Author: azeeadmin

Gooooood morning, Cupertino. Today’s the big event at Apple HQ. 2018’s been a slow year for Apple hardware (including a complete no-show at WWDC a few months back). As ever, we’ll be on-hand to help make sense of all the news as it breaks, and you can follow along with our handy live blog below. For those who want it straight from the source, you can follow Apple’s live stream or over on Twitter.

As far as what to expect, by all accounts there’s going to be A LOT. New iPhones are basically a given. Likely there will be a sequel to the iPhone X, along with a cheaper version that keeps the design intact, while swapping the OLED for something a bit cheaper. A new version of the Apple Watch also seems like all but a given at this point. Here’s a rundown of the most likely announcements for today’s big show to help you brace for the news.

Things kick off at 10AM PT, 1PM ET.

Researchers at the University of Maryland are adapting the techniques used by birds and bugs to teach drones how to fly through small holes at high speeds. The drone requires only a few sensing shots to define the opening and lets a larger drone fly through an irregularly shaped hole with no training.

Nitin J. Sanket, Chahat Deep Singh, Kanishka Ganguly, Cornelia Fermüller, and Yiannis Aloimonos created the project, called GapFlyt, to teach drones using only simple, insect-like eyes.

The technique they used, called optical flow, creates a 3D model using a very simple, monocular camera. By marking features in each subsequent picture, the drone can tell the shape and depth of holes based on what changed in each photo. Things closer to the drone move more than things further away, allowing the drone to see the foreground vs. the background.

As you can see in the video below, the researchers have created a very messy environment in which to test their system. The Bebop 2 drone with an NVIDIA Jetson TX2 GPU on board flits around the hole like a bee and then buzzes right through at 2 meters per second, a solid speed. Further, the researchers confused the environment by making the far wall similar to the closer wall, proving that the technique can work in novel and messy situations.

The team at the University of Maryland’s Perception and Robotics Group reported that the drone was 85 percent accurate as it flew through various openings. It’s not quite as fast as Luke skirting Beggar’s Canyon back on Tatooine, but it’s an impressive start.

Grammarly now supports Google Docs. Over the course of the last few years, Grammarly has made a name for itself as one of the better grammar and spelling checkers on the market. As a Chrome extension, it neatly integrates with virtually every major online tool and social media site, but until now, Google Docs remained a blind spot.

Because of its real-time collaboration features, the Google Docs editor isn’t just a straight-up text field, after all, so the Grammarly team had to do a bit of extra work to make its service work there. Once you have installed the extension, though, it’ll now work just like in any other web app.

The feature has actually been available as a beta to paying premium users for a little while, but now everybody can give it a try.

It’s interesting to see Grammarly come to Google Docs now. In July, after all, Google announced that it was bringing its own grammar checker to Google Docs, too. Google’s twist here is that it is basically using the same kind of machine learning techniques that power its translation software to check for errors in your documents. My sense is that Grammarly actually offers a more comprehensive set of tools for keeping you from embarrassing yourself with bad grammar (including help with punctuation, for example), but Google’s tool remains in private beta, so I haven’t been able to give it a try yet.

Grammarly’s paid plans start at $29.95 per month, but you get a discount if you pre-pay for three months or a full year (and the company also regularly offers discounts to its free subscribers). There also is a team plan for businesses that starts at $10/month/members (with a minimum of three subscribers).

After a long hiatus, Product Hunt Radio is back. Every week I’m joined by the founders, investors and makers shaping the future of technology. You’ll hear from people you may recognize and others you should know. Upcoming guests include Andrew Chen, Brian Norgard, Michael Seibel, Garry Tan, Jeff Morris Jr., Patrick Collison, Tiffany Zhong, Sophia Amoruso and many others.

In our first episode back, I’m joined by two notable investors, Alexia Bonatsos and Niko Bonatsos.

Alexia is the former co-editor-in-chief of TechCrunch and founder of a new venture fund, Dream Machine, where she helps founders “turn science fiction into non-fiction.”

Her husband, Niko is managing director at General Catalyst, a leading Silicon Valley venture firm with investments in companies like Airbnb, ClassPass, Snap, Gusto, Warby Parker and others.

In this episode we talk about:

• The rise of voice. As Google Home, Amazon Echoes, AirPods and other voice-enabled devices continue to proliferate, we’ll see user behavior shift — the same way touch screens have influenced young kids — and new opportunities arise for creative entrepreneurs.
• The corrosive nature of behavior online, in part influenced by today’s advertising model, and potential solutions.
• The evolution of venture capital, with the rise of micro VCs and accessibility of capital.

Of course, we’ll also cover some of our favorite products that you might not know about, including an app to help end mobile phone addiction, a new anonymous social network (the next Secret done right?) and an app that reminds you that you’re going to die.

We’ll be back next week, so be sure to subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, Breaker, Overcast or wherever you listen to your favorite podcasts. Also, big thanks to our sponsors, Airtable, GE Ventures, Intercom and Stripe for their support.

LittleBits has been keeping busy. The New York based educational hardware startup recently announced a new Avengers-themed kit and its first acquisition. This morning, it’s back with three new kits, just in time for the back to school season.

As its name implies, the Base Inventor Kit is a sort of entry level set here, for those looking to sample LittleBits’ modular wares. At $100, it’s one of the cheaper complete kits from the company, containing 10 bits, all told.

There are a bunch of pre-designed creations that can be created with the kit, including a voice-controlled robotic hand. This being LittleBits and all, builders are also encouraged to create their own vision using the bits and bobs. Other possibilities include a smart lamp and intruder alarm.

The Electronic Music Inventor Kit joins the company’s Korg licensed Synth Kit in the company’s focus on music making. This time out, the base is a keytar, built using eight bits. Kids can also break from that form factor and build other instruments like an electronic drum kit.

At $130, the Space Rover Inventor Kit is the priciest — and arguably coolest — of the bunch. The planetary rover consists of 15 bits for 30 activities. That’s coupled with an app used to control the vehicles and offer some insight into the history of the space race.

The new kits will also utilize online courses from JAM.com, the educational platform run by recent acquisition DIY.

Sisense, a company that helps customers understand and visualize their data across multiple sources, announced an $80 million Series E investment today led by Insight Venture Partners. They also announced that Zack Urlocker, former COO at Duo Security and Zendesk, has joined the organization’s board of directors.

The company has attracted a prestigious list of past investors, who also participated in the round, including Battery Ventures, Bessemer Venture Partners, DFJ Venture Capital, Genesis Partners and Opus Capital. Today’s investment brings the total raised to close to $200 million.

CEO Amir Orad says investors like their mission of simplifying complex data with analytics and business intelligence and delivering it in whatever way makes sense. That could be on screens throughout the company, desktop or smartphone, or via Amazon Alexa. “We found a way to make accessing data extremely simple, mashing it together in a logical way and embedding it in every logical place,” he explained.

It appears to be resonating. The company has over 1000 customers including Expedia, Oppenheimer and Phillips to name but a few. Orad says they are actually the analytics engine behind Nasdaq Corporate Solutions, which is the the main investor relations system used by CFOs.

He was not in the mood to discuss the company’s valuation, an exercise he called “an ego boost he doesn’t relate to.” He says that he would prefer to be measured by how efficiently he uses the money investors give him or by customer satisfaction scores. Nor would he deal with IPO speculation. All he would say on that front was, “When you focus on the value you bring, positive things happen.”

In spite of that, he was clearly excited about having Urlocker join the board. He says the two spent six months getting to know each other and he sees a guy who has brought several companies to successful exit joining his team, and perhaps someone who can help him bring his company across the finish line, however that ultimately happens. Just last month, Cisco bought Urlocker’s former company, Duo Security for $2.35 billion.

For now Sisense, which launched in 2010, has another $80 million in the bank. They plan to add to the nearly 500 employees already in place in offices in New York, Tel Aviv, Kiev, Tokyo and Arizona. In particular, they plan to grow their international presence more aggressively, especially adding employees to help with customer success and field engineering. Orad also said that he was also open to acquiring companies should the right opportunity come along, saying “Because of talent, technology and presence, it’s something you have to be on lookout for.”

When a company reaches Series E and a couple of hundred million raised, it’s often a point where an exit could be coming sooner than later. By adding an experienced executive like Urlocker, it just emphasizes that possibility, but for now the company appears to be growing and thriving, and taking the view that whatever will be, will be.

Zoox, the self-driving car startup worth a reported $3.2 billion post-money valuation, is offering autonomous rides this week as part of the Global Climate Action Summit. The Global Climate Action Summit convenes state and local leaders, scientists, non-profits and others to discuss climate action opportunities.

In partnership with the Fairmont hotel in San Francisco, Zoox will transport select summit guests between the Fairmont and Moscone Center in its self-driving Toyota Highlander test cars. Zoox says it’s working with the Fairmont and the Summit to determine guests.

“Zoox was born to improve safety, congestion, and pollution in our increasingly dense cities,” says Zoox co-founder, President and CTO Jesse Levinson said in a press release. “We are proud to demonstrate our state-of-the-art autonomous technology, partner with the Fairmont, and show private enterprise support of Governor Brown’s and Mayor Bloomberg’s Global Climate Action Summit right here in our hometown.”

The goal of these tests is to show guests the potential of Zoox’s zero-emission autonomous technology, though, this is not the full realization of it. This advancement comes on the heels of Zoox co-founder Tim Kentley-Klay’s ouster from the company in late August. His firing came about a month after Zoox closed a $500 million funding round led by Mike Cannon-Brookes of Grok Ventures, which brought its total amount of funding to $800 million.

Zoox ultimately aims to commercially deploy autonomous vehicles by 2020 in the form of its own ride-hailing service. The cars themselves will be all-electric and fully autonomous. Meanwhile, ride-hail companies like Uber and Lyft are also working on autonomous vehicles, as well as a number of other large players in the space.

Accel-backed mobile-first jobs app Job Today has pulled in another $16M — an expansion to its November 2016 $20M Series B round. It raised a $10M Series A in January of the same year.

The 2015 founded startup offers a mobile app for job seekers that does away with the need for a CV.

Instead job seekers create a profile in the app and can apply to relevant jobs. Employers can then triage potential applicants via the app and chat to any they like the look of via its messaging platform.

The approach has been especially popular with fast turnover jobs in the service industry, such as hospitality and retail.

Job Today says it has more than five million job seekers registered on its platform, and claims to have delivered more than 100 million candidate applications to the 400,000+ predominantly small businesses posting jobs via the app to date (with 1M+ jobs posted). It currently operates in two markets: Spain and the UK.

The additional funding will be put towards expanding its presence in the UK market — where it says it’s seen “significant growth” in both job postings and candidate applications.

It says the overall volume of applications has increased by 46% year-on-year in the market, with the number of applications per candidate growing by 32% in the same period. The likes of Costa Coffee, Pret A Manger and Eat are named as among its “regular hirers”.

It’s also envisaging a Brexit bump for the local casual job market, as the UK’s decision to leave the European Union looks set to impact the supply of labor for employers…

Commenting in a statement, CEO Eugene Mizin, said: “The casual job market is often the first to experience the effects from macro-economic forces and Brexit will mean that many non-skilled and non-British workers will leave the UK. This will create a demand to fill casual jobs and create new opportunities for the less-skilled school, college and university leavers entering the workforce for the first time in 2019.”

The Series B expansion funds are coming from New York based investor 14W.

Job Today says it got additional growth uplift after integrating with Google Jobs — aka Google search’s built in AI-powered jobs engine. This launched in the UK in July 2018, and Job Today said it saw 101% growth in users in the first month of integration.

Accel-backed mobile-first jobs app Job Today has pulled in another $16M — an expansion to its November 2016 $20M Series B round. It raised a $10M Series A in January of the same year.

The 2015 founded startup offers a mobile app for job seekers that does away with the need for a CV.

Instead job seekers create a profile in the app and can apply to relevant jobs. Employers can then triage potential applicants via the app and chat to any they like the look of via its messaging platform.

The approach has been especially popular with fast turnover jobs in the service industry, such as hospitality and retail.

Job Today says it has more than five million job seekers registered on its platform, and claims to have delivered more than 100 million candidate applications to the 400,000+ predominantly small businesses posting jobs via the app to date (with 1M+ jobs posted). It currently operates in two markets: Spain and the UK.

The additional funding will be put towards expanding its presence in the UK market — where it says it’s seen “significant growth” in both job postings and candidate applications.

It says the overall volume of applications has increased by 46% year-on-year in the market, with the number of applications per candidate growing by 32% in the same period. The likes of Costa Coffee, Pret A Manger and Eat are named as among its “regular hirers”.

It’s also envisaging a Brexit bump for the local casual job market, as the UK’s decision to leave the European Union looks set to impact the supply of labor for employers…

Commenting in a statement, CEO Eugene Mizin, said: “The casual job market is often the first to experience the effects from macro-economic forces and Brexit will mean that many non-skilled and non-British workers will leave the UK. This will create a demand to fill casual jobs and create new opportunities for the less-skilled school, college and university leavers entering the workforce for the first time in 2019.”

The Series B expansion funds are coming from New York based investor 14W.

Job Today says it got additional growth uplift after integrating with Google Jobs — aka Google search’s built in AI-powered jobs engine. This launched in the UK in July 2018, and Job Today said it saw 101% growth in users in the first month of integration.

We’re just hours away from Apple’s big iPhone event and it looks like the company may have leaked its own news. AllThings.how spotted the names of future Apple products on Apple’s own website.

According to AllThings.how, Apple updated the product sidemap file minutes before taking the Apple Store down to add the new product pages. And this sitemap pointed to pages of unreleased products.

In particular, you could see links to products pages for the iPhone Xs, the iPhone Xs Max and the iPhone Xr. It lines up with previous rumors.

According to previous rumors, Apple is going to update the iPhone X with better components. In addition to this rumored iPhone Xs, there will be a bigger version of this device — a gigantic 6.5-inch iPhone Xs Max. Finally, Apple is going to replace the iPhone 8 with the iPhone Xr, a 6.1-inch device with an LCD display and a design inspired by the iPhone X.

Based on this sitemap file, the iPhone Xs and Xs Max should come in space gray, silver or gold. You’ll get to choose between 64GB, 256GB and 512GB. The iPhone Xr should be available in black, white, red, yellow, coral or blue. Storage starts at 64GB as well, and you can pay a bit more to get 128GB or 256GB of storage.

In addition to iPhone names, the updated XML file contains interesting information about the new Apple Watch. A previous leaked image obtained by 9to5Mac showed a new edge-to-edge display.

And it looks like the Apple Watch display will be slightly larger indeed. According to today’s leak, the small Apple Watch will feature a 40mm display (instead of 38mm). The bigger version will sports a 44mm display (instead of 42mm). It doesn’t sound like a huge increase, but you should also see an improved screen resolution.

Finally, the sitemap doesn’t indicate any change in the iPad and Mac lineups. Maybe Apple won’t mention those products at all. The company might also talk about updates that will be available later this year. Or Apple could unveil updated devices in the coming months.

Again, this is just a sidemap and it doesn’t necessarily reflect the final names of those products. But given the timing of this leak, it sounds more than plausible.