Author: azeeadmin

When he was still running Microsoft, Steve Ballmer caused quite the stir in the tech world by screaming “Developers! Developers! Developers!” Since the executive retired to spend more time with his basketball team, however, the tech giant’s current CEO is decidedly more…subtle in his approach.

In the kickoff keynote to the first all-virtual build conference, Satya Nadella delivered a speech in front of a large shelving unit packed with knickknacks and family photos. And there was “RGV2cw.” The seemingly nonsensical string of letters sat to the right of the CEO’s head. But these kinds of backdrops aren’t chosen at random. Surely there must be some meaning in the madness.

The letters sent twitter users scrambling to decode. One noted the presence of a user on a dev board with the name. Another quickly snapped up the handle to send Build related tweets. This user, however, appears to be the first to have cracked the code:

Microsoft’s Scott Hanselman confirmed the message. It was, quite literally, a coded message to developers. Specifically, it’s the word “devs” in the Base64 format. Here, run it through this decoder to see for yourself.

It doesn’t have the shouting, sweaty urgency of Ballmer, but it’s a nice tip of the fedora nonetheless.

Starting today, you’ll be able to browse and buy products directly from a business’ Facebook Page or Instagram profile.

Both Facebook and Instagram already supported a degree of ecommerce — for example, Facebook has its Marketplace and will likely make a bigger push through its Libra cryptocurrency initiative, while Instagram allows users to buy products featured in posts and ads. But the company’s new tools go further, enabling businesses that to create a full-fledged Facebook Shop.

After all, the pandemic has probably made consumers even more likely to treat Facebook and Instagram profiles as the go-to source of information on local restaurants and stores — if your favorite store has changed their hours, or switched to online delivery/curbside pickup, they’ve almost certainly posted about it on Facebook or Instagram. So why not allow visitors to make purchases without having to leave the Facebook and Instagram apps?

It’s also worth remembering that the pandemic’s economic fallout will likely kill off many small business — businesses that post and advertise on Facebook. So the company has a stake in helping those businesses survive in any way it can.

In a Facebook Live session today, CEO Mark Zuckerberg described this as a way to help businesses suffering in the wake of COVID-19, though he acknowledged it will not “undo all the economic damage.”

He also suggested that this will remain useful after the pandemic, “I do think we’re going to continue living more of our lives online and doing more business online.”

Meanwhile, Instagram’s vice president of product Vishal Shah told me this as a big, global test of the feature with nearly 1 million businesses already signed up.

Those businesses will be able to create a Facebook Store for free — they just upload their catalogue, choose the products they want to feature, then customize it with cover image and accent colors. Visitors can then browse, save and order products without leaving the Facebook and Instagram apps.

While Facebook’s vice president of ads Dan Levy said the company will charge “small fees” on each purchase, the real monetization will come from driving more advertising.

Levy described this as a “build and render anywhere” solution, with Shah adding that “the shop itself will be very consistent, whether it’s on Facebook or instagram.” What will differ is how consumers discover the shops, whether it’s via the Facebook Marketplace or a product tagged in a photo on Instagram.

The company also plans to launch another experience called Instagram Shop this summer, allowing users to browse products directly from Instagram Explore and eventually from the app’s main navigation tab. There will also be ways for merchants to feature and link products from their Facebook Stores in their live videos, and for consumers to connect loyalty programs to their Facebook accounts.

As part of this announcement, Facebook said it’s partnering with Shopify, BigCommerce, Woo, Channel Advisor, CedCommerce, Cafe24, Tienda Nube and Feedonomics. Merchants will be able to use these third-party platforms to manage their Facebook Shops and the ads tied to those Shops.

“We’re living through extraordinary times,” Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella opened his Build 2020 keynote on a somber note. It was an odd tonal shift following the event introduction by hosts Seth Juarez and Dona Sarkar.

The pair spent kicked the 48 hour livestream off standing a CDC-approved social distance from one another behind a large desk, trading silly banter and dad jokes. That last bit, at least carries a sense of normality amidst these extraordinary times.

Awkward banter and goofy jokes are a mainstay in tech presentations, for better or worse — but there’s bound to be an extra level of strangeness when you strip away the live audience (particularly the overly enthusiastic employees planted in the audience). At best, it can have YouTube presenter energy and at worst, it’s like one of those videos of sitcom with the laugh track edited out.

As a necessary first time experiment, Microsoft’s Build 2020 keynote was probably more good than bad. It was arguably the first truly big tech company event on this level since pandemic really started locking things down. After all, Apple’s WWDC isn’t until next month, and Google essentially punted on I/O, removing even the online elements.

“Right now, the most important thing all of us can do is focus our attention on helping people with the new challenges we all face,” the company wrote at the time. “Please know that we remain committed to finding other ways to share platform updates with you through our developer blogs and community forums.”

It’s a difficult decision to make either way, of course. Certainly the gravity of the pandemic can make such an event seem inconsequential by comparison, but there’s also something to be said when a company can reintroduce a sense of normality — albeit through artificial means.

The Juarez/Sarkar bumpers are intended to serve as a through line through the two days of programming, and naturally a little vamping is going to be involved. In the case of the opener, it was five or so minutes of the cohosts scrolling through Twitter hashtag comments on a Surface Studio, in a bid to approximate the sense of community one has in attending an in-person developer conference.

Nadella’s presentation that followed struck a better balance. It was simple and likely pre-recorded, with the executive standing in front of a full shelving unit housing knickknacks and family photos. He addressed the camera, as the feed cut back and forth between him and clips. If things felt off, it was mostly due to the fact that it’s impossible to watch it without constantly comparing it to the pomp of previous years event.

Microsoft perhaps took a note from Nintendo, which switched from live keynotes to a prerecorded Tree House presentation at E3 several years ago. It’s a tradeoff that loses some of the excitement of the standard format, but adds the ability to perfect a presentation through multiple takes. Nintendo above all benefits from the use of countless game trailers. B-roll is an extremely important piece of that puzzle. 

The curse of the live demo is gone, if you want it. Though the heavy reliance on Skype conversations in a followup Microsoft presentation really hammered home the fact that few of us live in home studios. Plane noises and lawnmowers were a regular reminder that things are just going to be weird for a while. Not bad, necessarily, but weird.

There’s certainly good to come out of this forced reformatting. For one thing, Build is accessible through a free registration. The official chat (which was a train wreck for reasons I won’t go into here) was full of excited developers and observers announcing that this was their first-ever Build. Ticket prices, travel and the limitations of in-person event spaces are difficult hurdles for many.

The next few months will determine whether this is the new normal for these sorts of events. It would be hard to blame organizers for continuing with an abundance of cautious into 2021. I suspect many will return to the in-person event, but hopefully the added accessibility of the virtual element will live on beyond the threat of COVID-19.

TikTok enlists a big name from Disney as its new CEO, Walmart is shuttering its Jet e-commerce brand and EasyJet admits to a major data breach.

Here’s your Daily Crunch for May 19, 2020.

1. Disney streaming exec Kevin Mayer becomes TikTok’s new CEO

Mayer’s role involved overseeing Disney’s streaming strategy, including the launch of Disney+ last fall, which has already grown to more than 50 million subscribers. He was also seen as a potential successor to Disney CEO Bob Iger; instead, Disney Parks, Experiences and Products Chairman Bob Chapek was named CEO in a sudden announcement in February.

Mayer was likely an attractive choice to lead TikTok not just because of his streaming success, but also because hiring a high-profile American executive could help address politicians’ security concerns about the app’s Chinese ownership.

2. Walmart says it will discontinue Jet, which it acquired for $3B in 2016

Walmart tried to put a positive spin on the news, saying, “Due to continued strength of the Walmart.com brand, the company will discontinue Jet.com. The acquisition of Jet.com nearly four years ago was critical to accelerating our omni strategy.”

3. EasyJet says 9 million travel records taken in data breach

EasyJet, the U.K.’s largest airline, said hackers have accessed the travel details of 9 million customers. The budget airline said 2,200 customers also had their credit card details accessed in the data breach, but passport records were not accessed.

4. Where these 6 top VCs are investing in cannabis

The results paint a stunning picture of an industry on the verge of breaking away from a market correction. Our six respondents described numerous opportunities for startups and investors, but cautioned that this atmosphere will not last long. (Extra Crunch membership required.)

5. Brex brings on $150M in new cash in case of an ‘extended recession’

Where upstart companies aren’t cutting staff, they are often reducing spend — which is bad news for Brex, since it makes money on purchases made through its startup-tailored corporate card. But co-founder Henrique Dubugras seems largely unbothered on how the pandemic impacts Brex’s future.

6. Popping the hood on Vroom’s IPO filing

Yesterday afternoon, Vroom, an online car buying service, filed to go public. What does a private, car-focused e-commerce company worth $1.5 billion look like under the hood? (Extra Crunch membership required.)

7. Experience marketplace Pollen lays off 69 North America staff, furloughs 34 in UK

Founded in 2014 and previously called Verve, Pollen operates in the influencer or “word-of-mouth” marketing space. The marketplace lets friends or “members” discover and book travel, events and other experiences — and in turn helps promoters use word-of-mouth recommendations to sell tickets.

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.

One usual characteristic of a bootstrapped company is that its growth is slower than its VC-backed competitors. Bootstrapped marketing spend relies on revenue, revenue often relies on marketing spend, and the tension between the two can force slower growth. VC-backed companies, in contrast, can afford to spend ahead of revenue, often allowing them to grow more quickly.

Byte has found a much faster bootstrapped path to growth. The company, which was founded in 2017 and launched its products at the beginning of 2019, is on track to reach a $100 million revenue run rate in Q2 of this year, according to president Neeraj Gunsagar.

Unlike bootstrapped startups with first-time founders, byte (it’s officially lowercase) was founded by serial entrepreneurs Scott Cohen and Blake Johnson. Cohen founded his first company in 2011 (acquired by Deluxe Corporation in 2016) and his second company, Currency, alongside Blake Johnson in 2016, which sold to a private equity firm in 2019.

The duo brought on Gunsagar, formerly CMO at TrueCar where he spent eight years, to help lead the next phase of growth at the company and prepare the organization for international expansion and the next product rollout.

But let’s back up. Byte is an invisible-aligner-for-teeth company that has entered the ring with behemoths like Invisalign and SmileDirectClub, as well as a smattering of smaller at-home braces startups, like Candid. But there are several big differences between byte and its competition.

The first is its technology. Alongside impression kits and invisible aligners, byte also includes a device called HyperByte in all of its treatment plans. HyperByte is an extra in-mouth device that uses high-frequency vibrations (HFV) to send micropulses through the roots of the teeth and the surrounding bone, speeding up the process of alignment.

HFV treatment is FDA-approved and offered in orthodontist offices around the country, but usually at a steep price.

HyperByte comes included with the cost of using byte’s service, which comes out to $1,895. (Folks can also pay via payment plan, called BytePay, which comes out to $349 down and $83/month for a little over two years.) The company also includes a whitening solution that can be used in conjunction with aligners.

Byte’s treatment plans are overseen and reviewed by licensed orthodontists each and every time, and customers can be connected to an orthodontist or dentist should they run into any clinical issue during treatment.

In some cases, insurance may reimburse customers for their byte treatment.

In other words, byte is working to bring down both the cost of aligners and the time it takes to treat patients. Importantly, byte focuses exclusively on Phase 1 malocclusions, or small misalignments in the teeth like tiny gaps or slightly crooked teeth, and not complicated issues like overbites.

Most interestingly, byte saw explosive growth in the first quarter of 2020 — the company saw 10x revenue growth over the last three months, compared to the same period of 2019, and says that it is continuing at that 10x growth rate through Q2. Byte also told TechCrunch that it generated “positive EBITDA business pre-[COVID-19].” (As is the case with all private companies, these numbers come from byte and are not independently verified by TechCrunch.)

Part of that profitability story is improving economics. Toward the end of 2019, byte’s cost to acquire customers (CAC) averaged $189 for initial impression kits, a figure that dropped to $88 by the end of April 2020.

The sharp CAC decline is due to several factors. According to Gunsagar, the price of Google keywords dropped dramatically in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic and the company has seen its direct and organic traffic double, perhaps driven by the coronavirus pandemic spurring increased interest in self-improvement.

Byte isn’t the only company caught in the self-improvement updraft. “There’s sort of this trend toward self-improvement and using this time constructively,” Jaimee Minney, SVP of marketing and PR at Rakuten Intelligence, told CNBC. “Book sales increase, games and puzzles, and we have seen health and beauty start to grow as well, especially when you look at it on a year-over-year basis. That’s one I might keep an eye on, the self-improvement piece.”

Gunsagar explained that, historically, other companies may have thrown even more marketing money at this type of environment to boost growth even more.

“We won’t sacrifice our customer experience and we won’t sacrifice profitability as we grow the business,” said Gunsagar. “We don’t want to have too many impression kits going through the system because we want to make sure we can support it from a technology and experience standpoint. Every dollar we spend is still super profitable. I could go spend more money and still stay below our CPC goal of $150 and blow past $100 million in revenue this year, but I just wouldn’t be super confident that our NPS score or our customer experience wouldn’t be penalized.”

In formulating this careful growth strategy, Gunsagar and byte aren’t just looking at the broader tech ecosystem, where we’ve seen growth at all costs backfire on companies. They can find examples in their own industry — SmileDirectClub grew fantastically ahead of its initial public offering in September of 2019 only to feel backlash from some customers who were reportedly asked for an NDA in exchange for a refund.

One other important piece of byte’s strategy is an upcoming bytePro launch in conjunction with dentists and orthodontists. The idea is to grow alongside the dental and orthodontic industry, rather than cut these healthcare professionals out of the food chain.

With bytePro, which launches next month, dentists and orthodontists are included even more in the process. Incoming clients can ask to work with their own dentist or orthodontist as they go through the byte aligner process, and even get their impression kits in their dentist’s office rather than order them online. On the other side, dentists and orthodontists can join the bytePro network to be matched with new patients. Moreover, folks that purchase byte show an increased interest in caring for their teeth year round, according to the company, whether that be cleanings or other dental work. Byte aims to connect those folks with a good dentist or orthodontist to protect the investment they’ve made in their new smile.

Though byte is not venture-backed, the company has taken a small investment from actress and investor Kerry Washington, who has also invested in The Wing and Community. Washington serves as Creative Director at byte.

“When I was looking at ways to continue growing my portfolio, I focused on companies that I can be really proud to be associated with, and that pride comes from the quality of the product and how it improves the quality of people’s lives,” said Washington. “The idea of having a voice is really important. With byte, I said really early on ‘if you can’t open your mouth, you can’t find your voice’ and when you hear the stories from real customers, people were afraid to smile and afraid to speak and that’s when I realized that this is a tool that can better people’s lives in so many ways.”

As cashiers across the country take precautions to limit interactions with customers in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, it’s hard to think of a better time for the rollout of an Amazon Go vision of autonomous retail.

Standard Cognition CEO Jordan Fisher has been building towards that future for the past several years. His startup has raised over $86 million from investors like CRV, Initialized Capital and Y Combinator to create a system for building and retrofitting a new generation of retail experiences where consumers can walk into a store, pick up their items and walk out of the store without checking out. In the midst of the pandemic, the early technology is getting renewed attention though the tech isn’t widespread enough to make an impact.

“It’s unfortunate that the industry is where it’s at today, I wish that we were five years ahead to be much more widely deployed and be able to actually make a major difference on these risk profiles,” Fisher told TechCrunch. “But I think we’re going to be thinking with a COVID mentality for years to come. This is definitely piece of investing for the future to make sure that we’re opening up our retail world in as safe a way as possible.”

As Standard Cognition prepares to scale in a world more amenable to skipping checkout, the San Francisco startup is making international movement, acquiring a competitor based in Italy called Checkout Technologies for an undisclosed sum. The startup is tackling a lot of the same problems that Fisher’s team was working on; this acquisition brings Checkout’s talent, tech and partnerships to Standard Cognition.

Fisher said the two teams had been communicating since the middle of last year and that COVID-19, which struck Italy particularly hard, had “added complications” to wrapping up the deal, though he says they were in final diligence stage by the time the pandemic had fully reared its head.

“There’s going to be consolidation in the autonomous checkout space,” Fisher says. “We’ve always been interested in being international because there are specific retailers we’re interested in.”

The Italian startup had a partnership with a “top 150 retailer” in Italy, Fisher says, which Standard Cognition will continue to work with. Checkout Technologies’ 13-person team will stay put in their Milan offices as Standard Cognition continues to look for opportunities in that market.

On the international front, Standard Cognition has also detailed plans to roll out its tech in Japan, which Fisher frames as an ideal market for the technology based on consumer habits around visiting convenience stores. Stateside, the startup says they’re currently working on multiple retrofits to bring their tech to existing storefronts and that they’ve also landed a partnership with the Red Sox to showcase their tech in the baseball team’s new stadium.

During his Build keynote, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella today confirmed that the company has acquired Softomotive, a software robotic automation platform. Bloomberg first reported that this acquisition was in the works earlier this month, but the two companies didn’t comment on the report at the time.

Today, Nadella noted that Softomotive would become part of Microsoft’s Power Automate platform. “We’re bringing RPA – or robotic process automation to legacy apps and services with our acquisition of Softomotive,” Nadella said.

Softomotive currently has about 9,000 customers around the world. Softomotive’s WinAutomation platform will be freely available to Power Automate users with what Microsoft calls an RPA attended license in Power Automate.

In Power Automate, Microsoft will use Softomotive’s tools to enable a number of new capabilities, including Softomotives low-code desktop automation solution WinAutomation. Until now, Power Automate did not feature any desktop automation tools.

It’ll also build Softomotive’s connectors for applications from SAP, as well as legacy terminal screens and Java, into its desktop automation experience and enable parallel execution and multitasking for UI automation.

Softomotives other flagship application, ProcessRobot for server-based enterprise RPA development, will also find a new home in Power Automate. My guess, though, is that Microsoft mostly bought the company for its desktop automation skills.

“One of our most distinguishing characteristics, and an indelible part of our DNA, is an unswerving commitment to usability,” writes Softomotive CEO and co-founder Marios Stavropoulos. “We have always believed in the notion of citizen developers and, since less than two percent of the world population can write code, we believe the greatest potential for both process improvement and overall innovation comes from business end users. This is why we have invested so diligently in abstracting complexity away from end users and created one of the industry’s most intuitive user interfaces – so that non-technical business end users can not just do more, but also make deeper contributions by becoming professional problem solvers and innovators. We are extremely excited to pursue this vision as part of Microsoft.”

The two companies did not disclose the financial details of the transaction.

Roelof Botha’s career is the stuff dreams are made of — that is, if the dream is to become one of the topmost investors in the U.S. venture capital industry.

Not only has Botha had tremendous success in his investing career, including an early bet on the mobile payments company Square (on whose board he still sits five years after its IPO), but in 2017, Botha was made the U.S. head of the venture firm he first joined 17 years ago, Sequoia Capital.

Considering that Sequoia is widely considered the most powerful venture firm in the country, that’s quite a position to hold. In fact, on Forbes’s 2020 Midas List, Botha was ranked the third-best VC in the world, just two spots behind the number-one ranked investor. That person: Neil Shen, who is the founder and managing partner of  Sequoia Capital China. (Doug Leone is the firm’s global managing director.)

It’s because of Botha’s position and the insights that he brings to the role that we’re very pleased to announce that he is joining us this year at Disrupt 2020, which runs September 14 to September 16.

Certainly, there’s a lot to talk about. While Botha’s career has seemingly moved in one direction, he has lived through numerous economic ups and downs dating back more than 20 years and has seen what it takes to get through tough times.

When he first came to the U.S. from his native South Africa, it was as a former McKinsey consultant looking to nab an MBA from Stanford. He graduated just as the tech economy was imploding inn 2000, but he managed to connect with a fledgling payments startup, PayPal, joining as a director of corporate development before becoming its VP of finance and later its CFO.

A role at Sequoia Capital would follow, and a young Botha didn’t waste the opportunity. Instead, he led the firm’s investment in YouTube, sitting on its board before Google purchased the then 1.5-year-old startup in 2006 for what seemed at the time like an ungodly sum: $1.65 billion. (Last year, YouTube produced $15 billion in revenue for the company.)

It hasn’t all been a walk in the park. Today, in fact, Botha has portfolio companies that are facing an uphill battle. Eventbrite, for example, on whose board he sits, had to cut 45% of its staff last month because of the impact of COVID-19 on the events business.  Another of his portfolio companies, Bird, the buzzy micro-mobility company, has conducted its own mass layoffs as much of the U.S. remains at home in an attempt to slow the spread of the virus.

We’ll talk with Botha about how he’s advising these startups, as well as about his outlook for the broader venture industry. More specifically, we’ll discuss how startups strike a balance right now between continuing on their paths and succumbing to false optimism about how quickly the “black swan of 2020,” as Sequoia has described the coronavirus in a letter to its founders, is resolved.

If you care about the global shifts that are reshaping the tech industry right now, this is one conversation you won’t want to miss.

Disrupt 2020 runs September 14 to September 16 and we have several Digital Pass options to be part of the action or to exhibit virtually, which you can check out here.

We’ll be announcing more speakers over the coming weeks, so stay tuned.

(Editor’s Note: We’re watching the developing situation around the novel coronavirus very closely and will adapt as we go. You can find out the latest on our event schedule plans here.)

Xiaomi on Tuesday unveiled the global version of MIUI 12, the latest update to its Android -based operating system, for hundreds of millions of smartphones as the Chinese electronics giant pushes to broaden its services ecosystem.

The world’s fourth largest smartphone firm said it is delivering a range of new features to its overseas users with MIUI 12 including a revamped user interface, the ability to cast the phone screen without the need to connect it to a computer, improvement to multitasking support and battery life, and more privacy controls to users.

Chief among the new changes is how the software looks. A company executive said animation renders slightly differently after installing MIUI 12, stretching more naturally across the screen — especially on smartphones with rounded corners — as a user taps on an app.

Xiaomi has been able to deliver this graphical improvement thanks to what it calls “kernel-level innovation” that includes a new rendering engine, she said.

“With our rendering, we have enabled color blending and Gaussian blur. You can see various degrees of blurring happening in real time as light penetrates different materials,” explained Louisa Jia, head of marketing and operations of Global MIUI, at an event today.

MIUI 12, which is built atop Android 9 and Android 10 (depending on the device it will be rolled out on), also changes how storage, memory, and power consumption usage are displayed on the phone, making it easier for users to quickly understand the state of their device at a glance.

As part of the new coat of paint, Xiaomi is also deploying dark mode across all third-party apps, including those that have not introduced support for this feature yet.

Support for multitasking is also getting an improvement, popping any additional app on a floating screen that users can move around to any part of the screen and engage quickly without having to switch from the game or other app that they were focusing on. The company said it is also introducing “ultra battery saver” feature that kicks in when the level of phone charge hits 5%. The new feature shuts off every non-essential service to deliver an additional five hours of battery life.

Privacy

Another interesting feature the company is introducing grants more privacy control to users. MIUI 12 will allow users to easily monitor and restrict apps from using the camera, microphone, location, contacts, storage, call history, and calendar.

Whenever an app uses any of these, a persistent icon appears in the notification bar, tapping which will allow users to see which app is using this data and easily shut that access. Additionally, like with newer versions of Android and iOS, MIUI 12 gives users the ability to determine how often an app can access sensitive personal information.

Xiaomi said with MIUI 12, it is also providing users with the ability to strip off sensitive information such as location data from a photo before they share it with their friends. By default, the new operating system will strip off such data from photos — a feature that privacy advocates have long desired, and business communication app Slack recently introduced to its service.

MIUI 12 will roll out to select smartphones — Mi 9, Mi 9T, Mi 9T Pro, Redmi K20, and Redmi K20 Pro — at the end of June, and dozens of smartphone models including Poco F1 and Redmi 6 that were launched in 2018, “soon afterward,” said Jia. The company said it will make a beta version of MIUI 12 available to users next week for those who don’t want to wait for too long.

More than 300 million smartphones ran MIUI software at the end of last year, Xiaomi revealed in its most recent earnings call in late March. The company has previously stated that it is banking on MIUI to expand its services ecosystem as it looks to cut its financial reliance on sales of gadgets.

At its Build developer conference, Microsoft today put a strong emphasis on machine learning but in addition to plenty of new tools and features, the company also highlighted its work on building more responsible and fairer AI systems — both in the Azure cloud and Microsoft’s open-source toolkits.

These include new tools for differential privacy and a system for ensuring that models work well across different groups of people, as well as new tools that enable businesses to make the best use of their data while still meeting strict regulatory requirements.

As developers are increasingly tasked to learn how to build AI models, they regularly have to ask themselves whether the systems are “easy to explain” and that they “comply with non-discrimination and privacy regulations,” Microsoft notes in today’s announcement. But to do that, they need tools that help them better interpret their models’ results. One of those is interpretML, which Microsoft launched a while ago, but also the Fairlearn toolkit, which can be used to assess the fairness of ML models, and which is currently available as an open-source tool and which will be built into Azure Machine Learning next month.

As for differential privacy, which makes it possible to get insights from private data while still protecting private information, Microsoft today announced WhiteNoise, a new open-source toolkit that’s available both on GitHub and through Azure Machine Learning. WhiteNoise is the result of a partnership between Microsoft and Harvard’s Institute for Quantitative Social Science.