Author: azeeadmin

Did you blow enough money on Uber to get Diamond status? A lot of users are finding out tonight as Uber rolls out its rider loyalty Rewards program to San Francisco and a slew of other cities. The feature calculates how much you’ve spent on Uber and Uber Eats in the last six months awards you perks like no-fee cancellations if you rebook, guaranteed prices between your two favorite spots, and free car upgrades. Uber confirms to TechCrunch that Rewards will roll out to the entire US soon but now is available in 25 places across the country.

Uber Rewards is still a bit complicated to be easy enough for everyone to quickly understand, but it does a could job of offering powerful perks and a way for everyone to earn $5 rebates. The program could discourage users from checking other ride hailing apps if their Uber’s ETA or price seems too high.

Meanwhile, Lyft’s loyalty program remains unseen. The competitor tried to steal the spotlight by announcing its own rewards system just two days before Uber, yet it seems like that was vaporware as it still hasn’t launched. Uber was far from first here, as Southeast Asia’s Grab has had rewards since 2016. But Uber could flex its deep pockets and cultural cache here by using slick product design to differentiate itself in a crowded market of lookalikes.

How To Use Uber Rewards

Luckily, almost everything in Uber Rewards happens automatically. All you have to do is look out for the invitation to join at the bottom of the home screen and activate it. You’ll then see your tier and the associated perks that you’ll get to keep for the next six months.

The only non-retroactive perk is the $5 credits you get for each 500 points you earn going forward. You get 1 point per dollar spent on UberPool, Express Pool and Uber Eats;  2 points on UberX, Uber XL and Uber Select; and 3 points on Uber Black and Black SUV.  The one perk you have to configure yourself is if you’re platinum, you’ll have to choose which route to get price protection for. You probably want to pick your home and your most frequent destination or one of reasonable distance that you often travel to or from during rush hour.

Uber Rewards is now available in Boston, Dallas, Orange County, Houston, New Orleans, Kansas City, Indianapolis, LA, SF, Fort Collins, Rockies, Pittsburgh, Lehigh valley, Gettysburg, Erie, and Western Massachusetts. That’s on top of the launch cities of Miami, Denver, Tampa, New York, Washington, DC, Philadelphia, Atlanta, San Diego, and anywhere in New Jersey. Once Uber has nailed the experience in the US, it plans to roll it out to international locales.

Uber Rewards Levels

Now, here’s a breakdown of the Uber Rewards tiers, the best perks, and how much Ubering it takes to earn them (from our November post announcing the feature):

Blue: $5 credits

The only Uber perk that doesn’t reset at the end of a period is that you get $5 of Uber Cash for every 500 points earned regardless of membership level. “Even as a semi-frequent Uber Rewards member you’ll get these instant benefits,” Janakiram says. Blue lets you treat Uber like a video game where you’re trying to rack up points to earn an extra life. To earn 500 points, you’d need about 48 UberPool trips, 6 Uber Xs and 6 Uber Eats orders.

Gold: Flexible cancellations

Once you hit 500 points, you join Uber Gold and get flexible cancellations that refund your $5 cancellation fee if you rebook within 15 minutes, plus priority support Gold is for users who occasionally take Uber but stick to its more economical options. “The Gold level is all about being there when things aren’t going exactly right,” Janakiram explains. To earn 500 points in six months, you’d need to take about 2 UberPools per week, one Uber X per month and one Uber Eats order per month.

Platinum: Price protection

At 2,500 points you join Uber Platinum, which gets you the Gold benefits plus price protection on a route between two of your favorite places regardless of traffic or surge. And Platinum members get priority pickups at airports. To earn 2,500 points, you’d need to take UberX 4 times per week and order Uber Eats twice per month. It’s designed for the frequent user who might rely on Uber to get to work or play.

Diamond: Premium support & upgrades

At 7,500 points, you get the Gold and Platinum benefits plus premium support with a dedicated phone line and fast 24/7 responses from top customer service agents. You get complimentary upgrade surprises from UberX to Uber Black and other high-end cars. You’ll be paired with Uber’s highest-rated drivers. And you get no delivery fee on three Uber Eats orders every six months. Reaching 7,500 points would require UberX 8 times per week, Uber Eats once per week and Uber Black to the airport once per month. Diamond is meant usually for business travelers who get to expense their rides, or people who’d ditched car ownership for ridesharing.

Alchemist, which began as an experiment to better promote enterprise entrepreneurs, has morphed into a well-established Silicon Valley accelerator.

To prove it, San Francisco-based Alchemist is announcing a fresh $2.5 million investment ahead of its 20th demo day on Wednesday. Jupiter Networks, a networking and cybersecurity solutions business, has led the round, with participation from Siemens’ venture capital unit Next47.

Launched in 2012 by former Draper Fisher Jurvetson investor Ravi Belani, Alchemist provides participating teams with six months of mentorship and a $36,000 investment. Alchemist admits companies whose revenue stream comes from enterprises, not consumers, with a bent toward technical founders.

According to numbers provided by the accelerator, dubbed the “Y Combinator of Enterprise,” 115 Alchemist portfolio companies have gone on to raise $556 million across several VC deals. Another 25 have been acquired, including S4 Capital’s recent $150 million acquisition of media consultancy MightyHive, Alchemist’s largest exit to date.

Other notable alums include Rigetti Computing, LaunchDarkly, which helps startups soft-launch features and drone startup Matternet.

Alchemist has previously raised venture capital funding, including a $2 million financing in 2017 led by GE and an undisclosed investment from Salesforce.

Nineteen companies will demo products onstage tomorrow. You can live stream Alchemist’s 20th demo day here.

Blue Origin, the rocket company founded by Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, is about to undertake the 10th launch of its New Shepard launch vehicle, with its capsule chock full of experiments. The launch, which was originally scheduled for a month ago but delayed for various reasons, will take place tomorrow at 6:50 AM Pacific time.

New Shepard is a sub-orbital space-visiting platform, not a satellite-launching one. But it uses a very traditional method of getting to the edge of space compared with Virgin Galactic’s rather involved mothership-spaceship combo, which scraped the very edge of space in its fourth test launch last month.

The rocket shoots straight up, as rockets do, reaches escape velocity, then pops its capsule off the top just before the Karman line that officially, if somewhat arbitrarily, delineates space from Earth’s atmosphere. The capsule, after exhausting its upward momentum, gently floats back to the surface under a parachute.

That’s the plan for Wednesday’s launch, which you can watch live here starting half an hour or so before T-0. But instead of taking a dummy load or “Mannequin Skywalker,” as the company calls its human stand-in during tests of the crew capsule, mission 10 has a whole collection of experiments on board.

There are nine experiments total, all flying through NASA’s Flight Opportunities program. They’re detailed here. Most have already been up in other vehicles or even a Blue Origin one, but obviously repetition and iteration is important to their development.

“The opportunity to re-fly our payload is helping us not only validate and compare data for different flight profiles, but also test modifications and upgrades,” said NASA’s Kathryn Hurlbert, who heads up the Suborbital Flight Experiment Monitor-2 project at Johnson Space Center.

More Flight Opportunities spots will be available on future NASA-sponsored launches, so if your lab has an experiment it would like to test on a sub-orbital rocket, get at the administrators as soon as the shutdown ends.

Tesla owners may soon have a way to see (and record) damage that happens to their vehicles when they’re unattended.

Tesla will roll out “Tesla Sentry Mode” for all cars with Enhanced Autopilot, CEO Elon Musk said in a tweet Tuesday. Musk didn’t provide any more information about when this feature might be available and how it might work.

TechCrunch has reached out to Tesla for more details.

The name suggests that this feature would stand guard, so to speak, by either keeping the dash cam on while parked or having it automatically turn on if the car is hit or being tampered with. It could operate similar to aftermarket product Owl security camera; although, again, details are scant.

In October, Tesla released version 9.0 of its software, which featured a number of updates, including a new UI on the center display and the ability to use the built-in forward-facing cameras as a dash cam. The dash cam feature is available only in Tesla vehicles built after August 2017.

The dash cam feature currently lets owners record and store onto a USB flash drive video footage captured by their car’s forward-facing camera. Owners first must configure a USB flash drive in Windows or MS-DOS file architecture and add a base-level folder in the flash drive called TeslaCam. The configured USB flash drive can then be inserted into either one of the USB ports in the front of the vehicle. When properly configured, the dash cam icon pops up on the status bar with a red dot indicating that it is recording.

Owners can tap the icon to save a 10-minute video clip or press and hold to pause recording. Recordings that aren’t downloaded are automatically deleted.

Viacom is bucking the trend of launching new premium subscription-based entertainment offerings with its bid to acquire Pluto TV for $340 million in cash.

It’s a way to distribute the company’s once mighty-with-millennial properties like Cartoon Network, Comedy Central, MTV and BET to an audience that doesn’t pay for cable and boost the audience and reach for its recent acquisitions Awesomeness and Whosay.

Launched in 2013, Pluto TV has built a catalog of titles by licensing movies and television shows from studios as well as content from YouTube and other shortform digital media distributors. The company now offers over 100 channels from 130 content partners that it distributes to roughly 12 million monthly active users — 7.5 million who access it through connected televisions.

“Today marks an important step forward in Viacom’s evolution, as we work to move both our company and the industry forward. Pluto TV’s unique and market-leading product, combined with Viacom’s brands, content, advanced advertising capabilities and global scale, creates a great opportunity for consumers, partners and Viacom,” said Bob Bakish, Viacom President and chief executive, in a statement. “As the video marketplace continues to segment, we see an opportunity to support the ecosystem in creating products at a broad range of price points, including free. To that end, we see significant white space in the ad-supported streaming market and are excited to work with the talented Pluto TV team, and a broad range of Viacom partners, to accelerate its growth in the U.S. and all over the world.”

Pluto Tv will operate as an independent subsidiary of Viacom and its chief executive and co-founder, Tom Ryan, will continue to serve as CEO of the independent entity.

“Since our launch less than five years ago, and particularly over the past year, Pluto TV has enjoyed explosive growth and become the category leader in free streaming television,” said Pluto TV CEO and Co-Founder Tom Ryan. “Viacom’s portfolio of global, iconic brands and IP, advanced advertising leadership and international reach will enable Pluto TV to grow even faster and become a major force in streaming TV worldwide.Viacom is the perfect partner to help us accomplish our mission of entertaining the planet.”

The deal is also a win for Pluto TV’s venture capital investors. Since its founding, Pluto TV had raised $51.8 million from investors including USVP, ProSiebenSat.1 Media, Scripps Networks Interactive, Sky, United Talent Agency, Luminari Capital, Chicago Ventures, Pritzker Group and others.

Launch startup Rocket Lab is following the success of its first couple commercial launches by adding a prestigious (and deep-pocketed) new client: DARPA. The New Zealand-based company will send an experimental satellite called R3D2 into low Earth orbit sometime in late February if all goes well.

DARPA is of course the Defense Department’s research wing, and it probably has whole file folders filled with experiments it would like to send up to orbit but has deferred from because of cost or timing restrictions. Rocket Lab’s whole business model is to make launches cheap and frequent so neither of those apply, and DARPA seems willing to give it a shot.

“The Department of Defense has prioritized rapid acquisition of small satellite and launch capabilities. By relying on commercial acquisition practices, DARPA streamlined the R3D2 mission from conception through launch services acquisition,” explained DARPA’s Fred Kennedy, director of the Tactical Technology Office, in a news release.

“The ability to rapidly space-qualify new technology and deploy space-based assets with confidence on short notice is a service that didn’t exist for dedicated small satellites until now,” said Rocket Lab CEO Peter Beck in his company’s corresponding release.

The satellite itself is actually more of a short term science experiment. It’s a “membrane antenna,” a thin layer of Kapton folded up into a tiny space that, upon reaching orbit, will unfurl to its full 7-foot diameter. The larger surface area may make for better signal reception and transmission, and packing into a smaller area of course makes more room for other components. (R3D2 stands for Radio Frequency Risk Reduction Deployment Demonstration, by the way.)

The whole thing weighs 150 kilograms, or about 330 pounds; that doesn’t leave a lot of space for ride sharing, so DARPA is paying for the whole Electron rocket. The plan is to launch in late February from Rocket Lab’s facility in New Zealand on the Māhia Peninsula. The exact date will only become clear once weather and other variables for that period are determined.

Fingers crossed for Rocket Lab on this one. It’s already done launches for private companies and for NASA; adding DARPA to the rolodex would be a big coup for a company looking to build up its profile.

Smile! You’re on camera. At least, your license plate is.

You might have heard of automatic license plate recognition — known as ALPR (or ANPR in the U.K. for number plates). These cameras are dotted across the U.S., and are controlled mostly by police departments and government agencies to track license plates — and people — from place to place. In doing so, they can reveal where you live, where you go and who you see. Considered a massive invasion of privacy by many and legally questionable by some, there are tens of thousands of ALPR readers across the U.S. collectively reading and recording thousand of license plates — and locations — every minute, the ACLU says, becoming one of the new and emerging forms of mass surveillance in the U.S.

But some cameras are connected to the internet, and are easily identifiable. Worse, some are leaking sensitive data about vehicles and their drivers — and many have weak security protections that make them easily accessible.

Security researchers have been warning for years that ALPR devices are exposed and all too often accessible from the internet. The Electronic Frontier Foundation found in 2015 dozens of exposed devices in its own investigation not long after Boston’s entire ALPR network was found exposed, thanks to a server security lapse.

But in the three years past, little has changed.

In the course of a week, TechCrunch found more than 150 ALPR devices from several manufacturers connected to and searchable on the internet. Many ALPR cameras were entirely exposed or would have been easily accessible with little effort. Of the ALPR cameras we identified, the majority had a default password documented in its support guides. (We didn’t use any of the passwords, as that would be unlawful.)

“It doesn’t surprise us to hear that the problems are still ongoing,” said Dave Maass, a senior investigative researcher at the Electronic Frontier Foundation. “What we tend to find is that law enforcement will get sold this technology and see it as a one-time investment, but don’t invest in cybersecurity to protect the information or the devices themselves.”

Darius Freamon, a security researcher, was one of the first to find police ALPR cameras in 2014 on Shodan, a search engine for exposed databases and devices.

Freamon found one then-popular model of ALPR cameras, the P372, a license plate reader built and released by PIPS Technology in 2004. Back then, its default password wasn’t a major hazard. But today, a dozen devices are still viewable on Shodan. Although the web interfaces are locked down in most cases, many of these devices allow unauthenticated access through its telnet port — allowing to run commands on the device without a password at all, giving access to each device’s database of collected license plates.

We also found more than a dozen ALPR cameras in use by police in California, given away by their hidden Wi-Fi network name but still cached by Shodan. Two ALPR servers by Texas-based firm MissionALPR were found online at the time of writing.  And, we also found more than 80 separate Genetec-built AutoVu SharpV devices — including two previously discovered license plate readers “as-a-service” device each in Washington and California. (Genetec said that only its setup process has a default password, and users are required to change the password on setup.) And, many of the ALPR cameras found independently years ago — even as far back as 2012 — are still online.

The list goes on and on.

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It’s not just police using ALPR services. Private companies, like large campuses and universities, also invest heavily in ALPR, but are unaware of the risks associated with storing massive amounts of data.

“In California, you’re responsible under state law to maintain reasonable security practices to protect against unauthorized access,” said Maass. “If it turns out that somebody is harmed because they put a license plate reader up and it didn’t have basic security like password protections, that person can be on the hook for punitive damages.”

We asked several ALPR device makers, including PIPS and MissionALPR, if they still produce devices with default passwords and if they offer advice to their customers with legacy equipment, but besides Genetec, no other ALPR device manufacturer commented or answered our questions prior to publication.

“Genetec has no access to the user-defined passwords and the only way to access the camera in case of a lost password is to do a factory reset,” said a spokesperson.

While many ALPR cameras — like the devices built and sold by PIPS and Genetec — are hardware-based, many cheaper or homebrew systems rely on an internet-connected webcam and cheap or free license plate recognition software, like OpenALPR, that runs separately on top. OpenALPR doesn’t have a default password (though many are still searchable online), but it is open source, making it free to download and cheap to operate.

But it means that now any camera can be an ALPR camera.

Case in point: When police in the city of Orinda, near San Francisco, began installing non-ALPR motion-activated cameras by Reconyx, investigative reporters at NBC’s Bay Area team were able to obtain with a single public records request more than five million photos in a three-month period from the city’s 13 cameras. A local resident then used free ALPR software to turn the images into a searchable database of license plates.

There’s a fine line between using technology to fight crime and creepily surveilling your neighbors. But device makers can — and will soon have to — do more to protect their devices from hacking — or simply leaking data.

Starting next year, California law will ban internet-connected devices manufactured or sold in the state if they contain a weak or default password that isn’t unique to each device. Not only does that protect against hacking, it prevents easy hijacking from powerful, network crippling botnets.

Until then, assume that if it’s connected to the internet, it’s not as secure as it could be.

Hollywood’s highest-profile lobbying group, the Motion Picture Association of America, has announced the addition of a new member: Netflix.

The trade group’s membership includes the major Hollywood studios, including Disney, Paramount, Sony, Fox, Universal and Warner Bros. Netflix is the first internet streaming service to join.

To regular moviegoers, the MPAA is probably best-known (to the extent it’s known at all) for its occasionally mystifying ratings system, but the group actively lobbies for the studios on a range of issues.

The news underlines the ways in which Netflix is increasingly becoming a part of the Hollywood establishment — or at least, finds its interests aligned with that establishment. (The company recently departed another trade group, the Internet Association.) This comes just a few hours after Netflix scored a record 15 Oscar nominations, including its first for Best Picture.

In fact, Politico (which first broke the news) notes that Netflix and Amazon have already been pushing alongside MPAA members for anti-piracy measures, as part of the Alliance for Creativity and Entertainment.

One Netflix practice that remains controversial is its resistance to windowing — in other words, giving its films an exclusive theatrical release before making them available for streaming. While the company has softened its stance somewhat, allowing “Roma” and other titles to have a brief period of theatrical exclusivity, this wasn’t enough for the major theater chains, which refused to show the films. However, the MPAA mostly stays out of those discussions.

“On behalf of the MPAA and its member companies, I am delighted to welcome Netflix as a partner,” said MPAA chairman and CEO Charles Rivkin in a statement. “All of our members are committed to pushing the film and television industry forward, in both how we tell stories and how we reach audiences. Adding Netflix will allow us to even more effectively advocate for the global community of creative storytellers, and I look forward to seeing what we can all achieve together.”

Video game revenue in 2018 reached a new peak of $43.8 billion, up 18 percent from the previous years, surpassing the projected total global box office for the film industry, according to new data released by the Entertainment Software Association and The NPD Group.

Preliminary indicators for global box office revenues published at the end of last year indicated that revenue from ticket sales at box offices around the world would hit $41.7 billion, according to comScore data reported by Deadline Hollywood.

The $43.8 billion tally also surpasses numbers for streaming services, which are estimated to rake in somewhere around $28.8 billion for the year, according to a report in Multichannel News.

Video games and related content have become the new source of entertainment for a generation — and it’s something that has new media moguls like Netflix chief executive Reed Hastings concerned. In the company’s most recent shareholder letter, Netflix said that Fortnite was more of a threat to its business than TimeWarner’s HBO.

“We compete with (and lose to) Fortnite more than HBO,” the company’s shareholder letter stated. “When YouTube went down globally for a few minutes in October, our viewing and signups spiked for that time…There are thousands of competitors in this highly fragmented market vying to entertain consumers and low barriers to entry for those with great experiences.”

“The impressive economic growth of the industry announced today parallels the growth of the industry in mainstream American culture,” said acting ESA president and CEO Stanley Pierre-Louis, in a statement. “Across the nation, we count people of all backgrounds and stages of life among our most passionate video game players and fans. Interactive entertainment stands today as the most influential form of entertainment in America.”

Gains came from across the spectrum of the gaming industry. Console and personal computing, mobile gaming, all saw significant growth, according to Mat Piscatella, a video games industry analyst for The NPD Group.

According to the report, hardware and peripherals and software revenue increased from physical and digital sales, in-game purchases and subscriptions.

U.S. Video Game Industry Revenue	2018	2017	Growth Percentage
Hardware, including peripherals	$7.5 billion	$6.5 billion	15%
Software, including in-game purchases and subscriptions	$35.8 billion	$30.4 billion	18%
Total:	$43.3 billion	$36.9 billion	18%

Source: The NPD Group, Sensor Tower

Oracle has allegedly withheld $400 million in wages from racially underrepresented workers (black, Latinx and Asian) as well as women, the U.S. Department of Labor’s Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs said in a filing today. The OFCCP is the office within the DOL that enforces equal pay and ensures government contractors comply with anti-discrimination regulation.

In the OFCCP’s second amended complaint today, the office alleges Oracle “impermissibly denies equal employment opportunity to non-Asian applicants for employment, strongly preferring a workforce that it can later underpay. Once employed, women, Blacks and Asians are systematically underpaid relative to their peers,” the complaint alleges.

Allegedly, Oracle’s underpayment of certain employees is driven by the company’s reliance on prior salary information and funneling non-white, non-male employees into lower-paid roles.

The department argues that Oracle’s “stark patterns of discrimination” started back in 2013 and continues into the present day. More specifically, the OFCCP alleges Oracle discriminated against black, Asian and female employees. This has all ultimately resulted in the collective loss of more than $400 million for this group of employees, the suit alleges.

The office also alleges Oracle discriminates against those who have visas, often putting them in low-level jobs. The vast majority of hires from Oracle’s college recruiting program, the suit alleges, were international students with student visas.

“These students required work authorization to remain in the United States after graduation,” the suit alleges. “In other words, Oracle overwhelmingly hires workers dependent upon Oracle for sponsorship to remain in the United States.”

The OFCCP filed the suit against Oracle last January, following the Labor Department’s 2014 audit of the company. That suit was followed by an employee-led class-action lawsuit last September alleging Oracle pays women less than men in similar jobs.

Oracle is subject to auditing as a result of its contracts with the federal government. Given Oracle’s agreement to provide equal employment opportunity, the OFCCP is asking the Court to require Oracle to pay those affected and correct its “discriminatory compensation and hiring practices.” The office is also demanding that Oracle lose its $100 million worth of annual contracts with the government.

Oracle, which declined to comment for this story, is not the only company the OFCCP has gone after. A couple of years ago, the office went after Google in an attempt to obtain compensation data, followed by a claim that Google has systemic gender-based pay inequities. That same year, the office sued Palantir for racial discrimination. Palantir, several months later, settled with the DOL, agreeing to pay $1.7 million in back wages and other types of monetary relief to those affected.