Year: 2018

In November, Google introduced Datally, a data-saving app largely aimed at emerging markets where users often rely on prepaid SIM cards, and don’t have access to all-you-can-eat unlimited data plans. The app lets users granularly control which apps can use data, which resulted in a 30% savings on data usage during pilot testing and now saves users 21%, on average. Today, Google is giving Datally an upgrade with several new features that will help users cut data usage even further.

One key feature is the introduction of daily limits, which allow you to control your data usage on a per-day basis. This one is more about creating better habits around data consumption, so you don’t accidentally burn through too much data in a day, then end up without any data left before the month ends.

This also ties into to Google’s larger push to give users more insights into their own behavior when using mobile devices, and more tools to combat the addictive nature of smartphones.

The company in May announced new time management features for Android users, as well as new features to help users silence their phones and wind down at bedtime. It also has software for parents to limit screen time for their children.

While the Datally feature is primarily about conserving data, it acknowledges that it’s often easy to get sucked into your smartphone and lose track of how much time – and then, consequently, how much mobile data – you want to spend.

Another new Datally feature lets you enable a guest mode where you control how much data someone borrowing your phone can use – helpful in those situations where phones are shared among family members.

The “Unused Apps” feature, meanwhile, highlights those apps you’ve stopped using but could still be leaking data. Google notes that, for many people, 20 percent of mobile data is from apps using data in the background that haven’t been opened for over a month. Unused Apps will find those culprits so you can uninstall them, it says.

And finally, a new Wi-Fi Map shows all the nearby Wi-Fi networks so you can find those with a good signal and stop using your mobile data.

Though Datally is aimed at helping the “Next Billion Users” come online, it’s not limited to emerging markets. Anyone concerned with data usage can give it a shot.

The new additions are rolling out to Datally today, says Google.

The Android app, which has been downloaded over 10 million times, is free on Google Play.

Apple this morning announced a new feature in iOS 12 which will automatically share your location with first responders when U.S. users dial 911 using their iPhone. The move is meant to address the problems with dialing emergency services from a cell phone, where outdated infrastructure has made it difficult to obtain a mobile caller’s location quickly and accurately, Apple says.

Approximately 80 percent of 911 calls come from cell phones, however, which is why it’s critical to fix this system.

In 2015, Apple launched HELO (Hybridized Emergency Location), which would estimate a caller’s location using GPS and Wi-Fi Access points. Today, Apple said it will additionally use RapidSOS’s Internet Protocol-based data pipeline to securely share this HELO location data with 911 centers, to improve the response times even further.

RapidSOS’s technology integrates with existing software installed at many 911 centers, which is how they’ll receive the data.

Apple also noted the FCC is requiring mobile operators to locate callers within 50 meters at least 80 percent of the time by 2021. Its location services exceed this requirement today, and now 911 centers will have access to the same accuracy.

In typical Apple fashion, the company stressed the new feature’s data privacy. User location data cannot be shared for non-emergency purposes, and only the 911 center will have access to the location during the call itself.

The 911 support was not announced during Apple’s software-heavy WWDC keynote earlier this month, where a number of other privacy, security and A.I.-powered features were introduced as coming later this year in iOS 12. Typically, the new version of Apple’s mobile operating system is release to the public during September, and that should hold true for iOS 12 as well.

“Communities rely on 911 centers in an emergency, and we believe they should have the best available technology at their disposal,” said Tim Cook, Apple’s CEO, in a statement about the new feature. “When every moment counts, these tools will help first responders reach our customers when they most need assistance.”

 

 

 

The largest payment app in South Korea, Toss, has pulled in $40 million in fresh investment from Singapore sovereign wealth fund GIC and Sequoia China.

The deal for Viva Republica, Toss’s parent company, comes just over a year after it raised $48 million from payment giant PayPal and others. There’s no valuation for this newest round, but we do know that it is a ‘bridge’ intended to bring new investors in and help accelerate the business for a large raise further down the line. (It is also the first Korean investment for both GIC and Sequoia China.)

Not that the business seems to need much more impetus for acceleration, growth is already strong. Viva Republica says that Toss’s registered user base has doubled over the past year to each eight million consumers, while it claims the app is processing $10 billion in transaction volume per month. The company forecasts that its annual transaction run rate will surpass $18 billion.

Back in 2016 when we reported on the PayPal -backed round, founder and CEO SG Lee — a dentist until he saw the potential for a mobile payment service — told us that Toss had begun to introduce additional services beyond peer-to-peer payments. That’s included consumer financing products, like loans, micro-insurance and cross-border payments.

Toss doesn’t have Korea to itself, its main rival is Kakao, the country’s most popular messaging app. In recent times Kakao, a $7 billion company, had opened business units in a range of industries including ride-hailing, content and payment. Its Kakao Pay business is backed by Alibaba, and it plugs into Kakao the chat app to allow peer-to-peer transfers with other consumer finance services.

Lee, the Viva Republica CEO, previously said he doesn’t fear Kakao since in his mind it is creating a b2b business while Toss is focused wholly on the consumer experience. Now it has a couple more seasoned backers in its corner too, courtesy of this new investment.

Fellas, you’re gonna want that cowbell. And what better way to get that cowbell than with an automatic cowbell-playing robot that uses simple components to create a musical experience like no other. The system, built over at Adafruit, includes a simple Arduino controller, a potentiometer to control the speed of the cowbell hammer, and a few audio systems to play back some BÖC and the immortal words of The Bruce Dickinson: “More cowbell.”

It even includes a controller to activate a fog machine for a little extra rock and roll.

You can download the code for the system here and there is a full build guide here. Ultimately this is one of the silliest DIY projects I’ve seen in a while but, as you may recall, the only prescription for certain fevers is obviously more cowbell.

Microsoft has acquired Flipgrid, a social education app that utilizes short video clips to create collaborative lesson plans. The Minneapolis-based startup, which began life as Vidku, has had strong growth for an experience that has been alternatively described as Instagram and Snapchat for the classroom. Early last year, it reported an 800 percent year-over-year growth in teacher accounts.

It’s certainly a play that makes sense in Microsoft’s portfolio, as the company looks to take back the education market currently being dominated by Google, thanks to its wildly popular Chromebook category. In May of last year, the company launched an educational variant of Windows 10, which joined such existing plays as its Minecraft Education Edition.

“We’re thrilled to see the impact Flipgrid has had in social learning thus far and look forward to helping them continue to thrive as part of the Microsoft family,” Microsoft VP Eran Megiddo, said in a release tied to the announcement. “We’re diligently committed to making sure their platform and products continue to work across the Microsoft, Google and partner ecosystems to benefit students and teachers everywhere.” 

How, precisely, Flipgrid will fit into Microsoft’s overall edtech play remains to be seen, though the company has already integrated the app into Microsoft Teams in Office 365 for Education. As with its Office 365 Education offering, the company will be making the app free for schools. Those who already purchased an account, meanwhile, will be getting a refund.

A round of updates to the app is forthcoming, as well. Microsoft will be unveiling those at Flipgrid’s education conference in early April. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Just shy of two years after launch, Pokémon GO is finally about to roll out one of its most notably absent features: Pokémon trading.

A staple of the series, trading lets players swap their Pokémon with another player’s in the never-ending quest to, well, catch’em all.

The trading mechanics will be tied into a new Friend system; the Friend system will roll out later this week, with the trading mechanics going live “soon after” (though Niantic doesn’t want to get more specific than that, presumably in case something breaks.)

Here’s how it all works:

• To trade with someone, you must be their in-game friend *and* within 100 meters (~320 ft.) of them
• To become friends, you exchange your unique Trainer Codes
• Once friends, you’ll get in-game perks for playing together. Your Pokémon will get attack bonuses when battling gyms together, for example – and when you raid together, you’ll get extra Pokéballs.



• The more you play together (raiding, battling gyms, etc), the higher your relationship level will be.
• Certain Pokémon (Legendaries, Shinies, and any Pokémon you don’t already have) are considered “special trades”. You can only make special trades with players with whom you’ve reached the higher tiers of friendship. In other words, they mostly want you trading with the people you play with somewhat regularly – not rando spoofers selling Pokémon on eBay.
• You can only make one special trade per day.
• Trades cost stardust (the in-game resource otherwise required for powering up a Pokémon). The rarer the Pokémon, the more it’ll cost to trade. Having a higher friendship level, though, will offset that a bit (note in the example below, for example, how it starts at a rather insane requirement of a million stardust and drops down to a more manageable 40,000 as the friendship level, shown in the upper right, increases)



Meanwhile, they’ve also introduced another entirely new concept as part of the friend system: Gifts. Every once in a while, spinning a Pokéstop will give you a “Gift” item. You can’t open it yourself – instead, you’re meant to send it to a friend for them to open. It’ll arrive marked with a photo of the stop you picked it up – a little Pokéstop post card, of sorts, bundled with a handful of “helpful items.” Niantic doesn’t say exactly what those “helpful items” might be, though they do note that they could include eggs containing Alolan Pokémon (which, for the most part, haven’t been made available in game yet)



While the trading/friend system might seem a bit complicated, with its stardust requirements and daily limits and friendship requirements, it theoretically helps limit some issues that a free-for-all trade system might face. It’s easy to imagine someone spoofing back and forth around the world to farm rare Pokémon as they pop up, slinging them on eBay (or wherever) for a few bucks a pop, and just spoofing to an agreed location to initiate a trade. Requiring players to have some history of playing/raiding/battling gyms together before they can trade the good stuff makes that a bit more challenging.

Welcome to Bag Week 2018. Every year your faithful friends at TechCrunch spend an entire week looking at bags. Why? Because bags — often ignored but full of our important electronics — are the outward representations of our techie styles, and we put far too little thought into where we keep our most prized possessions.

The WP Standard Vintage Leather Messenger Bag is a few years old. It helped launch the Whipping Post brand six years ago. I’ve used mine for about 3 years and it’s always been fantastic because the leather is amazing. The WP Standard Vintage Leather Messenger Bag is truly a wonderful bag.

It starts with the design. It’s simple and a nod to the classic postman’s bag of generations ago. But instead of mail, it’s designed to carry a laptop. There’s a main interior pocket that’s large enough to hold notebook or rangefinder, but not a DSLR. The interior laptop sleeve is padded by with extra thick leather and there’s an attached clip for keys (every bag needs this).

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The backside features a so-called newspaper pocket. This is a classic feature. It’s nothing fancy but just a large, thin pocket that spans the backside of the bag. It’s just thick enough to hold a newspaper folded in half.

I carried this bag nearly daily for several years and it’s held up fine. The leather looks worn but not dingy. Like a good pair of jeans, the leather has stretched and molded to the space of my 15-inch MacBook Pro, notebooks and camera I carry. To be clear, the interior pocket is larger than it was when I first got it but it doesn’t look stretched out, just used.

There is one downside to this bag: The shoulder strap is not comfortable because of the leather. After years of use, the leather on the shoulder strap pad is now smooth and unable to stay in place on my shoulder. It just slides around when I walk and it’s much worse when I wear a nylon coat. I’ve resorted to sliding the pad out of the way and using the leather strap which still has texture of raw leather on one side.

At $295 the bag is priced accordingly for the fantastic material and build. It’s a great bag to carry a few things and it will always be noticed. I have yet to see a bag as beautiful as the Vintage Leather Messenger Bag. If more space is needed, WP Standard now has a larger option that looks equally as good in the $310 Large Messenger Bag though I haven’t seen the bag in person yet.

Photos take in the sunny lobby of the Mendeli Street Hotel in Tel Aviv, Israel where they make a fantastic cold coffee.

A lot has been said about the coming future of wearables, but, it turned out, not a heck of a lot took off. It seemed most of us were happy with ‘wearing’ a smartwatch and leaving it at that. In fact, Apple’s recent announcements around the iWatch show that ‘wearables’ are not really about just wearing something with electronics embedded, but really about health.

Now, we know that the home fitness market and wellness market is not going anywhere. And yet we still have an obesity issue in the world. What if what we wore could help us with that, while we exercise?

That’s the idea behind Wearable X, the New York-based startup which launched last year with the “Nadi X”. This is a collection of smart yoga apparel with woven-in technology. They claim this can identify the various yoga poses and provide users with real-time feedback via gentle vibrations. Nadi X comes with a companion iPhone app and device, called The Pulse. The Pulse is where the battery and Bluetooth module clips behind the upper left knee so as not to interfere with your yoga practice.

The company is now launching a Kickstarter campaign for four new designs, including a menswear line and redesigned user-friendly app with enhanced features.

Founder & CEO Billie Whitehouse says: “With Nadi X you not only have convenience but haptics increase reaction time and make you feel more accountable not only through the instant reaction but also through the progress tracking. Our data is more sophisticated than most because we have 5 data points. Most only have one. Single data is what I call ‘dirty data’. It’s just not a thorough look at the true movements that are taking place.”

The new features include progress tracking, customizable playlist “yoga flows” whereby the user can create a truly personalized practice and yoga practice incentives. It’s notable that last year yoga pants outsold denim worldwide.

Pulumi, a Seattle-based startup that’s coming out of stealth mode today, wants to make it easier for developers and ops team to define their infrastructure by writing code. Instead of using a cloud-specific configuration language, the service’s tools allow developers to define the infrastructure for their applications in the same programming languages they already use for the applications.

The service has the backing of Madrone Venture Group and Tola Capital, with Madrona’s S. Somasegar joining its board of directors.

What’s interesting here is that it doesn’t matter whether that infrastructure is containers, virtual machines or a serverless function, or whether those will run in a private cloud or one of the major public clouds. Supported languages currently include JavaScript, TypeScript, Python and Go, with support for .NET, Java, C# and node.js following soon.

Pulumi CEO Joe Duffy has extensive open source experience (he built the team at Microsoft that took .NET open source), so it’s no surprise that Pulumi, too, has a number of open source components. What the service offers in addition to that, though, is a hosted service for managing Pulumi stacks after they have been deployed, as well as tools for collaboration and integrating the service into existing workflows.

As Duffy and his co-founder and executive chairman Eric Rudder argued when I met with the team ahead of today’s announcement, today’s vendor-specific templating languages only lead to “configuration sprawl” and result in templates that mix code and configuration into an unholy mix of unreadable files that nobody wants to touch. This approach, Rudder and Duffy argued, also leads to a wider gap between developers and the operations team that try to support them. The team told me that it managed to reduce more than 1,000 lines of Helm code into fewer than 200 lines of Pulumi code, for example — and much of those 200 lines is reusable.

“There is a massive movement to the cloud among enterprise customers around the world,” said Somasegar. “As that trend continues to gather and gain momentum, new and transformative techniques are required as customers truly begin to take advantage of cloud-native capabilities. This transformation grows leaps and bounds with serverless computing starting to emerge as the next frontier to enable truly distributed applications and services that are powered by microservices and event-driven functions.” And his view, Pulumi’s code-first approach will help push this movement forward.

Pulumi is now available as a preview — and all of its pricing plans are currently available for free.

By placing all the information about services or complex manufacturing and assembly processes on a private, permissioned blockchain, the idea is that a company can create an “immutable” audit trail of data. When you think about it, currently this involves a labor-intensive combination of paper and networks. But initial trials with private blockchains in the last couple of years have shown there is potential to reduce the identification process of a data trail from several days to minutes.

Indications that this is becoming a hot issue amongst startups arrives today in two pieces of news.

Firstly, London-based “Gospel”(yes, that really is their name…) has raised £1.4m in seed funding from investors led by European-focused LocalGlobe.

The blockchain startup says it has been working with an unnamed “aerospace and defence manufacturer” to develop a proof of concept to improve record keeping for its supply chain. What’s the betting it’s British Aerospace? They aren’t saying.

At any rate, Gospel says it has developed a way of securely distributing data across decentralised infrastructures, offering companies the potential to automate records for complex products that usually require significant manual management. The idea is that is shares only the information it needs to, securely, with other partners in its supply chain, potentially leading to improved efficiency and lower costs of information recall.

Founded in December 2016 by entrepreneur Ian Smith, Gospel uses a private blockchain that requires users to set up a network of “nodes” within their ecosystem. Each party controls their own node and all the nodes must agree before any transaction can be processed and put on the blockchain. The node network acts as a consensus and provides a mechanism of trust.

Smith says: “For manufacturers and other businesses dealing with critical data there is a problem of trust in data systems, particularly when there is a need to share that data outside the organization. With Gospel technology we can provide an immutable record store so that trust can be fully automated between systems of forward-thinking businesses.”

Prior to this seed round, Gospel was backed by a number of angel investors including Gumtree co-founder Michael Pennington and Vivek Kundra, the Chief Information Officer for the US Government during Barack Obama’s administration.

Secondly, Russia-based startup Waves, which has issued its own cryptocurrency, is getting into the space with the launch of Vostok, a universal blockchain solution for scalable digital infrastructure.

The idea is that public institutions and large enterprises can use the platform to enhance security, data storage, transparency and stability of their systems.

Vostok, which is named after the craft that carried Yuri Gagarin into space, claims to be significantly faster and cheaper than existing blockchain solutions, claiming 10,000 transactions per second (TPS) at only $0.000001 per a transaction. This is compared to Bitcoin which has transactional processing capacity of 3-6TPS and costs $0.951 per transaction. Vostok also uses a closed operational node set and Proof-of-Stake.

Sasha Ivanov, CEO and Founder of Vostok and Waves Platform, said: “Vostok is a multi- purpose solution, quite simple, but at the same time non-trivial. It will allow any large organisation to gain the benefits of blockchain without having to create new systems from scratch or retrain their staff.”