Author: azeeadmin

Surprise, the AirPort Express isn’t dead! While Apple stopped selling AirPort products back in April, the company is still updating the firmware of the once beloved AirPort Express.

This firmware update is quite significant as it adds support for AirPlay 2 and the Home app. In other words, you can now plug speakers to a dusty AirPort Express and turn them into wireless speakers for your home sound system.

The AirPort Express was a pretty basic home router. It hasn’t been updated since 2012, which means that it’s nowhere near as performant as today’s cheap routers. It only supports 802.11n while everybody has moved on to 802.11ac.

Its Ethernet ports are limited to 100 Mbps. So if you have fiber internet, the AirPort Express is not a good solution as it caps your internet connection to 100 Mbps.

But the AirPort Express also has an audio jack — something that you can’t find in many Apple products these days. Today’s update makes this audio jack relevant again, as it’s a cheap way to get started with AirPlay 2.

After updating the device with the AirPort Utility app on your Mac or iOS device, you can launch the Home app and add the router as a new Home accessory. After that, you’ll find the AirPort Express in your AirPlay speaker list.

Apple recently released AirPlay 2, an update to its audio and video protocol. With AirPlay 2, you can stream music from your Apple devices to multiple speakers at once. On your phone, you can control the volume of each speaker individually and play the same song across your home.

While Sonos, Bose and other speaker manufacturers are updating their devices to support AirPlay 2, chances are many devices won’t get an update. The AirPort Express update can help you go through this transition.

Air Canada has confirmed a data breach on its mobile app, which the airline said may affect 20,000 people — or 1 percent — of its 1.7 million app users.

The company said it had “detected unusual log-in behavior” occurring between August 22-24.

According to an email to customers, attackers may have accessed basic profile data, including names, email addresses and phone numbers — but also more sensitive data that users may have added to their profiles, including passport numbers and expiry date, passport country of issuance, NEXUS numbers for trusted travelers, gender, dates of birth, nationality and country of residence.

But credit card data was not accessed, the airline said.

It’s not known if there was a direct breach of Air Canada’s systems or if hackers attempted to reuse passwords from other sites that may have also been used on Air Canada’s mobile app.

When reached, an Air Canada spokesperson did not comment on the breach, referring only to a FAQ on the airline’s website.

Air Canada joins the ranks of other airlines that have admitted data breaches in recent months. Delta said earlier this year that customer data was stolen after a security lapse at one of its third-party customer support service vendors. And, last year Virgin admitted it a hacker broke into its internal network, prompting the company to force-reset staff passwords.

Nebula Genomics, the startup that wants to put your whole genome on the blockchain, has announced the raise of $4.3 million in Series A from Khosla Ventures and other leading tech VC’s such as Arch Venture Partners, Fenbushi Capital, Mayfield, F-Prime Capital Partners, Great Point Ventures, Windham Venture Partners, Hemi Ventures, Mirae Asset, Hikma Ventures and Heartbeat Labs.

Nebula has also has forged a partnership with genome sequencing company Veritas Genetics.

Veritas was one of the first companies to sequence the entire human genome for less than $1,000 in 2015, later adding all that info to the touch of a button on your smartphone. Both Nebula and Veritas were cofounded by MIT professor and “godfather” of the Human Genome Project, George Church.

The partnership between the two companies will allow the Nebula marketplace, or the place where those consenting to share their genetic data can earn Nebula’s cryptocurrency called “Nebula tokens” to build upon Veritas open-source software platform Arvados, which can process and share large amounts of genetic information and other big data. According to the company, this crossover offers privacy and security for the physical storage and management of various data sets according to local rules and regulations.

“As our own database grows to many petabytes, together with the Nebula team we are taking the lead in our industry to protect the privacy of consumers while enabling them to participate in research and benefit from the blockchain-based marketplace Nebula is building,” Veritas CEO Mirza Cifric said in a statement.

The partnership will work with various academic institutions and industry researchers to provide genomic data from individual consumers looking to cash in by sharing their own data, rather than by freely giving it as they might through another genomics company like 23andMe .

“Compared to centralized databases, Nebula’s decentralized and federated architecture will help address privacy concerns and incentivize data sharing,” added Nebula Genomics co-founder Dennis Grishin. “Our goal is to create a data flow that will accelerate medical research and catalyze a transformation of health care.”

Wear OS, Google’s smartphone operating system that was once called Android Wear, is getting a new look today. Google says the overall idea here is to give you quicker access to information and more proactive help. In line with the Google Fit redesign, Wear OS now also provides you with the same kind of health coaching as the Android app.

In practice, this means you can now swipe through multiple notifications at once, for example. Previously, you had to go from one notifications card to the next, which sound minor but was indeed a bit of a hassle. Like before, you bring up the new notifications feed by swiping up. If you want to reply or take any other action, you tap the notification to bring up those options.

Wear OS is also getting a bit of a Google Now replacement. Simply swipe right and the Google Assistant will bring up the weather, your flight status, hotel notifications or other imminent events. Like in most other Assistant-driven interfaces, Google will also use this area to help you discover other Assistant features like setting timers (though I think everybody knows how to use the Assistant to set a time given that I’m sure that’s 90% of Assistant usage right there).

As for Google Fit, it doesn’t come as a surprise that Wear OS is adapting the same circle design with Hear Points and Move Minutes as the Android app. On a round Wear OS watch, that design actually looks quite well.

While this obviously isn’t a major break from previous versions, we’re definitely talking about quality-of-life improvements here that do make using Wear OS just that little bit easier.

Not to be confused with a dog-walking startup, Bark is a watchdog for kids’ and teens’ internet security. Today, it announces a $9 million Series A led by Signal Peak Ventures, with participation from Two Sigma Ventures, Symmetrical Ventures, Fuel Capital, Hallett Capital and Atlanta Seed Company.

The round comes as the Atlanta-based company, which uses artificial intelligence to track kids’ online activity and notifies parents when its algorithm finds concerning content, passes an impressive landmark. To date, Bark’s algorithm has analyzed more than 1 billion messages across text, email and social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, Snap and GroupMe.

“Having Bark connected to your child’s devices and accounts is similar to wearing a seatbelt,” a Bark representative told me. “You would not let your child drive a car without wearing one, so why give them a device that can access the world 24/7/365 without a safeguard?”

Bark launched at TechCrunch Disrupt New York in 2016 and has quickly acquired a large user base of parents. The app, which costs $9 per month, alerts parents with an email or text when its algorithm comes across content that it deems inappropriate or dangerous, then shares that content with the parent. Bark’s hope is the app will protect kids from potentially dangerous behavior, like sexting, cyberbullying or contact with internet predators. They also want to warn parents when Bark’s AI detects signs of depression or suicidal thoughts in the child’s online behavior. 

According to the 1 billion messages processed by the app, 66% of teens and 57% of tweens have experienced cyberbullying as a bully, victim or witness; 54% of teens and 40% of tweens engaged in conversations about depression or anxiety; and 40% of teens and 28% of tweens encountered violent subject matter.

Bark was founded by Brian Bason (pictured below), the former CTO of the Twitter-acquired social marketing startup Niche. Bason and the other members of the executive team at Bark have five children among them with another on the way. They say kids and teens are receptive to the app, though it seems like something that would be less than tolerated by any teenagers I know. Bark, at least, doesn’t give parents full, unfettered access to every single message their kids send and receive.

 

“We highly encourage families to have open discussions about online safety and how using Bark helps, and to engender trust with their children by giving them appropriate privacy online,” they said. “Children appreciate that Bark does not give their parents the ability to read everything they’re doing.”

Bark says the app is not an invasion of children’s’ privacy: “Children are already giving access to their personal data to companies like Apple, Google, Instagram, Snapchat and more.”

The app is also available to school administrators, who can be notified of any issues detected in school-issued student email, chat, documents or cloud storage. Following the Parkland, FL. shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School that killed 17 students in February, Bark began offering the service to any schools using Google’s G Suite for Education for free. Schools using Microsoft Office 365 Education are now also eligible for the free service.

Of course, AI isn’t foolproof. Bark doesn’t catch everything and sometimes it alerts parents of behavior that’s just teens being teens. For times when teen jargon is too difficult to translate, the company provides resources to help parents crack the code. Don’t know what a finsta is? They’ve got your back. Or if you just want to learn the ropes of social media platforms like Instagram, they’ll guide you through them. For more serious issues, Bark’s blog also has tips on avoiding predators and dealing with cyberbullying, for example. Plus, when a parent receives a Bark alert, the service provides a list of recommended next steps.

Bark has previously brought in roughly $500,000 from Karlin Ventures and Social Starts.

Datree, an early-stage startup based in Israel, wants to help companies create a set of policies for their applications, and apply them in GitHub before a commit goes live. Today, it announced $3 million in seed funding from TLV partners.

The check was actually written last September, according to the founders, and they are making the investment public today.

Like many Israeli startups, before they wrote a line of code, they did their research talking to 40 companies, and found a common pain point in modern development techniques. Code was being committed ever faster and teams were more widely distributed. Instead of a monolithic application, you had containerized microservices, often being built by disparate teams. All of this came together in GitHub .

The team decided that the best way to deal with this kind of chaos was to try and bring some order to it by creating a catalogue of development teams and their work. The idea was to bring these teams and their work together in a central place, then apply a set of internal best practices to their code to catch any policy violations before they committed the code. It’s important to note that they only extract metadata to build this catalogue.

If you can use Datree to confirm that each pull request in GitHub complies with a set of internal policies in an automated fashion, you could potentially save your development teams a lot of pain trying to track down issues after the commit.

This is of course, the whole idea behind the DevOps model. The developers develop as fast as they can and operations is responsible for making sure the code is in decent shape, secure and complies with company policy before it gets published. Datree has created a report engine to scan all this code and report on what aligns with the policies and what doesn’t in an automated fashion. They also recognized that not every policy is rigid and that there will be exceptions, and they allow for that too.

Right now, it’s early days and the company consists of the three founders and 5 additional people “in a garage in Tel Aviv.” They are working with six design partners including HoneyBook, SimilarWeb and PlayBuzz on early versions of the solution, but they have a vision, and they have $3 million to build it out and see if it has a market fit. They plan to split their time between San Francisco and Tel Aviv as they attempt to expand their market.

Last month Google rolled out a Maps’ “match” feature which purported to predict how much you’d like a particular place, like a restaurant or bar. The feature uses the data it has on you, such as the backlog of places it knows you’ve visited, and what it can assess as your dining preferences. Look up Thai food restaurants regularly? Maps will show you similar places in the area with a high-match percentage attached to them.

Yelp and Foursquare have been trying something similar out for years. But both the AI approach and the ‘five star rating’ approach hardly appears to this new generation of users.

Now a startup out of Berlin wants to do something similar, but it wants to crowdsource that information in a simpler, easier way than other apps before it.

The YOBO app (iOS/Android) takes a new approach, likely to appeal to the Millennial and Gen-Z generations. Instead of building its location-based data and recommendations on set words and ratings, it’s using, yes, emojis and photos. What more could the Instagram generation want?

Emojis are used billion of a times a day and have been described as the fastest growing language in history. Many people, young people especially, find it easier to communicate using its smiley faces and icons than text. We saw Apple introduce Animojis and this trend is expected to grow even further. YOBO is using emojis as training data for people’s preferences for places.

There’s another problem the app is trying to solve: the fact that many places that might have been previously worth visiting are now crowded with tourists.

As co-founder Tobias Szarowicz says: “Because we were using Yelp, Foursquare, Tripadvisor and Google to plan a weekend trip to Prague, we ended up with the same annoying stag party at almost every place we went. The reason for that was simple: we all put the same popular bars, restaurants and clubs on our list and ended up at the most touristic places in town. This experience made us think about how we could use technology to personalise the real hyperlocal world around us, so people could feel local wherever they are.” YOBO is now live on iOS with users sharing across major cities like Berlin, Hamburg, London and Amsterdam.

The idea is that users share photos of locations and rate and categorise these places using emojis. These posts are then compiled into other users’ individual recommendations based on their current location. Over time, the app also claims to learn the habits of its users and recommends only places that suit them personally – along with considering the weather, the time-of-day, their activity and personal preferences.

Using Emojis to rate places is a simple and fast way for people can express their emotions. Because they are likely to get more data down to its ease of use, YOBO can use machine learning to begin to recommend local spots the user might personally like rather than just the most popular ones.

This problem about location popularity was acutely illustrated recently when “The Shed at Dulwich” became the No. 1 restaurant on TripAdvisor earlier this year. The problem was, it was fake. A London-based writer wanted to illustrate how easy it is to manipulate review sites like TripAdvisor, Yelp, Foursquare and Google, by pushing an entirely non-existent restaurant to the top spot in London. And he achieved it.

The makers of YOBO say this wouldn’t be possible because, on YOBO, users who rate things always need to be near the place they are rating.

Here’s how Yobo works:

Think of a hyperlocal Instagram: People anonymously share pictures of their favourite local places like restaurants, bars, etc. and use up to 3 emojis to rate the place and express their feelings. No typing of text. The platform’s machine learning then uses those emojis to rate the place.

Additionally, using image recognition, the app can draw conclusions on the nature of a specific place. For example, if someone shares a photo of a cup of coffee, the app knows that people can get coffee at that location and can categorise it as a breakfast or lunch place. YOBO claims this works for any specific food or any other object recognised on a picture. All recommendations are shown in a personalised places-feed.

By tapping on a specific place, the user gets presented with more details about it. Together with a gallery of images and a map, all additional information is displayed visually in an emoji cloud. The bigger the emoji the more relevant it is.

On the profile-page users can find the whole collection of places they shared and ‘bucket-listed’. The specific local taste of each user is displayed in an emoji-cloud on top of the profile page. The bigger the emoji the more relevant it is for the user’s individual taste. You can’t ‘follow’ someone on the app in the way you do on Twitter, but if someone posts a photo he or she will get notified if someone else rated that photo with emojis.

Unlike Yelp, Tripadvisor, Google, Foursquare YOBO is 100% visual. All information about a place is displayed in pictures and emojis, no text at all. For the generation it’s targeting, that speaks to their world.

How the app plans to make money is to be explored, but the startup believes there is still no efficient and convenient marketing solutions for local owner-managed businesses, so in theory they could build-in more personalised discounts to venues.

Last winter the company closed a small pre-seed-round to get the app ready for market and is now raising a seed round to enter new European cities.

The team consists of Tobias Szarowicz (CEO); Anton Kahr (CTO) is an experienced deep-tech developer; Alexander Beer (CPO) a former co-founder of Montredo, a marketplace for luxury watches; and Izabela Zięba (CMO) an expert in performance marketing.

Four of the world’s largest crypto exchanges are leading a $32 million investment in an ambitious venture out of Korea that’s aiming to develop a new stable coin using e-commerce as the lynchpin.

Global exchanges Binance Labs, OKEx, Huobi Capital, and Dunamu — the firm behind Korea’s Upbit — have all poured capital into Terra, a crypto project whose founding team is headed by Daniel Shin, founder and president of TicketMonster — the $1.7 billion Korean e-commerce firm that has been owned by both Living Social and Groupon.

This is the first time global exchanges have come together on a deal, and the stellar line-up of investors includes Polychain Capital, China’s FBG Capital, Hashed, 1kx, Kenetic Capital and Arrington XRP — the crypto fund from TechCrunch founder Michael Arrington .

The deal is a token-based investment round, as opposed to equity. Shin told TechCrunch that Terra plans to hold a private sale in a couple of weeks to add additional capital to this “highly strategic” set of investors. The company will eschew a public sale with retail investors, but it plans to hit exchanges — you guess which ones… — in the coming months.

Yet another stable coin

Stable coins, for the uninitiated, are tokens that are designed to remain at the same price… stable, as the name suggests.

They’re typically pegged to the U.S. dollar and are highly sought after in the world of crypto, where stability is hard, nay impossible, to find. Today, stable coins are mostly used for trading and exchange-related purposes and Tether, the controversial project backed by Bitfinex, is probably the best-known. There’s plenty of criticism around Tether, and research has suggested that Bitcoin’s phenomenal rise in late 2017 — when its value it a record high of nearly $20,000 — was fuelled by Tether manipulation.

Arguably, Tether is the best example of a stable coin, and since it is propped up by the injection of hundreds of millions of dollars on a routine basis, it would be fair to say that the concept has never worked.

That viewpoint might be a little cynical, and Terra believes it can make the concept work through mass adoption of its token. Its gateway for that is to leverage e-commerce in Asia.

While Terra is marketed as a stable coin in its whitepaper and other documents, it would be fair to see it as more of a fintech platform — think Alibaba’s Alipay on the blockchain. That’s because the project is kicking off by working with a slew of e-commerce firms across Korea and other parts of Asia.

Shin explained that Terra aims to complement existing payment solutions by offering its own Stripe -like payment option that would allow customers to pay using its coin (a name hasn’t been decided on yet). For merchants, that could mean circumventing existing payment networks like Visa, which take a cut of all revenue. On the other side, the project could help offer incentives for consumers to buy using the token, for example, through discounts that don’t add to the e-commerce platform’s cash burn.

Because buying crypto and using wallets still isn’t mainstream — and it is a clunky experience — there’s also the potential for consumers to earn tokens when they use platforms, Shin said. The token would be spendable across all supported e-commerce services.

Already, Terra has secured quite a list of partners. There are 15 e-commerce services signed up — including Woowa Brothers, Qoo10, Carousell, Pomelo, and Tiki — which between them boast a cumulative 40 million customers and some $25 billion in annual transaction volume.

Shin said the project is targeting Asia because it is the world’s most active crypto region. He believes that Terra can take a slice of the payments behind the partner businesses — he’s targeting payment GMV in the region of “tens, if not hundreds, of millions of U.S. dollars” before the end of 2019 — and in doing so set itself up for becoming a stable token by virtue of usage.

Of course, it also has its own stability engine. That features a second token — Luna — which Shin said acts as collateral by accumulating revenue by taking the small transaction fee incurred when spending the Terra token. Shin said an algorithm will use Luna to buy back the Terra token in high season to keep the price stable, while it will burn a portion of tokens to maintain stability during periods of recession. A more detailed explanation of the ‘reserve ratio’ can be found in the Terra whitepaper.

Alipay on the blockchain

What makes Terra particularly interesting is that the intention is to build the next Alipay.

Alibaba affiliate Ant Financial, which runs Alipay, may be little known in the U.S. and Europe, but it is dripping with ambition. It is tipped to go public in the next year or two, and already it is valued at over $100 billion following a recent $14 billion funding round.

Alipay is China’s dominant mobile payment service, and it has spawned a digital bank, lending products and more. Ant claims over 500 million users, and it has spent close to $1 billion on a series of aggressive expansions across Asia and beyond as it aims to replicate its formidable Chinese business outside of the country.

Shin explained that he believes Terra could do the same in Asia where, like Alipay, it will try to leverage e-commerce (in this case its partner businesses) to go beyond payments and into financial services.

Shin explained that the plan is to roll out with initial e-commerce partners in Korea during Q4 of this year, before widening to cover Southeast Asia and beyond in 2019. One year later — 2020 — is when he believes Terra will have the required base to welcome developers and third-parties.

“Many projects open up a developer platform prior to adoption,” he explained in an interview. “Once we have tens of millions, if not hundreds of millions, of users is when we’ll open up.”

Exactly what that platform will look like is unclear at this point. Terra is designing a multi-chain structure in order to accommodate numerous chains with its stable coin concept, but it is yet to decide which will primary and therefore the platform for third-party development. Ethereum has tended to be that canvass, but the project is a challenging phase right now so holding out isn’t necessarily a bad thing at this point.

Terra is a hugely ambitious project in the field of often-impossible ideas that is crypto.

Taking on Alipay head-to-head is tough, developing a stable coin is impossible, but doing both lengthens the odds further still. But yet Shin and his team have won the backing of a collective of top names in the crypto space. That, if nothing else, is a good reason to keep an eye on this project.

The odds may be long but, as Shin explains it, you can readily argue that there is upside to having so many big-name partners on board.

“The worst case scenario with this project is a reverse ICO with over 10 e-commerce companies,” he explained. “But the best possible outcome is that we build a platform that competes with Alipay on the blockchain.”

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