Year: 2019

Amazon announced a new capability today called Amazon Rekognition Custom Labels to help customers train machine learning models to understand a set of objects when there is a limited set of information.

Typically, machine learning models have to work on large data sets to learn something like what’s a picture of a dog, as opposed to some other animals. Amazon Rekognition Custom Labels can work with a limited data set to teach the algorithm a group of objects specific to a given use case.

“Instead of having to train a model from scratch, which requires specialized machine learning expertise and millions of high-quality labeled images, customers can now use Amazon Rekognition Custom Labels to achieve state-of-the-art performance for their unique image analysis needs,” the company wrote in a blog post announcing the new feature.

For example, you may want to teach the model to identify a set of engine parts, a limited set of information, which has a lot of meaning to a specific use case. Less information like this actually poses a problem for most machine learning models, but this feature has been designed specifically to learn from a smaller amount of data. Instead of hundreds or thousands of images, Amazon Rekognition Custom Labels can work with as few as ten images to learn to identify the object.

Amazon has gotten flack from the ACLU and shareholders in the past for selling Amazon Rekognition to law enforcement to help identify faces. This feature offers a more benign use of similar technology.

The new feature goes live next week on December 3rd, right in time for AWS re:Invent, the company’s customer conference taking place in Las Vegas.

CBS’s over-the-top streaming service, CBS All Access, is the latest to counter the threat from Disney+ by investing in children’s programming. Today, the company is launching a kids’ programming lineup including original shows and other library content. Plus, in one of the first major content integrations ahead of the ViacomCBS merger, the CBS streaming service will soon add a selection of Nickelodeon children’s TV shows to its catalog.

The first Nickelodeon titles will roll out in January, the company says.

In August, CBS had announced plans to launch children’s programming on its service by way of deals with WildBrain (formerly DHX Media) and Boat Rocker Studios. With WildBrain, CBS licensed the kids’ TV series “Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs,” produced with Sony Pictures Animation. And with Boat Rocker, CBS licensed the new “Danger Mouse,” produced with BBC Children’s Productions.

The two shows are the first original children’s series on the service, which today is better known for its original programming aimed at adults, like “Star Trek: Discovery,” “The Good Fight,” “The Twilight Zone,” and soon “Star Trek: Picard.”

Today, its two originals are now live for subscribers alongside a library of kids’ content that includes “Bob the Builder,” “Inspector Gadget,” “Madeline,” “Heathcliff,” “The Adventures of Paddington Bear,” and the original “Danger Mouse.”

Over the next several weeks, CBS says it plans to grow its kids’ library to over 1,000 episodes as more TV series are added.

“Bringing children’s programming to CBS All Access is a significant step toward providing even more value for our subscribers and now for their children as well,” said Marc DeBevoise, President and COO, CBS Interactive, in a statement. “We’re bringing to market a fantastic roster of exclusive originals along with a library of marquee series for families, and we look forward to continuing to expand our children’s programming offering, especially with the future addition of incredible programming from Nickelodeon.”

The company did not specify which titles from Nickelodeon would come to CBS All Access, but it’s possible the lineup could include shows like “SpongeBob SquarePants” or “Dora the Explorer,” which went over to Amazon Prime Video after Viacom pulled them off Netflix back in 2013. Today, some of the early seasons of those shows and others are available as part of Amazon Prime’s free streaming perk, while later seasons can only be rented or purchased.

Plus, “Spongebob,” “Dora,” and other classic Nickelodeon kids’ shows are not included in Nickelodeon’s new agreement with Netflix, which is focused on new, original content using both well-known characters and all-new IP. According to The NYT, that deal was valued at $200 million.

It would make sense for CBS All Access to eventually absorb Viacom’s kids’ streaming service Noggin, which is where you can today find “Dora,” along with other shows like “PAW Patrol,” “Peppa Pig, “Team Umizoomi,” “Wallykazam,” “Bubble Guppies,” “Rusty Rivets,” “Blue’s Clues,” “Blaze,” “Shimmer & Shine,” “Max & Ruby,” “Wonder Pets,” “Nia Hao, Kai-Lan,” and several others to round out CBS All Access as a more family-friendly streaming service with a wide catalog in order to better compete with Netflix, Hulu and of course, Disney+. Once a combined company, it doesn’t make sense to ask its customer base to subscribe to both services or choose between them.

Apple has released its annual holiday ad, just in time for Thanksgiving. Named “The Surprise,” the ad focuses on two young girls who spend a lot of time playing with an iPad.

The ad focuses on a family that travels across the country to visit the mother’s father. Like many families, the parents hand them an iPad when their daughters start to fight…

When they arrive at the grandfather’s house, we realize that the grandfather’s wife recently passed away. Both the grandfather and the mother are still mourning.

While their parents tell the kids to watch something on the iPad, they end up using the iPad to build a touching slideshow using old family photos.

In other news, Deadpool actor Ryan Reynolds has invested an undisclosed amount in a company selling prepaid phone plans called Mint Mobile. It all sounds like a weird sponsored Instagram post, but a source tells TechCrunch that Reynolds now owns more than 25% of the company with this recent investment. What he invested is thoroughly unclear and a Mint Mobile spokesperson did not comment on the company’s valuation.

Mint Mobile is a mobile virtual network operator, meaning the company does not actually own the network infrastructure it operates on. It uses T-Mobile’s cellular infrastructure. The MVNO launched beneath Costa Mesa, California-based Ultra Mobile in 2016 and the brand was only recently incorporated as its own entity. Ultra Mobile CEO David Glickman is also the CEO of Mint Mobile. 

MVNOs are vehicles to create a new carrier brand without having to worry about all of the infrastructure barriers of entry. As the T-Mobile and Sprint deal wraps up and T-Mobile’s scrappy “uncarrier” marketing slows down, there may be more attention being paid to these smaller MVNO entities.

Ultra Mobile has carved out a niche focusing largely on prepaid plans for low-income immigrants in the United States. The company’s online-only Mint Mobile brand seems to have been an effort for the company to bring a younger demographic onto its service. The company sells 3, 6 and 12-month prepaid blocks of wireless service, their cheapest regular-priced option being a $15 per month plan (billed annually).

Bringing Reynolds onboard certainly seems to be an effort to bring a star with a substantial social media following into the fold. Celebrity deals where recognizable names put up some cash and supply a big PR boost for the startup are far from rare. Andreessen Horowitz has built an entire fund around getting celebrities into startup deals. Retired NFL running back Marshawn Lynch is the public face of Beast Mobile, another MVNO.

“Celebrities generally invest in high-end products like skincare brands or delicious gin companies,” Reynolds said in a press release. “Yet Mint is making wireless way more affordable at a time when the average American is paying 65 dollars a month.” Reynolds is also an owner of Aviation Gin.

Disclosure: TechCrunch is owned by Verizon Wireless.

AWS today announced a number of IoT-related updates that, for the most part, aim to make getting started with its IoT services easier, especially for companies that are trying to deploy a large fleet of devices. The marquee announcement, however, is about the Alexa Voice Service, which makes Amazon’s Alex voice assistant available to hardware manufacturers who want to build it into their devices. These manufacturers can now create “Alexa built-in” devices with very low-powered chips and 1MB of RAM.

Until now, you needed at least 100MB of RAM and an ARM Cortex A-class processor. Now, the requirement for Alexa Voice Service integration for AWS IoT Core has come down 1MB and a cheaper Cortex-M processor. With that, chances are you’ll see even more lightbulbs, light switches and other simple, single-purpose devices with Alexa functionality. You obviously can’t run a complex voice-recognition model and decision engine on a device like this, so all of the media retrieval, audio decoding, etc. is done in the cloud. All it needs to be able to do is detect the wake word to start the Alex functionality, which is a comparably simple model.

“We now offload the vast majority of all of this to the cloud,” AWS IoT VP Dirk Didascalou told me. “So the device can be ultra dumb. The only thing that the device still needs to do is wake word detection. That still needs to be covered on the device.” Didascalou noted that with new, lower-powered processors from NXP and Qualcomm, OEMs can reduce their engineering bill of materials by up to 50 percent, which will only make this capability more attractive to many companies.

Didascalou believes we’ll see manufacturers in all kinds of areas use this new functionality, but most of it will likely be in the consumer space. “It just opens up the what we call the real ambient intelligence and ambient computing space,” he said. “Because now you don’t need to identify where’s my hub — you just speak to your environment and your environment can interact with you. I think that’s a massive step towards this ambient intelligence via Alexa.”

No cloud computing announcement these days would be complete without talking about containers. Today’s container announcement for AWS’ IoT services is that IoT Greengrass, the company’s main platform for extending AWS to edge devices, now offers support for Docker containers. The reason for this is pretty straightforward. The early idea of Greengrass was to have developers write Lambda functions for it. But as Didascalou told me, a lot of companies also wanted to bring legacy and third-party applications to Greengrass devices, as well as those written in languages that are not currently supported by Greengrass. Didascalou noted that this also means you can bring any container from the Docker Hub or any other Docker container registry to Greengrass now, too.

“The idea of Greengrass was, you build an application once. And whether you deploy it to the cloud or at the edge or hybrid, it doesn’t matter, because it’s the same programming model,” he explained. “But very many older applications use containers. And then, of course, you saying, okay, as a company, I don’t necessarily want to rewrite something that works.”

Another notable new feature is Stream Manager for Greengrass. Until now, developers had to cobble together their own solution for managing data streams from edge devices, using Lambda functions. Now, with this new feature, they don’t have to reinvent the wheel every time they want to build a new solution for connection management and data retention policies, etc., but can instead rely on this new functionality to do that for them. It’s pre-integrated with AWS Kinesis and IoT Analytics, too.

Also new for AWS IoT Greengrass are fleet provisioning, which makes it easier for businesses to quickly set up lots of new devices automatically, as well as secure tunneling for AWS IoT Device Management, which makes it easier for developers to remote access into a device and troubleshoot them. In addition, AWS IoT Core now features configurable endpoints.

The Daily Crunch is TechCrunch’s roundup of our biggest and most important stories. If you’d like to get this delivered to your inbox every day at around 9am Pacific, you can subscribe here.

1. Uber has again been denied licence renewal in London over safety risks

With Uber’s two-month license extension in London coming to an end, the company has once again been denied a full renewal by the city’s transport regulator — which said that it had found a “pattern of failures” that put “passenger safety and security at risk.”

This doesn’t mean the company has to halt London operations immediately. Instead, Uber says it will appeal the decision, and it will be able to continue operating in the city during the appeals process.

2. eBay to sell ticket marketplace StubHub to viagogo for $4.05 billion

The deal will merge StubHub’s U.S.-based marketplace with viagogo, which serves a worldwide audience as a ticket marketplace in Europe, Asia, Australia and Latin America.

3. More than 1 million T-Mobile customers exposed by breach

A T-Mobile representative told us that the attack was discovered in early November and shut down “immediately.” But if you’re a T-Mobile customer, it may be a good idea to change your password and check up on your account details.

4. Scribd raises $58M for subscription e-books and audiobooks

At the beginning of this year, the company — known for a Netflix-style, e-book and audiobook subscription — announced that it had more than 1 million paying subscribers. It also said it’s been profitable since 2017.

5. HP rejects Xerox again, but leaves door open for negotiation

In a letter released this morning, the HP board of directors summarily rejected Xerox’s latest takeover offer, saying it significantly undervalues the company. At the same time, it left the door open for further negotiation.

6. Inside Prosus Ventures’ $4.5 billion bet on India

TechCrunch spoke with Larry Illg and Ashutosh Sharma of Prosus Ventures (currently in the midst of a takeover attempt of British food delivery startup Just Eat) to understand how significant food tech is for the investment firm and the bets it is making in India. (Extra Crunch membership required.)

7. This week’s TechCrunch podcasts

This week’s Equity skips the normal news roundup for an interview Poshmark CEO Manish Chandra and investor James Currier. And over at Original Content, we review Netflix’s first music competition show “Rhythm + Flow.”

$35 million-funded Omni is packing up and shutting down after struggling to make the economics of equipment rentals and physical on-demand storage work out. The startup fought for a second wind after selling off its physical storage operations to competitor Clutter in May. Then sources tell me it tried to build a whitelabel software platform for letting brick-and-mortar merchants rent stuff like drills or tents as well as sell them so Omni could get out of hands-on logistics. But now the whole company is folding, with Coinbase hiring roughly 10 of Omni’s engineers.

“They realized that the core business was just challenging as architected” a source close to Omni tells TechCrunch. “The service was really great for the consumer but when they looked at what it would take to scale, that would be difficult and expensive.”

The news follows TechCrunch’s report in October that Omni had laid off operations teams members and was in talks to sell its engineering team to Coinbase. Omni had internally discussed informing its retail rental partners ahead of time that it would be shutting down. Meanwhile, it frantically worked to stop team members from contacting the press about the startup’s internal troubles.

“We’ll be winding down operations at Omni and closing the platform by the end of this year. We are proud of what we built and incredibly thankful for everyone who supported our vision over the past five and a half years” an Omni spokesperson says.

“Coinbase has reached an agreement with Omni to hire members of its engineering team. We’re always looking for top-tier engineering talent and look forward to welcoming these new team members to Coinbase” a Coinbase spokesperson tells us. The team was looking for more highly skilled engineers they could efficiently hire as a group, though it’s too early to say what they’ll be working on.

One major question is whether investors will get any cash back. Omni raised $25 million from cryptocurrency company Ripple in early 2018. Major investors include Flybridge, Highland, Allen & Company, and Founders Fund, plus a slew of angels.

Coup, an electric moped scooter-sharing service that operates in Berlin, Paris and Berlin, has announced in an email that it is going to shut down in all three cities. On Twitter, the company says that operating the service is “economically unsustainable” in the long term.

“We plan to discontinue our service in Berlin and Tübingen in by the middle of December 2019. It is also planned to close the COUP locations in Paris and Madrid,” the company says in its email announcement. The service still operates normally for now.

Coup also says that users who topped up their accounts with prepaid packages will get reimbursed when the service eventually shuts down.

“Even though Coup is a well-known brand in this market with a loyal customer base that regularly uses our services, operating Coup in the long term has become economically unsustainable,” Coup told a user on Twitter in French.

Coup is a wholly owned subsidiary of Bosch. It operates a service with hundreds of Gogoro scooters that you can book and ride with the Coup app. Just like other free-floating micro-mobility services, you could unlock a moped scooter somewhere and leave it somewhere else as long as you remain in the operating area.

Coup competes with Cityscoot in Paris. The French startup operates a similar service and has recently announced a partnership with Uber.

We have reached out to the company and will update this article if we hear back. Here’s the full email from Coup:

Dear COUP customer,

We have some sad news for you. We plan to discontinue our service in Berlin and Tübingen in by the middle of December 2019. It is also planned to close the COUP locations in Paris and Madrid.

We deeply regret this. Over the past three years, you and all the other COUP customers have remained loyal to us. We are proud to have been able to establish such a strong community in such a short period of time. Thank you for your loyalty, and thank you for using our service.

You can continue to use COUP in the usual way until the service is discontinued. In a separate e-mail, we will let you know when exactly this will happen. Until then, nothing will change in your contractual relationship with COUP.

If you have incurred costs for prepaid packages that have not been used up, they will of course be reimbursed. You can also continue using up your freerides until the service is discontinued.

Our customer support team will also remain open for telephone and e-mail inquiries.

SF-based Peak Design hasn’t really changed much about its now-classic Everyday bags over the years, and they’ve regularly received plenty of praise and good reviews so that makes sense. Today, however, Peak is launching the ‘V2’ collection of its entire Everyday line, including smart revisions of some of its best equipment, and all-new designs for some additional options.

The Peak Design Everyday V2 lineup includes improved Everyday Backpacks (starting at $259.95), with the company’s signature magnetic latch closure for the top compartment. The overall design is cleaned up and much more attractive overall, to my eyes, and they’ve beefed up the dimensions of the laptop compartments enough that the smaller 20L version should be able to easily hold your 15 (or 16 now, thanks Apple) -inch MacBook Pro. You can also modify the height of the laptop sleeve for when you’re carrying smaller notebooks, and there’s a bunch of other changes like much-improved zippers that promise more durability over time.

Peak has also used 100% recycled material for the fabric that makes up the outer shell of the Everyday Backpack V2, and they’ve got Bluesign certification, which is a third-party certification about sustainable sourcing for textiles, for all but the Black color way for these bags. Peak also says the top has been opened up, and there’s more room in the expandable side pockets, plus new magnetic attachment points for holding straps and keeping them from swinging around.

The Everyday Backpack, which has been my go-to photo backpack since its introduction basically, is also now joined by the new Everyday Backpack Zip (starting at $189.95), which skips the MagLatch closure for a more traditional full zip-up system. This line is more approachable in terms of price, and it doesn’t’t offer internal capacity expansion, or as many compartments. It also comes in smaller sizes (15L and 20L, no 30L option) and just generally has fewer bells and whistles. That said, it looks to be even more discreet for general use as a daypack, and the smaller size option is probably something that people with smaller frames were looking for anyway.

There’s also a new Everyday Totepack (from $169.95) with a roll-top flap and handles, as well as an Everyday Tote (from $149.95) that is a true shoulder bag vs. the convertible backpack Totepack design. These options are probably ideal for students or lighter photo/everyday carry use, and present yet another set of options for people looking for something other than a more standard backpack.

Peak also updated the Everyday Messenger (starting at $219.95), which is its shoulder bag for photographers, as well as the Everyday Sling (from $79.95). These single-strap bags all get improved aesthetics, as well as weight savings vs. last generation, while their gear compartments are a little bigger and they have the new UltraZip more durable zippers, as well as recycled materials.

Overall, Peak is launching a ton of updated products all at once, which is nice because it means the whole line benefits from the new materials, designs and zippers it’s now using. The added models mean there’s definitely a bag for everyone’s needs in the line now, and in fact it might actually be the case that the range means it’s harder to pick which one is right for you.

We have a couple of the new bags in for testing, and will be providing a review of these in the coming days once we’ve had a bit more time to spend with the new gear, so stay tuned.

SF-based Peak Design hasn’t really changed much about its now-classic Everyday bags over the years, and they’ve regularly received plenty of praise and good reviews so that makes sense. Today, however, Peak is launching the ‘V2’ collection of its entire Everyday line, including smart revisions of some of its best equipment, and all-new designs for some additional options.

The Peak Design Everyday V2 lineup includes improved Everyday Backpacks (starting at $259.95), with the company’s signature magnetic latch closure for the top compartment. The overall design is cleaned up and much more attractive overall, to my eyes, and they’ve beefed up the dimensions of the laptop compartments enough that the smaller 20L version should be able to easily hold your 15 (or 16 now, thanks Apple) -inch MacBook Pro. You can also modify the height of the laptop sleeve for when you’re carrying smaller notebooks, and there’s a bunch of other changes like much-improved zippers that promise more durability over time.

Peak has also used 100% recycled material for the fabric that makes up the outer shell of the Everyday Backpack V2, and they’ve got Bluesign certification, which is a third-party certification about sustainable sourcing for textiles, for all but the Black color way for these bags. Peak also says the top has been opened up, and there’s more room in the expandable side pockets, plus new magnetic attachment points for holding straps and keeping them from swinging around.

The Everyday Backpack, which has been my go-to photo backpack since its introduction basically, is also now joined by the new Everyday Backpack Zip (starting at $189.95), which skips the MagLatch closure for a more traditional full zip-up system. This line is more approachable in terms of price, and it doesn’t’t offer internal capacity expansion, or as many compartments. It also comes in smaller sizes (15L and 20L, no 30L option) and just generally has fewer bells and whistles. That said, it looks to be even more discreet for general use as a daypack, and the smaller size option is probably something that people with smaller frames were looking for anyway.

There’s also a new Everyday Totepack (from $169.95) with a roll-top flap and handles, as well as an Everyday Tote (from $149.95) that is a true shoulder bag vs. the convertible backpack Totepack design. These options are probably ideal for students or lighter photo/everyday carry use, and present yet another set of options for people looking for something other than a more standard backpack.

Peak also updated the Everyday Messenger (starting at $219.95), which is its shoulder bag for photographers, as well as the Everyday Sling (from $79.95). These single-strap bags all get improved aesthetics, as well as weight savings vs. last generation, while their gear compartments are a little bigger and they have the new UltraZip more durable zippers, as well as recycled materials.

Overall, Peak is launching a ton of updated products all at once, which is nice because it means the whole line benefits from the new materials, designs and zippers it’s now using. The added models mean there’s definitely a bag for everyone’s needs in the line now, and in fact it might actually be the case that the range means it’s harder to pick which one is right for you.

We have a couple of the new bags in for testing, and will be providing a review of these in the coming days once we’ve had a bit more time to spend with the new gear, so stay tuned.