Month: August 2018

Over the last couple of years, a once well-kept secret began to gain traction in New York media outlets: wealthy American investors, including VCs and hedge fund managers, had begun snapping up tracts of land in New Zealand, largely out of fear that a Trump administration could have a destabilizing effect on an already polarized United States but also owing to growing concerns about climate change and other impending disaster scenarios.

Now, facing a growing backlash over rising housing prices, New Zealand’s parliament has banned non-residents from purchasing most types of homes, aside from new apartments in large developments. (Australians and Singaporeans are exempt because of free-trade deals.)

The bill, passed narrowly yesterday, was reportedly heralded by New Zealand’s Trade and Economic Development Minister David Parker as a “significant milestone.”

Said Parker, “This government believes that New Zealanders should not be outbid by wealthier foreign buyers . . . Whether it’s a beautiful lakeside or ocean-front estate, or a modest suburban house, this law ensures that the market for our homes is set in New Zealand, not on the international market.”

The move to block foreign buyers isn’t a complete shock in lieu of the amount of publicity that New Zealand has garnered in recent years as a haven for wealthy survivalists, including those in tech. The New Yorker began exploring the trend in profile about Y Combinator President Sam Altman, which said that Altman’s plan, in the case a pandemic, was to “fly with his friend Peter Thiel, the billionaire venture capitalist, to Thiel’s house in New Zealand.”

The outlet followed up with another piece several months later, in January of last year, about many other investors who’d come to see New Zealand as their backup plan. In fact, there were so many of them — particularly hedge fund managers — that it had become a bit of a running joke, LinkedIn founder and investor Reid Hoffman told the magazine. He recalled telling a friend that he was thinking of visiting New Zealand, after which the friend had asked Hoffman, “Oh, are you going to get apocalypse insurance?” Said Hoffman to the New Yorker,  “Saying you’re ‘buying a house in New Zealand’ is kind of a wink, wink, say no more. Once you’ve done the Masonic handshake, they’ll be, like, ‘Oh, you know, I have a broker who sells old ICBM silos, and they’re nuclear-hardened, and they kind of look like they would be interesting to live in.’ ”

(Thiel’s ties to New Zealand became particularly prominent after the New York Times published his successful 2011 application for citizenship to the South Pacific island nation, in which Thiel had stated: “I am happy to say categorically that I have found no other country that aligns more with my view of the future than New Zealand.” The piece reported on Thiel’s application in February of last year because several days earlier, Trump signed an order that temporarily banned all refugees from the U.S.)

According to the country’s Internal Affairs Department, last year, 36,450 people were granted New Zealand citizenship. Nearly six thousand of them came from the United Kingdom. Another 4,665 came from India and, lower down the line in terms of the percentage of people accepted, 1,314 people were granted citizenship who were born in China, and 735 were born in the U.S.

The country is home to roughly five million people altogether.

It’s hard to know just how many wealthy Americans have become landowners in New Zealand, though New York hedge fund managers appear to have gotten the memo about the country ahead of Silicon Valley.  (Thiel, notably, had created a hedge fund called Clarium Capital back in 2002, though it’s been wound down in more recent years.)

According to the New Yorker, Rob Johnson, a former hedge fund manager with Soros who is today the president of a Soros-backed think tank called the Institute for New Economic Thinking, told an audience at the World Economic Forum in Switzerland in 2015, “I know hedge-fund managers all over the world who are buying airstrips and farms in places like New Zealand because they think they need a getaway.”

Meanwhile, a BBC report about the new ban states that Chinese investors have actually been among the biggest and most active offshore buyers of property in New Zealand in recent years.

I’m a huge fan of single board computers, especially if they’re small enough to swallow. That’s why I like the Tomu. This teeny-tiny ARM processor essentially interfaces with your computer via the USB port and contains two LEDs and two buttons. Once it’s plugged in the little computer can simulate a hard drive or mouse, send MIDI data, and even blink quickly.

The Tomu runs the Silicon Labs Happy Gecko EFM32HG309 and can also act as a Universal 2nd Factor security token. It is completely open source and all the code is on their GitHub.

I bought one for $30 and messed with it for a few hours. The programs are very simple and you can load in various tools including a clever little mouse mover – maybe to simulate mouse usage for an app – and a little app that blinks the lights quickly. Otherwise you can use it to turn your USB hub into an on-off switch for your computer. It’s definitely not a fully-fledged computer – there are limited I/O options, obviously – but it’s a cute little tool for those who want to do a little open source computing.

One problem? It’s really, really small. I’d do more work on mine but I already lost it while I was clearing off a desk so I could see it better. So it goes.

Intel has an ambition to bring more artificial intelligence technology into all aspects of its business, and today is stepping up its game a little in the area with an acquisition. The computer processing giant has acquired Vertex.AI, a startup that had a mission of making it possible to develop “deep learning for every platform”, and had built  a deep learning engine called PlaidML to do this.

Terms of the deal have not been disclosed but Intel has provided us with the following statement, confirming the deal and that the whole team — including founders Choong Ng and Brian Retford — will be joining Intel.

“Intel has acquired Vertex.AI, a Seattle-based startup focused on deep learning compilation tools and associated technology. The seven-person Vertex.AI team joined the Movidius team in Intel’s Artificial Intelligence Products Group. With this acquisition, Intel gained an experienced team and IP to further enable flexible deep learning at the edge. Additional details and terms are not being disclosed.”

A note on Vertex’s home page says the team will become part of Intel’s Movidius unit, which was formed around a computer vision chipmaking startup of the same name that Intel acquired in 2016.

Vertex says that Intel will continue to develop PlaidML as an open source project (see its Github page here), where it will continue to support a variety of hardware under an Apache 2.0 license with an Intel nGraph backend. “We are excited to advance flexible deep learning for edge computing as part of Intel,” the company said.

Intel, once a pace-setter and leader in the computing industry on the strength of its processors, has lost some momentum amid a new wave of companies building processors for mobile and other next-generation devices. The company has set its sights on being at the centre of the next wave of computing, and that is the wider context for its focus on R&D and other investments in AI. Vertex is an interesting company in that regard, as its platform is focused on building AI capabilities into a variety of chips, and is focused on helping bridge the gap between having powerful processors and actually using them to build AI into apps.

“There’s a large gap between the capabilities neural networks show in research and the practical challenges in actually getting them to run on the platforms where most applications run,” Ng noted in a statement on the company’s launch in 2016. “Making these algorithms work in your app requires fast enough hardware paired with precisely tuned software compatible with your platform and language. Efficient plus compatible plus portable is a huge challenge—we can help.” For Intel, this could mean using Vertex’s IP to help build its own applications, or potentially applications for of its customers.

It’s not clear how much funding Vertex.AI had raised. Investors included Curious Capital, which focused on pre-seed and seed-stage funding for startups in the Pacific Northwest; and the Creative Destruction Lab, an accelerator focused on machine learning startups based in Toronto.

More to come.

Google is introducing an additional format for featured snippets in its search results today. For years, these snippets have appeared at the top of the search results page and featured both images and text that Google thinks are relevant to your query. They are all about Google saving you a click. Today, Google is going beyond this single answer for some queries and introducing a panel that also features relevant subtopics, saving you even more clicks.

Google’s canonical example for a query to trigger this new panel is “Quartz Vs. Granite.” This query brings up the usual snippet, plus subtopics like cost, benefits, weight and durability. Those topics are automatically chosen based on what Google’s algorithms understand about this topic.

You don’t need a [vs.] query to trigger this, though. If you look for something like “emergency funds,” you’ll also see a similar panel.

For now, I was only able to trigger these new panels on mobile, but Google says it is rolling out this feature over the coming days, so it may be a while before you spot one in the wild. I was also unsuccessful in triggering them with any other query I tried, but maybe you are luckier than me.

Google notes that today’s announcement is part of an ongoing effort to provide more comprehensive results to your questions. This February, for example, Google started showing multiple featured snippets when its systems think a query has multiple interpretations.

One gets the distinct impression that nothing is ever permanent with MoviePass — including, of course, MoviePass itself. The troubled film subscription service has been through a number of different rule changes in recent months, as it’s worked to stem the financial bleeding.

In an email, CEO Mitch Lowe outlined the latest updates to the once-unlimited subscription plan. Most notable among the changes is the limiting of selection to “up to six films to choose from daily, including a selection of major studio first-run films and independent releases.”

On top of that, there may be further limitations on showtime availability for the selected titles, based on “the popularity of those films on the app that particular day.” The company has already begun limiting access to specific films, starting with a barring of major blockbusters and moving toward limiting selection generally.

If nothing else, at this plan spells out something more concrete that what’s appeared from the outside to be somewhat arbitrary choice in recent weeks. Now users can go to the “This Week’s Movies” page to see what’s available. Right now, there’s a semi-consistent, rotating selection. For example, you can get into BlacKkKlansman and The Meg today, but not tomorrow (weekend box office, you know). 

Which movies are chosen and when will likely be at least partially dependent on deals struck between MoviePass and studios/distributors. And, of course, “up to six films” leaves the door open for a lot of wiggle room on selection here. It will also likely severely limit the ability to go see films in repertory movie houses, not to mention those in areas outside of big cities, where selection is far more limited.

This latest change comes as the company marks the one-year anniversary of the $9.95 plan that helped get the company into this financial and customer service mess. Based on the current ratio of responses to a tweet celebrating the milestone, it seems safe to say the company’s got a lot of work to do if it hopes to win back one-time loyal users.

Denmark’s GN Hearing broke new ground in hearing aid technology five years ago when it inked a deal with Apple to develop a hearing aid that would integrate seamlessly with an iPhone, with no need for an intermediary device. And today it announced a significant, new milestone expansion in that technology: it has partnered with Google to bring the same functionality to Android handsets.

Google has published a specification for audio streaming for hearing aids using Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) and connection-oriented channels which, in the words of Google, relies on “an elastic buffer of several audio packets to maintain a steady flow of audio, even in the presence of packet loss. This buffer provides audio quality for hearing aid devices at the expense of latency.” GN Hearing will be the first to develop these hearing aids using Google’s specifications, which it helped to write.

“Google is working with GN Hearing to create a new open specification for hearing aid streaming support on future versions of Android devices,” said Seang Chau, Vice President of Engineering at Google, in a statement.

This will mark the first time that Android smartphones will stream audio directly to hearing aids, and, since Android devices account for a majority of smartphones in use today, it is a big step up in helping people who use hearing aids be more integrated with the “smartphone revolution” and the wave of services and applications that come with using mobile devices.

Up to now, because of how hearing aids are designed to amplify sounds, those who used one, and also wanted to use an Android device, would either have to use a supplementary piece of hardware to use the two together, or remove the hearing aid altogether and have a poor quality conversation.

In addition to using the specification to stream audio from calls and phone apps directly to the hearing aid, users will also be able to monitor their hearing aids and modify their volumes using an app on their phones.

Anders Hedegaard, the CEO of GN Hearing, tells TechCrunch that he “cautiously” estimates that the first hearing aids with live Android integrations will hit the market in 2019. And while his company does not have exclusivity on this — and the specification, like others on Android, is open source for anyone else to use — GN Hearing is likely to be the first because it has been working on the specification.

Hearing loss has been on the rise, in part because people are living longer, and in part because of environmental factors (like headphones that people use with loud volumes). The World Health Organization estimates that there are some 466 million people with disabling hearing loss, up from about 360 million in 2013, and that will grow to 900 million by 2050.

But despite the growth of the issue, both the hearing aid industry and its users have been relatively slow to embrace wireless technology, although things have been changing. Hedegaard said that when his company first announced its partnership with Apple in 2013, the idea of a connected hearing aid was relatively new, and it took until 2016 for any one of its competitors to add the iPhone integration that GN Hearing pioneered. “Today, data connectivity is a core part of hearing aids,” he said, “and 90% of our devices have it.”

Similarly, the amount of hearing aid users actually employing the connected functionality is also going up.

“We have seen the percentage of people using connectivity going up dramatically,” he said. In 2013/14, he estimated that only about 10 percent of people who had connected hearing aids actually used the service with apps and other devices. Now “the majority” download apps and take advantage, he said. It helps that with each year, the gap between the ageing population and those who have spent years using computers and mobile phones and apps is shrinking. “Time is going our way,” he said.

You’ve got one week left to plant your early-stage startup squarely in the path of 10,000 people, including influential investors, technologists, potential customers and the media. If you want to showcase your company at Disrupt San Francisco 2018, which takes place September 5-7, there’s no better place to do it than the Startup Alley exhibit floor. And the only way to do that is to buy a Disrupt SF Startup Alley Exhibitor Package before the application deadline expires August 24.

Startup Alley is the entrepreneurial heart of Disrupt SF 2018, where you’ll find more than 1,200 pre-series A startups and sponsors of every technical stripe. And they’ll be displaying the very best and latest products, platforms and services.

A prime networking environment, Startup Alley is home to collaboration, inspiration and opportunity. Luke Heron, CEO at Testcard.com, had this to say about his Startup Alley experience:

“TechCrunch uses a curation process regarding the companies it accepts,” he said. “So being in Startup Alley — among all these other fantastic startups — has a hugely positive impact when you’re fundraising.”

What does a Startup Alley Exhibitor Package include? Take a look.

• Two Founder passes for all three days of Disrupt SF 2018
• A one-day, 3’x6′ exhibit space
• Use of CrunchMatch — our curated investor-to-startup matching platform
• Access to The Main Stage, The Next Stage, The Q&A Stage, The Showcase Stage
• All workshops
• Access to the attendee list; ability to message attendees with the Disrupt App
• Attend the TC After Party

And because it’s just not a TechCrunch Disrupt without contests and giveaways, here’s a little added incentive just for you.

Two companies from Startup Alley will be tapped to participate in the Startup Battlefield competition as the Wild Card companies. Yes, you may still be selected to pitch to top investors in front of hundreds of thousands of people at the event and online. But you have to get your Exhibitor Package today if you want the chance.

That’s more exposure gold, folks. Come and mine it.

Disrupt San Francisco 2018  takes place September 5-7, and you have until August 24 to secure your spot in Startup Alley. Don’t wait, buy your Startup Alley Exhibitor Package now. We think Luke Heron said it best. “If you’re a startup founder or an entrepreneur, attending Disrupt is a no-brainer.”

WordPress has taken down a handful alt-right blogs, according to several complaints from affected blog owners and readers who claim the sites were removed from WordPress.com, despite not being in violation of the company’s Terms of Service. Some site owners also said they were not notified of the shutdown in advance and have lost their work. The removals, we’ve learned, are in part due to a new policy WordPress has rolled out that now prohibits blogs from the “malicious publication of unauthorized, identifying images of minors.”

Yes, that’s right: the company has created a new rule to specifically handle the Sandy Hook conspiracists, and boot them from WordPress.com.

While some of the affected sites had already been flagged for other violations, many were hosting Sandy Hook conspiracy theories and other “false flag” content.

In a YouTube video, the host of one site lamented, “They have wiped out 11 years of my fucking life.” He then read through WordPress’s Terms of Service, confused as to how he was in violation.

According to Google’s cache, his site hosted 9/11 “truther” content and claimed that Sandy Hook was a staged event. These are generally repugnant points of view to a large swath of people, but he’s correct in saying they weren’t views that WordPress had prohibited.

The update to WordPress’s policy follows a damning report from The NYT this week that explained on how the world’s largest blogging service has allowed Sandy Hook conspiracy theorists to remain online.

The issue, in part, has to do with how WordPress’s policies were originally written, the article explained.

WordPress policies were designed to be more resistant to the strategic use of copyright claims as a means of getting content removed. Longtime web veterans know they were written this way because they were created at a time when large corporations would wield copyright law – like the DMCA – as a weapon used to force platforms to take down content about their company that they deemed unfavorable.

But in recent years, the permissiveness these policies has also created loopholes for those whose spread disinformation, incite hatred and violence, and post abusive and offensive content to the web.

With little other recourse available to them, some Sandy Hook parents have used copyright law get images of their children removed from the web.

As The NYT explained, a Sandy Hook victim’s father, Leonard Pozner, filed copyright claims with a number of platforms, including WordPress, on images of his son Noah, a 6-year old victim of the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting. Facebook, Amazon and Google complied with those requests. But WordPress responded with form letters that explained why the content could stay online.

The responses, which Mr. Ponzer described to the paper as “automated, very generic,” and “very cold,” said that the conspiracy blog posts represented “fair use” of the material. It defined fair use as anything that included “criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching, scholarship, and research.”

Unbelievably, the letters also warned Mr. Ponzer that it could collect damages from him for knowingly materially misrepresenting copyrights.

Yes, WordPress told the father of a murdered 6-year old that it could seek damages from him if he didn’t stop asking it to remove the stomach-churningly offensive content from those who believe the Sandy Hook shooting never happened, and that parents mourning the loss of their children were actors.

The company told The NYT that language was a part of a predefined statement it used, and was sorry that it did so in this particular situation.

However, it also admitted that the posts in question weren’t in violation of any current WordPress user guidelines or copyright law.

We understand the company has since phoned Mr. Ponzer to apologize directly. It then created a new policy to address the problem.

Its new policy reads:

The policy affects blogs hosted on WordPress.com, not self-hosted blogs using WordPress software.

Combined, WordPress powers 31.6 percent of websites on the web, and has 60% of the CMS market, so this change has a sizable impact on the web as a whole.

The company declined to comment on the new policy.

If the booted bloggers now move to their own self-hosted sites, the responsibility of shutting them down will fall on the web hosting companies. Of course, don’t expect that to happen anytime soon. 

Some of the affected bloggers will probably claim their rights to free speech are being violated. They’re wrong. The First Amendment protects people in the U.S. from the government censoring or punishing you for what you say. It doesn’t protect your Twitter account, Facebook profile, or now, your WordPress.com blog.

No, it’s not just you.

Slack is experiencing issues, as noted on the company’s status page. The issues appear to largely be focused on its Workspace/Org Administration service. We here at TechCrunch HQ East are no longer able to send one another direct messages, and honestly the idea of swiveling our chairs around to speak to one another is giving us some intense anxiety.

Thank goodness for Twitter DMs, right?

According to the latest update, “Our team is looking into the issues preventing private channel membership from displaying in Enterprise Grid workspaces.”

We’ll update as we hear more. Until then, enjoy the long weekend, I guess.

Update: Slack notes “We’re still working to ensure this is fully resolved, however folks may be seeing improvements at this time. Thanks for bearing with us.” We’ve seen some on our end, so I guess maybe don’t leave the office just yet.

The Boring Company announced a proposal yesterday to construct a 3.6 mile hyperloop to carry fans from the city directly to Dodger Stadium in less than four minutes for about $1.

This proposed loop, called the “Dugout Loop,” would run from Dodger Stadium to privately owned Boring Co. property in either the Los Feliz, East Hollywood or Rampart Village neighborhoods. To increase public transit use and in turn decrease traffic congestion, the company plans to build in the vicinity of the LA Metro Red Line and is currently choosing between three Red Line stations in the area. When the final path is determined, the tunnel would be built 30 to 44 feet below the surface of the ground, and even deeper when traveling under standing infrastructure like bridges.

Proposed Map of Dugout Loop

In theory, this emission-free tunnel system would help encourage Angelenos to use public transit and begin to shed the city’s car-clogged image and resulting smog.

The loop would consist of a single underground tunnel that runs under Vin Scully Avenue and Sunset Boulevard, two loop lifts (essentially elevators for the electric skates to bring them in and out of use) and ventilation/exit shafts. Each electric skate will be able to carry between 8-16 passengers.

To start, the Boring Co. plans to serve only about 2.5 percent (1,400 people) of the stadium’s capacity per event, with the potential to ramp it up to 5 percent based on feedback from the city and users. For a plan proposing to reduce traffic congestion in the city, these underwhelming numbers are unlikely to make a significant impact.

If the City of Los Angeles accepts the proposal, the Boring Co. says it would complete construction on the loop in 14 months. This would mark the second acceptance for the company following the proposal accepted by the City of Chicago earlier this summer to build a tunnel between O’Hare International Airport and downtown Chicago. And if ground on the Dugout Loop was broken before the Chicago loop, it could mark the second tunnel built by the Boring Co.

However, the Dugout Loop is not the only proposal the city has received. In addition to Boring Co.’s tunnel, LA is considering a gondola proposal from Aerial Rapid Transit Technologies that would carry 5,000 passengers an hour far above the city traffic and deposit them at the stadium.