Nintendo’s been known to upgrade consoles with some regularity. It’s an easy way to keep audiences engaged over the long life of a system. Released in March 2017, the Switch certainly seems due for an update.
Sure, the hybrid console has been a runaway success for Nintendo, but after a year and a half, sales plateau, and some revamped hardware could be exactly the shot in the arm the device needs. According to a new report for The Wall Street Journal citing suppliers and other anonymous sources, Nintendo has a new version of the console in the works for later next year.
Details are still pretty thin — apparently Nintendo itself hasn’t figured out precisely what such an update would entail. A new screen is understandably pretty high up on the wish of upgrades to the console. After all, the current display was something of an afterthought for a console primarily designed to be plugged into a home entertainment system.
Price is still an important factor here, however. As such, a high-end OLED is probably out of the question. That said, there are still plenty of affordable options that can be pilfered from the smartphone space.
Timing-wise, the new Switch is expected to arrive “as soon as summer.” Nintendo, naturally, isn’t commenting.
U.S. prosecutors have charged seven suspects accused of working for the Russian GRU, the country’s military intelligence unit.
The Justice Department’s National Security Division alleged the seven hackers were part of “a conspiracy to use computer hacking to obtain non-public, health information about athletes and others in the files of anti-doping agencies in multiple countries, and release of stolen information selectively and sometimes misleadingly.”
Prosecutors accused the seven Russian residents — charged with several counts of computer fraud and abuse and money laundering — of hacking into the World Anti-Doping Agency and several media outlets, among others. The U.S. also accuses the hackers of carrying out a massive disinformation campaign in the run-up to the 2016 presidential election — including stealing documents believed to be the Democratic National Committee.
The suspects named as GRU officers are Aleksei Sergeyevich Morenets, 41, Evgenii Mikhaylovich, Serebriakov, 37, Ivan Sergeyevich Yermakov, 32, Artem Andreyevich Malyshev, 30, and Dmitriy Sergeyevich Badin, 27, who were each assigned to Military Unit 26165, and Oleg Mikhaylovich Sotnikov, 46, and Alexey Valerevich Minin, 46.
The indictment accused the hackers of “often using fictitious personas and proxy servers,” and said they “researched victims, sent spearphishing emails, and compiled, used, and monitored malware command and control servers.”
Among the victims were a nuclear energy company
“As part of its influence and disinformation efforts, the Fancy Bears’ Hack Team engaged in a concerted effort to draw media attention to the leaks through a proactive outreach campaign,” prosecutors said. (Fancy Bear is also widely known as APT28.) “The conspirators exchanged e-mails and private messages with approximately 186 reporters in an apparent attempt to amplify the exposure and effect of their message.”
The government said that the hacking efforts were part of a Russian government campaign set on “muddying or altering perceptions of the truth.”
“The actions of these seven hackers, all working as officials for the Russian government, were criminal, retaliatory, and damaging to innocent victims and the United States’ economy, as well as to world organizations,” said FBI director Christopher Wray. Their actions extended beyond borders, but so did the FBI’s investigation.
Three of the named Russians were also charged earlier this year as part of Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s probe into Russian interference in the 2016 election.
Although it’s not the first time that Russia has been linked or suspected of carrying out cyberattacks and spreading disinformation, the U.S. and U.K. have not until today officially accused the Kremlin of its role in these attacks.
The charges were filed hours after the U.K. and Dutch authorities found evidence that Russia had targeted the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons in The Hague in April. The OPCW was investigating the poisoning of ex-Russian spy Sergei Skripal, who is living in the U.K. in exile.
U.K. Foreign Secretary Jeremy Hunt said the government was weighing up further sanctions against Russia, which it blamed for the attack.
With Circle Invest, Circle has been trying to make it as easy as possible to get started with cryptocurrency trading. And the company wants to go one step further with collections of multiple tokens.
When it first launched, Circle Invest was pretty straightforward. You could download an app, sign up and buy Bitcoin, Bitcoin Cash, Ethereum, Ethereum Classic and Litecoin in just a few taps.
But the company then started adding more coins. And if you’re new to the cryptocurrency industry, it’s hard to understand the difference between Ethereum and Ethereum Classic if you weren’t looking at the market when the fork happened.
That’s why Circle introduced a feature called “buy the market”. In one tap, you can buy all the coins on Circle Invest, weighted depending on their respective market capitalization. For instance, the total market capitalization of Bitcoin is much higher than the market cap of Monero. So you’ll end up with a lot of bitcoins.
30 percent of Circle Invest users are using this feature. People who buy this package probably don’t invest as much as users who build their own portfolio, so it might not be 30 percent of Circle Invest’s transaction volume.
Coinbase recently introduced a similar feature called bundles. In just a few taps, you can purchase all the coins on Coinbase. Of course, both Coinbase and Circle Invest provide a limited selection of coins. But it’s clear that they both want to list more assets in the future.
With collections, you can buy a subset of the tokens available on Circle Invest. There are three packages for now — Platforms, Payments and Privacy. For instance, you’ll find Bitcoin, Bitcoin Cash, Stellar and Litecoin in the Payments collection. Once again, collections are weighted by market cap.
Recruitment websites are some of the oldest and most established residents of the internet, but if you’ve ever used them to find jobs or fill vacancies, you know that there is a lot of room for improvement in how they work. Now, a startup that is out to do just that by applying artificial intelligence to the task has raised a large round of capital to grow its business, both in terms of adding new technology and also expanding more internationally.
ZipRecruiter, a startup based out of LA that has built a marketplace for employers to post open positions, and — by way of AI — help job-seekers to connect to openings that best match their skills and interests, has raised $156 million in a Series B round of funding, at a valuation I understand from sources to be in the region of $1 billion.
This latest round is being led by Wellington Management Company and returning investor IVP, along with participation from unnamed existing investors. ZipRecruiter has in total now raised $219 million, with its previous round, $63 million led by IVP in 2014, being its first significant outside funding.
This latest money comes at a time when ZipRecruiter has already made a lot of headway in the job-seeking market. Ian Siegel, the co-founder and CEO, said that over 100,000 businesses, and 10 million job seekers, are using ZipRecruiter for their recruitment needs: Siegel estimates that ZipRecruiter is already accounting for about 10 percent of activity in the U.S. recruitment market, with over 5.6 million jobs listed on its app as I type this.
“Everything’s gone really well,” he said. (I find he’s a little prone to understatement, which maybe isn’t a bad thing in the sometimes-overheated world of tech startups.)
The company’s basic services revolve around two distinct areas. It provides listings for job openings on its own platform (which is primarily accessed by way of its mobile apps), and it disseminates jobs across a plethora of other sites — it works with the likes of newer entrants like Facebook, as well as more established players like LinkedIn. While the disseminating service hits potentially tens of thousands of sites and has its own benefits (although Siegel describes it as “posting and praying”), it’s the mobile app and the direct service that he believes is where the company has what he calls its “secret sauce”, a big data analytics exercise for matching candidates to roles.
“As soon as you post a job as an employer, we search through 10 million active job applicants to find the best matches,” he said. “This is not Boolean matching but deep learning that uses 64 different dimensions of information.”
This includes details like what other employers a person has shown interested in, how many times people have searched for openings for specific jobs (a measure of interest), and also how a particular candidate’s profile matches with those that an employer has shown interest in before.
Siegel says that this is not just an exercise in bringing the most impressive candidates to the top of the pile, again and again, and serving less qualified candidates uninteresting prospects, but it’s also not a silver bullet and might drive home some hard truths for those looking for their dream job.
“There are more jobs that need to be filled than there are unemployed in the US today,” he said. “There is a job for everyone, but that doesn’t mean everyone will get one.”
That brings ZipRecruiter to one way that it will likely develop in the years ahead.
“We’re really focused right now on continuing to improve the quality of the matching that our system is making, and optimising the mobile experience.” But in addition to that, he sees an opportunity in also helping candidates figure out why they are not matching well with the jobs they might aspire to have. “We are really good at helping you see jobs you’re likely to get, but what about jobs you aspire to that may not naturally make you a match? In the not too distant future, we will be able to say if you add one more skill all these jobs will become available to you. The nature of the guidance will be very interesting.”
You can see how that might also apply to how ZipRecruiter could help organizations also better tailor their ads as well, to better target specific users, giving the startup an even better foothold in a market that has rapidly shifted but still remains very entrenched with players like Monster.com, Indeed and more.
“In a tight and ever-evolving labor market, businesses need effective, innovative hiring solutions now more than ever,” said Eric Liaw, General Partner at IVP in a statement. “ZipRecruiter has modernized the recruitment experience in an essential, undeniable way. Their sophisticated implementation of AI technology has established them as the foremost platform in the space, having driven millions of employment matches–they’re truly poised to be the next internet marketplace success story. The growth of the business has been phenomenal, and we are thrilled to deepen our partnership with the company as they continue to improve the lives of both job seekers and employers of all sizes.”
Amazon this morning announced a new way for customers to use Alexa’s skills – together, in combined requests. That is, you can start a request in one skill, then have it fulfilled in another. For example, the AllRecipes skill can now connect the HP skill in order to print out recipes for customers, Amazon says.
This is the first of many combined skills to come.
Skill Connections, as the developer-facing feature is called, can initially be used to take three types of actions – printing, booking a reservation, or booking a ride.
That means future skills could allow you to book a concert ticket through a skill, then connect to a taxi skill to find you a ride to the show. The idea is that customer wouldn’t have to separately invoke the different skills to complete the one task they wanted to accomplish (i.e., going to a show), or repeat information. Instead, data is passed from one skill to the next.
This isn’t the first time Alexa has tried to tie skills together in some way, but it is the first time it actually allowed two skills to talk to one another. Previously, Alexa was making game recommendations when customers exited a skill, as a means of exposing Alexa users to new content they may like. But this was more of a nudge to launch another skill, not a direct connection between the two.
Skill Connections is launching into a developer preview starting today. During this testing period, printing will be provided by a skill from HP, food reservations will be provided by OpenTable, and taxi reservations will be provided by Uber. Epson and Canon will soon provide prints services as well, Amazon notes.
Developers who are accepted into the preview could do things like offer to print a game’s leaderboard using the HP skill, or book a taxi to a spot where you’ve made a reservation, Amazon also suggests. To be considered, developers first have to fill out a survey.
Developers can apply either to connect their skill to those from HP, OpenTable or Uber, or they can apply to provide services to other skills. The feature will remain in testing for now, with a public launch planned for a later, but yet unknown date.
Google has partnered with media company PRX to launch the Google Podcasts creator program. PRX, a public radio distribution marketplace, is behind shows like This American Life, Reveal and The Moth Radio Hour. The accelerator aims to remove access barriers to podcasting and to increase the diversity of the podcast industry.
“We want to dramatically change the podcasting ecosystem and support more access,” PRX CEO Kerri Hoffman said in a press release. “Training is a primary way to close the skills gap that keep many from being successful in podcasting. This is particularly true for those who are underrepresented in other forms of media. We hope to elevate more diverse voices and empower others with tools to create and share.”
The idea is to focus on empowering and training underrepresented people, offering free educational tools and showcasing their work. As part of the program, which kicks off in January, 12 teams will receive seed funding, training and mentorship. Those who are interested can apply until November 18 here.
“We are committed to lowering barriers to podcasting through education and information sharing,” Google Podcasts Product Manager Zack Reneau-Wedeen said in a press release. “As we work to bring hundreds of millions more listeners into the fold, we want to play a role in ensuring content is available for all types of global audiences. PRX has a proven track record of mentorship and education, and we couldn’t be more excited to work with them as our lead partner.”
The LOT Network has been around for a few years now. Its mission is to fight patent trolls and it does so by having all of its members commit to a pledge that ensures that whenever they sell a patent to a company that’s in the business of patent trolling, all of the members will automatically get a free license to the patent.
Current members include the likes of Google, Facebook, Amazon, Slack, GitHub, Cisco, Canon, Lenovo, Netflix, Alibaba, Crate & Barrel (yep) and most major car manufacturers, including Tesla. More than 300 organizations are now part of LOT and today, Microsoft is joining the fray.
“The way the organization works is that all of the members sign a license agreement that in essence says that they’re providing a license to each other, such that if they were ever to transfer a patent to another company, that if that company is in essentially the business of asserting patents — that’s basically what it does for business — then the rest of the members in the network would get a license for free automatically,” Microsoft’s Chief IP Counsel Erich Andersen told me. He noted that it’s a way to reduce the risk of patent assertion at a community scale.
Projects like LOT seem to have had an impact over the course of the last few years as the number of the kinds of patent lawsuits at least hasn’t increased in recent years.
Obviously, it took a while for Microsoft to join LOT. Andersen, though, noted that the company’s Azure IP Advantage already provided protection against intellectual property risks for Microsoft’s cloud customers. “One pillar of [Azure IP Advantage] was related to this,” he explained. “We basically said to our Azure customers: if we ever transfer a patent to one of these patent assertion companies, then you’ll automatically get a license from us for that patent, and you don’t need to worry about it.” Joining the LOT Network then is essentially the next step for Microsoft in that it provides similar protections not just to its own customers but anybody who signs up for the network and accepts its pledge (and startups can join for free, for example).
Andersen admits that the patent troll problem isn’t as acute today as it was only a few years ago, but he notes that it’s still a widespread issue.
By joining, Microsoft itself also gets the same kind of protections for itself. “Just as we’re giving a commitment to everybody in the LOT Network that they’ll get a license to our patents if we transfer them to a non-practicing entity [aka, a patent troll], we get the same commitment coming the other direction.”
“Maniac,” a new miniseries on Netflix, comes from an impressive creative team — it stars Emma Stone and Jonah Hill, while director Cary Joji Fukunaga also helmed the first season of “True Detective,” and creator Patrick Somerville used to write for “The Leftovers.”
And yet the series left us a bit cold. On the latest episode of the Original Content podcast, we try to figure out why.
“Maniac” seems to take place in an alternate present (or maybe it’s the past, or the future) inspired by ’80s science fiction — a world with robots and sentient AIs, where computers have an old-fashioned bulkiness and tactility, and where advertising comes in the form of an “ad buddy” who sits next to you and delivers targeted marketing spiels.
Against this backdrop, Annie Landsberg (Stone) and Owen Milgrim (Hill) sign up to test a new pharmaceutical drug, which eventually leads to extensive, shared hallucinations.
So there’s a lot going on here. For Jordan, there was a bit too much happening, seemingly at random, and often pulled from other, more immediately reading science fiction. And while Anthony was more intrigued, he’s still not fully on-board yet either.
You can listen in the player below, subscribe using Apple Podcasts or find us in your podcast player of choice. If you like the show, please let us know by leaving a review on Apple. You also can send us feedback directly. (Or suggest shows and movies for us to review!)
Farewell, Yahoo Messenger. Hello, Yahoo Together? Yep, Yahoo is returning to the messaging space today after closing its older app due to lack of use. Designed for group chats between family, friends, clubs and others, Yahoo Together tries to differentiate itself from others through its ability to organize group conversations into separate topics, similar to the IRC model, and its ability to send smart reminders about upcoming events.
The app, previously codenamed Squirrel while in beta, was built by the Communications Team at Yahoo – the same folks who previously worked on Yahoo Messenger. However, Yahoo Together was built on a new messaging platform, we understand, though it still leverages some existing technology from Yahoo Messenger.
While much of what the app offers – the ability to chat, share photos, GIFs, links, and reactions – isn’t unique to the messaging space, Yahoo hopes people will appreciate the organizational capabilities in Yahoo Together.
“In many apps, you have a set of people, and then a single thread,” explains Michael Albers, Oath VP and Head of Communications Products. (Oath also owns TechCrunch, but we were not given access to the beta version for testing, we should note. Corporate synergies, hooray!)
“What’s unique to Yahoo Together is that it allows you to create long running groups, but create an infinite amount of separate topics to organize conversations, and where helpful, limit access to some of those topics to a subset of the group,” he says.
This, along with support for file attachments and a more robust search interface than Messenger, makes Yahoo Together feel more like a hybrid of consumer group chat and a tool that could fit more into the productivity space, like Skype or Slack. But unlike Skype or Slack, it doesn’t have support for calls, and the topic-based chats aren’t designed the same way.
It does use the hash symbol for its side conversations, which people may recognize from Slack. But the pound sign was actually adopted for use within IRC networks decades ago to label channels, and Yahoo credits IRC for the idea, in this case.
These topic-based chats aren’t just new chat rooms you set up by adding people you know from your contacts, but rather function as subsets to a main group chat.
You don’t have to add everyone from the main group chat to the topic-based sidechat, either. This makes it easier for people to keep up with just the conversations they need to be involved in – like a surprise party for mom or dad, or those they care about – like a sports team’s practice schedule – as opposed to scrolling through long message threads.
During the beta, Albers says Yahoo Together saw five times the number of messages per day, compared with Yahoo Messenger, which the team felt was a promising metric.
Following today’s launch, the team plans to roll out more features as the app continues to evolve.
“Our focus is to create the best product for our audiences and the opportunity with consumer productivity in a group messaging context,” says Albers. “We believe this is where this app sets us apart from others in the space, by focusing on the consumer needs to engage with their communities,” he adds.
It’s unclear how much attention Yahoo Together will receive, as Yahoo previously experimented with a group money pool app, Tanda, which was shut down only months after launch. It’s also very difficult to break into the messaging space today, in a market that’s dominated by major apps like Messenger, WhatsApp, WeChat, Line, and others.
Yahoo also didn’t clarify its user acquisition strategy, when asked, beyond touting the app’s feature set as how it plans to grow its user base. It’s not clear, then, if Yahoo will target user acquisition in emerging markets like India, or if it’s hoping to actually grow a base here in the U.S.
The app is live today on iOS and Android in global markets.
China’s internet battle is rapidly reproducing itself in Southeast Asia. One new hotspot is the Philippines, where Tencent just agreed to invest in Voyager, a fintech business started by telecom firm PLDT.
The deal would bring Tencent into direct competition with arch-rival Alibaba, which entered the Philippines 18 months ago when its fintech affiliate Ant Financial invested in Mynt, a financial venture from Globe Telecom which is a competitor to Voyager.
Following a week of speculation, PLDT announced a deal today that sees Tencent and KKR pay up to $175 million for a minority stake in the Voyager business. There have been reports that PLDT is looking to sell its majority stake, for now that has been retained but the firm did say that it has options to add other investors via the creation of new shares that would reduce its total holdings to less than 50 percent. Still, it plans to retain its position as the largest shareholder whilst bringing in expertise and more capital for growth.
Fintech is rapidly becoming a key focus for startups and larger tech companies in Southeast Asia, where the internet and mobile phone ownership promises to increase digital inclusion and give the region’s collective population of more than 600 million people new ways to save and spend. Microloan startups have raised significant funds from investors this year — Philippines based SME lender First Circle just closed a $26 million investment this week, for example — and the bigger fish in the pond are eying key infrastructure plays such as mobile wallets and payment systems.
That’s where both Voyager and Mynt come into the picture.
Voyager offers a range of digital services which include a prepaid wallet, digital payment option for retails, a remittance network for sending money, a digital lending service and a loyalty and rewards program. Mynt is similar, offering payment, remittance and loans for consumers and businesses.
The Voyager deal is the biggest investment in a Philippines-based startup — though you can debate whether a telco spinout is really a “startup” — and it only goes to reiterate increased attention Southeast Asia is seeing from China, and how fintech is becoming one of the hottest verticals.
The Philippines is a particularly hot market for fintech for a number of reasons. The country’s large overseas worker base makes it the world’s third-largest remittance market — worth an estimated $28 billion — despite a sharp drop this year. While, as we wrote when covering First Circle’s news this week, SMEs account for 99.6 percent of the country’s business, 65 percent of its workforce and 35 percent of national GDP but there’s few credit options or limited data for assessment.
Fintech is seen as a key driver that enable Southeast Asia to massively increase its digital footprint and reap economic benefits. More broadly, the region’s internet economy to tipped to grow from $49.5 billion in 2017 to over $200 billion by 2025, according to a report from Google and Singapore sovereign fund Temasek.
“In many apps, you have a set of people, and then a single thread,” explains Michael Albers, Oath VP and Head of Communications Products. (Oath also owns TechCrunch, but we were not given access to the beta version for testing, we should note. Corporate synergies, hooray!)
These topic-based chats aren’t just new chat rooms you set up by adding people you know from your contacts, but rather function as subsets to a main group chat.