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Yahoo shares tumble as investors fear Verizon acquisition trouble
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Katie Roof
| 2,016 | 12 | 15 |
TechCrunch is owned by Verizon, but we do not have inside information on the latest deal conversations. (We’ve reached out, but haven’t been given a comment). One could also expect that Verizon executives would want to be certain that Yahoo didn’t withhold information about the hack in the deal negotiations. If Yahoo knew more about the breach than they let on, Verizon would have an especially good reason to ask for a discount. A betrayal of trust would not be a good way to start the new relationship. A Yahoo spokesperson told us that “we are confident in Yahoo’s value and we continue to work towards integration with Verizon.”
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Darrell Etherington
| 2,016 | 12 | 23 | null |
Nintendo Switch patents tantalize gamers with possibilities of VR, touchscreen, new controllers
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Devin Coldewey
| 2,016 | 12 | 15 |
Everyone is , but the company continues to be cagey about critical details like the resolution, the presence or absence of a touchscreen and so on. Well, speculation will certainly heat up with the appearance of a nearly 150-page patent application that gamers are still poring through for hidden info. The patent document, which was filed in June but only today made public, , where everyone promptly lost their minds. It’s worth noting that features aren’t confirmed just because they’re in the patent; Nintendo could easily be planning ahead or just protecting implementations of scrapped ideas. But there’s still lots of good stuff here. Perhaps the biggest potential revelation is that there are references to a touchscreen: The main unit includes a touch panel on the screen of the display such that display functions as a touch screen. The touch panel may sense position, pressure or other characteristics of touch. In the present embodiment, the touch panel is of a type (e.g. the capacitive type) that enables a multi-touch input. This would open up all kinds of possibilities: ports of Wii U games, 3DS games on the Virtual Console and, of course, all the gameplay elements that touchscreens bring. Try not to get too excited, though — this may have been one of the features cut to save cost and development time. A head-mounted display unit that would use the Switch in “portable mode” (i.e. tablet form) as a VR platform is also shown. This is surprising for two reasons — first, it’s some of the first attention we’ve seen Nintendo give to VR at all. And second, because it really wouldn’t make a very good VR headset! Rumors give the Switch a 720p or 1080p display, which is just fine for playing games at handheld distance, but up close the pixels would be enormous. The Joy-Con controllers, although I suppose that’s redundant and I should just call them Joy-Cons, have some new features, as well. Multiple shoulder buttons are shown, which makes each one a more complete device when used independently, and there are also references to motion controls and IR position-tracking being built in. Just what they would be used for remains a mystery, but it does open up the possibility of Wii-like gaming or at the very least in-game motion gestures. NFC and vibration are also mentioned. The things most likely to be real are these alternative Joy-Cons, with directional pads instead of or in addition to the analog stick. Everyone will want these, because they’ll be much better for playing classic games, and some just prefer them. Not much was revealed in terms of specs, but there are a few nuggets that seem worth counting on, such as that there seems to be an SD card slot for easy storage expansion, and that USB-C appears to be the interface used for connecting to the dock. As far as performance, the Switch will have two distinct modes, “console” and “portable,” and in the latter mode the fan (suspected but now seemingly confirmed) will be limited in its RPMs to reduce noise. But because of battery and heat constraints, that the Switch will run in 720p while acting as a handheld. The dock switches the output to 1080p and adds extra cooling power. Although the Switch definitely makes some compromises, it’s looking to check quite a lot of boxes on gamers’ wish lists. We’ll know next month how many of these features made it to the final product. Search for patent number 20160361640 if you’d like to scour the document for more.
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The government body that oversees the security of voting systems was itself hacked
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Devin Coldewey
| 2,016 | 12 | 15 |
The U.S. Election Assistance Commission, which is responsible for testing and certifying voting systems, among other things, was hacked around the time of the election, . The EAC confirmed a “potential intrusion” in a statement issued to TechCrunch. This isn’t a smoking gun for a stolen election or anything like that; the EAC doesn’t actually run the elections, nor does it handle voter information. But it is a shameful display all the same, especially considering how loudly and frequently the hacking threat has been this year. Recorded Future heard early this month that the EAC had been hacked, and found someone they refer to as Rasputin (not the hacker’s real name or handle) trying to sell more than 100 logins to its systems. Some of those logins had full administrative privileges, and many had access to confidential testing plans and results for voting hardware around the country. The EAC’s internal website, as shown in a screenshot provided by the hacker to security researchers. In addition to logins, Rasputin was selling an open SQL injection vulnerability for the EAC’s internal website. The researchers notified the EAC and law enforcement and the issue was fixed, but it could have been exploited at any time up to its resolution. In its statement, the EAC said it was working with the FBI “to determine the source of this criminal activity.” I asked for more information on when and how the hack was detected, and will update this story if I hear back. Rasputin, as you might guess from his name, spoke Russian and may hail from that land, but there’s no reason to think this was a state-sponsored job — . The icing on the cake is that the EAC this October entitled “Don’t believe the hype. Foreign hackers will not choose the next president.” It’s entirely possible that foreign hackers were, at that very moment, present on the commission’s network. “We work with state and local officials across the country to identify and share best practices regarding cybersecurity, including information on testing systems, auditing the results and creating contingency plans,” read the article. “Election officials use this information to better prepare and secure their systems.”
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A closer look at the 3D-printed Adidas 3D Runners
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Brian Heater
| 2,016 | 12 | 15 |
The 3D Runners aren’t going to change the sneaker world. Not yet, at least. For now, the technology isn’t affordable or scalable enough for the mainstream shoe-buying public. The $333 price tag is simultaneously a nod to the technology that gave the shoes life and a reminder of its still prohibitive nature. But unlike the $700+ self-lacing that launched earlier this year in limited quantity, the underlying tech on Adidas’ new sneakers feel truly inevitable. Three things you notice about the 3D Runners right out of the box. One, they’re sexy as hell. Two, they’re extremely light. Three, they’d be completely useless in a rainstorm. Between the Primeknit upper and the lattice-work 3D-printed midsoles, the sneakers look to be made of mostly air — no doubt a considerable factor in helping keep the running shoes so lightweight. The company refers to the 3D-printed midsole as a “3D web structure,” a reference to the geometrically complex scaffolding that varies density based on where the foot strikes to better distribute impact and absorb shock. The design also allows for more elasticity on the bottom of the shoe, particularly when coupled with the malleable knit top. And they fit pretty well out of the box — a big change from most of the running shoes I’ve picked up over the years. Are they worth $333? Unless you’re particularly hung up on getting something limited edition, of course not. But the 3D Runners aren’t meant to be viewed along the lines of the company’s more commercial offerings. Instead, like the and the biodegradable synthetic also shown off this year, they’re more of a nod to what’s possible. As 3D printing for manufacturing becomes more prevalent, it’s easy to see how the technology might someday help shoe makers push the envelope on trainers’ efficiency and footwear customization. Meantime, they’ll certainly make your sneakerhead friends jealous. [gallery ids="1429080,1429079,1429078,1429077,1429076,1429074,1429073"]
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Next Entertainment wants to make it possible to live stream for a living
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Lora Kolodny
| 2,016 | 12 | 15 |
A Taiwan-based startup called has raised $25 million in an outsized Series A round of funding for apps that make it possible to live stream for a living. The company’s founder and CEO, Andy Zhong, is no stranger to tech and new media. He previously started , a social gaming company acquired by a Chinese conglomerate, Zhongji, in 2014 for $960 million. In fact, FunPlus is one of the investors in Next Entertainment, along with China social live-streaming giants which incubated the new company. For the unfamiliar, Inke is a major live-streaming app in China that brings everyday users together in chat rooms where they can interact with and broadcast alongside a known or emerging personality. Inke’s app allows viewers to pay live streamers with virtual gifts that they purchase in-app. Think of it like a video conference call crossed with a YouTuber’s latest meme-ready installment with a tip jar. Inke also gained note for its “beautify” filters that are meant to help users feel confident before they live stream. Next Entertainment is aiming to export and mirror the success of its predecessor Inke beyond China. Its flagship app, available in Taiwan now, is called MeMe. It allows users to build a following, connect with viewers and make money through ads and digital gifts. Streamers can click the camera button and choose if they want beautify or not before they start a live stream. Viewers can follow popular streamers, or streamers they’ve discovered and like, and interact with them, or each other, sending them social gifts as they would on Inke. And users can check nearby to interact with locally based streamers. The company will take a category-specific approach in the U.S. with apps dedicated to live streaming around special interests for sports fans, Zhong tells TechCrunch. Zhong said Next Entertainment will also gamify its apps. “Both viewers and streamers will gain access to different features by doing certain activities as they level up.” Additional investors in Next Entertainment’s Series A round include: and The company’s competition in the U.S. will include everyone from Facebook Live, Snapchat and Twitter to newcomers like , or genre-specific mobile social networks that have incorporated live streaming, such as
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Mercedes launches car-sharing service Croove
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Kristen Hall-Geisler
| 2,016 | 12 | 15 |
For something like a century, car makers have sold one car to one person one time and then waited for them to wear out that car and come back to the dealership for another one. Increasingly, that model is outmoded, and Mercedes-Benz is putting another nail in that model’s coffin with . The car-sharing service launched in Munich this month with a couple of twists. Croove is a peer-to-peer sharing service, unlike fellow Daimler-owned service or BMW’s . Those services provide a fleet of cars to be shared in a city. Croove is open to anyone with any brand of car — private cars included. Croove is only available as an iOS app for now, though Mercedes promises to have an Android version available soon, plus a desktop site. Requirements for sharing are simple; owners fill out a profile for their vehicle, including any options it has. The app then walks the owner through setting the price to rent the car. The vehicle does have to be “in good condition and no more than 15 years old,” according to a press release. It’s just as simple for renters to rent, as long as they’re at least 21 years old and have a license. They use the app to find a car that suits their needs and contact the owner. Then the two users can either arrange an in-person key exchange, or the renter can pay a bit more for pickup and delivery by the owner. The app includes a checklist to use when looking for damage after the rental is concluded. Mercedes is looking to develop a PIN-based keyless function to make the exchange even more frictionless. Croove is part of Mercedes’s CASE strategy, which stands for connectivity, autonomous driving, sharing and electric drive systems. Mercedes announced the creation of this separate, independent entity in September to advance technologies in these spaces from ideas to reality. The EQ electric mobility brand, which includes the concept vehicle, also falls under this particular umbrella.
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Rivvr brings wireless VR to the Oculus Rift and HTC Vive
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Lucas Matney
| 2,016 | 12 | 15 |
Wires don’t really exist in anyone’s conception of the future. Often they’re just needed for powering devices, but in the case of high-quality VR, the headsets rely on wires to connect to high-end PCs that provide the brains. is looking to cut the cords with its hardware solution that will provide wireless play to both the Oculus Rift and HTC Vive. I had a chance to take an exclusive first look at the device from the YC-backed company and pop on a VR headset to see how well it works. Unlike other devices which are aiming to send the entire raw HDMI signal over the air, Rivvr uses its proprietary tech to compress the much smaller video feed from the PC, sending just about 40-80 mbps of video signal over the air. The device weighs around 300 grams, but really doesn’t make the headset feel any heavier as there are no longer any heavy cords pulling on the back of the headset. How did it all actually feel? Liberating. The wires have been one of the most annoying limiting factors of VR immersion as of late, it’s not the biggest deal breaker, but it’s certainly something that there’s a demand to fix. There are still some kinks in terms of connection, this is very much a tough solution to crack. The increased tracking latency, which the team claims it has gotten down to 11ms, wasn’t noticeable in the slightest during my short demo time spent between Tilt Brush and Fruit Ninja. Over the course of a few minutes, I had a couple signal drops where the image digitally fractured though the tracking never hiccuped. This isn’t a device you’re going to get sick using but there are still some issues that need to be addressed. Rivvr is a hardware startup spun out from the YC-backed startup , a company that’s selling monthly access to powerful cloud computers. The Rivvr team is hoping to use the combined technologies to one day beam virtual reality content to a user’s headset using Sixa’s high-specced cloud computers. Limits in the current infrastructure of American internet service providers make this a bit difficult, but the team sees cloud computing as an essential evolution that will drive these upgrades moving forward in the next few years. It will be interesting to see whether service providers can keep up with the speed of hardware development, especially as VR headsets glance towards a future where each eye has a 6K display powering it. Pricing isn’t totally set for the wireless device yet, though CEO Mykola Minchenko says we will hear more at CES next month. The company did detail that it is probably planning to offer the device in the $200-$300 range in two models sporting 3 hour and 6 hour battery lives respectively. Minchenko says the device will ship by the end of spring 2017.
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Oracle CEO Safra Catz joins Trump transition team
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Kate Conger
| 2,016 | 12 | 15 |
Oracle’s chief executive Safra Catz will join President-elect Donald Trump’s transition team, an Oracle spokesperson told TechCrunch. Catz was one of several top tech executives that , his children and his advisors yesterday at Trump Tower in New York. Catz was the most outspokenly optimistic attendee prior to the meeting, saying, “I plan to tell the President-elect that we are with him and are here to help in any way we can.” Catz added that she hoped Trump would reform the tax code, reduce regulation and negotiate trade deals that would benefit the tech community. Catz will remain in her role as CEO at Oracle while working on the transition. TechCrunch asked Oracle about the nature of Catz’s role on the transition team and will update if the company provides further detail. Unlike some of the other attendees of Trump’s tech summit, Catz was not particularly outspoken about politics during the election season. Federal Election Commission data shows no contributions to presidential candidates in Catz’s name, although the CEO has donated to Republican and Democratic Congressional campaigns. Larry Ellison, Oracle’s chairman, is a Republican mega-donor who contributed millions to a super PAC that backed Marco Rubio’s failed presidential bid.
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Verizon is letting Samsung brick the Note 7 after all, but waiting until after the holidays
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Brian Heater
| 2,016 | 12 | 15 |
About a week ago, Samsung announced that it was finally ready to be done with this whole Note 7 situation, once and for all. The company issued a release stating that it would issue a software update here in the States that would effectively brick the troubled handset, rendering it inoperable when not plugged directly into a power source. Verizon (our parent company) standing in stark and surprise contrast to Samsung’s announcement — and, for that matter, its fellow carriers, stating, “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.” The company added that it was concerned about holiday travelers who might need their handset in case of emergency. Today’s news marks between the two positions. Verizon won’t push the release on December 19, as Samsung intended, but it will issue the update, waiting until January 5 to do so. Says the company, “We want to make sure you can contact family, first responders, and emergency medical professionals during the holiday travel season.” Those planning to navigate CES on the phablet, on the other hand, are out of luck. But at least it will give the stubborn owners a little more time to say goodbye. Just please, please, please if you’re doing any holiday travel, don’t board a plane with the thing.
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GM will begin testing and building self-driving cars in Michigan
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Darrell Etherington
| 2,016 | 12 | 15 |
GM is going to start building its next generation of self-driving vehicles at the Michigan plant where it builds its Chevrolet Bolt, the company’s CEO Mary Barra announced Thursday. It will also be testing vehicles on public roads in metro Detroit, GM said. GM is already testing self-driving vehicles using autonomous systems created by Cruise, the startup it acquired earlier this year, in both San Francisco, California and Scottsdale, Arizona. The Michigan testing is clear to proceed after state governor Rick Snyder signed into law legislation that allows expanded testing of autonomous vehicles on public roads by companies and organizations. It also allows the purchase and use of autonomous vehicles by consumers once the tech is ready, and the use of such cars by ride-hailing providers, including companies like Uber or those run by automakers themselves. Barra explained in a that Michigan provides a lot of variety in terms of real-world testing conditions compared to its existing trial cities, including a “wide range of road, weather and climate conditions,” which include snow in significant volume and much colder temperatures. She notes that their test areas will now cover everything from “desert heat[…] to crowded streets” across the cities where they have a presence. As of September, Cruise had around 30 self-driving test cars in operation in SF and Scottsdale combined. In the blog post, Barra noted that GM is committed to an autonomous vehicle future in large part because of the benefits they provide customers due to potential improvements in “safety, convenience and quality of life.” Barra cited 2015 traffic statistics from the U.S. Department of Transportation, which counted over 35,000 traffic-related deaths, around 90 percent of which were due to human driver error. In an interview with Barra captured by CNBC at a press conference in Detroit announcing the news, Barra explained why she believes GM has an advantage when it comes to competing with other companies developing autonomous driving tech. “We have 100 years of really understanding vehicles, putting them on the road, making sure we have a safe, high-quality vehicle,” she told reporters. “When you take autonomous, electrification, connectivity, I think we are going to have a very special offering to the consumer.” Barra said that while there are over 100 people working in Silicon Valley on GM’s autonomous driving systems, they will “work seamlessly” with teams based in Michigan as the new manufacturing of its next-generation assembly facility near Lake Orion, Michigan, kicks off early next year. The Orion plant is where GM assembles the Bolt EV, which is the car GM uses as the base of its current-generation Cruise autonomous test cars. “In today’s work world, location isn’t so important,” she added, regarding the distributed nature of GM’s autonomous engineering efforts.
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8Bitdo’s NES30 and Retro Receiver for NES Classic is the ideal wireless controller
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Darrell Etherington
| 2,016 | 12 | 15 |
If you are one of the lucky few who either managed to get an NES Classic Edition already, or who will likely be getting one this holiday as a gift, then you’ll notice right away that the controller included is barely usable, thanks to a short cord. That’s where comes in. The included cord is so short that there’s already a brisk Amazon business in selling extension cables — but for not much more money you can pick up the 8bitdo kit, which includes a wireless controller modeled very closely on the original Nintendo gamepad, and a Retro Receiver wireless dongle to connect it to your tiny new console. As you can see from the image above, it’s very close to the classic controller Nintendo makes — with the addition of right and left shoulder buttons, plus an X and Y button on the right-hand side. One of these works as an auto-fire button in some games, and the other is just redundant. But they don’t get in the way, and their presence means you can use this as a standard Bluetooth controller with a range of other gadgets and have more control options. The important thing is that this controller feels like a Nintendo controller, and that’s key to retaining that nostalgic appeal for old-school players. Plus, once you’re paired successfully, which took me a couple of minutes to get right once I plugged in the Retro Receiver, the connection is rock solid. Battery life is also great — 8bitdo claims 20 hours, and I did not have to recharge it after a series of long-play sessions that included actually beating Dr. Mario for the first time (yes, on slow, but whatever). It’d be nice if you could pair multiple controllers with a single receiver, but you’ll need to pick up a second kit for multiplayer wireless sessions. 8bitdo’s controller should also have the benefit of being easier to find than Nintendo’s own hardware; the controller is set to begin shipping from Amazon on December 16; pre-orders at $39.99 for a kit, which includes both receiver and the NES30, are open now.
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NextView Ventures is looking to raise at least $50 million for a third fund
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Connie Loizos
| 2,016 | 12 | 15 |
, one of few seed-stage venture firms in Boston, is looking to raise at least $50 million for a third fund, shows an that was processed yesterday. The firm closed its second fund with $40 million in 2014 and its debut fund with $21 million in 2012. NextView was founded in 2010 by three former veterans of other venture firms: Dave Beisel, who’d previously worked for Venrock; Rob Go, who was formerly with Spark Capital; and Lee Hower, a former investor with Judith Capital. They’ve seemingly worked hard to raise the profile of the firm over that period, too. Go, for example, posts two or three pieces of analysis or advice each month to his widely read . (One of his most recent posts compares the process of sourcing venture deals to the process of drumming up customers for a software company, including nurturing leads over an extended period.) The firm typically writes checks of between $100,000 and $1 million. Some of its newest investments include , a four-year-old, Boston-based startup that fights people’s customer service battles for them (NextView led a seed round in the company last month), and , an MIT spinoff at work on self-driving technologies. NextView led a seed round in the company in October. At least 13 of NextView’s portfolio companies have been acquired, shows . Most recently, Farmeron, a farming data startup that had raised $4.3 million, was by privately held Virtus Nutrition for undisclosed terms. Another company, seven-year-old, Boston-based Objective Logistics, a maker of employee performance software that had raised $7.6 million from investors, was acquired in June by the cybersecurity company Bit9 in a reported . NextView was also an investor in the mobile ad startup TapCommerce, acquired by Twitter in 2014 for a reported . The company had raised altogether. Other seed-stage funds in Boston include the sector-agnostic firm ; (which focuses on hardware startups), (whose partners are also the firm’s biggest investors), (mostly enterprise focused) and (it funds internet, consumer and B2B startups). Another Boston-based early-stage firm, the Experiment Fund, earlier this year following infighting between the firm’s two general partners.
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Eaze CEO steps down
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Sarah Buhr
| 2,016 | 12 | 15 |
Keith McCarty, founder of the well-funded pot delivery startup , is stepping down from his position as CEO. Instead, the startup’s chief product and technology officer Jim Patterson will take on the role and McCarty will remain on the board of directors “as a strategic advisor on company growth,” says a on the site announcing the change of roles. McCarty enjoyed previous success as the fourth employee at Yammer (which sold to Microsoft for just over $1 billion) before founding Eaze; his pot delivery startup was one of the first to raise venture capital. The company now claims to serve hundreds of thousands of patients seeking relief through medical-grade marijuana. McCarty and Patterson worked together at Yammer, where Patterson was the chief product officer and McCarty recruited Patterson in May to help him define Eaze’s company roadmap as it grew. But it seems an odd time for McCarty to step out of the role. Many states have started to relax on medical and recreational pot use and Eaze recently raised in Series B funding to help it get into new markets. Recreational use of marijuana is now legal in eight states and the District of Columbia. California, which holds the lion’s share of Eaze’s customer base and the industry as a whole, just legalized the recreational use of the drug and marijuana is expected to bring in close to by the end of the year in Colorado, where it has also been legalized for recreational use. However, according to Eaze, Patterson is the guy for the next phase of growth. “Jim has a proven track record of building innovative technology products and has an acute understanding of the cannabis industry,” read a company . “His management background and technology expertise make him uniquely positioned to lead Eaze during a period of rapid industry growth. As our company expands, Jim has the experience to lead us through our next chapter, and we cannot wait to see where he takes us next.”
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Why the Trump administration needs a chief data officer
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Bob Muglia
| 2,016 | 12 | 15 |
After President-elect Donald Trump’s surprising win — despite almost all national polls showing Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton a virtual lock for victory — a narrative has emerged that the stunning result was a loss for big data, too. “Tonight, data died,” Republican strategist Mike Murphy said on MSNBC. In truth, reports of data’s death are greatly exaggerated. Sure, there is and should be a great deal of hand-wringing over and re-examination of the value of data. (More on that later.) But the election’s outcome has no bearing on the fact that big data continues to grow as a disruptive, transformational force across corporate America. IDC that the amount of data created annually in the world will soar to 180 zettabytes (or 180 trillion gigabytes) in 2025 — 18 times more than today. How big is just one zettabyte? It’s equivalent to the contents of 80,000 rows of four-drawer file cabinets reaching to the moon. With the number of connected devices expected to grow from 20 billion today to 80 billion by 2025 — “Everything we have of value will be connected to the internet,” IDC says — the world is only beginning to harness data for everything from market and customer intelligence to building World Series . Big data offers huge opportunities to identify new markets and revenue streams, innovate in areas like healthcare and scientific research and even bolster cybersecurity defenses. It deserves an advocate and leader at the top of the federal government, which is why President-elect Trump should appoint the nation’s first chief data officer. For Trump, who has not been known for embracing technology beyond Twitter, backing a major initiative around data could build his bona fides as a job creator and forward thinker. Trump is at heart a businessman, and the opportunities in big data are eye-popping. Big data and business analytics’ worldwide revenues will soar by 50 percent, from nearly $122 billion last year to more than $187 billion in 2019, IDC has . Forrester the big data technology market will grow three times faster than the overall IT market. By naming a chief data officer, Trump also could signal his commitment to technology as a key economic engine in his new administration, and smooth over bruised feelings with Silicon Valley over his campaign promises to antitrust actions against Amazon and Apple into making its products in the United States. While it’s highly doubtful we’ll ever see Trump as cozy with Silicon Valley as President Obama has been, the appointment of a chief data officer could be one of the moves that helps him win some fans in the Valley, where he currently seems to have few. Not that I think Trump necessarily cares about his reputation in the Valley, but it’s clearly good for America if Trump and Silicon Valley find ways to work together. Obama established an in April 2009, three months into his first term, to help oversee the delivery of digital services to Americans, coordinate federal investments in tech R&D and encourage opportunities in science, technology, engineering and math (STEM). , and have led the office. Trump should retain that office and add the new role to work with the CTO and oversee areas specific to data. He would have a number of qualified candidates from both the public and private sectors from which to choose the data chief role, such as: By establishing the chief data officer position, Trump can show he understands the strategic value of big data and what it can do to grow the economy and pave the way for new products and business models — and it could help reverse the incorrect notion left by the incorrect polling that the power of big data is overrated. Polling isn’t big data, it is tiny data. The number of data points in a typical poll is small enough to analyze in Excel. It’s like the difference between 1,200 households included in a 1960’s TV ratings survey and Netflix’s gathering of millions of data points about what everybody is watching 24×7. As the election and the Brexit vote in June showed, polls are questionable in delivering reliable analysis because they are subject to the answers people give, which don’t always match how they act, as opposed to most business data that is based on actual behavior, such as which links a customer clicked on a retailer’s website. Pollsters further bias the data by weighting it based on what they’ve observed in previous polls. The problem with the polls is that the data was wrong going in. Polling has rightly taken it on the chin in this election. The current approach has failed and needs a complete overhaul. Perhaps the answer is to use modern approaches that leverage social platforms such as Facebook that would provide data from tens of millions of people to improve accuracy. Big data didn’t cause the polls to fail, but perhaps in 2020, it could be the solution that brings polling into the cloud era. Big data is a transformative movement in business. If there’s one thing Trump needs to understand about technology, it’s that.
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Mario arrives as Pokemon Go peaks, with declining downloads, falling revenue
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Sarah Perez
| 2,016 | 12 | 15 |
The phenomenal mobile hit Pokémon Go has peaked, just as the anticipated Nintendo title vying for mobile users’ attention and the chance to best Pokémon’s record-breaking numbers. According to new data from App Annie, Pokémon Go has seen declines in both downloads and revenue over the past several months, though it’s still highly ranked because of the massive size of its active user base. Pokémon Go’s U.S. downloads fell from over 80 million in July 2016 to 1.5 million in November, the firm found in a new analysis of Pokémon Go data. The figures indicate the app is nearing market saturation, as November accounted for only 5 percent of all U.S. downloads for the game since its U.S. debut. (Or, in other words, most of the people who want to play the game, already have it installed.) Despite the drop, the game was decently ranked at #16 in the U.S. in November, in a ranking of all iOS and Google Play Games downloads combined. For comparison’s sake, however, it was #1 in July. More importantly, perhaps, is the fact that Pokémon Go’s active users are declining, which, in turn has affected how much revenue the game is pulling in. Though it still has a sizable audience with 23 million mobile active users in the U.S., that’s down by a little less than a third from July to November. In July, the game saw 66 million monthly actives playing, said App Annie. When the game launched, U.S. users were spending an hour each day in the game, and now that’s down to 45 minutes per day. In addition, Pokémon Go has seen its U.S. revenue drop from $125 million in July down to over $15 million in November. This saw it fall from #1 on the combined iOS and Android Games revenue chart to #6 during the same time frame. The game has tried to juice its declining numbers through special events, like the one it held during Halloween which than the week prior. App Annie found that the week boosted U.S. revenue by 170% over the previous week, thanks to this event. It also tried to get players to return with But neither of these initiatives were enough to bring Pokémon Go back to its earlier record numbers. Of course, earnings and engagement like what Pokémon Go continues to see are something other mobile developers would kill to have. And U.S.-only stats only tell part of the story. But these new figures can help to illustrate where this massive mobile hit may end up leveling off, now that all the hype is winding down. (Expect the Mario hype to take over going forward!) Pokémon maker Niantic Labs has prepared for the game’s slowing traction, though, and has been moving to monetize the app through other means. This includes the sponsorship deals with businesses like McDonald’s in Japan, Sprint, and “It’s not surprising to see Pokemon Go’s performance peaked after it’s exceptional, record-breaking launch,” notes App Annie SVP of Research, Danielle Levitas. “The heart of the story, however, is that the game’s 23 million monthly active users [U.S.] in November was more than 50% greater than the #2 most popular game,” she adds. If that’s what Pokémon Go’s peak looks like, it’s not a bad place to be.
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Twitter cuts Dataminr access for law enforcement fusion centers
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Kate Conger
| 2,016 | 12 | 15 |
Facing pressure from the , Twitter announced that it will limit the data access it formerly provided to domestic surveillance hubs. Twitter’s has been to prohibit the use of its data for surveillance, but a social media monitoring firm it partially owns, Dataminr, has repeatedly taken government contracts that give local and federal law enforcement unfettered access to news alerts based on Twitter’s raw data. The ACLU discovered Dataminr’s work with fusion centers through , and Twitter responded in a this week that it would instruct Dataminr to cut off access for all in the United States. Fusion centers contracted with Dataminr “could search billions of real-time and historical public tweets and then potentially share information with the federal government,” said Nicole Ozer, technology and civil liberties policy director at the ACLU of California. Dataminr disputes Ozer’s point about access to historical tweets, claiming it never gave “direct firehose access” of historical archives of tweets or bulk Twitter data to any clients. Dataminr says it uses Twitter’s wealth of data to craft breaking news alerts, but does not share the “firehose” data with any of its customers. Twitter said Dataminr has refined its product over the last year to focus more on breaking news alerts for media companies and first responders, while Dataminr says breaking news has been its core offering all along. Experiments with geospatial analysis, such as the one the ACLU uncovered, have been abandoned according to the company. “Together, we have worked towards a focused Dataminr breaking news alert product for the purpose of first responders learning about news and events as early as possible. We see public benefit in a targeted Dataminr alerts product of this kind,” Colin Crowell, Twitter’s vice president of global public policy, wrote. Dataminr said in a statement that it is working with Twitter to protect privacy and civil liberties, and it will still offer a limited version of its product to law enforcement for use in first response. “We offer a limited version of our product, which provides tailored breaking news alerts based on public Tweets, to those supporting the mission of first response. Datatminr’s product does not provide any government customers with their own direct firehose access or features to export data; the ability to search raw historical Tweet archives or to target or profile users; conduct geospatial analysis; or any form of surveillance,” a Dataminr spokesperson said.
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Watch Plug and Play’s winter summit demo days here
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Lora Kolodny
| 2,016 | 12 | 15 |
, the international corporate innovation and venture capital firm, is holding its this week in Silicon Valley. At the two-day event, dozens of startups that have come through one of Plug and Play’s many accelerator programs will pitch their products and services to executives at corporations and early-stage investors who may be interested in working with them. Plug and Play charges attendees from the general public for tickets to attend and watch the pitches as well. Unlike other accelerators, Plug and Play Ventures doesn’t automatically invest seed funding, or demand equity stakes, in every single company it admits. And its admissions committee for each batch includes not just Plug and Play mentors and investors, but a committee of corporate executives who review applicants. The corporate “anchor partners” who will be involved in each acceleartor are listed on the Plug and Play website so entrepreneurs can decide if they want to reveal what they’re working on to these large industry players before applying. Otherwise, Plug and Play’s accelerators are what you’d expect, 3-month bootcamps for promising tech startups in different industry segments. Plug and Play aims to help startups in a given category move from prototyping and design into a stage where they’ve got a refined business model and are generating income. And it uses accelerators to help large employers, who pay Plug and Play for “corporate innovation as a service,” to connect and work with some of the best and the brightest startups in their field. Typically the corporations are not looking to invest in newly formed startups, but to learn about emerging tech and trends from them, and begin to engage them on a limited basis, say in a pilot project, a non-recurring engineering contract, or a first sales contract. Phillip Seiji Vincent, the Director of Internet of Things and Mobility at Plug and Play, tells TechCrunch that “The accelerators are just one vehicle we make investment decisions through. It’s always case by case and we back over 100 startups each year, and make hundreds of connections between startups and corporate partners that lead to meaningful business for them both.” On Thursday, companies will be presenting in health and insurance, and on Friday companies will be presenting across travel and hospitality, internet of things and mobility. [youtube=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t_bqRq8tJ6E&w=560&h=315]
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Are encrypted direct messages coming to Twitter?
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Taylor Hatmaker
| 2,016 | 12 | 15 |
Following his chat with whistleblower Edward Snowden, dropped a hint about what privacy features might be in the cards for Twitter. In the tweeted exchange, Dorsey and Snowden continued the Tuesday, veering back to the topic of Twitter itself. When Snowden asked if Twitter might consider making the platform’s private messages more secure in some way, Dorsey left the door open for a major security tweak. reasonable and something we'll think about — jack (@jack) Twitter’s possible interest in enhancing the security of its private messaging tools comes at the right time—or a popular time at least. In 2016, many of the major social networks built end-to-end encryption into their messaging platforms. In April, WhatsApp of end-to-end encryption, based off of the increasingly popular Signal Protocol created by Open Whisper Systems. In May, Google expressed its interest in making end-to-end encryption the default in its , but the feature remains nested in a that must be toggled on. In July, Facebook even built an option for —a more user-friendly way to say, yep, end-to-end encryption—into its mobile Messenger apps. And the popularity of the open source encryption protocol that underpins all of those features continues to soar, with seeing in user activity toward the end of the year and a new app to . If you missed 's live Q&A with , don't fret! You can watch it here: — Stand With Snowden (@StandSnowden) Tuesday’s interview was timely, given with the incoming Trump administration and his own exile to ever-relevant Russia. The livestream was also intended to raise awareness for the , which seeks to (you guessed it) secure a pardon for Snowden before President Obama leaves office. The Snowden chat meandered over a broad swath of security-adjacent topics, as Snowden interviews are wont to do. Among the topics in the hour-long stream, Snowden highlighted the threat of metadata collection, noted his home nation’s fragile relationship with democracy, and aired his most recent, —”The fact that when you add a picture to a tweet, you lose 22 characters? That’s painful”—to name a few. As a vibrant public gathering place for all manner of activists, minorities, and , those who speak out on Twitter worry with good reason about the company’s interest in building robust privacy tools. We’re in touch with the company about its private messaging intentions and will be closely following any plans it might have for the near future.
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Android Pay is now available in Japan
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Jon Russell
| 2,016 | 12 | 12 |
Android Pay continues its international rollout with today, some six weeks after reached Japanese shores. Google has partnered with Rakuten to power Android Pay using its Rakuten Edy payment system, which is available at over 470,000 locations in the country, including stores like Family Mart, Lawson, McDonald’s and Domino’s. There’s also support for loyalty programs, which include Rakuten’s Super Points initiative. Google said that it plans to work closely with FeliCa Networks, the RFID smart card system started by Sony, to add support for more eMoney services and traditional payment firms including Visa, MasterCard, Bank of Tokyo-Mitsubishi and more next year. Android Pay is available to users in the U.S., U.K., Ireland, Poland, Singapore, Australia, Hong Kong, Japan and New Zealand. The mobile wallet app can be downloaded to supported devices that run on Android KitKat 4.4 or newer.
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Google has reportedly stopped developing its own self-driving car
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Jon Russell
| 2,016 | 12 | 12 |
Google has reportedly shelved its long-standing plan to develop its own autonomous vehicle in favor of pursuing partnerships with existing car makers. that Google’s self-driving car unit — known internally as Chauffeur — is working with established automotive names to develop cars that will include some self-driving features, but won’t ditch the steering wheel and pedal controls. The firm is already working with Fiat Chrysler, and that could be the start of others to come. Google first set out to do away with the steering wheel and pedals approach, but this backtrack is from Alphabet CEO Larry Page and CFO Ruth Porat, who found the original approach to be “impractical,” according to the report. That’s despite . While Google may be taking its foot off the gas for self-driving vehicles, The Information’s sources suggest it still harbors ambitious plans and is working to introduce an autonomous taxi service before the end of 2017. Google has long been rumored to move into the on-demand car space — — and this would bring it into direct competition with Uber. this year, while another, younger company, and , so Google is very much playing catch-up here. The company is hosting a media event around its self-driving car business in California on Tuesday, so we’ll have more details soon.
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Crunch Report | Super Nintendo World Theme Park
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Khaled "Tito" Hamze
| 2,016 | 12 | 12 |
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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Facebook Events app comes to Android
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Josh Constine
| 2,016 | 12 | 12 |
that launched in October on iOS is . The Facebook Events app helps you browse nearby happenings, see the dates of your upcoming Facebook Events as well as imported calendars and aggregates wall posts and alerts from Events to declutter your main app’s notifications. The Events app hasn’t proven too popular on iOS, oscillating between No. 250 and No. 500 on the U.S. social networking apps chart, according to App Annie. But massive usage was never the goal. The app is designed to help Facebook’s extroverts and event promoters better discover and manage events. That trickles down to a better experience for everyone else as these users invite friends to events using Facebook. If Facebook can boost overall usage of its Events feature, no matter how people get to it, it could solidify one of its biggest differentiators versus competitors. No other social app has a vibrant events community, while event platforms like Eventbrite lack full-fledged social features. Plus, if Facebook can demonstrate that it’s the go-to place to discover what’s going on locally, it could attract more ad dollars from event promoters.
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Real-time motion capture system from Disney Research uses as few sensors as possible
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Devin Coldewey
| 2,016 | 12 | 12 |
Serious motion capture setups often involve dozens of optical markers, inertial sensors or both, making them a pain to set up and tear down, and producing a ton of data. produces high-quality results from just a handful of sensors by making some smart assumptions about how the body works. The researchers noted that all kinds of things can prevent the ideal number and placement of sensors, while occlusion of markers, costumes, bad lighting and other factors can also get in the way. What they propose is a minimal system that still produces good real-time results. In their system, one inertial unit is put on each hand, one on each foot and one each on the head and tailbone. Optical markers in the same places offer a way to reconcile relative motion measured with absolute position as seen by a reference camera. They can get away with having so few sensors because the data they send is put into a physics-based model that knows a little bit about how the body moves. Based on the position of the markers and the forces they detect, it computes a “physically plausible” position and motion, double checked with a set of known motions, joint positions and poses to be sure it isn’t something weird. So even though there’s no sensor saying the elbow isn’t bending backwards or the knee’s torqued in some weird way, the system can infer that’s not the case because its simulation of the body doesn’t permit it. In the image up top, the blue man is the ground truth produced by a normal suite of sensors; the green man is what the model computed, and the yellow man — occasionally quite janky — indicates frame by frame the “motion priors” being used to help out. The minimal setup and real-time feedback, the researchers suggest, would be helpful in motion-capture scenarios and virtual reality. Body tracking done via Kinect or headset sensors is limited in many ways, but it’s no use replacing it with a 50-part system that takes an hour to apply, or a full-body suit. On the other hand, a couple of elastic bands with sensors are easy to put on or take off, and the results likely more than good enough for everyday VR applications. The paper describing this system was presented today at the in London.
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Google taps Van Jones and Anil Dash to discuss race and algorithmic bias
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Megan Rose Dickey
| 2,016 | 12 | 12 |
You may remember that time Google was under fire for wrongfully , and the time . Today at Google’s Mountain View headquarters, the company acknowledged its shortcomings, as well as the shortcomings of other technologies in relation to racism and bias, at Decoding Race, the fourth installation of Google’s Race@ series to address issues of race and racial justice. “That day was one of the worst days of my professional life, maybe my life,” Bradley Horowitz, who led up Google Photos at the time, said about the day he heard about the gorilla incident. “It was launched to great reception and I was feeling pretty good about things. I woke up and my inbox was on fire. People were typing in gorilla and African-American people were being returned in the search results.” How that happened, Horowitz said, was that there was garbage going in and garbage going out — a saying he said is common in computer science. “To the degree that the data is sexist or racist, you’re going to have the algorithm imitating those behaviors,” Horowitz said. “What data should we be feeding it, how should we be correcting that.” Horowitz went on to say that Google’s employee base isn’t representative of the users it serves. He admitted that if Google had a more diverse team, the company would have noticed the problems earlier in the development process. There were about 300 Googlers in attendance, and Valeisha Butterfield Jones, head of black community engagement at Google, told me that they were expecting thousands to tune in via the internal livestream. She said she expected the audience to be very diverse, but mostly white, “which is great.” Butterfield Jones also mentioned that Drummond had sent out an email about the event to everyone at Google, which to me signifies how important Drummond sees this event. The panel, moderated by CNN political commentator Van Jones, also touched on what it will take to build a more inclusive tech industry, as well as what’s preventing progress from being made. A belief that emerged is the idea that people can lend privileges to those who are disadvantaged. Ultimately, tech needs to be more empathetic and the industry needs more black and Latino creators, Fog Creek CEO Anil Dash said. The biggest inhibitor to increasing the number of black and Latino creators, Dash said, is Asian-Americans, “who turned our backs” on black and Latino communities after those communities welcomed Asian-Americans into their neighborhoods.
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TrademarkVision uses machine learning to make finding logos as easy as a reverse image search
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Devin Coldewey
| 2,016 | 12 | 12 |
A company’s logo is an important part of its identity, but the process behind defining, registering and protecting these trademarks is a convoluted and rather archaic one. A startup called aims to simplify it by replacing that laborious and arcane process with what amounts to a machine-learning-powered reverse image search. This isn’t in some lab, either: The EU just switched their whole image trademark system over to it. Most people probably haven’t had to do many trademark and logo searches. Well, why don’t you so you know what it’s like? Try to find the Nike “Swoosh” or something. Oh, back already? Probably because TESS looks and operates like it was built in the late 1990s. You can get the hang of it in time, but for complex or broad operations like, for example, looking for logos the Swoosh, it’s useless. And if you want to know what’s out there that’s like an image you have but isn’t in the database? Forget about it. And it isn’t just the website. The whole system of describing and classifying trademarks is clumsy and outdated. Because it was created decades ago, it relies on words, not images, and numerical codes to indicate something like a box or letter inside a circle. Only robots will understand. “These words — every system has a different meaning for them. You need to know a coding system for the country you’re in, and you’d have to check one country at a time,” explained founder and CEO Sandra Mau. “There are the ‘Vienna codes,’ the U.S. uses the ‘design codes,’ Australia uses keywords… this non-uniformity has caused a lot of problems for years,” added Cameron Mitchell, the company’s COO. That’s where TrademarkVision saw opportunity. Its engineers applied similar machine-learning technology to what the likes of Google and Facebook are using, but with a different purpose. “All that has been centered around captioning for ,” Mau said — for example, identifying faces and locations so images can be categorized or indexed efficiently. “We’re the first in the world to caption what’s in a .” https://youtu.be/lPAd9zs9J_I Specifically, TrademarkVision captures the details that would otherwise need to be described in the various country-specific design codes. Mau demonstrated the system for me at a TechCrunch event and the possibilities instantly opened up in my mind. Right off the bat, it’s incredibly easy to find a trademark listing you know exists, like for the Swoosh — even this can be hard on old systems, but it’s a snap when all you have to do is drag and drop an image in. But because the image recognition and return algorithms allow for a bit of fuzziness, you also get other trademarks, be they related by owner or just visually similar. Not only does it find similar trademarks, but it can — for any country — to classify the logo you put in, since the system was built specifically to recognize them. So there’s a bit of esoteric knowledge that just dropped in value a bit. And since it recognizes imagery similar to what’s put in, it can also warn trademark holders when a suspiciously similar trademark appears, or just one that’s similar enough to warrant a look. Boom: instant, low-cost trademark infringement monitoring service. The first result is the logo I searched for, using a low-quality image downloaded from some random site. Although TrademarkVision has been testing its services at smaller scales within the IP and branding industries, this weekend saw it integrated into the EU Intellectual Property Office’s official trademark search engine. ; you can test it right now. “Working with governments helps set the standard and change it around the world,” Mau said, adding that apart from the whole developing-an-AI-to-interpret-trademarks thing, it wasn’t that hard to implement. “It’s really easy to just plug and play us in — we’re really just a SaaS provider.” TrademarkVision is currently also working with IP Australia on that country’s trademark search engine, and one has to assume that the webmasters at the USPTO are glaring covetously at EUIPO just now. Moving out from the rather monochromatic, red tape-encumbered trademark world is the company’s next aspiration. It’s easy to conceive of global logotype searching, recommendations for how to differentiate one’s designs, even getting into evaluating motion graphics — why not, the way machine learning algorithms are improving? It seems likely we’ll hear more from TrademarkVision as its eminently practical application of machine learning tempts more IP authorities. In the meantime, check out the company’s Labs for demos and explanations of its technology.
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SpaceX pushes first crewed launch of Dragon capsule to 2018
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Darrell Etherington
| 2,016 | 12 | 12 |
SpaceX had intended to launch its first Dragon capsule with a human crew on board in 2017, as part of a NASA mission. The planned launch has been pushed back to 2018, however, representing a delay of around half a year. SpaceX has pushed back the timing for the momentous mission as it revamps its fueling procedures for Falcon 9 rockets following a launchpad explosion this September. Officially, SpaceX told TechCrunch in an official statement that it needs added time for “assessment and implementations” regarding its “designs, systems and processes” following the explosion earlier this year, hence the alternation in schedule. It notes that it is “finalizing the investigation” into the “anomaly” responsible for the September 1 accident. Meanwhile, SpaceX says that its commercial crew team “has continued to work closely with NASA and is completing all planned milestones for this period.” The reports that SpaceX’s unique plans to fuel its rockets while astronauts were already in the crew capsules mounted on board may be part of the planned changes, though members of a NASA committee assigned to review the practice are apparently sworn to secrecy in terms of discussing details with the media regarding those briefings. In its official comments, however, SpaceX details the progress regarding its process of fueling the rocket while astronauts are present on the spacecraft, noting only that they will be further examined as a result of the investigation, with changes to be made as determined necessary. Still on track for 2017 is an uncrewed demo launch, now targeting Q4 with the updated timeline. Dragon’s being designed with reuse of up to 10 missions possible, SpaceX notes, and other testing happening for crewed missions during 2017 include testing of spacesuits, parachutes, the crew access arm and more. This puts SpaceX and rival Boeing in closer proximity in terms of crewed commercial mission launches, with the latter , and a crewed test to follow in August. If SpaceX hits its revised timeline, we should see the demo without astronauts launch in November 2018, with the first crewed launch in May 2018, so still ahead of Boeing’s time frames.
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The Firefly 2 offers a smooth, cool draw for your vaping pleasure
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John Biggs
| 2,016 | 12 | 12 |
It’s getting nigh on Holiday Season and how better to celebrate the old Yule log than with a nice herbal vaporizer. The is a very clever and very well-built convection vape that creates a smooth, flavorful draw and can extract the maximum in herbal pleasure out of a little bit of material. Like the Firefly 2 is foremost about function. The system heats herbs to 400 degrees Fahrenheit inside a small chamber that is visible through a window on the top panel. The whole thing is four inches long and about an inch thick and the glass top panel sticks to the body with magnets. To activate the vape you simple hold your fingers over two little pads on either side of the Firefly. Finer control is achieve via the app that connects seamlessly to the Firefly and allows you to set the temperature and manage the activation method. [gallery ids="1426991,1426992"] Users of older vapes definitely won’t miss the arcane button press combinations and timing requirements of earlier systems. The Firefly activates and begins heating when you touch the side buttons and is ready when the light turns green. Once green you simply inhale for 10 seconds. I estimate you can get about 15-20 hits off of one charge and you can swap out batteries as needed. You can also add concentrates after sticking in a little aluminum disk into the heating chamber. The thing you’ll notice is that the Firefly 2 does not get hot – it’s nicely insulated and the glass top remains cool to the touch – and it’s very well built. My only concern would be that the magnetic top could slide off in transit but even energetic pushing couldn’t dislodge it so, while care is must be taken, it should survive a ride in a back pocket. The vapor is cool and flavorful and very effective. I’m not a regular smoker by any stretch but I had no trouble inhaling and enjoying the experience. The smell is also reduced with the Firefly 2 as the material is carefully and fully heated. It’s interesting to note that the Firefly is so cool because its creators, Sasha Robinson and Mark Williams, came from Flip, the once ascendant camcorder company, and Apple. This dream team of product design and software creation led to what can only be described as a perfect storm for heshers. Now for the potentially bad news. The Firefly 2 costs $329 but includes an extra battery, USB charger, and a cleaning kit. You also get three concentrate discs in the package. Still, a little over $300 is a small price to pay for what amounts to one of the most perfect vaping machines. It’s compact, easy to use, and simple – just the treat for folks who want a puff or two now and again without the fuss of rolling papers or pipes. I, for one, welcome our streamlined convection vaping overlords.
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Google’s head of diversity is leaving the company
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Megan Rose Dickey
| 2,016 | 12 | 12 |
Google’s head of diversity, Nancy Lee, is retiring from Google after several years of leading the company’s global diversity and inclusion team, TechCrunch has learned. Lee, who originally joined Google’s legal team back in 2006, has been working on diversity at Google for the last few years. She started her diversity efforts as director of people operations in 2010, and became vice president of people operations in 2013. As head of people operations, Lee has overseen a number of initiatives, like diversity trainings and a Googler in Residence program that places Google employees at historically black colleges and universities. She’s also led the charge to increase diverse representation at the company. , we saw that overall representation of women went from to 31 percent female in 2015. But the overall percentage of black and Hispanic people did not increase at all, with overall representation of blacks remaining at 2 percent and Hispanics remaining at 3 percent. In 2015, only 4 percent of Google’s hires were black and 5 percent of its hires were Hispanic. It’s not clear who will take over as head of diversity or when Lee’s last day is. Google declined to comment for this story.
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Colonel panic: KFC loyalty club system hacked
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Devin Coldewey
| 2,016 | 12 | 12 |
Did someone order their chicken extra risky? KFC has alerted members of its Colonel’s Club loyalty system in the U.K. that its website had been targeted and several accounts potentially compromised. The 1.2 million members of the club, who can earn and cash in “Chicken Stamps” over repeated visits to the restaurant chain, were alerted by email of the intrusion. They were advised to change their passwords and, if the old passwords were shared with any other sites, to change those as well. This suggests that the finger-clickin’ good attacker may have had access to password data in one way or another, either through internal databases or by snooping on improperly secured login exchanges. I’ve asked the Colonel for more information on the nature of the hack, what measures the company will be taking to better secure its services and the accuracy of recent leaks describing the exact composition of the legendary 11 herbs and spices. KFC responded shortly after this post went live with this soothing statement: We take the online security of our fans very seriously, so we’ve advised all Colonel’s Club members to change their passwords as a precaution, despite only a small number of accounts being directly affected. We don’t store credit card details as part of our Colonel’s Club rewards scheme, so no financial data was compromised. : KFC elaborated on the hack itself at my request: As a result of automated software attempting to guess Colonel’s Club members’ passwords, we have implemented changes to our back end and front end systems. One thing customers may notice is the addition of reCAPTCHA on the website, which is used to distinguish between human and software login attempts.
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Watch Netflix’s ‘The OA’ trailer and ask yourself WTF is happening
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Darrell Etherington
| 2,016 | 12 | 12 |
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DvHJtez2IlY] Netflix makes so many original shows we don’t even hear about some of them until they’re airing imminently — that’s the case with , a new freaky supernatural mini-series with an 8-episode season debuting December 16. The show looks spooky as heck, following the story of a girl who disappeared when she was a child, only to return seven years later (with the bonus of having regained her sight). She’s been busy, however, as some kind of weird memory retrieval therapy involving a fish tank for the brain and experiential recall shows. There’s lots of classical-sounding strings and a muted color palette, along with some tense moments, blood and what looks like it might be a holding cell for human test subjects, so expect plenty of creepy twists and turns in this thriller of a series. Netflix is also teasing this out with weird questions on like “Have you seen death?” along with short video clips that resemble found footage of the main character apparently jumping off a bridge. Twitter users are rightly pointing out that this is some pretty messed up stuff to push out without warning or disclaimer, and it definitely should’ve thought twice about that particular marketing stunt. Still, I’m intrigued by the trailer and the concept so I’ll probably tune in. I’m also a sucker for anything even remotely sci-fi, so Netflix basically has my number with a whole bunch of its recent releases, including this one.
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Here’s what the back of Fisker Inc’s EMotion electric sport sedan looks like
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Darrell Etherington
| 2,016 | 12 | 12 |
Henrik Fisker’s newest electric car company, Fisker Inc., continues the gradual reveal of its first car, the EMotion. I certainly have a lot of feelings looking at this — feelings like skepticism that this vehicle will ever make it to production. But Fisker Inc. maintains that it will, and that once it does, it’ll have a 161 MPH top speed with 400 miles of range from its on-board electric powerhouse. Fisker Inc. previously showed us (embedded below), and now it’s ready to reveal the back. The back of the car features “wide sculptural shoulders, thin light blue tail lights, wide trunk opening, and aggressive lower rear diffuser to improve aero,” according to the company. [gallery ids="1409348,1409347"] Also new in this image is the shiny metallic paint job, which is a contrast from the matte appearance of the previously released renders. You can also see the back of the color contrast roof, which will likely be a full-length panorama-style sunroof, and the gadget, which looks just like the badge from the original Fisker, whose assets were purchased by a Chinese company and relaunched as Karma Automotive. Fisker Inc. says we’ll hear more about the vehicle and its plans in 2017, but we’ll still have to wait until at least the middle of next year to get a better idea of when exactly these things might start to ship.
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Trulia founder Pete Flint is now a VC with NFX Guild
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Connie Loizos
| 2,016 | 12 | 12 |
, a young mentorship-driven startup accelerator that was already managed by three powerhouse partners — James Currier, Gigi Levy-Weiss and Stan Chudnovsky — just added another impressive name to its roster: Pete Flint, the co-founder and longtime CEO of the real estate site . (You might remember that Zillow, the real estate listing site, for $2.5 billion last year.) Flint had left Zillow four months after the acquisition — and almost exactly 10 years after starting Trulia. Though he remains on Zillow’s board, he says that since jumping away from the firm, he has spent his time largely “helping a bunch of startups, as well as spending time with the venture community,” and that he decided to join NFX expressly because it combines four of his passions. First is investing, natch. Flint also says he’s eager to mentor companies, having received “terrific advice” himself early on. “Sharing some of what I did right and some of what I did wrong [feels] highly rewarding and can add a huge amount of value very quickly.” Flint also said he gravitated to what NFX is creating, which is less early-stage fund than startup platform. (The firm has built all kinds of products and software and systems and processes to help its portfolio companies become as successful as possible.) Last, Flint notes, like a growing number of other early-stage investors, NFX is obsessed with building community, something about which Flint personally feels strongly. “I found during my own entrepreneurial journey that the best advice was often sort of through this safe sharing between peers,” he told us on a call earlier today. Currently, NFX is investing a $15 million fund, capital for which has been supplied in large part by four big brands in tech investing: Greylock Partners, Shasta Ventures, CRV and Mayfield. Asked if Flint’s move suggests a bigger fund is in the works, Flint declines to say, but he concedes that NFX has “big ambitions” and says “it’s natural that we’ll have to raise more money at some point to do what we want to do.” Flint says that prior to joining NFX — where he will be “100 percent focused” from now on — he had made a range of seed-stage investments in companies that largely remain in stealth, including several digital health startups, a few international real estate companies and a recruiting platform. Some of his bets include , and . Flint was also an angel investor in Viv, the next-generation AI assistant founded by the creators of Apple’s Siri. Viv was by Samsung earlier this year. Flint found his way to NFX through Levy-Weiss. The two sat on a panel several years ago and had remained in touch, Flint says. NFX is currently working with its third batch of startups. All the companies that pass through its program are referred to NFX through a network of scouts — some of them investors and many of them entrepreneurs. (No company can enter into the accelerator without being routed through them.) Each company is provided with $120,000, along with 30 hours of programming, mentoring and introductions to investors. NFX in turn gets between 5 percent and 7 percent of their startup depending on how much money the company has raised previously.
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In Founders Den, a private club that relies on the power of persuasion
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Connie Loizos
| 2,016 | 12 | 12 |
If you live in San Francisco and know much about tech startups, you’ve likely heard of , a shared office space and private club for startups and investors that leases 8,500 square feet on a nondescript block in San Francisco. Founders Den accommodates between 12 and 15 startups at a time, each of them with six or fewer employees. The startups must be invited into the fold, and they must agree to stay no longer than six months. They’re also asked to pay market rates for the space they occupy. “It’s a terrible business,” jokes Jason Johnson, an entrepreneur who decided six years ago to establish Founders Den with three friends: Jonathan Abrams, Zack Bogue and Michael Levit. The four work to break even each month, owing to additional office perks that they provide, like a full-time office manager. “If we wanted to make money on [the space], we’d lease it out to many more companies and charge a premium,” Johnson says. “But that isn’t of interest to any of the four of us.” What is of interest is forming a “curated” community of founders who help one another and provide each other with investment opportunities, and on that front, Founders Den is proving very successful, especially for its creators. Johnson says he has invested in several startups to get their start inside of Founders Den, including , the six-year-old company behind the Docker open source platform space (it has gone on to raise $180 million from investors), and the mobile app company SocialCam, by Autodesk for $60 million in 2012. A founder doesn’t have to make room for anyone at Founders Den on his or her cap table; instead, “informally, we get to build a relationship over many months, and if we’re lucky, they’ll let us invest,” Johnson explains. Johnson says he has also hired “several people who were either founders here or involved here in some way” into the company he himself founded at Founders Den: , a maker of digital, keyless door locks and a doorbell camera. August has since raised roughly from investors and now employs 80 people. (It has also since moved two blocks away, though Johnson still pops into Founders Den regularly.) Johnson might have created August with or without the support of his friends, but the camaraderie and support from Founders Den seems to have helped each of its founders, as well as many of its tenants. In the years since forming Founders Den, Bogue has co-founded an early-stage venture firm, , that in May closed its Abrams has created , a popular social, real-time platform that allows users to see the news that their friends share, as well as makes it easy for users to create their own newsletters. Meanwhile, as we reported , Levit recently teamed up with Rick Marini — co-founder of Tickle (sold to Monster) and Branch (picked up by Hearst) — to form Dragonfly Partners, a new advisory firm that’s matching U.S. companies looking to get sold with China-based companies that are hungry for revenue. Having a clubhouse has helped. Bogue says that at least 10 Data Collective portfolio companies have rented space at Founders Den — a nice deal sweetener for a fledgling startup in a crowded real estate market. Abrams meanwhile says that he has happily looked over the shoulders of other, nearby founders when trying to work out bugs in Nuzzel’s platform. (Bogue was his very first beta tester, Abrams says.) Indeed, Data Collective, Founders Den and Dragonfly Partners continue to operate out of Founders Den. Seemingly, being in the mix has benefited shorter-term residents, too. In addition to SocialCam and Docker, some of Founders Den’s better-known tenants have included the point-of-sale software maker , which was with IBM earlier this year about an acquisition; and the venture firm , which closed on a record in commitments this past summer. Certainly, people who are invited into the club by the founders — usually through a direct connection or a friend of a friend — seem to like being there. Charles Hudson, a partner with SoftTech who more recently left to launch his own , is back at Founders Den while he gets his new firm off the ground. Other regulars on the scene include serial entrepreneur Jay Adelson, Lieutenant Governor Gavin Newsom, serial entrepreneur and Y Combinator partner Justin Kan and prolific angel investor Gil Penchina. Each pays a nominal “membership” fee to access a spot at Founders Den whenever it’s convenient for them to be there. It’s a fun “side project for each of us,” says Bogue of Founders Den when we sit down to talk about its operations. Could it have been more? We ask Bogue, for example, whether he or the other founders ever regret not turning Founders Den into more of a business, given that startups like have been assigned for creating collegial spaces for startups on a broader scale. He says they don’t. “If I didn’t have Data Collective as my full-time thing, I might consider [trying to replicate Founders Den elsewhere],” says Bogue. “But expanding it would be a full-time job.” Besides, he insists, the idea was never to get rich through Founders Den. “We don’t want to engage in the business of desk arbitrage. We’re doing this to build a cool community.”
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Room-service robots — and that’s just the start
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Ramamurthy Sivakumar
| 2,016 | 12 | 12 |
At a popular hotel nestled in the heart of Silicon Valley, two long-separated technologies came together not long ago — all in the name of toothpaste. A small robot, outfitted with 3D cameras, was loaded up with a bath kit, a newspaper and a spare towel. It then took the supplies, rolled out of the lobby, called for the elevator and delivered the items to a guest room. Since this demo last fall, a fleet of Relay robots made by , a company in our investment portfolio, has made more than 50,000 similar deliveries in six cities across North America. The results of this field test answered a very important question for us as longtime technology investors: What happens when you give a general-purpose computer chip a high-resolution view of its environment and the ability to react to what it sees? Turns out you create a brand-new industry. Vertically integrated, function-specific robots that can perceive their environments are able to handle repetitive tasks, learn to do new ones, be available at all hours and be serviced and upgraded easily. Think of a lawn mower that can cut grass by itself. Or a robotic companion able to find, fetch and carry items from a grocery shelf for an elderly shopper — even if the store has moved the items to different shelves. These kinds of devices are at the forefront of a wave of machines with the potential to work with greater autonomy, at a lower cost, in everything from hospitality and retail to package delivery and situational monitoring. And they are creating investment opportunities in technologies across all these markets — and more. In other words, room-service robots are just the start of something much bigger. The potential, and desire, for autonomous home and work devices has existed for some time. Remember the Roomba vacuum? Introduced in 2002, its parent company has sold more than 14 million home robots worldwide. What’s been missing, until now, is a way to accelerate this concept — specifically, a cost-effective ability for a machine to have a high-resolution awareness of its environment, or of its owner’s visual cues, and take action in real time. Traditionally, environmental awareness has been the province of expensive machine-vision systems. But with the advent of high-quality 3D cameras, less expensive devices have the potential to recognize their surroundings with far greater precision than ever. Combine these cameras with faster processors and machine-learning algorithms, and it’s now possible to create function-specific robots pre-loaded with gesture recognition, knowledge of common navigational challenges and cultural behaviors (not getting onto a crowded elevator, for example) and the ability to routinely update that understanding. If it seems you’ve heard about these abilities before — greater autonomy, better intelligence, an ever-expanding knowledge base — it’s because you have. Those same traits are the hallmark of new industries built around self-driving cars and drones. But the combination of 3D cameras, real-time processors and machine learning is poised to make an impact that is broader and deeper. Greater camera resolution, for example, will enable drones to work with greater precision and safety. Imagine one that can fly through a city or across rugged terrain to deliver packages while seeing clearly enough to avoid antennas and birds — and even change its route automatically if first responders need to clear the airspace. We’re already seeing these kinds of capabilities from an array of companies, such as Mitsui-backed , whose TUG robots navigate busy hospital corridors to deliver everything from patient meals to blood samples for lab analysis. To date, these robots have traveled more than 1 million miles and made more than 19 million deliveries. Real-time processing could be a great fit in a number of other environments, including retail. Consider a robot that rolls up and down the aisles of a big-box store to check inventory: It could count the stock and order new items automatically, in a fraction of the time it would take a conventional floor staff. and are now developing and testing products in these areas. Meanwhile, — launched by the co-founders of Skype — just announced it will use robots to deliver groceries in Washington, DC this fall. As for machine learning, possibilities abound on land and below it. Rugged robots could roam volcano craters, and submersible vehicles could patrol rivers — both armed with historic data and algorithms to identify potential eruptions or the telltale signs of industrial pollution. Agriculture is another key market, with companies such as India’s building specialized machinery for harvesting cotton using 3D cameras and machine-learning systems. When you consider this feedback loop — the collection of high-resolution visual data, the ability to process it quickly and the fuel it provides to create even deeper-learning algorithms — it’s reasonable to consider tackling what are now extremely expensive and difficult endeavors. Think about mapping the ocean floor, or assessing the health of landscapes, crops or animal populations with greater precision and detail. These activities are the predictable outcome of putting function-specific robots to use. What’s more, when coupled with machine- and deep-learning technologies, they will form the essential building blocks of general-purpose robotics platforms that will be more flexible and can be adapted for multiple uses. For the moment, you might want to check the front door… there may be a grocery delivery waiting.
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Apple’s new TV app goes live on Apple TV, iPhone and iPad
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Sarah Perez
| 2,016 | 12 | 12 |
Apple’s is now available to all users, thanks to the iOS and tvOS updates rolling out today. The app, offers Apple TV, iPhone and iPad users a single destination to access the TV shows and movies from across the apps you have installed on your devices, while also helping you keep track of favorites programs, search across apps, get recommendations, plus access your own iTunes library and the iTunes store. The idea of a centralized application comes at a time when there are a growing number of streaming video applications available for watching TV on mobile phones, tablets and other connected devices. However, end users have been frustrated by the fragmented experience this multitude of apps offers – not only do you have to sign in or authenticate with your pay TV provider in order to watch on each one, it’s hard to remember which network’s app has your favorite shows and films. “TV,” as Apple’s new app is called, is meant to simplify video viewing on Apple TV, iPhone and iPad with a user experience that feels more like a Netflix front-end to the wide array of content that’s available across applications. Unfortunately content from all the major streaming providers – including Netflix – is not available through the TV app. Instead, the focus seems to be more on aggregating the content across individual TV networks’ applications, rather than all the major services. However, Hulu and HBO are supported at launch, at least. Thanks to single sign-on, U.S. users can more easily access the content that requires a pay TV subscription as they only have to enter their login information one time. Apple has been steadily adding providers to the list of those that support single sign-on during the beta, and, as of today’s launch there are on board. These include familiar brands like Dish, DirecTV, and Sling TV, but not yet some of the larger names in telecom like Comcast or Time Warner, for example. The TV app includes a variety of features to help you more easily find something to watch. With Live Tune-in with Siri, you can tell Siri that you want to watch the game, ask her which games are on right now, or tell her the name of a program you want to see. This will immediately launch the stream in question, without you needing to navigate to the live stream from within the TV app itself. If you don’t know what to watch, you can ask Siri for ideas by saying things like “What should I watch tonight?” or “Show me great holiday movies.” You can also tell Siri that you want to continue watching a show or movie, and the video will start where you left off. Your progress will be synced between devices, too, so you can start viewing on one and pick up on another. Inside the TV app are sections that will help you discover what’s on and what you may like. A “Watch Now,” section includes all the shows and movies from both iTunes and your apps, while “Up Next” points you to those you’re currently watching or new rentals and purchases you’ve made. Meanwhile, Apple is also offering recommended content through curated collections to help you find trending shows, shows and movies by genres, and other hand-picked collections from Apple’s editors. The TV app with single sign-on was previously rolled out in the Apple beta releases, so we knew its public launch was nearing. The app works on all fourth-generation Apple TVs and will arrive in latest version of its mobile software, iOS 10.2.
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Apple may participate in $100 billion SoftBank fund
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Katie Roof
| 2,016 | 12 | 12 |
With a fundraising target of $100 billion, Apple’s participation would mean that the world’s largest tech company would be investing in the world’s largest tech fund. SoftBank itself is investing about $25 billion and the Saudi Arabian government is expected to contribute $45 billion.
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Hundreds of new and redesigned emoji come to iPhone & iPad with iOS 10.2
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Sarah Perez
| 2,016 | 12 | 12 |
Along with the launch of for Apple TV, Apple today also began rolling out the latest version of iOS, which at last brings the expanded lineup of new emoji to all users. In iOS 10.2, there are hundreds more emoji to choose from, including more diverse characters, more emoji representing different professions, more food, sports and animals, as well like the facepalm, shrug, selfie, The update brings full — meaning those emoji that have been approved by the standards body that decides how our pictogram-based communications will evolve. Over the years, the consortium has steadily added improvements to the emoji lineup, including the ability to choose the skin tone for the people characters and hand gestures you send. you’ll be able to represent more professions via emoji, including teacher, welder, coder, business worker, farmer, chef, student, mechanic, doctor/health worker and There are also tons of new animals and several more foods, drink glasses (hooray whiskey!), along with a number of sporting-related emoji, including medals, that will help in the future when sending messages about the Olympics. Among the people emoji is the facepalm gesture and often-used shrug, which we today tend to type using characters like this:¯_(ツ)_/¯. Hand gestures include the extended arm for a selfie, crossed fingers, handshake, “call me” hand, fist bump and raised back of hand. There are also new face emoji, like the green, sick guy and the Pinocchio-nosed liar. (Hmm, that could come in handy.) In addition to the new characters, Apple has the emoji in iOS 10 to “reveal more detail.” But this move briefly became controversial when people discovered the new peach emoji — popular for sexting (it’s clearly a butt), looked entirely different in one of the iOS 10.2 betas. about the matter, Apple decided to . Sexting was saved. Apple notes the new emoji will work across Apple devices, including iPhone, iPad, Apple Watch (watchOS 3.11) and Mac (macOS Sierra 10.12.2). Along with the added emoji, 10.2 brings and
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Lucas Matney
| 2,016 | 12 | 15 | null |
Opera Mediaworks will change its name to AdColony
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Anthony Ha
| 2,016 | 12 | 12 |
Opera Mediaworks will have a new name in the new year — AdColony. Mediaworks started as of mobile browser company Opera, but it split off when a Chinese consortium (and took the Opera name with it) earlier this year. AdColony, meanwhile, was a mobile video ad startup that was . It continued to operate within Mediaworks (it says it’s the second most widely installed SDK among the top 1,000 apps, after Google), and AdColony’s Will Kassoy is now CEO of Mediaworks. Now the entire company is taking on the AdColony name. “I am excited to unify the advertising business under the AdColony brand globally,” Kassoy said in the . “We are passionate about brand experiences that evoke emotion and drive real outcomes by combining both creativity with the next generation of advertising technologies like data science-driven automation and Artificial Intelligence.” The name change will take effect in January.
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Forget Spectacles, group messaging is Snapchat’s most important launch in 2016
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Jon Russell
| 2,016 | 12 | 13 |
There was neither fanfare nor pizzazz, but yesterday Snap — — quietly shipped a new feature that could dent other messaging apps and obstruct upcoming social startups. . It’s an obvious part of any chat app but something that hadn’t been present in Snapchat until this week. A messaging app introducing groups is not revolutionary in itself, but when that app happens to have more than 100 million daily users, it becomes a killer feature that impacts other services. Given that Snapchat’s core userbase is young people, there’s no doubt that they were going elsewhere to host group conversations with friends. Perhaps it was Kik, or Facebook Messenger, or WhatsApp, or even just iMessage — regardless, their user behavior will now change. Over time, those conversations will migrate over to Snapchat, solidifying engagement with the many millions of teens and people in their 20s for whom it is already the go-to app on their phone. It will also give less active users a big reason to open the app more often if their friends drag them into groups. Snapchat, as we know, is anchored in messaging but it has built out a considerable media business and is , both of which will be boosted by the introduction of groups. For an idea of how important this release is, check out : OMG SNAPCHAT HAS GROUPS — Andrea (@slariet) Thank god for snapchat groups I've been waiting for this — 🅱️et out of my swamp (@ugotlefever) these snap chat groups are lit 😂 — Ty Seiber (@Tyseiber10) Snapchat groups are the best thing to come out of 2016 — Will (@willjwoodward_) Snapchat now has groups and if has changed my life — Ian (@iandavis95) psa: not sure how it took this long bUT YOU CAN FINALLY MAKE GROUPS ON SNAPCHAT NOW — tayler (@tayvanarsdale) This could be just the start of Snapchat’s efforts on multi-person conversation. The app offers live video chatting in one-on-one conversations, but that could be extended to cover groups, too, thereby tapping the growing trend for multi-person video communication that services like and are pursuing with signs of success. In the case of Houseparty, which was created by the team behind now-defunct streaming app Meerkat, on its group video chats. People may best remember Snap in 2016 for , , but the addition of groups seems significantly more impactful. It is particularly important since and .
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Crunch Report | Google Spins Out Waymo, A Self-Driving Car Company
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Khaled "Tito" Hamze
| 2,016 | 12 | 13 |
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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Everything that happened at Disrupt London 2016
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Anna Escher
| 2,016 | 12 | 13 |
The doors to TechCrunch Disrupt London 2016 opened December 5 at the Copper Box Arena in London. The two-day conference hosted more than 2,300 attendees, with hundreds of thousands more tuning in online. You can also watch the full panels from Disrupt London on , and catch select segments on . During Startup Battlefield, 12 companies plus one audience choice company pitched to a panel of judges in hopes of winning the Disrupt Cup and the €40,000 Grand Prize. TechCrunch editors pored over the judges’ notes and narrowed the list down to : And the winner of Startup Battlefield at Disrupt London 2016 is… Seenit http://tcrn.ch/2he5msy Posted by on Tuesday, December 6, 2016 for its user-generated content aggregation app. The idea is that businesses or event organizers can assign video shots to fans, and then aggregate that content for promotional videos or memories. You can watch their pitch in the video above. InsideDNA, the company that looks deep into DNA to find the best drug targets for your body, The winner of the Disrupt London 2016 Hackathon is Emotion Journal. The hack is a voice journaling app that performs real-time emotional analysis http://tcrn.ch/2h1YCdg Posted by on Sunday, December 4, 2016 Before the conference kicked off, hackers stayed up all night to create apps, sites and hardware in the Disrupt Hackathon. Each group had one minute to present to a panel of judges onstage. The , a hack that used IBM Watson to create a smart voice journal. You talk to it about your day and it analyzes your emotions and stores the logs. If you do it once a day you can see a visual representation of your feelings and experiences over time. We also saw during this year’s presentations. The first runner-up was Sayfe Space, a company that gives refugees a platform to naturally describe their problems and get support by anonymously chatting with volunteers who can empathize and offer support. The team used IBM Watson for natural language processing and the chatbot interactions. Doshbot, an AI assistant that helps you save money, was the second runner-up. It integrates and pulls in your banking transactions and GPS location and mixes them with your emotional tones and writing style on social networks, such as Twitter and Facebook. On Day 1 of the conference, we heard from speakers like Mustafa Suleyman of Google DeepMind, saw an on-stage demo from Marc Raibert of Boston Dynamics and watched Volkswagen launch a new mobility company. Here’s the full rundown: Volkswagen launches Moia, a new standalone mobility company, on stage at Disrupt London http://tcrn.ch/2gsTXRC Posted by on Monday, December 5, 2016 Boston Dynamics founder Marc Raibert showed off the features of the SpotMini at Disrupt London http://tcrn.ch/2h0O81s Posted by on Monday, December 5, 2016 The second day of Disrupt London featured a demo from Samantha Payne of Open Bionics, an interview with Azmat Yusuf from Citymapper and more. Here’s the full rundown: Professor Jackie Hunter of BenevolentBio on AI's role in medicine at Disrupt London Posted by on Tuesday, December 13, 2016 Find out what the Citymapper CEO thinks cities of the future will be like http://tcrn.ch/2gzjnNB Posted by on Tuesday, December 6, 2016 Cofounder Alex Zhu defends Musical.ly's safety policy for young users http://tcrn.ch/2h6h9q7 Posted by on Wednesday, December 7, 2016 Thanks to everyone who came to Disrupt London; we hope to see you back next year and at Disrupt New York and San Francisco in 2017. You can find more photos from the event on our , and
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Pokémon GO fitness gains were short-lived
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Devin Coldewey
| 2,016 | 12 | 13 |
During the supreme madness of the Pokémon GO season this summer, it wasn’t uncommon to hear people talk about how the insanely popular game was boosting activity levels and making people walk miles more than they did before. That effect appears to have been significantly overstated, according to . Now, to be clear, this research real, although the journal, while it is a major one, tends to during the holiday season. That one of the Harvard researchers is dressed as Pikachu while presenting their results is instructive. The study (noticed by ) surveyed 1,182 Americans, all of whom had an iPhone 6, and a little under half of whom were Pokémon GO players. The participants were found on Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, which at this point seems like something of a niche population — but then again, most of what we know about psychology was learned by testing psych undergrads, so we can give this particular sourcing a pass. At any rate, in the weeks leading up to the game’s release, there was no significant difference between steps taken — automatically recorded by the phone — by the two groups. The week the game came out, however, the Pokémon-playing group showed an average of 955 extra steps per day, while the control group remained near the baseline. These were, of course, the crazy early days of the app, when everyone was walking their feet off trying to catch ’em all. That thousand-step gain was cut in half by week 4, however, and by week 6 was all but wiped out. Additional analysis, by the way, showed no significant interaction effect with other variables — age, income, neighborhood walkability, etc. That could be from a lack of data, or it could be that the game just caused comparable increases across the board regardless of other factors. No doubt there were a few people who walked miles more because of the app, but it doesn’t appear to have been a widespread phenomenon. As the researchers summarize it: Although the association between Pokémon GO and change in number of steps was short lived in our study, some people might sustain increased physical activity through the game. Also, the effect of Pokémon GO on physical activity might be different in children, who were not included in our study. Other potential benefits might exist, such as increased social connectedness and improved mood.
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Disqus lays off 11 as it plans a deeper focus on data
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Ingrid Lunden
| 2,016 | 12 | 13 |
Some downsizing and refocusing is underway at , the startup incubated at Y-Combinator that became an early mover in the business of offering a plug-in to help online publishers manage comments on stories. TechCrunch has learned and confirmed that the company has laid of 11 people, about 20 percent of its small staff, as it prepares to shift its business deeper into data services for publishers and advertisers. The cuts have been made in several departments, from sales through to engineering as part of the company “rebalancing” its priorities in light of that shift. Disqus, co-founded in 2007 by (who is still its CEO) and and with only $10.5 million raised in funding in all that time, is perhaps best known for its free commenting platform, which is in use across millions of websites and other communities today. But more recently Disqus has been trying out other things to expand its business. That has included a growing programmatic ad platform , which debuted in 2014 (it’s this that makes the company money, as Disqus takes a share on ads that run through its otherwise free platform). And earlier this year, Disqus opted for another traffic gain as it relaunched of its own site as a central repository not just of content and comments from sites that you follow and comment on with a Disqus ID; but also of standalone comment threads that existed independent of these, . It’s not clear how well those consumer efforts have gone, but from what I’ve heard the plan is to halt them as Disqus turns to its B2B focus. The new effort will be built out of the (anonymised) data that passes through Disqus’ platform which sees some 2 billion monthly unique users. Disqus plans to reveal more details next year about these new data services, but one likely area it will focus on is marketing tech. Given how Disqus has used some of its data to help grow its own ad business, it could perhaps turn to offering data analytics to publishers and advertisers for more insight into what consumers are reading and discussing. While Disqus was a an early and leading player in the world of online comments, times have changed. In addition to Facebook’s aggressive move into the online comments (it Disqus for us here at TC, ), there are other competitors like Livefyre, which is and priorities. Along with all that, the nature of how people interact with content online has changed in recent years, with many now taking to social media to troll, fight trolls, and sometimes engage in spirited debate, rather than do it on sites, underneath the articles that got them thinking or outraged in the first place. From what I understand, it’s a small team at Disqus, only around 55 people, so cuts like these don’t come lightly. Good luck to them all.
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Apple’s standalone support app hits the U.S. App Store
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Sarah Perez
| 2,016 | 12 | 13 |
Apple’s is now hitting the U.S. App Store. The app, which had quietly debuted last month outside the U.S., lets you access product documentation, schedule appointments, as well as chat, email or schedule calls with an Apple Support technician, among other things. While the ability to look for nearby stores and schedule appointments at the Genius Bar was previously available through the , this feature was a bit buried among a variety of other functions. In addition, Apple’s “ ” app that launched with iOS 8 was not well-received, and was quickly archived to users’ Apple junk apps folder. The new , as it’s called, is more useful because it centralizes all the product information and provides a more streamlined way to access customer support, when needed. In addition, the app is personalized to each user. That is, the app recognizes all your iCloud-registered devices so you don’t have to figure out details like what model of iPhone or Mac computer you have. (Yes, in the real world, many people don’t obsessively keep track of this information – they just know they bought “the new iPhone.”) This personalization allows customers to get just the product and support documentation that pertains to their devices. And it can speed things up when communicating with a support rep, too, as they won’t waste time figuring out their device details. [gallery ids="1414635,1414633,1414632,1414631,1414630,1414629"] Apple customers will also be able to launch a native chat with an Apple service expert right in the app, and they can view their support case history when the session wraps. If an in-store appointment is required, users can schedule this in the app and receive a reminder notifications. Plus, the app can help point users to authorized repair providers in the local area, as well. The app’s arrival hits at one of the busiest times of the year – the U.S. holidays, when many people are unwrapping their new Apple devices for the first time, and potentially running into issues or having questions. That’s a trial-by-fire for a new service like this. However, Apple has at least tested the app in the wild for around a month – ahead of its U.S. arrival. Apple says additional countries will also receive the app in the coming weeks.
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Scanadu to shut down support for its Scout device per FDA regulation and customers are mad
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Sarah Buhr
| 2,016 | 12 | 13 |
Medical startup informed customers today it will no longer support its Scout device starting May 15, 2017. The reason? Though Scanadu has been working with the Food and Drug Administration to get full approval for this and other devices, it seems Scout didn’t make the cut. Scanadu came out of the X Prize Foundation’s competition, but soon broke an , raising more than $1.6 million in less than a month for the Scout, a medical device that could check for heart rate, blood pressure and body temperature. Scanadu used Scout, which could detect vitals such as temperature and upload that information to a smartphone, as a preliminary device for medical research. The device could also send collected information from an app to your doctor. The FDA has declined to comment on why Scanadu is shutting down support for Scout, but according to Scanadu, Scout was simply an investigational device under the Scripps Institutional Review Board (IRB) approved protocol. “From the beginning of the campaign, this was an investigational device that was part of a study which has now reached its endpoint with data collection for the study ending in November 2016,” a Scanadu spokesperson told TechCrunch. “FDA regulations require that all investigational studies be brought to closure and their respective devices be deactivated. As a result, we will deactivate the Scanadu Scout® devices by . However, customers paid anywhere from $149 on Indiegogo to $199 to use the device and the information Scout users were given at the beginning of the study conveyed Scout would continue to work after the study. “You will be in the study for a minimum of 12 months and the study will remain open for 18 months or until FDA clearance of Scanadu Scout,” read a letter to customers. “After the 18-month survey, your continued participation in the study will be purely passive, meaning you will not be asked to do anything and only your usage data of the Scanadu Scout will continue to be collected.” The new letter sent to Scout supporters talks about the startup’s commitment to continue bringing innovative technologies to consumers, just not with Scout. “Thank you for your dedication to Scanadu Scout over the past years,” read the most recent Scout customer letter. “We have learned a lot from your usage data and feedback. The success of this project wouldn’t have been possible without you.” But it is the collection of that data without anything in return that has sparked a lot of anger in those who’ve bought and supported the use of Scout. I hope you guys don't plan to crowdfund your next project — Jen Piro (@jenniferpiro) Another user, long time supporter Dr. David Fraser wrote TechCrunch in an email, “They basically took our money, took our data, took the learnings from the process and dumped the very backers who got them started. No recompense, no future trade-up voucher, nada!” As for what’s being done with customer data, Scanadu tells us, “ cripps Translational Science Institute is currently processing the data collected in the 18-month study survey and will issue its final report in May 2017. The study results will be published in a peer-reviewed journal in collaboration with Scripps.
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Electron is trying to sell a blockchain makeover to the UK’s energy sector
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Natasha Lomas
| 2,016 | 12 | 13 |
UK startup is hoping to convince the energy sector to buy into the transformative potential of blockchain technology — and, down the line, unlock commercialization opportunities for over the top services running on a decentralized infrastructure platform. At this point it’s built a demo platform on the , and has pumped in simulated data from 53 million metering points and 60 energy suppliers as a dummy representation of the UK energy market — using that to run tests which it claims show such a platform would enable energy supplier switches to be executed up to 20x faster than current switching rates. That’s the efficiency and cost-saving carrot it’s hoping will convince industry players to buy in to a vision of upgrading their current “hodgepodge” of processes, says co-founder Paul Ellis, whose financial services background led him to the idea of applying blockchain to a sector that’s not renowned for innovating business processes without being marched into doing so by the stick of regulation. “The energy market is built on technology that mostly is around 25 or 35 years out of date. It’s been built up over a period of time — it’s a hodgepodge of different systems. And it tends to be driven more by regulators than for example the financial services industry is,” he says, arguing that blockchain in particular could provide “a lot of very helpful benefits for this industry”. “The financial services industry is incredibly focused on this, in large part because of one of their core functions is acting as a custodian of record. [But] the energy industry don’t see that as one of their USPs… [Yet it’s also] a highly competitive, heavily regulated industry operating over a shared infrastructure.” The sector’s existing shared infrastructure includes platforms for balancing and settlement, and for shared registration facilities. Electron’s aim is to encourage the energy industry to collectively shift these functions onto shared blockchains. An example of an area it reckons could benefit from utilizing blockchain technology is registration services — aka mechanisms whereby various energy industry assets are recorded. So a blockchain here would be both the place of record where energy providers go to obtain information about particular assets, and also to record any transactional changes. “These are good reasons to have blockchains. They’re very cost effective. You don’t require third party intermediaries to operate these shared platforms,” argues Ellis. “A blockchain provides a way to remove the cost inefficiencies and the barriers to innovation that a central service provider would necessarily bring.” He says Electron would not be looking to monetize any shared blockchain infrastructure directly, only covering its costs there, but rather via the commercial services opportunity these platforms would unlock. “Where we see benefit is when you start commercializing… the opportunities that this throws up,” he tells TechCrunch. “For example… the kind of thing that could be done would be offering services that make switching or registration of change of ownership of properties easier to do when the property changes hands. “It might be connecting in things like births, marriages and deaths — so that suppliers are better informed about the status [of their customers]… Or it would be licensing and selling the technology into other areas, or extending it to other utilities such as water or telecoms.” Electron also touts the potential for blockchain to lay the foundations for households to participate in peer to peer energy, and flexibility trading in future — turning energy surplus and varying demand into a potential market. Ellis also reckons energy regulators could potentially gain — by, for example, being afforded privileged access to the blockchain to gain real-time intelligence on the marketshare of the various energy providers instead of having to survey providers to generate market data. All this is the grand vision of what’s possible with a radically different infrastructure. But of course for any of it to be possible Electron needs the UK’s energy industry to buy in and be convinced that investing in decentralized blockchains is worth its while, vs, for example, having a single provider run a centralized database that all players plug into — which would be an alternative route to improve switching efficiency, for example. “We have a number of conversations going on,” says Ellis of progress on its sales pitch. “There’s a degree of interest in finding out more.” “I think the logic of co-operating to develop this is very strong — so we’re very optimistic that we’ll get a lot more buy-in on this, and get a lot more people around the table,” he adds. He reckons a best case scenario for getting its blockchain platform up and running in the domestic energy market is within “about two years”, noting that regulator Ofgem has set a similar timeframe for the industry to provide a next day energy provider switching platform for consumers — so there’s still some regulator stick being brandished here. If Electron can sell the concept in the UK he’s confident the approach could be replicated in other energy markets. The London-based startup, which was founded at the end of 2015, has raised around £400,000 (~$500k) in pre-seed funding from private investors to date, as well as securing two Innovate UK grants (totaling £150k) to develop its technology. In terms of other blockchain startups targeting the sector, Ellis says most in the energy space are focusing on peer-to-peer energy trading — name checking the likes of in New York, and in Australia — vs pushing to decentralize top down, as Electron is hoping to do. “We’re not aware of anyone else who’s focusing top down. And that’s the reason why we’ve started our process with this registration platform because that’s very much a top down energy industry infrastructure issue,” he says. But the challenge of convincing a slow moving industry to take a radical change of technology direction perhaps explains why few others are focusing their disruptive efforts on building an industry-wide collaboration.
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Munchery tries to win over commuters with a pop-up shop in San Francisco
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Lora Kolodny
| 2,016 | 12 | 13 |
Food delivery startup is trying its hand at brick-and-mortar sales, opening a pop-up shop in San Francisco that we spotted this week. In the competitive and cluttered market for online food delivery, Munchery is distinct in that it sells chef-prepared meals that just need to be heated, meal kits with recipes and pre-measured ingredients to its members and other customers. Most other food delivery companies focus on just one food type, generally cooked meals, groceries or meal kits. There are meal kits with pre-measured ingredients from the likes of: , , and . For companies like this, refrigeration, recipes and packaging matter more than heat and speed. Then there are meals delivered to groups of employees where they work including , and For these companies, heat and precise timing of deliveries matters more. And of course, there are platforms that enable online ordering of food from a wide variety of restaurants, like pioneers (which also owns Seamless), and Groupon-owned which operates in smaller cities. Munchery’s physical retail effort could be as much about branding as it is about expanding into a new sales channel. Having a presence and giant signs in a well-trafficked subway station should ostensibly lead to better brand awareness, at least, if not an increase in food sales for Munchery. Underscoring the competitive nature of the food delivery business, one floor below the Munchery pop-up shop, Grubhub was advertising with subway posters. One featured a 20-something guy tucking into a piece of pie, a take-out box on the table beside him. The slogan reads, “Mmm, just like mom used to order.” Cute stuff. A company representative said that Munchery will use the San Francisco-based pop-up shop as an experiment of sorts. If it succeeds, they’ll open pop-ups in other cities. The pop-up will also sell meals that aren’t yet available on the site or app, yet, and if they sell well it may add them into the mix. If its pop-up experiment works, the company will have successfully adapted a move from e-commerce players in fashion to the food world. To help scale their startups, apparel and accessories brands like Bonobos, Everlane, the Tie Bar and Warby Parker opened pop-up shops or their own storefronts where their products could be purchased, or at least tried on then ordered from a tablet to be shipped home. As we recently reported, Munchery has been in recent quarters, leading to the appointment of a new CEO at the company in November, James Beriker. The company’s cofounder and former CEO Tri Tran has moved into the Chief Strategy Officer role.
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The International Space Station’s network bandwidth will be doubled by new upgrades
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Devin Coldewey
| 2,016 | 12 | 13 |
The internet connection on the International Space Station and other platforms in orbit is that will double its capacity, NASA announced today. But they aren’t sending up a new router or satellite; the improvements are mainly terrestrial. The ISS and dozens of satellites rely on the Space Network, a more or less unified architecture for sending large amounts of data from orbit to base stations around the world. Its maximum bandwidth is 300 Mbps, which is of course much faster than most ISPs provide, and more than enough for everyone on the ISS to stream videos at once. Of course, they’re far too busy to do that, and the network has to support all kinds of experiments, devices, and other satellites. About 28 terabytes of high-definition, real-time space data is beamed down every day on average, in addition to astronauts’ internet browsing, video calls, and so on. Everything is sent through a dedicated network of Tracking and Data Relay Satellites, which then pass the signals down to base stations — which pass them on to their Earthly destinations. This highly technical video explains the whole process in detail: It’s the base stations that are getting the big update. New hardware is being installed at the White Sands (in New Mexico, shown up top) and Guam terminals that will double the space station’s downlink capacity. “Fundamentally, this upgrade of both the onboard and ground data communications systems enables an increase in the scientific output from the space station,” said NASA’s Mark Severance in the agency’s news post. Those onboard improvements weren’t detailed, but updated hardware to handle the increased bandwidth would be a logical complement to the sea-level items. The ground terminal updates are an ongoing process, as well — worryingly described as bringing them “into the 21st century.” New, more flexible architecture is in the process of being implemented. I contacted NASA for more information on what specifically the updates will entail, and when they are expected to be put into action. A brief reply indicated that Guam has been brought up to spec and both it and White Sands will be getting upgrades simultaneously, with improved speeds “hopefully in the very near future.”
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Uber snooping lawsuit exposes data and security practices
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Kate Conger
| 2,016 | 12 | 13 |
Uber fired Ward Spangenberg this February on his 45th birthday. Now he’s suing the tech giant, claiming that he was terminated as a result of age discrimination and because he blew the whistle about insecure data practices at Uber just a few weeks before his shares vested. Spangenberg has also made some of his own user data public in court filings leaving Uber scrambling to keep that data secret. Spangenberg’s allegations, first reported by , represent yet another dent in Uber’s reputation when it comes to data protection. Uber executives have been accused of spying on reporters’ trips and the company’s recent riled privacy advocates. But Uber says its past mistakes are just that — in the past — and that it has taken steps in recent months to improve data security. Spangenberg and Uber have accused each other in court filings of mishandling data. Spangenberg says Uber did not take the necessary precautions to prevent employees from snooping on their ex-girlfriends or querying the accounts of celebrities. Uber claims that Spangenberg inappropriately accessed HR emails and deleted important company data from his computer. Uber began building out its security team roughly eighteen months ago, so many data protection initiatives are relatively new for the company. In his lawsuit, In his lawsuit, Spanginberg says his troubles began when Uber hired John “Four” Flynn as chief information security officer, poaching him from Facebook last July. Flynn implied Spangenberg’s age impeded him from fitting in to Uber’s youth-driven culture (prompting Spangenberg to include age discrimination claims in his lawsuit) and said that his work was deficient after he reported the security problems, Spangenberg claims. “Much of the information is out of date and doesn’t accurately reflect the state of our practices today,” Flynn wrote yesterday in an email to Uber employees discussing the Reveal report. “Like every fast-growing company, we haven’t always gotten everything perfect. But without the trust of our customers we have no business,” Flynn added. He also noted that Uber presents employees with a pop-up each time they access customer data which warns them not to abuse their access to look for information about personal acquaintances or celebrities, that access to data is limited based on employees’ roles at the company, and that access is audited regularly to detect abuse. “All employees are required to acknowledge and agree to a data access policy, including at on-boarding. You’re reminded of this policy every time you access internal data tools once you have the required permission (see below). All data access is logged and routinely audited, and all potential violations are quickly and thoroughly investigated. We have terminated employees in the past for violating this policy,” Flynn said. Spangenberg’s lawyer, Barbara Figari, says that Uber employees had an easy way to get around the data access policy — they’d simply pull the customer’s data into a project, making the query look like a product test rather than plain old snooping. “It wouldn’t show as a deviation for security purposes. It would show as an error test in a project,” Figari said. During Spangenberg’s employment, Figari admitted, there was no pop-up warning employees not to improperly access data. Uber says that pop-up now appears routinely, including when employees pull data into projects to run tests. Figari said that customer data could also be accessed by employees who exported the information to Google Drive, where its use could no longer be observed by auditors, to tinker with it. “If you’re agreeing Uber can have the data, there’s an assumption made as a consumer the there have been appropriate measures put in place to keep that secure,” she said. Spangenberg suggested one alternative to securing user data from prying employees, Figari said — requiring employees to fill out a request before they viewed the data. “You should have to fill out a request to view someone’s data. Someone could lie on the form, but it’s a gatekeeping function,” Figari explained. Spangenberg also claims that Uber ordered him to encrypt data to prevent foreign authorities from accessing it during raids on Uber offices abroad. “We’ve had robust litigation hold procedures in place from our very first lawsuit to prevent deletion of emails relevant to ongoing litigation,” an Uber spokesperson told TechCrunch. “It’s not a secret that Uber has trip coordinates and other personally identifiable information about riders and drivers, and it’s our obligation to protect that. We cooperate with authorities when they come to us with subpoenas.” In a declaration filed Oct. 5, Spangenberg included of his own Uber data to demonstrate the amount of information employees could access. The data includes Spangenberg’s location and the time when he hailed his rides, his email address, and his credit card provider and issuing bank. The information included in the filing appears to include more comprehensive Uber than users themselves can access — researcher and Uber user recently his own Uber data, which included location, speed, credit card information, and phone battery level. However, Uber immediately demanded that Spangenberg’s user data be re-filed under seal. “Exhibit A contains customer data collected by Defendant and constitutes Defendant’s confidential, proprietary, and private information about its users — the very existence, content, and form of which are of extreme competitive sensitivity to Defendant in that they demonstrate what data Defendant considers important enough to capture, how that data is stored and organized, and could, individually or in the aggregate, provide Defendant’s competitors with insights into how Defendant views, analyzes and executes certain aspects of its business,” Uber wrote in a court filing. Now, as Uber adds security measures to keep employees from looking at user data, the company also has to worry about keeping the public out.
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The Daily Beast brings Cheat Sheet news summaries to its mobile app and Alexa
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Anthony Ha
| 2,016 | 12 | 13 |
launched a new version of today, incorporating one of the IAC-owned news site’s main features — , which provides brief (150 to 200 word) summaries of the day’s top stories. The Cheat Sheet gets prominent placement in the app. In fact, it’s now one of two main sections, along with Top Stories. And that’s not the only new place where you can find Cheat Sheet summaries, a.k.a. Cheats — the company also just launched “flash briefings” . Why push the Cheat Sheet now? Daily Beast President and Publisher Mike Dyer told me that the section’s traffic has grown 35 percent year-over-year, and it and now accounts for 10 percent of the site’s total. Plus, he said that 90-second news briefs (the time it takes to read a Cheat out loud) are the ideal length for Alexa. Dyer also argued that the Cheat Sheet represents a new format for journalism — he suggested that aside from tweets, most journalism falls somewhere between an article and a deeply reported feature, so “our view is that there’s white space between an article and a tweet.” Now, if you’re the kind of journalism nerd who likes arguing about different formats (i.e., me), you might be thinking, “What about news briefs?” Well, Dyer argued that Cheats are a different “art form”: “What makes it distinct, if you look at brief products, they do a pretty good job of giving short version of what is happening, but we describe a Cheat as an overview with a point of view. It’s not enough to just discuss what’s happening, it’s about getting a reporter and editor’s expertise.” Dyer also suggested that it’s a bit “contrarian” for The Daily Beast to continue to developing and updating its app at all, especially while not pursuing distribution through Facebook’s Instant Articles or Google’s Accelerated Mobile Pages project. “One of the things I’ve felt lately is that a lot of publishers are not investing as much as they should in their own app,” he said. Sure, publishers probably reach a bigger audience by focusing on social media and their own websites, but “we’ve been very careful not to pursue scale for scale’s sake, and [instead] to pursue influence and expertise.”
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How to DIY a Westworld host at home
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John Mannes
| 2,016 | 12 | 13 |
to see the limitations of this world, the dead ends. We here at TechCrunch choose to see the possibilities. Looking back at the first season of Westworld, I have to say I’m impressed at the nuanced approach Lisa Joy and Jonathan Nolan take to artificial intelligence. Reveries, backstories and even the idea of hosts training on other hosts all give a nod to real AI research. Building a Westworld host is kind of like — directions are pretty much useless. Instead, here are some for DIY-ing your own Westworld host at home. Oh, also… We convinced Oxford and Stanford-educated artificial intelligence researcher and Chief Scientist of Semantic Machines, , to go on record about how he would approach the challenge. Overkill? Hardly. So many improvements would need to be made to that I don’t even consider this cheating. Atlas can walk around on a variety of uneven surfaces, open doors and even stand up after being knocked down — but you surely won’t mistake it for being human. The robot walks awkwardly and weighs 330 pounds, so unless you just want to build a and call it a day, you’re going to need to make some massive alterations. For starters, you have to find a way to implement human fine motor skills. We have 43 muscles in our faces that help communicate and convey emotion in surprisingly complex ways. Unfortunately, the issue with adding more anthropomorphic features is that the creepiness factor goes up without giving you something that screams “human.” To build a true human analog, you have to get the temperature of the skin correct, you have to nail the textures and the small things, even the sweat. Shaking the rough, stone-cold hands of an unpolished host would ruin the entire experience instantly. But in the grand scheme of challenges, this is nothing some and a night reading every bio-engineering textbook ever written couldn’t solve. AI needs tons of information to accomplish a single, well-defined, task. We train our machines for weeks on data, then they can play a single game or sort spam. Comparably, even with limited information, humans can manage quite a bit. Imagine that you just burned your hand by touching a skillet on the stove. If your conclusion is that skillets burn people, you’re probably a experiment gone wrong. The obvious answer here is that a pan on the stove burned you because it was used recently and excessive heat can burn us. A computer might instead opt to just never touch a skillet again — far too stupid to be our dear Dolores. Professor Klein explains that there are two prevailing approaches to solving this problem. First is from bottom-up, while the other is from the top-down. Most of the work right now in AI is bottom-up. We strive to do increasingly complex things — words to sentences to full dialog. The alternative is to input rules and let a system figure out the nitty-gritty of how to achieve desired outcomes on its own. We have made much more progress from the bottom than from the top. Figure out how to work effectively from the top down and you might just find yourself with a seven-figure starting salary at a major tech company. Just like Bernard studying Theresa, we can garner a lot from our own species. Intelligence, whether human or artificial, requires information and an objective. We can model the interplay between information and objectives with utility. The cost of a cappuccino in San Francisco is $5, but its utility takes into account the value (or lack of) of the calories you could do without, the time you spent getting the coffee and your post-caffeine productivity. From here, modeling decision-making is as easy as calculating utilities for things and asking which is higher. Throw in some game theory, a bit of rational choice and maybe even some behavioral economics and you’re getting closer to building a host. “Data, learning, memory, computation and hardwired goals make intelligence work,” said Professor Klein. “This is true for machines and people. Human goals are myopic, I want to be satisfied in life, and we make intermediate decisions to maximize those functions.” Starting to feel like a host yourself? That’s the idea. We struggle to model everything perfectly, especially over longer time horizons, because the world is an incredibly complex and dynamic system — far too complicated for even our most sophisticated processors. “Our systems today use brute force to solve problems,” noted Professor Klein. “Humans do a lot more meta computation, thinking about what to think about.” Today’s state of the art is . We capture the utility of various moves, prune away the inefficiencies and that’s about it. Importantly though, the hard-coded assumption in a game like Go is that we want to win! This starting assumption connects back well to the idea of “cornerstone” backstories from the show. Having hosts talk to each other in their free time is a fantastic way to train them from . Similarly, some tech companies today use simulated training data to speed up the training process. Another thing to keep in mind is that real humans are constantly improvising. A host just running off a static objective function isn’t very fun. Something readily adaptable, like Bayesian cognition, is a natural fit for a host. “We can turn data into behavior,” Professor Klein said. “The same algorithm can go from terrible to great with just more examples.” The world exists in a series of ever-changing states and a good AI needs to be able to react in real time to update its preferences. Increasing the number of inputs increases complexity and disorder — two things that sound terrible, but are actually quite necessary. Last but not least, reveries. They pull from ideas of emergent behavior and phase transitions, which are a real challenge for researchers in the AI space. “If you build a set of capacities, say A, B and C and add in a way for them to interact, say +, you can generate A+B, B+C, C+A and so on that you couldn’t generate before,” explains Professor Klein. This is a way of saying that the tiniest of memories, something as innocuous as a hand gesture, can wreak havoc on a complex system. Bicameralism (the voice that speaks to you) has been pretty much debunked as a theory of consciousness, but such a voice could force emergent behavior, similar to that of reveries. “We see themes of the viral nature of consciousness,” added Professor Klein. “We see the same things with ideas, a meme is a viral idea.” The butterfly effect explains how something as insignificant as a wing flap could alter any complex system, whether ocean tides or cognition, in dramatic and unforeseen ways.
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Google introduces WebVR API to latest Chrome beta on Android
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Lucas Matney
| 2,016 | 12 | 13 |
Today in a , Google shared that the latest beta of Chrome for Android has adopted the WebVR API which will allow users to enjoy online content through Chrome with a VR headset. Introducing the WebVR API in Chrome Beta for Android, with support for VR headsets like View. — Google VR (@googlevr) In the pat, you might have come across content on the web that asks you to toss your phone into a headset to view, but those experiences only offered a fixed perspective that really ignored most of what makes VR headsets cool. With this latest update, web developers will have access to the input and output capabilities of mobile VR devices and controllers as well as super pertinent data like the headset position and orientation info. All of this news of APIs and betas might seem a little bit boring, but it’s really going to throw open the floodgates of VR access on the web and give creators a place for VR content that isn’t YouTube of Facebook. This will greatly increase what you can do with devices like Google’s Daydream View mobile headset. The multi-platform nature of WebVR has excited a lot of developers with many believing the standard will soon encompass much of the VR content that people view. Google detailed in the post that WebVR support will soon be extended to desktop and Google’s low-cost Cardboard VR platform in a future Chrome release.
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Tech companies should probably come out against a Muslim registry now
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Taylor Hatmaker
| 2,016 | 12 | 13 |
With the Trump administration looming a hazy, ominous shade of toxic creamsicle orange on the horizon, some in tech are . Others won’t go so quietly, especially when it comes to the apparently hyperpartisan issue of facilitating genocide. After The Intercept’s Sam Biddle if they would provide data for a hypothetical but not like Muslim registry, most companies projected the special sort of loud silence that only an unanswered PR inquiry generates. (Notably, Twitter said no.) Now, a handful of employees at major tech companies are launched by former Googler Ka-Ping Yee and Slack’s Leigh Honeywell. Anyone who signs the commits to the following: We refuse to participate in the creation of databases of identifying information for the United States government to target individuals based on race, religion, or national origin. We will advocate within our organizations: – to minimize the collection and retention of data that would facilitate ethnic or religious targeting.
– to with unnecessary racial, ethnic, and national origin data.
– to responsibly destroy high-risk datasets and backups.
– to implement security and privacy best practices, in particular, for to be the default wherever possible.
– to demand appropriate legal process should the government request that we turn over user data collected by our organization, even in small amounts. If we discover misuse of data that we consider illegal or unethical in our organizations: – We will work with our colleagues and leaders to correct it.
– If we cannot stop these practices, without endangering users.
– If we have the authority to do so, we will use all available legal defenses to stop these practices.
– We will raise awareness and ask critical questions about the responsible and fair use of data and algorithms beyond our organization and our industry. Beyond the names on the current list, we’re sure that many more tech workers are deeply opposed to some the more alarming machinations of the Trump administration than they’ll let on. Most are likely waiting for their top brass to take a company-wide stance, lest they be scolded or even fired for breaking rank. Of course, Silicon Valley is a traditional bastion of Bay Area liberalism until those values become at odds with its bottom line. (Indeed, tech loves pretending that Peter Thiel is an abberation rather than a homegrown organic, grass-fed monster person!) We doubt that many of tech’s major data players will be willing to commit to some of the specifics here, like data destruction, end-to-end encryption and de-identifying future demographic data, but the pledge does apply more pressure for companies to come out with a statement on their own terms. We refuse to assist the US gov in mass deportation & religious targeting. Join us. Sign the pledge at — neveragain.tech (@neveragaintech) While this is all still hypothetical and preventative, the reality of a Muslim registry analogous to the Jewish registries that made the Holocaust so darkly efficient would not be difficult to procure. Between social networks and targeted advertising, tech companies command a nearly boundless well of personal demographic information on their users. Even if users opt to not disclose their own race/religion/sexuality or other identifying details, search histories and social network data could piece the identity puzzle together easily, at scale. There’s no doubt that the information exists—and users are rightfully nervous about it—but what tech companies will do and say remains, unlike everything else, unknowable. The names so far:
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Greg Kumparak
| 2,016 | 12 | 12 | null |
Microsoft to open Cortana virtual assistant to third-party devices and apps
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Darrell Etherington
| 2,016 | 12 | 13 |
Microsoft is making Cortana , so that they can integrate their own services in Cortana-powered devices. The news comes after an that Cortana would be coming to some IoT devices via next year’s Creators Update for Windows 10. Cortana’s new Skills Kit and Devices SDK run approximately parallel to Amazon’s Alexa Skills Kit and Voice Service; the Skills kit lets developers build app experiences that can be called up and controlled via Cortana using voice commands, while the Devices SDK allows third-party hardware makers to build gadgets that include Cortana on-board – whether or not they have a display, which was a limitation of the IoT implementation revealed previously. The Skills Kit preview is on now for a few select partners privately, a lineup that includes Knowmail, Capital One, Expedia and TalkLocal. It works similarly to how Alexa does for third-party apps, letting outside devs build integrations that will work in response to user voice commands, like “Hey Cortana, there’s a leak in my ceiling and it’s an emergency” to get TalkLocal searching for a plumber in the area. [youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bikRuaJAv5g&w=680&h=382] On the connected hardware front, Microsoft is teaming up with partners in a variety of verticals, including in connected cars, the software giant notes. It’s also working with audio accessory maker Harman Kardon, and provided a peek at an upcoming device slated for release in 2017 that probably looks pretty familiar if you’re at all familiar with Amazon’s Echo. Like the Skills Kit, the Devices SDK is in private preview mode for now, and will roll out in a more open fashion sometime in 2017. There’s a to express their interest, however. And while Amazon already has open tools for developers looking to build either Alexa services or gadgets, as well as a funding vehicle to help encourage invested parties even further, Microsoft definitely has an edge when it comes to working with OEM software licensees.
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It’s not you, it’s the post-seed gap
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Paul Martino
| 2,016 | 12 | 13 |
Record numbers of startups are failing to advance from their seed round to Series A. This glitch in the funding ecosystem is older than you may realize. Between 2009 and 2012, if 100 startups raised seed money, an average of just about 30 would secure a Series A, according to a new from Mattermark. For founders, those are rough odds — and they only get tougher over the most recent few years. Here’s the good news: It’s not you, it’s the post-seed gap. And some more good news: By changing your funding strategy, you can avoid the fate of post-seed startups that die for no good reason. The post-seed gap is not a reflection of the quality or types of startups entering the market. The truth is that Series A funds grew unexpectedly large, so deal size inflated, too. As Mattermark , the average Series A round size for Y Combinator startups increased between 2008 and 2014, from about $2 million to $10 million. Preqin that the average Series A round was $12 million in the first half of 2016. Bigger funds write bigger checks, but not necessarily checks than they used to. Series A funds with $800 to $900 million feel pressure to make headline-catching, risk-averse deals. So, Series A candidates must hit lofty milestones. Once upon a time, $1 million in revenue was enough to raise an A round. Now, $5 million is a common bar. Most companies can’t hit $5 million in revenue with $1 to $2 million in seed funding. The result is that Series A funds make bigger investments in fewer startups. But many companies that got to $1 or $2 million in revenue on that initial $1-2 million deserve more time, as they have achieved non- trivial product market fit. The changes in Series A funding sources have created an underserved cohort of entrepreneurs who are frustrated, stuck and scrambling. They have no reason to shut down, but they still struggle in the post-seed gap. So how do you avoid this trap? Here are a few suggestions. In April 2014, I argued that . Data from CB Insights that the average seed deal was $1.1 million back then. Now, I advise tech startups to raise at least $2.5 million in seed money. How you raise that $2.5 million depends on the capital efficiency of your company. If you build hardware or IT infrastructure, you may need one big injection of capital to create your product. If you make consumer tech, you can probably raise multiple seed rounds that add up to $2.5 million or more. Use to either pump up your seed round or complete multiple cycles of funding. One company that raised a large seed round was (disclosure: I’m an investor). CEO , co-founder also of , knew he was going after a massive opportunity in a difficult-to-navigate market. As a result, a larger seed round made tons of sense for him. Relying on just one or two seed funds increases your odds of starving to death in the post-seed gap. In addition to a VC fund, bring on at least 10-12 angels who contribute roughly $100,000 each. Again, try using AngelList. Diversifying your investors is important because seed funds are unlikely to provide follow-on funding if you get stuck in the post-seed gap. They give a little money to a lot of startups expecting only a few to deliver massive returns. Their business model is to fold quickly on any questionable hand. Big syndicates do save startups in the post-seed gap. provides a perfect example. When the company’s seed funding ran low, the founders returned to angels who had invested because of their strong personal belief in WedPics’ potential and mission. Not long after this top-off Bullpen led the post-seed round. If you have existing angels, product-market fit and plans to raise a large Series A within 12 months, consider doing a post-seed round. Some people call it seed prime, seed extension, top up, build round or pre A. To be clear though, the post-seed round is . The post-seed round isn’t necessarily an alternative to raising extra seed money or expanding your syndicate. Those two pieces of advice might lead you to a post-seed round, or they might get you to a Series A. If you don’t have $5 million in revenue and a $10-$15 million Series A is out of reach, think post-seed. I empathize with entrepreneurs who have to fold brilliant startups for a lack of funding. Now that you know about the post-seed gap, don’t repeat others’ mistakes. Your seed process isn’t over until you’ve raised upwards of $2.5 million. If that gets you to a Series A, congrats. If not, talk to investors who do post-seed funding.
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A single typo may have tipped the election
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Devin Coldewey
| 2,016 | 12 | 13 |
Among the many exasperating lapses detailed in on Russia’s apparent interference with the 2016 election, one in particular stands out — the scale of its repercussions matched only by its banality. It seems that the hack of John Podesta’s emails may have been the result of a single typo in an email intended to warn him of the risk. The typo? A Clinton campaign aide told the Times that he wrote “legitimate” instead of “illegitimate” in reference to a phishing email. One click later, and the hackers were in the door. It’s one tiny mistake in a tragicomedy of errors, but — if it’s true — is a powerful demonstration of how the smallest lapse in cybersecurity, a single typo or click, can serve as the fulcrum on which an entire career, news cycle, or arguably election can be tipped. is long, but well worth the read — if you don’t mind finishing the article a little more weary and cynical than you started.
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SyncThink uses VR to help test athletes for concussions on the field
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Lucas Matney
| 2,016 | 12 | 13 |
Concussion from high-impact sports like football have gathered a great deal of attention over the past decade as studies have emerged detailing some of the long-term impact of repeated head trauma. , which was founded by Dr. Jamshid Ghajar who heads the Stanford Concussion and Brain Performance center, is aiming to discover concussions earlier and with more accuracy than existing solutions, by utilizing virtual reality. A clear advantage of the company’s EYE-SYNC system is that it’s highly portable, another is that its very private. Numerous instances regarding how concussion tests are being “gamed” by players so that they can stay in the game have been disclosed over the years. Those problems are far less common for SyncThink’s VR headset solution which effectively cuts the person taking the test off from the rest of their environment. The company uses a DK2 Oculus Rift developer kit outfitted with eye-tracking sensors to give athletes and other concussion-prone individuals access to a quick and effective method of detecting whether a person is suffering from brain trauma. The headset systems have already been utilized across Stanford University’s athletic programs. While the most visible application of this may be on the sidelines of a football game or other high impact sport, SyncThink believes that there will be a good deal of interest from the military given the device’s compact nature. Today, the Boston-based company announced that Indiana University will
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These custom 3D-printed topographical maps could make nice stocking stuffers
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Devin Coldewey
| 2,016 | 12 | 13 |
If you intend on delaying your gift-buying to the degree that you have to 3D print a few just before go time, you’re in luck. This easy to use little tool lets you quickly select, customize, and print out a tiny topographical map of anywhere in the world. , as it’s called, is pretty easy to grok. Put in a location and it loads right up; adjust the zoom and height (a multiplier of actual altitude, for emphasis), then select whether you’d like it whole or sliced into square puzzle pieces Then you have your choice of downloading the resultant 3D model or having it printed at Shapeways. That’ll run you , though, so you might want to just bring it to your local maker space. ; it gets its mapping data from Google its topographical data from the . Coverage may vary or be spotty in some places, but most of the areas I checked came up just fine, although the lack of labels may make it a little difficult to recognize what you’re looking at.
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Just Eat pays up to £240M for Delivery Hero’s UK ops, £66M for Canada’s SkipTheDishes
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Ingrid Lunden
| 2,016 | 12 | 14 |
Yet more regional consolidation is underway among the giants of take-out and delivery startups in Europe as they gear up to compete more aggressively against newer entrants like Deliveroo and Uber Eats. Today, Berlin-based announced that it is selling its UK business, which operates as hungryhouse, to rival for £200 million ($251 million) in cash, plus another £40 million ($50 million) on top of that based on hungryhouse’s performance between now and the date of the deal closing (subject to approval by the competition regulator). Separately, Just Eat also announced that it would be acquiring , a delivery startup in Canada, for £66.1 million ($83 million), to expand its position there. The two deals come just five days after Delivery Hero — which was — announced that it would , another global rival, from Rocket Internet for an undisclosed amount of money. It seems now that the deal in part is to help finance the other transaction. The Foodpanda acquisition strengthens Delivery Hero’s operations in Europe, South America and Asia. The UK market has been a particularly crowded one for food delivery and take out startups. In addition to Just Eat and Delivery Hero, there are newer entrants like Uber Eats and Deliveroo. The latter two focus on a smaller and higher end selection of restaurants and have as such been eating into the margins and market share of older players, who have taken more of a catch-all approach to the business of takeaway. That, incidentally, has also been the strategic approach for many of these earlier businesses also when it came to expansion: scale as fast and as globally as you can to improve margins by dominating in all markets (an approach followed by many other on. In the case of the UK, Delivery Hero first entered the country when it acquired hungryhouse in 2011, with the business first getting its start in 2006. But the bigger strategy, however, appears to have changed somewhat, as players like Just Eat and Delivery Hero look to sell off assets in certain regions to help build up their presence in others. This week is not the first time that we’ve seen these companies trading off and selling companies to each other. Previous deals have included Rocket Internet operations from operations to Just Eat, “The sale of hungryhouse to Just Eat rationalizes our global footprint, and we remain focused on operating market-leading brands, globally,” said Niklaus Ostberg, CEO of Delivery Hero. “Proceeds from this sale will allow us to pursue further global growth opportunities, as we have consistently and successfully done in recent years. We also want to thank the entire hungryhouse team – this transaction reflects their amazing achievements within the Delivery Hero Group since 2011.” Just Eat said it expects That’s not to say that these companies are winding down that much or getting any less global in the wider sense — not for now, at least. Just Eat in Canada is a case in point. The company already claimed to be the number-one take-out company in the market, and it sees the acquisition as a way to strengthen that position. Delivery Hero says that its wider footprint covers 17 million active users and 271,000 restaurants in 27 countries in Europe, the Middle East, Latin America and the Asia-Pacific region. In addition to take out ordering, Delivery Hero also offers premium food ordering and delivery in 51 cities across 10 countries. Just Eat, which went public in 2014, is based out of London, and says that it covers 16.6 million users and more than 63,900 take-out restaurants.
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Pebble says its smartwatches should continue to work in 2017
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Jon Russell
| 2,016 | 12 | 14 |
, Pebble has reassured its smartwatch owners that they aren’t about to suddenly stop working. There’s much uncertainty around the future of its watchers after the announcement of the deal. , which is ominous for anyone who wears one. Pebble hasn’t made any guarantee about the future of its services, but that it intends to keep its watches ticking throughout 2017 at least: Fitbit is going out of its way to keep Pebble software and services running through 2017. To be clear, no one on this freshly-formed team seeks to brick Pebble watches in active service. The Pebble SDK, CloudPebble, Timeline APIs, firmware availability, mobile apps, developer portal, and Pebble appstore are all elements of the Pebble ecosystem that will remain in service at this time. Of course the future of third-party apps — which are what makes any smartwatch ‘smart’ — are less clear. Developers know better than to spend their precious time on a sinking platform, so you wouldn’t expect that many apps will stop running in the future. Pebble did say it has “seen a massive influx of community developers teaming up to keep the Pebble watch experience alive, long into the future,” but it isn’t clear exactly what that will mean for its apps. It is confirmed that Pebble’s cloud services will close down and, in the short term, the team is working on an update that will “ensure the operation of core Pebble functions… won’t break functionality” once that happens. Pebble Health is one part of the watch experience that will continue following that update, which is expected to be released over the coming months. Despite these efforts, Pebble owners should probably start looking for a new smartwatch for next year. That’s assuming that they haven’t .
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Car sharing network Turo launches in the UK
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Darrell Etherington
| 2,016 | 12 | 14 |
A lot of us have cars, but not a lot of us use cars – estimates suggest our cars are sitting unused as much as 95 percent of the time, which is kind of insane if you think about it. That’s why things like exists, which lets people rent out their vehicles on-demand via an app, Airbnb style. Turo is expanding to the UK today, but its debut there will actually focus on rental fleets, first, and then eventually explore opening up the service to individual car owner, in a bit of a reversal of its typical expansion strategy. “We’re launching first with what were kind of late adopters of our model in the U.S. We stayed for many years exclusively focused on individuals renting their cars,” explained Turo CEO Andre Haddad in an interview. “We’ve seen in the intervening years some of these individuals become rental entrepreneurs, with 5, 10 or 15 cars. And more recently we’ve seen small rental companies come on board.” Those “mom-and-pop” rental operations are the focus of the expansion for the UK launch, Haddad said. They tend to want to compete with the big rental chains, but often have only one or a few locations, and no big marketing or tech development budgets of their larger rivals. Haddad said that this approach seemed like the “smartest and fastest” way to enter the market, given what they’re seeing in terms of user searches and the concentration of geographic interest. Turo is seeing a decent chunk of its users go on to become effectively small rental operations themselves, and part of what’s driving that is how the economics work for people who list their vehicles on its service. Turo has seen that drivers can recoup enough revenue from renting their cars to cover their lease for the month in as few as a couple of days, letting them enjoy cars they wouldn’t normally be able to own because of financial limitations. So why the UK for this first overseas expansion? It’s a matter of interest, essentially, as gleaned by observing data gathered from existing activity on the Turo platform. “15 to 20 percent of our business is now international, and what we found was that UK travelers were the largest group within that 15 to 20 percent,” Haddad said. “What was fun to see was that they were booking sort of the American classics, like the Mustang that they can’t easily find in the UK, or the Jeep Wrangler.” But it’s not just about where users are coming from; people looking to rent were also looking to the UK and London for rentals, even though it wasn’t one of the markets in which Turo operated at the time. “They’ve been using Turo more than any non North American group, on the one hand, and on the other , as we were looking at the data coming out of our platform searches and our traffic, we found a lot of people searching for our cars in London and other locations.” London was Turo’s largest non-North American city in terms of interest, hence the decision to start there with its UK vehicle availability. Haddad says that it’s generally “really excited” about the potential for its model to spread further internationally, however, so it’s reasonable to assume London is just a start.
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Crunch Report | Amazon Drone Delivery Begins in U.K.
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Khaled "Tito" Hamze
| 2,016 | 12 | 14 |
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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Codementor raises $1.6 million to become elite marketplace for freelance developers
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Lora Kolodny
| 2,016 | 12 | 14 |
(incorporated as Peer Idea Inc.) has raised $1.6 million in seed funding to grow its online education business into a marketplace for elite freelance developers who are among the top-rated mentors on its site. Based in Mountain View with a development office in Taiwan, Codementor is a graduate of Techstars in Seattle. led the seed round in Codementor, which had previously raised $1.2 million in early-stage funding from , and individual angel investors. Codementor founder and CEO Weiting Liu said, “When we started out we were more like a coding bootcamp, but we realized we could be this layer of on-demand mentorship that can be a missing puzzle piece that fits alongside all other free and paid learning resources out there.” A partner with WI Harper and investor in Codementor, said in this next stage, Codementor should focus on enhancing its matching algorithms, which enable the platform to automatically identify available, qualified engineers and pair them with programmers seeking help, or companies seeking to engage them for a freelance project. “Liquidity is crucial for them to be successful,” Chen said. “Investing resources to shorten the expected wait time to hire a developer across every single possible technology stack; this can potentially be a game changer to how companies work with engineering talent in 10 years. Among its users, the company counts 150,000 developers who have sought programming help, and 5,000 vetted developer-mentors, each expert in different programming languages. Developers go through a video interview and peer-review process before they are cleared to become mentors. Only the top 2 percent of mentors, as rated by other developers, are matched to freelance opportunities on Codementor. The company competes with a wide range of freelance marketplaces and jobs boards where businesses can turn to find software engineering talent. To name just a few, competitors include: Freelancer.com, GitHub Jobs, Guru.com, Upwork and Toptal. Its hybrid model, offering mentorship and an elite, invitation-only freelance marketplace, will help Codementor stand out and prove attractive to up-and-coming engineers alongside established ones, Weiting said.
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Omnity search engine finds documents relevant to yours — regardless of language
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Devin Coldewey
| 2,016 | 12 | 14 |
With the amount of published research, patents, white papers and other written knowledge out there, it’s hard to be even reasonably sure you’re aware of the goings-on around a certain topic or field. is a search engine made to make it easier by extracting the gist of documents you give it and finding related ones from a library of millions — and now supports more than a hundred languages. The process is simple and free, at least for the public-facing databases Omnity has assembled, comprising U.S. patents, SEC filings, PubMed papers, clinical trials, Library of Congress collections and more. You upload a document or text snippet and the system scans it, looking for the least common words and phrases — which generally indicate things like topic, experiment type, equipment used, that sort of thing. It then looks through its own libraries to find documents with similar or related phrases that appear in a manner that suggests relevance. For example, say you put in the results of your clinical trial testing a food additive on a certain strain of mice, and found it resulted in a certain condition. Omnity would return documents describing other tests of that additive, on mice or other animals, or unrelated tests that produced that condition, with no need for you to specify the important aspects or drill down. The similarities and connections between your document and the results are presented in a nice pretty graph, as well. This portion of Omnity has been operational for some time, but yesterday the company announced that it was expanding its system to encompass more than a hundred languages. So you can put in research papers or filings in Chinese, Russian, Arabic, etc. — and it will conduct the same process in a cross-lingual way and return relevant results. The process works the same for documents in other languages, but Omnity knows that a phrase in French is the equivalent of a phrase in English, even though it may not grasp the subtleties of the translation process. It still knows, and it still comes back with the right docs. For now the database is focused on English-language repositories, but CEO Brian Sager told TechCrunch in an email that the company is “in the process of international expansion. Enabling individual foreign language documents is the first step in that process, and we will be adding non-English documents over time.” The service is free, so you may be wondering how these people make money. As with so many other companies, private customers pay the bills. The public website is the lure, showing that the system works with a large — 15 terabytes, at present — database. But the system can also be deployed internally at a company, for example at a law firm that must track millions of documents and court cases and have them ready for instant recall. “A single enterprise customer may have hundreds of terabytes to tens of petabytes, a scale 1000X or 10000X greater than all public documents combined,” Sager wrote. “This is where our revenue model is focused, cross-connecting and auto-classifying custom ingested documents at scale.” The method is similar in some ways to Semantic Scholar, another machine learning-powered search engine that extracts meaning from text to make documents more easily searchable and categorizable, but Omnity’s approach is a little more abstract. “Omnity makes mathematical equations that describe statistical patterns of rare words in discrete documents, without regard to work proximity, and without regard to grammar or grammatical content,” wrote Sager. Semantic Scholar, on the other hand, understands grammar the way we do and uses it to draw meaning out of the text. It’s an interesting juxtaposition: two AI-powered search engines that, despite similarities, are still very distinct. Perhaps it’s a look into the next generation of search.
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Uber ordered to stop self-driving vehicle service in San Francisco
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Darrell Etherington
| 2,016 | 12 | 14 |
Uber has been ordered by state regulators to stop using self-driving cars in California, according to the , at least until it secures the necessary permit issued by the state to allow companies to test autonomous vehicles on public roads. The California Department of Motor Vehicles saying Uber was expected to secure such a permit, but Uber maintained that it did not require this clearance because its vehicles were not fully self-driving and have a driver onboard at all times. The self-driving pilot program in San Francisco is an expansion of Uber’s original launch of the service . This city expansion featured Volvo’s XC90 SUV, a third-generation version of Uber’s autonomous test vehicle. Uber said earlier that it did not intend to pursue this permit, the on a site dedicated to autonomous vehicle operation on public roads. In a letter to Uber telling it to end the launch of its self-driving service, the DMV states that Uber will face “legal action, including but not limited to, seeking injunctive relief” if it does not comply. Prior to the state regulators explicitly ordering Uber to stop, Uber’s apparently running a red light, thought the circumstances of this incident aren’t known at this time (including whether this was while the car was human or computer-operated when it ran the light). Uber told TechCrunch it is looking into this matter as “safety is a top priority.” That means it’s only been less than one day since Uber started its test, had its first documented incident with the vehicles and was ordered by the state to stop what it was doing. This definitely looks more like the risk-happy Uber of the early days that often acted in contravention of local regulators to achieve its business goals. “It seems to me from my reading of the law that while this [permit pertains to the] concept of an autonomous vehicle, there’s a human in it [in Uber’s case],” Uber advisor and shareholder Bradley Tusk told TechCrunch in an interview. “Beyond that, to take a bit of the excitement out of it, Uber often does something innovative and new, regulators don’t quite comprehend it at first, then it gets worked out.” We’ve reached out to both Uber and the California DMV for further comment. The California DMV provided the following letter, which it sent to Uber earlier this afternoon.
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Magic Leap may call its mixed reality device the Magic Leap One
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Lucas Matney
| 2,016 | 12 | 14 |
In response to the news that Magic Leap’s VP of PR Andy Fouché for the same stealth startup its chief marketing exec left for last month, the secretive mixed reality company has released a smidgen of news related, assumedly, to its mixed reality device for consumers, the name. Magic Leap One. In a statement detailing that the company has hired National Geographic marketing head Brenda Freeman to tackle marketing efforts as CMO of Magic Leap, a company spokesperson also mentioned that it was “ This reveal comes just a week after a report in raised major questions about how quickly the company was progressing on its consumer mixed reality headset. Specifically, the report raised questions on whether the company was capable of miniaturizing the technology that they had sold investors on to the point of catching up with competing devices from teams like Microsoft. We know literally nothing other than the name right now, but it seems that the company is at least getting the branding together for a big launch, now about that product… So the team and I just ask for a little more patience with us. We are a bit like slow foodies when it comes to MxRL — Rony Abovitz (@rabovitz)
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A tale of two Amazon deliveries
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Natasha Lomas
| 2,016 | 12 | 14 |
A jovial middle-aged man pokes the order button on a touchscreen from the comfort of his armchair. Minutes later he’s ambling through the bucolic Cambridgeshire countryside at the bottom of his garden to pluck a parcel from the ground. It’s his Amazon delivery materializing like manna from heaven — thanks to the . One of just two U.K. customers living in the picturesque, rural area Amazon has chosen to kick the quadcopter chops of this oh-so-boutique “beta trial.” Meanwhile, I’m sitting at my computer not-so-quietly fuming that the Amazon Marketplace delivery I ordered on November 25 — due for delivery between December 7 and 10 — has just as spectacularly failed to arrive in my house. Yet Amazon’s delivery interface cheerfully informs me that my delivery has been made. Which it has not. I have had to burrow deep into the many menus of the website’s awfully confusing customer interface trying to find a button that will allow me to inform Amazon that my parcel has not, in fact, been delivered. No such button exists. Amazon is not, after all, the seller for this transaction — it’s just the highly branded platform facilitating the sale. Buyer beware and all that. But over in Prime Air promo land, Richard A, the friendly looking fellow starring in the Prime Air marketing video, is already back in his cozy front room unboxing his Amazon Fire TV and packet of air-freighted dog biscuits. I should be so lucky. Instead, I am sitting indoors wearing fingerless gloves and a woolly winter scarf over my TechCrunch jumper because the electric heater I ordered on Amazon is sitting useless in someone else’s building. Multiple messages to the seller querying where my delivery has gone have gone unanswered. Buried deep within the bowels of Amazon’s Marketplace messaging interface I eventually unearth a failed delivery message, which suggests an attempted delivery was made on December 7, after which the delivery company wrote that it would try again the following day. Yet it’s now days later and I still don’t have my delivery, so I switch tactics and try to get hold of the delivery company. The best route for that appears to be Twitter, where a DM query to their customer service account gets their attention within minutes. They also claim my delivery has been made, and ask for my email so they can send me the delivery slip. I reply immediately hoping for a quick resolution but hear no more from them for the rest of the day. The following morning I get an email with the delivery note attached. The document has indeed been signed by someone — just not by me. There’s an identification number for this person that is not my ID number. The address on the slip also looks partial, as if the seller failed to include my flat number along with the street number which the Amazon ordering interface delivered to them when I clicked “purchase.” Now although I finally have some information about where the delivery has gone I still have no clue who has my heater, because the signature is an indecipherable squiggle. Nor do I know where it is — because the address on the slip is not complete. I definitely still don’t have it. But Amazon and its Marketplace seller have my money. I am not happy. I immediately DM the delivery company telling them that the signature and ID number are not mine, and reiterate that I have not received the delivery. They say they will contact the relevant department to see what they can do. No more DMs are forthcoming from them for the rest of the day. We’re settling into a pattern that requires an awful lot of patience — over and above the nearly two weeks I’ve waited to receive the heater I bought on Amazon. It seems especially unjust when I consider the 13 minutes Richard A had to wait for his impulse gadget purchase plus dog treats to turn up just beyond his doorstep. How the marginal fraction of Amazon drone delivery beta testers live… Later in the day, a few hours after the Prime Air promo video has been tweeted out by Jeff Bezos, an email from the Marketplace seller lands in my inbox. They blame their radio silence on being extra busy over the holiday period, and claim my delivery was made on December 9 — a day when, incidentally, I was at home listening for the doorbell that was never rung by the delivery person who didn’t turn up. This detail is extra odd because Amazon’s “track package” feature consistently informed me my delivery would arrive on December 10. I waited in all morning on that day, too. Yet apparently the package had already been delivered by then. Just not to me. Behind the shiny facade of Amazon’s e-commerce platform it seems there are a lot of wires not plugged into anything at all. Of course the seller’s “proof” of delivery is the same delivery slip that the delivery company already sent me. I email back right away refuting all this and pointing out they seem to have missed the apartment number on the address slip — routing my parcel to somewhere else on the street, presumably, just not to me. Given it took the seller a full two days to respond to my first message I am not hopeful of a speedy response. And sure enough the email exchange lapses right back into silence. It’s getting dark outside now. It feels like it’s going to be another cold night. I pull on another pair of socks to ward off the chill I am being forced to endure while I wait to see if the heater I ordered for the winter months will ever be delivered. Or if I can get a speedy refund — which would free me from this Amazon Marketplace delivery limbo to be able to go and buy a heater from an actual shop and deliver it to my actual house myself. So much for the convenience of online shopping. What does this careless un-delivery tell us about Amazon’s Prime Air drone scheme? That it’s first and foremost a brand marketing exercise, existing in another realm entirely to the reality of shopping on Amazon outside a chosen handful of regions and markets where delivery has been hyper-prioritized by the company. These can include urban regions where it offers its Prime Now two-hour delivery service. Or the minuscule U.K. drone delivery trial-cum-marketing exercise. Or even its Prime same-day delivery service. All of those Amazon-branded delivery services are partial in multiple ways, such as where they are available; and which goods can be delivered this way. Prime is also a fee-paying membership club. The “prime” goal is to convince users of the utility of locking themselves into an ongoing e-commerce relationship with Amazon by signing up for Prime membership. Yet outside the handful of slickly managed delivery-cum-PR channels, Amazon’s sprawling marketplace can be the very opposite of a convenient consumer experience — as my experience amply illustrates. Also not mentioned in any Amazon promotional material: how technology convenience can carry a steep for the workers sweating to fulfill its overly expeditious promises. Amazon Marketplace limbo has at least been a useful experience in illustrating technology’s flip-side. And convinced me never to order anything from Amazon again. I have lost count of the number of bricks-and-mortar shops I have walked past in the weeks of waiting that have just the sort of electric heaters I need on sale there and then — any of which could have been sitting in my apartment keeping me warm all this while. Many of which are also less expensive than the one I ordered. Once again, the “convenience” of online shopping is looking increasingly relative. I’m also left wondering how Amazon will cope when drone deliveries go wrong. Will it add a button for “my drone never arrived?” Or “my drone arrived but my parcel wasn’t attached?” Or “my drone delivery got ruined in the rain?” Or will it just gear its systems to pump out mindless delivery affirmations that claim all is well with Prime Air even if it’s not, and not really bother connecting the dots to be in a position to help when stuff goes wrong? Maybe Bezos and Co. will sweat to make drone deliveries function seamlessly even when things inevitably go, awry but even so, they will still only be catering to a marginal fraction of customers with this vanity impulse buy service. Prime Air drones are there to sell more stuff on Amazon, not provide a vital utility at any scale. And as the saying goes, if it’s inaccessible to the poor, it’s neither radical nor revolutionary. So while Amazon’s marketing machine continues to pump out its one-sided narrative of push-button on-demand lifestyle fodder consumerism, it pays to remember the reality of this e-commerce empire is a lot messier, complicated and conflicted for those outside its VIP club. On-demand? At this point I’ll settle for actually delivered.
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What kind of bird is that? Snap a picture and the Merlin Bird Photo ID app tells you
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Devin Coldewey
| 2,016 | 12 | 14 |
Is that a bufflehead? A coot? Maybe a loon? Get close enough to take a picture and the will tell you in seconds — sort of like a Shazam for would-be ornithologists. The photo ID capability has actually been a part of the greater Merlin ecosystem for more than a year, but the Cornell birders behind it just recently added the ability to do it from the mobile app. Take a picture, zoom in and let the database do the work. Good luck catching an osprey in flight with your Galaxy S4 though. If it were that close I’d advise ducking instead. Of course, getting close enough to get a decent picture of a warbler with your wide-angle smartphone camera might be something of a challenge. But if you get the shot, the creators claim the app is 90 percent accurate. If you’re not sure, answer a few questions — what did its call sound like, did it have a bar on its throat, etc. — and that should put it right. You don’t even need to be online, though you will need to download a couple hundred megabytes of data first. “This app is the culmination of seven years of our students’ hard work and is propelled by the tremendous progress that computer vision and machine learning scientists are making around the world,” said Pietro Perona, who co-founded Visipedia, the company Cornell collaborates with to make the app. “Ultimately we want to create an open platform that any community can use to make a visual classification tool for butterflies, frogs, plants or whatever they need,” said Cornell professor Serge Belongie, the other co-founder. The app is free on and — just make sure you’ve got half a gig of free space before you commit to downloading it.
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Adding encryption to cameras won’t solve photojournalists’ problems
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Haje Jan Kamps
| 2,016 | 12 | 14 |
When the Freedom of the Press Foundation , encouraging the company to implement encryption features into its cameras, it missed the point. Yes, encryption is a great idea, but when dodging bullets in war zones, in tin-pot dictatorships or nasty cutlery if you’re filming gangs, it isn’t going to help you. As a photographer, you need gear that is absolutely bomb-proof, and super fast to operate. For photographers who enter conflict zones, sometimes “bomb-proof” is meant literally. You need to be able to flick a switch and be ready to shoot the second the action hits. Anything that gets in the way of that will simply not be used by photographers. When weighed against speed and getting the photo, everything else loses. Even if the camera manufacturers by some miracle are able to implement encryption that takes no time at the photography stage, using encryption will cause delays when reviewing footage, and that is where we run into a couple of issues. Photographers and videographers regularly review the photos they are taking. Reviewing on-the-fly is part of the advantage of digital photography over shooting on film, after all. That review process is usually a single button-click away. The other thing to know is that professional photographers will know their gear well enough to be able to operate it blindly. They’ll be aware of their surroundings, only stealing very quick glances at the screen to check settings or to check whether a photo is exposed roughly correctly. Adding an encryption step to the process makes things complicated, and it shows that the letter-writers over at the Freedom of the Press Foundation fall into the that many startups also experience. People experience problems every day, which are solved by companies all around us. Your taxi company is pissing you off (Uber!). You want a more genuine experience when traveling (Airbnb!). Sometimes, your taxi has to drive on roads rather than soaring through the air ( !). The problem you quickly run into as a startup is that your customers usually don’t have a clue. They experience the problem, but as a startup, you own the solution. Which means that, sometimes, the solution you come up with is different from what the customer had in mind, but as long as the problem is solved, they don’t usually care. The faster horse fallacy can be traced back to Henry Ford, who ( ) said that “If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said a faster horse.” The joke, of course, is that if he had done customer studies, he would never have invented the first mass-produced car. The Freedom of the Press Foundation is onto something — there a problem: The thing is, encryption only solves part of the problem, and that is the question of sources. If a photojournalist or filmmaker is able to keep someone from watching the footage, they can protect their sources. But that is the only problem that is solved. The letter suggests that Google and Apple’s operating systems make it easy to encrypt their contents. Which is true, but there are a couple of quirks about that. Most phones use fingerprint recognition to keep the data encrypted. That is useful because it is incredibly fast, but it isn’t extortion-proof. It is relatively trivial to force someone to unlock a phone at gunpoint, for example. If that doesn’t work, you can knock them unconscious and get the fingerprint that way, or simply force someone to place their finger on a pad. The way around that is to use a PIN code or a proper password, but that brings us back to my original point: Photographers and videographers need to be able to review footage on-the-fly. If you’ve ever had the misfortune of trying to enter a Wi-Fi password on an SLR camera, you know that passwords aren’t really the way forward. PIN codes, come to think of it, aren’t much better; they require your attention (which you don’t want when bullets are flying). Either way, all of this assumes that your adversaries are more or less playing by the rules. If you find yourself in a place where there’s more people with guns that cameras, those rules are, shall we say, open to interpretation. Given enough time, you could probably beat a fingerprint or PIN code out of someone. Don’t get me wrong, I believe in source protection, but I’m not sure how many digits I’d be willing to lose to a set of bolt cutters in exchange for a 4-digit PIN code. One? Two? Zero? I’ve never been put in that situation, and I’m keeping my (remaining) fingers crossed to hope that never comes up. Okay, so imagine Canon somehow comes up with a military-grade encryption method that is fast to encode, fast to decode, with a quick way of entering a password to unlock it to review footage and an equally fast way of re-locking the footage if a photographer should be snatched on the street… Now what? Encryption prevents the assailants from being able to the footage, but that’s only part of the problem. Even if data is encrypted, it’s trivial to destroy or steal it. You can break an SD card with two fingers, you can smash a camera with a rock or a bullet, or you can strip-search a photographer, take every piece of electronic equipment they have and throw it in a lake. The only real way to prevent from happening is real-time off-site encrypted backups. Imagine taking photos and them immediately streaming to an armored car or — better yet — to the cloud. There are a number of challenges here, of course, not least that Wi-Fi or data plans in war zones can be absent, unreliable or both. The way war-zone photographers currently deal with this is by shooting on small cards (8-16GB) and using dead drops regularly. Leave the cards at your hotel or at an embassy, ship them home in the post, shoot on two cards and leave one of them with a friend. Yes, photographers get hassled all the time. Yes, data can be seen, destroyed or stolen. But demanding Canon (why not Nikon? Leica? Sony?) implement encryption doesn’t help. It lets them off the hook. Imagine if the next pro-level camera had encryption built in, would that stop photojournalists from getting hassled, kidnapped, murdered? Would it prevent data from being stolen or destroyed? By prescribing a solution, the Freedom of the Press Foundation is showing that they don’t fully grasp the problem. As startups, we recognize that. Let’s just hope that Canon does, too.
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Photojournalists demand encryption, Light is giving it to them
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John Mannes
| 2,016 | 12 | 14 |
Against the backdrop of falling bombs in Aleppo, to executives at major camera companies asking them to take responsibility for the lack of encryption on today’s devices. Legacy manufacturers don’t currently offer encryption, which, in certain scenarios, can be the difference-maker in protecting valuable footage in hostile environments. The nonprofit, which counts Edward Snowden on its board of directors, drew the supporting signatures of 150 photojournalists and filmmakers. “Without encryption capabilities, photographs and footage that we take can be examined and searched by the police, military, and border agents in countries where we operate and travel, and the consequences can be dire,” the open letter reads. While we wait for Canon, Nikon and the rest to figure out their next steps, there’s already a camera startup we should be paying attention to that is implementing encryption — . While not quite a Canon 5D Mark IV, Light’s new multi-lens L16 will probably best the oversized rudders of competitors to get an on-camera encryption solution to market. The Palo Alto-based company but company CEO Dave Grannan explained to TechCrunch that when the camera finally hits the market, it will come with full-disk encryption. Grannan further noted that powerful asymmetric key encryption is on the team’s roadmap. The later should help fill in gaps that basic Android encryption cannot provide, but for now it’s a good start. Light’s new camera with 16 lenses Light’s camera is built on the Android platform, meaning implementing basic encryption was incredibly easy. This is because encryption is nothing new for consumer smartphones that gave life to the Android ecosystem. The real question is why, in 2016, these devices offer more security than DSLRs that cost thousands of dollars. “It really just comes out to running through the business case and asking how big the market is,” said Grannan in an interview. Unfortunately for photojournalists, the consumer market is substantially larger than the market for specialty professional gear. Adding encryption to cameras is the ethical thing for major camera manufacturers to do, but ethics isn’t the only reason they should do it. There is a strong business case that supports the move. Cameras are becoming more connected by the day, and with increased connectivity comes increased risk. We’ve all seen the aftermath of high-profile celebrity “hackings.” Consumers today want to be confident that their photos and videos are safe — regardless of whether they used their smartphones to capture them. “Nobody would build a camera from the ground up today without basic encryption capabilities on it,” added Grannan. The need for encrypted cameras stretches far beyond the war-torn towns of Syria. Consumer and professional markets are becoming more intertwined as the world starts to rely more on everyday citizens to capture incidents of police brutality and other high-risk events that need documentation. Rapid encryption can present a large computational burden, but it’s becoming harder to make that argument as cameras continue to become faster and more powerful. It will just be a matter of when professional solutions catch up to their consumer peers. As this transition plays out, there’s still room for debate about how much encryption will actually help journalists in the line of fire.
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Lucid Motors unveils the Air, a new luxe electric car with a 400-mile range
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Darrell Etherington
| 2,016 | 12 | 14 |
California-based Lucid Motors revealed its today, a fully electric sedan aimed at the “executive” market, with a 400-mile range rating from its onboard 100kWh battery, a 2.5-second 0-60 mph time and a target market date of 2018. The vehicle prototype was shown off today at a special unveiling event in Fremont, California. Lucid’s founding team includes CTO Peter Rawlinson, a former Tesla team member, as well as Derek Jenkins, previously of Mazda and VW and BMW alum Brian Barron. The Lucid Motors plan is to build these electric vehicles starting in , at a new factory facility that’s set to bring around 2,000 new jobs to the sate according to the company and Arizona Governor Doug Ducey. [gallery ids="1428431,1428430,1428429,1428428,1428427,1428426,1428425,1428424,1428423,1428422"] Rawlinson previously noted that the cars would boast a combined 1,000 horsepower across its electric motors, and that there would be a version made available with a max 400-mile estimated range. The vehicle will also have some autonomous features, according to Rawlinson’s previous statements. Previous prototypes have been displayed with the signature black and white camouflage of vehicles worn prior to their official debut, but we did have an idea of what the Air would look like. It’s more impressive without the obfuscating cladding, however, if perhaps a bit more sober and sensible looking than its competition from Tesla, for instance. That “executive” moniker that Lucid keeps throwing around with this vehicle is a pretty good indicator of what you can expect in terms of price, which hasn’t yet been made official. Over $100,000 is where Lucid is setting expectations for early releases, with lots of options included. The sedan approach is also more pronounced in the Lucid Air’s design than it is with the Model S, which suggests it may be looking to compete more with vehicles like the BMW 7 series (in fact, it previously released images comparing it to that and the Mercedes S-Class, like the one above). Lucid also has a partnership in place with Samsung SDI, the battery-focused subsidiary of the Korean tech giant. Lucid has raised over $130 million across three rounds of venture funding, including from the Chinese Environmental Fund. Lucid’s vehicle looks interesting, but it’s going to be a very different market in 2018 when this car launches, with EV entries from many of the major luxury brands joining the fray at around the same time. The challenge will be getting to the starting line, but new players still might have some advantages over legacy automakers when it comes to electric, even if the established brands are accelerating their EV plans.
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Uber says self-driving car ran red light due to “human error”
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Darrell Etherington
| 2,016 | 12 | 14 |
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_CdJ4oae8f4] An Uber spokesperson says the incident in the video above was definitely caused by an error on the part of a human driver – full statement: Uber is aware of the incident depicted in the video above, which appears to show one of its self-driving test SUVs running a red light in San Francisco, where it of the cars in service early on Wednesday; the company tells TechCrunch it is investigating what exactly occurred. The video, , was captured by a dashcam mounted inside a vehicle operated by Luxor Cab, one of SF’s licensed cab companies. When contacted and asked for more information about the incident caught on the taxi’s camera, an Uber spokesperson provided the following statement: Safety is our top priority. This incident has been reported and we are looking into what happened. Uber’s self-driving test vehicles in San Francisco have a human driver behind the wheel, as well as a co-pilot technician in the front passenger seat taking measurements and observing data about the rides. The human driver is there to take control of the vehicle in case of any incidents, including ones like this, in theory, where a vehicle might fail to come to a complete stop at an intersection. It’s also possible the human driver was in control of the vehicle at the time of the incident in the video, which would obviously present its own set of problems. Early on in the company’s Pittsburgh trials, with the Ford Fusion self-driving test vehicles it’s using in that city, including wrong-way driving. That the cars are not able to fully drive themselves is part of the reason Uber has argued that it does not need to seek from the state’s Department of Motor Vehicles a permit to test its vehicles on California roads (a position which the ). We’ve asked Uber to update us if they discover more about the conditions surrounding the incident in the video and will update when and if that becomes available.
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Anthony Ha
| 2,016 | 12 | 13 | null |
Dropbox is slightly more diverse than it was last year
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Megan Rose Dickey
| 2,016 | 12 | 14 |
Dropbox today , showing a slight increase in overall representation of underrepresented minorities at the company. Dropbox is now 3% black, up from 2% black last year, and 6% Latino, up from 5% last year. Regarding senior leadership roles, Dropbox increased the percentage of women in those roles from 21% last year to 27%. As you can see above, Dropbox increased its hiring of all minority groups, making up 45% of all new hires in 2016 compared to just 41% last year. “Though we’ve made progress in hiring minorities this year, the numbers aren’t where we want them to be,” . It’s going to take a drastic overhaul (firing everyone and starting from scratch) of any company’s workforce in order to make a dent in the overall representation of people of color, LGBTQIA people and people with disabilities. Since that probably won’t happen, it’s important that tech companies continue to release these reports because, in an industry where data is King/Queen/Ruler, numbers and accountability matter. It’s also important that companies implement programs to foster inclusive, supportive environments for underrepresented people in tech. At this point, Dropbox and many other tech companies are doing this. Dropbox, for example, is one of the many companies that has committed to an equal pay policy and has partnered with non-profit organizations like CODE2040 to hook up students of color with internships. It’s been said before, but probably bears repeating: there’s no point in filling up a leaky bucket in which a pipeline of talented people join a company only to leave due to a toxic workplace.
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Yahoo discloses hack of 1 billion accounts
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Kate Conger
| 2,016 | 12 | 14 |
Yahoo has suffered another hack. The company disclosed today that it has discovered a breach of more than one billion user accounts that occurred in August 2013. The breach is believed to be separate and distinct from the theft of data from that Yahoo reported this September. Troublingly, Yahoo’s chief information security officer Bob Lord says that the company hasn’t been able to determine how the data from the one billion accounts was stolen. “We have not been able to identify the intrusion associated with this theft,” Lord wrote in a announcing the hack. “The stolen user account information may have included names, email addresses, telephone numbers, dates of birth, hashed passwords (using MD5) and, in some cases, encrypted or unencrypted security questions and answers,” Lord added. Yahoo was alerted to the massive breach by law enforcement and has examined the data with the help of outside forensic experts. The data does not appear to include payment details or plaintext passwords, but it’s still bad news for Yahoo account holders. The hashing algorithm MD5 is no longer considered secure and MD5 hashes can easily be looked up online to discover the passwords they hide. Yahoo says it is notifying the account holders affected in the breach. Affected users will be required to change their passwords. Yahoo also announced today that its proprietary code had been accessed by a hacker, who used the code to forge cookies that could be used to access accounts without a password. “The outside forensic experts have identified user accounts for which they believe forged cookies were taken or used. We are notifying the affected account holders, and have invalidated the forged cookies,” Lord said, adding that he believed the attack was launched by a state-sponsored actor. Today’s revelations add to Yahoo’s long string of security problems. Yahoo employees that led to the theft of data from 500 million users as early as 2014, but the company did not announce the breach until this September. What Yahoo executives knew about the breach, and when they knew it, have been crucial questions in Verizon’s ongoing acquisition of Yahoo. Yahoo did not disclose the first breach until several months after the deal was announced. in July for $4.83 billion, and Yahoo’s security incidents have led to speculation that Verizon might ask for a $1 billion discount on the company. “As we’ve said all along, we will evaluate the situation as Yahoo continues its investigation,” a Verizon spokesperson said today. “We will review the impact of this new development before reaching any final conclusions.” (Disclosure: Verizon owns AOL, which is the parent company of TechCrunch.) Yahoo also faced scrutiny over its security practices in October, when Reuters reported that the company had in early 2015 at the behest of a U.S. intelligence agency. Yahoo’s general counsel Ron Bell Director of National Intelligence James Clapper to provide the public with more clarity about the email scanning program.
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Runchkins is Trunk Club for kids, with an optional buy-back power-up
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Haje Jan Kamps
| 2,016 | 12 | 14 |
You know what it’s like… you’ve just bought the cutest little outfit for the tiniest person in your family, and they promptly go and grow out of it. If that sounds familiar, might just be about to become your most favoritest startup. Nothing says Christmas more than some delightful Bokeh. Aaaah. Bokeh. The concept is simple: You buy clothes, your kid wears ’em, and once the little one has grown out of ’em, you can sell ’em back to the company in exchange for store credit. You don’t even have to buy your own clothes, either; the company just launched where you can request presents you want, or give boxes of perfectly matched outfits to your vertically challenged friends. The service, launched in spring, aims at the newborn through six-years-old age range, and is currently only selling new clothes. The plan for the near future isn’t hard to guess, however: The company is planning to start selling lightly used clothes at cheaper prices as soon as it starts getting a meaningful flow of resaleable clothes back into its warehouses. The business model is ingenious; it incentivizes repeat business and it helps parents re-use or recycle old clothes. Clothes sold back to the company but that aren’t good enough for resale will be . The model makes particular sense in the age bracket, too: zero to six-year-olds grow like mushrooms after an autumn rainfall. The business is growing quickly, too. Launched in private beta in 2015, the company launched to the public in March this year. In less than nine months the company is up to 4,000 users, and 70 percent of customers who’ve placed an order placed another within three months.
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Confirmed: Zola wedding registry raises $25 million from Lightspeed Venture Partners
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Jordan Crook
| 2,016 | 12 | 14 |
, the online wedding registry for engaged couples, has confirmed that it raised $25 million in Series C funding led by Lightspeed Venture Partners, according to . We on the round in late November, at which time sources said the company was valued at $200 million, pre-money. Zola lets couples put together a wedding registry online, which can include products from brick-and-mortar retailers, services like Blue Apron, or funds for various high-cost items (like, for example, a honeymoon). The report said that Zola is tracking toward $120 million in annual gross sales for 2017 — Zola takes approximately 40 percent for every product purchased through the platform. Zola CEO Shan-Lyn Ma also told Re/code that some of the new funding from Lightspeed will go toward marketing, including MTA subway ads, which is a growing trend among NYC-based startups (such as Handy, Seamless, Casper, Oscar, and JustWorks). Including this most recent round of funding, Zola has raised a total of $40.85 million in funding, according to . You can check out Zola for yourself right .
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Apple pulls watchOS update after reports of bricked devices
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Greg Kumparak
| 2,016 | 12 | 14 |
Do you have a second generation Apple Watch? Did you think you had a watchOS update waiting for you, only to have nothing show up when you went to grab it? Don’t worry: you’re not crazy, nor alone. Apple has pulled the release of watchOS 3.1.1 following reports that the update was breaking watches. 3.1.1 was first released on Monday morning; by Tuesday night, Apple had pulled it down. While not everyone who updated their watch had issues, some users reported that their watches were showing a red exclamation mark at bootup (like the one below) — and doing a hard reset often didn’t fix it. It’s unclear what’s causing the bug and how many users were impacted, but Apple’s on the exclamation mark issue says anyone seeing the issue will need to have their watch serviced (which, if you’re taking it into the Genius Bar, probably means replaced.)
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Ashley Madison settles with the FTC over online dating hack
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Taylor Hatmaker
| 2,016 | 12 | 14 |
More than a year after its , Ashley Madison will settle up. After news emerged that the company was subject to an investigation by the Federal Trade Commission, the company now faces a $17.5 million settlement as a result of the multi-state investigation. Lucky for Ruby Corp., the online dating service’s , it will only pay only $1.66 million outright, with the remaining costs tabled due to its inability to pay in full. According to the : “The settlement includes an immediate payment of $1,657,000 divided amongst the states and the Federal Trade Commission, of which New York will receive $81,330.94. The remainder of the $17.5 million payment is suspended based on ruby Corp.’s inability to pay. Up to 652,627 New York residents were members of Ashley Madison at the time of the security breach.” The that Ashley Madison misled its subscribers and did not adequately protect users from a security breach that exposed the private data of at least 36 million people across the globe. “Creating fake profiles and selling services that are not delivered is unacceptable behavior for any dating website,” Vermont Attorney General William H. Sorrell said in the FTC release. A collection of 13 states and the District of Columbia worked with the commission on the case. Due to Ashley Madison’s global user base, the FTC also cooperated with the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada and the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner in the investigation. “This case represents one of the largest data breaches that the FTC has investigated to date, implicating 36 million individuals worldwide,” FTC Chairwoman Edith Ramirez said. Ramirez led a conference call on the settlement Wednesday afternoon. In addition to the settlement payment, Ashley Madison will be forced to fully overhaul its privacy practices as a result of the investigation.
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Alibaba is back on U.S. blacklist of “notorious marketplaces”
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Lora Kolodny
| 2,016 | 12 | 22 |
The USTR dropped its calling out marketplaces that are rife with counterfeit and pirated goods this week. Many of the shopping centers and sites listed in this “Special 301” report were absolutely predictable, like Beijing’s Silk Market, St. Petersburg-based social network VK.com, or The Pirate Bay, which was formed by an anti-copyright group in the first place. One entrant proved controversial, however, Taobao Marketplace, the e-commerce behemoth owned by Alibaba Group. Today, Alibaba Group CEO Daniel Zhang hit back at the US government office, chalking up the USTR’s decision to list Taobao as a “notorious marketplace” to rising American protectionism. President elect Donald Trump ran a protectionist campaign. He frequently rails against free trade agreements, outsourcing, and other facets of global trade that he claims have killed jobs in the US. Alibaba Group in an email sent to all employees and published online: “…Protectionism is ever present around the world and influences that are not free market-oriented come into play. As we accelerate our pace of globalization, certain countries will deploy all sorts of ways to fence themselves off… We are committed to protecting intellectual property, but will not be bullied by those who exploit the issue for unfair advantage.” The USTR publishes the Special 301 report each year, in part, to caution consumers who don’t want to buy knockoffs, or pirated apps and content which all too frequently carry malware. But the report is also used to pressure companies, and governments, to enforce the internationally recognized intellectual property rules that help American businesses compete fairly in global markets. Alibaba and Taobao had been absent from the list for four years until this week, even though they’d been clashing with French, American and other luxury goods brands earlier this year. In the spring of 2016, the company a special membership to the International Anti-Counterfeiting Coalition, after protests from fashion industry insiders and IP firms. According to Alibaba’s own statements to investors, Taobao’s mobile app alone boasts 150 million daily users, and the marketplace see 20 million product reviews posted daily. Across all of its businesses, Alibaba sold $500 billion worth of goods in 2015, from 10 million merchants who use their platforms. In his public statement on Thursday, Zhang recounted efforts the company has taken to thwart pirates and counterfeiters. For example, it has used to identify and block problematic sellers, and worked closely with law enforcement to shut down factories and send counterfeiters to prison. Alibaba Group claims it removed 16 times more links than the number that brands, or their IP attorneys, have reported as infringing on their intellectual property rights this year. That could be because Alibaba’s sites don’t make it easy for brands to file complaints about IP infringements, however. The USTR, in its report, specifically recommended that Alibaba Group could improve its standing by: “Simplifying processes for right holders to register and request enforcement action; making good faith takedown procedures generally available; and reducing Taobao’s timelines for takedowns and issuing penalties for counterfeit sellers.” Besides Taobao, 21 different digital platforms and 12 different physical malls were labeled “notorious marketplaces” by the USTR, selling everything from pirated music, videos, games, and software to counterfeit hardware and luxury goods. The report also identified an emerging trend around intellectual property theft called “stream ripping,” that’s plaguing the music industry. This is when a site lets users convert a licensed streaming music or other file into an unauthorized copy for download and distribution. The first site to make the list for this offense was Youtube-mp3.org, which is based in Germany but popular among users in Turkey and Mexico. Youtube-mp3.org saw 4.8 billion visits in 2016, the report says.
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Jason Kilar on founding Vessel and the wonderful world of customer service
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Navin Chaddha
| 2,016 | 12 | 22 |
Jason Kilar’s interest in customer service was sparked by a visit to Disney World when he was 10 years old. The wonder he felt as he walked underneath the train station and out onto Main Street stays with him to this day. It was a turning-point for him, even at that young age. Eventually, Kilar would intern at Disney World and walk those same steps each night after his shift ended. “It really influenced who I was at an early age as a manager,” Kilar shared. His career started with Amazon when it was a relatively small, early-stage private company. While there, Kilar was able to grow from his roots and expand while learning deep lessons about the importance and value of culture and what it means to stay true to the company’s mission over long periods of time. Something, he says, that is required when scaling up to a much bigger company. From Amazon, to Hulu and now with Vessel, throughout his career, Kilar has found that building teams of people that have spark, are curious and innovative is the key to building a better model. The strength of the teams has been key to his successful business endeavors. [soundcloud url=”https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/291979586?secret_token=s-rb9Yc” params=”color=ff5500&auto_play=false&hide_related=false&show_comments=true&show_user=true&show_reposts=false” width=”100%” height=”166″ iframe=”true” /]
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Crunch Report | Uber Ordered to Stop Self-Driving Pilot in SF
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Khaled "Tito" Hamze
| 2,016 | 12 | 22 |
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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The Canary Flex is a cool little camera with some kinks to work out
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Brian Heater
| 2,016 | 12 | 22 |
The security camera space was different when Canary blew past $1.9 million in pledges on Indiegogo way back in 2013. These days, it’s a packed space with high-profile competition from Nest, Netgear, Blink and Netatmo, to name just a smattering. The original Canary camera was an imperfect but solid debut from the New York-based hardware startup, with good hardware featuring built-in perks like air quality measurement and a solid software offering that streamlined alerts and monitoring on a mobile platform. Announced this fall, the Flex doesn’t aim to replace its predecessor so much as augment it. The new camera isn’t as feature-rich as the original, but it’s small, battery-powered, weatherproof and just generally more fun. Canary hit a home run with the industrial design this time out. The Flex is pill shaped and small enough to hold comfortably in one hand, a perfect size for stashing on an out of the way bookshelf or mounting to a wall while going largely unnoticed. It’s small enough to pick up and move around, but designed to stay put. On the front is a 1080p camera with a wide-angle lens and a large glowing circle that changes color to alert the users of its connectivity status. At top is a circular speaker grille for two-way audio (coming soon), because, among other things, the ability to yell at intruders is apparently a very popular feature among security camera buyers. On the back is the power button and a magnetic power port for charging up the 6700mAh battery — or, should you opt to just go ahead and hardwire the thing in spite of its portability. The bottom has a standard tripod mount along with a pretty powerful magnet that attaches to the desktop base. The company also offers up a slew of different creative mounts for staking it in the dirt or tying it to pipe, among other things. In most indoor settings at least, however, the complementary stand should do the trick. Getting rolling with the Flex is simple. Admittedly, I had a bit of a leg up with a standard Canary already deployed at home. In that case, you simply turn the camera on, open the app and designate the location. “Office” versus “Home” in my case. From there it’s just a matter of pairing up the camera and answering a series of questions. The company has been refining the software since the release of the original Canary and the set up process shows, allowing users to set time parameters for sleep, ensure the device doesn’t record when they’re home and designate what sort of motion will trigger an alert, including the ability to block out objects that aren’t people or animals. The mobile software offers a quick toggle between different locations, each of which brings up an individual timeline tied to different alerts, along with the ability to watch a live stream, along with icons letting you know the status of the battery and Wi-Fi signal. By default, the timeline saves a day’s worth of notifications. Anything beyond that will cost you $10 a month, which comes with 30 days of video history, bundled with insurance and a two-year device warranty. There are a slew of additional customization options, including the ability to add additional members for monitoring and drill downs on each of the different kinds of notifications, including mobility, connectivity and batter/power. Testing the camera in our big corporate office, I had some connectivity issues. Multiple times I got notifications that the camera was offline, though it would always reconnect itself. It may have to do with the glut of signal in our office space, or the nature of office Wi-Fi, but its an annoyance nonetheless. By default, the camera largely operates in Battery Mode — a sort of hibernation from which it awakens when motion is detected — or when the user switches over to live view (at which point it takes a few seconds to wake back up). The company rates the battery at “months,” though if you actively engage with the device or position in a high-traffic area, you’re not going to make it that long without a charge. The camera can shoot in 1080p, but as with many of these devices, the shot generally ends up being significantly lower res over Wi-Fi. It’s plenty clear enough for security purposes, and while the 116-degree field of view isn’t the widest on the market, I didn’t have an issue getting a lot in frame when I stuck it up high on an out of the way shelf. And like the standard Canary, the Flex also has built-in night vision detect that will trigger when the camera senses low light — or when the user initializes it manually over the app. At $199, the Flex slots in toward the higher end of the market, but is by no means the most expensive. Its portability and waterproofing make it a solid addition to the Canary family that leverage the company’s existing software and two years’ worth of upgrades and tweaks. There are still some things to work out, but the company’s certainly been attentive with issues in its original camera. For those who already have a Canary at home, it’s a solid addition to help extend the product’s reach. For everyone else, the competition’s a bit more stiff — and it will be interesting to see how Netgear’s new outdoor offering stacks up.
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Twitter overcharged video advertisers, issues refunds
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Josh Constine
| 2,016 | 12 | 22 |
Now it’s Twitter copying Facebook… but in the worst way. Following of inaccurate metrics by Facebook, today broke news that Twitter overcharged some advertisers. Between November 7th and December 12th, a source tells BI that video ad buyers were overcharged up to 35 percent. Twitter apparently informed these advertisers earlier this week and issued refunds, but didn’t publicly announce anything until after BI’s report today. In a short, , Twitter writes that “We discovered a technical error due to a Twitter product update to Android clients that affected some video ad campaigns.” It doesn’t mention that advertisers were over-billed or that they’ve been issued refunds. reports that some of those refunds might only be $1, indicating at least a portion of those advertisers impacted weren’t running huge campaigns. Still, the news sows distrust in Twitter’s ad platform at a tough time for the company. , while its share price has struggled and talks for it to be acquired fizzled out. Live video and the lucrative ads that run with it are Twitter’s big hope, which is why even a minor billing error in this department is problematic.
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Uber explains why it looks like its app is still tracking your location, long after drop-off
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Sarah Perez
| 2,016 | 12 | 22 |
Uber responded today to that its app continues to check users’ locations even when they hadn’t used the ride-hailing service for days or weeks. The company explained that the issue is being caused by the iOS operating system itself, not direct tracking by its app. Many users had realized that Uber’s app appeared to have recently checked their location, according to their iPhone Settings. But Uber says this is behavior that’s being triggered by the iOS Maps extension that Apple opened in September. It’s not due to a bug in the Uber app nor is it a consequence of the recent location services update, the company told us. The reason this issue was worrisome is because Uber announced last month that it but only for five minutes after drop-off. The data would help it improve drop-off and pick-up point accuracy in the future, Uber had said. Some users, of course, were the company may overstep here, or felt generally uncomfortable about sharing this data. That’s not surprising, given that Uber has had several high-profile slip-ups regarding user privacy in the past, including , reports of Uber dubbed “God View,” reports that , among other things. But, , an iOS feature would allow users to check to see if Uber kept its word about limiting location tracking to only five minutes after the drop-off. He explained that, in iOS’s Settings, you’re able to track which apps are accessing your location. Under “Settings → Privacy → Location Services,” an indicator appears next to apps that have recently checked your location. The indicator is purple if that check was recent, or gray if it was in the last 24 hours. He noted also that he had been checking this for his Uber app, but didn’t see any signs of misuse. As it turns out, that wasn’t true for everyone. , Gruber says many readers sent screenshots of the Uber app still checking their location, even though it had been days or even weeks since they last used the car service. Some TechCrunch reporters here saw the problem on their devices, too. yeah I haven't taken an uber in almost a week, app isn't even running in the background. Concerning. — Chris Harber (@britishchris) Apparently, still tracks locations even though the app hasn't been opened for days. Very creepy. (via ) — jin (@jin_) Screenshot seems a bit pointless but take it from me I have a grey Uber triangle and haven’t used for a couple days. — Max (@kikujiro) old ver last used 7 days ago. Is it possible that Uber enabled as Maps extension explains icon? — Caleb Powell (@caleb_powell) Just saw an iOS pop-up telling me that Uber has been using my location. Haven't opened it in over a week. — × (@johnnynoble) Obviously, this seemed to be concerning behavior on Uber’s part, as it would appear to indicate the company was not true to its word. However, Uber says the location tracking is not intentional behavior on the part of its app. Uber investigated the issue today, at our request, and found the issue is related to the iOS Maps extension. This also explains why not everyone was seeing the problem. was made available in September, and is based on Apple’s protocol for . Other map extensions from Uber competitors would work the same way, then. According to an Uber spokesperson: “For people who choose to integrate ride sharing apps with iOS Maps, location data must be shared in order for you to request a ride inside the Maps app. Map extensions are disabled by default and you can choose to turn them on in your iOS settings,” they said. In other words, it’s not a bug, it’s feature. And it’s a feature of iOS. Unfortunately, the way iOS is designed will make it difficult for users who like to keep an eye on their apps for privacy’s sake from being able to just glance at their Settings in order to see if those apps are misbehaving. And Uber isn’t the only third-party app that’s been integrated with Apple Maps: Lyft, OpenTable and Yelp are also available. Perhaps Apple needs another color-coded indicator in the Location Services Settings to show users if it’s the that’s accessing your location data, or if it’s the that’s causing your otherwise unused app to look as if it’s tracking you. After all, if the feature is designed to give users control over their own private data, we’ll need better tools than those iOS currently provides.
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Facebook kills off exact location sharing in Nearby Friends, adds “Wave”
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Josh Constine
| 2,016 | 12 | 22 |
Nearby Friends didn’t turn into the Foursquare-killer it could have been, but Facebook is still trying to help people meet up in person… with a few changes. Facebook has removed the precise location-sharing feature from , which now only lets you opt-in to broadcasting your approximate distance from friends and current neighborhood. Previously, you could select to temporarily or permanently share your constant exact pinpoint on a map with specific friends, or request this from a friend. This was useful for meeting up with someone on the move, knowing when someone was arriving or frighteningly, stalking your significant other. Facebook Nearby Friends’ old map and precise location-sharing feature have been removed But it also lent an air of creepiness to a product that is relatively privacy-safe for a location-sharing service, as users fully control who sees what. And if your forgot you’d permanently shared your exact spot with someone, it could needlessly drain battery. TechCrunch noticed the map being removed from the Nearby Friends service in the Facebook app’s More tab, and Facebook now confirms that the feature for letting people see your precise location on a map is no longer active. That strips Nearby Friends’ main visual component too, making it now just a list of people’s proximities and neighborhood. That seems to have paved the way for a desktop version of Nearby Friends in the chat sidebar on the right. It shows a list of friends within a few miles, with their neighborhood and name. Tapping lets you send them a message to arrange a get-together. Facebook confirmed this is in testing after we spotted the addition. Facebook is testing a Nearby Friends list in the right sidebar (magnified here in the red box) Finally, Facebook has built a successor to the classic “Poke” feature called “Wave.” Some users have the option to send a Wave to friends they see in Facebook Nearby to let them know they’re interested in what that friend is up to. It’s a lightweight way to reach out without a full-fledged instant message, but that could lead to a conversation on Messenger about whether they’re free to hang out. Wave addresses the core flaw of Nearby Friends — that just because someone is in your proximity, doesn’t mean they’re available. This is what plagued Foursquare, too. You were never sure if you should drop in on someone down the street, as their check-in wouldn’t necessarily tell you if they were on a date or in a meeting there. Wave was pointed out by Matteo Gamba and , and first covered by . A Facebook spokesperson confirms that “We are testing a new feature within Nearby Friends allowing people to send their friends a waving hand emoji to say hello and help them meet up. This is meant to give people more ways to express themselves, and help friends interact with one another in new fun and lightweight ways.” Facebook Nearby Friends never received the proper attention in the bloated Facebook product. It was buried alive in the main app’s More tab since its launch in . That’s unfortunate, since it was so useful for figuring out who was a few blocks away and might want to get coffee, have drinks or chill. [Disclosure: I worked on an in-person gathering app called Signal in 2013 that’s since shut down.] Facebook hadn’t given the product much love until recently. Perhaps that’s because Facebook got burned when someone figured out how to turn an exact-location-sharing feature in Messenger into a map of people’s movements. Facebook subsequently from Messenger. But for Facebook because it’s one of the few companies with both your real-life social graph and an app you open frequently enough to spontaneously notice friends saying they’re nearby and available. Messenger (or Snapchat) could deliver a gathering feature at scale that dedicated apps like Down To Lunch and Free haven’t achieved. Messenger already has an “Active Now” section showing friends available to chat with, and a Nearby Friends section in the threads list would make perfect sense. Social networks are often accused of making us more isolated behind our screens. This is Facebook’s chance to get us face-to-face with the people we care about, and not just in a or .
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Autonomous cars seen as smarter than human drivers
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Kristen Hall-Geisler
| 2,016 | 12 | 22 |
PwC released the results of its latest survey on the future of automotive technology, and it seems Americans are coming around to the idea of autonomous cars, ride hailing and car sharing. So much so that 66 percent of respondents said they think autonomous cars are probably smarter than the average human driver. , a global provider of professional services, directly surveyed 1,584 people aged 16 and older in the U.S. to ask them about the future of transportation. They found that people’s acceptance of the new technology depended more on their attitudes toward technology than their age and that people wanted practical tech as opposed to shiny doodads. Gen X and Gen Y, which covered ages 21 through 49 in this study, were the most likely to be enthusiasts who were interested in all the new automotive technology. People older than 50 and younger than 20 were less interested in any automotive tech at all. It’s interesting to note that the top three technologies that people would consider paying more for were emergency-related. Comprehensive vehicle tracking, remote vehicle shutdown and a driver override system were on the wish lists of more than two-thirds of respondents. Those technologies even outranked gesture controls and perfect integration with smartphones. Ride-sharing usage via services like Uber are slowly creeping upward, with 37 percent of respondents saying they’d used ride sharing at some point. Of the remainder who hadn’t used ride sharing, 55 percent said they were interested in trying it. But you’ve been warned, Uber: while 74 percent of respondents believed that “ride sharing does not hurt the economy,” 72 percent did believe the industry should be regulated. That interest did not extend to car sharing. Only 23 percent had used a service like Zipcar or car2go, and only 37 percent were interested in even trying it out. As for autonomous cars, people were mostly worried about safety, including the possibility of their car being hacked. But people also gave lots of positive responses for using self-driving cars, like being better transportation for the elderly and having fewer accidents. So people are concerned about self-driving cars being safe, but they’re also willing to concede that they’ll probably follow the rules of the road better and crash less. The study found that 13 percent of consumers saw no advantages to autonomous vehicles. When asked if they’d be willing to give up some privacy for access to high-tech features like augmented reality displays in autonomous vehicles, 60 percent said no. And 53 percent (part of those who were concerned about safety) said they were “scared of self-driving cars,” so there are still barriers to overcome for our robot overlords.
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Uber lawsuit alleges employees were misled on equity compensation
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Katie Roof
| 2,016 | 12 | 22 |
The lawsuit claims that Uber promised a more tax favorable type of options at the time employees were hired and then later changed the plan. The case alleges that at least 100 others on the Uber staff may have been impacted and that these stock options can potentially be worth “hundreds of millions of dollars” to employees and also save Uber “millions of dollars of tax deductions.” The plaintiff, Lenza McElrath, who was previously a lawyer and is now an engineer at Uber, says that he was under the impression that all his shares could be treated as ISOs, which do not require an upfront tax bill. He said he was later given a notice about a change to the exercisability schedule, that effectively turned most of his shares into NSOs, which are taxed at the time they are exercised. While many startups allow their shares to become exercisable over the course of a four-year vesting agreement, Uber has share agreements that become exercisable after just six months. In other words, Uber employees can buy the stock they are entitled to shortly after they gain employment. Exercising options sooner can potentially result in long-term tax savings, so Uber can make the case that they did this to benefit employees. But by designating them as “exercisable” at this point in time, regardless of whether they are actually exercised, it triggers the law that no employee is entitled to more than $100,000 of exercisable ISOs in a given year. The rest are automatically treated as NSOs. According to the legal claim, “this tax is many times the strike price and can total hundreds of thousands of dollars, meaning that NSOs – unlike ISOs — can impede an employee’s ability to exercise the option depending on whether he or she has the financial resources to pay the tax.” They may also argue that the employment agreement states that the ISOs could be subject to tax restrictions. “The Option will be incentive stock option to the maximum extent allowed by the tax code.” The stock option agreement, which was presented after the employee joined the company, specifically warns that the options could be treated as NSOs. They explicitly lay out the scenario where anything in excess of $100,000 triggers the NSOs. But even if McElrath’s financial burden is exaggerated, the court may still want to evaluate what was verbally promised to him in the course of job interviews or other communication with the company. It has yet to be determined if they’ve fallen short on commitments to him or other employees. If the court ultimately concludes that McElrath was misled, then this suit may have precedent. This case could not only pose significance for the other similarly situated Uber employees, but also the staff at other startups. Early employees at places like Google and Facebook were handsomely rewarded after the companies went public and their share values went up. Uber is rumored to go public within the next two years. A similar lawsuit was previously filed in a California state court, where the judge dismissed most of the allegations against Uber, but . The suit was refiled in the U.S. District Court on Monday and he is represented by Phillips, Erlewine, Given & Carlin, a firm which has been involved in a class-action suit against the Honest Company.
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In 2017, Airbnb needs to grow into your full-fledged travel bookings hub
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Taylor Hatmaker
| 2,016 | 12 | 22 |
Airbnb can find you a well-appointed place to crash during your next big trip, but it’d really prefer to hang out every step of the way. To that end, in 2017, we can expect Airbnb to expand its horizons considerably, moving well beyond the vacation rentals that it’s remained synonymous with since . As the company confirmed last month, its plans to expand into flight bookings are clear, with “ ” lined up to join its other new offerings, now categorized a bit murkily as “experiences,” “places” and “homes” (aren’t homes places?), which all fall under the broader umbrella of “trips.” According to , Airbnb will pull this off by buying up an existing online travel site, or by striking a data licensing deal with a provider like or . The move is rumored to precede Airbnb’s long-anticipated IPO, which is expected within the next 18 months. In looking to add new revenue streams, Airbnb is eyeing some tried and true models. Major booking sites like Kayak, Priceline and Expedia all offer a one-stop shop for trip planning, with hotels, car rentals and flights collected in the same place. Most of these services also offer packages, where travelers can score a bundled deal or promotional offer if they opt to book everything in one fell swoop rather than putting together a trip one piece at a time. This sort of bundling could be an opportunity for Airbnb, were it to grow into the travel booking hub of its dreams. Airbnb’s recalibrated mission is plainly evident from its greeting page, where the company invites you to browse “Homes, experiences, and places — all in one app.” That goal was driven home by last month’s launch of “ ,” a new way for travelers to book reservations for things like surfing lessons, cooking classes and even music sessions at their destination of choice. Airbnb takes a larger cut of these listings than the 6-12 percent it collects from its regular rental bookings. These experiential bookings are offered by local host-types with specialties that might catch the eye of vacationers looking for an authentic local experience. Like flight bookings, these alternative listings won’t strike a nerve with communities , since they aren’t displacing anyone or driving up real estate markets in such a direct way. Nor would they create the same kind of expensive friction with state and local governments. Amid costly , Airbnb knows it needs to branch out. With an IPO looking inevitable in the not too distant future, even as it , Airbnb would be wise to broaden its listings toward less sticky revenue streams before it takes the plunge.
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Tesla tops 2016 Consumer Reports’ customer satisfaction survey
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Darrell Etherington
| 2,016 | 12 | 22 |
Tesla has claimed the top spot in , which polls subscribers about their cars and their feelings toward the brands that make them. Ninety-one percent of Tesla owners polled would buy another Tesla vehicle in the future, the survey found. Consumer Reports’ survey pool covered more than 300,000 different vehicles, and Tesla regained the crown that it held in the previous year, besting Porsche and Audi in the No. 2 and No. 3 spots, respectively. It topped Porsche by 7 percentage points, and the rankings represent the number of respondents who said they’d “definitely” purchase another car by the same automaker in the future. Tesla’s Model S earned a , after its reliability rating improved. The publication also chided the automaker for Model X reliability, however, leading to an overall low ranking in its annual reliability survey when it comes to the Tesla brand as whole.
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How technology is merging with the human body
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Daniel Waterhouse
| 2,016 | 12 | 22 |
The gulf between “human” and “machine” is closing. Machine learning has enabled virtual reality to feel more “real” than ever before, and AI’s replication of processes that were once confined to the human brain is ever-improving. Both are bringing technology into ever-closer proximity with the human body. Things are getting weird. And they are going to get a lot weirder. Let’s use this question as a starting point: Is standing on the edge of the roof of a Minecraft cathedral in VR mode scarier than looking over the edge of a mountain in Norway? I have done both, and the sense of vertigo was greater in Minecraft. Our brain has to let us understand a version of the world we live in, and to make decisions that optimize the survival of our genes. Due to this wiring, a fear of heights is a sensible apprehension to develop: Don’t go near the edge of tall things because you might fall off and die. In fact, what we see is the brain’s interpretation of the input data provided by our eyes. What we see , but is instead our brain’s interpretation of the parts of reality that we have evolved to consider useful. By understanding how we turn “the process of seeing” into “what we see,” the illusions of virtual reality can feel more real than reality itself: for example, Minecraft versus Norwegian mountains. It will take a long time until humans stop perceiving things like the VR cathedral roof as risks that pose an existential threat. Indeed, over the next few years, we will continue to develop technologies that con the brain into certain interpretations. At the same time, our understanding of the brain is becoming ever-greater. Modern research into neuroplasticity has shown us that to take over from parts that stop functioning. As our understanding grows, it is not a big leap to believe that we can programmatically adjust the processing of different artificial stimuli to cause much greater slights-of-hand than VR does today. The tricks that can be played on the aural sense are being exposed by a new wave of smart ear-buds and sound software. The show their dedication to full immersion, and experiments with acoustic filtration, turning background noise into harmonies. The Company — the self-described “specialists in artificial olfaction” (the science of smelling without a nose) — has developed a technology that replicates the function of a human nose. The applications range from to the supersession of . With these developments in mind, it is not hard to imagine a full VR rig (headset, earbuds, gloves, maybe even sensors for the nose and mouth) that completely blurs the line between virtual reality and reality itself. In fact, the virtual experience may offer avenues of perception that reality cannot, especially if we find ways to stimulate chemicals in the brains that strengthen synapses around memories. Perhaps or VR pods ( ) are not so far away. As a result of these developments, technology is becoming closely merged with our bodies. However, the interplay between technology and the body does not end with VR. It gets even more interesting when you add artificial intelligence to the mix, as AI attempts to replicate the processes of the brain within machines. Technologists have been trying for decades to use our understanding of the brain to build algorithms to solve highly complex, non-linear problems. Recent months and years have seen more notable breakthroughs than before, due to progress in core algorithms, smart codification of these algorithms and improvements in sheer compute power. We are still a long way from general AI — a model that recreates the entire brain — and it is not clear if and when we could get to that point. One limiting factor is that we need to fully understand the brain before we can build a machine that replicates it. By studying different processes of the brain — image recognition, learning a language and so on — we can decipher how those processes work and how we learn. Do brain algorithms need to be shown lots of similar things in order to learn, or is the algorithm self-teaching? In other words, is the algorithm “supervised” or “unsupervised”? Developing truly unsupervised AI will continue to challenge practitioners for years to come, including the technology giants who have embraced (read: made lots of acquisitions in) the industry.
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Google hits the reset button
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Frederic Lardinois
| 2,016 | 12 | 22 |
, Google always held its biggest event of the year, its I/O developer conference, in San Francisco. This year, however, it moved it out (and outdoors) to an amphitheater in Mountain View, right next to its campus. Looking back, that move now feels symbolic. In many ways, 2016 was a year of change for Google: It was the first full year after the surprise and the year that saw Google about its own hardware, and the . Across the industry, 2016 was also the year of AI and machine learning — and Google was very much at the forefront of this. Let’s get Google’s misses right out of the way: the launch of its and messaging apps only led to mass confusion and very little adoption; smartwatches are struggling and the fact that Google the launch of Android Wear 2.0 to early next year isn’t helping its wearables strategy; Project Ara, Google’s Lego-like smartphone project, also . But given the amount of products Google offers, it’s no surprise the company occasionally misses the mark. So let’s get to the good part. Google used the last year to sharpen its product portfolio and to go after potentially lucrative markets that it previously allowed to linger. Hardware is an obvious example here. After years of working with different hardware manufacturers to produce what were essentially Android reference phones under the Nexus brand, Google ditched that effort this year and launched its under its own name and brand. That itself would have been a big deal, but Google also launched (its Amazon Echo challenger), , a new version of the Chromecast dongle and the . That’s an unprecedented amount of hardware from Google — and even more so because virtually all of these were developed from the ground up. If you needed any evidence that Google is serious about making its own hardware, just read over that list again (and you could maybe even add the Pixel C tablet to it, though that launched late in 2015 and has lingered ever since). At the core of a lot of these products and Google’s overall AI ambitions is the , Google’s effort at building a conversational personal assistant that’ll work across its product line. The company’s interest in machine learning and AI isn’t new, of course, and the Assistant built on years of developing the Google Knowledge Graph and other projects (which include Google ). But in 2016, Google found a bunch of new surfaces to highlight its AI smarts that actually make sense to consumers. While the Assistant in Google Home wasn’t first to market, I find it to be smarter and more useful than Amazon’s current efforts. And with and other projects, Google has also found a way to seed the developer community with the tools to replicate and improve upon its own work (which will eventually flow back into its own products, too). As Google competes with Microsoft and others in the productivity space, it has also started to bring some of those AI smarts to its own productivity tools. Those tools previously fell under the Google Apps for Work (or Education) moniker. This year, Google decided that name wasn’t good enough, so it went for “G Suite” instead. I’m not a fan of that name, but that, too, shows how Google is trying to reset expectations. Indeed, maybe the one area that most clearly shows the changes Google went through last year is its (there’s another new name) division. As Google at a small and exclusive event in late September, both the G Suite and all of its products for developers and small businesses now fall under the Google Cloud umbrella. Internally, Google had been using “Google Enterprise” as the name for all of these efforts, but somehow decided that wasn’t the right name, either. A lot of that change — and Google’s clearly renewed efforts to finally take the enterprise seriously after letting both its productivity tools and cloud platform linger for a bit as both Amazon and Microsoft made huge strides in the last few years — comes down to Google bringing Diane Greene onboard in 2015. Her arrival signaled that it wasn’t going to cede a lucrative market like that to its competitors. Over the course of the last year, it finally started opening up more data centers for its Cloud Platform, launched a slew of new cloud products (including a series of ) to better compete with AWS and Azure, made Firebase , and to help enterprises teach their employees how to use the G Suite apps. It even launched low-code enterprise app development tools. It also made a number of updates to the G Suite apps to help make them more useful for large enterprises. Most of these are small moves, but taken together, they show Google has hit the reset button on its enterprise efforts and started to go after this market. The Alphabet/Google reorg probably helped to push some of these changes along, but it also complicates things. Waymo, formerly known as Google’s self-driving car project, , for example. It does seem to have served its purpose in getting Google itself to look at its own projects, though, and search for revenue opportunities beyond the advertising machine that continues to print virtually all of its money. As for next year? Google I/O will be at Moscone again (according to what I’ve heard), but I don’t think Google is done reinventing itself just yet.
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ClusterHQ, an early player in the container ecosystem, calls it quits
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Frederic Lardinois
| 2,016 | 12 | 22 |
, an early player in the container DevOps ecosystem, today that it is shutting down operations immediately. “Unfortunately, it’s often the who end up with arrows in their backs. And sometimes, archery injuries are ,” the company’s CEO Mark Davis writes in a blog post today. “For a confluence of reasons, the ClusterHQ board of directors, of which I am chairman, have decided it best to immediately shut down company operations.” The company’s shutdown does come as a surprise. Not only did the company in a Series A round led by Accel Partners London last year, but it also a number of new products last month. The company also opened up a new office in Silicon Valley in 2016. Davis doesn’t detail what exactly happened or what those “self-inflicted” wounds and “confluence of reasons” were. Just a few days ago, ClusterHQ CTO Serge Pashenkov that the company grew “an incredibly talented team of engineers” over the course of the last year and promised that “2017 will also be a big year for the company.” That, sadly, wasn’t meant to be. The company a lot of its products, including its container data volume manager, and that code will obviously outlive the company. When ClusterHQ raised its funding round last year, Davis told me that the company planned to monetize through paid tools and services. With the beta launch of FlockerHub last month, the company launched what would have likely been its flagship product. While it’s unclear what exactly happened at ClusterHQ, chances are the company’s product just didn’t catch on in the way its founders and investors expected, so the board decided it was best to call it quits. “I’ve been part of big successes as well as failures. While the former are more pleasurable, the latter must be relished as a valuable part of life, especially in Silicon Valley. The big successes are literally impossible without the many failures. Take a moment to think about that,” Davis writes. “Philosophical and ruminations aside, it is deeply disappointing to be at this juncture. It hurts.” We’ve reached out to the company and will update this post once we learn more about what prompted today’s decision.
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Josh Constine
| 2,016 | 12 | 14 | null |
Uber deploying self-driving cars from San Francisco pilot in Arizona instead
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Darrell Etherington
| 2,016 | 12 | 22 |
Uber will be rolling out its third-generation self-driving test vehicles, which are sensor-lated Volvo XC90 SUVs, in Arizona following their loss of registration in California. An Uber spokesperson tells TechCrunch that the cars actually left for Arizona by truck on Tuesday morning, and that they will be deployed there “in the next few weeks” with the full support of state Governor Doug Ducey. Earlier on Thursday, Governor Ducey for Uber’s self-driving test, basically articulating an unqualified desire to have Uber redirect its efforts to Arizona. GM is , with a Scottsdale pilot launched earlier this year, and the state has also been working with Google’s self-driving car project, now its own company under Alphabet known as Waymo. Uber met with the California Department of Motor Vehicles and the California state Attorney General’s office on Wednesday, after refusing to pursue a permit for testing autonomous driving in the state and continuing its San Francisco city pilot anyway. The result of the meeting was that the DMV revoked registration for 16 of Uber’s vehicles, the test fleet it had deployed with autonomous hardware and software in SF. California’s DMV said it had also invited Uber once again to complete its permitting process, a required step for any company looking to test autonomous tech on public roads in the state. Uber said it would instead look to deploy its vehicles elsewhere, and it clearly wasted no time in doing so. [gallery ids="1431203,1431204,1431205,1431206,1431207,1431208,1431209"] Uber maintains that it did not require the permit because its vehicles still required a driver present at all times, and were not truly classified as autonomous cars under the California DMV’s definition. The ride-hailing company provided TechCrunch the images above of its XC90 fleet being loaded on Otto semi-trucks for transport to Arizona. Developing…
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Signal for Android update ducks censorship, adds stickers and doodles
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Taylor Hatmaker
| 2,016 | 12 | 22 |
As mainstream interest in online privacy expands, wants to grow along with it. This week, the app added two features, one a serious response to international censorship and the other a light, fluffy feature set meant to make the app even more user friendly for those who might be new to this whole encryption thing. As detailed in a post on the , the latest Signal update (Android only for now) circumvents state-sponsored censorship in Egypt and the United Arab Emirates by building in , a way for the app’s usage to disguise itself as Internet traffic to another service altogether. “With enough large scale services acting as domain fronts, disabling Signal starts to look like disabling the internet,” Signal explained in the blog post. “When those users send a Signal message, it will look like a normal HTTPS request to www.google.com.” Beyond its censorship workaround, Signal updated its Android app with a few fun features, allowing users to now add stickers and doodles to photos à la Snapchat, Facebook and other mainstream social apps. Here’s the full list of changes to : As far as truly private messaging services go, Signal is particularly well positioned for widespread adoption right now. For one, the app’s user interface resembles something like Apple’s Messages app far more than it does more arcane forms of encrypted communication, like . Open Whisper Systems also powers the new the end-to-end capabilities of better known apps like , , and . Beyond that, Signal itself has taken off in recent months, with considerable following the election. I use Signal every day. (Spoiler: they already know) — Edward Snowden (@Snowden) Signal’s open source roots and robust privacy protections make it a favorite among big names in privacy, which boosts adoption too. A perfect (the old ratings, the organization is working on a current scorecard) and Edward Snowden’s stamp of approval don’t hurt either. And if that wasn’t enough to convince you, look, stickers!
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LG takes the fun out of CES by announcing five phones ahead of time
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Brian Heater
| 2,016 | 12 | 22 |
That’s one way avoid the CES scrum – just go ahead and start making all of your announcements before the show even starts. LG will likely still have a few other tricks up its sleeve at Vegas in a few weeks, but the company picked Christmas week to start unloading its show announcements, including . The set it pretty uninspired – so maybe LG is saving its real firepower for the actual show. Or equally likely, for Mobile World Congress in Barcelona a few weeks later – a much bigger event for handsets than CES, which has turned into much more of a TV and washing machine event for many big name electronics makers. The most intriguing of the bunch is the Stylus 3, LG’s budget take on the Galaxy Note series, which could have a bit more appeal for users given that Samsung’s device is out of commission for the foreseeable future. That one’s got a middling 5.7 inch display, octa-core process and a 3,200mAh battery, which is removable – a bit of a signature on LG’s recent offerings that sets it apart from much of the rest of the industry. There are four other phones on the list, all variants on the company’s budget K line of handsets. The K10 is the top of the heap with a 5.3-inch display, fingerprint scanner, Android 7.0 on-board and the same process as the new Stylus. And for good measure, the company also took the wraps off also set to debut at the show. Surprises are overrated anyway.
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