Author: azeeadmin

Mobileye, the Israeli-based automotive sensor company acquired by Intel in 2017, is leveraging the huge amounts of data it can collect to help build precise maps of the UK’s roads and infrastructure.

The company announced at CES 2019 that it has reached an agreement with Ordnance Survey to help the UK mapping agency bring high-precision location data to businesses in the country. Under the agreement, Mobileye’s sensors will be retrofitted onto Ordnance’s utility fleets to collect volumes of location data on road networks and roadside infrastructure. The collected data is then cross-referenced with existing geospatial data sets to develop accurate maps of Britain’s roads and surrounding areas.

That kind of information could be useful to utilities to provide precise locations of manhole covers and other assets, Mobileye CEO Amnon Shashua told TechCrunch in recent interview. As a result, companies can better plan and manage maintenance needs.

Mobileye and Ordnance Survey piloted the concept in 2018. A number of Ordnance Survey vehicles have also  been fitted with Mobileye 8 Connect technology to collect data on the roads of Britain. The pilots are delivering a new level of roadside data that, through the partnership, will benefit customers across the many sectors including utilities, infrastructure and telecommunications, according to Mobileye.

At first glance, this looks like a shift for Mobileye. But it’s closely linked to Mobileye CEO Amnon Shashua’s vision for the company and future cities.

“Using maps to improve operations between businesses and cities will help bring us closer to the realization of smart cities and safer roads,” Shashua said. 

The deal demonstrates the utility of mapping innovation beyond future autonomous vehicles, the company said.

“We envisage this new rich data to be key to how vehicles, infrastructure, people and more will communicate in the digital age,” Ordnance Survey CEO Neil Ackroyd said in a statement.

A former Magic Leap engineer believes the problem with most consumer-facing augmented headsets on the market is their bulky size.

“You wouldn’t want to wear them for more than one hour,” Xu Chi, founder and chief executive officer of Nreal told me as he put on a bright orange headgear that looked just like plastic Ray-Ban shades. Called Light and powered by Qualcomm’s Snapdragon processor, Nreal’s first-generation mixed reality glasses officially launched at Las Vegas’ tech trade show CES this week.

With a light-weight play, the two-year-old Chinese startup managed to bring in some big-name investors. Aside from debuting Light, Nreal also announced this week that it has raised $15 million in total funding to date. The proceeds include a Series A from Shunwei, the venture fund that Xiaomi founder set up, Baidu’s video streaming unit iQiyi, investment firm China Growth Capital, and others. According to Xu, R&D is his company’s biggest expense at this stage.

The financial injection bears strategic significance to Xiaomi and iQIYI. The former is best known for its budget smartphones but its bigger ambition lies in an Apple Home-like ecosystem that surely welcomes portable MR headsets. IQiyi, on the other hand, already has a channel dedicated to virtual reality, which is meant to immerse the end user in a completely digital environment. MR content may just be around the corner to provide an interactive experience of the real world.

Taking money from Shunwei rather than straight from Xiaomi is a thought-through choice. Xiaomi has backed hundreds of manufacturers to gain control over supply chains. Its portfolio companies, in turn, get access to Xiaomi’s retail channels, but they make comprises on various fronts such as product design and pricing.

Xu doesn’t want his freshly minted business to lose independence. “We don’t want to pick sides. We want to be able to work with Oppo and a whole lot of other brands. We want to be compatible with a wide range of devices — smartphones, laptops, PCs, and so on,” said the founder.

In early 2017, the Chinese entrepreneur started Nreal with his cofounder Xiao Bing, an optical engineer. The brand “Nreal” conveys the partners’ vision to bring users to spaces that fall between the real and unreal. Xu, who spent years working and studying in the US, decided to pursue his ideas back on his homeland for easier access to supply chains.

“We are combining our technological know-how from overseas with great resources in China’s manufacturing industry,” the founder said of his firm’s edge.

The 85-gram (about 3-ounce) Nreal Light isn’t as featherweight as regular glasses but it’s a significant improvement from the biggies it’s going after — Magic Leap One and Microsoft’s HoloLens. Nreal was able to shrink its gadget size because it uses a display solution that requires fewer cameras and sensors than its peers, Xu explained.

Furthermore, Nreal is fixated on the consumer market from the outset, unlike its bigger rivals which, in Xu’s words, are “building gadgets for the next five or even ten years.”

“They want to disrupt everything from cell phones, computers to televisions. They are not necessarily oriented towards consumers,” Xu added.

When it comes to performance, Light claims its display has a 52-degree field of view and a 1080p resolution, which my human eyes weren’t able to verify when I wore it to play an interactive shooting game. That said, I did experience minimum dizziness and latency on Light, as the company promised.

The only irritating part was I started to feel the weight of the specs on my nose bridge a few minutes into my session. Xu assured me that what I tried on was a prototype and that an assortment of nose pads and lenses for different facial features will be available. The glasses also come in a variety of flashy coral colors.

Nreal Light won’t be shipping until Q2 this year and mass production won’t arrive until Q3. Xu hasn’t priced his brainchild but said it will probably hover around $1,000. By comparison, HoloLens charges $3,000 and Magic Leap One costs $2,300.

Where does that price tag leave Nreal in terms of profitability? It’s a matter of what kind of consumer hardware Nreal wants to become. “Do we want to be Apple or Xiaomi?” The founder asked himself rhetorically. He’s sure of one thing: As the MR industry matures in China, production costs will also come down. The company is already mulling its own factory so as to beef up supply chains and reduce costs, according to Xu.

AT&T recently started a shady marketing tactic that labeled its 4G network as a 5G network. Now, rivals Verizon and T-Mobile are not having any of it.

In an open letter, in which AT&T is not named directly, Verizon says in part “the potential to over-hype and under-deliver on the 5G promise is a temptation that the wireless industry must resist.” TechCrunch agrees. The advantages of 5G networks are profound. The next generation of wireless networks will bring more than just increased speeds and AT&T’s current campaign of calling a 4G network a 5G network clouds the water.

T-Mobile is more direct in its criticism of AT&T. Because that’s how T-Mobile rolls. Watch.

This isn’t the first time AT&T has employed this mislabeling campaign. The wireless carrier did something similar prior to launching its LTE network and it was shady then and it’s shady now.

Disclosure: TechCrunch is a Verizon Media company.

Another day, another batch of bad apps in Google Play.

Researchers at security firm Trend Micro have discovered dozens of apps, including popular utilities and games, to serve a ton of deceptively displayed ads — including full-screen ads, hidden ads and running in the background to squeeze as much money out of unsuspecting Android users.

In all, the researchers found 85 apps pushing adware, totaling at least 9 million affected users.

One app — a universal TV remote app for Android — had more than five million users alone, despite a rash of negative reviews and complaints that ads were “hidden in the background.” Other users said that there were “so many ads, [they] can’t even use it.”

The researchers tested each app and found that most shared the same or similar code, and often the apps were similarly named. At every turn, tap or click, the app would display an ad, they found. In doing so, the app generates money for the app maker.

Adware-fueled apps might not seem as other apps packed with malware or hidden functionality, such as apps that pull malicious payloads from another server after the app is installed. At scale, that can amount to thousands of fraudulent ad dollars each week. Some ads also have a tendency to be malicious, containing hidden code that tries to trick users into installing malware on their phones or computers.

Some of the affected apps include: A/C Air Conditioner Remote, Police Chase Extreme City 3D Game, Easy Universal TV Remote, Garage Door Remote Control, Prado Parking City 3D Game, and more. (You can find a full list of apps here.)

Google told TechCrunch that it had removed the apps, but a spokesperson did not comment further.

We tried reaching out to the universal TV remote app creator but the registered email on the since-removed Google Play store points to a domain that no longer exists.

Despite Google’s best efforts in scanning apps before they’re accepted into Google Play, malicious apps are one of the biggest and most common threats to Android users. Google pulled more than 700,000 malicious apps from Google Play in the past year alone, and has tried to improve its back-end to prevent malicious apps from getting into the store in the first place.

Yet the search and mobile giant continues to battle rogue and malicious apps, pulling at least 13 malicious apps in sweep in November alone.

Plaid, a startup that has made a name building APIs for financial services apps aimed at consumers, expanded its horizon today with the purchase of Quovo, a similar company with a focus on the investments side of the financial service business.

Bloomberg reported the price tag could be as much as $200 million, but the company told TechCrunch that it is not sharing the price. It seems that Plaid, which has raised almost $310 million, including $250 million on a $2.65 billion valuation just last month, was eager to put the money to work.

While Plaid helps link your checking and savings account to modern financial apps like Venmo, Acorns and Robinhood, Quovo’s APIs are aimed at the investment side of the financial services market with up and coming customers like Betterment, Wealthfront and SoFi, and established players like Stifel, Vanguard, Empower Retirement and John Hancock.

The combined companies plan to offer a full range of financial services APIs. “Together, we’ll build a single platform that developers and large companies alike can use to build any financial application—from payments to lending to wealth management,”  the company wrote in a blog post announcing the deal.

Each company helps developers build financial services applications by providing the tools to integrate with accounts, so that developers don’t have to build these links from scratch. Much like Twilio helps build communications into an app and Stripe helps add payments functionality, Plaid builds easy integration with checking and savings accounts. Now it will also provide similar integration for investments.

The deal is expected to close this week and the Quovo team is expected to join Plaid shortly. Quovo CEO, Lowell Putnam, will continue to run the Quovo team and lead strategy for that part of the product set, according to a company spokesperson.

Quovo was founded in 2010 and has raised $21 million, including $4.8 million Series B last May, according to Crunchbase data. If the price is accurate, it would seem that the company gave a nice return on the $21 million investors made in the company.

Last week, in light of Apple’s revised revenue guidance, my TC colleague Ron Miller made a tongue-in-cheek apology for taking so long to upgrade his old iPhone.

He wrote that he had finally bitten the bullet and shelled out to upgrade a more than three-years-old (but still working) iPhone 6 for a shiny new iPhone XR ($750+) — deciding at the last minute to spare his wallet the full $1,000 whack for the top of the range iPhone XS. 

Ergo, even the famous Apple premium only stretches so far.

I bring even less good news for the company. I still can’t bring myself to upgrade my (still working but now heavily creaking on the battery and storage front) iPhone 6S because — and here’s my line — Apple removed the headphone jack. Which is absolutely an affront to usability and choice.

My (petite) ears do not conform to the one-size fits all shape Cupertino uses for its bundled earbuds. So even if the earbuds weren’t low audio quality I still couldn’t use them. Headphones that you have to walk around holding in your ears because otherwise every twist and head turn pops them right back out again are, to put it politely, not very useful.

And, yes, this also applies to wireless AirPods — even if I wanted to give Apple more money to be forever stuck having to charge a pair of headphones before being able to use them, which frankly doesn’t sound very smart to me.

On the earbuds front Apple does not cater to petite people, period. I have to use in-ear headphones, with replaceable rubber caps that come in a range of sizes (typically requiring the tiniest of the bunch). This means a 3.5mm jack, which lets me use my own choice of appropriately sized headphones, is not optional but essential.

A 3.5mm jack also lets me invest in higher audio quality kit, should I choose to.

Apple has other ideas, however. And judging by its own messaging at the time it ditched the headphone jack, it presumably thinks I should bravely ram its earbuds in my undersized ears anyway. Er, no thanks!

Of course I could upgrade and just plug in a dongle to (re)convert the Lightning port into the necessary 3.5mm headphone jack. But that’s yet another dongle tax ($9) I shouldn’t have to pay.

iPhones are a premium product, after all. Having to buy extra accessories that are actually essential to get you back to where you were doesn’t feel like progress. (A better word for these irritating wallet-gougers would be ‘unnecessaries’.)

Add to that there is of course the sheer irritation and hassle of having to remember to have the stupid thing with you whenever you want to use your headphones.

While, for those into Apple aesthetics, dongles are of course 100% pure eyesore.

Also — an extra kicker — the Apple Lighting to 3.5mm converter doesn’t appear to play nice with third party remotes. So your headphones’ physical volume control is probably going to be glitchy… (Just check out all these 1-star reviews.)

I won’t get started on Apple also vanishing the SD card port from the MBA. But the expense and hassle of trying to deal with that SNAFU, following a work laptop upgrade, has put me right off the prospect of ‘courageously’ forgetting about other ports that I really need to use.

Nor am I the only TCer affronted by Apple ditching the headphone jack. My colleague Greg Kumparak wrote in December that he’s still missing the 3.5mm port two years later. “It enabled happy moments and never got in the way,” he lamented of the missing jack.

Safe to say, no one is ever going to bemoan the lack of a dongle like that.

For TC’s Miller, he was finally pushed to upgrade his trusty old iPhone because of bad battery and a glitchy recharge cable.

My own iPhone 6S has also tipped over into bad battery territory. The original battery was replaced in 2017 (after being in a faulty bunch that Apple offered free replacements for). But the other day the phone experienced its first “unexpected shutdown” — and a pop-up informed me Peak Performance Capability had been switched on.

Aka the performance management feature Apple got in some hot water with consumer groups for not being clear enough about previously. So there’s now an option to disable this in iOS settings.

I could also, of course, pay to replace the battery. Which would be a lot cheaper than a new iPhone. Or else — even cheaper — just carry a spare battery pack.

So which is less hassle to remember? A spare battery or a headphone dongle?

At least a battery pack extends the daily longevity of the handset which feels like it’s offering some added utility (with the bonus social feature of being able to offer to juice up friends’ devices on-demand).

I’d certainly much prefer to keep a spare battery pack in my bag when I leave the house than always be trying to remember where on earth I left the dumb headphone dongle.

Ignoring Apple’s customary fraying charger cables (which can just be replaced), the other issue I’m facing with my current iPhone is storage. It’s almost full.

Apple offers cloud storage for a fee (after a small amount of free space). But I could also delete stuff I’m not using and buy an external hard drive for storing iPhone photo content (which is what’s taking up the most space) and offload the data to that.

Then I could wipe the iPhone 6S clean and start again.

Frankly the prospect of a rebooted iPhone 6S, which (battery wobbles aside) otherwise still works fine, is more appealing than paying a premium for an otherwise not so different handset which will, in certain key aspects, be less welcoming and useful to me than the one I already own.

It’s almost the more environmentally friendly choice, of course. And let’s not forget that lots of dongles = lots more unnecessary e-waste. So imposed dongle hell is bad for the planet too.

One size never fits all but when combined with an upwardly inflating Apple premium the Cupertino philosophy is starting to feel increasingly awkward.

While ‘reuse don’t replace’ feels more and more normal.

Razer, the company that makes high-end hardware and software specifically tailored to gaming enthusiasts, is adding new voice and touch features to its platform to bring it into the next generation of computing and take the Razer gaming experience to the next immersive level. Today at CES, the company announced that it will be integrating Amazon’s Alexa into its gaming platform to let users control certain aspects of the Razer gaming experience by voice; and it also announced a new range of devices it’s calling HyperSense, to provide haptic interfaces for its gamers.

The Alexa integration will start to be rolled out in Q2 2019, while the HyperSense ecosystem is only getting previewed with no launch date at this stage.

Razer is also making some strides in its efforts to expand the ubiquity of its ecosystem to more than just Razer products: the company said that its Chroma Connected Devices Program — which brings in a new range of peripherals that can work with Razer machines — now has 15 new partners and covers 300 different devices that can run Chroma-enabled games and apps.

The Alexa integration is a signal of how, while Amazon has yet to build its own dedicated gaming hardware, it has been making some headway into that consumer sector regardless among the 100 million devices that now work with the voice assistant. Last September, Microsoft announced that Alexa would work with the Xbox One, the first big gaming console announcement for Alexa after making a little headway with Sony and the PlayStation Vue a year before.

As with those two, it looks like the Alexa integration with Razer is more around controlling what happens around the game — you will be able to control voice-control lighting effects, device settings and so on, but not in-game actions themselves — although you might consider that in-game controls could be the next step (perhaps one that Amazon would prefer to make itself).

“We’re thrilled to work with Razer and provide customers a first-of-its kind integration that showcases how Alexa can enhance the gaming experience,” said Pete Thompson, VP of the Alexa Voice Service, in a statement. “With Alexa, users can control compatible Razer peripherals while taking full advantage of other Alexa capabilities, including the ability to manage smart devices, access tens of thousands of skills and more.”

In the case of Razer, the company is bringing Alexa into its ecosystem by way of its Razer Synapse 3 Internet-of-Things platform, which it uses to connect up Razer and third-party peripherals that a user might have set up to play.

As Razer describers it, those wearing Razer headsets and mics can then be used to control compatible devices, such as in-game lighting, mice, keyboards and headsets. 

“This is an amazing look forward for Razer into a future for gamers where the full potential of gaming gear is seamless and intuitively controlled through voice activation, synchronization and connected cloud services,” said Razer Co-Founder and CEO Min-Liang Tan (pictured above) in a statement.

The haptic developments, meanwhile, will also come by way of a partnership with third parties — in this case, two companies called Lofelt and Subpac, as well as others that Razer is not disclosing.

As with other haptic systems, the idea with HyperSense is not that die-hard gamers will start installing wind machines, chillers and strange smells in their living rooms, but that Razer wants to build and work with others to create, for example, high-fidelity speakers and touch boards that will give users the sensation of different experiences in a way that will bring them even closer into the action of the game. (If you think this sounds closer and closer to Ready Player One, you’re not alone.)

So in the case of HyperSense, cues might include specific sound cues in games like rocket firing, or wind, which will might get “played out” in the form of sound waves that you can feel in your feet or — if you might imagine — a connected jacket that will suddenly make you colder, lean to one side, and shudder with the gust.

“We are finally able to feel what we see and hear all around using the gaming arena, sensing the hiss of enemy fire or feeling the full bass of a monster’s growl,” said Min. “Much like Razer Chroma where we have demonstrated the power of a connected lighting system across gaming devices, Razer HyperSense syncs gaming devices equipped with high-fidelity haptic motors to enhance immersion in gaming.”

In the case of both the voice and touch-based features, it makes perfect sense to bring both to Razer and other games platforms. The wider trend in the gaming industry has been to use advances in technology to make the experience more authentic feeling. Up to now that has taken the form of better graphics and audio, tapping into VR and AR, and playing against and with other people instead of just the machine. Touch is one that hasn’t really been touched (sorry) much up to now, but as we start to see more haptic bells and whistles on devices like our smartphones, it’s logical that it should come to games, too.

Voice, meanwhile, has been shaping up for a long time now as the next big interface, and in cases where your hands and attention might otherwise be occupied, having a voice interface can be indispensable — for example, if you are lost while driving and need to reset your car’s navigation. Games don’t have that kind of urgency — not in the real-world sense, at least — but it seems like just a matter of time before we see games designers and console makers improving the overall experience by letting people speak naturally to move through the action with a scream or even a calm request to turn down the volume a bit.

The DJI Smart Controller lets Mavic 2 owners take to the skies without the need of a mobile device. The $650 controller includes a 5.5-inch screen that can display images streamed from the connected drone in full HD resolution.

DJI says this screen is twice as bright as mobile screens, too, which should make it easier to use in direct sunlight.

The device is a smart, though expensive accessory for drone owners. Right now, for most drones on the market, owners have to connect a mobile phone to a controller in order to access most of the controls of the drone and to view live video images. Often this is a cumbersome process and requires the owner to ensure multiple products are charged and connected. By combining the screen with the controller, it eliminates an extra step. The built-in screen in the cancelled GoPro Karma controller was one of its best features.

The screen itself is an Android device and reportedly supports DJI Go 4, DJI Pilot and other third party apps. The battery lasts 2.5 hours.

Video is streamed to the connected controller over DJI’s OcuSync 2.0 video transmission system. From my experience, it’s the best system available on a consumer drone platform, allowing images to hit a mobile device from an incredible distance.

DJI is going to sell the controller by itself starting today for $650. It will also be available in bundles with the Mavic 2 Pro and the Mavic 2 Zoom.

Virtual reality is — as many have learned the hard way — nothing without content. There are a number of solutions on the market at present, but many are unweildy and/or prohibitively expensive for  many content creators.

Taiwanese 3D imaging company eYs3D announced this week that it’s teaming with Lucid to create the Axis, a hand-held solution for a fraction of the price of higher end systems. What, precisely that fraction is, however, remains to be seen, so we’re going to have to take the companies’ words for it now.

Lucid’s certainly got experience with the small bit. The company has been providing modules for a number of mobile devices including, notably, Red’s Hydrogen One handset, which utilized camera depth to shoot photos for its innovative 3D display.

Per the release,

What was previously possible only with 8-16 high-end DSLR cameras and expensive software or depth sensors is now combined into a single, tiny camera module with stereo lenses paired with IR sensors. AXIS is the world’s first depth-sensing solution which will cover up to 180-degrees field of view while providing millimeter-accurate 3D in point cloud or depth map format.

The system is targeted primarily at game designers, developers and animators. It’s due out at some point in Q3 this year.

After a successful holiday season, Sony’s PlayStation 4 is nearing some pretty wild milestones.

The company announced Monday that they had sold over 5.6 million PS4 units over the holiday season worldwide, bringing the total number of current-gen consoles sold to 91.6 million, a number that suggests the popular console is still vibrant even after five years on the market.

Microsoft has been in a losing position throughout the “console wars” and while it hasn’t released its own numbers recently, it’s estimated that the quantity of Xbox One units sold may make up just about half of what Sony has shipped this generation. Meanwhile, Nintendo has had a banner year following the success of the Switch which launched in late 2017 and has become the fastest-selling game console ever in the U.S. though the total units sold still drags far behind the much older PS4.

Beyond the hardware, Sony also delivered some statistics on title sales, saying that they sold over 50 million titles and that they have sold at least 9 million copies of the Spiderman Sony-exclusive title. A staggering 876 million PS4 games have been sold to date.