Category: UNCATEGORIZED

Congress grilled Facebook’s CEO today, unleashing critiques of his approach to cryptocurrency, privacy, encryption, and running a giant corporation. Mark Zuckerberg tried to assuage their fears while stoking concerns that if Facebook doesn’t build Libra, then the world will end up using China’s version.

During the hearing before the House Financial Services Committee that you can watch here, Zuckerberg recommitted to only releasing Libra with full US regulatory approval. But given the tone of the questioning and Zuckerberg’s lack of fresh answers since Facebook’s David Marcus testified about Libra in July, Libra now looks even less likely to launch in 2020. With few highlights or positive moments coming from the hearing, here are the lowlights that matter.

The hearing started tensely, with Rep. Maxine Waters (D-CA) declaring that “Perhaps you believe that you’re above the law, and it appears that you are aggressively increasing the size of your company, and are willing to step over anyone, including your competitors, women, people of color, you own users, and even our democracy to get what you want . . . In fact, you have opened up a serious discussion about whether Facebook should be broken up.“

However, some members of congress used their time to advocate for American dominance instead of heavy regulation. Rep. Patrick McHenry (R-NC) said “the question is, are we going to spend our time trying to devise ways for government planners to centralize and control as to who, when and how innovators can innovate.”

Zuckerberg tried to leverage nationalist sentiment to deflect scrutiny. “As soon as we put forward the white paper around the Libra project, China immediately announced a public private partnership, working with companies . .  to extend the work that they’ve already done with AliPay into a digital Renminbi as part of the Belt and Road Initiative that they have, and they’re planning on launching that in the next few months.”

Yet Zuckerberg wouldn’t commit to blocking anonymous Libra wallets that could facilitate money laundering, only saying Facebook’s own Calibra wallet would have strong identity checks.

When pushed on why Libra Association members like Visa, Stripe, and eBay left the organization, Zuckerberg admitted “I think because it’s a risky project and there’s been a lot of scrutiny.”

There’ll be more major launches from Facebook that could raise questions about its impact on society, Zuckerberg revealed. “Later this week we actually have a big announcement coming up on on launching a big initiative around news and journalism, where we’re partnering with a lot of folks to to to build a new product that’s supporting high quality journalism.” Facebook plans to launch a News section featuring headlines from top outlets, though only some will be paid.

The hearing is ongoing and we’ll continue to update this article with major takeways.

There’s no shortage of lidar solutions available for autonomous vehicles, drones, and robots — theoretically, anyway. But getting a lidar unit from theory to mass production might be harder than coming up with the theory in the first place. Sense Photonics appears to have made it past that part of the journey, and is now offering its advanced flash lidar for pre-order.

Lidar comes in a variety of form factors, but the spinning type we’ve seen so much of is on its way out and more compact, reliable planar types are on the way in; Luminar is making moves to get ahead, but Sense Photonics isn’t sitting still — and anyway, the two companies have different strengths.

While Luminar and some other companies aim to create a forward-facing lidar that can detect shapes hundreds of feet ahead in a relatively narrow field of view, Sense is going after the short-range, wide-angle side of things. And because they sync up with regular cameras, it’s easy as pie to map depth onto the RGB image:

Sense Photonics makes it easy to match traditional camera views with depth data.

These are lidars that you’d want mounted on the rear or sides of the vehicles, able to cover a wide slice of the surroundings and get accurate detection of things like animals, kids, and bikes quickly and accurately. But I went through all this when they came out of stealth.

The news today is that these units have gone from prototype to production design. The devices have been ruggedized so they can be attached outside of enclosures even in dusty or rainy environments. And performance has been improved, bumping the maximum range in some cases out to over 40 meters, well over what was promised before.

The base price of $2,900 covers a unit with an 80×30 degree field of view, but others cover wider areas, up to 95 by 75 degrees — a large amount by lidar standards, and in higher fidelity than other flash lidars out there. You do give up some other properties in return for the wide view, though. The proprietary tech created by the company lets the lidar’s detector be located elsewhere than the laser emitter, too, which makes designing around the things easier (if not exactly easy).

Obviously if people are meant to order these online from the company these are not going to be appearing in next year’s autonomous vehicles. No, it’s more for bulk purchases by companies doing serious testing, before their self-driving cars go into production.

Whether Sense Photonics kit or some other lucky lidar company’s ends up on the robo-fleets of tomorrow is up in the air, but it does help for your product to actually exist. You can find out more about the company’s lidar platform here.

TikTok today released a new set of safety videos designed to playfully inform users about the app’s privacy controls and other features — like how to filter comments or report inappropriate behavior, among other things. One video also addresses TikTok’s goal of creating a “positive” social media environment, where creativity is celebrated and harassment is banned.

This particular value — that TikTok is for “fun” — is cited whenever the Beijing-based company is pressured about the app’s censorship activity. Today, TikTok hides under claims that it’s all about being a place for lighthearted, positive behavior. But in reality, it’s censoring topics China doesn’t want its citizens to know about — like the Hong Kong protests, for example. Meanwhile, it doesn’t appear to take action on political issues in the U.S., where hashtags like #dumptrump or #maga have millions of views.

To figure out its approach to moderation, TikTok recently hired corporate law firm, K&L Gates, to advise it on how to create policies that won’t have it coming under the eye of U.S. regulators.

In the meantime, TikTok is tackling the job of crafting the sort of community it wants through these instructive videos. But it’s not just issuing its commands from the top-down — TikTok partners with its own creators to participate in the videos and then promote them to fans. The first set of videos, released in February, featured a dozen TikTok creators, for example.

This time around, the company has pulled in a dozen more, including: @nathanpiland, @d_damodel, @juniortvine, @Stevenmckell, @supershaund, @ourfire, @thedawndishsoap, @katjaglieson, @mahoganylox, @chanydakota, @shreksdumpster, and @christinebarger.

This is a much different approach to community-setting, compared with Twitter, Facebook or Instagram. Those platforms took years before they addressed users’ basic needs for privacy, security and anti-harassment features, like filtering comments, blocking and muting, and more. In the meantime, social media became a haven for trolls and abuse.

TikTok is approaching the problem from a different standpoint — by consciously creating a community where users are knowledgable and feel empowered to kick out the bad elements from disrupting their fun.

The only problem is that TikTok’s definition of what’s “fun” and appropriate has a political bent.

Creativity and art aren’t only meant for expressing positive sentiments. And given that TikTok is already enforcing China’s censorship of topics like Tiananmen Square, Hong Kong, and Taiwan to its over 500M+ global monthly users, it wouldn’t be a leap to find the company one day censoring all sorts of political speech and other social issues  — effectively becoming a tool for China to spread its government’s views to the wider world. And that’s far less fun.

Demodesk, an early stage startup that wants to change how sales meetings are conducted online, announced a $2.3 million seed investment today.

Investors included GFC, FundersClub, Y Combinator, Kleiner Perkins and an unnamed group of angel investors. The company was a member of the Y Combinator Winter 2019 cohort.

CEO and co-founder Veronika Riederle says that the fact it’s so closely focused on sales separates it from other more general meeting tools like Zoom, WebEx or GoToMeeting. “We are building the first intelligent online meeting tool for customer facing conversations. So that is for inside sales and customer service professionals,” Riederle explained.

One of the key pieces of technology is what Riederle calls, “a unique approach to screen sharing.” Whereas most meeting software involves downloading software to use the tool, Demodesk doesn’t do this. You simply click a link and you’re in. The two parties online are seeing a live screen and each can interact with it. It’s not just a show and tell.

What’s more, in a sales scenario with a slide presentation, the customer sees the same live screen as the salesperson, but while the salesperson can see their presentation notes, the customer cannot.

She said while this could work for any number of scenarios from customer service to IT Help desks, at this stage in the company’s development she wants to concentrate on the sales scenario, then expand the vision over time. The service works on a subscription model with tiered-per user pricing starting at $19 per user per month.

When they got to Y Combinator, the company already had a working product and paying customers, but Riederle says that the experience has helped them grow the business to over 100 customers. “YC was extremely important for us because we immediately got access to an extremely valuable network of founders and potential customers, and also just a base for us to really [develop] the business.

Riderle founded the company with CTO Alex Popp in 2017 in Munich. Prior to this seed round, the founders mostly bootstrapped the company,. With the $2.3 million it should be able to hire more people and begin building out the product further, while investing in sales and marketing to expand its customer base.

The Plug and Play network of accelerator programs is partnering with the non-profit organization The Alliance to End Plastic Waste to create an accelerator focused on developing technologies to reduce, remove or replace plastics in the industrial ecosystem.

Like Techstars, Plug and Play operates a number of industry-focused accelerator programs around the world and for this program, targeting solutions that will lower the impact of plastic waste on the environment, the accelerator . will operate two programs annually in three different regions — Silicon Valley, Paris, and Singapore.

For its part, the Alliance to End Plastic Waste will work with the companies that support the organization, which include some of the largest chemical companies and manufacturers of plastic waste, to select focus areas and source specific startups working on solutions.

Representative members of the organization include:  BASF, Berry Global, Braskem, Chevron Phillips Chemical Company LLC, Dow, ExxonMobil, Formosa Plastics Corporation USA, Gemini Corporation, Geocycle, Grupo Phoenix, Henkel, LyondellBasell, Mitsubishi Chemical Holdings, Mitsui Chemicals, PepsiCo, PolyOne, Pregis, Procter & GambleSealed Air Corporation, Shell, Sinopec, SKC co., ltd., Storopack, SUEZ, Sumitomo Chemical, TOMRA, and Total.

Industrial companies don’t have the best history when it comes to reinventing their entire business models with new technologies, but at least there’s some effort being put toward these initiatives.

Each program will run for 12 weeks and accept ten startups. In true accelerator fashion there will be a demo day where AEPW and Plug and Play would have the opportunity to invest in participating companies.

“I believe when we bring together all the stakeholders—large corporations, entrepreneurs, startups, and universities—you can create real change,” said said Saeed Amidi, the founder and chief executive of Plug and Play, in a statement. “By devoting resources and attention to this global issue of plastic waste, we can make a difference in the environment. Through this platform I commit to spend more of my time on sustainability-focused initiatives and will invest in 20 startups in this space per year,”

Applications are now open for the first program, which will run from February through May 2020.

There are a lot of scientific papers out there, and finding the right ones, or the right connections between them, can be extremely difficult. Semantic Scholar uses AI to understand and index journal articles, but until recently has been limited to a handful of topics. It has now expanded to cover practically every branch of science — and some 175 million papers.

I covered Semantic Scholar, a project of the Allen Institute for AI, when it first launched in 2016, at which time it had only indexed papers in computer science and neuroscience. The next year, it added biomedical papers covering a variety of sub-topics.

The problem they are attempting to solve is simply that there’s too much information for academics to parse. And while they may do their best to keep up with the literature, a key insight or relevant result may be hidden away in an obscure journal that only gets the vaguest reference in a citation or review.

“We created it because of information overload in science,” explained project head Doug Raymond in an interview. “The focus of the team was, how do we make science more discoverable?”

Semantic Scholar uses natural language processing to get the gist of a paper, understand what processes, chemicals, or results are described, and make that information easily searchable. Not only does it make finding literature relevant to a given topic earlier, but it can establish patterns and find connections that might not have been clear before.

For instance it may be possible using the platform to identify trends in authorship as far as gender and other demographic balance (work on this is underway), or find bad actors who systematically cite themselves. In other cases the trends may be more immediately relevant: the majority of patients with kidney diseases are female, but the majority of those used in studies are male.

That’s not to say the system is doing research by itself, but facts and trends can appear under this kind of analysis that might have remained dormant otherwise. Especially since the system now encompasses most scientific domains and can make those connections between them as well as within them.

Expanding from a handful of disciplines to practically all of them was not an easy process, though the challenges are not what you might guess.

“We found that most of our models generalize well to new domains of science,” said Raymond. “That said, there’s always room for improvement. Some domains have very different conventions in how they write abstracts or lay out tables.”

The language model they created, SciBERT (an evolution of BERT, a more general purpose NLP agent), has been tweaked to understand different types of notation and so on. But apparently it didn’t choke, as I would have, after learning on CS and moving to organic chemistry. The results are functional enough to package into something like Supp.ai.

Raymond said the biggest problem was the more prosaic challenge of improving the system’s infrastructure to support the increased volume of data.

“The hardest thing, I’d say, was moving to a data pipeline that’s real-time and instantaneous rather than batch processing them,” Raymond explained. “Once we got to this scale, with the number of papers and partners, we had to redo the pipeline to get things done in hours rather than days.”

More partners means working with major science publishing outfits like Elsevier and Nature, who with the threat of SciHub and pressure from academics to move towards open access models, feel the presence of both stick and carrot as far as working with new efforts like Semantic Scholar.

As it is, the system has ingested most of the open access literature out there, and also has the key information for papers behind paywalls — users just won’t be able to pull up the full document without paying. On the other side of the equation, a partnership with Unpaywall keeps links to open access papers up to date. Open access articles, the platform has happened to note, are rapidly increasing proportion of all articles: more than doubling, from something over 10 percent to just under 30 in the last decade.

Now that the expansion part is mostly complete, the Semantic Scholar team is working on a few new features: improved summaries of articles, domain-specific functions, and a feed view that could show, say, a cell biologist the latest and most relevant findings in their field without exposing them to the firehose of research constantly being published.

Semantic Scholar is free to use — you can find it here.

Nooruldeen Agha, has been thinking about what’s next for fashion retail for years.

The serial entrepreneur behind the Dubai-based online fashion retailer, Elabelz and marketing studio Elephant Nation had always wanted to redesign the shopping experience for how customers actually shopped in stores and online.

“If it was 1994 and we knew what technology is today and we want to reinvent this [shopping] experience… one thought was how we bought our whole life and how we go to the mall,” says Agha. 

Shopping is, for most people, a social activity. Friends go to the mall or department store together to try on clothes and ask each other for advice. Most online and offline shopping experiences are completely divorced from that, Agha said.

So he wanted to take the social aspects of Instagram and the subscription box and retail elements of StitchFix to create the new Los Angeles-based startup, Flip Fit. 

But to do it, Agha needed a push. His businesses in Dubai were successful, he says, and there was no need for him to pursue another new venture — especially one in America.

Then he met Jonathan Ellman at the Summit conference in Los Angeles.

“We met at a party.  At midnight,” Ellman says. “At 10 o clock the next morning we were sitting on a balcony talking to each other and  came to an understanding that Noor with his dynamics and understanding the industry… that he could not stay in Dubai.”

Ellman has a history as an investor and an operator. He was the founder of the scout program at GreatPoint Ventures and spent years at HoneyBook. And he knew immediately that Agha’s idea had legs.

For the next year, the two laid the foundation for the business. Noor had all of the connections already. Elabelz was pulling in $23 million in revenue off of the sale of 150,000 boxes of clothes — so the logistics and fulfillment and brand partnerships would be a breeze. The company has 200 brands that have already signed on as of today’s launch including: AG, JBrand, Hudson, Retrobrand, Boyish, MadeWorn, Junkfood, Mavi and Edwin.

FlipFit works by creating a social network based on friends and followers. The company isn’t borrowing from Facebook or Instagram, but instead is trying to build out its network from scratch. Users of the app are encouraged to take vote on selfies their friends take in different outfits. Each vote garners in-app cash that can be redeemed whenever someone purchases an item ($10 for each new voting user and $1 per vote).

As users vote on the styles they like, they can also add clothes to a virtual wardrobe. When they’re ready they can select a few styles from that closet to be shipped out to them to try on. If the user doesn’t like the clothes, then they just return it.

The mechanics aren’t that different from a number of other online retailers, but the difference is in the company’s decision to create an entirely new social graph.

Initially, Agha and Ellman are tapping influencers to hook in their target customers. Over the next 90 days roughly 500 influencers across social media will be encouraging their audiences to vote on different outfits using the FlipFit app. The influencers are getting $150 in store credit twice-a-month or getting paid sponsorships (depending on the size of their following). The outfits with the most votes are the ones that the influencers will keep… training their audiences on the mechanics of how to shop as they market the product.

Agha says that the user experience is most akin to TikTok or Snap,rather than Instagram. There’s a publicly available feed for those who want to use it or the feed can be made private and shared among friends. And the app is only available for children 13 and up.

On the business side, the company is keeping 33% of the cash from any item sold. It’s cut is higher, because FlipFit handles all of the back end logistics of shipping and returns, according to the co-founders. Every box the company ships includes the standard pre-printed return label.

“Returns are our default. While the rest of the industry is fighting this phenomena, we are leaning into it,” said Jonathan Ellman, co-founder and co-CEO of Flip. “Almost half of all fashion shoppers bracket their online purchases, buying several pieces to try on at home with the intention of returning what doesn’t fit or what doesn’t match what they saw online. We believe returns should be as easy as the purchase and by making the shopping process more efficient and effective, we’re keeping clothes out of landfills and in your closet.”

The company is, to date, backed by a $3.75 million seed round led by TLV Partners with participation from Lool Ventures.

“Flip is the evolution of social media and e-commerce — birthing the baby of Istagram and Amazon and creating the first physical product marketplace where your likes and actions impact the products you receive,” says Rona Segev, a general partner at TLV.

Paid memberships and subscriptions have become the popular business model these days in the media industry, with publishers believing quite rightly that a closer connection to readers leads to a deeper customer relationship and ultimately more sustainable revenue.

That’s certainly true at big media companies (hello Extra Crunch) and there are also a spate of startups like Substack and Pico building out models for smaller publishers. But what if you want to build your own stack with an open-source foundation?

That’s where Ghost comes in. The open-source CMS, which has been around for a couple of years now following a successful Kickstarter, announced this week that it is launching subscription features as part of Ghost 3.0. The features will be included in both the open-source, self-hosted version as well as the organization’s paid hosted SaaS product.

Ghost 3.0 allows publishers to connect the CMS directly to Stripe, which processes credit card transactions as well as Apple Pay out of the box. Interestingly — and something CEO John O’Nolan empathized with me — Ghost will not take an additional transaction fee (I believe Stripe’s standard fees still apply). That’s a serious difference with some of its competitors, who take 10% or more of a publisher’s revenue as part of their business model.

From Ghost’s own website, “Unlike VC funded startups which pop up and shut down every few years, with Ghost you own the platform you depend on.”

In addition to handling payments, the CMS connects that payments data to a more robust set of user registration flows, allowing a publisher to know who its customers are and who is paying. Ghost content can be designated for different audiences — free content for everyone, and paid content only for active paying members. Ghost also has integrations with a number of other services.

Ghost itself has continued to expand from its April 2013 Kickstarter, which netted the organization $300,000 in pre-sales. CEO John O’Nolan shared that the organization has had net revenue of more than $5 million since launch, and has a current ARR of $1.73 million through its hosted product. That revenue funds a team of 15, who are fully distributed and remote.

Raydiant, a startup promising to turn TVs into interactive digital signs, is making several announcements today — a new company name, a new CEO, new partners and $7 million in new funding.

Until today, the company was known as Mira, and it was founded by Tuan Ho (who previously founded internet TV company Philo), along with venture studio Atomic. The goal is to offer an alternative to existing digital signage solution which it says are often improvised, bespoke or expensive.

With Raydiant, customers just plug the company’s HDMI device into a TV or other screen and connect that device to the internet. Then they can edit and update the content from Raydiant’s online dashboard, and they get  access to a number of other digital signage applications.

Customers include Westin, Ramada, Harvard University and Wahlburgers, the restaurant chain owned by the Wahlberg brothers. in fact, Raydiant/Mira was featured in an episode of the Wahlburgers TV show, with Mark Wahlburg testing out the technology as way to create a virtual presence in Wahlburgers restaurants.

The new applications being announced today show the range of what customers can do with these screens — the partners include BlueJeans (videoconferencing), Soundtrack Your Brand (licensed music), SinglePlatform (digital menus) and PosterMyWall (drag-and-drop content editing).

Ho and Atomic have also brought on Bobby Marhamat, the former COO of Revel Systems, as Raydiant’s new CEO.

“We are thrilled to have so much energy around the company with everything from our new brand, the financial support from our investors and incredible partnerships with the industry’s top enterprise companies,” Marhamat said in a statement. “Raydiant is a thriving and growing company, and we are committed to providing businesses with first-class service to bring any screen to life and create an interactive experience within a brick & mortar location.”

Lastly, the company is announcing that it has raised $7 million in funding led by 8VC, with participation from Atomic, Bloomberg Beta, Lerer Hippeau, SV Angel and Transmedia Capital. It says the money will be used to develop new applications, sign more partners, grow the team and bring on more customers.