Month: August 2018

Palm’s smartphone return appears to still be on track for 2018. Last year, an executive at TCL confirmed that the dearly departed mobile brand would be making a comeback as part of the smartphone conglomerate’s portfolio, and with a little less than five months left in the year, the “PVG100” has hit the FCC and Wi-Fi Alliance.

The handset was spotted by Android Police, but we don’t really have much more to go on than a name and a couple of Wi-Fi bands. As the site notes, however, the absence of 5GHz support leads one to surmise that this won’t exactly be a barn-burning flagship. The handset also looks to be running Android 8.1 — not really a surprise, given that Android Pie is still limited to Pixel and a smattering of other devices.

We’ve reached out to TCL for more information, but I don’t anticipate hearing much until the phone is officially official. Meantime, I’d expect we’re looking at something similar to the company’s recent BlackBerry brand reboot. That is to say, some stylistic choices that evoke bygone products like the Treo or Pre, in hopes of triggering some smartphone nostalgia buried deep inside our lizard brains.

Like the KeyOne, however, the homage will only be skin deep. After all, can you really have a true Palm device without Palm OS webOS? Sadly, the latter is mostly found on LG TVs and refrigerators these days, but perhaps a stylish Android skin could help trigger some of those smartphone memories.

TCL’s owned the Palm name since 2014, and the relative success of the reborn BlackBerry line could be exactly the motivation the company needs to dust off the old brand.

Skype Classic is not being killed off…well, not just yet. In July, Microsoft announced Skype 8.0 was launching on the desktop, and that it would be shutting down version 7.0 (aka Skype Classic) as a result. The older version would no longer function after September 1, 2018, it had said. However, the company has now decided to hold off on Skype 7.0’s shutdown for the time being, following significant user backlash.

In a post published to its community forum, Microsoft announced that support for Skype Classic would be extended.

It reads, in full:

******UPDATE******

Based on customer feedback, we are extending support for Skype 7 (Skype classic) for some time. Our customers can continue to use Skype classic until then.

Thanks for all your comments – we are listening. We are working to bring all the features you’ve asked for into Skype 8.

Watch this space.

Beyond the post itself, Microsoft isn’t sharing any further information about the closure or its plans. So it’s unclear at this time when Skype Classic will be closed down for good. From the sounds of things, however, Microsoft’s goal is to bring the features users are demanding to Skype version 8.0 before ending support for version 7.0.

Some Skype Classic users were so upset about the impending shutdown, they even started a Change.org petition, which pleaded with Microsoft to “keep the desktop version of Skype alive for professional users!”

The petition stressed that the way pros used Skype is different from a mainstream audience – the one Microsoft is now seemingly trying to court with things like @mentions and emoji reactions, and a more colorful and youthful user interface.

Professional users were especially concerned about their ability to have multiple conversations happening at the same time across several windows; about losing an app that offers high information density; and about not having control over the application for customization purposes, for example.

There was also a bit of general backlash against the various visual changes, seemingly inspired by other social apps.

As the petition noted: “a professional user know what he needs and what he wants, so do not add, change or remove something unless there is a overwhelming [sic] demand for a change from the current user base.”

To what extent Microsoft will address the needs of this pro user base are unknown, but it seems that until it comes to some sort of decision on the matter, Skype Classic will remain.

 

 

Health tech continues to make impressive strides forward, but some pieces of the healthcare puzzle are still lagging way behind.

Communication is one of those pieces. But a startup called Klara, which just received $11.5 million in Series A, is looking to change that.

FirstMark Capital led the round, with participation from existing investors Lerer Hippeau, Project A Ventures, and Atlantic Labs, alongside a few angels including Zac Weinberg and Nat Turner (Flatiron Health founders), Vivek Garipalli (Clover Health founder and CEO) and Clark Valberg (InVision founder and CEO).

Led by founders and co-CEOs Simon Bolz and Simon Lorenz, Klara looks to rethink the way that communication is handled across the healthcare industry.

As it stands now, the vast majority of communication across a practice, both internally and with patients, happens either in person or on the phone. A good deal of this communication is either diagnostic, or part of the treatment, and yet phone calls and one-on-one convos don’t offer a record of the conversation. They also take time.

According to Klara, the average practice misses around 34 percent of calls. Missed calls turn into calls back, which often turns into an endless game of phone tag. These back-and-forth calls take up a good chunk of a practice staff’s time.

But Klara, a HIPAA-compliant messaging service, saves up to two hours of time for a medical practice’s staff each day. The service lets all departments of a practice, from doctors to physician’s assistants to nurses to the payments department and the scheduling department, communicate via text around a patients diagnosis and treatment. The platform also allows medical staff to communicate directly with a patient regarding scheduling and treatment.

Not only does this save time for the staff, and reach patients where they want to be reached, but it also saves money. According to Klara, doctors estimate that phone calls alone cost between $15 and $20 each, and that prescription renewal calls alone cost around $10,000/year.

Klara hasn’t finalized its pricing, but charges on a per-month basis based on the size of the practice.

The long-term vision for Klara is to incorporate complementary services, like payments and scheduling services, as well as insurance carriers and pharmacies. The idea is to turn Klara into the fabric of the healthcare system.

Klara says it currently has thousands of practices on the platform, with hundreds of thousands of patients. As part of the funding deal, FirstMark’s Amish Jani will join the board.

While this animated fellow looks like something out of NBA 2K18, it’s really an AI that’s learning how to dribble in real time. The AI starts out fumbling the ball a bit and by cycle 95 it is able to do some real Harlem Globetrotters stuff. In short, what you’re watching is a human-like avatar learning a very specialized human movement.

To do this researchers at Carnegie Mellon and DeepMotion, Inc. created a “physics-based, real-time method for controlling animated characters that can learn dribbling skills from experience.” The system, which uses “deep reinforcement learning,” can use motion capture date to learn basic movements.

“Once the skills are learned, new motions can be simulated much faster than real-time,” said CMU professor Jessica Hodgins.

Once the avatar learns a basic movement, advanced movements come more easily including dribbling between the legs and crossovers.

From the release:

A physics-based method has the potential to create more realistic games, but getting the subtle details right is difficult. That’s especially so for dribbling a basketball because player contact with the ball is brief and finger position is critical. Some details, such as the way a ball may continue spinning briefly when it makes light contact with the player’s hands, are tough to reproduce. And once the ball is released, the player has to anticipate when and where the ball will return.

The program learned the skills in two stages — first it mastered locomotion and then learned how to control the arms and hands and, through them, the motion of the ball. This decoupled approach is sufficient for actions such as dribbling or perhaps juggling, where the interaction between the character and the object doesn’t have an effect on the character’s balance. Further work is required to address sports, such as soccer, where balance is tightly coupled with game maneuvers, Liu said.

The system could pave the way for smarter online avatars and even translate into physical interactions with the real world.

Last month, Instapaper spun out from Pinterest – two years after being acquired – to again become its own independent “read later” service. Today, the new company is announcing a plan that will allow it to sustain itself in the years ahead: yes, its subscription service has returned. The company is relaunching its Instapaper Premium subscription service for $2.99 per month or $29.99 per year. This offers a variety of upgraded features to Instapaper users, including an ad-free website, full-text search, and more. It’s also live again in the EU, as it has now become GDPR compliant.

Instapaper’s relaunched Premium service will include the following:

• Full-text search for all articles in your account
• Unlimited Notes
• Text-to-Speech playlists on mobile
• Speed reading to get through all of your articles up to 3x faster
• An ad-free Instapaper website
• “Send to Kindle” using a bookmarklet or our mobile apps

These are the same features that Instapaper had made free for all, directly following its acquisition by Pinterest.

In doing so, Instapaper became a more compelling alternative to rival Pocket, which continued to charge for things like ad-free browsing and full-text search. But it also raised the question as to what Pinterest aimed to do with Instapaper going forward – if it wasn’t bringing in its own revenues, there was concern the service was being put in maintenance-only mode.

In truth, Instapaper never quite made sense for Pinterest, beyond both sharing a similar focus in allowing users to save pieces of the web to their personal collections – in Instapaper’s case, articles to be read; for Pinterest, just about anything else. Of course, it also brought to Pinterest a valuable team of engineers.

The companies had said at the time of the acquisition they would work on the development of Rich Pins. Pinterest today offers Article Pins that let users save stories they want to read. But it has never become known as an Instapaper alternative.

Instapaper has lived through several ownership changes since being first founded by Marco Arment. It was later sold to Betaworks, and then to Pinterest. Now the same team who have been working on Instapaper since the sale to Betaworks in 2013 are back in charge of the new company called Instant Paper, Inc.

They’ve spent the last two months working on becoming GDPR-compliant, and today say they’ve again made the service available to European Union users as a result.

“We are very sorry for the extended downtime and, as a token of our apology, we are giving six months of Instapaper Premium to all EU users affected by the outage,” the company apologized in its announcement.

“We’ve updated our privacy policy to include the rights afforded to EU users under the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). Additionally, in the interest of transparency, we are posting our privacy policy to GitHub where you can view a versioned history of all the changes to our privacy policy.” the blog post also noted.

Those interested in upgrading to Instapaper Premium can do so here.

WhoCanFixMyCar, the U.K. online car repair marketplace, has secured £4 million in new funding. Backing the startup is Shell Ventures — the corporate venture arm of Shell — in addition to chairman Sir Trevor Chinn (who previously chaired the boards ofAA, Kwik Fit and RAC), Active Partners, and Venrex Investment Management.

Launched in 2011 by former investment bankers Al Preston and Ian Griffiths, WhoCanFixMyCar.com claims to be the biggest online marketplace in the U.K. for matching car owners with repair garages (although the likes of ClickMechanic might not agree, despite having slightly different models).

Specifically, the company, which has offices in Newcastle upon Tyne, London and Kiev, operates a local garage and mechanic online comparison service, allowing drivers to post jobs and receive quotes from local garages and mechanics.

The platform currently has 11,500 garages registered to the site, and says it has processed 1 million repair requests from U.K. drivers and receives circa 60,000 new job requests from drivers every month.

This, I’m told, has seen single site garages obtaining around 600 new customers per year on average through WhoCanFixMyCar, with top regional garage groups securing 3,000-4,000 bookings per year.

Furthermore, Shell’s investment via Shell Ventures follows the development of the Shell Helix Service Specialist Network, a recently launched scheme which allows independent workshops on the WhoCanFixMyCar.com site to be officially associated with Shell. In other words, strike this up as potentially quite a strategic investment for Shell.

Armed with a cash injection, Al Preston, co-founder of WhoCanFixMyCar.com, says that the plan it to keep scaling the startup’s activities and consolidate its position in the UK.” We are also focusing on new products and solutions that will further benefit our garage network and provide car owners with a better, richer experience when it comes to car maintenance and repairs,” he says.

Maybe a year and a half after Russian interference was believed to have a key impact on the election of a U.S. president isn’t the best time to be floating new voting technologies. Not if you’re looking to avoid some major skepticism, at least.

But West Virginia is going ahead with plans to allow some limited voting through a smartphone app called Voatz, nonetheless. The plan, spearheaded by West Virginia Secretary of State Mac Warner, will utilize the Boston-based startup’s technology to allow troops stationed abroad to vote in the upcoming November midterm.

Both Voatz and Warner, naturally, tout the security of the app. Indentification requires a user to take a selfie, which is matched with a state I.D. using facial recognition. Ballots are then anonymous and recorded with blockchain tech.

Naturally, not everyone is thrilled about the idea.

“Mobile voting is a horrific idea,” the Center for Democracy and Technology’s Joseph Lorenzo Hall, told CNN. “It’s internet voting on people’s horribly secured devices, over our horrible networks, to servers that are very difficult to secure without a physical paper record of the vote.”

Not a fan, apparently.

The state has been testing the tech, and Warner says that paper will still be an option for those serving abroad, even as it offers access to smartphone voting. The lack of paper trail for electronic voting, however, is generally considered a bit of a nonstarter, and recent events will likely only make security experts more wary of adopting new tech.

The number of tech platforms taking action against Alex Jones, the far right InfoWars conspiracy theorist and hate speech preacher, has been rising in recent weeks — with bans or partial bans including from Google, Apple and Facebook.

However, as we noted earlier, Twitter is not among them. Although it has banned known hate peddlers before.

Jones continues to be allowed a presence on Twitter’s platform — and is using his verified Twitter account to scream about being censored all over the mainstream place, hyperventilating at one point in the past 16 hours that ‘censoring Alex Jones is censoring everyone’ — because, and I quote, “we’re all Alex Jones now”.

(Fact check: No, we’re not… And, Alex, if you’re reading this, we suggest you take heart from the ideas in this Onion article and find a spot in your local park.)

We asked Twitter why it has not banned Jones outright, given that its own rules service proscribe hate speech and hateful conduct…

Abuse: You may not engage in the targeted harassment of someone, or incite other people to do so. We consider abusive behavior an attempt to harass, intimidate, or silence someone else’s voice.

Hateful conduct: You may not promote violence against, threaten, or harass other people on the basis of race, ethnicity, national origin, sexual orientation, gender, gender identity, religious affiliation, age, disability, or serious disease. Read more about our hateful conduct policy.

Add to that, CEO Jack Dorsey has made it his high profile mission of late to (try to) improve conversational health on the platform. So it seems fair to wonder how Twitter continuing to enable a peddler of toxic lies and hate is going to achieve that?

While Twitter would not provide a statement about Jones’ continued presence on its platform, a spokesman told us that InfoWars and Jones’ personal account are not in violation of Twitter (or Periscope’s) ToS . At least not yet. Though he pointed out it could of course take action in the future — i.e. if it’s made aware of particular tweets that violate its rules.

Twitter’s position therefore appears to be that the content posted by InfoWars to other social media platforms is different to the content Jones posts to Twitter itself — ergo, its (hedgy & fudgy) argument essentially boils down to saying Jones is walking a fine enough line on Twitter itself to avoid a ban, because he hasn’t literally tweeted content that violates the letter of Twitter’s ToS.

(Though he has tweeted stuff like “the censorship of Infowars just vindicates everything we’ve been saying” — and given the hate-filled, violently untruthful things he has been saying all over the Internet, he’s essentially re-packaged all those lies into that single tweet, so… )

To spell out Twitter’s fudge: The fact of Jones being a known conspiracy theorist and widely visible hate preacher is not being factored into its ToS enforcement decisions.

The company says it’s judging the man by his output on Twitter — which means it’s failing to take into account the wider context around Jones’ tweets, i.e. all the lies and hate he peddles elsewhere (and indeed all the insinuating nods and dog whistles he makes to his followers on Twitter) — and by doing so it is in fact enabling the continued spread of hate via the wink-wink-nod-nod back door.

Twitter’s spokesman did not want to engage in a lengthy back and forth conversation, healthy or otherwise, about Jones/InfoWars so it was not possible to get a response from the company on that point.

However it does argue, i.e. in defense of its fudged position, that keeping purveyors of false news on its platform allows for an open, real-time debate which in turn allows for their lies to be challenged and debunked by people who are in their right minds — so, basically, this is the ‘fight bad speech with more speech argument’ that’s so beloved of people already enjoying powerful privilege.

The problem with that argument (actually, there are many) is it does not factor in the human cost; the people suffering directly because toxic lies impact their lives. Nor the cost to truth itself; To belief in the veracity and authenticity of credible sources of information which are under sustained and vicious attack by anti-truthers like Jones; The corrosive impact on professional journalism from lies being packaged and peddled under the lying banner of self-styled ‘truth journalism’ that Jones misappropriates. Nor the cost to society from hate speech whose very purpose is to rip up the social fabric and take down civic values — and, in the case of Jones’ particular bilious flavor, to further bang the drum of abuse via the medium of toxic disinformation — to further amplify and spread his pollution, via the power of untruth — to whip up masses of non-critically thinking conspiracy-prone followers. I could go on. (I have here.)

The amplification effect of social media platforms — combined with cynical tricks used by hate peddlers to game algorithms, such as bots retweeting and liking content to make it seem more popular than it is — makes this stuff a major, major problem.

‘Bad speech’ on such powerful platforms can become not just something to roll your eyes at and laughingly dismiss, but a toxic force that bullies, beats down and drowns out other types of speech — perhaps most especially truthful speech, because falsehood flies (and online it’s got rocket fuel) — and so can have a very deleterious impact on conversational health.

Really, it needs to be handled in a very different way. Which means Twitter’s position on Jones, and hateful anti-truthers in general, looks both flawed and weak.

It’s also now looking increasingly isolated, as other tech platforms are taking action.

Twitter’s spokesman also implied the company is working on tuning its systems to actively surface high quality counter-narratives and rebuttals to toxic BS — such as in replies to known purveyors of fake news like InfoWars.

But while such work is to be applauded, working on a fix also means you don’t actually have a fix yet. Meanwhile the lies you’re not stopping are spreading on your platform — at horrible and high cost to people and society.

It’s hard to see this as a defensible position.

And while Twitter keeps sitting on its fence, Jones’ hate speech and toxic lies, broadcast to millions as a weapon of violent disinformation, have got his video show booted from YouTube (which, after first issuing a strike yesterday then terminated his page for “violating YouTube’s Community Guidelines”).

The platform had removed ads from his channel back in March — but had not then (as Jones falsely claimed at the time) banned it. That decision took another almost half year for YouTube to arrive at.

Also yesterday, almost all of Jones’ podcasts were pulled by Apple, with the company saying it does not tolerate hate speech. “We believe in representing a wide range of views, so long as people are respectful to those with differing opinions,” it added.

Earlier this month, music streaming service Spotify also removed some of Jones’ podcasts for violating its hate-speech policy.

Even Facebook removed a bunch of Jones’ videos late last month, for violating its community standards — albeit after some dithering, and what looked like a lot of internal confusion.

The social media behemoth also imposed a 30-day ban on Jones’ personal account for posting the videos, and served him a warning notice for the InfoWars Facebook Page he controls.

Facebook later clarified it had banned Jones’ personal profile because he had previously received a warning — whereas the InfoWars Page had not, hence the latter only getting a strike.

There have even been bans from some unlikely quarters: YouPorn just announced action against Jones for a ToS violation — nixing his ability to try to pass off anti-truth hate preaching as a porn alternative on its platform.

Pinterest, too, removed Jones’ ‘hate, lies & supplements’ page after Mashable made enquiries.

So, uh, other responses than Twitter’s (of doing nothing) are widely possible.

On Twitter, Jones also benefits from being able to distinguish his account from any would-be imitators or satirists, because he has a verified account — denoted on the platform by a blue check mark badge.

We asked Twitter why it hasn’t removed Jones’ blue badge — given that the company has, until relatively recently, been rethinking its verification program. And last year it actively removed blue badges from a number of white supremacists because it was worried it looked like it had been endorsing them. Yet Jones — who spins the gigantic lie of ‘white genocide’ — continues to keep his.

Twitter’s spokesman pointed us to this tweet last month from product lead, Kayvon Beykpour, who wrote that updating the program “isn’t a top priority for us right now”.

Beykpour went on to explain that while Twitter had “paused” public verification last November (because “we wanted to address the issue that verifying the authenticity of an account was being conflated with endorsement”), it subsequently paused its own ‘pause for thought’ on having verified some very toxic individuals, with Beykpour writing in an email to staff in July:

Though the current state of Verification is definitely not ideal (opaque criteria and process, inconsistency in our procedures, external frustration from customers), I don’t believe we have the bandwidth to address this holistically (policy, process, product, and a plan around how & when these fit together) without coming at the cost of our other priorities and distracting the team.

At the same time Beykpour admits in the thread that Twitter has been ‘unpausing’ its pause on verification in some circumstances (“we still verify accounts ad hoc when we think it serves the public conversation & is in line with our policy”); but not, evidently, going so far as to unpause its pause on removing badges from hateful people who gain unjustified authenticity and authority from the perceived endorsement of Twitter verification — such as in ‘ad hoc’ situations where doing so might be terribly, terribly appropriate. Like, uh, this one.

Beykpour wrote that verification would be addressed by Twitter post-election. So it’s presumably sticking to its lack of having a policy at all right now, for now. (“I know this isn’t the most satisfying news, but I wanted to be transparent about our priorities,” he concluded.)

Twitter’s spokesman told us it doesn’t have anything further to share on verification at this point.

Jones’ toxic activity on social media has included spreading the horrendous lie that children who died in the Sandy Hook U.S. school shooting were ‘crisis actors’.

So, for now, a man who lies about the violent death of little children continues to be privileged with a badge on his not-at-all-banned Twitter account.

Two of the parents of a child who died at the school wrote an open letter to Facebook’s founder, Mark Zuckerberg, last month, describing how toxic lies about the school shooting spread via social media had metastasized into violent hate and threats directed at them.

“Our families are in danger as a direct result of the hundreds of thousands of people who see and believe the lies and hate speech, which you have decided should be protected,” wrote Lenny Pozner and Veronique De La Rosa, the parents of Noah, who died on 14 December, 2012, at the age of six.

“What makes the entire situation all the more horrific is that we have had to wage an almost inconceivable battle with Facebook to provide us with the most basic of protections to remove the most offensive and incendiary content.”

Even Financial, a fintech startup that connects the disparate entities of the financial services industry, recently raised a $18.8 million Series A round led by GreatPoint Ventures with participation from Goldman Sachs, Canaan Partners, F-Prime Capital, Lerer Hippeau and others.

The close of its Series A comes on the heels of a $3 million investment from American Express Ventures, Plug & Play and Arab Angels in February.

“The round is notable because it signifies the buy-in we’re seeing from the largest institutions in the country,” Even co-founder and CEO Phillip Rosen told TechCrunch. “This is really about the maturation of the fintech ecosystem.”

Even offers products like a pre-approval API, real-time pricing, machine learning optimization, a product comparison and recommendation engine for consumers and more.

“We provide a Twilio-style API for any consumer facing app or site to integrate,” Rosen said. “Ideally, a consumer doesn’t know Eden Financial exists.”

In March, for example, Even expanded its partnership with Credit.com to power its personal loans marketplace. Credit.com offers consumers credit scores, as well as offers and loans. Other Even partners include The Penny Hoarder and Transunion, which Even connects with financial institutions like Prosper, Lending Club and Marcus by Goldman Sachs.

Eden is currently doing over $40 million a month in personal loan funding and it’s ramping up partnerships with credit card companies like American Express.

“It’s now a time to take advantage of this rapid growth,” Rosen said. “We have an opportunity to build out an infrastructure play, similar to what we’ve seen in travel search.”

Evolute, a 3-year old startup out of Mountain View, officially launched the Evolute platform today with the goal of helping large organizations migrate applications to containers and manage those containers at scale.

Evolute founder and CEO Kristopher Francisco says he wants to give all Fortune 500 companies access to the same technology that big companies like Apple and Google enjoy because of their size and scale.

“We’re really focused on enabling enterprise companies to do two things really well. The first thing is to be able to systematically move into the container technology. And the second thing is to be able to run operationally at scale with existing and new applications that they’re creating in their enterprise environment,” Francisco explained.

While there are a number of sophisticated competing technologies out there, he says that his company has come up with some serious differentiators. For starters, getting legacy tech into containers has proven a time-consuming and challenging process. In fact, he says manually moving a legacy app and all its dependencies to a container has typically taken 3-6 months per application.

He claims his company has reduced that process to minutes, putting containerization within reach of just about any large organization that wants to move their existing applications to container technology, while reducing the total ramp-up time to convert a portfolio of existing applications from years to a couple of weeks.

The second part of the equation is managing the containers, and Francisco acknowledges that there are other platforms out there for running containers in production including Kubernetes, the open source container orchestration tool, but he says his company’s ability to manage containers at scale separates him from the pack.

“In the enterprise, the reason that you see the [containerization] adoption numbers being so low is partially because of the scale challenge they face. In the Evolute platform, we actually provide them the native networking, security and management capabilities to be able to run at scale,” he said.

The company also announced that it been invited to join the Chevron Technology Ventures’ Catalyst Program, which provides support for early stage companies like Evolute. This could help push Evolute to business units inside Chevron looking to move into containerization technology and be big boost for the startup.

The company has been around in since 2015 and boasts several other Fortune 500 companies beyond Chevron as customers, although it is not in a position to name them publicly just yet. The company has 5 full time employees and has raised $500,000 in seed money across two rounds, according to data on Crunchbase.