Year: 2018

Today is the day that, after months of delays, the FCC’s repeal of net neutrality finally takes effect. But if you’re expecting broadband providers to suddenly feast on their customers and institute every now-legal impediment they can on free expression, I’m afraid you’ll be disappointed. What comes next isn’t internet hell but legal purgatory.

First, the technical aspect of things: Restoring Internet Freedom, the FCC rule that officially does away with 2015’s Open Internet Order, was proposed last April, finalized in November, passed in December, entered into the Federal Register in February, approved by the Office of Management and Budget in May — and today, finally takes effect. Chairman Ajit Pai put a cap on it with an opinion piece retreading the same tired arguments from the last two years.

But the official rulemaking process is only part of the story. It’s worth noting that basically from the moment Pai took over, the 2015 rules he opposed so strenuously were plainly not going to be enforced. Although the exact shape of the rules to come was not clear at that time, Pai’s stated deregulatory, pro-industry agenda (for some these are dirty words, for others a proud cause) assured broadband providers that they were safe from the previous rules.

And as that process has continued, it and the FCC have opened themselves up to lawsuits and legal challenges. Some allege improper conduct in the public comment portion of rulemaking; some allege the rule itself is technically incorrect; some tilt quixotically at undoing the rule in order to undermine its support in advance of the midterm elections.

Not only that, but many states have begun the process of establishing their own net neutrality rules, some even stronger than the 2015 ones being taken out of play. These will lead to numerous local conflicts, as the FCC claims its authority preempts that of states, while states claim the FCC has abdicated that authority by changing the statue under which it enforces the rules. (This is largely untested legal ground.)

All together this makes for an incredibly fraught situation for broadband providers. They are perhaps under the closest scrutiny ever; their past misdeeds haunt them even as they make pious promises of dedication to a free and open internet.

While no doubt they will attempt to get away with a few raids on the customer cookie jar via relatively innocuous (but frog-in-pot dangerous) practices like zero rating, serious larceny is almost certainly not on their minds, at least for the next couple years.

Following the highly visible and unpopular passage of a rule that unshackles them from serious regulatory oversight, any dramatic changes to their offerings or business deals will be seen as a breach of their newly acquired principles.

Not only that, but the kinder, softer federal rules may not be the ones they have to worry about. When states pass their own laws, it’s likely (or at least possible) that they will stay in effect during the inevitable legal challenge. It’s no good to try something shady but now legal under federal rules if by doing so you find yourself in violation of 20 individual state laws.

Something you can expect is a bit of PR from the FCC and broadband companies soon talking about how the new rules took effect and nothing bad happened. Sure — but they probably won’t mention the bad stuff that happened long before: the retraction of the broadband privacy rule, the relegation of abuses by broadband providers to the slow-to-act FTC, the endless favors given to telecoms and media companies like Sinclair, the total withdrawal of oversight in practices like zero rating that could easily morph into something worse, the mystifying reticence to address serious issues surrounding the rulemaking.

As has been true for the last year or so, the best thing consumers can do is be vigilant and voice their opinions. Ordinary users are the first to be affected by new policies and it may be something as simple as a new line item on your broadband bill that catches providers red-handed trying to slip something under the radar.

And as the year wears on net neutrality will likely emerge as a political issue; it’s divided along partisan lines despite being a clearly nonpartisan issue, but smart lawmakers see the writing on the wall and are cautiously aligning themselves with what they see is likely to ultimately be the winning side. The midterm elections will be a thriller no matter what, but net neutrality is just one more issue to throw on the table when deciding between people or parties.

In short the day many feared has arrived but in fact there’s nothing to fear from it. For now it’s a rubber stamp that will have little if any practical effect, since most companies will have been operating as if the new rules were in effect for some time now, and even so have opted not to invite disaster with consumer-hostile practices.

This is a battle that has been playing out for decades, and it isn’t going to end like this — the fight will continue for years and in retrospect it will be clear that this was just another chapter in the story. Just remember not to stop paying attention — in the end, that’s the way they’ll get you.

Byton, a Chinese electric car startup, has secured a $500 million Series B funding round to fuel the development of smart, connected cars. Investors include FAW Group, Tus-Holdings and CATL. Byton also announced the opening of a new HQ in Nanjing, China. This is on top of Byton’s research and development center in Santa Clara, Calif.

“By combining our expertise in R&D and traditional car-making with innovative Internet technologies, we aspire to pioneer a smart mobility revolution,” Byton CEO and Co-founder Dr. Carsen Breitfeld said in a statement.

At the Consumer Electronics Show, Byton unveiled its all-electric SUV concept. Earlier this year, Byton also announced a partnership with self-driving car startup Aurora. The terms of the partnership entail Aurora powering Byton’s autonomous driving features via a pilot deployment in the next couple of years. Byton plans to roll out its first batch of prototypes in April 2019 with the goal of Q4 2019 for the launch of a mass produced model.

San Jose-based Cohesity has closed an oversubscribed $250M Series D funding round led by SoftBank’s Vision Fund, bringing its total raised to date to $410M. The enterprise software company offers a hyperconverged data platform for storing and managing all the secondary data created outside of production apps.

In a press release today it notes this is only the second time SoftBank’s gigantic Vision Fund has invested in an enterprise software company. The fund, which is almost $100BN in size — without factoring in all the planned sequels, also led an investment in enterprise messaging company Slack back in September 2017 (also a $250M round).

“Cohesity pioneered hyperconverged secondary storage as a first stepping stone on the path to a much larger transformation of enterprise infrastructure spanning public and private clouds. We believe that Cohesity’s web-scale Google-like approach, cloud-native architecture, and incredible simplicity is changing the business of IT in a fundamental way,” said Deep Nishar, senior managing partner at SoftBank Investment Advisers, in a supporting statement.

Also participating in the financing are Cohesity’s existing strategic investors Cisco Investments, Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE), and Morgan Stanley Expansion Capital, along with early investor Sequoia Capital and others.

The company says the investment will be put towards “large-scale global expansion” by selling more enterprises on the claimed cost and operational savings from consolidating multiple separate point solutions onto its hyperconverged platform. On the customer acquisition front it flags up support from its strategic investors, Cisco and HPE, to help it reach more enterprises.

Cohesity says it’s onboarded more than 200 new enterprise customers in the last two quarters — including Air Bud Entertainment, AutoNation, BC Oil and Gas Commission, Bungie, Harris Teeter, Hyatt, Kelly Services, LendingClub, Piedmont Healthcare, Schneider Electric, the San Francisco Giants, TCF Bank, the U.S. Department of Energy, the U.S. Air Force, and WestLotto — and says annual revenues grew 600% between 2016 and 2017.

In another supporting statement, CEO and founder Mohit Aron, added: “My vision has always been to provide enterprises with cloud-like simplicity for their many fragmented applications and data — backup, test and development, analytics, and more.

“Cohesity has built significant momentum and market share during the last 12 months and we are just getting started.”

For many architects, the hardest part of their job starts after they finish designing a building, when the onerous process of code compliance begins. Written to ensure the safety and accessibility of buildings, codes dictate everything from the height and depth of stairs and where railings end, to the amount of floor space in front of toilets and the height of windows. Regulations are constantly updated, which means that even the most diligent team of architects often miss violations, resulting in costly delays. Y Combinator alum UpCodes wants to help them by using artificial intelligence, including natural language processing, to create what the San Francisco-based startup describes as “the spellcheck for buildings.”

Called UpCodes AI, the program is a plug-in that scans 3D models created with building information modeling (BIM) data and alerts architects about potential issues. It draws on the same backend as UpCodes’ first product, an app that compiles regulations into a constantly updated, searchable database with collaboration tools. UpCodes AI, which launched to the public last week, currently supports recent versions of Autodesk Revit and will add ARCHICAD, Sketchup and IFC in the future.

“This is like Grammarly for the construction industry. By highlighting code errors in real-time, the software acts as a code consultant working beside you at all times,” UpCodes co-founder and CEO Scott Reynolds tells TechCrunch.

UpCodes’ co-founders Garrett and Scott Reynolds and UpCodes AI technical lead Mark Vulfson

UpCodes was founded in 2016 after Reynolds became so frustrated by traditional code compliance while working as an architect that he switched career paths and launched the startup with his brother Garrett, a former software engineer at PlanGrid, to fix the process.

Building codes change so often that they are sometimes referred to as “living documents.” UpCodes’ database draws directly on regulations put online by municipalities and is updated almost in real-time. This eases a major pain point because many architects who thought they had followed regulations find out too late that they missed an amendment. In worst case scenarios, completed work needs to be torn out and rebuilt, potentially costing tens of thousands of dollars. This is a frequent occurrence and Scott Reynolds points to studies by McKinsey and the National Association of Home Builders that cite the complexity of code compliance as a major reason for reduced productivity in the construction industry and rising home prices.

Automating code compliance may also make it easier for architects to expand their practices, since regulations can vary dramatically between jurisdictions. UpCodes currently covers building codes in 26 states and the District of Columbia. Though UpCodes AI is still in its early stages, Reynolds tells TechCrunch that during its private beta it identified an average of about 27 violations per project.

One of its private beta users was Nicholas LoCicero, a designer with CallisonRTKL, an architecture firm known for retail design. LoCicero told TechCrunch in an email that the company used UpCodes AI on two retail locations that needed brand updates. Accessibility, which includes making sure that there are unobstructed ways of exiting a building from any point within it, is one of the most important parts of code compliance, and LoCicero said UpCodes AI was able to flag issues with door clearance, depth on stairs and tread width more quickly than the typical compliance process.

The program “definitely has the potential to save us hours of time with smart egress and accessibility tools and components that will help us develop projects faster during different phases of design” while ensuring that compliance is maintained, he added.

So far, UpCodes has raised $785,000 in funding from angel investors, as well as Y Combinator and Foundation Capital. It now has over 100,000 monthly active users and recently hired Mark Vulfson, former senior manager of engineering at PlanGrid, to serve as UpCodes AI’s technical lead.

Though the adoption of BIM data has made planning buildings more efficient, that’s “only a modest use of BIM’s full potential,” Reynolds says. He notes that it’s just within the past few years that more than 50% of American architecture firms have started using 3D information-rich modeling instead of 2D modeling. Programs like Revit and ARCHICAD, and new developments in APIs, finally made automated code compliance possible.

The use of AI in architecture is still new, but there are already several companies, including Autodesk and CoPlannery, exploring how to apply AI technologies to solve common problems in design, construction and engineering. Since AI is used in other major industries, including finance and healthcare, to automate compliance, it makes sense to assume that somewhere down the line, another company might try to build a competitor to UpCodes AI.

Reynolds believes that the UpCodes team’s combined industry and technical expertise will give it an edge over future rivals. He says his brother Garrett has a background in diffusion MRI analyzing large 4D data sets, while Vulfson brings “extensive experience deploying client side and web-based products” to the startup. UpCodes also works with a building code consultant who is based in New York City.

“The whole industry of code compliance has been neglected by software engineers for so long that it’s hard to imagine someone else doing what we’re doing,” Reynolds says.

“Building codes are a creativity killer.  These regulations are one of the most restrictive components of design,” he adds. “Imagine restricting every brush stroke an artist makes with ten thousand rules–that’s what building codes feel like to an architect. That’s why I quit my career to do this. I want to take away that frustration and make architecture more fun, like it is in school.”

Michigan Central Station long stood as a symbol of Detroit’s decline. Now, thanks to Ford, it could represent Detroit’s return.

Today at an press conference in front of the Detroit icon, it was announced that Ford’s bid to purchase the train depot was accepted and the deal was done. The large building will be at the center of Ford move to turn Detroit’s Corktown neighborhood into Ford’s automotive technology groups campus.

“The deal is complete,” Matthew Moroun, whose family has owned the station since 1995, said at today’s event. “The future of the depot is assured. The next steward of the building is the right one for its future. The depot will become a shiny symbol of Detroit’s progress and its success.

This deal was Detroit’s worst-kept secret. It’s been known about for months. It will bring life to the desolate Corktown area, which though right next to the thriving downtown core, has yet felt the much love from Detroit’s rebirth. Amtrak last used the station in 1988 and it has since changed hands several times.

This deal has the potential to change Detroit. The downtown core is already experiencing a revival in business and culture but so far the surrounding neighborhoods have struggled to keep up. Corktown has ample room for new housing and businesses and redeveloping Michigan Central Station would throw the neighborhood the attention and money it needs to grow.

This would be Ford’s second recent investment in Detroit’s Corktown neighborhood. At the beginning of the year Ford announced it would put 200 employees in The Factory, a building less than a half a mile from Michigan Central Station. A redeveloped train station could house 1,000 Ford workers. Ford currently houses most of its employees in facilities around the Detroit suburb of Dearborn.

Amazon and its grocery store chain Whole Foods announced this morning that savings for Prime members will make their way to ten more stores across the U.S. this week, including Arizona, Georgia, Oregon, North Carolina and Washington, among others. The tie-up gives Amazon shoppers another reason to join the Prime membership program – 10 percent off on-sale grocery items at Whole Foods, and other deeper discounts on a weekly basis.

The discount program was first announced in mid-May, starting in Florida, with promises to soon expand across all U.S. Whole Foods Market and Whole Foods Market 365 stores throughout the summer. Amazon has been making good on that goal, with a rollout to 12 more states, including California, Texas and Colorado later that same month.

The company today says the Whole Foods discounts have reached the following markets: Alabama, Arizona, Arkansas, California, Colorado, Florida, Georgia, Hawaii, Idaho, Kansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri (Kansas City only), Nevada, New Mexico, North Carolina, Oklahoma, Oregon, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, and Washington.

By the end of this week, Amazon says it expects the Prime member savings to reach nearly half its Whole Foods Market stores.

The expansion is moving at a faster pace than planned, it seems.

In the company’s announcement, Whole Foods Market President and COO A.C. Gallo noted that the timeline for the rollout of the Prime savings has been accelerated – something attributed to “positive customer feedback and successes,” it saw over the past month.

However, the reality is that Amazon-Whole Foods is seeing continued competition from Walmart Grocery, which is more affordable without a membership and offers curbside pickup, as well as from other grocery delivery services, like Instacart.

Meanwhile, Target has been expanding its own grocery delivery business, Shipt, across the Southeast and Midwest at a rapid pace as it prepares to go coast-to-coast. And it’s expanding its Drive Up curbside service for everyday items, though for now excluding fresh and frozen groceries. The retailer has plans to remodel over 1,000 of its stores, too, in order to better accommodate the new ways people shop – like offering bigger Order Pickup counters and more space for Drive Up orders.

Amazon needs a stake in the grocery business to remain competitive, but it also needed a way to bring Whole Foods’ high prices down to drive loyalty, given its reputation for costly groceries. (“Whole Paycheck” was the joke.) Rebranding the price cuts as a Prime member benefit seems to be a good way to go about that.

The savings are available by providing your Amazon account’s phone number at checkout, or by using the updated Whole Foods app.

The Whole Foods discounts are also available through Amazon Prime Now delivery in Atlanta, Austin, Dallas, Denver, Los Angeles, Sacramento, San Diego and San Francisco. Two-hour delivery on orders over $35 is free for Prime members, and will reach more cities throughout the year.

Jared Feldman, CEO of Canvs, said he has a big goal: “I think there needs to be a Google for emotions … where you can see how people feel about everything.”

Feldman argued that creating such a product, Canvs can not only help businesses make better decisions, but also contribute to “a more empathetic world.”

(When I pointed out that not everyone is comfortable with the idea of for-profit businesses having a detailed understanding of their emotions, particularly post-Cambridge Analytica, Feldman noted that Canvs isn’t involved in any kind of user targeting or attempts to change user behavior — instead, it’s all about “clarifying how people really feel about things.”)

Canvs’ first product was focused on helping TV networks understanding the social media conversation about their shows, with what Feldman said is much greater nuance than normal social sentiment analysis. Now the company is taking the next step with the launch of Canvs Surveys.

Using this product, researchers collect survey data the way they normally do, but they can then upload an Excel spreadsheet of open-ended responses and quickly get a detailed breakdown of how people responded, in aggregate, to different characters, storylines and so on.

Feldman explained that while surveys are a common research tool for businesses, open-ended questions can be a big problem. Not only can it take an enormous amount of time to classify and tabulate all the different responses, but it also involves a degree of subjectivity, based on how individual researchers interpret each answer.

At the same time, it’s the open-ended questions that can provide the most meaningful insights. For example, Feldman said Canvs works with NBCUniversal and found that three of the network’s pilots got similar responses when it came to the “closed ends” (namely, the survey questions where respondents choose from a menu or numerical scale of possible answers).

It was only in the open-ended questions that you could see meaningful differences — Feldman said that ultimately, it turned out out that the shows that “overperformed for ‘enjoyment’ and underperformed for ‘interesting'” did well with viewers, while the shows that respondents saw as more interesting than enjoyable did poorly in the ratings.

Feldman argued that this is an insight that applies to companies beyond TV.

“For every single industry now, because of the Internet, because of how many choices we have, the only thing that gets people to do something is an emotional connection,” he said. “That’s the rub.”

He added that a tool like Canvs Surveys doesn’t replace the work of researchers. Instead, he argued that it reduces the “manual work” and makes them “more focused on what they’re really good at, which is insights and storytelling.” (Plus, researchers who want to go deeper can dig into the individual responses and flag answers that weren’t classified correctly.)

It seems that NBCUniversal is happy with the results. The company’s senior director of program reserach Benoit Landry said in the announcement:

Having just wrapped up our first pilot testing using Canvs Surveys, I can say with confidence this isn’t an iterative improvement for the research community, it’s a first-ever. We went from spending 16 hours trying to hand sort open-ended survey responses, down to one hour with Canvs, and that’s in addition to never-before-seen normative insights across pilots. It’s an extraordinary efficiency gain and cost savings for NBC for something we do dozens of times each year.

Canvs Surveys is available for free for researchers analyzing up to 5,000 open-ended responses.

Ford is teaming up with startup Postmates to pilot test autonomous on-demand delivery in Miami and Miami Beach, Fla. The pilot program includes 70 businesses like Coyo Taco

Ford is also testing vehicle designs with multiple lockers in order to be able to serve more than one customer per delivery route. Since Postmates handles anything from food to hardware, the lockers are a variety of sizes.

The goal is to see how businesses and consumers interact with self-driving delivery cars. On the employee end, they get an access code to place the item inside. On the customer side, they’ll receive a text message with an access code when the order is ready to be picked up.

“Ultimately, we’re trying to make interaction with self-driving vehicles as easy as possible,” Ford wrote in a blog post. “Through our collaboration with Postmates, we’re testing different methods for efficient deliveries to help local businesses expand their reach and provide a seamless experience to customers.”

This is similar to Ford’s previous partnership with Dominos in Ann Arbor, Mich. and Miami, Fla. What’s different about this pilot, however, is the vehicle design that features multiple lockers, and both a touchscreen and audio for instructions. Each locker also has two cup holders to ensure seamless delivery of beverages.

Ford expects to officially deploy its purpose-built autonomous cars in 2021. In its pilot with Dominos, Ford found “customers enjoyed the voice instructions that played over speakers mounted on the outside of the vehicle to explain how to get their pizza out of the self-driving vehicle upon arrival at their house,” Ford EVP and President of Global Markets wrote in Medium post in December.

In a DevOps world, the operations part of the equation needs to be on call to deal with issues as they come up 24/7. We used to use pagers. Today’s solutions like PagerDuty and VictorOps have been created to place this kind of requirement in a modern digital context. Today, Splunk bought VictorOps for $120 million in cash and Splunk securities.

It’s a company that makes a lot of sense for Splunk, a log management tool that has been helping customers deal with oodles of information being generated from back-end systems for many years. With VictorOps, the company gets a system to alert the operations team when something from that muddle of data actually requires their attention.

Splunk has been making moves in recent years to use artificial intelligence and machine learning to help make sense of the data and provide a level of automation required when the sheer volume of data makes it next to impossible for humans to keep up. VictorOps fits within that approach.

“The combination of machine data analytics and artificial intelligence from Splunk with incident management from VictorOps creates a ‘Platform of Engagement’ that will help modern development teams innovate faster and deliver better customer experiences,” Doug Merritt, president and CEO at Splunk said in a statement.

In a blog post announcing the deal, VictorOps founder and CEO Todd Vernon said the two companies’ missions are aligned. “Upon close, VictorOps will join Splunk’s IT Markets group and together will provide on-call technical staff an analytics and AI-driven approach for addressing the incident lifecycle, from monitoring to response to incident management to continuous learning and improvement,” Vernon wrote.

It should come as no surprise that the two companies have been working together even before the acquisition. “Splunk has been an important technical partner of ours for some time, and through our work together, we discovered that we share a common viewpoint that Modern Incident Management is in a period of strategic change where data is king, and insights from that data are key to maintaining a market leading strategy,” Vernon wrote in the blog post.

VictorOps was founded 2012 and has raised over $33 million, according to data on Crunchbase. The most recent investment was a $15 million Series B in December 2016.

The deal is expected to close in Splunk’s fiscal second quarter subject to customary closing conditions, according to a statement from Splunk.

While Uber has changed the way that many think about transportation, it’s also changed the way that many drunk people find their way home at night. Rather than haphazardly hailing a cab or driving home under the influence, Uber provides a relatively safer way to get from point A to B on an indulgent evening.

The company has been curious about its drunk users, applying for a patent with the United States Patent and Trademark Office for a system that would use machine learning to determine the ‘state’ of a passenger.

While the patent limits itself to a dry discussion of ‘user state,’ it seems that what Uber is really interested in is detecting the difference between users of sound mind and users who are under the influence.

CNN first spotted the patent, which describes a method of measuring the user’s behavior on their phone against their usual behavior, using information like location, data input accuracy, data input speed, interface interaction behavior, the angle at which the user is holding their device, or even the speed at which they’re walking.

The patent also describes a system that would notify drivers of the passenger’s ‘state’, theoretically letting them prepare for the adventure ahead.

The patent says that riders in a particularly unusual state may be matched with drivers who have special training or expertise, or may not be provided service at all.

In the vast majority of cases, hailing an Uber is one of the safest ways for a drunk person to get home. On the other hand, Uber has run into issues with drivers who have sexually assaulted passengers. CNN reports that at least 103 Uber drivers in the US have been accused of sexually assaulting or abusing passengers in the last four years, with many of the police reports noting that the passengers were inebriated or had been drinking before getting into the car.

Notifying drivers when a passenger is drunk could save those drivers the headache of hauling around an out-of-control passenger, or prevent drivers from dealing with passengers who puke in their car, which may lead to disputed charges. But the system described in this patent could also allow for predatory behavior by malicious drivers.

There is also the broader implications of Uber knowing when you’re drunk. The company has not been a beacon of trust with regards to user data, having to pay $20,000 for using “God View” to spy on users and reportedly paying to cover up a massive data breach.

Of course, only a fraction of a company’s patents ever make it into the final product. Only time will tell if Uber’s idea to monitor the state of passengers will end up in the app.