Author: azeeadmin

As someone who’s had a years-long front-row seat to Russia’s efforts to influence U.S. politics, former Facebook Chief Security Officer Alex Stamos has a pretty solid read on what we can expect from the 2018 midterms. Stamos left the company last month to work on cybersecurity education at Stanford.

“If there’s no foreign interference during the midterms, it’s not because we did a great job,” Stamos said in an interview with TechCrunch at Disrupt SF on Thursday. “It’s because our adversaries decided to [show] a little forbearance, which is unfortunate.”

As Stamos sees it, there is an alternative reality in which the U.S. electorate would be better off heading into its next major nationwide voting day, but critical steps haven’t been taken.

“As a society, we have not responded to the 2016 election in the way that would’ve been necessary to have a more trustworthy midterms,” he said. “There have been positive changes, but overall security of campaigns [is] not that much better, and the actual election infrastructure isn’t much better.”

Stamos believes that it’s important to remember that foreign adversaries can’t dictate the outcome of an election with any kind of guarantee. What they can do — and what he calls his “big fear” — is that they can still mess everything up in a way that calls the entire system into question.

“In most cases, throwing an election one way or another is going to be very difficult for a foreign adversary, but throwing any election into chaos is totally doable right now,” he said. “That’s where we haven’t moved forwards. ”

Stamos gave examples of attacks on voter registration sites that lose voter data or denial-of-service attacks on the day of elections.

“With a disinformation campaign at the same time, you can make it so that you have half the country that thinks the election was thrown,” he said.

To a foreign adversary seeking to undermine U.S. democracy, creating that kind of doubt isn’t very technically difficult. Even with no votes changed and no voting systems breached, a little doubt goes a very long way toward accomplishing the same goals as a more sophisticated hacking campaign.

Stamos cites new ad funding disclosures as one substantive change that will help make U.S. democracy healthier, but more efforts need to be taken.

“Russian interference or not, we do not want a future where campaigns and candidates are cutting up the electorate into smaller and smaller pieces — so I think ad transparency is the first step there,” he said.

In some cases, those efforts will require a major shift in the way both the U.S. government and private social media companies have conducted themselves. For one, as he wrote in Lawfare, the U.S. needs “an independent, defense-only cybersecurity agency with no intelligence, military or law enforcement responsibility” rather than a patchwork of agencies each partially responsible for cybersecurity defense.

The news may not be great for 2018, but a strong dose of realism now will amplify the clarion call to do better before 2020.

This is officially a trend. This afternoon, Slack reported connectivity issues through its official status channel. We can confirm. Roughly half of our messages are going through. And yes, it’s super duper annoying.

“We’re investigating problems with connectivity at this time,” the company writes. “We’re sorry for the interruption and will keep you posted as soon as we have an update”

This is the third large connection issue the popular chat service has experienced in roughly a month or so. We’ll report back as we hear more.

UL, the company behind the tablet and phone performance benchmark app 3DMark, has delisted new Huawei phones from its “Best Smartphone” leaderboard after AnandTech discovered the phone maker was boosting its performance to ace the app’s test.

The phones delisted were the P20, P20 Pro, Nova 3 and the Honor Play.

“After testing the devices in our own lab and confirming that they breach our rules, we have decided to delist the affected models and remove them from our performance rankings,” the company said in a statement.

For the Huawei case, the rules are actually a little fuzzy. Phones are permitted to adjust performance based on workload, which results in peaks or dips in performance for different apps, but they are not permitted to hard-code peaks in performance specifically for the benchmark app. Huawei reportedly claimed that the peak in performance seen during the run of the benchmark app was an intuitive jump determined by AI; however, when an unlabeled version of the benchmark test was run, the phones were unable to recognize it and, as a result, displayed lower performances.

In other words, the phones aren’t so smart after all.

Huawei is not the first company caught overstepping these rules. Samsung did as well in 2013, and ironically the results of these benchmark tests actually mean little in terms of overall general performance of the phone.

While they can point to how a phone may perform during heavy stress, average performance is still best discovered through individual testing.

Huawei did not immediately return a request for comment.

Vegans, rejoice! JUST’s sustainable egg alternative is set to arrive in stores this fall.

The vegan foods company, formerly known as Hampton Creek, will sell the egg-free and dairy-free “egg” in certain grocery store chains across the U.S. 

JUST co-founder and CEO Josh Tetrick, whose company was valued at $1.1 billion last year, says fans of JUST have long-awaited this day.

“Launching JUST Egg is a major milestone and we’re excited for it to become a favorite part of families’ meals far into the future,” Tetrick said in a statement. “Fans of JUST have been looking forward to this moment for some time and we’re eager to hear customers’ feedback when they try it at home or in their favorite restaurants.”

JUST’s “egg” product is among its growing line of vegan foods. It also carries salad dressing, cookie dough and mayo, most of which you can buy on Amazon and in grocery stores. The company also runs a clean meat lab, where it’s competing against Impossible Foods, Memphis Meats and other startups to conquer the lab-grown meat market.

If you’re unfamiliar with JUST, you may remember Hampton Creek. The company ditched its former name in 2017 after major scandals and poor business decisions led it down a bad, bad road.

Founded in 2011, JUST was a VC darling, raising capital from Facebook co-founder Eduardo Saverin, Salesforce founder and CEO Marc Benioff and Khosla Ventures, among others. But in 2016, reports emerged that employees were buying products off the shelves to increase sales figures, a move that resulted in an SEC investigation.

The company went on to lose several executives amid other reports it was blasting through $10 million per month. The final blow, however, was last July, when every member of the company’s board stepped down, except for CEO Josh Tetrick, who remains at the helm.

After a couple of months, Tetrick hit the ground running again with new board members and patents signaling a new direction for JUST.

JUST Egg will be available in Hy-Vee, Fresh Thyme, Gelson’s, Nugget, Mollie Stone’s, New Seasons, Lunardi’s, Mariano’s, Haggen, Metropolitan Market, Acme Fresh Markets and others.

Twitter is testing a new experience for web users, the company announced in a tweet on Thursday. A small number of Twitter users will see the updated version of Twitter for web, which will include access to Twitter’s Bookmarks feature, and scrolling through Twitter’s Explore section, the tweet said and a spokesperson confirmed.

However, Business Insider grabbed screenshots of the opt-in pop-up that appears when you’re invited to test the revamped website, which promises other features like night mode, data saver and more.

These are not necessarily “new” features though — Twitter rolled out its dark-themed “Night Mode” to the web client a year ago.

The differences appear to be more subtle, as it turns out. For example, Night Mode is now a toggle switch, as is Data Saver, instead of an option to click on from your settings menu.

Trends also shifted from one side of the home page to the other, underneath the “Who to follow” suggestions, which gives the interface a cleaner, more organized appearance.

The “Compose Tweet” pop-up looks different as well. Instead of a boxed-in rectangular area to write in, it’s more of an open space with an underline. The “Location” button is missing on Compose, too, and the “Tweet” button has moved to the top.

The addition of Bookmarks to the web client is the biggest and most welcome change. The feature publicly launched in February of this year on mobile platforms, but had not yet made it to the web. None of the other tweaks seem to be radical changes, though — not like the update that turned Twitter’s stars into hearts, for instance, or the one that introduced threads.

Twitter declined to say how many users were being opted in at present, or when the experience would roll out more broadly. But if you’re being offered the opt-in, you’ll see it.

Entertainment has changed. New platforms led by YouTube have emerged to change the dynamic of broadcast media — once dominated by the rigid programming of TV — while the internet has enabled new media stars to engage with their audiences in new, high-touch ways. Developments like live streaming, social media and more have made the stars of today more relatable and more easily reachable than those of yesteryear.

The easiest example to grasp is arguably the Kardashian family.

They dominate the media, have accrued millions of fans on social networks and have branched into retail, fashion, production and more. Their relationship with fans is 24/7 and, regardless of how you feel about the family, their popularity is a clear indicator of this new always-on connection between public figures and their fans.

A new startup is seizing on an opportunity to help up-and-coming online entertainers take a leaf out of that book and grow their relationships with fans.

Popbase is an app that operates almost like an interactive forum for new media.

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The app is designed to take the relationship beyond videos and encourage a more interactive experience. Initially, that means trivia quizzes, exclusive content and news snippets — i.e. exclusive content clips for members — but the plan to go beyond that and enable games, augmented reality, collectibles and more.

While the primary goal is to help grow the fan-creator relationship, Popbase is also aimed at enabling YouTubers to monetize their brand through in-app purchases and advertising around content. Creators take a 60 percent cut of all revenue with the remainder going to Binary Bubbles, the Los Angeles-based startup behind the service. However, that revenue split can rise as high as 70 percent for creators when they “start doing really well,” according to Binary Bubbles CEO Lisa Wong.

In addition, there are incentives for referring others to the platform.

“YouTubers who aren’t as huge as PewDiePie [the star with 65 million subscribers] work very hard,” Wong told TechCrunch in an interview. “With Popbase, we are giving them a chance to gamify and monetize their YouTube content and personality.”

If you recall the once-wildly popular ‘The Kim Kardashian: Hollywood’ app — which was reportedly grossing $200 million per year — Popbase’s strategy is to allow influencers with a more modest budget to tap its platform and offer some of those customized experiences for their audiences.

So far, Binary Bubbles has signed up five YouTubers — with a collective fan base of one million followers — and it is looking for more influencers with a following that sits between 10,000 and one million fans.

Wong, who spent over 25 years working in the video game industry for companies like Sony PlayStation and Activision, started Binary Bubbles in January 2017 alongside CTO Richard Weeks and CBDO Amit Tishler. Wong reconnected with Weeks — a programmer whose past employers include Lucas Art — when they both worked on an AR project, and the addition of Tishler, who is an artist/animator, rounded out the founding team.

The startup has raised around $145,000 to date, and it is targeting a total pre-seed round of $500,000.

Revolut, the new-generation smartphone-based bank which is blowing up Europe right now, has confirmed its intention launch in the United States and Canada later this year, taking its interesting combination of personal banking, crypto wallet and fee-free stocks trading app to main-street North America. Co-founder and CEO Nik Storonsky said the company now has a 60,000 person waiting list for U.S customers for when it launches.

Onstage at TechCrunch Disrupt San Francisco today Storonsky, said the startup, which has already passed the ‘unicorn’ stage of a billion dollar valuation, would be launching some time between October and December this year.

Revolut’s app-based checking account and debit card offers customers payment notifications, built-in budgeting controls and the ability to spend and transfer money globally using the real exchange rate, thus bypassing forex fees.

In the last six months, Revolut has launched a feature allowing customers to buy, hold and sell cryptocurrencies, although these are held within the app’s wallet, and can’t be traded on exchanges. The crypto currencies the company uses to provide this service is also held offline in ‘cold storage’, Storonsky told me on stage. He wouldn’t say where.

Last week, the company launched a fully contactless metal card that gives customers up to 1% cashback on spending in either fiat or cryptocurrency, overseas travel insurance and a personal concierge for booking everything from restaurant tables to festival tickets.

Revolut is also actively working on a commission-free trading platform. This will put it at logger-heads with the US-based Robinhood, which bills itself as a disruptive force in the online brokerage industry, by allowing customers to buy and sell stocks and exchange-traded funds (ETFs) without paying a commission. Why? Because Robinhood has announced its intention to expanding into the personal banking space, while Revolut (a bank) is expanding into Robinhood’s space. It should make for an interesting battle-to-come.

Launched three years ago, London-based Revolut has grown very quickly in Europe. The company has a total of three million customers and claims it is opening over 7,000 new accounts every day. Revolut has raised over $336 million in funding from VCs including Index Ventures, Ribbit Capital and DST Global, and unusually originally crowd-funded its startup capital.

Incumbent US banks would do well to sit up and take notice. They are about to have a very aggressive challenger bank appear on their doorstep which appeals to the many millennials who run their lives via a smartphone.

Google’s Pixel 3 and Pixel 3 XL are hardly a secret at this point, having leaked out again and again over the last few weeks. But they’re still not quite official.

The phones just took one big step closer to real, with Google sending out invites for a “Made By Google” event that will almost certainly focus on the phones.

The invite itself doesn’t say much, besides that it’ll happen at 11 am on October 9th in New York. They also use a “3” (as in Pixel 3) to make a heart in “I <3 NY”, presumably no accident.

The rumor mill, meanwhile, has said plenty. Like that the Pixel 3 will likely have a Snapdragon 845 processor, 4GB of ram and a 12.2 megapixel camera behind a 5.5″ display. The beefier Pixel 3 XL, meanwhile, is said to bump things up to a 6.71″ display (complete with the always controversial camera cutout) and 6GB of ram.

Kadho, a company building automatic speech recognition technology to help children communicate with voice-powered devices, is officially exiting stealth today at TechCrunch Disrupt SF 2018 where it’s launching its new technology, Kidsense Edge voice A.I. The company claims its technology can better decode kids’ speech as it was built using speech data from 150,000 children’s voices. The COPPA-compliant solution, which is initially targeting the voice-enabled devices and voice-enabled toys market, is already being used by paying customers.

As anyone with an Echo smart speaker or Google Home can tell you, today’s devices often struggle to understand children’s voices. That’s because current automatic speech recognition technology has been built for adults and was trained on adult voice data.

Kidsense.ai, meanwhile, was built for kids using voices of children from different age groups and speaking different languages. By doing so, it believes it can outperform the big players in the market like Google, Samsung, Baidu, Amazon, and Microsoft, when it comes to understanding children’s speech, the company says.

The company behind the Kidsense AI technology, Kadho, has been around since 2014, and was originally founded by PhDs with backgrounds in A.I. and neuroscience, Kaveh Azartash (CEO) and Dhonam Pemba (Chief Scientist). Chief Revenue Officer, Jock Thompson, is a third co-founder today.

Initially, the company’s focus was on building conversational-based language learning applications for kids.

“But the biggest pain point that we encountered…was that the devices that we were using or apps on – either mobile phones, tablets, robotics, or smart speakers  – they’re not built to understand kids,” explains Azartash. He means the speech recognition technology wasn’t built on kids’ data. “They’re not designed to communicate or understand kids.”

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The team realized there was a bigger problem to solve. Teaching kids new language using conversational techniques couldn’t work until devices could actually understand the kids. The company shifted to focus instead on speech recognition technology, using a data set of kids voices (which it did with parents’ consent, we’re told), to build Kidsense.

The initial product was a server-based solution called Kidsense cloud AI in late 2017. But more recently, it’s been working on an embedded version of the same platform, where no audio data from kids is collected, and no data is sent to cloud-based servers. This allows the solution to be both COPPA and GDPR-compliant.

This also means it could address the needs of device makers who have been previously come under fire for their less than secure toys and robotics, like Mattel’s Hello Barbie, or its canceled A.I. speaker Aristotle. The idea today is that toy makers, smart speaker manufacturers, and others catering to the kids’ market will need to be compliant with more stringent privacy laws and, to do so, the processing has to be done on the device, not the cloud.

“All the decoding, all the processing is one on the device,” says Azartash. “So we’re able to offer better efficacy and better accuracy in converting speech to text…the technology does not send any speech data to the server.”

“We’ve figured out how to put this all onto the device in an efficient way using minimal processing power,” adds Thompson. “And because we’re embedded we can charge a flat fee depending on the product anywhere to a subscription model.”

For example, a toy company working with thin margins on a product with a really small lifespan might want a flat fee. But another company may have a product with a longer lifespan that they charge their own customers for on subscription. They may want to be able to update their product’s voice tech capabilities over-the-air. That’s also possible here.

The company says its technology is in several toys, robotics, and A.I. speaker products around the world, but some of its customers are under NDA.

It’s also testing its technology with chip makers and big-name kids’ brands here in the U.S.

On stage, the company also showed off its latest development – dual language speech recognition technology. This is the first technology that can decode two languages in one sentence, when spoken by kids. This is an area smart speakers and their related voice technology are only now entering, within the adult market that is. For example, Google Assistant is preparing to become multilingual in English, French and German this year.

Currently, the company has approximately $1.2 million in revenue from customers on annual contracts and its SaaS model. It’s been operating in stealth mode, but is now preparing to reach more customers.

To date, Kadho has raised $2.5 million from investors including Plug and Play Tech Center, Beam Capital, Skywood Capital, SFK Investment, Sparks Lab, and other angel investors. It’s preparing to raise an additional $3 million before moving to a Series A.

For Lori Systems chief executive and co-founder Josh Sandler, deals like the one between his company and the Kenyan government to solve last-mile solutions around the national railroad are about far more than just logistics.

Sandler, whose family battled apartheid in South Africa as social workers, township doctors and (more dangerously) as financiers for the Spear of the Nation (the armed wing of the African National Congress), looks at logistics as an economic cornerstone for building more stable and democratic societies in sub-Saharan Africa.

His parents had immigrated to the U.S. in 1990 when Sandler was still a young child to escape the violence that accompanied the negotiations to dissolve South Africa’s apartheid state. Sandler’s father had worked as a doctor in township hospitals, while his mother was a social worker who was setting up a support network for abused children.

“A lot of the family was getting arrested and the country was breaking up and people feared a civil war and my dad got a fellowship in America and moved to Florida,” Sandler says. 

But South Africa remained the touchstone for Sandler’s family life and he would often return to visit those activist relatives who remained to help shepherd the country through its early years as a democracy. It was during one visit to the country — when Sandler was working in a refugee camp — that the need for better economic solutions to the region’s problems became clear.

In the aftermath of the economic collapse of Zimbabwe and the long-simmering civil war in the Congo in 2008, refugees from the region were flooding into South Africa — and it triggered a response in the country’s citizens. Xenophobic violence resulted in rioting, looting and the murder of immigrants at camps — and Sandler had gone to volunteer at the shelters that were caring for these refugees.

“I had been debating between investment banking and the peace corps and went with investment banking because there needs to be a macroeconomic solution for this,” Sandler said. “Finding the core challenges from a macro perspective and preventing this from occurring by establishing strong systems and an economy that can prevent… all of these crises.”

So Sandler studied development economics. His work focused on supply chains — specifically working with the Kenyan government to analyze what went into the dramatic cost increases that are attendant with the sale of every good and service in the country. “When you buy a mango on a farm, it’s half a penny and then in the supermarket it’s 80 cents,” said Sandler.

From Kenya, Sandler moved to study Nigeria and worked on problems with supply chain management in pharmaceuticals. “I did a lot of trips and treks back to the continent and what I kept seeing is challenges in the supply chain — part of it is middlemen and part of it is haulage.” Sandler said. “That’s a big issue that’s due to a lack of flexibility and coordination in the system.”

After seeing the elegance of the marketplace model that Uber had set up for ride-hailing and given the penetration of smart and feature phones in Africa, Sandler thought he could do something to create a marketplace for the trucking industry.

“Before, providers were managing individual trucking companies with a difficult marketplace and no transparency,” says Sandler. “By driving that through our system and having more pricing visibility we’re able to bring down the cost of bringing bulk grains to Uganda by 17.3 percent.”

Lori Systems first launched in Kenya and started working with a network of trucking companies. Around that time the company also came to the attention of TechCrunch.

Yes, Lori Systems has been on a TechCrunch stage before — as competitors (and eventual winners) of our inaugural TechCrunch Battlefield competition in Nairobi.

Since appearing on stage at our Nairobi event, Lori has grown quickly. The company counts 70 employees on staff — up from 20 — and now has 70 cargo operators responsible for a network of 2,500 trucks using its service.

The staffing changes at Lori include some big new executive hires, including Andrew Musoke, who has come on board as director of commercial products, and a former director of Maersk, Mehul Bhaat, who will be running operations in East Africa for Lori, Sandler says.

Lori has also expanded internationally — working with fleets in Kenya, Uganda, Rwanda and South Africa while also increasing the types of cargo that its fleet operators are transporting. “We went from just doing grain and fertilizer to now we do all freight bulk,” says Sandler.

Not everything about the TechCrunch experience was positive for Sandler and the company. After their victory, Lori, and Sandler, were subjected to criticism from some African press. “There were really bizarre implications with the underlying tone being white male privilege,” says Sandler. “It’s an important conversation to have around white male privilege… [but] it was coming out on a very personal level on a gossip column.”

The accusations aside, Sandler said the victory in the Startup Battlefield Africa competition validated the company with potential new hires.

As for the opportunity, Sandler says there’s $180 billion in hauling income across the African continent, and very little of it has been optimized with software. Ultimately, if Lori succeeds it will mean lower prices and increased spending power for consumers across Africa.

“If you’re earning a dollar a day and 40 percent or 60 percent is going to logistics that could be going somewhere else, that’s a problem,” Sandler said. It’s exactly the problem that Lori is setting out to solve.