Author: azeeadmin

23andMe, the genetics testing company, is in a state of constant evolution, as you’d expect any 12-year-old company would be. But that also means that customers need to be aware of how the company is using data that users may have earlier consented to give without anticipating its newer initiatives.

One new tie-up was a particular point of interest here at TechCrunch’s massive Disrupt show, taking place this week in San Francisco. Specifically, CEO and co-founder Anne Wojcicki was asked a series of questions about 23andMe’s pact with pharmaceutical giant GlaxoSmithKline, which announced in July that it acquired a $300 million stake in 23andMe in order to more efficiently develop drugs. As part of the four-year-deal, GSK gains exclusive rights to mine 23andMe’s customer data to more quickly and efficiently develop drug targets. Said Wojcicki of the partnership: “If we start with genetics, will we have a higher success rate” when it comes to drug development? (She clearly thinks so.)

As Wired reported last month, this isn’t entirely new terrain for the company. 23andMe has for the last three-and-a-half years been sharing insights gleaned from many of the more than 5 million people who’ve sent their spit to 23andMe. It just used to be that it shared that information with GSK and six other pharmaceutical and biotechnology firms. Now, GSK alone will be able to access what Wojcicki describes as aggregated and wholly anonymized customer information.

Even still, in an age where privacy leaks are rampant, 23andMe customers have expressed some chagrin about the deal, and Wojcicki’s chat today might not assuage them. The reason, as she underscored: 23andMe customers aren’t being asked to opt in to this data-sharing agreement, but rather, they are being told they can opt-out via email. The move assumes that someone who bought a 23andMe kit years ago will respond to an email from 23andMe that gives them this option, when, let’s face it, many may never even see the email, let alone open it.

What consumers may well like better is the future that Wojcicki imagines for 23andMe, one that focuses not so much on drug development but also, and perhaps even predominately, on prevention.

The idea, said Wojcicki, is to rely on 23andMe’s “community” of customers who tell the company “all kinds of things” about themselves — then potentially figure out connections between these disparate things. “Some people have Crohn’s disease. Some have heart issues. People have everything,” and sometimes at once, she suggested. Meanwhile, 23andMe is uniquely able to help figure out links that siloed research cannot.

Relatedly, the company hopes to do more to help its customers manage conditions that they may be prone to develop. If someone appears to have a heightened risk of macular degeneration, for example, 23andMe might suggest that the customer wear sunglasses and take vitamins and get tested as soon as possible. If someone appears to have a heightened risk of developing Parkinson’s disease, the progressive nervous system disorder that 60,000 Americans are diagnosed with each year, 23andMe hopes eventually to be helpful in preventing or mitigating the outcome of the disease, she said.

What 23andMe will never do, said Wojcicki, is work with police departments to help it identify any of its customers. As she explained it, 23andMe requires “a lot of saliva from customers specifically for privacy issues.” (She noted that a smaller amount — as with drool that might escape the mouth of someone who’s asleep — isn’t sufficient.) 23andMe also prevents people from uploading data from outside sources in order to try to make connections, as happened in the case of the so-called Golden State Killer, wherein investigators used an open-source genetic database, GEDmatch, to explore family trees and see whether any contained matches to DNA samples from the crime scenes they studied.

It worked. The killer was caught. But 23andMe has a moral obligation only to its customers, she said. When law enforcement knocks, said Wojcicki, “We say no.”

You can check out the full discussion here.

After launching a $36 million fund earlier this year to help support black female founders, Backstage Capital isn’t showing any signs of slowing down. Today, the fund’s founder and managing partner Arlan Hamilton announced that it will launch an accelerator to further amplify and support the best companies led by underestimated founders.

The four cohorts will be located in Philadelphia, London, Los Angeles and a fourth city to be determined through a public vote.

“We decided on Los Angeles because the ecosystem is really prime for it,” Hamilton said onstage today at Disrupt SF at Moscone West. “There is just the most diverse group of founders and types of companies they’re building. There is a lot there to pull from.”

With London, Hamilton said she visited the city a few times and was blown away by the founders and the interesting challenges they face there.

“There is a lot of money and a lot of investors, but it reminds me of three years ago in Silicon Valley,” she said. “It’s a melting pot of a city and we can pull from different parts of Europe as a launching pad. And there are several groups of African founders who found their way in the ecosystem in London who are doing great things with great resources but are being overlooked.”

But it was Philadelphia that served as location inspiration.

When Philadelphia is thinking about what it means to become a tech city, it’s not about ‘how do we retrofit this Silicon Valley model, but more so how do we use technology to do what Philadelphia does best,” said Aniyia Williams of Tinsel and Black and Brown Founders, who was onstage with Hamilton.

Williams will spearhead the Philadelphia chapter of the accelerator to provide more resources for founders there.

“It’s our privilege to be helping out with the Backstage Accelerator. We’ve been thinking through an ecosystem of how to support founders,” Williams said. “Philadelphia has one of the highest poverty rates of American cities and one of the highest populations of poor black and Latinx people. So for us it’s about closing that wealth gap to address inequity in tech. There needs to be more active participation from everyone.”

Backstage Accelerator will be accepting applications throughout the rest of this month, and six companies will be chosen per cohort. The accelerator will invest $100K in each company in exchange for 5 percent equity.

Participants can look forward to a different kind of accelerator experience, Hamilton said, starting with the demo day model.

“Demo day to us seems a little like standardized testing,” she said. “It’s important to a lot of the accelerators, but we’re wondering what could be an alternative to a demo day? We’re just thinking about things through a different lense, and at the same time having very high standards like we always do.”

Hamilton said it took awhile for her to be convinced to launch an accelerator.

“We really do things that we feel we can dominate,” she said. “I just didn’t think we were ready for it; why would there need to be another accelerator?”

She said Backstage reached 100 companies this year and put from $25K to $100K in those companies, providing strong value.

“In most cases we are the first call our founders make — either for a good or bad reason,” Hamilton said. “We have the most impact without having to raise hundreds of millions of dollars, but it’s not happening fast enough. We don’t like to wait for other people to catch up to us, so it makes a lot of sense to us today [to launch an accelerator], and it was after very deep and strategic thought to get to this point.”

Christie Pitts, Backstage Capital investment partner and chief of staff, will head up the accelerator, which is one of the programs that came out of Backstage Studio.

“My purpose is changing the narrative in tech and who is allowed to be a successful tech founder,” Pitts told us after the Disrupt panel. “Being a successful entrepreneur is not a zero-sum game. You can have a successful company, and I can have a successful company. And we feel like there is an opportunity in this space for underestimated founders where they can learn how to fundraise.”

To help build out programming and work with the cohorts in the four locales, Backstage Capital will enlist the services of Wayne Sutton and Melinda Epler, co-founders of Change Catalyst, a firm that promotes the importance of creating inclusive tech ecosystems. Microsoft and MailChimp are also partners in the accelerator’s launch. Mark Levy, formerly the global director of people at Airbnb, will also contribute to the accelerator.

Hamilton remains steadfast about the importance of diversity and inclusion in tech.

“I just think that Microsoft and MailChimp are understanding that we’re now the cool kids,” Hamilton said. “It’s the right side of things to be talking about. And you can only talk so much before it’s time to act.”

Hamilton said that the firm’s $36 million fund it announced earlier this year will yield results by the end of the year. She also says we’ll see Backstage with a $100 million fund by the end of 2020.

“We’ll keep doing what feels right to us, and try to leave things a little better than where we found them — that’s always our goal,” she said. “The accelerator will allow us to continue with our growing deal flow. And maybe by 2021, there’s a chance we could be in 10 to 12 cities investing in 100 companies a year.”

mSpy, a commercial spyware solution designed to help you spy on kids and partners, has leaked over 2 million records including software purchases and iCloud usernames and authentication tokens of devices running mSky. The data appears to have come from an unsecured database that allowed security researchers to pull out millions of records.

“Before it was taken offline sometime in the past 12 hours, the database contained millions of records, including the username, password and private encryption key of each mSpy customer who logged in to the mSpy site or purchased an mSpy license over the past six months,” wrote security researcher Brian Krebs.

Bug hunter Nitish Shah found the data and notified mSpy about the leak but couldn’t reach anyone who could shut it down. He showed Krebs how to access the data, which included personal data on customers.

mSpy is a platform that allows parents to see what their children are doing online and, presumably, allow partners to keep tabs on each other. The app allows you to monitor “WhatsApp, Snapchat, Facebook, and other messaging apps” and tracks calls, SMS, and GPS data.

mSpy has leaked data before and Krebs reported a hack in 2015 that the company denied for a full week. This latest leak is less a hack than an oversight in database control.

I’ve reached out to mSpy for clarity on the breach.

Meet Stealthy a new messaging app that leverages Blockstack’s decentralized application platform to build a messaging app. The company is participating in TechCrunch’s Startup Battlefield at Disrupt SF and launching its app on iOS and Android today.

On the surface, Stealthy works like many messaging apps out there. But it gets interesting once you start digging to understand the protocol behind it. Stealthy is a decentralized platform with privacy in mind. It could become the glue that makes various decentralized applications stick together.

“We started Stealthy because Blockstack had a global hackathon in December of last year,” co-founder Prabhaav Bhardwaj told me. “We won that hackathon in February.” After that, the #deletefacebook movement combined with the overall decentralization trend motivated Bhardwaj and Alex Carreira to ship the app.

Blockstack manages your identity. You get an ID and a 12-word passphrase to recover your account. Blockstack creates a blockchain record for each new user. You use your Blockstack ID to connect to Stealthy.

Stealthy users then choose how they want to store their messages. You can connect your account with Dropbox, Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, etc.

Every time you message someone, the message is first encrypted on your device and sent to your recipient’s cloud provider. Your recipient can then open the Stealthy app and decrypt the message from their storage system.

All of this is seamless for the end user. It works like an iMessage conversation, which means that Microsoft or Amazon can’t open and read your messages without your private key. You remain in control of your data. Stealthy plans to open source their protocol and mobile product so that anybody can audit their code.

Some features require a certain level of centralization. For instance, Stealthy relies on Firebase for push notifications. If you’re uncomfortable with that, you can disable that feature.

The company also wants to become your central hub for all sorts of decentralized apps (or dapps for short). For instance, you can launch Graphite Docs or Blockusign from Stealty. Those dapps are built on top of Blockstack as well, but Stealthy plans to integrate with other dapps that don’t work on Blockstack.

“We have dapp integrations in place right now and we want to make it easier to add dapp integrations. If somebody wants to come in and start selling messaging stickers, you could do that. If you want to come in and implement a payment system to pay bloggers, you could do that,” Bhardwaj said. “Eventually, what we want to be is to make it as easy as submitting an app in the App Store.”

When you build a digital product, chances are you’ll end up adding a messaging feature at some point. You can chat in Google Docs, Airbnb, Venmo, YouTube… And the same is likely to be true with dapps. Stealthy believes that many developers could benefit from a solid communication infrastructure — this way, other companies can focus on their core products and let Stealthy handle the communication layer.

Stealthy is an ambitious company. In many ways, the startup is trying to build a decentralized WeChat with the encryption features of Signal. It’s a messaging app, but it’s also a platform for many other use cases.

A handful of messaging apps have become so powerful that they’ve become a weakness. Governments can block them or leverage them to create a social ranking. Authorities can get a warrant to ask tech companies to hand them data. And of course, the top tech companies have become too powerful. More decentralization is always a good thing.

The way we get around is changing fast. Between ride services, on-demand car sharing and other methods to have a car only when you need it, owning one is getting less and less compelling. A new startup called Carma offers a happy medium for those who want the convenience of owning a car without the hassle of, well, owning a car. Instead, you just subscribe to it.

Carma launched publicly today at the Startup Battlefield at TechCrunch Disrupt SF 2018. Its system is more flexible than a lease, cheaper than hourly or daily car-share services and precision-targeted at millennials (whatever those are) and dealerships.

It works like this: You pick from a variety of new and newish vehicles sourced from the inventory of car dealerships in the area. For a set monthly fee you basically get to treat it like your car. Insurance is included, as is ordinary maintenance — you’re mainly on the hook for gas and a few incidentals.

Keep paying for as many months as you like, or just one, and when you don’t need the car any more, just give it back to the dealer. Boom, you’re car-free again.

The assumption is that there’s a considerable population of people who are caught between the high-cost, low-commitment world of car and ride sharing and the variable-cost, high-commitment world of ownership. They don’t want to have a $20,000 asset sitting around doing nothing but costing money, but they also don’t want to pay through the nose every time they want to go more than a mile or two. Where’s the medium-cost, medium-commitment option? That’s where Carma intends to fit in.

“If you’re looking for a week, or a trip, there are a lot of good options that are for fractional use, by the mile or the minute, or daily rentals,” explained founder and CEO Azarias Reda in an interview. “This is for someone who needs a car on a daily basis.”

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Young, flighty, commitment-averse millennials are the prime demographic, he noted: “Millennials are the biggest consumer of leases. They’re already driving this notion of ‘I want to access this vehicle but not necessarily own it.’ Subscriptions combine those desires.”

Ultimately the cost is more per month than a lease or ownership, but if what the driver values is flexibility, there’s no comparison.

More importantly, it’s a great option for dealerships. These places have all kinds of inventory sitting around that could be deployed in whatever manner they see fit: a couple for extended test drives of new models, a few older ones paying their way despite being the last four on the lot from last year, a different way to monetize overnumerous used vehicles, and so on.

It’s not the only one — Fair and FlexDrive are startups with similar aspirations and are already on the market. And some car manufacturers offer specific, though often luxury-oriented, medium-term subscriptions. Carma, however, is taking a slightly different tack. While those services are direct to consumers, Carma aims to be a white-label backend for similar services branded and operated by local dealerships and finance outfits.

Carma tested the consumer model but found there was friction from usurping the place of primacy for drivers from the dealers themselves. After all, your local Subaru dealer doesn’t just want to be a lot filled with cars — they want to be a known, local presence and trusted maintenance partner to their customers.

So the deal would be that Carma provides all the infrastructure as far as handling insurance, fleet tracking, user agreements and billing, but it all takes place through an app specific to a dealer or group of them. It allows that direct connection between driver and dealer to stay in place while offering the benefits of subscription to both parties. Dealers would pay a monthly license fee based on the size of the fleet.

Organizations that manage leases could also be the client, providing the subscription possibility to multiple dealers they work with. This is the case in one of Carma’s early deployments in Canada, where a leasing outfit with more than a billion dollars (Canadian, naturally) in lease originations has launched its own branded subscription service, AutoONE.

Allowing the dealers to keep their pride may be a serious advantage over national or international branded services that treat them like inventory management modules. And the mobility market is large enough, of course, that several services should be able to compete alongside one another with variations in offerings and inventory.

After all, why pay for a service with built-in insurance if your job pays for it? Alternatively, why have your own if you can get it month by month for a few bucks more? Want to switch your car every month? Want to pay less to be limited to models three years old and back? These variations will certainly all be put into play.

Reda comes from a computer science and fleet management background at the University of Michigan, where of course some of the sharpest minds in automotive tech can be found. The company is a Techstars alum and is backed by them, Fontinalis, Kybba, Right Side Capital, and IDV — terms undisclosed for now.

The mobility space is evolving fast, and it’s companies like these that keep that evolution rolling along.

Ashton Kutcher and Effie Epstein discussed their investment strategy at TechCrunch Disrupt SF. With their VC fund Sound Ventures, they invested in Bird. While they are conflicted on this topic, Kutcher had a passionate answer about scooters.

Here’s a video of what he had to say:

I recommend listening to the video to hear how mad Kutcher was. But if you’re at work, here’s the main quote.

“This is like the simplest one of them all in so much as nobody wakes up in the morning, opens their front door and says ‘god look at how many cars there are, they’re parked everywhere.’ They are fucking parked everywhere! There are cars parked everywhere! It’s ridiculous! They’re clogging the roads, they’re making it impossible to get anywhere you want to go,” Kutcher said.

“But boy do we open up the door and go ‘man there are scooters all over the place.’ Hold on, wait a second, this is aversion to change. And suddenly we go: Alright, we have to regulate the hell out of this because people are complaining. But nobody is complaining about the fact that there are cars everywhere.”

At Disrupt SF 2018, Girlboss CEO Sophia Amoruso sat down with former TechCrunch co-editor Alexia Bonatsos to talk about the success of Girlboss and the failure of Nasty Gal, Amoruso’s failed retail startup.

Nasty Gal shut down in 2016 — and even without that, it would’ve been a hard year for Amoruso. “So in 2016, in a six-month period, I was on the cover of Forbes and then a month later, my husband of a year left me,” she said. “That was in July, and then in November, on the day Trump was elected, we filed for Chapter 11. How do you pick yourself up after that?,” Bonatsos asked Amoruso. “That day when Trump got elected. I had — the world was having a bad day,” she answered. “I wasn’t sure why. I was crying.” But Amoruso had also continued to nurture the Girlboss brand. “I continued nurturing it very part-time,” she said. “Two hours a week.” But she also used the brand to launch a podcast and slowly grew the company over time.

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“Girlboss really exists to connect, inspire, nurture, advance women in their careers professionally as entrepreneurs,” she said. “Both in their lives and in their work within companies and starting their own companies.”

At its height, Nasty Gal had 300 employees, made more than $100 million in revenue and was valued at $350 million. Now, with Girlboss, Amoruso is building a lifestyle brand for women based on the success of her first book. In the four years since the book came out and two years after the failure of Nasty Gal, Girlboss has grown to become a successful brand — though Amoruso didn’t want to call it a media brand, even though its flagship product is definitely all about content. But Girlboss now also puts on a conference series, features podcasts and includes a philanthropic arm.

“I have a chip on my shoulder. I really want to get it right this time. I’m very fortunate to be able to start from scratch with all of the learnings over the last 10 years,” she said.

Lockheed Martin and the Drone Racing League are working together to make driverless drones much, much smarter. The project, aimed at bringing AI to commercial drone flyers, is “challenging teams to develop artificial intelligence (AI) technology that will enable an autonomous drone to race a pilot-operated drone – and win.”

The racers can win up to $2 million in prizes. Lockheed Martin Chief Technology Officer Keoki Jackson announced the challenge at TechCrunch’s Disrupt event in San Francisco today.

“At Lockheed Martin, we are working to pioneer state-of-the-art, AI-enabled technologies that can help solve some of the world’s most complex challenges – from fighting wildfires and saving lives during natural disasters to exploring the farthest reaches of deep space,” said Jackson. “Now, we are inviting the next generation of AI innovators to join us with our AlphaPilot Innovation Challenge. Competitors will have an opportunity to define the future of autonomy and AI and help our world leverage these promising technologies to build a brighter future.”

Contestants will use NVIDIA’s Jetson platform to fly drones “without any pre-programming or human intervention” through a multi-dimensional race course. The contestants can win an extra $250,000 for creating an AI that outperforms a DRL human-piloted drone, a sort drone Turing test that could mean smarter drones for both amateur flyers and Lockheed’s own extensive drone programs.

Lockheed Martin is working with the Drone Racing League to bring the competitors in human-controlled drone racing into the AI future. The goal is to create a drone that flies as well – or better – than a human.

You can learn more here and the challenge opens in November.

Clinc co-founder and CEO Jason Mars just announced the company is expanding to a third vertical: Automotive. The company, which started in fintech and recently unveiled a product for drive-thru restaurants, is aiming its voice AI service at the automotive industry. The idea is to give automakers a platform that they can integrate into their vehicles that will allow drivers to control and interact with their vehicles through natural language.

Launching alongside the new product, Clinc also revealed a platform to give developers access to the conversational AI. The company says it’s easy enough for developers with little to no experience in machine learning to build with Clinc’s products.

Clinc’s conversational AI is fantastic and the company’s products in other verticals show that if it’s used by automakers, the technology could usher in a new wave of user interfaces. This is not Siri.

The company was founded in Ann Arbor, Michigan in 2015 with a solution for fintech and currently has several contracts with major banks such as USAA, Barclays and S&P Global. In most cases, when integrated into the bank’s system, Clinc’s technology emulates human intelligence and can interpret unstructured, unconstrained speech. The idea is to let users converse with their bank account using natural language without pre-defined templates or hierarchical voice menus. The company says it works in any language.

With its new developer platform, companies can use Clinc’s system to integrate the company’s natural language processing into their products.

“We’re thrilled to be democratizing the world’s most powerful conversational AI and to be empowering people to solve important problems and to create amazing things,” said Dr. Jason Mars, Clinc CEO. “We’ve taken the complexity out of machine learning infrastructure and we’re giving developers the keys to our AI brain to create and deploy their own customizable virtual assistants.”

A meek and quiet “no” was Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey’s refrain as he responded to an onslaught of questions from House Energy Committee Republicans about whether his service shadowbans or is biased against conservatives. A few Democrats like Rep. Sarbanes (D-MD) accurately pointed out that the whole point of the hearing was to “work the ref” in an attempt to badger Twitter into an overcorrection that would promote conservatives and make it tougher to enforce its policies against right-wing trolls and conspiracy theorists.

Before the start of the hearing, Dorsey laid out data that showed Democrat an Republican Congress members got the same number of impressions per tweet when controlling for follower count — debunking the theory that it suppresses conservative view points. Given the session’s spurious purpose, many of the questions were just different ways of asking if Twitter discriminated based on political ideology, which Dorsey repeatedly denied.

But two interesting points have come out of the hearing so far, which followed this morning’s session with Dorsey and Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg about their efforts to prevent election interference.

First, Dorsey said that Twitter will release an abuse transparency report in order to quantify harassment on its service and its progress at preventing it. Rep DeGette (D-CO) cited Amnesty International’s “Toxic Twitter” study on harassment of women on the service. She asked if Twitter has demographic-based data on abuse and its response to reports of harassment.

Dorsey responded that “We do have data on all violations that we have seen across the platform and the context of those violations. And we do intend, and this will be an initiative this year, to create a transparency report that will make that data more public so that all can learn from it and we can be held public accountable.”

In May, Facebook began publishing abuse reports detailing the number of nudity/sexual content, graphic violence and hate speech posts it removed and what percentage were caught by automated systems.

Twitter already publishes transparency reports full of info about requests by the government for private user data or content take-downs, as well as copyright infringement and requests by content owners to suspend pirates. But the public knows little about just how many instances of abuse occur on the platform, how often they’re reported, Twitter’s speed and accuracy with which it responds to reports and the development of products that could thwart or remove abuse before it spreads. We’ve asked Twitter for details on what will be included.

Second, Dorsey agreed to have Twitter undergo a civil rights audit. Rep Frank Pallone (D-NJ) asked, “Will you commit to working with an independent third-party institution to conduct a civil rights audit of Twitter?,” as well as make the results public and use them to change policies. Dorsey agreed, while noting that it already does internal audits with its Trust and Safety Board.

Again in May, Facebook agreed to a similar civil rights audit as well as a political bias audit. These will investigate whether Facebook discriminates against minorities or suppresses conservative views. It’s unclear exactly what the scope of Twitter’s audit will be, but we’ve asked the company.

These commitments could give Twitter more ammunition with which to fight back against the accusations that it’s failing to solve the abuse problem and that it preferences liberals — if the results come back positive. But they also could become a way to prove it’s moving too slowly, and any signal of bias no matter how small is sure to be seized upon by the current administration.

Yet while Dorsey spent the day saying Twitter is doing everything it can to prevent election interference and fairly enforce its policies, it’s yet to make a quantifiable financial commitment to that drive.

Facebook agreed to double its security and content moderation staff from 10,000 to 20,000 even if that hurt its profits. Yet when Rep. Pallone asked how many human content moderators Twitter has, how much they’re paid and how they’re trained, Dorsey dodged. “We want to think about this problem not in the number of people but in how we make decisions to invest in new technologies,” the CEO said.

After years in the red, Twitter posted a record $100 million profit last quarter. It’s time for it to pledge some of those profits, not just more words, toward solving its problems.