Year: 2018

Shortly after Uber announced the end of its forced arbitration policy for individual claims of sexual assault or harassment by Uber drivers, riders or employees, Lyft has done the same, Recode first reported. This means anyone who alleges sexual misconduct at the hands of Lyft drivers, riders or employees won’t have to argue their case behind closed doors. Instead, they can take the claim straight to court.

“Lyft has a longstanding track record of action in support of the communities we serve, from our commitment to the ACLU to standing up for pay equity and racial equality,” a Lyft spokesperson told TechCrunch. “The #metoo movement has brought to life important issues that must be addressed by society, and we’re committed to doing our part. Today, 48 hours prior to an impending lawsuit against their company, Uber made the good decision to adjust their policies. We agree with the changes and have removed the confidentiality requirement for sexual assault victims, as well as ended mandatory arbitration for those individuals so that they can choose which venue is best for them. This policy extends to passengers, drivers and Lyft employees.”

As the Lyft spokesperson noted in their comment, Uber made the decision to drop mandatory arbitration about 48 hours before the company had to respond to a lawsuit filed by 14 women who alleged they were assaulted by their drivers. The women also asked Uber to waive its arbitration clause.

Twitter’s latest effort to curb trolling and abuse on the site takes some of the burden off users and places it on the company’s algorithms.

If you tap on a Twitter or real-world celebrity’s tweet, more often than not there’s a bot as one of the first replies. This has been an issue for so long it’s a bit ridiculous, but it all has to do with the fact that Twitter really only arranges tweets by quality inside search results and in back-and-forth conversations.

Twitter is making some new changes that calls on how the collective Twitterverse is responding to tweets to influence how often people see them. With these upcoming changes, tweets in conversations and search will be ranked based on a greater variety of data that takes into account things like the number of accounts registered to that user, whether that tweet prompted people to block the accounts and the IP address.

Tweets that are determined to most likely be bad aren’t just automatically deleted, but they’ll get cast down into the “Show more replies” section where fewer eyes will encounter them. The welcome change is likely to cut down on tweets that you don’t want to see in your timeline. Twitter says that abuse reports were down 8 percent in conversations where this feature was being tested.

Much like your average unfiltered commenting platform, Twitter abuse problems have seemed to slowly devolve. On one hand it’s been upsetting to users who have been personally targeted, on the other hand it’s just taken away the utility of poring through the conversations that Twitter enables in the first place.

It’s certainly been a tough problem to solve, but they’ve understandably seemed reluctant to build out changes that take down tweets without a user report and a human review. This is, however, a very 2014 way to look at content moderation and I think it’s grown pretty apparent as of late that Twitter needs to lean on its algorithmic intelligence to solve this rather than putting the burden entirely on users hitting the report button.

If you’ve ever been hiking or skiing, gone to a music festival or state fair, you know how easy it is to lose track of your friends, and the usually ridiculous exchange of “I’m by the big thing”-type messages. Lynq is a gadget that fixes this problem with an ultra-simple premise: it simply tells you how far and in what direction your friends are, no data connection required.

Apart from a couple extra little features, that’s really all it does, and I love it. I got a chance to play with a prototype at CES and it worked like a charm.

The peanut-shaped devices use a combination of GPS and kinetic positioning to tell where you are and where any linked Lynqs are, and on the screen all you see is: Ben, 240 feet that way.

Or Ellie.

No pins on a map, no coordinates, no turn-by-turn directions. Just a vector accurate to within a couple feet that works anywhere outdoors. The little blob that points in their direction moves around as quick as a compass, and gets smaller as they get farther away, broadening out to a full circle as you get within a few feet.

Up to 12 can pair up, and they should work up to 3 miles from each other (more under some circumstances). The single button switches between people you’re tracking and activates the device’s few features. You can create a “home” location that linked devices can point towards, and also set a safe zone (a radius from your device) that warns you if the other one leaves it. And you can send basic preset messages like “meet up” or “help.”

It’s great for outdoors activities with friends, but think about how helpful it could be for tracking kids or pets, for rescue workers, for making sure dementia sufferers don’t wander too far.

The military seems to have liked it as well; U.S. Pacific Command did some testing with the Thai Ministry of Defence and found that it helped soldiers find each other much faster while radio silent, and also helped them get into formation for a search mission quicker. All the officers involved were impressed.

Having played with one for half an hour or so, I can say with confidence that it’s a dandy little device, super intuitive to operate, and was totally accurate and responsive. It’s clear the team put a lot of effort into making it simple but effective — there’s been a lot of work behind the scenes.

Since the devices send their GPS coordinates directly to each other, the team created a special compression algorithm just for that data — because if you want fine GPS, that’s actually quite a few digits that need to be sent along. But after compression it’s just a couple bytes, making it possible to send it more frequently and reliably than if you’d just blasted out the original data.

The display turns off automatically when you let it go to hang by its little clip, saving battery, but it’s always receiving the data, so there’s no lag when you flip it up — the screen comes on and boom, there’s Betty, 450 feet thataway.

The only real issue I had is that the single-button interface, while great for normal usage, is pretty annoying for stuff like entering names and navigating menus. I understand why they kept it simple, and usually it won’t be a problem, but there you go.

Lynq is doing a pre-order campaign on Indiegogo, which I tend to avoid, but I can tell you for sure that this is a real, working thing that anyone who spends much time with friends outdoors will find extremely useful. They’re selling for $154 per pair, which is pretty reasonable, and since that price will probably jump significantly later, I’d say go for it now.

Last November, AWS announced a new product called Amazon Sumerian, a toolkit and platform for developers to build “mixed reality” apps — that is, using virtual reality, augmented reality and 3D — without needing to have any specialised programming or graphics skills. And today, after running the service in a private beta for the last several months, Sumerian is now generally available.

In addition to being able to build a mixed reality app, you can also deploy it without writing custom code, Amazon says. The web-based editor also integrates with Amazon Lex for natural language and AI, Polly to turn text into speech, AWS Lambda for running code, AWS IoT to connect with Amazon’s IoT platform, and Amazon DynamoDB if you are running a NoSQL database. It supports WebGL and WebVR and Oculus Rift, HTC Vive, iOS and Android ARCore. Support for the new Oculus Go is coming, AWS said.

AWS has made huge strides in building out its cloud business, where developers, startups and much larger and mature organizations use the company’s infrastructure to host apps and other services, in what looks to be on track to be a $20 billion business this year. More recently, Amazon has been looking at ways of expanding its reach (and revenues) with these companies by offering a deeper range of services running within the cloud. Amazon Sumerian is a part of that strategy.

As Kyle Roche, the GM of Amazon Sumerian, described it, the company saw a gap in the market between the rise of new VR, AR and 3D tech, and a huge pool of organizations that might want to use that technology, but either lack the expertise and resources to do so, or would like to test something out before dedicating those resources more seriously.

“We are targeting enterprises who don’t have the talent in-house,” he said. Tackling new tech can sometimes be “too overwhelming, and this is one way of getting inspiration or prototypes going. Sumerian is a stable way to bootstrap ideas and start conversations. There is a huge business opportunity here.”

He said that early users in the closed beta have included a company developing training for medical devices, Mapbox building a framework for geospatial rendering, a business designing a walk-through a hotel lobby, e-sports companies, and some media and entertainment properties.

Adam Schouela, the VP of Fidelity Labs, said that the financial services giant has been working on a range of potential applications, including solutions to train its customer relations teams, ways of visualising financial modelling, and services for its customers to discover and use Fidelity’s services.

“What we try to do is look at emerging tech and rapidly build prototypes for Fidelity and the financial services industry,” he told TechCrunch.  We’ve done a lot of work in the voice interfaces and user interfaces with AR and VR. When we saw what Sumerian was providing and potential integration between voice interfaces and VR, we thought this was a great opportunity. With voice interfaces one of the great use cases is when your eyes and hands are otherwise busy. With VR, it’s stuck to face and you can’t see and your hands are busy so voice happens to be a great way of interacting with virtual environments.”

A demo of one of Fidelity’s services is here:

I/O may have ended, but Google’s still trickling out news at a steady rate. The latest update comes from one of the more unexpected corners of the Googleverse. Pixel Buds, the company’s hotly anticipated and lukewarmly received bluetooth headphones are getting a nice software update.

In a blog post today, the company highlighted some new features that should help make the earbuds a bit more well-rounded.

At the top of the list is improved bluetooth pairing. It’s not a hardware upgrade, so users may still run into some of the issues the product got dinged for early on, but not it’s a lot easier to switch between synced hardware. Choosing Pixel Buds from the drop down menu on a connected computer will swap the connection from the current to new device.

The headphones are also getting a couple new touch gestures. Triple tapping the right earbud will turn the headphones on and off, while double tapping will skip a song to the next track. Though that second gesture requires going into the Pixel Buds settings inside the Google Assistant app to enable.

All of those updates are rolling out to users starting today. None are earth shattering, exactly, but they should make the Pixel Buds experience a bit better for those who’ve already plunked down the $160 for Google’s wireless headphones.

Blogger, the blogging platform Google acquired back in 2003, is somehow still alive and kicking, even though few people remember it still exists. But alive it is — and it’s even getting some updates to its Google+ integration that will see all those 20 people still on Google+ rejoice.

After a year of inactivity, Blogger’s own news blog sprung to live this morning with a brief update that lays out the changes. Google calls this a “spring cleaning,” and we all know what that means: shutting down features.

You probably don’t care, but gone from Blogger are support for third-party gadgets, the Next Blog feature and the polling widget. Soon, OpenID support will be gone, as well, and Textcube.com is also shutting down. What is Textcube.com, you ask? It’s a Korean blogging service Google acquired back in 2008.

But there are also new features, which I’m guessing the sole two engineers still working on this project slaved over for the last year.

Blogger’s Google+ widget integration (yes, try not to laugh) will be transformed into HTML widgets to “give you more flexibility in how you share and see your followers.” Fifteen years after acquiring the service, Blogger now also supports logging in with multiple accounts. Google also today noted that the Blogger infrastructure has moved to Cloud Spanner, Google’s newest database service. 

In the near future, you can expect a new video management feature, too. Exciting stuff.

It’s surprising that Blogger is still around. I can’t remember the last time I saw a Blogger site in my searches, and it sure doesn’t have a lot of mindshare. Google also has let the platform linger and hasn’t integrated it with any of its newer services. The same thing could be said for Google+, too, of course. Google cuts some services because they have no users and no traction. That could surely be said for Blogger and Google+, but here they are, still getting periodic updates. I think the writing is on the wall, though, and I wouldn’t expect them to survive the next major Google spring cleaning.

Sarah Guo didn’t necessarily set out to become a venture capitalist. She certainly didn’t imagine she would become one of the first general partners at one of the oldest venture firms in the country. Yet Guo is both of these things today. Indeed, the venture firm Greylock Partners, which Guo joined five years ago as a principal, is announcing her promotion this morning.

Greylock, which closed its current, 15th, fund with $1 billion in October 2016, now has 12 general partners altogether.

For Guo, the appointment caps a lifetime spent in the world of startups. Before joining Greylock, she worked as an analyst at Goldman Sachs, where she led much of the bank’s coverage of business-to-business tech companies and advised public clients, including Twitter, Netflix, Zynga, and Nvidia.

A graduate (for both her undergraduate degree and MBA) of the University of Pennsylvania, Guo also worked previously at Casa Systems, a 15-year-old tech company that develops a software-centric networking platform for cable and mobile service providers and that — in a twist that we think is pretty neat — was founded by her parents. (Her father, CEO Jerry Guo, took the company public earlier this year.)

In a conversation earlier this week, Guo said that growing up around entrepreneurship gave her an “understanding of how difficult” starting a company truly is. It also occurred to her early on that “something related to company building was what I wanted to do in the future.”

Guo also said that not much will change with her promotion. Broadly speaking, she focuses on B2B applications and infrastructure, cybersecurity, AI, AR, and healthcare. She already sits on the boards of several companies, including the security startup Obsidian, which was founded by ex-Cylance and Carbon Black execs last year and quickly raised $9.5 million led by Greylock.

She said she does hope to mentor more up-and-coming investors like herself, however.

Guo first became acquainted with Greylock through Aneel Bhusri, a partner at Greylock and the cofounder and CEO of the software giant Workday. The two talked occasionally when Guo was covering internet and software startups at Goldman, and he’d encouraged her to meet some of his venture partners, she said. “I came in, not necessarily ready to venture forever. But I’m now very excited about it obviously,” she added with a laugh.

Guo’s other deals to date include Aware Networks, a 15-year-old, Buffalo Grove, Il.-based company that develops collaboration applications for mobile communities, and a still-unannounced company.

We didn’t talk about the fact that Guo just became one of Greylock’s first female general partners, but it’s very much worth mentioning, considering the firm was founded in 1965.

Greylock had lost another senior female investor — Sarah Tavel — to Benchmark last year. Tavel was the first female general partner with Greylock; she went on to become Benchmark’s first female GP.

Altogether, women still represent just 15 percent of decision makers at Silicon Valley’s major venture capital firms. Their ranks are growing slowly however.

Meanwhile, many other investors are choosing to launch their own female-founded venture firms. Among the newest of these is Breakout Ventures and a fund we reported on last night that’s being created by life sciences investor Beth Seidenberg, long of Kleiner Perkins.

Correction: This story briefly mischaracterized Guo as Greylock’s first female GP. Based on the nomenclature used by Greylock, we were under the impression that Tavel was a partner but not a general partner — a seemingly small but important distinction within venture firms. Tavel had been hired at the GP level at Greylock, we’re told.

French premium cable television company Canal+ is slowly moving away from building its own set top boxes. As Next INpact spotted, you can now subscribe to Canal+ and get an Apple TV 4K with Canal+’s myCanal app already preloaded.

Canal+ has been around for decades and was the first premium TV channel in France. Over the years, the company started distributing all sorts of premium channels through satellite, cable and partnerships with internet service providers.

While you had to get your own Canal+ set top box to receive Canal+ 15 years ago, the company’s own box has slowly become irrelevant. As all the main French internet service providers give you a set top box, Canal+ has partnered with them to offer multiple add-ons to receive Canal+’s content.

When Canal+ announced its most recent device, Canal+ already said that you’d get a better experience with the myCanal app on the Apple TV.

That’s why Canal+ is betting everything on over-the-top distribution. If you don’t subscribe to Canal+ through your ISP, you can get an Apple TV 4K for €6 per month in addition to your TV package. If your internet connection isn’t fast enough or you’d rather use satellite TV, you can still get a Canal+ set top box.

But the writing is on the wall. Most people will soon watch Canal+ through myCanal on Android TV, tvOS, iOS, Android, a Samsung TV and desktop computers.

In France, Molotov and myCanal have been some of the top performing apps for tvOS and Android TV. This partnership could boost the Apple TV in France.

Sometimes, you just need more RAM. That’s especially true when you want to run memory-hungry enterprise applications like SAP’s HANA database or high-performance computing workloads. Until now, if you wanted the Google Compute Engine to run applications like that, your options topped out at 624GB of memory. Starting today, though, the company is going beyond that by introducing three new tiers on top of this that top out at 3844GB and 160 virtual compute cores.

These three new machine types, dubbed ‘n1-ultramem,’ join Google’s existing ‘n1-megamem’ machines. Unsurprisingly, this kind of performance comes at a price. Running the “low-end” machine with 40 cores and 938GB of RAM for a month will set you back just over $3,221. The high-end machine with 160 cores and 3844GB of RAM is yours for $12,885.1716 per month.

You can see the hourly prices below:

With these new machines, Google now matches the top-end memory-optimized options on the AWS platform, though Google offers slightly more compute power thanks to a higher number of cores and newer processors.

Unsurprisingly, Google notes that the canonical use case for this kind of machine is running SAP HANA. “If you’ve delayed moving to the cloud because you have not been able to find big enough instances for your SAP HANA implementation, take a look at Compute Engine,” the company writes today. “Now you don’t need to keep your database on-premises while your apps move to cloud.”

The new ultramem machines are now available in three Google Cloud regions (us-central1, us-east1 and europe-west1), with more to follow.