Month: August 2018

Twitch Prime, the perks program for Amazon Prime members offering free loot, games and other benefits is ditching one of its best features: ad-free viewing. According to an email sent out to Amazon Prime members today, ad-free viewing will no longer be included as a part of Twitch Prime for new members, beginning on September 14. However, members with existing annual subscriptions will be able to continue to enjoy ad-free viewing until their subscription comes up for renewal.

And those with monthly subscriptions will have access to ad-free viewing until October 15.

Twitch’s email offered a simple explanation as to why ad-free viewing was no longer going to be a part of the benefit program, saying that: “advertising is an important source of support for the creators who make Twitch possible.”

The company also stressed that this change would “strengthen and expand that advertising opportunity for creators so they can get more support from their viewers for doing what they love.”

In an accompanying blog post, Twitch further explained that the change will allow Twitch to remain a place where “anyone can enjoy one-of-a-kind interactive entertainment” and where creators can “build communities around the things they love and make money doing it.”

In other words, creators need to make more money, and so does Twitch – especially if it ever wants to challenge YouTube.

As you may expect, Twitch user reaction has been swift and negative. In the comments of Twitch’s post, users are threatening to ditch Twitch Prime altogether saying that its other features – like in-game loot, monthly channel subscriptions, exclusive badges and the like – were not the main reasons they were interested in this perks program.

Twitch Prime was launched in September 2016 as a benefit for Amazon Prime members – one of the now many perks that accompany a Prime subscription, in addition to Amazon’s Prime 2-day shipping. Amazon had acquired Twitch in 2014, and this was the first big move it made to integrate the two properties beyond airing some TV pilots on the service.

Since Twitch Prime’s launch, Amazon has been adding features to the program – most recently, free games every month, for example. Twitch says this year it’s given away over $1,000 worth of games and loot to members, and promises “more and better free games” and loot in the future.

Although ad-free viewing across Twitch won’t be included in Twitch Prime in the future, the company did note that there will still be a way to turn off ads.

If Twitch users have an Amazon Prime membership (meaning they’ll still have Twitch Prime, too), they can use their monthly subscription token on a channel that offers ad-free viewing to subscribers.

In addition, users can opt for Twitch Turbo, a separate monthly subscription program that offers ad-free viewing across all of Twitch, plus other features like additional emoticons, chat badges, priority support and more.

Users, of course, are outraged that a benefit that used to come free with a Prime subscription will now cost an additional $8.99 per month.

Twitch’s decision to remove ad-free viewing could be a part of its bigger plan to woo creators to its service.

The company has been in the news as of late for having YouTube-esque ambitions. According to a report from Bloomberg, the company wants to turn the game-streaming site into a broader video service and has been pursuing livestreaming deals with dozens of popular creators and media companies who have large YouTube fan bases. The company has offering minimum guarantees as high as a few million dollars a year, plus a share of future advertising sales and subscription revenues, the report said.

Animoto, a cloud-based video maker service for social media sites, has revealed a data breach.

The breach occurred on July 10 but was confirmed by the company in early August, and later reported to the California attorney general.

Names, dates of birth, and user email addresses were accessed by hackers, but the company said it wasn’t known if data had been exfiltrated. The company also said that users’ scrambled passwords were exposed in the breach, but it wasn’t clear if the hackers gained the private key, which could be used to reveal the passwords in plain-text.

The company also said in a security announcement that user geolocations were also exposed to hackers, but noted that it “does not keep geolocation information for all users.”

Payment data is not thought to be affected as it’s stored in a separate system, the company said.

Animoto did not immediately return a request for comment. TechCrunch will update once we learn more.

The New York City-based company did not say how many users were affected by the breach, but last August claimed more than 20 million users on its platform.

Animoto is the latest social media service to be breached. Last month, Timehop revealed a breach affecting 21 million users, exposing their names, email addresses, gender, and dates of birth. Timehop’s breach was largely attributable to the company’s lack of two-factor authentication on its network, which helps to prevent against hackers from reusing already-exposed credentials from breaches of other sites and services.

Animoto didn’t say how its breach occurred but pointed to “suspicious activity” on its systems. The company also said it reset employee passwords and reduced employees’ access to critical systems.

Animoto, a cloud-based video maker service for social media sites, has revealed a data breach.

The breach occurred on July 10 but was confirmed by the company in early August, and later reported to the California attorney general.

Names, dates of birth, and user email addresses were accessed by hackers, but the company said it wasn’t known if data had been exfiltrated. The company also said that users’ scrambled passwords were exposed in the breach, but it wasn’t clear if the hackers gained the private key, which could be used to reveal the passwords in plain-text.

The company also said in a security announcement that user geolocations were also exposed to hackers, but noted that it “does not keep geolocation information for all users.”

Payment data is not thought to be affected as it’s stored in a separate system, the company said.

Animoto did not immediately return a request for comment. TechCrunch will update once we learn more.

The New York City-based company did not say how many users were affected by the breach, but last August claimed more than 20 million users on its platform.

Animoto is the latest social media service to be breached. Last month, Timehop revealed a breach affecting 21 million users, exposing their names, email addresses, gender, and dates of birth. Timehop’s breach was largely attributable to the company’s lack of two-factor authentication on its network, which helps to prevent against hackers from reusing already-exposed credentials from breaches of other sites and services.

Animoto didn’t say how its breach occurred but pointed to “suspicious activity” on its systems. The company also said it reset employee passwords and reduced employees’ access to critical systems.

Mike Rothenberg, infamous Silicon Valley venture capitalist and founder of Rothenberg Ventures, has been formally charged by the Securities and Exchange Commission for overcharging investors to fund personal projects.

Rothenberg had been under investigation by the SEC for quite some time. The SEC now alleges in a statement the investor and his firm had misappropriated up to $7 million dollars for personal enjoyment, meanwhile claiming the funds were from his own coffers to pay for lavish parties, hotels and sporting events.

We’ve reached out to Rothenberg for comment and are waiting to hear back.

*This post is being updated

Mike Rothenberg, infamous Silicon Valley venture capitalist and founder of Rothenberg Ventures, has been formally charged by the Securities and Exchange Commission for overcharging investors to fund personal projects.

Rothenberg had been under investigation by the SEC for quite some time. The SEC now alleges in a statement the investor and his firm had misappropriated up to $7 million dollars for personal enjoyment, meanwhile claiming the funds were from his own coffers to pay for lavish parties, hotels and sporting events.

We’ve reached out to Rothenberg for comment and are waiting to hear back.

*This post is being updated

Venezuela has just taken drastic and unprecedented steps to stabilize its currency as it grapples with hyperinflation and other economic issues. The country’s currency has not only been massively devaluated and renamed, but is now tied a state-issued cryptocurrency called the Petro, which itself fluctuates based on oil prices. Hardly anyone knows what to expect out of this.

The Petro is not new; it arrived earlier this year in the form of a stepped offering to private and then public buyers, raising more than $3 billion from foreign governments and presumably some private buyers. President Trump forbade the U.S. from taking part.

Although it is supposed to be a liquid asset reflective of the price of oil, and there is of course a whitepaper that describes the system in broad strokes, though it lacks almost any real technical detail. But the country’s own national assembly called the state-issued cryptocurrency unconstitutional, blockchain industry experts have called it a scam, and there are Russian machinations to consider as well. Bloomberg has a good roundup of official communications about the token.

The scheme originated in the administration of Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro and seems to be an attempt to lend some credibility and stability to the country’s currency. The strong bolivar, which has lost more than 90 percent of its value over the last decade, has been renamed the sovereign bolivar and artificially returned to pre-inflation values. In practical terms that means a loaf of bread that cost 100 bolivars in 2012 and 100,000 last week will now, theoretically, cost around 100 again. Whether that will actually happen — the black market rates are probably more influential — is anyone’s guess.

In case it isn’t clear, I’m not an economist and don’t plan to become one. But this is an historic moment in the blockchain world in that it is the first time an official fiat currency has been pegged to a state-run cryptocurrency. That makes it of interest to the international community for many reasons, although obviously this is far from the ideal method by which one might want to demonstrate such a system.

Although this whole situation is nominally of interest, it seems unlikely to benefit the people on the ground in Venezuela who have no use for oil-based cryptocurrencies and just want to buy some bottled water, a package of diapers, and a train ticket out of the country. How this all plays out will no doubt be instructive but let’s not lose sight of the humanitarian crisis playing out on the streets. Here as elsewhere, donations can help.

Venezuela has just taken drastic and unprecedented steps to stabilize its currency as it grapples with hyperinflation and other economic issues. The country’s currency has not only been massively devaluated and renamed, but is now tied a state-issued cryptocurrency called the Petro, which itself fluctuates based on oil prices. Hardly anyone knows what to expect out of this.

The Petro is not new; it arrived earlier this year in the form of a stepped offering to private and then public buyers, raising more than $3 billion from foreign governments and presumably some private buyers. President Trump forbade the U.S. from taking part.

Although it is supposed to be a liquid asset reflective of the price of oil, and there is of course a whitepaper that describes the system in broad strokes, though it lacks almost any real technical detail. But the country’s own national assembly called the state-issued cryptocurrency unconstitutional, blockchain industry experts have called it a scam, and there are Russian machinations to consider as well. Bloomberg has a good roundup of official communications about the token.

The scheme originated in the administration of Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro and seems to be an attempt to lend some credibility and stability to the country’s currency. The strong bolivar, which has lost more than 90 percent of its value over the last decade, has been renamed the sovereign bolivar and artificially returned to pre-inflation values. In practical terms that means a loaf of bread that cost 100 bolivars in 2012 and 100,000 last week will now, theoretically, cost around 100 again. Whether that will actually happen — the black market rates are probably more influential — is anyone’s guess.

In case it isn’t clear, I’m not an economist and don’t plan to become one. But this is an historic moment in the blockchain world in that it is the first time an official fiat currency has been pegged to a state-run cryptocurrency. That makes it of interest to the international community for many reasons, although obviously this is far from the ideal method by which one might want to demonstrate such a system.

Although this whole situation is nominally of interest, it seems unlikely to benefit the people on the ground in Venezuela who have no use for oil-based cryptocurrencies and just want to buy some bottled water, a package of diapers, and a train ticket out of the country. How this all plays out will no doubt be instructive but let’s not lose sight of the humanitarian crisis playing out on the streets. Here as elsewhere, donations can help.

Amazon is today rolling out a set of new features to its Echo Dot Kids Edition devices – the now $70 version of the Echo Dot smart speaker that ships with a protective case and a year’s subscription to Amazon FreeTime, normally a $2.99 per month subscription for Prime members. Now joining the Kids Edition’s parental controls and other exclusive content are new skills from Disney, Hotel Transylvania, and Pac-Man as well as a calming “Sleep Sounds” skill for bedtime.

There are now four new skills that play sounds of thunderstorms, rain, the ocean, or a babbling brook, as well as an all-encompassing “sleep sounds” skill that offers 42 different soothing options to choose from. New parents may be glad to know that this includes baby soothing sounds like cars, trains and the vacuum (don’t knock it until you try it, folks. It works.)

Amazon clarified to us that while there is a version of sleep sounds in the Skill Store today, this version launching on the Kids Edition is a different, child-directed version.

Also new to the Kids Edition is “Disney Plot Twist,” which is like a Disney version of Mad Libs where players change out words and phrases in short adventure stories. The skill features popular Disney characters like Anna, Olaf and Christoff as the narrators and is exclusive to Kids Edition devices.

The new movie “Hotel Transylvania 3: Summer Vacation” is featured in another new skill, Drac’s Pack, which includes monster stories, songs and jokes.

Meanwhile, Pac-Man Stories is a skill that includes interactive stories for the whole family, that work similar to choose-your-own-adventures – that is, the decisions you make will affect the ending.

Both of these are broadly available on Alexa, meaning they don’t require a Kids Edition device to access.

Stories, however, does appear to be one of the areas Amazon is investing in to make its Alexa-powered speakers more appealing to families with young children. The company recently decided to stop working on its chat stories app Amazon Rapids, saying it will instead continue to adapt those Amazon Rapids stories for the Alexa platform.

Amazon also tries to market the Echo Dot Kids Edition to families by making some kid-friendly content, like Disney Plot Twist, available exclusively to device owners.

For example, it already offers exclusive kid skills like Disney Stories, Loud House Challenge, No Way That’s True, Funny Fill In, Spongebob Challenge, Weird but True, Name that Animal, This or That, Word world, Ben ten, Classroom thirteen, Batman Adventures, and Climb the Beanstalk, with this device.

But the Kids Edition can also be confusing to use, because the exclusive skills come whitelisted and ready to go, while other kid-safe skills have to be manually whitelisted through a parents dashboard. And there isn’t enough instruction either from Alexa or in the Alexa app on this process, at present, we found when testing the device earlier.

Unless there’s a specific exclusive skill that parents really want their kids to have, the savings are also minimal when buying the Kids Edition Dot/FreeTime bundle, versus buying a regular Dot and adding on FreeTime separately.

Magnetic resonance imaging is an invaluable tool in the medical field, but it’s also a slow and cumbersome process. It may take fifteen minutes or an hour to complete a scan, during which time the patient, perhaps a child or someone in serious pain, must sit perfectly still. NYU has been working on a way to accelerate this process, and is now collaborating with Facebook with the goal of cutting down MRI durations by 90 percent by applying AI-based imaging tools.

It’s important at the outset to distinguish this effort from other common uses of AI in the medical imaging field. An X-ray, or indeed an MRI scan, once completed, could be inspected by an object recognition system watching for abnormalities, saving time for doctors and maybe even catching something they might have missed. This project isn’t about analyzing imagery that’s already been created, but rather expediting its creation in the first place.

The reason MRIs take so long is because the machine must create a series of 2D images or slices, many of which must be stacked up to make a 3D image. Sometimes only a handful are needed, but for full fidelity and depth — for something like a scan for a brain tumor — lots of slices are required.

The FastMRI project, begun in 2015 by NYU researchers, investigates the possibility of creating imagery of a similar quality to a traditional scan, but by collecting only a fraction of the data normally needed.

Think of it like scanning an ordinary photo. You could scan the whole thing… but if you only scanned every other line (this is called “undersampling”) and then intelligently filled in the missing pixels, it would take half as long. And machine learning systems are getting quite good at tasks like that. Our own brains do it all the time: you have blind spots with stuff in them right now that you don’t notice because your vision system is filling in the gaps — intelligently.

If an AI system could be trained to fill in the gaps from MRI scans where only the most critical data is collected, the actual time during which a patient would have to sit in the imaging tube could be reduced considerably. It’s easier on the patient, and one machine could handle far more people than it does doing a full scan every time, making scans cheaper and more easily obtainable.

The NYU School of Medicine researchers began work on this three years ago and published some early results showing that the approach was at least feasible. But like an MRI scan, this kind of work takes time.

“We and other institutions have taken some baby steps in using AI for this type of problem,” explained NYU’s Dan Sodickson, director of the Center of Advanced Imaging Innovation and Research there. “The sense is that already in the first attempts, with relatively simple methods, we can do better than other current acceleration techniques — get better image quality and maybe accelerate further by some percentage, but not by large multiples yet.”

So to give the project a boost, Sodickson and the radiologists at NYU are combining forces with the AI wonks at Facebook and its Artificial Intelligence Research group (FAIR).

“We have some great physicists here and even some hot-stuff mathematicians, but Facebook and FAIR have some of the leading AI scientists in the world. So it’s complementary expertise,” Sodickson said.

And while Facebook isn’t planning on starting a medical imaging arm, FAIR has a pretty broad mandate.

“We’re looking for impactful but also scientifically interesting problems,” said FAIR’s Larry Zitnick. AI-based creation or re-creation of realistic imagery (often called “hallucination”) is a major area of research, but this would be a unique application of it — not to mention one that could help some people.

With a patient’s MRI data, he explained, the generated imagery “doesn’t need to be just plausible, but it needs to retain the same flaws.” So the computer vision agent that fills in the gaps needs to be able to recognize more than just overall patterns and structure, and to be able to retain and even intelligently extend abnormalities within the image. To not do so would be a massive modification of the original data.

Fortunately it turns out that MRI machines are pretty flexible when it comes to how they produce images. If you would normally take scans from 200 different positions, for instance, it’s not hard to tell the machine to do half that, but with a higher density in one area or another. Other imagers like CT and PET scanners aren’t so docile.

Even after a couple years of work the research is still at an early stage. These things can’t be rushed, after all, and with medical data there are ethical considerations and a difficulty in procuring enough data. But the NYU researchers’ ground work has paid off with initial results and a powerful data set.

Zitnick noted that because AI agents require lots of data to train up to effective levels, it’s a major change going from a set of, say, 500 MRI scans to a set of 10,000. With the former data set you might be able to do a proof of concept, but with the latter you can make something accurate enough to actually use.

The partnership announced today is between NYU and Facebook, but both hope that others will join up.

“We’re working on this out in the open. We’re going to be open-sourcing it all,” said Zitnick. One might expect no less of academic research, but of course a great deal of AI work in particular goes on behind closed doors these days.

So the first steps as a joint venture will be to define the problem, document the data set and release it, create baselines and metrics by which to measure their success, and so on. Meanwhile, the two organizations will be meeting and swapping data regularly and running results past actual clinicians.

“We don’t know how to solve this problem,” Zitnick said. “We don’t know if we’ll succeed or not. But that’s kind of the fun of it.”

What Robinhood did to democratize buying individual stocks, Titan wants to do for investing in a managed portfolio. Instead of being restricted to rich accredited investors willing to pour $5,000 or even $500,000 into a traditional hedge fund that charges 2 percent fees and 20 percent of profits, Titan lets anyone invest as little as $1,000 for just a 1 percent fee while keeping all the profits. Titan picks the top 20 stocks based on data mined from the most prestigious hedge funds, then invests your money directly in those with personalized shorts based on your risk profile.

Titan has over $10 million under management after quietly spinning up five months ago, and this week the startup graduates from Y Combinator. Now Titan ready to give upscale millennials a more sophisticated way to play the markets.

This startup is hot. It refused to disclose its funding, likely in hopes of not tipping off competitors and incumbents to the opportunity it’s chasing. But it’s the buzz of YC, with several partners already investing their own money through Titan. When you consider Stanford-educated free stock trading app Robinhood’s stunning $5.6 billion valuation thanks to its disruption of E*Trade, it’s easy to imagine why investors are eager to back Titan’s attack on other financial vehicles.

“We’re all 28 to 30 years old, says co-founder Clayton Gardner about his team. “We want to actively invest and participate in the market but most of us who don’t have experience have no idea what we’re doing.” Most younger investors end up turning to family, friends, or Reddit for unreliable advice. But Titan lets them instantly buy the most reputable stocks without having to stay glued to market tickers, while using an app to cut out the costs of pricey brokers and Wall Street offices.

“We all came from the world of having worked at hedge funds and private equity firms like Goldman Sachs and Blackstone. We spent five years doing that and ultimately were very frustrated that the experiences and products we were building for wealthy people were completely inaccessible to people who weren’t rich or didn’t have a fancy suit” Gardner recalls. “Instead of charging high fees, we can use software to bring the products directly to consumers.”

How Titan Works

Titan wants to build BlackRock for a new generation, but its origin is much more traditional. Gardner and his co-founder Joe Percoco met on their first day of business school at UPenn’s Wharton (of course). Meanwhile, Titan’s third co-founder Max Bernardy was studying computer science at Stanford before earning a patent in hedge fund software and doing engineering at a few startups. The unfortunate fact is the world of finance is dominated by alumni from these schools. Titan will enjoy the classic privilege of industry connections as it tries to carve out a client base for a fresh product.

“We were frustrated that millenniala only have two options for investing: buying and selling stocks themselves or investing in a market weighted index” says Gardner. “We’re building the third.”

Titan’s first product isn’t technically a hedge fund but it’s built like one. It piggybacks off of the big hedgies that have to report their holdings. Titan uses its software to determine which are the top 20 stocks across these funds based on turnover, concentration, and more. All users download the Titan iOS app (no Android for now), fund their account, and are automatically invested into fractional shares of the same 20 stocks.

Titan keeps 1 percent of whatever you earn in profit. There is a minimum $1000 investment, so some younger adults may be below the bar. “We’re targeting a more premium millennial for start. A lot of our early users are in the tech field and are already investing” says Gardner.

For downside protection, Titan collects information about its users to assess their risk tolerance and hedge their investment by shorting the bottom 0 to 20 percent of the market so they’ll earn some if eveything crashes. Rather than Titan controlling the assets itself, an industry favorite custodian called Apex keeps them secure. The app uses 256bit encryption and SSL for data transfers, and funds are insured up to $500,000.

How have its bets and traction been doing? “We’ve been pleasantly surprised so far” Gardner beams, noting Titan’s thousands of clients. It claims its up 10 percent year-to-date and up 33 percent in one year compared to the S&P 500’s 2 percent year-to-date and 22 percent in one year. Charging a fee on profits rather than on how much users invest aligns Titan and its clients around success.

But beyond the demographic and business model, it’s the educational elements that set Titan apart. Users don’t have to hunt online for investment research. Titan compiles it into deep dives into top stocks like Amazon or Comcast, laying out investment theses for why your should want your money in “the everything store” or “a toll road for the Internet”. Through in-app videos, push notifications, and reports, Titan tries to make its users smarter, not just richer.

With time and funding, “Eventually we hope to launch other financial products, including crypto, bonds, international equities, etc” Percoco tells me. That could put Titan on a collision course with the Wealthfront, Coinbase, and the recently crypto-equipped Robinhood as well as direct competitors like asset managers BlackRock and JP Morgan.

“If we fast forward 10 to 20 years in the future, millennials will have inherited $10 trillion, and at this rate they’re not equipped to handle that money” says Gardner. “Financial management isn’t something taught in school.”

Worryingly, when I ask what they see as the top threats to Titan, the co-founders exhibited some Ivy League hubris with Gardner telling me “Nothing that jumps out…” Back in reality, building software that reliably prints money is no easy feat. A security failure or big drop could crater the app’s brand. And if its education materials are too frothy, they could instill blind confidence in younger investors without the cash to sustain sizable losses.