Author: azeeadmin

One gets the distinct impression that nothing is ever permanent with MoviePass — including, of course, MoviePass itself. The troubled film subscription service has been through a number of different rule changes in recent months, as it’s worked to stem the financial bleeding.

In an email, CEO Mitch Lowe outlined the latest updates to the once-unlimited subscription plan. Most notable among the changes is the limiting of selection to “up to six films to choose from daily, including a selection of major studio first-run films and independent releases.”

On top of that, there may be further limitations on showtime availability for the selected titles, based on “the popularity of those films on the app that particular day.” The company has already begun limiting access to specific films, starting with a barring of major blockbusters and moving toward limiting selection generally.

If nothing else, at this plan spells out something more concrete that what’s appeared from the outside to be somewhat arbitrary choice in recent weeks. Now users can go to the “This Week’s Movies” page to see what’s available. Right now, there’s a semi-consistent, rotating selection. For example, you can get into BlacKkKlansman and The Meg today, but not tomorrow (weekend box office, you know). 

Which movies are chosen and when will likely be at least partially dependent on deals struck between MoviePass and studios/distributors. And, of course, “up to six films” leaves the door open for a lot of wiggle room on selection here. It will also likely severely limit the ability to go see films in repertory movie houses, not to mention those in areas outside of big cities, where selection is far more limited.

This latest change comes as the company marks the one-year anniversary of the $9.95 plan that helped get the company into this financial and customer service mess. Based on the current ratio of responses to a tweet celebrating the milestone, it seems safe to say the company’s got a lot of work to do if it hopes to win back one-time loyal users.

Denmark’s GN Hearing broke new ground in hearing aid technology five years ago when it inked a deal with Apple to develop a hearing aid that would integrate seamlessly with an iPhone, with no need for an intermediary device. And today it announced a significant, new milestone expansion in that technology: it has partnered with Google to bring the same functionality to Android handsets.

Google has published a specification for audio streaming for hearing aids using Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) and connection-oriented channels which, in the words of Google, relies on “an elastic buffer of several audio packets to maintain a steady flow of audio, even in the presence of packet loss. This buffer provides audio quality for hearing aid devices at the expense of latency.” GN Hearing will be the first to develop these hearing aids using Google’s specifications, which it helped to write.

“Google is working with GN Hearing to create a new open specification for hearing aid streaming support on future versions of Android devices,” said Seang Chau, Vice President of Engineering at Google, in a statement.

This will mark the first time that Android smartphones will stream audio directly to hearing aids, and, since Android devices account for a majority of smartphones in use today, it is a big step up in helping people who use hearing aids be more integrated with the “smartphone revolution” and the wave of services and applications that come with using mobile devices.

Up to now, because of how hearing aids are designed to amplify sounds, those who used one, and also wanted to use an Android device, would either have to use a supplementary piece of hardware to use the two together, or remove the hearing aid altogether and have a poor quality conversation.

In addition to using the specification to stream audio from calls and phone apps directly to the hearing aid, users will also be able to monitor their hearing aids and modify their volumes using an app on their phones.

Anders Hedegaard, the CEO of GN Hearing, tells TechCrunch that he “cautiously” estimates that the first hearing aids with live Android integrations will hit the market in 2019. And while his company does not have exclusivity on this — and the specification, like others on Android, is open source for anyone else to use — GN Hearing is likely to be the first because it has been working on the specification.

Hearing loss has been on the rise, in part because people are living longer, and in part because of environmental factors (like headphones that people use with loud volumes). The World Health Organization estimates that there are some 466 million people with disabling hearing loss, up from about 360 million in 2013, and that will grow to 900 million by 2050.

But despite the growth of the issue, both the hearing aid industry and its users have been relatively slow to embrace wireless technology, although things have been changing. Hedegaard said that when his company first announced its partnership with Apple in 2013, the idea of a connected hearing aid was relatively new, and it took until 2016 for any one of its competitors to add the iPhone integration that GN Hearing pioneered. “Today, data connectivity is a core part of hearing aids,” he said, “and 90% of our devices have it.”

Similarly, the amount of hearing aid users actually employing the connected functionality is also going up.

“We have seen the percentage of people using connectivity going up dramatically,” he said. In 2013/14, he estimated that only about 10 percent of people who had connected hearing aids actually used the service with apps and other devices. Now “the majority” download apps and take advantage, he said. It helps that with each year, the gap between the ageing population and those who have spent years using computers and mobile phones and apps is shrinking. “Time is going our way,” he said.

You’ve got one week left to plant your early-stage startup squarely in the path of 10,000 people, including influential investors, technologists, potential customers and the media. If you want to showcase your company at Disrupt San Francisco 2018, which takes place September 5-7, there’s no better place to do it than the Startup Alley exhibit floor. And the only way to do that is to buy a Disrupt SF Startup Alley Exhibitor Package before the application deadline expires August 24.

Startup Alley is the entrepreneurial heart of Disrupt SF 2018, where you’ll find more than 1,200 pre-series A startups and sponsors of every technical stripe. And they’ll be displaying the very best and latest products, platforms and services.

A prime networking environment, Startup Alley is home to collaboration, inspiration and opportunity. Luke Heron, CEO at Testcard.com, had this to say about his Startup Alley experience:

“TechCrunch uses a curation process regarding the companies it accepts,” he said. “So being in Startup Alley — among all these other fantastic startups — has a hugely positive impact when you’re fundraising.”

What does a Startup Alley Exhibitor Package include? Take a look.

• Two Founder passes for all three days of Disrupt SF 2018
• A one-day, 3’x6′ exhibit space
• Use of CrunchMatch — our curated investor-to-startup matching platform
• Access to The Main Stage, The Next Stage, The Q&A Stage, The Showcase Stage
• All workshops
• Access to the attendee list; ability to message attendees with the Disrupt App
• Attend the TC After Party

And because it’s just not a TechCrunch Disrupt without contests and giveaways, here’s a little added incentive just for you.

Two companies from Startup Alley will be tapped to participate in the Startup Battlefield competition as the Wild Card companies. Yes, you may still be selected to pitch to top investors in front of hundreds of thousands of people at the event and online. But you have to get your Exhibitor Package today if you want the chance.

That’s more exposure gold, folks. Come and mine it.

Disrupt San Francisco 2018  takes place September 5-7, and you have until August 24 to secure your spot in Startup Alley. Don’t wait, buy your Startup Alley Exhibitor Package now. We think Luke Heron said it best. “If you’re a startup founder or an entrepreneur, attending Disrupt is a no-brainer.”

WordPress has taken down a handful alt-right blogs, according to several complaints from affected blog owners and readers who claim the sites were removed from WordPress.com, despite not being in violation of the company’s Terms of Service. Some site owners also said they were not notified of the shutdown in advance and have lost their work. The removals, we’ve learned, are in part due to a new policy WordPress has rolled out that now prohibits blogs from the “malicious publication of unauthorized, identifying images of minors.”

Yes, that’s right: the company has created a new rule to specifically handle the Sandy Hook conspiracists, and boot them from WordPress.com.

While some of the affected sites had already been flagged for other violations, many were hosting Sandy Hook conspiracy theories and other “false flag” content.

In a YouTube video, the host of one site lamented, “They have wiped out 11 years of my fucking life.” He then read through WordPress’s Terms of Service, confused as to how he was in violation.

According to Google’s cache, his site hosted 9/11 “truther” content and claimed that Sandy Hook was a staged event. These are generally repugnant points of view to a large swath of people, but he’s correct in saying they weren’t views that WordPress had prohibited.

The update to WordPress’s policy follows a damning report from The NYT this week that explained on how the world’s largest blogging service has allowed Sandy Hook conspiracy theorists to remain online.

The issue, in part, has to do with how WordPress’s policies were originally written, the article explained.

WordPress policies were designed to be more resistant to the strategic use of copyright claims as a means of getting content removed. Longtime web veterans know they were written this way because they were created at a time when large corporations would wield copyright law – like the DMCA – as a weapon used to force platforms to take down content about their company that they deemed unfavorable.

But in recent years, the permissiveness these policies has also created loopholes for those whose spread disinformation, incite hatred and violence, and post abusive and offensive content to the web.

With little other recourse available to them, some Sandy Hook parents have used copyright law get images of their children removed from the web.

As The NYT explained, a Sandy Hook victim’s father, Leonard Pozner, filed copyright claims with a number of platforms, including WordPress, on images of his son Noah, a 6-year old victim of the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting. Facebook, Amazon and Google complied with those requests. But WordPress responded with form letters that explained why the content could stay online.

The responses, which Mr. Ponzer described to the paper as “automated, very generic,” and “very cold,” said that the conspiracy blog posts represented “fair use” of the material. It defined fair use as anything that included “criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching, scholarship, and research.”

Unbelievably, the letters also warned Mr. Ponzer that it could collect damages from him for knowingly materially misrepresenting copyrights.

Yes, WordPress told the father of a murdered 6-year old that it could seek damages from him if he didn’t stop asking it to remove the stomach-churningly offensive content from those who believe the Sandy Hook shooting never happened, and that parents mourning the loss of their children were actors.

The company told The NYT that language was a part of a predefined statement it used, and was sorry that it did so in this particular situation.

However, it also admitted that the posts in question weren’t in violation of any current WordPress user guidelines or copyright law.

We understand the company has since phoned Mr. Ponzer to apologize directly. It then created a new policy to address the problem.

Its new policy reads:

The policy affects blogs hosted on WordPress.com, not self-hosted blogs using WordPress software.

Combined, WordPress powers 31.6 percent of websites on the web, and has 60% of the CMS market, so this change has a sizable impact on the web as a whole.

The company declined to comment on the new policy.

If the booted bloggers now move to their own self-hosted sites, the responsibility of shutting them down will fall on the web hosting companies. Of course, don’t expect that to happen anytime soon. 

Some of the affected bloggers will probably claim their rights to free speech are being violated. They’re wrong. The First Amendment protects people in the U.S. from the government censoring or punishing you for what you say. It doesn’t protect your Twitter account, Facebook profile, or now, your WordPress.com blog.

No, it’s not just you.

Slack is experiencing issues, as noted on the company’s status page. The issues appear to largely be focused on its Workspace/Org Administration service. We here at TechCrunch HQ East are no longer able to send one another direct messages, and honestly the idea of swiveling our chairs around to speak to one another is giving us some intense anxiety.

Thank goodness for Twitter DMs, right?

According to the latest update, “Our team is looking into the issues preventing private channel membership from displaying in Enterprise Grid workspaces.”

We’ll update as we hear more. Until then, enjoy the long weekend, I guess.

Update: Slack notes “We’re still working to ensure this is fully resolved, however folks may be seeing improvements at this time. Thanks for bearing with us.” We’ve seen some on our end, so I guess maybe don’t leave the office just yet.

The Boring Company announced a proposal yesterday to construct a 3.6 mile hyperloop to carry fans from the city directly to Dodger Stadium in less than four minutes for about $1.

This proposed loop, called the “Dugout Loop,” would run from Dodger Stadium to privately owned Boring Co. property in either the Los Feliz, East Hollywood or Rampart Village neighborhoods. To increase public transit use and in turn decrease traffic congestion, the company plans to build in the vicinity of the LA Metro Red Line and is currently choosing between three Red Line stations in the area. When the final path is determined, the tunnel would be built 30 to 44 feet below the surface of the ground, and even deeper when traveling under standing infrastructure like bridges.

Proposed Map of Dugout Loop

In theory, this emission-free tunnel system would help encourage Angelenos to use public transit and begin to shed the city’s car-clogged image and resulting smog.

The loop would consist of a single underground tunnel that runs under Vin Scully Avenue and Sunset Boulevard, two loop lifts (essentially elevators for the electric skates to bring them in and out of use) and ventilation/exit shafts. Each electric skate will be able to carry between 8-16 passengers.

To start, the Boring Co. plans to serve only about 2.5 percent (1,400 people) of the stadium’s capacity per event, with the potential to ramp it up to 5 percent based on feedback from the city and users. For a plan proposing to reduce traffic congestion in the city, these underwhelming numbers are unlikely to make a significant impact.

If the City of Los Angeles accepts the proposal, the Boring Co. says it would complete construction on the loop in 14 months. This would mark the second acceptance for the company following the proposal accepted by the City of Chicago earlier this summer to build a tunnel between O’Hare International Airport and downtown Chicago. And if ground on the Dugout Loop was broken before the Chicago loop, it could mark the second tunnel built by the Boring Co.

However, the Dugout Loop is not the only proposal the city has received. In addition to Boring Co.’s tunnel, LA is considering a gondola proposal from Aerial Rapid Transit Technologies that would carry 5,000 passengers an hour far above the city traffic and deposit them at the stadium.

Analytics company Crimson Hexagon says Facebook has reinstated its data access to Facebook and Instagram.

That access was suspended last month, with Facebook saying it was investigating whether the company had violated any of its data use policies. (The social network, of course, has been dealing with the fallout from a separate controversy over user data.)

In this case, the issue appears to be related to some of Crimson Hexagon’s contracts with the U.S. government, with Facebook saying it wasn’t aware of those contracts when contacted by The Wall Street Journal.

What followed, according to a blog post by Crimson Hexagon Dan Shore, was “several weeks of constructive discussion and information exchange.” It seems that Facebook was satisfied with what it learned and ended Crimson Hexagon’s suspension.

Shore said that government customers make up less than 5 percent of the company’s business, adding, “To our knowledge, no government customer has used the Crimson Hexagon platform for surveillance of any individual or group.”

“Over time we have enhanced our vetting procedures for government customers,” he said. “Nevertheless, we recognize it is important to go beyond vetting by monitoring these government customers on an ongoing basis to ensure the public’s expectations of privacy are met. As governments and government-sponsored organizations change how they use data, we too must change.”

Firebase is now Google’s default platform for app developers and over the course of the last four years since it was acquired, the service has greatly expanded its feature set and integrations with our Google services. Today, it’s rolling out yet another batch of updates that bring new features, deeper integrations and a few design updates to the service.

The highlight of this release is the launch of in-app messaging, which will allow developers to send targeted and contextual messages to users as they use the app. Developers can customize the look and feel of these in-app notifications, which are rolling out today, but what’s maybe even more important is that this feature is integrated with Firebase Predictions and Google Analytics for Firebase so that developers can just react to current behavior but also Firebase’s predictions of how likely a user is to spend some additional money or stop using the app.

Developers who use Atlassian’s JIRA will also be happy to hear that Firebase is launching an integration with this tool. Firebase users can now create JIRA issues based on crash reports in Firebase. This integration will roll out in the next few weeks.

Another new integration is a deeper connection to Crashlytics, which Google acquired from Twitter in early 2017 (together with Fabric). Firebase will now let you export this data to BigQuery to analyze it — and then visualize it in Google’s Data Studio. And once it’s in BigQuery, it’s your data, so you’re not dependent on Firebase’s retention and deletion defaults.

Talking about reports, Firebase Cloud Messaging is getting a new reporting dashboard and the Firebase Console’s Project Overview page has received a full design overhaul that’ll allow you to see the health and status of your apps on a single page. The Latest Release section now also features live data. These features will start rolling out today and should become available to everybody in the next few weeks.

Firebase Hosting, the service’s web content hosting service, is also getting a small update and now allows you to host multiple websites within one project. And when you push an update, Firebase Hosting now only uploads the files that have changed between releases, which should speed up that process quite a bit.

If you want to have a brutal workout from the comfort of your own home — and have about $3,000 to spend — look no further. Tonal, a strength-training system powered by electromagnetism resistance technology and machine learning, is launching today to let you get ripped and in shape without having to go to the gym.

There are two key features that make Tonal different from the weight lifting machines you’ll find in the gym. For one, there aren’t actual weights. Instead, Tonal uses electromagnetism to simulate and control weight.

So when you’re doing a bicep curl, for example, “the thing pulling back on you isn’t gravity — it’s an electromagnetic field controlled by a computer algorithm,” Tonal CEO and founder Aly Orady told me at the company’s San Francisco headquarters last week. “It’s digitally-controlled weight.”

The other key feature is the built-in personal trainer. For $49 a month, Tonal members get access to personal training sessions, recommended programs and workouts.

“It’s like having an entire gym and a personal trainer in your home,” Orady said. “That’s a pretty big claim but I’m going to show it to you and you’re going to love it.”

He was right. I loved it in a pure hate kind of way. I had a chance to try it out and I feel confident saying I had the worst day of my year — but, you know, in a good, yet sadistic way. It’s just that I’m horribly out of shape and this machine isn’t messing around.

Tonal works by first determining your baseline strength with a 10-minute test. The test entails completing four movements (seated lat pulldown, seated overhead press, bench press and neutral grip dead lift) as fast and as powerful as you can. From there, Tonal gives you a baseline score for your core, upper body and lower body.

As you can see from my results below, I’m very strong.

But seriously — my trainer told me I was very strong. From there, I completed my first workout. And that’s when I realized that while I may be strong, my endurance is non-existent.

As I made my way through my first workout, Tonal could automatically tell that I was on the struggle bus headed farther into struggle town. That’s because Tonal was constantly monitoring the quality of my reps and based on that, dynamically adjusted the weight.

Tonal, which mounts to your wall like a TV, is pretty pricey ($2,995), but it joins the likes of startups like Peloton and Mirror. Peloton is an internet-connected cycling bike that retails for $1,995 plus $39 a month for content while Mirror is similarly an at-home device that lets you see video of a fitness instructor and classmates for exercises like barre, yoga and pilates. Mirror has raised $13 million from Spark Capital, Lerer Hippeau Ventures, First Round Capital and others. The company, however, has yet to launch its product and pricing.

Tonal is not disclosing its amount of funding, but has raised money from Mayfield, Shasta, Bolt Capital, Next Play Capital, Upside Partnership and others.

Credit Karma, the service best known for providing free credit score monitoring and other financial advice (mostly to millennials), is getting into the mortgage business. The company today announced that it has acquired Approved, a mortgage platform that brings modern technology to a process that even today often still involves faxing documents back and forth. The companies did not disclose the financial details of the transaction.

At first glance, this may seem like a bit of an odd acquisition, given that Approved is mostly a service for banks and mortgage brokers. But it also makes perfect sense for Credit Karma to get into the mortgage business.

Indeed, Credit Karama Chief Product Officer Nikhyl Singhal told me that he sees this as the natural next step in the company’s evolution.

“As we’ve expanded, you’ve seen us move from credit cards as a way to help members with that part of their life to first personal loans to auto — meaning auto loans, auto insurance,” he said. “Today, we’re really talking more publicly about mortgage. Mortgage being for many of our members the most important financial decision they’ll make.”

It’s also no secret that Credit Karma’s largest user base is millennials. As they get older and start getting to the point where they consider buying a home (assuming they are in the financial position to do so), the company obviously wants to keep those users engaged on their platform and offer them more services.

Singhal also stressed that 80 percent of Credit Karma members are active on the service before they get a new mortgage — and Credit Karma obviously knows all of this because it is able to collect a lot of very detailed financial data about its users.

As Singhal noted, Credit Karma has been working on getting deeper into the mortgage business for about 18 months. “The acquisition is just the continuing effort of saying, ‘look, we’re serious about taking our scale and being that trusted destination for our members as it relates to helping them with their mortgage.'”

Credit Karma already offers some mortgage brokerage services and today’s acquisition is meant to help speed up this process with the help of Approved’s technology. “What approved has spent a lot of time doing is working with lenders to help them automate and make them more efficient,” Singhal explained. A more efficient process, Singhal expects, means the lenders can reduce rates and save Credit Karma members money.

Approved CEO Andy Taylor and CTO Navtaj Sadhal are both Redfin alums, so they know this business well. Taylor told me that he believes that Credit Karama will allow him to scale his service up beyond what a stand-alone company could’ve done. Taylor tells me that he sees Approved’s mission as helping consumers navigate the often tedious and painful world of getting a mortgage. “Moving to Credit Karma is going to immediately give us the sort of resources and immediate scale to continue to drive that mission-driven work,” he said. “We can reach significantly more people than we could otherwise. We can spend less time focusing in on the minutia of building the lender system and more time focussing on bringing transparency to the transaction and having a better loan application process.”