Month: July 2018

The New York City Council has voted in favor of a new law requiring Airbnb and similar home-share companies to share data on their users. The company has fought the law tooth and nail, but city authorities say it’s basically common sense for the local government to be informed of the number and nature of residents using the service.

The law was characterized by the council as one that would “provide the City with an additional tool to enforce the laws against illegal short term rentals.”

“This bill is about transparency and bringing accountability to billion-dollar companies who are not being good neighbors,” explained NYC Councilwoman Carlina Rivera.

You can read the text here; what it amounts to is that Airbnb is required to collect and present the following information monthly:

• Name, physical address, email, Airbnb profile URL, and phone number of hosts active that month
• Addresses and URLs of any properties a given host rents out, and whether it was a full-home or partial-home rental
• Total days the property was rented, rent/price paid, and any fees collected by Airbnb

Failure to do so will result in a substantial fine: $1,500 or more per item, depending on the listing. Some of this data has already provided voluntarily by Airbnb for a year and a half in monthly reports for its New York operations; here’s one it totally coincidentally issued today.

It is however one thing to give statistics like average amount earned per month in this or that borough, and quite another to say Jane Jamison of 224 East 85th St earned $3,712 from 12 nights at this address and 8 at her second place over in Brooklyn.

The granularity of the data matters. In the first case Airbnb is in a position of power, voluntarily granting data more or less of its own choosing, while also protecting the privacy of its users. But in the second case hosts can be identified individually for all kinds of purposes: fines, taxes, licenses, inspections, and so on.

It’s not ideal for Airbnb or hosts, both of which will have their liberty curtailed considerably by the mere fact of their commerce being open for inspection by the city and potentially released publicly as part of studies, lawsuits, and so on.

But as with so many other new industries that have gotten ahead of regulation, this kind of clampdown was inevitable from the start; how long did Airbnb really think it could get away with its limited disclosure of data so obviously valuable to local government fighting skyrocketing rents, property scams, unscrupulous landlords, and so on?

Airbnb says that the whole thing is bought and paid for by the hotel industry, which of course does have an enormous interest in keeping its thumb pressed firmly down on this new challenger.

“We’re not surprised the City Council refused to meet with their own constituents who rely on home sharing to pay the bills and then voted to protect the profits of big hotels,” Airbnb thundered in one of its usual bombastic statements. “The fix was in from the start and now New Yorkers will be subject to unchecked, aggressive harassment and privacy violations, rubber stamped by the City Council.”

But while Airbnb may be a young company, it is fabulously rich and extremely politically active, so this argument comes off as a bit disingenuous. We’ve seen similar rants from other unregulated companies as they run headlong into the red tape and inertia inherent to the establishment.

What the harassment and violations comprise isn’t clear. Certainly there is one man suing the city, saying he was targeted with housing code violations after speaking out against the proposed law; Airbnb is paying his legal fees.

But the city says its targets are bad actors, people running what amount to off-the-books hotels, renting units with unsafe conditions, or keeping housing units off the market for long-term residents so they can make a greater profit off visitors.

There’s no doubt that, armed with this more complete information, city authorities will have the opportunity to do legal and financial harm to the people who are taking part in this technically unsanctioned but largely harmless (and in many ways beneficial) business.

If they’re going to require this information to be disclosed, users of Airbnb and other services deserve to know exactly what it is going to be used for. It’s not enough to say that bad actors are being targeted when a man who opposed the city has $30,000 in fines leveled at him the next week.

Regulation is necessary for healthy and safe industry, and data is necessary for regulation, so this bill seems reasonable to me and to the city council members who voted for it in overwhelming majority. But it’s only part of the puzzle; citizens should feel that their elected officials are acting to protect them, not expose them.

Facebook wants to expand your Messenger contact list with a little help from Instagram. The company has launched a feature in Messenger that pulls in your contacts from Instagram, if you opt to connect your account. The option appears in Messenger’s “People” tab, alongside the existing option to sync your phone’s contacts with Messenger.

The feature was first spotted by Jane Manchun Wong, who posted a screenshot to Twitter.

Others outside the U.S. noticed the option as well.

We also found the option enabled in our own Messenger app, and have now confirmed with Facebook it’s a full public launch.

When you tap on “Connect Instagram,” Messenger adds contacts from Instagram automatically. In addition, your Instagram username and account also then becomes visible to other people on Messenger.

The result is an expanded social graph of sorts – one that combines the friends and family you know from Facebook, without those you know from Instagram.

Not everyone is thrilled with the feature, however.

As one Twitter user pointed out, it’s not clear that pushing “Connect Instagram” (the button’s title that appeared to some), means Messenger will automatically add your Instagram contacts to Messenger. It seems that you should be given a choice here as to if you want to add them, but that’s not the case.

In December 2017, TechCrunch spotted a very similar option to sync Instagram contacts to Messenger in the same People section. However, the option never launched to the public and later disappeared. But the recent re-emergence of the feature is not a continued test – it’s now rolled out, Facebook says.

This is not the first time Facebook has added integrations between its apps.

For example, in 2016 it gave businesses access to a unified inbox of conversations from across its platforms, including Facebook, Instagram and Messenger. Last year, it also tested a cross-app notification feature. There’s even an option to launch Facebook right in Instagram itself, via an icon on your Instagram profile page.

The timing of the launch is notable, given that Instagram’s own Direct Messaging service has become a popular communications service of its own.

Instagram Direct as of April 2017 had 375 million users, and has been spun off into its own standalone app last year in select countries outside the U.S. With so many users now messaging through Facebook-owned Instagram, it’s clear that Facebook wants to capitalize on that activity to grow its own Messenger app, too.

Rolls-Royce showed off its new vision for the future of engine maintenance this week at the Farnborough Airshow, and it might make your skin crawl.

As part of its IntelligentEngine vision (which the company announced at the Singapore Airshow earlier this year), it demonstrated plans for both a robotic snake and swarm of cockroach-like miniature robots that, in theory, will work together to inspect the interior of aircraft engines without removing the entire engine.

Neither technology is mature enough to be put into practice yet, but here’s how it should work:

In partnership with Harvard University and the University of Nottingham, Rolls-Royce is working to build 10mm miniature, collaborative robots — called SWARM — that will be able to provide to the human operator a live video feed of an engine interior via small cameras.

While scaling these bots down to size will be a challenge for the company and its collaborators, it’s a challenge that Harvard University researchers have been working at for eight years now, according to a statement given by Harvard researcher Sebastien de Rivas at the show.

For SWARM to access the engines, these small bots will catch a ride with FLARE — a pair of endoscopic, snake-like robots that can slither inside the nooks and crannies of a large piece of machinery and deposit SWARM at the inspection point. The company also has plans for FLARE to carry out internal patch repairs.

In addition to these ambitious plans, Rolls-Royce also displayed slightly more mature technologies, including a network of periscope-like INSPECT bots, which they plan to permanently install inside engines for constant spot maintenance, as well as remote boreblending robots that can be controlled by specialist engineers to assist with complicated maintenance tasks.

These kinds of advancements in engineering could help lead to more cost-efficient maintenance of large crafts, where previously maintenance was driven by internal sensor data and carried out manually — a process that can last up to five hours, James Kell, Rolls-Royce on-wing technology specialist, told The Engineer. With robots like SWARM, Kell told the publication, the process could take as little as five minutes.

While the efficiency of these robotic assistants cannot be denied, the accuracy and reliability has yet to be demonstrated, and the level of comfort passengers have knowing their aircraft was inspected by an intelligent swarm of robotic bugs is still up in the air.

If you’d rather spend time chatting with strangers who share a hyper-specific interest instead of keeping up with your co-workers’ stale memes on Slack, Reddit is ready for you. The platform has quietly been working on a chat room feature for months now, and today it expands beyond its early days as a very limited closed beta.

Plenty of subreddits already make use of a chat room feature, but these live outside of Reddit, usually on Slack or Discord. Given that, it makes sense for Reddit to lure those users back into the engaging on Reddit itself by offering its own chat feature.

I spent a little time hanging out in the /r/bjj (brazilian jiu jitsu) chat as well as the psychedelics chat affiliated with r/weed to see how things went across the spectrum, and it was pretty chill — mostly people asking for general advice or seeking answers to specific questions. In a Reddit chat linked to the r/community_chat subreddit — the hub for the new chat feature — redditors discussed if the rooms would lead to more or less harassment and if the team should add upvotes, downvotes and karma to chat to make it more like Reddit’s normal threads. Of course, what I saw is probably a far cry from what chat will look like if and when some of its more inflammatory subreddits get their hands on the new feature. We’ve reached out to Reddit with questions about if all subreddits, even the ones hidden behind content warnings, will be offered the new chat functionality.

Chat rooms are meant as a supplement to already active subreddits, not a standalone community, so it’s basically like watching a Reddit thread unfold in real time. On the Reddit blog, u/thunderemoji writes about why Reddit is optimistic that chat rooms won’t just be another trolling tool:

I was initially afraid that most people would bring out the pitchforks and… unkind words. I was pleasantly surprised to find that most people are actually quite nice. The nature of real-time, direct chat seems to be especially disarming. Even when people initially lash out in frustration or to troll, I found that if you talk to them and show them you’re a regular human like them, they almost always chill out.

Beyond just chilling out, people who are initially harsh or skeptical of new things will actually often change their minds. Sometimes they get so excited that they start to show up in unexpected places defending the thing they once strongly opposed in a way that feels more authentic than anything I could say.

While a few qualitative experiences can only go so far to allay fears, Reddit’s chat does have a few things going for it. For one, moderators add chat rooms. If a subreddit’s mods don’t think they can handle the additional moderation, they don’t have to activate the feature. (A Wired piece on the thinking behind chat explores some of these issues in more depth.)

In the same post, u/thunderemoji adds that Reddit “made moderation features a major priority for our roadmap early in the process” so that mods would have plenty of tools at their disposal. Those tools include an opt-in process, auto-banning users from chat who are banned from a subreddit, “kick” tools that suspend a user for 1 minutes 1 hour, 1 day or 3 days, the ability to lock a room and freeze all activity, rate limits and more.

To sign up for chat rooms (mods can add as many as they’d like once approved), a subreddit’s moderators can add their name to a list that lives here. To find chat rooms to explore, you can check for a link on subreddits you already visit, poke around the sidebar in this post by Reddit’s product team or check out /r/SubChats, a dedicated new subreddit collecting active chat rooms that accompany interest and community-specific subreddits.

A bit of good news for the perpetually clumsy. Corning unveiled the latest version of its ubiquitous smartphone-encasing material today at an event in California. Gorilla Glass 6 is, naturally, designed to be more durable than its predecessor, introduced roughly this time two years ago.

The big takeaways here are the ability to withstand drops from higher heights and, perhaps even more importantly to most users, multiple drops per device.

“On average, in lab tests, Gorilla Glass 6 survived 15 drops from 1 meter onto rough surfaces, and is up to two times better than Gorilla Glass 5,” according to a release from Corning. “Under the same test conditions, competitive glass compositions, such as soda lime and aluminosilicate, did not survive the first drop.

As many recent flagships (the iPhone included) embrace wireless charging, glass backs are becoming a fairly common occurence in the smartphone world. As such, many manufacturers are embracing Gorilla Glass on both sides of the handsets — effectively covering ~85-percent of the devices’ surfaces in glass. That naturally makes the whole thing more vulnerable.

On many of these handsets, we’re seeing manufacturers embrace different generations of Gorilla Glass on opposite sides. Sometimes it’s over price concerns, but in many cases, different numbers have different strengths — some manage drops better, others are more scratch resistant. The scratch resistant apparently is about the same as its predecessor.

Compromises, it seems, have to be made. It will be interesting to see how ubiquitous Gorilla Glass 6 becomes — and how quickly.

Corning is making the material available to manufacturers now. It should take a few months to start arriving in handsets.

After a wildly successful last few months thanks to Fortnite, Epic Games is delivering some substantial new updates to its Unreal game engine which supports a variety of cross-platform titles and experiences. Some features like smoother compatibility on mobile and better support for Switch come directly from the fact that they’ve had to iterate so quickly on building such a massively successful cross-platform title.

“Our engine is as good as it is because we ship games,” Epic Games CTO Kim Libreri told TechCrunch. “How many clicks an artist has to do to be able to change the color of something or adjust the look of something is all highly optimized because the artists scream at us day-in and day-out on the engine team if it’s not efficient.”

The engine enables indie developers to gain access to a system for environment building and rendering that is on-par with the major studios. A lot of the new features come from tools that Epic Games built because it needed them for its own titles. The latest 4.20 update is fairly notable for the engine, bringing some performance bumps but also a new visual effects engine and some other new stuff.

One of the bigger highlights of this update is a system for rendering objects at reduced polygonal complexity when need be. The engine’s Proxy Levels of Detail tech competes directly with some of the technology built by Simplygon, which Microsoft acquired last year. The tech basically allows objects to render in low-poly mesh versions rather than a soft of all-or-nothing scenario where as you traverse an environment objects will just appear out of nowhere on the horizon as they render.

The company says that this tech was essential for ensuring that Fortnite players on an even footing even when on lower-power devices. The feature was available in an experimental build since the most recent update, but it has been honed to be more reliable in this new release.

Another heavy hitter of the release is the early access release of Niagara, a long-awaited visual effects editor that the company talked about a lot at GDC. The tool allows developers a lot of control over particle physics for something like an explosion or fire and will eventually be replacing the engine’s existing Cascade system.

In additions to visual effects looking more realistic, Epic is looking to give cutscenes a shot in the arm with tech that allows developers to deliver some pretty top notch movie-quality shots via depth-of-focus bokeh-like enhancements that draw attention to what matters in a scene. On a similar note, Epic is releasing the tools they have been using in their work to create more realistic digital human characters.

There’s a lot of other new functionality in this release including updated AR support for Magic Leap One and ARKit 2, as well as some mixed reality capture functionality in early access.

All of these features are available to devs now in the 4.20 update.

After a wildly successful last few months thanks to Fortnite, Epic Games is delivering some substantial new updates to its Unreal game engine which supports a variety of cross-platform titles and experiences. Some features like smoother compatibility on mobile and better support for Switch come directly from the fact that they’ve had to iterate so quickly on building such a massively successful cross-platform title.

“Our engine is as good as it is because we ship games,” Epic Games CTO Kim Libreri told TechCrunch. “How many clicks an artist has to do to be able to change the color of something or adjust the look of something is all highly optimized because the artists scream at us day-in and day-out on the engine team if it’s not efficient.”

The engine enables indie developers to gain access to a system for environment building and rendering that is on-par with the major studios. A lot of the new features come from tools that Epic Games built because it needed them for its own titles. The latest 4.20 update is fairly notable for the engine, bringing some performance bumps but also a new visual effects engine and some other new stuff.

One of the bigger highlights of this update is a system for rendering objects at reduced polygonal complexity when need be. The engine’s Proxy Levels of Detail tech competes directly with some of the technology built by Simplygon, which Microsoft acquired last year. The tech basically allows objects to render in low-poly mesh versions rather than a soft of all-or-nothing scenario where as you traverse an environment objects will just appear out of nowhere on the horizon as they render.

The company says that this tech was essential for ensuring that Fortnite players on an even footing even when on lower-power devices. The feature was available in an experimental build since the most recent update, but it has been honed to be more reliable in this new release.

Another heavy hitter of the release is the early access release of Niagara, a long-awaited visual effects editor that the company talked about a lot at GDC. The tool allows developers a lot of control over particle physics for something like an explosion or fire and will eventually be replacing the engine’s existing Cascade system.

In additions to visual effects looking more realistic, Epic is looking to give cutscenes a shot in the arm with tech that allows developers to deliver some pretty top notch movie-quality shots via depth-of-focus bokeh-like enhancements that draw attention to what matters in a scene. On a similar note, Epic is releasing the tools they have been using in their work to create more realistic digital human characters.

There’s a lot of other new functionality in this release including updated AR support for Magic Leap One and ARKit 2, as well as some mixed reality capture functionality in early access.

All of these features are available to devs now in the 4.20 update.

Funko. Even if you don’t know the name, you’ve probably seen their toys. They’re the ones who make those figurines with the big ol’ heads that line the walls of half the stores at the mall — the ones that seem to exist for just about every pop culture-related license on the planet, from random 80’s horror movies to mega properties like Star Wars or Marvel.

So of course they’re getting into Fortnite toys.

The company announced today that it’ll ship Fortnite-themed toys across ten different product lines, from clothing, to keychains, to the aforementioned big-headed Pop! figurines. While there don’t seem to be any images of the toys in progress out there just yet, the company says the new stuff should start hitting the shelves by the holidays of this year.

Funko Pop! figures from the company’s Gears of War line — photo by Marco Verch

Fortnite is a pretty obvious fit — and as long as the game’s absolutely ridiculous popularity doesn’t dive off off a cliff before Christmas for some reason, it’s a pretty big win.

It’s easy to imagine Funko-fied versions of the game’s most recognizable bits, like a vinyl keychain Battle Bus or a Pop! version of the supply llama. But even beyond that, it could be a pretty consistent source of new, limited run releases — something that Funko loves to do. Fortnite shifts to a new “season” every few months, with each iteration introducing dramatically new character skins and retiring those that came before it. Fortnite’s creators at Epic undoubtedly have the data to prove exactly which skins are most popular, which should help them figure out which ones to turn into merch.

As of April, Fortnite was reportedly already pulling in around $10 million per day on in-game items alone, and adding a bunch of real world merch to the mix is probably just going to make that money machine crank even harder.

Funko. Even if you don’t know the name, you’ve probably seen their toys. They’re the ones who make those figurines with the big ol’ heads that line the walls of half the stores at the mall — the ones that seem to exist for just about every pop culture-related license on the planet, from random 80’s horror movies to mega properties like Star Wars or Marvel.

So of course they’re getting into Fortnite toys.

The company announced today that it’ll ship Fortnite-themed toys across ten different product lines, from clothing, to keychains, to the aforementioned big-headed Pop! figurines. While there don’t seem to be any images of the toys in progress out there just yet, the company says the new stuff should start hitting the shelves by the holidays of this year.

Funko Pop! figures from the company’s Gears of War line — photo by Marco Verch

Fortnite is a pretty obvious fit — and as long as the game’s absolutely ridiculous popularity doesn’t dive off off a cliff before Christmas for some reason, it’s a pretty big win.

It’s easy to imagine Funko-fied versions of the game’s most recognizable bits, like a vinyl keychain Battle Bus or a Pop! version of the supply llama. But even beyond that, it could be a pretty consistent source of new, limited run releases — something that Funko loves to do. Fortnite shifts to a new “season” every few months, with each iteration introducing dramatically new character skins and retiring those that came before it. Fortnite’s creators at Epic undoubtedly have the data to prove exactly which skins are most popular, which should help them figure out which ones to turn into merch.

As of April, Fortnite was reportedly already pulling in around $10 million per day on in-game items alone, and adding a bunch of real world merch to the mix is probably just going to make that money machine crank even harder.

InkHunter, an augmented reality tattoo try-on app that was born out of a 48-hour hackathon back in the altogether gentler days of 2014 has bagged a place in Y Combinator’s summer 2018 batch, scoring itself the seed accelerator’s standard $120,000 deal in exchange for 7% equity.

We first covered InkHunter in April 2016 when it had just launched an MVP on iOS and was toying with building a marketplace for tattoo artists. Several months and 2.5 million downloads later InkHunter launched its Android app, having spent summer 2016 going through the ERA accelerator program in New York.

At that time the team was considering a b2b business model pivot, based on licensing their core AR tech to ecommerce apps and other developers. Though they wanted to keep the tattoo try on app ticking over as a showcase.

Fast forward two years and it’s the SDK idea on ice after InkHunter’s app gained enough traction in the tattoo community for the team to revive their marketplace idea — having passed eight million users — so they’ve relocated to Mountain View and swung back around to the original concept of a try-before-you buy tattoo app, using AR to drive bookings for local tattoo artists.

“We are focusing on iterating from ‘try’ to ‘try and buy’ experience, based on feedback we got from our users. And this is our goal for the YC program, which places a lot of focus on growth and user interactions,” CTO Pavel Razumovskyi tells us.

“Last time we have talked, we did not expect such adoption on the tattoo market. But when we saw really strong usage and feedback from the tattoo community, we decided to double down on that audience.”

The newly added booking option is very much an MVP at this stage — with InkHunter using a Typeform interface to ask users who tap through with a booking request to input their details to be contacted later, via text message, with information about relevant local tattoo artists (starting with the US market).

But the team’s hope for the YC program is help to hone their approach.

“While this approach doesn’t scale, it helps us to figure out problems and quickly iterate solutions,” he adds. “We are almost done with this stage, and close to launch an in-app search for tattoo artist into selected locations, listing only licensed artists with the large portfolio.”

InkHunter says close to half (45%) its users have expressed a desire to get a tattoo within the next few months, while it got more than 500 booking requests in the first week of the concierge feature.

Though you do have to wonder whether users’ desire to experiment with ink on their skin will also extend to a desire to experiment with different tattoo artists too — or whether many regular inkers might not prefer to stick with a tattooist they already know and trust, and whose style they like. (A scenario which may not require an app to sit in the middle to take repeat bookings.)

“We want to help them do this with as little regret as possible,” says CEO Oleksandra Rohachova of InkHunter’s tattoo hungry users — so presumably the team will also be carefully vetting the tattoo artists they list on their marketplace.

The main function of the app lets users browse thousands of tattoo designs and virtually try them on using its core AR feature — which requires people spill a little real-world ink to anchor the virtual design by making a few pen marks on their skin where they want the tattoo to live. As use-cases for AR go it’s a pretty pleasing one.

InkHunter also supports taking and sharing photos — to loop friends’ opinions into your skin-augmenting decision, and help the app’s fame spread.

The team’s hope for the next stage of building an app business is once an InkHunter user has settled on the design and placement of their next tat, they’ll get comfortable about relying on the app to find and book an artist. And the next time, for their next tattoo too.