Year: 2018

Heads up, startup fans. One of the best ways to experience Disrupt San Francisco 2018 is for free — and who doesn’t love free? Right now, we’re hunting for the best early-stage AI startups to apply as a TC Top Pick. If your company earns that designation, you get to exhibit for free in Startup Alley at Disrupt SF 2018, which takes place September 5-7 at Moscone Center West. Apply today.

AI will be a big focus at Disrupt SF ’18, and that shouldn’t surprise anyone. Oil fueled the 20^th century, but data, AI and machine learning fuel the 21^st. Where once mobile strategy reigned, “AI first” is the new rally cry across nearly every industry, and it will only continue to grow.

If you want to get your AI startup in front of literally thousands of tech influencers, investors and media, Startup Alley at Disrupt SF ’18 is where you need to be. If you want to do that for free, here’s what you need to know.

Our seasoned — and highly discerning — TechCrunch editorial team will evaluate every TC Top Pick application and select 60 companies — five startups representing each of these 12 tech categories: AI, AR/VR, Blockchain, Biotech, Fintech, Gaming, Healthtech, Privacy/Security, Space, Mobility, Retail or Robotics.

If your AI startup earns a TC Top Pick designation, you will receive a free Startup Alley Exhibitor Package, which includes a one-day exhibit space in Startup Alley, three founder passes good for all three days of the show, use of CrunchMatch, our investor-to-startup matching platform, access to the event press list and a chance to be chosen as Wildcard company — which means you could potentially compete in Startup Battlefield for this year’s supersized $100,000 prize.

Remember we mentioned media coverage? In addition to potential coverage from any of the 400 media outlets roaming Startup Alley, each TC Top Pick also gets a three-minute interview on the Showcase Stage with a TechCrunch editor — and we’ll promote that video across our social media platforms. It’s the gift that keeps on giving.

TC Top Pick applications close on June 29, and only five AI startups will make the cut. Will yours be one of them? You have nothing to lose (and we have special offers for early applicants). Take your shot, and apply today.

If you live in a city, you’re probably deciding between a handful of major broadband or wireless carriers — maybe something like Comcast or AT&T. But there’s a good chance that there are a bunch of local carriers that are looking to get off the ground, and Benjamin Huang wants to help make sure there are even more options/.

That’s the idea behind Necto, a startup looking to create a sort of ISP school to help people get started with their own internet service provider founded by Huang and Adam Montgomery. Typically that’s a pretty tall order, but Necto works with individuals to learn how to build a network, get the right equipment, and deploy it in order to get consumers access to a new internet service provider that’s an alternative to the larger carriers. There are already emerging providers like Sonic in San Francisco, which aims to offer quick internet for a cheaper price, but there’s a whole group of individuals waiting in the wings that are trying to build their own ISP and the associated business behind it, Huang said. Necto is launching out of Y Combinator’s winter 2018 class.

“Ultimately, we want to see so many ISPs that net neutrality isn’t an issue,” Montgomery said. “It’s cheaper than ever and easier to start an internet service provider. People didn’t know they could do this, and networking engineering is the highest cost. You have to have a lot of stuff to build out. We remove that and bundle it as an ISP starter kit service. We give guidance to the operators, these are the customers you have, this is the equipment you need buy, here’s how to construct them. It’s more like constructing Ikea furniture. The hard part we remove which is automatically configuring these routers.”

Necto started off as its own attempt at an internet service provider, but Huang and Montgomery found that trying to get wholesale fiber was a high barrier to entry. The pair started looking into wholesale wireless, and Huang said that technology is getting to the point where it’s just as fast as typical broadband and an option for resale. The challenge then is getting the equipment into the hands of individuals that want to ramp up their own ISP and showing them how to get started. Then, they’re off to the races and work to build a business around that, including customer service and other facets of it.

Necto essentially charges for the guidance of how to start an ISP, including a class that individuals go through in order to get one off the ground. Then the company continues to ship software to ensure that it’s not as difficult to keep the equipment up and running, as well as provide ongoing support for those individuals. The equipment is all off the shelf, Huang said, in order to lower the barrier to entry for these providers.

The challenge here, however, will be ensuring that not only individuals know they can get an ISP off the ground, but getting their — and consumers’ — attention in the first place. Necto hopes to take a hyper-local strategy, Montgomery said, like traveling to farmers’ markets and working with local operators to ensure they can track down the right people that are looking to build a business around ISPs. There are still going to be plenty of challenges as it continues to work with wholesale wireless providers in order to get these businesses off the ground.

Researchers at UC Berkeley have shown they can embed stealthy commands for popular voice assistants inside songs that can prompt platforms like Siri or Alexa to carry out actions without humans getting wise.

The research, reported earlier by The New York Times, is a more actionable evolution of something security researchers have been showing great interest in: fooling Siri.

These exploits are still in their infancy, as are the security capabilities of the voice assistants. As capabilities widen for smart assistants that make it easier for users to send emails, messages and money with their voice, things like this are a bit worrisome.

One takeaway is that digital assistant makers may have to get more serious about voice authentication so that they can determine with greater accuracy whether the owner of a device is the one voicing commands, and if not, lock down the digital assistant’s capabilities. Amazon’s Alexa and Google Assistant both offer optional features that lock down personal information to a specific user based on their voice pattern, meanwhile most sensitive info on iOS devices requires the device to be unlocked before it’s accessed.

The potential here is nevertheless frightening and something that should be addressed early-on publicly. As we saw from some of Google’s demonstrations with their Duplex software at I/O this week, the company’s ambitions for their voice assistant are building rapidly and as the company begins to release Smart Display devices with its partners that integrate cameras, the potentials for abuse are widening.

Medium has abruptly pulled a feature that allowed publishers to operate paywalls on its platform, leaving some independent media scrambling for alternative options to maintain a crucial source of revenue.

The company this week shuttered a two-year program that let media run paid subscription services on its site. Nieman Lab reports that Medium contacted its 21 remaining subscription publishing partners at the end of April to give them a week’s notice on the shutdown. Although Medium said it offered to extend the deadline for those who needed more time.

A lot can happen in a week, but it’s not a lot of time when it comes to rejigging business models — particularly in the media industry where revenue is sacred and direct relationships with readers are savored.

Of course, because this is life, there were some complications.

One publication, the Boston Institute for Nonprofit Journalism (BINJ), said the shutdown came out of the blue as it apparently didn’t get the notification email.

But even those who did had to scramble.

Another partner, Electric Literature, faced a rush to find an alternative subscription product and get its subscribers to move over without churn. Executive editor Halimah Marcus said the publication’s subscription income is worth $25,000 per year.

Medium told Nieman that the move was primarily a result of the introduction of Medium’s own $5 per month subscription product last year. Those paying that fee — which unlocks all content on Medium — weren’t able to access stories from the likes of BINJ or Electric Literature which Medium said created “confusion.”

As is so often the case in social media — where it be Facebook, Medium or others — building on someone else’s platform carries the risk that they might make changes that negatively impact your business. That’s the case here, as even Medium seemed to acknowledge by pointing out that other media had already left for new shores.

“Since Medium introduced its own subscription product in March of 2017, publications that want to build their own subscriber bases have largely found other avenues via which to build that base,” Medium’s head of partnerships Basil Enan added in a statement.

Still, news of the change came just days after a rather flattering New York Times story focused on how Medium CEO Evan Williams — of Twitter and Blogger co-founder fame — plans to “fix the internet.” Williams penned an essay on the problems of advertising-based models and the good that technology can do.

Democrats from the House Intelligence Committee have released thousands of ads that were run on Facebook by the Russia-based Internet Research Agency.

The Democrats said they’ve released a total of 3,519 ads today from 2015, 2016 and 2017. This doesn’t include 80,000 pieces of organic content shared on Facebook by the IRA, which the Democrats plan to release later.

What remains unclear is the impact that these ads actually had on public opinion, but the Democrats note that they were seen by more than 11.4 million Americans.

You can find all the ads here, though it’ll take some time just to download them. As has been noted about earlier (smaller) releases of IRA ads, they aren’t all nakedly pro-Trump, but instead express a dizzying array of opinions and arguments, targeted at a wide range of users.

“Russia sought to weaponize social media to drive a wedge between Americans, and in an attempt to sway the 2016 election,” tweeted Adam Schiff, who is the Democrats’ ranking member on the House Intelligence Committee. “They created fake accounts, pages and communities to push divisive online content and videos, and to mobilize real Americans,”

Russia sought to divide us by our race, our country of origin, our religion, and our politics. They attempted to hijack legitimate events meant to do good – teaching self-defense, providing legal aid – as well as those events meant to widen a rift.

Here’s just some examples: pic.twitter.com/YMX2FTgPGU

— Adam Schiff (@RepAdamSchiff) May 10, 2018

He added, “By exposing these Russian-created Facebook advertisements, we hope to better protect legitimate political expression and safeguard Americans from having the information they seek polluted by foreign adversaries. Sunlight is always the best disinfectant.

In conjunction with this release, Facebook published a post acknowledging that it was “too slow to spot this type of information operations interference” in the 2016 election, and outlining the steps (like creating a public database of political ads) that it’s taking to prevent this in the future.

“This will never be a solved problem because we’re up against determined, creative and well-funded adversaries,” Facebook said. “But we are making steady progress.”

Aurora, AWS’s managed MySQL and PostgreSQL database service, is getting an undo feature. As the company announced today, the new Aurora Backtrack feature will allow developers to “turn back time.” For now, this only works for MySQL databases, though. Developers have to opt in to this feature and it only works for newly created database clusters or clusters that have been restored from backup.

The service does this by keeping a log of all transactions for a set amount of time (up to 72 hours). When things go bad after you dropped the wrong table in your production database, you simply pause your application and select the point in time that you want to go back to. Aurora will then pause the database, too, close all open connections and drop anything that hasn’t been committed yet, before rolling back to its state before the error occurred.

Being able to reverse transactions isn’t completely new, of course. Many a database system has implemented some version of this already, including MySQL, though they are often far more limited in scope compared to what AWS announced today.

As AWS Chief Evangelist Jeff Barr notes in today’s announcement, disaster recovery isn’t the only use case here. “I’m sure you can think of some creative and non-obvious use cases for this cool new feature,” he writes. “For example, you could use it to restore a test database after running a test that makes changes to the database. You can initiate the restoration from the API or the CLI, making it easy to integrate into your existing test framework.”

Aurora Backtrack is now available to all developers. It will cost about $0.012 per one million change records for databases hosted in the company’s U.S. regions, with slightly higher prices in Europe and Asia.

If you’ve been meaning to ask your friends just how eggplant emoji your new summer cutoffs are, you’re in luck. Today, Instagram is introducing a feature it’s calling the “emoji slider,” a new audience feedback sticker that polls your viewers on a rating scale using any emoji. The updated Instagram app is available now in the App Store and in Google Play.

For example, if you decide to stay in on a Friday night and take risqué selfies you could ask your friends to rate just how angel emoji or how inexplicably-purple-devil-emoji your behavior is. Or say you see an animal and can’t quite figure out if it’s a snake or a salamander with those little tiny legs, you could poll your Instagram story-goers to ask how snake emoji the thing was on a scale of no snake emoji to 100 percent snake emoji. The impractical applications are endless.

Instagram says the emoji slider grew out of the natural popularity of the poll sticker, which is admittedly a pretty fun way to pressure your friends and admirers into spontaneous audience participation. With the emoji slider, you can ask how [emoji] something is instead of just asking your followers to operate under a binary set of options, because binaries are over, man.

If you’re into it, you can find the emoji slider in the sticker tray with most of the other excellent stoner nonsense. Just select it, write out your question, slap that baby on your story and wait for the sweet, sweet feedback to roll in.

After months of tension and a variety of smaller milestones, the FCC order voiding 2015’s net neutrality rules and instating its own, much weaker ones will finally take effect on June 11, the agency’s chairman Ajit Pai said today.

Although the rule was approved in December, entered into the Federal Register in February, and under ordinary circumstances would have taken effect in April, “Restoring Internet Freedom” had one extra step that needed to be taken.

The Office of Management and Budget needed to take a look at the rule because it changed how the industry reported information to the government, and under the Paperwork Reduction Act that authority had to approve the final version.

That approval was granted on May 2, the FCC explained in a news release, and June 11 was picked as the effective date “to give providers time to comply with the transparency requirement.”

The Congressional Review Act paperwork filed yesterday means the Senate will soon be voting on whether the rules can stay in place, but the likelihood of that bill passing the Senate and House and getting signed by the president is pretty much nil. Still, the votes will put proponents and opponents of net neutrality in the open and potentially make it an election issue.

Lawsuits alleging various flaws in the process or rule itself may eventually cause it to be rolled back, but that will take months, if not years, and, lacking evidence of direct harm, judges are unlikely to take the rules out of effect while considering the case.

Don’t expect much to happen immediately should the new rule take place; the industry is too savvy to blast out some new, abusive rules under the far more permissive framework established by this FCC. But as before, consumers will often be the first to spot shady behaviors and subtle changes to the wording of marketing or user agreements, so keep your eyes open and tip your friendly neighborhood tech blog if you see something.

Online advertising reached $88 billion last year, a 21 percent increase from 2016 and a new high, according to the latest IAB Internet Advertising Revenue Report.

The report is prepared by PricewaterhouseCoopers for the Interactive Advertising Bureau, a trade organization of online advertisers and publishers.

Aside from stumbling after the financial crisis a decade ago, the numbers have been on a pretty steady march upwards, setting new records every year. But the IAB says digital ad spending crossed a particularly noteworthy milestone last year — for the first time, digital exceeded the total amount spent on broadcast and cable TV ads ($70.1 billion).

And aobile advertising continued to claim even more of the pie. It already accounted for the majority of digital ad spend in 2016, and in 2017, it grew to $49.9 billion (57 percent of the total, and a 36 percent year-over-year uptick).

Meanwhile, digital video was up 33 percent to $11.9 billion, mobile video was up 54 percent to $6.2 billion, social media advertising increased 36 percent to $22.2 billion and digital audio was up 36 percent to $1.6 billion. Even search and banner ads were up, 18 percent and 23 percent, respectively.

PwC US Partner David Silverman said that there are four main factors driving the continued growth — improvements in technology, the ability to target large scale audiences, the availability of self-serve platforms for small business advertising and the rise of brands that sell directly to consumers, usually online.

In the past, the IAB has suggested that much of this growth is coming from new advertisers, rather cannibalizing revenue from other channels. When I brought the issue up this week, Silverman said the real trend is “convergence.”

“I’d say the cannibalization that has occurred over time is eyeballs shifting away from traditional media,” he said. “This is an area that’s going to continue to really drive growth — the convergence of media and particularly video. At some point, people only watched TV at home, on their living room couch. Now people watch it on any device, anywhere.”

“It’s about giving the user what he wants, when he wants it, on whatever platform he may be on,” added Anna Bager, the IAB’s executive vice president for industry initiatives.

The report comes at a time when the big advertising platforms are under increased scrutiny (and, in Europe, regulation). But Facebook and Google continue to exceed revenue expectations. And while the report doesn’t break out ad spending for any one company, it says the top 10 ad sellers accounted for 74 percent of ad spending in the most recent quarter (so it’s within the recent historical range of 70 to 75 percent).

Researcher Amanda D. Hanford at Pennsylvania State University has created a real cloaking device that can route sound waves around an object, making it invisible to some sensing techniques.

From the report:

Hanford and her team set out to engineer a metamaterial that can allow the sound waves to bend around the object as if it were not there. Metamaterials commonly exhibit extraordinary properties not found in nature, like negative density. To work, the unit cell — the smallest component of the metamaterial — must be smaller than the acoustic wavelength in the study.

Hanford created an acoustic metamaterial that deflected sound waves under water, a difficult feat. In testing she and the team were able to place the material in water and measure sound waves pointed at it. The resulting echoes in the water suggested that the sound waves did not bounce off or around the material. This means the new material would be invisible to sonar.

Obviously this technology is still in its early stages and the material does not make the objects invisible but just very hard to detect in underwater situations. However, the fact ship captains could soon yell “Activate the cloaking device” as evil, laser-toting dolphins appear on the horizon should give everyone a bit of cheer.