Author: azeeadmin

A system that uses a technique called constructive solid geometry (CSG) is allowing MIT researchers to deconstruct objects and turn them into 3D models, thereby allowing them to reverse-engineer complex things.

The system appeared in a paper entitled “InverseCSG: Automatic Conversion of 3D Models to CSG Trees” by Tao Du, Jeevana Priya Inala, Yewen Pu, Andrew Spielberg, Adriana Schulz, Daniela Rus, Armando Solar-Lezama, and Wojciech Matusik.

“At a high level, the problem is reverse engineering a triangle mesh into a simple tree. Ideally, if you want to customize an object, it would be best to have access to the original shapes — what their dimensions are and how they’re combined. But once you combine everything into a triangle mesh, you have nothing but a list of triangles to work with, and that information is lost,” said Tao Du to 3DPrintingIndustry. “Once we recover the metadata, it’s easier for other people to modify designs.”

The process cuts objects into simple solids that can then be added together to create complex objects. Because 3D scanning is imperfect, the creation of mesh models of various objects rarely leads to a perfect copy of the original. Using this technique, individual parts are cut away, analyzed and reassembled, allowing for a more precise scan.

“Further, we demonstrated the robustness of our algorithm by solving examples not describable by our grammar. Finally, since our method returns parameterized CSG programs, it provides a powerful means for end-users to edit and understand the structure of 3D meshes,” said Du.

The system detects primitive shapes and then modifies them. This allows it to recreate almost any object with far better accuracy than in previous versions of the software. It’s a surprisingly cool way to begin hacking hardware in order to understand it’s shape, volume and stability.

Short-form video app TikTok has been growing in popularity across international markets, including in the U.S. where a merger with Musical.ly has seen the app topping the App Store charts. Facebook and Snapchat have been hastily trying to copy TikTok’s features as a result. A part of TikTok’s ambitious global expansion plan has been its more recent targeting of emerging markets — like India and Indonesia — where the company’s quietly launched “TikTok Lite” app has been gaining ground in the latter half of 2018.

TikTok hasn’t yet made much fuss over its Lite version, which actually consists of two separate apps.

The first was launched on August 6, 2018 in Thailand, but is now available across other primarily Asian markets, including Indonesia, where it’s most popular, as well as Vietnam, Malaysia and the Philippines.

This version of TikTok Lite has grown to 5 million installs since its August debut. (It’s actually written with a lowercase “l” in “Lite” in the Play store, which is how you can tell the difference between this and the other app.)

This version was also briefly live in India, Brazil and Russia, but now these countries are served by a separate Lite app (written as “Lite” with an uppercase “L”), which launched on November 1, 2018.

This second version of TikTok Lite has now become the larger of the two, thanks to India. It has around 7.1 million total downloads, according to Sensor Tower data.

It has also now been installed across 15 additional non-Asian countries, including Egypt, Brazil, Algeria, Tunisia, Russia, Ecuador, South Africa, Dominican Republic, Guatemala, Kenya, Costa Rica, El Salvador, Nigeria, Angola and Ghana.

Combined, the two TikTok Lite apps have gained more than 12 million downloads in around six months’ time, TechCrunch confirmed with Sensor Tower.

However, TikTok Lite is not being heavily promoted at this time — especially when compared with the outsize marketing that TikTok’s flagship app has been seeing as of late.

This advertising is courtesy of TikTok’s Chinese parent company, ByteDance, which has had an infusion of billions in outside capital recently. The company is valued at $78 billion, as of October.

And it’s spending, apparently:

E.g.:

Sensor Tower found that more than half of TikTok Lite’s downloads came over the past month, following TikTok Lite’s return to India. Combined, the two Lite apps’ downloads reached around 6.7 million in December, which was a 158 percent increase over November’s 2.6 million installs, it said.

Despite TikTok Lite’s growth, 12 million+ downloads is only a drop in the bucket when it comes to TikTok’s larger user base. This represents only 4.5 percent of TikTok’s downloads on Google Play since August 2018, and only about 3.6 percent of all TikTok downloads since then across both the iOS and Google Play app stores combined.

To date, TikTok’s main app has been downloaded more than 887 million times on Google Play. That doesn’t count the downloads from the Chinese version called Douyin, which is found on third-party Android app stores. That means TikTok’s true install base is even bigger.

ByteDance itself had publicly said last July the TikTok user base had grown to 500 million+ monthly active users — a way of counting who’s regularly using the app instead of just installing it on their phone.

Given that Facebook Lite grew to 200 million users in less than two years‘ time, it seems like a “Lite” version of TikTok, now one of the world’s biggest apps, could be doing a bit better than 12 million installs over a six-month period.

The problem seems to stem from a variety of factors, including how TikTok Lite is marketed in the Play Store. The app uses screenshots and a description that make it seem like it’s just another version of TikTok. But according to user reviews, people were disappointed to find it’s a consumption-only app. Many have left reviews complaining about how they can’t make videos. They call it “fake” and “bad” as a result.

TikTok would do better to clarify how its Lite version is different, to eliminate this confusion.

It’s common for major tech companies to offer a “lighter” version of their app for emerging markets where low bandwidth is a concern. These apps tend to be smaller in size, more performant and sometimes either have reduced capabilities or special features aimed at low-bandwidth users.

Google, for example, has a suite of light apps — the “Go” edition apps — like Gmail Go, YouTube Go, Files Go, Google Go, Google Maps Go and Google Assistant Go. Uber now offers Uber Lite. Facebook operates apps like Facebook Lite, Messenger Lite and Instagram Lite — the latter which launched just ahead of TikTok Lite, in fact.

Like most “Lite” apps, TikTok Lite clocks in at a smaller size — it’s only 10MB to 11MB (depending on the version) versus the much larger 71MB of TikTok’s main app.

A rep for TikTok confirmed the company is now offering a Lite version in some markets so users can choose a smaller app if they have concerns around data or the storage space on their phone. No other information about the Lite versions or strategy was provided.

So far, ByteDance’s efforts around TikTok Lite seem more experimental, given it hasn’t put up a proper description on Google Play, runs two separate Lite versions and had offered the app in some markets briefly, pulled out, then returned with another version. It will be interesting to see what TikTok Lite becomes when it gets the sort of attention that the main TikTok app is receiving today.

One Denver-based startup’s long-shot bid to move today’s commercial jets beyond supersonic speeds just got a big injection of cash.

Boom Supersonic, which is building and designing what it calls the “world’s first economically viable supersonic airliner,” announced today that they’ve closed a $100 million Series B funding round led by Emerson Capital. Other investors include Y Combinator Continuity, Caffeinated Capital, SV Angel, Sam Altman, Paul Graham, Ron Conway, Michael Marks and Greg McAdoo.

The startup has raised around $140 million to date.

“Today, the time and cost of long-distance travel prevent us from connecting with far-off people and places,” said Boom CEO Blake Scholl in a statement. “Overture fares will be similar to today’s business class—widening horizons for tens of millions of travelers. Ultimately, our goal is to make high-speed flight affordable to all.”

Alongside the fund raise, Boom is further detailing its plans to begin testing its Mach-2.2 commercial airliner this year. The company is aiming to launch a 1:3 scale prototype of its planned Overture airliner this year called the XB-1. The two-seater plane will serve to validate the technologies being built for the full-sized jet.

The startup’s supersonic Overture jet will hold 55 passengers, and the team hopes that the costs of flying more than double the speed of sound will be comparable to today’s business class ticket prices. $100 million may seem like a lot of money, but the development costs for lengthy projects like these can quickly race past estimates.

The company already has pre-orders from Virgin Group and Japan Airlines for 30 airliners .

Starwood’s data breach just got both better and worse at the same time.

Marriott, the parent company of hotel chain giant Starwood, said it has revised the number of customers affected by its recently disclosed data breach from 500 million to “fewer than 383 million unique guests.” That doesn’t mean all those 383 million guests are affected, Marriott said, but the hotel giant still can’t yet give a more precise number of customers whose data was stolen.

The bad news is that the company confirmed that more than five million unencrypted passport numbers were stolen, on top of the more than 20 million encrypted passport numbers.

That might be a problem, given passport numbers can be used for identity theft and to commit fraud, but is the sort of data that remains highly valuable for spy agencies that can use the information to track down where government officials, diplomats and adversaries have stayed — giving insight into what would ordinarily be clandestine activities.

Marriott also said that 8.6 million unique payment card numbers were taken, but only 354,000 cards were active and unexpired at the time of the breach in September.

The hotel giant said it had “no evidence” to show that the hackers stole the keys needed to decrypt the data, but did not say how it came to that conclusion.

Starwood’s security lapse became the largest data breach last year, and remains one of the most damaging hacking incidents in recent memory. The company said the contents of the stolen data were from the Starwood guest reservation database, which it acquired when it bought Starwood and its 1,200 properties in 2016 for $13 billion.

Marriott said in its Friday update that it has “completed the phase out” of Starwood’s reservation database and now runs guest bookings through its Marriott database, which was not affected by the breach.

If you think times are bad at Apple, spare a thought for HTC, the once king-of-hill phone maker that continues to struggle very badly.

The Taiwanese smartphone company, which offloaded a portion of its business to Google for $1.1 billion and is pivoting to VR, laid off yet more staff in 2018 and had its worst year of sales ever.

According to its own figures — and as noted by Bloomberg’s Tim Culpan — the company brought in just 23.74 billion TWD ($770 million) in revenue over the entire year. That’s the first time it has grossed less than $1 billion during a year as a public company.

That figure represents a massive 62 percent drop on HTC’s paltry revenue for 2017 — 62.12 billion TWD, around $2 billion — which was its poorest year since 2005. We don’t yet know the total loss for 2018, but its three previous quarterly reports combined amount to a total operating loss of 11.13 billion TWD, $361 million, with one more quarter to add.

HTC’s 2018 total was so bad that it actually made more money during just one single month a few years ago. Its total revenue during May 2013, back when phones like the One M7, One Mini and One Max made it one of the best smartphone companies on the planet, came in at 29 billion TWD.

Those days of booming sales are, of course, long gone as these charts painfully illustrate.

The decision to sell a large chunk of the smartphone business to Google one year ago was the icing on the cake served at HTC’s smartphone wake. Yes, the company did announce the U12+ — with a squeezable side — in May and it is working on a blockchain phone that we kind of got a look at during our Shenzhen event last year, but these are peripheral plays that are tucked well away from where the mainstream players are dueling, a place where HTC used to be.

Even VR, trumpeted as HTC’s great area of hope, is a long-term play.

The company doesn’t break down revenue — that’ll come later when it releases its next earnings report in February — so we don’t know how its Vive and other virtual reality plays are working out in terms of numbers. But the immediate future isn’t great.

Lucas Matney — TechCrunch’s resident virtual reality cyberpunk — noted just this week that 2019 is shaping up to be a very testing year for the entire VR and AR industry, HTC/Vive very much included.

“There are plenty of reasons to be long-term bullish on AR, but the time horizons some have espoused seems to be bogus and pitch decks organized around a near-term spike in phone-based or glasses-based users are going to have a tougher time being taken seriously in 2019,” Matney wrote.

If that proves true, HTC’s sickly sales may well contract further still.

In many ways, it’s hard to not feel sorry for the company. Pivots this brutal are usually carried out by private startups who can keep the contents of their books to themselves, rather than 22-year-old public companies who must file financial statements. Unfortunately for HTC, information like monthly sales, losses and other revealing data will continue to be public information, ensuring that this painful transition continues to play out with full public scrutiny.

Despite an incredible downturn in success, co-founder, president and CEO Cher Wang continues to run the business with no calls for a change in leadership. Wang keeps a low profile and has said little of her plans to turn things around. Maybe 2019 is a good year for being more forthcoming, especially if the losses continue to mount as seems inevitable.

Amazon just over a year ago launched its first in-home furniture brands, with private labels Rivet and Stone & Beam. This past fall, it began experimenting with a new, more visual way to shop for furniture and other merchandise with its Pinterest-like recommendation service Scout. Now, Amazon is venturing further into home furnishings with the debut of Amazon Showroom, a visual design tool that allows you to place furniture into a virtual living room, customize the décor, then shop the look.

The retailer didn’t formally announce the launch of Amazon Showroom, but a spokesperson confirmed it’s a recent test available that’s now available on Amazon.com and in the Amazon mobile app.

You can access it from the “Accounts & Lists” drop-down on the web; the Home, Garden & Pets department on the web; or the Home & Kitchen department on the mobile app.

Currently, the new feature is focused on helping Amazon shoppers put together a living room. In a virtual setting, you can make adjustments to the wall color and the flooring, then swap out each item in the space with one of your own choosing – including the sofa, coffee table, chair, end table, lamp, rug, and even the art on the wall.

To do so, you just click on the piece in question, then pick another from the right-side panel where a scrollable list of other options are available, along with their prices. This selection can be filtered by a number of factors, as well, like price, style, color, material, brand, and star rating.

Not surprisingly, Amazon’s own home furnishing brands are heavily featured here.

As you work on your project, you can save your room design to pull up later. And you can save more than one room design, if you’re trying to decide between different styles. When satisfied, an “Add to cart” button lets you place all at into your cart for checkout with just one click.

Amazon Showroom – a name that’s almost a cruel reference to Amazon’s ability to turn brick-and-mortar stores into showrooms for online shoppers – isn’t the retailer’s first attempt at helping shoppers visualize items in their home ahead of purchase. The company also launched an AR shopping feature in its app in 2017, which allows you to place a virtual item in your camera view to see how it goes in your own room. That can be useful if shopping for a single item, but less so when designing a complete room.

Home furnishings is still an emerging category for online retail, not only because they’re hard to visualize, but also because heavy items are expensive to ship. However, major retailers see the potential in this growing market.

Walmart, for example, launched a new home shopping site for furniture and décor last year, which features its own in-house brands and more visual, editorial-style imagery. It has also snapped up other home furnishing and décor retailers, including Hayneedle and recently, Art.com, and is building its own visual search.

Amazon confirmed the launch of Showroom in a statement.

The retailer wouldn’t say when the feature debuted, exactly, but a Twitter account was tweeting links to a pre-production site earlier in December. It’s also unclear at this time if Amazon Showroom was built entirely in-house.

“Amazon Showroom is a new way for customers to visualize their home furnishing purchases when shopping online,” a spokesperson told TechCrunch. “Amazon Showroom presents customers with a virtual living room, where they can customize the décor and furniture selection providing the ability to visually compare to scale representations of furniture items together in a room to determine how an item will fit with the style of a room and work with other complimentary pieces. The result is a photorealistic rendering of a room that answers the question: ‘How will this all look together?’,” they said.

The feature is live for all customers on the web and in the Amazon app.

DiscountMugs.com, a large online custom mug and apparel store, had a four-month long data breach just before the busy Christmas holiday season.

The company said in a letter to state attorney generals that hackers siphoned off credit card numbers from customers who made orders through its site between August 5 and November 16, 2018 using code injected on the company’s payments page.

The malicious card skimming code was removed from the site after it was discovered.

According to the letter, the hackers stole credit card numbers, the security code, and expiration date, as well as names, addresses, phone numbers, email addresses and ZIP codes — everything that someone might need to make fraudulent payments.

But the company didn’t say how many people were affected by the breach. It’s believed to be thousands of customers who made purchases through the site during the four-month period.

TechCrunch reached out to Sai Koppaka, chief executive of parent company Bel USA, who did not respond to a request for comment, nor did the company’s spokesperson. Emails sent to Comvest, a private equity firm and an investor in Bel USA, also went unreturned.

DiscountMugs.com might not be a household name but it ranks in the top 10,000 sites in the U.S., according to Alexa, bringing in thousands of customers every day.

The company becomes the latest in a line of websites affected by credit card skimming code. The so-called Magecart group of hackers have targeted thousands of sites in the past few years, scraping credit card data when a customer enters their information at the checkout and silently sending it on to the hackers’ servers.

Other big name companies were hit, including British Airways, Newegg, and Ticketmaster.

A hacker has targeted and released private data on German chancellor Angela Merkel and other senior German lawmakers and officials.

The data was leaked from a Twitter account, since suspended, and included email addresses, phone numbers, photo IDs and other personal data on hundreds of senior political figures.

According to a government spokesperson, there was no “sensitive” data from the chancellor’s office, but other lawmakers had more personal data stolen. Other portions of the leaked data included Facebook and Twitter passwords. Some had their credit card information stolen, and chat logs and private letters published in the breach.

Germany’s Federal Office for Information Security said in a statement that it was “extensively investigating” the breach, but does not believe there was an attack on the government’s networks.

It’s been reported that the hacker may have obtained passwords to access social media accounts. Often, hackers do this by tricking a phone company into “porting out” a person’s phone number to another SIM card, allowing them to password reset accounts or obtain two-factor codes.

The hacker leaked data on senior lawmakers across the political spectrum, but noticeably absent were accounts for the country’s far-right Alternative for Germany party.

The hack is reminiscent of a data breach involving the Democratic National Committee in 2016, which targeted the Democrats in the U.S. in the months running up to the U.S. presidential election. The U.S. government later attributed the hack to Russia, which prosecutors say tried to influence the election to elect Donald Trump to the White House. The Justice Department brought charges against seven suspects earlier this year for being part of the so-called “Fancy Bear” group of hackers, working on behalf of the Russian government.

Little is known about who is behind the leak of German lawmakers’ data. The German government has not speculated about who — or if a nation state — may have been behind the attack. But the alleged hacker said in a statement linked from their Twitter account that they “operated alone and does not belong to any organization or similar on Twitter.”

According to security experts who’ve seen portions of the data, the hacker spread the stolen information across several sites and mirrors, making it “really hard to take down.”

Germany’s minister for justice Katarina Barley called the breach a “serious attack,” one that aimed to “damage confidence in our democracy and institutions,” according to the BBC.

It’s not the first time that the German parliament has faced security issues. In 2015, attackers stole gigabytes of data on lawmakers, which Germany’s domestic spy agency later accused Russia of behind behind the breach.

Russia has repeatedly denied launching cyberattacks.

Robinhood, the U.S.-based “zero-fee” stock trading app and cryptocurrency exchange, is stealthily recruiting for a new London office ahead of plans to eventually launch in the U.K., TechCrunch has learned.

According to sources within London’s thriving fintech industry, Robinhood is hiring for multiple U.K. positions. These span recruitment, operations, marketing and PR, and customer support. Notably, the company is also seeking people in compliance, and product, including product design.

In other words, significant localisation and local product market fit appears to be the intention. Compliance is also an important part of Robinhood’s future U.K. regulatory requirements as it applies to local regulator the FCA for the appropriate licenses. Robinhood declined to comment on its U.K. plans.

Meanwhile, news that Robinhood is stealthily recruiting ahead of a planned U.K. launch is interesting in the context of local fintech startups who have launched or announced their own fee-free trading offerings.

Launched late last year, London-based Freetrade has built a bona-fide “challenger broker,” including obtaining the required license from the FCA, rather than simply partnering with an established broker. The app lets you invest in U.K. stocks and ETFs, but will soon add U.S. stocks, too. Trades are “fee-free” if you are happy for your buy or sell trades to execute at the close of business each day. If you want to execute immediately, the startup charges a low £1 per trade.

In June last year, Revolut, also headquartered in London, announced its intention to add commission-free trading to its banking app, in what was seen as a bid to compete with Robinhood. So far, no product has surfaced, although I’m told that we should see trading added to Revolut in Q1 this year.

What’s intriguing about the Revolut-Robinhood comparisons is that the two companies share a number of investors, namely Index and DST. Both companies have incredibly high valuations, too, and, depending on respective burn rates, quite deep pockets.

Co-founded by Baiju Bhatt and Vlad Tenev (pictured above), Robinhood claims 6 million accounts and is valued at $5.6 billion, having raised a total to date of $539 million. It has around 300 employees across its HQ in Menlo Park, California and its regional HQ in Lake Mary, Florida.

Revolut claims 3.5 million users, and at its last funding round was valued at $1.7 billion. The fintech has raised a total of $340 million, and has a headcount of 600 in London and across its various regional offices.

Today, many companies provide developer access to their services via APIs. Moesif, a San Francisco startup, wants to help these companies gain insight into their customer’s API usage patterns. Today, the company announced a $3.5 million seed round.

The investment was led by Merus Capital with participation by Heavybit, Fresco Capital and Zach Coelius, who sold his startup, Cruise Automation, to General Motors for $1 billion in 2016.

Moesif co-founder and CEO Derric Gilling says Moesif is akin to Mixpanel or Google Analytics, except instead of tracking web or mobile analytics, it looks at API usage. “As more and more companies are using and creating these APIs, there comes a point where you need to understand how your customers are using them, any problems they are running into and how do you actually decrease developer churn.”

The company is aiming at two primary types of users. First of all, there are developers who can use the monitoring features to understand when there are issues with the API. These folks have access to the free tier.

Moesif also targets business units like product management, sales and marketing, who use the tool to understand who’s using the API, how often, and with machine learning, understand who is likely to stop using the product based on how they are using it. The tool can tie into other business systems like Mailchimp or a CRM tool to get a more complete picture of customers as they use the API.

The product was released last year and Gilling says his company already has 2000 customers, which includes both the free and pay tiers. He said they have had particular success with SaaS and FinTech companies, both of which make heavy use of APIs. Customers include PowerSchool, Schwab and InsideSales.

While the company currently consists of the three founders, flush with the seed investment, it intends to hire around 10 people in the next six months including a VP of engineering, additional developers and sales and marketing folks.

Moesif was founded in 2016, and the three founders went through the Alchemist Accelerator last year.