Month: August 2018

Descartes Labs, a New Mexico-based geospatial analytics startup, today announced that its platform is now out of beta. The well-funded company already allowed businesses to analyze satellite imagery it pulls in from NASA and ESA and build predictive models based on this data, but starting today, it is adding both weather data to its library, as well as commercial high-resolution imagery thanks to a new partnership with Airbus’ OneAtlas project.

As Descartes Labs co-founder Mark Johnson, who you may remember from Zite, told me, the team now regularly pulls in 100 terabytes of new data every day. The company’s clients then use this data to predict the growth of crops, for example. And while Descartes Labs can’t disclose most of its clients, Johnson told me that Cargill and teams at Los Alamos National Labs are among its users.

While anybody could theoretically access the same data and spin up thousands of compute nodes to analyze it and build models, the value of a service like this is very much about abstracting all of that work away and letting developers and analysts focus on what they do best.

“If you look at the early beta customers of the system, typically it’s a company that has some kind of geospatial expertise,” Johnson told me. “Oftentimes, they’re collecting data of their own and their primary challenge is that the folks on their team who ought to be spending all their time doing science on the datasets — the majority of their time, sometimes 80 plus percent of their time — they are collecting the data, cleaning the data, getting the data analysis ready. So only a small percentage of their work time is spent on analysis.”

So far, Descartes Labs’ infrastructure, which mostly runs on the Google Cloud Platform, has processed over 11 petabytes of compressed data. Thanks to the partnership with Airbus, it’s now also getting very high-resolution data for its users. While some of the free data from the Landsat satellites, for example, have a resolution of 30m per pixel, the Airbus data comes in at 1.5m per pixel across the entire world and 50cm per pixel over 2,600 cities. Add NOAA’s global weather data to this, and it’s easy to imagine what kind of models developers could build based on all of this information.

Many users, Johnson tells me, also bring their own data to the service to build better models or see

While Descartes Labs’ early focus was on developers, it’s worth noting that the team has now also built a viewer that allows any user (who pays for the service) to work with the base map and add layers of additional information on top.

Johnson tells me that the team plans to add more datasets over time, though the focus of the service will always remain on spatial data.

As summer comes to a close and the leaves begin to brown, the gaming world goes through its own sort of transition. A handful of new titles prep for launch, including Call of Duty: Black Ops 4. But unlike previous CoD titles, Black Ops 4 represents a counter-attack on the world’s biggest game, Fortnite Battle Royale.

For the first time, Call of Duty is ditching a campaign and opting to introduce a new Battle Royale mode to the first-person shooter.

It’s a risky approach, which could potentially put off long-time CoD players and likewise disappoint the Fortnite crowd who have already invested time and money in an already-dominant Battle Royale game.

Time shall surely tell, but luckily we’ll get a sneak peek at the new Black Ops 4 Battle Royale, called Blackout, in September.

Prepare accordingly.#Blackout pic.twitter.com/X70KVQ75gU

— Call of Duty (@CallofDuty) August 14, 2018

Activision and Treyarch confirmed that Blackout will be available via a limited beta on September 10 for the PS4. The companies did not confirm if or when the Blackout beta will be playable on other platforms.

Thus far, we know very little about how Blackout will work. Here’s what we do know: The game can be played in solos, duos, or quads. Treyarch built its biggest CoD map ever, which is 1,500x bigger than Nuketown. There will also be vehicles within the Black Out mode.

To participate in the beta, users need to pre-order Black Ops 4.

A few months ago, Google announced Google One, its new subscription program for getting more Google Drive storage and other perks. Over the course of the last few weeks, Google slowly rolled existing Drive subscribers over to a Google One membership and starting today, new users can sign up for a One subscription, too.

Google One plans start at 100 GB for $1.99. There’s also a 200 GB tier for $2.99 and a 2 TB option for $9.99. If you need even more storage space, Google will happily sell you 10 TB, 20 TB and 30 TB plans for between $99.99 and $299.99 per month.

One nice feature of these new plans is that you can share your storage allotment with up to five family members.

While storage is the main feature here, Google also promises additional perks. The most important of these may be access to live 24/7 support. These Google experts at the other end of the line will help you with figuring out any question you may have about a Google product.

Another perk here is that you get deals on hotels when you search for them in Google Maps. Recently, Google also gave all One members credits on Google Play and the company today said that it’ll soon offer members deals for purchases in the Google Store and through Google Express, too.

It’s worth noting that One is very much a consumer product. For businesses, Google’s G Suite remains the way to get additional service and features.

For now, Google One is only available in the U.S., but it’ll roll out to more countries soon.

XYZPrinting may have finally cracked the color 3D printing code. Their latest machine, the $1,599 da Vinci Color Mini is a full color printer that uses three CMY ink cartridges to stain the filament as it is extruded, allowing for up to 15 million color combinations.

The printer is currently available for pre-order on Indiegogo for $999.

The printer can build objects 5.1″ x 5.1″ x 5.1″ in size and it can print PLA or PETG. A small ink cartridge stains the 3D Color-inkjet PLA as it comes out, creating truly colorful objects.

“Desktop full-color 3D printing is here. Now, consumers can purchase an easy-to-operate, affordable, compact full-color 3D printer for $30,000 less than market rate. This is revolutionary because we are giving the public access to technology that was once only available to industry professionals,” said Simon Shen, CEO of XYZprinting.

The new system is aimed at educational and home markets and, at less than a $1,000, it hits a unique and important sweet spot in terms of price. While the prints aren’t perfect, being able to print in full color for the price of a nicer single color 3D printer is pretty impressive.

RunSafe, a Mclean Virginia startup, got started doing research for DARPA on how to defend critical infrastructure. They built a commercial product based on that initial research that they claim eliminates an entire class of attacks. Today, the company released a product called Alkemist that enables customers to install the solution without help from RunSafe.

RunSafe co-founder and CEO Joe Saunders says that the product began with the DoD research and a simple premise: “If you assume hardware in the supply chain is compromised, can you still build trusted software on top of untrusted hardware. And so we came up with techniques that we have since greatly expanded to protect the software from compromise. We eliminate an entire class of attacks and greatly reduce the attack surface for software across critical infrastructure,” he told TechCrunch.

Saunders uses a data center cooling system as an example. If someone were able to control the cooling systems, they could cause the whole data center to overheat in order to shut it down. RunSafe is designed to prevent that from happening whether it’s a data center, a power plant or water works.

The way they do this is by hardening the software binary so malware and exploitations can’t find the tools they need to execute across the infrastructure. In the data center example, that means the attacker could find their way in, and attack a single machine, but couldn’t replicate the attack across multiple machines.

“They’re looking for functions and memory and different things that they can use in their exploitation. What we do is we make it very difficult for the attack tool to find that information, and without the ability to find the memory or the functions, they can’t execute their attack,” he said.

He says that they do this by making every instance “functionally identical but logically unique” by relocating where functions and memory exist at a low level in the software. “When an exploit is looking for memory or function to exploit the software product, it can’t locate them,” Saunders said. And that makes it practically impossible to move across the system, he explained.

He points out this is a far different approach from how most security vendors approach the problem. “Other solutions that are leveraging intrusion detection or monitoring or analytics are detecting when there’s a compromise, but they’re not solving the problem — you still can be breached and the exploit can still execute. We’re eliminating the exploit,” he said.

The company works with hardware manufacturers to install their solution at the factory before they get deployed, and with customers like data center operators to protect their critical infrastructure. Prior to the release of Alkemist, the installation required some hand-holding from RunSafe. With today’s release, the customer can install the product themselves and that could increase their customer base.

RunSafe launched at the end of 2015 and released the first version of the product last year. They currently count a dozen customers and are protecting hundreds of thousands machines across their customer base and expect to cross one million protected machines by the end of the year, according to Saunders.

The company has raised $2.4 million in seed investment.

The company that owns MoviePass lost a ton of money last quarter. Unsurprising, I realize, but in context, it’s actually a bit of a mind boggling. The more austerely named Helios and Matheson Analytics had one heck of a tough quarter, posting a $126.6 million operating loss, as compared to a loss of $2.7 million a year prior.

If one chose to simply look at adoption rates, as MoviePass is no doubt hoping from its shareholders, things have been sunshine and lollipops over that same time period, with the movie subscription service growing to three million users. That, of course, ignores the on-going fiscal tire fire that has been the company last several months.

It’s probably not worth listing all of that right now, but suffice it say, the summer of MoviePass hasn’t gone as planned, instead being plagued by movie blocks, bugs, ever-changing pricing structures and some very irate customers. Late last month, the service borrowed $5 million to end one of multiple outages.

As The Hollywood Reporter notes, a shareholder has filed suit against the company, as its stock price has also felt the burn. Again, not particularly surprising. The suit claims, in part that the “defendants carried out a plan, scheme and course of conduct which was intended to and did, deceive the investing public and cause the plaintiff and other members of the class to purchase Helios common stock at artificially inflated prices.”

MoviePass, meanwhile, has continued to paint the picture of an an enthusiastic user base and a company working to leverage that into something resembling a profit. “Our community has shown an immense amount of enthusiasm over the past year,” CEO Mitch Lowe recently said in a statement, “and we trust that they will continue to share our vision to reinvigorate the movie industry.”

What do you get when you connect a bunch of filmmakers with a bunch of programmers? Something like Flowbox.

Flowbox, which began life as a unique object-oriented programming language for visual effects, has grown into something truly powerful in the moviemaking industry. Run by Mikołaj Valencia​, Michał Urbańczyk​, Paweł Pietraszko, and Mat Bujalski, this Polish company is currently working with a number of big studios to add VFX to huge productions.

“Flowbox is an industrial strength image processing platform incorporating many recent innovations in computer graphics field,” said Valencia. “It delivers semi-automated rotoscopy, one of the most tedious manual labor used in 25 precent of all video content processing. It allows for huge time savings.”

The team is working on adding other tools to the toolchain as well including color correction and image composition.

The system is unique in that it uses a visual interface to change the video. It also supports distributed computing which speeds up the compositing system immensely.

The idea was born in 2010 as a reaction to the poor tools available to filmmakers at the time.

“The idea for the Flowbox project was initiated in 2010 by Wojciech Daniło, by this time as Senior Technical Director at Alvernia Studios (the most modern film studio in Poland),” said Valencia. “His job was to design and create solutions for visual effects for international productions like Arbitrage with Richard Gere and Vamps of Sigourney Weaver. That’s when he discovered the problems faced by his associates and how limited and inflexible the leading tools were.”

The company has raised $1 million so far including an infusion from Innovation Nest.

The app’s high-tech approach to rotoscoping could be just the thing filmmakers need to unlock the true potential of their already powerful tools.

Microsoft today will begin to allow Alexa device owners to summon its own virtual assistant, Cortana, through their Echo devices, as well as call for Alexa via Cortana. The integration between the two voice computing platforms was previously announced and briefly demoed on stage in May at Microsoft’s Build 2018 event in Seattle. But the companies at the time hadn’t given a timeline as to when the integrations between the two assistants would be available to the public.

Now, the companies are taking the first steps towards that goal with a public preview of their Alexa-Cortana collaboration.

Customers who want to test out this new feature will be able to try it starting today, August 15, Microsoft says. The integration will continue to roll out in the days ahead, so you may not immediately gain access, we should note.

Initially, customers will be able to call up Microsoft’s Cortana through their Echo devices and enable Amazon’s Alexa on Windows 10 devices and on Harman Kardon Invoke speakers. Later, it will arrive on mobile platforms like iOS and Android.

Once enabled, the integration will allow Cortana users to ask Alexa to shop Amazon, manage their Amazon orders, and use some of Alexa’s third-party skills. Alexa users, meanwhile, will gain access to Cortana’s knowledge about productivity features including calendar management, their day at a glance, and their email.

For example, Echo device owners can say to Cortana things like “What new emails do I have?,” “What is on my calendar today?,” and “Add ‘order flowers’ to my to-do list.”

And Windows device users can click the microphone button or say “Hey Cortana, open Alexa,” followed by queries like “What are today’s shopping deals?,” “Set the temperature to 72 degrees,” or “Open Jeopardy.”

The companies say that more skills and features will be added in time.

“With this public preview, we want users to engage with the experience and provide feedback so our teams can continue to improve the experience,” a Microsoft spokesperson said. “Our goal is to create a seamless integration and this is our first step towards achieving that goal.”

When Microsoft and Amazon first discussed making their assistants work together, there was some skepticism about how it would all work. Some people feared the voice commands would be awkward, or believed the integrations were unnecessary.

However, when the companies demoed the integrations live at Build, it was clear they had thought about the user experience. Launching Cortana via an Echo was as simple as saying so: “open Cortana.” That made it feel more like using a third-party skill. You could then issue commands without having to keep saying “Cortana each time.” The same was true for the reverse, when talking to Alexa on a Microsoft device.

At the event, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella had also stressed the values of a more open system, saying “We want to make it possible for our customers to get the most out of their personal digital assistants – not be bound to some walled garden.”

Getting their virtual assistants to work together isn’t the only way the two companies have teamed up. Alexa is also shipping on some Microsoft PCs, for example. Cortana, however, isn’t making much of a leap beyond the Windows platform, which has allowed other voice assistants like Alexa and Google Assistant to gain traction in the voice-powered devices space.

Oracle, a company not exactly known for having the best relationship with the open source community, is releasing a new open source tool today called Graphpipe, which is designed to simplify and standardize the deployment of machine learning models.

The tool consists of a set of libraries and tools for following the standard.

Vish Abrams, whose background includes helping develop OpenStack at NASA and later helping launch Nebula, an OpenStack startup in 2011, is leading the project. He says as his team dug into the machine learning workflow, they found a gap. While teams spend lots of energy developing a machine learning model, it’s hard to actually deploy the model for customers to use. That’s where Graphpipe comes in.

He points out that it’s common with newer technologies like machine learning for people to get caught up in the hype. Even though the development process keeps improving, he says that people often don’t think about deployment.

“Graphpipe is what’s grown out of our attempt to really improve deployment stories for machine learning models, and to create an open standard around having a way of doing that to improve the space,” Abrams told TechCrunch.

As Oracle dug into this, they identified three main problems. For starters, there is no standard way to serve APIs, leaving you to use whatever your framework provides. Next, there is no standard deployment mechanism, which leaves developers to build custom ones every time. Finally, they found existing methods leave performance as an afterthought, which in machine learning could be a major problem.

“We created Graphpipe to solve these three challenges. It provides a standard, high-performance protocol for transmitting tensor data over the network, along with simple implementations of clients and servers that make deploying and querying machine learning models from any framework a breeze,” Abrams wrote in a blog post announcing the release of Graphpipe.

The company decided to make this a standard and to open source it to try and move machine learning model deployment forward. “Graphpipe sits on that intersection between solving a business problems and pushing the state of the art forward, and I think personally, the best way to do that is by have an open source approach. Often, if you’re trying to standardize something without going for the open source bits, what you end up with is a bunch of competing technologies,” he said.

Abrams acknowledged the tension that has existed between Oracle and the open source community over the years, but says they have been working to change the perception recently with contributions to Kubernetes and the Oracle Functions Project as examples. Ultimately he says, if the technology is interesting enough, people will give it a chance, regardless of who is putting it out there. And of course, once it’s out there, if a community builds around it, they will adapt and change it as open source projects tend to do. Abrams hopes that happens.

“We care more about the standard becoming quite broadly adopted, than we do about our particular implementation of it because that makes it easier for everyone. It’s really up to the community decide that this is valuable and interesting.” he said.

Graphpipe is available starting today on the Oracle GitHub page.

As the world shifts to a cloud native approach, the way you secure applications as they get deployed is changing too. Twistlock, a company built from the ground up to secure cloud native environments, announced a $33 million Series C round today led by Iconiq Capital.

Previous investors YL Ventures, TenEleven, Rally Ventures, Polaris Partners and Dell Technologies Capital also participated in the round. The company reports it has received a total of $63 million in venture investment to date.

Twistlock is solving a hard problem around securing containers and serverless, which are by their nature ephemeral. They can live for fractions of seconds making it hard track problems when they happen. According to company CEO and co-founder Ben Bernstein, his company came out of the gate building a security product designed to protect a cloud-native environment with the understanding that while containers and serverless computing may be ephemeral, they are still exploitable.

“It’s not about how long they live, but about the fact that the way they live is more predictable than a traditional computer, which could be running for a very long time and might have humans actually using it,” Bernstein said.

Screenshot: Twistlock

As companies move to a cloud native environment using Dockerized containers and managing them with Kubernetes and other tools, they create a highly automated system to deal with the deployment volume. While automation simplifies deployment, it can also leave companies vulnerable to host of issues. For example, if a malicious actor were to get control of the process via a code injection attack, they could cause a lot of problems without anyone knowing about it.

Twistlock is built to help prevent that, while also helping customers recognize when an exploit happens and performing forensic analysis to figure out how it happened.

It’s is not a traditional Software as a Service as we’ve come to think of it. Instead, it is a service that gets installed on whatever public or private cloud that the customer is using. So far, they count just over 200 customers including Walgreens and Aetna and a slew of other companies you would definitely recognize, but they couldn’t name publicly.

The company, which was founded in 2015, is based in Portland, Oregon with their R&D arm in Israel. They currently have 80 employees. Bernstein said from a competitive standpoint, the traditional security vendors are having trouble reacting to cloud native, and while he sees some startups working at it, he believes his company has the most mature offering, at least for now.

“We don’t have a lot of competition right now, but as we start progressing we will see more,” he said. He plans to use the money they receive today to help expand their marketing and sales arm to continue growing their customer base, but also engineering to stay ahead of that competition as the cloud-native security market continues to develop.