Year: 2019

The Japanese spacecraft Hayabusa 2 has just completed the next phase of its multi-part, multi-year mission by shooting a bullet into the asteroid it had been circling and returning to space.

Hopefully, the spacecraft has been able to collect samples of asteroid material kicked off from the surface by the impact from the specially made bullet that the Hayabusa craft shot.

The landing and mining mission is the sequel to an earlier mission (the first Hayabusa voyage), which was a seven year voyage during which the spacecraft observed an asteroid, collected samples and returned to Earth.

Scientists said that collecting material from the Ryugu asteroid could offer clues to support a hypothesis of how water and life formed on the surface of the Earth in the early days of the planet’s formation. Ryugu is a near earth asteroid that scientists have identified as carbon-rich (a C-type), which may have water in their rocks.

Japan’s Hayabusa 2 is expected to return to Earth in 2020 with its rocky haul.

According to the rocket’s Twitter feed the rocket began its descent roughly 20 kilometers above the asteroid’s surface in the early hours of the 21st and touched down a few hours ago.

The descent and collection was supposed to take place last year, when the spacecraft deployed two rovers on the surface of the asteroid to scout its geography. Those rovers relayed images of a terrain that was a bit more rocky than scientists had expected, so more planning had to be done before the mission could be carried out.

China’s Baidu, which is often compared to Alphabet’s Google, is showing no signs of slowing down its pace of betting on video content as its core advertising unit feels the squeeze from rivals. The company’s latest financial results show its video streaming business iQiyi posted a net loss of 9.1 billion yuan or $1.3 billion in 2018, compared to just 3.74 billion yuan in 2017.

Not long ago, iQiyi announced raising $500 million in convertible notes to fuel its spending spree. The video site, which filed for a $1.5 billion U.S. IPO last February, aspires to be the “Disney of China” with a Netflix-style production house and a plan to merchandise a library of intellectual property. Baidu also felt the heat as content costs from 2018 jumped 75 percent to $3.42 billion mainly on account of iQiyi expenses.

The cash burn appears to be paying off. IQiyi added 36.6 million subscribers last year, bringing its total users to 87.4 million. 98.5 percent of them were paying, a promising ratio given Chinese users were long used to getting free content in a country with rampant online piracy. IQiyi’s most serious contender Tencent Video had 82 million users as of Q3.

2018 also turned out to be the first time Baidu has crossed the 100 billion yuan earnings mark as the firm pocketed 102.3 billion yuan ($14.88 billion) in total revenues, an increase of 28 percent from 2017.

In Q4 alone, Baidu’s total revenues grew 22 percent to $3.96 billion at a slower rate compared to the previous quarter. Online advertising from search results, news feed and video content still made up the majority of the company’s income despite the considerable resources the behemoth has poured into autonomous driving and other AI-focused efforts.

Meanwhile, Baidu’s lucrative advertising business is facing heightened competition from ByteDance, the fast-ascending new media company with a suite of news and video apps that are proven popular with marketers. The Beijing-based firm that’s also unnerved Tencent was expected to achieve $7.4 billion in revenues last year, Bloomberg reported citing sources.

To fend off attackers, Baidu has broadened its advertising inventory beyond the web to include the likes of elevators. In another move, Baidu paid $133 million in cash prizes luring users to its namesake search app on the eve of Chinese New Year. But its search service has over the years been a repeated target for criticism on issues ranging from false medical ads to more recently the subpar quality of its search results. Baidu has nonetheless held onto its commanding position in a market where Google is absent and smaller players like Bing and Sogou remain the underdogs.

On the AI front, Baidu made a total of 13 investments in 2018 that made it the most prolific corporate venture capital focused on the realm, according to a report from CB Insights. Microsoft’s M12 venture and Google Ventures followed closely behind.

Though Baidu’s AI business is far from achieving mass commercialization, the segment has scored some notable landmarks. Over 200 million devices now use DuerOS, the company’s answer to the Alexa voice assistant. Baidu’s autonomous driving open platform Apollo has accumulated 135 original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) including Volvo, which is working with its Chinese ally to deliver level four self-driving passenger vehicles that can operate on pre-mapped roads with minimum human intervention.

Facebook will end its unpaid market research programs and proactively take its Onavo VPN app off the Google Play store in the wake of backlash following TechCrunch’s investigation about Onavo code being used in a Facebook Research app the sucked up data about teens. The Onavo Protect app will eventually shut down, and will immediately cease pulling in data from users for market research though it will continue operating as a Virtual Private Network in the short-term to allow users to find a replacement.

Facebook has also ceased to recruit new users for the Facebook Research app that still runs on Android but was forced off of iOS by Apple after we reported on how it violated Apple’s Enterprise Certificate program for employee-only apps. Existing Facebook Research app studies will continue to run, though.

A Facebook spokesperson confirmed the change and provided this statement “Market research helps companies build better products for people. We are shifting our focus to reward-based market research which means we’re going to end the Onavo program.”

With the suspicions about big tech giants and looming regulation leading to more intense scrutiny of privacy practices, Facebook has decided that giving users a utility like a VPN in exchange for quietly examining their usage of other apps and mobile browsing data isn’t a wise strategy. Instead, it will focus on paid programs where users explicitly understand what privacy they’re giving up for direct financial compensation.

Facebok acquired Onavo in 2013 for a reported $200 million to use its VPN app the gather data about what people were doing on their phones. That data revealed WhatsApp was sending far more messages per day than Messenger, convincing Facebook to pay a steep sum of $19 billion to buy WhatsApp. Facebook went on to frame Onavo as a way for users to reduce their data usage, block dangerous websites, keep their traffic safe from snooping — while Facebook itself was analyzing that traffic. The insights helped it discover new trends in mobile usage, keep an eye on competitors, and figure out what features or apps to copy. Cloning became core to Facebook’s product strategy over the past years, with Instagram’s versions of Snapchat Stories growing larger than the original.

But last year, privacy concerns led Apple to push Facebook to remove the Onavo VPN app from the App Store, though it continued running on Google Play. But Facebook quietly repurposed Onavo code for use in its Facebook Research app that TechCrunch found was paying users in the U.S. and India ages 13 to 35 up to $20 in gift cards per month to give it VPN and root network access to spy on all their mobile data.

Facebook ran the program in secret, obscured by intermediary beta testing services like Betabound and Applause. It only informed users it recruited with ads on Instagram, Snapchat and elsewhere that they were joining a Facebook Research program after they’d begun signup and signed non-disclosure agreements. A Facebook claimed in a statement that “there was nothing ‘secret’ about this”, but it had threatened legal action if users publicly discussed the Research program.

But the biggest problem for Facebook was that its Research app abused Apple’s Enterprise Certificate program meant for employee-only apps to distribute the app outside the company. That led Apple to ban the Research app from iOS and invalidate Facebook’s certificate. This shut down Facebook’s internal iOS collaboration tools, pre-launch test versions of its popular apps, and even its lunch menu and shuttle schedule to break for 30 hours, causing chaos at the company’s offices.

In an attempt to preempt any more scandals around Onavo and the Facebook Research app or Google stepping in to block the apps, Facebook is now taking Onavo off the Play Store and stopping recruitment of Research testers.

Calling all lunatics — the first fully private moon landing mission is about to take off from Cape Canaveral. A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket carrying SpaceIL’s Beresheet lander is set to take off about an hour from now, at 5:45 Pacific time. Watch it right here!

The launch isn’t just the lander — in fact, the lander is only a small part of the payload. The primary passenger is Nusantara Satu, an Indian communications satellite that will provide connectivity to rural areas in the country difficult to reach by ordinary means. Once it gets to its geosynchronous orbit it will deploy the U.S. Air Force Research Lab’s S5 experimental satellite, which will track objects and debris around that altitude.

But by the time those deploy (about 44 minutes after launch), Beresheet will be well on its way; it’s entering a transfer orbit with an eye to lunar insertion and touchdown on the surface there in April.

Should it accomplish its task, the Israeli satellite will be the first private mission to land on the moon. So far it’s just been us, Russia and China — others have passed by or orbited, to be sure, but no one has made a soft landing and taken pictures, as Beresheet intends to do.

It was originally planned to do this for Google’s ill-fated Lunar Xprize, which went unclaimed despite serious interest — the truth is it was just a bit too ambitious for its own good. But several of the companies and teams that entered are still going strong, moving forward at their own paces.

At around $100 million, Beresheet will be the cheapest moon landing mission by far, and as the first to do so on a privately engineered and built (not to mention previously flown) rocket, as a secondary payload and with a private launch coordinator… let’s just say that it’s likely to set records all over the place if all goes well.

The first thing that needs to happen, of course, is takeoff. So tune in below at 5:45:

WaitWhat, the digital content production engine behind LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman’s Masters of Scale podcast, has secured a $4.3 million Series A investment led by Cue Ball Capital and Burda Principal Investments.

Launched in January 2017, WaitWhat will use the cash to create additional media properties across a variety of mediums, including podcasts.

Investors are gravitating toward podcast startups as consumer interest in original audio content skyrockets. Podcasting, though an infantile industry that hit just $314 million in revenue in 2017, is maturing, raking in venture capital rounds large and small and recording its first notable M&A transaction with Spotify’s acquisition of Gimlet and Anchor earlier this month. The music streaming giant shelled out a total of $340 million for the podcast production platform and the provider of a suite of podcast creation, distribution and monetization tools, respectively. It plans to spend an additional $500 million on audio storytelling platforms as part of a larger plan to become the Netflix of audio.

WaitWhat, for its part, dubs itself the “media invention company.” Founded by June Cohen and Deron Triff, a pair of former TED executives responsible for expanding the nonprofit’s digital media business, WaitWhat is today launching Should This Exist, a new podcast hosted by Flickr founder and tech investor Caterina Fake.  Fake will interview entrepreneurs about the human side and the impact of technology in the show created in partnership with Quartz.

“People don’t just transact with content; they want to feel connected to it through a sense of wonder, awe, curiosity, and mastery,” Cohen said in a statement. “These are contagious emotions, and research shows they stimulate sharing. Where many media companies aim for volume — putting out lots of content with a short shelf life — we’re building a completely distinctive portfolio of premium properties that are continually increasing in value, inspiring deep audience engagement, and creating opportunities for format expansion.”

Other investors in the round include Reid Hoffman, MIT Media Lab director Joi Ito and Liminal Ventures. WaitWhat previously raised a $1.5 million round from Victress Capital, Human Ventures and Able Partners, all of which have joined the A round.

I can’t tell you the number of times I’ve heard friends lament how difficult it is to find a decent calendar app. The stock calendar apps are certainly serviceable but there’s so much that they can’t handle in terms of managing and prioritizing tasks.

Sunsama, launching out of Y Combinator’s latest batch, is taking a crack at solving the calendar conundrum with a $10-per-month professionals-focused productivity planner.

Co-founders Ashutosh Priyadarshy and Travis Meyer began with the idea that the relationship between task managers and calendars were a mess. Devotees to “get things done” to-do apps end up re-typing tasks they’ve been assigned to on project-based systems like Trello and Asana which just leads to a whole lot of confusion. Sunsama’s third-party integrations make it easy to drag these tasks into your to-do list every morning and keep things updated as your tasks evolve and priorities need to shift.

The company takes some pretty clear design inspiration from existing enterprise apps. The influences from Google Calendar, Slack and Trello are pretty clear but the resulting interface all works together very thoughtfully with a drag-and-drop organizational flow that lets you import projects from linked services. It all makes for a very friendly, pretty system that can enable you to fly through the often cumbersome of populating your to-do list in the first place. The company currently supports integrations with Asana, Trello, Slack, Github, Gitlab, Jira and Todoist.

While a lot of other task management apps rely on a freemium model or low annual subscription, Sunsama takes $10-per-month for their service. It’s definitely an expense, but the founders see apps like $30-per-month email service Superhuman as a sign that professionals are willing to drop some cash on a service that cleans up their digital life.

The company wants to snag individual users but getting small teams onto the service could be their clearest route to wider adoption. When your entire team is on Sunsama, you’re able to check out what other members of your channels have on deck when they’re working on a particular project. There’s the risk of getting lost in the fray of other necessary platforms on the company level, but the founders think the deep integrations will keep people turning to Sunsama when they want to see how a project is going.

The startup seems to have taken more than a few on-boarding cues from Superhuman, which takes you off the waitlist only after they’ve gotten a chance to personally talk you through their service and see whether you’re a good fit. You can sign-up to request Sunsama access on their site now.

I can’t tell you the number of times I’ve heard friends lament how difficult it is to find a decent calendar app. The stock calendar apps are certainly serviceable but there’s so much that they can’t handle in terms of managing and prioritizing tasks.

Sunsama, launching out of Y Combinator’s latest batch, is taking a crack at solving the calendar conundrum with a $10-per-month professionals-focused productivity planner.

Co-founders Ashutosh Priyadarshy and Travis Meyer began with the idea that the relationship between task managers and calendars were a mess. Devotees to “get things done” to-do apps end up re-typing tasks they’ve been assigned to on project-based systems like Trello and Asana which just leads to a whole lot of confusion. Sunsama’s third-party integrations make it easy to drag these tasks into your to-do list every morning and keep things updated as your tasks evolve and priorities need to shift.

The company takes some pretty clear design inspiration from existing enterprise apps. The influences from Google Calendar, Slack and Trello are pretty clear but the resulting interface all works together very thoughtfully with a drag-and-drop organizational flow that lets you import projects from linked services. It all makes for a very friendly, pretty system that can enable you to fly through the often cumbersome of populating your to-do list in the first place. The company currently supports integrations with Asana, Trello, Slack, Github, Gitlab, Jira and Todoist.

While a lot of other task management apps rely on a freemium model or low annual subscription, Sunsama takes $10-per-month for their service. It’s definitely an expense, but the founders see apps like $30-per-month email service Superhuman as a sign that professionals are willing to drop some cash on a service that cleans up their digital life.

The company wants to snag individual users but getting small teams onto the service could be their clearest route to wider adoption. When your entire team is on Sunsama, you’re able to check out what other members of your channels have on deck when they’re working on a particular project. There’s the risk of getting lost in the fray of other necessary platforms on the company level, but the founders think the deep integrations will keep people turning to Sunsama when they want to see how a project is going.

The startup seems to have taken more than a few on-boarding cues from Superhuman, which takes you off the waitlist only after they’ve gotten a chance to personally talk you through their service and see whether you’re a good fit. You can sign-up to request Sunsama access on their site now.

California, which has some of the strongest data breach notification laws in the U.S., thinks it can do even better.

The golden state’s attorney general Xavier Becerra announced a new bill Thursday that aims to close loopholes in its existing data breach notification laws by expanding the requirements for companies to notify users or customers if their passport and government ID numbers, along with biometric data, such as fingerprints, and iris and facial recognition scans, have been stolen.

The updated draft legislation lands a few months after the Starwood hack, which Becerra and Democratic state assembly member Marc Levine, who introduced the bill, said prompted the law change.

Marriott-owned hotel chain Starwood said data on fewer than 383 million unique guests was stolen in the data breach, revealed in September, including guest names, postal addresses, phone numbers, dates of birth, genders, email addresses, some encrypted payment card data and other reservation information. Starwood also disclosed that five million passport numbers were stolen.

Although Starwood came clean and revealed the data breach, companies are not currently legally obligated to disclose that passport numbers or biometric data have been stolen. Under California state law, only Social Security numbers, driver’s license numbers, banking information, passwords, medical and health insurance information and data collected through automatic license plate recognition systems must be reported.

That’s set to change, under the new California assembly bill 1130, the state attorney general said.

“We have an opportunity today to make our data breach law stronger and that’s why we’re moving today to make it more difficult for hackers and cybercriminals to get your private information,” said Becerra at a press conference in San Francisco. “AB 1130 closes a gap in California law and ensures that our state remains the nation’s leader in data privacy and protection,” he said.

Several other states, like Alabama, Florida and Oregon, already require data breach notifications in the event of passport number breaches, and also biometric data in the case of Iowa and Nebraska, among others.

California remains, however, one of only a handful of states that require the provision of credit monitoring or identity theft protection after certain kinds of breaches.

Thursday’s bill comes less than a year after state lawmakers passed the California Privacy Act into law, greatly expanding privacy rights for consumers — similar to provisions provided to Europeans under the newly instituted General Data Protection Regulation. The state privacy law, passed in June and set to go into effect in 2020, was met with hostility by tech companies headquartered in the state, prompting a lobbying effort to push for a superseding but weaker federal privacy law.

California, which has some of the strongest data breach notification laws in the U.S., thinks it can do even better.

The golden state’s attorney general Xavier Becerra announced a new bill Thursday that aims to close loopholes in its existing data breach notification laws by expanding the requirements for companies to notify users or customers if their passport and government ID numbers, along with biometric data, such as fingerprints, and iris and facial recognition scans, have been stolen.

The updated draft legislation lands a few months after the Starwood hack, which Becerra and Democratic state assembly member Marc Levine, who introduced the bill, said prompted the law change.

Marriott-owned hotel chain Starwood said data on fewer than 383 million unique guests was stolen in the data breach, revealed in September, including guest names, postal addresses, phone numbers, dates of birth, genders, email addresses, some encrypted payment card data and other reservation information. Starwood also disclosed that five million passport numbers were stolen.

Although Starwood came clean and revealed the data breach, companies are not currently legally obligated to disclose that passport numbers or biometric data have been stolen. Under California state law, only Social Security numbers, driver’s license numbers, banking information, passwords, medical and health insurance information and data collected through automatic license plate recognition systems must be reported.

That’s set to change, under the new California assembly bill 1130, the state attorney general said.

“We have an opportunity today to make our data breach law stronger and that’s why we’re moving today to make it more difficult for hackers and cybercriminals to get your private information,” said Becerra at a press conference in San Francisco. “AB 1130 closes a gap in California law and ensures that our state remains the nation’s leader in data privacy and protection,” he said.

Several other states, like Alabama, Florida and Oregon, already require data breach notifications in the event of passport number breaches, and also biometric data in the case of Iowa and Nebraska, among others.

California remains, however, one of only a handful of states that require the provision of credit monitoring or identity theft protection after certain kinds of breaches.

Thursday’s bill comes less than a year after state lawmakers passed the California Privacy Act into law, greatly expanding privacy rights for consumers — similar to provisions provided to Europeans under the newly instituted General Data Protection Regulation. The state privacy law, passed in June and set to go into effect in 2020, was met with hostility by tech companies headquartered in the state, prompting a lobbying effort to push for a superseding but weaker federal privacy law.

California, which has some of the strongest data breach notification laws in the U.S., thinks it can do even better.

The golden state’s attorney general Xavier Becerra announced a new bill Thursday that aims to close loopholes in its existing data breach notification laws by expanding the requirements for companies to notify users or customers if their passport and government ID numbers, along with biometric data, such as fingerprints, and iris and facial recognition scans, have been stolen.

The updated draft legislation lands a few months after the Starwood hack, which Becerra and Democratic state assembly member Marc Levine, who introduced the bill, said prompted the law change.

Marriott-owned hotel chain Starwood said data on fewer than 383 million unique guests was stolen in the data breach, revealed in September, including guest names, postal addresses, phone numbers, dates of birth, genders, email addresses, some encrypted payment card data and other reservation information. Starwood also disclosed that five million passport numbers were stolen.

Although Starwood came clean and revealed the data breach, companies are not currently legally obligated to disclose that passport numbers or biometric data have been stolen. Under California state law, only Social Security numbers, driver’s license numbers, banking information, passwords, medical and health insurance information and data collected through automatic license plate recognition systems must be reported.

That’s set to change, under the new California assembly bill 1130, the state attorney general said.

“We have an opportunity today to make our data breach law stronger and that’s why we’re moving today to make it more difficult for hackers and cybercriminals to get your private information,” said Becerra at a press conference in San Francisco. “AB 1130 closes a gap in California law and ensures that our state remains the nation’s leader in data privacy and protection,” he said.

Several other states, like Alabama, Florida and Oregon, already require data breach notifications in the event of passport number breaches, and also biometric data in the case of Iowa and Nebraska, among others.

California remains, however, one of only a handful of states that require the provision of credit monitoring or identity theft protection after certain kinds of breaches.

Thursday’s bill comes less than a year after state lawmakers passed the California Privacy Act into law, greatly expanding privacy rights for consumers — similar to provisions provided to Europeans under the newly instituted General Data Protection Regulation. The state privacy law, passed in June and set to go into effect in 2020, was met with hostility by tech companies headquartered in the state, prompting a lobbying effort to push for a superseding but weaker federal privacy law.