Author: azeeadmin

Robinhood’s human resources department is keeping busy this month, announcing this morning that the zero-fee stock trading app and cryptocurrency exchange has tapped CapitalG partner Gretchen Howard (pictured) to lead operations.

The news comes two days after the well-funded startup hired Jason Warnick, a long-time Amazon executive, as its chief financial officer. Warnick, Amazon’s former VP of finance, joins Robinhood amid speculation the fintech ‘unicorn’ is gearing up for an eventual initial public offering.

Howard, who’s joining as a vice president, has been a partner at Alphabet’s growth investing arm since 2014. Before that, she was a vice president at Fidelity Investments.

Earlier this year, Howard helped source CapitalG’s first investment in Robinhood, though another partner, David Lawee, lead the deal. In addition to Robinhood, she’s worked closely with CapitalG portfolio companies CreditKarma, Lyft, Airbnb and Gusto.

Robinhood brought in a $363 million Series D funding round led by DST Global in May. The company raised the capital at a more than $5 billion valuation —  a 4x increase from its valuation one year prior. In total, Robinhood has secured $539 million in equity funding from ICONIQ Capital, Thrive Capital, NEA, Sound Ventures and several others since it was founded in 2013.

“I’ve been inspired by the velocity with which Robinhood builds and launches high-quality products and share their passion for democratizing financial services,” Howard said in a statement provided to TechCrunch. “While it’s bittersweet to leave Alphabet … I’m excited to remain in the Alphabet family and work closely with the CapitalG team from the portfolio side.”

While it seems to be more common for former operators to transition into venture investing, VCs, too, opt to switch sides of the table from time to time. Howard is a great example of this, as are two former Andreessen Horowitz investors Balaji Srinivasan and Asiff Hirji, who currently serve as Coinbase’s chief technology officer and chief operating officer, respectively. Coinbase is an A16z portfolio company.

Sinemia announced this morning the return of its physical debit card for in-person movie ticket sales, by “popular customer demand.” The MoviePass competitor dropped the feature back in May, but the push toward a cardless system was met with pushback from customers irritated by third-party transaction fees driving up the service’s cost cutting promises.

The new cards can be used to purchase movie tickets in-person at theaters, the day of the same. They can also be used for standard online orders, but those tickets will be subject to the same sorts of fees that have left some customers irritated at Sinemia’s shifting business model. The card its will also cost you $15, a one-time purchase made through the company’s site — which means it will take a couple of movies before the savings really kicks in.

“While our customers have been pleased that we are the only subscription service that continues to provide tickets to any movie for any showtime at any movie theater, we are constantly seeking to improve,” CEO Rifat Oguz said in a release. “Based on customer feedback, we’ve brought back physical debit cards to give our customers the option to avoid all booking fees as well as choose how they want to enjoy their night out at the movies.”

Like MoviePass, Sinemia’s plans have gone through numerous changes in the past year, though its upgrades generally appear aimed at offering users more options, rather than a bid to figure out how to stop losing money. That said, the initial move toward an all card-free system was clearly received as a misstep among many users.

Media center app Plex today announced a partnership with streaming music service TIDAL, offering discounted access to TIDAL’s 60 million tracks and 244,000+ music videos for Plex Pass subscribers. The Plex Pass is the media center app’s own subscription program, which adds support for watching and recording from live TV as well as other premium features and advanced controls.

Now, Plex Pass holders will be able to add TIDAL into the mix for $8.99 per month, instead of its usual $9.99 per month price. It’s not a steep discount, but one that could prove compelling for serious Plex users who have already centralized their access to entertainment within the Plex app.

Over the past year or so, Plex has doubled down on its mission to become a one-stop show for all your media, having added support for podcasts, streaming TV (by way of a digital antenna) and a DVR, personalized news, and, most recently, web shows. This is in addition to the software’s ability to organize your home media collections of movies, TV shows, personal video, music, and photos.

The company’s goal is to capitalize on its expansive entertainment library in order to offer better recommendations across media types. That is – it could suggest podcasts or web shows based on the TV or music you enjoy, for example.

Plex customers who add TIDAL will have access to the streamer’s entire music catalog, along with artist recommendations for those who aren’t already in your media library, as well as a feature that will display the missing albums from artists in your library. The service also offers artist radio, discovery radio for finding new tunes from those not in your library, new release recommendations, music videos, and more.

Universal search and playlists features will combine results from Plex’s library and TIDAL, allowing you to locate tracks from your local library alongside TIDAL tracks, and add both to the same playlist.

“An incredible music and media experience is something that matters to both TIDAL and Plex users, and the addition of TIDAL’s music streaming service within Plex makes it the only solution that organizes and curates all major media types in one place,” said Keith Valory, CEO of Plex, in a statement. “It’s another step closer to making all the media that matters to you accessible from one app, on any device, anytime.”

TIDAL will also point its subscribers to Plex as a part of the deal, giving them access to Plex’s music features and mobile app, or, in the case of Tidal HiFi subscribers ($19.99/mo), they get a Plex Pass for free.

Once signed up for TIDAL, Plex users can quickly merge their subscription to Plex from here.

The TIDAL subscription is available on Plex mobile and web* to start, with expansion to other TV platforms expected to follow.

Versions required: Plex Media Server 1.14.0.5470; iOS 5.7.2; Android 7.8.0; Web 3.77.2 

Headphone maker Sennheiser has patched its software after the company admitted a serious vulnerability that made it easy for hackers to impersonate any website — even encrypted pages.

The software, which helps Mac and Windows users to connects their headphones to other devices, also installed a self-signed root certificates with an easily obtainable private key. Because the key was stored in the operating system’s certificate store and the same key was used on every installation, it was easy for anyone to create their own certificate on a website to look like the original website — even when it isn’t.

That makes it easy for phishing, credential stealing, or spreading malware and disinformation when it looks like it’s coming from the original, legitimate source.

“The victim would have to inspect the HTTPS server certificate respectively code signing certificate in a detail level that shows the root certificate to which the certificate in question is linked,” said the report by Secorvo’s Hans-Joachim Knobloch and André Domnick, published this week.

But most people never do — they see a green padlock and assume the best.

To prove their point, the researchers created a wildcard certificate that spoofed Google’s homepage, making it look almost impossible to distinguish rom the real site.

Make no mistake: this was a monumental security flaw that put every Sennheiser software user at risk. But what made matters worse is that removing the software wouldn’t remove the certificate — leaving them still vulnerable to spoofing and impersonation attacks.

“Since the certificate is not removed from the trusted root certificate store during update or removal of the software, every system on which HeadSetup 7.3 was installed at any time in the past – and every user on such a system – remains vulnerable,” said the report.

Sennheiser later issued a software update that remediated the vulnerability by updating the root store with a new certificate that omitted the private key.

Microsoft also released its own advisory this week, warning users of the inadvertently disclosed certificate and private key. The software giant updated its own certificate trust list to protect Windows users from certificate spoofing by throwing an error.

Cast your mind back to 2015 and you might remember a similar security scandal: the Superfish adware, which shipped preinstalled in Lenovo PCs.

Like Sennheiser, Superfish contained a certificate that effectively allowed the company to man-in-the-middle the user’s connection and inject ads — even when the connection is encrypted and believed to be “secure.” The key was made public, allowing anyone to take advantage of the weakness while on the same network.

Lenovo was later fined $3.5 million for the security lapse.

Before we send any planet-trotting robot to explore the landscape of Mars or Venus, we need to test it here on Earth. Two such robotic platforms being developed for future missions are undergoing testing at European Space Agency facilities: one that rolls, and one that hops.

The rolling one is actually on the books to head to the Red Planet as part of the ESA’s Mars 2020 program. It’s just wrapped a week of testing in the Spanish desert, just one of many Mars analogs space programs use. It looks nice. The gravity’s a little different, of course, and there’s a bit more atmosphere, but it’s close enough to test a few things.

The team controlling Charlie, which is what they named the prototype, was doing so from hundreds of miles away, in the U.K. — not quite an interplanetary distance, but they did of course think to simulate the delay operators would encounter if the rover were actually on Mars. It would also have a ton more instruments on board.

Exploration and navigation was still done entirely using information collected by the rover via radar and cameras, and the rover’s drill was also put to work. It rained one day, which is extraordinarily unlikely to happen on Mars, but the operators presumably pretended it was a dust storm and rolled with it.

Another Earth-analog test is scheduled for February in Chile’s Atacama desert. You can learn more about the ExoMars rover and the Mars 2020 mission here.

The other robot that the ESA publicized this week isn’t theirs but was developed by ETH Zurich: the SpaceBok —  you know, like springbok. The researchers there think that hopping around like that well-known ungulate could be a good way to get around on other planets.

It’s nice to roll around on stable wheels, sure, but it’s no use when you want to get to the far side of some boulder or descend into a ravine to check out an interesting mineral deposit. SpaceBok is mean to be a highly stable jumping machine that can traverse rough terrain or walk with a normal quadrupedal gait as needed (well, normal for robots).

“This is not particularly useful on Earth,” admits SpaceBok team member Elias Hampp, but “it could reach a height of four meters on the Moon. This would allow for a fast and efficient way of moving forward.”

It was doing some testing at the ESA’s “Mars Yard sandbox,” a little pen filled with Mars-like soil and rocks. The team is looking into improving autonomy with better vision — the better it can see where it lands, the better SpaceBok can stick that landing.

Interplanetary missions are very much in vogue now, and we may soon even see some private trips to the Moon and Mars. So even if NASA or the ESA doesn’t decide to take SpaceBok (or some similarly creative robot) out into the solar system, perhaps a generous sponsor will.

As Roborace accelerates its plans to build an autonomous racing league, the company is finding that its toughest competition are still human drivers.

In this version of the John Henry story, the humans clearly are still winning, but the robots are catching up.

“We’re going to call it a singularity event when an autonomous racing car is faster than any racing driver,” says Lucas Di Grassi, Roborace’s chief executive and one of the world’s best Formula One racecar drivers. “We started the year 20% slower and we are now 6% slower.”

For the company’s long-term vision, the cars need to be better than any human, because part of the company’s pitch is to be the proving ground for autonomous technologies and a platform to put automakers’ best innovations through their paces in extreme conditions.

“We think when the car reaches a level that is better than any human this will create a layer of trust on the roads,” says Di Grassi. 

It’s a vision that has attracted the attention of some of the world’s biggest companies. Earlier this week, Amazon announced its own initiative for autonomous racing cars. And if Amazon is interested, you can be sure other large technology companies are also angling for a pole position in this proving ground for technology’s latest moonshot.

Amazon’s version of autonomous race cars are smaller than Roborace’s full-sized vehicles — and at $399 are far cheaper than the $1 million vehicles that Roborace is planning on putting on tracks.

Beyond the potential corporate competitors, the company’s human competition is more than just a technical obstacle for Roborace. It’s also a critical unknown when it comes to predicting whether anyone actually will want to watch the races.

When asked whether he thinks Roborace can find an audience for races that are divorced of any element of human risk or drama, Di Grassi says “We don’t know.”

To integrate the two worlds of robot racing and human Formula One (or the increasingly popular Formula E series), Roborace has tweaked its competitive model. Earlier this year, the company unveiled a new model of its car that has room for a human driver behind the wheel.

That human driver is critical to Di Grassi’s new vision for how Roborace competition will now work. In the latest iteration of the company’s races, which will see their first flag waved in April or May of 2019, human drivers will play a larger role in the race.

“We are trying to combine humans and computers in a sport,” says Di Grassi. “The races next year will be a combination of drivers racing for the first part of the race and in a pit stop the driver jumps out and the autonomous vehicle will take over. We want to create this reality that the human and the machine are working together for a better outcome.”

Di Grassi hopes that this integration of the human element and autonomy will be enough to attract viewers, but there are other ways that the company plans to bring an audience to the wild world of autonomous robot racing.

“People want to interact,” says Di Grassi. And with the company’s planned robot races, there will be ways for audiences in the stands to shape the course of the race, potentially by throwing augmented reality obstacles onto the track for the autonomous cars to avoid — creating new challenges for technology to be put through its paces.

“We’re going to try and engage and we’re going to try and get different forms of engagement,” Di Grassi says. Including developing an open source platform that would enable viewers to interact with simulated races in virtual reality — encouraging audience participation and competition in virtual racing leagues that could mirror the action among actual racing teams. 

Like traditional Formula One racing, Roborace is serving two audiences. One is the company’s actual customers — the automakers and vendors that are building the software and hardware for electric and autonomous vehicles — and the audience that ideally will be around to see the fruit of all that labor.

Right now, no automakers have signed up as partners, in part, Di Grassi says, because they’re not confident with their technology. “The automakers are afraid because the software is not ready,” says Di Grassi. But the company’s chief executive is undeterred, because of the profusion of technologies required to make autonomous vehicles work. “Autonomous cars are a combination of a lot of different technology segments — sensors, electric motors, batteries. Our customers are sensor processing companies [and] companies like Nvidia, Qualcomm, Intel,” DiGrassi says.

However, at some point Roborace needs that audience so vendors can prove that their technology works, and people can become more comfortable with the safety and capabilities of autonomous vehicles.

“Nobody’s using high precision vehicle model like drifting and sliding and these situations will be very real. There is a whole different segment that we can develop faster in a controlled environment,” says DiGrassi. “The pitch is to compete against each other to develop technology faster and you develop trust among consumers… this will give trust to people to jump into autonomous taxi in the future.”

Bay Area-based robotic exoskeleton company Roam announced this morning that it has secured a $12 million series A. The round, led by Yamaha Motors, with investments from Boost VC, Heuristics Capital Partners, Menlo Ventures, R7 Partners, Spero Ventures, Valor Equity Partners and Venture Investment Associates, brings the company’s total funding up to around $15 million.

Investors are understandably bullish on the space, which has far-reaching implications for industrial workers and mobility. Of course, Roam’s got a fair bit of competition in the robotic exoskeleton category, including prominent names like Ekso and SuitX. So far, however, the company has looked to carve out a niche with a product focused on skiers.

The Elevate, first announced in March, will finally be available for demo rental over the Christmas holiday in select Lake Tahoe locations, followed by Park City, Utah over the Presidents’ Day holiday. This new round will go a ways toward boosting sales and marketing for the first product.

In addition to the funding, Yamaha partner Amish Parashar and Spero general partner Shripriya Mahesh will be joining Roam’s board of directors. Here’s the former on the deal, “By making these robotic exoskeletons affordable, scalable, and powerful Roam has removed the biggest barriers to widespread adoption. We envision these products will one day be commonly used to create new thrilling experiences and support human mobility.”

Facebook pissed off journalists earlier this year when it announced that ads run by news publishers to promote their articles involving elected officials, candidates, and national issues would be included alongside political campaign ads in its ads transparency archive, albeit in a separate section. The News Media Alliance representing 2000 newspapers including the New York Times and NewsCorp plus other new organizations sent a letter to Mark Zuckerberg in June protesting their inclusion. They claimed it would blur the lines between propaganda and journalism, and asked Facebook to exempt news publishers.

Now Facebook has granted that exception. Legitimate news organizations who publish with bylines and dates, cite sources, and don’t have a history of having stories flagged as false by third-party fact checkers will no longer have their ads appear in the Ads Archive. They also won’t have to carry a “Paid for by…” label when they appear in the News Feed. Facebook will be using its newly built news publisher index that outlets can apply to to decide which ad buyers are exempt. That index is up and running in the US and will expand to other countries, but for now Facebook is using a third-party list of legitimate UK news outlets who’ll be exempted.

The change comes as Facebook rolls out enforcement of its political ads transparency rules in the UK today. “Now political advertisers must confirm their identity and location, as well as say who paid for the ad, before they can be approved to run political ads on Facebook and/or Instagram” Facebook tells TechCrunch. These ads will also feature the “Paid for by…” label.

The hope is that by determining who is paying for these ads, properly labeling them, and exempting journalists, Facebook will be able to better track foreign misinformation campaigns and election interference. Meanwhile, users will have a better understanding of who’s funding the political and issue ads they see on Facebook.

Is barking orders at our AI-powered voice assistants turning us into jerks? Are our kids growing accustomed to commanding the Google Homes and Siris of the world to turn on the lights without the politeness of a “please”?

Perhaps. With that in mind, from here on out, Google Assistant will be a bit more cheery if you take the time to say “please” or “thank you”.

If, for example, you say “Hey Google, please set a timer for 10 minutes”, Google Assistant will respond “Thanks for asking so nicely! 10 minutes, starting now.”

To be clear: it’s totally optional. Prefer to be curt? That’s okay — Assistant won’t chastise you. But if these are habits you’re trying to instill in a little one or polish up yourself, Assistant will respond in kind.

Google first mentioned that they’d be adding this feature, which they call “Pretty Please”, at I/O in May. Amazon rolled an almost identical feature into Alexa back in April of this year.

Google Assistant is picking up a few other new tricks this morning:

• You can say “Hey Google, Call Santa” to have a chat with ol’ Saint Nick himself. That’s been around a while, but they’ve added a new storyline (and visuals, if you have an Assistant device with a display.)
• They’ve added a bunch of Christmas stories to Assistant’s story time feature, so you can say things like “Hey Google, read me ‘Twas the night before Christmas'”, or ‘Hey Google, tell me a Christmas story’ to kick things off.
• You can now add things to a specific list, such as your wish list or Christmas dinner shopping list, via Assistant. Say “Hey Google, add ‘Kindle for mom’ to my gift list” and it’ll know what you mean. You can also create new lists via Assistant, and Google notes that they’ll soon support third party services Any.do, Bring!, and Todoist.
• If you have a Assistant device with a display built-in, it can now double as a lil’ Karaoke machine — ask it to play a song via Google Play Music, and the lyrics should now appear in sync.
• If you have an Assistant device with a display built-in and a Nest doorbell, you can now chat with whoever’s at the door thanks to a new two way talk button.

Atomico, the London-based venture capital firm co-founded by Skype founder Niklas Zennström, has launched a new program to find, mentor and back the next generation of angel investors across various hubs in the European tech startup ecosystem.

Dubbed the Atomico Angel Programme, and unveiled on stage at TechCrunch Disrupt Berlin, the new initiative is headed up by newly promoted Atomico Partner Sophia Bendz, with support from Associate Will Dufton. Prior to joining Atomico she was an exec and early employee at Spotify, and has been a very active angel investor based in the Nordics over the last few years.

In a call last Friday, Bendz explained that the idea behind the program is to help “activate” a new generation of angel investors who Atomico believes are well-placed to discover “the most innovative and ambitious” founders just starting out, and to attract new people to angel investing sooner than might otherwise happen. More broadly, Atomico is always looking for new ways to help grow the ecosystem in Europe. A rising tide lifts all boats, after all.

“We are passionate about helping all of the ecosystems to flourish and this is one way of boosting them, and we’re also passionate about helping to activate the next generation of angels,” said Bendz. “And for me it has been such a rewarding journey doing angel investments, and there are more people out there with knowledge and capabilities, so this is a way for us to sort of help seed them in a way”.

The Atomico Angel Programme will run on a 12-month rolling basis, with 12 angels backed in the first cohort (full list published below). Each angel is given $100,000 to write multiple early-stage cheques. They remain entirely autonomous and who they choose to invest in is up to them, as long as it does not violate Atomico’s ethical investment principles and commitments to its LPs (i.e nothing “unethical” including drugs, alcohol, tobacco, firearms, and porn startups etc).

And of course angels get a share of the upside if or when the founders they back succeed, in the same way that Atomico does. To promote collaboration by angels in the program, Atomico is also allocating “pooled carry,” meaning that one company’s success benefits all the Atomico angels in the same cohort.

“It’s more relationships than transactions that matters for us, so this is a long-term play where we care about relationships with founders and talented and interesting people in our ecosystem,” said Bendz. “It’s a way for us to come closer to the grassroots community and we are always passionate about, you know, connecting and making sure people meet, so we can help being that connector and put the graduate community even closer to the old established institutions and the people that they want to meet”.

Interestingly, Atomico itself doesn’t do seed investments but backs companies one or two stages later at Series A and beyond, so the Angel Programme is very different from the angel scout networks typically operated by large VC firms in Silicon Valley that want to build a bridge to seed stage deal-flow.

It is also notable that, unlike some U.S. VCs, Atomico is making the initiative public from the get-go, offering a greater level of transparency. After all, there’s something rather odd about angel investors investing in young companies but unable to disclose where the money is actually coming from. That said, Atomico isn’t disclosing the exact split between Atomico, the angels in the program, and the pooled carry.

Another thing worth pointing out and the part that is arguably disruptive, albeit on quite a small-scale, is that the program has a chance to create angel investors that might never have the personal wealth to start investing, and therefore to diversify the angel ecosystem with fresh ideas and new, otherwise untapped investor talent. That’s because the program is targeting people who are not expected to have had a huge exit or even any exit at all. Right off the bat, the gender balance of the first cohort is better than any group of angels I’ve come across.

“What I’m excited about with this program is we are doing things a bit differently, we’re transparent about it and reaching a slightly different group of angels than the ones that are approached by the big firms in the Valley,” said Bendz. “These are more people that are operators, founders, co-founders. c-suite people, and some are great connectors with their feet down in the depths of the ecosystem, so we want to help them to do angel investments, maybe even sooner than what normally happens: People with great deal-flow that maybe haven’t had their own liquidity event”.

That’s not to say that there isn’t direct upside for Atomico. The firm makes no secret that it wants to find well-placed future angels in hard to reach “pockets” right across the often fragmented European ecosystem.

The first cohort is quite shrewdly filled with a number of known uber-connectors, such as former U.K. government advisor Rohan Silva and Station F’s Roxanne Varza. And whilst there is absolutely no guarantee that Atomico will go on to back any of the companies its newly activated angels choose to invest in, VC relationships often work best when they start early. Bendz also told me Atomico worked hard to find angels outside of its existing network.

To that end, the full list is as follows:

• Doreen Huber, Founder, LemonCat
• Suvi Haimi, Co-Founder, Sulapac
• Stefano Bernardi, Co-Founder, Token Economy
• Rohan Silva, Co-Founder, Second Home
• Clare Johnston, Founder, The Up Group
• Emily Brooke, Founder, Beryl
• Gregory Gazagne, Executive Vice President, Criteo
• Roxanne Varza, Director, Station F
• Josefin Landgård, Co-Founder, Kry
• Tuva Palm, Founder, Executive Tech Advisor
• Ritu Jain, Co-Founder, LifeX
• Johan Brand, Founding Partner, We Are Human