Author: azeeadmin

Local TV broadcasting company Sinclair Broadcast Group today announced the launch of a new streaming service called STIRR that aims to bring local TV news and other content to the growing number of cord cutters across the U.S. The company today owns more than 190 TV stations, which it’s leveraging in order to create its own “skinny bundle.” However, unlike TV streaming services such as Sling TV, PlayStation Vue, Hulu with Live TV or YouTube TV, for example, STIRR will be free and ad-supported instead of a paid subscription.

The service will offer access to national news, sports, entertainment and digital-first channels and a video-on-demand library in addition to its local content, which serves as the anchor for the new service.

In a special channel called STIRR CITY (yes, all caps), the service will stream a curated, 24/7 program lineup based on where the viewer lives. This will include local news, local and regional sports, entertainment and city-focused lifestyle programming from the local Sinclair TV station in that city.

STIRR CITY joins other original channels developed for the service, including STIRR Movies (for some reason, no caps), STIRR Sports and STIRR Life.

STIRR Sports and Life will offer locally focused programs, we’re told. For example, the Sports channel may show high school football, and the Life channel might show a local lifestyle show like “Seattle Refined.” When local content isn’t available, the channels will be fleshed out with content aggregated from other networks on STIRR.

STIRR Movies will also be aggregated content, but the company is exploring additional deals, we’re told.

At launch, there are more than 20 national networks and digital-first stations available, but few are notable.

The list includes: BUZZR, Charge, Cheddar, Comet, CONtv, Dove Channel, DUST, FailArmy, Futurism, Gravitas, Mobcrush, MovieMix, NASA TV, Outdoor America, The Pet Collective, SOAR, Stadium, TBD, The T and World Poker Tour.

The company says it plans to grow its selection to more than 50 networks by the end of 2019.

It’s clear, however, that the network selection won’t be the draw here — it’s the local content.

Today, it’s still fairly difficult for cord cutters to access local programming. While consumers can use a digital antenna to capture over-the-air TV signals for free, it requires the installation of a not-very-aesthetically-pleasing antenna. (At least Amazon’s Fire TV Recast gives you the option of hiding the antenna in a back room so as not to junk up your entertainment center.)

But even with an antenna, signals can be hit-or-miss — some areas have poor reception, or are too far from the signal’s source for a good experience.

And while the new crop of live TV streaming services provide another means of accessing local channels, they are not free.

Plus, the live TV services include cloud DVRs, which subscribers use to record programs then skip the ads. STIRR doesn’t have a recording option, which may make it attractive to advertisers.

“Despite the explosive growth of new national over-the-top (OTT) services, local TV station’s programming, especially local news, has remained some of the most popular and desired content to audiences and advertisers alike,” said Adam Ware, STIRR’s General Manager, in a statement. “By creating the STIRR CITY channel format, local TV stations can now extend their programming strength to OTT,” he added.

Ware also points out that STIRR will give advertisers a way to reach a different demographic that is no longer watching traditional TV.

“Local broadcast traditionally skews older. Streaming skews younger,” he tells TechCrunch. “This brings the two together for the first time,” he says.

STIRR’s ad sales will be coordinated between Sinclair Digital, OTT Compulse and Sinclair’s local stations. And its ad revenue is shared with content partners. (The company hasn’t ruled out a premium version that eliminates ads, we understand, but has nothing like that at launch.)

Also of note, you don’t have to live in a particular city to tune into its local programming via STIRR. That’s good, too, because STIRR doesn’t have a presence in all major metros. But it will suggest your closest markets when you load the app.

One caveat about STIRR: while local programming is available, STIRR won’t stream the prime time shows that these networks carry — you’ll still need your antenna or a paid streaming service for that. (Or, if you’re like a growing number of TV viewers, you don’t watch much network TV these days, in favor of streaming shows on Netflix and Amazon.)

In time, STIRR’s selection of content could be enhanced by more regional sports channels, as it’s a top bidder for those being sold by Disney and Fox. That could make the service more compelling.

STIRR is available for free on the web, iOS, Android, Amazon Fire TV, Apple TV and Roku.

*We’ve run into some launch bugs when testing STIRR, and have gotten page load errors when trying to access the Channel Guide. Hopefully these will smooth out in time as traffic stabilizes.

Continuing a trend that VCs here in London tell me is seeing an increasing amount of deal-flow in Europe attract the interest of top-tier Silicon Valley venture capital firms, TechCrunch has learned that email security provider Tessian is the latest to raise from across the pond.

According to multiple sources, the London-based company has closed a Series B round led by Sequoia Capital. I understand that the deal could be announced within a matter of weeks, and that the round size is in the region of $40 million. Tessian declined to comment.

Founded in 2013 by three engineering graduates from Imperial College — Tim Sadler, Tom Adams and Ed Bishop — Tessian is deploying machine learning to improve email security. Once installed on a company’s email systems, the machine learning tech analyses an enterprise’s email networks to understand normal and abnormal email sending patterns and behaviours.

Tessian then attempts to detect anomalies in outgoing emails and warns users about potential mistakes, such as a wrongly intended recipient, or nefarious employee activity, before an email is sent. More recently, the startup has begun addressing in-bound email, too. This includes preventing phishing attempts or spotting when emails have been spoofed.

Meanwhile, Tessian (formerly called CheckRecipient) raised $13 million in Series A funding just 7 months ago in a round led by London’s Balderton Capital. The company’s other investors include Accel, Amadeus Capital Partners, Crane, LocalGlobe, Winton Ventures, and Walking Ventures.

New year, new you, new Slack. The popular workplace chat service’s resolution clearly involved a bit of a facelift, starting with a new logo. A redesigned version of the familiar grid logo launched this week, and appears to have rolled out on most major platforms.

Slack did the customary thing of explaining the hell out of the new design over of its blog. There’s all of the usual stuff there, about maintaining the spirit while moderning thing up a bit. The company also calls the design “simpler,” which is certainly up for debate. That’s fair enough from the standpoint of the color scheme, but try drawing this one from memory. It’s considerably tougher that the old tic-tac-toe version.

 

The new logo does away with the tilted hashtag/pound symbol of overlapping translucent colors in favor of a symmetrical arrangement of rounded rectangles and pins. The multiplying colors have been pared down to four (light blue, magenta, green and yellow) and the whole effect is reminiscent of a video game console or hospital.

“It uses a simpler color palette and, we believe, is more refined, but still contains the spirit of the original,” the company writes. “It’s an evolution, and one that can scale easily, and work better, in many more places.”

Created by Michael Bierut at the New York firm, Pentagram Design, the new logo marks the first major redesign since the company was launched (in fact, the original apparently predates Slack’s official launch). “The updated palette features four primary colors, more manageable than the original’s eleven, which suffered against any background color other than white,” the firm writes in its own post. “These have been optimized to look better on screen, and the identity also retains Slack’s distinctive aubergine purple as an accent color.”

The new design does potentially open up another issue:

Unintentional, obviously, and the orientation of the above negative space addition is the ancient symbol that was later mirrored and coopted by the worst people, ever. As a number of designers have noted, well, these things can happen, though the association and “once you’ve seen it, you can’t unsee it” effect could eventually prove the new logo’s ultimate undoing.

Lance Armstrong revealed last month that an early investment in Uber — courtesy of a $100,000 check that he funneled into the company in 2009 through Lowercase Capital —  “saved” his family from financial ruin. This was after evidence surfaced in 2012 that he used performance-enhancing drugs, and he was stripped not only of his seven consecutive Tour de France titles but also lost the many lucrative endorsement deals he enjoyed at the time.

Armstrong, talking with CNBC in December, declined to say how big a return that Uber investment has produced, but it seemingly gave him a taste for the riches that venture capital can produce when the stars align. To wit, Armstrong just founded his own venture fund, Next Ventures, to back startups in the sports, fitness, nutrition and wellness markets, and it today announced is first investment.

That portfolio company: Carlsbad, Ca.-based PowerDot, a 2.5-year-old maker of an app-based, smart muscle stimulation device that sends electrical pulses to contract tender soft tissue, helping runners and other athletes recover from their workouts.

We weren’t able to talk with Armstrong — a public relations spokesperson for the firm said he isn’t prepared to speak in detail about it yet — but last month, he spoke candidly about his past actions continuing to haunt him, including years of lying to the public and race organizers, as well as his “bullying,” which he called “terrible,” adding: “It was the way I acted; that was my undoing.”

In fact, Armstrong, who has been banned from cycling from life, said that as he has begun reaching out for meetings, not everyone is eager to take his calls. As he told CNBC’s Andrew Ross Sorkin, “You have to assume that’s what they’re thinking: ‘I don’t want this association; I don’t trust this guy.”

Armstrong seems to be getting by in the meantime. Just this week, Architectural Digest took readers on a tour through Armstrong’s contemporary Aspen home and his art collection. Armstrong purchased the 6,000-square-foot home a decade ago. He and his family now live in Colorado full-time.

Robots are amazing things, but outside of their specific domains they are incredibly limited. So flexibility — not physical, but mental — is a constant area of research. A trio of new robotic setups demonstrate ways they can evolve to accommodate novel situations: using both “hands,” getting up after a fall, and understanding visual instructions they’ve never seen before.

The robots, all developed independently, are gathered together today in a special issue of the journal Science Robotics dedicated to learning. Each shows an interesting new way in which robots can improve their interactions with the real world.

On the other hand…

First there is the question of using the right tool for a job. As humans with multi-purpose grippers on the ends of our arms, we’re pretty experienced with this. We understand from a lifetime of touching stuff that we need to use this grip to pick this up, we need to use tools for that, this will be light, that heavy, and so on.

Robots, of course, have no inherent knowledge of this, which can make things difficult; it may not understand that it can’t pick up something of a given size, shape, or texture. A new system from Berkeley roboticists acts as a rudimentary decision-making process, classifying objects as able to be grabbed either by an ordinary pincer grip or with a suction cup grip.

A robot, wielding both simultaneously, decides on the fly (using depth-based imagery) what items to grab and with which tool; the result is extremely high reliability even on piles of objects it’s never seen before.

It’s done with a neural network that consumed millions of data points on items, arrangements, and attempts to grab them. If you attempted to pick up a teddy bear with a suction cup and it didn’t work the first ten thousand times, would you keep on trying? This system learned to make that kind of determination, and as you can imagine such a thing is potentially very important for tasks like warehouse picking for which robots are being groomed.

Interestingly, because of the “black box” nature of complex neural networks, it’s difficult to tell what exactly Dex-Net 4.0 is actually basing its choices on, although there are some obvious preferences, explained Berkeley’s  Ken Goldberg in an email.

“We can try to infer some intuition but the two networks are inscrutable in that we can’t extract understandable ‘policies,’ ” he wrote. “We empirically find that smooth planar surfaces away from edges generally score well on the suction model and pairs of antipodal points generally score well for the gripper.”

Now that reliability and versatility are high, the next step is speed; Goldberg said that the team is “working on an exciting new approach” to reduce computation time for the network, to be documented, no doubt, in a future paper.

ANYmal’s new tricks

Quadrupedal robots are already flexible in that they can handle all kinds of terrain confidently, even recovering from slips (and of course cruel kicks). But when they fall, they fall hard. And generally speaking they don’t get up.

The way these robots have their legs configured makes it difficult to do things in anything other than an upright position. But ANYmal, a robot developed by ETH Zurich (and which you may recall from its little trip to the sewer recently), has a more versatile setup that gives its legs extra degrees of freedom.

What could you do with that extra movement? All kinds of things. But it’s incredibly difficult to figure out the exact best way for the robot to move in order to maximize speed or stability. So why not use a simulation to test thousands of ANYmals trying different things at once, and use the results from that in the real world?

This simulation-based learning doesn’t always work, because it isn’t possible right now to accurately simulate all the physics involved. But it can produce extremely novel behaviors or streamline ones humans thought were already optimal.

At any rate that’s what the researchers did here, and not only did they arrive at a faster trot for the bot (above), but taught it an amazing new trick: getting up from a fall. Any fall. Watch this:

It’s extraordinary that the robot has come up with essentially a single technique to get on its feet from nearly any likely fall position, as long as it has room and the use of all its legs. Remember, people didn’t design this — the simulation and evolutionary algorithms came up with it by trying thousands of different behaviors over and over and keeping the ones that worked.

Ikea assembly is the killer app

Let’s say you were given three bowls, with red and green balls in the center one. Then you’re given this on a sheet of paper:

As a human with a brain, you take this paper for instructions, and you understand that the green and red circles represent balls of those colors, and that red ones need to go to the left, while green ones go to the right.

This is one of those things where humans apply vast amounts of knowledge and intuitive understanding without even realizing it. How did you choose to decide the circles represent the balls? Because of the shape? Then why don’t the arrows refer to “real” arrows? How do you know how far to go to the right or left? How do you know the paper even refers to these items at all? All questions you would resolve in a fraction of a second, and any of which might stump a robot.

Researchers have taken some baby steps towards being able to connect abstract representations like the above with the real world, a task that involves a significant amount of what amounts to a sort of machine creativity or imagination.

Making the connection between a green dot on a white background in a diagram and a greenish roundish thing on a black background in the real world isn’t obvious, but the “visual cognitive computer” created by Miguel Lázaro-Gredilla and his colleagues at Vicarious AI seems to be doing pretty well at it.

It’s still very primitive, of course, but in theory it’s the same toolset that one uses to, for example, assemble a piece of Ikea furniture: look at an abstract representation, connect it to real-world objects, then manipulate those objects according to the instructions. We’re years away from that, but it wasn’t long ago that we were years away from a robot getting up from a fall or deciding a suction cup or pincer would work better to pick something up.

The papers and videos demonstrating all the concepts above should be available at the Science Robotics site.

If nothing else, the addition of ECG/EKG reinforced Apple’s commitment to evolving the Watch into a serious medical device. The company has long looked to bring its best selling wearable to various health insurance platforms, and according to a new report, it’s reaching out to multiple private Medicare plans in hopes of subsidizing the product.

If Medicare companies bite, the move would make the $279+ tracker much more successful for older users. Along with electrocardiograph functionality, last year’s Series 4 also features fall detection, an addition that could make it even more appealing to the elderly and health care providers.

The new report cites at least three providers who have been in discussions with the company. We’ve reached out to Apple for comment, but I wouldn’t hold my breath on hearing back until the ink is dry on those deals. For Apple, however, such a a partnership would help increase the target audience for a product that’s been a rare bright spot in the wearable category.

Apple’s not alone in the serious health push, of course. Fitbit has also been aggressively pursuing the space. Today the company announced its inclusion in the National Institutes of Health’s new All of Us health initiative.

Today, Ubiquity6 has announced that it is acquiring Wavy, a small AR music startup founded last year.

In a blog post, the Wavy team confirmed that they’ll be joining the Ubiquity6 team and won’t be continuing their work on the Wavy app. “When we met the team at Ubiquity6, it became apparent that joining the team there would be a leap forward towards our shared mission of enabling creators to edit reality,” the post reads.

Wavy’s app had sought to give musicians an outlet to bring concerts into phone-based AR users’ living rooms.

The tight team of 3 joins Ubiquity6 after what was generally a rough year for the consumer-focused AR industry. While the number of supported devices climbed, the actual user base didn’t see much growth. A lot of the progress came in the platform tools such as Ubiquity6, the startup closed a $27 million Series B led by Benchmark and Index Ventures in August. The company now has just shy of 40 employees.

The Wavy app shares some essential DNA with what Ubiquity6 is looking to build. The app allows people to drop 3D objects into spaces and upload videos of the “music experiences” unfolding in front of them. It’s very fundamental stuff but at its base level asks questions about how 3D content can interact with spaces and people and how those new environments change the context of the art and music.

This fits into what Ubiquity6’s idea of a spatial internet, where users can stumble upon 3D environments where AR content lives based on where they are and what their phone camera is seeing. The company hasn’t launched widely, but the had a pilot program with the SFMOMA last year and have also announced that they are working with Disney.

We chatted with Ubiquity6 CEO Anjney Midha at TechCrunch Disrupt SF 2018 about the opportunities and challenges that lie ahead for the consumer-focused AR industry.

Acorn Biolabs wants consumers to pay them to store genetic material in a bet that the increasing advances in targeted genetic therapies will yield better healthcare results down the line.

The company’s pitch is to “Save young cells today, live a longer, better, tomorrow.” It’s a gamble on the frontiers of healthcare technology that has managed to net the company $3.3 million in seed financing from some of Canada’s busiest investors.

For the Toronto-based company, the pitch isn’t just around banking genetic material — a practice that’s been around for years — it’s about making that process cheaper and easier.

Acorn has come up with a way to collect and preserve the genetic material contained in hair follicles, giving its customers a way to collect full-genome information at home rather than having to come in to a facility and getting bone marrow drawn (the practice at one of its competitors, Forever Labs) .

“We have developed a proprietary media that cells are submerged in that maintains the viability of those cells as they’re being transported to our labs for processing,” says Acorn Biolabs chief executive Dr. Drew Taylor.

“Rapid advancements in the therapeutic use of cells, including the ability to grow human tissue sections, cartilage, artificial skin and stem cells, are already being delivered. Entire heart, liver and kidneys are really just around the corner. The urgency around collecting, preserving and banking youthful cells for future use is real and freezing the clock on your cells will ensure you can leverage them later when you need them,” Taylor said in a statement.

Typically, the cost of banking a full genome test is roughly $2,000 to $3,000 and Acorn says they can drop that cost to less than $1,000. Beyond the cost of taking the sample and storing it, Acorn says it will reduce the fees to store such genetic materials to roughly $100 a year.

It’s important to note that Healthcare doesn’t cover any of this. It’s a voluntary service for those neurotic enough or concerned enough about the future of healthcare and their potential health. 

There’s also no services that Acorn will provide on the back end of the storage… yet.

“What people do need to realize is that there is power with that data that can improve healthcare. Down the road we will be able to use that data to help people collect that data and power studies,” says Taylor. 

The $3.3 million that the company raised came from Real Ventures, Globalive Technology, Pool Global Partners and Epic Capital Management and other undisclosed investors.

“Until now, any live cell collection solutions have been highly expensive, invasive and often painful, as well as being geographically limited to specialized clinics,” said Anthony Lacavera, Founder and Chairman at Globalive.  “Acorn is an industry-leading example of how technology can bring real innovation to enable future healthcare solutions that will have meaningful impact on people’s wellbeing and longevity, while at the same time – make it easy, affordable and frictionless for everyone.”

 

Silicon Valley venture capital firm BlueRun Ventures has lassoed $130 million in capital commitments for its sixth fund. The firm invests in early-stage mobile software and financial services companies, including online lending platform Kabbage and navigation tool Waze.

BlueRun has also announced the promotion of Cheryl Cheng to general partner. Cheng joined the outfit in 2008; she’s focused on mobile and data opportunities within the enterprise and consumer markets. The firm also counts founder John Malloy and Jonathan Ebinger as GPs.

In a conversation with TechCrunch, Ebinger outlined the firm’s growing interest in the Mexican startup ecosystem, as well as startups focused on data sharing.

“There’s been such a backlash against data privacy — the pendulum has swung too far to one side — but I think there are learnings to be had around the benefits of data sharing in healthcare and in financial services,” Ebinger told TechCrunch.

BlueRun deploys $3 million to $5 million at a time and up to $15 million in a company’s lifespan. In addition to leading Kabbage’s Series A financing in 2010 — a company that is poised to go public in the near future — BlueRun was also the first institutional investor in PayPal and was a Series A investor in Coupa, a cloud-based software developer that completed a NASDAQ initial public offering in 2016. The firm invests in global companies building businesses focused on the U.S. market.

Contrary to VCs’ latest trend of raising larger and larger pools of capital, BlueRun’s latest effort is the firm’s smallest flagship fund to date. Previously, BlueRun closed on $150 million for its fifth fund in 2014 and its second vehicle, raised in 2000, garnered $460 million. BlueRun also operates funds in Korea and China.

Sprint today announced it will support Apple’s Business Chat – the new platform that allows businesses and customers to interact over iMessage. According to the carrier, customers can now message a Sprint customer service agent, get info about plans and other services, as well as look up store information in Maps, Safari and with Siri during a chat session.

The support from Sprint comes after two other launches on the platform this week.

TD Ameritrade said it will allow customers to fund their brokerage accounts using Apple Pay on Apple Business Chat. And Gubagoo said it will connect car dealerships with customers through Business Chat for viewing inventory, plus scheduling test drives and service appointments.

Apple has been steadily growing its list of supported Business Chat partners, and today has a number of big brands on its platform, which is still in beta. These include names like 1-800-Contacts, DISH, Overstock.com, Quicken Loans, Kimpton Hotels, West Elm, Burberry, Vodafone, Wells Fargo, Credit Suisse, Jos A. Bank, Men’s Warehouse, The Home Depot, Hilton, Four Seasons, American Express, Harry & David, and several others.

The platform also supports integrations with customer service platforms LivePerson, Salesforce, Nuance, Genesys, InTheChat, Zendesk, Quiq, Cisco, Kipsu, Lithium, eGain, [24]7.ai, ContactAtOnce, Dimelo, Brand Embassy, ASAPP, IMImobile, and MessengerPeople, according to Apple’s website.

Business Chat was officially introduced at WWDC 2017, and is Apple’s entry into the business messaging and chatbot space.

Before its arrival, customers would generally reach out to businesses through social media sites like Facebook (e.g. Pages and Messenger; WhatsApp and Instagram) and Twitter. But Apple’s product gets the businesses even closer to the customer, as their chats can live alongside those from family and friends. Plus, they don’t have to share their data with a third-party.

For consumers, reaching a business through iMessage is also a bit easier at times.

A company’s Business Chat profile is highlighted across Apple’s iOS platform in areas like Safari, Maps, Spotlight, and via Siri. This makes it more seamless to move from one Apple app to an iMessage chat, compared with having to seek out the business’s social media profile.

It’s also less painful than having to dial a customer service phone number, in many cases – as Sprint today pointed out.

“More consumers are embracing quick and easy self-service and digital assistance versus calling customer service through an 800 line,” said Rob Roy, Sprint chief digital officer, in a statement about the launch. “Apple Business Chat is an amazing tool for our customers that makes communicating with Sprint fast, easy and stress-free.”

Business Chat has come at a time when the “phone” part of our smartphones is turning into just another “app” – and increasingly, a spammy and bothersome one thanks to spam calls. Apple’s solution makes it easier for customers and businesses to move away from phone lines, while Google is leveraging AI to handle spammers – and even place calls for customers through its Google Duplex technology.