Category: UNCATEGORIZED

Online service SoloSuit wants to help Americans who are being sued for a debt fight back using automated tools. The company, which is launching its service nationwide today at TechCrunch Disrupt Startup Battlefield, guides users through preparing a response to their lawsuit, optionally having a consumer protection attorney look over the entire document on their behalf, then handing the printing and court filing.

The idea for SoloSuit came from founder, George Simons, who had bought a car during his first year of law school and struggled to find an attorney who would help him out. That prompted the realization that there are likely millions of people across the U.S. who also can’t find attorneys to take cases for a variety of reasons. For example, they may struggle if there isn’t enough money in the case to make it worth an attorney’s while, or if the attorney they want is too busy to get on the phone, he suggests.

The area of focus SoloSuit landed on, however, was debt lawsuits. Every year, 10 million Americans get sued for debt and 9 million automatically lose because they aren’t able to figure out how to respond to those lawsuits, Simons claims. These debts could include medical debt, credit cards, auto loans, student loans, or any other unsecured debts. After a debt collector is unable to collect from the consumer, they may choose to sue for that debt instead.

With the SoloSuit web app, users can respond to these lawsuits in about 15 minutes, the startup says.

The way the process works is that when someone receives a complaint and summons in the mail, they’ll usually only have 14-30 days to respond, depending on the state, before they automatically lose their case. Often, customers will Google for information about what to do next, which is where they’ll find SoloSuit’s free online guides. These will also refer the potential customers to the web service. Here, the web app, which was demoed at Disrupt, will guide the customer through creating the response to the lawsuit and optionally pay to have an attorney review it.

Customers can either pay $15 to have the response printed and filed on their behalf, or $115 to have an attorney review it before filing.

The startup spun out of the Brigham Young University LawX legal design lab, where it was originally founded by a team of students. Simons ended up taking the reins and the other students have moved on. Currently, he is the sole founder but is expecting to hire a technical co-founder soon.

Since SoloSuit’s founding a couple of years ago, it has seen 3,000 Utah-based customers who have been sued for a combined total of $11 million in debt lawsuits. The startup believes they’ve helped around 50% of those cases get dismissed.

Today, the service will launch across all 50 U.S. states and will add the attorney review feature.

Seems everything charges a monthly fee, these days. It also seems that every Apple event brings another way to fork over $10 a month to the company. This time out, it was the addition of Fitness+, which brings metric-focused video workouts to an Apple TV near you. To keep things simple (and to keep you subscribing), the company is offering up a trio of new Apple One bundles.

It’s not quite mix and match yet, but there are three pricing tiers. Individual offers Apple Music, TV+, Arcade and iCloud for $15 a month. The Family version will get you those four services for $20 a month. For the hardcore, there’s the $30 a month Premier tier, which bundles iCloud, Music, TV+, Arcade,  News+ and Fitness+.

Things get a bit more complicated from there, with various tiers of iCloud storage added onto the final total.

Developing…

Seems everything charges a monthly fee, these days. It also seems that every Apple event brings another way to fork over $10 a month to the company. This time out, it was the addition of Fitness+, which brings metric-focused video workouts to an Apple TV near you. To keep things simple (and to keep you subscribing), the company is offering up a trio of new Apple One bundles.

It’s not quite mix and match yet, but there are three pricing tiers. Individual offers Apple Music, TV+, Arcade and iCloud for $15 a month. The Family version will get you those four services for $20 a month. For the hardcore, there’s the $30 a month Premier tier, which bundles iCloud, Music, TV+, Arcade,  News+ and Fitness+.

Things get a bit more complicated from there, with various tiers of iCloud storage added onto the final total.

Developing…

In addition to keeping old generation devices at an entry-level price, Apple is introducing a brand new Apple Watch at a cheaper price point. The new Apple Watch SE features the same design as the newly announced Apple Watch Series 6. But it costs $279.

“The second thing we're doing to make Apple Watch available to even more people is to create a new model that combines elements of Series 6 design with the most essential features of Apple Watch, all at a more affordable price,” Apple COO Jeff Williams said.

The Apple Watch SE uses the S5 system-on-a-chip, which was first released for the Apple Watch Series 5. However, it has the same, big display as the one on the Series 6. It also has the same accelerometer, gyroscope, compass and altimeter as the ones in the Series 6.

And because the Apple Watch SE shares the same design as the Apple Watch Series 6, you can use the most recent complications and watch faces that are going to be introduced with watchOS 7.

So we’ll have to look at the tech specs in details after Apple’s event because the Apple Watch SE looks like a good deal when you compare it with the Apple Watch Series 6 that costs $399. You might not get blood oxygen data like on the Series 6, but it’s a good watch for users who just want a watch to track their workouts, for instance.

Apple is still keeping the Apple Watch Series 3 at the same price ($199). This device is a few years old now and it features the older screen design. So the Apple Watch Series 3 is not compatible with the most recent watch faces and complications.

The company is also positioning the Apple Watch SE as a way to offer an Apple Watch to your kid. There’s a cellular model, which means you can communicate with your kid without handing them a smartphone.

The Apple Watch SE will be available on Friday. Pre-orders start today.

Apple’s new Series 6 watch has some exciting new health features. Thanks to a new health sensor, the Apple Watch Series 6 is able to measure your blood oxygen levels in 15 seconds. The watch will also record background measurements while you sleep.

Your blood oxygen level measures how much oxygen your red blood cells are carrying. In partnership with health care providers, Apple plans to conduct health studies using this new blood oxygen measurement capability.

Additionally, Watch OS 7 will be able to measure your full range of VO2 max, detect if you’re washing your hands and monitor your sleep.

Developing…

As expected, the centerpiece of today’s big hardware event is the latest version of the Series 6. Apple continues to utterly dominate the smartwatch category, with the company currently commanding around 30% of the wearables category. As such, it’s no surprise, really, that the company’s building on what’s worked so far, maintaining a health focus for the device. The biggest addition here a new built-in  sensor capable of measuring the color of one’s blood to determine the level of oxygen in under 15 seconds.

The new watch features an energy saving always-on display, designed to save on battery (for those new sleep features), dropping brightness down when you’re in daylight. There’s also an always-on altimeter to keep track of elevation while hiking. A number of new watch faces have been adding, including new live Memojis and a Pride stripes.

Developing…

Twitter debuted its election hub on Tuesday, introducing a set of tools to help Americans prepare for the most uncertain election in modern U.S. history.

The platform will add a new “US Elections” tab in the Explore menu, where the trending tab and other curated topic lists live. That tab will serve as Twitter’s central source for hand-picked election news, debate livestreams, state-specific resources and candidate information.

Twitter will also introduce what it’s calling a series of “public service announcements” to educate voters on critical election-related topics. Those PSAs will present information on voter registration, instructions on obtaining a mail-in ballot and suggestions for safe voting as the pandemic continues to rage across the United States.

“Twitter wants to empower every eligible person to vote in the 2020 US election, and we’re focused on helping people register, better understand the voting process during COVID-19 including early voting options, and feel informed about the choices on their ballot,” Twitter Public Policy Director Bridget Coyne and Senior Product Director Sam Toizer wrote in a blog post on the announcement.

Twitter took a number of measures early on to address concerns around misinformation and platform manipulation around the 2020 election. Unlike Facebook, which has taken more incremental steps, Twitter opted to no longer accept political advertising in a decision made last October. The platform also began aggressively flagging tweets containing election-related misinformation months ago, setting expectations for high profile serial platform rule-breakers like President Trump.

Twitter kicked off a political war with the president in May when the company added a fact-checking label to a pair of his tweets containing false claims about voter registration and mail-in voting security. In the last month and a half alone, Twitter locked the Trump campaign out of its Twitter account for sharing a video with the false claim that children are “almost immune” to COVID-19, hid a tweet from the president that discouraged voting and restricted a handful of tweets from Trump that encouraged Americans to vote twice, which is illegal.

Last week, in a foreboding sign of what Americans might expect from November’s election, Twitter expanded its misinformation rules to address what happens if a candidate declares victory prematurely. In that same update, Twitter also said it would take action against any tweets “inciting unlawful conduct to prevent a peaceful transfer of power or orderly succession.”

While Twitter is far from containing its own misinformation problem, it’s shown a proactive willingness to adapt to real concerns around the 2020 election, making policy changes on the fly and adjusting those choices somewhat fluidly as needed. By anticipating worst-case scenarios, Twitter will at least be going into the 2020 U.S. elections with its eyes open — and with so many unknowns in such a tumultuous year, let’s just hope that’s enough.

As part of the continuing global rollout of LanzaTech’s technology to capture carbon dioxide emissions and turn those emissions into fuel and chemicals, the company is rolling out a new small-scale waste biomass gasifier in India.

The new gasifier, which was announced Tuesday on TechCrunch Disrupt’s virtual stage, will be hosted at Mangalore Refinery and Petrochemical, one of India’s largest refiners. The LanzaTech gasifier, which will be built in partnership with Indian project development firm Ankur Scientific, will use waste to make ethanol and chemicals rather than power.

While most of the industry uses large-scale, expensive oxygen-blown gasifiers to make liquids, the LanzaTech air blown technology is much cheaper and easier to operate and can still produce bacteria at a scale that produces a meaningful amount of ethanol.

Contamination also isn’t an issue with the gas feedstock for LanzaTech’s bacteria, according to Holmgren. The new process can produce biochar that ends up replacing fertilizer in soil and thereby reducing nitrogen oxide emissions, which are another greenhouse gas contributing to global climate change.

If the pilot project is successful and the gasifiers are rolled out at scale across India, it could mean an ability for the country to produce roughly 25 billion liters of ethanol per year and result in removing 60 million tons of carbon dioxide annually, according to LanzaTech’s estimates.

“Overall something that people said makes no sense, may well make sense and may well result in benefits beyond just the immediate reuse of waste agri carbon and production of a fuel that results in keeping some petroleum in the ground,” according to a statement from Holmgren. “Holistic systems thinking is the way.”

For Holmgren, the small pilot project in India is an example of how small-scale, low-cost distributed systems can compete with the big oil industry.

“There are two paths to scale, bigger which is cheaper per unit produced, or massively replicating a small scale unit (numbering up vs. scaling up),” Holmgren said. “Most people have always believed that numbering up is for toys and food, but I think it will also fit process technology. Certainly, larger fits petroleum, but it can’t fit biotechnology or biomass or waste gases which are distributed and difficult to move.”

Decarbonization, Holmgren believes, will require a reimagining of traditional systems if humanity is to break the carbon cycle that’s now causing global climate catastrophes that can be observed in the Western United States right now.

“We must not benchmark today’s innovation against the past; we must, instead, imagine and create a very different future, one where the production of energy, fuels and chemicals is based on distributed, rather than centralized principles,” said Holmgren. “Recent breakthroughs in miniaturization, automation, AI and 3D printing enable distributed production beyond anything that could have been previously imagined and of course, a simple gasifier will help that along.”