Author: azeeadmin

Several weeks after it was reported by the WSJ that two of the biggest investors in SoftBank’s massive Vision Fund vehicle were cool on its planned $16 billion investment in the coworking company WeWork, those plans have changed radically, says the Financial Times.

According to its sources — and confirmed by our own — SoftBank is now in “detailed negotiations” to invest a comparatively modest $2 billion more into WeWork, plans that could be firmed up as soon as the end of this week.

A WeWork spokesperson at the company’s New York headquarters declined to comment.

The development is both surprising and unsurprising. The government-backed funds of Saudi Arabia and Abu Dhabi, which committed $45 billion and $15 billion, respectively, to the Vision Fund, haven’t been been known before to push back against the person pulling its levers, SoftBank CEO Masayoshi Son .

Indeed, given the vast sums of money that the Vision Fund has put to work since being announced in late 2016, it seemed there were few if any checks on Son or the 80-plus people who work for the Vision Fund.

Just some of its many bold bets include, most recently, a $500 million investment in Cambridge Mobile Telematics, an eight-year-old, Boston-area company that had earlier raised just one round of funding of less than $20 million to build out its technology. The Vision Fund also recently led a $400 million round into Emeryville, Ca.-based Zymergen, which manufacturers molecules for a wide array of industries and already counted SoftBank as an investor.

Still, according to that Journal piece, the two anchor investors were less enthusiastic about a giant new investment in nearly nine-year-old WeWork for numerous reasons, including that they see WeWork as a real estate play and both already have plenty of real estate in their portfolios; that WeWork CEO Adam Neumann would still control the company even while SoftBank was looking to acquire a majority stake; and because SoftBank has already committed $8 billion into WeWork in recent years, including through an agreement last year to invest a fresh $4 billion into the company via a convertible note and a $3 billion warrant that gave it the right to buy additional equity in WeWork.

As it stands, including the $2 billion that WeWork looks to receive from SoftBank imminently, SoftBank will have sunk $10 billion into the company. Perhaps it’s no wonder that the newest $2 billion is not coming from the Vision Fund but from SoftBank directly. (Son sometimes invests off SoftBank’s balance sheet directly,  expediency’s sake and, presumably in a case such as this one, when there may be pushback from Vision Fund investors.)

Either way, two billion dollars more from SoftBank is “hardly a stinging rebuke” of WeWork or its business model, says one person familiar with SoftBank’s thinking. This same source also notes that the $16 billion figure bandied about last year was “never a lock. There were always numerous options on the table.”

Whether SoftBank regrets what remains a huge bet can only be known in time. A shifting public market certainly seems like reason for worry, given that unprofitable WeWork relies increasingly on freely spending companies for its revenue, both customers that install their employees at WeWork’s coworking spaces, as well as those that have more recently begun licensing the company’s technology and aesthetic to WeWork-ify their own offices.

Unsurprisingly, Neumann, when asked how WeWork would fare in a downturn, told us at a Disrupt event in 2017 that it was positioned perfectly for one. “Business is a flexible thing,” he’d said at the time. “Space is fixed. Being able to give people that flexibility if a recession comes or when a recession comes is actually going to be a very needed product.”

According to the FT, SoftBank’s earlier plans for WeWork included SoftBank and the Vision Fund paying $10 billion to buy out all outside investors in WeWork. A further $6 billion of capital would have been injected directly into the company, including a $2 billion commitment this year, and a commitment to invest a further $4 billion based on agreed-up performance targets for WeWork in 2020 and 2021.

Our sources say that, as of this writing, the $2 billion being discussed will be split evenly to purchase both primary and secondary shares from earlier investors. We’re also told the company’s post-money valuation, assuming the deal is completed, will be $47 billion, a total that includes $1 . billion that Softbank invested in WeWork last year via that convertible note and the $3 billion more than the SoftBank committed last year to invest in the company this year.

WeWork’s losses in the first nine months of 2018 nearly quadrupled from a year earlier to $1.2 billion, says the FT, which says it viewed an investor presentation. The company’s sales meanwhile hit $1.5 billion during the same period.

When Matrix came out with its first PowerWatch the watch world was enamored. The self-powered smart watch would suck energy from your skin by using the temperature differential between your skin and the air, allowing it to run indefinitely without charging. Now the team has added a solar feature to their latest PowerWatch 2 which lets the watch both steal energy from your soul and the sol.

The watch is on Indiegogo now for $199 and it’s already raised $445,000. It will ship in March.

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The new watch features a color LCD screen, GPS, heart-rate monitor, as well as steps, cadence, and sleep sensors. It is compatible with Apple HealthKit and Google Fit.

“While PowerWatch 2 dramatically increases the amount of energy available to the charge-free wearable, MATRIX’s materials science and hardware engineers were able to also further miniaturize both the thermoelectric (TEG) and solar cell processes, decreasing PowerWatch 2’s weight and size even more, while maintaining the rugged aluminum build,” said CTO Douglas Tham.

We saw the watch at CES this year and it looks really nice. It’s not too smart – it’s more a health band than a smart watch – but the self-charging features are unique in the space. Given that it also feeds parasitically on your body heat like a strange, aluminum tick it’s a fascinating change in the way we think about our wearables.

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As Disney gets closer to launching a shiny new video service and continues to ramp up efforts in other new streaming areas like gaming, it looks like it might be winding down one of its more legacy bets. Babble, a parenting blog that Disney acquired reportedly for about $40 million to help it target hipster parents, quietly ceased publishing in the middle of December, TechCrunch has learned.

“For everything there is a season, and after more than a decade of serving as a community and resource for parents, Babble will be saying goodbye,” reads a post from the site’s editors. “To all the moms, dads, family, friends, writers, and readers who supported us – thank you. We are so grateful for the time spent sharing your stories and your lives, through all the ups and downs of raising tiny humans.”

When Disney acquired Babble — originally spun out from a (now-defunct) dating website called Nerve.com — in 2011, it was part of a bigger push at the media giant to built up a stock of content properties to target younger parents, the kind that turn to online media for parenting advice and inspiration.

The idea was that Disney would populate the site with lots of evergreen content aimed at savvy middle class parents — recent articles included a post on soft-serve pickle-flavored ice cream and kids nailing 80s-style Halloween costumes — to help it build a connection to these consumers that would lead, over time, to trusting and using and exposing kids to other Disney products as they grew up.

But times have changed. The Disney Interactive Media Group that housed Babble doesn’t exist as such anymore — and Babble’s two founders, Rufus Griscom and Alicia Volkman, moved on years ago from Disney.

And while (I’ve been told) hipster parents definitely still do turn to digital media to answer questions, get inspiration, or just waste time under the guise of doing something constructive, I don’t think that their focus has consolidated on a single destination to do that, but rather a plethora of sources that include other parenting-focused blogs, BuzzFeed-style viral sites that source stories from whatever is trending on social media, YouTube, apps like Pinterest and Facebook and more.

Sometimes, parents even meet other parents in real life, and talk and listen to each other that way.

It’s also not clear how much Disney had been investing in building out the Babble brand and site over the years. When it was acquired, it was on a growth tear, expanding 100 percent year over year with 4 million uniques. However, it hasn’t had much buzz or evolution since.

We’ve reached out to Disney to ask for more details, but in any case, this is far from being one of the biggest acquisitions to get shuttered by the company after things fizzled out. Club Penguin, a kids-focused gaming platform Disney acquired for around $700 million, shut down its main site in 2017, and its remaining app last year.

The heated debate around Amazon’s recently announced Long Island City “HQ2” is showing no signs of cooling down.

On Monday morning, the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union (RWDSU) hosted a briefing in which labor officials, economic development analysts, Amazon employees and elected New York State and City representatives further underlined concerns around the HQ2 process, the awarded incentives, and the potential impacts Amazon’s presence would have on city workers and residents.

While many of the arguments posed at the Summit weren’t necessarily new, the wide variety of stakeholders that showed up to express concern looked to contextualize the far-reaching risks associated with the deal.

The day began with representatives from New York union groups recounting Amazon’s shaky history with employee working conditions and questioning how the city’s working standards will be impacted if the 50,000 promised jobs do actually show up.

Two current employees working in an existing Amazon New York City warehouse in Staten Island provided poignant examples of improper factory conditions and promised employee benefits that never came to fruition. According to the workers, Amazon has yet to follow through on shuttle services and ride-sharing services that were promised to ease worker commutes, forcing the workers to resort to overcrowded and unreliable public transportation. One of the workers detailed that with his now four-hour commute to get to and from work, coupled with his meaningfully long shifts, he’s been unable to see his daughter for weeks.

Various economic development groups and elected officials including, New York City Comptroller Scott Stringer, City Council Speaker Corey Johnson, City Council Member Jimmy Van Bramer, and New York State Senator Mike Gianaris supported the labor arguments with spirited teardowns of the economic terms of the deal.

Like many critics of the HQ2 process, the speakers’ expressed their beliefs that Amazon knew where it wanted to bring its second quarters throughout the entirety of its auction process, given the talent pool and resources in the chosen locations, and that the entire undertaking was meant to squeeze out the best economic terms possible. And according to City Council Speaker Johnson, New York City “got played”.

Comptroller Stringer argued that Amazon is taking advantage of New York’s Relocation and Employment Assistance Program (REAP) and Industrial and Commercial Abatement Program (ICAP), which Stringer described as outdated and in need of reform, to receive the majority of the $2 billion-plus in promised economic incentives that made it the fourth largest corporate incentive deal in US history.

The speakers continued to argue that the unprecedented level of incentives will be nearly impossible to recoup and that New York will also face economic damages from lower sales tax revenue as improved Amazon service in the city cannibalizes local brick & mortar retail.

Fears over how Amazon’s presence will impact the future of New York were given more credibility with the presence of Seattle City Council members Lisa Herbold & Teresa Mosqueda, who had flown to New York from Seattle to discuss lessons learned from having Amazon’s Headquarters in the city and to warn the city about the negative externalities that have come with it.

Herbold and Mosqueda focused less on an outright rejection of the deal but instead emphasized that New York was in a position to negotiate for better terms focused on equality and corporate social responsibility, which could help the city avoid the socioeconomic turnover that has plagued Seattle and could create a new standard for public-private partnerships.

While the New York City Council noted it was looking into legal avenues, the opposition seemed to have limited leverage to push back or meaningfully negotiate the deal. According to state officials, the most clear path to fight the deal would be through votes by the state legislature and through the state Public Authorities Control Board who has to unanimously approve the subsidy package.

With the significant turnout seen at Monday’s summit, which included several high-ranking state and city officials, it seems clear that we’re still in the early innings of what’s likely to be a long battle ahead to close the HQ2 deal.

Amazon did not return requests for immediate comment.

The heated debate around Amazon’s recently announced Long Island City “HQ2” is showing no signs of cooling down.

On Monday morning, the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union (RWDSU) hosted a briefing in which labor officials, economic development analysts, Amazon employees and elected New York State and City representatives further underlined concerns around the HQ2 process, the awarded incentives, and the potential impacts Amazon’s presence would have on city workers and residents.

While many of the arguments posed at the Summit weren’t necessarily new, the wide variety of stakeholders that showed up to express concern looked to contextualize the far-reaching risks associated with the deal.

The day began with representatives from New York union groups recounting Amazon’s shaky history with employee working conditions and questioning how the city’s working standards will be impacted if the 50,000 promised jobs do actually show up.

Two current employees working in an existing Amazon New York City warehouse in Staten Island provided poignant examples of improper factory conditions and promised employee benefits that never came to fruition. According to the workers, Amazon has yet to follow through on shuttle services and ride-sharing services that were promised to ease worker commutes, forcing the workers to resort to overcrowded and unreliable public transportation. One of the workers detailed that with his now four-hour commute to get to and from work, coupled with his meaningfully long shifts, he’s been unable to see his daughter for weeks.

Various economic development groups and elected officials including, New York City Comptroller Scott Stringer, City Council Speaker Corey Johnson, City Council Member Jimmy Van Bramer, and New York State Senator Mike Gianaris supported the labor arguments with spirited teardowns of the economic terms of the deal.

Like many critics of the HQ2 process, the speakers’ expressed their beliefs that Amazon knew where it wanted to bring its second quarters throughout the entirety of its auction process, given the talent pool and resources in the chosen locations, and that the entire undertaking was meant to squeeze out the best economic terms possible. And according to City Council Speaker Johnson, New York City “got played”.

Comptroller Stringer argued that Amazon is taking advantage of New York’s Relocation and Employment Assistance Program (REAP) and Industrial and Commercial Abatement Program (ICAP), which Stringer described as outdated and in need of reform, to receive the majority of the $2 billion-plus in promised economic incentives that made it the fourth largest corporate incentive deal in US history.

The speakers continued to argue that the unprecedented level of incentives will be nearly impossible to recoup and that New York will also face economic damages from lower sales tax revenue as improved Amazon service in the city cannibalizes local brick & mortar retail.

Fears over how Amazon’s presence will impact the future of New York were given more credibility with the presence of Seattle City Council members Lisa Herbold & Teresa Mosqueda, who had flown to New York from Seattle to discuss lessons learned from having Amazon’s Headquarters in the city and to warn the city about the negative externalities that have come with it.

Herbold and Mosqueda focused less on an outright rejection of the deal but instead emphasized that New York was in a position to negotiate for better terms focused on equality and corporate social responsibility, which could help the city avoid the socioeconomic turnover that has plagued Seattle and could create a new standard for public-private partnerships.

While the New York City Council noted it was looking into legal avenues, the opposition seemed to have limited leverage to push back or meaningfully negotiate the deal. According to state officials, the most clear path to fight the deal would be through votes by the state legislature and through the state Public Authorities Control Board who has to unanimously approve the subsidy package.

With the significant turnout seen at Monday’s summit, which included several high-ranking state and city officials, it seems clear that we’re still in the early innings of what’s likely to be a long battle ahead to close the HQ2 deal.

Amazon did not return requests for immediate comment.

That most famous characterization of the complexity causality, a butterfly beating its wings and causing a hurricane on the other side of the world, is thought-provoking but ultimately not helpful. What we really need is to look at a hurricane and figure out which butterfly caused it — or perhaps stop it before it takes flight in the first place. DARPA thinks AI should be able to do just that.

A new program at the research agency is aimed at creating a machine learning system that can sift through the innumerable events and pieces of media generated every day and identify any threads of connection or narrative in them. It’s called KAIROS: Knowledge-directed Artificial Intelligence Reasoning Over Schemas.

“Schema” in this case has a very specific meaning. It’s the idea of a basic process humans use to understand the world around them by creating little stories of interlinked events. For instance when you buy something at a store, you know that you generally walk into the store, select an item, bring it to the cashier, who scans it, then you pay in some way, and then leave the store. This “buying something” process is a schema we all recognize, and could of course have schemas within it (selecting a product; payment process) or be part of another schema (gift giving; home cooking).

Although these are easily imagined inside our heads, they’re surprisingly difficult to define formally in such a way that a computer system would be able to understand. They’re familiar to us from long use and understanding, but they’re not immediately obvious or rule-bound, like how an apple will fall downwards from a tree at a constant acceleration.

And the more data there are, the more difficult it is to define. Buying something is comparatively simple, but how do you create a schema for recognizing a cold war, or a bear market? That’s what DARPA wants to look into.

“The process of uncovering relevant connections across mountains of information and the static elements that they underlie requires temporal information and event patterns, which can be difficult to capture at scale with currently available tools and systems,” said DARPA program manager Boyan Onyshkevych in a news release.

KAIROS, the agency said, “aims to develop a semi-automated system capable of identifying and drawing correlations between seemingly unrelated events or data, helping to inform or create broad narratives about the world around us.”

How? Well, they have a general idea but they’re looking for expertise. The problem, they note, is that schemas currently have to be laboriously defined and checked by humans. At that point you might as well inspect the information yourself. So the KAIROS program aims to have the AI teach itself.

At first the system will be limited to ingesting data in massive quantities to build a library of basic schemas. By reading books, watching news reports, and so on it should be able to create a laundry list of suspected schemas, like those mentioned above. It might even get a hint of larger, more hazy schemas that it can’t quite put its virtual finger on — love, racism, income disparity, etc — and how others might fit into them and each other.

Next it will be allowed to look at complex real-world data and attempt to extract events and narratives based on the schemas it has created.

The military and defense applications are fairly obvious: imagine a system that took in all news and social media posts and informed its administrators that it seemed likely there would be a run on banks, or a coup, or a new faction emerging from a declining one. Intelligence officers do their best to perform this task now, and human involvement will almost certainly never cease, but they would likely appreciate a computer companion saying, “there are multiple reports of stockpiling, and these articles on chemical warfare are being shared widely, this could point to rumors of terrorist attack” or the like.

Of course at this point it is all purely theoretical, but that’s why DARPA is looking into it: the agency’s raison d’etre is to turn the theoretical into the practical, or failing that, at least find out why they can’t. Given the extreme simplicity of most AI systems these days it’s hard to imagine one as sophisticated as they clearly want to create. Clearly we have a long way to go.

That most famous characterization of the complexity causality, a butterfly beating its wings and causing a hurricane on the other side of the world, is thought-provoking but ultimately not helpful. What we really need is to look at a hurricane and figure out which butterfly caused it — or perhaps stop it before it takes flight in the first place. DARPA thinks AI should be able to do just that.

A new program at the research agency is aimed at creating a machine learning system that can sift through the innumerable events and pieces of media generated every day and identify any threads of connection or narrative in them. It’s called KAIROS: Knowledge-directed Artificial Intelligence Reasoning Over Schemas.

“Schema” in this case has a very specific meaning. It’s the idea of a basic process humans use to understand the world around them by creating little stories of interlinked events. For instance when you buy something at a store, you know that you generally walk into the store, select an item, bring it to the cashier, who scans it, then you pay in some way, and then leave the store. This “buying something” process is a schema we all recognize, and could of course have schemas within it (selecting a product; payment process) or be part of another schema (gift giving; home cooking).

Although these are easily imagined inside our heads, they’re surprisingly difficult to define formally in such a way that a computer system would be able to understand. They’re familiar to us from long use and understanding, but they’re not immediately obvious or rule-bound, like how an apple will fall downwards from a tree at a constant acceleration.

And the more data there are, the more difficult it is to define. Buying something is comparatively simple, but how do you create a schema for recognizing a cold war, or a bear market? That’s what DARPA wants to look into.

“The process of uncovering relevant connections across mountains of information and the static elements that they underlie requires temporal information and event patterns, which can be difficult to capture at scale with currently available tools and systems,” said DARPA program manager Boyan Onyshkevych in a news release.

KAIROS, the agency said, “aims to develop a semi-automated system capable of identifying and drawing correlations between seemingly unrelated events or data, helping to inform or create broad narratives about the world around us.”

How? Well, they have a general idea but they’re looking for expertise. The problem, they note, is that schemas currently have to be laboriously defined and checked by humans. At that point you might as well inspect the information yourself. So the KAIROS program aims to have the AI teach itself.

At first the system will be limited to ingesting data in massive quantities to build a library of basic schemas. By reading books, watching news reports, and so on it should be able to create a laundry list of suspected schemas, like those mentioned above. It might even get a hint of larger, more hazy schemas that it can’t quite put its virtual finger on — love, racism, income disparity, etc — and how others might fit into them and each other.

Next it will be allowed to look at complex real-world data and attempt to extract events and narratives based on the schemas it has created.

The military and defense applications are fairly obvious: imagine a system that took in all news and social media posts and informed its administrators that it seemed likely there would be a run on banks, or a coup, or a new faction emerging from a declining one. Intelligence officers do their best to perform this task now, and human involvement will almost certainly never cease, but they would likely appreciate a computer companion saying, “there are multiple reports of stockpiling, and these articles on chemical warfare are being shared widely, this could point to rumors of terrorist attack” or the like.

Of course at this point it is all purely theoretical, but that’s why DARPA is looking into it: the agency’s raison d’etre is to turn the theoretical into the practical, or failing that, at least find out why they can’t. Given the extreme simplicity of most AI systems these days it’s hard to imagine one as sophisticated as they clearly want to create. Clearly we have a long way to go.

Qualcomm used its CES press conference today to announce the third generation of its Snapdragon Automotive Cockpit Platform, its latest AI-centric platform for building in-car experiences that include everything from voice-driven interfaces to good-old navigation systems, all with modern visual interfaces.

The platform now comes in three tiers — Performance, Premiere and Paramount — for entry-level, mid-tier and high-end platforms. The core is the same, though, and it’s built on top of the Snapdragon 820A platform with supports for the company’s AI Engine, signal processor, CPUs and GPUs.

It also includes the Qualcomm Hexagon Processor, an accelerator for running machine learning models for use cases like natural language processing and object classification, as well as Qualcomm Vision camera sensors and computer vision hardware. The Vision part isn’t meant to power self-driving cars, though. Instead, it’s meant to “support differentiated use-cases on lane-level crowdsourcing of drive data for building map layers.” What the platform does offer, though, is support for contextual safety for driving assistant features like in-cabin monitoring and surround view monitoring.

“With our 3rd Generation Snapdragon Automotive Cockpit Platforms, we are reiterating our commitment to bring highly differentiated and customizable in-car experiences to our customers,” said Nakul Duggal, senior vice president of product management, Qualcomm Technologies. “Our new Snapdragon Automotive Platforms are designed to deliver a concurrent implementation of next generation high-resolution digital instrument clusters with industry leading infotainment technologies supported through artificial intelligence capabilities, leading edge graphics for high-resolution multiple display configurations, vision enhanced precise positioning for supporting safer and smarter navigation, much more.”

The platform is now available to the automotive industry and the company’s development tools for the automotive industry now support it.

Qualcomm used its CES press conference today to announce the third generation of its Snapdragon Automotive Cockpit Platform, its latest AI-centric platform for building in-car experiences that include everything from voice-driven interfaces to good-old navigation systems, all with modern visual interfaces.

The platform now comes in three tiers — Performance, Premiere and Paramount — for entry-level, mid-tier and high-end platforms. The core is the same, though, and it’s built on top of the Snapdragon 820A platform with supports for the company’s AI Engine, signal processor, CPUs and GPUs.

It also includes the Qualcomm Hexagon Processor, an accelerator for running machine learning models for use cases like natural language processing and object classification, as well as Qualcomm Vision camera sensors and computer vision hardware. The Vision part isn’t meant to power self-driving cars, though. Instead, it’s meant to “support differentiated use-cases on lane-level crowdsourcing of drive data for building map layers.” What the platform does offer, though, is support for contextual safety for driving assistant features like in-cabin monitoring and surround view monitoring.

“With our 3rd Generation Snapdragon Automotive Cockpit Platforms, we are reiterating our commitment to bring highly differentiated and customizable in-car experiences to our customers,” said Nakul Duggal, senior vice president of product management, Qualcomm Technologies. “Our new Snapdragon Automotive Platforms are designed to deliver a concurrent implementation of next generation high-resolution digital instrument clusters with industry leading infotainment technologies supported through artificial intelligence capabilities, leading edge graphics for high-resolution multiple display configurations, vision enhanced precise positioning for supporting safer and smarter navigation, much more.”

The platform is now available to the automotive industry and the company’s development tools for the automotive industry now support it.

Ahead of its announcements of new TV partnerships at this year’s Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, Roku today shared some new numbers about the growing traction of its overall platform. The company said the number of active accounts grew 40 percent year-over-year in 2018, to top 27 million by year-end. In addition, its total streaming hours grew 61 percent year-over-year to 24 billion hours of movies, TV shows, sports and more being streamed across its devices.

In Q4 2018 alone, Roku users streamed an estimated 7.3 billion hours, up about 68 percent year-over-year.

Roku’s decision to release new numbers about active users and hours streamed comes at a time when the company itself is becoming more competitive with streaming services themselves, instead of just offering a platform on which their apps can run. In fall 2017 Roku began to aggregate the free content from the various channels across its platform in its own Roku Channel, then combined that with content it licensed directly from studios. This free, ad-supported content has given Roku a way to further grow its advertising revenues.

Since its launch, the channel has added more types of content, including sports, news and entertainment from both traditional and digital studios, and just last week launched its own set of premium subscriptions where it gets a cut of customers’ purchases.

Some analysts now believe the Roku Channel’s average revenue per user is now the fastest-growing contributor to overall revenue growth at Roku

Now Roku is working with more manufacturers to get its Roku OS – and therefore its Roku Channel – in front of more people.

At CES this week, Roku announced the Westinghouse Electronics was joining the Roku TV licensing program.

It also announced a partnership with TV brand TCL. The two companies will work together to make 8K TCL Roku TVs that will become available to consumers in late 2019. As a result of catering to TV makers, Roku said it’s updating its 4K and HDR hardware reference design to include far-field microphones for voice search and control. TCL will be the first to deliver these TV models in 2019.