Month: July 2018

Arrivo, the upstart high-speed mass transit technology developer launched by a former co-founder of Hyperloop One, has inked a massive partnership with a Chinese state-owned infrastructure developer to help finance mobility projects around the world.

Genertec America, an affiliate of the China National Technical Import and Export Corp., which is a wholly-owned subsidiary of the General Technology Group Holding Co., has agreed to put up a $1 billion credit line to finance projects anywhere in the world that will use Arrivo’s technology.

“Arrivo provides a unique solution for regional mobility and a great complement to high speed rail and airports. We are excited to be an early partner in the deployment of mobility systems utilizing Arrivo’s transformative technology,” said Yalin Li, President of Genertec America, in a statement. “We look forward to many opportunities to build this new mode of transportation in regions around the world.”

Working with a Chinese infrastructure developer may be both a blessing and a curse for Arrivo. China’s infrastructure loans have come under fire from U.S. government officials, who accuse the Chinese government of saddling countries with overwhelming loads of debt so they can seize strategic assets. And the Chinese government is working to curb profligate spending on unnecessary infrastructure projects domestically — which could impact how it deploys capital abroad.

“None of these projects will be on our balance sheet. We will be the technology vendor to the project owner, so final financing terms will be between Genertec and project owner,” Arrivo chief executive Brogan BamBrogan explained via text. “They are excited because they see the true potential of operationally profitable transportation/mobility projects – which is extremely rare today (perhaps doesn’t even exist).”

The news comes on the same day that Hyperloop Transportation Technologies (another player in the wild world of tubular transportation) announced an agreement with the government of Guizhou to set up a 10 kilometer test track in the city of Tongren.

The curbs on infrastructure spending that China is enacting may also prove problematic for HTT and its commercial project in Tongren. For the deal, HTT is going to provide the technology and talent, and the government in Tongren will finance and build the project. Financing for the joint venture will be split between Hyperloop and outside investors and the Tongren goverment.

Arrivo has one project underway in Colorado — a plan to loop Boulder and Denver together using its variation on the hyperloop model. The company is planning a $10 million to $15 million facility in the state.

Unlike the original vision of a hyperloop, which would send a vehicle speeding through an de-pressurized vacuum tube at nearly 700 miles per hour, Arrivo’s system relies on what it calls “guideways” which are built to integrate with existing infrastructure. The company touts that these thoroughfares will be able to move 10 times the number of vehicles of ordinary highways and can include public transit and delivery vehicles.

In some ways, it’s more akin to the proposed Boring Co. mdoe of transportation proposed by BamBrogan’s former boss, Elon Musk (BamBrogan was an early employee at SpaceX).

And while Arrivo and HTT are getting calls from China, Hyperloop One is looking to the UAE as one of its first international ports of call.

What’s clear is that local governments in China and the country’s state owned enterprises see promise in new mobility infrastructure investment — and look at hyperloop technologies and their offshoots as a potentially more attractive investment option than other infrastructure developments which the government might view as more of a boondoggle.

India has quickly become ground zero for the smartphone wars. Last year, the country surpassed the U.S. to become the world’s No. 1 smartphone market, and manufacturers are falling over themselves to plant a flag.

Samsung and Xiaomi have been the two biggest winners in recent quarters, battling it out for the top spot. Earlier this year, the latter edged out the former, but the battle has remained neck and neck for the huge — and growing — market. According to new numbers from Canalys, both companies shipped 9.9 million smartphones for Q2 2018.

Xiaomi held onto the top spot — though just barely, with Samsung growing 47 percent year-over-year. That’s the Korean manufacturer’s biggest growth spurt in the country since late-2015. Look, here’s a graph.

Combined, the two manufacturers comprise 60 percent of shipments in India for the quarter. Vivo and Oppo round out the top four, making Samsung the only non-Chinese company vying for a top spot. The company announced recently that it will be doubling down its efforts in the country with a factory it’s deemed the world’s largest.

ASUS has seem some growth in the country, as well, tripling since the previous quarter. Apple’s shipments, meanwhile, have dipped around 50 percent year-over-year, according to the firm, as the company adjusts its strategy in the country.

“Apple’s paring back of distributor partners and move to a ‘brand-first, volume-next’ strategy will reap rewards as it will ensure better margin per device,” says Rushabh Doshi of Canalys. “Getting priorities right will be important to smartphone vendors, and it will be a choice between profitability and volume growth.”

CloudHealth, a startup that enables customers to manage a multi-cloud environment, announced today it was adding support for Google Cloud Platform.

With today’s addition, CloudHealth now supports AWS, Azure, VMware and Google, giving customers a fairly comprehensive view of their cloud usage.

Company co-founder and CTO Joe Kinsella says the company has been seeing inbound interest for Google Cloud support dating back to 2014, but up until now there hasn’t been enough interest to warrant a startup investing the resources necessary to support another platform. He says that has changed over the last 12-18 months as they’ve seen an increase in requests and decided to take the plunge.

Google Cloud cost summary page in CloudHealth. Screenshot: CloudHealth

“I think a lot of the initiatives that have been driven since Diane Greene joined Google [at the end of 2015] and began really driving towards the enterprise are bearing fruit. And as a result, we’re starting to see a really substantial uptick in interest,” he said.

As for why Google is gaining traction, Kinsella believes they have found ways to differentiate themselves in some key areas. “Its two biggest differentiated services are in machine learning services and the App Engine service. I also think that they have generated a lot of innovation across Infrastructure as a Service and Platform as a Service, and they built really reliable, durable, flexible, highly configurable services,” he said.

Dave Bartoletti, an analyst with Forrester Research, who specializes in the public cloud says he has also seen increasing interest in Google Cloud. “Google’s developer experience (e.g., role/account management, CI/CD toolchains, and language support) now rivals AWS and Microsoft. Very strong identity and access management, security, database, and AI/ML services are drawing increasing numbers of traditional enterprise customers,” Bartoletti told TechCrunch.

CloudHealth is a cloud-based subscription service. Customers sign up and enter their cloud credentials and they get an integrated view of their cloud activity in a single interface. Kinsella says their solution provides several primary benefits including visibility, governance, compliance and cost control.

Cross cloud usage view in CloudHealth. Screenshot: CloudHealth

The company’s primary competitor is customers trying to build a tool to monitor multi-cloud activity themselves, something that Bartoletti also sees. “Cloud cost monitoring and optimization tools help clients pay only for what they use, pay as little as possible for what they use, and develop best practices for workload sizing and automated operations to continue to save money over time, without needing to build a large cost management practice in house,” he said.

The company, which has over 300 employees, is based in downtown Boston with multiple offices around the world. It was founded in 2012 and has raised over $87 million with its most recent Series D round generating $46 million from the likes of Kleiner Perkins, Scale Venture Partners, Meritech Capital Partners, Sapphire Ventures and .406 Ventures.

Bird, the scooter startup that has raised more than $400 million in funding, has introduced a program geared toward low-income people in order to increase access to transportation. Called One Bird, the program eliminates the $1 fee to unlock a Bird so that the rider just has to pay 15 cents per minute.

“Everyone should have access to transportation that is accessible, affordable, and environmentally-friendly,” Bird CEO Travis VanderZanden said in a statement. “One Bird makes this a reality by providing a way for everyone to ride Birds in their city. We warmly welcome all new riders, and encourage our current eligible riders to enroll in the program, so together we can create a community with fewer cars, less traffic, and reduced carbon emissions.”

The program is live in every market where Bird operates, which includes cities like Atlanta, Austin, Santa Monica, Calif. and Washington, D.C. In order to sign up for One Bird, you have to either be enrolled in or eligible for a state or federal assistance program, like CalFresh, Medicaid, SNAP or a discounted utility bill. Eligible people can reach out to one@bird .co to learn more.

Lime, a bike- and scooter-share startup, has a similar program. In May, Lime launched Lime Access to enable people who qualify for state or federal assistance programs to purchase 100 rides on pedal bikes for $5.

Increasing access to transportation has long been a talking point for companies like Uber, Lyft, Spin, Lime and Bird. In San Francisco, which still has yet to decide which companies will get to operate scooter services in the city, the Municipal Transportation Agency has asked companies to outline how they each plan to support people in low-income communities. For Bird, offering discounted rides appears to be one of its strategies.

You can read more about the scooter wars here.

Let’s all take a minute to appreciate the view in the British Airways social media cockpit, where staffers at the coalface of the airline’s Twitter account have presided over a wildly unusual ‘interpretation’ of Europe’s new data protection rules.

One that, er, suggests quite the opposite of GDPR compliance… Given the company’s social media staff have been caught encouraging customers to post personal data such as their address and passport number into a public forum — and here’s the anti-privacy cherry! — claiming it’s necessary for GDPR compliance!

Insert your own [facepalm of choice]…

Mustafa Al-Bassam, the UCL information security PhD student who flagged the company’s social media fail in the above Twitter thread has since filed his own data protection complaint against British Airways — after finding its check-in page was leaking his personal data to a bunch of third parties for ad targeting purposes.

Now that could be okay — say if the company asked for and gained consent for sharing his data. Or if it had another valid legal basis for collecting data, i.e. other than consent. Though it’s pretty hard to imagine what might legally justify an airline sharing paying customers’ personal information and travel data with advertisers without their express consent…

Well, Al-Bassam says he was not asked for consent to share his information with advertisers. And if you’re processing data by consent — as British Airways’ privacy policy appears to suggest is what the company thinks it’s doing here — then GDPR does in fact require you to actually ask for and actually obtain consent first.

tl;dr: Consent by default is not consent. So again the company appears to be suffering from some form of regulatory delusion syndrome where whatever it thinks GDPR compliance means is what GDPR compliance means. Say like embedding a catch-all ‘consent’ in the depths of a privacy policy. Or just saying the word ‘GDPR’ out loud three times while looking in the mirror.

Hint: Nope! Not compliance! No!

We reached out to British Airways to discuss its approach to GDPR compliance but at the time of writing the company had not responded to a request for comment.

Asked if it could give the company any GDPR guidance, a spokesperson for the UK’s data protection watchdog told us: “Any personal information that an organisation asks for must be limited to what’s necessary for that purpose. Any processing of that information must be secure and take appropriate technical and organisational precautions.”

Of course the airline is by no means the only company failing entirely to grok GDPR. The regulation is still pretty new (having come into force on May 25) and there are clearly A LOT of privacy dents still to be ironed out all around the online place.

Some of these are accidental and/or idiotic kinks. While others look much more like an intentional deforming of the rules (hi Facebook!). But given the GDPR regime also supports punitive fines for compliance breaches (hello lawsuits!) it’s to be hoped that none of these privacy fails — accidental, spectacularly stupid, intentionally hostile or otherwise — will be around for too long.

Our first Virtual Hackathon, which takes place at TechCrunch Disrupt San Francisco 2018 on September 5-7, is shaping up to be a world-class showdown. Thousands of the world’s best programmers, hackers, marketers, designers and developers will compete. One hundred teams will score free passes to Disrupt SF 2018, and one team will go on to win the $10,000 grand prize — but that’s not your only chance to win big.

Our sponsors keep coming up with challenging contests to test your hacking mettle (more on that in a minute). Together they’ve placed literally thousands of dollars and an impressive list of prizes on the table — and it’s yours for the winning — if you’ve got the right stuff.

If you want a chance of winning, you better get your backside in motion. The application for submitting your hack is August 2. Sign up right here, right now.

We’ve recruited some outstanding judges for the Virtual Hackathon, including folks from Pinterest and Slack. They’ll rate each submitted hack on a scale of 1 to 5 based on the idea’s quality, technical implementation, and the product’s potential impact.

Teams that score in the top 100 will receive up to five Innovator Passes to Disrupt SF. The top 30 teams from that group will move on to the semi-finals and demo their hack at Disrupt SF. The judges will then narrow the field, and 10 teams will demo their product to the world on The Next Stage. One “Best in Show” team will win the $10,000 grand prize and be crowned the first TC Disrupt Virtual Hackathon champion.

Let’s talk sponsor contests. We’ve told you about Sony Pictures and United Airlines. And we told you about the sweet cash you can win from contests sponsored by BYTON, TomTom and Viond, plus Visa and HERE Mobility.

Now we’re thrilled to tell you about this contest sponsored by Amazon.

Amazon Alexa

Alexa is Amazon’s cloud-based voice service available on tens of millions of devices from Amazon and third-party device manufacturers. With Alexa, you can build natural voice experiences that offer customers a more intuitive way to interact with the technology they use every day. The collection of tools, APIs, reference solutions and documentation make it easy for anyone to build with Alexa.

The Alexa Skills Kit (ASK) is a collection of self-service APIs, tools, documentation and code samples that makes it fast and easy for you to add skills to Alexa. ASK enables designers, developers and brands to build engaging skills and reach customers through tens of millions of Alexa-enabled devices. With ASK, you can leverage Amazon’s knowledge and pioneering work in the field of voice design.

Workshops: Head over to the Alexa Twitch channel to learn how to build engaging skills. We hold office hours every Tuesday at 1:00PM – 2:00PM PDT; get answers to any technical questions, discuss your skill use case and learn voice design best practices.

Sponsor Prizes: 

• 1st Prize: $5,000 + 10 Echo Spot Devices
• 2nd Prize: $2,000 + 10 Echo Spot Devices
• 3rd Prize: $1,000 + 10 Echo Spot Devices

Don’t miss your opportunity to score free passes to TechCrunch Disrupt San Francisco 2018 and to show the world just how freakishly good you are at creating and coding. And yes, win serious money and prizes in the process. Remember, sign up here and submit your hack by August 2. We can’t wait to see what you can do!

After launching a free program to protect election systems last December, Cloudflare has an update on how things are going. The program, known as the Athenian Project, provides Cloudflare’s services for free to state and local government websites that administer elections, host voter registration or verification data or report election results.

Those services include the DDoS protection the company is best known for but also its Web Application Firewall service, IP reputation database and the ability to cut off web traffic from a particular country or IP address. Cloudflare also is offering how-to videos and other documentation to explain its protections to potential clients.

“In November, every state and district in the country will hold congressional elections. Election officials — and all of us — want to make sure that voter information remains secure and that websites stay online as voters seek out information on polling places and voting requirements, and anxiously refresh results pages on election night,” the company wrote in its blog.

Cloudflare’s July Athenian Project update shows that more state and local governments are getting on board with the suite of free election services. Though many declined to be named, that includes the San Francisco board of elections, South Carolina’s Pickens County, North Carolina’s State Board of Elections and the state governments in Hawaii, Idaho and Rhode Island.

The company notes that it has been in talks with election officials in 27 states out of 50 and Cloudflare’s protections have been implemented in 10 state election websites so far.

Over the last six months, an increasing number of security companies have begun offering their services for free or at a discount to state and local election authorities. Last month, Synack announced free penetration testing for voter registration sites and voter databases. In April, Centrify offered a free eight months’ worth of its identity management software to state and local election boards. Because elections are run by states with mostly opt-in federal assistance, interest in these programs is uneven. Still, more security is better than no security.

“To work as designed, citizens must trust the electoral system, its strength, integrity, and the people who protect it,” Cloudflare wrote in its blog update. “Cloudflare is proud to support local officials on the front lines of election security.”

Every few months, Google’s Project Fuchsia makes the rounds in the tech press. And for good reason, given that this is Google’s first attempt at developing a new open-source kernel and operating system. Of course, there are few secrets about it, given that it’s very much being developed in the open and that, with the right know-how, you could run it on a Pixelbook today. There’s also plenty of documentation about the project.

According to the latest report by Bloomberg, about 100 engineers at Google work on Fuchsia. While the project has the blessing of Google CEO Sundar Pichai, it’s unclear what Google really wants Fuchsia to be. I don’t think it’ll replace Android, as some people seem to believe. I don’t think it’s the mythical Chrome OS/Android mashup that’ll bring Google’s two operating systems together.

My guess is that we’re talking about an experimental system here that’s mostly meant to play with some ideas for now. In the future, it may become a real product, but to do so, Google will still have to bring a far larger team to bear on the project and invest significant resources into it. It may, however, end up in some of Google’s own hardware — maybe a Google Home variant — at some point, as that’s technology that’s 100 percent in the company’s control.

It’s not unusual for companies like Google to work on next-generation operating systems, and what’s maybe most important here is that Fuchsia isn’t built on the Linux kernel that sits at the heart of Android and ChromeOS. Fuchsia’s kernel, dubbed Zircon, takes a microkernel approach that’s very different than the larger monolithic Linux kernels that power Google’s other operating systems. And building a new kernel is a big deal (even though Google’s efforts seem to be based on the work of the “littlekernel” project).

For years, Microsoft worked on a project called Singularity, another experimental microkernel-based operating system that eventually went nowhere.

The point of these projects, though, isn’t always about building a product that goes to market. It’s often simply about seeing how far you can push a given technology. That work may pay off in other areas or make it into existing projects. You also may get a few patents out of it. It’s something senior engineers love to work on — which today’s Bloomberg story hints at. One unnamed person Bloomberg spoke to said that this is a “senior-engineer retention project.” Chances are, there is quite a bit of truth to this. It would take more than 100 engineers to build a new operating system, after all. But those engineers are at Google and not working on Apple’s and Microsoft’s operating systems. And that’s a win for Google.

Got an odd screw, nut, bolt, washer or fastener you need to buy more of, but have no idea to how to find the right one? Amazon’s AR “Part Finder” can help. The company has rolled out a new feature on mobile that lets you point your camera at the item in question, so Amazon can scan it, measure it, then direct you to matching items from its product catalog.

The company didn’t announce the feature’s launch, but confirmed to us it was rolled out to all users a couple of weeks ago.

The feature takes advantage of the iPhone’s camera and its augmented reality capabilities to measure the object in question – a process it walks you through when you first launch “Part Finder” by tapping the Camera button next to the search box in the Amazon app.

This is the area where Amazon has added a number of product-finding functions that let consumers search for products without entering text. For example, here is where you’ll find the barcode scanner, the image recognition-based product search, package X-Ray, Smilecode scanner, AR View, and more.

To use Part Finder, you first tap the icon to launch the feature, then place the object on a white surface next to a penny, as instructed. (A piece of white paper worked well.)

The instructions explain how to correctly tilt the phone in order to measure the part. This involves an augmented reality display of a crosshairs and circle that appear on the white surface in the camera’s viewfinder. You tilt the phone until the circle is lined up in the center of the crosshairs.

Amazon’s app then scans the item and delivers results, assuming the product is in focus and you’ve followed the instructions properly.

On the following screen, you add more information to help narrow down the results. For example, we scanned a screw and it asked for other details like whether it was a flat head and the drive type. (Some of this information could have been derived from the scan, one would think, so it’s not clear how much Amazon is relying on the scan itself versus user input here.)

Of course, a screw is an easier thing to find on Amazon. The feature will be a lot more handy when you’re stuck with an odd part that you don’t know how to identify. Unfortunately, we don’t currently have a bunch of unintended parts lying around to test.

Amazon’s Part Finder is one of the more practical examples of AR technology, which can be used to determine the size of real-world objects using a smartphone’s camera. Apple, for example, is introducing a new app in iOS 12 called “Measure” which will let you point your iPhone at things like picture frames, posters and signs, tables, and other objects, to get automatic measurements.

Amazon is not the only retailer using AR to improve the shopping experience. Many other retailers are also taking advantage of the technology – like Wayfair, Houzz and Target are for visualizing furniture in your own room. Topology is using AR to let you virtually try on custom-fit glasses. Target is letting shoppers try on makeup at home in its mobile AR Studio. Ebay’s AR tool helps sellers find the right box for their items. And so on.

The Part Finder feature is currently showing up in Amazon’s app on iOS. No word yet on its Android release.

Malta AKA “Blockchain Island” has been making waves lately in the world of cryptocurrency and governance. Their latest move involves the crypto exchange Binance and the ICO builders at Neufund.

The plan is simple: Neufund will help MSX, the Malta Stock Exchange’s skunkworks, create tokenized securities. Binance has agreed to carry these securities on its own exchange, essentially creating a straight path to regulated tokens via the already regulated Malta Stock Exchange. In short, this enables Malta to become the first country to be able to offer tokens alongside traditional equities as well as an easy way to go public in multiple ways including via ICO.

The plan is still in the pilot stage. This year they will begin “the public offering of tokenized equity on Neufund’s primary market which may later be tradable on Binance and other crypto exchanges pending regulatory and listing approvals” said Neufund CEO Zoe Adamovicz.

“We are thrilled to announce the partnerships with Malta Stock Exchange and Binance, that will ensure high liquidity to equity tokens issued on Neufund. It is the first time in history, that security tokens can be offered and traded in a legally binding way. The upcoming pilot project will allow us to test the market’s reaction and realize the overall project idea in an environment with minimized risk.” said Adamovicz.

“We are delighted to welcome Neufund as our key partner in building a Blockchain-based exchange that is fully integrated with established financial markets. With the upcoming pilot project we become a worldwide pioneer in digital finance,” said Joseph Portelli, chairman of the Malta Stock Exchange.

This move is interesting in that it offers a parallel track to companies wishing to go public via token sales. While even the terminology isn’t completely hashed out in regards to the future of these systems, having a spot like Malta lead in the matter of token sales selling alongside equities is a solid decision. Malta is increasingly becoming the testbed for these sorts of experiments and, even if this is not yet a real project, it could create a turnkey solution for ICO launches on the island.