Month: October 2018

Make no mistake, Huawei’s going after the big dogs here. The company’s taken a Samsung-esque approach to the world of flagship smartphones with a beast of a handset that delivers everything and the kitchen sink.

The Mate 20 Pro is a 6.4 inch powerhouse with features and specs to spare. It’s a combination of the genuinely useful and the just sort of novel, but the hardware maker has clearly spared no expense getting itself on the global map with this thing. 

There’s a lot to unpack here, but the most compelling feature of the set may well be the device’s wireless charging. While that’s not particularly exciting on the face of it, get this, the company is confident enough about the on-board battery that you can use it to wirelessly charge the competition.

I’m not sure how practical that will be for a majority of users, but as someone who has multiple phones on his person most days, I’ve  found myself in a handful of scenarios where pulling a little extra juice from the phone’s massive 4,200mAh battery. The phone itself, naturally, has quick charging capabilities, hitting 70 percent battery after 30 minutes.

You’ve also got three cameras on the back, because Huawei. They’re all smushed together a square design, which the company says was inspired by sports cars. Sure, why not? There’s a 20-megapixel lens for super wide shots, a 40 megapixel standard shooter and an eight megapixel telephoto.

Oh, and those in-screen fingerprint readers everyone’s talking about? There’s one here, too, along with a depth-sensing face unlock for added security. The depth detecting front-facing cameras are also being put to use for things like image scanning and, yes, 3D selfies.

Inside is the proprietary Kirin 980 processor the company’s been talking up since way back at IFA. Huawei says its chip is able to eke out better performance than Qualcomm’s premium Snapdragon, but we’ll wait for the benchmarks for that one. And Huawei, like Apple, has been investing a lot in on-board AI processing, which is certainly on display here.

Paperspace wants to help developers build artificial intelligence and machine learning applications with a software/hardware development platform powered by GPUs and other powerful chips. Today, the Winter 2015 Y Combinator grads announced a $13 million Series A.

Battery Ventures led the round with participation from SineWave Ventures, Intel Capital and Sorenson Ventures. Existing investor Initialized Capital also participated. Today’s investment brings the total amount to $19 million raised.

Dharmesh Thakker, a general partner with Battery Ventures sees Paperspace as being in the right place at the time. As AI and machine learning take off, developers need a set of tools and GPU-fueled hardware to process it all. “Major silicon, systems and Web-scale computing providers need a cloud-based solution and software ‘glue’ to make deep learning truly consumable by data-driven organizations, and Paperspace is helping to provide that,” Thakker said in a statement.

Paperspace provides its own GPU-powered servers to help in this regard, but co-founder and CEO Dillon Erb says they aren’t trying to compete with the big cloud vendors. They offer more than a hardware solution to customers. Last spring, the company released Gradient, a serverless tool to make it easier to deploy and manage AI and machine learning workloads.

By making Gradient a serverless management tool, customers don’t have to think about the underlying infrastructure. Instead, Paperspace handles all of that for them providing the resources as needed. “We do a lot of GPU compute, but the big focus right now and really where the investors are buying into with this fundraise, is the idea that we are in a really unique position to build out a software layer and abstract a lot of that infrastructure away [for our customers],” Erb told TechCrunch.

He says that building some of the infrastructure was an important early step, but they aren’t trying to compete with the cloud vendors. They are trying to provide a set of tools to help developers build complex AI and machine learning/deep learning applications, whether it’s on their own infrastructure or on the mainstream cloud providers like Amazon, Google and Microsoft.

What’s more, they have moved beyond GPUs to support a range of powerful chips being developed to support AI and machine learning workloads. It’s probably one of the reasons that Intel joined as an investor in this round.

He says the funding is definitely a validation of something they set out to work on when they first started this in 2014 and launched out of Y Combinator in 2015. Back then he had to explain what a GPU was in his pitch decks. He doesn’t have to do that anymore, but there is still plenty of room to grow in this space.

“It’s really a greenfield opportunity, and we want to be the go-to platform that you can start building out into intelligent applications without thinking about infrastructure.” With $13 million in hand, it’s safe to say that they are on their way.

MongoDB is a bit miffed that some cloud providers — especially in Asia — are taking its open source code and are offering a hosted commercial version of its database to their users without playing by the open source rules. To combat this, MongoDB today announced that it has issued a new software license, the Server Side Public License (SSPL), that will apply to all new releases of its MongoDB Community Server, as well as all patch fixes for prior versions.

Previously, MongoDB used the GNU APGLv3 license, but it has now submitted the SSPL for approval from the Open Source Initiative.

For virtually all regular users who are currently using the community server, nothing changes because the changes to the license don’t apply to them. Instead, this is about what MongoDB sees as the misuse of the APGLv3 license. “MongoDB was previously licensed under the GNU AGPLv3, which meant companies who wanted to run MongoDB as a publicly available service had to open source their software or obtain a commercial license from MongoDB,” the company explains. “However, MongoDB’s popularity has led some organizations to test the boundaries of the GNU AGPLv3.”

So while the SSPL isn’t all that different from the GNU GPLv3, with all the usual freedoms to use, modify and redistribute the code (and virtually the same language), the SSPL explicitly states that anybody who wants to offer MongoDB as a service — or really any other software that uses this license — needs to either get a commercial license or open source the service to give back the community.

“The market is increasingly consuming software as a service, creating an incredible opportunity to foster a new wave of great open source server-side software. Unfortunately, once an open source project becomes interesting, it is too easy for cloud vendors who have not developed the software to capture all of the value but contribute nothing back to the community,” said Eliot Horowitz, the CTO and co-founder of MongoDB, in a statement. “We have greatly contributed to — and benefited from — open source and we are in a unique position to lead on an issue impacting many organizations. We hope this will help inspire more projects and protect open source innovation.”

I’m sure this move will ruffle some feathers. It’s hard to discuss open source licenses without getting religious about what this movement is all about. And since MongoDB is the commercial entity behind the software and manages outside contributions to the code, it does have a stronger grip on the actual code than other projects that are managed by a large open source foundation, for example. For some, that alone is anathema to everything they think open source should stand for. For others, it’s simply a pragmatic way to develop software. Either way, though, this will kick off a discussion about how companies like MongoDB manage their open source projects and how much control they can exert over how their code is used. I, for one, can’t wait to read the discussions on Hacker News today.

Dating app Hinge is today launching a new feature aimed at improving its recommendations, based on whether or not matches had successful real-world dates. The feature may also help to address one of the major problems with today’s dating apps: that no one knows how well they actually work. After all, it’s one thing to get matches and have conversations, but it’s quite another to turn those into dates, much less a long-term relationship.

With a new feature called “We Met,” Hinge will ask users a few days after they shared their phone numbers if they went on a date, and, if so, if they’d want to see that person again. This data will be used as a signal to inform Hinge’s algorithms and improve matches, if the user later returns to the app.

During beta trials, Hinge says that 90% of members said their first dates were great, and 72% said they wanted to go on a second.

“Ultimately, if you went on a date with someone and you thought they were great, that’s the strongest signal that we’ve gotten very close to your type of person. So if there are more people like that person, we can show them to you,” says Hinge CEO Justin McLeod.

By “like that person” it’s not a matter of physical appearance or some sort of profile categorization, to be clear.

“You can’t really aggregate people into their component pieces and try to crack what’s someone’s ideal person,” McLeod explains.

Instead, Hinge uses collaborative filtering – people who like X also like Y – to help inform its matches on that front.

With the launch of We Met, Hinge will now know when dates succeed or fail, and eventually, perhaps, why. It also plans to combine the We Met data with other signals – such as, whether users become inactive in the app or delete their accounts, as well as email survey data – to figure out which dates may have turned into relationships.

This is something of a first for the dating app industry, which is today incentivized to keep users “playing” their matching games, and spending money on in-app subscriptions – not leave them. It’s not in dating apps’ financial interest, at least, to create relationships (i.e., heavy user churn).

This influences the dating apps’ design – they don’t tend to include features designed to connect people in real life.

For example, they don’t make suggestions of events, concerts, and other things to do; they don’t offer maps of nearby restaurants, bars, coffee shops, or other public spaces for first dates; they don’t offer built-in calling (or gamify unlocking a calling feature by continuing to chat in app); they don’t use in-app prompts to suggest users exchange numbers and leave the app. Instead, apps tend to push users to chat more – with things like buttons for adding photos and GIFs, or even tabs for browsing Facebook-style News Feeds.

The problem of wasting time chatting in dating apps has now become so prevalent that many users’ profiles today explicitly state that they’re “not looking for pen pals.”

Of course dating apps – just like any other way of meeting new people – will have their share of success stories. Everyone knows someone who met online.

But claims that, for example, Tinder is somehow responsible for a whole generation of “Tinder babies” are hugely suspect, because the company doesn’t have any way of tracking if matches are actually dating, and certainly not if they end up getting married and having kids. It even said so in a recent documentary.

All Tinder has – or any of these companies, really – are anecdotes and emails from happy couples. (And this, of course, should be expected, with user bases in the tens of millions, like Tinder.)

We Met, meanwhile, is actually focused on quantifying real world dating successes in Hinge, not in-app engagement. Longer term, it could help to establish Hinge as place that’s for people who want relationships, not just serial dates or hookups.

The feature is also another example of how Hinge is leveraging A.I. combined with user insights to improve matches. Recently, it rolled out a machine learning-powered feature, Most Compatible, to help provide users with daily recommendations based on their in-app activity.

Hinge says We Met will launch today, October 16, on iOS first. Android will soon follow.

Instacart chief executive officer Apoorva Mehta wants every household in the U.S. to use Instacart, a grocery delivery service that allows shoppers to order from more than 300 retailers, including Kroger, Costco, Walmart and Sam’s Club, using its mobile app.

Today, the company is taking a big leap toward that goal.

San Francisco-based Instacart has raised $600 million at a $7.6 billion valuation, just six months after it brought in a $150 million round and roughly eight months after a $200 million financing that valued the business at $4.2 billion.

D1 Capital Partners, a relatively new fund led by Daniel Sundheim, the former chief investment officer of Viking Global Investors, has led the round.

Instacart is raking in cash aggressively but spending it cautiously. The company still has all of its Series E, which ultimately totaled $350 million, and the majority of its $413 million Series D in the bank, a source close to the company told TechCrunch. That means, in total, Instacart has $1.2 billion at its fingertips. Currently, according to the same source, the company is only profitable on a contribution margin basis, meaning it’s earning a profit on each individual Instacart order.

In a conversation with TechCrunch, Mehta said the company didn’t need the capital and that it was an “opportunistic” round, i.e. the capital was readily available and Instacart has ambitious plans to scale, so why not fundraise. Instacart plans to use the enormous pool of capital to double its engineering team by 2019, which will include filling 300 open engineering roles in its recently announced Toronto office, he said.

As far as an initial public offering, it will happen — eventually.

“It will be on the horizon,” Mehta told TechCrunch.

“2018 has been a really big year for us,” he added. “The reason why we are so excited is because the opportunity ahead of us is enormous. The U.S. is a $1 trillion grocery market and less than 5 percent of that is bought online. It’s an enormous category that’s highly under-penetrated.”

In the last six months, Instacart has announced a few notable accomplishments.

As of August, the service has been available to 70 percent of U.S. households. That’s due to the expansion of existing partnerships and new deals entirely, like a recently announced pilot program between Instacart and Walmart Canada that gives Canadian Instacart users access to 17 different Walmart locations across Winnipeg and Toronto, Ontario.

The company has also completed several executive hires. Most recently, it tapped former Thumbtack chief technology officer Mark Schaaf as CTO. Before that, Instacart brought on David Hahn as chief product officer and Dani Dudeck as its first chief communications officer.

In early September, the company confirmed its chief growth officer Elliot Shmukler would be leaving the company.

The 6-year-old Y Combinator graduate has raised more than $1.6 billion in venture capital funding from Coatue Management, Thrive Capital, Canaan Partners, Andreessen Horowitz and several others.

In today’s world of Slack, email and a gazillion other web apps and services, it’s become increasingly hard to search for information. Did your boss Slack you or email you that information about your bonus? Or did they share it via a Google Doc? Who knows? Clearly not you, but Journal knows.

Journal, a machine learning and natural language processing-powered platform designed to search across all your web services and tools, today announced a $1.5 million seed round led by Social Capital. Since receiving the funding about a year ago, Journal has been able to launch a beta community of users. Today, Journal is publicly launching its Mac app, web app and Chrome extension.

“We’re passionate about helping people use information effectively,” Journal co-founder and CEO Samiur Rahman told TechCrunch. “In this case, we want to help people manage their knowledge. So we want to help individuals to leverage all of the places that they have information right now.”

It was that thesis that led Rahman and his team to land on wanting to build a suite of tools that “acts as a second brain for people. That’s obviously a long way away but that’s what our long-term vision is.”

Based on the demo Rahman showed me, Journal looks pretty darn useful. I had an opportunity to install it, but I was hesitant to do so. That’s because Journal requires viewing permissions to your email, apps and other services with which you sync Journal.

That’s scary for a couple of reasons — the main one being privacy. For example, what happens if Journal gets hacked? Or if the government requests data from Journal?

Well, Journal uses zero-knowledge encryption that ensures Journal employees can’t read or decrypt the information of the user. Here’s a bit more information on how Journal handles security:

Journal asks for view permission to the apps a user integrates so that we can enable search across their apps.

To keep users’ information safe, all data in Journal is encrypted both in transit and at rest.

Data such as the contents of files, emails, messages, etc. are encrypted using the Fernet symmetric encryption method, which uses AES-128 in CBC mode + HMAC-SHA-256 with a random IV. This means that the data can’t be decrypted without the secret key. Our file systems where the conceptual index is stored is encrypted using Amazon KMS, which uses AES-256 in GCM mode.

The secret key is a combination of a hash from the OAuth access key for the account you’ve integrated and a Journal secret key. If our database gets hacked somehow, the hacker would need to also be able to get access to our separate authentication store and our secret key to decrypt your information.

I’m not a security expert, so I asked my colleague, TC Security Editor Zack Whittaker, for some insight. He told me Rahman’s explanation makes sense, further explaining that what Journal does is essentially split the private keys needed to access your data. Whittaker said that’s smart, but that he’s more concerned about general trust.

Journal has access to a treasure trove of data — much of which would be very valuable to advertisers. Right now, advertising is not part of Journal’s revenue plans, but that could change.

“I can’t say for certainty that we won’t, but I think ad-based revenue ends up creating some really bad incentives, Especially when you’ve got all this really private data about people and their usage patterns. The very likely route is that we end up going through companies that pay for teams to use.”

As with most tech products these days, it comes down to how much do you trust the company and how much do you care about your data?

And depending on who you are, you may have a stronger threat model — that is, what threats you face based on who you are. Black communities, for example, are at a greater risk of surveillance by the government than white communities. So you adjust your behavior based on your personal threats.

Privacy concerns aside, Journal looks like a really useful product. But we’ll see if I get around to setting it up.

The Voyage may be dead, but the Kindle line still has some life left in it. This time last year, Amazon upgraded the high-end Oasis model, and now the mid-range Paperwhite is getting a little love.The workhorse of the company’s devoted e-reader line just got a handful of upgrades that will give users a more premium experience, while keeping the device’s starting price at $130.

Waterproofing is the most exciting among the upgrades here. Remember that time four years ago when we ran a story with the headline, “This Waterproof Kindle Paperwhite Is Humanity’s Greatest Achievement?” Well, this is that potential fulfilled — now directly from Amazon. The reader sports an IPX8 rating, meaning it can be dunked in two meters of water for up to an hour.

That bit comes, in part, courtesy of another key upgrade. Like the Oasis before it, the reader sports a flush front, rather than the raised bezels found on older, cheaper models. The move gives the model an overall more premium feel and should help keep water from invading its circuits. It also goes a ways toward making this the thinnest and lightest Paperwhite, as well.

Another key change is the bump from four LEDs to five. Seems like a small thing, but it goes a ways toward keeping the front lighting more uniform across the board, versus the more patchy consistency found in earlier models.

Performance should be roughly the same on this model, though storage has been doubled to 8GB. There’s a 32GB model as well, for those who really aren’t into cloud storage. That move comes largely because the model is also getting Bluetooth, so users can listen to audio books through Audible using the device. The Whispersync feature makes sure users are up to date with both the text and audio versions.

There are a couple of tweaks to the software, including an updated home page with more customized recommendations, along with the ability to save different setting profiles.

Pre-orders start today, and the new Paperwhite will begin shipping November 9. That $130 version includes Special Offers (ads), which Amazon says most customers are still opting into. Prices go up from there.

In this fun video the Boston Dynamics Spot dances, wiggles, and shimmies right into our hearts. This little four-legged robot – a smaller sibling to the massive Big Dog – is surprisingly agile and the team at Boston Robotics have taught the little robot to dance to Bruno Mars which means that robots could soon replace us on the factory floor and on the dance floor. Good luck, meatbags!

As one YouTube commenter noted: if you think Spot is happy now just imagine how it will dance when we’re all gone!

Lyft has been testing versions of an all-access monthly subscription plan since March. Now, it’s ready to make it available to everyone in the U.S. 

Starting today, U.S.-based riders can sign up for the plan. It will be available to everyone in the U.S. by the end of the week. Lyft’s All-Access plan costs $299 per month for 30 rides (up to $15 each). Let’s say your ride goes over $15, you would just pay the difference. All other rides past the initial 30 you take that month are discounted five percent. It’s worth noting that rides do not rollover.

Before Lyft landed on this plan, it tested a much cheaper one that cost just $199 upfront to get 30 free rides worth up to $15 per ride. Another plan Lyft was testing cost $399 a month for 60 rides. Then, in May, Lyft opened up a wait list for a plan that cost $200 upfront for 30 rides (up to $15 each).

Lyft’s subscription product is all part of the company’s plan to get people to ditch their own cars (except the people who use their own cars to drive around Lyft customers). Earlier this year, Lyft CEO Logan Green said the company was moving in a direction to achieve for transportation what Netflix achieved for entertainment.

Specifically, Green said, “We are going to move the entire industry from one based on ownership, to one based on subscription.”

Technology, like so much of life, is cycle. Gadget evolve, leaving holes in our lives that some fresh new startup is waiting in the wings to fill. There are few better examples of the phenomenon than the Mighty. Introduced last year, the product built a pretty solid reputation as “the iPod Shuffle for Spotify.”

The new Mighty Vibe is designed to address some of users’ concerns with the first generation product. Chief amongst the updates is improved bluetooth range. Enough of the product’s 50,000 users complained about spotty connections that the company made it a priority this time out.

The new version of the device should work at a range of up to 20 feet — of course, the thing is small enough to be worn on your person, so that’s not a huge issue in most cases. It’s also water/sweat resistant, making it a solid workout companion. The larger battery, meanwhile, should get upwards of five hours on a charge. The app has been redesigned from the ground up, too, for faster operation.

The Vibe is priced the same as its predecessor, at $86 (while the first-gen will come down in price until the company sells out of back stock). It still only works with Spotify, though Mighty tells me that it’s working with additional partners, with plans to offer more music service compatibility some time next year.