Year: 2018

The folks at Spectrum have found a truly cool project for quadcopter pilots. It’s a spinning sensor that will stop the rotors if your finger gets too close to the blades, thereby preventing you – or your kids – from getting cut.

Researchers at the University of Queensland in Brisbane, Australia created so-called Safety Rotor to help prevent accidents with more powerful quadrotor drones. The system constantly senses for a “finger” – in this case a hot dog – and then slams the rotor to a stop within 0.077 seconds. A cage around the propellers spins more slowly than the propellers and is constantly on the lookout for biological material approaching the blades.

The measured latency [of the Safety Rotor’s braking response] was 0.0118 seconds from the triggering event to start of rotor deceleration. The rotor required a further 0.0474 s to come to a complete stop. Ninety percent of the rotational kinetic energy of the rotor (as computed from angular velocity) was dissipated within 0.0216 s of triggering, and 99 percent of the rotational kinetic energy of the rotor was dissipated within 0.032 s.

The safety functionality of the safety system was tested on the bench using a processed meat “finger” proxy to trigger the hoop, and also applied to an open rotor (without hoop) for comparison. The rotor was spun at hover speed (1100 rads−1) and the finger proxy was introduced into the hoop at 0.36 ms−1 … The rotor and finger motion were captured using a shutter speed of 480 Hz. The rotor came to a stop within 0.077 s, with only light marks on the finger proxy from the impact of the hoop. The rotor was completely stopped by the time the finger reached the rotor plane. In contrast, the tip of the finger proxy introduced to an open rotor was completely destroyed.

The kit adds $20 and about 22 grams to the drone so it’s not particularly expensive or difficult to implement. It could be, as they note, a real lifesaver if you tend to put your juicy, blood-filled digits into copter blades.

Pandora just launched a family version of its Premium service. For $14.99 a month, up to six users can access Premium features (the individual version costs $9.99 a month). The new subscription option was added with little fanfare and spotted earlier today by Android Police.

This better positions Pandora to compete with Spotify Premium and Apple Music, at least from a pricing perspective. Both of those services also offer family plans covering up to six people for $14.99 a month. An annual subscription to Pandora’s Premium Family is also available for $164.98 a year.

In addition to other Premium features, Premium Family includes a personalized playlist called Our Soundtrack that selects a mix of songs based on every family member’s listening habits. Pandora just finished rolling out personalized playlists last week, which it announced earlier this year in a bid to take on one of Spotify’s most popular features.

Other Premium features include on-demand listening, playlist creation, downloads for offline listening, unlimited skips and replays, better audio and no ads.

TechCrunch Disrupt is coming back to Berlin this winter, and you can already buy tickets. It will feature technologists, investors, entrepreneurs and media outlets; Startup Alley, where over 400 pre-Series A companies exhibit; Startup Battlefield, our premier startup pitch competition where a curated group of tech’s top early-stage startups will compete for the $50,000 grand prize, the coveted Disrupt Cup and intense media and investor interest.

Disrupt Berlin will feature workshops, world-class networking and after-parties. It’s time to place buying Disrupt Berlin tickets at the top of your priority list. Our two-for-one Innovator pass promotion goes live in just 48 hours with a limited number of passes, and it won’t last long. Sign up today.

We’re also beginning to announce our first speakers, and we’re delighted that Saul Klein, Founding Partner at Localglobe, will be joining us.

Localglobe is a new-ish seed fund focussed on helping London’s great most ambitious founders build game-changing businesses. Previously, Saul was a Partner at Index Ventures from 2007 until May 2015. In 2012 David Cameron appointed Saul to be the UK’s first tech envoy to Israel and a Technology Business Ambassador.

Saul is a serial entrepreneur with two decades of experience building and exiting companies in the US, Israel and Europe. He has a passion for working with seed and early-stage businesses. Most recently Saul co-founded Kano and Seedcamp, as well as a co-founder and original CEO of Lovefilm International (acquired by Amazon). He was also part of the original executive team at Skype (acquired by eBay).

We love Berlin. It’s the epicenter of Europe’s vibrant startup scene, and we can’t wait to see what the continent’s tech titans and rising stars will bring to Disrupt Berlin 2018 on November 29-30. These two action-packed days offer tremendous value at full freight but, on this Wednesday, May 30 at 12pm CEST / 6am EDT we’re offering a limited number of two Innovator passes for just €695. Simply sign up for our newsletter and we’ll notify you when to jump online and grab some for you and a friend.

Budget-minded startup fans take heed — this limited-time offer won’t stick around forever. Just imagine how much better you’ll feel knowing you got the best deal possible. And let’s face it, if you want to showcase your company, products and ideas in front of the international tech startup community, Disrupt Berlin 2018 is the place to do it.

Consider this: At Disrupt Berlin 2017, we hosted 2,600 attendees — including technologists, investors, entrepreneurs and media outlets. And those attendees made a bee-line to explore Startup Alley, where 416 pre-Series A companies exhibited the very best up-and-coming tech and talent.

Don’t forget about Startup Battlefield, our premier startup pitch competition. A curated group of tech’s top early-stage startups will compete for the $50,000 (or about €42,600) grand prize, the coveted Disrupt Cup and intense media and investor interest. Just ask the folks at Lia Diagnostics, the winner of last year’s Startup Battlefield at Disrupt Berlin.

Disrupt Berlin offers so much more, including workshops, world-class networking opportunities and after-parties. Your Innovator pass provides access to all that, along with: speakers on The Main Stage, The Next Stage and The Q&A Stage, full use of the Disrupt attendee list, use of the Disrupt Mobile App to contact conference attendees and, after the conference, access to the Disrupt Berlin event video library.

It’s time to place buying Disrupt Berlin tickets at the top of your priority list. Our two-for-one Innovator pass promotion goes live in just 48 hours with a limited number of passes, and it won’t last long. Sign up today.

Our sponsors help make Disrupt happen. If you are interested in learning more about sponsorship opportunities, please contact our sponsorship team here.

Fresh from completing its acquisition of Uber’s Southeast Asia business, ride-hailing firm Grab has officially launched its food delivery business — GrabFood — today.

The service is already available in beta in a handful of countries, including Thailand, but now it is available in Singapore (Grab HQ) with plans to reach Grab’s core six markets in Southeast Asia in the coming months. As part of its acquisition of Uber Southeast Asia, Grab took charge of UberEats in the region and moved its merchants and customer base to GrabFood before shuttering the Uber service.

GrabFood is available as a standalone app in Singapore, but in countries where Grab offers motorbikes on-demand the service is integrated into the core Grab app. The service will compete against the likes of Deliveroo, FoodPanda, Go-Jek’s GoFood, and others.

The GrabFood service is also tied to Grab’s rewards and loyalty program — GrabRewards — and customers can use cash, cards or GrabPay to pay for their orders. Two notable features allow customers schedule orders in advance while there is also no minimum spend on orders.

Grab announced a deal to buy rival Uber’s local business in March, although the deal itself doesn’t seem to have progressed quite as smoothly as expected. As TechCrunch reported last month, a mixture of regulatory concerns, disgruntled employees scheduled to transition to Grab and consumer concern at the lack of competition have weighed on what is Grab’s coming-of-age moment.

Nonetheless, Grab said in a statement that its move into food delivery is an important part of its strategy to develop “an interconnected ecosystem of consumer services to make the everyday lives of people easier.”

Removing Uber may have made that goal more realistic, but Grab will face competition regionally after Go-Jek, the market leader in Indonesia that’s backed by the likes of Google and Tencent, confirmed plans to expand to four new markets imminently. Go-Jek is putting $500 million behind that expansion, which it said will be modeled on a partner approach that gives local founding teams full control of the business in each new country.

Rather than standing still, Grab is reported to be raising $1 billion in fresh funding at a valuation of $10 billion, according to the Wall Street Journal. That would represent a significant increase on the $6 billion valuation that Grab commanded when it gobbled up $2 billion from SoftBank and China’s Didi Chuxing last July.

Go-Jek, meanwhile, recently raised around $1.5 billion from a list of investors that include Tencent, JD.com, Google, Allianz, Meituan and Singapore-based funds GIC and Temasek.

Disliking one’s internet provider is such a common condition that it’s hard to imagine that ISPs have anywhere to go but up in the eyes of their customers. Nope! There are new lows ahead, if the latest American Customer Satisfaction Index is any indication. Charts ahead!

The ACSI compiles thousands of interviews with consumers and produce a score for various companies and industries based on a number of metrics. And this year, internet providers fell from last place to last place minus.

(Note: Verizon owns Oath, which owns TechCrunch. Believe me, it doesn’t affect our coverage.)

“An all-time low for the industry that along with subscription TV already had the poorest customer satisfaction among all industries tracked by the ACSI,” the report reads. “Customers are unhappy with the high price of poor service, but many households have limited alternatives as more than half of all Americans have only one choice for high speed broadband.”

Despite what the FCC and broadband companies like to say, few people have more than one good choice for internet provider, unlike even other industries that are dominated by a handful of companies, like mobile. And the service people do have access to isn’t inspiring loyalty.

Pretty much every category saw a drop, despite ardent promises from the likes of Comcast and Cox to improve their customer service and simplify bills and offers.

I myself actually just had a good interaction with Comcast, but because it was just a nice customer service agent helping me navigate the company’s labyrinth of misleading offers and upsells, I consider it as breaking even. Or it would have if my bill hadn’t just nearly doubled without any notification, so in the end it’s probably a negative.

Streaming services and video on demand were included in the survey for the first time this year, and did fairly well. Netflix, PlayStation Vue and Twitch were well thought of, and even the worst-ranked service, Sony’s Crackle, beats most of the perennially disliked pay TV providers. Strangely enough, most of the latter are the very same providers are often the same as the perennially disliked broadband providers. Coincidence? You be the judge.

Overall, those companies are at the very bottom of the list, below even airlines and insurance companies — and ironically, the TVs that are used to watch the content are at the very top of the heap. Time to step up your game, ISPs.

Let’s flash back to the Machine Age, the period in American history that gave us the assembly line, the first nonstop transcontinental flight, regular radio broadcasts, and the first robot capable of performing more than 20 movements. These technological advancements inspired a style of art called Precisionism, popularized by big names like Georgia O’Keefe, Charles Sheeler and Charles Demuth.

The Cult of the Machine exhibit at the de Young museum in San Francisco is a reflection of attitudes toward machines and robotics during the Machine Age, the period between the two world wars during which industrial efficiency was the reigning mantra. In an era where efficiency was seen as both beautiful and as a threat, there was an influx of art inspired by anxieties people had about the rise of industrial technology. The exhibit rehashes the “are machines a friend or foe to humans?” debate through a Precisionist lens with a thorough, possibly too thorough, collection.

Curated by Emma Acker, the exhibit is predominantly Precisionist works. Precisionism is an early 20th century American modernist style that was born from artists who synthesized European cubism and futurism with the American vision of industrial, urban themes. We see smokestacks, factories, bridges and skyscrapers painted with geometric, smooth techniques.

Technologists today have expressed concern about the takeover of robotics, decline in manufacturing jobs, losing control to AIs, biased algorithms and the loss of craftsmanship to machines. Every tech company has a strategy around machine learning and AI. Venture capitalists are investing in robotics startups. There are robots designed to make pizzas. Robots that autonomously deliver goods through the last mile. Autonomous vehicles designed to replace drivers and flying cars on the horizon. Tech continues to make our world more efficient and convenient, but it’s impossible to predict whether machines will eventually help or hinder us as a species. When strolling through the Cult of the Machine exhibit at the de Young, one starts to wonder if this line of questioning will ever end.

Duality of machines as light and dark

The de Young collection is a balance between the anxieties Americans felt toward technology during the Machine Age, mixed with the hope that technology brought to a more connected, convenient world. One gallery dives into menacing interpretations of what technology meant during the period. Charles Sheeler’s “Suspended Power,” a 1939 oil on canvas depicts a large machine hanging over a few small humans in a factory — a stark representation of the immense, barely-controlled power technology can exert over humanity — and how with one mis-engineered piece, we could be crushed. The piece is the star of the exhibit, encapsulating the looming, unquantifiable threat of the future.

 

Artists certainly saw the darkness in America’s worship of industry. Take Charles Demuth’s, “Incense of a New Church,” 1921. Here a factory is compared to a church, smoke to incense.

Much of the exhibit is scenes of factories, smokestacks and urban landscapes void of humans, movement and color. The pieces themselves look like they were painted by machines, with no brush strokes to be detected. It could be the combination of the monotony of this art — the quantity of motionless urban landscapes — that makes parts of the exhibit feel empty and tedious. But that just may be the point.

Clarence Holbrook Carter’s “War Bride,” closes the exhibit. A bride stands to face her groom, a machine.

The absence of human error evokes anonymity and alienation that exist in a technological world. There’s an eerie emptiness to these close up shots of mechanical systems. Yet they are the small pieces that make up our world.

Confusing efficiency with beauty 

During the Machine Age, the demand for efficiency became the driving force of the modern era. Its easy to see how efficiency was confused with beauty, rather than seen as the fulfillment of economic needs. Yet artists were finding meaning in the intersection of art, commerce and industry.

“I speak in [the] tongue of my times. The mechanical, the industrial. Anything that works efficiently is beautiful.” – Charles Sheeler.

This exhibit is not by any means beautiful. There is nothing here that one might be inspired to hang on a living room wall.

However, for the first time “artists started to discover beauty and meaning in our American fabric of industry and production and elevated it to the level of fine art,” says Acker. “The ideas and themes explored in the works from this period seem to resonate so much with our current moment. That’s what I wanted to emphasize. Precisionism was the springboard for thinking about larger themes around our relationship to technology during the Machine Age and today. And how the excitements and anxieties Americans experienced around tech innovation are reflected in our same social forces today.”

Conflict between humans and machines 

Perhaps the most interesting part of the exhibit is an interactive feature that invites visitors to select three words out of 30 to express what technology means to them. Some of the options are: creative, interconnected, revolutionary, automated, isolating, surveillance, collaborative, addicting, alienating, cold. At the end of the exhibit the most frequently-selected words are displayed in a collective word portrait.

 

The word cloud is updated every three seconds, and is contrasted with another word cloud. The other is a composite of Machine Age terms describing technology, drawn from 1920s-1930s American periodicals. Size and color of the words is determined by how frequently it appeared in the texts. It seems the visitors of this exhibit have more optimistic views of tech than the media during the Machine Age did.

Overall the exhibit connects two views of technology: a cult-like promise of a better engineered world, and the crushing fear of the unknown threatening humanity’s livelihood.

Where does this leave us now? “We can relate to [the Machine Age] now as we enter this 4^th industrial revolution. We’re looking forward with excitement and some trepidation toward disruption, displacement and changes on the horizon,” says Acker.

Cult of the Machine: Precisionsim and American Art runs through August 12, 2018 at the de Young Museum in San Francisco. For those interested in exploring how tech has shaped art throughout American history, this exhibit is one to see.

 

While Facebook and Cambridge Analytica are hogging the spotlight, data brokers that collect your information from hundreds of sources and sell it wholesale are laughing all the way to the bank. But they’re not laughing in Vermont, where a first-of-its-kind law hems in these dangerous data mongers and gives the state’s citizens much-needed protections.

Data brokers in Vermont will now have to register as such with the state; they must take standard security measures and notify authorities of security breaches (no, they weren’t before); and using their data for criminal purposes like fraud is now its own actionable offense.

If you’re not familiar with data brokers, well, that’s the idea. These companies don’t really have a consumer-facing side, instead opting to collect information on people from as many sources as possible, buying and selling it amongst themselves like the commodity it has become.

This data exists in a regulatory near-vacuum. As long as they step carefully, data brokers can maintain what amounts to a shadow profile on consumers. I talked with director of the World Privacy Forum, Pam Dixon, about this practice.

“If you use an actual credit score, it’s regulated under the Fair Credit Reporting Act,” she told me. “But if you take a thousand points like shopping habits, zip code, housing status, you can create a new credit score; you can use that and it’s not discrimination.”

And while medical data like blood tests are protected from snooping, it’s not against the law for a company to make an educated guess your condition from the medicine you pay for at the local pharmacy. Now you’re on a secret list of “inferred” diabetics, and that data gets sold to, for example, Facebook, which combines it with its own metrics and allows advertisers to target it.

Oh yes, Facebook does that. Or did do it for years, only ending the practice under the present scrutiny. “When you looked at Facebook’s targeting there were like 90 targets – race, income, housing status — that was all Acxiom data,” Dixon told me; Acxiom is one of the largest brokers.

Data brokers have been quietly supplying everyone with your personal information for a long time. And advertising is the least of its applications: this data is used for informing shadow credit scores, restricting services and offers to certain classes of people, setting terms of loans, and more.

Vermont’s new law, which took effect late last week, is the nation’s first to address the data broker problem directly.

“It’s been a huge oversight,” said Dixon. “Until Vermont passed this law there was no regulation for data brokers. It’s that serious. We’ve been looking for something like this to be put in place for like 20 years.”

Europe, meanwhile, has leapfrogged American regulators with the monumental GDPR, which just entered into effect.

The issue, she said, has always been defining a data broker. It’s harder than you might think, considering how secretive and influential these companies are. When every company collects data on their customers and occasionally monetizes it, who’s to say where an ordinary business ends and data brokering begins?

They fought previous laws, and they fought this one. But Dixon, who along with the companies themselves was part of the state’s hearings to create the law, said Vermont avoided this pitfall.

“The way the bill is written is extremely well thought through. They didn’t worry as much about the definition, but focused on the activity,” she explained. And indeed the directness and clarity of the law are a pleasant surprise:

While data brokers offer many benefits, there are also risks associated with the widespread aggregation and sale of data about consumers, including risks related to consumers’ ability to know and control information held and sold about them and risks arising from the unauthorized or harmful acquisition and use of consumer information.

Consumers may not be aware that data brokers exist, who the companies are, or what information they collect, and may not be aware of available recourse.

This straightforward description of a subtle and widespread problem greatly enabled by technology is a rarity in a world dominated by legislators and judges who regularly demonstrate ignorance on high-tech topics. (You can read the full law here.)

As Dixon pointed out, lots of companies will find themselves encompassed by the law’s broad definition:

“Data broker” means a business, or unit or units of a business, separately or together, that knowingly collects and sells or licenses to third parties the brokered personal information of a consumer with whom the business does not have a direct relationship.

In other words, anyone who collects data second hand and resells it. There are a few exceptions for things like consumer-focused information services (411, for example) but it seems unlikely that any of the real brokers will escape the designation.

With the requirement to register, along with a few other disclosures brokers will be required to make, consumers will be aware of which they can opt out of and how. And if they find themselves the victim of a crime that used broker data — a home loan rate secretly raised because of race, for instance, or a job offer rescinded because of a surreptitiously discovered medical condition — they have legal recourse.

Security at these companies will have to meet a minimum standard, as well as access controls. And data breach rules mean prompt notification if personal data is leaked in spite of them.

It’s a good first step and one that should prove extremely beneficial to Vermonters; if it’s as successful as Dixon thinks it is, other states may soon imitate it.

While Facebook and Cambridge Analytica are hogging the spotlight, data brokers that collect your information from hundreds of sources and sell it wholesale are laughing all the way to the bank. But they’re not laughing in Vermont, where a first-of-its-kind law hems in these dangerous data mongers and gives the state’s citizens much-needed protections.

Data brokers in Vermont will now have to register as such with the state; they must take standard security measures and notify authorities of security breaches (no, they weren’t before); and using their data for criminal purposes like fraud is now its own actionable offense.

If you’re not familiar with data brokers, well, that’s the idea. These companies don’t really have a consumer-facing side, instead opting to collect information on people from as many sources as possible, buying and selling it amongst themselves like the commodity it has become.

This data exists in a regulatory near-vacuum. As long as they step carefully, data brokers can maintain what amounts to a shadow profile on consumers. I talked with director of the World Privacy Forum, Pam Dixon, about this practice.

“If you use an actual credit score, it’s regulated under the Fair Credit Reporting Act,” she told me. “But if you take a thousand points like shopping habits, zip code, housing status, you can create a new credit score; you can use that and it’s not discrimination.”

And while medical data like blood tests are protected from snooping, it’s not against the law for a company to make an educated guess your condition from the medicine you pay for at the local pharmacy. Now you’re on a secret list of “inferred” diabetics, and that data gets sold to, for example, Facebook, which combines it with its own metrics and allows advertisers to target it.

Oh yes, Facebook does that. Or did do it for years, only ending the practice under the present scrutiny. “When you looked at Facebook’s targeting there were like 90 targets – race, income, housing status — that was all Acxiom data,” Dixon told me; Acxiom is one of the largest brokers.

Data brokers have been quietly supplying everyone with your personal information for a long time. And advertising is the least of its applications: this data is used for informing shadow credit scores, restricting services and offers to certain classes of people, setting terms of loans, and more.

Vermont’s new law, which took effect late last week, is the nation’s first to address the data broker problem directly.

“It’s been a huge oversight,” said Dixon. “Until Vermont passed this law there was no regulation for data brokers. It’s that serious. We’ve been looking for something like this to be put in place for like 20 years.”

Europe, meanwhile, has leapfrogged American regulators with the monumental GDPR, which just entered into effect.

The issue, she said, has always been defining a data broker. It’s harder than you might think, considering how secretive and influential these companies are. When every company collects data on their customers and occasionally monetizes it, who’s to say where an ordinary business ends and data brokering begins?

They fought previous laws, and they fought this one. But Dixon, who along with the companies themselves was part of the state’s hearings to create the law, said Vermont avoided this pitfall.

“The way the bill is written is extremely well thought through. They didn’t worry as much about the definition, but focused on the activity,” she explained. And indeed the directness and clarity of the law are a pleasant surprise:

While data brokers offer many benefits, there are also risks associated with the widespread aggregation and sale of data about consumers, including risks related to consumers’ ability to know and control information held and sold about them and risks arising from the unauthorized or harmful acquisition and use of consumer information.

Consumers may not be aware that data brokers exist, who the companies are, or what information they collect, and may not be aware of available recourse.

This straightforward description of a subtle and widespread problem greatly enabled by technology is a rarity in a world dominated by legislators and judges who regularly demonstrate ignorance on high-tech topics. (You can read the full law here.)

As Dixon pointed out, lots of companies will find themselves encompassed by the law’s broad definition:

“Data broker” means a business, or unit or units of a business, separately or together, that knowingly collects and sells or licenses to third parties the brokered personal information of a consumer with whom the business does not have a direct relationship.

In other words, anyone who collects data second hand and resells it. There are a few exceptions for things like consumer-focused information services (411, for example) but it seems unlikely that any of the real brokers will escape the designation.

With the requirement to register, along with a few other disclosures brokers will be required to make, consumers will be aware of which they can opt out of and how. And if they find themselves the victim of a crime that used broker data — a home loan rate secretly raised because of race, for instance, or a job offer rescinded because of a surreptitiously discovered medical condition — they have legal recourse.

Security at these companies will have to meet a minimum standard, as well as access controls. And data breach rules mean prompt notification if personal data is leaked in spite of them.

It’s a good first step and one that should prove extremely beneficial to Vermonters; if it’s as successful as Dixon thinks it is, other states may soon imitate it.