Author: azeeadmin

Myki, a startup based between Beirut and New York which offers both a consumer and enterprise identity management solution to store sensitive information offline, today announced at TechCrunch Disrupt in San Francisco that it’s raised a $4 million Series A to scale its operations.

The round was led by Dubai-based VC BECO Capital with participation from Beirut-based LEAP Ventures and B&Y Venture Partners, all of which are returning investors. Myki plans to expand its U.S. operations with its “decentralised Identity Management” solution for enterprise.

Priscilla Elora Sharuk, who co-founded the startup with Antoine Vincent Jabberer in 2015, said: “Online security and data privacy is not a privilege, it is a right, and that is why at Myki we empower our users with the tools to securely manage their digital identity.”

Myki actually launched on the TechCrunch Disrupt Battlefield stage in September of 2016, and has since gone on to win several plaudits from tech industry outlets for its free and powerful password management, and amassing more than 250,000 users worldwide.

Back in May, on the TechCrunch Disrupt Berlin stage, Myki announced a partnership with self-sovereign identity application Blockpass to combine self-sovereign identity and offline password security.

Myki is going after the consumer password space, with biometric authentication such as touch ID and Face ID; the enterprise with “Myki for Teams”; and a solution for Managed Service Providers.

America’s reluctance to regulate crypto is costing the country on startups and potentially the future of technology.

That’s the view of two major names in the crypto space, Ripple CEO Brad Garlinghouse — whose company created cryptocurrency XRP — and Michael Arrington, the founder of TechCrunch who runs a dedicated crypto fund, who shared their thoughts at TechCrunch Disrupt San Francisco today.

While there’s been no breakout blockchain company so far — excluding those that service the industry through crypto exchanges or mining — nearly every major tech company has a stance on blockchain, and is actively looking into how it can work with it. While big companies as diverse as Facebook, IBM and Google are looking hard at what’s possible, most startups — which also bring innovation — are being developed elsewhere in the world.

“We have a few good U.S. investments,” Arrington said of his $100 million ‘Arrington XRP’ fund. “But 80-90 percent of our investments are in Asia, Europe and Israel right now because they are actually countries where there’s enough regulatory certainty that entrepreneurs feel safe starting token or blockchain companies there.

“Here [in the U.S.] they don’t. There’s so much regulatory uncertainty, add to that the tax burden and the visa burden of coming here and then our current federal government’s stance on immigration in general, they’re just saying ‘Fuck it’ and they’re staying in Singapore or Israel or Europe instead of coming here and starting companies,” he added.

In more stronger terms, Arrington said the lack of clarity is “single-handedly fucking the next stage of technology development.”

“The SEC needs to get their act together,” he added. “If they had done that with the internet in 1994-1995, TechCrunch/none of us would be here, we’d all be living in Shanghai or somewhere else, wherever had managed to get their act together.”

Garlinghouse echoed those statements, whilst adding that there is certainly a need for intervention from a regulator.

“There are unequivocally bad actors in the ICO ecosystem,” he said. “There have been frauds and massive scams — hundreds of millions of dollars, if not billions, have been heisted — if anything I’m surprised the SEC hasn’t been more aggressive.

“The clarity [around regulation] would be very helpful, there’s a risk that a lot of this developments ends up not being in the U.S,” Garlinghouse explained. “The impact on the United States economy for having the internet that we think of today being very US-centric in many ways has been very, very positive for the United States.”

While there’s been plenty of speculation around what tokens that the SEC might deem to be securities, Garlinghouse said that he isn’t concerned about a clampdown on XRP.

“We joked at an all-hands meeting recently — and some people didn’t find it funny — that if Ripple shutdown tomorrow, the XRP ledger would continue to operate. So if XRP is a security, it is a security of what?” he said.

“The facts are pretty clear: XRP is not a security… I don’t spend a lot of time worrying about that.”

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

Challenger bank N26 is launching a premium plan for professional accounts. N26 already had a free plan for freelancers and self-employed called N26 Business. N26 Business Black introduces the same perks as N26 Black, but for freelancers and self-employed.

The new plan costs the same for regular users and business users. The company recently raised the price of N26 Black, so you’ll now have to pay €9.99 per month for N26 Black or N26 Business Black.

In addition to regular N26 features, N26 Business Black lets you withdraw money anywhere in the world without any conversion fee. You also get the Allianz insurance package, which includes travel insurance, mobile phone and ATM theft protection as well as extended warranty on things you buy.

In order to sweeten the deal, N26 is offering three months of Zervant for customers based in Austria, Germany and France, and three months of Debitoor for everyone. Those are invoicing and accounting platforms for freelancers and small companies.

Never has it been so clear that the attorneys charged with enforcing the laws of the country have a complete disregard for the very laws they’re meant to enforce.

As executives of Twitter and Facebook took to the floor of the Senate to testify about their companies’ response to international meddling into U.S. elections and addressed the problem of propagandists and polemicists using their platforms to spread misinformation, the legal geniuses at the Justice Department were focused on a free speech debate that isn’t just unprecedented, but also potentially illegal.

These attorneys general convened to confabulate on the “growing concern” that social media companies are stifling expression and hurting competition. What’s really at issue is a conservative canard and talking point that tries to make a case that private companies have a First Amendment obligation to allow any kind of speech on their platforms.

The simple fact is that they do not. Let me repeat that. They simply don’t.

What the government’s lawyers are trying to do is foist a responsibility that they have to uphold the First Amendment onto private companies that are under no such obligation. Why are these legal eagles so up in arms? The simple answer is the decision made by many platforms to silence voices that violate the expressed policies of the platforms they’re using.

Chief among these is Alex Jones — who has claimed that the Sandy Hook school shooting was a hoax and accused victims of the Parkland school shooting of being crisis actors.

Last month a number of those social media platform that distributed Jones, finally decided that enough was enough.

The decision to boot Jones is their prerogative as private companies. While Jones has the right to shout whatever he wants from a soapbox in free speech alley (or a back alley, or into a tin can) — and while he can’t be prosecuted for anything that he says (no matter how offensive, absurd, or insane) — he doesn’t have the right to have his opinions automatically amplified by every social media platform.

Almost all of the big networking platforms have come to that conclusion.

The technology lobbying body has already issued a statement excoriating the Department of Justice for its ham-handed approach.

[The] U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) today released a statement saying that it was convening state attorneys general to discuss its concerns that these companies were “hurting competition and intentionally stifling the free exchange of ideas.” Social media platforms have the right to determine what types of legal speech they will permit on their platforms. It is inappropriate for the federal government to use the threat of law enforcement to limit companies from exercising this right. In particular, law enforcement should not threaten social media companies with unwarranted investigations for their efforts to rid their platforms of extremists who incite hate and violence.

While the Justice Department’s approach muddies the waters and makes it more difficult for legitimate criticism and reasoned regulation of the social media platforms to take hold, there are legitimate issues that legislators need to address.

Indeed, many of them were raised in a white paper from Senator Mark Warner, which was released in the dog days of summer.

Or the Justice Department could focus on the issue that Senator Ron Wyden emphasized in the hours after the hearing.

Instead of focusing on privacy or security, attorneys general for the government are waging a pyrrhic war against censorship that doesn’t exist and ignoring the real cold war for platform security.

America may have created AI, but China is taking the ball and running when it comes to one of the world’s most pivotal technology innovations.

That’s according to Kaifu Lee, a world-renowned AI expert who founded Sinovation, a China-U.S. fund that raised its fourth fund worth $1 billion earlier this year.

Speaking at TechCrunch Disrupt San Francisco, Lee — who led Google in China before it left the country — said any lead America’s tech industry may have enjoyed is rapidly being eroded by hungry Chinese entrepreneurs who have oodles more data at their disposal to build, train and deploy AI systems.

“People assume that because the U.S. is so strong in AI research, that the U.S. should dominate,” Lee said. “But actually, China is catching up really first.”

Sinovation already has five AI companies in its portfolio that are valued at over $1 billion — that might be a record for any VC firm worldwide — and he explained China’s “magical ascent” in AI has taken just two years.

“Coming from way behind, now [China] is actually ahead of the U.S. in AI implementation,” Lee said. “AI we should think of it as electricity. Thomas Edison [the inventor of electricity] — and also the AI deep learning inventors who were American — they invented this stuff and then they generously shared it.

“Now, China, as the largest marketplace with the largest amount of data, is really using AI to find every way to add value to traditional businesses, to internet, to all kinds of spaces. The Chinese entrepreneurial ecosystem is huge so today the most valuable AI companies in computer vision, speech recognition, drones are all Chinese companies,” Lee added.

But it isn’t just progress in the eyes of investors — who create valuations through their investment — Lee said that Chinese AI firms generate more sales, too, while China accounts for nearly half of all VC investments and 43 percent of all AI startups.

“These are companies that were founded between two and four years ago,” Lee explained. “This is really how fast it’s been, you have to be there to see the excitement and the pace.”

In the case of Sinovation, their billion-dollar AI companies include crypto firm Bitmain, image recognition company Megvii (known as Face++), fintech-focused 4th Paradigm, autonomous driving AI company Momenta, and chip outfit Horizon Robotics.

Much of the reporting around how China is using artificial intelligence centers around ways that the government is using facial recognition for surveillance purposes. While that has included crime fighting, with facial recognition successfully used to identify and capture suspects, there are also concerns around more sinister applications, such as the surveillance of Chinese minority Uighur Muslims. China is reported to have detained as many as one million Uighur in camps, and facial recognition technology is believed to be one key part of surveillance strategy.

Lee, however, brushed off concern around the darker applications of AI in China, pointing out that the technology has the capacity to be abused anywhere in the world. He said China is also using the technology to develop new kinds of retail, manage busy urban traffic, build new kinds of educational services, and more.

Indeed, Sinovation’s takes an unusual route to develop technologies and startups. As well as investing, it also develops technology in-house using a team of 200 people in its ‘institute.’ Not only does that team work with portfolio companies and on a consultancy basis, but it develops its own services where it sees gaps in the market.

Indeed, the firm recently span out its first venture from that tech team, which helps traditional retailers develop online-to-offline capabilities, which essentially marry the benefits of online commerce with more traditional brick and mortar retail. That’s a strategy that Chinese e-commerce giants Alibaba and JD.com have invested heavily in.

McCarthyFinch sounds a bit like a law firm — and with good reason. The startup has developed an AI as a Service platform aimed at the legal profession. This week, it’s competing in the 2018 TechCrunch Disrupt Battlefield in San Francisco.

The company began life as a project at a leading New Zealand law firm, MinterEllisonRuddWatts. They wanted to look at how they could take advantage of AI to automate legal processes to make them more efficient, cost-effective and faster, according to company president Richard DeFrancisco.

“They were working on leveraging technology to become the law firm of the future, and they realized there were some pretty tremendous gaps,” he explained. They found a bunch of Ph.Ds working on artificial intelligence who worked with more than 30 lawyers over time to address those gaps by leveraging AI technology.

 

That internal project was spun out as a startup last year, emerging as an AI platform with 18 services. MinterEllison, along with New Zealand VC Goat Ventures, gave the fledgling company US$2.5 million in pre-seed money to get started.

The company looked at automating a lot of labor-intensive tasks related to legal document review and discovery such as document tagging. “Lawyers spend a lot of time tagging things with regards to what’s relevant and not relevant, and it’s not a good use of their time. We can go through millions of documents very quickly,” DeFrancisco said. He claims they can lower the time it takes to tag a set of documents in a lawsuit from weeks to minutes.

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He says that one of their key differentiators is their use of natural language processing (NLP), which he says allows the company to understand language and nuance to interpret documents with a high level of accuracy, even when there are small data sets. Instead of requiring thousands of documents to train their models, which he says law firms don’t have time to do, they can begin to understand the gist of a case in as little as two or three documents with 90 percent accuracy, based on their tests.

They don’t actually want to sell their platform directly to law firms. Instead, they hope to market their artificial intelligence skills as a service to other software vendors with a legal bent who are looking to get smarter without building their own AI from scratch.

“What we are doing is going to technology service providers and talking to them about using our solution. We have restful APIs to integrate into their technology and do a Powered By-model,” DeFrancisco explained.

The startup currently has 10 trials going on. While he couldn’t name them, he did say that they include the largest law firm in Europe, largest global provider of legal information and the fastest growing SaaS company in history. They are also working on agreements with large systems integrators including Deloitte and Accenture to act as resellers of their solution.

While they are based in New Zealand, they plan to open a U.S. office in the Los Angeles area shortly after Disrupt. The engineering team will remain in New Zealand, and DeFrancisco will build the rest of the company in the U.S as it seeks to expand its reach. They also plan to start raising their next round of funding.

People like to say that brick-and-mortar retail is dead, but direct-to-consumer businesses continue to dabble with physical stores all the same.

Why? Because brick-and-mortar retail provides businesses with benefits an online shopping platform can’t, namely consumer experiences that create and sustain shopper’s relationships with brands. 

To help the next generation of digitally native stores expand into the physical world, Uppercase, formerly known as thisopenspace, is launching out of stealth with $3.5 million in venture capital funding. Lerer Hippeau has led the round, with participation from CRV and SV Angels.

Uppercase works with real estate agents, architects and designers to build stores for online brands in New York City, Los Angeles and Toronto.

Co-founder and CEO Yashar Nejati started the company after noticing that online brands were experimenting with pop-up shops then establishing permanent storefronts.

Men’s retailer Frank & Oak, which picked up a $16 million Series C this year, is a great example of that trend. The company began as an internet retailer and now has several stores throughout Canada. Luggage startup Away, trendy shoe company Allbirds and Emily Weiss’ makeup company Glossier have done the same.

“Anyone can launch an online brand,” Nejati told TechCrunch. “Brands truly stand out from the crowd once they grow beyond digital — we’re seeing this with Warby Parker, Casper and Indochino, who will have over 350 stores by the end of 2018. Uppercase is part of a modern growth strategy, providing tech-enabled flexible retail stores for brands to launch, analyze, and grow their retail presence.”

So far, Uppercase has built stores for furniture company Joybird and Venus et Fleur, which sells artfully arranged roses.

Early-stage investor Lerer Hippeau has backed a number of direct-to-consumer brands, including the aforementioned Allbirds and Casper.

“We’ve seen the importance of an omnichannel strategy as companies scale,” Lerer Hippeau Graham Brown told TechCrunch. “Uppercase is the perfect partner for brands born online looking to expand into the physical world.”

The Transportation Security Agency will expand its 3D carry-on luggage scanning program it originally launched in more than a dozen airports this July.

The agency originally estimated the program would be rolled out in 145 airports by 2019, but now raised that projection to 200 scanners, David Pekoske, the agency’s administrator, told lawmakers Wednesday.

In contrast to traditional 2D scanners that take photos from just a couple of angles, 3D scanners will use computed tomography (CT) to take hundreds of images per second with a spinning X-ray camera. With a more granular picture of each bag, the CT technology can build an interactive image that can be rotated and analyzed from 360-degrees by screening staff.

“They are a significant enhancement in security effectiveness,” said Pekoske in an open hearing at the Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee. “And I’ve also watched passengers actually self-align behind the CT machines because it’s a better passenger experience.”

In addition to creating an intuitive and quick way for agents to analyze these bags, the technology will also lighten the load on travelers by requiring them to take fewer items out of their bag prior to scanning.

The TSA might be one of the most unloved federal agencies, but says its new scanning methods may one day allow flyers to leave their liquids and electronics inside their luggage without losing degrees of security. Pekoske also said that the agency has been able to detect 3D-printed firearms in travelers’ baggage, noting that the new CT scanners will make it easier.

However, just when that day will be is still yet to be determined. While the TSA has raised its deployment estimate to 200 machines, this will only cover a fraction of the country’s 2,200 screening lanes.

It’s one of the few ways that the TSA is trying to balance security with rolling back some of the restrictions that have been imposed in recent years, following airborne incidents after the September 11 attacks. The agency, created just months later, has been plagued with scandals and controversies. When the agency isn’t facing accusations of groping passengers passing through its security checkpoints, it’s under fire for conducting not-so-secret surveillance programs on innocent Americans. That so-called “Quiet Skies” program — first brought to light by The Boston Globe earlier this year, was jumped on by lawmakers.

Pekoske said that out of the “thousands of passengers” monitored, no arrests have been made, the program “hasn’t foiled any threat,” and yet data is kept on travelers for at least two years in case it’s proven useful in the future.

But the administrator wouldn’t go into much detail, as much of the program “is classified,” but said that he was “confident” it’s reduced the risk to the traveling public.

A TSA spokesperson did not return a request for comment.

Meet PoLTE, a Dallas-based startup that wants to make location-tracking more efficient. Thanks to PoLTE’s software solution, logistics and shipment companies can much more easily track packages and goods. The startup is participating in TechCrunch’s Startup Battlefield at Disrupt SF.

If you want to use a connected device to track a package, you currently need a couple of things — a way to determine the location of the package, and a way to transmit this information over the air. The most straightforward way of doing it is by using a GPS chipset combined with a cellular chipset.

Systems-on-chip have made this easier as they usually integrate multiple modules. You can get a GPS signal and wireless capabilities in the same chip. While GPS is insanely accurate, it also requires a ton of battery just to position a device on a map. That’s why devices often triangulate your position using Wi-Fi combined with a database of Wi-Fi networks and their positions.

And yet, using GPS or Wi-Fi as well as an LTE modem doesn’t work if you want to track a container over multiple weeks or months. At some point, your device will run out of battery. Or you’ll have to spend a small fortune to buy a ton of trackers with big batteries.

PoLTE has developed a software solution that lets you turn data from the cell modem into location information. It works with existing modems and only requires a software update. The company has been working with Riot Micro for instance.

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Behind the scene PoLTE’s magic happens on their servers. IoT devices don’t need to do any of the computing. They just need to send a tiny sample of LTE signals and PoLTE can figure out the location from their servers. Customers can then get this data using an API.

It only takes 300 bytes of data to get location information with precision of less than a few meters. You don’t need a powerful CPU, Wi-Fi, GPS or Bluetooth.

“We offer 80 percent cost reduction on IoT devices together with longer battery life,” CEO Ed Chao told me.

On the business side, PoLTE is using a software-as-a-service model. You can get started for free if you don’t need a lot of API calls. You then start paying depending on the size of your fleet of devices and the number of location requests.

It doesn’t really matter if the company finds a good business opportunity. PoLTE is a low-level technology company at heart. Its solution is interesting by itself and could help bigger companies that are looking for an efficient location-tracking solution.

D-ID, the company developing software to scramble facial recognition technologies, has signed its first customers and launched its initial product onstage at TechCrunch Disrupt San Francisco.

The culmination of an idea that was 14 years in the making, D-ID’s technology is being sold as both a service and as an enterprise software solution on-premise for certain customers.

Pricing for the service is based on each image that the company’s technology manipulates and will range from $3 down to a few cents per image.

“We have moved too fast with face recognition, which is now a threat to privacy,” says D-ID chief executive officer Gil Perry.

And while many companies are pitching facial recognition as the next new thing in biometric security, those services have to be balanced with a respect for an individual’s privacy, Perry says.

“People are now aware… and they care,” Perry said.

D-ID’s founding team has seen several requests to make a consumer app, but Perry said to have the largest impact, the company wanted to serve the organizations that store massive amounts of images.

“Amazon and all these companies are going to need face recognition, so we’re not going to stop face recognition,” says Perry. His goal is to make that facial recognition technology responsive to the privacy and security concerns that individuals rightly have.

What Perry envisions is that companies will use D-ID’s software to store scrambled versions of their customers’ faces rather than an actual, unfiltered image of someone’s face. The idea is to protect the user’s “real” facial information by only storing one of D-ID’s distorted copies.

Perry uses the example of an iPhone X secured with D-ID’s technology. Instead of capturing a true image of a user’s face, the phone takes a picture and then uses D-ID software to distort the image. That distorted image becomes the one that the phone “remembers” and can be used to unlock the device. D-ID basically becomes an abstraction layer to prevent any company from having an individual’s “real” face in its databases.

Data privacy regulations like the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), which became enforceable in May 2018 and require companies to guard personal data, including biometric data, more stringently or risk heavy fines are already driving interest in the company’s software, according to Perry.

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D-ID serves three verticals: companies that need to protect images of their employees or customers, health management organizations and government and security agencies that want to secure biometric data.

The company’s approach to digitally manipulating images renders images unreadable by the machine learning tools that are used to identify an individual, but are imperceptible to the naked eye.

“We use advanced image processing and deep learning to process the photo or video in such a way that it will look similar to the human eye but machines, AI, face recognition classifiers will not be able to recognize the individual,” Perry said.

For the founding team at D-ID (which stands for de-identification), the problem of anonymity online wasn’t academic.

As we’d noted when the company launched from Y Combinator’s demo day in 2017, Perry met his chief operating officer Sella Blondheim when both were in the Israeli Special Forces about a decade ago, while chief technical officer Eliran Kuta served in the Israeli Intelligence Corps.

Kuta spent nearly a decade in the Israeli Defense Force’s elite technical unit, 8200, before joining civilian life and taking a job at Houseparty, which is where he met Perry. Meanwhile, Blondheim was working at sales software startup Natural Intelligence. On nights and weekends Perry and Blondheim would convene to hash out the technology that would become the foundation for D-ID, eventually bringing Kuta on as CTO and co-founder, as well.

“When we saw that this [facial recognition technology] was going to be the end of privacy as people know it. We took on this mission we were determined to solve privacy,” says Perry. “To solve the right to privacy and prevent it from disappearing. To make a solution that would be available to everyone before it’s too late.”

The company has certainly found investors willing to buy into its vision. It has bounced from prestigious accelerator to prestigious accelerator starting off in the 8200 Accelerator group and then moving to Y Combinator in its summer 2017 batch. Already, the company has nabbed a seed round of $4 million from investors, including Pitango Ventures, and snatched a massive pilot customer in Cloudinary — which the company announced at its demo day.

Perry estimates there are some 360,000 companies in the world with 22 billion pieces of media — all of which could be potential customers for D-ID’s solution. Indeed, the breadth of the company’s initial customer base, including an auto manufacturer, a financial services firm and a big printing corporation, speak to the market segments that would find the company’s technology appealing.

“That is going to fix face recognition now,” Perry said. “This is going to be the center of face recognition. Everyone will use it. Everyone will be using D-ID.”