Year: 2018

Ride-sharing companies have long touted the cost benefits of their platforms. Well, depending on the city, it can be cheaper on a weekly basis to take an UberX or UberPOOL than it is to own a personal car, according to Kleiner Perkins Caufield Byers partner Mary Meeker’s 2018 annual internet trends report.

In four of the five largest cities in the U.S., it is indeed cheaper to rely on Uber than it is to own a car. Meeker’s analysis took into account cost of gas, car insurance, maintenance and parking.

So, if you live in New York City, Chicago, Washington, D.C. or Los Angeles, it’s cheaper to take an Uber. But that’s not the case in Dallas, where the average weekly cost of car ownership is $65 compared to the average weekly Uber cost of $181.

Meeker’s report also looked at the rise of on-demand workers in the U.S. Last year, there were 5.4 million on-demand workers in the country. This year, there are an estimated 6.8 million people working in the on-demand economy.

“These are big numbers,” Meeker said onstage, noting how these types of jobs are helping to supplement income for people, provide greater flexibility and improve work-life balance.

You can check out the full deck below.

In a policy change set for next month, the Trump administration is moving to shorten visas for Chinese students in fields like tech and engineering. While most visas are issued for the longest possible length of time under law, the new policy will allow U.S. officials to put a one-year cap on visas for Chinese graduate students who are “studying in fields like robotics, aviation and high-tech manufacturing,” according to the Associated Press.

A State Department official told The Hill that “Although the large majority of visas issued to Chinese nationals are issued for the maximum validity, consular officers may limit the validity of visas on a case-by-case basis” under the new rules.

Beyond the student limits, U.S. consulates and embassies reportedly received instructions that any Chinese citizen applying for a visa will need to secure additional special permission form the U.S. if they work in research or management for any company the U.S. Commerce Department lists as an entity “requiring higher scrutiny.”

The new visa policy shifts come as Trump is knee-deep in a controversial new tariff plan targeting Chinese trade and is intended to protect against the theft of U.S. intellectual property, or so the reasoning goes.

The visa change was signaled in the National Security Strategy report that the Trump administration issued in December. That document explains the rationale clearly:

The United States will review visa procedures to reduce economic theft by non-traditional intelligence collectors. We will consider restrictions on foreign STEM students from designated countries to ensure that intellectual property is not transferred to our competitors, while acknowledging the importance of recruiting the most advanced technical workforce to the United States.

The State Department noted these changes will go into effect starting on June 11.

It sometimes reads like a terrible love story, the relationship between Consumer Reports and electric car company Tesla . Consumer Reports withholds its affection, Tesla addresses its errant ways and not long afterward, the two come happily together until the next car review.

We saw this happen in late 2015, when Consumer Reports assigned Tesla’s Model S a “worse-than-average” rating in an annual report about the predicted reliability of new vehicles, knocking down the company’s share price by more than 10 percent in one day. Later, the car was re-instated by Consumer Reports as a top-rated ultra-luxury sedan after consumers said its reliability had improved, and it updated its software to include automatic emergency braking at highway speeds.

Something similar happened today. As you may have seen, Consumer Reports last week withheld its recommendation to buy Tesla’s more compact luxury car, the Model 3, after its testers “found flaws—big flaws—such as long stopping distances in our emergency braking test and difficult-to-use controls.”

Specifically, the outlet reported, the car’s stopping distance of 152 feet from 60 miles per hour was “far worse than any contemporary car” it has tested and “about seven feet longer than the stopping distance of a Ford F-150 full-sized pickup,” which weighs about 7,000 pounds. (The Model 3 weighs roughly half that amount.)

Tesla told Consumer Reports that its own testing had found stopping distances from 60 mph to 0 mph were on average 133 feet. Still, Tesla CEO Elon Musk also jumped on the phone with Consumer Reports’s head of auto testing to share information that Tesla had discovered about its braking system and to say the carmaker had an over-the-air software update in the works to address it.

The update has since been completed and shipped, and now Consumer Reports is both confirming that Tesla managed to improve the car’s braking distance by 20 feet and it says it’s giving the Model 3 its highly sought-after recommendation — even while it hopes Tesla will also do more to improve the car’s center-mounted touch controls, which its testers worry are difficult to use while driving.

It’s easy to characterize the whole thing as some sort of routine dance between reviewer and reviewee, but it’s a much bigger deal than that insists Consumer Reports, which has been reviewing products for 82 years and remains a powerful force, even while its influence has waned somewhat in the era of anonymous online reviews.

Indeed, the outlet notes in its newest review of the car that, until now, remote improvement to a car’s basic functionality on such a meaningful scale as Tesla just pulled off was “unheard of.”

That kind of observation clearly pleases Musk, who launched a tirade against the media last week but today is praising Consumer Reports for its “high quality critical feedback.” He also says that more improvements are coming.

Really appreciate the high quality critical feedback from @ConsumerReports. Road noise & ride comfort already addressed too. UI improvements coming via remote software update later this month. https://t.co/ZMLPJxmPlM

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) May 30, 2018

In the crowded security camera category Wyze’s products aren’t so much amazing as they are amazingly cheap. Take last year’s simply named Wyze Cam. There was nothing about the product that set it apart from the likes of Nest or Canary or the Netgear Arlo — beyond, of course, that crazy $20 price tag.

Announced this week, the Wyze Cam Pan is 50-percent more expensive than its predecessor, bringing the cost up to a whopping $30. With that bank breaking price, however, you get the titular panning feature, which gives you a 360-degree remote view of a room, on-top of the built-in 120-degree fish eye. It’s able to scan a full circle in around three-seconds, according to Wyze.

Panning is accomplished through the app with a swipe of the screen. The app also features motion tracking, an improvement over the first generation device, panning the camera as it spots moving objects.

The camera shoots 1080p video at 15 fps and can do up to 8x digital zoom. There’s also two-way audio and night vision — both relatively standard features on security cameras these days, but everything kind of feels like a bonus when the device runs $30. That price also includes up to 14 days of free video storage on AWS, a nice addition that a number of significantly more expensive competitors no longer offer.

Again, this isn’t world-setting-on-fire stuff here, but those who have been balking at pricier competitors don’t have a lot to lose here.

Want to understand all the most important tech stats and trends? Legendary venture capitalist Mary Meeker has just released the 2018 version of her famous Internet Trends report. It covers everything from mobile to commerce to the competition between tech giants. Check out the full report below, and we’ll add some highlights soon. Then come back for our slide-by-slide analysis of the most important parts of the 294 page report.

• As of 2018, half the world population, or about 3.6 billion people, will be on the internet. That thanks in large part to cheaper Android phones and Wifi becoming more available, though individual services will have a tougher time adding new users as the web hits saturation.
• While smartphone shipments are flat and internet user growth is slowing, U.S. adults are spending more time online thanks to mobile, clocking 5.9 hours per day in 2017 versus 5.6 hours in 2016.
• Interest in cryptocurrency is exploding as Coinbase’s user count has nearly quadrupled since January 2017
• Messaging apps and Twitch’s videogame streaming service are still steadily growing their user counts and streaming hours as communication takes new forms online.
• Voice technology is at an inflection point due to speech recognition hitting 95% accuracy and the sales explosion for Amazon Echo which went from over 10 million to over 30 million owners in 2017.
• Daily usage gains for services like Facebook are tightly coupled with revenue growth, showing how profitable it is to become a regular habit.
• We’re at an all-time high for public and private investment in technology, while the top 6 public R&D + capex spenders are all technology companies.

More analysis to come

At Google I/O earlier this month, the company announced Cloud Anchors, a tool that shares 3D data captured by a user’s smartphone with the cloud and can match that data up with another user to create a shared AR experience where each person’s phone is seeing the same things in the same places.

Today, Google is rolling out Cloud Anchor functionality to its AR drawing app called Just a Line which it released a couple months ago. Just a Line is hardly a breakout hit for Google, but the simplistic app that lets users paint the 3D world with a white line offers a nice testbed for early AR functionality that’s just as experimental.

What will likely differentiate Google’s offering from whatever Apple ends up shipping is that the Cloud Anchors is cross-platform. The Just a Line app is available on both Android and iOS, and with today’s update users on both platforms will be able to collaborate and view items in a shared space.

What’s generally important about multiplayer AR experiences is making the process simple enough for users to sync their spatial map with another user so that they see the same digital objects in the same physical locations. What Google has built seems a bit cumbersome with each user needing to stand next to each other to pair their environments. It also seems that the functionality is limited to two people at the moment.

Just a Line isn’t the most high stakes place for Google to be dropping this feature, so there is clearly room for the company to keep updating what they’ve got as they see what early usage looks like.

There’s been an explosion of medical startups centering their tools around machine learning to help doctors with predictive tools — and now Netflix’s former chief product officer Neil Hunt wants to enter the fray with one that hopes to get the right information from patients themselves.

That’s the hope for Curai, a machine learning-driven startup that helps patients deliver the right information to doctors to help medical professionals figure out the best diagnosis — and reduce the overhead for doctors such that they can work with more patients without the grunt work. Patients can send photos of rashes, describe their symptoms, or MRI results and help navigate those results to come to the best conclusion with doctors and have more readily available access. And the hope is that Curai will also develop into a system that can detect potential problems from symptoms that a patient might not even realize are relevant.

“We want to build a patient-facing system to commoditize healthcare knowledge, that helps patients and their doctors know and understand the decisions they ought to make, whether those are simple questions about health, diagnostic or treatment, in lots of different ways,” Hunt said. “[It’s based on] idea that you let computers do what computers are good at, and that’s data and knowledge and reasoning and logic. You let doctors do the things that humans are good at: coaching, intuition, empathy, and helping patients make decisions.”

Hunt was previously the chief product officer at Netflix. Curai’s other cofounders include Xavier Amatriain, the former VP of engineering at Quora, and Neal Khosla, a previous startup founder with a history at Stanford and Google. The company said it has raised around $10.7 million in a round that includes General Catalyst, Khosla Ventures and a variety of other angels.

In a lot of ways, Curai — and other startups focusing on machine learning to empower doctors to make better decisions — is a response to people just searching around the Web and getting answers from Doctor Google. That, in the end, generally ends up with what can be frightening results that are probably out of line with reality, Hunt said. The idea is that if patients can give a more robust history and set of symptoms, Curai can help doctors sift out what are some of the real underlying causes.

It then takes all that and packages it together in a sensible way for doctors, who will work with those patients to figure out the best treatment options. It’s supposed to be a way to get around a doctor having to pull up a medical history, which might contain either too much information — or just a record so large that they have to invest a lot of time trying to sift through everything. As the company is able to collect more data (like other startups, Hunt said that’s locked down and following typically strict regulations around healthcare), those algorithms improve over time, though getting enough quality data is part of the critical process of building a competitive moat in an otherwise increasingly competitive space.

“In some ways, the challenge with healthcare on the web is, you tend to discover you have cancer or diabetes, and they have nothing to do with what you came in for,” Hunt said. “If you imagine a system that can engage with the patient and [surface] the real facts and take those into consideration, like the history that a patient might not realize, it can point you to relevant information that’s something a bit more balanced.”

But getting that information may be a bit of a tall order, especially for more sensitive cases where patients might not want to disclose information. I’ve actually asked about this before of David Ebersman, who runs a startup called Lyra Health focusing on mental health, and he said the challenge is giving patients the confidence that they’re navigating a safer space to operate — which might help them be even more willing to work with a tool rather than expose some of those deeper problems face-to-face with someone. (Lyra Health recently announced it raised $45 million.)

“There’s a good degree of evidence that suggests an impersonal consumer facing product might be easier to talk to with things like drinking or sexual partners or thing that you might be embarrassed about, or that you might feel some difficulty talking to your doctor,” Hunt said. “Certainly in some of the work we’ve done so far, there’s a much bigger lean toward the embarrassing to talk about situations than you would expect if you were a practicing physician. I would suspect people are more ready and talk sooner to an impersonal interface than they would talk to a human doctor.”

There are certainly a lot of startups looking to take some of the pressure off doctors when it comes to more menial tasks — ones that could easily be accomplished by computers, but haven’t quite been tackled in medical offices — that come in a lot of different flavors. There are tools like Lyra Health, or a sort of “Alexa for doctors” from startups like Suki, which has also raised $20 million. All of this is designed to help take some of the workload of doctors and assist in building a better pattern-matching system, which gives them more time to work with patients.

Oculus wants VR to bring its users into magical worlds dreamed up by game developers, but the company also needs people to see the headset as a way to access the far corners of the real world alongside others.

The Oculus Venues app is launching today for the company’s standalone Go headset as well as the Gear VR. Venues marks a central hub for live events on the service, putting users in a shared social space to watch sporting events, concerts and shows. Facebook isn’t setting up cameras at these events, rather, they’re working with partners including NextVR, AEG, the MLB and Lionsgate to put on these events.

The app was announced earlier this month at Facebook’s F8 developer conference, but Venues wasn’t quite ready for primetime. Today, Oculus is sharing the first chunk of events all scheduled for the summer and it seems pretty robust.

Events include concerts with artists like Chromeo, movie screenings of films like Reservoir Dogs, MLB games and soccer matches as well as plenty of comedy shows. For the most part, events seem spaced out every couple days or so, but this is still a lot of VR content for headset owners coming from the service’s first few partners.

The first event is a Vance Joy concert tonight at 7:30 PST. Here’s a full list below, but it’s tiny so break out the spectacles.

Thanks to Google’s AR tech, you’ll soon be able to throw a skeleton onto your kitchen table and take a guided tour of the bones.

Google’s is bringing AR tech to its Expeditions app with a new update going live today. Last year, the company introduced its Google Expeditions AR Pioneer Program which brought the app into classrooms across the country, with this launch the functionality is available to all.

Expeditions will have more than 100 AR tours in addition to the 800 VR tours already available. Examples include experiences that let users explore Leonardo Da Vinci’s inventions and ones that let you interact with the human skeletal system.

You’ll need an ARCore or ARKit compatible phone in order to take advantage of the feature. A compatible AR/VR educator bundle is also now available from Best Buy.

Project Fi, Google’s wireless service, is getting support for a number of new phones today. Until now, if you wanted to switch to Fi, the only officially supported phones were Google’s own Pixel and Pixel 2 phones, the Nexus 5X and 6P, as well as the Moto X4 and its Android One variant. Today, Google is adding the Moto G6, as well as LG’s G7 ThinQ and V35 ThinQ phones to this list.

Since Google’s network is a bit different from its competitors, thanks to Fi’s ability to switch between the networks of T-Mobile, Sprint and U.S. Cellular to provide users access to the strongest signal in a given area, the company has always taken a very strict approach as to which phones it officially supported.

If you want to make the switch to Fi, which also recently introduced its own take on its competitors’ flat-rate plans, then the 32GB version of the 5.7-inch Moto G6 is now available for $199 (discounted from $249). The two LG phones will be coming to Fi next month for their standard retail prices of $899 for the V35 and $749 for the G7. While Google isn’t offering any major outright discount for the LG phones, those who pre-order one will get a $50 Fi credit.

It’s worth noting that the V35, LG’s new a 6-inch flagship phone, only launched today and is essentially a G7 with more RAM, a different display and larger battery. The phone was originally rumored to be an AT&T exclusive, but I guess we can put that idea to rest now.

Both the G7 and Moto G6 have generally received favorable reviews. Google also currently offers the Moto X4 for a heavily discounted $249, but that still makes the G6 the most affordable option for Fi. This may create a bit of confusion for potential users, though, as those are quite similar and it’s hard to figure out which one to pick (just like choosing between the G7 and V35). At the same time, though, it’s nice to see Google add more options for its Project Fi customers.