Year: 2018

A new coalition of activist groups led by Yelp and TripAdvisor are renewing the fight to get Google to give a fair opportunity to all sites instead of putting its Knowledge Cards atop the results for subjective search queries. The alliance that includes Fight For The Future and Consumer Watchdog.org has assembled tens of thousands of dollars to run targeted ads on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter “calling for Google employees to introspect and examine how Google’s One Boxes or Answer Boxes are harming the open internet,” says the project’s leader Luther Lowe, Yelp’s VP of public policy.

The initiative is certainly self-serving, as Yelp and TripAdvisor have the most to lose from Google’s own local results getting to sidestep the PageRank algorithm and be shown atop search results pages before their own sites. But it’s a fair question to ask why Google’s dominance in search should let it deviate from a fair process of choosing the best result to give its content a boost.

Here’s the campaign’s promotional video:

Yelp initially launched its “FocusOnTheUser.eu” campaign targeting Google+ in 2014 as the European Union was determining whether Google abused its power to preference its shopping results. That eventually led to a €2.4 billion anti-trust fine. Yelp has now filed a complaint with the EU that extends those concerns to how it treats local business results, which Lowe said is now the biggest category of search. The campaign was timed to come alongside this week’s 60 Minutes report examining whether Google is a monopoly.

The new Focus On The User that launched today concentrates on swaying Google’s employees rather than regulators, and includes new partners like DemandProgress and American Family Voices.

The coalition’s two stated goals are to get Google to:

1. Match users with the best possible information at the top of results. For local search (the most common category of search), this means creating an interoperable box and ranking Google’s content alongside other business listing pages across the web. An organic, merit-based process should pin the most relevant businesses from the web to the map. That box should provide a clear path to the source content, not a small link designed to generate a low CTR.

2. For other forms of answers (Wikipedia-powered information, recipes, etc.) rather than offering small links designed to generate low CTR, answer boxes should encourage users to leave Google.com and visit the source content for themselves. The box itself should be a clear path to the web-based information powering the box.

The coalition’s hope is that if Google has to deal with internal complaints or risks losing talent over the issue, it might redesign search results to be a more even playing field.

While it makes perfect sense for Google to simply spit back answers instead of results for immutable facts, like math equations or sports scores, it’s reasonable to expect subjective content to have to compete in the algorithm. If TripAdvisor has far more reviews for a restaurant and therefore a likely more accurate answer to whether you should eat there, it doesn’t make sense for a Google business profile based on far fewer reviews to appear first in the results.

Google has seen a sudden surge in backlash after downplaying the “don’t be evil” line in its mission statement and its Duplex demo worried people about how the company could use its new human-voiced artificial intelligence technology. This campaign could stoke that discontent. But because it comes from Google’s direct competitors like Yelp and TripAdvisor, employees may be able to write off the initiative as purely opportunistic. Unless the U.S. government gets serious about anti-trust regulation or Google’s employees cry out en masse, it may just ride out the campaign doing business as usual.

We’ve contacted Google requesting a statement in response to the campaign and will update if we hear back.

It is a well-known fact that Europeans are generally more concerned about privacy than some other countries. Indeed, we’ve had a history of major privacy breaches that had such catastrophic consequences that it is now part of our culture that personal data should be treated as highly sensitive — something the U.S. is now catching up to in the wake of the Facebook/Cambridge Analytica scandal. The culmination of this is the new EU-wide privacy regulation, the GDPR, which will come into effect on May 25, 2018, and was a hot topic during the recent Zuckerberg testimony.

As digital assistants improve, we’re learning new things to expect from them, but the tasks that a real life assistant may have handled before can still a bit of a challenge to home assistants.

Amazon’s Alexa voice assistant is gaining functionality to help it get smarter about working with your calendar. The new abilities will let users move appointments around and schedule meetings based on other people’s availability.

If you’ve been shared on someone’s calendar availability, Alexa will be able to suggest times that work for both of you. Just say, “Alexa schedule a meeting with [name]” and Amazon’s assistant will search through your schedule for a good time, suggesting up to two time slots that could work.

On a more basic feature level, Alexa won’t make you cancel appointments and reschedule them if a meeting time changes. You’ll be able to just ask Alexa to move an existing meeting, something that should have probably been supported from the beginning, but hey, better late than never.

Both of these features are available to US users today.

Mark Zuckerberg got to cherry-pick the questions he wanted to answer from EU Parliament after it spent an hour taking turns rattling off queries in bulk before leaving just a half-hour for his batched responses. Zuckerberg immediately trotted out his dorm room story of not expecting Facebook’s current duty to safety and democracy, and repeated his pledge to broaden the company’s responsibility. While he’s vowed to have his team follow-up with point-by-point replies, he managed to escape the televised testimony without any newsworthy gaffes.

The public will have to wait for canned, written responses to the toughest questions about why Facebook didn’t disclose the Cambridge Analytica issue immediately, how it uses shadow profiles and what he thinks about Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp being broken up. If Zuckerberg played it safe during his U.S. congressional testimony by being boring, he dodged scandal here by using the abbreviated format to bend the testimony toward his most defensible positions.

Future testimonies by technology industry executives will be much more productive for the public if officials keep questions succinct and only ask the hard ones, executives are given ample time to answer them all and they use a question-answer format. No more of this question-question-question-question-answer-answer-goodbye.

The Facebook CEO used his short answer period to explain that he feels like there’s plenty of new competition for Facebook, and that it actually aids competition by offering tools to enable small businesses to challenge big brands online. He cited that “dozens of percents” of European users have gone through Facebook’s GDPR settings, rolling them early so they’re dismissible until the May 25th deadline because, “The last thing we want is for people to go through the flows quicker than they need to and just hit OK.” That ignores the dark pattern designs built into that GDPR privacy flow, that while temporarily dismissible, does coerce users to consent by visually downplaying the buttons to opt out of giving Facebook data.

Zuckerberg laid out his thoughts about the future of regulation for social networks, noting that “Some sort of regulation is important and inevitable, and the important thing is to get this right.” He said that regulations would need to “allow for innovation, don’t inadvertently prevent new technologies like AI from being able to develop, and of course to make sure that new startups — the next student sitting in a college dorm room like I was — doesn’t have an undue burden in being able to build the next great product.” That’s positive, since blunt regulation could create a moat for Facebook.

But when Zuckerberg concluded his testimony, noting “I want to be sensitive to time because we are 15 minutes over” the scheduled 75-minute session length, several EU officials spoke up, angry that they felt their questions had been ignored. “Will you allow users to escape targeted advertising? I asked you six yes-or-no questions and got not a single answer, and of course, well, you asked for this format for a reason,” stated one member of Parliament. “I’ll make sure we follow up and get you answers to those,” Zuckerberg coldly responded. “We’re going to have someone come to do a full hearing soon to answer more of the technical questions as well.”

The combative atmosphere at the conclusion of the testimony means Facebook could encounter soured regulators in the future who might be emboldened by their disappointment in his appearance. Zuckerberg might have avoided losing the minds of the EU by dodging damning topics, but he sure didn’t win the hearts of Europe’s lawmakers.

Baidu, the Chinese search giant, is spinning out its business unit responsible for utility apps and its mobile ad business to sharpen its focus on artificial intelligence.

As part of the spin-out, Baidu is selling a large chunk of its equity in the ‘Global DU’ business to as-yet-undisclosed investors. The plan is to sell “a majority equity stake” in order to take Global DU independent. Once the deal is completed — it is targeted at a Q3 2018 timeframe — Baidu’s share of the business will drop to around 34 percent. Further, the business is likely to raise additional capital for growth.

Spinning out business units is commonplace among Chinese tech companies, Baidu itself recently did so with its financial services business.

Herman Yu, Baidu CFO, said this latest spin-out will give Global Du “autonomy and agility in its operation.”

It will also allow Baidu to focus more keenly on artificial intelligence. The firm said it will set up a new global business unit around its AI-powered services, including recommendation engine PopIn, keyboard app Simeji and other services in the U.S. and Southeast Asia. The plan is to allow these services to work more closely with Baidu’s AI labs, which include locations in Silicon Valley and Seattle.

Already, that push has helped Baidu’s earnings, which had been set back when the Chinese government invested internet advertising focused on medical services.

Despite the AI push, Baidu has suffered as key personnel departed over the past year.

Last week, Qi Lu, Baidu’s president and COO who is also its highest-ranking AI specialist, departed the company due to personal reasons. The exit was unexpected, particularly since the former Microsoft executive only took the role less than two years ago.

Prior to Lu’s departure, Baidu lost Andrew Ng — a globally-recognized AI pioneer who set up its U.S.-based research labs — back in March 2017. Later in the year, the head of its Silicon Valley lab exited, too.

Today’s the day for SpaceX’s launch of Iridium’s NEXT communications satellites and a pair of twin birds from NASA that will monitor the fresh water on the surface of the Earth. You can watch the launch right here:

Liftoff is scheduled for 12:47 PM Pacific Time, so SpaceX’s live stream should fire up about 15 minutes ahead of that; NASA will also have its own updates, since it has skin in the game.

This is an unusual launch — the rocket will be making some complicated maneuvers 300 miles up to make sure NASA’s satellites are deployed correctly, then it travels the rest of the way to the targeted orbit for the communication satellites.

A few minutes after liftoff, the Falcon 9 first stage (incidentally, the one that launched the lost Zuma satellite in January) will detach and burn up. This will be its last mission — it’s not one of the “Block 5” rockets with all the durability improvements, so it would take a lot of money and time to fly again, and the risk of failure would grow considerably every time. So this its swan song. Rocket, we salute you.

The second stage will take the payload to about 300 miles up, at which point it will cut off, and about 11 minutes after liftoff the rocket will dip its nose and spin a bit to get the GRACE-FO satellites into position. Ten minutes after they deploy, it will make a second burn and take itself up to nearly 500 miles altitude (this will take about half an hour), where Iridium’s satellites will be let out, ending the mission.

If for some reason things are delayed, the next launch opportunity is tomorrow at the same time.

The Kata Containers project, the first non-OpenStack project hosted by the OpenStack Foundation, today launched version 1.0 of its system for running isolated container workloads. The idea behind Kata Containers, which is the result of the merger of two similar projects previously run by Intel and Hyper, is to offer developers a container-like experience with the same security and isolation features of a more traditional virtual machine.

To do this, Kata Containers implements a very lightweight virtual machine (VM) for every container. That means every container gets the same kind of hardware isolation that you would expect from a VM, but without the large overhead. But even though Kata Containers don’t fit the standard definition of a software container, they are still compatible with the Open Container Initiative specs and the container runtime interface of Kubernetes. While it’s hosted by the OpenStack Foundation, Kata Containers is meant to be platform- and architecture-agnostic.

Intel, Canonical and Red Hat have announced they are putting some financial support behind the project, and a large number of cloud vendors have announced additional support, too, including 99cloud, Google, Huawei, Mirantis, NetApp and SUSE.

With this version 1.0 release, the Kata community is signaling that the merger of the Intel and Hyper technology is complete and that the software is ready for production use.

Right on the heels of launching its concierge service Hooch Black, Hooch announced today that it has raised $5 million in seed funding.

The company’s basic subscription of $9.99 gets you one free drink per day from a variety of partner bars and restaurants. Hooch Black (which you have to apply for, and which costs $295 per year) adds hotel deals, concierge service and other perks on top.

Even though Hooch had already raised $2.75 million in two pre-seed rounds, co-founder and CEO Lin Dai said it was more important to bring on strategic investors than it was to raise a lot of money: “We feel like the most important thing for our business is really the relationships.”

After all, he said the hospitality industry is controlled by “a few key companies,” so success is determined by working with those companies — it’s not a situation where someone can just beat you by outspending you.

The funding was led by Revelis Capital Group and Blue Scorpion Investments, with participation from Access Industries Holdings, Warner Music Group (Dai said that Hooch will be working with Warner Music on content, events and promotions), FJ Labs, Diesel CEO Stefano Rosso, former Comcast CTO Sree Kotay and others.

At the same time, the company is expanding its advisory board to include Bob Hurst (previously vice chairman of Goldman Sachs), Bonin Bough (former chief media and ecommerce officer at Mondelez) and Teymour Farman-Farmaian (previously CMO and CRO at Spotify and now managing director of Bitcoin wallet company Xapo).

Dai also said Hooch is preparing to launch its blockchain initiative this summer. What does blockchain have to do with free drinks? Well, Dai didn’t go into detail, but he suggested that by launching its own cryptocurrency token, Hooch could work with partners to create a “decentralized model for consumer rewards.”

Looking ahead, Dai said that Hooch might raise a “proper” Series A in 12 to 18 months, though he expects to reach profitability before then.

“At that point, we will have already built the moat around us with exclusive deals with all the top hospitality and experiential players,” he said. “That would be the appropriate time for us, if needed, to go back to a traditional round of funding.”

Twitter is shutting down its TV apps on Roku, Android TV and Xbox starting on May 24, the company announced this morning. The news of the apps’ closure comes at a time when Twitter is now trying to steer its users to its first-party mobile apps and its desktop website by killing off apps used by a minority of its user base – like the Twitter for Mac app it shut down earlier this year. And more recently, it has attempted to kill off popular third-party Mac apps with a series of unfriendly API changes.

It’s unclear why this has become Twitter’s agenda. While it can be a burden for a company to support a broader ecosystem of apps where some only have a niche audience, in some cases those “niche” users are also the most influential and heavy users. And arguably, anyone launching Twitter’s app on their TV must be a die-hard user – because who is really watching that much Twitter on their TV?

In terms of the TV apps’ shutdown, this is a somewhat abrupt strategy shift. The company had been steadily expanding its live streaming video content over the past year, and it saw its TV apps as a way to get that video in front of a television audience – and particularly cord cutters – who are looking to watch major news events, sports matches, and other entertainment.

The Twitter Roku app was one of the later TV apps to arrive, launching just a year ago, following the September 2016 launch of the Apple TV, Fire TV and Xbox One apps. At the time, the company touted the app as a way for people to “…watch live events and see what people are talking about, keeping them connected to what’s happening.”

It’s likely that none of Twitter’s TV apps have much traction. After all, Twitter didn’t have much in the terms of high-profile exclusive live video content. And on the TV, it has to compete for attention with top streaming services like Netflix and Hulu.

But these TV apps shutdowns aren’t tied to Twitter’s API changes, we’ve heard. Rather, Twitter has made the decision to kill off these apps as it works towards GDPR compliance. (Apparently, these apps were undeserving of time and attention on that front.) In addition, neither Xbox or Roku support a standard regularly supported video player, which made them more difficult to maintain. That also came into play with this decision.

Not all of Twitter’s TV apps are getting the cut, though.

Twitter for tvOS (Apple TV) and Twitter for Amazon Fire TV will continue to be available.

The team at Disney Research never fails to deliver fascinating (if not always particularly useful) experiments. Take Stickman. The robot is essentially one long limb, capable of some cool acrobatic maneuvers.

The system, detailed in a new paper from DR titled “Towards a Human Scale Acrobatic Robotic,” has two degrees of freedom and a pendulum it uses to launch itself in the air after swinging on a rope. The relatively simple robot tucks and folds, somersaulting in the air before landing on the padding below.

Those aerials are executed courtesy of a built-in laser range finder and six axis inertial measurement unit (a combination gyroscope/accelerometer), which calculate its position in-flight and adjust its positioning accordingly.

“Stickman emulates the behavior of human performers using a very limited set of sensing and actuation capabilities,” the team writes in the paper. “It is able to successfully perform several different somersaulting stunts by changing initial orientation and the timing of tuck, release, and untuck.”

The team says it’s going to continue experimenting with the robot, in an attempt to create more complex stunts down the road. No word on future plans beyond that, but for this headless acrobat of a robot, the sky, it seems, is the limit.