Author: azeeadmin

The latest hearing to target big tech will drill down on competition in Apple’s App Store and Google Play. The hearing, set for Wednesday at 2:30PM ET, will feature testimony from the two big app store gatekeepers, and three companies that have banded together to critique the immense power that Apple and Google command in the mobile software market.

Last year, 13 app makers banded together to create the Coalition for App Fairness, a group organizing against Apple in particular for its stranglehold over app distribution and the hefty fees it collects from software developers. The group is linked to legislation in states like North Dakota that seeks to make state laws more more favorable to software makers by removing app store fees.

Spotify, Tile and Match Group, which owns Tinder, Hinge and other dating apps, are all members of the coalition and will be testifying in the hearing, which is being held by the Senate Subcommittee on Competition Policy, Antitrust, and Consumer Rights. That committee is helmed by Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-MN), an emerging antitrust hawk who’s made reining in big tech’s power a cornerstone of her political brand.

The hearing comes a day after Apple launched Airtags, its own Tile-like product that can geolocate lost items like keys and wallets. Tile has criticized Apple for more than a year over those plans, claiming the tech giant implemented policies to hamstring the market leader in a product category it planned to compete within. The company previously testified before the House’s antitrust subcommittee, airing those concerns last January.

“We welcome competition, as long as it is fair competition,” Tile CEO CJ Prober said Tuesday following Apple’s big event. “Unfortunately, given Apple’s well-documented history of using its platform advantage to unfairly limit competition for its products, we’re skeptical.”

Prober called lawmakers’ interest in examining Apple’s policies “entirely appropriate” in light of Tile’s history of issues with the company.

Software makers have long been waging a battle against Apple over its iron grip on the app world. Last year, Epic elevated that struggle, picking a fight with Apple over the 30% cut the company takes on payments made through its App Store. Apple punished the company for its attempt at a workaround for the fees, kicking Epic’s hit game Fortnite out of the App Store and prompting Epic to launch an antitrust suit against the two trillion dollar company. Epic’s day in court kicks off next month, on May 3.

Right on schedule, Google today launched the third developer preview of Android 12, the latest version of its mobile operating system. According to Google’s roadmap, this will be the last developer preview before Android 12 goes into beta, which is typically also when you’ll likely see the first over-the-air updates for non-developers who want to try it out. For now, developers still have to flash a device image to their supported Pixel devices.

Google notes that with the beta phase coming up, now is the time for developers to start compatibility testing to make sure their apps are ready. Currently, the plan is for Android 12 to reach platform stability by August 2021. At that point, all the app-facing features will be locked in and finalized.

So what’s new in this preview? As usual, there are dozens of smaller new features, tweaks and changes, but the highlights this time around are the ability for developers to provide new haptic feedback experiences in their apps and new app launch animations.

This new app launch experience may be the most noticeable change here for both developers and users. The new animation will take the app from launch to a splash screen that shows the app’s icon and then to the app itself. “The new experience brings standard design elements to every app launch, but we’ve also made it customizable so apps can maintain their unique branding,” Google explains. Developers will get quite a bit of leeway in how they want to customize this splash screen with their own branding. The most basic launch experience is enabled by default, though.

Rich haptic feedback is also new in this release. It’s hard not to look at this and think of Apple’s now mostly abandoned Force Touch, but this is a bit different. The idea here is to provide “immersive and delightful effects for gaming, and attentional haptics for productivity.”

Other new features in this release include a new call notification template that is meant to make it easier for users to manage incoming and ongoing calls. Google says these new notifications will be more visible and scannable. There are also improvements to the Neural Networks API for machine learning workloads and new APIs to support a wider range of ultra high-resolution camera sensors.

With Android 12, Google is also deprecating its RenderScript API for running computationally intensive tasks in favor of GPU compute frameworks like Vulkan and OpenGL.

You can find a full breakdown of all of the changes in this release here.

Right on schedule, Google today launched the third developer preview of Android 12, the latest version of its mobile operating system. According to Google’s roadmap, this will be the last developer preview before Android 12 goes into beta, which is typically also when you’ll likely see the first over-the-air updates for non-developers who want to try it out. For now, developers still have to flash a device image to their supported Pixel devices.

Google notes that with the beta phase coming up, now is the time for developers to start compatibility testing to make sure their apps are ready. Currently, the plan is for Android 12 to reach platform stability by August 2021. At that point, all the app-facing features will be locked in and finalized.

So what’s new in this preview? As usual, there are dozens of smaller new features, tweaks and changes, but the highlights this time around are the ability for developers to provide new haptic feedback experiences in their apps and new app launch animations.

This new app launch experience may be the most noticeable change here for both developers and users. The new animation will take the app from launch to a splash screen that shows the app’s icon and then to the app itself. “The new experience brings standard design elements to every app launch, but we’ve also made it customizable so apps can maintain their unique branding,” Google explains. Developers will get quite a bit of leeway in how they want to customize this splash screen with their own branding. The most basic launch experience is enabled by default, though.

Rich haptic feedback is also new in this release. It’s hard not to look at this and think of Apple’s now mostly abandoned Force Touch, but this is a bit different. The idea here is to provide “immersive and delightful effects for gaming, and attentional haptics for productivity.”

Other new features in this release include a new call notification template that is meant to make it easier for users to manage incoming and ongoing calls. Google says these new notifications will be more visible and scannable. There are also improvements to the Neural Networks API for machine learning workloads and new APIs to support a wider range of ultra high-resolution camera sensors.

With Android 12, Google is also deprecating its RenderScript API for running computationally intensive tasks in favor of GPU compute frameworks like Vulkan and OpenGL.

You can find a full breakdown of all of the changes in this release here.

There are any number of seed rounds that cross our desks every day, a never-ending march of enterprise software, consumer apps, games, hardware, biotech, and sometimes even a space startup. But amid the regular flow of funding news, it’s still rare to come across a company raising money to take on addiction with software. So when Affect’s $1 million seed round from AlleyCorp came to my attention, I wanted to learn a bit more.

As someone who went to rehab for alcohol use disorder in what appeared to be a partially renovated middle school where the highest-tech thing that was in our group rooms were chairs, the idea of using software to help addicts reduce use and get their life back intrigued me.

Focused on stimulant abuse in particular, the startup wants to help people addicted to methamphetamine, for example, fully cease their use of the drug. Affect CEO Kristin Muhlner talked me through the company’s efforts during an interview. In short, the Affect app combines contingency management (rewards for positive behaviors) and cognitive behavioral therapy, or CBT (a form of therapy with known impact on addiction). Regarding the latter, Muhlner told TechCrunch during an interview that well-known recovery programs like AA or SMART Recovery also use forms of CBT in their approaches to helping addicts

In app form, those two concepts break down into things like cash rewards for multi-day abstinence or attending a group session. And on the therapy front, Affect offers group therapy, individual therapy, addiction counseling, and drug testing.

Like many companies today, Affect intends to learn from more data; it expects, per a deck that TechCrunch was able to review, machine learning to help the company hone its model and service over time. Let’s hope.

Critically, Affect is not opposed to medically assisted recovery, which matters. There is, in some recovery-focused theologies, a belief that any sort of medical assistance is akin to merely replacing one addiction, or substance, with another. This harmful view is contradicted by science. So, to see Affect cite adjuvant medication in its own pitch materials was heartening.

Stimulant abuse is rampant in America, and meth addiction is among the most deadly drugs in the country. Meth is no fucking joke. The only good amount of meth usage is precisely and exactly zero meth usage. So what Affect is building could actually change the world for stimulant addicts if it works.

I honestly hope Affect company winds up raising a bit more to more fully test out its thesis regarding addiction recovery. With insurance companies picking up the tab for Affect’s software, it has a chance to reach lots of folks in need. So many, in fact, that when I asked its CEO how it was handling go to market work, she said that her company had been warned that her user group was hard to reach. However, after putting up a digital ad, her company had to take it down seven minutes later. How’s that for product-market fit.

Let’s hope we see more startups working on this problem. Addiction is not going away and older methods are not the only way forward for addicts.

There are any number of seed rounds that cross our desks every day, a never-ending march of enterprise software, consumer apps, games, hardware, biotech, and sometimes even a space startup. But amid the regular flow of funding news, it’s still rare to come across a company raising money to take on addiction with software. So when Affect’s $1 million seed round from AlleyCorp came to my attention, I wanted to learn a bit more.

As someone who went to rehab for alcohol use disorder in what appeared to be a partially renovated middle school where the highest-tech thing that was in our group rooms were chairs, the idea of using software to help addicts reduce use and get their life back intrigued me.

Focused on stimulant abuse in particular, the startup wants to help people addicted to methamphetamine, for example, fully cease their use of the drug. Affect CEO Kristin Muhlner talked me through the company’s efforts during an interview. In short, the Affect app combines contingency management (rewards for positive behaviors) and cognitive behavioral therapy, or CBT (a form of therapy with known impact on addiction). Regarding the latter, Muhlner told TechCrunch during an interview that well-known recovery programs like AA or SMART Recovery also use forms of CBT in their approaches to helping addicts

In app form, those two concepts break down into things like cash rewards for multi-day abstinence or attending a group session. And on the therapy front, Affect offers group therapy, individual therapy, addiction counseling, and drug testing.

Like many companies today, Affect intends to learn from more data; it expects, per a deck that TechCrunch was able to review, machine learning to help the company hone its model and service over time. Let’s hope.

Critically, Affect is not opposed to medically assisted recovery, which matters. There is, in some recovery-focused theologies, a belief that any sort of medical assistance is akin to merely replacing one addiction, or substance, with another. This harmful view is contradicted by science. So, to see Affect cite adjuvant medication in its own pitch materials was heartening.

Stimulant abuse is rampant in America, and meth addiction is among the most deadly drugs in the country. Meth is no fucking joke. The only good amount of meth usage is precisely and exactly zero meth usage. So what Affect is building could actually change the world for stimulant addicts if it works.

I honestly hope Affect company winds up raising a bit more to more fully test out its thesis regarding addiction recovery. With insurance companies picking up the tab for Affect’s software, it has a chance to reach lots of folks in need. So many, in fact, that when I asked its CEO how it was handling go to market work, she said that her company had been warned that her user group was hard to reach. However, after putting up a digital ad, her company had to take it down seven minutes later. How’s that for product-market fit.

Let’s hope we see more startups working on this problem. Addiction is not going away and older methods are not the only way forward for addicts.

Figma spent years in stealth before launching its web-based collaborative design tool. Since coming into the light, the company has been iterating quickly. Today, Figma launches its biggest product update to date.

Meet FigJam, Figma’s new whiteboarding tool.

The entire concept of Figma stemmed from the fact that designers were taking up much more space at the figurative table, and needed a place to collaborate efficiently. That is only more true today, especially during the last year of working from home, which is why Figma is extending itself throughout the workflow of designers with whiteboarding.

Not only does FigJam give designers a place to come up with ideas together, but it also gives non-designers a place to participate in the brainstorm.

FigJam functionality includes sticky notes, emojis and drawing tools, as well as shapes, pre-built lines and connectors, stamps and cursor chats. As expected, FigJam works with Figma so components or other design objects breathed into life on FigJam can easily be moved into Figma.

“Our point of view here was focusing on how to make FigJam work as the first step in the design process, before you go into actually doing design work,” said Figma founder and CEO Dylan Field. “We see people looking for a better, more fluid experience, but we also wanted to make it simple enough to bring other people into the tool.”

To take that a step further, Figma is also introducing voice chat into all of its products. That means users who are designing alongside one another in Figma or brainstorming in Figjam don’t need to hop into a separate Zoom call or Google Meet, but can just toggle on chat in Figma to use audio.

Figma didn’t build its voice chat from scratch, but rather worked with a partner to bring this to market. Figma did not specify which partner/tech it’s working with on voice chat.

Alongside the release of Figjam and voice chat, Figma is also releasing a more full-featured mobile app, which will be in beta as a Testflight at launch.

Image Credits: Figma

One final update that Figma is announcing today is branching and merging in Figma. This allows designers who are updating the design system, for example, to branch out and do their work and then merge that work with the existing design system, rather than updating a shared component or resource and affecting everyone else’s workflow.

Recent laws allowing healthcare providers to refuse care because of conscientious beliefs and denying care to transgender individuals might not seem like an issue for the tech industry at first blush, but these types of legislation directly contradict the core values of health tech.

Arkansas Governor Asa Hutchinson last month signed into law S.B. 289, known as the “Medical Ethics and Diversity Act,” which allows anyone who provides healthcare services — not just doctors — to refuse to give non-emergency care if they believe the care goes against their conscience.

Arkansas is one of several states in the U.S. that have been pushing laws like this over the past several years. These “conscience laws” are harmful to all patients — particularly LGBTQ individuals, women and rural citizens — especially because over 40% of available hospital beds are controlled by Catholic institutions in some states.

While disguised as a safeguard that prevents doctors from having to participate in medical services that are at odds with their religious beliefs, these laws go far beyond that and should be repealed.

“Non-emergency” service is open to interpretation

The Arkansas legislation is one giant slippery slope. Even beyond the direct effects that the law would have on reproductive rights and the LGBTQ community, it leaves open questions about the many different services that medical professionals could decline simply by saying it goes against their conscience.

Broadly letting healthcare providers decide which services they will perform based on religion, ethics or conscience essentially eliminates protections patients have under federal anti-discrimination regulations.

What constitutes an “emergency” to one doctor or EMT may be deemed a “non-emergency” by another. By allowing medical professionals to avoid performing some services, the bill can be interpreted as allowing anyone involved in the provision of healthcare services to avoid performing any kind of service, as long as they say they believed it wasn’t an emergency at the time.

The law also allows individuals to refuse to refer patients to someone who would provide the desired service for them. This places an undue burden on patients with physical or mental health issues and causes delays in treatment as the patient searches for an alternate provider. In cases of health and life-threatening issues, for example, women have been refused treatment at Catholic medical institutions and forced to ride to the closest emergency care center.

The health tech community is working to improve the health of all

The Arkansas law runs counter to the values of the businesses that are working hard to develop and improve medical technologies. Health tech startups at their core are fighting to provide more and better services to more patients — whether it’s by building platforms to make healthcare accessible to all, developing specific medical devices to improve the quality of service or researching new treatments and vaccines.

Imagine developing a vaccine for a global pandemic and then allowing doctors the right to refuse to administer it because it’s open to interpretation whether the virus represents an emergency to specific people. Or imagine a hospital pharmacist who deliberately tries to spoil hundreds of vaccine doses because of the conspiracy theories he believes. Laws like the one in Arkansas open up the healthcare system to abuse by conspiracy theorists, and it is already the case that many wellness providers are basing their advice and services on QAnon falsehoods.

The health tech community is not just developing medications and devices for patients whose beliefs are similar to their own. Equally, medical professionals should not be making it harder for people to get needed medical care based on personal feelings. On the contrary, the ultimate goal of health tech businesses and healthcare providers alike should be a singular focus on improving the quality of care for all.

“Medical ethics” and anti-LGBTQ laws are unethical

As the health tech community continues to work tirelessly to bring new solutions to the marketplace to improve the health of everyone, it must also stand against laws like this, which threaten to eradicate the important gains that have been made in enhancing the lives and health of patients.

The Arkansas law — and others like it — place the burden of finding appropriate care on the patient instead of on the medical community, where it belongs. These laws must be repealed.

It was “the eighth wonder of the world,” Donald Trump said, driving a golden shovel into the ground. The then-president touted Foxconn’s planned Wisconsin factory as a major win for his economic goals.

A year and a half later, the future of the manufacturing deal is far less certain. Earlier this week, the state announced a dramatic scaling back of a plan it had hoped would return blue-collar jobs back to the hard hit state. The Taiwanese manufacturing giant is scaling back its investment from $10 billion to $672 million.

The new plans also call for a massive cut to potential headcount — to 1,454, down from 13,000. Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers framed the reduction as a tax-saving deal in a press release issued this week.

“When I ran to be governor, I made a promise to work with Foxconn to cut a better deal for our state—the last deal didn’t work for Wisconsin, and that doesn’t work for me,” Evers said. “Today I’m delivering on that promise with an agreement that treats Foxconn like any other business and will save taxpayers $2.77 billion, protect the hundreds of millions of dollars in infrastructure investments the state and local communities have already made, and ensure there’s accountability for creating the jobs promised.”

Evers stepped into the role of Governor in 2019, following Scott Walker, who played a key role in negotiating the deal under Trump. The package included in the neighborhood of $4 billion in incentives for Foxconn, a record-breaking deal for the firm.

Plans for the TV factory shifted considerably since it was announced nearly four years ago, and in early 2019, it appeared that Foxconn had abandoned it altogether, before a phone call from Trump apparently put plans back on track.

As Reuters notes, the state has already spent in excess of $200 million on infrastructure, training and other aspects ahead of the planned factory opening.

Google today announced a major update to Meet, its video-meeting service, which brings several user interface tweaks for desktop users, as well as quite a bit of new functionality, including multi-pinning so that you can highlight multiple feeds instead of just one, as well as new AI-driven video capabilities for light adjustments, autozoom, and a new Data Saver feature that limits data usage on slower mobile networks.

If you’re anything like me, you’re increasingly tired of video meetings (to the point where I often just keep the camera off). But the reality is that this style of meetings will be with us for the foreseeable future, whether we like them or not.

Image Credits: Google

Google notes that today’s release is meant to make meetings “more immersive, inclusive, and productive.” The new UI doesn’t look to be a radical change, but it puts more of the controls and features right at your fingertips instead of hiding them in a menu. It also consolidates them in the bottom row instead of the current system that spreads out features between the main menu bar and an additional small menu at the top.

For presenters who don’t want to see themselves on the screen, Meet now also lets you minimize or completely hide your own video feed — and if you really want to glance into your own eyes, you can also pin your feed to the rest of the grid. Google says it also plans to soon let you turn off your self-feed across all Meet calls.

Image Credits: Google

Talking about pinning, one feature that seems especially useful is the ability to highlight multiple feeds. This new multi-pinning capability will make it easier to focus on the participants in a chat that are most active, for example. This feature will roll out in the coming months.

And coming in a few months, some of those highlighted feeds may look a bit more interesting (or annoying, depending on your point of view) because one new feature Google has planned — but isn’t ready to roll out yet — is video background replacement. For now, Google will only offer three scenes: a classroom, a party and a forest. The company says more will follow, but it doesn’t look like you’ll be able to bring your own videos to this feature anytime soon.

Image Credits: Google

Other new features in this release include Meet’s capability to automatically spruce up your video feed a bit to make sure you’re more visible in a dark environment and enhance your video when you are sitting in front of a bright background. This will roll out in the coming weeks. There’s also autozoom, which uses AI to automatically zoom in on you and put you in the middle of your frame. That’s coming to paid Google Workspace subscribers in the coming months.

In the words of co-founder and CEO Jonathan Shambroom, Creator+ is a new startup that will “finance, produce and distribute feature-length films from today’s top creators and emerging storytellers.”

The company is coming out of stealth today and also announcing that it has raised $12 million in funding led by Petra Group and Freestyle Capital, with participation from Jake Roper, Peter Hollens, Wendy Ayche (a.k.a. Wengie), Selina Tobaccowala, Jazwares CEO Judd Zebersky and others.

Shambroom (who’s been an executive at numerous startups and also served as general manager at Crackle) told me that one of the key aspects of the Creator+ strategy is that it controls “both sides of the equation” — it’s both producing films and building its own streaming platform, where the movies will be available for individual purchase, with no subscriptions and no ads.

He said that allows the startup to control costs and distribution, but it also “enables us to do something brand new with creators,” giving them a 50-50 split on revenue, as well as sharing audience data and ownership of the intellectual property.

“Creator” is a term that gets used pretty broadly, and Creator+ isn’t announcing any specific deals today. But co-founder and Chief Strategy Officer Benjamin Grubbs (who previously led creator partnerships at YouTube) told me the company is initially focused on “storytellers and artists.”

“We recognize that there are a lot of gifted storytellers on some of these large, open, ad-supported platforms where they already reach large audiences and fan bases,” Grubbs said. “But there are constraints, whether that’s time-based or economic, on the types of stories that you can actually tell.”

So Creator+ will allow those creators to break free of some of those constraints, making feature films with budgets in the low seven figures. Shambroom said the startup wants to deliver “what people expect in a film, 90 minutes give-or-take … in many of the genres that exist today” while also allowing creators to experiment with new formats and new production technologies. In some cases, these movies could be a creator’s “passion project,” while in other cases Creator+ could match them up with the right script.

“We see a multitude of roles and opportunities for creators, both in front of or behind the camera,” Grubbs added.

Creator+ plans to put between five and 10 films into production this year, with the first titles released in 2022. Shambroom said it’s committed to supporting underrepresented storytellers and has already hired Ben O’Keefe as its head of diversity and impact. The team also has global ambitions, which is why they brought on international investors, including Malaysia-based Petra Group.