Author: azeeadmin

It’s been a year for on-demand services in India. Drivezy today became the latest to refuel after it raised a $20 million Series B.

The round was led by existing investor Das Capital, with participation from automotive giant Yamaha, Axan Partners and IT-Farm. The deal takes Drivezy, which was formerly known as JustRide, to $31 million raised to date. In addition, the startup has also inked a $100 million asset financing deal backed by Japan’s AnyPay, which will see new cars and motorbikes added to Drivezy’s fleet over the next year.

Drivezy — which graduated Y Combinator and Google’s Launchpad Accelerator program — claims to have a fleet of around 8,000 vehicles that includes 5,000 two-wheelers (motorbikes and scooters) and 3,000 cars. That attracts around 37,000 customers every month. Abhishek Mahajan, one of the company’s five co-founders, told TechCrunch in an interview that the fleet should add a further 50,000-60,000 new vehicles, 75 percent of which would be two-wheelers, thanks to the AnyPay deal.

Mahajan said that Drivezy is currently market leader when it comes to self-drive two-wheelers — “self-drive” meaning vehicles that can be rented for a trip — with motorbikes and scooters accounting for “the bulk” of transactions, but just 20 percent of revenue. (That’s opposed to 80 percent for cars.) Revenue itself is 25 percent of the cut of a rental.

Aside from the asset financing deal — which will see AnyPay’s Harbourfront Capital vehicle own the new assets — Drivezy uses peer-to-peer and dealership partners for its fleet. The peer-to-peer appeal centers around increasing the utility of vehicles (and providing additional income to owners); that’s a similar pitch to car dealerships, who can draw income from vehicles used on Drivezy that would otherwise sit idle waiting to be purchased.

But the AnyPay deal is a “game changer,” according to Mahajan.

“When we fast-forward five years, we can’t imagine a scenario that car ownership in India goes from eight percent [right now] to U.S. level of 80 percent. India will have to skip a cycle on the culture of ownership and move into a sustainable sharing of cars model,” he added.

Drivezy isn’t alone in believing that future. The company’s main rivals include Revv, which raised $14.3 million led by Hyundai this year, and Zoomcar, which has raised $100 million from investors that include Ford and India’s Mahindra & Mahindra. With Yamaha jumping aboard with Drivezy, India’s on-demand rentals market has three automotive firms in the race.

For now, there’s no plan to move overseas, but Mahajan said that markets like Southeast Asia could become expansion targets in the future, once the India business is more developed.

Instagram is a visual service; it’s a feed of photos and videos and memes that users take in, but the company is rethinking how to optimize a visual service for users with visual impairments via a couple of new features.

The accessibility-focused update rolling out today offers two options to give visually impaired users alternative text descriptions of what’s happening in posts. One leverages user text input while the other uses Facebook’s object recognition tech to do the heavy lifting.

The descriptions will surface for users utilizing screen readers. The user-input alternative text option will pop up in advanced settings when a user is posting a photo. It’s definitely a little out of the way, but it exists now, so that’s something. While there’s a level of depth that can only come from a human-written visual description, the company’s use of its object recognition software is obviously going to be carrying out most of the text descriptions on items in the Feed, Explore and Profile sections.

It’s an interesting proposition for a service that has made a name for itself through being almost entirely visual, keeping text and external navigations at bay while promoting a feed that’s all about visual absorption. At this point Instagram is far from fringe, and neither is the segment of the population that has a visual impairment — 285 million according to the blog post announcing the feature.

Audi is making room in its electric future for more than SUVs or crossovers.

After a string of teasers, the German automaker finally unveiled the Audi e-tron GT concept, a four-door all-electric coupe that has some Porsche DNA sprinkled in and that looks a lot like the A7. Audi introduced the concept Wednesday during the press days of the LA Auto Show.

The GT concept follows the September reveal of automaker’s first all-electric vehicle, the Audi e-tron SUV that is expected to go into volume production next year.

The e-tron GT is a concept for now. But not for long.

The e-tron GT concept will be developed volume-production models by the end of 2020. Initial deliveries will be made to customers in early 2021. Audi said its performance subsidiary Audi Sport is responsible for transforming the car into a volume-production model.

First, the notable specs.

The Audi e-tron GT, which has a flat, wide underlying architecture and a long wheelbase, has separate electric motors fitted to the front and rear axles that produce an equivalent of 590 horsepower. The e-tron GT will accelerate from 0 to about 60 miles per hour in around 3.5 seconds and reach a top speed just shy of 150 mph, according to Audi.

The interior is vegan as well — perhaps a nod to Tesla — with synthetic leather and fabric from recycled fibers used on the seat cushions, armrests and center console. Audi doesn’t indicate whether a production version will off a vegan interior.

The vehicle has some Porsche touches as well. The Audi GT e-tron will be built on the Porsche Taycan platform. The Taycan, formerly known as Mission E, is an-electric sports car that Porsche plans to put into series production in 2019.

While Porsche worked with Audi on the e-tron GT, it should not be confused with another joint electric platform project between the two companies. Audi and Porsche have also partnered to develop its “Premium Platform Electric” (PPE), which will be the foundation for multiple Audi model families with all-electric drive.

The electric GT will have a range of about 248.5 miles, although that could change by the time the vehicle goes into volume production. The Audi e-tron GT also shares the same 800-volt system as the Porsche Taycan, a feature that will shorten the time it takes to charge the battery. It will take about 20 minutes to recharge the battery to 80 percent of its capacity, according to Audi. (It’s worth noting that the Audi e-tron SUV doesn’t have this capability).

The battery in the e-tron GT concept can be charged using a cable or wirelessly by positioning the vehicle over a charging pad that has an integral coil installed on the floor. It’s unclear with the induction charging feature will make it into the production version of the e-tron GT.

The e-tron GT is just the beginning of what promises to be a string of electric vehicle reveals by Audi. The company has said that it will sell 12 all-electric vehicles by 2025.

AWS has always been the pure cloud vendor, and even though it has given a nod to hybrid, it is now fully embracing it. Today in conjunction with VMware, it announced a pair of options to bring AWS into the datacenter.

Yes, you read it correctly. You can now put AWS into your data center with AWS hardware, the same design they use in their own datacenters. The two new products are part of AWS Outposts.

There are two Outposts variations — VMware Cloud on AWS Outposts and AWS Outposts. The first uses the VMware control panel. The second allows customers to run compute and storage on-premises using the same AWS APIs that are used in the AWS cloud

In fact, VMware CEO Pat  Gelsinger joined AWS CEO Andy Jassy on stage for a joint announcement. The two companies have been working together for some to bring VMware to the AWS cloud. Part of this announcement flips that on its head bringing the AWS cloud on prem to work with VMware. In both cases, AWS sells you their hardware, installs it if you wish, and will even maintain it for you.

This is an area that AWS has lagged, preferring the vision of a cloud, rather than moving back to the datacenter, but it’s a tacit acknowledgment that customers want to operate in both places for the foreseeable future.

The announcement also extends the company’s cloud-native like vision. On Monday, the company announced Transit Gateways, which is designed to provide a single way to manage network resources, whether they live in the cloud or on-prem.

Now AWS is bringing its cloud on prem, something that Microsoft, Canonical, Oracle and others have had for some time. It’s worth noting that today’s announcement is a public preview. The actual release is expected in the second half of next year.

Hand-held gimbals have largely been the realm of pro videographers. But DJI is looking to change things up with an ultra-portable take on its popular Osmo line. The Osmo Pocket is a four-inch-tall version of the drone maker’s camera stabilizer that can either be plugged into an iPhone or utilized as a standalone.

At $349 it’s not exactly cheap — in fact, it’s about twice what the Osmo Mobile 2 is currently going for on Amazon. That’s due in part to the inclusion of a one-inch touchscreen that lets you shoot and preview videos without an external camera. Of course, it can also be used in tandem with an iPhone or Android device via a Lighting or USB-C dongle. 

I suspect that pricing is going to inhibit the product’s ability to reach a more mainstream audience — especially with all of the things users can currently accomplish with just an iPhone. But the Pocket incorporates DJI’s impressive technologies and shot modes to accomplish some pretty cool videos.

The device can actively recognize and track an image with a few taps. There are also FaceTrack, time-lapse, FPV, selfie and panorama features built in. For quick, production-quality shots, there are a number of different shot modes, similar to the ones found on the company’s Mavic drones. Story Mode features 10 templates, and Pro Mode gives the shooter a wide range of controls over the final shot.

The gimbal does three-axis stabilization to keep shots steady, while the camera can shoot 12-megapixel images and 4K video up to 60fps.

I had the opportunity to play around with the device a bit this week, ahead of today’s announcement, and found it to be fairly intuitive. We’ll get more time with the gimbal in the near future, and hopefully get some more insight into precisely what justifies the $350 price tag. For now, it seems prohibitively expensive for a product that’s clearly trying to sneak out just in time for the holidays.

It’s a hefty price tag for a product that will admittedly make for some very cool Instagram stories — but I’m more than happy to be proven wrong here. The company is going to offer up a bunch of different accessories to make the Osmo a bit more diverse, including a waterproof case and action camera-style mount, so it can double as something akin to a GoPro. There’s a wireless charging case, as well, which extends the battery by around two hours. 

The Osmo Pocket is available through DJI  for pre-order today and starts shipping December 15.

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Earlier this year, the U.S. government tried to force Facebook to secretly recode its Messenger app to allow the feds to listen into an encrypted, real-time voice call on suspected members associated with the notorious MS-13 gang.

It was only when reporters revealed that when Facebook declined, the feds pushed the court to hold the company in contempt. The case collapsed, but details of the case remain under seal and out of the public eye.

Now, the ACLU wants to know how the feds tried to pull it off.

The rights and civil liberties group filed a motion in California on Wednesday to ask the judge to unseal the case to reveal exactly what the government asked that was enough to convince the court to demand Facebook dismantle Messenger’s encryption in the first place. The motion also wants to know what legal grounds the Justice Department had to compel Facebook to undermine the security in its own product — and for what reason the court pushed back.

Jennifer Granick, ACLU’s surveillance and cybersecurity counsel, said the public “deserves to know why the government thought it could dismantle measures that protect their right to privacy online.”

“The outcome of this legal dispute between Facebook and the Justice Department has the potential to affect the private communications of millions of Americans who use communication services such as Messenger, WhatsApp, Skype, and Microsoft Outlook,” she said.

It’s the latest in several attempts in recent years to compel a company to rework its products to help the government conduct surveillance. But because Facebook won its legal challenge in private, experts warn that other companies facing similar efforts to undermine their products will not be able to use Facebook’s legal precedent in their own defense.

“In a world constantly changing due to rapid advances in technology, the American legal system must keep pace,” said Kara Brandeisky and Kristin Mulvey, two law students at New York University’s School of Law, who helped write the motion. “That can’t happen if we don’t even know what the law says about our right to privacy and security.”

The ACLU’s motion was joined by the Electronic Frontier Foundation and Stanford’s Riana Pfefferkorn.

Facebook declined to comment. A spokesperson for the Justice Dept. also declined to comment.

Amazon’s AWS launched Amazon Forecast, a new pre-built machine learning tool today that will make it easier for developer to generate predictions based on time-series data. While predictions are pretty much the most standard use case for machine learning, building them still takes some skill. Amazon, of course, has already built plenty of these models for its own needs, so now it is essentially turning them into a product

“With just three clicks, you can give us the information and get a forecast,” AWS CEO Andy Jassy said in today’s keynote. “It’s super simple and when we benchmarked with customers in the private beta and ourselves, it’s providing up to 50 percent more accurate forecasts than what people were doing on their own before at one tenth of the cost of traditional supply chain software.”

Amazon, in its retail business, built a number of models to handle its own data. This is essentially the same technology that Amazon uses to forecast demand on its retail site. Users provide the company with all of their supply chain data and then gives the service the variables that could have impact on the forecast.

Behind the scenes, AWS looks at the data and the signal and then choose from eight different pre-built algorithms, train the model, tweak it and provide the forecast.

AWS is also making it easy to integrate this service with SAP’s and Oracle’s supply chain tools, as well as Amazon’s new Timestream database service.

The service isn’t necessarily cheap but it will surely save developers a lot of time.

Amazon today announced AWS DeepRacer, a fully autonomous 1/18th scale race car that aims to help developers learn machine learning. Priced at $399 but currently offered for $249, the race car lets developers to get hands-on – literally – with a machine learning technique called reinforcement learning (RL).

RL takes a different approach to training models than other machine learning techniques, Amazon explained.

It’s a type of machine learning that works when an “agent” is allowed to act on a trial-and-error basis within an interactive environment. It does so using feedback from those actions to learn over time in order to reach a predetermined goal or to maximize some type of score or reward.

This makes it different from other machine learning techniques – like Supervised Learning, for example – as it doesn’t require any labeled training data to get started, and it can make short-term decisions while optimizing for a long-term goal.

The new race car lets developers experiment with RL by learning through autonomous driving.

Developers first get started using a virtual car and tracks in a cloud-based 3D racing simulator, powered by AWS RoboMaker. Here, they can train an autonomous driving model against a collection of predefined race tracks included with the simulator, then evaluate them virtually or choose to download them to the real-world AWS DeepRacer car.

They can also opt to participate in the first AWS DeepRacer League at the re:Invent conference, where the car was announced. This event will take place over the next 24 hours in the AWS DeepRacer workshops and at the MGM Speedway and will involve using Amazon SageMaker, AWS RoboMaker, and other AWS services.

There are 6 main tracks each with a pit area, a hacker garage, and two extra tracks developers can use for training and experimentation. There will also be a DJ.

The League will continue after the event as well, with a series of live racing events starting in 2019 at AWS Global Summits worldwide. Virtual tournaments will also be hosted throughout the year, Amazon said, with the goal of winning the AWS DeepRacer 2019 Championship Cup at re:invent 2019.

As for the car’s hardware itself, it’s a 1/18th scale, radio-controlled, four-wheel drive vehicle powered by an Intel Atom processor. The processor runs Ubuntu 16.04 LTS, ROS (Robot Operating System), and the Intel OpenVino computer vision toolkit.

The car also includes a 4 megapixel camera with 1080p resolution, 802.11ac WiFi, multiple USB ports, and battery power that will last for about 2 hours.

It’s available for sale on Amazon here.

Personalization has long been at the forefront of Amazon’s business strategy. Today, it’s finally expanding to the company’s cloud storage arm, Amazon Web Services.

AWS has announced the launch of Amazon Personalize, a fully-managed service that puts personalization and recommendation under the control of developers.

AWS developers were already able to create recommendation models on Amazon SageMaker, but AWS’ latest update makes creating them much simpler and requires little machine learning experience. A new process called AutoML, which automates complicated ML tasks, “performs and accelerates the difficult work required to design, train, and deploy a machine learning model,” the company says.

AWS chief executive officer Andy Jassy unveiled the new feature, as well as several others, on stage at the company’s annual re:Invent conference this morning.

“One of the core tenets of our business is that with no physical boundaries we can have millions of items available,” Jassy said. “We worried if we didn’t find a way to give people signal through the noise, the catalog size would be overwhelming, so we built personalization … Necessity was the mother of invention for us.”

Dive deep into the new service here.

One of the challenges just about every business faces is converting forms to a useful digital format. This has typically involved using human data entry clerks to enter the data into the computer. State of the art involved using OCR to read forms automatically, but AWS CEO Andy Jassy explained that OCR is basically just a dumb text reader. It doesn’t recognize text types. Amazon wanted to change that and today it announced Textract, an intelligent OCR tool to move data from forms to a more useable digital format.

In an example, he showed a form with tables. Regular OCR didn’t recognize the table and interpreted it as a string of text. Textract is designed to recognize common page elements like a table and pull the data in a sensible way.

Jassy said that forms also often change and if you are using a template as a work-around for OCR’s lack of intelligence, the template breaks if you move anything. To fix that, Textract is smart enough to understand common data types like social security numbers, dates of birth and addresses and it interprets them correctly no matter where they fall on the page.

“We have taught Textract to recognize this set of characters is a date of birth and this is a social security number. If forms change Textract won’t miss it,” Jassy explained