Author: azeeadmin

Microsoft has quietly ended its Surface Plus financing program about a year after it launched. In a message on its site, the company said it stopped taking new enrollments on August 31 “after much thought and consideration.” The change does not affect existing customers, however, who will still be covered by their current financing plans.

Financed by Klarna, a Stockholm-headquartered online financial services provider, the Surface Plus financing program launched in August 2017. It targeted students and other people who wanted an affordable way to own a Surface device, allowing them to spread payments over 24 months. The Surface Plus plan also enabled customers to upgrade to the latest device after 18 months, as long as they returned their previous device in good working condition.

In a FAQ, Microsoft said existing customers will still be able to upgrade their Surface under the plan’s terms. The program’s end also does not affect existing warranty plans.

Microsoft’s Surface Plus for Business payment plans launched around the same time as the Surface Plus program and it looks like it will continue. TechCrunch has contacted Microsoft for more information.

Karen Lewis knows about water problems. The 67-year-old lives in Compton, where the water coming out of her tap is tinged brown by manganese, a metal similar to iron, from old pipes.

The water is supplied by the troubled Sativa Los Angeles County Water District. The district has been plagued by administrative scandal and charges of mismanagement, and it hasn’t been able to generate the money needed to fix the brown water.

Lewis has sat through innumerable community meetings and heard years’ worth of explanations, and she’s had enough. “Nothing’s been changed,” she said. “They’re not going to change.”

Lewis is one of an estimated 360,000 Californians who can’t safely drink the water that flows to their homes. It’s not a new issue. In the Central Valley, in particular, excess amounts of arsenic, nitrates and other substances that can cause cancers and birth defects have tainted drinking water. In Compton, residents have been living with foul-smelling brown water because the cost of fixing the pipes is high, and many can’t afford to buy a constant supply of bottled water.

Now, in the wake of the state’s prolonged drought and the notorious water crisis in Flint, Mich., a number of new solutions have been proposed in California.

• On Friday, lawmakers shelved two bills that supporters said would have helped. Under one voluntary measure, nearly all water districts in the state would have charged customers an additional 95 cents a month, unless the customers opted out of paying it. First proposed by Democratic state Sen. Bill Monning of Carmel as a mandatory tax, it didn’t muster the necessary two-thirds vote for passage, and Monning scaled it back.
• Monning also advanced a tax on dairies and fertilizer makers, industries that are heavy contributors to the nitrates found in some of the state’s groundwater. Associations representing those industries endorsed the bill, in part because the paying companies would have been protected from having to clean tainted water of nitrates. Legislators estimated that together the two bills could have raised more than $100 million a year. Assembly Speaker Anthony Rendon, a Democrat from Paramount, declined Friday to put the two measures to a vote.
• In November, California voters will decide on Proposition 3, which would permit the state to borrow almost $9 billion to help fund all kinds of water infrastructure projects: storage, dam repairs, watershed improvements and restoration of fisheries and other habitat. Voters in June approved a bond measure for more than $4 billion, some of it for waterway cleanup.
• In this summer’s state budget agreement, more than $23 million was set aside for safer drinking water, with another $5 million to address lead in water at child-care centers.

This week, activists rallied outside California’s Capitol, trying to build support for the two Monning bills. The measures wouldn’t have solved all the state’s drinking-water problems, but money from both could have been used for operations, not just infrastructure projects, said Phoebe Seaton, co-director of the nonprofit Leadership Counsel for Justice and Accountability, based in Fresno .

“The reason they’re so important is they provide the revenue necessary for operations maintenance,” Seaton said. The ballot measure bond money could be spent only on infrastructure improvements.

“That means helping … some districts get solvent so they can apply for grants,” she said. “They complement the bond funds.”

That was music to the ears of Compton residents. Their water district was the poster child for Monning’s bills. One crucial step for that district, Seaton said, is to get financially straight so it can secure the grants necessary to make improvements. Without the operational funding from the bills, she said, the Sativa district will continue to founder.

Cindy Tuck, deputy executive director of the Association of Water Agencies, a statewide trade group, said another tax is not the way to go and might cause more problems than it would solve.

“This is a social issue for the state of California, and the state should do something about it,” Tuck said.

The opt-out provision of the voluntary fee, she said, could have caused chaos in water companies’ billing systems.

“Water agencies have automated electronic systems,” Tuck said, and giving people a choice about paying one part of their bill runs counter to that. “I had one city tell me it would be over a million dollars just to change their system.”

Many customers might not even have known they’d paid an additional fee, she said, particularly if they used an auto-pay feature.

And if customers paid the voluntary charge without meaning to, they could have had their money refunded, setting off another complicated accounting procedure, Tuck said.

“It’s just a logistical nightmare,” she said.

Seaton had a different view: “There has been a lot of thinking on this. That’s why (there would have been) a notification period beforehand to include people.”

And the bill wouldn’t have gone into effect until 2020, she noted—enough time for some of those logistical details to be ironed out.

Lewis just wants relief from the brown stuff dribbling from her faucet.

“It’s not safe,” she said. “It can’t be safe.”

CALmatters.org is a nonprofit, nonpartisan media venture explaining California policies and politics.

“Evil Genius: The True Story of America’s Most Diabolical Bank Heist” is a tough title to live up to, but the Netflix docuseries pulls it off.

That’s because the story that “Evil Genius” retells is full of impossible-seeming details — it starts out with a botched bank robbery committed by a man with a bomb attached to his neck and gets stranger from there.

In the latest episode of the Original Content podcast, we talk about our reactions to the show — it tells an unforgettable story, but might have benefited from tighter editing.

We also mull over the growing genre of true crime miniseries, covering “The Staircase,” plus fictionalized depictions of real-world events like “Mindhunter” and “Manhunt: Unabomber.”

And we go over some recent streaming headlines, including Hulu’s rumored revival of “Veronica Mars” and Netflix picking up the U.S. rights to “The Great British Baking Show”.

You can listen in the player below, subscribe using Apple Podcasts or find us in your podcast player of choice. If you like the show, please let us know by leaving a review on Apple. You also can send us feedback directly. (Or suggest shows and movies for us to review!)

Here’s a prediction. ETH — the asset, not the Ethereum Network itself — will go to zero.

Those who already think that ETH will not see real adoption — thanks to a failure to scale, to adopt more secure contract authoring practices, or to out-compete its competitors — don’t need to be convinced that a price collapse would follow as a consequence.

But, if one believes that Ethereum will succeed beyond anyone’s wildest dreams as a platform then the proposition that ETH (as a currency) will go to zero will take a bit more convincing running a substantial share of the world’s commerce securely.

So here’s how Ethereum ends up succeeding wildly but ETH becomes worthless. Ethereum’s value proposition, as given by ethereum.org, is as follows:

Build unstoppable applications

Ethereum is a decentralized platform that runs smart contracts: applications that run exactly as programmed without any possibility of downtime, censorship, fraud or third-party interference.

These apps run on a custom built blockchain, an enormously powerful shared global infrastructure that can move value around and represent the ownership of property.

This enables developers to create markets, store registries of debts or promises, move funds in accordance with instructions given long in the past (like a will or a futures contract) and many other things that have not been invented yet, all without a middleman or counterparty risk.

If Ethereum succeeds on its value proposition it will therefore mitigate external risk factors for decentralized applications.

İstanbul, Turkey – January 28, 2018: Close up shot of Bitcoin, Litecoin and Ethereum memorial coins and shovels on soil. Bitcoin Litecoin and Ethereum are crypto currencies and a worldwide payment system.

No Future for ‘Gas’

There’s no value proposition for ETH in the official description. Perhaps this omission is because ETH’s value seems so obvious to the Ethereum Foundation that it is hardly worth mentioning: $ETH fees (dubbed ‘Gas’) is how you pay for all this.

If the concept of gas isn’t immediately obvious, let’s expand the metaphor: The Ethereum network is like a shared car. When a contract wants to be driven by the shared car, the car uses up fuel, which you have to pay the driver for. How much gas money you owe depends on how far you had to be driven, and how much trash you left in the car.

Gas is a nice metaphor, but the metaphor is insufficient as an argument to support non-zero $ETH prices. Gasoline actually burns inside an internal combustion engine; an internal combustion engine will not work without a combustible fuel. $ETH as Gas is a metaphor for how gasoline is consumed; there is no hard requirement for Gas in an Ethereum contract.

(Photo by Manuel Romano/NurPhoto via Getty Images)

Buying the “BuzzwordCoin”

Suppose we’re building a new decentralized application, BuzzwordCoin. By default, following a standard ERC-20 Token template, every transaction on BuzzwordCoin will pay gas in $ETH. Requiring every BuzzwordCoin transaction to also depend on ETH for fees creates substantial risk, third party dependency, and artificial downwards pressure on the price of the underlying token (if one must sell BuzzwordCoin for ETH ahead of time to run a BuzzwordCoin transaction, then the sell-pressure will happen before the transaction requires it, and must be a larger sale than necessary to ensure sufficient funds to cover the transaction).

Instead of paying for Gas in ETH, we could make every BuzzwordCoin transaction deposit a small amount of BuzzwordCoin directly to the block’s miner’s address to pay for the contract’s execution. Paying for Gas in a non-ETH asset is sometimes referred  to as economic abstraction in the Ethereum community.

The revised BuzzwordCoin contract has no functional dependence on ETH. We’re able to incentivize miners to mine transactions without paying any fees in ETH whatsoever.

If the BuzzwordCoin contract has non-transactional contractual clauses — that is, a functionality that should be regularly called by any party for tasking like computing and updating cached statistics in the contract — we can specify that the miner performing those clauses receives coins from an inflation or shared gas pool. In the shared pool, all fees for user’s transactions in a specific contract are paid to the contract’s wallet. A fee dispensing contract call performing the non-transactional clauses releases the fee to the miner (this bears some semblance to Child Pays for Parent in the Bitcoin Ecosystem).

Battling the economic abstraction

There are four main counterarguments to economically abstracting Ethereum: the lack of software support for economic abstraction; difficulty in pricing many tokens; the existence of contracts not tied to tokens; and the need for ETH for Proof-of-Stake. While nuanced, all four arguments fall flat.

Software Support: Currently, miners select transactions based on the amount of Gas provided in ETH. As ETH is not a contract (like an ERC-20 token), the code is special-cased for transactions dealing in ETH. However, there are efforts to make Ethereum treat ETH less special-cased and more like other ERC-20 Tokens and vice-versa. Weth, for instance, wraps ETH in a 1:1 pegged ERC-20 compliant token for trading in Decentralized Exchanges.

Detractors of economic abstraction (notably, Vitalik Buterin) argue that the added complexity is not worth the ecosystem gains. This argument is absurd. If the software doesn’t support the needs of rational users, then the software should be amended. Furthermore, the actual wallet software required for any given token is made much more complex, as the wallet must manage balances in both ETH and the application’s token.

Market Pricing: To mine on Ethereum with economic abstraction, miners simply need software which allows them to account for discrepancies in their perceived value of active tokens and include transactions rationally on that basis.  Such software requires dynamically re-ordering pending transactions based on pricing information, gleaned either through the miner’s own outlook or monitoring cryptocurrency exchanges prices.

Vlad Zamfir argues that the potential need to monitor market information on prices makes economic abstraction difficult.

However, miners requiring pricing information is already the status quo — rational actors need a model of future ETH prices before mining (or staking) to maximize profit against electricity costs, hardware costs, and opportunity costs.

Non-Token Contracts: Not all contracts have coins, or if they do, they may not be widely recognized, valuable, and traded on exchanges. Can such contracts pay fees without ETH?

Users of a tokenless contract can pay fees in whichever tokens they want. For example, a user of TokenlessContract can pay their fees in a 50/50 mix of LemonadeCoin and TeaBucks. To ensure liquidity between users and miners with different assets they would pay or accept fees with, a user can simply issue multiple mutually-exclusive transactions paying with fees in different assets.

Specialized wallet contracts could also negotiate fees with miners directly .  A miner could also process transactions paying fee with an asset they do not want if there is an open Decentralized Exchange (DEX) offer to exchange the fee asset for something they prefer —  it is possible to create DEX orders for paying fees which allowing only a block’s miner to fill a user’s offers in proportion to the fees that a user has paid in that block preventing the case where a user’s fee diversifying offers are taken by non-miners.

Proof-of-Stake: Without ETH, a modified version of Proof-of-Stake with a multitude of assets could still decide consensus if each node selects a weight vector for the voting power of all assets (let’s call it HD-PoS, or Heterogeneous Deposit Proof Of Stake). While it is an open research question to

show under which conditions HD-PoS would maintain consensus, consensus may be possible if the weight vectors are similar enough.

Proofs of HD-PoS may be possible by assuming a bound on the pairwise euclidean distance of the weight vectors or the maximum difference between any two prices. If such a consensus algorithm proves impossible, the failure to find such an algorithm points to a more general vulnerability in Ethereum PoS.  

Assuming a future where ETH’s main utility is governance voting, why wouldn’t all the other valuable applications on Ethereum have a say in the consensus process? Rolling back actions in a valuable token contract by burning ETH stake could be a lucrative business; if HD-PoS is used such attacks are impossible.

Vitalik Buterin (Ethereum Foundation) at TechCrunch Disrupt SF 2017

ETH’s ethereal value

If all the applications and their transactions can run without ETH, there’s no reason for ETH to be valuable unless the miners enforce some sort of racket to require users to pay in ETH. But if miners are uncoordinated, mutually disinterested, and rational, they would prefer to be paid in assets of their own choosing rather than in something like ETH. Furthermore, risk-averse users would want to minimize their exposure to volatile assets they don’t have to use. Lastly, token developers benefit because pricing in their native asset should serve to reduce sell-pressure. Thus, in a stateless ecosystem, replacing ETH is a Pareto Improvement (i.e., all parties are better off). The only party disadvantaged is existing ETH holders.

• The author holds Stellar and Bitcoin,  but has relatively little holdings in other cryptocurrencies. He has previously done a Virtual Lapel Pin Sale (like an ICO) for his cause, “Fuck Nazis”, on top of Ethereum which faced both government censorship and censorship from the Ethereum community. 

Few would equate human life with battery life, but for many migrants escaping war or famine, a single percentage point of battery can mean getting the right information at the right time – or not surviving at all.

Smartphones today have become an integral part of a forced migrant’s journey. From navigating mountains in Central Asia using Google Maps to staying connected with family back home via WhatsApp, smartphones have transformed the migrant experience – though not always for the better.

No electron spared

In Eastern Europe, many migrants pushed back from Hungary stay along the border on the Serbian side in abandoned buildings. Volunteers visit these sites to bring supplies, including repurposed car batteries that migrants use to charge their phones.

At one abandoned building less than a mile from the Hungarian border, migrants huddle around one car battery to charge their phones, and they all agree about the importance of battery life to them. Many asked for a power bank to enable them to charge their phone when outlets are not available. Between each other, they constantly compare notes on what apps use up the most battery power, and remind each other to close apps when not in use.

Nashid, a migrant from Pakistan taking shelter in this building, says one of his primary needs at this remote outpost is for a way to charge his phone. With no regular access to electricity, he depends on the visits of volunteers to be able to charge his battery, concocting all sorts of ways to keep it alive until their next visit. Some of his strategies include making sure his phone is turned off when he sleeps at night or if he naps during the day, as well as using the lowest brightness level possible. He swears that taking out a dead battery and shaking it repeatedly provides him with a few extra minutes of phone use.

For many migrants traversing Eastern Europe to get to Western Europe, the Hungarian-Serbian border presents the final frontier. Once in Hungary, migrants will have entered the Schengen Area, the 26 EU-member zone with no border controls, making their destination countries in Western Europe significantly easier to reach. Increased security though has made this border crossing significantly harder – with many migrants being beaten and pushed back into Serbia dozens of times before they eventually make it across.

Nashid has been trying to cross into Hungary from Serbia for the past eight months. He left his family, including a wife and two kids, back in Pakistan before setting out to Europe. He says he uses WhatsApp to keep in touch with them and to stay connected to his cousin in Paris – his ultimate destination. He admits, battery constraints aside, that his phone also provides him with a reprieve from long hours spent idly waiting every day. He tries to sneak a song or two, or watch a couple of Urdu-language videos on YouTube.

One journey, a million apps

Over the last few years, Serbia has taken on the role of a major transit point for migrants trying to make it to Western Europe. The Refugee Aid Miksalište Center in the Serbian capital Belgrade, a drop-in center open 24 hours a day, is staffed by NGOs that provide services to migrants in transit. As soon as you enter the Center, you again see migrants gathered around extension cords, charging their phones and using the Center’s free Wi-Fi to access their social media and Skype with friends and family back home.

Migrants in Serbia huddle around a power strip to charge their smartphones (Photo by Ziad Reslan)

The same scene seems to repeat wherever migrants congregate. The nearly 70 million forced migrants across the world today have had to travel thousands of miles to get to a place of refuge. More than half of these migrants come from just three countries: Syria, Afghanistan, and South Sudan. Syrians, the single largest forcibly displaced population, have to traverse on average more than 1,400 miles just to get to Serbia’s border with Hungary on their long trek from Aleppo to Western Europe.

From getting directions, to learning languages, to simply accessing entertainment, smartphones have become vital for migrants on these grueling journeys that can last for months – if at the very least to get some emotional support by talking to loved ones they leave behind.

At the height of the European refugee crisis in the summer of 2015, when nearly a million Syrian refugees crossed into Europe to escape a brutal civil war, Facebook and WhatsApp chat groups sprung up to let migrants know of real-time developments on the road, which smugglers to trust, and what rates to negotiate. Dropped GPS pins and Google Maps turn directions into practical routes migrants can take. In some cases, migrants on sinking boats in the Mediterranean have helped coast guards find them by sending GPS signals from their smartphones.

Migrants download German, French, English, and other language learning apps on their phones to aid them in acculturating to their eventual destination while they’re still on the move. They use Google Translate to understand road signs in Bulgarian, Serbian, and Hungarian. And with migrant journeys breaking up families, smartphones have become migrants’ only way to stay connected.

In recognition of the importance of connectivity to forcibly-displaced migrants, the United Nations Refugee Agency (UNHCR) – launched “Connectivity for Refugees” in mid-2016. The initiative advocates for migrants’ right to connectivity; enables access through negotiated data rates for refugees, subsidized device prices, and internet access centers; and provides training to ensure migrants are able to fully take advantage of their smartphones. Two years in, the UNHCR plans to increase the initiative’s staffing and roll out connectivity programs beyond the current pilot countries of Jordan, Greece, Chad, Malawi, Tanzania, and Uganda.

Startups, for their part, have also been ramping up efforts to help migrants. Two Columbia architecture students, Anna Stork and Andrea Sreshta, cofounded LuminAid. A startup that makes the PackLite Max 2-in-1 Phone Charger, a solar-powered phone charger and light source that the cofounders have given away to displaced migrants. With the UNHCR estimating that up to a third of a forced migrant’s income is spent on connectivity, Phone Credit for Refugees has taken on providing migrants with free data access. Others, like GeeCycle, have instead focused on collecting used smartphones from around the world and distributing them to refugees fleeing conflict.

The challenge of misinformation

NGOs like Save the Children Serbia operate out of the Refugee Aid Miksalište, a drop in center with free WIFi and available plugs. (Photo by Ziad Reslan)

For all of their benefits though, smartphones have not always improved the journeys of forced migrants. The reliance on anonymous sources on social media to navigate routes has left migrants vulnerable to smugglers and traffickers looking to take advantage of their misfortune. Even information obtained from relatives can turn out to be erroneous – with heart-wrenching consequences.

Jelena Besedic, an Advocacy Manager for Save the Children Serbia, says that the spread of misinformation has been part of the reason for the rise of unaccompanied children traversing the Balkans from Afghanistan. Parents of kids as young as eight now stuck in Serbia were falsely told that, if their kids arrive safely in Western Europe, they’re entitled to bring their parents.

Misinformation of this sort about the ease of the asylum process can lead migrants to take on increasingly dangerous journeys, only to be disappointed with the reality once they reach their destination countries. This misinformation has led organizations, like the International Organization for Migration, to start information campaigns at source countries to better educate would be migrants about the dangers of setting out west. In addition, increasingly nationalist governments, like Hungary and Italy, have started campaigns targeting the smartphones of migrants with text messages and online ads to dissuade them from coming to their countries in the first place.

Familial pressure on migrants may have always been a reality, but access to smartphones has made that pressure incessant and instantaneous. Stuck at the border between Serbia and Hungary, Nashid says he would never have made the trek if he knew what he would have to face on his more than 4,000-mile journey from Pakistan to France. But while he was still in Pakistan, he had received messages non-stop from his cousin in Paris telling him how easy it was for him to get there and how plentiful jobs are in France. Once Nashid left Pakistan, messages from his wife and two kids constantly asking whether he’d arrived in Paris have made the idea of going back home impossible.

Nashid ends our conversation by asking me to confirm a rumor he’s heard on WhatsApp. Is it true, he asks, that there are now personal battery banks that one can charge like a phone that extend a smartphone’s battery life by up to 100 hours? A charger like that, he stresses, would make a world of a difference to him out here miles away from the nearest plug.

JD.com’s billionaire CEO Richard Liu was arrested by Minneapolis police late Friday night on suspicion of alleged sexual misconduct. He was released yesterday afternoon around 4 p.m.

Today, JD.com, one of China’s largest online retailers, issued the following statement: “During a business trip to the United States, Mr. Liu was questioned by police in Minnesota in relation to an unsubstantiated accusation. The local police quickly determined there was no substance to the claim against Mr. Liu, and he was subsequently able to resume his business activities as originally planned.”

John Elder, public information officer for the Minneapolis Police Department, tells us the investigation remains active but he wasn’t able to share many further details, telling us he isn’t aware of when Liu arrived into the Minneapolis metropolitan area and that he isn’t authorized to say when the complaint against Liu was received. As for why Liu was detained for 16 hours instead of the 36 hours the local police department is authorized to hold a person before charging them or releasing them and continuing an investigation, Elder said the investigator “decided it wasn’t necessary to hold onto him, that we can conduct a fair and thorough investigation” without having Liue in custody. Elder added that more people are typically held the duration than released, but that it’s “not uncommon.”

According Minnesota’s state statute,  sexual misconduct is defined as a range of things that can lead to anything from a felony charge to a gross misdemeanor charge. Among these is a sexual act with a person under 13 years of age, if the actor is more than three years than the complainant; a sexual act between someone who is under 16 years of age with an actor who is more than four years older; circumstances at the time of a sexual act that cause the complainant to have a reasonable fear of imminent great bodily harm; an accomplice who uses force or coercion to induce an act with the complainant; and if the actor knows or has reason to know that the complainant is mentally impaired, mentally incapacitated, or physically helpless.

Asked if JD’s statement in any way interferes with the police department’s investigation, Elder says it does not. “People can say whatever they’d like. As with any investigation, this is a case and we’ll bring it through to fruition just like we do every other case.” This means deciding whether or not, based on the police department’s investigation, to refer the case for charge to either the city attorney’s office or the Hennepin County attorney’s office, which would then file paperwork through a district court.

JD.com’s rise in China has largely been unstoppable, though in May, its quarterly earnings report fell short of Wall Street expectations, owing in part to heightened competition from rival Alibaba. The company, which claims to have more than 300 million customers, is regularly profiled by local and international media outlets, with the love life of Liu a particular point of fascination.

Not all of that attention has been desirable. Liu, who was married in  2015 and has two children, reportedly tried to distance himself from a sexual assault that was alleged to have taken place the same year at his penthouse in Australia.

According to the New York Times, one of his guests, a property development professional, was found guilty of seven charges, including having sex with his accuser without her consent. Though Liu wasn’t accused of any wrongdoing, the Times reports that he asked an Australian court to prevent the release of his name by citing damage to his marriage and business. Last month, a judge rejected that request.

Like many of China’s new titans, Liu grew up poor. In a sit-down last fall with the Financial Times, he said he’d only tasted meat once or twice a year before going to college at age 18, instead eating corn-based products for months at a time, including “cornmeal porridge for breakfast, corn pancakes for lunch and dry cornbread for dinner — cornbread so tough it made your throat bleed.” The rest of the year they ate sweet pototoes. Today, the 44-year-old is reportedly worth nearly $8 billion.

In talking with the FT, Liu acknowledged JD.com’s fierce battle for customers with Alibaba without referring to the company by name. “Within five years I’m 100 percent sure we will be the largest B2C [business to consumer] platform in China — we will surpass any competitor.”

Starry wants to change the way the home internet is delivered. Founded in 2014, the Boston-based startup takes an innovative approach to the space by beaming broadband speed internet through the air, using millimeter waves.

The company’s novel technique has drummed up great interest during its four years of existence, offering the potential to circumvent the need to lay down fiber-optics and shake up ISP lockdowns. Investors have certainly been paying attention. In July, the startup raised another $100 million, bringing its total up to $163 million.

The company has been piloting its service for a couple of years now, starting in its native Boston and rolling out to a handful of other American metropolitan areas, including testing in Los Angeles and Washington, DC, both of which arrived this year. In January, Starry teamed up with networking manufacturing giant Marvell to help distribute the startup’s technology across the globe.

Starry CEO Chaitanya “Chet” Kanojia will be joining us next week at Disrupt San Francisco to discuss his company’s growth and the future of its cutting edge internet technology. Prior to founding Starry, Kanojia also served as the founder and CEO of TV streaming platform Aero and media advertising company Navic Networks, which was acquired by Microsoft in 2008.

Disrupt SF will take place in San Francisco’s Moscone Center West from September 5 to 7. The full agenda is here, and you can still buy tickets right here.

Disrupt SF will take place in San Francisco’s Moscone Center West from September 5 to 7. The full agenda is here, and you can still buy tickets right here.

Starry wants to change the way the home internet is delivered. Founded in 2014, the Boston-based startup takes an innovative approach to the space by beaming broadband speed internet through the air, using millimeter waves.

The company’s novel technique has drummed up great interest during its four years of existence, offering the potential to circumvent the need to lay down fiber-optics and shake up ISP lockdowns. Investors have certainly been paying attention. In July, the startup raised another $100 million, bringing its total up to $163 million.

The company has been piloting its service for a couple of years now, starting in its native Boston and rolling out to a handful of other American metropolitan areas, including testing in Los Angeles and Washington, DC, both of which arrived this year. In January, Starry teamed up with networking manufacturing giant Marvell to help distribute the startup’s technology across the globe.

Starry CEO Chaitanya “Chet” Kanojia will be joining us next week at Disrupt San Francisco to discuss his company’s growth and the future of its cutting edge internet technology. Prior to founding Starry, Kanojia also served as the founder and CEO of TV streaming platform Aero and media advertising company Navic Networks, which was acquired by Microsoft in 2008.

Disrupt SF will take place in San Francisco’s Moscone Center West from September 5 to 7. The full agenda is here, and you can still buy tickets right here.

Disrupt SF will take place in San Francisco’s Moscone Center West from September 5 to 7. The full agenda is here, and you can still buy tickets right here.

Labor Day is a holiday that just doesn’t fit Silicon Valley. It’s purported purpose is to celebrate working men and women and their — our — progress toward better working conditions and fairer workplaces. Yet, few regions in recent times have supposedly done more to “destroy” quality working conditions than the Valley, from the entire creation of the precarious 1099 economy to automation of labor itself.

My colleague John Chen offered the received wisdom on this discrepancy this weekend, arguing that Valley entrepreneurs should take the traditional message of Labor Day to heart, encouraging them to create more equitable, fair, and secure workplaces not just for their own employees, but also for all the workers that power the platforms we create and operate every day.

It’s a nice sentiment that I agree with, but I think he misses the mark.

What Silicon Valley needs — now more than ever before — is to double down on the kind of ambitious, hard-charging, change-the-world labor that created our modern knowledge economy in the first place. We can’t and shouldn’t slow down. We need more technological progress, not less. We need more automation of labor, not less. And we need as much of this innovation to happen in the United States as possible.

The tech industry may have become a dominant force by some metrics, but we are only just getting started. Entire industries like freight have little to no automation. Several billion people lack access to the internet, to say nothing of critical, basic infrastructure. Our drug pipeline is anemic, and costs for education, health care, construction, and government are continuing to skyrocket.

In short, we have barely scratched the surface of what we can achieve with software, with hardware, with better business models and better automation. These aren’t table scraps, but trillions dollar opportunities lying in wait for entrepreneurs to seize them.

And yet, we keep hearing persistent claims that overwork is a problem in the Valley. Discussions of work-life balance are practically de rigueur for startups these days, as are free meals and massages and unlimited vacation time. These demands are coming at a time when some of the most fertile opportunities for innovation in areas as diverse as robotics, space, biotech, cancer, and construction remain ripe for the taking.

It’s a hustlers world out there, and the message that those who want to shape that world should be hearing this Labor Day is simple: work harder. Hell, work today.

Certainly that’s the message ingrained in most places competing with the Valley these days. Mike Moritz wrote a column in the Financial Times earlier this year, comparing the hard-charging work ethic of Chinese tech entrepreneurs and workers with their Silicon Valley brethren. He didn’t mince words, and the piece ignited a firestorm of criticism.

But he’s right, and not just about Chinese founders. Entrepreneurs in developing and middle-income countries from India and South Korea to Brazil and Nigeria now have access to the same tools that top Valley startups use, with experience to boot. And they are hungry to transform their lot in life into something much more ambitious, much more grand.

We need to re-inject their level of urgency back into the Valley ethos and compete ferociously. We can’t rest on companies from the 1990s like Google, or the 1970s like Apple and Microsoft as the final wave of innovative companies. We need the next massive tech companies to be built, and they’re not going to be created 20-hour workweeks at a time.

Entrepreneurship is a rough and solitary life. Hustling isn’t fun, losing deals isn’t enjoyable, and working around the clock under intense pressure is not for the faint of heart. For those who want the easy road, there are many, many pathways today in the modern American economy that will guarantee it, whether that is a big tech giant, or some other Fortune 100 company.

Yet, the spirit of America is always choosing the bigger gamble, the bolder vision. And it is the people who stand up and demand that we make huge strides today — not tomorrow — that are going to own the future.

Of course, founding a company has to be a voluntary choice. No one should have to work for a pittance, or feel coerced into a high-pressure lifestyle when they aren’t ready and willing. No one should be locked into an economic system where they can’t improve their own income and status through tenacity and strategy. Our tech companies should absolutely be more diverse, and fairer to all people. Equity can and should be more widely distributed.

But when it comes to the true meaning of Labor Day in the American sense, we should celebrate the hard-working founders and entrepreneurs who are taking on the biggest challenges and focusing all of their talents on solving these critical human problems. That’s what made Silicon Valley what it is, and it’s the meaning of Labor Day that every founder and dreamer should center on.

There’s no lack of creative innovators, makers and technical entrepreneurs throughout Sub-Saharan Africa, and that’s why we’re bringing Startup Battlefield Africa 2018 — our world-renowned startup pitch competition — to Lagos, Nigeria on December 11.

We want to give every innovative early-stage startup in the region the chance to compete, which is why we’re extending the application deadline another week. We encourage tech startup founders (yes, we’re looking at YOU) to apply and join us for what may very well be a life-changing journey. You now have until September 10 at 5 p.m. PT to fill out and submit your application right here.

We’re not kidding around when we say Startup Battlefield can change your life. Since 2007, more than 750 companies have competed in our startup pitch competition. Our alumni community includes the likes of Dropbox, Mint, TripIt, Vurb and many others. Collectively, they’ve raised more than $8 billion in funding and produced 102 exits. And we can’t wait to add up to 15 amazing founders from across Sub-Saharan Africa to our ranks.

The benefits of competing go beyond the prizes bestowed upon the winning founders. Every participating team receives invaluable exposure — not to mention invaluable connections — that lasts far beyond the initial day of competition. Plus, competing in Startup Battlefield is 100 percent free. That exposure comes with some mighty fine ROI attached to it.

Our experienced TechCrunch editors will scrutinize every eligible application and choose up to 10 startups to compete, and those founders will receive free pitch coaching from Battlefield-tested editors. When the day comes, and you step on stage to make your pitch, you’ll be ready to handle whatever the judges throw at you.

In three preliminary rounds (up to five startups per round), teams have six minutes to pitch and present their demo to a panel of judges composed of distinguished entrepreneurs, technologists and investors (recruited by our editors). After each pitch, the judges pose tough questions in a six-minute Q&A. Five startups will move on to pitch again — to a different set of judges with another round of questions.

One company will earn the title of the TechCrunch Startup Battlefield Africa 2018 champion and the best startup in Sub-Saharan Africa. Now, about those prizes we mentioned earlier. The winning founders receive $25,000 in no-equity cash and a trip for two to compete in Startup Battlefield in San Francisco at our flagship event, TechCrunch Disrupt 2019 (assuming the company still qualifies to compete at the time).

Here’s what you need to know about eligibility. Startups should:

• Be early-stage companies in “launch” stage
• Be headquartered in one of our eligible countries*
• Have a fully working product/beta that’s reasonably close to, or in, production
• Have received limited press or publicity to date
• Have no known intellectual property conflicts
• Apply by September 10, 2018, at 5 p.m. PST

Startup Battlefield Africa 2018 takes place in Lagos, Nigeria on December 11. We’ve extended the application deadline as far as we can go. You have until September 10 at 5 p.m. PT — but don’t delay. Submit your application right here.

*Residents in the following countries may apply:

Angola, Benin, Botswana, Burkina Faso, Burundi, Cameroon, Cabo Verde, Central Africa Republic, Chad, Comoros, Republic of the Congo, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Cote d’Ivoire, Equatorial Guinea, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Gabon, Gambia, Ghana, Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, Kenya, Lesotho, Liberia, Madagascar, Malawi, Mali, Mauritania, Mauritius, Mozambique, Namibia, Niger, Nigeria, Rwanda, Sao Tome and Principe, Senegal, Seychelles, Sierra Leone, Somalia, South Africa, South Sudan, Sudan, Swaziland, Tanzania, Togo, Uganda, Zambia and Zimbabwe. Notwithstanding anything to the contrary in the foregoing language, the “Applicable Countries” does not include any country to or on which the United States has embargoed goods or imposed targeted sanctions.