Google continued its unstoppable takeover of CES 2019 by announcing that Samsung TVs will soon offer Assistant compatibility. The feature, which is arriving later this year, will give users the ability to adjust volume, change channels and switch image input.
Compatibility requires a separate piece of Google Assistant hardware — like a Home, Home Hub or third-party smart display or speaker. No surprise the announcement doesn’t include native Assistant support, but it’s still a nice win for Google.
Samsung, for its part, still has a lot of its eggs in the old Bixby basket. For all of the smart assistant’s flaws, it has one key thing that much of the competition doesn’t: native hardware support on a number of appliances and TVs. As such, Samsung’s not really really in a hurry to go all in on of Google Assistant or Alexa.
Bixby, of course, started life as a mobile offering, akin to Apple’s Siri play. Though the assistant has quickly branched out into a wide range of different products, including Samsung refrigerators. The company also recently announced a forthcoming premium smart speaker, the Galaxy Home, with a rumored budget version also arriving soon.
If your dream home involves a big screen on your fridge, then Family Hub is for you. Samsung has been developing some custom features to turn the fridge into a functional, shared display for all the family. And the company is announcing at CES an update to Family Hub with new features.
The interface has been completely redesigned from the ground up. Apps should be able to talk to each other better than before. And it’s not limited to the fridge anymore. You can start your oven from your fridge, control all your connected devices in your home and more.
With the family board, you can leave notes for other family members, view calendar information and see photos. Even if you’re not at home, you can use your Samsung phone to write down a note for your kid in case you’re going to be home a bit late.
And of course, Bixby is here. Samsung’s voice assistant lets you ask questions, find recipes and control your home.
Family Hub sounds like a neat feature, but the main issue is that you need to upgrade all your appliances to create a home that is completely compatible with the Samsung ecosystem. Also, do we really need yet another screen?
Vive has seemed to be devoting a lot of attention to the enterprise, but the company teased their new consumer VR headset called the Vive Cosmos at CES today. The positionally-tracked headset boasts tracked hand controllers and can be interestingly be powered via PC or “other methods,” making it the first in a new class of hybrid VR headsets.
The consumer market is going to be a tough one for HTC to hold onto. The company’s original HTC Vive garnered a lot of early excitement, but a series of aggressive price cuts from Facebook’s Oculus forced the company into a rough spot trying to find hardware margins in the less price-sensitive enterprise market. The company can’t really compete on the same playing field as Oculus as Facebook ships hardware at seemingly break-even prices, HTC’s move seems to therefore sell products that Facebook wouldn’t make in the first place.
What’s interesting is that HTC is relying on embedded inside-out tracking technology for this device, essentially removing SteamVR — Valve’s highly-accurate tracking tech — from the equation. This could be a big risk to HTC, as their main consumer market seems to be those looking to push high-end experiences and the alignment with Valve and SteamVR has been a big selling point there. The Vive Cosmos will run HTC’s new ViveRS operating system.
It’s unclear what kind of onboard compute will be available and how exactly the device is powered besides a PC connection.
What’s really going to matter is implementation and what kind of experiences without a PC. If the company can eek out performance that enables headset and controller positionally-tracked experiences on the device without a PC connection, they’d have something that could potentially be an interesting challenger to the $399 Oculus Quest, though it would assumedly operate at a much higher price point.
There’s still a lot we don’t know like specs, price or release date. More info will be available “in the coming months” according to the company.
HTC is giving its high-end enterprise-focused Vive Pro VR headset a feature bump in the next few months that’s focused on eye-tracking.
The company has certainly been having some financial struggles recently, those issues have seemed to force the company to more firmly fix its VR efforts on enterprise markets while loosely aiming to court consumers that aren’t scared away by the higher price point.
What does eye-tracking in a VR headset enable? Well, a few things actually. The most talked about technology is called foveated rendering which basically aims to reduce how much of a VR scene one’s computer has to render at full resolution by tracking where your gaze is. This can greatly reduce system requirements if you’re sporting headsets with insanely high resolutions. It doesn’t seem like this is the focus of this HTC product — at least right now — rather HTC seems to be focusing on utilizing eye-tracking as an input method for making quicker menu selections.
It’s certainly a nice thing to have in a headset, and something that has long been expected to be an included feature in next-gen headsets. HTC’s standard Vive actually had support for an eye-tracking add-on from a ViveX portfolio company called 7invensun. That being said, eye-tracking that isn’t being used to support a ludicrously high-res display probably isn’t that much of a system seller and it’s a little odd that they would ship such an iterative product.
No details on pricing but the product is slated to ship in April, the company says.
Several weeks after it was reported by the WSJ that two of the biggest investors in SoftBank’s massive Vision Fund vehicle were cool on its planned $16 billion investment in the coworking company WeWork, those plans have changed radically, says the Financial Times.
According to its sources — and confirmed by our own — SoftBank is now in “detailed negotiations” to invest a comparatively modest $2 billion more into WeWork, plans that could be firmed up as soon as the end of this week.
A WeWork spokesperson at the company’s New York headquarters declined to comment.
The development is both surprising and unsurprising. The government-backed funds of Saudi Arabia and Abu Dhabi, which committed $45 billion and $15 billion, respectively, to the Vision Fund, haven’t been been known before to push back against the person pulling its levers, SoftBank CEO Masayoshi Son .
Indeed, given the vast sums of money that the Vision Fund has put to work since being announced in late 2016, it seemed there were few if any checks on Son or the 80-plus people who work for the Vision Fund.
Just some of its many bold bets include, most recently, a $500 million investment in Cambridge Mobile Telematics, an eight-year-old, Boston-area company that had earlier raised just one round of funding of less than $20 million to build out its technology. The Vision Fund also recently led a $400 million round into Emeryville, Ca.-based Zymergen, which manufacturers molecules for a wide array of industries and already counted SoftBank as an investor.
Still, according to that Journal piece, the two anchor investors were less enthusiastic about a giant new investment in nearly nine-year-old WeWork for numerous reasons, including that they see WeWork as a real estate play and both already have plenty of real estate in their portfolios; that WeWork CEO Adam Neumann would still control the company even while SoftBank was looking to acquire a majority stake; and because SoftBank has already committed $8 billion into WeWork in recent years, including through an agreement last year to invest a fresh $4 billion into the company via a convertible note and a $3 billion warrant that gave it the right to buy additional equity in WeWork.
As it stands, including the $2 billion that WeWork looks to receive from SoftBank imminently, SoftBank will have sunk $10 billion into the company. Perhaps it’s no wonder that the newest $2 billion is not coming from the Vision Fund but from SoftBank directly. (Son sometimes invests off SoftBank’s balance sheet directly, expediency’s sake and, presumably in a case such as this one, when there may be pushback from Vision Fund investors.)
Either way, two billion dollars more from SoftBank is “hardly a stinging rebuke” of WeWork or its business model, says one person familiar with SoftBank’s thinking. This same source also notes that the $16 billion figure bandied about last year was “never a lock. There were always numerous options on the table.”
Whether SoftBank regrets what remains a huge bet can only be known in time. A shifting public market certainly seems like reason for worry, given that unprofitable WeWork relies increasingly on freely spending companies for its revenue, both customers that install their employees at WeWork’s coworking spaces, as well as those that have more recently begun licensing the company’s technology and aesthetic to WeWork-ify their own offices.
Unsurprisingly, Neumann, when asked how WeWork would fare in a downturn, told us at a Disrupt event in 2017 that it was positioned perfectly for one. “Business is a flexible thing,” he’d said at the time. “Space is fixed. Being able to give people that flexibility if a recession comes or when a recession comes is actually going to be a very needed product.”
According to the FT, SoftBank’s earlier plans for WeWork included SoftBank and the Vision Fund paying $10 billion to buy out all outside investors in WeWork. A further $6 billion of capital would have been injected directly into the company, including a $2 billion commitment this year, and a commitment to invest a further $4 billion based on agreed-up performance targets for WeWork in 2020 and 2021.
Our sources say that, as of this writing, the $2 billion being discussed will be split evenly to purchase both primary and secondary shares from earlier investors. We’re also told the company’s post-money valuation, assuming the deal is completed, will be $47 billion, a total that includes $1 . billion that Softbank invested in WeWork last year via that convertible note and the $3 billion more than the SoftBank committed last year to invest in the company this year.
WeWork’s losses in the first nine months of 2018 nearly quadrupled from a year earlier to $1.2 billion, says the FT, which says it viewed an investor presentation. The company’s sales meanwhile hit $1.5 billion during the same period.
When Matrix came out with its first PowerWatch the watch world was enamored. The self-powered smart watch would suck energy from your skin by using the temperature differential between your skin and the air, allowing it to run indefinitely without charging. Now the team has added a solar feature to their latest PowerWatch 2 which lets the watch both steal energy from your soul and the sol.
The watch is on Indiegogo now for $199 and it’s already raised $445,000. It will ship in March.
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The new watch features a color LCD screen, GPS, heart-rate monitor, as well as steps, cadence, and sleep sensors. It is compatible with Apple HealthKit and Google Fit.
“While PowerWatch 2 dramatically increases the amount of energy available to the charge-free wearable, MATRIX’s materials science and hardware engineers were able to also further miniaturize both the thermoelectric (TEG) and solar cell processes, decreasing PowerWatch 2’s weight and size even more, while maintaining the rugged aluminum build,” said CTO Douglas Tham.
We saw the watch at CES this year and it looks really nice. It’s not too smart – it’s more a health band than a smart watch – but the self-charging features are unique in the space. Given that it also feeds parasitically on your body heat like a strange, aluminum tick it’s a fascinating change in the way we think about our wearables.
As Disney gets closer to launching a shiny new video service and continues to ramp up efforts in other new streaming areas like gaming, it looks like it might be winding down one of its more legacy bets. Babble, a parenting blog that Disney acquired reportedly for about $40 million to help it target hipster parents, quietly ceased publishing in the middle of December, TechCrunch has learned.
“For everything there is a season, and after more than a decade of serving as a community and resource for parents, Babble will be saying goodbye,” reads a post from the site’s editors. “To all the moms, dads, family, friends, writers, and readers who supported us – thank you. We are so grateful for the time spent sharing your stories and your lives, through all the ups and downs of raising tiny humans.”
When Disney acquired Babble — originally spun out from a (now-defunct) dating website called Nerve.com — in 2011, it was part of a bigger push at the media giant to built up a stock of content properties to target younger parents, the kind that turn to online media for parenting advice and inspiration.
The idea was that Disney would populate the site with lots of evergreen content aimed at savvy middle class parents — recent articles included a post on soft-serve pickle-flavored ice cream and kids nailing 80s-style Halloween costumes — to help it build a connection to these consumers that would lead, over time, to trusting and using and exposing kids to other Disney products as they grew up.
But times have changed. The Disney Interactive Media Group that housed Babble doesn’t exist as such anymore — and Babble’s two founders, Rufus Griscom and Alicia Volkman, moved on years ago from Disney.
And while (I’ve been told) hipster parents definitely still do turn to digital media to answer questions, get inspiration, or just waste time under the guise of doing something constructive, I don’t think that their focus has consolidated on a single destination to do that, but rather a plethora of sources that include other parenting-focused blogs, BuzzFeed-style viral sites that source stories from whatever is trending on social media, YouTube, apps like Pinterest and Facebook and more.
Sometimes, parents even meet other parents in real life, and talk and listen to each other that way.
It’s also not clear how much Disney had been investing in building out the Babble brand and site over the years. When it was acquired, it was on a growth tear, expanding 100 percent year over year with 4 million uniques. However, it hasn’t had much buzz or evolution since.
We’ve reached out to Disney to ask for more details, but in any case, this is far from being one of the biggest acquisitions to get shuttered by the company after things fizzled out. Club Penguin, a kids-focused gaming platform Disney acquired for around $700 million, shut down its main site in 2017, and its remaining app last year.
The heated debate around Amazon’s recently announced Long Island City “HQ2” is showing no signs of cooling down.
On Monday morning, the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union (RWDSU) hosted a briefing in which labor officials, economic development analysts, Amazon employees and elected New York State and City representatives further underlined concerns around the HQ2 process, the awarded incentives, and the potential impacts Amazon’s presence would have on city workers and residents.
While many of the arguments posed at the Summit weren’t necessarily new, the wide variety of stakeholders that showed up to express concern looked to contextualize the far-reaching risks associated with the deal.
The day began with representatives from New York union groups recounting Amazon’s shaky history with employee working conditions and questioning how the city’s working standards will be impacted if the 50,000 promised jobs do actually show up.
Two current employees working in an existing Amazon New York City warehouse in Staten Island provided poignant examples of improper factory conditions and promised employee benefits that never came to fruition. According to the workers, Amazon has yet to follow through on shuttle services and ride-sharing services that were promised to ease worker commutes, forcing the workers to resort to overcrowded and unreliable public transportation. One of the workers detailed that with his now four-hour commute to get to and from work, coupled with his meaningfully long shifts, he’s been unable to see his daughter for weeks.
Various economic development groups and elected officials including, New York City Comptroller Scott Stringer, City Council Speaker Corey Johnson, City Council Member Jimmy Van Bramer, and New York State Senator Mike Gianaris supported the labor arguments with spirited teardowns of the economic terms of the deal.
Like many critics of the HQ2 process, the speakers’ expressed their beliefs that Amazon knew where it wanted to bring its second quarters throughout the entirety of its auction process, given the talent pool and resources in the chosen locations, and that the entire undertaking was meant to squeeze out the best economic terms possible. And according to City Council Speaker Johnson, New York City “got played”.
Comptroller Stringer argued that Amazon is taking advantage of New York’s Relocation and Employment Assistance Program (REAP) and Industrial and Commercial Abatement Program (ICAP), which Stringer described as outdated and in need of reform, to receive the majority of the $2 billion-plus in promised economic incentives that made it the fourth largest corporate incentive deal in US history.
The speakers continued to argue that the unprecedented level of incentives will be nearly impossible to recoup and that New York will also face economic damages from lower sales tax revenue as improved Amazon service in the city cannibalizes local brick & mortar retail.
Fears over how Amazon’s presence will impact the future of New York were given more credibility with the presence of Seattle City Council members Lisa Herbold & Teresa Mosqueda, who had flown to New York from Seattle to discuss lessons learned from having Amazon’s Headquarters in the city and to warn the city about the negative externalities that have come with it.
Herbold and Mosqueda focused less on an outright rejection of the deal but instead emphasized that New York was in a position to negotiate for better terms focused on equality and corporate social responsibility, which could help the city avoid the socioeconomic turnover that has plagued Seattle and could create a new standard for public-private partnerships.
While the New York City Council noted it was looking into legal avenues, the opposition seemed to have limited leverage to push back or meaningfully negotiate the deal. According to state officials, the most clear path to fight the deal would be through votes by the state legislature and through the state Public Authorities Control Board who has to unanimously approve the subsidy package.
With the significant turnout seen at Monday’s summit, which included several high-ranking state and city officials, it seems clear that we’re still in the early innings of what’s likely to be a long battle ahead to close the HQ2 deal.
Amazon did not return requests for immediate comment.
The heated debate around Amazon’s recently announced Long Island City “HQ2” is showing no signs of cooling down.
On Monday morning, the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union (RWDSU) hosted a briefing in which labor officials, economic development analysts, Amazon employees and elected New York State and City representatives further underlined concerns around the HQ2 process, the awarded incentives, and the potential impacts Amazon’s presence would have on city workers and residents.
While many of the arguments posed at the Summit weren’t necessarily new, the wide variety of stakeholders that showed up to express concern looked to contextualize the far-reaching risks associated with the deal.
The day began with representatives from New York union groups recounting Amazon’s shaky history with employee working conditions and questioning how the city’s working standards will be impacted if the 50,000 promised jobs do actually show up.
Two current employees working in an existing Amazon New York City warehouse in Staten Island provided poignant examples of improper factory conditions and promised employee benefits that never came to fruition. According to the workers, Amazon has yet to follow through on shuttle services and ride-sharing services that were promised to ease worker commutes, forcing the workers to resort to overcrowded and unreliable public transportation. One of the workers detailed that with his now four-hour commute to get to and from work, coupled with his meaningfully long shifts, he’s been unable to see his daughter for weeks.
Various economic development groups and elected officials including, New York City Comptroller Scott Stringer, City Council Speaker Corey Johnson, City Council Member Jimmy Van Bramer, and New York State Senator Mike Gianaris supported the labor arguments with spirited teardowns of the economic terms of the deal.
Like many critics of the HQ2 process, the speakers’ expressed their beliefs that Amazon knew where it wanted to bring its second quarters throughout the entirety of its auction process, given the talent pool and resources in the chosen locations, and that the entire undertaking was meant to squeeze out the best economic terms possible. And according to City Council Speaker Johnson, New York City “got played”.
Comptroller Stringer argued that Amazon is taking advantage of New York’s Relocation and Employment Assistance Program (REAP) and Industrial and Commercial Abatement Program (ICAP), which Stringer described as outdated and in need of reform, to receive the majority of the $2 billion-plus in promised economic incentives that made it the fourth largest corporate incentive deal in US history.
The speakers continued to argue that the unprecedented level of incentives will be nearly impossible to recoup and that New York will also face economic damages from lower sales tax revenue as improved Amazon service in the city cannibalizes local brick & mortar retail.
Fears over how Amazon’s presence will impact the future of New York were given more credibility with the presence of Seattle City Council members Lisa Herbold & Teresa Mosqueda, who had flown to New York from Seattle to discuss lessons learned from having Amazon’s Headquarters in the city and to warn the city about the negative externalities that have come with it.
Herbold and Mosqueda focused less on an outright rejection of the deal but instead emphasized that New York was in a position to negotiate for better terms focused on equality and corporate social responsibility, which could help the city avoid the socioeconomic turnover that has plagued Seattle and could create a new standard for public-private partnerships.
While the New York City Council noted it was looking into legal avenues, the opposition seemed to have limited leverage to push back or meaningfully negotiate the deal. According to state officials, the most clear path to fight the deal would be through votes by the state legislature and through the state Public Authorities Control Board who has to unanimously approve the subsidy package.
With the significant turnout seen at Monday’s summit, which included several high-ranking state and city officials, it seems clear that we’re still in the early innings of what’s likely to be a long battle ahead to close the HQ2 deal.
Amazon did not return requests for immediate comment.
That most famous characterization of the complexity causality, a butterfly beating its wings and causing a hurricane on the other side of the world, is thought-provoking but ultimately not helpful. What we really need is to look at a hurricane and figure out which butterfly caused it — or perhaps stop it before it takes flight in the first place. DARPA thinks AI should be able to do just that.
A new program at the research agency is aimed at creating a machine learning system that can sift through the innumerable events and pieces of media generated every day and identify any threads of connection or narrative in them. It’s called KAIROS: Knowledge-directed Artificial Intelligence Reasoning Over Schemas.
“Schema” in this case has a very specific meaning. It’s the idea of a basic process humans use to understand the world around them by creating little stories of interlinked events. For instance when you buy something at a store, you know that you generally walk into the store, select an item, bring it to the cashier, who scans it, then you pay in some way, and then leave the store. This “buying something” process is a schema we all recognize, and could of course have schemas within it (selecting a product; payment process) or be part of another schema (gift giving; home cooking).
Although these are easily imagined inside our heads, they’re surprisingly difficult to define formally in such a way that a computer system would be able to understand. They’re familiar to us from long use and understanding, but they’re not immediately obvious or rule-bound, like how an apple will fall downwards from a tree at a constant acceleration.
And the more data there are, the more difficult it is to define. Buying something is comparatively simple, but how do you create a schema for recognizing a cold war, or a bear market? That’s what DARPA wants to look into.
“The process of uncovering relevant connections across mountains of information and the static elements that they underlie requires temporal information and event patterns, which can be difficult to capture at scale with currently available tools and systems,” said DARPA program manager Boyan Onyshkevych in a news release.
KAIROS, the agency said, “aims to develop a semi-automated system capable of identifying and drawing correlations between seemingly unrelated events or data, helping to inform or create broad narratives about the world around us.”
How? Well, they have a general idea but they’re looking for expertise. The problem, they note, is that schemas currently have to be laboriously defined and checked by humans. At that point you might as well inspect the information yourself. So the KAIROS program aims to have the AI teach itself.
At first the system will be limited to ingesting data in massive quantities to build a library of basic schemas. By reading books, watching news reports, and so on it should be able to create a laundry list of suspected schemas, like those mentioned above. It might even get a hint of larger, more hazy schemas that it can’t quite put its virtual finger on — love, racism, income disparity, etc — and how others might fit into them and each other.
Next it will be allowed to look at complex real-world data and attempt to extract events and narratives based on the schemas it has created.
The military and defense applications are fairly obvious: imagine a system that took in all news and social media posts and informed its administrators that it seemed likely there would be a run on banks, or a coup, or a new faction emerging from a declining one. Intelligence officers do their best to perform this task now, and human involvement will almost certainly never cease, but they would likely appreciate a computer companion saying, “there are multiple reports of stockpiling, and these articles on chemical warfare are being shared widely, this could point to rumors of terrorist attack” or the like.
Of course at this point it is all purely theoretical, but that’s why DARPA is looking into it: the agency’s raison d’etre is to turn the theoretical into the practical, or failing that, at least find out why they can’t. Given the extreme simplicity of most AI systems these days it’s hard to imagine one as sophisticated as they clearly want to create. Clearly we have a long way to go.
