Category: Tech news

If you’re running a software company today, it’s almost a foregone conclusion that most or all of your apps will run in the cloud. Likely Amazon or Google’s. It’s hard to imagine that this wasn’t always the case, but there are still some late adopters migrating their own physical data centers into managed ones. And, as with all trends in technology, this too shall pass. Just when you were getting comfortable with containers and auto-scaling, a new architecture emerges, swinging the pendulum back to a truly distributed world.

What’s wrong with the cloud?

A typical self-driving car generates up to 100MB of data per second from a combination of cameras, LIDARs, accelerometers and on-board computers. That data needs to be processed nearly instantly to keep the car on the road. With so much data to sift through, the current generation of cellular networks can’t keep up. By the time data arrives in the cloud, it will be too late. Instead, data needs to be processed as close to the sensors as possible, directly at the edge of networks, on the cars themselves.

Most of us aren’t building or riding in self-driving cars (yet), but there’s a good chance we’re already interacting with edge computing every day. Neural networks in smart speakers in almost 40 million American homes are listening for words like “Alexa,” “Siri” or “Google” and, according to Statista, 3 billion Snapchats are scanned for faces each day in order to add the addicting face filters. By the end of the year, 20 percent of smartphones globally will have hardware-accelerated machine learning capabilities.

How did we get here?

All of these apps and devices are made possible by two major trends: advances in deep learning algorithms that help computers see, hear and understand and the proliferation of specialized processors like GPUs and TPUs that can run these algorithms efficiently, even in mobile environments.

Neural networks and deep learning aren’t new. In fact, the first artificial neural networks were created in the 1950s, and there have been multiple false starts since.This time, though, the abundance of labeled training data and compute power made it feasible to train these large models. Though AI research is still proceeding at a breakneck pace, fields like computer vision are starting to mature. Developers can choose from a variety of standardized model architectures, publicly available training data sets and tools. You no longer need a PhD just to get started. Technology is being democratized.

Hardware is catching up, fast. Machine learning algorithms like neural networks are really just long sequences of matrix multiplications. Specialized processors like GPUs and newer neural processing units like those in Apple’s A11 Bionic chip and Google’s Tensor Processing Unit (TPU) are optimized for exactly these mathematical operations, offering 10-100x speedups over traditional CPUs while using less power overall. As major chip manufacturers roll out mobile-ready machine learning accelerators, every device will soon have the power to run the latest AI models.

The edge = new opportunity

Big data, data science, machine learning and now deep learning have been slowly weaving their way into products and companies for the past decade. Most of the time, this happened behind the scenes, up in the cloud. Data warehouses and analytics pipelines process records en masse. Results are made accessible to end users through APIs and database queries. That’s not going away, but the edge presents a new opportunity to use the predictive capabilities of machine learning models more quickly.

Now, the algorithms move to the data. Information is processed in real time, as soon as it’s captured by the sensor, and results are available immediately. In this latency-free world, entirely new user experiences are possible. Your phone’s screen becomes a portal to a world of augmented reality. Products can be personalized for a single user while private data never leaves the device. Applications become ambient and frictionless, anticipating questions and answering them before you ask.

It doesn’t take a PhD

When done right, experiences made with AI and edge computing feel like magic, but building them is incredibly complex. There is a divide between the tech stacks used to train and deploy machine learning models in the cloud and the ones used to build applications for edge devices, like smartphones and IoT. Neural networks can replace thousands of lines of procedural code, but fail in unexpected, silent ways and need to be tested differently. Performance issues that can be solved by simply adding more compute or memory from a near infinite cloud call for specialized optimization when they occur out on edge devices we don’t control. Even the programming languages preferred by the cloud are different than those running applications on mobile devices.

This is starting to change. Tools and hardware are improving so quickly it’s hard to keep up. Heavyweights like Apple and Google have made mobile machine learning frameworks (Core ML and TensorFlow Lite, respectively) centerpieces of their latest developer offerings. More export options and better interoperability are being added to tools like AWS’s SageMaker, Azure’s ML Studio and IBM’s Watson Studio weekly.

For those who live under a rock (which, these days, I would recommend), President Donald Trump has become increasingly belligerent toward Amazon and its founder, Jeff Bezos.

In addition to a sequence of tweets against the e-commerce and cloud giant, Gabriel Sherman reported in Vanity Fair yesterday that “Now, according to four sources close to the White House, Trump is discussing ways to escalate his Twitter attacks on Amazon to further damage the company. ‘He’s off the hook on this. It’s war,’ one source told me. ‘He gets obsessed with something, and now he’s obsessed with Bezos,’ said another source. ‘Trump is like, how can I fuck with him?’”

“How can I fuck with them?” also could describe America’s backwards approach to its flagging prowess in critical technology fields, policies that stand in stark contrast to the massive and focused investment of strategic adversaries like China.

Through its Made in China 2025 plan, China is putting in place a series of initiatives to dominate the future of technologies like 5G wireless networking, artificial intelligence, cloud computing, biotechnology and semiconductors. It is working to raise about $36 billion for a new semiconductor fund, potentially spend $411 billion on 5G infrastructure, and create a massive domestic market for overseas stocks through Chinese Depositary Receipts.

China selects, grows, and champions a set of winners in each industry in order to concentrate resources and increase the probability of success globally for its chosen companies. As Antonio Graceffo described in Foreign Policy Journal, “National champions are companies which help further the government’s strategic aims and in return, the government supports these companies by providing easier access to financing, giving preference in government contract bidding, and sometimes oligarchy or monopoly status in protected industries, giving these companies a number of advantages over their competitors.”

One has to look no further than Huawei to see the benefits of these policies. Huawei was an unknown player when it started roughly three decades ago, but through an aggressive expansion plan and a wellspring of government support, it has emerged to be the single largest manufacturer of telecommunications networking equipment in the world, surpassing Ericsson back in 2012. The company had revenues of $92 billion last year, and it is taking an early lead in the 5G wireless standards race, which could give it a powerful position to shape the future of connectivity in the years to come.

Meanwhile, the leadership of the United States is increasingly targeting the tech sector — one of the few areas of true vibrancy in the American economy — and trying to undermine it at every turn. The Trump administration has announced tariffs on high-tech goods that will end up harming U.S. technology exports, rolled back net neutrality legislation and now is talking out loud about breaking up Amazon through antitrust laws.

On the latter, it’s not just Trump calling for war against America’s tech leaders: there is a growing movement against companies like Google and Apple which has led to increasing calls for antitrust action from both right-wing and left-wing policy analysts.

There are good reasons to be concerned about market dominance — it limits consumer choice and often increases prices. However, there are obvious limitations on how many competitors can enter markets like wireless infrastructure and cloud computing. The upfront costs are exorbitant — just launching a single data center today can easily cost hundreds of millions of dollars or more, and conducting original R&D in a competitive industry like artificial intelligence is equally expensive when a machine learning expert can go for tens of millions of dollars.

We are never going to have five Googles, nor five Dropboxes or five Amazons — the economics in these markets just don’t work that way. Their scale is what allows them to offer such comprehensive services at such low cost to consumers. Knocking out Apple is really opening the American market to the next four smartphone manufacturers, which would be Asian manufacturers like Samsung, Huawei, Lenovo and Xiaomi. That sounds like a Pyrrhic victory to me.

The U.S. believes in the power of free markets to cull losers and ensure winners a fair return, and the government avoids picking “winners” as a matter of course in its industrial policy. That worked great when the American economy was dominant, but it is no longer tenable in a world where strategic adversaries are putting their full weight behind a handful of companies.

So instead of getting on The Twitter and blasting Amazon, maybe this administration should start to consider that Amazon’s size and dominance in ecommerce and cloud services is actually an incredible blessing of American capitalism. Maybe it should start to think about how the government could assist Amazon in capturing more overseas markets, ensuring that the wealth generated by the company continues to return to its home country.

The threats faced by American tech companies parallel similar fears during the 1980s, when Japan’s resurgence on the world stage captivated the attention of U.S. politicians. China, though, is nearly 11 times the population of Japan, and has already overtaken the U.S. economy by some measures. This time really is very different, and the free market needs defenders. Ironically, that means backing American tech giants globally against their competitors.

MIT is disassociating itself from Nectome, the Y Combinator-backed startup promising to preserve customers’ brains for the possibility of future digital upload.

Co-founder Robert McIntyre described the procedure as “100 percent fatal” — it involves connecting terminally ill patients to a machine that pumps embalming fluids into their arteries.

The company has collected (refundable) $10,000 payments for a wait list, but its website now carries a note in “Response to recent press,” suggesting that the company would only carry the procedure out after further research:

We believe that clinical human brain preservation has immense potential to benefit humanity, but only if it is developed in the light, with input from medical and neuroscience experts. We believe that rushing to apply vitrification today would be extremely irresponsible and hurt eventual adoption of a validated protocol.

As noted in the MIT Technology Review, MIT has been criticized for potentially giving the company credibility by association — MIT Media Lab professor Edward Boyden was receiving money through a federal grant won by Nectome. (McIntyre and his co-founder Michael McCanna are both MIT graduates.)

Now the Media Lab has released a statement saying that after reviewing “the scientific premises underlying the company’s commercial plans, as well as certain public statements that the company has made,” it will “terminate the subcontract between MIT and Nectome in accordance with the terms of their agreement.”

The Media Lab says that the grant involved a research project to “combine aspects of Nectome’s chemistry with the Boyden group’s invention, expansion microscopy, to better visualize mouse brain circuits for basic science and research purposes.” Apparently Prof. Boyden has “no personal affiliation — financial, operational, or contractual — with the company Nectome.”

The statement concludes with a discussion of the science behind Nectome. The Media Lab doesn’t completely rule out the possibility of brain preservation and uploading in the future, but it suggests that the science isn’t solid yet:

Neuroscience has not sufficiently advanced to the point where we know whether any brain preservation method is powerful enough to preserve all the different kinds of biomolecules related to memory and the mind. It is also not known whether it is possible to recreate a person’s consciousness.

McIntyre told the MIT Technology Review, “We appreciate the help MIT has given us, understand their choice, and wish them the best.”

Stanley Kubrick’s iconic film gave us Hal and other sci-fi elements. Here’s how they stack up against reality.

Lockheed Martin’s Low Boom Demonstrator joins the ranks of NASA’s famed X-planes—and could bring back the age of supersonic civilian aviation that ended when the Concorde retired in 2003.

With 2018 midterms around the corner, the Democrats are looking for their answer to Cambridge Analytica, the Robert Mercer-backed political data firm that either won the 2016 election or tricked everyone into believing that it did, depending on who’s talking.

To that end, a prominent left-leaning accelerator is out with a new graduating class, just in time to gear up for November. Higher Ground Labs seeks to “supercharge” political startups with progressive causes at heart. The incubator and accelerator’s main cause is notching Democratic wins, from local to federal elections.

The group just announced a class of 13 politics-minded companies offering “innovative solutions” to get Democrats elected. The 13 new companies join 10 companies from Higher Ground’s 2017 class. The chosen startups will each receive around $100,000 each in seed funding, an invitation to Higher Ground’s accelerator bootcamp and proximity to the group’s star-studded advisory board, which boasts a former COO of the Obama Foundation, a former Clinton campaign CTO and current Strava chief product officer, a former FCC chairman, the guys at Crooked Media and the chief technology officer of the DNC, among many other high-profile names. The political accelerator’s investor list features notable names like LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman and Silicon Valley super angel investor Ron Conway.

“Last year, Higher Ground Labs invested in companies and entrepreneurs that provided game-changing technologies in Virginia’s state elections and the Alabama Senate race,” said Ron Klain, chair of the Higher Ground board and former White House aide. “Now, we are more than doubling the size of our portfolio, and will be backing two dozen companies that aim to have a major impact on the 2018 election, up and down the ballot.”

The 2018 class startups include:

5 Calls, an affordable phone-banking platform for everything from school board elections to federal campaigns.

Avalanche, a cognitive science-driven communications company.

CallTime, which aggregates data into comprehensive donor profiles using AI to optimize donor outreach.

Change Research, quick, accurate public opinion polling that cuts costs by as much as 90 percent.

Civic Eagle, a SaaS platform for policy advocacy campaigns.

Factba.se, a “transparency engine” that collects “every word spoken” by a political opponent to allow for discrepancies and shifts to be identified quickly.

GiveMini, a micro-donation tool that lets donors round up to the nearest dollar.

GrowProgress, a tool that predicts audience personality for message targeting.

Humanize, “a platform that democratizes the tools of advertising” to give regular people access to ad strategies that would normally be price prohibitive.

New Mode, engagement tools that highlight supporters’ stories.

Same Side, a platform to activate supporters who are “already doing cool things” in music, art and culture.

Swayable, a data science platform that enables rapid-response digital campaigns and examines “which kinds of people respond to which content.”

Voter Protection Partners, a group that works with campaigns to “manage voter protection teams and track, analyze, and respond to voting incidents and election administration problems.”

Projects like Higher Ground are fueling the kind of political technology operations that Democrats hope can translate into wins in 2018 and beyond. While national post-mortems on the 2016 election remain obsessed with the right’s deep pocketed big data mythos, plenty of folks in tech’s left-leaning epicenters believe that Democrats can do better with the right tools.

After a racial slur GIF caused Snapchat to remove its GIPHY sticker feature, Snapchat confirms to TechCrunch it’s reinstated its integration. GIPHY has apologized, fixed the bug that let the objectionable GIF slip through, and reviewed its GIF sticker library four times in an effort to guarantee that offensive content won’t end up in apps that embed it. Instagram had also removed GIPHY, but reinstated it last week with Snapchat saying it had nothing to share yet.

A Snap spokesperson told TechCrunch that over the past several weeks, the Snap team worked with GIPHY to revamp its moderation systems. Now Snap is confident that the fresh approach will protect users, so its brought the GIF stickers back. They let people embellish their photos and videos with overlaid animated illustrations and video clips.

So ends a month-long ordeal that started when a U.K. user spotted a GIF containing a racial slur for people of color. Snapchat removed the GIPHY feature as press backlash in the U.K. mounted. Instagram wasn’t aware of the issue until informed by TechCrunch, leading it to remove the GIPHY feature within an hour.

Warning: We’ve shared a censored version of the GIF below, but it still includes graphic content that may be offensive to some users.

The situation highlights the risks of working with outside developers that aren’t entirely under a platform’s control. Piping in external utilities lets apps quickly expand their offering to users. But if developers misuse people’s data, deliver broken functionality, or let objectionable content through, it can reflect poorly on the app hosting them. Facebook is currently dealing with this backlash surrounding Cambridge Analytica. Meanwhile, Instagram just severely restricted its APIs without warning, breaking many developers’ apps in what’s believed to be part of Facebook’s push to shore up data privacy.

Favoring news publishers, Snapchat historically never actively embraced developers, banning use of outside apps that require your Snapchat credentials. It’s more recently started letting devs build and promote their own augmented reality lenses. But after this set-back, we’ll have to see if Snapchat becomes any more reluctant to work with partners.

It makes all the sense in the world that Apple wants to leave Intel behind. Where it gets tricky is how it gets there.

I was pleasantly surprised by Motiv . Sure, my expectations were low for a fitness tracking ring, but pleasantly surprised is pleasantly surprised is still pleasantly surprised. The $200 Fitbit alternative gets a couple of key software upgrades this week, including, most notably, the addition of Android compatibility, along with some Alexa integration.

Initially launched as iOS-only, the Ring is taking baby steps toward working with the world’s most popular mobile operating system. It’s launching first as part of an open beta with, “a more comprehensive feature set” coming by middle of the year. But adventurous users can download the app from the Google Play Store right now.

The fitness tracking ring now works with Alexa, as well. Users can ask Amazon’s smart assistant to sync data and check their heart rate. More metrics are on the way by year’s end, in an attempt to save having to look at a phone screen every time, I suppose. After all, Motiv doesn’t seem likely to cram a tiny screen into the ring any time soon.

Speaking of Amazon, the Ring is now on sale through the online retail giant. Motiv will also be selling the ring at b8ta stores, for those who went to see it in person before dropping $200.

While dockless, electric bike-sharing programs have taken off in San Francisco and the surrounding Bay Area, the same can’t be said for New York City, yet. Today, Mayor Bill de Blasio effectively paved the way for bike-sharing startups with pedal-assist functionality to hit the streets in a legal way.

“As cycling continues to grow in popularity for commuting, deliveries and tourism, we are seeing the demand for pedal-assist bicycles that can help cyclists travel longer distances and more easily climb steep hills,” Mayor de Blasio said in a press release. “With new and clear guidelines, cyclists, delivery workers and businesses alike will now understand exactly what devices are allowed.”

This framework comes several months after Mayor de Blasio cracked down on e-bikes, which led to the NYPD confiscating 923 e-bikes and issuing about 1,800 citations to people who were caught riding them.

Before today, it was legal to own an e-bike, but it was technically illegal to operate them. Now, the Department of Transportation is working on rules and regulations to make pedal-assist bikes legal to ride in the city. The new framework legalizes pedal-assist bikes while keeping in tact regulations that make illegal throttle e-bikes that go above 20 MPH.

“Cycling, including on pedal-assist bikes, is not only fun, it’s a fast, affordable, healthy and sustainable way of getting around,” NYC DOT Commissioner Polly Trottenberg said in a statement. “With challenges like the L train tunnel closure on the horizon, our aim is to balance moving even more New Yorkers on two wheels with the need to manage that growth safely.”

The DOT is also exploring opportunities for dockless bike-sharing in the city. In December, the DOT requested “expressions of interest” from companies looking to launch some pilots in the city.

“Dockless bike share holds the potential to bring meaningful and affordable transportation services to wide areas of the City, and the City wishes to evaluate, in a careful and controlled fashion, whether Dockless vendors can operate safely and successfully in the City’s environment,” the memo stated.

JUMP, the NYC-based bike-sharing startup that scored an exclusive 18-month permit with San Francisco to operate its pedal-assist bikes, is obviously happy about this. In addition to San Francisco, JUMP operates its dockless pedal-assist bikes in Washington, D.C. and Sacramento.

The music-streaming service listed its shares Tuesday without the traditional bankers or ceremony.

Red flags and “disputed” tags just entrenched people’s views about suspicious news articles, so Facebook is hoping to give readers a wide array of info so they can make their own decisions about what’s misinformation. Facebook will try showing links to a journalist’s Wikipedia entry, other articles, and a follow button to help users make up their mind about whether they’re a legitimate source of news. The test will show up to a subset of users in the U.S. when users click on the author’s name within an Instant Article if the author’s publisher has implemented Facebook’s author tags.

Meanwhile, Facebook is rolling out to everyone in the U.S. its test from October that gives readers more context about publications by showing links to their Wikipedia pages, related articles about the same topic, how many times the article has been shared and where, and a button for following the publisher within an “About This Article” button. Facebook will also start to show whether friends have shared the article, and a a snapshot of the publisher’s other recent articles.

Since much of this context can be algorithmically generated rather than relying on human fact checkers, the system could scale much more quickly to different languages and locations around the world.

These moves are designed to feel politically neutral to prevent Facebook from being accused of bias. After former contractors reported that they suppressed conservative Trending topics on Facebook in 2016, Facebook took a lot of heat for supposed liberal bias. That caused it to hesitate when fighting fake news before the 2016 Presidential election…and then spend the next two years dealing with the backlash for allowing misinformation to run rampant.

Facebook’s partnerships with outside fact checkers that saw red Disputed flags added to debunked articles actually backfired. Those sympathetic to the false narrative saw the red flag as a badge of honor, clicking and sharing any way rather than allowing someone else to tell them they’re wrong.

That’s why today’s rollout and new test never confront users directly about whether an article, publisher, or author is propagating fake news. Instead Facebook hopes to build a wall of evidence as to whether a source is reputable or not.

If other publications have similar posts, the publisher or author have well-established Wikipedia articles to back up their integrity, and if the publisher’s other articles look legit, users could draw their own conclusion that they’re worth beleiving. But if there’s no Wikipedia links, other publications are contradicting them, no friends have shared it, and a publisher or author’s other articles look questionable too, Facebook might be able to incept the idea that the reader should be skeptical.

Disrupt SF might feel familiar to many of you, but I encourage you to be prepared for a surprise. The world’s most impactful tech startup conference is about to get bigger and better than ever.

We’re moving to Moscone West, doubling attendance capacity, and tripling our programming with a total of four stages across three days. Which means we need the greatest minds in the biz to grace our stage.

That said, I’m pleased to announce that 23andMe’s Anne Wojcicki and Unity’s John Riccitello will be joining us on stage!

Anne Wojcicki

After a decade investing in healthcare, Anne Wojcicki co-founded 23andMe in 2006. The company launched with a primary focus of giving consumers access to their own genetic information, disrupting an industry that Ancestry.com (founded in 1983) had been dominating.

But it wasn’t always smooth sailing for the company. In 2013, the FDA started to intervene with 23andMe after growing concerned that the company might be giving consumers possibly inaccurate information about their genetic health risk. This led to the FDA halting the marketing and sale of 23andMe’s personal genome service.

Regulatory approval, especially from the FDA, is a nightmare for many startups just getting their footing. But Wojcicki made the best of a tough situation and pivoted the company towards drug research and development, while simultaneously working on FDA approval.

Later that year, the company got the green-light to offer 10 carrier tests, including one for Parkinson’s and one for late-onset Alzheimer’s.

Since then, the company has partnered with Pfizer to help with drug research using 23andMe’s genetic data, introduced a therapeutics division, and hired top talent including Genentech’s Richard Sheller.

In 2017, 23andMe raised $250 million led by Sequoia, bringing total funding to $491 million to date. At the time, Wojcicki said that they had only begun to scratch the surface of direct-to-consumer genetics. The company also recently got approval for a new cancer risk test, becoming the first and only direct-to-consumer genetics company to receive FDA authorization to test for cancer risk without a prescription.

There’s more than plenty to discuss with Wojcicki when we get her on stage at Disrupt SF September 5 – September 7 and we’re thrilled to have her as a guest!

John Riccitello

At one point, a gaming engine was just that. A gaming engine. But today’s landscape, complete with a plethora of mobile, console and desktop games as well as the rise of AR/VR puts a gaming engine square in the middle of a brave new world.

John Riccitello’s Unity, a company whose software provides the backbone for more than half of all new mobile games, is poised to be one of the most important technology companies of the next decade, according to DFJ Growth partner Barry Schuler, an investor at the company.

As of mid-2017, Unity’s engine powered more than two-thirds of all content created for AR and VR. Ninety-one percent of applications on emerging AR platforms like the Microsoft HoloLens are created on the engine, while Samsung’s Gear VR has about 90 percent of its gaming titles built using Unity.

Alongside the growth of gaming, Unity’s ability to provide infrastructure for spatial computing puts Unity in a position to see other industries line up at its doorstep, from fashion to arts to the enterprise. As these spaces continue to heat up, Unity will be at the center of it all.

With nearly $700 million raised, Riccitello was pretty quiet when asked about the potential of Unity going public as of May 2017. Hopefully, the former EA COO will have more to share on that front on the Disrupt SF stage. But in the case he doesn’t, we have plenty of questions about the future of Unity.

Disrupt SF 2017 runs from September 5 to September 7 at Moscone West. Super early bird tickets are available here.

The latest numbers from Elon Musk’s automaker show slow but encouraging progress in its fight to deliver history’s most anticipated car.

The appointment of Paul Nakasone raises the question again: Should the NSA and Cyber Command be controlled by one man?