Month: August 2018

You’re not the only one feeling run down by the news of the day. The folks at Google apparently believe we could all use a dose of good news, at times, too. The company today announced it’s testing a new Google Assistant feature called “Tell me something good” that will allow users to hear a summary of more uplifting news stories. The stories will focus on people who are “solving problems for our communities and our world,” says Google.

To activate the feature, Assistant users in the U.S. can say, “Hey Google, tell me something good” to kick off the daily briefing of happy stories.

Google offers some examples of what the “good news” may include, like a story about how Georgia State University stopped students from slipping through the cracks; or how backyard beekeepers in East Detroit are bringing back the dwindling bee population; or how Iceland curbed teen drinking.

The stories are selected and summarized by the nonpartisan nonprofit Solutions Journalism Network, an organization that helps train journalists to better cover how people are responding to problems and how those actions can have positive results.

The stories themselves, meanwhile, will be chosen from a wide range of media outlets.

The feature arrives at a time when many people are feeling overwhelmed by the news, much of which is negative and troubling.

Some psychologists believe this sort of exposure may have long-lasting effects on mental health, contributing to stress, anxiety, depression, and even PTSD, in some cases. The impact may be greater if the news outlets you’re exposed to emphasize the suffering and emotional components of the stories they present, according to psychologist Dr. Graham Davey, who spoke to The Huffington Post about the topic back in 2015.

In addition, a more recent survey from the American Psychological Association found that more than half of Americans now say that the news causes them stress, and many report feeling anxiety, fatigue or experiencing sleep loss as a result. And new data from Blue Cross Blue Shield states that more than 9 million people in the U.S. are now suffering from major depression – up 33% from 2013 through 2016.

Of course, many people continue to keep up because they feel it’s their responsibility to stay informed.

Unfortunately, what’s shifted between the era of the daily paper and the nightly TV news, is the way people consume news. Stories often include visual or shocking elements, and include videos, photos, and audio clips captured by bystanders. We’re also continually checking our phones throughout the day, as well, instead of reading or watching news at designated times.

Being addicted to social media isn’t helping either – continually scrolling through our feeds is something that’s already linked to feelings of social isolation, as well as prolonged feelings of hopelessness or sadness, studies have shown.

A dose of good news from Google Assistant won’t solve these problems, as not everyone is aware of the cause of their stress and anxiety, nor will they seek out solutions to make themselves feel better. Plus, listening to a few good stories here and there won’t cancel out the larger majority of “bad” news stories that we more regularly consume.

Google acknowledges this feature won’t be some sort of “magic bullet,” it says.

“But it’s an experiment worth trying because it’s good info about good work that may bring some good to your day,” the company says.

The Google Assistant feature works on any Assistant-enabled devices including mobile phones, smart displays or Google Home devices.

It happens every day of the week. People who’ve been successful in tech invest in who they believe could be the tech leaders of tomorrow.

Now a new fund called Neo is taking the idea to the nth degree. Started by serial entrepreneur, successful investor and half of Silicon Valley’s best-known and networked set of twins, Ali Partovi, Neo “identifies awesome young engineers, includes them in a community of tech veterans, and invests in companies they start or join.”

The conceit isn’t entirely new. Several years ago, Bloomberg Beta, the venture firm backed by the media and services giant Bloomberg, began a data-driven campaign to identify people who it suspected might eventually begin a company. The idea was to start a dialogue with those individuals, and continue it. The personal loans startup Upstart somewhat similarly began life as a way for investors to bet on individuals poised for success. (Investors on its platform would lend money to individuals in exchange for a percentage of their future pre-tax income.)

Still, Partovi thinks he may have a special talent for identifying talent, and Neo’s investors must think he does, too, as evidenced by the fact that Neo just closed its debut fund with $80 million. Though Partovi isn’t naming names, he says the outfit’s investors include “CEOs, CTOs and founders of Amazon, Airbnb, Affirm, Dropbox, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Quora and Stripe,” among others.

“I’m not going to say that I can predict the best founders five years before they start companies,” says Partovi, who is also an investor in the fund along with his brother, Hadi, though they are minority investors. “I’m skeptical of anyone’s ability to do this,” he adds. “But I do have some prior experience with this — both in terms of successes and failure.”

One of the hardest lessons for Partovi, he says, was not believing enough in Craig Silverstein, the first person employed by Larry Page and Sergey Brin at Google, after he studied for a PhD alongside them at Stanford. “Craig was easily the smartest kid in our class” as an undergraduate at Harvard, says Partvoti. “When he told me about Google, I had already sold my first startup and I could have easily invested in it. But I missed it.”

Partovi says he “also could have told you that Max Levchin, a contractor of one of my first startups, was a genius — an absolute prodigy.”

Partovi and his brother didn’t make the same mistake when they met a young Mark Zuckerberg. “I remember Hadi telling me, ‘Mark reminds me more of Bill Gates than anyone I’ve ever met.'” The comparison was based on first-hand interactions with Gates. Ali Partovi was on the founding team of the Internet ad company LinkExchange, acquired by Microsoft in 1998 for $265 million. Hadi Partovi was on the founding team of the speech recognition company TellMe Networks, also acquired by Microsoft, for $800 million in 2007. Indeed, despite having reservations about Facebook’s business, they wound up backing it.

Partovi says now that he wishes he could “go back in time and tell myself the importance of investing in people.” Since he can’t, he created Neo, which he prefers to characterize as a “community that includes a communal VC fund.” As he explains it, he and partner Nadia Singer, who was formerly the head of outreach for the Q&A platform Quora, “hope to create a new type of entity in a way that, when YC first started, was something different and still today is somewhat different. It doesn’t occupy the same role as other VCs.”

One of subtle ways the firm is differentiating itself is by talking with top computer science students at a dozen colleges about, well, themselves. Allan Jiang, who graduated from Stanford this year, is now the CEO of Motif, a platform that allows session-recording and screen-sharing in any web browser. It’s also notably backed by Neo. But Jiang says that Partovi — with whom he had long discussions over the last year or so — didn’t talk about funding him but rather advised him as an individual.

“He kind of naturally said, ‘I would like to help out with this company that you started on,'” says Jiang, but it wasn’t like a lot of other venture firms that courted him with discussions first about capital, he says, including Lightspeed Venture Partners and Pejman Mar. “For Neo, that was secondary. It finds ways to support you as a person before there are any discussions about money.”

Christina Wadsworth, another freshly minted Stanford graduate who recently began work at one of the FANG companies (but was asked by the company not to discuss her new role just yet), similarly tells us that Partovi has been helpful to her for more than a year, even while knowing she might never start her own thing. “I never said I was going to create a company any time soon,” says Wadsworth, “and he was still happy to have me as a part of the Neo community, which I can use to build relationships and that I’ll maintain throughout my career.”

That support “may or may not lead to startup,” she adds, “and if not, that’s totally fine, too.”

Indeed, what feels perhaps the freshest about what Neo is doing is that no one is under any obligation to do anything other than Partovi. He says Neo basically makes a promise to the students it zeroes in on to back them if ever, whenever, they start a company, no matter how dumb-seeming their idea. “I’m not going to let my business judgment preclude me from an incredible business opportunity.”

Of course, whether that approach works will take time to discover. Partovi says that Neo now counts roughly 30 “scholars” from across the U.S. and Canada, and that it has written 10 checks — some to people straight out of college, as with Jiang — and some to founders outside the Neo sphere of influence but who Partovi and Singer think are special in their own way — and who may eventually benefit from an introduction to someone in Neo’s world. Altogether, that includes about 180 individuals, including Neo’s many investors, who will also happily mentor those whom Neo gives the nod.

As for students whose successful careers at big companies might get derailed by the ever-lingering prospect of startup funding, Partovi insists that he actually advises most students to get a job.

“We have a whole cohort of students who are chomping at the bit to start companies. I don’t give the same advice to everyone, but more often than not, I tell them my own story of getting a job and working at two companies before taking the leap myself. I spend a lot of time trying to discourage them from starting a company because I think it’s the right advice but also to make sure that if they do it, their heart is really in it.”

Continues Partovi, “I tell them, it’s a potentially demoralizing, depressing process, with many ups and downs. If they’re discouraged by me, then they weren’t really ready.”

China’s internet population has now grown beyond 800 million, according to the latest data from the Chinese government.

A new report [in Chinese] issued by the China Internet Network Information Center (CNNIC) put the number of people in China with access to the internet at 802 million. The agency — which is a branch of the Ministry of Industry and Information and is responsible for controlling the .cn country code — estimates that 29.68 million people in China came online for the first time in the second half of 2018.

For some context, the U.S is estimated to have around 300 million internet users. The number of internet users in China is now more than the combined populations of Japan, Russia, Mexico and the U.S., as Bloomberg noted.

The new statistic takes internet adoption in the country to 57.7 percent, with 788 million people reportedly mobile internet users. That’s a staggering 98 percent and it underlines just how crucial mobile is in the country.

Other notable data points from the report include:

• 21 percent of China’s internet users are also online banking users
• 71 percent used online payments or e-commerce services
• 74.1 percent used short video applications, which include ByteDance’s Douyin app (known as TikTok outside of China)
• 30.6 percent used bike sharing apps
• 43.2 percent used taxi-booking apps
• 37.3 percent used the internet to reserve buses and trains

The growth of China’s internet also puts pressure on the government to maintain its policy of control over information that appears online.

It is common knowledge that Western services such as Twitter and Facebook are inaccessible in Mainland China, but the government has also cracked down on local services that include Toutiao, which is run by new media firm ByteDance, which is currently talking to investors to raise $2.5-$3.5 billion. ByteDance was ordered to shutter a parody app it operated in China while four news and content apps were suspended from the App Store and Google Play for offending authorities. ByteDance responded by doubling its content moderation team and developing stronger systems for checking content.

Apple has also been caught in the crosshairs. The company reported purged thousands of apps from the App Store in China recently. Last year it removed more than 50 VPN apps, which can be used to circumvent China’s internet censorship system, because they are deemed to be illegal in China.

Four months after arriving on desktop, Gmail’s potentially job/relationship/self-respect-saving self-destruction feature is finally available on Android. The new feature, which was spotted by Android Police, arrived as part of the version 8.2 update.

It works similarly to its desktop counterpart. When you send a message, a small progress bar pops up at the bottom of the screen, with the word “Undo” on the right side.

From there, you’ve got approximately seven seconds to reconsider your life choices through a cinematic-style montage of increasingly horrific butterfly effects that will unfold over the coming months and weeks until you’re left dead in by the side of the road in a pit of jagged glass and self-loathing.

All of that because of one stupid email. You’re better than that, friend.

Go with Plan B by clicking Undo, and it will bring you back to the body of said email as a draft. The future is bright and wide open. See, was that so hard? I’m not saying you shouldn’t send any emails, ever. That’s just silly. I’m just saying choose your words a bit more careful next time is all. I’m looking out for you here. 

The feature is live now, though it appears to only work with emails sent from Gmail addresses within the app.

Braavo, a startup that provides financing to mobile app developers, is announcing that it has raised $6 million in Series A funding.

The might not seem like much compared to the $70 million that Braavo announced raising last year, but that was debt financing, used to loan money to developers. This new round is equity financing, used to fund Braavo’s own operations and growth.

Co-founder Mark Loranger told me Braavo was founded in 2015 in response to the “new dynamics” of mobile app businesses. And it’s worked with developers including Verv, Fanatee and Pixite.

“The data is there to create ways to provide financing to companies that otherwise would have to raise more [venture funding] and dilute themselves,” Loranger said.

For its first financing product, Braavo looks at Apple App Store and Google Play data, specifically the amount of money already earned by an app but not yet paid out. It can then provide an advance on some of that revenue.

Loranger described Braavo’s newer product as “more exciting” and “more data-driven.” It looks at user acquisition, user engagement and revenue, projecting how revenue would grow if a developer had more money for user acquisition — and then it can provide debt financing for that growth.

Braavo gets paid back as “a fixed percentage of future earnings,” Loranger said, so its incentives are aligned with the developers: “We only make our money back as they earn more revenue in the future.” And if app revenue doesn’t grow as anticipated, that just means Braavo gets paid back more slowly.

“We’ve never, ever lost a dime,” he said.

The company is also announcing the launch of a new analytics product that will allow businesses to track key metrics like the lifetime value of their customers.

Loranger said this will be available for free to anyone to anyone with a “revenue-generating mobile app business.” Rather than charging for the product directly, the goal is to “create more success for mobile app business that may end up qualifying for funding.”

The new round brings Braavo’s total equity financing to nearly $8 million. It was led by e.ventures, with participation from SWS Venture Capital (founded by Green Dot CEO Steve Streit) and Shipt CEO Bill Smith.

Tinder is today rolling out what may be one of its smartest additions yet with the launch of Tinder U, a feature designed specifically for Tinder users in college. Once enabled, students with a .edu email address will be able to register with their school, then swipe on students who also attend their school or others nearby. Beyond limiting potential matches to other students, the overall Tinder experience is unchanged.

Students will still be able to view each others’ profiles, swipe right and left to match or pass, message mutual matches, use Super Likes, and more.

To use Tinder U, students will first have to be geolocated on campus and log in to the Tinder app using their .edu email address. They’ll then have to check their inbox for the verification email and tap the button to confirm their account.

After completing this process, users will be in the Tinder U experience the next time they launch the app.

Here, students will see their school’s logo appear at the top of the screen, and individual profile photos will have flair on the bottom left to indicate the user’s school. Tinder U doesn’t prevent users from swiping off campus, however – using a toggle button at the top of the screen (see photo above), users can choose to swipe by location instead, or by Tinder Picks by toggling over to the diamond icon, if they’re a Gold member.

Tinder U makes sense for the company, whose user base already skews younger – it has said before that half its user base is between 18 and 24, for example. And dating apps’ usage, in general, among this age group has roughly tripped from 10% in 2013 to 27% by 2016, according to Pew Research. And of course, there’s the fact that Tinder itself got its start on college campuses – a market that’s young, single, and more willing to adopt mobile dating apps than other, older demographics.

The feature arrives at a time when Facebook is poised to enter the dating market – a market Tinder and its parent company Match Group today dominate. Tinder now has an estimated 50 million worldwide users, and nearly 3.8 million subscribers.

“Five years ago at college campuses around the U.S, students first heard about Tinder through friends. Tinder spread like wildfire, because it was a really fun and easy way to meet people who went to school, but you didn’t know personally,” Match Group CEO Mandy Ginsberg recently said, when announcing the product. “We believe it is critical that Tinder maintains a strong foothold at universities around the globe, especially given that every 18-year-old who starts college is building a social life from scratch making new friends and starting new relationships.”

Tinder says the new feature is launching initially on iOS devices at 4-year, accredited, not-for-profit schools in the U.S. that deliver courses in a traditional face-to-face learning format – meaning, no online universities or virtual schools will be supported. The company didn’t provide a timeframe for the Android release.

IoT devices currently lack a standard way of applying security. It leaves consumers, whether business or individuals, left to wonder if their devices are secure and up-to-date. Foundries.io, a company that launched today, wants to change that by offering a standard way to secure devices and deliver updates over the air.

“Our mission is solving the problem of IoT and embedded space where there is no standardized core platform like Android for phones,” Foundries.io CEO George Grey explained.

What Foundries has created is an open and secure solution that saves everyone from creating their own and reinventing the wheel every time. Grey says Foundries’ approach is not only secure, it provides a long-term solution to the device update problem by providing a way to deliver updates over the air in an automated manner on any device from tiny sensors to smart thermostats to autonomous cars.

He says this approach will allow manufacturers to apply security patches in a similar way that Apple applies regular updates to iOS. “Manufacturers can continuously make sure their devices can be updated with the latest software to fix security flaws or Zero Day flaws,” he said.

The company offers two solutions, depending on the size and complexity of your device. The Zephyr RTOS microPlatform is designed for smaller, less complex devices. For those that are more complex, Foundries offers a version of Linux called the Linux OE microPlatform.

Diagram: Foundries.io

Grey claims that these platforms free manufacturers to build secure devices without having to hire a team of security experts. But he says the real beauty of the product is that the more people who use it, the more secure it will get, as more and more test it against their products in a virtuous cycle.

You may be wondering how they can make money in this model, but they do it by charging a flat fee of $10,000 per year for Zephyr RTOS and $25,000 per year for Linux OE. These are one-time prices and apply by the product, regardless of how many units get sold and there is no lock-in, according to Grey. Companies are free to back out any time. “If you want to stop subscribing you take over maintenance and you still have access to everything up to the point,. You just have to arrange maintenance yourself,” he said.

There is also a hobbyist and education package for $10 a month.

The company spun off from research at Linaro, an organization that promotes development on top of ARM chips.

To be successful, Foundries.io needs to build a broad community of manufacturers. Today’s launch is the first step in that journey. If it eventually takes off, it has the potential to provide a consistent way of securing and updating IoT devices, a move which would certainly be welcome.

EE, the largest phone network in the UK, has fixed a website bug that allowed customers to add an unlimited amount of plan data to their accounts for free.

The bug allowed any customer to modify code on the customer’s account page that allows users to “gift” data to linked accounts.

Using man-in-the-middle tools like Burp Suite, it was possible to intercept the server request and swap out the recipient’s phone number with their own. By making the phone numbers the same, the system could be tricked into duplicating the data allowance without incurring any costs.

It was also possible to gift data to other connected accounts for free.

A pseudonymous security researcher who goes by The Infosec Spider contacted TechCrunch with details of the bug, which we reported to EE.

The company said in a statement that it fixed the bug within two days, and thanked the researcher.

“Our customer data was never at risk as users could only increase the data on their own plan, or another number associated with their account, after they successfully logged into their account,” said an EE spokesperson.

But the researcher said that the bug could have been exploited to defraud the phone giant.

It’s the second bug affecting EE the security researcher found this year. In May, the researcher found a company code repository online with a default password. In a separate security incident, EE also exposed the private keys for its Amazon Web Services instances because of a flawed deployment of its Jira bug tracking system.

Semmle, a startup that originally spun out of research at Oxford, announced a $21 million Series B investment today led by Accel Partners. It marked the second time Accel has led an investment in the company.

Other investors include Work-Bench, Capital One, Credit Suisse, Google, Microsoft, NASA and Nasdaq Trust. Today’s investment brings the total to $31 million.

Semmle has warranted this kind of interest by taking a unique approach to finding vulnerabilities in code. “The key idea behind our technology is to treat code as data and treat analysis problems as simple queries against a database. What this allows you to do is very easily encode domain expertise, security expertise or any other kinds of specialist knowledge in such a way it can be easily easily and automatically applied to large amounts of code,” Pavel Avgustinov, Semmle co-founder and VP of platform engineering told TechCrunch.

Screenshot: Semmle

Once you create the right query, you can continuously run it against your code to prevent the same mistakes from entering the code base on subsequent builds. The key here is building the queries and the company has a couple of ways to deal with that.

They can work with customers to help them create queries, although in the long run that is not a sustainable way of working. Instead, they share queries, and encourage customers to share them with the community.

“What we find is that the great tech companies we work with have the best security teams in the world, and they are giving back what they created on the Semmle platform with other users in an open source fashion. There is a GitHub repository where we publish queries, but Microsoft and Google are doing the same thing,” Oege de Moor, company CEO and co-founder explained.

In fact, the Semmle solution is freely available to open source programmers to use with their applications, and the company currently analyzes every commit of almost 80,000 open source projects. Open source developers can run shared queries against their code or create their own.

They also have a paid version with customers like Microsoft, Google, Credit Suisse, NASA and Nasdaq. They have relied mostly on these strategic partners up until now, all of which are also investors. With today’s investment they plan to build out their sales and marketing departments to expand their customer base into a wider enterprise market.

The company spun out of research at Oxford University in 2006. They are now based in San Francisco with 60 employees, a number that should go up with this investment. They received an $8 million Series A in 2014 and $2 million seed round in 2011.

Semmle, a startup that originally spun out of research at Oxford, announced a $21 million Series B investment today led by Accel Partners. It marked the second time Accel has led an investment in the company.

Other investors include Work-Bench, Capital One, Credit Suisse, Google, Microsoft, NASA and Nasdaq Trust. Today’s investment brings the total to $31 million.

Semmle has warranted this kind of interest by taking a unique approach to finding vulnerabilities in code. “The key idea behind our technology is to treat code as data and treat analysis problems as simple queries against a database. What this allows you to do is very easily encode domain expertise, security expertise or any other kinds of specialist knowledge in such a way it can be easily easily and automatically applied to large amounts of code,” Pavel Avgustinov, Semmle co-founder and VP of platform engineering told TechCrunch.

Screenshot: Semmle

Once you create the right query, you can continuously run it against your code to prevent the same mistakes from entering the code base on subsequent builds. The key here is building the queries and the company has a couple of ways to deal with that.

They can work with customers to help them create queries, although in the long run that is not a sustainable way of working. Instead, they share queries, and encourage customers to share them with the community.

“What we find is that the great tech companies we work with have the best security teams in the world, and they are giving back what they created on the Semmle platform with other users in an open source fashion. There is a GitHub repository where we publish queries, but Microsoft and Google are doing the same thing,” Oege de Moor, company CEO and co-founder explained.

In fact, the Semmle solution is freely available to open source programmers to use with their applications, and the company currently analyzes every commit of almost 80,000 open source projects. Open source developers can run shared queries against their code or create their own.

They also have a paid version with customers like Microsoft, Google, Credit Suisse, NASA and Nasdaq. They have relied mostly on these strategic partners up until now, all of which are also investors. With today’s investment they plan to build out their sales and marketing departments to expand their customer base into a wider enterprise market.

The company spun out of research at Oxford University in 2006. They are now based in San Francisco with 60 employees, a number that should go up with this investment. They received an $8 million Series A in 2014 and $2 million seed round in 2011.