China and the United States have been slapping each other with massive tariffs and more may come if the trade war continues to escalate, prompting some companies to move manufacturing out of China. One of the latest is GoPro, which announced it will move production of most U.S.-bound cameras out of China by summer 2019.
Cameras bound for other countries will continue to be produced in China. GoPro’s announcement isn’t a surprise, as its chief executive officer Nick Woodman told CNN in August that it would be “prudent” for the company to consider moving manufacturing out of China to lower costs or cope with potential tariffs.
GoPro hasn’t specified where production of U.S.-bound cameras will go, but Asian countries that have been considered as alternatives by other tech companies in the wake of the U.S.-China trade war include Vietnam, Thailand, and Taiwan.
In a statement, GoPro chief financial officer Brian McGee said “Today’s geopolitical environment requires agility, and we’re proactively addressing tariff concerns by moving most of our U.S.-bound camera production out of China. We believe this diversified approach to production can benefit our business regardless of tariff implications.
He added that even though GoPro’s manufacturing partner provides facilities, GoPro owns its production equipment, so the company “expect[s] to make this move at a relatively low cost.”
TechCrunch has contacted GoPro for more information about the move and possible destinations.
Google is bringing its Lens visual search feature to the iOS Google app, giving iPhone users a new way to search the web on mobile.
By tapping on the Google Lens icon, you dive straight into the camera at which point if Google recognizes something in the space that you tap on, the app will automatically populate search results for those objects.
Lens, which Google announced at its I/O conference in 2017, has been rolled out pretty slowly across the company’s suite of products, with most new features seeming to debut on the company’s Pixel phones before trickling down to other devices. Google Lens was previously available in the Google Photos app on iOS where the feature could recognize objects in images.
The company has also announced that they’re bringing some updates to Lens in Google Photos, with additional language support beyond English (now, Spanish, French, German, Italian, and Korean), and new ways to search images by style.
I’ve been thinking hard about the concept of sponsored content – you can find some of it on TechCrunch if you look hard enough and it appears almost everywhere else. It’s an important consideration because as a online journalist I’ve heard everything from “How much did Apple pay you to post this?” to “How much can I pay you to post something to TechCrunch?”
And I’m sick of it.
Journalists afflict the comfortable and comfort the afflicted. Marketers comfort the comfortable. The only person who wins in that struggle is the guy with the biggest wallet to buy as much coverage as possible. Crypto, for all its faults, promises to change that.
Now I’d like to introduce something else I built (and I never do this on TC so I think it’s pretty important and interesting.) It’s called HypeHop and it’s an experiment in sponsored video. Most sponsored video appears in front of your YouTube selections like a cold sore – you know it’s there, it’s unwanted, and you know it will take a while for it to go away. For example, this deeply applicable ad appeared as my son was watching Nerf videos, for example, proving that algorithms aren’t always the smartest.
Enough.
In the current system marketers pay media platforms for their audience. The marketer gets eyeballs, the media platform gets money, and the user gets bupkus. I wanted to try to change that.
With a few friends I made something called HypeHop. It basically pays you for watching videos. At this point it’s a proof-of-concept that accepts uploaded videos, a small payment for hosting, and then watches the viewer to ensure they are watching the video. “Watching the viewer?” you ask? Sure. We’re being surveilled every day. Isn’t it time we were paid for it?
Viewers currently get about 40 cents in BTC per view. I created a demo video with my son here to show off how it worked and preseeded some videos with BTC to test. Thus far it’s been an interesting experiment.
I’d love to talk to like-minded folks about expanding this technology. I could, for example, see this as a tool to make sponsored posts more interesting to readers – who doesn’t want a few pennies for reading marketing dross – and a way to monetize many marketing tools for readers, producers, and marketers. Ultimately this is a win-win-win in a win-win-lose world and it’s vitally important we look at it as a way forward in our fight against fake news and faker marketing.
25 years ago, anyone old enough to navigate DOS was likely playing Doom every spare minute, assuming their parents weren’t around. A quarter century after its release, the game’s legacy is unquestionable — but it could always use a few new levels. So co-creator John Romero made some. They come with a silver statue of his head impaled on a spike.
There’s not a lot one can say at Doom’s 25th anniversary that one couldn’t at its 20th, so I’ll spare you the big retrospective. Suffice it to say that Doom still rules, and if you’ve never played it, you’ve got a treat ahead of you. And at this point there’s enough of it to rival modern games in length and challenge.
What has happened in the intervening five years is the release of… well, Doom, AKA Doom 2016. This gory, kinetic remake charmed (and tore out) the hearts of millions, reigniting interest in a franchise that had seen better days.
Seeing this renewed interest, and with the 25th anniversary, approaching, co-creator John Romero decided he wanted to dive back into making maps for the game that made him.
“I worked on it part time during 2017 and 2018, mostly while I was on vacation or in the evenings,” Romero explained in an interview, apparently with himself, posted on his website. “For me, making this whole episode was a labor of love and a reminder of all the amazing times that we had at id working on the original. I was fortunate to be a part of such a great team and a foundational game.”
Sigil is a pack of nine levels that are an unofficial, but probably as official as we’re likely to get, fifth “episode” of Doom.
“I wanted the levels to feel like they belong to the original game as if they were a true fifth episode,” Romero told himself. “There’s more detail in the levels than episodes 1-4, but not overly so. The boss level is terrifying. There’s a massive room in E5M6 that is the coolest room I’ve created in any map.”
Many will remember the synth-metal soundtrack to the original, and to match that Romero tapped legendary metal guitarist Buckethead to contribute a song to Sigil. The catch is that the song doesn’t come with the free version of the expansion.
See, Sigil will release as a megawad — a wad of .wad (“where’s all the data?”) files, the original format for Doom expansions and mods. You’ll be able to download that for free and play it on your original copy of Doom; if you don’t have one, you can buy one for $5, and should.
But true Doom megafans will want to go with a boxed edition. The standard one comes with a 3.5″ floppy disk shaped USB drive with the game on it, but the “Beast Box” has a bunch of extra gear inside the giant box: a booklet and print, an XL Sigil shirt, and most tempting of all, “a pewter statue of John Romero’s head on a spike.” This is a reference to a famous Doom Easter egg, but honestly would have made perfect sense anyway.
“I believe the most important legacy of Doom is its community, the people who have kept it alive for 25 years through the creation of mods and tools,” said Romero. “It’s not at all lost on me that I have gone from a creator to a part of the community in that space of time, and I love that.”
Sigil comes out mid-February. I can’t wait. If you’re interested in the more modern Doom stuff, though, keep an eye out for Doom Eternal, the sequel to the 2016 hit. More of the same? Sounds good to me. Rip and tear!
If there was any doubt about YouTube’s power to influence children, look no further than this year’s list of the hottest holiday toys, based on Google shopping search data. According to the search giant, at least four of the top ten most searched toys were among those heavily featured in YouTube unboxing videos – subsequently turning them into the most in-demand and best-selling toys of the holiday season. Plus, another top toy is the JoJo Siwa Singing doll – a product from the YouTube star of the same name.
Clearly, we’re long past the days where TV commercials are the ways toy makers are reaching children. Instead, they’re leveraging the power of YouTube to drive hype and interest in their products, as Google’s list and those from the major retailers themselves show.
In particular, MGA Entertainment is having a great 2018 holiday season. The company, which is best known for disrupting Barbie with its Bratz dolls back in the day, is today the force behind some of the most in-demand toys, like L.O.L Surprise! and Num Noms, plus top preschooler brand Little Tikes, and others.
The toy maker has not one but three of its L.O.L. Surprise! toys on Google’s list this year, which the search giant points out were also all the subject of numerous YouTube unboxing videos over the holiday shopping season, which helped drive searches. The most searched for toy – Spin Master’s Luvabella doll – was also regularly featured across YouTube, the company notes.
This search data turns into real-world sales, too. Though we’ll have to wait for the holidays to wrap to get the final count, already L.O.L Surprise! toys have made their way onto Amazon’s Holiday Toy List, for example, and its Best Sellers. In fact, L.O.L. Surprises have claimed half of spots on Amazon’s top 10 list of the Best Selling Toys & Games, as of today. (And they’ve snagged spots further down the list: L.O.L Surprise! toys are the No. 13 and No. 34 best sellers, too.)
Not coincidentally, L.O.L. Surprises are the sort of toy that’s designed perfectly for the YouTube era. They’re basically made for unboxing.
The toys themselves are not sold in transparent packaging, but are rather hidden away inside some sort of container – a box, case or a ball, for example. The excitement for the kids comes from the unboxing process itself – only then will they see their doll and all their accompanying accessories. Sometimes there’s another step, too – like decoding secret messages on the outside of the packaging, or dunking a fizz in some water to reveal the enclosed toy.
With multiple steps to even get to the toy itself, it’s ideal content for YouTube. Combined with YouTubers’ high-pitched squeals of joy as they work their way through the process, and you’ve got the perfect recipe for selling toys.
Other most-searched toys from Google’s list also made an appearance on Amazon’s Top Toy list of 2018, like LEGO Friends Heartlake City Resort and the Kano Harry Potter Coding Kit, for example.
Google’s list is also biased towards tech toys, with top searches for things like the DJI Tello, VTech Kidizoom Smartwatch DX, as well as the Harry Potter kit in addition to classics from NERF and LEGO.
Amazon’s best sellers include some VTech and Melissa and Doug products, but not the specific SKUs Google had picked up on.
YouTube’s influence can be spotted on Walmart’s toys list, as well.
In its list of top toys rated by kids, L.O.L Surprise!, Pikmi Pops, Hatchimals, and Fingerlings – all of which star in dozens upon dozens of unboxing videos – make several appearances.
“Years ago, kids would have been glued to the TV watching the traditional channels, and now they’re watching content everywhere. They’re still watching TV, but they’re also watching it on tablets and parents’ cellphones,” Bedwell told Yahoo. “Everywhere they are, they can look at and consume content. And YouTube is now up there with the major TV channels with how many kids watch it.”
Softbank continues to invest in the future of transportation — this time in ParkJockey, a startup that has built a technology platform aimed monetizing parking lots. And ParkJockey, which was founded in 2013, is already using that capital to scale up.
Along with the Softbank investment news, ParkJockey also announced that it was acquiring two of the largest parking operators in North America. The startup, with help from Abu Dhabi-based Mubadala Capital and debt financing from Owl Rock, said it had reached an agreement to acquire Imperial Parking Corporation, a North American-based parking management company often referred to as Impark. The agreement follows ParkJockey’s acquisition of parking management operator Citizens Parking Inc.
The investment puts ParkJockey valuation to more than $1 billion, reported Miami Herald.
Miami-based ParkJockey developed a parking management platform that helps commercial property owners better monetize parking lots as well handle operations at large venues and stadiums. The company’s platform offers features like automatic license plate recognition and pay-by-app, among others. The company’s app can also be used by drivers to find parking spaces more efficiently.
Financial terms of the Softbank investment or the acquisitions weren’t disclosed. The announcement follows an Axios article last week that reported Softbank was backing the startup.
The Impark transaction is subject to regulatory approvals. The acquisition is expected to close in the first half of 2019, ParkJockey said.
Softbank’s investment in parking might seem rather, well pedestrian. It’s actually a bet on an automated future from present-day parking management issues like electric vehicle charging, designated areas for ride-hailing and automatic pay as well as a day when vehicles are fully autonomous.
A House Oversight Committee report out Monday has concluded that Equifax’s security practices and policies were sub-par and its systems were old and out-of-date, and bothering with basic security measures — like patching vulnerable systems — could’ve prevented its massive data breach last year.
It comes a little over a year after Equifax, one of the world’s largest credit rating agencies, confirmed its systems had fallen to hackers. Some 143 million consumers around the world were affected — most of which were in the U.S., but also Canada and the U.K. — with that figure later rising to 148 million consumers. Yet, to date, the company has faced almost no repercussions, despite a string of corporate failings that led to one of the largest data breaches in history.
The House report was scathing, criticizing the handling of the hack by Equifax’s former chief executive Richard Smith — who went on to “retire” following the breach.
Smith boasted that the credit giant held “almost 1,200 times” the data held in the Library of Congress every day, but the House report said that Equifax had “failed to implement an adequate security program to protect this sensitive data.”
“Such a breach was entirely preventable,” said the report.
The report confirmed most of what was already known, but added new color and insights that were previously unreported. The credit agency failed to patch a disclosed vulnerability in Apache Struts, a common open source web server, which Homeland Security had issued a warning about some months before. The unpatched Apache Struts server was powering its five-decades-old(!) web-facing system that allowed consumers to check their credit rating from the company’s website. The attackers used the vulnerability to pop a web shell on the server weeks later, and managed to retain access for more than two months, the House panel found, and were able to pivot through the company’s various systems by obtaining an unencrypted file of passwords on one server, letting the hackers access more than 48 databases containing unencrypted consumer credit data.
During that time, the hackers sent more than 9,000 queries on the databases, downloading data on 265 separate occasions.
Equifax’s former boss Smith passed the buck onto a single IT staffer for failing to patch the Struts system. In fact, it was just another example in the company’s cavalier attitude toward data security, the House report found.
“Equifax did not see the data exfiltration because the device used to monitor [the vulnerable server’s] network traffic had been inactive for 19 months due to an expired security certificate,” the report said. It took another two months for Equifax to update the expired certificate, at which point staff “immediately noticed suspicious web traffic.” Even Equifax’s own former chief information officer David Webb — who also “retired” following the incident — told House investigators that the whole incident could have been prevented had the company updated the vulnerable Struts system within two days of the patch’s release.
“Had the company taken action to address its observable security issues prior to this cyberattack, the data breach could have been prevented,” said the report.
Two more months later, Equifax went public. That was no picnic either.
When Equifax’s “are you at risk?” website wasn’t crashing, it was spewing out incorrect results. Then the site was quickly impersonated — and was inadvertently linked to by Equifax’s own social media staff. When concerned consumers finally got through to the site, they were offered Equifax’s own credit freezing service, which was kicking out weak PIN numbers — the one and only thing that was protecting consumers’ already fragile credit. The site was later pulled offline after another security researcher found a flaw in the credit freezing site that let an attacker siphon off sensitive consumer data. This was all while its call centers were overloaded, and many struggled to get basic questions answered.
In all, the House report didn’t hold back its critique — slamming the credit rating agency’s poor security practices, especially given the data involved — which the report noted that consumers do not “have the ability to opt out of this information collection process.”
Equifax’s response to the House’s report? Go on the defensive.
“We are deeply disappointed that the Committee chose not to provide us with adequate time to review and respond to a 100-page report consisting of highly technical and important information,” said Equifax spokesperson Wyatt Jefferies. “During the few hours we were given to conduct a preliminary review we identified significant inaccuracies and disagree with many of the factual findings,” the statement continued.
“This is unfortunate and undermines our hope to assist the Committee in producing a credible and thorough public resource for those who wish to learn from our experience managing the 2017 cybersecurity incident,” the statement continued.
When TechCrunch asked for those “significant inaccuracies,” the spokesperson returned with a bulleted list of “factual errors” — or nit-picks — rather than pointing out substantial discrepancies with the report — including that Equifax offered two years of credit monitoring and not one year as was stated in the report, and that the report referenced an apparent settlement with a state attorney general that has not occurred.
The race to replace the mouse and keyboard has yielded a lot of weird tech, but as various hardware startups try to find the missing link between what we have now and some sort of embedded brain chip, we’re seeing some fascinating solutions surface.
New York-based CTRL-labs just announced its first developer kit that’s aiming to refresh how people interact with computers — an armband that can track a user’s finger movements by measuring electrical impulses. It’s not quite a brain controller, though in practice this type of tech can definitely feel like it’s reading your mind, taking minor finger movements and yielding a surprising amount of insight into the position of your hand and the pressure you’re applying on your finger tips.
CTRL-labs’ investors are betting big on the insight this unconventional interface type can deliver. The startup closed a $28 million Series A in May with funding coming from Vulcan Capital, GV and others.
The use cases for something like this seem to be a little up in the air at the moment, hence the interest in getting a developer kit out into the wild. There are some more obvious use cases in the VR space, but pushing a theoretical input type on an industry with theoretical appeal obviously isn’t the best basket in which to put a Series A.
The system (called CTRL-kit) is, indeed, a developer kit, so there hasn’t been the highest premium placed on miniaturizing all of the tech in the tethered system, but the company tells TechCrunch that the intent is definitely to get into a wrist-worn form factor like a smartwatch in the future. Watch a few of the tech demos and you’ll see what an interesting proposition this is for the wearable of the future.
CTRL-kit
Think about the link between some lightweight glasses with a heads-up display and an Apple Watch-type controller that can parse hand gestures and you can see a more predictable endgame for this kind of tech.
Controlling augmented reality systems has always been a big UX question. Hand-tracking startups like Leap Motion have delivered very polished solutions that offer finesse but sidestep realistic user behaviors. Who’s going to wave their hands in front of their face while walking down the street? Microsoft has dumbed this down into optically tracked gestures like the “air tap” for HoloLens that let you select things in a pretty straightforward, yet cumbersome way. Magic Leap integrates a few input types into their system but seems to be pushing developers toward a physical controller while the current hardware is more focused on home use.
The company says they’re also intrigued by potential with the automotive industry and more conventional desktop applications. Like a good amount of technologies that are attractive for VR and AR tech, what CTRL-labs is building has an attractive endgame but suspect near-term utility. Startups like Thalmic Labs, now North, tried and failed to gain an audience for a consumer-grade motion-control armband like this. For the time being, the company expects a decent amount of developer attention to go toward using this tech for gaming.
The company says it plans to begin shipping the CTRL-kit in the first quarter of next year.
On the heels of an employee-led protest against Google, a group of 35 Google employees is banding together to take it a step further and end the practice of forced arbitration across the entire tech industry.
Forced arbitration ensures workplace disputes are settled behind closed doors and without any right to an appeal. These types of agreements effectively prevent employees from suing companies. Following the walkout last month, Google got rid of forced arbitration for sexual harassment and sexual assault claims, offering more transparency around those investigations and more. Airbnb, eBay and Facebook quickly followed suit.
However, optional arbitration at Google is only granted for full-time employees, which does not include the thousands of contract workers at the company. Now, a group of Google employees is demanding an end to forced arbitration, as it relates to any case of discrimination, across the entire industry.
As the employees note on Medium, arbitration is still forced for discrimination cases pertaining to race, sexual orientation, sex, gender identity, age and ability. Additionally, employee contracts in the U.S. still have an arbitration waiver, the employees wrote.
“We have not heard of any plan to render these waivers null and void,” employees wrote on Medium. “Google operates in 52 countries where arbitration laws vary, and leadership has not addressed these variances. What should we expect?”
Moving forward, they’re asking other tech workers to join them in their fight to end forced arbitration for all forms of harassment and discrimination. They’re also calling on elected officials to support the Arbitration Fairness Act, as well as Restoring Justice for Workers Act.
“We are already engaging with multiple organizations and can help connect the dots through educational materials and organizing resources,” they wrote. “2019 must be the year to end a system of privatized justice that impacts over 60 million workers in the US alone.”
I’ve reached out to Google and will update this story if I hear back.
A group of U.S. tech giants, including Apple, Google and Microsoft, have collectively denounced the new so-called “anti-encryption” law passed by the Australian parliament last week.
The bill was passed less than a day after the ruling coalition government secured the votes from opposition Labor lawmakers, despite strong objection from tech companies and telcos.
“The new Australian law is deeply flawed, overly broad, and lacking in adequate independent oversight over the new authorities,” said the Reform Government Surveillance coalition in a statement. The tech companies added that the law would “undermine the cybersecurity, human rights, or the right to privacy of our users.”
It’s the latest rebuke since the bill’s passing, following an extensive lobbying effort by Silicon Valley to push back on the anti-encryption proposals.
The law allows Australian police and the intelligence agencies wide-reaching powers to issue “technical notices” — essentially forcing companies and even websites operating in Australia to help the government undermine encryption or insert backdoors at the behest of the government. Critics argue that there’s little oversight, potentially allowing abuse of the system. And because the notices will almost always be issued with a gag order, any technical notices are served behind closed doors in secret.
Companies that refuse to comply with the demands in a technical notice can be served heavy financial penalties.
The Australian government won in part by accusing Labor of using scare tactics, saying that the opposition party was choosing to “allow terrorists and pedophiles to continue their evil work in order to engage in point scoring,” said Australian defense minister Christopher Pyne, in a since-deleted tweet. Labor caved in to the pressure, and party leader Bill Shorten instructed his members to vote for the bill. He promised that the party would offer amendments to the law once passed in the coming months, while keeping “Australians safer over Christmas.”
The tech coalition said it’ll hold the Australian parliament’s feet to the fire, urging lawmakers to “promptly address these flaws when it reconvenes” in the new year.
The group, which also includes Dropbox, Facebook, Google and Yahoo parent company Oath (which also owns TechCrunch) — was set up after the companies were named in classified U.S. documents as participants in the secret National Security Agency program, dubbed PRISM. All of the companies denied their willing involvement, and began a collective effort to lobby the government to reform its surveillance operations — many of which rely on compelled assistance from tech companies and telcos.
Evernote, LinkedIn, Snap and Twitter, which weren’t named as PRISM partners, later joined the coalition, and also signed on to the letter.
Cisco and Mozilla joined other companies in separately filing complaints with Australian lawmakers ahead of the planned vote, arguing that the law “could do significant harm to the Internet.”
that is. With Google Lens in the Google app on iOS, now you can → 
