Author: azeeadmin

Alexa skill developers will now be able to sell “consumables” within their voice apps, aka Alexa skills, Amazon announced this morning. The company says that, starting today, developers in the U.S. will be able to take advantage of this new feature to sell products to Alexa devices owners which can be purchased, used, then purchased again – for example, a pack of “hints” for a voice game, or extra points that allow a game to continue.

The addition is really more of an expansion of existing in-app purchase capabilities for Alexa skills, which first debuted last November before rolling out more broadly this May. Amazon also allows developers to make money in skills through paid subscriptions, and provides direct payouts to developers through its Developer Rewards program.

These incentives along with Alexa’s head start in the in-home voice computing market has allowed the platform to grow to over 50,000 skills.

Unlike traditional in-app purchases, however, consumables are something regular skill users would continue to buy over and over, without having to commit to a subscription.

A few top developers have already adopted the feature, Amazon says.

These include: Would You Rather for Family, which lets you purchase a 7-day pass to the Premium (paid) version in order to test it out; Volley’s Yes Sire, which lets you keep the medieval role-play game going with points when you would have otherwise had to stop playing; and Hypno Therapist from Innomore, which lets you buy a bundle of 10 hypnotherapy sessions from a catalog of 70+ therapies. When these are used up, you have to buy another bundle to continue reaching your other health-related goals.

Amazon notes that Sony Pictures Television will also soon launch a Who Wants to Be a Millionaire skill, which will let you buy one-time-use lifelines when you get stuck on a question.

Developers are able to implement consumables in a similar fashion as they add one-time purchases and subscriptions – through the Alexa Skills Kit (ASK) Command-Line Interface (CLI). Amazon also built a sample app, Name The Show, to demonstrate how to get started.

Additionally, Amazon says developers can turn to third-party tools like Storyline and Voice Apps to create skills using a more visual approach.

Consumables are currently available in the U.S. Amazon didn’t provide a timeline to an international launch.

Microsoft released Office 2019 for Windows and macOS this week, the latest version of its regular, non-subscription productivity suite. It’s the kind of Office that, ten years ago, you would’ve bought in a shrink-wrapped package at Office Depot. But it’s really not the version of Office that Microsoft would like you to buy — or that you probably want to have. That’s because at this point, Office 2019 is basically a limited version that doesn’t include the most interesting new features of its Office 365 subscription counterpart.

“We are really working very hard to position Office 365 in all its flavors — ProPlus for the commercial users — as very different from these versions of Office that have a year number in them,” Microsoft’s corporate VP for Office and Windows Jared Spataro told me. “Office 2019, all the features that we released in it, had previously been released in Office 365. So are our way of talking about the cloud versions of Office 365 is that they’re connected, that this breathes life into them.”

Spataro also noted that Microsoft wants users to remember that the connected Office 365 apps will offer higher productivity because of their cloud connectivity and a higher degree of security. He also argues that these versions deliver a lower total cost of ownership.

Back when Microsoft launched Office 2016, those releases were essentially snapshots (‘carbon copies,” Spataro called them) of the regularly updated Office 365 versions, which get monthly updates and feature releases. For the first time now, the on-premises version of Office only provides a subset of the full functionality, with a lot of missing functionality because virtually all of the most interesting new features — including all the machine learning smarts that are now rolling out to Office 365 — will be missing from Office 2019.

“I think there will be some confusion,” Spataro acknowledged. “It’ll take us some time to train people that the year number doesn’t mean it’s the best version.”

In a way, though, this makes sense, given that a lot of the new functionality that Microsoft is now building into Office 365 only works because it’s connected to the cloud. That’s the only way to pull in data for the new Microsoft Search functionality, for example, and to run the machine learning models and pull in data from those — and Microsoft has decided that the best way to charge for those is through a subscription.

Microsoft’s strategy isn’t all that different from Adobe’s, for example, which now focuses on its Creative Cloud subscriptions and the cloud features that come with those to promote its subscription service over shrink-wrapped versions of its applications. That has been a very successful transition for Adobe and Microsoft is looking for the same with Office 365 (and its Microsoft 365 counterpart).

When Salesforce bought Mulesoft last spring for the tidy sum of $6.5 billion, it looked like money well spent for the CRM giant. After all, it was providing a bridge between the cloud and the on-prem data center and that was a huge missing link for a company with big ambitions like Salesforce.

When you want to rule the enterprise, you can’t be limited by where data lives and you need to be able to share information across disparate systems. Partly that’s a simple story of enterprise integration, but on another level it’s purely about data. Salesforce introduced its intelligence layer, dubbed Einstein, at Dreamforce in 2016.

With Mulesoft in the fold, it’s got access to data cross systems wherever it lives, in the cloud or on-prem. Data is the is the fuel of artificial intelligence, and Salesforce has been trying desperately to get more data for Einstein since its inception.

It lost out on LinkedIn to Microsoft, which flexed its financial muscles and reeled in the business social network for $26.5 billion a couple of years ago. It’s undoubtedly a rich source of data that the company longed for. Next, it set its sights on Twitter (although Twitter was ultimately never sold, of course). After board and stockholder concerns, the company walked away.

Each of these forays was all about the data, and frustrated, Salesforce went back to the drawing board. While Mulesoft did not supply the direct cache of data that a social network would have, it did provide a neat way for them to get at backend data sources, the very type of data that matters most to its enterprise customers.

Today, they have extended that notion beyond pure data access to a graph. You can probably see where this is going. The idea of a graph, the connections between say a buyer and the things they tend to buy or a person on a social network and people they tend to interact with can be extended even to the network/API level and that is precisely the story that Salesforce is trying to tell this week at the Dreamforce customer conference in San Francisco.

Visualizing connections in a data integration network in Mulesoft. Screenshot: Salesforce/Mulesoft

Maureen Fleming, program vice president for integration and process automation research at IDC says that it is imperative that organizations view data as a strategic asset and act accordingly. “Very few companies are getting all the value from their data as they should be, as it is locked up in various applications and systems that aren’t designed to talk to each other. Companies who are truly digitally capable will be able to connect these disparate data sources, pull critical business-level data from these connections, and make informed business decisions in a way that delivers competitive advantage,” Fleming explained in a statement.

Configuring data connections on Mulesoft Anypoint Platform. Gif: Salesforce/Mulesoft

It’s hard to underestimate the value of this type of data is to Salesforce, which has already put Mulesoft to work internally to help build the new Customer 360 product announced today. It can point to how it’s providing this very type of data integration to which Fleming is referring on its own product set.

Bret Taylor, president and chief product officer at Salesforce, says that for his company all of this is ultimately about enhancing the customer experience. You need to be able to stitch together these different computing environments and data silos to make that happen.

“In the short term, [customer] infrastructure is often fragmented. They often have some legacy applications on premise, they’ll have some cloud applications like Salesforce, but some infrastructure in on Amazon or Google and Azure, and to actually transform the customer experience, they need to bring all this data together. And so it’s a really a unique time for integration technologies, like Mulesoft because it enables you to create a seamless customer experience, no matter where that
data lives, and that means you don’t need to wait for infrastructure to be perfect before you can transform your customer experience.”

Bleximo, a startup that aims to build ‘quantum accelerators’ — basically quantum-based application-specific integrated circuits — today announced that it has raised a $1.5 million seed round led by Eniac Ventures. Other investors in this round include Boost VC, Creative Ventures, KEC Ventures and Gyan Kapur.

Instead of building a general purpose quantum computer like IBM, Rigetti and others, Bleximo, which was founded by Cyclotron Road fellow and quantum physicist Alexei Marchenkov, wants to focus on building quantum processors that focus on very specific applications. Before founding Bleximo, Marchenkov worked at Rigetti Computing, where we worked on developing that company’s technology for general purpose quantum computers.

“At Eniac, we believe general quantum computing is still far away, but Bleximo’s approach of building vertical quantum computing architecture will bring this nascent technology to the mainstream in a more practical way — much like vertical AI is here today before general AI,” said Vic Singh, Founding General Partner at Eniac Ventures. “We are excited to support Founder Alexei Marchenkov, a recognized expert in quantum computing, and the Bleximo team to help build this reality.”

Right now, Bleximo is mostly looking at speeding up simulations of new materials and molecules for drug development. Quantum computing lends itself for solving these kind of problems, though the company argues that its technology is just as applicable to solving problems in energy, finance, manufacturing and security.

Not everybody seems to agree that general quantum computing is all that far away, though, so it remains to be seen if a real market for this kind of specialized quantum co-processors (Bleximo calls it a ‘qASIC’) will really develop, especially given that a quantum computer will also be some form of hybrid machine that combines classical and quantum computing. If it does, though, Bleximo seems well positioned to capitalize on it, especially given that its technology will be a bit simpler (as far as one can say that about anything quantum computing) and won’t need the large amount of qubits with long coherence times that a general purpose quantum computer would need.

Back in March, we asked the question “Are corporations that use Wikipedia giving back?” The answer was kind of, sort of, with one key exception, noting, “Apple, Facebook, Microsoft and Google all contributed around $50,000 by matching employee gifts. Amazon, on the other hand, is nowhere to be found on that list.”

Today, however, the online retail giant is looking to address that apparent oversight, announcing a $1 million donation to the Wikimedia Endowment, the fund behind Wikipedia. As it notes, the online encyclopedia has been hugely important to Alexa’s success, serving as the foundation for much of the assistant’s knowledge.

“Alexa leverages hundreds of sources to answer questions, including Wikipedia,” Amazon said in a statement offered to TechCrunch. “The Alexa team shares a similar vision with Wikipedia and the Wikimedia Foundation: To make it easier to share knowledge globally.”

Including Wikipedia as one of “hundreds of sources” seems to be downplaying the importance of the site to Alexa and many of its competitors, but a donation from Amazon’s deep coffers is an important gestures for the non-profit.

Amazon’s also hoping Alexa users will pitch in as well, by way of the new “Alexa donate to Wikipedia” skill.

This past Saturday, something pretty weird happened in Pokémon Go: immediately after the monthly “Community Day” event came to a close, a strange, new, never-before-seen Pokémon showed up. And by “showed up”, I mean it was everywhere. Around the globe, this thing was spawning every few feet. A grey blob with a hex nut for a head, it wasn’t like anything that anyone had seen in-game before.

It looked like this:

Weirder yet: no one could actually catch it. If you managed to get it to stay in a Pokéball, it would always turn into something else (in most cases, it turned into a Ditto). Just a few hours later, it was mostly gone.

Was it just a glitch? Many players assumed that Niantic put this thing in as a placeholder and a glitch brought it into public view. Or did they really just drop an entirely new Pokémon into the game out of nowhere?

Three days later, we’ve got an answer: it’s not a glitch.

This video just popped up on the official Pokémon YouTube channel, shining a bit of light on what’s going on:

In short: its name is Meltan, and it’s an upcoming Mythical Pokémon. It all seems to be a big publicity tie-in with the upcoming Lets Go, Pikachu! and Lets Go, Eevee! titles that’ll launch on the Switch next month. Based on the limited info we have so far, it seems like to get a Meltan in the new games, you’ll have to catch him in Pokémon GO.

This whole stunt was pretty damned clever. Thanks to special, limited time spawns, Pokémon GO’s Community Day events are when just about anyone who still plays the game will be actively looking at their screen. By sneaking Meltan in there for a bit at the end, they pretty much guaranteed a wave of “WTF?” would roll around the world. All for a little grey blob with a nut on his head.

As for how to catch an actual Meltan rather than a Ditto-lookalike: that’s still a mystery. Catching Mythical Pokémon in GO thus far has involved “Special Research” quests — a series of tasks that take a few days or weeks of play to complete. We might be looking at another one of those here.

Tinder in India is now rolling out a new feature that allows women to make the first move. The setting, called “My Move,” is similar to the core feature in rival dating app Bumble, which is currently enmeshed in multiple lawsuits with Tinder parent Match Group. Match sued Bumble for patent violations following failed acquisition attempts that would have made Bumble another Match Group brand along with Tinder, Plenty of Fish, OKCupid, Match.com, and others.

In February this year, Tinder confirmed it would later begin to test a new option that would allow women to choose when to start a conversation, but said this would not the default setting, as it is in Bumble. Instead, Tinder would allow women to decide whether or not they wanted this feature toggled on, it explained then.

The company hadn’t yet rolled out the option at the time, but said it would come in a future update as a test, ahead of a public debut.

According a report from Reuters out this morning, which TechCrunch has also confirmed, Tinder has been quietly testing “My Move” in India for several months, and intends to roll out it out worldwide if all goes well.

The company says it’s formally announcing the feature’s arrival in India today. It’s first available to users in India on iOS, Tinder tells us.

To use the feature, women go into the app’s settings to enable it with a toggle switch. Once turned on, only they can start a conversation with their matches. Previously, anyone could start the chat after a match.

“At Tinder, we are constantly evolving our platform to help create a low-pressure environment where our users feel in charge of the connections they make,” said Tinder India GM, Taru Kapoor, in a statement provided by Tinder.  “By giving our female users the ability to exclusively send the first message if and when they want to, My Move provides women the autonomy to choose how to engage with their matches and empowers them to control their experiences. We believe that true choice is letting women be who they are and empowering their choice to shape their own identity and experiences,” Kapoor added.

Tinder also notes that in India, conversations about dating are still “relatively nascent” but ideals are evolving quickly.

“Women, in particular, are seeking out ways to take charge of their romantic and social experiences – a phenomenon we see both across India’s cities and towns,” Kapoor said.

Bumble has grown to prominence by branding itself as a more female-friendly dating app, but the “women go first” feature has always felt a little bit of a gimmick.

What women tend to care about more is not who starts the chat, but how pleasant or awful that chat then becomes. In terms of dealing with straight up harassment, Bumble tends to take a public stance on banning online jerks – even going so far as to publicly shame and ban those who send nasty messages. (That is, if you believe that “Connor” was a real dude and not, say, a clever marketing stunt, which seems more likely.)

These moves – even if artificially crafted – help to set Bumble’s tone. Meanwhile, Tinder still has to deal with its “hookup app” reputation of days past. And present, if we’re being honest. Tinder is still the go-to place for on-demand sex, as HBO’s new Tinder-shaming dating app documentary Swiped points out.

In other words, Tinder simply adding in a Bumble-like feature alone won’t be that much of a threat to its rival, as the latter has positioned itself over the years to attract a different type of user. But it does go to show the extent of the bad blood between these two rivals, as Match Group has effectively taken the position that if it can’t have Bumble for itself, it will directly copy it.

When I was a child I had a fake soda can with a screw off top for hiding change. It wasn’t a very effective theft deterrent. For one, no sane person keeps soda cans on a bookshelf. For another, I’m not sure they even made Diet Rite at that point.

The HP Tango’s camouflage is admittedly a bit more logical. The printer features a fabric cover that makes the look like an anonymous book — well, more of a tome, really — when faced out. Bundled together, it really screams “I still own a printer, but don’t want the world to know it.”

In spite of doing its best to blend into its surroundings, the Tango’s actually lot a bad looking printer. It’s squat and curvy and fairly minimalist. It’s also wireless and designed to work with your phone and also responds to Alexa. And speaking of Amazon, there’s a Dash-style fulfillment program called Instant Ink, which reorders ink for between $3 and $10, depending on how much you go through.

The printer itself is $149 or $199, with the aforementioned cover, which comes in three colors. Might I suggest printing the titles of great works of literature on the outside, to really complete the effect?

Another European data protection agency has reported a sharp rise in the numbers of complaints since the EU updated its privacy framework four months ago, when GDPR came into force, updating regional data protection rules and introducing much higher penalties for privacy violations.

France’s CNIL agency said today that it’s received 3,767 complaints since May 25, when GDPR came into force, up from 2,294 complaints over the same period last year — which it notes was already a record year.

CNIL says this represents a 64% increase in complaints, which it suggests shows that EU citizens have “seized the GDPR strongly” — attributing public engagement on the issue to media attention on the new regulation and on data protection stories such as the Facebook-Cambridge Analytica data misuse scandal.

It also reports receiving more than 600 data breach notifications, affecting a total of around 15 million people, since GDPR D-Day.

Last month data from the UK’s Information Commissioner’s Office also showed a big rise in privacy complaints since the new regulation came into force, with 6,281 filed between May 25 and July 3 — more than double the 2,417 complaints lodged during the same period a year earlier.

A report in The Irish Times at the end of July also indicated similar increases in Ireland. The Irish Data Protection Commission was reported to have received 1,184 data breach reports two months after GDPR — up significantly on the average of 230 reported each month in 2017. The DPC also logged 743 complaints in the first two months of GPDR, with the regulation reportedly applying in 267 cases.

As well as receiving record numbers of privacy complaints from individuals, CNIL notes that two organizations have filed complaints on behalf as consumers (a ‘collective redress‘ capacity introduced by GDPR, at least in EU countries where the national government chose to adopt it).

The two organizations filing complaints on consumers’ behalf in France are Max Schrems’ privacy NGO, noyb (which was one of the first out of the gate to file GDPR complaints over ‘forced consent’, including in France against Google); and the French digital rights group, La Quadrature du Net, which CNIL says has lodged complaints with it against Google, Amazon, Facebook, LinkedIn and Apple.

In its four month update since GDPR the regulator also notes that European data protection authorities are currently handling and co-operating to investigate more than 200 cross-border complaints.

“These complaints raise questions about consent in general, and in particular that of minors,” it notes.

It also says 24,500 organizations have appointed a data protection officer, since GDPR came into force and ushered in a general requirement for a DPO (at least in most cases).

More privacy-related developments look to be in the pipe too, as CNIL says it will be proposing some new regulatory tools — including a biometrics standard regulation, which it says has been in consultation since September 3. “It will set a demanding and protective environment,” it writes of that.

Standards for a certification for DPOs is also slated to be finalized during September.

And the regulator says it’s working on a number of codes of conduct — to cover specific tech areas, such as medical research and cloud infrastructure.

Whether you’re trying to figure out how many students are attending your lectures or how many evil aliens have taken your Space Force brethren hostage, Wi-Fi can now be used to count them all.

The system, created by researchers at UC Santa Barbara, uses a single Wi-Fi router outside of the room to measure attenuation and signal drops. From the release:

The transmitter sends a wireless signal whose received signal strength (RSSI) is measured by the receiver. Using only such received signal power measurements, the receiver estimates how many people are inside the room — an estimate that closely matches the actual number. It is noteworthy that the researchers do not do any prior measurements or calibration in the area of interest; their approach has only a very short calibration phase that need not be done in the same area.

This means that you could simply walk up to a wall and press a button to count, with a high degree of accuracy, how many people are walking around. The system can measure up to 20 people in its current form.

The system uses a mathematical model to “see” people in the room based on signal strength and attenuation. The system uses off-the-shelf components and they’ve tested it in multiple locations and found that their total accuracy is two people or less with only one Wi-Fi device nearby.

Bodies and objects essentially absorb Wi-Fi as they move around in rooms, allowing the system to find discrete things in the space. Sadly it can’t yet map their position in the room, a feature that could be even more helpful in the future.