Author: azeeadmin

Weather remains one of the most-used apps on mobile devices, and yet so often it’s also one of the least dynamic when it comes to updates and new features (ironic especially if you live in a country like the UK, like I do, where the weather is a near-national obsession and does really change within the course of an hour. Captive audience!). So today during WWDC it was great to see Apple finally giving its own native weather app some love with a significant update.

Possibly its biggest since long ago dropping Yahoo for Weather Channel as its key data provider?

The company has completely refreshed the interface with an animated layout that reflects what state the weather happens to be in at the moment and place you are searching, similar to what Apple displayed in its last update but significant more dynamic, with more wind, rain, sun and smog (sorry). There are now thousands of variations that Apple says more accurately represent sun position, clouds and rain.

In addition to this, Apple now shows off a pretty extensive dashboard of more datapoints — taking the information way beyond basics of temperature and precipitation. Graphics now include wind, UV index and barometric pressure. Alongside this you now get full-screen weather maps, high resolution images that animate the progress of rain and clouds, air quality, and temperature — sort of like your own personal weather assistant.

Some of this has been a long time coming but also unsurprising, and not just because of how perennially popular weather apps are.

Back in March 2020, it emerged that Apple made a key acquisition of a weather app startup, Dark Sky, easily one of the best weather apps on iOS and Android before Apple shut it down.

Again, given how surprisingly neglected weather apps tend to be, especially considering how passively popular they are, it was possibly always a low bar that was going to be bettered by someone. But Dark Sky, which began as a Kickstarter of all things, really did the effort justice.

It’s not clear why it too so long for Apple to make it rain on its weather app after that acquisition, but it’s good that it finally has.

Of course Apple’s still not magical enough to bring you guaranteed sunshine for that camping weekend you have coming up, but the update will mean that the data nerds among us might have a lot more fun figuring out what will happen next, and hopefully get a more accurate picture of the details that will help you decide whether you absolutely have to make room for wellies in the car or not.

Briq, which has developed a fintech platform used by the construction industry,  has raised $30 million dollars in a Series B funding round led by Tiger Global Management.

The financing is among the largest Series B fundraises by a construction software startup, according to the company, and brings Briq’s total raised to $43 million since its January 2018 inception. Existing backers Eniac Ventures and Blackhorn Ventures also participated in the round.

Briq CEO and co-founder Bassem Hamdy is a former executive at construction tech giant Procore (which recently went public and has a market cap of $10.4 billion) Canadian software giant CMIC. Wall Street veteran Ron Goldshmidt is co-founder and COO.

Briq describes its offering as a financial planning and workflow automation platform that “drastically reduces” the time to run critical financial processes, while increasing the accuracy of forecasts and financial plans.

Briq has developed a toolbox of proprietary technology that it says allows it to extract and manipulate financial data without the use of APIs. It also has developed construction-specific data models that allows it to build out projections and create models of how much a project might cost, and how much could conceivably be made. Currently, Briq manages or forecasts about $30 billion in construction volume.

Specifically, Briq has two main offerings: Briq’s Corporate Performance Management (CPM) platform, which models financial outcomes at the project and corporate level and BriqCash, a construction-specific banking platform for managing invoices and payments. 

Put simply, Briq aims to allow contractors “to go from plan to pay” in one platform with the goal of solving the age-old problem of construction projects (very often) going over budget. Its longer-term, ambitious mission is to “manage 80% of the money workflows in construction within 10 years.”

The company’s strategy, so far, seems to be working.

From January 2020 to today, ARR has climbed by 200%, according to Hamdy. Briq currently has about 100 employees, compared to 35 a year ago.

Briq has 150 customers, and serves general and specialty contractors from $10 million to $1 billion in revenue.  They include Cafco Construction Management, WestCor Companies and Choate Construction and Harper Construction. The company is currently focused on contractors in North America but does have long-term plans to address larger international markets, Hamdy told TechCrunch.  

Some context

Hamdy came up with the idea for Santa Barbara, California-based Briq after realizing the vast amount of inefficiencies on the financial side of the construction industry. His goal was to do for construction financials what Procore did to document management, and PlanGrid to construction drawing. He started Briq with his own cash, amassed through secondary sales as Procore climbed the ranks of startups to become a construction industry unicorn.

“I wanted to figure out how to bring the best of fintech into a construction industry that really guesses every month what the financial outcomes are for projects,” Hamdy told me at the time of the company’s last raise – a $10 million Series A led by Blackhorn Ventures announced in May of 2020. “Getting a handle on financial outcomes is really hard. The vast majority of the time, the forecasted cost to completion is plain wrong. By a lot.”

In fact, according to McKinsey, an astounding 80 percent of projects run over budget, resulting in significant waste and profit loss.

So at the end of a project, contractors often find themselves having doled out more money and resources than originally planned. This can lead to negative cash flow and profit loss. Briq’s platform aims to help contractors identify outliers, and which projects are more at risk.

Throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, Briq has proven to be “extremely valuable” to contractors, Hamdy said.

“In an industry where margins are so thin, we have given contractors the ability to truly understand where they stand on cash, profit and labor,” he added.

Among many updates coming to iOS 15, Apple Maps will receive a number of upgrades that will bring more detailed maps, improvements for transit riders, AR experiences and other changes to the platform. The improvements build on the new map Apple begin rolling out two years ago, which had focused on offering richer details, and — in response to user feedback and complaints — more accurate navigation.

Since then, Apple Maps has steadily improved.

The new map experience has since launched in the U.S., U.K., Ireland and Canada and will now make its way to Spain and Portugal, starting today. I will then arrive in Italy and Australia later this year, Apple announced during its keynote address during its Worldwide Developer Conference on Monday.

In addition, Apple said iOS 15 Maps will include new details for commercial districts, marinas, buildings, and more. Plus, Apple has added things like elevation, new road colors and labels, as well as hundreds of custom designed landmarks — for example, for places like the Golden Gate Bridge.

Apple also built a new nighttime mode for Maps with a “moonlit glow,” it said.

 

For drivers, Apple added new road details to the map, so it can help drivers as they move throughout a city to better see and understand important things like turn lanes, medians, bus and taxi lanes, and other things. The changes are competitive with some of the updates Google has been making as of late to its own Google Maps platform, which brought street-level details in select cities. These allowed people — including those navigating on foot, in a wheelchair, on a bike, or on a scooter, for example — to better see things like sidewalks and intersections.

Apple is now catching up, saying it, too, will show features like crosswalks and bike lanes.

It will also render things like overlapping complex interchanges in 3D space, making it easier to see upcoming traffic conditions or what lane to take. These features will come to CarPlay later in the year.

For transit riders, meanwhile, Maps has made improvements to help users find nearby stations.

Users can now pin their favorite lines to the top, and even keep track on their Apple Watch so they don’t have to pull out their phone. The updated Maps app will automatically follow your transit route and notify you when it’s time to disembark, making the app more competitive to third-party apps often favored by transit takers, like Citymapper, for instance.

When you exit your station, you can also now hold up your iPhone to scan the buildings in the area and Maps will generate an accurate position, offering direction in augmented reality. This is similar to the Live View AR directions Google announced last year.

This feature is launching in select cities in 2021 with more to come in the year ahead, Apple said.

 

Apple has introduced a new feature to its camera system that automatically recognizes and transcribes text in your photos, from a phone number on a business card to a whiteboard full of notes. Live Text, as the feature is called, doesn’t need any prompting or special work from the user — just tap the icon and you’re good to go.

Announced by Craig Federighi on the virtual stage of WWDC, Live Text will be arriving on iPhones with iOS 15. He demonstrated it with a couple pictures, one of a whiteboard after a meeting, and a couple snapshots that included restaurant signs in the background.

Tapping the Live Text button in the lower right gave detected text a slight underline, and then a swipe allowed it to be selected and copied. In the case of the whiteboard, it collected several sentences of notes including bullet points, and with one of the restaurant signs it grabbed the phone number, which could be called or saved.

The feature is reminiscent of many found in Google’s long-developed Lens app, and the Pixel 4 added more robust scanning capability in 2019. The difference is that the text is captured more or less passively in every photo taken by an iPhone running the new system — you don’t have to enter scanner mode or launch a separate app.

This is a nice thing for anyone to have, but it could be especially helpful for people with visual impairments. A snapshot or two makes any text, otherwise difficult to read, able to be dictated or saved.

The process seems to take place entirely on the phone, so don’t worry that this info is being sent to a datacenter somewhere. That also means it’s fairly quick, though until we test it for ourselves we can’t say whether it’s instantaneous or, like some other machine learning features, something that happens over the next few seconds or minutes after you take a shot.

Over a year into a global pandemic, Apple announced some major updates to its FaceTime app at WWDC 2021, which will be available in iOS 15.

Notably, Android users will now be able to join in on FaceTime calls, posing some competition to apps like Zoom and Google Meet, which have boomed during lockdown. This FaceTime makeover will also include links to join calls, which can be sent via Calendar invites in advance of your meeting. These links work across platforms, whether you’re on the web, an Android phone, or your iPhone.

Apple is also adding updates that make the experience of video chatting on FaceTime more closely resemble real life conversations.

“When talking in person, our brains process hundreds of social auditory and visual cues when talking on a video call. Many of those signals can get lost, leaving us feeling drained. So this year, we’ve set out to make FaceTime calls feel more natural, comfortable, and lifelike,” said Craig Federighi, Apple’s Senior Vice President of Software Engineering.

Through a spatial audio feature, FaceTime calls will sound like you’re sitting in the same room with your friends – that means if someone is on the left side of your screen, their audio will come through the left side of your speaker. This functionality might not translate well to smaller devices like an iPhone, but could be interesting on devices like an iMac. The person speaking will have a white ring appear around their video while they’re talking, and users will be able to select a grid view to see the other people on the call, which seems quite similar to Zoom.

Next, Apple announced voice isolation, which will improve the speaker’s audio quality when calling from a noisy area. The demo video that was shown during the WWDC announcement featured a child walking into the video frame with a leaf blower. In TechCrunch’s liveblog, Darrell Etherington pointed out that the video seemed heavily edited.

Finally, a feature called SharePlay will come to FaceTime, which makes it easier for friends to watch streaming videos together. SharePlay allows for group listening, watching, and screensharing, and Apple shared partners for SharePlay including Disney+, Hulu, HBO Max, NBA, Twitch, TikTok, MasterClass, ESPN+, Paramount+, and PlutoTV. The SharePlay API will be available so that all video app makers can access it and integrate their own apps.

Over a year into a global pandemic, Apple announced some major updates to its FaceTime app at WWDC 2021, which will be available in iOS 15.

Notably, Android users will now be able to join in on FaceTime calls, posing some competition to apps like Zoom and Google Meet, which have boomed during lockdown. This FaceTime makeover will also include links to join calls, which can be sent via Calendar invites in advance of your meeting. These links work across platforms, whether you’re on the web, an Android phone, or your iPhone.

Apple is also adding updates that make the experience of video chatting on FaceTime more closely resemble real life conversations.

“When talking in person, our brains process hundreds of social auditory and visual cues when talking on a video call. Many of those signals can get lost, leaving us feeling drained. So this year, we’ve set out to make FaceTime calls feel more natural, comfortable, and lifelike,” said Craig Federighi, Apple’s Senior Vice President of Software Engineering.

Through a spatial audio feature, FaceTime calls will sound like you’re sitting in the same room with your friends – that means if someone is on the left side of your screen, their audio will come through the left side of your speaker. This functionality might not translate well to smaller devices like an iPhone, but could be interesting on devices like an iMac. The person speaking will have a white ring appear around their video while they’re talking, and users will be able to select a grid view to see the other people on the call, which seems quite similar to Zoom.

Next, Apple announced voice isolation, which will improve the speaker’s audio quality when calling from a noisy area. The demo video that was shown during the WWDC announcement featured a child walking into the video frame with a leaf blower. In TechCrunch’s liveblog, Darrell Etherington pointed out that the video seemed heavily edited.

Finally, a feature called SharePlay will come to FaceTime, which makes it easier for friends to watch streaming videos together. SharePlay allows for group listening, watching, and screensharing, and Apple shared partners for SharePlay including Disney+, Hulu, HBO Max, NBA, Twitch, TikTok, MasterClass, ESPN+, Paramount+, and PlutoTV. The SharePlay API will be available so that all video app makers can access it and integrate their own apps.

As part of its FaceTime update in iOS 15, Apple introduced a new set of features designed for shared experiences — like co-watching TV shows or TikTok videos, listening to music together, screen sharing and more — while on a FaceTime call. The feature, called SharePlay, enables real-time connections with family and friends while you’re hanging out on FaceTime, Apple explained, by integrating access to apps from within the call itself.

Apple demonstrated the new feature during its Worldwide Developer Conference keynote this afternoon, showing how friends could press play in Apple Music to listen together, as the music streams to everyone on the call. Shared playback controls also let anyone on the call play, pause or jump to the next track.

The company also showed off watching video from its Apple TV+ streaming service, where the video was synced in real-time between call participants. This was a popular trend during the pandemic, as people looked to virtually watch movies and TV with family and friends, prompting services like Hulu and Amazon Prime Video to add native co-watching features.

But Apple’s SharePlay goes much further than streaming music and video from just Apple’s own services.

The company announced a set of launch partners for SharePlay including Disney+, Hulu, HBO Max, NBA, Twitch, TikTok, MasterClass, ESPN+, Paramount+, and Pluto TV. It’s also making an API available to developers so they can integrate their own apps with SharePlay.

Users can screen share via SharePlay, too, so you can do things like browse Zillow listings together or show off a mobile gameplay, Apple suggested.

“Screen sharing is also a simple and super effective way to help someone out and answer questions right in the moment, and it works across Apple devices,” noted Apple SVP of Software Engineering, Craig Federighi.

The feature will roll out with iOS 15.

As part of the update to iOS 15, Apple will allow iPhone users to better customize how they want to be notified about incoming calls, texts or updates from apps based on their current status. With the new Focus feature instead of just silencing calls and notifications through Do Not Disturb, you’ll be able to set different types of notification preferences based on your status — like whether you’re driving, working, sleeping or through the use of custom categories of your own choosing.

The system also uses on-board AI to help determine what your status is at a given time. For example, the phone might suggest you turn off notifications when you’re arriving at the gym.

The feature somewhat recalls the smart launchers that had been popular on Android devices many years ago, like Aviate or EverythingMe, among others, which customized your device based on what you were doing, the time of day, and other factors. These apps never took off on iOS because Apple doesn’t allow third-party apps to deeply integrate with its mobile operating system or reconfigure the device’s homescreen and the trend later fizzled out.

Also new is Notification Summary, which bundles and prioritizes incoming notifications, based on things like time of day. Do Not Disturb has also been integrated directly into iMessages, so other users will know when you don’t want to be bothered by incoming notes.

Developing…

During the virtual keynote of WWDC, Apple shared the first details about iOS 14, the next major version of iOS that is going to be released later this year. There are four pillars with this year’s release: staying connected, focusing without distraction, using intelligence and exploring the world.

“For many of us, our iPhones have become indispensable,” SVP of Software Engineering Craig Federighi said. “Our new release is iOS 15. It’s packed with features that make the iOS experience adapt to and complement the way you use iPhone, whether it’s staying connected with those who matter to you most. Finding the space to focus without distraction, using intelligence to discover the information you need, or exploring the world around you.”

FaceTime gets a bunch of new features

Apple is adding spatial audio to FaceTime. Now the voices are spread out depending on the position of your friends on the screen. For instance, if someone appears on the left, it’ll sound like they’re on the left in your ears. In other FaceTime news, iOS now detects background noise and tries to suppress it so that you can hear your friends and family members more easily. That’s an optional feature, which means that you can disable it in case you’re showing a concert during a FaceTime call for instance.

Another FaceTime feature is ‘Portrait mode’. Behind this term, Apple means that it can automatically blurs the background, like in ‘Portrait mode’ photos. In case you want to use FaceTime for work conferences, you can now generate FaceTime links and add it to a calendar invite. FaceTime will also work in a web browser, which means that people without an Apple device can join a FaceTime call.

FaceTime is a big focus as Apple is also introducing SharePlay. With this feature, you can listen together to a music album. Press play in Apple Music and the music will start for everyone on the call. The queue is shared with everyone else, which means anyone can add songs, skip to the next track, etc.

SharePlay also lets you watch movies and TV shows together. Someone on the call starts a video and it starts on your friend’s phone or tablet. It is also compatible with AirPlay, picture-in-picture and everything you’d expect from videos on iOS.

This isn’t just compatible with Apple TV videos. Apple said there will be an API to make videos compatible with SharePlay. Partners include Disney+, Hulu, HBO Max, Twitch, TikTok and more. Here’s a screenshot of the initial partners:

Now let’s switch to Messages. The app is getting better integration with other Apple apps like News, Photos and Music. With items shared via Messages showing up in there. In other words, Messages (and iMessage) is acting as the social layer on top of Apple’s apps.

A new notification summary

Apple is going to use on-device intelligence to create summaries of your notifications. Instead of being sorted by apps and by date, it is sorted by priority. For instance, notifications from friends will be closer to the top.

When you silence notifications, your iMessage contacts will see that you have activated ‘Do not disturb’. It works a bit like ‘Do not disturb’ in Slack. But there are new settings. Apple calls this Focus mode. You can choose apps and people you want notifications from and change your focus depending on what you’re doing.

For instance, if you’re at work, you can silence personal apps and personal calls and messages. If it’s the weekend, you can silence your work emails. Your settings sync across your iCloud account if you have multiple Apple devices. And it’ll even affect your home screen by showing and hiding apps and widgets.

New smart features

Apple is going to scan your photos for text. Called Live Text, this feature lets you highlight, copy and paste text in photos. It could be a nice accessibility feature as well. iOS is going to leverage that info for Spotlight. You can search from text in your photos directly in Spotlight. These features are handled on device directly.

With iOS 15, memories are getting an upgrade. “These new memories are built on the fly. They are interactive and alive,” Chelsea Burnette, Senior Manager, Photos Engineering. Memories are those interactive movies that you can watch in the Photos app. Now, you can tap with your finger to pause the movie. While music still plays in the background, your photo montage resumes when you lift your finger.

You can now search for a specific song to pair with a memory.

This is a developing story…

Germany technology and parts supplier Robert Bosch opened a €1 billion ($1.2 billion) chip factory in Dresden, Germany on Monday, the single largest investment in the company’s history. The plant, which will mainly supply automotive customers, is a major signal that connected and electric vehicles are here to stay.

“Regardless of which powertrain we talk about … always we need a semiconductor and sensor,” Bosch’s executive vice president of automotive electronics Jens Fabrowsky told TechCrunch.

The plant will handle front-of-the-line processing, or wafer fabrication, in the semiconductor manufacturing process. The 300-millimeter wafers will be sent to partners, typically in Asia, to do packaging and assembly of the semiconductors.

300 millimeters is a “new field of technology,” Fabrowsky explained. As opposed to the 150- or 200-millimeter wafers that are produced at Bosch’s nearby factory in Reutlingen, Germany, the larger wafer size offers greater economies of scale because you can produce more individual chips per wafer.

The 77,500-square-foot plant will run on what Bosch calls “AIoT,” a term that combines artificial intelligence and Internet of Things to denote a fully connected and data-driven system that’s unique to the facility. Bosch will not only have real-time data on the approximately 100 machines, but also on the power, water and other aspects of the facility — up to 500 pages of data per second, Fabrowsky said. The AI-driven algorithm should detect an anomaly from any of the connected sensors immediately.

Despite its high levels of automation, the plant will employ around 700 people once it is fully operational.

It is unclear whether the plant will help resolve the ongoing global semiconductor shortage, which has forced automakers like General Motors and Ford to slash production volumes and temporarily shutter manufacturing facilities.

“At the point when we decided [to build the plant] it was purely driven by technology,” Fabrowsky said. “It was clear we needed to go into 300 [millimeters], and we needed to invest in some more capacity.”

The facility will begin production in July with chips for power tools before beginning production on automotive chips in September. It generally takes over 20 weeks to make a semiconductor chip, Fabrowsky said, including 600 individual steps in the wafer facility alone.

The company will also be investing €50 million ($61 million) to extend the clean room facilities at its Reutlingen plant, Bosch board member Harald Kroeger said at a media briefing Monday.