Author: azeeadmin

It’s Cyber Monday and Amazon has one deal for its customers that’s a little unexpected. The company just announced that it has made available, for free, the same machine learning courses that it uses to train its own engineers.

It’s a lot of information to digest — from a programming standpoint. According to a newly released statement by Matt Wood, an eight-year veteran of Amazon and a general manager of deep learning and AI at the company, there are more than 45 hours across 30 different courses that developers, data scientists, data platform engineers and business professionals can take gratis.

As he explains them, each “starts with the fundamentals, and builds on those through real-world examples and labs, allowing developers to explore machine learning through some fun problems we have had to solve at Amazon. These include predicting gift wrapping eligibility, optimizing delivery routes, or predicting entertainment award nominations using data from IMDb (an Amazon subsidiary). Coursework helps consolidate best practices, and demonstrates how to get started on a range of AWS machine learning services, including Amazon SageMaker, AWS DeepLens, Amazon Rekognition, Amazon Lex, Amazon Polly, and Amazon Comprehend.”

The company says that in order to help employers hire more efficiently, it is also introducing its own machine-learning certification that customers can take right now for half price.

Presumably, part of the idea is to enhance Amazon’s retail pages, as well as to potentially recruit more people into the company so it can accelerate its own growth.

If Amazon earns some much-needed goodwill along the way, so be it. As you may have read already, among the company’s other problems at the very moment are employees who walked off the job on Friday at the company’s fulfillment centers in Germany, Spain and France, some of them using the slogan “we are not robots.”

You can find Wood’s full statement here.

Corvus Insurance, a two-year-old, Boston-based insurance company that uses data across more than 50 criteria to predict and prevent losses for its corporate customers in the food and pharmaceutical industries, has attracted $8 million in funding, shows a newly processed SEC filing that says the capital came from six investors.

The company had previously raised $4 million seed funding led by Bain Capital Ventures. The filing shows a target of $10 million.

It’s an interesting company. Much of the data it extracts comes from internet of things sensors that can be used to predict the likelihood of a claim, including owing to pressure on a roof owing to the weight of snow, for example. But it also relies on other data from all around, including videos, mobile phones, and social media and turns them into tools for risk management.

Founder Philip Edmundson is a veteran of the insurance industry, having previously founded and sold a brokerage business in 2015. As he told the outlet Business Insurance earlier this year, he jumped back into the business after spying a fresh opportunity to focus not on getting rid of the middleman — which is the objective of many insurtech startups — but instead on the claims piece of the insurance business, which consumes far more of each dollar spent in the industry.

When it comes to shipping for example, he’d said that if a company has a claim or multiple claims around food spoilage with a certain shipper or region, similar instances can be avoided by planning around those situations after Corvus informs the broker and policyholder with its recommendations. (An agreement with one of the largest temperature sensor companies in the world, Sensitech, certainly helps.)

The company is focused for now on the food and pharmaceutical industries because both use sensors everywhere — on vehicles, machines, HVAC systems — for insurance and for regulatory reasons. But presumably, if it can prove its use case, it will expand its target market over time.

In the meantime, it’s part of a fast-growing, and increasingly crowded, landscape. As of last month, global fundraising for insurtech startups surpassed the volume reached in all of 2017, according to advisory firm Hampleton Partners’ latest insurtech M&A market report, which says  204 deals had been closed as of October, compared with 202 last year and 174 in 2016. All told, investors plugged $2.6 billion into those 204 deals — nearly the $2.7 billion that was plugged into insurtech startups in 2015.

Apparently all of those deals are leading to a lot of dealmaking, too. According to the report, the insurtech sector has seen 151 acquisitions since 2016, including by legacy players, as well as private equity firms.

The mysteries lying beyond our planet have puzzled and inspired scientists throughout the centuries. But today, the scientific community (and many others) have their eyes on Mars, where NASA’s InSight lander is set to touch down on the red planet.

The whole thing is going down at 3pm ET today, and you can follow along with the exhilarating descent right here, via NASA:

So why are we headed to Mars, and what are we looking for when we get there?

While the vast majority of us continue to wonder about extraterrestrial life, that isn’t the focus of this mission. Rather, InSight will use an array of instruments to probe the surface of the red planet as well as its interior using seismic investigations.

SPACE!

A month after launching to universal acclaim, Red Dead Redemption 2 is finally getting its online component. Red Dead Online launches in beta this week, with access opening for users starting tomorrow.

The roll out is admittedly a bit convoluted. Rockstar is clearly staggering things here, so as to avoid a repeat of the clustereff it experienced a few years back with the GTA Online launch. Those who purchased the $90 Ultimate Edition get first dibs, starting tomorrow. From there, new slots will open daily, based on when users first played the title, before things open to everyone on Friday.

The online version of the wildly popular western builds on the original title’s multiplayer modes, with both competitive and co-op elements. A narrative of sorts will tie the title together, though it will understandable be less complex than the one found in the offline single player, according to Variety. The open-world gameplay will include hunting, fishing and riding with posses of up to seven players.

The title has already proven a massive hit for Rockstar, moving more than 17 million copies in its first two weeks.

Walking into the office of Viktor Prokopenya – which overlooks a central London park – you would perhaps be forgiven for missing the significance of this unassuming location, just south of Victoria Station in London. While giant firms battle globally to make Augmented Reality a ‘real industry’, this jovial businessman form Belrarus is poised to launch a revolutionary new technology for just this space. This is the kind of technology some of the biggest companies in the world are snapping up right now, and yet, scuttling off to make me a coffee in the kitchen is someone who could be sitting on just such a company.

Regardless of whether it’s immediate future is obvious or not, AR has a future if the amount of investment pouring into the space is anything to go by.

In 2016 AR and VR attracted $2.3 billion worth of investments (a 300% jump from 2015) and is expected to reach $108 billion by 2021 – 25% of which will be aimed at the AR sector. But, according to numerous forecasts, AR will overtake VR in 5-10 years.

Apple is clearly making headway in its AR developments, having recently acquired AR lens company Akonia Holographics and in releasing iOS 12 this month, it enables developers to fully utilize ARKit 2, no doubt prompting the release of a new wave of camera-centric apps. This year Sequoia Capital China, SoftBank invested $50M in AR camera app Snow. Samsung recently introduced its version of the AR cloud and a partnership with Wacom that turns Samsung’s S-Pen into an augmented reality magic wand.

The IBM/Unity partnership allows developers to integrate Watson cloud services such as visual recognition, speech to text, and more into their Unity applications.

So there is no question that AR is becoming increasingly important, given the sheer amount of funding and M&A activity.

Joining the field is Prokopenya’s “Banuba” project. For although you can download a Snapchat-like app called ‘Banuba’ from the App Store right now, underlying this is a suite of tools of which Prokopenya is the founding investor, and who is working closely to realize a very big vision with the founding team of AI/AR experts behind it.

The key to Banuba’s pitch is the idea that its technology could equip not only apps but even hardware devices with “vision”. This is a perfect marriage of both AI and AR. What if, for instance, Amazon’s Alexa couldn’t just hear you? What if it could see you and interpret your facial expressions or perhaps even your mood? That’s the tantalizing strategy at the heart of this growing company.

Better known for its consumer apps, which have been effectively testing their concepts in the consumer field for the last year, Banuba is about to move heavily into the world of developer tools with the release of its new Banuba 3.0 mobile SDK. (Available to download now in the App Store for iOS devices and Google Play Store for Android). It’s also now secured a further $7m in funding from Larnabel Ventures, the fund of Russian entrepreneur Said Gutseriev, and Prokopenya’s VP Capital.

This move will take its total funding to $12m. In the world of AR, this is like a Romulan warbird de-cloaking in a scene from Star Trek.

Banuba hopes that its SDK will enable brands and apps to utilise 3D Face AR inside their own apps, meaning users can benefit from cutting-edge face motion tracking, facial analysis, skin smoothing and tone adjustment. Banuba’s SDK also enables app developers to utilise background subtraction, which is similar to ‘green screen’ technology regularly used in movies and TV shows, enabling end-users to create a range of AR scenarios. Thus, like magic, you can remove that unsightly office surrounding and place yourself on a beach in the Bahamas…

Because Banuba’s technology equips devices with ‘vision’, meaning they can ‘see’ human faces in 3D and extract meaningful subject analysis based on neural networks, including age, gender, it can do things that other apps just cannot do. It can even monitor your heart rate via spectral analysis of the time-varying color tones in your face.

It has already been incorporated into an app called Facemetrix, which can track a child’s eyes to ascertain whether they are reading something on a phone or tablet or not. Thanks to this technology, it is possible to not just to “track” a person’s gaze, but also to control a smartphone’s function with a gaze. To that end, the SDF can detect micro-movements of the eye with subpixel accuracy in real-time, and also detects certain points of the eye. The idea behind this is to “Gamify education”, rewarding a child with games and entertainment apps if the Facemetrix app has duly checked that they really did read the e-book they told their parents they’d read.

If that makes you think of a parallel with a certain Black Mirror episode where a young girl is prevented from seeing certain things via a brain implant, then you wouldn’t be a million miles away. At least this is a more benign version…

Banuba’s SDK also includes ‘Avatar AR’, empowering developers to get creative with digital communication by giving users the ability to interact with – and create personalized – avatars using any iOS or Android device.

Prokopenya says: “We are in the midst of a critical transformation between our existing smartphones and future of AR devices, such as advanced glasses and lenses. Camera-centric apps have never been more important because of this.” He says that while developers using ARKit and ARCore are able to build experiences primarily for top-of-the-range smartphones, Banuba’s SDK can work on even low-range smartphones.

The SDK will also feature Avatar AR, which allows users to interact with fun avatars or create personalised ones for all iOS and Android devices. Why should users of Apple’s iPhone X be the only people to enjoy Animoji?

Banbua is also likely to take advantage of the news that Facebook recently announced it was testing AR ads in its newsfeed, following trials for businesses to show off products within Messenger.

Banuna’s technology won’t simply be for fun apps however. Inside 2 years, the company has filed 25 patent applications with the the US patent office and of six of those were processed in record time compared with the average. Its R&D center, staffed by 50 people and based in Minsk, is focused on developing a portfolio of technologies.

Interestingly, Belarus has become famous for AI and facial recognition technologies.

For instance, cast your mind back to early 2016, when Facebook bought Masquerade, a Minsk-based developer of a video filter app, MSQRD, which at one point was one of the most popular apps in the App Store. And in 2017, another Belarusian company, AIMatter, was acquired by Google, only months after raising $2M. It too took an SDK approach, releasing a platform for real-time photo and video editing on mobile, dubbed Fabby. This was built upon a neural network-based AI platform. But Prokopenya has much bolder plans for Banuba.

In early 2017, he and Banuba launched a “technology-for-equity” program to enroll app developers and publishers across the world. This signed up Inventain, another startup from Belarus, to develop AR-based mobile games.

Prokopenya says the technologies associated with AR will be “leveraged by virtually every kind of app. Any app can recognize its user through the camera: male or female, age, ethnicity, level of stress, etc.” He says the app could then respond to the user in any number of ways. Literally, your apps could be watching you.

So for instance, a fitness app could see how much weight you’d lost just by using the Banuba SDF to look at your face. Games apps could personalize the game based on what it knows about your face, such as reading your facial cues.

Back in his London office, overlooking a small park, Prokopenya waxes lyrical about the “incredible concentration of diversity, energy and opportunity” of London. “Living in London is fantastic,” he says. “The only thing I am upset about, however, is the uncertainty surrounding Brexit and what it might mean for business in the UK in the future.”

London may be great (and will always be), but sitting on his desk though is a laptop with direct links back to Minsk, a place where the facial recognition technologies of the future are only now just emerging.

Amazon is shutting down its two-year-old restaurant delivery service in London, according to a report by the Evening Standard, which an Amazon spokesperson confirmed. Customers were sent emails which informed them of the change, saying they would no longer be able to order from Amazon Restaurants UK after Monday, December 3rd, the report said.

The retailer first expanded its restaurant delivery service to London back in September 2016, after its initial launch in Seattle, which was then followed by a number of other major U.S. markets. The service is a part of Prime Now, Amazon’s same-day delivery service, which in the U.S. allows consumers to shop Amazon and Whole Foods, and order from restaurants.

In the U.K., Amazon promised customers no menu markups on hidden service fees, as well as free delivery for Prime members with a minimum order of £15.00. Amazon later added a £1.99 flat fee on orders, however. Amazon also promised it would refund the difference between items ordered through Amazon and the current online price if the restaurant lowered a menu item’s price within 24 hours of the original order.

The delivery service was first launched in postcodes in the central, east, north and southeast of London, but later expanded across most of the city. It delivered food within an hour from more than 200 restaurants.

In London, Amazon has faced fierce competition from local players, including Deliveroo and Uber Eats, the report noted. That may have contributed to its decision to shutter its business in that market.

Amazon confirmed the closure in a statement shared with the news outlet, which it also shared with us.

“We are closing Amazon Restaurants UK. We would like to thank all of our customers and merchants, and delivery partners for their support,” they said.

The service is still running in the U.S., and that doesn’t appear to be changing any time soon. In fact, Amazon recently expanded its Seattle-based Daily Dish service in the U.S. to a new market, Austin, earlier this month. With Daily Dish, Amazon sends daily lunch specials to office workers, which they can order by replying to a text or using the Amazon or Prime Now mobile apps.

Coinbase, the $8 billion crypto exchange giant, is one of a bevy of big-name crypto investors backing a project aimed to revolutionize the U.S. securities industry using blockchain technology.

Brian Armstrong, Coinbase CEO, told the audience at TechCrunch’s Disrupt event in San Francisco this past September that his company intends to be the de facto marketplace for buying and trading crypto securities. Now Coinbase Ventures — its VC arm — has backed a startup that intends to help create demand in the market for such a security product.

Securitize offers a range of services to help companies create blockchain-based security tokens. Today it said it has raised a $12.75 million Series A round led by Blockchain Capital with participation from investors that include Japan’s Global Brain, Ripple’s Xpring fund and Coinbase Ventures.

The investment is primarily fiat currency with “a small percentage” of tokens; the latter will be converted to fiat currency or held in stablecoin, the company confirmed.

A former CEO of Telefonica’s R&D division, Securitize CEO and founder Carlos Domingo got into the blockchain space when he co-founded the “tokenized” VC firm Spice. He later spun out Securitize as a way to disrupt the U.S. securities industry, which he pegs at some $7 billion per year.

The goal of Securitize is to essentially tokenize shares to provide additional transparency, increased trading/liquidity and more efficient processes, Domingo told TechCrunch. So, for example, investors are able to buy and sell equity more easily and transparently, while tracking cap tables — traditionally a messy business — can be more process driven and clear.

The startup doesn’t intend to involve itself in trading — that explains why it has taken on a number of exchanges as investors — but it will instead provide the framework to tokenize companies. That includes developing the token itself, as well as processes like regulatory management, services for investors, smart contacts and more; all of which allows companies to launch security tokens through a process that it calls a “Digital Security Offering,” or DSO.

Pushing back on the idea of “decentralizing all the things,” Domingo said that “blockchain just happens to be a better way to deal with securities.”

Domingo said that Securitize has worked with compliance lawyers across the U.S. to offer services in a range of states. He’s further buoyed by an SEC announcement this month seemed to endorse the idea of security tokens, which are regulated like regular securities, although he is optimistic that the use case goes beyond cryptocurrency that fail the Howey Test.

“The opportunity is not just to work with blockchain companies,” he explained in an interview. “These are first movers, but the big opportunity is in digitizing private and public shares.”

Domingo is also looking at overseas growth opportunities in the future, although a more pressing item is the launch of Securitize’s own security token next year, once the business has stabilized further. That said, Domingo claims it is already profitable.

He believes the “pivotal moment” for digital securities will be when exchanges begin to offer them to the public. Coinbase has already taken steps to do that, but its timetable for launch is unclear. Domingo, the Securitize founder and CEO, believes that the first launches will come before the end of this year.

“2019 will be the year that you see 10-15 exchanges trading securities in a legal way,” he predicted.

Note: The author owns a small amount of cryptocurrency. Enough to gain an understanding, not enough to change a life.

Cyber Monday 2018 is projected to be the highest selling day of the holiday season this year, with $7.8 billion in online sales. And it’s no wonder: after a weekend of people juggling shopping online with shopping in stores, and hassling with each other in stores, today many go back to work. And so, we see a significant swing to online shopping.

Adobe — which tracks trillions of transactions across the US among major retailers online – predicts that today will see $7.8 billion in sales online today, up nearly 18 percent on 2017’s figure of $6.6 billion.

As of 7 AM PST / 10 AM EST on Monday, that prediction appears to be on track. Adobe says that consumers have already spent over half a billion dollars – $0.531 billion, specifically – with online retailers. (It will continue to update this figure throughout the day, and we will update as well.)

The report also suggests that Cyber Monday will be the best day to buy toys online, with savings of 19 percent on that product category. Some apparel, however, may be out-of-stock, Adobe says.

Although holiday spending used to kick off on Black Friday, e-commerce and the trend of shopping whenever you want — and not just when a store is open — has led to sales and seasonal promotions — and shopping — earlier and earlier. There has been $44.2 billion spent this month online so far, already passing Adobe’s full-month projections of $43 billion.

So far, the biggest spending day of the year has been Black Friday, where online US sales hit $6.2 billion dollars, with more than one-third of sales coming from mobile devices. Thanksgiving this year had a record $3.7 billion in sales, while one of the newer “shopping holidays,” Small Business Saturday, rung up $3.02 billion in online sales, said Adobe, up 25.5 percent.

But these are estimates, and so you are bound to get a lot of variation.

MasterCard provides a slightly more conservative figure: its SpendingPulse analytics predict that total sales “could exceed” $3 billion. It also estimated that last year’s Cyber Monday sale day brought in no more than $2.4 billion.

While Adobe says that it builds its estimates by tracking transactions at 80 of the biggest retailers online in the US, Mastercard tells us that SpendingPulse uses “national retail sales across all payments types in select markets around the world. The findings are based on aggregate sales activity in the Mastercard payments network, coupled with survey-based estimates for certain other payment forms, such as cash and check.”

The real numbers may lie somewhere in the middle.

Additional reporting: Sarah Perez

 

Airbnb has completed a much-needed hire ahead of its rumored 2019 initial public offering.

The hospitality giant has brought on Dave Stephenson, a long-time Amazon vice president and former president of Big Fish Games, as its chief financial officer. Stephenson replaces the company’s head of global financial planning and analysis, Ellie Mertz, who served as interim head of finance as Airbnb searched for its former CFO Laurence Tosi’s replacement.

Tosi, who had previously led finance at The Blackstone Group, left Airbnb in February to focus on his investment firm, Weston Capital Partners, amid a report from The Information that he and Airbnb co-founder and chief executive officer Brian Chesky had disagreed over “how to balance the financial stability needed to go public.” The Wall Street veteran was focused on financial discipline, while Chesky wanted to invest in innovation and “areas that might not yield profits for a while.”

Tosi was credited with leading the company to profitability quicker than many of its fellow technology ‘unicorns.’ Airbnb says it’s profitable on an EBITDA basis and cash flow positive with a $5.5 billion balance sheet. It reportedly recorded upwards of $3 billion in revenue in 2017.

Stephenson joined Amazon in 1999 and ended his tenure at the e-commerce powerhouse as the vice president and CFO of its worldwide consumer business. He left Amazon for a brief stint between 2011 and 2013 to head up the Seattle-based game developer Big Fish Games.

“In the years ahead, [Stephenson] will be Airbnb’s quarterback for long-term growth, driving us to be even more efficient and leverage what makes Airbnb unique to create new businesses and continue to expand,” Chesky wrote in a blog post this morning.

Stephenson is the second Amazon executive to jump ship to San Francisco-based Airbnb this year. He follows Amazon’s former VP of prime & delivery experience Greg Greeley, who was hired as the home-sharing company’s president of homes in March. Greeley similarly spent nearly two decades under Jeff Bezos and was credited with helping build Amazon Prime, as well as Amazon’s European business.

The well-funded company now employs more than 4,000 and boasts a $31 billion valuation — making it one of the most valuable private companies in the world. Since it was founded by Chesky, Joe Gebbia and Nathan Blecharczyk in 2008, it’s raised $4.4 billion in venture capital funding, most recently securing a $1 billion Series F from Capital G, TCV, Temasek, Bracket Capital and others.

Airbnb is expected to bring liquidity to its investors via a highly-anticipated IPO as soon as June 30, 2019. It will likely chase Uber to the public markets, giving 2019 two of the largest IPOs of the decade.

Uber, in a similar fashion, recently hired a CFO, too — a role crucial for any company eyeing an IPO. The ride-hailing businesses’ choice was Nelson J. Chai, the former CEO of insurance and warranty provider Warranty Group.

More U.S. consumers were shopping on mobile devices on Black Friday this year, with $2.1 billion in sales coming from smartphones. This trend was also reflected across the U.S. App Store. According to new data from Sensor Tower out this morning, the top 10 shopping apps on the App Store added half a million first-time users on Black Friday. That’s up 16.3 percent from the same day in 2017, the firm found.

Overall, new shopping app installs grew 9 percent over last year to reach approximately 1.8 million. To be clear, this number is new downloads, not re-downloads from someone who previously had the app installed on their device, but deleted it at some point. (Of course, those consumers may have already been customers on the web.)

Not surprisingly, Amazon’s app was the most installed, as it has been in years past. But Walmart’s app gained steam as it saw more significant year-over-year growth, the report said.

This year, Amazon added around 115,000 new app users, up 11.7 percent from 2017. Walmart, however, added 95,000 first-time users, up 39.7 percent over last year. Target’s app, which was the third most installed this year, grew 3.3 percent from 2017 with around 62,000 new users.

The rest of the top 10 was rounded out by Wish, Best Buy, eBay, Offer Up, Fashion Nova, Macy’s and JCPenney. This includes both brick-and-mortar and online retailers.

In terms of online-only retailers, the list looked a little different. Amazon was still in the lead, but was then followed by Wish, eBay, Offer Up, Fashion Nova, GOAT, Poshmark, Letgo, Zaful, and Shein.

Walmart, meanwhile, was the most-downloaded app out of all the brick-and-mortar retailers, followed by Target, Best Buy, Macy’s, JCPenney, Nike, Ulta, Forever 21, Hollister, and Sephora.

Overall, new downloads from the brick-and-mortar apps were up 24.7 percent over last year’s Black Friday, while the online-only apps grew around 20 percent.

Of these, Best Buy also had a good year in terms of new installs, the firm said. Around 34.5 percent new users installed its app for the first time, with about 39,000 new downloads in 2018 compared to 29,000 in 2017.

Sensor Tower wasn’t the only App Store intelligence firm predicting a boost in mobile shopping for this year’s Black Friday. App Annie had also forecast the sales holiday in 2018 would break new records.

In the two-week period including Thanksgiving, Black Friday and Cyber Monday, App Annie was predicting a 25 percent increase in time spent in shopping apps on Android devices – nearly double from the four years prior.

However, the Google Play numbers aren’t in yet because there’s a 3-plus day delay on Google Play between downloads and chart ranking changes. That means we won’t have accurate Android app store’s numbers until later in the week.