Year: 2018

Nintendo has just announced the latest in its Labo series of whimsical cardboard accessories for the Switch gaming console, and this one looks like a must-have. Called the Vehicle Kit for obvious reasons, the flat-pack, assemble-it-yourself add-ons include a steering wheel, gas pedal, “keys” that activate different vehicles, all of which work inside a cool-looking game that comes with.

Frankly this just looks like a humongous bargain. Perhaps the most humongous of all time. $70 gets you a whole fold-up steering assembly with shifters on the sides; a pedal that I really hope stands up to some serious stomping; a joystick for piloting a plane, a weird thing that controls a submarine; and a “key” that your Joy-Con fits into, which itself slots into the various other setups to activate them.

They’re all meant to be used in a game that, despite not having a name, looks insanely cool. It looks like a big island with secrets hidden all over the place that you just tool around in using your buggy, your submarine, and your plane, and whatever other weird vehicles you might come across.

You can race, spray-paint your vehicles, blow up rocks and cut down trees. There’s also a two-player mode where you battle with cars that have extendable arms for some reason. Don’t think too hard about it.

Of course you’ll have to put all this together yourself (I guess either I think kids read TechCrunch or our readers buy Nintendo gear made for kids), but we found Labo to be a delight to assemble and play with so that shouldn’t be a problem. It’s a feature, not a bug.

You’ll be able to buy this kit starting September 14 for $70, which, again, is obviously a steal. If any of us gets their hands on one ahead of that date we’ll definitely let you know.

Microsoft has partnered with Black Girls Code, led by Kimberly Bryant, to enable the organization to launch a chapter in Seattle, Microsoft announced on LinkedIn today. Since launching in 2011, Black Girls Code has introduced technology and computer science to young black girls in 13 cities throughout the country. Seattle marks Black Girls Code’s 14th chapter.

Microsoft also deepened its partnership with Technology Access Foundation, founded by Trish Millines Dziko. Across both partnerships, Microsoft invested $500,000.

Earlier this year, Black Girls Code teamed up with Lyft — after turning down a $125,000 donation from Uber last year —  to make the non-profit organization one of Lyft’s Round Up & Donate partners.

In a LinkedIn post, Microsoft Corporate VP and Lead Mary Snapp said she hopes the investments will “will help a lot more students find a passion for technology, the opportunity to pursue a STEM education and most importantly believe it is possible for them.

“As Satya has said in the past, Microsoft can only be successful if we have people of all backgrounds building our technology and we cannot build product and services for everyone unless everyone is represented in our engineering ranks,” Snapp wrote.

On Thursday, the Pentagon opened bidding for a huge cloud computing contract that could be worth as much as $10 billion. Given its size, the Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure contract, known as JEDI, is alluring for major cloud computing companies that might not normally do much business with the Department of Defense.

Announced in March, JEDI is structured as a winner-take-all contract with a potential 10-year term, though the Pentagon clarified that the original award will span just the first two years, so all 10 years aren’t set in stone up front.

While it’s not yet sparked the same level of outcry as Google’s AI contract with the Pentagon known as Project Maven, JEDI isn’t uncontroversial. The now infamous Project Maven was a smaller, more specific contract with direct implications for the military’s use of drones, while JEDI is broader and bigger, seeking a vendor to provide cloud services for all branches of the military. Google has since abandoned plans to renew the contract, but Maven was likely a kind of test run for the company in the lead-up to JEDI.

While Amazon is largely regarded as the most likely winner, Google, Microsoft, IBM and Oracle are also among the major tech companies expected to throw their hats into the ring. Earlier in the process, it looked possible that companies could band together to form unlikely alliances against the perceived frontrunner, though it appears in the final request for proposal that the Pentagon plans to award the contract to a single company capable of handling it. Interested parties will have until September 17 to submit proposals, so in the months to come we can certainly expect to hear more from companies in the running and workers who oppose JEDI involvement.

When we called the ACLU’s Amazon’s Rekognition press release an “attention-grabbing stunt” when we wrote about it earlier today, well, consider that attention grabbed. Several Democratic members of Congress have responded with a strongly worded letter to founder Jeff Bezos.

Reps. Jimmy Gomez and John Lewis issued a letter to Bezos, after the ACLU noted that the facial recognition software falsely associated 28 images of Congress members with mugshots in a criminal database. Lewis, a pivotal figure in America’s civil rights moment, was among those falsely matched in the ACLU’s testing — particularly notable as the testing appeared to have a particular bias against people of color.

“The results of the ACLU’s test of Amazon’s ‘Rekognition’ software are deeply troubling,” Lewis wrote in a statement. “As a society, we need technology to help resolve human problems, not to add to the mountain of injustices presently facing people of color in this country. Black and brown people are already unjustly targeted through a discriminatory sentencing system that has led to mass incarceration and devastated millions of families.”

A trio of Congress members (Sen. Ed Markey and Reps. Luis Gutiérrez and Mark DeSaulnier), meanwhile, wrote a letter addressed to Bezos with a series of questions about the technology:

While facial recognition services might provide a valuable law enforcement tool, the efficacy and impact of the technology are not yet fully understood. In particular, serious concerns have been raised about the dangers facial recognition can pose to privacy and civil rights, especially when it is used as a tool of government surveillance, as well as the accuracy of the technology and its disproportionate impact on communities of color.

Amazon for its part, both defended Rekognition and disputed the ACLU’s methods. “We remain excited about how image and video analysis can be a driver for good in the world, including in the public sector and law enforcement,” the company wrote in a statement provided to TechCrunch.

With regard to testing, it says:

[W]e think that the results could probably be improved by following best practices around setting the confidence thresholds (this is the percentage likelihood that Rekognition found a match) used in the test. While 80% confidence is an acceptable threshold for photos of hot dogs, chairs, animals, or other social media use cases, it wouldn’t be appropriate for identifying individuals with a reasonable level of certainty. When using facial recognition for law enforcement activities, we guide customers to set a threshold of at least 95% or higher.

The company also reiterated an earlier statement that the results are intended to be used to narrow down results, rather than lead directly to arrests.

Regardless, the ACLU’s stunt certainly got the attention the organization was seeking, both with regard to the aforementioned biases and broader security implications of facial scanning for law enforcement.

With today’s announcement from Atlassian that it was selling the IP assets of its two enterprise communications tools, Hipchat and Stride, to Slack, it closes the book on one of the earliest competitors in the modern enterprise collaboration space. It was also a clear  signal that Slack is not afraid to take on its giant competitors by forming key alliances.

The fact the announcement came from Slack co-founder and CEO Stewart Butterfield on Twitter only exacerbated that fact. Atlassian has a set of popular developer tools like Jira, Confluence and Bitbucket. At this point, Hipchat and Stride had really become superfluous to the company and they sold the IP to their competitor.

Not only was Slack buying the assets and Atlassian was effectively shutting down these products, Atlassian was also investing in Slack, a move that shows it’s throwing its financial weight behind the company as well and forming an alliance with them.

Slack has been burning it up since in launched in 2014 with just 16,000 daily active users. At last count in May the company was reporting 8 million active users, 3 million of which were paid. That’s up from 6 million DAUs and 2 million paid users in September 2017. At the time, the company was reporting $200 million in annual recurring revenue. It’s a fair bet with the number of paid users growing by third at last count, that revenue number has increased significantly as well

Slack and products of its ilk like Workplace by Facebook, Google Hangouts and Microsoft Teams are trying to revolutionize the way we communicate and collaborate inside organizations. Slack has managed to advance the idea of enterprise communications that began in the early 2000 with chat clients, advanced to Enterprise 2.0 tools like Yammer and Jive in the mid-2000s, and finally evolved into modern tools like Slack we are using today in the mobile-cloud era.

Slack has been able to succeed so well in business because it does much more than provide a channel to communicate. It has built a platform on top of which companies can plug in an assortment of tools they are using every day to do their jobs like ServiceNow for help desk tickets, Salesforce for CRM and marketing data and Zendesk for customer service information.

This ability to provide a simple way to do all of your business in one place without a lot of task switching has been a holy grail of sorts in the enterprise for years. The two previously mentioned iterations, chat clients and Enterprise 2.0 tools, tried and failed to achieve this, but Slack has managed to create this single platform and made it easy for companies to integrate services.

This has been automated even further by the use of bots, which can act as trusted assistants inside of Slack providing additional information and performing tasks for you on your behalf when it makes sense.

Slack has an otherworldly valuation of over $5 billion right now and is on its way to an eventual IPO. Atlassian might have thrown in the towel on enterprise communications, but it has opened the door to getting a piece of that IPO action while giving its customers what they want and forming a strong bond with Slack.

Others like Facebook and Microsoft also have a strong presence in this space and continue to build out their products. It’s not as though anyone else is showing signs of throwing up their hands just yet. In fact, Just today Facebook bought Redkix to enhance its offering by giving users the ability to collaborate via email or the Workplace by Facebook interface, but Atlassian’s acquiescence is a strong signal that if you had any doubt, Slack is a leader here and they got a big boost with today’s announcement.

If you missed the first few rounds of excitement about Nintendo’s mini nostalgia machines, you’ve got another shot.

Nintendo’s NES and SNES Classic consoles aren’t always easy to find, but they’re now available from Amazon for $59.99 (NES Classic) and $79.99 (SNES Classic). You can place an order for either right now, though be aware that the NES Classic won’t ship until it’s back in stock on August 12 and the SNES Classic looks like it’ll be back on August 3 — a pretty reasonable wait for a sure thing. Update: It looks like Amazon’s stock of the NES Classic may have already run out in the course of the last few minutes, though the SNES version is still available at its normal retail price (and let’s be real, it was the best console). They seem to be dropping in and out of availability, so try refreshing and see what happens!

When they were first introduced, the reimagined versions of two of the best-loved consoles of all-time arrived to feverish demand. Back in 2016, the NES Classic was difficult hunt down and when it hit in August 2017, the SNES followed suit, managing to even outpace interest in its own progenitor. (Naturally, scarcity is the perfect fuel for a nostalgia-powered fire.)

Nintendo originally didn’t intend for either console to be restocked indefinitely, but after observing the “unbridled enthusiasm” of the retro gaming boxes it decided to keep them around. The consoles reappeared in May and June but sold out quickly.

Even with the repeat appearances, it’s been hard to keep track of when and where the things go on sale. If you’re reading this and you’ve yet to score a one-way ticket to nostalgic 8- or 16-bit euphoria, the Amazon listings look like a sure bet — for the moment, anyhow.

Machine learning is everywhere these days, but it’s usually more or less invisible: it sits in the background, optimizing audio or picking out faces in images. But this new system is not only visible, but physical: it performs AI-type analysis not by crunching numbers, but by bending light. It’s weird and unique, but counter-intuitively, it’s an excellent demonstration of how deceptively simple these “artificial intelligence” systems are.

Machine learning systems, which we frequently refer to as a form of artificial intelligence, at their heart are just a series of calculations made on a set of data, each building on the last or feeding back into a loop. The calculations themselves aren’t particularly complex — though they aren’t the kind of math you’d want to do with a pen and paper. Ultimately all that simple math produces a probability that the data going in is a match for various patterns it has “learned” to recognize.

The thing is, though, that once these “layers” have been “trained” and the math finalized, in many ways it’s performing the same calculations over and over again. Usually that just means it can be optimized and won’t take up that much space or CPU power. But researchers from UCLA show that it can literally be solidified, the layers themselves actual 3D-printed layers of transparent material, imprinted with complex diffraction patterns that do to light going through them what the math would have done to numbers.

If that’s a bit much to wrap your head around, think of a mechanical calculator. Nowadays it’s all done digitally in computer logic, but back in the day calculators used actual mechanical pieces moving around — something adding up to 10 would literally cause some piece to move to a new position. In a way this “diffractive deep neural network” is a lot like that: it uses and manipulates physical representations of numbers rather than electronic ones.

As the researchers put it:

Each point on a given layer either transmits or reflects an incoming wave, which represents an artificial neuron that is connected to other neurons of the following layers through optical diffraction. By altering the phase and amplitude, each “neuron” is tunable.

“Our all-optical deep learning framework can perform, at the speed of light, various complex functions that computer-based neural networks can implement,” write the researchers in the paper describing their system, published today in Science.

To demonstrate it they trained a deep learning model to recognize handwritten numerals. Once it was final, they took the layers of matrix math and converted it into a series of optical transformations. For example, a layer might add values together by refocusing the light from both onto a single area of the next layer — the real calculations are much more complex, but hopefully you get the idea.

By arranging millions of these tiny transformations on the printed plates, the light that enters one end comes out the other structured in such a way that the system can tell whether it’s a 1, 2, 3 and so on with better than 90 percent accuracy.

What use is that, you ask? Well, none in its current form. But neural networks are extremely flexible tools, and it would be perfectly possible to have a system recognize letters instead of numbers, making an optical character recognition system work totally in hardware with almost no power or calculation required. And why not basic face or figure recognition, no CPU necessary? How useful would that be to have in your camera?

The real limitations here are manufacturing ones: it’s difficult to create the diffractive plates with the level of precision required to perform some of the more demanding processing. After all, if you need to calculate something to the seventh decimal place, but the printed version is only accurate to the third, you’re going to run into trouble.

This is only a proof of concept — there’s no dire need for giant number-recognition machines — but it’s a fascinating one. The idea could prove to be influential in camera and machine learning technology — structuring light and data in the physical world rather than the digital one. It may feel like it’s going backwards, but perhaps the pendulum is simply swinging back the other direction.

Electric scooter startups Bird and Skip have landed permits to operate in Portland under a new pilot program that aims to gauge how the controversial form of micro-transportation will fit in the city. And already there’s a bit of drama, or call it skeptical-scooter feelings, scuttling about.

The permits issued by Portland Bureau of Transportation will run until November 20, when the pilot program is set to end. Scooters could be available for rent as soon as this week, PBOT officials said.

The PBOT will conduct an evaluation of the program and survey Portlanders to determine whether scooters are compatible with the safe, efficient and equitable operation of Portland’s transportation system, the department said.

And while the official line from PBOT is neutral, there’s at least one staffer whose snarky tweet suggests that the scooters are something more repugnant: just another toy for tech bros.

It all started after PBOT tweeted a PSA about the rules for scooters. In response, one person wrote, “Instead of preemptively shaming and chastising e-scooter users PBOT should be bending over backwards to encourage this alternative. I would like @PBOTinfo staff to reread the climate action plan, bike plan, and comp plan to come to grips with the magnitude of their failure.”

A staffer within PBOT wasn’t too pleased and posted this retort.

“Or maybe they’re toys that tech bros leave strewn about, blocking corner ramps needed for people with disabilities. Also, people need to know the helmet laws for scooters are different than for bicycles. We’ll see how it goes during this pilot period!”

And then later, another tweet. This time the PBOT staffer tries to walk back the previous comments. Another 15 minutes later and it looks like that staffer’s tweeting privileges have been taken away.

The PBOT scooter skeptic, and the initial tweet that prompted the snippy response, is a symptom of a wider controversy bubbling up in densely populated cities throughout the U.S. as traditional car ownership — and the traffic congestion that comes with it — collides with public transit and newer forms of mobility such as ride-hailing, bike sharing and scooters.

The scooters have had a polarizing effect on residents living in cities. Some love the dockless scooter services because they provide a fast and cheap means of traveling short distances. Others loathe them, or more accurately, the misuse of them. (Scooters are supposed to be used in the bike lane, not on sidewalks.)

Still, the wave of scooters doesn’t appear to be slowing. Bird, for instance, launched in Portland and Cincinnati on Thursday. The company has launched in about 30 U.S. cities to date. Although not all of those have gone smoothly.

For instance, after Bird entered into Milwaukee on June 27, the city attorney issued a cease-and-desist letter and sued the scooter-share startup. The Milwaukee City Council is now considering a ban of all electric scooters.

Meanwhile, the streets of San Francisco remain scooter-less while the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency continues its review of the 12 applications from companies to operate electric scooters in the city. Bird, Lime, Lyft, Uber and others have applied for permits to operate electric scooter-share services in San Francisco. The ban, and subsequent permit process, was the result of several startups deploying their electric scooters without permission. 

Meanwhile, back in Portland, the number of scooters will be capped at 2,500, with each permitted company receiving a portion of the total. PBOT says it will continue to issue permits to companies that qualify under the pilot rules. In other words, Bird and Skip may soon have competition.

The PBOT is limiting the rollout, as well. Companies are allowed to deploy up to 200 scooters during its first week of operation. The department is also requiring that each company deploy a portion of their fleets in East Portland.

State law requires scooter riders to wear a helmet and prohibits use on sidewalks. Riders will be required to park scooters on the sidewalk close to the curb, so that scooters do not interfere with pedestrians, according to PBOT rules.

Amazon’s web services AWS continue to be the highlight of the company’s balance sheet, once again showing the kind of growth Amazon is looking for in a new business for the second quarter — especially one that has dramatically better margins than its core retail business.

Despite now running a grocery chain, the company’s AWS division — which has an operating margin over 25 percent compared to its tiny margins on retail — grew 49 percent year-over-year in the quarter compared to last year’s second quarter. It’s also up 49 percent year-over-year when comparing the most recent six months to the same period last year. AWS is now on a run rate well north of $10 billion annually, generating more than $6 billion in revenue in the second quarter this year. Meanwhile, Amazon’s retail operations generated nearly $47 billion with a net income of just over $1.3 billion (unaudited). Amazon’s AWS generated $1.6 billion in operating income on its $6.1 billion in revenue.

So, in short, Amazon’s dramatically more efficient AWS business is its biggest contributor to its actual net income. The company reported earnings of $5.07 per share, compared to analyst estimates of around $2.50 per share, on revenue of $52.9 billion. That revenue number fell under what investors were looking for, so the stock isn’t really doing anything in after-hours, and Amazon still remains in the race to become a company with a market cap of $1 trillion alongside Google, Apple and Microsoft.

This isn’t extremely surprising, as Amazon was one of the original harbingers of the move to a cloud computing-focused world, and, as a result, Microsoft and Google are now chasing it to capture up as much share as possible. While Microsoft doesn’t break out Azure, the company says it’s one of its fastest-growing businesses, and Google’s “other revenue” segment that includes Google Cloud Platform also continues to be one of its fastest-growing divisions. Running a bunch of servers with access to on-demand compute, it turns out, is a pretty efficient business that can account for the very slim margins that Amazon has on the rest of its core business.

HipChat, the workplace chat app that held the throne before Slack was Slack, is being discontinued. Also being discontinued is Atlassian’s own would-be HipChat replacement, Stride.

News of the discontinuation comes first not from Atlassian, but instead from a somewhat surprising source: Slack CEO Stewart Butterfield. In a series of tweets, Butterfield says that Slack is purchasing the IP for both products to “better support those users who choose to migrate” to its platform.

Butterfield also notes that Atlassian will be making a “small but symbolically important investment” in Slack — likely a good move, given that rumors of a Slack IPO have been swirling (though Butterfield says it won’t happen this year). Getting a pre-IPO investment into Slack might end up paying off for Atlassian better than trying to continue competing.

Atlassian VP of Product Management, Joff Redfern, confirmed the news in a blog post, calling it the “best way forward” for its existing customers. It’s about as real of an example of “if you can’t beat ’em, join ’em” as you can get; even Atlassian’s own employees will be moved over to using Slack.

According to an FAQ about the change, Stride and HipChat’s last day will be February 15th, 2019 — or a bit shy of seven months from the date of the announcement. So if you’re a customer on either one of those platforms, you’ve got time to figure things out.

It doesn’t sound like any of Atlassian’s other products will be affected here; Bitbucket, Jira, etc. will carry on, with only the company’s real-time communications platforms being shuttered.

Hipchat was launched in beta form back in 2009, long before Slack’s debut in 2013. It mostly ruled its space in the time in between, leading Atlassian to acquire it in March of 2012. Slack quickly outgrew it in popularity though, for myriad reasons — be it a bigger suite of third-party integrations, a better reputation for uptime, or… well, better marketing. By September of 2017, Atlassian overhauled its chat platform and rebranded it as as “Stride”, but it was never able to quite catch up with Slack’s momentum.