Category: Tech news

Google’s Pixel 3 and Pixel 3 XL are hardly a secret at this point, having leaked out again and again over the last few weeks. But they’re still not quite official.

The phones just took one big step closer to real, with Google sending out invites for a “Made By Google” event that will almost certainly focus on the phones.

The invite itself doesn’t say much, besides that it’ll happen at 11 am on October 9th in New York. They also use a “3” (as in Pixel 3) to make a heart in “I <3 NY”, presumably no accident.

The rumor mill, meanwhile, has said plenty. Like that the Pixel 3 will likely have a Snapdragon 845 processor, 4GB of ram and a 12.2 megapixel camera behind a 5.5″ display. The beefier Pixel 3 XL, meanwhile, is said to bump things up to a 6.71″ display (complete with the always controversial camera cutout) and 6GB of ram.

Kadho, a company building automatic speech recognition technology to help children communicate with voice-powered devices, is officially exiting stealth today at TechCrunch Disrupt SF 2018 where it’s launching its new technology, Kidsense Edge voice A.I. The company claims its technology can better decode kids’ speech as it was built using speech data from 150,000 children’s voices. The COPPA-compliant solution, which is initially targeting the voice-enabled devices and voice-enabled toys market, is already being used by paying customers.

As anyone with an Echo smart speaker or Google Home can tell you, today’s devices often struggle to understand children’s voices. That’s because current automatic speech recognition technology has been built for adults and was trained on adult voice data.

Kidsense.ai, meanwhile, was built for kids using voices of children from different age groups and speaking different languages. By doing so, it believes it can outperform the big players in the market like Google, Samsung, Baidu, Amazon, and Microsoft, when it comes to understanding children’s speech, the company says.

The company behind the Kidsense AI technology, Kadho, has been around since 2014, and was originally founded by PhDs with backgrounds in A.I. and neuroscience, Kaveh Azartash (CEO) and Dhonam Pemba (Chief Scientist). Chief Revenue Officer, Jock Thompson, is a third co-founder today.

Initially, the company’s focus was on building conversational-based language learning applications for kids.

“But the biggest pain point that we encountered…was that the devices that we were using or apps on – either mobile phones, tablets, robotics, or smart speakers  – they’re not built to understand kids,” explains Azartash. He means the speech recognition technology wasn’t built on kids’ data. “They’re not designed to communicate or understand kids.”

The team realized there was a bigger problem to solve. Teaching kids new language using conversational techniques couldn’t work until devices could actually understand the kids. The company shifted to focus instead on speech recognition technology, using a data set of kids voices (which it did with parents’ consent, we’re told), to build Kidsense.

The initial product was a server-based solution called Kidsense cloud AI in late 2017. But more recently, it’s been working on an embedded version of the same platform, where no audio data from kids is collected, and no data is sent to cloud-based servers. This allows the solution to be both COPPA and GDPR-compliant.

This also means it could address the needs of device makers who have been previously come under fire for their less than secure toys and robotics, like Mattel’s Hello Barbie, or its canceled A.I. speaker Aristotle. The idea today is that toy makers, smart speaker manufacturers, and others catering to the kids’ market will need to be compliant with more stringent privacy laws and, to do so, the processing has to be done on the device, not the cloud.

“All the decoding, all the processing is one on the device,” says Azartash. “So we’re able to offer better efficacy and better accuracy in converting speech to text…the technology does not send any speech data to the server.”

“We’ve figured out how to put this all onto the device in an efficient way using minimal processing power,” adds Thompson. “And because we’re embedded we can charge a flat fee depending on the product anywhere to a subscription model.”

For example, a toy company working with thin margins on a product with a really small lifespan might want a flat fee. But another company may have a product with a longer lifespan that they charge their own customers for on subscription. They may want to be able to update their product’s voice tech capabilities over-the-air. That’s also possible here.

The company says its technology is in several toys, robotics, and A.I. speaker products around the world, but some of its customers are under NDA.

It’s also testing its technology with chip makers and big-name kids’ brands here in the U.S.

On stage, the company also showed off its latest development – dual language speech recognition technology. This is the first technology that can decode two languages in one sentence, when spoken by kids. This is an area smart speakers and their related voice technology are only now entering, within the adult market that is. For example, Google Assistant is preparing to become multilingual in English, French and German this year.

Currently, the company has approximately $1.2 million in revenue from customers on annual contracts and its SaaS model. It’s been operating in stealth mode, but is now preparing to reach more customers.

To date, Kadho has raised $2.5 million from investors including Plug and Play Tech Center, Beam Capital, Skywood Capital, SFK Investment, Sparks Lab, and other angel investors. It’s preparing to raise an additional $3 million before moving to a Series A.

For Lori Systems chief executive and co-founder Josh Sandler, deals like the one between his company and the Kenyan government to solve last-mile solutions around the national railroad are about far more than just logistics.

Sandler, whose family battled apartheid in South Africa as social workers, township doctors and (more dangerously) as financiers for the Spear of the Nation (the armed wing of the African National Congress), looks at logistics as an economic cornerstone for building more stable and democratic societies in sub-Saharan Africa.

His parents had immigrated to the U.S. in 1990 when Sandler was still a young child to escape the violence that accompanied the negotiations to dissolve South Africa’s apartheid state. Sandler’s father had worked as a doctor in township hospitals, while his mother was a social worker who was setting up a support network for abused children.

“A lot of the family was getting arrested and the country was breaking up and people feared a civil war and my dad got a fellowship in America and moved to Florida,” Sandler says. 

But South Africa remained the touchstone for Sandler’s family life and he would often return to visit those activist relatives who remained to help shepherd the country through its early years as a democracy. It was during one visit to the country — when Sandler was working in a refugee camp — that the need for better economic solutions to the region’s problems became clear.

In the aftermath of the economic collapse of Zimbabwe and the long-simmering civil war in the Congo in 2008, refugees from the region were flooding into South Africa — and it triggered a response in the country’s citizens. Xenophobic violence resulted in rioting, looting and the murder of immigrants at camps — and Sandler had gone to volunteer at the shelters that were caring for these refugees.

“I had been debating between investment banking and the peace corps and went with investment banking because there needs to be a macroeconomic solution for this,” Sandler said. “Finding the core challenges from a macro perspective and preventing this from occurring by establishing strong systems and an economy that can prevent… all of these crises.”

So Sandler studied development economics. His work focused on supply chains — specifically working with the Kenyan government to analyze what went into the dramatic cost increases that are attendant with the sale of every good and service in the country. “When you buy a mango on a farm, it’s half a penny and then in the supermarket it’s 80 cents,” said Sandler.

From Kenya, Sandler moved to study Nigeria and worked on problems with supply chain management in pharmaceuticals. “I did a lot of trips and treks back to the continent and what I kept seeing is challenges in the supply chain — part of it is middlemen and part of it is haulage.” Sandler said. “That’s a big issue that’s due to a lack of flexibility and coordination in the system.”

After seeing the elegance of the marketplace model that Uber had set up for ride-hailing and given the penetration of smart and feature phones in Africa, Sandler thought he could do something to create a marketplace for the trucking industry.

“Before, providers were managing individual trucking companies with a difficult marketplace and no transparency,” says Sandler. “By driving that through our system and having more pricing visibility we’re able to bring down the cost of bringing bulk grains to Uganda by 17.3 percent.”

Lori Systems first launched in Kenya and started working with a network of trucking companies. Around that time the company also came to the attention of TechCrunch.

Yes, Lori Systems has been on a TechCrunch stage before — as competitors (and eventual winners) of our inaugural TechCrunch Battlefield competition in Nairobi.

Since appearing on stage at our Nairobi event, Lori has grown quickly. The company counts 70 employees on staff — up from 20 — and now has 70 cargo operators responsible for a network of 2,500 trucks using its service.

The staffing changes at Lori include some big new executive hires, including Andrew Musoke, who has come on board as director of commercial products, and a former director of Maersk, Mehul Bhaat, who will be running operations in East Africa for Lori, Sandler says.

Lori has also expanded internationally — working with fleets in Kenya, Uganda, Rwanda and South Africa while also increasing the types of cargo that its fleet operators are transporting. “We went from just doing grain and fertilizer to now we do all freight bulk,” says Sandler.

Not everything about the TechCrunch experience was positive for Sandler and the company. After their victory, Lori, and Sandler, were subjected to criticism from some African press. “There were really bizarre implications with the underlying tone being white male privilege,” says Sandler. “It’s an important conversation to have around white male privilege… [but] it was coming out on a very personal level on a gossip column.”

The accusations aside, Sandler said the victory in the Startup Battlefield Africa competition validated the company with potential new hires.

As for the opportunity, Sandler says there’s $180 billion in hauling income across the African continent, and very little of it has been optimized with software. Ultimately, if Lori succeeds it will mean lower prices and increased spending power for consumers across Africa.

“If you’re earning a dollar a day and 40 percent or 60 percent is going to logistics that could be going somewhere else, that’s a problem,” Sandler said. It’s exactly the problem that Lori is setting out to solve.

M. Scott Mahaskey captured the scene in an unscripted backdoor moment after the Twitter–Facebook Senate hearings.

Now valued at $5.6 billion, zero-fee stock trading app and cryptocurrency exchange Robinhood is starting preparations to go public. Just a year and a half ago, it was still largely under the radar. But then it raised a $110 million Series C at a $1.3 billion valuation in April 2017 and then just a year later scored a $363 million Series D, both led by Russian firm DST Global. Combined with the growth of its premium subscription for trading on margin called Robinhood Gold, the startup now has the firepower and revenue to make a viable Wall Street debut.

Today during Robinhood CEO Baiju Bhatt’s talk at TechCrunch Disrupt SF, he revealed that his company is on the path to an IPO and has begun its search for a chief financial officer. It’s also undergoing constant audits from the SEC, FINRA and its security team to make sure everything is kosher and locked up tight.

The CFO hire could help the five-year-old Silicon Valley startup pitch itself as the cheaper youthful alternative to E*Trade and traditional stock brokers. They’d also have to convince potential investors that even though cryptocurrency prices are in a downturn, allowing people to trade them for cheaper than competitors like Coinbase is a powerful user acquisition funnel.

Robinhood now has 5 million customers tracking, buying and selling stocks, options, ETFs, American depositary slips receipts of international companies and cryptos like Bitcoin and Ethereum. That’s twice as many customers as its incumbent competitor E*Trade despite it having 4,000 employees compared to Robinhood’s 250.

The startup has raised a total of $539 million to date from prestigious investors like Andreessen Horowitz, Kleiner Perkins, Sequoia and Google’s Capital G, allowing it to rapidly roll out products before its rivals can react. This rapid rise in valuation can go to some founders’ heads, or crush them under the pressure, but Bhatt cited “friendship” with his co-CEO Vlad Tenev as what keeps him sane.

The startup has three main monetization streams. First, it earns interest on money users keep in their Robinhood account. Second, it sells order flow to stock exchanges that want more liquidity for their traders. And it sells Robinhood Gold subscriptions which range from $10 per month for $2,000 in extra buying power to $200 per month for $50,000 in margin trading, with a 5 percent APR charged for borrowing over that. Gold was growing its subscriber count at 17 percent per month earlier this year, showing the potential of giving trades away for free and then charging for extra services.

But Robinhood is also encountering renewed competition as both startups and incumbents wise up. European banking app Revolut is building a commission-free stock trading, and Y Combinator startup Titan just launched its app that lets you buy into a  managed portfolio of top stocks. Finance giant JP Morgan now gives customers 100 free trades in hopes of not being undercut by Robinhood.

Over on the crypto side, Coinbase continues to grow in popularity despite its 1.4 percent to 4 percent fees on trades. It’s rapidly expanding its product offering and the two fintech startups are destined to keep clashing. Robinhood may also be suffering from the crypto downturn, which is likely dissuading the mainstream public from dumping cash into tokens after seeing people lose fortunes as Bitcoin and Ethereum’s prices tumbled this year.

There’s also the persistent risk of a security breach that could tank Robinhood’s brand. Meanwhile, the startup uses both human and third-party software-based systems to moderate its crypto chat rooms to make sure pump and dump schemes aren’t running rampant. Bhatt says he’s proud of making cryptocurrency more accessible, though he didn’t say he felt responsible for prices plummeting, which could mean many of Robinhood Crypto’s users have lost money.

Fundamentally, Robinhood is using software to make the common but expensive behavior of stock trading much cheaper and more accessible to a wider audience. Traditional banks and brokers have big costs for offices and branches, trading execs and TV commercials. Robinhood has managed to replace much of that with a lean engineering team and viral app that grows itself. Once it finds its CFO, that could give it an efficiency and growth rate that has Wall Street seeing green.

Alex Stamos has been at the helm of some of the world’s most powerful companies for the past half-decade and is widely regarded as one of the smartest people working in the security space.

Now, just a month into his new gig as an academic, he can look back at his time with a dose of brutal honesty.

“It’s kinda a crappy job to be a chief security officer,” said Stamos, Facebook’s former security chief, in an interview with TechCrunch at Disrupt SF on Thursday.

“It’s like being a [chief financial officer] before accounting was invented,” he said.

“When you decide to take on the [chief security officer] title, you decide that you’re going to run the risk of having decisions made above you or issues created by tens of thousands of people making decisions that will be stapled to your resume,” he said.

Stamos recently joined Stanford University after three years as Facebook’s security chief. Before then, he was Yahoo’s chief information security officer for less than a year before he departed the company, reportedly in conflict with then-Yahoo chief executive Marissa Mayer over the company’s complicity with a secret government surveillance program.

His name is synonymous to many as a fierce defender of user security and rights, but he was at the helm when both his former employers were hit by security scandals — Yahoo had a a three-billion user data breach, and Facebook with the Cambridge Analytica voter profiling incident. Although inherited, he said he wasn’t going to “shirk” the blame.

“I was the CSO when all this stuff happened — it was my responsibility,” he said.

“I also hope I was able to make things better,” he said. “If you’re making individual decisions that you believe are ethical and moral that are pushing the ball in the right direction, in the end if things are imperfect, you have to live with yourself and continue to do good things.”

He said most companies have to navigate security, but also privacy and misuse of their products.

Stamos admits that while he came from a “traditional CSO” background, he quickly learned that the vast majority of harm caused by technology “does not have any interesting technical component.”

Speaking to disinformation, child abuse and harassment, he said that it’s the “technically correct use of the things we build that cause harm.”

He said that the industry needs to vastly expand how companies deal with issues that encompass but don’t fall within the strict realm of cybersecurity. “There’s not really a field around it,” he said, talking to the need to redefine “cybersecurity” to also include issues of trust, safety and privacy — three things that are important for companies to be working to ensure, but don’t necessarily fit into the traditional security model.

“There’s not a tech company starting up right now that is not going to have to worry about these trust, safety and privacy issues,” he said. “And hopefully we can take some of those lessons and spread them out a bit more.”

“I’ve learned a lot of things from the failures I’ve seen up close and I want other people to learn about them,” he said. That, he said, is one of the things he wants to help teach at Stanford, where he’s likely to stay for some time.

Asked if he would ever go back to a previous role as a chief security officer, “not for quite a long time,” he said.

The Department of Justice has taken its first legal action against North Korea’s cybercrimes, in a massive complaint made public Thursday.

Lily Hevesh sets ’em up to knock ’em down—in breathtakingly complicated arrangements.

A dozen women brave polar bears and frostbite to walk, ski, and trudge to the top of the world. It’s a bonding exercise, yes, but also a unique chance to study the female body in extremis.

Native Instruments refreshes its entire line of music creation and performance tools. But the really fun stuff is in the flagship DJ controller.

Stuff is constantly falling—off tables, out of bags, from the sky. Let’s explore the science of all things tumbling downward.

A new report outlines how social and economic policies could shape the future of the wealthy and unequal region.

The latest performance variant of the truck is clad in Boron steel, rides 31-inch tires, and will take you down any road. Or lack thereof.

A new robot named Hal is sending medical training straight into the uncanny valley.

Dara Khosrowshahi has helped fix Uber’s image, but now he must make the company competitive in a crowded market.