Author: azeeadmin

On July 16th, Roadrunner: A Film About Anthony Bourdain will open in US theatres. Like many documentaries, the film pieces together archival footage, including interviews and show outtakes, to attempt to tell the story of its subject in their own words. It also includes words Bourdain never spoke to a camera before his death by suicide in 2018, and yet you’ll hear his voice saying them.

In an interview with The New Yorker, the film’s director, Morgan Neville, said there were three quotes he wanted Bourdain to narrate where there were no recordings, and so he recreated them with software instead. “I created an AI model of his voice,” he told the magazine.

It appears that was no easy feat either. In a separate interview with GQ, Neville said he contacted four different companies about the project before deciding on the best one. That company fed about a dozen hours of audio to an AI model. A lot of the work involved deciding the exact tone of Bourdain’s voice Neville wanted the software to replicate since the way the author and travel host narrated his writing changed so much over the years he was on TV.

Compared to some of the other ways we’ve seen AI and deepfakes used to trick people, this isn’t the worst example, but the ethics of it are still questionable. The film, as far as we’re aware, doesn’t include a disclosure that AI was used to replicate Bourdain’s voice. “If you watch the film, other than that line you mentioned, you probably don’t know what the other lines are that were spoken by the AI, and you’re not going to know,” Neville told The New Yorker. “We can have a documentary-ethics panel about it later.” In his interview with GQ, he said Bourdain’s family told him “Tony would have been cool with that,” adding, “I was just trying to make [the quotes] come alive.”

Editor’s note: This story originally appeared on Engadget. 

The Conversion Wizards, a conversion rate optimization (CRO) consultancy, was entrusted with boosting the conversion rates of a multibillion dollar company.

We used research to optimize the page and ran an A/B test. The winning version, labeled “radical,” resulted in a 75% increase in sales.

The original and double-control pages are actually identical. And to ensure that our judgment is sound, we always include a double-control.

Screenshot from the winning, optimized treatment (above the fold, desktop). Image Credits: Conversion Wizards

Here’s a screenshot of the original page (above the fold, desktop). Image Credits: Conversion Wizards

We took the average of those two identical pages as the baseline to determine the lift, and it revealed a 75% increase at 99% statistical significance.

Here are the Google optimize screenshots:

Image Credits: Conversion Wizards

Image Credits: Conversion Wizards

Here’s a link to the full image of the original page.

Here’s a link to the full image of the winning page.

A look under the hood

Before I discuss the changes that produced the lift, it is important that I quickly go over the research that informed those changes. Why? Because it is a critical aspect of the process and too many CRO practitioners do not devote enough attention to figuring out why more site visitors aren’t converting.

Help TechCrunch find the best growth marketers for startups.

Provide a recommendation in this quick survey and we’ll share the results with everybody.

We surveyed both bouncing visitors and subscribers to the Subscribe & Save program. One of the important questions we asked the bouncing visitors was: “If you did not purchase today, what was your reason?”

A banner quarter for Xiaomi helped the Chinese mobile company snag the No. 2 spot in global smartphone shipments, according to newly posted Q2 numbers from research firm Canalys. It’s pretty stunning growth for the company, up 83% year-over-year for the quarter and capturing 17% of the global market.

The surge puts Xiaomi at No. 2, globally, behind only Samsung’s 19% by a relatively small margin. Apple is at third with 14% (after its own solid growth has slowed), while fellow Chinese manufacturers Oppo and Vivo round out the top five at 10% a piece.

Huawei, of course, is nowhere to be seen among the top companies. It’s a pretty massive drop, due in no small part to blacklisting that has both barred the company from certain markets (namely, the U.S.) and cut off access to U.S. mobile products, including Google’s Android and various apps.

Image Credits: Canalys

Canalys cites aggressive pricing as a big factor in Xiaomi’s success — particularly contrasted with premium priced offerings from Samsung and Apple.

“It is now transforming its business model from challenger to incumbent, with initiatives such as channel partner consolidation and more careful management of older stock in the open market,” the analyst firm’s Research Manager Ben Stanton said in a release. “It is still largely skewed toward the mass market, however, and compared with Samsung and Apple, its average selling price is around 40% and 75% cheaper respectively. So a major priority for Xiaomi this year is to grow sales of its high-end devices, such as the Mi 11 Ultra.”

The company certainly isn’t a household name in the States (the company has dealt with its own issues here), but of late it has found particular success in Latin America, Africa and Western Europe. It seems that there are still plenty of markets available to continue its expansion as it looks to take on Samsung, even as Oppo and Vivo hope to continue their own respective rapid global growth.

Disrupt 2021 stands to be the best Disrupt yet. We have an incredible lineup of speakers both on the Disrupt Stage and the Extra Crunch Stage. And, of course, we can’t forget the Startup Battlefield, which has been a launch pad for some of the biggest tech companies in the world today, including Dropbox, Mint, and Cloudflare.

Today, we’re excited to give you a closer look at the Disrupt Stage, where the biggest names in tech talk about their companies, their plans, and what’s next for the greater tech ecosystem.

And this is just the tip of the proverbial iceberg when it comes to the three jam-packed days we’re planning for you at Disrupt. Along with these heavy hitters on the Disrupt Stage, you can get your founder how-to knowledge at sessions on the Extra Crunch Stage, breakout sessions and intimate roundtable discussions. You’ll be able to find and engage with people from all around the world through world-class networking on CrunchMatch and our virtual platform — all for under $100 for a limited time with even deeper discounts for non-profit/government agencies, students and up-and-coming founders!

So without any further ado, check out the current agenda for the Disrupt Stage:

HEALTH/BIOTECH

Saving the World with Ugur Sahin (BioNTech) and Ursheet Parikh (Mayfield Fund)

COVID-19 changed everything. It not only threatened our individual health and well being, but shook industries and economies across the globe. But the same could be said about the COVID-19 vaccines. Hear from BioNTech cofounder and CEO Ugur Sahin on the process of rapidly developing the world’s most sought after vaccine, alongside Pfizer, and the long-term potential of mRNA-based therapies. Sahin will be joined by Ursheet Parikh of Mayfield Fund to discuss what’s next for startups in this rapidly evolving industry.

Democratizing Healthcare with Toyin Ajay (Cityblock Health), Adrian Aoun (Forward), and Eren Bali (Carbon Health) 

It’s no secret that the current healthcare system in America is broken. Technology stands to make a huge difference, especially in the backdrop of eased regulations due to COVID-19. Hear how startup founders from Forward, Carbon Health and Cityblock Health decided to tackle the behemoth, backward industry of healthcare, as well as talk through their plans to democratize access and digitize the industry.

Pot, Pottery and Beyond with Seth Rogan (Houseplant), Haneen Davies (Houseplant), and Michael Mohr (Houseplant)

Somehow we live in world where alcohol is sold in grocery stores and weed is considered a gateway drug. But that is rapidly changing. The legalized cannabis industry is estimated to be worth more than $13 billion in 2021, and major players from big food, pharma, etc. all want a slice of the pie. Hear from actor and comedian Seth Rogan on his well-known passion for pot, and how it led him to start Houseplant. Rogan will also be joined by Houseplant chief commercial officer Haneen Davies and cofounder and CEO Michael Mohr.

The Disrupt Desk

Industry experts and TechCrunch editors break down the panels you missed with analysis, insight, and likely a laugh or two.

Startup Battlefield Competition – Session 1

TechCrunch’s iconic startup competition is back, as entrepreneurs from around the world pitch expert judges and vie for the Startup Battlefield Cup and $100,000

IMPACT

From ABC’s to IPO with Luis Von Ahn (Duolingo)

Language learning company Duolingo was founded in 2011 and has raised more than $167 million in private capital, and recently filed to go public. Despite avoiding monetization for years, the startup saw revenue growth of 120+ percent in 2020, with no signs of slowing. CEO and cofounder Luis Von Ahn will join us on the Disrupt stage to talk about gamifying education, prepping for a public offering, and how he and the team built the anti-Rosetta Stone with an owl as a mascot.

The Disrupt Desk

Industry experts and TechCrunch editors break down the panels you missed with analysis, insight, and likely a laugh or two.

Startup Battlefield Competition – Session 2

TechCrunch’s iconic startup competition is back, as entrepreneurs from around the world pitch expert judges and vie for the Startup Battlefield Cup and $100,000

FINTECH

Collecting Crypto Opportunities with Roham Gharegozlou (Dapper Labs)

Dapper Labs launched the digital collectible craze into the mainstream earlier this year with its smash hit NBA Top Shot, but even amid sinking NFT sales, CEO Roham Gharagozlou has big ambitions for the space. His startup most recently hit a $7.5 billion valuation and has aims to own the NFT ecosystem with their Flow blockchain product.

Breaking the Bank with Brian Armstrong (Coinbase)

Coinbase’s massive direct listing earlier this year couldn’t have come at a better time as peaking crypto enthusiasm reached market exuberance, but now amid a major market correction, CEO Brian Armstrong is once again tasked with building for the future and navigating volatility while fending off global competitors knocking at their door.

The Disrupt Desk

Industry experts and TechCrunch editors break down the panels you missed with analysis, insight, and likely a laugh or two.

ENTERPRISE/SAAS & SECURITY

Staying a Step Ahead with Rinki Sethi (Twitter)

In 2020, in the midst of an already-frantic year, Twitter was breached in a very public way. Behind the scenes, Twitter spends a tremendous amount of time, money, and energy on user protection and platform integrity. A big part of that is through information security. CISO Rinki Sethi will join us at Disrupt to talk through how Twitter tries to stay ahead of malicious actors, and how tech companies large and small can do the same.

From Bootstrapped to Billions with Tope Awotona (Calendly)

Dozens have tried to reinvent the calendar, and dozens have failed. Tope Awotona built Calendly not as a way to reinvent the wheel, but to add a layer of simplicity to the chaos of human communication and time management. And boy did it work! The once-bootstrapped company is now worth more than $3 billion, serving individuals and enterprises alike. Hear from the founder and CEO on how he got Calendly off the ground, why he decided to finally take institutional investment, and how the company has changed as it grows.

Startup Battlefield Competition – Session 3

TechCrunch’s iconic startup competition is back, as entrepreneurs from around the world pitch expert judges and vie for the Startup Battlefield Cup and $100,000

An Unstoppable Force and an Immovable Object with Stewart Butterfield (Slack) and Bret Taylor (Salesforce)

Slack and Salesforce are two of the biggest names in all of tech. The communication tool (born from one of the odder pivots in tech history) is commonplace across organizations from almost every industry. It’s an unstoppable force. The sales CRM behemoth is used all over the world by sales teams small and large. An immovable object. In December of 2020, the pair announced a $27.7 billion merger. Hear from Slack founder and CEO Stewart Butterfield and Salesforce President and COO Bret Taylor about the future of the combined entity, why the deal made sense, and what it’s like to write down that many 0’s.

Dogmatic Design with Melanie Perkins (Canva)

The rapid evolution of the design industry can’t be understated. From better collaboration among designers and other departments, to collaboration among designers themselves, to the democratization of design across an organization, the landscape is changing. Canva has led the charge in this evolution, building one of the simplest (and yet full-featured) tools on the market. Hear cofounder and CEO Melanie Perkins talk about scaling the business to now be worth upwards of $15 billion, and expanding the business from B2C to B2B, all while continuing to iterate the product.

The Disrupt Desk

Industry experts and TechCrunch editors break down the panels you missed with analysis, insight, and likely a laugh or two.

Startup Battlefield Competition – Session 4

TechCrunch’s iconic startup competition is back, as entrepreneurs from around the world pitch expert judges and vie for the Startup Battlefield Cup and $100,000

HARDWARE

Reflecting on Success with Brynn Putnam (MIRROR)

Mirror cofounder and CEO Brynn Putnam first hit the Disrupt Stage years ago to launch her idea for a better, more beautiful, fitness product. This year, she’s returning to our stage to talk through the ups and downs of building a hardware product, how she manages the variety of moving pieces of this business (from the instructor network, to the content and subscription business, to sales and marketing, etc.) and walk us through the company’s $500 million acquisition by Lululemon.

A Fictional Future Built with Real AI with Kai-Fu Lee (Sinovation Ventures) and Chen Quifan (World Chinese Science Fiction Association)

A leading mind in AI research and investment and a bold new voice in science fiction collaborate in “AI 2041,” a remarkable new collection of stories imagining a future shaped by technology being built today. Hear Sinovation Ventures Chairman and CEO Kai-Fu Lee and author Chen Quifan (AKA Stanley Chan) discuss the tech that inspired their book and the changes they expect over the next two decades.

Drones, Self-driving Cars, and Everything in Between with Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg (U.S. Department of Transportation)

Pete Buttigieg first came on the scene as a small town Mayor in Indiana. He launched onto the national stage as a presidential candidate for the Democratic party in 2020. He now serves as Secretary of Transportation under the Biden administration, and oversees everything from public transport to autonomous vehicle regulation. Hear Secretary Buttigieg’s take on micromobility, the future of cities, drone delivery, autonomous vehicles and more in this fireside chat.

Crafting a Lunar Trajectory in Newspace with Peter Beck (RocketLab)

Rocket Lab has upgraded its ambitions from building a global launch empire to designing its own spacecraft and visiting the Moon and beyond. Founder and CEO Peter Beck will speak to the challenges and opportunities lying ahead for his fast-growing space and tech outfit.

The Disrupt Desk

Industry experts and TechCrunch editors break down the panels you missed with analysis, insight, and likely a laugh or two.

VENTURE CAPITAL

Bankrolling Web 3.0 with Katie Haun (Andreessen Horowitz)

At $2.2 billion, Andreessen Horowitz’s third crypto-centric fund is their largest vertical-specific bet ever and a signal of just how crucial blockchain tech and decentralized finance is to the firm’s future. General Partner Katie Haun co-leads the crypto team tasked with tracking down the firm’s next Coinbase, which returned billions for the firm.

Checking In with Chris Sacca (Lowercarbon Capital)

Chris Sacca has been a judge on “Shark Tank” and appeared on the show “Billions.” But he’s best known for sharing his opinions on Twitter, a company in which he invested early and often, and for placing a wide range of other hugely successful bets, including Uber, Instagram and Twilio. Now, at his newest firm, Lowercarbon Capital, Sacca is focusing his attention and dollars on finding and funding solutions to climate crisis, and we’re excited to talk with him about where he’s seeing the most opportunity bubbling up in this fireside chat.

Speaking SPAC with Chamath Palihapitiya (Social Capital)

Chamath Palihapitiya, founder and CEO of Social Capital, is one of the world’s most well-regarded and respected investors, and has been at the forefront of the recent SPAC craze. Hear Palihapitiya’s thoughts on the future of SPACs, what tech sectors are primed for a boom, and what excites him most in terms of future investments.

The Disrupt Desk

Industry experts and TechCrunch editors break down the panels you missed with analysis, insight, and likely a laugh or two.

Startup Battlefield Competition – Final Round

TechCrunch’s iconic startup competition is back, as entrepreneurs from around the world pitch expert judges and vie for the Startup Battlefield Cup and $100,000

MEDIA & ENTERTAINMENT

Esports Everywhere with Nicole LaPoint Jameson (Evil Geniuses)

The pandemic not only spurred the growth of gaming as a hobby, but gave an extra boost to the world of esports. Hear Evil Geniuses’ CEO Nicole LaPoint Jameson outline where esports is headed, how data and technology are driving the players, teams, leagues and beyond, and what opportunities lie in this ever-growing industry.

A new challenger has emerged in the gaming hardware category. Game distribution giant Valve today announced the launch of Steam Deck, a $399 gaming portable designed to take PC games on the go.

The handheld (which has echoes of several portable gaming rigs of years past) features a seven-inch screen and runs on a quad-core Zen 2 CPU, coupled with AMD RDNA 2 graphics and 16GB of RAM. Storage runs 64GB to 512GB, the latter of which bumps the price up to $649. The built-in storage can be augmented via microSD.

Image Credits: Valve

Naturally, the thing is custom built for Valve’s wildly popular Steam platform (it’s right there in the name, after all). Users log into their Steam account and their library — and friends list — are right there, ready to go. There’s even a dedicated Steam button.

The system has been rumored for some time now, but it enters the world during a rapidly evolving era for gaming. Essentially the company is hoping to outperform the admitted graphical limitations of Nintendo’s Switch (OLED or no), while filling in the gap as cloud-based gaming from companies like Microsoft are still working on a foothold as they deal with latency and other technical limitations. There’s also the Nvidia Shield Portable — though we’ve not heard much from that project, of late.

Image Credits: Valve

Flanking the 1280 x 800 touchscreen are a pair of trackpads and thumb sticks. A built-in gyroscope also uses movement to control the gaming experience. There’s a single USB-C port for charging, peripherals and connecting to a big screen, while a 40Wh battery promises between 7-8 hours of gameplay, by Valve’s numbers.

Image Credits: Valve

The system is up for preorder now and starts shipping this December, in time for the holidays.

DeepMind stunned the biology world late last year when its AlphaFold2 AI model predicted the structure of proteins (a common and very difficult problem) so accurately that many declared the decades-old problem “solved.” Now researchers claim to have leapfrogged DeepMind the way DeepMind leapfrogged the rest of the world, with RoseTTAFold, a system that does nearly the same thing at a fraction of the computational cost. (Oh, and it’s free to use.)

AlphaFold2 has been the talk of the industry since November, when it blew away the competition at CASP14, a virtual competition between algorithms built to predict the physical structure of a protein given the sequence of amino acids that makes it up. The model from DeepMind was so far ahead of the others, so highly and reliably accurate, that many in the field have talked (half-seriously and in good humor) about moving on to a new field.

But one aspect that seemed to satisfy no one was DeepMind’s plans for the system. It was not exhaustively and openly described, and some worried that the company (which is owned by Alphabet/Google) was planning on more or less keeping the secret sauce to themselves — which would be their prerogative but also somewhat against the ethos of mutual aid in the scientific world.

That concern seems to have been at least partly mooted by work from University of Washington researchers led by David Baker and Minkyung Baek, published in the latest issue of the journal Science. Baker, you may remember, recently won a Breakthrough Prize for his team’s work combating COVID-19 with engineered proteins.

The team’s new model, RoseTTAFold, makes predictions at similar accuracy levels using methods that Baker, responding to questions via email, candidly admitted were inspired by those used by AlphaFold2.

“The AlphaFold2 group presented several new high level concepts at the CASP14 meeting. Starting from these ideas, and with a lot of collective brainstorming with colleagues in the group, Minkyung has been able to make amazing progress in very little time,” he said. (“She is amazing!” he added.)

Examples of predicted protein structures and their ground truths. A score above 90 is considered extremely good.

Baker’s group more or less placed second at CASP14, no mean feat, but hearing DeepMind’s methods described even generally set them on a collision course. They developed a “three-track” neural network that simultaneously considered the amino acid sequence (one dimension), distances between residues (two dimensions), and coordinates in space (three dimensions). The implementation is beyond complex and far outside the scope of this article, but the result is a model that achieves almost the same accuracy levels — levels, it bears repeating, that were completely unprecedented less than a year ago.

What’s more, RoseTTAFold accomplishes this level of accuracy far more quickly — that is, using less computation power. As the paper puts it:

DeepMind reported using several GPUs for days to make individual predictions, whereas our predictions are made in a single pass through the network in the same manner that would be used for a server…the end-to-end version of RoseTTAFold requires ~10 min on an RTX2080 GPU to generate backbone coordinates for proteins with less than 400 residues.

Hear that? It’s the sound of thousands of microbiologists sighing in relief and discarding drafts of emails asking for supercomputer time. It may not be easy to lay one’s hands on a 2080 these days, but the point is any high-end desktop GPU can perform this task in minutes, instead of requiring a high-end cluster running for days.

The modest requirements make RoseTTAFold suitable for public hosting and distribution as well, something that might never have been in the cards for AlphaFold2.

“We have a public server that anyone can submit protein sequences to and have the structures predicted,” Baker said. “There have been over 4500 submissions since we put the server up a few weeks ago. We have also made the source code freely available.”

This may seem very niche, and it is, but protein folding has historically been one of the toughest problems in biology and one towards which countless hours of high-performance computing have been dedicated. You may recall Folding@Home, the popular distributed computing app that let people donate their computing cycles to attempting to predict protein structures. The kind of problem that might have taken a thousand computers days or weeks to do — essentially by brute-forcing solutions and checking for fit — now can be done in minutes on a single desktop.

The physical structure of proteins is of utmost importance in biology, as it is proteins that do the vast majority of tasks in our bodies, and proteins that must be modified, suppressed, enhanced, and so on for therapeutic reasons; first, however, they need to be understood, and until November that understanding could not be reliably achieved computationally. At CASP14 it was proven to be possible, and now it has been made widely available.

It is not, by a long shot, a “solution” to the problem of protein folding, though the sentiment has been expressed. Most proteins at rest in neutral conditions can now have their structure predicted, and that has huge repercussions in multiple domains, but proteins are seldom found “at rest in neutral conditions.” They twist and contort to grab or release other molecules, to block or slip through gates and other proteins, and generally to do everything they do. These interactions are far more numerous, complex, and difficult to predict, and neither AlphaFold2 nor RoseTTAFold can do so.

“There are many exciting chapters ahead… the story is just beginning,” said Baker.

If you’re curious about the science and the potential repercussions, consider reading this much more detailed and technical account of the methods and possible next steps written in the wake of AlphaFold2’s CASP14 performance.

In our review last year, we called the Freewrite Traveler “outstanding, but expensive.” The latest version of Astrohaus’ distraction-free word processing hardware tool does little to address the latter concern. In fact, the Ernest Hemingway Freewrite Signature Edition comes in at a full $300 more than its predecessor.

But the latest edition of the hardware strives to be something more than just a utilitarian writing tool. In fact, Astrohaus secured the blessing from the Ernest Hemingway estate for the new version of a product that began life as the “Hemingwrite” for its 2014 Kickstarter campaign.

The product strives to live up to some of the ethos and/or aesthetics of “The Sun Also Rises” author. “Even though we changed the name to Freewrite in 2015, the original Hemingwrite concept is what captured the world’s attention,” co-founder and CEO Adam Leeb said in a release tied to the news. This time out, however, the company secured the family’s blessing.

The new version trades portability for aesthetic, with the inclusion of an attaché case that brings to mind both writers’ tools of yore and, more recently, retro turntables from companies like Crosley. There were, of course, travel typewriters that came with their own carrying case, but the Freewrite’s significantly slimmer profile makes the setup far more compact.

Here’s Astrohaus’ write-up of the hardware [best read in a Ron Burgundy voice]:

The Hemingwrite features an exclusive design with green keycaps and a hand-polished aluminum chassis that is uncoated and will develop a unique patina over time. Each unit is finished by hand – no two are exactly alike. Every Hemingwrite comes with a Hemingway monogramed cleaning cloth and an exclusive attaché case to safely store the device and elegantly transport it anywhere inspiration is found. The hard-sided Hemingwrite Attaché Case is crafted from rich cognac leather and a cream-colored velvet lining. A deep pocket is located inside to store books, pens, notebooks, or other pieces of writing inspiration.

If you’re looking for something to reduce the distractions that come from writing on a laptop, while ramping up the aesthetic homage to days of yore, the Ernest Hemingway Freewrite Signature Edition is available now for $899.

American Express is branching out into financial planning, with a little help from a seven-person startup called BodesWell.

This week, the credit card giant launched a pilot of its first self-service digital financial planning tool, dubbed “My Financial Plan (MFP).” The six-month pilot kicked off on July 11 with about 25,000 select Amex cardmembers.

American Express quietly invested in BodesWell in late 2020 via its venture arm, Amex Ventures. Since then, the financial services behemoth teamed up with the tiny startup to develop the financial planning tool for its users. The new product is designed to give users a complete picture of their financial health and help them make and achieve major life goals, such as buying a house or retirement.

TechCrunch talked with Amex Ventures’ Julia Huang, who led the investment and strategy around the new product, and BodesWell co-founder and CEO Matthew Bellows to learn more details.

The pair actually met while serving on a panel together in 2019. 

“I was drawn to the fact that it was not a round-up savings tool, but rather a holistic tool to understand your full financial picture that could be used to plan for the financial impact of your life decisions,” Huang told TechCrunch.

Before deciding to invest in BodesWell, Huang says Amex Ventures — which over time has backed more than 70 startups — had “evaluated the space quite extensively.”

Huang introduced Bellows and his staff to Amex’s Digital Lab team and they embarked on jointly developing a specialized offering for Amex customers. (While Bellow is based in Boston, he says the startup is “globally distributed.”)

“Our goal is to democratize financial planning with our cardmembers by providing detailed insights and forecasts to help them with their holistic planning,” she told TechCrunch.

Image Credits: Amex Ventures

Bellows started BodesWell in early 2019 with the goal of empowering clients and customers to build their own financial plan.

“So much of financial planning software is aimed at financial advisors, and requires them to run it,” he said. “So, most people can’t get the benefits of financial planning…Our hope is to expand benefits to a lot more people.”

BodesWell will guide users in setting up a financial plan and will work even better if they sync with their other financial information via Plaid so it can “update in real time,” Huang said.

The tool “takes into account income, assets, expenses and liabilities — what cash flow looks like holistically so that users can drag & drop to plan life events,” Bellow said. 

An estimated 85 million American households don’t have a financial, planner for a variety of reasons — including mistrust of a planner’s intentions or just feeling overwhelmed by the process.

The product is free during the pilot phase and American Express hasn’t yet determined if it will charge for it afterwards.

“We’re gauging first for engagement and the power of the product for our customers,” Huang told TechCrunch. “We want to make sure the product resonates and that we iterate on the product to make sure it’s good for the broader population. Our primary goal is that our customers use it and find it valuable.”

Amex Ventures has formed “some level of partnership” with more than two-thirds of its portfolio companies, she added.

“We try to engage with our portfolio in that way, to provide value with our startup ecosystem,” Huang said.

For its part, BodesWell had previously raised about $1.5 million from investors such as Cleo Capital, Ex Ventures, Riot.vc, GritCapital and Argon Capital and angels like HubSpot CEO Brian Halligan and Kintent CEO Sravish Sridhar.

The General Services Administration has denied a senator’s request to review documents Zoom submitted to have its software approved for use in the federal government.

The denial was in response to a letter sent by Democratic senator Ron Wyden to the GSA in May, expressing concern that the agency cleared Zoom for use by federal agencies just weeks before a major security vulnerability was discovered in the app.

Wyden said the discovery of the bug raises “serious questions about the quality of FedRAMP’s audits.”

Zoom was approved to operate in government in April 2019 after receiving its FedRAMP authorization, a program operated by the GSA that ensures cloud services comply with a standardized set of security requirements designed to toughen the service from some of the most common threats. Without this authorization, federal agencies cannot use cloud products or technologies that are not cleared.

Months later, Zoom was forced to patch its Mac app after a security researcher found a flaw that could be abused to remotely switch on a user’s webcam without their permission. Apple was forced to intervene since users were still affected by the vulnerabilities even after uninstalling Zoom. As the pandemic spread and lockdowns were enforced, Zoom’s popularity skyrocketed — as did the scrutiny — including a technical analysis by reporters that found Zoom was not truly end-to-end encrypted as the company long claimed.

Wyden wrote to the GSA to say he found it “extremely concerning” that the security bugs were discovered after Zoom’s clearance. In the letter, the senator requested the documents known as the “security package,” which Zoom submitted as part of the FedRAMP authorization process, to understand how and why the app was cleared by GSA.

The GSA declined Wyden’s first request in July 2020 on the grounds that he was not a committee chair. In the new Biden administration, Wyden was named chair of the Senate Finance Committee and requested Zoom’s security package again.

But in a new letter sent to Wyden’s office late last month, GSA declined the request for the second time, citing security concerns.

“The security package you have requested contains highly sensitive proprietary and other confidential information relating to the security associated with the Zoom for Government product. Safeguarding this information is critical to maintaining the integrity of the offering and any government data it hosts,” said the GSA letter. “Based on our review, GSA believes that disclosure of the Zoom security package would create significant security risks.”

In response to the GSA’s letter, Wyden told TechCrunch that he was concerned that other flawed software may have been approved for use across the government.

“The intent of GSA’s FedRAMP program is good — to eliminate red tape so that multiple federal agencies don’t have to review the security of the same software. But it’s vitally important that whichever agency conducts the review do so thoroughly,” said Wyden. “I’m concerned that the government’s audit of Zoom missed serious cybersecurity flaws that were subsequently uncovered and exposed by security researchers. GSA’s refusal to share the Zoom audit with Congress calls into question the security of the other software products that GSA has approved for federal use.”

Of the people we spoke with who have first-hand knowledge of the FedRAMP process, either as a government employee or as a company going through the certification, FedRAMP was described as a comprehensive but by no means an exhaustive list of checks that companies have to meet in order to meet the security requirements of the federal government.

Others said that the process had its limits and would benefit from reform. One person with knowledge of how FedRAMP works said the process was not a complete audit of a product’s source code but akin to a checklist of best practices and meeting compliance requirements. Much of it relies on trusting the vendor, said the person, describing it like ” an honor system.” Another person said the FedRAMP process cannot catch every bug, as evidenced by executive action taken by President Biden this week aimed at modernizing and improving the FedRAMP process.

Most of the people we spoke to weren’t surprised that Wyden’s office was denied the request, citing the sensitivity of a company’s FedRAMP security package.

The people said that companies going through the certification process have to provide highly technical details about the security of their product, which if exposed would almost certainly be damaging to the company. Knowing where security weaknesses might be could tip off cyber-criminals, one of the people said. Companies often spend millions on improving their security ahead of a FedRAMP audit but companies wouldn’t risk going through the certification if they thought their trade secrets would get leaked, they added.

When asked by GSA why it objected to Wyden’s request, Zoom’s head of U.S. government relations Lauren Belive argued that handing over the security package “would set a dangerous precedent that would undermine the special trust and confidence” that companies place in the FedRAMP process.

GSA puts strict controls on who can access a FedRAMP security package. You need a federal government or military email address, which the senator’s office has. But the reason for GSA denying Wyden’s request still isn’t clear, and when reached a GSA spokesperson would not explain how a member of Congress would obtain a company’s FedRAMP security package

“GSA values its relationship with Congress and will continue to work with Senator Wyden and our committees of jurisdiction to provide appropriate information regarding our programs and operations,” said GSA spokesperson Christina Wilkes, adding:

“GSA works closely with private sector partners to provide a standardized approach to security authorizations for cloud services through the [FedRAMP]. Zoom’s FedRAMP security package and related documents provide detailed information regarding the security measures associated with the Zoom for Government product. GSA’s consistent practice with regard to sensitive security and trade secret information is to withhold the material absent an official written request of a congressional committee with jurisdiction, and pursuant to controls on further dissemination or publication of the information.”

GSA wouldn’t say which congressional committee had jurisdiction or whether Wyden’s role as chair of the Senate Finance Committee suffices, nor would the agency answer questions about the efficacy of the FedRAMP process raised by Wyden.

Zoom spokesperson Kelsey Knight said that cloud companies like Zoom “provide proprietary and confidential information to GSA as part of the FedRAMP authorization process with the understanding that it will be used only for their use in making authorization decisions. While we do not believe Zoom’s FedRAMP security package should be disclosed outside of this narrow purpose, we welcome conversations with lawmakers and other stakeholders about the security of Zoom for Government.”

Zoom said it has “engaged in security enhancements to continually improve its products,” and received FedRAMP reauthorization in 2020 and 2021 as part of its annual renewal. The company declined to say to what extent the Zoom app was audited as part of the FedRAMP process.

Over two dozen federal agencies use Zoom, including the Defense Department, Homeland Security, U.S. Customs and Border Protection, and the Executive Office of the President.

More details are beginning to emerge on Houston-based Axiom Space’s ambitious project to build and operate the world’s first commercial space station.

Thales Alenia Space, a European aerospace manufacturer, will develop the two pressurized modules of the Axiom Space Station. The two elements, which are scheduled to launch in 2024 and 2025, will dock to the International Space Station before eventually detaching and operating as fully independent, commercial station.

The two companies announced the signing of the final contract, valued at €110 million ($130 million), on Thursday. Each module will be able to accommodate four people. Thales will also be designing the micrometeoroid and debris protection system for each module.

The modules are still in their design phase, Thales Alenia said. The company recently completed development of the first module’s four radial bulkheads at its facility in Turin, Italy. The bulkheads, once connected, will form a cylinder. That structure will attach to the common berth mechanisms, parts of the module that will can connect to the ISS, and hatches.

Image Credits: Thales Alenia Space (opens in a new window)

The two modules have a long road ahead of them. Thales Alenia, a joint venture between French company Thales Group and Italian conglomerate Leonardo, will begin welding on the first module this September through to next year. That module will be sent to Axiom’s Texas facilities in July 2023, where Axiom will then integrate the core systems and prepare it for launch in 2024.

NASA tapped Axiom to build the first commercial living quarters for the ISS in January 2020. Once the ISS is decommissioned, Axiom’s station will detach and function as a commercial center for future missions and scientific experiments. It’s a major part of NASA’s plans to encourage the growth of the burgeoning low Earth orbit economy and the buildout of other private orbital labs and commercial facilities.

Axiom will also operate the first fully private mission to the ISS, scheduled for January 2022. Axiom Mission 1 will send four private astronauts to space onboard a SpaceX Crew Dragon, for an eight-day mission.