Author: azeeadmin

Last month, Spotify announced that as part of its coronavirus relief efforts it would soon add new fundraising features for artists on its platform. Today, the company is following through with the launch of “Artist Fundraising Pick,” a feature that allows artists to fundraise for themselves, their crews, or one of the verified music relief initiatives Spotify has already vetted through the Spotify COVID-19 Music Relief project.

At launch, Spotify is working with a small group of fundraising partners to make the donation process easier, including Cash App, GoFundMe, and PayPal.me.

Cash App is currently Spotify’s preferred method, as it has also established a $1 million relief effort for artists. When Spotify artists choose their “$cashtag” as their Artist Fundraising Pick and secure at least one donation of any size, they’ll receive an additional $100 in their account from Cash App up until a collective total of $1 million has been contributed. This works for artists in the U.S. and U.K., but Spotify users worldwide can donate through Cash App.

To use the new fundraising tools, artists (or Spotify for Artists admin users) will go to their Artist dashboard and click “Get started” on the banner at the top to submit their Fundraising Pick. This is a similar process as to how artists choose which track they want to display on their profile.

Once live, fans can donate to the cause through the artist’s profile. In addition to Cash App, PayPal is broadly available and GoFundMe is available in 19 markets.

If the artist chooses to raise for a music relief organization, they can select from those associated with Spotify’s existing charity project, which launched last month in partnership with MusiCares, PRS Foundation, and Help Musicians. It has now expanded to include a wider range of participating organizations, including several local options, and is continuing to grow.

At launch, a handful of artists already have the new feature live, including Tyrese Pope and Boy Scouts who are fundraising through Cash App; Marshmello who is fundraising for MusiCares; and Benjamin Ingrosso who is fundraising for Musikerforbundet.

Spotify says it moved to quickly launch this feature because it believed it was in a unique position to help artists raise money from a global network of fans. However, it cautions that it’s never built a fundraising feature like this before, and considers this a “first version.” Over time, the feature will likely evolve and update based on artist feedback.

“This is an incredibly difficult time for many Spotify users and people around the world — and there are many worthy causes to support at this time,” the company wrote in an announcement. “With this feature, we simply hope to enable those who have the interest and means to support artists in this time of great need, and to create another opportunity for our COVID-19 Music Relief partners to find the financial support they need to continue working in music and lift our industry,” it said.

Just months after graduating from Y Combinator, href="https://h1insights.com/"> H1 Insights, the LinkedIn for the healthcare industry has raised $12.9 million in a new round of funding.

“It’s a better way to connect the ecosystem,” says co-founder Ariel Katz. The company already has over 8 million profiles for healthcare professionals in its database and is generating multiple millions of dollars in revenue, according to Katz. The company said it’s seen 350% growth over the last year and already counts 35 pharmaceutical companies among its customers.

By scraping public records and working with healthcare systems, payers, and data brokers H1 has amassed perhaps the most comprehensive profiles of medical professionals and service providers including their expertise, interests, publications, location, speaking engagements, and involvement in clinical trials.

Katz envisions a service that allows doctors to communicate with each other across specialties and a better way for pharmaceutical companies to find physicians that can be relevant to new pharmaceutical trials and treatments.

And the company continues to see growth even with pharmaceutical companies freezing their clinical trials. The outbreak of COVID-19 has forced most companies to halt clinical trials as most patients avoid hospitals for nearly everything but the most vital medical procedures, but H1 Insights offers services for pharmaceutical companies’ medical affairs department, who are still looking for healthcare officials to collaborate with, says Katz.

The company’s $12.9 million Series A round closed in February and was led by Menlo Ventures . Other investors included Baron Davis Enterprises (the eponymous personal investment vehicle for the NBA star), ClearPoint Investment Partners, Cloudera co-founder, Jeff Hammerbacher, Liquid 2 Ventures (the investment fund founded by former NFL superstar Joe Montana), Novartis dRx, and Underscore VC.

H1 signed its term-sheet in February, but wasn’t forced to reprice its round as the pandemic began to spread. With that cash now in hand, the company is poised to go on a massive hiring spree, says Katz.

“Advances in machine learning and AI are creating new opportunities to leverage data for a positive impact on human health,” said Greg Yap, partner at Menlo Ventures, and a new addition to the H1 board. “H1 is harnessing the power of this data and providing a robust platform for pharma, biotech and life sciences companies to connect with healthcare professionals. Their early traction is promising and shows that it meets a clear need for the industry.”

 

SpaceX is launching another batch of 60 of its broadband internet satellites today – its fourth Starlink launch of 2020, and its seventh launch of a large batch of the satellites in total. This will put its total operational constellation size at 418, extending its lead as the world’s largest private satellite operator.

The launch is set to take place at 3:37 PM EDT (12:37 PM PDT) from Cape Canaveral in Florida, and the live stream above should kick off at around 15 minutes prior to that takeoff time, or at around 3:22 PM EDT (12:22 PM PDT). The launch will also include an attempt to land and recover the Falcon 9 booster used for this mission, using SpaceX’s ‘Of Course I Still Love You’ drone ship stationed in the Atlantic ocean.

The Falcon 9 used in this mission has previously been used, during the first flight of SpaceX’s astronaut spacecraft Crew Dragon to the International Space Station during an uncrewed demonstration mission, as well as during a RADARSAT launch and a previous Starlink launch. It’s not the only part of the launch vehicle that’s being reused, either: The fairing that protects the Starlink satellites was flown before on SpaceX’s AMOS-17 mission.

SpaceX is still actively launching despite the COVID-19 pandemic, and still intends to bring its Starlink broadband service online for its first customers starting later this year, with initial coverage available in the northern U.S. and Canada. Through subsequent launches, it hopes to then expand to “near global coverage” by sometime next year.

This week, the company asked the FCC for permission to move its satellites to a lower operational orbital as part of its efforts to reduce the constellation’s potential to contribute to space debris. This could also help address complaints that SpaceX’s Starlink satellites interfere with ground-based night-sky observation and science, since a lower orbit would mean the spacecraft appear less bright.

M&A has largely slowed down in the current market, but there remain pockets of activity when the timing and price are right. Today, Medallia — a customer experience platform that scans online reviews, social media, and other sources to provide better insights into what a company is doing right and wrong and what needs to get addressed — announced that it would acquire Voci Technologies, a speech-to-text startup, for $59 million in cash.

Medallia plans to integrate the startup’s AI technology so that voice-based interactions — for example from calls into call centers — can be part of the data crunched by its analytics platform. Despite the rise of social media, messaging channels, and (currently) a shift for people to do a lot more online, voice still accounts for the majority of customer interactions for a business, so this is an important area for Medallia to tackle.

“Voci transcribes 100% of live and recorded calls into text that can be analyzed quickly to determine customer satisfaction, adding a powerful set of signals to the Medallia Experience Cloud,” said Leslie Stretch, president and CEO of Medallia, in a statement. “At the same time, Voci enables call analysis moments after each interaction has completed, optimizing every aspect of call center operations securely. Especially important as virtual and remote contact center operations take shape.”

While there are a lot of speech-to-text offerings in the market today, the key with Voci is that it is able to discern a number of other details in the call, including emotion, gender, sentiment, and voice biometric identity. It’s also able to filter out personal identifiable information to ensure more privacy around using the data for further analytics.

Voci started life as a spinout from Carnegie Mellon University (its three founders were all PhDs from the school), and it had raised a total of about $18 million from investors that included Grotech Ventures, Harbert Growth Parnters, and the university itself. It was last valued at $28 million in March 2018 (during a Series B raise), meaning that today’s acquisition was slightly more than double that value.

The company seems to have been on an upswing with its business. Voci has to date processed some 2 billion minutes of speech, and in January, the company published some momentum numbers that said bookings had grown some 63% in the last quarter, boosted by contact center customers.

In addition to contact centers, the company catered to companies in finance, healthcare, insurance and others areas of business process outsourcing, although it does not disclose names. As with all companies and organizations that have products that cater to offering services remotely, Voci has seen stronger demand for its business in recent weeks, at a time when many have curtailed physical contact due to COVID-19-related movement restrictions.

“Our whole company is delighted to be joining forces with experience management leader Medallia. We are thrilled that Voci’s powerful speech to text capabilities will become part of Medallia Experience Cloud,” said Mike Coney, CEO of Voci, in a statement. “The consolidation of all contact center signals with video, survey and other critical feedback is a game changer for the industry.”

It’s not clear whether Voci had been trying to raise money in the last few months, or if this was a proactive approach from Medallia. But more generally, M&A has found itself in a particularly key position in the world of tech: startups are finding it more challenging right now to raise money, and one big question has been whether that will lead to more hail-mary-style M&A plays, as one route for promising businesses and technologies to avoid shutting down altogether.

For its part, Medallia, which went public in July 2019 after raising money from the likes of Sequoia, has seen its stock hit like the rest of the market in recent weeks. Its current market cap is at around $2.8 billion, just $400 million more than its last private valuation.

The deal is expected to close in May 2020, Medallia said.

 

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

Today we’re unpacking some new data concerning what happened to Silicon Valley’s venture capital market in Q1, with a special focus on private financings towards the end of the three-month period. If the deterioration in deal volume we’ll go over today persists into Q2, the United States’ largest startup market could be in for more than a bump as the global pandemic slows economic activity.

We’ve already talked to venture capitalists who invest in fintech, social companies, consumer startups, and other niches to understand the present state of the venture capital market. We’re also looking through data on the global and domestic venture scene, digging into local data on Boston and Utah. Other cities and states will be examined in the coming weeks.

Fluid situations demand lots of attention.

However, up until March of 2020, the venture capital and startup market had one speed (fast) and one goal (growth). The new normal of the COVID-19 era is different, and with the help of some excellent data from Fenwick and West, a legal firm that works with technology companies, let’s dig into how Silicon Valley’s venture scene nosedived as Q1 came to a close.

January, February, Ouch

The venture capital scene in Silicon Valley got off to a hot start in 2020. Fenwick’s collected data indicates that there were 126 financings in the region in January of this year — up more than 100% from the preceding year’s January tally of 60.

As we get further along in the new way of working, the new normal if you will, finding more efficient ways to do just about everything is becoming paramount for companies looking at buying new software services. To that end, Comet AI announced a $4.5 million investment today as it tries to build a more efficient machine learning platform.

The money came from existing investors Trilogy Equity Partners, Two Sigma Ventures and Founder’s Co-op. Today’s investment comes on top of an earlier $2.3 million seed.

“We provide a self-hosted and cloud-based meta machine learning platform, and we work with data science AI engineering teams to manage their work to try and explain and optimize their experiments and models,” company co-founder and CEO Gideon Mendels told TechCrunch.

In a growing field with lots of competitors, Mendels says his company’s ability to move easily between platforms is a key differentiator.

“We’re essentially infrastructure agnostic, so we work whether you’re training your models on your laptop, your private cluster or on many of the cloud providers. It doesn’t actually matter, and you can switch between them,” he explained.

The company has 10,000 users on its platform across a community product and a more advanced enterprise product that includes customers like Boeing, Google and Uber.

Mendels says Comet has been able to take advantage of the platform’s popularity to build models based on data customers have made publicly available. The first one involves predicting when a model begins to show training fatigue. The Comet model can see when this happening and signal data scientists to shut the model down 30% faster than this kind of fatigue would normally surface.

The company launched in Seattle at TechStars/Alexa in 2017. The community product debuted in 2018.

The European Data Protection Board (EDPB) has published guidance for the use of location data and contacts tracing tools intended to mitigate the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Europe’s data protection framework wraps around all such digital interventions, meaning there are legal requirements for EU countries and authorities developing tracing tools or soliciting data for a coronavirus related purpose.

“These guidelines clarify the conditions and principles for the proportionate use of location data and contact tracing tools, for two specific purposes: using location data to support the response to the pandemic by modelling the spread of the virus so as to assess the overall effectiveness of confinement measures; [and] contact tracing, which aims to notify individuals of the fact that they have been in close proximity of someone who is eventually confirmed to be a carrier of the virus, in order to break the contamination chains as early as possible,” the EDPB writes in the document.

The European Commission and the EU parliament have already weighed in with their own recommendations in this area, including a toolbox to help guide contacts tracing app developers. The Commission has also urged Member States to take a common approach to building such apps. And has been leaning on local telcos to provide ‘anonymized and aggregated’ metadata for modelling the spread of the virus across the EU.

The guideline document from the EDPB — a body made up of representatives from the EU’s national data protection agencies which helps coordinate the application of pan-EU data protection law — brings additional expert steerage for those developing digital interventions as part of a public health response to the coronavirus pandemic.

“The EDPB generally considers that data and technology used to help fight COVID-19 should be used to empower, rather than to control, stigmatise, or repress individuals,” it writes. “Furthermore, while data and technology can be important tools, they have intrinsic limitations and can merely leverage the effectiveness of other public health measures. The general principles of effectiveness, necessity, and proportionality must guide any measure adopted by Member States or EU institutions that involve processing of personal data to fight COVID-19.”

Among the body’s specific recommendations are that where location data is being considered for modelling the spread of the coronavirus or assessing the effectiveness of national lockdown measures then anonymizing the data is preferable — with the EDPB emphasizing that proper anonymization is not easy.

Given the inherent complexity it also recommends transparency around the anonymization methodology used. (tl;dr: there’s no security in obscurity, nor indeed accountability.)

“Many options for effective anonymisation exist, but with a caveat. Data cannot be anonymised on their own, meaning that only datasets as a whole may or may not be made anonymous,” it notes.

“A single data pattern tracing the location of an individual over a significant period of time cannot be fully anonymised. This assessment may still hold true if the precision of the recorded geographical coordinates is not sufficiently lowered, or if details of the track are removed and even if only the location of places where the data subject stays for substantial amounts of time are retained. This also holds for location data that is poorly aggregated.

“To achieve anonymisation, location data must be carefully processed in order to meet the reasonability test. In this sense, such a processing includes considering location datasets as a whole, as well as processing data from a reasonably large set of individuals using available robust anonymisation techniques, provided that they are adequately and effectively implemented.”

On contact tracing apps — aka digital tools that are designed to map proximity between individuals, as a proxy for infection risk — the EDPB urges that use of such apps be voluntary.

“The systematic and large scale monitoring of location and/or contacts between natural persons is a grave intrusion into their privacy,” it warns. “It can only be legitimised by relying on a voluntary adoption by the users for each of the respective purposes. This would imply, in particular, that individuals who decide not to or cannot use such applications should not suffer from any disadvantage at all.”

The importance of accountability is also front and center, with the EDPB saying the controller of such apps must be clearly defined.

“The EDPB considers that the national health authorities could be the controllers for such application; other controllers may also be envisaged. In any cases, if the deployment of contact tracing apps involves different actors their roles and responsibilities must be clearly established from the outset and be explained to the users.”

Purpose limitation is another highlighted component. Apps need to have purposes that are “specific enough to exclude further processing for purposes unrelated to the management of the COVID- 19 health crisis (e.g., commercial or law enforcement purposes)”, it says.

So, in other words, no function creep — and no EU citizen mass surveillance via a pandemic backdoor.

The EDPB also writes that “careful consideration should be given to the principle of data minimisation and data protection by design and by default” — noting specifically that contact tracing apps “do not require tracking the location of individual users”.

Instead “proximity data should be used” for the contacts tracing purpose.

“Contact tracing applications can function without direct identification of individuals,” it further emphasizes, adding that “appropriate measures should be put in place to prevent re-identification”.

The guidance aligns with the coronavirus contacts tracing model devised jointly by Apple and Google — which have said they will be offering a cross-platform API for COVID-19 contacts tracing based on ephemeral proximity IDs shared via Bluetooth.

At one point the EDPB guidance appears to be leaning towards favoring such decentralized approaches to contacts tracing apps, with the body writing that “the collected information should reside on the terminal equipment of the user and only the relevant information should be collected when absolutely necessary”.

Although later on the in guidance it discussed centralized models that involve proximity data being uploaded to a server in the cloud, writing that: “Implementations for contact tracing can follow a centralized or a decentralized approach. Both should be considered viable options, provided that adequate security measures are in place, each being accompanied by a set of advantages and disadvantages.”

In Europe there is currently a big fight between different camps over whether contacts tracing apps should use a centralized or decentralized model for storing and processing proximity data — with a contacts tracing app standardization effort known as PEPP-PT that’s backed by Germany’s Fraunhofer Institute for Telecommunications and some EU governments wanting to support centralized protocols for COVID-19 contacts tracking, while a separate coalition of European academics wants only decentralized approaches on privacy grounds, and has developed a protocol called DP-3T.

“The current health crisis should not be used as an opportunity to establish disproportionate data retention mandates,” the EDPB warns. “Storage limitation should consider the true needs and the medical relevance (this may include epidemiology-motivated considerations like the incubation period, etc.) and personal data should be kept only for the duration of the COVID-19 crisis. Afterwards, as a general rule, all personal data should be erased or anonymised.”

The body also recommends algorithms used in contacts tracing apps be audited and regularly reviewed by outside experts.

Again, a key criticism of the PEPP-PT initiative has been around lack of transparency — including its failure to publish code for external review. (Though it has said it will be publishing code.)

“In order to ensure their fairness, accountability and, more broadly, their compliance with the law, algorithms must be auditable and should be regularly reviewed by independent experts. The application’s source code should be made publicly available for the widest possible scrutiny,” the EDPB writes.

Another notable piece of the guidance is for a data protection impact assessment not only to be carried out but that it be published — which marks a further push for accountability via transparency in such an unprecedented moment.

“The EDPB considers that a data protection impact assessment (DPIA) must be carried out before implementing such tool as the processing is considered likely high risk (health data anticipated large-scale adoption, systematic monitoring, use of new technological solution). The EDPB strongly recommends the publication of DPIAs,” it writes.

Typically DPAs leave it up to data controllers to decide whether to publish a DPIA or not — in this case the strong push from the central authority is that these documents are made public where COVID-19 contacts tracing apps are concerned.

Having highlighted the pros and cons of centralized vs decentralized approaches to contacts tracing, the EDPB goes on to recommend that the conceptual phase of app development “should always include thorough consideration of both concepts carefully weighing up the respective effects on data protection/privacy and the possible impacts on individuals rights”.

“Any server involved in the contact tracing system must only collect the contact history or the pseudonymous identifiers of a user diagnosed as infected as the result of a proper assessment made by health authorities and of a voluntary action of the user. Alternately, the server must keep a list of pseudonymous identifiers of infected users or their contact history only for the time to inform potentially infected users of their exposure, and should not try to identify potentially infected users.”

“Putting in place a global contact tracing methodology including both applications and manual tracing may require additional information to be processed in some cases. In this context, this additional information should remain on the user terminal and only be processed when strictly necessary and with his prior and specific consent,” it adds.

You can read the full document here.

Digital marketing company TapClicks announced this morning that it’s broadening its platform with the acquisition of AdStage.

AdStage first launched back in 2013 as a cross-network advertising startup, eventually expanding by automating ad campaigns and consolidating marketing data.

TapClicks founder and CEO Babak Hedayti told me that his goal is to build a “single, unified platform” for marketing. The company says it already sells interconnected products for analytics, intelligence, reporting, workflow and order management, with many of those capabilities coming from acquisitions — in 2019 alone, TapClicks announced that it was buying Megalytic, iSpionage and StatX.

By acquiring AdStage, Hedayti said TapClicks can deepen its intelligence capabilities, giving marketers a better understanding of how their campaigns are performing across different channels.

The companies said TapClicks made offers for the entire AdStage team to join, with the majority of the team accepting. AdStage co-founders Sahil Jain and Jason Wu are taking roles at TapClicks as general manager for marketing intelligence and vice president of engineering for marketing intelligence, respectively.

AdStage previously raised more than $15 million in funding from investors including Verizon Ventures, Freestyle Capital, 500Startups, Digital Garage and HubSpot. (Verizon owns TechCrunch.)

Jain said that before the COVID-19 pandemic, he was considering different paths for the AdStage’s future. That might have meant raising more funding, but he realized that “consolidation is happening” across the industry, and that by joining a company that was “very financially sound, we could leverage those resources to build the stuff that we’ve always wanted to build … the cool stuff that truly help marketers not just see what they’re spending on and the cross-channel makeup, but where to spend the next dollar.”

He also praised the way TapClicks handled the acquisition — Jain said that as the world changed around them, Hedayti and the other executives “never wavered from the deal, they never changed the terms.”

Looking ahead, Hedayti argued that despite the broader downturn in ad and marketing spending, there are still opportunities. For one thing, he suggested that large enterprises are going to be less interested in making a big investment in building their own marketing tools.

“When they need a technology partner for martech, they’re calling us,” he said.

It’s admittedly difficult to have a comparative conversation about the iPhone SE. This device isn’t really in the same neighborhood as the iPhone 11, even though it’s furnished with the same plush carpeting and fluffy armchairs.

The iPhone SE is a value offering. Even though I will use comparatives throughout this piece to help put it in the context of Apple’s lineup, that probably doesn’t matter to the vast majority of potential customers for this device.

Simply, it’s a super value for the price, just smashing really. And a damn good phone. Alas, I am too used to no home button for it to be really appealing to me, but this is going to be a great phone for millions of people. And talk about timing on the value side of things — $399 for an iPhone with Apple’s latest power plant on board is huge.

The quick response to the iPhone SE was that it was ‘an iPhone 8 with iPhone 11 internals’. That’s…well, that’s true. There was some general sentiment of shruggery about Apple producing a phone out of their ‘spare’ parts. But, dear reader, your level of excitement about that is very likely going to be tied closely to how much you can afford to spend on a phone, how much you care about camera quality and how much of a priority the size of your phone is to you.

Let’s begin at the end.

Size and feel

It’s smaller, but not too small. If you’re keening for a 4” phone you won’t find the solace you desire here, but it’s refreshingly thin and light and very easy in the reach department. If those things are vital for you, it’s the only game in town with fresh internals.

I actually bought an old iPhone SE a while back as a pocket device, but I found that I could no longer reliably type on a 4” phone.

The new iPhone SE is just fine in that regard, and 4.7” is what I consider to be my lower limit for typing reliably. That, of course, does not apply if your hands are smaller or your fingers are shorter than mine. If that’s the case, you may still find the iPhone SE to be too large for your tastes. But alongside current iPhones it is practically petite.

Touch ID makes an appearance on the iPhone SE — fortuitously as we enter a world where many of us will be mask wearers for some time and Face ID is naturally limited in its effectiveness.

Pushing the home button is so awkward. The insane durability and utility of the swipe-able interface presented in the iPhone X jumps out hard here. Those swipe gestures are so natural and organic now that breaking them is no easy feat. If you are coming from a current Touch ID device you’ll be ok, but it will be a big adjustment from, say, an iPhone X.

There’s not much more to say because we’ve seen this design in the iPhone 8. It still feels good and modern.

I didn’t have enough time to do a serious battery life test but it seemed…fine? It’s so hard to tell the first couple of days anyway with indexing and other background stuff happening. Apple also says that the new iPhone SE is IP67 rated for up to 1 meter for 30 minutes so it’s still dunk proof, one of the biggest reducers of accidental damage to come to iPhone in the years since the first SE.

Camera

The iPhone SE’s camera system is a rare monocular addition to the lineup. It’s a single, wide-angle camera with an effective 28mm focal length. This is slightly narrower than we’re used to seeing in iPhones these days, most of which hit around 26mm. This means a slightly closer crop on photos. There is no telephoto lens, just like the iPhone XR.

The iPhone SE gets a boost from the totally new image pipeline of the iPhone 11 and 11 Pro. The ISP and the Neural Engine of the A13 processor give it more help in a variety of ways, especially given that so much of what makes up photography is in now really computer math.

Even with the painful lack of a telephoto lens, this is still one of the better smartphone cameras on the market because it has the full imaging pipeline of the iPhone 11 behind it. If it didn’t, I think that it would feel much ‘older’ in terms of imaging quality, but it speaks to how much of photography is driven by the CPU or GPU rather than the lens and sensor these days.

This proves out, as in my tests, the iPhone SE camera was much improved over the iPhone 8, and offered more portrait modes than the iPhone XR. The additional modes focus on cutting subjects out of the background. Their inclusion is tied directly to the ability of the Neural Engine (a portion of the A13’s chip dedicated to high frequency low-lift machine learning tasks) to execute segmentation masking and semantic rendering.

It also records expanded dynamic range 4k 30fps video and 4k 60fps video with cinematic stabilization.

The biggest practical benefit of the pipeline, though, is the improved Smart HDR feature which I covered in my iPhone 11 review. This really improves detail across massive tonal ranges from bright highlights to shadow detail. While it does not magically make the iPhone SE the same class of image making device that the iPhone 11 is, it goes a long way to making your average snapshot look the best it can.

It does, and should, blow away the ‘old’ iPhone SE when it comes to sharpness, color rendition and dynamic range. It’s clearly better than its predecessor and clearly better than the iPhone 8, which it will most directly replace in Apple’s lineup.

For those considering stepping downward in their choice of device, it’s worth noting here explicitly that nearly across the board the image quality was just pounded by the iPhone 11 Pro. Which is, on one level, expected. The iPhone 11 Pro is a much more expensive device.

The iPhone SE does not have Night Mode. It performs notably worse than the iPhone 11 in dark areas because of this. It does have optical stabilization on the rear camera, which helps, but don’t expect the same performance in those tough conditions as the more expensive phones.

Given that the camera performs well across most other vectors, this is probably one of the biggest things in this category to recommend the iPhone 11 over the iPhone SE. That is assuming that we’re even having that conversation. Given that so many people use the iPhone as their primary camera, however, I think it’s one worth having. If you are pretty comfortable with ‘whatever’ pictures the iPhone takes, the SE is going to deliver with flying colors. You get a bunch of technical improvements and performance leaps behind the scenes and a solid, if not amazing, optical front end. Basically, It is what it is.

Screen

I prefer the iPhone SE’s color rendition to the iPhone XR. Though, on paper, the Liquid Retina Display and the Retina HD Display should be pretty much the same performance wise, there’s always been something a bit off-putting to me about the XR’s color tone — with True Tone off and at the same brightness, the iPhone SE tends to be more neutral warm with the iPhone XR ending up on the cooler end of the spectrum.

These observations are, by definition, anecdotal. And the panels that Apple is using in the iPhone SE are not really anything special — they are run of the mill ‘fantastic’, as is usual for the iPhone. The iPhone 11 Pro’s OLED screen, of course, trumps easily on black levels, color and tone.

The main differences between the iPhone XR and the iPhone SE screen come down to the ‘edge-to-edge’ design of the XR’s wraparound display and the SE’s more standard rectangle. Well, that and tap-to-wake.

The 32% difference in total pixels between the two devices is a complete non-factor in my testing, by the way. Once again, not a huge surprise given the same 326ppi.

As with the gesture situation, I really, really miss tap-to-wake, which seems. Not being able to wake your phone to peek at the screen with a touch is a step backward in usability for anyone who has previously owned an iPhone with that feature and I highly encourage people considering a move “down” to the SE to factor in losing that utility.

If you’re coming from another iPhone without it you’ll be fine, but if you had it, you’re gonna miss it.

Greasing the chute

The iPhone SE adds lubrication to what has historically been the most frictional section of Apple’s entry chute to its ecosystem. Where Apple previously relied on the the churn of used devices being put into the market or handed down to family members as a ’spackle’ for the low-end onramp, it now has a first party offering. One that is actually an amazing value for the price.

That lower price point can be looked at through a purely pragmatic prism: it’s cheaper and it fills in gaps in Apple’s device pricing umbrella. The last time people thought Apple was making a play for affordability was back in 2013 during the subsidization era, with the iPhone 5C. That didn’t actually help with the onramp issue because Apple did not commit to a ‘cheap phone’ strategy on any real level. Instead of the low end phone everyone expected, it released a relatively high-end phone as a branching upgrade path for iPhone 5 users.

This time around, we get to see exactly how a ‘cheap’ iPhone will perform.

I know Apple executives hate that word, but there’s a great UK idiom that I’ve always loved: cheap and cheerful. That’s exactly what the iPhone SE is. Attractive, inexpensive and pleasant to use. Not a bad tagline for a device.

But what does the company get out of it, really? Is undercutting the price of the iPhone XR or other devices worth it in the long run?

To fully understand the iPhone SE’s appeal for Apple, here’s a few bullet points to consider:

• People in Apple’s universe spend money with Apple.
• Once people enter Apple’s world, they are often very satisfied and do not leave.
• People are rewarded for entry with an extremely affordable device that will be supported for 5 years or more — an easy industry peak.
• Revenue generated per U.S. iPhone hit $80 in 2018.
• Subscription revenue for U.S. mobile apps jumped 21% in 2019.
• Worldwide app stores saw record consumer spend of $120B in 2019.

Back in 2018, analyst Horace Dediu noted that Apple appeared to be emphasizing a ‘lasts longer’ strategy for iPhones. The strategy, he noted, prioritized usage and users over units sold, which became reinforced when Apple stopped reporting unit shipments data and boosted the metrics it doled out about its Services category.

Basically, the longer that Apple keeps iPhones in circulation, the less they will sell on an individual basis — but the longer they would keep people in the ecosystem.

All of this adds up to the fact that Apple stands to gain far more from making the front door wider than it does from making the threshold higher. The iPhone SE opens up new audiences for Apple. It’s an ideal phone for first time iPhone users, young buyers getting their first device and people currently on a budget.

Besides being the first attempt by Apple at this market in the modern smartphone era, it’s also the first iPhone since the company pivoted heavily into the services business. Apple saw that every iPhone needed to give the breath of life to more business for its other divisions as the market for devices entered its oxygen-saturation phase.

The iPhone SE will bring, or graduate, people into the Apple ecosystem and push money into the services category of its business for years to come. Even if they keep the device for years and never upgrade.

In a time of severe market disruption, where big consumer purchases may take a back seat, Apple has timed the iPhone SE perfectly to serve a real need. The barrier to entry is lower and customers know that they will be served by this purchase for 2-5 years with full backing of Apple’s software support and far better security and privacy track record than the rest of the field. Right now, as we’re all isolated, these pocket machines make us more connected to one another and provide us a lifeline of information about the best way to stay healthy and safe.

As smartphones became ubiquitous and then commonplace, they have taken on the role of pariah and scapegoat for a number of societal ills. The focus on superficiality, obsession with small things or even plain old sloth. Now, all of those equations have been scribbled out. Just as parents have re-thought the idea of screen time while we’re all locked up and social media has become a vital tool for maintaining our sanity rather than bragging — we’ve also come to realize that maybe the smartphone stands between us and real isolation.

The iPhone SE has come along right as Apple has an opportunity to make those benefits available to the widest audience.

This iteration of the iPhone is one of those rare moments where the business gets served, the users get served and everyone comes out of it with a good deal.

When the Air Force asked hackers to break into a F-15 fighter jet at last year’s Def Con security conference, the results were both eye-opening and eye-watering.

It was the first time hackers were allowed to work on the system to look for bugs. In just two hours, a team of seven hackers found a devastating flaw, which if exploited in the real world could have crippled a critical aircraft data system, causing untold and potentially catastrophic damage.

It was also proof that the Air Force desperately needed help.

“I left that event thinking there is a huge national asset in this level of cyber expertise that we are lacking in full in our Air Force,” said Will Roper, assistant secretary of the Air Force for acquisition, technology, and logistics, in a call. As the acquisitions chief, all of the satellites that the Air Force builds fall under his purview. But the Air Force historically held the security of its systems and technology in absolute secrecy, fearing espionage or sabotage by the enemy. Roper said this was like being “stuck in Cold War business practices.”

“But in today’s world that’s not the best security posture. Just because you’re not telling the world about your vulnerabilities doesn’t mean you’re secure to go to war,” he said.

Riding the waves of last year’s success, Roper planned to bring in security researchers again at this year’s Def Con in Las Vegas — this time hack into a real orbiting satellite, hovering miles above the earth’s surface.

Space was once only for the brave and the well-funded. For decades, only a handful of governments had the resources to blast a satellite into space. But as private businesses fire tons of their own technology into orbit, space is more crowded than ever. Now, space isn’t just a level playing field for private enterprise, it’s also a potential future battleground for adversaries.

Miles above the earth, satellites may seem far from harm’s way, but Roper said the risks they face are real. “I could launch a direct ascent anti-satellite weapon that will go hit a satellite and disable it,” he said. “I could use directed energy weapons to try to blind a satellite or destroy components that allow it to collect critical information from the earth. I could jam satellite links so that you can’t communicate whatever information needs to be relayed to other important decision makers,” he said. And it’s not just the satellites in orbit. The ground stations and the communication links between the earth and the skies could be as vulnerable as the satellites themselves, Roper said.

“We don’t know the ghosts that are in our systems that come from the supply chain and the companies that assemble those and the fighters and satellites don’t either, because they don’t know to ask for them,” he said. The goal isn’t to just fix the existing bugs but also to shore up its supply chain to prevent introducing new bugs.

“We absolutely need help,” said Roper.

Working with the Defense Digital Service, which its director Brett Goldstein refers to as a “SWAT team of nerds that operates in the Pentagon,” they came up with Hack-a-Sat, a space security program that invites hackers and security researchers in to find the same bugs and flaws that the enemy wants to exploit.

It’s a massive shift from building closed and locked down systems that the Air Force is accustomed to. By switching to semi-open systems, it can open up its satellite technology to the wider community, while reserving the most classified technology to its in-house highly vetted experts and engineers.

Surprisingly, Goldstein, who reports directly to the Secretary of Defense, said convincing the folks upstairs to allow a bunch of hackers to take on a working military satellite wasn’t as difficult as it might sound. “There was enormous support for doing it and enormous support to partner with the Air Force on it,” he said. Roper agreed: “Isn’t it better to know about it prior to conflict than to naively keep our head in the sand and take that vulnerability into war at the risk of the operators who will have to use it?”

Roper and Goldstein say they want the cream of the crop to take on the satellite. In order to find the best hackers, the Air Force today launched its qualification round for the next month. The Air Force will let researchers hack a “flat-sat,” essentially a test satellite kit, which will help to weed out the right technical chops and skills needed to hack the orbiting satellite at Def Con.

Those who qualify for the next and final round get to take on the satellite as it orbits the earth.

“Our plan was to use a satellite that had a camera and to see if the team would be able to turn the camera to face the moon,” said Roper. “It would be a literal moonshot.”

What comes out at the other end is anybody’s guess. Both Roper and Goldstein said they want to be able to reveal the hackers’ eventual findings. But given that any findings may contain real-world security bugs of a working satellite, the Air Force may need to hold onto the key details to avoid a mid-orbit catastrophe.

At the time of writing, Black Hat and Def Con, the two largest security conferences that run back-to-back in Las Vegas every August, say it’s business as usual. But as the coronavirus pandemic continues with no end date in sight, the Air Force team is planning for a range of contingencies. Roper and Goldstein said they are determined to plow ahead, with an eye on virtualizing the event.

Whether or not the event is held on stage or remotely from people’s homes, the duo say the show will go on. The beauty of hacking is that often it can be done from anywhere with an internet connection.

As much as they hope that the hackers succeed in hacking the satellite, Roper said the event was as much about finding and fixing vulnerabilities as it was about “shocking our system” so that the Air Force thinks differently about security.

“I suspect there will be a generation of airmen and space professionals that will think about working with the hacker community different, so when they’re designing a satellite they’re not thinking,” said Roper. “If that generation comes to be, we will be in a much better cyber posture in the future to the better readiness of our forces.”