Year: 2018

The venture investment arm of massive meat manufacturer Tyson Foods is continuing its push into potential alternative methods of poultry production with a new investment in the Israeli startup Future Meat Technologies.

The backer of companies like the plant-based protein-maker Beyond Meat, and cultured-meat company Memphis Meats, Tyson Ventures’ latest investment is also tackling technology development to create mass produced meat in a lab — instead of on the farm.

Future Meat Technologies is working to commercialize a manufacturing technology for fat and muscle cells that was first developed in the laboratories of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

“It is difficult to imagine cultured meat becoming a reality with a current production price of about $10,000 per
kilogram,” said Yaakov Nahmias, the company’s founder and Chief Scientist, in a statement. “We redesigned the
manufacturing process until we brought it down to $800 per kilogram today, with a clear roadmap to $5-10 per kg by 2020.”

The deal marks Tyson’s first investment in an Israeli startup and gives the company another potential horse in the race to develop substitutes for the factory slaughterhouses that provide most of America’s meat.

“This is definitely in the Memphis Meats… in the lab-based meat world,” says Justin Whitmore, executive vice president of corporate strategy and chief sustainability officer of Tyson Foods.

Whitmore takes pains to emphasize that Tyson is continuing to invest in its traditional business lines, but acknowledges that the company believes “in exploring additional opportunities for growth that give consumers more choices,” according to a statement.

While startups like Impossible Foods are focused on developing plant-based alternatives to the proteins that give meat its flavor, Future Meat Technologies and Memphis Meats are trying to use animal cells themselves to grow meat, rather than basically harvesting it from dead animals.

Chef Uri Navon mixing ingredients with FMT’s cultured meat

According to Nahmias, animal fat produces the flavors and aromas that stimulate taste buds, and he says that his company can produce the fat without harvesting animals and without genetic modification.

For Whitmore, what separates Future Meat Technologies and Memphis Meats is the scale of the bioreactors that the companies are using to make their meat. Both companies — indeed all companies on the hunt for a meat replacement — are looking for a way around relying on fetal bovine serum, which is now a crucial component for any lab-cultured meats.

“I want my children to eat meat that is delicious, sustainable and safe,” said Nahmias, in a statement, “this is our commitment to future generations”.

The breadth of backgrounds among the investors that have come together to finance the $2.2 million seed round for Future Meat Technologies speak to the market opportunity that exists for getting a meat manufacturing replacement right.

“Global demand for protein and meat is growing at a rapid pace, with an estimated worldwide market of more than a trillion dollars, including explosive growth in China. We believe that making a healthy, non-GMO product that can meet this demand is an essential part of our mission,” said Rom Kshuk, the chief executive of Future Meat Technologies, in a statement.

One of the company’s first pilot products is a lab-grown chicken meat that chefs have already used in some recipes. 

FMT’s first cultured chicken kebab on grilled eggplant and tahini sauce

In addition to Tyson Ventures, investors in the Future Meat Technologies seed round included the Neto Group, an Israeli food conglomerate; Seed2Growth Ventures, a Chicago-based fund backed by Walmart wealth; BitsXBites, a Chinese food technology fund; and Agrinnovation, an Israeli investment fund founded by Yissum, the Technology Transfer Company of The Hebrew University,

“Hebrew University, home to Israel’s only Faculty of Agriculture, specializes in incubating applied research in such fields as animal free meat sources. Future Meat Technologies’ innovations are revolutionizing the sector and leading the way in creating sustainable alternative protein sources,” said Dr. Yaron Daniely, President and CEO of Yissum.

Lyft is committing $1.5 million to its Relief Rides program. The idea has historically been to better support people during times of crisis, such as natural disasters or other emergency situations. Now, Lyft is expanding its reach to help people who may need rides to job interviews or medical appointments.

One of the partners Lyft is looking to continue working with is Caritas of Austin, an organization that seeks to prevent and end homelessness. Already, Lyft has partnered with New Orleans-based Youth Empowerment Project to help people get to appointments and job interviews.

Lyft has been riding the do-good train as of late. Last month, Lyft announced a multi-million-dollar investment in carbon offsets. The hope with that initiative is to offset the impact of the numerous Lyft cars on the road.

But Lyft is not perfect. While it aims to increase access to transportation through this $1.5 million commitment, the ride-hailing company has a lackluster approach to serving the needs of people with disabilities.

In March, Disability Rights Advocates filed a class-action lawsuit against Lyft, alleging the company discriminates against people who use wheelchairs by not making wheelchair-accessible cars available in the San Francisco Bay Area.

At the time, a Lyft spokesperson said it currently has “partnerships and programs in place to provide enhanced WAV access in various parts of the country, and are actively exploring ways to expand them nationwide.”

Hopefully, some of this money will go toward ensuring Lyft’s core product is genuinely accessible to everyone. In a blog post today, Lyft said it’s working “with strong local and national partners” and will “expand these partnerships to support a diverse array of people, depending on the needs of each local community.”

Kubernetes, the open source container orchestration tool, does a great job of managing a single cluster, but Upbound, a new Seattle-based startup wants to extend this ability to manage multiple Kubernetes clusters across multi-cloud environment. It’s a growing requirement as companies deploy ever-larger numbers of clusters and choose a multi-vendor approach to cloud infrastructure services.

Today, the company announced a $9 million Series A investment led by GV (formerly Google Ventures) along with numerous unnamed angel investors from the cloud-native community. As part of the deal, GV’s Dave Munichiello will be joining the company board of directors.

It’s important to note that the company is currently working on the product and could be a year away from a release, but the vision is certainly compelling. As Upbound CEO and founder Bassam Tabbara says, his company’s solution could allow customers to run, scale and optimize their workloads across clusters, regions and clouds as a single entity.

That level of control could enable them to set rules and policies across those clusters and clouds. For example, a customer might control costs by creating a rule to find the cloud with lowest cost for processing a given job, or provide failover control across regions and clouds — all automatically. It would provide the general ability to have highly granular control across multiple environments that isn’t really possible now, Tabarra explained.

That vision of enterprise portability is certainly something that caught the eye of GV’s Munichiello. “Upbound presents a credible approach to multi-cloud computing built on the success of Kubernetes, and as a response to the growing enterprise demand for hybrid and multi-cloud environments,” he said in a statement.

Companies are working with multiple Kubernetes clusters today. As an example, CERN, the European physics organization is running 210 clusters. JD.com, the Chinese shopping site has over 20,000 servers running Kubernetes. The largest cluster is made up of 5000 servers. As these projects scale, they require a tool to help manage their workloads across these larger environments.

The company’s founder isn’t new to cloud-native computing or open source. Tabarra was part of the team responsible for producing the open source project, Rook, an offshoot of Kubernetes and a Cloud Native Computing Foundation Sandbox project.  Rook helps orchestrate distributed storage systems running in cloud native environments in a similar way that Kubernetes does for containerized environments. That project provided some of the ground work for what Upbound is trying to do on a broader scale beyond pure storage.

The computing world is suddenly all about abstraction. We started with virtual machines, which allowed you take an individual server and make it into multiple virtual machines. That led to containers, which could take the same machine in let you launch hundreds of containers. Kubernetes is an open source container orchestration tool that has rapidly gained acceptance by allowing operations to treat a cluster of Kubernetes nodes as a single entity, making it much easier to launch and manage containers.

Upbound launched last Fall and currently has 8 employees, but Tabbara says they are actively seeking new engineers. The nature of their business is about distributed workloads and he says the workforce will be similar. They won’t have to work in Seattle. He says the plan is to use and contribute to open source whenever possible and to open source parts of the product when it’s available.

Consumer spending in global app stores will total $106.4 billion by the end of the year and $156.5 billion by 2022, according to a new report from App Annie out this morning. The 2018 figure is down a bit from the $110 billion the firm was estimating back in December. Much of the growth continues to come from the Asia-Pacific region, where China is easily maintaining its position as the world’s largest app market, and accounts for 40 percent of worldwide spend.

The report also found that consumer spending per device is on the rise, and will grow 23 percent from $20.94 in 2017 to $25.65 in 2022.

App downloads will grow by 45 percent in 2022, reaching 258.2 billion.

Download growth through 2022 will come from Asia-Pacific markets including India, Indonesia, and Vietnam, as well as, more specifically, the rural areas of China. Meanwhile, growth in the Americas will be driven by Brazil, and in the EMEA region, by Egypt, the Ukraine, Poland, and Russia.

Meanwhile, the more stable and mature markets like the U.S. and Japan will see their annual downloads stabilize by 2022, the report forecasts. Downloads will remain high, however, with an average of 21 new apps downloaded per year per device in the U.S., and 15 in Japan.

But the increase in apps and less frequent downloads will lead to publishers spending more to acquire each new user.

Consumer spending in apps will grow 92 percent by 2022, reaching $156.5 billion.

The top countries in consumer spending in 2022 will be China, the U.S., Japan, South Korea, and Germany. China will be far in the lead, growing 107 percent from 2017 to reach $62.4 billion, compared with the U.S.’s 97 percent growth from $15 billion to $29.7 billion.

Average spending per device will grow 23 percent by 2022, to reach $25.65.

Japan’s spend per device will top $140 by 2022 – nearly six times the global average, and by far the highest worldwide.

The U.S. will see its spending per device nearly double by 2022 when it tops $60, by comparison.

Games, of course, will remain the main source of consumer spending, but other apps will gain ground from 2017 to 2022. During this time, spend outside of games will increase by $75 billion. This will be due to subscription revenue growth in dating apps and music and video streaming apps, App Annie says.

The full report is available from App Annie’s website.

Encrypted messaging service Signal received a curious email from Amazon Web Services. The representative at Amazon is saying that Signal is violating the terms of service by using domain fronting to avoid censorship.

Signal isn’t necessarily the most popular messaging app. But chances are you’ve been using Signal technologies in the past. The organization behind it has partnered with WhatsApp to develop the end-to-end encryption protocol used in WhatsApp.

While this is a great improvement over unencrypted communications, WhatsApp is blocked in China and owned by Facebook. And Facebook leverages WhatsApp user data in most of the world for its other services. So Facebook knows your address book, the timestamps and recipients of all your messages — Facebook just can’t read the content of your messages.

That’s why Open Whisper Systems, the organization behind Signal, is also developing its own messaging app and service. It’s available on iOS, Android and desktop. Everything is open source so security experts can audit the code themselves.

And, you guessed it, just like WhatsApp, many countries try to block Signal’s servers to prevent encrypted communications. Egypt, Oman, Qatar, the UAE and Iran all tried to block Signal.

There are multiple ways to block a service. You can block it at the DNS level by asking all internet service providers to block a specific domain name. But that’s easy to circumvent by switching to another public DNS, such as Quad9 and 1.1.1.1.

You can also block it during the TLS handshake. Most of the popular websites and internet services now encrypt your traffic between your device and the server. That’s what the green lock icon and the letters “https://” mean in your browser. It means that a government can’t see what you’re doing with a particular internet server once you’ve established a connection with this server.

Unfortunately, when the connection starts, the server and your device perform a TLS handshake, which is currently unencrypted. Governments have been using this weakness to block online services in their countries.

Signal and other sensitive services have used a technique called domain fronting to bypass those restrictions. Since 2016, Signal has been relying on Google App Engine to disguise its TLS handshake. The app pretends to talk with google.com even though it’s actually talking with Signal’s servers.

Countries could either block access to google.com (and Signal) or give up. Signal remained available Egypt, Oman, Qatar and the UAE because they didn’t want to block google.com — the organization couldn’t use the same method in Iran because Google doesn’t operate in Iran.

Last month, Google stopped allowing domain fronting on Google App Engine. Signal tried to find an alternative and wanted to use Amazon CloudFront to disguise its traffic as a connection to Souq.com, Amazon’s marketplace in the Middle East.

But now, Amazon is also taking a stance against domain fronting, threatening to suspend Signal’s CloudFront account. It sounds like Signal doesn’t have a solution for now. So if you live in one of the countries I listed and can’t access Signal anymore, now you know why. It might be time to build your own VPN.

It seems curious that Silicon Valley companies claim to champion free speech at all costs but don’t want to help when it comes to circumventing censorship using domain fronting.

There’s a financial risk as some countries might end up blocking google.com or souq.com in order to block services that use domain fronting. Those companies defend free speech until it could potentially hurt the bottom line…

At Hulu’s Upfronts presentation this morning in New York, the company announced the launch of a new consumer-facing feature that lets you tell Hulu to stop suggesting content you don’t want to watch. The feature was teased previously at CES in January as something that was in the works.

The option will appear in the user interface, underneath the content suggestion. From here, you can tap a button that says “Stop Suggesting.”

“We want you to be in control of the experience. If you don’t like something, you should be able to tell us,” said Hulu’s Head of Experience, Ben Smith, announcing the new feature.

When Hulu’s app makes misguided recommendations, it’s a bit more in-your-face compared with other streaming services, like Netflix. That’s because Hulu’s main screen – called “Lineup” – is an algorithmically-derived list of personalized suggestions. But these suggestions can be off, at times. That’s especially true if you haven’t bothered to set up separate user profiles, or enabled ones for guests visiting your home – like the babysitter.

And then when the babysitter watches the Kardashians, you’re screwed. The suggestion for that or similar reality programming could then appear in your Lineup with no way to remove it.

That changes with the “Stop Suggesting” button, which Smith says is launching this month.

LG has done a really terrible job keeping the G7 ThinQ under wraps. But clearly the company doesn’t mind. Building up the hype cycle is clearly more important to the handset maker than any kind of big reveal. In addition to leaked images from nearly every angle, the company has already issued several official press releases ahead of today’s big unveil in New York.

As numerous photos have already suggested, LG’s the latest company to go all in on the notch. There’s a big one up top that will no doubt evoke Apple’s new flagship for many users — though the G7’s cutout is smaller than the iPhone’s, and the curved bottom bezel is a bit larger.

In a prebrief ahead of today’s announcement, a spokesperson for the company said LG anticipates that the notch will be a fact of life on high-end handsets for the next one and a half or two years, as phone makers work to figure out the ideal solution for going full screen. A display manufacturer itself, the company floated its own flexible display tech as a potential workable solution.

LG’s settling on this as the latest iteration of the “second screen” feature found on the V20. Here, however, that refers to FullVision — essentially an optional black bar that sits on either side of the notch, creating the appearance of a flush top bezel.

Notch aside, the screen is a 6.1-inch QHD+, which works pretty well in sunlight, courtesy of a boost button. LG’s also put some effort into the phone’s speakers, which, until recently, have been one of the most overlooked pieces of most phones. These get really loud — in a demo, we were able to hear music pretty clearly played across the room.

The real centerpiece is, as the name suggests, ThinQ. That’s the AI camera the company introduced at MWC with the latest iteration of the V30S. It’s a neat feature that’s some combination of flashy gimmick and genuinely useful feature. Essentially the system utilizes AI features to identify what it’s shooting and adjust accordingly. It also shows its work in the process, flashing seemingly random words on screen as it attempts to figure out what it’s looking at.

I didn’t get to spend much time with the device this time out, but it did a pretty admirable job figuring out when people were in the room. In all, the system has 18 shooting modes — around double the amount rolled out on the V30S. New additions include:

• Baby
• Pet (In addition to Animal)
• Beverage
• Snow
• Sky

Of note is the low-light camera, which “increases the brightness of each shot.” It’s not really on the level of Huawei’s latest offering, and does appear to still include a fair amount of noise on dark shots, however. The handset also gets a Portrait Mode, which brings a familiar approximation of the bokeh effect, introducing blur in the background to help frame the subject. Like Samsung’s offering, the effect can be adjusted after the fact.

The handset has a devoted side button, dedicated to Google Assistant. LG has no plans to let users assign different features, but will do so if enough users request it. Built-in far-field voice technology also helps Assistant hear voices in a noisy setting.

The Xerox/Fujifilm deal was never a given for any number of reasons. Now the planned takeover has been thrown into even more doubt, as Xerox CEO Jeff Jacobson and six board members are stepping down.

The move is considered a huge win for Carl Icahn and Darwin Deason, who have been attempting to kill the Fujifilm deal, which they believe undervalues Xerox. As Reuters notes, pair of activist shareholders won a court ruling in New York last week, which found a judge referring to Jacobson as “hopelessly conflicted” in his role as CEO.

“Following the court’s decision last week to enjoin Xerox’s proposed combination with Fuji Xerox,” Xerox wrote in a statement, “the Board considered the significant risk and uncertainty of a prolonged litigation, during which the company would be prohibited from negotiating with Fujifilm, as well as the potential instability and business disruption during a proxy contest.”

Icahn was, unsurprisingly less reserved in his comments. The billionaire investor compared the Fujifilm deal to multiple heightened television dramas to really hammer his point home.

“We believe Friday’s decision and this agreement mark a watershed moment for corporate governance generally and for Xerox specifically,” said Icahn. “With new leadership in place, we believe Xerox will be much better positioned to take advantage of multiple potential value-enhancing opportunities, including restructuring its relationship with Fujifilm, our supposed ‘partner’ whose conduct over the last year is more unbelievable than what you see on fictional TV shows like House of Cards or Billions.”

Icahn added that this is “an exciting time to be a Xerox stakeholder.” It certainly is for Icahn himself — in addition to former Novitex head John Visentin, who will step in as CEO, Icahn Enterprises CEO Keith Cozza will become Xerox’s chairman. Sounds like the story is going to get really good in season two. 

Dish’s Sling TV service is expanding its Cloud DVR to a wide variety of new devices.

Chrome browser, Chromecast, Xbox One, LG Smart TVs, and more recent models of Samsung Smart TVs (2016 and 2017 models) will all now support Sling TV’s Cloud DVR service.

For those of you who don’t know, Sling TV DVR is a digital DVR service that lets users record up to 50 hours of content, with an unlimited amount of time for storing those devices. In other words, recorded content in the digital DVR will never expire.

Of note: Sling TV’s DVR service costs an extra $5/month on top of the base package, which starts at $20/month.

The company recently announced that it has 2.2 million users on the service, making Sling TV the biggest internet-based live TV service.

By comparison, Hulu Live has 450,000 users and YouTube TV has 300,000 users, according to a report from January, while AT&T’s DirecTV Now has 1 million users.

To check out the full list of Sling TV’s DVR-supported devices, check out this information page.

Hulu now has over 20 million U.S. subscribers – that’s up from the 17 million-plus it claimed in January. The news of its subscriber growth is being delivered alongside a series of pitches to advertisers at the company’s Upfronts presentation in New York this morning, where it’s also touting its upcoming original series and detailing its new ad products. One of those will be of particular interest to Hulu’s users, too – the company will at last allow subscribers to download shows to watch offline.

This is a feature both Amazon and Netflix already support, the former as of fall 2015 and the latter since late 2016.

However, the way Hulu is going about offline content is a bit different.

Subscribers on both the ad-supported and no commercials plan will have the ability to download content for offline viewing – something people like to do when preparing for air travel or for daily commutes on public transportation where it’s difficult to get a signal, for example.

However, ad-supported plan subscribers will download commercials along with their shows.

This makes Hulu the first company in the industry to support downloads with advertising, it says. This also means customers won’t have the ability to fast-forward through these offline commercials – the advertisers truly have a captive audience for their content.

Hulu isn’t yet offering key details like which shows will be made available for offline viewing, or when the feature will launch beyond the “2018-2019 Upfront season.” [If this is mentioned later in today’s presentation, we’ll update].

It’s worth pointing out that when this feature launched on Netflix and Amazon, the focus was on offering downloadable original content. With the option to advertise against the content, though, there may be less resistance to the idea of offering an offline version.

Ad-supported downloadable content is only one of Hulu’s pitches to advertisers. Notably, the company will also begin offering dynamically inserted ads in the Hulu with With Live TV experience sometime later this quarter. This lets brands reach Hulu subscribers watching live sports, news and entertainment programming, and will initially launch across some cable networks on the platform.

The company is telling advertisers it will use Nielsen Digital Ad Ratings (DAR) for OTT to measure, guarantee and report campaign audience delivery across all desktop, mobile and connected devices. But the bigger message is that Hulu is more like traditional TV – 78 percent of Hulu’s viewing takes place in the living room on connected TVs, it says. And across platforms, engagement is up by over 60 percent.

Alongside the ad product news, Hulu is introducing a number of new series, including Four Weddings and a Funeral and Ramy, which join upcoming Hulu Originals Castle Rock, Hulu’s second project from J.J. Abrams and Stephen King set to premiere on July 25; Catch-22, from George Clooney and starring Kyle Chandler; The First, from Beau Willimon and starring Sean Penn; and Little Fires Everywhere, from Reese Witherspoon and Kerri Washington, based on the novel of the same name.

Hulu’s The Handmaid’s Tale will return for a third season, and Hulu will be the exclusive SVOD home for ABC’s well-received The Good Doctor. 

The company also struck its biggest kids and family deal to date with its first-ever multi-year deal with DreamWorks Animation. The deal will see Hulu becoming the exclusive streaming home to future DreamWorks Animation feature films including How to Train Your Dragon: The Hidden World, The Boss Baby 2 and Trolls 2, starting in 2019; as well as DreamWorks library films like Shrek, Shrek 2 and Shark Tale; plus other exclusive original series that will kick off in 2020.