Year: 2018

A data privacy bill in California is just a signature away from becoming law over the strenuous objections of many tech companies that rely on surreptitious data collection for their livelihood. The California Consumer Privacy Act of 2018 has passed through the state legislative organs and will now head to the desk of Governor Jerry Brown to be enacted.

The law puts in place a variety of powerful protections against consumers having their data collected and sold without their knowledge. You can read the full bill here, but the basic improvements are as follows:

• Businesses must disclose what information it collects, what business purpose it does so for, and any third parties it shares that data with.
• Businesses would be required to comply with official consumer requests to delete that data.
• Consumers can opt out of their data being sold, and businesses can’t retaliate by changing the price or level of service.
• Businesses can however offer “financial incentives” for being allowed to collect data.
• California authorities are empowered to fine companies for violations.

As you can imagine, that puts something of a damper on the businesses of Facebook and Google in particular, and indeed those companies have aligned with others in opposition to the law, either individually or via trade organizations.

Naturally internet providers like AT&T and Verizon, which have for years made money from sharing the data of their customers with third parties, are also opposed.

It’s the kind of law one feels one could almost get behind without reading it, since it makes all the right people angry.

The bill heading to the Governor’s desk is actually a slightly hastily alternative to one proposed by moneyed activist Alastair Mactaggart, who organized a ballot initiative to put it up for a vote in November. But he promised to withdraw the measure if legislators put together their own version by today — which they have done.

Mactaggart’s proposal would have been even more restrictive, so lawmakers were put in a bind. The vote isn’t a sure thing. But if they waited and the measure passed, they would look weak and be forced into creating a law not of their own devising. But if they did something now, they could exert more control and look responsive ahead of the midterms.

It may only be a state law, but California is of course a highly influential and populous state, not to mention the one where a great deal of tech companies are based. So the effect of this law will have more than merely a local effect. After the Broadband Privacy Rule got nixed consumers found themselves in a bind, and now net neutrality has been negated as well — but states are picking up where the feds let it drop and may prove to be a powerful deterrent to the types of behaviors enabled in this regulatory vacuum. That is, if their own legislators don’t sabotage themselves.

If the law passes the Governor’s desk, the law still won’t take effect until January 1, 2020, giving companies time enough to both fight it and prepare for it.

Content creation has seen immense growth in recent years, with a shift in focus from mainstream content providers such as traditional television studious to internet-era startups either seeking to expand their portfolios or seeking to increase premium user memberships through exclusive content introduction.

In America, this scene has been predominately owned by Amazon, Netflix and Hulu, introducing critically acclaimed titles such as The Man in the High Castle, Orange Is the New Black and The Handmaid’s Tale, respectively, with many other industry giants scrambling to catch up (with Apple already signing a deal with Steven Spielberg to produce an Amazing Stories-reboot, Facebook spending as much as $1 billion on original content, Google announcing plans to potentially spend up to $3 million per drama episode and even Disney with their purported streaming service, among many others).

Similarly, in China’s growing television industry, a select few, namely Baidu, Alibaba and Tencent, continue to dominate the marketplace in terms of original TV content production. However, the vast majority of Western consumers have never heard of these internet giants or their respective subsidiaries and series, although this is set to change very soon, particularly with Chinese content currently in the early stages of global distribution.

What distinguishes China from the rest of the Asian market?

There are a variety of unique factors that distinguish China from other marketplaces around the globe, as well as in Asia. These factors include but are not limited to things such as increasing use of mobile devices for media consumption, increasing numbers in television consumption and a booming film/television industry primed for explosive growth.

According to eMarketer, Chinese adults will spend nearly three hours a day using their mobile devices, representing 41.6 percent of their total daily media time, with this same population spending nearly 40 percent of their daily media time specifically watching television. This heavy emphasis on mobile device usage, combined with an expected jump in digital video time in the next several years, creates a perfect environment ripe for increased video consumption by China’s growing population.

Furthermore, the Chinese television industry has experienced unprecedented amounts of growth in recent years. In fact, the Chinese television sector represents 88 percent of the combined film and television industry’s economic contribution to China, being valued at more than $35 billion dollars. Internet Protocol Television (IPTV) usage in China is also rapidly increasing, exceeding 100 million users in 2017, further fueling growth in television content creation. Other indicators of Chinese TV industry growth include the December 2017 formation of the Chinese TV Drama Export Alliance, a conglomeration of Chinese entertainment studios aimed at growing the presence of the Chinese TV productions worldwide, as well as increasing Chinese-language content being acquired by popular internet video-streaming companies such as Netflix.

The Chinese TV content producing behemoths

Chinese internet conglomerate Baidu is one of the primary drivers of growth in terms of Chinese television content, particularly with its iQiyi video-steaming platform. Gaining enough traffic for a U.S.-based IPO raising more than $2.25 billion, iQiyi is one of China’s largest and most popular video-streaming platforms, with more than 421 million monthly users and more than 126 million daily users. This high usage has allowed iQiyi to develop extremely popular original television content.

iQiyi has already developed TV hits such as Rap of China, Street Dance of China and Hot Blood Dance Crew, three extremely popular reality series watched by millions of Chinese amidst a government ban on hip-hop culture and tattoos on television. In fact, Western audiences may now begin to see these shows soon, particularly given a recently announced partnership between Rap of China and American hip-hop trio Migos.

Original content programming has also extended to scripted series, with detective dramas such as Burning Ice and Tientsin Mystic being renewed for second seasons while simultaneously being picked up by Netflix for American distribution just this year. Other extremely popular shows produced by iQiyi include The Lost Tomb, Evil Minds and Unforgiven, among countless others, with each of these shows being watched by millions of Chinese viewers. (Note: The Lost Tomb and Evil Minds have since been censored by the Chinese government.)

Alibaba is another powerhouse driving growth within the Chinese TV content industry, with its Youku video-streaming service. Youku currently boasts more than 500 million unique users, along with a powerful distribution network that includes Youku-branded hardware such as tablets, routers and IPTV boxes. Youku’s heavy daily presence in Chinese consumers’ lives allows for Youku-produced original content to have a wide audience across China for distribution.

One of Youku’s most popular series, Day and Night, partnered with Netflix for distribution in late 2017, with this partnership being the first Chinese-language series to be distributed globally. Other popular content includes historical dramas The Advisors Alliance and Oh My General, as well as fantasy drama Rakshasa Street, based off of a popular comic. Youku’s immense popularity in both short video clips, as well as in original content, make it a leader in producing original Chinese television content.

Internet giant Tencent is a third organization driving television growth in terms of creating original content in China. With Tencent fame originating from the ever-popular WeChat platform, Tencent Video currently claims an average of more than 137 million daily active users, making Tencent-produced content important as this original content arms race develops.

Popular shows produced by Tencent Video include action-adventure drama Candle in the Tomb, with a record 200 million views in one day and billions of views since, as well as historical romance Rule the World, based off an already extremely popular book of the same name. Tencent Video has even played a role in producing popular variety shows such as The Tomorrow Children. Television series slated for Tencent Video production in the immediate future include TV-adaptations of novels The Tibet Code, Mystery of the Antiques and manga Prince of Tennis. Tencent has committed to investing in further original content production, growing its portfolio of television content in the years to come.

However, the Chinese market does not solely consist of productions by iQiyi, Youku and Tencent Video. Popular content provider Sohu TV has also forayed into the original content sphere, producing popular drama Indelible Designation and detective series Medical Examiner Dr. Qin, as well as attempting to develop a Chinese version in a Saturday Night Live-style format.

Mango TV, another popular Chinese video platform, has also self-produced a variety of shows, including comedy Fashion Rivers and drama Gold Matchmaker, as well as an interactive Big Brother-styled show called Perfect Holiday. These two content providers, Sohu and Mango, and their respective offerings are simply additional examples of how original television content growth is playing a huge role in enhancing digital China.

Elsewhere in Asia…

However, China is not the only country that has invested significantly in original television content infrastructure (although it certainly is the largest). Other Asian countries have also taken a mobile-first approach to internet access, and, thus, also have rising rates of television viewership by mobile device.

In Thailand, LINE app’s LINE TV has dominated the mobile television landscape, launching a video-streaming service with original content development plans already underway. In addition, LINE TV has already secured partnerships with local television production studios and channels, marking a shift from its roots as a streaming service akin to YouTube to one more similar to Netflix and Hulu.

In Indonesia, even transportation giant Go-Jek is entering the content creation landscape, announcing a content creation production company called Go-Studios to support their content subscription model named Go-Play. In fact, Go-Jek even announced a partnership with VICE Media to produce original content, in light of a successful collaboration set for debut in 2019, entitled When We Dance by Joko Anwar.

Implications of original content growth for startups

The growth of original content, particularly in China, has huge potential for other technologies such as virtual reality machines and artificial intelligence. With Baidu, Alibaba and Tencent making known investments in these specific industries, it would not be a far reach to see both hardware and software integration within a television program for individual home consumption. Such examples might include a virtual reality headset to view a character’s perspective in a television series, or an artificial intelligence automatically suggesting a specific Halloween clothing outfit based off of a consumer’s preference of television series.

These implications make the increase in Chinese original television content a milestone, emphasizing both the strength and reach of top Chinese internet conglomerates, as well as the growing Chinese television industry.

Conclusion

There is immense potential in the original TV content sphere, with this ecosystem growing increasingly large in parallel with the rate of television being watched on mobile devices in Asia. This has resulted in China’s top internet conglomerates being forced to not only pay attention, but participate in the original content creation sphere, releasing high-quality episodic content in order to attract more viewers.

The release of online-exclusive series and their expanding Chinese audiences have grown to astronomic proportions, with hundreds of television shows being released yearly, with billions of views to match. Only time will tell if these Chinese dramas will achieve the same levels of popularity they enjoy at home, but for now, original Chinese television content is here to stay, and represents huge monetization potential for Chinese companies on a global scale.

Honda is ceasing development of Asimo, the humanoid robot that has delighted audiences at trade shows for years but never really matured into anything more than that, the Nikkei reports. But while the venerable bot itself is bowing out, the technology that made it so impressive will live on in other products, robotic and otherwise.

Asimo (named, of course, after science fiction pioneer Isaac Asimov) is older than you might guess: although it was revealed in 2000 as the first credibly bipedal walking robot, it had at that point been under development for more than a decade. The idea of a robot helper that could navigate a human-centric environment and interact with it in the same way we do was, of course, attractive.

But the problem proved, and still proves, harder than anyone guessed. Even the latest humanoid robots fail spectacularly at the most ordinary tasks that humans do without thinking. Asimo, which operated on a sort of semi-pre-programmed manner, was far behind even these limited capabilities.

That said, Asimo was an innovative, advanced, and ambitious platform: its gait was remarkably smooth, and it climbed ramps and stairs confidently on battery power. It could recognize people’s faces and avoid obstacles, and generally do all the things in a minute-long demo that made people excited for the robot future to come.

Alas, that future seems as far off today as it did in 2000; outside of factories, few robots other than the occasional Roomba have made it past the demonstration stage. We’ll get there eventually.

And the research that went into Asimo will help. It may not be the actual robot we have in our homes, but this kind of project tends to create all kinds of useful technology. The efficient actuators in its legs can be repurposed for exoskeletons and mobility aids, its sensor pathways and the software behind them can inform self-driving cars, and so on. I’ve asked Honda for confirmation and more details.

Robotics is still a major focus at Honda, but this particular robot is going to take a well-deserved rest. Farewell, Asimo — you may not have done much, but you helped us see that there is much that could be done.

The right music can make a boring photo or video epic, so Instagram is equipping users with a way to add popular songs to their Stories. TechCrunch had the scoop on the music feature’s prototype in early May, and now it’s launching to iOS and Android users in 51 countries including the U.S. Thanks to Facebook’s recent deals with record labels, users will be able to choose from thousands of songs from artists including Bruno Mars, Dua Lipa, Calvin Harris, and Guns N’ Roses. The launch could make Instagram Stories more fun to post and watch in a way that copyrights won’t allow on Snapchat, while giving the app a way to compete with tween favorite Musically.

And just a week after revealed its app has 1 billion monthly users, the company also announced today that Instagram Stories has 400 million daily users, up from 300 million in November and 250 million a year ago. That means Instagram Stories is growing about six times faster than Snapchat’s whole app, which only added 13 million daily users over the 6 months of Q4 2017 and Q1 2018 to reach 191 million.

Snapchat’s growth rate fell to its slowest pace ever last quarter amidst a despised redesign while Instagram Stories has steadily added unique and popular features like Highlights, Superzoom, and resharing of public feed posts. Instagram said last September that it had 500 million total daily users, so it’s likely that a majority of community is now hooked on the Stories format Snapchat invented.

Instagram Stories Music

“Now you can add a soundtrack to your story that fits any moment and helps you express how you’re feeling.” Instagram writes. To access the new music feature, users will be able to choose a special song sticker after they shoot a photo or video. They can search for a specific song or artist, or browse by mood, genre, or what’s popular. Once they select a song, they can pick the specific snippet they want to have accompany their content. Alternatively, iOS users can switch to the Music shutter mode in the Stories camera to pick a song before they capture a photo or video so they can sync up their actions to the music. That will come to Android eventually.

When friends watch a music-equipped Story, the song will post automatically. They’ll also be able to tap on the sticker to see artist and song title info, but for now these stickers won’t link out to a musician’s Instagram page or their presence on streaming services — though that would certainly be helpful. I also suggest that Instagram should create deeplinks that artists can share with their fans that automatically opens the Stories camera with that song’s sticker added.

It’s easy to imagine users lip syncing to their favorite jams, adding clashing background music for comedic effect, or earnestly trying to compose something emotionally powerful. Suddenly people ‘Gramming from home will a new way to entertain themselves and their pals.

Instagram tells me that musicians and rights holders will be compensated for the use of their songs, but wouldn’t specify how those payments would work. Facebook secured deals with all the major record labels and many independents to pave this way for this feature. Facebook has since announced that users can also add copyrighted music soundtracks to videos on their own before uploading and they wouldn’t be taken down like before. It’s also started testing a Lip Sync Live feature with a collection of chart-topping hits.

The big question will be whether the “thousands” of songs available through today’s launch will cover what most users want to hear, otherwise they might just be disappointed. With the a few enhancements and a widened catalog, Instagram Music could become a powerful way for artists to go viral. All those shaky phone camera clips are going to start look more like indie music videos you’ll watch til the end.

Regardless of what you may think of Facebook as a platform, they run a massive operation and when you reach their level of scale you have to get more creative in how you handle every aspect of your computing environment.

Engineers quickly reach the limits of human ability to track information to the point that checking logs and analytics becomes impractical and unwieldy on a system running thousands of services. This is a perfect scenario to implement machine learning and that is precisely what Facebook has done.

The company published a blog post today about a self-tuning system they have dubbed Sprial. This is pretty nifty and what it does is essentially flip the idea of system tuning on its head. Instead of looking at some data and coding what you want the system to do, you teach the system the right way to do it and it does it for you, using the massive stream of data to continually teach the machine learning models how to push the systems to be ever better.

In the blog post, the Spiral team described it this way: “Instead of looking at charts and logs produced by the system to verify correct and efficient operation, engineers now express what it means for a system to operate correctly and efficiently in code. Today, rather than specify how to compute correct responses to requests, our engineers encode the means of providing feedback to a self-tuning system.”

They say that coding in this way is akin to declarative code, like using SQL statements to tell the database what you want it to do with the data, but the act of applying that concept to systems is not a simple matter.

“Spiral uses machine learning to create data-driven and reactive heuristics for resource-constrained real-time services. The system allows for much faster development and hands-free maintenance of those services, compared with the hand-coded alternative,” the Spiral team wrote in the blog post.

If you consider the sheer number of services running on Facebook, and the number of users trying to interact with those services at any given time, it required sophisticated automation, and that is what Spiral is providing.

The system takes the log data, processes it through Spiral, which is connected with just a few lines of code. It then sends commands back to the server based on the declarative coding statements written by the team. To ensure those commands are always being fine tuned, at the same time, the data gets sent from the server to a model  for further adjustment in a lovely virtuous cycle. This process can applied locally or globally.

The tool was developed by the team operating in Boston, and is only available internally inside Facebook. It took lots of engineering to make it happen, the kind of scope that only Facebook could apply to a problem like this (mostly because Facebook is one of the few companies that would actually have a problem like this).

Facebook made two announcements about ad transparency today — one around the ads purchased by any Page and another around expanding its recently announced archive of political ads.

It seems like ad transparency is a big focus today, as Twitter just launched its own Ads Transparency Center, allowing anyone to see ads bought by any account.

In terms of bringing more transparency to Facebook Pages, the company says there will be a new section in Pages allowing users to bring up general information about Pages (like recent name changes and date of creation), and another where anyone can view all the active ads the Page is currently running.

As with any ad on Facebook, you’ll be able to flag ads viewed this way if you think they violate Facebook policies, and they will then be reviewed. Speaking to journalists via videoconference, Rob Leathern, a director of product management on the Facebook advertising team, noted that this is in addition to the “proactive” reviewing, performed both by humans and artificial intelligence, that Facebook already performs on every ad.

COO Sheryl Sandberg also said that Facebook is doing more to review political ads, which is resulting in more delays before those ads appear.

“We do not like the delays in the system [but] more manual review and more checks means more delays,” she said.

Now it might not seem like Facebook is sharing a tremendous amount of information here, especially since you only see the ad itself, not additional context like targeting, money spent or past advertising. When asked about this, Sandberg acknowledged that Facebook has more to do.

“There are lots of ways we can do more,” she said. “These are the first steps.”

Sandberg also said she doesn’t expect the additional transparency to affect ad spend on Facebook. She suggested that advertisers are aware of the changes, and while some of them have expressed concerns about competitors seeing their advertising, most of them are on-board.

“I think advertisers for most part stand behind the ads they’re running,” she said. “You actually can see a lot of your competitors’ ads [already], you just have to catch them.”

Meanwhile, Facebook says it will be launching its political archive in Brazil next month. These archives only start saving ads from the date that they launch (the one for the U.S. launched in May), but ultimately the plan is to store things for up seven years at a time.

As for why the archive will also include ads from news publishers that promote articles with political content, Sandberg said, “We decided that our goal is transparency. We are just erring on the side of being transparent.” She also noted that Facebook is now placing those ads in a separate section for “promoted  news.”

Sandberg was also asked about recent leaks to Motherboard and other publications of Facebook’s training material around hate speech — specifically around how it views white supremacy and neo-Nazis. Why not just make that training material public?

Sandberg argued that Facebook has already released extensive information about its policies, and she suggested that the leaked material is often taken out of context, outdated or just represents “bad training things.”

“I don’t think any other company has come close to the transparency we’ve put out,” she said.

NASA announced yesterday that its highly anticipated James Webb Space Telescope is delaying its launch — again.

It was announced in March that the mission would be delayed until 2020, which is already two years past its original launch date of October 2018. But after accepting the recommendations of an independent review board, NASA has announced that the launch has been rescheduled for early 2021.

According to the report, technical issues and human error have “greatly impacted the development schedule” and added $800 million to the already $8 billion budget approved by Congress.

For a mission that’s been deemed NASA’s “next big telescope,” it’s not surprising there’d be a few bumps in the road.

The telescope’s honeycombed structure of (literally) gold-plated mirrors will help scientists see further into the history of our universe than has ever been possible before. Following in the footsteps of the Hubble Telescope, Webb will have improved “sight” thanks to its abilities to see longer wavelengths, like infrared. By peering beyond the visible spectrum of light, there’s literally no telling what Webb might learn about the birth of the universe. And that’s kind of the reason NASA’s building it.

“The more we learn more about our universe, the more we realize that Webb is critical to answering questions we didn’t even know how to ask when the spacecraft was first designed,” said Thomas Zurbuchen, associate administrator for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate, in a report yesterday.

If that’s not enough pressure, the Webb (unlike the Hubble) will be too far away from Earth to be serviceable by either manned or robotic missions. So, when Webb finally reaches its orbit and unfurls (another tricky maneuver), there’s no going back.

While this mission represents an exciting new opportunity to explore deeper into space, NASA and other federally funded space agencies aren’t the only game in town any more. Billionaires like Yuri Milner, Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk are taking on the challenge in the private sector and designing new methods, crafts and rockets to explore this final frontier with a little more flexibility than NASA.

In addition to the obvious technical challenges of the Webb project, NASA has also run into problems with its primary contractor, Northrop Grumman . After encountering problems earlier this year successfully installing Webb’s sun shield, Northrop Grumman was also cited in yesterday’s report for “performance challenges” on the mission’s propulsion systems.

With NASA’s growing to-do list before Webb finally launches, it might still be awhile before we get to see the universe’s baby pictures.

Moov, the wearable maker best known for its line of fitness trackers with their accompanying digital coaches, is today branching off into mindfulness. The company is the latest to join the self-care craze, with the launch of a new app focused on mindfulness and meditation, Sanity & Self. However, unlike most of today’s meditation apps, Sanity & Self is aimed only at women.

Explains Moov’s co-founder Meng Li, the idea to build a mindfulness app came to her after becoming a mother herself.

“Even with a wonderful and supportive partner, I found it incredibly challenging to find time to take care of myself after I had my first child,” she says. “I saw other women around me struggling as well, and wanted to build an app specifically geared toward helping women and moms find time to recharge themselves.”

Women — and especially mothers — often find themselves stressed, tired and with little or no time to themselves. And instead of fathers being told to step up already and take on their fair share of parenting duties, women are just chastised for not “leaning in” more at work.

“Studies show that half of us have lain awake at night within the last month because of stress,” notes Li. “Women are more stressed than men, and moms often bear more of the burden of childcare than fathers. In fact, moms have as little as 17 minutes a day to themselves.”

Then there are the general stressors associated with our always-on culture. Technology, in particular, has enabled a blurring of lines between work and personal time to the point that many people feel they’re never really “off the clock.” (Until some point at which they burn out and quit, that is.)

Mindfulness apps have more recently stepped in to help address the problems that, ironically, technology helped to create.

The Sanity & Self app initially starts you off in a chatbot-style interface, though there’s a way to exit this experience to use the app normally. It’s an interesting idea in terms of not overwhelming new users with content, but it’s also frustrating — as chatbots are — because you can’t fully explore the app through back and forth texting.

However, once you bypass the bot (and you should), the app itself has a variety of sessions from which to choose. These are organized as colorful photo thumbnails under categories like Breathe, Meditate, Listen&Grow, Journal, and more.

There are also sessions related to massage and beauty, which is unusual for a mindfulness app, but features its female audience may like; as well as a section with audio cues for fitness training.

We asked Moov if it had repurposed materials from its existing digital coaching platforms for the new app. The company replied that some of the fitness content appeared briefly in an experimental Moov Studio app, but that’s been discontinued. The rest is new.

The app also organizes sessions to focus on specific needs, like feeling in control, managing time, sleeping better, de-stressing, feeling loved, setting healthy boundaries and more, which appear below the category listings.

The sessions are led by experts certified in wellness practices, including Ayurveda yoga, massage therapy, neuro linguistic programming, NASM, TRX, naturopathic aesthetics and more.

The app features an in-app community page, too, which is an interesting idea in terms of building up a social network for women. The questions and answers have been clearly pre-seeded ahead of the app’s launch, with a focus on beauty, self-care, stress reduction, fitness and other related topics to help set the tone.

Of course, if the app scales to support a larger number of users, Moov will need to concern itself with content moderation and managing spam. For now, the feeling is one of supportive communication, however.

The app itself is a freemium product. Upgrading to the $9.99/month Premium subscription gives you access to the full Premium session library, new sessions weekly and support for offline access. While there’s a good amount of content for the money, the pricing — nearly as much as Netflix — will require that you’re a regular user to get value for your money.

And with only 17 minutes a day to spare… well…

Sanity & Self’s launch is Moov’s first serious attempt at moving away from a devices business, supported by software, to a software-as-a-service business. But it says the other products remain unchanged; this is merely an expansion.

“We want this app to be more focused on overall wellness and self-care. We also want it to be accessible to everyone, whether or not they have a wearable,” says Li.

Sanity & Self is a free download on Apple’s App Store.

It seems like a simple concept: when rendering something in augmented reality (like, say, a Pikachu in Pokémon Go) and something in actual reality (like, say, a human, or a car, or a planter) passes in front of it, make the rendered object appear to be “behind” the real one.

In practice, it’s pretty damn hard. A device would need the ability to tell which pixels are close, or far, or somewhere in between. While adding more cameras (or lasers!) to the mix can help, achieving that sense of depth from the single rear RGB camera found on most smartphones — and doing it fast — is a helluva task. That’s why objects in most augmented reality apps tend to just sort of float in front of anything that gets too close.

Niantic (the co. behind the aforementioned Pokémon Go) has just acquired Matrix Mill, a company that has been working to tackle that challenge.

Founded in 2017 and spun out of a lab at University College London, Matrix Mill has been working on a product it calls “Monodepth” — a tool that takes data from a single RGB camera, passes it through a neural network, and spits out depth data fast enough to be integrated into a real-time game.

The company demonstrated its tech to a handful of press yesterday, showing an example of a Pikachu running around in Niantic’s existing AR engine vs one integrating Matrix Mill’s tool:

Note how, in the second version (starting at 0:33), Pikachu is occluded behind those passing by, or how it can seemingly run behind a planter rather than through it. While the visuals aren’t perfect (there’s definitely a bit of stray clipping), the integrations are early — and even at this stage, it’s a pretty big step forward in realism. Alas, no word yet on when this work might actually make its way into Pokémon Go.

Terms of the deal weren’t disclosed.

Niantic also demonstrated some of the tech it’s been working on behind the scenes, but has yet to integrate into its games – specifically, low latency, shared AR experiences.

“Codename: Neon”, for example, is an experimental game that has players run around a big open space, picking up orb “ammo” and firing it at those around them. Check it out:

Note how the game recognizes different players, labeling them on screen with a marker that follows them around. Projectiles track around the room in real time, with all players (and any observers) seeing the rockets whiz around them. By using multiple devices to build a shared map of the real world room, the game is able to understand where players are in relation to each other. It’s easy to imagine this tech being adapted for wizard duels for Niantic/Portkey’s upcoming Harry Potter game.

The same shared AR concept can be adapted for other genres. Here’s “Tonehenge”, a proof of concept co-op puzzler Niantic built in a few days:

Anyone else getting Wizard’s Chess vibes?

Finally, Niantic also disclosed early details on its “Real World Platform” – a set of cross platform (iOS and Android) tools and APIs it’s been working on for third party developers to build on top of. Want to build your own game in the same vein as GO? You bring the concept and the mechanics, they’ll bring the maps, the anti-spoofing tools, their massive database of real world points of interest, etc.

Niantic says it’ll open the platform up to a “select handful” of third parties later this year.

The Anita Borg Institute, the organization behind the annual Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing, has released its second-ever diversity report.

As of today, ABI employs 59 people — 27 white people, seven black people, seven Latix people, 13 Asian people, 1 Native American person, three people of two or more races and one person with an unspecified race. At the leadership level, ABI appointed Brenda Darden Wilkerson, a black woman, to serve as its CEO and president. The organization has also made some slight improvements in terms of gender balance, growing from just 4.2 percent male to 11 percent male. 

On stage, ABI has a goal of ensuring women of color make up at least 30 percent of the speakers, but did not disclose the exact breakdown for its most recent conference.

 

Under Wilkerson’s leadership, ABI looks to become more inclusive. The goal, Wilkerson told TechCrunch, is to “become much more representative of the women we support.”

Since her first day, about nine months ago, that has meant “broadening the tent,” she said.

“Making it much bigger and more inclusive, to let women of all backgrounds — socioeconomic, ethnicity, sexual orientation, ability and age,” Wilkerson said. “I think ageism is a huge problem.

That broadening of the tent specifically entails focusing on women of color founders, she said, pointing to a recent report that showed black women still receive a ridiculously low amount of venture funding. In total, according to digitalundivided, black women have raised just .0006 percent of all tech venture funding since 2009.

“We know that women and people of color create solutions that really solve so many people’s problems,” she said. “Those ideas grow out of the empathy of their experiences.”

Wilkerson expects to see some of these ideas come from the organization’s inaugural PitcHER startup contest this September. The thinking is that many of these types of companies will come from a number of women of color. If you look at categories that are focused on women and families, she said, “many times those fall more to women and people of color.”

Wilkerson also wants to recognize the women in the middle of their careers, who may “hit that ceiling and can’t go further in their organization,” she said.

ABI released its first diversity report in December 2016. At that time, ABI was 59.5 percent white, 17.5 percent Asian, 9 percent black and 9 percent Latinx. The organization did not disclose diversity at the leadership level, which was notable given that both former and current ABI employees earlier that year told me there was a lack of people of color in leadership positions.

Now, ABI seems more willing to do the work. And perhaps it helps that the organization has a black woman at the helm.

“The excuse choir for why the needle is not being moved needs to stop,” Wilkerson said. “I’m going to call bullshit on diversity fatigue. We’re going to take bold steps and say ‘this is not hard, it can get done.’ We’re going to do the hard things technologists do.”