Month: July 2018

The FAA just scored a legal win in its ongoing back and forth with drone hobbyists. The U.S. Court of Appeals opted to uphold a ruling granting the administration’s authority over consumer UAVs, a move that is expected to lead the way for additional restrictions on flight.

The ruling is based, in part, on a 2012 law passed by Congress that puts the FAA in charge of the then-emerging drone category. At the same time, however, it left a bit of an opening, essentially grandfathering in owners of some model aircraft already governed by safety organizations. According to the act, the FAA “may not promulgate any rule or regulation regarding a model aircraft.”

That loophole of sorts is what spurred drone hobbyist John Taylor’s case, which temporarily blocked the FAA’s drone registry requirement. Back in December, however, Trump signed a bill reinstating the registration.

Today, the court shot down Taylor’s request yet again. “Because the rule is within the agency’s statutory authority and is neither arbitrary nor capricious, the petition for review is denied,” Judge Merrick Garland wrote in the opinion.

As The L.A. Times notes, this decision will also be regarded as a win for Google and Amazon, who have both been lobbying hard for regulation on hobbyist drones as they look to the skies for projects like Prime Air and Project Wing. Along with registry, future laws may include additional flight restrictions and required self-identifying beacons.

U.S. space venture Virgin Galactic announced it has partnered with two aerospace companies to help bring commercial space launches to Italy.

The agreement with Italy’s largest private space company SITAEL, and ALTEC, a public-private company owned by the Italian Space Agency and Thales Alenia Space, has been two years in the making.

The idea is to put Virgin Galactic’s space vehicle system at the future Grottaglie Spaceport where it can be used by private individuals who want to experience space, as well as customers like the Italian Space Agency interested in conducting research.

Earlier this year, Italian aviation authority ENAC designated the Taranto-Grottaglie Airport as the future home for horizontally launched spaceflights in Italy.

While this Italian spaceport will eventually provide the infrastructure for future Virgin Galactic suborbital flights, the company will maintain its operational headquarters at Spaceport America in New Mexico.

“This partnership could see Virgin Galactic launch the first person in history into space from Italian soil — and in fact from any European territory,” Virgin Group founder Sir Richard Branson said in a statement. 

Virgin Galactic is owned by the Virgin Group and Aabar Investments PJS. There are two sister companies as well, Virgin Orbit, which focuses on launching small satellites into space using its LauncherOne orbital launch, and its manufacturing arm, The Spaceship Company.

Virgin Galactic is testing the SpaceShipTwo VSS Unity, a reusable space launch system that does horizontal launches. SpaceShipTwo and its carrier aircraft, WhiteKnightTwo, are manufactured and tested in Mojave, Calif. by The Spaceship Company. Here’s how it works: The WhiteKnightTwo carries the VSS Unity to a high altitude and then it is dropped. The VSS Unity then fires its engines and launches into suborbital space before re-entering the Earth’s atmosphere after customers have experienced a few minutes of weightlessness.

In the past several months, Virgin Galactic has had two successful test flights of SpaceShipTwo, the rocket-powered passenger spacecraft that may someday take tourists to the edge of space. In April, Virgin Galactic conducted its first test of its rocket-powered spacecraft since the fatal breakup of the company’s previous SpaceShipTwo-class spacecraft, Enterprise, in 2014.

Daimler has been granted a license to test self-driving vehicles on public roads in Beijing, making it the first international automaker to receive such permission.

The owner of the Mercedes-Benz brand was given the test permit by the Chinese government after extensive closed-course testing, the company said in a statement, adding that it marks a milestone in its research and development efforts in China.

Daimler, which also has licenses in Germany and the U.S., said it will now begin road tests in Beijing.

There are other companies testing autonomous vehicles in China, notably Baidu, which has been on public roads since at least 2016. For Daimler to qualify, the company said it had to add to its Mercedes-Benz test vehicles technical applications from Baidu’s Apollo platform. Daimler had to undergo testing at the National Pilot Zone (Beijing and Hebei) for Intelligent Mobility, with test drivers receiving rigorous automated driving training.

Daimler has also deepened its relationship with Baidu, specifically in R&D efforts focused on safety and autonomous driving. The goal is to understand the special requirements for automated driving in China, and to develop an early intuition regarding local technical trends, Daimler said.

Earlier this week, Baidu announced an update to its Apollo autonomous driving system, which is capable of Level 4 operations, a designation by automotive engineering association SAE International that means the vehicles take over all driving in certain conditions.

The Apollo program is an open-source autonomous driving platform that has been under development for years. Baidu isn’t interested in making the actual car — just the software that drives it. And it wants as many companies as possible to use its Apollo platform. Some 116 partners are now on the Apollo platform, including new partners Jaguar Land Rover, Valeo, Byton, Leopard Imaging and Suning Logistics.

The blockchain revolution is coming, but you might not see it. That’s the view of Brian Behlendorf, executive director of the Linux Foundation’s Hyperledger Project.

Speaking at the TC Sessions: Blockchain event in Zug, Switzerland, Behlendorf explained that much of the innovation that the introduction of blockchains are primed to happen behind this the scenes unbeknownst to most.

“For a lot of consumers, you’re not going to realize when the bank or a web form at a government website or when you go to LinkedIn and start seeing green check marks against people’s claims that they attended this university — which are all behind-the-scenes that will likely involve blockchain,” Behlendorf told interviewer John Biggs.

“This is a revolution in storage and networking and consumers.”

As for where blockchain might make a big impact, Behlendorf said he believes that the area of online identity is particularly ripe for change. Rather than relying on central systems such as Facebook or Twitter to hold information, blockchain solutions can potentially store information more securely and with more utility thanks to self-sovereign ID systems.

“That’s what gets me up in the morning more than almost every other use case,” Behlendorf said. “I think we’ve got something of a solution but’s only going to work if the end user experience of managing your identity and your personal data is made easy and made fluid. It [has to] feel something like your wallet when you pull out your driver’s license and show it.”

Hyperledger is providing the framework and tools that the foundation hopes will enable innovation in the blockchain space, and Behlendorf said that it currently has around 10 code bases, of which two are in production use with eight additional frameworks to build blockchains. He added that there are more options coming, thanks to Hyperledger focus on “organic” development ideas.

It might seem like an irony that blockchain projects, which can raise enormous amounts of money via token sales, are basing the technologies that power their businesses on open source tools, but Behlendorf said there’s nothing new in that situation versus how the Linux Foundation traditionally operates.

“There might be a few developers who get involved to improve their skills and reputation but the vast majority work on it because their business is investigating it, wants to use it or to do a pilot, so they have a responsibility to make sure it works,” Behlendorf explained.

“For them, knowing other companies are using it and making a profit is fine,” he added. “In fact, it’s a good thing.”

Community spirit is very much the focus, and Hyperledger has had to intervene in the rare cases that members have taken things too far.

“What you want to protect against is any one company benefitting from the brand or reputation that the community creates in a way that is unfair. So we do things like we protect the trademark… because that confuses the marketplace,” Behlendorf said.

“But we want to see companies building services on top of this. In fact, it’s essential to make this a virtuous circle.”

With long summer evenings comes the perfect opportunity to dust off your old boxes of circuits and wires and start to build something. If you’re short on inspiration, you might be interested in artist and engineer Dan Macnish’s how-to guide on building an AI-powered doodle camera using a thermal printer, Raspberry pi, a dash of Python and Google’s Quick Draw data set.

“Playing with neural networks for object recognition one day, I wondered if I could take the concept of a Polaroid one step further, and ask the camera to re-interpret the image, printing out a cartoon instead of a faithful photograph.” Macnish wrote on his blog about the project, called Draw This.

To make this work, Macnish drew on Google’s object recognition neural network and the data set created for the game Google Quick, Draw! Tying the two systems together with some python code, Macnish was able to have his creation recognize real images and print out the best corresponding doodle in the Quick, Draw! data set

But since output doodles are limited to the data set, there can be some discrepancy between what the camera “sees” and what it generates for the photo.

“You point and shoot – and out pops a cartoon; the camera’s best interpretation of what it saw,” Macnish writes. “The result is always a surprise. A food selfie of a healthy salad might turn into an enormous hot dog.”

If you want to give this a go for yourself, Macnish has uploaded the instructions and code needed to build this project on GitHub.

Years ago – six years ago, to be exact – a toy called Buckyballs came under attack by government officials intent on destroying fun. The Consumer Product Safety Commission banned the toys, which we noted were tiny rare earth magnets that were good for play but bad for a snack, because a few overzealous children swallowed one or two and found themselves in gastrointestinal distress.

The lawsuit against ZenMagnets, creators of Buckyballs, began as a “recall prior to record of injury,” something unprecedented in this space. That meant the company had to stop selling its magnets before anyone was actually injured, an odd position for a small company to be in.

Now, after six years of battle, Buckyballs are back. The company is now able to sell its biggest set, the Mandala and notes that the sets are not toys. They could cause intestinal pinching, writes the ZenMagnets team, and they recommend not leaving them around animals or small children. However, these odd and wonderful little toys are finally available for purchase. The kit now even comes inside a lockable box to ensure little hands can’t accidentally grab and eat them.

“We remain willing to work with the CPSC to develop the magnet safety standards for which we’ve already petitioned, and which will be more effective and reasonable than the all-ages, nationwide ban we succeeded in vacating in the Tenth Circuit,” wrote founder Shihan Qu. “As we’ve already been doing, Zen Magnets looks forward to providing not just the highest quality magnet spheres on the market, but also the safest in terms of sales methods and warnings. Now that the war on magnets is over, hopefully we can all focus towards the war on magnet misuse.”

“Magnets must be respected, but need not be feared,” he said. Truer words – besides these – were never spoken.

In what amounted to one of the most far-reaching and interesting conversations at TC Sessions in Zug, Ethereum masterminds Vitalik Buterin, Justin Drake, and Karl Floersch spoke openly – and often candidly – about a bright future for Ethereum scaling and, more interestingly, their way to build teams that work.

“There’s definitely changes that we could have made into the protocol,” said Buterin when asked whether or not he would have changed anything if he could start Ethereum again. But, he said, “there are ways in which that the problem is fundamentally hard.” In other words, growth was the only option.

“The demand for using public blockchains is high and we need to up the stability in order the meet that demand,” he said.

Floersch discussed the problems associated with Ethereum in the context of “adversarial networks.”

The network, he said, should “penalize people who don’t provide guarantees” and he felt that the tools available to simulate economic actors – including bad actors – are still weak.

“We come up with ideas, try to formalize them, and implement them,” he said. But, he said, the simulations still aren’t available.

The team expects aspects of Ethereum 2.0 – namely the Casper upgrade and the addition of sharding – to begin rolling out in 2019. After that, said Floersch, Ethereum 3.0 would enable quantum secure systems i.e. systems that can withstand the power of quantum computers.

“We’ll push quantum secure updates before there are commercial quantum computers,” he said.

Ultimately, said Buterin, Ethereum runs because the team is so tightly knit thanks to a clear roadmap. He said Bitcoin has many heads and the gridlock created was dangerous.

“Can they agree? No. You have gridlock,” he said.

“Part of the reason is that the Ethereum comminity early on [continued] to promote the idea of the Ethereum roadmap,” he said. “I feel that the roadmap is part of the social contract.”

“People who buy into ethereum buy in knowing that these are the things that people are going to want to push it forward. There may be deadlock on what specific path the community should take,” he said. But, he noted the roadmap keeps everyone on the same path. Given the expansive popularity and reach of the technology, it’s a fascinating bit of team-building that should inform other open source and blockchain projects over time.

You can watch the entire panel below:

In a series of late night/early morning tweets, Elon Musk offered up engineers from Space X and the Boring Company to help the soccer team trapped in a Thailand cave.

Musk began by suggesting a potential solution to help rescue the team and their coach who went missing late last month. As he noted, the Boring Company in particular has quite a bit of experience digging holes and working with ground penetrating radar. He then announced that he would be offer up help in the form of engineers from two of his companies.

“SpaceX & Boring Co engineers headed to Thailand tomorrow to see if we can be helpful to govt,” Musk tweeted. “There are probably many complexities that are hard to appreciate without being there in person.”

A spokesperson for the latter confirmed the plan, writing,

We are speaking with the Thai government to see how we can help, and we are sending SpaceX/Boring Company people from the US to Thailand today to offer support on the ground.”Once we confirm what exactly will be helpful to send or do, we will. We are getting feedback and guidance from the people on the ground in Chiang Rai to determine the best way for us to assist their efforts.”

The attempted rescue from the Tham Luang cave complex has proven difficult and deadly. Just last night, it was revealed that a form Thai Navy SEAL diver died bringing tanks of air to the 12 boys and their coach.

Have you felt a disconnect with your Alexa and wished she could share more of your sense of humor or tell you an actually scary ghost story? Startup Storyline makes designing your own Alexa skills as easy and dragging and dropping speech blocks, and has just raised $770,000 in a funding round led by Boost VC to help grow its skill builder API.

The company launched in 2017 to help bridge the gap between creators and the tricky voice recognition software powering smart speakers like Alexa. With its new funding, CEO and co-founder  Vasili Shynkarenka says that Storyline is hoping to expand its team and its interface to other smart speakers, like Google Home, as well work on integrating monetization and third-party services into the interface.

Storyline’s user friendly interface lets users drag-and-drop speech commands and responses to customize user’s interactions with their smart speaker devices. Users can choose between templates for a skill or a flash briefing, and test the voice recognition and logic of the design live in their browser window.

Since its launch, over 12,000 Storyline users have published 2,500 skills in the Alexa Skills Store — more than 6% of all skills in the store. The interface has also been used by the grand-prize winners of Amazon’s developer Alexa Skills Challenge: Kids and the publication Slate.

For Shynkarenka, the creation of these skills is vastly different from the creation of a typical smartphone app.

“Most people think of Alexa as another software platform, like a smartphone or the web, and that’s not [actually] true,” he said. “The most popular apps on Alexa are not the apps that let you chat with friends or browse your social networks. The most popular apps are content apps — the apps that you can use to play trivia games with your family over dinner.”

Just as YouTube has video creators, Shynkarenka says he wants Storyline to become the home for smart speaker content across devices. The startup has already cultivated an active online community of 2,500 creators excited about creating and sharing this content.

Storyline is not alone in this space however, Amazon itself released Amazon Blueprints in April that allows users to create customized Amazon skills using several different available templates.

As the smart speaker space, and subsequent skill creation one, continue to heat up, the creation of your perfectly customized new smart speaker family member may be closer than you think.

Felicity Conrad and Kristen Sonday were on very different paths until three years ago. Conrad was an associate at the powerhouse law firm Skadden Arps. Meanwhile, Kristen Sonday, a Princeton grad and the first person in her family to go to college, was reflecting on the several years she’d spent with the U.S. Department of Justice in Mexico City, working to extradite fugitives.

As it happens, both were coming to similar conclusions about the U.S. legal system, including that it’s especially challenging for people who don’t speak English. For Conrad, an opportunity to litigate a pro bono asylum case would set her on a path of wanting to do more for people seeking persecution from their own countries. For Sonday, the experience of working with foreign governments had a similar impact.

Perhaps it’s no wonder that soon after they were introduced by a mutual friend, they decided to create Paladin, a New York-based SaaS business that today helps legal teams sign up for pro bono opportunities, enables coordinators to track the lawyers’ work, and which captures some of the stories and impact that the lawyers are making through their efforts. This last piece is particularly important as the software helps legal departments see their return on investment for their attorneys’ donated time.

The company’s offering is timely, including for legal departments like that of Verizon, which has 900 attorneys and a global pro bono program that it uses Paladin to help manage. (Verizon owns AOL, which owns TechCrunch.) Lyft, a newer client, has a 50-person legal department and recently launched its own pro bono team.

Given how quickly immigration and other policies are being changed under the Trump administration and uneven guidance from Attorney General Jeff Sessions, the need for legal help is growing by the day.

For example, Lyft  — which is among a long line of tech companies to speak out in support of immigrants’ rights — is committing some of its lawyers to reuniting families that have been separated at the Southern U.S. border, says Conrad.

One question is how scalable Paladin’s offering is. The biggest challenge for the outfit right now would seem to be that few corporate lawyers do the kind of pro bono work that’s often most needed yet which involves litigation matters outside the scope of what they practice, including around immigration laws, social security benefits, and criminal and domestic abuse matters.

Sonday says Paladin has the solution to that, adding that the seven-person company has raised $1.1 million from investors — Mark Cuban, Hyde Park Ventures, Backstage Capital, R2 Ventures, MergeLane and Chaac Ventures, among them — toward that end.

What it plans to build, exactly: infrastructure that connects with organizations on the ground with legal services and law firms all over the world, no matter their size. Basically, it will begin acting as a matchmaker for legal departments, helping lawyers find the pro bono work about which they can feel most passionately.

Ultimately, Conrad and Sonday are betting that anything that makes the process of finding pro bono work a lot easier than it is today will increase the numbers of attorneys who give back to society. They’re also think that when law firms can better track the impact their employees are making, we’ll see more, and bigger, pro bono programs.

Says Sonday, “Right now, just 10 to 20 percent of law firms have someone in-house to manage that pro bono work. If we can help the other 80 to 90 percent of lawyers” connect with the people who need them most —  and who they feel good about helping — it’s a win-win all around,