Month: July 2018

Knock Knock, a startup building games for platforms like Facebook Messenger and WeChat, is announcing that it has raised $2 million in seed funding.

The goal isn’t to build interactive chat fiction, but rather fully fledged mobile games that are accessed from messaging apps, while also taking advantages of the opportunities offered by incorporating messaging and chatbots into the game mechanics.

“This is the most frictionless an experience can get,” said CEO Andrew Friday. “There’s no download, it’s hooked up to a fast messaging medium that you’re already using and people can bring their friends into the experience seamlessly.”

Friday was a senior product manager for chat games at Zynga, while his co-founder Andrew N. Green was previously the head of business operations at TinyCo. They plan to release their first game for Facebook Messenger later this year, and then a WeChat title in early 2019.

When I asked if there are any specific genres that will do best on messaging, Friday suggested that there’s actually “an embarrassment of riches.”

“Most great mobile game genres, and game genres in general, are good for the platform,” he said. “It’s just that if you try to just port those designs to the platform, it’s not going to work. If you rethink or reimagine these mechanics, how they would work best, how they would be most fun on the platform, there are so many genres that can work on chat.”

He also suggested that compared to FRVR, another recently funded startup looking to build chat games, Knock Knock is less focused on “hypercasual” games and instead taking “a deeper, more thoughtful approach.” Although thoughtfulness and depth are relative — Friday suggested that Knock Knock could still create the initial versions of its games in 90 days.

The funding was led by Raine Ventures, with participation from London Venture Partners, Ludlow Ventures and Gregory Milken.

“Knock Knock has the potential to usher in the next wave of chat games that will redefine the market,” said Courtney Favreau, a venture capital partner at Raine, in the funding announcement. “The founding team has an impressive track record in the mobile and chat gaming spaces and we’re very excited to help them bring their vision to life.”

Figure Eight, a platform that helps developers train, test and fine-tune their machine learning models, today announced a major new collaboration with Google that essentially turns Figure Eight into the de facto standard for creating and annotating machine learning data for Google Cloud’s AutoML service.

As Figure Eight’s CEO Robin Bordoli told me, Google had long been a customer, but the two companies decided to work closer together now that AutoML is launching in beta and expanding its product portfolio, too. As Bordoli argues, training data remains one of the biggest bottlenecks for developers who want to build their own machine learning models — and Google recognized this, too. “It’s their recognition that the lack of training data is a fundamental bottleneck to the adoption of AutoML,” he told me.

Since AutoML’s first product focuses on machine vision, it’s maybe no surprise that Figure Eight’s partnership with Google is also currently mostly about this kind of visual training data. Its service is meant to help relatively inexperienced developers collect data, prepare it for use in AutoML and then experiment with the results.

What makes Figure Eight stand out from other platforms is that it keeps the human in the loop. Bordoli argues that you can’t simply use AI tools to annotate your training data, just like you can’t fully rely on humans either (unless you want to employ entire countries as image taggers). “Human labeling is a key need for our customers, and we are excited to partner with Figure Eight to enhance our support in this area,” said Francisco Uribe, the product manager for Google Cloud AutoML at Google.

As part of this partnership, Figure Eight has developed a number of AutoML-specific templates and processes for uploading the data. It also offers its customers assistance with creating the training data (while also ensuring AI fairness). Google Cloud users can use the Figure Eight platform to label up to 1,000 images and they do, of course, get access to the company’s data labeling annotators if they don’t want to do all the work themselves.

Ahead of today’s announcement, Figure Eight had already generated more than 10 billion data labels and today’s announcement will surely accelerate this.

BitTorrent is now officially a part of Tron, the file sharing service confirmed in a blog post today. The news confirms rumors that have been floating around since the middle of last month. BitTorrent didn’t confirm any specifics, but Tron, a relatively new entrant in the wild world of blockchain startups, was said to have paid around $126 million in cash for company.

BitTorrent, of course, is no spring chicken. The San Francisco-based software company was founded way back in 2004, developing protocol that would become become synonymous with file-sharing in a post-Napster world. 

At present, BitTorrent claims around 100 million active users globally, with its self-titled client and BitTorrent Now, the latter of which tends to be video/music focused. The company will maintain those clients, operating out of Tron’s SF offices to “provide robust support for Tron’s global business development and partnerships, while pursuing its vision for the world’s largest decentralized ecosystem.”

As Variety notes, BitTorrent recently looked to put user concern about the acquisition to rest, stating that it “has no plans to change what we do or charge for the services we provide. We have no plans to enable mining of cryptocurrency now or in the future.”

The companies haven’t disclosed their plans beyond that.

Amazon and Walmart’s rivalry continues today with two dueling announcements related to their respective grocery delivery expansions. This morning, Amazon said it’s bringing grocery delivery via Whole Foods to several new markets in New York and Florida, including New York City and Miami, among others. Meanwhile, Walmart today is expanding grocery delivery in partnership with Postmates, with a launch in the L.A. region.

The Postmates expansion brings grocery delivery to Los Angeles and outlying areas including Glendora, Baldwin Park, Garden Grove, Rosemead, Pico Rivera, Foothill Ranch and Santa Clarita, plus San Diego.

Postmates now powers Walmart grocery delivery in seven total regions, it notes: Charlotte, Raleigh, Oklahoma City, Las Vegas, Tucson, L.A. and San Diego.

This rollout with Postmates follows news from May of Walmart ending its relationships with prior grocery delivery partners, Uber and Lyft. At the time, Walmart said customers in the four markets Uber served, and the one (Denver) that Lyft had served, wouldn’t notice any changes as it would be switching them over to new delivery providers.

Walmart currently partners with Postmates, Deliv and DoorDash on grocery delivery, instead of operating its own service in-house.

Rival Amazon is also expanding grocery delivery with Whole Foods, but its strategy is murky, too. Amazon customers can today order groceries from Whole Foods via Prime Now, or via Amazon’s own service AmazonFresh, or from other grocery stores also via Prime Now, depending on regional availability. At some point, Amazon needs to streamline its grocery delivery operations to eliminate customer confusion.

Today, Amazon says it’s bringing Whole Foods delivery to select areas of New York City, starting with lower Manhattan and Brooklyn. It’s also offering the service in Fort Lauderdale, Miami, Palm Beach, and parts of Long Island. Other NYC neighborhoods will be added throughout the year, as Whole Foods deliveries expand to other markets across the U.S.

As of April, Whole Foods delivery was available in 10 markets, including Austin, Cincinnati, Dallas, Virginia Beach, Denver, Sacramento, San Diego, Atlanta, San Francisco and L.A. It more recently expanded to 19 total markets, with subsequent launches in Chicago, Minneapolis, Indianapolis, Houston, San Antonio, and others.

As you can see, there’s some overlap in the markets served by Amazon Prime Now/Whole Foods delivery and Walmart (via Postmates) – that’s good news for customers in those regions, who will benefit from the competition not only between Walmart and Whole Foods/Amazon but others players like Shipt (Target), Instacart, Peapod and other local services.

Ford Motor plans to spend $4 billion through 2023 in a newly created LLC dedicated to building out an autonomous vehicles business.

The automaker announced Tuesday it has created Ford Autonomous Vehicles LLC, which will house the company’s self-driving systems integration, autonomous-vehicle research and advanced engineering, AV transportation-as-a-service network development, user experience, business strategy and business development teams. The $4 billion spending plan includes a $1 billion investment in startup Argo AI .

The new LLC will be primarily based at Ford’s Corktown campus in Detroit and will hold Ford’s ownership stake in Argo AI, the company’s Pittsburgh-based partner for self-driving system development.

Sherif Marakby, who heads up Ford’s autonomous vehicles and electrification division, has been appointed CEO of Ford Autonomous Vehicles LLC. He’ll report to a board of directors chaired by Marcy Klevorn, Ford’s executive vice president and president of mobility, a larger department that also houses Ford Smart Mobility LLC.

The investment in Argo AI — the startup launched by former Google self-driving project veteran Bryan Salesky and Peter Rander, who was the engineering lead at the Uber Advanced Technologies Group — has been public since the deal was first announced in February 2017.

But the total planned spend of $4 billion has not. The investment figure, and Ford’s decision to create a new organization dedicated to all things autonomous vehicles, provides some clues to the automaker’s ultimate ambitions. Ford’s work on autonomous vehicles was scattered throughout the company, from product development and research departments to its marketing and planning organizations.

Its decision to bring all of these various pieces together suggests the company is evolving from research and testing toward an autonomous vehicle business. In short, it sees a path toward commercial deployment.

“Ford has made tremendous progress across the self driving value chain — from technology development to business model innovation to user experience,” said Ford CEO Jim Hackett . “Now is the right time to consolidate our autonomous driving platform into one team to best position the business for the opportunities ahead.”

In June, Ford laid out a plan to spend the next four years transforming at least 1.2 million square feet of space in Corktown — Detroit’s oldest neighborhood — into a hub for its electric and autonomous vehicles businesses.

Ford plans to house 2,500 Ford employees, most from its emerging mobility team, in its new Corktown campus by 2022. The new campus will have space to accommodate 2,500 additional employees of partners and other businesses. The remaining 300,000 square feet will serve as a mix of community and retail space and residential housing.

Bain Capital and Vista Equity Partners, two multi-billion-dollar private equity firms, have just created a company providing software and services for public safety and government management whose technology touches roughly three-fourths of the U.S. population.

By merging TriTech Software Services, a technology provider to first responders across the country; Superion, which sells emergency management and back office software for government operations (including billing and payments); and the public sector and healthcare businesses of Aptean, Bain and Vista have created a juggernaut that dominates public sector services, from policing to paying parking tickets, without any government oversight.

However, many of the new technologies the company touts have come under fire from some police departments and civil liberties advocates.

The new business, which will be run by Superion’s chief executive, Simon Angove, will continue to offer the same suite of services it had in the past, and will use a new, undisclosed infusion of equity and debt from Bain and Vista to develop new products and services to bring to market. In all, the revenue of the combined company will be roughly $400 million, according to a person familiar with the transaction. 

About two-thirds of the revenue of the combined companies will come from providing software and services to public safety departments, like police, fire and emergency services.

In an interview, Angove touted the benefits of consolidating the operations of the three businesses. “This puts us in a great position in 5,500 communities… across America,” says Angove. “Three out of every four citizens are protected by this software.”

With the consolidation of the businesses, Angove says that police departments will be able to share information across jurisdictions.

“We have a much larger data set that we can mine for criminal patterns,” says Angove. “[And] the ability to share dispatch across jurisdictional areas. We have the opportunity to reduce the time it takes to respond to an emergency. We have the ability to hand off that dispatch.”

In a statement, the company said that the public safety business will focus on integrating devices that detect active shooters with emergency response systems; forecasting and preventing crimes through smarter patrolling; and advancing analytics that help measure and improve public safety.

That kind of future-forward, technology-centric policing was rejected in Oakland and is under review in other cities around the country, due to concerns about the utility of the algorithms and concerns over institutionalizing bias through faulty technology.

“Maybe we could reduce crime more by using predictive policing, but the unintended consequences [are] even more damaging… and it’s just not worth it,” Tim Birch, the head of resource and planning for the Oakland Police Department, told Motherboard in a 2016 interview about software vendor PredPol, another provider of predictive analytics to police departments.

And some studies indicate that the use of big data analytics in policing is inherently biased. Other, newer, technologies focused on public safety — like facial recognition technologies — suffer from similar problems.

If the consolidation of public safety services around a vendor that’s trying to bring more data and analytics tools to police departments when the efficacy of those tools is questionable is concerning, then the fact that the company is going to provide back end services to government agencies may be even more so.

In October 2017, Superion disclosed a data breach at one of their subsidiary businesses, Click2Gov, which affected thousands of customers in Wellington, Fla.

For one advocate working on integrating technology into public service, the data breach is a red flag that should have some municipalities on notice… and raise concerns about the consolidation among vendors in the market.

“The consolidation of these companies could cause concern,” the person said. “It’s the larger question of businesses in general and from the data and what they’re going to do with that. The security breach question is one that’s most concerning… What are they doing to ensure that it doesn’t become a larger problem?”

Superion didn’t comment on the data breach directly, but in an email response a spokesperson wrote that, “[protecting] our customers’ and their clients’ data is of the utmost importance to us.”

Elaborating on the company’s security practice the spokesperson continued, writing:

We are deploying the latest technologies with advanced real-time monitoring. For example, we don’t simply use applications to monitor our client data but use advanced threat protection and analytics to continually update and refine our data protection process – both in-transit and at rest. Further, we’re proactively moving toward a cloud-first strategy and leading the public sector to moving their data from disparate on-premise networks to highly secure, defense in-depth (i.e. multiple layers) cloud environments. Additionally, through training and education of staff, as well as ongoing monitoring and development of our corporate governance programs, we focus on preventative security measures, and we maintain industry-standard, client-specific regulatory compliance certifications.

While adopting technology in an effort to improve efficiency in government is, indubitably, something that states, cities and the federal government should be striving for, the consolidation of so many vital services in a single company should give regulators some pause. As should the consolidation of so much data within a company that serves two distinct functions within government. There’s a risk that information given to one could bleed over to be used or accessed improperly by another.

“We do not sell or share any data,” a spokesperson for the company said when asked about the potential for data leakage between the different business units. “Any data sharing is done only between police departments and regulated by specific and state and federal laws. Typically everyone who accesses any data about public safety needs to be certified by the FBI’s Criminal Justice Information Services Division and/or has received clearance from law enforcement agencies.”

Following Hulu massive re-organization of its business announced last month, which saw the departures of three major execs alongside the hires of two new ones, the company is consolidating its operations by shuttering its Marin office, the home to Hulu’s client device platform team. Around nine people from the under 20-person team in Marin will not be relocating to a different Hulu location as a result.

The changes were brought about by new CTO Dan Phillips, who recently joined Hulu from TiVo.

In his new role, he decided to further restructure Hulu’s team and operations. Phillips believes it makes more sense to bring together all of Hulu’s engineering and operations into three offices: Seattle, Santa Monica, and Beijing.

The client device platform is a layer across Hulu’s living room devices that allows developers to write code that’s deployed across devices. However, Hulu’s living room team is in Seattle. To better align the two, the client device platform team is making the move to Seattle.

The hope is that by brining the teams closer together, they can better collaborate and work more efficiency resulting in code that’s delivered faster, as well as faster updates to Hulu’s living room product. For example, Hulu plans to soon roll out new living room features around fall TV and sports.

The focus on the living room is of particular concern to Hulu as the company has said that 78 percent of viewing takes place in the living room. Basically, the TV is Hulu’s biggest screen, so it needs to prioritize those efforts.

With the move, around half of Marin’s team is being offered relocation, while around nine employees are being let go as Hulu has resources to cover their roles in Seattle, as well as in Beijing, and Santa Monica.

Hulu doesn’t characterize this as a “layoffs” situation, but rather a consolidation.

The company notes that, as opposed to cutting positions, it’s on track to hire over 200 positions in tech and product alone over the course of the year. That’s not a number it released before, but paints a picture of a company still aggressively hiring.

Unlike with the earlier re-org, none of the nine being let go are top-level execs.

The highest ranking employee leaving following the Marin closure is Hulu VP Julian Eggebrecht, whose role involved device platforms, emerging tech, and virtual and augmented reality.

“We’ve been fortunate to be a part of Hulu these last four years as the company launched its first VR application, entered the live TV business and grew to more than 20 million subscribers,” said Julian Eggebrecht. “I am looking forward to the next chapter and am grateful to all of our teams, both in and outside the US, and to Hulu for this experience,” he said, in a statement about his departure.

Hulu confirmed to us that this doesn’t mean it’s shutting down its VR efforts, but does not those continue to be “experimental” and not the biggest priority.

At this time, there aren’t planned re-orgs of other teams in the works, but that could change in the future.

“As Hulu continues to innovate and scale, it’s essential that we create greater alignment across our teams to deliver the highest quality experience possible to viewers.” said Phillips, in a statement. “Bringing our technology and product teams together into three core offices will help us achieve that. We are grateful to Julian for his leadership and thank the entire Marin team for their tremendous contribution over the past four years,” he added.

 

Today at the Google Next conference in San Francisco, the company announced it would soon be enhancing Google meeting hardware to allow voice commands.

For many people setting up meetings remains a major problem and pain point. The company wants to bring the same voice-enabled artificial intelligence it uses for tools like Google Assistant to meeting hardware. To that end, the company introduced Voice Commands for Meet today.

This will allow users to say, “Hey Google, start the meeting.” And this is just a starting point. They promise to be adding additional commands over time. They will be adding this functionality later this year.

Just last Fall, the company launched the Hangouts Meet hardware program, which provided a way for Meet customers to launch meetings using Google or other hardware such as the traditional Cisco or Polycom hardware found in many conference rooms. Google reports that customers have set up thousands of these Hangouts Meet-enabled meeting rooms.

By providing some simple commands to set up the meeting, invite participants, join a meeting and so forth using your voice, it can greatly simplify the sometimes complicated activity of meeting administration, which even after all this years often seems unnecessarily complicated and frustrating for many people.

Users are certainly getting used to interacting with devices thanks to Google Home, the Amazon Echo and similar devices.

It’s worth noting that Google is not alone in trying to bring voice-enabled hardware into the meeting room. Last November, Cisco announced Cisco Spark Assistant to bring voice commands specifically to Cisco meeting room hardware. The underlying the voice recognition technology comes from the MindMeld acquisition, a conversational AI startup that Cisco bought in May 2017 for $125 million.

Last month, Uber hit 10 billion completed trips across rides and deliveries, the company announced today. This comes about one year after Uber hit five billion trips. Lyft, Uber’s main competitor in the U.S., hit half a billion rides last October.

Uber officially hit the milestone on June 10, 2018 when 173 trips and deliveries simultaneously started at 10:12pm GMT. The trips were in 21 countries across five continents.

This milestone is despite Uber’s many struggles since it first launched in 2010. As many of you are probably aware, Uber has faced a bevy of criticism in recent history pertaining to its workplace culture, the behavior of its former CEO Travis Kalanick and more.

If you want to hear more about Uber from the boss himself, be sure to hit up TC Disrupt, where I’ll be chatting with Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi.

Apple came out swinging when it announced its latest MacBook Pro update earlier this month. In preparation for the launch, the company seeded souped up versions of the notebook with a diverse array of creative professionals, who happily discussed the ways in which the new specs have improved their workflows.

The reviews have been largely positive, as well — our own included. The laptop performed admirably and racked up some impressive benchmark scores in our testing that were in line with the performance boosts recorded by Geekbench itself. But in amongst those reviews, Dave “D2D” Lee reported some troubling findings in a video titled “Beware the Core i9.”

The YouTuber found that exporting video with Premier Pro actually took longer on the new models sporting a top of the line Core i9 than they did on last year’s model running an i7. Counterintuitive to say the least — and something that appeared to be some sort of system throttling, in order to deal with overheating while exporting. In the video, Lee speculated that the laptop’s chassis (unchanged from the previous generation) simply couldn’t cool the i9 properly.

“It was an issue that was unique to this year’s version, particularly the i9,” Lee told TechCrunch, in a followup interview this week. “It only occurred because this particular CPU is as power-hungry as it is. That puts it over the top.”

Benchmarks often only tell part of the story. They work well as for sterile, laboratory testing, but don’t always offer a decent stand-in for real world usage. Among other things, workflows vary a good deal from case to case and user to user. Lee says he was surprised to find that his own workflow was taxing to the system compared to the ones others shared in the online community after the initial video was posted.

Even so, as Apple makes a major push to recapture the hearts and minds of creatives, it will require systems that can handle just about anything creatives can throw at it. Lee tells TechCrunch that both Apple and Premier Pro-producer, Adobe, were quick to reach out after the video was posted.

“It was impressive to see how quickly they worked with the community find out what was going on,” he says. “The first step was to try to replicate this, to find out what was causing it. When they figured that out, I think they tried to figure out how to resolve it.”

It seems that Apple’s initial testing simple didn’t account for the specifics of the workflow Lee put the system through. In the intervening days, however, Apple says it has identified the issue and will be releasing a fix in an update to MacOS High Sierra rolling out today.

The company apologized for the bug fix in a statement provided to TechCrunch,

Following extensive performance testing under numerous workloads, we’ve identified that there is a missing digital key in the firmware that impacts the thermal management system and could drive clock speeds down under heavy thermal loads on the new MacBook Pro. A bug fix is included in today’s macOS High Sierra 10.13.6 Supplemental Update and is recommended. We apologize to any customer who has experienced less than optimal performance on their new systems. Customers can expect the new 15-inch MacBook Pro to be up to 70% faster, and the 13-inch MacBook Pro with Touch Bar to be up to 2X faster, as shown in the performance results on our website.

The company notes that a majority of users experience performance gains — which we can certainly confirm in our own testing. The issue at hand appears to have been something more complex and rarer than just a system shutting down or cutting back on power from overheating. The company is recommending users install the Supplemental Update to avoid performance slow downs during taxing actions.