Year: 2018

MyEtherWallet, the most popular crypto wallet service on the internet, is finally getting a mobile app as it bids to increase security for its users.

Today the company introduced MEW Connect, an iOS app that allows users to access their wallet through MyEtherWallet but without the need to type their private key. There are already solutions that allow them — such as hardware keys from Trezor and Ledger — but MEW Connect is offering the benefits for free.

The app is launching in the coming days as a limited iOS beta. Given that the website receives more than 600,000 visitors per day, demand for the beta is likely to be high. Those who aren’t successful this time around shouldn’t have too long to wait as a full launch is expected to come by the end of September. An Android version is also in the works and is expected to be released around the same time.

How does it work?

It’s really quite simple. The app uses a QR code scanner that replaces the need to enter a private key. Entering information like a private key on a website is something that people have always been warned against doing. Recent analysis suggests that more than $7 million has been stolen via phishing attacks on wallet services, but still people can be lazy or reluctant to buy a hardware wallet, so it’s a practice that continues to happen.

Now, using the MEW Connect app you simply scan a barcode on MyEtherWallet.com, which opens your wallet account using a peer-to-peer connection.

On the technical side, MyEtherWallet confirmed it is using Apple’s keychain services to encrypt the app — which it said retains data on-device — and pair it with the web-based peer. There are plans to utilize the Touch ID feature in iOS in the future, but the feature is currently absent.

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The app itself requires a master password to be set first — the app scores passwords and encourages stronger ones — and it provides a set of backup words, much like a device from Trezor or Ledger. The master password is designed to prevent unauthorized access, for example, if you lose your phone. The backup words, meanwhile — which should be written down on paper and stored carefully — are the key to getting access to your wallet in the event that you lose your phone.

That’s essentially it at this point. The app exists to remove the need to enter a private key. In testing, it worked fairly consistently across different browsers and computers I used, although there could be issues as with all alpha versions of software.

Payment potential

What’s particularly exciting, however, is what the app could become as and when it adds new features.

The main app screen includes a debit card style design and it’s easy to imagine that some form of payments, most obviously peer-to-peer, could be added to massively simplify the process of sending crypto.

But that’s not going to happen soon, according to MyEtherWallet founder Kosala Hemachandra, who told TechCrunch that he doesn’t want to rush introducing new features. Hemachandra said the intention is to move slowly to ensure users are comfortable with the app, but he did admit payments are on the roadmap.

“That’ll be the best use case for crypto we can implement in the near future,” he said in an interview. “If you want to go mainstream, that’ll be a huge advantage for the whole industry. First, we want people to get used to this MEW Connect concept, scanning a QR code and creating a P2P link.”

For now, the app does include a link that lets people buy crypto via a third party. That’s an approach MyEtherWallet has taken on its website service, and the affiliate money generated from that is enough to make the business profitable, cover payroll for its staff of 15 and generally keep the business sustainable.

Hemachandra said he knocks back interest from investors on a daily basis.

“I’m not really a fan of VCs,” he said candidly.

Removing private key risk

For the beta launch, Hemachandra said he’s hoping that lots of bugs are unearthed to improve the app experience.

“My hope is beta users will be developers who can go through our code. I really believe in open source and we don’t plan to hide anything,” he said.

Like MyEtherWallet.com, the plan is to publish the code for the MEW Connect iOS and Android apps online to allow scrutiny from the community. Given the reach of MyEtherWallet, this is definitely one project to keep a keen eye on.

Another is MyCrypto.com, a similar service whose founders include Hemachandra’s former business partner at MyEtherWallet, Taylor Monahan. The company recently removed private key access from its website for the same reasons to the launch of MEW Connect: user safety.

“Mass adoption of cryptocurrencies is unlikely in a world where a mis-click can cost you your life savings. Tragically, even when a user takes painstaking precautions in verifying that they are on the correct site before entering their private key, a compromise of the site itself can still result in a total loss of user funds,” MyCrypto.com CTO Daniel Ternyak explained in a blog post.

That two of the web’s largest wallet services are moving on from private keys is an important step for the crypto industry.

It’s one thing to run machine learning models in the cloud, where you have plenty of resources. On mobile devices, you’re dealing with very finite compute resources, so if you want to run your models directly on the devices, they have to be highly optimized. Add to that that Apple and Google are taking somewhat different approaches and use different frameworks and you can see why this is all a bit of a nightmare for mobile developers.

Boston-based Fritz, which is opening its service to all developers today, wants to make all of this far easier. It’s an end-to-end solution for adding machine learning models to mobile apps — and have them run natively on the device.

The company argues that as Apple and Google are both pushing their own frameworks, developers are left to work with what’s at best suboptimal tooling. Fritz then wants to build better tools to simplify life for developers.

“What we want the developers to do is build a model and then we take care of the rest,” the company’s CEO and co-founder Jameson Toole told me.

Fritz is agnostic as to the runtime that the models are actually using. Developers can bring their Core ML, TensorFlow Mobile and TensorFlow Lite models to Fritz and the SDK will monitor their performance and help developers push updated models to their apps without having to release a new version.

In addition, Fritz also offers a number of standard models for use cases like image labeling and object detection that the company has already optimized to work offline and at high enough frame rates to support live video.

Among the apps that starting using Fritz during its private beta are PlantVillage, which uses on-device machine learning to detect evidence of crop diseases and gives farmers in East Africa advice for how to treat them; MDAcne, for detecting cases of acne; and the more lighthearted InstaSaber, which turns a piece of rolled-up paper into a virtual lightsaber.

All of Fritz’s functionality is available for free. Over time, Toole told me, the team plans to add to the platform a number of premium services, including more collaboration tooling for teams and more automation features for managing and tweaking models. It’ll also launch more machine learning features, including style transfer and image segmentation.

In addition to its core service, Fritz also offers a number of tutorials and other resources for teaching developers about machine learning, as well as Alchemy, a tool for analyzing and benchmarking a custom model’s performance on mobile.

Toole also is open to going beyond smartphones and supporting other edge devices for IoT use cases, for example. Right now, the team is squarely focused on mobile, though.

Why do I write about tech? For James Ball, it’s because I want to write “soap-bubble light coverage” and “glossy coverage” “to counterbalance the ‘serious’ news of the day.” Ball, a former editor at The Guardian and the author of “Post-Truth: How Bullshit Conquered the World,” has a few choice words to say to reporters, columnists and analysts like me who cover the tech industry.

In a piece entitled “We need a new model for tech journalism,” Ball calls for nothing less than the dismantling of the current tech press, and its replacement by one far more critical of the corporate interests that dominate the industry.

Okay. But here’s the challenge: The whole idea of a coherent “tech press” seems to miss that technology has completely taken over the world. Want to cover Washington? Well, Alphabet is now the heaviest corporate spender on lobbying in DC. Want to cover foreign affairs? Well, U.S./China relations are squarely focused on issues of tech industrial policies, like China’s Made in China 2025 plan.

Every sector, every industry, heck, every decision is increasingly one in which technology either plays the prime role, or at least has major influence. Ball grasps that the work of a tech journalist is hard, writing that “Tech reporters are often expected to cover all facets of the industry.” Frankly, that was easier just a couple of years ago, before the iPhone and the global smartphone revolution made tech companies not just interesting, but powerful as well.

That to me is the burden of covering technology today. Tech now spans a spectrum from the proverbial two tinkerers in a garage to the most powerful corporations in the history of the planet. Most startup founders are broke, yet Jeff Bezos is worth $150 billion. Journalists need an incredible dynamic range to cover the range of these stories effectively.

Take startup coverage, which has always had a sort of effusive optimism that Ball clearly dislikes. Here’s the reality: startup life is awful. It’s stressful, emotionally draining and exhausting. And even after the founders make a total physical and mental commitment to a new product — a new way to see the world — the most common case is for literally nothing to happen. The average startup dies an anonymous death, without even a Medium “It’s been an incredible journey” post.

That’s not news. In fact, tech journalists could write “ambitious startup fails again!” stories pretty much every hour of the workweek and not run out of companies and founders to write about.

The reason people read about early-stage tech startups, indeed, why they want to read any news, is to peer into the exceptional and differentiate it from the mundane. They want to know why this startup succeeded when more than a thousand others fell by the wayside. Tens of thousands of high-growth startups are founded every year across the world, and yet, only a handful represents the complete economic value of the industry. That’s the story. I remain unabashed about covering success over failure (although learning from defeat has its uses).

Yet, our lenses need to change over time as these startups mature. It’s one thing to cover Airbnb back in 2008, and discuss this startup where a couple of founders are trying to help people attend the Democratic National Convention in Denver that year. But Airbnb is now a multi-billion dollar valued company, and deserves far more critical analysis than it did a decade ago. We saw this sort of narrative adaptation over time with Uber, and obviously with Theranos. But there are at least a dozen other companies that deserve fairly strict scrutiny of their actions on a daily basis, but often get limited attention.

To me, a renewed “tech press” needs to have both optimistic and pessimistic angles. It needs to cover very early startups with soft gloves while also knowing when to throw a punch as those startups mature and gain power.

Perhaps even more importantly, we need to start appreciating the complexity of our current environment. Alphabet can face a multi-billion dollar fine from the Europeans for antitrust, while also fighting a tooth-and-nail war with ISPs like Verizon and AT&T over net neutrality. These companies are so big, and touching so many facets of our lives, that there are no brushstrokes that can paint a simple abstraction of these companies. Some of their actions may be “good” or “bad,” but only deeper analysis is going to get us any purchase on the effects of these companies on our lives.

Ball and I completely agree that the coverage of technology increasingly requires specialization. No one can be informed about what is happening across the industry anymore, let alone cover it all. Indeed, I am not even sure a single human being can truly cover companies like Alphabet and Facebook. I am not sure their executives and boards know the complete extent of what is happening at their companies. We need more depth, more focus and more quality criticism if we are to build an effective press.

I am reminded a bit of Sara M. Watson’s work around “constructive tech criticism.” She wrote in her report, “Acknowledging the realities of society and culture, constructive criticism offers readers the tools and framings for thinking about their relationship to technology and their relationship to power.” To me, that’s a great mission statement for what coverage should do today. It requires us to renew our focus: to inform, to simplify and complicate as necessary, and to bring attention to the most salient issues of the day. That’s why I write, and why we should all be writing.

The latest robots out of MIT are small enough to float “indefinitely” in the air. Researchers accomplished the feat by attaching 2D electronics to colloids — tiny particles measuring around one-billionth to one-millionth of a meter. All told, the devices are roughly the size of a human egg cell.

What’s more, the addition of photodiode semiconductors means the tiny individual systems are able to to be self-powered, without the need for a battery. The system converts light into a small electrical charge that’s enough to keep the device’s on-board environmental sensors running, while storing on-board information.

As to what these tiny robots are actually good for, MIT plans to send them into hard to reach spots to monitor environments. The two at the top of the list are pipelines and the human body — so, two very different kinds of plumbing systems, really.

“The researchers hope to lay the groundwork for devices that could be dispersed to carry out diagnostic journeys through anything from the human digestive system to oil and gas pipelines,” MIT says, “or perhaps to waft through air to measure compounds inside a chemical processor or refinery.”

Basically you send it in one end and retrieve it on the other — which, again, means…different things in different systems. Once retrieved, information collected by the sensors can be downloaded off the system and analyzed.

Amazon is today announcing the new batch of startups joining its Alexa Accelerator program, powered by Techstars. Members of last year’s Amazon’s Alexa Accelerator program, which backs companies developing new experiences using voice-based technologies, went on to raise over $10 million in venture capital following their participation in the program, says Amazon. The new group includes startups focused on business use cases, STEM education for kids, accessible technology, and more.

The idea behind the accelerator is to help fuel early-stage companies developing for voice, giving Amazon an equity stake in the businesses.

The teams will participate in a three-month long accelerator program that culminates on October 9th with Demo Night, where they’ll present their business to venture capitalists and angel investors, and present their new Alexa experiences.

Amazon says it received hundreds of applications from 44 countries around the world for the 2018 program, and narrowed it down to nine it believes have the most potential.

During the accelerator program, the companies will improve their products, refine their business model, and develop for Alexa, while receiving mentorship from both Techstars and Amazon, as well as the broader Seattle community.

This year’s batch includes participation from the following:

Blutag

Blutag seems especially relevant to Amazon’s interests, as its company is helping stores create voice-based shopping experiences for their customers. It aims to enable retailers to build a voice-based store without coding, allowing customers to shop by asking Alexa for a particular product, then receive personalized product suggestions over text or email.

Conservation Labs

This startup is operating in the smart home space, offering a produce that connects to the home’s main water line to monitor household water use, in order to help homeowners gain money-saving insights and detect leaks.

HelixAI

HelixAI is taking Alexa to scientific laboratories. Not to be confused with genetic services marketplace Helix, this startup’s HelixAI digital assistant can respond to natural language queries to provide scientists and other others in lab settings with real-time information about their operating procedures, lab safety information, workflow and processes, and reference information. For example, you can ask HelixAI things like “what’s the boiling point of benzene?” or “What about the cut site for the restriction enzyme EcoRI?”

Imageous

Imageous is expanding Alexa’s smart home capabilities to the “smart building.” Its smart facilities AI assistant for occupants of commercial buildings brings the benefits of AI technology to building operators. The AI can take advantage of system data (environmental), social data from the occupant population (if they’re reporting they’re hot, cold or comfortable), and external data sources (e.g weather or traffic data), to optimize the building for energy use and comfort with a focus on efficiency and cost savings.

Jargon

Jargon is offering an on-demand translation service that removes language barriers by combining technology with human assistance.

Novalia

Novalia offers a Bluetooth platform connected to paper-thin self-adhesive touch sensors that capture data through touch, in order to create immersive, touch-based experiences, Its audio platform then responds to touch, and turns it into audio through a surface sound actuator or line out. The company has worked with a number of brands on digital signage, touch-based posters, and other projects.

Presence AI

This company is developing AI-powered conversations for small businesses to replace phone calls for things like bookings. Currently it operates over text message, but an Alexa integration could translate this to voice. (A less troublesome version of Google’s Duplex, perhaps, as it doesn’t try to impersonate a human.)

Unruly Studios

Boston-based Unruly is combining STEM education with physical activity by building programmable, electronic floor tiles that kids can code, then jump on, and run around on to play interactive games. The startup includes former engineers from Hasbro, iRobot, Mattel and Rethink Robotics.

Voiceitt

This company is working to make voice technology accessible, with the development of Automatic Speech Recognition technology (ASR) that allows people with severe speech impairments to communicate and be understood by voice. Customers train the software to understand their unique pronunciations, which it then translates into normalized speech output in the form of audio or text. The system can also be used to help people have face-to-face conversations.

(TechCrunch coverage: Voiceitt lets people with speech impairments use voice-controlled technology)

A number of these companies in this cohort are more focused on supporting businesses, rather than consumers, using voice technology. That’s not surprising given Amazon’s recent interest in putting Alexa in the office and in hotels, for example.

Amazon’s Alexa Fund backs the participating startups with an initial $20,000 funding in return for a six percent equity stake. The startups also have the possibility of receiving another $100,000 as a convertible note. 

However, there have been some concerns that along with the rewards, there are also risks for startups joining Amazon’s program. As The WSJ pointed out as did The Information, some entrepreneurs have taken a wary view of working with Amazon’s VC arm – especially after it led the Series A for home videoconferencing startup Nucleus, then proceeded to directly compete with it with the subsequent launch of the Echo Show.

But on the flip side, startups get an early peek at Amazon’s Alexa roadmap, and access to Amazon staff for help in developing Alexa skills.

Last November, Amazon announced an additional $100 million in venture capital for the fund targeted at international investment opportunities. Past Alexa Fund portfolio companies have included ecobee, TrackR, Rachio, Toymail, Ring (which Amazon acquired), Sphero, Vesper, Owlet, and many more.

Lime, the bike and scooter-share company that recently raised $335 million from GV, Uber and others, has hit six million rides since launching last June. Lime, which first launched in Greensboro, N.C., has since expanded to 70 cities.

In comparison, Bird announced in April it hit 1 million rides since launching in November.

Lime’s ridership in San Francisco is currently on hold as the city reviews permit applications from 12 companies to operate electric scooter services. But during the short period of time (from March through June) that Lime did operate in San Francisco, its scooters saw 300,000 rides. Over in San Diego, Calif., its scooters facilitated 1 million bike and scooter rides in five months.

Electric scooters are hot right now, with VCs pouring hundreds of thousands of dollars into the space, and ride-hailing companies placing their bets on scooter startups. Lyft, for example, has laid out its ambitions for electric scooters, as well as bikes. Meanwhile, Uber, as mentioned above, invested in Lime as part of a deal to put Uber branding on Lime scooters.

Be sure to check out TechCrunch’s scooter coverage below.

Xage (pronounced Zage), a blockchain security startup based in Silicon Valley, announced a $12 million Series A investment today led by March Capital Partners. GE Ventures, City Light Capital and NexStar Partners also participated.

The company emerged from stealth in December with a novel idea to secure the myriad of devices in the industrial internet of things on the blockchain. Here’s how I described it in a December 2017 story:

Xage is building a security fabric for IoT, which takes blockchain and synthesizes it with other capabilities to create a secure environment for devices to operate. If the blockchain is at its core a trust mechanism, then it can give companies confidence that their IoT devices can’t be compromised. Xage thinks that the blockchain is the perfect solution to this problem.

It’s an interesting approach, one that attracted Duncan Greatwood to the company. As he told me in December his previous successful exits — Topsy to Apple in 2013 and PostPath to Cisco in 2008 — gave him the freedom to choose a company that really excited him for his next challenge.

When he saw what Xage was doing, he wanted to be a part of it, and given the unorthodox security approach the company has taken, and Greatwood’s pedigree, it couldn’t have been hard to secure today’s funding.

The Industrial Internet of Things is not like its consumer cousin in that it involves getting data from big industrial devices like manufacturing machinery, oil and gas turbines and jet engines. While the entire Internet of Things could surely benefit from a company that concentrates specifically on keeping these devices secure, it’s a particularly acute requirement in industry where these devices are often helping track data from key infrastructure.

GE Ventures is the investment arm of GE, but their involvement is particularly interesting because GE has made a big bet on the Industrial Internet of Things. Abhishek Shukla of GE Ventures certainly saw the connection. “For industries to benefit from the IoT revolution, organizations need to fully connect and protect their operation. Xage is enabling the adoption of these cutting edge technologies across energy, transportation, telecom, and other global industries,” Shukla said in a statement.

The company was founded just last year and is based in Palo Alto, California.

Gideon Brothers, an ambitious startup out of Croatia that is building autonomous robots to put to work in warehouses and other industrial logistics, has quietly raised $765,000 in funding.

The round is led by TransferWise co-founder Taavet Hinrikus, who has become an increasingly active investor, recently backing fintech Cleo, legal tech startup Juro, and satellite company Open Cosmos. Ex-Wired U.K. editor David Rowan and a number of unnamed Croatian angels have also participated in Gideon Brothers’ seed round.

Founded in early 2017 and comprising a 40-plus team of deep learning and robotics experts — which includes 5 PhDs and 27 Masters of Hardware and Software engineering and other related disciplines — the company is developing an AI-powered robot for various industrial applications.

Dubbed “The Brain,” the technology combines 3D computer vision and deep learning to enable Gideon Brothers’ robots to be aware of their environment and operate autonomously, similar to self-driving vehicles.

“We have been developing a technology we call a ‘robot brain’,” co-founder and CEO Matija Kopic tells me. “We believe that robots of the future will rely on the same type of vision that you and I rely on, which is basically stereo vision. We’ve deployed deep learning on top of stereo vision to give our robots a new type of perception of their environment”.

The startup’s first product is described as an “autonomous and modular intralogistics robot” that is capable of safely handling large pallets in manufacturing, warehouse and commercial environments. It is designed to work alongside humans, with minimal changes to a facility, negating the need for prohibitively expensive retrofitting or investing in brand new robot-enabled buildings, which is the route that Amazon has gone down.

More broadly, Gideon Brothers wants to help address current labour shortages in industrial logistics. Citing a research brief by DHL, Gideon Brothers says that demand for supply chain professionals exceeds supply by a ratio of six to one. The work is often painstakingly dull and physically demanding, meaning that turnover can be as high as 40 percent.

“[We use] a combination of camera-based 3D vision, primarily powered by deep learning algorithms to make sure that our robot, whatever it ends up doing, is aware of its surroundings and the dynamics that exist in these old school industrial facilities which are not highly structured or highly organised like, for example, e-commerce environments are,” adds Kopic.

“We are targeting the remaining 90 percent of the world’s industrial facilities that are completely old school, traditional and centered around human beings as the drivers of those facilities and the business model”.

In practice, this means that instead of workers rushing around a warehouse taking orders from a computer-generated voice or a scanner, and then moving several tons of product around (the so-called “man-to-goods” model), the Gideon Brothers’ robot brings the goods to the worker. It receives instructions from the Gideon Brothers fleet management system, which is integrated into an operator’s Warehouse Management System.

“It goes to the pallet position it has been sent to, lifts it off the frame it is sitting on and transports the entire pallet to a commissioning or “picking” area where workers take the product that need to be packed onto another customer-specific pallet. The robot then returns the original pallet back to its original position – autonomously and safely. The workers don’t have to zoom around and can focus on more complex tasks like picking,” explains Kopic.

If all of that sounds incredibly ambitious for a European startup that has raised less than $1 million, it’s because it is. However, Kopic says that by setting up shop in Croatia he has been able to recruit a very specialist team while keeping costs much lower than direct competitors. It also has the advantage of being close to a number of facilities where the startup is currently testing its robots, including being given access to much-needed warehouse logistics data.

Investor Hinrikus echoes this sentiment. “[Gideon Brothers is] building a killer deep tech team. This will be the best team of deep tech talent to the east from here (well, before we get to China),” he tells me.

Amazon announced some new features this morning aimed at bringing more accessibility to the Echo line. At the top of the list is Tap to Alexa (not to be confused with the Amazon Tap, mind), which circumvents the need to use voice to interact with the Echo Show.

The new feature essentially turns the device into a touchscreen tablet, by clicking the feature on in settings. Once enabled, users can choose from a number of shortcuts to add to the home screen. The list includes news and weather, along with customizable functions, like the ability to turn specific smart home devices on and off, using text inputs.

It’s a simple solution, but it should offer a way into the Alexa ecosystem for users unable to audio cues to interact with the system. It’s the kind of thing that Amazon could really only add once it introduced displays into the mix.

Same goes for Alexa Captioning. The feature was introduced for U.S. customers a few months back, and now it’s being rolled out to those in the U.K., Germany, Japan, India, France, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. The addition will offer an on-screen text-based Alexa responses on both the Echo Show and Spot.

Taken together, the two features should help Amazon appeal to a whole new group of users.

Let’s be real — the latest batch of Samsung ads are more about the company’s perception of Apple than its own devices. But hey, that tact has worked for the company in the past, so who can blame ‘em? They do, however, offer at least one key bit of insight into the company’s on-going plans.

In a spot titled “Dongle” that takes aim at the easiest possible joke in the smartphone world, Samsung takes Apple to task for the iPhone for its lack of headphone jack. A conversation ensues between a customer and Genius Bar employee, the term “double dongle” is coined and the former grimaces like someone just explained the plot of Human Centipede to him for the first time.

Again, the ad’s less about what Samsung has, than what Apple doesn’t, but it does appear to reaffirm the company’s commitment to the headphone jack. Granted, we’ve seen companies do about-faces on the issue before. The most notable instance is probably Google, who called Apple out one year and dropped the jack the next.

But releasing such an openly mocking ad a month or so before dropping the headphone jack would not, as the kids say, be a great look for the company. The inclusion of the port has been a selling point for Samsung ever since Apple dropped it way back in 2016 for the iPhone 6. It’s an easy win for Samsung. All the company has to do is literally nothing.

And from the leaks we’ve seen of the Note 9, it appears that the 3.5mm will once again be returning.

Of course, what felt like an act of aggression to some two year back has become increasingly common amongst the competition. I’ve talked to a number of manufacturers who’ve retained the jack over the past two years, and nearly all have acknowledged that it’s simply a matter of time before they go that route as well.

It’s tough to say how much of the decision to keep the jack around is Samsung simply giving customers what they want, and how much is the company simply trying to distance itself from Apple. I suspect the truth lies somewhere in the middle. Samsung can continue to use its (admittedly pretty nice) wired AKG headphones as a selling point, while making all the “double dongle” jokes its hefty ad budget can support.