Year: 2018

Google CEO Sundar Pichai admitted today that YouTube needs to do better in dealing with conspiracy content on its site that can lead to real world violence. During his testimony on Tuesday before the House Judiciary Committee, the exec was questioned on how YouTube handles extremist content which promote conspiracy theories like Pizzagate and, more recently, a Hillary Clinton-focused conspiracy theory dubbed Frazzledrip.

According to an article in Monday’s The Washington Post, Frazzledrip is a variation on Pizzagate that began spreading on YouTube this spring.

In a bizarre series of questions, Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-MD) asked Pichai if he knew what Frazzledrip was.

Pichai replied that he was “not aware of the specifics about it.”

Raskin went on to explain that the recommendation engine on YouTube has been suggesting videos that claim politicians, celebrities and other leading figures were “sexually abusing and consuming the remains of children, often in satanic rituals.” He said these new conspiracist claims were echoing the discredited Pizzagate conspiracy, which two years ago led to a man firing shots into a Washington D.C. pizzeria, in search of the children he believed were held as sex slaves by Democratic Party leaders.

He also explained the new Frazzledrip theory in more detail, which he read about in The Washington Post’s report about the still rampant hateful conspiracies being hosted by YouTube. This newer conspiracy claims that Hillary Clinton and longtime aide Huma Abedin sexually assaulted a girl and drank her blood.

The Post said some of the video clips were removed after first appearing in April and had been debunked, but its review of the matter found dozens of videos where the claims were still being discussed. Combined, these videos had been viewed millions of times over the past eight months. In addition, the investigation found that YouTube’s search box would highlight these videos when people typed in terms like “HRC video” or “Frazzle.”

YouTube’s policy doesn’t prevent people from uploading falsehoods, The Post’s report noted.

Raskin asked Pichai about this type of extremist propaganda.

“What is your company policy on that? And are you trying to deal with it?,” he questioned.

Pichai admitted, essentially, that YouTube needed to do better.

“We are constantly undertaking efforts to deal with misinformation. We have clearly stated policies and we have made lots of progress in many of the areas where over the past year – so, for example, in areas like terrorism, child safety, and so on,” said Pichai. “We are looking to do more,” he said.

In terms of the Frazzledrip theory, he said it was more of a recent happening.

“But I’m committed to following up on it and making sure we are evaluating these against our policies,” the CEO promised.

The issue with videos like Frazzledrip is that YouTube’s current policies don’t fully encompass how to handle extremist propaganda. Instead, as The Post also said, its policies focus on videos with hateful, graphic and violent content directed at minorities and other protected groups. Meanwhile, it seeks to allow freedom of speech to others who upload content to its site, despite the disinformation they may spread or their potential to lead to violence.

The balance between free speech and content policies is a delicate matter – and an important one, given YouTube’s power to influence dangerous individuals. In addition to the Pizzagate shooter, the mass shooter who killed 11 people at the Pittsburgh synagogue in October had been watching neo-Nazi propaganda on YouTube, the Post’s report pointed out, in another example.

Asked what YouTube was doing about all this, Pichai didn’t offer specifics.

The CEO instead admitted that YouTube struggles with evaluating videos individually because of the volume of content it sees.

“We do get around 400 hours of video every minute. But it’s our responsibility, I think, to make sure YouTube is a platform for freedom of expression, but it’s responsible and contributes positively to society,” Pichai said. He added that its policies allow it take down videos that “insight harm or hatred or violence.” But conspiracy videos don’t always directly insight violence – they just radicalize individuals, who then sometimes act out violently, as a result.

“It’s an area we acknowledge there’s more work to be done, and we’ll definitely continue doing that,” Pichai said. “But I want to acknowledge there is more work to be done. With our growth comes more responsibility. And we are committed to doing better as we invest more in this area,” he said.

At the heart of the lightweight augmented reality glasses that you’ve been promised is the a display engine that a handful of tech companies are racing to improve.

WaveOptics is one such startup looking to expand the capabilities and shrink the form factor of waveguide displays.

The UK-based company has just raised $26 million in what it’s calling the “first stage” of its Series C. The money is coming from Octopus Ventures as well as IP Group, Robert Bosch Venture Capital, Gobi Partners, Goertek and Optimas Capital Partners.

Late last month, Sunnyvale-based DigiLens announced that they has raised new funding from Mitsubishi and Niantic. The increased movement comes just months after it was reported that Apple had acquired a waveguide display manufacturer, Akonia Holographics.

For so many of the companies, the mass market promise of AR is that they can eventually deliver something that every day consumers can use as a replacement for their smartphones.

Here’s a rundown of waveguides from WaveOptics:

The backbone of these AR systems are the increasingly shrinking waveguide displays. The display engines are incredibly complex and they’re both the most expensive component for most of today’s hardware and the piece of tech that is driving the bulky form factors we’re seeing today.

There will be some more iterative executions of the tech on the consumer side before things shrink down too much, but there are also quite a few existing industries where this tech already makes sense, particularly in the automative and enterprise workforce spaces where fashion is a distant second to utility.

While a lot of the players in the AR display race have been pushing up against the same shortcomings of this display type, there was some uncertainty for a bit as so much excitement rallied around Magic Leap and the giant leaps forward that they were talking about with fiberoptic scanning light field photonic chips and all.

Turns out it was mostly smoke and mirrors in terms of what appeared in the first-gen product, though Magic Leap has promised more advances are on the way for subsequent releases. Nevertheless, the looming presence subsiding is probably welcome news to more skirmish investors who want to be sure they’re backing the right horse.

No one has any trouble tracking their steps today. But how can you make sure people know you’re doing it? Ostentatiously checking your phone or watch every five minutes is a pain. What if I told you there was a shoe with a step-tracking computer sticking out of it where everyone could see? It’s a Puma . It was born in 1986, and will be reborn in 2018 — briefly.

The RS Computer was among the early stumbling steps of the personal computer era, when everyone thought that, since people were buying Amigas and Macs, they’d probably buy computer shoes as well. It didn’t really pan out, needless to say.

But what was deeply uncool in 1986 is, 30-some years later, strangely compelling. And it helps that you don’t have to attach it to a command line interface with a special 16-pin cable every time you want to check your steps.

Yes, the reissued RS Computer (RS stands for “running system,” not “robo-shoe”) is coming out the day after tomorrow at select retailers and in extremely limited quantity. The electronics have been updated not to be smaller (you could hide them away completely, after all) but simply to work with modern devices. That’s right — no need to break out your Apple IIe or C64.

[gallery ids="1757269,1757273,1757272"]

Instead of that cable you have Bluetooth, and inside the unit is an accelerometer that should more accurately measure steps and distance. It stores up to 30 days of data and you can recharge the shoe via micro USB.

I love that the giant computer unit literally has screws on it, and the red and black buttons — resembling battery poles — probably serve no purpose but were left on anyway. This is definitely a shoe that people will pay attention to. Just try not to overdo the look with a Casio calculator watch and Zack Morris phone. Know your limitations.

The 86 pairs of RS Computers will be available day after tomorrow (the 13th) at Puma stores in London, Berlin (I just left!) and Tokyo, as well as a few other retailers, including Kith. You should probably call your local stockist now and ask.

TechCrunch Startup Battlefield Africa just finished in Lagos, Nigeria, where 15 companies took the stage for the chance of winning the $25,000 equity-free grand prize, a trip for two to TechCrunch Disrupt San Francisco 2019 and the coveted title of “Africa’s Favorite Startup.”

The winner of the event was M-SCAN from Uganda, which develops portable mobile ultrasound devices (Ultrasonic probes) that are laptop, tablet and mobile phone compatible. The judges were impressed with its scalability potential to make many other medical access devices affordable for Africa, where mother and infant mortality is unforgivably high.

The runner-up was Bettr, a virtual banking experience powered by your smartphone and your data. Bettr has the potential to make banking way more accessible for millions of people currently unbanked across Southern Africa.

The other startups pitching, chosen from literally hundreds of entries, were:

Apollo Agriculture: Leverages advances in machine learning, remote imaging via satellite and mobile money to deliver input finance and agronomic advice to smallholder farmers with radical efficiency and scalability.

Sudpay: Developed an integrated, multi-support, multi-service and multi-operator digital tax collection platform that connects merchants to financial institutions.

LabTech: UriSAF by LabTECH is a urine testing hardware and software solution designed to speed up the diagnosis of Uterine Tract Infections (UTIs).

Complete Farmer: A “crowdfarming” platform that enables users to invest in sustainable farms and monitor farming activities without discarding their daily routine using data-driven cultivation protocols and IoT-enabled precision farming.

FoodHubs: Uses mobile solar-powered cold carts and cold rooms to help smallholder farmers store their produce, so as to avoid post-harvest losses.

Honey Flow Africa: Optimizes beekeeping operations by digitizing and bringing the power of IoT to the beekeeping process to improve honey production, processing and predictability.

Agripredict: Provides farmers with tools that equip them with information that will improve predicting disease, pest infestations and extreme weather conditions.

MAX: Transforms moto-taxi mobility in Africa using mobile apps, inclusive data-driven asset-finance and a comprehensive driver on-boarding program that uses machine learning and psychometric tests to profile drivers and create credit scores for them. MAX enables financial inclusion for drivers, prioritizes safety and uses IoT technology to track all drivers in real time.

CodeLn: An end-to-end technical recruitment platform that automates the entire recruitment process, making it fast and easy for companies to find and test Software Developers and reduce the risk of bad hires.

Bankly: An innovative financial product focused on reaching the unbanked in Africa, in a “Recharge to Save” model. Bankly developed a cash-digitization payment and savings products, in which users pay using Bankly vouchers.

Powerstove Energy: The world’s first clean cookstove with built-in self-powered IoT System for real-time monitoring. Its 100 percent smokeless biomass cookstove cooks food faster and burns 70 times less fuel using processed proprietary water-resistant Goodlife Biomass Pellets produced from forest and agricultural waste.

Pineapple: A fully decentralized insurer. With Pineapple, members pay premiums into their own wallets rather than a central pot. When claims occur, they are distributed to all wallets in the community, which collectively help pay for the claim.

Trend Solar: Assimilated a 4G Android Smartphone and Solar Home System to provide affordable access to energy, internet and mobile in an all-in-one solution that seeks to address the needs of 640 million+ people currently living off-grid in Sub-Saharan Africa.

Last year, we held our first-ever Startup Battlefield in Nairobi, Kenya. African startups impressed us with their innovative solutions and effective business models, so we had to come back and find even more impressive companies from across the continent. TechCrunch reviews several hundred startups from across the region, selecting the top 15 companies to compete onstage. Our partner for the event was Facebook Start.

It’s an ad duoply battle. Facebook is starting to test search ads in its search bar and Marketplace, directly competing with Google’s AdWords. Facebook first tried Sponsored Results back in 2012 but eventually shut down the product in 2013. Now it’s going to let a small set of automotive, retail, and ecommerce industry advertisers show users ads on the search results page on mobile in the US and Canada.

They’ll be repurposed News Feed ads featuring a headline, image, copy text, and a link in the static image or carousel format that can point users to external websites. Facebook declined to share screenshots as it says the exact design is still evolving. Facebook may expand search ads to more countries based on the test’s performance.

The reintroduction of search ads could open an important new revenue stream at a time when Facebook’s revenue growth is quickly decelerating as it runs out of News Feed ad space, the Stories format that advertisers are still adapting is poised to overtake feed sharing on social apps, and users shift their time elsewhere. In Q3 2018, revenue grew 33 percent year-over-year, but that’s far slower than the 49 percent YOY gain it had a year ago, and the 59 percent from Q3 2016. Opening up new ad inventory for search could reinvigorate the sagging revenue growth rate that, combined with Facebook’s privacy and security scandals, has put intense pressure on Facebook’s leaders Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg.

“We’re running a small test to place ads in Facebook search results, and we’ll be evaluating whether these ads are beneficial for people and businesses before deciding whether to expand it” Facebook product manager Zoheb Hajiyani to TechCrunch in a statement. The announcement of the search ads comes as Google’s CEO Sundar Pichai is under fire from Congress over data privacy, though the move could help Google look less like it has a monopoly in search. Facebook’s share of the $279.56 billion total worldwide digital ad market will grow to 19.5 percent this year, trailing #1 Google which has 31.5 percent.

Back in 2012, Facebook desperately sought extra revenue streams following its botched IPO. Sponsored Results let game companies, retailers, and more inject links to their Facebook apps, Pages, and posts as ads in the search typeahead results. Since advertisers could target searches for specific other Pages and apps, brands and game developers often tried to swoop in and steal traffic from their competitors. For example, dating app Match.com could target searches for competitor OkCupid and appear above its results. Facebook isn’t allowing advertisers to be quite as cutthroat with this test.

With the relaunch, advertisers with access will be able to simply extend their existing Newss Feed ads to the new “Search” placement through the Facebook Ads Manager, similar to how they’d pick Facebook Audience Network or Instagram. No videos ads will be allowed, and search ads won’t appear on desktop. For now, advertisers won’t pick specific keywords to advertise agains, and instead may appear in search terms related to auto or retail topics. Still, the placement will let advertisers dive deeper down the conversion funnel to reach people who might already have intent to buy something and fullfill that demand. Facebook’s News Feed ads (other than those retargeted based on web browsing) are better for demand generation, and sit higher in the funnel reaching users who don’t know what they want yet.

Ads will featured a “Sponsored” tag, and are subject to the same transparency controls around “Why Am I Seeing This?” Facebook plans to evaluate the benefits for users and advertisers in order to determine whether to roll out the ads to more countries and categories. Users will not be able to opt out of seeing search ads. They can “hide” ads using the drop-down arrow as with News Feed ads, but that won’t prevent different ones from showing up in search later.

One major concern is that Facebook already collects as much information as possible about people and their behavior to target its ads. With the reintroduction of search ads, it’s even more incentivized to gather what we do online, what we buy offline, and who we are.

Facebook will have to balance the injection of the ads with remaining an easy way to search for friends, content, businesses and more. Search is far from the core of Facebook’s offering, where users typically browse the News Feed for serendipitous content discovery rather than go looking for something specific. The most common searches are likely for friends’ names which won’t be great ad candidates. But given how accustomed users are to search ads on Google, this new revenue stream could help Facebook boost its numbers without too much disruption to its service.

Access to healthy food is particularly difficult in food deserts — areas where more than 40 percent of households don’t have access to a car, are located more than half a mile away from a grocery store and have a median income of less than 185 percent of the federal poverty level for a family of four, according to the D.C. Policy Center. In Washington, D.C., access to food is directly related to poverty and transportation. Lyft, which is gearing up for its initial public offering in Q1 of next year, is looking to help with the transportation piece.

The Grocery Access Program, which Lyft announced yesterday, is in partnership with Martha’s Table, a nonprofit organization based in D.C. that helps provide families with healthy food, clothing and education. The program will specifically offer families living in Wards 7 and 8, which only have three grocery stores available, discounted shared Lyft rides.

During a six-month pilot period from January through June, Lyft will offer $2.50 flat rides for families traveling to and/or from the grocery store. In order to be eligible, families must have children enrolled at one of seven participating elementary schools.

“Through the program, Martha’s Table and Lyft aim to reduce the time, transportation barriers, and financial burden as hundreds of families plan their shopping trips to select grocery providers, and further Lyft’s mission of improving people’s lives with the world’s best transportation,” the company wrote on its blog.

Sidecar, an early player in the ride-hailing business, is suing Uber, claiming the billion-dollar business “stifled competition in the market for ride-hailing applications,” according to a lawsuit filed in the U.S. district court in San Francisco on Tuesday — first reported by Reuters.

The company, co-founded by Sunil Paul in 2011, alleges Uber “used a number of tactics that are against the law to drive Sidecar out of business,” per Paul’s blog post published this morning. Sidecar had raised a total of $43 million in venture capital backing and operated its service in 11 U.S. markets before shutting down and selling its assets to GM in 2016.

“We fought hard in the marketplace, and were the first company to introduce a number of cutting-edge features that are now a part of every ride-hailing app,” Paul, Sidecar’s former chief executive officer, writes. “If Uber had won the ride-hailing market on a level playing field, we would have been disappointed, but that’s something we could have lived with. That’s not what happened.”

Specifically, Paul alleges Uber used predatory pricing strategies, i.e., subsidized rides and driver payments in order to drive other ride-hailing startups out of the market, and “interfered with the performance and quality of competing ride-hailing apps by using clandestine campaigns to send fraudulent ride requests through competitors’ ride-hailing apps.”

Uber didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

It’s been almost three years since Sidecar sold its remaining assets to GM; it’s safe to say Paul and co. have been less than fond of Uber for several years. In another blog post announcing the GM sale, Paul wrote: “We failed — for the most part — because Uber is willing to win at any cost and they have practically limitless capital to do it.” So why is Sidecar suddenly getting litigious? Could be because Uber filed confidentially for an initial public offering on Friday. The IPO, slated for the first quarter of 2019, is expected to be one of the largest and highly-anticipated technology exits in the last decade.

Uber has raised a total of nearly $20 billion in a combination of debt and equity funding and was most recently valued at $72 billion. Sidecar’s valuation, according to PitchBook, peaked at around $70 million in 2014. It was backed by GV, Lightspeed Venture Partners, Union Square Ventures, Richard Branson and other notable investors.

Uber has long been known for its scandalous reputation, especially while under the leadership of founding CEO Travis Kalanick, who’s business tactics have been called into question countless times.

Here’s Sidecar’s full complaint:

Sidecar v. Uber by on Scribd

How do other dating apps compete with Tinder? By further distancing themselves from Tinder’s “hot-or-not” user interface design to focus on differentiating features — like conversation starters, commenting and richer profiles. Today, another anti-Tinder app is doing the same. On the heels of its $12 million Series B announced earlier this year, the oddly named app Coffee Meets Bagel is today announcing a significant makeover, which includes a change to the way the app works.

Its cleaner, lightweight and more modern design does away with bright, competing colors and other outdated features, the company says. But more notably, it has ditched the big “Pass” or “Connect” buttons — its earlier variation on Tinder’s “like” and “dislike” buttons, which nearly all dating apps have now adopted.

Instead, Coffee Meets Bagel’s new interface puts more emphasis on user profiles — showcasing more of the text, and giving users the option to “heart” the profile or now, even comment.

Before a match takes place, users can tap a new commenting button that allows them to respond to the user’s profile directly, before making a connection. This could help potential matches break the ice or even spark a connection that may not have otherwise happened.

The feature is similar, to some extent, to the commenting feature in Hinge, a relationship-focused app that allows users to directly comment on some aspect of another user’s profile.

Coffee Meets Bagel says that during its beta testing, members who sent comments to their matches had a 25 percent higher chance of getting liked back. And when comments led to conversations, there was a 60 percent increase in total messages exchanged.

Focusing on enabling better conversations is a good way for other dating apps to combat Tinder, which leaves communication up to the users to initiate, without much guidance. This leads to inboxes filled with “hi’s” and nothing much else to say. By integrating commenting into profiles, however, users will be prompted to start conversations based on something they’ve read — allowing people to connect based on more than just their photos.

The app has also revamped its Discover and Suggested sections to offer seamless scrolling and better navigation, respectively. These sections are less cluttered than before, too, in keeping with the more minimalist spirit. Even the Coffee Meets Bagel logo has gotten a makeover, where the C and B now meet in the shape of a heart.The company’s anti-Tinder stance is shaping up in its social content, too. While Tinder has more recently embraced hook-up culture and the single life with its online publication “Swipe Life,” CMB is instead creating content that’s more inspiring, it says.

“We’re taking a stance against online dating conventions, like ghosting and treating people like profiles. We’re expanding the conversation to the self: self-reflection, self-discovery, and self-love,” the company explains in its announcement.

Coffee Meets Bagel has raised just under $20 million since launching back in 2012, but it’s faced threats from Tinder, which has challenged its model head-on with Tinder Picks — a curated selection of matches for Tinder Gold subscribers, similar to Coffee Meets Bagel’s curated daily picks.

The company’s app has close to 7 million installs to date, according to data from Sensor Tower, and more than $25 million in gross revenue. The revenue is growing over time, the firm also found, with users spending approximately $900,000 in the app last month, up 30 percent from November 2017.

Google today announced an update to GKE, the Google Kubernetes Engine, that brings integrated support for the Istio service mesh to service. Istio support is currently in beta.

While Istio isn’t yet the household name that Kubernetes has become in recent years, for many enterprises it’s an important building block for building their cloud-native platforms.

At its core, Istio is an open-source service mesh that helps you connect, monitor and secure microservices on a variety of platforms — one of those being Kubernetes. Istio, and its own sub-components like the Envoy proxy, offer a way to integrate microservices, secure them and aggregate log data while providing an additional abstraction layer over orchestration services like Kubernetes .

“We truly believe that Istio will play a key role in helping you make the most of your microservices,” write Chen Goldberg, Google Cloud director of Engineering, and Jennifer Lin, Google Cloud director of Product Management, in today’s announcement. “One way Istio does this is to provide improved visibility and security, making working with containerized workloads easier. With Istio on GKE, we are the first major cloud provider to offer direct integration to a Kubernetes service and simplified lifecycle management for your containers.”

Goldberg and Lin also stress that Istio allows developers and operators to manage applications as services and not as lots of different infrastructure components. In addition, they note that Istio allows you to encrypt all your network traffic. Unsurprisingly, Istio on GKE also comes with an integration into Stackdriver, Google Cloud’s monitoring and logging service.

Istio first launched in the middle of 2017. The project is the result of a collaboration between Google, IBM and Lyft. It hit its version 1.0 release this summer, at the end of July, and companies like Datadog, SolarWinds and others have since built plugins to integrate it into their service. The Cloud Foundry project, too, is making Istio a core part of its service by using it as the core of its new traffic routing stack.

The Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), the open-source home of projects like Kubernetes and Vitess, today announced that its technical committee has voted to bring a new project on board. That project is etcd, the distributed key-value store that was first developed by CoreOS (now owned by Red Hat, which in turn will soon be owned by IBM). Red Hat has now contributed this project to the CNCF.

Etcd, which is written in Go, is already a major component of many Kubernetes deployments, where it functions as a source of truth for coordinating clusters and managing the state of the system. Other open-source projects that use etcd include Cloud Foundry, and companies that use it in production include Alibaba, ING, Pinterest, Uber, The New York Times and Nordstrom.

“Kubernetes and many other projects like Cloud Foundry depend on etcd for reliable data storage. We’re excited to have etcd join CNCF as an incubation project and look forward to cultivating its community by improving its technical documentation, governance and more,” said Chris Aniszczyk, COO of CNCF, in today’s announcement. “Etcd is a fantastic addition to our community of projects.”

Today, etcd has well over 450 contributors and nine maintainers from eight different companies. The fact that it ended up at the CNCF is only logical, given that the foundation is also the host of Kubernetes. With this, the CNCF now plays host to 17 projects that fall under its “incubated technologies” umbrella. In addition to etcd, these include OpenTracing, Fluentd, Linkerd, gRPC, CoreDNS, containerd, rkt, CNI, Jaeger, Notary, TUF, Vitess, NATS Helm, Rook and Harbor. Kubernetes, Prometheus and Envoy have already graduated from this incubation stage.

That’s a lot of projects for one foundation to manage, but the CNCF community is also extraordinarily large. This week alone about 8,000 developers are converging on Seattle for KubeCon/CloudNativeCon, the organization’s biggest event yet, to talk all things containers. It surely helps that the CNCF has managed to bring competitors like AWS, Microsoft, Google, IBM and Oracle under a single roof to collaboratively work on building these new technologies. There is a risk of losing focus here, though, something that happened to the OpenStack project when it went through a similar growth and hype phase. It’ll be interesting to see how the CNCF will manage this as it brings on more projects (with Istio, the increasingly popular service mesh, being a likely candidate for coming over to the CNCF as well).