Author: azeeadmin

Spotify is making it easier to use its streaming app in the car, when the phone is connected to the vehicle over Bluetooth. The company today confirmed the launch of a new feature called “Car View,” which is a simplified version of the service’s Now Playing screen that includes larger fonts, bigger buttons, and no distractions from album art. In Car View, you’re only shown the track title and artist, so you can read the screen with just a glance.

The site 9to5Google was the first to spot the feature’s appearance in Spotify’s settings. However, some users have had the option for weeks in what had appeared to be a slow rollout or possibly a test, pre-launch.

Spotify this morning formally announced the launch of Car View in a post to its Community Forums.

The company says the feature is currently available only on Android devices, and only when the device is connected over Bluetooth.

When the phone connects, Car View is automatically enabled when your music or podcast starts playing.

Above: Car View in action; credit: 9to5Google

While Spotify already offers several in-car experiences through integrations with other apps like Google Maps, Waze, as well as through Android Auto, using the music app while behind the wheel has been very distracting and difficult.

I’ve personally found Spotify so dangerous to navigate while in the car, that I just won’t use it unless I set it up to stream before I drive. Or, in some cases, I’ll hand the phone to a passenger to control instead.

Given the difficulty with Spotify in the car, Car View’s lack of support for those who use the app over an AUX cable is a little disappointing.There’s no good reason why users should not be allowed to manually enable Car View from the Settings, if they choose. After all, it’s just a change to the user interface of a single view – and it’s been built!

Of course, manually toggling Car View on might not feel as seamless as the Bluetooth experience, but a feature like this could prevent accidents caused by people fiddling with their phone in the car. Hopefully, Spotify will make Car View more broadly accessible in time.

According to Spotify, once Car View is enabled, you can access your Library, tap to Browse, or use Search. While listening, you can use the seek bar to skip to another part of the song.

In the case that a passenger is controlling the music on your phone, they can temporarily disable Car View by way of the three dots menu. And if, for some reason, you don’t want to use Car View, the feature can be disabled in the Settings. (But keep it on, OK?)

Spotify also noted Car View supports landscape view, and will arrive on iOS in the future. It didn’t offer a time frame.

Car View officially launched on Android this week, and is now rolling out globally to all users.

 

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1. U.S. will reportedly seek criminal case against Huawei for stealing tech secrets

According to a new report from The Wall Street Journal, U.S. federal prosecutors are preparing a criminal indictment against Huawei for stealing trade secrets — specifically in the company’s actions around a T-Mobile smartphone testing tool known as “Tappy.”

The Chinese phone maker has faced increased scrutiny, escalating to open hostility from U.S. agencies and lawmakers who believe that Huawei poses a security threat due to its close relationship with the Chinese government. The tension escalated considerably last December, when Canada arrested Huawei CFO Meng Wanzhou at the request of the U.S.

2. Behold, Slack’s new logo

Who knew that everyone would get so worked up by a redesigned logo?

3. Microsoft pledges $500M to create affordable housing around Seattle

Microsoft’s pledge comes half a year after Seattle City Council failed to pass a “head tax” that would have required companies making more than $200 million a year to pay $275 per employee in taxes.

4. Facebook finds and kills another 512 Kremlin-linked fake accounts

In its latest reveal of “coordinated inauthentic behavior,” the company says it identified two operations, both originating in Russia, and both using similar tactics, without any apparent direct links between the two networks.

5. Google raises its G Suite prices

In the United States, the prices of G Suite Basic and G Suite Business editions will increase by $1 and $2 per user/month, respectively. G Suite Enterprise pricing will remain the same.

6. Ford’s iconic F-Series trucks are going electric

The move is intended to “future-proof” the enormous truck business against rising gas prices and regulations favoring electric vehicles over internal combustion.

7. AWS launches Backup, a fully managed backup service for AWS

Early adopters of AWS Backup are State Street Corporation, Smile Brands and Rackspace. This looks like a service that will make the life of admins quite a bit easier.

Square is announcing a new debit card, called the Square Card, which will allow businesses to withdraw and spend the money they’re bringing in through Square payments.

In a conference call with reporters, the company laid out a number of benefits that the card should offer to Square sellers. The big one: It could help with cashflow, eliminating any delay between making a sale and having that money available to spend.

To be clear, businesses aren’t creating a new bank account. Instead, the card — a free debit card from Mastercard — allows them to tap into the funds that are already in their Square account, without having to transfer the money to a separate bank account first.

In addition, Square said that for 40 percent of beta testers, the Square Card is their very first business debit card, making it easier for them to track their businesses expenses, which can be crucial come tax time. And the company is also trying to encourage spending within the Square ecosystem, offering a 2.75 percent discount (2.75 percent is the company’s standard processing fee) on purchases that Square Card holders make from other Square sellers.

C.C. Nedrow, owner of Payton’s Photography in Montgomery, Illinois, has been testing out the card, and she said it’s already been useful: “As soon as I get a payment, if I need to go buy props … I don’t have to wait. The funds are available immediately.”

Nedrow admitted that even with the Square Card, it’s not always possible to keep business and personal expenses separate. But if she makes a personal purchase with the card, it’s easy to go into her account and mark it as a personal expense. And she said she even took advantage of the discount to buy some coffee right before the call.

Square Seller Lead Alyssa Henry noted that this is one of several Square cashflow products —including Square Capital, which offers cash advances to small businesses. The Square Card currently works separately, but she said, “You can imagine, at some point in the future, that there could be further ecosystem integration.”

We’re coming to you with another episode of Mixtape, the TechCrunch podcast that takes a peek behind the headlines that go beyond tech.

This week, Megan Rose Dickey and I get into a discussion about women’s sexuality, because the world’s biggest “consumer electronics show” revoked an innovation award from Lora DiCarlo, a company that created a sex toy for women. In its initial objection, the CTA cited a clause that entries they believed “in their sole discretion to be immoral, obscene, indecent, profane or not in keeping with the CTA’s image will be disqualified.” That’s not great. Of course it walked the comments back, saying that the product, called Osé, didn’t fit into an existing product category. Except that the product falls squarely in the robotics category.

We also discussed robot delivery dogs, because those things don’t seem like they’re ever going to go away. And finally, people continue to do stupid “Bird Box” challenges based on dumb ideas they have after watching Netflix’s hit movie starring Sandra Bullock. Stop it.

Click play above to listen to the full episode. And if you haven’t subscribed yet, get on over to your favorite podcast platform, whether it be Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, Overcast, CastBox or whatever else you use.

Pro.com is basically a general contractor for the age of Uber and Prime Now. While the company started out as a marketplace for hiring home improvement professionals, it has now morphed into a general contractor and serves Denver, Phoenix San Francisco, San Jose and Seattle. Today, Pro.com announced that it has raised a $33 million Series B round led by WestRiver Group, Goldman Sach and Redfin. Previous investors DFJ, Madrona Venture Group, Maveron and Two Sigma Ventures also participated.

WestRiver founder Erik Anderson, Redfin CEO Glenn Kelman and former Microsoft exec Charlotte Guyman are joining the Pro.com board.

“Many of Redfin’s customers struggle to get professional renovation services, so we know firsthand that Pro.com’s market opportunity is massive,” writes Redfin’s Kelman. “Pro.com and Redfin share a commitment to combining technology and local, direct services to best take care of customers.”

The company tells me that the round caps off a successful 2018, where Pro.com saw its job bookings grow by 275 percent over 2017, a number that was also driven by its expansion beyond the Seattle market (as well as the good economic climate that surely helped in driving homeowners to tackle more home improvement projects). The company now has 125 employees.

With this funding round, Pro.com has now raised a total of $60 million. It’ll use the funding to enter more markets, with Portland, Oregon being next on the list, and expand its team as it goes along.

It’s no secret that the home improvement market could use a bit of a jolt. The market is extremely local and fragmented — and finding the right contractor for any major project is a long and difficult process, where the outcome is never quite guaranteed. The process has enough vagueries that many people never get around to actually commissioning their projects. Pro.com wants to change that with a focus on transparency and technology. That’s a startup that’s harder to scale than the marketplace the company started out with, but it also gives the company a chance to establish itself as one of the few well-known brands in this space.

We’re very excited to announce our first guests for this year’s TC Sessions: Robotics. TechCrunch is returning to the U.C. Berkeley campus again this April for another full-day session delving into all aspects of robotics. As we mark our third year, we’ve decided to add programming devoted to artificial intelligence, because you can’t really do robotics without AI.

We’ve got a ton of speakers, panels and demos to announce in the coming months, but we’re excited to start with a pair who encompass two distinct parts of the industry.

Hany Farid is Dartmouth’s Albert Bradley 1915 Third Century Professor of Computer Science, with a focus on human perception, image analysis and digital forensics. A recipient of the National Academy of Inventors, Alfred P. Sloan and John Simon Guggenheim fellowships, Farid is set to join the U.C. Berkeley faculty in July of this year.

Peter Barrett is the CTO of Playground Global, an investment firm that has backed a number of robotics startups, including Agility, Canvas, Common Sense, Skydio and Righthand Robotics. Prior to co-founding Playground, Barrett founded Rocket Science Games and served as the CTO of CloudCar and Microsoft TV.

TC Sessions: Robotics + AI is being held April 18 at UC Berkeley’s Zellerbach Hall.

Early Bird tickets are on sale now for $249 and students get a big discount with tickets running at just $45.

Squad could be the next teen sensation because it makes it easy to do nothing… together. Spending time with friends in the modern age often means just being on your phones next to each other, occasionally showing off something funny you found. Squad lets you do this even while apart, and that way of punctuating video chat might make it the teen girl “third place” like Fortnite is for adolescent boys.

With Squad, you fire up a video chat with up to six people, but at any time you can screenshare what you’re seeing on your phone instead of showing your face. You can browse memes together, trash talk about DMs or private profiles, brainstorm a status update, co-work on a project or get consensus on your Tinder swipe. It’s deceptively simple, but remarkably alluring. And it couldn’t have happened until now.

Squad takes advantage of Apple’s ReplayKit for screensharing. While it was announced in 2015, it wasn’t until June 2018’s iOS 12 that ReplayKit became stable and easy enough to be built into a consumer app for teens. Meanwhile, plus-size screens and speedy LTE and upcoming 5G networks make screensharing watchable. And with Instagram aging and Snapchat shrinking, there’s demand for a more intimately connected social network.

Squad only launched its app last week, but droves of Facebook and Snap employees have signed up to spy on and likely copy the startup, co-founder and CEO Esther Crawford tells me. Screensharing would fit well in group video chat startup Houseparty too. To fuel its head start, Squad has the $2.2 million it raised before it pivoted away from Molly, the team’s previous App where people can make FAQs about themselves. That cash came from betaworks, Y Combinator, BBG Ventures, Basis Set Ventures, Jesse Draper, Gary Vaynerchuk, Niv Dror, and [Disclosure: former TechCrunch editor] Alexia Bonatsos. Next, Squad wants to let people tune in to screenshares via URL to unlock a new era of Live broadcasting, and equip other apps with the capability through a Squad SDK.

“People under 24 do video chat way different than people 25 and above” says Crawford. Adding screensharing is “an excuse for hanging out.”

Serious ideas are preludes to toys

Screensharing has long been common in enterprise communication apps like Webex, Zoom and Slack. I even called a collaborative browsing and desktop screensharing app my favorite project from Facebook’s 2011 college hackathon. But we don’t just use our screens for work any more. Teens and young adults live on the digital plane, navigating complex webs of friendships, entertainment and academia through their phones. Squad makes those experiences social — including the “social” networks we often scroll through in isolation. Charles and Ray Eames said “Toys are preludes to serious ideas,” but this time, it is happening in reverse.

“The idea came from a combination of things — a pain we were experiencing as a team,” Crawford recalls. My development team is constantly sending each other screenshots and screen recordings. It seemed ridiculous that I can’t just show you what’s on my screen. It was a business use case internally.” But then came the wisdom of a 13-year-old. “My daughter over the summer was bugging me. ‘Why can’t I just show what’s on my screen with my friends?’ I said I think it’s not technically possible.” That’s when Crawford discovered advances in ReplayKit meant it suddenly was possible.

Crawford had already seen this cycle of tool to toy before, as she was an early YouTuber. Back in the mid-2000s, people thought of YouTube as a place to host videos about eBay listings, professional presentations or dating profile supplements. “They couldn’t imagine that if you let people just reliably and easily upload video content, there’d be all these creative enterprises.”

After stints in product marketing at Coach.com and Stride Labs, she built Estherbot — a chatbot version of herself that let people learn about her. Indeed, 50,000 people ended up trying it, convincing her people needed new ways to reveal themselves to friends. She met Ethan Sutin through the project and together they co-founded FAQ app Molly before it fizzled out and was shut down. “Molly wasn’t working; it had high initial engagement sessions, but then they would drop off. Maybe it’s not the right time for the augmented version of you,” noted Crawford.

Crawford and Sutin pivoted Molly into Squad to keep exploring new formats for vulnerability. “What excited Ethan and I was this mission to help people feel less lonely.”

Alone, together

Squad worked, thanks to a slick way to activate screensharing. The app launches to the selfie camera similar to Snapchat, but with a + button for inviting friends to a video call. Tap the screenshare button at the bottom, select Squad and start the broadcast. To guide users toward the best screensharing experiences, a menu of apps emerges encouraging users to open Instagram, TikTok, Bumble, their camera roll and others.

People can bounce back and forth between screensharing and video chat, and tap a friend’s window to view it full-screen. And when they want another friend to see what they’re seeing, Squad goes viral. One concern is that Squad breaks privacy controls. You could have friends show you someone’s Instagram profile you’re blocked by or aren’t allowed to see. But the same goes for hanging out in person, and this is one reason Squad doesn’t let you download videos of your chats and is considering screenshot warnings.

What’s so special about Squad is that it lacks the intensity of traditional video chat, where you constantly feel pressured to perform. You can fire up a chat room, and then go back to phoning as you please with your screen displayed instead of your blank face (though the Android version in beta offers picture-in-picture so you can show your mug and the screen).

“There’s no picture-in-picture on iOS, but younger users don’t even really care. I can point it at the bed and you can tell me when there’s something to look at,” Crawford tells me. A few people, alone in their houses, video chatting without looking at each other, still feel a sense of togetherness.

The future of Squad could grant that feeling to a massive audience of a celebrity or influencer. The startup is working on shareable URLs that creators could post on other social networks like Twitter or Facebook that their fans could click to watch. Tagging along as Kylie Jenner or Ninja play around on their phone could bring people closer to their heroes while serving as a massive growth opportunity for Squad. Similarly, colonizing other apps with an SDK for screensharing could allow Squad to recruit their users.

The startup will face stiff technical challenges. Lag or low video quality destroy the feeling of delight it delivers, Crawford admits, so the team is focused on making sure the app works well even in rural areas like middle America where many early users live. But the real test will be whether it can build a new social graph upon the screensharing idea if already popular apps build competing features. Gaming tools like Discord and Twitch already offer web screensharing, and I suggested Facebook should bring the feature to Messenger when in late-2017 it launched in its Workplace office collaboration app.

In June I wrote that Instagram and Snapchat would try to steal the voice-activated visual effects at the center of an app called Panda. Snapchat started testing those just two months later. Instagram’s whole Stories feature was cloned from Snapchat, and it also cribbed Q&A Stories from Polly. Overshadowed, Panda and Polly have faded from the spotlight. With Facebook and Snap already sniffing around Squad, it’s quite possible they’ll try to copy it. Squad will have to hope first-mover advantage and focus can defeat a screensharing feature bolted on to apps with hundreds of millions or even billions of users.

But regardless of who delivers this next phase of sharing, it’s coming. “Everyone knows that the content flooding our feeds is a filtered version of reality. The real and interesting stuff goes down in DMs because people are more authentic when they’re 1:1 or in small group conversations,” Crawford wrote.

Perhaps there’s no better antidote to the poison of social media success theater that revealing that beyond the Instagram highlights, we’re often just playing around on our phones. Squad might not be glamorous, but it’s authentic and a lot more fun.

The style transfer craze kicked off by an app called Prisma a couple of years ago led to a tsunami of painterly selfies flooding social feeds for several months, as we reported at the time, before the rapacious, face-snapping hoards shifted their attention toward fresh spectacles. But that’s not the end of the story.

The same tech is now creeping into (paper) kids’ books, via a partnership between children’s publisher startup, Kabook, and Prisma Labs: aka the b2b entity that the original app makers pivoted to in late 2017.

So instead of AI sending robots into a human-slaying frenzy, per the usual dystopian sci-fi storyline, we find ourselves confronted with neural nets being used to serve up contextual illustrations of children so parents can gift personalized books that seamlessly insert a child’s likeness into the story, thereby casting them as a character in the tale.

Not the end of the world then. Well, not unless you view this kind of self-centered content manipulation as a threat to children’s imaginations and developing sense of empathy. (The research on any ‘little princes in training’ will, unfortunately, have to wait a few decades to come through though.)

The Kabook integration is the first consumer product partnership that Prisma Labs has scored, according to a press release from the pair.

And while they note there are other publishing services that offer the chance to insert a bit of custom text and photography into a book they claim their collaboration is the only publishing technology that does this “seamlessly”, i.e. thanks to the AI’s style blending fingers.

[gallery ids="1770824,1770839,1770840"]

 

“We are excited to be able to work directly with the team at Kabook! to create a truly unique user experience; one that has offered young readers a completely personalized way to enjoy reading,” said Andrey Usoltsev, CEO of Prisma Labs, in a statement.

“Part of our mission at Prisma Labs is to develop new ways for people to express their emotions through digital creations, and through this partnership with Kabook! we are able to take that one step further and bring that to life on the pages of an actual book.”

Kabook, which was set up last year — describing itself as “a technology-based” children’s book publisher, with a focus on kids aged 0-7 years — is currently offering four stories that can be personalized with a kid’s AI-generated likeness.

Three of the books incorporate just one custom image into the story. While a fourth, called Hornswoggled!, makes uses of seven photos in a pirate-themed buried treasure adventure. 

The personalized stories start at $24.99 per book, with hard and soft cover versions available. 

Backblaze started out as a backup solution for consumers, but over the course of the last few years, it also added cloud storage and other services to its lineup. Today, however, the company is going back to its roots with the launch of Backblaze Cloud Backup version 6.0, its flagship service that offers unlimited storage and data transfers.

 

The updated backup service promises a number of speed increases (with backup being up to 50 percent faster depending on the network conditions) and less overhead, as well as the ability to keep the service from using certain networks to help users avoid overage charges when they are using a mobile hotspot, for example (or when their ISP only gives them a certain bandwidth allotment). Backblaze now also offers single sign-on support for Google.

 

The other major new feature is the ability to save snapshots to Backblaze’s B2 Cloud Storage service. This allows users to store all the data from their old computer and migrate it to a new one, for example, or save a set of files to the cloud as a permanent archive (or simply to free up space for all those Steam downloads). Just like when users restore files from their backups, they can opt to download it directly or get a USB drive shipped to their door.

Talking about those USB drives, Backblaze how now doubled the capacity of its USB keys to hold up to 256GB and its hard drives can now hold up to 8TB (and you can always return those and get a full refund from the company).