Author: azeeadmin

Augmented reality has the potential to change how we interact with the internet, as these technologies scale you can certainly bet that Facebook is going to be looking to shape what’s possible.

At our one-day TC Sessions: AR/VR event in LA next month, we’ll be joined by Ficus Kirkpatrick, Facebook’s Head of Camera AR Platform, to chat about the company’s strategies in 2018 and beyond for augmented reality.

While the bulk of Facebook’s VR ambitions have taken up residence under the Oculus name, the biggest AR platform available right now are the hundreds of millions of smartphones that people already have. Fortunately, Facebook has quite the presence on mobile but that’s made it even more of a challenge to fit AR ambitions into apps that already have so much going on.

Facebook is not the place most people turn to when they want to take a photo, but the company’s Camera team is hoping to change that by bringing augmented reality face and environment filters deeper into the app.

The Camera Effects AR Platform was Mark Zuckerberg’s hallmark announcement at F8 in 2017, a year when Apple and Google also started getting more verbose in their praise for AR’s potential. In 2018, the company has had some other things keeping it busy, but has continued to bring AR to other areas of the company’s suite of apps with new capabilities.

Right now Facebook is largely focused on the fun and artsy applications of AR, but where will the company take smartphone AR beyond selfie filters towards delivering utility to billions of users? We look forward to chatting with Kirkpatrick about the challenges ahead for the tech giant and the strategies for getting more users to warm up to AR.

$99 Early Bird sale ends tomorrow, 9/21, book your tickets today and save $100 before prices go up, and save an additional 25% when you tweet your attendance through our ticketing platform.

Student tickets are just $45 and can be purchased here. Student tickets are good for high/middle school students (with chaperone), 2/4 year college students, and master’s/PhD students.

It’s a common scene: A truck driver pulls up to a highway truck stop for fuel and lunch. She orders a burger and fries from the waiter standing at the counter. Then, she makes her way to the store next door to pick up a coffee to go.

In a matter of years, these kinds of simple, daily interactions will likely become a thing of the past as the tasks of truck drivers, waiters and clerks are increasingly done by machines.

Even if measurement techniques vary, the numbers don’t lie: Ultimately, large swaths of people will be displaced by machines. Depending on whether we’re using estimates from Oxford University, McKinsey Global or the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), it’s safe to assume that anywhere from 9 to 47 percent of the American workforce will likely be displaced by automation in the coming decades. Even the lowest estimates place millions of Americans out of work.

The way we work is changing. People possess the innate ability to innovate and evolve in the jobs they do, and new technologies — from the wheel to steam power and artificial intelligence — have drastically improved and impacted work throughout history. So many jobs of the future have yet to be created, but the trends show that machines and workplace technologies will shoulder the burden of intense physical labor and leave us more room for ideation and supervision.

As we all transition to a more integrated workplace it is imperative that we remember who operates the machines. Pragmatic and strategic policies can help us usher in a brighter future for hardworking American families and cities.

In our latest National League of Cities research, Assessing the Future of Our Work, we analyzed Bureau of Labor Statistics data and found that by 2030 the fastest growing jobs will require advanced soft skills like time management, active listening, coordination and judgement and decision making. But ultimately, no industry, job or task is safe from automation, and the new kinds of jobs that will arise in their place remain in some sense unknown. However, the most effective and tested defenses against these widely predicted disruptions are the original incubators — our American cities.

The report also recommends logical career pathways toward better opportunities that will be more sustainable in the face of automation and changing local economies. For instance, high-touch roles in the caring professions, like nursing and home healthcare, will grow and continue to be in demand. Meanwhile, cashiers — which will be one of the groups most threatened by automation — can transition to sales representatives. And in the construction industry, technologies like the Semi-Automated Mason (SAM100) will shift workers out of tedious manual labor roles and open up additional jobs for those with supervisory and technical skills.

Now more than ever we are in desperate need of the unique advantage each American city holds to build a different future. Each local economy is as strong as the talent pool it supports. Equipped with a clear understanding of the talent they possess, city leaders are uniquely positioned to construct the talent pipelines desperately needed to equip workers with those promising skill sets that will be in demand in the near future.

Our report found that three cities — Boston, Richmond and Minneapolis — have done an especially effective job of preparing for the future of work in a way that is accessible, equal and sustainable.

Boston’s workforce mix has been identified as being 38 percent susceptible to automation, meaning it is at low risk of automation. The city is at low risk because the local government is taking strategic steps to better support workers by offering adult literacy programs, apprenticeship opportunities and demand-focused credentialing programs for local growth industries.

Richmond has long been at the crossroads of critical economic, political and commercial power. Richmond’s existing labor force has been assessed as 41 percent susceptible to automation, meaning it is also at low risk of job losses due to automation. Richmond stays ahead of the curve by instituting programs like PluggedIn VA, which teaches important business skills like interviewing, shadowing and in-demand technical skills.

Minneapolis is the second largest economic center in the midwestern United States. With its robust university system, Minneapolis has proven its ability to connect its specialized workforce with in-demand careers. Hennepin Pathways, in particular, has proven effective in matching available talent with locally sustainable jobs.

As natural epicenters of talent, cities serve as the places where movements and ideas are found, focused and filtered into broader society. With a conglomeration of individuals in urban places and the density of people from all walks of life, cultures and creeds, cities have a dynamism that productively pushes our country forward.

Our future requires a new level of personalization and flexibility in a very traditional space — work. Technology can be compulsive, invasive and glitchy, but our greatest advantage moving forward will be our resilience.

It’s official: Hulu is reviving the cult mystery series “Veronica Mars”.

The show originally ran from 2004 to 2007 on UPN and the CW, with the titular high school sleuth played by Kristen Bell. Last month, there were reports that Hulu was in talks to bring the show back. Now it looks like a deal is in place, with Bell confirming the news on Instagram.

Hulu says it’s placed a straight-to-series order for eight more episodes of the show, with Bell returning as Veronica and serving as executive producer alongside creator Rob Thomas (who’s writing the first episode) and writers Diane Ruggiero-Wright and Dan Etheridge.

Apparently the story will return viewers to the Southern California town of Neptune, where spring breakers are getting murdered, fueling conflict between the town’s haves and have nots and ultimately pulling Mars Investigations onto the case.

Hulu also says it’s picked up the rights to the three existing seasons of “Veronica Mars”, along with the feature film, to start streaming in summer 2019. If you haven’t watched the show, I highly recommend it — especially the first season, which offers a near perfect combination of noir-ish mystery, class conflict and personal drama.

I was less impressed by less impressed by the Kickstarter-funded movie, which suffered from trying to stuff everything fans might possibly want into a two-hour runtime. Hopefully, Thomas and his team learned from the experience. Plus, these eight episodes should give them a lot more room to tell their story.

The Show was far and away the Echo product most in need of a makeover. The original device, introduced two years back, was far more concerned with function than form. That, of course, is in line with many of the company’s hardware offerings, which are often designed to simply show what things like Alexa are capable of.

The original Show was big and boxy, with an out of whack body-to-display ratio that took up a lot of space on whatever desk or kitchen counter it might be placed. The refreshed version is far more aesthetically pleasing than its predecessor. That’s important, because unlike products like the Echo or Echo Dot, you can’t exactly stash the product away if you intend on interacting with the display.

While the new smaller design and cloth backing are certainly an upgrade, Lenovo still leads the design pack with its simply titled Smart Display for Google Assistant. Google made the right choice here by leading with hardware partnerships to bring its concept to market. That said, the product should look at home in most kitchens.

Even more important than design language are the surface-level hardware upgrades. Screen size was one of my chief complaints with the original Show, and this generation effectively doubles it. Like Google’s Smart Displays, the product really does appear to be a tablet affixed to a speaker backing.

One of the features of the new Show is that it supports multi-touch. That’s certainly a handy and much welcome addition, though honestly, you’ll ultimately get limited use out of it. After all, the product is designed to be a voice device first and foremost, so the vast majority of interactions you’ll have with the thing won’t involve actually touching it.

That said, there are some compelling new additions that certainly benefit from the feature — including the integration of the Firefox browser. Of course, touch typing on a screen like this is a pain, so you’re probably not going to spend that much time doing it.

Of course, the ongoing Amazon/Google battle means no native YouTube support. Amazon’s found a workaround in the form of a desktop shortcut. The browser means you should also be able to access videos that way — a kind of workaround until the company inevitably launches its own competitor.

The sound has also been greatly improved here, as evidenced by today’s showcase. It’s still not good enough to serve as your primary listening device — of course, the company’s got the workaround for that, in the form of the Sub and Link. Or you can go the Sonos route, but this is an Alexa family, damn it.

Like its predecessor, the new device will run you $230.

Check out our full coverage from the event here.

Amazon wants Alexa to interact with as many people as possible, including the ability to show them things. And that means freeing the virtual assistant from the confines of Amazon’s screen-supporting smart speaker Echo Show or Fire TV, devices that give Alexa a face (and of course a voice).

The company announced Thursday at its big hardware event that it’s releasing a “smart screen” software development kit, which will allow developers to bring Echo Show-like functionality to other non-Amazon pieces of hardware. That could mean integrating Alexa into a smart TV or even a refrigerator; as long as there’s a display, developers can integrate Alexa into the device.

And there are already two companies that are integrating the SDK into devices. Amazon announced that Lenovo and Sony will be bringing Alexa to their devices through the smart screen SDK. Alexa will be available on Lenovo Smart Tabs, a new line of Android tablets, in the “not so distant future,” according to Amazon.

Meanwhile, Sony will integrate the SDK on all of its Alexa-capable televisions, starting with the music and smart home camera feature this year. Sony will integrate Alexa into other feature that can show you things in the first half of next year.

Eventbrite is having one hell of a debut on the New York Stock Exchange this morning.

Shares of the ticketing startup, founded back in 2006, have shot up over 50% in trading on the NYSE. After pricing its shares at $23 in its initial offering, investors have bid up the stock to a whopping $37, putting the company’s valuation at nearly $3 billion.

That’s well above where the ticketing company had hoped to be when it initially set terms for the public offering earlier this month.

The company started trading priced above its share price and nearly doubled its valuation. And if Eventbrite can do it, really almost any later stage startup should be thinking about the public markets right now.

Performance for the San Francisco ticketing company has been… somewhat lackluster. As we noted when wrote about the company’s offering:

Eventbrite is not profitable and has been losing money since 2016. According to the documents, it posted losses of $40.4 million in 2016 and $38.5 million in 2017. In the first six months of 2018, the company has posted a net loss of $15.6 million. The company is making changes to make up for some of those losses — at the end of August, it announced a new pricing scheme for its customers using the “Essentials” package.

Its revenue is rising though, increasing from $133 million in 2016 to $201 million last year.

Since the beginning of the year tech public offerings have been on a tear. As The Wall Street Journal noted in July, 120 companies had raised $35.2 billion on U.S. exchanges at that point — the best showing for public markets since 2014 and the fourth busiest year since 1995, according to the financial data and analysis service Dealogic.

We’ve noted before that it’s a bit mind-boggling that investors and their portfolio companies wouldn’t be taking more advantage of these heady times. Nothing lasts forever (not even cold November rain) and certainly not markets that have been this bullish for this long.

Some of the reasoning is likely thanks to a market that’s still awash in private equity, sovereign wealth and late stage dollars. SoftBank has hundreds of billions to invest; private equity firms are beginning to look at growth stage companies the way that I look at banana cream pies from Cassell’s; and venture firms are beefing up bigtime to keep up with the Joneses (or in this case, the Blackstoneses).

However, the fun is certainly going to come to an end, and likely sooner rather than later. Early stage investors are beginning to dole out their advice on lowering cash burn (something that happens every time they see the beginning of the end of the beginning of the end).

With that in mind, later stage companies should be looking for the exit signs wherever they can find them. Right now, that’s an IPO window which seems to be wide open.

Amazon was quick to note at today’s event that not all that much has been done to update the microwave for the 21st century. While that’s probably a pretty fair criticism of the ubiquitous home appliance, the new AmazonBasics microwave is less about space-age technologies than it is helping to usher in the future of Alexa in the kitchen.

Like last year’s Echo Buttons, the company says the product started off as an internal reference design. In other words, the company didn’t set out to build a microwave for consumers, per, say. Rather, it seems it was happy enough with its results to bring the product to market under its low-cost AmazonBasics line.

That last bit is important to note here. This, after all, is a $60 product. It’s a cheap microwave lacking the conveniences you’ll find on many high-end premium devices, so if you’re looking for a fancy new thing for your newly remodeled kitchen, I’m sorry Mario, but your microwave is in another castle.

The new device is more about convenience than anything else, as evidenced by the fact that the company built a popcorn Dash Button directly into the product. “It’s all right to laugh,” a rep said from the stage, acknowledging the sheer absurdity of the whole thing. But hey, if you’re going to integrate commerce directly into your microwave, popcorn is probably as good a place to start as any.

The product did require some fancy backend work on Amazon’s part. It turns out it’s hard to design a microwave that gets along with Wi-Fi signals. Makes sense, but it’s probably not the kind of thing you’ve ever really considered if you don’t work for GE. All of that’s important because in spite of the presence of an “Ask Alexa” button, the microwave requires an Echo or other outside hardware product to bring the assistant to the appliance.

All in all, the microwave is, well, just a microwave. It continues the company’s trend of bringing low-cost products to market as a sort of loss leader/reference design to nudge third parties into developing their own hardware.

Check out our full coverage from the event here.

Delta will later this year roll out facial recognition at its terminal at Atlanta International Airport for anyone traveling on an international flight.

The airline said the biometric facial scanning is optional — a move that will shave off a few minutes off each flight — but will help border and pre-flight security authorities before jetting out of the US. It’s the latest roll-out of facial recognition trials at Detroit Metropolitan and New York John F. Kennedy airports.

What might be convenient to some, to others it’s a privacy violation — and some argue that without approval from Congress, it could be illegal.

Facial recognition at airports is a controversial move, one that’s been decried over the past year since it first rolled out last year. Six major US airports completed trials as part of a wider rollout — aimed to be completed by today. CBP relies on airlines to collect facial recognition data, something Delta doesn’t shy away from. The airline said facial recognition “is a natural next step following CBP and Delta’s optional facial recognition boarding tests” at Atlanta.

Customs and Border Protection has previously said that the move was to crack down on those who overstay their visas, but privacy advocates said that it steps on privacy rights.

Delta said that travelers who don’t want their faces will be given several opportunities to opt-out, Delta spokesperson Kathryn Steele told TechCrunch, and can continue to “proceed normally” through security.

CBP spokesperson Jennifer Gabris said that only US citizens can opt out, and will have their documents checked manually.

Homeland Security, which oversees border security, struck a different tone when last year it said that anyone who wanted to opt out of having their faces scanned should “refrain from traveling.”

Biometric data collected by Delta is stored by the government for two weeks, but exit records on citizens and green card holders are held for 15 years, and 75 years for non-immigrant visitors.

If that makes you uneasy, don’t expect the rollout to slow any time soon. Homeland Security continues to expand the program and is expected to roll out to land borders. Airport biometric scanners last month caught a traveler with a fake passport after using the facial scanners at Washington Dulles airport.

Even with one success story in the bag, it’s a tough sell to convince the government to pull back now.

Everyone loves a tale of a bootstrapped startup founder’s journey to an eight-figure exit.

The team at Toronto-based Cluep have a good one.

The founders of the adtech startup raised less than $500,000 from angel investors before selling their company to Impact Group for $40 million ($53 milllion CAD) this week.

Founded in 2012, Karan Walia, Sobi Walia and Anton Mamonov were just 21, 17 and 16 years old, respectively, when they started the digital advertising platform, which uses artificial intelligence to help brands connect and engage with people based on what they are sharing, how they are feeling and the places they’ve been.

They, being teenagers, struggled initially to get the company off the ground. At one point, the trio hacked into computers at a university in Toronto to train the neural networks on large amounts of data sets because they didn’t have enough money to buy their own tech. On a shoe-string budget, they would split meals at Popeyes to get by.

Amazon’s big hardware event isn’t all about hardware — although there is plenty of that, too. Amazon also talked about how it’s making its virtual assistant Alexa smarter and more intuitive about human behavior, particularly when there are lots of connected smart home devices to tap into.

Amazon announced at the event Thursday a feature called Alexa Hunches, a new feature that allows the virtual assistant to follow cues about a user’s behavior and make suggestions. This all starts with a deep neural network that allows Amazon to understand and learn behavior.

For now, “Hunches” is focused on the smart home because connected devices like smart lights or security cameras give Alexa the data it needs to make the kind of judgment calls the human brain is capable of. For instance, a user might say “Good night, Alexa” or “Alexa, set an alarm.” And Alexa, which has heard these commands daily, will tap into all that behavioral data and follow a hunch. Alexa might respond with something like, “Hey, I think that you left the porch light on, would you like me to turn it off?”

Amazon has been testing hunches in the lab and expects to roll out the feature later this year. The hunches feature will learn and improve over time.