Month: October 2018

Lime is doing the most right now. In light of the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency denying Lime a permit to operate electric scooters in the city, Lime is gearing up to request a temporary restraining order.

“Lime believes that after selecting two other less experienced electric scooter companies and comparatively weaker applications in a process that was riddled with bias, the SFMTA should revisit the decision and employ a fair selection process,” the company wrote in a press release.

Those two “less experienced” electric scooter companies Lime’s referring to are Skip, which currently operates via an official permit in Washington, D.C., and Scoot, which has successfully and legally operated shared electric mopeds in the city for several years.

Following the SFMTA’s decision, Lime sent an appeal requesting the agency reevaluate its application. At the time, the SFMTA said it was “confident” it picked the right companies.

Now, since the SFMTA still plans to enable both Scoot and Skip to deploy their respective scooters on Monday, Lime says it “believes that it has no choice but to seek emergency relief in the court.”

Ahead of the decision in Santa Monica, Lime, along with Bird, protested recommendations for the city to not grant Lime a permit. Though, the city did end up granting Lime a permit. Lime, however, is not the only company that has appealed the decision in San Francisco. Earlier this week, Lyft reportedly petitioned SF Mayor London Breed, asking her to reconsider the SFMTA’s decision to only grant two permits for electric scooters.

“It’s unfortunate Lime has chosen this course,” John Coté, communications director for City Attorney Dennis Herrera said in a statement. “The SFMTA’s permitting process for the pilot program was thoughtful, fair and transparent. It includes an appeal process that Lime should be pursuing instead of wasting everyone’s resources by running to court.”

He added:

Lime appears to be playing games. It had weeks to resolve this and instead chose a last-minute motion in an effort to shut down the entire scooter program. Lime fails to admit that its application simply didn’t match those of its competitors. If Lime succeeds, it will be hurting the very people it purports to want to help – those who are ready to use scooters on Monday.

Last spring, Lime told San Franciscans that electric scooters were a great transportation alternative. Now, Lime is saying that if they can’t run electric scooters in San Francisco, no one can. It’s sour grapes from Lime, plain and simple.

I’ve reached out to the SFMTA and will update this story if I hear back.

It’s a funny thing, AI. It can identify objects in a fraction of a second, imitate the human voice, and recommend new music, but most machine “intelligence” lacks the most basic understanding of everyday objects and actions — in other words, common sense. DARPA is teaming up with the Seattle-based Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence to see about changing that.

The Machine Common Sense program aims to both define the problem and engender progress on it, though no one is expecting this to be “solved” in a year or two. But if AI is to escape the prison of the hyper-specific niches where it works well, it’s going to need to grow a brain that does more than execute a classification task at great speed.

“The absence of common sense prevents an intelligent system from understanding its world, communicating naturally with people, behaving reasonably in unforeseen situations, and learning from new experiences. This absence is perhaps the most significant barrier between the narrowly focused AI applications we have today and the more general AI applications we would like to create in the future,” explained DARPA’s Dave Gunning in a press release.

Not only is common sense lacking in AIs, but it’s remarkably difficult to define and test, given how broad the concept is. Common sense could be anything from understanding that solid objects can’t intersect to the idea that the kitchen is where people generally go when they’re thirsty. As obvious as those things are to any human more than a few months old, they’re actually quite sophisticated constructs involving multiple concepts and intuitive connections.

It’s not just a set of facts (like that you must peel an orange before you eat it, or that a drawer can hold small items) but identifying connections between them based on what you’ve observed elsewhere. That’s why DARPA’s proposal involves building “computational models that learn from experience and mimic the core domains of cognition as defined by developmental psychology. This includes the domains of objects (intuitive physics), places (spatial navigation), and agents (intentional actors).”

But how do you test these things? Fortunately great minds have been at work on this problem for decades, and one research group has proposed an initial method for testing common sense that should work as a stepping stone to more sophisticated ones.

I talked with Oren Etzioni, head of the Allen Institute for AI, which has been working on common sense AI for quite a while now, among many other projects regarding the understanding and navigation of the real world.

“This has been a holy grail of AI for 35 years or more,” he said. “One of the problems is how to put this on an empirical footing. If you can’t measure it, how can you evaluate it? This is one of the very first times people have tried to make common sense measurable, and certainly the first time that DARPA has thrown their hat, and their leadership and funding, into the ring.”

The AI2 approach is simple but carefully calibrated. Machine learning models will be presented with written descriptions of situations and several short options for what happens next. Here’s one example:

On stage, a woman takes a seat at the piano. She
a) sits on a bench as her sister plays with the doll.
b) smiles with someone as the music plays.
c) is in the crowd, watching the dancers.
d) nervously sets her fingers on the keys.

The answer, as you and I would know in a heartbeat, is d. But the amount of context and knowledge that we put into finding that answer is enormous. And it’s not like the other options are impossible — in fact, they’re AI-generated to seem plausible to other agents but easily detectable by humans. This really is quite a difficult problem for a machine to solve, and current models are getting it right about 60 percent of the time (25 percent would be chance).

There are 113,000 of these questions, but Etzioni told me this is just the first dataset of several.

“This particular dataset is not that hard,” he said. “I expect to see rapid progress. But we’re going to be rolling out at least four more by the end of the year that will be harder.”

After all, toddlers don’t learn common sense by taking the GRE. As with other AI challenges, you want gradual improvements that generalize to harder versions of similar problems — for example, going from recognizing a face in a photo, to recognizing multiple faces, then identifying the expression on those faces.

There will be a proposers day next week in Arlington for any researcher who wants a little face time with the people running this little challenge, after which there will be a partner selection process, and early next year the selected groups will be able to submit their models for evaluation by AI2’s systems in the spring.

The common sense effort is part of DARPA’s big $2 billion investment in AI on multiple fronts. But they’re not looking to duplicate or compete with the likes of Google, Amazon, and Baidu, which have invested heavily in the narrow AI applications we see on our phones and the like.

“They’re saying, what are the limitations of those systems? Where can we fund basic research that will be the basis of whole new industries?” Etzioni suggested. And of course it is DARPA and government investment that set the likes of self-driving cars and virtual assistants on their first steps. Why shouldn’t it be the same for common sense?

A fault in a Soyuz rocket booster has resulted in an aborted crew mission to the International Space Station, but fortunately no loss of life. The astronauts in the capsule, Nick Hague (U.S.) and Alexey Ovchinin (Russia) successfully detached upon recognizing the fault and made a safe, if bumpy, landing nearly 250 miles east of the launch site in Kazakhstan. This high-profile failure could bolster demand for U.S.-built crewed spacecraft.

The launch proceeded normally for the first minute and a half, but at that point, when the first and second stages were meant to detach, there was an unspecified fault, possibly a failure of the first stage and its fuel tanks to detach. The astronauts recognized this issue and immediately initiated the emergency escape system.

Hague and Ovchinin in the capsule before the fault occurred.

The Soyuz capsule detached from the rocket and began a “ballistic descent” (read: falling), arrested by a parachute before landing approximately 34 minutes after the fault. Right now that’s about as much detail on the actual event as has been released by Roscosmos and NASA. Press conferences have been mainly about being thankful that the crew is okay, assuring people that they’ll get to the bottom of this and kicking the can down the road on everything else.

Although it will likely take weeks before we know exactly what happened, the repercussions for this failure are immediate. The crew on the ISS will not be reinforced, and as there are only 3 up there right now with a single Soyuz capsule with which to return to Earth, there’s a chance they’ll have to leave the ISS empty for a short time.

The current crew was scheduled to return in December, but NASA has said that the Soyuz is safe to take until January 4, so there’s a bit of leeway. That’s not to say they can necessarily put together another launch before then, but if the residents there need to stay a bit longer to safely park the station, as it were, they have a bit of extra time to do so.

The Soyuz booster and capsule have been an extremely reliable system for shuttling crew to and from the ISS, and no Soyuz fault has ever led to loss of life, although there have been a few issues recently with DOA satellites and of course the recent hole found in one just in August.

This was perhaps the closest a Soyuz has come to a life-threatening failure, and as such any Soyuz-based launches will be grounded until further notice. To be clear, this was a failure with the Soyuz-FG rocket, which is slated for replacement, not with the capsule or newer rocket of the same name.

SpaceX and Boeing have been competing to create and certify their own crew capsules, which were scheduled for testing some time next year — but while the Soyuz issues may nominally increase the demand for these U.S.-built alternatives, the testing process can’t be rushed.

That said, grounding the Soyuz (if only for crewed flights) and conducting a full-scale fault investigation is no small matter, and if we’re not flying astronauts up to the ISS in one of them, we’re not doing it at all. So there is at least an incentive to perform testing of the new crew capsules in a timely manner and keep to as short a timeframe as is reasonable.

You can watch the launch as it played out here:

Two years ago, Boston Dynamics’ humanoid robot Atlas needed a big ol’ safety tether to shuffle its way down a flat hiking trail. Five years ago it needed a big, bolted-down support structure to keep itself upright.

Now it’s casually leaping up and over obstacles that would leave many humans huffing and puffing.

The company demonstrated Atlas’ newly found hops in a video published this morning:

It starts with a lil’ leap over a log before Atlas bounds its way right up a set of 40 cm (1.3 ft) steps.

While just getting a massive, heavy robot to walk on two feet is a feat few companies have cracked, there’s a whole set of new challenges at play here. Getting Atlas’ limbs up and over the step, while appropriately shifting the weight and momentum onto one foot without the whole thing face-planting… it’s a complicated set of mechanics. Notice the sideways leaps, and — particularly in the slow motion cut at the 9-second mark — the way the hips/feet seem to angle a bit to compensate.

(For the curious: Atlas weighs around 180 lbs, as of the last time Boston Dynamics disclosed the numbers.)

At this point, we’ve gone from “Haha, neat, look at the funny robot running like a human,” to “I’m pretty sure that robot could beat me up.”

Wondering what the company is up to here? We talked with Boston Dynamics’ founder Marc Raibert about the hows and whys a few months back at our robotics event in Berkeley. The video is below:

Bird, the scooter-sharing startup founded by former Uber VP of International Growth Travis VanderZanden, has brought a couple of former Uber employees to the flock.

Joining Bird as VP and Head of Finance is Dennis Cinelli, who worked as Uber’s head of finance for global rides up until this month, according to his LinkedIn. Uber, of course, is not without a financial leader. In August, Uber’s lengthy search for a chief financial officer ended when the company hired Nelson Chai, the former CEO of insurance and warranty provider Warranty Group. Bird has also brought on Uber’s now-former director of corporate development Yibo Ling, who also worked at Uber up until this month, according to Ling’s LinkedIn.

“As Bird enters its second year, we’re continuing to expand our talented executive team to build on and scale our momentum,” Bird founder and CEO Travis VanderZanden said in a press release. “Dennis and Yibo both bring valuable experience expanding markets and I look forward to working with them closely as we continue on our mission.”

Last month, Bird hit 10 million rides after about one year of operating. Earlier this month, Bird unveiled custom electric scooters and a delivery service for people to be able to rent scooters for a full day.

The advantage of entering an emerging market is that the market still has a lot of empty space to fill, and as a startup you can be the first player. Kazakhstan might not be the first country that comes to mind when you think of overseas expansion. However, it is the world’s largest landlocked country, and shares borders with Russia and China, which are important consumer markets as well as technology hubs.

In fact, companies in Russia and China provided good benchmarks for Chocofamily, now the biggest e-commerce holding in Kazakhstan. The 2011-founded startup’s current capitalization is $50 million, and they’ve hired 350 employees in their office in Almaty, the country’s largest city and previous capital.

The company claims it has 2 million registered users on its platform, and expects $170 million gross billings in 2018 with 7,000 purchases per day. Chocofamily launched their payment app, Rakmet, in 2017, following in the steps of WeChat Pay.

2011: Copying from Russia 

Looking at how Groupon was exploding in Russia, and how Delivery Club, a Russia-based food delivery service, was growing at a fast pace, the founder of Chocofamily, Ramil Mukhoryapov, decided the success could be replicated in Kazakhstan. So he quit his studies in Russia and went to Kazakhstan.

“Russia is three years above Kazakhstan. Check out what is happening in Russia and do the same in Kazakhstan, it is going to work in three years. That’s what we did, how we started the Chocofamily itself,” Nikolay Shcherbak, CEO at Chocofood says. “We just copied. If this works in Russia, it will work in Kazakhstan as well, because the markets are really close to each other.”

Ramil started with a daily deal service, Chocodaily, in Kazakhstan. After his first attempt was successful, he later started Chocofood, a food delivery service; Chocotravel, an online travel service; Lensmark, an online shop for contact lenses; and iDoctor, a platform with all the doctors in Kazakhstan where patients can find the doctor that they need and check doctor and hospital information and reviews. Now all these services are affiliates of Chocofamily Holding. 

How this company consolidated the market

In Kazakhstan, Chocofamily had competitors, but they either defeated them, purchased them or merged with them.

Chocofamily’s food delivery service, Chocofood, faced stiff competition in the market. Its rival was Foodpanda, which also started in Kazakhstan in 2013. After a four-year war of attrition, Foodpanda remained as No. 2 and wanted to get out of the market — so Chocofood acquired Foodpanda and took over their customer base and the legal entity. The company got additional growth uplift after integrating with Foodpanda.

“The best we got from the deal was the team, the people. They joined the company and just doubled our orders,” Nikolay says. 

Now Chocofood has an 80 percent market share in the food delivery market with 34,000 orders per month, working with 350 restaurants.

Online travel services Chocotravel merged with its rival Aviata in 2017. Now the two companies take a 67 percent combined market share. They’ve been profitable since the second half of 2018, with 80,000 air tickets and 50,000 railway tickets sold per month. 

In the future, Chocotravel plans to enter the South-Eastern and CIS (Commonwealth of Independent States, namely northwest Russia, Eastern Europe and the Baltic states) travel markets, and they are looking for additional funds for expansion.

2017: Copying from China

In 2017, the company launched a payment app, Rakmet, which means “thank you” in Kazakhstan. It allows users to pay for purchases by simply scanning QR codes. For users, the advantage is that every merchant gives them cash back.

The idea for the app came about in early 2017, as they were looking at other companies in different countries. 

“We were looking at WeChat, and it had a good system of using QR codes for payments. We thought it was a good idea. QR code technology is really old, but it only comes to our everyday life now,” Nikolay said.

Like other payment apps, users can use the Rakmet app by connecting their bank card to the app as a payment option. With a population of 18 million in Kazakhstan, bank card penetration is quite good; 19 million bank cards have been issued in total, and there are 10 million active bank cards.

For businesses to join the Rakmet app, they must give a certain percentage of cash back to customers. The approach has been especially popular with cafes and restaurants that have been using loyalty cards to attract consumers. Nikolay says it is a marketing strategy for merchants, because they’re paying the commission to Rakmet only for those transactions. To date, 300+ predominantly small businesses in Almaty have posted their stores via the Rakmet app. 

“Rakmet app will be on top of the ecosystem of all Chocofamily affiliates. We also plan to add different services to Rakmet app, such as allowing users to pay traffic fines to the government on the app and pay the parking fee using the app,” Nikolay says. 

Women are typically responsible for the household in Central Asia. Thus, women make up 60 percent of their users, making transactions on mobile such as booking flight tickets, ordering food, and making doctor appointments. The biggest growth is among their users in the age group between 25 to 35.

They also are working on big data. The team is now building the infrastructure for big data analysis, such as data warehousing and the support. Then they plan to build the mechanism for data processing. In September, they signed a contract with one of the universities in Kazakhstan so they can attract students who are experts on big data analysis.

In 2011, Chocofamily started with their own money. In 2013, they received $50,000 from two angel investors, then another $150,000. Then they attained Series A funding of $1 million from Murat Abdrakhmanov, an experienced entrepreneur in Kazakhstan, and later received $2 million in Series B.

This time instead of exposing users’ data, a Facebook bug erased it. A previously undisclosed Facebook glitch caused it to delete some users’ Live videos if they tried to post them to their Story and the News Feed after finishing their broadcast. Facebook wouldn’t say how many users or livestreams were impacted, but told the bug was intermittent and affected a minority of all Live videos. It’s since patched the bug and restored some of the videos, but is notifying some users with an apology that their Live videos have been deleted permanently.

The bug raises the question of whether Facebook is a reliable place to share and store our memories and important moments. In March, Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg told congress regarding the Cambridge Analytica scandal that “We have a responsibility to protect your data – and if we can’t, then we don’t deserve to serve you.” Between that misappropriation of user biographical data, the recent breach that let hackers steal the access tokens that would let them take over 50 million Facebook accounts, wrongful changes to users’ default sharing privacy settings, and now this, some users may conclude Facebook in fact no longer deserves to serve them.

Facebook user Tommy Gabriel Sparandera provided TechCrunch with this screenshot showing the apology note from Facebook on his profile. It reads “Information About Your Live Videos: Due to a technical issue, one or more of your live videos may have been deleted from your timeline and couldn’t be restored. We understand how important your live videos can be and apologize that this happened.”

When TechCrunch asked Facebook about the issue, it confirmed the problem and provided this statement: ““We recently discovered a technical issue that removed live videos from some people’s Facebook Timelines. We have resolved this issue and restored many of these videos to people’s Timelines. People whose videos we were unable to restore will get a notification on Facebook. We know saving memories on Facebook is important to people, and we apologize for this error.”

Facebook made a huge push to own the concept of “going Live” in 2016 with TV commercials, billboards and more designed to overshadow competitors like Twitter’s Periscope. It eventually succeeded, with Periscope’s popularity fading while one in five Facebook videos became Live broadcasts. But in its blitz to win this market, it didn’t build adequate safety and moderation tools. That led to suicides and violence being livestreamed to audiences before Facebook’s content police could take down the videos.

Nowadays, most users don’t go live frequently unless they’re some kind of influencer, public figure, or journalist. When they do see something important transpiring, Facebook has positioned itself as the way to broadcast it. But if users can’t be sure Facebook will properly save those videos, it could persuade them it’s not worth becoming a camera man instead of a participant in life’s most interesting moments.

One of the latest additions to the on-demand economy is Papa, a mobile app that connects college students with adults over 60 in need of support and companionship.

The recent graduate of Y Combinator’s accelerator program has raised a $2.4 million round of funding to expand its service throughout Florida and to five additional states next year, beginning with Pennsylvania. Initialized Capital led the round, with participation from Sound Ventures.

Headquartered in Miami, the startup was founded last year by chief executive officer Andrew Parker. The idea came to him while he was juggling a full-time job at a startup and caring for his grandfather, who had early onset dementia.

“I’ve always been a connector of humans,” Parker, the former vice president of health systems at telehealth company MDLIVE, told TechCrunch. “I’ve always naturally felt comfortable with all walks of life and all age groups and have just felt human connection is really critical.”

Seniors can request a “Papa Pal” using the company’s mobile app, desktop site or by phone. The pals can pick them up and take them out for an activity or have them over to play a game, complete household chores, teach them how to use social media and other technology or simply to chat. A senior is matched with a student, who must complete a “rigorous” background check, in as little as 30 seconds.

Parker says there are 600 students working with Papa an average of 25 hours per month.

“We’ve been fortunate that this is something the students really want to be part of,” he said. “They aren’t doing this for a couple extra dollars. They are doing this to help the community.”

The service costs seniors $20 per hour, $12 of which is paid to the students and $8 is returned to Papa. It’s not a subscription-based service, but seniors can pay for a premium option that lets them choose between three Papa Pals instead of being randomly paired with one of the several hundred options. The students do not provide any personal care, like bathing or grooming. And they are not a pick-up and drop-off service, like Uber or Lyft.

“We believe the Papa team has found a unique way to combat loneliness and depression in older adults,” said Alexis Ohanian, co-founder and managing partner of Initialized Capital, in a statement. “The experience that Papa Pals bring their members make it seem like they are part of a family.”

In addition to expanding to new markets, Papa is in the process of partnering with insurance companies with a goal of allowing seniors to pay for some of its services through their Medicare plans.

“Loneliness is a crisis. It’s a disease. It’s killing people prematurely,” Parker said. “We are providing a really massive impact to these people’s lives.”

Legacy open-backed headphone maker Grado is taking their classic design into the future with the small Brooklyn company’s first pair of wireless headphones.

The GW100s have a familiar look, but integrate Bluetooth tech and volume controls. They go for $249.

Grado headphones are a favorite of mine; they have a very unique open sound that really resonates and are perfect for home listening. Previous iterations haven’t really thrived as much on the road or in noisy offices because they tend to let in a lot of outside noise and leak a lot of your tunes. The company says that they’ve redesigned the housings and internals of the GW100s to reduce noise leakage by 60 percent — no famed wooden enclosures on this design either.

Part of what’s great about Grado headphones is their history; we toured the company’s tiny Brooklyn HQ a few years back and took a look at their operations… really cool stuff.

It’s tough for a company to make do on just brand legacy alone, and even though audio tech generally has a much longer shelf life than other products, there’s always a time to adapt, especially now as more hardware makers purge headphone jacks from their devices.

In the past few years, the company branched out into some more mobile-friendly products, but the magic wasn’t all there. The wireless GW100s keep the company’s same drivers, though it’ll be interesting to hear what they sound like as the company tunes them to be more amenable to “on-the-go” listening. Speaking of which, they also look like they have a sturdier design than some of the company’s more spartan headbands, which were strangely kind of part of the appeal, but are definitely welcome for something more likely to be chucked in a backpack.

The headphones charge via micro-USB and offer a 15-hour battery life, the company says. They also pack an included 3.5mm cable if you want to use them with your old gear. More details on precise audio tuning are listed on its product page.

Musicians are celebrating as the Music Modernization Act, an attempt to drag copyright and royalty rules into the 21st century, is signed into law after unanimous passage through Congress. The act aims to centralize and simplify the process by which artists are tracked and paid on digital services like Spotify and Pandora, and also extends the royalty treatment to songs recorded before 1972.

The problems in this space have affected pretty much every party. Copyright law and music industry practices were, as you might remember, totally unprepared for the music piracy wave at the turn of the century, and also for the shift to streaming over the last few years. Predictably, it isn’t the labels, distributors, or new services that got hosed — it’s artists, who often saw comically small royalty payments from streams if they saw anything at all.

Even so the MMA has enjoyed rather across-the-board support from all parties, because existing law is so obscure and inadequate. And it will remain that way to a certain extent — this isn’t layman territory and things will remain obscure. But the act will address some of the glaring issues current in the media landscape.

The biggest change is probably the creation of the Mechanical Licensing Collective. This new organization centralizes the bookkeeping and royalty payment process, replacing a patchwork of agreements that required lots of paperwork from all sides (and as usual, artists were often the ones left out on the cold as a result). The MLC will be funded by companies like Pandora or Google that want to enter into digital licensing agreements, meaning there will be no additional commission or fee for the MLC, but the entity will actually be run by music creators and publishers.

Previously digital services and music publishers would enter into separately negotiated agreements, a complex and costly process if you want to offer a comprehensive library of music — one that stifled new entrants to the market. Nothing in the new law prevents companies from making these agreements now, as some companies will surely prefer to do, but the MLC offers a simple, straightforward solution and also a blanket license option where you can just pay for all the music in its registry. This could in theory nurture new services that can’t spare the cash for the hundred lawyers required for other methods.

There’s one other benefit to using the MLC: you’re shielded from liability for statutory damages. Assuming a company uses it correctly and pays their dues, they’re no longer vulnerable to lawsuits that allege underpayment or other shenanigans — the kind of thing streaming providers have been weathering in the courts for years, with potentially massive settlements.

The law also improves payouts for producers and engineers, who have historically been under-recognized and certainly under-compensated for their roles in music creation. Writers and performers are critical, of course, but they’re not the only components to a great song or album and it’s important to recognize this formally.

The last component of the MMA, the CLASSICS Act, is its most controversial, though even its critics seem to admit that it’s better than what we had before. CLASSICS essentially extends standard copyright rules to works created before 1972, during which year copyright law changed considerably and left pre-1972 works largely out of the bargain.

What’s the problem? Well, it turns out that many works that would otherwise enter the public domain would be copyright-protected (or something like it — there are some technical differences) until 2067, giving them an abnormally long term of protection. And what’s more, these works would be put under this new protection automatically, with no need for the artists to register them. That may sound convenient, but it also means that thousands of old works would be essentially copyrighted even though their creators, if they’re even alive, have asserted no intention of seeking that status.

A simple registry for those works was proposed by a group of data freedom advocates, but their cries were not heard by those crafting and re-crafting the law. Admittedly it’s something of an idealistic objection, and the harm to users is largely theoretical. The bill proceeded more or less as written.

At all events the Music Modernization Act is now law; its unanimous passage is something of an achievement these days, though god knows both sides need as many wins as they can get.