Author: azeeadmin

This likely won’t come as a surprise to anyone who saw the news late last month, but Mayfield Robotics, maker of the adorable home robot Kuri announced today that it’s ceasing operations. The company, which began life as a part of Bosch, will close its doors by the end of October this year.

In July, Mayfield announced that it was ending the manufacture of Kuri, the home assistant it debuted at CES back in 2015. The news came as Bosch determined that there wasn’t a place for Mayfield or Kuri in its larger portfolio. At the time, the company noted that its future was up in the air, but still sounded somewhat hopeful that it might eventually find a home.

“Creating a robot like Kuri is a massive undertaking,” Mayfield wrote at the time. “We don’t know what the coming months will bring. Regardless, we stand firm in our belief that the home robot Renaissance is just beginning, and it’s going to be amazing.”

in spite of that optimism, Kuri is the latest in a long line of attempts at a home robot that ultimately missed the mark, due in part to prohibitively steep price tag.

After meeting with “dozens of companies” and seeking other investments, however, Mayfield is calling it a day. “Our team is beyond disappointed, it wrote in a blog post today. “Together we’ve spent the past four years designing and building not just Kuri, but also an equally incredible company culture and spirit.”

In the coming months, Mayfield says it will work to help employees find jobs within the larger Bosch umbrella.

Facebook has been a bit slow to adopt the voice computing revolution. It has no voice assistant, its smart speaker is still in development, and some apps like Instagram aren’t full equipped for audio communication. But much of that is set to change judging by experiments discovered in Facebook’s code, plus new patent filings.

Developing voice functionality could give people more ways to use Facebook in their home or on the go. Its forthcoming Portal smart speaker is reportedly designed for easy video chatting with distant family, including seniors and kids that might have trouble with phones. Improved transcription and speech-to-text-to-speech features could connect Messenger users across input mediums and keep them on the chat app rather than straying back to SMS.

But Facebook’s voice could be drowned out by the din of the crowd if it doesn’t get moving soon. All the major mobile hardware and operating system makers now have their own voice assistants like Siri, Alexa, Google Assistant, and Samsung Bixby, as well as their own smart speakers. In Q2 2018, Canalys estimates that Google shipped 5.4 million Homes, and Amazon shipped 4.1 million Echoes. Apple’s HomePod is off to a slow start with less than 6 percent of the market, behind Alibaba’s smart speaker according to Strategy Analytics. Facebook’s spotty record around privacy might deflect potential customers to its competitors.

Given Facebook is late to the game, it will need to arrive with powerful utility that solves real problems. Here’s a look at Facebook’s newest developments in the voice space, and how its past experiments lay the groundwork for its next big push.

Aloha Voice

Facebook is developing its own speech recognition feature under the name Aloha for both the Facebook and Messenger apps, as well as external hardware — likely the video chat smart speaker it’s developing. Code inside the Facebook and Messenger Android apps dug up by frequent TechCrunch tipster and mobile researcher Jane Manchun Wong gives the first look at a prototype for the Aloha user interface.

Labeled “Aloha Voice Testing”, as a user speaks while in a message thread, a horizontal blue bar expands and contracts to visualize the volume of speech while recognizing and transcribing into text. The code describes the feature as having connections with external WiFi or Bluetooth devices. It’s possible that the software will run on both Facebook’s hardware and software, similar to Google Assistant that runs both on phones and Google Home speakers.

Facebook declined to comment on the video, with its spokesperson Ha Thai telling me “We test stuff all the time – nothing to share today but my team will be in touch in a few weeks about hardware news coming from the AR/VR org.” It unclear if that hardware news will focus on voice and Aloha or portal, or if it’s merely related to Facebook’s Oculus Connect 5 conference on September 25th.

A source previously told me that years ago, Facebook was interested in developing its own speech recognition software designed specifically to accurately transcribe how friends talk to each other. These speech patterns are often more casual, colloquial, rapid, and full of slang than the way we formally address computerized assistants like Amazon Alexa or Google Home.

Wong also found the Aloha logo buried in Facebook’s code, which features volcano imagery. I can confirm that I’ve seen a Facebook Aloha Setup chatbot with a similar logo on the phones of Facebook employees.

If Facebook can figure this out, it could offer its own transcription features in Messenger and elsewhere on the site so users could communicate across mediums. It could potentially let you dictate comments or messages to friends while you have your hands full or can’t look at your screen. The recipient could then read the text instead of having to listen to it like a voice message. The feature could also be used to power voice navigation of Facebook’s apps for better hands-free usage.

Speaker And Camera Patents

Facebook’s video chat smart speaker was reportedly codenamed Aloha originally but later renamed Portal, Alex Heath of Business Insider and now Cheddar first reported in August 2017. The $499 competitor to the Amazon Echo Show was initially set to launch at Facebook’s F8 in May, but Bloomberg reported it was pushed back amid concerns that it would exacerbate the privacy scandal ignited by Cambridge Analytica.

A new patent filing reveals Facebook was considering building a smart speaker as early as December 26th, 2016 when it filed a patent for a cube-shaped device. The patent diagrams an “ornamental design for a speaker device” invented by Baback Elmieh, Alexandre Jais, and John Proksch-Whaley. Facebook had acquired Elmieh’s startup Nascent Objects in September of that year and he’s now a technical project lead at Facebook’s secretive Building 8 hardware lab.

The startup had been building modular hardware, and earlier this year he was awarded patents for work at Facebook on several modular cameras. The speaker and camera technology Facebook has been developing could potentially evolve into what’s in its video chat speaker.

The fact that Facebook has been exploring speaker technology for so long and that the lead on these patents is still running a secret project in Building 8 strengthens the case that Facebook has big plans for the voice space.

Instagram Voice Messaging

And finally, Instagram is getting deeper into the voice game too. A screenshot generated from the code of Instagram’s Android app by Wong reveals the development of a  voice clip messaging feature heading to Instagram Direct. This would allow you to speak into Instagram and send the audio clips similar to a walkie-talkie, or the voice messaging feature Facebook Messenger added back in 2013.

You can see the voice button in the message composer at the bottom of the screen, and the code explains that to “Voice message, press and hold to record”. The prototype follows the recent launch of video chat in Instagram Direct, another feature TechCrunch broke the news on thanks to Wong’s research. An Instagram spokesperson declined to comment, as is typical when features are spotted in its code but aren’t publicly testing yet, saying “unfortunately nothing more to share on this right now.”

The Long Road To Voicebook

Facebook has long tinkered in the voice space. In 2015, it acquired a natural language processing startup Wit.ai that ran a developer platform for building speech interfaces, though it later rolled Wit.ai into Messenger’s platform team to focus on chatbots. Facebook also began testing automatically transcribing Messenger voice clips into text in 2015 in what was likely the groundwork for the Aloha feature seen above. The company also revealed its M personal assistant that could accomplish tasks for users, but it was only rolled out to a very limited user base and later turned off.

The next year, Facebook’s head of Messenger David Marcus claimed at TechCrunch Disrupt that voice “is not something we’re actively working on right now,” but added that “at some point it’s pretty obvious that as we develop more and more capabilities and interactions inside of Messenger, we’ll start working on voice exchanges and interfaces.” However, a source had told me Facebook’s secretive Language Technology Group was already exploring voice opportunities. Facebook also began testing its Live Audio feature for users who want to just broadcast sound and not video.

By 2017, Facebook was offering automatic captioning for Pages’ videos, and was developing a voice search feature. And this year, Facebook began trying voice clips as status updates and Stories for users around the world who might have trouble typing in their native tongue. But executives haven’t spoken much about the voice initiatives.

The most detailed comments we have come from Facebook’s head of design Luke Woods at TechCrunch Disrupt 2017 where he described voice search saying it was, “very promising. There are lots of exciting things happening…. I love to be able to talk to the car to navigate to a particular place. That’s one of many potential use cases.” It’s also one that voice transcription could aid.

It’s still unclear exactly what Facebook’s Aloha will become. It could be a defacto operating system or voice interface and transcription feature for Facebook’s smart speaker and apps. It could become a more full-fledged voice assistant like M but with audio. Or perhaps it could become Facebook’s bridge to other voice ecosystems, serving as Facebook’s Alexa Skill or Google Assistant Action.

When I asked Woods “How would Facebook on Alexa work?”, he said with a smile “That’s a very interesting question! No comment.”

Creators of the 1Sheeld, a tool designed to connect smartphones to Arduino boards, have created something even more interesting. Their latest product, the Elkrem, is a smart kit for creating blockchain IoT devices and they have raised $250,000 from Endure Capital and Consensys to build the project.

The founders are Amr Saleh and Islam Mustafa launched the 1Sheeld at TechCrunch Disrupt 2013 and sold tens of thousands of units in 120 countries. Now they’re building a new tool based entirely on blockchain.

“Elkrem is a Blockchain hardware development board. It allows Blockchain developers to integrate Dapps with hardware prototypes in an easy way without having deep knowledge in hardware development, and also allows electrical engineers and hardware developers to connect Blockchain to their hardware projects without having deep knowledge of how the Blockchain works,” said Saleh. “So they both can trigger actuators through smart contracts and log sensors data to smart contracts as well.”

The board is similar to an Arduino and has two processors, storage, and WiFi model. One processor runs a specialized Linux variant with interfaces to Ethereum, IPFS, Swarm, Whisper, Bitcoin, Status.im, and others. The other processor can do anything else you throw at it.

“Our edge is faster development, faster prototyping and faster go to market,” said Saleh. “The board allows you to send private, decentralized IoT messages using peer-to-peer communication”

What does all this mean? Basically it’s a little board that makes it far easier to manage your Blockchain efforts. It uses a library called Koyn to let you accept payments in Bitcoin with a single line of code and they even built a few cool projects including a Bitcoin-enabled candy machine and an electrical outlet that you can rent with Bitcoins. The team plans to go live on Kickstarter later this year.

Capital, crypto, and regulation go together like bread, peanut butter, and jelly. And what better way to make a great sandwich than to bring them all together at TechCrunch Disrupt. I’ll be leading a panel with Avichal Garg of Electric Capital, Arianna Simpson of Autonomous Partners, and Valerie Szczepanik of the SEC in San Francisco.

Garg is a longtime investor and former product head at Facebook. He’s currently at Electric Capital where he’s a managing partner. Simpson is a skilled crypto investor and is currently managing director at Autonomous Partners. Szczepanik has had a long career at the SEC and was recently named Associate Director of the Division of Corporation Finance and Senior Advisor for Digital Assets and Innovation. All three of them will help us navigate the new world of investment we are no all coming to face.

The future of investment is currently up in the air. With the rise of token sales, fundraising seems like a needless task for most founders. But where will they be with the token world fizzles out? Can the new funding tricks stack up to VC and angel investment?

We’ll explore these concepts in our wide-ranging discussion and hopefully Szczepanik can shed some light on these new forms of investment.

The full agenda is here. Passes for the show are available here.

The Mosaic Manufacturing Palette 2 – an upgrade the original Palette – is a self-contained system for full color 3D printing. It works by cutting and splicing multiple filament colors and then feeding them through as the object is printed. The system uses a unique and internal cutter called the Splice Core that measures and cuts filament as it prints, ensuring the incoming filament can change colors quickly and easily.

The printer can out items in four colors and it can print any amount of any color. It extrudes excess color into a little object called a tower, allow it to print as much or as little of a color as necessary. It also has automatic runout detection which lets you print larger objects over a longer period.

It works with a number of current 3D printers and the printers require no real updates to use the Palette or its more robust brother, the Pro. A new piece of software called Canvas allows users to plan their color prints and send the instructions to both the Palette and the printer for printing.

The Palette 2 costs $449 while the Pro costs $699. The Pro lets you print faster than the Palette 2.

It’s a very clever hack – instead of making the printer do all the work you instead make the filament do the work. Because it is a self-contained system you can use the Palette with nearly any printer although the team is working on native support for many popular printers. They are able to print lots of interesting stuff including 3D printed phone case models, rubbery watch bands using stretchable materials, and even educational objects. Most impressive? They were able to print a scan of a brain with evidence of a tumor visible in yellow. While it’s not completely full color – yet – the Palette is a great solution for those looking to print color on a budget.

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Facebook announced this morning it’s making a change to how its ad targeting system works in order to tackle the misuse of its platform to discriminate and exclude audiences based on factors like ethnicity and religion. The company says it’s now removing over 5,000 ad targeting options that could have been misused to place discriminatory ads across its platform.

The news comes shortly after the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) filed a new complaint against Facebook that accuses it of helping landlords and home sellers violate the Fair Housing Act. It says that Facebook’s ad settings disregard the law by allowing advertisers to target certain demographics.

“When Facebook uses the vast amount of personal data it collects to help advertisers to discriminate, it’s the same as slamming the door in someone’s face,” Assistant Secretary for Fair Housing and Equal Opportunity, Anna María Farías had said in a statement issued by the department.

Facebook responded by saying this practice was prohibited in its advertising policies and that it would continue to work with HUD to address its complaints.

Today, the company says that it will remove over 5,000 targeting options which have the potential for misuse.

“While these options have been used in legitimate ways to reach people interested in a certain product or service, we think minimizing the risk of abuse is more important,” the company explained in a blog post. Facebook didn’t provide a list of the options being removed, but noted they related to attributes such as religion and ethnicity.

It also said that it would roll out a new certification to U.S. advertisers through its Ads Manager tool, that will require the advertisers to properly register their compliance with Facebook’s non-discrimination policy if they post housing, employment or credit ads. The advertisers will need to complete the certification, which involves being educated on the policy and agreeing to it through a form.

Facebook says this certification will reach other countries in time, and will become available through its other tools and APIs.

Earlier this year, Facebook had said it would update its product to catch discriminatory ads before they ran by hiring more ad reviewers and by using machine learning techniques. It also introduced new prompts to remind advertisers about its anti-discrimination policies before they created campaigns.

However, the issues haven’t just been about advertisers picking certain options to target individuals with their ads – they’ve been using ad targeting options to exclude others, as well. Facebook in April said it was removing thousands of categories from exclusion targeting as a result, including those related to race, ethnicity, sexual orientation and religion.

However, the company has been criticized for the way its ad targeting tools could be abused for several years.

Back in 2016, for example, Facebook had to disable an “ethnic affinity” targeting option for housing, employment, and credit-related ads, after a ProPublica report pointed out that these tools could be used for discriminatory advertising in housing and employment, which is illegal. It later rolled out more informational messages, updated its ad policies, and began testing tools to identify illegal ads.

The company more recently came under fire for allowing advertisers to target users based on interests related to their political beliefs, sexuality and religion – categories that are now deemed as “sensitive information” under current European data protection laws. The company responded at the time with an explanation of how users can manage their ad preferences.

Facebook today says that it will have more ad targeting updates to share in the months ahead, as it further refines these tools.

 

Uber recorded gross bookings, which is the total taken for all of Uber’s transportation services, of $12 billion, a 6 percent quarter-over-quarter increase and a 41 percent year-over-year increase. However, Uber also saw its losses grow to $404 million in the second quarter compared to a $304 million shortfall in the first quarter.

TraceLink, a nine-year-old, software-as-a-service platform for tracking pharmaceuticals and trying to weed out counterfeit prescription drugs in the process, has raised $93 million in Series D funding. Most of the money — $60 million — was used to buy primary shares, with another $33 million used to buy up the shares of previous shareholders.

Georgian Partners led the round round, with participation from Vulcan Capital and Willett Advisors, along with all of the company’s earlier investors. These include Goldman Sachs, whose growth equity arm had led the company’s $51.5 million Series C round last year, as well as FirstMark Capital, Volition Capital and F-Prime Capital.

As TC had reported at the time of that last round, TraceLink helps pharma companies comply with country-specific track-and-trace requirements through their supply chain, which has grown increasingly important following the passage of the Drug Supply Chain Security Act in 2013. The consumer-protection measure aims to prevent individuals’ exposure to drugs that could be counterfeit, stolen, contaminated or otherwise harmful.

At the time of its enactment, it also gave the industry one decade before unit-level traceability becomes enforced, meaning the clock is ticking.

Like Uber, WeWork, and small-but-growing number of private companies, TraceLink also appears to be preparing for life as a publicly traded outfit by releasing some of its financial metrics, including, in TraceLink’s case, quarterly revenue and customer growth numbers.

Just last week, the company published its “financial growth highlights,” which include a 62 percent year-over-year increase in its second quarter revenue; a 42 percent year-over-year increase in all bookings over the same period; and two-year revenue compound annual growth rate of 71 percent.

In June, we reported on TraceLink’s initial $60 million of funding after spying an SEC form relating to its fundraising. The company, based in North Reading, Ma., has now raised $167 million altogether.

According to a report from Bloomberg, Apple has been working on multiple new Macs. In particular, Apple could be planning to release a new entry-level laptop to replace the aging MacBook Air.

This isn’t the first rumor about a MacBook Air refresh. While Apple has released a 12-inch retina MacBook, it’s not nearly as cheap as the MacBook Air. It’s also not as versatile as it only has a single USB Type-C port.

And yet, the MacBook Air is arguably Apple’s most popular laptop design in recent years. Many MacBook Air users are still using their trusty device as there isn’t a clear replacement in the lineup right now. According to Bloomberg, the updated MacBook Air could get a retina display. Other details are still unclear.

After Apple updated the MacBook Air in March 2015, the company neglected the laptop for a while. It received an update in June 2017, but it was such a minor update that it looked like the MacBook Air was on life support.

It sounds like neither the entry-level 13-inch MacBook Pro (the one without a Touch Bar) nor the 12-inch MacBook have fostered as much customer interest as the MacBook Air.

Bloomberg also says that the Mac Mini is going to receive an update. The story of the Mac Mini is quite similar as the product has been neglected for years. Apple last updated the Mac Mini in October 2014 — it’s been nearly four years.

And the fact that Apple still sells the Mac Mini from 2014 is embarrassing. You can find tiny desktop PCs that are cheaper, smaller and more powerful. They don’t run macOS, but that’s the only downside.

It’s clear that laptops have taken over the computer market. Desktop computers have become a niche market. That’s why the updated Mac Mini could focus on people looking for a home server and who don’t want to mess around with a Raspberry Pi.

A new way to attack Facebook is to fraudulently report a news story as false in hopes of reducing its visibility, either because someone wants to censor it or just doesn’t agree with it. Sometimes known as “brigading,” a concerted effort by trolls to flag a piece of content can reduce its visibility. Facebook now sends stories reported as false to third-party fact checkers, and these purposefully inaccurate reports can clog the already-overcrowded queues that fact checkers struggle to worth through.

That’s why Facebook gives users a trustworthiness score ranging from 0 to 1 depend on the reliability of their flags of false news, The Washington Post reports. If they flag something as false news but fact checkers verify it as true, that could hurt their score and reduce how heavily Facebook factors in their future flagging. If users consistently report false news that’s indeed proven to be false, their score improves and Facebook will trust their future flagging more.

Facebook’s News Feed product manager Tessa Lyons confirmed the scoring system exists. There’s currently no way to see your own or someone else’s trustworthiness score. And other signals are used to compute the score as well, though Facebook won’t reveal them for fear of trolls gaming the system.

Friend-ranking scores

This isn’t the only way Facebook ranks users, though. It assigns you a shifting score of affinity toward each of your friends that determines how frequently you see them in the News Feed. This “friend-ranking” score is essentially a measure of graph distance from you to someone else.

If you like a ton of someone’s posts, get tagged in photos with them, search for them, view their profile, communicate with them, have lots of mutual friends, are in the same Groups and have similar biographical characteristics like location and age, your score toward them is lower and you’ll see more of them in your feed. However, they have a different score for you depending on their behavior, so constantly viewing someone else’s profile won’t make you show up in their feed more if they don’t reciprocate the interest.

I first reported on these friend scores almost exactly seven years ago, and you can still view them for yourself using this browser bookmarklet built by Jeremy Keeshin. Visit this site, drag the “Facebook Friends Rankings” link into your desktop browser’s bookmark bar, open Facebook while logged in, and tap the bookmarklet to reveal the Friend Ranking scores of your friends. It snoops the Facebook JavaScript to pull out the scores. The people you see at the top are who you’re closest to.

The need for this score highlights the difficulties of Facebook’s battle against fake news. Between subjectivity and purposeful trolling, there’s a lot of noise coming in with the signal about what should be removed. Anyone saying Facebook should have easily solved the fake news problems is likely underappreciating the nuance required and the intelligent human adversaries Facebook must defeat.

Facebook has a huge array of signals it can use to calculate Friend Rankings or trustworthiness scores. The question will be whether it can intelligently sort those signals to make coherent inferences about what to show us and when to believe us.