Year: 2019

An ongoing case in Singapore is testing the legal boundaries of virtual conferences. A court in the Southeast Asian city-state this week convicted human rights activist Jolovan Wham of organizing a public assembly via Skype without a permit and refusing to sign his statement when ordered by the police.

Wham will be sentenced on January 23 and faces a fine of up to S$5,000 or a jail term of up to three years. The judge in charge of the case, however, has not provided grounds of his decision, Wham wrote on Twitter.

Wham, 39, is a social worker at Community Action Network Singapore consisting of a group of activists, social workers and journalists advocating civil and political rights. He previously served as executive director of migrant worker advocacy group Humanitarian Organisation for Migration Economics.

On November 26, 2016, Wham organized an indoor forum called “Civil Disobedience and Social Movements” at a small event space inside a shopping mall in Singapore. The event featured prominent Hong Kong student activist Joshua Wong who addressed the audience remotely via a Skype video call.

The event’s Facebook Page indicates that 355 people were interested and 121 went. The Skype discussion, which lasted around two hours, was also live streamed on Facebook by The Online Citizen SG, a social media platform focused on political activism, and garnered 5,700 views.

Despite being advised by the police prior to the event to obtain a permit, Wham proceeded without said consent, according to a statement by the Singapore Police Force. Wham faced similar charges of organizing public assemblies without police permits and refusing to sign statements under the Penal Code.

In Singapore, it is a criminal offence under the Public Order Act to organize or participate in a public assembly without a police permit. The Police described Wham’s act as “recalcitrant” in regard to organizing and participating in illegal public assemblies.

Commenting on the charge against Wham, a joint statement from Joshua Wong and members of CAN Singapore argued that the event was “closed-door”.

“Skype conversations that take place within the confines of a private space are private matters that should logically, not require permits before they can be carried out,” raged the statement. “Wham’s discussion with Wong ended peacefully and would not have drawn any further attention if authorities hadn’t decided to act.”

FloWater, an eight-year-old, Burlingame, Ca.-based company whose reusable water bottle refilling stations produce purified water, has raised $15 million in its first major round of funding, it quietly announced last month.

Bluewater, a Swedish company that sells water purifiers, among other things, led the round.

FloWater caters to schools, colleges, fitness centers, hotels, and offices, and, in the words of CEO Rich Razgaitis, set out to address four environmental concerns from the outset: obesity in the U.S. which has been tied in part to the rise of sugary, carbonated beverages; the nearly 40 billion single-use plastic water bottles that are used up and tossed aside every year;  the millions of barrels of oil and hundreds of millions of pounds of CO2 byproduct waste used to create and transport bottled water; and the toxins in single-use plastic bottles, including endocrine-disrupting chemicals.

It has  a pretty compelling case to make, in short, as other purveyors of refilling stations would surely argue, and which clearly persuaded 13 investors altogether (according to a new SEC filing) to write checks to the company.

And it all started with an $18,600 bank loan, according to the company’s founder, Wyatt Taubman, who remains on the company’s board but stepped aside as head honcho in 2015 and has since founded a cold-pressed juice company.

Per his LinkedIn, Taubman, says he used that bank loan to launch a pilot refill station, before shaking $125,000 out of friends and family, and a second, $62,000 loan to launch additional refill stations. The company later raised $950,000 from the Tech Coast Angels and the Hawaii Angels, hired Razgaitis, redesigned the look of its product and, in 2016, raised $2.6 million in Series A funding.

FloWater customers include Google, Airbnb, Specialized Bikes, and, somewhat ironically, Red Bull.

It says its stations are now in nearly 50 states.

Samsung always has a huge presence at CES, but it isn’t the giant TVs and flashy next-generation gadgets that have my attention this year; it’s this simple, flexible monitor that looks like it would be right at home in any workspace. It’s called the Space Monitor, presumably because it gives you space, not because it’s meant for use in space. I don’t see why you couldn’t, though.

What the Space Monitor does is very simple: it clamps to your desk and sits straight up from the edge — up against the wall if there is one — and takes up about as little space as it’s possible for a display to.

When you want to bring something closer, or lower, or just need to adjust the angle or whatever, the neck of the monitor lets you bring it down all the way to the level of your desk and tilt it up or down as well (though not side to side). Cables go up through the stand so you won’t see them at all.

Combined with very thin bezels on the sides (there’s a thicker, but still very reasonable one on the bottom) this makes for quite a minimal presence, and it could allow someone (like me) to shrink their workspace in some dimension or other. I like my Dell Ultrasharps, but if I was putting together a new desk situation, I’d probably look very hard at these Samsungs.

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Sure, you could do a wall mount, but this is much easier and you don’t have to fiddle around with tools or load calculations. Just clamp it on there.

There are two models, a 27-inch QHD (2560×1440) model and a 32-inch 4K one (3840×2160); the latter costs $500, so the former will probably be a bit less. They use VA panels, which hopefully will be about as good as IPS, though of course not quite so good as OLED (though for that tech you’d have to add another zero to the price).

Only downside: 60 Hz maximum refresh rate. That’s a possible dealbreaker for some. But the specs also list a 4 ms response time, without explaining further. Perhaps I’ve misunderstood, but I asked Samsung to explain the discrepancy. The specs for the 27-inch display could also differ.

It feels nice to have a reason to visit the actual CES main halls this year. And of course, for the maximalists out there, I’ll also be sure to check out the mammoth new ultrawide:

Mobile AR gaming startup Niantic has closed a $190 million round of funding according to newly-filed SEC docs.

The filing comes after a WSJ report last month suggested the company was in the process of closing a $200 million raise from investors including IVP, aXiomatic Gaming and Samsung at a $3.9 billion valuation. The round closed shortly after that report on December 20 according to the new documents.

With the close of this round, Niantic has now raised more than $415 million to date. The startup’s other investors include Founders Fund, Spark Capital and Alsop Louie Partners, among others. The filings details that there were 26 investors in this funding round.

The new influx of cash comes as the creator of Pokémon GO prepares to release its next major title, Harry Potter: Wizards Unite. The augmented reality game does not have a release date yet, but is expected to launch this year.

Listen, everyone. It’s not every day that a new fact comes to light regarding a game that came out more than 30 years ago. And I happen to love it when retro games get broken in fabulous and entertaining ways. So the news that The Legend of Zelda for NES has a minus world like Super Mario Bros. and others hit me like a freight train.

The phenomenon was discovered by YouTuber SKELUX, who starts off his video with a quick explanation of how minus worlds work. If you think about an NES game as a big file, there are places where graphics are stored, sounds and music are described and, of course, level layouts and enemy logic are kept.

As a player, you are expected to navigate the structured parts of this file, namely the game world — level 1, 2, 3, this or that dungeon or town, etc. But there are ways to escape that structure by exploiting flaws in the game’s code, letting you run free in portions of the game’s data that aren’t meant to be “real” levels — yet the game’s engine will interpret the data as best it can, producing in some cases pretty wacky but still navigable levels. This type of thing gets its name from Super Mario Bros., where you could easily warp to a buggy level “-1” and progress from there.

Zelda and other games often use data trickery to get around the natural limitations of 8-bit computing and severely restricted storage space. For instance, did you know that in order to store them more efficiently, Zelda’s dungeons all fit together like giant tiles?

I just about lost my mind when I found out about that. Note that the above is two 16×8 grids set one on top of the other.

As SKELUX explains, the overhead map is similarly divided, except the bottom “half” isn’t actually filled with map data. And although there are cheats that let you walk through walls, the game’s code detects when you reach an invalid map coordinate and returns you to the starting location. But a little hackery takes that safety measure out of play and the result:

A new world!

And a horribly buggy one, as it turns out right from the start. Octoroks are shooting boomerangs out of their snouts; the old man on one screen tells you it’s dangerous to go alone, then next door says “leave your life of money”; a Molblin caterpillar shoots fireballs at you; glitchy inverted witch women swarm the statues of Death mountain; and so on.

It’s a strange, hilarious world, and one that obviously was not crafted but is simply created on the fly by the game’s engine attempting to make sense of the data it’s reading. It isn’t canon.

This type of video game archaeology is endlessly fascinating to me, because it demonstrates both the fragility and the robustness of these venerable pieces of software — and, of course, the enduring love and interest they engender in fans. Another one that recently absorbed my attention was the explanation of parallel dimensions inside Super Mario 64 and how sliding between them lets you beat a level with only half a press of the jump button.

That’s all. Please return to your ordinary lives, which likely seem just a bit more ordinary now that you know one more magical secret of the Legend of Zelda.

Bad news from Apple and signs of slowing international and domestic growth sent stocks tumbling in Thursday trading on all of the major markets.

Investors erased some $75 billion in value from Apple alone… an amount known technically as a shit ton of money. But stocks were down broadly based on Apple’s news, with the Nasdaq falling 3%, or roughly 202.44 points, and the Dow Jones Industrial Average plummeting 660.02 points, or roughly 2.8%.

Apple halted trading yesterday afternoon of its stock to provide lower guidance for upcoming earnings.

Apple’s news from late yesterday that it would miss its earnings estimates by several billion dollars thanks to a collapse of sales in China was the trigger for a broad selloff that erased gains from the last trading sessions before the New Year (which saw the biggest one day gain in stocks in recent history).

Apples China woes could be attributed to any number of factors, D.A. Davidson senior analyst Tom Forte said. The weakening Chinese economy, patriotic fervor from Chinese consumers, or the increasingly solid options available from domestic manufacturers could all be factors.

Sales were suffering in more regions than China, Forte noted. India, Russia, Brazil, and Turkey also had slowing sales of new iPhone models, he said.

Investors have more than just weakness from Apple to be concerned about. Chinese manufacturing flipped from growth to contraction in December and analysts in the region expect that the pain will continue through at least the first half of the year.

“We expect a much worse slowdown in the first half, followed by a more serious and aggressive government easing/stimulus centred on deregulating the property market in big cities, and then we might see stabilisation and even a small rebound later this year,” Ting Lu, chief China economist at Nomura in Hong Kong, wroe in a report quoted by the Financial Times.

U.S. manufacturing isn’t doing much better, according to an industrial gauge published by The Institute for Supply Management. The institute’s index dropped to its lowest point in two years.

“There’s just so much uncertainty going on everywhere that businesses are just pausing,” Timothy Fiore, chairman of ISM’s manufacturing survey committee, told Bloomberg. “No matter where you look, you’ve got chaos everywhere. Businesses can’t operate in an environment of chaos. It’s a warning shot that we need to resolve some of these issues.”

The index, remains above the threshold of a serious contraction in American industry, but the 5.2 drop from the previous month in the manufacturing survey is the largest since the financial crisis and was only exceeded one other time — following the Sept. 11, 2001 terror attacks on the U.S.

Founder and chief executive Jack Dorsey says Square has poached Amrita Ahuja from Blizzard Entertainment, a division of the gaming company Activision Blizzard, to lead finance at the merchant services and mobile payments company.

Ahuja will join Square later this month, about three months after long-time Square chief financial officer Sarah Friar exited the company in favor of a CEO opportunity at Nextdoor, a neighborhood social networking site. Friar, often described as Dorsey’s right-hand woman, joined Square in 2012 and led the startup through an initial public offering that valued the company at about $3 billion.

Prior to an eight-year stint at Blizzard, Ahuja clocked in a few years at Fox Networks Group, the Walt Disney Company and Morgan Stanley, where she was an analyst in the investment banking division.

“In Amrita, we have found an amazing, multidimensional business leader,” Dorsey said in a statement. “Amrita brings the ability to consider and balance opportunities across our entire business, and she will help strengthen our discipline as we invest, build, and scale.”

Shares of Square [NYSE: SQ] dropped more than 8 percent on Thursday.

Longtime political operative Bradley Tusk got his start in Silicon Valley in 2011, when a little-known founder of a transportation startup requested his help surmounting regulatory barriers. That founder, Travis Kalanick, couldn’t afford Tusk’s $25,000 fee, so Tusk agreed to accept half of his payment in equity. As you can imagine, that deal worked out pretty well for Tusk, whose shares in Uber are now said to be worth $100 million.

Tusk (pictured) spent several years advising Uber’s expansion strategy and, in 2015, decided to turn his efforts into a full-fledged business: part venture fund, part political strategy. Today, Tusk and his partner, Jordan Nof, filed paperwork to raise $70 million for their second venture fund, Tusk Venture Partners II.

A spokesperson for Tusk Ventures declined to comment.

The New York-based firm previously brought in $36 million for its debut fund — capital it used to back scooter “unicorn” Bird; medical marijuana delivery company Eaze; the marketplace for household service providers Handy; cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase; and fintech startup Grove.

In addition to deploying capital into startups, Tusk Ventures lends its political expertise to support companies plagued with regulatory barriers and communications issues, as well as help with grassroots organizing, opposition research and partnerships. Bird, of course, is an excellent example of a company that’s struggled with local politics as it has scaled across the U.S. and beyond. The scooter-sharing company was banned from San Francisco after releasing scooters without permits and has upset local leaders in Santa Monica, Los Angeles and more.

“Our diverse team of regulatory and political experts take on entrenched interests and politicians trying to stifle innovation so our companies don’t have to,” the firm writes on its website. “Our unique model provides startups with access to political, investment and operational expertise that is second to none.”

Prior to transitioning into startup advising and investing, Tusk served as campaign manager for Mike Bloomberg, as deputy governor of Illinois and as communications director for Senator Chuck Schumer. He also penned the book, The Fixer: My Adventures Saving Startups from Death by Politics, released last year.

Tusk joined us last week on TechCrunch’s Equity podcast to discuss mobile voting, his thoughts on Uber’s upcoming initial public offering and sky-high valuation and Saudi money in VC. Listen to that episode below.

Well, what have we here? If it isn’t the Samsung Galaxy S10, courtesy of perennial smartphone outer, EVLeaks. This marks one the first good looks we’ve got at the phone, which is likely due out in a couple of months at Mobile World Congress.

It’s a pretty rough photo — the icons are all blurred out and the cropping job isn’t great, likely in an effort to conceal the source. But it’s a pretty decent shot of the front — and hey, we probably have month and change to go for the thing to start leaking like crazy.

The most interesting bit here is probably the least surprising. After holding off on the notch last generation, Samsung has skipped it over entirely, instead opting for the hole-punch camera design we recently noted would be all the rage in 2019 smartphones. Huawei, notably, already beat Samsung to the proverbial hole-punch late last year with the Nova 4.

The “Beyond 1” mentioned here is the working title for the flagship phone. “Beyond 2” will likely be the S10 Plus, while the “Beyond 0” is expected to be a budget version, akin to the iPhone XR.

Another tidbit from the new leak is the phone’s apparent ability to wirelessly charge compatible handsets and perhaps even Samsung wearables. That would put the product in line with another recent Huawei handset, the Mate 20 Pro.

Well, what have we here? If it isn’t the Samsung Galaxy S10, courtesy of perennial smartphone outer, EVLeaks. This marks one the first good looks we’ve got at the phone, which is likely due out in a couple of months at Mobile World Congress.

It’s a pretty rough photo — the icons are all blurred out and the cropping job isn’t great, likely in an effort to conceal the source. But it’s a pretty decent shot of the front — and hey, we probably have month and change to go for the thing to start leaking like crazy.

The most interesting bit here is probably the least surprising. After holding off on the notch last generation, Samsung has skipped it over entirely, instead opting for the hole-punch camera design we recently noted would be all the rage in 2019 smartphones. Huawei, notably, already beat Samsung to the proverbial hole-punch late last year with the Nova 4.

The “Beyond 1” mentioned here is the working title for the flagship phone. “Beyond 2” will likely be the S10 Plus, while the “Beyond 0” is expected to be a budget version, akin to the iPhone XR.

Another tidbit from the new leak is the phone’s apparent ability to wirelessly charge compatible handsets and perhaps even Samsung wearables. That would put the product in line with another recent Huawei handset, the Mate 20 Pro.