Author: azeeadmin

Lyft is going to offer half-priced and free rides to polling places around the country on Election Day (November 6).

The ride-hailing giant said that it’s going to give out 50 percent off promotional codes to partners that encourage voter turnout. The company has linked up with Vote.org, Nonprofit VOTE, TurboVote and others to help distribute the codes to anyone who needs them.

On the day of the election the company said it will also provide a product integration that will help voters find their polling places to make it even easier to cast their ballot.

This non-partisan effort to get people to the polls is only becoming more critical. Election officials in one county in Georgia have proposed closing 7 of 9 polling places because they’re not sufficiently accessible for handicapped voters. Having Lyft available to help those voters who would be impacted by the closures (some of whom would have to walk three hours to get to the nearest open polls) could certainly be a boon.

As the company noted in its announcement, there’s a participation problem impacting elections in the U.S. Estimates from the Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement indicate that roughly 15 million people didn’t vote in the 2016 election because they didn’t have transportation to get to the polls.

The last presidential election was decided by 80,000 votes in three states, so getting out the vote and getting people to the polls clearly matters.

For those underserved communities where the 50 percent discount on rides isn’t enough, the company will provide transportation free of cost through non-partisan, nonprofit organizations like Voto Latino, local affiliates of the Urban League and the National Federation of the Blind.

Beyond just getting people to the polls, Lyft is providing ways for people to register to vote and learn about voting initiatives that are up for approval on election day. Through a partnerships with When We All Vote and National Voter Registration Day the company intends to remind passengers about voter registration deadlines; give drivers voter registration handouts and voter information at Hub locations; offer in-office voter registration for employees; and offer online voter information through the company’s partner organizations.

Voting access is a critical issue in making sure that every American’s voice is heard through the election process. According to studies from the Pew Research Center (cited by Lyft), 46 percent of nonvoters have incomes under $30,000 compared with 19 percent of likely voters. And 43 percent of people unlikely to cast ballots are Hispanic, African American or other minorities, which is double the percentage among likely voters.

Lyft is going to offer half-priced and free rides to polling places around the country on Election Day (November 6).

The ride-hailing giant said that it’s going to give out 50 percent off promotional codes to partners that encourage voter turnout. The company has linked up with Vote.org, Nonprofit VOTE, TurboVote and others to help distribute the codes to anyone who needs them.

On the day of the election the company said it will also provide a product integration that will help voters find their polling places to make it even easier to cast their ballot.

This non-partisan effort to get people to the polls is only becoming more critical. Election officials in one county in Georgia have proposed closing 7 of 9 polling places because they’re not sufficiently accessible for handicapped voters. Having Lyft available to help those voters who would be impacted by the closures (some of whom would have to walk three hours to get to the nearest open polls) could certainly be a boon.

As the company noted in its announcement, there’s a participation problem impacting elections in the U.S. Estimates from the Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement indicate that roughly 15 million people didn’t vote in the 2016 election because they didn’t have transportation to get to the polls.

The last presidential election was decided by 80,000 votes in three states, so getting out the vote and getting people to the polls clearly matters.

For those underserved communities where the 50 percent discount on rides isn’t enough, the company will provide transportation free of cost through non-partisan, nonprofit organizations like Voto Latino, local affiliates of the Urban League and the National Federation of the Blind.

Beyond just getting people to the polls, Lyft is providing ways for people to register to vote and learn about voting initiatives that are up for approval on election day. Through a partnerships with When We All Vote and National Voter Registration Day the company intends to remind passengers about voter registration deadlines; give drivers voter registration handouts and voter information at Hub locations; offer in-office voter registration for employees; and offer online voter information through the company’s partner organizations.

Voting access is a critical issue in making sure that every American’s voice is heard through the election process. According to studies from the Pew Research Center (cited by Lyft), 46 percent of nonvoters have incomes under $30,000 compared with 19 percent of likely voters. And 43 percent of people unlikely to cast ballots are Hispanic, African American or other minorities, which is double the percentage among likely voters.

The screwdriver-happy dismantlers at iFixit have torn the Magic Leap One augmented reality headset all to pieces, and the takeaway seems to be that the device is very much a work in progress — but a highly advanced one. Its interesting optical assembly, described as “surprisingly ugly,” is laid bare for all to see.

The head-mounted display and accompanying computing unit are definitely meant for developers, as we know, but the basic methods and construction Magic Leap is pursuing are clear from this initial hardware. It’s unlikely that there will be major changes to how the gadget works except to make it cheaper, lighter and more reliable.

At the heart of Magic Leap’s tech is its AR display, which overlays 3D images over and around the real world. This is accomplished through a stack of waveguides that allow light to pass along them invisibly, then bounce it out toward your eye from the proper angle to form the image you see.

The “ugly” assembly in question; pic courtesy of iFixit

The waveguide assembly has six layers: one for each color channel (red, blue and green) twice over, arranged so that by adjusting the image you can change the perceived distance and size of the object being displayed.

There isn’t a lot out there like this, and certainly nothing intended for consumer use, so we can forgive Magic Leap for shipping something a little bit inelegant by iFixit’s standards: “The insides of the lenses are surprisingly ugly, with prominent IR LEDs, a visibly striated waveguide “display” area, and some odd glue application.”

After all, the insides of devices like the iPhone X or Galaxy Note 9 should and do reflect a more mature hardware ecosystem and many iterations of design along the same lines. This is a unique, first-of-its-kind device and as a devkit the focus is squarely on getting the functionality out there. It will almost certainly be refined in numerous ways to avoid future chiding by hardware snobs.

That’s also evident from the eye-tracking setup, which from its position at the bottom of the eye will likely perform better when you’re looking down and straight ahead rather than upwards. Future versions may include more robust tracking systems.

Another interesting piece is the motion-tracking setup. A little box hanging off the edge of the headset is speculated to be the receiver for the magnetic field-based motion controller. I remember using magnetic interference motion controllers back in 2010 — no doubt there have been improvements, but this doesn’t seem to be particularly cutting-edge tech. An improved control scheme can probably be expected in future iterations, as this little setup is pretty much independent of the rest of the device’s operation.

Let’s not judge Magic Leap on this interesting public prototype — let us instead judge them on the farcically ostentatious promises and eye-popping funding of the last few years. If they haven’t burned through all that cash, there are years of development left in the creation of a practical and affordable consumer device using these principles and equipment. Many more teardowns to come!

As a race, human beings have a lot of shortcomings. We’re not very fast, not all that strong and while we have been able to create technology that helps us overcome our environments, we’re not very good at adapting to them. Animals, on the other hand, have been successfully adapting and evolving to meet the world’s challenges long before we were stumbling around.

While it might be too late for us to learn these lessons ourselves from our animal counterparts, it’s not too late to pass them on to our inventions. And biomimetic and bio-inspired labs across the world are doing just that.

“If you think about mobility technology in the engineering world, we have airplanes in the air, ships in the water, but none of these technologies are available without our artificial modification of the environment,” Dr. Sangbae Kim, associate professor of mechanical engineering at MIT and director of the university’s Biomimetic Robotics Laboratory, told TechCrunch. “Animals have evolved to be the best at mobility, because, for most of them, it’s critical for survival.”

Crafting technology to mimic nature is nothing new, Kim says. From developing aerodynamic technology to small conveniences like Velcro, humans have been taking a cue from the natural world for as long as we’ve been inventing. The field of engineering, says Kim, has this kind of inspiration as an intrinsic feature and it will be crucial to solving problems such as disaster reconnaissance, labor and even elderly care.

“This is technology we must have,” says Kim. “Not just something cool to have.”

With new technological developments, this kind of inspired design has gone far beyond Velcro in recent years.

Cheetah 3

A prodigy of Kim’s lab, the Cheetah 3 is a 90 pound rescue robot designed to traverse terrain that is dangerous or inaccessible to humans (e.g. power plant inspection of natural disaster reconnaissance) with cat-like reflexes and motion. Its predecessors have been able to make autonomous running leaps over obstacles in their path (granted, at a considerably slower speed than its namesake) and Cheetah 3 has the added functionality to complete all these tasks while blind. By not relying on its sensors and cameras, Cheetah 3 is designed to have a better intuitive knowledge of its environment and perform in scenarios that are either too dark or “noisy” (too visually stimulating.)

Sharklet 

Natural inspiration is not only found in robotics, but in material engineering as well. In 2002, Dr. Anthony Brennan, a material science and engineering professor at the University of Florida, was participating in Naval research to design strategies to keep vessels from growing algae and barnacles on their sides. While exploring the question, Brennan discovered that sharks — who spend their lives slowly moving through water — had answered it long ago. Examining the patterns in a shark’s scales, Brennan discovered that the unique ribbed, diamond structure of the shark’s scales discouraged microorganisms from settling on the surface.

Taking this discovery beyond naval ships, Brennan founded the company Sharklet in 2007 to design medical instruments built with this topology and create a non-toxic antibiotic alternative to harsh chemical cleaners.

Biomimetic Worm Bot

Out of Case Western Reserve University’s Biologically Inspired Robotics lab, this creepy-crawly bot is helping both roboticists and neuroscientists better understand a type of motion called peristalsis — or movement through contracting and expanding of muscle. While this kind of movement is not unique to earth-worms (humans, in fact, do it when swallowing), the ability to propel and maneuver their bodies through tight spaces with it is. To study this motion, the lab created the CMMWorm (Compliant Modular Mesh Worm) — a soft robot with a Lego-like capability to have segments detached and rearranged. Researchers told Gizmodo that they hope this kind of soft robot could be useful in situations as small as medical endoscopies and as large as investigating blocked pipes.

SpotMini 

And who could forget, man’s best friend, Boston Dynamic’s SpotMini. This electric robot weighs about 66 pounds, stands at just under three feet tall and can last for 90 minutes on just one charge. At TC Sessions: Robotics held at UC Berkeley this summer Boston Dynamics announced its plans to move SpotMini into pre-production and begin selling the bot in 2019 — marking the first move toward commercialization for the company. Boston Dynamics says that SpotMini would fit well into a home or office space, but doing what exactly is still a little unclear.

If you’re just looking for some canine-like companionship, you might be better off cozying up to Sony’s pricey Aibo instead.

Eventbrite filed an IPO today for $200 million, confirming reports earlier this summer that the event-planning company plans to go public later this year.

According to the document, the company plans to raise $200 million from selling Class A shares, but has yet to list the price per share.

As for what Eventbrite intends to do with the new funds, many are pointing to the need to recover the company’s recent losses. While the company reported a net profit of $201.6 million in 2017, operating and loss expenses still left the company unprofitable that year. The company reported a net loss of $38.5 million in 2017 and a loss so far in 2018 of $15.6 million.

However, the company does report a net revenue growth of 51 percent and reported a net revenue of $142 million so far in 2018.

The filing lists Goldman Sachs as a lead underwriter and bolsters the company’s commitment to providing a platform to “creators of all types” as a competitive advantage. To continue this commitment, the company says it intends to add extended capabilities across categories and countries.

While the company has been in the event space for a while, even older companies like Ticketmaster, StubHub and Live Nation continue to give the company a run for its money — and its customers. For perspective, in 2017, Live Nation reported a record $10.4 billion in revenue.

Social platforms like Facebook have also recently complicated this space by integrating ticket purchasing portals onto its site to direct customers to both Ticketmaster or Eventbrite. While driving one-time purchases to the services, these on-site portals keep users sequestered on Facebook and in turn don’t allow them to browse other options offered by the ticketing sites.

As it stands now, prior to its stock market debut, Eventbrite has raised $332.3 million over nine funding rounds since 2006, including a debt funding round for $1.5 million in 2008, with the backing of investors like Tiger Global, Sequoia Capital and DAG Ventures.

A massive trove of voter records containing personal information on millions of Texas residents has been found online.

The data — a single file containing an estimated 14.8 million records — was left on an unsecured server without a password. Texas has 19.3 million registered voters.

It’s the latest exposure of voter data in a long string of security incidents that have cast doubt on political parties’ abilities to keep voter data safe at a time where nation states are actively trying to influence elections.

TechCrunch obtained a copy of the file, which was first found by a New Zealand-based data breach hunter who goes by the pseudonym Flash Gordon. It’s not clear who owned the server where the exposed file was found, but an analysis of the data reveals that it was likely originally compiled by Data Trust, a Republican-focused data analytics firm created by the GOP to provide campaigns with voter data.

Chris Vickery, director of cyber risk research at security firm UpGuard, analyzed a portion of the data. (It was Vickery who found a larger trove of 198 million voter records last year exposed by a similar data firm Deep Root Analytics, which sourced much of its data from Data Trust.)

A spokesperson for Data Trust declined to comment on the record.

The file — close to 16 gigabytes in size — contained dozens of fields, including personal information like a voter’s name, address, gender and several years’ worth of voting history, including primaries and presidential elections.

Granted, much of that data is public. According to The Texas Tribune, that kind of voter data in Texas is already obtainable for a fee, but information relating to individuals’ political affiliations and party memberships is not. Sam Taylor, communications director for the Texas secretary of state, told TechCrunch in an email that certain data points — like Social Security numbers — are also excluded, and the voter data cannot be used for commercial purposes, like advertising.

But data-driven political firms like Data Trust use the data for political purposes, specializing in supplementing those voter profiles with information that might help a campaign to flip a person who might not vote for a Republican candidate at the ballot box.

That’s where this file fills in the gaps with dozens of other fields, which can be used by campaigns to position their political messaging.

For example, the data includes fields that might score an individual’s believed views on immigration, hunting, abortion rights, government spending and views on the Second Amendment.

Other fields were more relevant to the recent 2016 presidential election, in which the data predictively scored individuals on if they “trust” or have “no trust” for then-Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton.

The data also includes additional personal information, such as a person’s phone numbers and their ethnicity and race.

It’s not known exactly when the data was compiled, but an analysis of the data suggests it was prepared in time for the 2016 presidential election. It’s also not known if the file is a subset of the 198 million records leak last year — or if it’s a standalone data set.

Without an owner to inform of the exposure, it’s unclear if the data is still online.

There’s nothing inherently social about VR. In fact, putting on a headset and entering your own world can be a fairly isolating experience. But Survios’ latest offering is looking to turn that truism on its head. Electronauts is designed to deliver a social experience, in which players can create music for their surroundings.

The new title is immersive, but designed to be played in a social setting, like a party. Players inhabit a kind of Tron-like world, remixing tracks by popular acts like Steve Aoki and D.J. Shadow in real-time.

It’s a group experience the company envisions as something similar to Rock Band or Guitar Hero. Electronauts is an impressive title from the California VR studio that also developed the addictive first-person shooter, Raw Data.

Formed in 2013 by a trio of University of Southern California students, Survios is among the most compelling VR studios around. Before co-founding the company, President Nathan Burba served as the director of Project Holodeck, a USC project aimed at creating full-body 360-degree VR experience. The Oculus-based project took its name from Star Trek’s well known virtual experience. 

Since launch, Survios has generated plenty of notice from entertainment big wigs. Back in 2016, the company raised $50 million, in a round led by MGM.

Burba will be joining us at TC Sessions: AR/VR on October 18 at UCLA. The one-day event combines on stage conversations about augmented and virtual reality with in-person demos and networking.

Purchase your Early Bird tickets here for just $99 and you’ll save $100 before prices go up!

Students get a special rate of just $45 when they book here.

Historically, we haven’t been great about digital security. In 2016 (not long enough ago to feel OK about it), the top passwords were “123456” and “password.”

Awareness has certainly grown, but some folks could still use a nudge in the right direction. Luckily, Fortnite Battle Royale maker Epic Games has a solution.

The company has introduced a new emote to the game — emotes are just one type of cosmetic upgrade that helped Epic rake in $1 billion in revenue. However, this new Boogie Down emote is only available to folks who enable two-factor authentication on their Epic Games account.

As you can expect, hackers and other malicious actors are well aware of both the popularity of Fortnite and users’ willingness to spend money on the game. Obviously, these accounts are attractive targets for “the bad guys.”

Two-factor authentication — which asks for two separate verifications that you are you (usually a password and then an SMS confirmation) — has its shortcomings, but it’s most certainly an upgrade to a single password.

Incentivizing better security practices is an interesting take, and may very well be the first time a game maker has used the technique.

The Boogie Down emote (above) is the prize for enabling 2FA, and it was introduced as part of a competition by Epic Games. In March, the company asked its community to submit dance moves, with the winner making it into the game.

For what it’s worth, the actual dance seems way cooler than the emote in the game.

[via Kotaku]

Build versus buy? Potential partner or potential disruptor?

The option set for corporations to collaborate with startups used to be simpler. Today, the options seem almost endless: build, partner, buy, integrate with their APIs, co-develop product together, white-label a part of their technology, share specific data sets, cross-sell each other’s products — and more. The notion of a straightforward “vendor” relationship doesn’t apply anymore.

The landscape has also changed. If the corporate posture of the past around innovation could be described as “not invented here” with a strong bias toward building internally, today’s corporate posture leans in a much different direction, with many thinking about how to disrupt themselves before an external party beats them to it.

Not surprisingly, this has created more corporate and startup partnerships. While getting this type of collaboration right is beneficial for both parties, if you speak to most startups selling into large enterprises or corporate executives looking to partner with startups today, you will find many justifiable frustrations on both sides.

As the vice president of Business Development at RRE Ventures, an early-stage venture capital firm based in New York, a major part of my role is leading our business development initiatives, where we enable collaboration between corporations and startups. Before this role, I spent time on the corporate side and on the startup side, so I’ve gotten to see this dynamic from both angles throughout my career. While there is no silver bullet for this type of work, here are a few best practices I’ve learned, sometimes through painful mistakes, or observed along the way.

For startups looking to sell into large enterprises

Do your homework. Corporate executives expect you to be prepared. Spend the time to understand what their business might be going through. Do they need new growth opportunities? Do they need to cut costs? Given the size of these companies, it’s easy to find information on them.

Spend time reading recent press, analyst reports on the company or understanding more about the division you are speaking to. You want to walk in saying some version of “Here is how I think my product can be relevant to you and help you with one of your key objectives” instead of saying some version of “Here is my shiny object — don’t you want to buy it?”

Be realistic about where you are and where you are headed. The last thing you want to happen is for a corporation to agree to use or test your product only for you to tell them in the next sentence that you haven’t yet launched or built what you just showed them. Be realistic with the corporation about what you can do for them today, tomorrow and in the future. They will be more flexible than you might think if they understand your timelines and product road map.

Focus on ease of use and ease of integration. We might all be reading headlines about Mars exploration these days, but let’s ground ourselves in a different space reality. It’s not uncommon for major Fortune 500 companies today to still be operating tech or leveraging data models that were built before man was put on the moon. Your technology might be incredible, but if they can’t test it easily or seamlessly integrate it with their tech stack, you are unlikely to get real traction.

Understand the complexities of operating at scale. Think of your own trajectory as a company and how hard it has been to scale your company, from getting the right people to growing revenue and building the right product — and every detail in-between. Now multiply that by a million. Even though Fortune 500 corporations have more resources in absolute magnitude, they have all the same problems you do, often with more complexities, given their scale.

If integrating your product has negative consequences for them, it will likely affect millions of customers, billions of dollars of revenue and have major brand and shareholder consequences, so have some empathy on why they want to properly vet your product and company first.

Learn to fly at 30,000 feet or 30 feet. Effective startup leadership requires one to zoom in and out on a daily basis, quickly and seamlessly. The ability to quickly shift gears and move between big picture and small details is crucial for operating early-stage companies. It’s also essential for working with corporations. Depending on the meeting, a prospective client might want you to go into the technical weeds or have a strategy discussion on a use case that’s not on your road map.

Be ready to fly at both levels, and also be deliberate about where you personally spend your time, as it’s your scarcest asset while running a resource-constrained startup.

For corporations looking to integrate new technologies

Optimize for quality, not quantity, and focus on real use cases. While it can be tempting to meet with every startup employing the right buzzword of the moment (artificial intelligence, blockchain, machine learning), you want to avoid going on a startup safari where you see a number of cool things in the wild and walk away without doing anything differently in your organization.

Instead of meeting with technology companies based on buzzwords, identify real problems your organization needs to solve and find companies that can help you solve those problems. What matters in the end is translating technology to real tangible use cases that are digestible internally in your organization.

Make fast decisions. As a corporate executive I know puts it, “Maybes kill startups. A fast No is the best thing after Yes.” If you know you are not going to leverage the company’s product, say no as quickly as possible. With fewer resources, startups don’t have the same meeting after meeting bandwidth as you. Remember, saying no now isn’t no forever.

Should you find yourself in a different situation a few months from now, you can always go back and revisit the company. In either case, please give startups real feedback, especially when you don’t move forward with them. In many cases these companies are early on in their growth trajectory, and providing honest feedback helps them build their own product and business.

Create better internal processes to partner with smaller companies. Unless you are one of the few corporations that have set this up well, most of your internal processes (IT Review, Procurement and Sourcing, Compliance, Security, Risk Analysis and Legal Review) for commercial vendor relationships are not set up with smaller companies in mind, which have limited HR and legal teams. To innovate more quickly, create a different set of processes for these types of partnerships that allow you to still assess risk but in a faster, more streamlined way. If your ability to partner is slower than the pace of change, you will never be ahead of the curve.

Short-term versus long-term change. Think about innovation along different time horizons. A good place to start is McKinsey’s three horizons of growth methodology. Consider how you will collaborate with companies along these different time horizons. The most senior level in your organization should take this view as this conflicts with focusing on real use cases today. Make sure that your company is not just integrating incremental changes at all levels.

Build a better sandbox. Find ways to test new technologies with your own existing systems and data in a way that replicates scale without affecting your existing business. You don’t want to spend months creating a partnership only to find out the technology isn’t what you expected. The more this sandbox can mimic your true environment, the more likely you are to have success with the real integration.

We think a lot about corporate and startup collaboration and welcome any dialogue on the topic; contact us at platform@rre.com.

Amazon acquired social reading service Goodreads five years ago, squelching the life out of the competitive landscape, as minimal as it was. So it’s promising to see a new app appear with the goal of getting more people to move off of Goodreads for social book recommendations. That app is Inky, built by two bookworm friends who wanted a better way to track their reading and find recommendations of what to read next.

The app is very much an indie effort for the time being, and not as polished as a similar app, Reco. However, it works well for those who are looking for a simple way of tracking their “read” list along with their “to read” list, and who want a way to see what other good books people are into right now.

Explains co-founder Simon Bruno, “mobile apps for avid readers just suck. The market leader in social networks for avid readers, Goodreads, is practically synonymous with archaic,” he says.

After asking around about what people actually want in an app for readers, he recruited his friend Mike Salvador to help build it. Both just graduated from college, and have decided to work on Inky full-time.

“No one knows who we are,” Bruno says. “We’re definitely not funded.”

But, he adds, they’re updating the app every few days and getting “little sleep in the process.”

Currently, you can sign up for Inky using Facebook or email, and then you’re presented with some pre-selected users to follow. You can check or uncheck these suggestions as you choose. There aren’t many users on the app at present, beyond around 1,000 early adopters and some Instagram book nerds, the co-founder notes. So you may want to at least seed your network with a few of them.

You can then fill out your two bookshelves  -“read” and “to read” – with books, by searching for titles. Once added, these are presented in a visual format, similar to how Slice Bookshelf looked back in the day before its untimely demise. You can also tap on the books’ covers to read a description, giving you the feeling of picking up a book at the store and reading its jacket.

Unfortunately, the app only presents the new recommendations from those you follow and not their recommendation history in its home feed; but you can visit users’ profiles to check their lists until friends post something new.

The founders say their goal right now is to take in user feedback then build what they hear people want. They aren’t looking to make money off Inky just yet.

“The goal is to partner with publishing houses to help launch new titles, similar to Goodreads’ business model,” says Bruno. “Once we’re confident we have something people absolutely love, we’ll turn our heads towards monetization,” he says.

However, their vision is not to reproduce Goodreads in a more modern format. That is, Inky is not meant to be a catalog of all the books you’ve ever read, but rather a place to for you to show off the books you think should be read. For that reason, the team won’t offer a Goodreads import mechanism. Instead, its focus will be on recommendations.

That may make sense to a point, but there are times you want to read a book and then are unpleasantly disappointed by it. Your negative reaction is just as valuable to your network of book readers as are your recommendations.

As an occasional Goodreads user myself, I can’t see making a full switch to Inky. I miss the “Currently Reading” shelf, the book lists, the discovery features, and of course, the much larger community. But Inky is one to watch as it grows.

Inky is currently available on iOS, but the team says an Android version is the works.