Category: UNCATEGORIZED

Instagram announced some changes it’s making that are geared toward advancing equity within its workplace. The changes come after Instagram in June spoke about elevating, rather than suppressing Black voices in light of the killing of George Floyd.

“More than ever, people are turning to the platform to raise awareness for the racial, civic, and social causes they care about,” Adam Mosseri, head of Instagram, wrote in a blog post. “It’s a big part of why we committed in June to review the ways Instagram could be underserving certain groups of people. We have a responsibility to look at what we build and how we build, so that people’s experiences with our product better mirrors the actions and aspirations of our community.”

For starters, the Facebook-owned company has created an Equity team to work on “better understanding and addressing bias in our product development” the experiences people have on Instagram, Mosseri wrote. Part of the responsibilities of that team include creating fair and equitable products, as well as ensuring algorithmic fairness. According to a job posting for an equity and inclusion product manager, the team will be fully focused on equity and inclusion, and “creating the most equitable experience for our global communities.”

Instagram is also looking to hire its own diversity lead. According to the job posting, the director of diversity and inclusion will be responsible for increasing and retaining people from diverse backgrounds, among other things. Facebook has had a head of diversity in place since 2013, but given how big of a company Facebook has become, it seems worthwhile to have a diversity leader specifically focused on Instagram.

Instagram says it has also updated its policies around implicit hate speech, such as depictions of blackface or stereotypes about Jewish people. Instagram says it will also now disable accounts that make serious rape threats, instead of just removing the content.

On the verification front, Instagram has also expanded its criteria to include more Black, LGBTQ+ and Latinx media. Instagram has also stopped automatically prioritizing verification for accounts with high followings.

Metadata.io announced today that it has raised $6.5 million in Series A funding.

It’s been more than four years since I wrote about the startup’s $2 million seed funding. At the time, co-founder and CEO Gil Allouche described the product as helping business-to-business marketers target their ads as people who resemble their existing sales leads.

Since then, the company has launched its product in general availability, and Allouche told me yesterday that it’s become “really the middleware for the sales and marketing stack.”

“It doesn’t just … give you insights, it skips the human as the bottleneck of execution for marketing [operations],” Allouche said, adding that this makes marketing teams more efficient while also eliminating much of the drudgery. “If you’re a Don Draper who’s really good at creative or content, you should spend your time on that and not in an Excel spreadsheet.”

At the same time, ad targeting remains a key part of the company’s capabilities. For example, its new product MetaMatch allows advertisers to build and target custom audiences on Facebook, LinkedIn and programmatic display.

Allouche also said that demand has increased “quite significantly” since the beginning of the pandemic. That’s counter to larger digital ad trends, but he noted that B2B companies still need to reach customers, and many of the old tools — like in-person events — are now off the table.

In addition, he said that Metadata’s proprietary database of 1.4 million customer profiles have given it an additional advantage in the face of privacy regulation and ad-tracking restrictions.

The platform has been used by companies including Zoom, Drift, Pendo, Udacity, and Vonage.

The new funding was led by Resolute Ventures, with participation from Greycroft, York IE, Stormbreakers, Eloqua founder Mark Organ, Segment founder Ilya Volodarsky and others.

“Metadata isn’t another marketing technology,” Organ said in a statement. “From the origin of the company transforming marketing operations by eliminating tedious manual work, to today, creating a category that transcends demand gen, it is enabling the autonomous marketer to be a reality. It is the marketer that’s needed for the future.”

Ireland’s data protection watchdog, the DPC, has sent Facebook a preliminary order to suspend data transfers from the EU to the US, the Wall Street Journal reports, citing people familiar with the matter and including a confirmation from Facebook’s VP of global affairs, Nick Clegg.

The preliminary suspension order follows a landmark ruling by Europe’s top court this summer (aka Schrems II) which both struck down a flagship data transfer arrangement between the EU and the US and cast doubt on the legality of an alternative transfer mechanism — certainly in cases where data is flowing to a non-EU entity that falls under US surveillance law. 

Facebook’s use of these Standard Contractual Clauses (SCCs) to claim a legal basis for EU data transfers therefore looks to be fast running out of borrowed time.

European privacy campaigner Max Schrems, whose surname is attached to the CJEU ruling — and to an earlier ruling which invalidated the prior EU-US data transfer deal, Safe Harbor, on the same grounds of US surveillance overreach — filed his original complaint about Facebook’s use of SCCs all the way back in 2013. So the tech giant has had more than half a decade to get its European data ducks in order.

Reached for comment on the WSJ report, Facebook pointed us to a freshly published blog post, also penned by Clegg — who acknowledges “significant uncertainty” for businesses operating online services that rely on transatlantic data flows in the wake of the Schrems II ruling.

In the blog post the former deputy prime minister of the United Kingdom goes on to advocate for “global rules that can ensure consistent treatment of data around the world”.

“The Irish Data Protection Commission has commenced an inquiry into Facebook controlled EU-US data transfers, and has suggested that SCCs cannot in practice be used for EU-US data transfers,” Cleggs writes. “While this approach is subject to further process, if followed, it could have a far reaching effect on businesses that rely on SCCs and on the online services many people and businesses rely on.”

Facebook’s blog post lobbying for global rules to ensure “stability” for cross-border data transfers paints a picture of how the Schrems II ruling might negatively affect European startups — claiming it could result in local businesses being unable to use US-based cloud providers or run operations across multiple time zones.

The blog post doesn’t have anything much to say on how Facebook itself having to stop using SCCs might affect Facebook’s own business — but we’ve discussed that before here. (The short version is Facebook may need to split its infrastructure in two, and offer a federated version of its service to EU users — which would clearly be expensive and time consuming for Facebook.)

“Businesses need clear, global rules, underpinned by the strong rule of law, to protect transatlantic data flows over the long term,” Clegg goes on, before lobbying for regulatory leniency in the meanwhile, as Facebook continues to transfer EU data to the US in what he claims is “good faith” — despite the acknowledged legal uncertainty and the complaint in question dating back well over half a decade at this point.

Here he is pleading for data transfer mercy on behalf of other businesses who are not involved in this specific complaint: “While policymakers are working towards a sustainable, long-term solution, we urge regulators to adopt a proportionate and pragmatic approach to minimise disruption to the many thousands of businesses who, like Facebook, have been relying on these mechanisms in good faith to transfer data in a safe and secure way.”

EU lawmakers warned recently that there would be no quick fix for US data transfers, despite some parallel Commission noises about working with the US on an enhanced replacement mechanism for the now defunct ‘Privacy Shield’. (Although for businesses that aren’t, as Facebook is, subject to FISA 702 there may be ways to use SCCs for US transfers that are legal, or at least law firms willing to suggest measures you could take… )

Speaking to the EU Parliament last week, justice commissioner Didier Reynders suggested changes to US surveillance law will be needed to bridge the legal schism between US surveillance law and EU privacy rights.

And of course legislative changes require both time and political will. Although it’s interesting to see Facebook’s global VP feeling moved to wade in and call for global solutions for cross-border data transfers. Perhaps the tech giant will funnel some of its multi-million dollar domestic lobbying budget on making the case for reforming US surveillance law in future.

Ireland’s data protection regulator declined to comment on the WSJ report when we got in touch.

Schrems, meanwhile, is not sitting on his hands. In a statement following the newspaper’s report he said his digital rights not-for-profit, noyb, was not informed about the preliminary order by the DPC — speculating the information was leaked to the newspaper by Facebook to draw political attention to its cause.

He also reveals an intent by noyb to start a legal procedure against the DPC, saying it informed Ireland’s regulator this week that it plans to file an interlocutory injunction over the opening a ‘second’ procedure into the matter — arguing this move is in breach of a 2015 court order and is essentially the equivalent of letting Facebook carry on a multi-year game of legal whack-a-mole where it never actually faces enforcement for breaking each specific law.

“Facebook is knowingly in violation of the law since 2013. So far the DPC has covered them and for seven years refused to enforce the law. It seems after the second judgement by the Court of Justice not even the DPC can deny that Facebook’s international data transfers are built on sand,” Schrems told TechCrunch.

“At the same time, Facebook has in internal communication indicated that it has again shifted its legal basis from the SCCs to [the GDPR] Article 49 and the contract they allegedly sign with users. We are therefore very concerned that the DPC is again only investigating one of two legal basis that Facebook uses. This approach could lead to another frustrated case, like the ‘Safe Harbor’ case in 2015.”

What’s new since 2015 is Europe’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) — which came into application in May 2018 and has led EU lawmakers to claim standard-setting geopolitical glory, as the issue of data privacy has risen up the agenda around the world, propelled by the deforming effects of platform power on societies and democracies.

However the two-year-old framework has so far failed to deliver anything much at all on major cross-border complaints which pertain to platform giants like Facebook (or indeed to the adtech industry). This summer a Commission review of the regulation highlighted what it described as a lack of uniformly vigorous enforcement.

Ireland’s DPC is fully in the spotlight on this front too, as the lead regulator for a large number of US tech firms.

It finally submitted the first draft decision on a cross border complaint earlier this summer — but a final decision on that case (relating to a Twitter security breach) has been delayed as the draft failed to gain the backing of all the region’s data supervisors, triggering further procedures related to joint working under the GDPR’s one-stop-shop mechanism.

Any order from the DPC to Facebook to suspend SCCs would similarly need to gain the backing of the bloc’s other regulators (or at least a majority of them). Per the WSJ’s report, Ireland’s regulator has given Facebook until mid-September to respond to the order — after which a new draft would be sent to the other supervisors for joint approval.

So there’s further delay built into the GDPR process before any final suspension order could be issued against Facebook in this seven year+ case. Move fast and break things this most certainly is not.

The WSJ also speculates that Facebook could also try to challenge such an order in court. “Internally, Facebook considers the preliminary order and its future implications a big deal,” it adds, citing one of its unnamed sources.

Google Maps has had a sort of spotty relationship with the Apple Watch over the years.

Google first shipped a Watch-friendly build of Maps back in September of 2015, just months after the Apple Watch first hit the shelves. In 2017, however, Google nixed Map’s Watch support with little more than a suggestion that it’d be back… eventually. Google didn’t offer up much of a reason as to why it was being pulled, nor did they suggest how long it might take to return.

Turns out the answer is three years. As of this morning, as spotted by 9to5Google, Google Maps is back on the Apple Watch.

We first found out about Google Maps’ pending return to the Apple Watch back in August alongside an announcement of deeper CarPlay integration. At the time, Google said it should show up within the “coming weeks.”

As Frederic noted at the time, even this second iteration might not be as feature-packed as Google Maps regulars might be hoping for. It’ll help you get from your current location to a handful of preset destinations (like home or work)… but if you want to go somewhere new, you’ll have to start the process on your phone first.

If you’ve already got Google Maps on your phone, updating the app should bring it back to your wrist.

Monthly financing isn’t an entirely new concept in the world of Xbox. Microsoft offered a similar plan for the Xbox One S a few years ago. The idea is pretty simple: pay a monthly fee for hardware and software for two years until you outright own the device. What’s new here, however, is that the company is introducing the plan for its brand new consoles due out later this year.

Along with its Series S announcement, Microsoft detailed two new plans designed to get the consoles in the hands of those unwilling or unable to shell out $299 or $499 for a new system up front. It’s a move that greatly expands the accessibility of the system, even beyond the recent announcement of the low-cost model.

The move is in line with a recent rekindled interest in a hardware as a service model. We’ve seen a number of companies like Zoom embrace this to varying degrees. Though really, the rent to own model shares a lot with smartphone contracts — even as those have begun to fall out of favor in the U.S. to some degree in recent years.

Here, $25 a month will get a Series S console, bundled with Game Pass Ultimate. For $35 a month, meanwhile, you get Game Pass Ultimate plus the Series X. There’s nothing to pay up front. Given how central the Game Pass streaming service is to the next-gen console, it’s a pretty solid deal. After all, Game Pass Ultimate will run you $15 a month without hardware access thrown in.

With estimates around PlayStation 5 pricing ranging from around $450-$550, Sony’s got a tough act to follow in terms of aggressive pricing. Even though the PS5 has arguably drummed up considerably more excitement thus far than the next generation Xbox, a $25/month entry point is tough to compete with.

A new startup called Kinspire wants to make it easier for parents to find activities to help keep kids occupied — away from a screen. The app, which launches with hundreds of activities vetted by parents and teachers alike, arrives at a time when the coronavirus pandemic has many families continuing to engage in social distancing, cutting kids off from regular playdates and other activities. Meanwhile, millions of schoolchildren are now spending long hours online, engaged in distance learning activities.

For parents, this rapid and dramatic increase in screen time has many looking for alternative ways to keep kids occupied and entertained, preferably offline.

“We needed Kinspire in our lives as parents, so we built it,” explains Rob Seigel, PhD, a father of two and Kinspire’s CEO and co-founder. “Before Kinspire, I found it stressful having to search for an activity on websites and social media, then pitch it to my kids. Inevitably after all that work, they’d say no. Kinspire is the one-stop shop where kids can choose what they want to do, not what looks fun to dad,” he says.

He also wanted the app to offer the convenience of having the instructions and the materials together in one place. When quarantine started in the U.S., Seigel put a team together and built it.

At launch, Kinspire features over 350 screen-free activities, including project-based STEAM activities from Tinkerclass, via NPR’s “Wow in the World” — a kids’ podcast designed to encourage kids to think and “tinker” with ordinary household items. None of this content, at present, is paid, we’re told.

The Kinspire community will source the activities going forward by using the app’s “add activity” feature, after first creating their profile. Seigel says the team moderates the content through a combination of an A.I. moderation service and human review.

When you first open the Kinspire app, you’ll see a vertical feed of images, similar to Instagram. But instead of artsy photos or memes, kids and parents can scroll through the activity suggestions to find something fun to do. Each activity card will feature a photo taken by the Kinspire community, which includes teachers, activity creators, as well as parents and caregivers.

Some of the initial creators participating in Kinspire include Nicole Roccaro of @naturallycuriouschildren, Kari McManamon of @entertainmytoddler, Viviana Maldonado of @makethingsbox_, and Kira Silvera of @totsonlock.

Parents can also filter the suggested activities by age, whether it’s designed for indoors or outdoors, prep time, how much parental involvement is needed, activity type, materials needed, and even the mess level involved. (Now that sounds like a parent built this!)

You can also save favorite activities you may want to try later.

As kids complete the activities in Kinspire, they earn in-app rewards as they accomplish things like doing a creative or scientific project, a nature exploration, engaging in pretend play, practicing cooking, math, music, mindfulness and more. Some of the in-app rewards turn into digital character badges for profiles. Rewards also deliver printable instructions to help kids build origami characters with paper from home.

The app could help homeschoolers, remote learners, and any other families who are struggling to come up with new ideas for kids after exhausting so many during the early days of the pandemic.

The company plans to generate revenue by adding a premium subscription that will allow parents to subscribe to individual content creators to receive exclusive, additional content within Kinspire. This also lets Kinspire’s creative content partners monetize, as they share in that revenue.

Kinspire is also working on shoppable activities, a top user request during testing. This lets parents easily purchase all the necessary materials for an activity directly in the Kinspire app, instead of having to go to Amazon or another store. Kinspire would take a commission on those purchases.

Denver and New York-based Kinspire was founded in May 2020, during the pandemic, by a team with backgrounds in tech and children’s play experiences.

Sara Berliner was on the founding team and is an advisor at YC-backed Hellosaurus, a new interactive video platform and creator tool. Before Kinspire, she co-founded children’s IP studio Star Farm (2002-2008), started and built the Kids & Family group at ScrollMotion, now Ingage (2008-2012), and was Chief Strategy Officer at Night & Day Studios, home of Peekaboo Barn, from 2012-2018. She’s also a mother of two.

Kinspire’s current co-founders Rob Seigel, Dave Tarasi, and Nate Ruiz, meanwhile, have a combined twenty years of experience at startups like HeadsUp, Nodin, SolidFire, and NetApp. CEO Seigel was previously co-Founder and CEO of HeadsUp, CTO at Nodin, and a software engineer at SolidFire/NetApp, in addition to being a father of two boys.

The startup is currently bootstrapped and raising a seed round.

The Kinspire app is a free download on iOS and Android in the U.S. and Canada.

Bay Area-based Iron Ox today announced a $20 million Series B. The funding, led by Pathbreaker Venture and family office firms, brings the robotics company’s total funding up to $45 million to date. A number of other investors also took part in the round, including Crosslink Capital, Amplify Partners, ENIAC Ventures, R7 Partners, Tuesday Ventures, At One Ventures and Y Combinator.

Founded in 2015, Iron Ox has become one of the more prominent names in the world of agricultural robotics. In 2018, the company announced its first indoor farm, growing a slew of leafy green vegetables in hydroponic boxes.

Today they announced the addition of a Gilroy, California-based farm with 10,000 square feet of growing area. The location has already begun delivering vegetables to a number of retailers and restaurants across the state, including some big names like Whole Foods and smaller operations like Bianchini’s Market, which operates two locations in California. Today’s plans entail a nation-wide expansion in delivery for next year.

“We have made it our mission to address food security by developing autonomous greenhouses that grow a variety of local and consistently delicious food for everyone,” co-founder and CEO Brandon Alexander said in a release. “Today, we’re thrilled to announce the successful operation of our Gilroy farm as well as our consumer brand, and our plans to complete additional sunlight-enabled, out-of-state facilities in 2021.”

The appeal of robotic farming is pretty straightforward, addressing labor shortages and supply chain issues. In the era of COVID-19, some of those problems have become even more pressing, with additional concerns surrounding the potential for transmission. It’s no surprise, then, that the company was able to nearly double previous raises in an era when investors are eyeing any and all robotics and automation.

That the company has a proven model makes things all the more appealing.

Last year’s Motorola Razr reboot should have been a slam-dunk. An iconic name attached to a cutting edge form factor — what could possible go wrong? A lot, turns out, especially in the world of foldables where nothing seems to go according to plan. Some questionable design choices gave rise to a poorly reviewed device that continued the trend of foldable stumbles.

This week, however, the reboot is back. And this time, it’s, well, refined. In a blogpost announcing the launch of the “New Razr With 5G,” the Lenovo-owned brand is quick to note that, “We’ve heard from consumers that they feel tethered to their devices and want a way to stay connected while still living in the moment.” To put a finer point on it, here’s a quote offered to TechCrunch from a spokesperson,

We’re confident in our foldable system, which is why we retained much of the same technology from the first iteration of Razr. While evolving razr’s design to include 5G, we focused on areas to make mechanical refinements, based on direct consumer feedback.

In other words, the new Razr is the device that consumer feedback built. Now with 5G. It’s in keeping with the new version of the Galaxy Fold that Samsung recently launched. As many in the industry anticipated, the initial round of foldable devices would bump up against many of the issues commonly attributed to first generation devices. Here that means an update to things like the hinge, which drew some heat from reviews the first time around.

There’s also an improved camera — another issue with the original. This time out, it’s a quad pixel 48-megapixel sensor with improved low light shots and falser autofocus. There’s also a 20-megapixel one inside the device. The battery — another pain point on the original — has been upgraded slightly, from 2,510mAh to 2,800mAh. The company says it’s an “all day” battery, though the demands of 5G might have something to say about that. I suspect the demands of thinness really presented a brick wall when it comes to maxing out battery capacity.

The 5G comes courtesy of the Snapdragon 765G processor. That maintains the original’s inclusion of a mid-range processor (710 last time out), but this time Qualcomm has included next-gen wireless in an attempt to speed up adoption. At $1,400, it’s $100 less expensive than the original, but it’s certainly still pricey enough to make a middling processor a definite head scratcher. It’s true you’re paying for the foldable screen here, of course, but at that price, everything really ought to be the latest and greatest.

The new New Razr will be available in the fall.

According to Palantir’s latest S-1 amended filing published this morning, the company intends to start trading in two weeks on September 23 under the ticker PLTR.

That gives us a bit of time to speculate about how the company will perform on the public markets, particularly given Palantir’s unusually shareholder-hostile governance structure, which was a topic at today’s Investor Day event.

The good news: Palantir gave us the latest secondary sale trading data for shares traded by insiders before the company starts trading publicly. We also now know how insiders are going to register their shares, giving us some hints about who is excited to double down and who is looking to move on from the company.

Palantir has a large number of insiders today compared to other tech companies that recently filed to go public. According to its S-1, the company has 2,794 owners of its Class A stock, and 738 of its Class B stock. While there is almost certainly overlap between those two groups, it indicates that there are thousands of owners of Palantir shares today. Compare those figures to Snowflake, which had 1,026 owners, or Sumo Logic, which had 473 owners.

Palantir has more shareholders since it has been around longer (it’s approaching two decades), many early and even some recent employees would have had to exercise their stock options by now lest they expire, and there has been a robust secondary market for shares that has allowed new investors to buy into the company.

Given the number of people involved and the number of shares bought and sold over the past 18 months, we can get some insight regarding how insiders perceive Palantir’s value.

That strange feeling? That’s the sensation of being excited about new movies again.

Now that theaters are slowly reopening (though not yet in New York or most of California, and I am 100% okay with that), studios are once again releasing trailers to hype up their scheduled releases for 2020 and beyond. Today, we finally got the first trailer for a new adaptation of Frank Herbert’s classic science fiction novel “Dune.”

The story focuses on the desert planet Arrakis, also known as Dune, which has become the key location in a galactic power struggle — it’s the only source of the spice melange, necessary for both space travel and immortality. Paul Atreides (played here by Timothée Chalamet) comes to Dune as teenaged royalty, but palace intrigue soon threatens his life and turns him an uncomfortable messiah figure to the planet’s inhabitants, known as Fremen. (The trailer suggests that Paul’s “jihad” in the books has become a “crusade” in the movie.)

As a book, “Dune” has been sequeled, prequeled, turned into multiple TV miniseries and adapted into beloved computer games. Most famously, David Lynch directed (then disowned) a film version in 1984. And while Lynch’s “Dune” has some striking moments, it was also a box office bomb, and very few book fans would consider it a faithful or successful adaptation. (Alejandro Jodorwosky’s unsuccessful attempt to film the book was the subject of a separate documentary.)

This time around, “Dune” is being directed by Denis Villeneuve, who previously helmed “Arrival” and “Blade Runner 2049.” And it boasts an all-star cast — Chalamet is joined by Oscar Isaac, Rebecca Ferguson, Josh Brolin, Stellan Skarsgard, Dave Bautista, Zendaya, Jason Momoa and Javier Bardem, among others.

Unlike the Lynch version, this new “Dune” is only expected to adapt the first half of the book, with a planned sequel handling the rest. And while Warner Bros. is releasing the film, its parent company WarnerMedia is also planning a spinoff TV series for HBO Max, with Villeneuve directing the pilot.

“Dune” is currently scheduled for release in theaters on December 18, 2020. Will that actually happen? Well, Christopher Nolan’s “Tenet” (also from Warner Bros.) is the first blockbuster movie in theaters since the pandemic began, and it seems to be doing pretty well, particularly outside the United States.