Month: August 2018

Tesla’s fleet internet network and website appear to currently be down for some users and it’s causing problems for vehicle owners who rely on the Tesla app.

Electrek reported on the outage earlier and users across Twitter have been complaining about being unable to log into the company’s desktop site or mobile app. Reports have been popping up for the past couple hours and the company’s website is oddly also down currently. We’ve reached out to Tesla for more details of what exactly is happening.

What does that mean for Tesla owners right now? Well, it definitely means that they can’t get any new updates for the time being or see details about their vehicle in the app. Life is a lot rougher for users who may be solely relying on the Tesla app to unlock or start their car and don’t have app access to do either currently.

Updating

Tesla’s chief people officer Gaby Toledano, and one of the few female executives at the automaker, is on leave of absence 15 months after taking the senior management position.

The company confirmed she was on leave and did not provide a timeline of when she might return or if this move was more permanent.

“Gaby previously asked to go on leave to spend time with her family, and we support that. The HR team has been sharing her responsibilities,” the company said in a statement.

Toledano joined Tesla in May 2017 after 10 years on the executive team at video game publisher Electronic Arts. She has also led HR leadership positions at Siebel Systems, Microsoft, and Oracle. She replaced Arnnon Geshuri, who left the company after eight years amid complaints about work conditions at its Fremont factory.

Unlike the company’s public CEO Elon Musk, Toledano was one of the many in Tesla’s senior management team who rarely made public appearances, if any. The company has long eschewed attention on its executives, with the occasional exception of chief designer Franz von Holzhausen and CTO JB Straubel.

Toledano and several other executives made a rare public appearance in June when Musk pulled them on stage at Tesla’s annual shareholder meeting.

Toledano’s leave follows the departure of Sarah O’Brien, who headed up Tesla’s communications team. Laurie Shelby, who heads the company’s environmental, health and safety efforts, and Cindy Nicola, head of global recruiting, are the last remaining female executives at the company.

Doug Field, senior vice president of engineering, took what the company described as a leave of absence from the company in May. At the time, the company said “Doug is just taking some time off to recharge and spend time with his family. He has not left Tesla.”

Field left the company for good in July.

SurveyMonkey, which helps businesses gather feedback through its survey platform, has submitted paperwork to the SEC for its upcoming NASDAQ public offering. The company plans to raise $100 million in the IPO, per the filing, though that’s likely a placeholder amount.

The company, which will list under the symbol SVMK, has yet to price its shares. Most recently, SurveyMonkey brought in $250 million from Tiger Global, ICONIQ Capital and Social+Capital Partnership. The financing valued the company at $2 billion.

SurveyMonkey didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

At the ripe age of 19, San Mateo, Calif.-based SurveyMonkey has been prepping an IPO for years now, finally filing confidentially with the SEC via the JOBS Act, which lets companies test the waters before they formally release an S-1, in mid-June.

Despite its age, the company still isn’t profitable. SurveyMonkey reported a net loss of $27.18 million on $121 million in revenue in the first half of 2018. During the same period last year, it had a $19 million net loss on $106.5 million in revenue. In all of 2017, SurveyMonkey posted a $24 million net loss on $219 million in revenue.

The filing lists J.P. Morgan as the lead underwriter for the IPO.

The online polling company has raised some $600 million across several rounds of equity funding from investors, including Tiger Global, which owns a 29.3 percent pre-IPO stake. Its board includes Serena Williams and Sheryl Sandberg.

Sandberg’s late husband Dave Goldberg was the founder and former CEO of the company; he passed away in 2015. She owns 10,318,577 shares, but plans to “donate all shares beneficially owned by her (or the proceeds from the sale thereof) to the Sheryl Sandberg and Dave Goldberg Family Foundation as part of fulfilling their philanthropic commitment to the Giving Pledge,” the filing states.

SurveyMonkey joins a herd of unicorns that have announced plans to transition into the public sphere this year. Eventbrite, for example, submitted its IPO paperwork last week, with plans to raise $200 million from selling Class A shares.

Smartsheet, Zuora, Dropbox and DocuSign have all completed their public debuts this year.

Thousands of developers, designers, hackers and marketers from around the world worked for months to submit their creations to our first Virtual Hackathon, which takes place at Disrupt San Francisco on September 5-7. It wasn’t easy, but we narrowed the field down to 30 semi-finalists, and we can’t wait to reveal the winner at the show.

But right now, we want to send a huge shout-out of thanks and appreciation to nine outstanding companies for adding even more excitement to the Virtual Hackathon by sponsoring an exciting range of challenging contests. We’re looking at you, Byton, Viond, Visa, Amazon Alexa, Novartis, TomTom, Here Mobility, Sony Pictures and United Airlines. Tip o’ the hat!

These hack contests ranged from ways to use artificial intelligence in the age of autonomous cars to building an app that gives customers a unique way to book, pay for and view airline reservations — and so much in between. You can find the full list of challenges and prizes here.

We’re thrilled to announce the sponsored contest winners — a determined and creative lot to say the least. Drum roll, please!

Byton

• First place: CAR-O-KE
• Second place: Talk Talk

Viond  

• First place: A Trip to Space
• Second place: Make A Change
• Third place: World of Adventure
• Honorable mention: Jump360

Visa

• First place: Blindsight
• Second place: AI Vision
• Third place: Agri360

Amazon Alexa

• First place: AI Vision
• Second place: LadyBeats
• Third place: Smart Plant IoT
• Honorable mention: Gaze VUI and Winnie

Novartis   

• Veta Health
• Medable
• Wavy
• Pulse
• Cardios

TomTom

• ARound

Here Mobility     

• Blindsight

Sony Pictures   

• Sound Shop

United Airlines

• Pickle

Thank you all for participating and hope to see you at Disrupt SF next week!

Twitter chief executive Jack Dorsey and Facebook chief operations officer Sheryl Sandberg will testify in an open hearing at the Senate Intelligence Committee next week, the committee’s chairman has confirmed.

Larry Page, chief executive of Google parent company Alphabet, was also invited but has not confirmed his attendance, a committee spokesperson confirmed to TechCrunch.

Sen. Richard Burr (R-NC) said in a release that the social media giants will be asked about their responses to foreign influence operations on their platforms in an open hearing on September 5.

It will be the second time the Senate Intelligence Committee, which oversees the government’s intelligence and surveillance efforts, will have called the companies to testify. But it will be the first time that senior leadership will attend — though, Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg did attend a House Energy and Commerce Committee hearing in April.

It comes in the wake of Twitter and Facebook recently announcing the suspension of accounts from their platforms that they believe to be linked to Iranian and Russian political meddling. Social media companies have been increasingly under the spotlight in the past years following Russian efforts to influence the 2016 presidential election with disinformation.

A Twitter spokesperson said the company didn’t yet have details to share on the committee’s prospective questions. TechCrunch also reached out to Google and Facebook for comment and will update when we hear back.

Valimail, an enterprise email security firm, announced that it will offer its email protections for free to relevant government workers and campaigns through the 2018 midterms. That offer covers state election boards, voting system vendors and major party U.S. election campaigns, including congressional, statewide and gubernatorial candidates. The company will also offer the same email fraud prevention service, known as Valimail Enforce, to the Democratic National Committee and Republican National Committee at no cost through the 2020 U.S. presidential election.

“Bad actors are trying to disrupt our elections and sow chaos in our democracy,” Valimail CEO and co-founder Alexander García-Tobar said in a statement. “They are targeting email because it is one of the weakest points in digital communications.”

As Valimail observes, spear phishing attempts in which an attacker tricks their target into opening a malicious email are a particular problem. In a spear phishing attack, a hacker can compromise a target’s login credentials by getting them to click on a fraudulent link or just by pretending to be someone they aren’t and obtaining usernames, passwords and other sensitive information. (The suspected Russian government-affiliated attackers who compromised a Gmail account belonging to Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign chair John Podesta used spear phishing to achieve their goals.)

Spear phishing attacks often employ email spoofing, a strategy in which the attacker disguises their true identity and makes an email look like it’s coming from a trusted domain. Citing its own research, Valimail notes that 90 percent of cyberattacks originate in spear phishing and two-thirds of those employ a fake “from” address to target potential victims.

Valimail Enforce prevents this kind of attack with an email authentication system that only allows authorized senders to use a domain name. The company’s email authentication service employs standards like SPF, DKIM and DMARC and is Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program (FedRAMP) authorized, making it easier for government entities to adopt its security tools.

Though no states and campaigns have signed on to the new offering yet, Valimail has been talking with the National Association of State Election Directors and the Department of Homeland Security, the federal agency tasked with coordinating security for election systems — now designated as critical infrastructure — among the states. Valimail follows companies like Cloudflare and Synack in offering its services at no cost to help secure election systems.

Due to the state and local-led nature of U.S. elections, it’s very difficult to ensure that security measures can be uniformly implemented and enforced across the board. It’s too late for the patchwork of post-2016 election security efforts to provide any kind of comprehensive assurance for the 2018 midterms, but private tech companies are stepping in to fill some of the gaps. At the very least, getting some security relationships in place and educating state and local officials on potential precautions should be a useful stepping stone to more secure elections by 2020.

Pro-privacy search engine DuckDuckGo, which offers an alternative to surveillance engines like Google, has quietly picked up $10M in fresh funding from Canadian pension fund Omers’ VC arm. The Globe and Mail reported the news earlier this month.

It’s only the second funding round for the ten year old company — which last picked up $3M in VC all the way back in 2011, according to Crunchbase.

In a blog post announcing the investment, Omers Ventures argues that privacy and security concerns have “risen to the forefront of public consciousness” over the past five years — noting how governments are responding to public demand and data breaches and “starting to take real action”, citing the European Union’s updated privacy framework, GDPR, as one example.

With that conviction in mind, the fund actively pursued an investment in DDG, which has been profitable (via non-tracking advertising) since 2014 so was not in need of a cash injection. And, indeed, initially refused one. But Omers persisted and was able to persuade founder Gabriel Weinberg to take the money to help support growth objectives for DDG, “particularly internationally”, and including in Canada (where the fund is based).

Expanding its privacy and security offerings is another rational for DDG taking the funding.

At the start of this year the company branched out from its core product of private (non-tracking) search — adding a tracker blocker and other privacy and security tools to create a functional bundle to help web users keep their browsing private too.

In an interview with Bloomberg, Weinberg said the focus with Omers is “to figure out how to take that globally as they’re a global pension fund”.

Asked for more detail about the plans, he told TechCrunch: “While we are already global (and have been since launch in 2008), we are now trying to focus more on specific markets: In hiring, better tuning our search engine results for local markets, and expanding the channels we use to market DuckDuckGo to have more of a global focus.”

Hiring international staff will therefore be a big part of DDG’s growth push.

“We are focused on staffing up to continue to deliver the best all-in-one privacy solution (the one we launched at the beginning of the year) and marketing, with a more particular focus on outside of the US,” he said.

“Our top markets (in terms of search traffic) outside the US are: DE [Germany], UK, FR [France], CA [Canada], though we have significant growth and presence in most countries in terms of relative search market share.”

Weinberg added that Omers has “a deep personal interest and investment thesis in privacy, and do believe there is an inflection point now”.

A coalition of privacy groups are calling on lawmakers to fill the vacant positions on the government’s surveillance oversight board, which hasn’t fully functioned in almost two years.

The Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board, known as PCLOB, is a little-known but important group that helps to ensure that intelligence agencies and executive branch policies are falling within the law. The board’s work allows them to have access to classified programs run by the dozen-plus intelligence agencies and determine if they’re legal and effective, while balancing Americans’ privacy and civil liberties rights.

In its most recent unclassified major report in 2015, PCLOB called for an end of the NSA’s collection of Americans’ phone records.

But the board fell out of quorum when four members left the board last year, leaving just the chairperson. President Obama did not fill the vacancies before he left office, putting PCLOB’s work largely on ice.

A report by The Intercept said, citing obtained emails, that the board was “basically dead,” butt things were looking up when President Trump earlier this year picked a bipartisan range of five nominees to the board, including a computer science and policy professor and a former senior Justice Department lawyer were named in March. If confirmed by the Senate Judiciary Committee, the newly appointed members would put the board back into full swing.

Except the committee has dragged its feet. Hearings have only been heard on three nominees but a vote has yet to be scheduled.

A total of 31 privacy organizations and rights groups, including the ACLU, Open Technology Institute and the Center for Democracy & Technology signed on to the letter calling on the senate panel to push forward with the hearings and vote on the nominees.

“During the eleven years since Congress created the PCLOB as an independent agency, it has only operated with a quorum for four and one-half years,” the letter said. “Without a quorum, the PCLOB cannot issue oversight reports, provide the agency’s advice, or build upon the agency foundations laid by the original members. It is also critical that the PCLOB operate with a full bipartisan slate of qualified individuals.”

The coalition called the lack of quorum a “lost opportunity to better inform the public and facilitate Congressional action.”

Given the continuing aftermath of the massive leak of classified documents by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, the board’s work is more important than ever, the letter said.

Spokespeople for the Senate Judiciary Committee did not respond to a request for comment.

Next week, Bernie Sanders will introduce legislation aimed firmly at large companies he believes have taken advantage of “corporate welfare” by underpaying employees. Amazon and Walmart in particular have bore the brunt of the Senator’s criticisms, and the rhetoric has become increasingly heated over the the past few days.

Earlier today, Amazon accused Sanders of issuing “inaccurate and misleading” statements as he called the company out of warehouse conditions. The Vermont senator has since responded with a release, calling Amazon fulfillment center wages “absurd.”

“Thousands of Amazon employees are forced to rely on food stamps, Medicaid and public housing because their wages are too low,” Sanders says, “including 1 out of 3 of its workers in Arizona and 2,400 in Pennsylvania and Ohio, according to The New Food Economy. Bottom line: the taxpayers of this country should not have to subsidize employees at a company owned by Mr. Bezos who is worth $155 billion. That is absurd.”

In an interview yesterday, Sanders told TechCrunch that the company had not been forthcoming with information about employment. The company shot back, noting that the Senator had yet to take it up on its offer of a warehouse tour.

“In terms of visiting a fulfillment center, last month I was visiting Wisconsin and requested to visit the fulfillment center in Kenosha,” Sanders says. “Unfortunately, Amazon could not accommodate me then. In September, I look forward to visiting the fulfillment center in Chester, Virginia, and working out the details with Amazon. We have heard from workers there, including Navy veteran Seth King, about unsafe working conditions and at least one person has reportedly died at the warehouse.”

Sanders, of course, is far from the first person to raise issue with Amazon fulfillment center conditions. Stories have been floating around from current and former employees for years. CEO Jeff Bezos, who has been front and center in Sanders’ criticism recently told the press, “I am very proud of our working conditions, and I am very proud of the wages that we pay.”

The Atlantic has hired Facebook’s Alex Hardiman to head up its business and product efforts. She’ll join in the fall from Facebook, where she’s been serving as the social media giant’s head of news products.

In her new role, Hardiman will focus on digital consumer revenue, audience experience and product strategy, leading The Atlantic’s product, engineering, data and growth teams.

“I’ve always been a news person,” Hardiman said in a Facebook post. “It’s my passion during the workday and my guilty pleasure on nights and weekends. It’s why I spent a decade at The Times before coming to Facebook to help tackle some of the company’s formidable news challenges, and it’s why I’m now joining The Atlantic at a unique moment in its history.”

Hardiman joined Facebook in 2016, just as criticism against the platform for its role in spreading “fake news” began to spread like wildfire. She was promoted to lead its news efforts on the product side in May 2017. Before that, she spent more than a decade at The New York Times, completing her tenure as vice president of news products.

“Her leadership positions at both Facebook and The New York Times give her an unrivaled perspective on digital media, and her audience-first focus will sharpen the appeal of our work,” The Atlantic president Bob Cohn said in a statement. “All this will serve us extremely well as we aggressively expand our ambitions for 2019 and beyond.”   

At Facebook, Hardiman was involved in a variety of projects, including removing the trending feature and launching Facebook Watch. Both initiatives were part of a greater effort to remove fake news from the site and provide new avenues for more reliable news from trusted sources.

“Alex is a true leader who built a fantastic team,” a representative from Facebook told me. “She helped develop a framework and key news products for both people on Facebook and publishers. We wish her nothing but the best at The Atlantic.”

Here’s Hardiman’s full statement:

A Personal Update

I have some news to share: after two deeply gratifying years at Facebook, I’ve decided to leave and join The Atlantic in the fall.

I’ve always been a news person. It’s my passion during the workday and my guilty pleasure on nights and weekends. It’s why I spent a decade at The Times before coming to Facebook to help tackle some of the company’s formidable news challenges, and it’s why I’m now joining The Atlantic at a unique moment in its history.

Facebook has given me so many things for which I’m profoundly grateful: wildly talented colleagues, great relationships with news organizations that are reinventing their future, and deep humility for the difficulty of solving nuanced problems at Facebook’s scale. Facebook has a long way to go, but there’s important progress being made to rebuild trust with consumers and publishers. The people behind the scenes work like crazy to make that happen and they often fly under the radar, but you can read more about some of them here: https://www.cnet.com/…/the-cure-for-facebooks-fake-news-in…/. I’m proud of the News team’s mission-driven ethos and I couldn’t be more confident and optimistic about its future.

It therefore required an extraordinary opportunity to compel me to move on. The Atlantic has always been a part of my life when things got complicated. When I was conflicted about how to pursue professional ambition and motherhood at the same time, I found Anne Marie Slaughter’s perspective to be the most refreshing and relatable take on the issue. When I was trying to make sense of President Obama’s foreign policy, Jeffrey Goldberg’s reporting brought radical clarity and honesty to my understanding of America. Since before the Civil War, The Atlantic has consistently defined the most ambitious and contentious ideas of the moment. In today’s political and social climate, its role has never been more vital.

So when I met with The Atlantic and Emerson Collective teams to learn about the next phase of investment and growth, I already knew how much of a privilege it would be to join them. In my new role, I’ll be partnering with teams across The Atlantic to create digital products that people love, grow the company’s consumer revenue line, and transform The Atlantic from a media-centric organization to a leader in media and product. After having built products with hundreds of news organizations at Facebook from the outside, I’m particularly excited to return to tackle these opportunities with The Atlantic from within.

Facebook friends: thank you for everything. I’ve learned so much from you and have an unwavering appreciation for all that you do to better serve the people and publishers who use your products.

Future Atlantic colleagues: I can’t wait to get to work and join you on this important mission. Thank you for having me.