Category: Tech news

Catch up on the most important news from today in two minutes or less.

Private rocket launch startup and SpaceX competitor Rocket Lab made a big announcement today: It’ll be looking to re-use the first stage of its Electron rockets, returning them to Earth with a controlled landing after they make their initial trip to orbit with the payload on board. The landing sequence will be different from SpaceX’s however: They’ll attempt to catch the returned first stage mid-air using a helicopter.

That’s in part because, as Rocket Lab founder and CEO Peter Beck told a crowd when announcing the news today, the company is “not doing a propulsive re-entry” and “we’re not doing a propulsive landing,” and instead will leach off its immense speed upon return to Earth through a turnaround burn in space before releasing a parachute to slow it down enough for a helicopter to catch it.

There are a number of steps required to get to that point, but already, Rocket Lab has been looking to measure all the data it needs to ensure this is possible through its last few launches. It’s upgrading the instrumentation for its eighth flight to gather yet more data, and then on flight 10 it’ll have the rocket splash down into the ocean to recover that rocket for even more learning. Then, during a flight to be determined later (Beck is unwilling to put a number on it at this stage) they’ll try to actually bring one down in good enough shape to reuse it.

As for why, there’s a clear advantage to being able to re-fly rockets, and it’s a simple one to understand when you realize that there’s a huge amount of demand for commercial launches.

“The fundamental reason we’re doing this is launch frequency,” Beck said. “Even if I can get the stage done once, I can effectively double production ratio.”

Beck also added that the biggest difficulty will be braking the rocket’s speed as it returns to Earth — a feat next to which he said the actual mid-air capture of the Electron via helicopter is actually pretty easy, from his POV as an amateur helicopter pilot in training.

Rocket Lab has an HQ in Huntington Beach, Calif. and its own private launch site in New Zealand; it was founded in 2006 by Beck. The company has been test launching its orbital Electron rocket since 2017, and serving customers commercially since 2018. It also intends to launch from Virginia in the U.S. starting in 2019.

The company revealed its Photon satellite platform earlier this year, which would allow small satellite operators to focus on their specific service and use the off-the-shelf Photon design to skip the step of actually designing and building the satellite itself.

The two developers of an indie game called Ooblets have been subjected to “tens of thousands if not hundreds of thousands” of abusive messages following their decision to put their game on the Epic Games Store. It’s a worrying yet entirely unsurprising example of the toxic elements of the gaming community and their strangely unlimited hatred for Epic.

Ooblets is a game by a husband and wife team that looks like a sort of farming/dancing/collecting simulator with a fun, cute style. They’ve been developing it for a couple of years now with the help of Patreon supporters, and are getting closer to release.

In the process of lining up where and how to sell the game, the two entered into a contract with the Epic Games Store, which in exchange for near-term exclusivity would guarantee the developers the income they might have gotten if they’d decided to launch on multiple storefronts.

This practice adds some stability to what can be a very unpredictable sales environment, and as a side effect gave the two a fund upfront to finish development without having to rely on their Patreon supporters — whom they told about the new deal and consulted about what should happen next.

To be clear, the game will still be able to be bought and played by pretty much everyone on PC, just using a different storefront. Like if the chips you prefer started being sold at 7-Eleven instead of AM/PM. Except you can go to either one just by clicking your mouse.

But when they announced the news to the broader internet, it drew down on Ben and Rebecca Cordingley the ire of the easily provoked gaming world, specifically those who believe that Epic’s purchase of exclusives for its nascent gaming storefront is an affront to all that is sane and good in this world.

Immediately the two were inundated with messages “on every conceivable platform” telling them to die, swallow bleach, get raped, and both accusing Ben of anti-Semitism and mocking his being Jewish. Some, he said, went so far as to doctor video to make it seem like he had posted something then deleted it.

Horrified and taken aback by this massively disproportionate response to two people deciding to make a deal that should benefit their game and not affect their supporters (their patrons on Patreon were never promised the game, let alone on a specific platform), Ben wrote a post with his thoughts on the matter. You can read it here, along with some rather disturbing excerpts of the attacks on him and his wife.

These attacks are likely ongoing — in fact, the new post has probably just stoked the fire, and the two can look forward to a few more weeks of being told to kill themselves or that someone is going to find them and assault them.

The backlash against Epic over the last year has been perplexing to watch. The new storefront was created in the wake of Fortnite’s success to act as a dark horse challenger to the reigning champ of the PC gaming world, Valve’s Steam. Releasing on Steam has been a foregone conclusion for most PC games for years, but recently that practice has been challenged as companies like Epic and Ubisoft created their own launchers and game stores.

Flush with Fortnite cash, Epic has relied on two things to grow its storefront, which began (and remains) rather lackluster compared to its more mature and popular competitors. First, it has simply picked a number of games each month to give away for free, no strings attached — and not shovelware either, but actually great games that people want. Second, they’ve arranged for upcoming games to release exclusively on their platform.

Paid exclusivity is of course by no means new, especially not in the gaming community, where exclusivity among platforms has been the rule since the ’80s, when it was Mario versus Sonic, to today, when it’s Halo versus Destiny or a hundred others. Sony, Microsoft, Nintendo and many others pay huge amounts to lock in developers for years, sometimes buying them outright so their games will be released exclusively on a certain platform. Epic seems to be joining a fairly large club.

Steam has many features Epic doesn’t, it is true. The community of recommendations, mods, forums and gamified purchasing on Steam is unmatched anywhere else. But for the purpose of buying and launching a game, the two are pretty evenly matched. It’s understandable that people might be upset when a game they are looking forward to disappears from their wishlist on Steam, or that they have to download another app in order to launch some games. But this inconvenience is, let’s be honest, minimal.

It’s sad reading not just the initial outrage at the pair’s decision — which, as they explained, is helpful for them as developers and lets them finish the game with less financial uncertainty — but at the justification that many have put forward that by joking about how angry people get about the Epic thing in the original post, Ben was inviting the abuse he received. These “they should have known” or “they were asking for it” people seem to want the developer’s perceived tone to have equal importance as the thousands of death threats they received subsequently.

From Ben’s post:

I’d challenge anyone to be on the receiving end of this for a few minutes/hours/days to not come to the conclusion that a huge segment of the broader gaming community is toxic.

There’s a strange relationship a segment of the gaming community has with game developers. I think their extreme passion for games has made them perceive the people who provide those games as some sort of mystical “other”, an outgroup that’s held to a whole set of weird expectations. These folks believe they hold the magic power of the wallet over developers who should cower before them and capitulate to any of their demands. You can see this evidenced by the massive number of angry people threatening to pirate our game in retaliation to any perceived slight.

It’s hard to see the effects or scope of what a massive mob of online harassment is doing to someone until you’re on the receiving end of it. It’s also really hard to realize when you’re unwittingly part of a harassment group because you’ve been so convinced by the mob mentality that your anger and target are justified.

Ben and Rebecca are far from the first to be the target of this type of mob, and let’s not forget that 8chan got its start as a refuge for “gamergate” diehards who had been ejected from other platforms. The original toxic gamer outrage factory is now known for being an incubator for white nationalist terrorists. Threats from the collective fragile internet ego are manifesting in bullets and taking lives with frightening frequency.

If you’d like to support the game and developer, which I already intended to do before this unseemly furore, you can follow the developers and see the latest over at Ooblets.com.

The pugnacious-porcine meme is the latest example of people on social media embracing absurdity to cope with intense sadness.

Fredrick Brennan is appalled by the notorious chat site’s links to right-wing extremism and mass shootings. Inside his tortured journey through the web’s cesspool and his attempt at redemption.

The aircraft flying loops off the Oregon Coast on Monday was likely testing potential fixes for the troubled MCAS system, implicated in two crashes.

Disney’s upcoming streaming service Disney+ will be available as a $12.99 monthly bundle with ESPN+ and ad-supported Hulu.

That means the full Disney bundle (it owns ESPN and — thanks to the Fox acquisition — has a controlling stake in Hulu) will cost the same amount as Netflix’s standard U.S. plan. That’s also about $5 less than you’d pay every month if you signed up for each of the three separate subscriptions.

Disney CEO Bob Iger announced the pricing this afternoon as part of the company’s third-quarter earnings call, as reported in Axios and elsewhere.

Earlier this year, the company announced that Disney+ will cost $6.99 per month as a standalone subscription, and will launch on November 12. At the time, executives said they were “likely” to offer a bundle with ESPN+ and Hulu as well, but they didn’t provide any concrete plans or details.

At launch, Disney+ will include a big swath of the joint Disney-Fox content library, including the first two Star Wars trilogies, the latest Marvel movies, “The Simpsons” and the Signature collection of classic Disney films, with more content added as it gets freed up from third-party deals.

Disney is also developing original shows for the service, including several Marvel shows and the Star Wars spin-off “The Mandalorian.”

Burnette, who is CEO of Kodiak, was part of the Google self-driving project before leaving and co-founding Otto in early 2016, along with Anthony Levandowski, Lior Ron and Claire Delaunay. Uber then acquired Otto (and its co-founders). Burnette left Uber to launch Kodiak in April 2018 with Eshel, a former venture capitalist and now the startup’s COO.

In August 2018, the company announced it had raised $40 million in Series A financing led by Battery Ventures . CRV, Lightspeed Venture Partners and Tusk Ventures also participated in the round. Itzik Parnafes, a general partner at Battery Ventures, joined Kodiak’s board.

Kodiak is the latest autonomous vehicle company to test its technology in Texas. The state has become a magnet for autonomous vehicle startups, particularly those working on self-driving trucks. That’s largely due to the combination of a friendly regulatory environment and the state’s position as a logistics and transportation hub.

Facebook has filed lawsuits against two app developers accused of generating fraudulent revenue using the social media giant’s advertising platform.

The company announced the legal action in a blog post Tuesday.

“The developers made apps available on the Google Play store to infect their users’ phones with malware,” said Jessica Romero, director of platform enforcement and litigation. “The malware created fake user clicks on Facebook ads that appeared on the users’ phones, giving the impression that the users had clicked on the ads.”

The scheme uses a technique known as click injection, which relies on apps fraudulently generating ad clicks without the user’s knowledge to artificially inflate the amount of ad revenue. It’s a problem previously noted by security researchers. Often, developers create junk or easy-to-make apps which get downloaded millions of times, while in the background they’re clicking on invisible ads without the user’s knowledge.

Facebook said in this case two developers, LionMobi — based in Hong Kong, and JediMobi — based in Singapore — generated “unearned payouts” from the social media giant’s advertisement system.

By our count, the app developers have seen more than 207 million installs to date. The apps remain on Google’s app store. Google did not immediately comment.

The social media giant said it refunded impacted advertisers.

A Facebook spokesperson did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Last year, we told you about a New York-based startup that had begun lending cold, hard, cash to cryptocurrency holders who don’t want to offload their holdings but also don’t necessarily want so much of their assets tied up in cryptocurrencies.

Today, that two-year-old company, BlockFi, is announcing $18.3 million in Series A funding led by Peter Thiel’s Valar Ventures, with participation from Winklevoss Capital, Morgan Creek Digital, Akuna Capital and earlier backers Galaxy Digital Ventures and ConsenSys Ventures.

Apparently, BlockFi is gaining some traction.

Last year, after raising $1.5 million in seed funding from ConsenSys Ventures, SoFi and Kenetic Capital, it secured $50 million led by Galaxy Digital Ventures (the digital currency and blockchain tech firm founded by famed investor Mike Novogratz) that is used to loan out cash to customers who use their bitcoin and ethereum holdings as collateral.

The minimum deposit required: $20,000 worth of cryptocurrency.

According to founder Zac Prince, who talked with Bloomberg about BlockFi’s newest round, enough people are now using those loans that BlockFi has seen its monthly revenue grow more than 10 times since January.

No doubt the uptick in loans correlates with the rebound in Bitcoin’s value, which was priced as low as $3,400 earlier this year but is now valued at roughly $11,400.

Prince also told the outlet that he expects annual revenue to hit eight figures by the end of this year. In startup land, that means it’s time to roll out new money-making services. BlockFi already introduced a savings account product earlier this year that it says enables investors to earn interest on their assets. They are not backed by the FDIC, though the company says it “operates with a focus on compliance with U.S. laws and regulations.” And while it won’t say exactly what’s coming up next, it says in a statement about the new round more products are being added to its existing platform.

Prince previously spent roughly five years in consumer lending and began investing his own money in crypto in early 2016.

He told us last year that his “lightbulb moment” for the company came as he was in the process of getting a loan for an investment property. Instead of using a traditional bank, he decided to list his crypto holdings to see what would happen, and the response was overwhelming. “I realized that there was no debt or credit outside of [person-to-person] margin lending on a few exchanges, and I had the feeling that this was a big opportunity that I was well-suited to go after.”

Other companies providing crypto-backed loans that are issued in fiat currencies include CoinLoan, SALT Lending, Nexo.io and Celsius Network, among others.

Here at TechCrunch, we like to think about what’s next, and there are few technologies quite as exotic and futuristic as quantum computing. After what felt like decades of being “almost there,” we now have working quantum computers that are able to run basic algorithms, even if only for a very short time. As those times increase, we’ll slowly but surely get to the point where we can realize the full potential of quantum computing.

For our TechCrunch Sessions: Enterprise event in San Francisco on September 5, we’re bringing together some of the sharpest minds from some of the leading companies in quantum computing to talk about what this technology will mean for enterprises (p.s. early-bird ticket sales end this Friday). This could, after all, be one of those technologies where early movers will gain a massive advantage over their competitors. But how do you prepare yourself for this future today, while many aspects of quantum computing are still in development?

IBM’s quantum computer demonstrated at Disrupt SF 2018

Joining us onstage will be Microsoft’s Krysta Svore, who leads the company’s Quantum efforts; IBM’s Jay Gambetta, the principal theoretical scientist behind IBM’s quantum computing effort; and Jim Clarke, the director of quantum hardware at Intel Labs.

That’s pretty much a Who’s Who of the current state of quantum computing, even though all of these companies are at different stages of their quantum journey. IBM already has working quantum computers, Intel has built a quantum processor and is investing heavily into the technology and Microsoft is trying a very different approach to the technology that may lead to a breakthrough in the long run but that is currently keeping it from having a working machine. In return, though, Microsoft has invested heavily into building the software tools for building quantum applications.

During the panel, we’ll discuss the current state of the industry, where quantum computing can already help enterprises today and what they can do to prepare for the future. The implications of this new technology also go well beyond faster computing (for some use cases); there are also the security issues that will arise once quantum computers become widely available and current encryption methodologies become easily breakable.

The early-bird ticket discount ends this Friday, August 9. Be sure to grab your tickets to get the max $100 savings before prices go up. If you’re a startup in the enterprise space, we still have some startup demo tables available! Each demo table comes with four tickets to the show and a high-visibility exhibit space to showcase your company to attendees — learn more here.

Imagine a growing Israeli startup whose product is deepfake videos that are based on artificial intelligence and appear to be utterly authentic. The company’s marketing efforts, according to its website, are conducted by two departments — “consulting for corporations” and “consulting for governments and politicians.” In addition, “the company helps its customers uncover their opponents’ weak spots and make them go viral.”

Finally, imagine that the company describes its employees as “highly experienced men and women, graduates of elite units of the IDF intelligence branch and Israeli government intelligence agencies,” and that its technology is based on developments by these same security agencies. On top of all of this, of course its board of directors includes former heads of Mossad and the Israeli General Security Service (Shin Bet), as well as retired senior army officers.

When you are done imagining this, it’s time to think about the private intelligence firm Black Cube. Various investigative reports published recently in the media in Israel and abroad paint a troubling picture — not because the company is violating the law, but because of its lack of ethics and internal moral code.

According to these reports, Black Cube does not work only for giant corporations that want to dig up incriminating information about their competitors, it also has contracts with foreign governments that seek to repress political opponents. It not only helps governments find those who are evading their financial obligations, but also to harass women who complain about crimes of sexual violence. Not only does it identify those who defame rival businesses, but it also frightens off regulators and watchdogs, human rights activists and journalists. 

Black Cube, of course, is not alone in this. Have you ever heard of NSO, whose flagship product, Pegasus, can turn any cellphone into a mobile spying device? Or Glassbox and its product line? The list of such companies is long, and most of them are all but unknown. All of them are based on exploiting the skills, technology and professional culture created in the Israeli security establishment.

There is nothing new about former members of the Israeli defense and security agencies selling weapons and military know-how. But what has been added in recent years is the technology twist. Former high-ranking security officials and intelligence operatives, including from the renowned 8200 unit, strike out on their own. Some of them find employment in firms that break new ground, improve the world and better society; but others, in their greed, are willing to sell spyware and offensive cyber-weapons to dictators in Africa who need them to stamp out criticism and revolts.

This is also not a situation unique to Israel. Veterans of western security agencies worldwide face similar dilemmas once they retire from their careers in public service and seek their next professional challenges. The startup nation however, is based, to a large extent, on veterans of Israel’s high-tech units in the defense establishment. While this association certainly does bring honor, prestige, revenue and jobs to the Israeli economy, two issues resulting from this relationship need to be considered.

The first relates to ethics. If anything is clear today in the world of technology, it is the need to include ethical concerns when developing, distributing, implementing and using technology. This is all the more important because in many domains there is no regulation or legislation to provide a clear definition of what may and may not be done. There is nothing intrinsic to technology that requires that it pursue only good ends. The mission of our generation is to ensure that technology works for our benefit and that it can help realize social ideals. The goal of these new technologies should not be to replicate power structures or other evils of the past. 

Startup nation should focus on fighting crime and improving autonomous vehicles and healthcare advancements. It shouldn’t be running extremist groups on Facebook, setting up “bot farms” and fakes, selling attackware and spyware, infringing on privacy and producing deepfake videos.

The second issue is the lack of transparency. The combination of individuals and companies that have worked for, and sometimes still work with, the security establishment frequently takes place behind a thick screen of concealment. These entities often evade answering challenging questions that result from the Israeli Freedom of Information law and even recourse to the military censor — a unique Israeli institution — to avoid such inquires.

How can we know when the government permits to be sold, and to whom, technologies that were developed by the private sector but that have security implications? How can we know who intervenes when a foreign country in Europe arrests spies sent by a commercial firm, or when a Gulf state is targeted by an Israeli high-tech company? How can we know when the companies are serving the national interest, and their own bottom line — and who gets to decide this, anyway? And what is the impact on the defense establishment itself with the migration of its stars directly from national service to high tech? What effect does this have on the state’s decision-making process about which technologies to invest in, whom it trains and what it purchases?

Technology can make the world a better place — or much worse. Sometimes the results are mixed. We are all acquainted with app developers who make their terms of use impossibly complicated so they can invade our privacy; but not everyone is in the business of developing spyware or cyberattack technologies. The challenges created by social media platforms are well known, but not everyone uses them to manipulate others and to run an army of trolls to intimidate certain individuals.

Israel, and its tech business community, must carefully consider the negative ramifications of excelling in technology while disregarding moral and ethical questions. The “startup nation” must conduct extensive discussions on the crossroads between ethics and technology so as to endow the next generation with the strong moral compass necessary to navigate in this new world. The unanswered question at hand is how Israel, and similar western democracies, can grapple with the growing phenomenon of technological entities whose sole purpose is profit without any qualms about the moral implications of their products and services.

Why is tech still aiming for the healthcare industry? It seems full of endless regulatory hurdles or stories of misguided founders with no knowledge of the space, running headlong into it, only to fall on their faces.

Theranos is a prime example of a founder with zero health background or understanding of the industry — and just look what happened there! The company folded not long after founder Elizabeth Holmes came under criminal investigation and was barred from operating in her own labs for carelessly handling sensitive health data and test results.

But sometimes tech figures it out. It took years for 23andMe to breakthrough FDA regulations — it’s since more than tripled its business and moved into drug discovery.

And then there’s Oscar Health, which first made a mint on Obamacare and has since ventured into Medicare. Combined with Bright, the two health insurance startups have pulled in a whopping $3 billion so far.

It’s easy to shake our fists at fool-hardy founders hoping to cash in on an industry that cannot rely on the old motto “move fast and break things.” But it doesn’t have to be the code tech lives or dies by.

So which startups have the mojo to keep at it and rise to the top? Venture capitalists often get to see a lot before deciding to invest. So we asked a few of our favorite health VC’s to share their insights.

Phin Barnes – First Round Capital

Researchers have begun to see a trend: The rate of mass shootings is consistently much higher for places with fewer restrictions on guns.

As the accuracy of such algorithms improve, governments use facial recognition in more ways—and prompt increasing privacy and fairness concerns.