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4,213	2,020	"AI Weekly: Autonomous vehicle companies pivot to charitable deliveries during the pandemic \| VentureBeat"	"https://venturebeat.com/ai/ai-weekly-autonomous-vehicle-companies-pivot-to-charitable-deliveries-during-the-pandemic"	"Artificial Intelligence View All AI, ML and Deep Learning Auto ML Data Labelling Synthetic Data Conversational AI NLP Text-to-Speech Security View All Data Security and Privacy Network Security and Privacy Software Security Computer Hardware Security Cloud and Data Storage Security Data Infrastructure View All Data Science Data Management Data Storage and Cloud Big Data and Analytics Data Networks Automation View All Industrial Automation Business Process Automation Development Automation Robotic Process Automation Test Automation Enterprise Analytics View All Business Intelligence Disaster Recovery Business Continuity Statistical Analysis Predictive Analysis More Data Decision Makers Virtual Communication Team Collaboration UCaaS Virtual Reality Collaboration Virtual Employee Experience Programming & Development Product Development Application Development Test Management Development Languages AI Weekly: Autonomous vehicle companies pivot to charitable deliveries during the pandemic Share on Facebook Share on X Share on LinkedIn Are you ready to bring more awareness to your brand? Consider becoming a sponsor for The AI Impact Tour. Learn more about the opportunities here. Early on, the pandemic — which passed a grim milestone in the U.S. this week of over 100,000 dead — motivated the shuttering of businesses deemed nonessential out of concern for workers’ well-being. One industry heavily affected was self-driving vehicles, whose operators and developers were forced to pause pilots under guidance from state and local officials. Several companies resumed tests , however, after implementing a series of new precautionary safety protocols. And in something of a bright spot among a torrent of bad news, they’ve repurposed — or plan to repurpose — their vehicles for deliveries to those in need. Some experts predict the coronavirus outbreak will hasten the adoption of autonomous vehicles for delivery. A study published by CarGurus found that 39% of people won’t use manually driven ride-sharing services post-pandemic for fear of insufficient sanitation. Despite the public’s misgivings about driverless cars and their need for regular disinfection, they promise to minimize the risk of spreading disease because they inherently limit driver-rider contact. Beep Mobility, which provides autonomous, fully managed mobility solutions like driverless shuttles to private and public communities, tells VentureBeat that it’s ferrying food to frontline workers at the Orlando Veteran Affairs Medical Center and Nemours Children’s Hospital near its headquarters in Lake Nona, Florida. In partnership with real estate developer Tavistock Development and Park Pizza and Brewing Co., a local restaurant, the company says, it’s been able to provide contactless meal delivery to enable health care workers to remain on campus. Separately, since March 30, Beep has been working with the Jacksonville Transportation Authority at Mayo Clinic in Jacksonville, Florida to transport COVID-19 tests from a drive-through site to another facility at the hospital for processing. It says the collaboration has provided the Mayo Clinic a “safe and reliable” means of transporting the tests while freeing up workers for more pressing tasks. VB Event The AI Impact Tour Connect with the enterprise AI community at VentureBeat’s AI Impact Tour coming to a city near you! “During our pause in service, we at Beep mobilized our team quickly to repurpose our shuttles to help the community in transporting COVID-19 tests to making food deliveries to health care workers on the frontline of this pandemic,” a Beep spokesperson told VentureBeat. “Our goal is to relaunch in June. Since the pandemic, we have … been awarded multiple new contracts to provide autonomous mobility services in several new markets.” Another autonomous vehicle operator — Optimus Ride — this week announced that three of its vehicles will begin making deliveries at the Yards, a waterfront development in Washington, D.C., beginning this week. From D.C.-area restaurant and brewery Bluejacket, they’ll ferry boxes containing a week’s worth of food and ingredients furnished by the Neighborhood Restaurant Group and the Arcadia Center for Sustainable Food and Agriculture to families in need. Recipients are identified by Pathways to Housing, a nonprofit organization dedicated to ending homelessness. Earlier in the year, Optimus Ride kicked off a deployment within Paradise Valley Estates — a private 80-acre assisted living community located in Fairfield, California — and adapted the program to deliver 50-80 meals a day to residents during the pandemic. It also offers package delivery via autonomous shuttle to the residents, many of whom can no longer congregate in the community’s common areas. “Despite COVID-19, Optimus Ride has made tremendous progress … We have strongly added a new market vertical in logistics which includes the delivery of prepared meals, groceries, and other types of packages as part of our self-driving system,” the company said. “Optimus Ride is continuing operations during the pandemic currently with a focus on logistics. In fact, we believe the pandemic has accelerated some deployments in our extensive pipeline of clients.” For its part, Gatik — a startup that moves goods between fulfillment centers to retail stores, distribution centers, and offices with autonomous Ford Transit vans up to 7 days a week, 12 hours a day — plans to expand to Michigan. (In July 2019, it inked a deal with “multiple” retail partners including Walmart for on-demand and scheduled freight transportation.) In collaboration with one of the state’s largest retailers, it says it will operate its trucks, which are equipped with multi-temperature compartments to accommodate fresh food, refrigerated and frozen food, and medical supplies, on predetermined, fixed routes to facilitate online ordering and contactless delivery for residents. “As a result of COVID-19, Gatik’s solution has never been more important. Retailers are grappling with major logistics challenges and a dramatic rise in online orders. Gatik’s business model and product offerings ensure a resilient supply chain and enhance public health and safety via contactless delivery,” a spokesperson said. Beep, Optimus Ride, and Gatik aren’t the only autonomous vehicle companies applying their technologies for good during the pandemic. Cruise redeployed its vehicles to deliver meals for the SF-Marin Food Bank and SF New Deal, two food banks serving low-income families in the San Francisco Bay Area. The Hyundai-Aptiv Autonomous Driving Joint Venture , a collaboration between Hyundai and Aptiv to develop driverless vehicle technologies, is using driverless vehicles in Las Vegas to deliver food to families in partnership with the nonprofit Delivery with Dignity. And Nuro is using its shuttles to transport medical supplies around the Event Center in San Mateo and the Sleep Train Arena for people stricken with COVID-19. Encouragingly, it appears to be only the tip of the iceberg for a technological use case that’s making a difference. For AI coverage, send news tips to Khari Johnson and Kyle Wiggers — and be sure to subscribe to the AI Weekly newsletter and bookmark our AI Channel. Thanks for reading, Kyle Wiggers AI Staff Writer VentureBeat's mission is to be a digital town square for technical decision-makers to gain knowledge about transformative enterprise technology and transact. Discover our Briefings. The AI Impact Tour Join us for an evening full of networking and insights at VentureBeat's AI Impact Tour, coming to San Francisco, New York, and Los Angeles! VentureBeat Homepage Follow us on Facebook Follow us on X Follow us on LinkedIn Follow us on RSS Press Releases Contact Us Advertise Share a News Tip Contribute to DataDecisionMakers Careers Privacy Policy Terms of Service Do Not Sell My Personal Information © 2023 VentureBeat. All rights reserved. "
4,214	2,020	"ACLU sues facial recognition startup Clearview AI for privacy and safety violations \| VentureBeat"	"https://venturebeat.com/ai/aclu-sues-facial-recognition-startup-clearview-ai-for-privacy-and-safety-violations"	"Artificial Intelligence View All AI, ML and Deep Learning Auto ML Data Labelling Synthetic Data Conversational AI NLP Text-to-Speech Security View All Data Security and Privacy Network Security and Privacy Software Security Computer Hardware Security Cloud and Data Storage Security Data Infrastructure View All Data Science Data Management Data Storage and Cloud Big Data and Analytics Data Networks Automation View All Industrial Automation Business Process Automation Development Automation Robotic Process Automation Test Automation Enterprise Analytics View All Business Intelligence Disaster Recovery Business Continuity Statistical Analysis Predictive Analysis More Data Decision Makers Virtual Communication Team Collaboration UCaaS Virtual Reality Collaboration Virtual Employee Experience Programming & Development Product Development Application Development Test Management Development Languages ACLU sues facial recognition startup Clearview AI for privacy and safety violations Share on Facebook Share on X Share on LinkedIn Are you ready to bring more awareness to your brand? Consider becoming a sponsor for The AI Impact Tour. Learn more about the opportunities here. The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and a group of organizations filed a lawsuit against Clearview AI today in an Illinois court alleging privacy and safety violations and asserting that Clearview “will end privacy as we know it if it isn’t stopped.” According to ACLU vs Clearview AI court filings , the startup violated the Illinois Biometric Information Privacy Act, or BIPA, to create its facial recognition system. “If allowed, Clearview will destroy our rights to anonymity and privacy — and the safety and security that both bring. People can change their names and addresses to shield their whereabouts and identities from individuals who seek to harm them, but they can’t change their faces,” the ACLU said in a statement accompanying the lawsuit. The court filing goes on to call facial recognition in general technology that poses a severe risk to privacy and safety. The ACLU has been a direct supporter of a string of facial recognition bans put into effect last year in cities like San Francisco and Somerville, Massachusetts near Boston. “The capture and storage of faceprints leaves people vulnerable to data breaches and identity theft,” the filing reads. “It can also lead to unwanted tracking and invasive surveillance by making it possible to instantaneously identify everyone at a protest or political rally, a house of worship, a domestic violence shelter, an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting, and more. And, because the common link is an individual’s face, a faceprint can also be used to aggregate countless additional facts about them, gathered from social media and professional profiles, photos posted by others, and government IDs.” VB Event The AI Impact Tour Connect with the enterprise AI community at VentureBeat’s AI Impact Tour coming to a city near you! Clearview AI has been a target of privacy advocates since January when the New York Times reported a story with the headline “The Secretive Company That Might End Privacy As We Know It.” The story alleges that Clearview AI scraped more than 3 billion images from social media websites and the web without people’s consent to train its facial recognition system. Clearview has previously claimed its data gathering methods are protected by the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution. A data breach in February also called Clearview AI’s data security practices into question, and company security practices can result in a BIPA violation. Clearview AI has attracted controversy for reasons beyond data privacy. Huffington Post reporting in April revealed connections between CEO Hoan Ton-That and a number of white supremacists, far-right groups, and Trump-affiliated elites. Earlier this month, Clearview AI pledged to sell its tech exclusively to government and law enforcement agencies following BuzzFeed News reporting in February that found Clearview works with thousands of organizations around the world, including companies like Macy’s and Best Buy. In other biometric data collection news, BIPA was also used to file a lawsuit last October against Amazon’s Alexa for recording voice data. Illinois lawmakers nearly passed a bill last year requiring consent before recording people who speak with devices like Echo smart speakers, but that effort seemed to fall apart following interference by the Internet Association , a group associated with tech giants like Amazon and Google. VentureBeat's mission is to be a digital town square for technical decision-makers to gain knowledge about transformative enterprise technology and transact. Discover our Briefings. The AI Impact Tour Join us for an evening full of networking and insights at VentureBeat's AI Impact Tour, coming to San Francisco, New York, and Los Angeles! VentureBeat Homepage Follow us on Facebook Follow us on X Follow us on LinkedIn Follow us on RSS Press Releases Contact Us Advertise Share a News Tip Contribute to DataDecisionMakers Careers Privacy Policy Terms of Service Do Not Sell My Personal Information © 2023 VentureBeat. All rights reserved. "
4,215	2,020	"Researchers develop smart contact lenses to monitor and treat diabetes \| VentureBeat"	"https://venturebeat.com/mobile/researchers-develop-smart-contact-lenses-to-monitor-and-treat-diabetes"	"Artificial Intelligence View All AI, ML and Deep Learning Auto ML Data Labelling Synthetic Data Conversational AI NLP Text-to-Speech Security View All Data Security and Privacy Network Security and Privacy Software Security Computer Hardware Security Cloud and Data Storage Security Data Infrastructure View All Data Science Data Management Data Storage and Cloud Big Data and Analytics Data Networks Automation View All Industrial Automation Business Process Automation Development Automation Robotic Process Automation Test Automation Enterprise Analytics View All Business Intelligence Disaster Recovery Business Continuity Statistical Analysis Predictive Analysis More Data Decision Makers Virtual Communication Team Collaboration UCaaS Virtual Reality Collaboration Virtual Employee Experience Programming & Development Product Development Application Development Test Management Development Languages Researchers develop smart contact lenses to monitor and treat diabetes Share on Facebook Share on X Share on LinkedIn Are you looking to showcase your brand in front of the brightest minds of the gaming industry? Consider getting a custom GamesBeat sponsorship. Learn more. While much of the focus on wearable visual technology has been on glasses or contact lenses that promise to augment human sight, a South Korean research team has announced a different sort of innovation: smart contact lenses that can preserve the sight and broader health of users with diabetes. According to researchers at the Pohang University of Science and Technology, the wirelessly powered wearables will be capable of diagnosing, monitoring, and delivering medicine to treat diabetic retinopathy. Given their location directly on the eyes, the lenses are made from biocompatible polymers, using tiny sensors for real-time measurement of glucose levels in tears. If the wearer is determined to need insulin, drugs encased inside the lenses can be released directly where they’re needed. As predicted , health-focused wearable technologies have become a multibillion-dollar industry in recent years, with the lion’s share of attention going to smart watches — a natural starting point for small computing devices, with numerous potential advantages for businesses. But wireless earbuds, smart glasses, and contact lenses have continued to become more practical thanks to ever-shrinking components, all with the option to include health-monitoring biometric sensors. Just like standard contact lenses enabled wearers to shed their glasses, smart contact lenses could free diabetics from the need to tote around larger monitoring and treatment kits. Backed by the South Korean government and Samsung, the researchers and their commercialization collaborator Interojo are currently preparing for clinical trials of the smart lenses, which are expected to use miniaturized data communications and wireless power technologies. Samsung is already one of the world’s leading makers of wrist-based wearables, with an increasing focus on health applications. Further research is underway to determine whether the underlying “electroceutical” platform could treat Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s diseases, as well as mental illnesses, using direct electrical stimulations. VentureBeat's mission is to be a digital town square for technical decision-makers to gain knowledge about transformative enterprise technology and transact. Discover our Briefings. VentureBeat Homepage Follow us on Facebook Follow us on X Follow us on LinkedIn Follow us on RSS Press Releases Contact Us Advertise Share a News Tip Contribute to DataDecisionMakers Careers Privacy Policy Terms of Service Do Not Sell My Personal Information © 2023 VentureBeat. All rights reserved. "
4,216	2,020	"Apple's Q2 2020 revenue hits $58.3 billion despite retail shutdown \| VentureBeat"	"https://venturebeat.com/mobile/apples-q2-2020-revenue-hits-58-3-billion-despite-retail-shutdown"	"Artificial Intelligence View All AI, ML and Deep Learning Auto ML Data Labelling Synthetic Data Conversational AI NLP Text-to-Speech Security View All Data Security and Privacy Network Security and Privacy Software Security Computer Hardware Security Cloud and Data Storage Security Data Infrastructure View All Data Science Data Management Data Storage and Cloud Big Data and Analytics Data Networks Automation View All Industrial Automation Business Process Automation Development Automation Robotic Process Automation Test Automation Enterprise Analytics View All Business Intelligence Disaster Recovery Business Continuity Statistical Analysis Predictive Analysis More Data Decision Makers Virtual Communication Team Collaboration UCaaS Virtual Reality Collaboration Virtual Employee Experience Programming & Development Product Development Application Development Test Management Development Languages Apple’s Q2 2020 revenue hits $58.3 billion despite retail shutdown Share on Facebook Share on X Share on LinkedIn U.S. President Donald Trump and Apple CEO Tim Cook visit an Austin, Texas factory where Mac Pros are assembled, on November 20, 2019. Are you looking to showcase your brand in front of the brightest minds of the gaming industry? Consider getting a custom GamesBeat sponsorship. Learn more. If it wasn’t clear from Apple’s prior promise of a second-quarter 2020 revenue projection miss , the global coronavirus pandemic has weakened the company’s strong recovery from a shaky 2019, but the hit wasn’t as bad as analysts expected. Apple reported $58.3 billion in revenue for the quarter — a modest increase compared with the $58 billion generated one year ago, when it suffered a 5% year-over-year decline compared with the second fiscal quarter of 2018. Prior to the U.S. outbreak, but with awareness of its continuing growth in China, the company originally said earnings would fall in the $63 billion to $67 billion range. On average, analysts predicted earnings per share of $2.26 and revenues of roughly $54.5 billion — a drop of 6% to 8% for the second quarter — owing in part to closures of the company’s retail stores and COVID-19-related interruptions in its production facilities. However, Apple’s revenues were actually up roughly 1% over the year-ago quarter, even though the overall U.S. gross domestic product (GDP) contracted by 4.8% during the same period, with mounting virus death tolls and massive job losses raising the prospect of a prolonged recession or depression. “Despite COVID-19’s unprecedented global impact, we’re proud to report that Apple grew for the quarter, driven by an all-time record in services and a quarterly record for wearables,” said Apple CEO Tim Cook. “In this difficult environment, our users are depending on Apple products in renewed ways to stay connected, informed, creative, and productive.” Down in three major segments but up in two, Apple sold $28.962 billion in iPhones, $5.351 billion in Macs, $4.368 billion in iPads, $13.348 billion from services, and $6.284 billion in wearables and accessories. Year over year, those numbers contrast with prior quarterly sales of $31.05 billion in iPhones, $5.5 billion in Macs, $4.87 billion in iPads, $11.5 billion in services, and just under $5.13 billion in wearables and accessories. Except for major milestones, the company no longer discloses unit sales for any of its product lines. International sales constituted 62% of the quarter’s revenue, and Apple saw revenues grow in two key territories while declining in three others. Year over year, revenues fell from $25.596 billion to $25.473 billion in the Americas, from $10.218 billion to $9.455 billion in Greater China, and from $5.532 billion to $5.206 billion in Japan. However, sales grew from $13.054 billion to $14.294 billion in Europe and from $3.615 billion to $3.885 billion in the Asia Pacific region. Last quarter, Apple blew past both its projections and analysts’ expectations by posting $91.8 billion in revenue, up nearly 9% from the year-ago quarter, thanks to a strong holiday season. While sales of the Mac and iPad dipped, wearables, services, and iPhones each posted billion-plus-dollar gains, continuing the prior quarter’s record-breaking reversal of fortunes. As Cook noted, wearables and services continued to fuel revenue growth, but all other segments slowed down — though not as much as might have been expected. Although Apple recently released the second-generation iPhone SE , 2020 iPad Pros , and iPad Pro Magic Keyboard , all with potential to help its smartphone, tablet, and accessories categories, the company is not providing guidance for the third fiscal quarter of 2020, due to continued uncertainty wrought by the pandemic. Apple plans to restart brick-and-mortar retail operations in several U.S. states following reopenings of some stores in China and South Korea, where it has limited sales-specific foot traffic but has resumed device service operations. The company delayed an earlier plan to begin some U.S. reopenings earlier in April. Apple is issuing an atypically large cash dividend of $0.82 per share — an increase of 6% — payable on May 14, 2020 to shareholders on record as of May 11, 2020. It is also increasing its share repurchase program by another $50 billion, a measure that should drive up the value of remaining shares. VentureBeat's mission is to be a digital town square for technical decision-makers to gain knowledge about transformative enterprise technology and transact. Discover our Briefings. VentureBeat Homepage Follow us on Facebook Follow us on X Follow us on LinkedIn Follow us on RSS Press Releases Contact Us Advertise Share a News Tip Contribute to DataDecisionMakers Careers Privacy Policy Terms of Service Do Not Sell My Personal Information © 2023 VentureBeat. All rights reserved. "
4,217	2,020	"Google and Facebook: Digital ad market is avoiding coronavirus disaster \| VentureBeat"	"https://venturebeat.com/media/google-and-facebook-digital-ad-market-is-avoiding-coronavirus-disaster"	"Artificial Intelligence View All AI, ML and Deep Learning Auto ML Data Labelling Synthetic Data Conversational AI NLP Text-to-Speech Security View All Data Security and Privacy Network Security and Privacy Software Security Computer Hardware Security Cloud and Data Storage Security Data Infrastructure View All Data Science Data Management Data Storage and Cloud Big Data and Analytics Data Networks Automation View All Industrial Automation Business Process Automation Development Automation Robotic Process Automation Test Automation Enterprise Analytics View All Business Intelligence Disaster Recovery Business Continuity Statistical Analysis Predictive Analysis More Data Decision Makers Virtual Communication Team Collaboration UCaaS Virtual Reality Collaboration Virtual Employee Experience Programming & Development Product Development Application Development Test Management Development Languages Google and Facebook: Digital ad market is avoiding coronavirus disaster Share on Facebook Share on X Share on LinkedIn Are you looking to showcase your brand in front of the brightest minds of the gaming industry? Consider getting a custom GamesBeat sponsorship. Learn more. ( Reuters ) — Reports of the demise of the digital advertising market due to the coronavirus outbreak appear exaggerated, as the tech giants dominating the online ads business, Google and Facebook, said this week they saw early signs that the worst could be over. Their remarks countered Wall Street expectations of a devastation of the market as hard-hit brands in travel and autos, traditionally big ad spenders, have pulled marketing dollars and as small businesses, the lifeblood of big tech companies’ businesses, have shut down. At Google’s parent, Alphabet , first-quarter total revenue grew 13% from the previous year to $41.2 billion, while Facebook ‘s ad sales rose 17% to $17.44 billion. They issued first-quarter results that factored in only two weeks of the widespread stay-at-home orders in the United States. But both companies also reassured investors that revenue for the first three weeks of April showed signs of stability, following lower revenue in March. Alphabet, Facebook, and Snap credited direct response ads, or ads that solicit a direct action, such as clicking a link, using a coupon code, or downloading mobile games, for propping up sales during the pandemic. Such ads help advertisers get the most for their money by encouraging immediate response from audiences and are easier to measure, since brands can see how many people clicked on a link or took an action after seeing the ad. Brand advertising that is used to spread awareness and name recognition for a company, but whose effectiveness is often more difficult to measure, was harder hit. Alphabet said on Tuesday brand advertising declined on YouTube in mid-March, when the pandemic accelerated in the United States. Ad prices drop when marketers lower their spending and demand for digital ads declines, and direct response advertisers have been taking advantage of that, said David Campanelli, chief investment officer at ad agency Horizon Media. “This will likely continue through [Q2] as we expect pricing to remain low for the foreseeable future,” he said. Facebook executives said on Wednesday that they expected direct response advertising to continue to drive ad sales and that the coronavirus pandemic only reinforced the importance of the strategy. Still, Facebook was cautious, as economists are forecasting a global downturn in the second quarter and “if history were a guide, [it] would suggest the potential for an even more severe advertising industry contraction,” said David Wehner, Facebook’s chief financial officer, during an earnings call. Alphabet warned that the second quarter could be difficult because the early April trends may not hold. Snap, which owns messaging app Snapchat, said it would shift resources on its ad sales team to serve direct response advertisers better, due to the success of the category. But Twitter alarmed investors on Thursday when it pointed to a 27% decline in ad revenue as a sign of what the company has seen so far in April. Twitter’s ad business is heavily event-driven, and “the suspension of major sporting leagues in March will have hurt its bottom line and will continue to do so as long as social distancing and stay-at-home measures remain in place,” said Jasmine Enberg, senior analyst at research firm eMarketer. VentureBeat's mission is to be a digital town square for technical decision-makers to gain knowledge about transformative enterprise technology and transact. Discover our Briefings. The AI Impact Tour Join us for an evening full of networking and insights at VentureBeat's AI Impact Tour, coming to San Francisco, New York, and Los Angeles! VentureBeat Homepage Follow us on Facebook Follow us on X Follow us on LinkedIn Follow us on RSS Press Releases Contact Us Advertise Share a News Tip Contribute to DataDecisionMakers Careers Privacy Policy Terms of Service Do Not Sell My Personal Information © 2023 VentureBeat. All rights reserved. "
4,218	2,020	"Microsoft will show Xbox Series X games on May 7 \| VentureBeat"	"https://venturebeat.com/games/microsoft-will-show-xbox-series-x-games-on-may-7"	"Artificial Intelligence View All AI, ML and Deep Learning Auto ML Data Labelling Synthetic Data Conversational AI NLP Text-to-Speech Security View All Data Security and Privacy Network Security and Privacy Software Security Computer Hardware Security Cloud and Data Storage Security Data Infrastructure View All Data Science Data Management Data Storage and Cloud Big Data and Analytics Data Networks Automation View All Industrial Automation Business Process Automation Development Automation Robotic Process Automation Test Automation Enterprise Analytics View All Business Intelligence Disaster Recovery Business Continuity Statistical Analysis Predictive Analysis More Data Decision Makers Virtual Communication Team Collaboration UCaaS Virtual Reality Collaboration Virtual Employee Experience Programming & Development Product Development Application Development Test Management Development Languages Microsoft will show Xbox Series X games on May 7 Share on Facebook Share on X Share on LinkedIn Xbox Series X reveal. Are you looking to showcase your brand in front of the brightest minds of the gaming industry? Consider getting a custom GamesBeat sponsorship. Learn more. Microsoft announced today that it’s holding an event at 8 a.m. Pacific on May 7, showing games running on the Xbox Series X next-generation console for the first time. At this point, we’ve seen a decent amount about the system. We know what the console and controller look like, and we’ve gotten a glimpse at the specs. But we still haven’t seen any games running on the machine, although we know that titles like Halo: Infinite and Assassin’s Creed: Valhalla are coming to the system. This will put the Xbox Series X even further ahead of the PlayStation 5. For that system, we’ve seen the controller and know the specs, but we haven’t gotten a glimpse of the actual console yet, let alone gameplay footage. Microsoft is promising to show multiple games during this showcase, so we should see some new announcements. Normally, Microsoft would have a bunch of reveals and trailers to debut at E3, which happens every year in Los Angeles in June. This year’s show, however, is cancelled , so this digital event could be a substitute for Microsoft. GamesBeat's creed when covering the game industry is "where passion meets business." What does this mean? We want to tell you how the news matters to you -- not just as a decision-maker at a game studio, but also as a fan of games. Whether you read our articles, listen to our podcasts, or watch our videos, GamesBeat will help you learn about the industry and enjoy engaging with it. Discover our Briefings. Join the GamesBeat community! Enjoy access to special events, private newsletters and more. VentureBeat Homepage Follow us on Facebook Follow us on X Follow us on LinkedIn Follow us on RSS Press Releases Contact Us Advertise Share a News Tip Contribute to DataDecisionMakers Careers Privacy Policy Terms of Service Do Not Sell My Personal Information © 2023 VentureBeat. All rights reserved. "
4,219	2,020	"The fallacy of 'normal': How the coronavirus will reboot venture capital \| VentureBeat"	"https://venturebeat.com/entrepreneur/the-fallacy-of-normal-how-the-coronavirus-will-reboot-venture-capital"	"Artificial Intelligence View All AI, ML and Deep Learning Auto ML Data Labelling Synthetic Data Conversational AI NLP Text-to-Speech Security View All Data Security and Privacy Network Security and Privacy Software Security Computer Hardware Security Cloud and Data Storage Security Data Infrastructure View All Data Science Data Management Data Storage and Cloud Big Data and Analytics Data Networks Automation View All Industrial Automation Business Process Automation Development Automation Robotic Process Automation Test Automation Enterprise Analytics View All Business Intelligence Disaster Recovery Business Continuity Statistical Analysis Predictive Analysis More Data Decision Makers Virtual Communication Team Collaboration UCaaS Virtual Reality Collaboration Virtual Employee Experience Programming & Development Product Development Application Development Test Management Development Languages Guest The fallacy of ‘normal’: How the coronavirus will reboot venture capital Share on Facebook Share on X Share on LinkedIn Are you ready to bring more awareness to your brand? Consider becoming a sponsor for The AI Impact Tour. Learn more about the opportunities here. The measures most of the world has put in place to mitigate the spread of the pandemic has shut down the global economy in a more abrupt fashion than we’ve ever seen. Despite what many are saying , the idea of a V-shaped recovery is woefully optimistic. While parallels are consistently being drawn to past financial crises, these are simply not relevant to our current situation. Never before have we experienced the demand for goods and services completely come to a halt the way they did in March. We should anticipate the economic impact in the United States to better align with the unprecedented situation at hand — which will be severe to say the least. That’s not to say there’s no recovery in sight. I firmly believe we will emerge stronger and better equipped to respond to similar events in the future. But in the meantime, the fallout will send reverberations throughout the entire economy and be acutely felt within the venture capital and startup landscape. Shift to a mission-critical mindset At this point it’s nearly impossible to fully understand the implications of the shutdown. But with an expectation of 20 to 30% unemployment in the US, many Americans won’t be able to pay their bills, and the financial stimulus package will not nearly be enough. Even after we lift quarantine measures, fear will continue to drive consumer behavior, hampering consumer spending, which will surely bleed into the enterprise as companies shift from a “growth-mindset” to a “mission-critical-mindset.” Most of my firm’s enterprise companies with March quarter-ends missed numbers by 10 to 20%, while companies with April quarter-ends are more likely to miss by 20 to 40%. What’s more telling is that the sales pipeline for Q2 is being decimated, with qualified leads deteriorating by 20 to 50% and customers pushing out deals and reserving cash — that’s the canary in the coal mine. VC reality check: A healthy return from fantasy valuations Over the last several years, venture funding has become an increasingly crowded space, with investors fiercely competing with fast and highly priced term sheets. It’s been an age of unicorns, megafunds, and skyrocketing valuations. The current reset might be the forcing function for the industry to return to reality. The first area to be impacted will be the growth rounds, or fundings over $25 million. Up until a few weeks ago, it was a common occurrence to see companies raising $100 million rounds. A large number of VC firms have been throwing money at companies that have achieved very early revenue momentum — around $10 million or more of annual recurring revenue (ARR). This shift has been happening slowly over the last 10 years, with private companies staying private for longer to achieve more scale to go public. In the SaaS world, it was typical for these growth stage firms to pay 10 to 20 times forward projected ARR. Interestingly these valuations were significantly higher than their peers in the public markets, where the best-in-class highest growth public companies were trading at 15 to 20 times forward ending GAAP revenue. This created a huge discrepancy, where large firms were paying significantly higher prices for growth-stage private companies than the public companies. Meanwhile, these privately held businesses still had an extraordinary amount of risk and company-building in front of them. Those days are gone. To raise venture capital, startups will now have to show more tangible value and demonstrate more proof points. Entrepreneurs should expect more due diligence from investors and longer fundraising cycles at much lower prices. Stock market lunacy and a multi-quarter lull My instinct tells me that we’ll see venture return once we better understand the trajectory of the virus growth. However, the floodgates will not open immediately as long as there is massive uncertainty remaining over unemployment and the overall trajectory of the economy. In my experience, the value of the public markets consistently influences the vast majority of venture investors at all stages — despite this being lunacy for early-stage investors whose companies won’t see the public market for another seven to 10 years. So as the stock market fluctuates — in my opinion it will drop another 20 to 30%, or even more if you adjust for all earnings coming down — we may be in for a multi-quarter lull in venture activity. Most investments will likely pause in the near term, with many firms sitting on the sidelines until the dust settles. I believe we’ll see long-term investors re-engage in the next one to three months. But it won’t be the CVCs, it won’t be mutual funds, and it won’t be at the same prices. We’ll see pricing expectations come down in the next one to two quarters. A healthy reboot We will likely see a protracted, deep recession with 20 to 30% unemployment and various significant double digit negative GDP growth year over year for three to four quarters before some return to normalcy. We are also looking at two years for the venture ecosystem to recover. But even then, it’s unlikely we’ll see a full return to the landscape of the last few years — meaning the late 2010’s could have been the peak of venture capital as we know it. Given the ridiculously high valuations and the insanely difficult hiring environment, this may actually be a healthy reset. Even in this environment, there will continue to be massive technology innovation. Early-stage companies that grow up in this “new normal” and adjust their businesses to the post-pandemic world are more likely to succeed. I believe the old adage to be true: The best companies are built during challenging times. Jason Pressman is Managing Director at Silicon Valley VC firm Shasta Ventures. VentureBeat's mission is to be a digital town square for technical decision-makers to gain knowledge about transformative enterprise technology and transact. Discover our Briefings. The AI Impact Tour Join us for an evening full of networking and insights at VentureBeat's AI Impact Tour, coming to San Francisco, New York, and Los Angeles! VentureBeat Homepage Follow us on Facebook Follow us on X Follow us on LinkedIn Follow us on RSS Press Releases Contact Us Advertise Share a News Tip Contribute to DataDecisionMakers Careers Privacy Policy Terms of Service Do Not Sell My Personal Information © 2023 VentureBeat. All rights reserved. "
4,220	2,020	"Amazon reports $75.5 billion in Q1 2020 revenue: AWS up 33%, subscriptions up 28%, and 'other' up 44% \| VentureBeat"	"https://venturebeat.com/commerce/amazon-earnings-q1-2020"	"Artificial Intelligence View All AI, ML and Deep Learning Auto ML Data Labelling Synthetic Data Conversational AI NLP Text-to-Speech Security View All Data Security and Privacy Network Security and Privacy Software Security Computer Hardware Security Cloud and Data Storage Security Data Infrastructure View All Data Science Data Management Data Storage and Cloud Big Data and Analytics Data Networks Automation View All Industrial Automation Business Process Automation Development Automation Robotic Process Automation Test Automation Enterprise Analytics View All Business Intelligence Disaster Recovery Business Continuity Statistical Analysis Predictive Analysis More Data Decision Makers Virtual Communication Team Collaboration UCaaS Virtual Reality Collaboration Virtual Employee Experience Programming & Development Product Development Application Development Test Management Development Languages Amazon reports $75.5 billion in Q1 2020 revenue: AWS up 33%, subscriptions up 28%, and ‘other’ up 44% Share on Facebook Share on X Share on LinkedIn Are you ready to bring more awareness to your brand? Consider becoming a sponsor for The AI Impact Tour. Learn more about the opportunities here. Amazon today reported earnings for its first fiscal quarter of 2020, including revenue of $75.5 billion, net income of $2.5 billion, and earnings per share of $5.01 (compared to revenue of $59.7 billion, net income of $3.6 billion, and earnings per share of $7.09 in Q1 2019 ). North American sales were up 29% to $46.1 billion, while international sales grew 18% to $19.1 billion. Amazon’s leadership position in online retail and the cloud makes it a bellwether during the coronavirus pandemic. In short, revenue was up but profit was down. Analysts had expected Amazon to earn $73.61 billion in revenue and report earnings per share of $6.25. The retail giant beat on revenue but missed on earnings per share. The company’s stock was up 4% in regular trading and down 4% in after-hours trading. Amazon gave second-quarter revenue guidance in the range of $75.0 billion and $81.0 billion, compared to a consensus of $78 billion from analysts. All of that looked good to investors, except for this line: “This guidance assumes approximately $4.0 billion of costs related to COVID-19.” COVID-19 concerns Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos provided a longer-than-usual statement, given the company’s role during the pandemic and the coronavirus’ impact on its bottom line. Bezos name-checked AWS, Prime Video, and Fire TV; said essential workers were an inspiration; and noted that the company’s business has “never been more critical.” Then he addressed investors directly about that $4 billion: If you’re a shareowner in Amazon, you may want to take a seat, because we’re not thinking small. Under normal circumstances, in this coming Q2, we’d expect to make some $4 billion or more in operating profit. But these aren’t normal circumstances. Instead, we expect to spend the entirety of that $4 billion, and perhaps a bit more, on COVID-related expenses getting products to customers and keeping employees safe. This includes investments in personal protective equipment, enhanced cleaning of our facilities, less efficient process paths that better allow for effective social distancing, higher wages for hourly teams, and hundreds of millions to develop our own COVID-19 testing capabilities. There is a lot of uncertainty in the world right now, and the best investment we can make is in the safety and well-being of our hundreds of thousands of employees. I’m confident that our long-term oriented shareowners will understand and embrace our approach, and that in fact they would expect no less. Of the $4 billion figure, some $300 million will be dedicated to developing the company’s own COVID-19 testing capabilities. “We put some of our best people on it — I think everyone is trying to get testing,” CFO Brian Olsavsky said on the earnings call. VB Event The AI Impact Tour Connect with the enterprise AI community at VentureBeat’s AI Impact Tour coming to a city near you! In short, Amazon is going to spend money, not just make money, in response to the pandemic. Investors don’t like to hear that, and so the stock is down. Further related to COVID-19, Amazon says it has procured 100 million face masks and is “requiring that they be worn by all associates, drivers, and support staff.” The company also purchased more than 1,000 thermal cameras and 31,000 thermometers. Those will be used “to conduct mandatory daily temperature checks for employees and support staff throughout our operations sites and Whole Foods Market stores.” In fact, Whole Foods Market stores will offer masks to customers. AWS is now a $10 billion business Amazon Web Services (AWS) passed the $10 billion milestone in Q1, even as growth continues to slow down. In Q2 2019 , AWS growth fell to 37% — the first sub-40% growth rate since Amazon started breaking out AWS numbers. Then growth slipped to 35% in Q3 2019 , 34% in Q4 2019 , and now 33% in Q1 2020. It would appear that COVID-19 has done little to change the trend — next quarter we’ll know for sure. $AMZN AWS revenue growth – Q1 2017: 43% – Q2 2017: 42% – Q3 2017: 42% – Q4 2017: 45% – Q1 2018: 49% – Q2 2018: 49% – Q3 2018: 48% – Q4 2018: 45% – Q1 2019: 41% – Q2 2019: 37% – Q3 2019: 35% – Q4 2019: 34% – Q1 2020: 33% https://t.co/h1uSmr9KMv — Emil Protalinski (@EPro) April 30, 2020 AWS is the cloud computing market leader, ahead of Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud. High-percentage growth cannot continue unabated. And for a market leader, growth of 33% in sales to $10.2 billion is nothing to scoff at. AWS accounted for about 13.5% of Amazon’s total revenue for the quarter, which is on the higher end. Subscriptions and “other” (ads) Subscription services were up 28% to $5.56 billion. This segment mainly constitutes Amazon Prime and its 150 million paid members. Amazon didn’t want to talk much about Prime today, aside from Prime Video. That arm launched a premium movie rental offering — Prime Video Cinema — in the U.S., the U.K., and Germany for streaming in-theater movies at home. That’s right, everywhere you look there’s a pandemic tidbit. Amazon’s “other” category, which mostly covers the company’s advertising business, was up 44% to $3.91 billion in revenue. The company knows plenty about what its customers want to buy, or don’t want to buy, and it’s increasingly leveraging this for its advertising business. In Q4 2019, Olsavsky said on the earnings call that “it’s still early,” but the company was using machine learning to “drive better relevancy.” On the Q1 2020 earnings call, he noted that Amazon saw “some pullback from advertisers and some downward pressure on price” in March. On the flipside, it wasn’t “as noticeable as maybe some others are seeing, and probably offset a bit by the continued strong traffic we have to the site. So it’s a bit of a mixed bag. A large portion of our advertising relates to Amazon sales, not things like travel and auto off-site, which may have been disproportionately impacted at least early on here in the COVID-19 crisis. I think our advertising will prove to be very efficient as well. It can be directly measured so even as people are cutting back, perhaps on advertising, or their costs, I think this will be one area that will prove its value. It has in the past.” As always, Alexa was mentioned many times (12, to be exact) in the company’s press release, even though Amazon won’t break out the voice assistant in its earnings reports. The company did note that Alexa “can now answer tens of thousands of questions related to COVID-19.” VentureBeat's mission is to be a digital town square for technical decision-makers to gain knowledge about transformative enterprise technology and transact. Discover our Briefings. The AI Impact Tour Join us for an evening full of networking and insights at VentureBeat's AI Impact Tour, coming to San Francisco, New York, and Los Angeles! VentureBeat Homepage Follow us on Facebook Follow us on X Follow us on LinkedIn Follow us on RSS Press Releases Contact Us Advertise Share a News Tip Contribute to DataDecisionMakers Careers Privacy Policy Terms of Service Do Not Sell My Personal Information © 2023 VentureBeat. All rights reserved. "
4,221	2,020	"Yamaha Motor Ventures Co-Leads Seed Funding Round for Food Supply Chain Technology Startup Strella Biotechnology \| VentureBeat"	"https://venturebeat.com/business/yamaha-motor-ventures-co-leads-seed-funding-round-for-food-supply-chain-technology-startup-strella-biotechnology"	"Artificial Intelligence View All AI, ML and Deep Learning Auto ML Data Labelling Synthetic Data Conversational AI NLP Text-to-Speech Security View All Data Security and Privacy Network Security and Privacy Software Security Computer Hardware Security Cloud and Data Storage Security Data Infrastructure View All Data Science Data Management Data Storage and Cloud Big Data and Analytics Data Networks Automation View All Industrial Automation Business Process Automation Development Automation Robotic Process Automation Test Automation Enterprise Analytics View All Business Intelligence Disaster Recovery Business Continuity Statistical Analysis Predictive Analysis More Data Decision Makers Virtual Communication Team Collaboration UCaaS Virtual Reality Collaboration Virtual Employee Experience Programming & Development Product Development Application Development Test Management Development Languages Press Release Yamaha Motor Ventures Co-Leads Seed Funding Round for Food Supply Chain Technology Startup Strella Biotechnology Share on Facebook Share on X Share on LinkedIn SILICON VALLEY, Calif.–(BUSINESS WIRE)–April 30, 2020– Yamaha Motor Ventures & Laboratory Silicon Valley (“YMVSV”), the strategic business development and investment arm of Yamaha Motor Co., Ltd. (“YMC”) (Tokyo: 7272), today announced it co-led a $3.3 million seed funding round for Strella Biotechnology (Strella Biotech), an early stage agriculture technology team. Strella Biotech brings shelf life visibility to the fresh produce supply chain. The Company’s technology combines novel IoT biosensors with actionable insights to maximize freshness and reduce spoilage of fruit. Leveraging the USD $100 million Yamaha Motor Exploratory Fund (the “Fund”), the Strella Biotech investment is the latest in YMVSV’s portfolio of ag tech enterprises focused on technological solutions to food supply chain challenges. “Yamaha Motor remains keenly interested in teams applying innovative approaches to improving quality and increasing efficiency within the global food supply chain,” said Nolan Paul, Partner and Global Ag Tech Lead for YMVSV. “Strella Biotechnology takes on the real-world challenge of food waste in a simple, yet sophisticated, technological approach that is already making a difference in delivering more, higher quality produce to consumers.” The oversubscribed seed funding round for Strella Biotech co-led by YMVSV and Catapult Ventures raised a total $3.3 million U.S. with additional investments from Union Labs, Mark Cuban Red & Blue Ventures, and supply chain pioneer Art Mesher. The funding will support the company’s product expansion into the retail distribution market, refining its technology for on-pallet sensing to allow data streaming throughout transportation to ensure better product selection by distributors and product quality at delivery to grocery stores. To date, Strella has monitored nearly 150 million fruits in the packing segment of the supply chain, where some fruits are stored for up to a year to accommodate for demand. Fruit packers use Strella technology to predict fruit maturation in storage and schedule shipments to retailers, resulting in reduced food spoilage. “This is an incredibly exciting time in the lifecycle of Strella Biotech and to have Yamaha Motor Ventures as a partner to help deliver our food waste solution to the global market is very validating,” said Katherine Sizov, CEO of Strella Biotechnology. “Gaining access to both funding and expertise from Yamaha will help us scale and evolve our ethylene-sensing IP and we look forward to our path forward together.” About Strella Biotechnology Taking on the challenge of $1 trillion in global food waste, Strella Biotechnology provides actionable data to optimize the fresh produce supply chain. With proprietary biosensor technology fueled by Internet-of-Things capabilities, Strella Biotech offers a data-driven approach to ensuring fruit quality throughout every segment of the supply chain. Strella Biotech is working to help produce companies increase their margins and decrease shrink by providing dynamic shelf life predictions. Strella Biotechnology is committed to supporting lower carbon emissions from the fresh produce industry and increasing sustainability for a healthier planet. For more information, visit www.strellaBiotech.com. About Yamaha Motor Ventures & Laboratory Silicon Valley Yamaha Motor Ventures & Laboratory Silicon Valley is a wholly-owned subsidiary of YMC. Founded in 2015 in support of YMC’s long-term goal to contribute to society through business, YMVSV manages the Yamaha Motor Exploratory Fund, a USD $100 million investment fund with a 10-year lifecycle focused on seed to Series B investments. Headquartered in the home of innovation, Silicon Valley, Calif., YMVSV offers a wealth of business development resources to startup companies to drive innovation forward in the fields of mobility, sustainability, robotics, food and agriculture, health and wellness, and aviation. For more information visit www.ymvsv.com View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20200430005069/en/ MEDIA CONTACT: Lisa Spicer For Yamaha Motor Ventures & Laboratory Silicon Valley [email protected] VentureBeat's mission is to be a digital town square for technical decision-makers to gain knowledge about transformative enterprise technology and transact. Discover our Briefings. VentureBeat Homepage Follow us on Facebook Follow us on X Follow us on LinkedIn Follow us on RSS Press Releases Contact Us Advertise Share a News Tip Contribute to DataDecisionMakers Careers Privacy Policy Terms of Service Do Not Sell My Personal Information © 2023 VentureBeat. All rights reserved. "
4,222	2,020	"Why financial services need to make customer advocacy a priority (VB Live) \| VentureBeat"	"https://venturebeat.com/business/why-financial-services-need-to-make-customer-advocacy-a-priority-vb-live"	"Artificial Intelligence View All AI, ML and Deep Learning Auto ML Data Labelling Synthetic Data Conversational AI NLP Text-to-Speech Security View All Data Security and Privacy Network Security and Privacy Software Security Computer Hardware Security Cloud and Data Storage Security Data Infrastructure View All Data Science Data Management Data Storage and Cloud Big Data and Analytics Data Networks Automation View All Industrial Automation Business Process Automation Development Automation Robotic Process Automation Test Automation Enterprise Analytics View All Business Intelligence Disaster Recovery Business Continuity Statistical Analysis Predictive Analysis More Data Decision Makers Virtual Communication Team Collaboration UCaaS Virtual Reality Collaboration Virtual Employee Experience Programming & Development Product Development Application Development Test Management Development Languages VB Live Why financial services need to make customer advocacy a priority (VB Live) Share on Facebook Share on X Share on LinkedIn Presented by Yodlee \| Envestnet Catch this VB Live event for key findings from Forrester’s report on customer advocacy in the financial services sector, “The State Of Open Banking In Australia”, and why improving customer perceptions is not only good for your brand, but good for your bottom line — especially in these uncertain times. Access for free on demand right here. Your customers don’t think you’re any different from your competitors, says Alyson Clarke, Principal Analyst at Forrester. “Over the past few years, we’ve seen a huge lack of differentiation in financial services,” Clarke says. “You may think you’re different, but consumers think all banks are the same, all investment firms are the same.” Forrester’s research and insight around customer experience, engagement, and driving customer loyalty shows that the quality of the customer experience is what drives loyalty. What they call the three Es are the major drivers of customer experience: effectiveness, ease, and emotion. The Forrester model, called the Product to Customer Experience Index, measures how successfully a company delivers customer experiences that can create and sustain loyalty. They found that the drivers of customer loyalty are how good the experience is in delivering value to the customer, the ease with which customers can gain value from the experience, and how customers feel about their experience. In the end, loyalty comes down to retention, their interest in buying more from you, and their willingness to recommend you to others, Clarke says. But in Forrester’s customer experience index research, analysts found that around 30% of respondents strongly agree that all banks or investment firms are the same. While this answer is pretty consistent across all generations, that number shoots up to 37% with older millennials — the generation financial services firms are most interested in targeting as they buy houses and start families. Where financial services firms fall down the most is around that third E, emotion, Clarke says. Why does emotion matter? Because it has a significantly bigger impact on brand loyalty and revenue than effectiveness or ease. “This is the golden secret that so many firms have not quite understood yet,” she says. “Firms that excel at customer experience, and as a consequence excel at revenue growth, at a rate that’s much faster than their peers, typically score around 70% on the element of emotion.” These are the firms that are spending all their time investing in making digital experiences really easy and simple for customers. But the bar has now been raised, because people expect those experiences to be flawless. For instance, she points to Amazon Prime, which has led customers to demand that two-day delivery be the standard. That ease and effectiveness have become table stakes — but it doesn’t necessarily make customers loyal, she emphasizes again. It’s emotion that makes them loyal, emotion that makes your customers stickier in the long run. Personalization is one of the best ways to drive emotion, Clarke says, because it drives a one-to-one relationship with your customer. Even with an unknown prospect, you can still personalize the experience by asking questions, just like you would in getting to know a new friend. “You don’t grab a bunch of data and then assume things about the person you’re meeting,” Clarke says. “Instead, you get information, and you try to understand them. As they build trust and they trust you, you get more information from them, and you can share more information back.” You might have a basic segmentation understanding of your customer. But as the information flow ramps up, and you build a one-to-one relationship, your customer becomes willing to share more information, which in return, enables you to share insights and valuable information back to that customer. “It’s a two-way street,” Clarke says. “This can help drive emotion when it’s done right, because personalization can create a competitive advantage that can’t be replicated.” When you build that connection with the customer, that two-way information flow, it’s very hard for a competitor to come in and steal that customer away. They could come in with a cheaper price or new features, but customers tend to be a lot more forgiving when there’s that strong emotional connection that can come from personalization — they’re so much stickier, and they’re so much more forgiving. “You don’t need to be the cheapest, you don’t need to have the best interest rate, because they have a relationship with you,” she says. “They just trust you.” To learn how to actually build that kind of connection with your customers, what kind of personalized experiences customers are particularly interested in — and which drive them off — as well as real case studies from the financial services companies that are driving strong customer relationships in a world changed by a pandemic, don’t miss this VB Live event! Access for free on demand here. Attend the webinar to discover: How advocating for customers drives a sustainable competitive advantage Why the wealth management sector scored highest for customer advocacy in a recent Forrester survey How customer advocacy is linked to increased future purchase intent How to improve customer engagement through hyper-personalized digital banking experiences Guest speakers: Alyson Clarke , Principal Analyst, Forrester Dustin Walsey , Co-founder and CEO, Buckle Jim Del Favero , Chief Product Officer, Personal Capital Katy Gibson , VP, Application Products, Envestnet \| Yodlee Evan Schuman , Moderator, VentureBeat The AI Impact Tour Join us for an evening full of networking and insights at VentureBeat's AI Impact Tour, coming to San Francisco, New York, and Los Angeles! VentureBeat Homepage Follow us on Facebook Follow us on X Follow us on LinkedIn Follow us on RSS Press Releases Contact Us Advertise Share a News Tip Contribute to DataDecisionMakers Careers Privacy Policy Terms of Service Do Not Sell My Personal Information © 2023 VentureBeat. All rights reserved. "
4,223	2,020	"Vida Health raises $25 million to treat chronic health conditions remotely \| VentureBeat"	"https://venturebeat.com/business/vida-health-raises-25-million-to-treat-chronic-health-conditions-remotely"	"Artificial Intelligence View All AI, ML and Deep Learning Auto ML Data Labelling Synthetic Data Conversational AI NLP Text-to-Speech Security View All Data Security and Privacy Network Security and Privacy Software Security Computer Hardware Security Cloud and Data Storage Security Data Infrastructure View All Data Science Data Management Data Storage and Cloud Big Data and Analytics Data Networks Automation View All Industrial Automation Business Process Automation Development Automation Robotic Process Automation Test Automation Enterprise Analytics View All Business Intelligence Disaster Recovery Business Continuity Statistical Analysis Predictive Analysis More Data Decision Makers Virtual Communication Team Collaboration UCaaS Virtual Reality Collaboration Virtual Employee Experience Programming & Development Product Development Application Development Test Management Development Languages Vida Health raises $25 million to treat chronic health conditions remotely Share on Facebook Share on X Share on LinkedIn Are you looking to showcase your brand in front of the brightest minds of the gaming industry? Consider getting a custom GamesBeat sponsorship. Learn more. Vida Health , a virtual health care platform that connects people with chronic ailments to professional therapists and coaches, has raised $25 million to meet the “increased demand” for remote care — particularly around mental health. As with other virtual health-focused platforms, Vida said that it has seen a spike in demand for its service during the COVID-19 pandemic, which has pushed millions of businesses and consumers into lockdown. Indeed, the company said that since COVID-19 was declared a pandemic in early March, it has launched to more than 500,000 new end users, bringing the total number of people covered by its platform to over 1.4 million. Founded out of San Francisco in 2014, Vida targets those with conditions such as diabetes, depression, anxiety, and high blood pressure, and pairs them with a personal trainer, nutritionist, nurse, therapist, or other relevant support professional. The company’s platform also leverages machine learning to crunch data and personalize each user’s treatment plan. The Vida app can integrate with many popular health and fitness apps and devices, including Fitbit and Apple Watch, giving coaches direct access to their users’ vital stats — with this data, they can develop and tailor plans as the data changes over time. Built-in messaging and chat functionality also allows them to communicate in real time. Enterprises represent a major part of Vida’s target market, and it’s typically offered as part of a company’s health care benefits. Vida also sells device “bundles” that include contraptions such as heart-rate monitors, scales, blood pressure cuffs, activity trackers, glucometers, and more. VB Event The AI Impact Tour Connect with the enterprise AI community at VentureBeat’s AI Impact Tour coming to a city near you! Above: Vida Health bundle Health boom Prior to now, Vida had raised $53 million, and with another $25 million in the bank it’s well-financed to capitalize on what will likely prove to be a boom period for the virtual health care industry. Pre-pandemic figures from MarketsAndMarkets had the global telehealth market pegged as a $25 billion industry, and this had been expected to double within five years. However, with the coronavirus forcing industries across the spectrum to adapt to social distancing, the telehealth market could be set to grow exponentially. In the past few weeks alone, we’ve seen some sizable funding rounds plowed into the remote health care realm. Tyto Care, for example, raised $50 million to grow its telehealth examination and diagnostic platform, which includes a health kit that anyone can use at home to test their lungs, heart, throat, ears, skin, abdomen, and body temperature and transmit the data to their doctor. And earlier this week, Medici, which is a little like WhatsApp for remote medical care, secured $24 million. Vida’s latest funding round was led by global life science investment firm Ally Bridge Group (ABG), with participation from Yahoo cofounder Jerry Yang’s AME Cloud Ventures, Nokia-backed NGP Capital, Aspect Ventures, Canvas Ventures, Webb Investment Network, and Workday Ventures. VentureBeat's mission is to be a digital town square for technical decision-makers to gain knowledge about transformative enterprise technology and transact. Discover our Briefings. The AI Impact Tour Join us for an evening full of networking and insights at VentureBeat's AI Impact Tour, coming to San Francisco, New York, and Los Angeles! VentureBeat Homepage Follow us on Facebook Follow us on X Follow us on LinkedIn Follow us on RSS Press Releases Contact Us Advertise Share a News Tip Contribute to DataDecisionMakers Careers Privacy Policy Terms of Service Do Not Sell My Personal Information © 2023 VentureBeat. All rights reserved. "
4,224	2,020	"Udemy: Online course enrollment surged 425% amid lockdowns \| VentureBeat"	"https://venturebeat.com/business/udemy-online-course-enrollment-surged-425-amid-lockdowns"	"Artificial Intelligence View All AI, ML and Deep Learning Auto ML Data Labelling Synthetic Data Conversational AI NLP Text-to-Speech Security View All Data Security and Privacy Network Security and Privacy Software Security Computer Hardware Security Cloud and Data Storage Security Data Infrastructure View All Data Science Data Management Data Storage and Cloud Big Data and Analytics Data Networks Automation View All Industrial Automation Business Process Automation Development Automation Robotic Process Automation Test Automation Enterprise Analytics View All Business Intelligence Disaster Recovery Business Continuity Statistical Analysis Predictive Analysis More Data Decision Makers Virtual Communication Team Collaboration UCaaS Virtual Reality Collaboration Virtual Employee Experience Programming & Development Product Development Application Development Test Management Development Languages Udemy: Online course enrollment surged 425% amid lockdowns Share on Facebook Share on X Share on LinkedIn A Udemy logo seen displayed on a smartphone. Are you looking to showcase your brand in front of the brightest minds of the gaming industry? Consider getting a custom GamesBeat sponsorship. Learn more. Udemy has released data highlighting people’s move to online learning during lockdown and the specific courses they’re enrolling in. The San Francisco-based company, one of the prominent platforms in the “massively open online course” (MOOC) movement, said it saw a more than 400% spike in course enrollments for individuals between February and March. Business and government use increased by 80%, while instructors created 55% more new courses. The data supports other reports from around the world that indicate the online learning industry has been boosted by lockdown measures designed to curb the spread of COVID-19. It also follows a similar trend in the business realm, which has seen demand for remote-working tools go through the roof. Spike Udemy’s data indicates that demand was starting to increase slightly in early March, before the first national lockdown was ordered in Italy on March 11. As countries around the world followed suit in the subsequent weeks, enrollments increased by 425% in late March from the previous month’s baseline. In April, growth has largely remained above 300%. VB Event The AI Impact Tour Connect with the enterprise AI community at VentureBeat’s AI Impact Tour coming to a city near you! Above: Udemy enrollment growth The types of courses people have been taking reveal a lot about their current circumstances. According to Udemy’s figures, in the U.S. people have been leaning toward creative courses, with Adobe Illustrator lessons up 326%, while India has seen a 281% rise in business fundamentals and a 606% growth in communication skills. Italy, meanwhile, saw a 431% rise in people seeking guitar lessons, followed by copywriting (418%) and Photoshop (347%). Looking at the top-line growth figures, technical drawing has seen the biggest overall surge, with an increase of 920%, followed by art for kids (531%), pilates (402%), and coding for kids (375%). In tech skills, specifically, Google’s open source machine learning framework Tensorflow has been in high demand, with a 46% increase. Above: Udemy course demand Founded in 2010, Udemy has claimed some 50 million student enrollments in its 10-year history, spanning 150,000 courses — ranging from communication and team management to coding and data science. Udemy raised $50 million in funding less than two months ago — valuing the company at $2 billion. Figures from before the pandemic indicated that the global e-learning market was gearing up to reach $319 billion by 2025, up from $188 billion in 2019. With online work and education likely to become the norm for the foreseeable future, things are looking rosy for Udemy and its ilk. Moreover, Udemy’s data indicates that people are turning to online learning for both personal hobbies and professional development, underscoring how big its potential market could be. VentureBeat's mission is to be a digital town square for technical decision-makers to gain knowledge about transformative enterprise technology and transact. Discover our Briefings. The AI Impact Tour Join us for an evening full of networking and insights at VentureBeat's AI Impact Tour, coming to San Francisco, New York, and Los Angeles! VentureBeat Homepage Follow us on Facebook Follow us on X Follow us on LinkedIn Follow us on RSS Press Releases Contact Us Advertise Share a News Tip Contribute to DataDecisionMakers Careers Privacy Policy Terms of Service Do Not Sell My Personal Information © 2023 VentureBeat. All rights reserved. "
4,225	2,020	"Twitter beats Q1 2020 revenue estimates as coronavirus drives engagement \| VentureBeat"	"https://venturebeat.com/business/twitter-beats-q1-2020-revenue-estimates-as-coronavirus-drives-engagement"	"Artificial Intelligence View All AI, ML and Deep Learning Auto ML Data Labelling Synthetic Data Conversational AI NLP Text-to-Speech Security View All Data Security and Privacy Network Security and Privacy Software Security Computer Hardware Security Cloud and Data Storage Security Data Infrastructure View All Data Science Data Management Data Storage and Cloud Big Data and Analytics Data Networks Automation View All Industrial Automation Business Process Automation Development Automation Robotic Process Automation Test Automation Enterprise Analytics View All Business Intelligence Disaster Recovery Business Continuity Statistical Analysis Predictive Analysis More Data Decision Makers Virtual Communication Team Collaboration UCaaS Virtual Reality Collaboration Virtual Employee Experience Programming & Development Product Development Application Development Test Management Development Languages Twitter beats Q1 2020 revenue estimates as coronavirus drives engagement Share on Facebook Share on X Share on LinkedIn Are you ready to bring more awareness to your brand? Consider becoming a sponsor for The AI Impact Tour. Learn more about the opportunities here. Twitter reported that its Q1 revenue increased 3% to top analysts’ estimates as it continued to struggle outside the U.S. due to product issues and coronavirus quarantines. For the first three months of 2020 , Twitter had $808 million in revenue, up from $786.9 million for the same period one year ago and well ahead of the $776 million projected by analysts. That bump in revenue seemed to come mainly from Twitter’s efforts to more effectively monetize its current user base. Twitter uses a self-invented metric called “Monetizable Daily Active Usage” (mDAU) to track the efficiency of its advertising system. Twitter defines mDAU as “users who logged in or were otherwise authenticated and accessed Twitter on any given day through Twitter.com or Twitter applications that are able to show ads.” For Q1, the company said mDAU grew 24% year-over-year to 166 million, up from 134 million the previous year and 152 million in the previous quarter. In a letter to shareholders , the company attributed that increase to “seasonal strength, ongoing product improvements, and global conversation related to the COVID-19 pandemic.” As a result, U.S. revenue was $468 million, up 8% year-over-year, but international revenue was $339 million, down 4% year-over-year. Twitter blamed the latter on problems it continues to have with personalization and data settings for its mobile app, as well as the impact of COVID-19 in the Asia region. Twitter reported a loss of $8 million for the quarter, or $.01 per share, beating the average estimate of a $.02 per share loss. Due to uncertainty surrounding the coronavirus, the company did not offer any guidance on future earnings. VentureBeat's mission is to be a digital town square for technical decision-makers to gain knowledge about transformative enterprise technology and transact. Discover our Briefings. VentureBeat Homepage Follow us on Facebook Follow us on X Follow us on LinkedIn Follow us on RSS Press Releases Contact Us Advertise Share a News Tip Contribute to DataDecisionMakers Careers Privacy Policy Terms of Service Do Not Sell My Personal Information © 2023 VentureBeat. All rights reserved. "
4,226	2,020	"The game industry is still in the raising 'awareness' phase of helping climate change \| VentureBeat"	"https://venturebeat.com/business/the-game-industry-can-have-a-great-impact-on-climate-change-but-its-still-in-the-awareness-phase"	"Artificial Intelligence View All AI, ML and Deep Learning Auto ML Data Labelling Synthetic Data Conversational AI NLP Text-to-Speech Security View All Data Security and Privacy Network Security and Privacy Software Security Computer Hardware Security Cloud and Data Storage Security Data Infrastructure View All Data Science Data Management Data Storage and Cloud Big Data and Analytics Data Networks Automation View All Industrial Automation Business Process Automation Development Automation Robotic Process Automation Test Automation Enterprise Analytics View All Business Intelligence Disaster Recovery Business Continuity Statistical Analysis Predictive Analysis More Data Decision Makers Virtual Communication Team Collaboration UCaaS Virtual Reality Collaboration Virtual Employee Experience Programming & Development Product Development Application Development Test Management Development Languages The game industry is still in the raising ‘awareness’ phase of helping climate change Share on Facebook Share on X Share on LinkedIn Are you looking to showcase your brand in front of the brightest minds of the gaming industry? Consider getting a custom GamesBeat sponsorship. Learn more. One of the biggest impacts that media can have on environmentalism is spreading awareness that can then lead to practical action such as legislation. Rachel Carson’s book, Silent Springs , documented environmental effects caused by the indiscriminate use of pesticides which helped lead to the environmental movement in 1962. “You could draw a direct line to the creation of the EPA in America,” said E-Line Media cofounder Alan Gershenfeld, who’s currently developing an ocean exploration game called Beyond Blue. “Even photographs, like the Earth Rise photograph by William Anders on Apollo 8, raised awareness of the idea of a singular planet.” Gershenfeld said that games can have a similar impact on the world. He was one of four panelists, who all serve as part of the United Nations’ Playing for the Planet Alliance (a collaboration with the video gaming industry to inspire environmental action), discussing how the game industry can impact climate change on the second day of the GamesBeat Summit 2020. They went over how the game industry is helping combat global warming. Gershenfeld explored two ways that video games can inspire change. The first are games that are “already committed go deeper” on a specific issue, behavior, or piece of legislation while the second are games that explore an issue more broadly to spread awareness. He said his game, Beyond Blue, is trying to get players to think about the current state of the ocean. Event GamesBeat at the Game Awards We invite you to join us in LA for GamesBeat at the Game Awards event this December 7. Reserve your spot now as space is limited! The panelists all agreed that games have the potential to have an impact similar to Silent Springs , but the industry is still in the process of working toward that goal. “The environmental themes are rising up more and more, especially in the storytelling and action genres in games,” said Pietari Päivänen, who is in charge of special projects — such as environmental-related initiatives — at Supercell. “We are of course a way younger form of entertainment compared to books and moves. So we’re in the raising awareness side of things I’d say.” Gershenfeld mentioned climate change-themed mods in Minecraft and City: Skylines as a concrete way games have made players think about the environment. “They have to immerse yourself in that subject, as a modder,” he said. “That’s powerful.” Gershenfeld and other panelists say that the industry-wide push for a greener world has grown. “I actually think the push is coming from all angles,” Gershenfeld said of how both consumers and developers are more environmentally minded. “The recent climate marches had over 4 million youth out on the street globally, so there is an audience […] and the tools for making games are becoming more and more democratized, you’re seeing middle school and high school kids making games and they have provocative impact themes. It’s an impact generation.” Above: “The Power of Games for Climate Change” features Alan Gershenfeld of E-Line Media; Mathias Norvig of Sybo; Pietari Päivänen of Supercell; moderated by Sam Barratt of UN Environment. Studios can still make more practical changes at a ground level in order to combat climate change. Päivänen talked about how Supercell became carbon-negative by evaluating the footprint that their flights to other studios, their servers, and the energy consumption by their players and offset them. “It’s not that complicated,” he said. “The first thing you should be aware of is the calculation isn’t an exact science.” Päivänen and others mentioned that studios should hold an initial meeting as a starting point to get their own climate change projects rolling. “The challenge is then, when you have a game with 100 million [monthly active users] that small changes can be impactful in a good way, and they can take away the experience for players who liked it as it was,” said SYBO Games CEO Mathias Nørvig, who develops Subway Surfers, a popular mobile endless runner. “The first change we implemented was to put in environmental messaging in the game environment. We’re currently in Iceland for Easter and you’ll see windmills in the background. When we were in Austin, you’d see solar panels on the roof.” Nørvig said that changes like this may be small, especially compared to story-driven titles, but their impact can be significant. “It means that 100 million players are seeing windmills and solar panels,” he said. “We hope that encourages conversations in families and regions that haven’t had it before.” GamesBeat's creed when covering the game industry is "where passion meets business." What does this mean? We want to tell you how the news matters to you -- not just as a decision-maker at a game studio, but also as a fan of games. Whether you read our articles, listen to our podcasts, or watch our videos, GamesBeat will help you learn about the industry and enjoy engaging with it. Discover our Briefings. Join the GamesBeat community! Enjoy access to special events, private newsletters and more. 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4,227	2,020	"SearchUnify Announces Colubridae '20 to Elevate Search Experience \| VentureBeat"	"https://venturebeat.com/business/searchunify-announces-colubridae-20-to-elevate-search-experience"	"Artificial Intelligence View All AI, ML and Deep Learning Auto ML Data Labelling Synthetic Data Conversational AI NLP Text-to-Speech Security View All Data Security and Privacy Network Security and Privacy Software Security Computer Hardware Security Cloud and Data Storage Security Data Infrastructure View All Data Science Data Management Data Storage and Cloud Big Data and Analytics Data Networks Automation View All Industrial Automation Business Process Automation Development Automation Robotic Process Automation Test Automation Enterprise Analytics View All Business Intelligence Disaster Recovery Business Continuity Statistical Analysis Predictive Analysis More Data Decision Makers Virtual Communication Team Collaboration UCaaS Virtual Reality Collaboration Virtual Employee Experience Programming & Development Product Development Application Development Test Management Development Languages Press Release SearchUnify Announces Colubridae ’20 to Elevate Search Experience Share on Facebook Share on X Share on LinkedIn SUNNYVALE, Calif.–(BUSINESS WIRE)–April 30, 2020– SearchUnify, an award-winning cognitive search platform, announced the general availability of its annual Spring release, Colubridae ’20, from April 30, 2020. Keeping in mind the changing priorities of businesses, in these ever-evolving times, it aims to facilitate collaboration , upskilling, and information discovery & access among remote working teams. To that end, it introduces product installation for SharePoint, AEM, Higher Logic, and chatbot webhooks for creating automated workflows for seamless information exchange with third-party applications. On top of that, it packs a slew of other updates that elevate the user search experience. “We’re dedicated to empowering enterprises with a highly versatile platform that helps make data-backed decisions and deliver better outcomes, with the power of augmented intelligence ,” says Vishal Sharma, CTO at SearchUnify. “A lot has changed under the hood. First, we’ve introduced a community helper – a search powered bot to answer questions in your community discussions. The solution now analyzes and reports more data w.r.t case creation. We’ve also given KCS the attention it deserves with a dedicated space to effectively monitor your KM program. The chatbot too underwent several updates to enhance answer quality and availability,” he added. Embodying SearchUnify’s core promise of delivering seamless connectivity to all the major enterprise platforms and cloud solutions, the release also ushers in the support for several new content sources and search clients. SearchUnify has always worked very closely with leading research firms and best practice authorities like the Consortium for Service Innovation and TSIA. It received the KCS V6 certification by the Consortium for Service Innovation. The KCS enabler application, which helps organizations drive KCS adoption successfully, saw an overwhelming response from its customers. In the new release, the app has been upgraded significantly to enable organizations to measure the success of KCS implementation. The company’s vision to build chatbots on top of the cognitive search technology, in stark contrast to building standalone chatbots, was duly noted by TSIA in one of its latest reports about chatbots , in which it recommended SearchUnify chatbots as “best of breed”. To the goal of building a smart chatbot that involves minimal manual training, driven by unsupervised yet controlled learning, SearchUnify has further upgraded its chatbots in Colubridae ’20. Earlier this year, TSIA had recognized another of SearchUnify apps built on top of the cognitive search technology, Agent Helper, that assisted support agents with responding to customer cases, as “next-gen”. The new release introduces Community Helper to assist community managers and teams with taking community engagement to the next level. “As customer expectations evolve rapidly, it is paramount that we continue to find innovative solutions to their key problems,” said Alok Ramsisaria, CEO at SearchUnify’s parent company, Grazitti Interactive. “With Colubridae ’20, we can help enterprises paint a clearer picture of where they stand. Ultimately, it empowers them to improve search adoption, time to value, and experience. And that’s precisely what we strive for,” he added. To learn more, click here. About SearchUnify SearchUnify is a unified cognitive search platform that revolutionizes information discovery, fuels an insight engine , and makes for a robust platform for AI-based apps like customer-facing and agent-assist chatbots. Its AI powers relevant and personalized search results for customers, partners, and employees across industries including e-commerce, high tech, education, pharmaceuticals, and banking and insurance. It indexes disparate content repositories , makes relevant content easily discoverable, and provides advanced insights into user search behavior, content usability , and content gaps – all while self-learning to personalize the experience and ensuring the security of the enterprise data. View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20200430005667/en/ Media Ajay Paul Singh [email protected] +1 650 (603) 0902 VentureBeat's mission is to be a digital town square for technical decision-makers to gain knowledge about transformative enterprise technology and transact. Discover our Briefings. VentureBeat Homepage Follow us on Facebook Follow us on X Follow us on LinkedIn Follow us on RSS Press Releases Contact Us Advertise Share a News Tip Contribute to DataDecisionMakers Careers Privacy Policy Terms of Service Do Not Sell My Personal Information © 2023 VentureBeat. All rights reserved. "
4,228	2,020	"PwC's workplace contact tracing app won't share info with public health officials \| VentureBeat"	"https://venturebeat.com/business/pwcs-workplace-contact-tracing-app-wont-share-info-with-public-health-officials"	"Artificial Intelligence View All AI, ML and Deep Learning Auto ML Data Labelling Synthetic Data Conversational AI NLP Text-to-Speech Security View All Data Security and Privacy Network Security and Privacy Software Security Computer Hardware Security Cloud and Data Storage Security Data Infrastructure View All Data Science Data Management Data Storage and Cloud Big Data and Analytics Data Networks Automation View All Industrial Automation Business Process Automation Development Automation Robotic Process Automation Test Automation Enterprise Analytics View All Business Intelligence Disaster Recovery Business Continuity Statistical Analysis Predictive Analysis More Data Decision Makers Virtual Communication Team Collaboration UCaaS Virtual Reality Collaboration Virtual Employee Experience Programming & Development Product Development Application Development Test Management Development Languages PwC’s workplace contact tracing app won’t share info with public health officials Share on Facebook Share on X Share on LinkedIn PricewaterhouseCoopers automated workplace contact tracing app Are you ready to bring more awareness to your brand? Consider becoming a sponsor for The AI Impact Tour. Learn more about the opportunities here. As some countries declare the end of coronavirus community spread and plan for a safe return to work, surveillance technology appears to be becoming a much bigger part of the workplace. Already real-time computer vision and thermal cameras are beginning to enter the workplace to ensure social distancing or find people with elevated temperatures, and last week, PricewaterhouseCooper (PwC) introduced automatic contact tracing called Check-In for enterprise businesses to track employees. But contact tracing for large offices or businesses might look very different than solutions created for public health authorities such as that from a joint Apple-Google venture. Instead of sending a smartphone notification when a person tests positive, HR or company leadership can use the PwC service to generate a list of employees, assess employee contact risk levels, and contact employees considered most at risk of exposure. In this context, your company’s HR or crisis management officials take the role of contact tracers. PwC also has no plans to share information about its solution with local public health officials. And it has no plans to integrate with open source Bluetooth protocols like the one from the TCN Coalition made for sharing contact events across multiple apps and services. Depending on where you work, the solution may also be mandatory for employees, but it only tracks people within the geofenced confines of the workplace, PwC connected solutions and IoT lead Rob Mesirow told VentureBeat in a phone interview. Mesirow argues that if Fortune 1000 companies adopt a mandatory solution, it could be quickly adopted by tens of millions of people. VB Event The AI Impact Tour Connect with the enterprise AI community at VentureBeat’s AI Impact Tour coming to a city near you! “You really want to have as close to 100% participation as you can possibly get to make contact tracing effective, and how do you do that? You do that inside an enterprise,” he said. “I think it’s a tall order outside the enterprise because of adoption. If it doesn’t work in a small island nation like Singapore that has a lot more influence and power over their population, it’s going to be very difficult for it to work in a country as large and free as the United States.” PwC declined to share the number of clients who are using its solution but said associates are in talks with clients in retail, hospitality, factories, industrial environments, and financial services. Alongside prisons, cruise ships, and nursing homes, some of the largest COVID-19 outbreaks to date in the U.S. have occurred in meat processing facilities, and that appears to be contributing to a growing COVID-19 case count. In one Iowa county, 90% of cases can be tied back to a Tyson meat processing plant. Mesirow said he could see contact tracing solutions developing both inside and outside the workplace, but they might need each other in order to be truly effective. The historic joint venture between Apple and Google that created interoperability between Android and iOS devices will not enable employers to track employees, since that data is being made available only to public health officials. A test version of Apple and Google’s solution launched this week , while an API for contact tracing apps is due out in the coming weeks. Consumers’ lack of trust in Apple and Google could be a barrier to adoption, according to a Washington Post poll released today. EU officials last week predicted that in order to be effective, contact tracing apps must reach adoption rates as high as 60%. The Apple-Google solution, and others being developed by multinational coalitions, rely on decentralized Bluetooth contact tracing , while PwC’s solution uses a combination of Wi-Fi and Bluetooth. Businesses may be highly incentivized to put contact tracing apps in place because there’s a lot at stake. A workplace COVID-19 outbreak can cause closures, kill clients or employees, reduce profits, interrupt supply chains, or continue community spread that lengthens shelter-in-place closures. There’s also the prospect of legal liability or negligence claims. For their part, employees who believe a tracking app can help them feel safe — or who feel pressured to adopt tracking tech — may also be more likely to agree to download a dedicated app or more than a dozen PwC apps getting an SDK update to enable tracking. PwC’s solution can work on both employees’ personal devices and employer-issued hardware. “Unlike a lot of parts of the world, in the U.S. the employer is the main supplier for health care. So there’s some real skin in the game as it relates to protecting the health and well-being of our workforce,” Mesirow said. Under ideal circumstances, a workplace contact tracing app could keep businesses from shutting down unnecessarily as a precaution when there’s a local case. But like contact tracing apps put forward by public health officials, workplace-linked automated contact tracing faces some immediately recognizable challenges and limitations. One office in a skyscraper using the solution, for example, could lead an employer to believe everything is fine while community spread settles in nearby, increasing the likelihood of widespread outbreak. Because many carriers are asymptomatic, the virus can spread without any indication that anything is wrong. Though some states are already reopening establishments like restaurants and bowling alleys, areas like the San Francisco Bay Area will continue shelter-in-place orders for most jobs until June 1. Public health experts say some regions of the country won’t hit their peak number of COVID-19 cases for weeks, and that national testing capacity must quadruple before the United States economy can resume normal activity. Other workplace solutions are also under development: Private Kit: Safe Paths, a contact tracing app out of MIT in conversations with several governments around the world, is being released as a Windows 10 version for the workplace. VentureBeat's mission is to be a digital town square for technical decision-makers to gain knowledge about transformative enterprise technology and transact. Discover our Briefings. The AI Impact Tour Join us for an evening full of networking and insights at VentureBeat's AI Impact Tour, coming to San Francisco, New York, and Los Angeles! 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4,229	2,020	"Newzoo will extract analytics insights from Reddit's gamers \| VentureBeat"	"https://venturebeat.com/business/newzoo-will-extract-analytics-insights-from-reddits-gamers"	"Artificial Intelligence View All AI, ML and Deep Learning Auto ML Data Labelling Synthetic Data Conversational AI NLP Text-to-Speech Security View All Data Security and Privacy Network Security and Privacy Software Security Computer Hardware Security Cloud and Data Storage Security Data Infrastructure View All Data Science Data Management Data Storage and Cloud Big Data and Analytics Data Networks Automation View All Industrial Automation Business Process Automation Development Automation Robotic Process Automation Test Automation Enterprise Analytics View All Business Intelligence Disaster Recovery Business Continuity Statistical Analysis Predictive Analysis More Data Decision Makers Virtual Communication Team Collaboration UCaaS Virtual Reality Collaboration Virtual Employee Experience Programming & Development Product Development Application Development Test Management Development Languages Newzoo will extract analytics insights from Reddit’s gamers Share on Facebook Share on X Share on LinkedIn Reddit and Newzoo have teamed up to analyze gamers. Are you looking to showcase your brand in front of the brightest minds of the gaming industry? Consider getting a custom GamesBeat sponsorship. Learn more. Game and esports market researcher Newzoo has teamed up with social network Reddit to extract details on consumer engagement with video games. It’s an interesting partnership, because many of Reddit’s 430 million monthly active users are deeply engaged with games, and Newzoo will be able to mine the audience for data that is relevant to its analysis of the game market, the companies said. The firm will combine its existing data on games with community insights from gaming’s biggest social platform. As part of the collaboration, Newzoo now has access to Reddit’s aggregated data on games engagement, fueled by the social community platform’s users. The first phase of its implementation enables users to browse the engagement from Reddit’s main gaming-related subreddits and benchmark the level of community activity around any game IP, using a variety of metrics such as total subscribers, posts per day, and comments per day. Event GamesBeat at the Game Awards We invite you to join us in LA for GamesBeat at the Game Awards event this December 7. Reserve your spot now as space is limited! In addition to using feedback from its clients, Newzoo will expand these insights over time. Both companies also envision creating unique insights and metrics by combining social, viewing and gaming engagement data, valuable to game developers, publishers, and any other market with an interest in games. GamesBeat's creed when covering the game industry is "where passion meets business." What does this mean? We want to tell you how the news matters to you -- not just as a decision-maker at a game studio, but also as a fan of games. Whether you read our articles, listen to our podcasts, or watch our videos, GamesBeat will help you learn about the industry and enjoy engaging with it. Discover our Briefings. Join the GamesBeat community! Enjoy access to special events, private newsletters and more. VentureBeat Homepage Follow us on Facebook Follow us on X Follow us on LinkedIn Follow us on RSS Press Releases Contact Us Advertise Share a News Tip Contribute to DataDecisionMakers Careers Privacy Policy Terms of Service Do Not Sell My Personal Information © 2023 VentureBeat. All rights reserved. "
4,230	2,020	"Microsoft rebrands Visual Studio Online as Visual Studio Codespaces, cuts pricing by over 60% \| VentureBeat"	"https://venturebeat.com/business/microsoft-visual-studio-online-codespaces-pricing"	"Artificial Intelligence View All AI, ML and Deep Learning Auto ML Data Labelling Synthetic Data Conversational AI NLP Text-to-Speech Security View All Data Security and Privacy Network Security and Privacy Software Security Computer Hardware Security Cloud and Data Storage Security Data Infrastructure View All Data Science Data Management Data Storage and Cloud Big Data and Analytics Data Networks Automation View All Industrial Automation Business Process Automation Development Automation Robotic Process Automation Test Automation Enterprise Analytics View All Business Intelligence Disaster Recovery Business Continuity Statistical Analysis Predictive Analysis More Data Decision Makers Virtual Communication Team Collaboration UCaaS Virtual Reality Collaboration Virtual Employee Experience Programming & Development Product Development Application Development Test Management Development Languages Microsoft rebrands Visual Studio Online as Visual Studio Codespaces, cuts pricing by over 60% Share on Facebook Share on X Share on LinkedIn Are you looking to showcase your brand in front of the brightest minds of the gaming industry? Consider getting a custom GamesBeat sponsorship. Learn more. Not a month goes by without Microsoft rebranding something. Visual Studio Online is now Visual Studio Codespaces. It’s still the same remote development tool, though: Visual Studio, cloud-hosted developer environments, and a web-based editor meshed together. Most importantly, Microsoft will be slashing pricing on May 19. At its Build 2019 developers conference in May, Microsoft announced Visual Studio Online in private preview and then released a public preview at Ignite 2019 in November. Visual Studio Codespaces lets you access remote environments from common templates, clone from a GitHub repo, and edit code in a browser. I’m not sure if Visual Studio Codespaces is a better brand, but Visual Studio Online never got quite the message across. It’s not just an online version of Visual Studio, but more a cloud-hosted dev environment that speeds up project onboarding, lets you switch between local environments and the browser-based editor, and integrates Live Share for coauthoring, editing, and debugging. Visual Studio Codespaces is a response to a bigger trend wherein AI, big data, and cloud computing are shifting development beyond the “standard issue development laptop,” as Microsoft puts it. That was happening long before the coronavirus pandemic arrived, but it’s more important now as millions of developers are working from home. Microsoft, like many tech companies, is jostling to offer the best tools “that will help you be productive from wherever you’re working.” Lower prices A price cut never hurts. On May 19, when the digital Build 2020 event is supposed to kick off, Microsoft will start charging less for the time and resources developers use. The company will then post full details on the pricing page and calculator. VB Event The AI Impact Tour Connect with the enterprise AI community at VentureBeat’s AI Impact Tour coming to a city near you! Microsoft is also introducing a new instance type for the scenarios that do not require much power. The basic instance type (2 virtual cores, 4GB RAM) costs $0.24 per hour when it launches today and will go to $0.08 per hour next month (67% less). Update on May 1 : Microsoft accelerated the pricing change for the basic instance. $0.08 per hour is effective day. The existing two instance types will also get cheaper. The standard Linux instance type (4 cores, 8GB RAM) will go from $0.45 per hour to $0.17 per hour (62% less). The premium Linux instance type (8 cores, 16GB RAM) will go from $0.87 per hour to $0.34 per hour (61% less). A Codespace, as Microsoft now calls it, also incurs storage charges ($0.0088 an hour for a 64GB SSD), billed to the second. Developers will still be able to create and delete Codespaces at any time. If you want to avoid being charged at all, Microsoft recommends self-hosted environments. You can register any machine to Visual Studio Codespaces and connect to it from either Visual Studio Code or the browser-based editor. You’ll have to pay your own costs, but at least Microsoft won’t charge you anything. VentureBeat's mission is to be a digital town square for technical decision-makers to gain knowledge about transformative enterprise technology and transact. Discover our Briefings. The AI Impact Tour Join us for an evening full of networking and insights at VentureBeat's AI Impact Tour, coming to San Francisco, New York, and Los Angeles! 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4,231	2,020	"LinkedIn's AI gives job candidates feedback on their interview answers \| VentureBeat"	"https://venturebeat.com/business/linkedins-ai-gives-job-candidates-feedback-on-their-interview-answers"	"Artificial Intelligence View All AI, ML and Deep Learning Auto ML Data Labelling Synthetic Data Conversational AI NLP Text-to-Speech Security View All Data Security and Privacy Network Security and Privacy Software Security Computer Hardware Security Cloud and Data Storage Security Data Infrastructure View All Data Science Data Management Data Storage and Cloud Big Data and Analytics Data Networks Automation View All Industrial Automation Business Process Automation Development Automation Robotic Process Automation Test Automation Enterprise Analytics View All Business Intelligence Disaster Recovery Business Continuity Statistical Analysis Predictive Analysis More Data Decision Makers Virtual Communication Team Collaboration UCaaS Virtual Reality Collaboration Virtual Employee Experience Programming & Development Product Development Application Development Test Management Development Languages LinkedIn’s AI gives job candidates feedback on their interview answers Share on Facebook Share on X Share on LinkedIn Are you looking to showcase your brand in front of the brightest minds of the gaming industry? Consider getting a custom GamesBeat sponsorship. Learn more. LinkedIn today announced a new AI-powered feedback tool for people practicing answers to job interview questions. The Microsoft-owned company claims that in early tests, it resulted in a “significant increase” in LinkedIn members rehearsing their answers. The tool taps into technology Microsoft developed for Presenter Coach , a PowerPoint feature designed to provide guidance with respect to pacing, tone, and attention, and it could be of use to the more than 50% of people who say they lack confidence during interviews. Candidates have reason to be nervous — content agency Come Recommended reports that 33% of interviewers claim they know if they’ll hire someone within the first 90 seconds. With the new AI practice feature, once LinkedIn members record and upload their answers, they get a detailed assessment of their answer delivery within seconds. This includes a report with metrics like filler words used and their frequency, words per minute, and speed over time, as well as feedback on cadence, profanity, and phrases that might be considered culturally insensitive. VB Event The AI Impact Tour Connect with the enterprise AI community at VentureBeat’s AI Impact Tour coming to a city near you! For instance, the LinkedIn tool detects the pace of speech and recommends changes that might help interviewees better understand facts and figures. If a user inserts a disfluency like “um,” “ah,” “like,” “actually,” or “basically” or makes a potentially gender-charged reference like “you guys” or “the best man for the job,” it will recommend alternatives. “This [new tool] provides an interactive way to practice answers to the most common interview questions in private,” wrote LinkedIn senior director of product Blake Barnes in a blog post. “Interview prep also gives you the ability to request personal feedback on your practice responses from your connections.” LinkedIn today also launched a feature in preview called video introductions, which allows employers to request that candidates submit recordings or written snippets as a part of the hiring process. The aim is to enable hiring managers to assess a would-be employee’s communication skills prior to the first live interview; LinkedIn says that 92% of talent professionals consider soft skills (e.g., people and social skills) equally or more important for hire than hard skills (teachable and measurable abilities). With video introductions, recruiters can invite the most qualified candidates to answer up to two questions from a list of options including “Tell me about yourself,” “What is your greatest strength?,” and “Describe your most challenging project.” Candidates can choose to submit their answers via a short video recording or a written response. “It can be hard to know if a candidate is the right fit for a role simply by reviewing a resume, and it can be even harder to get a feel for who might be right for a position when you are sorting through hundreds of candidate profiles, And, in today’s virtual environment where the majority of the interview process has moved online, streamlining the hiring process to help fill critical roles quickly is essential,” wrote LinkedIn in a press release. “In early testing, we found this feature to be helpful in hiring for roles in which soft skills are of great importance, like sales and business development.” LinkedIn says it’ll test video introductions in a “rolling process” with global customers using LinkedIn’s New Recruiter and Jobs products. Those participating will be able to add video intro requirements to new and existing job listings either from the last page of the posting process or from the Project Settings page in the New Recruiting & Jobs dashboard. When looking through their applicant list, they’ll see an Invite to Video Intro option under the overflow action menu, which will prompt them to set up a video intro. VentureBeat's mission is to be a digital town square for technical decision-makers to gain knowledge about transformative enterprise technology and transact. Discover our Briefings. The AI Impact Tour Join us for an evening full of networking and insights at VentureBeat's AI Impact Tour, coming to San Francisco, New York, and Los Angeles! VentureBeat Homepage Follow us on Facebook Follow us on X Follow us on LinkedIn Follow us on RSS Press Releases Contact Us Advertise Share a News Tip Contribute to DataDecisionMakers Careers Privacy Policy Terms of Service Do Not Sell My Personal Information © 2023 VentureBeat. All rights reserved. "
4,232	2,020	"Learn how to start a podcast with this $45 online training bundle \| VentureBeat"	"https://venturebeat.com/business/learn-how-to-start-a-podcast-with-this-45-online-training-bundle"	"Artificial Intelligence View All AI, ML and Deep Learning Auto ML Data Labelling Synthetic Data Conversational AI NLP Text-to-Speech Security View All Data Security and Privacy Network Security and Privacy Software Security Computer Hardware Security Cloud and Data Storage Security Data Infrastructure View All Data Science Data Management Data Storage and Cloud Big Data and Analytics Data Networks Automation View All Industrial Automation Business Process Automation Development Automation Robotic Process Automation Test Automation Enterprise Analytics View All Business Intelligence Disaster Recovery Business Continuity Statistical Analysis Predictive Analysis More Data Decision Makers Virtual Communication Team Collaboration UCaaS Virtual Reality Collaboration Virtual Employee Experience Programming & Development Product Development Application Development Test Management Development Languages Sponsored Deals Learn how to start a podcast with this $45 online training bundle Share on Facebook Share on X Share on LinkedIn There has never been a better time to start your podcast. There are now over 60 million Americans listening to podcasts each week, according to Edison Research Infinite Dial 2020 , and that number is still growing. If you’re looking for a change in profession or have an idea for the next big podcast, The Start-to-Finish Guide to Launching a Successful Podcast Bundle can help your get started, and it’s just $45 right now. This bundle includes nine courses with over 541 lessons chock full of useful info and actionable tips to get you recording right now. You’ll learn all the basics, including how to choose and set up your gear, record professional intros and outros, and publish your podcast live on numerous platforms, including iTunes, Stitcher, and iHeartRadio. You’ll also delve into how to edit and mix like a pro using free and professional applications, including Logic Pro X. Through the course, you’ll learn the basics of audio engineering, including how to use audio plugins to mix voiceovers. Plus, you’ll learn how to create quality content by injecting more of your personality into the product. You’ll also learn how to grow your audience, market your passion project, and, perhaps most importantly, how to earn money from your podcast. Better still, this bundle grants you lifetime access to lessons that are invaluable outside of podcasting. For instance, the “Mind Mapping Mastery Course” included in the package offers you tips on how to organize thoughts and ideas effectively, and how to deliver speeches and presentations effectively to maximize your readers’ understanding. With over 39 hours of expert-led training valued at over $1,800, The Start-to-Finish Guide to Launching a Successful Podcast Bundle can help you jump start your podcasting career. VentureBeat readers can get lifetime access to this bundle for just $45 — over 90 percent off retail price. If you’re serious about your podcasting idea, you’re unlikely to find a better deal. VentureBeat Deals is a partnership between VentureBeat and StackCommerce. This post does not constitute editorial endorsement. If you have any questions about the products you see here or previous purchases, please contact StackCommerce support here. VentureBeat's mission is to be a digital town square for technical decision-makers to gain knowledge about transformative enterprise technology and transact. Discover our Briefings. VentureBeat Homepage Follow us on Facebook Follow us on X Follow us on LinkedIn Follow us on RSS Press Releases Contact Us Advertise Share a News Tip Contribute to DataDecisionMakers Careers Privacy Policy Terms of Service Do Not Sell My Personal Information © 2023 VentureBeat. All rights reserved. "
4,233	2,020	"Intel launches S-Series CPUs primed for gamers \| VentureBeat"	"https://venturebeat.com/business/intel-launches-s-series-cpus-primed-for-gamers"	"Artificial Intelligence View All AI, ML and Deep Learning Auto ML Data Labelling Synthetic Data Conversational AI NLP Text-to-Speech Security View All Data Security and Privacy Network Security and Privacy Software Security Computer Hardware Security Cloud and Data Storage Security Data Infrastructure View All Data Science Data Management Data Storage and Cloud Big Data and Analytics Data Networks Automation View All Industrial Automation Business Process Automation Development Automation Robotic Process Automation Test Automation Enterprise Analytics View All Business Intelligence Disaster Recovery Business Continuity Statistical Analysis Predictive Analysis More Data Decision Makers Virtual Communication Team Collaboration UCaaS Virtual Reality Collaboration Virtual Employee Experience Programming & Development Product Development Application Development Test Management Development Languages Intel launches S-Series CPUs primed for gamers Share on Facebook Share on X Share on LinkedIn Intel claims it has the fastest gaming processor. Are you looking to showcase your brand in front of the brightest minds of the gaming industry? Consider getting a custom GamesBeat sponsorship. Learn more. The competition in processors between Intel and Advanced Micro Devices heats up today as Intel launches its S-Series family of microprocessors targeted at gaming machines. AMD has Intel beat on core counts with 16 cores and 32 threads, while Intel’s latest processors have 10 cores and 20 threads. But Intel’s processors are clocked higher at up to 5.3GHz, compared with AMD’s at 4.7GHz. That’s a close competition and much closer than AMD has ever been before. But Intel claims it now has the edge over AMD with its turbo-boost frequency that reaches up to 5.3 GHz. Of course, this means that in some cases with multithreaded games, AMD will do better, and Intel could do better with single-threaded games. Intel claims that most games and applications still depend on high-frequency cores, and so faster clock speeds will lead to better framerates. Intel said that Sega’s Total War: Three Kingdoms dynasty mode has been optimized for the new Intel processor. As a result, players will see as many as six times more soldiers onscreen at a time. That’s should make the graphics a lot prettier. Sega’s Creative Assembly developed the dynasty mode in partnership with Intel so players can fight off waves of attackers. Event GamesBeat at the Game Awards We invite you to join us in LA for GamesBeat at the Game Awards event this December 7. Reserve your spot now as space is limited! Meanwhile, Intel says that a feature dubbed Software Masked Occlusion Culling can tap better CPU resources to eliminate culling artifacts from Remnant: From the Ashes. Intel has added some new overclocking features as well. Intel said that its processor can run PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds 10% faster in frames per second compared to its previous generation of chips, and 63% faster than a three-year-old PC. GamesBeat's creed when covering the game industry is "where passion meets business." What does this mean? We want to tell you how the news matters to you -- not just as a decision-maker at a game studio, but also as a fan of games. Whether you read our articles, listen to our podcasts, or watch our videos, GamesBeat will help you learn about the industry and enjoy engaging with it. Discover our Briefings. Join the GamesBeat community! Enjoy access to special events, private newsletters and more. VentureBeat Homepage Follow us on Facebook Follow us on X Follow us on LinkedIn Follow us on RSS Press Releases Contact Us Advertise Share a News Tip Contribute to DataDecisionMakers Careers Privacy Policy Terms of Service Do Not Sell My Personal Information © 2023 VentureBeat. All rights reserved. "
4,234	2,020	"InsideBoard Raises 25 million Euros to Enable Corporate Digital Transformation \| VentureBeat"	"https://venturebeat.com/business/insideboard-raises-25-million-euros-to-enable-corporate-digital-transformation"	"Artificial Intelligence View All AI, ML and Deep Learning Auto ML Data Labelling Synthetic Data Conversational AI NLP Text-to-Speech Security View All Data Security and Privacy Network Security and Privacy Software Security Computer Hardware Security Cloud and Data Storage Security Data Infrastructure View All Data Science Data Management Data Storage and Cloud Big Data and Analytics Data Networks Automation View All Industrial Automation Business Process Automation Development Automation Robotic Process Automation Test Automation Enterprise Analytics View All Business Intelligence Disaster Recovery Business Continuity Statistical Analysis Predictive Analysis More Data Decision Makers Virtual Communication Team Collaboration UCaaS Virtual Reality Collaboration Virtual Employee Experience Programming & Development Product Development Application Development Test Management Development Languages Press Release InsideBoard Raises 25 million Euros to Enable Corporate Digital Transformation Share on Facebook Share on X Share on LinkedIn AXA Venture Partners, Orange Ventures and ISAI Cap Venture, acquire stake in InsideBoard, the 1 st platform for organizational change management PARIS–(BUSINESS WIRE)–April 30, 2020– InsideBoard, the start-up vendor of the first SaaS platform for organizational change management based on Artificial Intelligence, raises 25 million euros from a second funding round conducted by AXA Venture Partners, with the participation of Orange Ventures and ISAI Cap Venture, thus joining forces with its historical fund, Entrepreneur Venture. “ This funding is a powerful signal that it is absolutely crucial for companies to engage their employees, massively and remotely, in achieving successful digital transformation and developing the skills of their human capital. It endorses InsideBoard’s founding vision: businesses can only reinvent themselves if they use individual potential to boost collective transformation,” says Michaël Bentolila, co-founder and CEO of InsideBoard. 25 million euros to accelerate international growth The funding will foster InsideBoard’s expansion abroad – particularly in the United States, and to support artificial intelligence-based product development and the empowerment of its consulting partners, with the coming launch of the latest version of its API. InsideBoard ambition: become the leading SaaS platform to engage teams remotely in the corporate transformation success Businesses no longer have any choice: they must revolutionize their approach to change management if they are going to succeed. Until now, 75% of transformation projects failed, because they were based on a traditional approach to change management that focused primarily on training. With InsideBoard, businesses now have a single platform that provides all the key employee engagement drivers needed to secure transformation projects’ employee adoption, wherever they work. “ InsideBoard’s artificial intelligence allows us to understand each employee’s particular engagement mechanisms and thus guide them, one step at a time, towards the achievement of their goals. Thanks to InsideBoard, employees can now get involved in just the same way as they already do in their everyday applications,” says Yohan Bentolila, co-founder and CTO of InsideBoard. Gartner Consulting named the InsideBoard platform as a leader in the Digital Adoption Solutions segment, consisting of platforms that are crucial to the success of transformation projects. Software vendor Salesforce, meanwhile, awarded its 2020 French ISV Partner of the Year prize to InsideBoard, in the “Customer & Partner Success” category. For more information: Web site: www.insideboard.com Twitter: @insideboard_tw View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20200430005359/en/ Press contacts: Agence Henry Conseil Nadia Rodionoff [email protected] Tel: +33-1-46-22-76-43 VentureBeat's mission is to be a digital town square for technical decision-makers to gain knowledge about transformative enterprise technology and transact. Discover our Briefings. VentureBeat Homepage Follow us on Facebook Follow us on X Follow us on LinkedIn Follow us on RSS Press Releases Contact Us Advertise Share a News Tip Contribute to DataDecisionMakers Careers Privacy Policy Terms of Service Do Not Sell My Personal Information © 2023 VentureBeat. All rights reserved. "
4,235	2,020	"Adjust CTO Paul Müller: Hypercasuals have permanently changed the app marketing playbook \| VentureBeat"	"https://venturebeat.com/business/hypercasuals-have-permanently-changed-the-app-marketing-playbook-says-paul-muller-cto-at-adjust"	"Artificial Intelligence View All AI, ML and Deep Learning Auto ML Data Labelling Synthetic Data Conversational AI NLP Text-to-Speech Security View All Data Security and Privacy Network Security and Privacy Software Security Computer Hardware Security Cloud and Data Storage Security Data Infrastructure View All Data Science Data Management Data Storage and Cloud Big Data and Analytics Data Networks Automation View All Industrial Automation Business Process Automation Development Automation Robotic Process Automation Test Automation Enterprise Analytics View All Business Intelligence Disaster Recovery Business Continuity Statistical Analysis Predictive Analysis More Data Decision Makers Virtual Communication Team Collaboration UCaaS Virtual Reality Collaboration Virtual Employee Experience Programming & Development Product Development Application Development Test Management Development Languages Sponsored Adjust CTO Paul Müller: Hypercasuals have permanently changed the app marketing playbook Share on Facebook Share on X Share on LinkedIn Presented by Adjust The rise of hypercasuals in the gaming app space is dramatically transforming the industry and how automation is being used, says Paul Müller, co-founder and chief technology officer of Adjust. During his one-on-one interview with Dean Takahashi at GamesBeat 2020, Müller noted that hypercasuals are a relative newcomer on the scene, but they’ve disrupted the competition for user acquisition and ad monetization by harnessing automation to drive downloads at scale. Right now, hypercasuals dominate the top of the App store and Google Play Store, with an estimated $2 billion to $2.5 billion in annual revenue. That’s unlikely to change, with Goldman Sachs’ recent $200 million investment in one of the biggest hypercasual names, Voodoo. “Hypercasuals have changed how the app store game is played,” he explains. “Today, if you think you can just organically rank in the app stores and get some nice free organic downloads from there, I have bad news for you.” Hypercasual companies don’t look at the daily active users within a single app, but across their entire portfolio. They developed a system Müller calls the snowball effect, taking advantage of the naturally short-lived appeal of each of these games. As attention flags for one game, users are driven to the next app and then the next, rolling and growing the company’s user base. Hypercasuals leverage the way app store rankings work by rewarding new downloads, and basically transitioning active users at the end of an app’s lifetime to the next game. That makes the new one a huge success, and the game moves up the app store rankings. The strategy reached its absolute peak around the fall of last year, when hypercasuals dominated most of the top lists. Anything that wasn’t taken by the Googles and Facebooks of the world was taken by hypercasuals, until the share of hypercasuals gradually fell off as the app stores took note — but hypercasuals have made a permanent impact. Automation is the force driving hypercasual dominance of the app stores. It’s not humanly possible to manage the number of campaigns these games require. As Müller explains, if you have 20 campaigns across 20 networks, you have to manage 400 campaigns. If you want to adjust your bids and volumes on a day-to-day basis, optimize your creatives, and run a lot of A/B tests to see what works, that’s a lot of work for a typical UA department. But now imagine you want to publish 100 games, 200 games, he continues. By adding another dimension, multiplying that by 100 or more, that becomes 40,000 or 80,000. It would take millions of clicks for enough UA managers to manage 80,000 bids and volumes — and you’d have to hire hundreds of people to manage that. Automation technology helps them not just do this at the same scale as before, but to take it further. They can now add more zeroes. Why stop at running 400 campaigns for a single app if you can run 40,000, or 400,000, with a machine doing all the heavy lifting. “What we’re currently doing is pushing that boundary,” Müller says. “What you see is not just some type of linear increase in ability. What you see is a complete transformation of what the marketer [themselves] ends up doing.” But while there’s a transformation in capability with automation, the human element is still crucial, Müller says, because marketing ultimately is about human connection. It’s about having your message reach the right people at the right time, to tell the story of your company. “A lot of companies talk about how a machine will replace marketers altogether, but I don’t believe that machines, at least at the moment, are good at being witty, or making a contextual joke, or just delivering the right message to another human,” he says. “What machines are great at is doing extremely repetitive things.” One of the biggest changes, Müller notes, is that automation is not taking away the jobs of marketers, but giving them better jobs. Marketers are now using their time to come up with better ideas, to try more A/B tests on a campaign — to try different creative, to try different messages, to try different targeting — and figure out what works well. They’re also freed up to focus on actual contextual approaches to individual audiences, specifically when it comes to retargeting. Automation is unlocking new campaign playbooks too, Müller says. For instance, you can prevent churn by catching the user who’s lost three games in a row and gets frustrated, and very easily reach out to that slice of users, before they quit in a huff, and say, “I want to optimize this campaign for their amount of sessions within the first 24 hours of engaging with this ad. You can look at any of a hundred points in your game to find opportunities to upsell, offer discounts for in-app purchases, and any other number of possibilities.” “What happens here is that UA transforms from just pouring in new users at the top to taking your users and increasing their LTV,” Müller says. “The impact UA could have on your operation as a whole would explode. Already it has a pretty big role for most gaming clients, but this would truly elevate it to a different level. This is the kind of technology that we’re thinking about.” Sponsored articles are content produced by a company that is either paying for the post or has a business relationship with VentureBeat, and they’re always clearly marked. Content produced by our editorial team is never influenced by advertisers or sponsors in any way. For more information, contact [email protected]. The AI Impact Tour Join us for an evening full of networking and insights at VentureBeat's AI Impact Tour, coming to San Francisco, New York, and Los Angeles! VentureBeat Homepage Follow us on Facebook Follow us on X Follow us on LinkedIn Follow us on RSS Press Releases Contact Us Advertise Share a News Tip Contribute to DataDecisionMakers Careers Privacy Policy Terms of Service Do Not Sell My Personal Information © 2023 VentureBeat. All rights reserved. "
4,236	2,020	"HTC launches Vive Sync app to let remote teams collaborate in VR \| VentureBeat"	"https://venturebeat.com/business/htc-launches-vive-sync-app-to-let-remote-teams-collaborate-in-vr"	"Artificial Intelligence View All AI, ML and Deep Learning Auto ML Data Labelling Synthetic Data Conversational AI NLP Text-to-Speech Security View All Data Security and Privacy Network Security and Privacy Software Security Computer Hardware Security Cloud and Data Storage Security Data Infrastructure View All Data Science Data Management Data Storage and Cloud Big Data and Analytics Data Networks Automation View All Industrial Automation Business Process Automation Development Automation Robotic Process Automation Test Automation Enterprise Analytics View All Business Intelligence Disaster Recovery Business Continuity Statistical Analysis Predictive Analysis More Data Decision Makers Virtual Communication Team Collaboration UCaaS Virtual Reality Collaboration Virtual Employee Experience Programming & Development Product Development Application Development Test Management Development Languages HTC launches Vive Sync app to let remote teams collaborate in VR Share on Facebook Share on X Share on LinkedIn Vive Sync presentation Are you looking to showcase your brand in front of the brightest minds of the gaming industry? Consider getting a custom GamesBeat sponsorship. Learn more. HTC has launched a virtual reality (VR) collaboration and meeting app to capitalize on the rapid shift to remote working brought about by COVID-19. Vive Sync , as the new app is called, debuted back in 2018 , and the Taiwanese tech company has been piloting the service with a number of clients since then. Today, Vive Sync is being made available for free as part of an open beta program for all companies. The launch comes as remote-working tools have surged in popularity over the past couple of months due to the pandemic. Yesterday, Microsoft announced that its Teams collaborative software had passed 75 million daily active users , up 70% on the 44 million announced less than two months ago. Videoconferencing platform Zoom has also seen its user base jump from 10 million in December to more than 200 million in March, while Google Meet has now passed 100 million daily active users and is adding 3 million new users every day. With Vive Sync, HTC is looking to tap a market similar to that of Teams, Zoom, and Meet, but with added engagement and interactivity — vital for teams seeking to replicate a physical working environment as closely as possible. HTC exec David Sapienza said that the future of work is “rapidly becoming more global and more remote” and that VR will serve as a bridge to this new world. Event GamesBeat at the Game Awards We invite you to join us in LA for GamesBeat at the Game Awards event this December 7. Reserve your spot now as space is limited! The Vive Sync can accommodate up to 30 participants simultaneously, with support for collaborative meetings, presentations, press conferences, and any other types of interaction. Different “seating” arrangements are possible, including small conference tables or auditorium setups. Above: Vive Sync Vive Sync also integrates with Microsoft OneDrive to make it easier to virtually share files, such as PowerPoint presentations, PDFs, videos, and images that can be displayed on a giant screen. Above: Vive Sync video presentation Other notable features include a speech-to-text option that allows participants to take notes through verbal comments, and they can also take screenshots to refer back to, while 3D drawing and annotation tools are designed to replicate a real-life whiteboarding session. Above: HTC Vive Sync: Virtual drawing Using a separate mobile app called Sync Avatar Creator , users can create their own personalized avatars from scratch. When integrated with their profile on Vive Sync, they will essentially have a full life-like digital representation of themselves. Moreover, if the user adopts HTC Vive controllers and uses hardware that supports eye-tracking, such as the Vive Pro Eye , there is potential for more meaningful “interpersonal communication” involving body language and eye movements. Above: Vive Sync avatar creator While the COVID-19 crisis could push VR toward wider adoption in the enterprise, buying and maintaining hundreds or thousands of VR headsets will be resource-intensive, so it’s not likely to happen overnight. However, HTC is clearly eager to capitalize on what it sees as the early stages of a transition to virtual, immersive meetings. For now, Vive Sync is only compatible with Vive VR hardware, including standalone headsets and those that require a PC connection. However, HTC said in future it will introduce support for other devices, including Facebook’s Oculus Rift and Quest and Microsoft’s mixed reality HoloLens headsets. VentureBeat's mission is to be a digital town square for technical decision-makers to gain knowledge about transformative enterprise technology and transact. Discover our Briefings. The AI Impact Tour Join us for an evening full of networking and insights at VentureBeat's AI Impact Tour, coming to San Francisco, New York, and Los Angeles! VentureBeat Homepage Follow us on Facebook Follow us on X Follow us on LinkedIn Follow us on RSS Press Releases Contact Us Advertise Share a News Tip Contribute to DataDecisionMakers Careers Privacy Policy Terms of Service Do Not Sell My Personal Information © 2023 VentureBeat. All rights reserved. "
4,237	2,020	"Guilded raises $7 million for gaming chat platform \| VentureBeat"	"https://venturebeat.com/business/guilded-raises-7-million-for-gaming-chat-platform"	"Artificial Intelligence View All AI, ML and Deep Learning Auto ML Data Labelling Synthetic Data Conversational AI NLP Text-to-Speech Security View All Data Security and Privacy Network Security and Privacy Software Security Computer Hardware Security Cloud and Data Storage Security Data Infrastructure View All Data Science Data Management Data Storage and Cloud Big Data and Analytics Data Networks Automation View All Industrial Automation Business Process Automation Development Automation Robotic Process Automation Test Automation Enterprise Analytics View All Business Intelligence Disaster Recovery Business Continuity Statistical Analysis Predictive Analysis More Data Decision Makers Virtual Communication Team Collaboration UCaaS Virtual Reality Collaboration Virtual Employee Experience Programming & Development Product Development Application Development Test Management Development Languages Guilded raises $7 million for gaming chat platform Share on Facebook Share on X Share on LinkedIn Guilded is building a new chat platform for gamers. Are you looking to showcase your brand in front of the brightest minds of the gaming industry? Consider getting a custom GamesBeat sponsorship. Learn more. Guilded has raised $7 million to build what it calls the “ultimate chat platform for gaming communities.” It sounds a bit like rival chat platform Discord to me, but the San Francisco company has convinced some veteran investors to give it money. Matrix Partners led the round, with participation from Initialized Capital, Susa Ventures, and Sterling.VC. Ilya Sukhar, a general partner at Matrix Partners, joined the Guilded board. Guilded will use the capital to expand the company’s team, build out features and functionality, and create strategic partnerships with top games publishers and developers as well as esports teams and organizations. Guilded has already built features for gaming communities into the platform, including voice and video chat, group calendars, and scheduling tools. In June, Guilded will launch its tournaments feature. Event GamesBeat at the Game Awards We invite you to join us in LA for GamesBeat at the Game Awards event this December 7. Reserve your spot now as space is limited! CEO Eli Brown, a former pro gamer who previous was part of Instagram’s growth team and Microsoft’s Xbox division, founded Guilded in 2017. It serves professional esports teams and over 50,000 high school, collegiate, casual and semi-pro teams. The company has 15 employees. Reddit founder Alexis Ohanian, managing partner at Initialized Capital, said in a statement that he wishes Guilded was around when he was a teenager playing with an Everquest Guild. He said he is excited to support them on the next phase of their journey as they start to support tournaments, voice, video and more. In an email, Guilded said the big difference between Guilded and other platforms is that it is built from the ground up with gaming needs in mind (calendar/scheduling functionality, direct channels to games, unique features to support guilds, just to name a few). Guilded will be available through web browser but also as apps for Windows and Mac OSX as well as Google Play for Android devices and App Store for iPhone. GamesBeat's creed when covering the game industry is "where passion meets business." What does this mean? We want to tell you how the news matters to you -- not just as a decision-maker at a game studio, but also as a fan of games. Whether you read our articles, listen to our podcasts, or watch our videos, GamesBeat will help you learn about the industry and enjoy engaging with it. Discover our Briefings. Join the GamesBeat community! Enjoy access to special events, private newsletters and more. VentureBeat Homepage Follow us on Facebook Follow us on X Follow us on LinkedIn Follow us on RSS Press Releases Contact Us Advertise Share a News Tip Contribute to DataDecisionMakers Careers Privacy Policy Terms of Service Do Not Sell My Personal Information © 2023 VentureBeat. All rights reserved. "
4,238	2,020	"GDC goes all-digital for its rescheduled August event \| VentureBeat"	"https://venturebeat.com/business/gdc-goes-all-digital-for-its-rescheduled-august-event"	"Artificial Intelligence View All AI, ML and Deep Learning Auto ML Data Labelling Synthetic Data Conversational AI NLP Text-to-Speech Security View All Data Security and Privacy Network Security and Privacy Software Security Computer Hardware Security Cloud and Data Storage Security Data Infrastructure View All Data Science Data Management Data Storage and Cloud Big Data and Analytics Data Networks Automation View All Industrial Automation Business Process Automation Development Automation Robotic Process Automation Test Automation Enterprise Analytics View All Business Intelligence Disaster Recovery Business Continuity Statistical Analysis Predictive Analysis More Data Decision Makers Virtual Communication Team Collaboration UCaaS Virtual Reality Collaboration Virtual Employee Experience Programming & Development Product Development Application Development Test Management Development Languages GDC goes all-digital for its rescheduled August event Share on Facebook Share on X Share on LinkedIn GDC 2019 drew about 29,000 people to San Francisco. In 2021, it will be online only. Are you looking to showcase your brand in front of the brightest minds of the gaming industry? Consider getting a custom GamesBeat sponsorship. Learn more. The Game Developers Conference has decided that GDC Summer will now be an all-digital event, getting rid of the physical side of the rescheduled gathering. The GDC was originally scheduled for March, but the organizers pushed it back to August after the onset of the coronavirus pandemic. They were planning to do the August event at the Moscone Center in San Francisco. But now the plans for a physical event are gone, due to lingering concerns over whether it’s safe to have in-person events. The GDC said that many game developers are embracing remote working arrangements and online collaboration, and so the GDC itself was inspired to adapt and deliver GDC in a digital format that will be available to everyone with an internet connection. The event is still scheduled for August. Of course, I take credit for this turn of events as the GamesBeat Summit 2020 event turned out well, and they’re copying us. (OK, well, maybe the world doesn’t revolve around me). GamesBeat's creed when covering the game industry is "where passion meets business." What does this mean? We want to tell you how the news matters to you -- not just as a decision-maker at a game studio, but also as a fan of games. Whether you read our articles, listen to our podcasts, or watch our videos, GamesBeat will help you learn about the industry and enjoy engaging with it. Discover our Briefings. Join the GamesBeat community! Enjoy access to special events, private newsletters and more. VentureBeat Homepage Follow us on Facebook Follow us on X Follow us on LinkedIn Follow us on RSS Press Releases Contact Us Advertise Share a News Tip Contribute to DataDecisionMakers Careers Privacy Policy Terms of Service Do Not Sell My Personal Information © 2023 VentureBeat. All rights reserved. "
4,239	2,020	"Gaming sees explosive growth in social video as people stay home \| VentureBeat"	"https://venturebeat.com/business/gaming-sees-explosive-growth-in-social-video-as-people-stay-home"	"Artificial Intelligence View All AI, ML and Deep Learning Auto ML Data Labelling Synthetic Data Conversational AI NLP Text-to-Speech Security View All Data Security and Privacy Network Security and Privacy Software Security Computer Hardware Security Cloud and Data Storage Security Data Infrastructure View All Data Science Data Management Data Storage and Cloud Big Data and Analytics Data Networks Automation View All Industrial Automation Business Process Automation Development Automation Robotic Process Automation Test Automation Enterprise Analytics View All Business Intelligence Disaster Recovery Business Continuity Statistical Analysis Predictive Analysis More Data Decision Makers Virtual Communication Team Collaboration UCaaS Virtual Reality Collaboration Virtual Employee Experience Programming & Development Product Development Application Development Test Management Development Languages Guest Gaming sees explosive growth in social video as people stay home Share on Facebook Share on X Share on LinkedIn Are you looking to showcase your brand in front of the brightest minds of the gaming industry? Consider getting a custom GamesBeat sponsorship. Learn more. Entertainment, in all of its forms, has always been an important pastime for Americans. And now with millions sheltering at home, it’s taken an even more crucial role in helping people escape the boredom and anxiety that comes with a global pandemic. As a result, there have been huge increases in not only TV consumption but also gaming. And it’s not just about playing solo: Social video has given rise to replays, promotions, live-streamed speedruns , and more that connect everyday players to the gaming franchises and influencers they love most. A new report from social video analytics company Tubular Labs shows just how much social video growth for gaming has occurred since people began sheltering in place. First, some topline stats. During the week of March 30, gaming content on YouTube had its best week ever — with 17 billion views, representing a 24% year-over-year growth. Facebook has also seen an increase in gaming videos, although not as much as YouTube. When it comes to the performance of various types of gaming content, there’s growth across the board, with the highest jump (35%) belonging to online games. (In the chart below, performance is based on Tubular’s V7 rating, which is the average number of views per video within the first seven days of upload, comparing pre-and post-COVID-19.) Event GamesBeat at the Game Awards We invite you to join us in LA for GamesBeat at the Game Awards event this December 7. Reserve your spot now as space is limited! Game-specific trends Tubular also examined trends around some of the most popular games: Call of Duty, Minecraft, and Fortnite. There have been 60% more Call of Duty videos uploaded on YouTube since people began sheltering in place in March, particularly around its Warzone’s Season Three. The pandemic has also given new players a chance to rise in the ranks: Four of the top five creators of Call of Duty content from March 10 through April 10 were not in the top five in the previous 30-day period. Of course, Call of Duty: Warzone launched March 10, so in addition to benefiting from folks staying home, the community is also excited for this new battle royale experience. Minecraft has seen more modest growth (6% in videos uploaded), but one creator in particular, Skeppy, has seen viewership skyrocket by an impressive 285%. Independent creators aside, official brand channels are an important part of the puzzle. And from Tubular’s analysis, it’s clear that Fortnite is revving up: The official channel has uploaded twice as many videos during the pandemic than it did in the 30 days prior, putting it in the top five for overall Fortnite creators. (Note: This was compiled before the Travis Scott concert.) Views for sponsored content rise during pandemic As marketers across myriad industries scrambled to revamp advertising strategies amid COVID-19, gaming is one area in which they’re latching on. Overall, 249 brands have worked with 457 gaming partners since the pandemic began, and per video performance is up, with the top campaigns delivering more than 1 million average V7 views. Looking at YouTube specifically, the week of March 30 was the most-viewed week for sponsored gaming content this year, and the sixth most-viewed week in the last three years. Viewership of esports surges With traditional live sports all cancelled, the pandemic could be esports’ time to shine. The week of April 6 saw the most views on esports content since the week of the Fortnite World Cup Finals last year. Live esports content draws viewership from an engaged crowd, those live videos are making an impact on demand as well. Tubular found that live esports videos that are published later generate a 20% higher average V30 rating and are 40% more engaging. When it comes to watching live streams, Twitch is one of the most popular platforms, and it’s only gaining steam in the pandemic. In the weeks after the outbreak, live streaming of gaming creators reached up to 869 million minutes watched per day across all viewers, a 20% growth from two weeks prepandemic. Who and what are they watching? The Electronic Sports League leads for minutes watched, followed by creators summit1g and loltyler1; highest watch time by game goes to Call of Duty: Modern Warfare and League of Legends. GamesBeat's creed when covering the game industry is "where passion meets business." What does this mean? We want to tell you how the news matters to you -- not just as a decision-maker at a game studio, but also as a fan of games. Whether you read our articles, listen to our podcasts, or watch our videos, GamesBeat will help you learn about the industry and enjoy engaging with it. Discover our Briefings. Join the GamesBeat community! Enjoy access to special events, private newsletters and more. VentureBeat Homepage Follow us on Facebook Follow us on X Follow us on LinkedIn Follow us on RSS Press Releases Contact Us Advertise Share a News Tip Contribute to DataDecisionMakers Careers Privacy Policy Terms of Service Do Not Sell My Personal Information © 2023 VentureBeat. All rights reserved. "
4,240	2,020	"Facebook now lets U.S. users transfer images and videos directly to Google Photos \| VentureBeat"	"https://venturebeat.com/business/facebook-now-lets-u-s-users-transfer-images-and-videos-directly-to-google-photos"	"Artificial Intelligence View All AI, ML and Deep Learning Auto ML Data Labelling Synthetic Data Conversational AI NLP Text-to-Speech Security View All Data Security and Privacy Network Security and Privacy Software Security Computer Hardware Security Cloud and Data Storage Security Data Infrastructure View All Data Science Data Management Data Storage and Cloud Big Data and Analytics Data Networks Automation View All Industrial Automation Business Process Automation Development Automation Robotic Process Automation Test Automation Enterprise Analytics View All Business Intelligence Disaster Recovery Business Continuity Statistical Analysis Predictive Analysis More Data Decision Makers Virtual Communication Team Collaboration UCaaS Virtual Reality Collaboration Virtual Employee Experience Programming & Development Product Development Application Development Test Management Development Languages Facebook now lets U.S. users transfer images and videos directly to Google Photos Share on Facebook Share on X Share on LinkedIn Are you looking to showcase your brand in front of the brightest minds of the gaming industry? Consider getting a custom GamesBeat sponsorship. Learn more. ( Reuters ) — Facebook will allow users in the United States and Canada to transfer photos and videos to a rival tech platform for the first time — a step that could assuage antitrust concerns by giving users an option to easily leave the company’s services, the social media network said on Thursday. The tool lets Facebook users transfer data stored on its servers directly to another photo storage service, in this case Google Photos — a feature known as data portability. U.S. and Canadian users will be able to access the tool through their Facebook accounts starting Thursday. The function has already been launched in several countries including in Europe and Latin America. It allows the social media company to give users more control over their data and respond to U.S. regulators and lawmakers who are investigating its competitive practices and allegations it has stifled competition. VB Event The AI Impact Tour Connect with the enterprise AI community at VentureBeat’s AI Impact Tour coming to a city near you! The U.S. launch also comes ahead of a hearing set up by the Federal Trade Commission on Sept. 22 to examine the potential benefits and challenges of data portability. Control of data that hurts competition has become a critical topic in the antitrust debate in the United States and Europe. Facebook’s Director of Privacy and Public Policy Steve Satterfield said over the past couple of years, the company heard calls from policymakers and regulators asking it to facilitate choice, make it easier for people to choose new providers and move their data to new services. “So it really is an important part of the response to the kinds of concerns that drive antitrust regulation or competition regulation,” Satterfield told Reuters in an interview. He said the company would be open to participating in the FTC hearing if the agency approaches them. Data portability is a requirement under Europe’s privacy law called the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and California’s privacy law called the California Consumer Protection Act (CCPA). Also, Democratic Senators Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut and Mark Warner of Virginia along with Republican senator Josh Hawley of Missouri introduced a bill, known as the ACCESS Act, in October, which requires large tech platforms to let their users easily move their data to other services. Satterfield said Facebook hopes to eventually allow users to move key data such as their contacts, friend lists, etc. onto another platform in a way that protects user privacy. Facebook developed its data portability tool as a member of the Data Transfer Project — which was formed to allow web users to easily move their data between online service providers whenever they want — and counts Facebook, Alphabet’s Google, Microsoft, Twitter and Apple among its contributors. Members of the project are also looking at letting users transfer data such as emails, playlists and events in the future, the company said. On a call with academics and policy experts from the fields of competition and privacy on Wednesday, Facebook said it is moving deliberately on data transfer partnerships with third-parties to avoid a repeat of the Cambridge Analytica incident. The now defunct British political consulting firm harvested the personal data of millions of Facebook users without their consent and used it for political advertising. ( Reporting by Nandita Bose in Washington, Editing by Chris Sanders and Cynthia Osterman ) VentureBeat's mission is to be a digital town square for technical decision-makers to gain knowledge about transformative enterprise technology and transact. Discover our Briefings. The AI Impact Tour Join us for an evening full of networking and insights at VentureBeat's AI Impact Tour, coming to San Francisco, New York, and Los Angeles! VentureBeat Homepage Follow us on Facebook Follow us on X Follow us on LinkedIn Follow us on RSS Press Releases Contact Us Advertise Share a News Tip Contribute to DataDecisionMakers Careers Privacy Policy Terms of Service Do Not Sell My Personal Information © 2023 VentureBeat. All rights reserved. "
4,241	2,020	"CNCF graduates package manager Helm to bring more stability to Kubernetes development \| VentureBeat"	"https://venturebeat.com/business/cncf-graduates-package-manager-helm-to-bring-more-stability-to-kubernetes-development"	"Artificial Intelligence View All AI, ML and Deep Learning Auto ML Data Labelling Synthetic Data Conversational AI NLP Text-to-Speech Security View All Data Security and Privacy Network Security and Privacy Software Security Computer Hardware Security Cloud and Data Storage Security Data Infrastructure View All Data Science Data Management Data Storage and Cloud Big Data and Analytics Data Networks Automation View All Industrial Automation Business Process Automation Development Automation Robotic Process Automation Test Automation Enterprise Analytics View All Business Intelligence Disaster Recovery Business Continuity Statistical Analysis Predictive Analysis More Data Decision Makers Virtual Communication Team Collaboration UCaaS Virtual Reality Collaboration Virtual Employee Experience Programming & Development Product Development Application Development Test Management Development Languages CNCF graduates package manager Helm to bring more stability to Kubernetes development Share on Facebook Share on X Share on LinkedIn Helm core maintainers Martin Hickey from IBM (left) and Taylor Thomas from Microsoft (right, in the hat). Are you ready to bring more awareness to your brand? Consider becoming a sponsor for The AI Impact Tour. Learn more about the opportunities here. The Cloud Native Computing Foundation announced today that the open source package manager Helm has become the 10th project to graduate, providing another boost to a movement that wants companies to rethink how they build online applications. Helm has already been widely adopted by the rapidly growing microservices community. But the latest milestone should raise Helm’s profile among Kubernetes newcomers while also boosting overall efforts to ensure that stability is a priority for cloud native computing. “Helm has had stability in mind from the start,” said Matt Farina, a Samsung engineer and Helm maintainer. “So many things change so often around Kubernetes as new features are coming out. We know people value that stability.” Fundamentally, Helm is designed to make it easier for developers to find and share software created for Kubernetes. It uses a packaging format dubbed “charts” that collects files describing Kubernetes resources. VB Event The AI Impact Tour Connect with the enterprise AI community at VentureBeat’s AI Impact Tour coming to a city near you! Helm is actually one of the older Kubernetes-related projects and has been part of the CNCF since the Linux Foundation founded CNCF in 2015. It was developed originally at Deis, a company eventually acquired by Microsoft. By the time version 3 was released last fall, Helm was seeing 2 million monthly downloads. Following a rigorous set of testing to validate its security and robustness, the CNCF officially voted today to move it to “graduated” status. Helm has already become a critical tool at companies like AT&T, Microsoft, and VMWare. But the new status should create new awareness and confidence around Helm for developers and companies just starting to embrace Kubernetes. “Many of the people who use it know that it’s mature,” Farina said. “It’s going to change the perception for people who are just coming to Kubernetes and just coming to the cloud native tools.” VentureBeat's mission is to be a digital town square for technical decision-makers to gain knowledge about transformative enterprise technology and transact. Discover our Briefings. The AI Impact Tour Join us for an evening full of networking and insights at VentureBeat's AI Impact Tour, coming to San Francisco, New York, and Los Angeles! VentureBeat Homepage Follow us on Facebook Follow us on X Follow us on LinkedIn Follow us on RSS Press Releases Contact Us Advertise Share a News Tip Contribute to DataDecisionMakers Careers Privacy Policy Terms of Service Do Not Sell My Personal Information © 2023 VentureBeat. All rights reserved. "
4,242	2,020	"Apple: Coronavirus hurt Q2 2020 earnings, but teams rose to challenges \| VentureBeat"	"https://venturebeat.com/business/apple-coronavirus-hit-q2-2020-earnings-but-teams-rose-to-challenges"	"Artificial Intelligence View All AI, ML and Deep Learning Auto ML Data Labelling Synthetic Data Conversational AI NLP Text-to-Speech Security View All Data Security and Privacy Network Security and Privacy Software Security Computer Hardware Security Cloud and Data Storage Security Data Infrastructure View All Data Science Data Management Data Storage and Cloud Big Data and Analytics Data Networks Automation View All Industrial Automation Business Process Automation Development Automation Robotic Process Automation Test Automation Enterprise Analytics View All Business Intelligence Disaster Recovery Business Continuity Statistical Analysis Predictive Analysis More Data Decision Makers Virtual Communication Team Collaboration UCaaS Virtual Reality Collaboration Virtual Employee Experience Programming & Development Product Development Application Development Test Management Development Languages Apple: Coronavirus hurt Q2 2020 earnings, but teams rose to challenges Share on Facebook Share on X Share on LinkedIn Are you looking to showcase your brand in front of the brightest minds of the gaming industry? Consider getting a custom GamesBeat sponsorship. Learn more. Following today’s release of Apple earnings for the second fiscal quarter of 2020 , CEO Tim Cook and CFO Luca Maestri held a conference call with financial analysts to discuss the results, which — as disclosed by the company in advance — missed initial guidance offered before the U.S. outbreak of COVID-19 cases but just barely eked out a revenue increase over the same quarter in 2019. Cook began his remarks by discussing the impacts of the coronavirus on Apple, characterizing the situation as massively challenging — enough to make the quarter short of where it could have been financially but one that he couldn’t have been prouder of, thanks to his employees’ resilience. Early in the quarter, Apple believed it was on track to hit the high end of its estimates and achieve a new revenue record. But that shifted as the outbreak became a pandemic, disrupting work and life across the U.S. and other countries. But Cook said Apple employees rose to the occasion, simultaneously turning out next-generation devices and sourcing over 30 million masks for frontline medical workers. The company is now producing 1 million of its own protective shields each week and continues to make donations to global and U.S. coronavirus relief funds. It also elevated reliable COVID-19 news within Apple News, produced content on the topic with Oprah and Lady Gaga, and developed both a symptom-checking website that has seen 2 million users and an app that’s had 3 million downloads. He also noted Apple’s cooperation with Google on an exposure notification system, which resulted this week in updates to the iOS and Android operating systems. Despite the outbreak’s impact on the company’s global supply chain, Cook said Apple’s manufacturing was effectively back on track as of the end of March. Maestri noted that the company encountered some temporary shortages but said the operations team and manufacturing partners “put forth an extraordinary effort” to return to normalcy. On the consumer side, shoppers effectively moved their Apple purchases straight from brick-and-mortar stores to the company’s website, and retail had a quarterly record during this quarter despite the physical store closures — an online purchasing trend Cook isn’t sure will continue once people are able to go out in public. For now, with device users stuck at home, the company has unsurprisingly seen record daily use of its FaceTime and iMessage services during the quarter. In remarks to Bloomberg coinciding with today’s earnings release, Cook said the company will begin reopening roughly 20 total stores across Austria and Australia within two weeks, as well as a few U.S. stores during the same period. The company’s campus in Cupertino, California will not reopen until early June at the earliest. While Apple isn’t providing broad guidance for the third fiscal quarter, Maestri suggested that currency challenges and overall market weakness will lead to revenue declines for the iPhone and wearables and potentially impact some services revenue. However, the declines should be understood within a larger context: Apple’s wearables segment alone has already reached the size of a standalone Fortune 140 company, which is to say around $22 billion in annual revenue. This is also traditionally the quarter ahead of new flagship iPhone and Apple Watch releases, so sales are often slow. On the other hand, the company believes iPad and Mac sales should improve over the coming quarter, perhaps buoyed by the new iPad Pro and latest MacBook Air. Cook suggested gains may be attributable to customers needing these categories of devices for remote work and online education. When asked about Apple’s continued R&D efforts, Maestri called out the company’s purchase of Intel’s 5G modem baseband group as an investment in a core technology and said Apple will continue to invest in development. Nothing has changed on the company’s M&A side, Apple said, and it’s always looking for ways to accelerate its product roadmaps and fill gaps in its portfolio in hardware, software, and services. VentureBeat's mission is to be a digital town square for technical decision-makers to gain knowledge about transformative enterprise technology and transact. Discover our Briefings. VentureBeat Homepage Follow us on Facebook Follow us on X Follow us on LinkedIn Follow us on RSS Press Releases Contact Us Advertise Share a News Tip Contribute to DataDecisionMakers Careers Privacy Policy Terms of Service Do Not Sell My Personal Information © 2023 VentureBeat. All rights reserved. "
4,243	2,020	"Resistant AI raises $2.75 million to protect algorithms from adversarial attacks \| VentureBeat"	"https://venturebeat.com/ai/resistant-ai-raises-2-75-million-to-protect-algorithms-from-adversarial-attacks"	"Artificial Intelligence View All AI, ML and Deep Learning Auto ML Data Labelling Synthetic Data Conversational AI NLP Text-to-Speech Security View All Data Security and Privacy Network Security and Privacy Software Security Computer Hardware Security Cloud and Data Storage Security Data Infrastructure View All Data Science Data Management Data Storage and Cloud Big Data and Analytics Data Networks Automation View All Industrial Automation Business Process Automation Development Automation Robotic Process Automation Test Automation Enterprise Analytics View All Business Intelligence Disaster Recovery Business Continuity Statistical Analysis Predictive Analysis More Data Decision Makers Virtual Communication Team Collaboration UCaaS Virtual Reality Collaboration Virtual Employee Experience Programming & Development Product Development Application Development Test Management Development Languages Resistant AI raises $2.75 million to protect algorithms from adversarial attacks Share on Facebook Share on X Share on LinkedIn Are you ready to bring more awareness to your brand? Consider becoming a sponsor for The AI Impact Tour. Learn more about the opportunities here. Resistant AI has raised $2.75 million in venture capital to develop an artificial intelligence system that protects algorithms from automated attacks. Index Ventures and Credo Ventures led the investment, which included participation by Seedcamp, UiPath CEO Daniel Dines, and Avast CTO Michal Pechoucek. Based in Prague, Resistant AI focuses on the growing problem of hackers harnessing AI to manipulate machine learning systems. Experts had predicted that cybersecurity would eventually lead to an AI arms race between attackers and their targets. “Companies are just now learning how to deploy AI,” said Resistant AI cofounder and CEO Martin Rehak. “And on the other side, we see criminals and fraudsters learning how to use those processes for their benefit and how to steal money at scale. Our job is to protect the AI and machine learning models.” VB Event The AI Impact Tour Connect with the enterprise AI community at VentureBeat’s AI Impact Tour coming to a city near you! Read more: VentureBeat’s Special Issue on AI and security Resistant AI’s team includes a core group that worked at Cognitive Security, which was acquired by Cisco Systems in 2013. That team originally began working on AI for security back in 2006, Rehak said, at a moment when such technology seemed far over the horizon. “The first five years, when I told anyone what we were doing, they told me I was crazy,” he said. The AI-related work became increasingly central while they were at Cisco. But the group finally struck out on its own to focus on the issue of AI being used to attack AI — or, as Rehak explains, AI being used to attack various automated decision-making systems. Experts have grown increasingly worried about the rise of adversarial attacks. This refers to the idea of someone externally introducing elements into a machine learning model in order to disrupt or manipulate it. When Resistant AI launched in 2019, it decided to focus first on financial companies, which had begun turning to automated systems to approve applications for various products. Fraud attempts can occur in several ways. In one basic scenario, people use utility bills or bank statements with names changed to fool algorithmic-driven verification systems into opening accounts or financing or approving loans. Resistant’s AI intervenes by detecting visual anomalies or identifying data that seems suspicious to stop it from entering the approval system. Resistant’s service can also review the decisions being made by a financial system, consider all the inputs, and look for correlations or inconsistencies within large batches. For example, a single request for approval might seem benign, but within a group of 100,000 requests, it may have abnormalities that resemble several other requests. “That way, we can see that someone under different identities is actually fingerprinting the system and trying to find the vulnerability,” Rehak said. By “fingerprinting,” Rehak means someone is submitting a range of documents and information to try to understand how a company’s algorithms and machine learning function. The goal of such an attack can be twofold. First, the hacker may be trying to figure out the parameters of the algorithms in order to commit fraud. However, they may also be trying to use the attack to learn about the algorithm in order to copy it. They might then sell the information to other people who want to commit fraud or possibly even to competitors of the company being attacked. In both cases, the hackers are increasingly using AI to automate and adapt their own methodology for probing these machine learning systems, Rehak said. Going forward, Resistant plans to use the money to expand its staff of 20 people and extend its sales operations in Western Europe. VentureBeat's mission is to be a digital town square for technical decision-makers to gain knowledge about transformative enterprise technology and transact. Discover our Briefings. The AI Impact Tour Join us for an evening full of networking and insights at VentureBeat's AI Impact Tour, coming to San Francisco, New York, and Los Angeles! VentureBeat Homepage Follow us on Facebook Follow us on X Follow us on LinkedIn Follow us on RSS Press Releases Contact Us Advertise Share a News Tip Contribute to DataDecisionMakers Careers Privacy Policy Terms of Service Do Not Sell My Personal Information © 2023 VentureBeat. All rights reserved. "
4,244	2,020	"OpenAI's Jukebox AI produces music in any style from scratch -- complete with lyrics \| VentureBeat"	"https://venturebeat.com/ai/openais-jukebox-ai-produces-music-in-any-style-from-scratch-complete-with-lyrics"	"Artificial Intelligence View All AI, ML and Deep Learning Auto ML Data Labelling Synthetic Data Conversational AI NLP Text-to-Speech Security View All Data Security and Privacy Network Security and Privacy Software Security Computer Hardware Security Cloud and Data Storage Security Data Infrastructure View All Data Science Data Management Data Storage and Cloud Big Data and Analytics Data Networks Automation View All Industrial Automation Business Process Automation Development Automation Robotic Process Automation Test Automation Enterprise Analytics View All Business Intelligence Disaster Recovery Business Continuity Statistical Analysis Predictive Analysis More Data Decision Makers Virtual Communication Team Collaboration UCaaS Virtual Reality Collaboration Virtual Employee Experience Programming & Development Product Development Application Development Test Management Development Languages OpenAI’s Jukebox AI produces music in any style from scratch — complete with lyrics Share on Facebook Share on X Share on LinkedIn Are you ready to bring more awareness to your brand? Consider becoming a sponsor for The AI Impact Tour. Learn more about the opportunities here. OpenAI today released Jukebox , a machine learning framework that generates music — including rudimentary songs — as raw audio in a range of genres and musical styles. Provided with a genre, artist, and lyrics as input, Jukebox outputs a new music sample produced from scratch. The code and model are available on GitHub , along with a tool to explore the generated samples. Jukebox might not be the most practical application of AI and machine learning, but as OpenAI notes, music generation pushes the boundaries of generative models. Synthesizing songs at the audio level is challenging because the sequences are quite long — a typical 4-minute song at CD quality (44 kHz, 16-bit) has over 10 million timesteps. As a result, learning the high-level semantics of music requires models to deal with very long-range dependencies. Here’s a Jukebox-generated country song in the style of Alan Jackson: VB Event The AI Impact Tour Connect with the enterprise AI community at VentureBeat’s AI Impact Tour coming to a city near you! Here’s classic pop in the style of Frank Sinatra: And here’s jazz in the style of Ella Fitzgerald: Jukebox tackles this by using what’s called an autoencoder, which compresses raw audio to a lower-dimensional space by discarding some of the perceptually irrelevant bits of information. The model can then be trained to generate audio in this space and upsample back to the raw audio space. Jukebox’s autoencoder model processes audio with an approach called Vector Quantized Variational AutoEncoder (VQ-VAE). Three levels of VQ-VAE compress 44kHz raw audio by 8 times, 32 times, and 128 times; the bottom-level encoding (8 times) produces the highest-quality reconstruction (in the form of “music codes”) while the top-level encoding (128 times) retains only essential musical information, such as the pitch, timbre, and volume. A family of prior models — a top-level prior that generates the most compressed music codes encoded by VQ-VAE and two upsampling priors that synthesize less compressed codes — within Jukebox were trained to learn the distribution of the codes and generate music in the compressed space. The top-level prior models the long-range structure of music so that samples decoded from it have lower audio quality but capture high-level semantics (like singing and melodies), while the middle and bottom upsampling priors add local musical structures like timbre, significantly improving the audio quality. Model training was performed using a simplified variant of OpenAI’s Sparse Transformers architecture against a corpus of 1.2 million songs (600,000 in English), which were sourced from the web and paired with both lyrics and metadata (e.g., artist, album genre, year, common mood, and playlist keywords) from LyricWiki. Every song was 32-bit at 44.1 kHz, and OpenAI augmented the corpus by randomly downmixing the right and left channels to produce mono audio. To condition Jukebox on particular artists and genres, a top-level Transformer model was trained on the task of predicting compressed audio tokens, which enabled Jukebox to achieve better quality in any musical style and allowed researchers to steer the model to generate in a style of their choosing. And to provide the framework with more lyrical context, OpenAI developed an encoder that adds query-using layers from Jukebox’s music decoder to attend to keys and values from the lyrics encoder, allowing Jukebox to learn more precise alignments of lyrics and music. Jukebox’s models required an immense amount of compute — and time — to train: The VQ-VAE, which contained over 2 million parameters (variables), was trained on 256 Nvidia V100 graphics cards for three days. The upsamplers, which contained over 1 billion variables, were trained on 128 Nvidia V100 graphics cards for two weeks. The top-level prior, which contained over 5 billion variables, was trained on 512 Nvidia V100 graphics cards for four weeks. In all these respects, Jukebox is a quantum leap over OpenAI’s previous work, MuseNet , which explored synthesizing music based on large amounts of MIDI data. With raw audio, Jukebox models learn to handle diversity and long-range structure while mitigating errors in short-, medium-, or long-term timing. And the results aren’t half bad. But Jukebox has its limitations. While the songs it generates are fairly musically coherent and feature traditional chord patterns (and even solos), they lack structures like repeating choruses. Moreover, they contain discernible noise, and the models are painfully slow to sample from — it takes 9 hours to render one minute of audio. Fortunately, OpenAI plans to distill Jukebox’s models into a parallel sampler that should “significantly” speed up sampling. It also intends to train Jukebox on songs from other languages and parts of the world beyond English and the West. “Our audio team is continuing to work on generating audio samples conditioned on different kinds of priming information. In particular, we’ve seen early success conditioning on MIDI files and stem files,” wrote OpenAI. “We hope this will improve the musicality of samples (in the way conditioning on lyrics improved the singing), and this would also be a way of giving musicians more control over the generations. We expect human and model collaborations to be an increasingly exciting creative space.” Musical AI is fast evolving. In late 2018, Project Magenta, a Google Brain effort “exploring the role of machine learning as a tool in the creative process,” presented Musical Transformer , a model capable of generating songs with recognizable repetition. And last March, Google released an algorithmic Google Doodle that let users create melodic homages to Bach. VentureBeat's mission is to be a digital town square for technical decision-makers to gain knowledge about transformative enterprise technology and transact. Discover our Briefings. The AI Impact Tour Join us for an evening full of networking and insights at VentureBeat's AI Impact Tour, coming to San Francisco, New York, and Los Angeles! VentureBeat Homepage Follow us on Facebook Follow us on X Follow us on LinkedIn Follow us on RSS Press Releases Contact Us Advertise Share a News Tip Contribute to DataDecisionMakers Careers Privacy Policy Terms of Service Do Not Sell My Personal Information © 2023 VentureBeat. All rights reserved. "
4,245	2,020	"Nvidia apologizes and removes 'Did it work' meme tweet \| VentureBeat"	"https://venturebeat.com/ai/nvidia-apologizes-and-removes-did-it-work-meme-tweet"	"Artificial Intelligence View All AI, ML and Deep Learning Auto ML Data Labelling Synthetic Data Conversational AI NLP Text-to-Speech Security View All Data Security and Privacy Network Security and Privacy Software Security Computer Hardware Security Cloud and Data Storage Security Data Infrastructure View All Data Science Data Management Data Storage and Cloud Big Data and Analytics Data Networks Automation View All Industrial Automation Business Process Automation Development Automation Robotic Process Automation Test Automation Enterprise Analytics View All Business Intelligence Disaster Recovery Business Continuity Statistical Analysis Predictive Analysis More Data Decision Makers Virtual Communication Team Collaboration UCaaS Virtual Reality Collaboration Virtual Employee Experience Programming & Development Product Development Application Development Test Management Development Languages Exclusive Nvidia apologizes and removes ‘Did it work’ meme tweet Share on Facebook Share on X Share on LinkedIn Nvidia Are you ready to bring more awareness to your brand? Consider becoming a sponsor for The AI Impact Tour. Learn more about the opportunities here. Nvidia today apologized for publishing a tweet on Tuesday that depicts a graphics card with scantily clad legs. The tweet imitating the “Did it work” meme was sent from Nvidia’s GeForce Twitter account, which has over 1 million followers. The tweet was “errantly” posted and quickly removed, an Nvidia spokesperson told VentureBeat. “We apologize unreservedly. This was errantly posted and removed quickly, as soon as we became aware of it,” the spokesperson said in a statement. The meme that Nvidia imitated started after a performance by Lisa from K-pop group Blackpink. As Mashable explains , when the legs are posted alongside a shot from the torso up on Twitter, it can look like a peculiarly natural fit. In addition to fans of the group, actor and host Stephen Colbert and brands like GameStop and Netflix posted their own tweets with Lisa’s legs, along with the phrase “Did it work?” Nvidia put the legs on a GeForce RTX 2080 Super graphics card, which drew the attention and ire of machine learning researchers. Nvidia machine learning research director Anima Anandkumar appears to have intervened to have the tweet removed. Thanks for bringing this to my attention. It is now fixed. I will ensure that this is not repeated again — Prof. Anima Anandkumar (@AnimaAnandkumar) April 29, 2020 VB Event The AI Impact Tour Connect with the enterprise AI community at VentureBeat’s AI Impact Tour coming to a city near you! Anandkumar is a frequent supporter of initiatives for the equitable treatment of women. Speaking with VentureBeat at the start of the year about machine learning trends, Anandkumar shared her optimism that the machine learning community could be on the cusp of a watershed moment in terms of maturity and inclusion. Earlier this month, she urged members of the AI community to ditch the idea of “godfathers of AI” because it “wipes out contributions made by numerous women in AI,” including ImageNet creator Dr. Fei-Fei Li. A Stanford University study highlighted by Li and published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences earlier this month found that women and people of color in academia produce scientific novelty at higher rates than white men, but those contributions are often “devalued and discounted” in the context of hiring and promotion. Last month, the Algorithmic Justice League — together with women technologists like former White House CTO Megan Smith and prominent AI researchers — launched the Voicing Erasure project to protest bias in tech journalism and academia. VentureBeat's mission is to be a digital town square for technical decision-makers to gain knowledge about transformative enterprise technology and transact. Discover our Briefings. The AI Impact Tour Join us for an evening full of networking and insights at VentureBeat's AI Impact Tour, coming to San Francisco, New York, and Los Angeles! VentureBeat Homepage Follow us on Facebook Follow us on X Follow us on LinkedIn Follow us on RSS Press Releases Contact Us Advertise Share a News Tip Contribute to DataDecisionMakers Careers Privacy Policy Terms of Service Do Not Sell My Personal Information © 2023 VentureBeat. All rights reserved. "
4,246	2,020	"Google's AI can adjust voice emotion, pitch, and speed with 30 minutes of data \| VentureBeat"	"https://venturebeat.com/ai/googles-ai-can-adjust-voice-emotion-pitch-and-speed-with-30-minutes-of-data"	"Artificial Intelligence View All AI, ML and Deep Learning Auto ML Data Labelling Synthetic Data Conversational AI NLP Text-to-Speech Security View All Data Security and Privacy Network Security and Privacy Software Security Computer Hardware Security Cloud and Data Storage Security Data Infrastructure View All Data Science Data Management Data Storage and Cloud Big Data and Analytics Data Networks Automation View All Industrial Automation Business Process Automation Development Automation Robotic Process Automation Test Automation Enterprise Analytics View All Business Intelligence Disaster Recovery Business Continuity Statistical Analysis Predictive Analysis More Data Decision Makers Virtual Communication Team Collaboration UCaaS Virtual Reality Collaboration Virtual Employee Experience Programming & Development Product Development Application Development Test Management Development Languages Google’s AI can adjust voice emotion, pitch, and speed with 30 minutes of data Share on Facebook Share on X Share on LinkedIn Are you ready to bring more awareness to your brand? Consider becoming a sponsor for The AI Impact Tour. Learn more about the opportunities here. In a paper originally published last October and accepted to the International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR) 2020 , researchers affiliated with Google and the University College London propose an AI model that enables control of speech characteristics like pitch, emotion, and speaking rate with as little as 30 minutes of data. The work has obvious commercial implications. Brand voices such as Progressive’s Flo (played by comedian Stephanie Courtney) are often pulled in for pick-ups — sessions to address mistakes, changes, or additions in voiceover scripts — long after a recording finishes. AI-assisted voice correction could eliminate the need for these, saving time and money on the part of the actors’ employers. A previous study investigated the use of so-called style tokens (which represented different categories of emotion) to control speech affect. The method achieved good results with only 5% of labeled data, but it couldn’t handle speech samples with varying prosody (i.e., intonation, tone, stress, and rhythm) and fixed emotion. The work from Google and the University of College London addresses this limitation. The researchers trained the system for 300,000 steps across 32 of Google’s custom-designed tensor processing units (TPUs), a scale of compute exceeding that used in previous work. They report that using 30 minutes of labeled data allowed for a “significant degree” of control over speech rate, valence, and arousal, and that affect accuracy didn’t degrade noticeably with at least 10% of labeled data. The researchers said that just 3 minutes of data allowed for control of speech rate and extrapolation outside data seen during training — a result the researchers claim beat out state-of-the-art baselines. VB Event The AI Impact Tour Connect with the enterprise AI community at VentureBeat’s AI Impact Tour coming to a city near you! The researchers’ system taps a trained generative model that can synthesize acoustic features from text. Similar to Google’s Tacotron 2 , a text-to-speech (TTS) system that generates natural-sounding speech from raw transcripts, the new system can produce visual representations of frequencies called spectrograms by training a second model such as DeepMind’s WaveNet to act as a vocoder, a voice codec that analyzes and synthesizes voice data. (This system uses WaveRNN. ) An annotated data set comprising 72,405 roughly 5-second recordings from 40 English speakers, amounting to 45 hours of audio, was used to train the system. The speakers, all of whom were trained voice actors, were prompted to read text snippets with varying levels of valence (emotions like sadness or happiness) and arousal (excitement or energy). From these sessions, the researchers obtained six possible affective states, which they modeled and use as labels along with labels for speaking rate (here defined as the number of syllables per second in each utterance). Here’s one of the voices the system modified (which sounds not unlike the default Google Assistant voice, interestingly) to have high arousal and an “angry” valence: And here’s that same voice with high arousal and a “happy” valence: And low arousal and sad valence: The study’s coauthors acknowledge that the work might raise ethical concerns because it could be misused for misinformation or to commit fraud. Indeed, deepfakes — media that takes a person in an existing image, audio recording, or video and replaces them with someone else’s likeness using AI — are multiplying quickly, and have already been used to defraud a major energy producer. In tandem with tools like Resemble , Baidu’s Deep Voice, and Lyrebird, which need only seconds to minutes of audio samples to clone someone’s voice, it’s not difficult to imagine how this new system might add fuel to the fire. But the coauthors also assert that in this case, since the focus of this work is on improved prosody with potential benefits to human-computer interfaces, the benefits likely outweigh the risks. “We … urge the research community to take seriously the potential for misuse both of this work and broader advances in TTS,” they wrote. VentureBeat's mission is to be a digital town square for technical decision-makers to gain knowledge about transformative enterprise technology and transact. Discover our Briefings. The AI Impact Tour Join us for an evening full of networking and insights at VentureBeat's AI Impact Tour, coming to San Francisco, New York, and Los Angeles! VentureBeat Homepage Follow us on Facebook Follow us on X Follow us on LinkedIn Follow us on RSS Press Releases Contact Us Advertise Share a News Tip Contribute to DataDecisionMakers Careers Privacy Policy Terms of Service Do Not Sell My Personal Information © 2023 VentureBeat. All rights reserved. "
4,247	2,020	"Google open-sources AI that searches tables to answer natural language questions \| VentureBeat"	"https://venturebeat.com/ai/google-open-sources-ai-that-searches-tables-to-answer-natural-language-questions"	"Artificial Intelligence View All AI, ML and Deep Learning Auto ML Data Labelling Synthetic Data Conversational AI NLP Text-to-Speech Security View All Data Security and Privacy Network Security and Privacy Software Security Computer Hardware Security Cloud and Data Storage Security Data Infrastructure View All Data Science Data Management Data Storage and Cloud Big Data and Analytics Data Networks Automation View All Industrial Automation Business Process Automation Development Automation Robotic Process Automation Test Automation Enterprise Analytics View All Business Intelligence Disaster Recovery Business Continuity Statistical Analysis Predictive Analysis More Data Decision Makers Virtual Communication Team Collaboration UCaaS Virtual Reality Collaboration Virtual Employee Experience Programming & Development Product Development Application Development Test Management Development Languages Google open-sources AI that searches tables to answer natural language questions Share on Facebook Share on X Share on LinkedIn Are you ready to bring more awareness to your brand? Consider becoming a sponsor for The AI Impact Tour. Learn more about the opportunities here. Google today open-sourced a machine learning model that can point to answers to natural language questions (for example, “Which wrestler had the most number of reigns?”) in spreadsheets and databases. The model’s creators claim it’s even capable of finding answers spread across cells or that might require aggregating multiple cells. Much of the world’s information is stored in the form of tables, Google Research’s Thomas Müller points out in a blog post, like global financial statistics and sports results. But these tables often lack an intuitive way to sift through them — a problem Google’s AI model aims to fix. To answer questions like “Average time as champion for top 2 wrestlers?” the model jointly encodes the question, as well as the table content row by row. It leverages a Transformer -based BERT architecture — one that’s both bidirectional (allowing it to access content from past and future directions) and unsupervised (meaning it can ingest data that’s neither classified nor labeled) — extended along with numerical representations called embeddings to encode the table structure. A key addition was the embeddings used to encode the structured input, according to Müller. Learned embeddings for the column index, the row index, and one special rank index indicate to the model the order of elements in numerical columns. VB Event The AI Impact Tour Connect with the enterprise AI community at VentureBeat’s AI Impact Tour coming to a city near you! Above: A table and questions with the expected answers. Answers can be selected (#1, #4) or computed (#2, #3). For each table cell, the model generates a score indicating the probability that the cell will be part of the answer. In addition, it outputs an operation (e.g., “AVERAGE,” “SUM,” or “COUNT”) indicating which operation (if any) must be applied to produce the final answer. To pretrain the model, the researchers extracted 6.2 million table-text pairs from English Wikipedia, which served as a training data set. During pretraining, the model learned — with relatively high accuracy — to restore words in both tables and text that had been removed. In fact, 71.4% of items were restored correctly for tables unseen during training. After pretraining, Müller and his team fine-tuned the model via weak supervision, using limited sources to provide signals for labeling the training data. They report that the best model outperformed the state-of-the-art for the Sequential Answering Dataset, a Microsoft-created benchmark for exploring the task of answering questions on tables, by 12 points. It also bested the previous top model on Stanford’s WikiTableQuestions, which contains questions and tables sourced from Wikipedia. “The weak supervision scenario is beneficial because it allows for non-experts to provide the data needed to train the model and takes less time than strong supervision,” said Müller. VentureBeat's mission is to be a digital town square for technical decision-makers to gain knowledge about transformative enterprise technology and transact. Discover our Briefings. The AI Impact Tour Join us for an evening full of networking and insights at VentureBeat's AI Impact Tour, coming to San Francisco, New York, and Los Angeles! VentureBeat Homepage Follow us on Facebook Follow us on X Follow us on LinkedIn Follow us on RSS Press Releases Contact Us Advertise Share a News Tip Contribute to DataDecisionMakers Careers Privacy Policy Terms of Service Do Not Sell My Personal Information © 2023 VentureBeat. All rights reserved. "
4,248	2,020	"Facebook's role-playing game teaches AI to complete tasks by reading descriptions \| VentureBeat"	"https://venturebeat.com/ai/facebook-rpg-teaches-ai-to-complete-tasks-by-reading-descriptions"	"Artificial Intelligence View All AI, ML and Deep Learning Auto ML Data Labelling Synthetic Data Conversational AI NLP Text-to-Speech Security View All Data Security and Privacy Network Security and Privacy Software Security Computer Hardware Security Cloud and Data Storage Security Data Infrastructure View All Data Science Data Management Data Storage and Cloud Big Data and Analytics Data Networks Automation View All Industrial Automation Business Process Automation Development Automation Robotic Process Automation Test Automation Enterprise Analytics View All Business Intelligence Disaster Recovery Business Continuity Statistical Analysis Predictive Analysis More Data Decision Makers Virtual Communication Team Collaboration UCaaS Virtual Reality Collaboration Virtual Employee Experience Programming & Development Product Development Application Development Test Management Development Languages Facebook’s role-playing game teaches AI to complete tasks by reading descriptions Share on Facebook Share on X Share on LinkedIn Are you looking to showcase your brand in front of the brightest minds of the gaming industry? Consider getting a custom GamesBeat sponsorship. Learn more. Demonstrating once again the potential of video games to advance AI and machine learning research, Facebook researchers propose a game-like language challenge — Read to Fight Monsters (RTFM) — in a paper accepted by the International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR) 2020. RTFM tasks an AI agent plopped into a procedurally generated environment with learning its dynamics by reading a description of them so it can generalize to new worlds with dynamics it isn’t familiar with. Facebook’s work could form the cornerstone of AI models capable of capturing the interplay between goals, documents, and observations in complex tasks. If the RTFM agents perform well on objectives requiring reasoning, it could suggest language understanding is a promising way to learn policies — i.e., heuristics that suggest a set of actions in response to a state. In RTFM, which takes inspiration from roguelikes (a subgenre of role-playing games that use a lot of procedurally generated elements) such as NetHack, Diablo , and Darkest Dungeon , the dynamics consist of: Monsters like wolfs, bats, jaguars, ghosts, and goblins Teams like “Order of the Forest” and “fire goblin” Element types like fire and poison Item modifiers like “fanatical” and “arcane” Items like swords and hammers At the beginning of a run, RTFM generates a large number of dynamics, along with descriptions of those dynamics (for example, “Blessed items are effective against poison monsters”) and goals (“Defeat the Order of the Forest”). Groups, monsters, modifiers, and elements are randomized, as are monsters’ team assignments and the effectiveness of modifiers against various elements. One element, team, and a monster from that team are designated to be the “target” monster, while an element, team, and monster from a different team are designated a “distractor” monster, along with an element that defeats the distractor monster. The position of the target and distractor monsters — both of which move to attack the agent at a fixed speed — are also randomized so the agent can’t memorize their patterns. Event GamesBeat at the Game Awards We invite you to join us in LA for GamesBeat at the Game Awards event this December 7. Reserve your spot now as space is limited! Human-written templates indicate which monster belongs to which team, which modifiers are effective against which element, and which team the agent should defeat. The researchers note that there are 2 million possible games within RTFM — without considering the natural language templates (200 million otherwise) — and that with the random ordering of the templates, the number of unique documents exceeded 15 billion. Agents are given a text document describing the dynamics and observations of the environment, in addition to a partial goal instruction. In order to achieve the goal, they must cross-reference relevant information in the document (which also lists their inventory), as well as in the observations. Specifically, RTFM agents must: Identify the target team from the goal Identify the monster belonging to that team Identify the modifiers that are effective against this element Find which modifier is present and the item with the modifier Pick up the correct item Engage the correct monster in combat The researchers leveraged reinforcement learning, a technique that spurs agents toward goals via rewards, to train an RTFM model they refer to as txt2π. By receiving a reward of “1” for wins and “-1” for losses, txt2π learned to build representations that capture interactions with the goal, documents describing dynamics, and observations. The team ran experiments in which they trained txt2π for a minimum of 50 million frames. While the performance of the final model trailed that of human players, who consistently solved RTFM, txt2π beat two baselines and achieved good performance by learning a curriculum. In the training phase on large environments (10 by 10 blocks) with new dynamics and world configurations, the model had a 61% win rate (plus or minus 18%), and it had a 43% win rate during evaluation (plus or minus 13%). “[The results suggest] that there is ample room for improvement in grounded policy learning on complex RTFM problems,” conceded the coauthors, who hope to explore in future work how supporting evidence in external documents might be used to train an agent to reason about plans. GamesBeat's creed when covering the game industry is "where passion meets business." What does this mean? We want to tell you how the news matters to you -- not just as a decision-maker at a game studio, but also as a fan of games. Whether you read our articles, listen to our podcasts, or watch our videos, GamesBeat will help you learn about the industry and enjoy engaging with it. Discover our Briefings. The AI Impact Tour Join us for an evening full of networking and insights at VentureBeat's AI Impact Tour, coming to San Francisco, New York, and Los Angeles! VentureBeat Homepage Follow us on Facebook Follow us on X Follow us on LinkedIn Follow us on RSS Press Releases Contact Us Advertise Share a News Tip Contribute to DataDecisionMakers Careers Privacy Policy Terms of Service Do Not Sell My Personal Information © 2023 VentureBeat. All rights reserved. "
4,249	2,020	"Duolingo's AI drives its English proficiency tests \| VentureBeat"	"https://venturebeat.com/ai/duolingos-english-test-ai-serve-and-score-questions"	"Artificial Intelligence View All AI, ML and Deep Learning Auto ML Data Labelling Synthetic Data Conversational AI NLP Text-to-Speech Security View All Data Security and Privacy Network Security and Privacy Software Security Computer Hardware Security Cloud and Data Storage Security Data Infrastructure View All Data Science Data Management Data Storage and Cloud Big Data and Analytics Data Networks Automation View All Industrial Automation Business Process Automation Development Automation Robotic Process Automation Test Automation Enterprise Analytics View All Business Intelligence Disaster Recovery Business Continuity Statistical Analysis Predictive Analysis More Data Decision Makers Virtual Communication Team Collaboration UCaaS Virtual Reality Collaboration Virtual Employee Experience Programming & Development Product Development Application Development Test Management Development Languages Duolingo’s AI drives its English proficiency tests Share on Facebook Share on X Share on LinkedIn Are you looking to showcase your brand in front of the brightest minds of the gaming industry? Consider getting a custom GamesBeat sponsorship. Learn more. Language learning startup Duolingo leverages AI and machine learning to create and score English proficiency tests automatically, reveals a paper published in the journal Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics. In it, researchers peel back the curtains on the family of algorithms underlying the Duolingo English Test, a $49 one-hour, at-home assessment that’s now accepted by over 2,000 university programs including Columbia, McGill, New York University, University College London, and Williams. AI-generated tests like Duolingo’s could be a godsend for employers looking to hiring English-as-a-second-language (ESL) candidates during the pandemic. Proficiency assessments like Test Of English As A Foreign Language (TOEFL) require that examinees travel to a proctored location, a tough ask in countries where executive orders have mandated the closure of non-essential businesses. Perhaps unsurprisingly, a Duolingo spokesperson says that test volume is up 300% and 375% globally and in China, respectively, and that 500 new programs have begun accepting Duolingo English Test since the pandemic began. As the coauthors of the paper explain, the Duolingo English Test draws on the item response theory in psychometrics to design and score measures of test-taker ability. It’s the basis for most high-stakes modern standardized tests, and it assumes that a response to a test item (i.e. question) is modeled by a function discretely representing an examinee’s ability and question difficulty. Fortuitously for Duolingo, this paradigm is well-suited to tasks where the goal is to estimate variables like ability and difficulty; questions can be created and tested with subjects to produce pairs (examine, question) graded “correct” or “incorrect,” from which parameters can be derived that anticipate future examinees’ abilities. Computer-adaptive testing (CAT) techniques enabled Duolingo to design a more efficient language test by assigning harder questions to test-takers of higher ability and vice versa. An iterative adaptive algorithm observes examinees’ responses to questions during testing and makes an estimate of their abilities. Based on a utility function of the current estimate, it then selects the next question, at which point the process repeats until the test is completed. VB Event The AI Impact Tour Connect with the enterprise AI community at VentureBeat’s AI Impact Tour coming to a city near you! For the Duolingo English Test, Duolingo designed a 100-point scoring system corresponding to the Common European Framework of Reference (CEFR), an international standard for describing the reading, writing, listening, and speaking skills proficiency of foreign-language learners. Then, the company’s researchers incorporated a range of different test formats, including: Yes/no vocabulary tests that vary in modality (text versus audio) to assess vocabulary breadth, where examinees are given both text and audio answers and must distinguish English words from English-like pseudowords (words that are morphologically and phonologically plausible, but have no meaning in English). The c-test format , which measures reading ability by providing examinees passages of text in which some words have been “damaged” (by deleting the second half of every other word) and tasking them with filling in missing letters. Dictation tests that tap both listening and writing skills by having examinees transcribe an audio recording. Elicited speech tasks that require examinees to say a sentence out loud. In pursuit of algorithms for the vocabulary tests that could rank questions by difficulty so that the sequence of questions in the overall proficiency test could be tailored to ability, Duolingo had a panel of linguistics Ph.D.s with English teaching experience compile an inventory of words labeled by CEFR level (which ranges from “Beginner/Breakthrough” to “Proficient/Mastery”). They fed this corpus to AI models to train them, and they report that the models eventually learned that advanced words — even pseudowords — are rarer and mostly have Greco-Latin etymologies, whereas basic words are common and have mostly Anglo-Saxon origins. For the c-tests, Duolingo leveraged a range of corpora gleaned from online sources — including English language self-study websites, test preparation resources for English proficiency exams, English Wikipedia articles that had been rewritten for Simple English, and the crowdsourced English sentence database Tatoeba — together with regression and ranking techniques to architect longer-form AI models. The models in question, which were trained on labeled texts and then on unlabeled texts with similar linguistic features, learned to predict not only the difficulty of a given c-test but also the difficulty of dictation and elicited speech tests. In fact, Duolingo reports that the trained model correctly ranked more difficult passages above simpler ones 85% of the time, and that its predictions mirrored those of a panel of four experts. The researchers used these predictions to automatically generate c-test items from paragraphs in the corpora and over 400 passages written by the experts. Ultimately, automating the serving of all questions to Duolingo English Proficiency examinees required creating a CAT administration algorithm, which was trained on over 25,000 test items to intelligently cycle through formats (e.g., yes/no vocabulary text or audio, c-test, dictation, and elicited). After choosing the first four questions at random, the algorithm estimates the test score and selects the difficulty of the next question to sample accordingly, a process that repeats until the test exceeds 25 items (or 40 minutes in length). In real test scenarios, human proctors review each test session for roughly 75 behaviors over multiple rounds, with the help of AI trained on millions of data points collected daily to detect rule-breaking. Beyond this, during test sessions, computer vision algorithms verify examinees’ identities (via their webcams) and tests are automatically canceled if they attempt to access external apps or plugins. Analyses of over 500,000 examinee-question pairs from over 21,000 tests administered in 2018 revealed that the Duolingo English Test produced rankings nearly identical to what traditional human pilot testing would provide, according to the paper’s coauthors. The test moreover correlated “significantly” (0.73) with English assessments like TOEFL and International English Language Testing System (IELTS) and satisfied industry standards for reliability (the degree to which a test is consistent and stable) and test security. (Duolingo found that test-takers could take the test about 1,000 times before seeing the same test item again, on average.) In future work, Duolingo researchers plan to investigate the extent to which people of equal ability but different subgroups (like gender or age) have unequal probability of success on test questions. In addition, they hope to study whether other indices, such as narrativity and word concreteness, could be incorporated into the Duolingo English Proficiency’s models to predict text difficulty and comprehension. To this end, a recently released version of the test includes more nuanced speaking and writing exercises and has higher test score reliability. “English is the most popular language to learn on Duolingo, and many learners also asked if we could certify their English skills formally, in order to help them gain access to higher education and better job opportunities,” wrote Duolingo machine learning scientist Burr Settles and assessment scientist Geoffrey LaFlair in a blog post published today. “Duolingo is a mission-driven company, and we created the Duolingo English Test to break down barriers to higher education. As a result, we’ve learned that an online, personalized approach to testing is not only important for increasing access — it’s an essential innovation that is reshaping the education system as we know it, and we are excited to be leading the way.” Duolingo’s investment in AI-enabled English testing coincides with improvements to the AI at the core of its language learning platform , which aims to make lessons more engaging by automatically tailoring them to each individual language learner. Statistical and machine learning models like half-life regression analyze the error patterns of millions of users to predict the “half-life” for each word in a person’s long-term memory, and to help content creators behind the scenes tailor beginner, intermediate, and advanced level material, Settles told VentureBeat in an interview last July. “There are millions of words in the English language, and maybe 10,000 high-frequency words — what order do you teach them? How do you string them together?” he said. “The core part of our AI strategy is to get as close as possible to having a human-to-human experience.” VentureBeat's mission is to be a digital town square for technical decision-makers to gain knowledge about transformative enterprise technology and transact. Discover our Briefings. The AI Impact Tour Join us for an evening full of networking and insights at VentureBeat's AI Impact Tour, coming to San Francisco, New York, and Los Angeles! VentureBeat Homepage Follow us on Facebook Follow us on X Follow us on LinkedIn Follow us on RSS Press Releases Contact Us Advertise Share a News Tip Contribute to DataDecisionMakers Careers Privacy Policy Terms of Service Do Not Sell My Personal Information © 2023 VentureBeat. All rights reserved. "
4,250	2,020	"How Draganfly brought a 'pandemic drone' to the U.S. \| VentureBeat"	"https://venturebeat.com/ai/draganfly-pandemic-drone-united-states-pilots"	"Artificial Intelligence View All AI, ML and Deep Learning Auto ML Data Labelling Synthetic Data Conversational AI NLP Text-to-Speech Security View All Data Security and Privacy Network Security and Privacy Software Security Computer Hardware Security Cloud and Data Storage Security Data Infrastructure View All Data Science Data Management Data Storage and Cloud Big Data and Analytics Data Networks Automation View All Industrial Automation Business Process Automation Development Automation Robotic Process Automation Test Automation Enterprise Analytics View All Business Intelligence Disaster Recovery Business Continuity Statistical Analysis Predictive Analysis More Data Decision Makers Virtual Communication Team Collaboration UCaaS Virtual Reality Collaboration Virtual Employee Experience Programming & Development Product Development Application Development Test Management Development Languages How Draganfly brought a ‘pandemic drone’ to the U.S. Share on Facebook Share on X Share on LinkedIn Are you ready to bring more awareness to your brand? Consider becoming a sponsor for The AI Impact Tour. Learn more about the opportunities here. Like the rest of the world, Canadian drone maker Draganfly has been anxiously watching the spread of the novel coronavirus. And when COVID-19 cases started springing up across Washington nursing homes in mid-February, the team began brainstorming. By March, Draganfly had licensed the machine vision and AI tech needed to offer social distancing and health monitoring services from the air. Demand to test the technology was “insatiable,” not just from government and law enforcement, but also from health care, airline, cruise, hospitality, theme park, and other commercial industries. By mid-April, the police department in Westport, Connecticut had a pilot underway, the first of its kind in the U.S. Moreover, Draganfly had three to seven more U.S. pilots planned. By April 23, the Westport pilot was dead. But the story doesn’t end there. We spoke with Draganfly CEO Cameron Chell before and after the abrupt termination of the Westport pilot. The drone company has two more pilots scheduled to start in less than two weeks. Chell says Draganfly has been “inundated” with requests from other jurisdictions, while the numbers on the private side “are even more prolific.” Indeed, the next couple of U.S. pilots will be in the private sector. One is drone-based, and the other is facility-based. Additional U.S. public sector pilots will start “relatively soon.” As for Canada, Chell said “a couple of institutions” are also interested, particularly in the transportation industry. As federal and local governments wrestle with the coronavirus pandemic — from tracking the spread of COVID-19 to gauging when to lift restrictions — everyone is taking a closer look at autonomous technologies like drones and robots. The public and private sectors are desperate for technology that can help limit human contact and provide early detection data on the implementation and effectiveness of measures like social distancing. Any business that relies on human interaction, whether with customers or between employees, will be hungry for data to understand health trends. And drones could play a critical role in detecting and tracking outbreaks, safeguarding both public health and business operations. Deploying drones since ’98 Unlike most drone companies, Draganfly has decades of experience. It was founded in 1998, and Chell prides himself on leading “the oldest commercial drone manufacturer in the world.” The Canadian company has some 25 employees and is based in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, with offices in Vancouver; Los Angeles; and Raleigh, North Carolina. Until this month, Draganfly was arguably best known for developing the first drone credited with saving a human life , in 2013. VB Event The AI Impact Tour Connect with the enterprise AI community at VentureBeat’s AI Impact Tour coming to a city near you! Cheap consumer drones have become popular in recent years, thanks to market leaders DJI and Parrot. But none of Draganfly’s four revenue streams is consumer-related. The first is contract engineering (primarily for tier one U.S.-based military contractors). The second is original systems manufacturing, meaning building drones that are fixed-winged and can perform vertical takeoff and horizontal landing, along with ground robots and other specialized products. That business line encompasses software design and development for other companies’ drones and includes the health measurement system that has been all over the news. The third line of business is managed services, when Draganfly essentially becomes the data collection and drone services arm of a business. The fourth line, which is still emerging, covers data analytics and management. While Draganfly does not build consumer drones itself, it has designed various payloads, gimbal attachments, and software integrations for its customers that do. The company prefers highly specialized work for the likes of U.S. marshals and border patrol. Forget cheap drones — think batteries that operate in colder weather, specialized sensors, and a North American supply chain. In the past five years or so, Draganfly’s work has started to skew toward the public safety arena. Draganfly customers “generally have a higher performance requirement,” Chell told VentureBeat. “They have some specialized needs that our engineering is attuned to. Also, they tend to not necessarily buy as much foreign product. The buyers in that area are a bit more conscientious, certainly on a military level, of security concerns and potential foreign parts and things like that. But even as that trickles down into public safety and law enforcement, they tend to have a bit more of a skew toward a North American or a NATO-based solution. So we’ve naturally ended up migrating that way.” Vital Intelligence Project Some 12 weeks ago, when “things got scary in Washington with nursing homes,” the Draganfly team was trying to figure out how drones could help. But they wanted to do more than just use drones to yell at people from the skies. “We were like, ‘Put a loudspeaker on a drone ?’ Big deal. Really? That’s not innovative,” Chell declared. “We were thinking if this hits, we need to be able to provide more value than very typical use cases like that.” The company realized it did not have the AI chops to pull off what it really wanted to do. So it started talking to its partners. “We went looking for it,” Chell said. “We were thinking ‘Oh, thermal cameras!’ Probably every person in the world has thought about thermal cameras. And we debunked the use of those very quickly. Thermal doesn’t measure core temperature, which is what is required to understand if there’s a potential fever present. We were like, ‘We [have] got to find something much different.’ And lo and behold, and very fortunately [for] us, it was the University of Southern Australia (UniSA), which is more coincidental than anything. But given the fact that they bought their first drone from us in 1999 — the trust relationship [was there, and] we could move very quickly.” The Canadian company researched, built use cases, ran tests, and in the space of a few weeks had signed a deal. Draganfly paid $1.5 million to license a health and respiratory monitoring platform, the Vital Intelligence Project, developed in a collaboration between UniSA and the Australian Department of Defence Science and Technology Group. Draganfly would commercialize and deploy the computer vision technology. The Vital Intelligence Project can help estimate the distances between people, but it can also monitor temperatures, heart rates, and respiratory rates of individuals in crowds and workforces. Draganfly envisioned the tech being deployed by airlines and cruise ships; for potential at-risk groups, like seniors in care facilities; and in convention centers; at border crossings; and within critical infrastructure facilities. “We licensed it for camera networks and for drones,” Chell explained. UniSA built the core technology — “the specific machine vision and AI in a non-productized form.” Draganfly simply happened to have the public research university in its Rolodex. The company then developed the productized form, including camera networks and drones. “That includes everything from going out and doing the policy development work through to what the GUI needs to look like,” Chell said. “Both software and mechanical engineering to provide stabilization on the drones so that they’re optimized to collect this data. That piece of IP, go to market, and actual commercialization piece is all in-house [at] Draganfly. But the hardcore research and IP behind the machine vision and AI up until this point has been [at] the University of South Australia. A bunch of test data and learning that we’re bringing in — we’re codeveloping that portion of the IP now, with them. However, they’re the hardcore Ph.D.s that are doing the AI work.” Still, some repurposing was required, as the Vital Intelligence Project was not exactly being used to monitor groups of people. “They were using it so that they can fly helicopters over … disaster relief zones and pick up the vital signs of survivors on the ground,” Chell said. “They could determine what resources they needed to apply where or the severity of survivors’ current situation, and did they need to get them right at that moment. They also ended up using it to monitor wildlife. You have a migration happening and you might have fires or drought. Wildlife officials need to see, ‘What is the health of the herd, and do we need to take any action?’ They also used it for prenatal babies, where they didn’t want a lot of people coming in and out of the ward because of potential introductions of infections, and also in that situation where probes and monitors being taped to babies don’t typically stay on or are uncomfortable in some way. Those are the journaled, peer-reviewed use cases that are out there.” Draganfly and the university took the technology and adapted it for social distancing and health monitoring. To be clear, the Vital Intelligence Project had never been strapped to a drone and pointed at a crowd before the Westport pilot. “The previous use case that would be most similar to this one was designed to be used in disaster relief areas to get the vital signs of survivors on the ground,” Chell said. “Those happen to be the same set of vital signs that we can now pick up anonymized in a crowd to determine if there’s infectious or respiratory challenges.” Westport: Flatten the Curve Pilot Program Draganfly started test flights in Westport, Connecticut to identify social distancing and detect symptoms. The city is in Fairfield County, adjacent to New York City and considered the epicenter for the spread of the coronavirus in Connecticut. The three-phase pilot was supposed to validate the technology’s use and have officials develop public safety policy around it. The next step would have been to test those policies. The whole process was supposed to take some 60 days, during which Draganfly hoped to initiate additional pilots. Phase one: Social distancing Phase one was to test whether the technology could be an effective resource multiplier, letting officials cover more ground to see if social distancing is being effectively adhered to, for example. Instead of sending a few cruisers out and having officers walk around, they could put one camera up in the sky and assess where to apply resources. “Social distancing, which we’ve shown on the videos, that’s actual visual data,” Chell said. “It gives the operator of the camera, typically the officer, the real-time data. They should make operational decisions at that point if they need to separate a crowd. Or everything is fine [and] they don’t need to go in and waste their time there.” Westport First Selectman Jim Marpe called it the “Flatten the Curve Pilot Program.” It was supposed to help the community “practice safe social distancing, while identifying possible coronavirus and other life-threatening symptoms.” Police Chief Foti Koskinas said at the time: “Using drones remains a go-to technology for reaching remote areas with little to no manpower required. Because of this technology, our officers will have the information and quality data they need to make the best decision in any given situation.” The hope was to deploy at town and state-owned beaches, train stations, parks and recreation areas, and shopping centers. “It will not be used in individual private yards, nor does it employ facial recognition technology,” the police department said. There was no health monitoring in phase one. Before the Westport pilot ended, Chell was already calling phase one a “success,” so we asked what exactly that meant. “The technology worked in a real-world environment,” Chell said. “So that was successful. We were able to get very good operational social distancing data. And the working relationship between the public safety officials and us was also a success.” Until it wasn’t. In announcing the end of the pilot just a couple of days later, Marpe said, “in our good faith effort to get ahead of the virus and potential need to manage and safely monitor crowds and social distancing in this environment, our announcement was perhaps misinterpreted, not well-received, and posed many additional questions. We heard and respect your concerns, and are therefore stepping back and reconsidering the full impact of the technology and its use in law enforcement protocol.” Koskinas added: “We thank Draganfly for offering the pilot program to Westport and sincerely hope to be included in future innovations once we are convinced the program is appropriate for Westport.” When we spoke to Chell a few days later, he seemed to understand why the pilot had to end. “The official pushback was around health monitoring, and the misunderstanding around how it works, what it does, and what it’s for,” he said. “And so at this point, Westport just feels politically that they just don’t want to move forward with the project. They had been extremely helpful. They provided us great insight, great policy framework, and all the rest of it, but they’re not going to move to go forward with us, at least not at this time, which is totally fine. There’s lots of people for us to move forward with, and [the people in Westport have] been totally professional and great to work with.” No part of the Vital Intelligence Project employs facial recognition technology, Draganfly has consistently said. Still, we wondered if the resulting output from phase one could be repurposed to do so. Could someone take the video feed and run a facial recognition algorithm on top of it? “No more than you could do that on a security camera system today,” Chell explained. “The requirements to run social distancing, in terms of resolution and stabilization in the video platform are minute compared to what you have to have in order to run the health measurement platform. So while today we can take existing security networks and do social distancing, you couldn’t take that same video feed and do heart rate, respiratory rate, or even often facial recognition stuff, which we don’t use.” Phase two: Anonymized health measurement The pilot never got to phase two, which was the anonymized health measurement. The plan was to test crowds as sample sets — how many are coughing, sneezing, have a fever (considering heart rate, respiratory rate, high blood pressure, and biometric measurements based on skin tones). We asked if the health monitoring tech had been tested with a variety of skin tones, given AI’s issues in the past. “It has. There’s some challenges with that at times,” Chell admitted. “So darker skin tones and different types of lights and the rest of it can create some problems. If you have somebody walking up to a kiosk and using this type of technology, it’s a different scenario because it’s a controlled environment, you control the lighting, and you can go from there. As opposed to, if you’re trying to do it across a large room that’s got 300 or 2,000 people in it, you’re not going to get every person, every time. But you are going to get a very meaningful population sample, especially as you do it more and more over time. You’re going to get 85% of the people — 15% of people, because of the lighting, because they [have] a hoodie on, or [a] certain type of skin tone, it’s just not going to catch. But again, it’s not meant to catch an individual.” That’s not a problem, Chell insists, because the technology is not meant to identify people. The whole point is to measure the health of a population. “When you combine things like fever, coughing, elevated heart rate, particular respiratory rates, then you’ve got a picture of health,” Chell said. “You’re not diagnosing if somebody has COVID-19 or not, but you are doing a health measurement and getting a pretty clear idea of the rate of infectious or respiratory diseases potentially in an area. If it’s under 0.02%, we’re in great shape. If it’s 0.02% yesterday, and then tomorrow in a similar-sized sample in the same area it’s at 1%, and the day after it’s a 3%, you’re on top of it. You’ve got some information now that can correlate with [the question of whether] social distancing [is] going to be required. Or you can certainly have policy developed. We’re not caught in a situation where we’ve got something being spread pandemically and we don’t even know it yet.” One big difference between phase one and phase two that led to major confusion is that the latter does not output video. Draganfly published videos to show how the technology worked, but that was misleading. The health measurement system does not record the subjects at a location that the drone “saw.” “It just comes back and says in this particular geographic location, where you did the health measurement data, there were 22 people in the field view. Here are the heart rates, here are the respiratory rates, here are the fevers. Here’s the likelihood, and percentage of, infections and/or respiratory disease.” The system takes “a stable 15 seconds” to acquire the data. “You need at least that much data time to understand respiratory rate,” Chell explained. “In that timeframe, you also have your heart rate beating so you’re able to collect that data concurrently. You can get biometric measurements of skin tone data quite quickly as well in that timeframe. Within reason, if you’ve got good skin tone exposure, you get core temperature, along with these other things for anybody that’s in the field of view. So if there’s 20 people in that field of view, and you’ve got a good angle on those 20 subjects, in that 15 seconds you can collect 20 sets of data.” The drone sends the data it collects back to the cloud (Draganfly uses AWS and Fortinet) for processing. “All of that happens in the cloud through encrypted lines. So that is a secure cloud environment where all of that AI happens. If the drone goes down, there’s no SD card that you can pull out with a bunch of great data.” Interestingly, Westport wasn’t using Draganfly drones — the plan was to deploy its Commander series in phase three. In the interest of time, the first two phases were to rely on third-party drones, which Westport already had. The police department launched its drone program in early 2016 to support its dive team operations when locating submerged objects or victims. It later expanded to accident investigation, documentation of scenes, search and rescue, public works projects, and pre-event planning. Draganfly claims its technology works at up to 190 feet away from subjects. “At 190 feet, you’re talking about a $35,000 drone, just because of the cameras and the additional sensors and stabilization. On a $600 drone, that doesn’t have really optimized stabilization software and such with it, it’s more like 20 feet. Using a drone that has optimized stabilization and a zoom lens — any distance, in theory, is possible. We are currently working with different ranges, and 190 feet has worked well.” But again, that was meant for phase three. The Draganfly system Westport piloted could have potentially worked from almost 10 times further away. For now, it doesn’t look like Westport will ever verify those claims. Other towns and companies, however, want to try. VentureBeat's mission is to be a digital town square for technical decision-makers to gain knowledge about transformative enterprise technology and transact. Discover our Briefings. The AI Impact Tour Join us for an evening full of networking and insights at VentureBeat's AI Impact Tour, coming to San Francisco, New York, and Los Angeles! VentureBeat Homepage Follow us on Facebook Follow us on X Follow us on LinkedIn Follow us on RSS Press Releases Contact Us Advertise Share a News Tip Contribute to DataDecisionMakers Careers Privacy Policy Terms of Service Do Not Sell My Personal Information © 2023 VentureBeat. All rights reserved. "
4,251	2,020	"AT&T's 39GHz spectrum win sets stage for national 3Gbps 5G service \| VentureBeat"	"https://venturebeat.com/mobile/atts-39ghz-spectrum-win-sets-stage-for-national-3gbps-5g-service"	"Artificial Intelligence View All AI, ML and Deep Learning Auto ML Data Labelling Synthetic Data Conversational AI NLP Text-to-Speech Security View All Data Security and Privacy Network Security and Privacy Software Security Computer Hardware Security Cloud and Data Storage Security Data Infrastructure View All Data Science Data Management Data Storage and Cloud Big Data and Analytics Data Networks Automation View All Industrial Automation Business Process Automation Development Automation Robotic Process Automation Test Automation Enterprise Analytics View All Business Intelligence Disaster Recovery Business Continuity Statistical Analysis Predictive Analysis More Data Decision Makers Virtual Communication Team Collaboration UCaaS Virtual Reality Collaboration Virtual Employee Experience Programming & Development Product Development Application Development Test Management Development Languages AT&T’s 39GHz spectrum win sets stage for national 3Gbps 5G service Share on Facebook Share on X Share on LinkedIn Are you looking to showcase your brand in front of the brightest minds of the gaming industry? Consider getting a custom GamesBeat sponsorship. Learn more. Prior to this year, 5G carrier AT&T had already placed a large bet on the 39GHz millimeter wave radio band, acquiring FiberTower’s sizable 379MHz blocks of spectrum. Today, AT&T confirmed that it has more than doubled its national 39GHz spectrum holdings to 786MHz, on average, a development that should enable the carrier to offer at least 3Gbps download speeds across the country — assuming it has the wherewithal to actually build towers to support the short-distance mmWave holdings. The considerably faster transfer speeds promised by 5G networks depend on empty spectrums — radio frequencies that aren’t already being used for other purposes. To hasten U.S. 5G development, the FCC has been auctioning blocks of millimeter wave spectrums , and AT&T swapped its FiberTower holdings for auction vouchers, enabling it to target contiguous spectrum blocks across the country. After bidding $2.4 billion, half from vouchers, AT&T won the 786MHz of nationwide 39GHz spectrum, bringing its national mmWave average to 1,040MHz, including separate 24GHz holdings. Last April, AT&T said its Netgear Nighthawk 5G hotspot hit a 2Gbps peak on its enterprise-focused 5G mmWave network, surpassing the carrier’s initial promises of 1Gbps peaks. But AT&T’s consumer 5G network has been disappointingly slower, offering 4G-like speeds using low band spectrum. Like rival T-Mobile, AT&T has focused its consumer 5G launch on covering large swaths of land rather than on ultimate performance. Doubling down on 39GHz means AT&T will have 800MHz bandwidth in some markets, enough for eight 100MHz channels. The carrier has previously said it can deliver up to 400Mbps of download speed per 100MHz channel, reaching 1.5Gbps across four channels , suggesting that 3Gbps should be easily attainable through all eight channels. Moreover, if a 5G device can simultaneously access AT&T’s 39GHz and 24GHz spectrums, or the 39GHz spectrum plus low or mid band channels, the speeds could be even higher. While AT&T now has the spectrum to support a national 39GHz 5G network, its ability to build out the supporting tower hardware remains a question mark. Like other millimeter wave frequencies, a 39GHz signal’s ability to travel is measured in feet rather than miles, requiring significant “small cell” radio hardware deployments to provide service. As such, AT&T has signaled that it will initially use mmWave to provide peak speed “5G+” in dense urban environments, with no specific timeline for wider rollouts elsewhere. By comparison, rival Verizon has focused almost exclusively on millimeter wave for its initial 5G rollout and has hit peaks in the 2Gbps range. Most of its real-world service has peaked at under 1.5Gbps, however, and the carrier has typically promised ideal performance of 1Gbps with more common speeds in the 600Mbps range. Today’s announcement notes that AT&T’s 5G+ network is now available in parts of 35 cities and is initially being densified to provide mobile service at “arenas, campuses, and more,” with fixed (home broadband) service potentially to follow. AT&T currently sells only a handful of phones with 5G+ support, including the Samsung Galaxy S20+ and S20 Ultra 5G , but the carrier is expected to broaden its selection later this year. VentureBeat's mission is to be a digital town square for technical decision-makers to gain knowledge about transformative enterprise technology and transact. Discover our Briefings. VentureBeat Homepage Follow us on Facebook Follow us on X Follow us on LinkedIn Follow us on RSS Press Releases Contact Us Advertise Share a News Tip Contribute to DataDecisionMakers Careers Privacy Policy Terms of Service Do Not Sell My Personal Information © 2023 VentureBeat. All rights reserved. "
4,252	2,020	"Conviva: Video streaming rose 20% globally in March amid coronavirus lockdowns \| VentureBeat"	"https://venturebeat.com/media/conviva-video-streaming-rose-20-globally-in-march-amid-coronavirus-lockdowns"	"Artificial Intelligence View All AI, ML and Deep Learning Auto ML Data Labelling Synthetic Data Conversational AI NLP Text-to-Speech Security View All Data Security and Privacy Network Security and Privacy Software Security Computer Hardware Security Cloud and Data Storage Security Data Infrastructure View All Data Science Data Management Data Storage and Cloud Big Data and Analytics Data Networks Automation View All Industrial Automation Business Process Automation Development Automation Robotic Process Automation Test Automation Enterprise Analytics View All Business Intelligence Disaster Recovery Business Continuity Statistical Analysis Predictive Analysis More Data Decision Makers Virtual Communication Team Collaboration UCaaS Virtual Reality Collaboration Virtual Employee Experience Programming & Development Product Development Application Development Test Management Development Languages Conviva: Video streaming rose 20% globally in March amid coronavirus lockdowns Share on Facebook Share on X Share on LinkedIn Are you looking to showcase your brand in front of the brightest minds of the gaming industry? Consider getting a custom GamesBeat sponsorship. Learn more. Video streaming is soaring as COVID-19 quarantines have people turning to movies and TV series to pass the time and ease their sense of isolation, according to a new study. The report by Conviva , a streaming media research firm, disclosed that video streaming by consumers around the world grew 20% in March, including a 26% increase in the U.S. In what may be a sign of just how much the quarantines have disrupted daily routines, the report found the biggest surge in viewing came during the day, with streaming up 40% between 10 a.m. and 5 p.m. “The last three weeks have dramatically changed how we work, socialize, and interact,” said Conviva CEO Bill Demas in a statement with the report. “As we all adjust to the new normal, streaming and social video have become even more important to many American households.” Conviva partners with many of the largest video services and has its monitoring technology deployed in more than 3 billion streaming video applications. That gives the company a pretty robust view of habits. For this report, the company analyzed data between March 3 and March 23 and compared the numbers in that final week to the two weeks prior to measure changes. VB Event The AI Impact Tour Connect with the enterprise AI community at VentureBeat’s AI Impact Tour coming to a city near you! As part of the shift, the company said early morning viewing rose 26% and early evening viewing increased 20%. The classic prime time viewing window of 8 p.m. to 10 p.m. saw a drop of 2%. There was a fair bit of variation. Africa saw an increase of 33%, while Europe saw only a marginal increase of 2.2%. That may suggest concerns over streaming services burdening the continent’s internet infrastructure have been overstated. In response to requests from the European Commission, several streaming companies have lowered their bitrates to ease their impact on networks. Meanwhile, Asian markets, which tend to be mobile-first when it comes to video streaming, experienced a 10% drop as more people stayed at home, according to Conviva. Conviva also tracked engagement with social media and local news as part of the report, which analyzed more than a thousand news outlets on social media and compared trends during the 30 days ending March 23 with the 30 prior days. Video of views for local news organizations on Facebook grew 247% during that window, with the number of views per video jumping 118%. During that same time frame, national news organizations saw an increase of only 97% on Facebook, an indication of just how much consumers are searching for information that is more geographically relevant, given the different rates of outbreaks and quarantine policies. As with other dramatic changes imposed by COVID-19, it remains to be seen how many of these trends will hold up after the crisis ends. It seems unlikely that so much daytime video viewing could continue, for instance, once people return to work and school. Still, the report suggests that video streaming platforms are likely to see a long-term bump as viewers become more dependent on them. “While the circumstances are unique and the shifting prime time is surprising, the streaming growth is not,” Demas said in his statement. “We anticipate streaming providers will retain new viewers long after the coronavirus crisis has ended, as viewers embrace the variety and flexibility of the medium.” VentureBeat's mission is to be a digital town square for technical decision-makers to gain knowledge about transformative enterprise technology and transact. Discover our Briefings. The AI Impact Tour Join us for an evening full of networking and insights at VentureBeat's AI Impact Tour, coming to San Francisco, New York, and Los Angeles! VentureBeat Homepage Follow us on Facebook Follow us on X Follow us on LinkedIn Follow us on RSS Press Releases Contact Us Advertise Share a News Tip Contribute to DataDecisionMakers Careers Privacy Policy Terms of Service Do Not Sell My Personal Information © 2023 VentureBeat. All rights reserved. "