Month: June 2019

Netflix Hack Day, the company’s internal hackathon, has a habit of producing some amazing gems — like a brain-controlled interface, a Fitbit hack that shuts off Netflix when you fall asleep, a Netflix app for the original NES, and a way to navigate the Netflix app with Face ID and ARKit, to name a few. At this year’s Netflix Hack Day, employees ventured into areas like voice technology and haptics — the latter, so your phone could vibrate right along with the on-screen action, among other things.

Project Rumble Pack, as the hack that used haptics was called, takes inspiration from mobile gaming. Some games vibrate, which allows players to feel the action — like a bouncing ball, a car on a race track, an object getting hit or destroyed, and so on.

Similarly, Project Rumble lets you feel the action in a scene from a show or movie — like a fight, battle or big explosion. (Imagine a Michael Bay movie with Rumble Pack turned on!) The team behind the hack, Hans van de Bruggen and Ed Barker, demoed haptics in an episode of Voltron where a huge explosion makes the phone shake in your hands.

The hack was created by syncing Netflix content with haptic effects using Immersion Corporation technology.

Another hack called The Voice of Netflix, taught Netflix to speak using the voice of Netflix’s favorite characters. The team trained a neural net to find words in Netflix’s content, which could then be used to create new sentences on demand.

A third favorite was TerraVision — a practical hack that sounds like a business opportunity.

The hack lets filmmakers drop a photo of a look like they like for a film location into an interface, then get back the closest results from a library of location photos. The hack used a computer vision model trained to recognize places for its reverse image search functionality.

The final highlight was a silly hack that plays “walk-out music” — like the music that kicks in when Oscar speeches go too long — when someone overstays their allotted time in a booked conference room.

Sadly, many of Netflix’s hacks don’t tend to escape the confines of the hackathon itself. But they can inspire real-world projects in other ways, and help to keep the creativity flowing.

An overview of this year’s Netflix Hack Day, which focused on Netflix’s studio efforts, is below.

Carnegie Mellon researchers working with peers from the University of Minnesota have made a big breakthrough in brain-computer interface (BCI) and robotic technology: They’ve developed a way for a person to to control a robot arm with their minds – with no surgery or invasive procedures required to make it possible.

The mind-controlled robot in this experiment also showed a high degree of motor control, as it’s able to track a computer cursor as it moves across a screen. This is obviously a huge step forward in the field, since it proves the viability of controlling computers with your brain more generally, which could have all kinds of potential applications, not least of which are providing people with paralysis or other kinds of disorders that affect movement an alternative way to operate computerized devices.

To date, successful, highly precise demonstrations and executions of BCI tech in people has depended on systems that incorporate brain implants, which pick up the signals from inside the user. Implanting these devices is not only dangerous, but also expensive and not necessarily fully understood in terms of their long-term impact. This has led to them not being very widely used, which means only a few people have been able to benefit from their impact.

The CMU and University of Minnesota research team’s breakthrough is to develop a system that can deal with the lower signal quality that comes from using sensors that are used outside of the body applied to the skin instead. They were able to employ a combination of new sensing and machine learning technologies to grab signals from the user that are from deep within the brain, but without the kind of ‘noise’ that typically comes with noninvasive techniques.

This groundbreaking discovery might not even be that far away from changing the lives of actual patients – the research team intends to start clinical trials soon.

Many roles inside of startups and tech companies are clear: marketers market, salespeople sell, engineers engineer. Then there are the roles like “product manager” that seem obvious on the surface (product managers “product,” right?) but in reality are very fuzzy roles that can be highly variable across different companies.

A few weeks ago, TechCrunch editor Jordan Crook interviewed J Crowley, who is head of product for Airbnb Lux and was formerly at Foursquare. Crowley came up in the consumer product world without a technical background, and he spoke to overcoming some of his own insecurities to become a leading product thinker in the Valley.

This week, I wanted to offer another perspective on product from Anjul Bhambhri, who is Vice President, Platform Engineering at Adobe, where she and her team conceived Adobe’s new Experience Platform for real-time customer experience management.

Across Bhambhri’s more than two decade career straddling the line between software engineering and product, she has worked on deeply technical, enterprise projects at Sybase and Informix as startups, big data infrastructure at IBM, and now at Adobe.

We discuss the challenges and opportunities of moving from an engineering career into product (and management more generally) as well as the ways she thinks about building compelling products that are sold B2B.

This conversation has been condensed and edited for clarity

Scaling out product after product

Danny Crichton: Anjul, thanks for joining us. One of the major initiatives that we’ve been doing as part of Extra Crunch is to interview experts in their fields, talking about how they go about doing their job, and how you think about the decisions that come up on a day-to-day basis in the work that you do. So to start, I would love to talk a little about your background.

Anjul Bhambhri: Very nice to meet you, and happy to share my journey, Danny. I have been in the software industry now for really almost 30 years. I’m an electrical engineer, and basically, my entire career has been in data, databases, and big data analytics.

Apple this morning announced a “voluntary” recall of MacBook Pro batteries due to potential overheating and safety risk. The recall only applies to mid-2015 15-inch MacBook Pros with Retina displays. As the company notes in a press release, these models were primarily sold between September 2015 and February 2017.

Concerned users can see if their systems qualify for replacement by checking the Apple Menu in their system finder. The company is hosting a page where they can enter their serial number to see if it’s covered here.

Developing…

We’re nearing the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 Moon landing on July 24, and to celebrate, there’s a new interactive augmented reality app called 321 LAUNCH that will bring a faithful recreation of the launch to your mobile device, and any surface you happen to have to hand.

Their are actually two AR experiences launches as part of this project, including the launch simulator that will start on July 16th and provide eight days of live broadcast content until the actual launch day of the 24th. The other will be part of the USA TODAY app, since USA TODAY is putting together the broadcast along with FLORIDA TODAY. This embedded AR content will focus on educational material about the technology behind NASA’s Apollo program, including the Saturn V rocket that brought the lander to the Moon.

The 321 LAUNCH app is available now, and provides a launch simulation ahead of the live broadcast that lets you follow step-by-step as the rocket is assembled, moved to the pad and ultimately launched. Helpful descriptions provide a great summary of what’s happening at each step, and you can do this anywhere you find a flat surface.

It’s a great way to easily and accessibly experience the launch and learn more about the technology NASA developed to make it happen, along with learning some general info about spaceflight and what goes into launching any rocket, plus it’s a free download.

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1. Slack prices IPO at $26 per share

Slack is debuting on the New York Stock Exchange today. Trading hasn’t opened yet as I write this, but The Wall Street Journal reports that the company has set a price of $26 per share.

The enterprise communication company is pursuing a direct listing, eschewing the typical IPO process in favor of putting its current stock on to the NYSE without doing an additional raise or bringing on underwriter banking partners.

2. Waymo takes its self-driving car ambitions global in partnership with Renault-Nissan

Waymo has locked in an exclusive partnership with Renault and Nissan to research how commercial autonomous vehicles might work for passengers and packages in France and Japan.

3. UK age checks for online porn delayed after bureaucratic cock-up

Digital minister Jeremy Wright said the government failed to notify the European Commission of age verification standards it expects companies to meet. Without this notification, the government can’t legally implement the policy.

4. iRobot acquires education startup Root Robotics

Root Robotics is the creator of an eponymous coding robot, a two-wheeled device designed to draw on whiteboards and other surfaces, scanning colors, playing music and otherwise playing out coding instructions.

5. SaaS data protection provider Druva nabs $130M, now at a $1B+ valuation, acquiring CloudLanes

Druva has made a name for itself as a provider of cloud-based solutions to protect and manage IT assets.

6. Why all standard black Tesla cars are about to cost $1,000 more

Tesla will start charging $1,000 for its once-standard black paint color next month, according to a tweet by CEO Elon Musk.

7. Tally’s Jason Brown on fintech’s first debt roboadvisor and an automated financial future

We sat down with Tally’s founder and CEO Jason Brown to discuss a new funding round, Tally’s growth strategy and the company’s vision for an automated financial future. (Extra Crunch membership required.)

You surely know the whole deal about carts and horses by now. When Samsung’s first 5G handset, the Galaxy S10 5G, arrives on Sprint tomorrow, users will be able to get those blazing fast mobile speeds in all of four markets: Atlanta, Dallas, Houston and Kansas City.

Those all launched last week, after the arrival of the carrier’s first 5G handset, LG’s V50 ThinQ. The good news is that a number of the biggest cities in the country will be getting coverage in “coming weeks,” including Chicago, Los Angeles, New York City, Phoenix and Washington D.C.

The other good news, I guess, is that you can still use the phone in the rest of the country, albeit with 4G speeds. Of course, with an eye-popping unlocked starting price of $1,300, you’re probably not going to want to spend much of your time on LTE with the rest of us peasants. For those who prefer not to pay all up front, plans start at $40.28 a month.

Sprint joins Verizon and AT&T, which got the 5G Galaxy back in May and June, respectively.

Fintech startup Brex went from 0 to a valuation of $1 billion in less than two years. It is a fascinating company, and so is Brex’s co-founder and CEO Henrique Dubugras. He’s coming to TechCrunch Disrupt SF to tell us more about the company’s explosive growth.

Brex first started with a corporate card for startups. Compared to legacy corporate cards, there are a ton of benefits. First, it’s easy to sign up to Brex as the company doesn’t require any personal guarantee or security deposit.

Second, you instantly get a virtual card that you can use for online subscriptions and other online purchases. After a few days, you receive a good old plastic card that you can use anywhere around the world — there’s no foreign transaction fees.

And it’s not just about a better on-boarding experience. Brex is a great way to access credit as the credit limit is around 10 times higher than the credit limit of traditional corporate cards. At the end of the month, all expenses are consolidated.

Given that Brex attended Y Combinator and is a good product for startups, it became an instant hit in Silicon Valley. More recently, the company created cards for other verticals, such as life sciences companies and e-commerce companies.

And the company raised a new funding round last week — Brex is now valued at $2.6 billion.

This isn’t Henrique Dubugras’ first startup. Originally from Brazil, Dubugras created payment company Pagar.me when he was just 16. He sold the company after reaching $1.5 billion in transaction volume.

He then enrolled at Stanford University but didn’t stay long. He left school after eight months to found Brex. And I’m quite curious to hear how he knew for sure that it was the right decision when Brex was still just an idea.

Buy your ticket to Disrupt SF to listen to this discussion and many others. The conference will take place on October 2-4.

In addition to panels and fireside chats, like this one, new startups will participate in the Startup Battlefield to win the highly coveted Battlefield cup.

Machine learning is the holy grail of data analysis, but unfortunately, that holy grail oftentimes requires a PhD in Computer Science just to get started. Despite the incredible attention that machine learning and artificial intelligence get from the press, the reality is that there is a massive gap between the needs of companies to solve business challenges and the availability of talent for building incisive models.

YC-backed Intersect Labs is looking to solve that gap by making machine learning much more widely accessible to the business analyst community. Through its platform, which is being launched fully publicly, business analysts can upload their data, and Intersect will automatically identify the right machine learning models to apply to the dataset and optimize the parameters of those models.

The company was founded by Ankit Gordhandas and Aaron Fried in August of last year. In his previous job, Gordhandas deployed machine learning models to customers and started working on a tool that would speed up his work. “I actually realized I could build a version of the tool that was a little more advanced,” he said, and that work ultimately led to the foundation of Intersect Labs. He linked up with Fried in October, and the two have been working on the platform since.

Intersect’s goal is to move analysts from purely retrospective analysis to creating models that can predictively determine business strategy. “People who live in SQL and Excel, they are really good at pulling the data of the past, but we are giving them the superpower of seeing the future,” Gordhandas explained. “All you need is your historical data, upload to our platform, and answer two questions.”

Ankit Gordhandas and Aaron Fried of Intersect Labs. Courtesy of Intersect Labs.

Those questions essentially ask what the model should predict (the outcome variable). From there, Intersect begins by cleaning up the data and ensuring that the various columns are properly scaled for data analysis. Then, the platform begins constructing a range of machine learning models and evaluating their performance against the target output. Once an ideal model is identified, customers can integrate it into their other systems through a REST-style API.

What’s interesting here is that Intersect can get better and better at identifying models over time based on the increasing diversity of datasets that it gets access to. Plus, as researchers identify new models or ways to tune them, the platform can potentially proactively improve the models it had previously identified for its customers, ensuring that they stay at the cutting edge of the field.

Today, the platform can handle one table of standard rows and columns for processing. Gordhandas said that the company intends to expand in the future to “image processing, audio processing, video processing, unstructured data processing” so that the platform can be applied to as diverse a set of data sources as possible

Gordhandas says that Intersect is attempting to sit in the middle of more specialized machine learning platforms that are limited to hyper-focused niches, while also offering more analytical power than comparably simpler solutions.

Certainly the space has seen a proliferation of options. New York City-based Generable (formerly Stan) uses Bayesian modeling and probabilistic programming to improve drug discovery, while Mintigo uses AI modeling to improve customer engagement. A huge number of other startups target different stages of the data analysis pipeline as well.

In the end, Intersect hopes to make these tools more widely accessible. The company has a couple of early customers already, and is going through the Y Combinator accelerator this batch.

Google has been steadily updating its tools for businesses looking to reach more customers across Google’s platforms, including Search and Google Maps. Last year, the company took on Facebook Pages with a feature that let users “follow” and message businesses directly, as well as be updated about promotions, sales, and other events. Today, Google is rolling out a host of other tools for Google My Business, focused on attracting customers and encouraging follows.

The suite of tools known as Google My Business was first introduced five years ago, as a way for businesses with a Google presence to have a one-stop shop for updating their business information online, add photos, read reviews, and — at the time — use Google+. While the latter has since shut down, Google is still competing with Facebook in its own way.

But now, instead of building out a vast social network of its own, it’s focused on helping businesses reach customers through Google’s most-used platforms.

Already, customers could “follow” a business to track its updates in the new “For You” tab on Google Maps. It’s very much Google’s version of liking a Facebook Page, then getting updates in a feed. Meanwhile, businesses could use the new Customers tab to read reviews and respond to inquires. They can also post to their business profile on Google.

Today’s update includes a handful of other tools for making those profiles more appealing.

For example, businesses can now add a logo to their profile, upload photos that are then displayed in a new dynamic module on their profile (and soon with captions), and set a profile cover photo. Again, more features to rival Facebook Pages.

Businesses can now also claim a short name and URL for their business so they can more easily direct people right to their profile page.

In a few more months, customers will be able to search Google Maps by these short names, as well.

Also new today are welcome offers. This allows a business to reward a new customer for following them by offering them a discount or some kind of deal.

In addition to the new features, Google is today launching a Marketing Kit website where businesses can order free stickers and posters to place at their retail location, and download assets for social posts, among other things.

As a part of this launch, Google is highlighting the top 5% of businesses in a given category as with a “Local Favorite” designation. These businesses will later this summer be able to order digital and physical badges of honor, if they make the cut.

Google says there are now over 150 million businesses using the Google My Business platform, since its 2014 launch.

“We hope that these more descriptive profiles not only help consumers quickly find the business that best suits their needs, but also help businesses stand out and express what unique about them,” explains Google Business Senior Product Manager, Amir Fish, in today’s announcement. “We’re committed to helping businesses succeed on Google and are excited to keep improving the experience for all people on Maps and Search,” it says.