Year: 2019

Sling TV’s growth has slowed dramatically as the competitive landscape for live TV streaming services has heated up. Despite this, the Dish -owned streaming service remains ahead of rivals in terms of subscriber count – largely due to it being first to market with streaming TV. Dish said today it closed out the year with 2.417 million Sling TV subscribers. That puts it ahead of AT&T’s DirecTV Now, which ended 2018 with 1.6 million subscribers.

It’s also more than newcomers like YouTube TV and Hulu with Live TV. The latter topped 1 million subscribers this past fall. YouTube TV doesn’t report its numbers, but had an estimated 800,000 subscribers as of last July. It’s likely neck-and-neck with Hulu Live TV at this point.

Dish reported its Sling TV numbers as a part of its Q4 2018 earnings, which also indicated that Sling TV is nowhere near making up for the subscriber loss from Dish’s satellite TV service. The company lost 1.125 million satellite TV subscribers during its fiscal 2018, up from the 995,000 it lost the year prior.

Meanwhile, Dish added a net gain of 205,000 Sling TV subscribers in 2018. That’s down from the 711,000 added in 2017 and the 878,000 added in 2016.

The company closed out the quarter with 12.32 million total pay TV subscribers, including 9.90 million Dish TV subscribers and 2.42 million Sling TV subscribers, it said.

In addition to the increased competition from other streaming services and a price increase, Dish’s carriage disputes have also impacted Sling TV.

The company no longer carries Univision on Dish or Sling TV. Plus, HBO and Cinemax left Dish and Sling TV on October 31, due to a dispute with the premium networks’ new owner, AT&T.

The move to drop HBO and Cinemax had already taken its toll on Sling TV in Q3, when Dish reported a net add of only 26,000 new Sling TV subscribers for the quarter.

In the months since, Sling TV has been trying new tactics to attract customers – including rolling out free content to non-subscribers, offering a la carte subscriptions that don’t require a core programming package, and, most recently, launching personalized recommendations.

Unfortunately for Sling TV, these moves may not be enough. And things won’t get better in 2019 as a number of new streaming video services compete for customers’ dollars – like those from Time Warner, Apple, and Disney.

Prosecutors have brought charges against a former Air Force officer for allegedly spying for Iran, the Justice Department confirmed Wednesday.

Monica Witt, a former Air Force counter-intelligence officer, is accused of defecting to Iran in 2013, after leaving the military in 2008 after more than a decade’s service and later working as a defense contractor.

Prosecutors said the officer, who according to the unsealed indictment had the highest level of top secret clearance, disclosed the details of a highly classified intelligence-gathering program that involved an intelligence operation against “a specific target.” Witt is also accused of disclosing the true identity of a U.S. intelligence officer to the Iranian Revolutionary Guard, which conducts the country’s cyber-operation, after she stopped working for the U.S. government.

Witt, a former Texas resident, first traveled to Iran in 2012 to attend a conference, which is where prosecutors allege she was recruited.

FBI executive assistant director for national security Jay Tabb said the indictments follow “years of investigative work,” adding that her alleged actions “could cause serious damage to national security.”

A previously released FBI missing persons report asking for information regarding Monica Elfriede Witt. (Image: FBI/supplied)

An arrest warrant was issued for Witt, who is still believed to be in Iran.

Prosecutors also charged four other Iranian nationals accused of working for the Revolutionary Guard — Mojtaba Masoumpour, Behzad Mesri, Hossein Parvar and Mohamad Paryar — with cyber-offenses relating to targeting U.S. government agents who once worked with Witt.

Prosecutors said the “skilled cyber actors” targeted Witt’s former colleagues with malware, which allowed the hackers to spy on the victims’ webcams and keystrokes.

Officials said that the hackers “tested its malware and gathered information from target computers or networks, and sent spearphishing messages to its targets.” In one case, prosecutors said the hackers created a fake Facebook account of a former colleague of Witt’s, which resulted in several of the targets to accept the fake account’s friend requests.

The government also issued sanctions against two companies, including New Horizon, which sets up the annual conference which Witt attended, for providing financial and technical support to the Revolutionary Guard. Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin said it took the action “against malicious Iranian cyber actors and covert operations that have targeted Americans at home and overseas as part of our ongoing efforts to counter the Iranian regime’s cyber attacks,” specifically attempts to install malware to compromise the computers of U.S. personnel.

A long-time London-based entrepreneur re-surfaces today with the launch of Numan a new kind of subscription business, with a rather unusual approach to a very old problem.

Sokratis Papafloratos (pictured) is one of the more ‘serial of serial’ European entrepreneurs. He was one of the first investors in Calm.com the mindfulness sleep and meditation site and app which recently attained Unicorn status. He also founded TrustedPlaces, the UK’s earliest and oldest local reviews site, which was Acquired by Yell Group Plc; family-photo-sharing platform, Togethera (which shuttered) and Secret Escapes, one of the UK’s first members-only travel company.

Papafloratos is now turning his attention to a tricky subject for men: erectile dysfunction (ED).

The startup is backed by, it says, a group of top-tier investors, led by Vostok New Ventures (who led the round for Voi and are significant investors in Babylon Health). ‘Health’ is where we get some more clues.

If you are familiar with businesses like Birch Box which sends women clothes on a subscription basis, you’ll be familiar with Numan. This online platform will aim to promote accessible medical remedies for ED whilst also building a brand and story-telling around health issues affecting men’s self-esteem and the lifestyle choices they make that might affect their condition.

While the early strategy will involve pharmaceuticals on subscription, the longer term play, says Papafloratos, will be the offer of direct-to-consumer medical products to help control the symptoms of ED, along with online support from healthcare professionals. It will also involve editorial content to help men and women understand the issue. Eventually, this could be a sort of “Babylon Health for Men’s Health”. But for now, the MVP involved drugs and content.

In case you are unaware, Erectile Dysfunction is the inability to get and maintain an erection, a condition that appareently affects two-thirds of men in the UK at any one time. It has been linked to mental health and lifestyle factors, such as anxiety, stress, alcohol and relationships. That means Numan will automatically have an audience, perhaps embarrassed by their predicament, who probably would rather look online for solutions than go for therapy or medical help.

Treatment will be offered in the form of generic solutions, such as Sildenafil and soon Tadalafil, and Viagra Connect. All medication provided by Numan is licensed for sale in the UK by the Medicines and and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA), which also oversees the authorisation of the numan.com to sell medicines online.

By selecting a treatment on the Numan homepage, consumers will be able to create an account, complete a short questionnaire covering symptoms and medical history. Then a member of Numan’s qualified clinical team will assess their suitability for the treatment. Once approval is granted, a prescription is created and the tablets are shipped and delivered to within 48 hours.

Numan next plans to expand its health and grooming offering to include skin and hair treatment for men.

Papafloratos says: “We’re not just providing an online pharmacy though. We’re putting real emphasis on providing you with the knowledge you need to make the right decisions for you. So we’re releasing The Book of Erections – an in-depth guide on how your erections come about, or sometimes don’t and what you can do about it. We’re also supporting that with in-depth information on our blog.”

He says the startup ran a survey of 1,000 men and 1,000 women in the UK earlier this year and found that from the men who reported having erectile dysfunction symptoms, only 42% sought help on the issue.

Slack has become a critical communications tool for many organizations. One of the things that has driven its rapid success has been the ability to connect to external enterprise apps inside of Slack, giving employees what is essentially a centralized workhub. This ability has led to some unintended consequences around formatting issues, which Slack addressed today with two new tools, Block Kit and Block Kit Builder.

Block Kit lets developers present dense content in a much more visually appealing way, while Block Kit Builder is a prototyping tool for building more attractive apps inside Slack. The idea is to provide a way to deliver content inside of Slack without having to do work-arounds to make the content look good.

Before and after applying Block Kit. Screen: Slack

Bear Douglas, who is Slack’s director of developer of relations, says developers have been quite creative up until now when it comes to formatting, but the company has been working to simplify it. Today’s announcement is the culmination of that work.

“Block Kit makes it easier for people to quickly design a customized app in Slack. We’ve launched a no-code builder that will let people design the messages that they show inside Slack,” she explained.

She said, that while this tool is really designed for people with some programming or Slack admin-level knowledge, the ultimate goal is to make it easy enough for non-technical end users to build apps in Slack, something that is on the road map. What enhancing these tools does, however, is show people just what is possible inside of Slack.

“When people see Block Kit in action, it is illuminating about what can be done, and it helps them understand that it doesn’t just need to be your communications center or [something that pings you] when your website blows up. You can actually get work done inside of Slack,” she said.

One other advantage of using Block Kit is that apps will display messages consistently, whether you are using the web or mobile. Prior to having these tools, work-arounds might have looked fine on the web, but the spacing might have been off on mobile or vice versa. Block Kit lets you design consistent interfaces across platforms.

Among the tools Slack is offering, none is actually earth shattering, but in total they provide users with the ability to format their content in a way that makes sense using common design elements like image containers, dividers and sections. They are also offering buttons, drop-down menus and a calendar picker.

Both of these tools are available starting today in the Block Kit hub.

Johnson & Johnson’s robotic surgery and medical device division, Ethicon, is dropping $3.4 billion in cash to pick up Auris Health, a developer of robotic diagnostics and surgical devices initially focused on detecting and treating lung cancer.

The healthcare giant said an additional $2.35 billion in payouts may be possible if Auris hits certain milestones.

Auris’ acquisition is likely a windfall for investors including Lux Capital and Coatue Management, which both invested as part of a whopping $280 million round the company closed two years ago.

Founded by serial entrepreneur Fred Moll, whose previous companies included the 22-year-old, publicly traded Intuitive Surgical, a robotic surgical systems manufacturer now worth around $61.4 billion, and Hansen Medical, a company that developed tools to manipulate catheters; Auris recently received approval from the Food and Drug Administration for its novel, robotic approach to surgery.

Last year, the company unveiled its Monarch platform, which takes an endoscopic approach to surgical procedures that is less invasive and more accurate to test for — and treat — cancer.

“A CT scan shows a mass or a lesion,” Dr. Moll said in an interview at the time. “It doesn’t tell you what it is. Then you have to get a piece of lung, and if it’s a small lesion. It isn’t that easy — it can be quite a traumatic procedure. So you’d like to do it a very systematic and minimally invasive fashion. Currently it’s difficult with manual techniques and 40-percent of the time, there is no diagnosis. This is has been a problem for many years and [inhibits] the ability of a clinician to diagnose and treat early-stage cancer.”

Monarch uses an endoscopy procedure to insert a flexible robot into hard to reach places inside the human body. Doctors trained on the system use video game-style controllers to navigate inside, with help from 3D models.

“In this new era of health care, we’re aiming to simplify surgery, drive efficiency, reduce complications and improve outcomes for patients, ultimately making surgery safer,” said Ashley McEvoy, Executive Vice President, Worldwide Chairman, Medical Devices, Johnson & Johnson, in a statement. “We believe the combination of best-in-class robotics, advanced instrumentation and unparalleled end-to-end connectivity will make a meaningful difference in patient outcomes.”

As part of the deal, J&J is bringing Dr. Moll in-house (which may be as much of a coup for the company as the acquisition of Auris and its patent portfolio.

“We’re thrilled to be joining Johnson & Johnson to help push the boundaries of what is possible in medical robotics and improve the lives of patients across the globe. Together, we will be able to dramatically accelerate our collective product innovation to develop new interventional solutions that redefine optimal patient outcomes,” said Dr. Moll, in a statement. “This combination is a testament to the incredible work of the Auris Health team and the innovation engine behind the Monarch Platform, which represents a huge step forward in endoluminal technology. We look forward to continuing to shape the future of intervention with the added expertise and resources of the world’s largest healthcare organization.”

J&J says that the Monarch robotics platform will play an important role within the Lung Cancer Initiative within the company, and, more broadly, will be used to support the company’s approach to open, laparoscopic, robotic, and endoluminal surgeries.

Other robotics initiatives are underway at J&J through work with Verb, the partnership it has with Verily, a subsidiary of Google’s parent company, Alphabet, and through its acquisition of Orthotaxy, a robotics company focused on knee surgeries.

“We are very committed to our partnership with Verily on the development of the Verb Surgical Platform. Collectively, these technologies, together with our market-leading medical implants and solutions, create the foundation of a comprehensive digital ecosystem to help support the surgeon and patient before, during and after surgery,” said Ms. McEvoy, in a statement.

Apple has made a small but important change to iOS that will allow users an easier way to manage their app subscriptions. In the latest release of the mobile operating system (iOS 12.1.4 and 12.2 beta), the company has relocated the “Manage Subscriptions” setting so it’s only one click away when you tap on your profile in the App Store, instead of being buried more deeply within the settings.

This may seem like a minor change, but it was a much-needed one.

As more mobile apps have adopted subscriptions as a means of generating revenue, it’s become critical to ensure consumers knew how to turn their subscriptions off. And, based on a reading of many angry App Store app reviews, many people don’t know how to do this. Most assume that they should reach out to the developer to have their subscription disabled – after all, it’s the developer who’s charging them.

It’s not really the customer’s fault for being unaware of how the process works, as Apple had made getting to the subscription management screen far more difficult than it should be.

In iOS Settings, for example, you would have to click iTunes & App Store –> Apple ID: –> View Apple ID –> then scroll all the way to the bottom of the screen to find the hidden setting.

In the iOS App Store app, it was a bit simpler.

You would first have to tap your profile icon on the top right of the Home page, then your Apple ID, then scroll down to the bottom of the page again.

By comparison, Google Play put subscriptions in its top-level navigation with no scrolling or extra clicks required.

With the iOS update, when you now tap your profile icon in the App Store, “Manage Subscriptions” is right there – and it’s accessible without scrolling. That’s a huge help in making this critical feature more accessible.

Unfortunately, Apple hasn’t made a similar change to simplify the path to subscription management in iOS’s main Settings.

The change was first spotted by MacStories Editor-in-Chief Federico Viticci, who shared a screenshot on Twitter.

Subscriptions are now one of the main driving forces behind the increase in consumer spending on iPhone.

A recent Sensor Tower report said that iPhone users in the U.S. spent $79 on apps in 2018, up 36% from last year. Much of that is due to mobile gaming, as always, but subscription-based apps are now playing a large role.

Unfortunately, not all developers have been playing by the rules. Many app makers were using misleading tactics to force users to subscribe – like hiding the true costs, using confusing buttons and user interfaces, or suggesting they join a free trial that ends up only lasting for 3 days.

Apple later updated its App Store guidelines to further spell out what is and is not allowed.

But making the rules and enforcing them are two different matters. In the meantime, being able to figure out what subscriptions you have and turning off those you don’t want needed to be simpler.

Also related to this is the fact that Apple is preparing to launch some new subscriptions of its own – presumably, its long-awaited streaming video service and perhaps the news subscription service as well – at a press event in March.

The update to subscriptions to appears to be rolled out worldwide for those on the latest version of iOS.

Chris Lorenz, Geoffrey Anderson, and James Borow may have spent their days over the past few years working at Snap, but on nights and weekends Anderson and Lorenz were laboring on a different project — improving Ethereum development tools. 

Now the three men are finally ready to take the covers off of the labor of love they’ve been working on and launch Forge Platform, a new toolkit for distributed applications.

Both Lorenz and Anderson were heavily involved in monetization at Snap, but over the past eight months the two had dabbled in building distributed apps — and realized that the toolkits that existed for Ethereum just weren’t on par with what’s available for traditional programming.

“I’ve been interested in Ethereum for about two years now and it was about six months ago that I started to really dig in,” says Lorenz. “We saw the opportunity to prop the ecosystem up and give better tools to developers and basically provide them with what they’re used to in analogous platforms.”  

Ultimately Forge will bring a suite of products to market for distributed application developers, but for now the company is focused on a service to provide insight into the performance of smart contracts over the Ethereum network.

The first tool is designed to give distributed application developers detailed analysis of how their apps are performing across a variety of smart contracts.

“We wanted to pick a platform where the majority of developers are,” says Lorenz of the decision to work with Ethereum. “The others are really interesting projects but they were also where Ethereum was a few years ago.”

The Ethereum protocol has the most support and is making advances in its quest to improve scalability, according to Lorenz.

The company’s SDK will launch in a few months, and Forge in the process of staffing up, thanks to a $1 million seed investment from Manta Ray Ventures and Upfront Ventures.

“Over the course of the past few months we’ve had 15 companies playing with the product and jumping in and providing feedback,” says Lorenz. “We were really working on scalability testing.”

In what are still early days for blockchain-based protocols and applications, Lorenz says its important for a robust set of tools to come onto the market and help ease developers into the new computing paradigm.

“It’s ideally to make it more successful for developers to come in and offer value to customers outside of gambling,” says Lorenz of his new toolkit. “This year we’ll see a lot of interesting projects get launched.”

Instagram confirmed today that an issue has been causing some accounts’ follower numbers to change. Users began noticing the bug about 10 hours ago and the drastic drop in followers caused some to wonder if Instagram was culling inactive and fake accounts, as part of its fight against spam.

We’re aware of an issue that is causing a change in account follower numbers for some people right now. We’re working to resolve this as quickly as possible.

— Instagram (@instagram) February 13, 2019

“We’re aware of an issue that is causing a change in account follower numbers for some people right now. We’re working to resolve this as quickly as possible,” the company said in a Twitter.

why did I just lose over half a million followers @instagram wyd sis

— James Charles (@jamescharles) February 13, 2019

so I just lost like 4K on Instagram and it unfollowed like 100 people within a matter of minutes? what’s going on

like I’m not mad about my follower count cause I’d rather have less spam followers and better engagement but like why is it unfollowing people?!

— stephanie duran (@ItsSteephh) February 13, 2019

INSTAGRAM FOLLOWER CULL

Last night Instagram removed inactive / bot accounts from all accounts, globally.

I’ve woken up to an inbox full of messages from concerned people / influences and brands who have in some cases, lost millions of followers while they were asleep! pic.twitter.com/ItUXqqmwQT

— Steve Bartlett (@stevebartlettsc) February 13, 2019

The Instagram bug comes a few hours after a Twitter bug messed with the Like count on tweets, causing users to wonder if accounts were being suspended in mass or if they were just very bad at tweeting.

With New York ToyFair right around the corner, 3Doodler is taking the opportunity to announce its first ever mobile app. Rather than simply launching a drawing program that mimics the company’s popular 3D drawing pens, however, the simply named 3Doodler app invites users to use their hardware to draw directly onto the phone or tablet’s screen.

The app makes sense in theory, at least. Using an iPhone or iPad (or insert Android device name here) is a much simpler and quicker way to generate stencils than asking people to shell out of for paper versions.

The app features step by step video instructions, tutorials and projects than can be used to construct much larger structures. As the company puts it in its press material, “As companies continue to develop pens that encourage artist to gravitate to screens, 3Doodler’s 3D printing pens aspire to take creators away from them.”

How exposure to the hot gun and a load of plastic will ultimately effect the screen over time remains to be seen, of course. Meantime, the app is available today in the App Store and Google Play.

It’s well understood that many network breaches begin with phishing emails designed to trick users into giving hackers their credentials. They don’t even have to work to find a vulnerability, they can just waltz in the front door. Elevate Security, a San Francisco startup, wants to change that by helping employees understand phishing attacks better using behavioral techniques. Today, the company announced an $8 million Series A round to build on this idea.

The investment was led by Defy Partners. Existing investor Costanoa Ventures also participated. Today’s round brings the total raised to $10 million, according to the company.

What has the company created to warrant this investment? “We have a solution that motivates, measures and rewards employees to change their security habits, while at the same time giving security teams unprecedented visibility into the security habits and actions of their employees,” co-founder Masha Sedova told TechCrunch.

Specifically, the company has built a Security Behavior platform. “Our platform pulls in data sets that allow employees or security teams to see where the strengths and weaknesses of their organization lie, and then apply a suite of solutions that are rooted in behavioral science that helps them change behavior,” she explained.

Sedova and co-founder Robert Fly started working on this problem when both were part of the Salesforce security team. They began working with the idea of gamifying security to teach employees and customers how to be more security aware.

Elevate Security dashboard

When Fly’s team at Salesforce dug into the root of security problems, it found that it was often simply human error. He said it wasn’t malicious on the employee’s part, but they had jobs to do, and expected the security team to handle these issues. He realized that shifting employees to become more security aware was as much a behavioral psychology problem as a technology one and the roots of Elevate began to take shape.

The first product they built on top of the platform is called Hacker’s Mind, a tool designed to help employees understand how hackers think and operate.

The company launched in 2017 and currently has 15 employees, half of which are women. It also boasts an entirely female board of directors, and the startup plans to continue this trend as it staffs up with the new funding. Its headquarters are in San Francisco, but it just opened an engineering office in Montreal. Current customers include AutoDesk, Exxon and Illumio.