Year: 2018

Thanks to KubeCon in Copenhagen, this week is all about containers — and especially Kubernetes. Given that Kubernetes was born out of Google’s internal container usage, it’s no surprise that Google also has a few announcements at the show. Maybe the most interesting of these is the launch of gVisor, a sandboxed container runtime that aims to ensure a secure isolation between containers.

As the name implies (at least if you live in this world), gVisor is a bit like a hypervisor that provides the isolation between traditional virtual machines, but for containers. That’s especially interesting to businesses that want to ensure the security of their container workloads, something that’s still a bit of an issue in the Kubernetes world.

“A growing desire to run more heterogeneous and less trusted workloads has created an interest in sandboxed containers — containers that provide a secure isolation boundary  between the host OS and the application running inside the container,” today’s announcement notes. “gVisor provides a strong isolation boundary by intercepting application system calls and acting as a guest kernel, all while running entirely in user-space.”

In addition to gVisor, Google is also launch support for Kubernetes in Stackdriver Monitoring. This new service, which is now in beta, will give developers a unified view of the state of their Kubernetes applications across clouds and om-premises environments. Outside of the Google Cloud, though, developers will have to do a bit of integration work to make everything run smoothly.

Nokia’s unsuccessful foray into digital health hardware and services looks like it is finally coming to an end. Today the company announced that it has entered into exclusive negotiations to sell the division to Eric Carreel, the co-founder and former chairman of Withings, after both Samsung and Google both reportedly also sniffed around. Withings formed the core of the division after Nokia acquired the French startup in 2016 for €170 million.

“Nokia announced a review of strategic options for the Digital Health business in February 2018. The planned sale is part of Nokia’s honed focus on becoming a business-to-business and licensing company,” the announcement said. The transaction is subject to terms agreed in the negotiations and completion of the information consultation with the Works Council of Nokia Technologies (France) SA., with the deal expected to close in late Q2 2018. Nokia’s licensing business is not included.

A Nokia spokesperson confirmed that the company is not disclosing any price at the moment. But as a measure of how small the business — which included smart scales, a heart and activity monitor and a smart thermometer — was for Nokia, and what kind of price multiple we might expect, last year, the digital health division pulled in a mere €52 million of revenues, while the rest of the company posted sales €23.2 billion.

The announcement today comes after months of speculation about the future of the business after a proposed layoffs and a leaked memo that admitted that the health operation was struggling and could see no way ahead to improve things, and announcing to staff that the company was starting a strategic review of the business.

“…Rather than only falling in love with our technology, we must be honest with ourselves,” the memo from Nokia’s chief strategy officer Kathrin Buvac said. “In its entirety, our Digital Health business has struggled to scale and meet its growth expectations. Currently, we don’t see a path for it to become a meaningful part of a company as large as Nokia.”

Those reportedly interested in acquiring the company included Google division Nest and Samsung, among French companies.

Nokia rebranded its Withings division as Nokia Digital Health in February 2017 and then pumped added extra investment and attention into boosting the division after shuttering other operations, namely another effort it had made into hardware, in VR cameras. The work did not pay off, however.

The news is the latest chapter in how Finland’s Nokia, once the world’s biggest mobile phone maker, has continued to struggle to find ways to forge ahead in using some of its extensive IP to dive into the consumer market.

Zinc, the London-based company builder tackling various societal problems, has picked up £3 million in seed investment as it readies its second cohort and mission. Backing the round is LocalGlobe, Niklas Zennström’s Atomico, U.K. university LSE, and a number of angel investors.

Launched late last year, Zinc helps build startups almost from scratch. Somewhat similar to Entrepreneur First, it focuses on recruiting potential founders — in this instance, experts in social science, technology, design and business — who through the 9-month programme form new companies.

Each Zinc cohort is tasked with tackling a specific mission around a broader theme. The debut programme, which was used to prove the model and is currently drawing to a close, set out to create startups that can tackle the problem of women’s mental and emotional health. This saw 55 prospective founders and entrepreneurs participate, resulting in 17 new companies being formed.

They span tech-enabled businesses working on problems as diverse as perinatal mental health, loneliness amongst the elderly, young women discovering sexual pleasure, stress-related physical conditions like IBS, women walking safely in cities, new talking therapies, and more. One criteria of Zinc-founded companies is that the resulting solution needs to be applicable globally, and that the problem being tackled affects a large enough number of people in the developed world ie ~100 million or more.

“We try to solve huge societal issues by mobilising talent, ideas and capital, and by taking a mission-led approach,” Ella Goldner, co-founder and GM of Zinc, tells TechCrunch. “Our programme does so by finding the best talent, surrounding them with smarts experts to help them build new tech-enabled scalable businesses, and help them develop products and services that tackle the issues in the context of the mission”.

Zinc’s second mission, which the company builder is currently recruiting for, will see it focus on the 150 million people living in places that have been hit hard by automation and globalisation over the last 20 or 30 years, as traditional industries in those areas have declined (e.g. coal, manufacturing, textiles, shipbuilding, ports and tourism).

“The founders on the programme are a diverse group of entrepreneurial creative individuals who are driven by the mission, and are keen to set up a new business. They have background in tech, the mission’s focus area, or in ops and marketing. The average age is 34 and they are truly diverse in terms of nationalities… We believe in people’s ability to take control over those issues and solve them, rather than relying on public sector to do that,” explains Goldner.

Suzanne Ashman Blair, partner at LocalGlobe, echoes that sentiment and says that Zinc has got off to a great start with its first mission. “To have an impact on society’s deepest challenges, we need to bring together entrepreneurial talent and capital. Zinc has demonstrated that its approach to addressing social problems through technology is a powerful combination”.

LSE’s investment in Zinc also sees it effectively become a founder of the burgeoning company builder. The London university is leading a new consortium of U.K. universities (Oxford, Manchester, Sussex and Sheffield) who will work with the Zinc programme to “turn research insight into new businesses that have commercial and social impact”.

To that end, in addition to Goldner, Zinc lists it founders as Paul Kirby (a former Head of the No 10 Policy Unit and previously a senior partner at KPMG), Saul Klein (co-founder of LocalGlobe and a serial tech entrepreneur), and Professor Julia Black (Pro-Director for Research at the London School of Economics and Political Science and a Board Member of U.K. Research & Innovation).

Meanwhile, Zinc says the new £3 million funding will enable it to plan future missions and replicate the success of its launch programme.

Nature, one of the most prestigious scientific journals in the world, has just announce plans to create a Machine Intelligence imprint, and researchers are not happy. The field has been doing fine with open-access journals — why clog it up with the paid-access model everyone has been trying to escape for decades? Over two thousand have signed a statement saying they won’t publish in it.

Academic publishing is a tumult right now, with open-access journals and proponents thereof battling with the old-guard prestige of the likes of Science and Nature — along with the fees from jealous keepers such as Elsevier and Springer. Meanwhile sites like Sci-Hub have worked to liberate the data held by paid journals, illegally of course, and become indispensable in the process.

The statement comes from Tom Dietterich at Oregon State University, founding president of the International Machine Learning Society.

“Machine learning has been at the forefront of the movement for free and open access to research… We see no role for closed access or author-fee publication in the future of machine learning research and believe the adoption of this new journal as an outlet of record for the machine learning community would be a retrograde step,” it reads.

The statement cites past opposition in the community to paid journals and the fact that all the major ones in existence charge nothing as well “The following list of researchers,” it continues, “hereby state that they will not submit to, review, or edit for this new journal.”

There are nearly 2,300 signatures from all over the world. Students, professors, researchers, architects, and engineers people the list; there are representatives of many major companies in the field: Google, Intel, Amazon, Microsoft, IBM; many of the world’s most august learning institutions can be found on it as well.

It’s not that machine learning is fundamentally incompatible with paid access, Diettrich told me in an email; rather, the field has grown to prominence so recently that free and open-access journals have just been the better option from the start.

“Our research community has been fortunate to develop an expectation of free and open access to published research, but many other areas of science and mathematics are moving in the same direction,” he wrote.

I asked if he thought Nature’s interest manifesting in this way indicated a healthy field. “It is a sign that Nature Publishing Group believes they can make money in this relatively young area of research,” he answered.

But the pledge seems like a widely supported one, he concluded: “My impression is that we have excellent representation from all of the major research labs in universities and companies.”

Nature may still draw papers because of its clout, but it looks like at least a significant number of researchers in this area will give it the cold shoulder. Are you among their number? Feel free to add your name to the list.

Oculus says that its new Go headset already boasts support for more than 1,000 titles out of the gate as of today. One of the most interesting of the small subset of those that I’ve taken a look at today has been the latest update for Bigscreen, which brings the previously PC-only VR desktop streaming platform to mobile with Oculus Go (Gear VR too).

The free app is launching in beta and there are still some performance issues to be sorted out, but the app ultimately does what it claims, streaming your PC’s display to the $200 Oculus headset, effectively bringing a much more capable machine into the small standalone headset.

Bigscreen is still driving plenty of updates but today the experience supports 1080p desktop streaming at 30 frames, a resolution and latency that is definitely best suited for streaming movies and videos from YouTube, not firing up a game of Fortnite. That functionality will be coming, however, as the team looks to bring 60fps desktop streaming to the Go.

That being said, there is full cross-compatibility between the desktop and mobile versions of Bigscreen with this release. The experience will definitely feel a little different without a tracked headset and controllers, but Oculus Go users will be able to dive in and chat with Vive, Rift and Windows MR users just the same.

Getting the remote desktop streaming feature on Go will require a little finagling for PC users who will also have to download the Bigscreen app in the Steam or the Oculus Store on desktop in order to fire up the app. From there they just need to open Bigscreen “in desktop mode” and punch the code that pops up into their Go headset. For now, remote desktop streaming is only open to PC users, Shankar says the startup is hoping to work on Mac support for the app later this year.

While Oculus launched a number of apps today at F8 focused on bringing users together in a social experience, none of them can do quite what Bigscreen does.

“The focus is just different,” founder Darshan Shankar tells TechCrunch. “We’ve been so much more focused on utilitarian value and providing something for people to do that they already love doing as opposed to just social for the sake of doing social.”

Bigscreen has raised $14 million in funding from Andreessen Horowitz, True Venture, Presence Capital and others for this mission of delivering the VR use cases that it sees users asking for. Though the company started four years ago, this is the startup’s first foray into mobile VR which has constituted the bulk of headset sales over the past few years.

The update is available now for Oculus Go and Gear VR users, support for Google Daydream is coming soon.

Beauty-in-a-box brand Birchbox has changed up its ownership structure.

The New York-based startup, which has raised almost $90 million in funding from noted venture firms like Accel Partners and First Round Capital, has a new majority owner in hedge fund Viking Global, sources confirm to TechCrunch.

First reported by Recode, Birchbox made some changes to its cap table after failing to find a suitable buyer. We are told that the details are still getting finalized, but that Viking is expected to take on a majority stake after investing about $15 million. Viking previously led Birchbox’s $60 million funding round in 2014.

Birchbox did not respond for comment. 

Birchbox has managed to become a household name amongst its targeted demographic of female millennials, but its business has faced challenges amidst growing competition. Ipsy, Glossybox, Sephora and Allure Magazine are amongst the many beauty sample box subscriptions that consumers can buy.

Its boxes retail for just $10 per month. And while they are able to find discounts and partnerships with beauty brands eager to partner with Birchbox, it can still be hard to keep distribution costs down, while also spending on sales and marketing to grow the business. Birchbox hopes that consumers will buy more full-sized products off of its website.

Recaps are not uncommon, but they are usually a sign that a startup is struggling. However, it is an opportunity for Birchbox to raise cash and remain in business while it figures out a longer-term plan.

Birchbox was founded in 2010 by Harvard Business alums Hayley Barna and Katia Beauchamp. Barna left Birchbox and is now an investor at First Round Capital. Beauchamp remains CEO.

Day 1 of Facebook’s F8 conference was packed with announcements and updates. Here are 10 big takeaways from Mark Zuckerberg’s keynote on Day 1. You can find full coverage and analysis of F8 here. 

1. Facebook announces a dating feature 

Your next fling could start on Facebook. The company announced a new set of dating features that it will start testing later this year. Users can opt in to create a dating profile visible only to non-friends who also opted into dating. Since it has more data on you than any other app, your matches could end up being a little more relevant.

2. A new privacy control called Clear History is in the works 

Facebook will launch Clear History, a new privacy feature allowing users to delete data Facebook has collected from sites and apps that use its ads and analytics tool. This means you can scrub some of your browsing history from Facebook’s data store. Mark Zuckerberg likened this to deleting cookies from your browser history.

3. Video chat and anti-bullying features are coming to Instagram 

Instagram is launching video chat. We don’t know what it looks like yet, but chances are it’s a straightforward feature that will expand on Instagram’s existing messaging tools. Instagram is also getting a new filter to protect users from bullying comments, and an improved Explore tab.

4. Facebook is reopening its app review process

Facebook will re-open its app review process following the pause it took after the Cambridge Analytica crisis – welcome news for developers.

5. Oculus Go goes on sale for $199

Oculus Go, Facebook’s cheap and capable VR headset, is now on sale. It costs $199 for the version with 32GB of onboard storage, and $249 for the 64GB variety.

6. Messenger gets a new look and chat translation 

Chat translation will roll out in Messenger through Facebook’s M Suggestions assistant. Messenger is also getting a cleaner look focusing on its core utility – chat.

7. Introducing 3D photos 

Facebook is bringing 3D photos to the News Feed. Chances are you’ll see them pop up in your friends’ status updates in the coming months.

8. WhatsApp’s Snapchat Stories clone hits a DAU milestone 

WhatsApp has snatched an international growth opportunity from Snapchat. WhatsApp Status now has 450 million daily active users.

9. AR camera effects comes to Instagram 

The augmented reality platform on Facebook has largely been hampered by the fact that it’s only on Facebook. Now, the AR camera effects platform is landing on Instagram, an audience devoted to photo-sharing.

10. WhatsApp is adding group video calling and stickers 

Group video calling and stickers are coming to WhatsApp. in the coming months, users can have at least four people on a single split-screen video call.

As recently as last week, Facebook was touting the growth of its Internet.org app Free Basics, but the program isn’t working out everywhere. As the Outline originally reported and TechCrunch confirmed, the Free Basics program has ended in Myanmar, perhaps Facebook’s most controversial non-Western market at the moment.

Its mission statement pledging to “bring more people online and help improve their lives” is innocuous enough, but Facebook’s Internet.org strategy is extremely aggressive, optimized for explosive user growth in markets that the company has yet to penetrate. Free Basics, an initiative under Internet.org, is an app that offers users in developing markets a “free” Facebook-curated version of the broader internet.

The app provides users willing to sign up for Facebook with internet access that doesn’t count against their mobile plan — stuff like the weather and local news — but keeps them within a specially tailored version of the platform’s walled garden. The result in some countries with previously low connectivity rates was that the social network became synonymous with the internet itself — and as we’ve seen, that can lead to a whole host of very real problems.

While the Outline reports that Free Basics has ended in “half a dozen nations and territories,” including Bolivia, Papua New Guinea, Trinidad and Tobago, Republic of Congo, Anguilla, Saint Lucia and El Salvador, Facebook told TechCrunch that only two international mobile providers have ended the program, leaving room for interpretation about how other countries ended their involvement and why.

As a Facebook spokeswoman told TechCrunch, Facebook is still moving forward with the program:

We’re encouraged by the adoption of Free Basics. It is now available in more than 50 countries with 81 mobile operator partners around the world. Today, more than 1,500 services are available on Free Basics worldwide, provided to people in partnership with mobile operators.

Free Basics remains live with the vast majority of participating operators who have opted to continue offering the service. We remain committed to bringing more people around the world online by breaking down barriers to connectivity.

Facebook confirmed to TechCrunch that Free Basics did indeed end in Myanmar in September 2017, a little over a year since its June 2016 launch in the country. The company clarified that Myanmar’s state-owned telecom Myanma Posts and Telecommunications (MPT) cooperated with the Myanmar government to shut down access to all free services, including Free Basics in September of last year. The move was part of a broader regulatory effort by the Myanmar government.

In a press release, MPT described how the regulation shaped policy for the country’s three major telecoms:

… As responsible operators, [MPT, Ooredoo and Telenor] abide by sound price competition practices – hallmarks of a healthy marketplace and to adhere to industry best practices and ethical business guidelines.

This [includes] compliance with the authority imposed floor pricing as set out in the Post and Telecommunications Department’s Pricing and Tariff Regulatory Framework of 28 June 2017, including refraining from behavior such as free distribution or sales of SIM cards and supplying services and handsets at below the cost including delivery.

In Myanmar, Facebook’s Free Basics offering ran afoul of the same price floor regulations that restricted the distribution of free SIM cards.

Elsewhere, Facebook’s Free Basics program is winding down for other reasons. Last fall, the telecom Digicel ended access to Free Basics in El Salvador and some of its Caribbean markets. Digicel confirmed to TechCrunch that it stopped offering Free Basics due to commercial reasons on its end and that the decision was not a result of any action by Facebook or Internet.org.

As the Free Basics program is part of a partnership between Facebook and local mobile providers, the latter can terminate access to the app at will. Still, it’s not clear if that was the case in all the countries in which the app is no longer available.

In 2016, India regulated Facebook’s free internet deal out of existence, effectively blocking Facebook’s access to its most sought-after new market in the process. Since then, vocal critics have called Facebook’s Internet.org efforts everything from digital colonialism to a spark in the tinderbox for countries dealing with targeted violence against religious minorities.

Still, according to Facebook, even as some markets dry up, the program is quietly expanding. In late 2017 Facebook added Sudan and Cote d’Ivoire to its Free Basics roster. This year, Facebook launched the initiative in Cameroon and added additional mobile partners in Columbia and Peru.

Myanmar’s access to Free Basics is now restricted, but Facebook indicated that its efforts to connect the country — and its 54 million newly minted or yet to be converted Facebook users — are not over.

Ron Gutman, the co-founder and CEO of HealthTap, a venture-backed medical advice startup, was reportedly elbowed out today by his board of directors. The reason, the board said in a letter to employees, was that it had finally heard too many complaints about Gutman’s behavior inside the company.

Recode published the news of his termination earlier, along with excerpts of an explainer provided to Gutman that alleges he “committed acts of intimidation, abuse, and mistrust, and that [he] repeatedly mistreated, threatened, harassed and verbally abused employees.”

“This leaves us with no choice but to fire you,” reads the letter. “The toxicity you introduced into the workplace ends now.”

The development may seem curious to those who followed Gutman’s earlier career. Back in 2011, Gutman was on the TED speaking circuit, talking passionately about the power of smiling and attracting a great deal of publicity in the process. His 2011 presentation has been watched nearly five million times; it later spawned a book, published by TED, called Smile: The Astonishing Powers of a Simple Act.

Gutman, a Stanford grad, has denied that he abused his employees in a public statement that reads: “The actions of the VCs are harmful to the Company and in violation of their duties. I will not stand for their effort to take control of the Company unfairly and to the detriment of the Company. I will continue to fight for HealthTap and for all of our employees, our customers and our users all over the world. My team and I remain committed to saving lives and help people live healthier happier longer lives.”

It’s not the first time that Gutman has found himself at the center of a controversy.

Nine years ago, Gutman sold an earlier startup of his, Wellsphere, to a much larger (and, for a minute, publicly traded) rival called HealthCentral, which at the time was a collection of consumer health and wellness information.

Terms of the deal were never disclosed, but plenty of complaints surfaced after the sale, by bloggers who claimed that Wellsphere had tricked them into agreeing to an “irrevocable, perpetual license” to use, make or sell whatever content they had posted to the company’s website. Why they found this so galling: To grow its “well” of content into something sellable, Wellsphere reached out to more than 1,700 medical bloggers, appealing to their self-perception as “true medical experts” and inviting them to publish even their previously posted material to its platform.

Gutman founded HealthTap the very next year, in 2010.

What happens to the company now is a bit of a question mark. HealthTap has raised nearly $40 million over the years, including from Mohr Davidow Ventures, Khosla Ventures, Mayfield and Eric Schmidt’s Innovation Endeavors. But it hasn’t raised fresh funding in five years — a sign, oftentimes, that investors aren’t prepared to throw more money at a company.

For now, says Recode, Gutman is being replaced by Bill Gossman, a software CEO whose LinkedIn profile shows that he also has been a longtime venture partner with Mohr Davidow. In the board’s letter to employees, it calls Gossman “the right leader for the company at this time.”

You can read the board’s letter in its entirety below:

Dear HealthTap Team,

The Board of Directors has decided to make a change in company leadership. As of this morning, Ron Gutman is no longer the President and CEO of HealthTap, nor is he employed by the Company in any capacity. He is also no longer a member of the Board of Directors.

After receiving concerning reports by employees about Ron’s conduct as CEO, the Board of Directors hired an outside law firm to conduct an investigation into these allegations. What we learned left us with no choice but to make this change, and we did so after taking the necessary steps from a corporate governance perspective.

Last evening the Board voted to appoint Bill Gossman as CEO and also elected him to the Board of Directors. He begins his position immediately. Bill is a tenured executive with a wealth of experience in enterprise software, consumer internet and mobile applications. Those of us who have worked with Bill in the past have witnessed his transparent, empowering leadership style, and we firmly believe he is the right leader for the company at this time.

There will be an all-hands meeting this morning at 9:30AM in Palo Alto, where you will get to meet Bill and hear about his near-term plans for the Company. You will also hear from the Board. We ask that employees in the San Francisco office join by video conference if they are unable to attend the meeting in person.

We are confident this change is the right thing to do and in the best interests of the Company. We want HealthTap to offer an atmosphere where employees are treated professionally and respectfully – and where they are rewarded for their contributions. We believe that by working together under Bill’s leadership, we can achieve HealthTap’s full potential.

Thank you for your continued hard work and dedication to HealthTap.

The BBC will start running ads in its podcasts, thanks to a partnership with podcast publishing and monetization company Acast.

Acast CEO Ross Adams told me that ads will start running later this week, with the BBC including “bumpers” today announcing the imminent ad launch.

“Podcasts are one way we’re reinventing BBC radio to engage younger audiences with our world class content,” said Bob Shennan, director of BBC Radio and Music, in the announcement. “We’re working with established and new talent to produce shows which are informative and entertaining as only the BBC can be. The BBC has been challenged to generate more commercial income to supplement the licence fee and this new deal will contribute to that.”

To be clear, the BBC will remain ad-free in the United Kingdom, where it’s supported by the aforementioned license fee. Adams said one of the things Acast could offer was the ability to make sure ads were only served outside the U.K. (and to account for edge cases like U.K. military bases in other countries).

Adams said Acast will also be providing the BBC with new data about how the podcasts are performing.

“We give them the data and the dashboard to start really doubling down and focusing on podcasting as a medium,” he said.

According the announcement, this will apply to all BBC podcasts outside the U.K. (subject to rights restrictions), including Global News, The Assassination, World Business Report and Radio 4’s In Our Time. Most podcasts will have a single 30-second ad at the beginning, then another at the end.