Month: August 2018

A study of circumstances and demographics attendant on attacks against refugees and immigrants in Germany has shown that Facebook use appears to be deeply linked with the frequency of violent acts. Far from being mere trolling or isolated expressions of controversial political opinions, spikes in anti-refugee posts were predictive of violent crimes against those groups.

The study was conducted by Karsten Müller and Carlo Schwarz of the University of Warwick. Their theory was that if country-wide waves of “right wing anti-refugee sentiment” result in subsequent waves of actual crime; these waves would travel the way any others do, via TV, word of mouth, radio, and of course social media.

Now, if the anti-refugee rhetoric spreads via social media, then we can expect more crimes to occur in areas where there is more social media use, right? And specifically, areas where there is more activity among anti-refugee groups would see the most.

To test this theory, Müller and Schwarz used activity on a pair of major Facebook pages in Germany to measure social media use in general and specific to right-wing groups. For right-wing activity they looked at page of the “Alternative for Germany” party, the most popular anti-immigration political faction in the country and one that does not attempt to control the conduct on its threads. As a measure of overall Facebook use, they used Nutella’s popular public German page.

With hundreds of thousands of posts and comments broken down by area, the researchers were able to identify overall patterns of social media use, and then isolate anti-refugee sentiment within that. Their findings are unambiguous:

Using these measures, we find that anti-refugee hate crimes increase disproportionally in areas with higher Facebook usage during periods of high anti-refugee sentiment online. This effect is especially pronounced for violent incidents against refugees, such as arson and assault. Taken at face value, this suggests a role for social media in the transmission of Germany-wide anti-refugee sentiment.

A quick estimate on their part suggests that the social media activity may have increased attacks by 13 percent or so — not a number to be quoted as definitive, but rather an indicator that we are not quibbling over half a percent here and there but meaningful numbers.

But the researchers are also careful both to carefully define the scope of those findings:

We do not claim that social media itself causes crimes against refugees out of thin air. In fact, hate crimes are likely to have many fundamental drivers; local differences in xenophobic ideology or a higher salience of immigrants are only two obvious examples. Rather, our argument is that social media can act as a propagating mechanism for the flare-up of hateful sentiments. Taken together, the evidence we present suggests that quasi-random shifts in the local population’s exposure to such sentiments on social media can magnify their effect on refugee attacks.

…and to account for the many confounding variables that may invisibly affect the data, of which below.

Correlation vs causation

No doubt many readers will be skeptical of any study like this one; after all, these are very complex issues with many moving parts, and correlations may appear between things regardless of whether those things directly cause or effect one another. Fortunately the researchers foresaw this objection and were circumspect in their delineation of the link between social media use and attacks.

There are a handful of prominent possible alternative explanations, which the paper deals with in various ways.

First is the possibility that attacks are just more likely in areas where there is heavier social media use. This was my first thought: where are conflicts likely to occur? In places with dense and diverse populations, which seem likely to also have more internet and social media use.

This is dispatched in several ways. In the first place, the study looks at changes in violence levels within an area, not across the whole of Germany. In other words, the pattern of anti-immigrant posts preceding anti-immigrant violence is seen whether it takes place in a smaller town with low levels of social media engagement, or in larger cities where Facebook use is much more frequent.

Next, the Nutella control group provides a measure of social media activity independent of political issues — so patterns of use for a broad swath of users associated with seasons, weekly rhythms, holidays and so on can be identified down to the level of the county. When a population deviates from that pattern, you can be reasonably sure that something about that population is driving that deviation.

Something they couldn’t exactly control but is nonetheless useful is seeing how various internet and Facebook outages affect the patterns. It turns out that internet disruptions completely eliminate the increases in violence normally seen during a country-wide wave of anti-immigrant sentiment. Furthermore, they write, “the effect of refugee posts on hate crimes essentially vanishes in weeks of major Facebook outages.”

Spikes in activity expressing negative feelings towards other frequently targeted groups, for instance Jews, were not associated with increases in refugee-related violence, so it isn’t just that people lash out when they are feeling especially hateful.

Lastly, the researchers showed that other coverage of refugee-related issues, like that by major news outlets, drives local engagement in the form of protests, but does not seem to predict violent acts.

As the researchers say, Facebook isn’t just plain causing violence to happen. The places where it happens are often historically right-wing places that have had higher incidence of violence and hate crimes in the past. But it seems inescapable that Facebook is nevertheless an important way that refugee-related hatred and vitriol in particular is spread, as evidenced by the lack of increases in violence when the social network is unavailable.

The connection seems clear: hateful content spreads via Facebook and where it is engaged with the most, there you find the most violence. On its face this doesn’t seem like something Facebook can moderate away — it’s a natural consequence of how the fundamental social media ecosystem pioneered by Facebook works. Having it repeatedly and systematically connected with increases in violence isn’t a good look.

In recent months, the CryptoKitties fad that had users buying and selling tens of thousands of dollars of blockchain-based collectable cats has settled down considerably. That is not to say that CryptoKitties hasn’t spawned numerous copycats (see CryptoPuppies, CryptoCountries and many more). Unfortunately, the immense popularity of CryptoKitties is unlikely to be repeated, at least not by clones hoping to cash in on the novelty of blockchain-based crypto collectables.

The legacy of CryptoKitties is still in development, but most can agree that the project raised awareness (and attracted development talent) to new uses for blockchain tokens. In particular, CryptoKitties introduced many to the concept of non-fungible tokens, or “NFTs,” which might impact more than the world of cryptocurrencies.

NFTs are unique blockchain tokens that can be transferred to other people, similar to cryptocurrencies (e.g. Bitcoin and Ethereum), but they ordinarily cannot be replaced by another token of equal value — this is because each NFT has its own unique token identifier (and often, associated reference metadata).

Today, most NFTs are used in blockchain-based collectible games; however, use cases of NFTs are only just beginning to be explored. This article briefly discusses the origin of NFTs, explores several flavors of NFTs in the blockchain ecosystem and highlights some potential legal hurdles facing NFT developers.

Collectible origins

The physical collectible trade emerged in the 1860s with the first baseball trading cards. Since that time, physical collectibles have dominated the collectible market. Ownership of physical collectibles is straightforward: When a collector buys a physical collectible, the collector has complete ownership and can sell or trade the collectible at will. Collectors are only prevented from infringing on a collectible’s underlying intellectual property rights. Thus, collectors can buy, sell or trade, but not copy, physical collectibles.

In the late 1990s and early 2000s, in-game collectibles, or virtual assets, emerged. Virtual assets are those goods only found in virtual worlds. Like physical collectibles, there is a robust market for virtual assets. Unlike physical collectibles, however, gamers who find virtual assets in the virtual world do not own them: Large game developers and publishers often license virtual assets to gamers through contractual terms. Thus, the exchange of virtual assets is cabined to authorized in-game trading or illegal trading via auction sites like G2G.

With the emergence of the ERC-721 token standard, new digital collectibles (like CryptoKitties) or tokenized goods, have changed collectible ownership discussions. Specifically, NFTs are revolutionizing digital asset ownership. NFTs allow for the complete ownership of tokenized goods: Collectors own their tokenized goods in perpetuity and can buy, sell and trade their tokenized goods at will. Thus, tokenized goods are a unique hybrid between physical collectibles and virtual assets, in that they offer complete ownership of digital wares. Even though in practice NFT owners have property rights in their tokenized goods, it is unclear if an owner’s property rights are recognized under U.S. property law.

Evolution: ERC-721 and exotic tokens

ERC-721

The first and most prevalent NFT is the ERC-721 standard, primarily due to the success of CryptoKitties. Developers are experimenting with ERC-721 for everything from digital collectibles to securitized investment products. The development of ERC-721 token-based collectible games and the subsequent explosion of speculative interest by investors has put a spotlight on several important legal issues, including issues related to ownership, privacy and money transmission.

In games like CryptoKitties, ownership of the token is clear-cut because each CryptoKitty is a newly developed piece of intellectual property. However, if larger game developers and publishers adopt NFTs, we could quickly revert to the well-worn path of virtual goods, where the token holder is deemed a licensee instead of an owner and is therefore unable to transfer or sell the virtual good to others off platform.

ERC-721 token-based games often play with the “tokenMetadata” function to create various permutations and combinations of characteristics (e.g. breeding in CryptoKitties). Depending on the application, this reference data may be stored in a centralized database or cache folder outside the control of the token owner, which may result in disputes over ownership, particularly when the intellectual property rights for the reference data and the token belong to separate owners.

NFTs can include functionality that may subject NFT businesses to FinCen registration because the same wallet that accepts NFTs can also accept ERC-20 fungible tokens. NFT businesses need to pay special attention to how they structure their tokens and the functionality of wallets that hold them.

Additionally, a tokenized asset exchange may qualify as an investment contract and thus a security. For example, suppose an application developer developed a tokenized asset, like a unique digital weapon, before the application or game in which the tokenized asset could be used has been developed. The application developer then decides to sell the tokenized asset for money to raise profits for the development of the application itself. This transaction may be deemed an investment contract and therefore an unregistered security.

ERC-721 collectable tokens currently dominate the NFT landscape, but we expect this trend to shift as new and more robust use cases come to the forefront. The development of other exotic token standards may also eat into ERC-721 market share; however, a diverse offering of NFT standards should help bolster the NFT ecosystem.

Exotic tokens

More exotic token standards, such as ERC-420 and ERC-998, offer insights into the potential of NFTs and quasi-NFTs. Tokens compliant with these exotic token standards will have unique functions that make them well suited for a variety of use cases. For example, in games, ERC-998-compliant tokens could represent characters that carry consumable rations (ERC-20 tokens) and non-fungible weapons (ERC-721 tokens) or, in commerce, classes of these tokens could be used for tiered membership programs or in the creation of markets in securities products.

While perhaps not the most politically correct use of NFTs, “Rare Pepes,” or rare digital art based on Pepe the Frog, allows users to create, trade and sell their artwork for “Pepecash.” Rare Pepes utilize ERC-420-compliant tokens (the “dank standard”), which demonstrates how NFTs can be used to establish limited editions of digital artwork. This type of quasi-NFT could also be used to offer multiple series of limited-subscriber investment products.

Exotic tokens are just emerging, and we expect to see additional standards and use cases come to market frequently over the coming years.

Conclusion

From the humble origins of the baseball card, NFTs, which offer many of the same features of physical collectibles and virtual assets, are the next evolutionary leap of this industry. NFTs also have many potential use cases outside the world of digital collectibles in everything from artwork to securitized investment vehicles. Although they are still in their very early days, we expect NFT’s to have a bright future.

Are you trying to stay off social media, but just can’t seem to stop yourself from posting?

When random thoughts pop into your head, do you find yourself launching Twitter and typing before you remember you’re trying to quit?

Well, now there’s a better way.

Hello, Brizzly.

Brizzly is a revolutionary new app designed just for social media quitters. 

With Brizzly, you can satisfy your over-sharing urges with its all-natural social media substitute.

It’s just like the real thing!

There’s a website! A cute logo with a cartoon bear! A text input box!

All you have to do is type what you’re thinking and hit SEND.

It’s that easy!

No more late-night cravings!

No more dopamine withdrawals!

No more oops-I-shouldn’t-have-tweeted-that-before-boarding-an-airplane regrets!

With Brizzly, you can enjoy all the benefits of social media without any of the downsides.

No begging for favs and retweets. No notifications blowing up your phone.

No stalkers! No bots! No spam! No Russian hackers!

No fighting! No bigotry! No harassment!

No abuse reports that do nothing!

No low-IQ basement dwellers arguing about the validity of historical facts!

And best of all, no Alex Jones!

Can you believe it? It really works! Post for yourself and see how easy it is to feel like you shared!

And all this without any of the repercussions that come from supporting platforms that turn a blind eye to the mess they’ve created with their ridiculous and naive policies!

I’ve been using Brizzly for a whole hour now, and I can tell you it works!

You can scratch that itch to share something no one cares about — what you had for lunch, your dumb political opinions, what you’re doing RIGHT NOW — and get back to your life. In seconds!

Brizzly works on any device — it’s just a website!

It’s live now and entirely free!

What are you waiting for?

* Footnote, for the thoroughly confused:

This is a joke, but Brizzly was a startup back in the day that served as a third-party Twitter client. The app launched in 2009 from the team at Thing Labs, founded by Jason Shellen, most recently, head of Platform at Slack. Shellen has been involved with social apps for years. He co-founded and sold Hike Labs to Pinterest; worked with Blogger before its acquisition by Google; and is still well-known as the founding PM at Google Reader. He began Thing Labs after leaving Google, where Brizzly was created. AOL bought Thing Labs, and he ended up working there on the rebranding of AIM.

Shellen today tweeted he bought back Brizzly, which he turned it into this silly website for now.

The posts really do go nowhere — it’s not a trick. The code is just a form reset. 

Shellen tells us he may end up using the Brizzly domain for something else in the future — he has a few ideas — but is nowhere close to launching anything at present. 

Morgan Stanley is no longer providing equity coverage on Tesla’s stock, the second firm to drop its stock rating on the electric automaker since CEO Elon Musk announced plans via Twitter to take the company private.

Tesla declined to comment. Morgan Stanley could not be reached for comment to explain why it dropped Tesla. However, some speculate that the brokerage firm could be playing some role in Tesla’s plan to become a private company.

Morgan Stanley’s website no longer shows a stock rating or target price on Tesla. Tesla stock was previously rated at “equal weight.” The move, which was reported by Bloomberg, caused Tesla shares to rise Tuesday. Shares closed at $321.90, about 3.6 percent higher than its opening price.

Morgan Stanley analyst Adam Jonas, a longtime bull of Tesla, had a $291 price target on the company. In his last research note on August 7, Jonas explained Morgan Stanley placed an equal weight rating on the company because it supports a near fair value and “not a more attractive investment on a risk-adjusted basis than the average stock under our NA coverage.”

Last week, Goldman Sachs Group dropped its Tesla rating and price target, although it gave an explanation for the move. The company is stepping in to advise Musk and the Tesla board on taking the company private.

Musk’s tweet August 13 provided more details, including that the company is working with Silver Lake and Goldman Sachs as advisors. The company has hired Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz and Munger, Tolles & Olson as legal advisors.

Musk first floated the idea of taking Tesla private at $420 a share on August 7 via a tweet that prompted the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission to investigate.

This likely won’t come as a surprise to anyone who saw the news late last month, but Mayfield Robotics, maker of the adorable home robot Kuri announced today that it’s ceasing operations. The company, which began life as a part of Bosch, will close its doors by the end of October this year.

In July, Mayfield announced that it was ending the manufacture of Kuri, the home assistant it debuted at CES back in 2015. The news came as Bosch determined that there wasn’t a place for Mayfield or Kuri in its larger portfolio. At the time, the company noted that its future was up in the air, but still sounded somewhat hopeful that it might eventually find a home.

“Creating a robot like Kuri is a massive undertaking,” Mayfield wrote at the time. “We don’t know what the coming months will bring. Regardless, we stand firm in our belief that the home robot Renaissance is just beginning, and it’s going to be amazing.”

in spite of that optimism, Kuri is the latest in a long line of attempts at a home robot that ultimately missed the mark, due in part to prohibitively steep price tag.

After meeting with “dozens of companies” and seeking other investments, however, Mayfield is calling it a day. “Our team is beyond disappointed, it wrote in a blog post today. “Together we’ve spent the past four years designing and building not just Kuri, but also an equally incredible company culture and spirit.”

In the coming months, Mayfield says it will work to help employees find jobs within the larger Bosch umbrella.

Facebook has been a bit slow to adopt the voice computing revolution. It has no voice assistant, its smart speaker is still in development, and some apps like Instagram aren’t full equipped for audio communication. But much of that is set to change judging by experiments discovered in Facebook’s code, plus new patent filings.

Developing voice functionality could give people more ways to use Facebook in their home or on the go. Its forthcoming Portal smart speaker is reportedly designed for easy video chatting with distant family, including seniors and kids that might have trouble with phones. Improved transcription and speech-to-text-to-speech features could connect Messenger users across input mediums and keep them on the chat app rather than straying back to SMS.

But Facebook’s voice could be drowned out by the din of the crowd if it doesn’t get moving soon. All the major mobile hardware and operating system makers now have their own voice assistants like Siri, Alexa, Google Assistant, and Samsung Bixby, as well as their own smart speakers. In Q2 2018, Canalys estimates that Google shipped 5.4 million Homes, and Amazon shipped 4.1 million Echoes. Apple’s HomePod is off to a slow start with less than 6 percent of the market, behind Alibaba’s smart speaker according to Strategy Analytics. Facebook’s spotty record around privacy might deflect potential customers to its competitors.

Given Facebook is late to the game, it will need to arrive with powerful utility that solves real problems. Here’s a look at Facebook’s newest developments in the voice space, and how its past experiments lay the groundwork for its next big push.

Aloha Voice

Facebook is developing its own speech recognition feature under the name Aloha for both the Facebook and Messenger apps, as well as external hardware — likely the video chat smart speaker it’s developing. Code inside the Facebook and Messenger Android apps dug up by frequent TechCrunch tipster and mobile researcher Jane Manchun Wong gives the first look at a prototype for the Aloha user interface.

Labeled “Aloha Voice Testing”, as a user speaks while in a message thread, a horizontal blue bar expands and contracts to visualize the volume of speech while recognizing and transcribing into text. The code describes the feature as having connections with external WiFi or Bluetooth devices. It’s possible that the software will run on both Facebook’s hardware and software, similar to Google Assistant that runs both on phones and Google Home speakers.

Facebook declined to comment on the video, with its spokesperson Ha Thai telling me “We test stuff all the time – nothing to share today but my team will be in touch in a few weeks about hardware news coming from the AR/VR org.” It unclear if that hardware news will focus on voice and Aloha or portal, or if it’s merely related to Facebook’s Oculus Connect 5 conference on September 25th.

A source previously told me that years ago, Facebook was interested in developing its own speech recognition software designed specifically to accurately transcribe how friends talk to each other. These speech patterns are often more casual, colloquial, rapid, and full of slang than the way we formally address computerized assistants like Amazon Alexa or Google Home.

Wong also found the Aloha logo buried in Facebook’s code, which features volcano imagery. I can confirm that I’ve seen a Facebook Aloha Setup chatbot with a similar logo on the phones of Facebook employees.

If Facebook can figure this out, it could offer its own transcription features in Messenger and elsewhere on the site so users could communicate across mediums. It could potentially let you dictate comments or messages to friends while you have your hands full or can’t look at your screen. The recipient could then read the text instead of having to listen to it like a voice message. The feature could also be used to power voice navigation of Facebook’s apps for better hands-free usage.

Speaker And Camera Patents

Facebook awarded patent for speaker

Facebook’s video chat smart speaker was reportedly codenamed Aloha originally but later renamed Portal, Alex Heath of Business Insider and now Cheddar first reported in August 2017. The $499 competitor to the Amazon Echo Show was initially set to launch at Facebook’s F8 in May, but Bloomberg reported it was pushed back amid concerns that it would exacerbate the privacy scandal ignited by Cambridge Analytica.

A new patent filing reveals Facebook was considering building a smart speaker as early as December 26th, 2016 when it filed a patent for a cube-shaped device. The patent diagrams an “ornamental design for a speaker device” invented by Baback Elmieh, Alexandre Jais, and John Proksch-Whaley. Facebook had acquired Elmieh’s startup Nascent Objects in September of that year and he’s now a technical project lead at Facebook’s secretive Building 8 hardware lab.

The startup had been building modular hardware, and earlier this year he was awarded patents for work at Facebook on several modular cameras. The speaker and camera technology Facebook has been developing could potentially evolve into what’s in its video chat speaker.

The fact that Facebook has been exploring speaker technology for so long and that the lead on these patents is still running a secret project in Building 8 strengthens the case that Facebook has big plans for the voice space.

Patents awarded to Facebook show designs for a camera (left) and video camera (right)

Instagram Voice Messaging

And finally, Instagram is getting deeper into the voice game too. A screenshot generated from the code of Instagram’s Android app by Wong reveals the development of a  voice clip messaging feature heading to Instagram Direct. This would allow you to speak into Instagram and send the audio clips similar to a walkie-talkie, or the voice messaging feature Facebook Messenger added back in 2013.

You can see the voice button in the message composer at the bottom of the screen, and the code explains that to “Voice message, press and hold to record”. The prototype follows the recent launch of video chat in Instagram Direct, another feature TechCrunch broke the news on thanks to Wong’s research. An Instagram spokesperson declined to comment, as is typical when features are spotted in its code but aren’t publicly testing yet, saying “unfortunately nothing more to share on this right now.”

The Long Road To Voicebook

Facebook has long tinkered in the voice space. In 2015, it acquired a natural language processing startup Wit.ai that ran a developer platform for building speech interfaces, though it later rolled Wit.ai into Messenger’s platform team to focus on chatbots. Facebook also began testing automatically transcribing Messenger voice clips into text in 2015 in what was likely the groundwork for the Aloha feature seen above. The company also revealed its M personal assistant that could accomplish tasks for users, but it was only rolled out to a very limited user base and later turned off.

The next year, Facebook’s head of Messenger David Marcus claimed at TechCrunch Disrupt that voice “is not something we’re actively working on right now,” but added that “at some point it’s pretty obvious that as we develop more and more capabilities and interactions inside of Messenger, we’ll start working on voice exchanges and interfaces.” However, a source had told me Facebook’s secretive Language Technology Group was already exploring voice opportunities. Facebook also began testing its Live Audio feature for users who want to just broadcast sound and not video.

By 2017, Facebook was offering automatic captioning for Pages’ videos, and was developing a voice search feature. And this year, Facebook began trying voice clips as status updates and Stories for users around the world who might have trouble typing in their native tongue. But executives haven’t spoken much about the voice initiatives.

The most detailed comments we have come from Facebook’s head of design Luke Woods at TechCrunch Disrupt 2017 where he described voice search saying it was, “very promising. There are lots of exciting things happening…. I love to be able to talk to the car to navigate to a particular place. That’s one of many potential use cases.” It’s also one that voice transcription could aid.

It’s still unclear exactly what Facebook’s Aloha will become. It could be a defacto operating system or voice interface and transcription feature for Facebook’s smart speaker and apps. It could become a more full-fledged voice assistant like M but with audio. Or perhaps it could become Facebook’s bridge to other voice ecosystems, serving as Facebook’s Alexa Skill or Google Assistant Action.

When I asked Woods “How would Facebook on Alexa work?”, he said with a smile “That’s a very interesting question! No comment.”

Creators of the 1Sheeld, a tool designed to connect smartphones to Arduino boards, have created something even more interesting. Their latest product, the Elkrem, is a smart kit for creating blockchain IoT devices and they have raised $250,000 from Endure Capital and Consensys to build the project.

The founders are Amr Saleh and Islam Mustafa launched the 1Sheeld at TechCrunch Disrupt 2013 and sold tens of thousands of units in 120 countries. Now they’re building a new tool based entirely on blockchain.

“Elkrem is a Blockchain hardware development board. It allows Blockchain developers to integrate Dapps with hardware prototypes in an easy way without having deep knowledge in hardware development, and also allows electrical engineers and hardware developers to connect Blockchain to their hardware projects without having deep knowledge of how the Blockchain works,” said Saleh. “So they both can trigger actuators through smart contracts and log sensors data to smart contracts as well.”

The board is similar to an Arduino and has two processors, storage, and WiFi model. One processor runs a specialized Linux variant with interfaces to Ethereum, IPFS, Swarm, Whisper, Bitcoin, Status.im, and others. The other processor can do anything else you throw at it.

“Our edge is faster development, faster prototyping and faster go to market,” said Saleh. “The board allows you to send private, decentralized IoT messages using peer-to-peer communication”

What does all this mean? Basically it’s a little board that makes it far easier to manage your Blockchain efforts. It uses a library called Koyn to let you accept payments in Bitcoin with a single line of code and they even built a few cool projects including a Bitcoin-enabled candy machine and an electrical outlet that you can rent with Bitcoins. The team plans to go live on Kickstarter later this year.

Capital, crypto, and regulation go together like bread, peanut butter, and jelly. And what better way to make a great sandwich than to bring them all together at TechCrunch Disrupt. I’ll be leading a panel with Avichal Garg of Electric Capital, Arianna Simpson of Autonomous Partners, and Valerie Szczepanik of the SEC in San Francisco.

Garg is a longtime investor and former product head at Facebook. He’s currently at Electric Capital where he’s a managing partner. Simpson is a skilled crypto investor and is currently managing director at Autonomous Partners. Szczepanik has had a long career at the SEC and was recently named Associate Director of the Division of Corporation Finance and Senior Advisor for Digital Assets and Innovation. All three of them will help us navigate the new world of investment we are no all coming to face.

The future of investment is currently up in the air. With the rise of token sales, fundraising seems like a needless task for most founders. But where will they be with the token world fizzles out? Can the new funding tricks stack up to VC and angel investment?

We’ll explore these concepts in our wide-ranging discussion and hopefully Szczepanik can shed some light on these new forms of investment.

The full agenda is here. Passes for the show are available here.

The Mosaic Manufacturing Palette 2 – an upgrade the original Palette – is a self-contained system for full color 3D printing. It works by cutting and splicing multiple filament colors and then feeding them through as the object is printed. The system uses a unique and internal cutter called the Splice Core that measures and cuts filament as it prints, ensuring the incoming filament can change colors quickly and easily.

The printer can out items in four colors and it can print any amount of any color. It extrudes excess color into a little object called a tower, allow it to print as much or as little of a color as necessary. It also has automatic runout detection which lets you print larger objects over a longer period.

It works with a number of current 3D printers and the printers require no real updates to use the Palette or its more robust brother, the Pro. A new piece of software called Canvas allows users to plan their color prints and send the instructions to both the Palette and the printer for printing.

The Palette 2 costs $449 while the Pro costs $699. The Pro lets you print faster than the Palette 2.

It’s a very clever hack – instead of making the printer do all the work you instead make the filament do the work. Because it is a self-contained system you can use the Palette with nearly any printer although the team is working on native support for many popular printers. They are able to print lots of interesting stuff including 3D printed phone case models, rubbery watch bands using stretchable materials, and even educational objects. Most impressive? They were able to print a scan of a brain with evidence of a tumor visible in yellow. While it’s not completely full color – yet – the Palette is a great solution for those looking to print color on a budget.

Facebook announced this morning it’s making a change to how its ad targeting system works in order to tackle the misuse of its platform to discriminate and exclude audiences based on factors like ethnicity and religion. The company says it’s now removing over 5,000 ad targeting options that could have been misused to place discriminatory ads across its platform.

The news comes shortly after the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) filed a new complaint against Facebook that accuses it of helping landlords and home sellers violate the Fair Housing Act. It says that Facebook’s ad settings disregard the law by allowing advertisers to target certain demographics.

“When Facebook uses the vast amount of personal data it collects to help advertisers to discriminate, it’s the same as slamming the door in someone’s face,” Assistant Secretary for Fair Housing and Equal Opportunity, Anna María Farías had said in a statement issued by the department.

Facebook responded by saying this practice was prohibited in its advertising policies and that it would continue to work with HUD to address its complaints.

Today, the company says that it will remove over 5,000 targeting options which have the potential for misuse.

“While these options have been used in legitimate ways to reach people interested in a certain product or service, we think minimizing the risk of abuse is more important,” the company explained in a blog post. Facebook didn’t provide a list of the options being removed, but noted they related to attributes such as religion and ethnicity.

It also said that it would roll out a new certification to U.S. advertisers through its Ads Manager tool, that will require the advertisers to properly register their compliance with Facebook’s non-discrimination policy if they post housing, employment or credit ads. The advertisers will need to complete the certification, which involves being educated on the policy and agreeing to it through a form.

Facebook says this certification will reach other countries in time, and will become available through its other tools and APIs.

Earlier this year, Facebook had said it would update its product to catch discriminatory ads before they ran by hiring more ad reviewers and by using machine learning techniques. It also introduced new prompts to remind advertisers about its anti-discrimination policies before they created campaigns.

However, the issues haven’t just been about advertisers picking certain options to target individuals with their ads – they’ve been using ad targeting options to exclude others, as well. Facebook in April said it was removing thousands of categories from exclusion targeting as a result, including those related to race, ethnicity, sexual orientation and religion.

However, the company has been criticized for the way its ad targeting tools could be abused for several years.

Back in 2016, for example, Facebook had to disable an “ethnic affinity” targeting option for housing, employment, and credit-related ads, after a ProPublica report pointed out that these tools could be used for discriminatory advertising in housing and employment, which is illegal. It later rolled out more informational messages, updated its ad policies, and began testing tools to identify illegal ads.

The company more recently came under fire for allowing advertisers to target users based on interests related to their political beliefs, sexuality and religion – categories that are now deemed as “sensitive information” under current European data protection laws. The company responded at the time with an explanation of how users can manage their ad preferences.

Facebook today says that it will have more ad targeting updates to share in the months ahead, as it further refines these tools.