Year: 2018

Apple announced a new feature for developers today called Create ML. Because machine learning is a commonly used tool in the developer kit these days, it makes sense that Apple would want to improve the process. But what it has here, essentially local training, doesn’t seem particularly useful.

The most important step in the creation of a machine learning model, like one that detects faces or turns speech into text, is the “training.” That’s when the computer is chugging through reams of data like photos or audio and establishing correlations between the input (a voice) and the desired output (distinct words).

This part of the process is extremely CPU-intensive, though. It generally requires orders of magnitude more computing power (and often storage) than you have sitting on your desk. Think of it like the difference between rendering a 3D game like Overwatch and rendering a Pixar film. You could do it on your laptop, but it would take hours or days for your measly four-core Intel processor and onboard GPU to handle.

That’s why training is usually done “in the cloud,” which is to say, on other people’s computers set up specifically for the task, equipped with banks of GPUs and special AI-inclined hardware.

Create ML is all about doing it on your own PC, though: as briefly shown onstage, you drag your data onto the interface, tweak some stuff and you can have a model ready to go in as little as 20 minutes if you’re on a maxed-out iMac Pro. It also compresses the model so you can more easily include it in apps (a feature already included in Apple ML tools, if I remember correctly). This is mainly possible because it’s applying Apple’s own vision and language models, not building new ones from scratch.

I’m trying to figure out who this is for. It’s almost like they introduced iPhoto for ML training, but as it’s targeted at professional developers, they all already have the equivalent of Photoshop. Cloud-based tools are standard and relatively mature, and like other virtualized processing services they’re quite cheap, as well. Not as cheap as free, naturally, but they’re also almost certainly better.

The quality of a model depends in great part on the nature, arrangement and precision of the “layers” of the training network, and how long it’s been given to cook. Given an hour of real time, a model trained on a MacBook Pro will have, let’s just make up a number, 10 teraflop-hours of training done. If you send that data to the cloud, you could choose to either have those 10 teraflop-hours split between 10 computers and have the same results in six minutes, or after an hour it could have 100 teraflop-hours of training, almost certainly resulting in a better model.

That kind of flexibility is one of the core conveniences of computing as a service, and why so much of the world runs on cloud platforms like AWS and Azure, and soon dedicated AI processing services like Lobe.

My colleagues suggested that people who are dealing with sensitive data in their models, for example medical history or x-rays, wouldn’t want to put that data in the cloud. But I don’t think that single developers with little or no access to cloud training services are the kind that are likely, or even allowed, to have access to privileged data like that. If you have a hard drive loaded with the PET scans of 500,000 people, that seems like a catastrophic failure waiting to happen. So access control is the name of the game, and private data is stored centrally.

Research organizations, hospitals and universities have partnerships with cloud services and perhaps even their own dedicated computing clusters for things like this. After all, they also need to collaborate, be audited and so on. Their requirements are also almost certainly different and more demanding than Apple’s off the shelf stuff.

I guess I sound like I’m ragging for no reason on a tool that some will find useful. But the way Apple framed it made it sound like anyone can just switch over from a major training service to their own laptop easily and get the same results. That’s just not true. Even for prototyping and rapid turnaround work it doesn’t seem likely that a locally trained model will often be an option. Perhaps as the platform diversifies developers will find ways to make it useful, but for now it feels like a feature without a purpose.

We already knew that veteran venture capitalist Fred Destin had teamed up with podcaster-turned-VC Harry Stebbings to raise a fund of their own, but now more details have emerged, including that the new VC firm has reportedly achieved its first closing.

According to my sources, Stride.VC — as the VC is to be called — has already closed £40 million, with a final target of £50 million or more. I’m told that LPs include a number of notable U.K. founders, although I’ve yet to peg who, along with the usual mix of institutional VC investors and family offices.

One name that has surfaced, however (via a Companies House regulatory filing) is Delin Capital, the investment vehicle of Russian-born entrepreneur Igor Linshits. He previously backed Mail.ru alongside Yuri Milner of DST fame, amongst many other investments spanning petrochemical, commodities trading, and tech. According to Wikipedia, he immigrated to the U.K. in 2009, where he became a British citizen and founded Delin Capital.

Delin’s core businesses are DCAM, one of Europe’s leading e-commerce logistics real estate players, and Delin Ventures, which supports emerging venture fund managers and makes direct investments in early-stage companies.

People with knowledge of Stride.VC’s strategy and investment remit say the new firm is targeting seed stage startups with a strong focus on the U.K., where both Destin and Stebbings are based. It will remain “sector agnostic,” however, and is looking to partner with “contrarian entrepreneurs” who are attempting to reshape various industries.

Destin has always maintained that at the earliest of stages it is less about a company’s strategy — which at seed is based on limited data and clearly subject to change — and more about a team’s conviction and determination. It is perhaps why a number of VCs and founders I talk to have always thought he was an odd fit at Accel in London, where he was most recently a Partner. Accel typically doesn’t invest in seed and is known to be extremely data-driven.

However, although it wouldn’t normally come as a surprise to see a VC with Destin’s experience and track record raise a fund of his own — having previously backed successful companies such as Zoopla, Secret Escapes, Carwow, Deliveroo, DailyMotion, Integral Ad Science, and Pillpack — it was reported by Bloomberg last July that Stride.VC’s fund-raising efforts were facing additional scrutiny after an accusation of inappropriate behaviour by Destin towards a female founder at a conference in 2013.

In a subsequent report in Business Insider, Destin issued a statement saying that he had “on occasion acted without awareness at parties and been flirty” and that if he had “offended anyone or made anyone feel uncomfortable in any way, I am truly sorry”. He also told BI that he had never used his position as a VC inappropriately.

Meanwhile, although only 21 years old, Stebbings has already packed a lot in for such a short career. He is best known as the founder and host of the popular “The Twenty Minute VC” podcast, which he still publishes. He was also most recently an Entrepreneur-in-Residence at Atomico, the VC firm founded by Skype’s Niklas Zennström, and has no doubt built up an impressive network in the U.K. and across the pond.

As I previously reported, the two met when Destin was interviewed by Stebbings on one of the earlier episodes of “The Twenty Minute VC” and after the show had finished being recorded, the two continued to chat. This led to Destin agreeing to be Stebbings’ VC mentor. They have since become close friends, including getting to know each other and their respective families outside of work, and this eventually resulted in the idea of doing a fund together.

Lastly, Stride.VC may have already written its first cheque, backing a yet-to-launch London fintech startup. Who that is, I haven’t been able to confirm, although if my information is correct it broadly plays in the home financing space.

The weekend provided no rest to news-wary reporters, with major announcements coming from Xiaomi, SoftBank, and the Chinese government the past few days that will continue to change the global tech landscape.

Xiaomi Chinese Depository Receipts

One of the most important yet underreported stories of 2018 has been the development of Chinese Depository Receipts (known as CDRs). I wrote a comprehensive primer on the investment mechanism a few weeks ago, but the summary is that CDRs will give mainland Chinese investors access to overseas-listed stocks that setup the right custodian accounts. Due to domestic capital controls and relatively weak stock exchange rules in China, many Chinese tech giants are listed on overseas stock exchanges in New York and Hong Kong.

Beijing-based Xiaomi, which produces a line of phones and offers mobile software services, is launching one of most anticipated IPOs of the year, with a valuation expected to top tens of billions of dollars. In its official filing, the company targeted a fundraise of $10 billion. While Xiaomi is a sterling example of the potential success of Chinese entrepreneurs, local retail buyers would likely have had no access to buy the stock, which will be listed in Hong Kong.

Fiona Liu and Julie Zhu at Reuters are now reporting that Xiaomi could be one of the first companies to take advantage of the new CDR mechanism, potentially reserving 30% of its new issue for CDR buyers. That would be about $3 billion if the assumptions of the fundraise play out.

If the CDR mechanism works as expected, Chinese companies and potentially many others could suddenly tap a vast new pool of capital, either in the IPO process or more generally. That could push valuations for many of these issues higher than they might otherwise go, since Chinese mainland investors have limited ability to invest in overseas stocks due to capital controls. A valuation that might cause a New York-based money manager to flee might be more than palatable to a Chinese investor.

While Chinese tech giants are likely to quickly offer CDR options to take advantage of their local brand power and increase upward pressure on their stock prices, the bigger question in my mind is how long it will take overseas companies to offer similar measures and get access to this capital market. While companies like Facebook and Google are blocked or mostly blocked from mainland China, other companies like Apple have strong brand presence in the country, and could theoretically offer a CDR as it strives for a $1 trillion valuation. There are huge legal and policy roadblocks to overcome of course, but such a debut would be a major milestone in China’s financial development.

SoftBank executive changes

Japan’s Softbank Group, which owns a set of major tech and finance companies, announced a new group of senior execs late on Friday that sets up something of a leadership contest to succeed the group’s founder, Masayoshi Son.

Several years ago, Son had indicated that Nikesh Arora, who had spent a decade at Google and eventually rose to be the company’s chief business officer, would succeed him. Arora became president and chief operating officer of SoftBank, but would last less than two years before heading out from the role. As a sort of coda to that chapter, we learned late last week that Arora has joined Palo Alto Networks as its CEO.

Now, SoftBank has announced that three people will take leadership roles in the company, and all three will join its board of directors. Rajeev Misra, who runs the $100 billion SoftBank Vision Fund, will become an executive vice president (EVP) while maintaining his duties to the fund.

Katsunori Sago, who until recently was the chief investment officer of Japan Post, Japan’s largest savings bank with a $1.9 trillion portfolio, will join SoftBank as an EVP and chief strategy officer. Sago had been rumored to be considering leaving Japan Post just a few weeks ago. Finally, former Sprint CEO Marcelo Claure was named an EVP and SoftBank’s new chief operating officer. Claure was elevated to executive chairman of Sprint last month, while stepping down as CEO.

Each of the three are positioned around the key tentpoles of SoftBank. SoftBank’s core business remains telecom, which Claure will presumably spend signifiant time on. The group’s financial interests, which includes a 100% stake in Fortress Investment Group, will likely get significant attention from Sago. And the SoftBank Vision Fund, which has received splashy headlines with its massive investments in global unicorn startups, is obviously a key future pillar of the company, giving Misra a powerful perch in the group.

Masayoshi Son is 60 years old today. While retirement seems to be the least likely course of action for the energetic entrepreneur, clearly he is starting to think through succession in a more robust way than he did before with Arora. That should make SoftBank investors far more content, and also provide a little bit of a competitive dynamic at the top of the organization to drive the group’s results in the years to come.

China initiates investigation into Samsung and other chip companies

The chip wars between China and the rest of the world continue to heat up. Now, it looks like Samsung, the world’s largest chipmaker, is in the crosshairs of Beijing according to a Wall Street Journal report by Yoko Kubota. In addition to Samsung, Micron and SK Hynix were also ensnared in the investigation.

China has made building a strong indigenous chip industry a core pillar of its economic development strategy. In addition to a comprehensive plan known as Made in China 2025, the country has also been attempting to put together the world’s largest semiconductor venture capital investment fund, which in aggregate could have tens of billions of dollars in capital at its disposal.

The investigations against the Samsung and the two chipmakers comes at the same time that China has also once again delayed the close of Qualcomm’s acquisition of NXP Semiconductors. Qualcomm has been waiting for months to get Beijing’s approval on that deal, which would provide the company a fresh source of revenue and a renewed product mix in strategic areas like automotive.

The use of economic investigations to help and hurt Chinese companies and their competitors is starting to become a mainstay. The United States used the negative conclusions of its investigation into Chinese telecommunications company ZTE in order to cut off its export licenses, practically killing the company. While the U.S. has now started to walk back that threat by floating the option of a large fine, it is clear that these sorts of tit-for-tat investigations are going to continue into the future.

At Disrupt SF (September 5-7), TechCrunch is running two big stages and doubling the amount of programming compared to past years. The goal is to cover more of the ever-expanding startup ecosystem, including those amazing founders aiming to get off planet earth and tap the vast domain of space (Yes, the final frontier!).

Space startups will also have a dedicated section of Startup Alley. (Founder tip: TechCrunch is offering five free exhibition spots in the space section of Startup Alley as part of our Top Picks program. Apply here — applications are open until June 29. Or lock in your spot in Startup Alley spot now.)

We have enlisted great speakers to talk space, and we’re especially excited to announce Alan Stern, co-author of the recently released “Chasing New Horizons: Inside the Epic First Mission to Pluto,” and also an engineer and planetary scientist, who has held executive roles at NASA and now leads New Horizons, NASA’s mission to the Pluto system and the Kuiper Belt. He has served as a consultant to private space exploration projects, including Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin and Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic, and he is a co-founder of World View Enterprises, which has raised $42 million to provide an accessible, affordable way to access nearspace with high-altitude balloons.

In addition to a fireside chat onstage, Stern will participate in a separate Q&A session and sign copies of his new book.

We’re also very pleased to announce three speakers who are building the ecosystem of companies and technologies to reach and exploit the earth’s orbit and beyond, a play investors are betting will become big business in the years ahead.

Natalya Bailey, co-founder and CEO of Accion Systems, a startup spun out of MIT’s Space Propulsion Laboratory, has developed an ion propulsion system that is the size of a postage stamp and is designed to power small satellites. The company has raised a total of $12.5 million in 2016 in an A round led by Shasta Ventures. Bailey earned her PhD in AeroAstro at MIT.

Peter Beck is CEO and founder of Rocket Lab, which is a New Zealand-based startup that delivers “complete rocket systems and technologies for fast and low-cost payload deployment.” Beck’s passion for rockets goes back to his youth, when he built a rocket to power his bicycle, a feat he somehow survived. In 2009, Beck lead the development and launch of Atea-1, the first rocket to reach space from the Southern Hemisphere. Rocket Lab has raised $75 million in rounds led by Data Collective and Bessemer Venture Partners, and its first commercial satellite launch is slated for this summer.

Will Marshall is co-founder and CEO of Planet, a company  that “builds small satellites and delivers information about the changing planet.” Marshall was a scientist at NASA/USRA where he was deputy systems engineer on lunar orbiter mission “LADEE,”  and received his PhD in Physics from the University of Oxford. Planet has raised more than $183 million in rounds led by DFJ, International Finance Corporation and Data Collective.

You’ll also be able to continue the conversation with these panelists as they will be taking attendee questions on our intimate Q&A Stage after their Main Stage panel discussion.

You don’t want to miss all this, as well as Disrupt SF’s many other features, including 14 tracks of content across four stages, ranging from AI to new retail to robots, CrunchMatch, Startup Battlefield and much more. Get your early-bird tickets today.

Today at Apple’s World Wide Developer Conference, Craig Federighi, SVP, Software Engineering, announced Apple is working to bring the best of the iPhone to the Mac. But this will not happen overnight, Federighi basically said. This is a multi-year project, he stressed, adding the first iOS apps Apple will bring to macOS will be made by Apple.

“There are millions of iOS apps out there, and some of them would be great on the Mac,” Federighi said.

It’s important to note that Apple is not merging the two operating systems. In fact Federighi started out this announcement by stating loud and clear that they will continue to be separate products.

Developers will have access to this feature in 2019 and it’s clear even from this distance that bringing the best of iOS to macOS could revive the app ecosystem over the coming years.

Apple is rolling out a redesign of the Mac App Store to bring it more in line with some of the experiences it’s focused on with the iOS App Store, which the company showed at its annual developer conference this year.

Apple is following-up on a redesign of the App Store on the iPhone, which changed the approach a little bit to highlight Apps with some editorial components and stories. The company says it is bringing over a lot of features and learnings from the iOS App Store, including whether an app was named editor’s choice or the app’s ranking. All this includes a new API to make it easier to leave reviews for the apps to try to spin up that feedback loop that helps surface the most popular or useful apps.

The UI is getting a complete redesign, with a new discovery tab to find editorial content around Mac apps, including stories and collections. You’ll also be able to see what’s popular in the top charts. Apps are bucketed together in some new tabs like work and developers. All this helps Apple figure out where to bucket all these apps to tailor to what people are looking for when they enter the App Store — whether that’s just generally clicking around or looking for new developer tools

Discovery has always been a critical problem for developers, and as the iOS App Store was flooded with millions of apps, it can become more and more difficult to stand out. Apple has iterated a lot of the iOS App Store, and it makes enough sense that it’s trying to port the parts of that experience that work over to the Mac App Store it launched a few years ago. It also offers Apple a playground to test new ideas that it could turn around and apply to to the iOS App Store.

While the Mac occupies a small slice of the company’s actual business, shipping a few million units a quarter, it still represents an important component of its user base. The Mac helps keep users locked into Apple’s ecosystem which branches beyond just phones and laptops, creating a continuous tissue between all those devices and keeping them on the Apple refresh cycle. Apple said it’s written more than 4,000 stories for the new Today tab for the iOS App Store.

Google today announced that the new version of Gmail will launch into general availability and become available to all G Suite users next month. The exact date remains up in the air but my guess is that it’ll be sooner than later.

The new Gmail offers features like message snoozing, attachment previews, a sidebar for both Google apps like Calendar and third-party services like Trello, offline support, confidential messages that self-destruct after a set time, and more. It’s also the only edition of Gmail that currently allows you to try out Smart Compose, which tries to complete your sentences for you.

Here is what the rollout will look like for G Suite users. Google didn’t detail what the plan for regular users will look like, but if you’re not a G Suite user, you can already try the new Gmail today anyway and chances are stragglers will also get switched over to the new version at a similar pace as G Suite users.

Starting in July, G Suite admins will be able to immediately transition all of their users to the new Gmail, but users can still opt out for another twelve weeks. After that time is up, all G Suite users will move to the new Gmail experience.

Admins can also give users the option to try the new Gmail at their own pace or — and this is the default setting — they can just wait another four weeks and then Google will automatically give users the option to opt in.

Eight weeks after general availability, so sometime in September, all users will be migrated automatically but can still opt out for another four weeks.

That all sounds a bit more complicated than necessary, but the main gist here is: chances are you’ll get access to the new Gmail next month and if you hate it, you can still opt out for a bit longer. Then, if you still hate it, you are out of luck because come October, you will be using the new Gmail no matter what.

Apple isn’t done with macOS just yet. The company presented the next version of macOS at the WWDC developer conference. With macOS Mojave, Apple is leaving the mountain metaphors behind.

“Today we’re excited to take Mac a huge leap forward,” Apple CEO Tim Cook said.

Apple’s senior vice president of Software Engineering Craig Federighi started with dark mode. With a single setting, you can invert the colors of everything. Even the background of the Finder, Calendar or Photos is black, not just the Dock or menubar. Apple had to redo all the buttons and color schemed across the operating system. If you find white documents too aggressive, dark mode is for you.

With the next version of macOS, the wallpaper and desktop will adapt depending on the time of they day, from morning to afternoon and night. On the desktop, macOS can automatically stack all your documents in the Desktop folder by format.

In the Finder, there’s a new Gallery view. It works a bit like the old Cover Flow feature, but with a flat design and metadata. It can be quite useful for a folder of photos for instance. In the metadata column, there are customizable actions using Automator. You can create a PDF, add a watermark, etc.

Quick Look is also getting an upgrade with iOS-like markup. You can draw on a photo, trim a video and more from a Quick Look window. In the Screenshot tool, you can now record quick videos.

Apple is expanding continuity between your Mac and iPhone. For instance, in Keynote, you can right click and add a photo using your iPhone. It’ll launch the camera app on your iPhone.

Apple News is coming to macOS. In case a web browser is not enough, you’ll now have a dedicated app with your selections, your sites and your recommendations. The Stocks app is also coming to the Mac. Voice Memos is coming to the Mac for quick audio recording as well.

And finally, Home will be available on the Mac to command your home with your voice, control your security cameras, trigger your connected lights and more.

Apple is adding new privacy protections. In addition to location data and address book access, the company is adding camera, microphone, message history, backups and Safari data privacy popups. In Safari, the browser is going to block Facebook like buttons and prevent those widgets from loading third-party Javascripts. You’ll need to grant explicit access. Safari will also try to prevent fingerprinting by making you look like a Mac with the default plugins, the default fonts, the default everything.

As expected, the Mac App Store is getting an update. It’s true that iOS got all the love on this front. Last year, Apple redesigned the App Store on iOS, but the Mac App Store stood still. It’s been completely redesigned with a left sidebar, a user interface that looks more like the iOS App Store. There will be editorialized content, video previews and new categories.

Apple is working on a new tool for data scientists. With Create ML, you can train a model without being a machine learning expert. It lets you manage a test set and use your local machine for small projects.

“We would like to give you a sneak peek of a multi-year projet,” Federighi said. Apple is basically going to let you port iOS apps that use UIKit on the Mac. This way, iOS developers will be able to port their apps much more quickly. It doesn’t mean that it’ll look like an iOS app. The new Apple News, Stocks, Home and Voice Memos use this macOS version of UIKit. Big buttons have been replaced with macOS-like menus with very little code changes.

Developers won’t be able to use UIKit for macOS apps just yet, but it’s clear that it could revive the app ecosystem over the coming years.

Apple TV is adding a new feature that will make it easier for users to sign on to their “TV Everywhere” applications – you know, the ones that require you authenticate with your cable or satellite TV provider in order to watch the channel’s content. Called “Zero Sign On,” the feature is an extension to the previously introduced Single Sign On option. SSO allows users to enter their cable provider TV credentials one time, then be automatically sign into all supported apps. Zero Sign On, on the other hand, doesn’t require you enter any info at all – instead, all that’s required is that you’re connected to the provider’s Wi-Fi network in your home.

The feature is not broadly available right now, unfortunately.

It will first roll out to Charter Spectrum customers, which was the latest company to join the list of pay TV providers supporting SSO.

However, that provider won’t arrive on Apple TV until sometime later this year, Apple said. But it will bring the option to Charter Spectrum’s 50 million subscribers.

By the time it launches, Apple may have other TV providers signed up as well, as it indicated that other providers would arrive in the future.

The addition could make Apple TV a better streaming player for those who don’t want to end their cable or satellite TV subscription, but would rather use Apple TV instead of a cable box. That’s not exactly a way to woo cord cutters, but it could be a selling feature for those who just want a more modern TV experience in general by using a streaming player with access to apps, and the option to talk to Siri to find things to watch.

Apple TV today supports over 100 video channels, the company said, so there are plenty of things to watch.

Zero Sign On was one of several new Apple TV features introduced this morning at Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference. But even though the Apple TV app was mentioned, no word of Apple’s new TV streaming service was mentioned during this part of the presentation.

Apple TV, still definitely not a hobby, has some new features being added as it grows. Tim Cook mentioned there are 50 percent more users now than there were last year, and no doubt they’ll be happy with the addition of Dolby Atmos audio and some nice sign-on streamlining.

Apple TV is now the only streaming player to be both Dolby Atmos and Vision certified. Assuming you’ve got a 4K HDR-capable TV, it could be nice to have, as iTunes boasts the biggest selection of content for those — but because hardly anyone does, it’s more of an aspirational feature at present.

There are more than 100 video channels now after the addition of several live news and sports ones. In France, Apple TV will be the exclusive provider of Canal+, and in Switzerland, Apple has partnered with Salt for a similar exclusive. And Charter Spectrum will also be coming to Apple TV later this year, so around 50 million people will be able to watch their normal cable content through the device. Finally!

Helpfully, many of these apps won’t require a separate log-in, including Charter Spectrum — as any smart TV user or cable cutter knows, managing these logons can be incredibly annoying. So a single sign-on (or zero sign-on, in some cases) will be a boon.

It is unclear what this means for those of us who share passwords between friends and family. Possibly not good.

If you’re a TV background video aficionado, you’ll also be interested in the new orbital video of Earth that can be displayed while nothing else is going on. It’s exclusive to Apple.