Not too long ago, the Cloud Foundry Foundation was all about Cloud Foundry, the open source platform as a service (PaaS) project that’s now in use by most of the Fortune 500 enterprises. This project is the Cloud Foundry Application Runtime. A year ago, the Foundation also announced the Cloud Foundry Container Runtime that helps businesses run the Application Platform and their container-based applications in parallel. In addition, Cloud Foundry has also long been the force behind BOSH, a tool for building, deploying and managing cloud applications.
The addition of the Container Runtime a year go seemed to muddle the organization’s mission a bit, but now that the dust has settled, the intent here is starting to become clearer. As Cloud Foundry CTO Chip Childers told me, what enterprises are mostly using the Container Runtime for is for running the pre-packaged applications they get from their vendors. “The Container Runtime — or really any deployment of Kubernetes — when used next to or in conjunction with the App Runtime, that’s where people are largely landing packaged software being delivered by an independent software vendor,” he told me. “Containers are the new CD-ROM. You just want to land it in a good orchestration platform.”
Because the Application Runtime launched well before Kubernetes was a thing, the Cloud Foundry project built its own container service, called Diego.
Today, the Cloud Foundry foundation is launching two new Kubernetes-related projects that take the integration between the two to a new level. The first is Project Eirini, which was launched by IBM and is now being worked on by Suse and SAP as well. This project has been a long time in the making and it’s something that the community has expected for a while. It basically allows developers to choose between using the existing Diego orchestrator and Kubernetes when it comes to deploying applications written for the Application Runtime. That’s a big deal for Cloud Foundry.
“What Eirini does, is it takes that Cloud Foundry Application Runtime — that core PaaS experience that the [Cloud Foundry] brand is so tied to and it allows the underlying Diego scheduler to be replaced with Kubernetes as an option for those use cases that it can cover,” Childers explained. He added that there are still some use cases the Diego container management system is better suited for than Kubernetes. One of those is better Windows support — something that matters quite a bit to the enterprise companies that use Cloud Foundry. Childers also noted that the multi-tenancy guarantees of Kubernetes are a bit less stringent than Diego’s.
The second new project is ContainerizedCF, which was initially developed by Suse. Like the name implies, ContainerizedCF basically allows you to package the core Cloud Foundry Application Runtime and deploy it in Kubernetes clusters with the help of the BOSH deployment tool. This is pretty much what Suse is already using to ship its Cloud Foundry distribution.
Clearly then, Kubernetes is becoming part and parcel of what the Cloud Foundry PaaS service will sit on top of and what developers will use to deploy the applications they write for it in the near future. At first glance, this focus on Kubernetes may look like it’s going to make Cloud Foundry superfluous, but it’s worth remembering that, at its core, the Cloud Foundry Application Runtime isn’t about infrastructure but about a developer experience and methodology that aims to manage the whole lifecycle of the application development. If Kubernetes can be used to help manage that infrastructure, then the Cloud Foundry project can focus on what it does best, too.
Not too long ago, the Cloud Foundry Foundation was all about Cloud Foundry, the open source platform as a service (PaaS) project that’s now in use by most of the Fortune 500 enterprises. This project is the Cloud Foundry Application Runtime. A year ago, the Foundation also announced the Cloud Foundry Container Runtime that helps businesses run the Application Platform and their container-based applications in parallel. In addition, Cloud Foundry has also long been the force behind BOSH, a tool for building, deploying and managing cloud applications.
The addition of the Container Runtime a year go seemed to muddle the organization’s mission a bit, but now that the dust has settled, the intent here is starting to become clearer. As Cloud Foundry CTO Chip Childers told me, what enterprises are mostly using the Container Runtime for is for running the pre-packaged applications they get from their vendors. “The Container Runtime — or really any deployment of Kubernetes — when used next to or in conjunction with the App Runtime, that’s where people are largely landing packaged software being delivered by an independent software vendor,” he told me. “Containers are the new CD-ROM. You just want to land it in a good orchestration platform.”
Because the Application Runtime launched well before Kubernetes was a thing, the Cloud Foundry project built its own container service, called Diego.
Today, the Cloud Foundry foundation is launching two new Kubernetes-related projects that take the integration between the two to a new level. The first is Project Eirini, which was launched by IBM and is now being worked on by Suse and SAP as well. This project has been a long time in the making and it’s something that the community has expected for a while. It basically allows developers to choose between using the existing Diego orchestrator and Kubernetes when it comes to deploying applications written for the Application Runtime. That’s a big deal for Cloud Foundry.
“What Eirini does, is it takes that Cloud Foundry Application Runtime — that core PaaS experience that the [Cloud Foundry] brand is so tied to and it allows the underlying Diego scheduler to be replaced with Kubernetes as an option for those use cases that it can cover,” Childers explained. He added that there are still some use cases the Diego container management system is better suited for than Kubernetes. One of those is better Windows support — something that matters quite a bit to the enterprise companies that use Cloud Foundry. Childers also noted that the multi-tenancy guarantees of Kubernetes are a bit less stringent than Diego’s.
The second new project is ContainerizedCF, which was initially developed by Suse. Like the name implies, ContainerizedCF basically allows you to package the core Cloud Foundry Application Runtime and deploy it in Kubernetes clusters with the help of the BOSH deployment tool. This is pretty much what Suse is already using to ship its Cloud Foundry distribution.
Clearly then, Kubernetes is becoming part and parcel of what the Cloud Foundry PaaS service will sit on top of and what developers will use to deploy the applications they write for it in the near future. At first glance, this focus on Kubernetes may look like it’s going to make Cloud Foundry superfluous, but it’s worth remembering that, at its core, the Cloud Foundry Application Runtime isn’t about infrastructure but about a developer experience and methodology that aims to manage the whole lifecycle of the application development. If Kubernetes can be used to help manage that infrastructure, then the Cloud Foundry project can focus on what it does best, too.
Not too long ago, the Cloud Foundry Foundation was all about Cloud Foundry, the open source platform as a service (PaaS) project that’s now in use by most of the Fortune 500 enterprises. This project is the Cloud Foundry Application Runtime. A year ago, the Foundation also announced the Cloud Foundry Container Runtime that helps businesses run the Application Platform and their container-based applications in parallel. In addition, Cloud Foundry has also long been the force behind BOSH, a tool for building, deploying and managing cloud applications.
The addition of the Container Runtime a year go seemed to muddle the organization’s mission a bit, but now that the dust has settled, the intent here is starting to become clearer. As Cloud Foundry CTO Chip Childers told me, what enterprises are mostly using the Container Runtime for is for running the pre-packaged applications they get from their vendors. “The Container Runtime — or really any deployment of Kubernetes — when used next to or in conjunction with the App Runtime, that’s where people are largely landing packaged software being delivered by an independent software vendor,” he told me. “Containers are the new CD-ROM. You just want to land it in a good orchestration platform.”
Because the Application Runtime launched well before Kubernetes was a thing, the Cloud Foundry project built its own container service, called Diego.
Today, the Cloud Foundry foundation is launching two new Kubernetes-related projects that take the integration between the two to a new level. The first is Project Eirini, which was launched by IBM and is now being worked on by Suse and SAP as well. This project has been a long time in the making and it’s something that the community has expected for a while. It basically allows developers to choose between using the existing Diego orchestrator and Kubernetes when it comes to deploying applications written for the Application Runtime. That’s a big deal for Cloud Foundry.
“What Eirini does, is it takes that Cloud Foundry Application Runtime — that core PaaS experience that the [Cloud Foundry] brand is so tied to and it allows the underlying Diego scheduler to be replaced with Kubernetes as an option for those use cases that it can cover,” Childers explained. He added that there are still some use cases the Diego container management system is better suited for than Kubernetes. One of those is better Windows support — something that matters quite a bit to the enterprise companies that use Cloud Foundry. Childers also noted that the multi-tenancy guarantees of Kubernetes are a bit less stringent than Diego’s.
The second new project is ContainerizedCF, which was initially developed by Suse. Like the name implies, ContainerizedCF basically allows you to package the core Cloud Foundry Application Runtime and deploy it in Kubernetes clusters with the help of the BOSH deployment tool. This is pretty much what Suse is already using to ship its Cloud Foundry distribution.
Clearly then, Kubernetes is becoming part and parcel of what the Cloud Foundry PaaS service will sit on top of and what developers will use to deploy the applications they write for it in the near future. At first glance, this focus on Kubernetes may look like it’s going to make Cloud Foundry superfluous, but it’s worth remembering that, at its core, the Cloud Foundry Application Runtime isn’t about infrastructure but about a developer experience and methodology that aims to manage the whole lifecycle of the application development. If Kubernetes can be used to help manage that infrastructure, then the Cloud Foundry project can focus on what it does best, too.
An analysis of the impact of Europe’s new data protection framework, GDPR, on the adtech industry suggests the regulation has reduced the numbers of ad trackers that websites are hooking into EU visitors.
But it also implies that Google may have slightly increased its marketshare in the region — indicating the adtech giant could be winning at the compliance game at the expense of smaller advertising entities which the study also shows losing reach.
The research was carried out by the joint data privacy team of the anti-tracking browser Cliqz and the tracker blocker tool Ghostery (which merged via acquisition two years ago), using data from a service they jointly run, called WhoTracks.me — which they say is intended to provide greater transparency on the tracker market. (And therefore to encourage people to make use of their tracker blocker tools.)
A tale of two differently regulated regions
For the GDPR analysis, the team compared the prevalence of trackers one month before and one month after the introduction of the regulation, looking at the top 2,000 domains visited by EU or US residents.
On the tracker numbers front, they found that the average number of trackers per page dropped by almost 4% for EU web users from April to July.
Whereas the opposite was true in the US, with the average number of trackers per page rose by more than 8 percent over the same period.
In Europe, they found that the reduction in trackers was nearly universal across website types, with adult sites showing almost no change and only banking sites actually increasing their use of trackers.
In the US, the reverse was again true — with banking sites the only category to reduce tracker numbers over the analyzed period.
“The effects of the GDPR on the tracker landscape in Europe can be observed across all website categories. The reduction seems more prevalent among categories of sites with a lot of trackers,” they write, discussing the findings in a blog post. “Most trackers per page are still located on news websites: On average, they embed 12.4 trackers. Compared to April, however, this represents a decline of 7.5%.
“On ecommerce sites, the average number of trackers decreased by 6.9% to 9.5 per page. For recreation websites, the decrease is 6.7%, which corresponds to 10.7 trackers per page. A similar trend is observed for almost all other website categories. The only exception are banking sites, on which 7.4% more trackers were active in July than in April. However, the average number of trackers per page is only 2.6.”
Shifting marketshare
In the blog post they also argue that their snapshot comparison of tracker prevalence of April 2018 against July 2018 reveals “a clear picture” of GDPR’s impact on adtech marketshare — with “especially” smaller advertising trackers having “significantly” lost reach (which they are using as a proxy for marketshare).
In their analysis they found smaller tracker players lost between 18% and 31% reach/marketshare when comparing April (pre-GDPR) and July (post-GDPR).
They also found that Facebook suffered a decline of just under 7%.
Whereas adtech market leader Google was able to slightly increase its reach — by almost 1%.
Summing up their findings, Cliqz and Ghostery write: “For users this means that while the number of trackers asking for access to their data is decreasing, a tiny few (including Google) are getting even more of their data.”
The latter finding lends some weight to the argument that regulation can reinforce dominant players at the expense of smaller entities by further concentrating power — because big companies have greater resources to tackle compliance.
Although the data here is just a one-month snapshot. And the additional bump in marketshare being suggested for Google is not a huge one — whereas a nearly 7% drop in marketshare for Facebook is a more substantial impact.
Cliqz shared their findings with TechCrunch ahead of publication and we put several questions to them about the analysis, including whether or not the subsequent months (August, September) indicated this snapshot is a trend, i.e. whether or not Google sustained the additional marketshare.
However the company had not responded to our questions ahead of publication.
In the blog post Cliqz and Ghostery speculate that the larger adtech players might be winning (relatively speaking) the compliance game at the expense of smaller players because website owners are preferring to ‘play it safe’ and drop smaller entities vs big known platforms.
In the case of Google, they also flag up reports that suggest it has used its dominance of the adtech market to “encourage publishers to reduce the number of ad tech vendors and thus the number of trackers on their sites” — via a consent gathering tool that restricts the number of supply chain partners a publisher can share consent with to 12 vendors.
They also point to the use of manipulative UX design (aka dark patterns) that are used to “nudge users towards particular choices and actions that may be against their own interests”, suggesting these essentially deliberately confusing consent flows have been successfully tricking users into clicking and accepting “any kind of data collection” just to get rid of cryptic choices they’re being asked to understand.
Given Google’s dominance of digital ad spending in Europe it stands to gain the most from websites’ use of manipulative consent flows.
However GDPR requires consent to be informed and freely given, not baffling and manipulative. So regulators should (hopefully) be getting a handle on any such transgressions and transgressors soon.
The continued existence of nightmarishly confused and convoluted consent flows is another complaint we’ve also heard before — much and often. (And one we have ourselves, frankly.)
Overall, according to the European Data Protection Board, a total of more than 42,000 complaints have been lodged so far with regulators, just four months into GDPR.
And just last week Europe’s data protection supervisor, Giovanni Buttarelli, told us to expect the first GDPR enforcement actions before the end of the year. So lots of EU consumers will already be warming up the popcorn.
But Cliqz and Ghostery argue that disingenuous attempts to manipulate consent might need additional regulatory tweaks to be beaten back — calling in their blog post for regulations to enforce machine-readable standards to help iron away flakey flows.
“The next opportunity for that would be the ePrivacy regulation,” they suggest, referencing the second big privacy rules update Europe is (still) working on. “It would be desirable, for example, if ePrivacy required that the privacy policies of websites, information on the type and scope of data collection by third parties, details of the Data Protection Officer and reports on data incidents must be machine-readable.
“This would increase transparency and create a market for privacy and compliance where industry players keep each other in check.”
It would also, of course, provide another opportunity for pro-privacy tools to make themselves even more useful to consumers.
An analysis of the impact of Europe’s new data protection framework, GDPR, on the adtech industry suggests the regulation has reduced the numbers of ad trackers that websites are hooking into EU visitors.
But it also implies that Google may have slightly increased its marketshare in the region — indicating the adtech giant could be winning at the compliance game at the expense of smaller advertising entities which the study also shows losing reach.
The research was carried out by the joint data privacy team of the anti-tracking browser Cliqz and the tracker blocker tool Ghostery (which merged via acquisition two years ago), using data from a service they jointly run, called WhoTracks.me — which they say is intended to provide greater transparency on the tracker market. (And therefore to encourage people to make use of their tracker blocker tools.)
A tale of two differently regulated regions
For the GDPR analysis, the team compared the prevalence of trackers one month before and one month after the introduction of the regulation, looking at the top 2,000 domains visited by EU or US residents.
On the tracker numbers front, they found that the average number of trackers per page dropped by almost 4% for EU web users from April to July.
Whereas the opposite was true in the US, with the average number of trackers per page rose by more than 8 percent over the same period.
In Europe, they found that the reduction in trackers was nearly universal across website types, with adult sites showing almost no change and only banking sites actually increasing their use of trackers.
In the US, the reverse was again true — with banking sites the only category to reduce tracker numbers over the analyzed period.
“The effects of the GDPR on the tracker landscape in Europe can be observed across all website categories. The reduction seems more prevalent among categories of sites with a lot of trackers,” they write, discussing the findings in a blog post. “Most trackers per page are still located on news websites: On average, they embed 12.4 trackers. Compared to April, however, this represents a decline of 7.5%.
“On ecommerce sites, the average number of trackers decreased by 6.9% to 9.5 per page. For recreation websites, the decrease is 6.7%, which corresponds to 10.7 trackers per page. A similar trend is observed for almost all other website categories. The only exception are banking sites, on which 7.4% more trackers were active in July than in April. However, the average number of trackers per page is only 2.6.”
Shifting marketshare
In the blog post they also argue that their snapshot comparison of tracker prevalence of April 2018 against July 2018 reveals “a clear picture” of GDPR’s impact on adtech marketshare — with “especially” smaller advertising trackers having “significantly” lost reach (which they are using as a proxy for marketshare).
In their analysis they found smaller tracker players lost between 18% and 31% reach/marketshare when comparing April (pre-GDPR) and July (post-GDPR).
They also found that Facebook suffered a decline of just under 7%.
Whereas adtech market leader Google was able to slightly increase its reach — by almost 1%.
Summing up their findings, Cliqz and Ghostery write: “For users this means that while the number of trackers asking for access to their data is decreasing, a tiny few (including Google) are getting even more of their data.”
The latter finding lends some weight to the argument that regulation can reinforce dominant players at the expense of smaller entities by further concentrating power — because big companies have greater resources to tackle compliance.
Although the data here is just a one-month snapshot. And the additional bump in marketshare being suggested for Google is not a huge one — whereas a nearly 7% drop in marketshare for Facebook is a more substantial impact.
Cliqz shared their findings with TechCrunch ahead of publication and we put several questions to them about the analysis, including whether or not the subsequent months (August, September) indicated this snapshot is a trend, i.e. whether or not Google sustained the additional marketshare.
However the company had not responded to our questions ahead of publication.
In the blog post Cliqz and Ghostery speculate that the larger adtech players might be winning (relatively speaking) the compliance game at the expense of smaller players because website owners are preferring to ‘play it safe’ and drop smaller entities vs big known platforms.
In the case of Google, they also flag up reports that suggest it has used its dominance of the adtech market to “encourage publishers to reduce the number of ad tech vendors and thus the number of trackers on their sites” — via a consent gathering tool that restricts the number of supply chain partners a publisher can share consent with to 12 vendors.
They also point to the use of manipulative UX design (aka dark patterns) that are used to “nudge users towards particular choices and actions that may be against their own interests”, suggesting these essentially deliberately confusing consent flows have been successfully tricking users into clicking and accepting “any kind of data collection” just to get rid of cryptic choices they’re being asked to understand.
Given Google’s dominance of digital ad spending in Europe it stands to gain the most from websites’ use of manipulative consent flows.
However GDPR requires consent to be informed and freely given, not baffling and manipulative. So regulators should (hopefully) be getting a handle on any such transgressions and transgressors soon.
The continued existence of nightmarishly confused and convoluted consent flows is another complaint we’ve also heard before — much and often. (And one we have ourselves, frankly.)
Overall, according to the European Data Protection Board, a total of more than 42,000 complaints have been lodged so far with regulators, just four months into GDPR.
And just last week Europe’s data protection supervisor, Giovanni Buttarelli, told us to expect the first GDPR enforcement actions before the end of the year. So lots of EU consumers will already be warming up the popcorn.
But Cliqz and Ghostery argue that disingenuous attempts to manipulate consent might need additional regulatory tweaks to be beaten back — calling in their blog post for regulations to enforce machine-readable standards to help iron away flakey flows.
“The next opportunity for that would be the ePrivacy regulation,” they suggest, referencing the second big privacy rules update Europe is (still) working on. “It would be desirable, for example, if ePrivacy required that the privacy policies of websites, information on the type and scope of data collection by third parties, details of the Data Protection Officer and reports on data incidents must be machine-readable.
“This would increase transparency and create a market for privacy and compliance where industry players keep each other in check.”
It would also, of course, provide another opportunity for pro-privacy tools to make themselves even more useful to consumers.
After years of speculation, some mockery, and more than a little befuddlement, the Magic Leap augmented headset is arriving in the hands of developers and users — and its first product is a somewhat janky piece of magic.
The company’s first developer conference is slated for tomorrow, with a keynote bright and early in the morning, but the $2.3 billion dollar augmented reality headset manufacturer let a slew of VIPs, media types (including your humble reporter) take a look at the first official content partnerships to come from its formerly super secret studios.
Development studios like Weta Workshop (whose partnership began with Magic Leap nearly a decade ago) and Wingnut AR (the augmented reality development studio founded by Peter Jackson) have revealed new games that involve battling robots and spider infestations (respectively); while the medical imaging company Brainlab and the direct to consumer furniture retailer and design consulting service, Wayfair, pitched their augmented reality wares to show the business use case for Magic Leap’s magic leap into virtual reality.
In all some sixteen companies pitched demos at the curtain-raising event today.
Earlier this afternoon Weta just debuted their augmented reality game as a preview to the Magic Leap conference and it’s impressive. The robot battling Dr. Grordbort’s Invaders is the clearest vision of what Magic Leap’s platform can do.
Magic Leap teased the two companies’ vision for what immersive augmented game play could like in its promotional materials for years, but the culmination of the development work the two have undertaken is about three to five hours of gameplay battling robots that appear from the walls and floors and doors of any room. It’s (pardon the easy pun) magic.
According to Weta games director Greg Broadmore, the final game is the result of six years of collaboration between the creative studio and Magic Leap.
Rony Abovitz, Magic Leap’s visionary chief executive, first reached out to Weta with a vision for “Our Blue” a far-reaching, immersive, science fiction-influenced immersive world that Abovitz wanted Weta to help realize. Abovitz kept in touch with the Weta team and as he began putting the pieces together for Magic Leap, brought the studio on board to develop content.
Setting aside the problems that Magic Leap still has with field of view and with slight glitches in the game mechanics (which could entirely have been the fault of this author), Dr. Grordbort’s lays out the Magic Leap headset as a convincing gaming device (albeit at a somewhat price-prohibitive $2,295 apiece.
In the game, users are given a backstory by the eponymous Dr. Grordbort, who informs players that they’re the last best hope to save the world from a robotic alien invasion. From there on in, it’s about picking up a blaster and shooting the potential robot invaders who appear from portals around a room.
To start the game, a user maps their space by wandering around it with the Magic Leap on. Once the device has the lay of the land ( a process that can take up to four minutes — depending on size) the narrative will commence and the user is drawn into Dr. Grordbort’s world and gameplay.
“The game helped shape the platform,” said Brodmore. “Dr. Grordbort’s was the problem and Magic Leap is the solution.”
Without the close relationship to Magic Leap that Weta enjoyed, the game from Wingnut’s studio was far less robust, but no less enjoyable.
In their first foray into Magic Leap’s world, the augmented reality studio created a game that puts the user into the most bizarre job training session they’ve ever experienced.
As the new hire at an extermination company that deals with some fairly vicious and viscous insects, the user is put through some paces with how to kill virtual bugs in real space. The mapping engines and graphics are exceptional, the narrator walking a user through the game shows off Magic Leap’s exceptional use of sound technology and the humor in the game is reminiscent of some of the best Wallace and Gromit set pieces.
Beginning with a simple bat, and working up through a flamethrower, players were instructed in how to kill various creepy crawlies and concoct a serum to attract others. I’m not a fan of first person shooters (or much of a gamer in general), but that Wingnut game was damn fun.
And if gaming was one side of the spell that Magic Leap was hoping to weave with new users, business use cases were the other.
In partnership with Brainlab, the company is trying to show how its toolkit can be used in both educational and operational theaters for physicians and surgeons. In a demonstration users were encourage to take a look at a replica of a brain tumor patient’s brain scan in three dimensions. The device is aimed at helping doctors plan surgeries and understand the potential ramifications of different approaches to removing growths in a brain.
Meanwhile, the retailer Wayfair put users through a demonstration of its first Magic Leap application. A visualization tool that takes furniture from a virtual showroom into the real space that furniture would occupy.
It’s part of a longterm skunkworks development project set up within the online retailer to explore applications for augmented reality in a bit to sell more stuff to more folks without the need for a physical showroom (although Wayfair has launched a few popups earlier this month)
Behind all of this is a simple truth. Magic Leap needs content — almost as much as it needed to reduce the form factor and improve the usability of its first headset.
It has achieved those last two demands above the expectations of even the most hardened critic. Wearables still look goofy, but they feel good and the pack that powers the Magic Leap experience is among the best — lightweight and wearable, and with a three-hour battery charge, among the best in the industry.
There’s still some assembly required, as a user needs to determine the type of headset they’ll need and select a nosebridge that gives the headset the proper lift so its hardware can work properly. If a user wears glasses, it’s going to require a special prescription that can be ordered separately as an attachment that fits into the headset.
The other pieces of hardware packaged with the Magic Leap include a motion sensing hand controller (similar to what users have experienced as part of any video game console) and a hip pack with the processing power of a notebook computer.
The device doesn’t need to be tethered to a computer, but it does only work indoors.
Setting aside the limitations of the first generation of a hardware device, the Magic Leap is about as impressive a piece of augmented or virtual reality hardware as I’ve seen. Other companies may have better fields of view and a more compact device, but they lack the variety of content that makes Magic Leap’s offerings shine. The early partnerships the company has inked have, indeed, paid off.
Its initial customers — in Chicago, Los Angeles, Miami, New York, San Francisco, and Seattle — will receive a home visit from a Magic Leap employee who will walk them through the way the product works in a thirty minute to sixty minute demo. That’s the same level of bespoke treatment that Google Glass offered to its initial explorers.
One benefit of an AR headset like Magic Leap’s is that it’s much, much easier to navigate than a fully immersive VR headset. Another, is the flexibility it offers in terms of applications from a mixed reality setting.
“This is the evolution of computing,” said Shrenik Sadaigi, the director of next generation experiences at Wayfair — and the architect of the company’s experiments in augmented and virtual reality.
“We think of this as a productivity device,” Sadaigi said. “Browsing for stuff on the web. That’s the computing environment. Your space is your screen and your space becomes another variable on the computing platform. We want to make people love the space they live in. Using mixed reality to … the app that we’re presenting today we think of it as a design experience.”
One of the big breakthroughs in the company’s platform is the controller and how easy it is to use, as Sadaigi noted in our conversation. “The controller is doing a lot of work for you. [The company] is giving you something new… that is kind of the old, but in a new form. It’s simplified the experience to swiping and clicking.”
More complicated interactions can be handled by using the voice interface the company has built into the device and the eye scrolling feature that’s part of the inside out tracking the company uses.
Behind all of this is Abovitz and his crazy vision for a new platform for computing.
“That decision to start something new and bigger and more ambitious, to try to change all of computing, was a bit nuts. It’s like Bilbo Baggins having to step out of the Shire,” Abovitz told VentureBeat earlier this year. “If you spend enough hours in a Magic Leap system, it’s almost impossible to go back to your phone or computer or television. You realize that they’re very thin slices. Magic Leap gives you a giant volume of computing. When you actually get to play with it, spatial computing means you work within a volume, not just a slice.”
SoftBank may soon own up to 50 percent of WeWork, a well-funded provider of co-working spaces headquartered in New York, according to a new report from The Wall Street Journal.
SoftBank is reportedly weighing an investment between $15 billion and $20 billion, which would come from its $92 billion Vision Fund, a super-sized venture fund led by Japanese entrepreneur and investor Masayoshi Son.
SoftBank already owns some 20 percent of WeWork. The firm invested $4.4 billion in the company in August 2017, $1.4 billion of which was set aside to help WeWork expand in China, Japan and Southeast Asia.
This August, WeWork raised another $1 billion from SoftBank in convertible debt. At the same time, WeWork disclosed financials to a handful of media outlets, sharing that its revenue had doubled to $763.8 million in the first half of 2018 as losses increased to $723 million.
SoftBank, for its part, seems to have a hankering for real estate tech. Not only has it become a key stakeholder in WeWork, but it has deployed significant amounts of capital to Opendoor, Compass, Katerra and others.
Last month, the Vision Fund backed Opendoor, a platform for buying and selling homes, with $400 million. The same day, it led a $400 million round for Compass, valuing the real estate brokerage startup at $4.4 billion. As for Katerra, SoftBank poured $865 million into the construction tech business in January.
WeWork, founded in 2010 by Adam Neumann and Miguel McKelvey, has raised nearly $5 billion in a combination of debt and equity funding to date. It was valued at $20 billion in 2017, though reports earlier this summer estimated its valuation would fall somewhere between $35 billion and $40 billion with additional capital from SoftBank. A $40 billion valuation would make it the second most valuable VC-backed company in the U.S. behind only Uber.
WeWork has more than 268,000 members across 287 locations in 23 countries.
Tech startups have found all kinds of ways to lend money to people who have either too little or not very good credit.
The approach of a nearly two-year-old, 15-person San Francisco-based startup called Divvy Homes is among the more creative we’ve seen, even while we question (for now) whether it’s good for potential customers.
How it works: in Cleveland, Atlanta, and Memphis, where Zillow estimates that median home prices are $52,000, $82,00, and $242,000, respectively, Divvy will enable a person or family to select a home they’d like to someday own, then to buy that home with Divvy’s help. The family chips in at least two percent for a downpayment. Divvy pays for the rest, then it collects a monthly amount that includes both market-rate rent and an equity payment.
It does this until the newly installed residents have amassed a 10 percent stake in the home. The reason, says the company: by partnering with Divvy, tenants — some of whom have credit scores as low as 550, which is considered “very poor” by the consumer credit ratings agency Experian — can build their credit scores and eventually land a mortgage insured by the Federal Housing Administration, which requires a credit score of at least 580.
According to CEO Brian Ma — who cofounded the startup at the company creation studio HVF Labs — the idea is for this to happen within three years, at which point Divvy will sell and transfer the property over to them.
It’s easy to see why this might be attractive to potential homebuyers who can’t secure a traditional mortgage in the current market — not all of whom suffer from poor credit but who are sometimes contract and self-employed workers without months of salary stubs to show nervous bankers. For example, Divvy says that it charge less in rent as a buyer’s equity begins to add up. That equity, it insists, can later turn into the person or family’s first mortgage payment.
For largely self-serving reasons, Divvy does what it can to ensure that the house isn’t a dud, too. As Ma describes it, Divvy uses data science and algorithms to ensure that a property makes sense financially, meaning that it will likely appreciate and that the tenants aren’t paying so much that they can’t simultaneously build equity in their homes.
Divvy also works with inspectors to make doubly certain each home is “move-in ready and won’t have large unforeseen expenses during the lease, like major roof, structural, pest, or foundation issues,” says Ma, who previously cofounded three startups, as well as spent several years as a program manager with Zillow.
Still, it’s also easy to imagine that many of Divvy’s aspiring homeowners will never actually own their homes. Consider: While Divvy may help some percentage of them improve their credit score, roughly 62 percent of consumers with credit scores under 579 are “likely to become seriously delinquent (i.e., go more than 90 days past due on a debt payment) in the future,” says Experian.
Naturally, like any other property owner, Divvy will evict tenants who don’t pay, even if it does so reluctantly.
“If a rent payment is missed, we will follow up to see how we can help,” says Ma. “Most of the time, it’s immediately curable or curable within a couple days. If it’s been longer than a week and we believe the tenant is going through some hardship, we will work our best to offer alternatives, including allowing them to purely rent the property by dropping the equity payments to lower their monthly payment. If we can’t find a way to cure the situation, we will go through an eviction procedure.”
Divvy also establishes the buyback price at the time that it’s buying the home — which can work for, or against, the tenants who hope to own it someday.
Adena Hefets, another Divvy cofounder who worked previously in both VC and private equity, recently explained to us that Divvy has a back-end model that projects where the house would price three years down the line and it allows tenants to “buy it back at that price at any time.” Yet buying it back early would invariably mean overpaying. More, in the cities where Divvy is operating, housing prices don’t move around a lot, so a tenant could be overpaying at any buyback price that’s north of where the home sells today. (Home prices in Northeast Ohio were rising as of last spring, but they were still at 2004 levels.)
With the broader housing market poised for a slowdown, tenants wanting to buy their homes might decide it’s cheaper in the end to just move out of them and find something else. Where would that leave Divvy? We’d guess it would leave it looking more a residential real estate investment trust than a “rent-to-own innovator.”
That’s not a terrible thing for Divvy, even if it sounds a little less glamorous. In fact, the company — which says already buying one home a day — is today disclosing that it has raised $30 million in equity and debt from Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) and a commercial bank called Cross River Bank that notably is backed by a16z.
Ma declines to say how much of the round is equity and how much is debt, but he says Alex Rampell, an a16z investor whose other bets include a different fractional ownership startup, Point, has joined the company’s board.
Pictured above (at TC headquarters), left to right: Divvy founders Nicholas Clark, Brian Ma, and Adena Hefets.
Google hardware launches are never spec-fests. The search giant would rather just sit on the sideline while companies like Apple and Samsung battle it out on that front. In fact, numbers like screen resolution, processor speed and battery capacity were conspicuously absent from today’s presentation.
Instead, the company seems more content to have hardware serve the product’s software — it’s a strategy that certainly makes sense given the company’s background. That often means that products like the Pixel don’t offer major spec upgrades year over year, instead relying on breakthroughs in AI, ML and the like to take them to the next level.
As such, the company regularly tosses out words like “pragmatic” and “practical” when discussing the decisions made in service of producing the Pixel 3. One such move was the continued reliance on a single rear-facing camera, when the competition is adding two or three to get the job done.
“We look at all of the different configurations we can get,”VP of Product Management Brian Rakowski tells TechCrunch. “If we would have added another lens, it would have given us no benefit over what we get with one really good lens.”
The simple answer is that the company was able to accomplish most of what it set out to do with a combination of “one really good camera” and software tricks like digital zoom, ultra low-light shooting and depth perception. That last bit is doubly important both for creating the bokeh effect in portrait mode and helping deliver augmented reality experiences through ARCore.
Senior Director of Product Management Sabrina Ellis says the company did consider a wide-angle lens for the rear of the device, but ultimately, “it wasn’t as much of a pain point.” It was, however, enough of an issue to warrant its addition to the front of the device.
That decision is what lead to the mismatched notches on the Google Pixel 3 (no notch) and Pixel 3 XL (giant notch). While the company has happily embraced hashtag notch life in Android Pie, the smaller Pixel’s slim profile wouldn’t have benefited from the addition of a notch.
“With the small one,” Rakowski explains, “it turns out the space is just too small when you put the wide-angle lens in. It’s a narrower phone, so you have room for an icon or two, whereas on the bigger phone everything you need for the status icons is up there, and it’s a very good use of the space.”
When I suggested the company was “notch agnostic,” both execs laughed in agreement. The hardware, Rakowski explained, is secondary to the overall experience. “We’re not obsessed with the specs,” he says. “We’re obsessed with the features and experiences.”
CAVU Venture Partners has led the $20 million Series B for Once Upon a Farm, which sells organic, cold-pressed baby food in 8,500 grocery stores in the U.S.
The Berkeley-based startup was originally founded in 2015 by serial entrepreneurs Cassandra Curtis and Ari Raz. Today, it lists actress Jennifer Garner and former General Mills president John Foraker as co-founders, too.
Both Garner and Foraker — who was the chief executive officer of the popular organic mac & cheese brand Annie’s Homegrown for more than a decade — joined the company in September 2017. Foraker had been an angel investor in Once Upon a Farm and, after conversations with Garner, decided to accept the role of CEO. Garner, widely known for her roles in Alias, 13 Going on 30 and the upcoming HBO original series Camping, was already somewhat of a Once Upon a Farm evangelist when she signed on as chief brand officer a little over a year ago.
“I am proud of the innovative business that we have built,” Garner said in a statement. “It is incredibly exciting to see so many families embracing our products. This latest round of funding allows us to continue to help busy parents give their children the most nutritious foods possible and make life a little bit easier for families across the country.”
Foraker told TechCrunch that since he and Garner joined, the business has grown 10x. Last fall, the company’s products were for sale in 300 stores; today, as mentioned, they are available in more than 8,000.
“Because she has global celebrity, the power of that, she can really help us get the message out and help lots of moms and dads find [Once Upon a Farm],” Foraker said.
Once Upon a Farm sells smoothies and applesauce for kids up to age 12 directly to consumers through its online marketplace and in stores. Pouches of its signature baby food, smoothies and applesauce are $2.99 each.
As part of the deal, CAVU’s co-founder and managing partner Brett Thomas, along with CAVU investor Jared Jacobs, will join the company’s board. S2G Ventures and Beechwood Capital also participated in the round for the startup, which raised a $4 million Series A in June 2017.
The company plans to use the funds to expand its direct to consumer business, partner with more U.S. grocers and build out a wider assortment of baby products.
“You can buy fresh pet food now in almost 20,000 stores in the U.S.,” Foraker said. “We think fresh baby food has a long way to go.”
Today, the Cloud Foundry foundation is launching two new Kubernetes-related projects that take the integration between the two to a new level. The first is Project Eirini, which was launched by IBM and is now being worked on by Suse and SAP as well. This project has been a long time in the making and it’s something that the community has expected for a while. It basically allows developers to choose between using the existing Diego orchestrator and Kubernetes when it comes to deploying applications written for the Application Runtime. That’s a big deal for Cloud Foundry.
The second new project is ContainerizedCF, which was initially developed by Suse. Like the name implies, ContainerizedCF basically allows you to package the core Cloud Foundry Application Runtime and deploy it in Kubernetes clusters with the help of the BOSH deployment tool. This is pretty much what Suse is already using to ship its Cloud Foundry distribution.
