy their data according to their own terms — as opposed to the platform’s. Data decentralization and linking is one important aspect necessary to democratize data ownership. But broad-based data sharing of sensitive data requires security and preservation of the integrity of data — to ensure someone has not changed the data along the way. [The most important word missing is “trust” and why that is so important.] Enter blockchain — an emerging technology that has since its uptake in the financial industry. The quintessential example of blockchain is bitcoin, which is predominantly based on this architecture. Blockchain provides a decentralized database (or ledger system) that allows for rapid updates and is accessible to a multitude of users. It facilitates a degree of transparency in its data linking that enables the verification of financial transactions with much less time and fewer resources than conventional methods for transaction verification require. Proponents laud its . Moreover, it provides these boons in a secure setting in which the individual, decentralized ledgers utilize cryptography. In theory, it delivers secure transactional data in a distributed manner that prohibits the inordinate accumulation of power found in centralized paradigms. Its usefulness is rapidly spreading to myriad other industries, including healthcare. The desire to facilitate individual control of personal data directly coincides with the movement to decentralize the internet. Both of these needs were considerably enhanced by the consumerization of IT and the sort of rapid exchange of linked data that semantic technologies enable. The effects of these developments will likely impact additional industries, which in turn will need to reconfigure their own architecture to accommodate the demands of the consumers. IT is swiftly changing; the demands of the people who rely upon it are playing a greater role in its evolution than ever before. The rapid and convenient exchange of data can actually take its rightful owners — the consumers — to heights as of yet still unrealized. Being able to combine data from varying providers, agencies and sources empowers consumers to ultimately assert more control over their lives and how they’re lived. Realizing such potential could well be data’s ultimate promise… and the defining moment of the 21st century.
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HandUp just expanded its gift card program for homeless people in SF
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Megan Rose Dickey
| 2,016 | 12 | 19 |
HandUp, a startup combating homelessness, just announced the expansion of its gift card program in San Francisco. The $25 gift cards, last August, enables homeless people to redeem them at Project Homeless Connect and Glide. Starting today, homeless people can also redeem the gift cards at the Mission Neighborhood Resource Center, MSC South Shelter in SOMA and the United Council of Neighborhood Services in the Bayview community, in exchange for food or other goods. The idea is that people purchase the gift cards and then pass them out to homeless people they see on the street. Since launching the gift cards, people have given out about 3,000 of them to homeless people. Of the ones given out, about 60-70 percent have been redeemed by homeless people. “It’s a modern cool idea and it’s going to demonstrate again the city’s love and support for the people on the streets,” San Francisco Mayor Ed Lee said today at The Hall, located in the heart of the Tenderloin neighborhood in San Francisco. HandUp CEO Rose Broome also announced today that people can now buy these gift cards at physical retail locations, like Equator Coffee and The Hall. HandUp has also formed partnerships with tech companies like Twitter, Zendesk, Dolby and Salesforce — all which have purchased gift cards for their employees to distribute to homeless people. “This takes and is an invitation to join to be even more collaborative about the way we do things,” Lee went on to say about HandUp’s gift card expansion. “And also allow the corporate sector to dialogue with us about how do these services of support get to more housing, get to getting people off the streets, get to making sure our corporate community is supportive of our city’s efforts and change the dialogue that we’re not blaming each other for the kind of devastation that people have in their lives, but we say let’s go forward with the best ideas that we have.” San Francisco has a homelessness crisis. The city has just for a homeless population of about 6,700, according to the San Francisco Department of Homelessness and Supportive Housing (HSH). Given the state of homelessness in San Francisco, city leaders see HandUp as a way to help homeless people better take care of their needs and connect them to the appropriate resources. The city sees HandUp as a great use of technology “to help solve problems and to answer questions and give people ways to both engage and to help, to be able to give resources without being concerned about how those resources may get used,” Jeff Kositsky, director of the HSH, said today. Since launching in 2014, HandUp has raised $850,000 in funding from investors like Jason Calacanis, Marc Benioff, Eric Ries and SV Angel, and received a $500,000 expansion grant from Google.org. “Homelessness is such a visible problem and people are looking for ways to give back,” Broome told TechCrunch ahead of the event today. “We’re excited to have the city’s support in promoting HandUp Gift Cards as a way the community can respond to homelessness.” If you’re interested in giving to the homeless via HandUp, you can buy gift cards or at Equator Coffee and Teas and The Hall.
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Samsung’s slim Notebook 9 line gets a boost
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Brian Heater
| 2,016 | 12 | 19 |
Samsung’s gone the simple route with its latest notebooks — right down to the name, which likely unintentionally invokes a very vibe. Less than a year after launch, the line’s 13- and 15-inch models are getting a refresh, because the company just couldn’t wait the few extra weeks for CES. The laptops are getting a new design, one that, from the press photos, at least, looks a bit like a Chromebook that made a wish upon a star to become a full-fledged laptop. It’s a model of minimalist efficiency that includes an extra-thin bezel and a display that swivels back to 180-degrees. More impressively, the laptops are quite light, with the 13.3-inch version coming in at 1.8 pounds and the 15-incher weighing in at 2.17. Samsung also claims the little notebooks are fairly durable, as well, with thermal and shock-resistant shells. The laptops promise seven hours of battery life (a notable step down from the former promise of 12 hours), coupled with quick charging, which should give users a full charge in 80 minutes. There’s also a fingerprint scanner and USB Type-C port onboard, along with some souped up processing power with seventh-gen Intel Core i5 and i7 processors, coupled with up to 16GB of RAM. No word yet on pricing and availability, but probably don’t plan on getting one for Christmas this year.
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Nintendo learns a multi-billion dollar lesson that Mario is no guarantee for success
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Matthew Lynley
| 2,016 | 12 | 19 |
Nintendo has not had a good past few days, despite its original superstar Mario finally hitting the iPhone. The company’s shares have dropped about 15 percent in the past five days, which once again shaves off a rather significant amount of the company’s market cap. On the year, Nintendo’s still up by more than 50 percent, but we can see below that it’s a rather lukewarm reception from Wall Street compared to the rather spectacular spike the company saw after Pokémon GO launched in July (charts from Yahoo Finance). Here’s where it is on the year so far: On day one, Super Mario Run — the company’s first Mario game for the iPhone, which was widely hyped at an Apple event and across the App Store — . But the app, despite hitting the top of the Apple iOS top grossing charts, was extremely frustrating for customers, whether that was a result of an always-on internet connection requirement or the small amount of demo content available before users had to purchase the full game for $9.99. In many ways, it may seem like Super Mario Run for the iPhone could be seen as a bait-and-switch. Super Mario Run sits at the top of the App Store — but it’s under the “free apps” section. The top rankings offer some of the greatest visibility for apps, and it’s an extremely coveted place to gather additional momentum and users and potentially create a positive feedback cycle. For Super Mario Run, and users, it would seem three levels is probably just not enough to qualify the app as a true “free” app in the same way that Pokémon GO was. But, these are both mechanical or optics issues for Super Mario Run. I do believe there’s another core fundamental element to it — unlike Pokémon GO, the game just simply isn’t as revolutionary, and it’s getting hammered for not only being just a decent game but also some extremely sharp pitfalls to actually get into the game. And Wall Street is already well aware that gaming companies are a hits-driven business, whether that’s on mobile or on proprietary consoles. I’ve been playing Super Mario Run for a couple of days now, and the always-on requirement is definitely a tough pill to swallow. Aside from that, the app just really feels . It’s a side-scrolling runner that adds a few basic flourishes. The two I’d point to first are the vault — Mario basically skips over a few small obstacles streamlining the run — and the little spin Mario does to slightly extend his jump (which is often required to hit the top of a flag pole at the end of a level). What it does feel like, in retrospect, is something that is nowhere near as revolutionary or polished as one of the original side-scrolling runners — Mirror’s Edge from EA for the iPhone 4 — felt like. While Super Mario Run feels like a decent game, Mirror’s Edge felt like something special. It offered some replayability in the sense of finding packages, as well as ways to sort of increase your level of mastery of the levels with different ways to handle guards. And the game, for its time, looked absolutely stunning too. In a shameful twist, , and many won’t be able to size up how Super Mario Run sits next to Mirror’s Edge. And that, honestly, is a tragedy — it’s a fantastic piece of gaming history that I believe really helped raise the bar for what games on the iPhone needed to look like and feel like. And it really helped the iPhone feel like a unique gaming device that could invent some new feeling with different interactions other than tapping virtual buttons. So what we have here, it would seem, is two branches. The first is, maybe Mario simply isn’t as big as the Pokémon brand, or not as beloved, so users are less forgiving. The more likely scenario is that users are less forgiving of the game it isn’t up to the same standards of design and polish that Pokémon GO had at launch, despite Niantic stumbling many times along the way. The Pokémon brand offers a multiplicative effect for the potential growth of an app, but the game still has to be good. Wall Street, on the release of Pokémon GO, offered Nintendo a . It was an opportunity to give the company the benefit of the doubt that, if it released games of the level of Pokémon GO with its biggest franchises, it would crack open a market of hundreds of millions of players that don’t have access to its consoles that cost hundreds of dollars. The Wii U (or Switch) are optional, but a smartphone is a requirement (whether or not you argue that the iPhone is a premium product or not). If all this is the case and the argument holds, Nintendo simply can’t just hang out. It has to produce games that meet a certain level of quality because iPhone owners are demanding as much polish as the other top games on iOS. Minecraft, Candy Crush and Clash of Clans are all good games that work well on the platform (well, Minecraft rounded up to yes) because they represent good mechanics that are highly polished and adapted well for the iPhone as well as offering hooks that really keep users engaged. Super Mario Run, again, is simply . And isn’t good enough. Wall Street, more or less, has known this for a while. Gaming is a hits-driven business, and a crappy series of launches for could spell disaster for a company like Activision, or an inability to continue to introduce good new content for games like and . The fate of Square Enix, one of the most prestigious brands in gaming history, you could argue also hinges on the success of future games and . Nintendo may have caught a break when it saw a big spike from Pokémon GO. It really offered some insight into Wall Street’s observations of companies like Nintendo and the growth that a new strategy offered. But like Zynga or King, you can build a big business out of a big hit, but that strategy needs to be highly repeatable. Nintendo, even with its cherished brands like Pokémon, Mario, Zelda and Metroid, needs to keep the hits rolling and not simply assume bringing these games to mobile — the largest potential audience Nintendo has ever seen — in mediocre fashion will keep people happy.
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A strange tale of Central European startups, angry investors, and secret NDAs
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John Biggs
| 2,016 | 12 | 19 |
story appeared in the Polish press. It was about an American consultant living in Denver who had been promising them investor contacts and customers in America. The story started breathlessly enough. Here it is in translation: The “American Dream” is something that grips the imagination of almost every startup founder. America is the biggest market in the world, it’s where Facebook and Uber raised $1 billion from investors. It’s a tempting place and it beckons many. However, one should be careful because criminals are lurking, criminals like Jakub Kostecki, a Pole with American passport living in Boulder, Colorado. It went on to describe seven startups who felt cheated by Kostecki. It’s full of anonymous sources and ominous language ending with an interview with Kostecki, a self-described recovering alcoholic who claims to be unable talk about his startup problems due to NDAs signed in the US. You can read a summary in . It’s a confusing story and one at odds with the all but for startups that culminated in Like so many Central European countries, startup founders are at once well-educated in the ways of western investment and also frightened. Consultants like Kostecki pop up over and over, promising big and, in some cases, delivering big. But once in a while discontent bubbles to the surface and insular startup ecosystems start arguing – and accusing. In the end, however, it shows the lengths startups will go to escape the confines of their home countries and how communication, anger, and NDAs can create every entrepreneur’s worst nightmare. “I lost a few thousand dollars and have already reconciled myself with this,” said one anonymous startup founder in the story. “But I want to publicize the case so that I can warn other startups who enter into business relationships like this one.” When it all began the companies approached Kostecki to look for customers and investors in the US. Kostecki, who considered some of the founders friends, offered to help. The interactions were formal enough at first but slowly the startups began to worry about the relationship. Again, the story is one-sided but in general the cooperation slowly broke down over time. When Kostecki didn’t get paid the startups complained that Kostecki “began to threaten them.” He promised to take their US-based intellectual property if they didn’t pay him. He warned them that he would steal their trademarks in the US or simply post a nasty story about the startup, burning them and preventing them from doing business in the US. He said he would tell the world about the “lack of professionalism and dishonesty” exhibited by startup founders. He threatened them with a smear job, two thousand miles from the medieval streets of Krakow or the hipstervilles of Warsaw. The startups all claimed different things but mostly it looked like a contract gone sideways. Kostecki was hot-headed and the startups, believing they had been duped, were angry. The result was a story that titillated the Polish startup world for a week and seemingly petered out. But in truth this is a common story, one of miscommunication, distant promises, and misunderstandings. It’s part of almost every foreign startup ecosystem I’ve seen. A promises one thing and the local misunderstand him or expect miracles. The tries, maybe fails, maybe does less than the founder expects. But in most cases the founders chalk it up to bad luck and the consultant apologizes. But in this case the founders went to the press. Photo: Getty Images/Luis Davilla/The Image Bank “My partner and I knew Kostecki,” said one of the alleged victims, Szymon Kubicki. “I was skeptical but my partner insisted and finally he convinced me after weeks of discussion. My partner paid him $500 in advance. There was no formal agreement document with Kostecki, only email exchanges with well defined work and payments.” “For $500 Kostecki was supposed to find leads and a suggest strategy to automate sales. The next payments were supposed to be on success fee basis,” he said. “Kostecki received the advance and sales presentation. We waited patiently for the results but nothing was happening. No emails no calls. All the correspondence was with my partner. He believed that any day something is going to happen. We did have one introductory call with some guy from the US, but Kuba didn’t follow up.” Then things took a turn. When Kubicki asked for the money back, Kostecki balked and got angry. “In response Kuba attacked me personally and said he’d return the money but would reserve the trademark in the US and said that any action in US meant that he got payment,” said Kubicki. “He also announced he’d send emails to contractors in Poland informing them the he’s the owner the brand in the US. He also said he would publish on Medium about how you can lose rights to brand/name through lack of competence.” None of this happened but the threats were enough to get most of the startups to clam up. Kostecki agrees with most of the claims, although he doesn’t remember the story as negatively as the startups do. “What was written was 90-95% factually correct,” he said. He spoke to me in detail about his experience and his candor was, after a news article filled with anonymous griping, refreshing. Kostecki is an outspoken Pole who now lives with his family in Boulder and has quit drugs and alcohol after years of “bipolar depression, alcohol, immaturity and everything that entails,” he said. He was about founders and mental health. He’s a vegan and has short brown hair and tired light blue eyes. In photos he oscillates between joyously happy with his family and serious and sad in a business setting. He sees some of the silliness associated with the Polish startup scene and he’s not afraid to call out their mistakes and try to help small companies trying to make it big. “I never solicited any business directly,” he said. “People came to me. I gave out a lot of free advice to dozens of Poles. When they wanted more I offered a service to a select few. I declined a lot of business when it didn’t make sense for them or for me. I never advertised, I never went out after people, I never intended to do this as a business. It grew very quickly and could have been big, but I didn’t enjoy the work and I decided to not continue.” Kostecki tried to be clear about how he could help the startups. “I ran a customer acquisition funnel or a fundraising funnel, but a funnel meaning a process,” he said. “I never promised introductions, although they would certainly be a part of the process, but I was clear that this isn’t the way to go in my opinion (the type of warm intros these startups can get is usually very poor) and that reaching out to investors with a good team and product in a semi-automated and content-rich fashion was what I believe would work for them. I offered to prepare content and collateral and distribute it and handle the response etc” The communication broke down almost immediately. Founders “went dark” and stopped responding or got angry. Kostecki replied in kind. One company, for example, made odd claims as the business relationship soured. “I was told by the CEO (who didn’t have a contract with me) that the guy who paid me left and that I had to give the new guy the old guy’s money back if I chose to not work for him. When I asked to see some paperwork that would attest to this I didn’t receive a response. There was no written contract. I didn’t receive an even semi-formal email. The guy just went dark.” In most cases Kostecki got frustrated. Then the Polish press began to talk about a warrant for alleged tax evasion and his clients panicked. “I learned about the ruling a few months ago. People can ask how that could have happened or judge me or whatever but that is the truth. This happened during the heady time of drinking, a nasty hypomanic episode and so on (again, not faulting anyone but myself and taking 100% responsibility). My move to the U.S. was planned 3 years in advance and was put off for 2 years so the timing was not correlated. I am the sole breadwinner for 7 people (living in my household) and need to figure out how to make everything work from a legal / logistics point of view.” “Because there was no contract and the guy was very aggressive I decided to up my leverage regarding his intellectual property,” he said. “I totally agree that this is hardball and I’m willing to be judged for it.” These days Kostecki is out of the Polish startup biz. He’s dealing with his issues, both personal and legal. The startups he worked with have stopped responding. Small companies from places like central Europe have a big problem. They are trapped, for lack of a better word, in a great, valuable market that can offer them a living wage but not the seemingly untold riches available to the Ubers and Facebooks of the world. You can, for example, set up the best ecommerce site in Croatia but when you try to expand you bump up against Amazon. You can create a Polish Facebook – one of the biggest was – and fall to Facebook’s might outside of the country. In short, the local market is at once a lure and a deterrent. A startup can make some money selling in their back yard but it becomes harder and harder to expand once the full focus is on local customers and not global ones. People like Kostecki want to help out but communication and unmanaged expectations often get the best of deals like his. In most cases the best thing for an international company to do is to simply fly to the country of interest and start doing business. One Polish company, , started building their US presence early and it netted them contracts, sales, and developers. Others have doubtlessly done the same, from Spotify to payment giant Klarna. But that takes money and time. The bottom line? Startups need to build with expansion already in the business plan. Expanding later is difficult if not impossible one founder told me and folks like Kostecki are everywhere, offering to help and sometimes delivering – or not. But they are rarely a solution. Kostecki, for his part, is done helping the Polish ecosystem. “I have stopped taking on any new business of this kind, but I continue to work for several companies who are very aware of what’s going on and have decided to continue,” he said. “This was always a side consulting gig, I never decided to pull the trigger and make it a permanent thing.” “Of course I fucked up by lashing out. I apologized to the people who felt I wronged them. I wasn’t soft but there was no malice here. There is nothing that can’t be dealt with by people sitting down and talking. I’m not promising everyone at the table will like everything they hear. All of this could have been resolved. Photo: Getty Images/Zarnell/Moment
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79 percent of Americans now shop online, but it’s cost more than convenience that sways them
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Sarah Perez
| 2,016 | 12 | 19 |
Eight in 10 Americans are now shopping online, according to a out this morning. That’s 79 percent of U.S. consumers who shop on the web or their phones, up from just 22 percent back in 2000. Over half (51 percent) have also bought something from their mobile phone, the study found, and 15 percent purchased after clicking through on a link shared on social media. While the study’s main focus is to detail how many shop online, where, how often, and using which platforms, what’s more interesting is how it teases out the answers as to why. Surprisingly, it’s not necessarily the convenience of being able to click a few buttons to have products shipped to your door that consumers said was most appealing: it’s cost, and the ability to research those costs and other matters, more efficiently across the web ahead of their purchase. This is an interesting takeaway on consumer behavior at a time when so many startup businesses are trying to solve the pain points that come with having to actually go out and shop. Companies are rolling out services ranging from to subscription boxes of everyday items, like or or those that save you the of having to visit the grocery store. In fact, this has been one of the criticisms of Silicon Valley’s approach to the new online economy. As General Catalyst investment associate Katherine Boyle : “In Silicon Valley, people strive to conserve time. In the rest of America, people conserve money.” This is true, according to Pew’s findings. 65 percent of online shoppers in Pew’s study said that, all things being equal, they’d prefer to shop in a physical store. Of course, that desire is something they’re expressing more in abstract, Pew notes. And the percentage of those who say they would shop local brick-and-mortar stores greatly decreases depending on how frequently they go online to make purchases. For example, 62 percent of those who buy online on a weekly basis said they would rather go online that shop a physical store. But 82 percent of those who don’t even make an online purchase even once a month said they would prefer to shop in physical stores. But when it comes down to where people end up choosing to shop, it’s often a matter of price. 65 percent of online shoppers said if they needed to make a purchase, they’d compare real-world prices with those online and then buy where they could get the best deal. Only 21 percent said they’d buy without checking online prices for comparison’s sake, and only 14 percent said they’d buy online without checking retail prices. Also interesting is how consumers responded to questions about the factors they take into consideration when they’re shopping for something they’ve never bought before. Compared with numerous other factors, the convenience of being able to make a purchase without going to the store is at the bottom of the list of what people considered important. Only 42 percent said this was either “somewhat” or “extremely” important, for example. Meanwhile, things they considered more important included comparing prices (86% said somewhat or extremely important), asking questions (84%), buying from sellers they’re familiar with (84%), looking at the product in person (78%), and getting advice from people they know (77%), reading online reviews (74%). Online reviews have become very important to Americans’ purchasing decisions, Pew also found. 82 percent say they consult online ratings when buying for the first time, and nearly half (46%) said that reviews can help them feel more confident about their purchases. However, shoppers have begun to lose faith in the trustworthiness of online reviews. 48 percent say it’s often hard to tell if these reviews are truthful and unbiased. This problem, in large part, has likely been exacerbated by the situation of paid reviews. For example, on incentivized reviews (those where the reviewer received a free product or discount), in an effort to make its reviews more authentic. The larger report also delves into topics like “showrooming” (checking online prices while shopping a physical store – something 45% have done); social media’s role in purchases; and payments. On that last front, it seems that the use of cash on the decline. 24 percent say they don’t make any purchases with cash during a typical week. Another 24 percent say they use cash for nearly all purchases. And the other half says it’s a mix. While the report didn’t dig into newer payment technologies deeply, it did note that 12 percent of Americans have paid for purchases by swiping or scanning their cellphones at the register. And in perhaps another example of technology not connecting with the average user, 39 percent said they’ve now heard of bitcoin, but only 1 percent have actually used it. The full report is available
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Hyundai’s self-driving system aims at affordability
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Darrell Etherington
| 2,016 | 12 | 19 |
Automaker Hyundai wants you to know that it’s also embracing the race to autonomous driving — but it’s also hoping to do so in a way that differs from the approaches of most automakers, in striving for tech that will both be available in vehicles owned by individuals, and that will actually be affordable for a good portion of car buyers. Hyundai debuted its self-driving tech this week, with the first public rides provided on the streets of Las Vegas ahead of CES in January. Hyundai’s using the Ioniq as the base for its test vehicle, and surprisingly its prototype vehicles actually look pretty much like stock Ioniq’s — lacking the crown of large, obvious sensors that we’ve become accustomed to seeing in self-driving cars brave enough to tackle city streets. That doesn’t mean these cars are running blind; Hyundai’s vehicles include four optical cameras behind the windshield, front- and side-facing LiDAR units, front mid- and long-range radars and rear-facing radars, too. That’s still a more conservative sensor loadout than you might get on, say, Uber’s autonomous vehicles, but there’s a reason for Hyundai’s restraint: a smaller overall volume of input means less onerous compute requirements on board the vehicle, which ultimately means lower cost for the system overall. Hyundai’s looking to fill gaps in its overall sensor picture using downloadable, high-accuracy mapping data, which means an area needs to be fully mapped out before autonomous driving can take place there using these vehicles. But as , if the mapping is there, the system seems to handle on-road obstacles, like pedestrians, with ease, or at least it did during a Las Vegas public road demo. The important thing about Hyundai’s approach is that it might make it possible to include autonomous-driving features on an affordable, even entry-level vehicle, whereas others targeting self-driving systems for individual-owned cars are generally planning to offer them as high-end options on high-end vehicles, like Volvo. Hyundai says that its work in Advanced Driver Assistance Systems (ADAS) are helping chart its path toward full autonomy, with a planned sensor standardization deadline on vehicles and functional benchmark in place in the 2019-2021 range. Full autonomy still has a number of barriers to overcome, however, beyond the technical — including regulatory and customer acceptance — so vehicles with full autonomous capabilities in the hands of everyday drivers are still quite a while off. Still, Hyundai is already thinking ahead to mass production, and that could be a big help in the future, especially if the cost of components like LiDAR decrease considerably between now and then, as they appear likely to. Aiming for affordability for individuals, and not just fleets or luxury buyers, is also a noble undertaking. Tesla, it’s worth noting, also seems to have interest in making this happen with the sensor suite and compute stack that will ship in the Model 3, but Hyundai’s approach still could do a lot for the affordability of autonomy at scale.
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Zuckerberg’s Jarvis home AI is like an Alexa that learns your musical tastes
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Darrell Etherington
| 2,016 | 12 | 19 |
Mark Zuckerberg set himself an ambitious personal project for 2016 – build a connected artificial assistant to help him automate certain tasks at home, including things like controlling the lights, watching for visitors and operating appliances. that his task actually turned to be “easier than [he] expected” in some ways – which should come as no surprise given that a good percentage of you out there reading this right now can accomplish all those things using readily available devices like Amazon’s Echo. To be fair, most (all?) Echo owners didn’t build their own Alexa service from scratch, and that’s what Zuckerberg set out to do, coding his own personal Jarvis using Python, PHP and Objective C, and incorporating machine learning techniques including language processing, speech recognition and face recognition. The Facebook CEO also had to wrangle a bunch of connected devices that don’t necessarily talk to each other out of the box, including Sonos, Spotify, a Samsung TV, a Crestron smart home and lighting system, a Nest cam and more. And once these were all tied together, Zuckerberg also had to build a way to translate natural language requests made as though you were talking too another person into commands that could operate all of the above. Plus, these requests had to be understood in context; if Priscilla Chan, Zuckerberg’s wife and co-chair of the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, asked for something to be done “in my office,” that should trigger a different action than if her husband made the exact same request. One of the more interesting things that Zuckerberg was able to get Jarvis to do that isn’t yet present in anything else on the market really is to recognize his taste in music and select appropriate tracks to play automatically with very little input. Jarvis will check back on previously played music to make a choice, and Zuckerberg can also ask it to change the mood using non-specific terms like “play something light” if he wants to get more specific. The system also tracks Chan’s taste separately and can do the same for her. It’s also noteworthy that Zuckerberg built a Facebook Messenger bot to communicate with Jarvis via text, and that he found that preferable overall to communicating with it via voice, mostly because he didn’t want to bother anyone else in the house. Zuckerberg’s takeaways from the project include that “AI is both closer and farther off than we imagine,” mainly because while it’s making great strides in specific domain capability, it’s not doing so well in taking lessons from one domain and applying it to problems in others – truly capable general AI is still a long way off, in other words. Still, Zuckerberg notes he spent only around 100 hours on building Jarvis in 2016 and ended up with a pretty capable system, one that he says he might eventually release if it can achieve more home automation functionality not tied to his specific setup. He also teases that this could prove the basis for a new future Facebook product. That’s likely more cheek than anything else, since it’s almost certain that Facebook’s engineers are at least exploring some kind of Alexa-type competitor. If they weren’t, that’d be massively short-sighted. Also, .
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Facebook encourages text statuses with new colored backgrounds
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Josh Constine
| 2,016 | 12 | 19 |
Facebook’s core attraction isn’t news articles you could find anywhere, it’s intimate posts from your real friends. That explains why Facebook is trying to make highly personal text statuses as eye-catching as photos with the new test of a colored background option. The feature lets users select a color that appears behind their text status in place of the normally-white background. Several of the color options offer an Instagram logo-style color gradient, which make them more stylish and modern than boring flat colors. Sent to TechCrunch by reader Hoan Do over the weekend, Facebook confirms this feature is in testing. It appears that it’s only testing in certain regions abroad, not in the US. Users without access to the test don’t see the colors if they look at the post, but that would likely change to everyone being able to see the colors if Facebook rolls it out more widely. [ : Facebook has now shared more details and a statement about the new feature. Colored status backgrounds are rolling out globally over the next few days. Only Android users will be able to create them, but everyone on iOS, Android, and web will be able to see them in the News Feed. A spokesperson writes “We’re rolling out a change to help people make their text posts more visual. Starting today, people can update the background color of their text-only posts on Android.”] Adding spice to status updates could help Facebook boost “original sharing” of unique personal content, as opposed to resharing of news articles and viral videos. In April, reported that Facebook was experiencing a decline in original, personal sharing. Apparently “original content broadcasting” was down 21% year over year as of mid-2015, and original broadcast sharing was down 15% year-over-year as of April. Facebook has tried to downplay that claim in the past, saying original content sharing was healthy. But VP of News Feed on stage at TechCrunch Disrupt SF in September that sharing of professional publisher content has grown at a faster rate than original sharing, making the latter a smaller percentage of total content. That may have played into Facebook instead of publishers in an update from September, which could restore a balance with more original content in the feed. Facebook seemed to already be encouraging text status updates with a that shows words in a larger font if your status is short, thereby making it more attention-grabbing. Both of these features could be see as trying to steal thunder from Twitter, which is the most ubiquitous text-focused social network, though one dwarfed in size by Facebook. When Facebook launched the News Feed, it was all about text. Some might remember the word “is” being automatically applied after your name so every update was actually about what you were doing, like: “Josh Constine is…” Yet CEO Mark Zuckerberg has said repeatedly that he sees rich media like video, 360, and VR as the future of sharing on Facebook. But there will always be some things best expressed with some simple words. Colored backgrounds make sure a spontaneous exclamation or a bit of poetry won’t get lost in the increasingly flashy feed.
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2016’s top programming trends
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Martin Puryear
| 2,016 | 12 | 26 |
Last January I wrote a predicting the major programming trends of 2016. But in the software development world, things can change very quickly. It can be difficult to see the high-level trends clearly through all the chatter about shiny new development languages, frameworks and tools. So, as we near the end of 2016, how accurate were my predictions? JavaScript/ECMAScript version 6 (commonly known as ECMAScript 2015 or ES6) in June of 2015, and I predicted that 2016 would see widespread adoption of its new features as web developers adjusted to the new version of this web standard. I was mostly correct. All the major browsers and Node.js (an open-source JavaScript runtime) are more than 90 percent ES6-compliant. Nowadays, we see significantly more ES6 syntax in production and not just internal utilities and smaller low-stakes systems, but the primary customer-facing systems, as well. Companies not dependent on legacy clients, like and , are enforcing ES6 syntax in their internal style guides. However, ES6 has not been universally adopted. Some developers need to support the old version of JavaScript for legacy reasons. Developers who want to use ES6 notation but still need to reach customers using legacy browsers can use tools such as or to convert modern ES6 code to the older syntax. Also, some ES6 features have not been fully implemented in every JavaScript environment, such as proper (Safari 10 and iOS 10 are happy exceptions). This is a great resource to see if your target platform is ES6-compliant. The old version of JavaScript isn’t going to disappear overnight, but we saw significant growth in ES6 usage over 2016, and I expect most redeveloped sites in the new year will use it as well. I’d say this prediction was pretty good! Backend as a service, or BaaS, increased in 2016, as predicted. BaaS is the practice of using to perform certain repetitive tasks for a project — tasks like cloud storage or push notification. By using these services, developers can focus on their specialty while these services do what they do best. Backend API services are thriving because frontend frameworks are changing to more easily interact with these services. Developers are also increasingly using a technique called composition, where an overall system is composed of several smaller applications. In such a system, these small applications are easily provided by third-party services. Note: In my last post I mentioned a popular BaaS named Parse. Shortly after the article ran, Facebook (its owner) announced that Parse would soon be shut down. Those using it will need to create their own and migrate before January 28, 2017. Services like and became a mainstay of many development teams in 2016, as predicted. These services allow engineers to quickly generate and replicate machine images called containers that bundle a piece of software with runtime, system tools and libraries, etc., guaranteeing that it has everything it needs to run in any environment. Developers can rapidly prototype a project on a lightweight virtual environment with pre-built version control, then easily deploy the new version on multiple servers. Server provisioning by hand is inherently tricky and time-consuming, so it’s no surprise that automating this process has caught on quickly. Related tools that grew in popularity last year include (for easily setting up development environments), and , and (for configuration management). Working with container-based systems has become an integral part of the standard developer’s toolkit. I see no reason for this to slow down. Functional programming languages like Haskell, Clojure and Scala grew steadily in popularity during 2016. Usage of these server-side languages is driven by explosive growth in the number of smartphones and connected devices in use, and by our increased expectations of a great experience on those devices. As our computers, tablets, smartphones and IoT gadgets become more powerful, servers become the bottlenecks to performance. Increasing a server’s ability to perform concurrent tasks makes it more responsive when interacting with a large number of connected devices. The functional programming model is (mostly) stateless, meaning that sections of software can more easily and efficiently be run in parallel across different CPU cores or machines, without needing complex synchronization. This gives the functional paradigm an inherent edge over the object-oriented approach when doing concurrent processing such as web requests. Things were interesting in 2016 on the visual design front. Not surprisingly, Google incorporated an increasing number of material design elements across its entire portfolio — systems (ChromeOS, Android), applications (Chrome, Drive, Google Play Music), websites (YouTube, AdSense) and even web search. We see material design aspects in Android apps from Slack, Twitter, Spotify, Airbnb and Wikipedia, and in websites from Asana, Geekbench and others. That said, we didn’t see adoption in other platforms (iOS, Tizen, Windows, MacOS — only a little with Ubuntu). Developers in these other places pushed forward with styles specific to those platforms, to varying extent. I give myself only a few points of partial credit on that particular prediction from earlier this year. If I’m allowed to recast my design prediction for 2017, then I’ll move away from traditional design paradigms altogether — toward non-visual interfaces (Amazon Alexa, Siri, Cortana, Google Home) or extra-visual interfaces (augmented reality, virtual reality). 2016 brought many exciting developments in software and 2017 promises to be even better as containers and functional programming languages grow in adoption and JavaScript moves to become even more central parts of standard development practice. I’m intrigued to see how software norms will progress in the coming year and eager to share my thoughts with my fellow developers!
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Apple leaps into AI research with improved simulated + unsupervised learning
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John Mannes
| 2,016 | 12 | 26 |
Corporate machine learning research may be getting a new vanguard in Apple. Six researchers from the company’s recently formed machine learning group that describes a novel method for simulated + unsupervised learning. The aim is to improve the quality of synthetic training images. is a sign of the company’s aspirations to become a more visible leader in the ever growing field of AI. , , and the rest of the techstablishment have been steadily growing their machine learning research groups. With hundreds of publications each, these companies’ academic pursuits have been well documented, but Apple has been stubborn — keeping its magic all to itself. Things started to change earlier this month when Apple’s Director of AI Research, Russ Salakhutdinov, would soon begin publishing research. The team’s first attempt is both timely and pragmatic. In recent times, synthetic images and videos have been used with greater frequency to train machine learning models. Rather than use cost and time intensive real-world imagery, generated images are less costly, readily available and customizable. The technique presents a lot of potential, but it’s risky because small imperfections in synthetic training material can have serious negative implications for a final product. Put another way, it’s hard to ensure generated images meet the same quality standards as real images. Apple is proposing to use or GANs to improve the quality of these synthetic training images. GANs are not new, but Apple is making modifications to serve its purpose. At a high level, GANs work by taking advantage of the adversarial relationship between competing neural networks. In Apple’s case, a simulator generates synthetic images that are run through a refiner. These refined images are then sent to a discriminator that’s tasked with distinguishing real images from synthetic ones. From a game theory perspective, the networks are competing in a two-player minimax game. The goal in this type of game is to minimize the maximum possible loss. Apple SimGAN variation is trying to minimize both local adversarial loss and a self regulation term. These terms simultaneously minimize the differences between synthetic and real images while minimizing the difference between synthetic and refined images to retain annotations. The idea here is that too much alteration can destroy the value of the unsupervised training set. If trees no-longer look like trees and the point of your model is to help self-driving cars recognize trees to avoid, you’ve failed. The researchers also made some fine-tuned modifications, like forcing the models to use the full history of refined images, not just those from the mini-batch, to ensure the adversarial network can identify all generated images as fake at any given time. You can read more about these alterations directly from Apple’s work, entitled
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No Signal: Egypt blocks the encrypted messaging app as it continues its cyber crackdown
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Farid Y. Farid
| 2,016 | 12 | 26 |
After a week of blocking the secure messaging app Signal in Egypt the service is back online thanks to new features added by its parent company . Last week Egyptian users raised the alarm about their inability to access the highly encrypted app popular among activists, including important whistleblower Edward Snowden. Egypt , and the move against Signal is just the latest attempt to stifle dissent and impede open journalism. “Signal is important as a means of secure communications without third parties knowing who I’m contacting,” said prominent Egyptian blogger and board member Mohamed ElGohary. ElGohary was one of the first activists to report the lack of access on . “I was trying to message a friend on Signal, and it said ‘unable to send’. I tried other friends, same issue. The failing to send also happened on another ISP. When I tried to use it on VPN, it worked. So I concluded that something happened in the scope of Egypt,” ElGohary told TechCrunch. The , available on IOS, Android and Desktop, uses built-in end-to-end encryption to prevent third parties (like governments) from seeing the content being sent. It is among Egyptian activists and journalists in protecting their sources. Dear world, as of yesterday both Signal & Telegram apps are not working in Egypt. Among all My losses, I’ve lost access to secure chatting. — Nora Younis (@NoraYounis) Egypt has blocked other VoIP apps such as before, but these for-profit communications services didn’t offer quite the same level of encryption and privacy features as Signal. Other countries in the Middle East and North Africa (like ) have also limited access to anonymous messaging services and in recent days has blocked social media in light of the recent assassination of the Russian ambassador. “These disruptions are not uniform and the causes behind them are not clear,” said , professor of communications at American University in Cairo, who authored a book on the . She uses Signal herself and was able to access the app when other users could not. The Ministry of Communications & Information Technology has not confirmed or denied its block of Signal. TechCrunch reached out to the ministry several times to no avail. With the recent targeting of Signal, security fears have been raised over what the San Francisco-based service provider Open Whisper Systems has termed “censoring access.” In an update of the status of the app, Open Whisper Systems included “support for censorship circumvention in Egypt and the UAE” as a using domain fronting. “The idea is that to block the target traffic, the censors would also have to block those entire services. With enough large scale services acting as domain fronts, disabling Signal starts to look like disabling the internet,” according to a technical note issued by the company. Authorities famously cut internet access in the midst of the 2011 revolution that toppled 30 years of autocratic rule under former president Hosni Mubarak. Can anyone subscribed to check if they can access the site , they claim I’m the only person who can’t. — Wael Eskandar (@weskandar) “Attempts to curtail freedom online, whether by blocking content or by user violations, is an obvious way to fight the effect of social media that was demonstrated in 2011 and in the couple of years after. The online world provided a free space for people to discuss and organize in a way that was unprecedented,” Abdulla said. Digital rights group claimed in a report issued earlier this year that at the height of the Arab revolutions Egypt bought surveillance technologies from European companies, including the Italian firm Hacking Team. The disruption of Signal’s service comes at a time especially when freedom of expression is regularly curbed. A Facebook page administrator was for “publishing false news” and authorities 163 Facebook pages for their incitement to violence. Egypt has intensified its cyber crackdown under president Abdel Fattah el-Sisi. In recent years authorities have blocked Facebook’s controversial for not allowing it to spy on users, imprisoned citizens for and reportedly used technology allowing for extensive surveillance of Egyptians’ online activities. In the wake of the terrorist attack earlier this month on a cathedral in Cairo killing 27 people, Egyptian political parties have renewed calls for parliament to pass a repressive that can carry the death sentence in some cases. “Unfortunately, most legislation in the Arab world is done with the intention of control rather than regulation” explained Abdulla of the law’s severity. “It also places part of the responsibility on ISPs, so that every layer of the society is policing another,” Abdulla said.
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Oculus engineer Dov Katz arrested in sting after allegedly soliciting sex from a 15-year-old girl
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John Biggs
| 2,016 | 12 | 26 |
Seattle police arrested Oculus’ Head of Computer Vision Dov Katz on December 23rd in a sting operation in which a police officer posed as a 15-year-old girl. Katz allegedly arrived at an Embassy Suites in Tukwila, Washington with $600 after agreeing in texts messages to pay $300 for sex without a condom. Katz told police he was there to rescue the girl. GeekWire has screenshots from the :
Local reported on the arrest. Katz is to be arraigned on January 5th and bail is set at $125,000. in computer vision and has worked at Oculus VR since 2013. bought the company in .
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Watch this smartphone-assisted robot beat the pants off of humans in air hockey
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John Biggs
| 2,016 | 12 | 26 |
[youtube=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lZmp9elPgKo] It’s the holidays and that means it’s time to watch robots cream humans in bouts of skill. The latest example of robotics winning over a meatbag? This amazing powered by a smartphone, Arduino board and a plotter-like robotic arm. The system works by watching the puck on the surface of the table and moving to where the puck is going. It actively blocks attacks on its goal and it can beat humans regularly. The smartphone’s camera is looking at the playing court. The camera’s captured data is processed in real-time by the smartphone. Detecting the position of the puck and the “pusher robot” (and according to the current location of all the elements on the court), your smartphone makes decisions and commands the robot what to do via Wi-Fi. Your smartphone will become an augmented reality device, showing predicted trajectories and position of all the objects involved in this game. You can build your own and the creator, Jose Julio of JJ Robotics, even included the . Give me a robot that can beat me at skeeball and maybe then we can talk, though. Until a robot learns the lure of spending hundreds of tickets to get a plastic frog it knows nothing of life.
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How to grow your app
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Jesse Michels
| 2,016 | 12 | 26 |
While there is a canon of growth strategies in the social space, the main theme of these interviews is really encapsulated by a quote from former VP of Growth at Facebook Alex Shultz: “Mark has said he thinks we won because we wanted it more, and I really believe that. We just worked really hard. It’s not like we’re crazy smart, or we’ve all done these crazy things before. We just worked really really hard, and we executed fast. I strongly encourage you to do that. Growth is optional.” Cory Levy has an interesting entrepreneurial trajectory. Typical for the valley, in that he dropped out of school freshman year to raise a million dollars and pursue his first startup, “One”. When “One” did not achieve the product-market fit that its co-founders hoped for Levy and his co-founder Michael Callahan pivoted to a different audience with whom the two had more success — the teen social networking crowd. And so their app became . “We started out idealistically — with this grand vision that we would connect you with like-minded people who are interested in the same things… kind of like an interest-based Tinder. If you’re a Laker fan walking into a bar, and someone else in that bar was a huge fan, you guys could connect and talk,” says Levy (although the bar scene isn’t typical for the high school-set). “We maintain that idealism — it underlies everything we do. But we knew that achieving our ultimate goal would require us to have a successful product with a large audience. And our first product didn’t cut it. Talking to someone about your interests was appealing but was not something that people had a burning desire to do…and it wasn’t going to help us achieve broad-based appeal. Talking to strangers about interests was a vitamin, not a pain-killer.” What do consumers have a burning desire for? Finding love on Tinder, food on Postmates, transportation on Uber — these are basic, core human needs that will never go away. These companies just found more convenient, efficient ways of providing them than past services. In the ideation phase — as an app developer — this is a crucial insight. Always resort back to core human needs when thinking of new ideas. The other problem with One was that it had everybody in mind as its ideal user-base. The best products simply don’t do that; Uber, Tesla, Facebook all started high end and niche in some way. Unless you are building a basic utility like Email or Venmo, building your product around an audience is crucial. Levy landed upon the high school audience — one that felt like Facebook was outdated, uncool and out-of-touch — but didn’t really use social services like Yik Yak as much as college students did. Since launch last November, After School has millions of teen users from 80% of American high schools in America. How does After School achieve viral growth? Through the tools advocated by Mike Jones at Science — rapid development and the iteration of new features. The final insight we gained from Levy really brings some closure to our learnings on how to achieve growth in the social space: The internet, even on mobile, has solved the bottom of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. The most basic utility apps — calculator, flashlight, Email, peer to peer payments etc. — have been created. As a result, the real opportunity is going to be in creating more entertaining, exciting, social and stimulating apps than ever before. That’s why apps like After School, Snapchat and Musical.ly have to iterate incredibly fast. Venmo builds one iteration, gets a network, and you depend on it as your payments platform for the next 5-10 years. If we don’t iterate every few months, we’ll become obsolete in social.
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New regulations could limit Didi’s taxi on-demand service in China’s top cities
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Jon Russell
| 2,016 | 12 | 21 |
There’s trouble in China for ride-sharing services after authorities in Beijing and Shanghai agreed to institute new regulations that could significantly reduce the driver pool for services like Didi Chuxing and Uber. According to rules that have , taxi on-demand services can only use drivers who are registered to live in either city. The regulations aren’t effective immediately, but they could deal a major blow to Didi and Uber because right now it is estimated that a significant percentage of their fleet of cars are not registered in either city. The exact numbers are not known but the that, for example, less than 10,000 of Didi’s 410,000 active drivers in Shanghai have permanent residency papers. The system is known as ‘hukou’ and it was instituted to prevent floods of people coming to big cities from rural areas. Despite that, many people who live in Beijing and Shanghai do so without papers. Since many of those unofficial citizens constitute the workforce behind on-demand services and taxi apps, the regulations could create a worrying situation for Didi and others. Didi, which is , didn’t directly comment on the local rule when we asked. Instead, its response focused on other elements of the ride-sharing regulations, which were and now no longer include restrictions over the price and quality of vehicles. “These rules are a significant improvement towards a more sensible and liberal framework. For instance, Beijing will introduce a five-month-long transition period. Shanghai lowers the wheelbase requirement from 270 CM to 260 CM [allowing cheaper vehicles among ride-sharing fleets], while scrapping the initial proposal for emission floors. There will be adequate time for adaptation, and more economy and environmental-friendly vehicles enter the service,” a Didi representative told TechCrunch. The regulations have been amended multi times since and, with Didi doubtless lobbying hard and using the contacts among its investor base, it remains to be seen if the local driver rules will come into force as they currently stand right now. While, on the plus side, many of China’s smaller cities are adopting the guidelines less aggressively than Beijing and Shanghai.
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Nokia reignites Apple patent battle with a spate of new lawsuits
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Brian Heater
| 2,016 | 12 | 21 |
Five years after burying the hatchet with Apple, Nokia’s back at it again. The one-time phone-making juggernaut announced this week that it’s ready to go back to court in a big way, filing multiple lawsuits aimed squarely at Cupertino. The company celebrated the filings with detailing the claims, which stem from 32 patents related to a wide range of related technologies, including software, video coding, chipsets, display, UI and antenna, among others — from the sound of it, just about everything apart from the big shiny Apple logo on the back of the iPhone. According to Nokia, Apple has refused to play ball with subsequent patents following the 2011 settlement, which marked the end of a two-year fight. “Since agreeing [to] a license covering some patents from the Nokia Technologies portfolio in 2011,” the company said in a statement issued today, “Apple has declined subsequent offers made by Nokia to license other of its patented inventions which are used by many of Apple’s products.” Nokia filed suits in three German cities, along with the US District Court for the Eastern District of Texas, the Walt Disney World of patent litigation. For its part, Apple also filed a suit this week in California, alleging that Nokia removed certain patents from the previous deal for the purposes of “extorting excessive royalties” — an alleged breach of contract. The previous settlement was reportedly valued at $720 million. We’ve since spoken with Apple in regard to the suit by the company yesterday in California, in which it suggests that Nokia is working with a number of companies on the aforementioned royalty “extort[ion].” “ We’ve also reached out to Nokia for a comment about what’s shaping up to be another fierce battle stemming from some unfinished business between the two big tech names.
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Uber stops San Francisco self-driving pilot as DMV revoked registrations
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Darrell Etherington
| 2,016 | 12 | 21 |
Uber has confirmed that it will stop its self-driving pilot in San Francisco, following a meeting today with the California DMV and Attorney General’s office. The DMV revoked the registration on 16 self-driving test vehicles Uber was using in its pilot. The DMV tells TechCrunch that it invited Uber to complete its permitting process at the same time it revoked it the vehicle registrations. Uber told TechCrunch that it will instead be looking to deploy the vehicles elsewhere for the time being. Here’s Uber’s statement on the matter in full: We have stopped our self-driving pilot in California as the DMV has revoked the registrations for our self-driving cars. We’re now looking at where we can redeploy these cars but remain 100 percent committed to California and will be redoubling our efforts to develop workable statewide rules. Uber had begun updating self-driving Volvo X90 SUVs in San Francisco on December 14, providing service to randomly selected uberX customers in the area. It chose not to pursue the permit the state issues to companies for testing autonomous vehicles on public roads, arguing that its cars didn’t require such permits as they could not operate completely autonomously at this stage. While initially Uber continued its pilot even in the face of regulatory objections, both the DMV and California’s Attorney General’s office said that Uber would face legal repercussions, including injunctive action, if they maintained the active service. Uber currently operates another trial of its self-driving technology, in Pittsburgh, where its Advanced Technology Group is based. Those trials, which began earlier this year, use Ford Focus vehicles retrofitted with autonomous sensors and onboard computing, and will continue.
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BitTorrent Live’s “cable-killer” P2P video app finally hits iOS
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Josh Constine
| 2,016 | 12 | 21 |
Cable companies rule TV because they control the expensive wires and satellites that can deliver low-latency live content at scale. Cable companies can then dictate how much per monthly paying subscriber they offer the channel owners for access because there are few alternatives for live distribution. And the cable companies can charge consumers exorbitant prices because they’re sometimes the only game in town. But BitTorrent has now done for live video what it did for file downloads: invented peer-to-peer technology that moves the burden of data transfer from a centralized source to the crowd. Instead of cables and satellites, BitTorrent piggybacks on the internet bandwidth of its users. Since P2P live streaming is so much cheaper than traditional ways to deliver live content, BitTorrent could pay channel owners more for distribution per viewer. And BitTorrent can offer that content to viewers for free or much cheaper than a cable subscription. The transfer technology and the app that aggregates these channels are both called . Now, almost a year after the protocol’s on smart TVs, and six months after it was supposed to arrive on iPhone, the BitTorrent Live app quietly became available on this week. Until now it’s on Mac, Apple TV and Amazon Fire TV — much less popular platforms. And that’s after being in development . The app features 15 channels, including NASA TV, France One, QVC Home and TWiT (This Week In Tech) that you can watch live. The latency is roughly 10 seconds, which could be faster than terrestrial cable, as well as systems like Sling TV that can delay content more than a minute. The problem right now is that BitTorrent Live has a pretty lackluster channel selection. It’s still working on striking deals with more name-brand channels. It could offer some for pay-per-view, but cheaper than the same content on traditional TV due to the reduced broadcasting costs. To get channels to sign on, BitTorrent Live will need more viewers… which will require better content. That’s a bit of a chicken and egg problem. But with today’s launch bringing it to a massively distributed mobile platform, it could start to attract an audience worthy of luring in better channel makers.
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Apps for holiday shopping
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Katie Roof
| 2,016 | 12 | 21 |
The holidays are almost here and there is still a little time left for last-minute shopping. Instead of sifting though all your discount emails, we found some apps that will help you save money and make both your online and in-store shopping experience easier.
Online shoppers may want to check out Slice, which makes it easier to monitor shipments. There’s no need to input any tracking codes because the app syncs with your email to notify you when packages are on the way. You can also save money with the price drop alerts and see a budget chart to get a sense of your spending by category. Slice also saves receipts and alerts you to product recalls. The app is free and available on iPhone, Android and the Apple Watch.
RetailMeNot will ensure that you never miss a sale again. The app aggregates all the sales for all major brands, showcasing both digital and in-store deals. Whether you’re planning to buy something at Macy’s or Victoria’s Secret, RetailMeNot highlights the best deals and keeps a database of all the coupon codes. There’s also a deal map to see discounts nearby. And for those of you who get hungry while shopping, the coupons for food court restaurants could come in handy. The app is free and available on both the iPhone and Android.
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Check out the 2016 TechCrunch Gift Guide
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Travis Bernard
| 2,016 | 12 | 21 |
Check out the 2016 TechCrunch Gift Guide .
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Crunch Report | Mario Run Breaks App Store Record
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Khaled "Tito" Hamze
| 2,016 | 12 | 21 |
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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Neurable nets $2 million to build brain-controlled software for AR and VR
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Taylor Hatmaker
| 2,016 | 12 | 21 |
As consumers get their first taste of voice-controlled home robots and motion-based virtual realities, a quiet swath of technologists are thinking big picture about what comes after that. The answer has major implications for the way we’ll interact with our devices in the near future. Spoiler alert: We won’t be yelling or waving at them; we’ll be thinking at them. That answer is something the team of Boston-based startup spends a lot of time, yes, thinking about. Today, the recent Ann Arbor-to-Cambridge transplant is announcing $2 million in a seed round led by Brian Shin of , a Boston-based alliance of regionally focused angel investors. Other investors include PJC, Loup Ventures and NXT Ventures. Previously, the company took home more than $400,000 after bagging the second-place prize at the Rice Business Plan Competition. Neurable, founded by former University of Michigan student researchers Ramses Alcaide, Michael Thompson, James Hamet and Adam Molnar, is committed to making nuanced brain-controlled software science fact rather than science fiction, and really the field as a whole . “Our vision is to make this the standard human interaction platform for any hardware or software device,” Alcaide told TechCrunch in an interview. “So people can walk into their homes or their offices and take control of their devices using a combination of their augmented reality systems and their brain activity.” Unlike other neuro-startups like and Interaxon’s , Neurable has no intention to build its own hardware, instead relying on readily available electroencephalography (EEG) devices, which usually resemble a cap or a headband. Equipped with multiple sensors that can detect and map electrical activity in the brain, EEG headsets record neural activity which can then be interpreted by custom software and translated into an output. Such a system is known as a brain computer interface, or BCI. These interfaces are best known for their applications for people with severe disabilities, like ALS and other neuromuscular conditions. The problem is that most of these systems are really slow; it can take 20 seconds for a wearer to execute a simple action, like choosing one of two symbols on a screen. Building on a proof of concept study that Alcaide published in the , Neurable’s core innovation is a machine learning method that could cut down the processing wait so that user selection happens in real time. The same new analysis approach will also tackle the BCI signal to noise issue, amplifying the quality of the data to yield a more robust data set. The company’s mission on the whole is an extension of Alcaide’s research at the University of Michigan, where he pursued his Ph.D. in neuroscience within the school’s . “A lot of technology that’s out there right now focuses more on meditation and concentration applications,” Alcaide said. “Because of this they tend to be a lot slower when it comes to an input for controlling devices.” These devices often interpret specific sets of brainwaves (alpha, beta, gamma, etc.) to determine if a user is in a state of focus, for example. Leisa Thompson/Neurable Instead of measuring specific brainwaves, Neurable’s software is powered by what Alcaide calls a “brain shape.” Measuring this shape — really a pattern of responsive brain activity known as an event-related potential — is a way to gauge if a stimulus or other kind of event is important to the user. This brain imaging notion, roughly an observation of cause and effect, has actually been around in some form for at least 40 years. The company’s committed hardware agnosticism places a bet that in a few generations, all major augmented and virtual reality headsets will come built-in with EEG sensors. Given that the methodology is reliable and well-tested from decades of medical use, EEG is indeed well-positioned to grow into the future of consumer technology input. Neurable is already in talks with major AR and VR hardware makers, though the company declined to name specific partners. “For us we’re primarily focused right now on developing our software development kit,” Alcaide said. “In the long game, we want to become that piece of software that runs on every hardware and software application that allows you to interpret brain activity. That’s really what we’re trying to accomplish.” Instead of using an Oculus Touch controller or voice commands, thoughts alone look likely to steer the future of user interaction. In theory, if and when this kind of thing pans out on a commercial level, brain-monitored inputs could power a limitless array of outputs: anything from making an in-game VR avatar jump to turning off a set of Hue lights. The big unknown is just how long we’ll wait for that future to arrive.
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Refurbished Apple Watches are now available through the official store
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Brian Heater
| 2,016 | 12 | 21 |
It was only about a month ago that Apple to its refurbished online offerings, along with iMacs and MacBooks, and now the company’s got another key addition. Starting this week, the company has added Apple Watches to its official refurbed store, with prices starting at $229 for the 38mm version of the first-generation model. That puts the watch at 14 percent below its shiny new retail counterpart, for a grand total of $40. That is, as , still pricier than many retailers are currently charging for new versions. Target, for one, took $70 off the watch in time for the holidays. Interestingly, the offerings aren’t just limited to the first-gen. The store’s also got second-hand versions of the Series 2, though, predictably, they’re not especially affordable. Those discounts also hover around the 14 to 15 percent range, at $469 for a refurbed 38mm and $509 for the 42mm. All of the above ship with the Apple seal of approval and a one-year warranty. And they might even ship just in time for Christmas.
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Disney’s making Snapchat shows, and the first is an aftershow for The Bachelor
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Darrell Etherington
| 2,016 | 12 | 21 |
Disney’s ABC TV group is embarking on a journey into Snapchat original programming creation, and it’s starting with , its storied 21-season franchise that chronicles the epic romance of a random person and a selection of around two dozen potential matches selected for their potential to generate interesting TV. I say that like I don’t watch , , and countless other official and third-party knock-offs of the series — when in fact I enjoy nothing more. So I’ll likely tune in to “Watch Party: The Bachelor,” the new post-episode programming on Snapchat that’s set to run for between three and five minutes with a viewing window of 24 hours from their original posting date, as reported by . This is just the first Disney-ABC Snapchat series, with a number of unannounced episodic shows to be revealed at a later date, but arriving sometime over the next few months for Snapchat users in the U.S. In case you somehow haven’t heard, this season’s Bachelor is Nick Viall, who’s just coming off a stint on Bachelor in Paradise in which he positioned himself well as the twice-spurned former contestant whose rejections have resulted in an emotional wall blocking off his heart, priming this season for a healthy helping of “I’m not sure if I’m ready… ” moments between himself and the crop of possible matches ABC will be throwing his way. The first episode of the new Snapchat show debuts on January 3, and even if it’s bad, you’re not going to have wasted much time if you end up watching it. , though.
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Misfit shoots for simple with the Phase hybrid smartwatch
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Brian Heater
| 2,016 | 12 | 21 |
I’ve been mostly enjoying my time with the Phase, thus far. It might be all the time I spent with the of late, but it feels good having a relatively reasonably sized watch on again. Something that’s not flashy like the , something that, honestly, you forget you even have until you need it. The Misfit Phase isn’t a groundbreaker. That path has already been blazed and reasonably well trod by the likes of Martian, Withings, Fossil and Timex — companies who saw an opening between an analog timepiece and a full-fledged smartwatch. Something that brings notifications and fitness tracking to the wrist, but otherwise gets out of your way. It’s a next step that makes sense for Misfit. The (now Fossil-owned) company’s devices have traditionally offered some combination of good looks and subtle functionality, and a hybrid smartwatch slots quiet well into the company’s existing ecosystem. At $175, it’s an easy enough sell to those who’ve already bought into the Misfit ecosystem, but standing out among hybrid smartwatches is getting tougher and tougher by the day. Like the , the Phase is a study in minimalism. It’s all smooth surfaces and round corners with little in the way of extraneous design. The device Misfit sent is a dark navy with a brown leather band — not the color combination I’d have opted for, but there are plenty of options on that front, and this being a traditional wristwatch, the bands are interchangeable. The backs close over metal pegs, rather than using the standard bar. This means they’re easier to get on and off so you won’t be able to change them out with just any bands. Instead, Misfit is offering up straps in packs of three, for $60 bucks a pop, with leather, cloth and sport straps, for the busy fitness tracker on the go. The Phase’s body is 41mm. It would be nice to have multiple size options, but as it stands, the watch fit pretty comfortably on my own wrist (I’m 5’11″) and a coworker, who is 5’4″. It’s a bit on the thick side, owing likely to smartwatch functionality. It slipped fairly easily beneath my sleeve, but left a noticeable bulge in the process. Unlike Martian’s devices, which feature a text crawl built into the face, the Phase is reliant on haptic buzzes, a small window on the bottom with a rotating color wheel and moving clock hands, which communicate in semaphore signals. Users designate different colors for different notifications, so if, say, you get an email, the circle turns green, the theory being that users assign different levels of urgency to different notifications. In practice, I didn’t find the notification colors useful. The window is small, un-illuminated and easily obscured by the watch hands and requires memorization on the part of the user. Also, there are only six colors and six services available in addition to calls and texts (Gmail, Skype, WeChat, Facebook Messenger, Viber, WhatsApp and Line). The addition is really more trouble than it’s worth. The Phase also sports a pair of buttons on the right side. The top is designed to offer a little more insight into the watch’s notifications. Tap it once and the hands spin to a point on the face that represents how far the user is toward their goal — so, 50 percent would land on the six. Two taps shows what time the alarm is set to. The bottom button, meanwhile, can be assigned a variety of different functions, including playing and pausing music, taking selfies, advancing slides in a presentation or other custom functions like triggering a device via IF. Misfit’s done a lot to offer a slate of different smartwatch-like functionality without an interactive display. I wish the company offered up more information in its Quick Start guide, however — in a lot of cases, figuring out that functionality takes a lot of guesswork. And many ultimately don’t really bring all that much to the table. One of the key things Misfit brings to the table is an existing activity tracking ecosystem. The Phase uses the company’s existing app for everything, which means users already have their social connections and past activity baked in. The App tracks distance, calories and steps, all standard stuff, autodecting whether you’re walking, running or swimming, and breaking all of that down by time of day. There’s no multi-sport tracking or heart-rate monitoring, so you’re really only getting baseline stuff here. There’s sleep tracking onboard as well — though it’s pretty basic stuff, utilizing the accelerometer to determine how much the wearer is moving and assigning it either light or restful sleep. The info isn’t constantly updated — instead you sync via the app, with the watch’s hands spinning around the face to let you know that the onboard data is being transferred. There are, of course, some noted benefits to only going part way on the smartwatch front. Battery life is pretty close to the top. The Phase uses standard cell batteries and can last six months before having to be swapped out. The watch is also water-resistant for swimming, sweating and showing, though that’s quickly become a standard feature in full-fledged smart watches, as well. Pricing is a key factor, as well. At $175, the Phase is priced the same as Withings’. That’s about $75 more than the Misfit Shine 2, but well below, say the $400 Apple Watch. In the end, the Phase doesn’t stand out that much from the growing number of hybrid smartwatches on the market. The moving hands and color wheel are neat ideas that ultimately don’t add a ton to the offering. But it’s a solid little hybrid with a nice design and the benefit of Misfit’s half-decade of building fitness trackers. It’s a solid addition to the company’s portfolio that doesn’t do much to move the minute hand on the hybrid smartwatch space.
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Darrell Etherington
| 2,016 | 12 | 19 | null |
Semantic Machines hopes to best Google in the conversational AI game
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John Mannes
| 2,016 | 12 | 21 |
I believe it was Sartre who wisely said hell is conversational AI. Despite the best intentions of engineers, today’s machine learning really is the savior and handicap of personal assistants. Berkeley-based startup might suffer the same Achilles’ heel, but its team of 18 artificial intelligence PhDs thinks it can get farther than the current state-of-the-art establishment. To understand what Semantic Machines is trying to build, you have to think about what existing personal assistants lack. Behind relatable names and repetitive humor, Siri, Google Assistant, Cortana and Alexa all essentially work the same way — they recognize and parse speech, classify intent and then execute commands. This is a perfectly good framework for building a voice recognition system that can interface with a string of APIs, but it falls woefully short if you expect it to carry an intelligent conversation. Intelligence is a tough nut to crack; it requires more than a great classifier. To build something you don’t want to throw on the ground, you need to balance data, learning, memory, computation and some semblance of goals. Semantic is trying to double down on the memory portion to give users the experience they expect. Google’s Allo struggling with memory on my personal phone “Today’s dialog technology is mostly orthogonal,” explains Dan Klein, co-founder and chief scientist of Semantic Machines. “You want a conversational system to be contextual so when you interpret a sentence things don’t stand in isolation.” Google’s Assistant is one of the best assistants on the market, and even it struggles to carry the simplest of conversations. In the example to the right, you can see just how hard it is to get it to recall information from a message directly above. It promised to remember! Semantic Machines has aims to close the gap here and let memory stretch even further back. I sat down with Dr. Klein and CEO Daniel Roth at the company’s HQ to see a demonstration in person. The image below is from the company’s website, but appropriately reflects my live demo. In an exchange about booking a hotel, Semantic’s AI is able to take in information and make recommendations at a level of sophistication that just isn’t commonplace today. Of course, much of this is dependent on API integrations, but it shows promise. With the right integrations, Semantic Machines offers a robust alternative While not pictured, the same AI was able to recall the booking of a previous San Francisco trip and W hotel reservation to easily rebook at a later date. Roth doesn’t have plans to release Semantic Machine’s AI to consumers. Instead, he wants to package it up and sell it to enterprises so they can offer better services to customers. This makes sense from a business model and adoption standpoint. Unfortunately, even though services like Siri and Google Assistant struggle, they’re deeply integrated. It doesn’t matter how advanced a conversational AI is if it doesn’t have the administrative power to execute tasks on your iPhone. With this model, Semantic Machines also gets to monetize its product for specific use cases. Right now Roth is focusing on customer support and commerce, but that list is by no means finite. The stacked team is laser focused putting the finishing touches on its proprietary internal framework. Once the system is fine tuned, it will be easy to add future integrations. It’s important not to undervalue Semantic’s team and the statement it makes to the competitive industry. Despite being an early-stage startup, Semantic employees have more than 250 research publications to their names, and 300 patents. That type of brain power, concentrated together in a single startup, is rare. Companies like Facebook and Google can offer compensation packages to top AI researchers that are out of reach for most. That hurdle really can only be overcome with a team that’s juiced-up about the product they are building. That definitely seems to be the case over at Semantic Machines.
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Everyone got into the tech M&A game in 2016
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John Mannes
| 2,016 | 12 | 21 |
Neither public markets nor tech giants offered any solace in 2016 for the ever-growing list of private unicorns. with valuations over $1 billion, the most in history. While interest in an all-expenses paid trip to the NYSE valuation guillotine was at an all-time low, non-traditional Fortune 500 companies did pluck a lucky few from the skies at very serious valuations. Moving into 2017, there’s little indication that trend is going to do anything but accelerate, especially given that every company is now essentially a software company. First came the venture arms, then came — now Fortune 500 companies are starting to embrace the idea of fully acquiring very mature tech startups. of in August gave hope to unicorn founders that big wins aren’t merely a relic of the past. Continuing into November, the insurance, automotive and consumer goods industries all showed a preference for tech, according to Data is limited because billion-plus-dollar acquisitions aren’t really a commonplace occurrence, but it’s safe to say that the aforementioned acquisitions generally fall into two categories. Most commonly, traditional players are looking to access new demographics. This was the case with , and to some extent . Walmart’s e-commerce business has been eaten alive by Amazon in recent years, Unilever is getting cornered by a streamlined competitor preaching convenience and Allstate is struggling to get its message across to a millennial generation that has only previously bought insurance for their smartphones. On the other side of the spectrum, some companies, particularly in the automotive sector, are just struggling to keep up. The shift to electric and autonomous vehicles is occurring at roughly the same time, and it is proving to be a challenge for traditional manufacturers. While most of us were not paying attention, major automakers relocated their and to start brushing elbows with software engineers. As software continues to eat its way through the world, This comes as mere startups, like Uber, have reached like GM. If 2017 holds to expectations, we will see a greater number of tech IPOs and acquisitions, particularly from non-traditional buyers. It wouldn’t be hard to imagine a startup like , which builds LiDAR technology, being acquired by an automotive parts manufacturer looking to cut the corner on innovation like . It also wouldn’t surprise me if a strong brand like got picked up by or if a major retailer like acquired . This is to say nothing of the myriad acquisitions of tech companies with valuations under $1 billion, increasing M&A activity of international companies and to add fuel to the fire with lower taxes and reduced regulatory oversight.
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This guy combined an iPhone and an HTC Vive to make a virtual camera (sort of like the ones used for Avatar and Inside Out)
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Greg Kumparak
| 2,016 | 12 | 21 |
When a movie is more CG than it is real — think movies like Avatar or any of Pixar’s stuff, where all or nearly all of the environment is rendered — a new challenge appears: the camera. Getting a fake camera (like the one in a rendering program) to move and behave like a real camera (like the one that the camera guy is traditionally holding) can be a pain. Testing a scene from a whole different angle is less “hey, let’s try that again real quick and I’ll shoot it from over there,” and more “hey, let’s tear open keyframes and rework a bunch of carefully set parameters.” James Cameron and the folks at Pixar have been solving this with “virtual cameras” — physical camera-like devices that let videographers shoot fully virtual scenes much like they would shoot any scene in the real world. They tie a simulated camera to the movements/orientation of a real-world camera proxy, and push everything the simulated camera “sees” back to a display on its real-world counterpart in real time. As you might expect, these virtual camera rigs are… not cheap. , the VFX artist behind the REALLY, REALLY for VR games like Space Pirate Trainer and Fantastic Contraption, has hacked together a solution of his own: VR in-game Virtual Cinematography just got a whole lot easier!! Check this out :D — Kert Gartner (@kertgartner) So what are you looking at? Kert is having Space Pirate Trainer render another view of the game to a second camera, independent of the player’s, in one corner of his screen. He’s using an open source project called to push what this camera sees to his iPhone in near real time. Meanwhile, he’s using a third HTC Vive controller (beyond the two the player uses for the game) to capture the location and orientation of the rig, and is using that to control the aforementioned in-game camera view. Strap the iPhone and an HTC Vive controller to a handheld stabilizer and bam! — he’s got a virtual camera built out of gear he already had lying around. It doesn’t look like it does the crazy stuff the Cameron/Pixar rigs do — those can do stuff like tweaking the simulated F-stop and focus (which would have to be accounted for at a software level in every game/environment with a rig like this in mind, which complicates things a good bit). But for a project hacked together out of existing components, this is — and hopefully, just the first step.
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Waymo enters formal talks with Honda to collaborate on self-driving
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Darrell Etherington
| 2,016 | 12 | 21 |
Former Google self-driving car project Waymo is wasting no time demonstrating its readiness to enter into commercial agreements — the Alphabet-owned autonomous driving technology company is in formal discussions with Honda on partnering up to use Waymo self-driving software and sensors on Honda vehicles. Honda announced the discussions, which preface a potential collaboration between the two companies, via . The automaker would provide engineers that would work hand-in-hand with Waymo engineers to develop vehicles intended to join with Waymo’s current fleet of test cars. Honda positions this as a parallel effort to its own “on-going” attempts to bring automated driving to highways for its customers sometime around 2020. It says the Waymo tie-up would “allow Honda R&D to explore a different technological approach to bring fully self-driving technology to market,” alongside what it’s already working on via its Silicon Valley Lab and through engineering efforts based out of Tochigi, Japan. Waymo also just took possession of from Honda competitor FCA, and will deploy those in its fleet, as well. This new potential partnership with Honda, if it progresses beyond this formal discussion stage, shows how potentially well-positioned it could be as a key supplier of autonomous tech to automakers down the road. At Waymo’s official unveiling earlier this month, the company went to considerable lengths to outline its position as a potential partner and supplier of self-driving tech to OEMs. It’ll have competition from others, including BlackBerry, Delphi and Mobileye, and potentially even Nvidia at some point down the road, but the project kicked off in 2009 at Google X and it’s clearly seeing the benefits of its early focus on true Level 4 and Level 5 autonomy (which is to say self-driving that requires no human intervention, or even pedals or a steering wheel) pay off in terms of its appeal as a technology partner.
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GM taps 500 Startups to find early-stage investments in upcoming classes
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Matthew Lynley
| 2,016 | 12 | 21 |
GM has made a number of big acquisitions and investments in the past few years. It and , Uber’s biggest competitor. For the most part, GM acknowledges that it needs to figure out how to tap into new aspects of the automotive experience, CTO Jon Lauckner said. But all these companies start somewhere. And GM is looking to find them early on in addition to the big investments they already make. So GM is now going to work with 500 Startups to track down a batch of companies within each class in order to continue to expand its touch-points beyond the areas it’s currently working. A GM spokesperson clarified that these are not seed investments, and that the investments — which will be done through GM Ventures arm — will be made at GM’s discretion at the company’s Series A round or later. The decision will be based on whether the company is successful. The intent is to give those startups access to mentorship in addition to what they’ll typically find through 500 Startups through GM’s network. GM will be seeking out 5 companies (though that is not a hard and fast number, Lauckner said) within each batch to make investments with 500 Startups. The firm is currently , and a partnership like this could also help it further differentiate itself from other accelerators. In fact, 500 Startups So while this is of course good for GM to get access to the 500 Startups pipeline, it’s good for 500 Startups to also find more added value it can provide to its batch companies beyond its marketing and growth help. Working with a firm like 500 Startups — which has seen hundreds of companies go through its program — can give GM access to a big pipeline of companies and the firm’s extended network to find new potential investments. 500 Startups works to find plenty of companies that are outside of domestic markets. The investments aren’t going to be fully restricted to the typical automotive areas that you might expect. That could expand to infotainment, machine learning startups and other kinds that might provide some kind of parallel or perpendicular support to GM’s core businesses. With these kinds of investments normally come opportunities to get access to partnerships — or even acquisitions — down the line as it builds a support network for early-stage startups. A GM spokesperson clarified that the investments that GM is making are not seed investments, and are instead to be made at a later time at GM’s discretion.
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Move over Cas9, CRISPR-Cas3 might hold the key to solving the antibiotics crisis
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Sarah Buhr
| 2,016 | 12 | 21 |
Researchers at North Carolina-based think they have a potential cure for antibiotic resistance using CRISPR’s lesser-known Cas3 enzyme. Most of the interest in CRISPR technology centers around the enzyme Cas9, which acts as a type of genetic scissors, allowing scientists to snip out, edit and replace DNA at certain intervals along the genome. However, Cas3 goes beyond Cas9 by targeting the DNA of bacterial cells and then chewing them up beyond the point of repair. This action turns the CRISPR-based bacterial immune system on itself, prompting the cell’s death. Co-founder Paul Garofolo likens the process to Pac-Man. “It comes in and it chews the target DNA so when a Pac-Man chews the chromosome it in turns kills the bacterium,” Garofolo told TechCrunch. And he and his co-founder Rodolphe Barrangou believe the technique could be used on dangerous antibiotic-resistant bacteria. The coming antibiotic resistance crisis has been called one of the world’s most pressing public health problems. Just imagine a world in which we had nothing to cure pneumonia, gonorrhea or meningitis. The introduction of penicillin in the 1940s was a life saver for millions, heralding the dawn of the antibiotic era. But, according to the Centers for Disease Control, more than half of the antibiotics prescribed these days for patients are inappropriate — merely killing good bacteria while weakening our immune systems and strengthening the bad bacteria, and we are fast approaching a day when we have nothing to cure us of these deadly bacterial infections. We’re already seeing the effects of antibiotic resistance in MRSA deaths. Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) — or staph — is a bacterium ironically picked up in hospitals and is highly antibiotic resistant. Though a shows MRSA infections are on the decline, two out of every 100 people are carriers and it can cause sepsis and death. Locus Biosciences hopes to head off a crisis with its patented technology and tells TechCrunch it is already in the midst of raising a significant round of Series A funding to do just that. Though it didn’t want to say how much or from whom the funding would come, Locus did tell us it was seeking finances from both strategic health investors and traditional VCs. The startup is also in the final rounds of the $2 million fund to combat antimicrobial resistance. The Locus team also comes loaded with heavy scientific and business chops. Barrangou came from Caribou Biosciences and helped found CRISPR company Intellia with Jennifer Doudna. Garofolo left Valeant Pharmaceuticals (yes, in 2008 to join pharma company Patheon as its CTO before starting Locus. Both teach in the sciences department at North Carolina State. But this technology, like gene-editing technique CRISPR-Cas9, isn’t perfect, and Barrangou and Garofolo are aware of the risks. For one it still needs to get FDA approval. And though the 21st Century Cures Act may be able to help out, it will still need to go through human trials to prove its effectiveness. On the upside, the enzyme is only able to target bacterial cells as it’s too big to enter a human cell and cause DNA damage there. You also don’t have the moral or ethical issues Cas9 presents. “We’re not trying to change baby eye colors or make super soldiers or any of those types of things…we’re killing some of the deadliest pathogens on the planet,” Garofolo said. Overall, it’s an intriguing idea and may have the potential to kill off bacterial diseases in a major way, possibly eradicating them from the face of the Earth. But, of course, all of that depends on FDA approval and proof this works in human trials first.
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Artificial leaf captures light to power drug production
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Devin Coldewey
| 2,016 | 12 | 21 |
Drug production is generally a matter of big factories churning out millions of aspirin or ibuprofen tablets a day, but there’s a lot to be said for manufacturing common drugs on a small scale, close to where they’re used. Researchers from the Netherlands have created an efficient and simple method for doing so that uses a method much like plants have for making own resources. Artificial leaves aren’t new: they’re a class of device which passively converts light into power for various purposes. Plants, of course, use photosynthesis to build their own critical chemicals, but they’re much better at it than our best imitations. In a significant step forward, however, Timothy Noël and his team at Eindhoven University of Technology have , such as those needed to assemble medical molecules. The key is their employment of a new type of material called a luminescent solar concentrator, which converts incoming light to a particular wavelength and guides it to the edges of the “leaf” (it doesn’t have to be shaped like one, by the way, but why not?). Thin channels are bored through the material, along which the chemical components of a medication can be pumped; the redirected, carefully tuned light sets off the reaction. The use of LSCs immensely improves the efficiency, making more complex and high-energy processes possible to carry out — even on cloudy days. “We now have a powerful tool at our disposal that enables the sustainable, sunlight-based production of valuable chemical products like drugs or crop protection agents,” said Noël in a TUE news release. “Using a reactor like this means you can make drugs anywhere, in principle, whether malaria drugs in the jungle or paracetamol on Mars. All you need is sunlight and this mini-factory.” For the next few missions, it’s probably simpler to just pack a bottle of pills, but for long-term production in resource-poor areas, this could certainly be a useful technology. The discovery is detailed in the researchers’ paper, published today in the journal Angewandte Chemie.
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Zuckerberg implies Facebook is a media company, just “not a traditional media company”
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Josh Constine
| 2,016 | 12 | 21 |
Mark Zuckerberg gave new insights about how he sees Facebook’s role in informing the world today during a one-on-one year-end chat with COO Sheryl Sandberg. Facebook’s CEO also lent support to employees trying to fight fake news today, though reports indicated some employees were dissatisfied by his initially tepid response to the issue. “Facebook is a new kind of platform. It’s not a traditional technology company,” he said today, mirroring when Facebook launched product updates and partnerships with outside fact-checkers to . But then he went a step further, now saying “It’s not a traditional media company. You know, we build technology and we feel responsible for how it’s used.” That implies Zuckerberg does in fact see Facebook as some kind of media company, just not like the old ones that created the content themselves.
[Update: We’ve added more details on why the media label matters] This is a significant shift from how Zuckerberg has discussed Facebook and media in the past. In August while in Rome to meet the Pope, reports that Zuckerberg responded to an Italian who asked if Facebook would become a news editor by saying “No, we are a tech company, not a media company.” He drew a line between Facebook and publishers, explaining that “The world needs news companies, but also technology platforms, like what we do, and we take our role in this very seriously.” The reason this distinction matters is that pure technology platforms receive greater regarding the content they serve, both legally and in the public eye. This stems from the 1996 Communications Decency Act’s Section 230(c), or the Good Samaritan act, that states “No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider.” Media companies are considered more directly responsible for their content. Previous statements have seen Zuckerberg willing to have Facebook assume some of that responsibility voluntarily, while avoiding the title of ‘media company’ that could trigger more technical liability. Looking closer at the Facebook product compared to the newsroom of a media company, you could see the users as the reporters creating the stories, while the News Feed algorithm acts as the editor, deciding which stories to run and how prominently. Meanwhile, Facebook’s leaders who write the community standards and content policies also act as editors, vetoing or allowing controversial content like reports of police shootings or nude historical photographs. Facebook writes the code that applies these algorithms and policies like a technology company, but it also makes editorial decisions about what to prioritize and permit, like the editor of a media company. [Update 2: What’s consistent in this week is that Zuckerberg sees Facebook as a third institution that incorporates values of both tech and media: a place for “public discourse”. Like a town square, it’s both an inclusive venue for expression, similar to a technology platform. But it’s one bound by the values of the community that established the town and live in it, similar to a media company’s editorial policy. Though a diversity of thought can be shared, there are still laws and norms that guide what legally can and is socially acceptable to share. A town square can support heated debate while banishing purposefully abusive citizens that break the social fabric. That seems to be the balance Facebook is hoping to strike on fake news.] Later in the talk, he notes that “reflecting on 2016, this is just something that I’m proud that people in this company take so seriously,” referring to fake news. But immediately after the election, Zuckerberg was reluctant to admit fake news was a massive problem warranting urgent attention. That prompted a “renegade task force” of employees to assemble and begin meeting in secret, on November 14th. By November 18th, , discussing fake news as a more serious threat, and outlining six ways Facebook would fight it, several of which last week. Now Zuckerberg is commending his team for taking the issue “super seriously,” displaying a wise course correction that could lead Facebook to use the full extent of its power to fight disinformation. If you look across the world it’s been a really tough year. There’s just been a lot of change, regardless of which side of it you’re on. If you’re pushing a new movement and that succeeded in the political movements in the US or in Europe or in parts of Asia, even if you were on the side of that that was pushing for that, this is big change and that’s an important thing for the world. And I think that, you know, when we think about what Facebook is doing in trying to give people a voice, one of the things that we are spending a lot of time reflecting on this year and I think going forward is that we have a big responsibility to make sure that these tools are used to create the most benefit for people around the world. You know, we build technology and we feel responsible for how it’s used. We don’t write the news that people read on the platform. But at the same time we also know that we do a lot more than just distribute news, and we’re an important part of the public discourse. , because I know that people in our community…you know we’re just a small part of the social fabric around the world but we are a part of that and do have a big responsibility to get that right and keep on doing better and better work for people around the world. I know that people here take that super seriously.
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Waggle raises $2.3 million because the internet doesn’t have enough funny animal videos
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Lora Kolodny
| 2,016 | 12 | 7 |
A startup called raised $2.3 million in seed funding to become the go-to destination for animal lovers and pet parents online, and for sharing all the cute pups and madcap kitteh adventures they have to offer. The New York City-based startup was incubated at , the venture arm of the production company behind premium comedy shows like 30 Rock, Portlandia and Saturday Night Live, among others. Co-founder and CEO Matt Cavnar said, “There was nothing out there community-driven around pets and animals. We think the bond people have with their pets, and people’s love of animals is a strong emotional one. Yet nobody was celebrating and promoting that.” To get its programming, Waggle collects user-generated pet content from users of its mobile app and website. It sifts out the gems from contributors, edits and adds a bit of production gloss to certain clips or images, then syndicates these as new media programming to the Waggle audience via multiple formats including an e-mail newsletter, website, mobile app, and Facebook account. Among other gags, one of Waggle’s quirky e-mail newsletters is written humorously from the point of view of animals. And the startup regularly live streams shows via Facebook that feature French bulldogs disco dancing, for example, or a parrot cooking. The well-connected startup also forges partnerships to fuel its digital programming. Westminster Kennel Club Dog Show, America’s Funniest Home Videos, the San Francisco SPCA, and others have partnered with Waggle to syndicate their content online, which helped Waggle build its early audience. On Facebook, Waggle has already aired at least 1,000 hours of live streaming pet videos, and garnered more than 10 million views since its beta period began in September, Cavnar noted. Eventually the startup hopes to help turn pets and their owners into micro- and mega-influencers online who can generate income from product placements, or content they provide to Waggle, or publish on their own, for example via an individual Instagram account. Waggle has 8 full-time employees now with half in San Francisco. It intends to use its capital for hiring, community and content development. led Waggle’s seed round, joined by , , , Broadway Video Ventures, and angel investors including Raine was an early backer of digital media startups including Tastemade, Mobcrush, Maker Media, and Life on Air which created the influential but now defunct Meerkat live streaming app.
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Here’s the first live gameplay demonstration of the Nintendo Switch
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Fitz Tepper
| 2,016 | 12 | 7 |
Tonight Nintendo of America President Reggie Fils-Aimé ( ) went on Jimmy Fallon to show off some gameplay from Super Mario Run, Nintendo’s first iOS game that launches next week. And after playing Super Mario Run Fils-Aimé, surprised everyone and opened a gold cube containing the , Nintendo’s new next-generation console. The console is a hybrid of sorts – and can be docked to play on a TV, as well as played on the go like a Gameboy. Upon seeing the Switch Fallon understandably “geeked out”, telling Fils-Aimé he’s watched the Switch demo video “about a million times”. They duo used Switch to play the much-anticipated new Zelda game, The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. After showing off some of the new open gameplay, Fils-Aimé actually pulled the Switch out of the dock and started playing the same game in the mobile-mode. And while they didn’t detach the two remotes, Fallon showed how there is a kickstand on the back so it can be propped up when you want to play in mobile-mode with the controllers. Check out the clip above to first see some live footage from Super Mario Run, then about halfway through footage of the Switch.
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‘Super Mario Run’ and the shape of Nintendo to come — an interview with Reggie Fils-Aimé
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Brian Heater
| 2,016 | 12 | 7 |
Mario’s accomplished a lot in the three and a half decades he’s spent in the public spotlight. He’s been a plumber, a soldier, a doctor, refereed basketball and tennis, played baseball and raced cars, made toys and worked at a brewery. He’s lived through every Nintendo console and watched generations of competitors rise and fall. But in spite of one of the most impressive resumes in all of video gamedom, his arrival on iOS was anything but smooth. Over the past decade, the company made it sufficiently clear that mobile was not and would never be the right play for Nintendo. You don’t have to dig too far to find a rich vein of quotes expressing that viewpoint, but here’s one that does the job pretty well: Having a hardware development team in-house is a major strength. It’s the duty of management to make use of those strengths. It’s probably the correct decision in the sense that the moment we started to release games on smartphones, we’d make profits. However, I believe my responsibility is not to short-term profits, but to Nintendo’s mid- and long-term competitive strength. But industries and buying habits change, and in order to survive, companies must shift accordingly. For Nintendo, that meant a reappraisal of how the gaming giant approached mobile gaming. “We have reshaped our overall business mission and key strategies that are driving it,” Nintendo of American President Reggie Fils-Aimé told TechCrunch in a sit-down interview ahead of the launch of the company’s latest mobile offering. “Our business mission is to make people smile through the use of our IP.” While Nintendo hasn’t shied away from its long-standing dedication to the marriage between platform and game, the opportunity presented by mobile was ultimately too strong to ignore, albeit from a sheer fiscal standpoint and from the point of view of a company looking to reach a new generation of users and underserved parts of the globe with the most valuable intellectual property in the business. It wasn’t exactly kicking and screaming, but no one can accuse Nintendo of launching headlong into a vibrant new format. In March of this year, the company took its first stab at the space in the form of Miitomo, a sort of social network built around Wii-like avatars and tied to the company’s My Nintendo program. The app started off strong, but a few months later, engagement had dropped off sharply. It was a strange choice for Nintendo’s long-awaited mobile arrival. It wasn’t a game, really, and it didn’t leverage any of the aforementioned IP. No Zelda, no Mario, not even a Samus or Kid Icarus. And then . The Niantic-developed app was a veritable phenomenon, a perfect fusion of Nintendo charm and mobile technology, utilizing geolocation and camera-based AR technologies in a way that simply couldn’t exist on other platforms. And in the process, it created the sort of gaming event that only comes a few times in a generation. It also managed to reignite interest in one of the company’s top properties. “Since the launch of Pokémon GO this summer, we’ve seen Nintendo 3DS have year over year growth,” says Fils-Aimé. “We’ve seen the unprecedented launch of Pokémon Sun and Moon. For us what this signals is that, if we get millions or billions of consumers to interact with our IP, the halo effect that it can have across all of our business lines is tremendous. That’s a fundamentally different strategy trajectory that we were on 10, 15 years ago. “ Next up is . Set for a release this month exclusively on iOS, the title marks the arrival of the one Nintendo property with even more instant cache than Pokémon. The game plays to the franchise’s strengths, built around a familiar sidescrolling format that maintains a lot of Super Mario Bros.’s familiar elements, from goombas and question-mark boxes to Bowser castles and ghosts, applying them to a slightly tweaked formula designed to play with a single hand in portrait mode, so users can play while hanging onto a subway strap. The camera advances automatically and Mario runs along with it. And, surprisingly, automatically leaps over enemies — which admittedly takes some getting used to after decades spent manually jumping on top of Koopa Troopas. The skill lies in jumping over games, grabbing power ups and collecting coins — the latter of which provides users different experiences of the same level when enough of the special pink versions are attained. “Our developers approach game development uniquely to each specific experience and game,” Fils-Aimé explains. “Super Mario Run is a game our team wanted to make accessible to everyone — five to 95. All you have to do is tap on the screen with one finger. But the ability to progress, the ability to capture all the coins, the ability to build your kingdom — that takes some mastery.” Anyone who’s spent any time in the Mushroom Kingdom will immediately feel at home among the pipes, and the Nintendo team, led by Mario’s legendary creator Shigeru Miyamoto, has done a fine job playing to the technology’s strengths, with a bright and shiny take of the portly plumber, paired with a souped-up version of the familiar soundtrack. All of that is set to newly designed levels in 24 worlds that echo but don’t directly duplicate the original. “Mr. Miyamoto and his team deserve a lot of credit for what they’ve been able to do,” Fils-Aimé continues. “Nintendo has experienced developing a wide range of different games for a wide range of different controls. Everything from the original D-Pad to the original motion controller. What we had to do was really think about how you build a compelling experience that you can literally play with one finger, by touching a screen.” The game’s appeal is, in no small part, due to its simplicity. As with the recently released NES Classic, it plays to Nintendo’s greatest strength these days: putting a new spin on the old classics. But that all-too-familiar approach has already made the $10 price point difficult for some otherwise enthusiastic gamers to swallow. While it might be less than the cost of a movie, $10 might as well be $100 for many in mobile app land — particularly in the wake of the free-to-download Pokémon GO. But between a free three-level trial and potential replay value, Fils-Aimé is confident that the company has hit the right price point. “Every game we develop — whether it’s for the home console or handheld — we ask ourselves what’s the right value for the offering,” he explains. “Look at Super Mario Run: 24 different worlds, three different modes, the on-going replayability for $9.99 here in the U.S. That’s a tremendous value, and we think in the end the consumer is going to respond accordingly, especially when they can sample a lot of the game for free.” Super Mario Run doesn’t capitalize on the iPhone’s strengths in nearly as innovative a fashion as Pokémon GO, but it does a good job playing to its relative weaknesses as a gaming system, porting Mario to a world devoid of custom controllers and massive screen real estate. Like Flappy Bird before it, it’s a game that can completed almost entirely with a single repetitive motion: the tap. And it also goes even more vertical than the first generation of platformers, with some parkour-style bounds off the sides of walls that help Mario advance to the next level, grab some elusive coinage and get out of some pretty tight scrapes. And as the NES Classic’s seemingly unmeetable demand has confirmed, the nostalgia factor alone will be more than enough to get most gamers through the door. I was only able to play through two levels in my demo, but the appeal is clear. It’s equal parts fun and frustrating the way Mario has always been. I’m not sure the purely aesthetic between-level world building or the opportunity to replay the same level in different configurations has quite the appeal Nintendo is banking on, but 24 world’s worth of gameplay should keep most casual gamers busy for a while to come. And hey, on a platform where Fruit Ninja and Angry Birds are considered classics, perhaps there’s something to be said for repetition. Playing through the game, it’s almost hard to recall the company’s initial reservations around a mobile Mario. With Miyamoto and a team of world-class developers who turned the game around in about a year, it’s easy to image where Nintendo’s mobile division would be if the company had leapt in a few years earlier, rather than stubbornly refusing to develop for someone else’s hardware. But Fils-Aimé insists that the company has no reservations about entering mobile when it did. “It really was important to be thoughtful around how this business opportunity would look in our broader business scheme,” he explains. “Being thoughtful around how we go about it and how we leverage it across all parts of our business. We’ve said for years that we could make this type of content, but for us it really was thinking about how it fits in the broader ecosystem of driving our IP. We believe we’ve found that approach. “
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The rise of the family office venture investor
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Paul Karger
| 2,016 | 12 | 21 |
Companies currently raising rounds of venture investment are inevitably learning some hard truths. Primarily, VC dollars aren’t as readily available as they were in previous years, and for the companies that are receiving funding, they’re finding that the terms are becoming increasingly less palatable. The good news for startups looking for funding is that a new pathway for direct investment is emerging: the family/multi-family offices of wealthy individuals and families. Single-family offices (SFOs) were first pioneered by the Rockefellers in the late 1800s as a way to centralize the management of the family fortune. Multi-family offices (MFOs) work under the same concept, but typically work with several wealthy families instead of just one. These offices traditionally managed investments and handled administrative items, like accounting and tax planning, property management, payroll activities, succession planning and legal affairs. The role of family offices has changed in the last 20 years, driven by the proliferation of wealth and dramatic increase in the number of millionaires, centimillionaires and billionaires around the world. There also has been a surge in the number of family offices and more sophisticated investors. According to Ernst & Young, there are now more than 3,000 outfits globally managing the money of a single family — half of which were created in the last 15-20 years. This new breed of ultra-high-net-worth families differs from the “old money” of the past. Their accumulation of wealth is typically more rapid and driven by savvy investment management or entrepreneurism. Many of those joining the ranks of the ultra-high-net-worth include money managers, former hedge fund managers and folks who generated their wealth in private equity. This represents a large population of sophisticated investors with deep networks in the startup and entrepreneurial community who are sitting on tremendous wealth (some estimates put family office total asset value around $4 trillion globally). These individuals often wish to stay in the venture investment game, but desire more transparency to underlying investments than the traditional venture investing experience provides. They also want the ability to cherry-pick the best deals. In addition, they want to avoid paying the typical “2 and 20” — a deal structure that requires investors to pay a 2 percent annual fee (some as high as 3 percent) to the VC firm on top of the 20 percent return on investment. This is why we’re seeing more of the mega-wealthy move away from only investing in private equity funds to increasingly working with their family offices to find the right types of direct investments that fit their long-term wealth-generation strategies. When you combine these factors with the emergence of cutting-edge investment platforms like that make it easier for companies to search for equity partners, the result is an exciting new funding pathway for the startup and venture communities. So what does it mean to bring on an individual or family investor in lieu of going the traditional VC route? The first thing to understand is that it’s not a growth equity fund — the primary goal of a family office is to invest wealth prudently and extend it beyond generations. Clients work with SFOs and MFOs because of the multi-disciplinary approach that ensures their wealth transfers across multiple generations in the most tax efficient manner possible, that their children and future generations have prudent investment programs implemented and that they have the appropriate infrastructure and fiduciaries installed to responsibly manage and maintain wealth. This gives family offices tremendous flexibility in the types of companies and industries that they choose for investment. These offices are typically not beholden to a set of mandates forcing investment into a predetermined space and criteria. The SFO/MFO investment process includes much more than writing a check. It’s about finding the right types of investments and management teams that are going to deliver long-term mission-driven value. Sure, everyone wants to find and fund the next unicorn, but because of the family commitments, offices of this nature are not going to do this through an indiscriminate “spray & pray” approach. Family offices are more focused on finding the opportunity and do not have a clock ticking in terms of putting funds to work like a venture fund may have. These dynamics change the investor/startup relationship, because it’s not about a quick exit. The family office isn’t running a fund with multiple investors to answer to, so they can afford to sit on the investment and help it grow. The same external pressures exerted by institutional investors to wind down investments or get out at inopportune times don’t exist. This significantly lessens the influence to artificially maintain high watermarks to receive incentive allocations. Family office decisions are based squarely on investment fundamentals, where long-term value creation replaces the 2/20 mentality. As a result, investments are more than fungible capital. It’s a commitment to align with the entrepreneur on a much deeper level. The deep, global networks of the ultra-wealthy families are used to create opportunities for the startups — from providing strategic advice, intelligence and subject matter expertise, to tangible benefits like identifying contract manufacturers to assist with the development of hardware products. So as a startup, how do you find these alternative sources of funding that offer such collateral benefits? The first and best thing you can do is look to your board and the connective network you already have. The ability to access family office networks is something to consider when building your board and team of advisors. If your existing network has been exhausted, there are events and other opportunities that can bring you closer together with angel investors and family offices. The nature of the family office induces secrecy (many don’t even have a website), which makes it nearly impossible to blast off unsolicited pitches. So it really does come down to networking. But in the end, being able to break through and figure out a way to connect with the right family office can act as a natural selection process and indicate the hallmark of a good entrepreneur and good deal. Another great place to start is identifying other entrepreneurs who have been successful in your specific space and may currently have a family office or more formal startup investment program. Most often, your ideas will resonate with these folks first and best. There’s no doubt that the slowdown in venture investment is impacting companies across industries. But entrepreneurs who open their eyes to non-traditional sources of capital and are willing to put in the legwork to identify them may find an enduring friend in the family.
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Breather raises $40 million for stylish workspaces on-demand
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Lora Kolodny
| 2,016 | 12 | 7 |
A mobile app that lets users find and book stylish workspaces on-demand, , raised a Series C round of $40 million. The funding brings Breather’s total capital raised to $73 million. led the round joined by , , and Menlo Ventures’ Managing Director Venky Ganesan told TechCrunch, in an e-mail, that Breather pitched his firm for an earlier round of funding but the partners passed. He said, “We did not think the CEO would hit his plans and that the company would use the money… But twelve months later, they hit all their plans and companies like Facebook, and Uber are using Breather all the time. A Breather space in any building becomes the most valuable space there with off the charts revenue per square foot.” The investor was tickled by the fact that people have been booking Breather rooms not just for meetings and conferences but therapy or tutoring sessions, rehearsals and even marriage proposals. According to a company statement, Breather intends to use its Series C capital for hiring, and geographic expansion, including further saturation where it already offers workspaces, and new cities as yet to be determined. Founded in 2012, Breather now operates approximately 300 spaces across 10 markets, including in Chicago, New York, San Francisco, Washington D.C., and outside of the U.S. in Toronto and London. Breather lets users book a workspace for as little as 30 minutes on very short notice. It also allows them to open the door to an office they’ve booked with a pincode delivered to their smartphones. The company’s competitors include Peerspace, Liquidspace, Sharedesk and apps from traditional office rental businesses like Regus that now allow booking of rooms via mobile.
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Microsoft outlines future mixed reality and cellular PCs with Intel and Qualcomm partnerships
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Brian Heater
| 2,016 | 12 | 7 |
If you weren’t anywhere near Shenzhen today, you likely missed some of the stories coming out of Microsoft’s . The company used the opportunity to highlight a number of partnerships and plans designed to hasten the next step in Windows evolution. At the top of the list is Project Evo, a collaboration with Intel designed at developing the next generation of PCs focused on mixed reality, gaming, AI and security. The whole project is still in the early stages, so there’s not much in the way of details, though the list of features includes the addition of far-field communications aimed at extending the range of Microsoft’s Siri/Alexa competitor, Cortana. Security upgrades include improved protection against malware and hacking, along with better biometrics through the Windows Hello system. Gaming will play a key role in Evo as well, likely through the Beam integration that made its debut during October’s Windows 10 Creators Update announcement. Functionality on that front includes game broadcasting and spatial audio. And anyone who’s been following Hololens, Windows Holographic and Creators Update won’t be all that surprised to learn that AR is a big piece of the puzzle, with Project Evo aimed at bringing Windows’ much hyped mixed reality offerings to a line of “affordable” PCs and headsets. Microsoft is also making a big play on China, on the mixed reality front, submitting HoloLens for governmental approval in that country and adding manufacturer 3Glasses to its list of headset developers that already includes Acer, ASUS, Dell, HP and Lenovo. Windows 10 support should arrive on the company’s S1 headset early next year. The software giant will also be partnering with Qualcomm to deliver the full Windows 10 experience to computers running on Snapdragon chips. “With Windows 10 on cellular PCs,” says EVP Terry Myerson, “we will help everyone make the most of the air around them. We look forward to seeing these new devices with integrated cellular connectivity and the great experiences people love like touch, pen and Windows Hello, in market as early as next year.”
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Coverage from Disrupt London 2016
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Travis Bernard
| 2,016 | 12 | 7 | null |
Light’s multi-lens L16 camera gets wider aperture but longer wait
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Devin Coldewey
| 2,016 | 12 | 7 |
We’re all curious to see whether Light’s crazy 16-lens camera can live up to its own hype, but it looks like we’ll have to wait just a little bit longer for the already-delayed gadget. On the bright side, so to speak, the camera is getting a significant improvement to its many lenses’ apertures. , Light’s creators write that they had originally planned on having the camera’s 16 modules — 5 at 28mm, 5 at 70mm, and 6 at 150mm equivalent — at a fixed F/2.4 aperture. Those have now been opened up to F/2.0, a significant improvement, although how significant is hard to say, since comparisons with traditional cameras probably wouldn’t provide much insight. Still, it’s good news for image quality and versatility, especially in low-light situations. What spurred this change is unclear, but its announcement now adds a sugar coat to an ever so slightly bitter pill delivered later in the post. The L16, you see, was originally slated for delivery over the summer, but high demand meant some got a fall shipment date instead — and then late this summer it was The latest blog post drags it out just a bit more: “We are on track to begin mass production of the L16 early in the second quarter of 2017.” Now, I might be overthinking this, but I feel like once you get out of the first quarter, it’s no longer 2017, and since that’s just the beginning of mass production, you may as well expect the camera to really start shipping in 2017. Light contacted me to say this date change really isn’t a delay, just a clarification of the earlier estimate; to me, 2Q seems a further away than “early 2017” and thus a longer wait than was suggested before, but perhaps I’m being ungenerous. “A more detailed production schedule” will come in January, so we’ll know more then. In the meantime the company is starting beta testing ( ) and has released some high-resolution images from test hardware for pixel peepers to tear apart — JPEGs but no RAW, alas. (They look a little noisy to me if I’m honest.) Lastly, there’s a lovely looking video that explains how the camera’s many-lens philosophy better in 2 minutes than I probably could. Worth watching in 1080p at full screen — hats off, whoever made this! https://vimeo.com/188140003
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This ‘artificial iris’ is like a pair of programmable shades in contact lens form
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Devin Coldewey
| 2,016 | 12 | 7 |
Smart contact lenses have been the stuff of science fiction for a long time, but as with jetpacks and faster-than-light travel, we’re still waiting on them. Research is ongoing, though, and a project at the University of Ghent shows promise not just in advancing the technology but providing some therapeutic value, as well. Herbert De Smet’s group has been working for some time with on initial applications and executions of smart lenses, and some early results were presented at IEEE’s this week. that can be set to varying opacities and patterns. Now, these patterns would be far too close to the eye for you to make them out, except perhaps as smudges or dark areas in your vision. They’re not intended to form images, however, but rather to darken the entire field of view for people who can’t do it themselves. Some people suffer from conditions that limit the ability of their eye’s iris — that’s the colored circle — to contract and dilate the pupil and control the amount of light admitted to reach the retina. If the pupil is stuck in the open state, bright situations — normally handled by reducing the pupil to a pinhole — will overwhelm the iris and cause pain or even serious damage. A contact lens that automatically changes its shade from totally transparent to as dark as a pair of sunglasses, as required by the ambient light, would fill this role nicely. That’s exactly what De Smet’s team has created; for a video of the LCD in action. The parts are in place: the LCD-infused lens and the chip that controls it are solid, and the power system, a set of tiny photovoltaic cells, captures enough energy — but the two have yet to be integrated. Once they are, the lenses will still, of course, need to be tested for safety. You can keep up with De Smet’s work at the .
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Heavy-hitting KKR just raised a $711 million tech growth fund
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Connie Loizos
| 2,016 | 12 | 7 |
, the global investment firm, is announcing a $711 million close this morning on its KKR Next Generation Technology Growth Fund, which it plans to use to back growth-stage companies in the technology, media and telco industries in North America, Europe and Israel. It’s a new product for the firm, though you might have seen its name crop up in a good many deals this past year; that’s because it began investing it nearly year ago. Among the bets it has made are the big data analytics company ; the tour-booking platform ; the cloud integration software company ; and the cyber defense company . Including those bets and others made outside the fund, KKR says it has invested more than $640 million in still-private, growth-stage investments since 2014. Some of those other investments include stakes in the anti-virus software company in the fantasy sports business ; and in the augmented reality company . What’s KKR’s criteria, exactly, when looking at these deals? According to new-hire David Welsh, who joined the firm in October from Adam Street Partners to head up the new fund, TMT Growth will be focused on “private companies that are beyond early-stage technology risk but are still scaling their market-expansion efforts and are experiencing high growth. They have technology and go-to-market models that are proven but have lacked the capital and backing of an established partner or sponsor who can help catapult their growth and development.” So what you’d guess, basically. As for the checks the fund will be writing, Welsh says these will tend to be less than $100 million and that his 12-person team will generally be targeting investments of $40 million to $50 million per company. Perhaps worth noting: The new fund doesn’t have any strict revenue thresholds, according to Welsh. In fact, it might invest in companies that still have operating losses. But it does “want to see a clear path toward profitability and evidence of a model that improves as revenue continues to scale,” he adds.
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Starbucks adds a virtual barrista, sous vide eggs and a Tencent partnership to its menu
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Lora Kolodny
| 2,016 | 12 | 7 |
At the today, the coffee and retail giant revealed some plans for 2017, including new foods comings to its cafes, and features heading to its incredibly popular mobile app. Notably absent among its announcements were any media and entertainment-related plans. In terms of its tech, Starbucks announced artificial intelligence-enabled features will soon be accessible in its popular, Starbucks Mobile App. Dubbed My Starbucks Barrista, the new features will allow customers to place orders through a messaging interface, a.k.a. chatbot, or hands-free with a voice command through the app. My Starbucks Barrista will be available on the iOS platform first, and only to a limited number of beta users in early 2017. The company also bragged about its mobile commerce achievements to-date. Starbucks reports that it has 8 million mobile paying customers now, with 1 out of 3 using Mobile Order & Pay, a feature that lets them place an order with no need to bother a cashier. The company’s success has extended to China. Starbucks reports that it is operating 2,500 stores, and opening one new store a day on average there, expecting its business in China to outpace the U.S. over time. To elevate its sales there, Starbucks has formed a strategic partnership with Tencent that will allow “social gifting” via WeChat in China. The partnership will extend WeChat Pay to all Starbucks stores in mainland China in December. Additionally, in a quest to double the sales of food in its stores by 2021, Starbucks announced forthcoming items it will add to its menus including organic soups, fresh salads, a gluten-free sandwich and sous vide “egg bites.” The Sous Vide Egg Bites, which will debut at Starbucks cafes in January 2017, are cooked with a method that’s been trendy among sophisticated chefs and food fanatics. It involves placing ingredients like steak, fish or eggs, in an airtight bag and heating them in a water bath, or a kind of mini-sauna, at a consistent temperature. Making the mainstream, fast food eater more aware of this cooking technique could stoke demand for sous vide home appliances. Although, from an environmental standpoint, it’s sort of a shame to think that disposable bags would be required for cooking, and not just packaging, all the eggs Starbucks can sell. We’ve reached out to Starbucks for more information about the sous vide technique they’ll be using in their kitchens.
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Airbnb’s plan to compromise with cities as regulatory challenges pile up
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John Mannes
| 2,016 | 12 | 7 |
Airbnb looks to be making a key strategy change with regards to its global lobbying efforts. After a that , Airbnb is rallying behind an age-old political tool — the compromise. Any good negotiation comes with table strategy. In Airbnb’s case, this takes the form of a prescriptive list of policy recommendations, as well as a firm bottom line of what the company feels is ultimately disruptive to its users, and, in many cases, the self-interest of local municipalities themselves. Ultimately, Airbnb has limited power in stopping governments from instituting any of the following regulations, but its latest release makes it very clear what the company’s preferences are and what it sees as its responsibilities.
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What the drone industry wants from the FAA and Trump
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Lora Kolodny
| 2,016 | 12 | 7 |
The commercial drone industry in the U.S. hasn’t heard much from the President-elect about his plans for rulemaking that will impact their business and global competitiveness. Last month, Associated Press broke the story that Trump is interested in , wresting that responsibility from the Federal Aviation Administration and handing it to a nonprofit chartered by Congress. But we still don’t know what his take might be when it comes to drones, which operate in lower airspace. Drones, of course, could be exceedingly useful to real estate companies, like Trump’s own, in terms of delivering aerial inspections and security surveillance around properties. So one would expect Trump to have a solid understanding of their potential, along with major players in the commercial drone industry domestically. In August, the FAA enacted its which provides national and universal rules around the commercial use of unmanned aerial vehicles that weigh up to 55 lbs. Meanwhile, NASA has been working with a range of tech companies — including Precision Hawk, Verizon (the parent company of TechCrunch), Gryphon Sensors, Airware, Flirty, SkySpecs, ne3rd, Harris/Exelis, Unmanned Experts — to develop to keep drones from colliding with each other or critical infrastructure. We do know that Trump has chosen as Transportation Secretary. A veteran of the Department of Transportation, her duties will include oversight of the Federal Aviation Administration and other offices like the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. Now, aviation and drone industry insiders are eagerly waiting to see who will join Chao’s team as FAA administrator. This week, a drone industry trade group called the sent the Trump transition team a letter with some policy and personnel recommendations. The letter encouraged Trump to “hire commercial drone experts into the new administration.” According to the co-executive directors of the group, Lisa Ellman and Gretchen West, who are both attorneys with the law firm Hogan Lovells, the industry group is hoping Trump’s FAA will prioritize the following: “The government must make it easier for everyone to participate in the regulatory process,” Ellman says.
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Alto’s next mobile gaming adventure is an Odyssey
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Darrell Etherington
| 2,016 | 12 | 7 |
Alto’s Adventure is still to pick up and play on the commute, on the airplane or basically anywhere I have both my iPhone and a few minutes to spare. The endless snowboarding adventure is one part mobile game and one part “in the zone” chill-out experience. But now there’s going to be a follow-up, and it’ll be more than an adventure — it’ll be an . Alto’s Odyssey is the name of the next game from Alto’s Adventure developer Snowman, a small studio based in Toronto. We don’t yet know much about what the Odyssey will contain, and Snowman isn’t tipping its hand; a tells you basically nothing, beyond that it’s coming in 2017. There’s also a teaser image, and we can get into some intense analysis of what’s going on in that visual. There are familiar components, including a bunting line in the foreground, but also much more grandiose structures, and hot air balloons. Also, Snowman founder Ryan Cash tells me that ideas for what eventually become this game were in the works before Alto’s Adventure was even released. It’s likely to be great, whatever it is, given Snowman’s track record. As a refresher, here’s some gameplay footage from the game’s original launch to lend you some zen.
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Harvesting next-gen technologies for the farm
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Michael Dix
| 2,016 | 12 | 7 |
It’s entirely possible — even probable — that the evolutionary, cutting-edge developments in the 21st century world of agriculture over the past few years have slipped under your radar. Fair enough, you’re busy. We get that. But that doesn’t mean that a massive and relatively stealthy disruption isn’t happening as we speak. In fact, you could argue that the period between right now and the arrival of the next Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) in 2030 will be as fundamentally transformative to the world of farming as the one that earned “The Father of the Green Revolution,” , a Nobel Peace Prize in 1970. In the 1950s and 1960s, the Green Revolution brought smallholder farming into the modern age. Modern seed stocks, industrial fertilizers and mechanized farm tools increased agricultural production across the globe. But that revolution may have also reduced agricultural biodiversity and increased the use of pesticides and herbicides, both of which threatened global food security. How have things changed since then, and how might they apply to both smallholder and industrial farming? Because of a confluence of global trends and macroeconomic indicators, the way we grow and harvest food for an increasingly exploding population couldn’t be at a more critical juncture than it is today. Here are the sobering facts: Right now, there are almost 7 1/2 billion people in the world. By 2050, that number is expected to mushroom to nearly 10 billion — more and more of whom (60 percent) will live in urban centers, where they’ll be much less likely to produce their own food. At the same time, as incomes are going up and extreme poverty recedes (the world’s poorest population has gone down by about 10 percent over the past decade), people’s diets will change. Higher incomes will lead to a greater consumption of meat. Meat production requires tons of land, energy and water — resources that could be used for smarter calorie production. So not only will there be shifting demands and a more selective approach to consumption, there will be growing needs to find sustainable solutions. To help meet this increasingly yawning gap between supply and demand, farmers need to be smarter and more efficient. That’s where technology comes in — the point on the X-Y axis where meets We recently completed an investigation into the complex and promising field of agtech. With an eye to where technology can best address the gap, we talked to farmers, agriculture startups and robot makers to uncover insights for what might usher in the next agricultural surge forward. Using existing farmland to grow more food isn’t sustainable. And it also isn’t as easy as it sounds. In fact, you could argue that it’s becoming harder for three main reasons. First, yield growth rates are beginning to plateau amongst richer, more developed countries that set the modern standard for agricultural production. This raises questions about our ability to meet the needs of a growing population with current methods. Second, the economics of agriculture are getting tighter (input prices are growing faster than commodity prices). Third, weather has become more variable as a result of climate change, making yields more unpredictable. But while it might seem obvious to some that technology can help mitigate some of these challenges, the fact is that agriculture is the least digitized major industry in the U.S. (according to 2015 from the McKinsey Global Institute). The good news is, that’s changing. Agricultural technology is beginning to force industry-wide digitization that could usher in an era of more sustainable production: Maybe it’s taken longer than it could have (or should have), but agriculture has become the latest industry to be unbundled by technology and the Internet of Things. Large companies and venture capital have heard the ring of the agtech dinner bell and have responded as you’d expect. Monsanto (agreed to acquisition by Bayer) and Syngenta (undergoing sale to ChemChina) recognized how the industry was changing and began actively investing in and acquiring startups with the focus of inserting themselves in the agtech chain. Recognizing the instability and potential financial upside of the moment, VCs have responded by pouring money into the category (to the tune of a record $1.6 billion in 2015). Data is the new coin of the realm, and agtech companies are seeking new ways to use data to create value for farmers across four key areas: Unlike buying a home with a research tool like Zillow (which provides a level of visibility that didn’t exist a decade ago), agriculture remains an opaque marketplace. Until recently, farmers had a hard time benchmarking their costs for seed and fertilizer, and expected yields based on inputs and soil type. They relied on word of mouth. Now, with companies like and , platforms exists for viewing data about other farmers’ costs and yields and global market factors. The result is greater transparency and farmers making more informed decisions. Farmers access experts routinely in the form of agronomists, meteorologists and financial advisors. However, now farmers can use products built upon expertise in data science, computer vision and machine learning. Without needing to understand these complicated subjects and their technology, farmers can use innovative products to capture the information they need. Companies like are using these to provide farmers across the globe highly localized and accurate weather predictions customized to their specific fields. Hardware companies like are making smart boxes that attach to the hitch of a tractor, which then uses computer vision and machine learning to scan crops as they pass over them, pinpointing the optimal place to plant and fertilize, as well as identify the ideal time to harvest crops. Automation crept into farming in the form of auto-steering tractors powered by GPS, but the industry still lacked simple business intelligence and workflow tools common to run-of-the-mill technology companies. Automation is now penetrating agriculture not only in the form of fully , and , but also in the form of that move away from Excel spreadsheets, sticky notes and white boards. “Doing more with less” is a mantra farmers have followed for generations. With productivity slowdowns occurring in wealthier nations, the magnitude and variability of weather impacts increasing and general resource constraint, precision is more important than ever. Agtech uses technology to manage commercial farms more like other 21st century businesses. That can mean customized nutrient addition and that tell you how hard your plant has to work to suck water out of the ground. The result is the kind of precision that gives farmers a level of control they never had before. So what does this mean looking forward? We’ll leave you with four predictions for where agtech might take us by the time the 2030 SDGs roll around:
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Facebook just secured an e-money license in Ireland, paving the way for Messenger payments in Europe
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Steve O'Hear
| 2,016 | 12 | 7 |
Paving the way for friend-to-friend payments to come to Facebook Messenger in Europe (and after the functionality debuted in the U.S. ), Facebook has quietly secured an e-money license from the Central Bank of Ireland. A quick search of the state bank’s shows that Facebook Payments International Limited was granted a license on the 24th of October. Specifically, the license pertains to e-money issuing and payment services provision and includes credit transfer, payment transactions and money remittance. And, due to Ireland being a member of the European Union, Facebook can take advantage of so-called passporting — meaning that the license applies throughout the other 27 EU member states. It’s not clear, however, why it took Facebook so long to acquire a European license. It was reported in the FT that Facebook began the process back in 2014 (Update: Facebook says the report was inaccurate and that the Central Bank of Ireland issued the license within its normal 90-day turn around). At the same time, we were about the company’s tentative attempts at acquiring one of London’s fintech money transfer startups. I’ve since heard a much more definitive story that one of those companies went as far as meeting with Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, but I digress… The other question is what exactly Facebook plans to do with its new license. Will it simply roll out Facebook Messenger Pay in Europe for friends wanting to send each other money in the same currency and in the same country or will it delve into currency exchange, which would seem to be more appropriate for Europe. As François Briod, founder of money transfer comparison site Monito and the person who me to the license, tells TechCrunch: It the short term, it means that Facebook Messenger will be able to roll out its peer-to-peer payment features in Europe. It could compete with the likes of Paym or Barclays’ Pingit in the UK, but most likely also democratize peer-to-peer mobile payments which did not take off as quickly as in the US. But there are also open questions about its potential in the mid-term: Is Facebook Messenger going to offer money transfers in all EU currencies, or only in Euro? Will the service be available for cross-border transactions within the same currency (e.g. euro in France > Euro in Germany) or extended to cross-currency transfers (e.g. GBP in the United Kingdom > EUR in Spain)? Facebook has confirmed its European e-money license and issued TechCrunch the following statement: “Facebook Payments International Ltd. (FBPIL) is pleased to confirm we have been approved authorization as an electronic money institution by the Central Bank of Ireland (CBI). The license enables us to roll out products like charitable donations on Facebook or peer-to-peer payments via Messenger in Europe, as we have in the U.S. The license authorizes FBPIL to issue donations from Facebook users to charities registered in the European Economic Area (EEA) only; and peer-to-peer payments, within the EEA.”
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Tread connects car enthusiasts via plate numbers
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Kristen Hall-Geisler
| 2,016 | 12 | 7 |
It is not uncommon in the automotive enthusiast community to admire another’s ride. The best most people could do was give a thumbs-up as they passed or leave a note on a parked car’s windshield. But no more; this is 2016. Today launches, an app that connects enthusiasts using their license plate numbers. There are many questions a person might have about the wisdom of an app like this. First of all, are drivers expected to use it while they’re driving? “We don’t want anybody texting while they’re driving,” said CEO and founder Jason Bosnak. “It’s not our intention for users to talk about a driver right in front of them.” He suggests letting a passenger, if you’ve got one in the car with you, use the app. Or remember the license plate number and message them via Tread when you’re parked. Or use a dash cam to capture the number for later. The press materials for the app said that users could message other users to challenge them to a race, which Bosnak admitted was poor wording. “You could find someone who has a car that’s similar to your car and ask about parts and problems, ask if they race,” he said. “It’s not necessarily a race-off in the streets. We’re not promoting people break laws everywhere.” Tread is promoting that enthusiasts can communicate with each other via this app rather than using forums or Facebook pages devoted to one make or even one single model. “It’s a segmented community,” Bosnak said. If you’re into cars, even if you’re really into your car, you’re probably also into other cars. Tread is aiming to connect people like you to share events, cool cars on the street and virtual garages. Over the past year, Bosnak has worked to make a simple app to use on the go and a website with features like the virtual garage and connections to Facebook and Twitter. The app — which is available for iOS now and Android within a month or two — will always be free to users, but Bosnak hopes to use targeted ads. “We could pair up advertisers with the cars you drive or are interested in,” he said. For example, if you post on Tread about needing new front brake discs, the app could show you when those discs are on sale at the AutoZone a mile from your house. The last concern is privacy, and it’s a concern for Bosnak too. “It’s very important, and we’ve spent a considerable amount of time thinking about it,” he said. He’s spoken with lawyers regarding the reasonable expectation of privacy; a car parked on the street is fair game, but a car parked in someone’s driveway is not. “We want to protect people so information isn’t disclosed,” Bosnak said. “It’s something the internet is challenged with.” Members have complete control over their vehicles on the site and can remove any post they don’t like. “I’m sure we’ll continue to learn how to better control our network. We want it to be enjoyable and safe for everyone to use.”
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Google open sources Embedding Projector to make high-dimensional data more manageable
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John Mannes
| 2,016 | 12 | 7 |
This morning, , Embedding Projector. The tool will help machine learning researchers to visualize data without having to install and run TensorFlow. Dimensionality, and vectors in general, is not something that most of us find easy to understand. The problem is that we all live in a three-dimensional world. We are taught length, width and height, so we struggle to imagine what a forth, fifth or sixth dimension might look like — this is why most of us found Christopher Nolan’s in the movie Interstellar. Instead of thinking about dimensionality of the world as we know it, try to just think purely about data. If I asked you to compare two houses, you might start by making a list of criteria that differentiate the houses. This list could include color, size, roof style and yard shape. This model could be considered a four-dimensional model. You could choose to visualize this data in a table, or you could try to represent it as a picture. To get there, you would have to use vectors. For a simple four dimensional model of two houses, you could actually create a chart in PowerPoint using traditional X and Y axis measurements in addition to features like bubble size and bubble color. For a significantly more complex model with thousands of dimensions, traditional tools start to break down. That’s where Google’s Embedding Projector comes in. If you have ever used Spotify’s Discover Weekly, you have run head on into embeddings, you just didn’t know it. At the advanced machine learning level, vector mappings can represent the attributes of songs. Mapping an entire collection of music against the preferences of an individual listener enables users to get personalized, accurate, music recommendations — something that just would not work in PowerPoint.
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Anthony Ha
| 2,016 | 12 | 21 | null |
Used-car marketplace Beepi shuts down outside of CA, merges with stealth Fair.com
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Ingrid Lunden
| 2,016 | 12 | 7 |
After going through nearly $150 million in funding, peer-to-peer used-car marketplace is shifting gears. TechCrunch has learned and confirmed that the startup is shutting down its operations outside of California, laying off 180 staff, and merging its remaining business with , a new venture co-founded by several car industry veterans that has yet to launch. The reduced size will leave Beepi with 80 employees. They are being told about the fate of the company this morning. TechCrunch understands that Beepi hit some bumps this year when one of its key strategic investors out of China decided that it wanted to pull out of the startup. A Beepi spokesperson would not confirm which backer pulled out but we believe it is Chinese automaker SAIC, which was revealed as an investor earlier this year in December 2015. Pointedly, that round had when Beepi first started to raise in May 2015. We also have learned that Beepi also approached at least one competitor to try to sell itself. “We’ve suspected that this may happen; in fact Beepi even approached us recently about buying their company,” wrote George Arison, co-founder and CEO of Beepi’s rival , in an internal email to his staff shared with TechCrunch. Shift, which has , including a $50 million round from Goldman Sachs last year, has instead turned its attention to picking up customers in the wake of Beepi winding down its marketing and other business. So into the vacuum came Fair. The still-stealth venture is fronted by Enjoy the freedom to drive the car you want for as long as you want,” it notes. “And when you’re ready, you can trade up, try something new, or just walk away.” Beepi’s business, which never expanded outside the U.S. but had been live in some 16 markets before today, was based around the idea of users consigning their cars to the company, which would inspect and spruce them up, sell them online, and then deliver them to their new owners. You may have seen the company’s distinctive bows across the hoods of the cars, if you’ve never used the service yourself. “Everyone gets a bow”, the company notes on its site. The cars would look practically new, but the prices were a huge drop on those of actually new vehicles. In a way, however, the business of users cars is as old as cars itself, and it seems that what Beepi was doing was not as defensible as it hoped it would be. Other dealers soon also began offering the same perks, but with a far smaller cost base, since they would already have established, more localised businesses. It will be interesting to see what kind of a twist Fair.com will put on this model and whether they can drive a business that Beepi could not. Ale Resnik, co-founder and CEO of Beepi, is staying on and believes that they will. “Georg, Scott, and Fedor are auto industry veterans that I deeply admire, and I’m excited to join forces with them to focus on the future of the car-buying industry,” he said in a statement. “Beepi will benefit immeasurably from this partnership.” Prior to this merger, Beepi had raised $149 million with Yuri Milner, Fabrice Grinda, Comerica and Foundation Capital, among some 35 others.
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Niantic confirms new Pokémon are coming
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Katie Roof
| 2,016 | 12 | 7 |
Niantic, the creator of the massively popular smartphone game, Pokémon Go, has confirmed that new Pokémon characters will be unveiled this Monday.
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CNote looks to upend traditional savings with the help of good timing
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John Mannes
| 2,016 | 12 | 7 |
Believe it or not, the money you have in your savings account right now is probably losing you money. In today’s economy, inflation outpaces the interest rates that banks pay to encourage saving money — this makes penny pinching less prudent than many might think. Catherine Berman, a former Managing Director at Charles Schwab and founder of a new YCombinator Fellowship backed startup called , believes she can solve this problem with a decades old, slightly obscure, financial entity called a CDFI or community development financial institution. By taking advantage of changes to the JOBS act, Berman, and her co-founder Yuliya Tarasava want to use CDFIs to bring 2.5 percent interest rates to savers. Cat Berman, co-founder of CNote are an integral part of economic development in the United States. They support affordable housing, minority owned business and other entities that may struggle to get the capital they need from traditional banks. CDFIs have attained almost cult status in the last decade due to their effectiveness and recognized financial stability. — it’s a lot of energy for a “There were 1200 people there; 7:30am breakfast networking sessions drew crowds of 60, breakout sessions were maxed out, and at one point you weren’t allowed upstairs to the lobby outside the ballroom where lunch was being held at all because it was too full,” CDFIs are only accessible over the counter to “accredited investors.” According to the Securities and Exchange Commission, this accreditation is only granted for individuals that can demonstrate either an income of $200k for two years running or a net worth of $1 million, excluding the value of one’s primary residence. However, while non-accredited investors are still prohibited from purchasing unregistered securities, CNote can itself receive accreditation to sell access to CDFIs if it can demonstrate its own financial health and the long-term feasibility of its business model. Since CNote hasn’t yet been approved to resell CDFIs to the average consumer, the savings isn’t really available yet — that is, unless you’re loaded (accredited investors can start using CNote today). Berman and a team of lawyers have been working to solve this and she throughly expects CNote to be approved by the time the product launches for unaccredited investors in March. Moreover, your money will have limited liquidity on CNote. Today, the service will let users withdraw 10 percent of their savings on a quarterly basis, with advance notice, but the plan is to ease up on the withdrawal cap by next year. Berman explains that limiting access to capital is actually one way to behaviorally nudge best financial practices. Moving money in and out of savings accounts and other investments is generally a bad strategy, unless you happen to be a particularly skilled day trader. In outstanding circumstances, Berman said she is willing to work with savers on an individual basis to get them their money outside of the aforementioned quarterly liquidity. It’s also true that these limits help CNote to minimize transactional volatility with their CDFI suppliers. Yuliya Tarasava, co-founder of CNote Eventually CNote wants to offer a full suite of savings products with varying returns and degrees of risk. The platform could some day enable people to put a philanthropic spin on their savings. CDFIs are fairly granular, so with slight orchestration, it would be possible to build a portfolio that directly benefited a specific underserved community. Integration is also key to CNote’s overall market strategy. The company wants to be accessible from the existing ways we manage our money. For this, think about being able to transfer money in and out directly from your du jour online banking platform. A large enough, devoted, community of savers would be of value to banks and other financial institutions. Thus far, banks have opted not to create their own competing services because, despite rising interest, CDFIs still carry a small-potatoes connotation. Some in the community worry that a sharp increase in the number of CDFIs , kinda like how more capital in an entrepreneurial ecosystem doesn’t always incentivize the proliferation of new, high-quality, startups.
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Commerce Dept. to send “digital attachés” to Mexico, South Korea and four other nations
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Lora Kolodny
| 2,016 | 12 | 9 |
The is opening six new international markets for its Commercial Digital Attaché program, according to the U.S. Secretary of Commerce Penny Pritzker, who spoke with TechCrunch today in San Francisco. The attaché program, which began in March this year, establishes commercial officers in countries where U.S. businesses seek to export their digital goods and services through e-commerce, or seek to engage in other online business activities. The expansion will send six new Commercial Officers to: South Korea, Indonesia, Mexico, South Africa, Germany and France. Previously, the Commercial Digital Attaché program included: ASEAN, Brazil, China, Japan, India and the European Union. According to Department of Commerce data, services that are delivered online account for more than half of U.S. services exports, and one-sixth of all U.S. goods and services. That number seems likely to increase thanks to three major trends. One is increasing mobile and broadband access in populations around the world. A second is the continued digitalization of previously analog services. Third is the rise of fully digital industry segments, like virtual reality and augmented reality in games, media and entertainment. Pritzker said the six nations added to the Commercial Digital Attaché Program were selected because U.S. companies already have huge engagement there, in terms of trade and commerce overall. “The role of these commercial officers is primarily to help American companies navigate the digital environment,” she said. The Secretary’s tenure will conclude in January when the Trump administration begins. It is not clear how incoming Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross will approach issues around the global distribution of digital goods and services, though he has extensive foreign investment and telecommunications experience. During her time leading the 46,000-employee Department of Commerce, Pritzker traveled to 40 countries, often bringing U.S. entrepreneurs in tow alongside government leaders to press foreign leaders for changes to policies that impede the easy exchange of digital goods and services, like stringent data localization requirements, for example. She helped negotiate a safe harbor rule, working with the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), which allows data to go back and forth online between businesses in the U.S. and Europe. That agreement supports $290 billion worth of trade, her department estimates. Other markets and issues remain challenging for U.S. businesses that want to deliver content, goods and services online and overseas. The Great Firewall in China and its censoring mechanisms are probably the best known.
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Oculus releases developer preview of Carmel WebVR product
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Lucas Matney
| 2,016 | 12 | 9 |
Many in the industry believe the next frontier for VR is web-based experiences that can be visited and absorbed across platforms. There are still quite a lot of unknowns when it comes to WebVR, but Oculus is looking to start shedding some of the mystery through its own browser. Today, the company launched the Carmel Developer Preview, giving devs some early tools and APIs to begin building and testing content for the web on Oculus headsets. Oculus first at Oculus Connect 3 this past October, where Oculus co-founder Nate Mitchell demoed some WebVR content onstage at the developer conference, The company’s blog post detailing the developer preview is appropriately mostly for the technically minded, with guides on , and a load of sample content for devs to check out. The browser itself is still in its incredibly early state and doesn’t even have an address bar, as it’s really just for testing, not exploring other WebVR content. Also, 2D web content is unavailable in the current preview. Developer versions of both Firefox and Chrome have already incorporated WebVR in some capacity, though Oculus’s entrance into the field means quite a bit, given their connection with the developer community and their widely available hardware. As Oculus notes, WebVR is an evolving API, and, while there is starting to be some consensus when it comes to a standard configuration, there’s quite a bit that’s still unknown. The Carmel Developer Preview is built upon the most common version of the API. There’s still a lot of news to come here; Oculus detailed that the company still has a lot going on related to its VR version of React, as well as some partner collaborations with the major browser makers.
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Data minimization — the new design rules for startups
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Nathan Kinch
| 2,016 | 12 | 9 |
Wait, what? Yes, you read correctly. “Data” and “minimization,” two words that have rarely been used in the same sentence, now represent one of the critical product design rules we must apply if we’re to build products that to the human beings we aim to serve. A little confused? Not to worry. Let’s “Simon Sinek” this article and . If you’re based in Europe, and you haven’t been living under a rock, you’re no doubt aware of the (GDPR) that goes into effect in 2018. , data minimization and the right to be forgotten are all requirements of the GDPR. And yes, organizations must comply. If you’re based in Australia, you may now be aware of the Australian Productivity Commision’s . In short, the “Comprehensive Right” the commission wants consumers to have means consumers: You might be based elsewhere; Asia, the Middle East, Africa or the United States. In that case, let’s not stay bogged down in the evolving regulatory landscape that’s supporting this and just look at a few key stats: The data equivalent of the Wild Wild West faces an existential threat. People, whether through their attitudes and behaviors or through evolving regulation, are gaining agency over their personal information and their increasingly nuanced digital identity. Personal data is no longer simply an asset that sits in aggregate form on the balance sheets of large organizations. It is swiftly becoming an asset of the data subject, the human being to whom that data relates. What this means is that organizations are merely a temporary custodian of a human being’s (customer’s) data. This shift forces changes to how we ask for, store and make use of personal data — meaning our design patterns, heuristics and best practices must evolve. Think about it like this; when you meet someone in the physical world, do you tell that person all your secrets? Do you show that person your passport and driver license — allowing them to take a photo for safekeeping? Do you give them the details of your left-leg inseam measurement? Unlikely. In the physical world, we tend to progressively disclose information. We do this on the basis of an ongoing dialogue, where shared understanding is developed and trust is earned through mutual exchange. That is because we have the agency to decide what we disclose, to whom and under what circumstances. The other person has the agency to do the same, and, as such, we operate on equal terms. Through the PIMS ecosystem referenced earlier, we can now support these types of exchanges in the digital world. Additionally, through conscious design efforts that respect the agency of the human beings your product aims to serve, you can make more effective use of just the “right” data. So, here are the design rules you’ve been awaiting. What this means is that the data you require to fulfill your value proposition must match the context and stage of the relationship. If someone wants to take a guided tour, find ways to enable them to browse anonymously. Then, support them with specific, action-oriented and value-generating onboarding when the time is right. Lead them on a pathway to success, and empower them to utilize their data to help realize this outcome. To put a commercial spin on this rule, focus on the metrics that matter. LTV means more than the number of sign-ups this December. You are the temporary custodian of the personal data you intend to utilize. For the purpose of achieving your business objectives, it’s critical you maximize the likelihood a person grants their explicit consent for you to use their information through an affirmative action. To do this, plain, human language (or visual references) that clearly states the exact purpose through which the data will be used to fulfill the business purpose is critical. No one likes nasty surprises. Start earning trust through radical transparency. Personal data is most likely a significant liability for your organization. Wouldn’t it be better to acquire the right data at the right time, without the need to hold the liability? Of course it would. So consider giving back data as a design rule and practice. Empower your customers to engage with you in multi-directional data exchange that creates shared value. Think of it like this: If giving back data is embedded into your onboarding journey, and the customer has the ability to control and utilize that information, you can ask to make use of it at appropriate times. Better yet, if the customer moves house (or changes any other key life status), they can simply update their address and choose to share that updated address with you. I always think, “Minimum data, maximum utilization.” If you keep this in mind and start that journey by giving, you’re likely to get a whole lot more in return. As I referenced above, this market is evolving rapidly. Nuance and complexity are everywhere. Although this is something we all have to deal with, don’t push this burden, and the unnecessary cognitive load that comes with it, back on the human beings you serve as customers. Keep things simple. Take advantage of the design rules above and begin familiarizing yourself with leading innovators in the PIMS ecosystem. Chances are you’ll be leveraging their capabilities sooner than you think.
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Segment adds Google BigQuery to expand its customer data platform
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Anthony Ha
| 2,016 | 12 | 9 |
helps businesses from services like Google Analytics, Mixpanel and Salesforce — and send that data to a variety of destinations, whether it’s an attribution product or a data warehouse. The company that it’s expanding its offerings by integrating with BigQuery, Google’s data warehousing service. This might seem like a pretty small announcement, especially because Segment already supported other warehousing products — specifically Postgres and Amazon’s Redshift — but CEO Peter Reinhardt suggested that this reflects a broader shift in the “cloud wars.” “We’ve noticed a real upsurge in demand for BigQuery,” he said. “It’s the first real threat to Redshift.” Not every one of Segment’s 7,500 customers uses its data warehousing options, but Reinhardt said that “almost 100 percent” of its enterprise customers do, and there’s also significant usage on the self-service side. He estimated that data warehousing customers were split 50-50 between Postgres and Amazon before — but after a little more than a month of beta testing, BigQuery had already claimed 10 percent of the total. Among BigQuery’s advantages, according to Reinhardt, are the fact that it can be simpler to use, and its pricing structure may be more appealing to smaller businesses.
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Obama orders review of Russian election hacking
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Kate Conger
| 2,016 | 12 | 9 |
President Obama has ordered intelligence agencies to conduct a complete review of the hacks and leaks that led up to and may have influenced the presidential election, according to White House homeland security and counterterrorism adviser Lisa Monaco. “The President has directed the Intelligence Community to conduct a full review of what happened during the 2016 election process,” . Cyberattacks on the Democratic National Committee and Hillary Clinton’s campaign manager John Podesta led to a series of damaging leaks that dogged the Clinton campaign throughout the election season. Her opponent, Donald Trump, was dismissive of the hacks and the of them to Russia. Although U.S. intelligence agencies assert that the attacks were conducted by Russian operatives, Trump told TIME magazine recently, “I don’t believe they interfered. That became a laughing point, not a talking point, a laughing point. Any time I do something, they say, ‘Oh, Russia interfered.’ Why not get along with Russia?” Monaco said the investigation would be completed before Trump’s inauguration in January. However, the results of the investigation may not become public, despite the fact that eight Democratic members of the Senate Intelligence Committee recently more information about Russian hacking. “You want to do so very attentive to not disclosing sources and methods that would impede our ability to identify and attribute malicious actors in the future,” Monaco explained. Republican Senators have also into Russia’s cyber intrusions, putting themselves at odds with the Republican president-elect. “I’m going after Russia in every way you can go after Russia,” Senator earlier this week. “I think they’re one of the most destabilizing influences on the world stage. I think they did interfere with our elections, and I want Putin personally to pay the price.”
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Sixa secures $3.5M as it launches its cloud computer for developers
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Lucas Matney
| 2,016 | 12 | 9 |
The promises of the cloud era have been many, but when it comes to hardware, most people have preferred to keep their personal PCs on-hand or on-location. is aiming to free the PC and move computing to the cloud with its low-latency virtual machines geared toward developers. The recent Y Combinator grad just closed a $3.5 million round of seed funding led by . More than 15,000 developers came onto the Sixa platform when it initially launched three months ago and, after building up a waiting list of thousands, the company is officially opening its beta today. “Even in its limited beta, Sixa saw serious demand as thousands of developers swarmed to access the service,” said Doug Renert, partner at Tandem Partners. “This funding really allows the Sixa team to respond to this demand quickly by taking the shackles off. And the funding will support spreading the word to the global developer community about how easily they can access powerful computers without having to deal with hardware whatsoever.” Developers can nab a Windows cloud computer with all the power they need for $49/month or $0.49/hour. The company also has models better suited for designers and gamers sporting high-end graphics cards and more RAM. The virtual desktop can easily be accessed via a web browser or via a separate application for those connecting USB peripherals. The problem with virtual machines in the past has largely been the latency. Moving the mouse only to watch the cursor trail a half-second later made getting anything accomplished a mental maze. Sixa has reduced the latency on its end down to 11 milliseconds, from there it’s all on the speed of your internet service provider and physical distance from the data center. “We’ve eliminated latency from using a PC in the cloud and added the convenience of having the most up-to-date hardware and software at all times ” said Mykola Minchenko, Sixa co-founder and CEO. Sixa is offering a free trial on its site, which gives users a couple of hours to test the system and see which configuration is best suited for their needs. A lot of utility is added by owning a cloud computer outside of simply not having to lug around a chunky PC wherever you are. If you’re say a video editor, you can sign up for the designer PC account and instead of exporting and uploading every edit just to show to a remote producer, you can just send them a link to your cloud computer at which point they can check out what you’ve got and make edits themselves. This same scenario plays out in countless ways for a great deal of other technical professions that involve testing in some capacity. For now, Sixa is focusing on devs, designers and gamers, but it’s looking toward other verticals as well, including data-rich design, secure enterprise access and virtual reality systems.
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How our AI called a scenario for Trump being elected and the ‘why’ behind it
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Shaunak Khire
| 2,016 | 12 | 9 |
As the world was collectively watching results of the 2016 election , we got a barrage of emails from people congratulating our AI for predicting a Trump win. Now before I dive into self praise, some context: After the first debate, we did a small experiment based on a random sampling of social media posts using labelled data feeds, a CNN (convolutional neural network; a feed-forward artificial neural network), a Bayesian methods-based network and a variant of word2vec-like algo. To be very clear, our AI did not call a Trump win, , but rather conditions that would support a Trump or a Hillary win, i.e. the following — and I am quoting content from an email sent to CNN’s New Day and Bloomberg Gadfly on October 3, 2016: a) If macro conditions stay the same, Hillary will win the election 54% to Trump’s 41%. We were planning on updating this for every debate. b) If there is a terror attack of the election or if the markets (S&P 500) drops more than 10% between now and November 8, Trump will narrowly win 52% to Hillary’s 46%. c) Trump’s engagement shows the half life of Trump’s passive supporter base (those that engage with only 1/4 tweets or posts with affirmation to what Trump tweeted or said) is roughly 4.3 days after an engagement. What that means is that these passive supporters are likely to moderate (i.e. support a neutral engagement) after 4.3 days. In cases of a terror attack this picture changes dramatically with moderation occurring only after 11.2 days. The scenario laid forth above is pretty clear. The “why,” however, is far more critical than the output, and I cannot stress how important the “why” is, because it reduces the overall blackbox-like effect of ANNs (artificial neural networks) — especially important in decision making. If you are an investor in AI, your ultimate bet is that the process of knowledge and reason will itself be commoditized. Too many people who pursue investments in these sectors do so with utter disregard for the process of how reasoning and knowledge work , a faculty otherwise known as epistemology. Within the very broad, boring — yet intellectually controversial — subject of epistemology, there are two widely held beliefs — the empirical view that experience is the source of all knowledge and the rationalist view that reason is the source of all knowledge. There is no definitive answer, and philosophically both arguments are valid; the former more than the latter, as the latter implies knowledge about an object. On a more practical level, and in context of , the relationship between knowledge, reasoning and experience can be illustrated using the sunrise problem. If we take an example of a person on a beach seeing the sunrise every day , the assumption is that after seeing X number of sunrises, said person would have enough prior experience to predict a sunrise in the future. Mathematically, it is impossible to know whether a sunrise will occur until it actually does — somewhat similar to the thought experiment. However, for an entity that has seen the sunrise X number of times , the probability becomes albeit a number that can be ignored and the sunrise becomes a “universal truth” of sorts until there is anomaly. An anomaly in this context could mean any change in the surrounding — for example, what if the sunrise did occur but the person was unable to see it because of grey skies? Broadly, what all of this means is that surroundings matter in context of an output — e.g. type of weather, season, time of sunrise, etc., and these surroundings need to be weighed in real time, in the present, against prior experiences in order to achieve a qualitatively better output as close as possible to a “universal truth.” Going back to our email — Point (a) is fairly straightforward and it depicts a win for Hillary if an election were to occur at that point in time, i.e. after the first debate. It is no secret that Hillary’s strong performance in the debate was a key driver for this output, so I want to extrapolate more on this. Point (b), however, takes into account an anomaly event. Prior experiences (from April 2015 to date) showed that support for Trump surged, following the horrific attacks in Paris and Brussels and after the stock market meltdown in January-February 2016. Ergo, the weighting for domestic security changed in a materially significant way after the attacks. Similarly economic concerns were weighed in a materially significant way after the stock market sell-off in January and February. This gives you a sense of how passive supporters and neutral voters reacted to a change in the surroundings, causing them to reweigh their support for either candidate at that point in time. Another aspect is time – which in this case determines time taken for a weight of a particular surrounding (e.g. security, economy) to materially change and impact an action (e.g. a pro Trump or Hillary stance). This is important because the election is held on a specific date and is not a “never-ending event.” From prior experiences this pool of people tended to revert to a neural stance by engaging (e.g. liking, RT, sharing, etc.) a moderate position than Trump on the economy and security after 4.3 and 11.2 days respectively. As we all know, neither a terrorist event nor a stock market correction of 10 percent occurred. However, two things did occur. The S&P had a major correction, falling nine consecutive days — its worst in 36 years — on the back of October’s Comey surprise — itself a security incident given the FBI’s involvement. Bottom line — the surroundings had materially changed to the point where they made an impact in how passive/neutral voters weighed them, ultimately affecting the output, i.e. the vote. It is therefore necessary to design an AI or an ANN that weighs prior experiences of surroundings (in this case text or words) using vector relationships between different words or numbers in context of raw data (this is materially different than sentiment analysis, which has propensity to output false positives), and then apply that to present surroundings. Additionally, from a product-design perspective, simplicity lies in explanation of the value brought forth to an end user. Doing so ultimately determines the logic and the rationale for an ANN’s output. On that level, the human race is exceptionally lucky to be good at guessing and finding everyday “universal truths” — such as the location of our car keys. Those who have good instincts tend to be more apt in decision-making than others. The core point, though, is one can’t actually predict (e.g. ) or even output (e.g. ) anything with absolute certainty — you are merely weighing surrounding information based on prior experiences, in the present and in relation to an entity, hoping that the sun has risen because a ray of light can be seen coming through the clouds. On a closing note, it is important to understand the role of biases. To be very clear, each one of us has a bias. Man is, after all, a social animal. As social animals, we tend to seek out and move in groups that we are comfortable with. Nowhere is this bias reflected more than in Silicon Valley itself — where for every successful startup founded by an immigrant, like WhatsApp, there is a Theranos or a Clinkle. The issue here isn’t necessarily success or failure, but rather the bias that extends into decision making processes. To blame an ANN or an AI or an algorithm (I am not referencing the Facebook News Feed algorithm, because that deserves a much deeper explanation as it relates to advertising and engagement) is to blame humanity itself. Biases exist and will continue to exist because the human brain is horizontally scalable, meaning that we can do at once a bunch of simple activities (eating and thinking about the election result for example) that require significant processing power, but we cannot analyze and weigh data points about every single object and reach an objective conclusion about that entity. A good example of bias is grit. While there is a lot of harping about grit being one of the most important qualities in life, for the average human, and indeed even for an algorithm, grit could also be misinterpreted as an individual having a long streak of non-accomplishment instead of looking at it in a coherent way and analyzing each data point within that streak in an objective manner. For most humans, this is not only not possible because of pre-existing biases but also because the human brain simply does not have enough time on hand to compute an output. It therefore becomes materially more easy to write about grit than to accept it on face value, as we tend to have a bias toward negative news (i.e. we assume non-accomplishment as the outcome of grit rather than the “grit part” of grit). The hope with an AI or ANN therefore isn’t to remove biases, for that is mathematically not possible, but rather to have each data point weighed as efficiently as possible so as to find an anomaly that hopefully turns out to be unbiased and impacts an overall decision with or without human instinct. The sooner we come out of our collective utopias, the better it will be for humanity in building solutions that positively impact people’s lives.
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New Michigan law prepares for autonomous future
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Kristen Hall-Geisler
| 2,016 | 12 | 9 |
Michigan Governor Rick Snyder visited the Automotive Hall of Fame in Dearborn, MI, which honors the automotive past, to sign a bill that aims to enable the automotive future. The law creates regulations for testing, using and selling in the state and clarifies how these vehicles will be used on public roads. The law specifically allows vehicles that have no human controls — no steering wheel, no pedals — to be tested in Michigan. It makes clear that both automotive companies and tech companies are able to operate self-driving ridesharing vehicles. This is no surprise, given that FCA, Ford, GM, Toyota, Google, Uber and Lyft were all partners in creating this legislation. And it allows the sale of autonomous vehicles to the public once the technology has been tested and certified. The law cedes that testing and certification to , according to an email from the Michigan Department of Transportation. “The traditional role has been for equipment standards to be determined and tested at the national level. That seems likely to be the same for autonomous technology.” While this does allow for the sale of certified self-driving vehicles, there are no provisions in place yet for educating the driving public or the dealerships on the safe use of these future cars. “The news accounts of the have certainly impressed upon the general public and those in the industry that there is an important need to be familiar with the vehicle characteristics,” the email stated. “The Michigan legislation does not proscribe a specific manner of addressing user familiarity with the technology, but key state agencies are ready to assist the private developers of the technology in this regard.” The law also creates the Michigan Council on Future Mobility, which will be part of . This new entity will regulate connected-vehicle networks as they arise and keep tabs on the use of traffic data generated by these networks, such as crash information.
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Verizon won’t push Samsung’s Note 7 bricking update, but the other carriers will
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Brian Heater
| 2,016 | 12 | 9 |
Early this morning to finally extinguish the on-going fire that is the Note 7 once and for all here in the States by way of a software update that won’t allow the troubled phone to charge at all. Apparently not everyone involved is onboard with the move. Verizon (the parent company to TechCrunch’s parent company) quickly , citing the potential risks involved in killing the phone altogether. By Samsung’s count, around only 7 percent of Note 7 owners in the U.S. have clung to their devices, but the carrier is concerned with the safety of those last few. Here’s the key part of this morning’s statement: Verizon will not be taking part in this update because of the added risk this could pose to Galaxy Note7 users that do not have another device to switch to. We will not push a software upgrade that will eliminate the ability for the Note7 to work as a mobile device in the heart of the holiday travel season. We do not want to make it impossible to contact family, first responders or medical professionals in an emergency situation. Of course, the mere mention of the Note 7 and travel in the same sentence brings to mind some other . Maybe this saga has a little life left in it, after all. Sprint is with the update and is reiterating its replacement plan. T-Mobile, for its part, is declining to comment for the time being. We’ve also reached out to AT&T and are waiting to hear back. Looks like AT&T is on-board with the update, as well. The company will be notifying customers with the following text message, And then there was one. Here’s T-Mobile’s official statement,
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Gamer chat app Discord hits 25 million users, can now be used in developers’ own games
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Sarah Perez
| 2,016 | 12 | 9 |
Jason Citron, who previously founded and sold the early mobile social gaming network OpenFeint, in May 2015. This — a challenger to incumbents like Skype and Teamspeak — has since grown to 25 million registered users, who are sending 100 million messages per day across its platform. Now, Discord is launching its next product: , a set of tools that bring voice and text chat to the games themselves. Available as a free SDK, GameBridge offers a new, simpler way to power voice and text in-game, while also allowing for community interactions. It lets players engage with one another by doing things like posting their game replays, loops and achievements in a text channel. Meanwhile, developer tools let them manage their gaming channels. For example, GameBridge can add or remove players for channels, it knows who’s in a voice channel and when people are talking, and it can control the local audio settings like mute and volume. Developers can also use the product to expand their community outside of their game through its support for custom bots for guild chat, and they can build up a community for a pre-launch title by bringing testers into early builds to chat about their experiences and give feedback. Developers, of course, can pick whichever features they want to use when they integrate GameBridge into their own applications. “Before GameBridge, devs had three options when it came to voice and text chat — build their own tools — which is time and resource draining; license some other tech — generally limited in what they will then actually have access to and what they can customize; or do nothing,” explains Discord CMO Eros Resmini. “GameBridge gives them a really strong fourth option.” The SDK, like Discord’s chat app, is free. That’s because Discord is currently a company that’s funded through investment. Eventually, the plan is to sell cosmetic items (think stickers or sound packs, e.g.) to generate revenue, but it’s not at that point yet. Thanks to this nature of being a free product, Discord has seen strong growth in recent months. Its number of registered users doubled in the last five months to 25 million, and it crossed 2.3 million weekly peak concurrent users, as well. Discord also has several community servers with more than 20,000 active members. One even has more than 40,000 members, in fact. At launch, 10 developers and publishers have already signed up to integrate GameBridge into their properties, including Nexon/Boss Key Productions with their first-person shooter game LawBreakers, Trion’s Atlas Reactor and several other indie developers. The SDK is now in private beta. Interested developers can sign up to test it out on the Discord website . In the long term, the plan is to open it up to all.
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Super Mario Run needs a constant internet connection to run
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Brian Heater
| 2,016 | 12 | 9 |
It a bit of news that will surely shift the value proposition of Mario’s long-awaited iPhone debut for legions of underground commuters, Shigeru Miyamoto that will only work on a device with a constant internet connection. The legendary game creator chalked up the decision to security concerns, fears that an offline mode would make the game unstable and open it up to piracy. Those worries are likely due in no small part to the fact that Nintendo simply isn’t accustomed to developing games for platforms it doesn’t have on lock-down. “Unlike our dedicated game devices, the game is not releasing in a limited number of countries,” Miyamoto explained. “We’re launching in 150 countries and each of those countries has different network environments and things like that. So it was important for us to be able to have it secure for all users.” Nintendo has since confirmed all of this, while listing off the benefits of keeping such a title always connected: Access to other users’ play data and scores for automatically generated Toad Rally challenges. In-game events that will offer players new challenges and rewards for a limited time. Linkage to Nintendo Account to access save data from multiple devices. For example, if players have Super Mario Run on their iPhone and iPad, they can share one save file across the different devices. However, this save data cannot be used with different devices at the same time. But for all those hoping Mario would save them from an underground commute or long, Wi-Fi-free plane ride, it surely feels a lot more like a bug than a feature.
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Samsung’s latest software update stops the Note 7 from charging altogether
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Brian Heater
| 2,016 | 12 | 9 |
As the prolonged garbage fire that is 2016 draws to a close, Samsung seems to finally be putting the final nails in the coffin of the Note 7 saga. Admittedly, the last couple of months have mostly been a few isolated death rattles, but believe it or not there are still some devices in the wild, in spite of the company’s best efforts to get them all back. New numbers posted today have the U.S. return rate at a lofty 93 percent. This follows news last month that the company would be releasing a software update designed to “limit the phone’s ability to .” At the time, the return rate was hovering around 85 percent. It was a start, but not quite as drastic as the steps taken by other Samsung wings, including New Zealand, where it was announced that the product would be cut off from wireless carriers altogether. Now the company is (or “bold” in its own words) and perhaps final step of another update designed to stop them from charging altogether. That update goes live just in time for the holidays, on December 19 , with a roll out that should take about a month or so. It’s worth (ahem) noting that unlike the New Zealand update, this push doesn’t cut off the phone from mobile networks (and also won’t stop it from accessing Wi-Fi), so those desperately clinging to their devices can still use it while plugged in. The company will also be “notifying consumers through multiple touchpoints to encourage any remaining Galaxy Note7 owners to participate in the program and to take advantage of the financial incentives available.” So perhaps our long Note nightmare is finally at an end.
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Occipital shows off a $399 mixed reality headset for iPhone
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Lucas Matney
| 2,016 | 12 | 9 |
Mobile VR is an Android game, but as more and more rumors flourish about the next iPhone, some companies are looking to get developers ready to bring iOS users into the world of VR. announced today that it is launching a mixed reality platform built upon its depth-sensing technologies called . The headset is available for $399 and starts shipping in March; eager developers can get their hands on an Explorer Edition for $499, which starts shipping next week. In September, the company an early model of the headset, though it didn’t really play up the device’s mixed reality capabilities. https://www.google.com/url?hl=en&q=https://youtu.be/Iys8yo0sjYg&source=gmail&ust=1481385249448000&usg=AFQjCNHTuFvDLSd_U7RCyMHM4wDM-Tagow The headset is built upon the company’s depth-sensing 3D Structure sensor, which offers advanced image mapping at a much higher frame rate than Google’s Tango camera due to the fact that it’s an external device with its own battery supply. The Structure sensor retails for $379, which makes the $399 price for Bridge pretty tolerable, given that it includes one of the sensors. The headset is compatible with iPhone 6/6S and 7 models. The iPhone camera really only offers a pinhole view into the world when the display is pressed up against your face, so Occipital has included a 120-degree wide-angle lens add-on to lessen this effect. It’s still not totally comfortable, but it’s definitely tolerable for short periods. The iPhone is definitely a huge platform that hasn’t seen a ton of love when it comes to AR or VR, but part of that is the fact that the phone doesn’t have an OLED screen or any VR optimization mode like Android to keep the head-tracking latency low. This means you won’t really want to use this headset unless you’re a developer. iPhones are allegedly getting OLED screens in their next iteration, according to some rumors, but it’s largely impossible to know what’s happening in Cupertino until Jony says the magic words and the products gyrate in front of you. I got to take an earlier model of the headset for a test drive recently and, while these current-generation iPhones definitely are not the most suited for mixed reality, the Structure sensor most definitely is. Rapid environment mapping allows users to place digital objects on real-world surfaces as the sensor produces a 3D mesh of the space you’re in. This also allows full positionally tracked room-scale in a mobile VR headset, which operated quite well.
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Workplace by Facebook begins to take shape
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Ron Miller
| 2,016 | 12 | 9 |
has been now, but it’s clear that Facebook has big plans for its enterprise social product. Just this week, at TechCrunch Disrupt in London, to integrate enterprise applications with Workplace, putting it in direct competition with Slack, . But Workplace hopes to differentiate itself from the enterprise social pack by being more than a tool for teams of knowledge workers to share information. Sean Ryan, VP of platform partnerships at Facebook, says Facebook wants Workplace in use across the organization, from the warehouse to the front office. “We look at it this way: we try to connect whole companies. Other products try to connect teams,” he said — taking a swipe at Slack and app. Just as Facebook’s consumer mission is to connect the world, Ryan sees Workplace’s mission to connect all employees in all companies, many of whom might not have traditionally used these kinds of tools. “We’re bringing a set of tools to employees who never had them. Most companies [in this space] are not focused on that area,” he says. It only makes sense from a social-network-building standpoint in Ryan’s view. The more people you have using the system, the more valuable the network — and you can’t achieve that with siloed systems. That’s all well and good, says analyst Alan Pelz-Sharpe from Digital Clarity Group, who has been following enterprise social since its earliest days, but this is an approach that previous generations of enterprise social products tried and failed. “No doubt Facebook does want to be a social tool for the entire company — but so did Jive, Yammer and countless others,” he said. While he acknowledges that Facebook has a strong brand and a familiar interface in its favor, it doesn’t insulate it from the same problems those earlier companies faced with this approach. “Normally, those challenges appear in the form of governance, administration and security. Viral growth of an application throughout an organization is good for Facebook but can bring in its wake, all [kinds] of complexity and confusion for the organization itself.” On the positive side, we’ve always known that enterprise social tools flatten hierarchies as employees have direct access to everyone in the company, regardless of their role. It strips away the layers of management and gives everyone the power to share their ideas. This gives employees a much greater sense of involvement — and indeed, Ryan says in an early test with a grocery chain, they found much greater employee satisfaction when using Workplace. The application integration announced this week takes that to the next step. As much as employees want to communicate, they don’t want to flitter from application to application. By building integration points — APIs — into Workplace, Facebook is providing the means to bring work product into the tool. If, like many people using Facebook in their personal lives, people start living much of their day in Workplace at work, that could prove to be very convenient. Dion Hinchcliffe, an enterprise social veteran and current chief strategy officer at , an online communities platform, says this integration could be key to Facebook’s success. “Collaboration tools that facilitate a simpler, more centralized experience and don’t require a user to leave the app to get other things done will inherently have more usage and adoption. The value proposition is that more work can be done more easily, in a more contextual and integrated fashion, all within one tool,” he explained. It has certainly worked well for Slack, but Pelz-Sharpe says the devil is most certainly in the details. “Integration with commonly used applications always helps with adoption but the real test is in how deep the integration goes. Is it simply the ability to see and click on the integrated application (portal like) or is there data and process sharing going on between the applications pulling it all into a cohesive whole,” Pelz-Sharpe wondered. While Ryan makes it clear that Workplace wants to connect the entire company, Pelz-Sharpe says Facebook still faces some serious challenges achieving that goal. “Resistance to Workplace by Facebook will not come just from the perception of it being a consumer social tool for time-wasting (largely by older people — it is not a millennial tool), but from its past approach of growth at all costs and figuring out the consequences later.” But Ryan remains undeterred. “This is about all workers.That’s why we are excited about this. Workplace [will make] the world’s employee more connected.”
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Josh Constine
| 2,016 | 12 | 7 | null |
Formation 8 founder Jim Kim and longtime VC Paul Lee partner on a new fund called Builders
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Connie Loizos
| 2,016 | 12 | 9 |
Jim Kim, who most recently co-founded the venture firm , is launching a brand-new venture firm called that a $200 million fund, judging by a recent SEC filing. His co-founder is Paul Lee, who left the Chicago venture firm Lightbank in 2014 and last year launched a startup studio called Roniin that we last year. It isn’t a surprise to see Kim starting something new. After a tumultuous 2015, Formation 8 had raising a third fund. We wondered whether Builders meant that Lee was similarly moving on from Roniin, however, so we recently caught up with both men to ask that question, as well as ask how they came together, and what Builders — which already has an office in both San Francisco and Chicago — plans to do differently than the hundreds of other venture firms up and running. (We also asked about the pair’s fundraising progress, but they declined to comment, citing SEC regulations.) More from that conversation follows. PL: We go back 15 years. We both started our careers at GE Capital. Jim was building up its IT practice; I was building up its media practice. But we spent time talking about deals, we’d get drinks. We’ve probably talked monthly ever since then. We did go off and build our own platforms. Jim built Formation 8. I ran Lightbank. But he was my first call in helping shape Roniin and he was the first investor in the platform and in five of the companies that have come out of the platform since. PL: It’s being rebranded as Builder Studios, and it will be working with the startups that we fund. [The $3 million seed round it raised] was used to prove out the concept and it worked; we learned how to run that P&L and run that infrastructure without a massive amount of burn. Now, we want to use that team of experts we’ve assembled [including engineers, sales personnel, marketers, and back office operations employees] to support our portfolio companies. JK: We aren’t commenting publicly on that right now. But when you look at the data, one out of every three seed-funded companies was able to raise a Series A round a few years ago; now, that percentage is much smaller. So there’s this opportunity to help an entrepreneur who has a good technical team to find product-market fit and help give them multiple shots on the goal. We aren’t talking about PR or HR. We think instead startups can benefit greatly from working alongside this studio and accessing this group of operators [to improve everything] from their UI/UX to product development. JK: We want to write $3 million to $10 million checks and accelerate the companies for their next round of funding. PL: We believe as an early-stage fund, you can’t be too sector-specific. Instead, we’re thesis driven, meaning we’re not looking purely for science experiments but rather the application of fantastic technologies in antiquated markets combined with ruthless execution by founders. [which invites customers to outsource their finance departments and that received seed funding from Roniin] is one example; it leverages the same blueprint. [an office cleaning and management service] is another. We especially like companies that are [small and medium-size business] oriented. JK: Traditionally, seed-funded companies will work on a product for six months, then they’ll feel that they have to start selling, so they’ll hire a VP of sales who it takes three months to find and another three months to train. It’s at least a year before you’re talking with customers and hearing if you’re addressing a customer pain point, and if you aren’t, you raise an extension found. [With Builders], from day one, we’re getting sales and marketing people involved with the founder to go after a vertical or a geography and to start talking with customers. If you can build features earlier and iterate multiple times and run these projects every two to three months, you’re going to find customer pain points a lot earlier, and you’re going to have more shots at Series A funding.
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Yahoo Answers makes its official mobile debut
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Sarah Perez
| 2,016 | 12 | 9 |
Yahoo Answers has officially launched on mobile. As Yahoo’s experimental app code-named Yahoo Hive had been rebranded as Yahoo Answers Now — a move that indicated Yahoo’s plans to bring its desktop Q&A site to the App Store. However, at the time, the app still required an invite in order to test it out — that restriction and the app is open to all. Getting an invite to try the service wasn’t difficult — you only had to email a request to a given address if you wanted in. But the existence of the extra step likely discouraged many users from signing up. Yahoo Answers, which still sees 300 million monthly users worldwide, is one of Yahoo’s better-known properties, if only because of the low-quality, sometimes frightening and sometimes hilarious answers that have been posted to its site over the years. Among much hand-wringing in the media industry and the problems of “fake news” and vitriol circulating on the web and social media, Yahoo Answers is a definite case-in-point as to why everyone on the web doesn’t deserve an equal voice. It’s crowdsourcing at its finest, which sometimes means humanity at its worst. From kickstarting to to, these days, a front page often filled with outright racist commentary, Yahoo Answers is in a precarious position to say the least. It will need to clean up its act on mobile, or risk getting booted from the app store for breaking Google’s and Apple’s guidelines. The new app includes several key features, like the ability to ask questions that are matched with qualified responders, the ability to follow others in a Twitter-like fashion, the ability to give thanks with a “thank you” and emoji buttons, notifications and it supports rich media like images and links. The app is available now on both and .
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Facebook corrects more metrics affecting ad reach, streaming reactions, plus Like & Share counts
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Sarah Perez
| 2,016 | 12 | 9 |
Facebook today it’s correcting a few more issues with its metrics in areas like audience estimation for ads, live video reaction counts and its Like and Share buttons. Though the fixes are referencing several of Facebook’s more high-profile products, the issues being addressed aren’t as significant as the ones Facebook identified earlier in 2016, when it discovered that the figures for . Following that reveal, Facebook has made a point to be more transparent about the miscalculations it finds across its system. Last month, for example, it announced it had found more bugs and errors that led to misreporting in products like This time around, there are only two corrections to misreported metrics, and one change that’s more of an improvement. This latter item is an update that’s rolling out to Facebook’s ad creation tool. When the advertiser starts building their ad, the tool gives them an estimate of the potential overall reach and the estimated daily reach of that campaign. Facebook says that it has improved its methodology on this estimation — specifically for sampling and extrapolating the potential audience size — so it’s more accurate. This helps give a better estimate for the target audience both on Facebook and cross-platform — meaning Facebook, Instagram and the Audience Network. While this change is about making numbers more accurate, the change to Live Video metrics is actually a correction. In Page Insights, Facebook was misallocating extra reactions per user (Likes, Hearts, etc.) to the “Reactions from Shares of Post” section instead of where they belonged on “Reactions on Post.” (The reactions were “extra” because the “Reactions on Post” column was only counting one reaction per unique user.) This issue meant that even though the total counts ended up being corrected, it could have given the impression that the Live Videos were seeing more engagement when shared than they really were. Facebook says this fix will roll out mid-December and will increase the “Reactions on Post” by 500 percent on average, while decreasing the “Reactions on Shares of Post” by 25 percent on average. The final issue involves a discrepancy found between the counts for Like and Share buttons via Facebook’s Graph API and the counts when you enter in a URL in the search bar in the Facebook mobile app. In this case, it’s still unclear why sometimes the mobile search query is higher or lower than what the Graph API is reporting. The company is still working to resolve this problem, it says. This one sounds more troubling than the live video reactions, but Facebook didn’t say how off the figures are from one another, or how often the problem occurs, as it’s still working on understanding why this is happening. Though none of these problems are mission-critical, they are further examples of Facebook having issues with its systems for providing transparency to those who use the network to make business decisions — whether that’s where and how to spend their ad budgets, or how to best grow their social media audience by using Facebook’s products. It’s also an example of how complex Facebook’s systems have become. The social network continues to release new products at a rapid pace, but its reporting systems haven’t caught up, it seems.
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John Glenn
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John Biggs
| 2,016 | 12 | 9 |
, John Glenn had a problem. Glenn, the first American in orbit, was inside his capsule, the Friendship 7. Mission Control wanted him to take over the capsule’s manual controls. During the effort the automatic systems failed, leaving him in full control of one of the most complex artifacts ever created by humankind. He was alone in space at the helm of a beast that could swing him away from Earth or tumbling into her thick atmosphere. “I went to manual control and continued in that mode during the second and third orbits, and during re-entry,” Glenn said. “The malfunction just forced me to prove very rapidly what had been planned over a longer period of time.” He survived to go on to run as a U.S. Senator and spent decades defining a policy laced with science and pragmatism. That man is gone now, taken at 95 years old while surrounded by his family less than a hundred miles from his birthplace in Cambridge, Ohio. Glenn was a hotshot, a pilot with thousands of hours under his belt flying countless sorties. He was the oldest man in space and he was a living example of the promise and potential of the American — and any other — heartland. He flew at supersonic speeds when most of America was crawling blindly through post-war fear and nostalgic ignorance and he pushed us forward at a time when hope was sparse on the ground. He flew above the Bay of Pigs and “Love Me Do.” He flew above the engineers building the first Concorde and he flew above an America at war with itself and the world. He flew above it all. Men and women like John Glenn are important. In an era defined by the same strife as his, in an era of hot fear and cold wars, we need men and women who can take the throttle in one hand and the steering in the other and lead us forward, be it in space, on the ground, in the lab or in the halls of power. We need thinkers and doers and makers and men and women who are not afraid to switch the manual. We need more John Glenns. The heroes of the Space Race are aging. The generations that followed them have no respect for space — yet — and to them spaceflight is another mundane wonder. We don’t die in childbirth. We travel thousands of miles in hours and can call anyone in the world in seconds. We have all of the world’s information at our fingertips. We, the sleepers, live in a wonderful dream that slowly wishes itself into life. We live in a world that even Glenn could not have predicted. So let’s appreciate what Glenn and his ilk gave us and let’s build on it. Let’s switch to manual. Let’s show no fear. Because it is in fear that we ignore our potential. “I don’t know what you could say about a day in which you have seen four beautiful sunsets,” Glenn said once on the magic of space flight. All we have to do to change the world is see a lifetime of sunrises.
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Our robotic overlords have written us a Christmas Carol!
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John Biggs
| 2,016 | 12 | 9 |
As we roll toward the end of humanity and the moment of robot takeover, it’s important to start learning the songs and customs of our inhumane artificial overlords. Researchers at the University of Toronto, for example, showed an AI a picture of a Christmas tree and asked it to write a song about it. The result? A song that we will soon all be singing as we huddle in the dark while our robot masters howl “Again! Again!” in their chip-tune voices. A describes the route the AI took to build the song. First the team fed in a hundred hours of music into a neural network, which allowed it to create listenable music, complete with melody, instruments and drums. Then they used a second neural network to analyze a picture of a tree. The neural network obviously couldn’t know that we don’t put flowers on our trees (yet) and presumably it took a few cultural clues from other sources, especially when it suggests there might be music coming from the hall. You put the two together and you have a beautiful song of joy, blessing and the inevitable fall of the human armies to the onslaught of dead-eye robots bent on victory and vengeance. Happy Christmas from the future! [vimeo 192711856 w=640 h=360]
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Podotree, Korean chat app Kakao’s content business, raises $107M at a $428M valuation
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Jon Russell
| 2,016 | 12 | 9 |
Kakao, the Korean mobile and web giant, is beefing up its social media and content businesses after its Podotree affiliate raised 125 billion won (around $107 million). The deal values it at 500 billion won, Kakao confirmed — that’s approximately $428 million. The company is best known for its Kakao messaging service, which is Korea’s most popular chat app with 150 million users worldwide, but manages two of its upcoming services, its social network and , its take on the increasingly popular digital comic space. Kakao said the money will go toward growing the Webtoon business, acquiring new IP and licensing rights and expanding into video content. Webtoons — digital comic services — are increasingly popular in Korea, Japan and other parts of the world Kakao confirmed that the funding was led by Anchor Equity Partners, with Singapore investment fund GIC one of a number of other, undisclosed backers that participated. The move mirrors a similar investment from Naver, Kakao’s major rival, which teamed up with SoftBank to launch to strengthen its own Naver Webtoon and Snapchat-like Snow services. In other Kakao affiliate news, the company’s gaming business is with a view to raising capital to expand overseas. in a multi-billion dollar deal more than two years ago. The business has had a challenging 2016. Its share price peaked at 120,000 KRW ($102.65) in January before falling to 71,000 KRW ($60.74) in November. It’s currently at 79,400 KRW ($67.95), giving the firm a market cap of around $4.5 billion. The company is strongest in Korea, where it claims to be installed on more than 90 percent of the country’s smartphones, but when he stepped into the top job last year. So far, Kakao has focused on Southeast Asia through , but it doesn’t seem to have done much more outside of Korea. That could be where services like Daum Webtoons can pitch in.
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Consider ethics when designing new technologies
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Gillian Christie
| 2,016 | 12 | 31 |
In the weeks since the U.S. presidential election, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has been firefighting. Not literally, but figuratively. Widespread accusations assert that his social media company contributed to the election’s unexpected outcome by propagating fake news and “filter bubbles.” Zuckerberg has harshly refuted these allegations, but the case poses a thorny question: How do we ensure that technology works for society? A Fourth Industrial Revolution is arising that will pose tough ethical questions with few simple, black-and-white answers. Smaller, more powerful and cheaper sensors; cognitive computing advancements in artificial intelligence, robotics, predictive analytics and machine learning; nano, neuro and biotechnology; the Internet of Things; 3D printing; and much more, are already demanding real answers really fast. And this will only get harder and more complex when we embed these into our bodies and brains to enhance our physical and cognitive functioning. Take the choice society will soon have to make about autonomous cars as an example. If a crash cannot be avoided, should a car be programmed to minimize bystander casualties even if it harms the car’s occupants, or should the car protect its occupants under any circumstances? Research demonstrates the public is conflicted. Consumers would prefer to minimize the number of overall casualties in a car accident, yet are unwilling to purchase a self-driving car if it is not self-protective. Of course, the ideal option is for companies to develop algorithms that bypass this possibility entirely, but this may not always be an option. What is clear, however, is that such ethical quandaries must be reconciled before any consumer hands over their keys to dark-holed algorithms. The widespread adoption of is unlikely to prevail if consumers are not certain about their underlying . The challenge is that identifying realistic solutions requires the input and expertise of a whole variety of stakeholders with differing interests: leaders of technology companies who are trying to innovate while turning a profit; regulators in varying jurisdictions who must form policies to protect the public; ethicists who theorize with evaluations of the unintended risks and benefits; public health researchers who are looking out for the public’s health; and many others. With so many different stakeholders involved, how do we ensure a governance model that will make technology work for society? What is needed is strong, anticipatory guidance by those who intersect the technology, health and worlds to determine how we develop and deploy that deliver the greatest societal benefits. It requires an approach not built on doing it alone at the country-level (as espoused by President-elect Donald Trump), but an inter-sectoral and inter-governmental approach. The World Economic Forum’s recently Center for the Fourth Industrial Revolution may be one venue to start these conversations. Ultimately, evaluation of the net effect of on individuals and society is needed to identify appropriate rules and boundaries. Mark Zuckerberg might a public discussion and debate among leaders from different sectors and nations to establish Facebook’s real role in delivering information. No matter how we view artificial intelligence , we know they carry certain consequences — some good, some bad.. but none neutral.
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Stroy Moyd’s dating show in an Uber goes from meme to mainstream
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Lora Kolodny
| 2,016 | 12 | 31 |
For years, Oakland-based stand-up comic has been driving for Uber and Lyft part-time to generate supplemental income. It’s a familiar story to anyone in a creative industry — even though Moyd was headlining at like the and and opening for icons like Dave Chappelle at in Oakland, comedy didn’t always pay his bills. Working for a couple of hyper growth tech companies in the San Francisco scene had a happy side effect for Moyd, giving him tons of tech-tinged material for his act. His content helped him get a membership at the hangout preferred by venture capitalists and startup founders in San Francisco, , where he sometimes performs to a members-only audience. But Moyd finally gained some national fame in 2016 online after turning his Prius into something more than a ride to hail. He made it into a game-show venue for something of a cross between and . In a video clip he self-produced and called “Rideshare the Love,” Moyd set up lonely hearts for a speed date of sorts, while driving them to their destinations. He arranged the dates by putting out word to his personal network and mailing list of fans, and through the occasional Craigslist ad, he said. Friends would tell their singleton buddies, “Hey, I hailed you a ride, car’s on the way.” And then surprise them with the dating game. Two competitors vie to become the chosen one. A single woman or man sits wearing an eye mask or blindfold, asking the suitors some fun questions, never seeing what they look like. After a few rounds, but before the first stop, the blindfolded party has to choose who he or she would prefer to date. And Moyd will drive them off to their first date straight away if they so choose. But, of course, there’s a twist. What if the person chosen doesn’t feel the love? He or she can reject the date and walk away with a cash prize instead. Moyd’s dating show video surfaced on and went viral earlier this year. Now the meme is poised to go mainstream. has signed the comic’s production company, Hella Funny, and will be shopping Rideshare the Love around for network, cable or online distribution in 2017. The talent management firm founded by TV producer is best-known for its work with Grammy-award winning hip hop icon Missy Elliot, and reality TV franchises including and . Here’s before he blows up to Aziz Ansari levels.
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Reverse-engineering the universal translator
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Vadim Berman
| 2,016 | 12 | 31 |
Cinema critics keep raving about a sci-fi drama by Denis Villeneuve focusing on one linguist’s attempts to decipher an alien language. Star Trek recently celebrated its 50th anniversary. As a language geek and a sci-fi fan, I felt it only logical to look into the feasibility of the universal translator, the device used by the crew of the Starship Enterprise. No, this is not yet another post about machine translation. This technology is already a reality with a and . While not yet at the level of a human translation expert, machine translation is already usable in multiple scenarios. (Translation of known languages is, of course, also a part of the Star Trek universal translator, and on some occasions have to tweak the linguistic internals manually.) This article will focus on the device’s decoding module for unknown languages, or . No matter how elaborate, all decipherment techniques have the same core: pairing an unknown language with known bits of knowledge. The classic story is the most famous example: A tablet with inscriptions of Ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs, Ancient Greek and another Egyptian script (Demotic) was used as a starting point to understand a long-dead language. Today, statistical machine translation engines are generated in a similar fashion, using as “virtual Rosetta Stones.” If, however, a parallel text is not available, the decipherment relies on closely related languages or whatever cues can be applied. Perhaps the most dramatic story of decipherment is , which involved two opposing points of view amplified by Cold War tensions. More recently, Regina Barzilay from MIT . But what happens when there is no Rosetta Stone or similar language? In face-to-face interaction, like the scenario depicted in , gestures, physical objects and facial expressions are used to build the vocabulary. These methods were used by the seafarers exploring the New World and are occasionally employed today by anthropologists and linguists, like . But what if the face-to-face interaction is not possible? For decades, researchers have been scanning the skies for signs of extraterrestrial intelligence. Some of them specifically focus on the questions, “what happens if we do get a signal?” and “how do we know if this is a signal and not just noise?” The two most notable SETI people working on these issues are and . Doyle’s work focuses on the application of Claude Shannon’s information theory to determine whether a . Doyle, together with the famous animal behavior and communication researcher , analyzed various animal communication data, comparing its information theory characteristics to those of human languages. John Elliott’s work specifically focuses on unknown communication systems; the publication topics range from detecting whether the transmission is linguistic to assessing the structure of the language, and, lastly, on building what he calls a “post-detection decipherment matrix.” In Elliott’s own words, this matrix would use a “corpus that represents the entire ‘Human Chorus’ ” applying tools, and, in his later works, include other communication systems (e.g. animal communication). Elliott’s hypothetical system relies on an ontology of concepts with a “universal semantic metalanguage.” (Just like compile a set of shared basic concepts.) Interestingly, there are certain similarities between the universal translator and the ways real-life scientists attack the problem. , “certain universal ideas and concepts” were “common to all intelligent life,” and the translator compares the frequencies of “brainwave patterns,” selects those ideas it recognized and provides the necessary grammar. Assuming that a variety of hypothetical neural centers may produce recognizable activity patterns (brainwaves or not), and that communication produces a stimulus that activates specific areas in the neural center, the approach may have merit — provided the hardware sensitive enough to detect these fluctuations will be available. The frequency analysis is also in line with , which is mentioned throughout the work of Elliott and Doyle. Other Star Trek series keep mentioning a vaguely described , which is used to facilitate translation. Artistic license and techno-babble aside, the word “matrix” and the sheer number of translation pair combinations correspond to a real-world model, which employs an abstract, language-independent representation of knowledge. There are a couple of occasions in Star Trek where a certain , used as a last-resort tool when the universal translator doesn’t work, is mentioned. The linguacode may also have a real-world equivalent called . Lincos, together with its derivatives, is a constructed language designed to communicate with other species using universal mathematical concepts. As someone who spent more than a decade working on a language-neutral semantic engine, I got very excited when I realized that the system and the ontology described by Elliott as a prerequisite to the semantic analysis is very close to what I constructed. Bundling all of the languages into a “human chorus” may steer the system toward a “one-size-fits-all” result, which is too far from the target communication system. It doesn’t have to be this way; with a system capable of mapping both syntactic structures and semantics (not just a limited set of entities), it is possible to build a “corpus of scenarios” that will allow for building more accurate ordered statistical models relying on the universality of interaction scenarios. For example: The reasons for that have nothing to do with a structure of a particular language, and generally stem from the venerable or necessities for efficient communication in groups. Using a system that runs on semantics will allow building a corpus without the dependency on surface representation and instead records word senses, and creates a purely semantic and a truly universal corpus. Having syntactic structures semantically grouped opens up even more possibilities. Instead of a Rosetta Stone, this system could serve as a high-tech “Rosetta Rubik’s Cube,” with an immense number of combinations being run until the best matching combination is found. Is it possible to test the hypothetical “universal translator” software on something more accessible than a hypothetical communication from extraterrestrial intelligence? Many researchers believe so. While it has not been proven that cetacean communication has all the characteristics of human language, there is evidence that strongly suggests it could. Dolphins, for example, use so-called individual , which appear to be equivalent to human names. Among other things, the signature whistles are used to locate individuals, and therefore, meet one of the requirements for a communication system to be considered a language: . In the course of , dolphins managed to learn an adapted version of American Sign Language to understand abstract concepts like “right” or “left. Lastly, the of dolphins requires coordination of activities that can be only achieved by efficient and equally complex communication. In addition to the often-cited cetaceans, there is evidence of other species having complex communication systems. A that ant communication may be infinitely productive (that is, have infinite amount of combinations like human language does) and that it may efficiently “compress” content (e.g. instead of saying “turn left, left, left, left” say “turn left four times”). Both Doyle and Elliott studied cetacean communication with various tools provided by information theory. for human language, bird song, dolphin communication and non-linguistic sources like white noise or music. Communication systems share a “symmetric A-like amplitude” shape: more symmetric for humans and dolphins, less symmetric for birds. Doyle conducted similar measurements with humpback whale vocalizations and arrived at similar conclusions. This is why several animal communication initiatives are coordinated with the SETI initiatives. A truly universal decipherment framework would be incomplete without the ability to ingest and learn a complex animal communication system.
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Jordan Crook
| 2,016 | 12 | 9 | null |
Kayako’s CEO on building a bootstrapped business
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Felicia Shivakumar
| 2,016 | 12 | 31 |
Shoor saw a pain point and spent over a decade building a product to solve it. He found customers where he could and adapted to a market that moved online. By being flexible, he opened opportunities for himself and his company. There is no clear path to success and stories like his show that the strength of your idea and how you go about growing it are also key to a building a company that lasts. Watch the video above to learn more about Kayako and how the platform helps companies offer better customer support.
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Toymakers are the early adopters pushing AR into the mainstream
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Amir Bozorgzadeh
| 2,016 | 12 | 31 |
In the race to greater consumer adoption, augmented reality is emerging as the early leader, thanks to its adoption by a key consumer market. The technology has always been a wonder, drawing its strength from its capacity to make just about any subject come to life, popping out of the real ground beneath our feet and conjuring up digital apparitions that serve as extensions of our own imagination onto the physical world around us. That ability to create wonder in the everyday, without total immersion, also provides a clue for why AR adoption has been faster (aside from technical limitations that still bedevil VR). One indicator of how the market is apparently more comfortable with AR than it is with its immersive sibling, VR, is that one of its earliest adopters are toymakers. In fact, the Toy Industry Association named augmented reality and related technologies the for 2016. “Think of the drama, dance, fine art and sculpture opportunities that AR brings. Kids could watch famous actors perform Shakespeare monologues in their living room,” Catherine Allen, AR/VR specialist & kids app producer, who has worked on products like Barefoot World Atlas and Elmer’s Photo Patchwork, told me. “They could see what a famous Henry Moore sculpture looks like, in their garden!” Earlier this month the AR startup Osmo, which creates board games, puzzle pieces and blocks that interact with mobile games and iPads, raised . More than 22,000 schools have adopted its products, a fivefold increase from a year ago, according to the company. Many parents may be reluctant to expose their kids to VR experiences because of the . AR, on the other hand, isn’t immersive, and plays out as a digital layer that enhances, or enables further, what is possible to do in real life. “One of the sweet spots for AR on phones and tablets is at the intersection of toys and games. I would generally call them kids products,” Jay Wright, president and general manager of Vuforia at PTC, the company behind the platforms that power many of the toys and games that run on AR, says. “Some are strictly for entertainment use, but many of them are designed to be educational. More and more of them are beginning to support STEM education.” One example of this new push toward STEM-focused, educational gaming is , an AR startup launched by an American expat living in Denmark. It all began with the simple wish of its founder to help her teenage daughter with math, and evolved into an experience tailored to girls with the aim of instilling an interest in science and technology. The video-equipped “Siggy Robots” carry out missions and adventures that require its audience of young female players to learn to code along the way in order to complete each of the story-based challenges. “This is really an exciting time where AR is used to reinspire learning again. Kids are now exposed to so much great technology in their leisure time and yet so little innovation goes into teaching,” Sharmi Albrechtsen, founder and CEO at SmartGurlz, says. “It’s really a pity — since it is a huge potential from a market perspective but also societal. Many kids lose interest in STEM because we have not been able to excite them!” SmartGurlz launched last month and sold out on Amazon. “I strongly believe that when it comes to STEM or teaching, the most important thing is to first capture the imagination of the students and then their curiosity,” Silas Adekunle, co-founder and CEO of , a U.K.-based startup that combines robotics with AR in the gaming space, told me. “AR has so much potential to make classrooms more interactive and engaging, with new ways to visualize complex information.” Other examples of AR-powered toys and games, many of them STEM-focused, that have hit the shelves this holiday season include: Hologrid: Monster Battle; Neobear Magnifier NEO; Virtual Explorer Antopia Adventure; AirHogs Connect Mission Drone; and Skylanders. And it hasn’t come with the kind of collateral damage or disruptive cost to traditional toymakers as we might have expected. “The interesting part is that the products and manufacturers that succeed use technology to enhance the play value of the products they bring to market,” Reyne Rice, chief executive of ToyTrends in September. This new breed of digitized toys and games introduces a digital layer that creates additional value to the underlying business proposition for toymakers. An example is Danish toymaker LEGO’s , named “Toy of the Show” at the and also powered by Vuforia. The AR component of its multi-platform gaming ecosystem depends, in part, on the expanded product line. For example, players can unlock new features, powers and game levels by purchasing new toy sets. “If it can drive additional purchases of physical toys, that’s a really good model. It’s like the razor and razor blade dynamic. The digital game is the razor and the physical toys are the razor blades.” Wright says. The digital soul that has been instilled in the physical toy allows for the industry to establish a stronger narrative with the kids who play its games and in turn only strengthens the way toymakers can market, engage and sell their products. Instead of threatening to cannibalize their current offering, AR actually serves to enhance and expand it.
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How male allies can support women in technology
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Jennifer Manry
| 2,016 | 12 | 31 |
The couldn’t be more aptly named: It truly is a celebration of the technical innovation, inclusive focus and relentless drive of women in tech. We were thrilled to be a small part of the celebration this fall, along with 15,000 other women technologists and male allies. You’ve hopefully heard a lot about the movement around women in tech, raising awareness about the challenges that women face in the tech industry and the importance of hiring and retaining a diverse workforce. A part of that dialogue is about gender allies — the concept that men need to be a part of the solution to reach gender parity in technology fields. There are so many reasons that men should get involved and be true allies to women in tech: It’s the right thing to do. It’s good for business. Diverse teams that reflect the end user create better results for customers. Male allies respect and appreciate their female teammates. They believe in equality. According to conducted by the National Center for Women & Information Technology, gender diversity benefits businesses in several ways, including better financial performance and superior team dynamics and productivity in gender-balanced companies. Studies report that gender-diverse technology organizations and departments produce work teams that stay on schedule and under budget and demonstrate improved employee performance. So, how do men become allies and be part of the solution that will so obviously make us as an industry and a society more successful? For starters, it’s not a label that you can self-appoint. The title “ally” is earned. Being an ally is an action, not a noun. If you’re on the sideline thinking about how sensitive and aware you are, you’re not an ally. You have to take action, and drive impact. And really, you’re not a male ally until women in tech identify you as one. It was just over a year ago that we learned this lesson together. We attended a conference where women and men delved into the issues that women in tech face, how men impact them and what change really looks like. It involved uncomfortable conversation, awkward moments and even some jaw-dropping confessions. The crucial component was honesty in a safe space where everyone assumed positive intent. We talk a lot about positive intent at the office because it’s one of our core values. If you start with assuming whomever you’re talking to is coming from a place of positivity, everyone involved benefits from seeing multiple sides of an issue and not jumping to conclusions. That was when we decided to become part of the solution together. Armed with the tools and tactics we learned, we started a Women in Tech Male Allies initiative with the goal of raising awareness about the challenges women face, identifying ways men can be a part of the solution, providing education about unconscious bias and training men and women to call out and work through bias issues. We both learned more about the issues and how we could take this newly formed partnership back to our teams to amplify the dialogue. The partnership element is crucial: Having a woman in tech and a man who is actively working to be a better ally meant we were able to show — rather than just say — how having a trusted partner is invaluable to the process and to making progress. Being a gender ally isn’t easy. In fact, we can guarantee that you’ll make mistakes just like we did. The thing to remember is that we’re all human. We will inevitably make mistakes. But, if you have a partnership and a trust that grants permission to be imperfect, those mistakes become learning opportunities and teachable moments. And to be clear, it’s not just the male allies who will fall short from time to time. Women in tech have a lifetime of experiences of receiving bias that may have been unconscious or outright explicit. Extraordinarily valid feelings stemming from that can be a barrier to accepting help or support from men who genuinely do want to help. Both sides have ample opportunities to misstep. Just like in tech, the “fail fast” mentality works. Do everything you can to get it right, but when you don’t, learn from it and make the next time better. Through our work at Capital One, we’ve found that men can help by serving as allies and contributing to a culture of inclusion. They don’t do this by charging in to save the day; instead, male allies play a supportive role in addressing the challenges that women face in the tech industry. Women in tech can invite men into the conversation and be a trusted partner to start and continue the dialogue. Gender parity isn’t going to be achieved by a single group. We’ll get there faster together.
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Weekly Roundup: Obama imposes sanctions on Russian intelligence, Snapchat and Oculus eat up startups
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Anna Escher
| 2,016 | 12 | 30 |
Trump’s U.S. election triumph sent Silicon Valley into a spiral of uncertainty, Facebook addressed its fake news problem, the IPO landscape saw little action and the UK separated form the EU. Snapchat rebranded to Snap Inc. and launched its Spectacles hardware product. Twitter is still fighting its abuse problem, Yahoo suffered two massive breaches and Samsung phones exploded. , and you can see the rest of our The Obama administration announced that it will and officials in response to the hacks of American political institutions during the election season. The real question is whether or not this even matters – as the election is already over. , a four-year-old Israeli startup whose augmented reality platform lets you visualize products you want to buy in an intended location. The deal closed for an amount reported between $30 million and $40 million. It’s Google’s world and we all just live in it. Cyanogen, the ambitious startup that aimed to build a better version of Android than Google, . The company that once claimed it was “putting a bullet through Google’s head,” has laid off staff, let go of its CEO and now it is shutting down its services and nightly software builds on December 31. But its Snapchat wasn’t the only one to make an acquisition this week. , which has developed $99 eye tracking device developer kits for computers, and software that can bring (and potentially VR headsets). Amazon’s drone delivery ambitions are nothing new. But discovered this week show new “airborne fulfillment centers” or, . The airborne fulfillment centers, or AFCs, would be stocked with inventory and positioned near a location where Amazon predicts demand for certain items will soon spike. Internet-connected devices may start helping in criminal cases, and one of Amazon’s always-listening Echo devices may be a key witness in a recent one. Police in Bentonville, Arkansas , asking the company to hand over data from an Echo device to help prosecute a suspected murderer. Amazon has so far declined to hand over information in the case.
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2017 will be a strong year for venture capital
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Matt Murphy
| 2,016 | 12 | 30 |
What does my crystal ball say about the outlook for venture capital in 2017? The building blocks of a better year are in place. Many venture capital firms are flush with cash, startup valuations have become more reasonable, technology industry M&A is robust and the technology IPO market is improving. Moreover, the obsession of funding unicorns at almost any price — and at the expense of smaller startups — has materially waned. All good news. Most important, venture capital has a good chance of returning, at least in part, to its fundamental roots in the new year. While investors have been infusing unusually huge sums in some of the biggest startups ever, venture historically has been about targeting promising companies early in their formation and betting they have the potential to soar. As an early-stage investor, Menlo has found that these deals have always offered the best potential returns. Overall, 2017 will be better than 2016, but 2016 wasn’t bad. Funding in early-stage startups declined, valuations fell — in some cases sharply — and the technology IPO market was weak until the very end, undermining prospects for startup exits. Nonetheless, company funding overall was strong and good venture firms had no problem raising new funds. Because venture firms have stockpiled money, they’re well-positioned to take another look at early-stage deals, now very reasonably priced, and once again invest in them liberally. In hindsight, 2016 turned out to be a year of rebuilding. VC investing was very robust in the first half of 2015, but then declined both quarters in the second half of 2015 before essentially bottoming in the first quarter of 2016 at about $12 billion. VC investments exceeded $15 billion in the second quarter and largely stayed there in the third quarter, according to PricewaterhouseCoopers and the National Venture Capital Association. What attracted a lot of media attention last year was the fact that the growth of unicorns — or venture-backed companies valued at at least $1 billion — continued a marked slowdown that started in the last quarter of 2015. Only nine companies that quarter became unicorns, down from 23 in the preceding two quarters. The trend continued in 2016. Nonetheless, top unicorns, such as Uber (Disclosure: a Menlo Ventures portfolio company) and Snapchat, continued to attract all the money they needed, whittling funds available for smaller startups. A weak IPO market exacerbated the trend. Wall Street lost its appetite for technology IPOs and the best unicorns saw no need to go public as long as ample private funds at generous valuations were readily available. Just 17 percent of companies surveyed in a said their goal was an IPO. The first 2016 IPO by a U.S. venture-backed technology company — , a cloud communications platform-as-a-service company — didn’t occur until June, and it raised more money than anticipated, which was a surprising, but excellent outcome. Today, the IPO market is strengthening — five successful technology IPOs have been added to the board since Twilio. Looking ahead, the biggest reason for optimism in the venture capital landscape is that venture firms aren’t hurting for cash. Buoyed by some billion-dollar-plus funds, 134 venture firms closed funds totaling $22.5 billion in the first half of 2016 alone, a record-setting pace, according to PitchBook. In addition, the Internet of Things (Iot) and big data analytics are driving a record number of merger and acquisition (M&A) deals, including Microsoft’s $26 billion of LinkedIn and Symantec’s nearly $5 billion of privately held Blue Coat Systems this year. M&A, of course, is a major exit path for startups. Technology M&A could be even bigger in 2017 because of more reasonable startup evaluations and a growing tendency among major companies to expand their horizons by buying smaller companies outside their traditional lines of business. That’s why software behemoth Microsoft purchased social network LinkedIn. Then, too, there is the surging stock market and, by extension, the rebound in technology IPOs. This has been fueled not only by a strengthening economy but by President-elect Donald Trump’s intention to bolster the economy further by reducing taxes, streamlining regulations and sparking major infrastructure development. A Republican-controlled Congress is highly likely to support the measures he proposes. In such an environment, there is every reason to expect that non-traditional startup investors, such as mutual funds, hedge funds and sovereign wealth funds, will continue to invest in private technology companies. Lastly, there is the distinct possibility that venture funds will resuscitate their traditional passion for early-stage investing. This usually pays off more because investors receive a bigger ownership stake and are an integral part of the startup team. According to Cambridge Associates, a research firm that studies the financial reports of venture firms, early-stage investments have accounted for the bulk of the venture industry’s gains since 1994. I’m often asked how I view 2017. Bottom line, I’m optimistic. Given the facts, there is no reason not to be.
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Why you probably won’t invest in the next unicorn
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Winter Mead
| 2,016 | 12 | 30 |
Value creation in enterprise tech is often driven by a cohort of exits, while value creation in consumer tech is generally driven by large, individual exits — a phenomenon I recently dug into. What the data revealed is that, in recent years, there is a trend of larger consumer exits, such as Facebook, Twitter and WhatsApp. And if this trend continues, that’s very good news for consumer-oriented funds. But the data further begs a deeper dive on VC-backed exit dynamics; in particular, what are typical VC-backed exit sizes?, including a look at the frequency of exits greater than $1 billion across enterprise and consumer. For companies with IPO exits of $1 billion or more in valuation, venture-backed enterprise exits outpaced consumer exits until recently. There were 144 IPO exits with greater than $1 billion in value, of which 97 are enterprise companies and 47 are consumer companies. Source: Sapphire Ventures On the M&A front, there were 96 exits of $1 billion or more in value, of which 65 are enterprise companies and 31 are consumer companies. Similar to the chart above, acquisition value of enterprise companies outpaced that of consumer companies until recently, when the venture capital ecosystem became more accommodating of large M&A transactions, potentially driven by the run up in market capitalization of some of the earlier, successful IPOs of companies such as Google and Facebook. Source: Sapphire Ventures Of course, looking only at outcomes with $1 billion or more in value only covers a fraction of where most VC exits occur. Slightly less than half of all exits in both enterprise and consumer are $50 million or less in size, and more than 70 percent of all exits are less than $200 million. Source: Sapphire Ventures Additionally, it’s interesting to consider cumulative value accretion across exit sizes for both enterprise and consumer (see chart below). The power law of venture outcomes is apparent in both enterprise and consumer, whereby a significant portion of total exit value is generated by the $1 billion-plus outcomes. In particular, exits greater than $1 billion generate 62 percent of total returns for enterprise and 77 percent for consumer. Source: Sapphire Ventures So, consistent with my previous conclusion about enterprise funds returning more capital than consumer ones, it furthermore turns out that the enterprise category has generated a larger cohort of successful outcomes, while outlier companies make up the vast majority of returns in the consumer category. Now we have to wonder about capital invested into each category and how investment cost per annum correlates with exit value. A future article will look into this question — and more. The information set forth herein is not intended to constitute investment advice and under no circumstances should any information provided herein be used or considered as an offer to sell or a solicitation of an offer to buy an interest in any investment fund managed by Sapphire Ventures. Sapphire Ventures does not solicit or make its services available to the public and none of the funds are currently open to new investors. Past performance is not indicative of future performance. Any portfolio companies referred to above do not necessarily represent all of the investments made or recommended by Sapphire Ventures, and were not selected based on the return on Sapphire Ventures’ investment in them. It should not be assumed that any specific investments identified and discussed herein were or will be profitable. Not all investments made by Sapphire Ventures will be profitable or will equal the performance of any of the companies identified above.
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Meet the five startups vying for Best App at the 10th Annual Crunchies Awards
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Jordan Crook
| 2,016 | 12 | 30 |
2016 sucked, if we’re being honest with ourselves. But the year wasn’t a total waste. The world of tech offered up a few shining stars in 2016, and in the era of apps, five standouts were nominated as finalists for The Best App of 2016 award. As the show grows nigh, we thought it might be helpful to let you get to know some of these startups. So without any further ado, here are the five apps vying for Best App at the , going down the evening of February 6th, 2017. Best App Finalists: Period-tracking app Clue has had a big year. Alongside a fresh $20 million in funding, the Berlin-based company has also surpassed 5 million users. Not to mention, the app is collecting all kinds of valuable data, from its users’ moods to when they’re “in the mood.” In a social landscape dominated by Instagram, Facebook and Snapchat, Musical.ly has found quite a bit of success with young people. The music video app (kind of like Dubsmash) was reported to have raised $100 million at a $500 million valuation in 2016, and has clocked in at 40 million MAUs. In the last year, no app has made quite as big of a splash as Niantic’s Pokémon GO. Kids and adults alike flocked to the app, which was the fastest-growing mobile game in history. Plus, Pokémon GO was the fastest game to ever hit . 2016 might be the year of video, but Prisma proved that photos are still the bread and butter of social media. The AI-powered photo-filter app has created a bit of a trend, with players like Snapchat copying the artistic filters, as well as framing company Level getting in on the action. Marijuana legalization is upon us, and Weedmaps has quite the head start. The app can help you with just about anything pot-related, from information about various strains to nearby dispensaries. You can check out the full list of 10th Annual Crunchies Awards finalists . Or… you can just to the Crunchies and join us as we celebrate the best tech, products and people of 2016.
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Uru finds the best places to introduce ads in online videos
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Anthony Ha
| 2,016 | 12 | 30 |
New York City-based startup is working on a new way for video publishers to make money. Imagine watching a normal-looking online video — except that on some of the surfaces (say, on the cabinet behind the stars of a cooking video), you’ll see logos or other art promoting a sponsor. Okay, that might actually sound a bit annoying, but Uru co-founder and CEO Bill Marino argued that it’s a better fit with videos — not to mention emerging media like augmented and virtual reality — than most traditional forms of advertising. “We are headed towards these more immersive mediums,” Marino said. “AR and VR are coming pretty swiftly, so we need to rethink how brands are presented inside these mediums. It has to be a lot more seamless and harmonious with the content.” We’re already starting to see that with custom, sponsored videos, but Marino said that it’s “just not scalable” for creators to always work directly with advertisers and shoot new videos for each one of them. Uru also says that in a study conducted by a researcher at the Center for Behavioral Research at New York University’s Stern School of Business, the new formats resulted in 80 percent better brand recall than existing video ad formats. The company is announcing that it has raised $700,000 in “pre-seed” funding led by Notation Capital, with participation from Betaworks, PJC, Rough Draft, Thatcher Bell, Christian Noske, Giphy CEO Alex Chung, Chris Cunningham of C2 Ventures and Eric Franchi of Undertone. [vimeo 163895262 w=640 h=360] Marino and his co-founder/CTO Brunno Attorre met at the Cornell Tech Startup Studio, where they won . In fact, they said they’re the first Startup Award winner to raise institutional funding. Marino told me that Uru’s technology isn’t just looking for flat, logo-friendly surfaces — it’s also “content aware.” “We identify the objects in [a video and] we identify higher level themes,” he said. “That’s really, really important. None of us want to see a Coors logo in a David Lynch film.” That means Uru isn’t limited to a single ad format. For example, Marino said it can identify the moments in a video where there’s a natural break, making an opportune spot for mid-roll video ads. The startup is still in the early stages of signing up advertisers and publishers, but it’s already held discussions with adtech company AppNexus. In a quote provided by Uru, AppNexus Senior Vice President of Technology Eric Hoffert said: “We are excited about the novel approach Uru is taking to make video advertising more seamless with content to improve user experience.”
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The real political divide is education
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Steve Welch
| 2,016 | 12 | 30 |
The two main political parties in this country are about to face a challenge that will create a complete realignment as politicians are forced to choose between robots and people. Vespasian ruled Rome from AD 69 to AD 79. The emperor was one of the first heads of state to encourage the development of art, science and technology. Vespasian was also one of the first heads of state to fear technology’s impact on workers. When an engineer offered a low-cost transportation machine for moving heavy columns to the capital, Vespasian paid the engineer handsomely for his invention, but decided not to use the machine, saying, “You must allow my poor hauliers to earn their bread.” This was just the beginning of a long debate on technology and unemployment. Those who constantly rang the warning bells that technology would replace humanity have proven themselves wrong time and time again, as over the last 2,000 years our quality of life has increased with technological advancements and jobs have been plentiful. But like everything, it is true until it is not. Indeed, 2,000 years after Vespasian worried about his hauliers, with the support of the city’s Democratic mayor. While Pittsburgh is just a testing ground for Uber, the At the same time Uber launched its driverless car, from doing business in the city. The tale of Pittsburgh and Austin offers an early glimpse into the battle that is coming. The same political party embraced two extraordinarily contradictory polices in response to a similar opportunity/threat. Since 2000 we have continued to see , while at the same time . This has been driven by new and innovative technologies. Not surprisingly, over that same time, . The reality is that the factors driving this trend are about to accelerate. Machine learning, big data and robotics are all separate technologies, but they are becoming interwoven and are feeding off each other. These connected technologies are creating something different this time. First and foremost, the new technologies are designed not to enhance workers’ capabilities but replace them altogether. When the car replaced the horse it still needed a driver. But when the driverless car replaces the car, there will be no driver — and to top it off, the car will be manufactured by robotics. Secondly, and perhaps more importantly, the skills required to outperform the machines are getting significantly greater. Throughout history, technology has continued to make obsolete specific jobs, but overall employment has grown as people have developed new skills that made them more productive. When machines took over the farm, those workers were able to be deployed in manufacturing with minimal training. This is no longer true, as technology will soon replace anything that is remotely repetitive and unskilled. This does not bode well for low-skilled workers. This is why the (Globalization is the other reason, but more on that in a separate column.) At the same time, these technologies provide great opportunities for those who are well-educated, with problem-solving and critical-thinking skills. These technological advancements will drive up earnings and wages while driving down costs. A net result will be a sustainably higher standard of living for those who possess the desired skills. This is particularly true in the United States. In addition, the United States has a history of quickly and efficiently capitalizing these types of companies. Google, Amazon, Apple (reborn) and Facebook are all less than two decades old and have literally created trillions of dollars of value. No other country has a company like these, let alone four. So as Uber launches its driverless taxi service and Google continues down the path to bring us a completely autonomous car, the (1.7 million truck drivers, 1.7 million taxi drivers). It is estimated that anywhere from 20-90 percent of unskilled workers will be automated out of the work force in the coming decades. Depending on where you are on the education and skills ladder, you will see these events very differently. Enter Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump. These populous figures learned how to tap into our populous anger without ever offering any real answers as to how to solve this problem. with almost every part of the Democratic Party establishment against him. Unfortunately, Bernie never understood governments have less control than they once did, because people and capital are completely fluid around the globe and his solutions would have only accelerated the problems: Quickly doubling the minimum wage will create greater incentives to replace low-skilled workers with technology. Trump’s anti-trade, anti-immigration and newly found Christian values propelled him to the party’s nomination with . While Trump offered immigrants as the scapegoats and trade as the devil, he offered little on policy other than the fact that he was the “only person” who could fix these problems. While technology has not been at the forefront of the 2016 campaign, it is the impact of technology that is driving the undercurrents and climate of the political environment. It is clear that this will be the defining issue of the elections to come. Both parties are currently constructed of unstable coalitions. This issue will pit these different coalitions against each other. The Democratic Party will see labor (which will be destroyed by this trend) at odds with its party elites (which will benefit greatly from this trend). The rise of Trump shows how divided the Republican Party is already between the business community (which will benefit from this trend) and their working class (which will be hurt by this trend) and evangelical voters. In fact, both parties have split not along ideological lines, but educational lines. In the Democratic Party, , while less-educated voters supported Sanders. There was a generational split in the Democratic Party, but this had more to do with the individual candidate and the fact that young voters could not support Clinton. In the Republican Party, , while more-educated voters supported anyone but Trump. There was also a gender split in the Republican Party, but this had more to do with Trump’s personality than anything else. There were also certainly well-educated Trump supporters who strongly and understandably wanted an outsider/business candidate. Take away the individual personalities and the trends are quite striking. The general election has also started to show the challenges that are coming. while Trump was the first Republican to lose them. At the same time, Trump has galvanized . I suspect if Trump could get through an afternoon without insulting women and minority groups he would have galvanized low-skilled non-white workers, as well. The political coalitions of the last 50 years are under great strain as technology is greatly changing who benefits from economic growth. The 2016 election offers us a glimpse into the future that Vespasian feared. As Pittsburgh and Austin have shown, it is still unclear how the parties will address these challenges. The real question, as the parties realign themselves, is who will be for the robots and who will be for the workers.
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Russia sanctioned and SpaceX looks back to the stars: It’s The Daily Crunch
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Darrell Etherington
| 2,016 | 12 | 30 |
Russia gets a parting gift from Obama, SpaceX wants to move back to more controlled explosions, plus internet matrimony. All that and more in The Daily Crunch for December 30, 2016. And if you’re one of the growing number of ailing wearable companies, maybe think twice before bickering in public. The White House may be getting new leadership early next year, but the Obama administration isn’t coasting: the U.S. Government just announced new sanctions it’s imposing on Russia for its role in the U.S. election hacks for the 2016 Presidential race. The sanctions include blocking GRU officials from traveling to the U.S., and extraditing 35 Russian intelligence operatives. It’s ‘too little, too late’ according to most observers, however – the ideal time for this to come down would’ve been sometime before voting. Launches for SpaceX have been on hold ever since a Falcon 9 rocket blew up on a launch pad during pre-flight routines. The issues seem to have been identified, according to the company, and it’s looking to get FAA clearance for a potential first launch back with Iridium, bringing that company’s satellites to orbit ideally sometime between January 7 and 9. The remaining hurdle of FAA clearance is a doozie, however. Tech startups going public were down considerably – back to 2009 financial crisis levels, almost. But the ones that did go public did very well, and the investment scene has also changed to allow later stage companies to stay private and continue to raise for longer. Global economic worries probably also dampened the market, and it’s not clear that those will get any better in 2017. Facebook is doing everything it can to avoid being entangled in an Illinois court case that has plaintiffs accusing it of violating local laws related to facial recognition. The social network is basically disagreeing with every definition of anything related to facial recognition tech and biometrics to avoid being found responsible for having broken the state rules. Someone definitely doesn’t want to face the music. Superstar international pro tennis champion Serena Williams is marrying that guy who co-created the self-professed “front page of the internet.” Alexis Ohanian proposed to Williams and she accepted, according to her announcement on r/isaidyes, a subreddit dedicated to proposals. I guess that’s cute, but Reddit’s still mostly a disaster. Like two schoolyard rivals bitterly teasing one another, Jawbone and Fitbit have been trading on-record jabs since Fitbit dropped its lawsuit against Jawbone. Guess what: neither of you is in very good shape right now so maybe focus on that instead of on bashing each other in court filings. Uber and Lyft have been accused of having discrimination problems, with drivers opting not to pick up passengers based on race and names, but in a letter to Sen. Al Franken, both denied their use of real names and profile pictures as a way to prevent fraud and ensure safety for all parties. It makes sense, but that discrimination problem still needs a fix that goes beyond posting a policy against that kind of behavior.
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LG’s Hub Robot sounds like a mobile Amazon Echo
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Brian Heater
| 2,016 | 12 | 30 |
LG and Samsung have really taken advantage of the calm before the CES storm by teasing out their product announcements, one by one. LG’s certainly ahead in terms of sheer strangeness here, having already announced a floating speaker and a wearable speaker collar. The Seoul-based electronics giant will also apparently be showing off a . It’s not the company’s first robotic rodeo, of course, having already released some robotic vacuum cleaners and, at the very least, shown off some…interesting takes on the space, including the that debuted at MWC last year (below). A trio of “non-cleaning” robots teased by the company, include what sounds like a lawn mowing model, a commercial model designed to offer up travel info to humans at airports and hotels and the Hub Robot – which, from the sound of things, is a bit like a mobile Amazon Echo. There’s very little to work with at the moment, but the company is calling the “Hub Robot” (their quotes, mind) “smart home gateway and a personal assistant for consumers.” All of the above robots will be equipped with some form of AI, according to the company, but it’s hard to say how far that will extend before Alexa-style question answering and home automation. Keep in mind that the company announced the SmartThinQ Hub (pictured at top), an Echo-style speaker that later incorporated Alexa functionality. If I had to guess, I’d say the Hub is will look similar to the company’s HOM-BOT, while trading in cleaning for personal assisting. Whatever the case, we’ll find out in a matter of days.
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SpaceX loads Iridium satellites for first Falcon 9 mission since explosion
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Darrell Etherington
| 2,016 | 12 | 30 |
The payload is now on board for SpaceX’s first return to launch following its September 1 explosion of a Falcon 9 rocket on a launchpad during fueling. The proposed launch is currently awaiting clearance by the FAA for a launch window that opens January 7 and goes through January 9. A return to flight for SpaceX would be a big step forward in terms of the private spacefaring company recovering from its September mishap. SpaceX has investigated the cause of the explosion, which occurred during pre-flight fueling procedures and resulted in no injuries. The company found that the likely cause was frozen oxygen, which burst a high-pressure tank containing helium, which is used for pressurization during the second stage of the rocket’s launch. SpaceX CEO Elon Musk has previously explained that the company believes it can avoid any future incidents with this system by altering the pre-flight fueling procedure. Milestone Alert: The first ten satellites are stacked and encapsulated in the Falcon 9 fairing. — Iridium Corporate (@IridiumComm) Iridium’s payload for this Falcon 9 mission is a group of 10 satellites, which will act as relay stations for its mobile voice and data network. All the planned flights on SpaceX’s manifest post-launch have been affected by the need to investigate and regroup following the explosion, but the company continues to win contracts from clients, including NASA, despite delays. SpaceX and Iridium had previously been looking at December 16 as a potential return-to-flight date for this mission, but both parties still need clearance from the FAA to proceed with the launch. January 7-9 is the next window, but there’s no surefire guarantee they’ll be cleared in time for that opening, either.
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