Author: azeeadmin

Kafka is an open source tool for handling incoming streams of data. Like virtually all powerful tools, it’s somewhat hard to set up and manage. Today, Amazon’s AWS is making this all a bit easier for its users with the launch of Amazon Managed Streaming for Kafka. That’s a mouthful, but it’s essentially Kafka as a fully managed, highly available service on AWS. It’s now available on AWS as a public preview.

As AWS CTO Werner Vogels noted in his keynote, Kafka users traditionally had to do a lot of happy lifting to set up a cluster on AWS and to ensure that it could scale and handle failures. “It’s a nightmare having to restart all the cluster and the main nodes,” he said. “This is what I would call the traditional heavy lifting that AWS is really good at solving for you.”

It’s interesting to see AWS launch this service, given that it already offers a very similar tool in Kinesis, a tool that also focuses on ingesting streaming data. There are plenty of applications on the market today that already use Kafka and AWS is clearly interested in giving those users a pathway to either move to a managed Kafka service or to AWS in general.

As with all things AWS, the pricing is a bit complicated, but a basic Kafka instance will start at $0.21 per hour. You’re not likely to just use one instance, so for a somewhat useful setup with three brokers and a good amount of storage and some other fees, you’ll quickly pay well over $500 per month.

New numbers from Gartner this morning show solid projections for the wearable market, in spite of a few relatively lackluster years following the category’s initial explosion. The drivers for the projected growth should be no surprise to anyone who has been following it of late — namely smartwatches and ear-worn devices (the unfortunately named hearables).

Overall, Gartner his predicting a jump in shipments in excess of 25 percent in 2019, up to 225 million, from 179 million. That number is expected to continue to increase all the way up to 453 million by 2022.

Smartwatches — led by Apple, Samsung and relatively recent entrant Fitbit — are a key factor, growing from 53 million units shipped to 74 million, and then up to 115 million by 2022. Impressive, if it plays out accordingly, though interestingly, average selling price is expected to drop over that time frame by ~$11 per device.

That’s a product of lower-priced competition for the industry-leading Apple Watch. We’ve already seen Fitbit undercut the competition pretty dramatically with the $150 Versa. How that will square with costlier health components like Apple’s ECG, however, remains to be seen.

Ear-worn devices — namely Bluetooth earbuds like Apple’s AirPods and Samsung’s IconX — are the other big driver. Gartner suggests they’ll account for nearly one-third of the wearables market by 2022.

Cruise Automation, the self-driving car subsidiary of GM, is getting a new CEO.

The autonomous vehicle company, which was acquired by GM in 2016 and became subsidiary GM Cruise, has tapped Dan Ammann as CEO. Ammann will step down as GM’s president, a role he’s held since January 2014.

Kyle Vogt, a Cruise co-founder who was CEO and also unofficially handled the chief technology officer position, is staying with the company. Vogt will now become president and CTO. The changes take effect January 1, 2019.

The executive-level shuffling makes sense for Cruise, which has transformed from a small startup with 40 employees to more than 1,000 today at its San Francisco headquarters. And it continues to expand as the company prepares to launch a commercial robotaxi business in 2019.

Cruise recently announced plans to open an office in Seattle and staff it with up to 200 engineers. And with the recent investments by SoftBank and Honda, which has pushed Cruise’s valuation to $14.6 billion, it has the runway to get even bigger. Vogt can focus on the tech and Ammann can build out and manage the business.

Ammann was at the center of GM’s initial investment and acquisition of Cruise. He oversaw GM’s relationship with Cruise. And he’s a person with whom Vogt has regular contact, something he mentioned while onstage at SF Disrupt in September.

Ammann also comes with a specific skill set. When Ammann first joined GM in 2010 as vice president of finance and treasurer, his first task was to manage GM’s initial public offering. This could signal a future move by the company.

“Dan’s been my partner since General Motors’ initial investment in Cruise and I am thrilled he has agreed to join us full-time,” said Vogt. “Dan’s thorough understanding of our mission and his operational expertise make him the perfect fit to lead Cruise into commercial deployment.”

“I’m excited to dedicate 100 percent of my time and energy to helping Kyle and the entire team realize our mission of deploying this technology at scale,” Ammann said in a statement provided to TechCrunch.

GM’s global regions and GM Financial will now report directly to GM Chairman and CEO Mary Barra .

Lyft has finally given us a glimpse of its forthcoming line of shareable bikes, which the ridesharing company says will be available to rent within its mobile app in select cities “soon.”

The news comes as the $15 billion company announces the final close of its acquisition of Motivate, the New York City-based mobility startup that owns a number of bike-rental services, like Citi Bike, Ford GoBike, Divvy, Blue Bikes and Capital Bikeshare. The transaction was reportedly worth some $250 million.

Lyft brought in $600 million in fresh funding in June from backers Fidelity Research & Management, AllianceBernstein, Baillie Gifford, KKR, CapitalG, Rakuten and others.

Now that its bike deal is complete, Lyft becomes the largest bike service provider in the U.S. That’s a big leap forward for a company that hopes to have the largest dockless bike fleet in the world — outside of China, of course, where companies like Mobike have deployed millions of bikes.

As part of the deal, Lyft will invest $100 million in New York’s Citi Bike, tripling the number of bikes available to 40,000 by 2023. 

Lyft launched its first fleet of scooters earlier this year in Denver, hot off the heels of scooter-mania, which saw companies like Bird and Lime garner billion-dollar valuations and complete launches all over the world.

The company says the scooters have been a success thus far. In Denver, for example, 15 percent of Lyft rides in 2018 were taken on scooters. The company has also made scooters available to rent within its app in Santa Monica and Washington, DC — a list that will undoubtedly swell in 2019.

Here’s hoping Lyft’s bike wheels are actually pink. If not, I will be gravely disappointed.

There’s a dark cloud on the horizon. The behavior of cloud infrastructure providers, such as Amazon, threatens the viability of open source. I first wrote about this problem in a prior piece on TechCrunch. In 2018, thankfully, several leaders have mobilized (amid controversy) to propose multiple solutions to the problem. Here’s what’s happened in the last month.

The Problem

Go to Amazon Web Services (AWS) and hover over the Products menu at the top. You will see numerous open-source projects that Amazon did not create, but runs as-a-service. These provide Amazon with billions of dollars of revenue per year. To be clear, this is not illegal. But it is not conducive to sustainable open-source communities, and especially commercial open-source innovation.

Two Solutions

In early 2018, I gathered together the creators, CEOs or general counsels of two dozen at-scale open-source companies, along with respected open source lawyer Heather Meeker, to talk about what to do.

We wished to define a license that prevents cloud infrastructure providers from running certain software as a commercial service, while at the same time making that software effectively open source for everyone else, i.e., everyone not running that software as a commercial service.

With our first proposal, Commons Clause, we took the most straightforward approach: we constructed one clause, which can be added to any liberal open source license, preventing the licensee from “Selling” the software — where “Selling” includes running it as a commercial service. (Selling other software made with Commons Clause software is allowed, of course.) Applying Commons Clause transitions a project from open source to source-available.

We also love the proposal being spearheaded by another participant, MongoDB, called the Server Side Public License (SSPL). Rather than prohibit the software from being run as a service, SSPL requires that you open-source all programs that you use to make the software available as a service, including, without limitation, management software, user interfaces, application program interfaces, automation software, monitoring software, backup software, storage software and hosting software, all such that a user could run an instance of the service. This is known as a “copyleft.”

These two licenses are two different solutions to exactly the same problem. Heather Meeker wrote both solutions, supported by feedback organized by FOSSA.

The initial uproar and accusations that these efforts were trying to “trick” the community fortunately gave way to understanding and acknowledgement from the open source community that there is a real problem to be solved here, that it is time for the open source community to get real, and that it is time for the net giants to pay fairly for the open source on which they depend.

In October, one of the board members of the Apache Software Foundation (ASF) reached out to me and suggested working together to create a modern open source license that solves the industry’s needs.

Kudos to MongoDB

Further kudos are owed to MondoDB for definitively stating that they will be using SSPL, submitting SSPL in parallel to an organization called Open Source Initiative (OSI) for endorsement as an open source license, but not waiting for OSI’s endorsement to start releasing software under the SSPL.

OSI, which has somehow anointed itself as the body that will “decide” whether a license is open source, has a habit of myopically debating what’s open source and what’s not. With the submission of SSPL to OSI, MongoDB has put the ball in OSI’s court to either step up and help solve an industry problem, or put their heads back in the sand.

In fact, MongoDB has done OSI a huge favor. MongoDB has gone and solved the problem and handed a perfectly serviceable open source license to OSI on a silver platter.

Open Source Sausage

The public archives of OSI’s debate over SSPL are at times informative and at times amusing, bordering on comical. After MongoDB’s original submission, there were rah-rah rally cries amongst the members to find reasons to deem SSPL not an open source license, followed by some +1’s. Member John Cowan reminded the group that just because OSI does not endorse a license as open source, does not mean that it is not open source:

As far as I know (which is pretty far), the OSI doesn’t do that. They have never publicly said “License X is not open source.” People on various mailing lists have done so, but not the OSI as such. And they certainly don’t say “Any license not on our OSI Certified ™ list is not open source”, because that would be false. It’s easy to write a license that is obviously open source that the OSI would never certify for any of a variety of reasons.

Eliot Horowitz (CTO and co-founder of MongoDB) responded cogently to questions, comments and objections, concluding with:

In short, we believe that in today’s world, linking has been superseded by the provision of programs as services and the connection of programs over networks as the main form of program combination. It is unclear whether existing copyleft licenses clearly apply to this form of program combination, and we intend the SSPL to be an option for developers to address this uncertainty.

Much discussion ensued about the purpose, role and relevance of OSI. Various sundry legal issues were raised or addressed by Van Lindberg, McCoy Smith, and Bruce Perens.

Heather Meeker (the lawyer who drafted both Commons Clause and SSPL) stepped in and completely addressed the legal issues that had been raised thus far. Various other clarifications were made by Eliot Horowitz, and he also conveyed willingness to change the wording of the license if it would help.

Discussion amongst the members continued about the role, relevance and purpose of OSI, with one member astutely noting that there were a lot of “free software” wonks in the group, attempting to bastardize open source to advocate their own agenda:

If, instead, OSI has decided that they are now a Free Software organization, and that Free Software is what “we” do, and that “our” focus is on “Free software” then, then let’s change the name to the Free Software Initiative and open the gates for some other entity, who is all about Open Source, to take on that job, and do it proudly. :-)

There was debate over whether SSPL discriminates against types of users, which would disqualify it from being open source. Eliot Horowitz provided a convincing explanation that it did not, which seemed to quiet the crowd.

Heather Meeker dropped some more legal knowledge on the group, which seemed to sufficently address outstanding issues. Bruce Perens, the author of item 6 of the so-called open source definition, acknowledged that SSPL does not violate item 6 or item 9 of the definition, and subsequently suggested revising item 9 such that SSPL would violate it:

We’re not falling on our swords because of this. And we can fix OSD #9 with a two word addition “or performed” as soon as the board can meet. But it’s annoying.

Kyle Mitchell, himself an accomplished open source lawyer, opposed such a tactic. Larry Rosen pointed out that some members’ assertion (that “it is fundamental to open source that everyone can use a program for any purpose”) is untrue. Still more entertaining discussion ensued about the purpose of OSI and the meaning of open source.

Carlos Piana succinctly stated why SSPL was indeed open source. Kyle Mitchell added that if licenses were to be judged in the manner that the group was judging SSPL, then GPL v2 was not open source either.

Groundswell

Meanwhile Dor Lior, the founder of database company ScyllaDB compared SSPL and AGPL side-to-side and argued that “MongoDB would have been better off with Commons Clause or just swallowed a hard pill and stayed with APGL.” Player.FM released their service based on Commons Clause licensed RediSearch, after in-memory database company Redis Labs placed RediSearch and four other specific add-on modules (but not Redis itself) under Commons Clause, and graph database company Neo4J placed its entire codebase under Commons Clause and raised an $80M Series E.

Then Michael DeHaan, creator of Red Hat Ansible, chose Commons Clause for his new project. When asked why he did not choose any of the existing licenses that OSI has “endorsed” to be open source, he said:

This groundswell in 2018 should be ample indication that there is an industry problem that needs to be fixed.

Eliot Horowitz summarized and addressed all the issues, dropped the mic, and left for a while. When it seemed like SSPL was indeed following all the rules of open source licenses, and was garnering support of the members, Brad Kuhn put forward a clumsy argument for why OSI should change the rules as necessary to prevent SSPL from being deemed open source, concluding:

It’s likely the entire “license evaluation process” that we use is inherently flawed.

Mitchell clinched the argument that SSPL is open source with definitive points. Horowitz thanked the members for their comments and offered to address any concerns in a revision, and returned a few days later with a revised SSPL.

OSI has 60 days since MongoDB’s new submission to make a choice:

1. Wake up and realize that SSPL, perhaps with some edits, is indeed an open source license, OR
2. Effectively signal to the world that OSI does not wish to help solve the industry’s problems, and that they’d rather be policy wonks and have theoretical debates.

“Wonk” here is meant in the best possible way.

Importantly, MongoDB is proceeding to use the SSPL regardless. If MongoDB were going to wait until OSI’s decision, or if OSI were more relevant, we might wait with bated breath to hear whether OSI would endorse SSPL as an open source license.

As it stands, OSI’s decision is more important to OSI itself, than to the industry. It signals whether OSI wants to remain relevant and help solve industry problems or whether it has become too myopic to be useful. Fearful of the latter, we looked to other groups for leadership and engaged with the Apache Software Foundation (ASF) when they reached out in the hopes of creating a modern open source license that solves the industry’s needs.

OSI should realize that while it would be nice if they deemed SSPL to be open source, it is not critical. Again in the words of John Cowan, just because OSI has not endorsed a license as open source, does not mean it’s not open source. While we greatly respect almost all members of industry associations and the work they do in their fields, it is becoming difficult to respect the purpose and process of any group that anoints itself as the body that will “decide” whether a license is open source — it is arbitrary and obsolete.

Errata

In my zest to urge the industry to solve this problem, in an earlier piece, I had said that “if one takes open source software that someone else has built and offers it verbatim as a commercial service for one’s own profit” (as cloud infrastructure providers do) that’s “not in the spirit” of open-source. That’s an overstatement and thus, frankly, incorrect. Open source policy wonks pointed this out. I obviously don’t mind rattling their cages but I should have stayed away from making statements about “what’s in the spirt” so as to not detract from my main argument.

Conclusion

The behavior of cloud infrastructure providers poses an existential threat to open source. Cloud infrastructure providers are not evil. Current open source licenses allow them to take open source software verbatim and offer it as a commercial service without giving back to the open source projects or their commercial shepherds. The problem is that developers do not have open source licensing alternatives that prevent cloud infrastructure providers from doing so. Open source standards groups should help, rather than get in the way. We must ensure that authors of open source software can not only survive, but thrive. And if that means taking a stronger stance against cloud infrastructure providers, then authors should have licenses available to allow for that. The open source community should make this an urgent priority.

Disclosures

I have not invested directly or indirectly in MongoDB. I have invested directly or indirectly in the companies behind the open source projects Spring, Mule, DynaTrace, Ruby Rails, Groovy Grails, Maven, Gradle, Chef, Redis, SysDig, Prometheus, Hazelcast, Akka, Scala, Cassandra, Spinnaker, FOSSA, and… in Amazon.

Last year, $7 billion followed into ICOs. Combined with 2018, the cryptocurrency-based funding mechanism is estimated to account for $20 billion. ICOs threatened to disrupt venture capital more widely across the board, but the signs suggest that a relative status quo for investment is returning with VC capital a preferrable option once again.

We’ve seen this with some recent investments — particularly those for Binance, Kucoin and Imtoken — but more widely a relative ‘norm’ is close to being reached, two crypto industry experts told an audience at the TechCrunch Disrupt Berlin event today in conversation with TechCrunch’s Mike Butcher.

The crypto winter is here. Crypto companies are laying off staff to cut costs. The market is moving south in terms of financing, but it isn’t all bad.

These moves are going to bring stability and legality, according to Vinay Gupta — one of the developers who helped birth Ethereum who is currently CEO of tokenization product Mattereum.

The altcoin craze “began to spin down once it was easier to do that kind of stuff on Ethereum because you didn’t have to run your own decentralized network, you could just write and Ethereum script, and then you can run it on smart contract,” Gupta said on stage in Berlin.

Vinay Gupta was a member of the Ethereum Foundation, which created the Ethereum cryptocurrency and helped popularize the blockchain among developers

“Some of those projects are very successful, some aren’t, but they all should have been properly regulated securities from the beginning, because they were raising money directly to the general public. The governments didn’t go away, the internet doesn’t exist in a separate dimension, there was always going to be a settlement with regulators, and what will come out of that as a correctly regulated token economy next year, the SEC will define these things are not okay.

“The regulated exchanges will come up [and] it’s all going to straighten itself out. But by then it will be much closer to regular finance than the kind of original blockchain wild west,” he said.

Indeed, security token platforms — which use blockchain to host equity-like tokens for unregulated U.S. securities — are on the up, with some predicting that ‘digital security tokens’ will hit exchanges potentially before the end of this year. And within the legal rules.

If anything, regular venture capital is reborn again within the crypto industry.

“It depends what projects you’re talking about,” Outlier Ventures’ Jamie Burke, the second member of the panel, explained.

“If you’re talking about protocol and infrastructure, the great innovation that we’ve got, I think it’s still going to stay with us is the idea that you can that should be open source, and it can be tokenized. And that gives it very powerful network effects. And so these things absolutely should have tokens.

“The point is who should participate in financing that network and who should participate in economic value creation and at what stage? So I think we’re going to start to see hybrids. Projects will initially raise money through equity (the riskier part) until they get to the point where they need wider adoption and they need this token to incentivize the network and various behavior,” Burke said.

Jamie Burke (left, with Techcrunch’s Mike Butcher) believes that venture capital can live harmoniously with token-based investing

Gupta — who is planning to raise capital equity-based for Mattereum — said that there’s very much still an important role for ‘traditional’ VCs to be a part of company building in the blockchain space.

“Traditional venture money is important because [VCs] put a lot of skill on the table. The kind of scaling challenges that we’re expecting to see over the next year or so are much more like the kind of things that you see on traditional venture because some parts of what we do are very much jurisdiction by jurisdiction. It’s not just you stand up the network and you go,” he said.

Got it! So venture capital is still an important part of the process, despite the past examples of companies raising tens of millions of dollars through token sales.

In fact, Gupta believes that the tokenization of assets — his startup recently ‘tokenized’ a 15th century a Stradivarius violin, worth a cool $9 billion — will enable smaller investors, the type who might have bought into ICOs, to spread their capital more widely without incurring huge amounts of risk.

“The ability to buy a little bit of 10,000s of thousands of assets is the kind of thing that you could only do a very large scale right now. But it gives a kind of stability to your investments that makes ordinary investors more able to get the kind of stability of return that you get with a pension funds,” he explained.

“I think there’s a pretty good chance that this will turn out to be good for retail investors, once the markets have settled down in the irrational exuberance is burned off.”

You can watch the full panel below.

A few years back, Occipital released a sensor that turned your iPad into a portable 3D scanner. Called the Occipital Structure, it packed lasers and cameras into a snap-on package that let the iPad be used for anything from accurately measuring a room’s dimensions to building 3D models for building prosthetic limbs. The catch? For the most part, it only worked with iOS.

Today Occipital is announcing a more flexible (and powerful) alternative: Structure Core. With built-in motion sensors and compatibility with Windows, Linux, Android or macOS, it’s meant for projects where cramming in an iPad just doesn’t make sense. Think robots, or mixed reality headsets.

By blasting out an array of laser dots and using the Core’s onboard cameras to map them, Structure’s SDK is able to map its environment and determine its position within it. You could, for example, use the depth sensors to have your robot build a map of a room, then use the SDK’s built-in route tool to get it from point A to point B on command (without bashing into everything along the way).

Beyond no longer being tied to iOS, Structure Core also beefs things up under the hood. Whereas the original Structure sensor uses USB 2.0/Lightning, Structure Core taps USB 3.0 — which, the company tells me, means the SDK can pull considerably more sensor data, faster. They’ve switched from a rolling shutter to global shutter (meaning every pixel on the sensor is exposed at the same time, helping to stop tearing/distortion on fast moving objects), and the field of view has been greatly improved.

Occipital isn’t the first to dabble in this space, of course. DIY’ers have been repurposing Microsoft’s Kinect hardware (RIP) to give their robots basic vision abilities for years; meanwhile, Intel has an arm it calls RealSense focusing on drop-in vision boards. But with companies like Misty Robotics turning to Occipital to give its robots sight, it made sense to take the iPad out of the equation and offer something that could stand on its own.

Structure Core will come in two forms: enclosed, or bare. The first wraps the chipset/sensors/etc. in aluminum in a way that’s ready to be strapped right into a project; the second sheds the enclosure and gives you on-board mounting points for when you’re looking for something more custom.

Pricing is a bit peculiar for a piece of hardware — the sooner you need it, the more it’ll cost. A limited run of early units will ship in the next few weeks for $600 each; the next batch goes out in January, for $499. By March, they expect the price to officially settle at $399 each. The company also tells me that they’re open to volume pricing if a team needs a bunch of units, though those prices aren’t available yet.

Legacy is tackling an interesting problem: the reduction of sperm motility as we age. By freezing our sperm, this Swiss-based company promises to keep our boys safe and potent as we get older, a consideration that many find vital as we marry and have kids later. Legacy, which exhibited in Startup Alley at Disrupt Berlin 2018, was chosen as the wildcard company to present its services onstage during Startup Battlefield.

How does it work? Well, the company delivers a system for grabbing sperm. The material is kept in a specially made container and shipped to a nearby clinic where they then test the sperm and place it in cryogenic storage. You can then make a withdrawal when you’re ready for babies.

“Our unique at-home solution allows men to have their sperm analyzed and frozen at a clinic without leaving their home or having to meet with a physician,” said founder Khaled Kteily. “All clients receive a full fertility analysis, including personalized recommendations using our machine learning-driven technology.”

Kteily ensures us that our special sauce will stay safe over the years.

“Our core values of privacy, quality, and security ensure discretion, anonymity, and the highest level of quality for all our clients, including multi-site storage, whereby our clients’ deposits are stored in multiple tanks in multiple locations at high security.”

The company offers three packages: Bronze, Gold and Platinum. The $1,000 Bronze package requires you to take your sperm to a clinic where it will be tested and cryogenically stored. The Platinum plan costs $10,000 and ensures the company will keep up to six samples of your swimmers indefinitely, affording your genetic material practical immortality.

Kteily founded the company after a friend looked for solutions to sperm storage while facing cancer treatment. Realizing there was nothing that looked trustworthy or usable, he used his background in health and entrepreneurship to build Legacy.

The company has raised $250,000 and they are profitable. Kteily sees his company as the “Swiss Bank” of sperm storage.

“Male fertility has declined by 50 percent. Every 8 months, men produce a new genetic mutation that gets passed on to their children. Birth rates around the world are plummeting and men are responsible for infertility in 30-50 percent of couples. Meanwhile, you can freeze sperm indefinitely with no loss in quality — through Legacy, without having to leave your home and at a tenth of the cost of egg freezing,” he said. “We treat our clients as a private bank would — our core values of quality, privacy and security ensure our clients are taken care of at every level.”