Year: 2018

At Google, the company offers a ‘Grab and Go’ program that allows employees to use self-service stations to quickly borrow and return Chromebooks without having to go through a lengthy IT approval process. Now, it’s bringing this same idea to other businesses.

Chromebooks have found their place in education and a number of larger enterprise companies are also getting on board with the idea of a centrally managed device that mostly focuses on the browser. That’s maybe no surprise, given that both schools and enterprises are pretty much looking for the same thing from these devices.

At Google, the system has seen more than 30,000 users that have completed more than 100,000 loans so far.

While Google wants others to run similar programs (and use more Chromebooks in the process) it’s worth noting that this is a limited preview program and that Google isn’t building and selling racks or other infrastructure for this. As a Google spokesperson told us, Google will give companies that want to try this the open source code to build this system and advise them through the setup and deployment. It will also engage with partners to help them build the hardware or set up a ‘Grab and Go’ as a service system.

Employees who want to use one of these ‘Grab and Go’ stations simply pick up a laptop, sign in and move on with their day. When they are done, they simply return the laptop. That’s it. Easy.

That’s not quite as exciting as Google building and selling racks of Chromebooks, but this project is clearly another move to bring Chromebooks to the enterprise. Specifically, Google says that this program is meant for frontline workers who only need devices for a short period of time, as well as shift workers and remote workers.

Google’s Assistant app mostly functions as a surrogate for its line of connected Home devices. But what about all of that information it’s aggregating? The company will start putting that to use, providing a “visual snapshot” of the day to come.

The new feature, rolling out to the app on Android and iOS today, pulls in a bunch of relevant information from across Google services, including calendar, reminders, stocks, package deliveries, flights, restaurant/movie reservations and suggested Actions. It also provides travel times to and from appointments to offer up a better idea of when to leave.

More features will be rolling out soon, including notes from Google Keep,  Any.do, Bring and Todoist, along with parking reminders, nearby activities and recommendations for music and podcasts. In other words, the Google Assistant app is angling to become your one stop shop for — well, basically ever single thing you do in a given day.

While Amazon’s Alexa play has been centered around commerce, it’s pretty clear that Google’s in it for the same reason as always: information. Using a voice controlled smart speaker is yet another way to gather all of that data from a user, and now it’s being out to use in a single spot.

It’s an obvious play — and an important reminder of just how much information these companies have on us at a given time.

Google, like all major internet companies, often participates in building new subsea cables because it wants to own the connectivity between its data centers around the world. Those cables are typically built and owned by a consortium of companies (and sometimes shared by competitors). Now, however, Google is building its own cable that will span from Virginia Beach in the U.S. to the Atlantic coast of France.

This marks Google’s fourth private cable. Its first two efforts spanned significantly shorter distances, though its ‘Curie’ cable connects Los Angeles and Chile. Over the course of the last few years, Google has also made significant investments in consortium-driven cables that span the Atlantic and the Pacific, and quite a few of these will go online in 2019.

The new so-called ‘Dunant’ cable (named after the first Nobel Peace Prize winner and founder of the Red Cross) will likely go online in 2020. And while it will land in France, it will actually connect Google’s North Virginia region directly to its Belgium region.

TE SubCom is the contractor for the project, which will be an almost 4000-miles long four-fiber pair system.

As Google notes, owning the cable means that it can lay it exactly where it needs it to be to connect its data centers, without having to take the needs of other consortium partners into account. Owning the cable also means that Google owns all the bandwidth for the lifetime of the cable (usually 15 to 25 years).

It’s a big day for Amazon’s EC2 cloud computing service today. Not only can you now run EC2 inside a Snowball Edge device, but the company also announced a bunch of new EC2 instance types in the cloud. Thanks to these new instance types, developers now have access to a new instance type (Z1d) with custom Xeon processors that can run at up to 4.0 GHz, as well as new memory-optimized instances (R5) that run at up to 3.1 GHz and that feature up to 50 percent more CPU power and 60 percent more memory than their predecessors. There are also some bare metal variants of these instances, as well as an R5d version that features local NVMe storage.

As Amazon’s Jeff Barr notes in today’s announcement, these new instances types were made possible by AWS’s Nitro system, which allows the company to combine the various building blocks that make up an EC2 instance in new ways.

The new Z1d instances are obviously meant for applications that need a lot of compute power (and for applications that can’t make use of GPUs for that). Amazon specifically mentions electronic design automation, high-performance computing for the financial services industry and relational databases.

The R5 instances, which can feature up to 96 cores and 768 GiB of memory, are mostly meant for in-memory caching applications and in-memory and big data analytics.

After a few quiet years, the hype around quantum computing is reaching a new crescendo. Quantum supremacy now feels like an achievable goal. Among the large tech firms, IBM — and specifically the IBM Q lab —  has long been at the forefront of the quantum revolution. Last year, the company showed off its 50-qubit quantum computer and you can already start building software for it using the company’s developer kit.

At Disrupt, we’ll sit down with Dario Gil, the head of IBM’s AI research efforts and quantum computing program to talk about the current state of quantum computing. We may even see a demo or two of what’s possible today and use that to separate hype from reality.

With a bit of luck, we may even get a better understanding of what quantum computing is all about. It’s a technology, after all, that’s far from intuitive and outside of the small circle of researchers, few really have a grasp on the details.

To hear more about this, you should join us at Disrupt SF. Passes for the show are available at the Early Bird rate until July 25 here.

This is the first time we’ve done an in-depth review of a comedy special on the Original Content podcast, but Nanette (which Netflix released last month) isn’t a typical stand-up show.

Hannah Gadsby starts off with some light, funny jokes about growing up as a lesbian in Tasmania, where being homosexual was illegal until 1997. But she soon veers away from joke-telling — in fact, Gadsby declares that she’s quitting comedy and starts analyzing the structure and content of some old jokes, asking difficult questions about who we’re laughing at and why.

Nanette can’t be boiled down to a one simple message, but perhaps the overriding theme is the need for stories with uncomfortable truths — versus jokes, with their tension-releasing punchlines. It’s led to articles declaring Gadsby to be the future of stand-up and wondering whether comedy is “broken.”

On this week’s episode, we’re joined by Brian Heater to talk about our reactions to the show — both to the way that Gadsby punctures the stand-up format and to her heartfelt call for more challenging and diverse stories.

We also discuss this year’s Emmy nominations, which, for the first time, saw Netflix beating out HBO for the most nominations.

You can listen in the player below, subscribe using Apple Podcasts or find us in your podcast player of choice. If you like the show, please let us know by leaving a review on Apple. You also can send us feedback directly. (Or suggest shows and movies for us to review!)

AWS’s Snowball Edge devices aren’t new, but they are getting a new feature today that’ll make them infinitely more interesting than before. Until now, you could use the device to move lots of data and perform some computing tasks on them, courtesy of the AWS Greengrass service and Lambda that run on the device. But AWS is stepping it up and you can now run a local version of EC2, the canonical AWS compute service, right on a Snowball Edge.

With that, you can now take one of these devices, put it right on your factory floor and then run all of your standard Amazon Machine Images on it. That cuts down on bandwidth since you can either handle all of the processing on the device or pre-process it before you send it on to the cloud. And to manage it, you simply rely on the regular AWS management console (or use the command line). Every Snowball Edge comes with an Intel Xeon processor that runs at 1.8 GHz and that can support any combination of instances up to 24 vCPUs and 32 GiB of memory.

Since you could use any server for most of these functions, being able to manage all of your services from one console — and have it work just like any other machine in the cloud — is the selling point here. It’s worth noting that this was also the original idea behind OpenStack (though setting that up is far more complicated than ordering a Snowball Edge) and that Microsoft, with Azure Stack and its various edge computing services, offers similar capabilities.

Using a Snowball Edge isn’t cheap either, though. on-demand fees for jobs that are mostly about data transfer start at $500, but if you want to keep a machine for a year, that’ll set you back at least $15,330. Chances are then, most companies will only use the extra compute power on the machine to manipulate some of their data before they send the Snowball Edge back to Amazon to import their data.

Early this year the Sustainable Oceans Alliance announced it would be starting its own accelerator with a focus on conservation. The nonprofit has just announced the Ocean Solutions Accelerator’s first wave of startups: a particularly varied and international lineup that’s easy to root for.

You may also remember that the SOA was one of the beneficiaries of the mysterious Pineapple Fund, administered by a mysterious cryptocurrency multimillionaire. No doubt that has helped get the accelerator on its feet in good time.

The startups — which I’m getting to, be patient — will receive an initial investment to cover the cost of relocating to the Bay Area for eight weeks this summer. There they will receive the loving care of the collection of academics, founders, officials and others in or around the Alliance, plus some important “personal development and executive training” intended to keep your company alive long enough to ship a product.

Interestingly, applications were only open to founders 35 years and under, presumably to get that young blood into the conservation game. Here are the five companies selected to take part:

SafetyNet, from London, makes light-emitting devices that attach to fishing nets and can be programmed to attract or discourage certain kinds of fish. This prevents a boat from catching — and subsequently throwing away — thousands of the wrong fish, a huge waste.

CalWave came out of Berkeley a couple of years ago and has been testing and refining its wave-harvesting renewable energy system, and in fact won a big Department of Energy grant just last year. Now presumably the team is looking to go from prototype to product and do some big installs.

Loliware’s edible cups.

Loliware has created seaweed-based straws and cups that are so compostable you can do it yourself — like, in your mouth. The items last for a day in a drink (or with a drink in them) but when you throw it away it’ll totally dissolve in about two months — or you could literally eat it. The New Yorkers were on Shark Tank and I’m guessing they ate one on camera. You can already order them on Amazon and people say they’re actually pretty tasty.

Etac, a Mexican company from Culiacan, has few details on its site, but SOA’s press release says the company “designs and produces functional nanomaterials for energy and environmental applications, such as oil spill and wastewater cleanup.” I believe them.

And because there can’t be an accelerator without a blockchain startup in it, there’s Blockcycle, based in Sydney, which aims to create a marketplace around waste materials that would normally go to the landfill but could also be valuable to recyclers, reusers and so on. (Turns out there was an uptick in blockchain applications after the Pineapple Fund thing.)

All five companies will present their ideas on September 11 at an event (specifically, a gala) timed to coincide with California Governor Jerry Brown’s Global Climate Action Summit in San Francisco. And then in October they’ll present again in Bali at the Our Ocean Youth Summit.

“These ocean entrepreneurs are a beacon of hope at a time when new, bold approaches are needed to fast-track innovation and sustain the health of our planet,” said SOA founder and CEO Daniela Fernandez. “By supporting these incredible startups, we are encouraging young people to take ownership of the environmental threats facing their communities, bet against consensus and re-invent existing markets to benefit, instead of harm, our climate, and ocean.”

Once a seemingly unstoppable retail juggernaut, Walmart’s been scrambling to define its digitally in this Amazon-defined era. This morning, the company announced that it’s struck a five-year deal with Microsoft, Amazon’s chief cloud competitor.

These sorts of partnerships are a regular occurrence for AWS — in fact, it announced one with Fortnite maker Epic Games, just this morning. The companies involved tend to put on a big show, in return for a discount on services, but Walmart and Microsoft are happily playing into the concept of teaming up to take on Amazon.

Microsoft’s certainly not making any bones about the competition. In an interview, Satya Nadella told The Wall Street Journal that the fight against Amazon “is absolutely core to this,” adding, “How do we get more leverage as two organizations that have depth and breadth and investment to be able to outrun our respective competition?”

Of course, neither Walmart nor Microsoft can be framed as an underdog in any respect, but Amazon’s stranglehold on online retail also can’t be understated. Not even a massive outage at the height of Prime Day could do much to ruffle the company’s feathers.

Included in the deal are AI/ML technologies design to help optimize the in-store experience — one of the key factors Walmart brings to the table in a battle against Amazon, which has mostly just dabbled in brick and mortar. For its part, Walmart has been testing cashier-less stores along the lines of Amazon’s, but the company has just to officially unveil its plans in that space.

“It just started as a grand experiment,” says Walter Cruttenden, the serial fintech entrepreneur, of his latest foray into the world of low finance. “Let’s see if we can reach people through games.”

Cruttenden, the founder of Roth Capital Partners, co-founder of the micro-investment application Acorns, and the former head of eTrade’s investment banking arm, has managed to raise another $7 million for his startup, Blast — which wants to give users a way to save money while playing video games.

“When I was in the securities business we talked about gamifying investing and saving,” said Cruttenden. Now, with Blast, Cruttenden is flipping the script and providing investment perks for people who’re playing video games.

Using Blast, gamers can save in two ways. The first is by siphoning off money (ranging from one cent to ten cents) while they play games. They can also make money for trying new games and advancing in levels in the popular games they’re already playing.

For gaming companies, Blast is another way to encourage players to stick around by offering small financial rewards for their game play. For Blast users, the idea is that they can save money (at a 1% interest rate — which is higher than most banks are paying out these days), while Candy Crush-ing the day away.

Since raising its initial $5 million round in March, Blast has managed to attract a few thousand users in its open beta. And those users are typically saving between $30 and $40 per month, according to Cruttenden.

Investors in the company include the self-help guru Tony Robbins, financial technology investment firm CreditEase and RX3, an investment fund based in Orange County.

The company said it would use the money to roll out new features, including a leaderboard, which rewards top-ranked gamers with cash prizes of up to $1,000.

Blast’s savings work with games on the Google Play Store and will be compatible with PC games — including Counter-Strike: Global Offensive on Steam.

To start saving with Blast, users need to download the app and create a wallet in the app that’s linked to a checking account. Once the account is set up, gamers can save in three ways, interest paid on balances, dividends from missions (rewards for playing), and payouts from the weekly leaderboard.

Blast tracks game play across some of the most popular games like Candy Crush, Arena of Valor and Clash Royale on android devices, and will launch on iOS in the fall.

“It’s tough for most people to save money, so we created Blast to help people start accumulating wealth simply by doing what they already enjoy – playing their favorite games,” Cruttenden said in a statement. “Blast takes something hard or boring – like saving money – and makes it fun and easy through gaming. The app is simple to use for both avid and casual gamers and adds a new dynamic that can make games more interesting. Gamers tell us they feel better with the time they spend gaming when they know they are micro-saving or micro-earning in the background.”

The company had previously raised $5 million from investors including Core Innovation Capital, Great Oaks Venture Capital, Snowmass Private Equity, and the law firm Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati.