Year: 2018

Over the course of the last few days, Google teased a few updates to Android Auto, its platform for bringing its mobile operating system to the car. At its I/O developer conference, the company showed off what the next version of Android Auto will look like and how developers can start preparing their applications for it.

Earlier this week, Google announced that Volvo would build Android Auto directly into its head units, making it one of the first car manufacturers to do so. Typically, Android Auto essentially mirrors your phone — with a special on-screen interface designed for the car. By building Android Auto right into the car, you won’t need a phone. Instead, it’ll be a stand-alone experience and thanks to that, the car manufacturer can also offer a number of custom elements or maybe even support multiple screens.

As the Android Auto team noted during its I/O session, in-car screens are starting to get bigger and popping up in different sizes and aspect rations. At the same time, input methods are also evolving and while Google didn’t say so today, it appears the team is looking at how it can support features like a touchpad in the car.

Unsurprisingly, the team is now looking at how it can evolve the Android Auto UI to better support these different screens. As the team showed in today’s session, that could mean using a wide-screen display in the car to show both the Google Maps interface and a media player side-by-side.

Developers won’t have to do anything to support these new screen sizes and input mechanisms since the Android Auto platform will simply handle that for them.

The new concept design for a built-in Android Auto experience the company showed today looks quite a bit like its integration with Volvo. It relies on a large vertical screen and a user interface that is deeply integrated with the rest of the car’s functions.

“The goal of this concept is to adapt Android Auto’s design to a vehicle-specific theme,” Google’s Lauren Wunderlich said in today’s session. “This includes additional ergonomic details and nods to the vehicle’s interior design.”

As part of today’s preview, Google showcased a few new features, including an improved search experience, which developers will have to support in their apps. This new experience will allow developers to group results by groups, say playlists and albums in a music app, for example (and interesting, Google mostly highlighted Spotify as a music app in today’s session and not its own Google Play Music service).

Google also promises a better messaging experience with support for the new RCS standard.

Google is also introducing a couple of new user interface elements in the media player like an explicit content warning and an icon that lets you see when a playlist has been downloaded to your device, for example.

But Google also briefly showed a slide with a few more items on its roadmap for Android P in the car. Those include support for things like integrations between driver assistant systems and Maps data, for example, as well as ways to suspend Android Auto to RAM for, I assume, the built-in version.

Google hasn’t shared any exact numbers that would allow us to quantify the popularity of Android Auto, but the team did say that “thousands of apps” now support the platform, a number that’s up 200 percent since last year. As more car manufacturers support it, the number of overall users has also increased and the team today reported over 300 percent user growth in the last year.

UberAIR is well on its way, with the plan to start demonstrating the technology in 2020 and start operating the flying taxi service in 2023. In order to get there, it’s going to need what Uber is calling “Skyports” — areas for these electric vertical take-off and landing vehicles to board and unload passengers.

On day two of Elevate, Uber’s architect and design partners revealed their concepts for skyports. All skyport concepts are required to be able to support more than 4,000 passengers per hour within a three acre footprint. The skyports must also ensure electric VTOLs can easily recharge in between trips.

While all of these skyports are structurally feasible, financial feasibility for cities is an entirely different story. Anyway, here’s a look at some new skyport concepts from Corgan, a design and architecture firm.

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The idea with the Mega Skyport, according to Corgan, is to create a system with modular components that can be adapted anywhere. The basic component, the skyport itself, could theoretically be added to open spaces, on top of parking garages or on the roof of skycrapers. Each skyport could handle 1,000 landings per hour. Corgan also envisions using this stations as community gathering spaces for things like concerts, art festivals and botanical gardens.

“The Station reconnects once divided neighborhoods that reside on opposite sides of the highway and therefore serves as a new community gathering point,” according to Corgan’s design prospective.

On day one, Uber Head of Aviation Eric Allison explained the node concept. Nodes are essentially skyport groupings to enable Uber to better manage the network of eVTOLs. For example, 40 nodes, Allison said, could manage trips for millions of people every day.

Another concept came from Gannett Fleming (above), which designed skyports that could support up to 52 eVTOLs per hour, per module. By 2028, the framework could handle 600 arrivals and departures per hour. The design, which enables solar recharging. uses robots to rotate the aircrafts while parked to better position them for immediate takeoff.

Pickard Chilton and Arup took a more vertical approach with their design for efficiency purposes. This design would enable 180 landings and takeoffs per hour, per module.

Next up is one from Humphreys & Partners. This concept is modeled after a beehive because, similar to a bee’s flight patterns to and from a hive, eVTOLs would replicate that same pattern in the Uber Hover. The design would accommodate 900 passengers per level, per hour.

The Beck Group took a similar bee-like approach with its design, called The Hive. Though, this design looks more like an actual hive than the one from Humphreys & Partners. This design could accommodate 150 takeoffs and landings per hour, and could be scaled to handle 1,000 trips per hour.

Last but not least is one from BOKA Powell. This design can handle 1,000 takeoffs and landings per hour and has a structure that can reverse itself in order to accommodate wind change.

Which one is your favorite?

The Democratic push to restore net neutrality took another step today with the official filing of a petition, under the Congressional Review Act, to force a vote on whether to repeal the FCC’s unpopular new rules. The effort may be doomed in the end, but it’s still extremely important.

The CRA is a way of reversing rules recently instated by federal agencies that’s simple and effective, though until this administration rarely used (but they made up for lost time, all right). Its expedited process and low bar to entry — only 30 senators are needed to bring a vote, and the vote generally happens quite quickly — have made it an ideal tool for Congress to undo Obama-era regulations, but the shoe is on the other foot now.

Democrats in the Senate are using the CRA as a potential method of removing the rules the FCC voted for in December and returning to 2015’s Open Internet Order and strong net neutrality rules. Today they filed the actual petition to force the vote.

“This is the fight for the internet,” said Senator Ed Markey (D-MA) in a press conference introducing the action. “By passing this resolution, we can send a clear message that this Congress won’t fall to the special interest agenda of President Trump and his broadband baron allies, but rather will do right by the people that send us here.”

You can watch the whole proceeding below:

Right now there are 50 senators supporting the measure, including one Republican. The Democrats are hoping to make this issue extremely visible in order to put pressure on other, perhaps undecided, Republicans who might cross the aisle with enough prodding from their constituency.

As I’ve written before, and as Senators themselves have admitted, the chance of this actually rolling back the rules is low, since it would have to also pass through the House, where Democrats are at a more serious disadvantage, then be signed by the President, which is unlikely to say the least.

But by forcing a vote, they force everyone in the Senate to take a position for or against the rules, including those who have attempted to stay “neutral” through silence.

By making them take a position with consequences, net neutrality can be made into a voting issue come election season this year, and in 2020.

“It always helps to build pressure at the FCC level, but this is about us losing elections,” Senator Brian Schatz (D-HI) told me late last year when this effort was just starting. “They have a 3:2 edge at the FCC because we lost. We have to understand that when we vote in 2020, we’re voting on the future of the internet. We can generate a lot of emails and that’s great. But the moment those emails are converted to votes, we win.”

Expect the actual vote to take place some time in the next week or so, though be warned that even in the case of success there won’t be any immediate effect. As with everything in government, even the short game is a long game. But it’s imperative that in the meantime voters don’t forget that this is an ongoing and critical issue.

Monzo, one of a plethora of U.K. fintech startups aiming to re-invent current account banking, has launched a new feature that makes it even more frictionless to transfer money to friends. Dubbed ‘Nearby Friends’, the new geolocation functionality uses Bluetooth to let you see anyone else that uses Monzo who is nearby so that you can initiate a payment without needing their phone number to be in your contact book first.

One of the ways Monzo has increased its virality from the get-go is by making friend-to-friend payments easy, either to people who already bank with the startup, or via the Monzo.me service, which gives users a payment link to share with friends. The idea, as Monzo co-founder often explains, is that unlike traditional incumbent banks that basically have zero network effects (perhaps beyond joint accounts), the challenger bank is designed to become more useful the more people who join it.

“Thanks to the magic of Bluetooth, you can see anyone else that uses Monzo nearby. To protect people’s privacy, you’ll only find people who also have the feature open at the same time. With just a couple of taps, you can send people money, without the need to swap numbers or do any other admin,” writes Andy Smart, iOS Platform Lead at Monzo, on the company’s blog.

Under the hood, Monzo’s ‘Nearby Friends’ uses Google Nearby, Google’s peer-to-peer networking API that allows apps to “easily discover, connect to, and exchange data with nearby devices in real-time, regardless of network connectivity”. Specifically, here is how Monzo says its implementation works:

1. When you open Nearby Friends, we send an anonymous token (a random string of text) to Google
2. That token is broadcast via Bluetooth to devices nearby
3. At the same time, your Monzo app starts searching for other devices near you
4. When your Monzo app discovers a device nearby, it receives the device’s token. Using the Monzo API, it exchanges that token for your friend’s name and profile picture
5. We also receive an identifier which we can use to work out who to make the payment to

The token does not identify you personally outside of Monzo’s systems, which means we don’t share any of your personal information with third parties during the process. The token we send to Google expires after a short period of time, meaning your personal data is unidentifiable.

Meanwhile, competitor Revolut recently — and relatively quietly by its standards — rolled out a very similar feature, as it is wont to do. Called ‘Near Me’, I understand it will be formally unannounced in a company blog post as soon as tomorrow and is another clear sign of how fast the $1.7B valued banking startup is moving.

Google announced today it was going to acquire Israeli cloud migration startup, Velostrata. The companies did not share the purchase price.

Velostrata helps companies migrate from on-premises datacenters to the cloud, a common requirement today as companies try to shift more workloads to the cloud. It’s not always a simple matter though to transfer those legacy applications, and that’s where Velostrata could help Google Cloud customers.

As I wrote in 2014 about their debut, the startup figured out a way to decouple storage and compute and that had wide usage and appeal. “The company has a sophisticated hybrid cloud solution that decouples storage from compute resources, leaving the storage in place on-premises while running a virtual machine in the cloud,” I wrote at the time.

But more than that, in a hybrid world where customer applications and data can live in the public cloud or on prem (or a combination), Velostrata gives them control to move and adapt the workloads as needed and prepare it for delivery on cloud virtual machines.

“This means [customers] can easily and quickly migrate virtual machine-based workloads like large databases, enterprise applications, DevOps, and large batch processing to and from the cloud,” Eyal Manor VP of engineering at Google Cloud wrote in the blog post announcing the acquisition.

This of course takes Velostrata from being a general purpose cloud migration tool to one tuned specifically for Google Cloud in the future, but one that gives Google a valuable tool in its battle to gain cloud marketshare.

In the past, Google Cloud head Diane Greene has talked about the business opportunities they have seen in simply “lifting and shifting” data loads to the cloud. This acquisition gives them a key service to help customers who want to do that with the Google Cloud.

Velostrata was founded in 2014. It has raised over $31 million from investors including Intel Capital and Norwest Venture partners.

It seems clear that Niantic always had broader plans than simple casual gaming. The Google-supported startup’s 2016 title Pokémon GO is largely considered a major factor in helping to mainstream augmented reality technology. Now the company is looking to take things a step further, tapping its massive user base to help build some large-scale AR maps.

The plan was first reported by Reuters this morning, courtesy of a conversation with Niantic CEO John Hanke. The executive told the service, “We want players to build out the game board they want to play on,” adding that the world building would foster a “new kind of social activity.”

There’s no timeline for any of this. And it’s not entirely clear whether the mapping will be output from Pokémon or the company’s eagerly anticipated followup, Harry Potter: Wizards Unite. What is clear, however, is that the company plans to start in public spaces like parks, utilizing AR tech built by recent acquisition, Escher Reality.

The plan here is to build a larger platform that can be utilized by third parties. It’s a feature that’s only likely to grow in demand as major mobile players like Apple and Google push developers to build AR apps through initiatives like ARKit and ARCore.

Google, which has supported the company since its earliest days, has been reasserting its commitment to augmented reality this week at Google I/O through offerings like the upcoming walking navigation in Maps.

What does a cell look like? If you had to draw one, you’d probably do the usual thing: a sort of fried egg with a nucleus yolk and a couple of ribosomes peppered around, maybe a rough endoplasmic reticulum if you’re fancy. But cells are vastly more complicated than that, not to mention three-dimensional. Allen Integrated Cell is a new tool that lets anyone visualize cells the way they actually exist in the body.

It’s from the Allen Institute for Cell Science, a Seattle research outfit founded by Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen . The institute has been doing research in this direction for some time, but today is the first public release of the Integrated Cell program, which you can try on the web right here.

The application is focused on stem cells specifically. The 3D models aren’t just based on theory but on direct recording and observation done in-house. There are dozens of cell types, and you can toggle the visibility of numerous proteins and substances that make up the cell.

In addition to observed locations of organelles and proteins, the system has learned to predict those locations by studying other similar cells, so even in cells that haven’t been searched for a given substance, its presence can be inferred by a probabilistic model.

This is important because the process used to select certain substances or organelles to fluoresce and be directly visible to microscopes isn’t good for the cells, and to tag multiple items is to risk cell death. But if the model can figure out where organelle A is based on the presence and shape of membrane B, tagging isn’t necessary.

“This is a new way to see inside living human cells. It’s like seeing the whole cell for the first time,” said the Institute’s executive director, Rick Horwitz, in a press release. “In the future, this will impact drug discovery, disease research and how we frame basic studies involving human cells.”

If you’re not a microbiologist, these will probably just look like poorly painted rocks or modern art. But to someone studying how a certain protein acts in vivo, how it responds to certain medications or hormones, what internal processes govern its distribution, this could be a powerful tool.

Still sound interesting? Check out the institute’s visual guide to human cells, also new today, and relive your high school biology days, but with an awesome web-native 3D viewer.

At this year’s CES, Hulu teased an upcoming addition for its Live TV streaming service: a new Live TV guide aimed at helping viewers browse currently airing programs, similar to a cable TV guide. Today, Hulu says it’s launching this new guide as well as a new Live TV destination in its app across its living room platforms.

The goal with the Live guide, Hulu had previously said, is to increase viewership of live television on its service.

“The majority of usage, even in our Live TV product, is on-demand,” Ben Smith, Senior Vice President and Head of Experience at Hulu, had noted back in January. “54 percent of usage is on-demand and 46 percent of usage is live.”

And much of that viewing is news and sports, he added.

In addition to trying to shift viewers from on-demand programming to live TV, the live TV experience is important to Hulu because of how much of its viewing takes place on television screens. The company said during its Upfronts presentation in New York earlier this month that the majority – 78% – of viewing on its service takes place in the living room, on connected TVs.

While to some extent, viewers may just prefer on-demand programming, Hulu thinks its interface may have also limited discovery of live TV, in some cases.

“One thing, in particular, we’ve heard from you is that at times it can be difficult to see what’s on another channel or flip between two channels you’re watching simultaneously,” noted Hulu VP of Product, Richard Irving, in Hulu’s blog post announcing the launch.

The company last year began testing a live TV destination and guide on its beta website, and found that users preferred this way of browsing live programming.

These features are now available across living room devices, including Xbox One, Apple TV (4th gen. or higher), Amazon Fire TV (1st and 2nd gen.), and Nintendo Switch devices.

In the updated Hulu interface, you’ll notice a new lightning bolt icon to the right of the Home icon that takes you to live playback on your most recently watched channel.

Plus, you’ll be able to pull up the new guide while you’re watching live TV to see what’s on, what’s coming up next or change channels.

You  can personalize this guide by sorting by “All Channels” or “Recent Channels,” the latter which displays the last 10 channels you’ve watched, says Hulu.

And, from the guide, you can set programming to record to Hulu’s cloud DVR, or start shows from the beginning (if they’re shows you can record).

Hulu says the new guide is rolling out to living room devices now, but will come to other platforms soon.

 

Google is suspending adverts related to a referendum in Ireland on whether or not to overturn a constitutional clause banning abortion. The vote is due to take place in a little over two weeks time.

“Following our update around election integrity efforts globally, we have decided to pause all ads related to the Irish referendum on the eighth amendment,” a Google spokesperson told us.

The spokesperson said enforcement of the policy — which will cover referendum adverts that appear alongside Google search results and on its video sharing platform YouTube — will begin in the next 24 hours, with the pause remaining in effect through the referendum, with the vote due to take place on May 25.

The move follows an announcement by Facebook yesterday saying it had stopped accepting referendum related ads paid for by foreign entities. However Google is going further and pausing all ads targeting the vote.

Given the sensitivity of the issue a blanket ban is likely the least controversial option for the company, as well as also the simplest to implement — whereas Facebook has said it has been liaising with local groups for some time, and has created a dedicated channel where ads that might be breaking its ban on foreign buyers can be reported by the groups, generating reports that Facebook will need to review and act on quickly.

Given how close the vote now is both tech giants have been accused of acting too late to prevent foreign interests from using their platforms to exploit a loophole in Irish law to get around a ban on foreign donations to political campaigns by pouring money into unregulated digital advertising instead.

Speaking to the Guardian, a technology spokesperson for Ireland’s opposition party Fianna Fáil, described Google’s decision to ban the adverts as “too late in the day”.

“Fake news has already had a corrosive impact on the referendum debate on social media,” James Lawless TD told it, adding that the referendum campaign had made it clear Ireland needs legislation to restrict the activities of Internet companies’ ad products “in the same way that steps were taken in the past to regulate political advertising on traditional forms of print and broadcast media”.

We’ve asked Google why it’s only taken the decision to suspend referendum ad buys now, and why it did not act months earlier — given the Irish government announced its intention to hold a 2018 referendum on repealing the Eighth Amendment in mid 2017 — and will update this post with any response.

In a public policy blog post earlier this month, the company’s policy SVP Kent Walker talked up the steps the company is taking to (as he put it) “support… election integrity through greater advertising transparency”, saying it’s rolling out new policies for U.S. election ads across its platforms, including requiring additional verification for election ad buyers, such as confirmation that an advertiser is a U.S. citizen or lawful permanent resident.

However this U.S.-first focus leaves other regions vulnerable to election fiddlers — hence Google deciding to suspend ad buys around the Irish vote, albeit tardily.

The company has also previously said it will implement a system of disclosures for ad buyers to make it clear to users who paid for the ad, and that it will be publishing a Transparency Report this summer breaking out election ad purchases. It also says it’s building a searchable library for election ads.

Although it’s not clear when any of these features will be rolled out across all regions where Google ads are served.

Facebook has also announced a raft of similar transparency steps related to political ads in recent years — responding to political pressure and scrutiny following revelations about the extent of Kremlin-backed online disinformation campaigns that had targeted the 2016 US presidential election.

Lyft is moving ahead with tests of the All-Access plan, a monthly subscription service for rides through the Lyft platform. In the next couple of hours, a select group of riders will see an option to sign up for a waitlist to be part of Lyft’s next round of All-Access invitations.

“Testing our newest All-Access Plan is the next step in moving rideshare from one based on ownership, to one based on subscription,” a Lyft spokesperson said in a statement to TechCrunch. “We’re excited to roll this out to more passengers in the coming weeks and continue offering Lyft’s affordable, convenient, and reliable rides.”

If selected from the waitlist, you’ll be able to buy a $200 pass in order to get $15 off 30 rides. That’s a savings of $250 if you were to take 30 $15 rides a month without the plan. Lyft isn’t disclosing the exact size of the test, but it’s going out to passengers nationwide.

This comes after Lyft began testing some plans in March that cost $399 a month for 60 rides and $199 upfront for 30 rides worth $15 per ride. Earlier that same month, Lyft CEO Logan Green said the company was moving in a direction to achieve for transportation what Netflix achieved for entertainment.

Specifically, Green said, “We are going to move the entire industry from one based on ownership, to one based on subscription.”