Author: azeeadmin

At its Build developer conference, Microsoft today announced that Azure Arc, its service for managing cloud resources anywhere, including competing clouds like AWS and GCP and platforms like Red Hat’s Open Shift, is now in public preview.

Microsoft first announced this Kubernetes-based solution at its Ignite event in Orland last September. One feature that makes it stand out is that it takes some of what Microsoft has learned from its Azure Stack project for bringing Azure Services to its customers’ data centers (and unsurprisingly, Azure Arc also supports deployments on Azure Stack). Thanks to this, Azure Arc doesn’t just allow you to manage containerized workloads anywhere but also includes the ability to bring services like Azure SQL Database and Azure Database for PostgreSQL to these platforms. It’s also worth noting that while this is a Microsoft service, it supports both Windows and Linux servers.

As part of today’s public preview launch, Microsoft also announced that Arc now supports SUSE Linux Enterprise Server and the SUSE CaaS Platform. “Azure Arc for servers gives customers a central management control plane with security and governance capabilities for SUSE Linux Enterprise Server systems hosted outside of the Azure cloud, such as edge deployments,” says SUSE President of Engineering and Innovation Thomas Di Giacomo.

It’s no secret that most large cloud vendors now have some kind of multi-cloud management service that’s similar to Azure Arc. Google is betting heavily on Anthos, for example, while AWS offers its fully-managed Outpost service. They all have slightly different characteristics and philosophies, but the fact that every major cloud player is now offering some version of this is a clear sign that enterprises don’t want to be locked into using a single cloud — even as these services make them place a bet on a specific vendor for their management services, though.

In a related set of announcements, Microsoft also launched a large set of new features for Azure Stack. This includes the private preview of Azure Stack Hub fleet management for monitoring deployments across Azure and Azure Stack Hub, as well as GPU partitioning using AMD GPU’s, which is also now in private preview. This last part matters not just for using those GPUs for visualization but also for enabling graphics-intensive workloads on virtualized desktop environments through Azure Stack Hub for enterprises that use AMD GPUs in their servers. With GPU partitioning, admins can give multiple users access to their share of the overall GPUs power.

At its Build developer conference, Microsoft today announced that Project Bonsai, its new machine teaching service, is now in public preview.

If that name sounds familiar, it’s probably because you remember that Microsoft acquired Bonsai, a company that focuses on machine teaching, back in 2018. Bonsai combined simulation tools with different machine learning techniques to build a general-purpose deep reinforcement learning platform, with a focus on industrial control systems.

It’s maybe no surprise then that Project Bonsai, too, has a similar focus on helping businesses teach and manage their autonomous machines. “With Project Bonsai, subject-matter experts can add state-of-the-art intelligence to their most dynamic physical systems and processes without needing a background in AI,” the company notes in its press materials.

“The public preview of Project Bonsai builds on top of the Bonsai acquisition and the autonomous systems private preview announcements made at Build and Ignite of last year,” a Microsoft spokesperson told me.

Interestingly, Microsoft notes that project Bonsai is only the first block of a larger vision to help its customers build these autonomous systems. The company also stresses the advantages of machine teaching over other machine learning approach, especially the fact that it’s less of a black box approach than other methods, which makes it easier for developers and engineers to debug systems that don’t work as expected.

In addition to Bonsai, Microsoft also today announced Project Moab, an open-source balancing robot that is meant to help engineers and developers learn the basics of how to build a real-world control system. The idea here is to teach the robot to keep a ball balanced on top of a platform that is held by three arms.

Potential users will be able to either 3D print the robot themselves or buy one when it goes on sale later this year. There is also a simulation, developed by MathWorks, that developers can try out immediately.

“You can very quickly take it into areas where doing it in traditional ways would not be easy, such as balancing an egg instead,” said Mark Hammond, Microsoft General Manager
for Autonomous Systems. “The point of the Project Moab system is to provide that
playground where engineers tackling various problems can learn how to use the tooling and simulation models. Once they understand the concepts, they can apply it to their novel use case.”

Fluid Framework was one of the sleeper hits of Microsoft’s 2019 Build developer conference. The idea behind the Fluid Framework is to provide developers with a new platform for building low-latency collaborative experiences around documents — and Microsoft itself is using it to do just that by rethinking some of the workflows in its own Office applications.

Now, for the first time, it is building Fluid Framework into a couple of key productivity apps, starting with Outlook and Office.com. In addition, Microsoft is also open-sourcing the Fluid Framework and making the code available on GitHub within the next few weeks.

“Discovering the full potential of the Fluid Framework can only be accomplished through creating a diverse, open, and vibrant developer community,” explains Microsoft’s Jared Spataro in today’s announcement. “For this reason, Microsoft will be making the Fluid Framework open source, allowing developers and creators to use key infrastructure from Fluid Framework in their own applications.”

Using JavaScript APIs, developers will be able to use Fluid Framework to build new collaborative experiences and while Microsoft isn’t emphasizing this in today’s announcement, its earlier materials around Fluid also emphasized that developers will be able to build intelligent agents that will work side-by-side with users as they create their documents.

Spataro notes that the company is open-sourcing the framework to invite developers to work alongside Microsoft on building the framework. Though Microsoft is obviously only releasing the code as open source now that it has most of the core components in place, it’s still nice to see the company bring this to the community, especially given that the code now seems to be ready for deployment in Microsoft’s own Office 365 tools.

Talking about those tools. Fluid Framework will soon make its debut in Outlook for the web, where it will allow users to work with tables, charts and task lists in the form of so-called Fluid Components that are updated automatically as they are editing elsewhere and hence automatically stay up to date.

In Office.com, Microsoft is introducing Fluid Framework workspaces for collaborative editing. They will include support for @mentions and feature activity feeds for each document.

Visual Studio Live Share is Microsoft’s tool for real-time collaborative code editing in the Visual Studio IDE and the Visual Studio Code editor. Earlier this year, the company also launched a preview of a browser-based version of the tool. While a shared real-time code editor is great, though, users always had to rely on additional tools to actually discuss what they were doing. That’s changing, however, because at Build 2020, Microsoft today announced that it is adding voice and text chat to this service.

Given the current state of things, any tool that makes it easier to collaborate online is probably a welcome addition to developers’ toolboxes. Unlike screen shares or other hacks for working together, one nice aspect of Live Share is that individual developers can keep their own, often somewhat idiosyncratic, settings they are used to. Like in most modern collaborative document editors, everybody gets to keep their own cursor, too.

As of now, it doesn’t look like the text and voice chat are integrated with any of Microsoft’s other communications tools like Teams, so at least for the time being, what happens in Live Share stays in Live Share.

The new features are now in public preview.

One vote.

That’s all it needed for a bipartisan Senate amendment to pass that would have stopped federal authorities from further accessing millions of Americans’ browsing records. But it didn’t. One Republican was in quarantine, another was AWOL. Two Democratic senators — including former presidential hopeful Bernie Sanders — were nowhere to be seen and neither returned a request for comment.

It was one of several amendments offered up in the effort to reform and reauthorize the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, the basis of U.S. spying laws. The law, signed in 1978, put restrictions on who intelligence agencies could target with their vast listening and collection stations. But after the Edward Snowden revelations in 2013, lawmakers champed at the bit to change the system to better protect Americans, who are largely protected from the spies within its borders.

One privacy-focused amendment, brought by Sens. Mike Lee and Patrick Leahy, passed — permits for more independent oversight to the secretive and typically one-sided Washington, D.C. court that authorizes government surveillance programs, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. That amendment all but guarantees the bill will bounce back to the House for further scrutiny.

Here’s more from the week.

THE BIG PICTURE

Three years after WannaCry, U.S. still on North Korea’s tail

A feature-length profile in Wired magazine looks at the life of Marcus Hutchins, one of the heroes who helped stop the world’s biggest cyberattack three years to the day.

The profile — a 14,000-word cover story — examines his part in halting the spread of the global WannaCry ransomware attack and how his early days led him into a criminal world that prompted him to plead guilty to felony hacking charges. Thanks in part to his efforts in saving the internet, he was sentenced to time served and walked free.

The Extra Crunch Live series continues today with two venture capitalists: Alexia and Niko Bonatsos.

The two investors don’t work for the same firm, but they each have an interesting perspective on the world of investing. Alexia is a former journalist — and a former co-editor of TechCrunch — who now runs Dream Machine, her own venture capital fund. In contrast, Niko has worked for General Catalyst for nearly ten years.

So Alexia will bring the small-fund perspective, and Niko will let us know more about what larger, older firms are thinking.

As I wrote last week, however, my goals for this talk aren’t merely another run-through of VC check sizes and other investing fundamentals. Sure, we’ll go over those questions to kick things off, but I’m more curious to learn what the pair are excited about when it comes to the future.

It’s been a depressing year so far, and, at least in theory, startups are supposed to accelerate the future. Bring it on, I say. Bring on that new, good shit.

Alexia’s fund claims that it helps “make science fiction nonfiction.” We’re going to press on that.

The chat comes in the shadow of one of the pair’s peers advocating for “building” lots of new stuff. Big things! Flying factories! But after a16z dropped its manifesto that “IT’S TIME TO BUILD,” the massive venture capital firm wound up stuffing another digital VC status-signaling playground with a bunch of money so that venture capitalists could hang out with rappers and partially ameliorate their youth-derived insecurities.

Building, indeed.

What are Alexia and Niko hoping to see built? Sure, they’re capital sources, but their selection process — the companies they choose to support — could impact what we use in the future.

I’m hoping to leave this particular chat a bit up on the coming few years, which should upgrade how down we all feel about the present.

Details are below for Extra Crunch subscribers; if you need a pass, you can get an inexpensive trial here.

See you all in a few hours.

Details

Here’s the information you’ll need:

• May 19, 11:00 a.m. PDT/2:00 p.m. EDT/5:00 p.m. GMT
  
  

This might seem like the worst time to be building an event software business, but it seems to be working for Bevy.com, which just announced that it has raised $15 million in Series B funding.

Co-founder and CEO Derek Andersen explained that the company had already started moving into virtual events when the conference business ground to a halt thanks to the COVID-19 pandemic. And it’s seen demand explode in the last few months.

For example, he pointed to how Duolingo has used the platform to host 1,000 events in the past six weeks, while Startup Grind went from a single virtual event in February (in Wuhan, China) to planning 600 for June. Salesforce is also using the platform, and community manager Sofía Rodríguez Mata said in a statement:

We’ve been blown away and inspired by our community’s resilience amidst the COVID-19 pandemic. Our customers are finding new and creative ways to learn, connect, have fun, and give back together. Although we feel the physical distance between us, it’s beautiful to witness how someone in Morocco can be in the same event as someone in Brazil or New Zealand. With Bevy’s help our user groups have organized 650 events with 20,000 RSVPs in the past few months.

Bevy actually emerged from Startup Grind —which Andersen also founded — to further develop and monetize the products that were initially built to help the entrepreneurial community organize a hundreds of events around the world.

They’re separate companies, although Andersen still leads both of them. He described Bevy as providing a “fully end-to-end virtual experience” for event organizers, offering tools for event creation and user registration while also integrating to other platforms like Zoom, Salesforce, Marketo and Meetup.

He also argued that these kinds of community events are key for companies pursuing a “customer-to-customer marketing model” —  instead of flying field marketing teams into new locations (which again, isn’t exactly feasible right now), you “empower customers to do this for you,” both at events and on a more ongoing basis.

“Whether it’s virtual, or offline, in forums, chats, or events, C2C realizes the importance of taking the corporation out of the conversation and giving the torch to the customers at massive global scale,” Andersen told me in a follow-up email.

Bevy previously raised a $6.4 million Series A. The new funding was led by Accel, with participation from existing investors Ryan Smith (the Qualtrics CEO is also joining Bevy’s board of directors) and Upfront Ventures.

“No one understands how to build community and drive virtual marketing events at scale better than the team behind Bevy,” said Accel General Partner Ryan Sweeney in a statement. “Bevy has unmatched domain expertise and an award winning product that is already trending.”

Chinese stocks have seen the highest highs and the lowest lows in recent weeks. While the country suffered the first economic shocks of the novel coronavirus that originated in Wuhan, China’s aggressive containment strategy has allowed the country to reopen in recent weeks, sending stocks at least temporarily to multi-year highs.

Yet, those bold numbers aren’t always what they seem. Multiple scandals in recent weeks have raised serious questions about the state of Chinese accounting practices, and whether stock exchanges are doing enough to protect investors from fraud and scandal.

The most notable story the past few weeks has been the fall of Luckin Coffee, which announced that it may have overstated sales by hundreds of millions of dollars. The company has since fired its CEO and COO, and has declined in value on Nasdaq by nearly 91% from its mid-January peak. The company in a filing with the SEC said that it delayed releasing its financials due to COVID-19 (as well as, just maybe, the fraud investigation as well).

A quieter scandal has been a similar accounting irregularity at TAL Education Group, a China-based tutoring company also traded on Nasdaq. And then overnight, Muddy Waters, the same research firm that first brought potential fraud at Luckin Coffee to light, released a new report on GSX Techedu indicating potential fraud, accusations which were denied by the education company. In its report, Muddy Waters claims that almost 70% of GSX’s students are “bots” and the company is wildly overstating its financials.

Given all these controversies, it looks like Nasdaq is ready to shore up its standards and protect its market for investors.

In new filings with the SEC, Nasdaq proposed amending its ruled to allow for tighter listing standards for companies based in a jurisdiction “that has secrecy laws, blocking statutes, national security laws, or other laws or regulations restricting access to information by regulators of U.S. listed companies.” While the rules would apply equally to all countries with information restrictions, context clearly points at China as being the biggest target. The new rules would require greater financial minimums and accountability standards to qualify for listing.

In addition, Reuters reported overnight that Nasdaq has sent notice to Luckin Coffee that it intends to delist the company’s ADR shares from the exchange. A press contact for Nasdaq did not respond to requests for comment on the news.

Tightening the rules on Nasdaq is ultimately a positive, since strong and transparent markets ultimately encourages more investors to place their money behind companies.

That wasn’t the only positive news for Chinese tech stocks though. The Hang Seng Index, which is the most important barometer in Hong Kong’s finance world, will consider adding companies with dual-class voting structures as well as equities that are located in markets outside of Hong Kong. While there is always grumbling among some investors at these corporate governance structures, American exchanges have mostly acceded to these models in recent years, and many tech IPOs have dual-class voting structures today.

Opening the Hang Seng Index to more locations is and remains complicated. For instance, Alibaba is traded on Nasdaq, but conducted another IPO late last year in Hong Kong that became the largest IPO of 2019, out-fundraising Uber with a haul of $11.2 billion. For some tech companies with global interests, tapping multiple global equities markets is key to gaining access to the most liquidity and market depth possible.

The addition of non-Hong Kong stocks to Hong Kong’s most important stock index in some ways mirrors the inclusion of Chinese stocks in MSCI’s popular emerging markets ETFs in mid-2018. Even as the world puts up more financial borders, companies and their stocks are increasingly global, and indices are following right along with them.

Better accountability and more access makes it a pretty good news day for Chinese stocks. Plus, Luckin Coffee announced last week that it is introducing new lifestyle products, so that might solve the whole damn thing over there quickly, no?

Hello and welcome back to our regular morning look at private companies, public markets and the gray space in between.

Yesterday afternoon, Vroom, an online car buying service, filed to go public. Based on its SEC filing, Vroom is a highly-successful private company in fundraising terms that has attracted over $700 million during its life as a startup. T. Rowe Price, AutoNation, Durable Capital Partners, General Catalyst and other investors fueled the firm during its youth according to Crunchbase data.

Vroom most recently raised $254 million in December 2019, a Series H round that valued the company at around $1.5 billion. From its mid-2013 Series A to today, Vroom has tried to accelerate from the startup world to the grown-up domain of the public markets. How did it do?

Finding out is our goal this morning. We’re also curious why the firm would pursue an IPO today; public offerings tend to shun volatile, uncertain periods. So let’s dig into the numbers and do a bit of a unicorn check-up.

What does a private, car-focused e-commerce company worth $1.5 billion look like under the hood?

Un-profits

TechCrunch dug into Vroom’s market last year, writing that the company “looks a lot like Carvana and Shift,” and noting that in 2018 the company had “laid off 25-50% of its staff as it exited several markets.” Vroom was therefore a bit early to the waves of unicorn layoffs that we’ve seen in 2020.

I raise the layoffs as they imply that the company might be in reasonable financial shape; what did the cuts buy the company in terms of profitability?

After months of news about large-scale event cancelations, Berlin-based mega-conference IFA announced today that it will go ahead with a planned in-person event, from September 3 to 5. With the future of the COVID-19 pandemic still uncertain around the world, the show will come with some major caveats.

For starters, the show, which traditionally takes over Berlin’s Messe conference center, will be broken up into four distinct events. Those include: IFA NEXT meets IFA SHIFT Mobility, IFA Global Markets and IFA Business, Retail & Meeting Lounges. A fourth event, the Virtual IFA Experience, will be held online, in keeping with most of the rest of the conference world.

Each event will be limited to 1,000 attendees per day. “While the organizers hope that the overall public health situation will improve between now and September,” organizers write, “they have decided to err on the side of caution and meet the strictest safety standards possible.”

The limited scope of the show is a step in the right direction, as are the increased on-site sanitation measures, but holding such a large gathering in the late-Summer is perhaps not the “side of caution” relative to the difficult decisions being made by the rest of the industry at this point in time. IFA, which is relatively unique in being open to the public, will now be invite-only. That includes 800 journalist, which will comprise the lion’s share of attendees.

Germany is currently number eight on the list of COVID-19 deaths, at just over 8,000. In spite of a recent ease on shutdown restrictions, Berlin has been hit with a wave of protesters demanding an end to a government enforced lockdown in recent weeks. According to The New York Times, more than 10,000 people have joined in protests across the country.

If it goes ahead as planned, IFA will be one of the first major tech shows to be held in-person since CES in January. Today, notably, was set to be the first day of Build, an event that Microsoft moved online, in keeping with moves of much of the rest of the industry.