Year: 2019

So, we’ve already announced that Anca Dragan, Alexei Efros, Hany Farid, Melonee Wise, Peter Barrett, Rana el Kaliouby, Arnaud Thiercelin and Laura Major will all be appearing at April’s big robotics show on April 18 at UC Berkeley (Early Bird sale is on now!)

This week we’ve got another big name to add to the list. Once again, we’ll be joined by none other than Marc Raibert.

As both founder and CEO for Boston Dynamics, Raibert been a principle force in pushing the limits for cutting edge robots. Developed as a pack robot for military applications, the company’s Big Dog has become both an important piece in the evolution of biologically inspired devices and a major online sensation.

Boston Dynamics has continued to innovate with the humanoid Atlas, wheeled robot Handle and the quadruped Spot. At our event last year, Raibert was joined on stage with the latest iteration of the SpotMini, which the company announced will become its first productized offering.

We’re excited to welcome Raibert — and a special robotic guest — back for this year’s event.

Early Bird tickets are on sale now for $249! Book today and you’ll save $100 before prices go up. You’ll join over 1000 engineers, researchers, entrepreneurs, and investors for this single-day event at UC Berkeley.

Students, grab your tickets for just $45 here.

In a surprise turn, Amazon has announced that it’s pulling out on plans to open one of two HQ2 locations in New York City. The move follows much push back from local government and citizens, who have pushed back on the company’s proposed Long Island City location, cited tax breaks and Amazon’s long-standing anti-unionization policies.

Amazon has offered a lengthy statement to TechCrunch, which also notes that it has no plans to re-open its search for a new location, instead sticking with already announced plans for Northern Virginia and Nashville.

Here’s the statement in full,

After much thought and deliberation, we’ve decided not to move forward with our plans to build a headquarters for Amazon in Long Island City, Queens. For Amazon, the commitment to build a new headquarters requires positive, collaborative relationships with state and local elected officials who will be supportive over the long-term. While polls show that 70% of New Yorkers support our plans and investment, a number of state and local politicians have made it clear that they oppose our presence and will not work with us to build the type of relationships that are required to go forward with the project we and many others envisioned in Long Island City.

We are disappointed to have reached this conclusion — we love New York, its incomparable dynamism, people, and culture — and particularly the community of Long Island City, where we have gotten to know so many optimistic, forward-leaning community leaders, small business owners, and residents. There are currently over 5,000 Amazon employees in Brooklyn, Manhattan, and Staten Island, and we plan to continue growing these teams.

We are deeply grateful to Governor Cuomo, Mayor de Blasio, and their staffs, who so enthusiastically and graciously invited us to build in New York City and supported us during the process. Governor Cuomo and Mayor de Blasio have worked tirelessly on behalf of New Yorkers to encourage local investment and job creation, and we can’t speak positively enough about all their efforts. The steadfast commitment and dedication that these leaders have demonstrated to the communities they represent inspired us from the very beginning and is one of the big reasons our decision was so difficult.

Unlike the other announced locations, Amazon’s plans for a Queens location have been the subject of criticism since day one, owing in part to deals that were brokered behind closed doors with Mayor Bill de Blasio. The city’s already shaky infrastructure and strained housing also came under scrutiny, as did the location of the proposed build, which had already been set aside for schools, affordable housing and parks, along with smaller commercial space. 

Amazon reps were grilled in multiple city council meetings, and met with statements like, “New York is a Union town,” by council members. Last week, the company was reported to be rethinking the move, but shook off the suggestion, telling TechCrunch, “We’re focused on engaging with our new neighbors – small business owners, educators, and community leaders. Whether it’s building a pipeline of local jobs through workforce training or funding computer science classes for thousands of New York City students, we are working hard to demonstrate what kind of neighbor we will be.”

A mere two days ago, de Blasio called the plan “mission critical.” For now, however, that mission appears to have failed.

Twitter has been secretly developing an enhanced camera feature that’s accessible with a swipe from the home screen and allows you to overlay captions on photos, videos, and Live broadcasts before sharing them to the timeline. Twitter is already used by people to post pictures and videos, but as it builds up its profile as a media company, and in the age of Snapchat and Instagram, it is working on the feature in hopes it will get people doing that even more.

Described in Twitter’s code as the “News Camera”, the Snapchat-style visual sharing option could turn more people into citizen journalists… or just get them sharing more selfies, reaction shots, and the world around them. Getting more original visual content into Twitter spices up the feed and could also help photo and video ads blend in.

Prototypes of the new Twitter camera were first spotted by social media consultant Matt Navarra a week ago, and he produced a video of the feature today.

He describes the ability to swipe left from the homescreen to bring up the new unified capture screen. After you shoot some media, overlays appear prompting you to add a location and a caption to describe “what’s happening”. Users can choose from six colored backgrounds for the caption and location overlay card before posting, which lets you unite words and imagery on Twitter for the first time to make a splash with your tweets.

Meanwhile, code digger and frequent TechCrunch tipster Jane Manchun Wong has found Twitter code describing how users should “Try the updated Twitter camera” to “capture photos, videos, and go live”. Bloomberg and CNBC had previously reported that Twitter was building an improved camera, but without feature details or screenshots.

Twitter confirmed to TechCrunch that it’s currently developing the new camera feature. A Twitter spokesperson told us “I can confirm that we’re working on an easier way to share thing like images and videos on Twitter. What you’re seeing is in mid-development so it’s tough to comment on what things will look like in the final stage. The team is still actively working on what we’ll actually end up shipping.” When asked when it would launch, the spokesperson told us “Unfortunately we don’t have a timeline right now. You could expect the first half of this year.”

Twitter has largely sat by as visual sharing overtook the rest of the social media landscape. It’s yet to launch a Snapchat Stories feature like almost every other app — although you could argue that Moments was an effort to do that — and it seems to have neglected Persicope as the Live broadcasting trend waned. But the information density of all the words on Twitter might make it daunting to mainstream users compared to something easy and visual like Instagram.

This month, as it turns away from reporting monthly active users, Twitter reported daily active users for the first time, revealing it has 126 million that are monetizable compared to Snapchat’s 186 million while Instagram has over 500 million.

The new Twitter camera could make the service more appealing for people who see something worth sharing, but don’t always know what to say,

Walmart’s tech incubator Store N°8 today launched its next startup, a VR merchandising company called Spatial&. The company offers VR experiences that enable customers to connect with merchandise, and is kicking things off by collaborating with DreamWorks Animation VR tour. At select Walmart locations across the U.S., Spatial& will set up a VR experience in the parking lot, allowing customers to visit DreamWorks’ “How to Train Your Dragon: The Hidden World” through VR. Afterwards, customers are directed to a branded, physical gift shop where they can make purchases.

The experience is meant to help DreamWorks market their film ahead of its February 22 release, while Walmart gets to hawk film merchandise to its customers.

It’s not all that different from the “exit through the gift shop” concept found at theme parks.

Upon entering the experience, customers are greeted by the film’s characters Ruffnut and Tuffnut, and are then led into a “dragon’s cave” where they’ll put on VR headsets and get seated in Positron motion VR chairs powered by the HP VR backpack.

The VR story they engage with will take them on a five-minute journey into the movie’s world, where they interact with other characters, including  Astrid, Hiccup, Toothless, Hookfang and more. During this experience, participants will have a multi-sensory encounter, thanks to hand tracking and 6DOF (6 degrees of freedom) in the Voyager VR motion chair.

When the experience wraps, customers are guided into a themed gift shop where they can buy merchandise like plush toys, action figures, DVDs, video games, and more.

Some merchandise from this collection will also be sold across 2,000 Walmart stores – not only those with the VR experience.

On the technology side, Spatial& and DreamWorks leveraged servers and workstations with Intel Xeon Scalable processors to stitch together high-res images and 360-degree VR videos. For the experience itself, the startup uses HP Windows Mixed Reality headsets, Omen by HP Mindframe Headsets, and PCs with Intel Core processors. Outside, parents can follow along with what their children are viewing via Intel-powered Omen by HP Gaming Laptops.

“We have set an extremely high bar for quality and innovation for the How to Train Your Dragon franchise, and our partners at Spatial& exceeded our expectations with their incredible work on this project,” said Abhijay Prakash, chief operating officer of DreamWorks Feature Animation, in a statement about the launch.“This latest Dragon film displays DreamWorks’ best in class creative abilities combined with state of the art advances in animation technology, and we are thrilled that this experience created by Spatial& lives up to that reputation while allowing fans to journey straight to the center of this unique world we’ve created for the film. It’s a truly exhilarating experience,” Prakash added.

Walmart says the experience will go live at 16 stores in the U.S., starting this weekend and continuing through early April.

Those locations include the following:

• Burbank, California (1301 N Victory Place) – February 15-16
• Pico Rivera, California (8500 Washington Boulevard) – February 17-19
• Anaheim, California (440 Euclid Street) – February 22-23
• San Bernardino, California (4001 Hallmark Parkway) – February 24-26
• Las Vegas, Nevada (5200 S Fort Apache Road) – March 1-2
• North Las Vegas, Nevada (6464 N Decatur Boulevard) – March 3-5
• Glendale, Arizona (5010 N 95th Avenue) – March 8-9
• Gilbert, Arizona (2501 S Market Street) – March 10-12
• San Antonio, Texas (8923 W Military Drive) – March 15-16
• New Braunfels, Texas (1209 S Interstate 35) – March 17-19
• Grand Prairie, Texas (2225 I-20) – March 22-23
• Allen, Texas (730 W Exchange Parkway) – March 24-26
• Sugar Land, Texas (345 Highway 6) – March 29-30
• Katy, Texas (1313 N Fry Road) – March 31-April 2
• Rogers, Arkansas (4208 S Pleasant Crossing Boulevard) – April 5-6
• Bentonville, Arkansas (406 S Walton Boulevard) – April 7-9

Spatial& is one of several tech startups being incubated by Walmart’s Store No. 8, which launched in 2017 to focus on retail innovation. Other businesses being incubated there include conversational commerce startup Jetblack, from Rent the Runway co-founder Jenny Fleiss; stealth startup Franklin from Wim Yogurt founder Bart Stein; and AI lab Project Kepler.

When you think about Infrastructure as a Service, you typically pay for a virtual machine that resides in a multi-tenant environment. That means, it’s using a set of shared resources. For many companies that approach is fine, but when a customer wants more control, they may prefer a single tenant system where they control the entire set of hardware resources. This approach is also known as “bare metal” in the industry, and today AWS announced five new bare metal instances.

You end up paying more for this kind of service because you are getting more control over the processor, storage and other resources on your own dedicated underlying server. This is part of the range of products that all cloud vendors offer. You can have a vanilla virtual machine, with very little control over the hardware, or you can go with bare metal and get much finer grain control over the underlying hardware, something that companies require if they are going to move certain workloads to the cloud.

As AWS describes it in the blog post announcing these new instances, these are for highly specific use cases. “Bare metal instances allow EC2 customers to run applications that benefit from deep performance analysis tools, specialized workloads that require direct access to bare metal infrastructure, legacy workloads not supported in virtual environments, and licensing-restricted Tier 1 business critical applications,” the company explained.

The five new products, called m5.metal, m5d.metal, r5.metal, r5d.metal, and z1d.metal (catchy names there, Amazon) offer a variety of resources:

Chart courtesy of Amazon

These new offerings are available starting today as on-demand, reserved or spot instances, depending on your requirements.

DigitalOcean started as an affordable but basic virtual private server offering with a pleasant user interface. Over the last few years, the company started adding features like object and block storage, load balancers and a container service. Today, it’s expanding its portfolio once again by launching a feature that was sorely missing in its lineup: a managed database service.

The first edition of these DigitalOcean Managed Databases only supports PostgreSQL, the popular open-source relational database. Later this year, it’ll add MySQL and Redis support (likely in Q2 or Q3). As for other databases, the company says that it’ll listen to customer feedback and use that to prioritize other offerings.

Like similar services from other vendors, Managed Databases promises to make life easier for developers. DigitalOcean users will be able to launch a database within a few seconds and the service then handles all the maintenance tasks, including updates. Like with the company’s other services, developers can either use a graphical user interface or the company’s API, in addition to third-party Terraform providers.

Daily backups are free and DigitalOcean promises end-to-end security of your data both at rest and in transit.

Here is what the pricing for the new service will look like:

“Our product development is driven by one vital question: How do we empower developers to do more valuable work in less time?,” said DigitalOcean’s vice president of Product, Shiven Ramji. “With Managed Databases, developers and their teams can focus on creating meaningful applications and sharing them with their communities, without the headache of having to manage the database infrastructure that enables the process.”

Good news for love-seekers this Valentine’s Day. In a bit of odd timing, users of the dating app Coffee Meets Bagel woke up this morning to find an email in their inboxes warning that their account information had been stolen by a third-party who gained unauthorized access to the company’s systems.

The email keeps most details about the situation vague, saying only that some data from users’ accounts “may” have been acquired by a third-party who gained access to a partial list of user details. It doesn’t say how that breach occurred, or how many users were affected.

This breach was discovered as part of a larger data dump of some 617 million account details, which recently went up for sale on the dark web. According to the seller, the stolen account databases came from a number of sites, including also Dubsmash, MyFitnessPal, MyHeritage, Whitepages, Animoto, HauteLook, 500px, and several others.

The Coffee Meets Bagel breach reportedly included 673MB of data taken in late 2017 and mid-2018. Earlier reports indicated that it could include a name, email, age, registration data and gender.

According to the Coffee Meets Bagel email to users sent out overnight, however, the affected information only included names and emails prior to May 2018.

The company also reminded users that it never stores any financial information or passwords, which means the impact of this particular breach is relatively minor. (In fact the most newsworthy thing about it could be why the company chose to disclose the breach today of all days!)

Coffee Meets Bagel says it’s now taking several steps to better protect its community going forward, including the hiring of forensic security experts to audit its systems and infrastructure, and its vendor and external systems. In addition, the company notes it’s still monitoring for suspicious activity and engaged with law enforcement about the incident. And it’s working to enhance its systems to better detect and prevent unauthorized access in the future.

Users were reminded to be extra precautious about any unsolicited communications that ask for personal data or direct you to a web page where personal data is collected. But the user passwords were not being proactively reset, according to this notice.

Coffee Meets Bagel isn’t the only dating app under attack as of late. This week, TechCrunch’s Zack Whittaker reported that many users were complaining their OKCupid accounts had been hacked, as well.

However, OKCupid denied a security breach had taken place. That means those account takeovers could be the result of hackers using login information they discovered by way of some other breach – that is, users had re-used the same email/password combination when signing up for OKCupid as had been leaked through another attack on another site.

We’ve asked Coffee Meets Bagel if it would disclose how many accounts were impacted and other details, and will update if the company responds or comments.

The full email from Coffee Meets Bagel is below:

Hello,

We recently discovered that some data from your Coffee Meets Bagel account may have been acquired by an unauthorized party. We would like to make sure you have the facts about what happened, what information was involved, and the steps we are taking to help protect you.

What happened?
On February 11, 2019, we learned that an unauthorized party gained access to a partial list of user details. Once we became aware, we quickly took steps to determine the nature and scope of the problem.

What information was involved?
The affected information only includes your name and email address prior to May 2018. As a reminder, we never store any financial information or passwords.

What are we doing
We have taken steps to protect our community, including the following:

• We have engaged forensic security experts to conduct a review of our systems and infrastructure.
• Vendor and external systems are being audited and reviewed to ensure there are no compliance issues or third party breaches.
• We continue to monitor for suspicious activity and we are coordinating with law enforcement authorities regarding this incident.
• We continue to make enhancements to our systems to detect and prevent unauthorized access to user information.

What you can do
As always, we recommend you take extra caution against any unsolicited communications that ask you for personal data or refer you to a web page asking for personal data. We also recommend avoiding clicking on links or downloading attachments from suspicious emails.

The security of your information is important to us, and we apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused you. As always, if you have any questions or need any additional information, please do not hesitate to contact us at contact@coffeemeetsbagel.com

 

Sales and marketing are steeped in data to explain just how well they are doing, but engineering, the department charged with creating the products these departments sell has lacked the tools to measure engineering effectiveness. Pinpoint wants to change that by making engineering a more data-driven endeavor. Today it announced a $13.5 million Series A round.

The round was led by Bessemer Venture Partners with participation from seed investors Storm Ventures, Boldstart Ventures, Bloomberg Beta, Slack Fund, Social Capital and Cherubic Ventures. That’s quite a lineup of investors for an early-stage startup.

Perhaps that’s because the company was founded by a couple of industry veterans, Jeff Haynie and Nolan Wright, who co-founded Appcelerator. That company was acquired by Axway in 2016. One of the issues the two founders observed running a company was the difficulty in measuring the effectiveness of their engineering group, and that there were a dearth of tools to help.

Sure if you were Facebook, Google, Apple or similarly large organization, maybe you could create such a product in-house, but the founders saw that engineering groups at most companies lacked a centralized, data-driven approach to understand how well the group’s efforts aligned with the broader goals of the organization. So they did what all good entrepreneurs do, they started a company to do just that.

Taking advantage of machine learning, the company built an application that taps into engineering tools like Jira and Github to manage, understand and even predict engineering outcomes. The approach doesn’t actually require engineers to do anything differently. They simply use their regular systems of organization and connect Pinpoint to them to gather data.

Team performance graph. Screenshot: Pinpoint

It wasn’t an easy tool to build because they needed actual data to train the machine learning models. The company used its own engineering efforts and those of several design partners to help launch the product. The founders also recognized that companies may be reluctant to move their engineering data to the cloud, so they came up with a solution, using an open source agent that sits on the customer’s systems, and only moves metadata to the cloud.

Pinpoint was founded in 2016. It’s based in Austin and currently has 25 employees. That is likely to increase fairly dramatically as they put today’s investment to use.

China’s largest car-hailing company is facing relentless pressure from all fronts. Beijing-based Didi Chuxing reportedly lost a staggering 10.9 billion yuan ($1.6 billion) in 2018, according to financial data that Chinese news site 36Kr obtained.

For some context, Uber posted a net loss of $939 million on a pro forma basis and an EBITA loss at $527 million during Q3 2018.

Didi has not responded to TechCrunch’s inquiry about its losses, but an internal letter leaked in September offers a glimpse at the depth of Didi’s troubles. According to the memo from founder and chief executive Cheng Wei, Didi had been operating in the red for six consecutive years and lost 4 billion yuan in the first half of 2018. At this moment, the transportation giant’s predicament appears to be multipronged.

Public backlash

The ride-booking app capped off 2018 with a bleak outlook after two female passengers were killed by their Didi drivers in separate instances, drawing ire of the government and triggered a nationwide backlash underpinned by a #DeleteDidi campaign that’s reminiscent of the #DeleteUber movement.

Didi responded with a fold of security measures, including stricter identity checks on drivers and a major reorganization to place customer safety ahead of growth. Hitch, the carpooling service that was complicit in both accidents and was popular among riders for its relatively cheap fares, is suspended indefinitely, a move that could exclude the more price-sensitive consumers.

Cash-burning model

Didi’s struggles had preceded the passenger murders. Cheng admitted in his memo that the company’s expansion was getting out of hand. “The expansion frenzy planted seeds of trouble and our internal system couldn’t keep up with our expansion.”

During the first six months of 2018, Didi shelled out about $1.7 billion in subsidies for drivers and steep discounts for passengers as competition intensified, Bloomberg reported citing sources. In the entire year, Didi burnt through a total of 11.3 billion yuan ($1.67 billion) on driver subsidies according to the 36Kr report.

Subsidies have played a key role in the rise of Didi and many other aspiring consumer-facing services in China. Investors dole out big bucks for early movers to gain market share rather than strive for profitability. That tactic has helped catapult tiny startups into billion-dollar businesses such as bike-rental service Mobike, but it has also led to the dramatic fall of some, Mobike’s peer Ofo being one alarming example.

Regulatory hurdles

Following Didi’s safety incidents, Chinese authorities hastened their pace to reinforce rules they had long laid out for the fledgeling industry, and some of the policies prove costly to uphold. For one, ride-booking drivers now need to obtain two licenses — one for the drivers themselves and the other for their vehicles to operate commercially.

The new requirement discourages part-time drivers as the costs of owning a commercial vehicle outpace the returns of taking up the gig work. Didi has tried to neutralize the constraint by offering test preps to drivers and teaming up with car rental businesses to equip drivers with the licensed vehicles. But these moves are set to incur new costs for Didi’s already money-burning business. The mobility startup was mulling a multi-billion-dollar initial public offering in 2018 that could value it upwards of $70 billion, Wall Street Journal reported last April.

New rivals

Another stumbling block for the firm is the swarm of new contenders eyeing a market long dominated by Didi after it swallowed up competitor Uber China. Neighborhood services marketplace Meituan, for instance, began to offer shared rides last year though it later put a hold on the capital-intensive new business to stay focused on its dining and hotel-booking units. On the other hand, traditional automakers, including a few that are state-owned such as BAIC, are charging full speed ahead by luring drivers with more favorable commission rates.

These newcomers have a long way to go before they could threaten Didi’s share, but Alibaba has a tool that can potentially help them grow. The ecommerce titan is not competing directly against Didi. Instead, its AutoNavi map service doubles as a ride-hailing platform that lets users book cars from a list of third-party operators. The model in effects levels the playing field for smaller players to challenge Didi, as they all compete on equal terms to court AutoNavi’s 1 billion daily active users.