Author: azeeadmin

At least 2 million people in the U.S. become infected with so-called “super bugs” and at least 23,000 people die as a direct result of these infections each year, according to the Centers for Disease Control (CDC). Now, HP’s Biohacker technology is working with the CDC on a pilot program to “print” and test antibiotics in an effort to catch these antimicrobial resistant strains from spreading faster.

The HP D300e Digital Dispenser BioPrinter technology works by using the same set up as a regular ink printer but instead dispenses any combination of drugs in volumes from picoliters to microliters to be used for research purposes.

Part of the reason these bugs spread so rapidly often comes down to mis-use of antibiotics, leading the bacteria to develop a resistance to the drugs available. The CDC hopes to give hospital providers access to the technology nationwide to cut down on the problem.

“Once a drug is approved for use, the countdown begins until resistance emerges,” Jean Patel, PH.D. D (ABMM), Science Team Lead, Antibiotic Resistance Coordination and Strategy Unit at CDC said in a statement. “To save lives and protect people, it is vital to make technology accessible to hospital labs nationwide. We hope this pilot will help ensure our newest drugs last longer and put gold-standard lab results in healthcare providers’ hands faster.”

The 3D bioprinting sector has been experiencing rapid growth over the last few years and will continue on pace through the next decade, mainly due to R&D, according to market researchers. Innovation in the space includes printing of organs, human tissue and drug research and development.

Further, this potentially valuable antibiotic resistance research could help patient care teams stem a grim future where we experience a regression in health and life spans due to no longer having the ability to treat currently curable diseases.

The HP BioPrinter is currently used by labs and pharmaceutical companies such as Gilead, which tests for drugs used against the Ebola virus. It is also being used in various CRISPR applications. The CDC will use these printers in four regional areas spread throughout the U.S. within the Antibiotic Resistance (AR) Lab Network to develop antimicrobial susceptibility test methods for new drugs, according to HP.

Ipsy, the beauty box subscription service and e-commerce site founded in 2011 by YouTube creator Michelle Phan, is expanding its business beyond sample-sized products. The company today is debuting a more expensive “Glam Bag Plus” subscription, which will ship customers five full-sized products for $25 per month.

The move aims to capitalize on Ipsy’s established customer base who now trust Ipsy’s beauty products recommendations to the point they’re willing to pay upfront for full-sized products, instead of only samples with the option to later shop online for the products they liked.

It may also help attract a new customer who doesn’t find value in samples – which are sometimes one-use products, or packaged poorly compared with their full-size counterparts, making them difficult to travel with or throw in a purse.

So far, Ipsy’s curation has been succeeding – it touts over 3 million subscribers, compared with rival Birchbox’s over 2.5 million.

Ipsy, for what it’s worth, tends to offer better samples than Birchbox, now majority owned by hedge fund Viking Global Investors, after some financial struggles.

Birchbox shipments are often too reliant on less valuable items, like single-use makeup wipes, tiny eyeshadows without a reliable protective case, or totally hit-or-miss perfume samples, for example. Ipsy, meanwhile, sends out full-sized makeup brushes and other full-sized items along with samples on a regular basis. It also prioritizes makeup products over hair and skin care items in its curation.

Plus, it ships products in a reusable makeup travel bag (which, frankly, is great for when you need to unload some of your less-loved samples on friends).

With the new Glam Bag Plus, customers will have the option of paying a little more – $25 per month instead of $10 – for a selection of full-sized products, which would normally retail for $120.

The company says it will work with brands like Sunday Riley, Ciaté London, Purlisse, Morphe, Tarte Cosmetics, Buxom, and others.

As before, the exact mix of products shipped will be based on subscribers’ beauty profile. Today, Ipsy creates over 10,000 different makeup combinations in its monthly Glam Bag memberships, it says, because of this personalization.

The Plus service will also ship out a deluxe (read: larger) makeup bag on the first delivery, then every third delivery afterwards, as part of its subscription.

The new service will better cater to skin and hair care companies, and especially to newer brands that may not offer a wide ranges of samples at this time, but still want to be able to reach Ipsy’s millennial subscriber base.

Initially, existing Glam Bag subscribers will be able to switch over to the Plus tier of service, which will ship its first bag in October.

However, the company is advising customers that it has limited quantities of Glam Bag Plus products, so if they choose to later downgrade back to the sample Glam Bag, they may end up on a waitlist if they decide later they want to re-join Plus.

Ipsy also says it’s not set up right now to handle customers who want both memberships, so those who do should create a second account as a workaround.

Ipsy’s co-founder Michelle Phan left the startup last fall to run online makeup site EM Cosmetics, but Ipsy itself remains profitable – and it has been for several years. The company’s real value is not the money to be made on the subscription business itself, but rather in helping beauty brands reach social media influencers and YouTube stars, whose makeup tutorials and recommendations help them to gain exposure.

While Ipsy, like many in the subscription business, won’t talk about its critical business metrics like churn or margins, the company believes the Plus subscription will do well because it’s something members have been requesting for some time. It also surveyed the user community and ran focus groups ahead of this product’s launch, it told Glossy.

The subscription will become available to more customers in the future, says Ipsy.

Hangouts Chat, Google’s business-focused Slack competitor is getting emoji reactions. That’s a feature that Slack has long had, so if anything, today’s move makes Hangouts Chat even more Slack-like than before.

Hangouts Chat, you may remember, is very different from Hangouts, Google’s chat app for regular users which at one point was supposed to be superseded by Allo. But then Allo failed and so the future of Hangouts remains uncertain. Hangouts isn’t getting emoji reactions today, though, that’s Hangouts Chat.

There’s really not much more to be said about this new feature. It works just like you’d expect and just like in Slack, this update allows you to now quickly add a thumbs-up emoji to all those comments in Hangouts Slack Chat that you couldn’t care less about but where internal politics dictate that you should say something (or, in Google-speak: “communication styles at work are evolving, and expressive communication modes are oftentimes preferred over simple text”). You could also use them for a quick internal poll or to acknowledge a request where typing ‘yes’ would’ve felt like too much work.

Either way, these new emoji reactions are now rolling out to all G Suite users. Google expects that everybody will have access to them within the next three days.

T-Mobile has revealed an uptick in the number of demands for data it receives from the government.

The cellular giant quietly posted its 2017 transparency report on August 14, revealing a 12 percent increase in the number of overall data demands it responded to compared to the previous year.

The report said the company responded to 219,377 subpoenas, an 11 percent rise on 2017. These demands were issued by federal agencies and do not require any judicial oversight. The company also responded to 55,372 court orders, a 13 percent rise, and 27,203 warrants, a rise of 19 percent.

But the number of wiretap orders — which allow police to listen in to calls in real time — went down by half on the previous year.

A spokesperson for T-Mobile told TechCrunch that the figures reflect a “typical increase of legal demands across the board” and that the increases are “consistent with past years.”

Although the results reveal more requests for customer data, the transparency report did not say how many customers were affected.

T-Mobile has 77 million users as of its second-quarter earnings.

Several tech companies began publishing how many government requests for customer data they received since Google’s debut report in 2010. But it was only after the Edward Snowden disclosures in 2013 that revealed mass surveillance by the National Security Agency when tech companies and telcos began regularly publishing transparency reports, seen as an effort to counter the damaging claims that companies helped the government spy.

T-Mobile became the last major cell carrier to issue a transparency report two years later in 2015.

The company also said that it responded to 64,266 requests by law enforcement for customers’ historical cell site data. That data became the focal point of the U.S. vs. Carpenter case earlier this year, in which the Supreme Court ruled that law enforcement must obtain a warrant for historical cell and location data. That figure is expected to fall during the 2018 reporting year as the new bar to obtain a court-signed warrant is higher.

T-Mobile also said it received 46,395 requests to track customers’ real-time location, and 4,855 warrants and orders for tower dumps, which police can use to obtain information on all the nearby devices connected to a cell tower during a particular period of time.

But the number of national security requests received declined during 2017.

The number of national security letters used by federal agents to obtain call records in secret and the number of orders granted by the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court were each below 1,000 requests for the full year.

Tech companies and telcos are highly restricted in how they can report the number of classified orders demanding customer data in secret, and can only report in ranges of requests they received.

Since the Freedom Act was signed into law in 2015, the Justice Department began allowing companies to report in narrower ranges.

Autonomous vehicle startup AutoX has launched a grocery delivery and mobile store pilot in a partnership with GrubMarket.com and local high-end grocery store DeMartini Orchard.

The pilot will initially be limited to an area of about 400 homes in north San Jose. The company, which employees nearly 90 people, has just two autonomous vehicles that will be used for the initial launch. Eventually, AutoX aims to expand the pilot west to Mountain View and Palo Alto, with more delivery partners joining soon.

Once customers in the prescribed area have downloaded the app, they can make an order. For now, these orders must be placed the day before delivery. Or, when the AutoX car arrives, the window rolls down to reveal AutoX’s selections from which customers can choose.

The idea is to offer two shopping experiences with self-driving cars, AutoX COO Jewel Li explained in a statement. Customers can order goods from an app and get them delivered by a self-driving vehicle. Or the self-driving vehicle can bring a shelf of goods that customers can pick and choose from right outside their house.

Unlike many other startups racing to deploy autonomous vehicles, AutoX is focused on delivering things, not people.

“We don’t think it makes sense for people to drive around these two-ton vehicles to go pick up an apple,” AutoX director of business and operations Hugo Fozzati told TechCrunch. “These errands are creating congestion and a ton of pollution. We want to focus on something that’s going to have a lot of impact.”

The company, which launched in September 2016, has raised $43 million from strategic and financial investors. AutoX is based in San Jose and also has offices in China.

Of course, AutoX is hardly the only autonomous vehicle delivery company to emerge in the past two years. Starship Technologies, Mountain View, Calif.-based Nuro, Robomart and Chinese retail powerhouse, Alibaba are just a few that have unveiled their own vision for autonomous delivery.

The pilot is the first step in AutoX founder and CEO Jianxiong Xiao’s mission to open up autonomous vehicles to everyone. It’s a goal the company contends can be reached using economical (and better) hardware. The company does use light detection and ranging radar, known as LiDAR. But instead of loading up its self-driving vehicles with numerous expensive LiDAR units, AutoX relies more on cameras, which it argues have better resolution. The company’s proprietary AI algorithms tie everything together.

“It’s the first step of our mission to democratize autonomy, also a testament to our cutting edge AI and all its potential capabilities,” Xiao said about the pilot program. “We believe self-driving car technologies will fundamentally change people’s daily lives for the better.”

VMware is hosting its VMworld customer conference in Las Vegas this week, and to get things going it announced that its acquiring Boston-based CloudHealth Technologies. They did not disclose the terms of the deal, but Reuters is reporting the price is $500 million.

CloudHealth provides VMware with a crucial multi-cloud management platform that works across AWS, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform, giving customers a way to manage cloud cost, usage, security and performance from a single interface.

Although AWS leads the cloud market by a large margin, it is a vast and growing market and most companies are not putting their eggs in a single vendor basket. Instead, they are looking at best of breed options for different cloud services.

This multi-cloud approach is great for customers in that they are not tied down to any single provider, but it does create a management headache as a consequence. CloudHealth gives multi-cloud users a way to manage their environment from a single tool.

CloudHealth multi-cloud management. Photo: CloudHealth Technologies

VMware’s chief operating officer for products and cloud services, Raghu Raghuram, says CloudHealth solves the multi-cloud operational dilemma. “With the addition of CloudHealth Technologies we are delivering a consistent and actionable view into cost and resource management, security and performance for applications across multiple clouds,” Raghuram said in a statement.

CloudHealth began offering support for Google Cloud Platform just last month. CTO Joe Kinsella told TechCrunch why they had decided to expand their platform to include GCP support: “I think a lot of the initiatives that have been driven since Diane Greene joined Google [at the end of 2015] and began really driving towards the enterprise are bearing fruit. And as a result, we’re starting to see a really substantial uptick in interest.”

It also gave them a complete solution for managing across the three of the biggest cloud vendors. That last piece very likely made them an even more attractive target for a company like VMware, who apparently was looking for a solution to buy that would help customers manage across a hybrid and multi-cloud environment.

The company had been planning future expansion to manage not just the public cloud, but also private clouds and data centers from one place, a strategy that should fit well with what VMware has been trying to do in recent years to help companies manage a hybrid environment, regardless of where their virtual machines live.

With CloudHealth, VMware not only gets the multi-cloud management solution, it gains its 3000 customers which include Yelp, Dow Jones, Zendesk and Pinterest.

CloudHealth was founded in 2012 and has raised over $87 million. Its most recent round was a $46 million Series D in June 2017 led by Kleiner Perkins. Other lead investors across earlier rounds have included Sapphire Ventures, Scale Venture Partners and .406 Ventures.

Here’s some unusual news: AWS, Amazon’s cloud computing arm, today announced that it plans to bring its Relational Database Service (RDS) to VMware, no matter whether that’s VMware Cloud on AWS or a privately hosted VMware deployment in a corporate data center.

While some of AWS’s competitors have long focused on these kinds of hybrid cloud deployments, AWS never really put the same kind of emphasis on this. Clearly, though, that’s starting to change — maybe in part because Microsoft and others are doing quite well in this space.

“Managing the administrative and operational muck of databases is hard work, error-prone, and resource intensive,” said AWS CEO Andy Jassy . “It’s why hundreds of thousands of customers trust Amazon RDS to manage their databases at scale. We’re excited to bring this same operationally battle-tested service to VMware customers’ on-premises and hybrid environments, which will not only make database management much easier for enterprises, but also make it simpler for these databases to transition to the cloud.”

With Amazon RDS on VMware, enterprises will be able to use AWS’s technology to run and manage Microsft SQL Server, Oracle, PostgreSQL, MySQL and MariaDB databases in their own data centers. The idea here, AWS says, is to make it easy for enterprises to set up and manage their databases wherever they want to host their data — and to then migrate it to AWS when they choose to do so.

This new service is currently in private preview, so we don’t know all that much about how this will work in practice or what it will cost. AWS promises, however, that the experience will pretty much be the same as in the cloud and that RDS on VMware will handle all the updates and patches automatically.

Today’s announcement comes about two years after the launch of VMware Cloud on AWS, which was pretty much the reverse of today’s announcement. With VMware Cloud on AWS, enterprises can take their existing VMware deployments and take them to AWS.

It isn’t the most usual situation for a founder to write a review trashing a competitor’s new product, but Oculus co-founder Palmer Luckey has never been the most conventional entrepreneur.

Yesterday, Luckey published a review of Magic Leap’s developer kit on his personal blog titled “Magic Leap is a Tragic Heap,” wherein he offered a few compliments but spent the majority of his words highlighting shortcomings of the new device while seeking to remind everyone of all the shit that Magic Leap execs talked about existing AR tech and how they nevertheless ended up running with a device that, in his opinion, made only minor improvements over the three-year-old HoloLens. 

There are a number of digs he makes in his review. Perhaps most insightfully he takes on the tracking technologies used for the headset and controller, noting areas where they are actually steps back in user experience. The Magic Leap One’s controller uses magnetic tracking, a system far different and generally more complex than the optical tracking systems that almost all VR companies, including Oculus, utilize. Once you read the paragraph where he trashes the lack of a clickable trackpad, it becomes clear that this is probably more than a little personal for Luckey.

Magic Leap One ‘Lightwear’

At this point, Luckey has moved beyond his VR days in a professional sense (for the most part). His new company, Anduril Industries, is focused on creating border security technologies; nevertheless, he has remained a very vocal personality in the VR space with a reputation of a hardcore hobbyist.

A lot of this beef seems easy to identify. Magic Leap CEO Rony Abovitz has spent the last several years raising a lot of money while developing technology in secret and trash-talking existing tech in public. In Luckey’s view this hasn’t been great for investment in the AR/VR space, where investors have had unrealistic expectations put in front of them that may have reduced interest in other existing companies that were taking a more conservative approach to hyping themselves.

The most brutal takes are reserved for the ML1’s display tech, which Luckey points out really isn’t any different from what other companies have been looking at. While the Magic Leap team invented terminology to describe what they have built, Luckey points out that they didn’t solve what they claimed that they would:

They call it the “Lightwear”. This is the part that has gotten the most hype over the years, with endless talk of “Photonic Lightfield Chips”, “Fiber Scanning Laser Displays”, “projecting a digital light field into the user’s eye”, and the holy-grail promise of solving vergence-accommodation conflict, an issue that has plagued HMDs for decades – in other words, ensuring that the focus of your eyes always matches their convergence, something that Magic Leap has touted as critical in avoiding “permanent neurologic deficits” and brain damage.  It is even more important for AR than VR, since you have to blend digital elements with real-world elements that are consistently correct.

TL;DR: The supposed “Photonic Lightfield Chips” are just waveguides paired with reflective sequential-color LCOS displays and LED illumination, the same technology everyone else has been using for years, including Microsoft in their last-gen HoloLens.  The ML1 is a not a “lightfield projector” or display by any broadly accepted definition, and as a Bi-Focal Display, only solves vergence-accommodation conflict in contrived demos that put all UI and environmental elements at one of two focus planes.  Mismatch occurs at all other depths.  In much the same way, a broken clock displays the correct time twice a day.

He also takes on the headset’s small field-of-view, something that honestly feels like a bit of a cheap shot when he compares it to other AR headsets that use much more simplistic optical systems. Magic Leap’s display offers a viewing area that has been estimated to be about 40 percent larger than the HoloLens, but is still a small box in someone’s perspective.

If you felt this was just someone’s occasionally harsh look at a big product, the intent is clear when Luckey attempts to estimate sales of the device by looking at the company’s order numbering system:

The Magic Leap order system was really easy to figure out for the first few days after launch.  I gathered some order numbers from friends and compared their order times, and I am pretty confident about predicting first-week sales.  Unfortunately, they changed the system shortly after I tweeted about it.  Based on what I do know, it looks like they sold about 2,000 units in the first week, with a very heavy bias towards the first 48 hours.  If I had to guess, I would put total sales at well under 3,000 units at this point.  This is unfortunate for obvious reasons – I know over a hundred people with an ML1, and almost none of them are AR developers.  Most are tech executives, “influencers”, or early adopters who work in the industry but have no plans to actually build AR apps.  This was a big problem in the early VR industry, and that was with many tens of thousands of developers among hundreds of thousands of development kits sold!  Multiplying the problem by a couple orders of magnitude is going to be rough for ML.

Luckey doesn’t seem like he’ll be publishing any follow-ups with this device either; he gave his personal device to iFixit to tear down after playing around with it for the review.

Following the post going up, Magic Leap CEO Rony Abovitz responded in typically eccentric fashion, assumedly comparing Luckey to a character from Avatar: The Last Airbender with more strange tweets to follow.

The biggest, most ambitious Disrupt event ever is less than two weeks away! Disrupt SF 2018 takes place at Moscone Center West on September 5-7 — that’s three action-packed, business-oriented days of programming. But like you, we know how to have a good time, too. It’s all about balance, friends. And that’s why you do not want to miss the TechCrunch After Party on Thursday September 6.

Disrupt After Parties are the stuff of legend, and this year will be no exception. Expect a ’90s theme complete with fun wearables like glow stick necklaces and slap bracelets. And you can get a tote bag — screen-printed on-site — to take home with you.

It wouldn’t be a TechCrunch After Party without a chance to get your dance on. We’ll have DJ King Mos spinning the best ’90s music all night long — with an immersive Sound Experience from Envelop.

There’s plenty to do while you sip a beverage and groove on the dance floor. Check out the graffiti artist creating a mural, dive into Snapfiesta’s Ball Pit Photo Booth to capture all manner of silliness, or relax, chill and chat in the Super Mario Brother’s Lounge. You can also continue to network — hey, we don’t judge.

Speaking of lounges, Universe presents the Top-Secret Lounge. We can’t divulge the details, but you might find specialty cocktails and a variety of ’90s games — among other things. You’ll have to keep a sharp lookout, though. It’s up to you to find the Top-Secret Lounge: look for discreetly hidden signage to suss out the location and gain access.

We invite all Disrupt SF attendees with an Innovator Pass and above to come and celebrate the entrepreneurial spirit of tech startups, network in a relaxed environment and burn off the adrenaline rush that comes with experiencing TechCrunch Disrupt. Basic Pass holders should email events@techcrunch.com to upgrade to attend.

In addition to all the craziness we have in store for you, our partners have lined up some activities and giveaways just for Disrupt SF attendees:

Fuel with sweetgreen during Disrupt Week 2018 
Take a break from the action with $10 app credit to use at sweetgreen. Redeem your app credit at our SoMa location (171 2nd St.) — only a 5-minute walk away from Moscone. Grab a (new) friend and come by for lunch or dinner. Redeem your $10 credit with this link. Limited quantities available, so claim your credit before they are gone!

Virtual Workout Session with Aaptiv
Start your day with an inspiring workout led by one of Aaptiv’s personal trainers! TechCrunch Disrupt attendees get free, unlimited access to Aaptiv — on-demand audio workouts you can do in the hotel gym, in your room or on the streets of San Francisco. Choose from more than 2,500 classes for running, cardio machines, strength, HIIT, yoga and more. Get started at aaptiv.com/disrupt.

We can’t wait to party with you!

It’s been a full year since Disney first made public its intentions to go head to head with Netflix. In the intervening months, the media giant has started the process of pulling content from the streaming service, bit by bit.

And while Disney isn’t planning to launch the product until some time next year, at least we’ve finally got a name. CEO Bob Iger is calling the video service “Disney Play,” according to a new report from Variety.

That little tidbit is buried in a larger piece of about Netflix competitors. In it, the chief executive notes that the services is Disney’s “biggest priority of the company during calendar [year] 2019.” That’s some big talk from a company with the reach and resources of a Disney.

From the sound of things, however, it’s going all in on its plan to beat Netflix and its ilk at their own game. Along with an extremely strong slate of existing films, the company’s got some big titles just over the horizon.

There’s Marvel’s Captain Marvel, the final installment of the Star Wars sequel trilogy and surefire sequels like Frozen 2 and Toy Story 4.  And then there’s the original content, led by a live action Star Wars series helmed by Iron Man director, Jon Favreau (who’s also directing Disney’s upcoming Lion King remake).

The exact date and pricing for the service are still TBD, but Iger has promised to undercut Netflix’s monthly fee.