Month: August 2018

It understandable took a few years for Samsung to get back on the horse, but the company is finally read to push the limits of battery life yet again. Announced today at an event in Brooklyn, the Note 9 presents a considerable jump in battery capacity over its predecessor, jumping 700mAh to a beefy 4,000mAh. That’s the biggest ever for the line.

The on-going Note 7 saga did have some upsides for the company, forcing its hand into launching one of the industry’s most comprehensive battery testing procedures. Naturally, that eight-point battery test was a centerpiece of today’s big event, noting that while the company was pushing the boundaries yet again, it’s still doing its due diligence.

The last several Galaxy device launches opted not to make battery a priority, focusing instead on things like camera AI, while keep capacity more or less the same.

“What we want to do is a tempered approach to innovation any time,” Samsung’s director of Product Strategy and Marketing told TechCrunch ahead of the event, “so this was the right time to increase the battery to meet consumer needs.”

Samsung’s internal testing are still in place here, along with with some third-party testing from organizations like UL. By waiting long enough to push the limits, the company has pulled off an impressive feat — turning its misstep into good. While the on-going issue would have been enough to take down a lesser company, the phenomenon didn’t make a dent in the hardware company’s bottom line.

Waiting a couple of years has allowed the company to put the whole thing in the rearview mirror, while positioning itself as one the industry’s most thoughtful and cautious manufacturers. All that and the device gets an admittedly impressive 4,000mAh battery, which should more than get you through the day.

It’s true, Fortnite is coming to Android this summer. We’ve known that for sure since May. There is, however, one key caveat (aside from that whole no Google Play bit): The obscenely popular sandbox survival game will launch on Google’s mobile OS as a Samsung exclusive.

The Epic title will be available for Galaxy users with an S7 or higher (Note 9,  S9, Note 8, S8, S7,S7 Edge). Those with a Galaxy Tab S4 and S3 will get a crack it it, as well).  That, naturally, includes the new Note 9, which the company is positioning as something of a mobile gaming powerhouse.

The specs are certainly impressive, and the 6.4-inch screen should lend itself well to portable gaming. There’s also a new Water Carbon Cooling system on board, to help keep the handset from overheating from more resource-intensive tasks. The new tech improves the liquid cooling system the company has had on-board its Galaxy devices since the S7.

Starting today, the title will appear on Galaxy devices’ game launcher, remaining an Android exclusive until the 12th — at which point, one imagines, it will become more widely available for the rest of Android users. As with the rest of the versions of the title (the PS4’s issues aside), the game will support multi-platform crossplay. 

To celebrate the deal, those who pre-order the Note 9 will be able to choose between free AKG noise cancelling headphones or a device with a 15,000 V-bucks — the in-game equivalent to to $150 of our regular people dollars. All Note 9 and Tab S4 users will also get access to a Fortnite Galaxy skin (see: above), which is unique to those devices. 

Facebook — under fire for the role it has played in helping spread misinformation through its social media platform — has been turning its attention to more positive applications of its tools, such as strengthening communities, fundraising for good causes, and maybe even finding The One. Today comes the latest in that list: the company today announced the official launch of Mentorships, a free service that will pair people who need help or guidance with those who can provide it.

Mentorships will start first with a focus on mentoring opportunities within specific Groups. This is a sizeable opportunity in itself, with collectively about 200 million Group members across the social network. Facebook’s product manager for Groups,  be extending the feature to a smaller selection of Groups before inviting participants more widely.

When we first spotted Facebook testing Mentorships nearly a year ago, we’d guessed it would be a service focused on career advancement, coming as it did so soon after Facebook made a move into job listings and LinkedIn launching its own mentoring features. As it turned out, an early pilot of the service was announced during Facebook’s Social Good Forum, where the initial users were iMentor, a mentoring group focused on first-generation college students, and the International Rescue Committee.

It’s the latter social good angle — helping provide guidance to people in need or for educational purposes rather than straight career coaching — that Facebook is going to focus on initially as the Mentorship service proceeds into a more widely available format.

Early users of the mentorship feature include Mama Dragons, a group focused on providing support to Mormon parents of LGBTQIA children; and a group focused on learning how to make soap. (Yes, soap.) Mentorship product manager Gabriel Cohen said that the kind of help that mentors will be providing will vary widely, from helping new Group members “learn the ropes” in the Group, through to providing more direct support and guidance in whatever the specific area might be.

For now, there is no element of payment involved in the service. “People are doing this out of a spirit of volunteering,” Mentorship product manager Gabriel Cohen said in an interview.

Interestingly, in this first iteration, Facebook is banking the administration and running of mentorships not only around specific Groups, but Group administrators. That is to say, it’s up to Group admins to decide whether they would like to enable mentorships within their communities, and then it’s also up to them to pair people together, and make the introductions. Thereafter, they can communicate through a guided program set up by Facebook — which provides some guidance on how to proceed and check in with each other — or directly through Messenger.

Cohen said that in its early conversations with those trying out the Mentorship feature that so far, admins seem to be okay with doing the heavy lifting, although there has been some feed back that points to Facebook over time providing more tools to help things along, whether it be in providing some recommendations on pairings or simply helping connect users in a more automated way.

“We are relying on them to make these matches, but I think there are opportunities to simplify the effort they need to make,” he said. “It takes a lot of work to maintain a community well and we don’t want to burden them more.”

But you can see why Facebook is taking this more manual route, at least at first: the company has been treading a fine line when it comes to how it uses algorithms to curate and facilitate communication on its platform. Some of that has not worked in its favor when it comes to other areas like news, and the company has made a deep swing to bringing in more people into the mix to set things aright. Introducing algorithms now could be a misstep that’s not worth it to make, especially since the ethos is supposed to be about connecting people directly.

Over time, Cohen said that the idea will be to expand Mentorships to more areas — essentially as many as there are Groups on the platform. These could cover not just parenting and soap-making, but fitness, support groups of survivors of violence or other disasters, and more.

And yes, he didn’t rule out having mentors appear alongside Facebook’s efforts in job listings, too.

“If we are looking for job searches outside of our the immediate networks, mentors can really help,” he said. “We do want to take advantage of this in the future. Jobs seems like a logical place to have this.”

Amazon this morning announced the launch of a toolkit for developers that will allow them to integrate Alexa into cars’ infotainment systems. The “Alexa Auto SDK” is available now on GitHub, and includes all the core Alexa functions like streaming media, smart home controls, weather reports, and support for Alexa’s tens of thousands of third-party skills. It will also add new features just for auto users, like navigation and search, Amazon says.

The source code and function libraries will be in C++ and Java, allowing the vehicles to process audio inputs and triggers, then connect with the Alexa service, and handle the Alexa interactions.

In addition, Amazon is offering a variety of sample apps, build scripts, and documentation supporting Android and QNX operating systems on ARM and x86 processor architectures.

The SDK will allow for streaming media from Amazon Music, iHeartRadio, and Audible, for the time being, and will allow customers to place calls by saying the contact’s name or phone number. These will be launched over the native calling service in the vehicle.

Plus, it can tap into a native turn-by-turn navigation system, when customers specify an address or point of interest, or if they cancel the navigation.

A local search feature lets customers search for restaurants, movie theaters, grocery stores, hotels, and other business, and navigate to the location.

This is not the first time Alexa has come to cars, by any means. Amazon has been working with car makers like Ford, BMW, SEAT, Lexus and Toyota, who have been integrating the voice assistant into select vehicles. Alexa is also available in older cars through a variety of add-on devices, like those from Anker, Muse (Speak Music), Garmin, and Logitech, for example.

With this SDK, Amazon is opening the voice assistant to other developers building for auto, who don’t yet have a relationship with Amazon.

Remember the scene in Minority Report where Tom Cruz walks through the mall and thousands of holographic ads pop up around him? That reality may not be as far off as we thought.

Blippar, the augmented reality startup that launched back in 2011, is today announcing the launch of a new product that would let retailers, airports, commercial real estate owners, etc. place augmented reality content across their space.

The product is called the Blippar Indoor Positioning System, and it uses computer vision and augmented reality to help customers, tenants, etc. find their way through a large indoor space such as a grocery store, department store, or stadium.

This isn’t Blippar’s foray into AR navigation. The company launched the AR City app in the summer of 2017, which uses the camera of the phone to pinpoint a user’s location with better accuracy than GPS, according to the company. Blippar rolled out functionality for AR City in more than 300 cities.

But the indoor positioning system should prove more lucrative. Location services is one critical piece of our digital lifestyle that hasn’t been completely overwhelmed by advertisements. But it’s not hard to imagine advertisements popping up within a department store or sports stadium as a user looks for the beauty department or the closest hotdog, respectively of course.

Blippar sees an opportunity to use this for retail and shopping, entertainment and gamification, tourism, and even design, giving interior designers a chance to check out AR furniture, paint colors, etc.

But there’s also a huge play here around data. Facebook may know just about everything about you, but the advertising behemoth hasn’t made the most of leveraging a user’s location. Blippar might stand a chance at doing just that with the new indoor positioning system, giving retailers unprecedented information around the way that customers move through a store.

Because the system uses computer vision to determine a user’s location, the product can be used in offline mode.

Blippar uses blueprints, photography, and 3D models of buildings to build out the indoor visual positioning system, and can turn around the project almost immediately if they have access to CAD files of the building’s layout. Adding content, however, takes as long as designers and other project leaders need to figure out what that content should be and how it should look.

Blippar has been through a number of evolutions as a company. The startup first launched as a tool for brands and publishers, laying AR content on top of real-world objects that were tagged with a Blipp (a little sticker to trigger the AR content).

The company then moved into visual search, letting users point their phone at a car or a flower and learning more about what that real-world object is.

That has all laid the foundation for this latest B2B iteration around navigation. Blippar hasn’t yet disclosed the exact cost of using this new product, but did say that it will range between $300K and $1 million. Thus far, the company has signed on two major clients, one retailer and one commercial real estate owner, though Blippar didn’t disclose which companies it’s working with.

Blippar has raised more than $100 million since launch.

Just a few weeks back, Valve moved into Discord’s turf a bit with a dramatic overhaul of Steam’s chat system.

Today, Discord is returning the favor by playing with the idea of selling games through its namesake chat platform.

The company says it’ll launch a beta of the game store later today, though it’ll initially be limited to a small slice of its userbase (which now sits at 150 million users). More specifically, the beta will roll out to just 50,000 users from Canada at first.

It’ll be dabbling in game sales on two fronts: they’ll directly sell some games, while other games will be added perks for its Discord Nitro subscription service.

Whereas Valve has massively increased the number of games on Steam over the last few years by opening up to third parties through things like Steam Greenlight or (more recently) Steam Direct, Discord is pitching this as a more “curated” offering with a slimmer number of options. At least at first, they say they’re aiming for something that feels more like “one of those cozy neighborhood book shops” — which, on day one of the beta, translates to eleven games.

The games it’ll sell first:

• Dead Cells
• Frostpunk
• Omensight
• Into the Breach
• SpellForce 3
• The Banner Saga 3
• Pillars of Eternity II: Deadfire
• Hollow Knight
• Moonlighter
• This is the Police 2
• Starbound

While eleven games may not seem like much, you can bet they’ll offer more than that in time. See that screenshot up top? You don’t dedicate an entire tab in some of your app’s most prime screen real estate unless you’re hoping to make it a key part of your business.

Taking things one more step forward, Discord is also getting into (temporary) exclusives — or, as it calls them, “First on Discord” games. While it doesn’t mention names and none will roll out with today’s beta, Discord says it’ll soon highlight select indie games that’ll be available only on Discord for the first 90 days-or-so after their respective launches.

Meanwhile, the company is also testing the idea of building up its premium subscription add-on, Discord Nitro, into a game subscription service. Whereas the $5-per-month service previously primarily got you a few mostly-aesthetic perks like animated avatars, a special profile badge, and bigger upload limits, the same 50,000 players mentioned above (or, at least, those on Windows) will get access to a rotating set of games.

The first games hitting the subscription beta:

• Saints Row: The Third
• Metro: Last Light Redux
• Darksiders : Warmastered Edition
• De Blob
• Tormentor X Punisher
• Dandara
• Kathy Rain
• GoNNER
• Kingdom: New Lands
• System Shock Enhanced Edition
• Super Meat Boy

While many of those games aren’t exactly new (some of them are 5+ years old), a lot of them are really great games (I’ve lost days to Super Meat Boy) that not everyone has gotten around to playing. It’s a solid way to pique peoples interest in giving Discord a bit of money each month if the GIFs and badges weren’t quite enough.

Oh, and for good measure, Discord is making itself a launcher — that is, you’ll be able to sort and launch most of the games on your computer right from Discord, including games purchased elsewhere and even those, notes the company, that require another launcher to run. If that’s not a shot across the bow in Steam’s direction, I’m not sure what is.

Hinge Health, the San Francisco-based startup that offers a tech-enabled platform to treat musculoskeletal (MSK) disorders — things like knee pain, shoulder pain, or back pain — has raised $26 million in Series B funding.

Leading the round is Insight Venture Partners, with participation from the company’s Series A backer Atomico. In fact, I understand that the London VC firm has doubled down on its investment and has actually increased its stake in Hinge.

The new round of funding brings total raised by the company to $36 million since being founded in 2015 (and originally based in London). Hinge Health founders Daniel Perez and Gabriel Mecklenburg still maintain a majority stake and control of the board.

Billing itself as digitising healthcare, Hinge Health combines wearable sensors, an app, and health coaching to remotely deliver physical therapy and behavioural health for chronic conditions. The basic premise is that there is plenty of existing research to show how best to treat MSK disorders, but existing healthcare systems don’t do a very good job at delivering best practice, either because of cost and the way it is funded or for other systematic reasons. The result is an over tendency to fall back on the use of opioid-based painkillers or surgery, with sub-optimal results.

The startup’s initial target customers are self-insured employers and health plans, with the pitch being that its platform can significantly reduce medical costs associated with chronic MSK conditions.

To that end, Perez tells me Hinge Health now has 40 enterprise customers in the U.S. and has partnered with 10 of the largest health plans. This is off the back of improved results, with 2 in 3 patients who go through the program avoiding the need for surgery, up from 1 in 2 at the time of the startup’s Series A. “[We’re] aiming to bump that to 80 percent soon,” he says.

Just don’t call Hinge a “software as a drug” or so-called digital therapeutic. Perez isn’t a fan of either term, and certainly not when applied to the work Hinge Health is doing.

“Both seem to imply you just pop one easy pill and that’s it,” he says. “While software, connected hardware, and behavioural health support (e.g. education, coaching, targeted notifications, gamification/rewards) can help scale the labor intensive processes involved in chronic care, it’s not akin to just popping a pill and you’re done. That’s why I really dislike the term “digital therapeutic” when applied to chronic conditions, and I wish it was retired”.

Instead, Perez considers Hinge Health to be a “Digital Care Pathway” as patients are still required to carry out a lot of work in order to tackle their chronic condition. In other words, it goes well beyond just passively popping a “digital pill”.

I ask the Hinge Health founder if perhaps it is access to a one-to-one health coach via the app that makes all the difference, especially related to adherence, rather than technology. That depends, he says, revealing that some patients rely very heavily on having access to a coach, while others need very little or zero coaching support, and instead rely on Hinge’s wearable motion sensors to guide them through their exercises and to track progress.

Adds Perez: “The clinical literature is very compelling; when you have a relationship with a real person on the care team, it boosts adherence to the care plan. Critically that person doesn’t have to be a doctor or even a nurse, but it must be someone you trust”.

Anchor’s been gaining a fair bit of steam lately with its dead simple mobile podcast editing app. The New York startup has also been branching out in some interesting ways, including the recent launch of a Manhattan-based studio designed to give podcasters access to far better equipment than the usual Skype setup.

Today, it’s taking on another key issue with upstart podcasts: monetization. Anchor is launching Listener Support, a Patreon-style subscription service (with a very NPR name) that lets podcasters make a little money for their hard work.

Once enabled on an Anchor dashboard, hosts are encouraged to share a link in their show notes, where listeners can plunk down $0.99, $4.99 or $9.99 a month for the privilege of audio content. After the money starts flowing in, hosts can collect their earnings by hitting the Cash out now button.

Anchor’s taking a 4.5 percent servicing fee from the subscriptions, on top of Stripe’s standard 5 percent processing charge. iOS and Mac users can also subscribe via Apple Pay. At launch, the service is available for a handful of partner podcasts, including ​Good Hustle​, ​Over the Thread​, ​Sweet Husbands​, ​So Fashionating​ and That’s Weird​.

The move follows the launch of a similar blockchain-based service from top Android podcast app, Castbox.

Getting directions to the nearest Starbucks or Target is a task Apple’s virtual assistant can handle with ease. But what about local businesses with names that Siri has never heard, and might mistake for another phrase or the user misspeaking? To handle these, Apple has created libraries of hyper-local place names so Siri never hears “Godfather’s Pizza” as “got father’s piece.”

Speech recognition systems have to be trained on large bodies of data, but while that makes them highly capable when it comes to parsing sentences and recognizing phrases, it doesn’t always teach them the kind of vocabulary that you and your friends use all the time.

When I tell a friend, “let’s go to St John’s for a drink,” they know I don’t mean some cathedral in the midwest but the bar up the street. But Siri doesn’t really have any way of knowing that — in fact, unless the system knows that “Saint John’s” is a phrase in the first place, it might think I’m saying something else entirely. It’s different when you type it into a box — it can just match strings — but when you say it, Siri has to make her best guess at what you said.

But if Siri knew that in the Seattle area, when someone says something that sounds like St John’s, they probably mean the bar, then she can respond more quickly and accurately, without having to think hard or have you select from a list of likely saints. And that’s just what Apple’s latest research does. It’s out now in English, and other languages are likely only a matter of time.

To do this, Apple’s voice recognition team pulled local search results from Apple Maps, sorting out the “places of interest” — you (or an algorithm) can spot these, because people refer to them in certain ways, like “where is the nearest…” and “directions to…” and that sort of thing.

Obviously the sets of these POIs, once you remove national chains like Taco Bell, will represent the unique places that people in a region search for. Burger-seekers here in Seattle will ask about the nearest Dick’s Drive-in, for example (though we already know where they are), while those in L.A. will of course be looking for In-N-Out. But someone in Pittsburgh likely is never looking for either.

Apple sorted these into 170 distinct areas: 169 “combined statistical areas” as defined by the U.S. Census Bureau, which are small enough to have local preferences but not so small that you end up with thousands of them. The special place names for each of these were trained not into the main language model (LM) used by Siri, but into tiny adjunct models (called Geo-LMs) that can be tagged in if the user is looking for a POI using those location-indicating phrases from above.

So when you ask “who is Machiavelli,” you get the normal answer. But when you ask “where is Machiavelli’s,” that prompts the system to query the local Geo-LM (your location is known, of course) and check whether Machiavelli’s is on the list of local POIs (it should be, because the food is great there). Now Siri knows to respond with directions to the restaurant and not to the actual castle where Machiavelli was imprisoned.

Doing this cut the error rate by huge amount – from as much as 25-30 percent to 10-15. That means getting the right result 8 or 9 out of 10 times rather than 2 out of 3; a qualitative improvement that could prevent people from abandoning Siri queries in frustration when it repeatedly fails to understand what they want.

What’s great about this approach is that it’s relatively simple (if not trivial) to expand to other languages and domains. There’s no reason it wouldn’t work for Spanish or Korean, as long as there’s enough data to build it on. And for that matter, why shouldn’t Siri have a special vocabulary set for people in a certain jargon-heavy industry, to reduce spelling errors in notes?

This improved capability is already out, so you should be able to test it out now — or maybe you have been for the last few weeks and didn’t even know it.