Month: August 2018

Microsoft today announced a couple of AI-centric updates for OneDrive and SharePoint users with an Office 365 subscription that bring more of the company’s machine learning smarts to its file storage services.

All of these features will launch at some point later this year. With the company’s Ignite conference in Orlando coming up next month, it’s probably a fair guess that we’ll see some of these updates make a reappearance there.

The highlight of these announcements is that starting later this year, both services will get automated transcription services for video and audio files. While video is great, it’s virtually impossible to find any information in these files without spending a lot of time. And once you’ve found it, you still have to transcribe it. Microsoft says this new service will handle the transcription automatically and then display the transcript as you’re watching the video. The service can handle over 320 file types, so chances are it’ll work with your files, too.

Other updates the company today announced include a new file view for OneDrive and Office.com that will recommend files to you by looking at what you’ve been working on lately across the Microsoft 365 and making an educated guess as to what you’ll likely want to work on now. Microsoft will also soon use a similar set of algorithms to prompt you to share files with your colleagues after you’ve just presented them in a meeting with PowerPoint, for example.

Power users will also soon see access statistics for any file in OneDrive and SharePoint.

Earlier today, Facebook said that it has committed to reducing its greenhouse gas emissions by 75 percent and using 100 percent renewable energy to power global operations at the social networking giant by the end of 2020.

So, while the company may have problems keeping foreign nationals from using the platform for influence operations (or garbage influencers from engaging in influence operations), at least they’ll be doing it with less of an effect on climate change.

Facebook gave itself a well-deserved pat on the back for its pace of acquiring renewable energy. The company bought over 3 gigawatts of new solar and wind energy since its first renewable energy purchase in 2013 (that includes 2.5 gigawatts in the past 12 months alone — a rate of acquisition that makes the intervening years look… well… kind of paltry).

What’s especially good about the Facebook renewable purchases is that they’re not just offset agreements — deals where a company buys renewable energy in some far-flung geography to offset the power they’re buying in local markets that relies on traditional carbon-based fuel sources.

“All of these wind and solar projects are new and on the same grid as our data centers,” the company said. “That means that each of these projects brings jobs, investment and a healthier environment to the communities that host us — from Prineville, Oregon, and Los Lunas, New Mexico, to Henrico, Virginia, and Luleå, Sweden.”

The targets that Facebook is making public today are part of the company’s commitment to the Paris Agreement through the “We Are Still In” initiative, the company said.

For Facebook, the announcement is something of a victory lap. Back in 2015, the company set a goal of having 50 percent of its power supplied to facilities from renewable energy sources by 2018. It actually hit that target in 2017.

No, it’s not just you. Yes, Slack is having connectivity issues yet again. Though this time, they seem a bit less pronounced. I know we’re having some problems off and on, with different channels appearing offline. For the most part, however, communication is still up, so you probably won’t be able to convince your boss to take the rest of the day off. Sorry.

Slack acknowledged the problems on its status page, noting, “Folks are having troubles connecting to their workspaces. We’re looking into the cause and will have updates shortly.” The site experience similar issues earlier this month and back in June.

We’ll update shortly after those updates arrive shortly. Shortly.

Instagram has introduced a wide-ranging set of new tools today with security and transparency in mind. In a blog post titled “New Tools to Keep Instagram Safe,” the company is announcing three significant updates: an “about this account” section to provide users more context about accounts with large followings, a form through which accounts can request a coveted blue verified badge and support for third-party authenticator apps.

Instagram’s new “About this Account” section is designed to give users more information that they can use when evaluating the legitimacy of an account. The feature will be available by tapping the menu button from an account with substantial reach and will provide information like when an account was created, the country in which it is based, accounts that share followers, a lineage of that account’s username changes over the last year.

The feature will also link accounts with large audiences to the Instagram ads they are running, a nod to recent conversations around ad transparency in light of Russian government-sponsored political ads and disinformation seeping into social platforms.

According to Instagram, “In September, people who have accounts that reach large audiences can review the information about their accounts that will soon be publicly available.” When that period is over, the About This Account tool will launch to users around the globe.

The second major Instagram change will offer accounts a path toward verification on the platform, standardizing a process that’s generally been opaque. A blue verified badge can be requested through a user’s own profile by tapping the menu icon, choosing Settings, and “Request Verification.” Instagram will then review the request, asking users to “provide your account username, your full name and a copy of your legal or business identification,” information that will not be made available to the public.

Last but certainly not least, Instagram is adding support for third-party authenticator apps like Google Authenticator and DUO Mobile that provide more robust methods of two-factor authentication (2FA). The move is a long anticipated effort to make Instagram more robust against threats to user accounts that target text-based 2FA, which is notoriously vulnerable to sim hijacking attacks.

“We’ve been focused on the safety of our platform since the very beginning, and today’s updates build upon our existing tools, such as our spam and abusive content filters and the ability to report or block accounts,” Instagram Co-Founder & CTO Mike Krieger said in a statement about the updates.

“We know we have more work to do to keep bad actors off Instagram, and we are committed to continuing to build more tools to do just that.”

Facebook is today launching a partner program for its Express Wi-Fi initiative, which helps bring higher-speed connections to developing markets, including India, Indonesia, Kenya, Nigeria, and Tanzania. The program itself involves having local business owners install Wi-Fi hotspots, where internet service is provided by local ISPs, mobile network operators, and others that Facebook has partnered with. Now, Facebook is launching a new partner program that will allow access point manufacturers to build devices compatible with Express Wi-Fi.

Its debut lineup of partners for “Express Wi-Fi Certified,” as the partner program is called, include Arista, Cambium Networks, and Ruckus Networks, an ARRIS Company.

Facebook first began testing Express Wi-Fi three years ago, and has since expanded it to the five above countries and 10 partners. The idea behind the project is to create an entrepreneurial grassroots base for the its Wi-Fi service – that is, the operators and ISPs would be working with local entrepreneurs who want to resell internet access in their own communities. The partners set the prices, but Facebook provides the software.

The company has tried to address the needs of developing markets before, via its zero-rating program Free Basics. But this program was criticized over net neutrality concerns, as it only provided access to specific websites – like Facebook, of course – to the developing markets. India eventually banned that program in 2016, as a result.

Express Wi-Fi, on the other hand, offers full, unrestricted access to the web, not a selection of pre-approved sites and services. It’s one of Facebook’s many connectivity initiatives today, along with others like OpenCellular, rural access programs, drones, and other infrastructure projects.

The new partner program for Express Wi-Fi, announced today, was built to address specific issues Facebook and its partners faced in the field, the company now explains. It says it has been working with the manufacturers to build new access points that better detect registration pages and more accurately count the amount of Wi-Fi data consumed.

This will allow the Wi-Fi service providers to sell prepaid access as well as different traffic classes – like offering some services or content for free, while charging for others. Presumably, this would be another avenue of making Facebook free to developing markets down the road.

Facebook says having hardware manufacturers on board will help its operator partners more easily set up and manage their Express Wi-Fi hotspots.

Weak and expensive connectivity is a big barrier to Facebook adoption in developing markets, especially as user growth in developed regions is stalling – or, even decreasing at times. In July, Facebook reported no user growth in the U.S. and Canada, and a loss of European users it attribute to GDPR requirements. Developing regions, however, are still coming online and could bring Facebook a whole host of new users, if people can get connected.

One of the underlying trends of VR/AR investment in 2018 is that money has become harder to come by for startups which may have had no trouble pulling together a round in 2016. Who better to chat with about why this is happening than a partner at one of the leading early stage venture capital firms.

Catherine Ulrich of FirstMark Capital will be joining us onstage at TechCrunch Sessions: AR/VR in LA on October 18th where we’ll get a chance to chat with her about investor perceptions surrounding augmented and virtual reality startups and where she thinks the real opportunities lie in the short and long term. 

Before joining FirstMark as a managing partner this past year, Ulrich served as the Chief Product Officer at Shutterstock and previously held a number of executive roles at Weight Watchers. Ulrich recently led the firm’s investment in Parsely Health, an ambitious medtech startup looking to reimagine the healthcare industry with its membership service.

FirstMark Capital is a New York City VC firm that has made a name for itself in the past decade with smart early stage bets. They’ve made notable investments in Airbnb, Frame.io, Shopify, Pinterest, DraftKings and Riot Games, among many others.

While so much of the AR/VR scene has been pushing forward in LA and San Francisco, FirstMark is firmly rooted in NY though they have managed to begin experimenting with investments in the space. The firm led 3D object platform Sketchfab’s $7 million Series A. The tool has become a popular hub for 3D models that can be shared and purchased by creators.

While some more established firms have been reticent to pump money into a field with so many variables, others see the massive opportunity presented by AR/VR as well worth the massive risk. With so many of today’s massive tech giants arguing that AR and VR will be the most critical future platforms, it’s really a question of when the timing will be right and which startups have the longevity to make it there. We’ll zero in on all of these questions and more when Ulrich takes to the stage at our October event.

Early bird tickets are now on sale for $99 – that’s 50% off before prices go up! Student tickets are available for $45. You can get your tickets here.

Find out more about the event, see more speakers, and join our newsletter here.

A few weeks ago, we posted the five top reasons why anyone in the startup scene — from new entrants to seasoned founders and investors — would be glad they attended Disrupt SF next Wednesday through Friday at San Francisco’s Moscone West.

Among other great features, we mentioned the 107 interviews and Q&As on the stages at Disrupt, guided networking thanks to CrunchMatch, the peerless Startup Battlefield competition and deep, deep Startup Alley exhibit area.

And there is so much more…

The most-talked-about topics: Disrupt SF is showcasing the latest advancements and innovations in all of the hottest categories: AI, AR/VR, blockchain, biotech and healthcare, fintech, gaming and investor topics, justice and diversity, mobility, privacy and security, retail, robotics/hardware and IoT and space.

The show has a great line-up of speakers, workshops and exhibitors across all these tracks, plus much more, ranging from deep nerdom like 5G networks and quantum computing to Mike Judge, the creator of HBO’s Silicon Valley, to the social side, with Bumble’s Whitney Wolfe Herd.

Hot product launches: Product launches are all over the show, from Startup Alley to the Startup Battlefield competition to the stages, where startups and big brands, ranging from BMW and iRobot to Mirror, Seismic, Clinc, Kairos and PlayVS will all make big reveals you won’t want to miss.

Fantastic female founder programs: Not only have we partnered with All Raise to offer a workshop and office hours for female founders with All Raise VCs, Disrupt will also host female-focused networking events and feature several remarkable women on our stage — Priscilla Chan, Aileen Lee, Arlan Hamilton, Bo Young Lee, Tina Sharkey, Anne Wojcicki, Jutta Steiner and Marillyn Hewson. All told, more than a third of our speakers and judges are women.

Wild Card drama. Startup Battlefield’s contestants have been training for weeks, but TechCrunch also chooses two wild cards from Startup Alley to compete at the last minute. And sometimes they do incredibly well. Just ask RecordGram, who was plucked from Startup Alley as the Wild Card and actually won the Startup Battlefield competition last year in New York! 

Founders note: It’s not too late to get a spot in Startup Alley — there are a couple of tables left!

Price point for everyone: Just want to get a taste of Startup Alley, get a Basic Pass. Want the full Disrupt SF experience, get an Innovator Pass. Founder or investor? We have passes designed just for you. Want to get behind the scenes, email us about how you can get an Insider Pass.

Register today so you can join in all the action starting September 5!

See you at the show!

To say Juul Labs has had a meteoric rise would be an understatement.

The company, which spun out of Pax Labs in 2017, now accounts for a staggering 72 percent of the e-cigarette market. And the product only came to market in 2015. Let that sink in.

But the company’s wild success hasn’t come easily. Regulatory hurdles like FDA approval and an ongoing investigation by the FDA to determine why teens and minors are so enthusiastic about the Juul vaporizer are but a few.

Cofounder and Chief Product Officer James Monsees has been there from the very beginning, and we’re absolutely psyched to have Monsees join us on the Disrupt SF stage in September.

Monsees co-founded Juul with Adam Bowen in 2003, when they would pepper in a handful of smoke breaks during brainstorming sessions. The constant distraction of a cigarette spurred them to start working on Juul.

In 2015, the iteration of the Juul that we see today came to market. It took a while to get going, but as the company expanded its distribution, Juul became a runaway success.

Unfortunately, at least part of that success came from minors, with whom the device is very popular.

As it stands now, Juul is working to educate the public about responsible adult use, marketing the product as an alternative for folks who smoke traditional cigarettes. In fact, Juul recently changed up its social media marketing to only reflect Juul users who were former smokers. Juul Labs has also invested $30 million going towards independent research, youth and parent education and community engagement efforts, which will be spent over the next three years.

But perhaps the most daunting task is FDA regulation, which takes millions of dollars and seemingly endless research.

At Disrupt, we’ll chat with Monsees about Juul’s positioning in the market, how to continue iterating and innovating in a state of limbo with the FDA and what’s next for the company.

Disrupt SF will take place in San Francisco’s Moscone Center West from September 5 to 7. The full agenda is here, and you can still buy tickets right here.

Nnamdi Okike, a first generation American whose parents immigrated from Nigeria, and Aaron Holiday, whose mother worked in the collections department of Sears and whose father was a substance abuse counselor in New Orleans, are not typical venture investors. And their firm, 645 Ventures, which just closed on $40.6 million for its second fund, is certainly not a typical venture fund.

Both men are firm believers in the power of data to help make better investment decisions, and both men are using that belief as the core tenet of their rapidly growing venture capital fund.

Holiday and Okike are using their backgrounds as technology driven analysts at Goldman Sachs and Insight Venture Partners (respectively) to build a new model for early stage investing. The two men believe they can have a greater geographical breadth and reach companies at earlier stages of their development by leveraging tools that automate the heavy lifting of the investment business.

For Holiday, the growth of 645 Ventures from its first fund of $8 million to the current $40 million under management is a testament to the firm’s technology-first investment thesis. A computer scientist who grew up in New Orleans’ sixth ward and attended Morehouse College, Holiday began his professional career developing algorithms for high frequency trading at Goldman Sachs.

Not content with just developing the algorithms, Holiday wanted to assume a more active role in managing money and found himself drawn to venture capital. He attended business school at Cornell and began working with the University’s BR Venture Fund, a small $4 million direct investment vehicle for venture capital.

From there he moved to Gotham Ventures, the New York-based affiliate fund of DFJ, and met Okike through an entrepreneur that both men were working with.

Okike had already been involved in angel investing and had taken a job at Insight Venture Partners in 2002 just after the dot-com bubble burst. As an analyst with the firm, the Worcester, Mass. native (his parents had immigrated to the U.S. from Nigeria) and Harvard alum, tracked the renaissance of the tech industry with Web 2.0 and thought that the data-driven approach that Insight used could be applied to earlier-stage startups.

“What I was seeing was that there was a proliferation of data on startups that you could use to drive an outbound sourcing models on startups,” Okike said. “Insight’s model was a team and using data that they were acquiring manually. What I started to see was that you could automate a lot of the data collection and you could do it earlier.”

Nnamdi Okike and Aaron Holiday, co-founders of 645 Ventures

Okike’s observations aligned directly with what Taylor saw too, and after a few conversations the two men raised $8 million for the first 645 Ventures fund in late 2014 and closed in 2015.

That first fund has already garnered successes with deals like MM.Lafleur, the women’s subscription clothing company, and Iterable, a marketing automation business, according to Holiday.

And with the second fund, the firm has attracted notable backers including: Princeton University, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, Spelman College, and tech investors like Albert Wenger, a general partner at Union Square Ventures; First Round Capital founder, Howard Morgan; Ken Chenault the former chief executive of American Express and a general partner and chairman at General Catalyst; and Mellody Hobson, the President of Ariel Investments.

“We agreed that the next wave of outbound deal sourcing was going to be earlier,” says Okike. And that the firm can uncover great deals across a broader geographical area, when investment decisions are more data driven. “One of our core beliefs is that you can build a geographically distributed fund through better data.”

As for the firm’s name, the local phone code for Martha’s Vineyard both evoked fond childhood memories for Okike and foregrounded the firms numerical and data-driven approach for Taylor. “When you saw the number, alphanumerically, numbers show up at the top of a list before names, so it would be good to have a number as the name of the firm,” Taylor said.

Google Cloud’s Text-to-Speech and Speech-to-Text APIs are getting a bunch of updates today that introduce support for more languages, make it easier to hear auto-generated voices on different speakers and that promise better transcripts thanks to improved tools for speaker recognition, among other things.

With this update, the Cloud Text-to-Speech API is now also generally available.

Let’s look at the details. The highlight of the release for many developers is probably the launch of the 17 new WaveNet-based voices in a number of new languages. WaveNet is Google’s technology for using machine learning to create these text-to-speech audio files. The result of this is a more natural sounding voice.

With this update, the Text-to-Speech API now supports 14 languages and variants and features a total of 30 standard voices and 26 WaveNet voices.

If you want to try out the new voices, you can use Google’s demo with your own text here.

Another interesting new feature here is the beta launch of audio profiles. The idea here is to optimize the audio file for the medium you’ll use to play it. Your phone’s speaker is different from the soundbar underneath your TV, after all. With audio profiles, you can optimize the audio for phone calls, headphones and speakers, for example.

On the Speech-to-Text side, Google is now making it easier for developers to transcribe samples with multiple speakers. Using machine learning, the service can now recognize the different speakers (though you still have to tell it how many speakers there are in a given sample) and it’ll then tag every word with a speaker number. If you have a stereo file of two speakers (maybe a call center agent on the left and the angry customer who called to complain on the right), Google can now use those channels to distinguish between speakers, too.

Also new is support for multiple languages. That’s something Google’s Search App already supports and the company is now making this available to developers, too. Developers can choose up to four languages and the Speech-to-Text API will automatically determine which language is spoken.

And finally, the Speech-to-Text API now also returns word-level confidence scores. That may sound like a minor thing — and it already returned scores for each segment of speech — but Google notes that developers can now use this to build apps that focus on specific words. “For example, if a user inputs ‘please set up a meeting with John for tomorrow at 2PM’ into your app, you can decide to prompt the user to repeat ‘John’ or ‘2PM,’ if either have low confidence, but not to reprompt for ‘please’ even if has low confidence since it’s not critical to that particular sentence,” the team explains.